by Tobias Hill
She goes to the window. In the yard Sydney and Cornelius are leaning, talking. They have been working at the car. Tomorrow they will drive to Montego Bay and take the truck back home together.
‘Might be you could fit her dresses,’ Mrs Jarrett says.
‘You kept them?’
‘No doubt. Don’t ask me where. Cornelius will know.’
‘I’m not her. Are you listening?’
‘No one asking you to be.’
‘That’s not what it feels like, sometimes.’
Mrs Jarrett looks her up and down. ‘You’ll do, child, as you are. You’ll just have to breathe in some.’
She does. Her grandmother helps. The dresses are beautiful.
The cagebirds are bananaquits. The great dark ones are John Crows. The morning sentinel she never finds – later she thinks she must have dreamt him. She studies hummingbirds instead, the mango, vervain and scissorstail. Even the yardbird cockerels demand attention, strutting their dusty finery.
She never knew she cared for birds, but here they are so bright, like flowers. She paints them with a set she finds in her mother’s chest one evening. It’s a child’s paintbox, old, pre-war, and the brushes have dried hard, but bit by bit she soaks and kneads them back to suppleness. Sometimes, when she paints, she licks the bristles while she’s thinking, forgetting what she’s at, staining her tongue with tinctures.
She thinks: everything is brighter here. Even the nights – which frighten her at first, plunging her into darkness – even they have a clarity. You see cars passing miles away, beyond the reach of sound, and on clear nights the wash of stars.
In Mrs Jarrett’s albums every other picture shows their daughter, their mother. In one, lights hang in swags along a nighttime promenade, though Bernadette herself shines brighter, her dress surf-pale and surf-fine, her smile flashing.
‘Kingston,’ Mrs Jarrett says. ‘We were dined at the Liganea. Afterwards she danced. The men you can imagine. She had that dress made up. It did look fine on her.’
Across each page of photographs a ghostly second lies, imprinted with faint designs – cobwebs, forget-me-nots – which sigh and lisp as Sybil’s grandmother lifts each of them away.
Bernadette in a crêpe dress, hardly more than a child. A handsome man stands just behind her, smiling, one hand on her shoulder. ‘Your uncle,’ Mrs Jarrett says.
‘His finest student. That was what Neville called her.’
‘He was fine himself. My child was never taught better.’
‘I wouldn’t have known him,’ Sybil says, and then, shyly, ‘I wouldn’t have known her.’
‘Well,’ her grandmother says, ‘leastways you know her now.’
One day – it is her idea – they walk up Cromwell with a picnic, her grandmother staunch and stiff, the chair they bring for her turned west to look down on all she owns – the fields let to Glasgow men, Kendal and Cessnock men. And beyond the Jarrett acreage – see the roofs there? – Green Island, where Bernardette was schooled; and beyond that the gleam of the sea, out at the end of things.
‘I like it here,’ Sydney says, and Mrs Jarrett says, ‘I’m glad’ – first to him, then to Sybil. She grabs Sybil’s hand in her own (which hurts, the old woman’s being all rings, skin and bone). ‘Thank you for coming,’ she says, and Sybil gives some awkward answer she mutters and forgets. ‘Thank you for having me.’ That’s what it might have been.
The days pass so easily. The sun at six: the sun at seven. Cutlassfish for Friday supper. Sydney and Cornelius, clearing land beyond the lawns, playing dominoes at night, pruning the pepper trees with their leaves like burnished leather. The downpour that comes on them all just as September ends, rain hemming the eaves. Four days of October breeze in which the young trees buck and sway. Then clear days again, like a bounty, the earth still warm, the nights like velvet.
The night she goes to Sydney’s room for the first time. He opens the door. There she is, barefoot, blue-lit, her lamp guttering.
He shivers when she touches him. He sweats and sweats under her hands. Ssh, she says, ssh, but still he is abject, grotesque, not to her but to himself. He breathes so fast it is as if he might be drowning.
Then the hunger takes him. Thought leaves him, and leaves him graceful. He is strong and sure as he has always been, alone, in the darkest places. His skin smells of smoke and resin.
