Chapter 24 A Chip Off the Old Block #3
After she left the café, she walked slowly up Roman Road, picturing herself falling under the wheels of a bus. She’d wake up in the hospital, bruised and bumpy but alive and, crucially, no longer pregnant.
“Els, hold on.”
She turned around to see Orla trotting along in her rabbit-fur hat and long wool coat. Snowflakes clung to her fringe and eyelashes. “You look like a Russian princess,” said Elsie.
“Why didn’t you wait for me?” Orla hooked her arm through Elsie’s. “Bitter out tonight.”
“Maud gave me the boot, didn’t she. Mean old cow.”
“Come on, it’s not her fault. It’s not good for business, is it? She’s trying to run a respectable establishment. Everyone can see you’ve got no ring on your finger.”
“It’s so unfair,” said Elsie. “I just want to be normal.”
“Quick, let’s run across the road before this motorcar.” They held on to their hats and scooted to the other side. “Did you think about, you know, what we discussed?”
“I can’t, Orla. I wish I could, but my mum would kill me. And my dad. He barely says two words to me anymore as it is. Just looks at me like I’m the Whore of Babylon.”
“You know, sometimes it happens without the girl even doing anything. You could pretend it was an act of God. Like he decided you were too young to be a mother.”
“Or I could say I was run over by a bus!” The idea made her feel more cheerful than she had in weeks.
“Come home with me now. No time like the present. We’ll stop and get a quarter bottle of whisky on the way. Just… just don’t ever tell anyone I helped you, will you?”
“What on earth did you do?” asked George. “You were, what, five months gone?”
Honor nodded. “Nearly. Orla said she’d done it herself lots of times, and that the baby would still have to come out but it would be tiny and dead.
I didn’t care, so long as I didn’t have to go on with it.
Anyway, she gave me some quinine in whisky—a far too large a dose for someone my size, I realized after.
It made me sick and unbelievably dizzy. Then she showed me how to use a douching apparatus.
Hot water, with a poison in it, I assume.
Poor Orla. She was so sorry for me and wanted to help.
It wasn’t her fault. But I got so ill I ended up in the hospital for nearly a week.
I’d contracted some kind of infection. All I remember is a tremendous amount of pain, and the nurses saying I’d die if the infection went into my bloodstream.
The subtext being it would serve me right.
They told me that if I lived, and my baby lived, it’d be damaged. A cripple or a moron or both.”
She was still weak and feverish when her mother picked her up from the hospital and told her they weren’t going home. They were going to Ireland, and never you mind about the war there.
Honor tried to never think back on those weeks, which existed as a sealed-off nightmare, not compatible with a life she could bear living.
She and her mother stayed in a two-room cottage, a shack, really, made of whitish stone, with a thatched roof that stank of mulchy decay.
More than anything, she remembered being cold all the time.
There was never enough firewood, nor food.
They ate a lot of kippers. (To this day, smoked fish turned Honor’s stomach.) The privy was twenty yards from the house, and it had no flush, just a pit.
Sometimes, when her mother was asleep, she’d think about killing her and then herself.
Or she fantasized about running away. But where could she go?
After half an hour of trudging in the snow, she’d have died of exposure.
When she went into labor, a month early, her mother fetched a local woman to help.
Mrs. Doyle, indescribably offensive with her spiderwebby sideburns and shiny red hands, her multiple layers of unwashed skirts, trudged into the bedroom and said, “God almighty, what’s with all this bleating and yelling?
You’ll raise the dead from their graves with that infernal racket, and that’d be all your poor mother needs, now, won’t it?
” Then finally—who knew how many hours later—“Ah, would you look at that, it’s a boy, it’s a lovely wee boy.
” The baby looked more like a pupa, so small and slimy and compact. So colorless.
“But he lived.” George said this quietly.
“He was tiny, but seemed physically all right. It was my mother who insisted on keeping him, taking him home. I wanted to wrap him up and leave him on some church steps. Either to die or to become someone else’s problem.
She said if I did that, I’d no longer have a home under her roof.
That she’d leave me there in that Irish hovel.
I think she soon regretted her decision, though.
” Honor paused to light a cigarette and lean into the shade.
