by Annie Murray
‘Christ.’ Next to what he realized must be the chapel, he had to stoop over for a moment to regain his breath, along with a scrap of composure. He couldn’t go in like this – he was shaking like a leaf!
Someone else was coming along the path and he straightened up, feeling foolish, and turned to see a middle-aged woman with a tired face. Seeing him hesitate she said, ‘This your first time? It’s not so bad when you get used to it, you know. We see them in the big hall. I’ll show you if you like.’
Stepping inside the dark, imposing entrance was a terrible moment, as if the building was engulfing him and he might drown. In the big hall he saw a short queue of other visitors lining up in front of two stiffly dressed nurses who sat at small tables positioned in the far corners of the room on each side of a curtained-off stage, beyond a scattering of chairs. Younger nurses were hurrying to and fro.
‘Yes, what name is it?’
Intimidated by the nurse in her stiff veil, he managed to cough out, ‘Brown. Cynthia.’
‘And that is for her?’ She held her hands out for the newspaper-wrapped parcel. Bob hesitated; he had wanted to give it to Cynthia himself. After all, it was the only thing he could offer. Left to himself, though, it would never have occurred to him to bring anything with him. He was in too much of a state to think. It was Dot who suggested the sweets and plums. In fact he knew that if it wasn’t for Dot, he wouldn’t be here at all. He would have chickened out.
‘We’ll see that she gets it. Now, you wait on that side.’
One of the scurrying nurses was dispatched to find Cynthia. Bob sat watching as other patients arrived, though he had an impulse to avert his eyes at the pity of it. Most were men, shuffling down to the other side of the hall. A few women came in, in shapeless gowns. Bob thought at first that this was the reason they somehow all looked the same, apart from the shuffling, depressed gait. Then he realized it was their hair. Almost all of them had the same look, their hair chopped round their ears and in a stern fringe. Patients. Inmates. He couldn’t marry it up in his mind, not with his Cynth.
Because of that he didn’t see her coming at first, as if she was just another one. She was walking slowly, led by the young nurse. Her head was down and her hands clasped. He saw at once that she had a long plaster on her left wrist and she was nursing her hand, her overall appearance that of a supplicant who has come to apologize for some terrible misdeed. She seemed to cringe as if the very light hurt her.
‘Here you are, Mrs Brown,’ the nurse announced. ‘Here’s your visitor.’
She waited until her charge was safely sitting before moving away to receive fresh orders.
There was a long silence. Bob was not quite sure she had even seen him. Cynthia kept her head down and clutched her hands together in her lap so tightly that her knuckles strained at the flesh. Bob stared at her in shock. She was clad in a strange smock of tough material, almost like canvas, which neutered all her womanly curves, and her hair, those lovely curls, had been subjected to the same institutional hacking. Even her fringe was too short and had convulsed into a frizz. He was so appalled he could hardly stand to look at her. His throat tightened and he found himself fighting tears.
‘Cynth?’ he dared to say. He didn’t think she had heard, amid the murmur of the other patients and their guests, so he repeated it, almost breaking down. ‘Look at us, will yer?’
She moved her head at a slant, squinting at him for a second as painfully as if he were the summer sun, then looked back in her lap. She picked restlessly at the dressing on her arm now, rocking slightly back and forth.
‘What’ve yer done?’ He leaned forward, longing to be close, yet repelled by her. ‘Did you hurt yourself?’ He found himself speaking as if she was a child.
There was a faint, indifferent nod in reply. And suddenly he couldn’t stand it. He felt as if his chest was going to rip open.
‘Cynth – love. For God’s sake! Speak to me! You’re my wife. When’re yer going to get better? When’re you coming home?’
Her rocking increased and she was obviously in terrible distress. Aghast, he saw her fling herself abruptly from the chair, face down, and start to bang her head on the floor.
‘Don’t!’ he cried, leaping to stop her. He was joined immediately by two nurses, who pulled her now feather-light body from the floor as Cynthia cried and struggled, flinging her head from side to side. Her mouth widened in a grimace and to his horror he saw that she was missing a good number of her teeth at the back and sides.
