‘Enjoy the christening?’ asked Mr Baldock.
‘No,’ said Laura.
‘Cold in that church, I expect,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘Nice font though,’ he added. ‘Norman – black Tournai marble.’
Laura was unmoved by the information.
She was busy formulating a question:
‘May I ask you something, Mr Baldock?’
‘Of course.’
‘Is it wrong to pray for anyone to die?’
Mr Baldock gave her a swift sideways look.
‘In my view,’ he said, ‘it would be unpardonable interference.’
‘Interference?’
‘Well, the Almighty is running the show, isn’t He? What do you want to stick your fingers into the machinery for? What business is it of yours?’
‘I don’t see that it would matter to God very much. When a baby has been christened and everything, it goes to Heaven, doesn’t it?’
‘Don’t see where else it could go,’ admitted Mr Baldock.
‘And God is fond of children. The Bible says so. So He’d be pleased to see it.’
Mr Baldock took a short turn up and down the room. He was seriously upset, and didn’t want to show it.
‘Look here, Laura,’ he said at last. ‘You’ve got – you’ve simply got to mind your own business.’
‘But perhaps it is my business.’
‘No, it isn’t. Nothing’s your business but yourself. Pray what you like about yourself. Ask for blue ears, or a diamond tiara, or to grow up and win a beauty competition. The worst that can happen to you is that the answer to your prayer might be “Yes”.’
Laura looked at him uncomprehendingly.
‘I mean it,’ said Mr Baldock.
Laura thanked him politely, and said she must be going home now.
When she had gone, Mr Baldock rubbed his chin, scratched his head, picked his nose, and absentmindedly wrote a review of a mortal enemy’s book simply dripping with milk and honey.
Laura walked back home, thinking deeply.
As she passed the small Roman Catholic church, she hesitated. A daily woman who came in to help in the kitchen was a Catholic, and stray scraps of her conversation came back to Laura, who had listened to them with the fascination accorded to something rare and strange, and also forbidden. For Nannie, a staunch chapel-goer, held very strong views about what she referred to as the Scarlet Woman. Who or what the Scarlet Woman was, Laura had no idea, except that she had some undefined connection with Babylon.
But what came to her mind now was Molly’s chat of praying for her Intention – a candle had entered into it in some way. Laura hesitated a little longer, drew a deep breath, looked up and down the road, and slipped into the porch.
The church was small and rather dark, and did not smell at all like the parish church where Laura went every Sunday. There was no sign of the Scarlet Woman, but there was a plaster figure of a lady in a blue cloak, with a tray in front of her, and wire loops in which candles were burning. Nearby was a supply of fresh candles, and a box with a slot for money.
Laura hesitated for some time. Her theological ideas were confused and limited. God she knew, God who was committed to loving her by the fact that He was God. There was also the Devil, with horns and a tail, and a specialist in temptation. But the Scarlet Woman appeared to occupy an in-between status. The Lady in the Blue Cloak looked beneficent, and as though she might deal with Intentions in a favourable manner.
Laura drew a deep sigh and fumbled in her pocket where reposed, as yet untouched, her weekly sixpence of pocket money.
She pushed it into the slit and heard it drop with a slight pang. Gone irrevocably! Then she took a candle, lit it, and put it into the wire holder. She spoke in a low polite voice.
‘This is my Intention. Please let baby go to Heaven.’ She added:
‘As soon as you possibly can, please.’
She stood there for a moment. The candles burned, the Lady in the Blue Cloak continued to look beneficent. Laura had for a moment or two a feeling of emptiness. Then, frowning a little, she left the church and walked home.
On the terrace was the baby’s pram. Laura came up to it and stood beside it, looking down on the sleeping infant.
As she looked, the fair downy head stirred, the eyelids opened, the blue eyes looked up at Laura with a wide unfocused stare.
‘You’re going to Heaven soon,’ Laura told her sister. ‘It’s lovely in Heaven,’ she added coaxingly. ‘All golden and precious stones.’
‘And harps,’ she added, after a minute. ‘And lots of angels with real feathery wings. It’s much nicer than here.’
She thought of something else.
‘You’ll see Charles,’ she said. ‘Think of that! You’ll see Charles.’
Angela Franklin came out of the drawing-room window.
‘Hallo, Laura,’ she said. ‘Are you talking to baby?’
She bent over the pram. ‘Hallo, my sweetie. Was it awake, then?’
Arthur Franklin, following his wife out on to the terrace, said:
‘Why do women have to talk such nonsense to babies? Eh, Laura? Don’t you think it’s odd?’
