Family of Women

by Annie Murray

  She carried the cup over and perched on the edge of the bed, leaning over to switch on the little lamp between the beds. They hadn’t shared a bed since he came out of the hospital.

  ‘It’s not fair on you,’ he’d said ashamedly. ‘I don’t want you to have to put up with it.’ She tried to argue, just a little, but he was adamant.

  ‘No – don’t, wench. I’m done for. I’m horrible. Just sleep across the room from me so I can see you.’

  ‘Harry?’ His stony, deep-sleeping face brought out her tenderness. ‘Your tea, love.’

  She reached for his hand, felt its stiffness, and it was then she knew. Her pulse picked up speed. She heard the blood thump in her ears.

  ‘Harry!’ She touched his face, shook him, but it made no difference to the cold statue he had become. ‘Harry – love! Wake up!’ She didn’t realize she was screaming.

  ‘Mom?’ Linda came running upstairs. ‘What’s happened?’

  Violet was backing away from the bed, both hands to her face. She was trembling all over.

  ‘He’s . . . your dad . . . I think he’s . . .’

  Linda went to her father, hesitating for a moment as if too scared to touch. Then she leaned down and laid her fingers on his neck, feeling for a pulse.

  How does she know how to do that? Violet thought.

  As if she’d spoken aloud, Linda said, ‘You can see it moving, the vein in his neck. Like a heartbeat.’ She turned, eyes wide. ‘It’s not beating any more.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Violet whispered.

  You could see now that he wasn’t there any more. His body had been vacated, life’s current lost. His face was even more sunken, the last sparks of him flickering off into the darkness of night while they were sleeping. They both stood staring for a few moments, too shocked to move. Then Linda took a step towards her and they were in each other’s arms. They didn’t say anything. Violet stroked Linda’s back. Her daughter smelled of Lifebuoy, and her curving shape in Violet’s arms felt a great reassurance. After a moment, they stood apart. Linda had tears in her eyes.

  ‘Poor Dad.’

  Violet shook her head, too full to speak. ‘Tell you what. Go and put the kettle on again.’

  She didn’t know why she said it, except that she wanted to give Linda something to do, and before calling the doctor, and telling Joyce and her mother, before all the busyness of death, she wanted to be alone with him, with his body, to know more fully than she could so far that he was gone.

  Linda nodded, somehow understanding, and went downstairs. Her footsteps sounded sad.

  With tentative movements Violet pulled back the bedclothes covering Harry. She thought there might be something to dread, smells, that he had soiled himself in passing as people did, she knew, but there was nothing but the cold that now seemed to hang about his skeleton body in the dark blue pyjamas. He had worn little but pyjamas these last weeks. Maybe it had been obvious that the end was coming, but somehow life just went on and she couldn’t let herself think about it.

  She laid her hand on his chest, on the protruding bones, a hard ache in her throat. His shoulders, ribs, chest, were nothing but jutting bones. She was so used to him, to washing, dressing him – not lovemaking, that had ceased a good while back – yet today she saw it all afresh.

  ‘What the hell did they do to you?’ she whispered. And everything in her began to ache and tears ran down her cheeks. And following came the realization that he had never told her, never felt able to talk to her. The years in Burma were something he could not voice, not to her, perhaps not to anyone, and this seemed the most heartbreaking thing of all. Had he been able to tell Joe Kaminski? Joe, who had also seen horrors in Poland untold to anyone around him?

  For one second, half closing her eyes, she made him once more into the robust young man she had married, but he was too altered and the picture slipped away. So long ago now, before the war, before . . . Roy Keillor’s face rose in her mind and she pushed the memory away, fraught as it was with guilt and longing. No good thinking back to the things you could have changed. That Roy and she . . . No – don’t think. Nothing could be changed now, not one second of it.

  Wearily she leant down to rest on her husband’s body, moving her head to find any softness in him, and the only yielding place she could come to rest was on the concave drum of his belly. She put her arms round his wasted frame as if comforting a child.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Why she was saying those words she wasn’t sure. It seemed the only thing that brought together everything she meant. And she thought of the night their little son Bobby was born, when Harry tenderly undressed her out of her soaked nightie in between her labour pains.

