Spilt Milk Read online

  In the bathroom down the hall, she washed and checked her appearance in the mirror. She still marvelled at the indoor bathroom with its ceramic bath and a sink with shiny metal taps for hot and cold water. In the mirror her eyes looked calm. Pale grey with a thin blue rim to them. Her hair had recently been salon-waved. She drew a sweep of blonde across her forehead and fixed it with a hair clasp. She did not look like a countrywoman any more, and she was glad.

  Vivian tucked a stray curl behind her ear and powdered her nose. It had been a sensible decision to marry Frank. She was fond of him, but she didn’t love him. If she didn’t love him, she was sure he could never break her heart. She applied red lipstick and blotted it with a tissue, just as she had read how to in a magazine. She used a little block of coloured wax and a small brush to paint her eyes. Another magazine article on feminine beauty, written by a man, had said it was off-putting to see women too brightly painted. Vivian read avidly these days, borrowing books from the town library. Books on manners and etiquette, housekeeping and homemaking. The Young Woman’s Friend, A Wife’s Companion, Good Manners for All Occasions, How to Care for a Husband. She was teaching herself to speak correctly too, as if she could cast off every memory of her past life with every ragged country vowel she refused to utter.

  She went down the staircase with its faded red Indian runner and stopped on the landing where the guest bedrooms led off a corridor. Four rooms, two either side.

  On the landing was a large brass spittoon, something Frank had brought back years ago from India when he’d worked out there as a young man. Vivian had filled the dimpled brass pot with peacock feathers. Nellie would have been horrified to see such unlucky feathers in a house. Vivian stopped to arrange the feathers, glancing out of the window onto the grounds at the back of the house. There was a scrubby rose garden, and a small vegetable patch which had been lawn before the war. Beyond were stables, where Frank’s automobile was parked and a green-painted pony trap gathered dust. An apple tree stood tall over one of the stables. All this was hers.

  It was hard to think she had once believed so fervently in a spinster’s life. She had read the other day that a husband was the most important element in a woman’s life. Above children and other family members. Granted, it was another article written by a man – why were so many articles aimed at women written by men? But he’d made a convincing argument. It made a kind of sense to think that married women should treat their husbands as both the masters of the home and eternally needy children. Women were natural carers, after all.

  Frank came downstairs. He wore a baggy charcoal suit, and his round-rimmed glasses had smears of fingerprints on them. He was rather elderly, but he had a good head of grey hair and thick white eyebrows that hung over his glasses in a comic fashion. His face was soft and good-humoured. He checked his watch and smiled.

  ‘Am I late this morning?’

  ‘No, dear,’ she said, enjoying the sound of the familiarity in her words. ‘I was waiting for you.’

  He held out his arm to her and they walked downstairs. On the ground floor was a hallway with a set of doors going off to the right and a small reception desk. A drooping fern in a glazed green pot sat on the desk, along with a brass bell, and a gong was suspended from a dark wooden frame. A carved cuckoo clock on the wall loudly tick-tocked.

  At the reception desk, Vivian let go of his arm.

  ‘Kippers this morning, please, Mrs Stewart,’ said Frank breezily, and disappeared into the dining room. Vivian went into the kitchens and put on an apron.

  Frank liked his kippers poached in milk and then set on a plate with a knob of butter and slices of dry toast. The cook, Mrs Dunn, was making breakfast for the guests: two farmers in town for the livestock market. Vivian said good morning.

  ‘It’s raining,’ said Mrs Dunn. And then, ‘Don’t forget he likes brown toast.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Vivian. She knew the cook didn’t like her. Every time she entered the kitchen she felt she was trespassing. Frank had laughed it off when she told him.

  ‘She doesn’t have to like you,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to like her either.’

  Despite the hurt she felt at his short reply, she had been glad he explained things to her. It stated clearly in one of her household management books that a distance must be kept between staff and members of a household. Kindness and distance. She flipped the kippers onto a warmed plate and congratulated Mrs Dunn on the newly washed floor. For a moment she heard Rose’s voice in hers, the sureness of it, the way she always knew how to be correct. Nellie used to say Rose was an ogre, but that was unfair. It must have been hard for Rose raising her sisters alone.

