by Melvyn Bragg
The grimy but, Grace thought, magnificent engine pulled in, drawing such a line of coaches that they stretched back to the bend in the track which swerved the traffic in from Scotland. There was no rush for seats. As yet the train was no more than half full. The whistles, the green flags, the more whistles, a rat-a-tat of slammed doors, the loud neighing from the engine and the train horse moved on.
Grace had secured a corner seat in one of the third-class compartments. It was dirty, but plush. Above the seats were sepia photographs of Morecambe Bay and Poole Harbour. The rack easily contained the small suitcase she had been loaned by Mrs Logan, the solicitor’s wife. She had her sandwiches, which she would not eat on the train but in the room she had booked – with the help of a friend of Mr Logan – in a bed-and-breakfast hotel on the edge of Alan’s small town. On her lap was the W. B. Yeats, which now she knew off by heart but was there as a refuge in case anyone threatened to intrude. She wanted to look out of the window at this new world as the train stopped and started through the landscape that undulated between familiar farmland and the grimy congestion of industry. She needed to steady her nerves all the way.
Grace wanted to wrap herself in her own thoughts and travel without contact but it proved impossible. A middle-aged couple took a shine to this young woman and plied her with questions and autobiography and food. Thankfully they left the train at Preston with a farewell that suggested a lasting friendship. The soldiers must have been in a separate section of the train because she neither saw nor heard them again after Carlisle. She realised that she would have been glad of their company, glad of a chance to talk about their experience of the war, glad to feel closer to Alan as the train took her closer to Birmingham and the excitement mixed with fearfulness.
What if he was so ill he could not see her or she was forbidden to see him? What if worse still had happened? What if his parents were angry with her for disobeying their request? At times, these and other questions welled up like tears, but she fought them off. She had to make this journey. It had become a pressure that would not be contained, a mission. She had to see Alan.
At Birmingham Grace went out of the industrial noise and surge of the station into the smog and manufacturing maelstrom of the ‘Workshop of the World’. Birmingham, the claim was, could make anything you wanted. Grace walked for an hour or so, amazed at the complexity, the canals and the boat traffic, the hurrying of everyone, the glistening fog that at times seemed to make the workers appear caught in a ghostland they could not leave. She had been warned by the solicitor’s wife that she would hate the city and its ‘vulgarity’, but Grace was enthralled by it. What a world was here! How did so many people fit in? Why were they all in such a hurry?
Nobody knew who she was! A prison door opened. Top hats and cloth caps on the same street, urchins like those she had read about in Charles Dickens. She realised that was partly why it was so unthreatening and so intriguing. She had read about it in his novels and other novels. Now she herself felt part of a novel, gliding through the soft smog, taking note of her route, which would thread her back to the station. Nobody knew who she was. Nobody cared and, for the first time in many months, she had a taste of freedom.
The bed-and-breakfast was a comfortable Victorian villa. Grace declined the offer of a snack but needed little persuasion to accept a cup of tea, which she took in the lounge where several guests were assembled in a whispering conference, waiting for bed.
She ate the sandwiches in her bedroom in a guilty manner, as if she were doing wrong and about to be told off. She was ravenous.
How could your step drag and float at the same time? Her throat was so dry. She felt empty even though she had made herself eat a creditable portion of the breakfast. She had left before nine and walked about the place for an hour, the high street cluttered with shops, the municipal park well inhabited by children on this Saturday morning. Grace had chosen Saturday because it was more likely that they would be in. They should have received her letter by now. Perhaps she had better go before Alan’s mother went shopping. Perhaps she had gone earlier and Grace had passed her by on the street. Perhaps Alan had come back and would be there, with them, in the bungalow towards which she now walked with a steady step. The door knocker was the brass face of an elephant: you used the trunk to make the knock.
The door was half opened, and it must be Alfred; Grace knew it was Alfred. He had Alan’s shape of face, the same mouth, something about the eyes. He looked at her without much interest. He was dressed, Grace thought, rather importantly. He wore a three-piece suit in brown tweed, a collar and a striped tie, which looked official. His brown brogues glittered.