“I know all babies cry, but Jack never stopped. He screamed all day and all night. Even I, who’d never met a baby, could see there was something not right about him.
As a toddler, he began to get this look in his eyes.
It’s hard to explain. It was like you couldn’t see a real person there.
When he’d do something naughty and we’d slap him, he didn’t flinch or react.
He seemed amused. Scornful, even. I know it sounds ridiculous. ”
“You thought the nurses’ predictions were being borne out.”
“Well, wouldn’t you? I’d tried to kill him, and this was the consequence. I can’t even pretend I felt guilty, though. Or guilt is too simple, too facile a description of what I felt.” Honor brushed away a tear with a violent swipe. “The real guilt came later, when he murdered that man.”
George stared at her. “Go on.”
And so Honor told her, at last, about Saul’s cousin Naomi, and Naomi’s husband, about the painting and the money, about abandoning Thomas without divorcing him, even about taking the stolen money herself.
“I can’t defend it. I suppose I was already so damned.
Because of my actions, a man was dead and a woman paralyzed, so what more was a bit of theft?
Of course I’d no idea what was actually happening to the Jews in Europe, or what was to come.
But I was so focused on myself, I’m not even sure it would have made any difference.
I’d been trapped in a nightmare since before reaching adulthood. And I saw a way out.”
“But I don’t see that you can blame yourself for Jack’s badness.
How do you know he wouldn’t have turned out like that anyway?
I mean, look at who his father was. What made Charles such a rotter?
I guarantee you his mother didn’t try to abort him.
If Cressida Mountford-Owen couldn’t direct a servant to do something, it didn’t get done. ”
Honor laughed. “But that’s precisely it.
That’s why I wanted to get to know you. I orchestrated it, you see, you moving in here.
If you were a horrible person, I reasoned, even an odd person, then Charles’s bequeathed heredity could be blamed for everything.
My conscience should be a bit lighter. You can imagine my disappointment when you were an utter joy. ”
George made a face. “I don’t know about that.
God, it is funny, isn’t it? In a farcical way.
And now that Charles isn’t my father, you can revert to your original theory.
If it helps, my sister Venetia is a soulless bitch.
And my other sister, Arabella, was never the full ticket.
” Honor laughed again as George protested she was serious.
“And supposedly my real father thinks I’m a chip off the old block.
Score one more for nature over nurture.”
The low sun cast a patchy radiance across the oblong of garden where Jack lay, turning the poppy petals a translucent orange.
Honor lit another cigarette and gazed into the distance.
“Comyns wants me to help him convict Saul. And in return, he’ll give me immunity against prosecution for bigamy.
Even retroactively legalize my marriage somehow.
I’m not going to do it, of course. But if I lose this house…
” She gestured to the bottom of the garden.
“You’ve got to tell him, you know. Saul. You’ve got to tell him everything you’ve told me.”
“It won’t matter. He won’t forgive me, and I don’t think he ought to.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But I’m not sure forgiveness is the point. These big secrets are poison, don’t you see?”
They were both quiet for a moment, then George grinned and patted Honor’s shoulder. “Anyway, we’ve got two tasks: make Comyns drop the charges against Saul, and somehow make you innocent of bigamy.”
“When you put it like that, it sounds most straightforward.” Honor smiled ruefully. “George—you were all right, weren’t you, when you had to get yourself fixed?”
“Oh yes—but how did you…”
“Robbie told me.”
“Ah. It was pretty ghastly. Painful. Annoyingly expensive. But it worked, which is the main thing.” She gave a slight shudder. “Those policemen saw my bloodstained mattress, unfortunately. Comyns tried to frighten me with it. Don’t worry, I gave him short shrift.”
“Thank God they didn’t pull the drawing room rug up,” said Honor. “Useless, really. I could tell Comyns despised those other policemen. They weren’t intelligent like him. Especially that big Scot with a drinker’s face.”
George bit her thumbnail thoughtfully. “You can’t have been the only one, can you?
Charles, I mean. He might still be doing it now.
” Imagining Honor as an innocent fourteen-year-old, she reached out to touch her cheek.
Honor covered George’s hand with her own.
In the wordless look they exchanged—vindictive, pained, extraordinarily resolute—a decision was made.