Burning Bright

by Helen Dunmore

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  BURNING BRIGHT

  Helen Dunmore has published ten novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby, House of Orphans and Counting the Stars. She is also a poet, children’s novelist and short-story writer.

  HELEN DUNMORE

  Burning Bright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The author gratefully acknowledges an award made to her by the Authors’ Foundation in 1992

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Viking 1994

  First published in Penguin Books 1995

  This edition published 2008

  1

  Copyright © Helen Dunmore, 1994

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 9780141917375

  One

  Last night Sukey came back. Her poor head was bleeding. You know how scalp wounds bleed, Enid told herself. The cut was only perhaps an inch long, but the blood welled and welled and would not clot. And Sukey looked at her and said, ‘What a nuisance this is, darling. I can’t seem to do anything about it,’ while Enid wiped the blood off Sukey’s forehead as it sprang sparkling on to her dress and arms. Sukey’s arms were bare and brown. She turned them over, holding them out, exposing the white flesh with fine blue veins beating in it. Blood spray hazed against her dress, though she was upright, smiling. But in the back of Enid’s dreaming mind there was a shadowy knowledge that all this blood could never have come from so small a wound. Even in her dream she knew what had really happened.

  Maybe if I’d seen her dead, thinks Enid for the thousandth time, turning over and brushing the light-switch. Sukey, cold and stiff as the inside of a trussed chicken. No more smell of her hair. No more secret door. Her hair all matted with blood and flies and bits of bone. You can’t make murder pretty. Sukey’s skull blue inside like chicken bones, and all in slivers.

  She’s here with me now, in this room. Sukey’s eyes, her breath, her long bright fleece of hair spread like a tent around us both. She never went away at all.

  Everything returns, thinks Enid. There wasn’t an inch of Sukey’s body I hadn’t touched. More than touched: loved. Perhaps Caro was right, that’s where it gets you, wanting everything. Where did it get you, my darling? Who would ever have dreamed it would get you there, sprawled out on the floor of that small closed room, your head askew on the fender? There was blood drying slowly from the outer rim of the stain on the dull red Turkey carpet. It dried inward, darkening. The slow tick of blood became silent. There was so much blood. And the fly still kneaded the window with its legs, trying to get out, crisping against the glass. By the time men with big boots came tramping round the cottage, you weren’t even Sukey any more. ‘The body.’ ‘The victim.’

  ‘Darling,’ murmurs Enid. She’d never have thought it would be so much worse not to have seen, and to go on and on imagining. She has imagined through fifty years.

  ‘I wasn’t there,’ says Enid. ‘I didn’t do anything. I never came.’

  ‘Enid, sweetheart,’ says the Sukey in her head, ‘you’ll have to find me another handkerchief. This one’s soaked through.’ And she holds out her white handkerchief stained with her bright blood.

  Downstairs Jenny’s baby howls. Jenny will be walking the floor again, to and fro, to and fro, missing out the board that creaks. There’s something wrong with that child of hers. It can’t be right for him to scream and scream like this, every night. But what a life for a ten-month baby, going from one squat to the next, one step in front of landlords and social services and bailiffs. The last place Jenny was in there wasn’t any glass in the windows, and it was winter then. Jenny boarded them up, but then she had to keep the electric light on all day, and she was sure it wasn’t good for the baby. She thinks this place is paradise by comparison, never mind the stairs and the fact there’s no proper kitchen.

  The buff official letter stands on Enid’s mantelpiece so she won’t forget it. She does forget things. Long-hidden memories rise, new rinsed. Decades of adult life are like a dull tide which is going out fast, leaving bare the landscape beneath. The letter tells her that the house has been sold again. Well, that’s nothing new. Buying and selling, buying and selling; they don’t seem to be able to think of anything else to do with this house. Certainly, nobody ever does any repairs. Well, Enid’s protected. A sitting tenant. They’ve explained her rights to her at the Law Centre. It’ll be the end for Jenny, though, and the baby, and the others who drift in and out, half living here, drying their laundry in the bathroom and cooking meals at midnight on a Calor-gas stove. Some of them are quite nicely spoken too. If the new landlords are the ones Enid watched over the banisters, then Jenny has no chance. A precious pair, thinks Enid, I wouldn’t like to meet either of those on a dark night in a dark alley.

  One was a big, powerful-looking man with curly hair. She’d listened but she hadn’t caught his name. It sounded foreign. He’d called the other one Tony, the one with a face like a knife-blade.

  They’ll sell up the house and move on fast enough, once they see there’s no money in it. And Enid’s not going to take a cheque for a thousand pounds and move out to please them. She knows her rights, and she knows that rents are sky-high outside. Here, her rent’s fixed.

  ‘We shall not, we shall not be moved…;’ quavers Enid, beating time with her heels on the rumpled cotton sheet. The baby in the room beneath is silent, then there’s a gasp and another roar of outraged breath. How the noise carries. The baby might as well be in Enid’s bedroom.

