by Anna Hope
On clear nights she will bring me to you.
She cringes at the thought of it; as though, in its pure bone whiteness, the moon can see into every cranny of her tawdry self.
What has she become?
The man in the wheelchair. Robin, last night: Perhaps I could come, after all?
She leans against the side of the counter and breathes out. She misses him. Fraser. Here in the shrunken hours of the night. She misses him still so much. Who is there to share her thoughts with? They wither inside her. She cannot even write them to him as she used to; can’t take a cup of tea back to bed and sit with a candle in the blackout and think of him—trying to imagine where he is, what he sees. She cannot imagine where he is, because he is nowhere, he is nothing. All of the many tiny things that he was: the way he turned his head toward her, the slow breaking of his smile, the laughter in him, the roll of his voice; the way that he eased her, eased her—these are all gone. These are all dead. All of the life that was in him, all of the life that they could have spent together. Gone.
Her heart thuds dully into the silence. Her broken heart, still beating on.
And she is alive. For what? She has endured. Is enduring. Killing time. Like all of them; the pathetic women with their adverts in the papers, the palpable desperation behind the cheer:
Spinster, 38. Loving disposition. Anxious to correspond.
Spinster.
Spinster.
Old maid.
She has become one of them. Slowly and then all at once. Those women other women pity. The lucky ones, with rings on their fingers and prams in the street. They cross the street to avoid her. They can smell it on her. Bad luck.
What next for her? For any of them?
Robin? Is he what is next?
Would it be all right if I came, too?
And would it be so bad? After all?
She shakes her head. She will not go. It is ridiculous. Weak. Her life has made her weak.
Behind her, the kettle whistles and jiggers on the stove. She pulls it off the flame, makes her tea, and then carries it into the bedroom and climbs back into bed.
When she worked at the munitions factory, she no longer woke in the night. She was too tired. They made her a machinist first. There was a grim satisfaction to it: punching holes in metal over and over again. Five holes in each sheet. Twenty-odd sheets an hour. She got up from twenty-four to thirty in her first week, working on a large bench with fifteen other women from eight till five o’clock. It was tiring, but she made sure that she never leaned against the bench, never ran the risk of being thought soft. At ten o’clock they all marched downstairs to drink a glass of milk. They stood in two long lines: one formed of the machinists, like her, and the other with women from different parts of the sheds. On her first day she noticed that they had bright yellow skin on their faces, their arms, and their hands.
“Canaries,” whispered the woman in the queue behind her. “Some of them haven’t got long left.”
Evelyn turned to her. “How do you know?”
“They’re sick, aren’t they? That’s why they look like that.”
The canaries sat at different benches on the other side of the room.
At the end of her second week she skipped lunch and went to the office of the overseer. “I’d like to move sheds,” she said. “I’d like to work with the TNT.”
The man stared at her over his glasses. He had a mild, distant face. He looked as if he might have been a schoolteacher before the war.
“Women like you don’t work on shells,” he said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Women like you don’t work on shells.”
“What do you mean, women like me?”
The man took off his glasses; without them his eyes were pouched, tiny things. He rubbed at them. One side of his right eye was pink and irritated. He sighed. “Miss?”
“Montfort.”
“Miss Montfort. The TNT sheds are a wholly different place from the rest of the factory.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. That’s why I’d like to work there.”
He eyed her. “Why are you here, Miss Montfort?”
“Why is anyone here?”
“Money, Miss Montfort. Money.”
“Then money is why I am here.”
He stared at her. He looked unconvinced.
“I should like,” she said crisply, “to work with the TNT.”
“All right,” he said, putting his glasses back on his nose, dismissing her with a wave of his hand. “As you wish.”
The girl she shared her bench with looked all of fifteen. On her first morning she passed Evelyn a stump of something. The girl had a round child’s face and plump lips. “Cordite,” she said. She spoke with a lisp. “We’re not supposed to eat it. But it’s ever so sweet and nice.”
Evelyn touched it to her lips. It was true. It was sweet.
“If you suck it,” said the girl, “it’s nice.”
The TNT buildings were on the far side of the factories. To get to them you had to pass through other sheds, full of older women: barefoot, thin, bent over their pots of molten lead, ladling the scaly liquid out; they looked liked gypsies, or witches, with their long hair unbound.
When daylight savings time began, and the world was plunged even further into blackness, Evelyn volunteered for the night shifts. To sleep in the day at least had novelty to it. So she lived her life in the dark. Coming on to the night shift in the blackout, the women would call to one another, holding each other’s hands to walk from the railway station to their buildings, forming long, snaking chains.
She was given the job of examiner, which meant she had to test the gauge of the calico bags filled with the TNT. She would handle up to a hundred bags a day. After two weeks her hair had turned a bright ginger hue. If she were ever out in the daytime, people would stare at her in the street. They would nod, as though they were acknowledging some unspoken debt, but were frightened nonetheless.
