Rosie Hogarth

by Alexander Baron

  Gran turned her head toward Nancy. “What’s the matter with me, Nance?” She spoke in a frightened, husky whisper. “They won’t tell me. The lady doctor comes in the morning, and when I ask her she just laughs and says, ‘Don’t you bother yourself, mother, you’ll soon be all right,’ and the nurses, they all say the same thing, too.”

  “And why shouldn’t they?” Nancy said. “They’ve got nothing to hide, dear. You’re just in here for a nice rest, and to be properly looked after. We’ll soon have you home again.”

  “They look after you in here, all right,” the young woman said. “We had chicken today, as much as we wanted, and trifle afterwards. You can have a Guinness every day if you want it, or orange juice. They come round with it on a tray and you can have whichever you like. Talk about Christmas! It’s wonderful.”

  The young woman’s voice had brought a spark of recognition into Gran’s eyes. “This is Mrs. Roberts,” she whispered, “she’s a nice young lady. She sits and talks to me.”

  “Cheer her up,” said Mrs. Roberts, “it don’t do to lie on your back and brood, does it? It never does anywhere, let alone here. It’s a real pleasure for me in here, I can tell you. Never had a time like it for years. No shopping, no washing up, being waited on hand and foot, all those beautiful things to eat you can never afford outside.”

  “She’s in here for a operation,” Gran broke in, “what do they call it, dear?”

  “Malignant growth,” Mrs. Roberts said cheerfully, “it’s a real whopper. They showed me the X-Rays. Isn’t it lovely and bright in here? There’s a wireless for every bed, and the nurses are ever so pleasant. They can’t do too much for you. Isn’t it a lovely day? Look at them flowers a lady visitor brought yesterday. You wouldn’t think it was November, would you? Ah, well, I’ll love you and leave you, and get back to my knitting. I’m sure you’d rather be on your own-e-oh.”

  Gran settled back against her pillows, looking straight in front of her with a faint grin of irony and disbelief, while Nancy chatted reassuringly and Jack, who had seated himself near the foot of the bed after uttering an uneasy greeting, unpacked the parcel of eggs, chocolate and butter which Nancy had made up out of her family’s rations. Gran’s cheeks had caved in, robbing her face of its lifelong set of grim obstinacy. She looked as if, in the struggle to sustain her waning strength, she had consumed all the flesh from her face, leaving only a skull clothed in waxy skin. Her hair, no longer piled in a firm white bun, straggled in white wisps of surprising sparsity, exposing the hideous newborn pinkness of her scalp. Her sunken eyes gleamed from wet sockets, giving her the appearance of some inanimate refuge through whose windows life glared, at bay, watching with a mixture of defiance and horrified fascination the approach of the executioner. Faint traces of expression crossed her face while she listened to Nancy, as if, halfhearing, she were trying to simulate undistracted attention, but the fear of death glared from beneath them all. She puckered her face up into a transparent smile and whispered, “How is the little one? Does she ask after me?”

  “She’s expecting you at her birthday party. Isn’t it wonderful how time flies? — only another month and she’ll be two. Oh, she doesn’t stop worrying me! ‘Where’s Nanny, where’s our Nanny-bunny?’ that’s all — on my word of honour — that’s all we can get out of her. How she chatters away! When I think of all those months we were trying to teach her words, we were beginning to get worried about her, and she just sat and stared up at us. And now all of a sudden she rattles away as if she’d been storing it all up. It’s like a miracle, Gran dear, you wait till you hear her.”

  Gran uttered a laugh that was like a querulous little cry. “That’s the way with them. That’s the way it is with the little ones. There you are with a helpless babe, a tiny white bundle of woollies and a tiny pink face, and before you know where you are there’s a young lady dancing about you.” She broke off, exhausted by the moment of animation, and lay listening to her own breathing, long and harsh. “I have to make myself breathe. It don’t hurt, but it’s like working a bellows. It’s hard.” On each expiring breath she moaned, “It’s hard.”

