We all sat on our crates in the empty cottage and we listened to her as she told us the story, her voice all earnest. We sat and listened till our bums were sore, our ears were ringing, but at last Maudy was talking, and talking so fast that I fancied she didn’t have time to think up lies. Then all of a sudden she slowed right down and got all serious.
‘Then Sadie says something that gets me thinking,’ she said. ‘She goes on about how whenever she sees you, Ruby, she thinks of Violet. You see, there was things about Violet and you that was just too similar.’ Then she started prattling on about how Violet would have looked at my age, how our birthdays were only days apart, how we were born in the same hospital and even how Dr Marks was there for both our births. She knew from Sadie’s stories that they never let mothers see their sickly babies after they had faded. Maudy seemed delighted – clapping her hands all excited – like having such a convenient daughter was a gift from God.
But then she stopped for breath and suddenly looked all thoughtful. ‘Once we’d realized this, Ruby, well we thought that if Sadie could see Violet in you, then why shouldn’t Emma? We thought that maybe, just maybe, you could become Violet; if not a switch at the hospital, then a ghost risen from the grave.’
I felt a trickle of cold down my back. Maudy’s plan had worked of course. I had stayed at Violet’s house, worn the clothes she would have worn and eaten the same food. I had played with expensive toys and been on day trips to the zoo and the museum and I had been like a daughter to Emma and I had let her love me. I had become Violet to Emma and, if Maudy had wanted me to be Violet too, then what had happened to Ruby? Could nobody see Ruby anymore? Just then I felt that I couldn’t see her either and I felt all empty inside like I had swallowed a ghost.
‘But it weren’t enough,’ said Maudy suddenly. ‘Emma could just think it chance that you and Violet was alike and we didn’t know what to do about that so I wanted to forget the whole thing. But once Clarence had a snifter of money the idea wouldn’t leave his head and neither could Emma.’
This was when Clarence took to lazing in the orchard, Maudy explained. He could hide from the farmer there and he could doze, that was true, but he could also think and he could look across the road to Emma’s house. So he sat in the shade of a tree, peering through the hedge at Little Willow, the house with its four windows and the door in the middle and the neat hedge and the red car with the big owl eyes.
He sat there day in day out, hoping to find out where Emma went and which friends she saw, but no friends came and Emma hardly left Little Willow. One day that Emma did go out, Clarence had tried to sneak inside the house, but people on the Sunningdale Estate are untrusting and the garden gate was bolted so tightly that he broke it as he tried to force it open.
‘I got other ideas,’ said Maudy. ‘I thought it was time for Emma to meet her Violet.’
But things weren’t that simple for Maudy; she had never clapped eyes on Emma but she did know where Emma’s house was and that she just sat at the window all day and didn’t ever leave. So she got me lingering in Willow Street across from this smart house with the red motorcar as she scrambled up the bank and stole apples one day. She hoped that Emma might glance out of her window and see me, notice my patchy face. But the lady of the grand house was not at the window that day and instead the door banged open and two little kids were running all over the place. Then came a pram and two ladies talking behind it, one was tall and hefty but Maudy didn’t care about her because she could tell straight away that the other lady was Emma, all prim and pretty, just how Sadie had described her. So now Maudy had her eyes on Emma, all she needed to do was follow her into the lido.
I blew it for her, of course. She never expected me to run. But I did. And all of a sudden she saw her plan falling apart. But Maudy’s luck changed when she found a leaflet on the green, a leaflet drawn by Emma, with her address on it. She sent Henry to bring Emma to us. She knew he wouldn’t say anything; he was born an idiot, how could he?
And so we were brought together, Emma and me. But as usual I wasn’t making things easy for Maudy. I wasn’t the little lady that Violet would have been and every time Emma came to the cottage I was there with dirty fingernails and a bird’s nest on my head, cursing and cuddling dirty chickens. Maudy realized that Emma would never think that I was Violet unless they did something more.
