The bicycle I thought would pass me was stationary and stood upended on its handlebars, the wobble of the lamp not caused by a journey over rough tarmac but by the rider, a dark figure crouched low in the road, winding the bicycle pedals and wrestling with a broken chain.
Now, closer to the light, I saw that the rider was a woman, plump and full-skirted, her voice familiar as she cursed the broken machine.
‘Sadie?’
She looked round quickly but then squatted back down by the bicycle, frantically turning the pedals with her hands until mud spat from the wheels. ‘Damn-Damn-Damn!’
‘Sadie!’
A bundle of belongings slipped from the pannier; petticoats and drawers, all wrapped in the scarlet lining of a midwife’s cape. She grabbed at the underwear frantically, stuffing it back into the pannier, then threw the cape around her shoulders, buckling it at her throat like armour. She wrestled with the pedals again.
‘Stop!’ I cried. ‘Stop right there.’
‘Looks like I don’t have a choice,’ she said, standing up wearily and lifting the bicycle onto its wheels.
‘Are you trying to get to Ruby? Where is she?’
‘I don’t know,’ she muttered.
‘You don’t know!’ I yelled. ‘You were supposed to bring her round to mine.’
She stopped, her fingers tensing round the handlebars. ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ she said. ‘All I know is that they’ve gone. Maud’s not told me where or why.’
‘Gone! But my daughter—’
‘She’s not yours, you know that.’ She turned to face me. ‘You must know that really.’
‘Of course she’s mine. Her real name is Violet Margaret Marks, she was born on 7th May 1926, nine years old, she has a birthmark on the side of her face—’
Sadie shut her eyes as if troubled by some lingering pain, but then her features hardened. ‘Ruby is the girl’s name and she is with her mother, where she belongs.’
‘I am her mother,’ I said. ‘All Maud has done is take her in for a few years, but that time is coming to an end, now it is my turn to have her back. Soon Maud won’t even be able to lift a finger to help her children. She is dying…’ but my speech slowed when Sadie shook her head slowly.
‘I told you before,’ she said, ‘there is nothing wrong with Maud.’
‘You can’t deny it, Sadie. I’ve seen her coughing blood on her handkerchief. I’ve seen how weak she is, she can hardly get out of that basket chair, she—’
‘A well woman has no need for these!’ She rummaged in her pocket, blue glass enclosed in her fist. ‘She gave them to me, for my ankles. Would an invalid give away chlorodyne?’
‘No but—’
She swung her arm at the ground, a bottle smashing into blue shards.
I let out a shriek and she threw another down, the glass shattering on the toe of my boot.
‘Maud has no need for medicine, not her, strong as an ox she is. But she knew how to fool people, oh yes, she’d had TB before, back when she was pregnant and on the pulmonary ward. She knows what TB looks like. She’s not dying any more than you are Ruby’s mother.’
‘But I am her mother,’ I said. ‘I am.’
‘Then you will be able to prove it.’
‘I don’t have to—’
‘Prove it!’ she repeated.
Proof: It was the answer I had been unable to give Maud. It was the scientific evidence that George craved. It was the rational explanation demanded by Walter and it was the common sense argument that Audrey knew I could not make.
‘Well there’s the matter of…’ I began, but suddenly my head was flooded with thoughts: there were the similarities on the birth certificates – the dates, the hospital and the presence of George; there was Ruby who was an oddity in her family yet shared my fair hair and eyes; there was the birthmark – the one in Violet’s photograph identical to the one on Ruby’s cheek; there was… But as I said each thought over in my head, I realized that they were proof to me alone and that, even together, they would convince no one. And there were other thoughts too, thoughts which I dared not speak out loud: the way both father and daughter would bury their nose in petals to smell a bloom; the silver rattle that had returned from the grave; and the violets that appeared indoors to accompany the dead as they came back to the living. No, these were such fanciful things – I could not say these things out loud!
