Exposure

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘There’s a knack to the stove,’ she tells him, hearing herself sound more English than she ever feels. ‘If you bank it up well at night, and pull the damper right out again in the morning for at least twenty minutes, then you should have plenty of hot water. We never let the stove go out, unless we’re going away or in the middle of summer, when you can use the immersion. I know things are different in America.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ he says. ‘We’ll work it out.’ He looks at the twin-tub. ‘I plan to order a Bendix for my wife. It’s what she’s used to back home.’ He steps forward and peers into the scullery. ‘I see you have plumbing in here.’

  They go upstairs. She wants him to like the house, to take it, but she doesn’t want him here. In Bridget’s bedroom he goes to the window where the view is, and says, ‘Scott will like this.’

  ‘Scott’s your son?’

  ‘That’s right. We have three boys. They’ll be attending the neighbourhood school.’

  His manner is so certain. He doesn’t ask her about the school, because he isn’t interested in her opinion. This will be his home, and his life. She’s no part of that. He moves aside courteously so that she can lead the way into her own bedroom. In the heat of a man’s preoccupation with his own family, she is cold. She’d always thought herself self-reliant, without realising how much she relied on the understatedly united front that she and Simon presented to the world. Simon would always put her and the children before all others. She didn’t have to notice that, until it was gone. Now her marital status will be the subject of cold enquiry rather than the nod of recognition that says: Yes, you are one of us. This man probably thinks that she’s separated from her husband, or, at best, a widow. She finds herself saying ‘we’ with emphasis, as she would never have done before.

  He’ll be a good tenant. He will pay the rent that will enable her to keep this house. It’s weakness and stupidity to think of anything else. Lily crosses her bedroom and says, ‘There is the same view from this bedroom, and then the two bedrooms at the back look over the garden.’

  He is no gardener. He’ll get a man in to mow the grass and keep the hedges trimmed.

  ‘Don’t bother with the back, by the copse,’ she says quickly. ‘We leave that part wild. The children play games and make camps there.’

  That’s fine by him. Will the house do? Yes, it will do. He will be able to send his wife an address now, and a description, so that she can look forward and think of it as her home. They’re having linen and kitchen equipment shipped over, along with their personal possessions and the kids’ stuff. He wants it all in place before they arrive, and some plumbing and electrical work, if Mrs Callington is happy with that? A colleague has recommended a contractor.

  He is sure of himself. He’s had his struggles, no doubt, but whatever these were they’ve left his confidence intact. His wife and children are coming over on the Queen Mary. By the time they get here, the Bendix will be in the scullery along with the closest approximation to an American fridge that London can provide. Their own drapes, as he calls them, and some pictures. His glance runs over the bookshelves. ‘You seem to have quite a library,’ he says, but not with appreciation.

  ‘The books will be stored in the loft,’ says Lily.

  ‘That’s fine.’

  He asks no questions about why she’s leaving the house, or where she’s going, and Lily is grateful for it. He makes no observations about the children’s clutter of toys, or their names on the bedroom doors. It’s enough for him that they will soon be out of the way.

  He looks at his watch as they go downstairs. They talk about dates, banks, agreements. If he’s surprised that it is Lily and not her husband who is negotiating with him, he doesn’t show it. Perhaps he puts it down to the customs of another country, worth noting, but, in the end, a matter of indifference to him.

  The front door closes on him. Immediately, Lily goes into the sitting room and begins to lift books from the top shelf. There’s more dust than she expects, so she goes back to the kitchen and fetches a damp cloth. Shelf by shelf, she clears the books into boxes, and then wipes the shelves clean. By the time the children come home from school, all the books from the sitting room are piled into boxes and waiting at the foot of the stairs. Paul and Sally will help her to carry them up to the loft-ladder.

  Bridget goes into the sitting room. ‘Mum! All the books have gone,’ she shouts, and then she hears the echo of her own voice, sounding quite different now that the books are no longer there to absorb it. She starts to hoot out notes, testing the echo, while Lily and the other two children tramp up and down the stairs with boxes of books. Already, the house has changed. It has begun to have the daring of an empty house, in which anything might happen.

