Reading by Lightning

by Joan Thomas

  I don’t think so, I said. George pulled another chart out of a heap of books on the workbench. In this one the orbits of the planets had geometrical shapes traced between them.

  Kepler calculated the ratio of the distance between planets, said George. The ratios parallel harmonic keys, which is kind of amazing.

  Was there actual music?

  How would anyone know? But mathematically there could have been. That was the point. He pushed his glasses back on his nose with his middle finger.

  Where would heaven be? I asked, looking closely at this map of the cosmos.

  Heaven? he said, amused. You’re asking on behalf of all medieval souls?

  Then he saw my tears start up, and there was a moment of acute surprise between us. He looked tactfully away and began to rifle through a stack of papers. I wonder what I have here, he said, kindly. For images of heaven you have to go back a lot earlier. I don’t know if I have anything. A lot of my copies of etchings are in Durham.

  He took a long time looking through his papers while I wiped my cheeks with my sleeve, and then he pulled out a large sheet of manila.

  Well, there’s this.

  It was a picture of the Garden of Eden drawn in a circle. The heavens made a border around it, like the rim on an ornate tea plate. And God leaned over the plate, and the sun rose behind him.

  I like this, said George, pointing to an orb in the heavens. It’s the moon. Look how it has God’s face. It’s a little duplicate image of God keeping watch over the world. It’s sort of interesting that they’d portray God like that, because the moon waxes and wanes.

  Where did this drawing come from? I asked.

  It was the frontispiece to the first Lutheran Bible. I copied it by hand.

  I stared at this testy old man with tousled hair peering down over the garden where Adam and Eve walked with their naked front sides turned decorously away.

  It was drawn in the early sixteenth century, said George. See, it says here.

  He pointed to a legend at the bottom of the page, but my eye was drawn to the signature beneath the legend: George Oldham. Their family name was Sheffield.

  That, he said, catching my questioning look. That’s in the tradition of foundlings.

  We stood close together, looking at the drawing. I felt my grief and guilt lapping inside me — I felt swollen with emotion, the way you feel full of sickness when you have the flu. And I felt something new, astonishment: I was almost off-balance with amazement. I’d never longed to know a boy like George because I’d never dreamt that such boys existed.

  The door opened and Madeleine poked her head into the shed. Mother says to stop mucking about and come inside. George, Mr. Shillingford wants to see you before he leaves. Go upstairs and wash up first. She spoke as though he were a child. He held my eyes for a minute and then he tucked the oilcloth more closely over whatever he had been moulding and held the door open for me, and we followed Madeleine back to the house. As we crossed the garden under the gaslit Manchester sky, I understood why I’d come all the way across the ocean, the other reason, besides saving Nan: I’d come to take George seriously.

  The day after George left for Durham, the rest of us drove to Salford to get my trunk and to clean Nan’s house.

  Nana said she didn’t want her things sold, I said in the kitchen after breakfast. She told me almost every day. She couldn’t stand the thought of the women on the street pawing through her things.

  Well, we’ll bring it all to the Tommyfield here in town, said Aunt Lucy. No one knows her here. What else can we do? I’m not burning the lot.

  It was strange to go back into the silent house on Stott Street, to smell its old, mixed smell of fry-ups, ashes-of-roses dusting powder, mouldy boxes, stale pipe. I was cautious, looking into Nana’s room. Someone, Mrs. Baxter probably, had made the bed up neatly and tucked Nan’s grey felt slippers with the backs trodden down just under the fringe of the yellow bedspread.

  I gathered up my things and packed up my trunk and stood in my dad’s room for the last time, looking through the flawed glass at the view it afforded of the back garden wall, and then I went to help Aunt Lucy in Nan’s room. We had to sort through all the junk I’d never attempted to clean up while I lived there: jars of face cream dried into cracks, boiled sweets all gone solid in their bag. Tangles of worn cotton stockings with stiff, dirty feet. An open tin of bright pink Gibb’s toothpaste with a film of dust on the surface. Hairpins in crumpled brown paper. Granddad’s bicycle lamp that we carried when we went out to the loo in the night. In a box of jars and bottles I discovered the recruiting pamphlet — the paper that sent my father to Canada — still wrinkled from the puddle where my granddad found it.