‘I can’t prove it,’ I said at last, ‘but I do have this.’ I fumbled in my pocket for the legal document Maud had given me, the one which granted me guardianship of Ruby. I held it out to her, but she did not take it. ‘The law is on my side, Sadie, you will find that Mr Crozier will be brought into this matter and—’
‘Mr Crozier?’
‘Maud has signed Ruby over to me,’ I said firmly. ‘She belongs to me in the eyes of the law.’
‘It don’t sound like Maud to trust a solicitor, she couldn’t afford Mr Crozier anyway.’
‘Of course Maud couldn’t afford the fees for Crozier’s to prepare the document,’ I said, ‘but Mr Crozier is a kindly man who made time to advise her on how to draft such a thing. It is a legally binding document, signed by Maud and a reputable witness.’
‘I doubt Mr Crozier’s ever set eyes on that.’
‘Of course he has, put it under your bicycle lamp. Read it!’ I thrust the document at her, angling the lamp over the paper. ‘It says that I will become Ruby’s guardian as soon as Maud becomes too ill…’ then I stopped myself, not knowing what I could say next. What did these bits of paper mean if Sadie was right and Maud was not ill? ‘Please take it, Sadie,’ I said at last, but she did not take it or even attempt to read it.
Instead she looked right at me. ‘So Mr Crozier has signed this, has he?’
‘No, but—’
‘The contract will have his stamp though?’
‘No, it doesn’t but—’
‘And you know how to get hold of this witness who saw Maud sign it? This Mister…’
‘No, but I could look for—’
‘So you still think these bits of paper prove anything?’
‘Yes…’ I said. I tried to hand the document to her again, but she still did not take it and now I knew that I had no hope of persuading her. ‘No,’ I said my voice cracking. I felt my arm weaken and the document quivered in my fingertips. ‘Oh God!’ I breathed.
‘I suppose it was money that was in that envelope I collected from you then?’
‘You didn’t know?’ I said weakly.
‘No, I suspected but I try to keep out of Maud’s business as much as she will let me. I should have known better. I knew about Maud and her ways.’
At last Sadie took the document from my hands but she did not read it, just folded it carefully and returned it to my pocket. ‘I never wanted to help Maud with this,’ she said. ‘I told you as much. But Maud said that, if I helped her, it would be the last time that she asked anything of me.’
‘You still could have refused her,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and I wish that I had. I did not know about Maud’s plan or what she intended in the end, but I suspected that she was up to no good. I did try to put you off – I told you that Maud was not ill, I told you that you were not Ruby’s mother and I hoped that you would believe me, but no words from my mouth would prove it to you – I suppose you had to find it out for yourself.’ Then her face softened. ‘You had some hope for a little while, that’s all. That’s the best way to remember this. When you think about all this nasty business, just remember how good it felt to have that little bit of hope.’ She drew a long breath and her voice sounded weary. ‘She was my little girl too, you know, she was my granddaughter – the little girl with the birthmark.’
‘You’re not making sense, Sadie,’ I said. She had not said niece, she had said granddaughter and she had said was. I started to realize that the girl she was talking about no longer existed; she was talking about someone who was dead. She wasn’t talking
about Ruby but a baby who had died nine years ago, she was talking about Violet.
‘Violet had no grandparents,’ I said slowly. ‘My parents have been dead for years and George’s mother…’
But then my voice faltered and I drew a sharp breath. Sadie’s face was angled downwards, the way the elderly do when they speak of the dead, but under her eyelids I saw a flash of bright blue.
‘Peter!’ I said. ‘You’re Peter’s mother?’
‘He told me you were pregnant,’ she said gently. ‘I saw your name down in the register at the hospital. I found out what had happened and I changed some of my shifts. I never thought that it would mean much to me; the bastard offspring of my son’s affair with a married woman, I mean. So I visited Violet out of curiosity at first. But then after I had seen my own flesh and blood, my grandchild…’ Her lip wobbled slightly but then she tightened her mouth and continued, her voice still strong. ‘Many think an illegitimate birth shameful but not him – we barely talk these days but back then things were different; he told me everything, we were close back then.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘He told me that once.’ I thought again of Peter and our flirtation. How he had carried a silver cigarette case close to his heart, the one that belonged to his mother. Peter had told Sadie about Violet, he had guessed that she was his child and he had found out what had become of her, perhaps he had cared about her too and now I not only mourned Violet but the life that I might have had with him.
