THE CLIMATE of opinion and behaviour Maud had grown up in had led her to expect the life ahead of her to centre on wifely devotion, accomplished domesticity, and motherhood. Recently, because of her success at school, her parents had talked about the possibility of her going to university, the college at Exeter perhaps, but she had known that though this might lead to her becoming a teacher, such a job would last only until she married, and then those woman’s duties would overcome other aspirations. Now they had come upon her in a rush. She would not be a wife to John but would find herself with something like a wife’s function; the cottage would demand tidying and cleaning and linen-washing, and in only a few months motherhood would arrive.
She thought of this as they travelled in the bus from Exeter to Dartcombe. The countryside around Bristol was lovely enough but not so lush as this, not so richly green, so that you wondered how the bus could manage to tunnel through the narrow lanes with their steep banks and tree branches which almost met overhead. The earth was dark red, the fields small and square, enclosed by hedges and alternating with dark woodland. If she had not been told by her English teacher that while when writing you may compare art to nature, you must never compare nature to art, she would have been reminded of the patchwork quilt her mother had made and which covered her bed at home. She would never see it again, and that thought brought a small, almost silent whimper. But John heard it and took her hand.
Seeing this and the tender look he gave her, an old woman sitting in a nearby seat caught Maud’s eye and gave her an approving smile. Her pregnancy, beyond concealment, was very apparent now, as was the gold ring on the third finger of her left hand.
“Are you feeling all right?” John asked her. “This bus is rather bumpy.”
“I’m very well. It’s nice here, it’s lovely.”
She could tell that pleased him, and she was aware of how fond she was of him. Still, it was a shock to her when, after a short walk from the bus stop to the cottage in Bury Row, John introduced her to Mrs. Tremlett.
“This is my wife, Maud.”
It had to be so, of course, but was it wrong to tell such a huge lie? It had to be told. You might say that the whole purpose of their coming here together and living together in this place, confronting this grim-faced but kindly woman, was founded on that lie. The alternative was the hideous truth, for that was how it now appeared to Maud.
Mrs. Tremlett was too polite to say what she was evidently thinking, that this young wife was very young indeed. She herself had been married at sixteen, and Mr. Goodwin’s wife was not much more than that. Like her own, the wedding was one that had had to be because of a coming child. But she said nothing, only ushered them in where the table was set with tea things, and although it was warm and still summer, a fire was laid in the grate.
“Your bed’s made up,” Mrs. Tremlett said, “so you’ll have nothing to do. Mrs. Goodwin can have a good rest after her journey.”
The bed was the first sign of what they would have to contend with in the future. “We shall get used to subterfuge,” said John. They were upstairs in the bedroom and Mrs. Tremlett had gone. “I shall make up the bed in the other room for myself, and somehow that will have to be concealed from our kindly neighbour if she’s going to do our cleaning.”
“I can do the cleaning, John. We don’t need her.”
“We shall, you know. When the baby comes. We’ll let her come once a week for now to keep her hand in.”
“We have to pretend we’re sharing this bed?”
“Of course we do. Think about it, Maud. What’s she going to think if this young couple, newly married, sleep in separate beds?”
“Not that newly married, I hope, John.” Maud put her hands to her swollen stomach, laughed, and burst into tears.
“Come on now, it’s all right. Everything’s going to be fine, Mrs. Goodwin. I’m going to do the bed now, and then we’ll have our tea.” He found sheets initialled MT—for Margaret Tremlett, he supposed—in a drawer in the bedroom tallboy and set about making up the bed. The last time he had done this it had been for himself and Bertie, and knowing they would never again share a bed, he felt a pain that was physical.
THURSDAY WAS to be Mrs. Tremlett’s day. She came early but John had already gone because it was his first day at his new school, and Maud was up washing clothes in the scullery sink. The kitchen range she knew how to operate, but the copper in the scullery puzzled her. How did you get hot water into it, and, come to that, out of it when the washing was done?
