by Anna Hope
She is the last to be reached. When he leans in to kiss her he smells of alcohol—not fresh, but saturated, as though he’s been drinking for a long time.
“I thought we were supposed to be coming down together?” she hisses into his ear.
“Sorry, Eves.”
“Where’ve you been, anyway? You look like hell.”
“Out.” He shrugs.
She rolls her eyes as he takes his place diagonally across from hers. Her mother knows better than to seat her two children together. The young men resume wheeling the soup trolley and start to serve.
“And what about you?” Evelyn says, turning to Lottie. “Country life treating you well?”
Lottie picks up her spoon. “I am rather well, actually. I mean, in a manner of speaking. I’ve been a little sick, too.”
“Excuse me a minute.” Evelyn tries to catch her brother’s eye, but he is already in conversation with Anthony, so she leans forward and steals a cigarette from his case on the table in front of him. She turns back reluctantly to Lottie. “What was that you said?”
“I’m going to have a child.” Lottie’s wispy little voice rises at the end of the line, as if she is unsure herself about this state of affairs.
Evelyn lights up.
“I’m going to have a child,” says Lottie again, a little louder.
“I heard,” Evelyn blows out a lungful of blue smoke. “Goodness me.”
To her right, at the top of the table, she can feel without looking that her mother’s eyes are upon her. She turns properly to Lottie, giving her mother the back of her head. “That’s wonderful.” She says, too loudly. “Congratulations. What do you think you’ll have?”
“Excuse me?” Lottie looks confused.
“What do you think you’ll have? Cannon fodder? Or the other kind? What shall we call it? Drawing room fodder? Tedium fodder?”
Lottie puts down her spoon. “I’m not sure I quite know what you mean.”
“Boy,” says Evelyn slowly, “or girl?”
On the other side of the table, as though alerted by some chivalrous instinct, Anthony and Ed look up. Anthony clears his throat and leans forward. “So. How are you, Evelyn old thing?”
He looks even plumper, thinks Evelyn, while Lottie looks thinner than ever. Perhaps they’ve got things confused and it’s Anthony that’s eating for two. For a brief, horrible moment an awful mental picture assails her: Lottie and Anthony, deep in the act. He smiles encouragingly. “Coming along with us on Thursday, then?”
“Thursday?”
“The burial. Westminster Abbey. Got a friend with a place on Whitehall,” says Anthony. “Good view of the Cenotaph. We’ll be having some drinks. You’re most welcome.”
The burial. Few drinks. He makes it sound like a trip to the West End.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “I’m not really one for funerals.”
Anthony looks at her, seeming to weigh the relative truth of this.
“Still fighting the good fight?” he says eventually. “What is it again? The labor exchange?”
“Pensions, actually,” says Evelyn.
She knows that he knows this. They have had this conversation before.
“Pensions.” He shakes his head. A loose flap of skin already hangs beneath his chin. Soon he will be one of those men with necks like farmyard fowl.
“I don’t know how you stand it,” chimes in Lottie, giggling, braver now that the reinforcements have arrived. “I’m sure I never could.”
“I know why she does it.” Anthony leans forward.
All the other conversations around the table appear to have ceased.
“And why’s that?” says Evelyn.
“Men,” Anthony cackles, leaning back in his seat. He slaps his leg, and holds out his arms. “All of those men. Just the thing for a girl like you. Cripples, most of them—can’t run away. Must be able to just pick them off.” His lifts both his hands and mimes shooting. “Fish in a barrel, what?”
Lottie sniggers.
Evelyn feels her skin flare. “Hardly,” she says. And finally, now, she manages to catch her brother’s eye. He is smiling, but the look is a faded version of the one she has seen so often before: of mingled awe and humor, that dares her to go on. He looks tired, as though he hasn’t the strength for whatever is about to unroll. And she is furious then, more furious with him than with the whole lot of them put together. “Hardly,” she says again, a little louder this time.
“And why not?” Anthony smiles encouragingly.
“I think we all know where I stand on this.”
“And where is that, Evelyn?” says her mother from the head of the table. “Where exactly is it that you stand?”
Evelyn turns toward her mother. “Why, on the shelf, of course.”
“The shelf?” says Lottie.
“Yes. The shelf. You know the one. The dusty old shelf.” She looks around the table, none of them quite looking at her, none of them quite looking away. “Haven’t you heard of it? It’s quite comfortable up here, I assure you. The view’s not bad. You wouldn’t understand, though, any of you.” She lifts up her fish knife. “You’re all on the other side. What’s the opposite of the shelf? In the mix? In the cake mix? Look at Lottie.” She waves her blade at her cousin, who gasps. “Isn’t she lovely? She’s a veritable little currant, wouldn’t you say?”
“Evelyn,” says her mother slowly.
She turns her head. “Yes, Mother?”
“Would you like an ashtray?”
She looks at the cigarette in her other hand, whose precarious length of ash is on the cusp of falling into her soup. One of the young men slips an ashtray under her right arm.
