by Jane Gardam
‘Yes, but he’d heard of it. He came from round there. It rains all the time, I do know that. I recited “The Daffodils” at school and won a certificate. I’m sure I’ve never been to the Lake District, and I’m over fifty.’
‘You don’t have to kill the king to understand Macbeth,’ said the grave-digger. ‘I’m quite out of money at present.’
‘O.K., then I’ll earn it. I’ll work for Boozer Bainbridge at the boating lake.’
‘You’ll do no such thing. No member of this family has ever spoken to Boozer Bainbridge, he’s a drunk. And you wouldn’t be passed by the town council.’
‘O.K., then. I’ll borrow from Eustace.’
‘Now, that,’ said Kitty solemnly, ‘I will not allow. It puts a girl under an obligation.’
‘Borrow where you like,’ said her father. He was strange and furtive about money and was often seen slinking into savings banks.
‘I’ll borrow from the vicar,’ said Hetty, watching her mother.
‘You will not!’
‘And, Pa, you have got money. Plenty of money for beer and cigarettes.’
‘Apologise!’ shrieked her mother. ‘I will not hear this in this house. Very well. I’ll sell my cameo brooch. It was your Aunty Margaret’s.’
Mr. Fallowes whistled a tune from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and went out to dig over his allotment.
The next day he drew out twenty pounds of her money from the bank and put it before her, his hands hovering in the hope of getting it back.
The following day a volume of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs arrived from Eustace in a good binding and Hetty flogged it in Middlesbrough for six pounds ten.
A week on, in the public library old Adelaide Kipling left the desk and slipped an envelope under Hetty’s book. Inside were two large squares of tissue-paper that turned out to be five-pound notes.
‘I couldn’t! Oh, Miss Kipling!’
‘I heard that you wanted to go to Grasmere. Poor Coleridge. D’you know, they papered his walls with newspaper? It was all they had. Just a little extra.’
‘Oh, I think it must be because Miss Kipling has always been so very fond of me,’ said Mrs. Fallowes. ‘I think she taught me “Daffodils”.’
Una Vane and her widowed mother were not set apart from the rest of the world entirely because of their joint tragedy, they were apparently set apart from one another. Down the Lonsdale—where Mrs. Vane had never once been seen—they said, ‘Whoever could imagine Una was her daughter?’ But though Una and her mother spoke little to each other they were in fact enmeshed and entangled together like the roots of a pot-bound plant.
Their worst time, the worst they would ever have, when Mr. Vane had called out a jolly goodbye and gone out to jump off the cliff, had been twelve years ago, and Una after staying with the Falloweses had returned home to a house standing in silent disbelief, a locked door on the medicine chest, a mother giving the appearance of being quite unchanged.
Within a couple of months Mrs. Vane had set up her salon, ‘Vane Glory! Where Permanent Waves are Permanent!’ She had had the board raised above the front door and taken down the brass plate that proclaimed her husband’s name and credentials. It was still somewhere about the house.
At first, from simple kindness, many people had patronised Vane Glory, but Mrs. Vane proved to be an unreliable cutter and the procession of underpaid girls who did the shampooing tended to come from the slums of Middlesbrough and had feeble fingers and broken nails. Mrs. Vane continued undeterred. She had a sardonic wit, no sense of self-pity and never referred to the past.
The house ran with cats. There were rivers of cats. They curled up in curlers and washed themselves around the wash-basins. As the years passed, odd clever Una stroked the cats, occasionally washed out the wash-basins and minded her book. Neither she nor her mother was remotely interested in cooking, so that they mostly ate out of tins; literally out of tins, spooning cold baked beans into their mouths and watching the cats pounce and spring at the blowflies against the window-panes, often forgetting an imprisoned client in the salon trapped beneath the electric drier or sitting with wet hair observed by yet more cats.
Mrs. Vane was proud of her drier, which was one of the latest power-filled domes. Her mother, who had been a hairdresser too, though trained, had had to sit her clients in front of a coal fire with a towel over the shoulders and a cup of tea while they held their heads to the flames. Mrs. Vane’s mother’s clients had looked like the victims of shipwreck. Mrs. Vane’s were like apprehensive pupae.
