by Juliet West
Separation had been the tactic thus far – separate mealtimes, separate outings, separate rooms. Paul and Adriana had, grudgingly, conceded the master bedroom to Francine, decamping to the guest room, while Jasmin was in Hazel’s old room, delighted with the teddy bears and the music box and the patchwork eiderdown sewn by Nanny Felix all those years ago. There were occasional conversations in the hallway or the drawing room, polite words masking a thousand resentments. The formality couldn’t last. One more week – one more day – and the pretence would be blown apart.
She yearned for Charles. The ring was still in its box, and she took it out every night and wore it for a minute or two, flashing her hand in front of the dressing-room mirror. Marriage seemed more of an impossibility than ever, and the war was just another complication. Still, there was Tuesday to look forward to. After Holloway, she would take a cab straight to Bruton Street.
Closing her eyes, she listened to the swish of the incoming tide. It wouldn’t be long before the sand was swallowed. And then it would be shingle or nothing, and Jasmin would whine to go back to the house, and Mrs Waite would pounce, fretting about what to cook for dinner and whom to serve, when and where.
‘Nee-Nee, look!’
Jasmin had fished something out of the large rock pool at the base of a breakwater, and now she was waving it in the air. It looked like a tin hat, seaweed dripping from the strap.
‘Put that down, darling.’
But it was too late. Jasmin had tipped it onto her head. The hat covered her eyes and rested on the pink bridge of her nose.
‘Please take it off!’ Francine called. ‘We don’t know where it’s been.’
Jasmin giggled and marched unseeing towards the shingle with her arms outstretched, as if she were playing a game of blind man’s buff. Her right foot stubbed up against a rock and she fell sideways, screeching as her head hit the sand.
‘Silly girl!’ Francine said under her breath. She sighed and stood up from the beach chair. Its wooden frame creaked – the old thing was on the verge of collapse. She didn’t want to step onto the wet sand in her white leather shoes, but really there was no choice. Jasmin didn’t seem to be getting up; she was howling, the hat still over her eyes. Gulls wheeled and screamed as Francine picked her way across the pebbles.
‘Sit up, darling. Come on.’ Francine crouched over her granddaughter, grasped her shoulders and pulled her up to sitting. It was only then that she noticed the holes on one side of the hat, the side where Jasmin had fallen. Like bullet holes, she thought, and then with a twist of fear she realized that in all likelihood they were bullet holes, and for all she knew the hat might have company; there could be a dead soldier or a mash of brains or any monstrous sight washed up by the hideous tide.
Carefully she tried to lift the hat but it was strangely resistant. One of the holes was almost triangular, folded inwards. Francine edged the hat to one side and felt a lurch of nausea as she realized the bent metal was wedged into Jasmin’s scalp. Gently she pulled, and as the hat finally came free there was a sickening slicing sound. Blood spilt from the deep wound, darkening Jasmin’s blonde tangles. Francine let the hat drop, heard it thump to the sand. A hush fell over the beach – the waves, the gulls, Jasmin’s cries; all were silent – and Francine looked around in bewilderment at the sudden, terrible peace.
34
It was like living inside Schoenberg’s head. Mornings were the noisiest. Metal doors clanked, keys jangled, Blakeys on boot heels struck like tolling bells on iron spiral staircases. The clash of chords would echo in her ears even after the morning had quietened.
Hazel looked down at the mug of weak cocoa. A layer of grease floated on the top. Soon, when she could summon the strength, she would take her spoon and skim off the grease, clasp the handleless mug, like a child, and gulp down the lukewarm liquid, trying not to taste or to smell. Trying not to gag. Then she would chew the bread – ignoring the flecks of unidentifiable grey – and wait to be let out for the half-hour’s exercise. In the yard she would walk slowly with her eyes raised to the sky. She would not look at Lucia, she would not look at the Holloway ground. Only the sky above gave her comfort. It was not part of this place; it was free and belonged to her as much as it belonged to Jasmin. A brief moment of sharing.
Sixteen days. Sixteen days she had been imprisoned and still no date for her appeal to be heard. She hadn’t been charged, had barely been questioned. It didn’t matter how much she pleaded, the wardresses just stared stone-faced, parroting the same lines about 18Bs and the Advisory Committee and backlogs and patience.
F-wing’s cells had been recently whitewashed. She was lucky, one inmate had told her, to have escaped the filth of other wings, where mushrooms and rats were liable to spawn overnight. But the whitewash masked nothing. Already it was flaking, wet with damp, impervious to the hot June sun and the tantalizing summer breezes that swooped into the exercise yard.
She had dreamed, once, that this cell was the summer house – its size was similar, she supposed – and she was with Tom, could feel him inside her, his skin welded to hers, their bodies moving like a tide, and the moment was coming, that indescribable moment, when their love would be equal and pure. She felt the truth even for a fraction of a second after the air-raid siren wailed and she woke to see the dim blue landing light seeping beneath the cell door.
Warnings were frequent; some nights she could hear aircraft overhead. But still no bombs.
‘Hazel, please.’
