Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

by Helen Dunmore

  The girls are asleep on the big bed. They won’t give it up. They like its iron frame and coiled iron springs. When the mattress gets too uncomfortable they beat the lumps out of it with their fists. It has a smell that Florence dislikes, but Marian butts at the striped ticking like a goat and buries her nose in it.

  ‘It smells of sleep,’ she says.

  To Florence it smells of the faintly urinous second-hand shop where she and Jack bought it years ago, as their marriage bed. She scrubbed the ticking and slung the mattress over two chairs, out on the Kilburn pavement. She brought out a third chair and sat there with her book in the fierce sun until the mattress cover dried and the stains were almost bleached away.

  ‘It’s our bed. You’re not getting rid of it,’ Clare told her father when he offered them twin divans. It was at the start of the magazine job. He came home so pale with excitement that Florence thought he was ill. They had a backer for the magazine at last. He came from the Persian Gulf, and his name was Alistair. Jack was to be editor.

  ‘The Persian Gulf?’ murmured Florence.

  ‘He read English at New College,’ said Jack, as if that explained everything.

  ‘At Oxford, do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, of course, at Oxford,’ he said impatiently, his pale eyes ablaze in his pale face.

  The mention of Oxford made her feel tired and sad. It would be another of those schemes that came not to nothing exactly, but in the end to Jack looking as if he’d been dipped in a dirty river and left on the towpath to dry himself and wander home as best he could.

  ‘But Alistair is a Scottish name,’ she said.

  ‘Not Alistair, for God’s sake. Al-Istrahar. Everyone calls him Ali.’

  ‘Do they?’

  She was wrong, and Jack was right. She saw it in his face when he came back triumphant a month later, bringing her ham from the Lina Stores. He had an office with a desk and a pair of shabby leather armchairs. He had a local where he drank with contributors, and a girl to type for him. There was a salary, to be paid every month.

  ‘Why does he do it?’ she asked Jack. The magazine had been going for ten months; ten issues. Florence visited him in the small office where he put his feet up on the desk and talked excitedly into the telephone.

  ‘He likes poetry.’

  ‘He likes poetry? Is that why he does it?’

  ‘You don’t understand, Florence.’ He waved his arm around the room. ‘The cost doesn’t mean anything to him. You’d think longer about buying a bunch of violets.’

  Violets don’t last five minutes once you get them home, thought Florence. ‘Does he write poetry?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thank God. He has too much respect for it. I wish there were more like him.’

  There was money for furniture now.

  ‘We like this bed,’ Marian said, her eyes as pale and fierce as Jack’s. ‘We don’t want twin beds.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Florence.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Marian and Clare together.

  ‘Paint your room or something then,’ said Jack, taking a handful of half-crowns and florins out of his pocket for the girls to pick through.

  ‘Any colour we want?’

  ‘Not black,’ said Florence. ‘The landlord would make you paint it over.’

  ‘We’ll move to the country,’ said Jack. ‘You can have a studio, Florence. The rent will be half what we pay for this place. I’ll build you a studio in the garden.’

  He might even do that, she thought. He was good with his hands, when he wanted to be.

  Marian is sleeping with her arms flung behind her head and her legs tangled in the sheets. Clare is curled neatly, facing away from her sister. The landing light dramatises the ruck of the bedclothes so that it looks as if they’ve been fighting. The room smells of skin, hair and sweat. They smell like women now.

  Clare has sprayed her sister’s perfume over herself before going to sleep. Imprévu. Marian had it for their birthday. She doesn’t like it any more; she’s gone off perfume, in the fierce, sudden way that Marian’s loves turn to hates. She won’t give it to Clare, though, because it’s hers. Clare can borrow it, but not have it.

  Florence sighs. It’s typical of the arrangements between her girls. They talk of ‘lending’ and ‘borrowing’ things which can in fact never be given back: sweets, shampoo, Easter eggs. The house rings as they drive their bargains. They shout and slap, and sometimes they wrestle each other to the floor. If Florence intervenes they stare at her, at bay, out of their identical faces.

