Spilt Milk (7 page)

‘We’ll move Mother into your rooms,’ Trixie was saying. ‘Nellie will look after her. I’ve already a buyer for the house. We have to act fast or he’ll find another property and we’ll have lost our chance.’

‘What if Nellie won’t do it?’ Nathan said.

‘You must
make
her marry you. For goodness’ sake, Mother will only sell this place if you have a wife. She says you need her here until you have a wife to look after you. You know that. We must get a move on. We both need money, Nathan, and we’re not going to get it with Mother holding on to the house.’

Trixie said Nellie was no spring chicken, but Nathan wasn’t exactly young himself and she was sure Nellie would accept a marriage proposal.

‘She’s too tall.’

‘She’s the best Jane could find. I just hope this one will stay and not disappear in the middle of the night like the last one.’

‘She’ll stay,’ Nathan Rumsby replied gruffly. ‘She’s got nowhere else to go.’

When they returned to the flat above the shop that night, Nellie went to her room. She took a chair and wedged it under the door handle. She would find another place to live, but for the moment, with the winter so hard and so little money in her pocket, she had no choice but to stay where she was. For a week she put the chair against the door, and for a week the butcher left her alone.

‘If you pay me five shillings more, I’ll leave my door open,’ Nellie said to him one morning. She might be a countrywoman, but she didn’t have straw for brains. She was catching on to how people were with you when you were on your own. Well, she could play the game too.

He put his hands in his apron pockets and his eyes flickered over her slowly.

‘How much for marrying me?’ he asked. ‘You’d keep your room. We can have a long engagement. As long as you like.’

Nellie didn’t answer him. She thought that kind of decision might cost more than money.

A grey, misty morning in February, Nellie and the butcher’s mother walked through the crowds on the docks, stopping to watch the fishing boats that had sailed in on the tide. Huge baskets of fish were being unloaded, stacked high on the cobblestones. Trixie had married her draper and moved away, and the butcher’s mother lived with them now. Nellie and the butcher were engaged. That was to say, if the old woman ever asked, she showed her a ring Rumsby had got from Woolworths.

Seagulls screamed and Nellie thought of Joe, of the town he had come from in the north where the birds sounded like crying
children. A seabird dived low over one of the fishermen, its yellow beak slicing the air close to his ear. The fisherman swung his head down, lost his footing and upturned the basket of fish he was carrying, spilling mackerel everywhere, a flickering silver dance at his feet.

Other seabirds swooped down. The noise of the birds frightened a herd of cattle being driven through the thoroughfare and they began to barge and push each other, knocking into the piled baskets of fish on the quay, spilling more of them. Children and stray dogs came out of alleys and mossy passageways just as fast as the seabirds descended. Men and women, too, fought for space among gulls and urchins, cramming fish into their pockets and shopping baskets. All around, the seagulls screamed and the fishermen yelled.

Anna Moats heard the commotion as she limped out of the Jug and Bottle. She saw the fish thick on the ground, the gleaners bent to their task, policemen and a few soldiers running, and the cattle stampeding. She decided to get a fish for her supper. The cattle veered towards her. Anna pulled a toad’s bone from her bag and held it out. The cattle cantered past, not one of them touching her.

It had once been common knowledge that Anna had something cunning about her. She had been proud of her reputation. If you wanted a neighbour’s cows to stop giving milk and their hens to stop laying, then Anna Moats was the woman to call on. She could help if you were the one whose cattle had been cursed or the butter kept curdling. A runaway herd of cows on the docks held no fear for her, and anyone who had known her as a young woman would not have been surprised to see the way the animals parted around her.

She tried to grab a fish, but her gnarled fingers couldn’t hold on to it. The fish were everywhere, slick and bright and smelling of the sea. A pain in her hip took her breath away. She looked at the harbour waters and tried to step away from them,
but the crowds pushed and shoved her. If the cattle had been afraid of her, the people were not. Anna was old in her bones. She was too often seen drinking to be taken seriously. A man bowled past her and nearly knocked her flying into the water.

By now, more people were coming to gather fish. The butcher himself had heard the commotion and brought a basket to fill. Rumsby’s mother complained about the smell of fish guts in the air. Nellie told her to hold her handkerchief tighter over her nose. The old woman coughed and spluttered and said she wished she were back in her own home again.

‘Shut up, will you?’ snarled Rumsby. ‘You smell worse than a load of fish yourself.’

Nellie carried the basket into the crowds. The cattle had been driven off towards the market square, but people were still on their hands and knees on the quay, pulling fish from pools of cow shit. There was an old woman far too close to the water’s edge.

‘Be careful,’ called Nellie. When she got close, she realized she knew her.

‘Mrs Moats?’ she said, taking her arm. ‘It’s me. Nellie Marsh. Come away from the edge.’

‘Nellie Marsh?’ said Anna. ‘What’re you doing here? Your sister said you was visiting relatives. Let me look at you. You came to me years ago and I cured you. Didn’t I?’

