by Joan Thomas
About the disposition of his body they have no information. Some sediment somewhere will draw him in, some ledge of molluscs, he will take his chances with all the other curiosities. That’s not what she thinks about, exactly, that or his dying. When her mind goes slack what’s there is their wild run in the rain along Oldham Edge that last night. Always there, the way a book falls open at the page where the spine was broken. And then her mind takes her onwards from there, follows George back to the city, takes her remorselessly with him back through the streets of Manchester, to the flat on Whittle Road where his mates were drinking, and then down another lane to the house George went into later, the narrow staircase with a soil line on the wall from people reaching blindly for a banister, and a girl climbing the stairs in high-heeled shoes too big for her (it’s Ellen climbing the stairs, for some reason she pictures Cornish Ellen, who cleared the tables at Mrs. Slater’s in Charmouth), George following, misery ticking at the fringes of his mind (but mostly it’s the ale he’s feeling), and Wilf and Tom and that other boy gloating on the pavement below, laughing the moronic laugh that boys laugh over things that are not funny. George climbing the stairs to sign his pledge to a new way of being. She does not quite go into the room, her imagination lets her stop at the door, lets her roll over then and pull the quilt over her face. She knows him now, now that he is gone; she knows what was behind the elaborate ramshackle construction of his personality, that it was this one longing, to be like everybody else.
They don’t talk about the news from England. Lily is aware of her mother watching her. She must know. Betty has a greedy, elevated look — she senses an opening, a wound. She’s got a personal stake in Lily’s spiritual condition: in her mind she was the one who led Lily to the Lord. One day Lily finds a page torn out of a notebook on her pillow:
Dear Lily,
Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths. I am praying for you.
Your sister-in-law-in-Christ,
Betty
They don’t talk about the news from England and they don’t talk about the war. It’s far away, they hear it the way you hear the sound of the parade on the day of the fair, drifting intermittently out of town on the wind. Lily picks up a day-old Winnipeg Tribune in town. On the second page are the lists, seventeen names today. MISSING IN ACTION. MISSING AND PRESUMED DEAD. KILLED IN ACTION. Evidently a name can progress daily through the lists, as though to take families gradually through the stages of shock and disbelief. Only Canadian names, of course, but somewhere else there must be lists of the English, and the Germans, and the Italians. And the Russians — they’re fighting in Russia now.
Deep in the night she swims to the surface, her arms flung across the mattress as if across waves, and she can’t keep her pain in, it comes wrenching out of her. It’s her mother who comes in the dark, clutching at the door frame and falling clumsily onto the bed. She pats Lily’s arm, over and over. It’s hard, I know it’s hard, she says, her voice thick with emotion. We can’t see a reason, but God always has a reason. A monster version of Lily leaps out of bed and yanks her mother to her feet, screaming, Get the hell away from me, digging her fingers into her mother’s upper arm. Her mother is crying then too, with her mouth open like a terrified child, her head wrenched sideways by Lily’s grasp on her hair. Stay the hell out of my room, the voice cries, a thrilling voice, plucking Lily out of the swallowing waves. But this is not what Lily does. Lily keeps her face against the pillow and all she actually says is, I’m all right, and after a few minutes her mother goes away.
Things happen in the night, but gradually, when sunlight twinkles off the scrolls of frost on the windows and the kitchen is full of the smell of coffee, the night draws them back in and opens a space in the day for ordinary pleasures. Betty is a great one for togetherness. She likes to make beds together, sheets floating down between them, she likes to stir while Lily pours. Before Lily went to England, she always wanted more talk in this house, and she has to laugh, remembering that. Betty tells them how many eggs she finds under which hen compared to how many she found last week, she tells them who drove down the road while she was walking across the yard. The less that happens in a day, the more she tells them. When she comes back from town she repeats both sides of every conversation: And I said, We can’t really use the whole thing, and he said, Well, do you want me to cut it in half for you? And I said, Sure, that would be good, and so he did, and then he said, Which half do you want? And I said, This one would be fine. Lily can picture Phillip when he comes home with all his life in the war inside him, sitting at Betty’s table and the handful of words in his mouth drying into peas.
