by Rose Tremain
I’d never heard Nicolina referred to as ‘that girl’ before. I hated Amy Cunningham for saying this. I wanted to give her face a stinging swipe with a tea towel. ‘I’ll buy it,’ I repeated, and walked away.
Yet when I got home and Nicolina and I were eating our tea in the kitchen, I raised my eyes and looked at her anew, as though I had been the one to call her ‘that girl’, and I saw that in among her beauty there was something else visible, something that I couldn’t describe or give a name to, but I knew that it was alarming.
‘Nicolina . . .’ I began, but then I stopped because I hadn’t planned what I was going to say and Nicolina looked at me defiantly over her glass of milk and said: ‘What?’
I wanted, suddenly, to bring up the subject of Paul Swinton. I wanted to remind her that his hands were strong and brown, unlike Gregory’s, which were limp and pale. I wanted to reassure her that I had been thinking about her future from the moment she’d come to live with me and that my vigilance on this subject had never faltered. But none of this could be said at that moment, so I started instead to talk about the closure of Cunningham’s and its replacement by a fish-and-chip bar.
‘Does that mean,’ asked Nicolina, ‘that we’ll have no money?’
I carried on eating, although I didn’t feel hungry. I wanted to say: ‘I suppose I knew that the young were heartless.’
It took quite a long time to complete the sale of Cunningham’s, but because everybody in the village knew that it was going to close, fewer and fewer people came into the shop. It became a bit like working in a hospice for artefacts, where everything was dying. I began to feel a sentimental sorrow for the wools and bindings and cards of ric-rac. Every morning, I removed the glove from the ebony hand and dusted it. Sometimes, I held the naked hand in mine and I thought how strange it was that no man had ever wanted to touch me and that I had never had a purpose in life until I became Nicolina’s replacement mother. I stood at my counter, wondering what the future held. I tried to imagine applying for a job at the fish-and-chip bar, but I knew I wouldn’t do this. I didn’t like fish-and-chips. In fact, I didn’t like food any more at all and I saw that the bones of my wrist were becoming as narrow as cards of lace.
Not long after this, some months after Nicolina’s fifteenth birthday, during a time when Elvis Presley’s ‘Love me Tender’ wafted out all evening from The Chelsea, I arrived at Cunningham’s to find the ebony hand gone.
I searched through every drawer in the shop and unpacked every bag and box in the stockroom, and then I telephoned Amy Cunningham at home and said: ‘Where is the hand you promised me?’
‘I did not promise it, Mercedes,’ said Amy Cunningham. ‘And, as I thought, an antique shop in Stratton is prepared to give me a very good price for it. The hand is sold.’
I stood in the empty shop, unspeaking (as people did in the novels I sometimes took out of the Mincington library). I unspoke for a long time. A customer came in and found me like that, unspeaking and unmoving, and said to me: ‘Where are your knitting patterns?’
The following day, Saturday, I couldn’t get out of bed. I said to Nicolina: ‘I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go by yourself to see Victor.’
She stood at my bedside, wearing lipstick. She offered to bring me a cup of tea.
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m going to go back to sleep. Give your father my love.’
‘What shall I take him?’ she asked.
‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘You’re on your own today.’
She looked at me strangely. Her lipsticked mouth opened a little and hung there open and I didn’t like looking at it, so I turned my face to the wall.
‘Auntie Merc,’ said Nicolina, ‘when you’re better, can you teach me the flamenco?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. Your mother was the dancer. Not me.’
The following Saturday, when we passed the cabbage field, there was no sign of Paul Swinton. I stopped on the lane, expecting Paul to appear, but everything was still and silent in the soft rain that was falling. Nicolina didn’t stop, but walked on in the direction of Waterford, holding high a pink umbrella. She looked like a girl in a painting.
When we got to the Bin, the Senior Nursing Sister pounced on us and took us into her office, which had a nice view of a little lawn, where an elaborate sundial stood. I saw Nicolina staring at this sundial while the Senior Nursing Sister talked to us, and I understood that both of us had our minds on the same thing: the sudden, swift passing of time.