Nellie said she had.

‘People like you believe in what I do. These days all anybody wants is motor cars and machines. Men and women are slaves to ’em. They don’t care, do they? They have their picture houses and trips to the seaside and the old ways are being lost. If I had book learning I might have written books so nobody could forget how things were. I know just as much as doctors, and probably a damn sight more. I might not be able to read words, but I can read a face.’

Anna pointed a finger at Rumsby. ‘That one, for example. I can
read his face all right. He thinks he owns you. You should stay away from that man. He’s got blood on his hands.’

‘Pig’s blood, Anna. He’s a pork butcher.’

‘Not how I see it. You’ll have no life with that one, I assure you. Get away as quick as you can.’

‘I’ve nowhere to go,’ said Nellie.

‘Nowhere to go? But of course you do. You come on home with me.’

Nellie glanced at Rumsby and his mother. They looked back expectantly, like large birds waiting to be fed.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll come with you. Just for a few days.’

Vivian had no idea how the child would be born, but she loved it already. Some days she lay on her bed for hours, a hand on her belly, feeling the movements it made. How would it find its way out of her? Her ignorance shamed her. She’d heard Nellie talk of lambing. Of the afterbirth and the importance of it not being left in the ewes. She supposed a human birth would be similar. She’d read all their housekeeping books and found only passing references to childbirth. Water needed to be boiled and a layette should be prepared. She should have seen a dentist, one book said. Pregnancy loosened women’s teeth. Another book recommended that after the birth the mother should stay in bed for three weeks without moving. Then she could get up and wash herself. But how could she do that alone?

Vivian looked at the clothes she had sewn, the small nighties and cotton caps, and hoped they would do. Everything was prepared as best it could be. She’d told the vicar’s wife she could not wash their linen any more, blaming the cold of winter, saying her fingers were rheumatic. She still wore a girdle tightly bound to hide her swelling shape, but in the cottage she risked undoing it, relieved to be able to breathe a little easier. She never took it off completely, thinking that if anybody came to visit her she’d have time to pull the girdle’s restricting laces tight again before opening the door.

Without any income now, she had to rely on her own stores to eat. She had stocked up on tinned foods before her money had run out. She’d bought flour, lard, sugar and salt, raisins and tea. All through the summer months she preserved fruit and made jams and pickles with this moment in mind. Jars of beans and tomatoes and cases of apples filled a shelf in the pantry. By being
careful she’d had plenty to eat over the winter and enough to last to springtime.

She gathered sticks and branches and made a log pile taller than herself. In the orchard, clumps of waxy snowdrops bloomed and Vivian picked bunches of them, filling the cottage. Jars and old tin cans filled with white flowers lined the stairs, the shelves and windowsills. They gleamed like hundreds of tiny candles. Dressed in the red robe the vicar’s wife had given her, Vivian prepared her home for the child.

When her time came, she screamed because she thought someone might hear her and come to help. When nobody came, she fell silent. Nellie’s hagstone hung from a string over the mantelpiece, a charm to protect her. She had piled wood by the fire and brought in the last of the coal. Vivian laid out Rose’s old newspapers on the floor and fed the stove until the kitchen was so heated, sweat ran down her face. The windows steamed as though a hundred faces were pressed against them, watching her solitary endeavours.

‘That baby was cold as winter,’ Anna was saying, sitting by the fire in her cottage, holding court, regaling Nellie with her tales of birthing local women. ‘I can assure you, the child’s mother saw it was gone from us. She was crying like a cat stuck down a well. I cannot tell you what wholly occurred that day, but I rubbed the little thing with my hands, standing over the fire with it, massaging it till it coughed and spat and took a breath. I put it to its mother’s breast and it sucked so hard the mother fainted.’

‘Is that really true?’ asked Nellie. She was stirring a pot of soup on the cooking range. Anna was full of stories and Nellie doubted most of them, but they drew her in nevertheless.

‘Do I look like a liar?’ said Anna. ‘I en’t got no tall-tale blisters on my tongue. I only speak the truth, and if I don’t like the truth then I don’t speak it. So there.’

Nellie nodded. She’d heard Anna say that many times. She had been living with Anna and her daughter Louisa for a month now.
Several times she’d walked up to her old home, thinking she might speak to Vivian. Once she had been standing behind the elder trees, hidden from view, and Vivian came out of the cottage to feed the hens. Her sister’s face was dreamy-looking, her eyes shining with a peacefulness Nellie did not recognize. Was Joe Ferier in the cottage? It stopped her heart to think of them together. But no. She was sure Vivian was alone. Her sister moved slowly through the long grass of the orchard, lazily, like someone who did not know they were being watched. She wore a red dress and a pretty blue shawl. Her blonde hair cascaded around her shoulders. Vivian had been skinny before, but she looked womanly now. It hurt to see Vivian looking so content. To realize that living alone suited her well.

