by Rosie Thomas
Some people might be more than usually sensitive to such leakages, she reasoned. It was not a lucky gift, at least not as Mr Feather had suggested. She remembered a girl at her school admired by everyone for having perfect musical pitch, but the same girl found it almost physically painful to listen to off-key playing. She would shudder and put her hands over her ears.
Such gifts were not always welcome, or comfortable to possess.
‘Nancy?’
Eliza was shaking her.
‘He’s gone upstairs to bed.’ Eliza was rubbing her hands together, her shoulders drawn close to her ears. ‘Why is it so cold in here?’
Nancy struggled to collect herself. ‘Has he? Is it?’
The corners of Eliza’s mouth turned down. Nancy knew how capable she was of kindling her mother’s irritation, but it saddened her to be made aware of it over and over again. Eliza unconditionally adored her sons but she measured her daughter against her own yardstick. Nancy must fulfil her mother’s ambitions for her, which had once been Eliza’s for herself. Eliza particularly disliked the notion that her child might be keeping something from her.
‘What are you hiding?’ she had once snapped when Nancy was much younger.
Flippantly Nancy had held out her upturned palms to show that there was nothing concealed there.
Eliza slapped them.
‘That’s enough. You are not a conjuror.’
Nancy wished she could be more the daughter Eliza wanted. She regretted the distance between them because it seemed so small, and yet was so impossible to bridge.
She took her mother’s hands now. ‘Ma?’
Eliza’s fingers were dry and hot. Nancy touched her forehead and found that it was burning too.
‘You’re not well.’
Eliza’s head drooped in defeat. She sighed, ‘Nancy, I am so tired of illness.’
Eliza let herself be led upstairs to bed. Their roles could suddenly reverse and in one second switch back again.
Once she had settled her mother under the eiderdown and listened at Cornelius’s door, Nancy wandered back through the darkened house. She was too concerned about Eliza to spare much thought for the little apparition, but she went into the drawing room and stood on the same spot. There was nothing there now and when she opened the doors overlooking the garden only cold, damp air swept in. But there was something at the back of her, like the palm of a hand moving just a hair’s breadth away from her head. She spun round, almost crying out, and searched the empty room. She walked the length of it and opened the front curtains.
A man in a long overcoat stood next to the railing topping the canal embankment. At first his face was hidden under the brim of his hat, but then he seemed to sense her watching him and looked up.
It was Lawrence Feather. She knew him at once, even though she had not set eyes on him since the day Eliza dispatched him from this room, more than eight years ago. He had stood in just the same way, motionless and intent, on the beach outside the hotel and she had looked down on him from a bay window.
A cold current crept through her, raising the hairs at the nape of her neck. The Uncanny was powerful, closer than it had been since the day of the Queen Mab. She had thought for a long time that she controlled it but now it spilled through the air and possessed her.
Feather stood for another moment, locking her eyes with his. Then with an exaggerated gesture he raised his hat to her, and walked slowly away.
Inside her head Nancy tried to defy him. She watched him turn the corner where the canal entered the tunnel and she thought – or perhaps she spoke the words aloud – if you are dead you can’t affect us. If you are not, there is nothing here that concerns you.
She closed the curtains tight, leaving not a chink between them, and continued her way downstairs. In the kitchen she made herself comfortable in a chair close to the range where she could hear the soft hissing of coals.
She had been sitting deep in thought for perhaps half an hour when her father came in. Devil was in his old tweed overcoat, his face not quite scrubbed bare of stage make-up and his regular smell of bay rum and cigar smoke spiked with fumes of brandy.
‘You’re up late, Nancy.’
She found a smile.
‘I was about to make a cup of cocoa. Would you like one?’
‘Keeping up your wartime skills, eh?’
He teased her, but he was proud of her work for Jinny’s column. Unlike Eliza, Devil was fond of Jinny. He asked about her while Nancy warmed and whisked the milk.
‘Got a young man yet, has she? A nice warm armful like that, she must have someone.’
‘Pa.’
Devil chuckled. ‘A young girl then?’
