by Jane Gardam
‘But this is a celebration,’ said Kitty Fallowes.
The vicar and Kitty scraped their plates.
The grave-digger closed his eyes.
All Hetty could think of was ink. There happened to be a bottle of blue-black Quink upon the table. Ink, and other things unlikely, were often to be found upon the Falloweses’ board. Ink. Her father picked up the bottle. He undid the stopper. He closed his eyes and inhaled the sharp ink smell and his wife and the vicar pretended not to notice. Her father passed the bottle to Hetty. ‘Life-blood,’ he said. The ink smelled salty, ferrous. Like blood. It brought back to Hetty, and perhaps to her father in times past, examination rooms, the joy of easy questions, the knowledge that all the work had paid off. ‘I can do all this!’ No joy like it. Page after page of wet, salt ink, blotted, legible, confident. It was ink that had freed her. Blessed ink. Ink for immortality. Stronger than history. History itself. There will always have to be ink. ‘Yes? What? Oh, sorry?’
‘I was saying, Hetty,’ said the vicar, ‘that we are all hoping this scholarship business won’t go to your head. I hope you’ll never forget how much of it you owe to your mother.’ Her father held the ink bottle out over the table. For a moment Hetty thought that he was about to use it as a libation on the fruit salad. ‘And I hope that you will never forget what it would have meant to your mother to have been granted an education like yours. She would have been granted a very different life. A fulfilled life. With her own money.’
‘She could have,’ said Hetty. ‘Women did.’
‘But I had mother,’ said Mrs. Fallowes.
The ink bottle hung above the tinned yellow cling peaches and was at length withdrawn and placed back on the table cloth. The grave-digger hung in obeisance over it and examined the reflection of his left eye in the magic pool of winking ink. Then he stirred the ink with his teaspoon.
The vast vicar flung himself about in his chair, helped himself to more fruit salad and poured condensed milk (thirty-five coupons) round and round his pudding bowl from the flowery tin. ‘Your mother has given up a very great deal for you, Hetty.’
Her mother looked down at her pretty arms, humble and assuaged, as though she was lapped in real cream.
The unspoken words around the table had nothing at all to do with Hetty. They said that her mother had married badly. And madly.
The vicar took her mother’s little hand. ‘I am proud of you, Kitty. She is so very much your daughter.’
Oh, bugger off, said Hetty. In her heart.
She slammed out, found her bike and went off to see Una, who was outside the back door of her house in the alley, her bike standing on its handlebars surrounded by sprockets and valves, pumps, spanners and chains. Girton’s new hope was wearing the railway lad’s trousers and a football shirt of her long-dead father when he’d been in the Oundle First XV. Her face was all oil.
‘It’s good, isn’t it? Shall we go and see how Lieselotte got on? Is that your letter? Let’s see it.’
The letter confirming Una’s economic security at Cambridge for the next three years was as streaked with oil as her face.
‘Don’t you care about it? Aren’t you going to put it in a glass case?’
‘Oh, it’s great,’ said Una. ‘Big surprise.’
‘Oh, come on, Una. Everyone knew you’d get it. You and Lieselotte didn’t even have to try.’
‘Oh no? Anyway I was only offered a place at Cambridge and a county grant. You’ve got a state award.’
‘London’s not Cambridge,’ said Hetty. ‘London’s a rag-bag.’
‘Well, stay at school another year and try for Cambridge, then. You’re not eighteen yet.’
‘Don’t be daft. I’m not pushing my luck. They’ve probably made a mistake and there’s another Hester Fallowes rolling about on a floor somewhere in floods of tears and all her relations committing suicide. Anyway, I’ll like London. I liked it at the interview. Even being met by Aunty Norah and going all the way out to Pinner for the night because it wouldn’t cost anything but the tube fare. I bought a dress in Oxford Street for two pounds. Green slime. Wonderful.’
‘Yes, I’ve seen it. You’ll have all your aunties down to see you. All the Café Lonsdale. All that sightseeing. You’ll have to take all of them to see Buckingham Palace and the crown jewels and the Great Vine at Hampton Court. And the Zoo. You’ll have to take the vicar to the Zoo. He’ll treat you to a bread roll at Church House and you’ll have to take him round the lions.’
