Mary George of Allnorthover

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  The sink was clogged. There was a bottle of milk on the hob of the Baby Belling and a tin kettle on one shelf of the open fridge. Valerie lugged the kitbag upstairs.

  Tom was dead. For a moment, Valerie really thought it. He was curled up and turned away against the covered window, and may well just have been asleep. It was the stiffness of his body, its absolute stillness, something she’d never seen in him before, that convinced her. She didn’t scream or run or rush towards him. She carried on as if he were asleep, laid the kitbag down and crept nearer.

  It took time to turn him onto his back. She warmed his face and hands, blowing and rubbing as he stared at her out of dull yellow eyes. His skin was yellow too, bristled and pimply, and his breath was rotten-sweet. Catarrh had crusted around his nose. His clothes were musty and his burning cheeks were stained deep red. Valerie went downstairs, boiled a kettle and carried up a cup of tea, a basin and a cloth. She washed his face, dabbing gently. He sipped the tea. She heaved one of the paraffin heaters upstairs and lit it. She fetched a clean basin of water and continued to wash him, his neck, ears, feet and hands, drying each part of him roughly and thoroughly with a towel she took from her bag. Tom smiled but winced as a scab in the corner of his mouth cracked and dribbled blood.

  Valerie pulled off his shirt and washed his chest, stopping for each bout of his scraping cough. She dressed him in her father’s vest, flannel shirt and oiled-wool jersey. She briskly took off his trousers and underpants, swabbed up and down and between his legs, then put him in the bottoms of a pair of her father’s warmest pyjamas. Tom was as tall as Morris, but not nearly as broad, so the clothes accentuated his thinness. No skin, all bones. Valerie wrapped him in her mother’s quilt and propped him up against the wall. Then she filled her hot-water bottle and heated a jar of her home-made soup, which she held to his mouth, waiting out the time it took for him to swallow every drop.

  Christie got his coat. ‘I’ll go straight up and fetch him back.’

  ‘He won’t want that.’ Valerie replied. She heard the rustle of Sophie as she came out into the hall to see who their visitor was. ‘He needs to get on with it, on his own, but someone should be keeping an eye.’ Her voice shook. ‘I mean, three days?’

  ‘It’s not been that long!’ Christie turned to his wife. ‘You’ve been looking in on him, haven’t you?’

  ‘Me?’ Sophie was indignant. ‘I never … I mean, you were up there all the time, weren’t you, you said …’

  ‘I said nothing! I’ve got work to do!’

  ‘Exactly. You said nothing!’ Sophie snapped. She nodded at Valerie and walked away.

  Christie stroked his beard and shook his head. ‘Looks like there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding.’

  ‘A dangerous one,’ Valerie said.

  Christie raised his voice. ‘Now, don’t go saying that! You’ve nothing to learn me about my own brother!’

  Valerie could see that Christie was as upset as she was. ‘Come on, let’s get back to him. You go straight up and I’ll go home for some painkillers to bring his temperature down.’

  ‘He ought to come back here.’

  ‘It’s alright. I’ll stay with him and bring him down to the surgery in the morning. He’ll need antibiotics.’

  ‘Says you’re a nurse now.’

  ‘In training.’ She had recently applied. ‘Perhaps you could fix up the Chapel so as to make it a bit warmer?’

  Christie hurried with her up the lane, puffing so hard that his face was almost obscured by his condensing breath. ‘He won’t be needing hospital, will he? That wouldn’t be right for him, would it? We can look after him here, can’t we?’

  ‘Of course.’ Valerie saved her breath. She had never met anyone as delicate and special as Tom. She couldn’t wait to get back to him.

  Billy and Mary were starving. They rushed into Billy’s kitchen and fell upon a tray of flapjack cooling on a windowsill.

  ‘Valerie’s such a good cook!’ Billy spoke through a mouthful.

  As Valerie came in, Mary exclaimed, ‘These are delicious!’

  ‘And not for you,’ Valerie retorted. Mary reddened and dropped her slice onto her plate. Valerie relented. ‘Go ahead. It’s just I wanted to take them up to –’

  ‘Tom Hepple,’ Billy groaned. He, too, put the flapjack down.

