by Susan Gandar
NINE
April 1917
SHE WAS CROUCHED DOWN in the gutter, in the centre of the cobbled street, and she was about to do what her father and mother had always forbidden her to do. But she had no choice.
On each of the three hundred and twenty-eight days that her father had been away, Jess had listened to the clink and clatter of metal on wood, as her mother separated the precious silver shillings, and then the bronze pennies, half pennies and farthings into four neat piles on top of the table. And when her mother had counted each individual coin, in each separate pile, Jess had counted too, in a whisper, so that she could not be heard.
Over the weeks and the months, the piles of coins had gone down from four to three as the shillings had disappeared, then the pennies and then the half pennies. Last night, when her mother had picked up the blue and white jug, there had been no clinking and no whispering; there had been no coins to count, none at all, not even a single brass farthing.
Jess crawled, on her knees, round and through a queue of people, under a market stall and up to a shopping basket. She stretched out a hand. The bread was still warm. And with the warmth came anger. Anger that a stranger could afford to buy this bread while she, her mother and her brother were being forced to live off nettles, dandelions, and turnip tops.
The loaf was large, too large to hide. She ripped off one end and, crouching forward, knotted it inside the frayed cotton of her underskirt. She put the rest of the loaf back in the basket with the torn end facing down. She crawled out from under the stall. She staggered to her feet and, with the stolen bread bouncing awkwardly against her legs, walked as fast as she could, so fast she was almost running, across the road to the opposite side of the street. Pushing through a line of women queuing up to buy food, she was about to step into the safety of an alleyway when she stopped to look back.
A woman was staring at her. She was wearing a tightly buttoned grey coat and on her right arm there was a black mourning band. At her feet, on the ground, was the shopping basket and inside it, torn side up, was the loaf of bread.
Jess wanted to run, slip away into the darkness, but her body, her legs, refused to obey. And then the woman nodded her head, so slight but still a nod, and the force that had prevented Jess from moving released its hold.
She ducked into the alley. Walls towered up on either side. Turning left and then right, then left and right again, she came out at the bottom of the main street just in front of the flint-stone church.
She took the right fork, running on past the post boy pushing his bicycle, inch by inch, up the hill. Houses gave way to cottages, the cottages to fields. The road narrowed into a white chalk track. She looked ahead and behind. No one was following her. She unknotted the bread from inside her underskirt. She sniffed it. She nibbled a corner. It was her due; she’d had the idea, she’d taken the risk and she’d done the running. Her mother would never know. She sank her teeth down into its doughy warmth.
She was standing exactly where she and her father had stood almost a year ago, the morning he had left home to go to the barracks at Winchester. Down below, on the other side of the ridge, she could see their cottage, tucked away at the edge of the woods, at the bottom of the valley.
The door was shut and the curtains drawn. There was no smoke curling out of the chimney and there was no washing hanging out on the line. And the garden, where her mother had spent so much of her time, digging up, clearing and planting vegetables, was now choked with weeds. The cottage was no longer a home: it was a tomb.
She ran down the track, through the gate and up the path to the door. She tore down the blanket she had helped her mother to nail up at the start of the winter. It was time to let in some fresh air and sunshine.
‘Mum, Mum, I’ve got us some bread.’
The figure curled up on the bed, under the mound of clothes and blankets, shifted.
‘Look, Mum, bread, I’ve got us some bread.’
Her mother sat up.
‘We can’t afford bread…’
Her mother took hold of her arm.
‘How did you get it? Did you steal it?’
Her grip tightened.
‘Did you? Tell me, did you steal it?’
‘It was a present, a present from a lady in the market…’
‘What have you been doing? Why would a lady like that want to give people like us a present?’
‘She felt sorry for us.’
She felt no guilt, none whatsoever, sitting at the kitchen table, watching her mother feeding pieces of bread, soaked in water, to her baby brother. It didn’t matter that the bread had been stolen. She was keeping them alive, making sure they would all still be there to welcome her father when he came back home.
She could see it. A summer’s evening, the sun dropping down behind the trees, her mother, holding her brother, both plump cheeked and laughing, and herself, standing in the doorway, watching her father dressed in his soldier’s uniform, a pack on his back, stride down the hill towards the cottage.
There was a loud rap. Her mother looked up.
‘See who that is, Jess.’
She knew who it was. She didn’t have to open the door. It was her father. He was standing there, smiling, waiting to be let in, his head cocked to one side, his fingers tapping impatiently.
‘Jess? Did you hear?’
He would get his old job back on the farm. They would be able to afford medicine for her brother and coal for the fire to keep them warm. There would be stews bubbling on the range and mugs of steaming hot tea and slabs of fresh bread, with butter and a slice of cheese, sometimes even ham, for a treat on a Sunday. They would be happy. They would be a family again.
She opened the door.
‘Mrs. Brown? Edith Brown?’
The post boy wiped the sweat off his face with the back of his hand.
‘That’s my mother.’
Jess took the brown envelope with OHMS printed on the front.
‘Thank you.’
The post boy walked away down the path.
