At that morning service, however, she was too much occupied to notice the vicar’s vestments. She believed that everyone was watching her. She could not forget herself, and, if she prayed at all, it was for the effrontery to carry it off. She had still to meet the congregation coming out after service. That was the time, each Sunday, when my mother and her acquaintances exchanged gossip. In the churchyard they met and lingered before going off to their Sunday meals, and they created there a kind of village centre. It was that assembly my mother had come out to face.
She chanted the responses and psalms, sang the hymns, so that all those round could hear her. She sat with her head back through the sermon, in which the vicar warned us in an aside that we ought to be prepared for grave events. But it was no more than an aside; to most people there, not only to my mother, the ‘failure’ of Mr Eliot was something more interesting to talk about than the prospect of a war. Their country had been at peace so long: even when they thought, they could not imagine what a war might mean, or that their lives would change.
The vicar made his dedication to the Trinity, the after-sermon hymn blared out, my mother sang clearly, the sidesmen went round with the collection bags. When the sidesman came to our row, my mother slipped me sixpence, and herself put in half a crown, holding the bag for several instants and dropping the coin from on high. Those near us could see what she had done. It was a gesture of sheer extravagance. In the ordinary way she gave a shilling night and morning, and Aunt Milly told her that that was more than she could afford.
At last came the benediction. My mother rose from her knees, pulled on her long white gloves, and took my hand in a tight grip. Then she went deliberately past the font towards the door. Outside, in the churchyard, the sunlight was dazzling. People were standing about on the gravel paths. There was not a cloud in the sky.
The first person to speak to my mother was very kind. She was the wife of one of the local tradesmen.
‘I’m sorry you’ve had a bit of trouble,’ she said. ‘Never mind, my dear. Worse things happen at sea.’
I knew that her voice was kind. Yet my mother’s mouth was working — she was, in fact, at once disarmed by kindness. She only managed to mutter a word or two of thanks.
Another woman was coming our way. At the sight of her my mother’s neck stiffened. She called on all her will and pride, and her mouth became firm. Indeed, she put on a smile of greeting, a distinctly sarcastic smile.
‘Mrs Eliot, I was wondering whether you will be able to take your meeting this year.’
‘I hope I shall, Mrs Lewin,’ said my mother with condescension. ‘I shouldn’t like to upset your arrangements.’
‘I know you’re having your difficulties—’
‘I don’t see what that has to do with it, Mrs Lewin. I’ve promised to take a meeting as usual, I think. Please to tell Mrs Hughes’ (the vicar’s wife) ‘that you needn’t worry to find anyone else.’
My mother’s eyes were bright and bold. Now she had got over the first round, she was keyed up by the ordeal. She walked about the churchyard, pointing her toes, pointing also her parasol; she took the initiative, and herself spoke to everyone she knew. She had specially elaborate manners for use on state occasions, and she used them now.
Her hand was still quivering and had become very hot against mine, but she outfaced them all. No one dared to confront her with a direct reference to the bankruptcy, though one woman, apparently more in curiosity than malice, asked how my father was.
‘Mr Eliot has never had much wrong with his health, I’m glad to say,’ my mother replied.
‘Is he at home?’
‘Certainly,’ my mother said. ‘He’s spending a nice quiet morning with his books.’
‘What will he do now — in the way of work, Mrs Eliot?’
My mother stared down at her questioner.
‘He’s considering,’ said my mother, with such authority that the other woman could not meet her glance. ‘He’s weighing up the pros and cons. He’s going to do the best for himself.’
At home my mother could not rest until my father got a job. She pored with anxious concentration through the advertisement columns of the local papers; she humbled herself and went to ask the advice of the vicar and the doctor. But my father was out of work for several weeks. His acquaintances in the boot and shoe trade were drawing in their horns because of the war. The hours of that sunlit August were burning away; somehow my mother spared me sixpence on Saturdays to go to the county; the matches went on, the crowds sat there, though outside the ground flared great placards that often I did not understand. The one word MOBILIZATION stood blackly out, on a morning just after my father’s bankruptcy; it puzzled me as ‘petition’ had done, and carried a heavier threat than to my elders.
It was not till the end of August that my father’s case was published. He had gone bankrupt to the tune of six hundred pounds; his chief creditors were various leather merchants and Aunt Milly’s husband; he was paying eight shillings in the pound. That news was tucked away in the local papers on a night when the British Army was still going back from Mons. For all her patriotism, my mother wished in an agony of pride and passion that a catastrophe might devour us all — her neighbours, the town, the whole country — so that in wreckage, ruin and disaster her disgrace would just be swept away.
October came, the flag-pins on my mother’s newspaper map were ceasing to move much day by day, before my father got a job. He returned home one evening and whispered to my mother. He was looking subdued; and, for the first time, I saw her shed a tear. It was not in gratitude or relief; it was a tear so bitterly forced out that I was terrified of some new and paralysing danger. All this time I had had a fear, acute but never mentioned, that my father might have to go to prison. Perhaps this infected me because my mother had warned me, one evening when we were having tea alone, that he must never contract a debt, and that we had from now on always to take care that we paid in the shop for every single article we bought. As I saw the tears in my mother’s eyes, the harsh grimace that she made, I was terrified that he might have forgotten. I was surprised to hear my mother say, in a dull and toneless voice: ‘Father will be going to work next week, dear.’
I heard the details from Aunt Milly, when she next came into our house.
‘Well, your father’s got a job,’ she said.
‘Yes, Aunt Milly.’
‘I can’t see him doing much good as a traveller. If they say no, he’ll just grin and go away. No wonder they’re only paying him enough to keep body and soul together.’
My father’s former employer, always known as ‘Mr Stapleton’, had persuaded a leather merchant to take him on as traveller, so that he could go the rounds of his old competitors.
‘I suppose I oughtn’t to tell you,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘but they’re giving him three pounds a week. I don’t know how you’re going to manage. Of course, it’s better than nothing. I suppose he wouldn’t get more anywhere else.’
It must have been almost exactly that time when my mother realized that she was pregnant again. I knew nothing of it; I saw that she was ill, and moved slowly, but I was used to her being ill; I knew nothing of it, all through that winter and spring, but I knew that she was constantly needing to talk to me.