Spilt Milk (24 page)

The farmhouse was always dark. Sometimes, coming in from outside in the sun, Framsden believed he had gone blind. Shapes blurred in front of his eyes. Slowly, his sight returned and he stood in the long shard of light that shone through the open door. He could make out the pattern on the lino floor, the wooden dresser with the chipped blue plates, the horse brasses dangling from a beam. The pile of boots and wellingtons by the kitchen door. Newspapers on the table were full of stories about the Suez Crisis. His father talked of that and nothing else at the moment. His mother came into focus at last, her curved shape over the sink where she was peeling potatoes.

‘Go and play,’ she said, looking over her shoulder, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘I’ve got a million things to do before we leave.’

He studied her a while longer, wondering if he should console her in some way. Grandpa George had had a stroke ten days earlier and his mother had gone to stay with his grandmother. He’d been alone with his father. It had been strange, just the two of them here. Now she was back home, her presence reinstated, preparing for them all to go to Hastings.

‘Will you please go on out and play,’ she said to Framsden.

He was too old to be spoken to like that. He was thirteen and at the new grammar school in town. It meant an hour-and-a-half bus ride there and back each day, and just that amount of journeying made him feel he already knew more of the world than his parents. They never left the farm, unless it was to go to the village or the livestock market in town. When he showed them his homework, they looked alarmed. ‘Latin?’ his mother
whispered. She had learned sewing and home economics at school. At his age, she’d been getting ready to leave education for good.

Framsden heard the farm dogs barking and wandered outside. His father had driven into the yard with his aunt. Visitors, even an old aunt, were a novelty out here, so far from the village. The Hubbards never came over now they were both at boarding school. Judith and he still went for long cycle rides, but not as often as before. Now she preferred the company of her girl cousins in the village. She had a hula hoop she would not be separated from.

His great-aunt was wrinkled, her cheeks dusty with face powder. Her little brown hat had a pheasant feather in it. They saw her once every couple of years, and she never changed. Small, neat, nervous of the farm dogs. She liked to bring him toffees in a paper bag. They were always covered in cat hairs. His mother wouldn’t let him eat them. ‘Please just call her auntie,’ his mother had once said. ‘It’s not polite to call her “great-aunt”. It makes her feel old.’

He slouched towards the car, head down, hands shoved deep in his pockets.

‘How’s my nephew?’ Vivian asked. ‘In long trousers now? What a big boy you are.’

‘I’m thirteen, Auntie.’

‘Already? Are you sure?’ she said, and strode off, calling his mother.

The Bell family drove through the village in their large flatbed truck, all of them squashed up in the cab. Charles and Framsden were wearing black suits and moved like people who were afraid there might still be dressmaker’s pins left in the seams.

‘I married your mother in this suit,’ Charles told Framsden as they climbed into the cab. ‘A good suit lasts a lifetime. They’ll probably bury me in it one day.’

His mother pushed a hat pin into the black pillbox hat she
wore. ‘Charles, that’s an awful thing to say.’ She had on a tight pencil skirt with a waisted black jacket. Her cheeks were rouged and her lips red. ‘Sateen,’ she told Vivian, who was touching the sleeve of her jacket. ‘I made it myself.’

Framsden was at the window seat. His aunt sat swaying beside him, grimacing as they bumped over potholes in the road.

‘Have a sweet,’ she said once they were on the main road, producing a creased paper bag, peeling cat hairs off a chunk of honey-coloured toffee.

Framsden pressed his face to the truck window. They travelled along roads he knew nothing of. He had never been to Sussex. He looked at his parents, his father bent over the steering wheel, his mother with a map on her lap, tracing the route with a gloved finger. He had never been this far from home.

There was a crowd in his grandmother’s house. A plump woman in a black velvet coat pulled him into a rattle of amber necklaces that hung across her chest, and kissed him with blubbery lips. He tried to be polite and bear it. He gave his grandmother a pleading look and she came to his rescue.

‘This is your great-aunt Lydia,’ his grandmother told him.

‘Come and sit on my knee, Roger,’ said the woman. She smiled and patted her knees.

