I had picked up the rest of the sheets and moved off to the linen press.
‘Here you are,’ I said, delivering two golden-brown slices to the bed-ridden Mary, for once having managed to get the toasting right. I placed a glass of water on her bedside table.
‘Thank you, Auntie Grace,’ she whispered, keeping her eyes closed. She had not moved since I left.
‘Can’t you sit up?’
‘It hurts,’ she said, and I felt the dropping of my name, as if she truly couldn’t make the effort.
‘Well, I have to go. Mrs Bishop can’t be put off.’ I looked down at her curled body, so small. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t go?’
The girl stayed silent.
‘Are you really sick, Mary?’
She opened her eyes, the whites had a red tinge in them.
‘Yes, Auntie Grace.’
‘Shall I leave you?’
I held my breath.
‘If you have to, Auntie Grace.’
I locked the front door behind me. I told myself it was for Mary’s safety—though I rarely bothered to use the deadbolt normally—to stop the wrong people from getting to her. Really, though, it was to keep her in and, although the lock could be easily opened from the inside, I hoped it might, at the very least, make her think twice.
†
For two hours, amidst the smell of mothballs and lavender, I sorted a box of jumbled shoes donated to the shop over the past month. As the shoes came in they were simply thrown into this box, with no sense of order, so the pairs were all mixed up, sandal straps snagging on heels, disintegrating laces breaking when I tried to pull them from the tangle. I worked and sorted them, laying them out in rows that began to take over the back room, sweating from the closeness of the air. I could not understand why they were not simply put out immediately, instead of being left in this complicated mess.
‘Oh, but there’s never enough room,’ Mrs Joyce replied when I enquired. ‘You have to select the very best of them to display. Didn’t I tell you that?’
‘No, you didn’t.’
I had struggled with the idea of having to sort out the entire box, but had been reluctant to voice any sense of being daunted by what was being asked of me.
‘No wonder it’s taken you so long!’ Mrs Joyce laughed.
The shop bell rang and we were assaulted by the booming voice of Mrs Bishop.
‘Thought I’d drop in and see how you ladies were getting on!’
‘Mrs Smith has sorted all of the shoes!’
Mrs Joyce waved her hand over to the back room behind the counter, lined with pair after pair of matching men’s, women’s and children’s shoes. Now I looked closely and could see that the majority of them were un-sellable, too scuffed, too flattened, missing heels. I had not noticed in my zeal. The children’s shoes were in the best condition and dominated the display already out on the shop floor.
‘Isn’t she a wonder?’ Mrs Bishop said, her voice tainted with disapproval at the extravagance of my service. Why did I manage to always get it wrong? How had I succeeded in being too helpful? My action spoke of excess, and there was nothing the widows disliked more than drawing attention to one’s self. We were to be shadows, beetling away in the background, content in our peripheral roles.
‘I didn’t understand,’ I said apologetically.
‘You can throw most of them back in the box,’ Mrs Bishop replied. ‘Awful what some people will donate. As if the poor don’t need their feet properly covered. I mean, look at them!’
The three of us moved to the doorway of the back room, staring in at the shabbiness. Stale foot odour wafted up.
‘Most of them are from deceased estates,’ Mrs Bishop continued pragmatically. ‘People just clear out entire houses.’
‘I don’t know how they can do that,’ I whispered, afraid of my own voice.
‘Sometimes, it’s for the best,’ Mrs Bishop conceded.
‘I still have everything,’ I went on, unable to stop. ‘Even an old shirt he wore painting the house, torn and all … paint-splattered. It stinks of turpentine but still I have to keep it, it seems such a precious thing …’
‘Are you feeling all right, Mrs Smith?’ Mrs Joyce asked. Too many times I had been asked that question. Mrs Bishop and Mrs Joyce were looking at me, their faces touched with understanding.
The shop bell rang again and two old ladies entered. Mrs Bishop and Mrs Joyce readjusted their expressions, becoming, once again, the hard masks I was accustomed to.
‘Good afternoon!’ Mrs Bishop exclaimed at the customers, making the frail little things jump. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ The day was anything but beautiful. Still, the two women nodded in agreement, smiling at the unexpected attention.
