Birmingham Friends

by Annie Murray

  Lisa was different, of course. She was full of common sense and free of illusions.

  ‘Look,’ she suggested, when to the fascination of her neighbours I had turned up again, weeping and distraught at her door. ‘When you’re ready, leave the littl’un with me. She can be with Alice for a bit and Daisy’ll help look after ’em. You know what she’s like with babbies. Even five minutes. It’s a start. You can’t go on like this. You’re making yourself bad with it.’

  I needed help and I took her advice. I had an instinctive trust in her that I felt for no one else. Sick with anxiety the first time, I left you lying there on the blanket next to Alice. Daisy was shaking an old tin with a few dried peas in for you. For ten minutes I paced with weak legs, up and down Stanley Street and Catherine Street. When I had decided to return to you I had to hold myself back from running down the road. I dashed the final few yards across the court and went in to find you laughing.

  ‘See?’ Lisa said. Then added, ‘That Kemp girl needs locking up. You should’ve called the police. You’ve spared that family too much.’

  ‘Perhaps it was partly my fault,’ I said, holding you close to me, my legs still trembling. ‘And I don’t want them on my conscience. I want them right out of my life – all of them.’

  ‘But she might try it with someone else’s?’

  I sat down, frowning. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Where’s she gone?’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. Away from me, that’s the main thing.’

  Lisa gradually weaned me off my terror. When I could leave you with her for an hour, I knew I was overcoming it. But often during that time I would arrive at her house and dissolve into tears. And she was always welcoming, sitting me down amidst all the chaos of her life and letting me be there, whatever was going on at the time.

  ‘You’re so good to me,’ I told her. ‘There’s just no one else.’

  ‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’ was all she said.

  My mother would be no good, I knew that. I was in a thoroughly distraught state, but couldn’t have admitted it to her. And anyway, other people’s nerves usually got thoroughly on hers. I knew also that she was not the person to consult about the other decision which faced me more pressingly as each day passed. If I didn’t go to London with Douglas, I knew it would be the end of my marriage.

  ‘What would you do?’ I asked Lisa one day.

  Lisa eased Alice up over her shoulder, the child’s head resting against her cheek. Her skin looked grey and tired.

  ‘In your shoes?’ She frowned. ‘I dunno. I s’pose ’e is your ’usband when all’s said and done. But ’e’s making you uproot yourself . . . ’Ow d’you feel about ’im?’

  After a silence broken only by small sounds from the babies, I finally admitted, ‘I can’t stand him.’

  ‘Well then,’ Lisa said. ‘You can earn a good wage on your own, can’t you?’

  When Douglas left we moved into our small terraced house in Florence Road in which you grew up until we moved to Drayton Road when you were eleven.

  I didn’t find the courage to tell him until he insisted on us beginning to pack. We were speaking so little anyway. He said, ‘You’ve betrayed me. I always knew you would.’

  I sat on our bed and replied, ‘Then why marry me?’

  The communication between us remained thin and stretched through those days of practicalities. I found myself looking at him in such a detached way sometimes, wondering what, in those disturbed days of the war, I had thought I felt for him and what had kept me believing it. I was weary and indifferent. You were asleep when he left and he, your father, didn’t even go to your room to look at you. We didn’t speak. I watched him walk down the road from the house with his cases and his camera round his neck and thought that I still hadn’t been to see his parents. He didn’t write. I never pursued him for money. I could, as Lisa had remarked, earn my own. Occasionally I saw signs of his career developing in newspaper bylines and felt some shame at how little I missed him.

  I was happy with you, Anna, and happy to devote my life only to us.

  It was Lisa who had prepared me for my separation from you. When I went back to work I found dear old Mrs Busby. I suppose she wasn’t so old, when you were still a baby, but she was grandmotherly even in her late forties. The first time she opened the door to me and saw me standing there with you in my arms, she said, in real tones of appreciation, ‘Oh, what a beautiful baby.’ I trusted her immediately. Whenever I came to collect you you were always clean, fed and occupied, and you had Reni James, company which you wouldn’t have had at home. I owed such a debt to Edith Busby. I loved my work. Life settled and didn’t feel lacking. I had you, my job, Roland. Dear Roland – he has always been such a good friend to us.

