OTHER TITLES BY ELIZA GRAHAM
Another Day Gone
Playing with the Moon
Restitution
Jubilee
The History Room
Blitz Kid
The One I Was
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Eliza Graham
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503903838 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1503903834 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781477805152 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 147780515X (paperback)
Cover design by Emma Rogers
Cover photography by Gabriel Martinez
For Brona
CONTENTS
MAP
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
ENTR’ACTE
19
PART TWO
20
21
22
23
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PART ONE
1
Woodlands Asylum, Oxfordshire, May 1947
They don’t like me using anything sharp at mealtimes, so someone has given me a blunt, round-tipped knife that looks as though it’s come from a child’s cutlery set. I attempt to cut a piece of mutton and the blade bounces against its hard surface. The chunk of meat shoots across the table. Jim and I try hard not to laugh.
Lunch is usually a civilised affair. White tablecloth. A vase of daffodils, sweet peas or roses, depending on the season. But the crockery is a clunky set, not porcelain. You notice the difference when someone clinks a fork against a plate: the sound is duller, thicker. Like post-war life itself. The food has a leadenness, too, but it’s not bad, especially if there’s fruit. A bowl of raspberries with even the very smallest dollop of cream on it makes a meal into a feast, but it’s too early in the season for that.
Apart from my mishap with the blunt knife we all get through lunch fairly well, with no disturbances or interventions. Ingrams looks relieved as he takes out a tray laden with bowls. He returns with the coffee, which they prefer to serve at the table. In the old days, they’d probably have taken it to the conservatory. We’re lucky to have someone like Ingrams: he’s so strong and fit he should probably be in a heavy manufacturing job. I don’t know if he served in the war; we tend to skirt that subject. ‘Our little family has quite enough to be getting on with,’ Jim will say if he feels the conversation is steering in that direction.
It may be different behind the green baize door on the first floor, but on our side we try to be civilised. We dress with care: no floppy, drab dresses for me. I usually put on a dab of lipstick for meals. Once a week a girl comes to the house to do my hair. I wish I could shave my legs so I didn’t have to wear the thick stockings more suitable for an elderly woman, hopeless in such warm weather. I’d love to go shopping and buy myself light silk or nylon stockings, if they’re available. I’m only twenty-three, for God’s sake. I’m not like those others. At least, I hope I’m not. I pray I retain the distinct edges of my personality and am not blurring into a shadow of myself.
After we’ve drunk the coffee in the clunky cups and saucers that match the lunchtime crockery, we like to go outside, weather permitting. Since 1939 the gardens have largely been given over to growing food, but there are still flowers. The last tulips are putting on a brave show of yellow and white and the wisteria is at its best. A rose bush by the lawn is already covered in early blooms the colour of amber. The colour of me. I am two people, because some days I feel like Amber and sometimes Maud. Sometimes amber contains petrified insects, doesn’t it? Something inside me has been frozen, too. I wish I knew what I contained and how to extract it.
I shake myself out of the reverie and notice that Ingrams is setting up a badminton net on the lawn. ‘Fancy a game?’ Jim brandishes a racket. He’s good at encouraging me to try things. Under his tutelage I am now learning bridge in the evenings after dinner. I attack the shuttlecock as though it’s an enemy missile, smashing it back with interest.
‘A new talent?’ Jim asks, retrieving the battered item from the flowerbeds. ‘Or did you play in the past?’
Did I play badminton as Maud? Or was it Amber? No, it’s definitely Maud who remembers that particular scent of a racket when you take it out of its press after a winter in a cupboard. Tennis, not badminton. I played on damp grass courts at school and then again, somewhere hot, where aromas, good and ill, wafted round us. Where was that place? I know I have already remembered its name, mentioned it to Dr Rosenstein. I lapse into one of my silences. Jim watches me with his sympathetic smile. ‘Want a break? There’s lemonade.’
Ingrams has laid it out on a little garden table. One of the glasses has a thicker rim than the others, I can’t stop noting. Small details may save your life.
‘Almost like old times.’ But Jim’s hand shakes when he lifts the glass. He’s not much older than I am; I think that’s why we struck up our friendship. North Atlantic convoy. U-boat attack. Ships sunk. Men, women and children overboard in freezing conditions; the rest of the convoy forbidden to stop to rescue them.
The lemonade’s good, if a little too dilute, but that’s to be expected, given rationing. I recall the more intense taste of lemonade in a small café somewhere distant where I once drank it with a Jewish girl whose name I can’t pull out of my head. The city where we drank it was the same place where I played tennis.
‘Cairo.’ I say it aloud, with triumph, and pull out the small notepad and pencil I keep in my pocket at all times in case of sudden recollections. Once the place-name is written down it can’t disappear again.
