by Juliet West
‘In hell? She didn’t do nothing wrong.’
‘The way she carried on? Took the easy way out, didn’t she.’
‘But I thought . . . it was an accident.’
‘You know what thought did.’
Followed the muck cart and thought it was a wedding.
‘Auntie Bea jumped in?’
‘I don’t know much more than that.’ Mum’s voice is guarded now. ‘She left a note. She was drinking too much, finding it hard to get straight, after Matthew left.’
Uncle Matthew. I remember him a little, the day of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Everyone traipsed up London Bridge to watch the procession. Dad gave me a shoulder ride, said Jen was too heavy and she’d have to walk. I sailed above the crowd. From Dad’s shoulders I could look down on Uncle Matthew’s bald head, the little blemishes and scars, the outline of skull bones underneath.
‘What happened to Uncle Matthew?’
‘We lost touch with him after she died. I heard he moved away, somewhere up north.’
‘Why did he leave her, though?’
‘Oh, Bea and her gadding about. She didn’t know how to be a wife.’
Above us, Alec starts up his coughing and Jen’s heavy limbs shift in the bed. Through the ceiling comes the tired rumble of her voice. She’ll be sitting up next to him, rubbing his back now, asking if he wants more powders.
Mum dozes on her mattress. I can’t draw my eyes from the glow of the coals and I can’t stop thinking about Auntie Beatrice. It’s her green satin dress I remember: the enamel buttons, each one painted with a tiny picture of a cat. My favourite was the Siamese; it had a matching green ribbon round its neck. Auntie Beatrice was wearing that dress the time she took me to a pub at Coldharbour, bought me a sherry and lemonade, and made me promise not to tell. Later we stood on the jetty, looking out across the water. ‘See, Hannah, the river is smiling,’ she said, her eyes misty with joy. Auntie Beatrice was right: I could see the smiles, the little waves bobbing past Bugsby’s Marshes like a thousand upturned mouths.
Next time I saw her, she was slumped against the dock wall. Mickey Austen had come to tell Mum, greasy cap in hand and his one buck tooth wobbling as he stuttered out the news. Mum rushed out the house, told us to stay inside and wait for Dad, but Jen said we should follow, fifty yards behind so Mum wouldn’t spot us.
Auntie Beatrice’s skin was smooth and red as a yew berry, not wrinkly from the water like you’d imagine. She had poppy-out staring fish eyes, until the constable bent over to force her lids down. Ribbon slithered down her neck, and her hands were swollen, purple fingers curled like claws. The cat buttons glistened on her green dress.
‘Third one since Christmas,’ the constable said, fingers drumming on his notebook. Mum nodded, her hand up to the side of her face so she didn’t have to look at the body.
The constable leaned in towards Mum, lowering his voice. ‘Had there been any . . . trouble?’ he asked.
Mum said something we couldn’t hear. Jen put her finger on her lips and we crept out from behind the police van. I remember how pale Jen looked in the cold dusk light.
The copper spotted us, of course. He raised his eyebrows at Mum and nodded in our direction. She turned round and frowned.
‘Jen! Hannah!’ she said. ‘Get home this minute. Go on – your dad’ll be back soon.’
The constable glowered at us: me, a scrawny six-year-old; Jen, chubby in a too-tight pinafore, wild ginger hair frizzing from her plaits. ‘You heard your mother,’ he said. ‘Now ’op it.’
We ran back along the high street, then slowed to a nervy pace, taking the shortcut through the bowling green and the graveyard until we reached the rec. We were in no hurry to get back home. We didn’t want to be the ones to tell Dad that his sister had drowned.
I never saw the river’s smiles again, though I often tried. Poor Auntie Beatrice. Not an accident, then. I wish I had been older, wish I could have talked to her or known something of her troubles.
Mum sighs in her sleep. The fire has almost died. She didn’t know how to be a wife. The wedding ring feels cold round my neck. I slip my hand through my blouse and warm it with my fingers.
13
Lady Tolland has never given him a key, so there is no choice but to break in. The lean-to door is always left unlocked, and from there he can climb onto the butler sink and force up the sash window, which has a loose catch. The window opens into the large kitchen at the back of the house. He squeezes through, tilting his broad shoulders, arching his body to avoid the low table stacked with mixing bowls and tarnished jelly moulds. He drops down onto the floor, the soles of his socks slipping on the tiles. He steadies himself, then leans against the table, surveying the kitchen and listening for unexpected footsteps.