  Mary followed the line of the white formica surfaces, their kidney-shaped curve around the breakfast bar, and then out past the split-level cooker to the huge new fridge. The marbled vinyl floor-tiles shone. This was the smartest room in Billy’s house and the cupboards were always exorbitantly full although Billy’s mother Linda hated cooking. She held down three part-time jobs and was chronically tired. She hated having to think of things for her family to eat when she herself never felt hungry, but she wanted them to eat well.

  At twenty, Valerie was the eldest and had grown up looking after Billy and Little Andrea, as she was still called, though she was now fifteen and taller than all of them, except her dad. Andrea had won a scholarship to ballet school, then in the next year, had grown four inches. A transfer had been negotiated to a performing-arts college where she boarded during the week. ‘Musicals, panto and tap!’ she groaned. ‘Everyone wants to be a Bunny Girl and even the teachers seem to think Swan bloody Lake is just an ice routine.’ Andrea had taken up smoking (‘All dancers smoke!’). When her family suggested she come home, she insisted she was happy. She had, at least, got out of the sticks. Valerie baked more than ever and sent parcels.

  ‘Tom Hepple has had a bad dose of flu,’ Valerie explained. ‘It surprises me that kids like you condemn someone for having been ill.’

  Mary started. ‘We don’t condemn him! It’s not his fault he has flu!’

  Valerie and Billy both laughed. ‘No, you dolt,’ Billy teased. ‘She means that you shouldn’t mind that he’s “ill”. You know, “off colour” but not nuts, raving, barking enough to chase you round the water and down the High Street! You’re not supposed to mind that!’

  ‘Lay off!’ Valerie lost her temper. ‘Of course Mary must have been scared; who wouldn’t be? But doesn’t it occur to either of you that the man has something to be upset about?’ Mary blanched. ‘I’m sorry, Mary, but –?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Mary managed stiffly. ‘Tom Hepple was always ill.’

  ‘Yeah, and how would you know different, Val, being all of ten at the time?’ put in Billy.

  ‘He talks to me,’ Valerie said, but it wasn’t true.

  ‘About wanting Mary to fish up his house?’ Billy sneered.

  ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course he knows she can’t do that!’

  ‘Then what’s he think she can do for him?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t know. I mean, he hasn’t …’ Valerie switched her attention to Mary. ‘Look. Like everyone, I’ve heard he called you his angel or something, said you could put things back, but is he pursuing you?’

  Mary thought about the meeting on the road. ‘No, not –’

  ‘He said she walked on water!’ Billy cut in.

  ‘Maybe he was describing what he saw, the way he saw it, but he must know that’s not actually what happened. He’s hardly been going round yelling about it since.’

  ‘For god’s sake!’ Billy shouted. ‘You’re jealous that he’s fixed on my Mary!’

  ‘Your Mary?’ Valerie had been so surprised at hearing Billy raise his voice that she had nearly missed it.

  ‘Your Tom?’

  She made for the door, calling without turning round, ‘Your June?’

  Mary pushed the piece of flapjack around her plate, making circles in the crumbs. Billy shook his head and sighed, nodded and drummed his fingers. Mary had never seen him so agitated.

  ‘What did she mean?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Do I really have to spell it out?’

  ‘No … About June. What did she mean?’

  Daniel met her outside school. ‘Come home with me.’

  What would the hundred-and-eighty-ye
ar-old mother think? At least she was dressed OK, all in black with a white shirt, a raincoat and beret. (‘You look like you ought to be in a convent,’ Billy had greeted her as he got on the bus that morning. ‘That’s rich coming from Jesus himself!’ she’d retorted.) She tried to walk beside Daniel as if she did so every day.

  He let them in with a big key that turned comfortably in the lock. A dark hall gave way to a long dining room, beyond which a garden went on further than Mary could make out. A deep tick resounded through the house, though Mary couldn’t see the grandfather clock she imagined. Daniel steered her into the living room and she held her breath and began to smile, but there was no one in there. The furniture was ill-matched, heavy and worn. To Mary, nothing looked like less than an heirloom. There was plenty of dark wood, but it was fashioned in clean foreign lines that made it appear unfamiliar and so good. The colours of the oriental embroidered cushions, the velvet chaise longue, and the purples, reds, oranges, pinks, greens and blues submerged in the stitched rug, were unlike any others. Mary thought of her own pale home and its unseasoned pine that even after all these years, had not aged.

