Birmingham Friends

by Annie Murray

  Chapter 6

  Birmingham, 1936

  A humid night in August. There was no breeze to stir the curtains at my open window, and I was lying restless, under a sheet. The sound of the front doorbell startled me out of my half sleep. It sounded twice, long and hard. For a few seconds I lay listening, trying to guess the time. It was already dark and felt like the middle of the night. A door opened downstairs. Daddy and Mummy must still be up.

  Out on the landing I saw my mother moving quickly down the stairs, still dressed but with her hair pinned up for bed. The old wooden cased clock on the shelves by the stairs said ten past eleven. I peeped round the banisters into the hall.

  They opened the door to Elizabeth Kemp, her face very white, eyes like huge dark wounds against her skin. She had on a cotton dress with a white shawl half covering it. Her pale hair was loose at her shoulders like a young girl’s and in her agitation she had evidently not thought to put on a hat. I watched, absolutely still.

  ‘I’m sorry. You’ve got to help me.’ Her voice was low and hoarse. ‘I shouldn’t have come here. I know you’re not my doctor, but I don’t know where else to turn.’

  She started to cry, weak, tired-sounding sobs. My mother steered her into the study and Daddy went in behind, shutting the door.

  ‘What’s going on?’ William was standing sleepily at my shoulder with only his pyjama trousers on. ‘Did I hear some sort of rumpus down there?’

  ‘It’s Elizabeth Kemp – crying her eyes out,’ I whispered.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t know. Can’t hear now anyway. Ssh – let’s go down and listen.’

  ‘Kate, we shouldn’t . . .’ That was William for you. Rather stodgy.

  But he followed me part of the way down the stairs. I stood at the bottom, listening so intently that even my own breathing felt like an interruption.

  For a time the three adults in the study talked in low voices. There were questions, answers, short exchanges, but I could only hear the tone of their voices and not the words. But suddenly there came an anguished outburst from Elizabeth that sent William and me haring back to the top of the staircase.

  ‘I can’t. I can’t do it. I just couldn’t bear it!’ And the sobbing began again.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter with the woman?’ William asked. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it.’

  For a second I felt annoyed at his superior tone, his implying that Elizabeth was making an unnecessary fuss about something. Of course our own mother behaving in this way was quite unimaginable, but I felt churned up inside by the sounds of such terrible unhappiness downstairs, even though I had no idea what the matter was.

  After more quiet talking the door opened. We squatted down, one at each side of the top step, hidden by the carved wood of the banister. I was astonished to see that Mummy had her arm round Elizabeth’s shoulders.

  In an exhausted but formal voice Elizabeth Kemp said, ‘Thank you for your advice. I’m sorry to have put you in such a difficult position.’ She glanced distractedly at a half sheet of paper she was holding. ‘I’ll do something as soon as I can. Next week.’

  With a strange gentleness my parents closed the door behind her and Mummy turned and leaned wearily against it. She looked unusually vulnerable, standing there like that in those hairpins, her emotion all clenched up inside.

  In a high voice she said, ‘Heavens above.’

  My father shook his head sadly. ‘Sometimes I wonder if the middle classes don’t have it worse. All this business of keeping up appearances.’

  ‘Thank goodness we’ve not had that to contend with.’ Mummy sounded close to tears. Daddy went over to her and took her in his arms and she leaned against him, both of them standing in silence.

  Unused to witnessing such intimacy, William and I avoided looking at each other. As our parents moved apart, the two of us shot into our bedrooms.

  * * *

  OLIVIA

  Before she had me, Mummy gave birth to her first baby at home. I know because she told me, early on sometime. Though she very seldom spoke to me of her feelings, there was no one else she could confide in, only her little girl. Who was too young. She couldn’t seem to let things out gently. Her words were like shards of glass coughed up from her throat. She was in labour for five days, and the baby, who would have been my elder brother, was born blue and without breath. They had to stitch her up inside, tight like a hessian sack.

