Spilt Milk Read online

A week later, Vivian and Nellie stood in the garden together. Nellie heaved armfuls of the vicarage sheets into the washtub, her face calm and steady.

  ‘I saw him again.’

  Vivian scrubbed at a sheet. She, too, had seen him.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Joe Ferier. I saw him in the hay fields.’

  Vivian had seen his tent pitched half a mile down the river. He liked to stand beside it, painting, with an easel set up. Whoever heard of a hired hand painting watercolours?

  Rainbows appeared in the soap bubbles that rose up and floated around them. Nellie caught one in her hand and popped it. Vivian put the paddle down.

  ‘I’ll make a blancmange for tomorrow,’ she said, wanting to change the subject. She stamped on a bubble as it landed on the ground beside her. Nellie giggled. She whipped up the soap suds with her hands, sending more bubbles flying around them.

  The sisters danced round the washtub, their clothes soaked by their splashing, a strange kind of excitement taking them over. Nellie shrieked and stamped her feet. Vivian scooped handfuls of soapy water from the tub and launched them at her. She ran towards the orchard, Nellie chasing her. They ran until they sank to their knees in the long grass.

  Vivian looked up at the sky, catching her breath, blades of green tickling her face. She turned her head to stare into Nellie’s grey eyes, so like her own. Her sister’s good, strong face was starred with brown freckles. Vivian would have the same freckles too if she didn’t use a chemist’s cream to make them fade.

  Nellie threw her arms back, revealing the sweat-marked pits of her blouse, and Vivian breathed in the familiar musky scent of her.

  ‘I had the strangest feeling when we met Joe Ferier the other day,’ Nellie said. ‘I thought I might fall in love with him.’

  Vivian sat up. ‘Oh, Nellie. No. Be careful. And not him. He’s uncouth. We know nothing of his family, his parents.’

  ‘We don’t know our parents either.’

  ‘We know they were good people.’

  ‘Don’t go getting in a bother about it. It was just a feeling, that’s all. It went away as fast as it came.’ Nellie turned on her side, a thoughtful look on her face. ‘Do you know where swallows go in winter?’

  ‘Swallows? They migrate to Africa. Why?’

  She fell back into the long grass. ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘I’ll make a blancmange,’ Vivian said again. She was glad Nellie was talking of other things now. ‘I’ll make enough for tea and for breakfast too. We can eat it in bed together if you like.’

  She picked a dandelion and squeezed the milky stickiness from its hollow stem. The harvest would be over soon enough. Joe Ferier would be gone for good, and she and Nellie need never think about him again.

  Three

  Yellow butterflies drifted in the late afternoon light and the air was heavy and hot. Nellie walked along the riverbank. She was going to swim and wash off the dust that clung to her from a day spent turning hay. She stopped and undressed under the willows, slipping into her swimming clothes. She had stitched lead weights into the hem of a cotton farm smock to keep it from lifting up in the water, and wore two pairs of black stockings for modesty’s sake.

  Nellie loved the Little River. It was shallow at its banks but, according to village legends, deep enough in its slow-running centre that a heavily laden hay wain pulled by two horses had once fallen in and was never seen again. Nellie hoped one day to find the sunken cart.

  All year round she swam. In spring and summer, she pushed through clouds of midges and bobbing ducks. In winter, she broke the ice and dived in, coming up with mud on her nose, red mottled skin and an unexpected grin on her face. Rose had always disapproved. Only labourers, farm dogs and water rats swam in the river. Nellie could still remember teaching herself to swim as a child, Vivian standing on the riverbank, her hands holding tight the rope they’d tied around Nellie’s waist, ready to pull her out if she went under for too long.

  Up by the oak trees that same afternoon, Vivian stood watching Joe Ferier’s tent. She swayed back and forth, as if building momentum to set off across the field. He had probably forgotten Nellie altogether. He was camping by the river, minding his own business, and did not need a silly woman asking him if his intentions towards her sister were honourable. And how would she explain it to Nellie? She would be struck down with embarrassment. This will not do, she told herself.

