Absolute Hush

by Sara Banerji

  But ever since Elizabeth had seen the children furtively slinking, she had been troubled by a sense of unease.

  ‘Oh, be a love and have a look all the same,’ she cried fervently. If Mrs Lovage went, then Elizabeth would not have to be confronted with her children doing something really ghastly and Mrs Lovage would be able to break it to her gently.

  Mrs Lovage gave just the right sort of sigh as she put down her cup, balanced her fag on the edge of the ashtray, then rose stiffly. She did these things very slowly in case Elizabeth had second thoughts and said, ‘Don’t worry, Mrs L. It doesn’t matter,’ but Elizabeth just kept leaning forward and smiling at her hopefully.

  ‘Off I go, then,’ said Mrs Lovage, making herself sound weary but willing, so that Elizabeth, instead of sensing reluctance, said, ‘You are kindness itself, Mrs L.’

  Mrs Lovage gave her one last brave smile as she went towards the door.

  Elizabeth sighed, leant back in her chair, and began luxuriously to plan the party for which Mrs Lovage’s Myrtle’s Yank’s PX – what a vulgar word, only Americans would buy their provisions from somewhere known only by initials – would provide.

  Dealing with the children always aggravated Mrs Lovage and she considered, as she puffed her way through the hall, that you would never have imagined that someone as gracious as Elizabeth could have such coarse children. She was determined to catch the children unawares, for there was no point in puffing and grunting to the top if, when she arrived, they had hidden the evidence. Tiptoeing, she came on to the first landing and from overhead she heard another of those strange shrill cries.

  ‘You haven’t got a hole,’ George said.

  ‘You must be trying in the wrong place,’ said Sissy, offended and frustrated. ‘Try again. Ouch!’

  ‘You can’t expect me to be like those satyrs if you’re going to scream all the time,’ complained George.

  ‘It hurts!’ cried Sissy. ‘The nymphs are all smiling as though they’re having fun. None of them is in agony!’

  The pair examined the figures on the quilt yet again.

  ‘True,’ sighed George. ‘But there seems to be quite a lot of difference between them and you. You are fatter in the middle and they are fatter higher up and lower down.’

  ‘It’s no use pointing out my faults,’ snapped Sissy. ‘The nymphs – all except for that one who’s doing something funny that I wouldn’t exactly like to do myself – are looking blissful. I think I should be able to lie looking blissful while you do things to me, George. I mean, I didn’t have to do anything when it was the Italian prisoner. He did it all.’

  After a sad pause, George said in a low voice, ‘There seems to be a big difference between me and the satyrs too.’

  ‘Yes. Well. You haven’t got hooves. So what?’ said Sissy crisply. ‘The Italian prisoner didn’t have hooves and he would have got his huge big thing in me without any trouble at all if you hadn’t gone screaming for Mummy.’

  They heard Mrs Lovage calling from the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Don’t make a sound,’ breathed Sissy, pressing her fingers against her brother’s mouth.

  ‘Kiddies, are you up there?’ called Mrs Lovage in a high and quavery voice.

  George and Sissy held their breath.

  Mrs Lovage sighed, felt tired, and could not face another flight, nor bear the thought of hunting the dirty children through the little attic bedrooms. Suppose they were hiding from her. It had happened before. She had gone from room to room, looking for them and feeling sure they watched her, unseen, silently sniggering, filthy little things. Then she would have climbed up all those stairs for nothing.

  She called, ‘George! Sissy! If you are there, answer me at once!’ in her strict voice and when this received no answer either, gave up and returned to the kitchen saying, ‘Behaving perfectly.’

  ‘Good,’ said Elizabeth. Softly drawing on her cigarette, she gazed out of the window and felt that even her children must have been purified by such a day.

  *

  Mrs Lovage had often hinted at something dirty that George and Sissy, sharing a bed, might be doing.

  ‘What sort of thing?’ they would ask, longing to know, loving dirtiness, and not able to guess how to proceed with what Mrs Lovage suspected them of. Until today, when they realised that the instructions for dirtiness were all embroidered on the Nymph bedspread.

  ‘It’s what Teddy must have been doing to Mummy,’ giggled George.

