The Lemon Tree (29 page)

Wallace Helena did not hear Elsie’s triumphant shriek as John Patrick Fitzpatrick entered the world, nor the happy running up and down of the women attending to mother and child. She was sound asleep on top of the coverlet of her bed, still in her camisole and petticoat; the rum had done its work.

She slept until nine in the morning. Then Mrs Barnes knocked on her door, to inquire rather anxiously if she would like her breakfast. ‘I’ve brought you a can of hot water,’ she called through the door.

Dragged back from the dark oblivion in which she had spent the night, Wallace Helena responded sleepily. Then as consciousness returned, she swore. Oh, my God! The soapery! The bank! The child!

She stumbled out of bed and shouted that she would be down in a quarter of an hour. Her natural liking for Elsie asserted itself, so she opened the door and hissed down the stairs after Mrs Barnes, ‘How’s Elsie?’

Mrs Barnes turned her cumbersome body to slowly look up at her, her careworn face beatific. She whispered back, ‘She’s fine. She’s sleepin’ now, thanks be. It’s a boy – and he’s loovely. You must see ’im later on.’

Wallace Helena had to smile at the woman’s pleasure. ‘I will,’ she promised, and shut her door.

Once she was washed and her hair brushed and neatly knotted at the nape of her neck, Wallace Helena’s mind cleared and she went down to breakfast with some of her
usual energy. The rum must have been excellent quality, she thought, as she tackled her breakfast bacon; she had not slept so well for weeks. She quelled the sense of panic that began to rise in her, at the thought of the decisions she must make, and told herself that other women must have faced some of the same problems. Last night she had had a terrible shock; today, she would try to keep calm and deal with it.

No matter how she tried to gather up her courage, she still felt an appalling aloneness amid her difficulties. She longed to have her mother to talk to. She feared Joe’s reactions, and, in any case, he was so far away; she must make a decision within a few days, at most.

Before she left for the office, she told Mrs Barnes not to bother to make lunch for her; she would eat at work. That, she thought, would ease the pressure in Elsie’s house. She took a last pull at her after-breakfast cigarello and regretfully stubbed it out. She doubted if she could ever stop smoking.

It was easy to say to herself that she would analyse coldly the difficulties she was in; it was much harder to do it. The minute she allowed her thoughts to rest on any aspect of her predicament, such a turmoil of emotion rose in her that common sense was blotted out. Common sense said, ‘Go quietly to North Wales for a holiday and be rid of the intolerable burden within you. You have enough problems already.’ Sentiment whispered, ‘It’s Joe’s child, an unexpected expression of years of devotion to each other. Remember, you may not be able to have another one. Remember!’

‘If the pregnancy is aborted and you can live without Joe, you can stay in Liverpool – and never have to face a Canadian winter again. You can live a civilized, refined life – with every comfort.’

‘And without Joe, it would be as empty as the food cupboard
before the harvest,’ prompted sentiment ‘He’s all the family you’ve got – except for Benji, who in his deprivation of the Estate is another problem of family, blast him.’

Family? What is a child, if not the perpetuation of a family?

In the course of the morning, she and Mr Bobsworth discussed the satisfactory financial standing of the Lady Lavender with two greybeards at the bank. Specimens of their signatures were then put on file, so that cheques could be honoured by the bankers.

Wallace Helena gave only half her attention to these formalities. She kept thinking about her mother delightedly nursing a little grandson; Leila had nearly gone mad when her brothers had died as children in Beirut, Wallace Helena remembered; and here she was, ready to consign her own child to perdition. As one of the bankers tenderly blotted her signature, she wanted to cry.

Though respectful to her, the bank staff persistently addressed Mr Bobsworth and not herself, assuming that he would be in charge of the company’s finances, and that Mr Al-Khoury, whose signature they would collect later, would be running it.

With a picture of her mother’s grandchild dancing before her, Wallace Helena smartly disabused them of this idea with a polite snub. Responsibility for the soapery was not going to slip away from her like that; it would be passed down the family by her.

