Eva Moves the Furniture

by Margot Livesey

  At this last sentence dimples appeared in both cheeks. I offered congratulations. With her wide eyes and bobbing manner, Anne reminded me of a wren. She told me she and her husband, Paul, had come to the school the year before; he taught mathematics; only three of the other masters were married. “As for single women,” she added, “you’ll have to be careful we don’t gobble you up.”

  I tried to smile—spinster, spinster—but my face must have betrayed me. Anne retreated into practical matters: where to buy stamps, how to get to Perth. Before she left, she drew me a map of the short distance to her house.

  That night, sitting by the fire, I was surprised to realise that I longed for the companions. I had not seen them since the day by the river. Going to Glasgow, I had hoped to be rid of them. Now what I dreaded was abandonment. I had lost David, lost Samuel; was I to lose them too? “I’m sorry,” I said. “You know I only wanted to help Lily.”

  In the Plishkas’ part of the house wireless music flared, then muffled again. The curtains hung motionless, the blue vase sat on the mantelpiece, the begonia squatted on the table. Nothing moved.

  The first week at the san was the exact opposite, medically speaking, of my experiences at the infirmary. A steady stream of boys came to the surgery, claiming nothing more serious than coughs and upset stomachs. In return I offered spoonfuls of medicine and small jokes. Mostly I diagnosed nerves about the start of school. Certainly that was true for the skinny suntanned boy who arrived one rainy morning with a badly gashed knee; he had slipped running to class.

  “What’s your name?” I said, fetching the iodine.

  “Scott. I’m a new boy.”

  “Like me.”

  As I cleaned the wound, Scott squirmed—not, he explained, from pain but in fear of being late. When I promised a note for the master, he grew still and began to tell me about his summer holidays. His days on the beach at Elgin sounded much like those I had once passed with Mrs. Nicholson’s children.

  After Scott left and I had written him up in the surgery log, I found myself standing at the window, watching the rain, close to tears: no cinema, no shops, no library, no trams, and no patients who really needed me. Worst of all, no Samuel. For a few days after David collapsed on the riverbank, I had believed that my peculiar choices made sense. Now I could no longer remember why telling Samuel the truth had seemed so important. And what had prevented me, after my botched attempt, from simply lying to make amends? I pictured his face when he first caught sight of me on the evening of my birthday, how he had held me as we danced.

  I fetched my coat and walked the short distance to Anne’s house. Fidgeting on her doorstep, I tried to think of an excuse for my visit, but at the sight of me her dimples appeared. “Eva,” she exclaimed. In an instant, she had me seated by the fire.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting,” I said feebly.

  “Not at all. I was just looking at some skirts, to see if they could be let out. Are you good at sewing?”

  “Dreadful.”

  She laughed, a surprisingly throaty sound that again made me think of a small bird. “I suppose living in Glasgow, there was no need with all those shops and tailors.”

  “Actually I swapped with my friend Daphne. I cleaned her shoes or went to the library in exchange for mending.”

  “We could do that. It’s none of my business,” she went on, “but I can’t help wondering why you took this job. I mean Glenaird isn’t exactly the centre of the universe.”

  I told her the parts of the story that could be told: not Samuel, not yet, but how my grandparents had worked at the Grange, and how Barbara at the age of fifteen had been sent to Troon as a housemaid, and about David and Lily and losing Ballintyre.

  “Oh, how awful,” said Anne. She asked if I still had relatives in the valley, and I shook my head. The flu epidemic that took Barbara had also carried away her parents; her surviving uncles and aunts had passed on in the twenties.

  Anne nodded sympathetically and bent to tend the fire. “The Grange is only half a mile away,” she said. “The Rintouls live there, but they don’t mind people walking through the grounds.” Then she confided the shadow in her life: her brother, Oliver, had been in the final stages of the Italian campaign and had come home utterly changed. “He wanders around like a beggar. The neighbours don’t recognise him.”

  “It’s early days,” I said. I described some of the remarkable recoveries I’d seen—the man who, after a month of silence, greeted me one morning; the sailor, so fearful of water he refused to bathe, who now swam with pleasure—and she seemed comforted.