  ‘They weren’t laughing,’ said Sissy. ‘They were struggling and grunting and serious.’

  George, thoughtful for a moment, said, ‘Well, Mummy never could see a joke.’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Lovage must do it,’ gasped Sissy after a moment.

  ‘Perhaps everybody you see walking about does,’ choked George. ‘Middle-aged people going arm-in-arm.’

  ‘Old men and women sitting outside the pub.’

  ‘Grocers.’

  ‘Nuns.’

  ‘Steam-engine drivers.’

  ‘Aunties.’

  ‘Grandpas.’

  Each new class of speculative copulators sent the pair into such wild paroxysms of laughter that they had to clutch each other to keep from falling off the bed.

  ‘Probably they all know how to do it,’ said Sissy.

  ‘Except us,’ said George.

  ‘Perhaps one has to practise quite a lot,’ said Sissy.

  ‘The dog didn’t,’ George told her. ‘The dog knew exactly what to do, without a bedspread or an Italian prisoner, and he was only two.’ It had been a silly dog. It had never learnt to beg, yet had succeeded in this complicated physical joke.

  ‘I think the problem is that virginity is blocking you,’ said George. ‘I’ll pop it with a pencil.’

  ‘Ouch, ouch,’ said Sissy, wrapping her legs like a monkey going up a palm tree.

  George clambered out of bed and hunted in the pocket of his shorts.

  ‘What’s that white thing?’ asked Sissy, leaning over.

  With a smile of pride George held it up. ‘A balloon. Probably RAF,’ he told her. ‘I found it behind a bush yesterday.’ He squashed the used condom back in his pocket, and pulled out a pencil.

  Sissy began gathering her clothes around her; scurrying, as though the sight of the pencil had cured her instantly of lust.

  ‘I’m going,’ she said. ‘I’m not waiting around here to be skewered.’

  Throwing the pencil down, George leapt back on to the bed and held her. Pushing her face back with his mouth, he kissed her neck, her mouth, her belly, laid his face among her thighs and breathed the strange new wild smells that came from there. Then he drew his lips up up along her body back towards her throat again. She stopped struggling against him and he began to feel her breath, quick and hot and excited, coming in little puffs against the side of his neck.

  George whispered, ‘I’m riding you, Sissy. You are my horse,’ and Sissy, who was usually the one who made the decisions, made a comfortable mumbling noise, and didn’t dispute it.

  ‘I can’t help feeling they are creating destruction and disaster,’ moaned Elizabeth in the kitchen.

  I am neither destruction nor disaster, though if you could have heard them weep and cry nine months later on you would have thought I was. I have been both. I have destroyed the universe. I have shattered the cosmos. I have sucked creation back inside my navel. The living creatures of the world have begged and screamed and prayed as they poured into me like dust into Mrs Lovage’s vacuum cleaner. All their prayers and promises made not a jot of difference. Inside they went, to nowhere, to turn to nothing. I swallowed them and rocks and trees and gases and seas, like a god devouring mist.

  But this time I come healing and creating, and the cosmos is about to crack like the shell of an egg to allow my hatching. I am Lump. Sissy and George had other names for me, but I turned out differently and confused them.

  Chapter 9

  Glamorous dinner parties, as Mrs Lovage knew, had, before the war, been
Elizabeth’s favourite occupation, although Tim had not liked them as much as Elizabeth. Once, a couple of years after they were married, Tim’s elder sister, Beattie, had said, ‘If I were married to Tim, I would prefer to be alone with him, rather than having this endless succession of strangers coming into my home.’

  At the time Elizabeth thought nothing of it but, after Lump, she recalled the quick glances that passed between Tim and Beattie, and times they had gone off together; like at that picnic when no one could find them for half an hour after everybody else was ready to go home.

  Tim’s mother had died when he was young and Beattie had been the nearest thing to a mother he had ever known. She had always lived nearby and Elizabeth suffered from a horrible guilty feeling that Beattie had grieved more over the loss of Tim than she, his wife.

  ‘I love her more than anyone,’ Tim had said to Elizabeth when they first were married. And added, too late, ‘Except for you, of course.’