  20

  Can You Hear the Sea?

  It’s almost dark. Lily and the children have changed from the London express on to the branch line. There’s a stretch of single-track railway ahead. As each train goes through, the driver hands over the key he carries to the waiting train at the other end. There is only ever one key, and it must be taken before the train can go forward. In that way, there will never be a collision on the single-track line. Paul already knew about the key system and he explains it to Bridget, who drums her heels into the upholstery until dust flies. The making of this journey is the one thing that has lightened Paul’s mood, but he knows that soon they won’t be travelling any more: they’ll be there. No London; no school; no Danny; nothing that he knows anything about. He won’t think about Dad. Their bags and suitcases are up in the racks. Two trunks have been sent ahead. Nothing else is coming with them. Sally preached at him yesterday about how much worse it must have been for Mum when she came to England, but even Sal is silent now, with her cheek pressed against the cold glass of the window.

  Lily is glad of the journey. It is a breathing space: for a few hours, at least, she can do nothing. The train is carrying them to their destination. It feels as if she hasn’t sat down for days. Every evening, until late in the night, she has sorted, cleared, labelled, packed. The loft is full of their belongings. She has cleaned until her hands are raw. Mrs Wiseman has got to like the house. She must come in, look around and turn to her husband with relief and satisfaction: ‘Why, this is just what I thought it would be like, from what you said. I think we’ll be happy here.’ If the tenants leave, there is no money to pay the mortgage. Finding the cottage was easier than she thought it would be. She decided on the Kent coast, because she would be able to visit Simon from there, and yet it was quiet, remote and cheap. The children would like the sea. She had picked out five villages from the Ordnance Survey map at the library. They were all on the railway: that was essential, because of visiting Simon. She telephoned the pub and the post office in each of them, to find out if there were any cottages to let. She’d struck lucky in the Smugglers’ Rest at East Knigge, where the landlord put her on to Mrs Woolley. The rent is less than a third of what the Wisemans are paying her.

  ‘It’s nothing fancy, mind,’ Mrs Woolley had warned. God knows what that meant. Well, they’d find out.

  Lily closes her eyes. She’ll rest them, just for a moment. The children are quiet: they’re tired too. The train canters on through the darkness. It knows where it’s going, at least, she thinks. She has left everything that she knows, but she doesn’t have to think about that, not yet, not until the journey is over. Her hair smells of train-smoke. The train from Berlin didn’t smell like this. The smoke was different. It was a big train and it went fast, until it stopped at the border. They had to show their papers. She had forgotten all that but now it is as clear as clear.

  ‘It’s so dark, Mum,’ says Sally. ‘We won’t be able to see anything when we get there. It’s never as black as this when you look out of the windows in London.’

  She sounds scared. Lily rouses herself. Children are sensitive: they pick up your thoughts. ‘No, but just think how nice it will be to wake up in the morning and see it all for the first time,’ she says,
as if Sally is as young as Bridget. ‘The beach is only half a mile down the lane. You’ll be able to run to the sea whenever you like.’ She does not repeat what Mrs Woolley has told her: ‘It’s not much of a beach. We don’t get many visitors, even in the summer.’

  The cottage has two bedrooms upstairs and an attic where a bed will have been set up for Paul. Downstairs, a kitchen and a living room. There’s an outside toilet. No bathroom. However, there are washbasins in both bedrooms, and ‘a bath can be taken in the kitchen if desired’. Lily wonders why, since Mrs Woolley has already got running water, she hasn’t installed a bathroom. But if she had, the rent would be higher.

  There is a grammar school five miles away, and the school bus runs through the village. For now, the children will go to the village primary school. There’s a station in East Knigge, although the railway is mostly used by freight trains from the quarry. Mrs Woolley told her all this and would have said more, but already Lily had used up almost nine minutes on the call.

  ‘We’ll soon be there,’ she says to the children. The carriage jolts and sways. Every so often the train slows and stops at empty platforms. A guard shouts, a lamp flashes, and they are off again.