‘God!’ Bob cried. ‘Don’t, Cynth – stop it, for God’s sake!’
‘She’ll have to go back,’ one of the nurses told him. ‘She’s in no state.’
‘Wait!’ Bob moved closer. ‘Cynth . . .’ Restrained on each side by the nurses, she turned wild eyes on him as if he was dangerous and terrifying, holding her head at an odd angle. Then, abruptly, she went limp and the nurses loosened their hold.
‘Leave us – just for a minute, will yer?’ Bob pleaded.
Cynthia was compliant now. She sank back down onto the chair and the nurses retreated a little.
‘What’ve they done?’ he nodded at her. ‘Your teeth?’
She put her hand vaguely to her mouth. ‘They said my teeth was bad. That it might help.’ Leaning forward, eyes stretched very wide, she whispered, ‘What about the little ’uns? Tell me!’
‘They’re all right,’ he assured her. ‘Em’s been a bit poorly. Dot’s looking after her and Joycie. They saw Violet – Olive’s got her and she’s thriving.’
‘Sid? Joycie?’ She spoke with great hunger to know.
‘They’re all right, love.’ Relief coursed through him. She was talking – only a whisper, mind, but talking properly. He was dangerously close to weeping. ‘They miss yer, though. We all miss yer, terrible, like.’
He could have bitten his tongue off for the distress this provoked in her. She was trembling, tears filling her brown eyes. Staring at her lap again, she whispered, ‘I want to die. That’s the only thing. I’m no good . . . No good.’
‘Oh, love . . .’ He was breaking down, her despair sinking through him, as if he was in a black pit with her. ‘Don’t . . . Don’t say that . . .’
Seeing them both weeping, the nurses came forward again. ‘She must go back now,’ they said. ‘We don’t want you getting worked up again, do we?’
And without a glance, a farewell or the touch of a hand, she was gone, in a tough guided shuffle across the hall and into the dark corridor.
Oh Christ . . . Oh Christ . . . The words banged in his head as he sat on the tram. He didn’t know why those words. He’d never been religious, except for the bits forced on him in the Home. It was more like that Indian habit someone once told him about, sitting quietly and saying a word over and over. Made you calm, they said. It gave him something to hold on to because there was that tight, bursting feeling in his chest again and he’d be terrified to let it out. He might cry and not be able to stop, or find he was unravelling like the end of a frayed rope.
He kept his head turned to the window as the leaf-sogged afternoon glided by outside, and took deep, convulsive breaths. Thank Christ there was no one in the seat beside him. Too grim a time of year for trippers out to the Lickeys for walks.
Again and again he kept seeing it: Cynthia flinging herself to the floor, the red mark on her forehead as they dragged her up, that stretch-eyed look she had – not her, not her at all. It wasn’t her. He hadn’t been to see his wife, but some stranger, possessed by a demon. Something that looked at him out of her eyes, which had swallowed her and taken her from him, encasing her in a shell of despair. His wife, his love – the only woman he had ever loved and he’d never wanted anyone else. She was just his Cynth, that was all. But over the months his Cynth had shrunk and shrunk until she was a tiny dot of light inside the desperate woman he had just seen, the dot of light he had glimpsed just in those seconds when she asked about the kids. Next time – if there ever was a next time – he visited, wo
uld that minute flame have been doused as well?
He put his head in his hands, his breathing fast and desperate. He had lost her. His Cynthia was gone, forever it seemed.
As the tram neared the middle of Birmingham, his thoughts moved back to what he had to go home to. A house bereft of wife and mother to his children, no comfort, sick kids . . . Em had been very poorly all week and Sid seemed to be going down with it as well and his feet had got infected after Em scalded him. Dot had given him a roasting over that, over his being out so much.
He decided to walk out to Nechells. It’d save some coppers and give him time. The thought of home dragged his feelings even further down. No – he couldn’t face it. Not yet. A few pints and he’d be set up. He’d find the first pub that sold his favourite ale.