  I loved him then, she thought, as her tears began to come. And holding him now, she knew she loved him today as well, and that despite it all, she had done her duty to him. Sitting up, she stroked her palm over his stubbly cheek, then rested it on his forehead.

  ‘It’s all right, love, you can stop struggling now. You can have some peace.’

  Chapter Sixty

  It was the sweetest, most exciting feeling.

  Alan had burst into Linda’s life, filling her with love and happiness and hope like a shower of rainbows. After that first day, walking home, she had felt like dancing along the pavement from the bus stop. She liked him and he wanted to see her again and he had told her he thought she was pretty. Her! Scruffy little Linda Martin, pretty! And the way he looked at her moved something in her, and he was lonely and unhappy and she was drawn in by him immediately. When would she see him again?

  He was lovely to her when her dad died. The burial at Witton cemetery felt unreal to her. She couldn’t seem to take in what was happening. The family were there, of course, except Carol. Joyce sobbed uncontrollably through the whole thing.

  ‘I can’t seem to stop,’ she kept saying afterwards. ‘I think it’s because I’m expecting.’

  Eva and Joe Kaminski came of course and, to their astonishment, so did Reg and Edna Bottoms.

  ‘Another old soldier,’ Mr Bottoms murmured. ‘Just wanted to pay my respects.’

  Mom looked exhausted, and so thin, with dark crescents under her eyes.

  ‘I’ve looked after him all this time,’ she said as they got ready that morning, just the two of them at home. ‘And it’s been a burden, I can’t say it hasn’t. But now – I feel lost.’

  Linda wanted Carol. At least she could look after Carol so that she didn’t have to think about herself. Joyce had Danny to comfort her and everyone was saying what a shame it was, losing her father with a baby on the way. Bessie was there, of course, with Marigold and Clarence, and Charlie and Gladys, but Linda didn’t expect anything from any of them. Otherwise it was just her and Mom. The family seemed to be disappearing. She couldn’t take in for a while afterwards that Dad had really died, that he was gone for good. He had been fading for so long to a poignant whisper: now silence. It was only when Mom started rearranging things, cleaning the room, bringing the table back in from the front to where it really belonged, taking his chair out, tears running down her face as she did so, that it began to sink in.

  ‘We’ll burn this.’ She looked down at the stained chair with his blue cushion on it, cigarette burns along the arms. ‘No good to anyone, is it? I can’t stand to see it.’

  Somehow it was arranged that Joe Kaminski would deal with it. A few days later Linda saw him outside going at it with an axe.

  The house felt empty. Mom kept saying she didn’t know what to do with herself.

  ‘You all right, Linda?’ she kept saying. ‘You thinking about that boy? Why don’t you bring him home to meet me?’

  She’d had to tell Mom about Alan. A bit about him anyway, that that was where she went sometimes after work. And was she thinking about him? Of course she was. She scarcely ever thought about anything else! He occupied her imagination, his pale face, expressive hands, his words, something she examined over and over again. Eac
h time she thought of him, the intense, yet vulnerable way he looked at her, it made her heart lurch. But she wanted to keep him to herself.

  When she went to Alan’s house he was almost always alone. She had met his father, Dr Bray. He was a large, imposing man, almost bald, with a residual ring of fuzzy brown hair and little half-moon glasses through which he peered at her. Though he always wore a suit he was not a smart man, but had a rather dusty, sagging air about him which Linda supposed was partly because his wife wasn’t there to do something about it. He also smoked a pipe and always smelt of tobacco.

  She went there a few days after the funeral. Sometimes Alan came to the shop to meet her but that day she had walked there by herself, expecting to find him alone in the big house as he so often was. But it was Dr Bray who answered the door.

  ‘Ah – hello. Come in.’ He spoke impatiently through his pipe, which trailed smoke as he stood back to let her in. She didn’t like the way he looked her up and down. Despite his brusque way of talking, his sludgy eyes seemed to linger on her for too long.

