“It’s not as bad as all that.” Irene offered her daughter the same glum reassurance with each visit to Bellevue Place. “You won’t remember the pain afterwards. I didn’t.”
The goading emphasis made Irene’s teeth rattle with pleasure. Emily feared the threat of weakness more than the pain, and wondered, staring past the elfin stoic at the foot of the bed, what she would find in the next six months to sustain her; what books and daydreams, letters, incidents and friends – what family – could possibly absorb the vacancy of her prospects. The doctor’s orders were for complete bed rest, which Emily dreaded the way she dreaded long journeys.
Irene was seventy-four, tiny and spry, clad in a pink woollen coat that she never took off. She lived along the road in Malvern Terrace in a house like her daughter’s with three rickety floors (one rented out), a sloping lawn, a Singer and treadle, the bed that sounded a minor chord when you lay on it, a few chairs and no heating. To the children, Liz, Lotte and Clive, she gave delicious teas; to their mother, a feast of stony looks. Or rather – stranger – like the coat, a sort of sympathy for all seasons done up to its neck in pride. Oh, you poor thing. I expect you’ll live. How ever did I manage, on my own?
A threat to survival and nothing less roused Irene’s pity. Sometimes, not even then. She came from Hanley Road in North London, where seven families topped and tailed in five-room houses. Her husband had died while she was pregnant with Emily. They were penniless after the birth, unable to pay the hospital bill. Men arrived to take Em and her brother into care, but Irene’s doctor intervened, waiving his fee. She took in work, making dresses, sleekly beautiful coats and skirts, sewing hems by evening candlelight until her head nodded and hit the bridge of the machine. At four she rose to scrub floors until eight, then walked up to Drummonds in Dalston for more piece-work. Bombs fell. Irene could not afford to stop for them. Besides, Matilda Voy upstairs had read her leaves and said she’d love to go on a journey West, maybe as far as Basingstoke. The children meanwhile, clutching kitbags and labelled underwear, went to Dorset. Irene took them to Paddington and returned home to find Miss Voy shaking beneath a tin tray on the edge of a crater two streets long. Didn’t see that one coming, did she? Don’t talk to me! You think you’ve got it bad.
Emily thought nothing of the sort, although perhaps she should have done: another pregnancy, and in her late thirties, had placed her in great danger. No matter – in Irene Coker’s world, the instinct for self-preservation cringed before the civilising virtues of self-sacrifice. The right to be distressed, or ever to complain, did not exist. All cries for help went up in smoke.
The ashen residue was sarcasm, a diet of sly belittling designed to toughen Emily and make her grateful, which she was. From Irene Em got her wit, know-how and dexterity. She was both educated and practical, a minder and a maker: she stitched and patched and sang and laughed. Made quilts, sold them. Bore kids, raised them. Cooked meals from almost nothing, ate them – standing up.
Her talent to deride was a less certain inheritance. Once only she tried to cow her mother, to pay her back in kind, and the attempt blew up in her face.
When Irene moved to Bath, to Malvern Terrace, to be near the grandchildren, she brought with her the high bed, the Singer, a suitcase with all her clothes in it, and an album of photographs. Somewhere along the line she’d also acquired a brown Hoover that ate the carpet. The sac, fully inflated, bobbed gruesomely. Emily turned it on and nearly lost her toes. “This thing’s dangerous. You should get a new one”, she shouted above the noise. “We’ll help.” Her mother wrinkled her nose and made no reply. The monster stowed, they spent the rest of that morning shaking out sheets and stocking a chest of drawers left by the previous owner with Irene’s things, light sweaters especially, many of which surprised Emily with their softness and scent of violets. She did not associate her mother with any kind of feminine sensuousness or with the word that sprang to mind as she lifted, unfolded, folded and set down on tissue paper a shell-pink crêpe de chine slip, cut on the cross – “luxurious”.
The French-seamed silk belonged to the pre-war era and a mother she could not remember. She was willing to bet the slip had been made, not worn, but the plain fact of its discovery was enough: the long-sought, frail and thrilling proof of Irene’s vanity; of fallibility. Emily gave an eagle cry of victory – and then spotted the letters. There was a small bundle of them tucked into one of the suitcase’s peach-coloured lid pockets. At this point, Irene was downstairs, investigating the fireplace, snapping kindling. It was January. From the upstairs bedroom window the tiled roofs of the crescent below Malvern Terrace bared themselves at the sun like hardy souls determined to enjoy the fresh air on deck.