Una always kept her hair cropped short and never mentioned hairdressing at school. Since the age of seven she had been taken up with Mathematics, and since sixteen with Mathematics and the bike-boy. Her mother never referred to either. Nor did her daughter. It was clear to anyone who ever gave the matter thought at all that Una must have an unconscious as deep as the sea. However else could she have survived Mrs. Vane’s unconscious too? ‘At Vane Glory,’ said the grave-digger, who adored both Una and Mrs. Vane, ‘there is a lot going on, out of sight.’
‘Not really,’ said Hetty, whose unconscious was only just beginning to build up. ‘Nobody goes there. They’re poor as mice. It all goes on cat meat.’
‘Let them eat mice,’ said her father. ‘At Vane Glory you might be out of the range of mice. You are beneath the sea. Six miles beneath the South China Sea—did you know?—there are blind white fish who are unaware of light. Una of course may swim up. I wouldn’t think her mother would. I think she rather enjoys the shadows.’
‘Half the time I don’t know what your father’s talking about,’ said Kitty Fallowes.
And now with Ray, who had been the fish-boy, and then the milk-boy, and had become the bike-boy with a job on the railway, Una skimmed the surface of the bright world like a dragon-fly. She had seen him as a child almost, helping in the fish shop, and she had met him properly two years ago when he had changed direction and come delivering milk to her back door. Mrs. Vane was his best customer.
Ray had walked up the yard each morning, cats like snipers watching him from every crack and cranny, and one day, when Una was hard at work on her bike, Ray took over. He told her of a better bike. She went to see it. A deal was made, and now they flew about the countryside together every weekend, though seldom speaking. Una changed.
‘I’ll do your hair,’ Una’s mother said to Una one empty day, soon after Lieselotte’s disappearance. Una had put aside the Cambridge reading list and was absorbing the journal of the Cyclists Touring Club through the drowsy afternoon. ‘I’ll give you a nice perm. And a tint. What colour would you like?’
‘Nothing. White.’
‘Now, white’s the one that nobody can do. I’ll give you a heliotrope.’
‘O.K.’
‘No,’ she said, looking through her rather tired pamphlets, ‘I don’t seem to have the heliotrope. It was all used up on that person who complained. I’ll do you a platinum.’
‘O.K.’
Humming a slow tune from Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, Mrs. Vane washed her daughter’s hair in the stifling front room. ‘Oh, Jeanette MacDonald has a lovely head of hair,’ she said. ‘Well, so has Nelson Eddy. Beautiful ripples.’
‘Beautiful eddies,’ said Una.
They laughed.
Mrs. Vane began to sing with a strong baritone, her face becoming male, square and fervent. She picked up a hairbrush and waved it about, giving a clever impression of managing a rearing stallion while brandishing a gun.
‘Not much longer now,’ she said, winding up the final roller and clipping it up into the electric charge that dangled with twenty-nine more from a lethal-looking mechanism that suggested Death Row. From Una’s small head sprouted all the rollers wrapped in waxy, horn-coloured papers like shreds of vellum. ‘I’m very highly strung today,’ she said.
‘Switch on!’ cried Mrs. Vane. The
re was a sizzling noise and a sharp hot smell. ‘Well, that’s fine. I’ll go and get us a cup of tea.’
Una stayed in position and looked out of the window. The angle of her unhappy neck made it impossible to read a magazine and her mother had not switched on the wireless, as she said that one cannot be too careful with electricity about. ‘That’s why I’ve never bought a second drier,’ she said. ‘My mother taught me that. She wouldn’t have anything with a charge in the house. There’s a flash-point that can strike at random.’
A perm took three hours. Clients became so exhausted that they had to go home and lie down. They were told not to touch the hair for three days, not even with a comb, or it would turn all to frizz. ‘Like not approaching velvet after it’s washed,’ said Mrs. Vane. ‘Not even run your hands over it.’
The sun shone peacefully and yellow on the garden. It was a childhood day. A radiant, southern day. She imagined Cambridge—Una who imagined nothing—like this. Day after golden day, and no more north-east wind. And Cambridge would be good on the bike. Flat. Open and clear. Unlike the jungle of Vane Glory’s garden, where among the twelve-foot-high hollyhocks standing in clumps around the foot-high grass somebody could be seen approaching now, through the gate.