  Daniel reappeared, holding a bottle of wine and two glasses. ‘Come on.’ She followed him up two flights of stairs, glimpsing mirrors and paintings but no sign of anyone else being at home. They clambered up a steep flight of steps that led to an attic scattered with paints and canvases. An easel stood at the far end and a mattress lay under a dormer window. Daniel pulled Mary down and poured them both some wine. He pushed a cassette into a machine by the bed and the small room filled with hectic jazz.

  ‘Do you like this?’ Daniel asked and she was touched to realise he might be anxious.

  ‘That high saxophone …’ Mary tried.

  ‘The soprano?’ She knew that.

  ‘Yes. It sounds like a bird that’s got caught behind a window.’ Daniel looked mystified but Mary pushed on. ‘And the low one, spiralling down and then up again.’

  ‘The tenor?’ She knew that, too.

  ‘It’s a, it’s a fighter plane with its tail on fire!’ Why say that? She knew she sounded like a child.

  Daniel began fiddling with a jar of brushes. Mary felt uneasy and drank her glass of wine in one gulp. She fumbled for her cigarettes.

  ‘Before you light up,’ Daniel began. Getting to his feet and crouching under the low roof, he moved away and turned his back. She waited but he said nothing further. As ever, she thought any confusion was her fault. ‘I’m cold.’ It was something to say.

  ‘I won’t be long.’ He pinned up a piece of paper and picked out some charcoal. ‘Close your eyes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Now that scar on your forehead, a crescent moon, is it not?’

  She could hear him drawing. ‘I can’t remember.’ She ran a finger over the tiny ridge and into the dip.

  ‘You were how old?’

  ‘I don’t remember, four I think. I fell and hit my head on the grate.’

  ‘The three moles to the side of your throat, a belt of stars?’ Mary fingered her throat. A belt of stars!

  ‘The feather on your head.’

  ‘The feather?’

  ‘Just below your crown. The patch where your hair doesn’t grow.’

  ‘Oh, that!’ He’d noticed that! ‘I was eight, I think. I’d been trying to stand on Julie’s shoulders.’ She remembered the shaved patch of skull, its strange blankness around the raised, forking wound and the tiny stitches; of course, a feather.

  ‘Your left wrist. Suicide?’

  ‘No!’ She laughed. ‘The side of a hot iron.’

  ‘You were?’

  ‘Twelve.’ She was getting good at this.

  ‘The sword on your belly.’

  Mary ran her hand across her stomach. ‘Appendicitis. Fourteen.’ Two weeks in bed and a visit from her father.

  Daniel stopped drawing. ‘Anything else?’ he asked.

  Mary didn’t want to open her eyes. She stretched her hand down. ‘My right thigh.’

  ‘Inner or outer?’

  ‘Inner. Half-way above my knee. An island.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Before I was born.’

  ‘Which island?’

  ‘Oh, somewhere almost even-sided. Greenland, perhaps.’ He continued to draw.

  ‘And a river across my left foot. I jumped from a swing onto glass. Ten.’ She raised her leg and traced the rippling thinness across all those little bones, wishing she had more to offer.

  The tape had ended and Daniel came over to put another in the machine. He leant over her and kissed her and then lay down. His hands slid under her shirt and round her waist, his fingers tracing a circle, round and round. ‘The sword?’

  She propped herself up, undid her trousers and lowered them just enough for him to be able to see her scar. He kissed it.

  ‘Greenland?’

  Mary was trembling, but she pushed her trousers down and then off. She raised one knee and put his hand on her thigh. He stroked her birthmark but as his fingers moved beneath her pants, she pulled his hand back. ‘I’m …’

  ‘Ah.’ He nodded, sprang up and went over to the easel. Mary sat up and saw her constellation – feather, moon and stars, sword, island and river; and now, just below the sword but more towards the centre, a tiny red flame.

  Daniel lay down again, holding her hard against him. She kept lifting her head to look across at the picture.

  ‘You like it? It’s not finished. I need your landscape next.’

