A Nightingale in Winter

by Margaret K Johnson

  She was sprawled in her chair, looking more unconscious than asleep, but there always had been a fine line between the two once she’d got hold of some gin, which was whenever she could get hold of some money.

  Rose. His mother.

  He stood there in the shadows looking at her—the open mouth and slack jowls and the dribble that was making its steady way into the grimy folds of her flesh.

  Rose.

  Suddenly she snorted, her whole body quivering. He stiffened, mentally preparing himself to face her. But then, although her slack lips firmed sufficiently to form a few incomprehensible mumbles, he saw that she was still asleep. She was dreaming, talking in her sleep. He wondered what a woman such as Rose dreamed about. He longed suddenly for another cigarette. Severini’s Paris studio seemed very far away indeed.

  He should never have come.

  “Leo?” The voice caused him almost to jump out of his skin. But as soon as he’d recovered himself he moved quickly toward it.

  “Well, as I live and breathe!” the voice was continuing. “It is you. Well, I’ll be—”

  “Shh!” He hurried over to the low wall that separated the two back yards. A woman was standing on the other side of the wall, a solid figure with her hands on her hips. Edie.

  “Don’t worry about Rose,” she said. “I heard her singing earlier. She’s put away enough gin so she won’t stir before bedtime. Oh, Leo.” She smiled at him and put her hands in his.

  He squeezed them. “It’s good to see you, Edie.”

  “Oh, yes! So bloody good you stayed away more than three years,” she said, but she was smiling, and her hands were moving in his, imparting a callused caress.

  He returned her smile, not bothering to come up with some excuse for his absence. It would be a waste of time with Edie; she knew him too well. They’d grown up together, shed each other of unwanted virginities, and comforted each other. She didn’t fully understand the passion of his painting, but she understood him better than any human being in the world.

  He pulled her as close as the low wall between them would allow him to, kissing her as convincingly as if he’d kissed no one else in three years.

  When they came up for air, she leaned against him for a moment before pulling back and looking him straight in the face. “Why have you come back, Leo?” she asked.

  He stroked her hair back from her face, comparing her to all the other women who’d passed through his life since he’d last seen her. Including the unfortunate creature who had borne his child and become the subject of his controversial painting. Without exception, they would be clingy, plaintive, and demanding after a period of absence. Wanting something from him, demanding it.

  In another time and place, if he were a different man with different ambitions, he would have married Edie, got a job in some factory, and fathered her children. Instead, he’d run away at fifteen and lived by his wits. Finally, he’d met artists who cared about the things he cared about, people who understood his passion for painting.

  “You mean apart from to see you?” he teased and received a sharp poke in the ribs as a reward.

  “I’m serious,” she persisted. “Why are you here?”

  “I’ve enlisted.”

  “So?”

  He smiled, unsurprised that this in itself wasn’t a sufficient explanation for her. “To be perfectly honest, Edie, I’m not sure what brought me here. Superstition perhaps?”

  “You mean to see it all one more time in case you get killed?” Edie always had been direct.

  “Perhaps. I didn’t think it through. I just came.”

  “Well,” she said dryly, “your roots are still here, right enough.”

  Rose.

  He half-turned to glance over his shoulder, but thankfully no one was there.

  “You shouldn’t have come, Leo.”

  He turned to face her again, drawing her back into his arms. “I’m glad I did. What’s been happening? How are your mother and father?”

  “Old. Ted was killed last year.”

  “Ted?” Ted was Edie’s younger brother. “But surely…”

  “No, he wasn’t old enough to join up,” she said. “Lied about his age, didn’t he? Copped it his first day at the Front, silly bugger. Thing is, Mum and Dad can’t seem to get over it. He was a little twerp, but even he didn’t deserve that. Half the boys in this road are injured or dead; they all enlisted together. Leo, what in heaven’s name possessed you to do it? Not as if you exactly care about King or Country, is it? And I thought you were well set up in Paris.”

  He shrugged. “I want to paint about it.”

