‘I want you to be happy. It’s true I did behave stupidly when you were born but it wasn’t meant the way you think it was. I loved you so much — I still do. If I tried to explain now you wouldn’t understand how it was then. One day you might, when you get your own career going. You’ll know what it means to be where I was when you were born, when I saw my big chance. But — I’m not making excuses, Molly. For a long time now, for years, I’ve been feeling more and more dreadful about you, but there was nothing I could do. There was Barbie, loving you and wanting you and not wanting you ever to know —’ She shrugged. ‘It happened. Leave it at that for now. There’s no sense in going over it again, not when we’re both feeling so — when Barbie’s only just died.’
‘When I get my own career going?’ It was as though Molly had heard nothing else that Lexie had said. ‘You mean you’re going to let me — that you aren’t going to spoil the contract?’
‘Not if it means that much to you.’ To her own amazement Lexie felt a yawn threatening her. Exhaustion point was very close suddenly. ‘I think you’re very young for the sort of people you’ll have to deal with. I’ve met some of them and they’re —’ She shook her head. ‘But I’m not stupid. I can’t see that you’re going to pay any attention to what I say —’
‘Of course I’m not,’ Molly said. ‘Why should I?’
‘Indeed, why should you?’ Lexie’s head drooped and she looked down at her hands on her lap. ‘I’ve been a lousy mother, haven’t I? But I meant well. Oh, I meant well. It was just —’ She found she had a little spurt of energy after all, and lifted her head to look at Molly. ‘I had to earn a living for us all. I had to take care of you the only way I could. Earning money. There was Barbie who could give you the same things I could — loving and looking after and someone to be with — except for one thing. The only way she could have made a living for us was working in a millinery factory, and she didn’t want to do that any more than I wanted her to. I had the stage — and —’ She was struggling now. ‘And I wanted the stage. The way you do. Can’t you understand that? The way you do —’
There was a brief silence, then Molly turned away and went to the dressing table to pick up a comb and start pulling it through her rumpled hair.
‘Well, if you know I want the stage,’ she said at last, ‘you won’t stop me from going to Hollywood.’ It was as much a statement as a question.
‘I’ve already told you I won’t spoil anything for you,’ Lexie said. ‘That I only want you to be happy.’
‘The only way I’ll be happy is going to Holly wood,’ Molly said. ‘Barbie wanted me to go —’ Her voice trembled and she took a breath, then went on more steadily. ‘It’s right for me. We talked about it a lot. I’ll stay in this show, touring Scotland until the war’s over, and that won’t be long now, everyone says so. Then as soon as there’s a ship, I’m going to America.’ She stared at Lexie’s image in the mirror. ‘Is that settled then?’
‘It’s settled.’ Lexie stood up. ‘Will you come out with me now? Show me the theatre? Show me the sort of work you’re doing? I’d love to meet some of the people in the show — the director and —’
‘I’d rather you went back to London,’ Molly said, and now she looked only at her own reflection in the mirror, pulling the comb through her hair over and over again till it shone like a piece of coal, for it was darker even than Lexie’s hair, thicker and richer. ‘I’m all right here. Everyone looks after me. Like Mrs Sturt downstairs. She’s a bit of an old nuisance, but she thinks I’m lovely, so —’ She shrugged, and now she did shoot a swift glance at Lexie. ‘I can look after myself. I’ve been looking after Barbie for years, really. Keeping her happy while I did what I wanted, my way —’ And again her voice wobbled and she speeded up her combing, dragging it ferociously across her scalp.
‘But money and —’
‘I’ve plenty of money. I’ve looked after it for both of us for ages. Barbie only took what she needed when she went to London. I’ve got plenty, and I get good money in this show and I’ll be getting some from Carters. I told you, I’m grown up now. I don’t just look it. I am.’
She turned back once more to Lexie. ‘I want you to go back to London. Give my love to Auntie Bessie. I’ll write when I can. Goodbye, Lexie. Just leave me alone and I’ll be all right.’
