The Dream House (44 page)

Slowly, dazed, Agnes made her way downstairs and out of the street door, out into the sunshine. For a long time – she didn’t know how long – she walked, past lines of white terraces, through the gardens of the squares, now fading in the late-summer heat, wondering how complete joy could turn to utter desolation in one cruel stroke. Finally, she sat down on a bench in a garden where children played in the care of gossiping nannies, and cried.

After the storm came calm and false hope’s false dawn. She would go back and see Harry, ask him if what that horrible woman said was true. Perhaps it wasn’t. Harry loved her, she believed that as strongly as ever. Surely he would have told her something as important as that – that he was married, that he could never marry Agnes. Or perhaps there was something they could do?

And so she retraced her footsteps.

But there was no answer this time when she rang Harry’s bell, and after waiting for a moment, she thought she saw a shadow at a window in the first-floor flat and a curtain fluttered, so she slipped away.

When Jeanette let her into the flat in Queen’s Square, the mantel clock was chiming six and no one was home. This, however, was par for the course these days. Agnes had hardly seen Raven since his angry departure nearly six weeks before, but she knew Vanessa saw him regularly – she was too absorbed in her own affair to realise how regularly. Her stepmother assured her that Raven was happy. He had found a place at his friend Tom’s newspaper, part devilling in the office, part writing pieces on routine matters that the regular journalists were too busy or too bored to cover. He was staying with a wealthy artist friend. Once or twice he and Agnes had met, but always in busy cafés or at crowded parties, and they had avoided the subject of Raven’s quarrel with their father. Raven seemed to have changed; he was caught up with his work, his writing, his new friends. He hardly saw Freddy any more, he said. Their paths had just diverged. Agnes thought sadly that she, too, had been left behind in his slipstream.

Jeanette saw at once that Agnes was distraught. She sat her down in the empty drawing room and went to make her some tea.

‘Madame Melton, she waited for you but then she must go out,’ the maid explained. ‘She is worried, very worried. You must telephone her
chez son amie
Madame Marshall now to say you are safe.’

Agnes’s father hadn’t returned from work when Agnes went to bed that night after an early supper. She lay all night, it seemed, tossing and turning until by the morning she was running a temperature.

Her father woke her, bursting into her room at nine o’clock. He had received a letter in the morning’s post from a Mrs Susan Herbert making certain allegations about his daughter’s morals. Did Agnes realize what she had done?

It was a week before Agnes, confined to the flat by her father, received a letter from Harry brought in by Jeanette who clearly thought that Agnes’s
affaire de coeur
was the most exciting and romantic thing to have happened for a long while. Although she was too careful of her job to assist the star-cross’d lovers to actually meet, she was happy to deliver this letter.

It confirmed the findings that Agnes’s father had already revealed to her. Harry confessed that he had married the youngest daughter of a neighbouring Catholic family in Cambridgeshire five years before. He had met Laura at a hunt ball and fallen for her quiet dark beauty, her air of mystery. But after the marriage he had realized there was something damaged about her. Her mystery veiled not dark passions beneath, but a heart that was locked up. She could not seem to give of herself, and a man as passionate and creative as him desperately needed a soulmate to whom he could open up. He had been deeply unhappy.

There was no chance of a divorce. Laura had already borne Harry a child – a daughter – and both families had closed ranks around mother and child. The whole matter was never to be mentioned outside the family. But Harry was in disgrace.

I can never forgive myself for becoming involved with you, my love, because I have hurt you so much, yet I cannot regret our love
, Harry wrote.
You are so natural, so impulsive and your love for me shone out of your eyes. I could not but respond in full. I adore you. You are the other half of my soul. I will always love you. I am not a whole person without you. But your father has made it plain to me that I should not see you and, thanks to La Herbert, my family threaten to ruin me if I bring further scandal by trying to force an end to my marriage. Shame, trouble and poverty are all I am ever able to offer you. Next to these the shining joy of my love would surely tarnish, corrode, grow worthless.

If Agnes had received this letter only a week before, she would have been demented with grief, but by now, some steel had entered her soul. She knew Harry was right. She could not breach her ties with family, she could not endure public humiliation. Nor would she bring down misery upon Harry himself. She was only seventeen, she had no mother to show her how to behave and she was lost.