‘I don’t know. Don’t be nosy.’
They both laughed and Nancy forgot her anxieties. She loved the rare occasions when she had her father to herself. She handed him his cocoa mug and he thoughtfully sipped.
‘It would taste much better with a splash of brandy.’
She ignored him.
‘And you?’ he asked.
‘Do I have a nice young girl?’
Devil had the grace to look slightly abashed.
‘I’d like to see you with a couple of admirers. You’re young and pretty. You should be having some fun and misbehaving, kissing someone under a full moon, instead of going off to work every day at your printers and coming home to your mother and me and Neelie. Eh?’
He sandwiched her feet between his on the rag rug.
She smiled. ‘Misbehaving? Is that what fun is?’
Until tonight the only men Nancy had known were just back from the war, no longer eager to snatch every opportunity for a kiss and a joke. Now they were home for good they seemed aware of an uncertain future.
Gil Maitland was different, and she thought he was thrillingly unlike any male she had ever encountered. Un-fortunately there had been no glimpse of any moon, and he had not been remotely eager for a kiss.
Devil raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course. What’s wrong with dancing to jazz bands, may I ask? Dressing up and drinking cocktails?’
‘Nothing at all.’
She told him about having tea and a jam biscuit with Jinny, and the puddle of rain on the steps that looked like mercury. She wanted to keep the Daimler and its owner to herself. Nor did she say I saw a ghost. Maybe two.
Devil didn’t notice any reticence. He loved to reminisce about his old tricks.
‘Mercury, eh? Ah, that was a good illusion, the Melting Wand. Maybe I should bring back some of the old favourites. Nostalgia plays well, or it used to. Listen to me, I’m getting old. Modern is what counts nowadays, isn’t it?’
‘Was it a decent house tonight?’
Like Eliza, Devil had gone grey. It was only when he smiled that he looked as rakishly handsome as ever. He didn’t smile now.
‘No,’ he admitted.
The Palmyra was going through a particularly thin time. Public tastes had changed, and it seemed that spectacular magic shows belonged to a happier and less cynic-al age.
‘Are you worried, Pa?’
He tried to shrug off the question. ‘Luckily I am not the worrying kind. Otherwise I’d have worn myself into the grave long ago.’
Nancy couldn’t remember a time when even the air they breathed had not been clouded with uncertainty about the theatre. But their impending poverty was usually Eliza’s refrain, and Devil’s chorus had always been that they should spend money and leave the making of it to him.
Tonight was different, though, in so many respects.
‘What can we do?’
‘My lovely girl. Thank you for that “we”, but the Palmyra is your old dad’s concern. Always has been.’
Once it had been his and Eliza’s together. Nowadays his wife was too infirm. Cornelius couldn’t help, and Arthur was doubly absent because they had chosen to make him inviolate. Arthur was now an army officer, with a classical education. He would never be allowed to step back across the divide into a disreputable and pre
carious life in the theatre.
A quick rush of love for her father caught in Nancy’s throat. To hide her emotion she gathered up the empty cups and took them to the sink.
‘How was your mama this evening?’
‘She wasn’t very well. I saw her into bed.’
Devil leapt to his feet.
‘What? Why didn’t you tell me?’
His wife, and the theatre. Always Devil’s true, twin poles.
‘She’s asleep now.’
‘I’ll go up to her. Goodnight, my girl.’
His lips brushed her forehead and he hurried away.
Nancy washed up the saucepan and crockery and left them on the scrubbed draining board. She damped the fire, and looked around the room for what needed to be done in the morning before she quietly made her own way to bed.
CHAPTER SIX
Devil came to Nancy’s room long before daylight.
He said hoarsely, ‘Your mother is ill.’
Nancy pushed back the bedcovers and ran. She found Eliza sweating and semi-delirious. When she put her hand to her forehead she moaned and twisted in the soaking sheets.
Devil asked, ‘Where has she been? What did she do yesterday?’
Nancy’s mouth went dry with fear. There had been a woman who coughed like a walrus. Cornelius had raised his head at the word.
