The Parentations

by Kate Mayfield

The boots pass him, so many soldiers’ boots with dried, cracked mud still clinging to them. But Jonesy searches for a sailor, a young man named Stanley whose last letter was full of innuendo that only Jonesy could decipher. There were no thick, black strike-outs on the pages this time. A life together, Stanley promised between the lines.

  He can only afford an hour before he must return to work in Magdalen Street. Whittling for the war effort reminds him of his prison work: hairbrushes, shaving brushes, walking sticks. One workshop cannot fill all the orders for Punch and Judy puppets, and thus send the spill to Jonesy. These, at least, he actually enjoys making.

  On his way into the station he caught the outline of two women wearing identical coats, one blue, the other lavender. They left an impression that washed over him, awakening his memory of two velvet capes of the same colours that once hung on pegs in the entry of a house on Fore Street. He and Willa visited with their mistress shortly after he began his apprenticeship; the night the long dead, golden sailor gazed at him playfully on the Thames shore. The fierce Irish woman in the kitchen fed them bread and marmalade, while Mistress met with the two women who lived there.

  Jonesy refrains from looking closely at the women wrapped in blue and lavender at Charing Cross Station today. He avoids faces during these days of war, except when he attunes to returning sailors and searches for Stanley. His longing encompasses him in a bittersweet ache. Jonesy carries the ache home with him, no wiser on the subject of Jutland, or Stanley.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  1917

  It occurs in broad daylight, a sunny bright day in June – the thing feared by everyone in the Fowler household. Iceland had warned them in a letter that Benedikt delivered to their box.

  We cannot know what effect a high-explosive bomb might have on you. We suspect you will not survive a direct hit.

  Now they too are caught up in the war’s voracious maw.

  Clovis had worked tirelessly these last three years to think of every scenario, every possibility to safeguard their existence. Mockett had produced medical exemptions for her men, not forged, but authentic certificates that Iceland had no way of producing.

  She insisted that each of them contribute to the war effort should they ever be stopped and questioned. Willa has enough outwork to make a normal seamstress go blind. But each time she sits down with her foot on the peddle of the sewing machine she silently claims a victory. It took weeks to muster the courage to approach Finn.

  ‘Sir, could you, would you, possibly consider a sewing machine for the household?’

  ‘She won’t like it.’

  ‘Well, sir, of course she won’t, but there are facts, sir.’ She waits for an invitation.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It takes me fourteen hours to make you a dress shirt, sir. With the machine …’ she pauses for strength despite her milquetoast character, ‘I can make a shirt in an hour and fifteen minutes.’

  His attention is piqued.

  ‘A dress, from ten hours to one hour, sir. I know a girl at the sewing factory. I’ve seen it.’

  ‘Well, girl. You surprise me. Leave it to me.’

  After registering false names and addresses, Rafe and Finn are assigned to guarding Tower Bridge at night. They blend in with other men in a melting pot of Londoners, who for one reason or another are not serving at the front.

  Early on, when it became apparent that the war would not end quickly, Clovis felt triumphant when she collected enough phials to see them through the next few years. She frequently wrote to Benedikt who disappeared for weeks to return each time with another delivery. Now the supply has come to a halt. Her own engagement with the war effort is a restless wandering back and forth to Mocketts’ laboratory in Limehouse. Women have no budget for frills these days, but the home medical kits that she suggested Mockett manufacture are a runaway success.

  In the small hours of these dark nights, Willa whispers her hesitant hopes to Jonesy.

  ‘It seems she’s trying to protect us,’ Willa says.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘We have a little more freedom,’ she adds.

  ‘To work,’ Jonesy replies.

  ‘Rafe has a studio now. That was unexpected.’

  ‘She does what she has to do.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s an insect in China, the white wax insect. In August they build cocoons of pure, shining wax on the trees. By September the whole tree is covered with palaces of white, a quarter of an inch thick. Clovis is like the white insect. She secretes a wax cocoon around us.’

