by Beth Morrey
Back in my kitchen, there was the tick-tick-tick of the clock, with no other sound to drown it out, and in the living room Leo’s chair was empty, and of course I didn’t have any new friends—I would never see Sylvie or Angela or Otis again, and would have to avoid the park now in case they thought I was trying to run into them.
I cleaned the house and remembered when we had young children and it was impossible to keep anything tidy. Now everything was spotless, and stayed that way. Eating an over-boiled egg for my lunch, I read more about David Bowie, and thought of the scarf and The Snowman. I had made Arthur a scarf for Christmas, forgetting that it was summer in Sydney, and now the knitting needles just rolled around my cutlery drawer, reminding me of my mistake. Later, I couldn’t be bothered with making dinner, so just had cereal and thought about watching television, maybe that documentary, but really, what was the point? Alistair watched Australian television now, bought me Australian slippers. I turned in early, checking the cupboards and shivering as I got into bed, waiting for the blankets to warm up. “Sibyl told me . . . before she died. I don’t think she knew what she was saying.” I blinked to banish the image of my daughter, Melanie, wide-eyed in my kitchen, backing away. The guilt gnawed away at me, as it had since that terrible day. Whenever I tried to weed it out, it just took a deeper root.
So the day ended as miserably as it began. But I still felt it somewhere—that spark. The beginning of something. Or the end. Who knows?
Chapter 3
Come closer, Missy.”
Kensington, 1942, and impervious to the booms above, Fa-Fa bent toward one of the candles, cupping huge hands around his pipe and puffing away to get it going. With each inward breath my grandfather’s lined face glowed in the charring light. A crash overhead made me flinch, but I was too caught up in his stories to pay attention to the bombs, snuggled in our bunk, nestling closer under scratchy wool, with half-eaten carrot sandwiches squashed in our hands. Fa-Fa blew out a stream of smoke and settled back.
“Mesopotamia, 1916. Flies like soot around my face.” He waved at the gray fog in front of him, and I could almost see them.
“That blasted fever, too weak to brush them away . . . When I’d recovered, I was allowed home on leave. Marvelous to be back in London after that terrible heat. Your grandmother and I went out to a restaurant in—where was it, Jette? Swallow Street?—to toast my return.”
Our grandmother, sniffling over there in a dark corner. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to have dinner with her—she barely ever opened her mouth, either to eat or speak. She gave us a watery smile and ducked her head at another skirl above. Then the gap, like thunder after a lightning strike. When it came, it was quite faint.
“We had a grand blowout, then walked back to Piccadilly to find a hackney—you couldn’t whistle for one, and of course it was dark along the back roads, and we were a trifle fuddled, must admit.” He chuckled and drew on his pipe, Henry and I giggling at the thought of Fa-Fa, and particularly our grandmother, in such a state. No beating about the bush; that was why we loved him.
“Then, in the darkness, Jette tripped and fell, and as I helped her up, a thief darted forward and filched her purse, the rascal! I immediately gave chase.”
Fa-Fa shifted his bulk on the low stool as Henry and I gasped and clutched each other. Jette, hunched in the shadows, the mouse to his man. I couldn’t see her expression in the gloom, only her hand gripping the handkerchief.
“Caught up with him fairly easily, turned him round and saw he was a young lad, too young to fight in a war but old enough to steal in one. Nothing much in the purse of value, a few coins maybe, but I wasn’t going back to Jette without it. Gave him a bit of a tap, just to let him know I wasn’t going anywhere. Thought that would be the end of it, but he clung on for dear life and try as I might, I couldn’t get it out of his grasp. Locked fast in his fingers, he just wouldn’t let go.” Fa-Fa held up a ham-fist, tendons bulging, sending a few flecks of tobacco to the floor. He stooped forward to sweep them up before he continued.
“In the end, had to give him a rare old pummeling, a good going over, but no matter what I did, his grip wouldn’t budge from the bag.”
Another draw on the pipe—puff, puff, puff—along with the slow glow of the burn. Jette’s thin fingers plucked at her dress.
