Mourning Ruby

by Helen Dunmore

  A birdman, anyway.

  ‘He went with Mariette,’ I tell her.

  She nods. ‘Mariette has had a busy day. Remind me to give her the velvet rose in my top right-hand bureau drawer, to trim her black straw.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you, my dear Florence? What have we been able to do for you today, apart from stirring the pot, which I saw you do so competently.’

  ‘Captain Marwood came in later. Just for an hour.’

  ‘Very good. That’s the fifth time – or the sixth?’

  ‘The sixth.’

  ‘If he has friends, Florence, encourage him to bring them.’

  Life-long friendships are forged quickly here. Life-long doesn’t mean the same as it does in normal life, although that’s not to say it means any less. One fine afternoon four young brother-officers may sit in our salon, smoking each other’s cigarettes, asking each other to hum the songs they have half-forgotten, so that Marie-Claude can play them. Even though she’d prefer to impress us all with Liszt, she likes the warm, rapt faces and the way they sing along when she plays.

  They lean against each other and talk in their own language which I have to learn just as much as the other girls, even though my English is perfect. If they are from the aerodrome, they talk about good shows and bad shows and Archie and dropping eggs. They laugh at each other’s jokes, clothes, and singing voices. They talk about having the wind-up sometimes, though always with a laugh and always in the past tense. They bite their nails and their hands shake. But as long as all their nails are bitten, and all their glasses spill over if they’re filled too full, and all of them get the wind-up sometimes, then the badness of it is divided, too.

  They are like us, although it feels wrong to say it, even inside my own head. If each one of us had to live the days we live alone, how would this life be possible? But we have patterns and they weave us together. We are a group, just as the men are a group. Imagine if they heard me say that.

  We look out for each other. Mariette will perch on Gabrielle’s bed to show her how the velvet rose looks on the black straw, and let her know that Madame’s really on the warpath this time, so Gabrielle had better slap on rouge and get herself down into the salon sharpish. ‘And you’re silly about drink, Gabi, you ought to try a couple of brandies. It gets you through with that nice warm feeling inside you.’

  Sometimes I wonder how the men manage to peel away from their friendship for long enough to go to bed with us. But even when they’re in bed with us, they don’t separate from each other, not really. We’re part of the group life they live. One goes with Mariette this time, his friend the next. It’s as close as they can get to going to bed with one another, which they would never do. They compare experiences afterwards. They talk about our breasts and our hips, but not about the things that really surprise them, such as the smell of us and the hair we have and where we have it, and the way our bodies look so much larger when we are naked than when we are dressed, and the way we are still in control when they have lost themselves and are panting and gasping as if their lives are in our hands. They don’t talk about any of these things.

  ‘Will you remember me, Florence?’ one of them asked once. He had rolled off me clumsily, and was lying on his back smoking a cigarette. He was a nice boy, with red hair and fine, thin skin. And a smile that let me know he was no fool. I can’t remember what he was called. He came a few times, then he stopped coming. I do remember that he was eighteen, six years younger than me. But there was something else. He was one of the few, the very few, who realized that I had a child.

  While he was smoking his cigarette, Claire began to cry, out in the garden. A sudden, piercing yell and then a silence that quivered. She was trying to get her breath. She must have fallen hard.

  No one came to her straightaway. The silence broke and she began to cry again, hard and rhythmic. I sat up in bed to listen. It was a strong, angry cry so I knew she hadn’t hurt herself much. But why didn’t anyone come? And then feet came running across the terrace.

  ‘Oh, Clairey, I thought you’d half-killed yourself, and now look at you, only a beensy little scratch on your knee. I can’t even hardly see it –’

  It was Gabrielle. She’d be pressing Claire’s red, wet face against her neck. Gabi loved to hold Claire.

  ‘You come along with Auntie Gabrielle, she’s got something to show you, if you’re a good girl…’ Her voice receded. She would be walking down into the orchard, carrying Claire, who wasn’t crying any more. The red-haired boy was watching me.

