‘Show her!’ Mrs Billings said. ‘Go on!’
‘Do I have to?’ Norah cried.
‘Yes!’
Slowly, Norah pulled off the shawl. Her once dirty-blonde hair was streaked with blue and green. Beatrice covered her mouth with her hand and allowed herself a smile.
‘Ink,’ said the headmaster. ‘Is this your doing?’
‘No, sir,’ Beatrice told him, honestly.
‘But you said!’ Norah squealed. ‘You said!’
Beatrice tried to compose herself. She focused on the large globe of the world, fading on the window ledge; that pale Atlantic Sea.
‘I just happened to mention,’ Beatrice said carefully, ‘that I had heard that ink might be good for the hair.’
‘Then you were obviously misinformed,’ said the headmaster.
‘What are you going to do about it?’ said Mrs Billings, rising to her feet. ‘My daughter looks … hideous!’
Norah began to cry again.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Beatrice. ‘I had no idea that you would want to wash your hair in ink. I know I wouldn’t.’
‘The impudence!’ said Mrs Billings.
The headmaster, who was very fond of Beatrice, punished her reluctantly. He could not face using the cane, so he told her that she must copy out Psalm 119, not because it was particularly relevant to the so-called crime, but because it was the longest.
‘And don’t go praying for my forgiveness,’ she told her brother that night, her hand already aching. ‘Because I’m entirely innocent. And anyway,’ she added, ‘it was worth it.’
9. Housekeeping
From the age of six, when her father had left teaching and the neighbours left him to it, Beatrice’s life had been full of fly-by-night housemaids who had baulked at the dust, the birds and her father’s unpredictable temper. Joanna had appeared soon after her eighth birthday and had stubbornly refused to let the dirt and feathers get the better of her. When she went away two years later, her cheeks blazing, prematurely forced into the arms of her nurseryman (they had five blissful weeks before the horse got him), she left a rambling three-storey house that was cluttered and in need of a top-to-tail clean at least once a fortnight, what with two messy children, a man living in his own feathery fog, sixty-five dead birds, forty-four small stuffed mammals, and various ornaments that practically begged the dust to land on them. It was a difficult job for anyone.
At first, no one noticed the mess, though in any case, her father barely noticed anything, apart from his creatures and solutions, the Journal of Native American Wildlife, and How to Mount, by J. A. Flindermann, which he always brought to the table, flicking between ‘Arsenic as a Preserve’ and ‘Skinning Small Mammals’.
These meals were now haphazard affairs. Joanna, though not much of a cook, had usually managed to assemble something that passed as wholesome – a broth, vegetables in abundance (courtesy of Cormac), a piece of grilled meat or fish, and all at set times. These times rarely altered, and even the erratic Mr Lyle seemed to have an inbuilt alarm, perhaps his very own cuckoo clock, that told him when his plate was on the table. Now that Joanna had gone, meals were cold, or lukewarm by default. They came from inside packets and cardboard boxes. Saltines, lumps of cheese in wax paper, jars of compote, German ham, occasionally a loaf. These things were ripped apart, and often never left the table, from where the family were able to graze.
Mealtimes were now any time you felt a rumble, an ache, a feeling of emptiness, when cracker boxes would be reopened, the crackers spread with jelly, peanut butter, chicken paste, shrimp mousse, in fact anything that happened to be left over from Joanna’s last big foray to the grocers, the bill still tacked above the groaning kitchen sink.
Then one day Beatrice saw it, all at once, like her eyes had been washed. Hacking at a square of pressed beef, she suddenly saw the clutter, the crumbs, the dust hanging in the air like a curtain, silverfish, grease, the grey smeary tint on the windows.
‘I can’t stand this any longer,’ she said, putting down her knife, suddenly feeling queasy.
‘What?’ Elijah looked up. He was flicking almonds into his mouth.
‘This filth. Can’t you see it? This whole house is filthy.’
Elijah shrugged. He could see their father passing the kitchen window, carrying a barrel. He flicked another nut and it landed at the back of his tongue, making him choke it into his hand.
