by Anna Hope
“LaRocca! That’s it.” He looks delighted. “Crazy man. Played like a lunatic.”
They are on the edge of the dance floor now, where the noise isn’t quite so loud. “So, then,” he says, “tell me. An anarchist with a love for American jazz.”
“But I’m not—” Their eyes catch, and something passes between them, a silent understanding. This is all a game.
“What’s your cover?” he says, leaning clos—close enough for her to smell the whisky on his breath.
“Cover?”
“Day job.”
“Oh, it’s dancing. At the Palais. I’m a dance instructress there.”
“Good cover.” He smiles, then his forehead creases again, as though he’s remembering something. “Not in that awful metal box thing, are you?”
She nods, feels the familiar wince of shame. “Afraid so, yes.”
“Poor you.”
The Pen. That awful metal box. Where she and Di sit, trapped, along with ten other girls, till they are hired, while the men without partners shark up and down, deciding if they want you, if you are worth their sixpence for a turn around the floor.
He leans back, as though to see her better. “You don’t look like the sort of girl who’s for hire.”
Is he making fun of her again? It could be a compliment, but she can’t be sure.
“I’m Ed, by the way,” he says. “Terribly rude of me. Should have introduced myself before.”
She hesitates.
“Right, then,” he says with a grin. “You can tell me your name when I get the thumbscrews out later.”
She laughs. The dance is almost over. Over his shoulder she can see Gus standing on the edge of the floor, staring out at them forlornly, two drinks in his hands, and as the music comes to its close she is clumsy suddenly, aware of her body, of the parts where it is close to Ed’s. She takes her hands down, steps back.
“Wait.” He catches her wrist. “Don’t go,” he says. “At least, not before you’ve told me your name.” His face has changed again. The smile has gone. It is deadly serious now.
“It’s Hettie,” she says. Because whatever game they were playing is clearly over, and, all told, she’s not the sort of girl to lie.
“Hettie,” he repeats, tightening his grip. Then he leans in close. “Don’t worry,” he says, “I won’t give you away. I know how much these things matter. I want to blow things up, too.”
Then he lets her go, and turns and walks, without stopping, without looking back, through the crush of people, across the floor, up the stairs and out of the club. The room wheels, a queasy kaleidoscope around her.
And here is Gus, crossing the floor toward her, sagging now, all jubilation spent. “Who was that, then? Someone you know?”
She shakes her head. But she can feel him still, this Ed, this man she doesn’t know, a Chinese burn scalding her wrist.
“You looked as though you knew him,” says Gus. He sounds aggrieved.
Hettie is furious suddenly. With poor, bald Gus. His awkward dancing and that half-cringing look on his face. And then, seeing that he sees this, she is sorry for him. “Perhaps I knew him,” she says quietly. “Perhaps I met him before.”
He seems a little appeased. When she doesn’t say any more, he nods. “Lemonade?” he says, holding out her drink.
. . . . . . . . . . .
“Evelyn.”
Someone is calling her name.
“Evelyn, turn that bloody alarm off, would you? It’s been racketing for an age.”
Evelyn opens her eyes to darkness.
She reaches from under the blanket and gropes for the clock on her bedside chest. There’s a sudden shocking silence, until Doreen grunts on the other side of the door. “Thank you.”
Evelyn curls onto her side, her knuckles in her mouth, biting down, as Doreen’s slippered footsteps retreat.
She was having the dream again.
She lies there for a moment more and then, when she is able, takes her fist away, sits up, and pulls the curtains aside. Thin light touches the face of her clock. The immovable realities of morning make themselves known. It is eight o’clock. It is Sunday, her mother’s birthday, and she has to be in Oxfordshire by lunch.
Bloody hell.
In the bathroom, the pipes clank and creak. She hauls herself out of bed, the soles of her bare feet cold against the floor, and while Doreen hums and splashes next door she dresses in the half light, choosing her least tatty blouse and her longest serge skirt, slipping into her stockings and shoes and pulling her cardigan tight.
