by Alice Jolly
Mollie, for God’s sake.
Under her feet, something moves, stones grate and crack. Her hands scrabble on the red-brick chimney, her cheek smashes against it. The world somersaults – roofs, chimneys, aerials, sky, stars. Everything spirals together. Bricks crumble and drop. A woman screams. Mollie’s bones roll, banging and slapping over the roof tiles. Stop, stop, but she can’t catch hold, folds like a rag over the edge. And now she will fall forever, into the square below.
But instead she lands immediately with a dull thud which presses itself into her bones. Her face is wet and she can taste blood in her mouth. She’s lying on a sheet of black tar, next to a wall. A terracotta pot is inhabited by dead twigs, a mop propped against the wall. A light flicks on and she’s bathed in its dull fuzz. Doors bang. She tries to move her twisted leg but pain dashes down her arm, across her back, into her hand. It’s starting to rain now and so the stars will go out and she’ll be washed away, washed off the roof like an autumn leaf, down into the streets, swept away down a gutter. A scraping sound and something is yanked open. A man’s voice mumbles. Then Rufus is beside her. She can hear his breathing but she’s turned the wrong way and can’t see him. She wants to move but she’s frightened of the pain.
Mollie. For Christ’s sake.
He takes hold of her hand and she expects him to hold it gently. But instead he seizes hold of her and twists her around. Her whole body is blazing red with pain. It lights up the tips of her teeth. She’s facing him now and his eyes, cheeks, lips are clenched tight. She tightens her grip on him, pressing his fingers together. Behind him she sees patio doors, the illuminated stillness of an antique-filled sitting room. In a corner of the room, an elderly man is speaking on a telephone. Mollie shuts her eyes and a woman’s voice says, He pushed her, I heard them, I saw him, I was at the bathroom window.
Mollie tries to move again, feels that flame of pain flare across her back. Rufus is kneeling beside her, his face white and shapeless as a potato, flattened by shock. And now, as he holds her hand, he’s crying. That pleases her. She’ll forgive him for pushing her off the roof, of course. She needs his hatred, his loathing. Together they’ll convince, together they will entertain the clinging devil and defy the power of pieces of paper, together they will be invincible.
Promise me, she says. Promise.
46
NOW
Patricia – Baghdad, May 2003
Dear Mother of Jay,
Here is Patricia who is Spanish journalist and friend of Jay and of Greg. Greg gives me your email and so I am getting in touch. We know here that you are very worried about Jay and so I give you now the latest news. Everyone has told Jay that he has to go home for a while now. And we have told him as well that this is what you want with all your heart. He has been in this country where there is war and death now for three months and this is no good to stay so long. All of the journalists here and the Peace Corps come for a few weeks and then they go home and back again. This is very necessary and everybody here has said this several times to Jay. The adrenalin of war is a drug, an addiction. You come to the time when the normal life of every day will kill you. This is no good. Jay has been seen this morning in Saddam City. This place was never a good place and now is very bad with much violence and journalists and people from Europe are very dangerous there. I went there this morning with other journalists and an Iraqi driver and two armed guards. Also we have a TV sign in the van. But Jay is there without any guard and he may be safe because he is known and people see him. They understand that he is not like anyone else. But still it is dangerous. And I have not the English to tell you how it is really – but it is like he is on fire, with his camera, photographing and laughing and his clothes now in pieces and he is like an angel. Really like someone from another world with no fear and great happiness but also great sadness. I cannot explain but I wish you could see. Now Hans is going to fetch him back and Greg will book a flight for him as you asked. This is better than to drive through the desert but may take a few days because the earliest flight now is Tuesday next week. When all is organised again I will call you or Greg maybe. He says not to worry about money as he will sort this out when all is ended. I send you my love and I hope you can understand well my English. I know that Jay will come back to this country after he has rested because this is his home now but I am glad that you will see him and take care of him a little. He tells me often about Brighton and how good it is there and invite me to come and see him when all is done which I hope is soon now.
God Bless You.
