Faith Fox Read online

  ‘The vicar was very good,’ she said. ‘I’ll think better of the vicar after this. I expect he let it out to Mrs. Middleditch by accident and she got round here first, living just round the corner.’

  ‘I’d guess it was she told him. She’s ahead of the field of knowledge in that church. She’ll be a woman priest next. She’ll be handing us the cup. What’s the matter? You’re saying nothing.’

  Dolly was getting slowly to her feet. She padded around the large pretty room overcrowded now with invalid furniture, the old family dining table, flaps down, under the window, a mighty sideboard laden with clean clothes, library books, unguents, ointments and sewing things that had wandered in among the decanters and candlesticks and fruit bowls that were still kept bravely about. She started drawing back curtains. She watched the black and white dawn garden, the wet grass. A bird or two hopped along the flower bed. One of them, a fat starling, watched her insolently between pecks at yesterday’s dinnertime crumbs. There were no supper crumbs, for there had been no supper. The Middleditch soup still stood on the kitchen draining board. The bird marched up and down, not yet letting go of the night.

  ‘I’d better get myself back to bed,’ Dolly said, ‘before the day starts up and they all come round again. Jack’ll be down first thing.’

  ‘Don’t count on it. It’s harvest time. And he’s got the new intake.’

  ‘I don’t. I never count on Jack. He has his life to live.’

  ‘Aye, and his wife and child,’ said Toots. ‘He’s lucky.’

  ‘They never got on, Andrew and Jack.’

  ‘But he’ll take the child, you know. You’ll see.’

  ‘What—Jack? Jack take the child? Don’t be silly, it’s its father’s child,’ said Dolly.

  ‘And how does a hospital doctor working all hours God gave look after a newborn child?’ said Toots. ‘Unless they get a nanny. Or Mrs. Fox could take over.’

  ‘Over my dead body, she will,’ said Dolly, rolling her eyes and looking as once she had done: effective, bellicose and certain.

  ‘It’s not up to you and it’s not up to me what happens to this child. It’s Andrew’s and the other grandma’s. It’s a South-country child. You said yourself at the start, when you knew it was coming, not to get excited, because we’d never see it.’

  ‘Andrew’s not out of touch,’ said Dolly. ‘He still comes up here. He can’t be out of touch, it’s where he was born and grew up. He’ll never get right out of touch from his home.’

  ‘D’you see that Apple Green letting that baby be brought up here? “Talking North?” They think we all say ee bah goom and sit on doorsteps.’

  ‘They know about the Duchess of Kent. She was brought up no distance off. She doesn’t sit on doorsteps,’ said Dolly.

  ‘They think we either sit on doorsteps or we’re the Duchess of Kent, that’s the trouble. They don’t know there’s anything in between, and I’m not surprised if they go by the telly and the papers. “Up North,” they call it.’

  ‘Andrew knows,’ said Dolly.

  ‘No. No, I don’t think Andrew does know any more. He’s gone now, Andrew. He’s forgotten it here. His home. He’ll go right back into his shell again now, like he did at sixteen. He’s got a whole world down there we’ve not a notion of. Go back to bed, Dolly. Go back to bed.’

  6

  Faith arrived at Ellerby Priors in a cocoon of shawls and pressed into a travel cot wedged along the back seat of her father’s Toyota. It was autumn and miles of stubble linseed shone dark gold. Well-kept metal field gates looked polished in the sun. Everywhere stood mountains of silage in black plastic rolls.

  ‘Like liquorice,’ said Pammie. ‘Great fat black beetles. Aren’t they horrible? What are they?’ She sounded pleased to see some expected ugliness.

  ‘It’s a good system,’ said Andrew. ‘It’s the harvest.’

  ‘Harvest? In plastic bags?’

  ‘Did you think it was haycocks and gleaning?’

  ‘I don’t believe I ever thought—I didn’t know there were still any hedges, either. I thought they’d all been dug up and ruined our heritage. I read about it in Country Life every time I pick it up.’

