The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [191]
“It’s them,” said Elsie. “He makes pots about them. It isn’t right.”
“Of course it isn’t. But they might not know. It isn’t our business. We should lock it up.”
“I think they know. But I don’t know what they think about it. Perhaps he—”
Perhaps he puts himself inside them, she wanted to say, and couldn’t, but Philip heard the meaning of the silence.
“It isn’t our problem. You shouldn’t be thinking about such things.”
“I have something to tell you. I’m going to have to go away. You’ll have to do without me.”
Philip turned to her, still holding the girl-on-her-stomach. He stammered. Had she got a job? Was she thinking of getting married?
No, said Elsie. She was going to have a baby. She would be cast out. If you looked at—all this—it would be unfair to turn her out, but that was what would happen. She would have, she said, in a steely way, to find one of those places for Fallen Women that the do-gooders talked about. She needed Philip to help her to do that.
Philip tried to say that someone must be responsible, and ask who he was. Fludd, Geraint, the fisher-boy?
“I’m not saying any more, and you won’t make me. Just help me to go away, without a lot of scenes and shouting. I can’t abide to be told off and shouted at. I can’t and won’t abide it.”
She was terribly on edge. Philip put the china girl down and put his arm round his sister.
“I’ll think of something,” he said, rather hopelessly. He didn’t know how he could or would, or what he would think of. But, in the event, he did.
He felt he could talk better to a man, and decided on Frank Mallett. He walked over to Puxty and said he needed to talk to the vicar in private.
Frank Mallett was not a judging man. His own temptations, made so much more comfortable by the sturdy openmindedness of Edward Carpenter, made him generous to the differing temptations of others. He listened to Philip, who was both worried and censorious, and remarked mildly that a person was about to come into the world in difficult circumstances, and needed the best possible start. It would be a good thing, he said, if it could all be managed without too much blame or punishment. Gently, said Frank Mallett. Did Philip know who the father was? Was marriage possible or desirable, was there likely to be any support, moral or financial?
“She won’t say,” said Philip. “She’s hard as a rock. She’s not going to say. So I don’t think she’s getting married, and I don’t think she’s expecting help.”
“Don’t take it too hard yourself,” said the vicar. “I don’t know how the family at Purchase House could manage without your sister. I can’t see any help in appealing to them—they’d be baffled, merely. In different ways.”
“They don’t pay her a penny. It isn’t really right, but they’ve made a good sort of—well, not a home—place to be, for the pair of us.”
“I think,” said Frank Mallett, “I shall consult the good ladies of Romney Marsh. But I shall consult them privately. I shall not put the case to the Home for Fallen Women, or the charitable trusts. No, I shall invite the imaginative ones to tea. Miss Dace, I think, who is practical and generous. Mrs. Oakeshott, who knows what it is to bring up a single child. And maybe Mrs. Methley, who has become a friend of Miss Dace, and is anxious for employment. I shall ask for their help.”
“I don’t want them to lay into Elsie or talk down to her. Even if she’s been daft.”
“I think with the best will in the world you won’t avoid a little talking-down. You could even argue it would be deserved. But I think they’ll find practical steps to take.”
Frank’s tea-party—to which he invited neither Philip nor Elsie—went well. It produced some interesting insights into the feelings of the three ladies. They were brisk, and they were practical, and they were kindly disposed. Miss Dace knew of a nursing home which would look after the young woman when the time came. She said that she and the Sister in charge of the Forget-me-not