She took off the locket that she always wore and opened it. A photograph of herself in the front half now faced the little portrait of Harry. She held one half in each hand and, closing her eyes against the tears, twisted the two halves until the hinge gave way. The half with her picture she wrapped in a little silk square. Then she took some paper and wrote the following:

I believe that you love me, truly, fully, and for us that must be enough. When you look on this locket, may you dream of me. When I look on your picture, may I dream of you. May God go with you always.

Then she placed the silk package and the note in an envelope for Jeanette to deliver.

Two weeks later, Agnes began to suffer from bouts of nausea. After she fainted in the street, Gerald called a doctor. The baby was due in May.

Agnes must have slept, because the next thing she knew, an iron hand was squeezing her abdomen. As the pain receded, she heard the clock in the hall chime two. She manoeuvred herself in the bed until she could turn on the light and there came a hot rush of liquid between her legs. The next contraction gripped her and she gasped in pain. When she lifted the blankets she screamed. Her nightgown and sheets were soaked with blood and water.

A door across the corridor opened. Miss Selcott came into the room, her hair bundled up in a ridiculous nightcap. She was still tying her voluminous dressing-gown. Taking in what was happening, she rushed over to the bed and grabbed the corner of the blankets from Agnes, who gasped again as the next contraction took hold.

‘You’ve started then?’ Miss Selcott said briskly, glimpsing the soaked sheets. ‘I’d better get some more linen.’

‘It’s early,’ whispered Agnes in terror. ‘Surely it shouldn’t come for another month.’

‘We’ll just have to manage. We’ll wait till morning, then I’ll send Lister for the doctor.’

‘Get the doctor now!’ Agnes pleaded and panted through another wave of pain. The contractions were growing in strength and frequency, but she was learning to breathe through them.

‘It’s too soon for the doctor, girl! First babies always take a long time. That’s what my mother said. Two days she was in labour with me. All the doctor will do is take one look at you and go away again.’

‘I want a doctor. Or somebody! Not you!’ Agnes cried out.

‘I’ll go and find Lister,’ sighed Miss Selcott. ‘But you can’t expect it not to hurt. You should have thought of that before you went to the bad, Miss.’

‘Just bring the doctor!’ And Miss Selcott vanished.

And so Agnes entered a place filled with pain where time had no meaning. As the hours passed and the room gradually lightened, she fell into a half-doze from which each contraction wrenched her. Her half-waking dreams were filled with ghoulish figures – Gerald, Raven, Harry, Vanessa – all shouting at her and wailing.

She hadn’t seen Raven and Vanessa since September, not since that terrible day when Gerald arrived home unexpectedly early on Jeanette’s afternoon off to discover his wife and his son entwined in the marital bed, all unaware that Agnes, too, was asleep in her own room.

Agnes was wrenched out of sleep by shouting and screaming, then the slamming of doors. Then a low exchange of angry words as Vanessa and Gerald dealt one another the verbal blows that spelled the death of their marriage.

Gerald was inconsolable. He would hardly speak to Agnes, but spent long hours at the office, even sleeping there. After a fortnight, during which Vanessa sent a motor van round to collect her possessions, sorted and packed into boxes by the weeping Jeanette, Gerald summoned Miss Selcott from Seddington Rectory. Her instructions were simple: to be Agnes’s constant companion, her chaperone and her carer. She was to make arrangements for Agnes’s confinement in Suffolk and, in due course, for the adoption of the baby. Above all, nobody in Suffolk – none of the neighbours – and as few people as possible in London, were to learn of this terrible further disgrace that had struck the Melton family. Enough people were gossiping about Raven and Vanessa. Somehow, Agnes must be saved from shameful public humiliation.

Agnes, stunned by the hard reality of Vanessa and Raven’s betrayal, which she had been up to then too naive to see clearly, and by the sight of her father once more brought to his knees by grief, felt only compassion for Gerald. She meekly complied. She would live a quiet, sequestered life, she would put up with the ministrations of Miss Selcott. The one thing she would not do was part with the baby.

‘I will not let you give it away,’ she sobbed at him. ‘I love its father and I can’t let the baby go. I will bring it up quietly, find somewhere away from you if that is what you want.’