“Evelyn?” repeats her mother.
“Yes?”
“When are you going to learn?”
“Learn what?” She crushes out her cigarette.
“Bitterness is simply not very attractive.”
Evelyn opens her mouth. Closes it again.
When she was growing up, she used to imagine her mother as a savage with a blowpipe, dispensing poison darts. She never missed. One had to learn to duck.
She put down her knife, lining it up with the side of her plate.
Bitter?
She isn’t bitter.
Bitter is the last thing she is.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Ada is on the other side of the small park when she sees Jack heading home, his back slightly hunched, his head bent against the cold. She has been out here longer than she intended, trying to calm herself, breathing in the chill afternoon air, walking looping circles of the patchy grass, one end to the other, avoiding the piles of fallen leaves. She sets off toward him now; if she walks fast enough she can catch up.
Jack lifts his head as she approaches. “Ada.” He looks surprised. “What are you doing out here?”
“I just”—she tries a smile, but her cheeks are numb—“fancied a bit of air.”
“You could have come to me.” He adjusts his pack. “There was plenty to do on the allotment today.”
Is his tone resentful? She cannot tell, but they fall in step beside each other anyway, crossing the park toward home. Ahead of them the sun is hanging low, in a sky the color of tin. Between them is the slight, constant distance—the distance they cannot name or broach. She takes a breath. “Jack?”
He slows, turning to her. “What’s that?”
She comes to a stop, hands clenched in her pockets.
“What is it, Ada?” His eyes seek hers out. “What’s wrong?”
“Earlier. Just after you left, a boy came. He knocked on the door.”
His brow creases. “Who?”
“I don’t know. He was—just one of those boys, selling things. Rubbish, most of it. But I—let him in.”
“You let
him in?”
“He was wounded,” she says.
He nods, accepting this. “What was it? Did he do something to you?”
“No, nothing like that. No.”
“Well, what then?”
She breathes in the scent of the leaves held in piles around them, the sweet beginnings of their decay. “There was something about him,” she says. “Something not right. I said I’d buy some dishcloths, just to make him go. But when I went to fetch my purse, when I was standing in the corner … he said it.”
“Said what?”
The old flicker of danger.
Their marriage is trip wired.
You can still stop.
“Michael,” she says.
The fuse is lit. She can feel it, fizzing in the air between them.
Jack is suddenly very still. “He said ‘Michael’?”
“Yes.”
“Michael Hart?”
“Just ‘Michael.’ ”
He takes a step away from her, “Well, who was he? Did he give you his name?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“What did he look like, then?”
A young couple walk past, heads bent toward each other. Ada waits until they have gone, and then speaks in a low, urgent voice. “He was small. Wounded. Had his left arm in a sling. I was standing with my hand on my purse and—he said ‘Michael,’ and when I turned around he was looking in front of him. As if he could see something.”
The wind troubles the plane trees. A shower of leaves falls to the ground around their feet.
“He was sitting in your chair.”
“What happened then?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I asked him why he’d said it. He said I’d imagined it. He said I was wrong. But I wasn’t wrong.” She feels her heartbeat increase. “I heard it,” she insists. “Plain as anything. ‘Michael.’ That’s what he said.”
Jack holds her gaze a moment more, his eyes searching, his face lined and reddish in the afternoon light. Then he looks away.
“What?” Ada says. “Say something. What?”
“It’s cold.” His voice is flat, controlled. “I’m going to go inside. Are you coming?”
She is silent, furious.
“Right, then.” He walks a couple of paces away from her.
“Jack! He said his name, Jack.”
He doesn’t reply, only shakes his head before setting off across the park.
Ada takes one breath. Two. She looks up, to where the sun is setting, bleeding into one of those glorious autumn sunsets that stain the sky. Then she puts her head down and follows her husband inside.
. . . . . . . . . . .
For some reason the light in their compartment doesn’t work. Evelyn fiddles with it, growing increasingly cross, and then goes out into the corridor. The lights are off there, too. There’s no sign of the conductor, but the next carriage is bright. The middle-aged man occupying it looks up from his crossword, catches her eye, and smiles out at her. Frowning, she turns and goes back to her carriage, and sits back down in the dark.
There isn’t even any decent conversation to be had, since in front of her Ed sleeps, just as he has since the train left Oxford, with his mouth open and his face slack. From the look and the smell of him at lunch, he probably didn’t sleep at all last night. She thrusts her hands into her pockets. It’s freezing in here; the heat must be run on the electric, too. The fields beyond the window are blue in the fading light. She used to like this time of year. Winter. The run-up to Christmas. Now it makes her uneasy. There’s nothing but darkness till spring.
The train jolts and Ed wakes. He rubs his face, giving her a vague, sleepy smile, before turning to look out of the window. “Where are we?”
She peers out. They haven’t passed a station for a while. “No idea.” Her breath is beginning to cloud in front of her face. “Sleep well, then?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“So.” She can’t help it. “That was well played.”
