Absolute Hush

by Sara Banerji

  After that, George lit his fires in remote parts of the garden where the smoke and flames would not be noticed from the house.

  ‘I think, when I grow up, I would like to be a bomber best of all,’ he told Sissy, as he held a magnifying glass under the sun and fanned the developing smoulder with a piece of newspaper. ‘Just imagine, Sis …’ he made some nasal sounds to indicate plane engines. ‘Then, boom! Boom! It must be absolutely thrilling to see the great flames roaring up as the bomb explodes.’ His little magnified flame let out a short crackle and sprang into life.

  Teddy never heard Sissy’s revision on the trade winds. He never came back. His plane was shot down over Germany.

  ‘I expect he burned to death,’ said George. ‘Do you think our father burned to death as well? I wonder what a person who’s burning to death smells like … ’

  ‘Shut up!’ said Sissy.

  Chapter 3

  It was April. Elizabeth brought tea into the garden because the weather was so mild.

  ‘This is the most perfect day,’ she said to her children, as lilac flowers floated into their milk. ‘The doves, oh, the sound of the doves in our garden. Does it sound so beautiful anywhere else, do you think? And there are ducks on their eggs among the reeds so we’ll soon have ducklings.’ She breathed in the exceptional air that was perfumed with earth and blossom and the warm cuddle of nesting ducks. There were satisfied deep quacks from the frogs in the water two feet away, and, in the trees across the moat, a cuckoo shouted.

  Sissy watched her mother, warily trying to see past her eyes if there was a picture of Teddy burning in her mind.

  Elizabeth threw out her arms across the plate of potato cakes and cried, ‘Isn’t this absolutely glorious? Could one ask for any more from life?’ Then she crinkled her nose, and said, looking suspiciously at George, ‘I smell smoke on your clothes. I hope you haven’t been lighting any more fires?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said George, almost a year older and so better at lying and concealing.

  George and Sissy had always shared a bedroom, though now they were eleven Mrs Lovage had started saying things like, ‘You’ve got plenty of rooms. They should sleep apart.’

  Elizabeth had considered, briefly, taking Mrs Lovage’s advice but a vision of Sissy’s tight face and eyes bright with anger came into her mind, and she dropped the idea. It was not exactly that Elizabeth was afraid of Sissy. More that she could not bear the unpleasantness. Sissy would freeze into an angry mood, and remain in it for weeks. It was easier to leave the girl alone.

  That night Sissy sat up, looked at George sleeping, and felt a shiver of thrill at the idea of this plump, quiet boy being filled, unknown to anyone but her, with a desire to destroy. She gazed into his pale wide face and tried to understand his motives. She stared at his closed eyes and wondered what they were seeing behind their heavy pale-lashed lids. She leant her ear to his nostrils and listened to the soft child breaths passing in and out. Perhaps he was dreaming of crackling flames and people screaming. It excited Sissy to imagine fat George quietly moving through the world and sowing destruction. One day, she knew, it was going to end in trouble, and the idea made her glad. She thought this must be because the adults in her life were so destructive. They tossed bombs on to each other’s towns, killing children, and thought nothing of burning to death young men with nervous eyelids and bushy eyebrows.

  Once she and George had lain on their stomachs, looked through the warped ceiling-boards of the room below, and watched their mother embracing Teddy. They had both been naked, had grasped each other not only with their arms, but with their lips and thighs as well, and the tangle of nude body had rocked and thrashed and tossed as though on the waves of some violent sea.

  ‘Why are they groaning?’ asked George. ‘Are they in agony?’ You could almost see him searching for the fire that had caused the pain and the excitement.

  ‘Shh,’ said Sissy. She knew that it was love, not pain, that made Teddy and her mother groan.

  Elizabeth, although she had threatened to eat a hundred aspirins for the sake of a chopped cucumber, had not even mentioned killing herself because Teddy had been burnt to death; but Sissy thought that if she ever loved anyone until she moaned, not even a thousand ring doves would make her forget. The idea of George prowling the world of adults with his matches and his ruthless joy seemed proper vengeance on a generation of grown-ups who did not love properly.

