We Five

by Mark Dunn

  “I’m going to ’phone for a taxi, if it’s all right with you. I’ll leave a nickel on the table.”

  “You do whatever you like,” said Maggie, quickly turning away. Then just as quickly she swung back around. “You know, none of this would have happened if you hadn’t fallen for Pat—if you hadn’t done the very thing that sinister game expected you to do.”

  “Pat wasn’t playing the game like the others. I just know it.”

  “And just how do you know this, Molly?”

  Molly brought herself to within a few inches of Maggie’s face. “Because Pat’s too stupid to play a game that thorny. There. I said it. I fell in love with a good-looking idiot. And I’ll deal with the consequences without any help from you.”

  And with that, Molly, along with her night bag and her wad of nightgown, fled into the night.

  At the hospital the clock in the corridor struck two. The men’s ward was dark and quiet save for the sound of a couple of patients snoring lightly and another man moaning, but not too loudly, in response to his nocturnal pain. Cain, sitting in his stiff, upright chair, dozed off. It was only for the briefest moment, but was still long enough to nearly topple him headlong from his chair. One of the nurses had asked earlier if he might not be more comfortable at home, or at least stretched out upon one of the divans in the solarium, which was often used to billet those who wished to spend the night close by.

  “Maybe later,” he’d replied. “I’m fine right here for now.”

  “Well, I’ll be at the nurse’s desk just outside if you need anything.” She smiled pleasantly. “You’re a good and devoted friend to sit up with Mr. Harrison like this.”

  Cain nodded. Circumstances did not permit him to give an even more revelatory response to the nurse’s thoughtful observation.

  At a couple of minutes past two, Pat Harrison woke from his morphine induced sleep of the dead. But he was hardly awake. Like each of the three other awakenings Cain had witnessed, Pat asked only for his mother, wondering in fractured words interposed between struggles for breath when she would come to see him. Each time, and not even knowing if Pat had understood a single word of his reply, Cain told his friend that he shouldn’t worry; she was on her way. Cain hadn’t the heart to divulge the hard truth: that Pat’s mother had died several years earlier after a lengthy bout with tuberculosis.

  Cain supposed he could say the same thing he’d said before. And yet, something about the disconsolate way Pat asked the question—as if, in spite of his jumbled cognition, he was getting the strong sense that she wouldn’t be coming—motivated Cain to say something quite different this time.

  At that instant, Cain’s mind flashed on a movie he’d seen a few years earlier. It was a D. W. Griffith picture starring Lillian Gish, The Greatest Thing in Life. There was a scene in the movie that had always haunted him. It took place during the Great War and involved a white officer and a mortally wounded Negro soldier. As the Negro was slipping away, he asked for his mother, and the officer hadn’t known what to say. He did know, though, that the soldier under his command would die easier if he thought his mother was at his side, easing him lovingly through the dark passage into death. Cain remembered vividly what happened in that next moment: the officer, pretending to be the dying soldier’s mother, reaching over and kissing the young soldier.

  The scene touched Cain deeply, the image of that kiss resonating for him long after he’d left the theatre.

  Cain raised himself up from his chair. He placed a cool hand on Pat’s feverish forehead. Pat, his eyes swollen tight from lacerations to his face, asked again if his mother was there. Had she finally come? The hand that touched him: was it hers?

  Cain answered yes.

  And then Cain placed himself halfway upon the bed so he could embrace Pat as a mother would embrace a child—holding him close and protectively in his arms. And then Cain, playing the part of Pat’s mother, kissed him on the lips.

  Pat accepted the kiss. He held the kiss tightly upon his lips as Cain slid back from the bed and into the chair.

  And then, most remarkably, the cloud lifted from Pat’s face and he smiled.

  And then he spoke.

  “Cain?”

  Cain leaned in. “What is it, Paddy?”

  With labored breath: “Tell my mother she needs a shave.”

  And in that next moment the rising and falling of Pat’s chest, his attempts to breathe through lungs that were crushed and nearly useless, stopped.

  Pat Harrison was dead.

