Spilt Milk Page 13

  Mrs White waved Nellie away when she tried to talk about her daughter’s likes and dislikes.

  ‘She is a baby, Mrs Farr,’ the woman said, ‘and thus quite incapable of having likes and dislikes.’

  At home, without the presence of Birdie constantly reminding them of their private arrangements, Nellie was relieved to find she and Henry and George slipped back into the easy way they had had before. They worked, ate, sat together, drank together, all their words slipping into the unanchored time between day and night when it didn’t seem to matter whose baby Birdie was, just that it was a surprising thing to have a daughter between them.

  Nellie visited Birdie on Sundays and brought her home one weekend a month. One Sunday morning she turned up and found the babies in Mrs White’s nursery all bawling and screaming in their cots. Nellie picked up Birdie and the child cried even more. She clung to Nellie’s neck, smelling viciously of dirty nappies.

  Mrs White was in her study, eating a plate of rollmop herrings.

  ‘The babies are crying.’

  ‘And I am eating! Your daughter is a naughty little minx who is playing on your heartstrings, Mrs Farr. This is my dinner time and these children know it.’

  ‘But why is she crying?’

  ‘Babies cry. They do it for attention. Oh, the Lord save me from weak-willed mothers. I have rules. You need to stick to them.’

  Nellie looked at Birdie, who suddenly stopped crying, seized her around the neck and kissed her cheek. ‘Mumma!’ Birdie gurgled, and began sucking Nellie’s chin.

  ‘What about your sister?’ asked Henry when Nellie arrived home with Birdie in her arms, saying she had removed her from Mrs White’s care.

  ‘Could she not live with us, Henry? I’m sure she won’t cry any more.’

  ‘I cannot have a baby in the house, Nellie. Vivian’s got a big house. Didn’t you say your sister always wanted kids? A life in the country would be much better for the child’s health. There’s my sister Lydia of course, but she’s got two boys and she’s a sulky creature. I wouldn’t want our daughter to go to her.’

  Nellie looked at him and felt a flush of pleasure. Our daughter, he had said. He cared about the child after all. And who was she to argue with him? He had accepted Birdie as his own. It was up to him to decide the child’s future.

  She wrote to Vivian, explaining that Henry was too sick to have a small child in the house. Birdie had a neat row of top teeth now, and she was affectionate and sweet. Would Vivian consider bringing up her niece? She must make sure not to spoil her and to keep to a strict routine.

  Vivian wrote back immediately. She would have the child. Of course she would. They were sisters, after all. This was her niece. Nothing and no one could take that away from them. I will love Birdie as I love you, Vivian wrote in her sentimental way, with all my heart.

  When Vivian walked into the pub to collect the child, carrying a bouquet of chrysanthemums and a pair of baby shoes as gifts, Nellie realized she had missed her sister. Their lives, so far apart for so long, swung back together again.

  Part Two

  Eleven

  Putting a photograph of her eighteen-year-old daughter in an envelope, Nellie Farr remembered a time many years ago when Birdie had been four. She had come home from Vivian’s six months earlier and still acted like she did not know Nellie at all.

  ‘She has forgotten who I am,’ Nellie had said over breakfast when Birdie sat eating her porridge in silence. George, trying to find something positive in the stand-off between mother and child, said Birdie was a bright kid to know how to upset her mother so well.

  ‘Will I be going home soon?’ asked Birdie, rattling her spoon in her bowl, kicking her legs against the chair rung.

  ‘This is home,’ Nellie said.

  Birdie shook her head.

  ‘I want my real home.’ She frowned, as if she thought Nellie was having problems understanding her. She was a small, elfin child. Her voice sounded uncannily like Vivian’s.

  ‘I want Auntie Vivian,’ she said. ‘Please. Please may I have Auntie Vivian?’ She threw her spoon across the room.

  How could a four-year-old child with a pursed mouth and a way of folding her arms make Nellie, a grown-up, feel this wounded? Nellie picked up the spoon and put it in the sink. A giant and a flea. She was the giantess, lumbering, unhappy, and here was Birdie, this little red-haired flea jumping around, biting her black and blue.

