‘Of course not,’ says Florence. She understands that Steve doesn’t want to part with the dog. She sees the new wife, flitting through back rooms, watching the transaction. She wants the dog gone.
‘Richard,’ says Florence.
‘Put out your hand for him to smell,’ says Steve, and she does so. The dog snuffles the back of Florence’s hand and then she turns it over and he tastes the salt of her palm. The touch of him is strange at first. He nuzzles her then, and she feels herself dissolve with tenderness for him, because he has not rejected her. Steve talks to the dog in a low, serious voice. ‘You’re going to live with this lady, and look after her,’ he says, as if there’s no question that, once having seen the dog, Florence can fail to want him.
He is right, of course. Florence pays the price for the dog, and takes the heavy lead, the collar, and the framed photograph of Richard as a six-week-old puppy.
‘But don’t you want to keep it?’
‘Best it goes with him.’ Steve holds out his hand to shake hers, to seal the bargain and maybe to end something which has become too hard. Then he says, looking straight into her eyes, ‘You’ll be wanting a shotgun. For the rabbits. Licence is easy enough to get.’
‘Yes,’ says Florence. ‘I was considering it.’
Steve nods, and that is the end of it. The dog goes with Florence, easily.
As she goes to sleep that night, with Richard on the floor at her feet, it occurs to her that Jack will not like the dog. But he is not a new husband, she thinks to herself, and laughs in the darkness.
Richard is gentlemanly with the girls, as if they are precious but foolish things for which he is willing to take responsibility. They want to come first with him. They coax him into their room, and he stays there for a while, dutiful, but watching the door. The house is under his protection and Florence is lord of all.
At the weekend, Jack comes home. In his case there are copies of the latest issue of the magazine, moist with newness, smelling of ink and promise. He takes them out to show to Florence. She watches how his hand strokes the glistening cover. He opens the magazine to show her two new poems by Hugh Carteret.
‘I had to go over to Paris to persuade him,’ says Jack, casual, offhand to any ear but Florence’s.
‘You went to Paris?’
‘He lives in the most extraordinary rooms. There were drafts pinned all over the walls and spread out on the floor. That’s how he works. He has to see it all in front of him. It’s a very physical approach.’
‘Presumably he lives alone.’
‘I don’t think so,’ says Jack, smiling. ‘Not from what I saw.’
Florence imagines the woman who would be fool enough to live with Hugh Carteret, a man who papered their home with his own words. She bends down and gives her hand to Richard, who is under the table.
‘Whose dog is that?’ asks Jack.
‘Mine.’
‘But you don’t like dogs.’
‘It’s very isolated here, when you’re in London. We need a dog for protection.’
Jack looks at her, startled, his eyes wide open. ‘Protection?’
‘I feel safer with Richard. The girls—Everybody thinks it’s a good idea.’
He says nothing more. She sees him glance down at his double spread again, but she withholds praise. It is almost time to take Richard for a walk. Jack tires her. He sits there with his magazine, misty, irrelevant.
Florence and Richard go up the hill, following the path the four men took. It’s the first time she has set foot on it since that night. There’s been rain, and any marks have been washed away. The wood pushes in around her but she is not afraid, even though she knows now that it’s neither empty nor peaceful.
The men will come again: four of them, or perhaps only two, and some nights a single man. There’s no stopping them. Richard will stir, and tense, and growl, and she will know that they are moving up the hill like shadows, pointing their torches to the ground. They will climb to the top, where the ghost of the Iron Age fort shows through bitten grass. She thinks they won’t shine their torches against her house. Word will have got around. Steve at the pub sees everybody, more or less.
She has Richard, and a shotgun is easy enough to get.
A SILVER CIGAR IN THE SKY
AROUND HER, THE crowd gasps. The Zeppelin wallows above the city and the crowd breathes out, willing it higher. Breath from thousands and thousands of lungs becomes hot air to push the Zeppelin up and away, out of danger.
It’s going to crash into the Wills Building.
It’s going to impale itself on the Cabot Tower.
