2011
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
1929: The Child’s Child
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
2011
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
I am indebted to The People’s War: Britain 1939–1945 by Angus Calder, published by Jonathan Cape, for information on the Second World War, particularly the ways in which the war affected the British public.
Ruth Rendell
By the same author
The Birthday Present
The Minotaur
The Blood Doctor
Grasshopper
The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy
The Brimstone Wedding
No Night is Too Long
Asta’s Book
King Solomon’s Carpet
Gallowglass
The House of Stairs
A Fatal Inversion
A Dark-Adapted Eye
The book was on the table in front of us, along with the teapot, the two cups and a plate of mince pies. It was a book and not the manuscript I had expected and, if I’m honest, feared.
‘Privately printed, as you see,’ Toby Greenwell said.
‘Your father had that done himself?’
‘Oh, yes.’
He picked it up and handed it to me. Like many such books, it had no jacket but a shiny cover with a picture of a young girl with pigtails and wearing a gymslip. She was standing in a green meadow and the title of the novel had been amateurishly done in black letters by someone who was no expert in the art of Times Roman.
‘When we spoke,’ I said, ‘you told me your father had mentioned this book to you but you never saw it till after he and your mother were dead. He was quite a distinguished novelist. He’d had – how many books published?’
‘Twelve. They weren’t bestsellers but they were – well, I think “widely acclaimed” would be the phrase, don’t you?’
Toby is not a writer himself and never has been. He is an architect, retired now, and living with his wife and the one remaining child still at home in a house he designed himself in the Surrey Hills. We met in the Highgate house he’d inherited from his mother six months before, Victorian Gothic and not much admired by him, though he grew up there. Martin and Edith Greenwell lived there from some time in the 1930s, a few years before Toby was born, until Martin and then Edith died. It was there, while going through the contents of the house, all of which now belonged to Toby, that in a bookcase in Martin’s study he found the privately printed novel. I asked him if he could remember what his father had said about The Child’s Child and the reasons he gave for its having never been published.
‘My dad told me the title,’ Toby said, ‘and that’s how I knew what it was. He hadn’t said he’d had it printed and bound and – well, as you see it now. I was surprised, to say the least. Less so when I remembered what he’d told me about it. You have to know that my mother was quite vehemently opposed to any attempts to have it published. I know that from him, not her. Apparently, she would never discuss it.’
I asked Toby if he had spoken to her about it.
‘Oh, yes. After he was dead. I didn’t know about the bound book then. I thought it was somewhere among his papers in manuscript. My mother’s comments were memorable. Perhaps you have to remember that she was born in the last years of the First World War, which made her very old when we spoke about the book.’
‘What did she say?’
‘That she had read it but was too disgusted to finish it. I think it was partly the fact that it was a true story or based on a true story, someone my father knew. If it were published, none of the people they knew would speak to them again, but she was sure no one would publish it. And she was right. He did try with the company that your brother works for – they had published all his previous books, there were nine by then – and his editor suggested he make certain changes. The character of Bertie could be made into a woman, for instance. Maud might be three years older than she is in the novel. But it was the homosexual element that they objected to. This was 1951, sixteen years before the act that made homosexual activity between consenting adults in private legal.’
‘I take it your father didn’t agree to modify the book?’
‘No, and when you read it you can see why he wouldn’t. I’m no literary critic, but I can see that you have to try and get into the sort of climate that existed then to understand perhaps why he wanted to write it and why he wouldn’t change it. Hence, private printing. You see, it was not only about getting understanding for homosexuals that he was very keen on, but also about changing the attitude to illegitimacy and what he called “unmarried mothers”. What would you call them now?’
That made me smile. Toby had his naive moments. ‘“Single parents”, I should think,’ I said.
‘But that’s fathers as well.’
‘I know. It’s called equality. It’s also called political correctness.’
‘Anyway, that’s the other theme of the novel. Would “theme” be the word?’
‘I expect so,’ I said. ‘Why not?’
‘One theme, then, is the injustice with which gay people were treated in the thirties and forties, and the other the injustice with which – er, single parents and their offspring were treated. There’s a brother who’s gay – that’s the man my father knew – and his sister who has an illegitimate baby –’
I interrupted him. ‘Don’t go on. Let me read it.’ I had another glance at the book before putting it in my bag. ‘I’m not an agent, you know. You know I’m a university lecturer, working for a PhD that happens to be more or less about one of the themes in this book.’
‘As you know, it was your brother who suggested you might be the right person to read it. I thought he’d read it, but as he reminded me, though he’s in publishing, it’s in marketing, not editorial.’ Toby spoke almost humbly. ‘I just want you to tell me if you think it will find a publisher. I think I listened to my mother too much and in my head I still hear the things she said.’
