I burst out laughing. There was something about George’s face; the grim mouth and the metal-framed eyes that made him look ridiculous, and the more I laughed the harder it was to stop.
George’s face softened. ‘I’ve missed those schoolgirl giggles,’ he said. ‘Come on, we should move these to where they should be.’
I followed George into the living room, dust sheets bunched in my arms. He was listing the other ‘little oversights’, as he called them: the hammer in the sink, the lamp fitted with a dead bulb and the fence painted two different shades of green. And what about his son? Was that another ‘little oversight’? Had he forgotten to bring him along too? And to think that we had trusted this man with a set of our house keys! I couldn’t stop laughing, with everything that I had been through, it was somehow comforting to be around someone who still got upset by the things that didn’t matter.
Suddenly George realized that I wasn’t just laughing at Mr Tuttle but at him as well and he stopped his rant and laughed too. ‘Well, it’s amazing that the lounge came off unscathed. Oh how do you cope with two old fools in the house?’
I kissed him on the cheek. We had drifted so far apart over the past weeks that I needed these little moments to remind me that he was a good man at heart.
‘I suppose I’ve already bored you with my lecture about the effects of trauma on neurons and how they can lose their connections and misfire and the analogy of loose electrical cables in the brain?’
I bit my lip and nodded, then started laughing again.
We shook out the dust covers and threw them over the furniture. One had old cobwebs folded inside and they landed on George’s head, coating his forehead in dust. He took off his glasses, blinking in the dirt, the skin around his eyes was moist, the wrinkles soft and pink. Without the glasses, his face was naked and vulnerable and I suddenly felt pity for him.
He wiped his eyes. ‘I really am your dusty old man now,’ he said and for a moment I remembered what it had been like before we were married, the times that we had like this one – the moments that had made me think that being married to him might not be so bad.
‘Of course you are,’ I said. ‘You are my Old Bear, remember?’
We looked at each other and smiled. I wasn’t sure what it was that I saw in his eyes, regret maybe, but things had been going wrong for too long. We both knew it was too late.
‘Come on,’ he said gently. ‘I suppose we’d better camp out in the dining room this evening.’
I nodded and followed him through.
‘George?’ I said.
‘What, darling?’
For days I had wanted to tell him about Ruby and how I had arranged for her to stay with us, but I feared his reaction and the right moment had never come. I had rehearsed the argument in my head and imagined myself telling him about how we may never have a perfect marriage but she at least might make us content. About how we could regain some youth – some pleasure in our old age that would see us through our dotage. About how we could watch her grow into a young woman we could be proud of. But now the moment had come, I found myself hesitating again.
‘Come on, Old Thing, what is it?’ George tilted his head and the light caught his spectacles, glazing them with mist, and the man that I had seen again for just a moment was lost.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ve forgotten what I was going to say. I’m sure it wasn’t important.’
George looked at me curiously. ‘I don’t know!’ he said. ‘Sometimes I think everybody around me is going mad – your little memory lapses, hammers in the sink, rogue dust covers and your little blue flowers – but maybe it is just me that is going mad.’
‘Blue flowers?’ I said.
‘Yes, your latest fad; glasses of little blue flowers, pansies, no, lilacs maybe.’
‘Violets?’ I said.
‘Yes, violets… Oh I don’t know, maybe violets.’
‘Those flowers were weeks ago,’ I said. ‘I remember because they were left at the party.’
‘Well yes, there were some after your party and then some more at supper the other week and this morning in the study. You are becoming obsessed with them.’
‘There were more violets this morning?’ I said. ‘Inside the house?’
‘Yes, there were more this time. I don’t know where you are getting them from. I’ve not seen them in the garden.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ I said.
He pulled a face, the face he pulled when he thought I was being childish, the face that meant I had ruined our earlier good humour with my infantile behaviour. But I knew better than to argue with him. He wasn’t my Old Bear any more.
