‘I just want to know why you did it,’ I said at last.
‘I told you, it was to help get rid of your cough.’
‘I don’t mean the gin.’
She stopped working and sat back on her heels again. Then she pulled her hands from the bucket and gathered the material onto her lap. She had forgotten that it was soaking wet and the red bled across her apron, but she didn’t notice and just sat cradling it like a baby while dye trickled onto the floor. Then she sighed. ‘Look that’s the end of it. I don’t want to hear no more about it. We gave you a little too much gin, you tottered around and then you fell on the stove. Hit your head on the door and that’s what broke the hinge. It’s your own fault. That stove ain’t never been the same since. I have to keep a candle underneath it now in case a draught gets in and it blows out. That’s why Clarence is mad. I keep nagging him for a new one but you’re the one who broke it in the first place, you broke it when you fell.’
‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘That’s not what I remember.’
She stared into her lap.
‘It’s something to do with this—’ I took out the photograph from my pocket, the one of the baby in the bonnet. ‘Isn’t it?’
Her face went all red and her eyes went big and shaky. ‘Jesus!’ she screamed. She jumped up and flung the soggy material at me but she missed and it made a loud bang as it hit the wall. Then it slid down, leaving a red stain on the plaster.
The sound jolted cold all through me and my blood must have been ice because for a moment I couldn’t move. I tried to say something but no sound came out, no words anyway.
‘Shut up, you little bitch!’ screamed Maudy. ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’ Then she was gone, the door banging behind her.
I got up slowly, my legs shaking. I looked at the photograph again. The baby was still but it was not peaceful and nor was I. I tore the baby in half, separating the pretty half from the ugly one. Then I threw both halves into the grate.
I walked over to the stove. The door was still hanging by one hinge, taunting me. I pulled at it with all my might. Then I summoned all my strength and kicked it, trying to break the hinge, then I dropped to my knees and bashed it with my shoulder as if I was falling. I could not break it, it was hard.
40
Emma
Rose Cottage was just a hazy outline against the purple sky as I rushed down the lane, panting and sweating after the long walk from Old Missensham. As I rounded the bend by the twisted oak, I saw that the cottage windows were black and lifeless and when I tried the door it was unlocked and opened easily, sweeping a draught across my feet. I felt my way into the front room, guided by the hollow strike of my heels on the flagstones. The only light came from a square of pale moonlight cast on the floor by the kitchen window and the faint glow of dying embers in the grate.
I stumbled to the hearth and felt for the wood box but it was gone, just an old log wedged under the grate. I threw it on the embers, cinders spiralling up the chimney as the bark crackled to life.
In the light of the flames the emptiness of the room was revealed to me. It seemed unnaturally large without the jumble of furniture or the bustle of children. The table was gone and the old basket chair. The Singer, Clarence’s rocker and even the iron doormat were gone, now just outlines etched in dust and memory.
The back room was empty too, the night gusting in through the open window and the rail hanging loose as if the curtain had been wrenched off in a hurry. The rocking horse was gone too, just stripes on the floorboards where the rockers had once stood. Only the bedstead remained, stripped of its mattress, and the dresser, pulled away from the wall as if an attempt to move it had been abandoned in haste.
I ran to the dresser and wrenched open the drawers. Maybe the family had left a letter for me, I thought, something from Maud excusing herself for some unfortunate misunderstanding, but the drawers were light and empty. I chastised myself for the foolish thought, and I realized that not only were the family missing, they did not want to be found.
I attacked the dresser, wrenching the drawers from their runners and flinging them onto the floor. Then I hurried back into the kitchen, stopping suddenly when I realized that I had nowhere to run – there was nowhere I could go now and nothing I could do.
I sank down in front of the fire and stared into the flames. There was a creak at the kitchen door and Smokey melted out of the darkness, rubbing his head against my knee. I picked him up and squeezed his warm body against my face, smelling the cold night on his fur. His purr was wheezy, the vibration strong enough to rattle through his whole body. The poor little thing, was abandoned, left all on his own, just as I was. Then I started to cry.