  ‘We’ve kept a few,’ said Andrew. He was driving now between two long high ones, weaving across the plain. They delivered him out upon a village with a lawn-like green, duck pond, white posts, sheep wandering.

  ‘It’s really very pretty,’ she said. ‘It’s as pretty as the Cotswolds without the coaches, though of course you don’t get the wonderful golden stone.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘It’s rough-looking somehow, isn’t it, the stone up here? Very picturesque, though. Lovely churches and houses. They look occupied—I mean in one ownership. Oh, this is pretty! Is that a castle? Right in the village. That would be National Trust in Sussex. You’d have to pay to go over it. Where are we?’

  Andrew didn’t quite know and for the past half-hour had been wondering and wishing for a map. He had been born and bred not thirty miles off and for years before he married had come home for Christmas to his parents’ house in Cleveland not more than an hour away. They lived by the sea on the estuary in the shadow of the chemical works. He had always taken the train and then a taxi from Darlington (‘Must have cost him all of five pounds,’ said Toots) and then another taxi on Boxing Day over to his brother’s on the moors, where they were going now on side roads from the motorway. He knew every field and lane and tree round here, or so he had thought, and you only had to look around to see how unchanged these lanes must be. But he hadn’t been concentrating, the past hour. Since they had swept off the A1 he had been trying not to hear Pammie’s endless patronage of the terrain.

  ‘Not far now,’ he said.

  ‘I’m fairly ravenous, Andrew dear. Shall we stop somewhere for lunch? She’s being awfully good. We could leave her in the car.’

  He set his face. It was a set face by nature. Now he clamped it. ‘We are almost there,’ he said. ‘I think there’d be umbrage taken if we stopped off for lunch. There’ll have been preparations. Anyway, there are no restaurants.’

  ‘What—nowhere? Well, a pub, then.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Pammie, I don’t think we can leave her outside a pub.’

  Pammie thought, Since he’s about to leave her for ever—and began to seethe.

  She had been seething for three months now over the arrangements for the child, Faith Fox: first at Andrew’s careless handing over of her to a nanny he had found from somewhere or other, a girl who lumped her about all over Surrey, taking her along to her own friends, and God knows who they were. One had turned out to be a prison warder and some others a covey of homosexuals. Once she had disappeared with the baby overnight leaving no message and Andrew, telephoning home and getting no answer, had rung Pammie thinking she would know what had happened. Pammie had suggested the police. Andrew, on duty all night after working all day on the wards, had said it would probably be all right. The girl had good references and had most likely taken the baby to her mother’s in Streatham.

  ‘In Streatham!’

  What’s more he’d been right, and nanny and child had come drifting back about eleven o’clock the next morning, the nanny with a hangover and the baby stinking of cigarette smoke.

  She’d had to go of course. Pammie had seen to that and Andrew had said yes, she was probably right, and with Pammie’s help had engaged someone else, very highly qualified, from Oslo, beautiful and calm and an excellent safe driver. The baby’s clothes were washed as white as snow by this paragon and she believed in regular bottles, an eventless day and no brand foods. For such a glowing, clean-looking girl, however, she left very dirty-looking knickers about the bathroom floor and wound herself daily for several hours around the telephone cord. Pammie saw her in this condition, her eyes dreaming, in the window of the front room of Andrew’s house whenever she called in
, and always talking in Norwegian. On making enquiries, naturally with Andrew’s permission, Pammie had discovered that the nanny was ringing Oslo twice a day, the bill already touching three hundred pounds.

  Also, she had broken down in the car one morning, flagged down another and asked the driver to take her and the baby to the supermarket, where she had left Faith with him in the car park while she shopped and then got him to drive them both home.

  ‘But he was a good man,’ she cried as Pammie drove her and her belongings relentlessly to Guildford station.

  Pammie had then taken Faith home with her and had cancelled many appointments.

  Exhausted Andrew, working a seventy-two-hour week in the hospital with sometimes three hours sleep a night, earning less money than many a nanny, living almost entirely on the wards or in his prison cell of a bedroom, widowed, wretched, had said, ‘They must do their best. Whole gang of women with nothing else to do. Let them sort it out.’