  Cain stared at Pat’s lifeless body for a moment. Then he got up and went out to the nurse’s desk to tell her what had happened. She telephoned the doctor who was on night duty, and went into the ward to confirm what Cain had reported. Cain stood next to the nurse’s desk. He watched the night doctor and one of the other night nurses racing down the corridor, listened to their shoes clicking isolate upon the linoleum. He watched them disappear into the ward. Cain walked over to the swinging doors and observed attempts to revive the patient. Then came a shake of the head and mumbled instructions to the nurses from the somber doctor.

  Cain walked down the silent corridor to a room he’d looked into earlier that day—the one with the locked glass cabinets lining the walls—the cabinets that had bottles and vials and ampoules inside. He looked for one with skull and crossbones on the label. He was set to break the glass and take something from inside which he could ingest to end the overwhelming agony of loss he was feeling in that moment—to remove himself to either a state of absolute nothingness or to some beautiful Afterworld where he might get lucky and find Pat among the angels.

  But in that next moment he recalled from his chemistry class at the college that there were few medicines in modern times—even those Victorian holdovers, the mercury and arsenic compounds—that healed and killed with equal efficacy, few chemical substances to be found in a hospital medicine cabinet that could be depended upon to induce an instantaneous and relatively painless death.

  Which is why Cain Pardlow withdrew from the hospital’s medicine supply room without breaking a single pane of glass—why, still unseen by anyone in his quest for infinite peace, he found himself in an unoccupied room, its window left temptingly half open. He smiled over how perfectly condign it seemed for him to take himself out of the world he now abhorred in the very same manner in which he’d been robbed of the only person he’d ever truly loved.

  And with that smile still pasted upon his lips, and with no thought of Ruth and the plans they had been making together, Cain Pardlow threw himself from the window. He died a convenient eight seconds later from a severely fractured skull.

  Chapter Nineteen

  London, England, October 1940

  Three days later Carrie’s mother died. Carrie was with her. And Jane had been with Carrie.

  The two had grown very close during Sylvia Hale’s final hours and in the wake of the senseless deaths of Pat and Cain. The week past had been a particularly hard one for residents of the nearby London neighbourhoods that were being bombed night after night, filling the beds of the venerable St. Bartholomew’s Hospital with the injured until there wasn’t a single mattress left unoccupied. (This in spite of a good many of the victims having been removed to hospitals elsewhere in the city, and even outside of the city altogether, any place that offered some modicum of safety in a land in which no one—not even the already severely injured—was really all that safe.)

  During their leave of absence from the factory, Carrie and Jane were conscripted by the Sisters of St. Bart’s to help tend to the Blitz’s most recent casualties. The two had worked very hard. Their assistance to the many men, women, and children who, like Carrie, had lost both their homes and close family members to the air raids kept Carrie from thinking too obsessively about her own trials, and prevented Jane from reliving in her every waking moment what Tom Katz had done to her.

  During their few hours of rest, the two had lain in Jane’s bed, even when air raid sirens ordered them t
o retreat to the hollowed-out Higgins backyard Anderson shelter. As exhausted as they were, there were still times—a good many times—when the jarring, concussive sound of the bombs falling nearby and the AA guns noisily acking the night sky kept sleep beyond reach. During nights like these they whiled the time away by sharing whispered reminiscences of the happiest and funniest moments of their closely linked childhoods.

  Tonight played out much as had the several nights preceding it. The only difference was that earlier in the day there had been a funeral. Carrie had watched her mother’s coffin being lowered into the ground, and had wept upon the shoulders of her friends Jane and Maggie and Ruth.

  Molly, as it turned out, was in Worcester, doggedly determined in the face of wartime travel obstacles to attend the funeral of her beloved Pat Harrison—even though the journey took twice as long as expected, even though she was booted from one particular train when all the civilian passengers were forced to give up their seats to soldiers in transit, even though she spent one long leg of her journey with a screaming, soiled child having been thrust into her lap, even though she was hungry and thirsty and very nearly knocked unconscious when the train came to a sudden halt and someone’s hat box fell down on her head, and even though her trip required at journey’s end a frank conversation with Pat’s father about how he’d died. It was the most difficult conversation she’d ever had, but Mr. Harrison had shown her only kindness in spite of his overwhelming grief. He had even placed her in Pat’s old room, where she cried herself to sleep for each of the two nights of her visit, a pair of her dead lover’s boyhood pyjama trousers swaddling one side of her face.

