by Susan Sallis
She pushed herself through the door before it was half-open and immediately started up the stairs. It put me – somehow – at a disadvantage; I hurried after her as if I were the visitor and she the house-holder. Luckily she did pause at the half-open door on the landing and I pushed past her, turned and blocked her entry.
She stood there, breathing heavily, her watery eyes enormous. She looked . . . hunted. I felt the same way. We faced each other, no more than twelve inches between us, in similar shabby outfits of blouses and cotton skirts. My sandals were the same ones I had worn the day I’d encountered her first: schoolgirl sandals, with good quality leather uppers that would long outlive the crêpe soles and hand-stitching. Her sandals had probably been bought the previous week at one of the many church bazaars where clothing coupons were not needed. I felt a terrible pang of shame for what Meriel and I had done that day. All right, as Mum was always saying, it was nothing criminal. But we had meddled and our meddling had had . . . outcomes. I stood aside suddenly.
‘Come in. Sorry. Come and sit down. It’s so hot.’
It took the wind out of her sails, and she came into our large living room uncertainly and made straight for the long open windows. She glanced at the view of the square and the college beyond, and almost flung herself into one of the fireside chairs I’d drawn up to catch any breeze that might pass by. I hesitated, wondering whether to offer lemon barley, then sat down carefully and pulled my skirt almost to my ankles. There was a strange smell coming from her; it reminded me of school.
I said, ‘I don’t know your name.’
‘I didn’t know yours, either. Found it by keeping an eye out.’
Strangely enough, I felt an enormous relief. Meriel had thought I was imagining things, or that it was just coincidence. I had known it wasn’t. She had been around . . . in the cinema or the Co-op or just walking in the park.
I waited and she said, ‘Sylvia. Sylvia Strassen. That bloke you chased all round the city back in the war . . . he were my husband.’
I swallowed, but denied nothing. Eventually I said, ‘We were schoolgirls. We didn’t mean . . . anything.’
‘It ’appened though, dinnit? He went off to see bloody Eva Schmidt that night and stayed there. If ’e’d come home proper, he’d still be alive now.’
It was so close to our pretend-stories: Meriel’s, Tom’s, mine. I kept swallowing, and she knew.
She said viciously, ‘It were your fault.’
I said again, ‘We were . . . children. We thought he was a spy.’
She looked surprised. ‘Your dad tell you that?’
‘No.’ I had no saliva left to swallow; my mouth was bone-dry. ‘We . . . we made it up.’
The surprise turned to astonishment, then she laughed. She looked different; much nicer. Still a rabbit, but a rabbit you might like to stroke.
She stopped laughing and said wryly, ‘Well, you could have been right, you could have been wrong. One way or another I reckon you owe him something.’ She looked around the room, then out of the windows. ‘Nice place.’ She nodded at our silver-framed wedding photograph. ‘Same one as was in the Clarion. I saw you coming out of the church. Is he – your husband – the one who found old Silverman?’
I had to adjust my thinking to Tom and our wedding and then back to our first meeting. ‘Yes.’
‘Is he here?’
‘No. He’s working.’
‘I’ve seen his name in the paper. Yours, too.’
‘I’m the tea girl at the office. But they let me do a piece now and then.’
‘That recipe the other week. It was all right.’
‘It came from my mother.’
‘Ah.’ Her eyes narrowed. Then she said, ‘Is your parents on the phone?’
She only had to look in the local directory to know they were. So I said, ‘Yes.’
There was another pause, longer. I had the impression she was tensing herself to tell me something. Her hands suddenly clenched on the wooden arms of the chair.
‘All right for some. Isn’t it? Good jobs, nice homes, telephones . . . plenty to eat too, I bet. Plenty of folks as ’d want to do you a favour.’
I swallowed hard. ‘We are very lucky.’ Mr Myercroft still kept us well supplied with stuff from his greenhouse, and Mum and Dad shared their garden produce with us. We were lucky.
‘Yeh. Thought so. Thought you might like to repay some of them favours, too. If you got the chance, that is. In memory of my ’usband.’ And she added almost proudly, ‘Wilhelm Strassen.’