  I saw Olivia one more time, in the summer of 1962. She was back up here for a time then. Alec Kemp more or less paid to keep her out of the way, like a wayward son being packed off to be shameful somewhere distant like Africa. Except she chose London.

  My morning’s list of calls included a visit to a Mrs Kemp, with a new baby. The name registered, of course, but it never occurred to me it would be her, not here in Birmingham, nor with ‘Mrs’ as the handle on the name. She was living in Moseley in one of those enormous Victorian houses that had already been sliced up inside for flats. I had to climb a flight of stairs – grand ones once, though dirty and communal now – to find the chipped door marked ‘3’.

  She was holding him as she answered the door, her small frame wrapped in a turquoise silk robe, hair loose and falling all over the place. The child was very tiny and startlingly dark. I realized immediately that the father must have been from India or similar. His eyes were huge, brown and alert.

  We never spoke. As soon as I’d realized who it was I was on my way back down those grimy stairs and out to the car. When I sat down in the seat I was shaking. I managed to drive back to the clinic, and handed Olivia’s notes over to another Health Visitor. I wasn’t having anything of that. Not after all this time.

  For Anna

  May 1981

  My dear one,

  I suppose I should have written this a long time ago and got it out of my system. It’s our story: Olivia’s and mine. You used to ask me about Olivia so often when you were a little girl, and what I used to feed your curiosity was a lie, or at least such a selective version of the truth as to amount to one.

  You will see from her letter enclosed with this that Olivia didn’t die during the war. In a way it was simpler for me to let you think she was dead all this time, and the fact was that for me she might just as well have died. I wanted her out of my life as cleanly as death would have taken her. She’d done such damage and I couldn’t stand any more.

  But I couldn’t resist telling you my happy memories. When you were young and fierce with affection for your friends it made me think of her so often and how we were together. We did have those good, happy times, Anna. I shouldn’t want you to think I had invented those. I always wanted you to know about Olivia as I knew her then, because I have loved very few people as I loved Livy.

  I’ve tried to be frank with you about all aspects of my life. I’ve always admired your straightness and I know this is what you would want. Some of it you’ll already know, but there’s much that you don’t. I seem to have ended up telling you my life story – but then there’s not much from that period of my life which is not somehow bound up with Olivia.

  I hoped to tell you all this at some point. I didn’t, though, expect you to hear any of it from Olivia herself. But in 1976 Alec Kemp died, and not long after that she began writing to me. They had gone very quiet, the Kemps. He stayed on the Council for a time, but he certainly never made it as an MP. I don’t recall him ever standing for Parliament again – a fact which has somehow made it easier for me to forgive him. What relations were like between Olivia and her parents all those years, I’ve no idea. But the letters started coming. She begged me to see her. She sent me bits and pieces whic
h she must have written in London after she left Arden Mental Hospital. Some of these were rather disconnected, but the ones I have included for you speak clearly. They tell of things I barely guessed at the time: the hidden side of her life at home of which I felt the vibrations, but for many years knew nothing of the causes. Her father’s death must have prompted her to reach back into the past and try to explain it. These fragments are, though, I have to add, stamped with Olivia’s hallmark: a complete lack of remorse for her actions.

  I didn’t respond. Even now I couldn’t bear to see her.

  I hope, Anna, that I have also given you enough of a sense of who your father was. Even had things been different, I don’t think we would have lasted in the end. He wanted to keep me like a cupboard full of starched white napkins and bring one out now and then to wipe his face on. Your generation would put up with that even less well than I did.