I told him that of course I would read it but it might take me a bit of time.
‘I think my dad would have liked you to look at it. He wanted it published, but as it stands, not expurgated, not neutralized to suit a narrow-minded readership.’
‘I’m not sure that “narrow-minded” is the term,’ I said. ‘They were of their time. They were the society of the day. Whatever I think of your father’s book, I can guarantee no one is going to want to expurgate it. We live in an entirely different climate of morality and sexual behaviour, a whole world of difference.’ I looked at him, guessing that he was thinking of his mother’s disapproval. ‘As you know, young people today, many of them or even most of them, wouldn’t understand what you and I have been talking about.’
‘That’s true. My own children wouldn’t.’ In a burst of confidence, he said, ‘My mother is dead. It couldn’t have been published during her lifetime, but it could now. I keep telling myself that and feeling more and more guilty about what I’m doing.’
‘Time enough to feel guilty if and when it’s published. Let me read it first.’
I took The Child’s Child home with me, where my grandmother had all twelve of Martin Greenwell’s novels in hardcover. They were first editions, all with their original jackets, each one a little work of art and all a world away in taste and design from the pigtailed child in the green field. I looked inside, but of course The Child’s Child wasn’t listed among Greenwell’s previous works. It occurred to me then that a friend’s mother had once told me how she’d smuggled a copy of Henry Miller’s Sexus through Customs when coming home by sea from France some time in the 1950s. A world away from today’s contraband, when it would be drugs, not a book.
While teaching at a university in west London, I had been working for a PhD on a subject with which no one among my family and friends seemed to have any connection: single parents or, in the phrase Toby Greenwell had used, unmarried mothers. As my supervisor remarked after I chose the subject (and she reluctantly approved), it would be a bit absurd in a climate where nearly half of women remain unwed. So ‘Single Parents’. Such women in English literature was the idea, but I was still asking myself – and Carla, my supervisor – if this should be extended into life. Into reality. Would this make it too much like a social-science tract?
When my grandmother died, I had already begun reading every English novel I could find that dealt with illegitimacy or with the mothers of illegitimate children. I was living in a flat in west London that I shared with two other women and a man, a not unusual configuration in overcrowded noughties London. The day before her death I had visited her in hospital, where she had been for just a week. A stroke had incapacitated her without disfiguring her, but she could no longer speak. I held her hand and talked to her. She had been a great reader and knew all those works of Hardy and Elizabeth Gaskell and a host of others that I was reading for my thesis. But when I named them she gave no sign of having heard, though just before I left I felt a light pressure on my hand from hers. The phone call from my mother came next morning. My grandmother, her mother, had died that night.
She was eighty-five. A good age, as they say. No one ever says ‘a bad age’, but I suppose that would be mine, twenty-eight, or my brother’s, thirty. We were just the age when people tire of sharing flats with two or three others or crippling themselves with a huge mortgage for two or three rooms, but at the time of our grandmother’s death we could see no end to it. We mourned her. We went to the funeral, both of us in black, I because it is chic, Andrew because as a fashion-conscious gay man, he possessed a slender black suit. My mother wore a grey dress and cried all the time, unusual for her in any circumstances. Next day we heard from my grandmother’s solicitors that she had left her house in Hampstead jointly to my brother and me.
I have been honest about why we wore black, so I may as well keep up the honesty and say we expected something. Verity Stewart – we had always called her Verity – had a son and a daughter to leave her considerable fortune to (and she did leave it to them), but as we were the only grandchildren I thought we might get a bit each, enough, say, to help start on what’s called the property ladder. Instead we got the property itself, a fine big house near the Heath.
Fay, my mother, and her partner, Malcolm, thought we would do the sensible thing, the practical thing: sell it and divide the proceeds. Instead, we did the unwise thing and kept it. Surely a house with four living rooms, six bedrooms and three bathrooms (and about three thousand books) was big enough for a man and a woman who had always got on with each other. We failed to take into account that there was only one kitchen, one staircase and one front door, congratulating ourselves that neither of us played loud music or was likely to have a party to which the other was not invited. There was one thing we never thought about, though why not I don’t know. We were both young, and if we had none now, each had had several partners and one of us, perhaps both, was likely to have a lover move in sooner or later
In Andrew’s case that happened quite soon.