  ‘But she has no feelings for us. So why does she do it? Why won’t she just give us our phials and let us go.’

  ‘I think she does not want to be alone. Her strength feeds off us.’

  On a June morning, Londoners are caught unawares. The brazen flight of the Gothas mercilessly drop bombs at eleven thirty that morning and they do not leave Bermondsey unharmed. Only Clovis is at home and all day she paces. She cannot eat and every attempt to settle leaves her more agitated. In the late afternoon they begin to straggle in – all but Finn.

  If he could, he’d get rip-roaring drunk. But alcohol scorches his gut now and he can tolerate only a sip or two – not nearly enough to escape for a few hours. Each night that he is on watch, Finn stares down into the tenebrous water of the Thames. Its power stirs his memory, which is too sharp and burdened by his lengthy life. Guarding the bridge in the wet and cold reminds him of his first journey north to the volcanic island that now, in a wildly queer way, sustains him.

  One night whilst on watch, a small, innocent gesture knocked him back. Rafe offered Finn his extra pair of gloves. He handed them over with a smile, exactly as Elísabet had once offered him gloves, finely knitted by her own hands. He thought about what he had done to her. Since that night she will not leave his dreams – and he likes it, and eagerly waits to fall asleep to be with her again in Iceland. These thoughts of Elísabet fisted him, so wholly unexpected.

  Then he had asked Clovis to release their phials. He’d calculated it was a good time to approach her; ever since his return from the Continent she’d been not her usual, horrible fucking self. The chaos of war seemed to intensify whatever change in her had emerged. But she refused him. Her manner was almost sorrowful, as if she honestly regretted that she couldn’t release them.

  Tonight he stuffs his hands in his trouser pockets. He’s wandered far today, it’s late. Walking towards Magdalen Street he looks skywards. Everyone in his path looks skywards. Bermondsey is on alert.

  The fuss they make when he arrives home unnerves him and reinforces his mood.

  ‘Albany Road was hit,’ he says. ‘The dairy. I was nowhere near it. You’re all overreacting.’

  In bed that night, when Clovis makes overtures that would send a believing man straight to heaven, Finn turns away.

  ‘I’m tired.’ He closes his eyes.

  She strokes his face.

  ‘I was worried about you, Finn.’

  ‘There was no need, Elísabet.’

  He feels her hand stiffen on his face.

  They lie side by side in an eternal moment of silence in which Finn senses a chill rising from her skin.

  He sighs. And then rolls out of bed.

  ‘You lied to me at Millbank, in the chapel.’ Each of her words are like tapered slivers of ice.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to her he considers his response.

  ‘I don’t know, Clovis. I suppose I did. I didn’t mean to.’

  He steps naked and barefoot to the hallway and takes a sheet from the corner linen cupboard. Back in the bedroom that he will no longer claim, he steps into his combinations and then patiently fills the sheet with his clothing, his shoes and boots, everything. He ties it up, then tosses the large bundle over his shoulder and gently shuts the door behind him.

  Finn spends a good hour setting up the opium bed in the conservatory where the view of the sky is worth the effort.

 
; In the following days, when Willa hears Clovis’s footsteps she braces herself for a torrent of criticism. Nothing pleases Mrs Fowler.

  ‘Your attempt to economize is appalling,’ Clovis shouts. ‘You waste food like a silly child. I should send you to Iceland for a winter. You’d learn rationing there. The years have made you an ungrateful girl. I’m increasing your contribution amount to the household. And if you don’t like it you can leave. There’s a housing shortage in Bermondsey. I wonder how long you’d last out there on your own – without your drops.’

  Their night sessions had become sporadic since the beginning of the war, but now Clovis drags Willa out of bed more frequently. And much to Willa’s sleepy confusion, Clovis adds an odd kind of spiritualism to her repertoire. She claims to see the ghost of Willa’s mother, and is so convincing that Willa jumps from the chair and runs from the room disturbed and anxious, leaving Clovis warmly satisfied.