  ‘My sister’s got a boy and a girl,’ he said. ‘Twins. She harks just like you did, when one of ’em sings out. She can tell if it’s anything wrong, just from the noise they make. She says there’s all sorts of crying.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s your kid, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does she live here with you?’

  ‘Where else would she live?’

  He nodded, and got up from the bed.

  I listen to Madame Blanche’s lilac heels tapping away down the corridor. She will look into every room she passes, pausing, assessing, a word here and a word there, a smile for Mariette, a long, considering frown for Gabrielle. Then to her own apartments, as they’re called. Her bedroom, and her little private salon where she receives her own visitors. She will be drawing the pins from her hat now. Another name will be lodged in the account book she keeps in her mind. William Hazell. She will remember that he is from the aerodrome. She will remember the colourless voice in which I gave her his name.

  Here’s Marguerite.

  ‘’selle Florence, Claire’s ready to say goodnight.’

  ‘I’ll be up in a minute, Marguerite.’

  I want to pick up my skirts and race up the two flights of stairs to the attic room where Claire nestles in her cot-bed, rosy and big-eyed with sleepiness, right hand curled around her plush mouse, left thumb in her mouth. Half asleep already. But I wouldn’t want anyone to hear the beat of my footsteps, the eagerness in them, the way my whole body longs to catch Claire up and press her, press her tight to my heart at the end of yet another day in this house, which is also our home. I don’t want Madame Blanche to hear the hunger in my steps. I don’t want her to note anything more in the account book she makes of my soul.

  Dearest Rebecca,

  (If you’ve got this far…)

  What I realized after thinking about Florence and writing about her was how weary she is. She’s a young woman but she’s weary. She’s being used up. She prostitutes herself so that Claire will survive and she will survive. The officers are clean, the house is elegant, there’s a garden, there’s music, the food is good and plentiful. But the fact is that Florence is there to be used until she’s used up, like the other girls.

  Madame Blanche has her eye on Florence, that’s true. She makes an exception of her. She’s grooming Florence. Maybe that offers a way out. But otherwise, if Florence is lucky and she doesn’t start drinking or drugging herself, she might put by enough to start a little business of her own one day. A dressmaking business, maybe. That’s about her best bet. Solange thinks she can start again elsewhere and maybe find a man who will take her on, but Solange is fooling herself, and Florence knows it. The miller has taken her on and he intends to punish her for it.

  Florence hasn’t got much choice – not in that part of the field of history in which she finds herself. No housing benefit for Florence, no help with childcare costs.

  She’s tough in her way, you’ll have seen that. She’s very controlled and very observant. She makes herself live from hour to hour. Has Claire had her face washed, is the piano tuned, will it soon be time to pick the baby turnips? Her mind is full of those things. She finds comfort in them; at least, she thinks it is comfort.

  She will never tell anyone everything. Even Claire won’t guess how much her mother loves her. When she’s older she’ll believe that Florence is too tough on her.

  The thing about warti
me love stories is that usually there are no boundaries or barriers. War breaks them. But that isn’t going to happen here. A woman so weary, so controlled, so wrapped up in her child, and a middle-aged man who is married and whose wife is expecting a child that he doesn’t want. (I’m going ahead of the story, and telling you what Florence doesn’t know yet.) Will isn’t a boy, he’s not one of those fresh-faced handsome public schoolboys we all know about, with a book of poems in his breast pocket. He’s a middle-aged man. He’s got a wife, and a child coming that means almost nothing to him. He’s not a cold man, but he’s tired, too, like Florence. He’s worked for an insurance company for years. He wanted to be an architect, but he’d never tell anyone that now. It was too big a leap for a boy whose father was a tin-miner.

  Will learned to fly before the war. They didn’t have a child for years and he saved and paid for his pilot’s training. He would go off to the aerodrome Sunday after Sunday. His wife hated it.

  Florence doesn’t know any of this yet. But I’m letting you into the story.