  ‘Terrible jerry-builders, those Georgians,’ says Enid aloud. She knows the history of the house. The fine façade hides some Georgian jiggery-pokery all right. Rubble inside the wall cavities, and there’s a long crack down the side of the stairs. Oh, the house is beautiful, if you don’t know what’s behind that honey-coloured stone which splits in the frost. The days of one hundred per cent conservation grants are long gone. They’ll get a lot more than they bargained for, those two, buying this house.

  Enid shuts her eyes, feeling for the deliciou
s warm entry into half-sleep. The baby’s crying recedes, and instead she hears the far-off noise of a ship’s hooter in the docks. ‘All gone…; all gone…;’ says the hooter. Enid breathes the warm smell of herself under the blankets. Wool prickles her chin. She’s wearing her jumper still, so she must have forgotten to undress. Did she go to the pub last night? She can’t remember.

  She sleeps, and there’s Sukey, standing by the edge of a lake and shielding her face from the sun. She’s about to dive. Her long beautiful body is flexed, her weight balanced on the balls of her feet. The rock she stands on is black and glistening. ‘Basilisk,’ whispers Enid in her dream. Sukey’s bare white toes curl, gripping the rock so as to launch herself from it. Below her the dark water is tense. Sukey’s waiting for something before she dives – what is it? She glances at the thick green bushes and calls, ‘En-id! En-id!’ but no one answers. ‘She’s waiting for me,’ says Enid, and she struggles to answer but cannot speak. Suddenly she is not behind the bushes any more, but high up on the rocks opposite, much too far away for Sukey to hear her even if she was able to call out. She can hear Sukey, but Sukey can’t hear her. She can see Sukey poised on the rock with the thick frame of the forest behind her. And then, out of the frame steps Caro. Her red hair sings against the green. Red for danger. Sukey hasn’t seen her; she calls again, ‘En-id! En-id!’ on two notes, high and clear ones which echo around the forest. Enid’s tongue is thick in her mouth and no sound comes out. Caro walks very lightly up behind Sukey, keeping directly behind her so that Sukey won’t catch even a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. She creeps up on Sukey like a cat, light but stealthy. The dark water waits for Sukey. And behind her Caro is climbing the rock, ready to spring.

  ‘Sukey!’ screams Enid, bursting her lungs, tearing her throat, but the sound is no more than a whimper. Sukey hears nothing. She drops her hands to her sides and bends her head forward as if she is laying it down on the block, and Enid screams again, rustily, and wakes.

  She scrubs tears off her face and struggles out of her blankets. This time she presses the light-switch and looks at her clock. Quarter past four. The baby’s not crying any more. Jenny will have an hour of peace before the dawn wail begins. A lot of time has passed. She must have been asleep.

  ‘No wonder you had a bad dream, going to bed in your clothes,’ she scolds herself. She must be more careful. The distinction between night and day is an important one, especially with new landlords coming. From the look of those two they’d have her put away in a home before you could say knife. Enid is good at watching, and at finding out what people are like before they’ve even seen her. People don’t realize how voices carry up a house. Enid’s door is usually ajar, and no one guesses that she’s just inside it, standing still, listening. You have to keep on the look-out. That’s what Sukey didn’t do, the dream said so as plain as plain. She didn’t see Caro coming. Miss Danger.

  Two

  A midnight-blue BMW sits in the clot of traffic moving up the East End’s Commercial Road. It’s not a ministerial car, and there are no police outriders to clear its path. Paul Parrett doesn’t want them today. He’s with the rest through the filthy air of the Blackwall Tunnel, through Tower Hamlets and Lime-house. The long file of cars is the only wealth in these streets. Banks have closed, shops are boarded and drifts of uncollected post bulge back through letter-boxes. Metal shutters the colour of mercury fillings cover Pizza Perfect. A row of derelict factories shows jagged teeth of broken glass braced by razor wire. Two Bengali road-menders stand laughing inside their tent of red and white road tape, then crouch over their drills. Paul Parrett’s car passes the drills very slowly. Their squeal bites against the thick metal of the BMW, and he sees that the men aren’t wearing ear-muffs. Young men, they never think ahead. He knows this part of London well, with its sweat-shops, its missions, its disastrous housing where walkways cook in diesel fumes and tiny balconies drip washing. His round, toffee-brown eyes glisten with attention while his hands deal automatically with gears and steering-wheel. The day is muggy. The sun’s already high but invisible in a pale haze of pollution. He winds down his window and rests his elbow on its frame. Just then a woman on the pedestrian refuge screeches after her child, who swings out off the rail, looking for a second as if he’ll somersault as a Transit van swerves close enough to shave his forehead. She’s wielding a double buggy and she can’t catch hold of him. Suddenly the child’s eyes dilate with fear as he sees the van and his game is stripped from him. He shrinks back against the dented steel railings which hold off cars from the refuge. Paul Parrett looks straight into the mother’s face, scored with fear, tiredness, the weight of the buggy, the breaking wave of traffic noise against her body. The little boy stares back at the big car with TV eyes. The babies’ mouths are level with the exhaust.