It was curious that the unthinking machismo of two old men in a bank should infuriate her so much that it drove her to an immediate decision. But it did. Sparked by bitter resentment, a mother instinct began to rise in a woman who had never wanted to be a parent, feeling that the world was too cruel a place into which to bring a child. Somehow, she swore, she and Benji would nurse the
soapery along. It offered a way out from the slavery of a homestead, if not for her, for the baby. And her half share in the homestead might grow more valuable – might even now have a market value, since the railway had come to Calgary and opened it up to Europe.

As she and Mr Bobsworth, looking gravely important, sat quietly in a hackney carriage weaving its way slowly back to the Lady Lavender, she hoped that soon there would be a letter from Joe. She had given him the alternatives; he might feel old enough and tired enough to come to a more clement country and marry her – but there was so little time. She began to panic that some sharp-eyed employee, like old Georgie Grant, used to so many
enceinte
women in the packed streets in which he must live, would spot what Dr Biggs had – and make her name mud in the Lady Lavender. Pride made her clamp her lips together, till her face looked as if it had been hewn from rock. When, a little later, she sent Mr Helliwell out to get some lunch for her from a nearby café, he wondered anxiously what had happened to the charming lady who had asked him to buy a copy of William Wordsworth’s work for her. She had given her orders to him as testily as her uncle would have done on a bad day. When he set a pile of beef sandwiches in front of her on her desk, however, she did say, ‘Thank you,’ and a few minutes later, when he brought a pot of tea for her that he had made himself, she was immersed in reading Mr Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’. Must’ve been hungry, he comforted himself, and thankfully went to have his own lunch.

Wallace Helena was unexpectedly very hungry, and she ate all the sandwiches; she did not have the same success in absorbing ‘The Solitary Reaper’. No matter how hard she tried, the charming words danced in front of her eyes and made no sense. Eventually, she put the volume
down. Crossly muttering, ‘Damn Georgie Grant,’ she took out a cigarello and smoked it.

It calmed her fretted nerves, but by the end of an afternoon spent in setting down her ideas for the immediate future of the Lady Lavender, for discussion, first with Benji and later with Mr Tasker and Mr Bobsworth, she was coughing badly.

She put down her pen, wiped her face with her handkerchief and looked at the somewhat disjointed jottings before her. It seemed suddenly pointless. If she kept the baby she would be out of circulation for some months, no matter what she planned.

She had gathered from one or two conversations with Elsie that most women did not go out more than was necessary, when they were breeding. Elsie said that middle-class ladies were penned up like chickens. ‘If they go out in the street, they sometimes get jeered at,’ she had added.

Wallace Helena mentally recoiled, both from the idea of being confined and of being humiliated in public. Her hands clenched in her lap, she stared out of the grubby office window at a sky promising perfect harvest weather. Frustration made her furious to the point of tears.

If the bloody Turks had had an ounce of compassion for their Christian subjects, she considered bitterly, she would probably now be living contentedly in Beirut, with full-grown sons, and summer holidays in Beit-Meri to look forward to; not a real worry in the world. Once one’s roots were gone, the normal values by which one lived shattered, it was easy to trip up and be plunged into situations which would never have occurred, had the even tenor of one’s life been left undisturbed.

She felt sickened, as she considered the attitude of the men round the Fort, if she had an obviously illegitimate child. She would be open to propositions as if she were a
prostitute. They might call after a vinegary woman they believed to be a despised Jewess, but they would not touch her; with a bastard in her arms, it would be far, far worse. Unless Joe married her.

She closed her eyes. Her head throbbed, and she cursed that she had not realized, earlier, what the stopping of her menses spelled out. ‘What you don’t expect, you don’t see,’ she fumed helplessly.

