The Lines We Leave Behind

by Graham, Eliza

  ‘Where would I have to go?’

  ‘Paddington.’

  ‘How would I get there?’ I half hope it might be too difficult.

  ‘My colleague said she’d book a taxi for you. If there’s budget.’

  I feel my cheeks go red. I really don’t need public money spent on me, but don’t want to flaunt my prosperity. ‘I could go on the train up to Waterloo and jump on the Tube.’ The idea of me just jumping onto a Tube as though there hasn’t been an almost fifty-year gap since I last used public transport makes me laugh at myself.

  ‘Perhaps someone could go with you the first time.’

  I trekked across wartime Yugoslavia with a map and compass. But now the London Underground is hostile territory.

  ‘You’d need briefing, too,’ Maureen says. ‘About what the women have experienced. It’s horrific stuff, Maud. Multiple rape. Loved ones murdered. Burnt-out homes. Concentration camps. You wouldn’t believe it.’

  Oh, but I would. I doubt that Balkan warlords have changed much in fifty years. My knuckles clench as I look around this little park, where mothers push buggies knowing they won’t be gang-raped and boys kick footballs in back gardens knowing they won’t be taken into the woods and shot.

  ‘Sometimes I feel . . .’ Maureen starts and then stops.

  ‘Feel what?’

  She looks the nearest Maureen could ever look to embarrassed. I keep looking at her until she continues. ‘I’m a social worker, not a psychologist or counsellor. I’m probably talking out of turn.’

  I mumble something.

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you, Maud.’

  ‘You didn’t.’ Although the conversation is certainly shifting something inside me, something that’s felt immovable and solid for decades.

  I want to tell her about David, about my son. I want to ask for her help, but the longing for him has been unspoken for so long that I don’t know how to express it.

  I stand up. ‘I’d better get putting those bark chippings round the saplings by the pond.’

  I feel her eyes on me as I go to the shed. The chippings have been delivered in large canvas bags. When my efforts to untie the strings at the top fail, I pull my penknife out of my gardening belt and cut the thick canvas, producing a slit of about an inch long. I strike more forcibly, ripping into the bag. Large incision on the victim’s right side. Mama once told me the details of my husband’s wounds. I clasp my knife hard and stab across the bag. I catch the canvas, but produce only a tear.

  I transfer the knife to my left hand and stab again at the canvas bag. The cut is cleaner but small. Why on earth would I have made such a feeble attempt at knifing my husband when my wartime training would have taught me to attack in the most efficient manner? I would have been vulnerable to a counter-swipe from him as my right arm swung across his body.

  Why didn’t anyone ever challenge Robert’s account of how it was he came to be stabbed? Dr Rosenstein helped me recall the events of that evening and see clearly that I hadn’t stabbed him. Others must have known that, too. Cutting open the bag of chippings has just reminded me of his lies. Lies uttered to save his skin, even if they meant depriving me of my freedom. And my child.

  I manage the train up to Waterloo by myself, after Maureen, on her day off, takes me to our nearest station and shows me how to buy a ticket and which platform to stand on and how to be sure that I’m on the right train. ‘You’ll know that it’s Waterloo because it’s the very end of the line,’ she told me. I am hoping this visit to the Bosnian women does not prove to be my Waterloo, too.

  The train is ninety-six seconds late when it reaches its end point. Nobody seems surprised. Although Maureen has told me how to get a bus or Tube from Waterloo on to the meeting place, on my arrival I feel too flustered to attempt this and stand in the taxi rank instead. I can remember how to do taxis, how to add on the ten per cent if the driver is obliging or amusing.

  We drive over Waterloo Bridge and I think of my husband telling me, years ago, how women finished off its construction because all the men had gone off to war. Down the Embankment we travel, passing buildings I remember, and many I don’t think I have ever seen before. London was still wearing a cloak of decrepitude when I was last out and about. Big Ben looks cleaner than I recall. All the smog has gone now. On down to Birdcage Walk and right past Buckingham Palace, which also looks more sparkling than I remember it just after the war. I wasn’t in London for Victory in Europe Day but watched the King, Queen and princesses on the balcony with Winston Churchill on a news film.