‘What happened to him, Sadie?’ I said. ‘Where is Peter now?’
‘It’s too late for all that, Emma,’ she said. ‘None of that matters anymore.’ Then she added; ‘I’m sorry,’ but the words were more of a lament than an apology.
So here she was, sister to Maud but also grandmother to Violet and mother to Peter, the woman he had spoken about, the woman whose cigarette case he carried and the woman he told everything to. She was the midwife who had attended the birth, tended Violet in the incubator and the one who had photographed her in the hospital and given the print to me. Violet was gone and Peter too and now Sadie, the last link to the life I had wanted was leaving me. Sadie kicked away the stand and started to push the bicycle along the road.
‘No, you don’t!’ I said, wedging my boot in front of the tyre.
‘Let go of me!’ she growled.
‘You still have to return my money or I will call the constable.’
‘And tell him what? How is buying a child going to look for a respectable woman from the Sunningdale Estate?’
‘I was not buying any child, I was buying my child—’ I stopped suddenly. My child – I had said the phrase so often in my head that it had started to sound natural, but now the words sounded strange and, after everything Sadie had said, I felt embarrassed to say them. ‘My child,’ I repeated weakly.
‘Oh, Emma, really?’ She pushed the bicycle over my foot and I grabbed at her hands, squeezing her knuckles hard over the break levers.
‘No!’ she shouted and we became locked together our faces inches apart as we wrestled across the cold metal. Her whole face was drawn into a frown, her eyebrows bunched low and her jaw thrusting forward but she kept shoving the bicycle hard against my thighs, as if nothing else mattered – not the mud on the road nor the broken chain, nor the bone in my hips nor the headlights approaching on the road nor the rumble of the evening bus which drowned out her curses.
Then came a screech of breaks and the bus was alongside us. The driver popped his window and peered out from under his cap. ‘Excuse me, Madam. Is this woman bothering you?’
‘Oh, thank God!’ I panted. ‘Yes she is. Please could you—’
‘Not you, lady, I was talking to the matron.’
Keeping her eyes on me, Sadie turned her head slightly and gave the driver a little nod.
I opened my mouth to protest but the driver’s eyes were moving slowly up and down my body and, in the light from the cabin, I saw the same woman that he did: the straggle of my loose hair hanging over my breast; the mud on my blouse; the ripped skirt; and my hands gripped tight around Sadie’s.
My arms dropped to my sides. Sadie’s eyes met mine again – it was just a glance but it was enough to tell me that this was farewell. She wrenched the pannier from the crossbar and kicked the bicycle into the hedge, the light from the lamp fading away into darkness. She mounted the bus and disappeared behind the dark windows. Then the door closed and the bell rang out as the bus pulled away into the night. I was left standing alone.
39
Ruby
My name is Ruby Brown, but Emma told me that it is not our names that make us who we are; it is our memories. She began to tell me that she had memories of a precious baby, but then she stopped like she wanted to tell me more but couldn’t bring herself to speak the words. She asked me about my memories too – where I lived before I came to Rose Cottage, how old I was in my first memory of Maudy. She would ask me these things over and over until I could not answer because my head swirled like carmine in a bucket. But there is one memory that I cannot shake, one that I must play in my head over and over again. If I don’t, I will start to believe their lies.
‘I know I didn’t break the stove,’ I said. ‘I don’t care what you say because I do remember what happened that day and I know it wasn’t my fault.’
Maudy didn’t look up. She stayed on the floor, her body bent double as she reached her hands into a bucket and squeezed carmine through a wodge of fabric. I watched her rock back and forth on her heels as she kneaded the cloth, but she didn’t say anything, the squelch of the water as it rushed red round her hands the only sound in the room.
