Angel of Brooklyn

by Jenkins, Janette

  The gramophone stayed silent, the records stacked and occasionally dusted, especially now the sunlight showed up all the dirt. She didn’t play the records because they reminded her that music should be shared, at a concert, a dance, or with the intuitive tapping of fingers on the four chair arms. But then she caught herself, one long light evening, walking about the rooms, wringing her hands, and the words ‘bad acting’ came to mind, so without a second thought, she lowered the needle and the air was full of a shrill-sounding woman singing ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’.

  She began exploring the surrounding countryside, and though it occasionally felt hostile with its brambles and stings, she refused to take it personally. In the bright summer light, the waves appeared blue, matching the sky in their sharp choppy brilliance. Birds chattered in the trees, invisible in the froth of jumping leaves, filling Beatrice’s head not with the macabre images from her past, but with a host of chattering women, cheerfully telling each other about a dress they’d just made, or how well their sons were doing, or how their husbands didn’t know the half of what they did around the house, and as soon as they came back through the door, they were messing it all up again.

  Beatrice found herself a wide smooth stone, and went there every day, with a blanket and a piece of bread and cheese. She liked the way the trees closed in around her, and then the water opened up, and the sky dipped down to meet it. The trees and the hills on the other side made her think of dabs of paint. Sometimes, she’d look at the water and forget about the war, then it would come back to her with a jolt, and she’d try to remember what life had been like, without the constant worry of death and destruction. It must have been wonderful, she thought. It must have been so easy, to get up in the morning, knowing that everyone around you would be safe, and all you had to do was bake bread, say, polish the brasses, or heat water to scrub the tide of grey sitting around your husband’s dirty collar. Who cleaned his collars in the army? Did they worry about washing in France? Did they have a bar of soap? She threw a couple of stones into the water. If they do have soap, she thought, you can bet it won’t be Woodbury’s, ‘For the Skin You Love to Touch’.

  Sometimes, she fell asleep by the side of her rock, holding onto its smoothness as if it was a pillow, and waking with an ache in her neck and her hair caught up with twigs. It was Martha who found her.

  ‘Are you dead?’

  Beatrice opened her eyes. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  ‘I thought you must be,’ said Martha. ‘Because I’ve been watching you for a really long time and a butterfly was sitting on your skirt, a big blue butterfly, the size of my hand, and you didn’t move at all.’

  ‘I was fast asleep,’ said Beatrice, sitting up and rubbing the back of her neck. ‘I always fall asleep just here.’

  ‘It’s the fresh air that does it. That’s what my mam says.’

  ‘And your mam is right.’

  Martha shrugged and walked to where the water was licking at the stones. ‘You don’t really believe that,’ she said. ‘You don’t even like my mam.’

  ‘Of course I like Lizzie. She’s lovely.’

  ‘You don’t like anybody. That’s what Auntie Ada says. You think you’re better than everyone else. Mind you …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You do look like a princess.’

  Beatrice laughed. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  ‘So you’re not a princess?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, I’m just an American, a long way from home.’

  ‘But this is your home, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ she said, picking leaves from her skirt. ‘Trouble is, I keep forgetting.’

  ‘That’s my trouble too,’ said Martha turning round. ‘I keep forgetting what my dad sounds like. I can remember his boots, his big clomping boots, but I can’t remember his voice.’

  ‘He’ll come back to you.’

  ‘He might,’ she said. ‘If the Germans don’t get him.’

  They stood side by side watching the water for a while, the dragonflies, the splashing on the stones, the way the waves seemed to change colour, from brown to green, to a sludgy kind of grey.

  ‘Do you know any Germans?’ Martha asked.

  ‘No,’ said Beatrice, shaking her head. ‘Not one.’

  ‘What do you think they look like?’

  ‘Like we do.’

  ‘Do they want to kill us? Would they like us all to die? Not just the soldiers?’

  Beatrice put her arm around the girl’s small shoulders. ‘I’m sure they wouldn’t want us all to die,’ she said. ‘And I’m sure the British soldiers don’t want all the German people to die either. I know I don’t.’

