by Fiona Shaw
‘Let’s go,’ Bobby said.
‘D’you want to try my bike?’ Charlie said, because they both knew he’d won the argument and he could afford to be magnanimous.
So they left the angry water and got threepence of chips, and Bobby rode Charlie’s bike up and down by the fountain in the park till he had to go home.
Charlie was about to go home too when he heard his name called.
‘Charlie Weekes, look at you.’
Wheeling round, he saw Annie on the far side of the fountain, arm hooked in with another girl’s. Cycling slowly towards them, he affected as much two-wheeled nonchalance as he could muster, sitting back in his saddle, one hand in his pocket, coming to a small skid-stop.
‘That’s quite a bike,’ Annie said. ‘I hope you came by it in a proper fashion.’
Charlie flushed and Annie’s friend giggled.
‘Got to go,’ she said, and with a peck to Annie’s cheek she strode off with that swinging girl’s walk that somewhere in himself Charlie knew would be important to him one day.
‘It was a present,’ Charlie said defensively.
‘You’re such an only child,’ Annie said. ‘I was teasing.’
‘Dr Markham gave it to me. For getting to school.’
‘Lucky boy,’ Annie said. ‘Give us a croggie home then. I’m knackered.’
‘But you’re too big,’ he said. ‘Won’t you be embarrassed?’
‘I don’t much care,’ Annie said. ‘I think it’s you that’s the embarrassed one.’
‘What if Auntie Pam sees you?’
‘She’s got worse to see than that,’ Annie said, but more to herself than to Charlie. ‘Come on, I’ll be careful of your precious bike. I haven’t seen you in an age. I’ll buy you a KitKat if you get me all the way home.’
It took all Charlie’s strength and concentration to cycle Annie home, so it was only as they freewheeled down the alley that he remembered what had happened the last time he’d been to the house.
‘Is Auntie Pam …’ he began, because he wasn’t coming in if she was there.
‘She won’t be home for another hour. She told me to get the dinner going. So I’ll start on the food and you can sit and tell me how you’re getting on.’
She opened the back door and let them in.
‘My feet are sodden, so yours must be worse. Give me your shoes or Aunt Lydia will accuse me of causing your death when you get pneumonia.’
It was so easy, talking to Annie. He sat on the kitchen stool, his back against the wall, eating his KitKat while Annie made him tea and toast. While he told her all about everything, she scrubbed potatoes, fried onions and laid the table for tea, only interrupting with the occasional question.
Once the tea was on, Annie sat down opposite and started filing her nails.
‘Do you all have tea together?’ she said.
And Charlie explained how Dr Markham often had to eat late, and how she had to go out on call at night and had a bell rigged up in her bedroom so she could hear if anyone rang at the front door.
‘It doesn’t wake you up?’ Annie said.
‘No. Maybe it does my mum, but she’s never said. Because her bedroom’s right next door to Dr Markham’s and there’s a door connecting them from the olden days.’
‘So they’re good friends?’ she said. ‘Your mum and the doctor?’
He nodded.
‘Because of Dr Markham we don’t have to live in one of the houses that are all flooded out. We saw them today, me and Bobby. You could smell the water standing at the top of the street, and there were men wading through it carrying mattresses and cushions. Bobby said all the families have got to sleep in the church hall and when it goes down there’ll be rats in their houses.’
‘Nothing like that thunderstorm last month, though,’ said Annie. ‘That petrified me.’
‘Me too. A bit,’ Charlie said. ‘A boy at school, his uncle was struck by lightning and his hair sizzled on the spot and never grew back.’
Annie laughed.
‘That’s a new excuse for baldness.’
‘I thought my mum had been struck, when she wasn’t in her bed, but then she came in, in her nightie, so it was all right.’
‘Safe and sound,’ Annie said, and Charlie looked up at her tone, because it was a bit sharp, as if he’d said something to annoy her.
‘Does Aunt Lydia feel better now?’ Annie said in a different voice.
Charlie nodded.
