And once more there was Mama’s long white face above her and the cold wet cloth on her head and it was better again –
* * *
On the third day Mildred sent a message round by Nellie’s youngest brother, the sensible one, to Jessie. She had thought she could manage well enough; had she not looked after Wilfred when he had the croup and then Samuel and Thomas when they had the chicken pox and had been so irritable? She had sat up with them often enough making sure they did not scratch and so infect their spots, so she should have been able to look after one small girl.
But what Poppy had was worse than croup and it was worse than chicken pox. She had sent for the doctor on the second day – which had amazed the neighbours considerably, for who ever spent money on such a thing in Leather Lane? – and he had shaken his head and told her that this year the measles were especially bad and there was some scarlet fever at the school too, and it was very possible she had one of them.
‘I cannot say at this stage,’ he had said portentously, looking down on the flushed little face on the pillow. ‘I dare say it’s the measles and the child will be like this till the spots appear. There are several cases at Baldwin’s Gardens School – she is a pupil there? Yes – and I dare say she may well have it. There are those that say they can tell if it’s measles from spots inside the mouth – some new nonsense from America, where all such nonsense comes from – but you must pay no attention to that. When she has the spots on her face is soon enough to be sure.’ He shook his head then, even more ponderously. ‘If, of course, it is the measles she has and not the scarlet fever. If she gets the white strawberry tongue then we can be sure. At present it is but a fevered tongue. So keep her cool and keep her dark, and we shall pray. There have been many deaths from the measles this summer, to be sure –’ And he had gone away, pocketing his half-crown fee and leaving Mildred feeling so cold with fear she could hardly breathe.
So, by the morning of the third day she could manage alone no longer. The sleepless nights and the long days of trying to maintain her work and fill her orders, while running up and down the stairs to lay cooling cloths on Poppy’s hot forehead, added to the terror which the doctor’s words had dripped into her mind, took their toll, and when she dropped a fresh boiled meat pudding on the floor because she had fumbled as she took it from the copper and it burst and sent its scalding contents all over her legs, she admitted defeat. She needed help.
Jessie came almost at once and the first thing she did was send Mildred to bed. ‘You can’t look after her if you’re exhausted,’ she said practically. ‘Tell me what I have to do and then go. I promise I’ll be as careful as you would yourself, so –’
‘I can’t go to bed,’ Mildred said. ‘I’ll sleep in a chair –’
‘Bed,’ Jessie said firmly. ‘What good can you do sitting there? If you’re asleep? Believe me, I’ll be there. I’ll watch and if there’s anything you should know about, know about it you shall. I’ll call you –’
‘You promise? Whatever happens, you’ll call me?’
‘What’s to happen? The boobalah’ll get hot. I’ll cool her with the cloths, she’ll sleep, she’ll get hot, I’ll cool her. And she’ll get better, please God, a day or two and she’ll get better –’
So Mildred went to bed and slept with the heavy stillness of total exhaustion and Jessie sat and watched Poppy and went through the ritual of wetting the cloths and setting them on her head and then, after a while, sponged her down with cool water to bring down her fever which was clearly raging. But Poppy became more and more ill, and more and more hot.
At six on the morning of the fourth day Mildred woke suddenly from her deep sleep and went padding at once into Poppy’s room, not stopping to put on her wrap or her slippers, and with her hair tangled on her shoulders, for she had not even stopped to plait it yesterday after Jessie had come and sent her to bed. And her terror and fury rose, for Jessie was sitting in the armchair beside the bed, her head back on the cushion and her mouth half open in an unlovely gape as she snored gently and Poppy was lying sprawled on her bed with the blankets thrown back to expose her bare legs.
She pushed past the chair, waking Jessie abruptly and leaned over Poppy and touched her, for the child was lying ominously still but after a moment Poppy moaned and half opened her eyes and then closed them again and pushed feebly at Mildred’s hands as she tried to cover her again.