  She rolled on top of him. ‘You’ve made them into something for me – not just accidents.’

  ‘The myth of Mary George!’ He held her for a long time and then looked at his watch. ‘Ma will be home soon. Will you have supper?’

  Too much, too much. ‘I’d better go.’ She jumped up and rushed down the three flights of stairs with Daniel asking her again to stay and eat, reassuring her, and then offering to walk her to the bus station.

  As they set off up the road, Mary saw a large old car go past, one with the fine low form of an ocean liner, driven by a woman with silver hair. She tooted and waved. Daniel waved back while Mary tried to hide behind him.

  By the end of October, school had become just a place Mary was leaving. The teachers were neither frightening nor charismatic anymore. If Mary had to knock at the staff-room door, she no longer shook at the thought of Mrs Rike being the one who opened it, sallow, hunched and pugnacious, looming up through a fug of smoke. Mrs Rike had been the reason Mary spent a year begging to be let off school. She would put the thermometer on a radiator or pour a bucket of water down the toilet or scratch at her chest – I’ve got a fever, I’ve been sick, a rash. Mrs Rike locked the First Years in cupboards till they were hysterical and refused permission for them to go to the toilet, so that they wet themselves. She would keep a class lined up in the corridor till no one twitched or breathed, homing in on the ones the other children most admired or ostracised. They would be interrogated, slapped when they tried to respond (‘But, Ma’am …’, ‘Don’t talk back!’), humiliated, slapped again and only let go when they cried. Mrs Rike’s dinner-duty consisted of stopping anyone emptying anything into the slops bucket, and sitting them down in front of their leftovers for the entire afternoon if necessary. Mary remembered the gristle she had pushed down her sock when Mrs Rike leant out of the window to have a cigarette. Once home, she had vomited anyway.

  Now, the pupils could eat more or less what they wanted of the grey roast beef, tinned burgers, mince and luncheon-meat fritters; the glasses of green jelly topped with a stiff peak of artificial cream, dry treacle tart and tepid custard with a rubbery skin. All his school life, Billy had gone into one end of the canteen and come out of the other with a plate of grated cheese. He’d persuaded his mother to write to the school about his ‘dietary restrictions’. Mrs Rike hated him almost as much as she hated Mary and measured his hair weekly with a ruler until the skinheads caught her attention and her determination shifted from cutting to g
rowing.

  For Mary, school was now a small place of which she occupied a small part. She studied English, Latin and French and so had just three teachers. In class, the pupils sat around chatting in groups of half a dozen or so, and the teachers spoke quietly and without authority. People still fell asleep or failed to turn up, but no one misbehaved. Mary liked the work and her books, but understood all this to be just a prelude to something that would begin next year. Her English teacher, Miss Anna Starr, had been lending Mary her own books, and offering to read her stories and poems. Miss Starr was always thoroughly made-up, her face powdered, her lips pale and finely outlined. She wore fashionable but elegant clothes and said as little as possible. If a class became rowdy, she spoke more and more quietly until she had recovered everyone’s attention. Her coolness could give way to a blast of warmth that was prized by her pupils for being so rarely received.

  Mr Travers was in the geography department and had been given the new role of careers adviser. All of the Upper Sixth had to visit him. Mary sat in his office, scanning the posters: a nurse holding out a tray of medicine, like a waiter presenting a meal; a smiling young white woman pumping a well in an African village as if she were doing a folk dance; a man in a white coat frowning at a machine; an eager dentist; and several shots of students in gowns and mortarboards, with no longer fashionable haircuts and shoes.

  ‘Your father was an architect, you say?’ Mr Travers looked nervously at Mary.

  ‘Is an architect, actually, Sir.’

  ‘Of course. And you?’

  ‘I’m not. I mean, I don’t think that it’s my thing.’

  ‘Of course. And what might be your thing?’

  Mary surveyed the walls. ‘Do you have any pictures of colleges in London?’

  ‘I can lend you some prospectuses.’ He jumped up and pulled a number of alphabetically-labelled cardboard boxes off a shelf.

  Mary watched the pile grow in front of her as he sorted the brochures like a gambler shuffling and dealing a pack of cards. ‘Do they have pictures?’