“Punch, jab, punch! But he wouldn’t let go. Like a dog with a bone.”
Boom went the bombs. My grandmother blew her nose. We were all wreathed in the fug of Fa-Fa’s smoke. It made my eyes water, but I couldn’t take them off him.
“Started kicking him in the shins, stamping on his feet. He was screaming but he wouldn’t let go. By the time I’d finished with him, he was curled in a ball at my feet, but his hands still gripped the purse. It was dirty and covered in blood as well. Realized even if I got it back, Jette wouldn’t want it. So I left him there, lying in the street, mewling like a baby, with the bag still clenched in those bloody hands.”
There was a brief silence, even from above, as Fa-Fa put down the pipe and polished his spectacles, rheumy eyes focused on the job. His hands were shaking a little as he put them back on.
“Damned scamp got the bag. Admired him for it. Whatever was in it that he wanted, he got. Good on him.” Leaning forward, he licked his fingers and pinched out the candle nearest our bunk. “And that’s the moral of the story tonight. If you really want something, you hang on. Don’t give up. Hang on, as if your life depended on it.”
“Even if someone beats you black and blue?” piped up Henry.
“Even if they do that!” retorted Fa-Fa, ruffling his hair. “Even if they cuff you.” He tweaked Henry’s ear. “Even if they thump you.” He aimed a mock punch at Henry’s stomach, then again a little harder. “Even if they bash the hell out of you, you hang on!” He and Henry began play-fighting, but as the bombs started up again, the frolic became something else. Fa-Fa had Henry in a headlock, my brother’s face a livid red, eyes sparkling with excitement or tears, I couldn’t tell which. Jette stood, holding out her white handkerchief.
“Father! What are you doing?”
My mother had slipped in through the cellar door, unnoticed. She was unwinding a scarlet scarf from her neck, pale from the cold and angry as usual. Jette rushed forward to embrace her, but Mama ignored her, still glaring at my grandfather. Fa-Fa looked up and released his hold on Henry, who fell back on the bunk, his hands at his throat.
“When will you learn to be gentle around the children? They’re not your recruits. I suppose you’ve been telling them awful stories again. Now, Milly, Henry, let’s get you in bed, it’s far too late for you to be up.” She began the motherly round of tucking us in, picking up our half-eaten pieces of bread and leaving them on the side table for morning.
Fa-Fa retreated to a chair in the corner to pack another pipe, sulking, as Mama lay down on her pallet. The last thing I remembered was her blowing out the final candle, and the comforting smolder as Fa-Fa smoked the night away. Then the ink-blot shadows on the walls sent me into a deep sleep that even the booms outside couldn’t penetrate.
* * *
—
The next night, an SC 250 bomb landed in the road outside our house, reducing the garden wall to rubble. No one was injured although Fa-Fa’s spectacles fell and shattered in the blast. After that, my mother decided we would be better off in the country and packed us off to my aunt Sibyl in Yorkshire. But it seemed the decision wasn’t so much based on the bomb as the story of the handbag, which Henry recounted to Mama the next morning, provoking another tirade. Fa-Fa was reprehensible, telling disgraceful stories which probably weren’t even true (Jette wouldn’t confirm or deny when asked), it was high time we got some country air, et cetera. So off to Kirkheaton we went, to a drafty old rectory where we slept in the attic, searched cupboards for ghouls, made dens in the woods and mostly forgot about the war and Fa-Fa’s strange habits.
We didn�
��t forget that story though, and used to tell it back to each other, lying in those hard narrow beds under the eaves. Each time, we’d add an embellishment—a dramatic flourish, some sordid detail—until eventually we weren’t sure where Fa-Fa’s tale ended and ours began. Did he make it up, or did we? Did any of it happen, or none of it? As the years passed, I was inclined to believe the latter.
Still, it’s true though, isn’t it? If you really want something, you hang on.
Chapter 4
A week went by without anything happening that I could put in an email to Alistair. I hardly left the house, except to get a few bits—a chop from the butcher’s, some lozenges from the chemist. I thought Sylvie was in front of me in the queue and bent my head so she wouldn’t notice me, but it wasn’t her at all, just some other middle-aged woman buying indigestion tablets.
