by Louisa Young
Kitty took an almond from her pocket and nibbled it, pointed end first, to and fro, tiny little squirrel movements with her clean little teeth. Perhaps Peter will want me more. Perhaps he might notice that I need somebody. It didn’t sound very likely.
Riley had gone out into the garden. Leaning forward, she saw him through the window, falling to his knees on the lawn, as if in fear, or prayer. But he doesn’t believe in God, she thought. He doesn’t go to church. Even as she thought it, he laughed suddenly, as if at himself. Suddenly you want God’s help, Kitty thought. She wondered if God would help her. She didn’t think so. God wasn’t really her father either.
She crawled out from under the piano, and stood by the window, looking out at Riley. Glancing up, he saw her, and waved distractedly. She waved back, a little movement, and withdrew behind the curtain. They don’t notice me at all. And it’s hardly going to improve, is it?
But then that was what parents did, after all. One way or another, sooner or later, they lost interest and went away.
Nadine was in bed for several days, and they were not to visit her, because she was tired. This terrified Kitty. Was Nadine going to die? Would anybody even tell her? And because she was scared she became angry. When Nadine did emerge she was very pale and everybody fussed over her, but Kitty was still angry with her. Let Nenna be nice to her, she thought – and Nenna was nice to her. When Riley had to go back to work, Nadine and Nenna sat together on the chintz sofa reading, with their matching cheekbones and their womanliness, and so Kitty went back under the piano, and felt unloved.
*
At supper on one of those slightly awkward evenings when Nadine was upstairs, and Riley and Peter were doing their best, Kitty jumped up from the table, declaring that she could see a firefly outside the window. Before anyone could say anything she rushed out of the room and out through the French windows in the sitting room, back round, searching, and losing it as it flashed and disappeared.
The night was warm and not very dark; the sky a rich blue and a small moon riding high. She scanned the garden – had she imagined it?
The others were behind her – Tom and Nenna together, and behind them the men, moving more slowly, indulgently. ‘We had fireflies here when I was a boy,’ Peter was saying. ‘I haven’t seen any for years.’ Kitty could smell his cigarette smoke.
‘Look!’ called Nenna. Kitty saw the dark form of her arm rising to point down towards the river – and yes, there it was – in fact more than one—
She raced down there. They’re my fireflies, she thought. Nenna has her own fireflies in Italy. I found these they’re mine. She wanted to get there first.
They were enchanting. So hard to track! They glowed in one place, then in another – you couldn’t really see how many there were. Ten? Twenty? They were moving about in the darkness, a magical sight. Fairies, she thought. Tiny spaceships. She imagined that they let out a low hum, that they were swimming like fish in the air. She didn’t know what they really looked like, and wondered.
‘Do you remember the song?’ Nenna called. ‘Lucciola lucciola vien da me, io to daro il pan del re—’
‘Pan del re e della regina, lucciola lucciola vien vicina …’ Kitty murmured it, remembering.
‘This one’s not moving!’ Nenna cried. ‘Let’s look—’ It was in a bush, in shadow, flashing. While Tom ran back to the house for his torch they peered at the little light: on, off. On, off. Kitty could feel everyone smiling, and snuggled in between Riley and Peter as they bent over to see. Then Tom was back, out of breath, triumphant, and the torch beam shone down. The light of the firefly was drowned in it, faded in the greater light, but still flickering, on, off, on, off. But that was not what caught the eye. What caught the eye was a spider, busy with captor’s web and mandibles, carefully eating the firefly.
‘Oh Christ,’ Peter said, and Kitty couldn’t really make it out, and for a short, long, timeless moment they stared, before Tom flicked the torchlight away.
‘What!’ Kitty cried. ‘What’s it doing?’
‘Nothing,’ said Nenna. ‘Nothing’ – but the word came out stiff with disgust and the edge of tears, and the sweetness of the search and the magic had dissolved.
‘Look, there’s some more!’ said Riley, pointing back down towards the riverbank. ‘Shall we look?’ But nobody was falling for that.
