House of Orphans

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Let me do that, Doctor,’ said Matti behind him. ‘You aren’t hardly dressed for it.’

  ‘I’ll finish it,’ said Thomas. He swung again and again, bludgeoning the thing open. He’d made a mess of it. A wet, splintered mess of unripe wood. No good to anyone, but he was almost through the trunk. The branches swished and crashed and it was done. The tree fell, staggering into the branches of another birch, smashing twigs as it settled. You couldn’t see where one tree ended and the other began.

  ‘Get some men up from the village,’ he said to Matti. ‘All this lot has to come down. They can have the wood and I’ll pay them well for the work. I’ll mark the trees which are to be cleared.’

  He had taken a pail of whitewash and a brush, and gone from tree to tree, marking their trunks. When he’d finished the trees stood with their white slashes, their leaves fresh and shivering. They didn’t have the first idea what those white marks meant. He touched the dry bark of a cherry. Its sap was rising, it was pushing out growth with all its might, pouring energy into flower and leaf and fruit.

  The raw stumps were dug up and the ground turfed over. Johanna had her vista.

  He would work at his desk by the window. It would be quiet. He’d hear the scratch of his own pen, moving over the paper, making observations and striking them out again. There’d be Matti in the garden, calling to old Agneta. And maybe footsteps in the hallway, quick and light on the wooden floor. He would look up. He’d see the forest and his heart would grow calm again, because the forest went on for ever.

  She’d find it quiet, but she might grow to like it.

  Agneta had closed up the bedroom floor of the house, on his orders. The room that had once been his and Johanna’s; Minna’s room where Johanna had died; the ‘nursery’ next to their old bedroom, which had only ever had one inhabitant; the spare bedroom and his old study-dressing-room. Everything on that floor was sheeted and shut, apart from the bathroom he’d had made from a fourth bedroom. The best bathroom in the district, with its big, royal, claw-footed bath, its elegant little sofa where Johanna liked to sit after her bath. He preferred the sauna, but the bathroom was useful when he wanted to come home and strip and wash away the smell of a day of sickrooms from his skin.

  The girl would sleep up in the attics, in what had been Kirstin’s room. He’d asked Agneta to clean and prepare it. It was a small room, but not cramped. He’d ordered a new mattress for the iron bedstead after Agneta told him Kirstin had left the old one soiled. There was a washstand, a rag rug, a table and chair, and a picture of St John the Baptist on the wall.

  He walked upstairs to check that everything had been done, the day before the girl arrived. Yes, Agneta had done the job well. The bedding was clean, the boards scrubbed. The room looked east, like the downstairs sitting room. He hadn’t been up here for years. Strange how much closer the forest looked from up here. Johanna’s garden looked insignificant.

  As long as she wasn’t one of those girls who takes fright at the sound of a mouse running in the attic. She wouldn’t have to mind being alone in the house at night, when he was called out.

  He lifted the bedding to check the mattress. Yes, it was as he had ordered. Good quality. He’d told Agneta to make sure of that.

  She would be living here. She would have her life here, this orphan who could have ended up more or less anywhere. She would look out of this window, and feel these boards under her bare feet. It was a long way from growing up in a city which was expanding so fast that now it bulged with more than eighty thousand souls.

  3

  It was hot and stuffy in the room where Brigitta Nordström lay. Thomas stood by her bed, taking her pulse. The room smelled of birth. The smell of blood was already staling.

  He never noticed such things while he was with a patient. He’d only realized the smell because he’d been outside and then come back in. After the baby was born and the placenta delivered, he’d become aware of pressure in his bladder. It had been safe to leave her for a few minutes.

  The air was cold and pure as he crossed the yard to the privy. He snuffed the sharp scent of pine, blown from the timber yard. At the mill, the saw squealed and whined. That sound had been there all through her labour. He’d become aware of it from time to time, a mechanical chorus to her grunts and moans.