‘You had to become Violet,’ Maudy said. ‘So violets are what we gave Emma.’
There had been a decorator working at Emma’s house, Maudy said, an old man. He was an absent-minded bugger, always muddling his words, leaving jobs half done and leaving the front door unlocked. And that is how Clarence got inside Little Willow. He would wait until Mr Tuttle had gone and steal the violets that the old man had left at the war memorial. Then he would slip inside and leave them all around. It was only little posies, mind, but Clarence knew that violets were the gift of Emma’s lover, the name of her daughter and the posy on her incubator, Sadie had said as much. Emma wouldn’t know where they had come from, so maybe she would take them as a sign of Violet’s return. Maudy chuckled to herself when she said this, but I could only think about the time when the old man saw me, the way he had looked right through me like I was a ghost and then called me Violet.
When I had moved in with Emma, the house became emptier than ever. There were days out in the city, visits to Rose Cottage and to Missensham House. There were trips to buy toys and books and fittings for clothes in the London stores and all of this gave Clarence the chances that he had hoped for – time to let himself into Little Willow and mess with the wireless dial, steal sixpence from the mantelpiece, drink Dr Marks’s sherry and move the old man’s tools around. He found a baby’s rattle buried deep in a gentleman’s suitcase and gave it to me when I visited Rose Cottage, telling me that it was precious and knowing that it would find its way back to Emma’s house with me when I returned. And little by little, I did not know it but, the ghost took over and I became Violet.
I sat on my apple crate, squirming as she talked. She chatted away, like a gossiping neighbour, chuckling all the time like none of it mattered. She clapped her hands together and slowed down at the important bits, just to make sure that we all shared in her pride.
‘But it still weren’t enough,’ Maudy said excitedly. She told us how no decent trustworthy family would part with their daughter for money, and how no respectable lady from the Sunningdale Estate would want to buy a child. There had to be one last reason for the money to change hands – Maudy had to be dying.
In the darkness of the van Maudy hugged me so hard my arms went numb. Her breath smelled like dogs’ meat and I fancied that she must have gnawed her cheek to a pulp. She’d only done it to get blood to spit in to a handkerchief, she said, and she’d had TB before, so it hadn’t been hard for her to fake it. She was even laughing to herself. She was far from dead, not a doctor nor a sickbed for her now, not a blanket, not a handkerchief or a cough, not even a snivel. I wished she did have TB, I wished she was dead.
I wriggled free from her, but I caught Fatkins’ eyes in the mirror and I was sure that he was watching me again.
‘Spose we’ll be learning a thing or two about vans like this in Birmingham, eh nephew?’ Clarence chuckled to himself. ‘There’s jobs for mechanics and panel beaters in them factories. No, wait! We could buy one of these little vans for ourselves. We got the cash, we’d just need to hand it over, how’s about that then?’ His face was turned to Fatkins waiting for an answer but Fatkins didn’t give one and his eyes didn’t move from that mirror. ‘What do you think, Ruby? Wouldn’t you like to be driven about in a little van?’
I said nothing.
Maudy gave Fatkins a sly little glance. I wondered if she’d seen him watching me and she gave a nervous little laugh.
I started thinking again. I thought of the weird old man with the haunted eyes, calling me dead names. Two little photographs, like faded memories, the babies in them sleeping so deep that they might be dead. A lit
tle yellow room and a cot never slept in. I shook my head and tried to chase the thoughts away but they kept coming; broken vases, a rattle in a dead baby’s hand, Emma’s eyes turning all glassy. I thought of gloves hanging limp from the line, their fat fingers pointing and accusing me, and Emma’s dress drowning in a bucket of blood. I closed my eyes and tried to think of a big house in a place called Birmingham, money and motorcars, but all I could see was blood spots on handkerchiefs and violets bringing bad luck and death. The van rattled metal through my head and the bitter carmine scoured my nose, my cheek started to throb as cruel memories returned. I could not be happy. Something wasn’t right.
‘Maudy,’ I said. ‘There’s something I don’t understand.’