‘Come on Kitty,’ Nenna said, and took her hand. ‘Come on’ – and that warm kindness took Kitty back to the house and away from the confusion, and there was still pudding to be had, Summer Pudding full of currants and raspberries, everyone’s favourite, which Nenna had never had before.
It wasn’t until much, much later that Kitty realised what she had seen, and even then she got it wrong. After she found out about sex, she decided the creatures had been mating, and everybody had just been terribly embarrassed.
The day Nenna left, Tom was already asking for reassurances about going to Italy the following summer. Riley snapped at him. ‘Nadine has been very ill, and this is not the time to bother her with plans for your social life in a year’s time,’ he said. Kitty listened, and heard this: Nadine is going to die. She took to turning down Nadine’s bed at night, putting her slippers out to warm, and going downstairs to ask Mrs Joyce to make Nadine’s preferred cake, the one with boiled oranges and ground almonds.
*
‘Well, I don’t think we can go this year, Tom,’ Nadine said, when Easter came.
‘Riley says we can go,’ said Tom heartlessly. ‘He says we can afford it. He says that amazingly enough the company is doing all right. He said so.’
Nadine smiled, and said, ‘No.’
*
After Easter, Tom said: ‘Well, as you’ve clearly given up on going again, I’ll arrange to go on my own. If I’m to do modern languages, I might as well do a course in Rome or Florence or somewhere.’
Nadine said, ‘Well, you must talk to your father about that—’ and even as Tom was saying ‘Which one? Riley or Peter?’ Kitty said, suddenly, and loudly, ‘And so will I.’
‘No, Kitty,’ said Nadine. ‘You can’t go alone. Or with Tom.’
‘Why?’ said Kitty. ‘Because he’s a boy, I suppose.’
‘Because he is older,’ said Nadine.
‘He’s always older,’ she said. ‘It’s because he’s a boy, isn’t it?’ her mouth running away with her now. ‘He can do what he wants because he’s a boy. Miss McDonald says women’s lives were transformed by the war and there’s no reason a girl shouldn’t do anything a boy can, now.’
She knew Nadine was in favour of Miss McDonald, who wore green tweed suits and scarlet lipstick, and had sleek black hair and a Boston accent.
‘It’s because Tom is nearly sixteen,’ Nadine said, ‘and you are twelve. It’s because he wants to study Italian some more before university. It’s not because he’s a boy.’
Kitty set her mouth firm. ‘He’s fifteen and I’m nearly thirteen,’ she said. ‘It’s because you love him more than me.’
This made Nadine cry. Kitty felt a pig. But she had nobody. If she wasn’t allowed to go to Italy, her nobodiness was compounded.
Chapter Eight
London, 1932–3
Mabel sometimes looked up from what she was doing – writing a song, wiping a table – and felt side-swiped by a mad wave. Her arrangements had been imperfect but under control. Now she was all at sea.
Why?
Peter.
Why Peter? She asked herself that too, and answered it. Because he was so damned kind. He was honourable. He was faithful. He was everything the dashing heroes in novels weren’t – those who in real life any sane woman should rush from. The kind of heroes beloved of young women who haven’t yet learned that life will throw them enough pain and danger without them having to look for it in a man.
Every time Peter did something kind or honourable, her heart lit up slightly, and slightly more, and slightly more, and its burdens, bit by bit, slipped away. And why did this leave her all at sea? B
ecause she had for years been in charge of her own safety, and letting somebody else contribute to it threatened it. Ironic, she knew that. And she knew she was right. Her answer was to go very very slowly.
They only wanted to be alone. They spent their hours together in peace, laughter and love-making, and left each other’s lives alone. There was an electric loveliness for them, lying in twisted sheets in the beautiful flat, talking of nothing in particular. Their conversation was abstract; their shared quotidian life made up of: ‘What shall we eat?’ ‘What shall we listen to?’ ‘How was your day?’ ‘Come here.’ The restfulness! They slept well in each other’s company, which neither of them did alone. And they both knew, though they chose not to touch on it, that the rest of the world might prove to be, or to have, a problem with them as a couple. They managed to keep that up for more than a year before the little fishes of outside attention gathered to nibble at them.
