Spilt Milk (10 page)

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.

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 good 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.

Henry Farr had been an army man all his life, and now he was finishing his career as a company sergeant. It was over. He was fagged out, used up and useless. With the shrapnel wound he’d got in his groin, and he hoped she’d pardon his French, he couldn’t even piss straight.

He described the French villages he’d seen, all bombed and ruined. He told tales of wounded men and the dead horses that lay where they had fallen. He spoke like the other soldiers in the wards spoke to each other, a bantering rough language full of slang and filth and hard jokes.

He was nothing like Joe Ferier. Henry was not interested in travel. It seemed a noble thing to him, to walk the same path every day. Sticking to something was what was important. Nellie said she agreed. He wanted to know all about her life. About her sisters. The types of apple trees in the orchard. How to force rhubarb and blanch dandelions. Nobody had ever asked her so much about herself.

They walked through the gardens of Hymes Court, where other soldiers strolled or stood around smoking, looking out
over the fields, contemplating the horizon of sky and woodland. Henry thought they were probably composing poetry because war seemed to do that to some men. Either it made them bloody-minded cynics or it made them weep like women and take up writing verse.

‘And do you write poetry?’

‘No, no. I’m the bloody-minded cynic, I’m afraid.’ But if he was honest, and he said it seemed an easy thing to be honest with her, he did weep. Sometimes he laughed too, though he didn’t know why. ‘Fucked up royally,’ he said, laughing. ‘Done over by those cunts we call officers. Oh, but we did it all for glory, heh?’

‘Ah,’ said Nellie, thinking of Rose and her belief in the glory of work. ‘Ah, yes, glory.’ She told him she had known an artist who had read poems to her. She hadn’t liked them much. ‘He’s probably in France now. Joe Ferier, does the name mean anything to you?’

‘Not at all.’ Henry stopped walking. ‘Does it mean anything to you?’

‘He was a friend of my sister,’ she said lightly.

Beyond the kitchen gardens were abandoned glasshouses, and they sat on a bench in the shelter of one, the sun filtering through the frames and colouring the glass with rainbow prisms. Henry hoped he didn’t shock her with his coarse language. He was too used to the company of soldiers.

‘I don’t mind a bit of swearing,’ Nellie said, lifting her face to the sun and closing her eyes. He didn’t have to mind his Ps and Qs with her. She liked him just as he was.

Henry picked flowering lilac for Nellie, woody branches of it, but she refused to take it indoors because lilac in the house was bad luck. She had a list of plants he should never bring indoors. Blackthorn, bluebells, may blossom, ivy. White flowers of any kind. She was full of old wives’ tales and fears that would have made him laugh if he hadn’t heard the same kinds of superstitions in
the trenches. He and his men had all of them relied on charms and omens to keep the shells away. Counting broken trees, finding meaning in the foolhardy way a bird might fly across the shell-torn sky, seeing another day’s grace in the sudden sprouting of mushrooms in the grassy fields of no-man’s-land: all of it the base of calculations they made on staying alive. Coming from Nellie, though, such beliefs seemed charming and innocent.

‘This is the tree of the heart, the hawthorn,’ she said, putting a green bud on his tongue, telling him locals called it bread and cheese. When they were children, she and her sister had loved picnicking on the sweet buds. He ate, wondering whether he might die of poisoning and not minding too much if he did.

‘What do you want from this wretched world?’ he asked Nellie as they walked through the village. They were going to watch newsreels at the Parish Rooms.

‘Company,’ she replied, and their hands brushed together for a moment.

In the Parish Rooms the vicar shook Henry’s hand and said it was an honour to have a veteran come by. He apologized profusely for the footage. Six months out of date, but what could you do?

The newsreel turned and flickered. Soldiers marched in fields of mud. Henry felt hot. He started to sway. Somebody moved beside him and he tried to apologize for his shaking.

‘Got to get out,’ he whispered to Nellie.

She took his arm and led him outside. He gulped the air. The sky was darkening to dusk. He shivered and shook. Children gathered, curious to see a grown man falling to the ground.

When he stopped shaking, Nellie was there, talking to him. Her words came and went in his ears. She was explaining about the birds she liked to watch, how they flew in the wind like rags. How she felt like that herself sometimes, all ragged and lost. She put her hands on his shoulders. They sat in the damp shadow of evening, holding each other.

Nellie drummed her fingers on her kitchen table. She blushed deeply. Henry was saying she must think about the consequences of marrying him. He coughed and cleared his throat and went outside and came back into the cottage and went out again, wiping his boots on the doormat so many times Nellie told him he’d wear it out if he didn’t stop.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ she told Henry, but he bolted the door of her cottage and said he had to show her what she was getting into, marrying him. It would be a marriage without children. They were agreed on that. Friendship and companionship were what they would have, but still, Henry felt there were things to be discussed. There were things he simply could not give her. Physical relations were out of the question.

‘But I don’t want them,’ she insisted, her hands covering her face.

It was impossible to talk of these things, she told Henry. Her heart, she said, was a terrible dry thing. She did not say that it had been hurt so badly by Joe and by Vivian that she did not dare expose it a third time. That, he did not need to know.

‘I’m a rotten old codger who’s past his prime. I want you to see what you’re buying before you sign the cheque.’

He took off his shirt and unwound his puttees, laying them out on the table. He unbuckled his brown leather belt. Nellie glanced at the door. She hoped nobody would call at the house. She fanned her face. It felt very hot in the room.

‘Henry, really, you’ve got nothing I haven’t seen before …’

‘Too late, old girl, here I am.’

Henry stood naked in front of her, except for his socks and his eye patch.

‘This,’ he said, pointing to his thigh and groin, ‘was shrapnel. An eight-inch shell burst alongside me in the trenches. And here,’ he pointed to his chest, ‘was where a shell came in through the top of my shoulder and out just here by the collarbone. So. What do you think? You can tell me honestly. I don’t want charity. We
can call it all off. Just say the word. I am no good to a woman who thinks her husband has certain duties to perform, because I’m not up to that kind of thing. I can’t do what a man should do in a marriage bed, and I haven’t the heart for it either.’

Nellie lifted her skirts and pulled down her stocking, showing him a curved purple scar on her right thigh.

‘A stone flew up from the threshing machine. It had a line of flint in it. Went clean through to the bone. Blood everywhere. I couldn’t walk for a while. They had to stitch it and I wouldn’t let the doctor near me. I was ten years old. My sister Rose threatened to hit me over the head with a hammer if I didn’t sit still. She would have done it too. She was the one who stitched it up. The doctor said I was too much trouble. I’m after company, Henry. Nothing more than that.’

In Rose’s old bedroom – because Nellie had never been able to sleep in her old room since Vivian left – they lay down together and held hands. Henry was naked under the coverlet; Nellie lay on top of it, fully dressed. They slept for a few hours. When they woke, they agreed they would marry as soon as possible.

Nellie and Henry married in a register office in town on 12 November 1918, the day after the war ended. Their local town was splendid with celebrations and there was dancing outside the corn exchange, but they avoided the crowds in case the noise set off Henry’s nerves. Vivian sent a pair of white lace gloves for Nellie and apologies for not being able to attend the ceremony. Frank had bronchitis again. He’d come out of hospital now and she was nursing him. Henry’s brother George, who ran a public house in London, sent them two crystal tumblers and a little Union Jack flag. The vicar and his wife sent a hamper. Nellie opened it and found jars of chutney, pickled walnuts, a bottle of cider and a box of fancy cakes, little squares of sponge iced in bright colours.