39
QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS
AND SHE WAS THERE.
The Mary Oak, which had been cut apart and burned after the discovery of Beatrice’s remains, was here in the umbra a towering memory of its former self. Shattered by an ancient bolt of lightning, its wide trunk ended eight feet above the ground in a blunt stump like an amputated arm raised defiantly at the heavens, except that the sky was blotted out by the vast bulk of the barrage balloon directly overhead. The broken prongs of dead limbs jutted from its trunk, bleached and pale with age, like bone.
‘Daphne!’ Rachel hissed. ‘Daphne! Are you there! Can you hear me?’
A woman’s voice, muffled, cried out in response.
Rachel ran to the tree, scanning it for any cracks or holes through which she could speak. Short of using the broken stubs of branches to climb to the hole in the top, she couldn’t think of any way to free its prisoner. ‘I’ll get you out,’ she promised. ‘Hang in there, honey. I’ll get you out.’ This close, Rachel could quite clearly hear Daphne crying inside the tree.
She explored the trunk with her fingers, hunting for fissures or crevices. To her surprise, a large chunk peeled away in her left hand like papier mâché, but when she put her right hand to the hole it was solid and refused to budge so much as a splinter, so she simply braced herself with her right while tearing at the widening hole with her left. She flung aside chunks of dead oak until the breach was big enough to see Daphne’s pale, tear-streaked face and wide eyes, and Rachel reached in to take her hand. Cold fingers gripped hers tightly.
‘I’ve got you. It’s okay. You’re safe now.’
Someone started applauding from the shadows, slow and sarcastic. ‘And the winner of this year’s award for most obvious distraction goes to,’ announced the Small Man, stepping forward. He had swapped his cardigan and braces for a general’s uniform, resplendent with gold braiding and medals. ‘Rachel Cooper, and her overdeveloped sense of importance.’
Rachel ignored him and turned back to Daphne. Her eyes were fixed on the Small Man’s approach and she’d shrunk back as far into the claustrophobic space of the hollow trunk as she could, but she kept her grip on Rachel’s hand.
‘Listen to me,’ said Rachel. ‘You are not Daphne Massey. You’re not Oak Mary either. Your name is Beatrice Rebecca Eaton. You came from Manchester to Birmingham with your son Stephen…’ The other woman’s eyes darted back to her and she frowned slightly. ‘Yes! That’s it! You remember! You wore this ring – take it…’ The thin gold band was loose enough for Rachel to be able to push it off with her thumb and she felt it drop into the tree just as a hand grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around. The Small Man’s face was inches from her own and twisted with fury.
‘Don’t turn your back on me, bitch!’ he snarled, and backhanded her. Rachel felt her lip split and tasted blood, and its redness rose up to fill her mind. She’d never hit another person before, so the punch she threw at his face was badly timed, off balance and with little force behind it. All the same, it was with her left fist, and it sent him sprawling as if he’d taken a sledgehammer between the eyes.
‘Keep your hands to yourself, little man,’ she spat.
He reeled. Blood was pouring from his nose. He put a hand to it and stared in amazement when it came away red.
‘You like the flesh so much,’ she added. ‘You better get used to that. But you don’t touch me or her ever again, understand?’ Adrenaline and rage were buzzing in her veins at the same time as a tiny voice at the back of her head was whining, Don’t make him angry, just give him what he wants and maybe he won’t hurt you, but she ignored that too, because it sounded uncomfortably like her mother’s voice. Besides, the stinging in her lips suggested that bridge was already burned.
The knife appeared in his hand, and he leered at her with bloodstained teeth. ‘She dies for me every night, and she does it so well,’ the Small Man said. ‘You’ll only get to do it the once, but if it’s any consolation I promise to make you feel like it’s lasting forever.’
He started towards her, but she saw him pause mid-step and his eyes widen.
There was a sound of cracking wood from the tree at her back.
‘I remember now,’ said a voice from inside.