It wasn’t until the train had left Scotland behind and was well into the north of England that Lexie realized that Molly hadn’t asked her who her father was.
40
As the war dragged out its last weary days, Lexie set about trying to reshape her life. Peace was coming; even though the terrifying autumn days when the second wave of rockets, the silent V2s, arrived and left London shattered and even more shaken than after the blitz and the threat of the first doodlebugs, everyone knew that. People started to talk about ‘after the war’ as a real time that would happen rather than as a fantasy, and beneath the exhaustion and the irritation that made people snap and snarl at each other there was a flicker of real hope. There would come a time when the streets would be bright at nights with lamps and unshuttered shop windows; a time when those shop windows would be piled high with goods as they had been long ago; a time when no one would ever again have to queue for hours for a box of matches, a packet of cigarettes or the rare treat of fresh food. There would be cosy nights beside the fire with no fear of death falling out of the sky, and holidays by the sea where now barbed wire befouled the beaches. There would be a time when you could live your own life and follow your own interest instead of the national one.
Lexie tried very hard to feel part of this new hopefulness, and to cut out of her conscious mind the memory of Barbara’s death and the loss of Molly, but it was exceedingly difficult. For all her efforts to be rational, all her attempts to tell herself she was being ridiculous, even hysterical, she could not stop herself from feeling that Molly was dead too, that her child had been lost as irrevocably as Barbara.
Her only remedy was work, she told herself, as she sat one afternoon late in February on the windowsill of Bessie’s living room, staring out across the road at the dripping trees in Victoria Park. Work had been Bessie’s salvation; after Barbara’s death and the news that Molly had refused to return to London she had seemed to shrink a little, to become greyer and wispier and even more tired. For a while Lexie had been sharp with anxiety as she watched her struggle through each day; was she going to lose Bessie too? Hadn’t she been punished enough already? But Bessie had gone on in her stubborn way, insisting on going to work at Alex Lazar’s City office all through the V2 rocket days, in spite of the risks, and she had been right to do so. Now she was still frail, still clearly tired, but there was a strength in her that sustained Lexie and reassured her, and helped her live through the passing days.
It was now more than half a year since she had last seen Molly and been so firmly excluded from her life. But the loss still bit keenly, though with Bessie there to lean on she could cope with the pain. Now it was just a steady ache, and only hurt enough to bring a little rush of tears to her eyes when she deliberately reminded herself of what had happened, much as a person with a sore tooth deliberately bites on it to feel the thrill of sensation it causes.
But I can’t go on like this, she thought as she watched the mist rising dankly beneath the trees in the park. There was a thick acrid smell in the winter air that was squeezing its way in through the cracks of the window frames and she coughed a little, feeling the rawness of the cold and hugging herself against it. There was no coal to be bought anywhere and they’d used most of their meagre ration before January was out. To light a fire before Bessie came home in the evening would be gross self-indulgence, she told herself mournfully, and again pulled her heavy cardigan more tightly round her body.
Work, she thought again, I must get back to work. If I’m fit to work, that is. Six months and she hadn’t danced a step, hadn’t practised a moment, six months of just pottering around the flat, cooking for Bessie when she came in,
and sitting for long hours staring out at the park. It was a dangerous way to be, she realized suddenly, because she didn’t mind it. To have buried herself in domesticity would have once seemed to her as bad as literally burying herself alive, yet now she had done it and hadn’t noticed how stultifying it was. I must get back to myself, she thought with sudden panic, and the thought brought her to her feet and she began to prowl around the living room, walking round and round the table with her head bent as she lectured herself silently. I must have been mad to let this happen; to rot like this, just because of — at once she pushed away the memories that had begun to rise in her, preventing herself from wallowing in them, determined to think forwards; I must have been mad and it’s got to stop.
