Suffolk, July 1918
Edith sat up, hiccupped, then reached for the glass of ginger cordial on the bedside table. She’d retired for an afternoon nap, but found it impossible to sleep. Her head ached and although the door was shut, she could still hear ten-month-old Irene’s piercing wails and the nurse’s soothing country voice all the way down in the kitchen. She replaced the glass, took up a damp flannel and sank back on the pillows with a sigh. As she dabbed her throbbing temples Edith reflected on the unfairness of life.
A month’s approval. It wasn’t enough time to gauge whether a baby was right for you. Not much longer than for a dress bought from a mail-order catalogue.
She and Philip had been married nearly five years before they’d decided to adopt. They had hoped and prayed for a baby of their own, but time had crept by and nothing had happened. Even the most insensitive of their acquaintances had stopped asking when they were going to ‘do their duty’ and start a family. Embarrassed, probably. Or, more likely, absorbed in their own sufferings during this dreadful war.
Soon after their second anniversary, Edith consulted Dr Stevens. A married man with children of his own, she knew he meant to be kind, but it had been a humiliating experience. ‘Let’s have a look at the works, shall we?’ he’d said, handing her up onto the bed in his surgery. She flinched from his cold hands while he shone a light into her most intimate parts and poked about with a speculum as though she were indeed something mechanical. ‘Everything’s in good order, Mrs Burns,’ he said with a twinkle. After that, if she saw his avuncular figure in the street she would nod and hurry on, unable to meet his eye.
It had taken months to persuade Philip to seek medical advice, but when eventually he did, the tests offered the same conclusion. There was no obvious medical reason why Edith might not conceive. All this should have been comforting, but instead she had become consumed by bitter frustration. It must be her fault somehow. Maybe she wasn’t relaxed enough, but then she found Philip reserved in that area of their lives as in much else, and their lovemaking was usually a hurried affair, not displeasurable, but a relief to them both when it was over. He would roll off her with a ‘That’s it then, I s’pose,’ and sink into a deep sleep, leaving her to lie on her back, quivering in the darkness, hoping that this time a baby would start.
When they’d first announced their engagement, Edith’s friends and family had viewed Philip as quite a catch. ‘Maybe not as handsome as my Bill,’ her forthright sister Muriel had said, ‘but he’s a good sort and you won’t want for anything.’
Edith had been thankful to escape for ever her widowed father and the farm cottage, the tears and roughness of her upbringing. She had worked hard at school, determined to better herself, and she had managed it. At seventeen, she won a college bursary to study shorthand and typing. With certificates and a glowing reference, she’d secured a job with the land agent’s office in the coastal town of Farthingsea, and for four years she’d been ever so happy, earning her own money, though less pleased to be living with Muriel. Her middle sister had married a signalman on the railway, and given birth to three boys in quick succession, which meant that Edith had to share a bedroom with Bill’s niece, the put-upon unofficial nursemaid, and the two older boys. The girl snored because of adenoids.
During the course of her day Edith sometimes nipped up the High Street with paperwork for Ratchett & Ratchett, Solicitors. Although it was one of the typists she dealt with there, she sometimes saw the junior solicitor, Philip Burns, a quiet, well-spoken man who always wore a formal tailcoat. His plain face was pleasant and he always greeted her politely. It wasn’t hard to guess that he was unmarried.
The cracked mirror over the bedroom washstand reminded Edith that she was no beauty either, with her small, beady eyes and thin lips. But she made sure that her suits were clean and fitted well so they showed off her trim figure, which she felt was her best feature. Neatness was her watchword. She spent ages in the mornings coaxing her pale flyaway hair into a smooth coil on her narrow head, and used powder to take the shine off her long nose. There were other ways she made the best of herself, too. She switched allegiance from the Nonconformist chapel to the Anglican parish church, and it was there that she and Philip had their first proper conversation one evening after a concert in which he had sung a short solo. She plucked up the courage to approach him and praised his fine tenor voice. Blushing, he asked where he’d seen her before and she pinked up in turn because he’d forgotten.
Philip lived with his mother, a stout widow who wore black bombazine and a disapproving expression. A few weeks after the concert she died in hospital after a fall. Edith took care to write Philip a letter of condolence in which she alluded to the loss of her own mother ten years before. It touched a chord with him, he wrote back. One Sunday after evensong he confided that he had recruited a housekeeper whom he was finding not much of a cook. He told Edith he could not dispense with the woman’s services, as she was recently widowed and easily distressed. Instead he’d decided to eat a good luncheon out when he could, then she’d only have to prepare a cold supper. Shyly, he asked Edith if she would care to join him one day.