  From the beginning he had displayed not a suspicion of interest in Faith. The death of life-giving Holly had not so much frozen as embalmed him. For the first weeks he had walked in a dignified trance, inclining as usual graciously from his great height towards all his patients, who thought him a consultant at least. At the funeral he had taken the same stance outside the church door, exasperating, infuriating, the friends of his late wife’s mother when they went back to the house afterwards for the wake. The house was (of course) Pammie’s. All had talked of Andrew’s stateliness and charm and all had said that no man should be able to behave like that, equally to all comers, at his young wife’s funeral.

  At least the baby hadn’t been there. Pammie had seen to that. It would have been embarrassingly heart-rending. Faith had been taken that morning (by Pammie) back to the nuns for the day, though Andrew had not seen why nor appeared to be interested when told.

  That had been the really terrible thing, said Pammie, and made you realise just how hard a doctor had to be.

  ‘It is a front,’ said Jinny, ‘a con. It’s against the invasion of privacy. It’s called a bedside manner. They’re disciplined. They have to be, doctors.’

  ‘Doctors suffer underneath,’ said Elaine (or Myra). ‘Well, look how half of them are alcoholics.’

  ‘And suicides,’ said Viv.

  It was Pammie and the nuns together who took Andrew in hand at last. Mother Clare asked to see him in the office when he was visiting the maternity hospital professionally, Faith under two months old. (‘And how could he bear to do that?’ asked Jilly, or Jinny. ‘The very premises. He’s a monster.’) Mother Clare had Pammie in at the same time. Together they confronted Andrew with Faith’s future.

  A brother? Andrew had a brother? Had Andrew thought –? The North-East was certainly a long way from the child’s roots but blood is thicker than—etc. Were his family in the North not concerned? Surely somebody up there must be feeling they should help? Wasn’t this family solidarity notable in the North?

  Andrew said that he was of very old parents and his father bedridden.

  ‘And the brother?’ Mother Clare was not intimidated by young doctors.

  Andrew had sat magisterially and made noncommittal clearings of the throat.

  ‘The brother, Dr. Braithwaite?’

  ‘He’s nearly twenty years older than I am.’

  When he had gone Mother Clare had said, ‘God help that child,’ and Pammie had exploded.

  Yet somehow or other here was the Toyota winding its way across the Plain of York, and Faith lying large-eyed and composed on the back seat, watching the berries fly past her in the hedges.

  7

  And where was Thomasina, Thomasina last seen leaving the health farm, broken and finished? Nobody but the general, and Andrew who had not noticed, had seen the blinded old woman feeling out for the handle of the car door. When her friends had met her again later they had seen a new representation of her that had chilled their hearts. A terrible, terrifying, gruesome, sardonic Thomasina, talkative, blank-eyed, trilling with laughter. ‘Oh, isn’t it a bore?’ She even said, ‘Poor Holly,’ and, ‘Funny little scrap. No, not a bit like her Ma. We’re calling her Faith—awful name, isn’t it? Vicar’s idea, or the nuns’—Andrew doesn’t seem to mind. Oh yes, dear little thing really. Very broad face. Square hands. Yeoman Yorkshire, darling, I’m afraid. Hope she doesn’t come with a built-in accent.’

  She missed the funeral. Yes—Thomasina missed the funeral. Everyone understood of course, as they looked for her about the crowded church. It would have been too much—too much for Thomasina. All those queer years when she and Holly had opted out together. Someone (Susan) had heard that morning that she had broken down. Someone else thought she had been taken to the Surrey Clinic and was under sedation. Pammie had moved heaven and earth to reach her and even Andrew had looked grave. But Thomasina was nowhere to be found. All that Andrew had said to Pammie about it, which was when he left to go back to the hospital for duty that same evening of the funeral, was that Thomasina’s not having taken to the baby was a ‘bit of a blow.’