Betty gets a long letter from Phillip — a mystery in itself to contemplate — and comes to the table with her face puffy from crying. He’s applied to be an airplane mechanic and will be sent to Mountain View, Ontario, for training, and then no doubt overseas. Lily has her school atlas from England and she brings it out, but Mountain View is not listed in the index. Ontario is just a pale orange patch in a map of Canada. She shows Betty approximately where the CP line runs across Northern Ontario. Betty traces the line slowly with her finger, considering how close Phillip will travel to the Great Lakes. For the first time Ontario is finding a place in her mind, by the prospect of Phillip travelling across it. Lily knows the way these brides think. On the train from Saint John there were a lot of Canadian brides who had gone east to see their husbands off. They took her in, even though she declined to produce a story about her sweetheart: they valued her as an audience for their special knowing. Then he went to Trenton, they would say, taking a pull on a cigarette, Valcartier, Petawawa, Shilo.
Scapa Flow, she says to herself, thinking that George must have liked the feel of that name on his tongue.
Betty’s bangs are cut straight across her forehead and her hair hangs in a long pale curtain down her back. She sits at the kitchen table resting her hands on her belly, and Lily stands behind her and braids her hair into two gleaming whips the colour of ripe wheat. Who taught Betty this way pregnant women have of hoisting themselves out of a chair? She’s the same age as Lily and she thinks nothing of all of this, she never complains, her expression doesn’t change when some sudden subterranean flailing lifts the cotton of her apron. Lily comes back from the barn and catches her hauling a pail of water in from the pump, swinging the axe over the chopping block. It doesn’t seem to occur to Betty that she could ask for special treatment. The first Mrs. Stalling, Betty’s mother, died in childbirth, when Rose was born. Are you afraid? Lily wants to ask Betty, but what good would it do to ask?
It takes her a long time to write to Madeleine and Aunt Lucy. She can’t bring herself to say, I feel as though my heart is breaking, and really, there is nothing else. Every time she picks up the mail she sorts through it, breathing fast, but there’s never an envelope with George’s spiky writing on it. Every morning she goes out to the henhouse to feed the chickens, stepping over the sill because her dad never got around to building a step. Then she goes to the barn and holds the pitchfork where her dad’s hands wore the handle smooth and pitches clean straw down for Molly. Morning and night she dresses up warmly, wishing for her dad’s grey wool jacket, and walks out to the pasture. One cow could forage in the barnyard, but soon there will be snow and she won’t be able to take Molly out, so for now she does it to remember her dad. She calls Blue and leads Molly out of the barn. She sees herself from the sky, a cow and a girl and a dog walking single file across the yard, like the premise for an Aesop’s fable. In the evening when she goes to fetch Molly she cuts across the fields, holding the barbed-wire fence down to swing her leg over the way he used to hold it for her, breaking off a willow switch and slashing at the dry, leaning skeletons of Russian thistle. During the day she remembers her dad, during the night George.
3
The new year comes, 1941. There’s no enterprise to make anything at all of this ye
ar, how could there be? I’m almost twenty-one. I’m five feet seven inches tall, I have blue eyes and brown hair past my shoulders, splitting at the ends because it hasn’t been cut since England. I wear a blue sweater that was once Lois’s, trousers my brother wore when he was half grown, with muslin blouses from England stuffed into the waistband. I have a wary, even-featured face, possibly severe, possibly interesting. No one cares, why should they? Lily and 1941 are going to roll on anyway. January, February, March, I’ll squat cantilevered over the icy plank of the outhouse with my pee hissing down in its momentary passage towards steam and ice, I’ll find a rusty stain on my underpants. Business as usual, while German tanks roll into Greece. I’m not consulted about this or anything else — I can’t choose not to breathe.