  Constitution Hill now and the Wellington Arch. Then we’re shooting north along Park Lane, the traffic suddenly moving more speedily and carrying me almost faster than I can bear towards Marble Arch and the junction with Oxford Street where Tyburn gallows once stood. Where they once hanged the traitors: drawing and quartering them too, if they really wanted to make a point. The driver pushes a button and the window beside me opens. ‘Thought you looked a bit hot,’ he says. I mutter a thanks.

  I can’t remember the name of the mews in which our marital home stood. As it isn’t a through road we won’t pass the house. I’m not sure I would even recall its number now. Perspiration beads my brow. ‘The city looks pretty this time of year,’ the driver remarks. I mumble agreement. ‘Much cleaner nowadays. I remember what it was like when I was a boy. All those coal fires.’

  ‘It was so grubby just after the war,’ I tell him, feeling proud that I am carrying on a conversation with a stranger.

  ‘You don’t look old enough to remember that.’

  It is a strange effect of my years inside institutions that I look, in some ways, younger than my seventy-one years. I’ve heard people remark the same thing of nuns and prisoners in certain Russian penal institutions. Lack of rich food? Limited alcohol? My teeth are not wonderful but are better since I’ve started going twice a year to the dentist, and they’re still my own, which is remarkable for anyone who has been through British psychiatric institutions for most of their adult life.

  ‘Were you here in the Blitz?’

  I tell the driver how I went dancing in nightclubs on heavy nights and this tickles his sense of humour.

  ‘Did you stay in London all through the war?’

  ‘I was a special agent.’ I can see his eyes studying me in the rear-view mirror. He nods, mouth turning up slightly. He thinks I’m nuts, a dotty old biddy who’s making it all up. Can I be sure that what I have told him is actually true? Robert’s long dead. There’s nobody left who can corroborate the facts.

  The taxi pulls into the kerb outside the hall where the meeting is to take place and the driver opens the door for me. I collect myself and am glad I mentally rehearsed the paying of the fare, rounded up with a tip. ‘I hope your day goes well.’ The gentleness in the driver’s voice touches me.

  I stand at the door, unseen, for a moment before going in, inhaling the institutional smell of wooden floors and tables and chairs that spend too long stacked up in an unaired room. The smell reminds me of arts-and-crafts therapy in a hut in the grounds of Stoke Park where they taught us green-baize-door people basket-making and pottery.

  A handful of small children riffle through boxes of toy cars and building bricks. The women are quiet, as quiet as newcomers usually were when they first showed up at Woodlands. But I don’t think sedatives are causing the quietness: these women have the stillness that results from deep trauma. They’re like trapped animals that have been released but can’t quite reconcile themselves to their freedom, waiting for the hunter to return and deliver the fatal blow.

  I look at their faces and see the features of some of the people I grew up among, with their sculpted cheekbones and long smooth chestnut hair. I recall the daughters and wives of the workers at the Trpca mine. And, of course, Ana. Ana was older than these girls when I knew her, already the mother of two young men, but she was still a beautiful woman and her brown hair had hardly any grey among it.

  The group eyes me warily as I approa
ch, looking for Pam, the outreach team leader who has set up this meeting. She’s a short woman with a London accent. ‘Thanks for coming.’ She touches my lower arm gently, as though to acknowledge that it was a hell of a thing for me to get myself from the suburbs to the other side of the city.

  Pam introduces me to the women, and to as many of their children as she can identify, laughing as they scamper away. ‘We’re pleased with how the little ones are coping. And the older kids at school. But these ladies have complicated needs and I need someone who can speak to them in their own language.’

  ‘How should I . . . ?’ I don’t know how to begin.

  ‘I thought I’d set you up in a corner there with a cup of tea and they can come up to you one or two at a time. But first perhaps introduce yourself to them in their language?’

