What Was Promised

by Tobias Hill

  So he should have. So Harry should have gone carefully. What was her name, the woman, then? Iris conveniently forgets. There’s no need, now, to give her her name, or to put a face to her. She was nothing special, neither the first nor the last.

  They were at the tunnel’s mouth. Meg and Beth were bent double, pop-eyed goblins, gorging themselves on air.

  ‘Alright, go on,’ Iris said, and they charged ahead, stumbling, glancing back at her from the gloom.

  ‘So,’ Harry shrugged, ‘these papers. There’s ours, the London Hospital’s, then there’s the ones for the places we took in under the Health Service. Mile End, St Clement’s, Bethnal Green. I looked at Bethnal Green for you. Your road, Columbia, it comes up. It’s on patient records. That must have been your local, Bethnal Green Infirmary. That or the Mildmay, and the Mildmay was a Mission, not everyone’s cup of tea, that, two lumps of salvation with your medicine . . . What I’m saying is, the old records for your neighbourhood, they’ve ended up at the London. You can look at them. I can slip you in. There’s all the births and deaths they did, operations, out-patients. There are maps for the nurses they used to send out, all the names and addresses. Good, eh?’

  ‘It doesn’t help,’ Iris said, and her voice echoed in the tunnel, took on a desultory resonance. ‘We never knew Pond’s real name, or where he came from.’

  ‘I know, but you said he was living in a cellar. Chances are he stuck to what he knew, a little lad. I wouldn’t have gone far, if I was him. What I was thinking was, I could get you in, you could look at the old maps, go back down your way, work out what street, maybe what house it was, Pond’s. You might put a name to the number, then.’

  ‘I can’t. It’s not there now, where he lived. They built flats on it.’

  ‘Right,’ Harry said, flagging. ‘Well, I just thought it was worth a shot. They’re blue-chip, these records, you won’t find better. You know what hospitals are like, wanting everything signed and dated.’

  The girls were twenty yards ahead, limned against the tunnel’s mouth. Iris lowered her voice. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘I thought I could help.’

  ‘Why? Does it make you feel better?’

  ‘No. Not at the moment, no.’

  ‘It won’t make us better.’

  ‘No.’

  They had stopped by then. Iris had folded her arms around herself. She could hardly make him out.

  ‘I need it to,’ Harry said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I need you.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said, and started on again. When Harry tried to take her hand she shook herself free, but when they came out into the December light they could hear church bells, the wind carrying them from Connie’s village in great intermittent swoops. It’s not Sunday, she thought, and then she knew they must be winter wedding bells.

  She did it anyway. She tried it just as Harry said, and there had been a boy, born at the house that would have stood about where the flooded cellar was. He would have been almost thirteen when Iris first met him. That didn’t seem wrong, when she weighed it up. Dora said Pond had been small for his age.

  His name was Sydney Marsh. His father was Stanley, a cabinetmaker with a workshop on Arline Street. His mother was Mary, like Iris’s. There were two younger sisters and a brother, less than a year older. Sydney was taken to Bethnal Green Infirmary at twelve weeks, with Eczema on face since birth. Now generalised with marked lichenification. Healing cavernous haemangioma R upper back. Mother – mild eczema. Maternal Uncle – eczema, asthma. Treatment – weak tar paste, all but face and hands.

  None of the Marshes came to the infirmary after the summer of 1940. When Iris looked for them elsewhere she found them all dead or missing in the end-of-the-world with which the Blitz began, when the Germans bombed London every night but one for ten weeks and six days. (Iris thinks of the one night sometimes: its millions of held breaths; its silent clouded heaven). Iris was one that year and still in Birmingham. Sydney must have been five. The Marsh house was struck early on, and towards the end of the war a rocket missed the City and demolished what remained, one house of thousands nearby destroyed or ruined beyond repair. By then little of the street survived, and what was left had been abandoned by all but the destitute.

  It disappointed her, the name. It was a glimmer of hope, alright, but it didn’t lead her to him. It didn’t shout out to her. Sydney Marsh. It solved nothing. There it was, in black and white, but it was just a name.