‘Leave her, leave her –’ Jessie said. ‘Poor little dolly, she’s so hot the blankets upset her – I let her lie that way and she slept, for the first time she slept. Better to leave her –’
‘What do you know? The first night you’re here and you can’t stay awake!’ Mildred said and her voice rang with ice. ‘She could have died, lying there with no one to care, and you snoring and me –’ And she choked on the words and turned back to the bed where once again Poppy was trying to push away the blankets with irritable little movements of her hands.
‘Die? Who’s talking of dying? You shouldn’t even think of such things, let alone say them!’ Jessie cried and turned her head and spat twice. ‘D’you want to bring an evil eye on her? Such talk –’
‘Evil eye!’ Mildred said, and the contempt in her voice was even colder. ‘That sort of ignorant talk is even worse – there have been children dying already from this – and we still don’t know what it is – measles, scarlet fever – we still don’t know –’ And she turned back to the bed and bent over and pushed the sweat-damp hair back from Poppy’s forehead and peered at her in the thin morning light, looking for the signs of the rash that would announce a diagnosis.
Poppy moaned and half opened her eyes and began to gabble and Mildred leaned even closer and said softly, ‘What is it, darling? What do you want?’ But there were no sentences there, no sense at all; just a string of disconnected syllables, and Jessie came to the other side of the bed and said loudly, ‘Hush you, now, boobalah, go to sleep –’
And amazingly Poppy did, opening her eyes again at the sound of Jessie’s voice and looking at her with what seemed like puzzled enquiry and then closing them and seeming to sleep, and after a while Mildred straightened her back and looked across the bed at Jessie.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said dully. ‘I didn’t mean to be – I’m glad you’re here. I need your help.’
‘Not to worry,’ Jessie said gruffly. ‘Listen, go get washed and dressed and then come here. I go make some breakfast – no, don’t argue. Much good you’ll be if you get ill on account you ain’t been eating. Go already –’
The day wore on with no change in Poppy, and Mildred agreed, though very unwillingly, to go and spend a couple of hours in the kitchen dealing with her urgent orders while Jessie sat and kept watch.
‘No sense in you losing money,’ she said with great practicality. ‘Sick little girls, they need a lot of good food when they get to convalescence, got to be built up, and that costs money. Go, you make the cakes, make sure the business runs. I’ll call you – and I won’t sleep –’ She stopped and said awkwardly, ‘Believe me, this morning, it hadn’t been more’n a second or two –’
‘I know,’ Mildred said. ‘I know. It’s just that –’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m so frightened. The doctor said, they’re dying – if Poppy –’ And she closed her eyes, refusing to contemplate the horror of it.
‘I told you, you don’t want to talk of such things.’ Jessie sounded gruff. ‘You got to think positive – she’ll be fine. Go make cakes. I’m here, use me, already –’ And she gave a sudden little lunge and leaned over and hugged Mildred awkwardly and then pulled away, pink with embarrassment, for that was the sort of thing that Mildred so disliked –
So Mildred baked and Jessie watched and then, at around nine o’clock when Mildred had set a bowl of soup and some freshly made toast on the table ready for some supper for Jessie, before going up to take over her vigil by Poppy’s bedside, she heard Jessie calling urgently from the top of the stairs, her voice tight and shrill with anxiety, and sh
e ran, almost unable to move her legs because of the way fear had lurched into her and turned her muscles to quivering jellies.
‘It’s the way she’s breathing suddenly,’ Jessie’s face was white and strained. ‘Come and listen – what is it? I don’t know –’
As soon as she was in the room Mildred knew. Croup, that dreadful laboured whooping breathing that made it sound as though the child was fighting for every breath, the sound that she had become so used to when she had nursed Wilfred, and at once she whirled and went hurrying downstairs to the kitchen again. Knowing what to do was the only comfort she had, and also her strength, for the jelly left her legs now, and she could move purposefully, even economically. The kettle was, as usual, on the boil and she seized it and went running back upstairs as fast as she could.