  I pull old words and phrases out of my memory. ‘My name is Amber.’ I pause, seeing the confusion on Pam’s face. ‘That’s what I was called when I lived in . . . Yugoslavia.’ Too complicated to give more details. ‘But, I’m known as Maud, too. I don’t know Bosnia myself but my mother was born in Sarajevo.’ My voice isn’t loud enough; I’m not used to talking to so many people. I raise it. ‘So you see, I have a little connection with you. Even if the way I talk doesn’t sound exactly like the way you speak.’

  One or two of the women seem to lose some of their stiffness. They are all looking at me now. I want to run out of the hall. You will feel intimidated, scared, too, sometimes. But you have it within you to do what is asked.

  ‘I want to help you with any language issues you have. Again, you must forgive me if I sound stilted and old-fashioned. I hope we can understand one another.’ I put a hand to my throat, which feels the strain of so much talking.

  Nobody says anything.

  ‘Tell our visitor your names.’ Pam points at the first lady.

  One by one they provide the information, but as though they were handing it to a concentration camp guard. I smile and nod as the introductions are made.

  ‘If you tell me more about yourselves and any particular problems with . . .’ I look at Pam.

  ‘Housing. Accessing medical services. Schooling.’

  I translate. ‘I’ll be over there,’ I say.

  I sit down at the table Pam has set up. ‘I am not doing this very well,’ I tell her as she brings me my tea. ‘They’re not exactly rushing over.’

  ‘They’re wary. Some of them have had dreadful experiences.’ A small boy pushes a toy car towards us. Pam picks it up with a smile. ‘Try playing with the children. If they see the kids like you, it will help.’

  I’m a woman in her early seventies who has barely had contact with small children. I never built brick towers with my son, never lined up toy cars and lorries for him to race. I pick up the car and push it back at the little boy. My push is a bit over-enthusiastic and the toy crashes into the wall. His eyes widen. I think he’s going to cry but he roars with laughter. Did Cecilia play with David like this? Or did she leave such frivolity to the nanny? Perhaps Robert was kind to David. He was cruel to me but his son was his own flesh and blood. I push a fire engine towards the little boy, who laughs again. A small girl turns to look. Before I know it I am surrounded with toddlers carrying toy vehicles for me to crash into the wall. The women remain where they are. I have travelled all this way to play cars. But I’m actually enjoying myself now. Let the women sit there in silence.

  I sit down on the ground because it’s easier on my gardening-stiffened back and am surrounded with babbling small children holding toys. A girl of about three sits beside me, looking up at me solemnly. When I smile at her, she puts her hands over her eyes. Do I frighten children with strangeness of the insane upon me, even though I was never really insane? Living with people who had lost their minds must have passed on to me something of their otherness, even though I have been so careful with my appearance today, standing in front of the mirror and pulling out eyebrow hairs according to the instructions in a women’s magazine I bought. I even applied lipstick, a heather-rose that the warden at home approved for me. I filed my nails. I dressed in the new clothes I ordered from a catalogue. But still I scare infants.

  Her shoulders move up and down. She’s laughing, not crying. She glances at me from between her fingers and grins. I smile back. ‘Peepo.’ Even useless old Maud can play this game.

  A pair of arms swoop the girl up. I look up and see her mother, a woman with a burnt face, standing with her child in her arms. ‘I would like to talk to you,’ she says in her own language.

  I stand up, feeling the joints in my knees creak. The woman places her daughter on the floor and tells her to look at the books.

  When we sit down she explains that she would like to write a letter to the teacher to explain that her older daughter is scared of getting undressed for PE in front of the boys. Her eyes glance away from mine and her voice tightens. Pam has already provided a writing pad and pen for me. ‘Shall I ask if your daughter can get changed in the lavatories?’

  The woman nods. When I’ve finished she signs her name at the bottom and addresses the envelope very carefully. ‘Thank you.’ There is the ghost of a smile. Apparently emboldened by their friend’s success, two other women approach me, sisters from a village in Bosnia that was abandoned to the Serbs. They introduce themselves as Esma and her younger sister, Naida. They would like me to translate a letter they have received from a consultant gynaecologist treating Esma. I do not know the words for all the medical terms and have to draw diagrams on the pad, feeling my cheeks burn. I explain that the woman must make another appointment in six months and offer to make the call. There is a telephone box across the road. When I’ve spoken to the consultant’s secretary, Pam suggests that we sit inside in a circle and have a chat.