‘Just look at us,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you ashamed? I don’t know how you of all people can stand it.’
‘Me of all people?’
‘Isn’t cleanliness next to godliness?’
‘Well,’ he said, contemplating another almond, and then going for the beef, ‘I think we’re talking about purity of the soul here, rather than anything physical.’
She swooped on the crumbs. ‘Are you going to help me?’ she asked, rubbing them into the sink, a sink that was already clogged with bowls and plates, globs of fat, shrunken cherries, a shrimp.
‘I don’t know, it’s a very big job.’
‘Think of it as a mission.’
‘By the time we finish, the house will be all messed up again. It will be a complete waste of time.’
It took nine days and a pile of fresh rat droppings to persuade him. They pumped water into pails, and found some disinfectant. They scooped debris into sacks. Beatrice mopped the floors until her elbows numbed. Then she washed the windows. Upstairs, Elijah changed the blankets and the greasy crumpled sheets that had been nibbled by moths. Somehow, he felt good about it. He even cleaned the bathtub, the solid black rim, the plug caught up with those wet angelic feathers. It was a big job. Huge. It took them ten days. Then Beatrice asked her father for some housekeeping money.
‘Money? What on earth for?’ He was studying a catalogue from a firm in Minneapolis, specialising in realistic glass eyes and reproduction beaks.
‘Food?’
He looked up, as if he didn’t know what the word meant, and then suddenly it dawned on him.
‘You can cook? A real cooked meal, all set out on a plate, and everything?’
She didn’t know what to say. She’d imagined plate chicken pies from Hoffmann’s, and maybe fried potatoes and a tub of creamy coleslaw from the stand on Wilton Avenue.
‘Joanna always said I was too young to cook, what with all the sharp knives and the heat.’
‘Nonsense! When I was a boy our kitchen maid was nothing more than a slip of a girl. Anyway, you’re older now,’ he said. ‘You must be.’ He was getting a headache. He’d been soaking rabbit pelts and the solution had got behind his eyes. ‘How old are you exactly?’
‘I’m ten.’
‘Elijah? Is ten old enough to cook?’
‘I don’t think so.’ He looked worried. Beatrice was small for her age. He’d seen how the stove flamed orange, spitting out its fiery coals. It had burnt Joanna’s apron. It had scarred her chubby hands. ‘I could try?’ he ventured. He didn’t want to, but, as a Christian, he thought it was the right thing to say.
‘Boys don’t cook, end of story,’ their father said to his catalogue. ‘I’ll leave some money on the fireplace every Monday. See what you can do with it.’
And so, at the age of ten years and nine months, Beatrice Lyle became their housekeeper. She did most things, though she let Elijah do the bathroom and the bedding because she didn’t like the moths, or the feathers in the tub. A woman called Mrs Oh took in all their laundry.
10. Snow
One February morning, Beatrice woke early and the world sounded different. True, her clock was still ticking by her bedside, there was the faint grunt and wheeze of Elijah through the wall, and the bell of St Bede’s was ringing the half-hour over on Morton Street. These sounds were the same, but something had changed.
It was half past five and the room looked blue. Rubbing her crusty eyes she got out of bed and slumped against the window, where she opened them properly, before rolling them into a squint. The yard had vanished. The world outside wa
s white, clean and perfect. Creeping downstairs, Beatrice pulled her thick winter coat from the hook, jammed her bare feet into her boots, and stepped into the stillness, breathing it in, blinking, as her eyes became used to this new kind of light. She moved, and the world began to creak. Above her head she could hear a steady dripping and the fading full moon sparked across the rooftops. Beatrice shivered, but she didn’t feel the cold because she was somewhere else entirely, stamping her initials in the Arctic, avoiding polar bears, jumping carefully from B to L, then falling down on the soft sweet square that used to be a lawn, where her thick sleeved coat made fat angel wings.
