Birmingham Friends

by Annie Murray

  When everything slows and the room is still he’s climbing away from my body, fast. He says ‘Christ’, and his voice is small and frightened. When our clothes are straightened out he is giving me looks across the room from the sides of his eyes. My face is bleeding.

  He has me moved to another office. I know it’s his way of showing remorse because of that cold wife. He never talks about her but I know she’s cold like cod on a slab. I don’t take it personally. Liaisons of that kind are naturally frowned on in the forces. I leave some time before seeking him out. Then I think he needs encouraging, that he might be afraid he’s hurt my feelings.

  I telephone then, every day. Of course the new secretary answers. She says, ‘Peter’ (she doesn’t actually say Peter of course) ‘is not able to speak to you at present.’

  And I say, in my best Wren voice, ‘Perhaps you could tell him it’s a matter of the utmost urgency?’

  I try to see him, but he is never alone, and is colder than the winter sea. The nose takes on a look of cruelty. I write. I wait outside his quarters. His face looms in my sleep. Eventually I go to his office, in tears, though I haven’t meant to cry. The secretary is still there, blond, trim and impassable as a shield for him. Following that they move me away from Southampton.

  Since that I have been with men a lot. Anyone’s. Everyone’s. Other Wrens won’t speak to me. Officers’ groundsheet, and not just officers. It’s something I can do well, when I don’t care for them at all. There’s a comfort in a man’s body, but I am playing it, I never lose myself. I am supreme for those moments. I’m queen, jewelled with ice and thorns.

  They never come back to me. They’re coated in a thick rime of disgust. I don’t allow myself disgust.

  * * *

  As days, then weeks passed, I became almost savage with anxiety about Olivia. At that time I was taken over by it and it felt as if nothing and nobody else mattered. Just as when Alec had imprisoned her in her bedroom all those years ago, my energy was all directed into thinking how I could help her and release her.

  It was not a good start to our marriage. We stayed at the house in Chantry Road, which was an arrangement Douglas was happy with, but made me feel I had not yet graduated fully from being a child, and I was restless and perverse. Douglas was working very hard as ever, pushing himself on, conscientious to the point of obsession, and I suppose lonely. He found it difficult to talk to men his own age, all returning now with their stories of war. Now and then he talked about moving on, finding a job in London. Each of us seemed shut away in our own thoughts and concerns.

  We lived chiefly on the top floor of the house, which in itself was equivalent to a spacious flat. We had an arrangement whereby we only ate with Mummy at weekends, if she was not working. In fact she had few weekends off and we did not see a lot of her. Mostly I prepared meals for Douglas and myself after work, chatting often with Mrs Drysdale who still came in daily, carrying them up to our living room which looked out over the garden. Douglas often worked odd hours too, covering evening meetings, and then I ate alone. Sometimes recently it had been a relief to do so.

  ‘You’re not here with me at all, are you?’ he said one evening as we ate mutton chops and vegetables. ‘In your head, I mean.’

  I looked across at him guiltily. He was eating fast, his tie off, shirt unbuttoned at the neck, keeping his eyes on his plate as he spoke. Our clock on the mantelpiece seemed to tick too loudly.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m just so worried about Livy.’

  Douglas helped himself to more carrots. ‘It’s a shame, of course,’ he said with his horrible journalistic detachment which sometimes made my blood boil. ‘Terrible, those places, from what I gather. But I can’t understand why it is you’re so attached to her. Nice girl of course, but she is off-centre you know. She was even flirting with me at our wedding. I don’t see what she’s done to merit such blind devotion.’ The tone of his last words was edged with sarcasm. I chose to ignore it.

  ‘It’s very hard to put it into words.’ I was trying to explain it to him and to myself. ‘You never saw her as she used to be. We’ve been friends for so long – I just can’t help loving her.’ My voice became high and tearful. ‘And I can’t bear to think of her locked away in that place.’

  Seeing me cry, Douglas was immediately full of concern. He pushed his chair back and came and leaned over me, an arm round my shoulders. ‘Don’t cry, my darling. I hate to see it.’ He stood stroking me with the immense gentleness he could sometimes summon, as I wept, feeling angry and helpless.

