Paper Faces

by Rachel Anderson

  “You get ever such a lot of meals out here, don’t you?” Dot said. “Up London, we don’t do this one.” All things were done differently in London. “Up London,” Dot explained, “we waits for our high tea what Mrs. Parvis makes till evening when the real people get back from their work. And Mr. Brown has to have his straight off, no hanging about, because he wants to be an engineer, so he goes to night school. Mrs. Parvis says he’ll never make it. I know he will. He’s ever so nice.”

  On the dresser, Dot noticed a framed picture of a man in uniform. It was a black-and-white photograph that had been partially tinted with pastel colors so that though the young man’s face was paper-white, his eyes were sky-blue and his medal ribbons bright as a rainbow.

  Dot said, “Your husband was ever so brave, weren’t he? That’s what Gloria says. That him, up there?”

  “Do you know, it almost could be. Actually, that’s another of my sons. In the merchant navy. Though people do say he’s very like my husband.”

  “Has he had it too, your boy there?”

  “Not as far as I know, my dear. Though I must admit, we’ll be glad when it’s all over in the Far East and they can come back safe and sound.”

  So it wasn’t over yet. Dot had been right all along and Mrs. Parvis wrong when she’d insisted that it was all over bar the shouting.

  “Is he brave, too?”

  “Well, there’s so many different and wonderful ways of being brave, aren’t there, my dear? That’s the admirable way our good Lord arranged it, didn’t he? So that everybody can have a stab at it. Even Miss Lilian has shown great fortitude in her own way.”

  Loopy Lil was arranging and rearranging the teacups on their matching saucers.

  “And your mother, too, is a most courageous young woman, isn’t she? The way she’s carried on.”

  Dot wished she knew what it felt like to be brave, and wondered if she’d ever get the chance to find out. She wondered if eating when you didn’t feel hungry was brave. She wondered if her father was brave. Was he a secret hero and was that why Gloria never talked about him?

  She said, “I think maybe my old man had a stab at it.”

  The pale young sailor in the silver frame stared serenely out across the wide spaces of the kitchen with faraway forget-me-not eyes. Dot tried to remember her father’s face from the brownish photo that Gloria kept in her handbag. She wished she could recall it more clearly. Even when she had the picture in front of her, she seemed only to see the flat bloodless paper. She wished her father was like this young man who sat in his own shrine on a country kitchen dresser among used OHMS envelopes and sprigs of dried white heather.

  She said, “We don’t ever talk about my old man. But I think he liked bananas.”

  A group of men and women came in to share the meal called elevenses. They had muddy boots, which they kicked against the kitchen step, and muddy hands, which they washed at the sink. One wore a sack round his shoulders like a shawl; another had it round her waist as an apron. They didn’t sit but stood around the table. The china teacups seemed too dainty in their dark working hands. There wasn’t much talking between them, apart from pleases and thank-yous when Dot heard how two of them spoke awkwardly with unfluent foreign accents.

  The huge kitchen suddenly seemed too crowded. Dot felt the room lurch away, while the milk jug with its bead-decorated muslin cover, the flypaper dangling from the lamp above the table, the rosy faces of the gathered people, flew round through the air. Dot knew from their voices that those two young men who’d been working in the fields must be prisoners.

  “You all right, my dear?” she heard Mrs. Hollidaye say.

  Them’s Germans, Dot wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come out.

  “She’s too hot, poor little scrap, in that tight coat,” said the woman in the sacking apron. Loopy Lil clucked anxiously around like a pigeon.

  Mrs. Hollidaye led Dot outside. “Of course it’s not your coat. You keep your coat on if you want to. It’s eating. That’s the trouble. We’ve got all the wrong food for you, and you’re just not used to it, are you? But I daresay you like apples. Come along, we’ll go and find the very nicest apple there is for you.”

  “I ain’t never met a German before,” Dot said. “Not close up.”

  “Poor boys. Little more than children when they first arrived. They’re just yearning to be home.”

  This wasn’t how Mrs. Parvis used to speak of the enemy.

  “One of them plays the piano most beautifully. They used to let him up here to practice from time to time.”

