Reading by Lightning

by Joan Thomas

  Other mates had the use of a flat in Manchester and came over daily. It was a conspiracy to keep George and me apart, a conspiracy of boys in khaki coming in and out of the back garden singing “Lili Marleen” and flirting with us girls, Aunt Lucy’s head moving in the kitchen window, Uncle Stanley standing in the doorway with his pipe, Lois and Madeleine plying George with tea and cocoa. He never has a minute to himself, poor lad, said his mother, but George said he was used to it. Even if you wanted to go to the infirmary you had to stand for an hour with a dozen other Tommies with the trots. I hung around on the flagstones, brazen as a streetwalker. I leaned against the shed going over what I especially wanted to say to him, which was, Don’t let the war change you. If the war changes you, the Germans will have won, no matter the outcome. As far as I knew, this thought was original to me. But there was no time for George to work on his Gesner encyclopedia, no time to walk on the moors. The boys in khaki were jittery and badly behaved. In George’s shed they tacked a notice stolen from a public lavatory: FLIES SPREAD DISEASE. KEEP YOURS CLOSED. A boy I’d never seen before fell against me in the hall and expertly squeezed my breast, with people not ten feet away. I stumbled into the kitchen and George looked at me with his clever eyes, George, who never had been one for the direct gaze.

  Their leave was over on Sunday, and on Friday night I was walking across the garden and heard a tap on the window of the shed. Then the door opened. George leaned out of the doorway and handed me a folded paper. I opened it and a card fell out.

  Miss Lily Piper is cordially invited for a private audience with Private G. Taperlegs Suite 21, 48 Whittle Road (off Addington Street), Manchester. At her convenience Saturday afternoon. The hiring of a hansom cab from Piccadilly Gardens is advised.

  George had closed the door of the shed — there were two boys inside with him. I climbed the stairs to my room, my knees trembling.

  Saturdays Madeleine and I always went to the depot, so that’s what I did, I spent the next morning at the depot. Around noon I found Mrs. Tupper and told her I was poorly and was going home. She gave me a look that said what a poor showing this was. With a war on, the look added. But I just left and boarded the tram to Manchester and all the way there I thought about George. Two Georges had come home for leave. One was the crude-mouthed Tommy, all slang and bravado. The other was the clever cynic. Neither of them was real — you could see it in George’s eyes, in the fixed way he delivered his lines. But the real George was still there, and I was going to meet him. I felt a dark excitement rising. I fixed my eyes on the window and a thought I could not dare to think lifted itself into my mind and I said yes to it, Yes, I said, and kept my eyes on the glass without seeing the streets skim by.

  I got off at Piccadilly Gardens, but I did not hire a taxi to Whittle Road. I knew where Addington Street was; Aunt Lucy had taken me to the dentist there and I knew I could walk. I was afraid of showing up at the flat early and finding George’s mates still there. So first I sat on a bench and ate the sandwich I was carrying for my lunch. I had in mind to buy George a gift, something to remember me by, so after I was finished eating I walked up Market Street. The shops were open, but their display windows were boarded up or sandbagged and you had to step inside to find out what they sold.

  I finally went into a men’s shop called Mayberry’s and saw leather gloves fanned in a display case. Gloves would be the thing for his poor sore hands. For your dad? the shopgirl asked. She was a beautiful girl like a film star with dark eyebrows and her hair bleached almost white. No, I said, hesitating. Oh, for your sweetheart! she said. She reached under the counter and brought out a pair of fine leather gloves. She said they were called calfskin, and they were the very colour of a Hereford calf. They’re not making this sort of thing any more, are they? she said.

  They had a strap with a tiny buckle at the wrist. I fingered the leather, admiring the narrow seams and the cunning little piece that was fitted in to accommodate the thumb. The shopgirl pursed her lips and looked out over my head, and I knew she thought I was too simple to appreciate them or too poor to afford them. All right, I heard myself say, I’ll take them. They were a shocking price for someone too poor to hire a cab, they were almost a quid. She wrapped them in dark tissue paper and tied a string around them and I put the package in my purse.