Then another temptation arose in his mind, one which as the days passed he had kept trying to push away. Flossie Dawson. Try as he might, she was seldom far from his thoughts. He wanted sympathy, comfort: where better to find that than with Flossie? He corrected himself. Mrs Dawson. Could he call in on a Saturday afternoon? It wouldn’t hurt – his visit to Cynthia had been so short after all that he was early. And Mrs Dawson seemed to be pleased to see him at any time. Gratifyingly so, for a woman as classy as that.
A tremor of excitement went through him, lightening his despair over Cynthia. After all, what was the harm? She was a lonely widow and he, well, the way things were looking, he was more like a widower himself. It was all above board, they were just giving each other a bit of company. There’d be no repetition of what happened last time, when the girl was up in bed. He’d apologized for that. It was when she’d brushed past him that time, and he hadn’t been able to help but reach out for her. Course, Cynthia being the way she was, he was deprived in that department. He hadn’t been able to help it. It wouldn’t happen again, not with a respectable lady like that.
But the memory of Flossie Dawson’s full lips meeting his, that stolen kiss which had so filled her with blushes and him with startling desire, made him walk even faster in the direction of her house.
Twenty-Nine
Late on, that grey Saturday afternoon, Dot made up the fire and sank down into a chair for a much-needed rest. On the rug at her feet, Em, Joyce and Nancy were playing a game – amiably for the moment – with some bits and pieces and a large helping of imagination: old cotton reels, a wooden spoon, little rag doll, broken clock and a small wooden box all figured in an elaborate game of ‘pretend’. Sid was out with the other boys, still walking gingerly as his sore feet gradually healed.
Leaning back exhaustedly in her chair, Dot smiled down at the three absorbed little faces in the firelight. Having only her brothers, so much older, Nance loved having the Brown girls there, and they were like sisters to her. Dot experienced a pang looking at them, though. Nance, with her swarthy complexion and bouncy coils of black hair round her chubby cheeks, looked so much more robust now than the others. Joyce was more subdued, but it was in Em that the strain showed worst. Of course, she had just been very poorly, although she was on the mend now, but the days of fever had left her even thinner and paler than before. Dot thought of the freckly, open-faced Em before Cynthia’s troubles began, and the child’s grief brought tears to her own eyes. Em was a shadow of what she had been before – more withdrawn, all the strain and loss of the past weeks showing in her pinched face. It felt as if Cynthia was dead and, Dot thought, she might just as well be so far as the children were concerned.
Em looked up and caught Dot watching her with tears in her eyes. Em’s own eyes, in her hollow face, wore a hunted look.
‘All right, bab?’ Dot said gently. ‘D’yer need to ’ave another lie-down now?’
Em shook her head determinedly.
‘You just go easy, then.’
The merest shadow of a smile touched Em’s lips and she went back to her game.
Dot’s mind wandered to the hospital. How was Bob getting on with his visit to Cynthia? She would go next time, she resolved. She missed her friend dreadfully. Of course, someone had to have the kids again for the afternoon and who else was going to offer but her, even though she’d looked after Em all week – and the others a lot of the time. She couldn’t just leave the poor little mite alone and poorly while Bob was at work – or out getting tanked up, which he seemed to be most of the time.
And the Browns’ troubles took her mind off her own loneliness, which came looming up whenever she stopped rushing about for long enough to let it. Then she allowed herself to imagine how things might have been if Charlie had not been killed. He’d been called up before they were married, even though they knew already they were made for each other. The twins had been well on the way before they tied the knot. She smiled wistfully at the thought of them as babies, one dark, one fairer like Charlie from the start. She and Charlie had married when he was on leave in 1916, a few months before the big push on the Somme. He’d survived it, not like the thousands of others. There was to be one more leave, when David and Terry were seven months old. Dot closed her eyes and let herself embrace the memory. They had been such sweet days, so few, and the last of her married life as it turned out, with her husband home and her two healthy sons, but with the war forever hanging over them like a louring cliff waiting to fall on their heads. It made every moment intense, poignant. Her mind strained to see Charlie’s face as he gazed down at her while they were making love, his laughter, bouncing David and Terry in his lap in turn, his eyes meeting hers, smiles of love and happiness, walking together so proudly with the old double perambulator Charlie’s mom had given them, she pushing the boys, Charlie’s arm warm around her waist. And the goodbye at the station, she holding up first David then Terry to be kissed, waving as Charlie disappeared, getting smaller and smaller, the smoke whirling past the carriage smudging him until he was gone. Gone. The pain stabbed through her, raw and agonizing, when she let it in.