  Vivian wrote regularly to Nellie. She still felt guilty for leaving her alone. Poor Nellie. Vivian hoped one day to be able to ask Frank if her sister might come and live with them.

  In the dining room, Frank was discussing the war with his friend Bernard Harding. Dr Harding was a balding man in a starched white collar and dark tweed suit. ‘Stewart,’ he called her husband, as if it were his first name. He and Frank had gone to school together. These days, both of them being too old to join up, they did warden duty, guarding the railway yards and urging people to keep their lights dimmed and curtains closed in case of Zeppelin raids. Frank, ever cautious, had asked Vivian to put up black paper on the windows to hide the lights at night.

  Dr Harding ran a surgery in the centre of town. He was a man devoted to society and the improvement of it. He’d been mentioned in the local newspaper just the other day for giving a talk to a ladies’ club. He’d lectured a full hall on the importance of eliminating weakness in the offspring of the working classes. Good breeding, he’d been quoted as saying, was vital for the future of the British Empire.

  When she’d first met him she’d thought he might be a possible husband for Nellie. He was a lifelong bachelor. ‘Everybody’s uncle,’ as Frank jovially called him. Vivian could not understand a man wanting to be a bachelor all his life. She didn’t believe anyone really wanted to live alone. Frank had been a bachelor too, but one in need of looking after when his mother died. He said Vivian was his angel sent from above.

  ‘Would you like more tea?’ she asked the doctor as she put the kippers down in front of her husband.

  ‘Bless you,’ he said. ‘Mrs Stewart, that would be wonderful.’

  Frank gave Vivian a mild smile. He had the same way of looking at her when he watched her getting into bed at night. Fondly. It was nothing like the way Joe Ferier had looked at her. She shivered thinking of Joe, a light stirring of the hairs on her arms. She touched her sleeve, smoothing her skin back to dullness. There was no passion in Frank’s gaze and she was glad.

  She’d met Frank by chance. He had been the answer to her problems just as she had been the answer to his. She and Nellie had been walking one afternoon in late summer.

  ‘It’s going to rain,’ Nellie had said. She always had an uncanny ability to predict the weather. Vivian had thought of the river and felt the familiar panic rise within her. The fear that her baby’s watery grave might be disturbed. It was always unbearable to imagine that.

  It had been humid for days and there was a sudden drenching downpour. The sisters walked slowly through it, a long way from home. Vivian heard a noise like a threshing machine’s engine and turned to see a small black motor car bounce around the corner, shiny as a beetle. It braked heavily and skidded, its front wheel mudguard knocking Nellie over onto the grass verge.

  The more Nellie insisted she was all right, the more Frank insisted he should drive the women home, or to a doctor’s surgery. It was Vivian who took charge. She wanted to get dry. Yes, she yelled, bent against the rain and wind, one hand holding her soggy hat down to stop it getting blown away. Yes, they would accept a ride.

  Frank turned up at the cottage the following week carrying a bouquet of goldenrod and purple irises. He liked to drive in the country on Sundays, he said, and thought he’d stop to see if Nellie was recovering.

 
Vivian found a tablecloth in the dresser drawer, one of their mother’s. She spread it over the table and invited Frank in. She served him tea in their best teapot. Nellie did not come home, though Vivian was sure she had caught sight of her heading across the fields away from the house. She doubted she would return until Frank’s motor car was gone from the track outside. Nellie had become more like Rose since they had started living together again, avoiding the gaze of others, being reclusive and shy, talking of the dangers of the outside world, just as Rose had.

  ‘Next time you come,’ she said to Frank, because already it seemed that he was a man of routine, ‘I’ll have fresh scones baked.’

  He had a small guest house in a town forty miles away. His mother had owned it, and when she died her housekeeper continued to run it. Now the housekeeper had died too, and a man simply couldn’t run a guest house. He needed a woman to do it.

  Frank visited on Sundays and always with a bunch of flowers in his plump hand. Each time they heard his car approaching, Nellie set off across the fields, announcing she had things to do, though what these things might be, she never said.

