by Jane Gardam
She always thought ahead, and it was always on somebody else’s behalf. Her Birthday Book was thick as a train timetable. She could give only modest birthday presents—a card of pins, a handkerchief of her grandmother’s, a few bread units and once, in 1945, a potato; but she never forgot. Kitty Fallowes was profoundly, most sombrely religious but, for one who looked so confidently towards the release from the sorrows of this world, she was put into an intensity of concern by small disorders. A shivering fit was always a rigor. A bad cold was a congestion of the lungs. In the air raids she had been stalwart and when it came to real sickness or a death of someone close to her she was almost nonchalant. Yet everyday indispositions were as the Black Death and, the more insignificant her acquaintance, the more assiduous she was in enquiring for them and reporting on them.
‘Most of it’s boredom,’ said her husband. ‘Imaginary illnesses. In the raids we all had to jump to it.’ When her brother was killed at Arnhem Mrs. Fallowes had been magnificent, and quite stern with the man’s poor wife. But again, ‘She didn’t like either of them much,’ said Mr. Fallowes to Hetty. Mrs. Fallowes spoke of her own ill health, indeed of everybody’s, of life itself, as a treacherous river on which we are flung at birth and must struggle against until this transient miserable body, the soul’s guest, merges properly into the sea of heaven.
These beliefs Kitty did not discuss directly in the Lonsdale Café, where she spent most of the time talking about Hetty, of whom she was tremendously proud and tremendously jealous. Mrs. Fallowes’s poor health as a child (the local doctor was famous for prescribing only glasses of water) had meant that she had had almost no education, and like many High Church women of the time, filled with the idea of making their bodies a living sacrifice and trying not to think of sex except as a method of pleasing a husband, she had thrown her passions into motherhood and Church ritual. And penitence. And Confession. And ‘being unworthy’. ‘Unworthy of gathering up the crumbs under Thy table,’ she always intoned in church beside the kneeling Hetty with desolation, even relish. She had been brought up by holy spinster aunts of a certain social standing who had held the civilised world together in Shields East, and these long-dead women were still of great importance to her. The hazy memory of them among the aficionados of the Lonsdale Café, and her lack of a Yorkshire accent, set her a little apart from the other ladies there, who were mainly people most regrettably not born in the town.
On the morning of the letter about Hetty’s great award, Mrs. Fallowes set off for the Lonsdale at the first opportunity to inform the known world.
‘I don’t suppose you want to come with me?’ she asked Hetty as she powdered her nose with a puff.
‘You’re right.’
‘They’d all love to see you, you know. Miss Bland’s so fond of you and her sister’s very ill.’
‘No thanks. I have to write letters.’
‘Letters could wait for one morning. You do know that Elsie Richardson’s going blind?’
‘I have to write straight off and tell the College. If she’s blind why don’t you just pretend I’m there?’
‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll hold on to your place if they don’t hear till the weekend. It’s library half-closing and Miss Kipling will be there. Now, you do owe her something, Hetty. And Mrs. Brownley’s always wanted a daughter, poor childless soul, though there wasn’t ever much hope—well, of course he was gassed—but she’s always been so interested in you. And she has that bowel trouble and a really terrible leg. Whoever needs a letter so soon?’
‘Oh, well, I suppose—Eustace.’
‘Oh. Eustace. Well, yes, of course you must write to Eustace, if he’ll ever get it on the Salisbury Plain. I’ll tell them that you’ll be going round to see them all, shall I?’
‘What, all of them?’
‘All the women?’ said the grave-digger. ‘She has to call round on all those women? Whatever for?’
‘Well, they’ll want to congratulate her. They’re very fond of her.’
‘Yes, but is she fond of them?’
‘That is not a Christian attitude, Malcolm. And I expect they’ll want to . . . give her little things.’
‘Well, now you’re talking.’
‘Sounds like a layette,’ said Hetty. ‘A fallen maiden.’
‘That will do, Hetty. It’s a formality, going to call on people. Formalities are going. We used to give the telegraph boy ten shillings in the war, when it was good news. Though it wasn’t very often. I think, Malcolm, we ought to have given the postman a ten-shilling note.’