The hens – Nellie’s jolly red hens – followed Vivian across the garden, chasing after her skirts like fond children. Vivian was talking to them. She went indoors singing an old hymn Rose used to sing, the cottage door banging shut behind her, the hens settling on the doorstep to wait for her. Nellie turned away. Her sister did not need her.

It was surprising to find there were still women in the village who called upon Anna Moats to deliver their babies. Nellie had gone with her to two confinements. It had been alarming to see women lumbering like wounded cattle through the pain of childbirth. Nellie felt useless. She did not know how to help. Their cries frightened her. ‘There’s no romance in childbirth,’ said Anna at the bedside of a labouring mother. ‘You hold her hand and tell her she’s a bloody marvel,’ she instructed Nellie as the woman’s face twisted in pain on the pillow. Nellie did as she was told. Such a small gesture, the clasping of another’s hand in your own. The woman clung to her. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’

The same day, Nellie and Anna did a tooth extraction. The old soldier in the village had a rotten tooth. He was in agony, a gin sweat pouring off him. Cheek like a cooking apple, green with
infection, shiny, round and swollen. Nellie got the tooth in a good grip with the pliers, her knee on the man’s chest, and then exclaimed loudly that the smell was too much to bear. She’d almost vomited over him, and Anna, gin-soaked herself, pushed her aside and pulled the blackened tooth, promising them all a tot of drink when it was over.

‘So will you deliver this baby?’ Anna asked Nellie and Louisa. ‘Mrs Thomas will be labouring with her sixth child, but I can’t walk there with my bad legs. She’s a strong woman and it’ll be an easy birth.’

‘I can’t,’ said Nellie. ‘Not without you. I’m afraid of what might go wrong. I think she should get a nurse.’

Anna scowled. ‘A so-called qualified midwife wants fifteen shillings to do what I do for eight. Three months’ training these women get, and I’ve more years’ experience than I care to remember. A doctor costs one pound. All well and good if your husband’s working, but Mr Thomas hasn’t had full-time work in months.’

‘We’ll do it, Mother,’ said Louisa roughly. ‘No need to take on.’

‘Can you manage a bowl of soup, Anna?’ asked Nellie. The old lady thanked her and Nellie turned to ask Louisa, but she was putting on her coat, saying she was going out. It was a dark afternoon and snow was beginning to fall. Nobody would want to walk anywhere in this, except Louisa had told Nellie she was meeting the wheelwright, who had asked her to go away with him if he could get at his savings without his wife knowing.

‘I’ll be back before you know it,’ said Louisa, and gave Nellie a wink.

‘You think you might go and see your sister soon?’ asked Anna as Nellie ate soup. ‘You and Vivian were so close. It’s a sad thing to see you apart. A man, was it?

‘Usually a man involved when women fall out,’ Anna said when Nellie didn’t reply. ‘Well, don’t leave it too long. It takes courage to go and make things better. You’re a brave girl, Nellie.’

‘I don’t think I am,’ said Nellie, and watched snow falling against the window.

Anna Moats thought she would miss Nellie when she was gone. She was sure Nellie would go back to the sister she loved. That was obvious. Nellie was stubborn and acted tough and distant with folk, but it was plain to see the woman had a heart as tender as a naked heel in a new boot.

After Louisa left, Anna sat back in her chair and told Nellie she had been the midwife who’d delivered both her and Vivian. What a laugh to see the girl’s astonished face! Of course Rose had never told her.

‘You were our mother’s midwife?’ asked Nellie.

‘For both of you. I brought you into the world, my dear. Your afterbirth is buried in the same place as your sister’s. Right under one of the apple trees in your orchard.

‘A slip of a thing Vivian was, born early and quickly. You were another story, Nellie. A long labour and a breech birth. You came feet first into the world, which is no way to arrive. An awkward birth makes for an awkward child, you know. Baby girls who make their mothers suffer at birth grow up contrary in later life, thinking themselves too good to get down on their knees and scrub a kitchen floor.’

‘Well, I’m not like that,’ said Nellie.

‘No, you’re not. Not at all. An exception, you are, Nellie Marsh. I’ll have a bowl of that soup now, if I may?’

Anna sat by the fire, sipping from the bowl Nellie put in front of her. She wouldn’t say it, but Nellie’s mother had nearly died of exhaustion. All the long hours of labour she’d sat on the bed, back rounded, her white cotton nightdress bunched over her thighs, legs pulled up, her hands holding them apart, trying to look over the vast curve of her belly, crying as if she was calling the child out of her. Cursing the father of it and Anna too, for her inability to make the pain go away. Poor Rose Marsh. And so
young. Rose’s mother had been a saint, claiming the children were her own daughters, and her husband going along with it. Oh yes, people said an awkward birth made an awkward person. But surely in this case it was the mother, Rose Marsh, unmarried, already shamed with one little bastard daughter, who had been turned awkward and hardened by Nellie’s birth?