She closed the door. She tore open the envelope. She took out the sheet of paper. She unfolded the letter.
“It is my duty to inform you that a report has been received from the War Office notifying the death of William John Brown.”
TEN
‘YOU DID SAY MR. Foster?’
The receptionist checked her computer.
‘Mr. Michael Foster.’
It had taken half an hour to get there. One minute her mother was upset. The next minute she was angry. At every left turn, right turn, traffic light, roundabout and T-junction, she repeated that Sam’s father was fine. He was at the airport. The hospital had phoned the wrong person.
‘Yes. That’s right. Look, there’s been some mistake. My husband–’
‘Seaview Road. Number seven? That’s the address he’s given us. Is that where you live, Mrs Foster?
‘Yes…’
It was her father. So how had the accident happened? It was impossible to believe that he had caused it; he was too careful a driver. Unlike her mother who thought nothing of overtaking in the inside lane and always accelerated when the traffic lights were changing to red, her father obeyed every chapter, paragraph, sentence, comma and full stop of the Highway Code.
If it said check your mirror, he checked it not twice but three times. Too much to the left, too much to the right, too much sticking out the front, too much sticking out the back, parking a car was no different to docking a Boeing; it required exactly the same amount of precision. All that was missing was the man wearing the metal earmuffs, walking backwards, waving him in.
‘Mrs Foster, if you’d just like to take a seat, I’ll let them know you’re here.’
Her mother’s mobile shrilled out.
‘It’s Dad’s work. Hello, yes, Rachel Foster speaking…’
Her father never drank the day before he flew. Whether they were having supper out or giving a party, it was a rule he would never break, not eve
r, however great the temptation. And last night would have been no different.
‘Yes, we’re at the hospital. We’ve only just got here. Yes, in the accident and emergency department. No, Mike didn’t phone. The hospital did. Yes, I will, as soon as I know. No problem. Bye.’
‘Mrs Foster?’
‘Yes?’
‘Hi, I’m Kelly, one of the team looking after your husband. If you’d like to follow me…’
Sam had expected crowds of disgruntled people, some drunk, many of them shouting. But the waiting area was empty except for a smartly dressed couple, sitting together, holding hands, talking quietly to themselves, and a young man in a hoodie eyeing up the refreshment machine. Nobody was bleeding.
Her mother had fallen over, several years ago, when carrying a large blue and white bowl from the sitting room into the kitchen. A piece of broken china had embedded itself into her leg, just below the knee. She’d insisted on pulling it out there and then. Blood had sprayed everywhere, all over her mother, all over the floor, all down the cupboards. The next thing Sam remembered was hearing someone repeating her name. When she opened her eyes she was lying on the kitchen floor and her mother, sitting upright on a chair with a blood-soaked towel knotted round her knee, was asking her father whether he thought they should take Sam to a hospital.
‘Your husband was brought in by ambulance, Mrs Foster.’
‘But how did it happen? My husband’s a pilot. He flies planes…’
They walked through a set of double doors. Stretching out in front of them was another white-walled corridor.
‘Yes, he’s told us.’
Kelly’s smile was tight-lipped.
‘He also told us that he was on his way to work, driving along, and there was a girl standing on the pavement. She walked out right in front of him. Whether it was accidental, she didn’t see him coming, or deliberate we don’t know. Your husband’s given the police a description.’
‘Has he been badly hurt, the person who phoned didn’t say?’
‘His seatbelt was faulty. When he braked, to avoid hitting her, he went straight into the windscreen. Got quite a nasty knock on the head…’
They stopped. The corridor widened out. There was a line of cubicles on either side. Each individual cubicle contained a couple of chairs and a lamp attached to the wall over a trolley bed. But only one had a curtain drawn across its entrance.
‘The x-rays and scan show nothing abnormal but your husband really should stay here overnight, for observation, to make sure that everything is fine, just in case there is any complication, but he won’t hear of it. We were rather hoping you might be able to get him to change his–’
Her mother shook her head.
‘You’ve got the wrong person…’
The cubicle curtain jerked open. And there was her father.
‘I want my car keys, I want my mobile, and I want them now.’
‘He only listens to his auto-pilot.’
The doors they had just walked through crashed open. A trolley, surrounded by doctors and nurses, smashed past. Lying on the trolley was an elderly man. As the trolley crashed through a second set of double doors at the far end of the corridor, Sam caught a glimpse of a brilliantly lit, white room with figures, wearing gloves, face masks and green overalls, standing round what looked like an operating table.
ELEVEN
‘YES, ON THE CORNER of Stanley Road and Mortimer Street. Yes, the keys are in the usual place. Yes, that’s right. No problem. Tomorrow will be fine. Cheers.’
Her father clicked off his phone.
‘They’ll collect the car today, fix the seatbelt and then bring it back over here, to the house, tomorrow, probably in the morning.’
Everything was going to be all right.
‘Your head looks awful. Does it hurt?’
They were almost home.
‘Bit of a bruise. That’s all.’
And her mother and father were talking to each other.
‘Are you sure they said no flying for two weeks?’