  I’m sorry I couldn’t just tell you this face to face, but it goes too deep, and I find I am more like my own mother in some ways than I’ve always hoped. I’m even glad you won’t be able to question me about it. I know how ill I am, whatever they say to humour me, and that my life now measures in weeks.

  But if you were to decide you needed to see Olivia, I should understand. Of course I haven’t seen her properly for over thirty years and I no longer know her. I’m sure she would wish you only good – really she always did – but I still can’t help feeling I want to pull you close in my arms and protect you from her as if you were still my tiny baby. This is quite irrational I realize. Even so, I would give you one warning: caution.

  Now I have finished with all this I feel only sadness about the Kemps. About all of it. I’m sorry if you feel I cut Olivia’s truth in half and chose to give you only the more palatable slice. It was all I could do. And now all I want is peace for the remains of my life. I want to remember the loving parts. What is forgivable by me, I forgive. Anything else is probably God’s department.

  I’m so very proud of you, my Anna. I hope you know that in all you have done you’ve been the greatest joy of my life. Go well, my darling.

  Part Four

  Chapter 29

  ANNA

  Warwickshire, 7 August 1981

  ‘You’re not going in there, surely?’

  The ivy leaves snaking round the stone gateway were such a dark green that in the stormy light they looked almost black. Between them she could make out some of the carved letters: Arden Mental Hospital, and in Roman numerals, 1848.

  The black cab growled rhythmically, wipers swishing away rain which was hammering on to the windscreen. The driver had spoken with his nose buried in his hanky.

  ‘Yes – I need you to wait please,’ Anna said, more sharply than she had intended. ‘I shan’t be long. ’Specially not in this.’ She pulled a navy beret over her straw-coloured hair.

  So this was the place. They had driven for some time, winding between cornfields, seeing its gaunt shape growing nearer on the rise, until they reached the entrance further round the flank of the hill among the trees.

  Arden.

  Trying to control her nervousness, she asked, ‘When was the fire?’

  ‘Can’t remember exactly.’ The driver gave a sneeze which ended in a groan. ‘Late seventies sometime.’

  ‘Anyone hurt?’

  ‘Oh, crikey, yes. Killed twenty or more of ’em – terrible thing it was. They moved the rest out, didn’t think it was worth the cost of rebuilding. What the hell d’you want to go there for? Place gives me the creeps.’ He blew his nose again.

  Her fingers were round the cold lever, poised to get out. ‘Just give me a few minutes.’

  As she turned to slam the door he called nasally, ‘They’re all set to knock it down soon anyway.’

  Anna strode away from the taxi, glad of a rest from him and his hayfever and lamenting nature. She cursed not having an umbrella. The days before had been so intensely hot it had been hard to imagine the possibility of rain like this. She was lightly dressed – black cotton jeans and a denim jacket – and the rain was falling steadily and hard. The sound of it was all around her and in minutes she was soaked. But she was relieved to be walking.

  The main building was no longer visible from here, and the drive curved up and round to the right, disappearing into what looked like a soft wall of green until she moved close up to it and saw the path straighten out again in front of her. Its surface was fractured and heaved up by quitch-grass and dandelions, puddles collecting in the cracks. Foxgloves and brambles held sway in what had evidently once been tended beds at its edges and the branches of the trees on each side were overgrown and meshed together, creating a tunnel of interlocking stems filled with the smell of wet leaves, wet earth.

  She followed it round the rightward curve, then to the left. The trees thinned, then stopped, the path opening out into an area which had been concreted over for a car park, now covered in tussocks like boils. She stopped. The building was there suddenly in front of her, shockingly black even against a grey sky.

  It was lower than she had imagined, but very wide, with an impressive entrance at the centre, carved scrolls of stone above the lintel. The square brick water tower in the middle of the complex had escaped the fire, although it was blackened. The decay of the place was evident in its every line. The points of tapering brick which Kate had described adorning the parapet of the roof were now all knocked off leaving jagged edges. The windows on the ground floor were boarded up behind the rusted bars and though the upper windows were uncovered there was no glass left in the frames. Through those to the right, at the eastern portion of the building, she could see only sky. At the west end, the windows were dark, looking into the one whole remaining wing of the building. As she walked nearer, a pigeon, startled from behind clumps of thistles, lifted itself to the roof with slapping wings.