‘Get me the Friar’s Balsam,’ she snapped at Jessie who was standing beside the bed and leaning over it watching Poppy with her eyes wide and terrified in her pale face. ‘Move, woman! We have to be quick –’
With swift assured movements Mildred took the small green bottle Jessie fetched her and poured some of its contents into the wash bowl from the stand in the corner and then poured the hot water from the kettle over it and the room filled with the thick fragrance of the resinous stuff and seemed to get even warmer.
‘Fetch up the small oil stove from the corner of the scullery,’ she said curtly to Jessie. ‘And bring the matches with you from the mantel in the kitchen – and a jug of water – and be quick –’ Already she was lifting Poppy, still producing those hoarse struggling sounds, from the bed, wrapping her in a sheet, and bringing her across the room to the wash stand where she had set the bowl full of spicy steaming water. ‘Hurry up!’ She almost screamed as Jessie hovered by the door, watching her fearfully, and then crouched beside the bowl, and holding Poppy carefully arranged her head so that the steam from it could reach her mouth and nostrils.
By the time Jessie came panting back up the stairs, the small oil stove in one hand and the jug of water slurping in the other, Poppy was breathing a little less noisily as the steam softened her tortured throat, and at a sign from Mildred Jessie tiptoed across the room and set the stove near the bed.
‘Light it,’ Mildred commanded. ‘And fill the kettle and put it on it. As soon as it’s boiling, I’ll bring her back –’
The two women worked in grim silence, and then, as the steam from the bowl of balsamic water subsided and the kettle began to boil on the oil stove, sending its stream of grey steam into the hot air, Mildred, moving with infinite care, brought Poppy back to the bed and, piling the pillows as high as she could, set her against them and then arranged the kettle so that the steam came and curled its way round Poppy’s head. And then she ran to her own room and pulled a sheet from her bed and came back to pin it over the head of Poppy’s bed, tying the top of it across the brass railings of the bed frame, and tucking the sides in halfway down the bed to make a sort of open-fronted tent inside which the steam was trapped.
Slowly the noise began to subside, as the harsh croaking breaths eased and at last Poppy slept, her eyes almost closed but with a rim of white showing beneath the lids. Her mother and her aunt sat on each side of the bed and watched and listened, as outside the night thickened and then began to lighten as an unwilling dawn skulked into the sky above the roofs and chimneys of the City away to the East and people and traffic began to stir in the street below.
They had been silent for a long time, listening to the plop and hiss of the gas mantle over the fireplace and the steady bubbling of the kettle on its oil stove and the sounds of breathing from Poppy. They were still difficult, still effortful, but far less so than they had been during that dreadful, terrifying hour when it had started, and as she sat and watched her child sleep Mildred felt rather than thought, watched ideas and words wander around inside her mind rather than gave conscious attention to them, and was almost as surprised as Jessie when suddenly she spoke. She had not known this was how she felt, had given no attention at all to the ideas that had come to her, but as the words came out of her mouth knew beyond doubt that she was right.
‘I shall never speak to him again. Ever,’ she said in a low voice.
‘What?’ Jessie had been sitting very still too and was also not actively thinking; she was by no means asleep, but she was not fully conscious either, sitting suspended in a limbo between alertness and lethargy and just letting the time slide over her.