  He came in from outdoors and the smell of the bedroom hit him, almost making him gag. The iron of her spilled blood, the sweat of her effort, a smothered smell of the excrement that had been forced out of her with the child. She had still to be stitched. He drew in his breath. The reality of the birth room folded around him again.

  There was no baby by the bed. It had been taken downstairs, out of the way It was another boy, now deeply asleep after the battering it had taken. The face was bruised, and the skull pointed. He’d been worried and had examined the child carefully, but there were no signs of serious harm. The baby flung out his arms and flexed and shrieked as he should. A big-boned child, like his father. What they call a fine boy. Those big bones had cost the mother a hard, dangerous labour, and she was too exhausted even to look at him.

  Her husband stood behind Thomas now. He hadn’t changed position while the doctor was out of the room. His feet were planted apart, and he gaped at his wife as if wondering why she didn’t get up and make herself useful. She’d been working in the sawmill office when it started. A couple of days earlier she’d had a cough and a cold. She kept going, because the work had to be done.

  It wasn’t as if she did heavy work these days. She kept house, minded the children, and looked after the figures. She even had Silja to help her with the scrubbing and laundry. She never had to lift anything heavier than a sack of flour for her baking. Those days were past. He was making money, yes, really making money at last after all the lean years of borrowing and building up the business and Brigitta lugging timber like a man when he was short-handed.

  Their children were coming to them late. He’d been getting worried, starting to ask what was wrong with her. But now she’d had the three boys, pop pop pop, one after another. This year, last year and the year before. Three fine boys. Well, once you’ve got that settled, you can start fancying a girl.

  ‘Keep still, Mrs Nordström. Don’t try to move just yet.’

  The woman’s eyelids remained shut. She was completely exhausted. A long, difficult delivery followed by a haemorrhage, fortunately not too serious and now safely contained. The baby had been breech. He could maybe have turned it if he’d been called earlier, but this was the first time he’d seen his patient since the previous birth. The man obviously wanted to save his money. It was going to take months for her to get her strength back. Thomas glanced behind him, at the husband. He would send him out of the room in a minute, while the stitching was done, but first there was something to be said, and in his wife’s hearing.

  ‘She mustn’t have another. She was lucky to get through it this time.’

  The man looked at him as if he was crazy. ‘What do you mean, Doctor?’

  ‘Look at her.’

  ‘But she’ll be all right, won’t she, in a week or two?’

  ‘Not if she has another child.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re saying to me.’

  Oh yes you do, Thomas thought. Ten months between this boy and the last. You were in there even before she’d stopped bleeding. Rutting in her like a boar with a sow.

  She was sunk back flat on the bed, her feet raised with pillows and the end of the bed raised too as he’d directed. She was grey-yellow in the face. But very likely she could hear them. He wanted her to hear. He wanted her to know.

  ‘Three fine healthy boys, that’s enough for anyone,’ he said, in a bluff manner that felt false.

  ‘But you need a girl to look after you when you grow old,’ said Nordström, as if pointing out that you needed a table to eat off.

  ‘You’ve got a wife,’ Thomas said. ‘If you carry on like this, you won’t have her, and then who’s going to look after those boy
s?’

  The point sunk home. He saw it register, then the man’s selfishness elbowed it away. ‘Yes, but, Doctor, a man’s got his needs, hasn’t he?’

  ‘We can have a talk about that,’ said Thomas. ‘But not now. Get your girl – what’s her name, Silja? I’ll need her to help me. When I’ve gone, I want her to sit with your wife, and fetch the child to her when it wants feeding. Mrs Nordström is not to move off that bed until I say so, and you’re to send for me if there’s any change at all. If by some outside chance she starts bleeding again –’ Nordström’s face wrinkled as if asking why he was being forced to hear this – ‘then raise the foot of the bed higher, pack clean ice in a clean flannel as quick as you can and get Silja to hold it tight against the bleeding until I come. Send for me any time of night if that should happen.

  ‘I’ll be back tomorrow and I’ll know at once if your wife has so much as put a foot on the floor. Ask Silja to come up here now, and I’ll give her directions.’

