The Silversmith's Daughter

by Annie Murray

  ‘The best models always honour this knowledge of what lies underneath,’ she told them. ‘But let’s not get too carried away – we’ll start with quite simple things.’

  But she did bring in anatomical pictures – birds and horses, dogs, even the human skeleton, showing the stretch of muscle over bone. Some of the lads seemed to understand this instinctively; others learned well. Tommy was more interested in wings and propellers. And a few were completely clueless and just seemed to like hacking about with lumps of clay. But it hardly mattered. It took them all out of themselves for a while and passed the time.

  There were other boys, among the joking and teasing which went on, who she remembered for other reasons. Amid the talk of the war, and how we were going to thrash the Hun now that the Americans had come on our side, there was the lad who talked excitedly about Russia. The Revolution was taking place now the Tsar had abdicated! That was what would happen everywhere soon! The workers of the world were going to rise up together and claim their rightful share! There would be a new world order, not run by rich toffs! Some of the others grunted in agreement: one or two told him to stick it and find some manners and not keep on about politics.

  Joe, the one with the patch at Hollymoor who had lost an eye and suffered bad abdominal injuries, was always sweetly courteous to her in an old-fashioned manner. He said he was from a farm outside Hereford and because his mother died when he was young, he had never actually set eyes on a female of any age until he was seven years old.

  ‘Good gracious!’ Daisy said. The lads were all seated round two tables with their clay and she stood moving between them. She saw Stephen, the tall, curly-haired one, raise his head with interest at this. ‘Did you never go to school?’

  ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘I think they just forgot about us all the way out there – me and my brother. Dad put us to work on the farm soon as we could walk more or less, and that was that. We was in bed with the sun, come five or so in the winter – and up with it again. We never knew no different.’

  ‘You poor little sod,’ someone else remarked.

  ‘So who was the first woman you ever saw?’ another wanted to know.

  ‘Oh, she were quite an old girl from another farm,’ Joe said. ‘I was out by the road and ’er went past with a cartload of muck. I never knew ’er was a woman then any’ ow –’ad a bit of a moustache on ’er, that one.’

  Everyone roared with laughter at this.

  ‘Well, you take a good look at Miss Tallis,’ someone suggested, still chortling.

  ‘Oh,’ Joe said seriously, ‘Miss Tallis looks like an angel to me!’

  Daisy blushed, touched by his sweet innocence. She saw Stephen smile and look down at his work again. The scar distorted his cheek when he smiled. ‘Now, now,’ she admonished kindly. ‘Let’s get on with our work, shall we?’

  There was Albert, another lad who she taught at Rubery hospital, who had lost a leg and an eye and had a badly puckered face. He told her matter-of-factly that the loves of his life were football and a girl called Beatty. Football was something he would now only be able to watch, but Beatty was sticking with him and ‘At least I’m still alive,’ was his way of looking at it. ‘Not like my pal Sam – he bought it on the Somme, left a wife and two kiddies.’

  Daisy saw Beatty sometimes, waiting out in the spring sunshine for Albert to finish the class. She was a shy girl, a little older than Daisy, with brown hair swept neatly back and tucked under her hat and a gently pretty face with slender arching brows. She would say hello, but all the time her eyes were searching for Albert and they came alight when she saw him.

  For all the tragedy that Albert was so wounded – though he was very determined to get along with a prosthetic leg – there was something about the pair of them that wrung Daisy’s heart. Love. Real love. Something she knew she had never had. And I never will now, she thought. Much as she loved her little Hessie, the notion filled her with despair for a moment.

  And yet there was a man, Den, who thought she was promised to him. He had started writing, ‘To my Daisy,’ at the beginning of his little notes. She found herself thinking, If he comes back, if the war spares him, then it’s a sign I’m meant to marry him.

