Joy and Josephine

By Monica Dickens

It isn't easy being born during The Great War. A young mother, desperate and alone, leaves her newborn on a church doorstep, whilst another dies in childbirth surrounded by wealth and family. Both baby girls are brought to the children's home, one to be adopted, and one to be looked after until her rich grandparents are in a position to look after her. After a tragic mix-up at the home, all is cast into darkness and uncertainty.

Years later Jo – a young woman seeking answers – attempts to discover which identity is rightfully hers. Did a poor young girl abandon her in a churchyard, or is she in fact a long-lost member of the aristocracy? Is she Joy, or is she Josephine?

Originally published in 1948, witty, engaging, and heartfelt, Joy and Josephine is Monica Dickens at her best.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448206308

Monica Dickens

Monica Dickens, MBE, 10 May 1915 - 25 December 1992, was the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens and author of over 40 books for adults and children. Disillusioned with the world she was brought up in - she was expelled from St Paul's Girls' School in London before she was presented at court as a debutante - she decided to go into service and her experiences as a cook and general servant formed the basis of her first book, One Pair Of Hands in 1939. She married a United States Navy officer and moved to America where she continued to write, most of her books being set in Britain. Monica Dickens had strong humanitarian interests and founded the Cape Cod and the Islands Samaritans in 1977, and it is for this charity that she recorded this audio edition of A Christmas Carol to benefit Samaritan crisis lines, support groups for those who have lost someone to suicide, and community outreach programs. In 1985 she returned to the UK after the death of her husband, and continued to write until her death on Christmas Day 1992.

Book preview

Part One: Josephine

Chapter 1

‘It’s the kiddies, that’s where it is,’ said Mrs Abinger, moist-eyed. ‘I always say …’

‘Oh so do I,’ agreed Miss Loscoe. ‘And so does my sister. She’s like that. You’ll see. She makes as big a fool of herself over all those little people at the Home as if they were her own.’

‘There now,’ said Mrs Abinger, watching the soldier in the opposite corner.

‘One thing I will say about my sister,’ said Miss Loscoe, as if she had not already said a hundred things about her since the train left Paddington, ‘she makes no distinction, no matter what class of home they come from. I treat them as I find, she says. They’re all kiddies to me.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Abinger, only half listening. She was trying to make out whether the young officer were the father of the baby in the Moses basket, into which he peered gingerly from time to time. If he were, why didn’t he wipe its nose? The poor little thing was blowing bubbles in and out as it breathed.

Mrs Abinger had always loved all babies. It had been the bitterest disappointment of her married life that she and George were childless, and now she was too old. George did not seem to mind, but Mrs Abinger had dreamed of babies for years. She was on her way now to make the dream come true at last by adopting a baby from the Home where Miss Loscoe’s sister worked as a nurse. A baby! It was going to make an utterly different place of the flat over the shop.

Mrs Abinger leaned forward. She could not help herself, in spite of the young man’s rather forbidding elegance. Everything about him was pale: his hair, his skin, his prominent eyes, the superior khaki of which his uniform was made.

‘Your baby has a shocking cold, hasn’t he?’ said Mrs Abinger, bobbing across the carriage at the basket with a: ‘Cuc-koo!’

‘What? Oh – yes, I suppose he has. That is –’ he cleared his throat and glanced down at the basket without bending his neck – ‘it’s a she.’ He uncrossed his legs and crossed them the other way.

‘There!’ marvelled Mrs Abinger, as if this were some remarkable feat of the baby’s. ‘Bless her then, the wee soul.’

She went on talking and clucking to the baby, and Miss Loscoe, not to be outdone, leaned forward too and mopped and mowed at the basket in an unpractised way.

‘May I?’ Mrs Abinger produced her own handkerchief and wiped the baby’s nose. It sneezed, and she and Miss Loscoe, talking at, rather than to the young man, asked if it were not a shame then.

Getting no encouragement from either the soldier or the baby, they subsided into their seats, Mrs Abinger fat and spreading, Miss Loscoe thin and whippy as the corset bones Mrs Abinger needed.

The train was travelling through the White Horse Vale. The soldier put down his magazine and looked out of the window, following dream hounds on a dream horse over the wheeling hedges. Miss Loscoe skimmed the meadows and the farms and sunny stubble with unobservant, town-bred eyes. Mrs Abinger kept seeing houses in which she would like to live. She saw a fat woman feeding chickens at her back door and thought it might have been her, if her lot had been cast in the country.

Soon after one o’clock, they began to look at each other and to raise their eyebrows. Mrs Abinger laid a hand on her raffia bag, and Miss Loscoe patted her mouth with a handkerchief as if the suggestion made her juices run.

‘Do you fancy anything yet?’ she asked.