James Derain is a novelist, his books published by Andrew’s firm, as were Martin Greenwell’s, which is how Andrew knew about his literary output. They met at a publisher’s party. The occasion can’t have been the anniversary of Oscar Wilde’s birth or, come to that, his death, it was too late for that, but it was something to do with Wilde, a hero of James Derain’s. At that party James told Andrew about Martin Greenwell and a book he’d written but never published that was based on the life of James’s great-uncle. That party was the start of their friendship. It led to a relationship – and soon a falling in love, which they celebrated with a trip to Paris for the weekend. They went to look at Wilde’s newly refurbished tomb. It had been restored to Epstein’s original pristine whiteness before its surface was damaged by the lipstick of all the women who had come to kiss it over the years. Who would have supposed lipstick could scar marble? Andrew was happy about the lip imprints, saying it almost made up for all the women who spat at Wilde in the street after his downfall.
Andrew and I had made a rough division of the house, the rooms on the left-hand side, upstairs and down, mine, and those on the right, his. That was all very well: I got one bathroom, he got two; I got three bedrooms and Verity’s study, he got my grandfather Christopher’s study and three bedrooms. But we had to share the kitchen, which was enormous and on my side of the house.
‘How many places have you lived in,’ Andrew asked, ‘where you’ve had to share the kitchen with two or three other people?’
I thought about it, tried counting. ‘Four. It seems different in a place this size.’
‘Let’s give it a go. If we can’t stand it we’ll have another kitchen put in.’
It didn’t much concern me. The house was marvellous to live in – in those first weeks – and like my grandmother I spent most of my time blissfully reading. It was spring and warm and I sat reading out in the garden, comfortable in a cane chair with a stack of books on the table in front of me, all of them fictional accounts of unwanted pregnancies and illegitimate births. Sometimes I raised my eyes to ‘look upon verdure’, as Jane Austen has it. Only one such birth in her works, only one ‘natural child’, and that one Harriet Smith, for whom Emma attempts the hopeless task of encouraging a clergyman, and therefore a gentleman, to marry her. Harriet may be the daughter of a gentleman, but somehow her illegitimacy negates that and makes her fit to marry a farmer but no one higher up the social scale.
One book I didn’t look at was The Child’s Child, and I wasn’t conscience-stricken, not then, though I did mention it to Andrew, who came out into the garden before going to work. He hadn’t exactly forgotten about the book but seemed to drag it up out of the depths of memory before light dawned.
‘It’s been lying in a cupboard for half a century,’ he said. ‘No harm done if it hangs about for a bit longer.’
Something happened that afternoon which was to have great importance in my life, as much as it has had in Andrew’s. I met James Derain.
The first thing anyone would notice about James was how handsome he was. Not like an actor, because actors aren’t necessarily good-looking the way they once were. Or film stars once were. Andrew had amassed a huge collection of DVDs of thirties and forties films, and the male stars, Clark Gable and Cary Grant and James Stewart and Gregory Peck, were all stunningly handsome and, when amalgamated, looked like James. Or he looked like them. Maybe more like Cary Grant than the others. I’ve heard that Cary Grant wasn’t very bright. If that’s so, the resemblance didn’t extend to his brains, for James was very bright indeed. He was – well, is – tall, slim, dark and seems to have a permanent, perfectly natural tan. His eyes are dark blue; his teeth are like Americans’ teeth and have apparently been looked after by a dentist from Boston. He’s a flawless man with perfect, long-fingered hands, and his feet, which I saw bare in the garden on a hot day, are strong and sinewy but as unblemished as a child’s.
I’ve described him as if I found him attractive and I did, but only as one finds a man in a painting or a photograph desirable. Even if I had leanings that way, I’d have tried to suppress them because he was Andrew’s and because I know how pointless it is for a woman to have sexual feelings for a gay man. I rather disliked him and I worked on suppressing that too.
I encountered them in the hall. They had just come into the house and Andrew introduced us. James said a cool ‘Hi’ and walked off ahead of Andrew towards the right, having already been told, I suppose, that the right-hand side of the house was Andrew’s and the left-hand side mine.
So I worked on it, telling myself that he might be shy or just awkward with women. He stayed the night but not, as far as I could tell, the following night. I found myself listening for his departure next morning, and when I heard Andrew seeing him off and from the study window saw him walking down the street, I felt relief. This I crushed down, telling myself I shouldn’t judge someone on an isolated meeting, and when he came back after a week or so, I concentrated on feeling how good this was for Andrew, who looked happy the minute James appeared.
He began to be at Dinmont House much more often than he had been at first. That’s normal in a love affair, of course. If it isn’t going to fizzle out it’s going to grow stronger. I realized I was thinking about it far too much, speculating about it, even watching them together for what signs I could spot that they were thinking of themselves as a couple rather than an ‘item’ – stupid word but expressive of the start of something that might never become a relationship. Was this going to be that? The worst possible outcome, as far as I was concerned, was that they intended to live together. In other words, that James would come and live here. I could have asked Andrew, but I told myself that I didn’t want to put ideas into his head. Stupid of me, because who could be made to live with a lover because his sister suggested it?