It was she who had to begin.
‘I’m Grace,’ she said.
For a chasmic moment she thought that he simply did not recognise her name.
‘Grace,’ she repeated, with a feeling of sick humility.
His reaction was to frown.
‘You’d better come in,’ he said, and he glanced with some concern at the suitcase.
Alfred stood aside and let her precede him into the cramped hall.
‘Elsie! We have a visitor.’
He waited until his wife appeared before speaking again.
‘Grace,’ he said, not in a friendly way, ‘this is my wife, Mrs Marshall.’
‘Grace?’
‘Alan,’ said Alfred. ‘The letters.’
‘Oh. Grace. Yes.’
‘I suppose we had better go into the lounge,’ said Alfred, and he led the way.
Grace put down her suitcase and decided against taking off her coat.
‘I could make you a cup of tea.’
‘No, thank you.’
Elsie’s face expressed relief. Alan’s hair, thought Grace, and the nose: certainly the reconstruction of Alan’s face from the features of his parents was a useful, even a necessary distraction as she was ushered into the lounge. Alfred stood in front of the unlit fire and motioned to Grace and Elsie to take the armchairs that flanked it.
‘This is very awkward,’ he said. ‘There’s no getting away from the fact that this is very awkward.’
Elsie studied Grace closely while trying to pretend not to be doing so. She was impressed by the young woman’s handsome looks, her self-possession, her apparent calm. And yet . . . Grace, used to concealing turmoil, had set herself to be calm. It must be a shock for them. They had asked her not to intrude and here she was; clearly her letter had not yet arrived. It now seemed to her an unworthy manoeuvre, almost a deception.
‘I wrote a letter,’ she said, ‘saying I would be coming here.’
‘Lost in the post,’ said Alfred, with no effort to conceal his disbelief. ‘In any case, if I may say so, where we come from people wait to be invited. They don’t just turn up out of the blue.’
‘Alfred!’
‘I speak my mind.’
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cup of tea?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I just wanted to see Alan, or at least to know how he was. I couldn’t bear it any more, thinking of him so ill and not knowing. And . . .’ Elsie looked alarmed and Grace went no further. She wanted to give her news to Alan first.
Elsie was trying desperately to communicate with Alfred by meaningful looks, which he ignored. It seemed to Grace, callow as she was in such matters, that Alfred was socially superior to Elsie and that she, conscious of his elevated position, was intimidated by him. Alfred levered himself on to his toes every now and then.
‘Did you travel far?’ Elsie asked of this young woman who had landed in their lounge as unexpectedly as a meteor.
‘From Carlisle,’ she said. ‘I stayed overnight nearby.’
‘With friends?’
‘In a bed-and-breakfast hotel.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Elsie. ‘Oh dear.’
It was Alfred’s turn to resort to mime: his expression said, Don’t you get too friendly.
Grace waited. The room was cold. It had the atmosphere of a
room little lived-in. It was fanatically tidy. But, Grace noticed with pleasure, there was a fine glass-fronted bookcase. Alan would have read all of those. Elsie caught her glance. ‘Alan was a big reader.’ She smiled. ‘It was difficult to tear him away from a book.’
Alfred began to charge a pipe, spinning out the process, concentrating on it.
‘I know,’ said Grace, released into an antechamber of happiness that she was talking with someone so close to Alan. ‘Especially poetry.’
‘He knew a lot of it by heart.’ A proud mother. ‘Sometimes when he said it I used to get goose pimples.’
Alfred jammed the tobacco down too hard. He used a match end to loosen it.
‘Yes.’ Grace smiled. ‘He was so taken up with it he brought you into it as well.’
Elsie nodded, as if the explanation answered a long-unasked question.
Where is he now? thought Grace.
‘Where is he now?’ asked Grace, humbly.
The silence implied to Grace that something terrible had happened. She kept her nerve. Her fists tightened and her nails dug into her palms. She arched back against the chair.
‘He was very bad,’ said Elsie. ‘Very bad. Wasn’t he, Alfred?’