‘I don’t mind,’ said Mrs Abinger, who was dying to get at her egg sandwiches.

‘Just as well, perhaps, before the tunnels come.’ Miss Loscoe drew her attaché case on to her lap. She ate under cover of the open lid, clearing her throat whenever she rustled a paper bag. When she got to her jam puff, she had to start light conversation to distract from the crumbs it made. This made her cough, and she tapped her breast bone and said: ‘My tickle cough.’

Mrs Abinger spread a paper napkin on her wide lap and ate steadily through her lunch, package by package.

The soldier began to be restive. He kept uncrossing and re-crossing his legs, looking at his watch, then down at the baby, then across at them.

Mrs Abinger offered him a rock cake. ‘Go on, do,’ she said. ‘They’re quite nice, though I do say it who made them.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but actually, I’ve booked a place in the restaurant car.’

‘They’ll never let you take the baby in there, surely?’

‘I know. I forgot about that. I’m not used to this kind of thing, you know.’

‘Well, you go along,’ said Mrs Abinger, motherly. ‘The baby will be quite safe with us.’

‘I don’t think I’d better. They told me …’ Indecisively, he sucked his lower lip still farther under his top teeth.

‘We’ll look after her. It will be a real pleasure, won’t it, Dot?’

Miss Loscoe murmured non-committally. She did not believe in being too forward with strangers.

‘Go on,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘It would be a shame to miss your lunch. I daresay you need feeding up after the time you’ve had in the trenches.’

He did not need much persuading. He seemed quite glad to get away from the baby for a while.

When he had gone, Miss Loscoe said: ‘Whatever made you say that about the trenches, Ellie? I didn’t know where to look. I make sure he’s one of those what they call desk warriors. Don’t tell me that uniform has ever been near the Flanders mud.’

‘That’s spiteful, Dot,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘You know anyone of his age would have to go willy nilly, if they were fit. Perhaps he’s been ill or wounded.’

‘Willy Parkes never went,’ said Miss Loscoe, baring her horse teeth as she wrestled with the cap of the thermos. ‘I sent him a white feather.’

‘Dot, you never did!’

‘I did,’ declared Miss Loscoe, ‘and proud of it. I’d do the same to this young dandy if he gave me cause to think he wasn’t fighting for the future of his little daughter.’

‘Do you think it is his daughter? He doesn’t seem very at home with her. It’s not right really, is it, to send him off on his own with her like that. Whatever is his wife thinking of?’ She leaned forward to dote on what she could see of the baby under the muffling shawls. ‘Do you think we’ve got time to lift her out before he comes back?’

‘Hardly wise,’ said Miss Loscoe, with the authority of one who was related to a nurse. ‘She might take something from the draught. My sister says it’s their little heads.’

‘That’s where it is,’ sighed Mrs Abinger. She crossed over to the other seat, and loomed over the basket. ‘It’s a bonny baby,’ she said. ‘I hope mine looks like that.’

‘I thought you fancied something a bit older,’ said Miss Loscoe, pursing her mouth, as if the baby were something on the haberdashery counter. ‘My sister says they have toddlers of two and three that would be just the thing.’

‘They might romp about and worry George, though. He’s not really struck on the idea at all, you know. I’m surprised he ever came to agree in the end. A baby might win him over gradually and when I see this dear little mite, I want one just like her. Dot –’ she gave Miss Loscoe a daring look – ‘I’m going to pick her up.’ Melting with love, she lifted out the swaddled baby, who gave a sleepy cry and jerked its body in her arms with a tinny cough.

‘There,’ said Miss Loscoe, ‘I told you.’ She held out her arms. ‘Let me take her. It’s not so blowy over here.’

‘Not yet.’ The baby lay snug on Mrs Abinger’s eiderdown lap, but when Miss Loscoe took her over, she began to cry, butting her head against Miss Loscoe’s flat chest.

‘Ah, she’s hungry,’ said Mrs Abinger, and Miss Loscoe handed the baby back, shocked. ‘Best put her down before he comes back,’ she said. ‘It’s not your baby, after all, to be making so free with.’

Mrs Abinger dandled her until she stopped crying, and then tucked her into the basket as skilfully as if she had been a mother all her life.

‘It’s not right, you know,’ she said. ‘She ought to have something. I wish we’d asked him if he’d brought a bottle for her.’

‘I wish we’d asked him to unscrew this before he went,’ said Miss Loscoe, struggling again with the thermos. Mrs Abinger’s capable hands opened it for her, and Miss Loscoe was drinking tea with her head back like a chicken, when the door slid open and the pale young officer came in, looking a little happier.

‘Everything all right?’ he asked. Miss Loscoe nearly choked. She put the thermos away hastily, without offering her friend any tea.