  They are not identical, Florence reminds herself for the thousandth time. Clare’s hair is slightly darker. Marian has a mole on her stomach. She has always been able to tell them apart. She has always wanted to tell them apart.

  But if I dyed my hair, and Marian had her mole removed, you wouldn’t know which of us was which.

  Of course she would, you clot. I’d have a scar.

  Clare breathes quietly, while Marian mutters to herself under her breath. Neither will wake. All through their childhood they slept twelve easy hours, as long as they were within sound and touch of each other. When Marian had her tonsils out, Clare sat up all the first night, haggard and silent, with her arms wrapped around her knees as she waited for her sister to come home. But Marian was away five nights. Florence wanted to take Clare into her own bed, but Clare resisted, stiff as wood.

  ‘She’s dead,’ said Clare in the middle of the fourth night. ‘She’s dead, and you’re not allowed to tell me.’

  The girls were seven then, and children under fourteen were not allowed to visit the ward. When Marian came home, Clare didn’t say a word. The girls went upstairs together, and Florence, following them, saw Marian sitting in the centre of the big bed while Clare felt over her face like a blind girl, patting Marian’s eyes, her lips, her cheeks and lips. For a long time after that Clare’s hands shook.

  They are quite safe. The house is locked, with the bolt in place. The windows are secure. Those men have gone their way, intent on their own purposes.

  She will go downstairs, make tea and read for a while to settle herself.

  The kitchen, like the girls’ room, faces away from the hill. The windows are small and the blackout blinds from the war are still in place. Florence keeps meaning to rip them out. Now she goes to the windows, one by one in the dim light from the hall, pulls down each blind and secures the strings. After that she switches off the hall light, closes the door and turns on the kitchen light.

  The whole point of this place is that we are free. We can do as we like.

  The kitchen is warm and it smells of the stove, banked up with coke to last the night. The plug sparks blue as she turns off the kettle. She makes tea, soothing herself with ritual, and finds the packet of Rich Tea biscuits which she keeps hidden from the girls. It’s surprising they haven’t found them yet. They eat everything, with such speed and lack of conscience that keeping up with their appetites is like holding back a river with one of the twig dams of her childhood. They will eat six slices of toast each when they come home from school.

  Florence bakes all their household bread. She has learned to do so, just as she’s learned to clean the kitchen floor, riddle and feed the stove, chop wood for the fires, unblock drains, and also top up the oil, clean the plugs and deal with the radiator of their old Morris Traveller. By nature she’s quick and efficient, and would rather do things herself than worry about finding the money to pay others. Money is time for her work. The girls have a long day at school, and then homework. They can’t be expected to do much during the week, beyond washing up on alternate nights and bringing in logs from the woodshed.

  Sometimes, by the end of the day, Florence is almost too tired to speak. She gets up at six thirty: late, she knows, by the standards of the women whom she sees selling eggs and cheese on market day.

  ‘You’re not in Kilburn now,’ she says to herself as she stands in the doorway with the first cup of tea of the day, looking out at the pale lands
cape blowing away from her for miles. ‘Be thankful you don’t have to keep chickens.’

  But it’s night now. She won’t be able to sleep, even if she goes back to bed. She keeps seeing those four points of light, jabbing into the dark of the wood. Again, fear floods through her. She can smell it, coming out of the seams of her body. She leaves her tea and goes back upstairs. She must be with her girls. Silently, she enters their room, crosses the floor, and lifts a corner of the curtain.