  Nancy patted the back of Gran’s hand. “Don’t you excite yourself. You just lay back and listen. That’s right, you close your eyes, I don’t mind. There,” she crooned, as if to a baby, “quiet, quiet. Isn’t that nice? You lay nice and quiet, and I’ll talk. She’s just learned about cats. They’ve got a kitten next door. It’s called Fluffy. She knows the name, she goes about all day looking under the sofa and calling out, ‘Fluffy, Fluffy.’ And do you know, she’s started eating fish, so that she can give Fluffy the bones. She used to scream the house down before when I tried to give her fish.”

  Gran opened her eyes. “You wrap her up,” she crowed. “You wrap her up warm. It’s dangerous, this time of the year.”

  “Of course I will, darling. You know I always do just what you say. We’ll wrap her up ever so carefully. She’s got a wonderful new woolly two-piece for the winter.”

  “You wrap her up.” Gran’s voice, broken by her quick breathing, was becoming feverish. “Letting her run about half-naked all the summer. That didn’t do her no good. Didn’t listen to me then, did you? Oh, no! I never knew nothing then, did I? The silly old woman! It’s wicked — wicked ideas you young ones have got. Rub her in with camphorated oil. Never mind what they tell you, these nurses, these clinics. They’ve not brought young ones up themselves. Rub her in warm. You watch her. Or you’ll lose her!” Gran struggled to sit up, her breath rattling in her throat. “You’ll lose her!”

  Nancy pressed her gently back by the shoulder, but Gran seized her wrist and pulled herself up, panting, into a sitting position. “Nancy!” Her eyes were glaring with the effort. “Take me out of here! They don’t know what’s good for me. They wash me all over, every morning. I tell ’em, it’ll be the death of me I say, but they don’t listen. Nobody listens here. I’m cold here, Nance. I’m deathly cold all the time.” Her face betrayed the same uncomprehending fear that makes a baby look so piteous when it is in pain. She beckoned Nancy closer, and her whisper became confidentially hoarse. “Nance, there’s germs here. Lady over in that bed told me. Germs —” her voice shook — “you never used to hear about ’em years ago. That’s what they’ve done for us with all their inventions, filled the place up with germs. They’ve got ’em in here, all over. They get in you when you breathe, and they get down to your heart, and you’re done for. Makes you afraid to breathe, it do. Lady in here died the other day, only sixty-nine she was. They reckon that was germs.”

  Jack looked embarrassed, but Nancy laughed heartily. “Oh, you are a silly old thing. You are a silly old, silly old thing. If I didn’t laugh at you I’d lose patience with you. Here I come to invite you to a birthday party, and Jack’s come to remind you about the wedding — that’s next month, too, isn’t it, Jack? — and you sit there telling us all about germs. Why, there’s less germs here than there are in my flat. They put stuff in the air to kill them. You ask the lady doctor, she’ll tell you. Now, what are you going to give Linda for a present? She’s been worrying me to tell her. I said you were going to get better and come home and bake a cake.”

  Gran relaxed and lay still, her eyes closed, till her breathing had become more regular. “You don’t know what’s for the best,” she murmured. “Some says do this, and some says do that. You don’t know what to do not to peg out. Nance, I don’t want to peg out. I want to see that kiddie grow up. My life has been a bitter one, Nance. I’ve lived on all these years in the hope of getting some goodness out of it, but never a taste have I had. I want to stay here till that kiddie’s old enough to remember me. I want to see her pretty and happy. If I go now, there’ll not be a soul left on earth after a few years that ever knew I was here. That’s what makes me cold, Nance, being forgotten. If I lived to a hundred I could see her wed. Nance, there’s plenty that lives to a hundred, ain’t there?”

  “Of course there are, dear. And you’ll be one more. Here,
I’ll break you off a nice piece of chocolate and you can suck it.”

  Having silenced Gran, Nancy went on chatting about family affairs, while the old woman sucked noisily and regathered her strength. Brown threads of chocolate began to dribble from the corners of Gran’s mouth. Jack frowned squeamishly and looked away. Nancy took out a handkerchief and, without altering the serene tenor of her talk, wiped Gran’s chin like a baby’s.