‘Mom?’ Nance’s voice cut through her memories. ‘I’m ’ungry!’
Dot jerked back to the present and forced a smile to her lips. ‘You can’t be, Nance – you only ’ad yer dinner a little while ago. Oh – ’ she looked at the clock – ‘blimey, where does the time go? It’s later than I thought!’
‘Can us ’ave a penny?’ Nancy wheedled. ‘To go down to Missus Price’s.’ Nancy always talked about the Miss Prices as if they were one person.
‘You’re a one, ain’t yer?’ Dot said. ‘You don’t want to go down there – it’s cold! And Em ain’t up to going out yet.’
‘Yes I am!’ Em said, the thought of a few sweets producing a remarkable acceleration in her recovery.
‘Well . . .’ Dot softened. After all, it’d be nice to have a few minutes’ peace. ‘Tell yer what, you can have tuppence. Get yer coat on, Em. And you could ask Molly to come with yer, get her some rocks?’
‘Molly Fox?’ Nancy wrinkled her nose.
‘It won’t hurt yer for once. Molly’s been ever so good to Em.’
Em said nothing but Dot could see from her eyes that she agreed. Dot had a soft spot for waifs and strays. And Molly, to her surprise, had turned up on the doorstep every day that week while Em was poorly and came and sat with her. Her fingers itched to get hold of the child and sort her out. There was something not right with her, Dot could sense, but she didn’t like to say anything and couldn’t quite put her finger on it. It was the way Molly always seemed to be dolled up in something a bit too old for her which made her look both waif and trollop at the same time. There was always that aroma of wee about her, and several times when she thought no one was looking, Dot had seen Molly press her hand to her privates as if they were sore. Dot longed to strip her off and give her a good scrub down and dress her in something else. But what could you expect with a mother like Iris Fox and that vile old father of hers? Dot, with her ready intelligence, could see that Iris was a slow-witted, vicious woman who had been a handsome looker when young and lured a good man into marriage. If the war hadn’t done for Joe Fox the way it
had he might have been able to keep Iris in line. But she’d been landed with the care of him and her father as well. You could almost feel sorry for Iris, but as it was she was such a foul-mouthed harridan without an ounce of kindness in her that Dot avoided her as much as she possibly could.
‘Go on, then – a joey’s all I’ve got and I want the penny back!’ She handed Em a threepenny bit from the old tea caddy and the girls made eagerly for the door. Dot watched them head across in the direction of the court where Molly lived.
‘Time for a cuppa,’ she said aloud.
By the time she’d drunk her tea the girls were back, mouths busily working. They seemed to have picked up Sid on the way as well and he had something pink and chewy trailing from the corner of his mouth.
‘There yer go – come on in. Get warm by the fire. I expect your dad’ll be in any minute,’ she said to the Brown children.
Em turned, shaking her head, a hurt expression on her face. ‘We’ve just seen him,’ she said quietly, as the others chattered, holding their hands out to the fire’s warmth. ‘But he weren’t going home – he was going up the other way.’
It was more than a couple of hours before Bob Brown came home. Dot kept an eye out, growing more and more enraged. What the hell did he think he was playing at, taking off again, tonight of all nights, when he’d been to see Cynthia? Not to mention taking it for granted that she’d give them all some tea, she cursed to herself. Typical bloody man. Thought meals just fell from the sky. She was also on pins herself, wanting to hear how Cynthia was, but she tried to keep her agitation under control for the children’s sake. Every so often she popped out to see whether there was any light in the house.