They were in the study, just as George had said. Five violets in George’s little sherry glass, their heads heavy and their stalks resting against the rim. I remembered how happy I had been to see them after the party, when I thought that Ruby had bought them as a gift. But now that the violets were unexplained, I started to think of my mother’s superstition about bad luck and death and the flowers that the midwife had lain by the incubator in that cold white room. This time the memories in my head were no longer happy ones.
I took the glass outside and flung the contents onto the patio, the water leaving a dark streak on the flagstones.
‘Emma! Don’t—’
But the violets lay on the stone, limp and bruised.
*
In my mind it was 1925 again. The violets in the field were dead. The trees were turning from green to brown and the blackberries in the hedgerows had shrunk to husks. In the triangular field the long grass had become dry and yellow and a breeze swept through the copse. But the days were still long and the air still warm. At three o’clock in the afternoon it was warm enough for a man to walk in the open air without a jacket, for that same man to loiter by the war memorial, and rest his back against the hot stone, for him to glance down the road to a house, a house on the edge of a new estate, where the low sun glazed the windows orange.
The man’s name was Peter, or that is what he had told me. I knew little else about him – he didn’t tell me and by then I knew better than to ask any more. All the same, I delighted in imagining what his life might be by revelling in every little detail of him.
His clothes were not new, but well repaired. He wore work boots, traces of mud staining the leather and the soles re-heeled. He was a labourer, but that I already knew, he had told me as much. . Sometimes bankers’ slips fell from his pocket, always deposits – savings to start his business. Bus tickets told me he lived in Oxworth, but as he always carried his camera in a work bag slung on his hip, I guessed that wherever he lived was not a safe place to leave it.
His body told a more complicated story, one I did not understand and one which drew me in further, always wanting to know him more. His skin smelt of ale sometimes, and cigarettes, from the London bars I thought, wild places where the men drank and sang together in a jostle of heat and muscle. But he was always clean-shaven, just for me I hoped, the smell of cologne masking the sweat. His body was big and awkward, but he was aware of that and could not always laugh at his clumsiness. His hands were rough and scarred from heavy work, the fingernails brittle, but capable of tenderness. Sometimes he would go quiet, his thoughts wandering, and I imagined him to be haunted by pain from his past. But that much I could only guess. By now I had found out that questions only soured things between us and I did not want to ruin what was left.
I knew he would be coming that day, this man I knew only as Peter, making his way from the station along the road through town, to the crossroads and the war memorial. I imagined the route he would take, what he would see on his way. I thought to myself of the point he would be on his journey as the time ticked on and by a quarter to three I felt I could feel him, my body warming as I sensed his approach.
George had taken a day off work, but on that Wednesday the day had settled into the comfortable weekend routine of gardening and packing away the keepsakes from our honeymoon and his presence in
the house annoyed but did not worry me. I had my best summer dress on, lipstick circling my mouth and a new scent, lavender, dotted inside my underwear where the skin was softest. But I kept up the pretence of potting hydrangeas, my old gardening shoes clomping between shed and kitchen, never stopping long enough for George to notice my smile.
He had sat in the lounge all afternoon, filing the mementos from our Brighton honeymoon; the cheap watercolours of the pier and the esplanade and the photograph we had taken with the donkeys on the beach, the tickets from the tram and the matchbook from the restaurant. He arranged them all in order of date, a clean page for each, his spectacles held in front of his face as he scrutinized the memories.
‘Are you finished with those pansies yet, darling?’ he called. ‘Can you spare ten minutes to help me sort out these postcards?’
I glanced nervously at the kitchen clock. ‘No,’ I shouted. ‘Not just now, can’t you leave them in the box?’
‘Please!’
I wiped my feet on the kitchen mat and went into the lounge.
He was sitting on the sofa, hunched over the coffee table spread with colourful scraps of paper and card, his spectacles folded in his hand. ‘Leave them in the box?’ he said. ‘Won’t you ever want to show people? Audrey perhaps? Sometimes I think it’s like you want to forget!’
