by Lizzie Page
‘Really?’
‘No. It was a ship.’
Pearl decides to meet Hitler. She will poison him with arsenic or maybe cyanide. She will drive him off a cliff – no, this would be a waste of a car. She will set a shark on him.
‘Where will you get a shark?’
‘All right, I’ll set Laurel and Hardy on him.’
‘Laurel and Hardy wouldn’t say boo to a goose.’
‘Then I’ll just stab him through the heart.’
‘Is that really the sort of thing Mrs Bankhead is looking for?’ I ask, although the name of Pearl’s teacher tastes like cod liver oil in my throat.
Pearl’s face says, ‘Stupid question.’
* * *
On Monday, I queue at the butchers, the grocers and at the post office, then go to Mrs Burton’s to knit and sew with the others. Everything and everyone seems just as normal, but when we’re having a tea break, Mrs Burton wipes her hands on her apron and whispers, ‘Please come over tonight, Mrs Lowe. Once everyone’s gone.’
That evening, I’ve just sat myself down in her homely kitchen when she says, ‘So you’ll find out soon enough. Ethel’s got herself in the family way.’
‘Oh!’ I say. ‘Oh.’
‘Indeed,’ Mrs Burton says, squeezing her lips shut.
‘I didn’t know Cyril had been home—’
‘He hasn’t,’ she says.
‘Oh.’
Mrs Burton shakes her head from side to side violently. I feel like I am in the presence of an unexploded grenade. Her face, I realise, is puffy. She’s clearly been crying for some time. I reach my hand out across the table to my friend but she pulls out a handkerchief the size of a tea-towel – it is a tea-towel – and does an elephantine blow.
‘The engagement will be off.’
‘Yes, I can imagine.’
‘And here I’ve been saving coupons and skimping and slaving over the damn wedding cake.’
‘Well… well, maybe this new fella—’ I begin. I can’t believe Ethel Burton would do this to her mother. How thoughtless and selfish could you be!
She shakes her head emphatically.
‘He’s not… It won’t. No, that’s not going to happen.’
I think of sweet Cyril Fellows. His florid skin must be burning in the heat of the Middle East. How’s he going to cope with this news? But then I think of poor Mrs Burton, for she is such good friends with Mrs Fellows, who might not be a member of the WAVs but has been a great support with the dog grooming and everything. How awkward this is going to be! The ripples of it will be felt far and wide. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs Burton is devastated by what her daughter has done – and this is without the worry an illegitimate baby brings to a family.
Mrs Burton goes to her larder cupboard and there her shoulders rock up and down, but when she turns round, she is attempting a watery smile and holding out a large tin.
‘Shall we, Mrs Lowe? Just a little?’
‘You don’t mean—’
‘What else can we do?’
* * *
Later, after we’ve each eaten a slice of the wedding cake and then tidied it up – somehow making it look almost whole again – Ethel trots down the stairs. She too is subdued and puffy – funnily enough, it’s the first time I’ve seen how much she resembles her mother. She rests her arm over her stomach in the way I remember doing once. There is nothing to see yet though. Her skirt and jumpers – always too tight – still look… too tight.
‘Say hello to Mrs Lowe then,’ Mrs Burton reminds her brightly. From under her fringe, Ethel sheepishly mutters ‘Hello’ and I ‘hello’ back. For the first time, I think, Poor girl. She’s only a youngster. If you can’t make a mistake when you are eighteen, when can you?
‘More tea, love?’ asks Mrs Burton presently.
‘Please.’
I wipe the crumbs from my mouth. The wireless is on in the background and there is more shocking – or rather really shocking – news. There’s been an uprising against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. Why do they have to use the word ‘liquidate’? I think of how distressed Sam will be to hear this.
Mrs Burton tells us that she gave her saucepans to the aluminium collectors and is now struggling without enough pots. Ethel finds this both incredible and funny. Mr Burton comes in from work, puts his hand on his wife’s shoulder, squeezes, then pulls off his dusty boots. Laurel lets rip and everyone laughs.