  ‘Alan!’ Dr Bray took his pipe out of his mouth and called upstairs. ‘Your friend’s here!’

  She heard Alan’s footsteps on the landing, then he appeared at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Hello – why don’t you come up?’

  ‘That’s not very polite,’ Dr Bray said. ‘Why don’t you come down and welcome your guest, Alan?’

  It came over as false the way he said it, trying too hard, like trying to force a rusty piece of old machinery.

  Alan didn’t say anything. He stared stonily down at his father. Linda went up to him.

  ‘Sorry,’ Alan said, as they went into his room. ‘He came home early.’

  ‘S’all right.’

  He leaned forwards and kissed her shyly on the cheek. ‘Thank God you’re here.’

  He was always so pleased to see her. His need of her thrilled her the way nothing ever had before. Very quickly she had begun to feel in conspiracy with Alan: the two of them against the adults with all their messy difficulties, against the world. It felt as if he was all she needed.

  He closed the door and went to his cupboard, bringing out his packet of Silk Cut, and held it out to her.

  ‘Ta.’ She took one nonchalantly and they shared a match. The first couple of times she’d smoked with him she’d coughed and found it a bit strong, but she’d got used to it now.

  ‘Won’t he smell it?’

  ‘He doesn’t care what I do, so long as I don’t bother him.’

  Alan put his head back and blew smoke at the ceiling. But he slid the window open before coming to sit by her on the bed. They ended up in their usual position, leaning against the wall, Alan’s arm round her waist. She cuddled up to him. Nothing else mattered when she was with him.

  Alan always spoke about his father in tones of complete contempt. He didn’t talk much about his mother, though Linda had shyly tried asking, but she knew Alan blamed his father for her being ill. He’d only talked about it once. They were down in the kitchen at the table, smoking then as well.

  ‘Course, he wouldn’t notice what state she was in,’ he once said savagely. ‘Not till it was too late, anyway.’

  His mother had been all right, he said, until she got married and had a baby.

  ‘So it’s my fault too, I s’pose.’ He said it as if it was a joke.

  ‘How can it be your fault? You were a baby!’

  ‘Oh, I dunno.’

  He stubbed out the cigarette fiercely into a saucer. Then he wouldn’t talk about it any more.

  Today there was a heaviness about him, a mood of melancholy. They sat in his room without the light on. It was nearly Christmas and the daylight was almost gone for the day. Outside was cold and damp.

  ‘What’ve you been doing?’ she asked. All his days must be so long and boring, she thought, without school, or a job. Dr Bray had talked the school into taking Alan back – after Christmas they said, as the term was almost over now. ‘I s’pose they think they’re giving me time to stew,’ he’d said sarcastically. ‘Appreciate what I’m missing.’

  ‘Nothing much. Playing a bit . . .’ He indicated the guitar propped against his desk. ‘Reading. Thinking.’

  ‘How’s your mom?’

  ‘Dunno. I’m going to see her on Sunday.’

  ‘Oh.’ She wasn’t sure what to say. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Yes, a trip to the asylum’s always rather jolly.’ He blew out another swirl of smoke. ‘Sorry – I didn’t mean it. Not to you.’ He looked at her. ‘How’s your sister?’

  ‘They say she’s getting better but it takes ages. But she’s all right. That’s the weird thing about Carol. She’s happier than anyone. You could come with us one day – come and see her.’

  She had taken herself by surprise, inviting him. She’d never invited him home yet, although it would be all right now – there was only Mom. In a way she wanted to, but in another she wanted him to be her secret. She didn’t want the family’s comments. Mom’d be bad enough, but imagine Joyce – and Nana! No, she wanted to keep Alan all to herself.

  ‘Yes – I could,’ he said. He sounded unsure, but pleased. He took another drag on the cigarette.

  ‘Let your hair down – will you?’

  She kept her hair clean now and enjoyed the feel of it swinging in a high ponytail. Alan liked to stroke it so she pulled the ribbon out and it fell in dark, glossy waves over her shoulders.

