by Angela Huth
‘I would. Although pigs . . . I’m not sure I could deal with pigs again.’
‘Of course you could. You loved Sly, remember? Now the unreal week is over you’ll be able to think more clearly. A week is much too short to be positive. But extraordinary things do sometimes happen. Recognition of what is right can come suddenly from heaven and remain firm, though the chance of that happening is small, I admit. You need to calm down, get some sleep. The solution will come to you. Why don’t you stay on for another week?’
‘No, I can’t do that. It would all be different. Confusing. I must get back, move to Brighton. But thank you. You’re a wise old bird, Stella. This has been an unforgettable time, staying with you and Philip.’
James came running into the kitchen in his pyjamas. Stella ruffled his hair. ‘He’s so like . . .’ Prue stopped herself.
‘He’s my saviour,’ said Stella.
Prue picked the child up. He was surprisingly heavy. The skin of his cheek against hers was as soft as fallen rose petals. He smelt of chocolate and milk. It was the first time Prue had ever held a three-year-old boy. Her eyes swarmed with tears. This was a might-have-been, a could-be-still. She handed James back to Stella, shaken. If she and Rudolph had a baby it would probably not have her green eyes, but Rudolph’s black ones, and tightly curled hair and skin the colour of wild honey. The idea was overwhelming. Prue drank the wine very quickly, wanting to blur the imponderables.
The next morning she drove away, confused that her aching for Rudolph was as deep as anything she had ever known, though the absolute certainty of love, such as she had felt for Barry One, was not quite there: mysteriously, it had faded a little in the night. But certainty was always elusive: its vagaries were mystifying. She had no doubt it would return.
The journey to Manchester seemed, in Prue’s state of exhaustion, to take for ever. Her plan was to spend a last night at The Larches, pack her things and leave for Brighton next day.
Bertha’s bicycle was not in its usual place. Prue, wondering if she had already gone, let herself in through the front door. She picked up a couple of letters waiting for her in the hall and took them to the sitting room. There, it seemed to her at a glance, a few things were just perceptibly different: cushions changed round, strange candlesticks over the fireplace, two pots of hideous scarlet flowers on the window-ledge. Prue felt a stab of annoyance. Her mother, presumably already installed as housekeeper, had not been slow to make her imprint on the house.
She went to the window, looked out at the bare garden. It was bigger. An illusion, of course, she told herself: the chicken run and shed had gone. Johnny had moved them while she was away. She had forgotten that he would, and their absence added to the feelings of unease that had confronted her since returning to the house.
With a pang of foreboding Prue took her case up to the spare room she had moved into on her last visit home. Barry had been generous to her so it was her turn to be generous to him and let him have the main bedroom again.
There, the clutter she had left on the dressing-table had disappeared. In its place were her mother’s myriad aids to her routine of beautifying: pots of cold cream, round boxes of Pond’s powder decorated with randomly flying puffs, a bottle of lavender water – things so associated with Prue’s childhood when she had stood beside Mrs Lumley as she had put on her makeup that a kind of desolation crept into her tiredness. She did not know why, for she wanted her mother to be secure in this job, happy. She opened the cupboard. Her own clothes had been pushed to one side. Mrs Lumley’s homemade drooping garments replaced them, the familiar dewlap hems and flabby collars. Shoes of delicately punctured leather, their sides swollen in permanent imitation of Mrs Lumley’s bunions, crowded on the floor. There was a strong smell of lavender mixed with nervous sweat. Prue turned to the bed.
On the table next to it there was an expensive-looking travelling clock in a leather case that she had not seen before. Perhaps Barry had found a substitute recipient for his presents. Prue picked up an ancient nightdress-case made of imitation fur in the shape of a cat. She could tell from its swollen belly that a pre-war nightdress was bundled inside. As a child in her mother’s bed on stormy nights she had liked to use it as a pillow. Prue lay back on the bed and closed her eyes, the cat now making a childhood pillow behind her neck.
When she opened them, her mother was looking down at her. ‘Oh, darling,’ she was saying, ‘we didn’t know when to expect you. You’ve been gone a long time.’ Prue sat up. They kissed each other on the cheek. ‘Everything all right with you, is it? You look quite pale. Tired.’