‘No, you silly Old Bear,’ I said. ‘That’s not it at all, I just need to set off on my walk very soon, it’s such a nice day, I need to be out by three to make the most of it – the days will be getting even shorter in a few weeks.’
He replaced his glasses and smiled. ‘I never knew that I had married such a sporty girl. What a lot of walking!’
I nodded and flexed a bicep in a silly gesture like a bodybuilder.
‘Looking after your figure, new clothes and new hair! And you always joked that you’d become a frump once we were married.’
I felt my face redden at the mention of our marriage, so I turned to go.
‘Just remember it’s the Hospital Ball at the end of the month,’ he called. ‘You did say to remind you so you had enough time to make a dress.’
‘It’s not October yet,’ I said.
He laughed, his little coughing laugh. ‘Yes it is, darling, it’s the ninth!’
October! I started to panic.
George was talking about the Hospital Ball. How it wouldn’t be too bad, how Walter would be going, so Audrey definitely would be too. There would be food and drink – and of course Walter was ever such a nice chap – he had known him since his service in Amiens – another wounded medical officer – now so highly respected as a psychiatrist in London…
But my mind was racing. How could it be October? I ran upstairs and started counting the days on the calendar. He was right; it was October. The days had come one by one as predicted, but something else hadn’t. I thought about the breakfast that I hadn’t been able to keep down on Friday; maybe those eggs hadn’t been off after all. I had been tired too and my breasts had ached but I had put that down to the exhaustion of a reckless double life.
I asked myself how this could have happened. But the answer was so simple that it could have come from the lips of a schoolgirl – it was carelessness, it was back luck, it was fate, it was basic biology. And not one of those answers had anything to do with George.
I went downstairs slowly and perched opposite George on the chair in the bay. I glanced at the clock – the minute hand taking big bites of time as it clicked forward. I sat still and rigid, the ticks of the clock getting louder until they filled the room. George’s breath hissed rhythmically and hooves clattered along the road. My stomach twisted and my palms grew moist, but still I sat, in silence, my heart throbbing in my ears.
When the clock struck three I saw myself jump up from my seat, pick up my cardigan and run out the door, but that was not me, just a faded outline, a ghost. The real me did not do that. I just sat quietly and pictured the date on the calendar – the illustration of red berries that circled the word ‘October’ – October the ninth.
George raised his head when he heard the chimes. ‘Hey, Old Girl, you look so pretty today. You know, it has been such a long time since we were together on our honeymoon. Why don’t you forget that walk of yours. Do you fancy going upstairs for a bit instead?’
‘Upstairs?’ I said.
‘Yes, upstairs – upstairs together.’
It wasn’t until I looked at his face that I realized what he meant. He had a strange little expression; raised eyebrows and his head tilted in such a way that his spectacles became opaque in the light from the window.
‘Oh!’ I said. ‘You mean like we did in Brighton?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Just like we did in Brighton. Do you still have the Dutch cap I got you from the surgery?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I still have it.’
‘Well good.’ He stopped to adjust the frame of his vapid glass eyes. ‘Well do you want to?’
I thought of the calendar, the berries growing round the October. My mind was still racing but now I questioned not how it had happened but where it would lead – disgrace? Poverty? An uncertain future at least. But here was an answer and George was offering it.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think we better had.’
‘What a funny way of putting things!’ he said. ‘Well then, as you say, I suppose we “better had”.’
‘Just not right now,’ I said quickly. ‘I think I would like to have a drink first. I think we both should; maybe some of your sherry. Would you mind—’
He jumped up quickly and headed for the decanter in the study.