As they ate together for the first time, at The Nelson, which did a very good set meal, she studied him carefully. He wasn’t much to look at. His round face was jowly and he was slow and careful in his movements, but she liked his gentle chuckle when she recounted stories of her employer, who had a habit of sneaking out to the pub to place ill-judged bets on the horses.
It wasn’t a passionate courtship, but Edith was content. She liked his three-storey brick villa in Jubilee Road, with its view of the sea between rooftops, and thought she would choose a live-in maid – she would have no qualms in sacking the housekeeper. As for Philip, he said he had often thought that he should marry. It would make his clients feel settled about him. And so it was arranged between them.
When war broke upon the world that sun-baked August day in 1914, Philip was too old to volunteer. When conscription was brought in and the upper age limit raised, he was excused because of weak lungs, extreme short sight and flat feet. At first Edith was secretly ashamed, but no one else appeared troubled by it and no coward’s white feather was handed to him in the street. He was the sort who looked older than his years, at thirty-seven undoubtedly middle-aged, his thick-lensed spectacles a result of years reading small print, his round-shouldered stoop from hunching over dusty tomes.
They were lucky, Edith realized, as she scanned the casualty lists in The Times or passed a bath chair in the street bearing a once sturdy young man whose legs had been replaced by a blanket. There was still plenty of work for Philip. People always needed lawyers and so their standard of living continued as before. She was barren, yes, barren (she would whisper the awful word to her reflection in the bathroom mirror) but she kept her sadness to herself. Others’ grief for lost husbands, sons and brothers was more important than her disappointment.
‘At least you’ve never had a child to lose,’ the next-door neighbour told her curtly, after a telegram arrived regretting the death of her youngest. Edith had called to express sympathy, but her words had somehow come out wrongly and the bereaved mother had snapped at her. She’d made her escape and swallowed a nip of cooking sherry to calm her nerves.
Five years and no child. Edith first mentioned adoption to Philip after she read about Belgian refugee orphans in The Times. The couple had just decided they weren’t sure about a foreign baby when she had spotted Miss Chad’s appeal in the classifieds.
*
Downstairs, little Irene continued to wail. Whether it was teething or tummy ache, Edith had no notion. What was the matter with the child? She had been a difficult baby from the start, always wanting to be held, when Mr Truby King was quite clear in his popular childcare manual that this was entirely wrong for Baby’s development. Only Philip appeared able to quieten her, but he was at work all day so Edith had had to cope alone.
They’d prepared a story when they’d brought her home to Farthingsea, that Irene was the child of one of Philip’s West Country cousins, killed along with his wife in a motor accident, a dreadful tragedy, and of course Philip had offered to step in and take the child. The neighbours accepted this fiction. Whether they questioned it was another matter. The important thing was that a respectable front had been put up.
More difficult to overcome was Edith’s failure to accept that this strange little girl was actually hers now. Irene’s face had filled out and she no longer put Edith in mind of a stray kitten, but her thick dark hair and deepset blue eyes were alien to Edith, like a changeling’s. Edith’s memory would often wind back to a vision of the placid, golden-haired tot at Miss Chad’s nursery. That child would have looked much more a part of the family.
By winning Philip’s heart, Irene had stolen all Edith’s hopes. To be fair, Edith had wrestled against her resentment of the baby. She knew it wasn’t right to blame Irene, but it was difficult to love a child who was inconsolable. In addition, she was jealous of her husband’s close bond with Irene. Edith couldn’t help how she felt, could she?
Then a miraculous thing had happened. Edith sighed and stroked her still-flat belly. She was happy, oh yes, delighted, but no one had warned her how ill the condition would make her feel. She’d not been able to manage Irene properly because of the nausea, so Philip had hired a nursemaid. For Edith was finally expecting a baby of her own.
Why this had come about after years of fruitless wanting was not easily explained. Dr Stevens said smugly that he’d always told her that it was only a matter of time. Muriel was sure that it was down to having a baby in the house, it ‘made things flow’. Philip thought she’d been too busy with Irene to worry about herself, so that something inside had settled. Time, flowing, settling, whichever it was Edith didn’t know. The important thing was that she was having a child who would be hers indisputably, blood of her blood, bone of her bone. It was a part of her now, growing inside, though she hadn’t felt it move yet. Everything would be perfect.
Or would be, if it weren’t for little Irene.