  “Yes —” Gran had finished the chocolate, and she took up her plaint, speaking now comfortably, almost boastfully — “I’ve had a hard time of it, I have. Live too easy, you young ones. You should have been young in my time, kep’ house on fourteen shilling a week like me. When it was coming in. Many a time it wasn’t, in a freezing winter, when my chap was out of work. Tramp in the snow with a thin shawl and broken shoes. Five in the morning till twelve at night breaking my back over other people’s washing. Lining up in the wet for meal tickets. Begging a pair of breeches from the school for my little barefoot boy. Running up the Guardians for ’undredweight of coal. That’s hard when you’re proud like me. That’s what it was like in my time.” She rested, gazing dimly at the past. “Year in, year out, your life goes away in the steam, over stove and boiler. There’s precious little youth and beauty left in you after that. Yes,” she croaked, “and it got worse after my chap pegged out.”

  “Oh, I don’ know,” Jack said, “he left you all right, didn’t he? I mean, I know it’s only a few bob a week, your annuity, but it’s something.”

  “Him,” she said, “he didn’t leave me enough to buy a box of matches. Never saved a penny in his life. It wasn’t his fault. He was one of them that never had the luck. It was my Victor saw to me. He had a bit saved up, and he left it all to me when he died. Yes —” her voice rose — “that’s one thing she never got, his money, what there was of it.”

  Nancy saw the look of startled attention that had appeared on Jack’s face. “We’ll have to being going now, Gran,” she said. “You won’t get better quickly if you wear yourself out talking. You try and go off to sleep, now, for a bit. I’ll come back on Thursday, and we’ll have another talk.”

  Gran went on as if she had not heard. “Ah!” — there was a pathetic, malicious chuckle — “that Kate, she never even knew there was a will till the vicar come in and said my Victor had give it him. Then he read it. Ah, I laughed then. I laughed all right. In her face I laughed. ‘All my savings in the Post Office I leave to my dear mother, Georgina Susan Hogarth, who never spared herself for me.’ ” She sat there listening. Her face didn’t move. Calm as you like, a little smile, haughty as if she was the Queen of England. Shame? Not her? She lay panting, watching while Nancy rose and gathered her things. Jack had not moved from his chair. “He left her without a penny. Nothing but the furniture and the pension. Not that she cared. The slut! She was provided for! Ah, he wouldn’t tell me when he was alive. I said to him once, I said, ‘Victor, my love, you can tell me. You can tell your own mother.’ He was too proud. He was like me, proud. Paralysed from the waist down, and creeping up him till it killed him. Him father those last two children? How could he? But he was ashamed, poor sweet, he was ashamed to tell his own mother. He said, ‘Go away, mother. You mind your affairs and I’ll mind mine.’ But at the last, it was me he thought of, not her. He as good as told me. In his will, he as good as told me.” She closed her eyes, utterly exhausted, and they listened to her raucous breathing. “Don’t go, Nance. Give us a drop of water. Drop of warm water. For me throat.” Nancy gave her a drink and sat down reluctantly to wait till she had recovered. Gran opened her eyes and drew a long breath. “I always hated her. The first time I set eyes on her I knew the kind she was. Eighteen when he brought her home the first time. Ah, she was pretty all right. A cheek full of roses. A bosom that nearly bust her bodice. He was so proud. A young man with a beauty to show off. He held her arm as if she might run away. It was the way she smiled at me. A girl comes home with your son, she ought to smile afraid. Not that one. Bold, she smiles, straight at me. ‘I’m not afraid of you,’ she says with her eyes. Ah, I hated her from that moment and she knew it. She wasn’t the kind to give up her joys, and serve a man, and slave and scrape in his kitchen like a respectable woman.” Her voice quavered and weakened, and tears of self-pity collected in the corners of her eyes. “The Lord sent a judgement on her when He dropped that bomb. She took my boy away. She made him unhappy. She left me alone. I lived my life out alone in a room, without my boy. Sixty years of suffering, and not a day’s happiness for a reward. Nance, I can’t be taken, not now, afore a little pleasure comes my way.”

  Nancy soothed Gran, made her comfortable again, kissed her and repeated her promise to return soon. She roused Jack, who was brooding as if he had forgotten them both, and led him out of the ward. She knew that he would be full of questions and she was wondering, with some alarm, how she could evade them, at least until she had seen Rose.

  On the way out she paused at Mrs. Roberts’ bed and said, “Well, bye-bye, dear, we’re off now. I’ll bring you some flowers when I come on Thursday. And I do wish you better.”

