The furnished house was in a street off Parkers Piece and cost five pounds a week. An elderly couple had gone to New Zealand for six months to stay with their sons – or perhaps for a year, the estate agent told Clara. ‘We’ll let you know in good time.’
The aspidistras from front and rear windows went into the garden shed, and two oleographs of Admiral Beatty were wrapped in copies of the Daily Mail and pushed under a sofa. ‘I’d like to strip off that ghastly wallpaper and whitewash the place, but I don’t suppose they’d like it one bit. And we’d lose our twenty pounds deposit.’
‘We must get a maid as soon as we can,’ Emma said. ‘I hate making fires. And we ought to let mother know where we are. She’ll be shocked at what we’ve done, after thinking we were only here on visits.’
Clara thought not. ‘She’s used to us. As long as we’re sound in wind and limb, she won’t mind.’
‘She will,’ Emma said.
Rachel received their letter with the morning post. At three o’clock in the afternoon she knocked at the door. ‘You know, this is the first time you’ve left home, and you didn’t even tell anyone. Your father has to be in the City today, or he would have come with me. He isn’t pleased, and neither am I. You did all this in secret. Why didn’t you tell us? You can do as you wish, I know, but you might at least have told us, so that we could have talked about it.’
‘Your coat’s wet,’ said Emma. ‘Let me hang it up, then you can sit down.’
Clara, not knowing how they would tell Rachel their reason for being here, went into the kitchen to make tea. Their lives had changed utterly. A few months ago the rest of the world hadn’t existed except as a place in which to find entertainment, but now it was there only to threaten them. She could not understand why it must seem as if something dreadful had happened. They were young, comfortably off, and healthy. But Emma had struck a blow to change their lives, and Clara wondered why she had acted in such an unnecessarily perverse way. The wickedest thought, which said what a pity Emma couldn’t lose the baby so that they could go back to being their old carefree selves, had again to be pushed out of her mind.
Emma rocked in a chair by the fire, and Rachel looked at her. ‘You’re pregnant.’
‘Yes.’
‘I knew there was more to it than changing houses. Your father also said: “I wonder what it is? Something is surely wrong.”’
‘Why is it wrong, mother?’
She sat on a straight-backed chair at the table, instead of comfortably by the fire, and lifted her hand as if to push the devil away. ‘Why is it wrong? she says. Why is it wrong?’ She turned as if semicircled by an audience, a hand to her heart. ‘Is it so hard to know what’s wrong and what’s right?’
Clara came in with the tray. ‘I see she told you.’
‘Told me? She’s like a barrel – or will be soon. I knew as soon as I came in the door. She disguised it at home, but doesn’t care to here – though I had my suspicions. Why wasn’t I told weeks ago?’
‘We were afraid,’ Clara admitted.
‘Afraid? I hope you never have anything more to be afraid of than that.’ She was troubled, and angry. ‘There’s no telephone here. I must talk to your father, poor man. He’ll be worried till he hears from me, but I can’t think how upset he’ll be when he listens to what I have to say.’
Clara set out cakes and poured tea. ‘The nearest telephone is at the station. But must you tell him?’
‘When did it happen? No, I don’t care to know. But who’s the father? Where is he, at least?’
Emma was silent.
‘Well, he certainly isn’t here, and that’s not a good sign. It’s terrible to think about. We had great hopes for you two after dear John died – may he rest in peace. We thought you would find husbands who’d make you happy.’
Clara was forced to say: ‘There aren’t so many men now, mother.’
‘There are for girls like you.’ Clara thought the tears on her cheeks came more at the mention of John than because of Emma. ‘You wouldn’t even have to try.’
‘Mother,’ Emma said, ‘please don’t go on like this. It’s my life. I don’t care what father says when he knows. I’m not dying, and he’s not going to be hurt. It isn’t the worst thing in the world.’
Clara shovelled coal from the scuttle and slid it on to the fire. The fumes of soot were bad for her skin. At home they had central heating fuelled by coke from the cellar. She hoped Emma would say nothing, and let their mother talk, for there was little to be gained by making her more unhappy than she was, and perhaps reminding her of what she had been as a young woman. But Emma would not stop, and Clara was to see how those who were most alike knew best how to make each other suffer.
‘I fell in love. It sounds stupid, but what else can I say?’
‘And did he?’
Emma smiled. ‘We enjoyed ourselves. It was as if we had only a week to live. If I spend the rest of my life paying for it, I won’t mind. He stayed every night in my cabin, after Clara and I had said goodnight.’
Clara would have felt that she too had been betrayed, had she not considered Emma’s frankness as self-indulgent boasting designed to hurt herself more than anyone else. ‘What a swine he was for not taking care!’
The same bright smile lit her eyes. ‘I wouldn’t let him. I wanted everything, and he did as I told him.’ She leaned forward. ‘It was beautiful.’
The world could fall to pieces, and she wouldn’t care, adding what a pity it was that she had come away with Clara instead of by herself. She had her own money, and when the baby was born she would bring it up without anyone’s interference. Later she would get some kind of job, because she couldn’t be idle all her life. Alec had said everyone ought to work, whether or not they had money.
Rachel straightened. ‘Alec?’
‘And do you know what he was? A pastrycook who did the fancy trimmings for our jaded tastebuds! If it’s of any interest he was also Jewish. Maybe that’s why I fell for him. He was very handsome, and kind, and we parted friends. But we agreed never to see each other again. He wanted to meet me, of course, but I insisted that we mustn’t. In any case, he was married and had children. It would have been too ugly and squalid. He took it very well, though not too well, thank goodness. Luckily I didn’t know how hard it would be, though I still wouldn’t have done it any other way.’
The clatter of Rachel’s falling cup stopped her. Clara went to the kitchen for a cloth. ‘You make me so clumsy,’ Rachel said. Now that Emma had stopped telling her story there was a veil of childish misery on her face. Rachel looked at herself thirty-five years younger, and the reflection of the mirror shook as if Emma was going to cry at last. When she didn’t Rachel said: ‘We must find him.’
‘You want to make him pay?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ her mother shouted.
‘It’s no crime, so leave me alone. I know my mind, and that’s what I want. If it’s a boy, I shall have him circumcised.’
‘It’s the fashion nowadays,’ Rachel said sharply. ‘Ever since the Royal Family had it done, I suppose.’
‘I’ll get a rabbi to do it.’
‘A schochan,’ she was informed.
‘Whoever it is. You never told me.’
‘You never asked,’ her mother said. ‘But what a shame. What a terrible shame it is.’
She above all knew there was nothing to be done. The ticking of the clock told her. That’s what came of giving girls an income as soon as they were twenty-one, and letting them do whatever they wanted. The war had been a disaster in every way, because as well as getting killed and maimed, young people had learned to have their own way.