“Now, Mrs. Vernall, with all due respect, if she’d been ugly I’d not charge half price.”
Stooped by the couch she said farewell to May, who thanked the deathmonger for all she’d done.
“You’ve been a godsend. When I have me next I’ll make sure that they send for you again. I’ve made me mind up that I want two girls, then after that I’ll stop, so I suppose you’ll be back when me second daughter’s due.”
May got a wan smile in response to this.
“We’ll see, my dear. We’ll see” said Mrs. Gibbs.
She said her goodbyes to the family, the lengthiest her one to baby May, then said no one need show her from the room. She put her hat and coat on. They could hear her as she stamped along the passageway and, after fumbling briefly with the catch, went out, leaving the front door on the latch.
The tuneless wail of an accordion moved on the river’s surface with the light and rippled the September afternoon. From where May stood upon the wrought-iron bridge between the river island and the park, her eighteen-month-old daughter in her arms, she could make out Aunt Thursa, far away, a small brown dot that walked the green’s far edge towards the cattle market further up.
Although too distant to be clearly seen May could imagine all too vividly every distressing detail of her aunt, who, next to her dad Snowy, May believed to be their family’s worst embarrassment. She could just picture Thursa’s bird-like head with its proud beak, its pale and staring eyes, its grey hair that erupted up in tufts and looked as though her brains were smouldering. She’d have her brown coat on and her brown shoes, bloody accordion slung around her neck, an ancient mariner with albatross. Both night and day she’d wander through the streets extemporising, fingers fluttering on the grey keys of her weighty instrument. May’s sense of shame would not have been so great if Thursa had displayed the faintest sign of any musical ability. Instead, her aunt made an unholy row, short stabs of falling or ascending chords all smudged into a skirling banshee wheeze, which stopped dead at the sudden precipice of Thursa’s frequent random silences. From noon till midnight seven days a week you’d hear her frightening cacophony, winding amongst the yards and chimneypots, that scared cats and woke babies in their cribs, that scattered birds and showed the Vernalls up. Stood there upon the bridge, May watched the speck of noisy sepia that was her aunt as, like a heron, the madwoman picked her way along the shore of Beckett’s Park, where leaves frothed up against Victoria Prom. When Thursa and her grim accompaniment both faded in the distance, May turned back to the blonde infant cradled in her arms.
The red hair that May’s daughter had at birth had fallen out and come back as white-gold, luminous catkins in a halo blaze that looked, if anything, more glorious than the hot copper with which she’d been born. Looked even more unearthly, certainly. The younger May grew lovelier each day, to May and Tom’s uneasy wonderment. She’d hurt to look at if it carried on. Both parents had at first merely assumed their child was only marvellous to them, that friends were being complimentary, but gradually had come to realise from the reaction everywhere she went that this was beauty without precedent, beauty that startled up a flock of gasps, a nervous awe, as if onlookers saw a Ming vase or the first of a new race.
May purred and drew her baby close to her so that their foreheads touched, pebble to rock, and so that their eyelashes almost beat against each other’s like two courting moths. The child gurgled with unrestrained delight, her sole response to nearly everything. She seemed that pleased to simply be alive and evidently found the world at large just as astonishing as it found her.
“There. All that nasty racket’s gone away. That was your auntie Thursa who’s half sharp, out with her squeeze-box kicking up a fuss. But she’s cleared off now, so that me and you can get on with our visit to the park. Out on the island there might be some swans. Swans. Should you like that? Here, I’ll tell you what, let your mam get into her pocket here, and you can have another rainbow drop.”
Fumbling in a side vent of her skirt her fingers found the small brown paper cone, top twisted, that she’d bought at Gotch’s shop in Green Street on their way down to the park. One-handed, with her other full of child, May unscrewed and then opened up the bag, reaching in to retrieve three chocolate drops, hundreds-and-thousands speckling their tops, one for her infant daughter, two for her. She held the first sweet to her baby’s lips, which opened with a comic eagerness to let May place it on the minute tongue, then pressed the two remaining chocolate discs together into one, shaped like a lens, the coloured flecks now beading the outside in little dots like the French painters used. She popped it in her mouth and sucked it smooth, her favourite way of eating rainbow drops.