  ‘Just the bad ones,’ said Martha.

  ‘Just the bad ones,’ said Beatrice.

  They walked around the edge of the reservoir, the ferns dipping their fronds into the water, the birds still chattering about the price of meat, and the merits of National War Bonds.

  ‘Do you know something?’ said Beatrice. ‘When I come here, I like to forget all about the war. I pretend it isn’t happening.’

  ‘Can you do that?’ said Martha.

  ‘Sometimes. If I try hard enough.’

  ‘I’d like to do that,’ she said, picking the head off a daisy and tearing the petals apart. ‘It gives me nightmares,’ she admitted. ‘And it makes Mam cry.’

  ‘Then let’s talk about something else,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘How about … Professor Hubert, and his world-famous flea circus?’

  ‘Will it make me itch?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, sitting down on the bank. ‘Because all of his fleas are very well behaved, and they all work under glass. Apart from the main attractions,’ she added. ‘They work on a special baize carpet, and they’re the most talented, and the most disciplined, and they would never jump onto your arm or make you itch, because they’re extremely dignified fleas.’

  ‘Have you ever met them?’

  ‘Many, many times,’ said Beatrice, ‘though I’m particularly well acquainted with Captain Thunder who shoots out of a cannon and lands on a flying trapeze.’

  ‘You know Captain Thunder?’ Martha sighed, leaning backwards. ‘You know all the best people. None of the fleas that I’ve ever met can swing on a flying trapeze.’

  The next day must have been the hottest day of the summer. The sky shimmered, clearing into a blue satin sheet, the sun flat and brittle, waking the village early with its sharp metallic rays.

  Beatrice sat in the garden, watching the bees chasing pollen, the scent of the magnolia so strong it changed the taste of her tea. She picked a couple of raspberries. She walked around the edge of the lawn, popping them into her mouth.

  Inside the house she shivered in the gloom and waited for the postman, who eventually appeared up the lane, red-faced and sweating, with nothing more than a pause at her gate to wipe his face with an already sodden handkerchief.

  At ten o’clock she rolled up her blanket, packed her bread and cheese and a flask of lemonade. She passed the men on the farm moving slowly in the heat. She often missed the pigs, and the jobs that took your mind off everything, but the men needed work and she didn’t begrudge them it. She climbed over the hawthorn-trimmed stile and through the swollen trees towards her stone. In front of her, the water hardly moved at all, but the heat prickled as she sat and opened out her collar; pulling off her boots and unrolling her stockings she felt the warm mess of stones creeping in between her toes. Then, as she tilted her face, she did her usual thing of thinking about the war for at least ten minutes, so that later, she could push it all aside and remember things from way back, or look at things now, or even dare to think about the future. Sitting back on her hands she thought about Jonathan, fighting in the sunshine, because surely the sun was shining like this in France too, drying out the mud and staining his skin a sweet olive brown? Was it worse in the sunshine? Did
the heat make them faint inside the thick woollen cloth of their uniform? Did they have their summer kit yet? She thought about the girls in the munitions factory. She’d heard that the chemist’s daughter had been killed in an explosion, ‘Another casualty of war,’ she’d said to the assistant, with his tremor and his tiny wire-framed glasses, but ‘Oh no,’ he’d said, ‘she’s a casualty of Mr Horace Blenkinsopp, who had been most remiss in acquainting her with all the safety rules, and in my opinion is now nothing more than a murderer.’

  Closing her eyes she wondered if she ought to volunteer at the hospital, where the wounded were often miles away from home, and needed help with the little things, like the reading and writing of letters, or a chat to make the day go by. But she knew she was romancing, with her visions of a neat blue dress and the red cross on her apron, floating down the ward like a lovely apparition, when the real truth was gruesome, and nothing more than mopping up, and laying out, or running after doctors and changing mouldy dressings and although she hated herself for it, she knew that she would never be able to stand up to the job, and therefore would be useless as a nurse.