In the interests of observing signs I invited them in for coffee one Saturday morning. James had been staying here since Thursday evening. We went into my favourite room, Verity’s study. Like the drawing room (Verity’s name for it) and the unused dining room and several bedrooms, it is full of books. Books on the shelves, books in the cabinets, stuffed in treble in places, one row pushed to the back and another two in front of it. James picked up Adam Bede, which was lying face-downwards on the table, glanced at it, turned a few pages and said he wouldn’t have the patience to read anything like this.
‘The way he goes on and on, paragraph after paragraph and page after page. Description and dialect – bores you to tears.’
I said, ‘He was a woman.’ I was shocked, because I thought everyone knew that, and James is a published author himself. But shocked at myself too, for speaking so scornfully. I was still trying hard to like him.
‘Why call himself George, then?’
‘Because she was more likely to get published than if she used her own name.’
‘Wasn’t that dishonest?’
In spite of the way I spoke, I didn’t want to quarrel with him, so all I said was that that was an original way of looking at it and had they had breakfast? Would they like something to eat?
‘No, thanks, Sis,’ Andrew said. He had taken up this unusual and old-fashioned usage when we were children. ‘We’ve both got hangovers. Coffee is fine.’
James stared. ‘Sis? That’s amazing. I’ve never heard anyone say that before.’
I managed a broad smile, but my eyes, I fear, remained cold. Still, I was determined to like him come what may and, once they had gone, returned to the novel James Derain, the novelist, thought was written by a man. Verity, quoting from somewhere in the Bible, used to tell me not to sit in the seat of the scornful, so I resolved not to be scornful or scathing even in my thoughts. So back to Adam Bede (telling myself that James’s mistake was one even an intellectual might make), and it occurred to me as I read that nowhere does George Eliot actually say that seventeen-year-old Hetty Sorrel is going to have a baby. Hetty has been seduced by Arthur Donnithorne, and this we also must assume. All we have been shown happening between them is a kiss. Hints are dropped, a great sorrow weighing on poor Hetty is talked of, but that she might be pregnant is never mentioned. No doubt James would call this dishonest, but those of us who know anything about Victorian prudery are aware that the author dared not refer directly to the unmarried Hetty’s pregnancy if she wanted her novel to be published. We know of the baby’s existence only when Adam is told it is dead and Hetty is on trial for murder.
We are supposed to be in 1799, and although George Eliot was writing in the 1850s, moral attitudes hadn’t changed much, if at all. Before I started on Adam Bede I had been reading a paper about a school in Cheshire started specially for young mothers aged fifteen or younger where they could take their babies with them while they worked for their GCSEs. It was a world away from Hetty Sorrel. The concept of disgrace and shame has utterly gone. In George Eliot’s day, unmarried pregnancy was all about disgrace and shame, as it still was halfway through the twentieth century. About punishment and endless retribution also. I started checking on detail in Adam Bede once more, and I was wondering if Hetty even knew she was pregnant, if living on a farm hadn’t taught her that what happened between her and Arthur might have this outcome. But, no, if girls weren’t told how they might get pregnant, would they make any connection between themselves and a cow coupling with a bull in a field?
At least all this had distracted me from Andrew and James. I picked up Adam Bede. Only George Eliot could make me – or anyone else, I should think – actually approve of a man such as Adam Bede marrying a Methodist woman preacher. We don’t dislike and despise him for it; we certainly don’t cast up our eyes because he’s married this woman who is also the choice of his difficult, old mother. There is even some guilty relief that now he can’t marry poor little Hetty because she has been transported for her crime. I wondered what Trollope would have made of it all. He has at least one illegitimate child in his fiction, but she is a rich, well-connected woman whose life led to a happy ending. I have moved on now to Fanny Robin in Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, another poor girl whose impending ‘confinement’ drives her to some sort of sanctuary in the workhouse; she nearly gets married but goes to the wrong church by mistake. But it is she that Sergeant Troy loves, not Bathsheba Everdene, whom he marries. And a fat lot of good that love does Fanny when she dies, alone and wretched, in childbirth.
I made a calculation of when the condemnation of ‘unmarried mothers’ ended. Easy to know when it began: the distant past, since for ever, since marriage came into being – marriage that men did their best to avoid and women dreamt of and struggled for. But when did society stop ostracizing these girls, even praising them and encouraging them to go back to school with their babies and plan for their futures? The conservative Christian culture of the fifties kept many women from premarital sex, but this changed with the coming of contraception that worked: with the pill. I fix on the mid- to late sixties, much the same time as homosexual activity ceased to be a crime.