Mrs. Tremlett opened the door in the bottom of the copper, inside which a fire was laid. “You leave that to me, my dear,” said Mrs. Tremlett. “You mustn’t use that dolly in your condition. Thicky, little old sheets can come next door with me and I’ll see to them.”
She always spoke in a gentle, friendly way, but it only made Maud wonder what treatment would have been meted out to her if her landlady had known the truth, that she was fifteen and unmarried, could never be married. She wasn’t sure what a dolly was but guessed it might be the wooden pole with a kind of wooden plate on the end of it that stood in the corner. How was she to wash John’s sheets? Perhaps by hand, using a bar of yellow soap and rubbing the linen against that wooden board with the bars across it. She would ask him when he came home. The sun was shining and she went out into it, standing in the front garden, holding up her face to the warmth.
They had been there a week and she had learnt all about the village shop, where you could buy tea and sugar and meat and fruit in tins as well as candles and string and oil for the lamps. Eggs and potatoes came from the farm on the hill, and a horse and cart laden with churns brought the milk, which the dairyman poured into her own blue china jug. For a butcher and a baker you had to take the bus into Ashburton or Newton Abbot, and she had done that once, at the former not knowing what cuts of meat to buy and very aware in this warm weather that whatever she bought must be cooked at once or it would go off. John said it would be best if he bought their meat after school and brought it home with him, two lamb chops, for instance, or mince to make rissoles or a cottage pie.
How thoroughly she had been looked after and tended to at home! While it went on, she had never thought about it. It just happened and she took it for granted. Mother and “the maid” did it all, with the charwoman whose niece had drowned herself coming in once a week to “do the rough.” Somehow Maud doubted if that life would ever be hers again. She had put an end to it by one of the two “acts” people called love she had performed with Ronnie Clifford in the meadow on the way home from choir practice. If she thought of Ronnie now, it was with bitterness.
The postman was coming up the village street, carrying his sack, which must be heavy even though it held mostly paper. All those letters coming to friends and relations from friends and relations. I wish I had a friend, she thought, my relations have been no good to me. Well, John has, but John is now my pretend husband. And Rosemary is lost to me because of Ronnie. The postman was opening their gate and coming up the path. He said good-morning and Maud said good-morning, and he handed her a letter but of course it wasn’t for her. It was addressed to J. Goodman, Esq. Maud took it into the house and sat down in the sitting room. Esq., she knew, was short for “esquire,” a polite way of addressing a man, better than Mr. and perhaps the next best thing to Sir or Lord. Some people said they could tell from the handwriting if the writer was a man or a woman, her father said he could, but Maud was sure she would be unable to do that. This writing sloped backwards, which she had been taught was bad and should be stopped when the writer was a child, just as left-handedness should be stopped and changed to right-handedness, as had happened in Ethel’s case. The man or woman who had written this envelope had put a little circle over the i in Devonshire instead of a dot, and that was a solecism her English teacher had called “illiterate.”
The letter might be from a friend, someone John had met at college perhaps, or it could be from a girl. Maud hoped in a way it was from a girl. Maybe a girl was more likely to put a little ring over an i. He had said he would never marry, but young as she was, she knew people said things like that and changed their minds when they met the right one. Her thoughts flew ahead to after the baby was born and John’s girl came here to visit them. Before they married, she and John would have to move so that the neighbours couldn’t find out, John and the girl would have a wedding, and they would all live together in the new place. Maud would say she was a widow, and they would all get on well, the new Mrs. Goodwin loving the baby as much as if he or she were her own. Maud put the letter, which had given rise to such daydreaming, on the sitting-room mantlepiece.
After Mrs. Tremlett had gone, carrying with her a big basket full of linen to be washed, Maud sat down on the floor with the sewing materials John had bought for her: pins and needles, reels of black and white cotton (the coloured ones would come later), a pair of scissors, a paper pattern for a baby’s nightgown, and a length of white lawn. She knew she was not so good a sempstress as she had led John to believe she was. The sewing machine was yet to come, and she had yet to learn how to use it. Meanwhile she tried pinning the pattern to the fabric, cutting it out, and tacking the pieces together. She was still at work when John came home, carrying a paper bag, itself wrapped in brown paper in case the blood from the scrag end of beef came through.