  When I’d had a cry, I said, ‘You finish your meal. I’m all right.’ I polished my specs on my napkin. Sniffing, I tried to smile at him.

  Douglas beamed at me across the table. ‘My darling, I do love you.’

  I was gradually learning that when I came to Douglas tearful and needy was when he could best cope with me. He always did love me most in my weakness.

  I went to the hospital. The walls were very high and the iron gates locked. All that could be seen of the inside was the tops of the trees. It took me some time to find the entrance, walking round the wide perimeter of the hospital grounds.

  On Lodge Road I heard voices calling desperately to the unseen world. They were men’s voices. One was shouting, ‘Hello? Hello? Is anyone there? Can you hear me? Hello?’ On and on. Another voice, high and strangely sexless, was insisting, ‘Tell her. Tell Doris I’m coming, Friday. Tell Doris I’m coming.’

  It was a beautiful spring day. I couldn’t associate my sweet friend with this place. Nor, of course, could I get in.

  I wouldn’t leave the Kemps alone. I went round to the house almost daily.

  At first Alec was jovial and defensive. ‘She’s all right,’ he assured me on a day after they’d been to visit. ‘A little better, we thought, didn’t we, Elizabeth?’ His wife nodded dumbly. ‘I don’t think there’s any need for you to feel so crusading about all this, Kate. She’s where she needs to be at the moment. None of us like it.’ He gave me a challenging look. ‘Her being in there isn’t a fact we want broadcast, of course.’

  ‘I bet it isn’t.’

  Alec stepped over to me, leaning down to put his face close to mine. I remembered for a second how I used to dream of him leaning over to kiss me. ‘Look here,’ he hissed. ‘If you let anyone know about this . . .’

  I met his gaze, steadily.

  ‘Don’t come here again,’ he finished in a low voice. He left the room.

  Elizabeth began to cry. ‘She told us they’d put her in one of those – those things where you can’t move your arms.’

  ‘You mean a straitjacket,’ I said brutally. I felt like screaming. ‘What did you expect? It’s a mental hospital. That’s what they do.’

  ‘But I thought – being who she is – that they’d be kinder. You know, treat her a bit differently. She’s in there with all nature of people.’

  ‘Since when has madness distinguished between classes?’

  Elizabeth put her hand to her head in a gesture of despair.

  ‘Who can get her out? Just him?’

  She nodded slowly. Her hands were never still as she talked. ‘It’s not that he wants her in there – you have to understand that. He loves her very dearly. He wouldn’t let you see it, of course, but he’s so afraid and ashamed of what’s happening to her. Of how she is. Things in our family haven’t always been – ’ She stopped, silenced herself. ‘We’ve been at our wits’ end.’

  Speaking more gently, I said, ‘I’ll go and see her. When are visitors allowed?’

  Elizabeth looked up at me. ‘I don’t think they’ll let you. They said close family only.’ I saw an unusual look of determination enter her face. ‘Perhaps if I were to write you a note. You might have to pretend to be her sister. If it had Alec’s signature . . .’

  ‘Being who he is,’ I quipped. ‘But he’s hardly going to sign anything for me now, is he?’

  Elizabeth looked at me with surprising calm. ‘Don’t you think I’m familiar with
my husband’s handwriting by now?’

  I stared at her, only grasping slowly what she was saying.

  ‘I daren’t write it while he’s here. I’ll bring it round to your house later.’

  As I was leaving, Alec appeared out of his study and I realized he had been waiting for me. His expression was very stern. ‘You’d better keep your mouth shut, Katie.’

  I was exhilarated suddenly. This man’s true colours were showing under the strain and I could be free of him.

  ‘I’ll keep it shut,’ I said. ‘For as long as it helps Olivia.’

  That evening an envelope was delivered at our house. The note inside explained that I was Olivia’s friend, that we were very close and that it would be beneficial for me to visit. The likeness of the handwriting to Alec Kemp’s was so extraordinary that I thought at first Elizabeth had persuaded him to put pen to paper himself. But there was a separate sheet on which Elizabeth had written, ‘I’m sure this will do it. Please believe better of me. E. K.’