All I had left was Maud’s broken promises and meaningless words typed on office paper yet signed only with a cross and the unintelligible scribble of a witness who probably didn’t exist. How could Maud do this to me? Maud who was a friend but now an enemy. Maud who was fatigued yet took on work, her stitching still as perfect as the day we met. Maud who needed medicine but did not take it. Maud who was too ill to be moved, yet now she was certainly gone.
Sadie’s words played again and again in my head: ‘She ain’t ill – there’s nothing wrong with her!’ But I had not listened. She had delivered Ruby’s birth certificate into my hands, but I had refused to believe what I saw.
And there was Ruby; the little girl was always insisting that Maud just had a mouth ulcer. Maybe she had suspected that Maud wasn’t ill and had been trying to tell me. She was just a child, but was she part of Maud’s plan all along? Had she known… she couldn’t have, could she?
I bit my lip to control the sobs, burying my face into Smokey’s soft coat. Pieces of what had happened flashed into my mind but never lingered long enough to make sense: there was little Henry who had picked up my leaflet yet could not read; there was Ruby stood waiting by the railings at the lido, but who was she waiting for; there was the midwife in the white room with the strange expression on her face; the seamstress coughing blood into her handkerchief, fed-up of sewing uniforms for hotels she could never afford; the grieving grandmother; the birth certificate with George’s name on; broken rocking horses; locked nurseries; the toll of St Cuthbert’s; pills for the insane; silver rattles; the smell of carbolic; violets indoors; tiny coffins; bad luck; death.
Then the tears stopped, the long draw of my breath filling the room. Around me the walls had melted into blackness and the dull square of light at the window had dissolved into the night. The fire in the grate had taken hold like it was draining the light from the room, sucking the darkness in closer and closer. My hands grew cold and the air around me chilled. It was the kind of stillness you only get at night. Like nothing existed outside this little room, not even time.
It was then that I saw it. It was lying in the grate, wedged between the slats, just inches from the flame. It was a photograph, ripped in half, the two pieces shivering in the draught from the chimney. I leant into the grate and rescued it, matching the pieces together. It was a small photograph – a grey image of a newborn lying on its back. The face was round, like that of any baby, the scalp haloed by a lace bonnet. The head was tilted slightly to show the left cheek – black marks cast on grey skin. Four tears, the highest smudged over the cheekbone.
The paper pulsed with my breath. It was my baby.
I turned the pieces over in my hands. There was a printer’s mark in one corner, ‘2/2’. This was my baby, there was no doubt, but this was not my photograph. Just as George has remarked all those years ago, there had been another copy all along. But the second copy had not been for the midwife’s official records. Sadie had intended it as a morbid keepsake of her granddaughter – a baby that had only ever drawn a few breaths. And somehow the photograph had made its way into this house.
So this is how the Browns had found out about Violet and my connection to her – through Sadie and the photograph. They had known all about me all along, my name and where I lived, and once Maud had befriend
ed me they found out about my past life and my loves and losses. But despite Maud’s constant chatter and lewd confessions and Ruby living under my roof, the Browns had made sure that I did not know them.
I threw the photograph into the fire. The paper curled in the flames, the two halves cleaving apart, splitting the image into two once more. I stared at the baby again – the flickering outline the face, the lowered eyelids and slack cheeks that had once suggested slumber – but this time I knew that Violet was dead.
41
Ruby
My name is Ruby Brown and I am not Emma’s daughter.
I watched Rose Cottage from the back of the van as we drove off down the lane. The white walls, looked bright in the evening light but they were getting smaller and smaller, as if they would shrink away forever. I looked as long as I could because I was certain that it was the last time that I would see the cottage and all of a sudden I felt very sad.
They didn’t care, of course. No, they didn’t give a toss. Not Maudy, not Andy, not Henry, not Jim-John. They all sat squeezed tight together on the van’s hard wooden benches, the last rays of the sun lighting up their faces, and those faces were happy.