40
BEATRICE
THE DAY SHE FINDS OUT SHE IS PREGNANT IS simultaneously the best and worst day of her life. There is no way that Stanley is ever going to acknowledge the child as his, and not just for the sake of his marriage – he has an important position in the Civil Defence Report and Control Centre in Salford to think about, much more important than that of a ten-a-penny secretary like Beatrice, no matter how pretty she is.
It is the best day of her life because she has a baby growing inside her. She is a mother, right now, regardless of what happens in the next nine months, and she’s seen so many people die because of the war that even though having a baby terrifies her it feels right and necessary. She already knows that if it’s a boy he will be Stephen and if it’s a girl she will be Joanne.
She manages to hide her bump for almost six months before anyone notices, and when they do the news is like a bomb dropped into the middle of her family. As good middle-class Catholics with an unimpeachable reputation in the community, the shame cannot be borne. She is accordingly shut away for the last months of what her parents, without a trace of irony, call her ‘confinement’ in a private women’s hospital in Wythenshawe, where she gives birth to Stephen, and this is where things get really awkward because everybody is under the assumption that she is going to have him adopted.
She has absolutely no intention of giving up her baby. She is prepared to name the father and drag her family’s name into the gutter if necessary, because if they’re going to steal Stephen away from her that’s where they might as well be.
Bridges are burned. Ties are cut. And when she departs Manchester Piccadilly station with only a suitcase and her child, she has all she could possibly want in the world.
* * *
Birmingham is an alien city. It has no easily definable centre, no names that she recognises, and the people talk strangely. She tells the local Food Office that her husband Larry is away at the war, stationed in Singapore, that all of her paperwork was destroyed when her home up north was bombed, and she’s come to stay with cousins, and nobody questions the wedding ring that she bought at a market stall on Church Street before leaving home. She is issued with the appropriate ration books – one for her, and one for Stephen.
The Ministry of Labour gets her a job making airplane parts at the Austin works in Longbridge and a place is found for Stephen at a nearby day nursery. On the first day she drops him off she is surprised to see so many mothers as young as herself doing exactly the same thing; it seems that nobody is keeping house any more, and she imagines whole streets of empty, echoing homes. It’s hard work and long shifts but she is surprised to find herself enjoying it; there is a camaraderie of a kind that she has never known, and the girls come from all walks of life and muck in together without judgement. Nobody wants to know where she’s from or who her family is – or if they do, it’s because they’re interested in her rather than the judging of her.
When Stephen is three months old, workers clearing the rubble from a bombsite near the nursery accidentally hit a gas main, and the fire which follows forces the nursery to close temporarily. Taking time off from the factory would mean losing wages, which Bea can’t afford, so with heavy reluctance she knocks on her neighbours’ door for help. She is already on pleasant enough terms with Carrie and Bert – a childless couple, he an engineer on the railways and therefore protected from the call-up, she a housewife – but even though they’ve traded rationing coupons and gossip Bea has never asked for anything really important until now.
‘I hate to ask,’ she says, over tea in Carrie’s sitting room. ‘It would only be temporary, just until the nursery opens again, and of course I’ll pay you.’
‘You jolly w
ell will not pay me!’ Carrie laughs. ‘I won’t take a penny!’ On her lap she is dandling Stephen, who is trying to pluck at her ear with his pudgy fingers. ‘No I won’t, will I?’ she repeats to him in a baby voice. ‘No I won’t!’
Stephen gurgles, and that seals the deal.
It becomes more than a temporary arrangement, of course. Carrie babysits whenever Bea can afford to pay her, despite her protestations, and often when she can’t. It is a relief to Bea that her baby is being cared for more closely than in a large, busy nursery, and having Stephen around helps distract Carrie from her sadness at the fact that she and Bert are having such trouble getting pregnant with their own. Sometimes she watches the glee with which Carrie receives Stephen into her arms, and something cold turns over inside her, for just a moment, and then mercifully is gone. Carrie will have her own baby soon enough, she knows, and then their sons can grow up together as neighbours and friends. It’s all just a matter of time.
