Letters to the Lost

by Iona Grey

  But it went on and on, like the nightmare, only this time there was no escaping it, no pretending. It swallowed everything, even time. Days and nights were chewed up in its vicious jaws until they became indistinguishable: a blurred, bloody scream.

  Faces appeared and disappeared: Charles, Ada, Nancy, Dr Walsh. Not Dan. Never Dan, even though she willed him there with all her remaining strength. Jesus looked down on her from his cross, His carved wooden compassion morphing into impassive boredom. Pain? He seemed to say. Tell me about it.

  And then at some point Jesus disappeared, along with the green walls and ugly curtains of the bedroom, and different faces hung above her as she was rushed along draughty tunnels. In addition to the unseen hands that had seized her insides and were wringing them like sheets on washday, other hands held on to her arms, her legs, pinning them down and pulling them wide apart.

  Indecent acts. An abomination. The unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God. Someone was thrusting something up inside her. She couldn’t see who it was because he was wearing a paper mask across the lower part of his face, but she didn’t think it was Charles this time. And then there was a syringe, with a long needle. They were going to use it to burst the tight balloon of her stomach, she was sure of it. She tried to put her hands over her ears to protect them against the bang, but they were a long way away and too heavy to lift, and it was going dark.

  When she opened her eyes it was still dark, but the storm of pain had passed. She was lying on her back, but there was no weight pressing up against her diaphragm and her body felt slack and empty. In the distance she could hear a baby’s reedy, warbling cry. As she sat up her insides seemed to slosh and surge, like liquid in a barrel. Standing, she felt a downwards rush, a warm gush that weighted the wet wadding between her legs.

  She stumbled past rows of white-humped beds and out into the cavernous corridor. A light burned dimly some distance along its length and she went blindly towards it, arms outstretched as if asking for something she couldn’t name. The crying continued, gathering fury. The chair behind the desk was pushed back, vacant. Beyond the desk a slab of soft light from a window slanted across the linoleum. Behind the glass she could see rows of canvas-sided cribs, each one containing a sleeping baby. At the sight of them something strange happened inside her body; a prickling, like tiny needles in her breasts, resonant of the sensations Dan had woken in her but sharper, harsher, making her suck in a breath.

  The click of footsteps behind her heralded the arrival of the nurse. ‘Mrs Thorne! What are you doing out of bed?’ She clicked her tongue disapprovingly. ‘You shouldn’t be up. You’ve lost rather a lot a blood – and still are, by the look of that gown. Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.’

  She spoke in a well-bred accent, but there was nothing genteel about her iron grip on Stella’s arm.

  ‘My baby – he’s crying, I can hear him. I must see him!’ Stella tried to shake off the nurse’s hand. ‘I want to see my son!’

  ‘Now, now, Mrs Thorne, what a lot of nonsense. Your baby isn’t crying, nor is it a boy. See – there she is, sleeping peacefully. Now, let’s get you back to bed.’

  With a strength she didn’t know she had Stella wrenched her arm from the nurse’s grasp and pressed her palms against the glass, peering in. Through the mist of her breath she gazed at the sleeping bundle that was her child. Her daughter. She was bigger than the babies on either side of her and the pale moon of her face was distorted and disfigured by a purple swelling on her left cheek.

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Perfectly fine, considering what she’s been through. It was a very difficult birth. Dr Ingram did marvellously well,’ the nurse said warmly, and Stella felt like she herself had had nothing whatsoever to do with the whole affair. ‘He was all scrubbed up and ready to operate but in the end he managed to get Baby out with forceps. That’s what caused the mark on her face. It’ll disappear in no time. Now come along, back to bed with you.’

  Reluctantly Stella allowed herself to be led away. Back beneath the papery starched sheets she looked up into the darkness and touched her own cheek. Indecent acts. She wondered whether Charles minded that she had failed to deliver his expected son. Would he love a girl?

  I don’t care, she thought fiercely and her heart swelled and bloomed. She’s mine, all mine. I’ll love her enough for both of us. Enough for the whole world.