  The women look at their hands. Eventually one of them, silent until now, asks me about my mother, where she lived in Sarajevo, nodding silently when I say that I can’t remember and my mother is now dead. ‘I never visited the city,’ I say. ‘I wish I had. Perhaps one day it will be possible again.’

  We sit in silence for a moment.

  ‘Did you ever go back to Yugoslavia as an adult?’ one of the sisters asks.

  ‘In 1944 I was in the north, near the Croatian–Slovenian border.’

  Puzzled looks. They’re too wary to ask me why.

  ‘I was working with the Allied forces,’ I say.

  Pam looks at her watch. ‘We can continue next week, if Maud can come back?’

  ‘I’d like that.’ The words come out before I’m aware I’ve spoken them, but it’s true.

  My mind feels as though it’s been flushed out; I feel dazzled by the contact with the women. Vocabulary I haven’t used for half a century floods my mind, even as I leave the hall. And just speaking the old language seems to have woken up part of my brain that’s been long dormant. Amber stirs within me. She’s been lost for so long I almost feel shy in front of her. Amber is trying to tell me something and I’m not sure I want to hear it.

  I can’t face another taxi drive so decide to walk back to Waterloo across Hyde Park. I remember those evenings in my early married life when I would walk to meet my husband coming from St James’s. I move briskly among the joggers and dog walkers. I have kept my fitness. I remember how hot it was that summer, how my lower legs ached when I did this walk. I was pregnant, expecting that child I never met because he was pulled out of me and taken away while I was still in that twilight sleep they’d induced in me.

  My son David, the boy I never saw when he was the enchanting age of those toddlers back in the hall. I have allowed cowardice and torpor to overcome my longing for him. Kinder to keep myself away from David, who has probably grown up viewing Cecilia as his mother. And he has never attempted to find me, either.

  But all those years ago as I walked across this park I had felt him move inside me for the first time. A pang of excitement had shot through me. I think now of Ana, whose love for her younger son, the boy fighting on the wrong
side, was so strong that she crossed the lines to be with him. My love for my child had been a lukewarm force in comparison.

  A young woman walking a West Highland terrier peers at me with concern on her face. I realise my cheeks feel cool. I have been weeping as I walk. I haven’t wept for decades – the drugs they gave me seemed to suppress the impulse. Something barbed and relentless is ripping my heart out like a fish hook. I turn off the track and head towards a clump of trees where I can wipe my eyes.

  For the first time in years I crave a cigarette and a drink. I’ve had a sherry or an occasional glass of wine over the years, but now I want a whisky. It’s lunchtime, so something must be open.

  I have drifted away from the route I meant to take. I’m heading almost due south and will come out of Hyde Park at Knightsbridge. I walk down Sloane Street, looking for a pub. There used to be a place I came to with Peter around the time of the Blitz, in towards Belgravia. I can’t remember where to turn off to the left and walk too far, coming to Sloane Square, finding myself staring up at Peter Jones, the store where I came with Mama to look at furnishing fabrics. Its glass curtain wall seems the same as it had in 1946. A sandwich and a cup of tea in its café will do as well as a Johnnie Walker and cigarette.

  Inside the store the displays dazzle me. A woman sprays my wrist with scent and I jump as though she’s opened fire on me. She apologises, looking aghast. I wander on through racks of scarves and bags, looking for cover. There is simply so much stuff. Did anyone own all these things when I was young?

  I take escalators and lifts up and down, dazed, until I find somewhere that can serve me an egg and cress sandwich and cup of tea. This is surely what a woman my age should be doing. A grandmother, perhaps. That thought makes me clutch my cup tightly. Could David now have a family of his own? How would I find out? Birth certificates can be obtained, I know that much. But if I don’t know when any possible grandchildren were born, or who their mother was, how can I take things a step further?

  I need to find my son.