Patricia
47
NOW
Jemmy – Brighton, May 2003
Twenty-two weeks and three days – so nine more days until the baby might be safe, or eight and a half now. But twenty-four weeks isn’t good enough. Jemmy asked at the hospital and at twenty-eight weeks a baby has a ninety per cent chance of surviving with no problems. But that’s thirty-nine days still to wait. As the bus ambles back through Kemp Town, Jemmy does the calculations again and again, sure that somehow it must be possible to come up with an equation which equals safety. At the hospital they say that the situation isn’t worse but it isn’t better. As the pregnancy progresses, the placenta is sometimes pulled up, but that isn’t happening in her case, or not yet.
At the hospital they are brisk with her. Once that would have hurt her but she understands now that the doctors are powerless, frustrated. A detached placenta isn’t meant to happen once, and it certainly shouldn’t be happening again. Although strangely, for her, it’s easier the second time around. Last time she didn’t ever believe that Laurie might die. Now she knows that it can happen and there’s strength in that knowledge.
She’d waited so long for the appointment and now that it’s gone all she can do is to wait for the next appointment in two weeks’ time. When she lost her job she hadn’t minded at all, had even felt relieved. But now perversely she misses the office.
She arrives back at the Guest House, climbs the front steps. At the hospital they say that the bleeding has made her anaemic and that’s why she’s out of breath. She uses the handrail to pull herself up, opens the front door. Inside the hall is silent – Mollie and the Stans are out. Mr Lambert might be around but it’s hard to know. Jemmy sees him sometimes early in the morning, wearing a pink net skirt over his jeans and a neat pale blue cardigan with mother-of-pearl buttons. His make-up smeary, his eyes sore. All that love, all that passion and no place for it to go. Perhaps when they drain his ulcerated foot love will come pouring out, a poison. Jemmy’s too tired to climb the stairs, sinks down on the bottom step, pulls her phone from her bag.
Mr Waldron answers immediately.
Who? Who?
Jemmy. You remember? We spoke before.
Oh yes, Jemmy. Yes, of course. How lovely to hear from you, my dear. How are you? Getting out to lots of parties, I hope. That’s what you want to be doing at your age. Make the best of it while you can.
Mr Waldron sounds different. His voice bounces in a way it’s never done before. Jemmy would like to tell Mr Waldron about the baby and about Bill but she knows that isn’t part of the deal. She dispenses comfort, never asks for it.
And how you are? Jemmy asks.
Oh better, my dear. Really much better. There’s a friend of Joyce’s – lives in the next street. Wallis. Widowed five years ago and been a great comfort to me.
Oh good. That’s nice.
Jemmy feels jealous of Wallis. Mr Waldron is her project. How dare Wallis barge in? She may have offered some comfort but she doesn’t understand, not really, not as Jemmy does.
Yes, Mr Waldron says. A great help. Hope you don’t mind, my dear, must be getting on. You see, Wallis and I are going away tomorrow, heading to Basingstoke to see her sister so we’ve a lot to prepare. Getting the coach, change at Reading.
Oh yes, I see. Of course.
Not at all. I always like to hear from you. And I’ll be back from Basingstoke in a week so we could speak then?
> Jemmy agrees to that and clicks the phone off. Tears rise to her eyes. She worries about Joyce’s unfinished cross-stitch of the coach and horses. Will Wallis put it away in a cupboard? Or even throw it in the bin? Jemmy doesn’t like to admit that she’s angry with Mr Waldron but she is. It’s too early for him to be going off on a trip to Basingstoke with some other woman. But she knows this is unreasonable. Mr Waldron has reached an age when he probably goes to a funeral most weeks. It’s impossible for him to feel so deeply about everyone, impossible perhaps for him even to feel so deeply about Joyce. Instead he dusts himself down, gets on to the next thing.
Jemmy wonders if she’s simply too young, too inexperienced in matters of death. For her, Laurie was the first. Death, like anything else, is probably something you get better at with practice. Perhaps she just needs a thicker skin. Put that cross-stitch away in the cupboard and organise a trip to Basingstoke. Jemmy knows that she shouldn’t be too hard on Mr Waldron. He’s only surviving as everyone is.
