Credit obviously to Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler.
London, July
The husband, at the age of forty-one, sits in the shop watching his wife, who's just now seeing her twentieth summer. Albert Lovett, with his balding brown hair and sweet dark eyes, is three years on to his second marriage. He got married when he was young, younger than Nell is now, but his first wife died, and even if she hadn't it wouldn't have ended too well. He could tell you that, but he wouldn't even if you asked him. Nell does sometimes, but he won't tell her about his first wife.
He drinks too much beer, and she too much gin. You could probably say he eats too much, too. He stabs a fork into his lamb pie. Albert isn't quite fat yet, but oh, he'll get there soon enough. He seems healthy now – a bit beyond chubby, but healthy still. He doesn't know that in four years, he'll be dead of gout. For now, he chews happily and glances up towards his wife.
'Nellie, dear' is what he calls her, and she glances up with a cheery smile. She don't like that name, and never has. Christened Eleanor Sawyer, she was, and called Nell by everyone after that, except for Albert. Who calls her Nellie, Heaven knows why. She don't quite like it, and she much prefers 'Nell', but he seems so merry when 'Nellie' is on his lips, that she hasn't half the heart to tell him so.
She flits round and round the half-full shop, a child in her arms who isn't even theirs. They look silly, don't they? Albert with his deep brown hair the same colour as chocolate, and Nell with her inky black curls, and both of them with dark, adoring eyes. And on Nell's hip, strangely, sits beautiful, darling little Johanna Barker, with Mrs Barker's lovely yellow hair and Mr Barker's crashing sea-storm eyes. How Nell used to pine, secretly, after them eyes of his; and how she swore all the time she wouldn't any more.
Well, on this particular day it's been four months since Mr Barker got carted off, three since the happening of what Mrs Barker so absently spoke about as her 'misfortunes,' and two since Mrs Barker's suicide, or so you might call it. It'll be another four months until authorities bother themselves to come wandering down this end of London looking for the daughter, but Nell has no way of knowing that now.
She's got a way with children, she has, and it's no different this time. She runs her shop with Johanna balanced on one hip, expects to raise her like her own daughter from here out. How she'll shout when they take her away; and how she'll think of her when she's out walking, for years after.
Nell and Albert, both of them, want so much to have a child. Albert never had children with his first wife; well, they were married so brief, and didn't particularly care neither one for the other. But he and Nell are great, great friends; and he thinks all the time, he longs to have children with her.
Nell, for her part, likes Albert very much, too; she even loves him by now, just not in the way she rather wishes she did. She's always, always wanted children, and Albert's the sweetest man she's ever met; she'd be glad to give him a child, if only she could. She'd be a wonderful mother, she thinks, but it's not so easy when you've got such a bloody shipwreck for a body.
Three years they've been married, you see; three years, two miscarriages, and one still-born daughter. Neither one will lose hope very quick at all, though, or if they do, they don't let on; they're both too bent that they should stay strong for the other, and keep on. In the four years Nell and Albert have left, they'll see four more miscarriages and three more still-born children. She'll say after every one that this'll be the last, and that she can't take any more, but she'll always change her mind later. They both want a child so much.
But for now – just for now, mind you – they've got pretty little Johanna. Nell likes Johanna quite a bit. It's a twisted circle, isn't it? She likes the baby; she didn't care at all for the mother; and she adored the father to bleeding pieces. She never said so, mind; she had her own husband to worry about. And anyway, Mr Barker wouldn't have noticed, would he, now; he was busy looking at his wife. Who in turn didn't suffer much feeling at all for him; which was plain to everyone but. Still, there it was. So, Nell's decided to look after the child; it's really the least she could do.
Mr and Mrs Albert Lovett and their shattered neighbours' child are an odd, patch-worked sort of family, if they are one at all. But Nell Lovett thinks, as she does often, that it's nice to pretend sometimes.
'Nellie, dear?' Albert calls her.
She looks up with a cheery smile. 'Yes?' she asks, standing at the counter. Johanna fusses; you might not think it of her later, but she's really a squally sort of child. Nell jiggles her until she quiets, and then turns her face back to Albert.
'Got another pie tucked away?' he says.
Nell smiles and pops one out of the oven with her free hand. 'There's always one for you, dear,' she says, and brings it over with a kiss on the forehead.