  Alan sat up and stubbed out his cigarette. Eyes fixed on her face, he took her head in both hands, stroking her hair.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  On the Saturday afternoons when she wasn’t working, they mooched about in town.

  Sometimes they went to the pictures, but Alan wasn’t really interested if it wasn’t a Western.

  Birmingham was a building site, still recovering from the war, everyone managing their shopping round the mess, the banging noises and scaffolding. They sat in a coffee bar at the top of the High Street, where there were other people their age, and felt grown up.

  Alan could be very funny when he wasn’t being gloomy. He had a biting sense of humour, keeping up a running commentary on the people walking past outside – ‘My God, look at that coat. D’you think someone should tell her? It’d be a public service wouldn’t it?’ And the faces he pulled were very funny. It felt good being with him, made her feel properly alive, as if she’d woken from the long uninspired doze she’d been in ever since Mom and Nana made her leave her beloved school.

  He bought a pair of denim jeans, like the Americans wore, and Linda saved up wages to buy a pair as well, which she wore with a big black sloppy jumper. She wore her hair long and loose, trailing down her cheeks, when she wasn’t in the bakery. Alan said he liked her with her hair down. And she managed to pick up a secondhand duffel coat. She felt excited about how she and Alan dressed and talked. It was different from most people. Almost all of the girls she knew dressed exactly like their mothers. It meant something, being different. They were the young ones, making the future. Violet didn’t seem to see it that way.

  ‘It’s not very flattering, is it?’ she said, looking at Linda’s new outfit. ‘I thought you were going to go shopping with me – get a nice new skirt?’

  ‘Well, I like it,’ Linda snapped. ‘I don’t just have to wear what you want, do I?’ I’ve done quite enough of what you want already, she wanted to add.

  The other thing about Alan was that he talked about ideas. He liked philosophy. He talked about something called existentialism which he said was about getting past all the ‘tosh’ all the adults talked about, with their establishment values, their religion and politics.

  ‘We have to carve out the way for ourselves – with the choices we make,’ he said to her earnestly, as they sat at a little table and sipped dark, strong coffee. ‘Not be trapped in systems made by other people.’

  Linda listened to him, feeling ready to go off pop. It was exciting enough sitting here with him, the taste o
f coffee and tobacco in her mouth, feeling all grown up and sophisticated. But now she could feel her mind expanding as well, the way she longed for it to do. If she’d carried on at the grammar school, wouldn’t she have been able to have ideas like this, instead of finding them out from him by chance? But then, wasn’t it romantic discussing them in a coffee bar with your boyfriend instead of with a load of girls in a classroom? At last here was someone who felt what she felt!

  ‘Everyone’s stuck, aren’t they?’ she said passionately, nodding out of the window at the Saturday afternoon shoppers trailing past in the Birmingham drizzle. ‘I mean look at them – you’re born, you work in a factory, have loads of kids, get old and fat and boss everyone else around to make them do exactly what you’ve done, and then you die!’

  She spoke with such vehemence that Alan stared at her and then burst out laughing.

  ‘What?’ She blushed. ‘What’s so funny? It may not be like that for you, but that’s what it’s like for me, what I’ll be stuck in if I let myself.’

  ‘Can’t imagine you getting fat.’ He was grinning.

  Linda stared at him, completely enraged by the laughter in his eyes. She was startled by the force of her anger. He’d missed the whole meaning of what she’d said! How could he reply in such a shallow way when she was laying out all her feelings in front of him? She took a fierce drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke in his face.

  ‘No. Well – it’s different for you, isn’t it? You can just go back to school!’ She was on the verge of tears suddenly. ‘It’s all there for you, if you want it.’

  He was startled by the force of her emotion. ‘Hey – what’s up?’

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you? And I thought you would.’

  Holding back the tears made her throat hurt. Wasn’t there anyone who would understand how she felt, locked inside herself with this enormous hunger to escape?

  She was quiet after that, couldn’t find words. Alan finished his cigarette. He looked uncertain.

  ‘Shall we go then?’