Family of Women

by Annie Murray

  When she started crying, really crying, they moved away. Linda went down on to the scrubby grass and picked up Snowdrop out of her run. She hugged the rabbit’s big, robust body, stroking her cheek against the smooth white fur.

  They didn’t overhear when the next visitor came. Mom told Dad about it at tea, the four of them round the table, window open and a breeze blowing in.

  ‘I met Eva up at the shops today,’ Violet said.

  Harry looked up, without much interest. ‘Eva?’

  ‘Kaminski. Next door.’

  ‘Oh ar.’

  ‘We were just going home, both of us, with the shopping and she said she’d walk with me. She asked about Carol – she was very nice as a matter of fact. Then all of a sudden she just came out with it. “You know, Peter and Alenka were not our only children.” I mean, I don’t always understand her – her accent and that – and I wasn’t sure what she meant.’

  Linda mashed her grey, boiled potato into the gravy. Glancing up, she could tell her father was listening now, elbows on the table, rubbing his hands together as if they were cold. And she could tell also that her mom was pleased he was listening, as if just for once they were talking like people who might like each other.

  ‘What’d she say then?’

  ‘She said they had four – another boy and girl. One was called Karol – but I think that was the boy. I didn’t catch the girl’s name. They were younger, she said. Anyway, the whole family were taken off to a camp, in Russia somewhere. Nineteen-forty-one I think she said. Cutting down trees – even the kids working morning till night in the freezing cold. The boy died in the camp and then – it was a bit hard to follow – but the little girl died somewhere else, after – I think she said in Persia? Died in her arms, she said, in a truck they were crammed into. Nothing she could do. Couldn’t even bury her. They just had to leave her.’

  Her eyes filled. Everything seemed to make her cry these days. Linda felt close to tears herself.

  ‘Terrible,’ Harry said. He stared ahead of him for a moment as if seeing things none of them could see.

  When they’d finished eating, the girls got down.

  ‘Go and check the rabbits,’ Mom said. They were trying not to aggravate Mr Bottoms – as much for Mrs Bottoms’ sake as anything.

  Harry got up from the table and put his hand on Violet’s shoulder. As she was going out, Linda heard him say, ‘Sorry, love. I’m sorry – about Carol. What I did – her hair. I wasn’t myself.’

  And she heard the half-stifled sound of her mother bursting into tears.

  ‘She’s so poorly,’ she sobbed. ‘I can’t stand the thought of her in that horrible metal thing!’

  Chapter Forty

  Linda went with Violet to the hospital for visits even though she had to wait outside.

  At first, Carol was very distressed and homesick.

  ‘I want to come home,’ she kept crying. ‘I don’t like it in here.’

  Violet found it terrible to see, and made even worse by the sight of her chopped hair.

  ‘She looks like a plucked chicken. What must those nurses think?’

  She seemed glad Linda was there: someone to talk to and relieve her feelings.

  The second time they visited, the two of them were utterly miserable. On the way home, Violet took her into the bomb-scarred middle of Birmingham and headed for the Bull Ring.

  ‘D’you want a hamster?’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Ooh, yes!’ Linda said. She knew Mom was trying to be nice. Carol’s illness had brought out a softness in her. And it was her way of finding comfort. She collected animals the way a bird feathers its nest.

  ‘What about Sooty?’ Linda said doubtfully. He was forever bringing birds in.

  ‘You can keep it upstairs, away from the cats. Make sure you keep the door shut.’

  They went home on the bus with two tiny hamsters in a little cage, one for Linda and one for Joyce. The man said they were sisters and wouldn’t fight.

  ‘They should behave themselves all right – like you and your sister, eh?’ he added with a wink.

  By the time they’d reached Kingstanding, Linda had called her hamster Goldie.

  ‘You can’t call her that – she’s not one bit of gold on her,’ Joyce sneered.

  ‘Can if I want.’

  Joyce called hers Loretta because she thought it was pretty.