Lucia had fallen into step beside her and she was trying – again – to strike up conversation. Hazel dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands, kept her focus on a faraway cirrus cloud, ignoring the crunch of pain in the muscles at the base of her neck. Never again would she speak to Lucia. She would not speak to any of the fascist women, the believers, the defiant inmates who clustered in the yard and around the trestle tables at mealtimes, humming fascist anthems when they thought the wardresses weren’t listening. They feigned cheerfulness, affected a kind of camaraderie. Mrs Dunn had appeared for the first time a few days previously and there was a round of quiet applause as she took her seat on the bench, her right arm lifted in a coded half-salute.
‘All right, you won’t speak to me,’ said Lucia. ‘But that doesn’t mean I can’t speak to you.’
Hazel watched the cloud drift southwards. It was shaped like a swallow on the wing. Its shape would change, it might divide into two, or three, but later Jasmin might look up and her eyes might fix on the same patch of moisture and air.
‘I should have covered for you when they came to the flat. Hazel? I know I shouldn’t have mentioned the drum corps. But they probably would have taken you anyway, don’t you see? Forgive me? I can’t bear to see you punishing yourself like this.’ She reached out her hand and touched Hazel’s elbow.
Hazel stood still in the yard and screamed.
It was Tuesday and her mother was visiting later in the morning. The wardresses listened in on conversations, made it clear that they would be writing reports. Hazel saw this as a good thing: they could listen and report as much as they liked, because then they would learn that she should not be here, that she had only become a blackshirt because she needed a home for her daughter. What a cruel bargain that had turned out to be.
Lying on the rough-woven blanket, she began the ritual mental torture, the game of if onlys. If only Winnie had arrived fifteen minutes earlier. They would all be in Devon by now; the police wouldn’t have bothered coming after her there, would they? If only they’d gone the week before, the date Winnie had first mentioned, and that Hazel hadn’t said she’d need a little more time to tie up her work in the office, because it wouldn’t be fair to leave Mr Boyne high and dry.
If only Lucia had been a true friend. Hazel understood her now. Lucia wanted someone she could possess, a kind of pet, dutiful and loyal. Yet she had chosen badly – first Hazel, and then Philip, each with ties beyond Lucia’s control: a daughter, a wife. No wonder she was bitter.
Would she have joined the movement if it hadn’t been for Jasmin? She turned away from the brick wall and faced the crooked chair in the corner of her cell. It was a hard question, but she was getting closer to the heart. And in the heart, that black heart, lay Charles. It was Charles who had changed everything, twisted her mind, turned her against the truth. Against Tom.
If only she had never known Charles.
‘Alexander!’ The wardress threw the door wide and stood back. ‘Visitor waiting.’
Her mother looked surprisingly undecorative. She wore a mustard-coloured sundress with a plain silk scarf and no jewellery. She had taken off her hat, revealing grey roots around her temples.
As Hazel approached the table, Francine stood up. There was a pained expression on her mother’s face. No doubt Francine was shocked to see how thin Hazel had become over the last fortnight, how lank and untidy her hair had grown.
‘Darling,’ said Francine. There was a handkerchief in her hand. Hazel felt dazzled by the whiteness of the cotton, its purity against the grime of this low-ceilinged room. The handkerchief was wet, she registered. Her mother had been crying. It was not like Francine to cry.
‘What is it?’ asked Hazel, leaning across the table to grasp her mother’s arm. ‘What is it? Not Jasmin?’ The pitch of her voice rose and heads turned towards them. ‘Jasmin?’
A voice called out from behind her. ‘The prisoner must sit!’
Hazel dropped into her seat. Hysteria bubbled in her chest and her breath came in gasps. Nothing had been said yet. Nothing. She was being ridiculous.
Francine dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief. ‘I’m afraid there’s been an accident,’ she said.
Flashes of sun-white light pulsed across the room. Hazel heard her mother’s words as if through a distant gramophone. The skin on the back of her neck tightened and froze.
‘Jasmin is in the hospital. She’s going to be all right, we . . . we think. The doctors are very positive. It’s a cut to her head, a piece of metal on the beach, silly accident, happened in a heartbeat, there was nothing I could have done. One of those silly, silly things.’
‘A cut?’
‘Well, it’s rather deep, they worry about infection. But darling, honestly, she’s in the right place. Your father is with her today.’
‘She needs me.’
‘In an ideal world, of course, but –’ She twisted one corner of the handkerchief and wound it around her forefinger.
Hazel clutched at the table, fixing her eyes on a cigarette scorch in the wood, willing the prison walls to crumble into dust. She would go insane if she could not be with Jasmin. She wanted to run to the wardress, to shake her and demand to be released that very second. ‘They have to listen,’ she said, her voice rising again. ‘There must be a way . . . some compassion. Please!’ She scraped back the chair, stepped across the floor to face the wardress. She was a middle-aged woman with a crescent of small moles on one cheek, not so hard-faced as some of the others.
‘Let me see the committee. Please.’ Hazel laced her fingers together, prayer hands pleading. ‘I must see the committee.’