He is certain the house is empty: Lady Tolland is still in Dorset. The Zeppelin raids have played hell with her nerves and she has vowed to stay out of London until the end of the war. A neighbour’s maid is looking in twice a week to air the rooms and check the traps for mice. She is unlikely to come on a Sunday.
All the gardening jobs are done, what little there is to do in the winter: water the greenhouse plants; make sure the apple store is dry; dig over the vegetable plot ready for spring sowing. Today he felt the garden stirring: humming, almost, the snowdrop shoots pushing through the leaf-mulched earth, delicate and fearless.
The kitchen has barely changed since he first visited on that warm autumn day so many years ago. Everything has its place – the copper pans, the pickling jars, the three sets of weighing scales. The clutter still fascinates him; he finds something comforting in the busy rows of shelves, the dresser crammed with gilt-edged crockery, the trappings of a wealthier past. Over the years Aunt Winch had gossiped snippets of the story: how Lord and Lady Tolland once owned a mansion in the best square in Knightsbridge. After his lordship died, the gambling debts emerged, along with his two mistresses and their several bastard children. Lady Tolland was forced to move, went from twenty-eight rooms to eleven, if you included the entrance vestibule of the Greenwich house and the attic room with its tiny skylight. She was almost penniless, and if it were not for the generosity of her brother-in-law, she wouldn’t have a London house at all.
He sniffs the shut-up air, the familiar smell of damp dog, though Lula has been dead for months now. He misses Lula, her whorled black spaniel fur, the way she padded behind him on the lawn as he pushed the roller up and down, up and down, imprinting the vertical lines that Lady Tolland found so pleasing.
On the windowsill, a pink cyclamen blooms in a green-glazed pot. The neighbour’s maid must have watered it.
For the first time in over a year – the first time since Esther died – he senses possibility: a shred of something less bleak. Is it wrong to imagine this other woman, to picture her standing before him, hair loose around her shoulders?
A tap drips and Esther floods back into his mind, a guilty reproach, and it is as if his dead wife’s palm is pressed again in his. Her hand was still damp when the orderlies came to wheel away her body. Christmas Eve, such a cruel date for a death. When their son woke on Christmas morning, he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. Instead he dangled a white sugar mouse by its tail, told Sam that Mummy was still poorly, but that she sent her love and this little Christmas treat. ‘“Make it last,” Mummy says. “Make it last, Sam!”’
Maddie was just a baby: the memory of her mother’s milk would fade soon enough, and Ellen insisted she had more than enough milk for two. It made him queasy, his sister with her enormous breasts, clamping Maddie onto her nipple, her own baby sleeping in the cradle nearby. Capable in a crisis, dear Ellen. Very capable.
He thinks of their third child, a boy, born too soon and never named, the only trace of him recorded on Esther’s death certificate: ‘24th December 1915. Cause of death: 1. Incomplete abortion. 2. Septicaemia.’
Was it his fault, allowing the pregnancy to happen so soon after Maddie?
He had carried Esther mo
st of the way to the hospital, her blood-soaked skirts staining his hands and coat so that when they arrived, the nurses weren’t sure who to treat first.
‘The womb is not a machine,’ the doctor had lectured in the hospital corridor as a nurse took Esther’s temperature. ‘A woman’s body needs time to recover, however pressing one’s desire. Think of fornication as a bus ride . . . Are you with me?’
He had nodded. His throat was too dry to speak. He knew about the bus ride, of course he did. Standard advice for eager lads.
‘So the trick is to bump along and then to jump off the bus one stop before the one you want. All right? Capital,’ and the doctor had patted him on the arm as he turned away. Christ, the nerve of that man.
His fingernails have dug into the edge of Lady Tolland’s pine table, leaving a pattern of tiny crescents. He walks over to the large window overlooking the back garden, fixes his eyes on the snowdrop shoots until the memory subsides.