‘I haven’t got a ten-shilling note. Not till the next commission. Have a look at Mrs. Brownley’s leg.’
‘You’re a cold man, Malcolm. Oh, I wish we had a telephone. There’s not a call-box till the town clock. Now, write to Eustace, Hetty, and come down to the Lonsdale later.’
But Hetty had disappeared.
‘Well, just at this moment she is writing to tell her boyfriend,’ she told the assembled company, while the old waitress creaked among them with the thick white cups. ‘Oh, well, yes, of course. She’s thrilled. And so of course are we.’
‘Is that the officer?’
‘Well, Eustace is not exactly an officer. He’s what is called “officer material”, I’m told. There’s not much time for these national-service boys to become officers.’
‘My sister’s Roy is,’ said someone.
‘People think he must be an officer because he’s so tall. He’s been a great help to her. With the exams. He has very nice manners. D’you know, he writes letters to me as well. It makes him seem part of the family. He’s very good with people of our age. Mine and Malcolm’s, though I’m afraid Malcolm doesn’t care for him so much as I do, but then Malcolm was in the trenches. No, Eustace would do anything for us. He cuts the grass. Of course, we’ve given him a lot of hospitality.’
‘Is it serious?’ asked the public librarian, Miss Kipling.
‘Oh, no. Just great friends. It’s early days.’
‘Is he well-off?’ asked Mrs. Legge.
‘Oh, I’ve no idea. The family’s in commerce.’ (She had found out that Eustace’s father managed a hat shop in Felixstowe.) ‘I mean, Hetty is only at the very start of her life.’
‘I’ve no belief in women with careers,’ came from the mound of rags in the new mechanical wheelchair that was Mrs. Eaves. ‘It shrinks the womb.’
‘The one worry I do have about Eustace,’ said Mrs. Fallowes, ignoring this interesting concept for the moment, ‘but I don’t say so to Hester of course, is that he doesn’t look very strong. He has that high colour.’
‘Does he cough?’
‘No, I’ve not noticed a cough, but, yes, he is what you’d call tubercular-looking. I’d not think that he’d live very long.’
‘Can Hetty cook?’
‘I beg your pardon, dear? Oh, cook. Well, you know, none of them can these days.’
‘Well, we should all be watching our vitamin intake, cook or not,’ said Mrs. Brownley, a very nice woman who was always presenting people with healthful things, especially now that foreign fruits were occasionally available. At the moment she was very taken up with grapefruit.
‘I bought this for Hetty,’ she said. ‘A little gift of congratulation. I knew she’d do it! You’d be surprised how far you can stretch a grapefruit, if you present it well. First you prise it out of the skin, if you can find one of those curved little knives we all had once. Yes. And then you squeeze the flesh. Yes. And let it lie all night with the skins sliced up on top of them—it makes all the difference if they’re on top. And then you pour it all—not the skins, all the nice mush—into a screw-top jam-jar. And then you shake it. Very hard. With a little saccharine.’
‘Is it the Classics?’ asked Miss Kipling.
‘The Classics?’
‘Is Hetty going to read Classics?’
‘Oh, yes. I think so. Almost all of them.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Miss Eaves. ‘I’m very glad she’s not passing over the old Classics. I really loved Jane Eyre. I thought she was doing something boring like Latin and Greek. I hope she’ll read Trollope, too.’
‘And if you have a refrigerator,’ said Mrs. Brownley, ‘which I am lucky enough to have, John working at the ICI, you can store it for several days. And you’ll find it deliciously cold. I hear that Jewish girl is very ill.’
‘Lieselotte?’ Mrs. Fallowes’s eyes grew large with alarm. ‘Oh, no. No, she can’t be. She was perfectly all right yesterday; they were all together somewhere, celebrating. All the afternoon. Oh dear, ill? Will it be all the emotion, d’you think? And not a word from Germany, you know. There’s never been confirmation, you know, one way or another. Most of them have heard by now. There must be someone left who could lay claim to her. A whole year. Oh, ill?’