But it wasn’t just us Browns in the back of the van, oh no, there was all the Brown’s worldly goods too, packed so snugly among us that we could barely wiggle or dare to let out a fart. There was Maudy’s sewing machine and Clarence’s rocking chair, there was the upended table and the bed sheets, pillows and linen. Old apple crates crammed with pots and pans and cups and plates, clothes and packets of flour and suet. There were metal buckets, basins, chamber pots and washboards and parcels of carmine and indigo. There was everything but the dresser and the old bed frame - the only things that Clarence could not drag over the floor or wrench from the walls.
My face was pressed against the back window, the rocker of Clarence’s chair digging into my shoulder. When I complained all Maudy did was wedge her sick blanket between me and the metal but my arm was stuck flat against my chest and I could barely draw breath. Maudy kept one hand on me and the other on the roof, her back braced against the wall to stop us sliding all over each other.
‘Many more hours to go,’ she said but she was grinning like a lunatic.
Clarence sat up front in the passenger seat, barking orders to poor Fatkins who did his best to avoid the wheel ruts and steer though the fading light. I felt bad for Fatkins. Earlier that day he had been called into the factory by a stone-faced Mr Walker, office telephone in hand. He was told about a family emergency, so he set off right away and lost all his delivery money. He drove all the way to Evesbridge to find the Browns and all their belongings sitting on the doorstep with a dodgy story about a threatening landlord and rent they couldn’t pay.
So he came and he helped, not complaining as usual. Just like he didn’t when Maudy gave him damp aprons or passed-off her sausage-fingered gloves as fine tailoring. I couldn’t see his face, just those massive hunched shoulders and big hands on the steering wheel and sometimes his eyes checking the road in the little mirror above the windscreen.
Maudy leant forwards and tapped Fatkins’ back. ‘This is ever so kind of you, nephew,’ she shouted over the din of the engine, ‘and I do hope your leg won’t suffer too much what with all this extra driving. Promise me you will look after it when you get back and put it up on the couch…’ I stopped listening and I suppose that he did too. His eyes flashed in the mirror - they were hard, like blue ice, darting over the road but never looking at her.
But Maudy saw none of this and she just kept on going on and it was only after some good long minutes that she realised that she wasn’t getting anything from him so she turned on me: ‘You need to look after yourself too, my special girl.’ She pulled her sick blanket tighter against my shoulder, then higher up so it is rested on my cheek. It wasn’t grey any more, not like it was when she was pretending to be sick; now it was bright red, freshly dyed and all bright and lively just like she was. The smell of carmine was strong in my nose.
The van slowed all of a sudden, a crunching noise from deep beneath us as Fatkins wrestled with the gears. The pots rattled and Andy’s face grew grim as his forehead tapped against the metal. Twigs squeaked across the windscreen.
‘Can’t we turn round and go through Missensham?’ Andy whined. ‘We ain’t even gone half a mile yet and there’s miles of these dirt tracks before we get to Evesbridge.’
‘We can’t go that way,’ hissed Maudy, ‘in case we are met.’
‘Met?’ I said. ‘Met by who?’
But nobody answered.
I saw Fatkins’s eyes in the mirror again. Suddenly they flicked up towards me and I fancied that they were looking right at me. His hands tightened on the steering wheel.
Clarence rested a hand on his arm. ‘Calm down, Old Fellow. We got money, is all,’ he said, ‘from a grand lady in town.’ He patted his chest pocket, which crinkled under his hand. ‘Got a little sympathy gift for our sorry predicament – a dying mother and a disfigured daughter. Best to make a quiet exit.’ He chuckled to himself.
Maudy’s stared at him. She had already sold Fatkins the story about the threatening landlord and now Clarence was ruining it. She wanted to shush him but all she could do was bore her eyes into the back of his head.
In the mirror, Fatkins’s eyes flicked back to me. But now I didn’t care if he was looking at me or not. I looked away and out the window, feeling sad and watching the blotchy rainclouds and the pale light winking through the trees. I started to think about earlier that day when me and the boys were sent out to get milk for Maudy and about how everything was different when we got back to Rose Cottage. And I got to thinking about how they had tricked me yet again…
*
‘Surprise!’ cried Maudy, flinging open the door.