  ‘They all right?’ Mom came up to see them in Linda’s bedroom. They all knew they were trying not to think about the hospital, and Carol stuck in that machine.

  The hamsters turned out not to be a good idea. Within a fortnight Linda woke up to find that Loretta had set upon Goldie in the night and killed her. She was covered in bloody gashes.

  ‘I don’t think you’re supposed to put hamsters in together, are you?’ Mrs Bottoms said when she heard. ‘He should have told you, really.’

  And quite soon after, Loretta died as well. Linda found her curled up in her bedding, cold and stiff. At the time, she thought of it as a bad omen about Carol. Fortunately, she was wrong.

  ‘Hello, pet.’ Violet bent down and kissed Carol’s cheek, stroking her hair. It had grown back a little now and was like a soft, fair cap all over her head, in varying lengths. ‘You all right?’

  Carol gave a little nod, drinking in the sight of her mother. Her father, of course, she did not expect to see.

  ‘I’m all right. I’m going to get better.’

  She spoke with such certainty that Violet gave a faint smile and leaned over her, eyes filling with tears of relief, though she tried to hide it.

  ‘Is that what the nurses say?’

  ‘They think I’m better as well. And I told them.’

  Carol’s face had changed somehow since the last visit. The look of sadness and preoccupation had gone. Her eyes were bright again.

  ‘It’s going to be all right. And I’ll be able to walk. He told me.’

  ‘Who told you? Have the doctors been?’

  ‘Yes – but it wasn’t them. It was him.’

  Violet’s hand stilled on Carol’s head and she frowned. ‘Who? What’re you talking about?’

  ‘Him. There.’ Her eyes looked up to the wall beside her. ‘He comes to see me – at night mostly. And he tells me things.’

  ‘Oh, I see – you’ve been having nice dreams!’ Violet laughed with some relief.

  ‘No – not when I was asleep. He’s just there, when I look up. And he smiled and told me it would be all right.’

  Violet frowned. ‘I think I’ll go and see if I can talk to one of the nurses.’

  She walked off along the ward, a slim, vulnerable figure in her old skirt and cardigan, mac over her arm. She was less intimidated by the nurses now. The thin one they saw the first day often came and talked to her.

  ‘She won’t believe me,’ Carol told the nurse when they came back together. ‘But you do, don’t you?’

  ‘What’re you talking about?’ the nurse said impatiently. ‘Who’s this “he?” ’

  ‘I dunno. But he’s there, and he talks to me.’

  ‘She’s coming on nicely now,’ the nurse said, ignoring Carol. ‘This week she’s really made quite a stride – everyone’s pleased with her. We think she could spend some of each day out of the lung soon. And of course we’re starting on the physiotherapy with her.’

  Whatever had happened, there had been a definite change. When they were in Aston for dinner on the Sunday – one of the last times Harry ever came – Bessie said, ‘Our Carol was looking better. Summat different about her. I’d say she was on the mend.’

  That week, for the first time in ages, things felt lighthearted, as if there was hope.

  When Violet said goodbye to her that day, Carol was beaming up at her, dark eyes aglow. She looked like an angel.

  By the time Carol had been in the isolation hospital for just over three months, she was spending more and more time outside the iron lung. Once they were sure she could manage without it, the hospital told Violet that
Carol was to be transferred to St Gerard’s, the Father Hudson’s Hospital at Coleshill, where she would be looked after and given more physiotherapy. Though her arms were little affected, the muscles in her legs were badly wasted and they thought it would take some time. There was also a problem with contractions in her spine. They said she might need an operation when she was older.

  Violet didn’t dare argue with them and took all this in quietly, but when she reached Linda outside, she burst out, ‘Coleshill if you please? That’s flaming miles away – it’s nearly Coventry! I don’t know what our mom’s going to say. She’ll have a fit.’

  Linda wondered why Nana once again seemed to be judge and jury about every thing that happened. Surely what mattered now was getting Carol better?

  Chapter Forty-One

  ‘Ticket?’