The letters were neatly folded into handkerchief-squares, their envelopes tied together with a shoelace. They were from Emily’s father, the father she had never met, and – a quick glance told her – spanned many years.
The top one was from 1926, quite late on in the marriage, and post-marked Baden-Baden. The hand was evenly spaced but shaky; some of the looped fs' and ps' did not connect to the next letter. Each sentence, in the manner of the time, heaved with a kind of formalised yearning. Emotions struggled and writhed beneath set phrases, pleasantries, so that the letters as a whole were never simply decorous. For all their awkwardness they communicated things the person writing them would not have been able to say out loud:
We are all well looked after here, my dear Renie, though it is perishing in the huts at night. There is enough food at least for us, and for which I am thankful. What a carry-on it is for the ordinary people hereabouts. They must push money around all day just to eat, and even then they come up short. Well, the machines are nearly done and then I will come home to you and little Arnold. It will not be long now, I think, but I am counting the days, as you may imagine.
Your loving husband, A
Looking up from her father’s bottled longings, Emily felt the necessity of a response. So she laughed. And having laughed, immediately sat down on the bed, as if she had been pushed. The machines would have been aeroplanes, for Lufthansa, she knew that much. Her brother remembered playing with the armfuls of worthless Deutschmarks that their father had brought home.
The next envelope in the pile contained a much earlier letter, sent from Montreal during the War, along with a certificate of demobilisation granted by the Royal Canadian Expeditionary Force in June, 1915. It exuded eagerness. He had been happy. By this point, he had an understanding with Irene and a heart defect. They intended to marry when he got back. Something – his happiness maybe, or her own eavesdropping – struck Emily as a dreadful betrayal. It was like confronting a person with their private habits and making a joke of them. There were things about people you might know, but were not supposed to know: the way they laughed without meaning it, their misshapen feet (Irene had a gnarled green toe), their peculiar sensitivities and coverings-up. Of course there was nothing misshapen about this letter, which was innocent and light-hearted, almost gaseous with hope. But her father had died of pneumonia. He’d been born with a hole in his heart. The adventurous, affectionate husband who’d written this, the letter she was holding, was not that man. A different man had existed. A different father, and a different mother.
“What are you up to?”
She had not known him, and she had not been told the truth about him, if such a thing could even be done; at any rate, no one had tried. It was a double blow.
“Em. What are you laughing at?”
The inquiry came from the top of the stairs.
As she held onto the letters, Emily wondered at her own nerve. She was powerfully angry and upset. Terrified, come to that, of who the woman now advancing down the short hallway might turn out to be. But the violent feelings were not enough in themselves. She required a declaration, as a murderer requires a victim, in order for her passion to enter the world of consequences.
Irene was in the room, smiling. She had glaucoma and needed to be close up to her daughter to understan
d the source of amusement. When finally she did understand, she gave a little shrug, making no attempt to wrest back the bundle of letters, admitting and denying nothing.
Emily read out a few choice endearments, astonished to find herself still laughing between the lines. Her mother listened unembarrassedly. Emily turned again to the letter sent from Baden-Baden. “Dearest, sweet”, she recited, almost crying with frustration. “I am counting the days. Your ever loving husband. Dear. Sweet.” It wasn’t the sentiment in the letters that beggared belief. It was Irene’s toleration of them – her weakness for them, one might say. Between what Em knew for certain of her mother’s disdain for romance and the wizened coquette now tutting and giggling at her side, a gulf of implausibility opened up.
“I don’t know why I kept them”, Irene said at last.
“Oh, you liar, Mum!” Emily exclaimed with real delight. “You big fibber.”
But as she crowed, she glanced about her – at the bed, the green eiderdown, the half-full chest of drawers, the nets – and saw the room of a woman, a widow, the silent correspondent, whose circumstances had always been reduced. Seen like that, the myth of sacrifice – that comforts had been refused, that there had been the option of refusing them – was one way to a kind of self-respect.
“Well, aren’t you clever, being inside my head.”
