The Green Gauntlet (27 page)

Claire said, ‘It was difficult to get here and anyway, I wasn’t sure when it was due. Do you mind telling me what the baby is?’

‘Why, it’s a girl,’ and the woman looked at her a little oddly, as though astonished she didn’t even know this much. ‘Will her husband be coming, or is he serving abroad? Mrs Craddock didn’t say. It was all rather tiresome. We wouldn’t have known who to tell if there had been difficulties.’

Claire, who had a lifelong prejudice against the medical profession (with the single exception of Maureen, who shared her antipathy to the ‘shall-we-brush-our-teeth’ approach), decided to give nothing away. She said, ‘Don’t tell her I’m here, I want it to be a surprise. I’ll buy some flowers if I can and come back after lunch.’ Then, turning at the door, ‘A girl, you said? What weight?’

The question caught the Sister by surprise so that she relented a fraction. ‘Six pounds, twelve ounces. You could see her … just a quick peep.’

‘Thank you, I can wait,’ Claire said, with a small jet of sourness. ‘I’ve had six myself and I’ve been travelling all night!’

She left the woman feeling that she had had the better of the contest but it brought her no satisfaction. Her tiredness and flatness was at one with the grey stone buildings and the slate-coloured sea. She found a small, drab-looking hotel open and dismissed the driver, giving him a thirty-shilling tip because his eyes looked as exhausted as she felt, and went into the little lobby to be greeted by a slovenly, balding man whose accent, surprisingly, placed him hundreds of miles to the south-east. He mumbled something about ‘winter terms’ and led her up to a vast, over-furnished bedroom overlooking the sea. There was an empty grate screened by a fan of shelf paper, a hideous patterned carpet and heavy lace curtains. The enormous wardrobe had one door fitted as a mirror and the bed had brass knobs, tarnished the colour of sand. The man shuffled off, promising to bring a pot of tea.

It was then, as she took off her hat, that she saw herself in the wardrobe mirror and the shock was salutary.

Claire had spent a long time in front of mirrors. Between the ages of eight and twenty-eight she had studied her reflection with satisfaction amounting to downright smugness, and for the next twenty odd years, having the flair of keeping pace with fashions, she had thought of herself as a woman who was putting up a bonny fight against time. Even lately, with the slow spread of flesh arrested by rationing, she had held her own, but the reflection she recoiled from in the oval mirror was that of a hollowed-eyed old hag and made her want to shriek with dismay. She sat on the bed fighting despair, running her gloved hands along her smooth, slightly pendulous cheeks, and the hopelessness of the situation sneered at her from the eye sockets and the compressed line of what she had once thought of as a ripe, country mouth.

She said, softly, ‘My God! What’s the use of it all then?’ and her voice seemed to come from somewhere outside the room, from the stairs, or the recesses of the dark landing with its smell of carbolic and damp fibres. She saw, as it were, her life in the round. She had loved a man and borne him six children. Two of those children were already dead, mashed to a pulp in disintegrating aircraft, and another was disfigured and minus a hand. Of the rest, one was a remote child absorbed in his own interests, another wrote patronisingly from thousands of miles away, and the third was married to a man who, for all she knew, might be drifting about in the ocean in the track of heedless ships.

She did not think of the by-products. Grandchildren were not her business, not even the six pound, twelve ounce child down the street. All that she could think of was the source—herself—alone in this cheerless room looking out over a slate sea, cut off, exhausted by the demands made upon her, physically, spiritually, every way. Slowly and soundlessly she began to cry so that when the man slouched in with the tea she jerked herself upright and crossed to the window, blinking and making some kind of show at blowing her nose. The man said, in his unlikely Essex accent, ‘Could manage breakfast. Nothing much mind you, we don’t get coupons for visitors after October. Not officially open, see?’