My saying this, quite innocently, because we had been talking about the possibility of civil-partnership legislation being extended to same-gender couples, led to a row between James and me, that quarrel I was determined to avoid. I hadn’t foreseen this – why should I? Besides, I was trying to like him, to step down from the seat of the scornful. I had a little fantasy about that, seeing it as a cumbersome armchair that I put up for sale on eBay, nasty old antique that it was. So, having got that out of the way and hoping to establish a friendship between him and me, I invited them to dinner. I was quite a good cook in that I dared to make things that are supposed to be culinary challenges, and tonight we had a cheese soufflé followed by a lamb dish with aubergines, vaguely Greek, which I knew Andrew enjoyed. James ate his without comment. They had brought the wine, a bottle of white and a bottle of red, and I resolved to drink it or drink one glass of it, supermarket plonk that it was. That the wine wasn’t very good didn’t surprise me because that was what they drank all the time. Not for want of cash. James was rich, independent of his book sales. I think he had a wealthy father.
I showed them The Child’s Child, which Andrew had, of course, seen before and James knew all about through the connection with his great-uncle, and because they were particularly apposite, I told them about its two themes. That one of those was close to the subject of my thesis was a useful coincidence and we had moved along to the cheese when James asked me, quite pleasantly, how my research was coming along. That led me to tell him about fixing a date for when unmarried motherhood ceased to be shameful and how that date was roughly coincidental with when homosexuality in private stopped being illegal.
James said, quite roughly, his tone changed, ‘There’s no comparison. Sending men to prison for being gay was outrageous, an affront to their human rights. Your girls just got looked down on by a bunch of old women.’
I said no one had ever heard of human rights in 1967, and as for ‘my’ girls, they suffered comparably. If gay men killed themselves from fear of discovery so did young women dreading disgrace.
‘No girl went to jail for having a baby,’ he said.
‘But they did,’ I told him. ‘Or the equivalent. They were sectioned and put in mental hospitals, called lunatic asylums then, for nothing more than having a child without being married. Some remained in them for years.’
‘I’ve never heard that. That can’t be true. It may happen in these novels you read, but not in real life. Tell her about Wilde in chains on Clapham Junction station, And.’
So that was what he called my brother. ‘He’s told me,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I knew. Believe me, I’m not saying gay men didn’t suffer terribly, I know they did. I’m only saying that women did too.’
‘No, you’re not.’ James filled his glass so full of Pinot Noir that it overflowed. ‘You’re doing what women always do, claiming an unfair share of the world’s ills. Victims, as usual.’
‘James,’ said Andrew quietly.
‘No, it’s not “James”. You needn’t defend her, she can look after herself. Those girls of hers had only to put on a wedding ring and they’d be all right. Men were ostracized, attacked, killed. My great-uncle – the one the book’s based on – was blackmailed, outlawed. He lived in daily fear of discovery.’ He was looking at me now, ceasing to talk as if I were not there. ‘That thesis of yours, in making some sort of tie-up between the Act of 1967 and women taking the pill, is an insult to all the men who suffered. Plenty of them are still alive, they’ll only be in their sixties. It’s an outrage to them. Luckily, it’ll never be published, or not where any of them are likely to read it.’
Andrew had got up, fetched a cloth and mopped up James’s spilt wine. He is more sensitive than I am, maybe I should say more tender, and his face had gone red. The hand that held the cloth was trembling. He was in love with this man, he must be, and I was appalled.
‘Perhaps we should change the subject,’ I said for my brother’s sake.
The seat of the scornful hadn’t been sold but had become a throne for James. ‘Obviously, you would like that. You’ve got yourself into a corner and this is your only way of getting out of it. Change the subject. What else can you do?’
I said that I could leave the room and would. Andrew said, ‘No, Sis, no. I don’t know how we got into this. It’s ridiculous. Please stay.’
In a mocking, rather high-pitched tone, James said, ‘Please, Sis, stay. Please don’t go.’
He sounded like a kid of five, not a grown man. His face had gone purple and I realized it was with rage. This meant an awful lot to him. But I shrugged and went. Down the passage and into the kitchen. I put plates in the dishwasher and washed up Verity’s silver by hand, listening for sounds from the dining room. What I was really listening for was footsteps crossing the hall and making for Andrew’s living room or his staircase. It must have been years since I’d had a falling-out with my brother. I thought the last time was when we were children. After a while I heard those footsteps and laughter. It was James’s laughter, only James’s. A door slammed and I decided this was the last I would see or hear of them for the night.
I cleared the dining table and started the dishwasher. That was when I remembered the last time Andrew and I had had a row. A table in another house, the house we grew up in, and Fay had gone to answer the phone, leaving the remains of all sorts of delicacies behind. Andrew started picking at them, hunks of cheese and half-eaten pots of crème brûlée, slices of pineapple, and I was hissing at him to leave them, not to touch – other guests were in another room – and I grabbed his hand, the hand that clutched a spoonful of some exotica, damson cheese I think it was. Twelve-year-old Andrew started to cry and Fay came back, exasperated, shaking her head.