‘Huh! Why has he got no fur?’ asks Ethel as though she has just noticed.
‘Long story,’ says Mrs Burton.
I leave them sitting round the table, the smelly dogs at their feet. My emotions are all over the place. I can’t unpick them any more than you can unbake a wedding cake, but I know grief, regret, jealousy and shame are all stirred into that mix.
50
1924 – Then
I was awash with yearning for my baby – the unborn baby. I dreamt of holding him. In my mind’s eye, he was a boy, a boy I would have named Richard. I dreamt of his little shape in his first clothes and of stroking his soft, sweet hair. Of pinning his early artwork on the walls or rolling a ball across the garden for him. The perfect project for Edmund and me, the bridge that would bring us together.
Everything seemed so unfair; there were times I just wanted to scream but there was no time nor place for screaming: my father needed looking after now.
Six months or so after the miscarriage, our father sold the carpet business to two young Jewish men fresh from Poland with small round caps on the backs of their heads (how did they stay on, Aunt Cecily wondered) and firm handshakes. And in the following months, Father deteriorated right before my eyes. It was like a terrible theatre performance with no happy ending. Like seeing a puppet without its supportive strings. His business had been holding him together, and now it was gone, and he was going to follow it out.
Once I started noticing his decline, I couldn’t stop seeing it. I read it into everything he did. Every little slip of the tongue, every little stumble. Mrs Webster had gone to bring her rampant efficiency to her widowed brother’s household in Northumbria. I went weekly to London, the dutiful daughter, and when he grew worse, I would stay over there. It was not like Edmund could give a damn.
The doctors came and couldn’t work it out, but their non-committal shrugs expressed that we had to understand: so many had died that anyone the age of my father – he was fifty-nine – was both lucky and disposable. He had had the luxury of a long life compared to so many.
I had seen my father deteriorate and then rally so many times that I allowed myself the delusion that he would always deteriorate and then rally. It was a stupid delusion for someone who has seen dead bodies piled up outside a hospital, but I wasn’t prepared for the end of my own father. Perhaps no one ever is?
For a few days, Father ate only crackers and water, and then he stopped eating altogether. His lips cracked and his tongue grew so dry that he stopped speaking. I lifted him up for the bedpan, cursing Olive, for I was alone now. I didn’t know where she was; she hadn’t written to me since our row in Leicester. Aunt Cecily said repeatedly, ‘She says she’s on her way,’ but still she didn’t come. Letters came from her to Father, and I read them out to him, my lips curling, revolting against the world. I made my voice sound jolly, jolly, jolly because, ‘Oh, Father, it’s super news, Olive is painting again!’
‘That’s my girl,’ whispered Father affectionately. The effort of saying that seemed to cost him dearly.
‘Don’t make her come if she’s busy,’ he added, always putting us first. I cursed her as I sent down for ice – it was the only thing he could tolerate – and I cursed her as I ran it along his lips, then wrapped it in a cloth to lie on his heated forehead.
Another thing I didn’t know, a thing I thought I knew: a ‘natural’ death can be as painful as an unnatural one. It can even be worse.
The reluctant doctor eventually came back and this time agreed to give him morphine. I had to beg for it, and if it hadn�
�t been for my years in France, I doubt I’d have had the confidence and I doubt they would have agreed.
Father raised his hand off the bed. ‘Did Olive come?’
I said she was on her way, and he said, ‘She’s very good, you know.’
Then I gave him the morphine, as often as I judged it needed. After a few uneventful hours, his breathing changed, and I knew it was time. I told him how we loved him, both Olive and I; that he had been an admirable father. Gently, I told him to join our mother, that she was reaching out to him now. At some point as I was telling him this, I’m not sure exactly when, he slid away from his bonds to this earth.
* * *
I am an orphan, I told myself, then shook myself. Don’t be so ridiculous. I’m a married woman.