‘I’m fine. Had a wonderful time. Everything all right with you?’
Mrs Lumley moved away from the bed. She dithered about, snapped at a curtain that was not completely drawn back. She pushed at her things on the dressing-table, glanced at her reflection in the looking glass. ‘If I’d known you were coming back to stay, of course, I would never have settled in this room till you’d gone for good.’
‘I’ve not come back to stay, Mum. I’m here for the night, too tired to drive any more today.’
‘Of course. You look exhausted.’
‘Before I left, Barry said that would be OK.’
‘And so it is. Of course it is.’ Her voice rose higher, as it always did when she was nervous. She swivelled to face her daughter. ‘But as you can see there was a change of plan.’ Their eyes met. Prue had no intention of helping her mother break the news. ‘It soon seemed it was a very silly idea, coming here daily, catching the bus morning and night.’
‘Very soon,’ snapped Prue. ‘Not quite two weeks.’ She was confused by her own annoyance.
‘Yes, well. “Much easier if you live in,” Barry said. “You won’t have to be up so early to get my breakfast.” ’ She giggled.
Prue wondered if her own giggle would sound the same, apeing youth, in thirty years’ time. ‘So he helped me bring my stuff round in the Daimler – or was it the Humber? I’m not sure, to be honest. Not much, though. I didn’t bring much because the idea is that I spend weekends at home, leave a few things for Barry in the fridge. Well, that’s the plan for the moment. One day, of course, if Barry’s thinks it’s a good idea, I might sell the lease. He’s got a good head for business, you can tell.’
‘Quite,’ said Prue. A fading wash of sky now filled the north-facing window. Her mother turned on the overhead light. Its forty-watt bulb, beneath a shade decorated with a zigzag pattern, made no more than a dispiriting glow in the dimness of the room. Prue went over to look out at the front drive. She saw Barry pull up in the Humber. ‘He’s back,’ she said.
‘Good. Nice and punctual. I’ve got a nice piece of plaice.’ She picked up a tortoiseshell hand mirror from the dressing-table, glanced at herself with smile. ‘Listen, darling, I don’t want you to think there’s anything to it, this arrangement with Barry. It’s just a job. It’s safety. No more worries. You understand?’
‘Of course.’
‘Anything else would be quite inappropriate.’ She struggled with the word. ‘Anything else would never happen.’
Prue granted her a smile. ‘Of course not. I can’t imagine it would.’
‘Very well, then, darling, that’s cleared up. It’s been on my mind. Now, let’s go down. We can easily stretch the plaice. We can have a nice supper, the three of us. I’m sure Barry would like that. Then we can make up the bed in the other spare room.’
‘I think I’ll go back to Wimberly Road, Mum, thanks.’
‘Very well. Please yourself. But you’d be very welcome.’
Prue saw the humour in being welcomed to what was recently her own house, and smiled.
As she came down the stairs, carrying her case, she found a cheerful husband at the bottom, arms wide open, demanding a hug. Too tired to argue, she agreed to stay for supper, but insisted on leaving afterwards. Barry gave her an envelope with the key to the Brighton flat, and a map. Over the plaice and sprouts, he and his housekeeper kept up a constant ping-pong o
f fatuous observations designed to lighten the tension. Prue left as soon as the pancakes had been admired. She drove recklessly fast to her childhood house, went straight to her shabby bedroom, posters of Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind still on the walls. All she could think was: Rudolph.
When she woke, early next morning, Prue allowed herself only a moment to remember the flotsam of her childhood that accosted her all round the room. Her eyes dashed past the slumped animals, dusty ornaments, the first hair ribbons of her collection hanging from the dressing-table mirror, and came finally to rest on the table by her bed, where a small snapshot of a man in air-force uniform, her father, taken by her mother, had always stood in a cheap little frame of imitation leather.