‘She doesn’t cry at all. She only sings while she’s cooking. She says she’s never had a best friend like Dr Markham before. She says she’s the kind of friend you only make once in your life.’
‘And do you like her, Charlie?’
‘She gave me my bike, and she’s nicer to my mum than my dad ever was.’
He stopped talking and scratched at a mark on the table. ‘But you tell me some things now.’
Annie laughed and started to answer him, but then the kitchen door was pushed wide and Pam came in.
‘What a nice surprise, Charlie. Nice to hear how your mother is getting on, these days.’
Annie was on her feet like a shot.
‘Mum! You’re back so early. Tea’s all prepared. I bumped into Charlie and so he –’
‘I can see, Annie, I have got eyes. You go bumping into things a bit often, I’d say. I can hear very well too.’
‘Charlie was showing me his bike,’ Annie said, and she was blushing, but Charlie didn’t know why.
He didn’t understand why Annie’s voice was shaking. He didn’t understand why she looked so frightened. He’d seen his aunt cruel and unkind a hundred times, but she was being quite nice today, he thought, for her.
Annie had come round the table and put her arm around Charlie’s shoulders. She was pressing into his skin with her fingertips and pushing him towards the back door.
‘He’s got to go now, or he’ll be late back. I’ll see him off,’ and she opened the back door and nearly pushed him down the step.
‘Go on, Charlie,’ she said. ‘Go quickly before you’re in trouble.’
Pressing a kiss to his head, she shut the back door and he heard the key turn in the lock.
He cycled fast through the dark streets, only stopping on the bridge to catch his breath.
Still the river rushed, crazy and bloated, and it sounded like something from a dream, something he might wake with the noise of and wonder what it was he was afraid of.
‘Where have you been?’ his mother said when he came in, and she brushed her hands off on her apron in such a way that he knew she was angry. ‘It’s pitch dark now, and I told you to be home half an hour ago.’
‘I met Bobby on the big bridge. We watched the water and we went to the park. Sorry, Mum.’
But he didn’t tell her about the visit with Annie, and he didn’t tell her about Pam.
33
The snow that fell in December was dry and hard, skittering on the road like oatmeal, and flurrying in the wind till the ground was white. The first morning, Charlie raced out to see, to stand inside it. He gathered up a fistful, cosseted it in his palms to make a snowball. But it wouldn’t stick. So he scooped armfuls and flung them this way and that, whooping and crying out.
Lydia stood beneath the porch, watching. Charlie called to her. His voice was small, as if the thick air had taken all the substance from it and left only the bare cartilage of sound.
Charlie called to her, and she wished he had a brother or sister, because she didn’t want to join him now. She didn’t want to play. But there was no one else and so she went out and scooped and flung with him till the time was pressing for breakfast.
The weather had sent Jean out early on her visits, worried that the roads might be blocked soon. Because of it, Lydia made Charlie leave his bike in the garage and walk to school in his wellingtons, his shoes wrapped up and bulking out his satchel. She watched him stomp sulkily down the drive, casting a look towards the garage as he went, and she bit back a laugh
. But as he walked out of the gate and out of her sight, she wanted to run after him and gather him into herself and hold him tight.
It had been more than a month now and what had felt almost like playing at first had settled down to being real. Charlie treated this house like his home, and Lydia was beginning to. She left her books in the kitchen and put out the few pieces of her mother’s china in the sitting-room cabinet. Her shoes were stacked beside Jean’s in the cloakroom and her shopping basket hung on the wall in the pantry. She worked out where the draughts came from and went to, which windows stuck and how if you put the wireless on in the kitchen at the same time as the kettle, then the lights wobbled in the sitting room. Each night she shared Jean’s bed and though she now locked her door as a precaution against discovery, Charlie had slept soundly every night since the thunderstorm.