Framsden moved away. ‘I’m not Roger,’ he said. She had no teeth and he had no idea who Roger was anyway.

His mother’s cousin, a balding man called Malcolm, and his stocky blonde wife said hello and shook hands with him. They had two sons at home. One day they hoped he might meet them. They wanted to know about grammar school. Would he try for university?

Framsden lolled against the open back door. An old man in a charcoal pinstriped suit arrived with a brown and white terrier he called Whisky. He was a neighbour. He was telling Framsden’s father how he had recently lost his wife. ‘A tragedy the way we
lose people in life,’ he said. ‘A tragedy. George was a marvellous man. A marvellous man.’

‘Have another glass of sherry, Jakey,’ his grandmother said. ‘Does Whisky want a biscuit?’

Framsden bent down and patted the furry little dog.

‘Take him for a walk,’ said Jakey. ‘Go on, lad, he won’t hurt you.’

Framsden shook his head politely. He was too interested in watching these people.

He stayed behind when they left for the funeral and watched horse racing on the television set. They didn’t have one at home.

In the evening, the family sat in the sitting room and played Monopoly. His mother said it had been a very nice service. Grandma Farr put a metal urn on the mantelpiece. She would have to think what to do with George’s ashes. She still had Henry’s urn in the wardrobe. She wanted to mix the two together, but she feared spilling them.

Framsden eyed the metal jar. It had dates in neat writing on one side: 1885–1956. He hoped she would take it away with her. He didn’t fancy sleeping on the sofa with that looking down on him.

His mother rolled up the sleeves of her cardigan and sat at the piano. She began to play a syncopated, lively tune, banging out the notes.

‘Birdie performed in the pub every Friday night,’ his grandmother told him. ‘She had the voice of an angel. She could have been a professional.’

‘These foolish things,’ his mother sang, her voice sweet and strong.

When she sang ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers’, Aunt Vivian came in wearing a pink dressing gown buttoned up to her chin and a hairnet over her curlers. She sang along too, sitting next to his grandmother, waving her hands back and forth, giggling like a girl.

‘You must take the piano home,’ said Grandma Farr. ‘George wanted you to have it.’

She began to cry, and so did his mother. Aunt Vivian said she’d make them cocoa.

The adults talked of the pub and the old days. The King’s death, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, the scandal of Princess Margaret and the divorced Peter Townsend. England beating Australia at cricket and retaining the Ashes.

Aunt Vivian remembered the end of the Great War and the influenza epidemic that took her husband. Framsden’s parents talked of the end of the Second World War. They had not seen any of the celebrations in the village, but they’d gone down to the river and Charles had taken Framsden swimming.

‘Nellie is a great swimmer,’ said Vivian.

‘What about Framsden?’ said his grandmother.

‘He’s a good swimmer,’ said his mother. ‘Charles taught him.’

‘He’s lucky to have a father. We never had one, did we, Nellie? Our sister Rose brought us up. Of course, she never married. She didn’t want us to either, truth be told. Our parents passed away when we were babies, and Rose took their place.’

‘I don’t think Rose ever went far from the cottage in her lifetime.’

‘She didn’t even like going into the village, I remember.’

‘So you were orphans?’ Framsden blurted out. He had never thought about where his grandmother and great-aunt came from. They were just there. Permanent and old as churches, the pair of them. It hadn’t entered his head that they must have had parents and been children.

‘Framsden, don’t be nosy,’ said his mother.

Vivian waved her hand at her. The boy could know a bit about his family, after all.

‘Our father worked as a coprolite miner. He was hurt and died of his injuries. We didn’t have the medicine you have today. He got a bad cut in his leg and it went nasty. Blood poisoning. And then mother was taken by diphtheria. We’d have been sent off to
the poorhouse and split up if it hadn’t been for our sister Rose. She was a mother to us.’

‘I wouldn’t say she was like a mother,’ said his grandmother. ‘She was loyal, but I don’t think she expected her life to turn out like it did. Now, Framsden, is that a wart on your thumb?’

She told him to get string from the kitchen drawer. He fetched it and a pair of scissors and came back. She cut a short length, wrapped it around his thumb and closed her eyes for a moment.