As far as everyone around me is concerned, January 1941 is about William John Piper, born at nine in the morning on January 3, an infant only a mother could love. He’s born in the Burnley hospital, and it’s Betty’s dad and sister who go in to town and bring Betty and the baby home to us. (First a widow and now a grandmother, my mother sighs.) The new nephew is comely enough, with fair skin and hair and a strong little body. But he has a rackety cry, like a badly tuned engine starting up, and his diapers have a smell beyond foul. Try to rock him and he stiffens and looks frantically away as though hoping for salvation from another quarter. They name him William, but five minutes with that baby reminds me my father’s sweet nature is gone from this earth forever.
Now it’s Billy who cries in the night and brings people hurrying to his side. He cries in the late afternoon as well, from the first sign of light fading until he falls asleep four hours later. After supper I take him. I show him the picture of his father on Betty’s bureau, I sing him the song Joe Pye learned on the ship, shaking his little hand to its military beat. I’ll be the one in charge of teaching him irony, I decide. He reacts to everything with the same outrage, letting out that terrible mechanical cry. I hold him warily. I keep expecting him to turn himself into a piglet and run away, I keep hoping he will. One evening when there’s no wind I tie him into a shawl against my breast and go outside. As we walk down the road his crying subsides and his blue eyelids slide halfway down over his eyes and he turns his face up with his lips in a little pout. I’m happy for the warm weight of his body against my breasts and walk for an hour, not sure whether he’s asleep or just dangling suspended over his grief.
By March he seems a little more reconciled to life, but Betty, wandering pale and puffy out of her bedroom for morning coffee, is not. March is about Betty, who’s talking less and praying more. Phillip is gone. He saw his new son and then he had to leave, and Betty is inconsolable. March is three stories about Betty, the first of which I’ll call The Provocation. This story begins when she spies me sitting cross-legged on my bed playing solitaire, and cries, Oh! and rushes from the room to conduct a fraught, whispered conference with my mother. Then, while I’m outside, my demonic playing cards disappear from my bedside table and a trash fire is set in the burn barrel. When I come in, the two of them are flushed and defiant, waiting for a confrontation. While they’re waiting, prayer sessions begin in earnest, and further notes and religious tracts appear on my dresser. These I carry ostentatiously out to the burn barrel.
Secondly, there’s The Opportunity, Betty’s attendance at her sister Isabel’s wedding to an Aussie airman. I’m not invited, but I do witness Betty trying to find a dress to wear, trying on all her old clothes over her new body, walking back and forth to look in the mirror in Mother’s room, and in the end having to wear a maternity dress. She comes back from the wedding looking like a cat that’s swallowed a bird. Everyone says hello to both of you, is all she says by way of report, as she picks Billy up from the chesterfield where he’s at last asleep.
And then The Leave-taking, announced at breakfast the next morning. Betty has decided to move back home. Her father will come for her on Saturday. There’s room for me now that Isabel’s gone, she says. Her long pale lashes flutter.
Well, I know Phillip was hoping his son could be raised with the family, Mother says, and goes to her room.
But Betty hangs on. Billy seems to do better when we’re there, she says, cutting her toast into fingers, her little morning ritual. He settles down faster at night. I don’t know why. And I guess . . . I guess I sort of miss living with my sisters.
Betty hates her stepmother, and even with Isabel gone it will be an awfully crowded house. This is down to Mother, who never thinks of anyone but herself. The baby can be crying his lungs out and over the screaming we’ll hear Mother: Could one of you girls bring me a cup of tea? But Betty won’t talk about it.
She does come to visit, she brings the new catalogue and a letter from Phillip and we have a nice conversation. I ask her if she’ll come out to the barn and hold the door level while I tighten the screws of the hinge. When I get her outside I force her to tell me why she left. I was just thinking of Billy, she says. It’s not an atmosphere I want him to be in. I straighten up and stare at her, the screwdriver in my hand. You don’t even close your eyes when we say grace, she says, her eyes round.
Then she looks away. And the sort of filth you read, I’ve looked into your books. Well, into one of them, but that was enough.
Which one? I can’t help asking.
I don’t remember the name, she says. She flushes. I have to think of Billy, she says.