  She pulled a scathing face at him. “You’re just as nuts as Ted was. All men are the same. There wouldn’t be a bloody war if it was left to us women.”

  “You become one of those suffragettes while I’ve been away?” he teased and felt her body tense a little in his arms.

  “Well,” she said a little too loudly, “so what if I have?”

  “Shh!” he warned her, but too late. There was a noise behind him. The sound of a door being opened.

  “What the bloody hell’s going on out here?”

  He froze, hands tightening on Edie’s arms as he saw her expression change from annoyance to sympathy.

  “Sorry, Leo,” she whispered.

  He nodded, and then, very slowly, he turned around.

  The slack lips shaped themselves into an unpleasant smile. “Well, well. Look what the cat’s dragged in.”

  “Hello, Mum.”

  “Leo’s joined up, Rose.” Edie’s voice broke the silence.

  The smile grew more scornful still, sneering back from yellowing teeth. “I had heard as they was desperate.” She looked him up and down and then turned her back, dismissing him. That might have been it, only at that moment she slipped on the uneven path and knocked her head against the door as she fell, and some deeply-ingrained instinct made him lunge forward to catch her before she hit the ground.

  “Is she all right?” Edie called over the wall.

  “I think so.”

  Rose was groaning, but to judge from the smell of her breath, he suspected it was as much from the amount of drink she’d consumed as anything. “I’d better get her inside.”

  “See you before you go, then,” she called after him as he struggled with the dead weight of his mother.

  He hauled her into the house and deposited her with difficulty into her chair and went back to close the door. When he faced the room again, she’d come round, and her black eyes were glittering at him from the chair. Immediately, his shoulders tensed. That chair. He hated it. Spewing horsehair from numerous tears, its wings were grimy and grease-encrusted, and its original burgundy color was now closer to the color of putrid meat.

  The chair was so much a part of her. She’d spent so much of her time in it, it seemed to him as if its decay was her decay, and each drunken night she spent flaked out in its accommodating depths contributed in turn to its decline. And yet somehow the chair seemed to give her power.

  She was staring at him, and he stood there, submitting to her scrutiny, his hands hanging uselessly at his sides. Thus he’d stood before her at age eight, twelve, fourteen—more times than he cared to remember.

  “Your bloody father reborn!” she said now. “He was bloody useless as well.”

  Leo had no way to judge how accurate a statement this was. He’d been four years old when his father had left them.

  With a great effort of will, he drew his hands from his sides and put them in his trouser pockets. He wanted to make some caustic comment but quite lacked the ability to do so. Rose robbed him of everything that was himself. She always had done so.

  “Well,” she said at length, “since you’re here uninvited, you may as well make yourself useful. Fetch some coal. It’s cold in here.”

  Wicked old hag. Leo’s hands clenched themselves into fists in his pockets. He swallowed, aware all the time of those glittering, black eyes upon him.

  “
It’s in the cellar, where it’s always been kept,” she reminded him helpfully.

  Bitch.

  “And you can make a cup of tea while you’re at it.”

  Without speaking, he filled a pan with water from the tap and set it to boil. Then he fetched the coalscuttle, lit a candle, and opened the cellar door with Rose watching his every action.

  “Close the door after you,” she told him. “There’s a terrible draft.”

  He closed the door. The candle guttered, leaving him temporarily in darkness, and the scuttle knocked against the cellar wall, almost falling from his clammy hands. He held it more firmly, lifting his free hand to the cold wall. Thankfully the candle recovered, burning stronger. Fearfully, he began to descend the steps.

  It would be all right. He could do it. He was Leo Cartwright, about to go to France to fight in a war and to change the face of modern painting. It was ridiculous to be frightened of the cellar. Such illogical fears had no place in his new life. They belonged to the past.

  Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he stood in the flickering circle of light from the candle and looked about him. The smell was the same: mildew, rotting junk, and soot. And there was the coal heap, just where it had always been. Leo looked at it, but made no move to fill the scuttle. Instead, his mind took him back.