  It was the only way with a man like Nordström. You had to be firm. If his wife said she would go downstairs now and make his supper, he’d let her. Thomas felt a familiar helplessness and weariness. It would seize hold of him, if he let it. He could only do so much, and maybe it didn’t improve matters anyway. After he’d gone, what would happen? Nordström, angry and frustrated, would take it out on someone. And who better to bear the brunt than his wife, who’d been the cause of the doctor speaking to him like that?

  ‘Have you some brandy?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For your wife.’

  ‘She won’t take anything like that,’ said Nordström with satisfaction. ‘She’s Temperance.’

  ‘It’s for medicinal purposes. She’s very weak.’

  ‘She won’t touch it,’ said Nordström, shaking his head.

  ‘Ask your Silja to bring it up, all the same.’

  ‘Have a drop yourself, Doctor, if you like. You had heavy work with that boy of mine.’ Nordström spoke largely, as if the blood and pain of his wife’s labour was a credit to his own manhood. Another fine big boy, never mind if it had nearly killed his wife.

  No, thought Thomas. He would not lose his temper with this man.

  Thomas stitched the tear while Silja held the lamp close, as he directed. She was a blockish girl, stubborn-looking in the same way the man was stubborn-looking. She could have been his daughter.

  ‘Hold that lamp still,’ he said sharply. The girl was gaping at her mistress as if she were a cow in a field. But no doubt they worked her hard enough, these Nordströms. Silja’s hands were red and raw.

  He finished the stitching. The husband was right, Mrs Nordström wouldn’t take the brandy even when he called it medicine. She turned her head aside mutely as he brought the glass to her lips. He wasn’t going to force her.

  Thomas went downstairs. ‘I’ll call again tomorrow,’ he said to the husband. The man looked at him with his shrewd money-making eyes, and nodded. ‘All the same, Doctor,’ he said, ‘you don’t know my wife.’

  Thomas knuckled his forehead to get rid of the tension there. His eyes closed briefly, wiping out the room and the man. Red sparks crowded into thick, velvety darkness. He wanted to stay there inside that darkness, but he must open them.

  ‘She won’t flinch, when it comes to it,’ said Nordström. ‘Remember what the Good Book says: “In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children.”’

  Don’t send for me, then, when she’s in labour with the fourth, Thomas thought, but he would not say it. He could vent his anger, but once the words had passed this man would stick to them. Nordström would nurse the grudge. He would let his wife die in her bed without relief, and then say that the doctor wouldn’t come.

  Outside the house, Thomas breathed in the smell of pine resin again.

  I won’t take his money, he thought. I’ll tell him to make an offering of it to the church, to give thanks for his wife’s survival. That’ll make him angry. He walked fast, relishing the crunch of his boots on the shrivelling crusts of ice.

  ‘You ought not to walk when you visit patients,’ Johanna used to tell him. ‘It lessens their respect for you. You should always ride, or take the carriage.’

  ‘By the time the horse is saddled and out of the stable I could be halfway there.’

  ‘That’s not the point, Thomas. A doctor shouldn’t arrive with mud on his boots.’

  But a patient had said to him once, ‘I can smell the spring, Doctor. It’s come in with you.’ No wonder, in those tightly sealed sickrooms that smelled of urine, sweat and medicine.

  The sawmill was less than a mile from his house. He’d be home in quarter of an hour, if he walked fast. And he wanted to walk fast. Walking between patients was the only time he seemed to get to himself, when Johanna…

  No. He was not going to think about Johanna.

  The sun was dropping; it lay big and red between the trees. He kicked at a crust of ice and it splintered like glass. Beneath it, the snow was open and porous in texture. Late-winter snow. Soon it would be gone. Spring was coming, and this year he felt less afraid of it.

  He’d repair Johanna’s garden swing-seat. It only needed new canvas webbing. He could do the job himself. He could sit out on summer evenings, reading, smoking to keep the midges away.