Her husband made a long stroke with the red matchhead and the rasp startled Grace. The flame was like a torch. He sucked hard at the pipe, his cheeks sunken, his eyes close-focused until the smoke finally convinced him that it was alight.
‘He was given an honourable discharge.’
‘It was nearly over anyway,’ said Elsie.
‘He was commended.’
The smoke billowed.
And now? Now?
‘And now?’
‘He’s in Cornwall,’ said Elsie, tentatively, ‘almost his old self again.’
‘Cornwall?’
‘We used to go for holidays there, before the war. Alfred made friends with the bank manager.’
‘He never talked to me about Cornwall.’
Why should he? said Alfred’s expression.
‘He kept himself very much to himself,’ said Alfred, with approval.
‘It’s lovely down there,’ said Elsie. ‘Palm trees and the sea. I could look at the sea all day.’
‘I expect they’ll take their honeymoon down there,’ said Alfred, looking firmly at Grace. ‘Just along the coast from where they are now.’ He put the pipe in his mouth and bit on it hard.
Grace felt that she had disappeared. Her body did not move, but that which was, consciously, her simply disappeared.
She woke to the gentle tapping of her face. She opened her eyes.
Elsie looked frightened. She had caught the truth in Grace and looked at the slightly thickened waist, not recovered from the birth, and she was terrified by what she sensed that she knew.
‘Don’t do that, Grace. Hello? Grace. Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ she heard herself whisper the word. It came like a last breath.
‘I’ll get you that cup of tea.’
Elsie all but fled from the room. Alfred went across to the sideboard and brought back a silver-framed photograph and handed it to Grace. ‘There you are,’ he said. There was no obvious cruelty but he wanted, as he told Elsie later, ‘to put an end to her nonsense once and for all’. ‘On their engagement day.’
Grace studied the photograph. Alan looked so well, smiling, squinting rather at the sun, the sea behind him. His arm was round a young woman who seemed, to Grace, as happy as she could never be.
‘Marion,’ said Alfred. ‘Daughter of our friends down there. They were childhood sweethearts.’
Grace examined the photograph with an expressionless intensity. This was the girl he had said was his sister. He had carried her photograph in his wallet.
‘We always hoped it would happen,’ he said, and took the silver frame out of her hands.
‘Tea?’ said Elsie.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Have a sip. It’ll do you good. Just a sip.’
Disciplined to oblige, Grace took the cup and drank a little of the sweet tea. It helped. She paused, took another sip and handed back the cup. There was a terrible silence. How could she now tell them that they had a granddaughter? That Alan had a child? Out of the depths she heard herself say, ‘One thing.’ Both Alfred and Elsie froze to attention. ‘I would . . . It would be better if Alan didn’t know I’d been here.’
‘I’m sure he’d like to know,’ said Elsie, forcing the words through her choking throat.
‘I think we should do as Grace requests,’ said Alfred. He took out his pipe and held it in front of him, his hand poised there, like the minister, Grace thought, at the end of a service.
‘I think we should respect what she says.’ He rocked on his heels. ‘And if I may say so, Grace, I respect you for saying it. Never fear, Alan will know nothing of this.’
Elsie subsided.
She insisted on walking Grace to the bus stop and Grace was glad of the company. And when the women parted, both of them knew the truth of it and Elsie, near tears, said, ‘I’m so sorry, Grace.’ And the young woman watched as the mother of Alan walked out of her life and did not look back.
Grace’s mind found a way to wall in the shock and the hurt and the future. Walking slowly, like an old person, she arrived at the station and caught the first convenient train. The journey was a waking sleep. Her grief seemed so palpable that no one attempted to breach it. It was as though she were ill of an affliction that demanded isolation. When finally she arrived in Grasmere, in the dim lighting of the dark village, with the blackness of the hills about her, the silence of the village was a moment of balm. Perhaps she could just walk on, past the house, and go up the road towards the lake and hope for moonlight and walk along the shore. Perhaps she could never come back – just merge into the deep of the hills beside the lake and never be found.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Mary now lived mostly in the constant present. John would see his mother more frequently. Save exceptionally, there had been no past. There was no future. There was no point in referring to ‘the last time I was here’ or saying ‘Next week we’ll go out if the weather holds up.’ Her past appeared to be an ocean of unknowing. Only now and then, prompted by John or by an unexpected breath of recognition, would cargo or wreckage from the past be washed on to the shore of the present. Her future was expressed in exclamations – ‘That will be lovely!’ ‘I’d like that!’ – that had no content. There were the occasions of recall, so rare, her last arias, John thought, her songs of remembrance.