  The maternity ward was its own enclosed world, quite cut off from the one outside. It was a world from which men were absent, except for an hour each evening when those who weren’t away on active service trooped in looking uncomfortable. The war, which had so dominated everyone’s lives for what felt, in the spring of 1944, like forever, seemed distant and irrelevant here. In their beds the women knitted cosily, not with scratchy khaki, but tiny garments in pastel lengths of whisper-soft lambswool unravelled from pre-war sweaters and cardigans. With babies nestled at blue-veined breasts they chatted, and veterans like Hilda Goodall in the bed opposite Stella’s dispensed advice to the first-timers.

  ‘I don’t care what that nurse says, you’d be mad to wake a sleeping baby. It’ll feed when it’s ’ungry, and it’ll soon let you know when that is, take it from me. Get some shut eye while you can.’

  Hilda, a quivering mountain of a woman, milky like a blancmange, had just given birth to her seventh. The only break she ever got was when she was in the hospital having another, she said. It wasn’t hard to see why; after an hour watching her grimy, whining brood squabble and sprawl at visiting time, the whole ward was desperate to see the back of them. The newest addition to her clutch of children was as noisy and demanding as the rest. Raymond Goodall had been the bawling infant Stella had heard on her first night.

  By contrast her own baby was angelic. When brought from the nursery every four hours to be fed she was invariably fast asleep, so that when the other mothers were discussing eye colouring Stella realized that she had no idea whether her daughter’s were the dark blue that appeared to be the norm amongst the others. She lay in Stella’s arms, limp and passive, inscrutable behind resolutely closed eyes. She showed none of the instinct for feeding that the other babies displayed, rooting hungrily for their mother’s nipple with quivering lips and frantic flailing fists, and when she fed it was apathetically, taking a few desultory draws before seeming to forget what she was doing and lapse back into a doze. Initially Hilda assured Stella it would be better once her milk came in, but the opposite proved to be the case. A stinging cascade of milk would be unleashed just as the baby lost interest, and she would splutter and choke and cry, a mewling cat-like sound quite distinct from the sound that came from the others.

  The nurses frowned when they picked her up. ‘Funny-looking little fing, ain’t she?’ Hilda remarked. ‘Big ’ead. No wonder you had trouble getting that out.’ Stella was too polite to say anything. Compared to baby Raymond, who was perpetually regurgitating all the milk he gorged and had jug ears, her daughter was perfect. Even with the bruise yellowing on her pristine new skin, she was the most beautiful thing Stella could imagine.

  And Charles was smitten too. As a vicar his parish duties had included visiting the sick so he was more at ease on the ward than the other fathers, and his clerical collar and his empty sleeve meant he was treated with deference by the nurses. They made a great fuss of helping him to hold the baby securely, though he wasn’t able to pick her up. He came most days, usually with Ada or Marjorie or even, on one occasion, Miss Birch.

  ‘What are you going to call her?’ she asked, holding the baby with surprising assurance, her stocky body swaying instinctively to some timeless rhythm.

  ‘Yes darling, we really must decide,’ Charles said. ‘I must confess I hadn’t got as far as thinking about girls’ names. Perhaps Lillian, for my—’

  ‘Daisy,’ Stella said dreamily from her snowy mountain of pillows. ‘I’d like to call her Daisy.’

  Charles looked uncertain, but Miss Birch beamed approval. ‘How beautiful. Daisy
. A fresh start.’

  One by one the faces in the beds around Stella’s changed, until eventually it was her turn to leave the ward and go home. She had stayed longer than was usual because of the baby’s continued failure to feed properly, but as the days passed she sensed the nurses’ concern give way to exasperation, as if Daisy was being deliberately stubborn and Stella wilfully inept.

  In the mildewed gloom of the Vicarage the iridescent bubble in which she’d been floating burst. The scent of milk, white soap and femininity was replaced by the inescapable cabbagey reek. It was as if Daisy sensed the change in atmosphere too. She became more wakeful, less placid, crying her high-pitched, off-key cry sometimes for hours on end. ‘She’s half starved, poor mite,’ Ada clucked, ‘why don’t you try her with a bit of flour and water?’ Desperate, Stella took her advice, and was almost relieved when Daisy wouldn’t take that either, since it made the problem seem less like a personal failure on her part. Surely when she was hungry she’d eat? The bruising had gone down on her face, leaving only a crescent-shaped mark, and when she was wrapped in one of the blankets that had been knitted for her by the parish ladies she looked perfectly normal. But when she undressed her for her bath Stella noticed how tiny her body appeared in relation to the size of her head and felt panicky and helpless.