Lydia finished the washing-up and checked her list. There was plenty to be getting on with before the morning surgery, but something in her resisted. She put the kettle on, rinsed the breakfast tea-leaves with boiling water and poured herself a pale cup of tea. She plugged in the bar heater, took the library book from the dresser and sat down at the kitchen table. Taking a deep breath and holding it, she opened the book at the first page and began to read:
When questioned later, the only unusual thing the ticket inspector noticed was that the carriage blinds were kept drawn for the whole journey. But he had given it no more thought than to check in his ticket book for payment taken. After all, it could have been a couple freshly wed, for all he knew, or a wealthy man with much on his mind who wished for no interruption. Besides the inspector had more important things to think on.
But had his knocks for luncheon, then dinner, then breakfast been answered, had the door been opened a little and had he glimpsed in, past the man guarding it, then he might have noticed that a woman slept on one of the lower bunks; slept, that is, for the entire journey – and perhaps the woman would have been glad of his notice, had she not been drugged to oblivion.
Light-headed, Lydia breathed out into the quiet kitchen till her lungs were empty. She loved it when the story hadn’t even begun and anything might happen. She loved it when you didn’t know yet what was important. She wanted to hold on to it, keep the feeling.
With that uncanny talent for finding what they want, the cat turned up and curled into her lap. For half an hour she read and then she put the book back on the dresser shelf, turned off the bar heater and went about her tasks.
If it had been the factory, she’d have been at her place for an hour by now, hands moving quickly, precisely, again and again, eyes focused, only lifting every now and then to snatch a glance at the clock whose arms, she always swore, moved more slowly than time itself.
Lydia had no regrets, but it had taken her by surprise to find that she missed her old home. All her life she’d lived on a terraced street, thick with other people and she was lonely in this big house surrounded by trees and hedges that didn’t think to speak. She wondered how Annie was – she missed the girl – and whether Dot was right. But she was sure she’d have heard, even up here, if she was.
She missed her old work. Not the labour of it, not the monotony or the condescension. But she missed Dot and the others, the bustle and chunter of the place, and she missed leaving it behind at the end of the day. Twice she’d been to visit Dot and they’d sat and gossiped, but there was something awkward in the air between them that they couldn’t get around, and when Dot asked her to come out on Friday with the girls, Lydia made an excuse.
Last night, undressing for bed, Lydia had stood and looked at herself naked in the wardrobe mirror. The air was so cold in her little room, it almost hurt to stand like that, still and upright. She noticed the slope of her shoulders and the slight line of colour where summer just marked her arms. Her feet with their high arches still surprised her. They were like a dancer’s feet, she thought, not hers. She smoothed her hands across her stomach, marking the lines made there by her pregnancy, and ran the flat of her hand over the dark triangle between her legs. At last she stared at her face, staring back uncertain, wondering, had she changed to have fallen in love with another woman? Had something in her body altered to make her a monstrous creature?
She laughed. It was silly to think so. But still it was what people said about people like her. About the men, anyway. You never read stories in the newspaper about women. It was silly because the truth of it was simple. She’d fallen in love with a man once, and she’d fallen out of love with him, and now she’d fallen in love with a woman.
The night before she’d had a dream that lingered in her mind after she woke like a trace of old perfume on a dress not worn for a while. She was standing somewhere sunny and warm and next to her was Robert with Charlie, just a little boy, perched on his shoulders. Charlie sat with his chin dipped into his father’s hair, eyes dropping. Robert had his shirt open and she thought how handsome he looked.
Waking, Lydia turned to look at the alarm clock. Her hand brushed Jean’s breast and, though her mind was elsewhere, she felt her body tighten with desire. But the dream had left such a taste of sadness in her mouth, such bewildering grief for a man she didn’t believe she had loved for years, that she left Jean sleeping and got up and sat alone for a while before it was time to wake Charlie.
The surgery was quiet when Lydia arrived later that morning, just a couple of people waiting in the porch, blowing on their fingers and stamping their feet. She opened up quickly, drawing the curtains in the waiting room, lighting the gas fire, tidying the magazines.