Behind her, the windows were blank dark rectangles. The house was tightly closed and Elijah would be sleeping, unaware, dreaming of a ministry and a large open-mouthed congregation. This white world was her secret, and it felt good to have it first, and to herself, but now her hands were starting to freeze, and her back was feeling wet. Scrambling to her feet, she shook out her sleeves, telling herself that she’d circle the garden before going back inside. A cat began to wail. Beatrice looked behind her, and suddenly the snow wasn’t a good thing any more, it was a thief, a ghost, the sheet they’d wrapped her mother in. How many times had Elijah told her about that sheet? Her heart was racing, jumping into her throat, as she slipped, arms outstretched, and the snow felt like glass on the open palms of her hands. Then she saw the blood. Two red spots spreading over the white. She was next to the outhouse. Frozen. At the window there was a bright unsteady glow from the kerosene lamp and she could hear her father moving things, working already. He sounded happy. He was singing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, tapping out the tune with something that might have been a hammer.
PATRIOTIC
‘YOU KNOW, I feel like a soldier,’ said Jonathan. ‘Do I look like a soldier?’
Beatrice laughed. ‘You only signed up an hour ago.’
‘Thanks to good old Vesta Tilley.’
‘Never mind Vesta Tilley, I’m worried.’
‘Look, darling,’ he smiled, pouring them both a large slug of brandy, ‘with all these new recruits, we’ll soon have the Boche on their knees.’
It was the song that made them do it; every single one of them had signed up that night, hesitant at first, shuffling in their worn velvet seats and looking at the line down the aisle, those millhands, the office workers, quarrymen, men who suddenly looked young and haughty, and brave. How could they stay in their seats after that?
Vesta Tilley had finished her last number. At least they thought she had. They were applauding, the ladies were reaching for their bags, and then the curtain went back with a jerk, dust motes flying into the footlights, and there she was again, stamping her little boots and pointing with a baton, singing, ‘We don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go!’ It had made their spines tingle, making them feel they should be doing something better, because what on earth were they doing, sitting in a theatre enjoying themselves, when they could be out there, doing their bit, a bit that could make all the difference?
‘When will you have to go?’ Beatrice asked.
‘First thing in the morning for the medical, then off somewhere for training.’
‘So soon?’
‘They need us. Aren’t you proud of me, darling?’
‘Oh for sure I’m proud, but it feels like I only just got here, and you’re leaving me already.’
‘An Englishman’s duty and all that.’ Jonathan smiled and tried to ignore her red eyes. The brandy was warming through his nerves. Yawning, he put his feet up on the ottoman. His head was buzzing; he could see himself in khaki, on a sleek chestnut gelding. There were rolling green hills and lines of rearing horses, like a painting he’d seen of the Napoleonic War. He was shouting crucial orders to men in smart lines.
‘There’s only Lionel left,’ Beatrice mused. ‘Lionel and the farmer.’
‘What?’ He’d been dreaming about France. He’d always wanted to go to France. He would take his guidebook up to bed. ‘Lionel?’ he said. ‘Lionel Bailey must be at least seventy and no bloody use to anyone at the front.’
‘It’s not his fault,’ she shrugged. ‘We can’t help when we’re born.’
On his way upstairs, Jonathan plucked the guidebook from the shelf; though he was swaying slightly, and his eyes were prickling, he wanted to read something about the place, to see the names of those foreign French towns, and the folded tissue maps. Beatrice let him go, she was wide awake, and she sat for a while at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of milk.
It was January 1915, and Britain had already been at war for nearly six months. Jonathan had followed all the action in The Times, positive that things would end before long, and Beatrice had believed him. Across the top of the window, icicles dripped like small jagged teeth as she pulled up her feet, covering them with the hem of her cold pleated skirt. Sipping the milk, circling her finger over the rim of the glass, she thought about her uncle Sonny, a navy man who’d been in Cuba in 1898, and the stories he’d told with a wince in his face. ‘They made me come home,’ he’d said. ‘But I felt like I’d abandoned them, and the men who were killed still talk to me in my sleep every night. They tell me that they’re lost. That they’re not really dead at all.’
She rinsed her glass slowly and looked through the window. The sky was a cold pitch black. She walked through the sitting room, with the remains of the fire, the clock ticking, next to the photograph of them smiling on Morecambe beach. She touched their faces with her fingertip. Jeffrey was the only one with his eyes open.