  George had said it would pass. Henry said the child had spirit. He liked her contrary nature.

  ‘Two years she spent with your sister,’ he said as they watched Birdie playing with a skipping rope in the backyard. ‘She’s bound to take a bit of time to settle in here. Mothers and daughters are always at each other’s throats. I remember Lydia was furious with our mother when we were growing up. I could never understand it. Mother was such a mild woman, God rest her soul. So quiet I used to forget she was there. In fact,’ he said, warming to his memories, ‘I only noticed her when she wasn’t there, if you see what I mean. Like one only notices a clock in a room when its ticking winds down and stops.’

  Nellie tried being mild. She bore Birdie’s tempers and furies as if they were light breezes and she a steady sailing ship. When the mildness infuriated both of them, Nellie tried spoiling the child. She bought her roller skates and took her to the circus, she fed her doughnuts and bagels and gave her sherbet sweets to suck.

  One afternoon a few months later, a sticky, airless day in September, Nellie took her swimming at the lido. The sun was hidden behind clouds, but the heat of the day was leaden. Birdie had red cheeks. Her head was as hot as a boiler plate.

  ‘This will cool us both down,’ Nellie told her daughter. She still hadn’t got used to having the child around all the time; was still surprised that this sulky-faced creature was her child. That it had come out of her.

  ‘I don’t want to swim. It’s too hot.’

  ‘That’s why we need to swim. To cool down.’

  Nellie felt her patience leaving her. She picked up Birdie, which was easy as she was still a tiny creature.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, and descended the steps into the water, Birdie under one arm, struggling like a cat in a sack to get free. She let go and Birdie swam away from her.

  She got to the other side of the pool, far away from Nellie, and then screamed and cried, whirling her arms like washing-machine paddles. People stared. A swimmer tried to help the child, but she screamed even more.

  Nellie swam over to her and slapped her.

  ‘That’s enough!’

  She put her arms around Birdie and carried her out of the water, ignoring the pity and scorn in the eyes of the skinny-hipped girls that lounged on the grass in bathing costumes, smoothing their short bobbed hairstyles.

  ‘I don’t like swimming,’ Birdie said in between sobs. ‘I want to go home.’

  It seemed such a simple request that, finally, Nellie thought it was time to give in.

  ‘All right. But it’s a very long train journey. It will take us he rest of the day to get there. I will have to send a telegram to Vivian.’

  ‘I want to play the piano.’

  ‘In the pub? That home?’

  Nellie sat on the grassy banks of the lido with the child wrapped in a towel. She had been holding her tight in it, the way you might hold down a large wild bird, pinning its muscled wings with the cloth.

  She loosened the towel, feeling her daughter’s limbs relax too.

  Big drops of rain began to fall. Though it could not possibly have had anything to do with a woman in a black swimsuit and rubber bathing cap, Nellie felt as if the weather was sympathetic to her and her miserable child. She tipped her face to the sky, feeling a cool breeze pick up.

  ‘We’d better go home then,’ she said.

  It seemed incredible that all that had happened nearly fourteen years ago. That Birdie had forgotten her time spent with her aunt and had also, it seemed to Nellie, forgotten those difficult days.

  Nel
lie put the photograph in an envelope. A recent one of Birdie standing outside the pub. She wrote very carefully on the back in pencil. Bertha ‘Birdie’ Farr. 1939, aged eighteen years.

  For many years, since Nellie took Birdie back, she had sent Vivian photographs and school reports. It was, she always felt, the least she could do.

  Vivian’s latest letter to Nellie lay on the bar top. Nellie had read it with interest. A farmer called Charles Bell had been coming into Vivian’s tea room for some time now. She had discovered he had built a farmhouse on the site of their old cottage.

  Five years ago, in 1934, the Langhams’ farm had been divided up and sold off as parcels of land, and Charles Bell had bought 100 acres at auction. More precisely, and Vivian was always precise in her letters, he had paid two pounds an acre for some scrubby land and water meadows that had been left fallow for years. With the land came their old ruined cottage, which had given the farm its name. Poplar Farm. He was a pleasant man who knew little of the region. He had come from Exeter because farming land was cheaper to buy in East Anglia.

