So still and beautiful, the quiet face framed in its veil of long, straight hair. ‘Mrs. Vaughan—dangerous? She’s kind. She’d do us no harm, she loves us.’
‘She told us last time that the baby lies with its arms stretched out like a—well, like a cross. She said it knows how it’s going to die. Well, I mean! It’s blasphemous.’
‘He does lie with his arms stretched out.’
‘Any baby does, sometimes. And she says he shines. She says there’s always a light around his head.’
‘I put the lamp on the floor once to keep the brightness out of his eyes. It did sort of gleam through a crack in the wood. We explained it to her.’
‘Well, she never listened then. And I say it’s not right. Everyone’s talking. They say…’ It took a little courage to insist, in face of that quiet calm. ‘They’re saying you ought to fetch a doctor to her.’
Mrs. Vaughan rebelled, predictably, against any suggestion of seeing a doctor. ‘What for? I’m not ill. Never better.’ But it alarmed her. ‘You don’t think there’s something wrong with me?’
‘We just thought you looked a bit pale, that’s all.’
‘I’m not pale, I’m fine, never been better in my life. Even them arthritics nearly gone, hardly any pain these days at all.’ And she knew why. Alone with Him, she had taken the little hand and with it touched her swollen knees, had moved it, soft and firm, across her own gnarled fingers. ‘Look at ’em!’ she had insisted to Nellie next evening, in the pub. ‘Half the size! All them swollen joints gone down.’
‘They look the same to me,’ said Nellie and suddenly saw Mrs. Hoskins through in the Private and had to hurry off and join her. ‘Barmy!’ she said to Mrs. Hoskins. ‘I don’t feel safe with her. How do I know she won’t suddenly do her nut and start bashing me? It should be put a stop to.’
Only one thing seemed to threaten Mrs. Vaughan with any suggestion of doing her nut and that was mention of her precious little family going away. If Jo searched for rooms now, he kept very quiet about it. To outside representations that she ought to let them go, that young people should be together in a place of their own, she replied that it wasn’t ‘like that’ between them; that Marilyn was ‘different’. All the same, they were young and shouldn’t always be cooped up with an old woman, and she fought to be allowed to move out to the shed and let them have her room; there was the bed out there now and in this weather it was warm and dry—she’d like it. In other days, she would have gone off to the pub in the evenings and left them free, but the Dog wasn’t what it had been, people didn’t seem so friendly, they looked at her funny and sometimes, she suspected, made mock behind her back of her claim to be housing God. Not that that worried her too much. In them old days—no one had believed in Him then, either. And I’ll prove it to them, she thought, and she would watch the children playing in the street and when she saw a tumble, bring in the poor victim with its bruises and scratches and cajole it into letting the baby touch the sore places with its little hand. ‘Now you feel better, love, don’t you?’ she would anxiously say. ‘Now it’s stopped bleeding, hasn’t it?—when the Baby touched you, it was all better in a minute? Now you tell me—wasn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ the children would declare, wriggling in her grasp, intent only upon getting away. ‘It’s dangerous,’ said their mothers, gathering outside the shops in anxious gossip. ‘You don’t know what she might do, luring them inside like that,’ and a deputation at last sought out Jo. ‘You ought to clear out, you two, and leave her alone. You’re driving her up the wall with these ideas.’
That’s just what we can’t do now,’ said Jo. ‘She gets upset if we even mention it.’
‘It could be the last straw,’ admitted Mrs. Hoskins, who knew all about it from Nellie at the Dog. ‘Properly finish her off.’
‘And then she’d be there without us to look after her.’
‘You can’t spend your whole lives in that one room.’
‘If we could get a place and take her with us… But we can’t find anywhere, not that we could possibly afford; let alone where she could come too.’
‘What?—you two kids, saddle yourselves for ever with a mad old woman? You couldn’t do that.’
‘She saddled herself with us,’ said Jo. ‘Where’d we be now, but for her?’
All the same, clearly something must be done. With every day of her life with them, Mrs. Vaughan’s obsession increased. She could not bear the baby out of her sight, would walk with Marilyn when she carried it out for a breath of air and almost threateningly warn off the curious who tried for a glimpse of the now quite famous child. If they came to worship, well and good. If not…‘If you don’t make some arrangements about her,’ said the greengrocer’s wife at last, to Jo, ‘I will. She’s terrorising the whole neighbourhood.’