“Dead,” Viola said helpfully, quite happy to give up Millie to the past tense.
Dorothy’s face collapsed into a kind of paroxysm of anguish. She put her hand to her forehead in a mime of despair. “Gone!”
“I hardly knew her,” Viola said matter-of-factly. “She always seemed to be abroad.”
“Hm,” Dorothy said, as if insulted by this news. She frowned. “What are you doing anyway?”
“Looking for eggs,” Viola lied easily. You always had to be seen to be doing something useful. It was so tiring.
“Shouldn’t that child” (they were always “that child” or “those children”) “be wearing a sun bonnet?”
“Bonnet?” Viola said, taken by such an old-fashioned word. Captain Wentworth beckoned. “Must get on,” she said. “Eggs to look for.”
When Viola was pregnant with Bertie, Dorothy had advocated a “natural birth” for the new baby at Adam’s Acre. Viola couldn’t think of anything worse. Sunny had been born in a big busy London teaching hospital, Viola high as a kite on pethidine. At night the babies were taken away to a nursery and the mothers were all given sleeping pills. It was bliss. They were kept in for a week and fed meals and snacks and milky drinks and not expected to do very much other than feed and change their babies, often without even getting out of bed. Viola wasn’t about to give all that up for some torturous rite of passage orchestrated by (a childless) Dorothy. Viola couldn’t help but think of Rosemary’s Baby.
She was virtually a prisoner. There was no telephone at the farm and how would she get to hospital if no one would drive her in the van? She regretted now not persevering with driving lessons with her father when she still lived at home. She hadn’t wanted to be stuck in a car with her father while he taught her stuff he knew and she didn’t (which was almost everything). He was an irritatingly patient teacher. She suddenly remembered something, how her father had spent every Saturday morning for a whole year coaching her so that she could get through her Maths O level. He had used the same pencil all year, a stubby soft-leaded one. Viola couldn’t keep her hands on the same pencil or pen for more than a day before she lost it. She felt sick at the thought of the algebra and equations they had worked their way through, her father persevering until she had (briefly) understood. All forgotten now, of course, so what had been the point? And all it meant was that she scraped through with a low grade, got middling results in all her A levels except for English, got a foot in the door of a mediocre university and ended up with a crap degree. And look where that had got her. Here. That was where. No money, no job, two kids, useless boyfriend. She would have been better off leaving school at fifteen and doing a hairdressing apprenticeship.
In the end, of course, she had Bertie in hospital and the devil did not come calling for his child. He had no need, he already had Sunny.
She must have fallen asleep. She woke with a start and felt her face burning uncomfortably from where the sun had progressed across it. It took her a few seconds to remember her children. How long since they went for ice-creams? She struggled to her feet and looked around the beach. No sign. Kidnapped, drowned, fallen off the cliff? Any number of scenarios had Viola in their dramatic grip, all of them indicting her as a terrible mother.
They were eventually found, waiting patiently if somewhat glumly at the Lost Children hut. Viola had no idea such a thing even existed. “Did you do that on purpose?” she said to Sunny as they raced the incoming tide to collect their wet sandy belongings and stuff them back into bags. (This is why we don’t come to the beach, she thought.)
Sunny was speechless with indignation. He had been terrified out of his mind when he realized that he couldn’t find his way back from the ice-cream van. The beach was vast and almost everyone on it was taller than he was. He had imagined them being washed away by the sea or having to stay there all night on the sand in the dark on their own. The added burden of knowing he was the one who, in his mother’s absence, was duty-bound to look after Bertie drove him to distraction and when a nice motherly lady came up to him and said, “Now then, what are you two doing wandering around? Have you lost your mummy?” he was overcome with relief and broke down in tears. He loved that woman with all his heart.
“Never do that again,” Viola said.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said quietly. The fight had gone out of him. He had begun the day as an overwound clock. Now he knew he was barely ticking.
“Where is Daddy?” Bertie asked.
“Swimming,” Viola snapped.
“He’s been swimming for hours.”