  This side of the house faces away from the hill and the wood, over disused pasture which is full of tall ragged weeds and dozens of scuttering rabbits. She has the pipe in her hand, although she can’t remember when she picked it up again. Suddenly it seems dangerous, as if it might spring out of her hands and smash the girls’ skulls. She peers into the dark. The clouds are rubbed thin and there is faint light from the quarter-moon. She waits. Behind her, the girls breathe. Jack’s dressing gown itches against her skin, but she doesn’t move. Very slowly, the long field comes into focus. Rough, lumpy land, full of shadows, bounded by the ruins of a drystone wall. There are so many gaps in it that the wall is more the idea of a wall than the thing itself.

  Something is approaching from behind the house, where she can’t see it. She knows it, not with her mind but in her flesh, and the house knows it too. Across her back, down to her fingers, along the inside of her thighs, the skin prickles with the ancient fell of hair rising. It knows what danger is, even if she doesn’t. She should have woken the girls, bundled them into the car, got them away down the track to safety. She should have turned off the landing light.

  They come into her field of vision in single file. There are four of them and they move quickly through the wall and downhill across the pasture. They are carrying things, but she can’t see what these are. The torches are switched off. The men are accustomed to dark and moonlight now, just as she is. They are walking faster than they walked uphill. If these are the same men … but she knows that they must be. No one ever comes here.

  ‘That’s the beauty of the place,’ Jack said, and then he spent three nights a week in London.

  They’re almost out of sight. They’re heading towards the lane, she thinks. It’s about half a mile away, and you can’t see it from the house. She waits, quite still, listening, working out how long it will take them.

  The sound of the engine carries clearly across the fields. It revs, settles, and then she hears the car – or no, a van – begin to move. Florence listens to the sound of the engine until it fades into the night. They’ll be heading for the main road, five miles away. She thinks she can still hear them. She shakes her head to clear it, and then the pulse of the engine is gone. Whatever they came to do, they have finished with it.

  She’s been holding her breath. Slowly, deliberately, she breathes out, letting her shoulders drop. She glances behind her. The girls’ arms look as if they are carved from alabaster: Marian’s above her head, Clare’s curled, as her body is curled. Her hands pillow her cheek. Awake or asleep, Clare drops naturally into poses.

  Alabaster dissolves, though, if you leave it out in the rain. Florence prefers to work with Carrara marble. Her girls are here and helpless, because Florence has not been thinking properly about the loneliness of the place, and about what they were doing there.

  The men could have brought their van up as far as the house, on the track that leads off the lane. Florence made Jack take down the wooden sign that pointed up to the house, because she’s here on her own with the girls so much of the time. Perhaps the men didn’t notice the track … But they must have done, as soon as they began to walk in this direction. It would have made sense to turn back for their vehicle. Instead, they left it, and came up across the fields, silently.

  Why would they come up silently, unless they knew that someone might be disturbed? Why would they shine a torch at the house, unless they wanted to be sure that no one was awake?

  They knew we were here, thinks Florence, and a shiver begins in her legs and goes right up through her body. They must have known their way. The path up the hill led to an Iron Age fort and it was marked on the Ordnance Survey, but these men didn’t need a map.

  ‘There’ll be no one to disturb you,’ Jack said when they first saw the house. ‘You’ll have the whole day to yourself, once the girls have gone off to school.’

  They leave for school each morning at seven thirty-five. Seven forty is too late, and seven thirty gives them five cold, annoying minutes on the platform when they could have been in bed. Florence drives them the five miles to the station, and they go another ten miles by train to school in the county town. They make their own way home, catching a bus from the station. It ambles around the lanes, but brings them within a mile of the house, and from there they walk. Or rather, they dawdle. They like these hours that belong to no one but themselves. Often they are not back until six, or later. Next month they’ll be coming home in the dark.

  She tiptoes out of the bedroom, and closes the door. She won’t be able to sleep now. If Jack were here they could talk about it. He would tell her to calm down. He would make her see how much safer the girls were here than in London.

  Of course he would, she thinks suddenly. If he’s going to leave us here three nights a week while he’s in London, he’s got to believe we are fine here. He’s quite happy to talk about tramps and poachers.