  No one in the world knows that he’s here, in a traffic jam on the Commercial Road, bonnet to bonnet with the sweaty drivers of Hondas and Toyotas and Audis. He could be anyone. He could do anything. He flexes his hands on the steering-wheel and looks in the mirror. He sees the bored face of a commuter, talking to himself or to his car telephone. A traffic jam is a good place to be alone. Who’s Paul Parrett to that gaunt young man in a green parka who feels a winter wind blowing even in July? That woman on the refuge won’t have seen the latest cartoon in the Guardian. He’s hard to caricature anyway. The thing about Paul Parrett is energy, so much of it that you have to wonder what would happen if he ever used it all. His dark perfect clothes are neutral. No eyebrows or catchphrases.

  St Anne’s on the left. Soon he’ll be nosing into the City. Everything’s packed so tightly together in London. Between one street and the next you move from world to world. If the traffic wasn’t so bad he’d glide from metal-sheeted shops and desolate housing projects to the canyons of the City in three minutes. It’s beginning now. Money starts to whisper through the car windows. There’s the first secretary in immaculate taupe suit, stepping out of a smoked-glass lobby and hurrying up the pavement to the next entrance. A dispatch rider jerks his Yamaha off the pavement.

  Paul Parrett loves the game of anonymity, just as long as he can stop it any time he wants. There’s a telephone on the left of his dashboard, and he keeps the codes in his head. He’s about six minutes late. They’ll be waiting for him. He presses a button.

  ‘Five-seven.’ He’s through. ‘John. I’ll be another quarter of an hour or so.’

  A small fluster. John knows the car hasn’t been sent for him, doesn’t know what’s going on, has been fast-footworked by his minister again.

  ‘Relax. Just have the messages ready.’

  Instantly John is calm, ready for business. He’ll be annoyed with himself because he has betrayed surprise. His role is to be ready for anything Paul Parrett chooses to do. John gives a précis of the papers which have arrived for the morning’s meeting. He is lucid and to the point. The best briefer in the business: the sort who can make any minister feel it’s all due to his own grasp of key facts.

  ‘Well done. That’s excellent,’ says Paul Parrett warmly. He’s always known about stroking people.

  He presses another button, cuts the connection and leans back against the seat. The air’s just a little too warm, but not unpleasantly so. Nearly there now. London’s all around him, like an animal in its lair, still potent in spite of everything. It smells of money the way a fox smells of fox. He smells it through the open window. He loves it. Those cliffs of glass are charged and humming. There’s not a door he passes that he can’t go in. It is his own choice to shunt past them in a traffic jam which is loosening up now, breaking into its component cars which stream off right and left as the drivers accelerate, thinking of the next meeting, of money, crisis, gain and loss. They may not think of the Commercial Road but it’s there somewhere, lodged in their minds like grit which they pearl into profit. They are allowed to see but not to suffer, shielded in their central-locking cars, guided by traffic signals, linked by emergency contact to AA, RAC,
police. But the sight of what’s on offer along the Commercial Road frightens them deep down, way below the stories they tell themselves. They race up their office steps boyishly, where a boy would take the lift. They pour a cup of freshly brewed coffee, lift a telephone, set the screens humming and pick up the rest of the world.

  Paul Parrett sits inside his expensive suit, and feels the remembered itch of cold winds through clumsy clothing. He remembers standing for hours at bus-stops for buses which never came, listening out for cars so he could cross the roads in London smog. He remembers chilblains and chapped knees, dressing in unheated bedrooms, icy lino, underwear washed once a week, the black bits cut out of potatoes. He remembers meagre fires and margarine. He doesn’t need a guide to the Commercial Road. He’s made his own maps to get out of it, and now he’s here in his car, after a bowl of coffee and French bread and on his way back from a place he’ll never visit again. A complete waste of time.

  He is a GI baby: one of the ones whose mother never got the chance to go to America. He is a bit of the war. By the time she found out about Paul, his father had already been shipped across to France. And that was that. His father might have died in France, or returned to the States. He might be alive still; he could very well be alive still. His mother is alive, he knows. He has checked it. One of the advantages of a ministerial position is that all sorts of small barriers fall away. The social security system is usefully comprehensive, and old people live a long time these days. She is in receipt of a supplementary pension, and she lives alone in rented accommodation. He has never seen her.

  Perhaps his adoption could only have happened just then, immediately after the war when there were so many children to be had. Bombed-out children, evacuated children, refugee children. A river of children whose parents had lost touch with them or with life. All these displaced kids to be slotted back into some sort of home. This is what Paul Parrett hopes. He hopes that a woman like Mrs Parrett wouldn’t find it quite so easy to get hold of a child now. In 1946 she got her hands on a six-month baby with no trouble.

 
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