*
They touched once or twice on his sobriety. She wondered how it had come about, after the last time she’d seen him in 1919.
‘Do you remember what I said to you?’ she asked.
‘You paraphrased Homer,’ he said. ‘You said I needed to eat a little more and take a little less wine. And that I should change myself, not the company I was keeping.’
‘And you said you weren’t fit for company.’
‘I wasn’t,’ he said, and a little shiver went over him, because he remembered all too well.
‘So what happened?’ she asked.
‘I – after a while – some years – I started to feel that I didn’t deserve to be drunk. Not that I deserved better. That I didn’t deserve the relief it brought me. Drink was a prize or a solace for good men who had suffered. I felt I didn’t deserve the solace of it. So I banned myself from it. I know not everybody can do that. But it worked for me. I talked to myself as if I were someone else. Looked at myself from outside, and – I suppose – once I wasn’t drunk all the time I realised I wasn’t such a dreadful character. I had to acknowledge, I suppose, that I had done my best, and that thinking everything was my fault was another kind of vanity, of self-obsession. Claiming all the power, as it were. As if I could have had the power to stop history!’
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘And?’
‘Best thing I ever did. The biggest prize. In the long run. I see chaps now …’
‘Mmm,’ she said, for she too had seen chaps.
‘But you are a good man,’ she said.
‘Hmm,’ he said.
‘You are,’ she said. Then, ‘We most of us live in the fear of the fact of ourselves.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not sure. I read it in a novel called Home to Harlem. It was about being negro—’
She stopped, and he looked at her.
‘But I was thinking, whatever we are, people expect us to be what they think that thing is …’
He smiled a little. ‘As in, a drunk is a drunk and a failure; an English gentleman is an English gentleman, a negro is a negro …’
‘Whereas a gentleman can be a drunk.’
‘And a negro can be a gentleman,’ he said.
She kind of smiled, and looked away from him, and said perhaps it was time they got up.
‘No,’ he said, and drew her back into his arms with a gaze, and they each thought, in their own way, how extraordinary this is, better not look at it too closely, this blessing we have tumbled into …
*
Iris Zachary, twelve and clever and skinny, her hair in plaits and her eyes an unexpected blue, grew impatient. Why did Mumma stay out all night twice a week?
Mabel said, ‘Work goes on too late for me to get home, so I stay with a friend.’
Iris said, ‘Which friend?’ Her mother’s friends were funny and interesting, with chocolate and saxophones and stories.
Mabel said, ‘You’re all right here with Grandma, aintcha honey?’
Iris shrugged. She liked her Grandma. Who wouldn’t? But she still didn’t look very happy about it, so Mabel said, ‘Sweetpea, I’m sorry, it won’t go on forever.’
And that was all very well, but when Mabel said it, she sensed that Iris sensed that something was not all right: a little whiff of sorrow passing over. Iris put her head to one side. And Mabel thought, Well, yes, in a way I do want it to go on forever. Because change is dangerous. Is Iris sensing that?
Lord, of course not. You’re thinking too much, baby.
Mabel had decided, about the situation. Peter would be her secret pleasure, her private life, and private. Not just for the obvious reason, but for personal ones too. It was not that she did not trust him. She did, for herself. But for Iris? No.
A man can love a woman, that she knew, but a man loving a child is a different thing. She knew that Peter had children, and she knew that they didn’t live with him. He hadn’t invited her into his past life, his family life, but he had been open in all kinds of ways about it, trying to get her to be open too. She knew he lived in a place in the country out by Sidcup, and had a mother in Scotland. He had told her, cautiously, about his wife Julia: her leaving, her returning, her death. With a little thought Mabel could see where her own past encounters with Peter fitted into the interstices of that story, and felt, for a moment, so second-best she wanted to scream. Why the outsider? Why, even here, with a man who loves her, Iris’s father, why even now the outsider, the Johnny-come-lately – why must whatever joy I’m allowed have to be secret and at the expense of the real wife’s life? She bowed her head under the weight of her anger, and waited for it to pass. It passes, it always passes, it has to pass. It passed.