  At last, the train loses speed, slides under a footbridge and comes to a halt with a hiss of steam. It’s the end of the line: East Knigge. They are here. They clamber down from the carriage, cold and stiff. There’s no one on the platform but the guard. The train isn’t going any farther, and it waits, panting, for its journey back along the single line. No one else has got off the train, and no one seems to be waiting to board it. The air is damp, and smells of salt. The man in the ticketoffice goes to look in left luggage, and sure enough, their trunks are waiting. But there’s no porter. They can leave the trunks there until morning. They’ll need a taxi, with those cases. It’s a fair old walk out to Beach Road.

  ‘Is there a taxi rank outside?’

  He laughs. ‘You from London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Turn right as you go out, and Joe’s number’s on a card in the phone box.’

  They come out of the station into darkness, and stand in a tight clump, with their bags and suitcases, until the taxi comes. Ten past six, and it feels like the middle of the night. Bridget is too tired even to complain. She leans against Lily and asks, ‘Is this Kent?’

  ‘Yes, we’re here now.’

  In one of Lily’s bags there is bread, butter, cheese, tea, a tin of Nescafé, a tin of baked beans and a tin of peaches. She’s packed the tin-opener too, just in case there isn’t one. There’s a shop in the village, but it will be shut now. Lily asked their landlady to arrange for three pints of milk a day. Today’s bottles should be waiting on the doorstep.

  At last, the taxi comes. It’s a decrepit Jowett driven presumably by Joe, who must be at least sixty. In no time he has stowed bags and suitcases into the boot and the back of the car. If the little ‘un sits on Lily’s knee, they’ll be off in two twos. Lily is almost suspicious of such cheeriness. Is he about to overcharge her? But he seems to know where he’s going. The road gets bumpier. They are flying through the darkness, jouncing on the hard leather seats. Lily grips Bridget, who has woken up completely and is craning out of the window. But there’s nothing to see.

  Joe puts on the brakes and they all slide forward.

  ‘Here you are.’

  The track is pale underfoot. On their left, set back, is a darker bulk. It must be the cottage.

  ‘You’d think they’d have left a light on,’ says Joe, who has already unloaded everything, taken Lily’s half-crown, ruffled Bridget’s hair and given back the change. She offers a tip, but he refuses.

  ‘I’m not a taxi-driver as such,’ he says, ‘I’m retired, but it keeps me on my toes.’

  Lily has an absurd, fleeting hope that he will carry their luggage into the cottage, find the lights and show them where everything is. But of course he climbs back into his car, and as they troop towards the gate he does an impressively rapid three-point turn, honks his horn and is on his way.

  Darkness and emptiness flow towards them.

  ‘I don’t like it here,’ says Bridget.

  ‘You’re so stupid,’ says Paul. ‘We haven’t seen anything yet.’

  The key will be left under a white stone to the left of the front door. There’s no stone. Lily bends down, scrabbling, until a cry from Sally shows the stone and the key on the other side of the door. Of course: Mrs Woolley meant on the left from inside the house. Three bottles of milk glimmer through the dark. Lily feels over the wood of the door until she finds a keyhole. The key has to be jiggled in the lock but at last it turns, and they push in all around her, as if the creatures of the night are at their backs.

  ‘Wait, wait. Let me find the light-switch.’

  Blindly, her hands sweep the wall. There it is, the blessed light-switch, and then a burst of light as they stand staring. They have stepped straight into a room, with furniture.

  ‘There isn’t any hall,’ says Sally.

  Perhaps the room will look better by daylight. There is a brown, worn carpet and two floral armchairs with grease marks where heads have rested. But at least someone’s laid a fire.

  ‘That was kind of Mrs Woolley,’ says Lily, wanting to start the children off on the right foot.

  ‘Who’s Mrs Woolley?’

  ‘She’s a silly old sheep. Baaa!’ shouts Bridget, who is beyond tiredness now.

  ‘That’s enough. Sally, get the matches out of my blue bag and light the fire. Paul, get the milk in from the doorstep, then you can help me carry these suitcases upstairs. Bridget, you can take the red bag into the kitchen.’

