Daughter of the House

by Rosie Thomas

  Devil wore a red paper crown that slipped down over one eye. He carved the bird with sweeps of the knife, pressing Jinny and Ann to second and third helpings and ordering Cornelius to top up their glasses. He loved the company of the two women, flirting with them indiscriminately and kissing Ann’s flushed cheek whenever she leaned within range. Ann was exhausted from working a month of night shifts and when the time came to clear the table Jinny ordered her to sit still and let someone else do the work.

  Ann didn’t argue, for once. She sat back against a cushion and beamed.

  ‘Three whole days off from the hospital, and no washing-up? What bliss.’

  There was a basket of Shaw’s Exotics to finish with. The scent of tangerines clung to their fingers and Nancy recalled the Christmas morning in the nursing home. Luckily Devil didn’t seem to think of it. He proposed toasts to the King and Queen and to absent friends, and insisted on rounds of Consequences and Pelmanism before singing the old songs. At the end of the evening Cornelius found some dance music on the wireless and they pushed back the rug and swayed in a tipsy confusion of arms and backsides. It was a happy day. When the time came for Jinny and Ann to leave Devil protested.

  ‘Don’t go. People are always going. Eliza, tell them to stay and keep us company.’

  ‘Pa, they need to go to bed and so do I. You’ve got an-other visitor tomorrow, remember?’

  ‘Who? Who is it?’

  George Gardiner had said he would be visiting some friends who lived not far away and she had already told her father of the painter’s plan to drop in on Boxing Day. Devil shook his head when she reminded him.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Cornelius found the yo-yos and settled his father in his chair beside the kitchen range.

  Nancy walked to the end of the road with Jinny and Ann. It was raining, with reflections of the street lamps breaking into circlets in the puddles and the wet air dense with coal smoke. The curtains of some of the houses they passed were torn or hanging loose, letting out chinks and ellipses of thin lamplight. They were all a little drunk and at the tipping point between finding everything hilarious and descending into melancholy.

  ‘We’ve had such a lovely time,’ Ann sighed as she put her arms around Nancy’s neck. ‘I do love you. Don’t we, Jinny?’

  ‘Of course we do. Come on, girl. We’ve still got skating to look forward to, the day after tomorrow.’

  Ice skating was Jinny and Ann’s new passion, taken up as eagerly as cycling, and they were proud of how good they were becoming at it. A big new rink had opened at Bethnal Green and they were taking Nancy for a Christmas treat even though she could hardly slither two yards on the ice. There was talk of a fish supper to follow.

  The two women linked arms and set off for Shaftesbury Avenue, turning at the corner to wave. Once they were out of sight Nancy went back to join Devil and Cornelius. Her yo-yo kept stopping at the bottom of its descent and twirling on the dead string.

  ‘Nancy? Jolly good. I wasn’t sure this was the place. Just let me pay the cabbie.’

  If George Gardiner was surprised by the neighbourhood and the state of the house, he did his best not to show it. Nancy tried not to mind about being discovered to be poorer than expected. At Whistlehalt she had been wearing an expensive dress chosen by Gil and her earrings had been another present from him, so the painter had assessed her on the basis of her outward appearance. To do him credit he quickly adjusted to the Wixes’ circumstances, squeezing down the hallway and bustling into the kitchen on his twinkling feet as if he felt perfectly at home.

  Devil was in his usual place. He was treating his headache with a glass of Guinness and the bottle stood at his elbow. Cornelius hadn’t wanted to encounter a stranger so he had taken the wireless upstairs to his bedroom.

  Gardiner held out his hand.

  ‘Devil, old man. It’s been a long time, eh? Getting on for forty years.’

  After a moment’s bewilderment, Devil shook.

  Nancy said, ‘It’s Mr George Gardiner, Pa. The painter, you remember? He’s brought something to show you.’

  Instead of answering Devil leaned forward in his chair and fumbled in the pocket of his trousers. He brought out the toy and winked at Gardiner.

  ‘I bet you’ve never tried one of these.’