‘You couldn’t look after yourself and a baby all alone,’ he said gently. ‘And, Agnes, what chance do you think you would have of a life of your own, with a child with no name? What man would look at you twice? And think of the child – it would be vilified. You must allow the baby to be adopted, my love, it is yours and his only chance for future happiness.’

‘It will not be given away,’ she said stubbornly.

Her father studied her gravely. ‘Think about what I have said to you, my dear,’ he said. ‘I will not do anything without your consent, but I beg you to give me that consent.’

As the birth approached, Agnes believed more and more strongly that she must keep this child of her love. No matter what kind of life she might have to lead, she would find a way to mother this baby.

Gerald rented a cottage in Hertfordshire, and she and Miss Selcott lived there quietly. Miss Selcott had made arrangements with a small hospital on the Suffolk coast to admit Agnes when the time drew near for the baby to be born, and it was with a view to travelling on there that they were to stay at Seddington House for a few days over the Easter holiday. Now, of course, all their plans were thrown into confusion by the baby’s early arrival.

As the morning sun strengthened, there was still no sign of the doctor. ‘Lister’s gone out now to see if he can find him,’ said Miss Selcott vaguely.

Agnes felt a change shudder through her body, as if she were being sucked into a vortex, then a terrible, burning pain as the baby began to push down inside her. She gasped and grunted, kicking off the tangle of hot, restricting bedclothes that Miss Selcott had modestly replaced each time Agnes had freed herself of them.

Miss Selcott rose from her chair, clutching her handkerchief uselessly, then, forgetting delicacy, cried out as she saw that the baby was coming. She caught it as it slithered out and Agnes fell back on the bed, exhausted.

Agnes was to go over and over this birth as the days, weeks, months and years elapsed, and each time, the certainty became rooted in her more strongly that, throughout the whole event, Miss Selcott’s behaviour had been strangely furtive. And now that the baby was born, Miss Selcott must have busied herself cutting the cord and wrapping the child in a towel. It didn’t cry, and the governess immediately left the room with her bundle.

Briefly occupied as she was with the further contractions that racked her body, and the shocking liver-like placenta that slipped out from between her thighs, part of Agnes’s mind was crying out for the baby. Where had Miss Selcott taken her child?

She called out, but could do nothing but lie there and wait for the strength to return to her limbs.

A few minutes later, Miss Selcott opened the door quietly and came and stood by the bed. Her face was grave.

‘How are you now, Agnes?’ she asked.

‘I’d like to see my baby,’ Agnes said, ignoring the question.

‘I’m afraid I have bad news for you, dear. The little boy did not survive. I am sorry.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘It’s true, my dear. It must be terrible to take in. The child is dead. I have given him to Lister who will make the necessary arrangements.’

‘I must see him.’

‘No. It’s not right. It will just upset you more.’

‘I must see him!’

‘You cannot. Lister has already taken him away. And he will bring the doctor. We are told the doctor was busy all night. There were more deserving mothers who needed his help you know.’

Agnes tried to pull herself up. ‘I don’t believe you. I don’t believe any of this. You’ve taken him, haven’t you? You’ve taken him.’ Her voice rose to a scream. ‘I want my baby!

‘It’s a dreadful thing to have happened, but you will come to see that it’s for the best,’ the woman told the hysterically weeping girl. ‘You’d have had a wretched life bringing up a child of shame, and you’re a selfish, stubborn girl refusing to let a married couple give it a respectable home. Just think, every time your father saw the boy it would have been a reminder of your wickedness. With the child dead there’s a chance now that some kind man might marry you, and you’ll have more children – but in the right way this time. God has been kind.’ Miss Selcott’s eyes almost glittered as she delivered this sanctimonious speech and she leaned in towards Agnes so the girl had to brush the spittle from her face.

‘
Give me my baby!
’ Agnes screamed.

The scream Kate heard was her own, as she was wrenched out of sleep in Paradise Cottage, the perspiration pouring down her face, her heart thudding in terror. Something was lost. A baby. Her babies. Sam. Daisy. She threw back the duvet and was halfway across the room before she recognized the familiar shape of the chest of drawers, the homely smell of pine and polish, and realized that she and her children were safe in Paradise Cottage. Pulling open the door, she padded out across the landing and into their room. They were both deeply asleep. Kate stroked a strand of hair from Daisy’s forehead and straightened Sam’s pillow, dropping a gentle kiss on his downy cheek before returning to her own bed.