  Garbage would go straight to the tip. Uncle Stanley rolled two barrels in for it and we filled them both. A man came in a van, and his boys began to carry out the furniture and all the boxes. Mrs. Crisp watched from her doorway. Mrs. Grimshaw stood on the curb arm in arm with Aunt Lucy, holding the cat. I buried me three sisters and me three brother-in-laws and me own husband, she said, but I never thought I’d bury your mam. I never dreamt your mam would go before me. Never in all the world.

  On the ride back to Oldham Aunt Lucy’s tears stopped dripping by Failsworth and she set herself the job of cheering us up. She turned around and patted my leg. All right, then, love?

  I’m fine, Aunt Lucy.

  My own girls wouldn’t of done half as well with their nana as you did. Would you, girls? Lois and Madeleine gave her thin smiles. Well, it’s true, I’m afraid, said Aunt Lucy. You would of been a dead loss, both of you, whingeing about missing your friends, and wanting to take the coach home every second day to see them. Lily was a real brick, not a word of a complaint. Although when you first come, love, I have to say I wondered. What a silent little thing you was when you first come. Heavens, I said, what have we got ourselves into! Didn’t I, Stanley? What have we got ourselves into? I said.

  What had they got themselves into? There I was with my trunk in their spare room, a big, healthy girl with an appetite for pork roast, apples, and bread and butter with brown sugar, bereft of any ambition she could openly admit to, scandalously ignorant of social niceties, as well as of Kepler, Ferdinand and Isabella, and the wave of Fascism creeping darkly across Europe. (War? I’d said to Madeleine after the New Year’s party. Between who?) An eager, self-conscious young woman with a savage battle between God and his enemy ready to flare up at any moment in her heart, less than a shilling to her name, holes in her stockings and chilblains on her toes, dreading the moment someone would say, When will you be going back to Canada, then, Lily?

  For the time being we had the task of getting Nan’s things sorted out and sold, and as Madeleine was still in school for almost a month and Lois had her exams, Aunt Lucy and I did it. On dry days we carried boxes out to the flagstones in the garden and set about cleaning. Set not your affection on things of this earth, where moths and rust do corrupt and where thieves break through and steal, that’s what I’d always been taught, but really it was the things that lasted, Nan’s smiling china terrier with its clumps of china hair outlined by a glaze of dirt, the silk pansies they gave her at the factory the day before her wedding, turned brown with age. The biscuit tin full of hair curlers with her hairnet stuffed on top, strands of pale hair tangled through it. It was all still here, but she was gone.

  Everyone must take a memento, Aunt Lucy said, standing in the midst of it all with a scarf tied over her hair. For herself she took the photographs. For George she picked up a blanket, because it was almost new and his dormitory at the university was so cold. Madeleine wrinkled up her nose and took the china terrier. I took the Barr Colony pamphlet, of course, and things I thought my father might remember: the biscuit tin from the kitchen and the milk pitcher that Nan’d said was a wedding present. All the time I worked I thought of George, thought there must be something that would please him more than a cheap new blanket. Then in one of the boxes I came across our granddad’s
hook with its aluminum stump and leather strap, lying among his folded clothes like part of a pirate costume. I knew better than to ask. With my heart racing at my own daring, I rolled it in a towel and smuggled it up to my trunk.

  Uncle Hugh came down from Liverpool and he and Aunt Lucy went to the solicitor’s. Eighty pounds to each of you, Aunt Lucy said when she came home. Everyone was amazed at what you can put aside by asking the butcher for bones and buying your smalls at the open market. I sat at the dining-room table in one of Lois’s old jumpers, afraid to meet Aunt Lucy’s eyes now that I had the money to buy my passage home. Then she put a hand on my shoulder. I’ll write to your dad, love, she said. And we’ll see what’s to be done.

