I shut my eyes, trying to stop my head from spinning. Why would George have been there? At that time he had been well into his secondment in obstetrics. There would have been plenty of doctors to attend a birth on the pulmonary ward. I shut my eyes and saw George bending over me, his face obscured by a surgical mask. Was this my imagination or an echo of memory from Violet’s caesarean birth? He had been allowed in the theatre as a doctor and was present there as a father but, for some reason, he had been there for Ruby too, and in my head the two babies, Violet and Ruby, born only days apart, became one again.
I stared at the birth certificate, the little details written in the slanting hand – the dates, the name, the hospital, the mother – and suddenly they did not matter. The only words that meant anything were ‘George Arthur Marks’. He was the link, but would I ever know why? All I needed to do was ask him. Asking him should be easy. George was my husband after all. He was the man who had given me security and luxury on the Sunningdale Estate, he was the man who filled the gap after the loss of my parents, the man who had shown me the sea for the first time and paid for a society wedding. But he was also the man who would not let me grieve, the man who psychoanalysed me behind my back, the man who wanted me to take pills so that I would not embarrass him in front of his peers. He was the man that I needed to ask but, deep down, I knew that I could not.
31
Ruby
My name is Ruby Brown but it should be Violet Marks. The girl who lives at Little Willow should be called Violet. There is a room in the house for Violet, a room with little purple flowers embroidered on the linen and the name stitched onto the counterpane in big curly letters. A whole room for Violet would surely bring bad luck. But the death in this house has already happened, I can feel it in every silence and every sigh. I will be glad to get away from here, if only for a little while.
Emma had spent almost a week planning our trip to the zoo but, when the day finally came, she changed her mind and said that I should go back to Rose Cottage and visit Maudy instead.
When I complained, she got all snappy and said that I had to go because Aunt Sadie said so. It was to help Maudy, she said, which sounded oh so grand because it wasn’t actually her that was doing the helping and all she did was walk me to the junction with the big stone cross and wave me off. She gave me a basket with a pound cake, which weighed about ten, and a big purple envelope smelling of lavender to give Maudy, which she needn’t have bothered with because I completely forgot about it and it never left the basket.
My nightshirt was in the basket too, but Emma didn’t say where I would be sleeping, she just said it would be Maudy’s decision, so she’d made sure that I was prepared. Well she didn’t prepare me that well because she sent me off without an umbrella in the spitting rain.
When I arrived at Rose Cottage Maudy was surprised to see me; surprised but not happy. She was bustling around with armfuls of linen, but when she saw me at the door, she flopped down in her chair and gathered her sick blanket around her, a big dent in her cheek as she chewed the inside.
Home looked different after so long away, smaller and darker. Aunt Sadie had put some things right – the curtains had been washed and the floor looked swept – but even Sadie hadn’t been able to fix the stove; the door was still hanging from only one hinge and it reminded me of the Bad Thing again and suddenly I wasn’t happy to be back at all.
Maudy told me that she was too ill to fuss over me; I would have to entertain myself. I reminded her that it was raining but she just shrugged and then I realized that the house felt empty without the boys. I fancied that they would be having loads of fun together at the almshouses, running around and playing tag and British Bulldog. And now I was bored and lonely back home too.
But no matter what I said, Maudy just sat and stared at me as if she wouldn’t be happy until she saw me doing something, so I left her and went into the henhouse. You see there was something bothering me, something that I couldn’t get out of my head…
‘Where did you get that?’ snapped Maudy when I came back in. She shuffled in her chair, pulling the blanket over her knees.
‘It was in the back room, in one of the drawers,’ I said, ‘under the order slips from the factory.’
Maudy must have known it was a lie but she didn’t stop to catch her breath: ‘Well go on, put it back!’ She waved me away but I sat down next to her.
‘What is it?’
It was obvious; it was the photograph from the cigarette case, the old crumpled photograph of the sleeping baby with the white bonnet and the chubby cheeks. I knew all this, of course, but I could pretend to be stupid when it suited me.
Maudy shook her head like I was a wasp bothering her.
‘What’s it doing here?’ I said. ‘Is it me?’
Maudy laughed. She reached out for the photograph but I pulled it away.
‘Nah!’ I said. ‘I’m still looking at it.’
She changed the subject. ‘I remember you when you was born,’ she said. ‘You was such a lovely surprise to me.’
‘A surprise?’ I said, thinking it a strange thing to say.
Then I got a funny picture in my head of Maudy not realizing that she had got all fat and her mouth going wide like a big ‘o’ when a baby suddenly popped out from under her skirts. I started to laugh but her face was serious.
‘I didn’t expect you to be born alive,’ she said. ‘I thought you would die.’
‘Why?’ I said, shocked, she had never said anything like this to me before.
‘Well, I was very ill,’ said Maudy. ‘My lungs were infected and that had weakened me. They said I would be too poorly to give birth, they said that we both might die, you and me.’
‘Who said that?’
‘The hospital – a doctor at the hospital. You see, I was lying in a hospital bed with my tummy all big and swollen and I didn’t know what was going on. All I could see were these bright lights and faces with masks on and I can remember feeling scared, but then everything went black. I thought it was all over, all over for the both of us.’
