The Childs Child by Barbara Vine

Author:Barbara Vine [Vine, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780670922208
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

JOHN WROTE to Bertie far more often than Bertie wrote to him, but John knew this was because writing never came easily to Bertie. Sometimes, his letters were plainly a third or fourth effort, copied from corrected earlier versions. Far from troubling him, John was touched. These revised letters showed how much Bertie cared for John’s opinion and wanted to impress him, surely a sign of love.

Little correspondence came to No. 2 Bury Row, and none of it to Maud. Her Bristol friends ignored her, as did her parents and sister Ethel. There was nothing from her grandmother, and Maud supposed that she didn’t know where her granddaughter was, had perhaps been told that she had gone away to school. Only Sybil occasionally wrote, simple, unimaginative letters asking after Maud’s health and Hope’s and dwelling exhaustively on the weather. Any friends Maud now had lived in Dartcombe and had no need to write to her, but in spite of this lack of attention from the outside world, she always picked up the letters from the doormat. She seemed, in John’s view, to have an uncanny instinct for sensing exactly when the postman came or else her hearing was better than his. She would bring a letter from Bertie to the breakfast table and lay it beside his plate, saying when John appeared, always unwilling to use Bertie’s name, “Another letter from your friend.”

They were infrequent enough, John thought, but still they came too often for Maud. One morning, about a year after Bertie had been to stay, the baby Hope on her lap, she picked up the envelope he had set aside, delaying reading its precious contents until he was alone, and said she hoped he wouldn’t be inviting “your friend” to stay with them again.

“Certainly not,” said John with unusual sharpness. “I know and he knows he wouldn’t be welcome.”

“You broke your promise. You promised you wouldn’t do those disgusting things but you did do them, and I can’t forget it.”

“Evidently. You won’t let me forget it either.”

How she had grown up since the birth of Hope, quite suddenly becoming a woman, and the kind of woman common in their family, narrow, censorious, quick to pass judgment. The sweet innocent was gone, the young girl who respected and admired him as if he really were her husband. Disgusting wasn’t a word she would have used a year ago. She had sounded like Ethel. He remembered how wistfully she had spoken that day before Christmas when she had talked about the Age of Marriage Act and about a superstition that was a means of delaying a birth. He was disappointed in her rather than angry. Although he had never put this feeling into words before, not even in his thoughts, he had supposed that because she herself had transgressed and been punished for it, she would more readily understand transgression in others, would have become tolerant and forgiving. He expected too, if unwillingly, that she would feel some gratitude towards him for providing her with a home and financial support and a shield of respectability.

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