‘What’s that, my special girl?’ She looked at me, drawing her head closer so that she could hear over the engine noise.
‘You remember you told me that Sadie would send the dead baby photographs to the parents, well why were there two photographs of Emma’s baby and why was one of them in Aunt Sadie’s cigarette case?’
Maudy made a little shushing noise and glanced quickly over her shoulder, then she opened her mouth. But suddenly her eyes grew large and she grabbed at the sideboard. There was a screech of metal. A bang.
The seat bucked under me and I flew across Maudy’s lap, cracking my forehead on the sewing machine. Henry and Andy became a blur of arms and legs. Jim and John flopped about in their seats like rag dolls. The sideboard lurched, packets of carmine exploding from the drawers.
Then everything was still.
44
Emma
I met Violet on one occasion only. It was the meeting that I mentioned before, the one that had happened in the spring of 1926. That was the one and only time; I have not seen her since.
They had told me not to talk about the meeting, said that it would be bad for my nerves if I did. And of course George had lectured me about the evils of sentimentality and its effect on women and how such silliness could be overcome by a stiff upper lip and a good dose of Britishness. But how can I not talk about it when this memory is all I have? I have endured ghostly violets and silver rattles fresh from the grave and the apparition of a little girl with the mark of a long-mourned baby on her face. My nerves were shot to pieces long ago, so what does it matter now? Fuck not talking about it. Fuck sentimentality, fuck being British, fuck George. I’ve been silent for long enough.
I do remember the meeting. Of course I do, I remember everything – Every. Single. Thing. I remember the ward, the globes of light reflected in glass, the gleam of the scrubbed walls, the scour of the carbolic in my nostrils and the electrical hum of the incubator – that steel sarcophagus. I can feel the presence of the midwife and the baby. And I can feel the absences of the husband and the father, but these are all just details, there is more to tell, so much more.
Ten years may have passed but, in my mind, time has stood still and any careless daydream or little lapse of concentration can send me back to the hospital. I can be scrubbing the kitchen sink when a gust of carbolic in my nostrils will return me to that room with its scrubbed surfaces and shiny medical implements. The hum of electricity when I flick a light switch becomes the hum of the incubator and suddenly I am beside it again, hunched in a wheelchair, watching, waiting. If I walk at night the headlights of a car reflected in a shop window startle me and when I close my eyes I can see the purple ghosts of the ward lights. I still go back to that room. I go back often. Nothing is faded.
So to the midwife for a final time – Sadie, the missing piece. The one that binds the triangle together; mother, father and child. To me she was the stranger, the faceless woman in a uniform, but to her I was more than the patient in the wheelchair; I was her son’s lover and the mother of his child, the one she blamed for his enlistment and deployment far away overseas. Some might have said that I was her daughter-in-law, but Sadie must have known that this could never be, not in the eyes of the law or God. She was a grandmother though, if only for a fleeting moment, and nobody could take that away from her.
She had her cape on, as if she had not wanted to remain but had been compelled to by circumstance. And she was tapping her foot, with impatience I had thought at the time, but now I can sense her anxiety. She felt for the baby more than I knew but could not show it. She placed a posy in the incubator, violets of course, but I do not know if they were from her or a sentiment from the absent father, the son who I had forced to leave her.
Then there was Violet – just a baby back then, and a baby she would stay forever. A baby that never had the chance to grow, a baby denied existence. The doctors had talked about the birthmark, that was true, but they had only mentioned it in passing as they peered into the incubator; small talk to avoid commenting on the real horror of what lay inside. Of course she was just a curiosity to them, a medical subject, and when they looked at her they would only see a tangle of slack flesh the colour of a bruise, a pathetic specimen, no more than a jumble of meat in a butcher’s window. Their trained eyes would know that the subject was merely a semblance of life, with nothing flowing or connected, empty lungs and a still heart, nothing to support it in this hostile world. They did not have a mother’s eyes, the eyes that would see a baby, a little girl, a name – Violet, my Violet, and they would not see that it was the birthmark, the final abomination, that marked her as mine.