  Sissy was in the Apostle Bedroom, skinning a dead fish she had found in the moat. She had planned to cure it with salt and make it into a purse. She heard the sound of fire roaring, dropped the strong smelling fish body, and, spilling salt, rushed over to the window. The thatched cottage in the High Street was burning.

  She heard her brother’s heavy footsteps tearing up the stairs. He flung open the door and stood there gasping, black streaks across his face, his eyes bright with excitement, his body shaking with terror.

  Panting, he told her, ‘I didn’t do it, Sissy! I didn’t do it!’

  As Sissy shook old fish liver from her fingers, the sky grew bright with flames and she could hear the distant sound of fire engines approaching.

  ‘Shall we go and look?’ George whispered. ‘Do you think it would be safe to watch from the window?’

  They went down into the big drawing-room and saw the sky fill with pink light and pieces of debris. The villagers were shouting and the sound of fire engines grew louder.

  Elizabeth was in her bath and, hearing the clamour, came running into her bedroom, wrapped in a towel. She leaned out of the window, and tears suddenly sprang into her eyes at the sight of the destruction of the cottage.

  She had felt a flash of envy for a sensitivity she suspected she herself lacked when George had told her about the Hindu widows. She had felt anxious, too, wondering if her son had made the remark because he recognised the flaw in her, and she thought that, if she had been a Hindu widow, she might have thrown herself on the funeral pyre of her husband, just to prove to everyone, including herself, that she did really have proper feelings like other people. But the agony! She was sure she would not be able to bear the agony. Eating a hundred aspirins would not hurt as much as burning to death, thought Elizabeth, though it would not have the same impact either.

  Now, looking out on to the burning cottage, for a moment it seemed as though God had taken up her challenge and set the house on fire to see if she would dare to immolate herself.

  ‘Her husband and her lover died fighting for their country, burned to death in their planes, and it broke her heart,’ the people of the village would say later. She had not cried when Tim or Teddy died but now she wept wildly at the sight of the cottage burning.

  There came a yell from the people in the street as the roof caved in suddenly with a great release of burning straw. The cottage seemed to expand and swell, glowing, into the sky. Then it shrank into a single-storey building.

  ‘Come on!’ said George. He grabbed his sister by the hand and they went into the garden, and out on to the road.

  The fire engines had arrived, wildly ringing, and the onlookers were screaming and shouting instructions.

  ‘Jump! We’ve got a mattress here! You’ll be all right!’

  ‘My baby! She’s upstairs in her cot.’

  Somewhere, under the sound of fire and bells and shouting, Sissy thought she could hear the sound of screaming. ‘The baby might die, George,’ she said.

  ‘Grown-ups kill lots of babies in air raids,’ replied George. He spoke almost casually, then gave a little shiver. Sissy did not know if he shivered from horror or excitement.

  ‘How did you do it?’ whispered Sissy.

  ‘I didn’t! I didn’t! I told you I didn’t!’ George whispered back and looked wildly round to see if anyone had heard.

  ‘I won’t take the blame this time,’ said Sissy.

  For weeks after the fire the village smelled of smoulder, and Sissy watched George with suspicion mingled with awe. George had caused a house to rise shini
ng into the sky before it collapsed. Because of George the villagers had screamed and thrown themselves from upstairs windows. George had brought fire engines roaring up the High Street.

  After the fuel from Teddy’s lighter had run out, George kept the gadget as a symbol of his pyromania and lit his fires with matches. He would steal two or three at a time, usually from Mrs Lovage, never so many that their absence would be noticed. These, not Teddy’s lighter, were what had set alight the pile of hay bales in the field beyond the garden and were responsible for destroying his mother’s magazines stored in the cellar.

  ‘A spark must have got on them when I raked out the boiler,’ she had mourned. ‘I wish I were dead, I am so unlucky.’

  George would ceremoniously lay Teddy’s lighter beside the object to be burned then, making a gesture of deference to the mascot, strike. He was superstitious about the matches. They had to be perfect. He would spend furtive ages going through his mother’s match-box finding just the right ones, with a head neither twinned nor bumpy, and an even, unsplit stick. The painstaking search had nearly led to him being discovered.