It’s going to catch and crash and sag before bursting into flame and spewing a river of fiery struts, fabric, metal and men on to the streets below.
The woman next to Iris grabs her arm. ‘My God,’ she says. ‘Look at it. Just look at it. It’s going to hit the tower.’
‘It’s all right,’ says Iris. ‘It’s not as low as it looks.’
‘How do you know?’ says the woman, offended.
‘I’ve seen one before.’
The crowd breathes in, breathes out in a long sigh of relief and maybe, for some of them, just a sliver of disappointment. Drama has loomed. It has almost touched them. But the Graf Zeppelin sails on, massively chuntering to itself, towards the Docks where more crowds line the wharves. Boys hurl their caps into the air and fathers swoop children on to their shoulders for a better view as the airship turns. It is right over them now. They gaze up at its belly and giant fins. They are in the shadow of the air-whale.
It’s going along the water. Heading for Avonmouth.
It’s going up by Hotwells.
To the Suspension Bridge!
Go up over the Downs, you’ll get a good view there.
Those who have motor cars jump into them and set off in pursuit of the Zeppelin, sounding their horns while passengers hang out of the windows to track its flight.
The motor cars roar past Canon’s Marsh, along Hotwells, up Clifton Vale. The airship is hidden by the turn of the hill. They’re going to miss it! They burst out on to the level and race for the Downs.
Iris Daniels has no motor car, and it’s not likely she ever will. She has come on her own to see the Zeppelin, saying nothing to her sister. Iris often goes for a long, solitary walk on a Sunday. It gets the fidgets out of her, she says, after the working week. She’s a dressmaker who would rather rip out a seam than send a client away with a less than perfect fit. She’s been back in Bristol for twelve years now. It was hard to begin with, but now she has to turn away clients. She spends long hours in the attic room that serves as her workshop.
Iris’s lips are parted. She stares at the Zeppelin as it chugs away over Bristol, touching nothing and impaling itself on nothing. The Graf Zeppelin is on a peacetime visit as part of its tour of Britain. She read all about it in the paper. This is a display flight, commanded by Dr Hugo Eckener, director of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin company. Iris has read the newspaper article with attention. She knows that the Graf Zeppelin is a friendly guest in the skies over Bristol, but her heart and her breathing refuse to believe it. Her heart bumps with fear. Her breathing is tight. Her body expects injury or death.
The Zeppelin has gone, and around the Docks, Navy Week continues. HMS Warwick, HMS Velox and HMS Versatile are visiting the city. The children who waved and cheered at the Graf Zeppelin are the children of peace. They weren’t even born, thinks Iris. It’s almost fourteen years since the end of the war. Sometimes it makes her dizzy, the way time rushes on and leaves you standing.
‘Iris! Iris!’
‘She’s off in a dream.’
‘Wake up, Iris. Are you coming tomorrow night, or not?’
She blinks, and looks around at the girls. ‘Coming where?’
‘Coming up west with us tomorrow night.’
‘Oh … I don’t know—’
‘Do come, Iris,’ pleads Grace. ‘Mother’s so strict, but she won’t mind me going if you’re ther
e.’
Iris is a married woman, and therefore able to throw a cloak of respectability over almost any outing. ‘Strict’ is one way of describing Mrs Butterfield, thinks Iris, who has been invited home to tea with Grace in Clapham. A more observant – or less cowed – person than Grace would see a harridan with an evil imagination who persecutes her daughter.
‘I don’t know why you let her get away with it, Grace,’ says Pansy, who looks delicate but is the most fearsomely self-willed girl Iris has ever met. ‘Ask her if she knows there’s a war on. Tell her they’ve put you on the evening shift. Watch out, girls, here comes the Stoat.’
‘I’ll come,’ says Iris quickly. ‘I’d like to.’
The Stoat – Miss Stote – is their supervisor. In a flash they are back at their desks and the rhythmic pounding of typewriters fills the room. Iris has never spent so much time with other women. Her marriage and brief life with Edward have fallen away, as if into the bottom of a well. She can peer down and see them shine but she can’t get at them. She’s earning good money, though. The two rooms where she and Edward set up home together are bright with bits of china she’s picked up from market stalls, and pretty cushions. She keeps it all ready, as if he might walk in any moment.
