The Cuckoo's Child Read online

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Eva decided. ‘Our first cup of tea in our new home! Do thank your aunt for the walnut cake, Laura. All men like walnut cake.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Philip.

  ‘There’s always bread and butter. Tom Illingworth will do it justice.’

  ‘Tom?’ The book of curtain samples on Laura’s lap became of consuming interest.

  ‘He’s coming for tea, if he can. Nice he’s so often in London, now he’s working for the LNER railway. Which one of these samples do you think is best, Laura?’

  ‘Oh, this one,’ Laura said, choosing at random.

  Soon after this, she left, murmuring her excuses. She had been scheduled to attend a thé-dansant at Claridge’s and had only just remembered it.

  ‘Let me get you a cab,’ Philip offered.

  ‘No thank you, Philip, I’ll walk.’

  Outside, she decided there was now no possibility of getting home in time to change; her escort would already have called at Chetwyn Square and found her absent. No use bothering about the excuses she would have to find for her shocking ill manners, either. In any case, the golden afternoon was too delicious to spend indoors, and her thoughts were now not at all suitable for carrying on even the mildest flirtation with Freddie Fford-Oliphant.

  The summer’s heat lingered on, and she wandered into St James’s Park in her light silk dress, a grey shot silk that sometimes looked lavender. Its skirt was a little too narrow for hurried walking, the heels of her black buckled shoes too high, and her lavender and black lace hat with its sweeping brim was pretty, but precarious in the breeze. And somehow, although she had thought it delightful when she chose it, knowing how fetching she looked in it, after the last hour in the flat with those two determinedly plainly dressed friends, the hat felt suddenly frivolous.

  She paused on the bridge over the lake. Below, a small boy in a sailor suit was feeding a family of ducks, while his nurse clutched a handful of his blouse, imploring him not to be too adventurous so near the water. Laura watched, trying to overcome the mixed feelings which had risen like boiling milk at the mention that Tom was expected for tea. She made herself feel calm and tried to stop thinking about him.

  Indeed, it had become her chief preoccupation in life at the moment to avoid thinking about Thomas Illingworth. She wondered if she’d ever become used to the sharp pain, somewhere near her breastbone, whenever his name was mentioned.

  But, oh bother, she couldn’t stop thinking about him.

  The last few months she’d spent in trivial idleness, trying to do just that. She had thought about working again in Stepney, such a refuge for an unhappy heart, but before she had made a fool of herself by asking, Uncle George had pointed out that her position there might now be an embarrassment, after the money she had donated. And so the summer had worn away, Laura once more drifting in her aunt’s wake. Not unaware of her unhappiness, her aunt and uncle had done their best, spoiling her with presents, clothes, weekends in the country, non-stop activities designed to wean her away from something they did not understand, and because she had wanted to be weaned, she had let them spoil her and tried to believe she was enjoying herself. Truthfully, she felt it was her very nature that was being spoiled by this shallow existence, meaningless compared with that of Una and Eva, filling their days, and all their spare time, with work for the WSPU and the many friends they had made in the movement; there was sisterhood and comradeship that Laura envied but could not bring herself to join in with wholeheartedly, much as she would have liked to.

  She wrote often to Jessie, now married to Matthew Pike. They had moved over to Bradford, to another working-class practice whose patients would no doubt frustrate Matthew as much as the Wainthorpe patients had ever done. But at least they wouldn’t be talking to him about ‘the doctor’ as they still referred to Widdop. The whole of Wainthorpe had reeled under the shock of Widdop’s arrest and sentence, while the practice had been taken over by two doctors from a neighbouring partnership.

  William Empson had written to thank Laura for the return of his manuscript and asked if he might continue to write to her. It was the beginning of a correspondence which she found far more rewarding than the short conversation in the Wainthorpe tea room, one which was blossoming into friendship. She looked forward to his letters, which were amusing, sometimes philosophical, often about the pressing issues of the day, and which made her wonder if he was trying, gently, to awaken her enthusiasm for the subjects. If so, he was succeeding. But more than anything, it was the reminiscences about his youth, and the farm, his sisters and, of course, Lucie, which he loved to put down on paper and which made Laura so eager to read them. She began to feel that she knew and loved Lucie, her mother, as he had known and loved her.