My father had many friends in the world of rugs and soft furnishings and they came in black suits to his funeral and greeted me solemnly and deferentially. We were a generation well acquainted with grief, so I suppose we were more practised than most at how to behave at a serious occasion. Aunt Cecily was standing next to me at the door. She still wore her massive frocks; they were so old-fashioned that I expected they might one day be fashionable again. Her hair was pinned back into its usual bow but she now wore a net over it, so no strays could break free. She looked suitably severe. I had recently bought a pea-green coat that I was very fond of, but I hadn’t wanted to wear green to the funeral, so instead wore an old black one that pre-dated my time with the FANYs. I made sure I smartened it up with a pretty scarf and my boots were shiny with polish. It felt very important to me to look the part.
Edmund surprisingly took a whole day off work and travelled back to London. His parents were coming, of course, Oh, the Lowes loved a good funeral. Edmund’s mother never failed to make an impression as she entered the church. She always set the standard with the right clothes, the right manners. I saw her scanning the pews. I thought maybe she was looking for Olive – as I was – but when she tapped me on the shoulder, I realised it wasn’t her she was interested in.
‘Who on earth are they?’
‘Who?’
She pointed at the two men in black with the yarmulkes on their bowed heads.
‘Oh, they’re the ones who’ve taken over Father’s business.’
‘You couldn’t find an English buyer?’ She pursed her lips disapprovingly.
‘I don’t think we looked,’ I said, regretting it as soon as I saw the expression harden on her face. My father would always be the self-made man and she would never forgive him for it, even in death.
‘Where is your sister?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think she can make it.’
She shook her head and I couldn’t tell if it was about Olive or me and Olive, and she said, ‘She never could be relied upon.’ And I thought, Well, actually that’s not true, she has many faults but not that one in particular, but I didn’t say anything because I had to be grateful, for Edmund’s mother had helped with the organisation and the flowers. And the lilies were so very beautiful. In wreaths and in vases, they brightened the church and they were appropriate too, not too gaudy or showy. I heard someone say, ‘Impeccable taste,’ and someone else whispered, ‘It’s the Lowe family. What did you expect?’
And it was a shock to hear how we had been incorporated into them, even Father, but it shouldn’t have been because it was Edmund’s mother who I had called first, in spite of myself, those first hours after Father had gone, and it was Edmund’s mother who raced round with a doctor to sign the death certificate and with smelling salts for me if I wanted them (I didn’t) and generally took everything out of my hands.
She had done Father proud, it couldn’t be denied. She had the same get-things-done constitution as Mrs Webster. Anyway, it was in Edmund’s mother’s interests to keep me sweet. We both knew that. I was the lone chance to keep the Lowe family name going now. And Edmund’s mother felt desperately strongly about family names. If Edmund was King Henry VIII, I was the Flanders Mare.
Aunt Cecily had an awfully loud whisper and when she whispered that she had ‘left Uncle Toby at home with a kind neighbour’, I’m sure half the attendants could hear. Never mind. She went on that he’d had a couple of bad days recently. Since every day now was a bad day with Uncle Toby this must have been quite diabolical. Uncle Toby didn’t know where he was or who he was anymore. He didn’t even remember Richard. My poor dear uncle and my poor dear aunt. Aunt Cecily unbuttoned her coat, then stretched like a cat in the sunshine. She smiled with her sad eyes. ‘Glad to get out of the house, quite frankly, Vivi.’
And then, she did arrive. The prodigal daughter. Five days too late. Had Olive made an effort for the funeral? I was expecting her not to have, but I do think she had. Her hair was combed and pulled back into the nape of her neck. The style did nothing for her, but it was, at least, tidy. Her coat was smart and fitted, which made a change from her usual shapeless creations, and its copper buttons shone. As soon as I saw them, I suspected the hand of someone else on them. This was not Olive’s work. I also knew that the lovely coat and its matching checked shawl would probably cover a multitude of sins: under that, she could be in anything from a nightgown to a smock with holes in. Her face was paint- and crumb-free. Her hands were silky and somehow naked-looking. Olive never wore rings. I felt like I was seeing those hands for the first time – perhaps it was only the first time for a long time I had seen them without the habitual splatter of paint.