‘Perhaps you want to put out the shoes now, Mrs Smith?’ Mrs Joyce asked while Mrs Bishop continued her small talk with the ladies. I wondered if this was a way to get me out of sight—did I not look presentable for them now?
In the back room, the rows of shoes seemed almost grotesque. I thought of the people who had once filled them. Those pale-lemon heels taking slender legs with stocking seams painted down their backs across a dance floor, trying hard to keep in time; those boots marching stolid, hairy legs off to war, never wanting to fall out of step; those sandals skipping a child home after a day of playing stuck-in-the-mud, ‘you’re it, you’re it, you’re it’, and those flats dragging stretch-marked thighs wearily to church, afraid of being forgotten. The one-step, the two-step, the every-day step. All that spinning and kneeling and crossing and dancing.
I picked up a pair of children’s shoes. They were brown soft leather lace-ups with teardrop-shaped holes cut into the toes. Not a mark on them and, as I turned them over, I saw the soles were not worn down at all. Did the child dislike them and refuse to wear them? Or had her feet grown so quickly that her ‘best’ shoes only lasted one wedding or a Christening or funeral, forever associated with adult events that meant they had to be hidden away in a box, their power only unleashed when her mother allowed? Or had this little girl’s feet never grown at all, a child taken to God before there was even time to fill this pathetically small amount of space? I did not know what had happened. I would never know.
†
I arrived home at three o’clock. Despite my failings, Mrs Joyce could not do without me once Mrs Bishop had gone on her merry, interfering way. The suits had to be re-assembled after a young man—‘down on his luck’ as Mrs Joyce referred to him—came in and tried on nearly all of them, creating piles of ‘trousers too long’ or ‘jackets with shiny elbows’ or, worst of all, ‘smells like old man’. He was not a pleasant young man, his cheeks covered in small vicious hairs, the beginnings of an untended beard, and he ended up buying the cheapest suit he found.
‘After all that effort,’ Mrs Joyce complained and went to put the kettle on, leaving me to clear up the mess.
My arms ached from lifting the heavy materials of the suits. Tired, I turned the key in my front door. I went to push it and realised I had locked it inadvertently. This meant it had been unlocked since I had left this morning. Perhaps Mary had ducked out to collect the post from the box (although I rarely had letters). Perhaps she needed air (although the back garden was surely the best sanctuary for a girl who was supposedly sick).
I re-turned the key and pushed open the door. The long, green corridor was, as to be expected, empty.
‘Mary?’ I called out, standing in the doorway. It seemed too hard to cross the threshold.
The house answered with silence. I wanted to hear some kind of creak or murmur, something to indicate she was here. The windows were rattling, as usual, the wood and glass moved by the winds to make tiny bangs and sighs. I took a step onto the carpet, recalling the moment when I had found Mary almost at this exact spot, waiting for me. In the mirror of the hall table, I could glimpse my reflection, just a section of myself, my pale face.
My legs moved down the corridor, these legs, and these shoes, which I knew so well.
I turned the handle of Mary’s bedroom door and heard no stirring from within.
Mary’s bed was empty and the roll-top of Fred’s desk was open. The lock had been jimmied with a screwdriver. Mary had left it sitting there, making no attempt to cover her tracks. The screwdriver belonged to Mr Roper. He had left it behind during one of his many handyman visits.
The pile of letters was gone.
Though I had imagined this, dreaded it, expected it, perhaps since the day Mary had arrived, the actual reality of seeing it—this violation, this loss—was shocking. Numb, I turned from the gaping desk to sit upon the bed, only to discover on the sheets a round, half-wet stain of what looked like blood. The outsides of the pool had dried, clotting into a brown edge, the middle still a fresh dark red.
What my mind would have liked—a kidnapping by faceless strangers or an enforced departure by nasty relatives or even a secret escape with Mr Roper—could not hold with the fact of Mary’s first blood on the sheets. Her stomach pains had been genuine, then, not a ploy. Yet here was the torn-open desk, the missing letters, her unmistakable absence.
