by Juliet West
It’s not like Mum to be sarcastic. I’ve an urge to kiss her goodnight, but she has already turned away.
Dor’s face is bandaged, and they’ve cut off what was left of her hair. One scorched eyelid is visible. She talks with the eye shut.
‘Run as fast as I could,’ she says. ‘Tripped . . . a step.’ Her cracked lips open only a fraction, just enough to show her front teeth, chipped and blackened.
‘You tripped on a step?’
She tries to nod, agitated. I reach out to hold her hand, then pull back. The nurse warned me not to touch.
‘Daniel . . . don’t let him come,’ she says. ‘Wait till later.’
‘Yes. You’re not to worry.’
I can’t tell her that he’s already been. That he ran all the way back to Canning Town to let me know she was here.
Her shoulders relax and she seems calmer. We sit quietly and I wonder if it would be all right to take a sip from the beaker of water on the shelf next to her bed. My mouth is still so dry.
I drink two mouthfuls, but this is a strange kind of thirst, one that water won’t cure.
Dor seems to be dozing now. I shut my eyes too and wonder how I can give Daniel this message, that he shouldn’t visit. I’ve no way of finding him. There’s only the cafe. But how will I serve him, after what passed between us? Words, I keep telling myself, only words.
Sometimes she speaks of you.
‘You still here, Hannah?’ Dor murmurs, half asleep. She lifts a bandaged arm and pats the stiff starched sheet. The sheet is raised up like a tent on a frame, must be to stop it from pressing on her skin. The movement of her arm wafts a sharp smell of tar.
‘I’m here. And I was dropping off with you. Don’t suppose anyone in London slept much last night.’
‘Should have been at the pictures with him. Stupid factory.’ Her voice grows louder. ‘Now it’s all gone . . . A small fire at first. Dr Angel said not to panic.’ Her eyelid flies open and she flinches at the sudden movement.
‘Shh,’ I say. ‘You don’t need to talk.’
‘And Daniel thinks I stood him up. You’ll tell him, won’t you, Hannah? That I meant to be there. I’ll get there when I can. But he ain’t to see me . . . like this.’ She pauses. ‘Is it very bad? I keep asking for a mirror, but they won’t bring it. The thing is, I can’t feel anything . . .’ Her voice tapers off, weaker than ever.
Dora’s mum appears with one of the older brothers. Kit is chewing his bottom lip so hard there’s a dark red mark.
‘We’re back, Dor,’ says Mrs Flynn, attempting cheeriness. She bends to kiss me on the cheek and rests her hand heavily on my shoulder. ‘And that’s nice, Hannah is here too. Now listen, Dor, we found the doctor and he tells us you’ll be just fine. They’ve wonderful medicine now, to take away the pain. It’s just time, he says. It’ll take a while.’ Her voice wavers. ‘We’ll have you on the stage by next Christmas, don’t you fret.’
Dor’s mouth curls up, almost a smile, and we wait for her to speak again, but there is only a deep sigh, and her head seems to sink back further into the pillow.
‘Get the nurse,’ Mrs Flynn whispers to me.
A nurse hurries over, her eyes glassy with exhaustion.
‘It’s Nurse Sands, is it?’ says Mrs Flynn. ‘You’ve been so good with her.’
The nurse lifts Dor’s arm and feels her wrist through a narrow gap in the bandages.
‘She’s sleeping, Mother,’ she says. ‘And if I were you, I’d go home and do the same. Rest is important after a shock like this.’ She looks at the three of us and leans in towards Mrs Flynn. ‘I must remind you it’s two to a bed at visiting time. If Sister finds out, there’ll be trouble.’
In the corridor, Mrs Flynn catches my arm.
‘Is your place bad?’
‘Just the windows smashed, and a few of Jen’s wedding plates. We’re all right, though. Freezing cold but all right.’
‘First off we thought it was Zepps,’ says Kit.
‘We all did.’
‘To think it was one of our own factories.’ He lights a cigarette and draws hard. ‘We done this to ourselves. Christ almighty.’ He shakes his head and gazes through the double doors of the corridor into the ward. It’s quiet but for a desperate wail of ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy’: an old woman’s voice, delirious.