  In July a letter came from my dad to me, saying, Your Aunt Lucy asked if you would like to stay in Oldham and go to school with Madeleine. The money from your nana and granddad will pay for your uniform and books and keep you in pocket money. We know you will help out to pay for your board, you’ve always been a good worker. Although I had not dared to pray for this to happen, I did pray then. I went outside and looked out over Oldham Edge and said a two-word prayer: thank you.

  And so I was set the task of discovering how to live with a new family. They made no efforts to explain themselves (because of course everyone was the same, and when I wasn’t the same they turned their eyes tactfully away). Manners, I had to learn. And the art of conversation. And tenderness. Aunt Lucy would sit on the bed brushing Lois’s hair, chatting all the while, and then reach for me. (How were my mother and I with each other? I couldn’t recall, those times were blank.)

  That summer George was off in Dorset with his professor, Dr. Acworth — off digging, as they put it, at Charmouth, on the sea. (There’s a tip off Middleton Road, said Uncle Stanley. If he’s that desperate to dig.) Six or eight times a day I walked by his open doorway. I was allowed to go in; one of our chores (which Lois and Madeleine loathed) was to run a feather duster over his shelves. I stood in his room and thought of him sinking into waxy dreams in that bed, his long legs folded like a grasshopper’s. Cautiously I opened cupboards and drawers, but most of his private things were gone. It was only on the open shelves that you could see George, and I stood and looked hungrily at the junk piled there, trying to guess what George would have to say about everything, the starfish that would not be just a starfish, the arrows with some sort of skin on them, the etching of a gigantic flea, all hairy legs and tiny praying head.

  Meanwhile Lois was busy. When her exams were over she took a job on High Street as a telephonist — she’d had enough of school for the moment. She spent her pay on having her hair done, she bought smart new frocks and scented hand cream, she grew more beautiful by the day. She scarcely spoke to me. I didn’t take this as a personal slight: she was like an athlete training to be the fastest runner in the world, her focus was absolute. The object of this unswerving ambition was Archie, an ordinary young man with a smile that hinted of nothing beyond it. Jolly good, he said, and A wee bit nippy out. But he drove a little green roadster, he had the Greek symbol of a posh school woven into his tie and apparently he had better vowels than the rest of them. At times I thought Lois was having us all on, but she gave no sign of this.

  All through August, Aunt Lucy made Madeleine sit with me in the afternoons and go through her Third Form textbooks: algebra, geometry, French, English grammar. When it got close to September she went to see the headmaster at Ward Street Grammar School, and then I was taken to the school to be tested, in through the massive central doors of a red-brick building. Someone called a proctor, an extraordinarily tall girl with glasses that magnified one eye beyond the size of the other, took me into an empty classroom. You may sit where you fancy, she said, as though this was a significant concession, and handed me a booklet of foolscap and a slate on which was printed:

  Discuss the British Empire’s contribution to world civilization through her colonies.

  Then she left and closed the door behind her. This question had been generously designed for me, with an eye to the debates that must take place nightly at tea all over the colonies. It required me to write about Canada, a notion that had become more and more flimsy as the months went by. After the first day, my Sheffield relatives had never asked, and home had shrunk in my mind to a miniature farm built for children, or a tiny sepia photograph in a leaflet from the Ministry of Agriculture. I stared at the question on the slate and a drift of debris floated into the examination room (chicken droppings lying like manna in the dust, the flat, wrinkled stream of cream shooting out from the spout of the cream separator. The image of my mother flinging potato peelings from an enamel basin into the pigpen. The pig with its two front feet in the trough, munching on something hideous, the red afterbirth of a calf). All of it too squalid to conjure up in words.

  I sat wretchedly fixed on the word colonies for a long time and finally I dipped my pen into the bottle of ink Madeleine had lent me and began to write:

  Near my home in Canada is a Hutterite colony, where we take our oats to be milled. Everyone in this colony dresses the same, mainly in black, and the women wear head scarves of dotted fabric.

