The Child's Child Read Free

felt relief. This I crushed down, telling myself I shouldn’t judge someone on an isolated meeting, and when he came back after a week or so, I concentrated on feeling how good this was for Andrew, who looked happy the minute James appeared.
    He began to be at Dinmont House much more often than he had been at first. That’s normal in a love affair, of course. If it isn’t going to fizzle out, it’s going to grow stronger. I realised I was thinking about it far too much, speculating about it, even watching them together for what signs I could spot that they were thinking of themselves as a couple rather than an item —stupid word but expressive of the start of something that might never become a relationship. Was this going to be that? The worst possible outcome, as far as I was concerned, was that they intended to live together. In other words, that James would come and live here. I could have asked Andrew but I told myself that I didn’t want to put ideas into his head. Stupid of me, because who could be made to live with a lover because his sister suggested it?
    In the interests of observing signs I invited them in for coffee one Saturday morning. James had been staying here since Thursday evening. We went into my favourite room, Verity’s study. Like the drawing-room (Verity’s name for it) and the unused dining room and several bedrooms, it is full of books. Books on the shelves, books in the cabinets, stuffed in double in places, one row pushed to the back and another two in front of it. James picked up Adam Bede, which was lying face-downwards on the table, glancedat it, turned a few pages, and said he wouldn’t have the patience to read anything like this.
    “The way he goes on and on, paragraph after paragraph and page after page. Description and dialect—bores you to tears.”
    I said, “He was a woman.” I was shocked because I thought everyone knew that, and James is a published author himself. But shocked at myself too, for speaking so scornfully. I was still trying hard to like him.
    “Why call himself George then?”
    “Because she was more likely to get published than if she used her own name.”
    “Wasn’t that dishonest?”
    In spite of the way I spoke, I didn’t want to quarrel with him, so all I said was that that was an original way of looking at it and had they had breakfast? Would they like something to eat?
    “No, thanks, Sis.” Andrew had taken up this unusual and old-fashioned usage when we were children. “We’ve both got hangovers. Coffee is fine.”
    James stared. “ Sis? That’s amazing. I’ve never heard anyone say that before.”
    I managed a broad smile, but my eyes, I fear, remained cold. Still, I was determined to like him come what may and, once they had gone, return to the novel James Derain, the novelist, thought was written by a man. Verity, quoting from somewhere in the Bible, used to tell me not to sit in the seat of the scornful, so I resolved not to be scornful or scathing even in my thoughts. So back to Adam Bede (telling myself that James’s mistake was one even an intellectual might make), and it occurred to me as I read that nowhere does George Eliot actually say that seventeen-year-old Hetty Sorrel is going to have a baby. Hetty has been seduced by Arthur Donnithorne, and this we also must assume. All we have been shown happening between them is a kiss. Hints are dropped, a great sorrow weighing on poor Hetty is talked of, butthat she might be pregnant is never mentioned. No doubt James would call this dishonest, but those of us who know anything about Victorian prudery are aware that the author dared not refer directly to the unmarried Hetty’s pregnancy if she wanted her novel to be published or if any publisher dared accept it. We only know of the baby’s existence when Adam is told it is dead and Hetty is on trial for murder.
    We are supposed to be in 1799, but George Eliot was writing in the 1850s, and the moral attitude hadn’t changed much if at