  Joe Ferier was a handsome man. There was no denying that. One day he would marry and have handsome children with a wife who would fuss over them. But that wife would not be Nellie. Vivian turned round and hurried home, hoping nobody had seen her under the trees, wishing she had never thought to go there.

  In the hay fields on the other side of the river, Louisa Moats lay back in a flattened bed of grass. She felt the rough earth under her buttocks, the sun warming her face. A ladybird crawled onto her cheek and she let it, feeling the slight tickle of it. Rowley Livet, the village wheelwright, told her she was a fine woman but an expensive one. He held out a tightly woven gold straw hat with a band of white feathers that turned into small wings on the crown. Did she know how much it cost him? And his wife at home with milk fever wanting money to pay the doctor.

  ‘She doesn’t need the doctor. All she need do is soak a few cabbage leaves in milk and slap them on her titties,’ Louisa said. She took the hat, laid it carefully beside her and slung her arms around his neck. Could she bring herself to kiss this man who had breath like raw onions and a smell of turpentine in his hair? For a new bicycle she might. A nice black one with a basket. She fancied her pretty hat was just the thing to wear for bicycle riding.

  The wheelwright’s hands, dry as kilned oak, slid up her thigh. He would get her a bicycle. Anything for his darling Lou-Lou. Across the fields, Louisa saw a woman standing alone. She looked familiar.

  ‘Wait up,’ she said, pushing him away. What was Vivian Marsh doing? Then she saw what the woman was staring at. A brown tent by the river.

  Vivian Marsh, that mousy, shy little woman, was lovesick. She had fallen for the new farmhand. The one who gave himself airs. She’d seen him reading heavy-looking books in front of the other men like he was educated or something. Louisa laughed. Two sisters after the same man? This would be interesting.

  ‘You all right?’ asked the wheelwright.

  ‘Never better. Right as a mailer, my love,’ she replied, and kissed him.

  Nellie climbed down into the water. She swam on her back, floating slowly with the current.

  ‘Who’s this?’ a voice called out. ‘Ophelia splashing in the reeds, is it? Or a mermaid come to enchant me?’

  Joe Ferier was sitting by his tent. He wore long johns and his hat, a needle and thread in his hand, darning a shirt.

  ‘I have your book,’ she said shyly. ‘The one on birds. I can go and get it. I left it on the bank.’

  He thanked her, took off his hat and said he thought he’d swim too if she didn’t mind sharing her river with him. Nellie turned away so he wouldn’t see her grinning.

  She was quicker than Joe in the water. She knew she would be, but still he tried to race her. From the weeping willow upstream to the row of elders at the widening bend of the river, they swam together. Nellie dived underwater, air bubbles bursting from her lips, a sense of daring enveloping her. After the long winter and the flood and losing Rose, an awful sadness had weighed her down for months. She could feel the water washing it away. The sun threw its dazzling white light across the water, and Nellie turned and twisted in its warmth. This moment, the river, this man. They seemed to belong just to her.

  A Sunday evening in June, Nellie sat beside Joe, unlacing her boots. Behind them in the meadow, brown cows gathered like an audience, heads low, watching them with mild eyes.

  ‘I have something for you,’ she said. She took a stone from her pocket. Vivian had found it when she was weeding Langham’s fields. Her sister always found things. Toffee-coloured flints shaped like arrow heads, black stones she call
ed devil’s toenails. She had a sharp eye and a collector’s desire to hoard. She kept empty birds’ nests and discarded eggshells. She pressed wild flowers and knew the names of every orchid, admiring them all, even the ones which stank like billy goats.

  ‘It’s a hagstone,’ Nellie said. She was not in the habit of giving gifts, and felt foolish. ‘You can thread a string through the hole in it and wear it on your belt. It brings good luck.’

  ‘I’ll need a bit of luck,’ said Joe, holding the stone up to the light and squinting at it. ‘I’ll be leaving soon.’

  She looked over her shoulder at him, trying to keep her voice light.

  ‘Leaving?’

  He showed her an advertisement for the America Line sailing company. A picture of a big steamship in still waters with a blue sky and lots of white clouds puffing around the ship’s tall smokestacks. Joe was going to sail to America. He set up a fishing rod and settled himself on the bank. He was sure he could be a serious artist in America. A painter. No master to work for but himself.