‘She’s been as good as gold,’ said Mrs Abinger.

‘Mm.’ The young man looked moodily into the basket and sat down. The comforting effects of his lunch soon began to wear off, and he became restive again. He kept glancing up at a suitcase on the rack. Presently, he smoothed his blond hair, and said: ‘I say, you’ll think me a bit of an ass, but they told me I’d got to give it some milk at two, and frankly, I don’t think I’ll be much of a hand at it. I wonder if you –?’

The ladies were delighted. He got out the bottle. ‘And this goes somewhere, I believe,’ he said, dangling a tiny bib from his finger tips.

His comical display of not knowing which was what he called ‘the business end’ of the bottle made Mrs Abinger laugh. But Miss Loscoe went: ‘Tchk-tchk. This will lay too cold on her stomach. I think you should take it along to the toilet and hold it under the hot tap.’

‘Oh Lord,’ said the young man. He took the bottle and stood holding it awkwardly, picturing what he would look like to anyone he met in the corridor.

‘Put it in your pocket,’ smiled Mrs Abinger.

‘Oh yes.’ He dropped it into his pocket and tried to smooth out the slight bulge it made in his tunic.

‘Well, he is a helpless Herbert, I must say,’ said Miss Loscoe when he had gone. ‘I daresay he’s used to Nannies and goodness knows what all.’ She sniffed class-consciously.

‘And quite right too,’ said Mrs Abinger, whose class consciousness was of the Feudal, contented sort.

‘It’s people like you keep the masses ground down,’ grumbled Miss Loscoe.

‘But don’t you see, Dot,’ said Mrs Abinger excitedly, ‘he’s a Sir. Look – there on the label of his suitcase.’

Miss Loscoe leaned forward to look. ‘Sir Rodney –’ The train went into a tunnel, and when it was light again, she saw that the young officer was called Sir Rodney Cope, Bt.

‘He’s a Bart too, Ellie,’ she said, almost as excited as Mrs Abinger. Her class consciousness crumpled when it came to striking up a travelling acquaintance with a baronet.

They all became quite friendly over feeding the baby. Sir Rodney Cope joked, and feigned amazed admiration at their knowledge when they took turns to hold the baby against their shoulders to bring up the wind. Mrs Abinger’s knowledge came from instinct. Miss Loscoe’s from her sister.

‘I say,’ he said, ‘it’s damned good of you. I’d never have been able to do all this. Probably choked the little devil. Phew!’ He dabbed a clean silk handkerchief at his matt brow, which did not look as if it had ever perspired in its life. ‘Thank the Lord it’s only a one-way journey. I couldn’t face the strain of playing Daddy all the way back to Town.’

‘You’re not her father, then?’ Mrs Abinger seized her opportunity.

‘God, no. I’m it’s uncle. My sister’s child.’

‘And you’re taking it to her, I daresay,’ prompted Mrs Abinger, trying to cloak her curiosity by turning questions into statements.

‘Well, er –’ he shifted on his seat and sucked at his lower lip – ‘actually, no.’

Mrs Abinger with her heavy head on one side, was looking so amiably ready to understand anything he might say, that he suddenly blurted out, in quite a different, more natural voice than the fade-away drawl he had used so far: ‘She’s dead, you know. Died having the kid. And we heard two weeks ago that her husband had been killed in Flanders.’

Miss Loscoe lowered her eyes and thought he should not have spoken of it. Mrs Abinger leaned forward and said: ‘I’m so sorry, my dear. I didn’t ought to have asked.’ She held the baby away from her shoulder and looked into its bloated face. ‘Poor little soul,’ she said. ‘An orphan, then.’

‘Fine start to her life.’ The young man gave a silly sort of bitter laugh and Miss Loscoe looked at him sharply. This was no time to be laughing. If one must talk about death, one should use the kind of voice in which she now intoned: ‘Poor little unwanted orphan child. Never to know a mother’s love.’

‘Oh, she’s not unwanted,’ said Sir Rodney. ‘It’s just that the family can’t cope. My mother’s ill, and the other grandmother … well, anyway. In fact, I was positively the only bloke handy to bring her on this trip or I’d never have taken it on. Fine way to spend your convalescent leave.’

‘You’ve been wounded?’ asked Miss Loscoe, hoping he would not tell, if it were somewhere not Quite.

‘Smashed foot,’ he said briefly.

Mrs Abinger glanced triumphantly at Miss Loscoe. ‘Who’s going to look after her then?’ she asked the young man, flopping her body to and fro as she rocked the baby.

‘She’s going to a children’s Home. Oh, quite a decent place, I believe. No Squeers and all that.’