He had told her how useless he had been, after the war, how he had thought he would never get himself back. He had told how much Riley had helped him, and how he never wanted to be useless again. He had told her that he had not been a good father, and that as a result his children weren’t very interested in him, though perhaps things were getting better. He had told her they lived with Riley and Nadine, and her fury roared back on a sudden hideons wave of injustice: another woman is bringing up Peter’s motherless children, when I am the one who loves him, who has his child—
What, you want to bring up his other children? When you won’t even tell him you have his child too?
Yes I do. I do—
She stopped it. That kind of fury did not keep a life together, didn’t keep a child fed and an old woman warm. She used to indulge her furies when she was younger, and her mother had been looking after her – but no grown woman with responsibilities can afford a temper like that. Bite the bullet, darling. This all proves the same point. That is his life, and Iris is mine. Iris is not for risking. Better to have no daddy than a late-coming unknown-quantity of a daddy …
So, she didn’t tell him anything. Not about Iris, about Betty, about Pixy, about Thornton …
Why not?
Fear.
If I tell him about Iris he might leave me. If I tell him my stories he’ll become part of them and part of me and I’ll never be able to extricate myself, and when he leaves me I’ll be left gutted and gaping, pulled to shreds by the ties that bind—
*
Mabel didn’t know who half the fathers in her family were. She didn’t know who Betty’s father was. She didn’t know when, where or how often the white blood that gave her her fair complexion or the Chinese blood that gave her her high cheekbones had come into the family. She knew about her Grandma Pixy, and she knew that her father was called George, back in Georgia. George from Georgia. She knew she had older brothers, in Chicago, San Francisco and Montgomery, Alabama. The name Zachary was Betty’s through Pixy – so, through Pixy’s owners.
This is what Pixy did; the story that Pixy told Betty and Betty told Mabel. Pixy cosied up to her owner Mr Zachary. (Mabel was not certain what exactly that meant.) She cosied up to him and she played him. (Does that mean she let him sleep with her and then blackmailed him? Mabel didn’t know.) She talked him into giving her time off each week. (How? M
abel wondered. Perhaps she told him she had to go to church to pray for her soul and his after the wicked adultery they had performed. Perhaps she told him he would go to hell and she wanted to save him.) She used that time to work – What work? It had to be secret, or he’d have known she wasn’t in church – and worked so hard, and saved every cent – but how much could she have made, a black girl, there, at that time, with those limited hours? – and using that money – How long must it have taken her! – and arguments from the Bible, she bought herself from Mr Zachary. Yes she did, she bought herself back. Stop a minute to think about that.
He was glad to see the back of her in the end because she talked so much and was so pretty. And then she went north, taking that long and difficult road, alone, where she started out again, working so hard, again, and saving every cent, again, and she went back down there and she bought her own father from Mr Zachary. She was fifty years old by then and her father seventy. And she would have done it again, and bought her mother, if her mother hadn’t been dead.
Pixy had Navajo blood, and was small and tough, and her hair was long. In her free life, she earnt a living playing violin day and night in a bawdy house in Chicago: any time a man made a go for her thinking she was on the menu she’d whip him across the face with the bow. She was famous for it. Some men came specially to be whipped across the face by Pixy. The proprietor was half in love with her and she made him pay for a new bow each time it got broke: this was to guarantee her some protection from the lowlifes. A fiddle bow gives a good slap around the face and leaves a welt sometimes. She was popular. The way she sang and played all the white men came down, and the whores were busy all night. This was the story. Mabel wondered if maybe Pixy was really a whore, and then she felt ashamed even for thinking it. But if she didn’t think it, she felt she was being naive. Anyway, by now, what did it matter? Pixy did what she had to do. She turned our family around. Pixy set us free and lifted our curse and sent her daughter into the world with a way of living that was neither whorehouse nor plantation. Pixy blessed us and freed us with the sweat of her body and the quickness of her brain and the fullness of her heart. By her pride.