  Jonesy too feels as if the rug is pulled out from under him; there is no escaping her scorn.

  ‘You’ve become careless,’ Clovis accuses him. ‘Stay away from the stations.’

  ‘Have you been following me?’ he asks, surprised.

  She resists the urge to smack him across the room.

  ‘Victoria Station in particular,’ she shoots back, ignoring his question. ‘You’ll be mistaken for a prostitute. Have you forgotten – they arrest people like you, prostitute or not.’

  He bites his lip until it bleeds. Jonesy wishes he could tell her that he haunts the stations just like thousands of other people who search for their loved ones among the returning wounded. Stanley. He only goes for Stanley. His presence at Victoria is not related to picking up men, even though the reputation of the station’s surrounding streets is well known. But he can’t tell her, he dares not say a word, for he sees her clenched fists and her dangerous eyes, and knows that today she would do violence to him given the slightest provocation.

  Willa and Jonesy are aware that the wind that brings this frightful shift is sleeping in the conservatory now, separated from his marriage bed like curdled milk.

  Then, quite unexpectedly, Clovis makes a swift departure from her daily habits. She instructs Willa to leave a breakfast tray outside her bedroom door instead of laying her usual place at the table. It is then curious to see Clovis descend the stairs in a two-piece black, tailored suit. The jacket borrows from the military in its design and the skirt is as full as a riding habit’s. Her hair, drawn over a pompadour wire frame, accommodates her enormous black hat. As if she were in the deepest wartime mourning, she draws a thin veil over her face and proceeds out of the door without a word. There is no pattern to her days out except the number, which is four a week.

  The house itself seems to sigh in relief when she goes.

  There are so many dead young men. Is it any wonder that their families cannot quite believe that they would simply disappear across the sea to die on foreign soil? Might the mourner be forgiven for entertaining the idea that their cherished one makes some herculean effort to cross the torrid waters once more, unbound by death, to come home to lament and utter their final farewell? The number of women, and indeed men, who wish to contact the dead in the other world has never been greater.

  Clovis operates from a first-floor flat, a room really, on the corner of Whittlesey Street just off Waterloo Road. It’s a respectable distance from the prostitutes that beleaguer the area, and more importantly, hundreds of thousands of soldiers pass through Waterloo Station and King George’s military hospital nearby. Where there are stations and hospitals, there are grieving people. She begins by stealing into St John’s church where lonely people seek solace. In a single day, she procures her first two clients.

  It is quite easy work. Clovis first senses and then sees an apparition of the departed in the room. She does not attempt to describe them. Things are murky in the world of the dead. Before long the distressed mother is describing her son, or husband, and Clovis has but to nod, yes, that’s exactly as I see it. She never tries to guess names, or where the death occurred. Her clients are more interested in the message. And in this, Clovis excels, for she does not overact. Her soldier ghosts use words like ‘if’.

  If I did not say it, or never said it enough, I love you.

  If when you think of me you feel sad, please know that I am at peace now.

  And so forth.

  Clovis takes no pleasure or interest in any healing that may take place, she is not working to relieve anyone’s tortured mind, or to soothe any pain but her own. The salve she seeks is money; soothing coins in her pocket, calming and powerful notes in her purse. She is in complete control, here in the shadow of the war’s wounded. The years of her soft interlude are finished. Her edges are sharpened again. She has come back to herself. One day soon she will to return to Magdalen Street after her day’s work to conquer her sister’s wraith and blow its cobwebs from her house.

  LONDON

  1922

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Each time Verity teaches a man Braille, or when Constance sees the tension in a veteran’s face soften after she has has read Tennyson aloud, they return to Lawless House slightly less empty, the salve of being needed having been applied. Their work with blind servicemen continued throughout the war’s duration. Then Ireland’s fight for independence brought more casualties who were blinded by mustard gas.

