Alfred and Emily (13 page)

And so the subject of Alistair McTaggart was dropped, but messages came from him, saying how much he looked forward to Mistress McVeagh's next visit; she had told him that her maiden name surely must mean she had a Scottish claim somewhere and he called her Mistress McVeagh. Between Fiona and Emily it was understood, without anything being said, that if Emily wasn't so very busy she would certainly spend more time up there with Alistair McTaggart, for, as Fiona reminded her, with a smile, ‘He loves you, Emily; he does, you know.'

Then he would telephone Fiona to say he was expecting Mistress McVeagh for the ceilidh next week. ‘I am counting on you, Fiona.' And, more often than not, Emily did go. She became known as Alistair McTaggart's friend from London, who was a storyteller in her own right. And all this went on, pleasantly enough, for a year, two, three – until one day Alistair rang Fiona to say he was not himself, he was poorly, would Mistress McVeagh perhaps come and see to him? Up went Emily to find him in bed, fevered, but with heavy sweats, coughing, and very much not himself. She telephoned Fiona to say she must stay and watch over Alistair, to whom she had already called the doctor, who agreed with her that Mr. McTaggart was not at all well. And then, one night, Emily
found him dying: it was his heart that was doing him in. He died, and Emily, having alerted his daughter to attend to the arrangements, went weeping to London. But she had to go back to Scotland for the funeral.

She learned from the people there that she would always be welcome if she returned for visits; and Emily wept again. She said to Fiona that she seemed to do little else. ‘And I'm
not
a weeper,' she protested.

As soon as Alistair McTaggart was buried Daisy rang to say her father had died. The funeral was next week.

‘It never rains but it pours,' said Emily; and the two deaths were only part of it.

On the whole, the Martin-White schools had gone along without much difficulty. Nothing very bad had happened, except for a fire, which burned nobody; the insurance, instructed by Cedric, paid up. And there had been a bit of trouble with tramps using a school in Cornwall as shelter.

But now it seemed as if a quarter of a century's accumulated bile was exploding over the name, the reputation, the very aims of the Martin-White schools. A teacher became pregnant, and before she could be unobtrusively got rid of, the press heard of it and there were headlines along the lines of ‘A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing'; ‘Martin-White Schools Shelter Immorality'; ‘Free Love Flourishes in the Martin-White Foundation'. For some reason the fierce moralities of the time had been touched off by this case, of a pretty girl called Ivy Smith who, like thousands of girls before her – fair-minded people were
pointing out – found themselves in the family way before they'd got a ring on their finger. There was no chance of Ivy getting a ring – her so-called fiancé had disappeared. Emily was, as it happened, visiting Scotland, and Fiona was on holiday with her children in the country. Daisy simply sacked the girl, and advised her to apply to such and such a convent. Emily and Fiona, hearing of this, told Daisy she was harsh; Fiona even used the word ‘hypocritical'. ‘We can't have illegitimate babies in our schools,' said Daisy. ‘Didn't you see what the papers said?'

The trustees (the debs and the bishops), as Fiona said, put their collective feet down and threatened resignations, public scandals, letters to
The Times
.

‘We can't have it,' insisted Daisy, who was suspected by Emily of taking too much personal relish in this. People were remembering that Daisy Lane had spent years of her life examining girls not only for skills in nursing but for behaviour, reputation, conduct, morals.

‘There is nothing we can do,' said Cedric, who thoroughly disapproved of how Ivy had been treated. ‘It will blow over. We can be sure of that.'

Next thing, there was an article in one of the more sensational newspapers about how girls looked after by the nuns of that convent were treated. ‘Nothing like it has been heard of since Dickens'; ‘Conditions that would have been condemned in a Victorian workhouse'. And so on. Ivy, who had visited Longerfield and had become friends with the Redway women, was rescued from the convent, and
invited to teach at the Longerfield school.

‘Well,' said Emily to Fiona, and with the kind of grim humour not everyone appreciated, ‘the Longerfield school has its Montessori-trained teacher at last.'