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘Well then I wakes up. And by then it was a few weeks later and I’m lying in the same hospital bed and I see that I am thin again and then all of a sudden I am sad because I thought I’d lost you.’ She looked up at me and her eyes were all wet but then she started laughing. ‘Then they bring you to me in a little cot. They don’t let me touch you, mind. But they tell me that you made it, we both made it. That is why you are special – because I thought I’d lost you.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know any of that.’
‘I was going to tell you,’ she said, ‘but I needed to wait until you was old enough to understand, and you’re a big girl now.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Almost grown-up.’
Maudy laughed. ‘You just remember that you are special.’ She winked at me. ‘More special than the boys.’
‘Why were you ill?’ I said.
‘I had TB.’
‘Tee-bee’ I said. ‘Emma was talking about that. But that’s not what you have now is it, Maudy? Now it’s just a mouth ulcer, like you said.’
Maudy looked sad but then she laughed. ‘Don’t you worry about me,’ she said.
I looked at the photograph. The baby looked tired, its eyes were shut and its face looked soft, like it could melt away like butter. I couldn’t tell whether its dream was happy or sad. It was dead to the world, as Maudy liked to say.
‘Why is the photograph here?’ I said. ‘Who took it?’
‘Sadie did.’
‘Sadie had a camera?’
‘She did, for a little while, she borrowed it from someone.’
‘Why did she take the picture?’
‘Sadie took photographs of lots of babies when she worked at the hospital. She liked to give the photographs to the parents. It’s something they used to do when she was younger. Lots of people did it back then, in the old days of Victoria.’
Well now I knew
that she was lying. If Sadie was always taking pictures of any old baby then why had she never taken them of her own kin? I had never seen a photograph of the boys around the house and I certainly hadn’t got a photograph of me. But then I remembered the last time I saw my ugly mug in a mirror and I realized that nobody would want one. I turned the photograph over.
‘What’s this mark on the back?’ I said.
Maudy tried to grab at the photograph again. ‘Well I can’t tell you if you don’t let me see, can I?’
‘It looks like the number two and then a slanty line and then another two,’ I said. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Why don’t you just shut up?’ she said. ‘I ain’t answering no more of your stupid questions.’
But I knew that once I’d got her going, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself. Her answers always came too quick, especially when she was trying to cover up for something.
‘Did Sadie take pictures of all the babies?’ I said. ‘How did she afford all those photographs? There must be hundreds.’
‘No-no,’ said Maudy quickly. ‘She only took them of some of the babies.’
‘Which ones?’ I said.
‘Just the special ones.’
‘Why were they special?’
She stopped and frowned. ‘Well it was the ones where the parents might never have been able to take another photograph of them. Where Sadie’s picture would be the only one.’
I thought hard. ‘Because the parents were poor?’ I said. ‘Because they couldn’t afford a camera or to go to a photographer?’
She frowned again. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s right. That is exactly why,’ but she said it so firmly that I knew that it was one of those grown-up lies. Then she smiled, one of her big gappy smiles, and held out her hand for the photograph as if our chat was over.
I pulled it away from her. ‘There’s a photograph like this at Emma’s house,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen it. I found it in the drawer in that little yellow room with the lambs on the wall. It’s just the same as this one, I’m sure of it.’
Then Maudy went quiet.
‘Why is this one here?’
The dent in Maudy’s cheek got bigger as she worked her jaw but still she said nothing.
I looked at the photograph again. The baby’s bonnet had lace round the front, nothing like Maudy could have afforded. The baby must have known that it was born rich because it had an expression on its face of deep peace like an angel in a church painting, the bonnet a little halo. Its mouth was open, just a bit, and its eyelashes were curled like little feathers.
‘What’s that on its face?’ I said.
‘Oh, what?’ said Maudy.
I held the photograph closer to her and pointed to the baby’s cheek. ‘It’s got some marks,’ I said, ‘on the side of its face.’
‘Oh I don’t think it’s anything,’ she said. ‘Probably just a smudge of something on the lens.’
I looked at the photograph and touched my cheek.
*
At dusk Maudy gave me a hug and told me that I had better get a move on if I was going to make it back to Emma’s before dark. It was still raining but she didn’t seem to care. I didn’t tell her about the nightshirt in my bag; I could tell that she didn’t want me. I also didn’t tell her that the photograph of the baby was leaving too, hidden away in my pocket. I thought that if I wasn’t important to her, then at least I would have something that was, and I vowed to keep the photograph close to me, always.
‘All right then,’ I said, ‘bye.’ But I was sad. And then I was out in the rain again. I remembered Emma’s words – it was Maudy who had to decide whether she wanted me home or not and I realized that Maudy had made her decision clear: she didn’t.
32
Emma
Before that summer I had seen a girl with a birthmark like Ruby’s on only one occasion. I mentioned this meeting before; the one that happened nine years previously in the spring of 1926, when I met my daughter, Violet.