  The following Sunday I took the note to All Saints and was let in through the gate. The hospital was a huge, stately building like a country house, with stained-glass windows above the entrance and sunlight pouring on to its soft-coloured stone.

  They wouldn’t let me see her. Not because I wasn’t a close relative, but because she wasn’t, they considered, in a fit state.

  In June they had her moved to Arden.

  ‘Alec wanted to get her out of the city,’ Elizabeth told me. I always tried to visit the house when she was there alone. ‘He’s very much afraid it will get out somehow that his daughter’s in an institution. He’s still hoping to stand at the next election.’

  I knew I had a kind of ally in Elizabeth, but I was wary of her. She had clearly decided that for the moment her feelings for Olivia must override her loyalty to her husband. But I saw I had never really known her at all, and she was so conditioned to giving nothing away. I was growing more suspicious about the whole situation. Clearly there was something more seriously wrong with Olivia than the odd outburst of emotion and anxiety she had shown before the war. And all these things were now beginning to build into a sequence of events that I hadn’t identified before. I wanted to get to the bottom of it: her unhappiness before the war, her withdrawal from me over those years, and what it was that had tilted her so far over that she had to be speedily put away out of sight.

  I knew, though, that I’d never get the answers direct from Elizabeth. Sometimes when she looked at me with those childlike blue eyes and gave her automatic smiles, I wondered what it would take truly to break her into honesty.

  Olivia had been in Arden for two weeks when, with Elizabeth, I managed to get into the place for the first time. I had gone alone the week before, carrying with me Elizabeth’s forged letter, but they turned me away.

  We went together on the sort of day which normally makes you feel glad to be alive. The sky was almost unmarked by cloud and there was a feeling of expectancy in the strong sunlight that I always associate with early summer. But sitting in the cab in which we travelled from Leamington Spa I was churned up inside with apprehension. As we passed under the stone archway at the entrance to the drive I felt as if my heart was going to explode. Even being a nurse, like most people I regarded places like Arden with a kind of flesh-creeping horror. The surface of the curving drive was so rough I was thrown from side to side on the back seat. I watched the place move nearer, a vast brick building, the edge of its roof sculpted into points, looking dark and impersonal.

  The grounds at Arden were in a shocking state. The hospital had been used for wounded servicemen during the war and it was only just in the process of adapting back to its normal use. This decrepitude only increased its grimness. It looked terrible. The grass was long and full of dandelions and thistles. The drive itself had clumps of grass growing between the wheel tracks and the flowerbeds were only just identifiable, so choked were they with weeds and branches from the overgrown bushes behind them. The wide view across the front looked more like a cattle field than the grounds of a hospital.

  The brickwork of the building itself was stained in places, and the roof, half covered with moss, showed dark gaps where slates had slid off and smashed on the ground where they still lay. The windows were grimy, some of the panes broken, and I wondered if these were in windows of dormitories. The building must have been cold enough in the winter as it was. I could hardly bear to think of Olivia inside there. Already, I felt I had stepped out of the world into a terrible, removed place.

  When we told the porter, a leathery-cheeked man, who we had come to visit, he said, ‘Crikey – we don’t get many visitors coming to see this lot.’

  He led us into a large hall and told us to wait. The hall must have been very grand before the war. Its ceiling was high and decorated with ornately carved wood. There were long windows along one side with iron radiators beneath them, which I found a reassuring sight. There was a platform at one end of the room. But once again everything looked dirty and worn. The grain of the wooden floor was obscured by grime and hundreds of round black indentations showed where rows of metal bedsteads had stood.

  We waited in silence, not looking at each other, as if we were both ashamed to be there.

  I was prepared for Olivia looking different, but when they brought her in, her arm grasped by a muscular nurse, I actually gasped. Her removal from the world outside seemed to have become a physical reality. Everything that had made her beautiful had in a few weeks altered or faded. They had dressed her in someone’s green gingham dress of a ludicrously large size which sat limp on her like a sack. Her hair, normally so glossy and curling, hung in flat, lank sheets each side of her face; her cheeks were pale and blemished. She barely raised her gaze from the floor, and when she did, her eyes were empty of expression.