She longed for Joe’s slow, rich voice patiently sorting out the chaos in her mind for her, pointing out the options she had and the probable outcome of each of them. Between the two of them, they had always found ways out of situations that had left their neighbours decimated; snowstorms, grasshoppers, drought, Indian uprisings, epidemics – they had crawled through all of them to better days. But there was a real joker in the pack this time – a baby, which she was not prepared to plan away.

There was a knock at her office door, and she roused herself. Benji put his head round the door. ‘All right if I come in?’ he queried cheerfully.

She smiled as best she could and told him to enter. She had not seen him all day, because he had been across the river to Birkenhead, to see a middleman who distributed their products in Cheshire. Now, as he came in, he asked if all had gone well at the bank.

‘Quite well,’ she told him. She poured herself some water from a carafe on her desk and drank a little.

He stood looking down at her, hands in pockets, and she went on, ‘I’ve arranged for you to see them tomorrow, to give them a new specimen signature. They’ve now got Bobsworth’s and mine, and they’ll honour cheques signed by any two of us.’

‘Good,’ he responded, and then, as she began to cough, he said, ‘You
must
see a doctor.’

She was startled by the remark and glanced quickly up
at him, her eyes wide, as if suddenly frightened. Then she looked down again at the sheaf of papers on her desk, and replied, ‘I saw one last night – and I must remember to pick up the prescription he’s making up for me, on my way home tonight.’

The last words came out slowly, as if her mind were elsewhere, and to Benji she looked extremely dejected. He wondered if the sudden absolute responsibility of the soapery was weighing on her. He had expected her to be bubbling with ideas and plans; dejection was not something he normally associated with her.

He had been on his feet all day, so he slowly pulled forward a chair and sat down beside her.

By degrees, he was realizing that the Lady Lavender had always been part of his life and that he did not want to leave it. This meant that he must resign himself to working with Wallace Helena, provided she stayed in England; and, though he often found her maddening, he liked her. She was family, and he felt a surprising warmth at having someone to whom he could speak frankly, without fear of serious censure. She barked and snapped like an irate terrier, but she rarely bit.

Wallace Helena put her elbows on her desk and rubbed her eyes with her fingers. Make up your mind, she ordered herself. You’ve either got to tell Benji everything and go on from there, or you have to say that you’re tired and are going to take a week’s holiday in North Wales.

Since she did not seem inclined to start a conversation, he told her about a successful arrangement he had made with the Birkenhead middleman to distribute posters with their washing soap; and he’d cut the wholesale price by a halfpenny to encourage him.

Though she nodded acquiescence to this agreement, she showed no enthusiasm; it was as if a light had gone out.

‘What’s to do?’ he asked himself. Something was wrong. Had the company’s finances proved to be in a worse state than anticipated? She had not yet told him the details of her visit to Benson.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked softly in Arabic.

The sound of her own language always drew her closer to him; it was the language of her childhood filled with nuances of love and respect. His concern was obvious, and she put out her hand towards him in a hopeless gesture. She said with a break in her voice, ‘I don’t know how to tell you, Benji. How to explain. What to do.’

He went rigid. ’is it to do with the Lady Lavender?’ he asked tensely.

She made a wry mouth. ‘Yes – insofar as what happens to me affects it.’

Oh, Lord! Something must have really blown up; she certainly looked a wreck. He swallowed and, filled with foreboding, said, ‘You’d better tell me.’

‘I’m going to have a baby.’

He looked at her in complete astonishment, and then burst out laughing. ‘Well, I’m blessed! Congratulations! You always insisted that you were single and I accepted it. But I suppose you felt it would be better in business to be known as
Miss
Harding?’

‘I am single; that’s the trouble.’

His grin vanished. ‘Are you engaged – or courting?’ he asked.

‘No.’

He looked at her in wonderment. This stick of a woman casually bedded? She wasn’t the type. He couldn’t believe it. Benson? Helliwell? Don’t be funny, he told himself.

‘You weren’t attacked – in the street – or down in The Cockle Hole?’