  He’d been four years old when Rose had first locked him down here—it had been the night his father had left. There’d been a row, nothing unusual with his parents, but this one had seemed worse than usual. It had gone on for ages, and he’d been sitting on the landing outside his bedroom, rocking his thin body, afraid. Even though he’d had his hands over his ears, he could still hear when the shouts turned into screams. The smashing of crockery. The impact of fists against flesh. Finally, the back door had slammed, and the house was scarily quiet. Until he heard his mother sobbing.

  Eventually, he’d plucked up enough courage to go downstairs to take a look. His mother was crying. He’d never seen her cry before. He’d stood there watching, not knowing what to do, starting to snivel. She’d whirled round at the sound, wiping her swollen face on her sleeve and pouncing at him practically all in the same movement.

  “What d’you think you’re bleeding well gawping at?” she’d shrieked, pinching hold of him and yanking him along so painfully he’d screamed. A bolt shot back, her grasp loosened, and suddenly he was falling as her weight propelled him down the cellar steps. He’d bounced a few times and then came to rest at the bottom just as the door closed and the bolt was shot home.

  It was pitch black in the cellar. He was frightened, and his shoulder hurt from his fall. He’d called out to her, sobbing, but she didn’t come. Time stretched on forever in the black, rotten-smelling darkness filled with monsters and leering faces.

  He’d dirtied his trousers, an involuntary act that gave her another excuse to hit him when she’d finally reopened the door.

  “You filthy, dirty little monkey, you!” she’d screamed at him. But when he’d clung to her despite the blows, she’d seen just how terrified he’d been all alone in the dark cellar. That had sealed his fate. Straight down the cellar whenever she’d considered he’d been naughty, dragging him kicking and screaming and begging all the way.

  From the street outside, he heard the click of high heels passing by on the pavement outside and returned to the present. Edie had been right; it’d been a big mistake to come back. But he could leave. He could leave and never come back again.

  All he had to do was get the coal.

  “The pan’s nearly boiled dry,” Rose complained when he finally re-emerged from the cellar.

  He poked at the embers in the grate before shoveling on some of the new coal. “I’m sure there’ll be enough there to last you the evening,” he said. “I’ve got to go now; I only came to speak to Edie about something.” He went to make her tea, catching sight of her compressed lips.

  “Edie, is it? Well, you needn’t think she’s kept faith with you these past three years.”

  “I didn’t expect her to,” he said, but when he left shortly afterward, Edie was there waiting for him in the darkness.

  He pressed himself into her willing arms, seeking the comfort of her familiar scent and the dependable softness of her breasts.

  “Poor Leo,” she crooned, stroking the back of his head. “Was it that bad?”

  His mind filled once more with the engulfing horror of the cellar, and he drew in a shuddering breath, stooping to bury his face into her neck.

  “She’s a bloody witch,” she told him.

  “She’s my mother,” he said.

  Edie held his face between her rough hands and kissed him. “An accident of birth, that’s all that is, me darlin’, an accident of birth.”

  She kissed him again, more passionately this time, her tongue hot and probing, her hands sliding down his back to pull his shirt from his trousers.

  They made love standing up in the alleyway. As Leo thrust into Edie’s body, he felt he’d at last found the home he’d come here looking for. Yet when it was over and they were standing looking at each other in the darkness, he knew he shouldn’t come back here again. He’d made a mistake coming here tonight; he didn’t intend to repeat it.

  There wasn’t any need for him to say any of this to Edie. They’d always been able to communicate using very few words. She lifted a hand to stroke his face and smiled.

  “Leo,” she said, “I’m going to marry Charlie. Charlie Baxter. He’s been invalided out. Lost an arm. We can live here with Mum and Dad, and I can take care of him. It’ll be a change for me, Leo. Something new. Since Ted got killed, it’s been like living in a morgue and…well, I want raise a family.” She lifted her other hand so that his face was held captive. “But I want you to do me a favor, Leo.”

  His body felt at peace now. Curiously, his mind did too. “What?”

  Her smile wobbled. There were bright tears in her eyes. “Let me imagine it’s you making love to me instead of Charlie. You always was the best.”