Now Emily felt weak. They went downstairs and boiled the kettle in a dark kitchen at the back of the house, below street level. Cars drumrolled overhead. Nothing in the kitchen was flush. The yellow formica tallboy did not fit against the wall – it wobbled if you pushed it – because the floor was uneven. The sink came away from the tiles. The paint bubbled with damp. They took their cups into the front room, which was warmer. It had a number of items picked up from Old Jack’s, the junk shop on Walcot Road: a pair of wing-back armchairs, a glass cabinet on splay legs, a drop-leaf dining table. And a coal fire.
Irene sat back with her tea and asked for the letters.
“I just want to see.”
Emily handed them over and her mother re-read the first two or three, carefully, considering. After that she seemed to grow bored. The two women talked about Don going to America for a term and what that would mean, about Clive’s splints, Summerfield. Em said there was no question of her joining Don; he hadn’t asked her, and anyway she didn’t want to go. Irene grunted, listening, and reached for the tongs to open the fire door. She fed the flames one letter at a time, as if to eke out the waste with an equally consuming and purposeful thrift.
The memory of those exploding intimacies made Emily’s face warm, so that on his arrival Dr Pattison took her temperature.
“Normal enough”, he said, tilting his head back to read the thermometer. “Though God knows it shouldn’t be. It’s absolutely freezing in here, Mrs Allden. Have you not got a heater? Of some description?”
She explained that the electric heater needed a new element, without adding that she did not know what an element might be (she was simply repeating her husband’s diagnosis) and that in any case it cost too much to run.
“And I’m only up here for a couple of hours in the afternoon. It’ll be warm soon. It hardly seems worth it.”
Dr Pattison, who was younger than he looked, smiled and sat on the bed. In the doorway Irene opened the clasp on her handbag and started fingering dryly through its meagre contents – stamps, small change, her pension book.
“I won’t stay, doctor. I just popped in to give my daughter this.”
She took out a postal order for five shillings.
“This is for Clive, Em. He wanted to get a book, he said, and I’ve an idea he wanted to choose it for himself. He told me the title.”
“Five shillings! Oh, Mum, you are good.”
Irene was quiet a moment, looking a little enviously at Dr Pattison and his patient. The vow of silence she observed with most visitors, anyone who was not family, could be relaxed in the doctor’s favour, but the opposing discretion with which he listened made her nervous.
“He’s a one, isn’t he, Em”, she broke out. “Little monkey. But he does read beautifully. I quite look forward to it.”
“He must enjoy it or he wouldn’t run along so eagerly.”
Dr Pattison smiled. He was looking down at his lap, hands folded, entranced by awkwardness – a short, rather solid man, in whom a combination of shyness, soft-spoken professional competence and a surprising delicacy of movement and touch suggested sadness. His eyes were forget-me-not blue – too eerie against the dark stain of his cheeks. Others said that he drank.
As if in response to some unvoiced dissent, Irene added abruptly: “They’ll all be after him, you mark my words.”
“He’s only eight”, Emily objected. “Give him a chance. I am sorry, doctor. Anyway, what about the girls? Liz’s going to have a nice figure.”
“Liz?” Irene sounded irritated. She had been put to work at twelve, and Liz was eleven or fast approaching, a little woman. “Liz is like you. Lotte’s pretty. Was there anything else, Em? If not, I’ll be off.”
When she had gone, Dr Pattison asked how Emily was, and how Clive was getting on with the splints and the spectacles, and Emily was relieved to report that she was feeling quite all right and Clive was being brave and Liz was already such a help in the house –
“Have you and your husband discussed the letter, Mrs Allden? Have you looked at the forms? You do know that you’ll have to decide very soon.” Dr Pattison shut his eyes as he marked the words with pauses.
“Yes I do. We have, Don and I have read the – papers.”
The doctor nodded.
“And I’m so grateful to you for everything. I understand everything you’ve told me – and I just can’t bring myself to sign them.”
“You’re aware of the risks?”
“Don has said it‘s my decision. He backs me up.”
Downstairs, the front door opened and the noise of traffic flowed into the passage along with the children back from school, arguing.
“It’s WILL”, Clive was saying furiously, his phlegmy treble charged with adult exasperation, “not ‘shall’. Shall is weaker than will. It’s feminine and the last line is masculine. It’s WILL never be slaves, Liz, you moron.”