There’s a long pause, and then she looks up at me again, clearly terrified at her own daring, her blue eyes blinking rapidly. I hate the way you treat your mother, she cries. I feel sorry for her. Look what life is like for her. She’s lost her husband, her only son’s gone to war. And she’s getting worse every day. She can hardly walk across the room. What’s going to happen to her? Tears begin to drip down her cheeks. I feel terrible leaving her, she sobs, but I just couldn’t stand it any more. I felt like I was going crazy. I know it’s not right, what I’m doing. It’s selfish, I know it’s selfish. Phil’s going to be so mad. I prayed and prayed for God to give me the strength to stay. And he didn’t, it just got worse. So that must mean something, don’t you think? Betty reaches for my hand. Maybe I can be more help if I’m not living here, she says. But don’t worry. I won’t tell Phillip the real reason.
Tell him whatever the hell you want, I say, shaking her off and turning back to the barn door with the screwdriver. Adjectival cow! I add under my breath.
So then Mother and I are on our own, and April and May and the months after are about us, about the way we make do.
Nebo Gospel Chapel, where my dad’s funeral was held while I was packing up my trunk in Oldham. I like walking in, I like the moment when everyone standing in the foyer registers my high heels, the upsweep of my dark hair, my slim black skirt and the Haig tartan jacket Lois gave me because she didn’t like the way it hung on her. It’s red and yellow and it hangs just fine on me.
Mr. Dalrymple-the-church-planter is still there, tending his crop, although he seems to have lost his preoccupation with the Rapture. His belt’s risen three inches closer to his armpits and his scalp’s coming off in flakes like oatmeal. Other than that he hasn’t changed much, but now I’ve seen a shark in a Blackpool aquarium and I recognize the mouth with its collapsed lips and inward-leaning teeth.
On Sunday mornings everything sticks to you. It’s the effect of all that silence. Getting ready for church I saw my dad standing in the kitchen in his undershirt shaving, his braces hanging down over his Sunday trousers. That sharp moment is still there, and what I felt when I saw Mrs. Feazel in the entrance, saw how she’s shrinking and darkening with age, her eyes getting sweeter and darker, like raspberries you’re boiling down for jam. And what I heard in town yesterday, I’m raw from hearing that a ship full of children being evacuated from London was torpedoed crossing the Atlantic. It’s an excellent badgering religion Mr. Dalrymple preaches, excellent for the Thirties, but now I want to hear what it has to say about this. We stand (why do we stand?) and Mr. Dalrymple prays at
length that God will protect our boys and help them resist temptation and bear witness to the power of Christ for salvation wherever they go so far from home. That’s it then: this business with fighter planes and U-boats and tanks is just a metaphor for the real battle, the battle for souls being waged in dance halls and canteens all across the Empire.
I open my eyes and look at the bent heads in front of me. None of us take it all in. We each have a little sliver of this war, our own little universe of suffering, but nobody has the whole thing. Except God, maybe. We sit then and I cross and recross my legs against the bubbly varnish of the pew, straightening the front pleat of my skirt. Maybe that’s what God is. God is a mind that can comprehend the whole thing, the sheep starving in Dannert wire on the Yorkshire moors, each separate child falling burning into the sea from the deck of the City of Benares, old men crying out from under rubble in London and Berlin, chimneys standing in rubble all across Europe and all the boys in khaki in Stuttgart and Oldham and Kiev with knowledge in their hearts. I turn my head, fix my eyes on the white cross-hatching of the window, on the pale green fields beyond. In the fraught days of my salvation, I never really put it to myself, what it would mean if God were true — a mind that could comprehend the whole world.
The next week I roll up to the church and hear the gravel crunch under the tires, and I say, I’m not coming in. Do you think you can manage the steps on your own, or do you want me to help you? My mother turns her white face to me and looks at me with loathing for the power I have over her and says, Take me home, then. While I negotiate the turn onto the Burnley road she clutches the edge of the seat and keeps looking straight ahead, terrified someone will see us. She’d rather miss church, rather have people believe she’s too ill, than appear in the doorway on her own and have to explain about me.