  Suddenly an image assaulted him. He stood still. It was Johanna again, frowning with concentration as she smeared Minna’s plump wrists with citronella oil, so that the midges wouldn’t bite her. As her mother screwed back the top of the citronella bottle, Minna twisted free from where Johanna had been holding her firmly between her knees. The child ran to the swing-seat and plunged herself into it, head down, frilled underwear flapping, the plumpness of her calves bulging above her tight little boots.

  ‘I’m hiding!’ she screamed.

  ‘She thinks that because she can’t see us, we can’t see her,’ said Johanna. Her face was soft with pleasure. For a moment that pleasure bound them: their shared child, their shared life.

  He shivered all over at the memory, like a dog, and began to walk home quickly, through the snow.

  4

  Eeva in the kitchen. Eeva learning to be alone after the packed rooms of the House of Orphans.

  The tap dripped. She watched the next drip gather, bulging at the tap’s mouth. It became full and it hung for a few seconds, as if it could hang there for as long as it chose. But of course it stretched itself out, and fell. Eeva picked up a ring of dried apple and ate it. Nobody saw, nobody knew.

  She’d been stripped of her privacy for over two years. It was deliberate, part of changing her from what she was into an orphan, ready for service. No one was ever alone. Even their clothes were communal. When they came back from the wash there was always a scramble to find something that fitted.

  When she’d first stood in the doctor’s kitchen she almost couldn’t remember what it was like to walk around a room and hear only the sounds of her own body, her own movement and voice. She raised her arms above her head, and let them fall. She stretched them as wide as she could, pointing her fingers until they ached. Nobody saw. Nobody asked what she was doing.

  ‘It’s quiet here,’ the doctor had said. ‘You may find it strange at first.’

  She couldn’t tell from his voice if he was apologizing for the quietness or telling her that was the way things were and she must get used to it. So she hadn’t said anything.

  Eeva lit the lamps. She loved to do this. Warm goldenness spilled around the room from the globes of the lamps. Light was plentiful here, she already knew that. She didn’t need to be careful of oil. He’d told her she mustn’t be afraid of lighting the lamps. She could take candles out of the store cupboard whenever she needed them. Anna-Liisa had said she’d be allowed to burn the stubs of candles in her room, but the doctor told her to take whole candles for her own use She had her own candlestick, made of pewter, and she burned the candles in it until they were halfway down, and then she hid them in her drawer, and took a fresh candle f
rom the store cupboard. This way she would always have light to read by, even if the doctor changed his mind.

  She held her candlestick high as she went upstairs, and made the wide corridors shine. Eeva wasn’t afraid of the quiet, or of the closed, sheeted rooms on the bedroom floor, below her attic. She liked to think of their emptiness beneath her as she slept. Nobody could interfere with her.

  He has money, she thought. If you have money as he’s got money, you don’t even need to think of it. It’s there, like light, like heat. Like something natural. It’s been there since before he was born and it’ll be there after he dies. She could see it in the way he walked around. You could tell that he always felt private and independent, wherever he was.

  She didn’t think he had ever been cold, unless he’d chosen to be outdoors in the frost for his own reasons. His skin had a close, fine texture that told her he’d always eaten well and always been warm. His eyes weren’t clouded and he didn’t peer at the newspaper. He could read perfectly well without glasses.

  She knew exactly how old he was. He didn’t know she knew that. Anna-Liisa had told Eeva that she and the doctor were born in the same year.

  ‘But of course I didn’t know him then. We didn’t meet that sort of family. But I’ve come to know him quite well…’ She smoothed her apron, satisfied. Anna-Liisa, Eeva knew, was forty-seven. So the doctor was old, many years older than her father had been. But he wouldn’t die yet. He’d live for a long time, and when he died he’d be put in the Eklund family grave, with his wife. He would never be alone, or unknown.

  Dr Eklund had a wife who was dead and a daughter who lived in Turku, which Dr Eklund called Åbo because he was a Swedish Finn. Swedish Finns were the top layer, and owned most of everything. The Russians hadn’t done anything to change that, even though they ruled Finland. Her father had explained to her the place of the Swedish Finns under Russian rule.