I did not know what to say; was this a kind of emotional blackmail? I kept silent. Tom was good at silence; it worked wonders for him. People who had not wanted to be cooperative found themselves filling the silence with things they had not meant to say. I hadn’t got the same gift, and I sat there finding it very difficult indeed to wait for her to say more. She found it difficult too; I sensed her gathering herself together.
She blurted suddenly, ‘What your dad gave me din’t last five minutes – oh, it seemed a lot at the time, but there was all sorts to do with it. I ’ad to see to the remains after . . . there was a funeral. That din’t come cheap. Then after the war, I ’ad to get in touch with ’is fam’ly. They din’t want to know. I married Willi so that he could keep out of internment camp – they were going to pay me a lot for that. But then he was going in anyway, and then he was killed – none of it my fault, was it? But the buggers wouldn’t pay up. There’s the rent. I ’ad a job but there was Arnie last year and no one wants to give a pregnant woman a decent job. And now ’e’s dead and gone, poor little sod, and I’m back to square one.’
It came out so fast, and there was so much information in-between each breath that I suddenly had no difficulty keeping silent. I needed to. Dad had been to see this woman? Dad had helped her out? It was so typical of Dad I could have cried.
‘D’you get what I’m getting at?’ she said, her voice a notch higher. ‘I need some cash, else I’ll lose the house. D’you get it?’
I nodded quickly. She sounded on the verge of hysteria. I seized on the other things she had said . . . she had been paid to marry Willi? Not our silly make-believe Fritz, but Wilhelm Strassen, a real man, a paid-for husband. And a lover. Eva. Eva Schmidt. Had they been so in love, so desperately in love, that they had made a suicide pact? Impossible to know that. But Arnie, who was Arnie? The penny dropped. ‘You had a baby? Last year?’ It couldn’t have been Wilhelm’s baby, then. ‘Not your husband’s?’
She said shortly, ‘Willi’s been dead four ruddy years. Arnie was born too early. He died. Had colic, fits – convulsions or whatever they call it.’ She shrugged. ‘I en’t bin strong since.’
‘No.’
I was so stupid; I just stared at her.
She leaned forward and spoke slowly. ‘I got to ’ave last month’s rent and next month’s rent, else I’m done for. And I reckon you could afford some . . . what do they call it . . . conscience money?’
‘Oh! Money. I’m sorry.’ Dad was out of the picture now; Dad had helped her out of sheer generosity. But might she apply to Dad again? Mum was not up to it. Not up to it at all. I said quickly, ‘How much do you need?’
‘I just told you! For Christ’s sake! Last month’s and—’
‘I don’t know what your rent is.’
‘Ten and six a week. Work it out for yourself. You could add something for food if you felt like it. Though I expect you’d like me to die of starvation!’ she gave a hoarse laugh.
‘Of course not.’ But it sounded so much money. Four guineas altogether. Would four guineas buy me an easy conscience? Tom had wanted me to keep my money separate from the housekeeping. ‘Let’s use yours for nice things like birthdays and treats,’ he’d said. There were twelve pounds in my nice new cheque book account. I felt mean, but I made out the cheque for six pounds – half and half, as it were. I flapped it in the air to dry the ink and then gave it to her. She stared at it for some moments, before giving a shout of complete disgust and
trying to fling it in my face; it fluttered to the floor.
‘’Ow the hell am I supposed to get ’old of that?’ she asked, her aggression suddenly escalating into fury.
I was angry, too. Buying an easy conscience was the same as blackmail, by the sound of things. Either way, I knew already there was no way out. And of course I should have known she wouldn’t have a bank account; I hadn’t had one until a few weeks ago. I stared down her incipient hysteria. ‘I haven’t got much here.’ I went for my bag and took out the old school pencil case Mum had made for me in the middle of the war; it was now my purse. I shook it out on to the table. She got up and followed me and stared down at the ten-shilling note, the two half-crowns, a sixpence and a threepenny bit, a halfpenny and a couple of farthings. It added up to fifteen shillings and tenpence.
She said, ‘That won’t get me far. I wanted to walk round to the Guildhall an’ get them off my back.’ There was a kind of despair in her angry voice. It was so hot and the thought of walking right into town and then all the way back to the estate was . . . tough. There had been no bike parked outside; and she was so thin.