  People were kind. They called at the Vicarage in a constant stream, their concerned gazes taking in the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, the pail of evil-smelling nappies in the scullery, the state of Stella’s lank, unwashed hair and milk-stained clothing. In the mornings Ada called in on her way to the shops to collect Stella’s ration book and ask what she wanted. Dazed and reeling from yet another broken night, Stella mostly left it to Ada to decide. Soups and milk puddings continued to appear, made by Dot and Marjorie and Ethel. Charles tucked into these with great enthusiasm, marvelling at the generosity of the parish, but Stella felt her well of gratitude running dry. Their kindness felt like a criticism, an accusation that she had failed as a mother as well as a wife.

  It was true, of course, which was why it hurt. Looking after Daisy, coaxing her to feed, coping with her crying, processing the mountains of washing she generated while also keeping up with the housework, washing her own hair, cooking and looking after Charles seemed overwhelmingly impossible, like the tasks presented to fairy-tale heroines to make them prove their worth. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her baby, but loving her only made the anguish of failing her all the more profound.

  Dr Walsh came, not to look at Daisy, but to talk to Stella. Charles was worried, he said. In a tone of bluff heartiness, he asked her about her appetite and how she was sleeping, while his watery eyes bored into her over the top of his glasses. She answered him truthfully, because she couldn’t imagine how anyone could meet Daisy’s round the clock demands and still eat and sleep normally. He left her with the promise that he’d ‘keep an eye on things’. Though perhaps it wasn’t a promise so much as a threat.

  The only silver lining in this sky full of black clouds was that exhaustion and the demands of a new baby blunted the edge of the pain of losing Dan. She carried the ache with her constantly and never forgot it, but it was deeper; the kind of pain you lived with rather than one that killed you. She adjusted. The brief spell of happiness they’d enjoyed last summer took on the aspect of a dream. Sometimes, in one of the restless, shallow slumbers that were about all she managed around Daisy’s waking, she would see him, and it would bring her a bittersweet comfort, like a candleglow in the dark, and sustain her through another bleak morning.

  She tried not to think about the house on Greenfields Lane. It was a painful reminder of the past she had lost and the future she would never have. As the months passed her hope quietly died. Dan had taken off from Palingthorpe in a cold, crisp October dawn and as the seasons turned once more and the apple blossom on the tree flowered and fell again in showers of confetti she mourned him, silently and secretly.

  31

  2011

  The Spitfire was mended.

  Will had got the call on his mobile just before 4 p.m., by which time he’d eaten a rubbery cheese toasted sandwich and a chocolate brownie and drunk enough coffee to give him a cardiac arrest. When he’d arrived at the garage he’d found his car parked outside, paintwork gleaming. Warren had managed to get a spare part from a mate of his, he’d told Will as he handed him the bill. It was about a third of what Will would have expected to pay in London.

  On the motorway a spectacular pink sunset spread across the sky and he fought the urge to press his twitching foot to the floor. ‘Don’t thrash her for a while,’ Warren had warned. ‘Break it in gently, like,’ but the temptation to ignore this was strong. Will was at Milton Keynes at six o’clock, when visiting time would be starting at the Royal Free. To distract himself from the thought (and from the need to pee – why had he drunk all that coffee?) he went over everything he’d discovered about Stella Thorne; everything he had to tell Jess.

  There had been no more children. Daisy Lillian Thorne, born 27th April 1944 was an only child. There had been no divorce either, from what he could tell. Stella Thorne had stayed married to Charles (or Maurice, as he now knew him to be legally named) until his death in 1967, and had not married again since. The absence of a second marriage certificate and also a death certificate suggested that there was a chance she was still alive. Her daughter, however, wasn’t. Daisy had died in 1980, in Berkshire.