‘I have to tell you something,’ he says afterwards, and he does. He tells her everything. Her head is on his chest. Sometimes she weeps. Later she sleeps and wakes to find him still talking of things she has never known. Her brother playing made-up games, her mother in the street of flowers, the songs men sing in Erith. There is no end to what he needs to tell, nor she to hear from him.
Letters come from London. When are you coming home? they say, and Sybil writes back. Soon, she says. At first it is the truth, and later it is still a truth, but not one they will understand until, given time, it sinks in.
Here is something you could know, Clarence writes, his script crabbed like his fingers by the wretched English winter. This is from when I was younger than you. I was working nightwatch at Frome sugar factory, which maybe you can see it now. It used to be we hitched down and walked back if it came to it. It was five miles. It was three fellows together.
Coming home it was still dark but getting on for dawn. It was the morning after I asked your mother for her hand. I saw her from a way off and when she saw me – how she smiled!! She was standing at the Glasgow crossroads. I saw that and I knew, how she smiled to see me come, that she meant to be mine. There she was, waiting for me, shining like a firefly.
She is on the terrace, fixing washing. Inside her gran is pottering, singing badly to herself some buoyant old island song. Down the drive Sybil sees their truck rattling home to them, its dust and flashes through the flametrees. Sydney is bringing up supplies, ice and fish and bottled gas and no doubt something small to make her smile from Green Island: there are always treats with him. Letters from England, too, if her luck is in.
But then it is in any case. Sybil needs no letter, no reminder to count her blessings. You make your own luck, alright, but you better cherish it. Maybe it comes in now and one day it draws out again. Sybil means to mind her blessings, to make the best of each of them.
Soon Sydney will walk on up, her gentle handsome man. He will lean into her kiss, sit and talk awhile, and when he goes from her he will leave reluctantly, as if nowhere but by her side is he at home in the world. It is a life. It is their life to come, and there is good in it.
5. Dora in October
She is thinking of happiness. Happiness, Dora thinks, isn’t at all like joy. Joy grasps you so fiercely, catches you up and sets you down before you know what’s happening, as if there has been some mistake and joy was never meant for you. You’re too fragile to live with joy: you bear it for no more than seconds. Joy feels as if it must be meant for angels, or animals.
And happiness? You must be happy, people tell her, and Dora wonders, must I be? Am I to be happy, then?
Joy, you know it when it grips you, you feel it so palpably that you might die of it. But happiness . . . to Dora, it’s less a feeling than a thought. There are days when she wonders if she even believes in it. She doubts it as others doubt love. It’s what people are meant to want. It’s so mild and virtuous. Happiness ever after: it’s the child’s consolation when the story is all said and done.
What if you had to choose? What if – Dora asks herself – you could have only one thing forever, what would it be for you, would it be joy or happiness?
*
She’s in Rantzen’s Fashions – not to buy at Dudley Rantzen’s prices; she only stopped to spend a penny – and there is Mary Lockhart, from the old days, from the Buildings.
Hide! Dora’s body says, and it doesn’t give her time to argue, it’s creeping crabwise back along the aisle towards the changing rooms – rump swishing through the coats – but it’s too late, Mary’s waving.
; ‘Dora!’ she calls, ‘Dora Lazarus? It is you, isn’t it?’
‘Mary,’ Dora says, emerging weakly. ‘I didn’t recognise you. Except you haven’t changed a bit.’
‘Oh, don’t,’ Mary says, and it’s true, the lie is clumsy. An English rose, Solly used to call Mary, with the thorns left on. Dora wonders what he’d call her now. Certainly she’s still handsome, still lovely in the bone . . . but there’s too much bone on show, too little softening flesh. As she leans in for a kiss Dora flinches at the smell of her: an evening perfume, the cloy of too many cigarettes, and something nastier beneath their musk and ammonia.
‘Are you in a hurry?’ Mary asks. ‘Could we go for tea?’
‘I’m sorry, Mary, I have a meeting of the residents . . .’
‘Oh, that’s a pity,’ Mary says, and it’s peculiar, but she sounds as if she means it. Did we ever once sit down together? Dora asks herself. So if not then, why now? We made strange neighbours then, and now we are only strangers.
‘Everything else has changed,’ Mary is saying, ‘around here, I mean. I’d heard, but it’s another thing to see it. I suppose it’s for the best. The Buildings were dreadful, weren’t they? Where are you living now?’