I said tersely, ‘Look. Give me the rent book. I’ll go and cash a cheque and pay it for you. I’ve got my bike under the stairs. Sit by the window and try to relax. I’ll be half an hour, no longer.’
She looked at me in sheer astonishment, then she laughed. I thought at the time it was a grateful, relieved laugh, and I smiled back at her. She rummaged in her bag and produced the rent book, one of those linen-and cardboard-covered note books with cut-outs on the edge for each month of the year. I glanced at it quickly, and saw that she was telling the truth: the month of May was not signed by the clerk . . . or by her.
I said, ‘You have to sign this.’
‘It’s all right. Other people often have to sign. Tell ’em I’m ill.’ She laughed again, this time bitterly. ‘Not far wrong, is it?’
I said nothing, tacitly agreeing, wondering whether she had TB or something even worse. I pressed her back into the chair and fetched the jug of lemon barley from the kitchen slab, poured her a glass and set it on the floor by the chair.
‘Close your eyes, if you like.’
‘What if anyone comes?’
‘They won’t. Ignore the bell.’
‘The windows are open, they’ll know someone’s ’ere.’
‘I always leave them open in this weather. Try to relax.’
She watched me leave. As I closed the door I turned and looked at her and smiled. She smiled back.
That was the last time I saw Sylvia Strassen, because when I got home forty minutes later she had left. So had our old three-bank Oliver typewriter. After running around the living room, bedroom and kitchen, then down the landing to the shared bathroom – as if it would be there – I had to accept what had happened. She had gone through my dressing-table drawers too; I had never had any jewellery except the silver bracelet Mum and Dad had given me when I matriculated, and that was never off my wrist. But the typewriter was important, especially to Tom. After standing for ages by the window with clenched fists, waiting for the tears to dry on my face, I had a bit of a brainwave. The Oliver was heavy and she was not strong, so she could not have carried it far. I went back into the square and down to Eastgate where Mrs Crutcheon ran her second-hand shop.
It was there. She told me she had given the young lady a fiver for it. And yes, she would accept a cheque from me, so long as I wrote my address on the back of it. It left me with less than three pounds in my lovely new account. It was a long, hot and heavy walk back to the flat; I wondered how she had found the strength to do it in reverse.
Tom’s first words, after our thank-God-for-each-other kiss, were, ‘Where’s Ollie? I want to get started, Rache. It’s been the most amazing day. Mr Harrison – I have to call him Fred – is so clear-eyed about it all, I’m not saying there’s no bitterness, but he can see why a lot of the atrocities happened. He says the Japanese weren’t much better to their own men.’
He was lumping the typewriter on to the table as he spoke, fetching quarto-sized paper from the bureau and winding in that first wonderful, virgin-white sheet. I just smiled at him, so happy to see him, so happy at his enthusiasm . . . it was what had made me love him in the first place, when we were following up the suspicion that Fritz – sorry, Willi – and Eva had made some kind of suicide pact.
There was a flip side to the enthusiasm, of course: he was almost obsessional about finding his father. The previous week we had had two days off and had spent them on the new British Railways, going to Liverpool to see a repatriated prisoner from the Far East who had been in the same regiment as Tom’s father. He had spent some time in a makeshift field hospital run by a Scottish doctor who distilled his own drugs from local plants and roots. The ex-prisoner, whose name was Stanley Clarke – ‘Call me Nobby’ – was wryly humorous. ‘Luckily he still had hydrogen peroxide when I was there, otherwise I’d be dead from blood poisoning. Sometimes the concoctions worked, sometimes they didn’t. He could bring down a fever, and when the quinine ran out he had something he said got to grips with malaria. But when he started boiling up grass, we knew he was on his beam-ends.’ His grin was full of admiration. ‘He distilled hope . . . that was what kept us going.’
Tom had said, ‘When I heard that you’d been in a field hospital I felt hopeful, too.’ He had tried to return the grin, but it was so important to him . . . I had been holding his hand. I had squeezed it hard.