  ‘What are you doing with those?’ his mother had cried. ‘I hope you’re not starting your fire-lighting habits again?’

  ‘I’m making a little car out of conkers,’ George wailed. ‘I need matchsticks for the axles.’

  His mother found this delightful, and hugged him and ruffled his hair in a burst of affection. He was so relieved at having escaped suspicion that he did not even wriggle.

  ‘But let’s make them safe,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We don’t want anything to catch fire, do we, darling?’ and, horror filling George’s mouth with saliva as he watched, she snapped off the heads of George’s carefully chosen matches.

  He managed to blurt, ‘They’ll be too short.’

  But Elizabeth only laughed and said, ‘You’ll have to find smaller conkers, then.’ After that, she kept asking him, ‘Where is the little conker car? Show it to Mummy, darling.’

  ‘How do you make a car from conkers, Sissy?’ George asked his sister hoarsely.

  ‘Well, you don’t, do you, silly,’ she snapped. ‘About the only thing you can make from them is chairs.’

  All afternoon the pair sat spluttering with exasperation as they tried to create with the spoiled matches, but though strong, their squat plump hands were neither flexible nor clever.

  Mrs Lovage always had matches with her because she was a heavy smoker. Cigarettes had shaped Mrs Lovage. Her mouth had become lopsided from the fag that was almost always hanging from its corner. Her eyes had become permanently narrowed from avoiding the smoke, and smoke had been rising up the front of her face for so many years that the front of her white hair had become stained a brownish yellow. Even her body had become a little twisted because of smoking, for, when both her hands were occupied, she would bring her bony shoulder forwards and ease on to it the ash from the cigarette her lips presently clutched. The small grey column would balance there until she got a chance to lean forwards and shake it, with a wriggle of a shoulderblade, into a wastepaper basket.

  Mrs Lovage had always had her suspicions about George. ‘Where were you when the village hall Christmas tree went up, that’s what I’d like to know?’ she had said last December.

  Mr Lovage, who was on the committee, had had to rush out and cut another tree on Christmas Eve, and people had brought decorations from their own trees because every single bit of tinsel from the hall had been burnt.

  ‘And what about Farmer Potter’s hay barn,’ Mrs Lovage had hissed in June. ‘I bet you knew something about that, young man.’

  ‘I don’t, Mrs Lovage. I really don’t,’ wailed George.

  The lopsided conker chair was not, Elizabeth pointed out, a car. She held the cracked, wool-festooned object to the light and considered it gloomily. She herself was good at manipulating materials. The manufacture of small delicate objects was her delight. She stitched miniature embroideries using the finest needles and the most glowing colours. Her brilliant silk landscapes, framed and hung, looked, from only a small distance, as though they were painted in oils with a sable paintbrush.

  ‘It’s rather crude, considering your age,’ she said at last. ‘I wonder why you could not make anything better than this.’

  But the very awfulness of this conker thing suddenly filled her with a desire to hug them. A blast of love rushed through her because of their incompetence. She took a step towards them, her arms reaching. But then she stopped. Sissy had one hand on her hip and stared into her mother’s face. Her eyes had that diamond brightness that always alarmed Elizabeth.

  ‘We could not make anything better because you did not have us educated,’ said Sissy coldly. ‘I don’t think it’s fair that you should laugh at us because we are bad at doing things when it’s your fault.’

  Elizabeth stared at her daughter with a sinking heart and thought, ‘I feel as if Tim has come back from death to scold me.’ She let out a moan, but for some reason refrained from saying, ‘You make me so unhappy I wish I were dead.’

  After Sissy’s remark, Elizabeth retired to her small sitting-room where, unable even to find the heart to go on with her embroidery, she flipped through the survivors of her collection of pre-war magazines and answered her children in monosyllables when they inquired if they could have a biscuit, or what time lunch would be ready.