  One day after seeing Beatty Solomons again, Daisy went home resolved to write to Den as soon as she had time. She had had another letter from him, one of his simple, matter-of-fact, illiterate notes. Each one that arrived gave her a twisted confusion of feelings. On the one hand she was filled her with longing for love, and increasingly with gratitude for his devotion. It was something miraculous to be loved. She thought of the depth of Annie’s grief, of Clara and Aunt Hatt. There was so much loss about her – she was the one who was fortunate. Despite all this came a feeling of dread, of being pushed by him in a direction that was nothing to do with her own will.

  One Saturday evening, once Hester was settled down, she wrote another letter to him.

  ‘Dear Den.’ This was as far as she got for a long time. She sat on her bed in the fading light, hearing John and Lily running up and down the lower staircase, playing some game. Reaching over, she picked up the bundle of silver wire from beside the bed. Running her hands along it, she could feel its twisting shape. She was fashioning it gradually into a tree and it was working rather well. Sighing, she put it down. Working with metal was a lot easier than writing letters.

  ‘I am teaching a lot of classes,’ she began again. There did not seem to be any point in going into detail. ‘The family are well and so are Lizzie and all the girls. Auntie Annie is better now and has gone back to the hospital.’ She knew Den was devoted to both Margaret and Annie, but still could not think of more to say about Margaret. Her stepmother, she realized gratefully, went on, undramatically, from day to day.

  She wished him well and signed off. Having written the envelope, she lay it on the bed beside her, trying to confront herself. Den seemed to have gone away to another world. But if he came back, what was she really going to do? Den had overcome a lot, she knew all too well. There was his father’s accident, his desertion of the family and later death. And their mother Mary, who had struggled to cope, had died far too young. And yet Den had worked and learned at Watts & Son. He had grown into an impressive man, solid and kindly. And he loved her. What more should she expect? She was hardly in a position to be fussy, she knew that. And it would be good for Hester to have a father – wouldn’t it?

  Staring up at the darkening window, she wondered whether Pa realized that Den had serious intentions towards her. She had never talked to him about it. The pain of the relationship with her father coursed through her again. Things were much improved on the surface, but her disgrace, her having Hester out of wedlock – with James Carson of all people – had wounded something for ever in their relationship, it seemed to her. She knew that he thought she was never going to do what her young promise had led him to think she would – to live up to him, to her mother, Florence Tallis. To go beyond, to be great.

  Perhaps he had washed his hands of her in that regard and would not really care who she married?

  Forty-One

  June 1917

  ‘How are you finding it, Miss Tallis?’

  The conversation with Mr Gaskin came back to Daisy as she sat on the tram, sweeping out of town along the Bristol Road. After their class at Vittoria Street the night before, he had approached her, almost as if worried.

  ‘I hope it’s not too much for you? I imagine there must be some . . . some difficult things to witness?’

  ‘It was rather hard at first, but I’m used to it now.’ She smiled, realizing how disappointed she would be if she had to stop. ‘In fact, I enjoy it – and I think the patients find the classes beneficial.’

  ‘Colonel Marsh has indicated that he thinks very much so – in fact, he has furnished us with a certificate to say so.’ Mr Gaskin smiled as if he found this rather quaint.

  ‘It’s good to feel I’m doing something for the war effort,’ she said. ‘How are the gauge-makin
g classes coming along?’ she thought to ask.

  ‘Yes, yes, very well . . .’ He began drifting away. ‘Anyway, that’s excellent, Miss Tallis – keep up the good work.’

  Looking out at the bright day, as the city thinned and opened into the suburbs, she felt the glow of his praise. It was a long time since anyone had praised her, she thought. Her younger years, full of achievements and compliments, of her own confidence and prizes, seemed another life, many years ago. She thought of the half-finished silver projects in her attic and her spirits sank, wondering for a moment quite why she was making such an effort to keep working on them.

  But as soon as she reached Hollymoor she was taken out of her self-absorbed thoughts. Walking through the grounds she heard spring birdsong from the trees, some of which still had frills of blossom on them. Her heart lifted. She wore a silver-grey dress and had plaited her hair up in a coil at the back.