‘Well, she’s got something, or so I heard. She may not be exactly ill. A cold. Sitting in grass and waiting for buses in the rain. She’s an indoor girl of course. Hardly goes out. Jews are supposed to have strong constitutions, but they’re not outdoor types.’
‘We could never get her into the Guides,’ said Hilda Fletcher (and thought: And Hetty only turned up twice).
‘But she’s German too. And Germans are outdoor types whatever else they’re not. I can’t think how she comes to let it be known she’s German. You’d think she’d have said Austrian. I expect it’s living with Quakers: they’re so truthful.’
‘There won’t be much interest in good food there,’ said Mrs. Brownley. ‘There’ll be very small helpings.’
‘But she never did look a well girl,’ said somebody else, as though Lieselotte Klein were already dead.
4
Oh, Hetty? Hetty? Are you about?’ called her mother. ‘I’m afraid Lieselotte’s been taken very ill. It sounds like a severe flu. She caught it waiting for a bus. Oh dear—just when everything’s going right for her at last.’
‘She’s tough,’ said Hetty.
‘And Mrs. Brownley’s sent you a grapefruit. In a bottle.’
‘What an odd reward for gaining a university place,’ said the grave-digger. ‘Oughtn’t she to have sent it to Lieselotte?’
‘Yes. Perhaps you should take it round to Lieselotte, dear.’
‘No, thanks, it’s mine,’ said Hetty. ‘I like grapefruit. I can count the grapefruits coming into this house the past five years. Nil. I don’t know where she gets them.’
‘Perhaps she sells her body,’ said the grave-digger.
‘Lieselotte’s had plenty of Ovaltine,’ said Hetty. ‘It was pretty well on tap. Covered in skin. Oh, O.K., I’ll go and see her, but she was fine yesterday.’
‘Well, don’t stand too close. She may have been harbouring something and it will have become released with relaxation after the good news. Oh—and did you write to Eustace?’
Dear Eustace,
Thanks for all your letters. I’ve been meaning to write but got rather half-hearted. I’m glad you don’t put your letters to me in the same envelope as the ones you write to my mother, which she hides in her lingerie.
I’ve got a big state scholarship so that I can take up the award to London. Nice letter. Came on posh paper. A lot of it is thanks to you. So thanks.
Thanks very much, Eustace. You did a lot for me.
Great excitement here and I’ve been given a bottle of crushed grapefruit.
I hope the survival course went well. I didn’t know you’d have to do that sort of thing in the Pay Corps but I suppose it does take some surviving.
I’m thinking of going away for a bit, and I’ll let you know for how long when I have it organised. It will be for as long as possible. I haven’t mentioned it here yet, so please don’t you, when you send your next letter to my mother. I’ve realised I have a lot of work to do so that they don’t find out that, apart from what you taught me, I’m practically illiterate.
Love, Het.
She sat looking with interest at what she had written, wondering at the louche, confident, uncaring girl it revealed. She was surprised at her plan of escape and wondered where the words had come from.
Going away for a holiday, am I? Correspondence certainly clarifies the mind, she thought. I have even remembered that I have the money.
She wondered which girl Eustace had fallen for, the easygoing letter girl or the humble maiden in the lanes. He would not find her style in this letter unexpected, for she had always sounded off like this in letters; but the physical presence of the Hetty he knew was the silent bluestocking of Sunday afternoons. He had never commented on the stark, uncaring Hetty of the letters. She had sent similar ones before. Sometimes she wondered if he ever read them.
There was a mystery about Eustace. A dichotomy. He played parts, she rather suspected. The pedant, the wooer, the grandee and the Minstrel Boy who to the Wars had Gone. ‘Ye gods,’ as the grave-digger would say, ‘who was he?’
And who the hell am I? So thought this morning’s common, flashy Hetty. I’m off to Una’s.
She biked round to her friend, pausing on the way beside the litter-basket outside the post-office, the post-office windows empty except for newspapers and flypapers. She went in and bought a penny-ha’penny stamp, stuck it on Eustace’s letter and then chucked the letter in the litter-bin. ‘Well, I have written it,’ she said, and rode off. Then she swerved round, circled back, leaned over from the bike and retrieved it. Then she binned it again.
