‘Throw her out?’
‘Classic care in the community. All the rage in the Eighties – help them to help themselves.’ Susan Fielding shifted in her chair; another slither of nylon beneath her skirt. ‘It’s much better now, of course.’
A waft of bleach sifted through the thin partition wall, mixed with a bass note of stewing steak burnt to the bottom of a pan. ‘When did Dorothea Walker die then?’ Margaret asked, wondering if it really was true that things had improved so much.
‘1980.’
A small silence hung in the air between them. 1980? 1980 was the year Margaret had fled from that silent, unforgiving city in the north to this big, sprawling city in the south. Seventeen, with nothing but a pair of black boots and a canvas satchel slung across her hip. It seemed impossible that she should ever have been alive when Dorothea Walker was too. ‘But the admissions form is from 1939,’ she said.
Susan Fielding paused for a moment as though counting each of those years too. ‘Yes,’ she frowned. ‘Dorothea Walker lived here for more than forty years.’ Then she hurried on. ‘Alas, nothing remains of her now.’
Lost to the wind, to the sea, to the air.
‘Except . . .’ The manageress flicked her eyes to the stack of files piled up on one shelf.
‘What do you mean?’ said Margaret.
‘The thing is, I really ought to see proof.’
‘Proof?’
‘Of your relationship to the deceased.’
‘But I don’t have a relationship with the deceased.’
‘Then your letter of permission – from a personal representative of the dead.’
A personal representative of the dead? But it wasn’t a message from beyond the grave that Susan Fielding wanted. It was paperwork, of course.
Margaret rummaged in her bag and brought out the slim brown folder. Out of that she produced a copy of a letter with bubbles over the is that provided her with all the authorization she might need.
‘Yes,’ said Susan Fielding after a brief perusal. ‘That will do.’ Then she stood and went to the door. ‘Maricel,’ she called to a passing nurse. ‘Can you ask Beverley to come to my office straight away, please.’ She turned back to Margaret. ‘Maricel comes from the Philippines,’ she said with a smile. ‘One of our best.’
Beverley didn’t come from the Philippines, or anywhere else. She came from Neasden. ‘Lived there all my life,’ she said as she led Margaret past fire doors and cleaning cupboards, small staffrooms and emergency exits of all kinds. ‘Never fancied anywhere else.’
Margaret pursued Beverley down the long corridors, pursued herself by the faintest trail of biscuits gone stale and disinfectant bought in bulk.
‘Have you come for me?’ an old lady wearing a sagging nylon dress whispered to Margaret as they crossed through one of several lounges, shuffling and sidling close enough to hook one knobbled finger onto Margaret’s red, stolen coat. The old lady wore a thin cloak of melancholy that Margaret recognized at once.
‘Now, now Mrs Storey,’ Beverley said, turning back. ‘No prisoners today, love.’ She unhooked the old woman’s finger and held the door for Margaret as they went out. ‘Thinks you’re her daughter come to take her home,’ she said as they moved on past cold ceramic tiles that curved their way up the walls.
‘Does her daughter visit much?’ Margaret looked back over her shoulder to where Mrs Storey was now staring at her through a panel of reinforced glass.
‘She hasn’t got a daughter.’
They continued down more corridors, past rooms with doors firmly closed and others ajar, Margaret catching glimpses of men and women bent low in their chairs, rocking and murmuring, or standing still and silent in the middle of a room as though uncertain which way to go now they had come to the end of their lives. This could be Barbara before too long, she thought, obese and incapacitated, hair diminishing rapidly, stuck forever in a bed. Either that, or with some kind of disease eating away at her lungs, stranded in a hospital ward as she wheezed down to her last. Then again, in not so many more years, it could be Margaret too, nothing to her name but a pair of elasticated trousers and a ragged fox fur around her neck. After all, not everyone would have someone like Beverley to see them out. Neasden. That promised land. It made Margaret wonder if perhaps her retreat from the north had been a little too hasty.
‘And where are you from?’ Beverley stopped all of a sudden at a locked door, turning to look round at Margaret as though she had read every one of her thoughts.
‘Edinburgh,’ Margaret replied. The alternative seemed too difficult to explain.