Mrs Abinger looked blank, but Miss Loscoe nodded to show she followed the allusion. ‘I always say it’s a small world,’ she said. ‘My sister works in a home for orphaned children, and on this very line too.’

‘That’s where we’re going,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘We –’ She was almost choked by a mad idea that suddenly surged up inside her. Such a wonderful, impossible idea that it left her scarcely enough breath to falter: ‘It’s not – it wouldn’t be – oh no, but of course – it wouldn’t happen to be at Bolt Bay, I don’t suppose?’

‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘It’s one of the best, they tell me. I say,’ as he saw them weaving about excitedly, ‘is that where you’re going? How rum.’

He took it more calmly than Miss Loscoe and Mrs Abinger. Miss Loscoe could not get over the smallness of the world, and made thrilled little staccato conjectures as to what her sister would make of the coincidence.

Mrs Abinger still could not speak properly. She was still filled with the idea which she dared not voice, yet which had taken such possession of her that she feared the words would burst out of their own accord.

Sure enough they did. Clutching the baby to her, she gasped: ‘I’m going to Bolt House to choose a baby to adopt. I suppose – oh, I don’t suppose – you’d let me have this one!’

‘Ellie!’ Miss Loscoe was scandalized. Coincidence or no coincidence – to say such a thing right out like that to a perfect stranger! ‘Well,’ she told her sister later, ‘I didn’t know where to look.’

But she was looking at Mrs Abinger, staring at the eager quivering of her fat red face, wondering whether she were going to take a fit. She was acting so queer, saying a thing like that, and actually waiting there open-mouthed, as if she expected to get an answer. Ellie was the best of souls, but she was only a tradesman’s wife, after all. Miss Loscoe would never have become so friendly with her if it had not been for the war, which levelled everybody. A grocer’s wife, with that poky little flat over the shop, to be thinking of adopting the baby of a titled family. Whatever would Sir Rodney say?

He did not seem affronted. He had leaned back a little before the onslaught of Mrs Abinger’s eagerness, but he smiled and said: ‘That’s jolly sporting of you, I must say, but the fact is, they don’t want her adopted. Oh God, no. When my mother’s better, and the kid doesn’t need so much looking after, she’ll probably have her back.’

‘She’s not to be adopted then?’ repeated Mrs Abinger on the dying, disappointed breath of her collapsing idea.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Oh, definitely no. She’s got to grow up a Cope, for her sins.’

‘Of course. I quite understand.’ The idea was quite dead by now. Mrs Abinger suddenly realized how tightly she was holding the baby, and slackened her arms, looking at it there in her lap as if she wondered what she was doing with it at all.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t ought to have spoken like that. I don’t know what made me think of such a thing.’

‘No indeed,’ said Miss Loscoe, and Mrs Abinger, seeing her drawn brow and pursed mouth and tapping foot, realized the full enormity of her presumption.

‘Here –’ she held out the baby to its uncle, who made futile passes with his arms, uncertain how to hold it.

‘You put her back,’ he said, but Mrs Abinger had forfeited her rights. Officiously, Miss Loscoe took the baby and tucked it, tight as a City umbrella, into its basket again.

Mrs Abinger looked miserably out of the window at the foregathering houses of Newton Abbot, and dreamed about how lovely it would have been to have this baby. A high-born baby, whose father had been a war hero, the mother a tragic and beautiful lady, fair and pale no doubt, like her brother.

She would have brought her up so ladylike, spent money on sending her to a good school, tried to make George move into a better neighbourhood if necessary. How she would have gloried in her aristocratic looks and dainty ways! For blood will out, Mrs Abinger knew, and the little girl would always have been like a swan among geese with the children of the Portobello Road.

It wasn’t as if they were working-class people. They had their own business and enough money put by for a daughter to have everything nice. They were well thought of by everybody–nothing for a child to be ashamed of. Why, George with his neat clothes and his finicking ways with his nails was as aristocratic looking as –

Mrs Abinger looked across at the exquisite, assured figure flipping over the pages of the Tatler, saw the polish of him which not even the havoc of war could dim, came out of her dream, and slumped, pressing her hat brim out of shape as she stared at the stamping boots of soldiers mustering on Newton Abbot platform.

Mad, she must have been to have thought of it. You had to laugh though. She might tell Phyll some day, as a joke. A baronet’s niece living over a grocer’s shop! You couldn’t help laughing at the idea. Why, that kind didn’t even come her way as customers, never knew the Portobello Road existed, as like as not.

The baby, digesting, hiccuped and murmured like a dozing old man.

‘Go to sleep, Joy,’ said her uncle, without looking up.

Mrs Abinger turned her head. ‘Is that her name – Joy?’

‘What? Oh –’ he lowered the magazine – ‘yes. Joy. Joy Stretton.’