‘She went to Chapel Market.’
A crowded place, ripe for the spreading of infection.
Eliza’s skin had taken on a strange blue tinge and she fought to draw in air through lungs that audibly bubbled with mucus. The intervals between each breath and the next seemed endless.
Father and daughter stared at each other across the tumbled bed. Neither of them uttered the word, but they didn’t need to. Devil’s face turned the colour of clay.
Through her rising terror Nancy tried to speak calmly. She would have to take charge of the situation; instinctively she knew that her father could not. ‘We must cool her down and help her to breathe. Bring me some water, washing cloths, towels.’
He hurried away, his slippers flapping on the linoleum of the landing.
Nancy slipped her arm beneath Eliza’s shoulders, and her heart twisted with love as well as fear as she supported their negligible weight. Eliza clutched at her wrist. Her eyes were wide and wild with fever.
‘Carlo?’ she gasped. And then another word that might have been Christmas.
‘Hush, Ma. Just try to lie still and breathe. We’re taking care of you.’
Devil returned as Nancy peeled away the sodden bed-clothes.
‘Now bring some dry sheets and a clean nightdress.’
He seemed relieved to do whatever he was told. She heard him fling open the doors of the big linen press on the landing.
Nancy wrung out a washcloth in an enamel bowl. She sponged her mother’s forehead and chest and then drew the sheet from beneath her before wrapping her in the towels. All the time she murmured as if to a distressed child, there, let’s get you dry, we’ll take care of you, I know it hurts.
She held her close, her lips against her burning forehead. Already the skin was pearled with fresh sweat. Nancy’s eyes met Devil’s.
‘You must go for the doctor.’
His nod held all their misgivings. Medical attention was not easy to find. Many doctors were still in France, attending to soldiers who couldn’t yet be brought back home. Others had dispersed to the overflowing military hospitals, and the voluntary nurses as well as the paid ones had mostly followed them.
Devil pulled on trousers over his pyjamas. ‘I’ll ask Cornelius’s man to come, shall I?’
‘Be quick.’
‘Carlo,’ Eliza muttered again, and then ‘Jakey? Jake, speak up. They can’t hear you in the gallery.’
She gave a sudden wild laugh and just as abruptly a spray of reddish foam came out of her mouth. Nancy wiped her lips and chin.
You are not going to die, she silently insisted. Don’t even consider it, because I won’t let you. I need you too much.
She held her until she seemed calmer. Racking shivers followed on from the sweating. Gently she laid her back against the pillows and pulled the hem of the soaked nightdress up to her mother’s thighs. Eliza’s hand descended like a claw and tried to prevent her from lifting it further.
‘It’s not Carlo, Mama, it’s me,’ Nancy whispered. ‘No one else is here to see anything.’
Tears rolled from the corners of Eliza’s eyes but she was too sick to protest further. Nancy lifted her mother’s hips and pulled up the nightdress. What she saw made her catch her breath in shock. Eliza’s belly was a pillow of white flesh scored with deep creases. Nancy knew only her own neat anatomy, and the glimpse of her mother’s damaged body made her gasp with shock.
Even in the grip of the fever Eliza knew what was to be seen. Her lips stretched in a rictus of distress.
‘I’m sorry.’ Nancy removed the garment and threw it aside, then as gently as she could she towelled her mother’s body and dressed her again. She spread a clean sheet on Devil’s side of the bed and hoisted her on to the fresh bedclothes. She covered her with the blankets, smoothed her hair off her face and held her in her arms, wordlessly praying. Eliza’s eyes were half-closed. Each successive breath seemed to be dragged out of her body.
Nancy listened to the steady ticking of the bedroom clock, counting the seconds as they built into slow minutes.
At last she heard the front door rattle and two pairs of boots treading up the stairs.
Dr Vassilis was a very old man with straggling whiskers and a bald domed head. He had clearly dressed in haste. His metal-framed spectacles chafed flaky patches at the bridge of his nose. The Wixes knew that he was kind, because Cornelius was not afraid of him, but he was not the best doctor in London.