  In the earliest years of her marriage, Tim had supposed her to be sulking when she acted like this but he had grown to understand her. When he kissed her on the nape of her neck and told her that she looked very beautiful when she was angry, she would turn a reproachful eye upon him and say, ‘I am never angry, Tim. Only very very hurt.’ When the hurt was unbearable, she would weep until she fainted, or develop a migraine. Then Tim would be forced to take a morning off work and stay at home to look after her. For absolute hurt, Elizabeth had the absolute and unarguable weapon. Suicide. Tim had been willing and, eventually, able to avoid hurting her. Elizabeth, in recognition of the efforts that he made, had bravely endured his pedantic delivery of well-intentioned lectures which usually ended with something like ‘I’m only telling you for your own good.’

  ‘Don’t go out in the sun without your hat, dear. You know how prone you are to headaches. I’m only telling you for your own good.’

  ‘I insist that, since we didn’t get back from the party till nearly three, you cancel the garden party and have a lie down this afternoon, darling. It’s for your own good.’ Tim took Elizabeth’s own good so much to heart that he even protected her from her children’s problems and injuries. She would hear Tim tell George aged three, ‘Let Daddy put some plaster on that cut. And don’t show it to Mummy. You know how delicate she is. She can’t bear the sight of blood, and if she sees that great gash she might faint,’ or to Sissy, ‘Better not trouble Mummy now, Sissy. She’s got a headache. But you can tell Daddy what that horrid boy shouted at you.’

  The children, on the other hand, seemed quite indifferent to the pain they caused her. They came marching into the drawing-room on their thick battered legs, untidy, not the least bit gracious, demanding bits of bread and margarine, and completely ignoring her suffering.

  ‘Ask Mrs Lovage,’ she told them faintly, through lips dry with outrage. How amazing that they could not see that she was too upset to give her mind over to such mundane matters. Was there any point in trying to explain to them? ‘I am too ill. I am too tired,’ she said wearily. But her beautiful tragic feelings were wasted on these gross children. They stood by the chaise-longue on which she lay and watched her with a sort of awkward defiance. Her long hair, which was streaked with grey, streamed over the cushions. Her silk gown was draped gracefully over her slender body. She was pale, she knew. She had looked at herself in the looking glass just before they came in. Her eyes were filled with the soft light of sorrow. But these two dumpling children did not notice. To them the world consisted of nothing more delicate than chunks of bread and margarine. She tried to avoid looking at th
em. She let her eye rest on her recently finished silk painting, softly glowing water in which was reflected a solitary wild goose. Then crinkled up her nose because of the smell of the children.

  ‘We’ve been in the moat,’ said George, giving his mother a cautious smile. ‘It usually stinks at this time of the year.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ moaned Elizabeth, and drew her arm across her face so that she could no longer see or smell her offspring. Through the softness of her skin she heard Sissy’s voice say sharply, ‘Well, what about the bread and marge? Can we or can’t we?’

  Chapter 4

  The Plague House was rich with bedrooms, as though fear of infection, two centuries earlier, had driven its inhabitants fretfully to abandon one suspect room after another. You could imagine them roaming corridors, clutching spluttering candles, sniffing tightly into cloved oranges as they pondered on the uncertainty of life, death, disease, and the unpredictability of bedding. George and Sissy had slept in every one except their mother’s and had renamed rooms, once called Front or Blue or Chinese, ‘Christmas’ because of a first stocking memory, ‘Spring’ because ducklings had been seen hatching from there, the ‘Sad Bedroom’ because George and Sissy had cried there after a pet hedgehog had died and ever after had used it for their grieving. Then there was the Parson Bedroom.

  George and Sissy had been ten. Eleven perhaps.

  ‘Would you like to see a naked grown-up man, George?’ Sissy had said, and George, after a quick gasp, had nodded cautiously, struggling between curiosity and the anticipation of trouble.

  ‘That Mr Parson’s having a bath,’ whispered Sissy, and George, giggling, had understood.

  Getting into the linen cupboard had needed stealth but at last they lay on their stomachs on the folded sheets and watched breathless through a crack as Mr Parson drew off his clothes. They had not dared to breathe in case he heard them. They had not dared to move either, because the starched linen crackled with the slightest stirring.