With little May against one shoulder like a set of bagpipes not in current use she sauntered from the slight hump of the bridge onto the island’s sparse and yellowed grass. The isle, two or three acres all in all, had the Nene forked around it to its north, continuing as two streams that re-joined to form one river at the land’s south tip. A foot-worn path ran round the island’s edge, enclosing at the centre marshy ground that was sometimes a pond, but not today. Once off the railed bridge May turned to her right, starting an anticlockwise circuit of the riverside, breeze in her dark red hair, her daughter slobbering chocolate on her neck. Some clouds slid through the azure overhead so that May’s shadow faded then sprang back, but otherwise it was a perfect day.
She walked now with the water on her right and the broad swathe of Beckett’s Park beyond, its old pavilion tinted lime by moss, its benches, bushes, and its public lavs, trees scorched by autumn starting to catch fire. The river’s mirror-ribbon ran below the dark reach of the overhanging boughs, reflecting shattered umber, cloudy sage, torn scraps of sky in peacock blue beneath the medalled shimmer of its rippled breast.
If today was a Sunday, there’d have been chaps renting boats out from the peeling hut propped up between the crowding elms there on the bank towards its cattle-market end. Most weekends, if the weather was all right, you’d find half of the Boroughs down the park in their best bonnets, walking arm in arm, shrieking and laughing as they rowed upstream through trailing willow fingers for a lark. The chimney-sweep from Green Street, Mr. Paine, who’d got one of them wind-up gramophones, would take it out with him on his hired boat. It was nice, hearing music out of doors; nice seeing Mr. Paine play sweet old songs while he cruised down the river in amongst the lovebirds and the splashing families. It made it seem as if times weren’t so bad.
May got on well with Mr. Paine. He’d once shown her the flowers he’d grown in his back yard, which was just down from Gotcher Johnson’s shop. Crammed into the brick rectangle there’d been more colours than she’d ever seen before, sprouting from a bewildering array of makeshift flowerpots. Pinks bloomed from tins. Apothecary jars spilled marigolds. Cracked piss-pots brimmed with fragrant jasmine sprays. May liked the Green Street crowd in general. She’d often thought that one day her and Tom might find a decent house to rent down there, away from Fort Street and her mam and dad, perhaps not far off from the chimney-sweep who’d got Eden in saucepans out the back, whose murmuring Victrola charmed the crowds out strolling on the Sunday riverbanks. And he loved little May. Who didn’t, though?
The riverside path curved round to the left, its grass a threadbare carpet, pile rubbed flat by strolling old men, lovers, truant boys. May followed it towards the isle’s far side, her pace unhurried and her skirt’s thin hem billowing at her ankles in the breeze. Head on her mother’s shoulder, little May was chattering fluently, unhindered by irrelevant concerns like sense or words.
Of course, May understood that while her child was almost universally admired, some people’s admiration might be shown in ways that were intolerably cruel. There’d been that afternoon some months before when her and Tom were walking in this park, having a Sunday outing with young May. They’d carried her or let her trot a while between them, holding one of her hands each, lifting her up for slow suspended leaps to skim the puddles a
nd the buttercups. There’d been a well-dressed couple marching by, keeping their distance from the Boroughs types, keeping at nose’s length, the way they do. The woman with her gloves and parasol stared at the Warrens and their little girl, remarking to her husband as they passed, “You know, it does upset me when I see a tiny child as beautiful as that being brought up by people of their sort.”
The bloody cheek. The bloody, bloody cheek that woman had, to say a thing like that. Tom yelled “You what?” at their retreating backs but they just walked on like they hadn’t heard. May could remember how she’d cried herself to sleep that night, face hot and red with shame. You’d think that her and Tom were animals, not to be trusted with a baby girl. May knew, just from the woman’s tone of voice, that if the couple could have found some means to have May’s daughter took away from her, then they’d have done it without thinking twice. The incident had sparked a fierce resolve, a fire that scorched her throat and stung her eyes. She’d show them. She’d look after little May better than some posh woman could have done.
