“Just glance,” Lily said with pretend irritation. “And anyway, you’re a chauffeur, not a nanny. If I want to be late for lunch I damn well can be.”
Coventry grinned, sketched her a deep and humble bow and went to fetch the Argyll with his arms full of little parcels for Stephen’s baby.
He waited outside Handley’s store, as he knew he would have to; but when Lily came out, a hatbox swinging from one hand, she was with Madge.
“It’ll be all right if Madge comes home for dinner, won’t it?” she asked Coventry. “Cook won’t mind? Mrs. Winters won’t mind?”
Coventry shrugged as he opened the door for the two girls. He gave Lily a small reassuring smile. For all her confident spending, for all her claiming of the Winters’s accounts, she was still a child in an older woman’s house; unsure of the rules and anxious not to offend. When Lily checked with him what she might or might not do, Coventry felt a tenderness that he thought he had lost long ago. She was like an orphan placed in a strict foster-home. She might be Mrs. Winters to the saleswomen when she ordered a hundred pounds of embroidery work. But at home she was Stephen’s nobody-wife and of negligible importance.
“When’s it due then?” Madge asked, eyeing Lily’s distended stomach with trepidation.
Lily giggled and leaned back against the seat as Coventry eased the car out behind a horse-drawn delivery van, and then bumped slightly on the tram tracks as he overtook it.
“May,” she said. “First week in May, only another two months. Golly, I can’t wait. I feel like a balloon. I haven’t even seen my feet for months.”
“And then what? Will you try and get back to work?”
Lily shook her head. “No. He’ll never let me work on the stage while I have a small baby,” she said in an undertone. “It’s all different for me, Madge, I can see that now. I thought at first that I could get my own way, that I could marry Stephen and it would be all right for me. But I can’t work. Not when I have the baby. He wouldn’t allow it. But what I can do is drawing room singing, and concerts in concert halls.”
Madge’s eyes widened. “Proper singing?”
Lily nodded. “Charlie’s been teaching me. He says my voice is good enough. I even sing little bits out of operas now! Think of that! He says I’m good enough to sing in concerts. And concerts are posh. Stephen doesn’t object to concerts. Besides, you don’t do seasons like theatre. You just do one and then it’s over. And I wouldn’t tour either.”
Madge nodded enviously. “And I was pitying you for missing the panto,” she said. “Precious little money, same show night after night and no work afterwards.”
“Are you out of work now?”
Madge nodded and drew her thin winter coat around her. “As usual,” she said. “All the pantos close at the same time, it’s too early to start the summer shows, even the clubs don’t pick up until after Easter. I hate this time of year. I never have enough money and I’m always afraid I’m never going to work again. I was just looking for a little present for my mum when I saw you. I’m going home to Southampton until they start auditioning for the summer shows. My mum can get me work waitressing in a restaurant.”
“Waitressing!” Lily exclaimed. She put an arm around Madge’s shoulder and gave her a hug. “Poor little Red Hot Baby!”
Madge pulled herself away, bridling at the sympathy. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll wait tables for two months but then I’ll be in a show. I’ll be back on the stage and I’ll be singing solo. Two months from now and you’ll be up to your eyes in nappies. A year from now and you’ll be pregnant again. A year after that and you’ll be pregnant again and your waist will have gone and you’ll have varicose veins. I know who I’d rather be!”
Lily said nothing, but let Madge move away from her.
Coventry, turning the wing mirror to see her face, saw her pallor and the way her bottom lip trembled like a child’s.
• • •
The last month of Lily’s pregnancy passed in a blur of fatigue. She still got up to see Stephen off in the mornings but she went straight back to bed after he had left and only dressed in time for lunch with Muriel. In the afternoons Charlie came and played the piano for her, every afternoon at two o’clock without fail.