  *

  ‘What about Pond?’

  On Golders Hill Jem is opening his eyes. The war is long ago. A dog barks: the trees echo it. Florence is smiling at her mischief.

  ‘Iris looks for him,’ Florence says. ‘Well, you do, don’t you? There’s no point fuming about it.’

  ‘I’m not fuming. Stop telling me what I am,’ Iris says, ungently, but her sister only curls down next to Jem, seeking alliance.

  ‘She’s been looking for years, and she never gets anywhere.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with looking,’ Jem says, and Florence elbows him. ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Don’t encourage her. I mean honestly, Iris, what do you need him for? What would you do with him if you found him? I don’t know why you bother. Why do you?’

  ‘Because I miss him.’

  ‘I don’t see why. I don’t. He wasn’t ever really one of us.’

  Iris doesn’t answer. She stands up on the hillside, brushes mowings from her dress. ‘We should get on,’ she says, ‘if you’re coming for tea. The girls will be running Harry ragged.’

  ‘But he wasn’t, was he?’ Florence says, cross with them both. ‘He wasn’t like us. We didn’t know him. He could have been anything.’

  ‘Royalty in exile,’ Jess murmurs, and Florence almost spits.

  ‘Some exile that’d be, a bloody Shoreditch bombsite.’

  ‘I always liked him, though, you know. I liked him whatever he was,’ Jem says, and he ghosts a wink at Iris. She could kiss him for it.

  Now she’s doing the tea. She thinks of Connie as she cooks, Pond and Jem and Semlin; her friends real and imaginary, lost and found.

  When the food can take care of itself she goes through and begins to lay: dusk will hold off but the rain might not; better to eat inside. She gets the photocube and lays it out where Jem will sit, with the shot of Florence facing him. Meg beams up at her, Harry and Beth are hidden, but Iris can hear them: their voices come in with the long summer light. The sky is warm to the west, cooler above; pink for a girl, blue for a boy.

  She goes to the French windows. Out on the lawn the girls are playing swingball with Jem, but Iris doesn’t really see them. She is thinking of the dreams she used to have at University. There was a fourth, and sometimes she still has that one, though the others are only memories. The fourth dream is so simple that Iris hardly thinks of it as a dream at all, it is so transparent in its intent.

  In the fourth dream she is back in the Garrets of Moor Grange. She walks down the corridor to knock at the Semlin door, but there’s no need, it’s already open. She steps through, and there is Pond.

  Other doors slam behind her. Iris shakes her head clear, and then Harry is striding in – marmalized by the girls – with the girls themselves around his heels, Megan gabbling at him, Beth dressed up in an assemblage of battered boxes – and here is Jem with Florence swooping past, exclaiming at the snapshot that has been laid out for their pleasure: Floss in splendid isolation, in the sunset, in Siena.

  Iris plucks at her younger one. ‘Excuse me,’ she says, ‘Who are you, please?’

  ‘The first girl on the moon.’

  Megan says, ‘We made her out of Daz.’

  ‘Well,’ Iris says, ‘I’m afraid moon girls aren’t allowed earth food.’

  Beth sheds sulky boxes. ‘I might not want it. What is it?’

  ‘Haddock Monte Carlo,’ her mother says, and the girls perk up.

  ‘What’s Monte Carlo?’

  ‘Wash you
r hands and you’ll find out,’ Iris says, and Harry pecks her on the cheek.

  ‘You look happy,’ he murmurs, and he sounds happy himself to see it; but she is, just at this moment. The low light has escaped the clouds and is burnishing the room, and suddenly it feels to Iris like 1968, not the deadly one she lives but that which people write about. Not now but Now, a halcyon summer in which anything is possible: moon girls, Italian flavours, and Jem come back to them, and Pond not gone for good, but living, smiling, imminent.