“What’s that?” His eyes find hers.
“Turning up late.”
He chuckles. “I wasn’t really late though, was I? Not in the end.”
“Where did you get to, anyway?”
“When?”
“This morning. You were supposed to meet me at ten, remember? Paddington Station? Under the clock?”
He yawns. “Sorry, Eves. Had a late one.”
“Whereabouts?”
“About.”
She thinks of what she did last night. Came back from a walk to an empty flat, read till her fire gave out, and went to bed. He has never invited her on one of his nights. She can only imagine where he goes. She studies his silhouette in the gathering dark. The easy lines of him. For years they were close. Now they rarely speak. She wonders what goes on beneath the surface. Even the war has hardly seemed to scar him; he barely appeared to miss a step, his face and body unblemished—his charm, if anything, increased.
He turns back, catches her looking, and smiles, taking out his cigarette case and offering one to her. “Funny,” he says.
“What? Your night?”
“No. Well—” He rummaged in his pocket for a light. “It was, sort of, but that wasn’t what I meant. I meant today.”
“Really? What was funny about it?” She can’t think of very much that was funny at all.
“I remembered something, when I went for a smoke, in the garden earlier on.”
“And what was that?”
A flame flares, hollowing his face. She leans in to light her cigarette.
“The summer house. On the island,” he says. “Remember when you hid there for a night?”
“It was two actually.” She feels a small sting of pride.
“You’re right.” He chuckles. “I remember now. They were beside themselves in the house.”
“I was only eleven. There were hardly many places I could go.”
“I knew you were there, though, all along.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Well, why didn’t you come sooner, then?”
“I thought you’d rather be on your own.”
She pulls her coat tighter around her. “I’m sure I probably did.”
She didn’t used to mind, then, being on her own. She used to do things like that all the time.
“Eves?”
“What?”
He stretches. “You all right, old thing?”
“Fine. Why? Shouldn’t I be?”
“You just seemed a bit …”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Just a bit—offish at lunch.”
“Offish?” She bridles. “That’s rich. Coming from you. You looked like death warmed up.”
“Fair enough.” He holds up his hands. There’s a silence, then, “Come on, Eves,” he says quietly. “How long can you be like this for?”
“This? What does ‘this’ mean?”
Someone passes in the corridor outside.
Am I bitter? Am I?
Tell me. Please. I’ll listen to you.
Ed leans forward, and she can just see his eyes in the plummeting light, the halo of blue smoke around his head. “It’s just—it’s not a crime to be happy, you know.”
She whistles. “Really? Gracious. What an incredibly facile thing to say.”
“I’m sorry.” He sits back. “Sorry, Eves. I suppose it is.”
She turns away to the darkness thickening outside.
Easy.
Easy for you to say.
Everything’s always so bloody easy for you.
. . . . . . . . . . .
“Di?”
“Mmmm?”
“You awake?”
“Mmm.”
There’s no fire here in Di’s small room, and Hettie’s nose is cold.
“What’s the time?” Di yawns, her voice thick with sleep.
“Don’t know. But it’s getting dark.”
Di rolls on to her back, and Hettie has to shift. Her right arm is dead anyway. She dangles it down the side of the bed, and the blood returns in pricks and swells of pain. “I’ll have to get back,” she says. “My mum’ll kill me if I’m late.”
Their breath blooms in soft clouds above their heads.
“You could just stay here instead.”
Hettie brings her arm back under the covers. It’s tempting. Given the choice she would. Stay here in Di’s rooms above the furniture shop, where there are no mothers to look you up and down, or sniff out the traces of the night on your clothes.
“Can’t. Told her I’d be back for dinner, didn’t I?”
But she doesn’t move. Not just yet. It’s cozy under the covers, here in their body-scented warmth.
“It was a killing night.” Di stretches, and Hettie can hear her smile.
They stayed for hours, and when they left it was morning: startled pigeons eyeing them, the men in overalls sprinkling the roads. Humphrey gave Di the money for a taxi, which they rode through half-deserted streets, upon which the pink winter sun was just starting to rise.
There’s a silence, then, “Humphrey wants me to go away with him,” says Di.
“What?” Hettie turns so they are lying face-to-face. “When?”
“Next weekend. To a hotel.”
It is too dark to see Di’s expression, but Hettie feels something cold take possession of her insides. “And will you go?” she whispers.
“Yes,” says Di. “I think I will.”
Hettie’s heart thuds into the space between them. They have spoken of this, endlessly. Of what it would mean, to finally be with a man. Not the boys they grew up with, or those they work with at the Palais, who are always trying to get them round the back of the stage door for a cigarette or something more. Not most of the men who hire them, in their shabby lounge suits, pressing themselves up, always that bit too tight. But a real man. Someone you liked. Two girls they know have done it already—one with a soldier in the war, who had to give the baby away, and another, Lucy, from the Palais who did it with a man from Ealing, for five quid—the deposit on a sealskin coat. It is here, then. The future, come for Di.