She stands up, heads on up the stairs, thinks of Jay. He’s been gone so long now, so very long. But his mother has spoken to him on the phone and he’ll be home soon. The situation in Iraq is more and more dangerous and he has no reason to stay. She thinks now of that evening – two years ago – when he came back to the room she lived in then, in the days of the many black cardigans and fingerless gloves. Usually she never let anyone into that room. Can it really only be two years? An evening as hot as an oven and Jay sitting on the cushions, his long legs bent up awkwardly, talking some meaning-of-life rubbish. That’s what she thought, until she knew better. Such love. She remembers Jay’s hands – white and thin but surprisingly strong and certain. She owes everything to him. And she longs now for his return because he will understand.
She gets into bed, curls up under the duvet, pulls Mollie’s patchwork blanket up to her chin. The room is large around her, the towering walls decorated at the top with elaborate mouldings. A section of plaster is missing from the ceiling revealing brown slats of wood. The paint on the frame of the long sash window has bubbled and is flaking away.
Jemmy drifts into sleep. (Jay, we think that life is the normal state. We think we’ve got a right to it and so when someone dies we’re shocked, outraged. Their life has been unfairly snatched from them. But it’s life that is shocking, outrageous. A miracle. Just this day is enough – might have to be enough.) The front door opens downstairs, pulls her out of sleep.
Mollie must be back but she probably won’t come upstairs. She’s busy now, putting clean sheets on the beds, clearing up the cat mess, baking fruitcake. For other people things move on, problems get solved. Whereas she’s like a record stuck in a groove, playing the same sad thread of melody again and again.
She thinks of Bill and considers calling him but she can’t do that because he’ll want a solution. More doctors. More tests. More rest. He’s someone who just never accepts that there are problems to which there is no solution. When was it she last saw him? Two weeks ago? She’d worn a loose coat. He’d pushed her bike, as they’d walked along the seafront, and briefly she’d felt like a young person again. Like she felt when they first met. Perhaps they could be happy like that again sometime, as long as they just walk along the seafront and talk about nothing at all.
From downstairs, she hears Mollie singing. A surprising voice which swells up through the house, a voice which should come from a woman fleshy as a sofa, not from Mollie’s skeleton bones. Rufus isn’t back yet but Mollie says he’ll be here soon. Dancing at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne. Of course, the only reason why he’s been away so long is because of projects in London, pains in his back. The image of a Happy Family is busily being created ready for Jay’s return.
Sometimes Mollie does still bring cake and soup up to Jemmy’s room but delivers them now with a certain impatience, makes Jemmy feel like a hypochondriac. This is the brutality of the survivor. Mollie has got away, now wants nothing to do with those left behind. Jemmy’s seen it at the Support Group. The women who get pregnant again, who have a living baby, suddenly brisk and impatient with the grieving. She doesn’t go to the Support Group any more because she’s become everyone’s worst nightmare. No one wants to know that lightning can strike twice in the same place. Where can she go? Nowhere, but mysteriously, she is still stubbornly occupying the planet.
Jemmy cradles the fragile weight of the baby in her arms. From deep inside her, she feels a flicker of movement, a dull touch against her flesh, a joyous fluttering. It helps to feel the baby kick because at least she knows that he or she is alive. She tries to make the most of every minute and doesn’t think about the future.
The journey to and from the hospital has made the pains in her back worse. She turns over and picks up a piece of paper which lies on her bedside table, a copy of the email which Jay sent from Iraq. She reads it through although she already knows what it says. She likes the end, the description of the sunset city and the woman singing the lullaby and the old man who speaks such excellent English. Laying the letter down, she runs her fingers over the scars on her wrists. Falling in barbed wire on the Downs. And she remembers Jay’s hands – so calm and precise with the bandages. She longs for him now, longs for him with every cell in her body.
