“Davy! Davy, is that you?”
He froze.
Instantly, David knew it had been a mistake to look for her. Stay calm, act like nothing’s happening. He began walking casually away.
“Davy!” The voice bubbled in and out of the crowds. “Davy! It’s him, I know it is. . . .” There was a muffled sound. “Let me through! Oh, please stop! It’s me, Cassie!”
David wished he had the guts to just walk on. But he couldn’t; there was something in her tone that drove right through him.
“Hello, Cassie,” he said. He wheeled round so swiftly that she almost bumped into him.
“It is you! I bloody knew it was.” Cassie hit him on the arm. “You bloody deaf or something? I was yelling all the way back down the market.”
He glanced at her, and his heart started thumping in his chest. He wished he could feel nothing, wished she seemed more like a stranger, but she didn’t. She was smiling at him awkwardly, tall as ever, slim and gangly. Still so young, how old was she? Twenty-four? He thought of the last time he’d seen her, terrified, tired, her pale face determined.
“How you doing, Cass?” he said.
“All right,” she said, and then she shrugged, and he knew she was regretting calling out to him. She crossed her arms, her bobbed hair shaking as she said, “Terry’s got some work up the reclamation yard off the Essex Road. We’re living back here now. Funny how things work out, ain’t it? How . . . how are you, Davy?”
“I’m not too bad.” He almost couldn’t bear to meet her gaze. His little sister, who sucked her thumb so hard there was a red welt on the joint, who had thick black lashes and funny little scrunched-up toes, who screamed like a rat in a trap if you put a barrette in her hair. His sister, who looked so much like his mother. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Bloody right. I saw you in the paper, one of them exhibitions. ‘Hark at him!’ I said to Terry. ‘Who the hell does he think he is!’ ”
“What do you mean?” He shrugged. “It’s my work, isn’t it? Can’t help that.”
“You had a flowery sodding necktie on, you big jessie.”
“It’s what I wear to . . .” He trailed off. It sounded so stupid. She laughed.
“I’m only having a go at you, Davy! I’m your sister, ain’t I? I can do that? I’m the only family you got.” That wasn’t true anymore, though. She realized it as she was speaking; he saw it. “How’s everyone? Your lot?”
“They’re all good.” He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, painful.
“How is she, Davy? My little girl?”
He realized this was why he was so scared. He was terrified she’d want her back again.
“She’s really well. She’s ever so bright, Cass. Into her books, she loves history. I read to her every night.”
“You tell her where she comes from?” She shifted, moving away from him, and he thought she might suddenly run off again.
He shook his head. “No. Never. Like you wanted.”
Then Cassie gripped his wrist, her thin face pale in the afternoon sun. “You don’t ever tell anyone. You promised me, all right? I know I was a mistake. Dad hated me. I know what it’s like. I couldn’t have another mistake round here. She’s better off with you.”
“You can come and visit her whenever you want, Cass.” He wished he could share just a tiny piece of the joy her daughter, his daughter, brought him. “She’s wonderful. We come up to London together, she and I, we visit a gallery, have lunch, and she always—”
“Don’t talk to me about her,” Cassie said, and she lowered her head, looked away, curling her face into an expression of agony. “I don’t want to know. I want to start over, see? Me and Terry, I’m sure we’ll have our own kids, sometime soon. That little one, she was a mistake, I was too young.” Her face darkened. “That piano poof, eh? All that time Aunt Jem thought it’d be nice for me to learn like Ma, and all the time he was just waiting to get into my knickers.”
It was Aunt Jem who’d called him. From a phone box, outside the Tube station. He’d picked up, thank goodness. “Cassie’s in trouble.” Just like that, after—how long had it been? Ten years? And he’d known right away who it was, what the problem was, known exactly what they wanted.