  The apple room was dim and scented with a mysterious sweetness like the breakfast honey. Apples of many shades of yellow and red, brown and gold, were laid out on yellowed newspaper, line after line, row upon row, on broad-slatted shelves.

  “Don’t they give such a lovely smell!” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “They seem to get better and better.” She picked over the nearest of the apples, taking out three that had small brown marks.

  “Those’ll do nicely for the compost,” she said, then chose a dark gold one for Dot. “We call this one a russet. Have a try. They do seem to be lasting awfully well. Even better this year than last, though maybe that’s just an illusion. For I heard such an interesting talk on the wireless. It seems we’re all losing our taste for sweet things because of the shortages. What do you think?”

  Dot bit through the taut and burnished skin of the apple into juicy flesh. The crunchy texture was like a raw potato she had once stolen from Mrs. Parvis’s vegetable rack. But the taste was refreshingly sweet. She wondered if this might be anything like the bananas that Mrs. Parvis said were so exceptional.

  But when she swallowed, the first mouthful of crisp apple hurt her throat so much, she almost cried.

  Mrs. Hollidaye had already warned about plum trees growing inside you. Could the same thing happen with a single bite from an apple?

  9

  St. Michael and All Angels

  Mrs. Hollidaye said, “Would you like to come with me, Dorothy, to help with the flowers?”

  What did she mean by that? Flowers didn’t need helping. They just were.

  “For a little run in the Ford.”

  “Dunno about that,” said Dot. She was used enough to being left behind while Gloria went off, but it seemed more dangerous to do it the other way around, for her to leave Gloria behind.

  “Sleep,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “That’s the best thing for her.”

  Dot clutched at the cuffs of her coat, but even the familiar softness of worn velvet was not reassuring.

  “Dunno if I’m allowed. See, we don’t go about in cars, not up London.”

  Then, in case she had given an impression that London was not as good as here, she added, “But there’s plenty of cabs.” She couldn’t remember having actually been in one, and anyway they rarely came past Mrs. Parvis’s lodgings. “Buses too. We have lots of buses up London. And Shanks’s pony.”

  “It isn’t far, just down to the village and back. I have to take Mrs. Squirrel. For her legs. Nurse Willow, that’s our district nurse, lovely lady, member of our Mother’s Union, holds surgery in the village hall. We have a special petrol allowance for that. It’s not unlike a Red Cross run. So I always take my flowers for the altar at the same time. And pick up the groceries. Saves Mr. Bob making the trip with the cart.”

  “No, I ain’t leaving her behind all on her own,” said Dot. “You got to understand, if anything went wrong, then my name’s mud.”

  “We shan’t be gone long. And Miss Lilian will be here to take her a nice little something on a tray if she wakes before we’re back. Won’t you, Lilian?”

  Loopy Lil clattered at the sink in the back scullery.

  “Oh, heck. Might as well.”

  “Splendid, my dear. Then you hop in the back to keep the dogs company for me.”

  It was more exciting and comfortable to travel in the back of a Ford car than on any part of a bus, even top front. Dot sat with the yapping dogs on e
ither side licking at her hands. The basket of flowers was on the shelf behind them. Not made of colored crepe paper, faded, dusty, and crinkled on bent-wire stems like Mrs. Parvis had in her parlor. But alive and dark and greenish, fragile and fragrant, dew on the petals and the crushed stems dripping with sap.

  “Those long ones have a lovely scent, don’t they?” said Mrs. Hollidaye over her shoulder. “I’m not sure if the purple ones are my favorite, or the more blue color.”

  She drove to a cottage where she helped an old woman bent in half like a crooked stump into the front passenger seat.

  Dot tried to imagine that the two women in front were her footmen and she was one of the royal princesses, preferably Margaret because she wouldn’t have to be queen, which would be quite a responsibility if you thought about it, going for a drive in a carriage with her regal dogs and her regal flowers. Then she realized she didn’t have to pretend to be anyone going anywhere when she already was herself going for a real drive in a car with two dogs beside her and fresh flowers behind.