  Linda fished in her pocket for her penny and the conductor grumpily shoved a ticket at her and moved on. She made a face at him behind his back and returned to staring out of the rain-streaked window. The 29A had left the estate behind and was grinding along in the cold, wet October morning. She felt very out of sorts.

  They’d been to see Carol on Saturday, right over at Father Hudson’s in Coleshill. She had a proper bed now, instead of the machine, and seemed much happier. She was in a long ward with doors all along one side that could be opened to wheel the beds onto a terrace outside when it was fine. The nuns who nursed her were kind, she said. Her favourite was called Sister Cathleen. And they were doing physiotherapy every day. It was the only time her face fell, talking about that.

  ‘It hurts ever such a lot,’ she whispered to Linda with tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t like it.’

  Sister Cathleen, who had a round, freckly face, said Carol was ‘coming on grand’. But she still wasn’t home and it felt such a long time since she had been, and the place was such a long way away. Nothing felt right with Carol away all the time. And Dad was drinking more. She tried to pretend to herself that that wasn’t true, but she knew really it was. You never knew how he was going to be when he drank so you could never relax. All she wanted was to get out.

  Yesterday she had wanted to meet her best friend Lucy Etheridge in Sutton Park, but Mom had said no.

  ‘We’re going to Nana’s – you know we are.’

  ‘But why do we have to every week? Can’t we stay here and do something different – just for once?’

  ‘You know we can’t – she’ll be expecting us!’

  ‘Dad’s not going!’

  ‘All the more reason for you to go,’ Mom snapped. She was bad-tempered all the time, living on her nerves.

  ‘I’m fed up with going there. It’s always the same and it’s boring.’

  For once she and Joyce were in agreement. ‘I want to stay at home,’ Joyce said.

  ‘Enough of your bloody lip! Course we’re going – no arguments.’

  Violet left Dad with a ham sandwich and a plea not to go to the pub. He didn’t go to the nearest pub, which sold Mitchells & Butlers beer, but walked further for his Ansells. Linda knew Mom was just trying to make herself feel better – he’d be out the door seconds after they’d gone.

  Mom kept saying, ‘He’s getting worse. It never used to be this bad.’ She looked thin and wrung out.

  Linda glanced down proudly at the uniform skirt she was wearing. King Edward’s Grammar School! She said it over and over again to herself like a magic spell. Even after a year the wonder of it had not worn off.

  When she took the eleven-plus she was full of nerves, remembering how Joyce had said it was ever so hard. Joyce had gone without a thought to the new secondary modern school close by on the estate. Linda got part way through the test paper and wondered if it was all a mistake. If she didn’t find it too difficult, did that mean she’d not understood the questions and got it all wrong? Her hands began to sweat with anxiety and her heart was banging away. She didn’t have any real idea what going to the grammar school meant, it was all unknown, but there was something glowing in her, like the little pilot light in the Ascot heater in the bathroom. She wanted it.

  And they gave her a place! It was the one time in her life when she saw she had impressed her father.

  ‘Let her have a go,’ he said. ‘She’s earned it.’

  Mum was unsure, Nana full of scorn.

  ‘We’ll never afford the uniform,’ Violet said. It was all beyond what she knew, unknown territory, and she wanted to play safe. ‘And it’s two buses away. No – it’s better if you don’t go. You’ll be worse than you are already, nose always in a book. That’s not real life, you know. No – it’s not for people like us.’

  It took Linda all her powers of persuasion – that she’d have no other clothes all year and she’d do odd jobs to get the money, she would even eat less to save the money, she’d do anything, if only she could go! It was Dad who stood up for her and for that she was deeply grateful.