‘Tom Purdy was his name, I think – though it might have been Tim,’ she had explained to Prue on her tenth birthday. ‘We met in a pub. He was in uniform, ever so smart, handsome. I happened to be carrying my new Box Brownie. It was my most precious possession. I took it with me everywhere. I persuaded him to stand outside the pub, let me take his picture. I think he was flattered. He was going back up north next day, where he was stationed. Anyway, I got the sun behind me, he gave a lovely smile, said “Cheese”, when I gave him the signal, and that was that. You were born nine months later. I never saw him again. We were in that much of a hurry we never exchanged addresses. I often wish we had.’
Sometimes Prue had asked her mother to try to track down Tom, or Tim, Purdy, but she said there was no use, what was the point? As he’d never known about his daughter, he probably would not want to be bothered all these years later, she said. Prue’s only – possible – inheritance from her father was her eyes: Mrs Lumley said she thought they were a deeper emerald than her own though she couldn’t be sure, could she? Their meeting had been in a dark shed. And as she had been unsure of the spelling of Purdy (Purrdy?) she had thought it safer to pass on her own maiden name to her daughter. Prue had managed to extract from her the only facts about her father that her mother had gleaned. But there were not many, for she and Prue’s father had not been concentrating on conversation, Mrs Lumley had snapped one day, when Prue was goading her. He had grown up in Yorkshire and was an electrician by trade before joining the RAF. He did not like pork crackling – a fact Mrs Lumley had proudly observed for herself in the pub – and had very shiny shoes. There was no point in asking for more, for there was no more. As Prue grew older, questions about her unknown father faded. She thought ignorance about one parent was sad but not traumatic, and for months on end she gave him no thought.
She had not been in her childhood bedroom for a long time. The sight of the small dusty photograph in its disintegrating frame made her pause for a moment. A flicker of old regret went through her, but then she was steady again. She swung her feet above the rag-rug by her bed, its scraps of material clotted and stained, to avoid it with her bare feet. Funny how she had never had anything against it as a child. She had thought it rather nice, the bright colours. She had liked her room very much, she remembered. It was her refuge, the place she could write her secret diary and try out nail polish, but she could no longer see it with a child’s eyes.
Prue went to the window, looked out at the narrow strip of garden. As usual there was not a flower in sight (her mother preferred artificial), and the pattern of nearby roofs was so familiar that they slotted instantly back into her visual memory. She sighed, grabbed a skirt from the top of her open suitcase. It smelt powerfully of Rudolph. A bath was needed.
In the grim little bathroom, a threadbare mat twisted on the brown linoleum floor, both anger and sadness came upon her. She lighted the geyser. As always, it needed several attempts before the flame took hold. She listened to its tuneless wheezing, a sound she had hated for years, as she watched a thin spittle of brackish water peter out of the taps. She touched one of the aged white tiles that covered the walls and gave the room the air of a public lavatory. Then she looked at a strange version of herself in the freckled mirror above the basin, and at the well-remembered cracks in the basin. A lump of soap sat in its own slime. Prue picked it up. Blimey! Her mother’s wartime habit of sticking together old bits of soap still went on . . . She examined the disgusting clutch of cream and peach scraps, hard, cracked, jammed together. What was her barmy mother up to, such useless economy? Soap was still rationed, but not hard to find if you were willing to pay a few extra pence. A flame of irrational anger seared through Prue. She vowed that she would buy a bar of Imperial Leather, out of her own rations, in Brighton and send it . . . Even as the idea came to her, melancholy replaced anger, guilt as her mean thoughts followed irritation. Her mother, after all, had had a hard time bringing up Prue on her own. She had done her best. Her economies were understandable. All the same, Prue had no wish to spend a moment longer in that bathroom. She couldn’t bear to wash in the grimy tub, whose bottom was still scarcely covered with the tepid, sluggish water.
She went slowly down the steep staircase, its pre-war carpet deadening every familiar step, and into the kitchen, half wondering why she did not rush straight out of the front door. But something made her want to pause for a last moment, remember why she was glad to be going. She sat on a chair at the small square table. The unusual silence made her uneasy. She had once thought it a perfect kitchen, with its constant music of clattering saucepans and a steaming kettle. Now, deserted by her mother, the life seemed to have gone out of it. Still, Prue thought, she was leaving Manchester for good this time. She would resist ever returning here, to the obsessive neatness, the poppies on the china . . .