The light is stronger by the time she has finished dressing; still, she avoids her reflection in the mirror on the wall.
Outside, in the scrubby patch of grass that passes for a garden, she pushes open the door of the damp lavatory and squats, shivering as she pees, before pulling the chain and stepping out. There’s a battered packet of Gold Flakes in the pocket of her cardy and she coughs as she lights one up. She looks up at the trees, at their wet black winter branches latticing the lightening sky. As she stands there, a single, tired leaf detaches itself, twirling down onto the path. After a couple of drags she throws the cigarette onto the path beside the leaf and puts her foot over them both, grinding them into the ground at her feet.
In the kitchen, she boils water for her coffee, then pours the coarse grounds straight into her mug, taking it to the table, where she sits and lights another cigarette.
“Good morning.” Doreen’s smiling head appears around the door.
“Morning.” She dumps two heaped spoonfuls of sugar into her cup and stirs.
“How’s you?”
“A-one, darling.” Evelyn salutes. “A-one.”
“Breakfast?” Doreen disappears into the pantry to root around.
“God, no.”
“Off to the country?”
“Paddington. Ten o’clock,” says Evelyn.
Doreen emerges with bread and butter. “Better get a move on, then.”
As much as Evelyn loves Doreen, as much as sharing this flat with her is the calmest, least troubling living arrangement that she can imagine, just now, just this morning, she really doesn’t want to talk. She would rather sit here, alone, with the remains of her dream wrapped around her like a stole against the gray morning air.
Doreen pulls out a chair and begins slicing bread. She is humming. Dressed to go out: wearing a pretty frock, her cheeks scrubbed and powdered, her hair up. Though it’s hard to tell in this light, she may even be wearing rouge.
“What are you up to, anyway?” says Evelyn. “It’s Sunday. Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
Doreen looks up from her slicing. “I’m off today, too. The man, remember. I told you last week. He’s promised to take me out of London. Said I was languishing in the smoke.”
“Ah.”
“I know he’ll drag me up a godforsaken hill somewhere and make me look at a view. Still …” Doreen smiles, apologetic, flushed.
Evelyn crushes her stub in the ashtray. “You’re right. I do have to get a move on.” She pulls on her coat. “You look lovely. You are lovely. Have a lovely time. Say hello from me.” She goes to the door, then turns back. “And wish me luck.”
“Luck,” says Doreen, grinning, holding out her buttery knife, “And remember, don’t let the old girl get you down.”
Evelyn stands beneath the clock, tapping her foot against the ground, scanning the Paddington crowd for her brother. No sign. She checks the departures board a last time and then heads off across the station, moving through wide slices of morning light. Irritating. It’s irritating he should be late.
The engine is spitting ash when she arrives at the platform, and she just has time to jump on the last carriage before it pulls away. She walks the length of the swaying train, checking each compartment for her brother’s tall, rangy shape, the wel
come of his smile. He is nowhere, though, and the train is full, but in the last carriage of second class she finds a compartment to herself.
Where the hell is he, then? They’ve had this arrangement for weeks.
She feels a brief, worried contraction on his behalf—but then pushes it away. She doesn’t want to think about her brother. Her brother can more than look after himself. She wants to think about her dream. About how it begins.
It begins like this: She’s in the sitting room of the house she grew up in, and she is reading a book. The doorbell rings; she marks her place and stands, moving across the carpet to the door. Now all she has to do is turn the handle and step into the hall, and Fraser will be there, waiting for her on the other side. Her hand is over the doorknob, and she is touching it, can feel the cool brass of it sliding into her palm; she presses down, the door swings open, and—
She opens her eyes. She never gets any further than this.
These are things she remembers: light, a morning in summer, Fraser beside her on the bed. The shifting patterns across his face.