  So when she was expecting me she chose to go to hospital. She waited for me, settled on stiff white sheets. Although I was small I wouldn’t come out. She lay on her labour bed for four days with her feet up in leather stirrups while the doctors tried to decide what to do. The pains were mild at first. Then her body pressed down tighter and tighter and she was in agony back and front but they wouldn’t let her move. She cried out, ‘My baby’s dead.’ One of the nurses slapped her and said, ‘Pull yourself together.’ They wouldn’t let her eat.

  On the third day when they unstrapped her legs she tried to jump out of a window. The next day they cut me out by Caesarean section and by a miracle I was still alive. They told her one of my hands was tightly gripping the umbilical cord. They instructed her not to have ‘relations’ with Daddy for four months after. She swore never to let him touch her again. She didn’t quite manage that.

  Usually she is sitting in the drawing room. She hasn’t been well these last weeks. She seems exhausted and her face is white.

  ‘What bad luck to be off colour while the weather’s so good,’ Daddy jokes. ‘Poor old girl. At least you’ve got Olivia home to keep you company.’

  Dawson eyes her knowingly. Later I realize you can never fool Dawson.

  I come skipping down Chantry Road from my piano lesson at Mrs Weiss’s cosy house, wearing my little leather sandals and a silk frock. I’ve had a lovely afternoon and I want to tell Mummy about it. I run inside, leaving Dawson to pull the door closed by its cold iron knob.

  ‘Mummy? Mummy?’

  My feet thud up the stairs and Dawson looks up at me from the hall with her dark, handsome eyes. ‘You should leave her to sleep, Olivia,’ she calls, but there’s a smile in her voice. Along the dark corridor, shadowy after the brilliant day outside and the more so because their bedroom door is closed. My feet slip on the red carpet.

  ‘Mummy?’ I knock. There is silence. Softly I turn the handle and push the door open. I stand in the doorway unable to move.

  The bed has turned red. Even her hair is soaked almost to the roots as she lies askew across the covers, her eyes closed. Her face is chalk white, the cheeks drawn in tight. She still has a satin slipper on one foot.

  I cross the room. By her feet is the deep blue and white chamber pot, full to overflowing with blood. Next to it on the floor something long and sharp, streaked red.

  I find my voice. ‘Dawson!’ I scream. ‘Dawson!’

  It was only when my mother went secretly to a doctor that she realized how much an abortion would cost. She had no money – none of her own. Without asking my father for the price she could not even contemplate it. Rich as we were, her choice was as limited as so many others in her position and she resorted to the same thing: a sixpenny knitting needle.

  If I had not been at home she would have died.

  * * *

  Within a fortnight of her visit to our house, Elizabeth Kemp suddenly became gravely ill. I could get almost nothing out of Olivia.

  ‘She’s in a private nursing home,’ was all she’d tell me. She sat, pale and tight-lipped in one of the cream chairs in the Kemps’ beautiful drawing room.

  ‘Can I come and see her?’

  ‘No, I told you. She’s very ill. She can’t have visitors.’

  ‘Well, when will she be better?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Olivia put her hands over her face and burst into tears. ‘I wish I knew. I just want her back home.’

  ‘Your father must be able to see her, surely?’

  Olivia looked guarded suddenly, as if afraid. �
�Yes. Sometimes.’

  When Alec Kemp came home later that afternoon his face was grey and exhausted.

  If Granny Munro had any idea of what was happening in the Kemp household she chose to keep silent. She was blunt, but not brutal. And she was in the same position in the house as a child: an eavesdropper, not a person responsible enough to be automatically party to information, though she was shrewd enough to guess most of it.

  By the autumn of 1936 she had settled in much better. She was keeping her clothes on and she and my mother had reached an uneasy truce.

  One Saturday William and I were talking to her while she tidied her room – or at least I was in there and William had to come barging in as well.

  ‘Goodness, Granny,’ William said. ‘What a mess.’

  ‘I think it looks rather nice,’ I said loyally, staring round at the tottering staircases of drawers she had removed from the chest, the rush-seated chairs tilted over on the bed amid the letters and diaries, the full skirts of dresses in sea blue and grey and her tweeds, the tangles of pearls and heavy amber and jade beads, all of which she was evidently trying to sort into piles. William blushed at the sight of some of her more personal items of underwear: huge brassières and corsets and bloomers strewn across the bed.