She was glad not to recognize the faces waiting today. No one from the factory. There had been a few and everyone had been friendly enough, but Lydia felt uncomfortable with it. Jean wasn’t back yet from her calls. The snow would probably have slowed her, just as it must have kept some would-be patients at home today. In the consulting room, Lydia touched the wooden honeycomb on the mantelpiece like a votive charm. Charlie’s find, that first time. Something to keep them safe. She thought how different things would have been if he hadn’t noticed it, if he hadn’t been the boy he was. She would never have met Jean, or only on the far side of a doctor’s desk; she wouldn’t be here now. But still she couldn’t shake her sense of sadness and she busied herself to push the feeling away.
‘We’ll never be able to hold hands,’ Lydia said. It was lunchtime and they were eating soup. ‘Not anywhere anybody might see us.’ She cupped her hands around the bowl for warmth. ‘Not even in front of Charlie.’
‘No,’ Jean said, and she began to eat, spooning the soup carefully, methodically into her mouth. She kept her eyes on her bowl.
‘I loved holding hands, when I first knew Robert,’ Lydia said. ‘Claiming him. I didn’t know it would feel so important.’
She looked out through the window, at the white beyond.
‘I used to love it,’ she said again.
‘We can’t, you’re right.’ Jean’s voice cut in sharply. ‘We can’t hold hands because you’re a woman and I’m a woman. So if holding hands is that important, go back to him, why don’t you?’
Lydia looked at her. She’d never heard Jean speak like this; never seen her angry like this. Her mouth was pinched, her hands were moving in angles, setting down the soup spoon with a sharp clat on the bowl, picking up her knife as if she wanted to write something in the air with it, then putting it down and resting her hands in two fists on the chequered oilcloth.
‘But I don’t want to,’ Lydia said. ‘Even if I could, I’d never go back to him. I was just thinking, just trying to understand something, something I’ve been feeling,’ and she bit her lip to stop her tears.
They ate their soup in silence and afterwards Jean washed the dishes and Lydia put the kettle on for a cup of coffee. Jean’s habit. Leaning her elbows on the counter, she stared at the wall as she waited for it to boil. She noticed the bobbles in the plaster, and a stray hair caught fast somehow on the wall, but drifting in the kettle steam. She paused for the water to
fall off the boil, as Jean had told her, and poured it into the coffee jug. She didn’t look at Jean. She didn’t speak.
Then she felt Jean’s hands on her shoulders, felt her kiss the back of her head.
‘I didn’t mean all that,’ Jean said finally. ‘I don’t like it either, having to keep all this secret all the time.’ And then, in a softer voice, ‘I’m sorry.’
She pressed her finger lightly to the back of Lydia’s neck and, soft as soft, ran her nail down over her skin. The touch was so gentle and so insistent, it drew Lydia’s breath from her and she gave out an involuntary ‘oh’.
‘What’s more,’ Jean went on, ‘if you ever tried to go back to him, I promise you, I’d physically manacle you to one of the beehives to stop you, or something else equally dramatic.’
Lydia snorted with laughter and turned round and they kissed, Jean lifting her hand to cup the back of Lydia’s head and keep her close.
Only when they sat down to drink the coffee, nearly cool in the jug by now, did Jean tell Lydia what was on her mind.
‘I’m worried. About where all my patients, all those ill people, are going,’ Jean said.
‘What ill people?’
‘The ones who should be coming in to my surgery, or calling me for home visits.’
Lydia frowned, perplexed. ‘But isn’t it a good thing if not so many people are getting ill?’
Jean drank down her coffee and poured another cup. She banged it on the table, coffee gathering in a small pool.
‘I shouldn’t have time to do this,’ she said. ‘I should be too busy. I should be snatching lunch and longing for a cup of coffee. Like last winter, and the one before.’
‘Maybe people just aren’t as ill,’ Lydia said again.
Jean shook her head. ‘I bumped into Dr Glover. He told me he’s run off his feet. He said he’s got quite a few new patients and he doesn’t know why.’ She stood up. ‘I’ll give Jim a call. It’s time we went to the pub.’