by Anna Hope
“I didn’t want to hear that story,” she says.
He looks up at her. “Oh, God,” he says, and his face drains of blood. “I’m so sorry. It’s just—there was something—I lost. And I—haven’t tried to be with anyone since.”
“I want to go home.” She stands up, pulling on her coat. “I have to go to work and I want to go home.”
“Of course. That was dreadful of me. All of it. God,” he says, shaking his head. “What an utter fool.”
And then he hits himself, punches himself hard in the temple. He hits himself so hard that her hand flies up to her mouth. He sits there for a moment, as though stunned. Then lifts his hand again.
“No!” She puts her hand out to stop him and catches his wrist. “Please! Don’t.”
He stills, nodding slowly, as though acknowledging something, and brings his hand onto his lap. He flexes his fingers out. “Sorry,” he says quietly. “I don’t know quite what happened there.”
After a moment, he stands up. He straightens his trousers. All of his drunkenness seems to have drained quite away. He simply looks exhausted now. He pats his pockets and takes out some money. He looks at it, seeming to think about it. “Have you enough money to get home?”
“Yes. I’ll get the tube. It’ll be running now.”
“Right-o.” He puts the money back in his pocket, and she is glad. “Your hat,” he says, picking it up and passing it to her. Their knuckles graze briefly as she takes it from him. Then he walks to the door, and they step out onto the green-tiled landing. He presses the button for the lift.
He looks down the lift shaft, as though it were fascinating all of a sudden, as though study of lift shafts were his favorite thing in the world. It seems to take an awfully long time traveling up. They stand side by side, not speaking. When it arrives, he pulls back the cover. “Forgive me,” he says, quietly, “for being such a terrible bore.”
“You weren’t,” she says.
He shakes his head. “You’re very kind,” he says, with a tiny, rueful smile, “but I know that’s not true.”
Hettie steps into the lift, and he pulls the grille across.
As the lift starts to jerk and crank its way down, she catches a last glimpse, through the grille of the door, of the latticed, broken jigsaw of his face.
. . . . . . . . . . .
This is not how Ada had imagined it. She had imagined somewhere different: a dark room with a round table, like somewhere from the pictures, or from the comedy sketches—the ones of people talking to the dead. There have been plenty of those these last few years. But this room is ordinary and light: the back room of a house in a street as ordinary as Ivy had said it would be. And the woman sitting opposite her is ordinary-looking, too, in a way. There is something about her, though, difficult to grasp. It is hard to tell her age for a start; she could be forty-five or so, the same age as Ada, but she could be ten years older. Her skin is smooth and unlined. She seems to have all her teeth.
The woman was reluctant when she knocked on her door. She could tell that, when she asked for a Mrs. Kempton, holding out the piece of paper she was carrying, explaining that a friend had recommended her—a friend who had come to see her during the war. The woman looked up and down the street and then, “All right,” she’d said, she supposed she’d better come in. “But I don’t really do this anymore.”
She showed her through a hallway smelling of recently cooked meat, past an open door through which Ada glimpsed a parlor with a piano against one wall, then into this room at the back of the house, with just one table in it and no other furniture, no pictures, looking out over a small garden, in which a rosebush stands, still heavy with the last of its blooms.
“Have you brought something of his with you?” the woman asks now.
Ada’s heartbeat increases. They haven’t even spoken of money yet. How much will this woman ask for when they are done?
She takes the lumpen one-eyed rabbit from her bag. It took a long time for her to decide what to bring. It is a toy she stitched for Michael one Christmas, when he was a baby, and which he didn’t let go of for the next few years. She puts it on the table where it sits, sorry looking and sagged; the felt rubbed bare in patches, its one brown eye staring back.
The woman turns the worn rabbit in her hands. In the silence, Ada can hear a clock ticking somewhere in the house. “Have you nothing else?” the woman says eventually. “Nothing else of his?”
Her mouth feels dry. “Is that wrong, then?”
“Not wrong, no.” The woman puts it back on the table. Her hands are pale, her fingers long. “I just wonder if we may need something a little more recent than this. Have you a photograph at all?”
The most recent one Ada could find was the one from the box, the one that was blurred, and she had hoped not to have to get it out, but she takes it from her bag and puts it in the woman’s outstretched palm.
“I’m sorry.” She begins to sweat; it inches its way between her skin and her stays, a long slow curl.
“Why?” The woman looks up. Her gaze is even.
“It’s not a very good photograph.”
The woman holds it for a moment more and then nods briefly before putting it down on the table. Then she stands and draws the curtains, which are green but thin, so now green light filters into the room. “I hope you don’t mind the curtains drawn,” she says. “But we don’t want to be disturbed.”