“I know what you must think, doctor. But I can’t do it.”
“‘Britons never, never, ne-ver WILL be slaves’.”
“Have it your own way”, a girl sighed. “But it’s still ‘shall’. Mr Meyler said.” And with that Liz took Lotte, who was crying, downstairs to peel potatoes while Clive began his painful, expostulatory ascent to the bedroom.
“He’ll be all right”, Emily assured the doctor. “He likes to do it on his own. It takes him a while.” She raised herself onto her elbows. “Are you managing, Clive? Dr Pattison is here. Do you want him – “
“Mr Meyler said. Mr Meyler said. Who cares what that fat oaf thinks? He’s not a proper Briton. He’s from Swansea.”
“Clive?”
A gulp halted the invective at the bottom of the stairs.
“How would he know?”
Clive was really her favourite child. The idea of having a favourite horrified her, but there it was. Many years later, when he returned to visit her and she could barely mumble his name – when names no longer meant anything – a part of Emily still knew this, and though by middle-age Clive himself fumed with neglect, nevertheless she clung to him. In the chill passageway beneath the framed butterflies, she turned to her other grown-up children, saying, “I love this one. I can’t help it. It’s true”.
The same part of her tried to concentrate, now, as Neil Pattison told her all about placental insufficiency, but it was no use. Emily heard only the short-breathed stagger of her son in the background. Clive had been born blue, with the umbilical cord round his neck. Every day when he clambered up the stairs, her heart leapt at his restoration, the joy of knowing that he had survived and she had not been left on her own. Because that was the worst thing by far about a still-birt
h. Worse than the fact of it was the stillness and isolation of the room they put you in, the unmarked afterthought with a lone bulb in which you were abandoned to get on with things. And the dead two – one before Liz, another between her and Clive – had been hard deliveries, and she had screamed for hours, probably. When it was over, the nurses were never kind enough. They took the baby away, shut the door and let you have a good cry. Two days later, you were dressed and sent home with antibiotics. And you always felt you’d failed, no matter what people said, which wasn’t much. Clive had nearly died on the way out, but not quite, so he had to be lucky.
“I’m lucky, I know.”
Dr Pattison, nodding, was saying, “You have three lovely children”, and seemed prepared to leave it at that, then changed his mind. Some gear of impartiality slipped as the boy stumped nearer.
“You will be in this bed for the next twenty weeks, all day and night except for one hour or two at the most, and you could still lose the child, or it will be born with defects, or it will die shortly after birth. Or you will. Having this baby could kill you, Mrs Allden – Emily. I mean it, and I wouldn’t be much of a doctor if I left here feeling I hadn’t got this across to you. Do you understand?”
Emily looked at her hands.
“You could die from any number of complications that we mightn’t be able to detect until – “
Clive came in, elated.
“Beast!”
He saw Dr Pattison and stopped.
“Oh, Clive. You did it all on your own again, didn’t you?”
The little boy, thin as a seed, held himself against the edge of the door, his head angled away from the doctor and his mother. He moved his jaw around, stuck for words in front of the man sitting where he, the hero, would normally sit at this time of day. The doctor smiled and checked Clive’s legs, tapping the shinbone and the clamps, asking if anything he did hurt any more than usual. Clive looked at his mother out of the corner of his eyes.
Dr Pattison left and Liz, the capable one, cooked dinner. At eight she put Lotte to bed, checked on Emily, and ran Clive’s bath. Don had gone back to work at the Technical College. Between tasks, Liz walked about the house on her hands.
The next morning, after his father had left for the day, Clive returned to his parents’ bedroom and gave Emily his glasses to clean.
“Beastie not getting up no more? Beastie staying flat for ever and ever?”
A posture went with the nasal voice – shoulders hunched and arms locked straight down by his sides.
“Maybe not for ever”, Emily spat and polished. “Here.”
“Beastie continue to pretend she’s alive by being brought tea and toast in morning which Beastie can’t eat because Beastie stiff as a post?”
Don had brought her some breakfast on a tray.
“Is that what you’d like?” she said.
Clive chewed the insides of his cheeks and gave her his sideways stare. He went to the toilet next door and steadied himself. It was a fine day and from the top of the house you could see small birds speedboating across the open sky. He was full of exciting title music and fast getaways.