What could I imagine? The pain and shock of her first monthly, her lying curled on the bed, wondering what was happening to her. Did she know anything of women’s secrets or did she think, as I had, she was seriously ill, her area down below suddenly revolting against her and turning from a source of pleasure to a flow of disgust? Would she have known, initiated by a sister or her mother years ago, before she was taken from them? Or would she have been crying, afraid of the mess on the sheets, afraid of me? Getting up—the pain from her back lessening now it had begun—and moving to the bathroom, taking a rag from the drawer and washing herself with a flannel, seeing herself in the mirror finally—staring at the face she had previously been un-curious about—and wondering why she wasn’t allowed into Fred’s desk. All those hours, lying in pain, directly across from the forbidden.
Had I left the screwdriver somewhere in plain view? I could not remember. If Mary had experienced her first monthly visit, I had missed the signs of her moving towards womanhood and there were, no doubt, other signs I had failed to see.
I moved away from the blood and made my way through the kitchen. For a minute I held to the hope she would be out in the garden. Reading my lies, yes, but nonetheless present.
Standing on the backyard steps, it was clear she’d gone for good this time. Each one of my letters from Fred was pegged on the clothesline. They had been hung in order of date, each held on with a single peg, the paper crushed and mutilated, the wind smacking at them, threatening to whip them off completely or rip them apart.
I un-pegged them slowly, holding each against my stomach in an attempt to smooth them out, to perhaps repair the damage. Even as I took down the last of them—the one in which Fred gave me his death—I continued to believe I would find the letter from Mary’s mother, the letter that would have definitively turned her against me. Of course, it was the only one Mary had taken with her.
†
‘I no longer want her to be my responsibility,’ I said to Father Benjamin that evening. I’d reported her missing to the police and driven straight to the presbytery. ‘If she is found, you’ll have to return her to the Home.’
Father Benjamin nodded, resigned. He did not seem to have the strength left to argue. He had lost any remaining fat off his bones, his face turned skeletal.
‘I tried my best,’ I continued. ‘You couldn’t expect more of me.’
‘No,’ he said quietly. I felt some kind of judgment hanging between us and needed to tip the scales away from his damnation of me.
‘I wish you all the best with the scheme, Father Benjamin. Perhaps there are some of them who can be saved … from themselves. But you will have to get them younger.’
‘Younger?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Before the … corruption sets in.’
Father Benjamin stared at me. I returned his gaze, though I desperately wanted to look away. I had a sip of tea. I felt the liquid flowing down my throat, trying to warm me.
‘Perhaps you’ve done your best, Mrs Smith,’ Father Benjamin said ethereally, one foot in another world already. ‘I don’t know if I have yet. God can only know that. Only God can know the true nature of our souls.’
‘Yes, Father Benjamin,’ I said.
We both glanced at the crucifix sitting alone upon his wall.
I no longer wanted Mary’s black face to belong to me. What was left of Father Benjamin understood and I could be free of any further thought of her.
†
When I woke the next morning, the light coming through my window had a different feel to it. Winter had begun to sap the sun of its warmth; we were finally heading to the cold.
I dressed and went into Mary’s room. It had a dullness about it which I was willing to concede came from her absence. But there was nothing to be done about that.
I pulled the sheets from the sagging mattress and took them to the laundry tub. I washed them in the same hurry I had washed Fred’s, only realising after I had scrubbed for an hour that the dried bloodstain was unlikely to come out without a long soak. Even then, I would still be able to see the outline: a round spot like a coin. The sheets would have to be thrown away.
I had left Fred’s letters on the kitchen table so I took them back to the desk. The roll-top stood open, with its broken lock. I noticed Mary’s window was smudged with fingerprints, the glass wanting a thorough wipe. And I had tracked in dirt when I came in from the garden yesterday. I needed to vacuum.
‘Not Mary’s window anymore,’ I said out loud, listening to the words in the emptied house.
†
It was easy, really, to move along. I worried about what I would be asked at church, who would inevitably pry into the details of Mary’s departure. I had momentarily forgotten about the hushed lines of communication, how everyone knew about Mary running away before Mass even began, how this erased the need for direct enquiry. None of them had any facts, I was sure, only Father Benjamin’s reassurance I had done my very best under difficult circumstances.