The duty doctor gave her a sleeping draught but it did nothing to still her mind. Back in her cell, Hazel stared at the 25-watt bulb burning in its metal cage. Twenty minutes till lights out. A letter, that was her only hope. There was time to write a letter, if she was quick. Tom worked on a newspaper, didn’t he? He would have connections. They would vet the letter but it would get through, so long as she kept it superficial, said nothing about the prison or the conditions. Gripping the pencil, her hand began to tremble, and as she wrote, a dreadful weariness trickled and dripped through her limbs.
35
‘Post for you,’ his mum said, nodding towards the rack on the wall where they kept the keys and the letters.
It had been a difficult day at work. Crow on the rampage again – no one was safe from his curses. All Tom wanted was to unlace his shoes and stretch out on his bed, drift off to nothingness. But no, here was a letter and his mum was clearly curious. He took the envelope from the rack. You couldn’t blame her for hovering. The writing wasn’t familiar and the postmark was faint, impossible to distinguish in the gloom of the hall passage. He balanced the envelope on his knee and tore it open with his good hand. Shaking out the letter, he scanned down to the name at the bottom.
‘Not bad news, I hope?’
‘What?’ He fought to unscramble his brain, to counteract the shock. ‘No . . . a comrade from Spain. He might be passing through London.’ Tom refolded the letter and stuffed it into his jacket pocket, searching for the right words, the small talk to stall her interest. ‘Warm again, eh?’ he said. ‘I’ll have some lemonade if there’s any left?’
‘Just about,’ she said, disappearing into the kitchen. ‘Last of the lemons, though.’
He went into the front room and sat on the settee next to a stack of neatly folded blankets. Strange to see his father’s pullovers reconfigured: those familiar earthy colours – brown, beige, moss green. He chewed his lip as he pictured the grave, new grass grown over the mound, lush and thick. He walked across to the window. Quickly he took out the letter again and read through the short paragraph. She wanted him to visit her in Holloway. An urgent family crisis. Please believe I do not ask this lightly. And then that strange phrase, the writing growing fainter, weakening. It is of your intimate concern.
The nerve of her! He ought to rip the letter to pieces, pretend it had never arrived. It would be easy enough to ignore, no harm done. For all she knew he no longer lived at Boone Street. Yet she had remembered the address, must have kept the notes that he’d stuffed under the summer-house door. It had been – what? – over three years since they were in touch.
Bea took a coaster from the mantelpiece and set the glass down on the side table. ‘Seeing Jillie tonight, love?’
Jillie. What had they arranged? ‘She’s coming over, I think.’
‘Off out?’
‘We’ll stay in with the wireless, Mum. Keep you company.’
‘You’d better have a shave. She won’t think much of you looking like that.’
In the bathroom, he lathered his face with shaving soap. His left hand ached; there was a pain in his missing fingers, and the scar on his palm itched. It had been joined by other scars, a criss-cross of shrapnel wounds working their way up his arm, yet this one was still distinct, still had the power to set his teeth on edge. Her phrases dangled and looped. It is of your intimate concern. What the hell was she talking about? He drew the razor across his skin. Through the open window, he heard a woman laugh. Water splashing onto a parched flowerbed. He rinsed the blade in the sink, turned his face to shave the other side. Perhaps he would visit her, and he’d do it soon. Yes, he’d see if he could get a visiting order. After all, there might be a story in it, he might be able to stand up those tales of luxury living for the 18Bs. God knows he could do with getting into Crow’s good books.
The order was granted, no questions asked. All right, he wasn’t a famous reporter, hardly a household name, but he
’d thought someone in the prison might run a check, discover that he was a journalist for the Chronicle. But no, here he was on the number 29 bus, the visiting pass folded inside his shirt pocket. He could feel the friction of the paper, the heat of it. It might be dangerous, he knew that. It might as well be ticking.
The bus passed St Pancras, close to the tenement block where Jacob had lived. Tom had visited once, when he was just home from Spain. On the hillside at Jarama, he’d pieced back together the Charlotte Mew, and now he felt that Jacob’s family would like to have the book, with all its scribbles and underlinings, the jottings of Jacob’s own poetry in the blank pages at the back. There were photographs to pass on too, and an old pocket watch that had somehow survived the attack.
Arriving at the flat, Tom had seen that the blinds were still drawn. Inside, Jacob’s mother greeted him with an embrace. A young woman, the ex-fiancée, was there too. ‘He often spoke of you,’ Tom said to the girl, and she had pawed at her heart as if it would break.
Holloway loomed, ugly and ornate, its Victorian turrets and crenellated walls deep red against the morning sky. He’d never been inside a prison before, assumed it would be nothing like he’d imagined, but in fact it was exactly as he’d imagined: bunches of keys hanging from the belts of unsmiling guards; gloom and damp; a stink of boiled cabbage and disinfectant. He was patted down and shown into the visiting room with the others who were waiting. They were women in the main, some higher class, others down-at-heel in threadbare cardies hugged to their skinny bodies. It was cold in here, despite the June sun blazing outside.