  He was only briefly interested to find I had lived in the cottage. Our lives are just ancient history to others, she wrote.

  Her letter went on for several pages. She had fallen in love with cats and bought herself two blue Persians she intended to breed from. She talked of the charity work she did with her doctor friend, helping young women who had got themselves into trouble. A whole page was devoted to whether or not she would marry Dr Harding if he proposed to her. She was sure he was going to ask any day soon. She was forty-nine years old now. She had been waiting for the man to make up his mind for nearly twenty years. Was she being terribly foolish? Nellie thought that if the doctor had wanted to marry her, he would have asked her years ago. Vivian’s desire for him was unfathomable, except that her sister might like the idea of being a small-town doctor’s wife. That she would be taking another step up in her social world.

  Vivian’s letter had come with a package. Several pink cotton handkerchiefs with a silk-embroidered B, for Birdie, and wrapped within them the hagstone. Vivian believed Nellie should keep it now. She thought it was the stone that had led this Mr Bell to her, reacquainting her with their old home. She was still afraid that her baby’s grave might be discovered one day, perhaps if there was a drought and the river dried up. Or equally a flood might leave the remains of that tiny life on the riverbank for somebody to discover. Vivian could not bear the idea of this. She believed the stone should be with the sister furthest away from the Little River.

  Nellie held it in her hand, cool and brown as a fish’s belly with a cream colour swirling through the round hole in its side. Between them the stone had taken on a deep importance. They had given it a place in their lives by keeping it. The stone was the only link they had to each other, apart from her daughter. She would keep it safe. That didn’t seem too difficult a thing to do.

  Over the years she had thought to take Birdie back to see Vivian. She’d imagined her spending summers with her aunt, but always there was the worry that it might upset them all. Birdie had forgotten entirely the time she had spent with Vivian. It was best to keep it like that. Too complicated to explain the giving away and taking back of a child.

  You know how it is, Nellie wrote, and hoped Vivian could understand how it was to see a child grow into a young woman.

  Time goes by and you don’t see anything changing. Children seem as though they will stay children for ever. That they will always need their hair setting in ringlets and will forever wear pinafore dresses. And then suddenly here I am sending you pictures of Birdie and she’s eighteen years old. A young woman who will no doubt soon enough meet a man, marry and have her own family. I want no spinster life for my daughter, Vivian. I want her to be happy. I know too well that years and years have gone by, but still, it seems like yesterday she was just a child. Just like yesterday too, Vivian, when I last saw you and yet that was many years ago now. One day soon, we must find the time to see each other again. And I will keep the hagstone safe, you can be sure of that.

  Twelve

  Birdie lit a cigarette and threw the match down on the cobblestones. She sat on a beer barrel in the backyard under the soot-covered elder tree, its white blossoms flecked with dirt. Ancient hopscotch chalk marks she had made as a child, playing for endless hours out here on her own, were still visible at her feet. A train rattled past above her, and she wondered if any of the passengers were looking down onto her backyard. What might they see? A young woman with red-blonde hair waiting for a lover? Oh, the thrill of that idea. She longed to be in love. Perhaps the passengers saw her as a woman already married. A housewife taking a moment for herself. Or perhaps they saw her as she was. Just a skinny, eighteen-year-old barmaid avoiding a family gathering inside.

  She stubbed out the cigarette on the brick wall and picked up a pebble, lobbing it onto the hopscotch grid. She hopped and skipped over the squares. Her wedge-heeled sandals threatened to turn her ankle over if she carried on. There wasn’t time for old childhood games anyway. Her cousins and Aunt Lydia were here, and she should go and say hello.