  Cornelius had done well to make himself scarce, Nancy thought a little grimly, because it wasn’t going to be an easy visit. Devil’s memory was better on some days than others although Nancy suspected that he chose to make himself more opaque when he couldn’t be bothered to talk.

  ‘A yo-yo?’

  The painter reached for it but Devil feinted. The puck spun upwards, he seemed to release the string and the object vanished. Devil spread his hands wide and wheezed with laughter.

  ‘Very good,’ Gardiner chuckled. ‘Just like old times. You used to do something similar with my brushes when you sat for me.’

  ‘Sat? Where did I sit? Nancy, bring the man a chair.’

  She placed one for him and hung up the visitor’s handsome overcoat. He kept his leather-bound portfolio close beside him. She offered him a drink and he politely insisted that he would like nothing better than a Guinness. Luckily there was one bottle left on the pantry shelf.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Devil asked.

  The painter reminded him of the portrait of Devil in costume for The Philosopher’s Illusion.

  He concluded, ‘I’d adore to see it again. I won a student prize with it, you know. The Founder’s Medal at the Rawlinson School.’

  ‘I know. I was there. Eliza was wearing a new green dress.’

  Devil drew in a deep breath, and his eyelids fluttered as if he were inhaling the scent of her hair mingling with the long-ago rose he had worn in his buttonhole. Nancy smiled inwardly. It was typical. He could also remember the exact sequence of a trick that he hadn’t performed since before she was born.

  Gardiner took the opportunity. ‘Speaking of Eliza, I thought you might like to see this?’

  He reached into the portfolio, brought out a sheet of drawing paper and placed it in front of Devil.

  It was a long time before Devil spoke. And then all he said was, ‘Yes.’

  Nancy looked over his shoulder. The drawing was of a ripe and lovely young woman with rounded limbs and breasts. She was absorbed in her own thoughts and her nakedness seemed incidental.

  ‘Old Charlie Egan left it to me when he died,’ Gardiner said.

  Very firmly Devil removed it from the painter’s grasp.

  ‘It’s for me, I suppose?’

  The other man hesitated. ‘W-e-e-ll. I thought a fair ex-change might be in order.’

  He had come in the hope of retrieving his own lost prize-winner. Nowadays his thoughts would continually return to the past, as old men’s did.

  Devil indicated the kitchen walls, bare except for a manufacturer’s calendar. Gardiner’s gaze passed over the newspaper coils plugging the gaps in the sash frames.

  ‘Eliza took against it,’ Devil explained. ‘She took against a lot of things.’

  Gardiner sighed. He could hardly snatch the drawing back again.

  ‘I’d like you to have it,’ he said in the end, to Nancy.

  She was touched. They had a few photographs of her mother, but they didn’t capture her in the way these deft pencil lines did. She was ten years older now than Eliza had been then, and not nearly as beautiful, but she could see how the drawing defined their resemblance.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Gardiner smoothed the front of his yellow-checked waistcoat and placed his feet together. His round cheeks shone with the satisfaction of at least having done a good deed, even if he was leaving empty-handed.

  ‘Well, I won’t keep you any longer. You have a splendid daughter to comfort your old age, Devil. I am quite stricken with envy. I’m sorry not to have met your sons this time.’

  A footstep creaked overhead and they all ignored it.

  When
Nancy came back from showing the visitor out Devil quickly lowered the drawing and she had the impression he had touched his lips to it. He poured himself the remainder of Gardiner’s stout.

  ‘That fellow always was the biggest molly in London,’ he said.

  The ice was crowded with holiday skaters in pairs and zig-zagging chains and the seats surrounding it were thronged with spectators. The new rink was hardly more than a barn with a roof over arched trusses and a waist-high wooden partition enclosing the ice, but the walls were painted in bold colours and decorated with huge photographs of the club’s star skaters caught in mid-leap or pirouette. There was a little stage at the far end where a band played in the evenings and on weekend afternoons.

  Jinny and Ann held one of Nancy’s hands apiece as she struck out on her wobbling blades. With the two of them to support her she gained confidence and soon she broke free to balance with outstretched arms. Sliding in a long arc she finally crashed into the wooden barrier, knowing no other way to stop. Her ears filled with the rasp of steel, the laughing calls of the other skaters and the brassy oompahs of the music.