  ‘Livy?’ I bent my head to intercept her gaze. I saw myself, guiltily, as I must have seemed to her: larger somehow than this place would allow, face blooming from the air outside, healthy and free in a blue dirndl dress and light coat. She continued to stare at the floor.

  The nurse, with cheeks the colour of boiled ham, led her to a chair. When she made no effort to sit on it the nurse pushed her down. The woman’s masculine-looking arms bulged out from the sleeves of her tight blue uniform dress and she smelled pungently of sweat. I pulled a chair round to face Livy. The nurse stood over her. ‘Could you leave us, please?’ I said sharply.

  ‘I’ve got to stay in the room.’ Her voice reinforced the impression she gave of a man dressed as a woman. She ambled over to another chair by the door. ‘You’ve got fifteen minutes,’ she shouted across to us.

  Olivia sat quite still, hands clasped in her lap, head down. The top button of the dress was missing and it was so loose that it gaped open, showing her dark, naked nipples. I leaned over and softly pulled it together and pressed it against her body.

  After a moment she looked up at her mother and the tears came straight away. ‘Mummy, oh Mummy.’ She flung herself sideways and buried her face in her mother’s shoulder, grasping on to her, knuckles white.

  With surprise I watched Elizabeth’s steely calm. She held Livy for a few moments, then made her sit up again, almost pushing her away. ‘Listen, darling. Listen to me. You’re not going to be here for long, we hope, but you’ve got to try and get better.’

  ‘But people don’t come out of here.’ Livy’s eyes were bulging. ‘Some of them have been here years and years.’

  ‘You won’t be,’ Elizabeth said firmly. ‘You won’t.’ I felt they had forgotten I was there.

  ‘Isn’t this enough?’ Olivia whispered. I watched her white, strained face. ‘Haven’t I done enough for him? Isn’t he satisfied?’

  I saw a look of panic flash across Elizabeth’s face. She actually shook Olivia slightly. ‘What are you talking about? This isn’t a punishment. Don’t be so stupid. You’re here because you’re ill and you need help.’

  ‘She died,’ Livy said suddenly, her eyes still
stretched wide. She perched on the edge of the chair, kneading the fingers of one hand with the other ceaselessly as she talked.

  ‘Who died?’ Elizabeth asked sharply.

  ‘Eileen.’ She spoke very fast, her voice like that of a little girl. ‘They put her in the side room next to the ward when she went off. They call it going up the stick, the nurses. Eileen went up the stick. Right up – up to the top and she fell off. She shouted and shouted. All day for hours and hours. They went in and tried to stop her – men as well. Crowds of them. But they couldn’t and she carried on. Then she went quiet suddenly. They tried to stop us seeing, but we saw anyway when they carried her out. They’re always dying. The man comes round every day and asks if they’ve got any for him. His thinks we don’t know what he means, but we do. And Mary says she’ll be next because it’s waiting for her, always there waiting for her because of what she did years and years ago. Like me . . .’

  Elizabeth made a convulsive gesture towards Livy as if to silence her, but she stopped abruptly of her own accord.

  ‘Livy?’ I took her hands. Trying to speak calmly, I said, ‘You do know who I am, don’t you?’

  She nodded, and in a tiny voice said, ‘Katie.’

  ‘Are all the nurses like her?’ I asked, inclining my head a fraction towards the woman who had planted herself over by the door.

  Olivia followed my glance, fearfully. ‘She’s not a nurse,’ she whispered. ‘She’s a miner’s wife. Her husband works in the men’s side. He couldn’t get a job. They’re from Cannock.’ She added as if incidentally, ‘Everybody shouts here.’

  Then the little girl voice came back. ‘I think I’ve had some sort of breakdown. That’s what Daddy says, and the doctor says so. I can’t seem to – manage any more. And they give me things. I don’t know what they give me.’

  ‘Give you things?’