Joy Stretton. Mrs Abinger looked out of the window again and saw herself following Joy’s career in the papers and society magazines. Knowing when she was presented at Court, and what she wore at her coming-of-age party; knowing when she got engaged to some handsome young nobleman; knowing her wedding day.

And on that day, Mrs Abinger would go and stand in the crowd outside St Margaret’s, as she had at other weddings when she could get up West on early-closing day. When Joy came out like an angel, with her lilies, and her veil thrown back in a cloud round her beautiful face, Mrs Abinger would think of today, and have a little cry, perhaps.

But wouldn’t Joy laugh if Mrs Abinger were to step forward, a fat grocer’s wife from North Kensington, and say: ‘When you were a baby, I held you in my arms, and dreamed of having you for my daughter’!

As the train went through Ivybridge, Miss Loscoe, who was still not really speaking to Mrs Abinger, shut her book into her case with a snap and said to the carriage at large: ‘Queensbridge is the next stop. I think I’ll pop along and titivate.’

She went out. Mrs Abinger brushed crumbs off her coat, straightened her hat and tucked away the slippery brown hair that never would make a tidy bun. She buttoned her gloves, stood her raffia bag and handbag in her lap and waited, looking wistfully at the Moses basket, wondering whether she could offer to carry the baby out.

Rodney Cope stood up to smooth his uncreased tunic, and flicked a speck of dust off his trousers. ‘Lord, doesn’t a train journey make you feel a wreck?’

Mrs Abinger had not expected him to speak so friendly to her again. She thought she had spoiled that little intimacy they had established over feeding the baby, when anyone would have thought they had known each other for years.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, pleased. ‘I always say the first thing you want when you arrive is a good wash.’

‘By George yes. I hope the hotel has a decent bath. I say –’ He looked down at the basket in that apprehensive way of his, as if he had a monster there instead of a particularly beautiful baby. ‘How are you getting out to Bolt Bay from the station?’

‘There’s a bus that connects with this train, they say,’ Mrs Abinger quoted Miss Loscoe’s sister.

‘I’ve got a cab ordered,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’

‘No really, it’s very kind, but we couldn’t accept, I’m sure.’

‘I wish you could. I don’t want to be left alone with the kid. Suppose she’s sick? And turning up carrying her. I shall feel such an ass. I never know which way you’re supposed to point them.’

When Miss Loscoe came back, with the schoolmarm expression she had worn since her friend’s faux pas accentuated by her dragged-back hair, Noah’s Ark hat, and buttoned up frock coat, Mrs Abinger said triumphantly: ‘The gentleman has been kind enough to offer us a lift out to Bolt House. That’ll be better than the bus, won’t it?’

‘I daresay,’ said Miss Loscoe ungraciously, ‘but if my sister is off duty, I’ve no doubt she’ll meet us on the bus.’

‘Then I hope you’ll come,’ Sir Rodney said to Mrs Abinger. ‘You can’t desert me now in my hour of need.’

‘If it was a case of that – Oh well,’ said Miss Loscoe, ‘I’m not saying she will come. She doesn’t take her off duty, as often as not, she’s so devoted to her work. In which case, I’m sure we should be quite pleased to help you with the baby.’

As the train slowed down, Mrs Abinger made as if to pick up the basket, but Miss Loscoe seized one handle, and they carried it down the platform lopsidedly, for Miss Loscoe was tall and Mrs Abinger dumpy. The basket tipped still more as Miss Loscoe peered about for her sister.

‘You’ll know her by her hair,’ she said. ‘You never saw such a colour. And thick! She can hardly get a brush through it.’ But this was evidently a day when Nurse Loscoe was devoted to duty.

‘Well,’ said Mrs Abinger, as they started off in the stuffy horse cab, with the basket lying across both their laps, ‘you can’t help laughing, can you? We come here to fetch away one baby, and turn up with another. Whatever will your sister think, Dot?’

‘Yes, she’ll have to laugh.’ Mrs Abinger, being in disgrace, should not have been so jolly and cheerful, but Miss Loscoe had to agree, for her sister was a great one for seeing a joke. She could not deny her that.

Bolt Bay was a small fishing village huddled into a gap in the rocky cliffs, where a stream came down from the inland hills. The sea, pushing in to meet it, had hollowed out a perfect natural harbour, a goblet of sheltered water, where the fishing boats could lie behind the arm of the little cob. There was a jetty where old men sat on lobster baskets mending nets, a sickle of firm sand, and outcrops of slithery rocks among which the tide lingered in warm pools.

‘Looks as if I’m bringing Joy to the end of the world,’ said Rodney Cope, and yawned once more. He felt as if he had been travelling for ever. It would be good to get back to Town tomorrow.