I splashed out on a bottle of wine on the way home, though drinking on my own seemed like a slippery slope. But the evenings stretched, and a glass of something gave the synapses a sly tweak, lending a little entheos—the Greek buzz of enthusiasm. Just the one glass, maybe two small ones, distracting myself from the rest of the bottle by poking around various rooms in the house, most of which were hardly ever used anymore. What did I need a dining room for? All those dinner parties?
The dust in Leo’s study gave me a coughing fit. I should really pack up the books and get rid of them, but he would have been horrified; most of them were first or rare editions and I didn’t know enough about them to be sure of getting a decent price. So instead I wiped them and read the inscriptions: Darling Leo, Christmas ’86, with love; Leo, read this and please be kind—Monty; Dad, another old tome for you—Mel. Tómos, meaning “slice.” Each book a slice of the man. None of them were mine. I stopped reading when the children were born.
One night and another visit to the vintner’s later, I found myself in Alistair’s room, still as it was when he was a boy. His soccer posters, his Lego models, his fossils. My son, the archeologist! The room was like one of his sites, the artifacts and remains of some revered pharaoh. And now the next in line slept here—I smoothed the pillow where Arthur’s golden head had lain. How I missed him. A gap in the shelf where the first edition should be.
The day Ali left home, we drove him to his halls of residence, Leo chuntering about red bricks, while I was speechless with the effort of not crying, smiling as we unloaded his bags and settled him in that dingy little room, as if it were just wonderful to think that he was going off into the world to make his own way. What an adventure! Just at the end though, when we said good-bye and he hugged me, I found I couldn’t let go. Eventually Leo gently pried my fingers from Alistair’s sweater and gave them a reassuring squeeze. “He’ll be back at Christmas,” he said heartily. Christmas, always Christmas—casting its fairy lights on the banality of every other day.
I went to the fridge again, then to Mel’s room to pack up a few of her books. She had her own flat in Cambridge, and it wasn’t like she ever visited anymore—not since that terrible afternoon. After checking the cupboard doors on my way to bed, I remembered the lights were still on in the living room, so had to drag myself downstairs again. As the room flicked into darkness, the street outside was illuminated, revealing a young couple wrapped around each other, making their way home after a night out. Her teeth glinted in the lamplight as she smiled up at him, tucking his hand more firmly under her arm as he kissed the top of her head. Lithe and blithe with most of their mistakes unmade. It might have been Leo and me, half a century ago. I closed the curtains, did another round of checking and reeled off to bed.
* * *
—
The next day, nursing a headache, I went to the chemist again and again saw a woman who looked like Sylvie, only this time it was Sylvie. I ducked, but it was too late.
“There you are!” she exclaimed, as if I’d only been gone five minutes. “You rushed off the other day. How are you feeling?”
“Fine, thank you.” I shuffled forward in the queue, hoping she wouldn’t notice the aspirin, which I always used to hide from Leo. A hangover was an admission of guilt. If I didn’t have one, then I hadn’t drunk too much the night before.
“Snap.” Sylvie nudged her box against mine. “I’ve got the most god-awful monster behind the eyes. All self-inflicted, of course. Angela can really put it away. She’s a hard-drinking journalist. What about you?”
She had the air of everything in life being a tremendous joke, a flippancy that made me want to kick off my shoes and talk of cabbages and kings—to be in a world where things didn’t matter so much. But all I could manage was a weak shrug.
“Fancy a coffee?” She nodded at the café opposite. It looked as warm and inviting as Sylvie herself, all low lamps, metro tiles and bare wood. There was the row of workers at their laptops, bashing away; two mothers with strollers, heads together as they coochy-cooed at their offspring; a couple deep in conversation, their hands entwined. I didn’t belong there, amidst all that companionship and industry, and had no idea why Sylvie would offer such a thing.
“Oh, thank you, but I really must be going.” I handed over my coins and reached for my paper bag of painkillers.
“All right, well, see you soon, hopefully. Millicent.” She remembered.
