The Echo of Twilight

by Judith Kinghorn

  There is so much I wish to say and tell you, and it is my dearest wish that we will one day be able to meet and speak as friends. In the meantime, I am grateful for everything you have done for us, and I remain—

  Yours,

  Pearl

  I folded the sheet of paper and put it inside the envelope along with the ring—the ruby and diamond ring she had given me, loaned me. I took a last look around my room, my yellow room, picked up my suitcase—empty of novels, Bible and encyclopedia—and glanced over at the bookcase where a dog-eared pamphlet titled The Private Shadow remained. And then I followed Lila along the darkened corridor and down the staircase.

  “Wait here,” I said as I put down the suitcase.

  I pushed the envelope beneath Ottoline’s door, and then I stood for a moment with my forehead rested on it. I felt like a mother abandoning a child—abandoning a helpless child without a good-bye. And for a moment I vacillated: What will she do? Who will look after her? How will she cope? Then I heard Lila, my own child, the real child, and I turned and walked back to her.

  The house was quiet, but a few lamps were already lit downstairs. Rodney and Mrs. Lister were up and about. In the kitchen, Mrs. Lister cried, said she’d had no idea and that it was all such a shock, and what about Lila? And what about Her Ladyship—did she know? And where was I to go? On and on it went, as I knew it would. Then she mentioned Stanley, saying she could sort of understand it, imagine that I’d wish to be reunited with him now that the war was over.

  I said, “Unfortunately, that can’t happen. He died.”

  She looked horrified. “But when?”

  “Oh, a while ago now . . . I didn’t say anything because of . . . Billy and Hugo, and your boys.”

  She flung her arms around me and began to cry again. And yes, I felt guilty, but I couldn’t pretend about him anymore. And as I held her, as Rodney smiled at me, I knew he knew.

  Eventually I stepped away, out of the kitchen, and called down the passageway for Lila.

  Rodney accompanied us outside, where the taxicab sat waiting with its headlights shining into the rain and mist and falling leaves. He placed my suitcase in the boot, gripped me by the shoulders and said, “Are you sure? Are you quite certain?”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t want to wait a little longer—see them and say good-bye?”

  “No, it’s better like this. His Lordship won’t be surprised. And I’ve left my lady a note . . . As I told you, I decided a while ago that I’d leave when the war ended—and now it has ended. And I don’t wish to spend another winter in the country. In fact, I don’t want to stay another week.”

  “Are we really that bad?”

  “You know what I mean. It’s time for me to move on.”

  “Look, this may seem a little impudent, but—” Rodney reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out his wallet.

  “No, I don’t need any money, Rodney,” I said, and I pushed away his hand. “I’ve managed to save up quite a bit over the last four years. But thank you anyway. It’s very kind of you . . .”

  “What will you do? For work, I mean. Your savings won’t last forever, you know. It’s prudent to keep something set aside.”

  “I’m not sure. Shop work, perhaps. I’ve seen advertisements, and it seems to pay quite well.”

  “You will let me know if you need anything—any help?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “I’ll miss you—and her,” he added, nodding at Lila, already sitting in the back of the taxi and singing happily to her doll.

  I tried to smile. “We must keep in touch, you and I.”

  He lowered his hands, stared down at his shoes. “Yes, indeed.”

  And then, because I knew so much and felt for him—and because a million moments had passed since he had first opened that door to me—I flung my arms around him and held on to him for longer than was usual.

  “A little irregular, Mr. Watts,” I said, stepping back, wiping away tears.

  “A little irregular, Pearl . . . But isn’t today, here and now and everything? And won’t it always be so?”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  “And you. Write to me. Let me know . . . Let me know how you’re both getting on and all that.”

  “I will, I promise. And I’ll keep my fingers crossed about Derek, but I’m sure you’ll hear something soon. They’ll be releasing prisoners of war. He’ll turn up.”

  “Oh yes,” he said, ever brave and standing taller.

