by Juliet West
At the end of his shift he leaves Beaumont’s and wanders into the nearest pub, buys a pint of stout and chooses a small meat pie from the tray on the counter. He takes the table in the corner, away from the heat of the fire, and pulls a book from his jacket pocket.
The novel is not a good one, the prose flat and repetitive so that he finds it difficult to concentrate. Is it the writing, or is it him? Perhaps it is not possible to surrender to a story in the way he did when he was a boy. He thinks again of Jude the Obscure, of the cold, disbelieving horror that made him sick in the woods behind the Dorset house. He’d read the book in three days, creeping into the woods when his aunt thought he was playing in the field with the dairy farmer’s sons.
Aunt Winch had told him not to bother Lady Tolland, but he wanted to return Jude the Obscure in person. Perhaps he might even feel bold enough to ask her opinion. He couldn’t sleep with the whole thing in his head, the very sight of a cupboard door making his food rise with the memory of the babies and Little Father Time, their limp bodies hanging from two hooks and a sturdy nail.
He found his moment after breakfast one morning, when Lady Tolland was walking around the garden. She had stopped to admire a white flowered shrub, and as he edged to her side, the book clutched in both hands, she turned and smiled.
‘Such a delicate hydrangea,’ she said. ‘The petals are like babies’ fingernails.’
He swallowed hard, glanced up at the hydrangea and tried not to think of the fingernails.
‘I’m returning the book, Lady Tolland. I’m very grateful for the borrow, thank you.’
‘You have finished it already? And what is your opinion?’
‘I . . . I . . .’ He had wanted her opinion. ‘I did like it, but it was very tragic. I was wondering, ma’am: why would Mr Hardy imagine such terrible things?’
‘I hope the answer is always beyond your knowing.’
‘Because it ain’t true, is it? The hangings?’
‘Who can know? Who can know what poverty and shame may bestow?’ Then she bent to sniff the bloom, holding the hydrangea stem between her thumb and forefinger. Her mood seemed to change as she waved her black-gloved hand at the book and, with the same gesture, motioned him away towards the house.
‘There’s no need to return it to me out here. Lay it on the hall table, would you, and have Immy take it up to my room?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. At the mention of Immy’s name, he felt a hot blush spread through his body. He bowed and began to walk away, but she called out again.
‘If you wish, I’ll see to it that you may read from my sister’s library during your stay. You’ll find a great variety in there.’
In his head there was a kind of reverse explosion: a thousand fragments of possibility soldering into one.
6
I write to George every week, like I promised, but there’s been nothing from him for a while now, not even a postcard. You bump into other soldiers’ wives and often they’ll lower their voices, all confidential, start saying how much they miss the old man and how they’re ill with the worry. I join in, of course, say the same things, but the honest truth is, I’m not ill with the worry. I miss him in some ways, it’s true. I miss our own rooms. I miss him for the children’s sake. But there’s plenty I don’t miss: his fingers inching up my nightdress, his wet lips kissing me on a Saturday night.
I stoke up the stove and refill the second kettle so that everything is in order when Mrs Stephens comes down from her rest. She’s put a fresh pinny on, but when she smiles, there’s a strand of beef trapped between her front teeth. I don’t say anything, just smile back.
‘Many in?’ she asks.
‘Only a handful.’
‘Mondays is always quiet. And it’s still raining. You’ll get the tram home today?’
I shrug. ‘I’ll end up soaked just walking to the stop. Might as well save me money.’
‘Tell you what . . .’ she says, and disappears back upstairs.
I squeeze out the cloth and wipe down the tables, not that they really need it. It makes me jump when the bell over the door rings and Mr Blake walks in.
‘Just a coffee today, Mrs Loxwood,’ he says.
He doesn’t have a newspaper; instead he pulls a letter from his jacket pocket and starts reading. When I place his cup on the table, he says thank you in an absent-minded kind of way that makes me feel invisible.
‘Mrs Loxwood?’ he calls.
I turn back to face him, pulling out my pad because I suppose he’ll be wanting food after all.
He looks up at me and for the first time I see the details of him. Such truthful eyes. Brown eyes, same as mine, but there are slants of yellow like golden spokes, beautiful as sunlight.