‘I don’t think it’s nonsense,’ said Laura.
‘Don’t you? What do you think it is, then?’ He smiled at her teasingly.
‘I think it’s love,’ said Laura.
He was a little taken aback.
Laura, he thought, was an odd kid. Difficult to know what went on behind that straight, unemotional gaze.
‘I must get a piece of netting, muslin or something,’ said Angela. ‘To put over the pram when it’s out here. I’m always so afraid of a cat jumping up and lying on her face and suffocating her. We’ve got too many cats about the place.’
‘Bah,’ said her husband. ‘That’s one of those old wives’ tales. I don’t believe a cat has ever suffocated a baby.’
‘Oh, they have, Arthur. You read about it quite often in the paper.’
‘That’s no guarantee of truth.’
‘Anyway, I shall get some netting, and I must tell Nannie to look out of the window from time to time and see that she’s all right. Oh dear, I wish our own nanny hadn’t had to go to her dying sister. This new young nanny – I don’t really feel happy about her.’
‘Why not? She seems a nice enough girl. Devoted to baby and good references and all that.’
‘Oh yes, I know. She seems all right. But there’s something … There’s that gap of a year and a half in her references.’
‘She went home to nurse her mother.’
‘That’s what they always say! And it’s the sort of thing you can’t check. It might have been for some reason she doesn’t want us to know about.’
‘Got into trouble, you mean?’
Angela threw him a warning glance, indicating Laura.
‘Do be careful, Arthur. No, I don’t mean that. I mean –’
‘What do you mean, darling?’
‘I don’t really know,’ said Angela slowly. ‘It’s just sometimes when I’m talking to her I feel that there’s something she’s anxious we shouldn’t find out.’
‘Wanted by the police?’
‘Arthur! That’s a very silly joke.’
Laura walked gently away. She was an intelligent child and she perceived quite plainly that they, her father and mother, would like to talk about Nannie unhampered by her presence. She herself was not interested in the new nanny; a pale, dark-haired, soft-spoken girl, who showed herself kindly to Laura, though plainly quite uninterested by her.
Laura was thinking of the Lady with the Blue Cloak.
‘Come on, Josephine,’ said Laura crossly.
Josephine, late Jehoshaphat, though not actively resisting, was displaying all the signs of passive resistance. Disturbed in a delicious sleep against the side of the greenhouse, she had been half dragged, half carried by Laura, out of the kitchen-garden and round the house to the terrace.
‘There!’ Laura plopped Josephine down. A few feet away, the baby’s pram stood on the gravel.
Laura walked slowly away across the lawn. As she reached the big lime tree, she turned her head.
Josephine, her tail lashing from time to time, in indignant memory, began to wash her stomach, sticking out what seemed a disproportionately long hind leg. That part of her toilet completed, she yawned and looked round her at her surroundings. Then she began halfheartedly to wash behind the ears, thought better of it, yawned again, and finally got up and walked slowly and meditatively away, and round the corner of the house.
Laura followed her, picked her up determinedly, and lugged her back again. Josephine gave Laura a look and sat there lashing her tail. As soon as Laura had got back to the tree, Josephine once more got up, yawned, stretched, and walked off. Laura brought her back again, remonstrating as she did so.
‘It’s sunny here, Josephine. It’s nice!’
Nothing could be clearer than that Josephine disagreed with this statement. She was now in a very bad temper indeed, lashing her tail, and flattening back her ears.
‘Hallo, young Laura.’
Laura started and turned. Mr Baldock stood behind her. She had not heard or noticed his slow progress across the lawn. Josephine, profiting by Laura’s momentary inattention, darted to a tree and ran up it, pausing on a branch to look down on them with an air of malicious satisfaction.
‘That’s where cats have the advantage over human beings,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘When they want to get away from people they can climb a tree. The nearest we can get to that is to shut ourselves in the lavatory.’
Laura looked slightly shocked. Lavatories came into the category of things which Nannie (the late Nannie) had said ‘little ladies don’t talk about’.
‘But one has to come out,’ said Mr Baldock, ‘if for no other reason than because other people want to come in. Now that cat of yours will probably stay up that tree for a couple of hours.’
Immediately Josephine demonstrated the general unpredictability of cats by coming down with a rush, crossing towards them, and proceeding to rub herself to and fro against Mr Baldock’s trousers, purring loudly.
‘Here,’ she seemed to say, ‘is exactly what I have been waiting for.’