  As I walked back to the san, I started making bets. If I held my breath for eight steps, the furniture would have moved. If I held my breath for ten, one of the companions would be there. But when I opened the door of my sitting room, everything was exactly where I had left it.

  On the next dry afternoon, I asked Mrs. Plishka for directions and walked up the main road to look at the Grange. Larger than Larch House, it was built of the same grey granite. A copper beech, like the one by Barbara’s grave, grew near the front door, and from the first large branch hung a swing. So this was where Barbara had spent her childhood, had polished the brasses and seen her future husband. I longed to look through one of the dark windows, but as I stepped closer, somewhere inside a dog began to bark forlornly.

  I followed the drive up the gentle hill. Around the bend, I came upon an immensely tall conifer with spongy reddish bark. I was standing looking at it, wondering what kind of tree this was, when a pain stabbed my side. Not appendicitis, I thought, paging through a textbook; not kidneys.

  “It’s a California redwood.” The girl stepped from behind the trunk.

  “You’re here.” I was so pleased I almost embraced her

  “In California they have whole forests of these trees. Some of them are big enough for a car to drive through the trunk.”

  She watched me with her bluebell eyes. The pain throbbed and was gone. “How did it get here?” I asked.

  “The first owner of the Grange went to America and brought several back. This was the only one to survive.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about it.” The girl tossed her braids and began to edge away. “Do you want to go for a walk?” I added quickly.

  “Not today. You should go home too.” With a final flick of her braids, she stepped behind the tree.

  As I headed back to the san, I noticed neither the light on the hills nor the sheep in the fields. The girl was here, and surely the woman had come too. My loneliness blew away, like dandelion seeds in the wind.

  A few days, perhaps a week later, I was at my sitting room window, drawing the curtains, when I saw a dog on the cricket pitch. No, not a dog, a fox trotting across the dewy grass, head held low. I had last glimpsed one with David, in the lane by Ballintyre. How pleased he would be when I told him. Then, as the animal disappeared behind the pavilion, the sorrow returned, as keen as the day by the river.

  “He was very glad you were coming here,” the woman said. She was standing behind me.

  She smiled and seemed to understand that I could not speak.

  “When we lived near Fort William,” she continued, “a family of foxes had their earth at the back of our cottage. In the evenings we would watch the cubs play.”

  “You lived near Fort William?” For a moment I was so startled that even my sadness was forgotten.

  “My husband was working on the railway as an engineer. Later, of course, we moved to Troon.” She pointed to the door. “I think you have a visitor.”

  Mrs. Plishka, a dab of flour on her red cheek, held out a plate. “Scones,” she said. “For breakfast, with honey.”

  From then on the companions came often, singly and together, and were more forthcoming than they had ever been. The girl knew not only about the redwood but where to find the last blackberries and the best chestnuts. The woman spoke of her husband and sons; for their first anniversary her husband had made her a stainless-steel toast
rack. “Dear man,” she said. “It held six slices. He couldn’t understand why I laughed and laughed. Such an unromantic gift.”

  As the weeks passed I gradually grew accustomed to the rhythms of my new life, the awkward boys, the lack of bustle, my pleasant flat. Happily, Anne and I fell into friendship. Such was the nature of the infirmary that I had never before had a married friend, and sometimes I longed to ask what was it like, having a man so close all the time, but there was a delicacy about Anne that forbade intrusions. One Saturday in early October, she suggested a walk to the nearest village, on the far side of the valley. By road it was over four miles; using the footbridge across the river less than two. “I’ll show you the pub,” she said, “and we can look at your mother’s school.”

  The afternoon was so clear and still that, as we descended the stairs to the river, I could hear each separate leaf falling in the woods around us. We crossed the bridge and followed the track up the hill, between fields of sheep. Anne asked about Barbara: Had she been good at school?

  “Not especially.” I tried to recall David’s stories. “She had to stand in the corner for a whole afternoon because she got caught carving her initials on her desk. And she left when she was fifteen.”