  Then I walked back down Market Street and turned up in the direction of Addington. All along, doorways were sandbagged, and at corners the street signs fixed to buildings were buried behind the sandbags or taken down to foil the Germans. I walked up to a corner that looked familiar and turned right but the quarter was a tangle of narrow winding roads and I was very soon bewildered. As I walked I thought ahead to meeting George. I was glad for the gift. Having something to give him would ease the awkwardness when I arrived. He had given me several small gifts, but I had never given him anything. Not even our granddad’s hook that I’d saved when we cleaned out Nan’s house. When I moved into Madeleine’s room I was frightened she’d see it in my trunk and think I was totally barmy, so I’d hidden it in the linen cupboard. Aunt Lucy’d found it and said, Bloomin’ heck! Whatever is this doing here? There was a drive on just then for aluminum, they were collecting people’s jelly moulds and pie tins, so she sent Granddad’s hook along to be melted down into whatever it was they use aluminum for in a war. So that was a gift I never gave him, and it was just as well.

  I began to need to go to the bathroom, urgently, it was all I could think about, and then an inhuman sound like a bleat penetrated my thoughts and I followed it down a lane, and coming around a corner I found that I was back at Piccadilly Gardens and that the noise was coming from a newsman on the corner, jangling the change in his pockets and emitting a single raw syllable — News! — every five seconds. There was a public lavatory in Piccadilly Gardens and I went into it. It was freezing and stinky, but I didn’t have much choice.

  Back out on the street I suddenly felt distaste at the thought of the gift. It came to me standing on the pavement that the gloves I’d bought would not please George at all. There they lay in my purse, limp scraps of calfskin — it was their very fineness that appalled me. They were something Uncle Stanley would admire. And could George even wear gloves that weren’t army issue? Maybe he could, but I didn’t know, I had no idea how things worked. I saw painfully that this gift was a dreadful mistake — it put everything in jeopardy. I turned and ran all the way to the shop. There were other customers in the shop this time and I had to wait. I can give you a credit note, the shopgirl said coldly, not looking at me. That’s the best I can do. So although I almost never came to Manchester and never bought anything in shops as fine as this one, I had to take a credit note.

  I was not far then from Albert Square, and I walked to it and sat on the bench where I’d sat the day George and I came into Manchester. I sat watching the pigeons with their red feet stepping over the pavement, thinking about that day, the way everything had unrolled, so easily, so unthinkingly. I remembered running out of the post office with him, wearing my blue poplin dress, the tide of indulgence and longing that followed us from the people waiting in the queue (because we were tall and walking in step, because there was war coming). I’d snatched it up, turned my profile to it, and then I’d come out of the post office into the light of the sky, blinking at the brightness, and a convoy of lorries thundered past. I turned away from the noise and found myself looking into a dark passage at a soldier slouching there with his girlfriend, nuzzling her bosom. He was jawing her breast with an open mouth, the way a fox will jaw a goose egg. She wasn’t laughing. She just stood with her head tipped obligingly against the wall, her face turned towards the street. She was wearing a blue poplin dress too — it was such a popular shade of blue, a sort of uniform. She stood there in the dark and I stood in the bright sunlight, in the petrol fumes and roar of engines, and then I looked back to see George gazing at me. Not tenderly, but studying me as though I was a subject of genuine curiosity to him.

  Albert Square was n
ot far from the Manchester Art Gallery and sitting on the bench I remembered going with George to see the picture of Jesus. I felt a sudden need to see it again, now, as I stood at the gate of my life. And so I got up and walked quickly in the direction of the art gallery. Its pillars were banked by sandbags, but the door was open. I went up the marbled stairs inside, past the centaurs and Lapiths roiling in the lobby, trying to let my feet take me to the painting of Jesus because I couldn’t even recall what floor it was on. I could not call up Jesus’ face, just the covert night scene, a pale green moon revolving behind his head, or perhaps it was his halo. His hand, his gesture at knocking, the hand that spoke of an intimacy with the heart he was visiting — although there were dried stalks and vines in front of the door to show it had not been opened for some time.

  I walked through two floors of the empty gallery, listening to my own footfalls. I did find a white room that seemed to be the same room, but either it was not, or the picture had been taken away. Instead of Jesus there was a huge, gilt-framed painting of a woman lying on a bed in a lacy white gown. A lace cap was etched on her forehead like frost on a window. Beside her stood her husband in a fine black costume. I saw immediately that the woman was dead, her features white and heavy. And that a third figure, a woman in a black gown sitting at the foot of the bed, was the same woman. This woman’s face was alive with sorrow, she leaned her temple against her hand, a witness to her own dead self.