Ada wonders who or what would disturb them, around the back of this quiet house. The woman comes to sit, and there’s silence again as she touches the rabbit and then the photograph in turn.
Even though none of this is funny, Ada is filled with the urge to laugh.
The woman opens her eyes. “I’m not one for the séance,” she says. Her voice has changed; it is light and clear.
Ada jolts.
“None of those tricks or performances for me.” The woman takes her hands away and puts them in her lap. “I’ve been trying to listen,” she says.
“Listen to what?”
“To your son.”
A sour thin chill passes down Ada’s spine, and in its wake comes a wave of nausea. She closes her eyes and waits for the feeling to pass.
“Are you all right?”
Ada opens her eyes again and focuses on the woman’s smooth face. “I think so.”
“I should have said,” says the woman, “if at any point you feel that you want this to stop, then you must say.” She spreads her hands on the tablecloth. “I’ve been trying to listen,” she says again, frowning, “but it’s hard.”
“How do you mean?”
“He is dead. Your son. Without a doubt. I cannot feel him here.”
The room tilts.
“Are you all right?”
Ada comes back to herself. Nods.
“Good,” says the woman, evenly. “Your son is dead. But you didn’t come here to learn that.” She speaks almost briskly, in a matter-of-fact way.
Didn’t I?
Ada finds that she is glad of the briskness.
Perhaps I didn’t, after all.
“Tell me about him.” The woman puts her finger on to the photograph. “Can you tell me when this was taken?” She pushes it across the table.
Ada glances briefly toward it. “I’m not sure.”
“Why do you carry it if you don’t want to look at it?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Why not?”
She makes herself look. “His face is blurred.”
“Yes, it is.” The woman looks up. “If you don’t like it, then why do you carry this particular photograph?”
“I don’t.”
The woman raises her eyebrow.
Ada shifts in her chair; she feels like this is a test she is failing—has already failed. “I have one in the frame, in the parlor, but I didn�
��t think I should bring that one on the bus.”
The woman’s face softens. “I’ll tell you what,” she says. “I think that you should put this away.” She hands the photograph back. “And I wouldn’t look at it again if it makes you feel like that.”
Ada takes it and puts it back in her bag, feels relief course through her.
“Why don’t you describe him to me instead?”
“Pardon?”
The woman’s gaze is steady. “Why don’t you describe him to me? I’m sure you could describe him better than any photograph would.”
This feels like another test, a worse one.
“Don’t worry,” says the woman softly. “There’s nothing to get right. Just see what comes into your mind.”
She tries to think, but her mind is blank—or rather, not blank, but fizzing and thick. She shakes her head to try to clear it. She cannot see him. Cannot conjure his face. She cannot do this and the photograph is blurred and her son is dead. She stands up, putting her hands on the table. They do not look like her own. Her blood is like a tide. Then the woman is beside her, her cool hand on hers. The tide passes. There is silence behind it.
“Let me get you some water.”
Ada sits. She can hear noises from the kitchen, water being poured from a jug. The woman returns, placing a glass down on the table before her. “Would you like to stop?”
“No.” She is thirsty, suddenly, terribly thirsty. She drinks the water down. “I want to go on.” She puts the empty glass on the table between them and finds the woman’s eyes. “No one,” she says. “Not one person. Not in three years. Not my husband even, has ever asked me to talk about my son.”
The woman nods. “Tell me.”
Ada closes her eyes. “He was—ordinary. An ordinary boy.” She remembers something then, something she hasn’t thought of in a long time. “He was funny. He told daft jokes.”
“What was his favorite?”
“He told a joke about—” She grimaces. “Terrible jokes.”
“Tell me one.”
“He used to tell a joke about India … about Indian food. And India-gestion.”
The woman smiles. So does Ada. “He told that one over and over again. Terrible.” She shakes her head. “He’d play out with his football—all hours—till I had to drag him in. He went along to the games with his dad, you see, ever since he was small. He liked swimming in the canal. In the summertime. I always told him not to, but he wouldn’t listen. I always knew when he’d been doing it, though.”
“How?”
“He smelt funny.” She wrinkles her nose. “He couldn’t hide it. I used to worry he’d get sick. But he never did.”
The woman nods again. “Did he want to go to war?”
The question is simple, but shocking somehow, in its directness.
“At first.” Ada nods. “When all the lads from his team joined up. But he was too young then. He went after his birthday in 1917.” She pauses. “But by then it felt … different.”
“How?”
“Well, it felt—like they were all—like it was hopeless, didn’t it? Like they were all just going to their deaths. And I think he knew.”
“Why do you say that?”
“There was something that he said to me. ‘There’s nothing safe,’ he said. ‘There’s no such thing.’ I couldn’t get that out of my head. I still can’t. And I think—I could have stopped it, somehow.”