  ‘Ah, spotted my dreadnoughts have you?’ she laughed. ‘Poor William. I tell you what, you go down and fetch us up a nice cup of tea and Katie and I will have them stowed away by the time you get back.’

  With relief, William squeezed out of the door.

  ‘The poor lad, I shouldn’t tease him so,’ Granny said, winking at me over her glasses. ‘But he is a bit of a stiff fellow, isn’t he? Very like his father, I’m afraid, and his before him.’ She sighed, folding an enormous pair of pink bloomers. ‘You don’t really remember your grandpa Robert, do you? He was a good man. Truly good. You can’t argue with that sort of goodness – it wouldn’t be fair.’ Her face wore a wistful expression. ‘But oh, I did long to let up occasionally and do something really wild and bad. I’d have to go for a good stump along the beach or a bracing swim to get it out of my system and then I’d feel better. Until the next time, anyway.’ She smoothed down the bloomers and picked up another pair. ‘You know, Katie, you can spend all your life keeping your feelings packed tightly away. I’m not sure it’s always the best thing. Trouble is, after years of doing it you don’t have much practice at showing how you do feel.’ She peered at me with her watery eyes, looking suddenly sad and vulnerable. ‘I know I rather overdid it when I first came here.’

  I went and flung my arms round her. She smelt of camphor and rose water. ‘Granny – it’s been absolutely lovely since you came. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened!’

  And she laughed tearfully and hugged me back.

  In the evening when Daddy went to look in on her there was clearly something wrong. She was lying at an angle across the bed in silent distress. She had spent most of the day seeing to her room and it was immaculate.

  ‘Win,’ Daddy shouted. ‘It’s Mother.’

  I came running immediately. ‘What? Granny, what’s wrong?’

  I knelt down and took her hand. It felt cool and clammy, like the feet of those birds Olivia used to have. She was trying to speak, but nothing came out that made sense. ‘Granny, Granny!’ I sobbed, leaning my head against her fulsome body, feeling the stiff corset under my ear through the silky stuff of her dress. ‘Don’t be poorly, Granny, please.’

  All I had from her in reply was a low, frightened whimper.

  It was agreed that we’d care for her at home. We could see in her eyes that she’d prefer it. Her stroke had in fact been a mild one, and within days her speech began to unfurl into something we could recognize. The left side of her body slowly began to tingle back into life.

  ‘I’m not done yet,’ she said defiantly, one corner of her mouth lurching up unasked. ‘I’ll be out in the breakers.’ But just then she couldn’t even get out to the bathroom.

  My mother rose to the occasion and nursed her with a kind of objective professionalism. She was brisk and detached and left me to provide the other components of nursing: company and affection. As soon as I came home from school I spent every moment I could sitting in the easy chair next to Granny’s bed.

  ‘You’ve got to get better – please, please,’ I kept saying to her. ‘Please try, Granny.’

  With huge effort she’d manage the words, ‘You’re not nagging me – are you?’

  Granny’s illness pushed everything else to the back of my mind. Olivia was away at school and normally I missed her every single day. We wrote long letters full of details of our days and jokes and anecdotes about school. I wrote to her still, but the letters were shorter and full of my worries about Granny. I had almost forgotten that unseen, at home, Elizabeth Kemp was dragging herself very slowly, painfully back to health. But that was something shut away from my understanding then. Olivia never even hinted to me what had happened. She tried to preserve her parents, present them to me perfect as seahorses on a bed of wax. I had no idea just how much she needed me.

  Angus often came to see Granny after she fell ill. They had an affinity with each other. She liked him to read to her and I’d often go into her room and find Angus’s dark head bent over Wilkie Collins or Edgar Allan Poe. (‘Anything with a really good story,’ Granny would say.)

  One wet winter afternoon I sat listening as Angus finished off a chapter from The Woman in White. After a few minutes Granny coughed gently and interrupted him. ‘It’s all right. You stop now Katie’s here. You’re a good reader, Angus Harvey, I’ll say that.’