It might be Ray. She did not want Ray to see her like this. Strung up.
How curious. Why not? Ray had no interest in what she looked like. (Except he likes my thighs, she thought. I know he does. He looks them over for design faults and doesn’t find any. ‘You’ll have stamina,’ he says. ‘You’ll never have full speed, but you’ll get there. We might try the Osmotherly Twenty.’)
A face appeared through the hollyhocks and vanished. It was her father’s face. She must have fallen asleep. Don Quixote’s beautiful sad face. She jerked upright and electricity fizzed. Her eyes ran with the warm lotions, or with some memory.
‘What is it? Ma? Ma? You’ve forgotten me.’
‘No, I haven’t. What d’you think I am—an amateur?’
Una knew that her mother was not qualified to dress hair. ‘Ma!’
Her mother dabbed the parchment rolls and leaned Una’s head over the basin. ‘Here’s the messy bit. Sloppy-slops.’ Water flooded the floor. The curlers were drawn out slowly, one by one, the loose hair rinsed again. A cat caught a strand of it from among the hairnets behind the taps, and then spat it out.
‘Interesting colour,’ said Mrs. Vane. ‘Did we say we’d do it eau-de-nil?’
‘No. Platinum.’
‘Oh.’
‘Well, I’m not going to look,’ said Una. They looked at each other instead, and began to laugh. Down she went for another warm rinse and up she came like a horse from the trough, and saw again the melancholy, lean man at the window. He was now walking away.
‘There’s someone looking in, Ma. It looked like—’
‘Like who?’
‘Like, well, Dad.’
‘It’s Hetty’s Pa. You’ve forgotten.’
‘You saw him? You didn’t ask him in?’
‘He’s a law unto himself. He’s not just anyone. He’s getting worse.’
‘He’ll have come round about Hetty. Or—Ma? Does he come round here?’
‘Never. He never would. He’s a gentleman.’
‘You are hopeless. You’re a non sequitur, Ma.’
‘Now that would be a good name for a shop. A shop selling fast cars.’
‘And what are you talking about? Mr. Fallowes is a sexton.’
‘Sexton Blake of the Ace of Spades. Ha ha.’
‘Mother, I must go out and find him. It may be one of his bad days. Hetty’s decided to go off for a bit.’
‘Oh, well. Put your head back. Hmm. Very strong-coloured water. Makes me think of my dear old Dad. He could lower a pint.’
‘You’d better not talk like that when you come to see me in Cambridge.’
‘Mirror . . . There now. Mirror on the wall!’
‘Help! I say, it’s rather good. It’s like burnt toast.’
‘Call it caramel. Caramel cream,’ said Mrs. Vane.
After the last rites, the final shampoo, the final drying beneath the helmet with the sparking wires, Una was combed out.
‘I look older,’ she said, turning her head about. ‘Do I look like Jeanette MacDonald?’
Mrs. Vane began to trill like a curlew. ‘“I’ll see you again, Whenever spring breaks through again”.’ A cat made a dash for the door. ‘You’ll break the glass,’ said Una, but she began to sing too.
The voices of mother and daughter floated down the street, where Mr. Fallowes stood with his old leather-saddled bike, listening and thinking.
She is not mine, he said to himself, and so I am allowed to say, ‘What thighs.’ And, ‘What hair.’ The mother is mad, though good-looking.
He chose to walk home slowly beside his bike, giving it a rest; but at home there was nobody. Church again, he supposed, and went to his allotment. If this was Peace, it was almost unendurable. He drifted to the trenches.
And no black-out any more as winter comes. No girls to collide with in the dark, and then slip away from, unknowing and unknown.
5
The grave-digger had forgotten that the house would be empty when he reached home because Hetty and her mother were on a valedictory outing prior to Hetty’s Lakeland holiday. There had been several of these, Hetty suggesting most of them and being pleasant and sweet. Once they had gone to the Lonsdale, where Mrs. Fallowes had sat proudly beaming as the group all said how they had always known that Hetty was clever. The woman who had been her kindergarten teacher said she remembered how ambitious Hetty had always been. ‘Oh, very ambitious. And you told such stories about yourself. We thought you really believed them, and we had to make you stand in the cupboard. So clever.’