The Senior Nursing Sister informed us that Victor had fallen into a depression from which it was proving difficult to rescue him. He had broken his Doris Day record into shards and thrown away his shoes. He’d cut open his pillow and pulled out all the feathers and flung them, handful by handful, round his room. I privately thought that, at that moment, he must have looked like one of those ornamental snowmen, trapped inside a glass dome.
‘Why?’ I asked.
The Senior Nursing Sister sniffed as she said: ‘Your brother-in-law had become accustomed to watching a white bull that was kept on the water-meadows. Our staff would sometimes be aware that, instead of addressing them, as reasonably requested, he was addressing the bull.’
Nicolina laughed.
‘We knew about that old white bull,’ I said. ‘Victor imagined—’
‘The bull has gone,’ said the Senior Nursing Sister. ‘We enquired of the farmer as to why it had been removed from the meadow and we were told that it had been put away.’
‘What’s “put away”?’ said Nicolina.
‘Gone,’ said the Sister. ‘Put out of its misery.’
I looked at Nicolina. We both knew that the Senior Nursing Sister was unable to talk about death, even the death of a bull. And I thought this could be one of the reasons why so many people came voluntarily to the Bin, because, there, the words which described the things that made you afraid were differently chosen.
‘We’ve become alarmed that Victor might inflict harm on a fellow inmate,’ said the Senior Nursing Sister, ‘so we have had to move him.’
‘Move him where?’
‘To a secure room. We hope it may be a temporary necessity.’
Neither Nicolina nor I spoke. We stared at this woman, who was unobtrusively ugly, like me. We’d brought Victor a gift of twenty du Maurier cigarettes and I knew that we wouldn’t be allowed to give these to him, in case he set fire to the soft walls which now surrounded him.
‘What’s going to become of him?’ I said.
‘He’s receiving treatment,’ said the Sister. ‘We expect him to recover.’
We had no choice but to trudge home through the rain, and when we came in sight of the cabbage field, I thought perhaps Paul Swinton would be there and that the sadness we were feeling about Victor might lift a little with his breezy smile. But when we got to the green lane, Nicolina said: ‘Let’s go a different way. Let’s go by the road and see the new houses.’ And she went hurrying on, leaving me standing still as the sun came out and cast a vibrant light on her pink umbrella.
Things began to move quickly after that day, as though striving to catch up with time.
The Chelsea exploded one afternoon, and when I rushed into the front room to see what the bang was, there were Gregory and Nicolina doing the forbidden thing on the floor behind the sofa. Flames were beginning to lick the curtains, but Nicolina and Gregory stayed where they were, finishing what they had to finish, and when I turned on the fire extinguisher, Gregory’s bottom was covered with foam, like fallen feathers.
That evening, when Gregory was gone and the fire was out, I told Nicolina she ought to be ashamed of herself. She picked her teeth and flicked what she found there on to the hearthrug. ‘Are you listening to me?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Nicolina. ‘Why should I be ashamed of myself? Just because you never had a man? And anyway, I love Gregory. When I’m sixteen, we’re going to get married.’
I felt very hot. I felt my blouse begin to stick to my ba
ck. ‘What about Paul?’ I said.
‘Paul who?’ asked Nicolina.
‘Paul Swinton, of course. He told me he’d wait for you . . .’
‘He knows that’s pointless. He knows I’m marrying Gregory.’
‘How does he know?’
‘Because I told him.’
‘Told him when?’
‘That time when you were in bed. He started to say ridiculous things. I told him they were ridiculous. I told him I was soon going to be Mrs Gregory Dillon.’
I got up and went over to Nicolina. I tried to put my arms round her, but she pushed me away. ‘I want better for you,’ I said.
‘Shut up, Auntie Merc!’ she snapped. ‘I’m going to get peeved with you if you crush me with stuff like that.’
In the nights, I lay in my narrow bed and wondered what to do. I thought of the life Nicolina would have with Gregory Dillon in some lonely city. I wished Aviva were alive to snap her castanets in Gregory’s face and send him packing.