‘At least two weeks. You were there when they said it…’
Her mother swerved right into a side street. A car travelling towards them, down the main road, slammed on its brakes.
‘Rachel…’
Her mother slowed.
‘You didn’t even indicate…’
The car stopped.
‘You don’t just–’
Sam slid down into her seat. She closed her eyes.
‘Get out.’
Her father laughed.
‘Rachel…’
He was sitting in his cockpit.
‘I said get out.’
Her mother was standing on her platform.
‘Because if you don’t like the way I drive then do me a favour and get out of my car.’
They sat there, in silence, the three of them going nowhere, her mother tapping her fingers against the steering wheel.
‘I’m sorry.’
The tapping stopped.
‘Apology accepted.’
The car moved forward. Sam opened her eyes. This time her mother indicated.
‘So will you be OK, the two of you, if I go and get the shopping? Because we could send out for a delivery this evening…’
Her mother was holding her car keys but there was no sign of her moving out of the kitchen, along the hall, out of the front door and into her car. She was stuck.
‘We could have a pizza or we could try out the new Indian place in Portland Street. They both do home–’
‘I’ll go and get the shopping.’
Her father grabbed the keys out of her hand.
‘You can’t.’
He was at the door.
‘You mustn’t drive. I was there when they told you.’
Her mother snatched the keys back from him.
‘Not for at least three days.’
The front door slammed. Her father sank down onto a chair. He sat there, silent, head in his hands, slumped down over the table.
‘Dad, everything’s going to be all right, isn’t it?’
Her father lifted his head.
‘Please, Sam…’
‘With you and Mum…’
Her father closed his eyes. He shook his head, slowly, from side to side.
‘Not now, please.’
‘You won’t have to leave, will you?’
He stood up.
‘I’m going upstairs to change. Get out of this uniform…’
He walked out of the kitchen, slamming the door shut behind him.
She would make his favourite sandwich: cheddar cheese and oak-smoked ham on granary with honey mustard. She would take it upstairs and he would laugh and give her a hug. Her mother would come back from the supermarket. They would unpack the shopping and there would be chicken casserole in tomato sauce, with anchovies, garlic and capers, for supper.
She sliced and buttered the bread. She added a slice of cheese, some mustard, another slice of ham, some more mustard and then another slice of cheese. Her father liked his sandwiches big, very big. But he also liked them very neat and very orderly.
There was a thump of feet down the stairs and along the hallway. The door opened and her father stumbled into the kitchen – or rather the ghost of her father. In less than ten minutes, in the time it had taken for her to prepare the sandwich, he had turned into a stooped and frail old man.
‘Sam…’
He clutched at her hand.
‘Please…’
‘Dad? What’s happened? What’s the matter?’
His mouth twisted, contorted, but no words came, only a trail of spittle.
‘Dad…’
He sank down onto the kitchen floor and, twisting himself up tight into a ball, began to whimper.
‘Si…’
His body juddered and juddered again, uncontrollably. He started to retch.
She jumped up and grabbed the plastic washing up bowl from the cupboard underneath the sink. She crouched b
ack down beside her father.
‘Dad?’
It was stupid but she held out the bowl. Her father pushed it away. He slid down to one side, his head and upper body propped up against a kitchen cupboard. He coughed, then retched and coughed again. His mouth opened and he vomited, helplessly, all over everything and everywhere, including himself.
She scrambled, gagging from the smell, up on to her feet. She snatched up her mobile and punched in her mother’s number. It rang. And rang. And rang. There was silence, followed by a click, and then her mother’s laughing voice told her to leave a message.
‘Mum. It’s me, Sam. It’s Dad, he’s really ill, he’s been sick and everything. I don’t know what to do, come home, please, come home…’
Her father was still lying there, slumped down against the cupboard, but his eyes were now closed. Her mother had left twenty minutes ago. It was a ten-minute drive to the supermarket. She wouldn’t be back for at least half an hour.
Sam punched in the three digit number she had always assumed, in her previous life, the one she had been living just fifteen minutes ago, she would never have to dial.
‘Ambulance, please. Yes. Number seven, Seaview Road. Yes. Seaview Road. That’s right. It’s my father. My name? My name is Sam, Sam Foster.’
How long would the ambulance take to get there? Ten minutes? Fifteen? She put the phone down. She was trembling, not just her hand, but her whole body.
TWELVE
THE TROLLEY CRASHED THROUGH the double doors into a brilliantly lit, white room. Figures, wearing gloves, face masks and green overalls, stood round what looked like an operating table.
‘Sam? It is Sam, isn’t it? You came in this morning. With your mother…’
An arm was placed around her shoulder and she was led away, down a corridor, round a corner and into a room. The nurse called Kelly asked if she would like something to drink, a tea or a coffee. Sam replied. A door closed. And there was silence.
She sat there, her body clenched tight, her eyes unseeing, her mind blank, conscious of each and every beat of her heart, each short, sharp gasp for air. If she allowed herself just for a second to let go, everything, her mind, body, the room in which she was sitting, would spiral out of control.