They left their bikes and took a bus, for Lieselotte lived five miles away at Shields West with two Quaker people called the Stonehouses who had no children of their own. It was not clear how she had fetched up with the Stonehouses in 1939, but they were said to be very left-wing and unconventional and thoughtful about politics. Mr. Stonehouse had been wounded in the First World War in the Quaker Ambulance Service and now spent most of his time in a not very comfortable Lloyd-loom chair with books and pacifist pamphlets about his feet. Mrs. Stonehouse had the pale Quaker face that seems always to be attending to a secret voice. Blue eyes gazed over your head.
She came padding now into the sitting-room carrying a small tray crowded with mugs of Ovaltine. Lieselotte was sitting knitting on the brass coal-box with the beaten metalwork scene of St. George and the Dragon, the only vigorous thing in the room, and her special perch. Beside her was a neatly laid but unlit fire. The room was warm and swam with sunlight and cleanliness. Hetty stirred the mushroom-coloured depths of her Ovaltine and thought about Lieselotte, who had known since Christmas that she had won a top award at Girton, and had now landed the grant to match it.
‘Well, nobody’s surprised,’ said Hetty. ‘You never tell us anything, but I bet you came out wonderfully in the interview.’
‘She never said one word,’ said Mrs. Stonehouse. ‘Not a word to either of us.’ She looked at Lieselotte with great affection.
‘I didn’t say many things at the interview at all,’ said Lieselotte. ‘I thought the German accent might not be very popular.’
‘But it’s a German Jewish accent.’ Hetty was still embarrassed because she was ignorant of everything to do with Lieselotte and uneasy about saying ‘Jewish’. When Lieselotte had arrived in their midst with not a word of explanation, and hardly a word of English, and fat, plain and inarticulate, there had been a general unspoken belief that she was some sort of neutral German who had got into England by accident and couldn’t be sent back. ‘Jews’ meant little except they were people you never met and couldn’t know. There was, of course, Jesus, but you couldn’t know Jesus socially, because He was the Son of God. Other Jews didn’t want to know you socially and made you feel scruffy.
Lieselotte, 1939–1945, had made no friends at the school. None. She had sat at the back of the class producing perfect work, speaking French fast and easily and quite differently from the French teacher, who never corrected her. Each day she had plodded three times back and forth between the Stonehouses’ little villa and the school. Each day she had gone back home for lunch because she had to eat funny food. It was inconceivable that Lieselotte would ever take a bike to bits on the pavement or kiss in corners at school dances, or walk the lanes on Sundays hand in hand with a man. Lieselotte was apart. She was in some way full. Sated. It was as if she had come long ago to the end of experience. The bold English girls on whose empire the sun never set frolicked and giggled about her. They had heard somehow that, at sixteen, Lieselotte had had to go to the police station to be registered as ‘an enemy alien’, but they had never asked questions. They never offered a confidence and she seemed not to mind. They did not let themselves dwell on her and they rejected the idea that it was only the shell of her who sat there at the back of the class, smiling. Only in the last year when work and aspirations had drawn the clever ones together had she somehow become part of the trio. But even so, she was cautious of commitment. And so were Una and Hetty.
‘She makes me feel silly,’ said Hetty’s mother, ‘but I always feel silly with clever people. Except, of course, with Eustace. Eustace draws one out.’
‘Now, that you must not say,’ said the vicar, patting her wrist. ‘Cleverness is nothing. It has no part in the soul.’
Watching Lieselotte today upon the militant coal-box, Hetty saw suddenly something not at all to do with cleverness. Some hint of Lieselotte, some prop withdrawn to leave her straight and strong. Something completed. Something unconquerable.
A few hours later, in the churchyard grasses, Hetty was saying, ‘Lieselotte?’
‘Yes?’ She knitted on.
‘What happened to your mother?’
She knitted.
‘Someone must have told you. Has nobody ever asked you—not even the Stonehouses?’