Nurse Sands passes and frowns to see us still there.
‘Rest,’ she mouths at me.
Windows are blown out all along Chrisp Street, but the market is trading, busy as ever. Shopkeepers have swept up the glass, hung signs from the door frames saying, BUSINESS AS USUAL. A newspaper boy weaves through the street, shouting, ‘Mirror!’ I stop him and he pulls a paper from the sheaf under his arm. ‘Ha’penny, miss,’ he says, and I drop the coin into his ink-black palm.
There’s nothing much about Brunner’s in the Mirror. Just a couple of sentences halfway down page three: ‘The Ministry of Munitions regrets to announce that an explosion occurred at a munitions factory in the Silvertown neighbourhood of London. It is feared that the explosion was attended by considerable loss of life and damage to property.’
The rest is all news of the war, food shortages, a statue of Gladstone unveiled in Edinburgh. I fold the paper neatly and leave it on a stack of crates next to a veg stall. Ahead of me now is St Gabriel’s Church. I look towards the row of shops opposite, try to focus on an old man nailing cloth to the inside of an upstairs window. The man doesn’t have a hammer. He’s using what looks like the sole of a clog. But no matter how hard I stare, the church invades me. I can smell my wedding day, feel it: the wood polish on the pews, the candle grease, the gardenias for purity. I turn to the church, confront it, and a tall, smiling girl appears on the steps with her new husband. She is clutching at him, delighted. The groom is a much older man, dressed in a brown suit that is a shade lighter than the one George wore. Two bridesmaids appear, throwing tiny squares of torn-up newspaper. One square lands on the toe of my boot, then wisps off into the gutter.
I should creep into the church, light a candle and pray for Dor. Try to purge the image of Daniel’s face, the sanctuary of his hand in mine as we crossed Bow Creek.
A pulsing begins low down, spreading through my body. A burning ache.
15
He leaves Silvertown as the sun rises, the dawn air dense with smoke and disbelief. His knuckles are crusted with blood and brick dust, and his fingers ache with cold. He cuts through a side street, dodging the swept-up heaps of glass and rubble. In an upstairs room, a baby cries. He remembers the last woman he found, an old lady, who clung on to his bleeding hands as they pulled her out. She was asking for her grandchildren. ‘In the back bedroom,’ she said, blank-eyed, pointing up at where the back bedroom used to be.
Volunteers are arriving now from across London, their sleeves rolled up. Soldiers, some of them, home on leave. The police are turning people away, setting up cordons to stop the gawpers.
He walks through Canning Town, over the bridge, Bow Creek rising with the unstoppable tide. Church clocks strike the hour as he turns into the dock road. He calls into his room to wash and collect clean clothes. The windows have held in the boarding house, no obvious damage.
His Saturday shift starts in twenty minutes. He should be tired, but he has never felt such strength, such energy, surging through every vein.
Sparks from the spot welder sear blocks of orange-white into his vision. The yard is busy with the smelting and welding and mending of ships. War damage to the merchant fleet is worse than ever with the German U-boats sneaking around the coast. They’ll torpedo anything to strangle Britain’s supplies.
Daniel’s hands throb under his thick leather gloves, but the pain is nothing. To have seen such suffering in Silvertown . . . He is so sorry for Dora, yet he cannot quell the rising energy, the certainty of this feeling, the blaze in Hannah’s eyes when she shoved him in the alleyway. She was angry, certainly. Surprised. But something had passed between them. The crackle and spit of desire.
‘Steady there,’ the foreman calls.
Daniel straightens up and surveys the wound in the side of the ship that he is attempting to repair. He has overworked the steel. Heavy-footed, the foreman walks to his side.
‘Mind on the job, Blake, mind on the job.’
He nods an apology, experiences a rush of relief when the tea whistle sounds.
Walking to the cafe, he notices a soldier in hospital blues standing outside the George pub. He is on crutches, one leg missing from mid-thigh. Daniel takes a folded newspaper from his pocket and reads the headline on page five: ‘Gallantry Amid Fire.’ In France, it has been a terrible winter. The mud is lethal, he has heard. Healthy lads are drowning in it, choking in slime-filled shell holes. You’re not supposed to complain, bad for morale, but there’s one old boy at Beaumont’s can’t keep his trap shut. His nephew is back from the Somme, got pissed one night and told his uncle everything. Corpses liquefy in the mud, seep through the trench walls. ‘Hero juice’, they call it.