She was nearly nineteen. It was her piano teacher. Like her mother, she’d always loved the piano. Sentimental Jem had given her lessons every year as a birthday present. A moony-eyed, thin-faced, hungry boy in London with no money, come down from Edinburgh to study music, passionately in love with her, he said. Angus was his name. He wanted to marry Cassie; Cassie, out of her mind with fear and shame, had said no. She was seeing Terry already. And she couldn’t bear the idea that she’d be the girl at secretarial college who’d have to leave because she got knocked up. She’d got the measure of Angus too, got him to agree to pay for the backstreet abortion, and Aunt Jem, full of surprises, had known just the woman. But Angus had done a bunk the day before, never turned up with the money. Aunt Jem didn’t have it, and then Cassie started saying she’d run away. Have it, then ditch it. That’s when Jem called her nephew. “I don’t know what to do,” she’d said, her voice breaking. “I think she might hurt herself. Or the baby. Can’t you—come and see her?”
That summer was the last time he’d been back here, several visits culminating in the final time, when he came to collect his new daughter. For though things were changing on the King’s Road and elsewhere, in working-class Walthamstow where Cassie lived with Aunt Jem, a nineteen-year-old unmarried mother would have found herself alone and friendless fairly soon. Terry wouldn’t stick around, Cassie was sure of that. She’d lose her place at the secretarial college.
They told everyone Cassie was spending the summer in Ireland, helping a sick aunt. In fact, she came back to the old neighborhood, to Penton Street with Aunt Jem, took a room by the market, had the baby at the University College hospital down the road.
When Cassie handed the ten-day-old baby girl over to David, he took her gently, cradling the soft wrinkled head in one hand.
“Now, listen,” Cassie told him. “I don’t want to see her again.” She was very calm. “I don’t want nothing to do with it. I want to go on and forget all about it.”
He remembered her face when she said it. Only people who’d had a childhood like theirs would understand the need to start again, put the past entirely behind them. He’d done the same thing, after all, hadn’t he?
“Of course,” he’d said, and he’d leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Don’t worry, Cass. Don’t worry anymore.”
• • •
He thought about that now, and Florence growing every day at home, and the leaks and the money pouring down the Winterfold drains.
“I’m not sorry I did it,” she said. “Maybe I should be, but I’m not.”
And David said the first heartfelt thing he’d said all day. “I’m glad you did it too, Cassie. I love her more than—I love her more than if she was my own.”
She gave no sign that this pleased her, but he knew it did. “What’d you call her in the end?”
“We named her Florence. We call her Flo most of the time.”
“Flo.” She said it a few times. “It’s nice. She like me?”
“Yes, she is,” he said. “Really like you. She’s very clever.”
“Oh, sod off.”
“Her language is better than yours, anyway.” She laughed. “She’s very gangly, but very charming.”
“That’s her dad, the weirdo.”
“I think it’s us too. Mum.” They moved out of the way to let two shuffling old ladies pass.
“I was right, wasn’t I? To give her to you? Tell me I was right?”
“I think you were right.” He wished he didn’t feel so sick, so apprehensive, being back here. He’d throw his arms round her, squeeze her tight. “I know you were right, Cassie.
Don’t you want to come and see her one day?” He thought of Florence, kneeling on her bed that morning, trying to make a flower out of paper, tongue sticking out in concentration. “She’s lovely.”
Cassie closed her eyes briefly and gave a bitter little smile. “No, Davy love. I don’t want to ever see her again, all right? Please don’t ask me again. You said you weren’t ever coming back. What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” David said.
His father hadn’t seen the point of Cassie, but her being born meant he didn’t bother David’s mother for a while, and that was a good thing. He kicked David around instead. Balanced him on the mantelpiece once, so he sat there, legs dangling, the coals from the fire burning his bare feet, while his father ate supper and laughed; and when his mother came home and scooped him back onto the floor, he hit her across the face. That time he broke her nose.
So every time he thought of his mother, something would remind him, lead him back to something else. David couldn’t see that the memories were important, that he shouldn’t bury them deep in his heart, that he might do himself more injury that way. He could only see how much they hurt him and his sister, and the damage they could do to Florence. He was sure Daisy knew the truth, he didn’t know how. And he sometimes felt Martha didn’t understand Florence the way he did.