The possibility of a defective birth had not occurred to Emily until Dr Pattison mentioned it. Whatever the risks involved with this pregnancy, for some reason Emily took them to be of the all-or-nothing variety. She could not imagine an alternative or compromised outcome, a state between absolute loss and complete gain – which was strange, considering her job at Summerfield and considerable experience in such matters. Summerfield was the school behind the cypresses behind the approach golf course – a joke and a threat to dim kids elsewhere in the city. The children in her care were all ESN, with a range of incapacities, from the merely slow to the bawlingly disturbed. Emily minded them with great compassion: there were pictures to cut out, collages to be made, chaotic trips – occasionally – to parks and gardens to be survived. She thought it a shame that they suffered their imperfections as they did, but her sympathy couldn’t extend to real empathy because she did not for a moment question the necessity of their segregation from the rest of infant society. Assessments had been made and that was that. Only now in the empty house, after Liz had led Clive away, did she consider that assessments were indeed made – by someone, somewhere – and that, as a result, of all the children born equal, or not obviously deformed, there were a minority who passed from the Eden of normality into a world of certified inadequacy, for ever. They were a separate concern.
But her brother was blind in one eye. Her grandfather had had a cleft palate. Cousin Phyllis, in Edgware, could not be trusted to go to the shops and still depended on her Mum for everything. And Julie Naish, Emily’s best friend over the road, who played the saxophone with one lung, smoked as though she had three to spare. Was anyone the full shilling?
She heard Irene’s words, repeated with a prophetic insistence: you won’t remember the pain afterwards. The pain that was fear and threat and dire uncertainty, a sum of conditions only secondarily, historically, physical. Her mother had carried her despite the shock of bereavement, and they had both lived. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps it was all or nothing in the end.
The thought reoccurred to Emily on several future occasions, each time with a rush of adrenaline and woozy relief. The first was when the Gas Board finally installed a heater – downstairs – on Benjamin’s sixth birthday.
The gas fire had three upright bars, each the size of a large Cadbury’s, and a dial at the side with two settings, Super Heat (all three bars) and Miser Rate (one bar). There was a turning-on tea ceremony-cum-birthday party at No 2 – this in the middle of the Energy Crisis – and as the weak flame leapt Irene had an inspiration. “Take off your clothes, Benjamin”, she quavered, from deep within her pink fastness, “or you won’t feel the benefit”.
Benjamin did as he was told, and stripped. He’d seen, besides, something in his grandmother’s comical, indulgent eye that his mother might have missed. It was fun, nudity, and the idea stayed with him. Spring and summer of that year were both hot, so one blistering day Benjamin decided to walk home from school, naked. It started as a dare with his school-friend Daniel and turned into a demonstration. Daniel needed a lot of persuading just to unbutton his shirt and then refused outright to take off his trousers. Benjamin sighed pityingly. If he had to take the lead, he would.
He arrived at the front door with his clothes tucked under one arm.
“D’you see your Benjum, then?” gasped a neighbour.
“You won’t be able to do this when you’re grown up”, his mother said, and sent him back to look for the sock he’d dropped along the main road.
Don and Emily eventually got a new element for the heater in their bedroom, but it smelled funny, and on balance, and because they were the children of their generation, they preferred to do without. Nothing was safer, too. A while after the gas fire had been fitted in the front room, someone left it on unlit. The hiss was scarcely detectable beneath Clive’s own hum of concentration as he settled down to watch TV, shivered a bit, got up and struck a match.
Em heard the whoomph! from the kitchen and was by her son’s side before he had recovered himself enough to cry out. His forehead was the colour of Empire; the air smelled of burned hair. Clive brushed away his scorched specs. Little black filings – eyebrows – tickled his cheeks.
“See?”, Emily cried, shaking the teenager, who had a notorious temper. “You’re still in one piece, aren’t you? See? There you are. Oh, Clive!”
Her emotion caught up with her. She fought it back.
Clive’s eyes had started to leak meanwhile and Emily, noticing, reacted as though robbed of her own fear. She almost snapped: “Would you believe it? Clive Allden, you great big baby. It’s never as bad as all that.”
Views from Above
Elin-Maria Evangelista
The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley Page 20