  3

  Speaking English Perfectly

  The room where I sleep is long enough for a single bed, and wide enough for the door to swing open. It is in the attics, next to Claire. There’s an iron bedstead with a striped ticking mattress, darned linen, a darned white counterpane. There’s a rag rug on the boards, and the walls are white. I scrubbed the boards myself, and polished them with beeswax and turpentine, and I painted the walls white. The dormer window looks out and away, over roofs into treetops and sky. My window faces west, away from the war.

  It looks towards England. At home our house faced east, into the morning. We had a courtyard where grapevines grew over pillars. My mother would point north, and east.

  ‘England is that way, Florence. Over the sea. One day you’ll go there.’

  But she said it as if it couldn’t happen, and it never did. My mother told me how the wind always blew in England, even inside the houses, and how dark it was in the winters. She hadn’t been back in more than twenty years. But sometimes in August, when it was so hot that she lay on her bed in her chemise and I lay close, she would say different things. She would say that they had Romans in England, just as we had them in Orange. But up there they built for war, not pleasure. No wonderful amphitheatres and circuses. They built a wall across the land, from sea to sea, and patrolled it with soldiers.

  ‘Why did they build it, Maman?’

  ‘To keep the wild people out, Florence.’

  I don’t have blinds at the dormer window, or curtains. When I wake up the sky is there immediately, to let me know what the day will be like. At night the stars come so close you’d think they were elbowing their way through the glass.

  My bed is narrow, but not too narrow for Claire to cuddle in beside me when she wakes in the night. I hear her as soon as she stirs and I’m out of bed before I know that I’m awake. I scoop her out of the tangled cot and press her face against my shoulder so she won’t wake anyone. When she was a baby she smelled of mashed potatoes when she woke up red and sweaty. Now she smells of vanilla. In my bed she tucks close to me, at my back, with a bunch of my nightdress in her fist. I lie awake a little longer and watch the stars. Sometimes there’s a moon and the clouds fly over it so fast it feels as if we’re flying too. I wish that time would stop and we would always be here, safe, with Claire curled into sleep and the house still and silent beneath us.

  Madame Blanche didn’t want me to have this room. I have a perfectly good room downstairs with a thick red carpet, green silk curtains, a washstand and a wide bed. Madame Blanche is very proud of our rooms. Everything in them was chosen by her. They are elegant, restrained, tasteful, she thinks.

  ‘Except for the mirror,’ said Gabrielle. She was in my room, leaning over the dressing-table, fixing her back-hair. ‘Look where she’s put it.’

  I looked. ‘Dressing-table mirrors are always like that.’

  ‘Not that mirror,’ said Gabrielle in her quick, cutting voice. ‘The one over there.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, smiling, as if I’d known and understood all along what the mirror over there was for. And the china figures in Mariette’s room that I’d never looked at too closely. A book here, a picture there.

  ‘She makes me laugh. Like they haven’t got the point already. Like they don’t know what kind of house they’re in.’

  That was when I first came. Gabrielle remembers what I was like then, but the others don’t. They all came after I did. There’s a lot of coming and going here.

  But Marie-Claude thinks her bedroom is lovely. She dusts it and polishes the furniture herself, and when she has a day off she washes all her ornaments in soapy water, rearranges them, and replaces their labels if they’re stained or faded. Marie-Claude collects china baskets of flowers. They all have different names and Marie-Claude makes labels for each basket, in her best handwriting, decorated with curlicues and sprigs of flowers. Country Garden, Rose Bower, Maiden Dreaming, Sweet Violets. Marie-Claude is saving up for Bridal Posy.

  I told Madame Blanche I couldn’t sleep downstairs. It gave me bad dreams. She didn’t like it, but she gave in. She doesn’t come up here. No one does, except Claire, and sometimes Marguerite.

  *

  ‘You’ll have a room of your own,’ said Madame Blanche the first time we met. It was late December, the first winter of the war. I was five months pregnant with Claire. I was on my way north, to find work.