He shivered. Cassie put her hand on his arm. “Listen, Davy. I’d best be off. They’ll be wondering where I went. I only said I was going to the post office. You get back home to Molly and those kids.”
“Martha.”
“All right, then.” She tossed her hair, and he knew she knew what Martha was called. It was just bravado, what they did to get by, the Doolans of Muriel Street. “Good to see you, Davy. Honest.”
It occurred to him she was called Bourne now; that was Terry’s name. And he’d changed his name to Winter. Aunt Jem was dead, a heart attack last year. In a generation, there’d be nothing left of their old family, or their father’s name. Just their children, being brought up in the same house. David took out his little sketchbook, scribbled down his address, tore out the page and pressed it into her cold fingers. “Here. In case you ever need me.”
Cassie shook her head, her mouth clamped shut, her gray eyes swimming with tears. “Don’t ask me again,” she said after a minute. She looked down at the paper, then shoved it into her pocket. A gesture just like Florence’s, full of confidence and strangely awkward. “Got to get back to work now. Good seeing you again, big brother.”
“You too.” He kissed her cheek. “Terry treating you well?”
She waggled her head. “So-so. He’s all right. I’m all right. Hoping to have our kids next year. That’s what Terry wants. Suppose I do too. Anyway, bye, then.” She raised her hand like a signal, and then she was gone.
• • •
As he walked through the crowded backstreets, the old roads he knew so well, past the site of the old mission hall and Grimaldi’s churchyard and the old fishmongers, Cally Road toward King’s Cross, he knew he wouldn’t tell Martha he’d seen Cassie. And afterward, on the train going back to Winterfold, David flicked through the bomb-site drawings again, his eyes taking in every last detail, as if there might be some salvation in it. He knew he’d put them away when he got home, maybe never look at them again. Perhaps it was right they stayed in the past. Perhaps Cassie was right. For the remainder of the journey he practiced drawing Wilbur, as the coal-black steam threw smuts against the carriage windows, taking him farther and farther away from hell and back to his own home.
When he came into the kitchen that evening, teatime was over and the children were outside. He could hear them chanting, some strange game. Martha was slicing up onions for supper. He stood in the doorway watching her, her slim fingers sliding the moon shapes into the red pot. She wiped her eyes on her forearm at one point, her hair falling in front of her face; then she looked up and blinked, laughing to herself, and saw him.
“Hello there,” she said, and he knew he loved her more than anything and anyone in the whole world.
“Hello,” he said, coming toward her. “I’m sorry for this morning. I’m sorry for everything. I didn’t sell the drawings, but I’ve had an idea. A wonderful idea.” He gripped her shoulders and kissed her. “Everything’s going to be great.”
She stepped back, holding the knife, still smiling. “Careful, I’m armed. Well, that’s good news. What’s got into you?”
“Just as I say.” He threw his hat onto the table. “Everything bad is in the past. Everything good is in the future.”
Martha stroked his cheekbone, tracing the line of his eye sockets. “You look exhausted.”
The onion scent on her fingers made his eyes water. He kissed her again and she leaned back in his arms, her back curving away, arms outstretched; then she flung herself around him again and hugged him.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she whispered in his ear, head lying on his shoulder. “I hate arguing with you. I love you, darling.”
“Em, Em . . .” He breathed in the scent of her, closed his eyes. “It’s in the past. I’m getting us a drink. I love you.”
When he’d made them both strong, lime-scented gin and tonics, Martha threw the thyme from their garden into the pot with the chicken, and they went outside and sat on the lawn, watching the children chase the dancing dragonflies, their rainbow wings catching the summer light. Martha sat back in her chair, humming, occasionally calling out to one of them. David gulped his drink down like a dying man. He knew he had seen his past today, in all its forms. And now he had to remake the future.