  The sunset finished its extravagant display. The seven o’clock news came on. Sod breaking the new part in gently. Will covered the rest of the distance to London in the fast lane, his shoulders tense as he hunched forward over the steering wheel. At ten to eight he turned into the hospital car park. God, he absolutely had to pee before he went in to see her. He found the toilet, and looked at his reflection despairingly in the mirror. His shirt was crumpled, his hair sticking up wildly where he’d pushed his hands through it as he’d driven. He tried to dampen it down but it looked even worse, like it hadn’t been washed for a week or something.

  The buzzer went for the end of visiting time as he raced through the doors of the ward. A nurse he hadn’t come across before was sitting behind the desk. She looked up in surprise and faint distaste when Will approached, panting.

  ‘Can I help? Visiting time has just finished.’

  ‘I know . . . Been stuck in traffic on the . . . motorway.’ Christ, he was unfit. ‘I need to see . . . Jess. Jess Moran.’

  ‘Sorry—’

  ‘Please. Two minutes, that’s all. I know it’s the end of visiting time and I know it’s a pain in the backside for you when shambolic idiots like me come running in at the very last second, but please. Please. I really need to see her.’

  Instead of being won over by this impassioned speech the nurse looked simply impatient. ‘Well, you can’t. She was discharged this morning. She’s not here.’

  ‘Discharged?’

  ‘That’s right. Now if you’ll excuse me—’

  ‘But where to? Where’s she gone? She didn’t have anywhere—’

  The nurse’s expression became positively frosty. ‘We’re under strict instructions not to disclose that information to anyone. Now, perhaps you’d be good enough to leave my ward before I call security?’

  It wasn’t a bad place.

  If you ignored the screeching kids and the blare of other people’s music and the television turned up to full volume in the common room and the raucous laughing and arguing that went on in a variety of languages and accents pretty much around the clock, it was OK. The communal kitchen was with out a doubt the most untidy place Jess had ever seen in her life. Venturing in there for breakfast on her second morning she had found the cold remains of a takeaway curry spread all over the table (and much of the floor) and a dirty nappy by the toaster.

  But Jess was glad to be there. She was glad to have a room of her own, with a bed and a radiator that belted out heat and a tiny en-suite shower room with hot water (most of the time). She was glad to
have lights that worked and a duvet that didn’t smell of old mushrooms. It was stupid to wish, even for a second, that she was back at Greenfields Lane where Will Holt might find her. Especially since it didn’t actually look like he wanted to. After all, he’d known where she was and when he could come in and see her, and he’d chosen to drop off the bag of clothes and the letter when it wasn’t even visiting time. When he wouldn’t have to stay.

  At least he had delivered the letter – that was another thing to be glad about. Now she had somewhere to live her top priority was to find work, but helping Dan Rosinski with his quest to find Stella came a close second. She’d hoped to have Will Holt’s help, and that day in the hospital when they’d sat together and read the letters in companionable silence she’d actually been daft enough to think they might continue the search together. Now she wished she hadn’t told him about it. He’d made a good job of looking interested at the time, but that was just because he was posh and polite. Anyway, she was determined to find Stella Thorne on her own. Somehow.

  She wasn’t entirely on her own. Dan Rosinski’s letter had included a mobile phone number and an email address. On her second day in the hostel she temporarily suspended her search for work and went to the library where, armed with her new address, she filled in the forms to get a library card. She took it straight upstairs to the computer room.

  It took approximately ten minutes to set up an email account, and at least three times that to compose her message. Blood drummed in her ears as the cursor hovered over ‘send’ and she read back over what she’d written. Was it too personal? Would he think she was some unreliable drop-out who was going to con him? Would he inform the police and ask them to arrest her for breaking and entering or squatting or something? She was just about to start deleting bits and rewriting them when her hand slipped. With a muted whooshing sound the email sent.

  She let out a little gasp of horror, attracting the attention of the man to her left, who glared at her as if she had broken some cardinal library rule. Bugger, but it was too late now. She resisted the urge to drag the message up from the ‘sent’ box to read through again and hovered her fingers over the keyboard, wondering what else she could look up to take her mind off it. She’d just typed in ‘Job Vacancies Church End’ and looked up the first few results when the little message icon flashed up in the corner of her screen. With her heart leaping into her mouth she clicked on it.