That was eighteen years ago and he didn’t cry any more, though he was still a lot more vulnerable than I was. But tonight I was the one who was tender and sensitive, partly because I felt that quarrels, if they must happen, should be about personal matters, not near-political things. It made me think that this one might have been deliberately engineered. It was a fine evening, a nearly full moon shining. A walk round the garden might have done me good, made me feel calm and taken away my resentment. Like all the gardens around, ours was large and dense with trees and shrubs, a lawn like a green island in the midst of them. And because the walls between were overgrown with ivy and creeper and clematis, they were not like separate gardens but formed one great estate, the grounds perhaps of a big country house.
I wouldn’t need a coat, it was still too warm for that. I walked down the passage to the single glass door that led to the garden – Andrew’s part had French windows – and as I put the key in the lock I saw him and James walk from under the trees on to the lawn. The moon was quite bright enough to show them to me. James had his arm round Andrew’s waist, and as I watched he placed his hand round Andrew’s head, drew it to him and kissed him deeply. Abruptly I turned away. I went to the furthest point in the house from the garden, the study, where all those books were. Somehow I knew, and I didn’t like it but was powerless to do anything about it, that Andrew would bring James here to live with him.
By my age I ought to have known the truism that things always look different in the morning. As the night comes on and the deeper it gets, the more mad we are, the more prone to dreadful fears and fantasies. In the morning, not when we first wake up but gradually, things begin to look different from how they looked at eleven, at midnight. I don’t suppose this rule applies in the case of a terrible shock or a tragedy striking, but nothing like that had ever happened to me. I didn’t have presentiments either, I didn’t have a sense that something bad would happen later in the day or something good. But I could replay the events or sights or words uttered that had so upset me and look at them in a new way. I had, after all, no reason apart from a kiss to believe that Andrew would ask James to live here with him, and I couldn’t even know for certain that he was in love with James.
Next morning I was due to see my supervisor to talk to her about the progress of the thesis, see what she would say about including real cases in the nineteenth century of women giving birth outside marriage or if she thought I should concentrate solely on contemporary fiction.
Andrew came in, looking not so much awkward as sad. ‘I’m sorry about last night, Sis,’ he said. ‘I’d have done anything to avoid it.’
I said that I knew he would, and his face was just as it had been eighteen years ago when I grabbed his arm and the lump of damson cheese flopped on to a white lace table mat. He was not crying, of course, not quite.
‘You see, James feels very intensely about what gay people went through. He feels it personally. He had this uncle, or great-uncle maybe, whose friend hanged himself because he was gay, and he’s got a friend, a very old man now, who was sent to a mental home for aversion therapy. They showed him pictures of gay porn and gave him electric shocks if he reacted – well, if he got excited by them.’
This only reminded me of those poor girls sent to penitentiaries and put to harsh domestic work for nothing more than being pregnant outside marriage. But there was no point in saying it aloud. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, though it was not. ‘It’s over.’ And then I asked, because I really had to know, ‘Is James going to come here and live with you?’
‘Would you mind if he did?’
‘Your half of the house is yours and my half is mine. You must please yourself.’
‘You’d hate it, though, wouldn’t you?’
He did that a lot, told people how they felt when he didn’t really know. He did it to me, to our mother, Fay, and her partner, Malcolm, and no doubt he did it to James. I told him I wouldn’t hate it (not true) but that he should think carefully before he asked James, and then I felt I’d gone too far. I was not his mother or the wife he would never have.
‘I’ve done that, I’ve thought carefully,’ he said, but he didn’t tell me the outcome of these thoughts of his. He had to leave for work if he was to get in by ten. He’d scarcely gone when I heard James’s footfalls pounding on the staircase and the front door slamming as he went out. He slammed it so hard that the whole house seemed to shake.
Carla, my supervisor, cautioned me against letting too much reality creep in. If I could find a case that closely paralleled, say, the experience of Fanny Robin when she goes to All Souls’ Church instead of All Saints’, where Sergeant Troy is waiting to marry her, I could use that or briefly refer to it. There was probably a case Hardy had heard of and I might try finding it. Otherwise, I should go easy on the social work and the case histories.
