by Tanya Moir
Grandpa William excuses himself. My mother and I sit in silence beside the bed. I pick at the rough corners of my nails, biting the skin surreptitiously when Maggie isn’t looking. An orderly comes in to change the catheter bag, which is when I realise what it’s there for.
‘Your father’s so sweet,’ the orderly says. ‘He’s here every day, you know. Brushing her hair, reading books to her. It’s lovely to see a couple so devoted.’
Grandpa William gets back from the bathroom, and as they pass in the doorway, she lays her free hand on his arm. ‘How are you today, Will?’
‘Oh, not doing too badly, thank you, Tracey.’
Maggie and I stare across the room at him as if he is a stranger. But we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s the decent thing, and someone has to do it.
‘Mum can hear you,’ he says to Maggie. I wonder how he knows.
We sit in silence for a bit longer.
‘I’ll get us a cup of tea,’ Grandpa William decides. ‘Come on, Janine, you can help me.’
I don’t need telling twice. I push my chair back carefully, not wanting to show how eager I am to get out of there, and follow him, shoes squeaking, down the long linoleum corridor that smells of ammonia and indeterminate things boiled slowly. He seems to know his way around.
‘They’ve got a lovely garden here,’ he says, as we approach an open fire-door. ‘Beautiful, now the roses are out.’
We step out onto the old bullnose verandah, Grandpa William already reaching for the packet of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. He has one in his mouth and lit so quickly it’s almost a magic trick, and when he takes it out again he holds it backwards, lit end cupped in his palm, like Annabel and I try to do when we’re hiding in the hedge around our school.
I look obediently at the rose beds, two half circles cut into the lawn, a riot of apricot and pink under the warm blue Nelson sky.
‘You mustn’t be frightened,’ Grandpa William, frowning, tells a spot on the verandah boards in front of his left toe.
(Easy for him to say. He didn’t share Sarah’s genes. He was bound to her by nothing more than the sticky dust of time, and that, unlike blood, can be shrugged off.)
‘She’s still your nanny.’
Okay, but the problem is I’ve never been sure what that meant at the best of times. Something, clearly. Maybe Grandpa William knows, but this doesn’t seem like the moment to ask him.
‘We have to think of the good times. Remember how she used to be.’
I think hard. She used to send me a card with ten dollars inside for my birthday every year — that was nice. Even when ten bucks stopped buying as much as it used to. And when she made me go down to the dairy for cigarettes, she always let me keep the change. What else?
Gin and fag ash. Spam and chips. Stories about Eddie.
Grandpa William’s mind seems to have wandered off somewhere else, and I wonder (then, and now) what Sarah he is seeing, here at the end, beneath this foreign sky.
I know I should say something. But it’s hard to think what. The things I really want to know — When is Nanny Biggs going to die? Is there some kind of schedule? — can’t be asked.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘No,’ he says quickly, and then, ‘They say not.’ He drops his cigarette butt into a bucket of sand. ‘Better get on with making that tea.’
When we get back to the room, Maggie has the hairbrush out, but Nanny Biggs isn’t keeping still. They both seem agitated.
Eventually, visiting hours are over, and again we follow Grandpa William’s little hatchback through the strange streets, retracing our path to the yellow brick unit by the park that looks exactly as I’d expected. My mother sits down on the sofa like it’s the edge of the world, and Grandpa William opens the curtains to the midsummer sun and pours two whiskies without asking. I’d quite like one myself, not to mention a smoke. I mix myself another glass of Tang.
The clock on the mantelpiece above the fake fire reads quarter to five. The house is silent except for its tick tick tick and the far-off shouts of somebody else’s children. Fifteen minutes later, I begin to see why Grandpa William rings.
We stay for a week. I send Annabel a postcard.
It’s a long drive home to Invercargill. All the way down SH6 to its pale beginnings, crossing the rivers high, the Mataura a shallow brown stream beneath our wheels, incapable of harm. Nine hundred and seventy-six kilometres south of Hope, I have plenty of time to work out.
We go back in April for the funeral.