“It’s actually Missy,” I blurted as she pulled open the door. It tinkled merrily and she turned back with a raised eyebrow.
“I’m sorry?”
“Well, my name is Millicent, but everyone calls me Missy.” I floundered, dropping my change, feeling the heat building in my face.
“Oh, right, well, Missy it is! I’m sure I’ll bump into you again, I’m always around.” Sylvie waved and exited, wielding her wicker basket like a 1950s housewife.
I left the chemist, flustered and overset. No one called me that. Not since Leo, and before him, Fa-Fa. She must have thought me utterly ridiculous. Cheeks still burning, I found myself walking across the road toward the café. If she was there I’d jolly well have a coffee with her, stop being so silly.
The workers were still tapping away, the mothers clucking over their babies and gossiping, but the couple had gone. There was no sign of Sylvie, but I ordered a coffee anyway and sat at a table, feeling stiff and embarrassed, sure everyone was watching me, wondering why an old lady would come in here on her own. But no one seemed to notice, and gradually the warmth and noise of the place started to sink in. Someone had left a newspaper on the next table. I took it and read about the politician Jeremy Corbyn, who lived nearby, and the astronaut Tim Peake, living much farther away, and the actor Alan Rickman, not living anywhere anymore. He was in one of Leo’s and my favorite films, about a ghost who tries to cheer up his bereaved wife. I was a bit like Nina, the wife, wandering around my empty house in the hope of a miraculous resurrection. I always thought she was wrong not to stay with her husband, Jamie, even though he was dead.
I stayed there for a while, sipping my coffee and reading the paper, and when I’d finished, the smiling waitress collected my cup, the mothers shifted their strollers for me, and a man left his laptop to hold open the door. I walked home slowly, noting the pine needles that still littered the pavement but occasionally holding my face up to the weak winter sun.
When I got back, rather than embark on my usual round of cleaning, I went upstairs to the spare room and brought down an old paisley throw, draping it experimentally over the sofa. Then I went back up and fetched a lamp, placing it on a low stool to one side. I stood contemplating it for a while, then, feeling faintly foolish, went into the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea.
Later on though, when the light faded, the lamp and blanket looked rather snug. I skipped cereal for once and cooked myself some pasta, eating it off a tray on the sofa while I watched some new period drama. Leo would have scoffed at the anachronisms, but it was a relief to be pulled in by gentle domestic tribulations. I considered rounding my evening off with a glass of wi
ne but remembered I’d finished the bottle the night before. Ah well, I could always buy another tomorrow. Who knew who I’d bump into?
I still didn’t have much to write to Alistair about, but at least I’d been invited for a coffee and went, in a way. Baby steps. Old lady steps. Even if I wasn’t quite sure where I was going.
Chapter 5
Down, down, down, and it’s 1956 and I’m in Cambridge, kneeling on the floor trying to make a fire.
There I was, Milly Jameson, in my second year at Newnham College, miserable in a freezing room, pretending I enjoyed reading Homer. The other students were so glamorous, shrieking down the long corridors and sneaking men into their rooms. The girl next door to me was garrulous and captivating, my polar opposite. Tiny and curvy, with tinted blond hair set in perfect waves, she kept a bottle of gin under her bed for “magic hour” cocktails served to her numerous guests. Alicia Stewart and her legendary soirées—every night, I heard her gramophone and banged on the wall as she sang, to the tune of “Mr. Sandman”: Mr. Barman, bring me a driiiink . . . Make it so strong that I can’t thiiiink. I had no idea how she intended to get a degree—probably by charming the exam paper into submission.
However, Alicia’s fearsome cocktails were one of the few things that allowed me to unbend, so we had become friends of a sort, or at least she facilitated my drinking habit. My room had a window that opened handily onto a lean-to, serving as an escape route for those who found themselves locked in the college residence halls after hours, so in return for the odd tipple, I permitted her to smuggle her gentlemen friends out. She swore there was no more going on than heavy petting, as if I were in any way an arbiter in these matters, being as far from “necking” as I was from singing with the Chordettes.