No sooner had Emily returned to London from the funeral of Harold than there came a letter signed by Betsy Tayler, Phyllis Redway, and a separate letter from Mary Lane:

Emily wrote to Mary to say that she had had nothing to do with the treatment of Ivy; and knew that Mary would see that this message was transmitted to the others. All the same, she might not be personally responsible, but responsibility she did have – some. And there was another thought niggling away. When she had heard first that this girl had got pregnant and there was no chance of a wedding, she had found herself thinking, What a nuisance. How very badly timed. And, Imagine that a baby could dislodge all our arrangements…
They were negotiating a deal that would spread the foundation's work into Wales and into Scotland. A scandal would easily put an end to that. Suddenly there were complications and difficulties where before there had been none. A baby. Just one baby. A ‘love-child', they called it…So Emily had fulminated, admittedly, only to herself, her ill-temper kept private and not admitted even to Fiona. And now she was ashamed of herself. She, who had ‘swooned and mooned' – as she put it – over Fiona's infants, being so censorious over an illegitimate child.

The train from London must be late: people waiting for Emily were on their second and third cups of tea.

Who was waiting? Not Mr. Redway, who had said he was too old to get excited because some silly girl had a bun in the oven. He sat outside the long windows, in a chair, bundled up: there was a sharp little wind. Ivy was very much there, centre stage, the baby in a basket beside her. Mrs. Redway was dead, having gone presumably to her Maker, where she had told everyone for years she was heading. Alfred, who had not much changed, was there, with Bert beside him, who had got fat and blowsy: his hand shook as he lifted a teacup. Betsy, the fair-sized matron, sat with Phyllis, a sharp-nosed, dark woman. If this gathering had been only a week ago, the self-congratulatory complacency of the two wives would have been quite intolerable – but events were moving fast. What had not changed was Ivy's readiness to tell her tale, again and…‘Oh, not again,' Bert had complained.

She had indeed just gone through the recital, but concluded with ‘Yes, I know that Mrs. Martin-White had nothing to do with it – but she was off with her fancy man in Scotland.'

At this Alfred, suddenly angry, said to her, and it sounded like an explosion of emotion, ‘Not well said, from a girl whose fancy man wasn't up to much.'

‘But well named,' said Ivy, standing up for herself. ‘He fancied me up and fancied me down, fancied me up the creek and there he left me.' She tittered. This girl, who so recently couldn't say boo to a goose, had acquired a hard gloss of defiance, like impertinence, from her experiences at the convent.

Alfred said, ‘Emily McVeagh has been a friend to most of us here for many years – longer than you have been alive.'

Bright-eyed with anger, Ivy remained silent. Her two supporters – the wives – were also silent.

Rescuing Ivy from the convent, they had promised her a home with one of them.

Ivy was a small dark round girl, rather like a squashed raspberry (Bert's definition), who wore fluffy red jumpers and little short skirts.

Alfred had said to Betsy, ‘No, she cannot come and live with us. Don't you do it, Betsy. I'll find myself in bed with her before I know how it happened.'

Alfred was a susceptible man, and Betsy a jealous wife: never had anything so direct been said between them. Mr. Redway, perhaps not so old after all, said that Ivy was a girl ‘anyone could see, was no better than she ought to be'. With neither house being ready to take in Ivy, Mary Lane
stepped in. She was alone now in her house; this didn't suit her at all; she would be happy to give Ivy a home. Meeting Alfred out near the pond where the horses bathed, she told him that he needn't worry: Ivy would be married within the year.

‘That girl's trouble,' said Alfred, to his old friend Mary. ‘She puts my back up. I don't know why.'

Mary knew very well why the men were against Ivy. She desisted from making any of the rude remarks that came to her tongue, and said, ‘Alfred, rest yourself. It'll be all right.'

The two Tayler boys, no longer boys, had returned from yet another venture into foreign lands, and at once Tom took a fancy to Ivy.

This conversation took place between father and son. ‘Tom,' said Alfred, ‘the girl's not twenty-two yet. And you are almost old enough to be her father.'

‘Yes, I know, Dad.'

‘Are you so set on her?'

‘Yes, I am.'

‘Then I'm going to ask you to wait a year. You and Michael go off on your trip first.'