  Back out on the street I walked blindly up towards Piccadilly Gardens. Darkness had fallen while I was in the art gallery and there were no lamps to hold it back. Massive buildings rose up out of the ground on either side of me, like cliffs thrusting up out of the paved city, and faceless figures moved in the black doorways. On the street there was still a bit of light from the sky, but a lorry with no headlights loomed up in front of me and I dove back to the pavement and stood against a pile of sandbags, trembling. I tried to turn my thoughts away from the picture, but I could not, I could not resist its details, the woven reeds on the floor, the husband’s hand, resting on a skull that sat on a stand beside the bed — as though he’d reached down to steady himself and the skull was what his hand encountered. I started walking again, trying to shut my mind to the face lying on the gleaming satin pillow, the waxy, bloated heaviness of the dead face. So changed, so impossibly changed, so certainly the same woman. I trudged over the uneven stones and near Piccadilly I heard the newsman’s bleat again, longer now, he was calling Final News! I heard the newsman and hopelessly I turned up the street I’d taken when I got off the tram at noon. I was in a desperate dream, a familiar one, distractions drawing me away from the urgent task at hand. But it was not until I stepped into a pub to check the time and saw that it was well past six that I realized the distractions had been devised by myself alone and that I was not going to meet George.

  9

  Both sides were praying, but apparently England was God’s favourite. At first when France fell all they talked about was so many men getting out of Dunkirk in those little boats — the divine miracle of it. People said the Channel was calmer that day than mariners had ever seen it. But really, it was a shocking defeat, France gone and all the weapons and lorries England had managed to build over the last year smashed up and left behind. A boy I knew by sight, Ruth’s boyfriend, was killed, and Uncle Stanley had a nephew lying in the Royal Victoria in Hampshire gravely injured. People now said that the Germans had four planes for every British plane, and the insane fact that England had lost the war began to press itself into our brains, although you couldn’t say so out loud because you could be fined for spreading alarm and despondency. Daily we were told to expect the invasion. Archie was stationed in Wales with the RAF and he told Lois that the citizens in a village along the coast had collected soup plates and buried them in rows on the beach so the Germans would think they were mines being uncovered by the tide. By the end of June the Channel Islands were occupied. Jenny had a brother in Guernsey, and suddenly there was no mail in or out. In Guernsey, it was rumoured, German soldiers roasted and ate the carrier pigeons belonging to English families, killing two birds with one stone, you might say. It was close, close.

  Madeleine and I left school in June with no attention paid to our leaving whatsoever, and began to spend all our time with the WVS, working mostly in the donations depots. Going back to Canada was out of the question: the Germans had started to bomb Liverpool. Two weeks after that the Blitz started and then of course London was all on fire. It was a flaming target they could see from the other side of the Channel, so after that there wasn’t much point to the London blackout. We hadn’t been bombed yet, but each public garden and commons had a big wagon with a winch on it, and when the air raid siren went off a crew came out and put a fish-shaped barrage balloon up to foil enemy bombers. As we ran to the shelter we saw them hanging in the air over Oldham, the whole scene looking like a children’s story of the future, of the day the fishes take to the air.

  I did not write to George, and he did not write to me. The night I left him waiting alone in a flat in Manchester he didn’t come home at all. He just rolled in to pick up his kit an hour before he had to get on the train on Sunday. Aunt Lucy didn’t have the heart to be angry. I didn’t see him, I had gone to deliver some sewing to Nettie. He missed his next leave. He was confined to barracks again, but Wilf dropped in to see us. Wilf said George had asked him to deliver a message: to tell us that he declined to submit further correspondence to the scrutiny of morons. I felt as if someone had clouted me, my cheeks burned with mortification. He means the censors! said Wilf. Christ, Lily!