  For the last year she’d entered the portals of this other world of the grammar school, away from their scruffy house with its stinks of the animals and cabbage water and Dad throwing up – to a place where the world opened up in books and maps and pictures, the way it had that day in Johnny Vetch’s house in Aston when he showed her his cases of fossils and his book about the stars and she knew it was possible for someone else like her to care about learning. At school she was in heaven, even though she never felt quite like most of the others. There were only a very few who were poor and down at heel like her. At first she’d wondered if she could ever keep up. By summer she was among the top five in her form, and though a few of the girls were snobby, they weren’t all, and she had Lucy, a best friend who was prepared to stick around with her.

  ‘If you go there,’ Johnny Vetch said to her in his gentle voice, ‘you’ll learn things you’d never dream of in the other school. You’ll be another person. It’s where they separate the sheep from the goats.’

  Johnny was a quiet, thin man of twenty-three. He’d gone away to college and had some sort of breakdown. He lived with his mom still and did odd jobs that didn’t demand too much of him.

  ‘He overtaxed his brain, that one,’ Bessie would say. ‘That’s what happens. Overtaxed it. You want to be careful, my girl. You don’t want to end up like Johnny Vetch. Nose in a book and no wife.’ She added something else behind her hand to Mom and laughed in a way which meant it was something crude.

  Be careful, was all Nana ever said. The only safe thing, so far as her grandmother was concerned, was having babies and more babies and staying at home like a fat queen bee in a hive trying to keep everyone under your thumb. Like her.

  ‘The world’s a big place,’ Johnny told her one day. ‘Full of interest. One day I’m going to go on a boat along the Amazon river. I’ve read about it. There’re spiders there as big as my hand.’

  The spiders made her shiver. But Johnny didn’t tell her just about spiders. He told her about the birds, the snakes and butterflies in the Amazon. And the deserts across the world, full of seeds just waiting for a fall of rain so they could burst out into the brightest, most radiant flowers you could ever see. And about rocks and crystals, and the Northern Lights dancing like chiffon in the cold night, and constellations of stars. Johnny loved the blackout. You could see everything better.

  One winter night before the war ended, when Johnny was still all right, he came round while Linda was at Nana’s.

  ‘Tell Linda to come outside a minute,’ he said from the doorstep. ‘There’s something I want to show her.’

  ‘Don’t talk daft,’ Nana dismissed him. ‘She’ll catch her death.’

  But Linda was already jumping up to get her coat down off the hook. Whatever was Nana on about? She walked home every night with Mom, didn’t she? It was just because Nana didn’t approve of Johnny Vetch.

  ‘Be careful . . .’ Nana said reprovingly. ‘Don’t go keeping her out for long. Her mom’ll be in soon.’ It was getting late. But Mom sometimes was late these days.

  The night was cold wit
h the promise of ice. The air made her cheeks feel slapped. Once Nana had slammed the front door huffily, the dark closed in on them.

  ‘Your eyes’ll get used to it,’ Johnny said. ‘Come on.’

  He took her hand and led her down the street towards his mother’s house. She thought they’d go down the pitch black entry and inside, that he probably had a new book he’d ferreted out of some musty old shop somewhere. Or a new rock to show her. Linda knew people thought Johnny was strange, and that he couldn’t hold down much of a job or anything. He wasn’t thought of as ‘normal’, but she always felt safe with him. They were in tune somehow.

  ‘Best be quick,’ he said. ‘This is something special. I’ve got the key off Mr Jacobs.’

  Linda thought this sounded exciting. ‘Where’re we going?’

  ‘Wait – you’ll see.’

  Two streets away was a brick church. To Linda’s astonishment, Johnny led her round to the side door and unlocked it. Leading her inside, he pulled a torch from his pocket. Once more, her eyes adjusted. She could smell the place, a strange sweetness of stone and paper and wax, and as Johnny moved the weak beam of the torch around them she could make out a vast, dark space, pews stretching in lines ahead of them. It reminded her of her grandmother’s funeral, when Dad had got upset and fought with that rough old man who’d turned up. The school had taken them into church once or twice, but that was all. It gave her a funny feeling, as if she had stepped into somewhere quite distinct from the street outside. She realized that Johnny knew the place very well. Perhaps he went to church every week? She didn’t know.