  The question is, what was Madame Blanche doing in the third-class carriage? I didn’t think of it until much later. She had plenty of money. What was she doing on those hard, dirty seats which smelled of coal?

  Now I believe that she had spotted me as I changed trains, among the market women and close-faced men and boys with raw faces going to be soldiers. I must have given so much away, while I thought I was hiding it all.

  The young woman is travelling alone, late in the evening, in a third-class compartment of the Paris train. She is wearing a dark-blue woollen skirt and jacket, edged with black braid, well-cut and obviously hand-made. Her hair is dark, thick, smooth, drawn into a knot. Her hands are gloved and her expression composed. (This is what I saw in the mirror as I stood in my bedroom at home for the last time. I looked perfectly calm, even serene. Perhaps a little pale, and it’s true that there was a rash on my neck, hidden by my high-collared blouse, and a cluster of tiny spots on the left side of my chin. I never have spots. My lips were pressed firmly together. I took a good look at myself, like a burglar checking that no signs of his intentions will give him away as he strolls casually down the street, whistling and glancing up at shuttered windows.)

  As she changes for the Paris train, the young woman signals a porter to transfer her luggage, which consists of a valise, a large basket and a hatbox. The porter heads up the train to the first-class compartment, and she has to pull at his arm and tell him that no, it is the third-class compartment she wants. He becomes surly after this, expecting a small tip or none. He slams the luggage into the third-class compartment in a way that conveys his disrespect. She flushes, scrabbles in her bag, over-tips him. He walks away, flicking the coin she’s given him.

  Once in the compartment, the young woman reaches up to stow her hatbox safely in the rack. The movement shows that her waist is thickened by pregnancy. When she has reassured herself that the hatbox is not going to be crushed, she squeezes into a seat between two market women who smell of wine. She closes her eyes and appears to fall asleep as the train jogs north. But her gloved hands are not sleeping. They clutch the small black bag on her lap as if it contains her whole life.

  So, as you see, I left plenty of clues. Half of them would have been enough for Madame Blanche.

  It was a corridor train. There were people standing in the corridor and among them was Madame Blanche. At the next station, the two market women got out, barging the other passengers with their empty baskets. This was the stopping train, not the express. I leaned forward and watched the two women clamber d
own the steps, hoist their baskets and go off down the tracks together. They were home. It was a halt in the middle of nowhere, no lights. They would cross the cinders, find the muddy lane that meant home. It was a fine night, with a moon. There would be cottages where they were expected, maybe even welcomed. They would talk of prices and how the market had gone. Maybe they’d lie about how much they’d made, and keep back a few sous for a jug of wine the next time.

  I wanted to be them. They looked as if they’d already barged their way through enough suffering and sorrow to get the measure of it. Now they’d be lifting the latch of the door, scolding the dog, checking that the fire had not been allowed to go out.

  In the train window my face looked back at me. My hair was still smooth from the brushing I’d given it that morning.

  If I went north I would find work. I could cook, or sew, or work in a laundry. I knew how to do all those things. I would look for a job where accommodation was provided.

  I would become a widow. My husband had died in the first days of the war, before I knew I was pregnant. He had left me nothing to live on and his family had never liked the marriage.

  – But if you are a widow, why are you wearing blue?

  – I have not got enough money to buy mourning.

  – Silly girl, doesn’t she know that half the world hasn’t got money to buy mourning? Stick your clothes in a vat of black dye, that’s what you do. When they try to come up, bulging and roiling in the inky water, thump them down with a stick. That’s the way to get the dye even.

  It was a good, easy story, but it had holes in it already.

  The north was where I was going, close to the war. People wouldn’t ask so many questions there. There would be plenty of work. There were new factories opening, to make munitions. They wanted women workers there.

  I shivered. It was getting cold already. This was the north. The smell of the engine smoke nauseated me, and the smell of sweat and onions. I must get out to the corridor.