The yellowness spread to her skin—first her face, then all over the rest. She watched her hands turn with creeping fascination. Her eyes were tinged with bronze. She hardly recognized herself in her mirror. After her bath, the water was the color of blood. But she felt a strange, creeping power from this subterranean life. She felt she was getting closer to something real. She felt she might be turning into a witch.
Then she started to become sick. She noticed a peculiar taste in her mouth after meals. She was sick, often, and the vomiting would relieve the taste. Her urine was the color of strong tea. She began to lose weight. Her temperature rose. A rash broke out all over her body. When she fainted at work they took her out of the sheds and sent her home. The doctor came and examined her in bed. When he had finished, he made a few short notes on the pad in his hand. She listened to his pen, scratching into the silence, as she stared at the faded flower pattern that was papered to the wall.
“Miss Montfort,” he said. The s in Miss sounded sibilant; it lingered in the air.
“Yes?”
“Are you aware that you’re pregnant?”
She turned to him.
“No?” He shook his head, closed his pad, and put it back into his bag. “You need to stay in bed. To recover from the TNT poisoning.” His voice softened. “I doubt very much that you will keep your child.”
She did as the doctor ordered, and stayed in bed for a week. She told no one, not even Doreen. It was easy not to, since everyone already thought she was ill. She slept late—long strange sleeps, full of dreams—and when she woke, in the late mornings, she put her hands to her belly and thought of the tiny life that was gathering itself there. She thought back to that last morning she and Fraser spent together: the heat of the day, the tang of the salt held in his lip. A small, clear voice in her rejoiced. Whatever t
he consequences, it made sense, somehow, of everything that had gone before.
But after a week she began to bleed, first brown and scant, then red and bright. A week later the bleeding was finished. The small scrap of life had left her, a tiny addition to the crowded ranks of the dead.
When she was well again she went back to the factory and asked for a job. They put her back in the machine shed where she had started out. Two weeks later, she had her accident and lost her finger.
When the bandages came off she almost smiled. It was eloquent, with its smooth, rounded stump. The proof of absence. The real thing.
She rubs the nub of her finger now with her thumb. In the darkness she can just see the outline of her satchel, hanging from the back of her bedroom door. Rowan Hind’s address is on a pink piece of paper inside. Today is Wednesday. The office will close at twelve as it always does, and she will have the afternoon free. Tomorrow, Thursday, Armistice Day, is a national holiday, so if she wants to catch Rowan Hind then she should go to Poplar after work today; there will be no chance on Thursday, the streets will be thronged and he will most likely not be at home.
She brings her knees up and clasps her arms around them.
So she said she would go with her brother, to the burial of this Unknown Warrior; to stand on Anthony’s balcony and listen to them bray at the show.
How pleased she is for the scraps that Ed throws her way.
They get ideas. Fixed in their heads. They can’t move on.
You’re meddling, Eves.
Her little brother. Dismissing her. He used to look up to her once. To listen when she talked.
She won’t go. She hates it, anyway, this Armistice Day; this new tradition already dripping with oily reverence; another opportunity for those with blood on their hands to play fancy dress in their murderers suits and drag their horses and their gun carriages behind them as they parade the London streets. As if there were no other way to honor the dead.
Someone should do the world a favor. They should take one of those great guns that they wheel out for the occasion and turn it around; they should train it on the massed dignitaries at the Cenotaph, in the abbey, on the king and Lloyd George and Haig and the whole lot of them, should shoot them while they sit there, their old heads bent in prayer. Praying for the souls of the dead. Hypocrites; stinking hypocrites all.
. . . . . . . . . . .
She can’t see much between the legs. There are lots of different sorts of legs, though: brown trousers, black trousers, checked, and blue and black women’s stockings. There’s a strong, fusty smell, like her granny’s house, only stronger.
The little girl gives a tug on her father’s hand.
“What’s that?” His big face looms high above her.
“Can I come up again, Dad?”
“All right, chicken.” He smiles. “Come on.” And he lifts her, hoisting her high onto his shoulders, in one clean movement of his strong arms. She puts her hands on his head, the way he taught her to, steadying herself, and now she can breathe again, and see. She can see her family far below, her two older sisters and her mother on the other side of her dad, surrounded by all of the other hundreds of people, who are standing up here together on top of the cliffs. She can see the high, white cliffs, which are not white today, but gray, and the gray sky, and the gray-green sea. And then below, down in Dover where they have come from, the town where they live, she can see even more people. She tried to count them, earlier on, but had to stop, because it made her feel hot and dizzy. Her dad said there are thousands and thousands. The reason there are so many is because all the children have been given the day off school. And all the dads have been given the day off work.
The little girl scans the horizon.
She knows they are waiting for a ship—a ship that has a soldier on it. But they have been up here for ever already and there has been no sign.
Then, at the blurry line where the sea meets the sky, she sees something. The little girl squints. Looks away. Looks again. It is definitely there: a dark shape in the fog. “Daddy,” she says, excitedly, kicking her heels against her father’s chest. “Look!”