Nobby Clarke had said, ‘Wish I could be more help, son. Fact is, I was delirious most of the time. And you’ve got to remember, none of the orderlies were permanently in the hospital. They’d come and do a stint when they were marched back at the end of the day. When there was an operation, the Japs would let a couple of them help out. You never got to know them.’ He had looked at Tom’s face, and said very seriously, ‘Listen, my son. If your dad is still alive, there will be news. But you will have to make up your mind to wait for it. The mess and muddle out there is pretty bad. The Japs burned every damned piece of paper they could. But you’ve told me a lot about your dad today and he sounds an unusual sort of a bloke – someone who will stand out in a crowd, be remembered. Drawing things all the time . . . I’d remember someone like that. Other people will, too.’ He had glanced at my face, and added, ‘You ’aven’t wasted your time today because I’ll be on the look-out now. If I ’ear of anyone who would rather do a sketch of someone than talk to ’im—’ he laughed. ‘Well, I’ll be in touch.’ He had tapped the letter on the arm of his wheelchair. ‘I’ll keep your letter close. Never fear.’
No, it hadn’t been a waste of time, we had gone there together, and come home together. But when we were delayed at Crewe Tom had lowered the window in the crowded compartment and hung out, looking at the faces that thronged the platforms. He had forced a smile at me as he sat down again, excusing himself by saying, ‘People don’t just disappear.’ I had smiled back. He knew, as well as I did, that people disappeared all the time. And it nearly always meant they had died.
Much later that night in June, when I had read Tom’s article and we had eaten a salad and new potatoes and corned beef, I told him about Sylvia Strassen. He stared at me in disbelief and I spread my hands helplessly.
‘Sorry, love. I know I’m a complete idiot, but she was so thin. And anyway, this time I’ve paid for it – literally!’
Tom suddenly burst out laughing. I stared at him, astonished and a bit annoyed.
He spluttered, ‘It sounds so like that farce we saw in Cheltenham a couple of weeks ago. Jangling door bells and you and this woman coming and going like blue-assed flies!’ He leapt out of his chair and gathered me to him. ‘Oh Rache, don’t you see? You’ve always worried about that weekend in the war – the only one we spent together because I was posted the following week – now . . . you need not give it another thought. When that woman talked of conscience money she was right. That’s what it was. You’ve paid your dues, imaginary though they were.
They’re gone.’ He kissed me. He has a special way of kissing me; each time is the first time. He looked straight at me, his blue eyes so full of love it made mine water. He said very quietly, ‘Maybe if it hadn’t been for her and Wilhelm Strassen and Eva Schmidt and—’ He hesitated a moment and forced himself on, ‘and poor old Silverman, we wouldn’t have squashed about three years of getting to know each other into eight hours.’
I cupped his cheek in my palm. ‘There would have been another way. We could not have simply missed each other for the sake of eight hours.’
That night Tom and I lugged the mattress from the bed to the open windows in the living room. The bedroom was a cubby hole partitioned from the living room; it was airless and very hot. This way we slept practically under the stars. I thought of Meriel and her two babies in Orion, where it was possibly hotter than it was here. I thought that probably they were on their own in the house. Unless Rex was with them. I prayed that he was. I prayed that she could know just a little of the happiness I had in such abundance. I fell asleep composing the letter I would write to her tomorrow, telling her about how Sylvia Strassen pinched the typewriter. I loved the thought of her with her hair in short curls again, laughing as she read about it.
July and August were almost molten. I submitted my ‘Saturday Supper’ recipes and two diamond-wedding-party pieces. Katherine and Stanley Holdaway had been born in the city and married in 1888. She had been eighteen and he a year younger. It was a lovely interview; they were both warm and full of fun; he called her Mother and she called him Dad. They had no children; not one. She chuckled without bitterness as she told me ‘It’s all part of the wishful thinking!’
The other two had come to live just outside the city at the beginning of the war. They called themselves elderly evacuees. They still ran their smallholding, and I came home with two summer cabbages and a newspaper parcel of runner beans.
Uncle Gilbert chuckled at both the articles.
‘My God, Rachel, you know all about pulling heart strings. Everyone will have a soppy smile on their faces when they read this, and there will be a few hankies in use!’