I contemplated trying to talk to Victor, but Victor had gone very silent since his time in the Secure Room. He sat by his window, smoking and staring at his feet in bedroom slippers. I took him a transistor radio and he held it close to his ear, like you might hold a watch, to hear its tick. He never asked about Nicolina and she never visited him any more.
And on the green lane, there was never a sign of Paul Swinton. The cabbages grew and the sun shone on them and then, one day, they were cut and gone, and the leaves and roots left behind began to smell sour. It became irksome for me to walk that way.
On my last day at Cunningham’s, before the removers came to take away what was left of the sewing silks and bindings, a woman came into the shop and sat down at my counter. It was Mrs Swinton, Paul’s mother. She wore a choked expression, as though she found it difficult to swallow. She blinked very fast as she talked. She asked me to persuade Nicolina to change her mind and agree to marry Paul. I invited her to sit down on one of the last remaining leather chairs. ‘Nicolina doesn’t know her own mind,’ I said. ‘She’s too young.’
‘No,’ said Mrs Swinton. ‘Paul told me she was planning to marry somebody else. Some boy.’
‘She’s saying that in the heat of the moment. Because they dance and carry on. But it won’t last. They’re children.’
Mrs Swinton stared at me sternly, no doubt wondering how I could allow my niece to ‘carry on’ with anybody at the age she was. In her day, said this stare, nobody carried on in this village.
She opened her bag and took out a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes, which were brown, like Paul’s. ‘He’s so unhappy,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to do. He’s letting the land go to ruin.’
What came into me then was a sudden white-hot rage with Nicolina for breaking the heart of the man who loved her. ‘Who do you think you are?’ I wanted to scream at her. ‘Just tell me who.’
‘I’ll talk to her,’ I told Mrs Swinton. ‘Tell Paul to try to be patient. It may all work out in the end.’
‘I hope so,’ said Mrs Swinton. ‘The power of love to wound is a wretched business.’
After Mrs Swinton left, I stood alone in the shop, which had always been sweetly perfumed with mothballs, until it was almost dark. Then I walked home and found Nicolina in bed, weeping.
I tried to stroke her hair, but it was in a wild tangle, as though she’d attempted to pull it out. She screamed at me to leave her alone.
I went downstairs and, out of habit, melted a Mars bar with milk to make a hot drink. I imagined I was making it for Nicolina, but then I decided she wouldn’t want a Mars bar drink right now, so I stood by the stove, drinking it myself. I longed for my dead sister to come alive again and walk in my door.
I switched on the wireless and a programme about the Camargue came on: a wild place full of white horses and bulrushes and empty skies, and I thought how lovely it would be to go there, just for a day, and smell the horse smell and the salt wind. I was so caught up in the programme that I didn’t hear Nicolina come downstairs. But suddenly I looked up and saw a figure at the kitchen door and jumped right out of my cardigan, imagining it was Aviva’s ghost.
Nicolina was wearing old check dungarees, a bit like the ones we used to dress her Ladies in. Her eyes were burning red.
‘Gregory’s gone,’ she said.
‘Sit down, Nicolina,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to sit down.’
‘Come on. Sit down and we’ll talk about it.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it. He’s gone. That’s all. It’s over. I’m only telling you because you need to know.’
She turned round then, as if to go back upstairs, but there she stopped and stared at me and said: ‘There’s something else. I’m pregnant. I expect you’ll throw me out now. I expect you’ll disown me.’
I spent the next weeks and months trying to reassure Nicolina. I told her I would repaint the little room at the back of my bungalow and make it into a nursery. I said a baby would be a novelty in my sheltered life. I said we would build a swing and hang it from the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. I said there was no chance of anybody being disowned. No chance.
Slowly, she came crawling out of her misery shell. She told me she was grateful for what I was doing. And, one Saturday morning in October, she agreed to come with me again to visit Victor.
We followed our old route over the fields. Nicolina made no protest about this. As we drew level with Paul Swinton’s land, my heart began to beat unsteadily, wondering if he would be there, wondering if, when he saw Nicolina with her pregnant belly, he would try to do her harm. But there was no sign of him. The field was ploughed and empty soil. Yellow leaves from the hedgerows lay fallen there. It was as if Nicolina had known this is how it would be: just the blind earth, waiting for winter.