‘Quakers don’t ask a lot of questions.’
‘D’you find them, well, you know—a bit boring? Jews are supposed to be so, you know, argumentative. Vibrant.’ Hetty was trying to imagine the Stonehouses being vibrant. ‘I mean, didn’t they get excited when you got the letter from Girton?’
‘No,’ Lieselotte said. ‘No, not excited,’ and she began to laugh. Her laughter was very rare and not particularly attractive. It was spluttery and damp. Her eyes streamed. ‘James shook hands with me and Rosie kissed me and then we had a bit of silence.’
‘It wouldn’t have been like that if, you know, if you’d been at home in Germany?’
‘At home?’ she said, and her accent suddenly reverted to long ago. ‘Oh, shot op, Hetty. I am counting.’
Una and Hetty lay still in the grass as Lieselotte counted stitches.
‘There’s a queer thing walking up this grass stalk,’ said Una. ‘It’s like a bullet. It’s far too heavy for it. It is not intelligent. It ought to hurry up and split.’
‘Split?’
‘Into a moth. A great big angry leathery moth.’
‘Thirty-two. Finish. Good,’ said Lieselotte.
‘Why are you still knitting air-force blue when the war’s been over more than a year?’ asked Una.
‘There are still the armed forces.’
‘Yes, but they’re mostly home.’
‘There are pockets in the Far East. There is great need in Germany.’
‘They won’t want woollen socks in the Far East. They won’t want air-force blue in Germany.’
‘Do Quakers always use Christian names, Lieselotte?’
‘No. They use given names.’
‘You could change to an English name!’
‘I’m a Jew. And I am a German.’
‘Maybe you’ll become something else at Cambridge.’
‘Like what? A Seventh-day Adventist? Oh, Hetty, Hetty! Oh, child.’
‘I’m two months older than you.’
‘You are child in the womb.’
‘You were born grown-up, Lieselotte,’ said Una.
‘Hetty is clever, so,’ said Lieselotte. ‘And for all I know she is an angel, so. But she is babe unborn and child of babe unborn.’
‘So, so, so,’ said Hetty. ‘If you mean my mother, I couldn’t agree more.’
Una turned on her stomach, and her face now almost grazed the flaking oval disc on the side of the tombstone that told the tale of an eighteenth-century dame and her brood. ‘D’you know what it says on this, Het? It’s Latin. Come on.’
‘It says the geezer died,’ said Hetty, ‘and his wife died, but before she died she had twelve children and they all died, and before he died he married again and the new one had eight children (he was quite a goer). And then she died and she was still only, let’s see, twenty-seven. Nice sort of life. We’re pretty lucky. Makes you want no children. They must have been scared crazy in the eighteenth century when they got, you know, pregnant. I’m not having any children. Even now, it’s dangerous. And disgusting. Even if they don’t die.’
‘I shall marry,’ said Lieselotte, ‘and I shall have many children. And they will not die.’
The late afternoon sun was as hot as ever. ‘That was thunder,’ said Una. ‘We’re all going to get soaked. We’d better run for a bus.’
Lieselotte was catching a different bus from Hetty and Una, on the opposite side of the road.
Hetty and Una rolled out of the flattened grass, leaving in it for a short time the impression of their narrow bodies, like the forms of hares. Lieselotte wound up her knitting and put it in the linen bag. Big splashes of thundery rain began to fall about the churchyard. Hetty thought: We shall probably never come back to this place.
When they reached the road Hetty called across to Lieselotte at the bus stop opposite. She felt brave and affectionate with happiness. ‘Sorry, Lieselotte. I didn’t mean to ask about your mother.’
Then her bus and Una’s came swishing up in the rain, and they jumped in and Hetty swung out on the bar as the bus swept away, calling again to Lieselotte, who was struggling with a queer grey mackintosh that looked like wet tissue-paper and kept ballooning out around her fat body. There was the impression of glittering glasses, and wildness. Lieselotte was slapping and slapping at the mackintosh, which wouldn’t stay down over her stout legs. She didn’t look up.