  I climbed into the waiting motorcar, and as I held on to my daughter, as our taxicab swept down the treelined driveway, I turned and looked back at Rodney Watts—singular, unchanged, standing on the driveway in his tailcoat and striped trousers—and beyond him, the house: a house I had arrived at as a silly girl with blistered feet, a case of books and head filled with romantic notions. A place I had arrived at with swollen ideals and inflated ambition, and was now, four years later, leaving as a mother, a woman of limited means and meager expectations, but a woman who had known love.

  I watched Rodney raise his hand, watched him disappear behind the rhododendrons. Then I turned, fixed my eyes ahead and pulled my daughter’s small body closer. And for a moment I could see it all: the sky, the hills, those high-up purples and blues, that dark bird’s wing, those feathery clouds and him, sitting under the apricot light of another country and time.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Nineteen

  Yes, Memory is a cruel thing. For it knows our struggle to remember, and to forget, and it ignores Time. It whispers or withholds, suggesting more, or less, secure in the knowledge that it will have the final say. Secure in the knowledge that it can—at any time it so wishes—erase, adapt or rewrite our story. Redeeming, damning, it thrusts upon us, altering statements to questions and shrinking our vistas.

  And so we cling onto the slow days of our youth, rich and golden and soft beneath our feet, heavy with promise and the blue skies of an eternal summer. Then we remember our autumn, when the skies lowered and the song stopped and dusk began to fall. And we knew that summer had an end, and that we would, also.

  My life had not turned out as I’d once imagined, but I could have no regrets; I had Lila. And I took strength and comfort from her—her smile, her touch, and each time she wrapped her arms around my waist and told me she loved me. Each time she lifted my hands and pressed her mouth to my palms, each time I lowered my face to her hair, her sweet-smelling golden hair, I was grateful. And when she was good, I’d say, “Your father would be very proud of you, Lila.” And when she was naughty, I’d say, “Your father would be so disappointed.”

  But there was no father. I had no husband—dead or alive—and no war widow’s pension. Lila and I belonged nowhere and to no one. And I still yearned for that, to belong, for us both to belong. I wanted to believe that my life—begun the day my mother chose to abandon me on a dirty workshop floor, the day she decided to walk into the Thames—would amount to something more than this today, tomorrow and the day after. With all my heart I wanted to believe that I was not the continuum of my mother’s end, and that the future would prove it; that there would be an alteration, a change in the circumstances of my life.

  On our arrival in London, I reverted to my own name, or rather, my maternal grandfather’s name. I had never wanted the name Morton and could not allow my daughter to grow up with it. Thus I became Mrs. Gibson, another war widow. The city was full of them, and I was just another, I thought.

  Lila and I spent one night at our first boarding house. It was the only place I could find advertising vacancies. And it was cheap and close to the station. But I should have known. I should have known by the sign offering rooms by the hour and by the seedy characters hanging about the lobby. And I should have known by the London-bound revelers singing on board the train and those dancing—drunkenly, wearily and still dra
ped in flags—about the station concourse that there was a party going on in London: a victory party.

  The walls of our room were paper thin and amidst the alcohol-infused revelry and arguments, amidst clanking beds and constant thunder on the staircase, I didn’t get any sleep. None at all. Traffic flowed past all night, rattling windows as horns honked and bells rang out and lights flashed across the torn wallpaper. The sudden and deafening clatter of life: so different to Northumberland.

  The following day I secured lodgings in Bayswater, led by another sign in another window: NO GENTLEMEN, WOMEN ONLY—WIDOWS WELCOME. However, I learned very quickly that a woman on her own with a child was something to be viewed with suspicion—particularly by those inherently suspicious, even in the aftermath of war. We had been there for less than a week when I was asked to leave because another widow had told the landlady she suspected that I was not a widow at all, that I was an unmarried mother. I had been caught out on technicalities, the details of my husband’s regiment and my war widow’s pension. My landlady said she had no choice; she had to take such complaints seriously—otherwise what would people say? They would say she was lowering the tone of the neighborhood, and then what?