‘Hallo, Baldy.’ Angela came out of the window. ‘Are you paying your respects to the latest arrival? Oh dear, these cats. Laura dear, do take Josephine away. Put her in the kitchen. I haven’t got that netting yet. Arthur laughs at me, but cats do jump up and sleep on babies’ chests and smother them. I don’t want the cats to get the habit of coming round to the terrace.’
As Laura went off carrying Josephine, Mr Baldock sent a considering gaze after her.
After lunch, Arthur Franklin drew his friend into the study.
‘There’s an article here –’ he began.
Mr Baldock interrupted him, without ceremony and forthrightly, as was his custom.
‘Just a minute. I’ve got something I want to say. Why don’t you send that child to school?’
‘Laura? That is the idea – after Christmas, I believe. When she’s eleven.’
‘Don’t wait for that. Do it now.’
‘It would be mid-term. And, anyway, Miss Weekes is quite –’
Mr Baldock said what he thought of Miss Weekes with relish.
‘Laura doesn’t want instruction from a desiccated blue-stocking, however bulging with brains,’ he said. ‘She wants distraction, other girls, a different set of troubles if you like. Otherwise, for all you know, you may have a tragedy.’
‘A tragedy? What sort of tragedy?’
‘A couple of nice little boys the other day took their baby sister out of the pram and threw her in the river. The baby made too much work for Mummy, they said. They had quite genuinely made themselves believe it, I imagine.’
Arthur Franklin stared at him.
‘Jealousy, you mean?’
‘Jealousy.’
‘My dear Baldy, Laura’s not a jealous child. Never has been.’
‘How do you know? Jealousy eats inward.’
‘She’s never shown any sign of it. She’s a very sweet, gentle child, but without any very strong feelings, I should say.’
‘You’d say!’ Mr Baldock snorted. ‘If you ask me, you and Angela don’t know the first thing about your own child.’
Arthur Franklin smiled good-temperedly. He was used to Baldy.
‘We’ll keep an eye on the baby,’ he said, ‘if that’s what’s worrying you. I’ll give Angela a hint to be careful. Tell her not to make too much fuss of the newcomer, and a bit more of Laura. That ought to meet the case.’ He added with a hint of curiosity: ‘I’ve always wondered just what it is you see in Laura. She –’
‘There’s promise there of a very rare and unusual spirit,’ said Mr Baldock. ‘At least so I think.’
‘Well – I’ll speak to Angela – but she’ll only laugh.’
But Angela, rather to her husband’s surprise, did not laugh.
‘There’s something in what he says, you know. Child psychologists all agree that jealousy over a new baby is natural and almost inevitable. Though frankly I haven’t seen any signs of it in Laura. She’s a placid child, and it isn’t as though she were wildly attached to me or anything like that. I must try and show her that I depend upon her.’
And so, when about a week later, she and her husband were going for a week-end visit to some old friends, Angela talked to Laura.
‘You’ll take good care of baby, won’t you, Laura, while we’re away? It’s nice to feel I’m leaving you here to keep an eye on everything. Nannie hasn’t been here very long, you see.’
Her mother’s words pleased Laura. They made her feel old and important. Her small pale face brightened.
Unfortunately, the good effect was destroyed almost immediately by a conversation between Nannie and Ethel in the nursery, which she happened to overhear.
‘Lovely baby, isn’t she?’ said Ethel, poking the infant with a crudely affectionate finger. ‘There’s a little ducksie-wucksie. Seems funny Miss Laura’s always been such a plain little thing. Don’t wonder her pa and ma never took to her, as they took to Master Charles and this one. Miss Laura’s a nice little thing, but you can’t say more than that.’
That evening Laura knelt by her bed and prayed.
The Lady with the Blue Cloak had taken no notice of her Intention. Laura was going to headquarters.
‘Please, God,’ she prayed, ‘let baby die and go to Heaven soon. Very soon.’
She got into bed and lay down. Her heart beat, and she felt guilty and wicked. She had done what Mr Baldock had told her not to do, and Mr Baldock was a very wise man. She had had no feeling of guilt about her candle to the Lady in the Blue Cloak – possibly because she had never really had much hope of any result. And she could see no harm in just bringing Josephine on to the terrace. She wouldn’t have put Josephine actually on to the pram. That, she knew, would have been wicked. But if Josephine, of her own accord …?
Tonight, however, she had crossed the Rubicon. God was all-powerful …
Shivering a little, Laura fell asleep.