‘No wonder my sister calls it a dead end,’ said Miss Loscoe. She sat back, missing most of the view, but Mrs Abinger, looking from the cab, was enchanted with the place, as thousands were to be in later years when it was inevitably discovered into a holiday resort.

But in 1918, bungalows and nautically named villas had not yet begun to straggle up the sides of the cliffs and inland up the valley towards the farms. The hotel had not been contemplated, and the cobbled cottages had yet to sprout annexes and plumbing and notices of Crab Teas.

Between one high-tide wash and the next, the white sands were practically untrodden and the shrimps lurked unmolested under the seaweed fringes of the pools. The only outsiders who came there were the visitors to the Children’s Home, and one or two artists, too decrepit to do anything about the war, who made a cult of Bolt Bay and would paint nothing else on the South coast. One of them was sitting with a sketch book on the sea-wall, where the cab turned away from the harbour to climb the drive to Bolt House. He was a raffish man in a linen hat and rope shoes, and he gave them a look as dirty as his jersey, as if they had no right to be there with hats and umbrellas and suitcases.

Bolt House stood well above the village, an ugly, aseptic white block, with five symmetrical gables and a garden of terraced lawns. The horse pulled the cab at a walk past a group of children playing with a nurse, and Mrs Abinger said: ‘Oh look, Dot! Is that your sister?’

Miss Loscoe peered over the basket. ‘Oh dear me no,’ she said. ‘Lily is my elder sister, you know.’

The Matron was at the front door to meet them, one hand protecting her cap from the sea breeze, the other protecting her eyes from the sun which blazed low at the harbour mouth. Mrs Abinger was glad they had come with Sir Rodney, for Mrs Jessop was intimidating, with her spade of a jaw, masculine eyebrows, and monstrous starched cap, which tugged at its moorings when she let go of it to shake hands. She greeted the two ladies as if she were not quite sure who they were, and they stood by, while a great to do was made over Sir Rodney and the baby.

When another nurse came out to take Joy, Mrs Abinger poked Miss Loscoe, who frowned and shook her head and moved a step farther away.

Seeing that he limped with a stick, Mrs Jessop looked as if she would have liked to have Sir Rodney carried into the house too. She tried to put a hand under his elbow, but he stood back politely for her to go in first, so she summoned the other two and sailed in, her cap subsiding as she entered the hall, which was dark after the evening glare outside.

As she followed Miss Loscoe in, Mrs Abinger looked back at the lovely little amphitheatre, the dazzling water black-edged under the shadow of the cliffs, the first clouds of the day waiting on the horizon to draw the sun into a glorious sunset, and regretted her years in London. Perhaps when George retired? But he did not care for the seaside or the country, and he would never leave all his clubs and societies. ‘They wouldn’t hear of my going,’ he would say, as he had that time when the anniversary meeting of the West London Provision Retailers’ Fellowship had come at Easter, and they had not got to Bournemouth after all.

It was a clean house, smelling of floor polish, milk, and washed babies. Mrs Jessop took them into her over-furnished sitting-room, where in contrast to her virile appearance, everything possible was tasselled or frilled or draped with scarves, and announced that they would all have tea. Mrs Abinger was dying to see the babies, Miss Loscoe was dying to see her sister, and Rodney Cope was dying to get into his waiting cab and back to the comparative civilization of Queensbridge, but they had to have tea first.

Mrs Jessop was starved of sociability. Having no one to talk to but the staff and the children, she had a reservoir of conversation accumulated for visitors. It poured over her lips like an unleashed weir, while Rodney sat looking defensive with his chin tucked in, helping himself to all the sardine sandwiches. The two ladies sat on the edge of the sofa with listening expressions and little fingers elevated. Miss Loscoe never ate much in company. She nibbled round a cress sandwich, as if there might be a slug in the middle, and would not drink more than one cup of tea for fear her stomach should rumble.

Mrs Abinger, who was ready for her tea after the journey, wished that Matron would stop talking for a moment, and offer her a third cup and pass the shortbread. Was she not going to cut the chocolate cake then? It might be just there for show, and wanted intact for a more important tea-party to-morrow.

But Sir Rodney Cope made this party important, surely? Matron seemed to think so. She talked almost exclusively to him. When she was in private work before her marriage, she had nursed Rodney’s mother through an illness. She told him a lot about this, and asked several times after Lady Cope, without waiting for an answer. She tried to keep up with all her titled or wealthy patients, and for years had subjected Lady Cope to four page commentaries on the weather, the state of the world, and her own doings in it. That was how this Home had come to be thought of for Joy.

She did not talk about the Home or the babies. She had them all the time, but it was not often she had an officer to talk to about the war as seen from Bolt Bay. When she had told them about the escaped German prisoner who had been caught with his pockets full of carrots which she knew had come from her kitchen garden, Mrs Jessop tapped a knife on top of the cake, lightly, so as not to spoil the icing, and cocked her towering cap inquiringly at them.