He had finally come to the conclusion that she would never again be as she had been before. It was an obvious conclusion but it took him some time to accept it. He had known it for at least a year but there were different levels of knowing. It was only now that the intellectual sense of ‘knowing’ had turned into a visceral sense. Previously he knew it as an observable phenomenon but also as a problem that might be solved or alleviated – by new medicines, by time, by nursing, by his own amateur attempts to repair the ruin. Now he knew, as they used to say, ‘in his bones’ that she was relentlessly falling away from what she had been. The most he could hope for her was a steady contentment as he watched her being transformed, like a butterfly slowly going back into its chrysalis.
The present was puzzling. One persistent mantra was that ‘we only live in the present’. John thought that memory and planning challenged that mantra but here was a blunt truth of it. You were alive because of the breath you were taking now. However busy with the filing of recollections and the construction of future possibilities, that unique couple of handfuls of galactically sensitive stuff inside the eggshell skull was operating now. It only needed a now event – a heart attack, a bus, a bullet – and it would be all over. Back to particles, back into the cycles of billions of years to be part of the next act in the drama. But even then, John thought, it would still be now. Even if the particles did not realise that, though who knew what they thought? The present was forever there a
nd its primacy was indisputable, however hedged in and jostled by what was gone and what was to come. It was the quick of life.
Yet when faced with this present, with his mother, John often found it hard to bear. He felt an intensity but there was also an inexcusable boredom. Maybe the present was just too hard. Maybe he could not face it. It was the clearest and most brutal reminder of death. Every breath you took was one less. Maybe the present was sliced up so minutely that only those who suffered from an affliction had the stamina to keep in it. Or perhaps it did not exist. When you thought of a word it was the future. When you spoke it, it was the past.
An alternative was to turn off the switch, let Mary be in her present world and leave him to rummage around the past and the future, only now and then lobbing back a polite and hopefully helpful remark. But that was a form of cheating, wasn’t it? That was condescension. Not to try to be engaged in her world was to leave her alone in it and how could he do that?
The other point was in John’s too easy assumption that she was always much the same. The room would be spruce; family photographs on the wall, magazines, those fluffy toys brought by the grandchildren, a box of shortbread biscuits or chocolates on the side table. Mary would be asleep or in one of several recognisable degrees of wakefulness. The room was the same, with the view of trees and the dunes and a distant derelict industrial building that she was convinced had been a school. He could be lulled. Perhaps he wanted to be lulled. He wanted her to be anchored here, calm water lapping about her. But was not that a way to classify and dismiss her, to treat her as less than human?
The six-monthly phone calls from the psychiatrist disturbed these dreams of equilibrium, and the call he had taken earlier in the week had caused him to change his plans and, although she was in no danger, go to the home on the following Saturday.
There had been a ‘marked deterioration’ since his last visit, the psychiatrist reported. The pattern now seemed to be that she slept and stayed in her room for two days and then she would be lively enough to get up and join the others in the public rooms. On those days she could seem ‘as right as rain’. But her food intake was increasingly variable. That could be made up with supplementary drinks. It was not a worry, the psychiatrist wrote. Her weight was ‘pretty constant’. She showed no signs of the depression that could accompany dementia, which was a blessing. She did, however, have a growing tendency to be irritable and fractious with the nurses when they came to change her pads or wash her or move her. And she had started to spit out the pills – galantamine – that the nurses had a duty of care to make sure she took every morning. But they were very good with her, the psychiatrist said. They would leave her and come back in five or ten minutes when she would have forgotten all about the obstructive irritability and ‘likely as not’ she would be more placid a second time round. Just as Eileen, the nurse, had told him.