I look around to see if my exclamation has startled anyone. Not that people here are over-sensitive to others talking to themselves. Jim has floated off to help the others, who are weeding the rockery. I’d like to help too but Ingrams isn’t keen because of the trowels, hoes and forks. My mother used to encourage me to work in the garden. Perhaps she could write and ask if I might help with something that doesn’t involve blades or tines. In the meantime, nobody minds me wandering along the old wall, pulling out shoots of sticky willy from the honeysuckle bushes and checking for bindweed. I reach the dovecot on the lawn, at a slight distance from the wall and trees so it is safe from cats. The dovecot belongs to Woodlands, not to me personally, but it’s become mine in the last few weeks. A previous patient took the doves through the homing procedure. Now they fly in and out of the dovecot at will, always returning to roost.
I keep a little stepladder propped up against the wall near the dovecot. When I’m on the top step I can look into the doves’ living quarters. Two pairs are out of the dovecot, somewhere around in the trees. One pair is inside, bright black eyes peering out at me.
When I’ve stacked the stepladder away I check the bird bath and table for water and food, even though I have already come out here before breakfast.
Later in the summer we’ll have raspberries, strawberries and blackcurrants. I wonder whether the doves will make themselves a nuisance by eating the fruit? We might have to net the bushes. Apples and pears will follow the soft fruits in the autumn. I’m starting to hate the tinned peaches that have featured in so many meals for so long now. Sometimes, if I stack plates and bring them out to the kitchen to help, I see the large catering cans on the shelves, packed by women on a canning line in a faraway Southern US state. Ingrams ushers me out if he sees me looking at the tins.
This stay has gone on for such a long time now. Perhaps they’d let me go to my parents for a short visit. That’s sometimes allowed. Thinking about my parents makes me feel as if syrup from the peach cans is oozing through my brain, sticking all the memories and emotions together. I glance over to the others. Jim’s stopped gardening and is now juggling three old tennis balls he keeps in a cracked flower pot. He aims to get to five within the next month. His face is tight with concentration. Perhaps I should try to juggle.
I go upstairs to my room for some quiet time before tea.
On the landing a man stands beside the green baize door on the left. They must be coming out for their afternoon walk. I turn right. I’m not like them. I just need to remember.
Nobody follows me as I walk down the corridor to my own room. I can open my own bedroom door but, once I’m in, it closes behind me and can’t be opened from the inside. It’s too quiet. I open the windows and the voices of the gardening group reach me through the safety bars. Since the war I seem to need sound.
I can feel my monsters stirring, crawling along my blood vessels, flexing their muscles, making my legs and arms restless. I look at my watch. Too early. I pace round and round, picking up books, magazines, my hairbrush. My body still does not feel entirely mine. ‘I miss something,’ I told Dr Rosenstein at the last session. ‘It’s making me feel so unsettled.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But you need to uncover for yourself what you’re missing and why.’
‘Can’t you just tell me?’
She looked at me with those kind eyes. ‘You need to go through the process.’
Perhaps it would be better to ring the bell and ask if I can be let out again and wait in the garden. But that would be showing a weakness.
At times you will find it very hard to stick to your new persona. You will struggle.
I could write in my notebook, but I can’t work out what I want to say. I need to do something, though. They’ve let me bring some of the books from the library up here, mainly old atlases. I open a Times atlas from the middle of the last century and turn to the map of the Adriatic and Balkans, just to the east of Italy, across the Adriatic Sea, and to the north of Greece. My finger traces the outline of a country that didn’t exist in the nineteenth century, or indeed until after the Great War: Yugoslavia.
Future Yugoslavia’s territories are mostly divided between the old empires of the Austro-Hungarians and the Turks, though the Italians and others claimed parts of it too. I close the thick pages, which seem almost heavy with history, taking out a more modern equivalent, published just before the Second World War. It gives the country the name of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and shows its constituents: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. So many bits and pieces of territory, invaded, occupied, cut up between powers. Balkanisation, that’s what they call the fragmentation of countries: a pejorative term, implying splitting into competing and opposing pieces. Just like me, really: I have Balkanised my own psyche. Bits of me are at war against each other.
I push the atlases aside, jittery, thoughts pulsing through me like electric shocks.
Somehow the minutes pass and I hear the clink and rattle of the drugs trolley coming down the corridor towards my door.
I can never be sure what Dr Rosenstein will require of me. In our first session she asked me to identify some strange ink blobs. I didn’t know her then and so I simply told her what I thought a rational and sane person would say. I didn’t tell her that the blob that was probably a butterfly actually reminded me of an aircraft on fire.
The next morning, as always, Dr Rosenstein asks if I have dreamed and I tell her I can’t remember any dreams, even though I keep my writing pad and pencil on my bedside table so I can write them down if they occur. She expresses no surprise and suggests we talk about the person I was before Robert found me. We’ve already talked about my childhood, so this is the next step. ‘You told me that the Blitz was the start of what you called grown-up freedom?’