‘Yes, thank you. I don’t mind,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘Just a small slice.’

Miss Loscoe declined, and Sir Rodney said he really must be getting along, and reached to the floor for his stick.

‘Don’t dream of cutting into it just for me,’ said Mrs Abinger hastily. ‘I’ll just take a shortie, if I may, to fill the cracks.’ But Matron, who did not want to cut the cake, carved her a large triangle by way of teaching her a lesson. Mrs Abinger had to bolt it while everyone was getting up and preparing to leave the room.

Mrs Jessop rang the bell and told the robust Devonshire maid to send Nurse Loscoe to her. ‘We’ll see over the Home first,’ she announced, ‘and then we will decide which one of my brood is to be taken off my hands. I take it your credentials and cetera have all been approved by the Board?’

Mrs Abinger stuffed in the last piece of cake, and stood up, mumbling an affirmative. She swallowed. That might have been a good cake, if only she had been given time to enjoy it.

‘I told them at the time it was a two- or three-year-old I fancied,’ she began, ‘but I’ve been thinking now, I …’

‘Quite, quite, quite,’ said Matron grandly. ‘I’ve no doubt we shall fix you up most satisfactorily. I’ve two or three in mind for you. It’s six months’ probation, you know, before the child is permanently adopted.’ She said this as if it were only Mrs Abinger who would be on probation, not the child.

Rodney Cope was hovering by the door, leaning on his stick and murmuring about his cab. He stood back as there was a knock, and the door opened to Mrs Jessop’s clarion: ‘Come in!’

Miss Loscoe took an involuntary step forward, checked herself, and said in a social voice: ‘Why there you are Lily! It’s quite a treat to see you.’

Nurse Loscoe shot a glance at Matron before answering: ‘Hello Dot. You are a stranger.’ She was an over-taxed woman of about forty-five, pigeon-toed, in a long striped skirt, with eyes that were pale pebbles behind thick glasses. She had a strained, leaning forward air as if she were slightly deaf, or always trying to catch up with something that was too much for her.

Mrs Abinger was surprised. She had visualized someone upright and martial, but Miss Loscoe’s sister did not look as if she could venture one, let alone the thousands of assertions with which she was credited. Even the famous hair was only a rusty bird’s nest under a crumpled cap.

‘Excuse me being such donkey’s years in coming,’ she said to Mrs Jessop. ‘I had little Bobby in the bath, and it was a choice between keeping you waiting and leaving him to drown.’

She was true to her reputation as a joker. It was the tool with which she patted down all the difficulties which cropped up in her path. She tried very hard at it, quashed often, but brightly undaunted.

She said bravely to Matron’s frown: ‘I beg you’ll excuse my pinny too. I’m afraid it looks rather like a wet week in Manchester.’ She plucked at her apron and pushed her glasses back.

‘It doesn’t matter, Nurse,’ said Matron, looking as if it did. ‘This is only a family party after all. You shall come with us round the Home if you can leave your work for a moment. Come now –’ she began to marshal her party, but Rodney said: ‘I say, I really must go now, thanks all the same, if there’s nothing more I have to do about Joy.’

‘You won’t come and see my hee-uge family?’ Mrs Jessop was arch at him, which did not suit her face.

‘So sorry,’ he said. ‘Another time, but now I really … been here too long as it is …’ He edged into the hall, propelling himself sideways with his stick.

‘I wouldn’t dream of detaining you, Sir Rodney,’ said Matron, a little huffily. ‘Of course you’ll want to see your little niece before you go, so that you can report to Lady Cope how well she’s settling down.’

‘Oh all right then,’ he said unwillingly. ‘But I’m not very good at stairs, I’m afraid.’

‘But she’s right here on the ground floor!’ cried Matron gaily, throwing open a door in the hall. ‘We don’t mix them with the others, you know, till Doctor has seen them.’ She got him back from the front door, where he was reassuring himself that his cab was still there, and ushered him in. Looking back, she caught Miss Loscoe and her sister exchanging a few hasty words in the hall. Their heads came up guiltily as Mrs Jessop commanded: ‘Come along all! We may as well start our tour of inspection here.’

Joy Stretton was in a barren little room scarcely bigger than a cubicle. It held a washstand, a low nursing chair and two identical cots, side by side under a heavy framed print of ‘The Age of Innocence’. The room was dark, because it faced on to the kitchen garden which sloped steeply up the hill behind the house, cutting off the light.

‘I’m afraid I can’t switch on the electric light,’ said Mrs Jessop, who still called it this because it had not long been installed. ‘The man says the wiring in this room is faulty. He dared me to touch the switch.’