  ‘Watch and learn,’ Jinny called to her as she sped by. She carved a supple figure-of-eight and twirled to skim backwards, perfectly repeating the figure. Her ankles swiftly crossed and recrossed as she drew sharp crystalline furrows and Ann battled to keep up, her red-gold hair turned orange by the globe lights suspended overhead. Jinny held out one teasing hand and Ann just managed to catch her fingers. They raced away, speeding past the slower pairs, all the way up to the bandstand and the lively saxophonist who tilted his instrument and sent the notes glissading through the busy air before they turned back again.

  Afterwards Nancy remembered their faces, looking for her through the swirling crowd, Ann’s with a shadow already in it.

  They set off across the ice and it seemed suddenly that Ann was holding back, shaking her head and with her eyes widening in alarm. She was panting as if she was out of breath. Jinny half-turned to see what was wrong as Ann’s free hand came up to her ribs and she folded in pain. Her knees buckled and Jinny leapt to support her. They swayed for a second in each other’s arms and somehow crept to the barrier. Ann leaned on it for support but her body slumped as her legs gave way beneath her. The nearest skaters swerved or stumbled as she collapsed.

  Jinny knelt over her. She didn’t speak aloud but Nancy heard her heart crying out, ‘Ann? Annie, come back.’

  Ann lay staring with her left cheek compressed against the ice. Her jaw sagged horribly. Threads of her hair fanned out like a sparse pillow with melting crystals shining in it.

  A circle of people jostled around her toppled body, their faces looming and their mouths opening and closing on a tide of meaningless words. Jinny lifted her love’s head and tried to cradle it in her lap until two of the people took Ann’s limp shoulders and heaved her up. Two more men seized her feet. Together they hauled her off the ice as if she were a sack of coal. A blanket was placed on the soaking walkway next to the ice and they laid Ann down on it. Her head was lolling and her unseeing eyes still stared.

  Nancy struggled towards them. ‘Help us. Oh, help us.’

  A man knelt down and began to administer artificial respiration.

  Jinny tore off her gloves and cupped Ann’s temples between her hands. She was looking up at the people.

  ‘She’s a nurse,’ she kept saying. ‘She’s a nurse, she knows what to do.’

  Nancy stood by, wobbling on the blades because her trembling fingers couldn’t undo the stiff bootlaces. Time crept by, full of voices and flurry. The music stopped and the ice was cleared, more faces turning to stare as the skaters silently slid by. A second man took over the work of pumping at Ann’s chest.

  ‘Keep going,’ Jinny ordered. She was white to the lips.

  A doctor pushed his way through to them. He held Ann’s wrist and shone a light into her extinguished eyes.

  It was obvious to Nancy that Ann Gillespie was dead.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Ann’s funeral took place on the first day of 1932. The cause of death was a ruptured aortic valve, the weakness in her heart probably present since the childhood bout of rheumatic fever from which her twin had died.

  Her aged mother and father travelled down from Dunfermline. The sudden death of their only surviving child had shrunk them to cobwebs in their black clothes. They stood alone in the front pew, bewildered by grief and the strangeness of being in London. Standing directly behind her, Nancy saw that under her hat Mrs Gillespie’s grey hair held the faint remnants of her daughter’s bright colour.

  Martinmart‌inmartinmartin. She was thinking of the Kentish bicycling weekend, the brisk scepticism that had been so characteristic of Ann, and the child’s voice she had heard. She half-glanced over her shoulder to see if the soaking girl was there, but there were only the rows of mourners.

  At Jinny’s insistence they were gathered in a crematorium chapel, recently constructed from raw red bricks on lines not dissimilar to the ice rink. She said that Ann was not going be laid in the ground and there would be no religious obfuscation over her body before the disposal, because she wouldn’t have wanted either of these things.

  ‘Annie’s gone and there’s nothing else. I am being practical.’

  She didn’t look at Nancy as she said it.