Sarah Harding walks down Knightsbridge with the summer budding around her, the first warm day curling up from the pavement towards a soft blue sky. Her arms are bare. Everywhere there are pale-armed girls in sleeveless dresses and men admiring them and everyone is smiling, and nobody cares if the dresses are five seasons old and it’s bound to rain before evening.
Most of the servicemen — infantry and navy boys — have melted away from London without a word, and no one’s supposed to ask where they’ve gone or say anything about it. But Will Biggs is still here.
He’s waiting for her in his fifth-floor mansion flat with a bottle of champagne. Like something out of a film. Because today — 24 May 1944 — is Sarah’s twenty-third birthday.
As she climbs the first two flights of marble stairs she’s Vivien Leigh, and there’s still a chandelier overhead and tycoons and duchesses, not clerks, behind every door, and if a bomb should crash through the Art Deco ceiling now, how sad and romantic it would be. On the third flight, Sarah decides that if she’s dying today, there are two things she’d like to do first, and one is to drink champagne.
Will opens the door. Behind him, there’s a gramophone playing Cole Porter. Will is holding the bottle and two glasses in his hand, and the windows are open and full of warm air and sky, and if she leans out Sarah can see the shaggy green of Hyde Park across the rooftops. Who’d have thought she would ever be twenty-three, and here? She turns for the camera, breeze in her hair.
It could stop there. There’s no real need for the rest. Declarations, promises and rings. It’s all a bit overwhelming.
She says yes, of course. Cries happy tears. And doesn’t mind the least little bit that the ring in question is modest and dated and scratched and has been on a corpse’s finger. But as Will unzips her dress, she feels slightly cheated. Because what was going to be an adventure is now almost a duty.
Next time, Will takes a photograph of her there in his bed, and Sarah plays up to the lens. Gives him something to remember her by. They’ve run out of records, so he turns the radio on, and it’s playing ‘We’ll Meet Again’, and they dance, Sarah’s cheek pressed into Will’s chest, because they don’t know if they will, and neither of them is the betting type, but if they were, they wouldn’t put money on it.
And they don’t, it turns out. Not for sixteen months. By which time so many things have happened.
When Will disappears like all the rest, Sarah isn’t worried. Ten days later, she wonders which of the D-Day pictures are his, and she isn’t frightened for him, because he’s not fighting, just taking photographs, and the Germans won’t be aiming for him. They’ll be trying to kill Eddie.
The week after that, before they’ve even had time to print the casualty lists, Sarah can’t be frightened for anyone else, because the doodlebugs start coming. Death stuttering from the sky like a dodgy motorbike, and it’s a horrible noise, but you want it to go on and on, because if you hear it stop, you know it’s you it’s come for.
A letter arrives from Eddie, who says the French countryside isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and you can’t get a decent beer and the girls aren’t as pretty as his sisters and Kate, and he saw Will on D-Day+5, and not to worry too much if they don’t hear anything else for a while because everyone over there is awfully busy.
Sarah stops going out much, because being engaged takes all the fun out of dancing. So she isn’t there with Ivy the night the doodlebug hits the ventilation shaft of the club in Wardour Street, an
d she doesn’t know why Ivy isn’t at work the next day until Mr Higgins the chemist shows her the paper.
The day after that, there’s a postcard from Brussels waiting for Sarah when she gets home, and the handwriting means nothing to her, but it turns out to be Will’s, and it says he’s safe and not much else, not even I love you.
Sarah continues to write to Will every week, sitting down in the kitchen with Betty, who now has a new fiancé in the air force, and May, who is not quite nineteen and in love with an army captain. It would be nice to get a reply, like Betty and May, but Sarah tries not to be cross, because it would be awful to be cross with the dead, and perhaps he’s lying somewhere with an injured head, not knowing his own name. May says that happens in hospitals all the time. Or he’s in enemy hands, like Charlie Lucas from Number 14 and Jenny Wyatt’s brother. The Germans eating the week’s sugar ration she used to bake his rock cakes.