In the bedroom the lamplight jumped across the ceiling. Jonathan was asleep, mouth open, one arm out of the sheets, his finger tucked inside the pages of his guidebook, just about pointing to Amiens.
Beatrice slept fitfully for half an hour, her hand on his shoulder blade, and then she woke to the sound of someone banging hard on the front door. Jonathan turned over, mumbling something through the shadow of his lips, but didn’t wake.
‘The door,’ she said, finding her dressing gown. It was an urgent kind of banging, and she suddenly felt afraid, almost sailing down the stairs, struggling with the bolts, and the key that had been pushed behind the curtain, the blast of cold air, fumbling, and then Jeffrey, his face white, his hair blowing back in the wind.
‘I need to see you. I know it’s a hell of a time, I’m sorry.’
She ushered him into the kitchen, where he sat at the table. Beatrice lit the lamp, and he looked at her.
‘I didn’t know what to do, you see, I’ve been thinking all night, and they didn’t mention the procedure, and I’ve been wondering and thinking, and I needed to speak to you about it, because maybe they said something to Jonathan? Another booklet? A paper of some kind?’
‘A paper?’
‘Yes, a paper, you know, a get-out clause? You see, now that I’ve thought it all through properly, I don’t think I’d be any real use in a war. I mean, look at me.’
‘You’ll be all right.’
She uncorked the brandy bottle and poured him a drink. He stretched his fingers around it.
‘I really can’t face it, Beatrice.’
‘So tell them. They won’t make you go. Volunteers are supposed to be willing.’
‘I’ve been going out of my mind. What on earth was I doing there in the first place? I don’t even like Vesta Tilley.’
He sat breathing hard. Beatrice folded her arms, rocking slightly in the cold. She had no idea how to calm him.
‘Where’s Jonathan?’ he asked suddenly.
‘In bed.’
‘In bed? Yes, what am I thinking? Look at the time, of course he’s in bed.’
‘He’s sleeping but raring to go.’
‘He’s the type who’ll do well in a war, anyone can see that. Me? I’m easily broken.’
‘Should I wake him?’
‘Good God, no.’ He lit a cigarette. His hands were trembling. ‘He’ll tear me to pieces for this.’
‘I doubt it.’
�
�He will.’ He downed the brandy and poured himself another one. He looked at her. ‘I’ve heard such stories,’ he whispered.
‘People tell stories. They have to. It’s what keeps them going.’
He rubbed at his face. ‘Make me feel better?’ he whimpered. ‘Say something that will make me feel better?’
‘Jeffrey, this war will be over before you even get there. Nothing will happen to you. And if you don’t want to fight, you can do other things.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know.’ She smiled. ‘Hold flags? Draw maps? And of course you’ll look dashing in the uniform.’
‘You think so?’
‘Absolutely.’
He smiled with her. ‘What a start to the year this is. I don’t want to be alone,’ he said. ‘Not tonight.’
‘Then stay, have coffee. You’ll feel better in the morning. Believe me.’
‘Three weeks’ training doesn’t seem long enough,’ said Beatrice.
‘It’s plenty. And I’ve seen more than enough of Queen’s Park in the rain to last me a lifetime. I just want to get there. Get the whole thing over and done with.’
Jonathan talked as if he were going to save Europe single-handedly, though she supposed they’d drummed it into him.
‘Well, let’s hope it’s over soon,’ she said, ‘for everyone.’
She’d made a special going-away meal, shrimp salad, brisket, syrup tart, and she was wearing her best blue dress, the one that matched her eyes, or so he’d told her. He was in khaki. A soldier now. She kept touching his sleeve.
‘Is it comfortable?’ she asked. It looked thick, and scratchy. ‘Does it soak up all the rain?’
He speared a small shrimp. ‘I’m not going on holiday.’
‘Sorry, I was thinking about the weather, I want you to be comfortable, whatever it is you’re doing. Be careful not to drop sauce on your jacket.’
They ate, not saying anything for a while.
‘This really is delicious,’ said Jonathan, making an effort to smile.
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