Human Croquet Kate Atkinson

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THE BONNY BONNY ROAD

The London house was a hive of activity as the staff got ready for the return of Sir Edward and Lady de Breville from abroad. Not alone, but with their new baby. Sir Edward de Breville had sent for his own nanny to come up from the family’s country residence. Although Nanny had been enjoying her retirement in the heart of the country – all that gossip and rhubarb wine – she responded well to the call of duty and hauled herself up to town from Suffolk, tempted by a second-class railway ticket and the opportunity to shape another generation of de Brevilles. What’s more, she had been promised a nursery staff of four – a dogsbody, two nursemaids and a second nanny – underneath her and was looking forward to throwing her weight around in her old age.

‘All those people for one little baby,’ the parlourmaid whispered to the footman, ‘and to think, my mother brought up six of us single-handed.’

‘Ah, but the rich are different,’ the footman said, ‘they take a lot more looking after.’

The de Brevilles had always been rich, ever since they came over with the Conquest and were handed lands left, right and centre by the Bastard (conqueror and king), for their zeal in subduing the stubborn English. Since then they had just got richer and richer, with their huge tracts of farmland in Wiltshire, their orchards in Kent, their fields of barley in Fife, their fields of coal in Yorkshire, a swathe of elegant buildings in Mayfair.

Edward de Breville, last of his line. Twenty-nine years old, tall and handsome, as was the birthright of all first-born de Breville sons. A responsible man, he didn’t leave those orchards and coal-fields unvisited, or fail to keep an eye on his overseers. The rich do not get richer by neglecting their money. A war-hero, a captain of men, with a distinguished scar running the length of one handsome cheek where a German bayonet caught him. A man who believed in King and Country, despite everything he’d witnessed in the fields of Flanders. A man who believed in cricket on the village green and humility in the company of men of the cloth, even lowly vicars.

And the most eligible of bachelors – well-behaved girls swooned for him, society girls pretended innocence for him, fast young things slowed down and boasted about their domestic skills. ‘Such a catch,’ the society matrons whispered furiously over the lobster in aspic and the claret jellies.

In the first season after the Great War Edward de Breville was the most competed-for man in London. Which of the lovely, and not so lovely, well-bred English roses would he choose for a consort? He would not, surely, look across the Atlantic to all those upstart daughters of press barons and bankers and vulgar shipping millionaires, all of them dying to be duchesses?

No indeed, for Sir Edward’s eye had roamed a little further south than New York or Boston – to somewhere more exotic, more outlandish – had been charmed by the lovely form of an Argentinian cattle heiress, Irene Otalora. ‘Beef?’ the society matrons gasped in horror.

Sir Edward didn’t have to travel as far as the pampas to find his Argentinian bride, for she had a French mother and was quite the European, summering in Deauville, where Sir Edward discovered her, daintily sipping a citron pressé. They married abroad, quietly, to avoid interest in her problematic Catholic religion.

Sir Edward watched his wife on the night of their wedding, dropping her silken clothes around her ankles like Botticelli’s Venus rising from the waves. She unwound the long black hair that curled to her waist and stepped out of her clothes and raised her arms above her head to display her body to her new husband and Sir Edward thought of Salome and Jezebel and the Queen of Sheba and thanked God for French mothers-in-law who educated their daughters so well.

For an untimely second, Sir Edward had a vision of a roomful of stone-cold English roses lying stiffly between the nuptial sheets like effigies, an entirely unwelcome vision immediately banished by the sight of his new wife gliding towards him. The grandee tilt of the head, the coquettish smile, the thrusting breasts with their darkbrown aureoles, the firm grasp of those brown fingers on his manhood … Sir Edward melted into his honeymoon bed and his honeymoon wife.

And now there was little Esme. ‘A very pretty child,’ was Nanny’s pleased verdict. ‘We’ll make a real de Breville out of her.’

Lady de Breville visited the nursery every day and cooed prettily over her lace-clad baby and spoke high-class nonsense in French while Nanny smiled patiently and waited for her to go so she could get on with giving the child oatmeal and Scotch broth. Lady de Breville had the baby’s ears pierced when she was only a few weeks old, so now she had tiny gold hoops in her little brown ears. Like a gypsy, Nanny thought, but managed to hold her disgust in. She was only a servant after all.

Every evening little Esme was brought down, long after Nanny would have had her in bed, and paraded in the drawing-room to be admired by Sir Edward and Lady Breville’s dinner guests as they glittered and fluttered in their sequins and feathers drinking ‘cocktails’. Being foreign, of course, Nanny thought, Lady Irene didn’t know how to treat servants. Nanny didn’t like the patrician line Lady Irene took with the nursery staff. Nanny didn’t like it at all. Nanny began to mutter under her breath.

Lady Irene had cut off all that sensual hair and now had a sleek androgynous bob that didn’t entirely go with her voluptuous Latin American figure. She showed more leg – and very good leg it was – than any other London hostess, and danced the Charleston as well as any chorus girl. Sir Edward had begun to notice the overbearing nature of his Buenos Airean brahmin, beginning to wonder if this marriage was such a good idea after all. He looked at girls like Lady Cecily Markham and Lady Diana de Vere with their pale well-fed skin and horse-riding hips and regretted rejecting them so peremptorily. They would have handled the servants so much better.

Nanny declared that she was very sorry but she was going to go back to Suffolk if Sir Edward didn’t mind, it wasn’t that she wanted to make trouble or anything but she didn’t really see eye to eye with Lady Irene – foreign ways and so on – she had known Sir Edward as man and boy but really—

‘Thank you, Nanny,’ Sir Edward interrupted kindly, ‘of course you may go.’

