I have never told Edmund that it was his child. I thought that it must be like a Cyclops or some sort of monster and the doctor might be able to tell, that he might say it was the child of degenerates – although Edmund and I are not degenerates and what we did wasn’t degenerate. But to talk about that sort of thing makes it seem coarse and sordid, which it wasn’t. It was perfect.
And it was the most wonderful fun keeping the secret. First there was a great to-do because we had all the furniture in Edmund’s bedroom moved. Edmund was funny about sleeping with his back or even his side to the window, he wanted to face it head on so the bed had to be turned round, and then there was a wardrobe with a mirrored door opposite the bed and he would wake up in the night and think there was someone in the room, so it had to go. It was just like when we were young and used to do things together. I would bring flowers from the garden and arrange them in his room and he would teach me to smoke. He just did it to amuse himself, really, because I never got the knack of it at all. We used to open all the windows wide so that Ada wouldn’t smell it, but she always did, and she used to tut and sigh and flap the curtains like anything. I have never smoked in public in my life, I might add. I’ve never got used to the sight of women smoking all over the place. I couldn’t bear that, during the last war, seeing all those girls walking about in trousers with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. All those horrible square shoulders and sensible shoes and nasty, greasy rolls of hair, as if they were pretending to be men. It was such a relief when the dresses came back and proper evening clothes, and everyone started looking like themselves again.
Anyway, Ada made a dreadful fuss about the smoke and Edmund worried awfully about upsetting her, so in the end I said, ‘I know how to solve the problem, it’s our house and we simply shan’t let her in, then she won’t know.’ So that was it, we said we wouldn’t have her or any of the servants in the room, we made them leave trays outside the door and then I’d dash out and pick up Edmund’s dinner when no one was looking.
It sounds strange to say this now, but the whole business of the baby was a very great shock to me. Not only the pain, but I had never been entirely sure about how babies actually happened – of course, I was married so I knew one didn’t get a baby by shaking hands, but I certainly didn’t understand how they were born. I suppose people like Ada must have known about these things, but we didn’t. I mean, I doubt if Louisa knew any more than I did and she had a real baby. I suppose Jimmy wasn’t able to make one – he can’t have been able to because I certainly didn’t know what to do to stop one coming and with Teddy, well, there already was a baby, that was rather the point. Of course, Teddy never asked about any of that, but then men don’t need to worry, do they? Still, I suppose women are not required to die in wars. Or at least they never used to be, but I suppose the air raids changed all that. Not that I minded air raids, I thought they were rather exciting. I thought it might have been a good death for us, a direct hit. If Edmund was there and it was quick, I shouldn’t have cared a bit.
There’s a poem by A. E. Housman that Edmund read to me, that says something about the name dying before the man. That’s what’s happened to me, you know. When I die, if anybody notices, they’ll say, ‘Oh, her, wasn’t she the one who did her husband in all those years ago and got away with it?’ The older ones, that is. The younger ones won’t even know my name.