SYLVIE LIT A candle. Winter dark, five o’clock in the morning by the little gold carriage clock on the bedroom mantelpiece. The clock, an English one (‘Better than a French one,’ her mother had instructed), had been one of her parents’ wedding presents. When the creditors came to call after the society portraitist’s death his widow hid the clock beneath her skirts, bemoaning the passing of the crinoline. Lottie appeared to chime on the quarter, disconcerting the creditors. Luckily they were not in the room when she struck the hour.
The new baby was asleep in her cradle. Words from Coleridge suddenly came into Sylvie’s mind: Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side. Which poem was that?
The fire in the grate had died down, leaving only the smallest flame still dancing on the coals. The baby began to make mewling sounds and Sylvie climbed gingerly out of bed. Childbirth was a brutal affair. If she had been in charge of designing the human race she would have gone about things quite differently. (A golden shaft of light through the ear for conception perhaps and a well-fitting hatch somewhere modest for escape nine months later.) She left the warmth of her bed and retrieved Ursula from the cradle. And then, suddenly, breaking the snow-muffled silence, she thought she heard the soft nicker of a horse and felt a little buzz of electric pleasure in her soul at this unlikely sound. She carried Ursula over to the window and drew one of the heavy curtains back far enough to see out. The snow had obliterated everything familiar, the world outside was shawled in white. And there below was the fantastic sight of George Glover riding bareback on one of his great Shires (Nelson, if she wasn’t mistaken) up the wintry drive. He looked magnificent, like a hero of old. Sylvie closed the curtains and decided that the tribulations of the night had probably affected her brain and were making her hallucinate.
She took Ursula back into bed with her and the baby rooted around for her nipple. Sylvie believed in wet-nursing her own children. The idea of glass bottles and rubber teats seemed unnatural somehow but that didn’t mean that she didn’t feel like a cow being milked. The baby was slow and floundering, confounded by the new. How long before breakfast, Sylvie wondered?
Armistice
11 November 1918
DEAR BRIDGET, I have locked and bolted the doors. There is a gang of thieves – should the ‘i’ come before the ‘e’? Ursula chewed the end of her pencil until it splintered. Undecided, she crossed out ‘thieves’ and wrote ‘robbers’ instead. There is a gang of robbers in the village. Please can you stay with Clarence’s mother? For good measure she added and also I have a headache so don’t knock. She signed it Mrs Todd. Ursula waited until there was no one in the kitchen and then went outside and pinned the note to the back door.
‘What are you doing?’ Mrs Glover asked as she came back inside. Ursula jumped, Mrs Glover could move as quietly as a cat.
‘Nothing,’ Ursula said. ‘Looking to see if Bridget was coming yet.’
‘Heavens,’ Mrs Glover said, ‘she’ll be back on the last train, not for hours yet. Now shift yourself, it’s long past your bedtime. It’s Liberty Hall here.’
Ursula didn’t know what Liberty Hall meant but it sounded like rather a good place to live.
Next morning there was no Bridget in the house. Nor, more puzzlingly, was there any sign of Pamela. Ursula felt overwhelmed by a relief as inexplicable as the panic that had led her to write the note the previous night.
‘There was a silly note on the door last night, a prank,’ Sylvie said. ‘Bridget was locked out. You know, it looks just like your handwriting, Ursula, I don’t suppose you can explain that?’
‘No, I can’t,’ Ursula said stoutly.
‘I sent Pamela to Mrs Dodds to fetch Bridget home,’ Sylvie said.
‘You sent Pamela?’ Ursula echoed in horror.
‘Yes, Pamela.’
‘Pamela is with Bridget?’
‘Yes,’ Sylvie said. ‘Bridget. What is the matter with you?’
Ursula ran out of the house. She could hear Sylvie shouting after her but she didn’t stop. She had never run so fast in all of her eight years, not even when Maurice was chasing her to give her a Chinese burn. She ran up the lane in the direction of Mrs Dodds’s cottage, splashing through the mud so that by the time Pamela and Bridget were in sight ahead of her she was filthy from head to toe.
‘What is the matter?’ Pamela asked anxiously. ‘Is it Daddy?’ Bridget made the sign of the cross. Ursula threw her arms round Pamela and collapsed in tears.
‘Whatever is it? Tell me,’ Pamela said, caught up now in the dread.
‘I don’t know,’ Ursula sobbed. ‘I just felt so worried about you.’
‘What a goose,’ Pamela said affectionately, hugging her.
‘I have a bit of a headache,’ Bridget said. ‘Let’s get back to the house.’
Darkness soon fell again.
Snow
11 February 1910
‘A MIRACLE, SAYS the Fellowes feller,’ Bridget said to Mrs Glover as they toasted the new baby’s arrival over their morning teapot. As far as Mrs Glover was concerned miracles belonged inside the pages of the Bible, not amid the carnage of birth. ‘Maybe she’ll stop at three,’ she said.
‘Now why would she be going and doing that when she has such lovely healthy babies and there’s enough money in the house for anything they want?’
Mrs Glover, ignoring the argument, heaved herself up from the table and said, ‘Well, I must get on with Mrs Todd’s breakfast.’ She took a bowl of kidneys soaking in milk from the pantry and commenced removing the fatty white membrane, like a caul. Bridget glanced at the milk, white marbled with red, and felt uncharacteristically squeamish.
Dr Fellowes had already breakfasted – on bacon, black pudding, fried bread and eggs – and left. Men from the village had arrived and tried to dig his car out and when that had failed someone ran for George and he had come to the rescue, riding on the back of one of his big Shires. St George slipped briefly into Mrs Glover’s mind and hastily slipped out again as being too fanciful. With not inconsiderable difficulty, Dr Fellowes was hoisted up behind Mrs Glover’s son and the pair had ridden off, ploughing snow, not earth.
A farmer had been trampled by a bull, but was alive still. Mrs Glover’s own father, a dairyman, had been killed by a cow. Mrs Glover, young but doughty and not yet acquainted with Mr Glover, had come across her father lying dead in the milking shed. She could still see the blood on the straw and the surprised look on the face of the cow, her father’s favourite, Maisie.
Bridget warmed her hands on the teapot and Mrs Glover said, ‘Well, I’d better to see to my kidneys. Find me a flower for Mrs Todd’s breakfast tray.’
‘A flower?’ Bridget puzzled, looking through the window at the snow. ‘In this weather?’
Armistice
11 November 1918
‘OH, CLARENCE,’ SYLVIE said, opening the back door. ‘Bridget’s had a bit of an accident, I’m afraid. She tripped and fell over the step. Just a sprained ankle, I think, but I doubt that she’ll be able to go up to London for the celebrations.’
Bridget was sipping a brandy, sitting in Mrs Glover’s chair, a big high-backed Windsor, by the stove. Her ankle was propped up on a stool, and she was enjoying the drama of her tale.
‘I was just coming in the kitchen door, so I was. I’d been hanging out washing although I don’t know why I bothered because it started to rain again, when I felt hands shoving me in the back. And then there I was, sprawled all over the ground, in agony. Small hands,’ she added. ‘Like the hands of a little ghost child.’