  3. Pond in August

  Waster. Useless pikey waster. Shut your face, I’ve had enough of you, you’re as much use as a plate of cold sick. You fucking waste of space, pikey little dole queue scum. You can take the scum out of the slum but you can’t wipe the shit off a turd. You little tosser. Dosser. Shut up, you waste of space gobshite. Pot of toss. You make me sick to the teeth. Scraping you divvies off my streets. STAND UP WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU. Scum, that’s all you are. You waste of spunk. You don’t deserve nothing. My God you’re a job, filling my cells with your stink of piss. Do us a favour, boy. Do us a favour and we’ll let you go. Do us a favour and jump off the pier, go on, why don’t you? Walk into the sea, we’ll let you out for that. You’ve no right. You’ve no right to breathe the same air as a human being.

  Brighton came first. He wanted to see the sea again. It wasn’t hard. He got on the train and no one spoke to him. He was still little then. He could still make himself colourless. No one even saw him.

  He got off the train and he could smell it. Solly and Dora had taken him there once for holidays. He walked to the sea and sat down on the stones. It was sunny, the stones were warm as loaves. There was music drifting from the pier. He had his satchel with the clothes. But he wasn’t cold.

  There was a draw to it. There is this draw to the sea and the ends of the lines. He wasn’t the only one who felt it. The streets and parades, the prom and the beach, they were full of people like him. They were then and they still are. But he’s not one of them anymore.

  Brighthelmstone. That’s another name for Brighton, the name it had before people grew tired of its beauty. It was on a sign. By the sign was a bench with a roof where he slept. Sometimes a hairy man slept there and then he slept on the beach. At night the stones were cold and he wore all the clothes. Sometimes at night he could hear the sea down under them. Curl into the stones and you can hear the sea breathing under everything.

  Another night there was another man. He came to sleep with him and he let him. He didn’t have a knife. He didn’t want one. It was after Mrs Malcolm and he didn’t want to see harm come to anyone ever again.

  He was dirty after the sleepy man but he was dirty before. Dora had hated dirtiness but she hadn’t known about him. He knew the truth and the truth is he was dirty before Dora ever came. It was the knife that made him. He didn’t always know that. He started knowing it the day when Mrs Malcolm died in the street of flowers. After Mrs Malcolm he didn’t want to fetch his old knife or even look on it again. So he didn’t have a knife when the sleepy man came and so he let him.

  Moon was angry with him. He wanted to take care of him and he wouldn’t have it. It was July 1952. Moon didn’t speak to him until September 1955. It doesn’t matter now. Now Moon is gone, but he was there then and it was a lonely time when he wouldn’t say anything. It wasn’t kind of him.

  Mostly the days were the same. The nights were different. Sometimes they were quiet. The best ones are so soft. There is a lull. The air stops moving. The people are all gone. On those nights he slept well and when he woke he walked along the low line where the stones end and the sand begins. The sand is the bottom of the sea and in the moonlight, when he walked, the sea belonged to him.

  But at night anything can happen and you have to watch yourself. The sleepy man could come or the police, or there was fighting. It began with drink or no drink. Once there was a knife and he was no longer small but he tried to make himself colourless. A man was cut and the next day he came back down with stitches in him. His flesh opened up warm and deep and they went and shut it up. That’s what the cut man told him. He wasn’t happy about it. They went and stitched me up, he said.

  In the days he ate and lazed. He was fed by God. To get the daily bread you had to hear the good news and the cut man never listened but he did. It was fair enough. Or some days they didn’t go to God but mostly it was the same arrangement. You listened and ate, you ate while you listened. Sometimes it’s best if you nod. An old lady told him odd things. The burned child is not the sinner. Cities give us collision. The blade itself incites violence. Other things he didn’t like but she had food so it didn’t matter.

  He didn’t ask for the room but the old lady gave it. She had nine of them but none for the cut man. She only wanted him and once a woman who wept and later a black woman who made him think of Mrs Malcolm though really she was nothing like. She wore only white and ate only white food and drank milk. She powdered her skin with anything white she could get her hands on. They gave her flour because with that she could do no harm to herself. He stayed with the old lady for four hundred and ten days, four hundred and eleven nights. She had Tales of Arabian Nights. She had books and he could borrow them. Some of them he could read but some were French or half in Japanese or Russian. She had two rooms just for books and one for newspapers. She liked the crosswords. Sometimes they did the ones she’d missed. They had to dig for them. Or they just played games with words. He made them up for her.