  ‘Perhaps your sister doesn’t like flowers?’ Frank asked when Nellie had been late leaving and they could both see her running through the orchard.

  ‘Don’t mind her,’ said Vivian. ‘She’s awkward. I like flowers very much.’

  He stayed for hours, without need of conversation, hands folded over his stout belly, drinking tea and eating cake, happy to watch her mending clothes or doing her chores. He seemed to grow more comfortable in the chair the longer he sat there. Some days he stayed until it got dark and Vivian had to ask him to leave for fear Nellie was sat outside, waiting to come inside.

  ‘Why does he keep coming?’ asked Nellie a couple of months later. She brushed a hand across the yellow chrysanthemums arranged in a stone jar on the table. ‘He drinks all our tea and takes our sugar.’

  ‘He has asked me to marry him,’ said Vivian. She had been waiting to tell Nellie. Hoping she would understand she could not bear her life here any more. So much had happened. She longed to be away from this cottage, where every room was filled with memories of her daughter.

  ‘Marry you? But you can’t marry him. We’re sisters. We promised Rose we’d never marry.’

  ‘I have said yes.’

  ‘But he’s so old.’

  ‘He needs a housekeeper.’ Vivian avoided her sister’s hard stare. ‘Forgive me, Nellie. Living here I feel like the river is watching me, waiting to catch me out. I cannot stay any longer. I hope you will come with me. I shall explain to Frank.’

  ‘No,’ said Nellie. She had lived away from home for those months after Joe left and she always liked to suggest she had learned a great deal about human nature during that time. ‘If he marries you, he will expect you to give me up. You are leaving me.’

  ‘I would never do that. I shall insist you must come with me.’

  But Nellie had been right. Frank had said they’d wait and see about her sister joining them.

  Vivian and Frank’s honeymoon was a night at a hotel by the sea. A favourite place Frank had been coming to since he was a child with his brothers and parents and then with his widowed mother until she passed away. A grey stone hotel perched among rockery gardens of pink heather.

  ‘Vivian,’ said Frank that first night. ‘Come to bed. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  It was touching to hear the gentleness in his voice. He thought her innocent and afraid. She felt knowing instead. She had already been Joe’s wife. Not in name perhaps, but she had been the mother of his child.

  She woke the next morning and expected to see her sister beside her, the wooden crucifix that hung on the lumpy lime-washed wall of their room. Then she heard Frank snoring and remembered. She was married. She whispered her new name under her breath. Vivian Stewart.

  She had thought Frank would give her what she desired more than anything, but in the time they had been married there had not yet been any children.

  Vivian brought another pot of tea and a jug of cold milk to the table for the doctor.

  ‘Isn’t she a treasure?’ Frank said, beaming.

  Dr Harding agreed heartily. ‘Your mother would have adored her,’ he said, and added another sugar to his tea.

  Eight

  Hymes Court sat in a valley, a long tree-lined driveway leading to it. There were circular steps to the front door, stone pillars and a yellow rose climbing them. Inside, nurses in starched white uniforms bustled back and forth across parquet floors. A wide sweeping staircase led the eye upwards, and framed oil paintings hung on the walls up the stairway.

  ‘You want the side entrance,’ a soldier told her. ‘Kitchen staff don’t use this door.’

  Nellie liked the work. The nurses said her rice pudding cheered even the weakest of the men. She baked bread and made health-giving jellies. Eggs in aspic, beef tea, calves’ foot broth, stewed rabbit in milk. Her heart went out to those poor wounded boys that came and went in their temporary hospital rooms. She would have spoon-fed any one of them if she’d been asked to.

  The owner of the house, a military man called Williams, was away fighting and his mother and sister had moved to Switzerland for the duration of the war. His wife and six-year-old daughter had stayed behind. They lived in the east wing, away from the wounded soldiers who cried in the night. Away from the smell of iodine and mustard plasters.

  Nellie saw the little girl coming and going with her mother. Her name was Dorothy. She had blue eyes and a pleasing face. Dorothy waved at her each time she saw her, and Nellie felt flattered by the child’s attentions.