My head, rather against my will, was full of James Derain. Although we both knew it was a possibility, we had never, Andrew and I, talked about lovers moving in with us. The house was left to us, and we were a brother and a sister who got on well together. We were so excited about it, so pleased, that we shifted our stuff in without thinking much, without considering the possible pros and cons. We had both had boyfriends, but Andrew had never shared his flat with anyone. I had shared a single room once, but only for a few months; it had not been a serious relationship. If James was going to live in the other half of Dinmont House I knew I must make a superhuman effort to get on with him. If I examined my behaviour I could honestly say that I had done very little, if anything, to antagonize him, and it looked to me as if he was one of those gay men who dislike women, all women. I had never met one before, but I had heard of them. I knew they existed. They were the antithesis of those whose closest and best friend is a woman and of whom they are often fonder than they are of their current lover.
I delayed going home. The sun was shining, it was lovely in Regent’s Park and I thought of walking all the way home by way of Primrose Hill. When I was a child I used to think of Primrose Hill as being the seaside. I was standing in the sea or just on the sand and looking across the hill itself, the green rise such as English coastal resorts have, with beyond it that long terrace of tall houses like Brighton or Eastbourne. But I wasn’t standing in the sea, I was sitting on a seat on the Outer Circle. It would take me a long time to walk home and it would be uphill all the way, and I knew I was putting it off in case James Derain was there. I had heard him go out, but that was three hours ago and he might have come back, Andrew might have given him a key. I told myself that I couldn’t live like this, that yesterday I was happy, or at least content, and now I was letting myself be driven out of my own home by a friend of my brother’s I hardly knew.
Instead of walking across Primrose Hill, I went to the 24 bus stop and was turning into our street when I saw James in the distance. My instinct was to hide from him, cross the street, even just bend down to take a stone out of my sandal, but of course I did none of this. I advanced on him and he advanced on me, and he was charming, all smiles and how was I and wasn’t the sun wonderful. Then he said he was sorry for last night, he always got aggressive when he drank too much, it was a problem he had to ‘address’. He and Andrew had been drinking before they came and that was something he would have to stop. Could I forgive him?
Of course. What else could I say? I had a shred of hope that he was making for Hampstead tube station, not Dinmont House, but no, he was going home, he said, and by that he plainly meant my home and Andrew’s. When I went back into the house after posting a letter, I waited in the hall, listening. James was a writer so he didn’t go out to work, he worked at home. Writing by hand? On a typewriter, if anyone still does? Or on a computer, as I would expect? And was he at home in any permanent sense? It was most likely that he was only staying here with Andrew for a few days or a week, and at the end of it he would go back to wherever he lived.
It was no good loitering there like a lost soul. I went into the study, looked through all the files of notes I had accumulated and finally came upon an account I had got from somewhere of a young woman executed for infanticide in 1801. This story of terror and despair, of a homeless, destitute girl with nowhere to turn, her crying, distraught child a heavy drag on her, I had found upsetting the first time I read it and found it doubly so now. Perhaps because I was in an anxious, uncertain state. It might be that the newspaper in which this account appeared was seen by George Eliot and gave her the germ of an idea for Adam Bede. But she wasn’t born until 1819, so she could not have seen it until some forty years at least after it had appeared. Perhaps I should have abandoned this attempt at an analogy and seen instead what I could find of instances of brides going to the wrong church, as Fanny Robin does. And then, out of nowhere, I was reconstructing in my mind’s eye James Derain as he looked when we encountered each other in the street half an hour ago.
He was carrying a ‘man bag’, a black-canvas-and-tan-leather thing on a long strap, exactly the size of an average laptop. He was carrying a computer. It was plain what had happened. When I heard his footsteps on the stairs this morning he was going home to wherever his home was to fetch his laptop. So that he could work on his new book here in this house. Andrew would very likely give him a little bedroom on the top floor to write in. He would work up there in the peace and quiet of an upper room in Dinmont House, with its view of gardens, of trees, of a sea of leaves, and beyond them in the thin mist that hangs over London, the river and the tall blurred towers …
I stopped myself there and suggested I pull myself together out of wild imaginings. James had probably come only for the weekend and was one of those obsessive writers, compelled irresistibly to a keyboard as they once were to a pen and ink.
Apart from Mary Barton, I had never been very happy with the works of Elizabeth Gaskell. Carla told me that everyone used to call her ‘Mrs Gaskell’ until feminism intervened and dropped the honorific. Her novels all have axes to grind. They aim to set the world right, as many Victorian novels do, but many try to disguise this, which hers do not. I sat on the sofa in the study to begin Ruth, very much aware that I would have been outside in the garden in the swing seat but for the thought of James Derain watching me from the other study. This was pure paranoia, for I had no reason to believe that he would watch me or cared at all what I did. If I was not out there it was because I knew I couldn’t settle to my book just under that upper window, in the eyeline of anyone sitting at the desk.