Mrs Lumley had inherited the house from her own parents and lived there all her life. Familiar to Prue were myriad stories of how, until she had become the owner, the lavatory was in the yard, which was now the small garden, and heating was provided by one small fire in the front room. Her parents had also left her their scant life savings, which she had spent on modernizing the house in 1938. It was then she had given up her job in the cotton mill, where she and ‘the girls’ had enjoyed working for many years. Always in search of a husband, she had decided that a position in the old Ford factory in Trafford Park, reopened to make engines for fighter planes, might be just the place to run into a good bunch of young men. But by the time she applied there were no vacancies left.
‘Fate,’ she had said to Prue, one day at the kitchen table. ‘If I’d got a job there I wouldn’t have thought of following my heart’s desire, would I? Hairdressing.’ She had just enough money to rent a small, dingy shop, some way from the centre of the city, which she named Elsie’s Bond Street Salon. Surprisingly, it had done well, and Prue had enjoyed helping out in the school holidays.
But she could never share her mother’s love of Manchester. In Mrs Lumley’s view it was a glamorous place: dance halls, huge shops, banner-waving marchers keeping in time with the trumpet players, trips to the Zoological Gardens with a sandwich lunch on Sundays, the marvellous Christmas circus at Belle Vue. Prue’s recollection, above all, was of darkness – the perpetual smoke hovering over the rooftops, the vast buildings of blackened stone, the cold, the dank, the endless rain. There were just a few things she did remember with some awe: the handsome cathedral, so solid in the murky dusk, its lighted clock looking no bigger than a watch-face: the grandeur of the town hall, whose windows, when lighted by occasional sun, enlivened its sooty stone walls, making it fleetingly cheerful. And the Ship Canal. Prue loved that. Often she had gone with friends to watch the great liners, pulled by tugs from the sea, cutting through water thick as melted chocolate. Her most vivid childhood memory was of an afternoon walk with her mother through a field of buttercups near the canal. A vast ship appeared to be approaching them through a sea of yellow.
‘How’s it sailing in a field?’ she had screamed.
Her mother had clutched her, laughing. ‘It’s on the canal, you silly thing,’ she had explained. ‘Just looks as if it’s coming through the field. It’s what you call an illusion.’
That had been a bright moment. Frigh
tening, then funny. Prue had made Rudolph laugh with the story. But mostly she remembered bombs, fires, the gut-splitting wail of sirens. In the 1941 air raid, when buildings had crashed down on the corner of Deansgate and St Mary’s Gate, she and her mother had stood at the kitchen window watching terrifying monster flames roar into the sky. No fireman’s ladder would reach beyond their base. The Manchester of her distant past she could not love, would not miss. She felt no affection either for the richer, more genteel part where she had lived with Barry. She was ready, now, to leave for good. She stood up. The chair squawked one final time. She hurried to the front door.
Her journey to Brighton was complicated. She was lost several times, but did not mind. Once she stopped in an agreeable-looking village, bought fish and chips and ate them in the back seat of the Sunbeam, parked by a pond a-flutter with ducks. She liked the warmth of the seats with their gentle smell of leather. Random thoughts jangled through her mind. Did her mother have breakfast with Barry? And, if so, would it be in her old pre-war dressing-gown, as was her custom at home? Would Barry take to giving her extravagant presents, now there was no longer a wife on whom to bestow them? Would her mother resist flirting with him? Would he resist shagging the kind of older woman he apparently fancied more than a young one? These were not disturbing questions, just questions.
But then came Rudolph. Where was he now? Zooming through the sky, his entire concentration on his piloting, no thought for her? They had left it that he would not contact her for a week. If he heard nothing after that, he had said, he would presume she had chosen to turn down his offer of life in America. What was she going to do? Go, or stay? Either decision would be alarming.
Once she arrived in Brighton, Barry’s considerate, hand-drawn map helped Prue find her way to the old cinema with no trouble. As she got out of the car she could smell the sea, a sharper smell than she remembered in Norfolk. There was a breeze, too. It blew her skirt about as she stood looking up at the fine old building with its peeling paint and boarded-up windows: she could see that if Barry spent a fortune it could once again be a handsome place.