Her father straightens up and gives a low cry. A murmur moves through the crowd; the girl stretches to watch as it ripples through the people below.
Now lights appear—ship’s lights—and then … a ship, many ships, a large, dark ship and six smaller ones on either side. Below, her older sisters jump up and down, clamoring to be lifted so they can see, too. But her father ignores them, and she stays up there on her father’s shoulders as the ships come closer, her heart beating a frantic rhythm on her chest. He pats her on the shins. “Good girl,” he murmurs. “Good girl.” And she could just about pop with pride, because she was the first, she was the first one to see.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Poplar is even farther than Evelyn thought.
She left the office at one; she hasn’t had any lunch and it’s already nearly two. She’s sitting on the bottom of the omnibus, squeezed in between the window and a large, damp-smelling woman; and the whole bus is crammed full of people, in the aisles, standing all the way up the stairs. She rubs her sleeve against the glass and peers out but recognizes nothing; she traveled into uncharted territory hours ago.
The scars of war are more obvious out here: entire houses missing in the middle of terraces, the gaps given over to tumbled rubble and wild grass. Earlier, the bus stopped by a half-ruined house and she could see into the upstairs bedroom, see the red-flowered wallpaper that the last unlucky occupants chose, weather-faded now, streaked with water and rust. When the bus lurched on again she was glad; it seemed too sad a thing, too intimate to be seen.
The conductor passes, and she leans over the woman and touches his sleeve. “Excuse me?”
“Yes, Miss?”
“I’m looking for Poplar High Street . … Are we nearly there?”
“Next stop.”
She leans back in her seat. Poplar. It sounds so bucolic; Pissarro was the one who painted poplars, wasn’t he? There was a letter that Fraser sent her, an early one, describing a route march that he had taken.
Just like something out of Pissarro, a long, straight road with poplars on either side. You could never have imagined what was going on twenty miles north.
“Excuse me.” She squeezes past the woman beside her and, as the bus starts to slow, jumps off the back. The cold air is welcome after the packed, fetid bus. To her left is a straggling row of down-at-the-heels shops and costermongers, several of them with black-clad queues of women alongside who eye her as she passes by. The barrows are half-full of unpromising looking vegetables: graying potatoes, carrots, gritty turnips, and swedes. From her right, on the other side of the road, comes the clank and trundle of distant, heavy machinery, and across roofs and scrubland she can see the tilting cranes of the docks.
She heads along a wide main street in which rubbish and dead leaves fill the gutters. On either side of the road a few bored-looking men sit sprawled on benches, smoking. She avoids their gaze—knows the look, sees it every day, the stare of unemployment, of anger and apathy: a combustible mix. Farther up the hill she passes two cafés with a steady stream of dockers pouring out of each. A couple of the men turn their heads and shout halfheartedly after her. She puts her head down and pulls her collar up.
Grafton Street is two streets farther on: two rows of low terraces facing each other across a narrow strip of earth. There are no pavements and no trees, only a tangled knot of children whose noisy, scrappy game has full possession of the road. She looks for numbers on the doors, but sees none. When she turns, having covered the houses on one side, she sees the children have left off whatever they were playing and are standing, staring her way. Some of them are older than she first thought; they look to be all ages, from toddlers to nine or ten.
“Excuse me.” She takes a couple of steps closer t
o them, cursing her accent. “I’m looking for the Hinds. I know they live at number eleven, but I’m not sure from which end I’m supposed to count.”
The knot of children contracts like a dirty brown sea anemone and a small girl is given a push from behind. Despite the cold, she’s not wearing any shoes. She crosses the dirt with small, wary steps toward where Evelyn stands.
“Number eleven?” Evelyn holds out the paper and points to the numerals.
The girl stares blankly at it.
“Hind?” She bends so that her face is close to the girl’s. “Rowan Hind?”
“That’s my dad,” the girl whispers, and flinches away; and then she is gone, running, a pale streak disappearing around the back of the terrace.
Damn. Evelyn straightens up. She should have said something to reassure the kid; she must have thought her father was in trouble and ran back to warn him. He’ll probably hide—probably never come out now.
The rest of the children are still staring at her, as watchful as cats. She has the sudden, silly impulse to do something stupid, to pull a face or do a dance on the spot. But she does neither. Instead she folds the piece of paper, puts it back in her bag, and walks slowly away, toward the sounds of the distant docks. As she walks, she racks her brain. She could knock on doors, asking for the Hinds, but then that would only arouse more suspicion. Who knows what type of person they think she is? Someone come to cause trouble, no doubt.
And wouldn’t they be right?
She shakes her head. Damn. Damn. Damn.
A door to one of the terraces opens to her right. A pretty woman stands framed within it. Evelyn can just make out the little girl hiding behind her skirts.
“Mrs. Hind?”
The woman is pregnant, close to her time, and tired. Pale eyes. Thin, fair hair tied loosely at her neck.