close to a baby before. She had caught glimpses of them, of course: pink little faces buttoned into knitted bonnets, their lower halves neatly tucked beneath ribbon-edged blankets, in their passing prams. But she had never held an infant, or even looked closely at one, until now. It was the Easter holidays of 1948, she was fourteen, and she had come to stay with her mother, to meet the new baby, a child who was, it still seemed astonishing to her to realise, her half-brother.
It was remarkable how little babies could do, except expel repellent things from every orifice, and sleep. The baby couldn’t sit up, or even hold on to anything for more than a few seconds, before the object fell out of its grasp. Neither could it – he, Jamie: she had always to remind herself he would become an actual person, in future – say a word. His limbs waved about, like an upturned May bug. Yet Iris and Digby seemed untroubled by these deficiencies. Ruth did find the infant’s smiles winning, and the way he wriggled his legs in delight when smiled back at, but she dreaded being asked to hold him, dreaded the feel of his squirming body, stronger than you’d think and uncoordinated. Her uncle had once taken her fishing to Lake Vyrny, and her tiny brother reminded her of a fish, flailing in a landing net, as if he were in the wrong element. She didn’t know what she was meant to do with him.
It was all rather disgusting. Luckily Ruth was not expected to attend to the actual care of the child, since Mrs Lockyer came in from Hexham every day to help. But she had been asked to lend a hand here and there. She’d learned that whenever the baby’s nappies were changed, its faeces had to be scraped from the muslin Harrington squares into the lavatory, before the soiled cloths were put into a special bucket with a lid, containing a solution of bluish liquid which smelled like a public swimming bath, only worse. A second bucket, with borax, came next, while the towelling outer nappies went into another, dry, bucket. Thrice a week, Mrs Lockyer boiled the muslins in a large enamel bowl on top of the stove, creating the pervasive brassica-tainted vapour from which no room was spared. It filled the house, like the steam from a suet pudding of dung. When sufficiently boiled, the muslins were reunited with the towelling squares in scalding water, to which soap flakes were added; a thin, waxy film formed on the surface of the milky water as it cooled. Once scrubbed, the squares were rinsed, then squeezed through the wooden rollers of the mangle. Before the squares were pegged out to dry, each one was firmly shaken out – snap snap – with a sound like a flock of pigeons’ wings as they picked up speed in flight. And the infant went through four, sometimes five, nappies every day! It was extraordinary to Ruth that anyone would knowingly have a baby, considering the sheer work hours involved. The rewards seemed too meagre.
Ruth wondered whether Helen would have a baby, too. Despite the manifest disadvantages, she rather hoped that she might; it would give Helen something to occupy herself with. As it was, her stepmother was tremendously busy, but to no apparent purpose, like a bluebottle on a windowsill. She belonged to endless committees; she was a botherer. Ruth tried to like Helen; she wanted her father to be happy and, to judge by Digby’s reaction to the infant Jamie, a child would bring him joy. But sometimes it seemed to his daughter that Edward had plumped for Helen only because she was so unlike Iris. Helen wasn’t sophisticated, or beautiful, or even especially good company, but neither was she selfish or wilful or sharp. Ruth secretly thought that Helen was bossy and rather dull.
On the other hand, Ruth was surprised to find herself very fond of Digby. She knew she shouldn’t be: if it had not been for him, her parents might still have been together, whereas poor Helen was blameless. But she couldn’t help liking him, because he was quiet and clever and kind and he looked like some odd bird, a crane, perhaps. He reminded her of her uncle Christopher, though not to look at: Christopher had a small, straight nose and broad shoulders, like his brother. She had been touched to notice that when Digby came with Iris to take her out from school, or to meet her off a train, his face glowed with pleasure the moment he caught sight of her. He was thoughtful. It was Digby who had installed the piano, even though she was hardly ever at their house, because Ruth was good at music, and liked it. He never told her what to do, whereas Helen made her feel as though she were a small but obdurate problem, which could be solved only by a programme of constant intervention, like repeatedly dabbing at a stain.
Digby’s mother lived nearby with her sister, both of them widows. They were known, collectively, as the Hillbillies. The aunt – Hilary – had been a widow for many more years than she had been a bride, her young husband having been killed during the final weeks of the First World War. There had been no children and she was devoted to Digby, and would keep arriving unannounced to coo at the new baby. She knitted moss-stitch matinée coats for him, with matching rompers. The idea was that she might look after the baby in the mornings, once he was a little bigger, so that Iris could go back to work, arranging Digby’s appointments and driving him on his visits.
‘Do look! Isn’t he killing?’ said Hilary to no one in particular, whenever the baby so much as wriggled.
Ruth was surprised and rather relieved to see that her mother was insensible to this baby worship. She seemed fond of her new son, but she didn’t coo. Iris liked Digby’s relations, especially her mother-in-law Billa, who was bookish and rather gruff and made no secret of the fact that she was fonder of dogs than of babies. But then Iris always liked people who felt no need to apologise for themselves.
Ruth was meant to live up here with Iris half the time and with Edward, near Tewkesbury, for the rest. But she really spent only about a third of the time with her mother. Most of her life seemed to take place at school. On weekend exeats and at half terms it was so much simpler to go to her father’s, because he was less than half an hour away. And then she still stayed in Malvern with her grandparents sometimes. They kept her room for her with her childish things – her teddy and doll’s house and old books – and took her out for tea at the Abbey Hotel on those Saturdays when she wasn’t allowed to stay the night away from school. She didn’t like to hurt their feelings by not visiting, even if she would have preferred to be with Iris.
If someone had asked Ruth where her home was, she would not have known what to answer. Was it at her father’s house, or here with her mother? She liked both houses, each of which was close to a river. Edward’s house had beams and windows with sills so wide you could sit on them, looking through the lattices of lead. An old orchard of plum and gnarled apple trees stood beyond the garden, between the house and the river. This river was wide and sleepy, with shallow muddy sides where swans rested among the reeds, whereas the river by Iris’s house was rocky and dark and urgent, and the water there gave off a cold smell, like mountains. It took ages to get to Iris’s house, down an endless rutted track, fringed in spring with carpets of violets. Iris seemed to have forgotten that she used to find the countryside dreary. Ruth loved the house, which stood quite alone, framed by three old Scots pines, a low stone wall separating it from the sheep-cropped green field which ran down to the river. It was an L-shaped house with slate floors in the older, lower part and wide wooden boards in the eighteenth-century part, which had tall ceilings and windows which went right down to the ground. It was an improbable house, neither a rectory nor a farmhouse, but with something of the character of each. Iris didn’t have very much furniture, which made her rooms look elegant, and she went in for big dramatic arrangements of flowers, or just greenery: a bowl of white peonies fringed with copper-beech leaves, or masses of pussy willow in a tall jug, or in autumn great arching sprays of blackberry and rosehips. At Edward’s house there were plenty of low armchairs and dark, highly polished oak furniture. There were ladder-back chairs, and place mats depicting hunting scenes, and lots of silver cruets, the saltcellars and mustard pots lined with dark-blue glass. Ruth thought that her father’s made a better winter house because it was cosy, but her mother’s house was lovely in the summer.
When Ruth listened to the other girls in her dormitory talking about their visits home – their ponies and Labradors, their tartan picnic rugs folded just so, their endless cousins coming and going to tennis and croquet parties, or to play mah-jong, or to take tea at shaded tables overlooking the lawn – she envied them the simplicity and order of their lives. They all went to point-to-points, or sailing in the Isle of Wight. They all seemed to do the same things and to know