The sound of rain in the street is insistent, pressing.
‘Ain’t it . . . terrible weather?’ he says.
‘Ain’t it?’
I can feel the pulse in my finger as it grips the pencil. Mr Blake’s eyes move from my face to my hands. He opens his mouth to speak.
The door to Mrs Stephens’s flat bangs and she appears behind the counter. ‘You can borrow this,’ she says, waving a black umbrella with an ivory handle. ‘Now off you pop – it’s well past three.’
Mr Blake resumes his reading of the letter. I walk through to the back to collect my coat.
By the time I get to Blackwall, I’m already soaked through, and the vicious easterly has turned Mrs Stephens’s umbrella inside out. At the approach to the tunnel, there’s a commotion involving a horse tethered up to a van. The horse doesn’t want to go in the tunnel, keeps dancing to the side and rearing up, until the back doors of the van fly open and several crates smash out, dumping vegetables across the road. Beetroot, I think, but it’s hard to be sure with the rain and the wind battering my face. The driver is trying to calm the horse, leaning in to stroke him, but you can tell the animal is too spooked and he’s going to have a hell of a job getting him through to Greenwich. What do you expect without blinkers? That horse isn’t stupid.
Truth is, I’ve never been through the tunnel myself, although I did once try.
I must have been five and Jen would have been eight. The tunnel had just opened: on the day of the ceremony we’d seen the royal carriage go past on the dock road and we’d heard the band playing at the rec. Next morning, Sunday, Jen had shaken me from sleep in the bed we shared. ‘Wake up,’ she whispered, poking her toenails into my ankle for good measure. ‘Wake up – we’re going on an adventure.’
We left Ellesmere Street ten minutes later, telling Mum we were calling on Granny Hinton, who lived a couple of roads away. We walked right down to the high street, past Poplar Workhouse, where the shadowy windows seemed to have their sights fixed on me. Beyond the workhouse lay East India Dock, its sharp crane hooks and black masts scratching at the sky.
Jen knew I was frightened to walk past the workhouse, but she told me I had to keep going. I wondered if Ruby from the infant school was still in there. Her beautiful black curls all shaved off; that’s what they were saying in the playground.
‘Scaredy-cat, scaredy-cat, don’t know what you’re looking at,’ Jen chanted, dropping my hand and rushing ahead, so that I had no choice but to follow her along the street, chasing up Robin Hood Lane until the tunnel entrance was in sight. We stood and gawped as a carriage was swallowed into the wide black mouth.
Jen stared at a sign screwed to the red brick of the tunnel gatehouse.
‘“Ped-er . . .”’
‘“Pedestrians,”’ I said.
She gave me an evil look, then put her hands in her pinafore pockets. ‘D’you think we have to pay? Well, we ain’t got no money, so we’ll just have to chance it. Come on.’
Jen crouched down past the gatehouse window, in case there was someone inside. I was little: I didn’t need to crouch. Down the stone spiral staircase we went, into the gloom. The tunnel was lit by flickering electric lamps and the shadows were like coal heaps, sliding and trembling. We were used
to smells, the stink of the docks and the factory chimneys, but this was a new kind of smell. There was something so heavy about it, close, like a poisoned rag smothering your face. Again, I wanted to turn back, but Jen held my hand, dragging me on.
‘Wally Mills dared me,’ she said. ‘He’s done it twice already. We ’as to count how many electric lamps is on the walls, for proof. Three so far.’
Then came the water. A small drop of water, which fell from the high arched roof onto the top of my nose.
‘Can it rain in a tunnel, Jen?’
‘What you on about?’
‘There’s water falling, on me nose.’
Jen turned round, saw the drop trickling down my nose and cackled. ‘The Drink’s coming in,’ she laughed. ‘We’re all gonna drown!’
The Drink. That meant the sea, the river, the whole bottomless swirl of it, and I knew for sure that all those walls were cracking and the weight of the Thames was about to come crashing down. I turned round and ran, back up the spiral staircase, each breath a sharp pinch, and the sound of Jen’s laughter echoing behind.