‘If we had not gone there, had not dragged her there, it wouldn’t have happened –’ Mildred was speaking as much to herself as Jessie. ‘If he had not been so stupid as to run off like that, you wouldn’t have been so stupid as to follow him, and I wouldn’t have been so stupid as to agree to go with you. If she dies it will be the fault of the stupidity of all three of us, but mostly his, for he started it all. Mostly his –’
Jessie stared at her, alarmed by the venom in her voice. ‘But Millie – you said the doctor said – there’s measles and scarlet fever at the school. She must have got whatever it is there –’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Mildred said savagely and now she did look at Jessie. ‘So she caught measles? Don’t they all get measles? Of course they do. But they don’t all get so ill! If she hadn’t spent that awful day there in all that noise and – all that nonsense of music and soldiers and people shrieking and crying like demented parrots, she would have been quiet and safe at home here when she started to feel poorly, and I’d have sent her straight to bed and she would have been well by now – but she went to that horrible place because of you, because of him, and now if she dies –’
‘She won’t die!’ Jessie said shrilly. ‘She won’t die! You know she won’t! Don’t say such things, you shouldn’t speak of such things –’
But Mildred ignored her. ‘If she dies it will be at his door that the fault lies. If she dies – I shall hate him for always. And if she lives I shall hate him for always, for all the suffering she has had. And for my own – I shall never speak to him again –’
And that was all she would say. Jessie tried to reason with her, to persuade her that by no stretch of any imagination could anyone be blamed for Poppy’s present state and certainly not Lizah. But Mildred sat there rocklike and silent, as the day lifted outside and scrubbed the small window of the bedroom from deep indigo to pallid grey, and refused to listen. Jessie could see that the words she poured out rolled over her unheard, and at length gave up. When Poppy was better, and Mildred less frightened and exhausted, then she’d understand that it was no one’s fault that Poppy had been ill and would forgive everyone, including Lizah. And Jessie badly wanted Lizah to be forgiven, for wasn’t he now a soldier, nebbish, a poor boy gone to fight for Queen and Country, worthy of attention? And wasn’t he, a deep inner voice whispered, her beloved Poppy’s own blood father? And if he once could be acknowledged as that, and married Mildred, as Jessie so much wanted him to, wouldn’t then Jessie herself be able to see more of Poppy and love her as freely as she wanted to, yearned to and needed to? So did Jessie tell herself as she sat quietly and waited for Poppy to recover, and bided her time.
29
Before the SS Dunottar Castle had passed through the Azores to reach the Canaries, Lizah had decided that there had to be a way to get out of the army and back home that did not involve travelling on ships. His knowledge of geography was sketchy in the extreme, but he felt sure that there must be a route from Cape Town that would take him home overland; certainly, he told himself, no power on this earth could get him to suffer again as he had suffered during that first dreadful week of buffeting and juddering. He had been so sick as no man had ever, he told himself fervently, been sick before. He had lain in that godawful hammock swinging helplessly with no one to give him any aid at all, surrounded by countless other men as sick and miserable as he was and making a damned sight more noise about it than he did, and promised himself and any God who might be listening that the moment he got to stinking Cape Town he was walking away f
rom this lousy army and setting off home. And if it took a year to make it on wheels, then so be it. Never again, he whimpered between his bouts of retching, never ever again on a ship –
But then the sickness stopped and together with the rest of the regiment he crept out on deck, blinking like a woodlouse newly freed from its prison under a dark rock, into the sunshine and glittering blue freshness of the sub-tropical sea and began to feel better; and knew how much better when even the army’s dull porridge and bread and plum jam tasted good. He would have preferred his mother’s salt beef or stuffed chicken neck or gedampte beef laced with carrots and onions and rich gravy, but this would do well enough, and he ate it ravenously and asked for more and even began to enjoy some of the fun the men were organizing for themselves. When they crossed the equator, in particular, they all had a very noisy time of it and General Buller, wise in the ways of soldiers, allowed an extra ration of grog and though that did give Lizah a queasy morning afterwards, for he had little capacity for alcohol even though he liked to drink it, he began to feel life was worth living after all, even in the army.
And then it became even more worth living, for while he was sitting on deck the day after the equatorial crossing, his back to a bulkhead, recovering slowly from his binge, he heard someone shout his name and lifted his chin cautiously to see a group of men leaning over the rail of an upper deck and staring down at him.
‘Hey, Kid Harris – you’re Kid Harris, ain’t yer?’
‘What if I am?’ Lizah had learned long ago the importance of keeping his guard well up.
‘’Ere, mate, I wants to shake you by the ’and, I do! Won me a sov an’ an ’arf, you did once, when I needed it real bad, five or so years back – when you knocked out Jerry the Yank in the third, down the Whitechapel Road. Put on a bob I did, just a bob, on account the Yank was the way out favourite an’ you just walked it ’ome and the odds was the best I ever ’ad! Come on up ’ere pal, and let me shake you by the ’and!’
Jubilee (Book 1 of The Poppy Chronicles) Page 31