In Lady Tolland’s library – a small, crimson-papered room between the kitchen and the drawing room – he unloads four books: one from each trouser pocket and two from the saggy lining of his jacket. Lady Tolland is very old now, over seventy, he’s sure, but her eyes are sharp as ever. What would she say if she discovered him here? He imagines he could win her round . . . They could drive a fresh bargain. She has always liked a bargain. In any case, he has kept his side of the pact: the garden is well cared for; the wisteria no longer invades the windowpanes; the bindweed is as good as banished. Lady Tolland’s promise, however, escapes her each time she goes away. She should trust him with a key.
Slowly he paces the shelf-lined walls of the library, slotting the books back into their original places, until he holds a single volume in his hand. He traces the gilt lettering of the cover: Satires of Circumstances, Lyrics and Reveries. He has written out all Hardy’s poems, keeps the papers in a trunk. Still, he turns the pages until he reaches ‘The Going’:
Well, well! All’s past amend,
Unchangeable. It must go.
I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon . . .
He shuts the book, clasps it tight for a moment, then slides it onto the shelf. A dead man held on end. Surely this year will be different? It is 1917 and he wants to feel alive.
As he passes back through the kitchen, he looks at the calendar nailed to the wall. Next birthday he will be thirty. He thinks of Sam and little Maddie, how happy they seemed this Christmas at Ellen and Alf ’s house, playing with their cousin, patting Ellen’s enormous belly and asking would the stork come soon. When they went for a walk in the woods, Sam had run ahead, called out, ‘Daddy!’ when he spotted a strange fungus growing from a tree trunk. ‘Coming!’ he and Alf had called in unison. Sam turned and glanced between them, picked up a stick and jabbed at the fungus so that it crumbled from the tree in a cloud of spores.
A grating sound echoes from Lady Tolland’s hallway. A key turning in the door? He lunges towards the open sash window, then pauses when he hears the first chime. It was only the grandfather clock, gearing up to strike midday.
Sunlight hazes through the cloud as he leaves the house. The day feels more like April than January. By the park gates, a young woman is helped from a carriage by an older man: her father, perhaps. The hem of her yellow dress is trimmed with white lace. He glances up and finds that the woman is looking at him. He smiles, touches the peak of his cap. The woman casts her eyes down, a blush rising on her pale winter cheeks.
Downhill he strides, down towards the river, King William Street with its pubs and trinket shops. He stands at the riverside and looks over the railings. The tide is out and there are children crouched along the muddy banks, sacking tied round their ankles to protect their feet. The smell of silt rises up, rank and salt-stained. One of the children lifts a small lump of flat mud towards her mouth, spits on it and rubs until the shape of a coin emerges. The copper catches the sun and the girl smiles at her good fortune.
14
After the morning rush a woman walks into the cafe on her own. She’s about my age, wearing grubby cornflower-blue gloves and a creased old coat. But she’s posh-looking for all that, and when she opens her mouth, you know she’s not local.
‘Are you the proprietor?’ she asks me.
Vernon Cridge looks up from his fried bread and snorts a laugh.
‘You’ll be wanting Mrs Stephens,’ I say, ‘but she’s gone out. She’s on a . . . special delivery.’ She’s taking pies and sandwiches round to her friend Mrs McCarney on Galbraith Street. Mrs McCarney’s son has been killed and all the aunts and cousins have trooped down from Archway.
‘If I could perhaps leave you one of these, to put up in the window?’ She opens her leather satchel, takes out a cardboard folder and pulls a poster from it. ‘It’s for a meeting next week, not far from here.’ She smiles and shows her white teeth.
I look down at the poster. PEACE MEETING, 20 RAILWAY STREET, POPLAR. SPEAKER: JACK FENWICK, THE NO-CONSCRIPTION FELLOWSHIP. STRIKE A BLOW FOR FREEDOM AND RIGHT! At the bottom of the poster, there’s another line, written smaller: UNDER THE AUSPICES OF WSF: SUFFRAGE FOR ALL!
I’ve heard of them, the Workers’ Suffrage Federation. They’ve set up shop down the Roman Road, led by one of the Pankhurst lot. Dor thought she was marvellous, What’s-’er-name Pankhurst, went along to a couple of suffrage meetings before the war. I might have gone too, but Teddy was just born and it was a job to leave the house. Of course, Dor lost interest when the war started and this Pankhurst sister turned out to be against the fighting. Dor was very keen on the war at that time. She was still seeing Len, thought he was the bee’s knees in his uniform.