‘I was still only sixteen, supposed to be at boarding school, but I somehow managed to persuade my mother to let me go to one of the few remaining girls’ schools near our house in West Kensington. Easy to say I was with friends and sneak out with them instead of going down into the shelters.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Cinemas. Nightclubs, if we could get hold of make-up and evening dresses—’ I pause. ‘I wasn’t so keen on them later on. I grew out of that scene, I suppose. But I was in a nightclub in London when I met . . . him for the first time.’ I can’t quite bring myself to say his name. Dr Rosenstein’s expression takes on more intensity. ‘That was much later on. The Blitz had ended. I’d finished school and was working. My parents had left the city by then.’
‘Can you remember when exactly that was?’
It’s in my brain, my trained brain. ‘It was 1943, the last weeks of summer or perhaps even early autumn.’ We knew the war was building up to an invasion at some point. ‘He appeared from nowhere.’ My life had felt stagnant; I was no longer in such danger at nights and I almost missed that.
‘I wonder how he came to know about you? That you spoke Serbo-Croat? That you had the attributes that would make you good at . . . the kind of work he was offering?’
I’ve wondered all these things myself. ‘I don’t know.’ My head is a tangle of threads. I close my eyes for a second to see if I can disentangle the strand linking me to the person I was when Robert and I first met: that muddled, immature girl I was before I became Amber.
2
Nightclub, West End of London, late summer 1943
Maud drained the glass and replaced it on the smeared table. Her cigarette box was empty. She tried to catch Peter’s eye, but he was playing some game involving flipping playing cards off the edge of the table and betting on the way they would land on the floor.
Really, all she wanted was to go back to her own flat. And sleep. She couldn’t turn up late to work. Dr Farish was kind but he did need a receptionist who turned up before the patients and without nursing a headache. He’d told her today that she had been the most reliable girl he’d employed and had the most unusual ability to recall details. Or had that been yesterday? She squinted at her watch.
The doctor had been referring to her strange memory for names and ailments and insignificant details about patients: the names of their cats and dogs and distant relatives – details she picked up while not even meaning to listen in to waiting-room conversations. She was also adept at mending the surgery’s decrepit equipment. ‘I’ve always been good with machines,’ she’d told him. ‘Used to fix the wireless set. Sometimes even my father’s car.’
Peter scooped up a card from the sticky dance floor, caught her eye and beamed at her. Obviously a good night’s sleep wasn’t what he had in mind. She should end the relationship, really. He was no longer on operations, which would have made ditching him bad form; he was training for bombers now. Judging by the attention he was receiving from some of the other women here, Peter wouldn’t be alone for long. She could take a short holiday, visit her parents in Shropshire . . .
A hand landed on Peter’s elegant shoulder. An older male’s hand, weathered, tanned. ‘Old man.’
The scraping of Peter’s chair was audible above the band, hi
s normal off-duty lethargy swept away by the appearance of this stranger. He was wearing uniform, but she couldn’t quite work out his rank. A chair was produced for Robert, for that was the newcomer’s name. Unusual for them not to refer to him by surname or some dreadful nickname; it felt in some sense deferential. Robert spoke mainly to Peter at first, before switching to chat with the rest of the group as if he’d known them all for ever. A bottle of champagne and fresh glasses appeared on the table. Maud sat up. Her drowsiness seemed less enveloping. Robert seemed to be one of those people who could draw conversation from a table of tired, inebriated revellers. The other women seemed redder-lipped, brighter-eyed as he talked to them. The men began to tell self-deprecating jokes and sat up straighter.
Robert-whatever-his-name asked her to dance. Her first impression had been correct; he was a little older than the other men at the table. He wasn’t matinée handsome like Peter – his eyes were too hooded – but he had a presence and danced well, with a controlled energy and precision, asking her the usual questions about herself and what she did.
These days everyone had to do something. She told him about her job, admitting that it wasn’t very interesting. ‘The last receptionist left for the Wrens.’
‘Why’d you get into it in the first place?’
Maud concentrated on a flaking piece of paintwork on the wall over his shoulder. ‘Couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do and thought I’d be good at it.’
Frankly, any woman, even someone older with kids, could do her receptionist job. But perhaps nobody else could do the extras, such as mending the spirometer. Sometimes the only way to get through the day was to play secret little games with the patients, memorising random facts about each one. Mrs Bates’s younger son has a kitten called Heinz, but he’s worried it sounds too Kraut so they’re changing it to Harry. Mr Kidd’s daughter, Janice, wanted her husband to try for the RAF, but he defied her and signed up for the army.
‘Well, tell me what you can do.’ Robert swung her gently around a pillar, missing the drunk naval officer and his dance companion who were swaying in front of it.
The Lines We Leave Behind Page 1