His last leave was awful. She meant it to be perfect, but it was such a shock, somehow, to see him thickened and brown in the face and restless as she’d never known him. They only came back to themselves when they went walking, late into the velvety summer nights, not talking, just arm in arm, stopping at a coffee-stall and then walking on again as if they could get to a place where there wasn’t a war. He was all right, he said. He didn’t want to talk about it much. They did talk, though, one night, about what Iris would do if he got killed. That was typical of Edward. Very serious, very responsible, old for his age. He’d always been like that. He’d made his will and it was in the top right-hand drawer of the big chest of drawers in their bedroom. He wished there was more to leave her. If there was a baby—
‘Don’t talk like that!’
‘Don’t you want a baby? I do.’
He’d never have said a thing like that before. He’d have been too shy, even with her.
‘It’s not that. It’s you talking about leaving things. I don’t want things left to me. I want—’ But she stopped herself. She wasn’t going to be weak and say, ‘I want you to come back,’ and make him think that she had any doubt of it. His neck was brown and roughened, and his face and forearms too. His hands were calloused. He undressed and there was a line where the weather-beaten colour ended. Beyond it, his skin was white and fine-grained. She pressed her face into the silky skin of his shoulder, and felt the new muscle under it.
‘Of course I want a baby,’ she murmured.
But it didn’t happen. His leave ended; he went back. A week passed, and another, and then it was clear that there wasn’t going to be a baby. She couldn’t write a thing like that in a letter, though, especially with his letters being censored. They should have made up a code, like one of the girls at work had done with her best boy before he was sent out, but Iris and Edward didn’t think of it.
Iris gets out her best silver dress, made last winter and only worn twice, her silk stockings and best cami and lays them on the bed. She can’t help feeling there’s something wrong in wearing the silver dress without Edward when Edward might—No. Don’t think of that. Edward said: ‘Make sure you don’t stick in here, Irie, night after night.’ And the girls at work are the only people she knows in London, apart from Edward’s parents and his awful sister.
Pansy has got tickets for the show at the Royal Fortune, where Iris has never been before. It’s near the Lyceum, apparently. They all paid into a kitty and they’re going to have an early supper at the Corner House first. Her good coat will be warm on top. She strokes the fabric of her silver dress. It fits like a glove again, now that she’s altered it. She lost weight when Edward went out.
The thing Iris likes best about the show is the costumes. They are wonderful. She’d like to look at them close up, to see how the designers manage to make them fit so well and yet the girls who wear them can dance as free as if they were in the altogether. In one number, all the girls have plumes of ostrich feathers attached to diamanté bands in their hair. Iris costs them in her head. She’d choose a slightly different shade of blue for the satin of their bodices, though. Even under the lights, the colour is harsh against the girls’ skin.
‘Come on, Iris! It’s the interval. We’re all going out.’
Iris smiles and shrugs on her coat, but leaves it open, so that the gleam of her dress shows.
‘Aren’t the costumes lovely?’ she says to Joan.
‘You’d need to have a figure like yours, or Pansy’s,’ says Joan, rather mournfully. She is heavy-set, and doesn’t help herself by wearing pink. Her dress is too tight, straining across her hips. She needs to offset her colouring. A dark, misty green and some clever cutting would do wonders for her. Although, with her figure, she’d look better in something tailored …
‘I’d love to make a dress for you, Joan,’ Iris says.
‘Oh – Iris!’ For Iris’s clothes are the envy of the office. ‘Would you really? But wouldn’t it be awfully expensive?’
‘I can get the stuff for you cheap. There’s a place I know. I’d like to, Joan, really.’
Joan stumbles over the end of the row of seats, blushing with pleasure. I ought to have thought of it before, thinks Iris.
The streets are packed. The Lyceum’s just out for the interval, too. Crowds swirl around the stalls that sell roast chestnuts, chocolates, coconut ice. Grace has gone to the cloakroom. Suddenly Pansy grabs at Iris’s arm, almost pulling her over. ‘My heel!’