She looked at her watch. Two o’clock. Two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon: still time to do something with the day. She ran downstairs to her own flat and her icy bedroom, switched on the light and sat at her dressing table. I must fix myself up, go up to town, see what I can sort out —
The face that stared back at her from the mirror was like a stranger’s, pinched and pallid, the hair lifeless. Panic rose in her sharply. Had she changed so much so quickly? There were lines there she hadn’t seen before, surely, a softness about the jawline, a dullness in the skin that was so unfamiliar as to be chilling. She said aloud. ‘I’m forty-four,’ then bit her lip and went on gazing at her image. ‘I’m not supposed to be so old, am I? When was I thirty? What happened to twenty? I’m forty-four, forty-four —’ She caught her breath in a sharp little hiss and began to scrabble in the drawer where she kept her precious supply of make-up, a dwindling resource in these days of shortages of everything, and began to put it on.
Her old skill was still there; under her quick fingers the pallor eased and became just an interesting background for the soft flush of rouge, the shadows under her eyes were lost as she applied darker, richer ones to the lids, her lips lost their harshness as she curved them with colour and when at last, with a flick of mascara, she completed her canvas and could lean forward and stare in the mirror again and feel the panic begin to subside. She didn’t look all that bad now, surely? Forty-four, perhaps, but not a decrepit forty-four.
‘I can,’ she whispered to her reflection. ‘I can,’ and didn’t know quite what she meant by it. But she did know that she’d reached a corner of her road and was taking the right turning. It would have been so easy to say, ‘I can’t,’ and sink back into the morass of depression and domesticity of the past six months, so easy to flee from her reflection when it had stared back at her so dully, but she hadn’t. She’d changed that alarming image, restored it to some of its former excitement, and with that change of appearance she had changed herself. ‘I can,’ she said again, but this time loudly, pushing back her dressing table stool and going across to her wardrobe. There were clothes there she hadn’t worn for months; she could look good again and she would —
When she reached the front door, looking elegant and assured in a chalk-stripe suit and a small hat that was a nonsense of feathers and veiling perched over one eye, there was a letter on the mat. It was one of the familiar blue airmail letters that he’d been sending with almost religious regularity ever since she’d come back to England. She bent and picked it up, turning it over and over in her gloved fingers.
Would she open this one, or would it be one she put away in a drawer and left, waiting till she could cope with it?
She wouldn’t answer it, that was for certain. She’d decided that when the first of them had been waiting for her when she’d come back from that dreadful journey to Scotland. How could she speak to him again when he couldn’t be told of his daughter? How could she tell him of his daughter when the child — no, the young woman — had so determinedly and so firmly rejected her mother? Bad enough she was suffering the hurt of that rejection; no need to hurt him, too, giving him a child and snatching it away in the same moment, for surely Molly would be as uncaring of him as she was of Lexie? Why should she care, after all? She didn’t know him. Better he shouldn’t know of her. So Lexie had argued when that first letter came, and she had reminded herself of that argument with each subsequent letter. Now she dropped this one back on the doormat and walked over it. Let it lie, she thought as she pulled the door closed behind her and went clattering down the steps into the street. Let it lie. I’m going back to work. I can’t confuse myself with him. Not now.
It was dark when Bessie got home. She stood in the hallway putting her keys back into her bag and listened for Lexie, but knew even as she strained her ears that she wasn’t there. She had always been like that with Lexie. From the time she had been a toddler, Bessie had known instinctively where she was in the house and how she was feeling. It was a closeness that had been born long ago in Sidney Street when Shmuel had been alive, and which had been reforged in these past six months. Bessie had found her child again and had been happier than she would have thought possible, even though she’d known that Lexie was grieving, that she had been blanketed in a deep depression that had slowed her steps and dulled her eyes and made her lethargic and silent. So now she knew that Lexie wasn’t here, as the hint of her old favourite perfume in the air made her spirits plunge, even as she felt glad that Lexie was so much better.