  Chapter Seven

  Revigny, France, April 1916

  IN THEIR ROOM AT REVIGNY, Eleanor watched Kit’s reaction to the “chest of drawers” that Jenkins, the orderly, had just proudly brought up for them.

  “It ain’t exactly Chippendale, but it ought’a do you for now,” the man said, surveying his handiwork with his hands on his hips. He was still slightly out of breath from carrying it up several flights of stairs to the attic room.

  “It’s perfect, Jenkins. Simply perfect,” Kit told him. “Thanks so much.”

  The chest of drawers was fashioned from a sturdy wooden packing case and complete with shelves and hinged doors. It was the closest they were likely to get to a dressing table, and increased the items of furniture in the poky room to four, with the two beds and the battered old wooden chair.

  “Well, Miss Kit, like I said, anything I can do for you sisters…”

  “Better not let Sister Palmer hear you call us sisters, Jenkins.” Kit twinkled, holding the door open for him.

  The orderly’s eyebrows shot upward with exasperation. “Sisters, nurses, VADs? I don’t know! Seems to me you all do the same job anyhow. Don’t know why she’s got to make so much fuss about what you’re called, except for she makes a fuss about everything. Besides, I reckon she needs my services far too much to get rid of me.” This last was said with obvious relish. Jenkins made no secret of the fact that he regarded Sister Palmer as his archenemy.

  “Anyway,” he continued enthusiastically, “there’s a rumor going about that she’s to be sent up the line any time now. Maybe we’ll get someone less hoity-toity to replace her.”

  “We can only pray, Jenkins,” Kit said, holding open the door for him. “We can only pray. Thank you again for the darling chest of drawers.”

  After he’d gone, Kit closed the door and crossed the room to give the new item of furniture an affectionate pat, causing Eleanor to smile. The lack of furniture in their room had been a source of complaint from Ki
t ever since they had arrived, and Eleanor doubted somehow whether the addition of the makeshift dressing table would be enough to satisfy her friend’s nesting instinct for long.

  “It isn’t even as if we’re able to spend very much time in here to be able to appreciate a chest of drawers,” she teased.

  Kit grinned at her, flinging herself down on her bed in a casual, leg-revealing manner, which would have turned her mama pale. “You have your book,” she teased back, “so you must allow me my chest of drawers.” Her glance roamed around the room. “Actually, thinking of your book, we ought to get Jenkins to put us up a shelf.”

  Eleanor was still smiling. “We only have the one book between us,” she pointed out.

  “Oh, no,” Kit corrected her hastily, “don’t go including me in joint ownership. I can’t think of anything I want to own less than a medical text book written in French.”

  The book in question had been left in one corner of their room, presumably by the previous occupant. Eleanor had mentioned it to Sister Palmer, concerned that its owner might be missing it, but had been given short thrift.

  “Goodness, girl, do you really think I have the time to concern myself with lost property?” had been the irritated response, and this, together with Kit’s assurances that the owner of the book had left it behind deliberately because it was so dull, had prompted Eleanor to keep it. It was illustrated, and although she didn’t understand some of the language, she still found it fascinating and dipped in to it most days, usually before she went to sleep.

  “The next thing I want to tackle is our clothes,” Kit was saying, lying back now with her hands behind her head.

  Eleanor didn’t need to ask what Kit meant. The rigidity of the rules about their uniform was another thing that bothered Kit, but then Eleanor suspected that Kit enjoyed having something to campaign about, if only to liven up the routine of hospital life. Eleanor, on the other hand, didn’t feel the need to have the routine livened up; she was happy with things the way they were. Very happy, in fact. There was a procedure for everything on the ward, even day-to-day cleaning, and most of the procedures were laid down by Sister Palmer. The VADs went about with lists and itineraries in their heads. There was absolutely no scope for decision-making or impulsiveness, but the wards were spotlessly clean and the patients’ dressings were applied and changed as quickly and efficiently as was humanly possible in such a busy environment.