agree. And I, for one, must be careful of my mood.
We set off again. The dogs are released onto the grass. Tussy skips after them. A sullen-looking Janey searches for flowers to press. The trees are tossed. The wind is loud in the leaves. The kites in the air fly slanted and set their owners straining. Down in my bad lung there’s a pain. Naught to fret over, but there. Too much fast air after these long days spent between the dust of the mattress and the smoke of the fireside.
“Karl is so happy to have Frederick nearby again,” says Jenny now. “It does me good to see him happy, he’s been so nervous of late.”
“I’m glad, Jenny. That’s nice to hear.”
“Of course, he hasn’t been alone. My own hair is gone gray thinking about Laura in France. Her second baby lost, and now pregnant again. Caught up in this damned war. It has us all hysterical.”
“You oughtn’t worry, Jenny. Laura’ll be fine. Doesn’t she have Paul to look after her?”
“Paul?” she says, whipping a handkerchief from her sleeve and making a whisk of it at me. “Paul is French. And a politics man.”
“Mohme!” Tussy is calling from about twenty yards. “Mohme! Mohme!”
“What is it?” Jenny says without slowing her gait.
Tussy runs to catch up with us. She comes round us and, walking backwards, her hem dancing around her boots and liable to trip her up, holds out a feather. “Look what I found. Which bird is it from, do you think?”
Sighing, Jenny takes it and runs it through her fingers. “A common magpie,” she says, and hands it back.
Tussy looks at it a moment, disdainful, and drops it. Wanders back onto the grass.
“And it’s not only Laura,” Jenny says when we’re out of ear-shot again. “I also worry for these two. Look at Janey there and tell me she isn’t radiant? And Tussy, perhaps she even more so. But I’m anxious. I’m anxious that, for this same reason, they are all the more out of place and out of time. And with the life we give them, how will they ever meet a good ordinary man?”
“How will any of us?” I says.
She squeezes my arm and grants me a smile. “Oh, Lizzie, you are funny. But perhaps I am not expressing myself well. I speak of a subject it is hard for people who do not have children themselves to understand. A mother will look at her children, and if she sees that one of them has already been denied the chance of a happy kind of life, she will naturally worry that the others will go the same way. I know I sound like a philistine when I say it, Lizzie, but if they could but find husbands, a German or even an Englishman if he had a solid position, and get themselves comfortably settled; if they could do that, I wouldn’t mind my own losses so much. The last thing I want is that they have the kind of life I have had. Often I think I would like to turn away from politics altogether, or at least be able to look upon it as a hobby to take up and leave down as I please. But for us, Lizzie, it is a matter of life and death, because for our husbands it is so, and I fear it has to be the same for our children. This is our cross to bear.”
I say naught. Thoughts and memories come vivid, of old desires and chances lost, and though there’s regret in them, and mourning, it’s not unpleasant to have their company. We walk on.
“But we must be optimistic, mustn’t we, Lizzie? Rather than dwell, we must look forward to better things. And I do think we are entering a new phase, a happier time for all of us. Your move to London marks a change. I believe great things will happen now that Frederick is here. Karl has been so looking forward to it.”
“Frederick also. He’s overjoyed to be out of that job. Only a month wanting till he’s fifty, and he’s like a young drake again.”
“Ha!” She hugs my shoulder. “And it is about time. Frederick’s talents were wasted in that dusthole. It is true there was pleasure to be gained from taking money out of the enemy’s pocket, draining it from the inside, so to speak, but enough is enough; the real work has to begin, and Frederick is essential to it. He really is a genius. Are you following his articles on the war?”
“Not myself, nay.”
“Oh, but you must, they explain—” She sucks in her breath. “Oh, I do apologize Lizzie, I wasn’t thinking. I’ll read them to you one of these days. Or better, I’ll have Nim do it. She wouldn’t mind. She likes to keep abreast.”
Up ahead, Frederick has stopped at a coster’s cart to buy ginger beer for the Girls. I wish he wouldn’t. I’ve seen it done in Manchester, the ginger boiled in the same copper that serves for washing, and it’s not healthful. Jenny halts us in order to keep our distance from the others. She bends down and picks some flowers from the verge.
“What are these?” I says when she puts a posy in my buttonhole.
“Snow-in-the-summer,” she says. “It’s rare to see them still blooming this late.”
“They’re lovely,” I says.
She gives a vague smile and, seeing that the others have moved off, starts us up once more. “I realize I have been talking only of myself.”
“That’s all right, Jenny.”
“Well, I do not want to talk anymore. It is only boring you and upsetting me. And distracting us from the other matter.”
The other matter is, of course, the house. She reminds me that the maid, Camilla Barton, is due to arrive in a fortnight’s time, and gives me advice on how to keep her, which is harder than I might think, for things aren’t like they used to be, in sixty-eight and the crisis years, when the good families were letting go of their help and the registries were brimming with girls to be had for the asking and for a price much closer to their worth. Nay, things have changed and a girl will walk if she finds a better situation, and it’s often not even the mistress’s fault, for it’s difficult to define in exact terms what’s owed a girl and what she herself owes, and not everyone can learn the art of leaving the servants alone.
“I recommend a second girl,” she says. “Frederick instructed me to find only the one, and I followed those instructions, but my true feeling is that you will need two. Everything works better with two. The girls are happier because they have company and get to sit down in the evening, and you are happier because the work can be divided out and gets done. You do not want to be a slave with your apron never off. London is your retirement. If I could afford it, I would get another.”
“Can’t Nim manage? Has she ever threatened to leave?”
“Nim? Oh, she’s different. We’ve had her for so long she’s like family.”
In the distance, Karl beckons us to a tree where he thinks we ought lay the picnic. Jenny flutters her handkerchief in answer.
“Speaking of family, Lizzie, I would like to say something to you.”
“What’s on your mind, Jenny?”
“I’d like to clean the air.”
“Does it need cleaning?”
“About your sister.”
The other matter. The real matter.
“Jenny,