  So Lila and I moved on again—to another room in Bayswater, with meals, a shared bathroom and, crucially, a sympathetic landlady. It was a clean, quiet and calm household, but beyond it, the city remained engulfed in a hysterical atmosphere of patriotic fervor. There were demands for vengeance against Germany, demands to Hang the Kaiser. And there was about to be a general election, in which recent legislation decreed women over the age of thirty be allowed the right to vote.

  I was twenty-eight.

  A few days after the election, I secured a part-time job a short bus ride away at Selfridges department store, where I spent three days a week spraying scent on diamond-clad wrists. My landlady’s daughter, Myrtle, looked after Lila while I worked, and we spent our Christmas there, with Mrs. Dalby and Myrtle, in the gaslit front parlor decorated with paper chains made from old newspapers. I received a card from Rodney and one from Mrs. Lister, but I heard nothing from Ottoline.

  The year 1919: It sounded bizarrely futuristic. But I’d heard people say that there was good luck to be had in that double number. And there was.

  Early that year, I was offered full-time work at the store, and moved upstairs—to lingerie. Trying to sell corsets and brassieres to women with bound chests made no sense, but by then little made sense anyway. I spent my days staring at painted smiles and expensive faces, watching women clutching onto the arms of men with glass eyes and stiff legs, and surveying French lace and frills as though such things mattered. However, working full-time brought in a little more money, and a few months later, in the summer, Lila and I moved out of our lodgings and into a two-bedroom flat in Fulham. It was sparsely furnished, and without a bathroom—just the usual shared lavatory outside, and a tin bath in the kitchen—but it offered us privacy and more space.

  Myrtle continued to look after my daughter, and each evening after she left, after I’d put Lila to bed, I’d do my chores and then sit beneath the gaslight, sewing—patching, mending and adapting Lila’s clothes. She was growing quickly, and though I didn’t have the money to buy new clothes for her—or for myself—I did have an eagle eye at jumble sales. Lila always looked smart; everyone said so . . . Smart as a carrot.

  I didn’t need luxuries because I had my memories of Ralph, and they were enough, I thought. Night after night, I closed my eyes to that dim, colorless room and returned to the hills—still purple and blue—and to him: long sandy lashes and sunburned cheeks, fingers smeared with paint. But I could no longer see the color of his eyes. Like my romantic heart, my memories had shriveled.

  I no longer prayed and had stopped going to church. Toward the end of the war, I had struggled with my faith, and then, after the Spanish flu epidemic took hold, I knew I couldn’t subscribe to a god capable of inflicting more suffering. I wasn’t the only one to give up on him. Most of the people I worked with thought the same: What good had all those prayers done? The god Kitty had taught me to believe in, that magnanimous deity who absolved and forgave, granted miracles and made the world better, had gone, presupposing he had ever been there.

  Though the war officially ended that summer, with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, reminders of it were everywhere. Heroes, the newspapers called them: HEROES, EACH AND EVERY ONE. More than three and a half million men had been demobilized. War torn, twitchy, hungry and filthy, our heroes flooded the capital, lingering outside Tube stations, in squares and on street corners, dazed by normality, and in the absence of orders, unsure what to do or where to go next. They stood in line not for a medal, but a cup of tea or lump of stale bread; they slept on park benches, on flagstones and in gutters. Some wore tin masks lest their missing mouths and noses offend our sensibilities, while others, those without limbs, sat about in wheelchairs, waiting for a penny to be dropped into a hat. As those they had fought for wrinkled their own perfect noses and murmured, Something really ought to be done.

  I was on my midmorning break, hurrying back from the bank, when I heard the first stroke of eleven and everything stopped—as if by magic. Horse-drawn delivery wagons, tramcars, taxicabs, motors and cyclists all came to a halt. Delivery boys skidded to a standstill, road sweepers paused in their work, men removed hats and stared downward, and veterans saluted. Like an eerie photograph, Oxford Street froze into the November mist and within the silence, which second by second deepened and spread out over the city, was a deafening agony. But for two minutes the universe stopped as we paused and remembered. For two minutes we dreamed of another time.