  ‘You remind me of my sister,’ Nellie told her, when the girl’s mother brought her into the kitchens one day.

  ‘Is she six like me?’

  Nellie laughed.

  She was a loveable child. Nellie couldn’t help feeling Vivian’s little one might have been like her had she lived.

  What Dorothy liked best, her mother said, was a Victoria sponge with plum jam in the middle. Their old cook used to make them.

  ‘My sister was the cake maker in our house,’ Nellie said. ‘But I’ll have a try.’

  The next day more casualties arrived and there was no time to be baking cakes. She worked long hours, chopping vegetables and pushing pots and pans back and forth, steam filling the kitchen, her face red and flushed. The nurses were rushed off their feet too, and nobody had time to stop and talk or to walk in the gardens where red tulips and wallflowers coloured the unsettled spring weather.

  ‘Dorothy’s gone,’ said a nurse when Nellie finally took a sponge cake up to the east wing.

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘Abroad. Her mother was worried they might catch tuberculosis from the soldiers. They’ve gone to Switzerland. Some people get all the luck. I wish I was out of it.’

  Coming downstairs, Nellie studied the oil paintings that lined the staircase. The richness of the depth of paint made her want to reach out and press a finger to the canvases. There was a painting of the present family. Dorothy stood between her mother and her father in his army uniform, a ribbon in her blonde hair.

  Nellie supposed that one day when the war was over and Dorothy grew up, there might be an oil painting of her with her own children here, along with the others. The thought pleased Nellie, though she couldn’t say why. Perhaps she felt glad that in all this chaos there might be a life that could be lived simply and happily.

  Nellie took the cake to the soldiers’ mess rooms. A newspaper was spread on the table and a name caught her eye. Langham. She read on. The two Langham boys had died in action. Poor Mrs Langham and old Hang’em. She picked up the paper to take it away with her. A picture of Nathan Rumsby was on the front page, next to news about the possible end of the war. He’d been found guilty of murdering his mother. Nellie dropped the paper.

  A soldier picked it up and handed it to her.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I remember you. You had a plan to end the war. A g
ood one, I’d say.’

  Scarring covered the right side of his face. He wore an eye patch. His cheekbone, the unscarred one, was high and smooth, his hair combed and glossy with hair oil.

  She moved away, thinking of getting back to the kitchens.

  ‘Ah, but you don’t remember me? Why should you? One wounded soldier looks much like another.’

  Nellie clasped the newspaper to her. ‘Perhaps I do know you. I have to go, excuse me.’

  He said he was the soldier who’d got into an argument with some pacifists one day last year in her village. ‘Let the generals fight it out. That’s what you told us. Wonderful!’

  Nellie still didn’t remember. She thought she might fall down if she didn’t get outside and breathe fresh air, and yet something made her stay. He seemed so desperate to talk. He’d got himself blown up in the Somme, had a stint in a hospital in Dorset, and now found himself back at Hymes Court, where he’d been invalided back on a Blighty One. That was shorthand for any wound bad enough to get you sent home. Once he was discharged from here, he really was home for good. Demobbed. Pensioned off. No more running like a rabbit out of the line of fire. Well out of it all.

  ‘It’s very good to see a friendly face at any rate,’ he said. ‘Let me introduce myself. Sergeant Henry Farr. Single so far, the lads like to call me.’

  Nellie held out her hand.

  ‘Eleanor Marsh. Nellie. And I really have to get back to work now.’

  ‘Damned good cake,’ she heard him say as she hurried away.

  At the end of the day he came to the kitchens to find her. He leaned an arm against the door frame and smoked a cigarette.

  ‘I can’t abide children. I have these blasted night terrors, you see. Noise can set them off. The sound of children crying sends me off in a spin.’

  ‘I don’t have any children,’ she said, taking off her apron and shaking it out. ‘And I don’t want any either.’

  They spent her days off together. She met him off the omnibus and took him home to the cottage, where they walked in the orchard. On sunny days they sat by the river.