‘Right,’ she said, unwinding the string. ‘You go outside and you bury that nice and deep. The time the string takes to rot down in the ground is the time that wart will take to fall off. You’ve got to believe in the magic and it will do its job.’

‘But it’s dark out.’ He looked to his parents, imagining they might say something.

‘Come on, boy. I’ve never been afraid of the dark. Do you want me to go out there and do it myself? At my age?’

Framsden crouched in the garden and dug a hole with a kitchen fork. The fork wasn’t really up to the job, and its handle bent in his hand. He dropped the string into the hole, covering it up. He could see his family at the window with the curtains open, the light from the house spilling across the grass.

The next morning his grandmother asked to be left alone, so they went into town and ate potted shrimps and bread and butter in a café. Aunt Vivian bought him a stick of pink rock and a gobstopper the size of a hen’s egg. He and his father climbed the steep hill to the castle and went on the dodgem cars at the funfair. His mother bought postcards of the East Hill funicular and sent one to Connie and Judith and another one to Ella Hubbard at her boarding school.

‘Do you want to write a note?’ she asked Framsden.

He shook his head. He wished his mother wasn’t sending Ella a postcard. It was a stupid thing to do. The Hubbards’ farm was much bigger than theirs. They had new machinery. Huge fields
of wheat. Norman Hubbard thought their little farm was a joke. He could imagine Ella laughing at the postcard, explaining to her schoolfriends that it came from her old nanny, a farmer’s wife who wore too much make-up for a woman of her age. Who would want a postcard from somebody else’s mother?

Nellie saw the family off that afternoon. She watched the noisy farm truck, its exhaust belching black smoke, disappear from sight, then she went in and sat in George’s chair by the fire. The mantel clock tick-tocked, steady as a dripping tap. Time dragged. Perhaps she should have asked Vivian to stay on with her? But Vivian had her gentleman friend now.

Nellie thought she had done a good job of looking happy when they all left. Charles had been desperate to get back to his farm. They all had their own lives. Even the boy. She would have liked to have kept the boy with her. They could have gone to the beach every day. She had yet to see him swim.

All right, old girl?
she heard George’s voice ask her.

‘George?’

Fancy a port and lemon? I could do with a beer myself after all we’ve been through today. What a cracking grandson we have
.
Framsden’s a fine-looking boy.

When the door knocker rapped loudly and she saw the shadow of Jakey through the half-closed venetian blinds, she sat very still and waited for him to go away. She wanted to keep the silence in the house. Only then could she hear George’s voice.

Framsden thought it odd that the only holiday they had ever taken was to go to his grandfather’s funeral. Other families went camping or hop picking together. Why couldn’t they be more like other families? Why couldn’t they go to Butlin’s, like Connie and Judith did? And Connie didn’t even have a husband to go with.

Now, after a few days back at the farm, it was as if they had never been away. He wandered down to the river and stood by
the water, staring at the wart on his thumb. It was definitely getting smaller. His grandmother’s charm was working.

The poplar trees rustled loudly and then fell silent. He gazed into the water. Shadowy fish swam past. A newt dived down into the depths. Beside him a gang of sparrows flew out of the bushes, taking their quarrelling chatter with them, and he watched them tumble in the air. What if his gran was a witch? It was quite an exciting thought.

A fish leapt for a fly, and he was spooked by the sudden movement. He saw a rippling flicker of silver rising up into the air. The fish snatched at the fly, twisting, flopping back into the river. It was gone from view, the mirror surface of the water settling again to a pure reflection of the sky and the clouds and the trees. Framsden was filled with a sense of magic. It shocked him to see a fish leaping, defying its watery life, plunging upwards into his world.

Moments later, a brown hare ran across the fields on the other side of the river. It paused, crouching, flicking its great ears back and forth. He saw its amber eyes, the dark inky tips of its ears. Then it bounded away. Had it stared at him? His grandmother would have said it had. She had been born here, like he had been.

‘You and me, we share our beginnings,’ she’d told him, a secretive finger pressed to her lips. ‘We’re river children.’