I craned my neck around, desperate to see who she was with, but she was sandwiched behind Mrs Webster and her son, Harry, in front of my father’s barber, Mr Tomassi. Seeing all these people from Father’s life was a reminder that it wasn’t just us – he had been well-loved – and it made me want to cry.
I kept looking at the people near Olive to see who was most likely to be the woman in question: there were two there, but neither seemed to fit, and that woman on her own – oh no, she wasn’t on her own, she was with a heavyset man on crutches. I decided Olive must have come without her. Even my sister must have realised that bringing someone like that to her own father’s funeral would be unreasonable. Her words swam in my head. She lost someone she loves too, during the war. Not everybody did. Some merely skipped away and didn’t even look back.
That was probably one of the worst things she had said. Is that what Sam thought about me too? That I’d walked away carefree – or for no good reason at all? I had reasons, plenty of them – only now, when I looked around at the polite Polish-Jewish businessmen, their hands behind their backs, conversing with the vicar, I wondered if perhaps my reasons didn’t add up as well as I had thought they had.
My aunt was leaning in to me. Her false teeth clacked slightly out of time with the rest of her.
‘Please, darling, talk to each other. I can’t bear to see you two like this.’
‘We are talking to each other,’ I lied. I couldn’t even look up, I was afraid to meet my own sister’s eye – the reactions I’d had when I saw her were too strong and too uncomfortable.
* * *
And I was pregnant again. Oh, I was nothing if not persistent. I think I was on week four, which meant thirty-six anxious weeks to go. This time, I was determined to hang onto it, and this time, it would know to cling on. It had to. I hadn’t known how hard you had to work at it before…
Now we know. Now we know…
Aunt Cecily got up and insisted Olive move next to me. ‘Sit together, girls,’ she pleaded, not even attempting to keep her voice down now. Everyone looked round at us so that an objection was out of the question. Olive made her ungainly way along the pew, slender and sweet-faced as ever – I grinned at her despite myself, then tried to cover it up by looking indifferent.
‘You’re on your own?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Your… friend didn’t want to come?’
She turned in the pew and peered at me. Her eyes were never brighter. ‘My friend?’
‘Your…’ at least I could do a proper hushed
voice – ‘Lady friend?’
Olive laughed. She picked up the New Testament resting in front of her, flicked through it, then put it down. I don’t know what she could have been looking for there.
‘It’s over.’
‘Oh,’ I said, momentarily thrown. ‘I can’t say I’m sad.’ What was this viciousness in me? Was it purely about the girlfriend – or was it perhaps resentment that I had been left with Father and the ice cubes? But that, I told myself, was a choice I had made deliberately.
‘No, I didn’t think you would be,’ she said. She pulled her shawl around her so that there was no chance of it infringing on mine. We both stared ahead. My aunt tsked from further along the pew but I didn’t know if it was at us or if something else had happened.
And then Father’s coffin came in, and I could only gasp at how small and light it seemed, like a child’s. I had forgotten Edmund was in the pew behind and when he put his hand on my shoulder, I shuddered involuntarily. His touch startled me nowadays, but he always played the good husband in public. I took out my handkerchief and covered my face with it. I could feel Olive glancing sideways at me. I don’t know what she saw.
As the vicar spoke to us about light and darkness, I remembered makeshift funerals in sleet and hail at the back of Lamarck Hospital. You’d always try to go if you weren’t working; you’d go to give the deceased a bit of respect and dignity, belatedly. It would make that letter back home more palatable: We buried him in full attendance. He was much mourned. The lies that were told in those letters, I can’t tell you – those shallow graves, the tiny lopsided crosses. The promises we made: We’ll come back to it. Fix it.
