She herself hadn’t said the things or looked or even felt as she had thought she would.
It wasn’t the way she had planned it. She hadn’t-really-taken Charles’s place. There was something missing with her, Laura. But it would be different tomorrow, she told herself, or if not tomorrow, then the next day, or the day after. The heart of the house, Laura said to herself, suddenly recalling a phrase that had taken her fancy from an old-fashioned children’s book she had come across in the attic.
That was what she was now, surely, the heart of the house.
Unfortunate that she should feel herself, with a deep inner misgiving, to be just Laura as usual.
Just Laura….
2
“Baldy seems to have taken quite a fancy to Laura,” said Angela. “Fancy, he asked her to tea with him while we were away.”
Arthur said he’d like very much to know what they had talked about.
“I think,” said Angela after a moment or two, “that we ought to tell Laura. I mean, if we don’t, she’ll hear something-the servants or someone. After all, she’s too old for gooseberry bushes and all that kind of thing.”
She was lying in a long basket chair under the cedar tree. She turned her head now towards her husband in his deck chair.
The lines of suffering still showed in her face. The life she was carrying had not yet succeeded in blurring the sense of loss.
“It’s going to be a boy,” said Arthur Franklin. “I know it’s going to be a boy.”
Angela smiled, and shook her head.
“No use building on it,” she said.
“I tell you, Angela, I know.”
He was positive-quite positive.
A boy like Charles, another Charles, laughing, blue-eyed, mischievous, affectionate.
Angela thought: ‘It may be another boy-but it won’t be Charles.’
“I expect we shall be just as pleased with a girl, however,” said Arthur, not very convincingly.
“Arthur, you know you want a son!”
“Yes,” he sighed, “I’d like a son.”
A man wanted a son-needed a son. Daughters – it wasn’t the same thing.
Obscurely moved by some consciousness of guilt, he said:
“Laura’s really a dear little thing.”
Angela agreed sincerely.
“I know. So good and quiet and helpful. We shall miss her when she goes to school.”
She added: “That’s partly why I hope it won’t be a girl. Laura might be a teeny bit jealous of a baby sister-not that she’d have any need to be.”
“Of course not.”
“But children are sometimes-it’s quite natural; that’s why I think we ought to tell her, prepare her.”
And so it was that Angela Franklin said to her daughter:
“How would you like a little baby brother?”
“Or sister?” she added rather belatedly.
Laura stared at her. The words did not seem to make sense. She was puzzled. She did not understand.
Angela said gently: “You see, darling, I’m going to have a baby… next September. It will be nice, won’t it?”
She was a little disturbed when Laura, murmuring something incoherent, backed away, her face crimsoning with an emotion that her mother did not understand.
Angela Franklin felt worried.
“I wonder,” she said to her husband. “Perhaps we’ve been wrong? Eve never actually told her anything – about-about things, I mean. Perhaps she hadn’t any idea…”
Arthur Franklin said that considering that the production of kittens that went on in the house was something astronomical, it was hardly likely that Laura was completely unacquainted with the facts of life.
“Yes, but perhaps she thinks people are different. It may have been a shock to her.”
It had been a shock to Laura, though not in any biological sense. It was simply that the idea that her mother would have another child had never occurred to Laura. She had seen the whole pattern as simple and straightforward. Charles was dead, and she was her parents’ only child. She was, as she had phrased it to herself, ‘all they had in the world.’
And now-now-there was to be another Charles.
She never doubted, any more than Arthur and Angela secretly doubted, that the baby would be a boy.
Desolation struck through to her.
For a long time Laura sat huddled upon the edge of a cucumber-frame, while she wrestled with disaster.