Daniel feels the eyes of the soldier on his back as he passes by, hears him cough and mutter, ‘Fucking poltroon.’
The cafe is open as usual, but Mrs Stephens is flustered, not a wink of sleep, she says, and she plonks the mug of coffee in front of him with a sigh.
Later he walks to Lion Street, weaving through the Poplar back roads until he is standing in front of Aunt Winch’s low brick terrace, the two ground-floor rooms where she had lived and died, where he had lived too, until he was nineteen years old and could afford a lodging room of his own. He pictures her standing at the window of the front parlour, waiting for his Saturday visit. Through the prism of the rippled glass she would seem tinier each time, hunched, as if the great black shawl was an impossible weight upon her shoulders.
She had seemed in good spirits on that last visit, hobbled across the room and touched him on the arm: an affectionate gesture, the closest she would ever get to a kiss. It was late January, he remembers, a few days before her birthday.
‘Off to Greenwich tomorrow?’ she had asked. Always the same question.
‘As usual.’
‘Is Lady Tolland back from Dorset? She didn’t say in her letter.’
She had reached up for the Christmas card that was still displayed on the dresser. He knew it wasn’t a letter at all, just a picture postcard signed: Regards of the season, Lady Tolland. Still, Aunt Winch’s face was proud as she reread the card, then propped it back against the picture frame.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘She usually comes home February, don’t she? March if there’s snow.’
‘Snow? Her ladyship don’t like the cold. And those trains can be terrible draughty.’ She captured a wisp of her thinning hair and tucked it back into her bun.
‘I believe she gets fetched in a motor car now,’ he said.
‘Fancy.’ She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her watery eyes. Her lips tightened. ‘Is she still borrowing you them books?’
‘Not so much these days.’
‘Just as well, eh? Never done you no good, book learning. It’s all very well for those what’s born to it.’
There was nothing to be gained from arguing. He would never change her, he knew that. It was what she believed, and after all, perhaps she was right. What good had it done him? All those hours sitting in Robbo’s shed on the pile of hessian sacks, pages angled towards the cobwebbed window to catch the light. Robbo had given up on him, said he’d turned weird, and if he wanted to sit in his dead dad’s shed reading while the rest of them were enjoying themselves round the back of the church hall, that was his lookout.
Sometimes a black cat would be waiting for him at the shed door. Were they lucky, black cats, or unlucky? He never could remember. He loved the cat, loved the feel of her warm purring body, her claws piercing his thighs as she settled on his lap.
Robbo said he was mad, because all the girls were swooning for him – he could take his pick and he’d get further than the other lads ever could. Even Nancy Smith was sweet on him, said Robbo, and she was nearly sixteen. He didn’t bother telling Robbo that he’d already had Nancy Smith, had her in the shed, and there were splinters in his palms to prove it. Nancy was a pretty girl all right, but afterwards when they walked around the rec, she had bored him rigid.
He wanted a girl who could attract him like the women in Lady Tolland’s novels. Someone with a free spirit: Sue Bridehead before she left Jude; Anna Karenina before Part VI; Elizabeth Bennet, but quirkier. Above all, someone who needed to be loved and who would love him completely. He spent hours in Robbo’s shed imagining this perfect woman. It helped him to read his books and to dream because it stopped him thinking about his own lost mother.
Had Esther been a perfect woman? She had read Anna Karenina, at least. But after they were married, she became irritated whenever he sat down to read. She admitted she had merely leafed through the Tolstoy. ‘Those endless chapters about farming,’ she said. ‘What do I care about Russian peasants?’
Two children are watching him from the upstairs window of Aunt Winch’s old house. They tap on the glass, pull silly faces, and then a woman appears and ushers them away. He smiles and walks on, back towards the dock road.
Perhaps when he gets back to the lodging room, there will be a letter from his sister. She might have enclosed a picture from Sam. Sam can write his name now, with a back-to-front ‘S’.