  The range in the kitchen was supposed to have been lit for them, but it’s cold. It heats the water, too, so there won’t be any hot for washing. Never mind, she’ll look at it later. There are fireplaces in both bedrooms. The whole place smells of damp.

  ‘It’s cold here. I don’t like it. Why can’t we go home?’

  ‘You know why we can’t go home. Don’t pretend to be an even stupider baby than you are,’ says Paul as he swings up another suitcase.

  ‘That’s enough, Paul. Bridgie, go and sit by the fire that Sally’s making, and you’ll soon be warm.’

  I make a baby of Bridget, Lily thinks. That will have to stop. She reaches up to the kitchen shelf for a blackened saucepan. She can heat the baked beans over the fire and then at least the children will have something hot. If there’s a toasting fork, they can have toast too.

  ‘Are there sheets on the beds, Paul?’ she calls up.

  A pause, then: ‘No. Just blankets and eiderdowns.’

  She should have asked the taxi-driver to go back to the station for their trunks. Never mind, they can sleep without sheets for one night. She runs up and down stairs, unpacking and putting in place what’s needed for the night, telling the children to hang their nightclothes near the fire to warm them, to find their thickest jumpers and their hot-water bottles and bring these downstairs too. They do as Lily says with an alacrity that she finds almost painful. They want so much to believe that there is order in all this and that their mother knows what she is doing. When the fire is hot enough, she sets the kettle to boil and fills the children’s hot-water bottles one by one. Now it’s time for the baked beans. Paul kneels by the fire, toasting bread, while upstairs Bridget yelps at the cold as Sally washes her face and hands.

  They sit in a half-circle around the fire, on a blanket from upstairs. The hot toast is deliciously sodden with tomato sauce and butter, and the children eat wolfishly, in silence. The coal scuttle is full. Thank God the woman did that, because Lily would never have found the coal bunker in this dark. The core of the fire glows red. There’s one piece of toast left. If Bridget goes to bed as soon as she’s finished eating, then the first day will be almost over, thinks Lily. She must get the range going, and then the house will warm up. Who knows how much better these rooms will look with sunlight coming into them? And she’ll clean the whole place fr
om top to bottom.

  She sighs, and changes it to a cough when Sally glances quickly at her face. The children look so tired. She must put the chamber pots under their beds, for night-time. They can’t go out to that toilet in the dark.

  ‘I want to sleep in your bed, Mum,’ says Bridget.

  ‘Listen,’ says Lily. ‘Can you hear the sea?’

  They are all still, listening. A long shushing sound, close but not loud. It must be the sea. It can’t be anything else.

  21

  Don’t Get Cold

  Giles’s leg is doing well, but they haven’t moved him to the King David yet. His temperature stubbornly refuses to return to normal, and the slightest effort makes him breathless. The maggots have done their job. The wound is bright pink and clean, which Sister says is an excellent indicator of healing.

  The little dark nurse, Nurse Davies, brings a kidney dish and his toothbrush, with the paste already spread on it. For Christ’s sake, surely he ought to be able to squeeze out his own toothpaste? But his hands tremble as they hold the brush and after he has finished, rinsed and spat he falls back on the pillows sweating with weakness.

  ‘Let’s get you more comfortable,’ says Nurse Davies. ‘Upsidaisy.’ She’s very strong. With one arm she levers him forward and up, and then she holds him there as she plumps up the pillows and puts them back in place, before gently lowering him into position again. ‘Better now?’

  ‘Thank you.’ How long has he been in here? He must ask Anstruther. Ridiculous not to be able to remember, but one day melts into the next in an atmosphere of relentless good cheer. Anstruther says that the next stage will be a cloud of new growth around the broken bones. It won’t look pretty but that’s what they want to see on the X-rays. The metalwork will stay in for at least a year, possibly two. Some people never have it removed. Bodies are remarkably adaptable things, and there are plenty of chaps still walking around with shrapnel from the trenches inside them.