When I spoke of the meeting before, I probably mentioned how brief it was and how little of it I remembered, then rambled on about the unpleasant smell of carbolic and new-fangled incubators and starched uniforms and a big to-do about hospital innovations in the newspapers.
You see, they had told me not to talk about it, said that it would be bad for my nerves if I did. George had told me to be British and not get all silly and sentimental. His generation had been through far worse, he said, and a stiff upper lip was the best way to get through these things. I spoke very little about the meeting before; only said how brief it was and how little I recalled. But the thing is, I have been fooling myself for many years – I do remember the meeting well, more than I cared to admit before. And now I think it is time that I talked about it properly. Despite what George says, it’s not always good to be British.
So much time has passed, but my memory is as clear as if I were standing in that sterile room right now, nine years later. The smell of the carbolic has lingered in my nostrils for a decade and the hum of the incubator has been constant in my head all this time. At night I find that I only need to shut my eyes to see the scrubbed walls and the gleaming glass. I can still sense the presences that waited in the white room with me that day. The midwife had little meaning at the time, but now when I revisit that day she feels cold and unwelcome, and there was Violet too, the one who everything centred around, warm and wanted. But I have to mention that there was absence also, the husband and father, usually one and the same, but for me that absence was not one man but two.
So to the midwife first. As I have said before, she was a middle-aged woman with a round face. She had her cape on and was ready to leave, tapping her foot impatiently as she left a posy as a parting gesture. But enough about her; we know who she is now, so let’s just call her Sadie.
Then there was Violet. Of course she was just a baby back then. Three days old if you take it from the date she was expected but 35 days old if you take it from the date five weeks beforehand when she was wrenched into this world by the very accident of nature that put her, not in her mother’s arms but incarcerated in the metal box. I didn’t mention her much before, I blamed a memory lapse and a strong dose of morphine, but the truth is, I just couldn’t bring myself to talk about her, so instead I just wittered on about a tiny baby and a dear little domed forehead.
But the birthmark was something I could not forget. It marked the whole of one cheek with bright red tears. They had thought it was blood, tried to clean it off, but it stayed, raw and inflamed like a wound. Some of the nurses had said that Violet was disfigured, others just looked away embarrassed or tutted and shook their heads; ‘poor little thing’, ‘never mind.’ But to me these imperfections marked her as mine, not anybody’s baby but mine.
And then there was me of course, Emma Marks. But Emma Marks was not the same person she is now. Yes, I was younger then and still a newly-wed, and yes, I was probably too concerned with silliness such as what I was supposed to be doing and thinking, and what the midwife would make of my unkempt appearance. But my body had suffered more than a pale face and dishevelled hair; I was shrouded in a hospital gown and hunched in a wheelchair, my hands supporting the wadding that bound my abdomen. And over the past eight months my life had changed too.
I had already cared for Violet for several months; eaten the right foods, put my feet up, smoked to help me sleep and never dared raise my arms above my head, but now she was a reality, I was helpless.
I had become a mother and suddenly I had a connection to the tiny entity in the incubator – a connection that had not been severed when they removed her from me, the wound on my abdomen a painful reminder of the bond. I could do no more for Violet than watch her as she lay motionless but for the irregular heave of her tiny chest. I held my breath between each flutter of her fragile ribcage until I thought that it was my willpower alone that caused each movement.
Sadie knelt beside me, her bag open on the floor. She rummaged inside franticall
y as if what she was looking for could not wait. I did not know what she sought at the time, but now I can guess what was hidden among those antiseptics, thermometers and boiling tubes. It was a small box camera and, later that day, she would take a couple of exposures of the baby Violet. Maybe the infant would be alive at the time, maybe she would be dead, but now I know that it does not matter because Violet had been just as close to one as the other. Maybe the photographer herself did not know.
I watched the movements of Sadie’s mouth, listened to the drone of her words, but I could not recollect what she said until now.
‘You really shouldn’t be here for long, Mrs Marks.’ Then came a pause as if her statement was a question requiring an answer that did not come. ‘It really is late in the day and the matron will be making her rounds soon. I really shouldn’t have let you in. It’s against hospital policy and…’ her words faltered when still no answer came ‘…it’s just, well, I wouldn’t have allowed it at all if it weren’t for your insistence and Dr Marks’s position at the hospital…’
I did not listen to her for long because her face spoke of something deeper. It was a round face, as I have mentioned before, framed by a wisp of hair straying loose from her cap, but the expression on that face is something that has stayed with me for all these years – the raised eyebrows and tight mouth and those eyes so blank and distant. It was an expression that I could not quite read but it is one that I have seen on her face since – and now I understand more about what that expression meant.
‘Time to say goodbye to Violet,’ she said.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Goodbye.’
*
So that was my meeting with Violet. Even now I wonder whether this was the only time I met her or if I really did see her again nine years later standing in the lido wearing that little spotted dress.
33
Saturday was beautiful, the air clear and crisp. The leaves in the cutting flashed past the carriage window in waves of amber and gold as the train rattled along the icy track. The grass in Regent’s Park was glazed with ice, the cold wind gusting across the zoo’s enclosures keeping other visitors away.
The Liar Page 20