  But I knew as I wrote that my admission into Ward Street Grammar School was doomed with this tack. I struggled to recall a map in the Grade Eight history text at the Nebo School — the head of Queen Victoria floating off the coast of England, with black arrows reaching like octopus legs from her neck to various corners of the Empire. Afraid to cross out what I’d written, I attempted a segue:

  The colonists who came from England to the Canadian prairies in 1903 were not so sensibly dressed for the perils that lay ahead.

  I was still on the follies of the Barr Colonists when the tall girl came back and asked me to surrender my booklet and led me from the room.

  Why they accepted me into the Fourth Form I never understood. I can only assume that the master who read my essay was some sort of anarchist. Whatever the reason, Ward Street Grammar School, with its polished wood floors and high windows, with its gowned masters and piles of poetry books bound in red cloth like hymnals, was one of those extravagant gifts life gives you sometimes, the first token of which (the harbinger of joys to come, I wanted to call it as I read Macbeth the first week) was the uniform, radiating so much promise simply hanging from a hook in Aunt Lucy’s spare room that even now when I stand in a dry goods store and finger a bolt of merino in that particular shade of dark blue, I feel a throb of pleasure move down the back of my legs.

  5

  Leon Blum? said George. Who’s the bloke who wrote you this?

  Just a friend, I said. A boy from Montreal. Our banker’s son.

  Lily has a beau, said Lois. She’s a dark horse, that girl. She’s been here more than a year and this is the first we’ve heard of him.

  He’s not my beau, I said. I might have wanted Lois and Madeleine to believe that he was, but not George.

  Lily’s friend is a Marxist, said George, looking up from the letter. That’s what this is all about, and shame on you lot for your ignorance.

  He’s a banker’s son, said Madeleine. He won’t be a Marxist.

  Most Marxists are bankers’ sons, said George. That, or landless gentry.

  What are you doing? I cried, for he had pulled a little notebook out of his pocket and was beginning to copy Russell’s address off the envelope.

  I just want to see if any of the lads here know him. There’s a Marxist group meets in Bardsley’s. In the bookshop. Monty’s been.

  How could they possibly know him, all the way over here? cried Lois. Oh, you are a git.

  He’s going to write to him, said Madeleine. That’s why he’s copying the address. Lily, stop him. He’s going to take your boyfriend on as one of his pen pals.

  Don’t, I said to George, and put out my hand for the letter. George scribbled fast and then popped his notebook into a pocket and folded up the letter and gave it back. Don’t write to him, I said.

  It’s nothing to do with you if I do, he said.


  It’s everything to do with her, you cretin, cried Lois. Madeleine grabbed him and I helped her and we pulled him down onto the floor. I could smell his scalp and his shirt, which was not as fresh as it might had been. While he writhed on the carpet we took the notebook from his pocket and ripped the address out of it.

  George was home for his autumn half-term (which was the week after ours) and the whole house woke up. Even when he just sat in the parlour reading, he had the knack of turning everyone into more of what they naturally were — he refined their essence, you might say, making Uncle Stanley darker and more terse, filling Madeleine with gentle mischief, turning Aunt Lucy into an exact younger version of her mother, all songs and sighs. Or maybe it was just me he changed: he turned me into someone who breathed through her pores, who watched. Watched him especially. Standing in the front hall fiddling with the strap of my satchel, I watched him sunk in a parlour chair reading, irritation with the argument of his book playing across his pale face, his middle finger pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  On Saturday night Archie came to pick Lois up and carry her away in his little roadster, and the rest of us — Madeleine, George, George’s friend Monty, Jenny from next door and me — went to the pictures on Horsedge Street. Afterwards we tried to go into the Hartford Arms, and the proprietor called across the bar, Oy! Come back when those lasses are grown, so then we walked back home and George picked up two big bottles of Uncle Stanley’s stout and we went out through the garden and onto Oldham Edge, where we passed the bottles of sour and yeasty stout back and forth. Below us lay the tangled yellow-green strands of the streets of Oldham, and the dark bulk of the mill where Uncle Stanley worked, looming like a parliament over the town.

  It’s ever so bright here compared to home, I said, hearing how English I sounded.