  She had argued with him about the car. They’d never had one before, and although Florence could drive, he could not.

  ‘I could drive you to the station if we had a car,’ she said, but he shrugged.

  ‘There’s a bus. Why do we want a car? All these things, Florence! They tie you down.’

  ‘Quite the opposite,’ said Florence. ‘They free you. This isn’t London, and I can’t get materials delivered. Do you think I want to be wheedling with taxi-drivers to let me put stone in their boots?’

  He had to concede that she couldn’t lug stone on to the bus, and then trundle it up the track on a wheelbarrow.

  ‘Didn’t you think of that when we looked at the house?’ asked Florence. ‘And if we have a car, it’ll make it much easier if you want to come home instead of staying up in London. I don’t mind how late it is. I can pick you up from the station.’

  ‘I can’t be going back and forth all the time. I’ll sleep in the office, or on someone’s sofa.’

  She didn’t suspect him of sleeping anywhere else. He was probably right to stay. The magazine was like a baby, and needed constant attendance.

  They got a fourth-hand Morris Traveller. It sat at the top of the track, saying to Florence: You could. You could.

  I should have got the girls into the car as soon as those men were away up the path, thinks Florence. There were four of them. If four men put their shoulders to the back door it would burst open.

  There is no telephone in the house, because it would cost too much to bring the line across a mile of fields. Florence had never minded. She had always felt safe here, lapped by miles and miles of darkness.

  The next morning, Florence says nothing to the girls. The postman brings a letter from Jack, about a poet whom he has finally persuaded to contribute, and a sheaf of bills. She asks the postman if he would like a cup of tea, and he sits down in the kitchen, slinging his heavy bag to the floor. It’s a long haul from the village and he always makes that plain.

  ‘It’s a quiet life for you up here,’ he says, sipping tea. ‘Wouldn’t go for it myself.’

  ‘I’ve got my work,’ says Florence. ‘It suits us.’

  He nods. ‘You should get a dog,’ he says. ‘Wonderful company, a dog.’

  She opens her mouth to tell him she doesn’t like dogs. Suddenly she thinks of the warm bulk of a dog at her side, like a soldier. Not only at her side, but on her side. ‘Maybe I should,’ she says.

  ‘If you’re interested, there’s a Stafford going at the pub.’

  ‘A puppy, you mean?’ A puppy was no good.

  ‘Two years old. Beautiful dog. Steve
married again, that’s where it is,’ adds the postman cryptically. ‘I’ll tell him you’re interested if you like. It’s a lovely breed. Lovely temperament.’

  ‘Are they … Do they make good guard dogs?’

  ‘Burglars won’t take on a Staffie.’

  When Jack comes home at the weekend, Florence says nothing to him, either. He is pale from overwork, and lit with an exhilaration that has nothing to do with her or the girls. Three times he has to walk down to the village to make calls from the phone box. His other world calls to him like a siren, bright, compelling and far more real than the grey house, or the hill. Marian and Clare take little notice of him and spend the weekend in their bedroom reading magazines borrowed from girls at school. At night he sleeps deeply, obliviously. To him, the countryside is nothingness. If asked, he will say how peaceful it is. Empty.

  The four men walk across Florence’s mind. They go up the hill, finding their way by torchlight. They come down fast, looking for escape. If she went up the hill she might see where they have disturbed the earth. She is afraid to see it, and deliberately does not walk that way, even when Jack suggests that they go up to the old Iron Age fort on top of the hill.

  ‘No,’ says Florence, ‘let’s go to the river.’

  Soon he’ll be gone, back to London. She fears it but also longs for it. She has arranged to go down to the pub and see the dog on Sunday evening. Secretly, she has bought dog food, a bowl, a blanket and a basket. She doesn’t know what else dogs need.

  The dog is called Richard.

  ‘You won’t change his name,’ says Steve, and it’s not a question but a command.