‘Lovely city,’ Beverley said, turning back. ‘If a little cold.’
Dorothea Walker’s file had been cold too, a case long dead (rather like the patient herself), ready for the shredding machine several years since. It contained a record of the last forty years before she died – her admissions number, her medical condition and several different diagnoses of the status of her mind. All of these seemed to have changed over the years, requiring a range of treatments as the fashions in therapy changed too. Shocks. Baths. Drugs. Basketmaking. And finally the talking cure (but the latter only once it was all too late). Eventually they seemed to have left Dorothea alone to wander the corridors at will, a guinea pig rotting slowly at the bottom of its cage. Then, when the next innovation was in the air (turn them out to fend for themselves), Dorothea did the sensible thing and died.
There was no hint of a previous life, of any family member left behind to grieve. As with Margaret’s client, Dorothea’s past was nothing but a land enclosed by mist. Once here, now gone, nothing much in between that anyone had seen fit to record. There was paperwork, just as Janie had specified, but none of it was of any use.
Still, even though it was over thirty years since Dorothea had turned to dust, it didn’t feel sufficient to hand back the file and leave by the front door. This dead woman was the only link Margaret had to a more recent corpse up north.
‘Did anyone know what Dorothea was like?’ she asked as she closed the madwoman’s file, more from desperation than anything else.
‘Oh, yes.’ Susan Fielding picked up a glass paperweight from her desk as though to study its heft. And the care assistant from Neasden came into her own.
Beverley had met Dorothea Walker.
Margaret was surprised. ‘You don’t seem old enough.’
‘Oh, bless you, love, but I am. Started here in ’79 when I was just a young thing. Nearly sixty now!’ Beverley was clad in a uniform of daffodil yellow with dark-green piping down the legs. It clung to her generous fifty-something curves in a way that was flattering rather than not.
‘Beverley is one of our longest-standing employees.’ Susan Fielding gave an ambiguous smile. ‘She remembers them all.’
‘I try my best.’ Beverley leaned up against the side of Susan Fielding’s desk, making herself comfortable amongst all the memorabilia of the lost.
‘What was she like? Can you remember?’ Margaret was interested now.
Beverley raised her eyes to the strip light suspended from the ceiling. ‘Oh, she was sad. Sad. Always brushing and brushing at her hair.’
‘We like to keep their hair short now, if possible,’ Susan Fielding interrupted, a hand to her own well-calibrated cut.
Beverley continued as though Mrs Fielding hadn’t spoken. ‘Silver, it was. All about her like a cloud.’
‘Did she talk much?’
‘Oh, yes, dear, but not so as you’d understand. Same thing over and over. “My angels, my angels.”’ Beverley raised her hands to the ceiling as though she too was calling down the heavenly host.
‘My angels?’
‘That was what she called them. Her little twins what died.’
‘Was that why she was here?’
‘Who knows, dear?’ Beverley gave a shake of her head. ‘Could be anything in those days.’ Susan Fielding cleared her throat as though to indicate the time for questions was over, but Beverley wasn’t finished yet
. ‘Used to sing too. “Oh my darling.” Do you know it?’
And for a moment Margaret thought the care assistant from Neasden might break into song. Ruby lips and forty-niners. Kisses for little sisters.
Susan Fielding obviously thought so too, for she stood up all of a sudden and pushed back her chair. ‘I think . . .’
‘Did anyone visit her?’ Margaret pressed on. She didn’t want to lose what could be her last chance.
‘Not that I remember, dear.’ Beverley shook her head. ‘But then I wasn’t on shift all the time.’
‘But what about when she died? Did she leave anything behind?’
‘Oh no, dear.’ Beverley stood up now and smoothed the trousers of her uniform. ‘She never had a thing other than what the hospital provided. Her solicitor dealt with it all at the end.’
William Nye of Nye & Sons solicitors. Slowly rotting in his cage now, too.
Susan Fielding went over to the door. ‘Thank you, Beverley. You’ve been a great help.’ And she held it open to show her longest-serving care assistant out.
‘Then again,’ Beverley said, propping herself back against Susan Fielding’s desk, ‘there are the boxes.’
