25 December 1940
Dear Jane,
At the same time that I lost everything I’d known, I found you. Besides being my nurse, you have been a comforter, a counselor, and a friend. I deeply appreciate the gifts, and I want to give one to you, too. I am unfit to be a mother to Lily. She needs more than I can possibly give her. You have been more of a mother to her this month than I can ever be. I am leaving the baby gifts for you and begging you to take my Lily as your own.
Resolved, I folded it and left it unsigned. Donning the clothes from Jane, I peeked out of my room to see that the nurse’s station was empty, then tiptoed past it. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a handbag, left unguarded, just asking for me to take it. I asked to be forgiven for this one last sin.
Grabbing it, I rushed out into the cold night.
In my hurry I nearly ran into a motorcar that was passing by. “Watch it, missus,” a man shouted from the window.
Missus. It reminded me that I was nameless. I couldn’t very well get on for very long like that. I would have to come up with something.
It didn’t take me long to choose a name. Taking my unused first name, a reminder of the grandmother I’d never liked, matching this new, troubling face, I would be Helen. And forming an eternal connection to my new friend and to the baby girl I was leaving behind with her, the name was complete. I would now call myself Helen Bailey.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The underground wasn’t running, as it was Christmas morning, so I walked as long as I could and then huddled from the cold in a storefront doorway for the remainder of the dark hours.
For a moment I questioned the sanity of my choice, peering in the direction that would take me back to the hospital. It was unlikely that my absence had been noticed yet. But no, my decision was final. It was better for Kyle to assume that I had died than to come home to a broken, unworthy wife. Better for my parents to lose me than to have even more to explain, and to have even more disappointment to endure. Better for Lily to grow up in a loving, stable home. These thoughts warmed me from within.
I ran my fingers through my hair, a habit that would be difficult to break. I had forgotten that it sat in patches now. Maybe I would just keep the scarf over it and simplify everything.
My hands were icy, and I slipped them into my pockets. I felt my ring in there, its lonely weight. I held it up to my left hand, sighed, and put it back.
My attention rested on the handbag that I had taken from an unknown nurse. I already felt guilty about that, but I convinced myself that it was a theft of necessity. Surely, the mitigating circumstance gave me some kind of pardon. And in light of what I had stolen from God, it didn’t even compare. But would anyone be looking for me because of it? I was easy enough to describe. I turned my head side to side and saw that the street was deserted.
I opened the clasp to see a little mirror, a lipstick case, a key, and an envelope with money in it. Five pounds, with a note saying, “Esther, pick out something lovely for yourself for Christmas. I wish I could be there. Love, Mum.” Esther’s mum had been generous, and I started to think about how I could best stretch this useful find.
As the light of Christmas morning peeked over the horizon, I started walking toward the nearest station. With five pounds, I could have found a cab and had much to spare, but I was determined to be frugal from the start. Wrapping my scarf around my face, I did not attract any attention, and I boarded the first train of the day.
I got off at Ranelagh and glimpsed the gray flats that had been, for four days, my first home as a wife. Memories flooded me—love and longing, sickness and salvation. But no, those were the memories of another girl. A beautiful girl. That was not me any longer. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my coat and walked on, bristling at the scratchy feeling of the wool against my damaged skin.
Just a few blocks more and I arrived at my destination—Saint Stephen’s. It hadn’t been a conscious decision to come here, but as I reflected on it, it made sense. Despite my protestations, something inside me craved anything that was familiar. I couldn’t return to Westcott Manor, and I couldn’t bear to go see Lucille’s home. In my mind she was still my best friend, and I knew that she would never again walk through my gate and stay at my house. Saint Stephen’s had seen me only a couple of times, but it was somewhere warm, somewhere I knew I could feel safe for a few hours.
The church glistened with candles and wreaths, and by eight o’clock a children’s choir had begun rehearsing for the Christmas morning Mass. I stayed in a pew off to the side and smiled when I saw the procession coming up the aisle. Dear Father Sullivan. If only he had counseled Kyle to remain in the seminary. He would be serving at Mass in Durham right now instead of fighting to survive on a faraway battlefield.
At the end of Mass, I decided to try an experiment. The congregation filed out, each person shaking the hands of the priest and wishing him a good holiday. I joined the ranks and took my turn. I held on to his hand for just a bit longer than necessary, forcing him to look at me more closely. But Father Sullivan didn’t recognize me. Not a flicker.
I went back in to the church and stayed for the next Mass, too, all the while considering what I would do next. I was afraid that if I stayed in Liverpool, I would be tempted at some point to inquire about my parents or about Kyle or Lily. And that only opened the door to the bigger temptation of reentering their lives. But I had brought the punishment onto myself, and I was not going to carry them down with me.
The money in my handbag—Esther’s handbag—would take me anywhere that I reasonably needed to go. Julianne Westcott had nursing credentials, but Helen Bailey did not, and I couldn’t turn to those skills without papers. Although, in wartime desperation, could evidence of that proficiency at least open some doors?
