Another time, she remarked, ‘Ould Woodie is a mingy master, a proper pinchpenny, so he’s askin’ for theft. I suppose the Missus is used to ’im being mean and pokin’ his nose into the housekeepin’ book. And him payin’ out for his fancy woman; the poor Missus must lose out because of her,’ she giggled knowingly.
Polly laughed. Then she said more soberly, ‘It’s hard when you’ve no man interested in yez.’
As Polly’s grief over Patrick diminished, she had begun to look for someone to replace him; she was young and strong and could not imagine life without a man in it. But she lived in a world of women domestics, and the valet of the Colonel who lived next door was, she soon found, not interested in females. ‘And he a fine lookin’ man,’ she tut-tutted to Fanny. Fanny’s reply was ribald in the extreme.
Every time Polly went home to see her parents, however, she was reminded how lucky she was. The stench of sewage and the lack of even a decent cup of tea had not bothered her in earlier days – she had taken hardship for granted; but not any longer.
The overcrowding had been lessened by the removal of her paternal aunt and her five children to another cellar, but she was grieved to see her struggling mother grow progressively wearier and her unemployed father more despairing. She gave them most of the two shillings a week she earned, and, after her few hours of freedom, she would return thankfully to the nursery, to have only the smell of the baby round her and to know that tea might not be a very large meal but it would certainly arrive.
Though not given to pondering on what the future held, she began to consider how she could continue working for the Woodmans after Alicia was weaned. As a possible alternative, she dreamed occasionally of the gardener in Princes Park. He had never asked her out but he always seemed glad to see her. If he were promoted, he might be given a tied cottage in the park; they were sometimes provided for more senior gardeners. There he might be able to keep a pig and grow some vegetables – and keep a wife.
Unlike Rosie, she did not meet the tradesmen who came to the house and lingered round the back door until they were sent packing by Mrs Tibbs or, in the case of the grocer, invited into her private bed-sitting room to discuss the week’s groceries.
In the darkness of the early morning, Rosie, the house-parlourmaid, used to scurry down the path in the back garden, to get a kiss and a quick fondle from the milkman, who was courting her. Then, trembling with desire, she would rush back into the house and tear upstairs to wash out the great bath with its mahogany surround, before Humphrey Woodman got up. She would lay out his cut-throat razor, his moustache scissors and his shaving cup on the bathroom dressing-table and wipe down his leather razor strop which hung on the wall beside the sink.
‘He used to tan ’is sons’ hides with his razor strop,’ Rosie told Polly. ‘I remember Master Edward gettin’ it so hard once, he fainted. And even then he never lifted a finger against ’is Pa. Loovely young man, Master Edward is; always says “thank you”.’
Rocking the baby in her arms as she paused at the doorway of the bathroom she was not allowed to use, Polly remembered the dreadful state of Elizabeth’s back after she had been beaten and she wondered if he had used the strop on her. No one, she thought passionately, should use a strop on such a pretty lady, no matter what she had done. Since that day, she had more than once found her Mistress with tears on her face. She wondered what else he had done to her, and she shivered.
I
Elizabeth had no idea whether her husband had expressed any feelings in public about the new arrival in the family, but she suspected that Maisie had done so and that the news of Alicia’s doubtful origins had reached some of her acquaintances. Certainly, the number of invitations she usually received had dropped off, and one or two ladies appeared not to have seen her when she met them while out walking.
Her conscience told her that, as Andrew and she moved through their usual group before the birth, mutual friends must have sensed the attachment between them – and her pregnancy, at so late an age, must have caused speculation behind delicately waving ball fans.
She decided that she did not care; she would brazen it out. And Humphrey could take himself to hell, as long as he kept her. Once she had recovered from the beating, she had done some urgent arithmetic, and had decided that she could not possibly live on her marriage settlement from her father; it provided pin money, but that was all.
In her despair, she had considered writing to her brother in Ceylon and asking if she could make a home with him; but he had always been a poor correspondent and lived up country on his tea plantation, sharing a house with his partner. Two bachelors together, she thought wryly, would not want to be saddled with a woman. And it was said that men sometimes, well, sometimes did intimate things together – and she could not face the possibility of that.
So she decided to use Humphrey to her own advantage. If he threatened to beat her again, she would say sharply that she would show the bruises to the wives of his business associates. Stiff-necked Presbyterians, most of them, they might feel she deserved it, but faced with it, they would freeze out Humphrey. They’d be a pack of Pontius Pilates, she thought maliciously.
The armed truce prevailed, with occasional tiresome arguments which never resolved anything.
II
Though Elizabeth’s friends might snub her, Humphrey found, to his embarrassment, that when he met business acquaintances accompanied by their wives, several of the ladies inquired after Elizabeth’s health and whether the baby had been a boy or a girl.
The same thing happened when he attended social events alone. Where was dear Elizabeth and how was the new baby?
He knew he must, to save unwanted conjecture, persuade Elizabeth to accompany him occasionally, and he must learn to reply civilly to polite inquiries. He could not ignore both mother and daughter indefinitely. His Manchester brother, Harold, and his wife, Vera, had been offended at not being asked to the christening, and he had told them that it had been very quiet because Elizabeth was still weak and Florence was in the family way herself. Though his brother accepted this, Vera felt that it confirmed her own suspicions.
At St Margaret’s Church, Humphrey and Elizabeth stood side by side each Sunday morning in frigid silence. He hoped that she had been privately Churched, attended a traditional service of thanksgiving; otherwise, the minister would ask awkward questions.
Elizabeth had, indeed, been Churched. One morning, she had kneeled alone before the priest, while he intoned over her Psalm 127, with its uncomfortable references to men with quivers full of arrows, and she wept quietly for Andrew Crossing, the darling of her youth, who had deserted her. In a worldly way, she knew he had been wise to slip quietly out of her life, by the simple process of handing over her legal work to one of his partners. She knew he should have done it long before. But it hurt.
It was common enough for women to cry after giving birth, so the priest ignored the tears stealing down Elizabeth’s cheeks. He was, however, kind enough to invite her into the vicarage, where he handed her over to his sister, who kept house for him. She was a fussy, plain woman who produced a strong cup of tea and ten minutes’ bracing conversation on the joys of having children. It gave Elizabeth time to blow her nose, before walking home.
III
Alicia’s first Boxing Day was a Sunday. Harold and Vera Woodman, accompanied by their three sons, came to spend the day with Elizabeth and Humphrey. At tea time, Alicia was brought down by Polly and laid in her mother’s arms; she behaved admirably and gurgled and smiled at the company.
Aunt Vera stroked the fine down of ash-blonde hair on the child’s head. ‘She’s as fair as a lily – and with such light grey eyes,’ she remarked, watching Elizabeth’s face.
Elizabeth