Mother and child had by now wandered round the island’s northern, cattle-market end, dawdling along beside the river’s edge towards Midsummer Meadow and the south. The baby’s eyes, clear blue like winter sky, gazed fascinated at the central bog where ducks with heads beer-bottle emerald still pecked and fussed near almost emptied nests. Far off, a factory horn made brief complaint.
Around May’s snub-nosed shoes were ghost-green leaves with queer pods bulging from their fallen stems. Split with a thumbnail they’d have grubs inside, the offspring (or so May’s dad had once said) of small black flies who’d lay eggs in the bud, deforming it to what was called a gall. It was a nasty thought, but better than the first conclusion she had drawn, which was that worms and maggots somehow grew on trees, signs of death blossoming unnaturally from leafy boughs that represented life. The bank was strewn, beside the blighted leaves, with other bits of litter here and there: dog muck blanched by a diet of well-gnawed bones, an empty packet of ten Craven ‘A’ that had the black cat mascot on its box in sodden cardboard and a half-inch tall, now at the mercy of the island’s birds.
Apart from this there was a pair of pants, a set of ladies’ bloomers in the grass between the tree roots, white and crumpled up. Some couple had come here to have it off far from the gaslights on Victoria Prom, the river’s tinkle lost beneath their groans, then not cleared up behind them when they’d done. May tutted, though she’d done the same herself with Tom before they’d married, here at night beside the river, him on top of her, then afterwards they’d sit here and they’d talk, propped up together underneath a tree. Head resting on Tom’s breast she’d heard his heart, both gazing off towards the stream’s far side, the scrublands and the railway tracks that stretched off to the abbey out at Delapre. She’d listened to him, quiet and wonderstruck, while he told her his tales from history, the subject that had been Tom’s best at school. The whole Wars of the Roses, he’d explained, the wars between the Lancasters and Yorks, had been decided on the soil across the river from where May was walking now. The King was captured on the waste-ground that the Boroughs thought of still as its back yard. She’d sprawled there, half asleep and marvelling at the important things these fields had seen, at the low voice of her husband-to-be, whose spunk hung cooling from the dandelions. The memory made May warm between her thighs so that she had to stop and shake her head to clear it before she could concentrate on her and young May’s Friday afternoon. She went on, curving round the isle’s south end and back in the direction of the bridge.
Re-entering the main grounds of the park she peeped to see if Thursa was nearby. Her aunt, however, was by then long gone, as were the other sorts who’d been about. Perhaps her aunt had led them dancing off Pied Piper fashion with a cockeyed tune on her accordion, brown coat a-flap, her grey hair streaming like a chimney fire. May laughed and so did young May, joining in.
The only other people she could see were up near Derngate and the hospital, mothers or governesses pushing prams by Becket’s Well at the park corner there. Snobs. Why, even their servants put May off, looked at her like they thought she’d steal their purse, despite being no better born than her … although that wasn’t strictly speaking true. Being hatched in a gutter full of shit, near everyone was better born than May.
That didn’t make her a bad mother, though. It didn’t mean that woman had been right. She took more care of her own little girl than all the la-di-da types did of theirs. May looked after her daughter to a fault, at least if what the doctor said was right. What that had been, young May kept getting colds, just coughs and sniffles how most babies do. The doctor came to see her, Dr. Forbes, annoyed he’d been called out so many times, and they’d had words, him and the older May. He’d led her out onto her own front step and pointed further off down Fort Street’s length to where the simple girl from down the way was sitting on the cold, uneven flags with a toy tea-set spread out all around, sharing black puddle-water with her dolls.
“You see? That child is healthier than yours, because her mother lets her play outside. Your baby, Mrs. Warren, keeps too clean to build up a resistance to disease. Let her get dirty! Don’t they say you’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die?”