She’d known this was coming; she’d seen it develop over the past few weeks, seen the depression lighten, just as the mist in the park across the street did on winter mornings, first heavy and wet, completely shrouding the trees and the park benches and the truncated walls where once the railings had stood proudly — the railings that had long since vanished to be made into bullets and tank housings — and then swirling a little, becoming thinner in places so that just the ghosts of the tree trunks showed through and then the outlines of the benches and finally the grey grass itself. So it had been with Lexie and now, Bessie told herself as she reached for the light switch to illuminate her way up the stairs, now the mist has gone altogether. It’s still grey days with her, but she’s out of the fog. She’s on her way, and she’ll leave me behind again.
The light sprang on and the letter on the mat seemed to shout at her and she bent and picked it up, staring at the crisp writing on the back. Commander Cramer, it said, and then the string of numbers that was the coded address of his ship. She turned it over. Alexandra Asher, he’d written; no attempt to use the polite address; no ‘Miss’. Just her name, uncompromising as a headline on a theatre poster. Bessie put the letter down on the hall table and went upstairs. She was bone-tired and there was the fire to be lit and supper to be made and her lips curled a little wryly. How like the old Lexie to have gone out so impulsively, without stopping to think of Bessie coming home to a cold, empty and foodless flat; she’s getting better. She’s her old self again, almost, thinking first of Lexie and then of Lexie and again of Lexie, then feeling bad because she remembers other people afterwards. Darling Lexie, Bessie thought, I’m glad you’re better and I wish you weren’t — but I’m really glad —
She dropped her coat on her bed, then went into the living room to take their precious box of matches from behind the clock and use only one to light the fire. As the paper caught and then the handful of sticks, she crouched for a while holding out her hands to the sudden blaze, grateful for its thin heat but mostly for its bright light. Soon the sticks would disintegrate into dull ash, once they’d done their job of igniting the briquettes made of wood shavings and coal dust that were all the fuel they had left this winter. There would then only be, if she was lucky, a dull glow as the briquettes gave up their heat with great reluctance, so this moment of brilliance was to be relished, and she breathed in the smell of cheerfully burning wood, absorbing the scent of it and glorying in the moment while it lasted.
When the phone rang she felt almost irritable. It was probably Alex, she told herself. He’d not had time to come to the office for weeks, so busy was he with his ENSA work at Drury Lane and with his niece Hannah’s affairs — for as she slowly came to terms with the loss of her husband in th
e blitz and restructured her life, her demands on her uncle became heavier than she perhaps realized — and there were matters of business they had to discuss.
But it was Lexie and her spirits lifted absurdly, took a little somersault and made her voice sound glad and eager. She hadn’t just gone out impulsively concerned only with her own doings. She had been concerned for her, Bessie, coming home to the empty flat, and she cried joyously, ‘Lexie! Where are you? I just got in and —’
‘I know.’ Lexie’s voice came thin and distorted through the phone, but there was a crispness in her tone, a purposefulness that had been missing for a long time. ‘I’ve been calling every ten minutes since half past six. I should have left a note, but I was an idiot and forgot. I didn’t want you to worry —’
Bessie felt the tears fill her nose and, childlike, rubbed it with the sleeve of her coat. ‘I wasn’t worried,’ she lied, grinning at the phone as though Lexie could see her, could recognize the pleasure in her. ‘I wasn’t worried —’
‘Good,’ Lexie’s voice clacked. ‘I was, leaving like that. Listen, Bessie, I’m going back to work. I suddenly decided this afternoon that I can’t — well, anyway, I’m in Cockie’s office and there’s a tour they’re putting together for the suburban houses. Wimbledon and Streatham and Golders Green — it’s a revue of bits from several of the old shows, just to tide them over, they say, till they can get a really good one together for the West End. They’ve made a place for me — we’ve got to sort it out and I won’t be able to get home for a while yet. So don’t worry, will you? It might be quite late. I’ll try to get home in time to tell you what’s happening but — anyway, don’t worry. Have you lit the fire?’
Bessie grinned in the flickering light. ‘I’ve lit it,’ she said. ‘I’m all right, Lexie. It was nice of you to worry — thanks.’
Family Chorus Page 42
