‘It’s got to be called something,’ Clara answered.
Rachel laid a finger on Emma’s forehead. ‘I thought her time would never end.’ Clara waited for her to say more, but she leaned across the bed and put the palm of her hand under Emma’s nightdress, holding it on her left breast till she thought to take the golden Star of David from her own neck and lay it on the table as a present for the baby. ‘Please God they’ll both be well.’
‘We shall have to make sure it’s the end of her troubles,’ Clara said.
‘Nothing ever ends,’ Rachel told her, before leaving for London a fortnight later. ‘Our lives only go on so that Death can get its reckoning.’
Clara laughed, and so did Emma, who put her arms around her mother and said after a kiss: ‘Where did you hear such sombre old twaddle?’
Rachel pushed her away, but Clara noted that it was a playful action. There was an air of affection before their parting.
‘It certainly isn’t twaddle. Eternal truths need stressing again and again. They always have – especially to one’s children. And you’re still children, don’t forget, till I die, whatever you may think.’
‘Eternal truths!’ Emma exclaimed. ‘Really, they only enslave us, mother.’
‘They do if you want them to,’ Rachel said. ‘But they needn’t at all. Eternal truths keep people like us civilized. We’d be badly off without them. And they’re more than necessary for the rest of the world.’
Emma smiled, and helped her on with her coat. ‘I hope not.’
‘Hope!’ Rachel said. ‘You won’t get very far on that – though I should hope, I suppose, that you’ll both find good husbands before very long.’
But Clara had made up her mind never to marry, and never to have children. Any such process would certainly stop with her. A magazine article said that all women should have children, even if only one, for what woman, the wise man asked, wanted to be ‘the end of the line’? It was bad for the woman, bad for society, and bad for the country. Clara threw the magazine across the parlour. If she were destined to be lonely at the end of the line, so be it, she snorted. And what damned line did the fool mean? A clothes line? Let the idiot have children himself, if he could. And if she didn’t, there were millions around her who most certainly would, so as far as the country went there was nothing to fear. Let the people breed. It would give them something to do in their otherwise empty lives. Nature had organized things very well, except that the country had too many inhabitants for comfort, judging by the queues for buses, trains and picture-houses which hadn’t been there before the war. But as for her – no children, she told herself, ever.
12
When the train arrived at Liverpool Street station they said that Rachel had been robbed, and then died from a heart attack, but a farmer found her purse by the railway line and gave it to the police. Nothing was missing. Her lost Star of David, Clara explained to her father when he asked, had been given to the new baby.
Percy wrote in his letter that his dear wife must have passed away in an effort to get out of the speeding train, and dropped the purse during the heart-failure which stopped her from doing so. She had not wanted to die while in the moving carriage, and perhaps she would still be here if she hadn’t done such a lot of travelling in the last few months. He wondered if Emma knew that self-centred actions invariably had such repercussions? The strain on her mother had been more than either she or Clara had imagined. He had told her not to go so often to Cambridge, and they had quarrelled about it on more than one occasion. But she had been too devoted to listen, and in such a matter he had not persisted. She was one of the good people of the world, without whose kind we might all become barbarians again.
Across the letter Clara had written in broad red penciclass="underline" ‘SNAKE! HYPOCRITE!’ – and called him as much to his face after the funeral. ‘Your sort are the barbarians,’ she wrote in the small space left after he had signed his name.
13
‘I had a letter from father,’ she said.
‘You are lucky,’ Emma replied.
‘Aren’t you interested?’
‘Burn it – for all I care.’
Clara always mentioned Emma and the baby when she wrote to her father, if only to prove to herself that she was not the sort of person who would become a barbarian if people like her mother ceased to exist. She tried to count herself charitable in her thoughts and at least some of her actions, while aware that she rarely succeeded in doing anything good. Her father’s favourite saying was that the road to hell was paved with good intentions, and she decided that what for many people might be a very effective footpath she had made into a Ministry of Transport ‘A’ Road by concocting in her own mind plans for helpful actions which through inanition she neglected to carry out. Her only kindnesses, she supposed, were those which came to her suddenly and were accomplished with no inner discussion. To mull over doing good beforehand was a way of giving herself the credit for it, though she would never allow herself to receive any when she did help someone.
She wrote to her father frequently now that he was alone, and in one letter added a postcript too quickly to be considered, saying wouldn’t it be best if the three of them came to live at home? ‘The lease will be finished on this hole of a house in a couple of months, and it’s difficult to know where we will go when it is.’
The letter was in the post before she wondered whether her suggestion had been wise. She could hardly go to the pillar box and get it back and had, after all, only done it for the best. ‘For the best she had done it,’ her mother used to say, when Clara dropped her dinner plate in the nursery, or pulled a plant in the garden, and Emma would take up the call so that Rachel told her to stop or she too would be sent to her room.
Clara waited, till she forgot either to wait or hope, and as the days went by Emma fed her baby with care and assiduity. Time had no meaning now that she was so occupied. ‘It’s only for a while, though,’ she said emphatically. ‘I’ll want to do something soon.’
‘Such as what?’
‘Work. Act. Get out of this.’
Did she think she could find any sort of job with an illegitimate child clinging to her waist?
‘I want to travel.’ She put her book down. ‘There’s no place in the world I don’t want to go. But I wish I’d been born a man.’
Clara laughed. ‘They have their troubles too, or so I understand.’
‘Oh yes, but I’d still be me, and things would be easier. I’d be able to do much more. I wouldn’t feel so weighed down with unnecessary complications.’
‘Things will turn out all right.’ Clara lit a cigarette. ‘Except, of course, that you have Thomas to care for now.’
‘Give me one. You know I like to smoke after lunch. I’ll get someone to look after him whenever I go away.’
‘A person you can trust, I hope.’ Clara could not see herself nursing a baby, not even her sister’s. The idea seemed ludicrous. ‘Mother would have taken him, I expect, but I can’t imagine father setting to.’
Emma lifted her book again. ‘I shall find someone.’
On fine days the maid pushed the high perambulator down the street, often when Clara thought the weather too damp and bitter for him to be out. He would get a chill, or something worse. But Emma said he had to get used to the elements, otherwise he would be vulnerable to all sorts of things when he grew up.