‘The boxes?’
‘Everything the patient brought with them when they first arrived.’
Down, down they went, deep into the bowels of the residential home, the smell of damp intensifying the further into the basement they got. They passed through a series of square spaces, each darker than the next, full of old chairs and tables with only three legs, wardrobes with doors missing and empty yawning insides. Eventually they came to a wooden door with a lock all painted in black. Beverley took a large key from the pocket of her uniform. Two hands. Two turns. And it moved at last. ‘Open sesame!’ she said.
They had arrived in a small and dusty room stacked from floor to ceiling and back again with junk. A replica of Barbara Penny’s box room up north. No emergency exits. No windows out into the light.
‘It’s stuff from the old hospital.’ Beverley touched her hand to a switch at the side of the door and a dim light glowed yellow in the darkened space. ‘Some of it was on display for a while on the balcony over the dining hall. But then she arrived . . .’ Beverley pointed to the ceiling. ‘After that it was all packed up.’
Earthenware plant pots. Porcelain soap dishes. Giant thermometers. Whistles on strings. Heavy woollen uniforms. Ceramic bedpans. Ledgers of all sorts.
And these.
‘Admission boxes,’ Beverley said. ‘I found them one day when I was down here rooting around.’
Margaret peered at the pile of solid wooden boxes. ‘What’s in them?’
‘Oh, all sorts. Clothes. Jewellery. Purses and combs. Things that the patients brought with them when they first arrived.’
And there it was again, that prickle through every one of Margaret’s bones. This wasn’t paperwork. It was something much more precious than that.
It took Beverley three goes before she got the right pile, dust smeared all down the front of her uniform, though somehow Margaret felt certain that the care assistant from Neasden wouldn’t mind a bit.
‘Thank God she was one of the last,’ Beverley said when she finally hauled out a wooden box all battered and scratched, handing it down to where Margaret was waiting to receive. They both craned in to look as Margaret opened the lid, kneeling at the altar of a woman long dead in the hope that she would illuminate an old lady more recently deceased.
A nightgown with pink ribbon threaded through the neck.
A hairbrush with a handle made of bone.
Two US dollar bills, soft as rags.
And an envelope, unsealed.
Margaret picked up the envelope. It was light as air. A single-page will, perhaps. A birth certificate. A letter with an instruction from the dead. In fact, inside was this:
Three locks of hair, faded now. Blonde. Mousy. Dark. Each tied with a piece of ribbon that had once been pink, too.
Margaret and the care assistant from Neasden gazed at the little cuttings of hair in silence, as though trying to decipher some message sent back from the past. Then Margaret said, ‘Why three?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said twins.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Beverley took the envelope from Margaret and peered closer inside as though the answer might be there (which it was). ‘She used to say there was another, coming to take her away. Never did, of course. We thought she’d just made her up.’ Beverley gazed into the dark vault of the basement ceiling. ‘Now what was the name?’ she said.
An orange decaying on a plate. A jewellery receipt wrapped around a Christmas gift. Margaret stared down at the three little locks of hair.
Oh my darling.
‘It wasn’t Clementine, was it?’
‘Yes.’ Beverley’s face opened up. ‘That’s it. Clementine. How did you guess?’
1944
Clementine Walker, lithe as a deer and just as fast, ran through the dark with her torch held low. Just off the train, she was late again, but didn’t care one bit. She would not be going back to 14 Elm Row tonight. Nor ever again, if her plan worked out. Far to the east bombs fell, a woof woof woof as they hit, followed by the yap yap yap of the guns in reply. The streets were deserted; people fled to the comfort that was underground, knee to knee inside their corrugated huts or huddled on platforms deep below the road.
But Clementine showed no fear as she ran, no inclination to dodge from porch to porch or any other street-level shelter she could find. She preferred the open air to the enclosed. The clouds. The stars. The trees as they loomed up out of the night. Fires on distant rooftops. Sirens wailing. The constant drone of planes. Clementine liked the thought that one moment she might be here, and the next she might be gone. Besides, she had an important appointment to make.
Out of a side alley a warden appeared, holding on to his tin hat. ‘Get to cover, Miss!’