‘Someone else'll snap her up,' said Tom, grinning.

Which was what Alfred was counting on.

The two wives, having learned that it was their men, as much as ‘those nasty old crows', the nuns, who didn't like Ivy, became less belligerent. Even Emily, their embodiment of heartlessness, had been excused by Mary Lane.

Into this atmosphere came Emily, on that chilly afternoon.
Although tousled and reddened, invigorated by the wind, she was in fact pretty tired, having been wrestling with representatives of various Scottish charities all morning.

‘Brrrr,' said Emily, briskly, rubbing her hands together. ‘I'd forgotten how cold Longerfield can get.'

Emily, who had been on her way to becoming heavy, if not stout, had got thinner nursing Alistair McTaggart and because of tribulations since. She wore a dark-blue costume, with the recently again fashionable fox fur. ‘I wonder if that's the fox I shot last spring down near the woods,' said Bert.

‘You'll need a cup of tea.' Alfred directed his wife, who was already at the tea tray.

Emily, having taken in the company, understood that the pretty little thing with the baby beside her must be the cause of so much trouble. She said to the girl, smiling, ‘Well, I'm Emily Martin-White. Here is the delinquent.'

Ivy offered a crisp little nod in return. Alfred said, ‘It's all right, Emily. Mary has explained.'

The wives, who had been holding Emily in their minds for weeks now, as everything they must hate, had only recently relinquished her to her usual place, a formidable elderly woman, who had achieved such miracles of organisation.

‘Mary told me that those nuns shut you up in a cell, with nothing to eat but bread and water,' said Emily.

‘I gave as good as I got,' said Ivy, haughtily.

‘Yes, she did,' said Betsy, excitedly.

‘Yes,' enthused Phyllis. ‘The nuns were always telling us how sinful we were,' said
Ivy. ‘They gave us bad food – and it was because we were sinful; they made us wash all the clothes of the convent in cold water because we were sinful. And I told them that parable, you know, the woman taken in adultery.'

‘Indeed, I do,' said Emily, who had been in church every Sunday throughout her childhood.

‘Jesus said to the men who were going to stone her, “Let him among you without sin throw the first stone.” And before Jesus said that, he bent and wrote something in the dust with his finger. “Have you ever wondered what that could have been, Sister Perpetua?” And she hit me. And I hit her back. That was why they locked me up.'

Emily laughed. ‘Good for you.'

‘Nothing but bread and cold water, and I was pregnant.' Ivy introduced what was felt to be an unnecessary addition to an overload of accusation.

‘It was very wrong,' said Emily.

That word was pursuing her. During the long hours she had been wrestling with the charitable representatives, today Scotland, yesterday Wales, they had repeated how wrong it was that such exemplary schools, like the Martin-White schools, should employ unmarried mothers.

How very much they had enjoyed themselves, Emily recognized, those representatives of public charity, saying, ‘It was wrong. It is wrong.'

Wrong, wrong, wrong, agreed Emily now, silently, as one does with words or, for that matter, phrases of tunes, that nag and pester: Now go away. Leave me alone.

Alfred was saying, ‘I am so glad you are here, Emily. Because we need to pick your brains. We need your advice, you see.'

Loitering on the lawn, beyond where sat old Mr. Redway, were the twins, still called that, the two Tayler boys. Knowing they were going to be wanted at this discussion, they had waited till their father summoned them, which he now did, waving an energetic arm at them as he sat. In bounced Tom, who at once pulled up a chair to sit himself near the disgraced one, who was shining and replete with the attention she had been getting.

The baby squawked; Ivy picked it up, and rocked it in her arms, glancing at Tom, smiling.

She was not altogether sure she wanted to be Alfred's daughter-in-law. On the plus side, everyone knew that Alfred, when Bert died, would be in charge of the farm, possibly an heir. Bert was not long for this world, Ivy had decided. And there was a question of Tom's age. Did she really want to marry an old man? – well, he was certainly attractive, full of the strengths he had acquired on his travels. But not young. Not a young man. There was one of the young farmhands she had noted, had fancied, was keeping in her mind…