‘Why did you let him do that to me?’ I said. ‘Why?’
She stopped moving, her body still like a statue, then she gave her head a little shake as if there was something bothering her, like the water had gone cold or the dye wasn’t fixing and she let out a big sigh. ‘You might think you remember what happened, Ruby, but you don’t, not really.’ She wiped her hands on her apron and sat back on her heels. ‘We just gave you a tot of gin to clear up that flu you had, you remember you’d had that cough since spring, you remember how you were coughing, don’t you? And you know we couldn’t afford a doctor.’
‘I was getting better,’ I said. ‘It was just a cold.’
‘All that happ—‘ but a cough took the word away and then she kept coughing until she had to take out her handkerchief and wipe it round her lips. I felt bad for her but the doctor had told her to rest and she hadn’t listened. I still wanted my answers, so I just sat and waited for them.
‘All that happened is that we gave you a little too much by mistake,’ she said at last. ‘ You got tipsy, that’s all.’ She gave me a funny twisted smile and a wink and plunged her hands back into the water. ‘No wonder things are getting all muddled up in your head.’
‘I didn’t do it,’ I said again. ‘I didn’t break the stove.’ I held my arms out wide like a scarecrow, I knew that they looked all thin that way. ‘Look at me, I’m not strong enough. How could I?’
Still Maudy didn’t look. ‘You fell, I told you. You took a nasty knock there. That must have muddled things in your head. Not that you ever had much brains to start with.’ She smiled again, a bigger one this time, trying to turn things into a joke, but I wasn’t about to let her.
‘I didn’t do it,’ I said.
She shook her head all weary. ‘Well it’s just like I said, you don’t remember, do you?’
‘It isn’t that I don’t remember, I do, I just remember something else, something different from what you’re telling me.’
‘Well you remember what you want to then,’ she snapped. ‘It don’t make no difference to me.’ She started to knead the cloth again, but this time she put all her strength into it, her hands got faster and faster and the water sloshed over the sides of the bucket. She was chewing her cheek frantically, her forehead was squeezed into lots of little lines and her breaths were fast and wheezy, then her eyes went roun
d and she stopped dead and just stared into the pool of red. ‘This thing that you think you remember,’ she said, suddenly all quiet, ‘well, no matter whether you think it’s the truth or not, you can’t go around telling it to people.’
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘Well, how would it look? You remember it one way and Clarence and me remember something else, and so you would look foolish wouldn’t you. Like a liar, nobody would believe you, so it’s best not to tell.’
‘I might tell someone,’ I said. ‘Someone who would believe me. I might tell Emma.’
‘No!’ she shouted and suddenly she was standing up, water gushing down from her hands. ‘Someone like her is the very worst person to tell.’ She started jabbing her fingers at me, her knuckles red. ‘Mrs Fancy-Pants of all people! Can’t you see what she would do? She would call the constable, get all hot under the collar. Then what do you think would happen? You want to make it look like you come from a bad home? You want to get taken away from me and end up in the children’s home? Because that is where you would end up if you told someone like her.’
Then I started to get scared. I didn’t want to go into a children’s home, so I didn’t push it. ‘I won’t say a thing,’ I said. ‘Not to Emma, not to anyone.’
Maudy knelt back down again but this time she moved as if she was carrying a big weight on her back. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but you must promise.’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘Cross my heart.’
She put her hands back into the bucket but her movements were slower and the bites into her cheek became harder and more deliberate until she was licking blood round her lips. ‘Good girl,’ she said. ‘Special girl.’
I watched her rocking back and forth, the triangles of her shoulder blades squeezing together under her dress. All I could hear was the sounds from the bucket; the slap of cloth each time she pounded into it, then a squelch and gurgle of water as the dye raced round her hands. I stared into the back of her head, trying to bore into it with my eyes, using all my energy as I tried to hear her thoughts, but there was nothing, and I just got a blank feeling.
The Liar Page 24