‘I’ll pop along and fetch a lamp.’ Nurse Loscoe, who never walked anywhere, was on her mark in the doorway.

‘Don’t bother, Nurse. We shall only be a moment.’ But Lily Loscoe had pounded away, her rubber soles squeaking along the polished hall. Matron did not bother to call after her.

Rodney Cope bent over the nearest cot, peering with a screwed-up face. ‘Looks all right to me,’ he said.

Matron’s laugh rang in the tiny, crowded room. ‘How droll,’ she chortled. ‘You’re looking at the wrong baby!’

‘Am I, by Jove?’ He squeezed past Matron’s bust and peered into the other cot. ‘Like as two peas. All babies look the same to me, don’t you know.’

‘There’s a man for you!’ Mrs Jessop wagged her wedding cake cap at him.

But when Mrs Abinger stepped forward and looked shyly into the first cot, she saw that the babies did look alike. This one had the same high, bulging forehead and precociously well-formed nose. When it opened its eyes at her, she saw that they were blue, like her Joy’s.

‘What a little love,’ she breathed.

‘Oh, she’s a foundling,’ said Matron casually, watching Joy’s uncle, who was trying to think of something to say about his baby.

‘A foundling? Abandoned, you mean, like Moses?’ asked Mrs Abinger.

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Jessop. ‘Father Munroe brought her to me the day before yesterday. He found her in his church porch. Poor old man, he was so concerned, but as I told him, it’s nothing unusual in these times, with all sorts and conditions of girls at the munition factory, only a cycle ride from the naval barracks.’

‘There now.’ Shocked, Miss Loscoe squeezed forward to have a look at the price of sin.

‘The poor little soul. How the mother could …’ murmured Mrs Abinger, but Matron said: ‘Don’t worry about her. She’ll be far better off here than she would if the mother had kept her. I know that type of girl.’

Rodney Cope, bending over Joy in the dim light, was pleased with himself for being observant. ‘I say,’ he looked up. ‘These aren’t the clothes I brought with her.’ He had watched with a gloomy eye his mother’s maid packing the dozens of ridiculous garments, and he was sure he had not seen the unbleached flannel nightdress and jacket which Joy was wearing now.

‘Now don’t you go telling Lady Cope we’ve stolen her granddaughter’s pretties,’ said Matron. ‘It’s the rule here that they don’t wear their own clothes until we’re sure there’s no infection. No offence, mind. Just a health precaution. The other baby’s dressed just the same, you see.’

‘Beats me how you can tell ’em apart.’

‘We shouldn’t be very good at our job if we couldn’t tell one baby from another. But we label their little wrists, just to make sure.’ Mrs Jessop fished out Joy’s hands, clicked her teeth, and then looked, less gently, at the foundling’s wrists.

‘Nurse has forgotten again,’ she grumbled. ‘I told her. You have to see to everything yourself these days, that’s what it is, Sir Rodney. The war’s taken all the best nurses. I have to make do with the older women or very young girls.’ She was afraid he might go back to Lady Cope with a tale of inefficiency, but he was not concerned with anything now except squeezing himself out of the room.

Mrs Jessop followed him out, and Mrs Abinger went round and hung her red face over Joy’s cot, clucking and cooing unashamedly now that they were alone.

‘You can tell this is a love child, can’t you?’ said Miss Loscoe looking into the other cot from a safe distance.

‘Oh no, Dot, how can you say such a thing? Poor little innocent; it’s not her fault. I wouldn’t risk giving offence to Sir Rodney by remarking on it, but they really do look alike, you know. She went back to the foundling’s cot and clucked a bit there, lest the baby should feel left out. ‘If I were to pick her up,’ she said, ‘I could almost fancy it was Joy, like in the train.’

The front door banged. ‘There,’ said Miss Loscoe, ‘what do you think of that? He’s gone without saying good-bye to us. I call that very poor thanks for all we’ve done for him. Quite the swell, oh yes. Agreeable enough when it suited him; make use of you and then cast you off like an old shoe. Why, he’s hardly spoken above a word to us since we got here. I’ll give him Sir Rodney Cope with his la-di-da.’

Mrs Abinger was hurt too, but she said: ‘Never mind. The cab ride was nice, and I’m sure we quite enjoyed helping in the train. It made the long journey pass quicker than I’d expected.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m sure, if my company bores you,’ said Miss Loscoe, who was ready now to take offence at anything.

Mrs Jessop came back with a less enthusiastic reprise of the tour now that the title had left the party. As they started up the stairs, Nurse Loscoe kicked through a swing door below, carrying a flaring oil lamp.

Matron turned, and stood with one foot above the other, like Caesar on the steps of the