  “Bye-bye, duck,” Mrs. Roberts said, “I’ll keep an eye on the old lady.” She held up the socks that she was knitting. “They’re coming on lovely, aren’t they? They’re for my chap. I thought I’d get ’em finished while I can. After all, you never know, do you?”

  They walked to the bus stop in silence. Jack was the first to speak. “Thank God for the fresh air! She looks as if she’d been in the grave a month already. I can’t stand ’em when they’re like that. I know it’s wicked, but I can’t. I don’t want to go near ’em.”

  “We all come to it, dear. We should go to people when they need us, not just when we need them.”

  “But don’t it make you sick?”

  “Sick, dear? Where’s your heart?”

  “That’s your mother talking. You’re her all right. You’re the only one that is.”

  Nancy laughed. “I’m half of her.” She was afraid to say any more, and she was surprised when Jack said it for her.

  “Yes, and I know who’s the other half.” She had not thought him capable of this. She was surprised, too, at his calmness. For the first time she found herself regarding him as a fellow-adult. “You thought I’d be all over you with questions,” he said, “didn’t you, Nance, when we come out of there?” His face, harassed and reflective, was lit by a vague smile. “All that business she was going on about.”

  “She’s wandering, poor thing. She doesn’t know what she’s saying any more.”

  “Turn it up, Nance. I ain’t so green as I’m cabbage-looking. Not quite, anyway. You going to tell us all about it, Nance?”

  “When I’ve seen Rosie. Do us a favour, Jack, and leave us alone till then. I’m not so clever. I don’t know what to say, not till I’ve thought.”

  “All right, love.” Again she was surprised at his gentleness. He spoke again. “Here, tell us one thing. Does Barmy come into the story?”

  “Barmy?” She stared in bewilderment.

  He studied her expression, then grinned. “All right, skip it, Nance. Just an idea come to me. Here, she is done for, isn’t she, the old lady?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid her time has come.”

  “You don’t sound upset. You with your soft heart, I thought you’d cry buckets over it.”

  “What for?” Nancy asked calmly. “The young may die but the old must. That’s the last thing to cry over.”

  “You’re a funny one, all right.”

  She took him home for tea, and did not detain him when he offered to leave early. “Don’t forget about Rosie,” he said at the door. “Tell her to forget the whole thing. You know, I mean, no hard feelings and all that.”

  “Don’t you worry, dear. Look, you come to tea on Thursday. I’ll tell you how Gran’s getting on, and then we’ll have that talk.”

  “Roll on Thursday! So long sweetheart.”

  Chapter Six

  When Nancy had was
hed up the tea things, seen to the baby, finished her ironing, run out to telephone and make sure that Rose would be at home, banked up the fire, cooked Tom’s dinner, served it and apologised for leaving him alone for the evening, she forced her aching feet into her outdoor shoes, sighed, “Poor old me! Always on the go! I could just do with an evening by the fire,” and went out.

  After a few minutes of chat she put the question directly to Rose, “What have you been up to with Jackie Agass?”

  Rose gave her version of the affair, in an angry, defensive tone that was unfamiliar to Nancy. “I couldn’t help it,” she concluded, “he came worrying me. I put up with him. I don’t know why. Old times’ sake, I suppose. He seemed all at sea. I thought I’d help him. He had the usual queer ideas about me. He insulted me right and left. I can’t imagine why I swallowed it. I even let him nag me into bed. That’s shocked you, hasn’t it, my poor innocent?”

  “It’s all in a lifetime.”

  “Why, why, why?” Rose said intensely, pressing the knuckles of her clenched fists together, “Why did I ever tolerate him? That’s what I can’t forgive myself. I’ve felt dirty and humiliated ever since.” She went to the side table and poured a brandy for herself. “I won’t offer you brandy. I know you don’t like it. The kettle’s boiling, there’ll be tea in a minute. He couldn’t touch me with his insults, but somehow he got right through my skin. Look at the way I acted. That’s the devil of it! Losing my temper, like any little Lamb Street girl.”

  “Well, that’s what you are, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, am I?” Rose cried. Her voice softened. “I’ve been wondering about myself ever since. All my confidence —” She broke off and exclaimed suddenly, “I need confidence!”

  “Don’t be too hard on him.”

  “Hard on him! I never want to see him again! Or any of those other stupid people!”

  “You always set up to be all for them.”