‘How well you are looking, Mrs Smith,’ Mrs Andrews said.
‘The colour is back in your cheeks,’ Mrs Bishop declared.
‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘Aren’t the poplars growing well?’
The group turned towards the line of trees against the church fence. The poplars were still too short to provide a proper barricade but they were heading towards height and protection. I wasn’t sure if this was an appropriate thing to point out and was reassured by the nodding of heads and murmurs of assent.
‘Yes, they are growing very well,’ Enid Parker said quietly.
The sky above the trees was a blanket grey.
PART II
‘I sincerely, deeply, fervently longed to do what was right; and only that. “Show me, show me the path!” I entreated of Heaven.’
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
9
Many years later, I had a dream all the streets of the city were emptied of children and the crowds who had celebrated the end of the war wandered around in black veils, weeping for their lost babies. In my dream, I did not belong in such a world—the women pushed me away—and I had to run back to my mother’s house, a house I did not remember but which, in my dream, was a larger version of the home I had shared with Fred and then with Mary, its rooms vast, emptied of furniture and smelling, overwhelmingly, of varnish. I stood on the back step again, and the laundry tub was overflowing, its sudsy water running up to my bare feet, stopped only by the force of my dream-will from drowning me. In the distance, further away than it should have been, the jacaranda tree was burnt black.
†
I haven’t lived in that house for four years now. It seemed sensible, when I finally accepted there would be no further additions to my household, to move into a flat.
Mind you, I had not been hasty. The poplars at the church grew tall and I smiled and simpered to Mrs Bishop and the widows, m
aintaining the illusion as I always had. Only gradually did I become desperate to flee, particularly after my final encounter with Father Benjamin. I kept my plans well hidden. The surprise from the church group when the For Sale sign sprung up in my front garden was testimony to how well I’d looked on the outside.
‘You will still be coming to services here, of course, Mrs Smith?’ Mrs Joyce asked, unable to comprehend my wish to attend a closer congregation.
‘Yes,’ I lied and wondered at the amount of attention my leaving was eliciting. Surely these women did not really like me? I reasoned there was probably a dearth of gossip; the mouths needed new material to chew on. The Mavis boy had killed himself months before, but the speculation surrounding his demise—a sad follow-on from Father Benjamin’s more expected, but just as talked-about, departure—had begun to grow weary, not helped by the failure of Mr and Mrs Mavis to appear and receive their condolence.
‘Everything is changing,’ Enid Parker said mournfully. She had tried to reach out to me after Mary was gone, but I had rejected her pity.
She was right, though, everything was changing. Father Benjamin had been replaced by a young ginger-haired gentleman whose healthy smile seemed a mockery of his predecessor. Father Richards would stand on the church steps positively beaming, frightening the old people with his enthusiasm. The loss of the Mavises had been felt as well, their quiet dignity a sorry absence, and with the growth of the poplars, even the feel of the churchyard had changed, now secluded and un-inviting.
Leaving Wayville Street and the house I had believed would one day sing with my family life was a deafeningly quiet time. I labelled the trunks meticulously, making lists of what was going into each of them, worrying about losing sight of the smaller ornaments. I wrapped the best china in layers of butcher’s paper and had to make disconcerting decisions on what was to be sacrificed, moving as I was into a smaller place, with less space for furniture and plants.
When I first arrived at the two-bedroom flat it smelt of mothballs and I learnt from my neighbour that a Jewish lady had lived and died there. I aired it as much as was possible, letting the breezes in through the fly-screens. Whenever I returned from an errand, though, I found myself on the same carpet track as the previous owner: down the corridor, past the bathroom on the right, straight to the main bedroom and the built-in wardrobe to hang up my coat, out to the tiny laundry where the hat hooks were, nestled next to the living room that swept onto the dining area and then immediately to the kitchenette, decked in canary yellow, for a well-earned cup of tea. I was following in the footsteps of the dead and try as I might, it was hard to find another route.
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