Both girls examine the shoe. The heel has come away from the sole, but cleanly.
‘You can get that repaired.’
‘It’ll mean a bloody taxi.’
‘Pansy!’ exclaims Joan. ‘It’s not your heel that’s gone. I’ll tell you what, girls, I’ll get us all some chocolates.’
Joan plunges across the road to queue at a stall. The crowds swallow her. So many people – it must be all the shows having their interval at the same time. If Grace comes out, how’s she going to find them?
Something changes. Iris can never remember quite what she noticed first. A thick thrum in the air, like a train coming down the line. A stillness. Sweep and ripple through the crowd as one head tips back and then the next. A taxi squeals to a stop and the driver jumps out and runs down an alley.
‘Oh my good Christ,’ says Pansy, and her face is a white disc, turned to the dark sky.
Except it’s not dark. Something vast and rimmed by light swims over the gap between the buildings. It looks like a cigar. A silver cigar, filling up the black sky.
The air packs itself together and slams at Iris. She is on the ground. There’s a stink of smoke and a shrieking noise by her ear like a kettle that no one has pulled off the hob. Slowly she moves bits of herself. A hand. Her legs. The smoke panics her. She has got to get up out of this. She watches herself shake as if she were someone else.
Up you get, Iris. She stands. She can’t see Pansy anywhere, or any of the girls. No, there’s Pansy sitting on the pavement, her mouth square like a baby’s, screaming. But that’s not the kettle noise. The shrieking comes from somewhere else. She looks around. Someone must have picked her up and put her down in a different street. The buildings are all wrong. She turns. There’s the Lyceum. People are running and screaming now, like Pansy. But over there, where the stalls were, no one’s running. There are heaps on the pavement. Bits of building fallen down. Everything trembles as if it’s going to fall, or perhaps it’s her, shaking.
Iris picks her way over the rubble. A man tries to get hold of her but she pushes past him. Her coat has gone. Her dress is ripped down the front. I must look a sight, she thinks. Lights flare, and Iris picks her way.
Someone is mouthing at her. She can’t hear the words, and she takes no not
ice. It has gone very quiet. Something’s lying on the ground in front of her, half hidden by bits of building. At first Iris thinks it’s a dummy out of a shop window, then she sees it’s a person. It hasn’t got any clothes on, but then she sees rags of pink over the jammy-wet flesh. She doesn’t dare look any closer. Nothing moves. Slowly she gets down on her knees and starts to pick at the rubble.
The excitement of the Graf Zeppelin friendly visit is over, and Iris slips out of the crowd. She won’t catch the tram home; she’ll walk. It will do her good. She shouldn’t have come down here. Why ever did she think she wanted to see a Zeppelin again? It was a stupid idea, not like her. What was in her head? Laying a ghost, or some such rubbish. Lucky that Sarah and the boys didn’t come down. It wouldn’t do for them to see Auntie Iris in such a state.
She’s lucky. She should count her blessings. Living with Sarah and Ray … They’re as good as gold to her and, besides, they need her. She pays a third of the rent, and her keep. She has the two attic rooms, one for her dressmaking, the other as a bedroom. The boys are seven and nine, and Iris loves them more than she ever thought she’d love anyone, after Edward. She’s making good money, and she saves regularly for them, into a Post Office account they’ll have when they’re twenty-one. Sometimes she gives herself a treat and imagines their faces when they see how much it has added up to over the years.
But who would have thought of the Germans sending over a Zeppelin in broad daylight, and that everyone would clap and cheer? Sarah was only fifteen when the war ended, thank God, and Ray a year older. They were courting then, and they stayed together. Iris doesn’t think they’ve ever been separated for as much as a night.
She used to be so jealous of Edward, for being dead. She used to wish it had been her. But these last few years, when she looks at his photograph, he is so young. She thinks about everything he’s missed. He isn’t smiling in the photograph. He was like that: serious, responsible. He wanted her to have a baby. He never knew Sarah’s boys.
Girl, Balancing & Other Stories Page 21