by Susan Gandar
‘Amy Roberts.’
‘Address?’
‘Tudor Close.’
‘Number?’
A tall figure, dressed in pilot’s uniform, gold braid on his sleeves, cap perched at just the right angle on top of his head, was striding towards the entrance doors of the accident and emergency department.
‘I’m sorry…’
The automatic doors slid open.
‘The house number? In Tudor Close?’
‘Twenty-four, I think. I’m not sure…’
The figure disappeared outside.
‘No problem. We can check. If you’d like to take a seat I’ll get…’
She couldn’t wait. She’d done all she could. There was a police car sitting outside the girl’s house. When her parents arrived home they would be driven straight to the hospital.
She pushed her way past a family, a little boy his head buried in his father’s shoulder, his right hand tightly bound in a wet towel, the mother sobbing into her phone. Behind were two girls, the same age as herself, supporting a third, the side of her face streaked a livid red. The doors slid open. And there he was. Head held high, arms and legs pumping, on his way to somewhere else.
‘Dad…’
An ambulance, blue lights flashing, sirens blaring, turned off the main road. It accelerated up the ramp directly towards her father.
‘Dad, look out.’
There was no slamming of brakes. No thump of hard metal crunching into soft flesh. The ambulance continued up the ramp. It screeched to a stop outside the accident and emergency department. The driver got out, walked round to the back and threw open first one door, and then the other. An elderly couple looked Sam up and down, shook their heads, muttered something to each other, and continued walking down the ramp towards the main road.
She stood there, trembling, staring at the spot where her father had just been. There had been no slam of brakes, no thump of metal, no screaming or calling out for a doctor, because there had been nothing to scream or call out about. Instead of shattered bone and blood and guts there was empty space. Her father had vanished – if he had ever been there at all.
She ran back into the accident and emergency department, through the waiting area, and down the corridor to the lift. She punched the button. She stepped inside. The doors closed, the doors opened, people got in, people got out; sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and, at last, the tenth floor.
‘Stand clear… oxygen away…VF… shock.’
A trolley, laden with equipment, stood at the end of her father’s bed. She recognised it.
‘Asystole. Flat line.’
It was the same trolley the doctors had used to shoot electricity through the old man’s body. The old man with the grey face thick with stubble, locked away in his coma, who had suddenly sat upright, straight backed in his bed, his arms outstretched, his eyes staring, his mouth opening and closing as if he was trying to say something. That bed was now empty.
‘There’s no heartbeat. It’s been too long.’
A nurse started to remove an intravenous tube from her father’s right arm. A second nurse started to remove an intravenous tube from his left arm. A third nurse unplugged a monitor.
Her father was being tidied up, packed away, like he was nothing more than a head, and a chest, with two arms and two legs which had never felt pain, had never felt anger – had never known love.
She pushed past the trolley, with its plugs and its wires, its paddles and its cables, which had produced the electric shocks that had shot through her father’s body, sending him convulsing off the bed. None of which had worked.
‘Dad, it’s me, Sam.’
She grabbed hold of his hand.
‘Please come back.’
Someone was trying to pull her away from the bed.
‘Sam, come with me now. Your dad can’t hear you…’
It was Mac. Standing next to him was Dr. Brownlow.
‘We did everything we could.’
And now Mac was putting his hand on her hand, and he was uncurling it, finger by finger, out of her father’s. She kicked out, hitting him hard on the shin. He jumped back. She held on to her father’s hand even tighter.
‘We love you…’
Her whole body was screaming.
‘Please come back…’
She had to make him hear.
‘We love you, we love you. Please come back.’
‘Sam, stop now, Dad can’t hear you…’
She had a special gift. That’s what the old lady in the church had said. She could see and hear things other people couldn’t see or hear, go to places other people couldn’t reach. So where would her father be now? Where would he go, inside his head, if he was in a coma?
She closed her eyes. Sometimes her father would be away for just a couple of days, sometimes a full week, often even longer, but, wherever he was, even if it was on the other side of the world, they had always been able to talk to each other. She had always been able to reach him.
FORTY-THREE
November 1917
‘YOU ARE PREGNANT, AREN’T you?’
The needle stabbed into her finger. Blood oozed out onto the sheet.
‘The Major thinks I’m just his silly little wife but I’m neither silly, nor am I stupid. Nor am I blind. So are you or are you not pregnant?’
Jess nodded.
‘And my son’s the father.’
She nodded again.
‘And, of course, he loves you.’
Jess raised her eyes.
‘Yes, yes, he does, very much.’
For month after month she’d had to walk around the house, her eyes down, her mouth closed, with her swollen belly tightly corseted.
‘And you love him.’
Tom had told her that his parents were decent people. And he’d been right. Now, at long last, she could tell the truth.
‘Yes, yes, I do.’
Jess put down her sewing.
‘Do you think… Tom… do you think he’s still alive?’
The telegram had said missing in action. That was over four weeks ago and they had heard nothing since.