“As long as I can hear the piano playing then there’s no cause for concern,” Muriel reassured herself as she sat in Rory’s room with a small fire of rationed coal burning against the dismal April weather. Rain poured against the octagonal tower windows as hard as sleet. The sea was grey with white heaving crests. Muriel listened to the piano and Lily’s faultlessly clear voice, richer in tone and deeper in intensity. When the piano playing stopped for an hour at a time Muriel did not let herself worry. “A man like that, an attractive man like that, would hardly desire Lily as she is,” she told herself. “So broad in the beam and so tired, her skin so pale and dark shadows all around her eyes. He comes to sit with her out of sympathy, and because he sees her talent. We should be grateful that he comes to take her out of herself. If it were not for him I think she would spend the whole day in bed.”
Stephen was edgy and bad-tempered with everyone but Charlie for all of April. A national miners’ strike was threatening and the government had called on all loyal citizens to volunteer for new units of the regular army. Stephen, reading this, had flung down the newspaper in disgust. “Volunteer!” he exclaimed to Charlie. “Again?”
Charlie, seeing the way Stephen’s hands trembled and the pallor around his mouth, slapped him on the back. “Not you!” he said, and his voice was instantly reassuring. “You’ve done your share, old man. You’ll never have to serve again.”
Stephen had nodded his head. “I have,” he repeated. “I have done my share. They couldn’t make me serve again. Could they?”
“All nonsense anyway,” Charlie said comfortingly. “Politicians! What do they know?”
“Nothing!” Stephen agreed. He beamed at Charlie with sudden warmth. “Stay to dinner, old man! A chap gets tired of a houseful of women. Stay to dinner!”
“I’ve got no dinner jacket!” Charlie protested.
“Oh, what the hell!” Stephen poured them both another whisky. “We never change for dinner these days, do we, Lily? The days when we would dress for dinner and then go out are long gone!”
So Muriel and Lily ate their dinner in their afternoon dresses—“So scruffy!” Muriel thought—and Charlie and Stephen in their lounge suits laughed and talked together. They had a wide acquaintance in common from the Trocadero Club, and a whole set of private jokes which neither Muriel nor Lily could understand or enjoy. At nine o’clock Charlie said: “Good heavens, I have to run, I’m working tonight,” and Stephen looked like a little boy anxious to be taken out on a treat.
“You coming down tonight, Stephen?” Charlie asked casually as Muriel rang for his overcoat.
“I should say so! I could come with you now, actually.”
Muriel, watching Lily, saw Lily’s small patronizing smile. Lily knew that Stephen wanted to enter the Trocadero with Charlie. He wanted to spend the evening at Charlie’s table where the girls gravitated to the man who could get them work at the Kings Theatre, and who was, in addition, the most attractive man in Portsmouth.
“I have to go home to change into my black tie,” Charlie warned. “But if you don’t mind waiting you can come with me.”
Stephen jumped up and kissed Lily in passing, on the forehead. “I’ll come at once!” he said. “Can’t keep the audience waiting!”
“Thank you for your hospitality, Mrs. Winters,” Charlie said to Muriel. And he winked at Lily and took her hand. “Go to bed,” he said softly, almost inaudible under the noise of Stephen getting his coat and hat. “You look exhausted. Go to bed now, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Lily looked up at him, her eyes warm with affection. “Tomorrow at two.”
• • •
The night of 3 May, Lily woke from a deep sleep with a strange wrenching pain in her belly. She lay for a little while, wat
ching the ceiling, thinking nothing. Then it came again. A deep pain, a different pain from the usual aches of pregnancy. “It’s coming,” she said. “Early.” Then the pain eased and she slept a little more.
She woke again in the early hours of the morning, with her sheets soaked and her belly tight with a hard sharp pain.
“Stephen!” she called. He could not hear her. She glanced at the alarm clock on her bedside table. It was two in the morning, he might not even be home yet.
She heaved herself from the bed and walked awkwardly to the door. Halfway there a pain stabbed her in the belly like a knife and Lily folded over with a gasp. It eased after a little while. “Stephen!” Lily called, frightened.
She opened the door and looked across the landing. His dressing room door was open; the narrow bed was empty. Lily turned back into her own room and threw on her dressing-gown. She was feeling better now, she had a sense of rising excitement mixed with fear. Her suitcase stood at the door, it had been packed for a week. She was to have the baby in an exclusive and expensive ward of the hospital with Dr. Metcalfe, the finest obstetrician in Hampshire. She tied her dressing-gown around her and went down the stairs to wake Muriel.