Ruth isn’t a slow read, it’s almost a compulsive read, and I raced through the early chapters. What struck me was that while those other novels are about other things as well, have subplots and interwoven stories, Ruth is concerned entirely with seduction and illegitimacy. Hardy’s Tess has the courtship of Angel Clare and marriage to him; Wilkie Collins’s No Name and The Woman in White are much more involved with the legal aspects; Hetty Sorrel’s history is important but still subservient to Dinah’s work and religion and to the Bede family’s way of life. So here I was in Verity’s study learning what it was really like to know one is pregnant by a faithless lover, to put on a wedding ring and call oneself ‘Mrs’, yet ultimately deceive no one. Every character believes Ruth has committed a terrible sin, even the sympathetic ones, the kindly ones who take her in and share what little they have with her, even they speak in hushed voices of her sin and her ‘crime’. The Bensons’ old servant Sally forcibly cuts off Ruth’s hair so that she may ‘sham decently in a widow’s cap tomorrow’, and Ruth submits without protest, for she too believes she has sinned and her punishment is justified.
This was where I laid down the book for the time being, rather surprised that I who have read Tess and Oliver Twist without feeling more than pity and wonder could be so affected by a novel written 150 years ago. There was no doubt in my mind, so persuasively honest is Gaskell’s writing, that the social scene was really like this, this was the fate of the ‘fallen woman’. She is thought to have based the character on a real woman called only Pasley, whose life of rejection and banishment to a penitentiary seems to have been worse than anything Gaskell allowed to happen to the fictional Ruth.
That evening I was going out with friends, just a meeting in a pub. I certainly wouldn’t change out of jeans and T-shirt and I wouldn’t keep my eye on my watch, checking that I was not late, as I had sometimes done in the past. I would even put on trainers instead of my newish, rather nice sandals, because I meant to walk across the Heath to Highgate. These trainers were in a cupboard in a spare room on the top floor. They were up there because I still hadn’t emptied the wardrobe and cupboard in my bedroom of Verity’s clothes. I told myself and told Fay, who offered to do the emptying for me, that as a busy solicitor she shouldn’t take on that and I didn’t mind them being there. But the truth was that I liked them in the house, they reminded me of Verity, and sometimes I opened the wardrobe and put my cheek against silk or delicate wool and smelt the Coty L’Aimant she always wore.
Upstairs, I found my trainers and was putting them on when I heard a sound that made me jump. It was coming from the other side of the wall in Andrew’s part of the house and it was the five-note signature of Windows starting up or logging off. A little phrase, but not much like Proust’s. So James Derain was working here and in the study. Well, what had I expected? I knew it already and it was stupid of me to mind. I directed my thoughts and my eyes back to single parents, and real ones this time, not the fictional kind.
Mary Wollstonecraft had an illegitimate child by a man called Imlay and would have had another had not the philosopher William Godwin married her five months before the birth of the girl who became Mary Shelley. That was in 1797. Rebecca West had a child by H. G. Wells, Dorothy L. Sayers had a child by a man called Bill White. Both these births were in the teens of the twentieth century and the writers had the children as a gesture of defiance. But they put no illegitimate children into their fiction, though Sayers has a ‘fallen’ woman in Strong Poison. The date of this novel’s publication was 1930, a few years after Verity’s own birth. Harriet Vane is tried for murder, and at her trial her history comes out: she has cohabited with a man without marriage for a year, and if she is not ostracized by the people she knows, this is because they are an arty, bohemian crowd. Others deeply disapprove of her, but things have moved on a bit. No one talks about her crime or her sin. She is not sent to Coventry or cast into outer darkness, and eventually, many books later, she is considered sufficiently redeemed so as to be able to marry Lord Peter Wimsey. Of course she doesn’t have a baby – not, that is, until she comes to have several in wedlock.
Sayers’s child was born in 1924. She seems to have made no attempt to look after John Anthony herself. No doubt she wasn’t prepared to call herself ‘Mrs’ or wear a wedding ring. The baby was fostered by Sayers’s cousin Ivy and called Sayers ‘Cousin Dorothy’. Even when the novelist married Atherton Fleming in 1926, John Anthony continued to live with Ivy. Sayers’s parents deeply disapproved of her marrying in a registrar’s office and never knew they had a grandson. She wrote once more about marital irregularities and touched on illegitimacy in The Nine Tailors, in which a couple marry in the belief that the woman is free while in fact her husband is still alive. Their children are illegitimate and must remain so even though the Thodays marry as soon as they legally can. This is more of a typically Victorian situation, the kind of thing Wilkie Collins wrote about, than a subject for a novel published in 1934. It shows, though, that the desperate need for respectability was still going strong long years after Verity was born.
While I was learning all this, someone tapped at the study door. I knew who it was because Andrew and I had never knocked on doors when the other of us was inside. We just walked in. This had to be James. He was carrying a book, an oldish paperback of The Picture of Dorian Gray