Free Lettice & Victoria by Susanna Johnston Page B

service. Roland, numb and dumb, suffered noticeably. Lettice, snapping and flashing, looked wretchedly unhappy too, particularly when Archie told her that he intended to visit Victoria and Maudie.
    ‘Archie, you are an angel.’ Thus he felt free to go with a clear conscience.
    Roland visited Victoria in hospital. He kissed the baby and left as soon as he dared.
    Archie wrote, ‘What can I say? I could write a good deal but would prefer to talk to you. Of course I would sooner you had given birth to a son but I will come and see you, if I may. Maudie is a pretty name and I’m sure you are already a wonderful mother. Your news has revived me and I no longer believe myself to be in a department store at closing time. Best love.’
    Victoria answered, ‘Dearest Archie. You are very kind. Please come but don’t put yourself out. Don’t come if you think it might bother Lettice. It is terrible for her. I do hope that you will though. Best love.’
    Archie went to see her the day after the funeral.
    During Archie’s visit he told Victoria, ‘Lettice knew of my coming and approved of my doing so.’
    He did not ask to see the baby. She was in another room with a label on her wrist.
    Victoria knew that, soon, there was to be no alternative but for her to go, indefinitely, to live at The Old Keep for she was short of money.
    Amongst many letters Victoria received concerning her double event, a grizzly one came from Northern Italy.
    Mungo had spotted both items in Laurence’s airmail edition of the
Times
and wrote to say, ‘Laurence would, most certainly , have bidden one to comment on your news both sad and glad. The poor old dear is slipping away fast. One has been efficacious in persuading him to receive the priest. Elena has proved herself to be the most frightful stumbling block and refused to show him up. As one mentioned before, one’s first instincts were consistent with facts, she is a thorn in everyone’s flesh. One can’t think what’s got into her. After all, peasants are surely of the faith.’
    Poor Elena. How painful for her to witness the agnostic Laurence being got at. The
buffo
went on to say, ‘It cannot be long now. Have no fear. The old dear is in excellent hands.’
    A packet of sea horses came for Maudie. Elena had wrapped them carefully in a padded envelope and for the first time since widowhood, Victoria wept.
    At The Old Keep Victoria and Maudie slept in a room at the top of the tower. Victoria had specially requested this. The winding stairs were tricky with a baby to carry up and down but it gave privacy. It was rum up there. At one stage there had been six openings in the brickwork, cutting through and randomly punctuating the thick wall. In these gaps doves had rested; billing and cooing. Lettice, never eager to tamper with the picturesque, had glassed them in – or rather glassed them out. Panes, flat against the inside wall, had been slotted into place. Sprig-muslin curtains cuddled round them likepeek-a-boo bonnets, pinned permanently open, never destined to be drawn. Each tiny curtained window, air neither entering nor escaping, framed doves – comfortable each night in time-worn resting places.
    Victoria lay awake, alert, as birds landed and left, teased and tumbled as though on six television sets but more enthralling. In one window a plump, ruffled and fluffed pair pecked at each other, beady-eyed.
    In another three were squeezed in side by side, bored and sedentary. Archie and Harold in the first perhaps; then the three Bobbies.
    Above Maudie’s cot a third pair perched. They preened and praised. Lettice and Roland. Above this there was a small resting place where a solitary bird gazed and met her eyes. Antics varied from box to box and at one moment she saw a pale and hazy Edgar drift away without flurry. By morning every bird had flown.
    Most of the neighbours knew that Lettice had her daughter-in -law and baby granddaughter staying with her.
    Belinda was the first to call.