  Cornelius sat next to Jinny, protective of her even though she held herself so tightly as to appear invulnerable. He explained to Nancy and Devil that the gas-fired ovens used in the new crematoria were hygienic and efficient and in his opinion Jinny was quite right to make this modern choice. Mr and Mrs Gillespie quietly accepted the decisions Ann’s friends made, apparently relieved not to be called on to deal with the formalities themselves.

  The vicar read out a short address. He said that sad-ly Ann had never married, but her life had been rich in friendships.

  Jinny sat listening to him, her white face stiff.

  The vicar’s neutral words were accurate. Ann did have many friends.

  Gil was amongst them. Just before the ceremony began he slipped quietly into the chapel and stood at the back with his narrow head bowed. Nancy didn’t have to turn round; she sensed that he was there and his presence comforted her.

  He had told her, ‘I want to pay my respects to Ann and to be there for Jinny’s sake. I won’t stay afterwards because you will be with your family.’

  They couldn’t be seen together at their friend’s wake because it would raise questions. So the boxes stacked up beside each other, year upon year. They were never opened at the same time and the contents never spilled over.

  Lion had arrived too, correct in a black tie. In contrast to Gil he came over to clasp Nancy’s hand and murmured, ‘It’s bloody awful. Ann, of all people, who was of value in this vile world. Couldn’t someone else have died in her place?’

  ‘I know. I feel the same.’

  ‘How is Jinny?’

  ‘Brave.’

  Lizzie came with Tommy, now a lanky boy of fourteen. Matthew was suffering a bad attack of rheumatism and Faith stayed at home to look after him. Jake was in America so Freddie had come in his place, even though he had barely known Ann. The remaining seats were packed with her nursing friends and hospital colleagues, and more from the two women’s trades unionist and political circles.

  After the curtains closed on the coffin, Jinny stood up in front of the mourners.

  ‘Ann’s parents and I would like you to join us at the Thistle, the pub on the corner of this street.’

  With a smile for the appropriate name she held out her arms to them all before leading the way out into the cold new year.

  They crammed into the back room of the public house. There was tea and sandwiches, beer and whisky. A murmur of exchanged condolences soon swelled into a loud babble. In the distance Nancy could see Devil, gesticulating to an audience of nurses in the flow of one of his stories. His remaining hair was almost entirely white but his thick eyebrows were still dark. He was a mag
netic figure even now.

  Lizzie took her arm. ‘I said to Jinny, give up the driving, there’s a job with me in the office at Shaw’s Exotics for as long as she wants it. And I told her to have some paid time off first, before coming back.’

  ‘That’s good of you.’

  Lizzie compressed her lips into a dark red line. ‘It’s not an act of generosity. You know me better than that.’

  Nancy was irritated. Lizzie didn’t always have to pretend to be so hard-boiled. But her cousin went on, ‘In a few months’ time I’m going need to someone I can trust. I might have to hand over some of my work.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  A hairline crack seemed to be appearing in Lizzie’s enamel.

  ‘For the usual reason, I suppose. I’m forty-two and I’ve just found out I’m in the family way.’

  ‘Lizzie? But that’s good news, surely? Raymond must be pleased.’

  Lizzie nodded.

  ‘He is, as a matter of fact. He’s delighted, and he’s insisting that as I’m divorced there’s no reason not to get married. Quietly, you know. I’ve had to agree. It wasn’t my plan at all, not in the least, but I thought at my age …’ She twisted her thin shoulders in a smartly tailored black serge coat. ‘I must say, you seem to have managed better than I have. Never a slip. I take my hat off.’

  Nancy was used to Lizzie but she was embarrassed. The compliment was misplaced, apart from anything else. With Lion, and at the beginning with Gil, she had taken every possible precaution. In the last years she had let herself become careless. She had not even pursued the idea to any conclusion, thinking only oh well, if it did happen, there would be a way to deal with it.

  It had not happened, and she didn’t suppose now that it would.

  She kissed her cousin’s cheek.

  ‘I hope you’ll be very happy.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure that’s in my contract,’ Lizzie smartly retorted. Nancy could see that she was happy though, and it might have been because for once she was not in control of everything that touched her.