  They were washing up. He said, ‘A Go ace went north, always tending seawards, homewards, triumphant.’ She liked that. She made him say it again and the next day she wrote her answer and left it on the hallway table. It said, ‘O, if you only could listen! Nothing whatever surpasses tenderness.’ And that night he said, ‘I do, but when other people cluster together, listening dissipates.’

  Some nights they listened to recordings. There was one piece she had which was so beautiful he covered his ears because it was unbearable. Other nights they drank strong drink and those nights she came to him. Her flesh was warm and deep and he found he wanted it.

  Her name was Alice and in the end she died. It was night and he packed his things. He didn’t want to be with the dead. That was his last time in Brighthelmstone. He went down to the sea and it was a good night, soft. He sat down on the stones. The sea was hardly breathing. It was like a pond, and in the pond, a moon.

  He walked inland. He knew about the countryside but he hadn’t lived in it. He had read books but not enough. The weather was turning and it was colder than he knew. If it’s warmth you want you need the places where other people live. There’s a warmth you only get where people come together. You can’t kindle it in yourself. You can’t do it alone. That’s what the cities are for. That’s why people huddle and hug and touch, for the warmth it brings. Cities give us collision. They strike the fire out of us.

  He thought he would harvest apples and sleep in hay as his reward, but it wasn’t like that. He slept in woods under leaves. What people there were there were poor, with nothing to spare for him. Once he went too close and their man shot a gun at him. Run now, Moon said, run, and he hadn’t moved but then he did. He went into the woods and lay under a broken tree, and for days he kept on running and sleeping wherever the days left him.

  He was hungrier than he had ever been. He followed the slots of deer and found them but he couldn’t kill them. They looked him in the eye. He knew not to eat the mushrooms. He drank puddles if the rain was fresh and groundwater where he heard it gibbering out of the earth. He broke the awns from the last corn and cooked them over embers. He made fires from flints and lichen, but their warmth never got into him, he couldn’t get enough of them.

  He came to Crowborough and asked for the London road. He went across the Weald. He followed the roads but didn’t walk them. Alice was dead and he was afraid the police would come for him. At Tunbridge Wells he saw them waiting and he went away over the fields.

  Winter was coming. He l
ooked for holes, but the animals were small and jealous and he wasn’t strong enough to dig anything better for himself. He wondered if he had the strength to live that way again. He had grown older and softer. Moon was looking out for him but still, he didn’t know.

  He went closer to the roads. One night a lorry stopped for him. He asked for London but the man was only going east as far as Canterbury. He got down where the lights began. The man said Whitehorse Lane and when Wednesday came he found his way. He listened to the news of God and ate as much as they would give him.

  He heard about people like him who had died. The Sally Army First Lieutenant told him. The cold can take you just like that, the First Lieutenant said, and he snapped his fingers. His other name was Hughes and he had been all over, Newfoundland to Africa. He was older than Alice. It worried him that Hughes would die. He didn’t want to see that again but he needed a place to last the winter and Hughes offered one.

  It was alright, that place. There were steps that pulled down with a hook. The bloody old banger lived at the bottom and he lived at the top. There were boards across the beams and they made an attic. There was a camp bed up there with old tyres under broken springs. There was a round window, quartered with cobwebbed panes, and on clear mornings the sun was caught in it. It was alright except you couldn’t stand up in it.

  They had a bargain. His side of it was: one, to keep himself presentable; two, odd jobs; three, to be in at night, to put the wind up the burglars. It was a good bargain. There were never any burglars. Hughes’s side of it was: one, the roof over his head; two, breakfasts and suppers, and if there was hoarfrost or night frost he could eat them in the kitchen. Afterwards he could sit by the range and read for half an hour.

  Most days he did the odd jobs. Wednesdays, Hughes put on God’s armour and they went to Whitehorse Lane to give out soup, soap and salvation. Sundays too, and then he laid out the books and chairs and took them in. The harvest songs frightened him and he was glad he had missed them.