  She lowered her flask of lemonade into the water, grinding it into the stones. Flattening out the blanket, she sat against the bark of a tree watching the birds bobbing gently on what little waves there were. It seemed almost impossible that there was a war going on. Perhaps it had ended and she didn’t even know about it. She hadn’t read a paper in two days.

  A heron appeared, and she saw her father with his scraggy unkempt hair chasing after the bird with a net that was too small and flimsy, and she smiled, but then she quickly closed her eyes, where she could picture him doing ordinary things, like eating a meal, lacing his boots, or blowing into his coffee.

  ‘You’re here again. I didn’t think you would be, but you are.’

  Beatrice opened her eyes and smiled. Martha was holding out a fat bunch of buttercups.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be here?’ she said, taking the flowers and putting them under her nose. They smelled of warm fields and dust.

  ‘Grown-ups say one thing, and then they do something else.’

  ‘Sometimes we have to. Thanks for the flowers. They’re very yellow. I like yellow.’

  Martha sat on the stone with her chin in her hands. ‘I’ve escaped,’ she said. ‘Harry’s at war with Billy and Bert, and I’m supposed to be the prisoner.’

  ‘Won’t your mother wonder where you are?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘She’s washing all the windows and I’m just playing out.’

  ‘Any more news from your dad?’

  ‘We had a letter last week. We sent him some Oxo.’

  ‘He’ll like that.’

  ‘Will he know what to do with it? He can’t even make himself a sandwich.’

  Martha picked at the stones, stringing them out into lines. The sun was hot even in the shade, the birds had dry throats, and the insects hummed like fans.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Martha.

  ‘That I shouldn’t be here, doing nothing at all, that I’m lazy and I really ought to be working.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Beatrice hitched up her skirt. Her legs were the colour of milk. ‘Rolling bandages. Packing equipment. Anything.’

  ‘Ginny let those men have your job,’ said Martha. ‘I don’t like them. The one with the yellow skin told Harry to bugger off, and those aren’t my words, I’m only repeating what he said.’

  ‘Sure you are. I know that.’

  Martha looked at Beatrice with her bare legs, her stockings stuffed into her boots, and she began unlacing her own.

  ‘Hadn’t you better tell your mother where you are?’

  ‘Is it dinner time?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then I’m playing out,’ she said. ‘That’s all I’m doing. I’m just playing out.’

  The heat became painful. Beatrice thought she could feel the ground moving, it was like she was sitting on a soft wide hammock. She rubbed her eyes, hard.

  ‘Don’t you wish we had ice cream?’ she said. ‘I do.’

  ‘I don’t have it much. Sometimes Mam will get a brick and we have to eat it quickly, and I always get a headache.’

  ‘What’s your favourite flavour?’ Beatrice asked.

  ‘Flavour? It’s just white.’

  ‘Vanilla.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Probably. What other flavours do you like?’

  ‘I don’t know any other flavours. Do you?’

  Beatrice nodded. She saw the board in the window of Manfredi’s, the painted bowls and fruit. ‘I know hundreds. Let’s see now, there’s raspberry,’ she said, counting off on her fingers, ‘pistachio, chocolate, mocha, hazelnut, coconut, strawberry, lemon, banana, apricot, cinnamon, blueberry, toffee, cherry, apple cake –’

  ‘Apple cake? Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wish I lived in America.’

  ‘It’s only ice cream.’

  Martha walked to the edge of the water and dipped her feet in it. ‘Ouch,’ she said, ‘it’s freezing.’

  ‘I used to swim all the time in New York,’ Beatrice told her. ‘Almost every day.’

  ‘I can’t swim very well,’ admitted Martha. ‘I don’t like the water on my face. Are you coming in?’

  Beatrice hesitated, but the heat was too much. The water was humming cold, and without hesitation she sat right down in it, and then floated on her back as her light summer skirt began billowing around her. Martha laughed. ‘I never thought you’d do that,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d be tippy-toeing around the edges, just like my mam always does.’