There is no letter waiting on the hall table. He sits on the edge of his bed and instead thinks of Hannah. Blood rushes in his ears. He wonders if he will ever sleep.
16
The bottle of barley water is warm in my pocket. Mum boiled it up this morning, stirred in a little sugar she’d been saving. If Dor can’t manage a cup, I’ll give it to her with a spoon. Drinking’s important when you’re suffering from burns – it says so in Jen’s first-aid book. I cradle the bottle in my left hand and the warmth of it is a comfort on this cold afternoon.
It’s only a few more yards to the hospital. The wide stone steps at the entrance are lined with people waiting for visiting to start. Children lark about on the pavement, buttoned up in their Sunday best, leaping on and off the low wall by the hospital railings. One child has cuts on his face, and his arm is in a sling. He hangs about at the edge of the group, wincing as he tries to join in.
Three o’clock strikes and the visitors shuffle in. The children fall into line, sombre now. The boy with the broken arm is in front of me, clutching at the skirt of an older girl who might be his big sister.
I’m on the third step when a hand touches my shoulder. I know it’s him before I turn.
‘She don’t want you visiting,’ I say, quiet as I can because there are faces all around, watching. ‘You know how shocking she looks,’ I say. ‘She don’t want you to see.’
He nods and I turn away. I mustn’t look at him, his brown eyes so tender. I move forward with the queue. Inside the hospital now, more stairs, up to the first floor. We congregate in the corridor, waiting for a nurse to unlock the doors into the ward. My legs feel terribly shaky, but there’s nowhere to sit, just a wall painted shiny green and a picture of two black swans on a river, the varnished frame screwed in at each corner. I lean against the wall and the side of the frame presses against my scalp.
The clock outside Sister’s office shows four minutes past three and the crowd in the corridor starts to mutter with impatience. ‘Didn’t come all this way to be kept waiting,’ they say. ‘They only gives us a couple of hours as it is.’ A large woman with her back to me lets out a long sigh. She has the same hat as Mrs Flynn – green felt and a black ribbon. Mrs Flynn will be on her way, with another of the boys, perhaps. Two visitors to a bed, the nurse said yesterday. I’ll have to keep my visit short.
At last a nurse comes. She holds the door wide open, looks us up and down, unsmiling. One man is told to come back when he’s cleaned his boots.
In the ward, another nurse is standing in front of Dor, lighting up a cigarette by the look o
f it. The nurse takes one puff to get it going, then leans down and puts the cigarette between Dor’s lips. It cheers me to see it, because if she fancies a fag, that has to mean she’s feeling better. The nurse moves away and I catch a proper look at Dor. Except it isn’t Dor. It’s a different woman: bandaged head, yes, but there are curls of dark brown hair around her temples. Freckles on her hands.
It’s happened with Dad over the years – swapping beds or wards or even moving hospitals with not a word of warning. I scan the ward, the two dozen or so patients, but there’s no sign of her here. Nurse Sands trots up.
‘Who are you visiting?’ she asks.
‘Dora Flynn. I thought she was here yesterday . . .’ I nod over towards the bed where the woman is dragging on her cigarette. She stares at us, poker-faced, and leans over to tap ash into a small glass bowl.
‘Yes, I thought I recognized you,’ says Nurse Sands. ‘A friend?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Come into Sister’s office. I’ll send for tea.’
Back down the hospital steps. The taste of strong tea bites at my throat and still there is the thirst that won’t be quenched. I stumble down the last step and have to reach out to grab the iron railing. The bottle of undrunk barley water tips from my coat pocket and smashes onto the pavement. I bend to pick up the pieces and curse under my breath. As if I haven’t cleared up enough bleedin’ glass this past two days. That’s all I can focus on: the glass, collecting every last scrap, my gloves wet and sticky with barley water.
White cotton flaps in the corner of my vision.
‘Let me help,’ says Daniel. He is holding out a handkerchief, gestures for me to put the glass into it, then crouches to pick up the last few pieces.
‘How is she?’ he asks.
We are both crouching now, heads down, our words directed at the pavement.
‘Gone.’
He nods slowly, as if he was expecting the news. It makes me seethe, him taking it so calm like that.