And then there was me, Emma Marks. It does not matter who I had been up to that point; young, middle-aged, newlywed or adulterer. And all the little details that had concerned me so much at the time – those little worries such as the state of my hair, the midwife’s impatience or the doctor’s whispers – they do not matter either. What matters was what could not been seen, because over the past eight months I had changed, I had become a mother. The bond I had with Violet was severed when they wrenched her from my body, but such things do not happen without leaving wounds.
So I watched her. It was all I could do to focus on those tiny faltering breaths – the effort for each gasp of air, the shuddering ribcage, the gape of the mouth. In out, in out… my own breath held in anticipation… because I feared each breath to be the last.
Sadie knelt down next to me, her bag open beside her. She rummaged inside frantically, as if what she was looking for could not wait. I did not know what she sought back then, but now I know about the old Box Brownie that was hidden among the thermometers and boiling tubes. It was a camera that was to produce two photographs – one for each parent. But Sadie knew more than the words that were recorded on the birth certificate and she was to keep one photograph, not for George, but for her son. She must have thought it an innocent keepsake, but it was an image that would haunt so many people.
So, more about Sadie; the midwife, the professional, the starched uniform and the bedside manner. She spoke of the matron’s rounds and Dr Marks’s senior position, but her words were just diversions as her face spoke of something deeper. It was the expression that I could not quite read. But now I see the professional holding back her own tears – the attempt at a smile of reassurance and the tensed muscles and distant eyes masking worry and concern.
I did not know that she had seen the doctors’ notes and the nurses’ charts nor the death certificate prepared and waiting. I did not know that Violet was already dead to her, she had already moved on and now her look of concern was for me.
‘Time to say goodbye to Violet,’ she said.
‘All right…’ I said, this and only this because I did not know that would be the last time that I ever saw her.
‘…Goodbye.’
45
Ruby
My name is Ruby Brown, but it should be Ruby Red – red like the glow of the broken stove. Red like a hot poker. Red like the burning of flesh and the scar left behind. Red like a broken heart.
There is one thing missing, of course, one thing that doesn’t make sense. I know you are not stupid; you must be thinking it already. Well, you know I said that there was a Bad Thing that happened? The
part of the story that I didn’t want to talk about? That part you didn’t want to know? Well this is that part…
My hand shook as I gave the mug back to Maudy, fire sliding down my throat.
Maudy’s face swayed. ‘A bit more, my chicken. Like I told you, gin is good for the flu. You need it to get rid of that cough.’
‘I don’t like it,’ I said. ‘It burns.’
‘Yes it burns a bit, but it won’t work unless you have more. You can do this – remember you are nine years old today, so show me you can be a big girl!
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I feel funny. I want to go to bed.’
She leant forward and stroked my hair. ‘Not yet,’ she said and poured more into the mug.
Clarence sat in the chair by the stove. He was drinking too, half of the gin bottle already sloshing around in his tankard. He lifted it earnestly to his mouth, as if getting drunk was a solemn duty. Trails of smoke came up from his pipe. His legs were outstretched, warming on the stove that glowed and spat in the corner.
‘I will put up with the coughing,’ I said. ‘It isn’t so bad.’
Maudy gave Clarence a quick look, her eyes all wet like puddles. He stared back at her, raising the tankard slowly, as if thinking hard. Then something passed between them. It was that look that adults have when they know something; something they won’t share, that only they can understand. Then Maudy looked away quickly and stared into the fire, the embers shining in her eyes.
Clarence jumped up like he’d been stung. He slammed the mug on the table in front of me, and Maudy jumped in her skin.
‘Drink it!’ he screamed. His face was huge and his eyes wild. ‘Don’t stare at me, girl. Drink!’
I picked up the mug and swallowed the gin quickly, it slid down the corners of my mouth and burned a hot river inside me.
The Liar Page 27