  “I used to write things on my desk but I don’t remember carving. That sounds very enterprising.”

  The village was a mere few dozen houses clustered around the school, the church, and the pub. A young woman, face puffy, hair dishevelled, answered our knock at the schoolhouse door. Anne and I exchanged guilty glances; she had clearly been asleep. I apologised for disturbing her and explained our errand.

  Still yawning, the teacher fetched the key. Inside, while Anne questioned her—How many children? Did she teach languages?—I pretended to study a map of the Holy Land.

  “Come to me,” I whispered, closing my eyes. I imagined the photograph of Barbara that hung above my bed coming to life. But when I looked around, I saw only Anne and the teacher.

  “Maybe we can find her initials,” said Anne. “How long have these desks been here?”

  “Since well before my time.” The teacher had sat down at the front, as if about to commence a lesson.

  Every desk I examined was a mass of initials, swearwords, caricatures. I was gazing despairingly at a stick figure when a slight noise caught my attention. Near the window the lid of a desk was rising slowly into the air. Fortunately, Anne was engrossed in another desk, the teacher oblivious. I hurried to press down the lid.

  Amid the dense tangle the initials emerged, the B nicely chubby, the M not quite finished. I ran my finger over the letters. In them I glimpsed my mother, not the misty, demure woman of the photograph, whom I had tried to summon a few minutes earlier, but the lively girl of David’s stories—good at party games, able to recite the whole of “Tam O’Shanter,” a terrible cook. Already, I thought, I was six years older than she had ever been.

  When I showed Anne, she clapped her hands. “I knew we could find it,” she said, and I was touched by her belief.

  Outside the school, we thanked the teacher and were about to retrace our steps when a man emerged from the pub, bareheaded. “Anne,” he called, and walked towards us, smiling. He bent to kiss her cheek, and she made introductions.

  “Eva McEwen, Matthew Livingstone.”

  “Like the explorer,” he remarked, just as the same thought crossed my mind. “I wanted to ask your permission to visit one of your patients, Douglas Best.”

  Later it was to seem a good omen that almost the first thing I noticed about Matthew was his owl-like glasses, similar to those Barbara had worn. His hair was the shade of brown that fair children often have as adults. I told him he could visit the san any time between two and five. Then he offered us a lift, but Anne said no, we were on our constitutional. As we headed out of the village, I asked what Matthew taught.

  “English and first-form Latin. He came to the school a year before us and was friendly from the start. He helped me with the garden, and he’s a great games player: cards, consequences. Rumour has it he came north to escape a broken engagement.”

  “Really?” I said, my attention caught by the coincidence. Not that Samuel and I had ever been engaged.

  Back at the san, Lily’s weekly letter was waiting. She enclosed a photograph she’d discovered among David’s papers: the three of us picnicking on the beach one summer afternoon before the war. David was smiling broadly, holding a sandwich; I had my skirts hitched up from paddling, and even Lily, although she wore a hat, had taken off her shoes. Gazing at our sunlit faces, I yearned to be back in that time and place.

  In the unit the trickiest cases were the men who displayed photographs of themselves, as if they could, miraculously, be reunited with their former features. Here, doctor, they would say, you can see my eyes were always a little close together; my nose did have a bit of a bump. I recall the awful day Archie’s fiancée came to visit. It was shortly after Samuel had operated, pulling a flap of skin down from Archie’s forehead to form new nostrils, and we were all optimistic that this time the graft would take. But Cecily had sat by his bed, sobbing—“I can’t, Archie. I just can’t”—until the staff nurse turned on the wireless, full volume.

  Later, after Cecily left, sniffling away on her high heels, I approached, thinking to offer the inadequate solace of tea or the paper. Without a word, Archie held out a photograph. A handsome young man in RAF uniform gazed up at me. Cecily’s new beau, I assumed, the man who had tempted her away from Archie; then I saw the inscription: Darling Cecily, with much love from your very own high flyer, Archie. I was still looking back and forth between the man in the picture and the man in the bed when Archie plucked the photograph from my hand and, in one swift movement, tore it in two.