  Nellie watched the reeds moving back and forth at the water’s edge. She had not thought of him leaving.

  The fishing line twitched and wriggled, and Joe reeled in a small trout. He whooped and yelled and stamped his feet in triumph. Nellie leapt up too, caught in his good humour, stamping her bare feet, pointing her toes, doing a step back and forth, a jig she and Vivian had made up.

  Joe grabbed her by the hand and swung her round in a waltz.

  ‘You dance like a man, Nellie. I bet you’ve only ever danced with other women.’

  ‘With my sister, yes.’

  ‘You have to let me lead. Follow me. There you are. You see?’

  He waltzed her round and round, and she let herself drift in his arms until she felt dizzy. Then suddenly he kissed her hard on the mouth, pressing his body against her, his hands holding her tightly. She pushed him away in horror and he let go, an amused look on his face.

  ‘Will you build the fire or gut the fish?’ he asked, stepping away from her as if nothing had happened. She said she’d build the fire, hurrying to gather wood, her fingers touching her mouth where her lips felt bruised, tears of confusion pricking her eyes.

  They cooked the trout and ate the moist pink flesh with their fingers. Fish scales glittered on Joe’s bare arms and several stuck to his face, small winking discs of light on his stubbled chin. He was talking, full of opinions about the world. She and Joe were the same age, and yet she felt like a child in his presence. She knew so little. He talked politics. Farmers were not taking on union men, so they could avoid the minimum wages recently set for workers. There were strikes in the north of England. Nellie knew nothing of any of it. He read to her a book of poetry by someone called Pound. She didn’t like the verses at all and only pretended to listen, sucking fish juices from her fingers, imagining herself on the deck of a steamship, watching the coast of England slipping from view.

  When she got home, Vivian was sitting up, a candle burning low beside her. She was mending a skirt, her fingers sewing quick stitches. The needle flashed silver as Vivian stabbed the fabric with it, pulling it out, stabbing it into the cloth, over and over.

  ‘Did you enjoy your swim?’

  Nellie fetched a glass of lemonade from the jug in the pantry. She wished Vivian had been asleep in bed so that she could have avoided this confrontation.

  ‘It was refreshing, yes.’

  ‘You never swam at night before. I wonder why you do now. You are rarely at home these days.’

  ‘The evenings are so hot,’ said Nellie. She turned her back on her sister, her face burning.

  Vivian stopped sewing. ‘It’s unladylike the way you run out of the house after our evening meal. You’re like a farm dog after a rabbit. What makes you so keen to leave me behind, I wonder?’

  ‘You sound like Rose.’

  ‘That’s because she would have said the same thing.’

  ‘I’m going up to bed now,’ said Nellie, finishing her drink. ‘Will you come soon, Vivie?’

  ‘Is it him you swim with?’

  Nellie could not bear this conversation.

  ‘He likes to swim and so do I,’ she said, and went up to bed, not waiting for a reply.

  Vivian stopped sewing. Nellie was going to marry Joe Ferier and leave her. She was sure of it. Alone, Vivian could not keep the cottage and earn enough to live on. She’d have to go into domestic service or move to town and work in a factory. Joe Ferier was ruining everything between the sisters. She got up, tidying away her work. She locked the front door and closed the curtains. The worst thing was, she was jealous. Horribly jealous that he had chosen Nellie instead of her.

  At the Home and Colonial Stores in town, Nellie bought a cardboard suitcase, a packet of hooks and eyes (in case they were hard to come by in America), a new girdle, and felt violets to sew onto her winter hat. If Joe wouldn’t stay, then she and Vivian would go with him. She enquired into the price of train tickets to Southampton and found a shipping agency by the docks who told her she could buy her passage to America through them.

  ‘I’ll want a double berth, for my sister and myself,’ she explained. ‘I’d like to reserve the berth and I’ll pay for it in the next few weeks.’

  ‘You can go with whomever you want, Miss,’ said the man at the desk, yawning. ‘Take my sister too, if you want. I wish you would. But you have to pay up front.’

  She didn’t have the money.