Martha
March 2013
BILL, DAISY, FLORENCE.
In the weeks after David died, Martha realized that she did not see things clearly anymore. She had lost all sense of what was normal and what wasn’t. She could see the fear in people’s eyes if she walked into the village, when she went to the shop or to church. The horror of grief. She felt marked, like a leper. They wanted to shy away from her because of what she had done, and what had happened in her house that day.
She had to change several aspects of her day-to-day life. At first some were difficult, but it was much better this way.
She didn’t go into the study. There was time to go through his papers, his sketches, the documents of their family. Not yet.
The night it happened, she had found Florence in there, and something about her face, her searching eyes, was like a warning signal. There was too much in the study; it was all him. She couldn’t be going in there, and neither could anyone else. Martha saw that quite clearly.
“I need to use the study,” she told Florence. “Papers in there I need to find.”
“I was just looking for something.” Florence’s eyes were red raw. Her fingers flapped uselessly; she had beautiful hands. She swallowed. “Ma . . .” Then she started crying. Martha stared at her daughter’s sunken, heart-shaped face and knew she couldn’t tell her anything. She stroked her lightly on the arm.
“Just give me a couple of minutes in here, please, darling. The police need some information.”
The next day, Florence left. Left the house less than twenty-four hours after he’d died. Something about a manuscript on loan in London only for one more day. It was a lie, of course.
“If I don’t go now . . . I can’t explain.” She’d rushed forward and briefly embraced her mother; and just as Martha inhaled that familiar Florence smell of coffee, something spicy, her soft hair brushing Martha’s cheek, Florence gave a soft cry that seemed to stick in her throat.
“I don’t know what else to say to you,” she’d mumbled; Martha wasn’t sure, afterward, exactly what it was she’d said. For how could she know? How could her baby girl, the one she didn’t choose but had been handed on a plate, the one she hadn’t loved to begin with, not at all, how could she know? Was it a memory, the truth of the years rolling back like a stone to reveal the
emptiness at the beginning, the huge lie at the heart of it all?
When you were little, you loved to chew my finger. Your long, white, slim little fingers gripping mine, your tiny hard pink gums, your mouth sucking my knuckle, your huge blue eyes as clear as a summer sky. The solid small heft of you in my arms. You in your place with us. And I loved you, even though you weren’t mine.
And then she was gone, like that.
She came back for the funeral, that awful, cold, icy day when everyone except Martha cried, and the earth was frozen so stiff that the men took twice as long to dig the plot, and the ice seemed sewn into the mud, glittering underfoot, as the family gathered around the open grave and watched the coffin lowered in. Martha saw him there, saw the earth she was handed scattering onto the wooden lid, saw the faces of her family—Bill’s eyes hazy with grief, Florence’s red with weeping, hands in front of her mouth, Lucy’s hunched shoulders and flushed cheeks, mouth turned down like a clown’s, Cat biting her woolen-glove-clad finger.
Martha didn’t cry. Not then.
Since the funeral, Florence, like Daisy, had vanished. She was fighting this court case. She was always busy: I have to meet my barrister tomorrow. I have a paper to finish. She’d say she was coming back and then she didn’t. I’m staying with Jim in London. I’ll call you. She never did. The trial’s in May.
And in December or January, May seemed so far in the future as to be ridiculous. He would have come back by then; this was all like the episode in the kitchen, when she had felt herself slipping away. He had gone and would come back. It seemed logical to her.
• • •
Bill, Daisy, Florence.
This is what Martha kept remembering: how it was when they returned from the hospital, nearly five years ago. A hot summer’s day, the hills beyond the house golden and lazy with late-afternoon heat. David was limping, his knee still bandaged. She’d helped him from the car, and then walked with him through to the garden.
“I need to show you something.”
His arm was heavy around her neck as she helped him along the rocky path toward the daisy bank. When they reached the scar of the freshly milled brown earth, he stared down at it.
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