* * *
Longbridge is close enough to the Lickey Hills that every so often Bea can hop on a tram and take a lunch break at the Bilberry Hill pleasure grounds and tea rooms there, watching families picnic and children ride donkeys, or just sitting on the broad sweep of Beacon Hill overlooking the city while she eats her cheese sandwiches.
It is here that she meets Billy Marriner.
He is a private in the 1st Battalion Worcestershire Regiment she learns later, on convalescent leave with malaria from fighting the Japanese in Burma. He is tanned and floppy-haired, and her first sight of him is chasing a donkey, which has taken it into its stupid head to make a bid for freedom. He catches hold of its harness and brings it to a skidding halt only yards from her, sees that she’s watching and tips her a cheeky wink before returning the errant animal to its owner. A few minutes later he plonks himself down on the grass next to her, introduces himself and asks if she’d like to join him for a ginger beer at the pavilion.
Beatrice, being very careful to remove her fake wedding ring and hide it in the pocket of her factory overalls, says yes.
And that is that.
* * *
They have lunch twice more on the hill and go to a dance at the West End in Suffolk Street. She tells Carrie that some of the girls from the works have arranged to go out on the town, which isn’t a total lie because they have – she just chooses to omit the fact that she’s meeting a young man there. Afterwards he offers to see her safely home, which alarms her, because the last thing she needs is for her neighbours to see her stepping out with a soldier.
‘I’m more than capable of finding my way home safely, Billy Marriner,’ she tells him.
‘I don’t doubt that,’ he replies. ‘But there’s all manner of nasty types out on the streets at night. Thieves, looters, ruffians.’
She arches an eyebrow at him. ‘Ruffians?’
‘Or worse, maybe even Americans.’
She gives a gasp of mock horror and clutches at her throat.
‘And so what kind of gentleman would I be if I let you take your chances alone? I fear you’d have no respect for me.’
‘Well then,’ she replies, ‘I expect you to see me home like a gentleman.’ She places a kiss on his cheek and takes his arm as they go in search of a tram. All the same, she insists that he leaves her at the corner of Queens Road, about which he is not happy.
‘Look how dark it is!’ he insists. ‘I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to you in the last few yards.’
‘It’s light enough,’ she says. ‘You can stand here and watch me wave to you from my front door and that will have to do.’
‘But why?’ he protests.
‘Shh! Keep your bloody voice down!’ she hisses. ‘Because I don’t want my nosey parker of a neighbour getting the wrong idea about you, that’s why!’ It’s unfair on Carrie but seems to convince him. Reluctantly he agrees, and when she waves to him from her front step he waves back – and then, in a voice that rings down the street, he calls out with a laugh: ‘Farewell and goodnight, sweet Beatrice!’
Bea winces. ‘You ass,’ she mutters, and glances fearfully at the neighbours’ windows on either side. With their blackout curtains it is impossible to tell whether anyone is in and awake or not, but there is no movement so she tells herself that nobody has heard him.
All the same, as she closes her door she thinks there might be a flicker in her peripheral vision, as of a chink in a curtain in Carrie’s upstairs bedroom quickly closed, but she tells herself that it’s probably just a gleam of light on the glass pane.
* * *
On the third of these ‘girls’ nights out’ there is a strange, small smile playing about the corners of Carrie’s mouth as she takes Stephen, and a tone in the way she says, ‘Well you be sure to have a good time, all right?’ which sets Bea’s heart fluttering with the panicked certainty that somehow she knows about Billy. Bea thinks she might be able to brazen it out but it seems worse than the original lie, almost insulting to her friend, so she sighs, crosses her arms, and sets her jaw defiantly. ‘You know, don’t you?’
And bless her, Carrie actually blushes as if she is the one caught in a deception. ‘Yes, I do. Sorry, bab.’
‘No need for you to be sorry. But how?’
Carrie shrugs. ‘I’ve got eyes and ears. You seem far too happy for someone who’s just going out with her girl friends.’ Stephen is pulling at her lip.