“The butcher’s shop was full of women,” he said. “I was the only man, and I think I was the only man to be in there all day. The butcher was too polite to laugh. When he’d served me, he said, ‘It’s not often we see gentlemen in here, sir. They do the eating of it and the ladies do the buying.’ ”
JOHN HAD never before seen Bertie’s handwriting but guessed the letter was from him. Who else would be writing to him? His mother or father perhaps. He had written to them, telling them he was settled in Bury Row with Maud nearby in the care of Mrs. Tremlett. Nearby was the word he used, not wanting to commit himself to writing next door. It was unlikely they would even think of writing to Maud. He wrote about the beauty of the village and the countryside, the ancient church and the churchyard where a famous poet of the last century was buried, the bicycle he had bought, and the ease of the journey to school all day. No answer had as yet come. The letter that had come he opened carefully, his heart beating faster.
His own letter to Bertie, written on that night he had spent alone in the cottage, had been full of passion as well as tender love, but Bertie’s reply was devoid of that. It was short, and the personal part contained descriptions of acts they had certainly performed together as well as words Bertie had often used while they made love, but still John was profoundly shocked by them. This aspect of their love he felt was sinful, led to policemen and police courts, to violence in the streets, to prison and a whole spectrum of ugliness and shame. These were the words that went with sodomy and buggery and which led to stringent laws being made to plant in the minds of young men a horror they dared not overcome. Yet they excited him, they seemed inextricably associated with Bertie, his beauty and his voice and his powerful attractions. Should he try to write to some extent in this vein when he answered? If it would make Bertie care for him more, need him and love him—yes, he thought he would.
But when he had read the letter again and again, knowing it and the terrible, beautiful words by heart, he would wait until Maud had left the kitchen to lay the table, and then he would open the door of the range and put Bertie’s letter on the burning coals inside. Doing this would hurt terribly, but he dared not leave such a document—he thought of this sheet of paper as a document because of the words it contained—in this house for Maud or even Mrs. Tremlett to find.
While keeping his eyes on the little passage and the kitchen door beyond, the letter in his trouser pocket, its presence nevertheless reminded him of what he had to do. One day, he thought, not now, not yet. If she asked him about the letter, for instance, she might ask whom it was from, expecting him to say from a woman. Even though he had told her he would never marry, he knew that denial would carry no weight with her, would carry no weight with any woman. She would like him to have a girl, and if he did, it would naturally lead to marriage. When he imagined her response to his telling her the truth, he felt sick with self-disgust. You could never say this to a girl. Girls didn’t know that such tastes, such behaviour, such desires, existed, or if they had heard it hinted at with sniggers or downturned mouths and mock shudders, their reaction was to recoil. “Queers,” men like him, wore women’s brassieres, with padding to resemble breasts, and put red ink on their underpants to look like the blood that came from women once a month, but just the same they hated women. Bertie had told him all these things. John knew only that he was different, yet could never say so.
Sometimes he encountered old men who lived alone but were not widowers. One such was living in their street in Bristol, and probably one in this village. John knew they were like him, unable ever to tell anyone the reason for their solitary lives, condemned to answer their families’ repeated suggestions that it was time they married with the response that was not a reason, that they were “confirmed bachelors.” It was rather better when two single men shared a house, for so repressive was the taboo on homosexualism—he hated the word, but what else could you call it?—that few if any people guessed why they were together.
Maud’s emergence from the kitchen with a tablecloth over her arm and a hand full of cutlery interrupted this unhappy reverie. Through the open doorway he watched her lay each place with a knife, a fork, and a spoon, and when she went to fetch water glasses from the sideboard, he slipped into the kitchen and pushed Bertie’s letter into the range.