  Beatrice dipped her head inside the gentle ripples, bringing it out, gasping, unpinning her hair, flipping back her neck and letting the water spray in a fine shimmering arc. The weight of her fingertips pressed down into the cold, and she laughed.

  ‘My teeth are chattering,’ said Martha. ‘I have pins and needles.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Beatrice, ‘but it was worth it.’

  Shivering, they lay side by side on the blanket. ‘We’re like a couple of seals,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘You are,’ said Martha. ‘I’m only wet up to my knees.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Beatrice, twisting and squeezing out her hair, ‘we’ll dry.’

  As the drops of icy water evaporated from her legs, Martha looked across Anglezarke, throwing up her arm in a dreamy kind of gesture.

  ‘My dad once swam all the way across there,’ she said. ‘Granny was stamping her boots, screaming and shouting, but my dad was just a dot bobbing up and down. He couldn’t hear a thing. He was ten and he was in trouble for something. I think he’d dropped his dinner plate, and his mam went mad, and they started arguing and he just ran out of the door, and down to the water where he jumped in and started swimming until he reached the other side. Everyone came to watch, and when he got out, dripping and panting, and rolling onto the stones because he was that exhausted, they all began to cheer, which made Granny even madder, and she gave him a good clip around the ear before she let him have a towel.’

  ‘That’s a wonderful story,’ said Beatrice. ‘Is your granny still alive?’

  ‘No, she died last year. Kidney trouble, whatever that means.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘She was old. She always smelled like the back of a cupboard.’

  Beatrice pulled up her sodden sleeves and squeezed the water from her hem. ‘Both of my grandmothers died when I was three,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember them at all, though I’m told they looked after us for a while, when my mother died. They died the same year. One collapsed at her front door. One collapsed in her garden, when she was picking out some roses. They were still in her arms when they found her, or so my papa said.’

  ‘Your mother died?’ said Martha, struggling with the words. It was the worst thing she could think of, her mother lying stock-still in a coffin. ‘When?’

  ‘The
minute I was born,’ said Beatrice. ‘My fault.’

  ‘But you were just a tiny baby.’

  Shrugging, Beatrice pursed her lips into something of a smile, all the time thinking that babies were dangerous things. By now, the sun was making the world a blurred-edged kind of place. Her legs felt weak. The reservoir was dissolving into pools of coloured flakes.

  ‘I didn’t tell,’ said Martha, looking at her hands, ‘about yesterday. I didn’t tell anyone that I’d seen you, though I was dying to tell Harry about Captain Thunder. I nearly did, I had to keep biting my lip.’

  ‘It’s nice to have something for yourself, but perhaps you ought to tell your mother, because she might not really approve.’

  Beatrice, her shoulders steaming, retrieved the bottle of lemonade, and they drank it, three gulps each, laughing at nothing at all, so it looked like they were drunk on it. In the distance, behind the clumps of trees, the church bells were ringing.

  ‘Dinner time.’

  ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘You don’t,’ said Beatrice, ‘but you have to.’

  Martha pulled a face. ‘Oh I’m going, I’m going,’ she muttered. ‘I know you want your peace and quiet, and all of them sandwiches for yourself.’ Suddenly, she stopped. ‘You’re lovely, you are,’ she said, before running through the trees towards the track where Harry had last been seen parading with his rifle.

  Beatrice stretched. Her clothes were drying fast against her skin as she ate her bread and cheese. The sky was taut. The bees were sticking to the lavender. A butterfly appeared; it was wide-winged and blue, like the one that Martha had described the day before, and it hovered over the water before landing on a stone, its wings like a cut of good cloth, with a thin line of violet and a dusty turquoise haze. Butterflies were finer than birds. People collected them. They had them pinned and pressed behind glass. Delicate. They made pictures. Brooches. They decorated their hats with them. When Beatrice had asked her father why he had none in his collection, he’d puffed and grunted saying, ‘Not enough meat.’