The days over Christmas 1963 were wet and grey, merging into each other, short hours of gloomy daylight. There was a smell of woodsmoke coming from the chimney. The corrugated-iron roof of the house was shiny with rainwater. Birdie, in a waterproof cape over her good clothes, sang a line of a song under her breath as she cycled out of the yard and up the farm track. Charles had recently covered the track in concrete and she picked up speed, cycling easily over the smooth surface. She lifted her voice and sang out loud to the dripping hedgerows.

She had told Charles the other day that she regretted never having a career as a singer. Charles said her part-time job playing the piano and singing at Hymes Court for the old folk there meant she did have a career as a singer.

‘I mean a
real
singer,’ she said, irritated by his lack of understanding. ‘In a dance hall with a band.’

She reached the road and a car sped past her, sending a spray of rainwater towards her. It wasn’t fair to be angry with Charles: he had not stopped her being a singer; she had done it to herself. In any case, she and Charles both knew the dance halls she’d once gone to were a thing of the past. Kay Kelly, the beautiful auburn-haired singer she had named her daughter after, would be an old lady by now. Birdie cycled with her head down against the rain. It was too late for regret. She was a farmer’s wife. For twenty-two years she had started her mornings before dawn, going out to milk cows in a draughty barn. The same barn whose walls she had whitewashed the summer she met Charles.

Her daughter would be a young woman now. And Framsden
was twenty. The age she had promised herself she would tell him about his sister.

She cycled fast, feeling slanting rain sting her cheeks, her eyes watering. This was always a harsh time of year. Charles thought she hated Christmas. He jokingly called her Scrooge, and he and Framsden liked to make much of her apathy towards the festive season, pulling low faces and saying ‘Bah! Humbug!’ to her as they opened their presents under the tree.

The old people at Hymes Court would be wearing paper hats today. They had Christmas crackers with their lunch every day over the festive season, right up to New Year’s Day. She liked entertaining the old folk, and Charles was right: she did get to sing to an audience, even if some of them fell asleep.

Her daughter had been born on the 29th of December. That’s what made Christmas difficult. It threw up the past at her, and she allowed herself to be sentimental. And truly, she was getting worse the older she got. Nostalgia attacked her on every side. All the children she had known in the village were grown up now. Some of them were married. Ella Hubbard was dating a county cricketer whose father owned a seed merchant’s business. She, too, would be married soon, no doubt.

She’d sent Ella a pale blue ribbon for her birthday. Another December baby born on the last breath of the year. Ella used to complain about having a birthday at this time of year. People always forgot it. Birdie had promised she would never forget. And she hadn’t. She’d bought ribbons for Ella every year when she was small and had seen no reason to stop. Now of course it was just a little joke. Something slipped into a Christmas card. There was nothing wrong with that. And if Ella only waved when she saw her in the village these days, it was still a sign that the girl remembered her. That perhaps she thought of the days when she had wanted to live at Poplar Farm. The days she wanted Birdie as her mother.

Birdie stopped by the council houses, wheeling her bicycle up
the path of one of them and leaning it against the wall. Connie came out of the green-painted door, waving a set of car keys. She looked matronly in her nurse’s uniform, a blue wool cape over her shoulders. Judith, home for the holidays, back from her job as a nanny in London, stood at the door looking skinny and leggy in tight black trousers and a roll-neck sweater, smoking a cigarette. She reminded Birdie of Connie as a young woman. She had the same determined expression on her face, the same searching brown eyes.

‘How’s things?’ asked Connie as they climbed into her car. ‘All well at home?’

‘We had a quiet Christmas,’ said Birdie. ‘Just us. Framsden has finished making his boat. I don’t know how many coats of varnish he gave it. He says he’s going to row us all the way into town in the summer. He’s keen to take us up to where the new flats have been built on the site of the old tannery. You can fish for eels there. He reckons he’s going to set up a little smokehouse at home and smoke his own.’

‘Well, that sounds enterprising,’ said Connie. ‘He’s a good lad, your son. Judith was thrilled with the carved bookends he made her for Christmas.’