‘My husband is writing letters and going for meetings with everyone he can. We both believe that Tom will come back home to us.’
The Major’s wife turned back to her stitching. Every week, after the linen had been delivered back to Eaton Villa, the Major’s wife would check through it, item by item, ticking everything off in her laundry book. Any sheets which were worn thin in the middle had to be cut down the centre and the outside edges sewn together so that the thin bits were on the outside. It took at least a couple of thousand stitches, tiny, almost invisible ones, nothing else would do, to repair one sheet.
‘I’ve always known that one day my son would fall in love and want to get married and have a home of his own. And that’s all I have ever wanted, that he should be happy. His father, the Major, however, has always wanted more. Tom, when he comes home, will marry a girl from a good family, with a title and money.’
The Major’s wife snipped through her thread.
‘A girl like Emily Cunningham.’
The baby kicked out, angrily, against the tightly laced corset she was wearing. It narrowed her waist but only thinly disguised her rounded belly.
‘There’s no Emily Cunningham, and there’s no Matthew Cunningham, never has been. The girl out walking with Tom was me.’
The Major’s wife snapped shut the lid of her sewing box.
‘And the baby I’m carrying is your son’s. Nobody else’s. I wrote to Tom four weeks ago telling him I was pregnant, when he received that letter, if he was alive…’
He was. He had to be.
‘He would have written to you, asked you to look after–’
‘We have received no such letter.’
The Major’s wife rose from her chair.
‘Please talk to the Major, the child I’m carrying is his grandchild, your grandchild, and always will be, in marriage or
out of marriage…’
‘And if I do, if I tell him about all the games you’ve been playing, leading our son on…’
No games had been played and nobody had led anybody on. When the war ended, if Tom came home, maybe he would marry her, maybe he wouldn’t. But what she did know was that in the short space of time they’d spent together, something very real had happened between them. And whatever the Major’s wife said or did, and however many weeks and months passed, she, Jess, had to try to remember, and hold onto, that truth.
‘I know exactly what my husband will say. He will insist on your removal from this house, instantly, with no reference, no money, and with only the clothes on your back. And with your mother dead there will be nowhere for you to go. You’ll have no roof over your head and no food on your plate. You will end up walking the streets…’
Five month’s pregnant and without a reference would make it impossible for her to find a job.
‘If you are with child it cannot and never will be my son’s. And you cannot and never will be a member of this family. Now do you still want me to talk to my husband?’
She couldn’t take that risk.
‘No, ma’am.’
She picked up her sewing.
‘So, if you’re not pregnant your tiredness and sickness must be due to something else entirely, must they not?’
She lowered her eyes back down to her needlework.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
FORTY-FOUR
SHE’D HAD TO WAIT another whole week before the Major and his wife went out in the evening. She needed time – just in case it went wrong.
She untied her apron, the best white for serving dinner, and dropped it down on the chair beside her bed. One, two, three, four, five, six buttons, and she peeled off her black dress. She unlaced and pulled off her corset. She unpinned and then un-tucked the first strip of sheeting. She passed it round and round her body, round and round, gradually easing her breasts out of their prison. She held them in her hands, slowly, slowly, massaging away the pain.
She unpinned and un-tucked the second strip of sheeting. She passed it round her body, again and again, again and again, until it fell to the floor and she was standing there, naked, the gold locket fastened round her neck glinting in the candlelight. She cupped the weight of her swollen belly in her hands, stroking it gently, whispering to the child inside, ‘Forgive me, please, forgive me.’
She lowered herself down into the hipbath, sat there in the steaming hot water, stained yellow with mustard powder, waiting, hoping, for the cramps to start. They didn’t. She’d tried jumping down off a chair, again and again, but it hadn’t worked. Drinking gin wasn’t an option. There was none in the house and, even if there was, the Major’s wife would have noticed. There was only one more thing she could do. And it was something you only did if you were really desperate. And she was.
Stitch by stitch she unpicked the seam of her corset. The Major’s wife had stays made out of whalebone. But she, the maid-of-all-work, had stays made out of beaten steel. They weren’t only cheap. They were also very hard and very sharp; when she was kneeling down or bending over she could feel the metal digging into her hips and belly. And something hard and sharp was exactly what she needed. She pulled the stay, inch by inch, out of its seam. It was about as half as wide as her little finger, very thin and completely flat. Both ends were slightly rounded.
Tom knew, from her last letter to him, that she was pregnant. If he was still alive, and he did come home, he would expect to find her with child. Her own mother had lost two babies, one at six weeks, the other three months into pregnancy before being safely delivered of her brother. It wasn’t unusual. And that’s what she would tell him. That she had lost the baby. And he would believe her. And understand.
She saw him running up the steps, through the front door and into the hallway of the house. He would scoop her up in his arms and hold her so tight that it was impossible to breathe. Then she saw them standing together, side by side, in front of an altar, Tom slipping a gold ring onto her finger.