  For what everybody had assumed, of course, had scarcely needed to discuss, was that Thomasina would be scooping up Faith to rear her as her own. Thomasina so fit and young for her years. Thomasina so lovely and bereft. Thomasina had separated herself so extraordinarily from her own world for Holly, had dedicated herself utterly, utterly (and what a terrific job she had made of it), she would slip naturally (and therapeutically for all concerned), tenderly, into the new motherhood of Holly’s child. They had all so much assumed it that they were already talking about how marvellous it was that it was so, and congratulating the ghost of Holly on the ready-made union. How wonderful, if this pointless disaster had had to occur, if fate had had to decide to remove from the world such a golden person, that here was Thomasina with her crooked smile continuing to fly her brave pennant. Well, she didn’t.

  She wouldn’t.

  She abandoned them all, the lot of them, Pammie and Jilly and Jinny and Susan and Elaine and the golf club and the NSPCC and her son-in-law Andrew with the great purple sleepless circles under his eyes. Faith Fox she did not look at when she went to say goodbye to Pammie and leave the dog with her—Pammie supervising the sterilisation of bottles, a washing machine nearby whirling with baby clothes. ‘Not looked towards the cot, not once!’

  Thomasina had laughed and kissed Pammie and said that she was off to Egypt. She was wearing a fuchsia-pink trouser suit and big jewellery and there was a man in a splendid old car at the gate who looked like a colonel. ‘Very nice-looking. Very nice car. This is true, Elaine.’

  The fury of Surrey rang out round its Bridge tables, patios, clubs. Thomasina was now seen as traitor, as Quisling in their midst, for nearly thirty years ungenerous, secretive, across invisible tracts of uncharted snow. Her icy introversion, her uncaring selfishness? How they foamed, and spat, how they snarled, how they thundered. The defection of Thomasina filled their lives up to the end of the second month of Faith’s life and died only to flare again more fiercely when picture postcards of the Sphinx began to arrive. These were objects calculated to dumbfound, condemned as in most evil taste.

  ‘If she comes back—if she comes back –’ they said (even Pammie), ‘I’m afraid I can’t know her anymore.’

  Only an Englishwoman, of course, would have behaved like Thomasina, and I mean English. A Scot might have suffered silently, would have most pointedly not removed herself. A Welshwoman would have wept and chattered but carried on. An Irishwoman would have brooded or keened, explained, referred the matter to higher authority, and the world would have slowly healed a little. But an Englishwoman from either of the two main tribes, South and North, above and below the line from the Wash to the Severn, the language-line that is still not quite broken to this day, would act the part of the unconquerable, camouflaging herself, her grief, her fear, behind a mask that can do nothing, is meant to do nothing, but
antagonise. It is a mask slapped on out of consideration, out of a wish not to increase concern and also out of a genetic belief that our deepest feelings are diminished when we show them. The fearless, comic, incorruptible battle-axe Englishwoman is now almost gone. There don’t seem to be many of the young shaping up in that mould.

  And maybe good riddance but maybe more’s the pity, for she’ll be missed here and there and especially in fiction. But in great grief her ghost walks still, and very mysterious and insulting it seems to those who aren’t of her cast of mind and who love her and wish to be near her. But those of her ilk comprehend and talk of her behind her back. They would mostly act the same way themselves.

  So Thomasina went off with the general and Faith watched the red berries in the unknown lanes.

  8

  The day, then, that Pammie accompanied Andrew Braithwaite to Yorkshire to deposit his daughter Faith Fox (as everybody seemed to be calling her) with his brother Jack, her mind was executing something like a triple fugue. There was first the theme of the north, the foreign country and culture into which the little scrap was to be translated, ‘The North’ as Pammie imagined it. Then there was the factual ‘north’ as it was unfolded to her between London and their destination. Then there was the account of both norths that Pammie’s mind was automatically preparing to take back to Surrey again. Pammie, whose life consisted of emotional thunderstorms and the describing of them, was as intensely involved in the rumblings and crashes and lightning flashes of this one, the Fox Saga, as an actress who has landed a plum role. Learning the book of all her adventures was as important to Pammie as experiencing them.