‘He’s very clever,’ said Birdie, and wished she didn’t feel she had to defend her son’s interest in woodworking. When Framsden passed his eleven-plus and went to grammar school, his teachers had talked of university. In the end, Framsden had not done much at school besides being in a skiffle band and the cricket team. Woodwork had been his best subject, and everyone knew you didn’t need a grammar-school education to do a craftsman’s job.

Framsden surprised them last year, saying he wanted to be an apprentice to a furniture maker. Charles had been disappointed enough to say so. The farm was Charles’s life. He had imagined it would be Framsden’s too. Father and son had fallen out for the first time ever. Framsden stormed about, talking of leaving home. Then the harvest had started, the busiest few weeks on the farm.
By the time they had finished, somehow or other the conversation about furniture makers and apprenticeships had been forgotten.

Connie slowed down at a junction and pulled out onto the main road.

‘Charles is still smarting about Norman Hubbard’s offer to buy up the water meadows,’ Birdie said, wanting to change the subject. She looked out of the car window at the flat landscape of sugar-beet fields, the road cutting through them. She wondered if he should have accepted. And if Framsden didn’t take on the farm, what would the future hold for them when they were too old to work?

At the mention of Norman Hubbard they drifted, as they often did, on to the subject of Kathleen. Was she going to divorce Norman? There was gossip in the village that he was seeing another woman. Connie, who knew everything that happened in the village, said the rumours were true. The woman had been seen taking the train to London. ‘She was expecting a baby,’ Connie said, driving carefully round a pothole in the road. ‘Norman took her to a private clinic to get rid of it.’

‘Does Kathleen know?’

Connie glanced at her. ‘I’d say she was the one who insisted Norman take her there.’

Neither of them saw Kathleen any more. She was off at horse shows in the summer, and in the winter she went hunting with the Quorn in Leicestershire. The family were rarely together. Ella had a bedsit in town, and James had gone to university. During the holidays he lived at a friend’s house.

‘It’s Ella that bothers me,’ said Connie. ‘She is such an unhappy young woman.’

Birdie hated to think of Ella being unhappy. She was sorry she couldn’t talk more openly with Connie. To have a secret, to keep a part of yourself hidden, was exhausting. All her life she seemed to have had secrets that kept her watchful and distant from those she should have been open with. You couldn’t keep secrets from
yourself. You could try to push them to the back of your mind, but they revealed themselves over and over, and always when you least expected them.

‘Poor Kathleen,’ said Connie. ‘But she’s tough. She keeps Norman under her thumb most of the time.’

Birdie didn’t answer. Poor Ella, she thought as they turned down the long tree-lined drive to Hymes Court. Ella was a secret too.

Hymes Court was a lovely old house. It had a grand entrance hall with a sweeping staircase to one side of it. A large rosewood table, circular and highly polished, stood in the hallway, a red poinsettia in a pot upon it. The parquet flooring had a freshly waxed smell. Old-fashioned family portraits lined the stairs.

The first time Birdie worked there, Connie had insisted on showing her the paintings. There was one she thought uncanny. A woman and a girl. In a small gold badge in the lower part of the wood frame was a painted inscription:
Dorothy and her daughter Amelia, aged six. 1946.

‘Every time I walk past this painting I think of you, Birdie. The girl looks just like how I imagine you must have looked as a child.’

The woman wore a green evening dress with pearls around her neck. The little girl stood in front of her in a ruched pale blue dress, holding her mother’s hand. The child had a calm gaze, the same straight-backed pose as her mother. She had brown curly hair, grey eyes and a delicate, elfin face, with a small chin and high cheekbones.

‘She doesn’t really,’ said Birdie, laughing. ‘At that age I was a ginger-haired street urchin, charging round on roller skates.’

Birdie played the piano and sang for an hour, then had tea and sandwiches with the residents. She liked the old people. They were like children, all of them needing coaxing in different ways.

Music was the key. When she played the opening chords to a tune they knew, she could almost see memories flying around the
room. There was an unguarded enthusiasm in the old people’s voices as they sang together. Sometimes she too was overcome with her own memories. She remembered the noise of the pub, her mother at the bar, her father watching through the door. She played a music-hall number and imagined Uncle George beside her, telling her to budge up and let him play something risqué. A bit naughty!
‘
Don’t have any more, Mrs Moore,’ she sang, and there was laughter and handclapping.