Just as she was about to tap on her bedroom door she heard the noise of the key turning in the lock of the front door. Lily peered over the bannisters.
Three men came into the hall. Coventry, his hat knocked askew, was supporting Stephen, whose legs were bending under him, dead drunk. On his other side was Charlie Smith.
“Oh, Charlie!” Lily said. She came down the stairs in a rush, her hands held out to him.
Charlie abruptly dropped Stephen who slumped to the floor, only half-supported by Coventry. Charlie caught Lily’s outstretched hands. “Is it coming?” he asked.
Lily’s face was radiant. She smiled from him to Coventry. “It is! It is! Will you take me to the hospital?”
Coventry, holding Stephen’s arm as he sank unstoppably downwards, looked from one to another of them.
“I need my bag,” Lily said. “In my bedroom.”
Coventry heaved Stephen into a wooden carver chair which stood at the side of the hall and left him there while he ran up the stairs into Lily’s bedroom and brought down the bag in one hand.
“Should we wake your mother-in-law?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t know,” Lily said. “She shouldn’t see Stephen like this . . .”
But Muriel’s door was opening. She came out on to the landing. “I heard voices,” she said. “Is that you, Lily? Is the baby coming?”
“She needs to go to the hospital,” Charlie said, his voice assured. “Stephen here’s a bit under the weather. Shall Coventry and I take her now?”
Muriel peered over the bannisters, clutching her dressing-gown across her nightdress. “Oh dear,” she said inadequately. “No, I think I had better get dressed and take her.”
Lily suddenly gave a gasp and clutched to Charlie’s hands. “Oh God!” she said. “I think I’d better go at once.”
“Come on,” Charlie said. He picked up her bag and Lily turned to the door with him.
“You can’t go like that!” Muriel protested ineffectually. “Lily, you must get dressed! You shouldn’t even be downstairs like that! Wait for me! I’ll come as soon as I am dressed. We’ll leave a message for Stephen. He’ll come too.”
Charlie glanced into Lily’s face. Suddenly she had gone deathly white and she had her bottom lip gripped between her teeth.
“We daren’t wait,” he said tersely.
Coventry nodded and swept Lily up into his arms. He held her carefully and strongly and carried her down the small flight of steps to the garden path. Charlie was holding the gate and then went to the car door to help Lily in. They folded up the arm rest and stretched her along the back seat. Lily’s colour had come back to her cheeks. She gave them her cheeky grin. “Go on then,” she said. “My heroes.”
Coventry and Charlie jumped into the front seats and Coventry started the engine with a roar. They sped down the road and then turned north, to the hospital. Lily lay on the back seat with her eyes closed, her stomach clenching in painful contractions from time to time. No-one had told her that she could time her pains. No-one had told her of the mechanics of birth. Lily lay, as ignorant as a child, gripped by one hard contraction after another, gasping with pain. But when Charlie glanced back at her he could see she was smiling.
• • •
The baby was born at five o’clock in the morning: a small beautiful seven-pound boy. He had a downy head of fair hair and Lily’s blue optimistic eyes.
The hospital routine was such that he was taken away from Lily as soon as he was born, before she had even seen him. Lily was washed, offered a cup of tea and commanded to rest.
“But I want my baby,” Lily said, struggling up in the bed against the firm hands of the nurse pressing her down to the pillows.
“Not now, dear,” the nurse said firmly. “It’s time for you to rest.”
“But I want to see my baby,” Lily said. “I hardly caught a glimpse of him. And I want Charlie to see him too, and Coventry, and Muriel.”
“They can see him through the window of the day nursery during visiting hours—four till five o’clock every afternoon except the weekends. Your mother-in-law has been here and we told her all was well and sent her home in her car. Your husband’s still here.”
“Stephen?” Lily asked in surprise.
“The gentleman who brought you in,” the nurse said stiffly.
Lily smiled in relief. “That’s Charlie,” she said. “Will you ask him to come in?”