We stopped dead on the step; she had never opened the front door to us kids before and she was panting with excitement, her grin so big it could swallow her whole face.
‘Guess what I’ve been up to since you’ve been gone – my big handsome boys and my special girl – come inside. I bet you ain’t expecting this!’ She opened the door up wide. Henry, Jim-John and me all turned round to look at Andy but he just shrugged his shoulders, so we did as she said and we went inside.
In the front room the doormat was propped against the wall, the floor was bare and all the pots and pans were piled high on the draining board. In the back room the dresser was away from the wall and the drawers were empty. In the corner was a pile of old wooden apple crates stuffed with clothes and bed sheets.
‘What the bloody hell?’ yelled Andy. ‘What have you done to our things?’
‘Are you blind as well as stupid?’ said Maudy, pointing to the crates. ‘That daft wooden horse had to go though – but then it was a big ugly thing after all and there ain’t going to be room for everything in the van. Here, Andy, you’re a big, strong man now, help me shift the dresser. I’m worried we may have to leave it if--‘
‘What are you talking about, you silly bitch?’ yelled Andy.
‘We are moving house!’ she cried, and clapped her hands together with a big gappy grin like a baby with wind. I thought that there was something different about her then I realised that she was looking well, almost healthy, the sweaty patches had gone from her armpits and the coughing has stopped, in fact her cheeks were rosy from the exercise.
‘No we ain’t,’ said Andy. ‘Moving house takes weeks, you have to have somewhere to go!’
‘We do,’ she said, all excited. ‘We are going to Birmingham. Now come along and help me, my kindly nephew is coming with the van and we don’t want to miss our lift.’
‘This is madness,’ said Andy. ‘I ain’t helping nobody.’
‘Don’t then-’ she threw the broom at him ‘-just sodding help or sit out the way-’ she pointed at the pile of crates ‘-sit over there!’
She stormed into the back room, cursing all the way. She rammed her shoulder into the dresser but it wasn’t going to h
elp her either and didn’t move an inch. Her chin was stuck out the way it was when she was in a proper mood but there was a twinkle in her eye that I hadn’t seen for weeks.
‘What about the job I was going to get at the garment factory?’ shouted Andy. ‘Or all that sewing work Fatkins brings you. Now we won’t have no money.’
‘There will be work in the factories, me and Clarence can both work,’ she said, abandoning the dresser. ‘Andy, you, my big grown-up man, can get any job in any factory or any accounts department you want. We’ll have enough money to live in a boarding house while we get settled. We can make motorcars in the factories and we can buy a house of our own.’
‘Are you mad?’ said Andy. ‘We’ll never have enough money for our own house, I’ve been looking at your accounts, remember, we…’
But Maudy was grinning madly, she took an envelope from her pocket. It was big and purple just like the envelope I forgot to give to her when Emma sent me visiting with the pound cake. She waved it in the air, a big grin on her silly face.
Andy snatched it from her. He peered inside, rummaging his hand between the folds. Then his face turned white. ‘What have you done?’ he said.
‘Just trust us,’ said Maudy. She wouldn’t say anything more.
We sat down quietly on the apple crates. Maudy was acting all busy bundling up linen but Andy looked thoughtful. I wanted to ask him what was in the envelope but I got a feeling that then wasn’t the right time. I stared at it in his hands but the paper was thick and I couldn’t even guess what was inside. It smelled of lavender and I started to feel like something bad was about to happen.
‘Where’s Smokey?’ I said.
‘Clarence caught him,’ said Maudy, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘He left him with Sadie, she will bring him to Birmingham for us.’
I knew it wasn’t true. Smokey had been spending all day at the rabbit warrens. He would have never come back. He hated Clarence and never went near him. Clarence would never have caught him. I tried to think of a plan.
The Liar Page 25