He put his bag down on the end of the bed and took out a muslin mask that he hooked over his ears. Eliza saw his half-blanked face and writhed away in terror. Devil and Nancy had to hold her down so the old man could lower his stethoscope to her fluttering chest.
The doctor stepped back after making his quick examination.
‘Spanish influenza is highly contagious,’ he muttered in his Greek-accented English. ‘To nurse her I advise you both, three layers of muslin, so, over the nose and mouth.’
‘To hell with the muslin, tell me about my wife.’
Vassilis shook his head at Devil. He looked like an old sheep.
‘You will do no good to be sick like she is.’
‘What can we do?’ Nancy begged.
‘Aspirins is the best medicine. Keep her warm, if she will drink let her have it, watch her carefully.’
‘Is that all?’
Vassilis nodded sadly. ‘I can tell you, it is in a way hopeful that your mother is older and not so strong. This flu, I don’t know why – and I am only a doctor, perhaps it is God himself who understands these things – it seems to like the young and the strong best of all. They die like this,’ he clicked his bony fingers, ‘and the weaker ones, babies and old people, they stay alive.’ He shrugged.
Devil gripped one of the brass bed knobs so tightly that his knuckles whitened. For once he was completely in the room, no other concern colouring his expression, his face stripped naked by anxiety. Nancy’s thoughts flicked to her mother’s ruined body and just as quickly she steered them away again. She could read love for his wife plainly written in Devil’s face. He would be a smaller man without her. Nancy had always assumed that it was Devil who led the way, charming other people and pleasing himself, while Eliza resented his glamour. Now it occurred to her that he was only trying to deflect some of the power she held over him.
What a complicated measure men and women were obliged to dance, she thought. She didn’t include herself in this company, or even wonder when her own dance might begin.
The doctor took a brown vial from his bag. ‘Two of these for her, every four hours. A high dose but it is best in such a case.’
At the door, as Devil was sh
owing him out, he asked, ‘How is Cornelius?’
‘The same,’ Devil told him.
But that was not quite true. When daylight came and it seemed that Eliza was poised on the very margin between life and death, Cornelius slipped into the room.
Nancy got up from the bedside to try to warn him or perhaps to shield him but he gently put her aside. He studied his mother’s congested face and listened to her breathing, then lifted her wrist to count her pulse. He was composed, although he understood how ill she was. Eliza opened her eyes and saw him.
‘There, Ma,’ Cornelius soothed. ‘I’m here.’
The winter light crept across the floor. The three watchers sat in silence until Devil’s chin drooped on to his chest and he fell into an exhausted doze. Nancy tensed with Eliza’s every breath but Cornelius remained impassive. When Eliza coughed so hard that she retched up mouthfuls of pink mucus he wiped it away and afterwards moistened her lips with a few drops of water.
An hour passed and then another. There was no change, but Eliza still breathed.
‘We should send for Aunt Faith,’ Nancy said at last.
Devil lifted his head. ‘I will do it.’ He was glad of anything that was not just waiting.
It was time for another dose. Cornelius took the bottle from Nancy and administered the pills, doing it more deftly than she could have done. She saw that he had somehow been hooked from his despair into the detached state that must have allowed him to do his work in France. It was odd to feel any satisfaction on this terrible morning but she did feel it, and it grew stronger when her brother touched her arm and said in a voice that was almost his own, ‘She is holding on, you know.’
When Faith arrived two hours later in response to Devil’s telegram, Eliza had fallen uneasily asleep. Her features were sharp and her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets.
Nancy and Faith wordlessly hugged each other.
Faith was wearing the dark clothes she had put on after Rowland was killed on the Somme. His death had come only a little more than a year after Edwin succumbed to his wounds at Ypres. Faith’s happiness now was all in her grandson, Lizzie’s child, although there had not been so much satisfaction when the baby came far too soon after Lizzie’s hasty wedding. The marriage had not lasted many months into the war and the whereabouts of little Thomas Shaw Hooper’s father were not now known.