Eleanor was born on the 30th of June.
I could see the poplar tree in the garden through the window.
The leaves of the poplar fluttered and shimmered, and I watched
them from my bed. There have always been trees in my life, always,
somehow, at times that were important to me.
And I thought:
‘Other people have been through this before, thousands and millions
of people, always, from the beginning of the world. If they could
bear it, I can. Cousin Delia,’ I thought, ‘and Grandmother and
Mrs. Simms and the women in the bus.’
And later I thought:
‘I can never have any more children! I can never face this again.’
And then they told me it was a girl; and I could not believe
it; it seemed such waste; I had wanted a son so much; I had been
so sure it was a son; and now it seemed that he had not been
real at all; I could not bear it, and I cried.
When I saw her, I did not mind so much, she was just a baby,
and I loved babies.
Walter did not mind the baby being a girl. He wanted it to be
called Eleanor after his mother. He was worried and irritable
at this time; he did not like the monthly nurse, nor the household
being upset. The meals were not punctual, he said, specially
breakfast, and if breakfast was late, it upset his morning’s
work.
He was busy with his book just then; he had made, he thought,
a new discovery about his script and that made him irritable.
‘I don’t know what I shall do if that baby cries in the morning,’
he said; ‘it will drive me frantic.’
She had cried in the garden in her pram; she was only a week
old.
I asked the nurse to put the pram round the other side of the
house. She had put it there, she said, so as not to disturb me.
Walter kept coming to me about things that went wrong.
The laundry had torn his shirt, and he could not find his sleeve-links;
it was odd how he seemed to depend on me, as though he were a
child almost; I had hardly realized how much before, and I was
glad in a way.
‘It shows I am some use to him,’ I thought, ‘in spite of the
pheasant and the accounts’; and yet sometimes I was sad about
it too.
Mrs. Simms had said to me once:
‘My Simms was a standby to me; you never would believe what a
standby ’e was.’
And I wished sometimes that Walter were like Simms.