  As she approached the workshop, near the door she saw someone in a wheelchair, facing away from her. Drawing closer she began to recognize the dark curls of the man called Stephen. His body seemed to list a little to the right, something she had not noticed when facing him.

  As she walked round to greet him, he smiled shyly and looked up at her. ‘I thought I’d hold the door open. I think everyone’s in now, though.’

  ‘Oh, good – thank you,’ Daisy said. Her mind on the class ahead, she was about to step into the workshop.

  ‘Would you mind pushing me in now, please, Miss Tallis?’ He spoke apologetically, as if he was bothering her. ‘I let the orderly go.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Daisy said, embarrassed that this had not occurred to her.

  She manoeuvred the chair, aware suddenly of being very close to the young man, of the delicate shape of his neck, the rich brown, curling hair. In those seconds she was brought up close to the reality of his injuries. His shoulders in the blue uniform tunic were broad, strong looking, though there was that slight tilt to them, as if something within had been shortened in some way. He had a thin blanket draped over the lower half of his body which hung abruptly straight down where his legs ended. It was painful to see. Even though he was facing away from her, she averted her eyes.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said brightly, pushing the chair up to one of the tables amid the chat of the other men. They quietened then and called out greetings to her.

  ‘Good afternoon.’ She smiled fondly round at them all.

  Leaning down, she pushed on the lever to put the brake on. As she did so, she was suddenly acutely aware of her closeness to him. She saw, close up, the weave of his uniform and texture of skin on the back of his left hand, resting on the grey blanket: the pale, sallow skin, the tributaries of veins. She caught a scent of carbolic soap and as she straightened up, her hat brushed against his shoulder.

  ‘Oh, sorry!’ She was startled. Even bending so close to him had felt strangely intimate, as if she was doing wrong in some way.

  ‘That’s all right, miss – no harm done.’ He smiled with a certain irony, as if to say, What’s a little knock from a straw hat compared to all this? ‘Thanks.’

  Until now she had paid little attention to him. He was the quietest member of this class and one of the more able, but he would lower his head and fix his attention on the task in front of him, rather than joining in the class chit-chat. Now she found her eyes drawn to him, wondering about him.

  ‘Today,’ she said, speaking up to get their attention, ‘I’ve brought a model from the art school for you to work from.’

  Before, they had worked mainly from pictures, or even just from memory. She drew it out of her bag with a flourish.

  ‘Ha – a parrot!’ someone laughed.

  ‘Yes, well, it’s a cockatoo.’ The bird was creamy white with a rakish yellow crest, its claws fixed on a stand so that she could set it up on the table. It had been heavy to carry.

  ‘Couldn’t you’ve brought one that was still alive?’ asked the lad with the eye patch.

  ‘I think that might have caused me a bit of trouble on the tram, Joe,’ she said. ‘Specially if it was a bit of a chatterbox.’

  ‘My Uncle Fred had a parrot,’ said a new lad, called Windy for reasons she did not care to enquire about. Like many of the others he was not local – came from down south somewhere. Trying to send the wounded lads to a hospital near home had largely gone out of the window months ago. ‘Cor, ’e used to make some ripe announcements –’e’d been in a pub, Uncle Fred said. One day—’

  ‘Shall we get on with it, gentlemen?’ Daisy said sternly.

  ‘Yes, miss. Sorry, miss.’

  She saw Stephen look down, apparently amused.

  Daisy cut up the block of clay into shares for them all and handed them out.

  ‘I’ve done a lorra fings in the last few years what I never expected,’ said Sid, a man from somewhere in London with a badly scarred face. He held up his lump of clay. ‘If you’d asked me a year or two back I don’t s’pose I’d’ve said, well, yeah, mate, I’ll be sat in Birmingham, me chest and fizzog full o’ metal junk, making a clay parrot . . .’

  The others laughed.

  ‘Well, it doesn’t look much like a parrot yet, Sid,’ Daisy said and Sid pulled a face like a small boy who has been ticked off.

  They settled down, though parrot stories kept emerging. By the end of the class a variety of clay cockatoos had appeared from the clay – some of which, truth to tell, looked more closely related to the pigeon, and a few that were really quite good.