As if I was being sent a sign, Father Sullivan said a prayer for the citizens of Manchester, who had suffered a devastating blow from the Germans just two days before. On the twenty-third and twenty-fourth, thousands of bombs had been dropped on the city, igniting the largest fire in the war so far. In one hospital alone, they lost fourteen nurses. Surely, they could use some help from someone who could demonstrate an ability in that field.
The next morning, as thousands of people evacuated Manchester, I headed toward it.
And this was how I earned a living. I followed the war from town to town, going where tragedy had struck the hardest. I would present myself as a traveling nurse who had lost her paperwork in the Blitz. It was a credible story, enhanced as I proved what I could do and by my obvious injury. When things stabilized in an area, I traveled on to another devastated town desperate for skilled, albeit disfigured, hands.
Whenever I could, I sent money anonymously to Esther at Smithdown to repay what I stole, plus a little more for the inconvenience.
People looked at me twice, which was something that I eventually grew used to. But instead of looking at me because they saw beauty, as they once did, they looked because they saw the opposite. It was just a flashing thought, I could see, because I was surrounded with the wounded and the dying, most of whom looked much worse than I did. Nevertheless, it was tiresome.
I managed to tolerate this unusual life, chasing disaster. If I died, I didn’t care. I was already dead to everyone I knew and loved, and the sooner the Germans took me, the sooner this nomadic life would come to an end.
Month after month I ached to step into the crosshairs. To join Lucille, who had deserved to live so much more than I did. If I hadn’t been such a coward, she might be alive today. If I had been willing to see my parents straightaway, we might have stayed at Westcott Manor, having one of our sleepovers, laughing until they told us to go to sleep. Little Lily would have broken the ice with my parents, and they might have welcomed Kyle when he returned.
That vision wasn’t to be. But I’d tried to make it right, as best as I could. I died so that Kyle could live and the good God that Kyle somehow believed in had to live up to his end of the bargain. It was trag
ic that I had to deny Kyle knowledge of his daughter, but with no idea when, or if, he would ever return, I had to choose what was best for her. I had to believe that he would have understood.
Year after year an end was denied to me as millions died and yet I lived. Each November brought a bittersweet awareness of the milestones that must have been attained by the daughter who was in the arms of a more deserving mother. What did her first smile look like? When had she cut her first tooth? Did she wear her hair back in plaits or down in curls? With the only reverence I had remaining for anything, I found a post office and sent an annual offering, care of Jane Bailey at the hospital. A pressed flower, a doll’s dress, whatever could be found or made along these sparse times, sent always with the same unsigned message:
To dearest Lily, I wish you the happiest of birthdays.
I moved to a new town after each one, so that the postmark would already be outdated by the time it arrived.
I did not make friends where I went, nor did I keep records, so the end of the war still found me without the necessary credentials to be hired permanently. As the country celebrated, I waded aimlessly through an endless shower of streamers and confetti. As the country recovered, my skills were not needed as urgently.
I was able to stretch out my unusual employment for just a few more years, going to cities that had not yet recovered from their devastation. But that couldn’t last forever, and soon I was faced with dwindling funds. I had saved enough to get by for a little while, but it wasn’t going to support me for long. I checked into a boardinghouse in Stoke-on-Trent for no other reason than the bus got a flat tire on the city’s outskirts and I had decided to get off.
But funds were not the greatest of my problems. I began to choke on my own loneliness.
One day I picked up a knife with my right hand, which I was still trying to regain the full use of after all this time. In my left hand, I held an apple. As I applied pressure to the fruit with the blade, it slipped, cutting instead my wrist. I reached for a towel but hesitated to stop the flow of blood, mesmerized with the growing red pool on the counter. I watched the blood leave the wound, and all the sadness flowing out with it. It dripped onto the floor and onto my shoe, and still I watched.
At last I took the towel and wiped up the mess, but the image didn’t leave me, nor did the feeling. I managed to bind my wrist tightly.
It happened again, a few weeks later, this time on purpose. Again I watched, detached, as the blood and sadness left my body. If only I could cut deep enough, if only I could wait long enough, that would be it. This would be over.
But something always made me reach for that towel.
That something, I discovered, was my brother. I hadn’t thought of him in some time, having buried him along with the rest of my former life. But the birth of the new prince made his memory difficult to ignore. The name Charles was all over the newspapers and the trinkets and the conversations. For a little while you couldn’t go a day without hearing it to the point of nausea.
“Charles, such an adorable child.”
“Charles, new hope for the monarchy.”
I was long past due to visit Bootle. I used the last of my money for train fare.
As the countryside grew more familiar to me, I shut it out by focusing on a Vogue magazine someone had left on the seat. Flipping through its pages with the eyes of a different woman, I noted that hat fashion had taken a peculiar turn. They were taller now, with creases and curves that looked unnatural. Skirts were pleated. I rather liked the pleats, but the hats I could have done without. At last I put the magazine aside, bored with its triviality, and closed my eyes, hoping to sleep through the rest of the ride.
A jerk to the train startled me, and I looked out to see that we were inching our way along.
“That’s because of the new tracks they’re constructing,” someone next to me said. I looked up to see a squat old lady across from me holding her handbag and umbrella in her crossed hands. Her hat was saucer shaped, the practical kind, with a silk flower tucked into the sash.