She sat in Una’s kitchen soon, and they shared the grapefruit between two small bowls, carefully measuring the juice. Una’s mother passed through the kitchen from her hair-dressing salon at the front of the house. The salon had once been the seat of the doctor’s surgery and still held the whiff of anxiety and prognosis. It was not a busy hairdresser’s, since it was claimed that Mrs. Vane was self-taught and some of her clients were a little afraid of her, for she was an uncommunicative, mocking woman with gypsy eyes. But she was cheap.
‘We’re going out,’ said Una, ‘to Lieselotte. She’s ill, or something.’
Mrs. Vane hummed a tune from her lost, thé-dansant years.
‘We ought to take her something.’
‘Whatever for?’ said Hetty. ‘We never have before. You sound like my mother. We’re not old.’
‘Yeah, but we’re not kids. And Germans are generous.’
‘She’s never given us anything,’ said Hetty.
They finished their grapefruit and pedalled the five miles to Shields West, where they propped the bikes against the Stone-house kerb beside the seafront. Mrs. Stonehouse opened the door and, exactly as before, shook both of them by the hand and stood aside for them to pass. Mr. Stonehouse seemed not to have moved since their last visit, but there was now nobody seated on the coal-box. Mr. Stonehouse laid aside the Daily Herald, rose, then he also shook hands, and silence found its way among them.
‘We heard that Lieselotte isn’t very well,’ said Una at last.
‘She is quite well,’ said Mrs. Stonehouse, ‘but unfortunately she isn’t here any more. She has been rehabilitated.’
‘What—to Hamburg? She can’t. Not in one day!’
‘It is a repatriation of a kind, but not to Hamburg. No. She has simply gone away. The Award letter was quite a coincidence. Nothing to do with it. We had heard nothing about repatriation, but I think the Jewish organisations—the Kindertransport—may have been in touch with her. She has been getting a few letters that she has never explained.’
‘But she was with us on Monday! She was in the churchyard, knitting. She never said.’
‘I don’t think she can have known it would be so soon. I think it is to do with something that’s been discovered about her family. It was not for us to ask, we felt.’
‘But what if it had happened in the middle of h
er exams?’
‘Something to do with America,’ said Mrs. Stonehouse. ‘A visa has been procured somehow.’
‘I don’t think the exams really came into it,’ said her husband. ‘We must just wait to hear from her.’
The quiet house that had protected Lieselotte from her early years of nightmare blazed with summer light from the sea. At the front door again, Mrs. Stonehouse allowed herself to say, ‘It really is very sudden. We’re trying to get used to it.’
She opened the door wider and wider, holding the handle tight. ‘We’re trying to get used to it, but we feel very . . . diminished without her. And very sad.’
‘Well, I should think so!’ said Hetty. ‘Well, it’s mad. It can’t be for ever? She’ll probably walk in again tonight.’
‘York,’ said Mrs. Stonehouse. ‘They were taking her to York.’
‘Well, it sounds like the Gestapo. But at least it’s not far. It must be a temporary thing, York.’
‘She was up, packed and away with them. All in a few minutes. She’s left her books, and most of her clothes. Very nice people, but rather bossy. They weren’t Quakers.’
‘York?’
‘We did just wonder if they’d said “New York”.’
They stood on the doorstep again, saying goodbye, the sandy, salty wind blowing right through the house and out of the open back door, where sheets and pillowcases were galloping on a clothesline in the wind. It was as if Lieselotte had been gathered up, laundered and would soon be folded away.
‘She’s left her mac,’ said Hetty, seeing the dead grey tissue-paper bird hanging from a hook in the passage.
‘She didn’t care for it,’ said Mrs. Stonehouse. ‘It was mine. I don’t care for it very much either. I think she’s going to be very well-provided-for now. There seemed to be talk of money, though they were all chattering away in German, which of course we have been unable to do with her. At first she just listened and looked . . . well, quite vacant. And then she began to stumble into it. And then she began to talk quite fast. She quite lit up. We heard a different voice. A new person. An excited person.’