  All through the class, she felt herself wanting to go and look at what Stephen was doing and for some reason held herself back. The sudden shock of intimacy she had felt at coming so close to him had made her feel shy towards him. But she did not want to look as if she was ignoring him.

  Towards the end, as they were packing up and some of the lads who could walk were pushing the wheelchair-bound out of the room – ‘Thanks, miss!’ – he still seemed absorbed in his work and she walked round to look at what he had done, standing at his shoulder.

  ‘That’s very good.’ She was truly impressed. He always did a good job, but this was particularly fine. By this time, he was using a thin stylus to mark on the feathers.

  ‘The cockatoo-ness of the cockatoo,’ he said, leaning back to look at it. She liked his voice. It was quiet, smooth, unaffected.

  ‘Yes,’ she laughed, head on one side. ‘That’s the thing. You’ve got the underlying structure – the shape is just right so that it actually is a cockatoo.’ It was easily the best one in the room. ‘You’re very good,’ she said. ‘Have you done any modelling before?’

  ‘No.’ He set the bird down carefully and rubbed his hands together. His long fingers were grey with dried clay. ‘Not this – but I do work with my hands. Cabinetmaking, restoration. I work – or used to – with my father. But . . .’ He seemed hesitant to admit this. ‘I do a bit of drawing as well. It makes you examine things – really take notice of every aspect of them.’ As he spoke he looked ahead of him and she could not see his face. ‘I used to paint a little as well – just watercolours, when I had a bit of time. Are you an artist, Miss Tallis?’

  He twisted round to look at her then, seeming glad to talk about something, not just the joking chatter that went on most of the time. But she also saw a moment’s flicker of pain pass over his face. His eyes were greyish blue and like his voice, sincere.

  ‘An artist? No – not really.’ She moved to the other side of the table so that he did not have to keep turning in the chair. ‘I’ve had to do a lot of drawing in my training at the art school. We did drawing and a lot of modelling, like this –’ she pointed at the cockatoo – ‘so I’ve done plenty, but what I really like is designing things. I’m a silversmith.’

  She felt the pride in her voice as she said it and she saw the respect in his eyes.

  ‘Are you? That’s an impressive trade.’

  ‘My father and mother were silversmiths. I mean, my father still is – my mother passed away
when I was young. She was very good, everyone says,’ she said with the usual swell of pride. ‘My father taught me a lot, but then they opened the school in Vittoria Street and I was able to go and learn more there.’

  ‘I learned everything from my pa as well,’ he said. ‘Wood is more our thing – he’s marvellous at it. I hope I’ll be able to go home soon. They did come over here to visit, once, when I first came back from France, but it’s a long trip for them.’

  ‘Where’s home?’ she said, relaxing back to lean on the other table, facing him.

  ‘Suffolk,’ he said. ‘Town called Framlingham. Nothing like as big as Birmingham – it’s a small town but it has a castle.’

  ‘I’ve hardly been anywhere except Birmingham in my life,’ she said. ‘And we live very near the middle of town – in the Jewellery Quarter as it’s called. Hockley. It’s a busy place, full of businesses all crowded in, everybody making all sorts of things. The only place I’ve seen is where my stepmother comes from – a village near Bristol.’ She felt a blush come over her, the reason why she had been there the last time coming powerfully into her mind. ‘It seemed so small and quiet! I was glad to get back here.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stephen said. ‘I suppose it must feel very different.’

  There was a silence in which both of them looked down, shy suddenly. Daisy, feeling obliged to break the silence, said, ‘I wish I was better at painting.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Stephen said, ‘I wonder whether after all this –’ he gestured towards his absent legs – ‘after all that’s gone on, painting isn’t a completely ridiculous, insane, futile thing. Other times, I think p’rhaps it’s the only thing to do.’

  Daisy met his gaze. ‘Creating beautiful things is the thing to do.’ She sounded so insistent that only afterwards, she thought to add, ‘I think.’