‘Look at your hair,’ said an old lady when Birdie sat down with them after the ‘show’, as Connie called it. ‘You want to get a brush through that.’

Birdie touched her head. Mrs Livet was a plump old woman, her features sunk in doughy cheeks and a row of double chins. She knew the words to most of the songs.

‘You’re right, Mrs Livet. The rain makes it curly. What about you? Did the hairdresser come this week?’

‘She comes every week. I like to look nice, I do. I’m right as a mailer after she’s been. I’ve been watching you, Miss, and you remind me of somebody from round here.’

Birdie smiled.

‘I’m city-born, dear. A Londoner. I told you already.’

A man leaned towards them, his blue-veined hand reaching out for a biscuit.

‘Louisa doesn’t listen to anybody.’

‘Do you have a sister, Mrs Bell?’

The old man coughed and thumped his fist on the table. ‘You know she doesn’t, Lou! She told you last week. And the week before that.’

‘And I know you don’t have sisters, Mrs Livet,’ said Birdie. ‘Because you told me so.’

‘Did I? Oh, I forget. I was a holy trouble, my mother always said.’

‘I’m sure you were,’ said the old man. ‘I bet you had all the fellas after you.’

Birdie smiled and got up to leave. It was dusk outside already. The days were so short in winter. Connie would be waiting for her. She waved to Mrs Livet as she reached the door, but the old woman was still deep in conversation and had forgotten all about her. As she stepped out into the damp afternoon, the sound of rain greeted her, promising stormy days ahead.

A month later, Mrs Livet sought Birdie out after the old people’s sing-song was over. Birdie settled in an armchair beside her. She didn’t mind taking time to chat. The past interested her, and everybody here talked of nothing else.

‘My mother was the village midwife,’ Mrs Livet told Birdie. ‘An old witch, some people said. I remember there were three sisters who lived nearby, Mrs Bell, and my mother always kept an eye on them. They lived a bit of a way from here. I was quite jealous of the youngest one because my mother thought she was the bee’s knees.’

‘I’m sure she thought you were too,’ said Birdie. She stared out of the window and wondered what she might make for tea tonight.

‘They had plenty to hide, those sisters. Plenty to hide.’

Birdie smiled.

‘Oh, really? Like what?’

‘Well, for one thing, the eldest one was not a sister.’

Birdie turned her head. ‘The eldest who? Your mother? Is this a riddle?’

‘The sisters. The eldest was the
mother
of the two younger sisters. Do you see? Do you understand? That kind of thing happened all the time. Girls were so innocent when I was young. Nobody knew nothing. Some chap would find you on your own in a field with not a soul about. He’d have his way with you, give you a shilling and send you home, telling you to keep your mouth shut.

‘My mother delivered the babies. She knew the truth, but she never said a word. She only told me years later.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Birdie said, trying to keep track of the story. ‘Your mother delivered whose babies?’

‘Keep up, can’t you? The eldest sister was the mother of the other two. Barely fifteen years old when she had the first one, a child herself. She kept those little mites and brought them up. Never told a soul. As far as anybody knew, they were all sisters. She could have abandoned those kiddies or dropped ’em down a well or something. Women did things like that in my day. There was a lot of shame for a girl caught out by a man. People could be right nasty. I do not wholly know who the father or fathers of the children was. That is something I cannot rightly tell you. In the old days we had travelling salesmen come round the villages, and they had a reputation for being ladies’ men. My guess is they had different daddies. My mother never said. Funny what comes back to you. I haven’t thought about those women for years. You made me think of them. They might be dead now, I suppose. There was a fellow they liked. Oh yes, they liked him all right. Handsome as a summer’s day, he was.’

Birdie got up to leave. ‘That’s a sad story, Mrs Livet. You’ll have to tell me more next time I come. I have to be getting home now.’

She was shocked when the old woman leaned across and grabbed her hand, pulling her towards her. ‘You’re hiding something, en’t you? That’s why you pretend to be all friendly when you en’t really. Cold as dead fish, you are. I bet your husband don’t even know who you really are.’