  I remember the maple trees along the Edge that fall had black spots on every leaf, like a leopard’s. I remember bushes like saskatoons with round leaves, but bearing white berries that murmured poison. I remember how hard we worked, how greasy our hair was, how starved we were for comforting food, how we dressed in whatever came to hand in the morning. It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter what we were. All the longings we held for ourselves, all our hopes for things to be a certain way, were pressed down to a little glowing nugget and put to the side, buried in a hat box in the back of a wardrobe. I remember Madeleine lying face down in her bed and crying about their cousin in Hampshire, who had a brain injury. I sat beside her and stroked her shoulder.

  I can’t cry in front of Mother, she said when she sat up. You’re such a pillar of strength, Lily.

  Oh, Madeleine, I said, shaking my head. I couldn’t say what I was thinking, that in a funny way those days suited me. It was a relief to just do what was expected of you, to be free to be good. Or maybe it’s that I was more prepared than most. I never had imagined the future as an ordinary, flat road running off towards a vanishing point. This was the world as I knew it, a fearful struggle between good and evil.

  It was the last four years that began to seem unreal, the unconscious days when I lived only for romance. Strangely, it was then I began to think about home, to worry about my father, that he was (to use Nan’s term for it) taking fits, something my mother’s letters never hinted at, but they wouldn’t, would they? Home came to me freshly while I sorted through barrels of mouldy clothes at the WVS depot: the barn, where the dry, dusty hay and the moist, rotting manure were two strands of the same smell, my father’s cheek resting on the breathing side of a cow while he milked. The path the cows had worn deep into the turf of the prairie. Thinking about walking with Dad to the pasture, I sorted shirts, walking back and forth between rows of garment stands in the damp old depot. My mother I could only really picture in an uncharacteristic moment: when she laughed, like the day we were picking saskatoons and she made her hair into a horsetail to drive away the flies. No one in our family made a sound when they laughed, but Mother’s face would crumple and her eyes would stream as though laughter were so alien to her face that it completely dismantled it. How pretty she must have been as a girl! Before the light in her face was put out. By things never being quite what she wanted them to be. By me I thought as I
dumped out a crate of flattened shoes. By my nature being something she was bracing herself to resist, by my turning out as she had feared from the moment I was born or even before.

  It seemed my father loved me, but my mother’s attitude was based on a clearer grasp of who I was. But who was I, what was so bad about me — what was the sin that stained me as a child, when Satan used me to distract listeners from the word of God? I could see the hungry little girl I was, the fidgety, yearning child. I never did anything that bad, I protested to myself, I never did anything. And this seemed very true, it still seemed to be true: I saw how careful I was not to do anything, not to have a self that anyone could lay hold of or blame. Better a series of gestures, better no self at all than a self who would be held responsible. And that took me to my long afternoon on the streets of Manchester, to a shame I turned away from.

  Aunt Lucy asked us gently to pray for George, but I didn’t even try. I was free to be good, but I couldn’t pretend to pray. That particular canopy over the world, I saw now, had been dismantled and packed away. It wasn’t George’s science that had done it and it wasn’t even the war. It had started before that, as long ago as George saying, Oh, you’re low church (the way he said of Russell, Oh, he’s a Marxist), putting a name on the thing, making it one thing that others looked at from the outside, the way the prairies were now one thing and not the whole world. Or before that: it was seeing the ocean, its mind closed, indifferent to the ships plowing along its surface and the ships rotting below with skeletons bobbing in their cabins. It was the size of the world, so much bigger than I’d imagined when I signed on to save it. And it was people such as Aunt Lucy, who were kind to me because they were kindly disposed, with no thought of attracting God’s attention.

  Prairie turf with all the sand dug out from under it, that’s what my faith was like. As for the moment when it did collapse, I could picture myself out walking alone on Oldham Edge and seeing the face of God in the clouds with rays of sun shooting out behind him. A petulant, disagreeable face, like in the frontispiece from the Lutheran Bible: things have slipped beyond him. I look at the face of God and then I’m distracted by my thoughts and look away. A breeze blows across the moors, and when I look up again it’s rearranged the clouds a little. The face is slanted, distorted, as though God’s been stricken by palsy. And then the face blurs a bit more. The next time I look up it’s gone, the clouds are just white clouds against a sky the colour of harebells, and I’m still walking along the Edge, a cold wind biting at my ears and, laid out at my feet, the fields along the Yorkshire border, where a batch of new conscripts in straggling columns charges at scarecrows.