  ‘Birdie, there you are,’ said Uncle George when she stepped into the kitchen at the back of the pub. He looked relieved to see her. Aunt Lydia and her cousins Roger and Malcolm were sitting at the long wooden table, drinking tea with her mother.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ said her aunt. Birdie tried to look pleased to see her. None of them was very fond of Aunt Lydia, but there was an unspoken belief that she had been treated shoddily by life and they forgave her time and again, her clumsy comments and judgemental ways. She wore a dark blue velvet dress with a high lace collar and a string of pearls. Aunt Lydia liked to say she was a psychic, compelled to seek out truths. She studied horoscopes and palmistry. Birdie’s mother said the woman knew nothing but a load of hokum gathered from the silly journals she subscribed to.

  ‘So now,’ her aunt said. ‘Have you seen my boys? Don’t they look handsome?’

  Birdie’s cousins nodded hello. It had been a year since she had seen Roger and Malcolm. They were a couple of years older than she was and, growing up, she had always found their visits once a year in the summer months a kind of torture. Much as she had longed for brothers and sisters, Malcolm was dull and Roger was spiteful. She still remembered him stamping on her woodlouse farm, a project she and her schoolfriend Joan had nurtured one summer, building small barns out of wooden lolly sticks and the discarded sardine cans they’d dug up from the loose soil under the elder tree.

  Aunt Lydia began lamenting the times they lived in. She was going to lose her boys to war. She couldn’t sleep at night for thinking about it. But men had to be men. They were going to serve their country, and wasn’t that the downside of having boys? ‘Men have the weight of the world on their shoulders,’ she said. ‘And only mothers of sons understand this. Our mother knew it, didn’t she, George? Having sons is a way of building nations.’

  ‘I don’t know I built many nations,’ said George. ‘And what about Walter? Where’s the man who’s covering Great Britain in linoleum?’

  ‘He is away working,’ said Lydia, and Birdie noticed how her aunt coloured slightly. ‘He’s in the north of England at a trade fair this week.’

  ‘What a surprise,’ said Roger sarcastically, playing with a square metal lighter in his hand. ‘Our absent father is still absent.’

  Aunt Lydia’s husband, Walter, was always away. Birdie had only met him once, at her father’s funeral. George had said one time that Walter probably had another family somewhere. Birdie’s pa used to joke that Lydia had buried Walter under the floorboards years ago.

  Birdie felt a stab of loss, thinking about her father. The funeral had been over a year ago, but she still woke most days with a horrible start, remembering all over again that Pa was gone.

  Aunt Lydia finished her cup of tea and asked if she might have another. Birdie could see her mother losing patience. She didn’t like people getting under her feet. She was
chatty and friendly in the pub, but it was an act really. Her mother was a solitary, private kind of woman. She knew everybody around here, but she didn’t have close friends. She’d never needed them with Pa and Uncle George around. She’d never really needed a daughter either, it seemed to her.

  Birdie looked out at the backyard. That was where her childhood had been spent, out there among the beer barrels, an only child playing hopscotch on her own, or turning skipping ropes with Joan while her mother, in her own eccentric way, washed the leaves of the elder tree so that they shone green and bright.

  Uncle George put some cash in Birdie’s hand.

  ‘Take your cousins out and show them around,’ he said. ‘Poor beggars are going off to training camp soon. Give ’em a tour of the city. Get them out from under your mother’s feet, heh?’

  Birdie took the brothers greyhound racing at Walthamstow. She won on the tote, backing a handsome black dog whose name, Bed of Roses, appealed to her. Roger won too and bought them fish and chips, which they ate sitting on a bench, celebrating their winnings with a bottle of R. White’s lemonade.

  Later that afternoon they saw a Gracie Fields film in the local fleapit, a story of a rags-to-riches factory girl. Roger talked through it, leaning against Birdie, whispering into her ear, making jokes and acting the fool. Birdie tried to concentrate on the film. Roger rested his hand on her knee, his fingers squeezing. She slapped his hand away and he looked pleased with himself.

  ‘Little wild cat,’ he said, grinning. ‘I like a girl who acts hard to get.’

  It was only the thought of dancing that made her agree to go out with her cousins on their last night before they left for training camps. Roger was plain awful. He’d tried to kiss her after the cinema, coming outside with his arm clamped around her waist as if they were courting. When she told him to lay off her, he’d laughed and set off up the street with his hands in his pockets, whistling. He was quite maddening.