She was lying in a white bed in a sun-filled room. Tom was standing looking down at her. She held the child up to him. He took their newborn in his arms. Happy, smiling, he cradled it in his arms. It was then that she noticed the little girl, standing at the end of the bed, staring at her. She went back to the church and there was the same little girl, standing between herself and Tom at the altar. And there she was again, standing in the hallway of the house, pulling at Tom’s trousers, trying to get his attention. Her lie would follow them everywhere.
But he wasn’t coming home. He was missing in action. That’s what the telegram had said. And he was missing because no body had been found. And that was because there was no body to find. He had been blown to pieces, his fingers and toes, eyes and ears, just lumps of dead flesh flying through the air.
And the child inside her was nothing more than a lump of flesh. No more. No less. Yes, it was alive, it twisted and kicked, but it didn’t feel joy. It didn’t know fear. And it didn’t feel pain. It didn’t matter whether it lived or died. It wouldn’t know or care.
She poured water out of the jug into the bowl. She washed and dried the metal stay. Without the child she had a chance. She would work out her time here at Eaton Villa, get the Major and his wife to give her a reference and then she would apply for a better job with decent pay. She would start her life all over again. Years from now, married with a husband and children, all of this would be forgotten.
She spread out an old sheet on the floor, in the narrow space between the bed and the door, and lay down. She hitched her nightdress up above her waist.
‘What you trying to do? Kill yourself?’
Ellie jumped down through the open window.
‘Because if you are there’s no better way of doing it…’
She grabbed the steel from Jess’ hand.
‘Come here, you silly girl.’
She heaved Jess up from the floor.
‘So what’s happened, because something must have?’
She pulled her down onto the bed. They lay, side by side, arms wrapped round each other.
‘She knows, I told her, but she already knew, she’d already guessed…’
They hugged the blanket around themselves to keep warm.
‘So what did she say?’
‘It can never be Tom’s…’
‘So whose is it then? The Archangel bleeding Gabriel’s?’ Ellie snorted. ‘What else did the old bag say?’
‘The Major would throw me out if he knew…’
‘Listen, Jess, they want you to get rid of it and they’ll be dead chuffed if they can get rid of you at the same time. But you mustn’t let them. You want to keep this baby, don’t you?’
It was easy to say but not so easy to do.
‘Tom’s dead, he’s been blown to pieces, he’s never coming home…’
Ellie pulled the blanket tighter around them.
‘Listen, Jess, there was a girl back in my village. The day she found out her husband had been killed in action she never stopped smiling. It was the best thing that had ever happened to her. When he had a drink in him he’d beat her black and blue then he’d force himself on her. A month later she stopped her smiling. She’d had another letter. They’d made a mistake, got the name wrong. Her husband was alive and on his way home.’
Mistakes did happen; she’d read about them in the papers.
‘I’ll look after you, Jess, hold your hand and everything, that’s what I used to do for my mother and I’ll do the same for you. Nothing to it, a bit of pushing, a bit of shoving, and out it comes. Give your Tom something to look forward to. A trouble shared is a trouble halved. So, what do you say?’
FORTY-FIVE
April 1918
ALL SHE WANTED TO do was scream. If she did, the Major and his wife would hear her. They would run up the stairs and along the corridor into her attic bedroom. They would see Jess lying on the floor, her nightdress hitched o
ver her hips, with Ellie kneeling beside her. They would call for the doctor and there would be hot water and clean sheets.
But screaming would also mean having her baby dragged out of her arms, lying there, helplessly, while it was handed over to a stranger – never being allowed to see her child again.
Ellie pushed a bundle of rags into her mouth.
‘Here, bite on this.’
The Major and his wife had said nothing when, at six o’clock that evening, she’d told them that she was feeling ill and could she please have their permission to go upstairs to bed. The Major’s wife had tilted her head to one side.
‘What exactly is the problem?’
If they didn’t hurry up, the baby, and everything else, all the blood and bits, would squeeze themselves out, down here in the living room, onto the Major’s precious Indian silk carpet.
‘It’s…’
She indicated down below. Let the Major’s wife think it was her monthly.
‘I need to… lie down.’
She stood there, eyes down, back straight, her hands clenched into fists, as the pain knifed through her.
‘Are you sure, Jess, that is all it is?’
All the Major’s wife had to do was count back, the days, weeks and months, to when Tom was at home. But perhaps she’d already done that.
She bobbed a curtsey.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘You don’t need a doctor?’
The Major looked her up and down over the top of his newspaper.
‘No, sir.’
‘Are you sure? If you do, you should say.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
She curtseyed again. But she wouldn’t be able to do a fourth. Her legs would give way underneath her.
‘Very well. You may go upstairs.’
Nothing to it, a bit of pushing, a bit of shoving and out it comes was how Ellie had described it. But then Ellie had never had a baby.
The pain was so awful she didn’t think she would be able to get through the next two hours, let alone three or four, upstairs, alone in her room, with no one to hold her hand and no one to talk to. And Ellie had promised, when it happened, day or night, she would be there.