The nurse frowned. “We don’t have visitors now, Mrs. Winters, it is your rest time. Mothers have to learn to do as they are told. We’ve got far too many mothers to have them running around at all times of the day and night. You go to sleep now like a good girl and we’ll bring Baby to you at nine o’clock. We’ll take him away then and you rest again, and then we bring him to you at one. And your family can visit at four. I expect you’ll give him a bottle, won’t you? A modern girl like you?”
Lily’s smile never shifted but her blue eyes grew hard. “I can’t sleep until I have seen Charlie,” she said mendaciously. “I have to give him a message. I have to. It’s something serious. Can’t you let him in for a minute?”
The nurse looked studiedly thoughtful as if she were considering an outrageous life-threatening request. “I shouldn’t allow it really,” she said.
“It’s about my husband,” Lily said, improvising rapidly. “He won’t know where his cufflinks are. He won’t be able to go to work without them. I have to send a message for him.”
The nurse capitulated at once under the powerful claims of male need. “Men!” she said, tossing her head. “Well, he can come in for two minutes,” she said grudgingly. “And I will be timing him! Mothers and babies have to learn their routine. Rest and feed. Rest and feed. Not chatter and what-not.”
Lily nodded, her dark eyelashes sweeping down and shielding her eyes.
“You can come in,” the nurse said coldly to Charlie, who stood in the doorway. “For two minutes only. She’s being very naughty and insistent. She’ll have to learn how we do things here. She’ll have to do them our way. She’s going to be here for a long time, she’s going to have to learn to be a good girl.”
“Charlie,” Lily said in her bleakest Portsmouth accent, “tell this stupid bitch to fetch my baby, I want you to take me home.”
26
THEY TOOK A MOTOR-CAB which had just set someone down outside the hospital; Lily was too angry to wait for Charlie to phone the Winters’s house for Coventry and the car. She insisted on leaving the hospital at once with her baby wrapped warmly in the hospital’s cot blanket.
The nurse followed them to the front door, remonstrating and scolding in turns. “But what will Dr. Metcalfe say?” she demanded, thinking of that luminary’s response to the loss of his fat fees. “Mrs. Winters, you can’t just storm out like this! What am I
to say to Dr. Metcalfe?”
Lily scrambled into the cab, her baby held warm and safe under her coat, nuzzling into the crook of her arm. Her face was alight with excitement and defiance. Charlie swung into the cab beside her, and slammed the door. Lily leaned forward and called out of the window. “Tell him to bugger off!” she said in her best Duchess voice. “Give him Mrs. Winters’s compliments and tell him to bugger off!”
Charlie let out a shout of laughter and pulled Lily back into the cab as they drove off.
“You’re a caution, you!” he said, still laughing. “What did that poor woman do to make you so mad?”
Lily started laughing too as her anger fell away. “Oh, she was awful, Charlie! She wouldn’t let me have my baby, and she wanted to keep you out. And I’m supposed to be in there for a fortnight and then a convalescent home for another fortnight. She wouldn’t let me have my baby and she wanted him bottle-fed. And anyway—I can’t see what the fuss is about. My ma had me in the front bedroom and was serving in the shop the next day.”
Charlie put his arm around her and held her close.
“Let’s see him then,” he said. Lily held her coat back out of the way and Charlie peered into the little face. “He’s so small,” he said in wonder. “Can I touch him?”
Lily nodded and Charlie extended a cautious hand. He touched the baby’s clenched fist. At once the little hand opened like a flower and gripped on his thumb. The tiny fingers, each one with a perfect minute nail, held Charlie’s giant thumb with surprising strength. “I say,” Charlie said, awed. “He’s got a grip, this one. He knows what he wants.”
Lily beamed down at the baby. Charlie looked at her clear lovely profile. “God, Lily,” he said. “I wish I was an artist. I wish I could paint you like you are now.”
She turned and smiled at him. “I wish my ma could see him,” she said. Her eyes were luminous with tears. “I can’t believe that she has a grandson that she’ll never know, that he’ll grow up never knowing her.”