The woman gives a polite cough into her gloves. ‘A couple of posters in your window are out of date, if you don’t mind me saying so. A Christmas bazaar at the Liberal Association, well . . .’ she laughs brightly, ‘well, Christmas just seems an age away once we get into January, don’t you agree?’
‘I suppose.’
‘If you like, I can paste that up now . . .’ She reaches out for the poster, but I pull it close to my chest.
‘I’ll check with Mrs Stephens, if it’s all the same.’
‘Of course.’ She buckles up her satchel, then smiles right at me. ‘And perhaps you might be interested in coming along yourself?’
‘P’r’aps.’
Just as she’s walking out, Vernon Cridge belches loudly. She pauses for a second, then quickens her pace to the door, tries to open it, but pushes instead of pulls. Then she gives the door a hefty swing back, setting the bell jangling. She hurries out, almost colliding with Mrs Stephens, who’s coming in the opposite direction.
‘Excuse me,’ says Mrs Stephens, turning to look at the girl’s back. ‘Miss High-and-Mighty.’
‘She’s brought a poster,’ I say, holding it up from behind the counter.
Mrs Stephens raises her eyebrows, then looks towards the poster, eyes screwed up. ‘My spectacles are upstairs,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to read it me, Hannah.’
I recite it word for word, and when I get to the part about striking a blow for freedom and right, Mrs Stephens folds her arms across her chest.
‘She wants to know if we can display it in the window,’ I tell her. ‘Meeting is next Thursday, January 25th, I think . . .’ I scan down to the date. I wonder if I might go along, listen to what they’ve got to say. Peace is what we all want, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll mention it to Dora. Peace would be right up her street, now she’s met Daniel. I don’t know how she’d cope if he went off to war.
‘Give it here,’ says Mrs Stephens, holding out her hand.
‘Shall I mix up some paste?’
‘Shall you mix up . . . ?’ She doesn’t bother finishing the sentence, just rips the poster in half, then half again and drops the pieces onto the counter. ‘You’ll put that filth where it belongs – on the fire. Paste it up? I might as well spit in poor Mrs McCarney’s face! Peace meeting, for heaven’s sake. Shirkers’ me
eting, more like. Waltzing down here in her fancy gloves . . .’
Mr Cridge drains his mug of tea and mops up the bacon fat with his fingers.
‘One or two shirkers frequenting your establishment, Mrs Stephens,’ he calls out, his voice grim.
‘Whatever do you mean, Mr Cridge?’
‘I’m saying there’s young men drinking tea in here what should be putting the boot into the Boche.’ He sticks out his tongue to lick the fat from his fingers.
Mrs Stephens turns her back on him, lifts the countertop and steps into the kitchen next to me. She lets the counter drop with a bang and the torn-up pieces of poster flutter to the floor.
‘I don’t know about that, Mr Cridge. I’m not acquainted with all our customers’ private circumstances,’ says Mrs Stephens. ‘Some people have good reasons . . . medical or whatnot. It’s these meetings I object to, these . . . peace cranks and their preaching.’ She bends down to pick up the poster fragments, opens the stove door and throws them onto the coals. ‘Ain’t that right, Hannah?’
At lunchtime Daniel comes in and orders a bowl of soup and potatoes. I haven’t seen him since before Christmas and I think there’s something different about his expression, less melancholy. Dor must be having this effect on him. A thought catches me. Perhaps Dor has invited herself round to his place after all. She’d have told me, though, if things had moved on. She always tells me everything, whether I want to hear it or not.
‘Would you like a slice of bread, Mr Blake?’ I set the bowl down and he looks up, smiling.
‘Call me Daniel, Mrs Loxwood.’
‘I mustn’t really. Not in the cafe.’ I gesture towards the kitchen, where Mrs Stephens is ladling out meals. A waitress has got to be professional with the customers, she says. There’s a knack to it, a proper tone to be struck: friendly, not familiar.
‘But maybe down the White Horse?’ he whispers, as if we’re planning some conspiracy.
I can’t help blushing when he mentions the pub. I nod quickly, ask him again whether he would like bread.
