‘I’d like her to die….’
There was a gentle nudge. Nannie was handing her the baby, whispering:
“Careful, now, take her-steady-and then you hand her to the clergyman.” Laura whispered back: “I know.”
Baby was in her arms. Laura looked down at her. She thought: ‘Supposing I opened my arms and just let her fall-on to the stones. Would it kill her?’
Down on to the stones, so hard and grey-but then babies were so well wrapped up, so-so padded. Should she? Dare she?
She hesitated and then the moment was gone-the baby was now in the somewhat nervous arms of the Reverend Eustace Henson, who lacked the practised ease of the vicar. He was asking the names and repeating them after Laura Shirley, Margaret, Evelyn…. The water trickled off the baby’s forehead. She did not cry, only gurgled as though an even more delightful thing than usual had happened to her. Gingerly, with inward shrinking, the curate kissed the baby’s forehead. The vicar always did that, he knew. With relief he handed the baby back to Nannie.
The christening was over.
Part 1 – Laura – 1929
CHAPTER one
1
Below the quiet exterior of the child standing beside the font, there raged an ever-growing resentment and misery.
Ever since Charles had died she had hoped… Though she had grieved for Charles’s death (she had been very fond of Charles), grief had been eclipsed by a tremulous longing and expectation. Naturally, when Charles had been there, Charles with his good looks and his charm and his merry carefree ways, the love had gone to Charles. That, Laura felt, was quite right, was fair. She had always been the quiet, the dull one, the so often unwanted second child that follows too soon upon the first. Her father and mother had been kind to her, affectionate, but it was Charles they had loved.
Once she had overheard her mother say to a visiting friend:
“Laura’s a dear child, of course, but rather a dull child.” And she had accepted the justice of that with the honesty of the hopeless. She was a dull child. She was small and pale and her hair didn’t curl, and the things she said never made people laugh-as they laughed at Charles. She was good and obedient and caused nobody trouble, but she was not and, she thought, never would be, important.
Once she had said to Nannie: “Mummy loves Charles more than she loves me….”
Nannie had snapped immediately:
“That’s a very silly thing to say and not at all true. Your mother loves both of her children equally-fair as fair can be she is, always. Mothers always love all their children just the same.”
“Cats don’t,” said Laura, reviewing in her mind a recent arrival of kittens.
“Cats are just animals,” said Nannie. “And anyway,” she added, slightly weakening the magnificent simplicity of her former pronouncement, “God loves you, remember.”
Laura accepted the dictum. God loved you-He had to. But even God, Laura thought, probably loved Charles best…. Because to have made Charles must be far more satisfactory than to have made her, Laura.
‘But of course,’ Laura had consoled herself by reflecting, ‘I can love myself best. I can love myself better than Charles or Mummy or Daddy or anyone.’
It was after this that Laura became paler and quieter and more unobtrusive than ever, and was so good and obedient that it made even Nannie uneasy. She confided to the housemaid an uneasy fear that Laura might be ‘taken’ young.
But it was Charles who died, not Laura.
2
“Why don’t you get that child a dog?” Mr. Baldock demanded suddenly of his friend and crony, Laura’s father.
Arthur Franklin looked rather astonished, since he was in the middle of an impassioned argument with his friend on the implications of the Reformation.
“What child?” he asked, puzzled.
Mr. Baldock nodded his large head towards a sedate Laura who was propelling herself on a fairy bicycle in and out of the trees on the lawn. It was an unimpassioned performance with no hint of danger or accident about it. Laura was a careful child.
“Why on earth should I?” demanded Mr. Franklin. “Dogs, in my opinion, are a nuisance, always coming in with muddy paws, and ruining the carpets.”