‘She looks like a grey boiled sweet,’ said Una. ‘We won’t be seeing much more of her, you know.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’s cleverer than us. She is a Jew. She’ll find her own sort. She’s somebody, Lieselotte is. She’ll soon forget us.’
‘But we’ve just started knowing her.’
‘You can’t really know her. She’s a Jew and we’re not.’
‘How d’you know we can’t?’
‘It’s common knowledge. Jews have a secret life and they’ve drawn tighter together now. After, you know, Belsen and that.’
They both turned their minds from this unbelievable word. They had seen the film. They had watched in silence. They hadn’t referred to it again. A blank.
And I have secrets, too, thought Hetty. My mother and the vicar, and my mother and Eustace. And my feelings in my father’s arms. And sex and that. And—
But she could not on this happy day think of anything else worth calling secret. Not much. The hollow of the two wars that had shaped her. Maybe the deep thing she felt for Una, and the depth of her sadness about her own and Una’s Pa.
3
The Lonsdale Café was the Versailles of Shields East, the melting pot for ideas and discoveries, the epicentre of the post-war world. It was a long, grey room with a dirty glass ceiling lately rescued from swathes of blackout crepe, a dusty piano at one end with candlesticks on metal brackets, one broken. The small tables still boasted table-cloths made of cloth, though very thin, and there was, intermittently, a waitress of great age, like the last ethnic Tasmanian, waddling between the tables in a black dress worn shiny and a frilled apron grown small over the war years. It had been intended for a fly young girl long gone off to munitions in turban, red lipstick and slacks.
To this establishment there came now, several times a week, in peacetime again, their other duties done, respectable survivors of the old town. They gathered here partly from a hunger they had not felt during the war. The bottled coffee looked like gravy browning but cost only a penny-ha’penny. The penny cakes were so hard they bounced, but they were metaphors for the past. The women in their shabby pre-war coats brought with them gloves which they laid upon the table like passports. They wore felt hats with a small bird or a feather or a piece of painted fish bone in the hatband. They lifted their cups with little fingers raised, as courtesans of the Regency, a secret sign, and sat discussing one another.
Most of the women of one particularly large group were Mrs. Fallowes’s friends. Her friends were multitudinous, though none knew her as Hetty did. All at the Lonsdale sang a litany—as Mrs. Fallowes did too—on all their friends,
all appearing to concur until one or other got up to go home. Then the theme would be taken up again but played in a different key. ‘No love lost in the Lonsdale’ was a refrain of the grave-digger, but in fact there was no love to lose. Not actually love, unless it was the love born of cemented experience, love maybe of their own presence there. ‘It is only contingency,’ said the grave-digger, ‘contingency and hats.’
But there was one thing every woman there agreed upon and that was Kitty Fallowes. A very nice, pretty-faced, good woman, a real friend. Too religious, which must be hard on her daughter these days, but somehow it suited her. The atmosphere in that house of course was very intense, Kitty often falling on her knees and weeping. She had been seen through the glass door of the vestibule, though that vicar was obviously a help to her. ‘Obviously!’ They looked hard at one another. ‘Now, Mr. Fallowes—’ There would then be a rolling of eyes. A husband was meant to be a bread-winner, a man who each day went to work at a certain time and returned home at five o’clock to a properly laid-up meal and a quiet evening with the wireless. Mr. Fallowes had never stepped inside an office and was always covered in earth.
One of the reasons that the Lonsdale liked Kitty Fallowes was that she really did feel most deeply for them all, especially about their health. She rejoiced with those who rejoiced, though there hadn’t been a lot of that about except on VE and VJ days, which somehow had been very flat. Each time it had been very disappointing weather for the street-parties.
But what she did, most superbly, Kitty Fallowes, was to weep with those that wept. As others are drawn to pleasure, Kitty Fallowes was drawn to death and dying and was an over-enthusiastic predictor of the first manifestations of both. She prepared you. Magnificently. It was said by the unkind that she’d been known to adapt her clothes for mourning for those still living. Like the eighteenth-century tombstones, she gathered to herself the fullest register of misfortunes and reacted to new information about them with very comforting excitement.