One night in December, Sarah walks past a crater where the fish and chip shop used to be, and among all the wrappers and brick dust blowing about there are other papers. Do you still think you’re winning the war? they say. And for the first time, she realises that she does, and the Germans must think so too, and really, they should know. The little British flags on the Daily Mail map will be at the Rhine any day now. After that, it’ll just be mopping up. They’re going to win, and it’s going to be over.
All this mess will be cleared away, and they’ll go back to being the way they were, except with shiny new bits. The old things will matter again. Weddings, and what the neighbours think. Doing things in the right order. There’ll be years and years to be lived. And there’ll be men who don’t come home.
As she turns into Kings Close, Sarah sees that her mother and Betty are right. Which is why, four months later, she hands Will Biggs’ baby to a woman from York on platform twelve at King’s Cross Station.
THREE
There aren’t many people at Nanny Biggs’ funeral. The orderly from the nursing home. The man from the unit next door. A posse of five unknown upright old men from the RSA, to which Grandpa William apparently goes, though he’s never said a word to us about it.
We bring along a nice bouquet from the Southland branch of the Printers’ Union and put it on top of the coffin. It’s less frightening than I thought it would be, that too-shiny box. There’s no proof at all that Nanny Biggs is really inside it.
Maggie looks around at the empty rows of folding chairs. ‘She didn’t know anyone,’ she explains, to herself mainly, and I wonder how that could be, after sixty-three years in the world. I think you’d have to try quite hard. But maybe it’s not that difficult after all. Maybe you just go on, and all the people get left behind you.
The service is brief and not at all like the ones on TV. Grandpa William, hands on his knees, pays close attention to every word, as if there might be a test on it at the end. I feel sad for him, but he’s not the sort of man you touch, so Maggie and I just sniffle a bit, sitting there on either side. No one else gets up to speak. We don’t say any prayers.
The one decent thing Grandpa William can’t do, it seems, is cry. Even when they start playing ‘We’ll Meet Again’ as we trundle Sarah out between an RSA guard standing to attention.
But there’s a moment — is there? — outside when I accidentally catch his eye, and it’s as if the blinds have slipped and I can see inside, and it’s just a derelict shell, scorched brick and matchsticks. Chimney bones and shredded curtains. And no reason — none at all — why the wall that is William Biggs should have stood up all these years. Or maybe I’m just imagining it. What do you expect to see in an old man’s eyes?
They drive Nanny Biggs off to wait her turn at the crematorium. In the foyer of the funeral home, the veterans drink whisky.
When they’re finished, Maggie and I take Grandpa William home. We tread around him carefully for the rest of the day, and it’s funny, in retrospect, to think we thought there was anything we could do that might upset him.
The next morning is a bit early, you might think, to start sorting out Nanny Biggs’ things. But we need to get back by Monday, so we don’t have very much time. Maggie has a column due. ‘Dear Dinah’ readers can’t wait.
I find it in an old white leather handbag. Not locked in the trinket box which, in the absence of its key, Grandpa William flicks open with a screwdriver and potters off again without waiting to see what’s inside. Just zipped up in the lining pocket of a patent clutch on the top shelf of the wardrobe. The last place, really, you’d look. But that’s what it comes down to, in the end. Every crevice of your life fair game for the fingers of sulky teenagers, for strangers and relations. Never keep a secret. Because once you’re dead, nothing’s yours any more. It all belongs to them.
An aerogramme that begins Dear Madam, and then gets right to the point.
I believe you are my mother.
Was Sarah alone when she read it? Or was Will Biggs sitting there across the breakfast table, buttering his toast? Nothing between them but a sheet of blue paper so thin that if he looked up, he might see right through it to the words on the other side. In the bright sun of Sarah’s new world, on a warm southern summer’s day for carrying white handbags.
But no, he can’t have been. Because as soon as she opened it, the photograph would have slipped out, as it did just now. And he wouldn’t have needed to ask who it was. A slightly different arrangement of the same parts, a variant answer to Sarah x Will. It’s all of us. It’s Maggie.
What do you do with something like this? When Grandpa William walks in, you stuff it in your handbag.
If you’re Sarah Harding, you leave it there, zip it away down deep where you don’t have to see it again. Pour yourself a gin and pretend it was just another nightmare.