Perhaps it was his manner, his general churlishness, or, even more likely, that dreadful word ‘coupons’ that he pronounced as ‘koo-pongs’. Somehow it threw into relief the frightful muddle of the last few years, and the supineness of people like herself who meekly accepted these idiotic interruptions in their lives and this warping of all natural functions, such as eating, loving, working at something worthwhile, and watching children you had carried in your womb develop and take on responsibilities of their own. Whatever it was it rallied her so that what Paul would have called a sharp injection of Derwent commonsense gushed through her and she whipped round on the creature and snapped, ‘I want a bath and I want a hot meal. And while I am bathing light a fire in here and don’t give me that stuff about ‘there being a war on, either! I daresay you’ve got good Welsh coal stacked away somewhere below and bacon and eggs too, I wouldn’t wonder! If I’m fed and rested and thawed out I’ll pay you summer rates and something over the odds as well. It depends on you, understand?’ and she grabbed her bag, plucked out a five-pound note and crammed it into his podgy hand.

The man couldn’t have looked more startled if she had jammed a revolver into his belly. His mouth opened and closed not so much like a fish in a bowl but like a big mongrel dog being teased by a withheld ball. Then, unbelievably, he smiled, showing several broken teeth, and said, ‘You’re from Devon. Recognise the ole burr! Served with the Devons in the last show. Look there!’ and he bent forward, pointing to a bluish furrow that ran diagonally across his naked pate. ‘I got that at a place called Bois des Buttes. Devon battle honours. Had some good pals in that outfit. Most of ’em went west o’ course.’

Suddenly he was human and not only human but a kind of comrade. Claire said, sensing the surge of courage in her body, ‘You’re right, I am from Devon, and I had friends in that battle. They still celebrate it every year down there. We got four V.C.’s, didn’t we?’

‘Five,’ the man said, and then seemed to pull himself together, almost as though he was gathering himself for a leap.

‘I’ll run the bath and tell the missus to fry something special and make more tea. I’ll soon get a fire going. Sometimes she smokes but not today, not enough wind!’ and he went out, massaging his scar as though to remind himself that it was still there.

III

T
he harsh rustle of coals awakened her and she saw that it was coming up to one-thirty. She washed herself in cold water and finding the room almost cosy she stood in her suspender-belt and bra in front of the mirror again.

This time it had a more encouraging message. She neither looked nor felt sixty. Just approaching the fifty mark maybe, about the time of that crazy second honeymoon she had spent with Paul a few miles up this same coast. Streaks of grey showed in her hair but her flesh, taken all round, was firm and smooth and her belly a good deal flatter than the bellies of her Valley contemporaries. Her legs, she noted, were still as shapely as they had been thirty years ago, and the broad swell of her hips and buttocks had never bothered her, for Paul had so often assured her he preferred a woman with ‘something to catch hold of and jeered at the straight lines of the ’twenties. She thought, as she continued to study herself critically, ‘I don’t really look so different, not if I make the effort, only right now I don’t have to make it on his behalf. He’s got his precious Valley, and that sense of duty that is really male vanity, but my job is to see what can be done to straighten out this nasty little mess! Well, I’m glad I’m here to give it a go. It’ll do me a damned sight more good than sitting around waiting for the balloon to go up.’

She dressed carefully, gave herself a touch of lipstick and marched down to lunch, served with a double gin. Then, donning coat and hat, she sailed out into the long grey street ready, if necessary, to do battle with the Devil.

It was very far from being easy, but easier than she had bargained for. She had always thought of her daughter-in-law as a heedless little thing who, like her husband in pre-war days, had lived from hour to hour, and never had much capacity for wondering where her non-stop frolic would lead, if anywhere. She had forgotten the Welsh sense of doom that could exist side by side with recklessness and a sensuality akin to her own, so that when it was over, and the shock wave of the news had receded, she watched Margaret take refuge in the Celtic awareness of losing every fight in the end, the fight against Anglo-Saxons beyond Offa’s Dyke, against the mountains, the weather, the rock-sown soil of the hill farms, and the unremitting greed of industrialists.

She said presently, ‘You must have lived with this possibility a long time now?’ and Margaret said, slowly, ‘I pushed it away. Everyone does, don’t they? We had plenty of happy times, happier than I ever had before.’

The conviction of the statement puzzled Claire. It had always seemed to her that Margaret’s marriage had been relatively successful, more rewarding, she would have thought, than Stevie’s and Monica’s. She said, ‘You and Andy hit it off once. You could try again, couldn’t you? He’s going to need someone with patience and you’ve got a lot more than I imagined.’

‘There’s Vanessa,’ Margaret said.

‘Vanessa?’