  On her way along the west wing she saw a large sign nailed to the front of the building warning, ‘Danger, Falling Masonry’. For what seemed a long time she made her way down the side of the building, through rampant grass and thistles which sent cool shocks of water down her thighs with every step she took. There was nothing to see. No chink of the windows was left uncovered. About half way along were two wooden doors with large rusty keyholes, and she pushed against them, relieved when they refused to budge and she didn’t have to go inside.

  Very little remained of the hospital’s east end and the fire had worked its way round and eaten into most of the middle wing which separated the two open quadrangles, but had stopped short of the water tower. These areas were cordoned off with flagging white plastic tape. Most of the rubble must have been taken away, leaving only some charred bricks which looked as if they had come loose since the clearance. Uneven sections of walls remained as partitions between the rooms.

  Anna lifted the tape and stepped over one of the sections of wall, hearing the throaty sound of other pigeons unseen in their shelter among the ruins. She was standing in what must have been a long room. Whatever it had once been used for, its character now was quite lost. Had there been beds in this part, or were the wards only upstairs? Was this a dayroom? Squatting down at one end, she could see patches where the texture of the wooden floor showed through the silt of ash and plaster. She stroked the wet grain of it with her fingers, a tiny contact with Arden’s past. With Olivia.

  Ignoring the tape, she scrambled over the remains of the inner wall into the quadrangle. The hospital had been arranged in two separate halves, the men’s and women’s sections, each with their own airing court for daily exercise. There was the remains of a circular path, now colonized by weeds and made from uneven segments of stone, a tree stump in the middle. Following the path round, she stumbled over tufts of grass and groundsel. She stood looking at the ruined walls and the slit-eyed water tower.

  The airing court. Their light on the world, this enclosed rectangle of sky. Images from Olivia’s strange, disconnected account of herself filled her mind. How had she felt that June morning, moving
along the drive towards this hospital? Was the sun shining, sky an exuberant spring blue and the leaves new and bright? She had not mentioned these things of course. Perhaps she had seen nothing. They arrived from Birmingham by ambulance, closed in, probably dark inside, Olivia sitting or lying in the juddering, gloomy space, watched over by iron-faced orderlies. Had she been tied in: strapped? How had they restrained her frail body? Perhaps they had already tamped her down with phenobarbitone so that she knew little of the journey. Or had her brown eyes had to face, wide awake, this place of lost souls, of strange cries and wild movements?

  ‘I thought, when they took me there’ – Anna heard the words in her mind – ‘that I was going to my death. They would have absolute control over me. They proposed to bury me alive . . .’

  Anna began to cry, the sadness of the past days swelling in her at the sight of these remains: hundreds of square yards of stone and brick which had been the crucible of so many lives. Raindrops on her cheeks felt cold compared with her tears. She turned her face to the sky.

  She had never seen Olivia, yet she had learned, through her childhood, to love her: her mother’s friend, beautiful and tragic, their affection for each other passionate and sparkling as a fairy story. The mention of her brought a special light in to her mother’s eyes. Kate and Olivia – best friends. Ordinary but magical. Olivia enshrined as something Anna longed for. She was more than a girl who had been a friend: she was friendship itself.

  And now she was left with the legacy of their story, this telling of the other side of Olivia so long left hidden in blue shadow. This woman with whom she was so oddly linked. She had held Anna’s life in her hands and almost taken it away.

  But even despite the worst Olivia had done, now Anna had seen Arden she could only feel an aching empathy with her. And coming here had not finished this as she had somehow hoped it might. Her mind was alive with questions that now only Olivia could answer. She felt the past clutching at her, filling her with a need she could barely even explain.