And if you’re Maggie?
You whip it out again, as soon as he’s gone, and read it over and over. Because it’s a short letter, and there are a lot of things to think, and they won’t all fit at the same time. And when you do put it away at last, it’s not because you’ve finished with it. Any fool, looking on, could see you’re just getting started.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she hisses at me, ‘say anything about this. Understand? Not to anyone. Especially your grandpa.’
Her name is Vivien. Maggie’s sister. Like the film star. And I wonder which of her hopeful mothers gave her that name.
On Sunday, as we negotiate the right-angle bend into Tarras, I look across and see that Maggie’s crying. Big fat silent tears that must be making it difficult for her to see the road. I’ve never seen her do this before, and it seems an alarming loss of control, like wetting your pants in public. I decide it’s kindest not to notice.
I don’t understand, back then. Not yet. We hardly ever saw Nanny Biggs, and Maggie didn’t seem to enjoy it very much when we did, so I’m not sure why she’s suddenly so upset. Maybe it’s Grandpa William. Leaving him up there all by himself. Really alone now, not just pretending.
The hills close in around us again. I watch the Clutha swirl between red branches, and I don’t know why, but it comes to me that Maggie is crying for us. Me and her, snagged up in sadness. And maybe Vivien too, still out there somewhere, waiting for a reply. Her hopes resting, now, in the rear footwell of our car, transferred to another handbag.
It’s a beautiful day here on the island. The kind you don’t often get in a northern winter. Not crisp, but golden and soft, like a windfall apple in long wet grass. Ella’s keen to get outside, and I’m tempted to leave Maggie where she is for a while, because back in Invercargill in ’84, random bouts of weeping aside, she’s actually quite happy.
For starters, Sarah Harding makes a lot more sense to her now. All those days with Evelyn at Kings Close. The endless afternoon naps, the not remembering, the never quite meeting your eye. The bitterness in every birthday cake, the sting in each school prize.
Plus, I suspect, it’s more the idea of a mother that Maggie misses. And at last she’s free to construct the one she wants,
without the real thing wavering in, gin in hand, to stub a fag butt through her bubble.
But most importantly, there’s her very own sister to search for. We’re both excited. It shouldn’t even take long, since we have her address. True, it’s nearly twenty years old, but Kenton Hall doesn’t sound like the sort of place a family leaves in a hurry. We look at Vivien’s photograph, Maggie and I, and we can’t feel too sorry for her, because imagine growing up in a place like that, all honeyed stone and hahas. Like ugly sisters, we count the fairy tale windows behind her head and sigh. I bet Vivien had a pony.
Ah yes — Maggie in 1984. Motherless, but not alone. Hot on the trail of someone to halve her troubles, a heart built to the very same plan as her own. Hoping her big sister might know how to use it. Even on those days she does feel unhappy, it’s okay now — she has a licence. Maggie-whose-mother-just-died. You don’t have to hide that kind of sadness. It’s the kind they bring you cakes for.
Ella noses my elbow. She’s quite right, it’s a good time to stop. Waiting for Vivien to write back. My mother suspended in autumn light. The leaves still on the trees.
Jake’s back today. From the fuss Ella made, you’d think he’d been off up the Amazon for a year, not for a week in Melbourne. Still I have to admit it was odd, him not being here, part of our routine. The grind of his outboard swinging in to the jetty steps. The rhythm of hammer and power tools I’ve come to expect as the soundtrack to my day.
He brought me a bottle of duty-free Scotch. A really good single malt, not the cheap rubbish Grandpa William drank. If the sky stays this clear tonight, it might be cold enough to drink it. No frost, of course. Just icy stars, and a white mist blanketing the water. A night for forty-year-old whisky and flannel sheets.
But right now there’s still some kick in this midwinter sun, and it’s warm outside — warm enough to be spring, if you ignore the long shadows and heavy grass, the sullenness of the garden. I follow Ella round to the back of the house, behind the sheds and down to the old vegetable patch where she hunted cabbage whites all summer, but must now make do with the flash of a thrush’s breast among the rotting stems — the closest she’ll ever get, here, to a rabbit.