  How could we forget?

  But by then, even by then, I struggled to remember Ralph’s voice. Only very occasionally and in silence would it come to me, like a scrap of music played in the distance and always too far away to hear properly. All of him belonged to another time, and London was noisy, too noisy to hear a single voice from years before. For the most part, I was content to be amidst that cacophony, content for ringing bells and honking horns to silence my ghosts. But at the end of each day, as I weaved my way home, past couples linking arms and heading to bright lights and warm fires, I dreaded the oncoming quietude, those lonely hours after Lila had gone to bed.

  The act of living had become a great effort, and I wondered if there was something wrong with me physically. I had reached the end of my spiritual resources, the end of my pathetic optimism, and I had held my breath for so long that emotionally I had ceased to exist. The notion of the future—once bright and exciting, and filled with possibility—caused only anxiety, and that sense of separateness I had always known had become amplified.

  Reflecting on my life, I realized I was a failure. There was nothing special or superior about me; nor would there ever be. Self-pity tapped late at night, brought on, I suppose, by nothing more than loneliness. Then, afterward, I would fall into self-loathing: I am a selfish, self-centered creature, I’d think. After all, I had Lila, and I was alive.

  It was sometime after that two-minute silence, perhaps a few days or a week, that I decided I needed to break out of my malaise—my grief that wasn’t actually grief. My life, but for a few all-too-short months, had been a long, monotonous routine and—outwardly, at least—it had taken its toll. I was the reflection of disappointment and thwarted hopes, the unextraordinary result of extraordinary circumstances. Shackled by shame and burdened with what Kitty had once called a brave heart.

  I considered my assets: I was still attractive—pretty by most standards, and I had that quality often remarked on called poise—and I wasn’t stupid. I had a reasonable general knowledge, could talk about a variety of subjects including literature, people and places. I reviewed my weaknesses: an untrusting nature, perhaps; a predisposition toward loneliness; an inherent romanticism . . . an agonizing, lifelong feeling of unworthiness; a lack of worldliness; a confused understan
ding of who I was, and where I fitted in; a tendency to bolt and run from difficult situations . . .

  At the end of my brief, amateur self-analysis, I knew it was time to adopt a different demeanor, a more positive approach. It would start externally, with a new look, I decided, knowing that would be the easy part. Two days later, I had my hair cut. Almost twelve inches fell to the floor of the salon. That same evening, after Lila had stopped squealing and running her hands over my shorn hair—Can I just touch it again, Mummy?—after I’d finally got her to bed, I applied my new makeup. I practiced in front of the mirror . . . starting with a smile and leading on through unmistakable shades of gayness to silent laughter. I could be happy. I would be happy. I would take myself out into the battlefield of life and fight for my share—no matter how small. I would not sink without a fight; I would not be like my mother, or like Ottoline.

  I’m not sure if it was my hair or my lipstick, but the new me certainly evoked more attention than the old me, and not just from the road sweepers and workmen—so fond of a wolf whistle and tawdry one-liners—but from men on the sixth floor, including one called Leo Holland.

  Leo, or Mr. Holland as he was to me then, had recently arrived from Manchester to take up a managerial position in the accounts department at the store. He was a few years older than I was, a bachelor. My colleague, Mary—also from the North—introduced us, telling him that I, too, had spent time “up there.” He asked me where, exactly. And so I told him, and he knew that part of Northumberland. It was where his grandmother had been born. And thus my friendship with him began.

  And at first, it was just that, a friendship—and very much a work friendship, involving nothing more than the occasional lunch together in the staff dining room. But then it moved on and away from the confines of the store. He asked me out to the pictures, and I went. Then he asked me again, and I went again. And at the end of that second time, as he waited with me at the bus stop, he said, “What are you doing on Sunday?”