We went on, saying nothing, carrying our gifts for Victor, which consisted that day of some slices of cold pork and a bag of pear drops. We’d decided not to tell Victor about the baby. If you told Victor anything in advance of its being, he was unable to grasp it. It was as though the future were an enormous mathematical equation that had no meaning for him. Or perhaps time itself had no meaning for him any more. He hadn’t seen Nicolina for months, but when we went into his room and she handed him the pork slices wrapped in greaseproof paper, all he said was: ‘Aviva’s hair was dark, but yours was always fair. I prefer the dark.’
She kissed his stubbled cheek and we sat down on the bed. Victor unwrapped the pork slices and began eating them straight away. Between mouthfuls he said: ‘We’ve got a new resident. Younger than the rest of us. His name’s Paul Swinton.’
I looked at Nicolina, but her face was turned away. She was holding on to a hank of her pale hair.
‘I’m all in favour of new residents,’ Victor continued, crunching on a sliver of crackling. ‘They cheer me up.’
That night I couldn’t sleep. Sorrow makes you weary, but never gives you rest.
I really didn’t know how I was going to get through my future: the baby, the dirt and noise of it and having no money to buy toys. All I’d ever wanted was quietness. A life spent measuring elastic. I’d had forty-three years of a life I’d loved and now it was over.
The following day I took a bus to Stratton. A long time had passed since Amy Cunningham had sold the ebony hand to the antique shop there, so I told myself that it would be gone by now. But it wasn’t gone. It was standing on a marble washstand, with a price tag of seventeen shillings tied round its thumb. And when I saw it and picked it up, a surge of pure joy made my head feel light.
There was only one problem. I didn’t have seventeen shillings. I said to the shop owner: ‘I’ll give you what I have and pay the rest in instalments.’
The shop owner had a little chiselled beard and he stroked this tenderly as he regarded me, clutching the hand to my breast. ‘How much have you got?’ he asked.
I counted out eight shillings. He looked at this money and said: ‘I’ll take eight. It was sold
to me as ebony, but it’s not, of course. It’s mahogany. It’s just gone a bit dark with time.’
He offered to wrap the hand in brown paper, but I said this wasn’t necessary. I carried it away, just as it was, held tightly in my arms. And when I got home, I brought out the Min cream and a duster and polished it till it shone, as it had always shone in the Cunningham’s days. Then I placed the hand by my bed, very near my pillow, and lay down and looked at it.
I asked it to give me courage to go on.
Loves Me, Loves Me Not
Frank Baines arrived in London from the USA on a fine September morning in 1985. He put up at a hotel in Piccadilly and dozed awhile, and then he went down into the lobby and stared out at the red buses and the tides of people, hurrying along in the sunshine. And he felt wary of stepping out and joining them, because they seemed too vivid and noisy, too purposeful, knowing and bright.
Frank remembered England dark. Dark and slow and quiet. Dark railway carriages, on slow trains, where silence was preferred. Dark pubs. Dark little homes with, under the stairs, some deeper, incredible darkness in which a dog or a cat – or sometimes a child – lay sleeping. And that strange, end-of-the-world darkness that was a London wartime dusk . . .
Frank took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He realised now that to have gone on imagining England the way it had been in the 1940s was dumb. Years had come and gone. There had been the Beatles and Mary Quant and pale-pink lipstick. There had been Julie Christie with her shining teeth. Now, there was Mrs Thatcher in all her shades of electric blue, and her yellow hair. But Frank had only ever seen these people in magazines or on the TV, and so it was almost as though he’d never believed they were quite as they seemed, never believed they hadn’t been enhanced by some clever, artificial light. Because the England that he’d once known had stayed in his mind through all these decades of change: a monochrome world, hushed and wintery and pure of heart. And it was only now, in 1985, standing in the lobby of the expensive hotel he couldn’t really afford, that Frank saw how stubborn and wrong his vision of this country had been.