‘The Newling Estate,’ Dora says, and, pride making her unguarded, ‘We have a little garden.’
Mary smiles keenly down at her. ‘Aren’t you the lucky one?’
‘Oh yes,’ says Dora, ‘ever so.’
‘How did you swing that, with just the boy? Or did you have your own, later?’
‘No, none of our own. And you, Mary? Where do you live now?’ she asks, though she already knows.
‘Highbury, for our sins.’
You have no shame, Dora thinks, to speak in the same breath of your family’s sins and success; but ‘You’ve done well for yourselves,’ is all she says.
‘We’ve worked for it. Well, that’s Michael, there’s never been any stopping him.’
‘You won’t come this way often, then?’
‘No . . . I was just passing,’ Mary says, and some of the air seems to go out of her, her gaze wandering across the winter-dressed mannequins and the clientele, who thumb Rantzen’s wools and furs as if they are still marketgoers, testing meat for tenderness. Mary frowns, as if puzzled to have ended up amongst them. ‘I had a call to make in Whitechapel. My son in-law, you know, he’s a surgeon at the London.’
‘Yes,’ Dora says, ‘I did hear that. You must be proud,’ she says to Mary, as she said to Iris four years ago; but what she thinks is, Hospitals. That’s the smell, the one she hides.
‘Well,’ Mary says, fussing with her bag, ‘I suppose this is goodbye, then,’ and smiles with a sadness Dora never thought she could possess.
She’s old, Dora thinks. And sick. You wouldn’t know we’re almost of an age. Of course she has had children, too: and then, the thought vindictive, Michael must still love her very much.
‘Goodbye Mary,’ she says.
She is herself still pretty, in her way. Solly says so. Other men, too, with their looks and words. Once that would have made her shy and it remains a surprise to her, a thrill, half-anticipated, half-disbelieving.
She is uncoarsened, unsatisfied. Still hungry, still slim and firm, her flesh filling her skin. There is still a glow to her. She walks with her chin up. She is happy with Solly, happier with him than with anyone. But there are other things than happiness.
She takes the long way home from Rantzen’s, enjoying the autumn sunshine. The estate children have come out to play. Dora calls their names and they run up, larking at her heels, breathlessly chattering. ‘There’s eels in Lee’s all in a bucket!’ cries Ria Isaacs. ‘We put our hands in them!’
‘Well, aren’t you brave?’ Dora says. She remembers Ria before she was born. The flutter and butt of a babe in the belly. The elder sister, Bessie, six years old and grimly determined, sitting out in the road with a handscrawled sign until her mother Sarah heard of it and hauled her in: FOR SALE, GIRL BABY, 2d.
Will we would we
Can we could we
Might we may we
Kiss the baby?
Dora, Dora, Solly always says, Why is it always not enough? I have far more better things to do with my time than watch my wife being sad. Watching her being happy – that would be a better thing. I could be listening to her singing. Why be sad, dearest? Nothing in life is perfect. Look at what we have.
What do we have? she will ask, and he will take her hand, press it, rub it between his own as if to kindle warmth in her.
‘We have us,’ he says.
But why can’t things be perfect? Some things almost are. The delight of infants. Music. There are Bach sonatas – those she dared play as a girl – which seem to Dora so transcendent, so unbridled in their brilliance, that only in performance are they anchored to the earth. A man made them. What man can make, cannot men live?
There is no residents’ meeting: she was invited to one once, but was too timid to attend. Not that Mary will ever know that. Dora walks through Newling’s titanic shadows, opens her front door, locks out the world behind her. She sees to her face and makes Solly his tea. Two rounds of salted dripping, the fat studded with scratchings; two of chopped liver. She cuts the crusts and lays them out: tomorrow they’ll be crumb for schnitzel. Sun floods the dusty windowpane, illuminates her nimble hands, the hatch, the piano’s treble end. It is October and still warmish, though the long days are drawing in and people stay outside, making the best of it, basking and brooding on winter. In Market Square, Jack Harrow’s Staff bitch lies on her back, nipples bared for all to see, and barks at the afternoon, on and on, like a silly girl with hiccoughs. No dogs, the Market Square signs say, No ball games, No hawkers.