But on she ran. Eighteen and fully grown. Hair tamed and curled. Eyes that saw it all. Running along the pavements in her silent shoes towards the heart of a city she no longer called home.
The soldiers who had swarmed through the streets only the month before were all gone now, vanished into battle across that short stretch of sea between two warring coasts. Out beyond the narrow channel they had marched their way to glory or been left to roll and lurch in the surf; wading through water, seaweed clinging to their boots, shooting their way across the dunes, or ending their lives face down on a cold French beach.
As Clementine ran through the dark she thought of them all. The patina from their fingertips on her neck. The rough press of their uniforms up against her chest. She’d been busy for weeks anointing each one with whatever he needed before moving on: their chins resting in the cup of her collarbone, faces buried for a moment in amongst the lustre of her hair. She’d loved each of them in those moments. Now she couldn’t remember any of their names.
Except . . .
In the nook of a pub, hidden away in the lounge, they had sat knee to knee as he spoke about what was to come. ‘They won’t tell us, but we all know. It’ll be France. The big one.’
Stanley Shaw. Face like a pale harvest moon, glimmering with sweat and something else too. Belief in the Almighty. And his plan.
‘The bombs’ll start after we leave. A week perhaps. A few days. Who knows?’
Soldiers on beaches, wet sand in their mouths. The whistle of bullets piercing a thousand chests. Men sunk in shallow water, rifles clogged with salt.
Clementine pressed her knee close against Stanley’s as though to ward off the worst. But Stanley shifted slightly, the two of them still touching but not quite as tight. Unlike every other man Clementine had ever met, Stanley Shaw had never put a hand to her in a way that he ought not.
‘What should we do when it happens?’ said Clementine, moving her knee close again.
Stanley’s fingers were loose on his pint glass. ‘Be prepared,’ he said.
And Clementine
knew at once what he meant.
Where was that photographer now, the one who twirled his buttons as he pressed the shutter down? Lost already, perhaps, beneath battlefield mud. Or fallen through the cold night air to land in an unlikely, foreign place. Sunk to the bottom of an ocean, lying covered by a pall of silt. Or waiting in a pub just like this one for the announcement they all knew would come. All infantry. All pilots. All sailors. All men. Rise up and head for France.
All around Clementine smoke drifted and coiled in the air. From a corner someone barked a laugh, too loud, suddenly cut off. In the saloon a song had started, running ragged through the throng, rising and falling, petering out for a moment until someone picked it up again with a shout. Tight in her hand Clementine clasped the small tumbler of gin that would have to last her all night. It was warm, the liquid thick in her throat. She placed her other hand on Stanley’s arm and said, ‘Tell me again about home.’
In the nook of a pub, hidden in the lounge, Stanley Shaw spoke. Of plains as wide as the sky. Of wind sweeping through corn. Of horses, sleek and brown, galloping along endless wooden rails. For all of Clementine’s life everything had been narrow and dark, cluttered with people’s secrets and their promises that never worked out. A house full of rooms that started as one thing and ended up as something worse. A mantelpiece scattered with berries. A head shorn and prickled. A coal-hole that dirtied her hem. Also a penny circling in the darkness. Heads to the future. Tails to somewhere else.
Stanley Shaw spoke on. Of beans lying in a colander. Of tomatoes as big as his hand. Of two boys sitting at a table and, behind them, a man and his wife. And looking down on everything from its place on the wall, a small stitched sign in a frame: God Loves Us All.
The gin trickled and burned its path down Clementine’s throat as she listened to everything Stanley had to say. She knew what she was being offered. The promised land, within her grasp at last.
Down, down in the shelter, in a hole dug deep into the dirt, eight-year-old Ruby sat listening to the bombs, while far away in the centre of the city her sister Clementine ran on into the night. Eyes bright, a jewel of a thing just waiting to be cut, Ruby knew that the big American would not be coming tonight. There was the precious chicken all roasted now and cooling on a blue china plate. A pot of potatoes peeled and ready to boil on the stove. There was a pile of cutlery just waiting to be laid out. Six knives, six forks, six spoons. But there had not been the sign Clementine promised for when the time came.
The Other Mrs Walker Page 18