(Jay, what was it that you did that night? Even now I’m not sure. Perhaps you just saw the ugly as beautiful. Your particular talent and you passed some part of it on to me. So that sometimes my mind can remain still, can reserve all judgement. So that there are no good days or bad days, only days where good and bad are so inextricably mixed that the one can’t be sorted from the other.) Even at the time of Laurie’s death, there had been moments when she’d been able to see the world like that. And it’s there again in his letter. Do other people see it? Or is she the only one?
Below Mollie’s voice floats to the end of the song, the hoover starts. Jemmy would like to see Rufus, after all she’s heard about him. Allow Mollie her happiness, there’s little enough of it around that one shouldn’t judge the quality of it.
The lace curtain at the window is dirty but the sunlight shining through produces an interesting spider’s web image on the wall. The duvet is warm and she’s here with her baby – her baby who is alive today. Maybe it’s easier to be happy when you don’t have anything much to be happy about. Despair and happiness are not opposite ends of a spectrum. Instead they lie on a circle, close together, the one making the other possible. She has nothing left to lose. And so no choice. All she can do is enjoy the afternoon with her baby and that spider’s web light shivering on the wall.
48
BEFORE
Rose – Worcester, March 1963
Rose, Violet, Mrs Bertie Fawcett. She is all three. And the Worcester morning – pale and devoid of questions – welcomes all comers. She stands at the French windows in the sitting room, looks down over the brick city. Canal, railway station, allotment, cathedral and the distant heather-coloured Malvern Hills. The day shakes itself awake, still tired and bleary-eyed. Traffic flickers on a silver ribbon of distant road.
Increasingly she feels marooned, up here, in the stately white house in Langley Crescent. The city has sailed on into record shops, night clubs, girls wearing tiny shift dresses and smoking in the streets. She shudders, puts on her sunglasses, lights a cigarette. Sitting down to drink her morning coffee, she leafs through the newspaper.
Towards the back, she sees the photograph, adjusts her glasses, moves the page closer. The face staring out at her is Mollie – but also the face which was hers, all those years ago. White teeth, a haze of black hair, playful eyes, skin flawless as fresh snow. For a moment, she pushes the paper away, turns her face as though to defend herself against assault. But then gradually she breathes again, opens the paper. She’s Violet Fawcett and has nothing to fear. She runs her eyes over the article.
Rising West End star. An accident falling from the roof of a mansion block in Chelsea. Comfortable in hospital but will not be completing the run of A Man For
All Seasons at the Ambassadors Theatre. Mr Rufus Ravello arrested and then released.
So. So. Rose feels her heart thumping, presses her hand to her chest for a moment. After all this time of not knowing. All that childish talk about the theatre. Rose is impressed but not, finally, surprised. Mollie inherited her talent, after all. But it isn’t the story that holds her attention, it’s the photograph. Her own face. And suddenly it all rushes at her – Coventry, the Peace Pledge Union, Frank. But as soon as the memories begin she cuts them off. One must not be sentimental.
What will she say to Bertie? Of course, he would love some news of Mollie. He’s never stopped talking about her, never stopped asking. And it hasn’t always been easy to head him off, to manage things. He’s suggested endlessly that they contact the police, hire a private detective, put a notice in the newspaper. Out of kindness, she’s resisted these ideas. Now that Bertie is ill, it’s particularly important not to upset him, not to raise unrealistic expectations. She’s always been in charge of the post and so intercepted those occasional letters. Not Known At This Address. Mollie might have turned up at the house one day, except she would know better than to do that.
Of course, it’s all very stupid. When she first met Bertie, that Blitz night in the bar of the Feathers Hotel, straight off the train from the smouldering coals of Coventry, she could have told him. Or she could have told him at any time afterwards. I am not really Violet Bunton, I am Rose Mayeford. I was confused, I made a mistake. Bertie wouldn’t have minded, he might anyway have suspected something. That night he might have seen the identity cards. But the moment to tell had never been right. It’d always been simpler to leave things as they were.