  It wasn’t far. The bent lady with the bad legs was helped out. Mrs. Hollidaye parked beside a stone cross, under which lay a brown dog sleeping. Mrs. Hollidaye adjusted her hat pin, gathered up the flowers, and took Dot’s hand firmly in hers. She paused by the brown dog on the ground.

  “Why, here’s Mr. Honeysett’s old Bess,” she said, bending down to stroke the dog’s muzzle.

  Dot thought how strange it was to be able to recognize a person’s dog even when the person wasn’t there, and then to know the dog’s name. It wasn’t like that in London. People didn’t even know most other people’s names, let alone their dogs’. In fact, Dot wasn’t at all sure if the dogs in London had names. Dogs’ names wasn’t something Mrs. Parvis had yet spoken about.

  “Dear old thing. She must be thirteen at least. That’s about eighty in dog years.”

  Mrs. Hollidaye’s dogs were left inside the car, bobbing up at the rear window.

  “I’m afraid their noses are a little out of joint,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “Never mind. They’ll just have to learn.”

  The old dog on the ground yawned and seemed almost to smile at them.

  “Up London,” said Dot, “we don’t have dogs so much.” She wished they did. It would be good to be greeted as you walked along by smiling creatures lying along the pavements. It would give Mr. Brown a surprise when he went to night school.

  In the village shop, Mrs. Hollidaye introduced Dot to the man in a brown overall who stood behind the wooden counter.

  “Good morning, Mr. Bob,” she said. “This is a young friend, Dorothy. She’s come to visit us from London.”

  “From London!” said the grocer. He made it seem important and special. “Well, just fancy that! She must have seen a few sights in her time.”

  A lady in a black straw hat, who was being weighed out a pound of grits by the grocer’s assistant, overheard.

  “A tiny child from London!” she repeated. “Why, the poor creature! Oh, you little angel!” She darted over to embrace Dot so tightly that she couldn’t breathe.

  Dot had never been hugged by a stranger. Mrs. Parvis gave no sign of being interested in her, let alone liking her enough to want to touch her.

  “What can we give the little child?” said the lady. “Just think what she must have been through! If only there were a little chocolate bar we could give her. Do you remember those peppermint creams we used to be able to get? Mr. Bob, you must have something under the counter.”

  “What Dorothy needs is a breath or two of good fresh air,” said Mrs. Hollidaye sharply. “And that’s exactly what we can give her. To put a few roses back in her cheeks.”

  “The little lamb,” said the lady.

  After the shop, Mrs. Hollidaye took Dot down a shady footpath, moist with ferns and ivy, heavy hedge tops meeting overhead. At the end, in sunlight, was a large building with high windows and a big main door.

  Mrs. Hollidaye put her flowers in a tin bucket of water in the porch, where other bunches of flowers were being collected.

  “Is it a hospital?” said Dot. “We had the flowers where my baby was.”

  “St. Michael and All Angels, dear,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “It’s our parish church. Though I daresay, long, long ago, sick people probably came here to seek a cure.”

  Dot liked the sound of the name, Michael. She wished that Baby had been a Michael.

  “At Baby’s hospital, you could buy a bunch from the flower lady near the gate. People took them in for them other people what was sick but we didn’t never have no dosh.”

  Dot wanted to point out that Baby had died anyway, but remembered Gloria’s warning to mind her p’s and q’s.

  Inside St. Michael and All Angels, women were arranging the flowers in golden tubs. There were tall gleaming candlesticks, a glittering cross so bright it seemed to burn, and an enormous golden eagle with hooked beak and shiny dangerous eye.

  “Gold!” whispered Dot. “I ain’t never seen so much real gold before! Bet they ain’t got this much even up the palace.”

  “No, not gold. Brass. But it’s all awfully nicely polished, isn’t it? Mrs. Buss and Mrs. Cheese, that’s our two brass ladies, come in and see to it on Fridays. Provided they can get hold of the Brasso. We’ll say a little prayer for your baby, shall we?”

  Dot didn’t know. So she grinned vaguely in a way that could have meant yes or could have meant no. “He died and all,” she said.

  “Yes, my dear, that’s why I thought it would be nice to say a little prayer, to remind our dear Lord to take care of him.”

  “Them nurses took care of him,” said Dot.

  But perhaps they hadn’t cared enough? Perhaps our dear Lord would have a better chance.

  “Anyway, I think it was a bit our fault, like. See, we used to visit him every day. But then there was that day she gave me the brooch what she said I wasn’t never to forget. And we didn’t go to see him. That’s what done for him.”

  “Nonsense, my dear, that’s just superstition. He died of pneumonia. There was nothing anyone could have done.”

  Mrs. Hollidaye took off her leather gloves and laid them neatly on top of her handbag on the pew beside her, straightened her hat, and unhooked a cushion that hung from a brass hook beneath the shelf. The cushion was embroidered with a pattern of golden keys. She knelt down on the cushion, placed her ungloved hands together, closed her eyes, and appeared to be either thinking or sleeping in an upright kneeling position.

  Dot decided she had better copy Mrs. Hollidaye. She found a similar cushion hanging in front of her place, sewn in neat wool stitches. Hers had an embroidered picture of a lamb standing in a field of flowers with yellow light sprouting out from around its head. The lamb had a nice expression rather like a kitten’s. Dot didn’t want to hurt its face, so she placed her knees carefully to one side of the lamb so that they pressed into the sewn field of flowers on the edge.

  Dot closed her eyes. She could see nothing except a vivid scarlet blur, the color of a London bus. So she thought about Baby, not sad thoughts but ordinary ones. She remembered him propped up by the nurses, waving his little hands about. That was before he became too ill even to be propped. She remembered one time when a nurse had beckoned Dot into a side room, pulled over a metal chair for Dot, and brought the bundle to her wrapped in a bulky scratchy blanket. She had laid him in Dot’s arms and let her hold him on her own.

  Even though he was small, he’d felt heavy. He had seemed to be sleeping, yet even in sleep his closed eyelids quivered and his tiny fists were half clenched. When he woke, he gazed up at Dot almost as though he knew her, yet she couldn’t be sure if he really saw her, for his eyes had a distant faraway look like a sailor in the navy staring across the Pacific seas.

  After that, the other nurses always made her wait in the corridor. Perhaps they’d known all along what was going to happen to him. Perhaps they hadn’t wanted her to see.

  Dot opened her eyes to glance sideways at Mrs. Hollidaye b
ut she was still in the same position, kneeling, so Dot lowered her lids, and though she hadn’t meant to, she found herself thinking about Gloria, still asleep in that high bed with the soft eiderdown. Poor Gloria, who hadn’t had breakfast. No cooked egg inside its shell and served on a plate patterned with a picture of cauliflowers, no rich fruit lying in sweet juice, no butter, no bread, no yellow cream. And no coming to this gold place to see the green and multicolored flowers.

  When Mrs. Hollidaye had finished her praying and they were leaving the church, she stopped at the back and showed Dot a book with writing in it.

  “It’s very sad when a baby dies,” she said. “But at least when they are so very young, they have no chance to sin and bring more wickedness into this world. Well, that’s how I comforted myself. We could put your little brother’s name in here. It’s our parish record of who is specially in need of prayer each week. The sick and the departed. What was his name?”

  Dot found to her surprise that, just as she often could no longer remember what her father’s face looked like, now she couldn’t remember Baby’s name. How could it go so quickly?

  She said, “He didn’t have no name. He did have something official because the nurses, like, said he had to. That’s the law, they said. But me mum weren’t there, so them nurses had to invent it themselves. Anything they could think of.”

  “I expect they wanted to make sure he was baptized,” said Mrs. Hollidaye.

  “Me and Gloria, we always called him Baby.”

  “‘Baby.’ That’s lovely.” Mrs. Hollidaye handed the pen to Dot. “Would you like to write it?” She pointed to the place on the open page of the book. Dot thought it was the loveliest book she’d ever seen. Around the edge of each page was a pattern of angels’ heads with blue wings. St. Michael and All Angels. It would have been nice if Baby’s name could have been Michael.

  Dot shook her head. “Can’t do writing,” she said.

  “Very well. I’ll do it.”