Bea scuffs Carrie’s hall rug with one toe. ‘I thought I was being so clever, too.’
Carrie points to Bea’s left hand. ‘That and the fact that you’ve forgotten to put your “wedding ring” on again.’
Bea curses, in the kind of language nice girls from respectable families never use unless they’ve been working for months on a factory floor. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone!’ she insists. ‘Carrie, please, promise me you won’t tell a soul.’
‘Of course not. You wouldn’t be the first, you know.’ She shifts Stephen into the crook of her other arm where he starts grabbing her headscarf. ‘Gerroff, you little tike!’ she laughs, pulling his hands away, and Bea feels a sudden stab of jealousy. ‘Is he nice?’ Carrie continues. ‘This fella of yours?’
Bea’s smile is reluctantly drawn. ‘Yes, he’s nice.’
‘Nice enough to be happy that your ration book comes with a bit more than he might be expecting, so to speak?’
‘Truthfully? I don’t know. He’s very young.’
‘They all are, bab,’ Carrie sighed. ‘They all are. Of course I won’t tell a soul, no catches, no conditions. Just…’ She hesitates, plainly wondering how much of Bea’s business she wants to be part of, despite the other woman’s baby wriggling in her arms. ‘Just find out, that’s all. Find out. And if he’s not the kind that’d be happy, best break it off sooner rather than later.’
Bea nodded.
‘Because no man likes to be strung along, no matter how much fun he’s having along the way.’
‘I know, I know.’
* * *
The problem is that despite Carrie’s wise advice, it is Bea who is having altogether too much fun. Billy is a local boy and knows a hundred secret places around the city to show her. She leaves her ring at home and doesn’t tell him about Stephen because she’s enjoying herself for the first time in a long while with a fella. And he is very young, it turns out; nineteen compared to her twenty-four. It shouldn’t make a difference but it does, and the more often they see each other and she reinforces the illusion that she is free and single the harder it becomes to tell him the truth.
The thing is, she’s not sure that she even wants to tell him the truth. He’s sweet and attentive and makes her laugh, and she might even be falling for him, but if she were to introduce him to her child he would become a potential father, and she absolutely does not know him well enough for that. Maybe, in time.
So when he proposes to her, it makes things somewhat awkward.
They are walking in the woods of the Lickeys in the saddle between Beacon and Bilberry Hill
s, and it is a perfect afternoon of light and birdsong. Without warning, he stops and seizes both of her hands.
‘Will you be my girl?’ he asks earnestly.
‘I thought I already was!’ she laughs.
‘No, I mean really. The doctors say I’m nearly well enough to be sent back to the regiment, and I wanted to know… wanted to ask…’ He stammers to a halt, blushing. ‘Will you be waiting for me when I get back? I’m not asking you to marry me now, because I think that would be cruel – I mean I might not make it back – but if I do, what do you say? You and me, a little house, we can bring our children up here—’
She puts a hand on his chest to stop him right there. ‘Billy,’ she says, ‘there is nothing I would like more—’
He whoops and crushes her in his arms and swings her around and when she is deposited back on the ground, a little breathless, she continues: ‘But there’s something you need to know first.’
His beaming face clouds.
She swallows. ‘I already have a son.’
He backs away a step, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’
She offers him a shy, embarrassed smile.
‘But I thought…’ He turns away, baffled, then turns back. ‘You mean you’re not…’
Now his manner is starting to irritate her a little. ‘Not what, Billy?’
‘Not, well… pure.’
She laughs. She knows she shouldn’t, that this is precisely the wrong thing to do, that he will think she’s laughing at him, and she genuinely isn’t, but there’s something so deliciously old-fashioned about the word ‘pure’ which surprises the laugh out of her all the same.
‘What’s so funny?’ he demands.
‘Nothing, I—’
‘How dare you laugh at me! You lead me on—’
‘Oh that’s unfair, I never led you on—’
‘Letting me think you were a decent—’
The Hollow Tree Page 31