‘Easy, easy.’ Now the van driver is walking the spooked horse round in circles, tugging at the bridle to keep his head down so he can’t see the tunnel entrance. Some of the beetroot are mashed into the road, pink and muddy, and others have rolled away. A girl runs out from the Tunnel Gardens, swipes a beetroot from a puddle. She shoves it into her pinafore pocket and runs off, startling the horse again as she flashes past.
Alice and Teddy are with a crowd of other children, larking and screeching at the end of the street near the railway line. They’re wet through and I can’t believe Jen has let them out in this weather. Teddy will catch it with his chest. He’s always the first to sicken. When Alice sees me, she runs over, Teddy following, his Ducky wobbling from the waistband of his breeches.
‘We found a dead rat, biggest ever,’ says Alice.
‘All opened up,’ Teddy adds, his voice high-pitched, almost hysterical. ‘All bleurghy and red.’
‘Did you touch it, Teddy?’ I try to smile a little. If I sound too cross, he won’t tell the truth.
‘Alice poked it with a stick. White bits came out.’
‘Back to the house, both of you. Where’s your Auntie Jen?’
‘With Nana,’ says Alice. ‘Nana came round crying and they had to go off.’
‘Go off where?’
‘Don’t know.’ Alice is sulky now, slouching towards the house.
‘Don’t take on, Alice – I ain’t got the energy. Get in the yard.’
Teddy cries while I’m washing his hands. The bar of Sunlight is thin with a sharp edge and when I drop it, it slips straight down the grate. Alice laughs, hopping from one foot to the other in her maddening way.
‘Wait there,’ I tell them. There’s another bar in the scullery, cracked and yellow, but too big at least to disappear underground. I look around for a note from Jen, but there’s nothing. Nothing in the hall either, behind the button box. On the parlour table is a cup of tea that hasn’t been touched, as if Jen has left in a tearing hurry.
My first thought is to take off to the tenements to try to find Mum, drag the kids along with me. But it will be dark soon and there’s every chance we’d cross paths, end up in a worse muddle. Teddy’s little teeth are chattering, and Alice is still hopping around, asking me questions I can’t answer, like ‘When is Auntie Jen back?’ and ‘Why was Nana crying?’ I get them indoors, strip off their damp clothes and tell them to warm up in bed while their things are drying.
Before long they’re messing about, Alice singing and the floorboards banging. I’m about to go upstairs, calm them, when there’s a knock on the parlour window and a ‘Yoo-hoo.’
Dor.
She comes round the back into the scullery, dripping wet.
‘Jen sent me,’ she says.
‘It’s Dad, ain’t it?’
She nods, taking off her wet coat and draping it over the mop handle behind the door. She follows me into the parlour.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Disappeared this morning. Your mum popped down the market, forgot to lock up and he walked right out.’ She sits in the armchair by the range, reaches into her skirt pocket for her cigarette tin.
‘And?’ My heart starts knocking. In my head, there’s a picture of Beatrice: the poppy-out fish eyes, the purple claws for hands.
‘And your mum spent hours looking in the usual places – Ellesmere Street, where she called on me, the workshop – till she ended up at the nick and sure enough they had him in the cells. Public disturbance, they said.’
‘But they can’t . . . He’s ill!’
‘It’s all right. They haven’t charged him with nothing. They’ve sent him to the nuts’ ward at the hospital. Jen’s gone with your mum to take his things.’
Upstairs, Teddy starts to howl. Alice taunts him. ‘Crybaby,’ she says. ‘Stupid baby.’
‘I’ll go and sort the kids out,’ says Dor, sliding the unlit cigarette behind her ear. ‘Jen and your mum’ll be home soon. You make some tea.’ She nods at the kettle on the stove.
Dor cheers the kids up in no time and has them singing one of her silly songs.
‘Have a banana!’ Alice starts shouting.
Teddy giggles. ‘’Nana, ’nana,’ he chants.
I stand watching the kettle, and the main thing is that I feel terribly guilty, because I haven’t been round to see Dad since before I started at the cafe. The sight of him that day – a dumb creature under a blanket – it did something to me, gave me a queer feeling low down, like my insides were curling up.