  ‘I suppose you’d like tea?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course. What other pleasures do I have left in life now apart from my food? Well, and your company of course.’

  Simmons had a kettle on the hob downstairs. I carried a tray up and we settled down by the fire. She left the light off so the room was lit only by the flames. Rain flung itself at the window. Granny sipped her tea carefully from one side of her mouth, some of it spilling into the saucer which she held underneath. She tutted with frustration until she saw Angus and me watching her anxiously. She smiled lopsidedly at us. Tiny flames danced in the lenses of her specs.

  ‘Don’t you worry about me.’ I heard a mischievous twinkle in her voice. ‘I must say it’s lovely seeing the two of you together. You make a lovely pair. Or am I embarrassing you?’

  It was too dark for me to see if Angus blushed as I did. He was still smiling affectionately at Granny.

  I jumped up, anxious to find some activity to hide behind. ‘Yes you are. Now – shall I do your hair for you?’

  She shuffled over a little so I could sit on the edge of the bed and I pulled the pins gently from her long grey hair. It reached half way down her back, thick and soft. I felt Angus’s eyes on me, watching the two of us together.

  ‘Tell me,’ Granny said to him. Patiently he waited for her to manage the words. ‘What is it you want to do with your life, Angus?’

  After a moment’s thought he said, ‘What I’d really like is to invent something. A machine or tool that would be very important to people. Make their lives better or make it easier to build something else. Or create something really beautiful that people could enjoy looking at.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t think I’m brainy enough to go for anything really academic like William.’

  Granny waved her good arm dismissively. ‘Never mind William. I wasn’t talking about him. William will do whatever William does. I’m interested in you. Are you saying you plan to be an engineer?’

  He looked into the fire, his thin face serious. ‘I think what I’d like most is to learn the basics of something really well. Get an apprenticeship somewhere.’

  ‘What about the university?’

  ‘Perhaps later. I want to work in the real world a bit first.’ He seemed embarrassed to be talking about himself like this.

  ‘You’re good at Meccano,’ I said eagerly.

  Angus laughed. ‘That
’s a start, I suppose.’

  I realized with surprise that for all the years Angus and I had grown up and played together we had barely ever had a conversation without the others around, when of course there was a lot of ragging and we were always intent on cricket or some other game. We didn’t have serious conversations. Self-conscious suddenly, I concentrated on the soft feel of Granny’s hair sliding between my fingers. I hoped Angus would think the pink of my cheeks was only from the fire.

  ‘What will you do after school, Katie?’ he asked.

  ‘I think I’d like to be a nurse.’

  ‘You’ve made up your mind then?’ Granny said.

  ‘Only just this minute.’ I laughed. ‘But I’ve really known that’s what I want to do for ages. I want to look after people. It seems the obvious thing.’

  I felt Angus watching me again. I knew there were new feelings between us.

  ‘You’ve always been good at looking after people,’ he said. ‘Your grandmother, Olivia . . .’

  ‘Olivia?’ I was startled. ‘What d’you mean? Why does Livy need looking after?’

  ‘It’s always looked to me a bit as if that’s how it is, that’s all. Sorry. Perhaps I’ve had it all wrong.’

  ‘Livy’s all right!’

  ‘Well anyway, I think you’d make a very fine nurse.’

  ‘What’s this,’ Granny interrupted, ‘the mutual appreciation society?’ She was smiling, her face cock-eyed and rather comical-looking. ‘You two want to look out.’

  Seeing she’d embarrassed us again, she added, ‘I think I need a doze now. And you must need a rest from me. Thank you for your company, Angus. I’m most grateful.’

  She was already sinking into sleep as we left the room’s cosy light and went downstairs. William was studying in his bedroom.

  ‘I suppose I should be going,’ Angus whispered. ‘William’s putting me to shame.’

  But he stood with me in our big family room at the back of the house where there were old easy chairs, a Welsh dresser and a piano. He seemed reluctant to leave, and I found I didn’t want him to. I perched on the arm of a chair, woollen skirt pulled tight across my knees, a compromise between remaining standing and committing myself to sitting down in the chair.