  Every summer before the war Beattie had given a party for the slum boys from the East End of London. The children would arrive at the country station, grey-faced and smutty, and leave three hours later, noisy with excitement, their chins stained with jelly and dye from their crêpe paper bags of take-home sweets.

  Beattie had invited Elizabeth once but Elizabeth had said, shuddering, ‘I don’t know how you can bear it. So sordid, all that running dye and dribbling sweets. And those awful children.’

  Laughing, Beattie had said, ‘I suppose it must be because I have none of my own that I adore the little Londoners.’

  Elizabeth’s own pre-war parties had been famous. People talked about an invitation from her for days after, and these successes had made her more tranquil and accepting of life’s little pinpricks. In the days of her entertaining she had got on with her children better and, in return, her children had loved her more. In those days Sissy used to give her little bunches of wilting daisies, and once had presented her with a grubby sawdust-stuffed pin-cushion with the words ‘I love Mummy’ marked out in pins. Elizabeth knew that Tim had helped the child but, all the same, it had been rather sweet. Things like that never happened nowadays, thought Elizabeth with a touch of bitterness.

  During her years of entertaining, Elizabeth had never failed in her duty as a mother either. Always, even before the biggest party, she would go up and kiss her children goodnight. Nanny Button had been in charge of the nursery then and Elizabeth would ask, as she wafted into the nursery in a haze of Chanel and a tinkle of gold and sapphires, ‘How have my darlings been today, Nanny? Were they good?’

  Usually Nanny would raise her eyebrows and say, incredulity in her tone, ‘Good, madam?’ but Elizabeth always tried to ignore this and, turning to the children, would say tenderly, ‘Goodnight, darlings, sleep tight. How’s Mummy looking?’ then twirl round the room so that they had the pleasure of seeing her looking beautiful.

  Sometimes she would make the mistake of asking, ‘What have you two been doing?’ but had had to stop asking this because it tended to provoke a torrent of distasteful information.

  ‘We got frogs and plopped them in the mud and they splattered mud all over Sissy’s face and she laughed and laughed and I could see right down her throat and I could nearly see the sausages and mash she’d had for lunch.’

  ‘There, there, that’s enough, darling,’ Elizabeth would say swiftly. Or, from Sissy, ‘We got this dead mouse, see, Mummy, and squashed it up and put it in water and it got stinking and bubbling and went black and it’s in this bottle in case you’d like to sniff it …’

  Elizabeth would recoil: ‘I must go. I think I hear the doorbell.’

  Elizabeth had been shocked, when war broke out, at how joyfully Nanny had departed to work in the ammunitions factory, later coming back to collect her things, and tell Elizabeth she was earning double with half the effort.

  Now Elizabeth was going to start giving parties once more, and her relationship with her children would become like it had been then. With excitement, she started planning sending invitations to young airmen friends of Teddy’s – James, Lewis and Robert. And two, Billy and Charles, she had met through Tim. They were all nice young men, and had been kind to Elizabeth in her bereavement, coming to help her in her crises, and even, on a few occasions, playing with the children.

  Mrs Lovage said they pinched vegetables from the garden. ‘And bribe our ducks into the base with pieces of bread, and there’s always one short when the ducks come back.’

  I’ll give them roast duck for dinner on the night of my party, thought Elizabeth, since they like it so.

  The young airmen all had talismans. Teddy’s had been the frontdoor key of his London flat. When he had left home for the first time, wearing his new airforce uniform, his wife, Katy, had run after him and slipped the key in his pocket.

  ‘So you don’t waste any time ringing the bell when you come back again, darling,’ she had said, and he knew that she was telling him that he would be able to come home unexpectedly and know that she still loved him and nobody else.

  Teddy had had this key in his pocket ever since he last left home. In times of agony, watching someone he knew shot down in a burst of fire and smoke, or realising that his friend’s plane was not among the returned, he used to put his fingers round the key in his pocket and feel reassured.

  Teddy never used the key to open his frontdoor in the end.

  On his first leave he had turned the corner into his street and stopped, unable for a moment to take in what he saw. Or did not see. For it had gone. Not just the door, but the house. The street. The pub on the corner. The little shop where they bought ice creams and tobacco, the street lights, the plane trees, even the pavement. Where once his home had been, there was now only mountains of tumbled masonry and twisted iron, from which oozed plumes of smoke and plastpr-dust.