‘Solly?’ Dora calls, ‘dripping or liver?’
No reply. Dora makes up a plate. In passing, on her way, her hand reaches to touch the wall-turned picture on the piano, as if it were a talisman.
Solly is snoring in his deckchair – bought on impulse in the spring – the wireless beside him talking about Apollo and the dark side of the moon. Dora looms over it, picking at the sandwiches, then glances at her neighbours’ curtains, sets down the plate, turns off the wireless, kneels.
He’s a well-made man, her one. Not tall and not what you’d call handsome – not that she’s ever told him so – but stocky and hard-wearing, like a thing you’d be sensible to buy. He’ll be fifty-four this year, but he could be almost anything, thirty or seventy. His arms are big and freckled and sunburned from the elbows down. Under his string vest his chest is thick with red hair. When he sleeps he isn’t gentle, the way some are: the dozing Solly frowns. You can see the animal in him. He’s a bear, an ape . . . or what? An orangutang, that’s it. The Times is crushed protectively against one hairy armpit. From his free hand his pipe droops: his knuckles graze the lawn. As Dora bends to look, a single ant climbs up his thumb, pausing in the unruly hairs, rearing, sending messages: we are entering unknown lands.
She takes another bite of sandwich, then reaches out, weaves her fingers through the vest, into his hair, and grips him, waking him with a start.
‘We’re closed,’ he says, ‘no! Mmn, what? Oh. I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘You snore too loud,’ she says, and he catches her in one foreshank, swings her down onto him. ‘Don’t! Look, it’s tea time, I did you dripping.’
‘For dripping,’ Solly says, ‘a fellow would forgive you anything,’ and he leans down for the plate.
You’ll never guess who I saw, she wants to say. But she shouldn’t. There is no good at all to be had from raking up the Lockharts.
‘Ah,’ he sighs, munching. ‘How do you always know what I want?’
‘I put my ear to your head,’ she says, ‘and listen to your dreams’; but Solly is starting to frown.
‘Wait. Don’t move.’
‘What? What is it?’
‘Look at that,’ he says, ‘will you? I’m telling you, these ants. They’re in for the high jum
p now, see, they’ve eaten half my sandwiches.’
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘Solly.’
Some dawns, as she wakes, she finds herself thinking, I’d like to go home now, please, can I?
She doesn’t mean Shoreditch, nor the Buildings, though she does miss them. It’s Danzig she really wants. To start again, to have another run: that’s what Danzig would mean. But it’s no good, Danzig is gone. Even the name has been effaced. There is no going back, however much she yearns for it.
She is forty-eight, only forty-eight, and so often thinking of the past. She dwells on it. Dwells in it, almost, lingering over its attendant happinesses and unhappinesses. And its joys too, of course. Like this.
*
In the Columbia Buildings square the LCC men are talking. Each one steps up to say his piece, clambering onto the tailboard of a public information van which has been parked up for the purpose: his colleagues nod and tamp their pipes until they’re called upon. There are three of them, all younger than Dora, each with the oilskin confidence of local government. They’re not shy to raise their voices: they might as well be costers, with lungs on them like that. The second man totters as he gets down, one arm windmilling, and laughter eddies through the crowd . . . but the truth is it’s muted, with no proper malice to it. These days the Buildings can’t muster much in the way of a public gathering. Most got out years ago, all those who had the cash or chance for something, anything, elsewhere. It is March 1957, and the Buildings are being condemned.
‘A few of you,’ the third man says – he is the most senior of them – ‘a few of you may have heard rumours that portions of the Columbia Market Buildings would remain habitable for awhile. Let me hit such speculation on the head. You should all of you be making alternative living arrangements today, if you have not done so already, whether with us or through your own enterprises. By this time next year the tenements you see now will have been demolished in their entirety. In five years this land will be occupied by brand new homes, designed, as Mr Laing has told you, by the best architects, to the highest modern specifications, with conveniences and space to suit the needs of the twentieth century family, and with planned occupancy comfortably exceeding that afforded currently. I will be frank with you. You know as well as I do that your habitations here are damp, cramped, poorly ventilated, badly plumbed, inadequately lit . . . I could go on, and no doubt so could you. Our ambition is to make these slum defects things of the past –’