The train rattles through a tunnel. When it emerges again into the unpromising morning, Evelyn catches sight of her reflection in the mirror above the seat. Because of the way it’s angled, slightly downward, she can see her hair parting clearly. She hasn’t seen her hair in daylight for a while, and in among her dark hairs are coarse white ones—too many now to count.
And here is the truth of things, she thinks. Even if the dream were real, if he could assemble himself from his thousand scattered parts; if she could open the door and find him standing before her, whole; he would be horrified: She will be thirty next month. She has betrayed him. She has become old.
Outside, London’s suburbs slide on. She thinks of all the people, in all of the houses, waking to their gray mornings, their gray hairs, their gray lives.
We are comrades, she thinks, in grayness.
This is what remains.
When Evelyn wakes, there’s a small boy on the knee of a large woman sitting on the seat in front of her. Both of them are staring. The child has a headful of orange curls and a round, pasty face. The woman looks immediately away, as if caught in the act of something shameful, but the child carries on looking, mouth open, with a thin silver slug trail from his nose to his chin. Three more people sit in the carriage, too: a man and two elderly women over by the door. Evelyn looks out of the window. They are pulling out of a station. reading, halfway there.
“That lady’s got no finger.”
“Shh,” says the woman with the child. “Shh, Charles.”
Evelyn raises an eyebrow.
“Look out of the window, Charlie,” says the woman in a high, strangled voice. “Can’t you see the sheep?”
“No,” says Charlie, wriggling and squirming on the woman’s lap. “Look.” He appeals to the man next to him. “Lady’s got no finger.” He is leaning forward now, the line of drool almost touching his mother’s skirts.
Evelyn looks down at her hand. She has indeed got no finger. Or half a finger. Her left index finger ends in a smooth rounded stump just after the knuckle.
“Good gracious, Charlie,” she says, looking across at him. “Do you know what? You’re quite right.” She waggles her stump in his direction. “Did you eat it while I was asleep?”
Charlie jumps back. The rest of the carriage takes a sharp breath, and then, as if in a game of Grandmother’s footsteps, everyone freezes their gaze straight ahead.
“You can touch it if you like,” says Evelyn, leaning toward the little boy.
“Can I?” the boy whispers, reaching out.
“No!” manages his purple-faced mother, yanking Charlie back. “Absolutely not.”
“Well,” says Evelyn with a shrug. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
Charlie slumps back onto his mother’s lap. His eyes flicker from the stump to Evelyn’s face and back again.
“And where are you going to, Charlie?” says Evelyn.
“Oxford,” says Charlie, punch-drunk.
“Perfect. Me, too. You can wake me up when we arrive.”
At Oxford, Evelyn waves good-bye to Charlie, changes trains, and takes the branch line that leads out to the village. She still half-expects to see her brother, emerging sleepily from further up the train, but she is the only person to alight on the tiny platform. The small ticket window is shuttered up; a few straggling remnants of geraniums survive in the hanging baskets, the brittle skeletons of foxgloves in the beds. She walks out over the crossroads, where the butcher’s and the post office face each other with blank-eyed Sunday expressions, and passes the low, five-housed terrace that leads to the green.
There was a boy who lived here, Thomas Lightfoot, the son of one of the men who worked for her parents; her brother played with him sometimes when they were children. She always liked his name. He was the first person she knew to die. She remembers her brother telling her, one sunny afternoon in London, in the spring of 1915. He had a wife and a child and he lived and died and all before he was twenty-three. She looks into Thomas’s house as she passes now, sees a young woman through the window, back turned, scrubbing at something in the sink.
Evelyn walks on, her feet the only sound on the road, leaving the village behind, until she is passing open fields, where scattered crows pick at the stumps of the crop. The sun is out. She shuts her eyes against it, letting the light dance orange on her lids, and takes a lungful of pure air: glad, despite of herself, to be out of London. Ahead of her, the low stone wall that marks the boundary of her parents’ land comes into view; behind it are clusters of high firs, their branches dark against the bright sky.