“They’re always building and rebuilding,” she continued. “All over the country. Sometimes it seems as if we’ll never recover from the war.”
“Yes,” I added. I’d been here, there, and everywhere in the three years since VE Day. It was the same story at each stop. Towns starting over. Life slowly returning.
“Of course, this area received such a pounding from the Germans.”
“Was Bootle hit hard?” I asked. It was the one part of the country I had avoided.
“Oh yes, but no harder than any other, I suppose. I had a dear friend on Milton Street that died. Marly Conyard, poor thing. She was putting out food for a stray cat when it hit.”
“I lost a friend, too.”
“It’s ugly business, war. I’m glad it’s over.”
I didn’t answer her.
“And what are you here for?”
“I’m going to Bootle Home to visit . . . a friend.”
“Bootle Home. Ah, that was sad.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was damaged severely just before the end of the war. They lost one whole wing.”
My heart froze. “I didn’t know.”
“You’ll see when you get there. They’ve patched it up quite properly, although the stone wasn’t from the original quarry, so you can see the new part if you know where to look.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Oh yes, and a few died. I suppose your friend made it, though?”
“I can only hope.”
I didn’t feel like talking anymore. I didn’t want to have to wonder if anything had happened to Charles, or imagine Bootle Home as anything other than what it had been.
We swayed back and forth as we crossed the makeshift tracks while men worked to repair the gaping crater left by an explosion.
When the train pulled into Bootle, I said good-bye to my companion and stepped out. The exhaust from the train polluted the air that I knew from memory would otherwise have smelled sweet.
“Taxi, Miss?”
A toothless man offered to take me wherever I needed to go. I pulled out my coin purse, which was nearing a death of starvation, and turned him down.
“I’ll walk, thank you.”
It was roughly three miles to the north, as I recalled, and the weather was pleasant enough. I took a sandwich from my handbag and ate it along the way.
I’d prepared myself for the worst, based on the comments of the train passenger, but Bootle Home looked relatively untouched. Now that I knew to look, I could see a slight discoloration on the left wing, but I might not have noticed without her commentary.
I walked up the familiar steps, ten years estranged. Before I could open the door, a couple of the residents came out with an orderly. All three were laughing, bundled in their winter coats, with cherry-red noses and cheeks. One resident was a little girl, just about the age that Lily would be. She wore a knitted pink hat with matching mittens, and I thought I might make one in time for the next November package, Lily’s eighth. I stared longer than I should have and wiped away a cold tear that escaped.
I turned away and looked up at the intricate carving atop the threshold. Complexities immortalized in lacquered wood. I sighed and entered. The hallway was the same, as were the sofas, which looked as untouched as when I was here before.
A young woman with dull brown hair pulled into a frighteningly severe bun sat behind the desk. Her eyes widened when she saw me, but then she looked down and shuffled her feet beneath the metal chair.
“Where is Miss Ellis?” I inquired.
“Miss Ellis?” She put a well-chewed pencil into her mouth and looked up into nowhere. “I’m not sure. I replaced Mrs. Hainsworth. But I think Miss Ellis was before that. She left to live with her daughter or something.”
“I don’t believe she had any children.”
“Or maybe it was her sister. I don’t know.” The pencil came out of her mouth, but she held on to
it. I saw a deck of cards lying next to her, displayed by suit in a setup for Patience, or some other useless diversion. “Anyway, what do you want?”
“I’m here to see Charles. Charles Westcott. Is he here?”
“Yes. Charles. Are you a relative?”
“I’m . . . I’m a friend.”
“You have to be a relative or get special permission.”
“I have permission. From his sister.”
“I didn’t know he had a sister.”
“He did. But she died. In the Blitz.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t let you in without permission.”
I had not come this far to be dismissed by such a mindless little twit. I leaned in so that she could get a good, hard look at my face. I saw her quiver a bit.
“Look. It was his sister’s dying wish that I come here and check in on him. Surely you wouldn’t deny a dead girl’s final request?”
“No . . . I suppose I wouldn’t.”
“I didn’t think so. Now, where is his room?”
She pulled out a register and pushed a pen toward me. “Here. You have to sign in first.”
I sighed but went through the little charade. Helen Bailey. It came naturally now. It had taken almost a year not to start my name with a J, longer than it had taken me to write my married name without thought. She looked at my name and appeared satisfied. “He’s in room 203. It’s just down the hall, on your right.”
The same room as before. It was comforting to think that there were some things that didn’t change, even if they were insignificant ones.
I walked to Charles’s room, and it felt as if it could have been just yesterday since I’d been there. I found it empty, but it was unchanged. The bed linens were still the stark white ones, but it wasn’t as if that were likely to change. The same brocade curtains lined the windows and looked over the same gardens, still well tended by someone other than a McCarthy.
Only one thing was different. The colorful pots still lined the windows, but like the memory of the gardener who had brought them here long ago and stolen my heart with his kindness, their contents were withered and brittle, covered by a canopy of spiderwebs. I traced my finger along one of the sinewy strands, pulling it like taffy.
The Memory of Us: A Novel Page 29