  An air-raid warden, seeing him staring dizzily, told him that the night before, a doodlebug had homed in on Teddy’s street and destroyed it.

  Several hours later he learnt that his wife had been killed by the bomb. Teddy told Elizabeth he remembered that, at the moment he heard the words ‘Katy is dead’, he felt something trickling along his wrist and, looking down, saw blood leaking out of his clenched fist. Watching the blood splashing on to the floor like red tears, the idea came to him that, because he was not crying, the sorrow which had filled him so tightly had found another way of getting out. But then he had opened his fist and discovered his frontdoor key, which he had gripped so hard, it had pierced his skin.

  The day Teddy was killed, George and Sissy found his frontdoor key lying on the lawn where it must have dropped when he leapt into the jeep in the morning. George and Sissy had offered the key to Elizabeth.

  ‘It just shows,’ said Sissy, ‘that talismans really work. He’s dead because he didn’t take it with him.’

  ‘That’s just silly superstition,’ snapped Elizabeth.

  ‘Don’t you want it?’ said George trembling, sensing a deep emotion he was unable to comprehend.

  ‘No,’ said Elizabeth. She strode away from the children as though something about the key had made her angry. Teddy had tried to make love to her the night before but she had refused. Of course it wasn’t her fault he was dead … but …

  ‘What have we done now, Sis?’ George shuddered.

  They had stood for several moments after that, looking at the key as though it contained some secret that careful scrutiny would reveal. At last Sissy had said, like a judge giving a verdict, ‘We shall bury it.’

  The children made a little ceremony of the action as though they were symbolically burying Teddy himself, talking in low voices and then scattering cherry blossom over the place. When it was complete they stood in silence with bowed heads for a few moments as if they had really been at a person’s funeral.

  Elizabeth threw open the dining-room door. She had neglected the room since Tim had gone, allowing the sheen to dim on the Jacobean furniture.

  ‘Don’t bother with polishin
g the table, Mrs Lovage,’ she would say. ‘I don’t expect to be having anyone at it for many years.’

  The whimper of self-pity always produced an instant response from Mrs Lovage, either in the form of a cigarette, a nice cup of tea, or, if neither was swiftly available or appropriate, a gesture of compassion. This was a symbolic movement made in the air and without actually touching Elizabeth, who was one of those people who rejected physical contact. Mrs Lovage would stretch out her hands caressingly in Elizabeth’s direction and, for some reason, Mrs Lovage’s airy gestures gave Elizabeth more solace than Tim’s hugs had ever done.

  Now, though, she felt stimulated by the sight of the dim dining-room and, calling Mrs Lovage over, began excitedly to outline her plans for restoring it to its former grandeur.

  Running her hands caressingly over the grimy furniture she said, ‘Could Myrtle’s American get us some polish?’

  Mrs Lovage looked doubtful. ‘Well, dearie, the Yanks are so sloppy. It’s the British that go in for all those shining buckles and buttons.’

  ‘And we’ll starch the lace and linen,’ cried Elizabeth, but the warmth of anticipation only lasted for a moment. Women! She could not think of any she would like to ask. Why did there always have to be a lady sandwiched between two men? She gave a shudder.

  Mrs Lovage looked up.

  ‘What’s the matter, dearie?’

  ‘For a moment I got a vision of lady dinner guests looking like slices of ham.’

  Mrs Lovage stared, feeling she might have to opt out of flexible thought if it led to such bizarre ideas.

  ‘I once met a woman who reminded me of ham,’ Elizabeth tried to explain, remembering the time Tim had brought a Wren home.

  Elizabeth had been suffering from a pale complaint which lacked any sordid symptoms, but made her incapable of making love.

  ‘I’ll be over it soon I’m sure, darling,’ she had told Tim, her voice brave but weak, as they lay side by side in bed.

  ‘Can’t I just caress you?’ he had begged.

  ‘I’m too weak,’ she had murmured, trying to turn away from him. He had put his arm across her and tried to pull her back.