  The Prowses had also gone to Sylvia Hale’s funeral. As had factory forewoman Vivien Colthurst and one of the other assembly workers, Miss Dowell.

  “Don’t you come back to work, love, until you feel up to it,” Miss Colthurst had said to Carrie, smiling sympathetically.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” Carrie adamantly responded. Jane, who was standing next to her, said that she also intended to come into work the next day.

  That night Carrie and Jane drifted off early only to be awakened by the wail of the air raid siren. “I refuse to move from this bed,” Carrie dissented wearily.

  “I’ll keep you company,” said Jane.

  A moment later Lyle stumbled into the bedroom and sought to know, in a harried tone, why the two of them were just lying there and not getting their “blooming arses out to the Andy.”

  “Because, little brother,” Jane calmly replied, “we’re waiting for the bomb that has both of our names stamped on it—the one that’ll deliver us from this blooming vale of blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

  “You go right ahead and bodge up Mr. Churchill’s words like that. He can’t hear you. But still it ain’t very patriotic.”

  Jane chortled. “Since when have you got yourself all Hope-and-Glory patriotic, little brother?”

  “Since I went down to enlist yesterday.”

  Jane sat up in bed, nonplussed. “You didn’t!”

  “I did.”

  “And they took you? Even though the first time you get shot you’ll be bleeding Guinness all over the battlefield?”

  “Have your bit of a laugh. They took me this time. By the way, that Peter Pan git what tried to fly himself out of that St. Bart’s window—the recruitment officer was asking if I knew him, since I must have said something about knowing every bloke what ever set a toe in the Fatted Pig. He hadn’t heard what happened to him and didn’t know why he never came back in to finish filling out his enlistment papers.”

  Now it was Carrie who registered surprise on behalf of both herself and her bed companion. “Cain Pardlow had decided to enlist?”

  Lyle nodded. “Even the most cowardly of conchies can sometimes come to see the light.”

  “Did you know this, Jane?”

  Jane nodded. “Ruth told me. The two of them had made a pact. He was going into the army and she was joining the A.T.S.”

  “Now that Cain’s gone, is that what she still wants to do—leave the factory and go into the Auxiliary?”

  Jane shrugged with her neck. “I don’t think she’s decided.” Jane became ruminative. “I didn’t know Ruth was so fond of Cain.”

  “Oi! Ladies! It seems to me—if I may interrupt—that if we’re all going to be buried under a pile of bricks by the bleeding Luftwaffe tonight, I should at least have the pleasure of a last supper.”

  Jane sighed. “Do you fancy a meal, brother? Are you saying you want me to get up and make you something?”

  Lyle nodded. Then with a nod in Carrie’s direction, he said, “Whilst I talk to this one here.”

  “Why didn’t you just say you wanted me out of the way so you could have a chin-wag with Carrie? And maybe whilst you’re wagging, you could do it in the Anderson shelter.” At that moment the All Clear sounded. Jane laughed. “Or right here in my bedroom would be lovely too.”

  Jane got up from the bed.

  “I’ve got two eggs. I didn’t tell you because I was saving them for a special occasion. You deserve those eggs for your decision to enlist. I’m very proud of you.” Jane delivered a kiss to her brother’s forehead before leaving the room.

  Lyle sat down on the bed facing Carrie. He waited until the sound of Jane’s retreating footsteps died away. Then he said, “Do you know where he is? The bleeding bugger what did that to her?”

  “You mean where he lives? No, Lyle. I don’t. What are you thinking about doing?”

  “He’s a fire watcher with the A.F.S, ain’t he? At night, I mean. And then in the daytime I’ve clocked him delivering coal for Mr. Matthews.”