  On Monday Matthew arrived at the san with a grammar book and settled down with Douglas Best. “Do you know what the possessive is?”

  “No, sir.” The boy shook his head emphatically.

  They worked for an hour, until I brought the tea tray. “Now,” said Matthew, “what about a game?” In a few minutes he had organised Best, the two other boys in the ward, himself, and me into gin rummy.

  The following week he invited me to see Major Barbara in Perth; he had wangled an extra allowance of petrol. I accepted his invitation unthinkingly. Romance had become as foreign to me as the phrases the Plishkas tossed back and forth; besides, who else would he ask? The two school secretaries were cut from the same cloth as Nora Blythe, and the only other single women were the girls working in the kitchens.

  I had last been to the theatre with Samuel, and as the usher showed us to our seats I could not help wondering where he was, whether he ever thought of me. Then Matthew drew my attention to the fresco on the ceiling. “That cherub in the corner looks a bit like Best,” he said.

  The lights dimmed, and soon, almost in spite of myself, I was smiling at Barbara’s attempts to bully her family into good behaviour. Beside me, Matthew laughed heartily.

  Afterwards at the George Hotel he ordered beer, and in a moment of daring I asked for a whisky mac, Daphne’s favourite tipple. We secured a window table, with a view across the River Tay. Matthew remarked that this was the first time he had been to the hotel since the blackout ended. We had the usual conversation about where we’d each spent the war. He had taught in a school in his hometown of Stoke-on-Trent. “Bad eyes,” he said, indicating his spectacles as if I might have missed them.

  I wanted to ask why he had come north. It was a natural question but not one I thought I could ask naturally. I sipped my drink.

  “Did Major Barbara remind you of anyone?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” He puffed out his chest.

  “Mrs. Thornton.”

  “She who knows what’s best for you, better than you know yourself.” We both laughed.

  Back at the san, only the hall lights were on. The Plishkas had retired for the night and my patients, when I went to check, were sleeping peacefully. For a
moment, standing at the foot of the dark ward, I longed for the infirmary. Even on the quietest night, someone had always been awake, eager for conversation. Then I opened my sitting room door and found the woman seated by the hearth.

  “Hello, I’m watching Tizzie sleep.” She pointed to the other armchair, where the cat lay, paws twitching.

  I slipped off my coat and scooped Tizzie onto my lap. “I went to see Major Barbara.”

  “Matthew is a nice man, don’t you think?”

  I stared; it was so unlike her to offer this kind of opinion. “I hardly know him,” I said at last.

  The woman gave a little frown. “What about the play?”

  “I liked it, though I think they made it too easy to laugh at Barbara.” I scratched Tizzie’s head. “I didn’t even notice that she has the same name as my mother.”

  “I can’t imagine your mother ordering people about.” The woman was gazing at the feathery ashes.

  I remembered what David had said in the hospital. “Did you know Barbara?”

  She nodded.

  “Can you tell me about her?”

  The woman stepped over to the mantelpiece, where Barbara’s blue jug had the place of honour. Delicately, she touched the rim. “You know her by being here, by walking these roads and seeing what she saw. You should let that content you.”

  Alone, I carried the protesting Tizzie out to the corridor. She stalked off, tail waving. The woman had known Barbara. In the midst of so much loss, here was one small gain.

  13

  Christmas brought three weeks’ holiday. Anne and Paul were staying at the school, Matthew was going home to Stoke-on-Trent, and I took the train to Edinburgh. I had pictured spending the days with Lily much as we used to—shopping, doing the housework, enjoying the occasional outing—but I soon realised how foolish these imaginings were. Violet seldom left us alone for a moment, and she bossed Lily endlessly: clean this, cook that. Worst of all, though, were her comments about David. Once when Lily was reminiscing about his habit of putting out delicacies for the birds at Christmas, she exclaimed, “Heavens, Lily, what a feckless man, giving plum pudding to the sparrows. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even have a roof over your head.” Only Lily’s quick glance prevented me from vehement contradiction.