She takes the road that leads behind the house, so she can approach without being seen. Opening the gate in the wall, she enters and stands on the lawn. In front of her is the house, seen from the side, its Cotswold stone deep golden in the sun. As she stands there, a black-clad maid comes running out of a side entrance and scoots around a tree trunk to where she is lost from view. Soon a small cloud of smoke rises into the air. Evelyn smiles: Good for her.
She sets off across the lawn, heading for the back of the house. The grass is surprisingly tall for November, and by the time she reaches the steps her shoes are soaked. She pushes the door open with her hip and swears under her breath as she reaches to unbuckle her shoes. They are suede, thinly strapped—the only vaguely ladylike pair she owns and a rare concession to her mother’s tastes—but they are too wet, now, to wear. She kicks them off and takes them to the cupboard by the back door, where a familiar smell greets her: damp and cobwebs and the close winter-rubber smell of stored galoshes. She chucks her shoes in between the umbrella stand and an old tennis racket, considers for a moment the merits of wearing galoshes to lunch, thinks better of it, then pads in damp stockings on cold flags down the corridor past the kitchen. A quick glance through the interior window tells her that they are buzzing: a platoon of servants scurrying to and fro.
When she reaches the end of the corridor she stops, puts her hand to the wall.
Once she turns the corner, she will be in the main hall, at the end of which is the glass front door, and behind the front door is where Fraser stands in her dream. And she knows it is stupid, but still …
She closes her eyes, letting the feeling of his nearness fill her, fill her chest, her arms, the air before her face, until—
“Evelyn.”
She snaps open her eyes.
“What are you doing?” Her mother, trussed in cream and gold, rears before her. “Where are your shoes?”
“I”—Evelyn looks down at her stockings, clinging wetly to her toes—“I came in around the back. They’re in the cupboard,” she adds. “Under the stairs.”
Her mother makes that noise: that special, back-of-the-throat click.
“Well, it won’t do. And neither will that blouse. You look like a shopgi
rl. Is this your latest pose?”
“I—”
“Your cousin is here.” Her mother leans forward, hissing. “And your old dresses are upstairs. Now go at once and change.” She steps back, narrowing her eyes. “Where is your brother?”
“I—don’t know. We were supposed to come together but then—”
“But what?”
“But then he wasn’t there.”
“He wasn’t there? Well, where is he, then?”
Evelyn shrugs, defeated. “I’m sorry, Mother. I really don’t know.”
Her mother pulls herself up to her full height—she is magnificent, really, even Evelyn has to admit—and steers her great Edwardian bosom into the wind.
Evelyn grits her teeth. Occasionally, just occasionally, she can muster the strength to pick her battles. “Mother?”
Her mother turns back toward her.
“Happy Birthday.”
Her mother nods once, swiftly, as though acknowledging something painful but necessary, like the removal of a tooth, then pushes open the door to the kitchen. As the door swings shut, the hubbub within dies. Her voice barks out an order—something about fish.
Evelyn turns back again and closes her eyes. But it is useless. The feeling has gone. She walks around the corner. The front door is there, ten feet of impassive wood, but behind its panels: nothing. No one is waiting for her on the other side. There is nothing but the brightness of the day and the dancing patterns made by the sun as it hits the bubbled, blown glass.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Jack pushes his breakfast plate away and stands then, “I forgot this yesterday,” he says, taking a squash from the bottom of his haversack. “It’s a good-looking one, I think.” He puts it in the middle of the table and shoulders his empty bag. “Right, then. See you tonight.” He stays there a moment, as though there were something more he wanted to say.
Twenty-five years.
Ada stays seated. His wide-shouldered bulk fills her view. He is wearing his old Sunday clothes, allotment clothes, softened and worn with use. She can still see the young man in his silhouette. Just.