  Of course, Tom Illingworth had come to see her on his visits to London. Three times, to be exact – each visit less satisfactory than the previous one, though in what way Laura would have been hard pressed to say. For no reason she could name, except that there was an awkwardness that had not been present between them until that time at Farr Clough when she had rejected his advances. He was not still taking umbrage at that, surely? If he was, would he have come to see her, charming Lillian, and talking with George, who had found him a very ‘sound’ young man, high praise indeed?

  But then, there had come a day when he hadn’t arrived as he had said he would, and nor had he returned since . . .

  Below the bridge, the little boy’s supply of bread was giving out and the fleet of greedy ducks suddenly set up a raucous noise and began to swim away, their instinct for self-preservation guiding them unerringly towards a better source of free food in the shape of an old man with a large brown paper bag. The boy set up a roar of frustration and as Laura watched his struggles with his nurse, she felt a hand on her shoulder. Startled, she spun round, and could hardly believe it was Tom Illingworth himself who stood there, conjured up like some bad genie from a bottle. He was breathing heavily, as though he’d been running.

  ‘Why, Tom!’

  ‘Laura. The girls told me you had just left when I arrived at the flat and I guessed you’d take this way.’

  ‘Yes, the park is lovely at this time of year.’

  They stood looking at each other. ‘How very elegant you look,’ he said.

  Then we’re an elegant pair, she thought, struck anew by his appearance. So handsome he looked in his smart London suit, his high buttoned jacket, carrying a pair of lemon gloves. Not at all like the slightly dishevelled, windblown young man she had first met on the moor beyond Farr Clough. And how tanned and fit!

  ‘How is your mother?’

  ‘Very well. Settled in her new house. She likes being within walking distance of the town, and so near her sister. Your aunt and uncle are well?’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’

  ‘Look here,’ he said abruptly, ‘let’s cut all the chat. I have something to say to you – apologies, explanations to be made.’ She was very still, staring over the lake towards the domes and roofs of Whitehall, visible beyond the leafy arches of the trees. ‘Please, will you listen to me, let me have my say? After that I will go away and you need never see me again, but hear me out first, hmm?’

  She held her breath, sensing they were entering deep waters, but looked at him steadily and gave a slight nod.

  What he had to say was in fact soon said, but she had been right. These were deep waters indeed, deeper than she could have imagined. He gave it to her in terse sentences, letting the bald facts speak for themselves . . . An unwise and unhappy marriage, too young, when he had lived in South Africa . . . now dissolved . . . things easier to arrange out there, but still, the time it had taken . . . he had just returned from a return visit to finalize things. And now it was over, a sore and painful episode in two lives.

  He said, speaking rapidly, ‘If only you knew how I regret it, all of it . . . I should never have married her. She saw better than I it would be no use, but she let herself be persuaded. I should have
listened, waited.’ He looked taut and vulnerable and extremely wound up. ‘I regret it deeply, especially because of you. I had hoped you returned my . . . fondness, I let myself believe, but I was a fool . . . We need never see each other again. When I’ve finished the job I’m doing, soon, my next one may be anywhere in the world.’

  Divorce, she thought, still staggering from a revelation of something she could never have dreamed up.

  Divorce did not carry the same social stigma for a man as it did for a woman. A woman should remain true to her marriage vows, whatever the circumstances, where a man might sow his wild oats and nothing be thought of it. ‘If a woman divorces her husband,’ she said, ‘she doesn’t easily find acceptance, even in this enlightened day and age. But it’s easier the other way round, for a woman to marry a divorced man.’

  He met those clear, candid eyes that saw so directly, and were clearer than ever.

  ‘I wouldn’t put you through that, Laura. In any case, your aunt and uncle would never let you marry a divorced man.’

  ‘They can’t stop me, I am over age. But you underestimate them. If my happiness depended on it, if that was what I was determined to do, they would never try to prevent it.’

  The angry little boy ceased his roaring and was walking quite happily away holding his nurse’s hand. A swan sailed into view, two squirrels ran up a tree, one after the other, the golden leaves of autumn fluttered in a shower on to the bridge.

  ‘And does it?’ Tom asked, breathing hard. ‘Does your happiness depend upon it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘Yes, it does.’