Paper Faces

by Rachel Anderson

  The gardener found her a length of binding twine in a shed so that she could learn to skip. And the young woman let her tie the grizzling baby into the bath chair and wheel it around the courtyard to look at the hens.

  Dot had lived like this forever. The days of reading and resting, of sewing and eating and growing, merged one into the next. She didn’t miss Gloria. This was where she lived now. It would be like this forever, no change, the pattern was fixed. She was stronger than a roach, as strong as an ox. No one would ever cut pieces off her while she slept.

  Then came the snow and she had to stay in and watch from the window how it piled up against the water butt, how it lay like a blanket along the sills, how it changed the distance from bluey-brown to white as far as you could see. Her fingertips turned white as bone, her lips became chapped, and the air was so cold it hurt to breathe. The baby went back to its yelling on the scullery floor.

  “My dear! Have you ever seen such a fall as this!” said Mrs. Hollidaye as she carried the tea tray through to the drawing room. “I’ve just measured it with my knitting tape. Six and a half inches! The poor dogs hardly know what to make of it. And the postman says he only just made it through.”

  Loopy Lil got stuck in a drift on her way back from the farm with the milk.

  “So now, my dears, there’s two of you to warm up by the fire!”

  Through the snow strode a visitor. He came in at the side door as though he knew his own way.

  “You’ll find her in the drawing room,” Dot heard Mrs. Hollidaye say. “Yes, she’s simply full of beans now.”

  He didn’t wear a white jacket like hospital doctors but a heavy greatcoat with the collar turned up and boots dampened with slush. But Dot knew he was a doctor because his hands smelled clean and soapy.

  First he sat on the sofa and talked to the dogs. He knew them both by name. Dot took no notice of him. But then he asked her what she was knitting, so she had to answer him, and after that she agreed to let him tap her chest with his rubber hammer, peer into her ears with his pencil light, and press the back of her tongue with one of Mrs. Hollidaye’s silver apostle teaspoons.

  “Say aah!” he said. Then he said, “Aha, definitely harvesting time. Ripe and ready for removal, I’d say, and not a minute too soon. Miss Dorothy, you’ve done very well.”

  When the doctor had gone, Dot said, “I got to go back in the hospital, ain’t I, Mrs. H.?”

  “Yes, my dear. Dr. Trees thinks you’re ready.”

  “Well, you want to know something? I were just pretending to him, because I ain’t really full of beans. Truth is, I’m still ever so peaky. And them other doctors said I weren’t to go back up London for no operation not till I was A-one, else I’d be dead as a herring.”

  Mrs. Hollidaye seemed not to have heard. She merely suggested there’d be time for a game of spillikins before supper.

  After Dot had won two rounds, Mrs. Hollidaye said, “We’ll have supper early this evening. You’ll need to take a bath tonight, won’t you, my dear, so as to be clean as a new pin for tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow! Ain’t I going back up London then?”

  “No, dear. Dr. Trees has most kindly arranged your admission to our local hospital.”

  “Oh, no! I ain’t going there. Not on your life.”

  To have to submit to having a part of one’s body removed while one slept was going to be bad. But to have to allow it to be done in a strange place was impossible. Dot knew she couldn’t be brave enough for that. “If I got to have it done, I’ll go back to the place I was before, back down the Duke’s Ferry Road. Where Baby was and all.”

  “You’ll find they’re very good. Miss Lilian had her teeth done there.”

  Mrs. Hollidaye steadily poured tea.

  “You’re booked into what we call the Princess Elizabeth Children’s Annex. We had a silver subscription for the bedspreads and curtains. That’s Elizabeth, after our royal princess, you know.”

  “Course I know,” said Dot. “She lives at Buckingham Palace.”

  “Then I daresay you also know, my dear, what Princess Elizabeth said during the blitz? How splendidly full of cheerfulness and courage all you young London children are. So that’s why they’ve named the new wing after her. To remind you. For that is exactly how you are going to face tomorrow, aren’t you? Full of courage!”

  It was all so planned. Dot could see no way out. Only a raid could save her now. Or perhaps there was something else? She ran from the room and up to her bedroom, where the windows were kept open all day to destroy the germs. It was as cold as an old grave.

  Dot stood by the open window. “God in heaven,” she said, for Mrs. Hollidaye had explained how you could speak to the good Lord and sometimes the good Lord spoke back. “God in heaven, let it snow. And snow and always snow and block up all the paths and roads, fields and ditches.”

  15

  At the Princess Elizabeth

  The snow stayed. It was her friend. Dot woke on that morning that could have been the last morning of her life and knew by the brightness reflected across the ceiling that she was safe, for the roads would still be blocked.

  She slid joyfully down from the bed and hopped across the cold carpet to the window. The lawns were as smooth and white as yesterday, and the meadow as white, and all the fields away to the marshes on the faraway horizon. And even beyond would be snowbound, perhaps right as far as the sea.

  The snow had made the gardens silent, though not inactive. Mrs. Hollidaye had pointed out how one could see creatures even more clearly when they were silhouetted as in a shadow cutout. A blackbird, with its beak gleaming golden against the white, scuttled out from under the rhododendron bushes, making a flurry of snow slither off the broad leaves. Then the brownish scurrying of a hare across the top of spiky snow-blown grass. Overhead a sea gull circled the treetops, pale feathers shining against the dark gray of a flat sky.

  And Dot saw something else alive and moving out there too, brown yet larger than a hare. The huddled figure shambled alongside the yew hedge toward the wicket gate. A curious tramplike person wrapped against the weather in an old shawl. Mrs. Hollidaye’s shawl. But it was not Mrs. Hollidaye.

  It was Loopy Lil. What was she doing? Where was she off to before her breakfast?

  After Loopy Lil’s lurching figure had disappeared, her footprints were left behind in the lawn, not soft white marks like all week, but brownish foot-shaped prints. Plod, plod, spoiling the tidiness.

  Downstairs the range was blazing, porridge steaming, eggs coddling.

  “Snow’s still here!” said Dot cheerfully. “And I seen two gulls. Blackheads. Long way from home, ain’t they?”

  “I expect they’re hungry,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “And searching for food, the poor mites. There you are, my dear.”

  She placed the porridge bowl in front of Dot with a dollop of honey in the middle and some cream on the edge. Dot watched the honey and cream dissolve and trickle like two rivers to join in a silver-and-golden spreading lake.

  “That’s the way, a good breakfast. We’ll need it today. Long drive.”

  The porridge changed. The honey and the cream disappeared into a mess of gray.

  “That snow, it don’t look no better,” Dot said. “Still blinking bad.”

  “I believe it is relenting, my dear, just an iota, and the forecast is certainly more optimistic. We should be fine on the road if we leave plenty of time. I’ve sent Miss Lilian to do a recce.”

  Mrs. Hollidaye, supping porridge with her back to the flaming range and her face toward the window, exclaimed, “Why, do look, Dorothy! Here’s our friend Mr. Coal Tit back again. Now, I do wonder where he’s been.”

  The small birds clustered tightly on the swinging coconut were fighting for a firm grip. And beneath their feeding place, where yesterday had been snowy white, was today damp and brown with mud and warm droppings.

  “Ready for your eggs now, my dear?”

  But a distant sickness, a mild headache, had
taken Dot’s appetite. The pain in her jaw had come back. Or was it in her ear? Or in her throat? She never could locate it. Her spoon dropped listlessly back into the dull porridge lake.

  “Never mind, Dorothy. You sit cozily by the range till we’re ready. Ah, and here’s Miss Lilian back now like the angel of good tidings.”

  Loopy Lil blew in through the side door like a bundle of old rags with tiny crystals of white on her woollen hood.

  “What’s that if it ain’t snow?” Dot demanded.

  “Sleet. Yes, the weather’s definitely taking a turn for the better. Well, don’t just stand there, Lilian dear. Come on in. We need that door closed.”

  The bearer of bad tidings fumbled with her layers of damp shawls, and Dot felt fear on all sides till she was suffocated, as though lying beneath collapsed building rubble. She was trapped. She could do nothing to help herself.

  The driveway was still snowed up, but once they reached the road there was a narrow track between high mounds on each side.

  Loopy Lil came too. Someone had to wipe the inside of the windscreen clear of condensation and clear the outside of the buildup of brown slush.

  The journey began but wouldn’t end. Dot pulled the tartan rug up over her face to breathe the smell of dogs. She had to have something to hold on to when she disappeared into the black hospital pit.

  Mrs. Hollidaye was not her next of kin, so she wasn’t allowed to take Dot farther than the main entrance, where she handed her briskly over to the care of a nurse.

  Dot would have liked to have had a hand to hold. Instead, she clutched tightly to the handle of the suitcase Mrs. Hollidaye had lent her and followed the nurse along broad passages to a bright room where a group of children, all with suitcases and well wrapped in outdoor clothing, stood huddled like refugees from a foreign land waiting to be told where to go next.

  “Come along, children, we can’t stand around like lost dogs all day. We’ve got work to do! Come now, coats off!”

  Two were giggling together and seemed to know each other. Dot envied them. She glanced toward the window to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Hollidaye’s car, but the windows, though clear glass, gave on to an enclosed garden with bare rosebushes poking up like black twigs through the slush.

  Dot was shown to her bed, where a notice was taped with pink sticking plaster to the end rail. She recognized her name but not the other word.

  “What’s it say?” she asked the nurse who was smoothing out fresh sheets.

  “‘Tonsillectomy,’” said the nurse. “It’s what you’re in for, isn’t it?”

  Dot looked at the other children’s beds. They all had this word. Everybody was here for the same thing to be done to them.

  “What time?” Dot asked the nurse.

  “There’s a clock up there on the wall, can’t you see?”

  Dot tried again. “I mean, what time is the time they do it. When they put us to sleep. I got to know.”

  “Oh, not today! The docs have all gone off long ago.”

  “Tomorrow, then?”

  “I daresay. All depends. Can you help tuck in that sheet your side? Thanks. You have to be under observation, all of you, for twelve hours beforehand. Didn’t they tell you? Then you have to have twelve hours fasting, too.”

  Dot didn’t know what fasting was.

  “Not eating or drinking anything, not even so much as a crumb. Else you may choke.”

  Dot wished someone had told Mrs. Hollidaye this before, then she wouldn’t have wasted all that food feeding her up.

  “They wheel you down in batches, two at a time, throughout ops day. All right?”

  How? Dot wondered. In pairs marching side by side, or one behind the other? Who would be paired with who? Would the two who already knew each other be together?

  “Don’t look so worried. It may never happen!”

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “No, I don’t mean it like that. I mean it’s not as bad as you think. You won’t know a thing about it. You’ll be Harry flatters, out like a light.”

  Dot already knew about hospitals. Everything you feared might happen, did happen, only worse. Now that she was back in one, it felt as though she’d never been outside.

  Soon, all twenty children were in their beds, stiff in their laundered nightgowns, without having been offered any supper, nor even as much as a sly sip of water. The hands of the clock on the wall dragged round. Dot had time to worry. What if she died like Baby? She didn’t mind about that so long as she got a lovely little grave like Mrs. Hollidaye’s baby daughter. But she knew that Gloria wouldn’t think to give her one. Out of sight, out of mind, is what Gloria would say.

  Dot wished she’d been given a bed nearer one of the windows so she could see out, or at least by the door. A great big boy was in the bed by the door. When the lights were turned out, he began crying.

  “I want my mummy,” he wailed.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be seeing her again soon,” said a nurse.

  Not if he dies, he won’t, Dot thought, and felt better to realize that at least she wasn’t frightened by that.

  Next day, Dot was made to lie on a high hard bed in a glittery room without windows, and they pressed over her face a black rubber bowl that smelled like the inside of her gas mask. But instead of protecting her from attack, this mask forced the gas at her, rushing it up into her face with a sinister hissing. As she began to choke, she kicked and struggled for breath before tumbling down into nowhere.

  But after that, life began again and it was easy to feel full of courage and cheerfulness. They gave the children white ice cream and red jelly, and brightly colored drinks clinking with chunks of ice. They let them slide around on the polished floor and listen to music on the ward radio. There was a cupboard full of toys and a shelf of books.

  It wasn’t at all like staying in the hospital.

  16

  Marrow Jam for Tea

  After Mrs. Hollidaye had fetched Dot from the Princess Elizabeth, she told her, “Your mother telephoned, my dear. She would like you home with her now. Isn’t that simply grand?”

  “Home?” said Dot.

  “I explained it was a bit of a flap to go for the train this afternoon. So we’ll pop you on the first one tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow was too soon.

  “What if I don’t want to go?” said Dot.

  “Yes, I do know, my dear, it’s always difficult, isn’t it? Having to do things one doesn’t want.”

  “I can’t go back,” Dot said. “Please, Mrs. H., I want to be here, stay with you. And the dogs. And Miss Lilian.” She thought, I don’t belong there anymore.

  Mrs. Hollidaye said, “Yes, wouldn’t that be splendid?” The conversation was over. She said, “High time to start a new pot of jam. Let’s see what we have left. Come, will you, my dear, and help choose?”

  Dot followed Mrs. Hollidaye into the larder. How could she be concerned about the choice of jam?

  “Mrs. Parvis hates me. I heard her say I ain’t worth the air I breathe.”

  “So which is it to be? Quince, cranberry jelly, mulberry? What a decision.”

  “And anyway Gloria don’t want me neither.”

  Gloria still wanted Baby, the apple of her eye.

  “See, she’s an usherette now, so she don’t have time for me no more.”

  “My dear, it’s probably hard for you to understand, but your mother is very young. And confused. And she needs you.”

  While Loopy Lil and Mrs. Hollidaye were organizing tea, Dot walked slowly round the gardens, dragging her shoes through crunchy heaps of left-behind snow. Mrs. Hollidaye was incapable of understanding how the thought of having to leave tomorrow hung on Dot’s shoulders like a heavy woollen cloak of despair.

  Leaving, said the rooks cawing, leaving, said the trees, leaving, said the pigeons, to leave, leave, leave, said the hens behind their wire enclosure. It gave her a dull all-over pain more acute than any kind of real pain. In the fading light, she began to see things she�
�d not noticed before. How the bark of the oaks was not brown but pale gold; how primroses were nestling safely among tussocks of bristly dry grass. How the leaves that still clung to the branches of the pear tree were silvered on their undersides.

  There was nothing like this back at Mrs. Parvis’s. Back at Mrs. Parvis’s was an indoor world. Dot remembered how each spoon at Mrs. Parvis’s was stained a streaky brown in the bowl, and bent crooked at the shaft, with NAAFI stamped on the handle.

  She remembered how the table around which they sat at high tea was covered with a sheet of speckled gray lino that had a strange stickiness. When you touched it with the edge of your hand, your skin felt as though it had become attached so that you were in danger of becoming a part of Mrs. Parvis’s table forever.

  In Mrs. Parvis’s parlor there were greasy patches on the chairs, which she covered with little cloths. Along the narrow landing at Mrs. Parvis’s were laid pieces of carpet to cover the cracks in the lino. At Mrs. Parvis’s the metal meat safe hanging from its nail outside the basement room never contained meat, only sausages and suet, with bluebottles buzzing round.

  How could Mrs. Hollidaye consider allowing Dot to return to that unsafe place where the air robbed your cheeks of their roses, where buildings collapsed though the bombs had long since stopped, where there was no glass in half the windows, no water in the taps, where nothing was quite what it seemed to be?

  At Mrs. Parvis’s, things were often pretending to be other things, like Mrs. Parvis saying one thing when she meant another, things were hiding other things, like scraps of rug concealing cracks, white glass windows concealing sick children.

  “And nobody don’t want me there anyhow,” Dot finished out loud.

  She would stay here, where things were what they seemed to be, where trees were trees, hens were hens.

  She went indoors and sat hunched in her coat and mittens on the sofa by the drawing-room fire.

  “I ain’t going, Mrs. H.,” she said. “A million horses ain’t going to drag me back there. And there’s him, too. When he turns up, he ain’t going to want me neither. I don’t even know what he looks like.”