  ‘Then I’ll come back later,’ she told him.

  Nellie vowed she and Vivian would wear ostrich feathers in their hats when they left. A barrel organ played a jaunty tune outside the railway station, and in a moment of madness she tossed her last shiny shilling into the black cap of the small monkey that sat upon it, thinking it might bring her luck. The monkey chattered noisily and ran to its owner, holding up the shilling. Nellie suddenly wished she could retrieve the coin. She would need all the money she could get in order to leave, and here she was giving it away like a lady with a heart set on charity.

  The sun was low by the time she walked along the dusty road towards home, her shadow with its suitcase a dark giant walking in front of her. Nellie felt defiant and sure. Joe said the world was there for the making. It was shapeless until you formed it your own way. He said you just had to stand up and start walking in the right direction. Nellie lifted her head. He was right. She was ready to walk. All she had to do was persuade Vivian to join her. She prayed her sister would agree to leave the cottage; Nellie would not leave without her. She would find the right time to talk to Vivian, and she’d understand it would be an adventure. Next week, when Joe was leaving. It was best not to give Vivian too much time to think about it.

  Vivian lay beside Nellie in bed in the dark under their lace curtain tent. She was sweating, the heat of their two bodies making her feel weak. These were the dog days of early summer, and the night was sultry with heat. The window was open in the hope of finding a breeze, the room quiet but for their breathing and the sound of mosquitoes whining. She had discovered the suitcase a few days ago, packed and hidden under the bed.

  Vivian felt Nellie touch her hand under the covers, and rolled against her. Nellie may have a quick temper, her feet might be cold in bed all year round, she might hate darning and always sew a crooked seam, but Vivian could not bear to think of life without her. To lose Nellie would be to lose a part of herself.

  ‘Don’t you ever long for another life?’ whispered Nellie.

  Vivian closed her eyes. Of course she did. The wheelwright’s wife feeding her baby came into her mind. There was the scent of the river in the room. And something else. Woodsmoke in Nellie’s damp hair. Fish scales and waterweeds, the nicotine perfume of pipe tobacco on her skin.

  She wrinkled her nostrils, pushing Nellie away, pulling the sheets up to her chin.

  ‘You and I don’t need to stay here for ever,’ said Nellie. ‘Not now it’s just the two of us.’

  ‘This is our home,’ Vivian replied. How
could they possibly leave here? They were meant to be here. They were sisters. She hated Joe Ferier with a passion that shocked her. She could picture him perfectly. His dark eyes, his scarf loose around his throat, revealing the soft dip of collarbone. She would drown herself in the river rather than let Nellie leave her.

  A day later, Vivian saw Joe walking across the fields. He was easy to spot, even at a distance. With his arrogant loping gait and black hat, he looked more like a landowner than a hired hand.

  Vivian left the cottage. She would talk to him. Ask him to explain to Nellie that he could not take her with him. The sisters would not be separated. She would make sense of all this, as she always tried to make sense of everything.

  As a child, Vivian thought she had been chosen by God to understand the connections He had made in the world. She had believed He wanted her to become a schoolteacher one day. She’d counted the number of fine fronds that made up an owl’s wing feather, noting in an exercise book that the dry hollow stem of the feather and the tiny elements of it all were part of a whole pattern of connecting things. Everything was God’s secret. A feather might be as soft as a girl’s cheek, but it was also as dry as a corn stalk, strong enough to carry a bird in flight and as light as a whisper. It was all those things. A river could be no more than a snake of silver in the grass, or it could be wide enough to hold the whole sky in its reflections, but it was all water, tiny drops of cold that filled rain butts and church fonts alike. A man could be handsome and given to walking with a swagger, and yet hold the key to everything without even knowing it.

  When she saw him, she pretended to be surprised.

  ‘Not working?’ she asked. ‘I hear Langham is worried about the harvest this year because of the drought.’

  ‘Well, I’ve worked my hours in any case,’ said Joe. ‘I’m not labouring for Langham now, so he can’t hire or fire me as he chooses.’

  He wished her well, tipped his hat and began to walk away. Vivian called his name. She asked if he was a believer. He looked surprised.