‘Stevie’s baby. That was the name we decided on. We found it in a book and liked it. It’s a pretty name, both of us thought so.’

‘You’ve finally decided to keep the baby, then?’

Margaret looked at her steadily for the first time since she had been shown in by the cooing Sister Pritchard.

‘That’s something I won’t even talk about, except to tell you again what I told you on the phone. I’ve always wanted a baby. It seemed daft being married and getting past thirty and not having one. But even after Andy went along with the idea nothing happened, not even a near-miss. I don’t know why. There was nothing wrong with me. Vanessa came easily enough, in spite of all the twaddle they talk!’

‘The twaddle they talk.’ Claire felt herself warming to the girl minute by minute. She had, it seemed, immense reserves of courage and far more commonsense than she had advertised in the past. She said, ‘Supposing Andy accepted the baby? Have you thought of that possibility?’

‘I never had to, did I?’

The answer, Claire thought, was a kind of rebuke. It made her wonder what decision, if any, had formed in the mind of Stevie, aside from his assurances to her that he would join Margaret in brazening it out, no matter what it cost in terms of family exile.

‘No,’ she said, ‘but now everything’s changed. You’ve got to look at it from a general instead of a personal standpoint. Andy’s very much involved, and so, for that matter, am I and Paul, who doesn’t even know I’m up here.’

Margaret said, quickly, ‘You think I was so wrong? You think I did this deliberately, because I needed a man? Well I did now—at the beginning, but it soon changed and I was glad. If Vanessa hadn’t been Stevie’s she would have been just anyone’s and that is worse, although I don’t suppose you can see it like that being mother to both of them.’

‘Then set your mind at rest,’ Claire said, ‘because that’s something I can understand. And when I heard Stevie was dead I was glad about the baby. Don’t ask me why—something to do with continuity maybe, but I was glad. It was that that decided me to come here and it wasn’t a light decision either. Paul is the only important person in my life and he’s back there alone phoning London and wondering about me, and why I don’t phone him back.’

‘He’ll find out then?’ Margaret said, ‘about us and Vanessa? He’s bound to, isn’t he?’

‘Not until I think he can take it. I didn’t come here without some kind of plan but it involves all of us, not just you and Andy and that baby of yours.’

To the girl in bed she had an obstinate strength that was difficult to oppose for there was kindness in her eyes, and deep concern. She waited and Claire said, ‘I gave you silly advice before. I don’t think it would be a good idea to try and pretend Vanessa belonged to a stranger, but I think it would be even sillier to go off somewhere on your own and let your marriage go to pot the way Stevie’s did. Monica belonged in their world but you never did, not really. In a way Andy is as much to blame as you for this awful muddle. It just isn’t possible to throw discipline and responsibility out of the window, the way those two did all their lives and it seems to me Stevie realised this towards the end. There couldn’t have been much wrong with him to finish the way he did, crashlanding on the off-chance of saving a man’s life!’

‘What does it all amount to in the end?’ Margaret asked, dully. ‘Maybe Monica was right about this hero stuff. Now I’ve got to face up to it alone.’

‘You haven’t! I’m here, and I’ll do everything I can to help. I’m not blameless myself. All the time they were growing up in the Valley I pretended to myself their selfishness was just high spirits and let it go at that. How do you feel about Andy and how will he react to Vanessa?’

‘I don’t feel anything special about Andy,’ she said, deliberately. ‘I’ve forgotten him somehow and I can’t even remember his voice. You still couple them in your mind but you didn’t know Stevie once he began to grow up.’

‘Don’t forget Andy will have changed too. He’s probably not the same person at all.’

‘Maybe he isn’t but how would any man react? You don’t expect him to shed tears over Vanessa, do you? Would your husband, after the last war?’

She couldn’t answer this because Paul and Andy, or Paul and Stevie for that matter, had very little in common unless it was virility. Paul had dragged himself away from the Valley to fight whereas The Pair, obsessed as they had always been in noise and gadgets, had gone whooping off to war like a couple of overgrown schoolboys. It was unlikely that either one of them had given a thought to their wives back in ’39, and what had Andy ever done to keep his memory green in the heart of this pretty, sensitive girl, who must have ached for him, as she herself ached for Paul through the last war? Did he really deserve anything better than a cuckolding?