‘Yes, and so quick to read. Of course I taught you to read.’
‘My mother taught me at home,’ said Hetty. Her mother shifted about and became nervous.
‘Loyal to Mummy!’ said the teacher, crooking her finger, and her mother mopped and mowed.
‘Well, that was nice,’ she said, after they’d left. ‘Darling, do you have to wear that varnish?’
(‘Did you see the nails?’ said Mrs. Finch when they were well away. ‘Shape of things to come. Well, she always had that look. She was deep.’)
‘And tomorrow we’ll go on a bus. We’ll go and see somebody and have tea. We might go together to Wilton Woods, darling.’
These were the woods where Mr. and Mrs. Fallowes had done their courting. They had been engaged for four years (‘And of course we never did anything. I think the engagement was a bit long, actually’) and had once been surprised by a wandering cow. The sad little story had gone down the years. Hetty heard it again. She herself had passed a terrible afternoon with Eustace in Wilton Woods, and had been wary about woods hereafter.
‘I’d rather not.’
The vicar had called in unexpectedly and taken Hetty aside because, he said, her mother was looking hurt.
‘You must realise that you are going away to a new place and new friends, and for your mother there will be nothing new. Only the loss of her daughter.’
‘She’ll have you, of course,’ said Hetty.
‘I hope you are not already growing hard, Hetty. I hope you will never turn against your mother.’
‘Why ever should I?’
‘There are things you cannot understand.’
‘If you’re talking about Pa, then don’t worry. There’s no one like Pa for Ma. Nobody else could muscle in for long. They love each other.’
‘Hetty, I don’t like that look. You understand nothing. It’s my fate—I’d say luck—to have met your mother and I flatter myself I’ve brought her a little happiness. She talks to me, of course, and a great deal of the time about you. And your . . . difficulties with the young man.’
/> ‘I’m going on Saturday,’ said Hetty the minute the vicar was out of the door. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you yet, but now I am. I’ve fixed it all up, even the train times.’
‘But however shall we know you’ve arrived safely? I don’t suppose there is a telephone.’
‘Well, since there isn’t one here—’
‘Oh, but I’m sure Mrs. Brownley would take a call and come down.’
‘It’s three miles away and she’s only got one leg or something.’
There was a tight-lipped, huffy evening, the grave-digger unconcerned, reading Heidi and remembering holidays on the Rhine.
‘I’ll write as soon as I get there,’ said Hetty. ‘You’ll have it by Monday.’
‘Oh, my, Hetty! But you know I shall be taking you. Settling you in.’
‘With my party shoes in a bag?’
‘But there are such queer people about, now that the war’s over.’
‘They weren’t all that ordinary then. And, Ma, the Lake District! It’s full of old trouts.’
‘Which lake is it?’
‘Well, it’s not all that near a lake, it turns out, but it’s near a mountain called Robinson.’
‘It doesn’t sound very Wordsworthian.’
‘She’s a nice woman who keeps the place. She’s well-known. Mrs. Stonehouse has been, just last year.’
‘Is this woman a Quaker? I really ought to come with you to see her if she’s a Quaker. I’ve never been happy about Quakers, everything in black and white. They have renounced the Sacraments.’
‘She’s very hospitable. She cooks these massive puddings and she’s often had students. I’ll be reading all day . . . Oh, Ma! What can go wrong? Hilda and Dorothy have been there. Hilda actually knows a lot of other people there!’
Mrs. Fallowes stopped ironing shirts and said, ‘Hetty! Hetty, why ever didn’t you say? Well! Now you have made me happy. Hilda and Dorothy!’
6
When Lieselotte Klein had stepped off a train at York in the late summer of 1939, a splendid sanity that had not been known to her in Hamburg or during most of her childhood flickered back to life. Standing on the platform had been two women officers of the British Red Cross Society resplendent in dark serge, polished leather, brass and footwear; unsmiling, daughters of Empire, aware of their national significance yet utterly different from their counterparts—if by now there were such—in Nazi Germany.