  “What are you going to do, Lyle?”

  “What do you fancy I’m going to do?”

  “Be in for the high jump would be my guess. They’ll either hang you straightaway or you’ll end up spending the rest of your life in prison.”

  Lyle thought about this for a moment. “What difference does it make?”

  “I thought you were joining the army.”

  “I am. If the police don’t nick me. And maybe they won’t, because I intend to do this smart—not leave behind any trace it was me. And I’ll be cold sober. That was Osborne’s problem. He went after that stupid little sod whilst his head was only halfway screwed on.”

  “Sober or drunk, Lyle, Molly’s dad shouldn’t have done anything to Pat.”

  “Says yourself. I never held with any of them buggers—not from what Jane said about ’em. And then after what that Katz did to her—”

  “Miss Colthurst at the factory—her family’s been friends with the Matthewses going back years. She told me at the funeral this afternoon she was going to pay a visit to Mr. Matthews on her way back to the factory—tell him everything she knew about the three men he still had working for him. She thinks he’ll give them the sack right on the spot.”

  Lyle shook his head. “That ain’t enough. There are jobs for conchies opening up everywhere. They’ll just plant themselves someplace else and go right back in business. I know all about buggers like these. You see, I used to be one myself.”

  “You never were, Lyle. Don’t put yourself in their camp.”

  Lyle looked away to avoid making eye contact with Carrie.

  Carrie went on: “Mr. Matthews doesn’t keep things to himself, Miss Colthurst says. Word will get around about what they did. People will find out about their game. They’ll be forced to move away. And isn’t that the best thing, Lyle? That they should be gone forever?”

  “I still think the bleeder should be made to pay for what he did to my sister.”

  Carrie got quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You’ve changed, Lyle. You didn’t used to be this way.”

  “You’re right. I didn’t used to be this way. I didn’t used to care. Well, about Jane at any rate. Seeing her like that—that way—it, it changes things. You fancy my eggs? Poached on toast. You’ll like the way Jane makes ’em.”

  There was great tenderne
ss in Carrie’s smile. “Eat your poached, Lyle. We both want you to have them.”

  Earlier that day, Vivien Colthurst had stood next to the table in the factory canteen where Maggie and Ruth sat sipping from their smoking cups of tea and not speaking. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought the two of you in for the rest of the day shift. Your minds clearly aren’t on your work.”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Maggie answered reflexively. Then she added, “Work helps. It keeps me from thinking too much about my missing mother, who went from being amusingly barmy to certifiably mental all in one week.”

  Vivien grabbed a chair and sat down in it back-forward the way men sometimes do. “First, Maggie—your mother isn’t mentally insane. She’s romantically insane, like one of those Thomas Hardy heroines—like, like Tess of the Dubers.”

  Ruth rolled her eyes. “For love of heaven, Vivien! Mrs. Barton isn’t at all like a Thomas Hardy heroine. I wish for once you’d read a whole book and not just the jacket description. What was the second thing you were going to say?”

  “That if Maggie can’t concentrate on her work—that goes for you too, Ruth—there’s going to be an accident. She might die. You might die. This being a munitions factory, dearies, we could all die. I wish I’d left the two of you back at the cemetery.” Ruth and Vivien rose together. “If you’d like to use my Riley to go back to the city, my three ride-alongs and I can manage with the seven-thirty bus.”

  “You’re very kind, as always,” said Ruth. “Perhaps we will. You’re right. Maggie and I do have a lot on our minds right now.”

  Vivien touched Ruth on the shoulder. “I know you’ll make the right decision, love. About whether to join the A.T.S. And it will be your decision.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Ruth, trying to smile. Through brimming eyes she added, “We—Cain and I—we were good friends, but we were just friends.”

  The colour in Maggie’s face had suddenly changed. It had nothing to do with the factory’s mercury vapour lighting, which tended to make everyone look a little like the witch in The Wizard of Oz. There was a lighter cast to it. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she announced. “I think my bloody mother has turned my entire digestive tract into a warzone.”