It was all very well for him to talk, him up Horsemarket in his doctor’s house. Nobody would accuse him or his wife of being unfit to bring up a child, the way that old cow had with her and Tom. His children, May knew, could have mucky knees and nobody would think the worse of him. It wouldn’t be him that got talked about, or be his wife what cried herself to sleep with the humiliation of it all. Having some money spared you all of that. The Doctor didn’t know what it was like.
Here young May shifted in her mother’s arms and pulled a face. It was her ugliest one, although it would have shamed a work of art. If the wind changed and she’d been stuck like that, May’s baby would still knock spots off Miss Pears. The reason for her daughter’s restlessness was more than likely want of rainbow drops. She reached in her skirt’s pocket for the bag, discovering they’d only got three left. Giving May one she pressed the other two into another sandwich for herself. With her miniature vision in the crook of one arm, so May senior went on beside the railings and the lavatories towards the dung-chute of Victoria Prom. The sun was lower. Time was getting on. She didn’t want to keep her little girl outdoors too long, despite old Forbes’s advice. With little May not long rid of one cough some fresh park air had seemed a good idea, but there was no sense overdoing things. They’d best get home and in the warm while there was still some bright, and it was quite a walk. Stepping from under tea-leaf coloured trees they turned left on the curving promenade and carried on through cattle market musk towards the iron gas-holder’s rotund bulk.
May passed the Plough Hotel across the road at Bridge Street’s mouth, continuing until the pair had reached the foot of Horseshoe Street where they turned right, beginning the long trudge uphill along this eastern boundary line into the Boroughs’ grubby, glad embrace, into its welcoming and soot-streaked arms. The sun was a Montgolfier balloon descending on the railway station yards. Breeze stirred the pale curds of her daughter’s hair and May was pleased she’d brought her out today. There was a feeling in the air, perhaps brought on by sunset or the autumn’s cool, as if these hours were a last precious glimpse of something, of the summer or the day, which made them twice as flawless and as fair. Even the Boroughs, with its bricks rubbed raw, seemed to be trying to look its very best. A wealth of newly-smelted golden light slicked its slate rooftops and its guttering, spread blinding scum on the rainwater tubs. The scraps of lilac cloud over Bellbarn were handbill fragments, torn, left pasted up on the great awning’s deepening blue above. The world seemed so rich, so significant, like an oil painting May was walking through with her Gainsborough baby on her hip.
Across the trot and creak of Horseshoe Street, its cobbles greased with fibrous olive smears, was wasteland where St. Gregory’s once stood, or so May’s dad had t
old his daughter once. There’d been some tale about an old stone cross a monk had brought here from Jerusalem, so as to mark the centre of his land. They’d set it in an alcove at the church, and for some centuries it was a shrine where folk made pilgrimages and all that. “Rood in the Wall” they called it. ‘Rood’ meant cross, though in May’s mind she mixed it up with ‘rude’ and thought of the stone cross as plain or coarse, chipped ruggedly with rudimentary tools from hard grey rock, rough-cut and biblical. The monk was sent by angels, so he’d said. Angels were common in the Boroughs then, gone now unless you counted little May. The church itself was also long since gone, with only nearby Gregory’s Street to mark the fact that it was ever there at all. Now buddleia and nettle ruled the plot, the first with fallen petals thick as meat, the latter thrusting white and senile heads up into the last spare rays of the sun, lit with a burning citrine at their tips. To think it was the centre of the land.
The baby chuckled, clutched against May’s side, so that her mother turned to see what for. Some way uphill, where Gold Street and Marefair cut across Horsemarket and Horseshoe Street to form a crossroads, on the corner there outside Vint’s Palace of Varieties a slim young fellow leaned against the wall, looking away then slyly looking back as he played peek-a-boo with little May.
Her daughter seemed enchanted by the man, and an inspection forced May to admit that there was much to be enchanted by. He wasn’t tall but had a slenderness, a litheness, not a wiriness like Tom. The fellow’s hair was blacker than his shoes, a springy nest of unwound liquorice whips. His girlish, long-lashed eyes were darker still, batting flirtatiously to tease the child. Fancied himself, May thought. And fancied her.