What a delight little Esme was. Sir Edward had started to visit the nursery almost every day. The second-in-command nanny – Margaret – was now in charge and doing a very good job. She was a very plain girl, very religious with lots of modern ideas about fresh air. The nursery dogsbody had broken an ankle, tripping in the muddy street, and was staying with her sister until she was better. There were two nursemaids, Mina and Agatha. Agatha was pretty in a very English way, blond curls, hazel eyes, snub nose. Edward’s mother, the dowager Lady de Breville, had always had very strict rules about interplay with the servants, it simply wasn’t done.

‘This simply isn’t done,’ Sir Edward murmured through the blond curls as he caught Agatha on the back stairs and sank his hands into her ripe flesh. Sir Edward didn’t mean to shout out quite so loudly as he shuddered to a climax somewhere inside the fustian petticoats of the nursemaid and Agatha certainly didn’t mean to squeal quite so much when the aristocratic member penetrated her plebeian hymen – certainly neither of them intended to draw the attention of the mistress of the house. But in no time at all there was a terrible commotion on the back stairs and a dark avenging angel had whisked Sir Edward upstairs out of the servants’ sight, but not their earshot, and was screaming in a polyglot language that pronounced Sir Edward a damned cochon loco.

The town house was in a certain disarray. Lady Irene retired to Paris for a few weeks to think things over. Not that she had the slightest intention of ending her marriage but Sir Edward needed to suffer a little, show a little repentance – an emerald necklace perhaps, or a racehorse. Agatha was dismissed without references. The nanny, Margaret, came down with a dreadful dose of flu. Mina was put out by the amount of work she had to do. ‘When did I last have a day off?’ she asked Esme, who gurgled and waved her tiny fists around in the air.

Mina was in love with one of the footmen, a callous, callow youth called Bradley. Mina had lately been rejected by Bradley. Mina’s heart was breaking.

* * *

‘I’ll take you out for your walk then,’ Mina sighed, carrying Esme down to the back hall where the huge baby carriage was parked. Mina, in her dull nursemaid’s uniform, pushed the baby carriage along the leafy London streets, turned through the huge wrought-iron gates to the park, took bread from her pocket and threw it for the ducks, sat on a park bench and sang a little nursery rhyme, watched a drowsy Esme fall helplessly into sleep, ate a dry biscuit from her pocket, caught sight of Bradley across the other side of the pond – surely not? But it was his day off after all, she knew that – Mina knew what Bradley should be doing every second of the day. He had spurned her, used her and spurned her, taken her virtue and discarded her like an old rag (Mina read a lot of cheap fiction), but Mina still loved him, her heart would always belong to him.

Quackquackquackquaaak! went the ducks as Mina stood up suddenly, shedding biscuit crumbs and tears – there was another woman with him. Not just any other woman, but Agatha, the disgraced nursemaid – a scarlet woman. A fallen woman. Behaving in a very familiar way with Bradley. How long had she been behaving in this familiar way with Bradley? Mina strode off to question, to berate, to cling tearfully to Bradley and beg for the return of his affections, and if not the return of his affections then at least a little money to help bring up the disgrace he’d seeded in her neat, round nursemaid belly. For Mina was also a fallen woman. Unbe-known to Mina and Bradley, Agatha is also a seed-pod, carrying Sir Edward’s baby. So many fatherless babies concentrated in one London park. Baby Esme sleeps on peacefully.

Who was coming along the path now? A shabby woman, overweight and old for her years. A dingy brown coat that had never been in fashion, a big man’s umbrella, a big Gladstone bag. Here was Maude Potter, wife of Herbert Potter, a clerk in a shipping company. The Potters had no family, only each other. Mrs Potter had lost four babies in the womb and had just come out of a charity hospital where she’d been delivered of the fifth, a dead little girl. Mr Potter’s employers would not even give him the morning off work so he could come and accompany her home. In her big Gladstone bag she had her hospital nightdress and the baby clothes she’d hopefully taken in with her. Her breasts were leaking, her fat empty belly was wobbling, she was utterly distracted, thought she might throw herself in the boating pond.

Quackquackquack, went the ducks. Here was a turn up for the books, thought Maude Potter, a big posh baby carriage like you would see the royal family’s babies in. Maude Potter looked inside the baby carriage. Lo and behold – a baby! Poor baby, surely it belonged to someone? She looked around, there on the other side of the pond a man and two women, one of them a nursemaid by the look of it, shouting and screaming and spouting language that no decent person would ever use. ‘You whore!’ Mina screamed at Agatha, ‘You slut!’ Agatha screamed back, while the footman tried to make himself invisible. Such people were clearly not fit to be in charge of a baby. Poor Baby.

The baby gave a little whimper in its sleep. Maude Potter thought she would just lift it out and give it a little cuddle. The baby opened its eyes and smiled at her. ‘Oh,’ said Maude Potter. Her breasts ached, her womb contracted. This baby didn’t really belong to anyone, she thought, lifting it gently out of its covers, had maybe been abandoned? Had maybe been put in this park by God himself, to give Herbert and herself the child they deserved (Maude was very religious)? Yes, the baby had come down to earth like a fallen cherub. Or, now Maude becomes very fanciful, a gift child, like little Thumbelina, a present from the fairies … nightclothes tumbled from the Gladstone to make room, a little nest, a walnut shell …

Mina could hardly see for the tears in her eyes. Nearly fell in the pond as she marched away from Agatha and the footman, head held high trying to regain her dignity. She would not look back and see them arm in arm, walking away together, the seducer and his fallen woman. Mina stumbled back to the baby carriage, pulled the brake off, took it by its handle, felt its well-sprung rocking, pushed it off along the path – stopped. Brushed the tears out of her eyes in disbelief –

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