  One boisterous morning when the sisters are enjoying a pot of tea with the ex-servicemen, a new blind veteran enters the lounge from the terrace of the hostel, guided by a volunteer. The men rise from their chairs and follow a strip of drugget that crosses the room and leads directly to the French door that opens onto the terrace. The men overwhelm the soldier with welcome so that at first the sisters do not gain a full view. But when the veterans finally peel away from the young man, Verity takes such a resounding gasp, that the men are quite alarmed.

  ‘Please, what is it?’ they ask in unison.

  ‘It’s just that …’ Constance summons the words. ‘My sister and I …’

  ‘Sir.’ Verity sweeps over to the new veteran. ‘May I ask your name?’

  ‘Henry Mason, madam.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, her voice thick and sore. ‘How do you do, Mr Mason.’

  When he removes his service dress hat his auburn hair gives the sisters a start, but it is his dark glasses that spark a memory, a searing image of the boy playing with Verity’s spectacles, placing them on his face, running through the garden, peering through them in wonder at the way Verity views the outdoors.

  ‘We’re very sorry,’ Constance addresses the group. ‘We thought we recognized you, Mr Mason.’

  Like one who has a terrible addiction to the drink, who after years of abstinence accidentally picks up the wrong glass, their longing is unearthed by a mistake, and the sisters must now have more. Disturbed, because they have so swiftly and unexpectedly lost their footing and know they cannot fight it, they prepare to set out once more in search of Rafe.

  But first, another shock. It isn’t their neighbours, or their ever-changing housekeepers and gardeners, it is those who pass through their lives in other small ways who notice.

  ‘Good morning.’ The postwoman is surprised that one of the sisters answers the door.

  ‘Good morning.’ Constance reaches for the package.

  ‘Dear me. I grow fatter, slower and greyer each year.’ The post-woman’s lingering gaze detects no change at all in the woman, who politely smiles at her pointed remark.

  Hired at the beginning of the Great War, the postwoman retains her position, and during eight years of service she has come to believe that there is something queer about the residents of Lawless House.

  Similarly, the elderly newsagent on Park Street often hesitates with a quizzical rheumy eye on Verity before he relinquishes the paper.

  ‘After all this time, it is now, when Camden Town grows even more populated, that I feel we’re in danger of losing our anonymity,’ Verity says.

 
‘Perhaps it’s time to make more drastic efforts,’ Constance suggests.

  They are not often caught in a nostalgic web, but today their thoughts loom on the Limehouse of their past, where late on sultry nights they dressed as men.

  ‘Will it be you? Or me?’ Verity asks.

  Constance studies her sister’s face.

  ‘Try a pair of your dark glasses.’

  Verity chooses silver frames with dark green lenses and curls the wire around her ears.

  ‘Definitely you,’ Constance says.

  ‘All right then, do it.’

  Constance takes the scissors to her sister’s hair and shears it like a hedge. With a little Brilliantine it rivals any man’s cut in its accuracy. Verity steps into a pair of tweed trousers; the hairy wool grazes her naked skin. A man’s shirt and waistcoat help fill out the suit’s jacket. For an off the peg, it appears expertly tailored. The brogues are from Jermyn Street where a smirking snob of a man measured her feet. Admiring their sheen, she sits with her legs crossed, surpassing the garçonne, looking every bit the man.

  ‘And now the derby.’ Constance places the hat on her sister’s cropped head. ‘You will pass, but you must be confident. Practise your walk while I change.’

  Constance stretches a wig over her pinned-up hair. The chestnut-brown bob takes ten years off her. A chemise-style dress with a dropped waist accentuates the angular lines of her body. A hat and gloves, a long lavender scarf that serves as a wrap, and ankle-strap, button shoes complete her ensemble. She looks unremarkable, and not herself.

  On this Saturday they travel south on the electric railway, changing lines three times before they see the light of Wapping. The scent of the river encases them, reminding them that every structure, every path has tentacles that eventually reaches the Thames.

  ‘You can relax, Verity. We are of no interest to this community. Look how it still clings to its identity.’

  ‘It does, Constance. Men look happy to be out of uniform and back to work.’