Above the mantelpiece, three pictures hang in a column, smoke-stained from the range. I take them down one by one and rub the glass with my sleeve. The first photograph shows Mum and Dad standing behind Jen and me, the four of us wearing our best clothes and Mum in her two strings of imitation pearls. Jen and I are sitting together on a wooden bench, my boots swinging, hers pointing down, the tips just touching the floor. It’s 1900. I remember the date because that’s why we had the picture taken. ‘To mark the turn of the century,’ Dad had said, though at the age of eight I didn’t care too much for the turn of the century. It sounded like something old and creaky – hardly worth celebrating, or getting pulled into best clothes for, having to stand still while the man disappeared under the cloak of his camera.
The next photograph is Jen and Alec on their wedding day, seven years later, Jen aged seventeen. She is wearing a high collar of lace and a brooch at her throat that looks as if it’s killing her. Alec seemed handsome then, in his skinny way. I didn’t blame Jen for marrying him. We all thought Alec was a catch, a bit of class from the city with a rag-trade fortune he reckoned to inherit. The charm wore off and the fortune was lost, but give him his dues: he brings in a wage every week – his ‘commission’, as he calls it. I’ve never quite found out what he does for a living, but to my knowledge, he’s never been behind with the rent.
The last photograph shows me and George on our wedding day, February 1912. Of course, it’s only our heads and shoulders that’s showing because we had to keep my middle out of view. I held the posy of flowers over my stomach, camomile and fern, with gardenias for purity, a gift from Jen at the last minute. ‘Just my little joke,’ said Jen. ‘No need to look so po-faced.’
Dad had been ill for a few years by then, but he managed to come to our wedding. Oh yes, I’ll never forget Dad at my wedding. He was high as a kite – one of his maniacal moods, the mood that always comes before the melancholy. All through the service he talked and mumbled, and at the end he shouted, ‘Bravo!’ and clapped his hands as if he’d just watched a turn at the music hall.
I spray a fine layer of spit on the glass of the photo – pffft, pffft – like I’m cleaning shoes, then rub at it until our faces shine out. Do I miss you, George? I stare at your long, straight nose and your pale skin, smooth like a boy’s. What children we are, in this picture. I blush to think of our wedding night, how a
wkward we were together. We lay apart on the cold sheets. George didn’t touch me on account of my condition, though Dor had told me that it was perfectly safe – she had a married friend who’d read it in a book – and in fact I ought to make the most of it because I couldn’t fall for another child all the time I was expecting. But how could I tell George that, even if I’d wanted him to touch me? It would have embarrassed us both to talk of such things. Instead I asked him what his dreams were, his ambitions. He replied he’d need to think about it; what were mine? There was no point saying a clerking job, a job where I could use my brain and write words on paper, because no office would have me now that I was married. So I told him my ambition was to be a good mother to our baby. And a good wife, I added, and he patted the top of my shoulder through my cotton nightdress. ‘The same,’ he said. ‘A good dad and husband. Here’s to Mr and Mrs Loxwood.’ I lay awake after that listening to the tick of our new mantel clock, a present from Mum and Dad. The clock struck eleven, a dull chime, and George began to snore.
Footsteps skip down the stairs and Dor reappears in the parlour. I hang the photograph back on the wall.
‘Reckon they’re ready for their tea,’ says Dor. ‘Want me to peel some spuds?’
‘Don’t be daft. You’ve done enough, traipsing over here on such a filthy day.’ More than anything I want her to stay, but it’s not fair to keep her here. I’m trapped in this gloomy house; I can’t expect to trap her too.
‘If you’re sure, Hannah. But listen, why don’t you come down the White Horse on Friday night? I’m meeting some of the girls from the factory.’
‘Just you and the girls?’
Dor rolls her eyes to the ceiling, like I’m a terrible prig.
‘Unless you can think of any unattached gentlemen willing to chaperone us? Come on, Hannah. Do you good.’
It’s so easy for Dor. If she fancies going out, off she goes, and now she expects me to come too. Shouldn’t complain, though. I should be thankful she bothers asking.
‘I’ll see. See how Mum is.’
‘Well, if you don’t come Friday, I’ll pop round Sunday. Might bring some sherry, eh? I can do your hair like Holly Forrester.’ She pulls a strand from my pinned-up plaits and curls the hair round her index finger. The loose ringlet falls towards my shoulder.