I went to the bookshelf and took down Mrs Beeton. I sat down again and rested the spine on my knees, leafing through the pages until I found a square of blotting paper with a violet inside, the last one I had received. I pushed the violet aside to read the scribbles of ink: ‘9th of October – 3pm – usual place’. I touched the violet gently with my finger. It was as my mother had warned: a violet inside brought bad luck – but she had been wrong too – it didn’t mean death, it meant life. Already I could feel the baby scouring my insides.
I wanted to go upstairs, into the front bedroom and stand in the bay, to look out over the road towards the war memorial, maybe catch a final glimpse of Peter. I had done it every Wednesday – every Wednesday at three o’clock for three whole months as I waited for him. He would always turn up a few minutes early. Walk up to the cross and rest his back on the stone. Sometimes I would wait a few moments, watching him as he shuffled his feet, put his hands in his pockets and lit a cigarette, cupping his hands over the flame. Then I would run downstairs, only stopping to grab my cardigan on the way out.
I imagined him now, his back against the hard stone and the cigarette burning down to ash. Maybe he would look up the road to the house, take his pocket watch out, turn it over in his fingers, shake it, listen to the mechanism, his large clumsy fingers turning it over in his hands. Maybe he would cup his hand to his ear for the chimes of St Cuthbert’s. He would lick his lips, swallow slowly, the bulge in his neck dipping towards his chest. He would wipe the sweat off his face, the sweat that smelled like leather, shuffle his feet awkwardly, self-conscious and alone. Maybe he would nod to people passing by, cast his eyes to the road as traffic passed. How long would he wait? Would he look up to the window? Walk past the house? Oh Peter, my Peter!
George returned with the decanter and two glasses. ‘Well, this is unexpected, isn’t it? Quite unlike you, darling. It’s gone three o’clock, what about your walk?’
‘My walk?’ I said, the words sticking in my throat. ‘No, it’s a bit late for that now.’
It was too late. By then I didn’t have a choice. Violet was already blooming deep inside me. Peter would know what my absence meant. I had made my decision. It was over.
25
Ruby arrived on the doorstep of Little Willow with her belongings tied in a blanket. She had been walking in the rain and was wet through. I bustled her inside and sat her in t
he living room, lighting a fire in the grate.
‘The chickens!’ she said, and burst into tears.
I patted her shoulder, frustrated by her sobbing. It had been a good four days since the chickens had died and I worried if this was the real reason for her outburst. If she felt bad about leaving Rose Cottage, I wanted to show her that she could feel at home here too. I wanted her to feel the softness of a proper bed, to enjoy running in the garden, to feel happy and warm in the nursery, to savour a proper meal eaten at a dining room table, to smell soap and lavender water and to wear proper petticoats. But, most of all, I wanted her to want me.
I put my hand on hers. ‘I know what will cheer you up – let me show you your room.’
We went upstairs and I opened the door to the nursery. The sun was beaming through the open window, making the yellow paint glow, and the lambs gambolled happily among the poppies. The room was warm and airy, the furniture glinting with polish, sparkles of dust circling in the sunlight and I breathed in the scent of cut grass from the garden. I thanked God that Mr Tuttle had not yet touched this special place and I smiled at Ruby and squeezed her hand.
‘It’s a baby’s room,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay in here.’
I took her to the back bedroom instead, and flung open the curtains, angry that I had not had time to clean two rooms. I told her to sit on the bed and she slumped down, burying her face in the pillow, her sobs muffled by the down.
‘Whatever is the matter now?’ I snapped.
She gasped against the pillow: ‘Chi-ick-ins!’
I untied her belongings, laying the blanket out to dry over the back of a chair. Then I started to fold her clothes into the drawers, working slowly, all the time willing the crying to stop, but soon all the clothes were put away and her shoulders still shuddered with sobs. I sat next to her and put a hand on her back, but her tears continued, her back warm and damp against my palm, her ribs heaving as she gasped for breath.
‘There there,’ I said, awkwardly brushing the hair away from the warm curl of her ear. ‘There there.’
The Liar Page 15