“How could you have stopped it?” The woman leans forward in her seat.
“I could have hid him.” She looks up. Her heart is beating so hard and so fast that she believes that the woman must be able to hear it, see it, through her stays, through her dress.
“How?” says the woman, equally softly. “How could you have done that?”
“My husband.” Her voice is thick, but she clears her throat. “He works at a factory. He knew someone in the union who was doing it. They did it for one or two of them at the same time.” She has never told this to anyone before. Cannot believe she is saying it now. “He wanted to, Jack. But I said no.” She shakes her head. “I said he had to go.”
“Jack is your husband?”
“Yes.”
“He would have risked an awful lot to do that.”
“I know.”
“So would you.”
She can feel a tightening, her heart, her throat. Pressure building. It is difficult to swallow. She speaks quickly, the words tumbling out. “I thought that if he went, if he hid, and they found him, then he could be worse off. That they would have sent him over anyway. You read about those men that they found like that. And anyway”— she shakes her head—“he wouldn’t have gone. Michael. He’d never have done it. But I keep thinking now, What if I’d let Jack try? We might still have him today.”
The only sound is the quiet hissing of the gas.
“Do you feel guilty?”
She looks up. For the first time she feels scornful of this woman. What use is she, if she can’t tell the obvious? If she can’t read what’s right in front of her face? And what is she doing here, in this empty room, talking to this stranger of the most intimate of things? “Of course I do.”
“Guilt is a very powerful attractor.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Do you see him?”
“Who?”
“Your son.”
She feels a prickling on her scalp, as if insects were running in among her hair. “Yes.”
“It that why you’re here?”
The insects start to sting and bite. “Yes.”
“Tell me about it.” The woman holds her gaze.
She shifts in her seat. “I see him, in the street.”
“Go on.”
“At first it was all the time. Then not for years, and then this week … I saw him again.”
The woman’s face is still. “And does he speak to you? When you see him?”
She shakes her head.
“Do you ever see his face?”
“No. He’s always looking away.”
The woman nods and lets out a breath. It is as if none of this surprises her. “I want to tell you something,” she says. “I don’t know if it will help.” She pushes with her hands against the table and stands. “But then there’s not much that does help, is there?” she says. “In the end.”
“I see so many women here,” she says, “and they are holding, all of them. Holding on to their sons or their lovers or their husbands, or their fathers, just as surely as they are holding on to the photographs that they keep or the fragments of childhood they bring with them and put on the table here,” she gestures with her hand. “They’re all different but all the same. All of them are afraid to let them go. And if we feel guilt, we find it even harder to release the dead. We keep them close to us; we guard them jealously. They were ours. We want them to remain ours.” There’s a silence. “But they are not ours,” she says. “And in a sense, they never were. They belong to themselves, only. Just as we belong to ourselves. And this is terrible in some ways, and in others … it might set us free.”
Ada is silent, absorbing this, then, “Where do you think they are?” she says.
“Who?”
“All those dead boys. Where are they? They’re not in heaven, are they? They can’t be—old people. Ill people. Babies, and then—all of these young men. One minute they’re young, they’re alive, the next they’re dead. In hours they’re all dead. Where did they go?”
“Were you ever a believer?”
“I used to think I was.”
The woman’s face changes; it looks older suddenly, the lines less sure. “I don’t know where they are,” she says. “I can listen, with the objects that people give me; I can try to hear. And sometimes … some of them seem … calm. I can feel that. And I can pass that on. A
nd that helps, I think. Some of them are harder.”
Ada licks her lips. They are cracked, dry. “And what about my son?” she says. “What about Michael?”
The woman frowns, comes back over to the table and puts her hands on it. For a moment more she stands there. Then she shakes her head, as though to clear it. “I think,” she says, “that you must learn to let him go.”
Ada is silent.
“Tell me,” the woman says. “Your husband. Jack, you said his name was?”
“Yes.”
“He is well, is he?”
It is an odd question. “Yes, I think he is,” says Ada.
“Can I give you some advice?”
She nods, warily.
“Look at your husband,” says the woman. “See what you find there. He’s living. He’s alive. He wants to be seen.”
. . . . . . . . . . .
At a quarter to four the woman starts stacking chairs onto tables. Evelyn is the only customer left in the place, over in the far corner of the café, by the greasy window, the remains of her third cup of tea and a bacon sandwich by her side. She closes her book and pulls on her coat. “Thank you,” she calls to the woman as she leaves. The woman lifts a vague hand in good-bye.
It is getting dark already on the brown street outside, the buildings thickening, growing bulky with it. Yet the sky ahead is still high and light blue, as if it might be readying to detach itself, leaving the earth to its darkness, floating free. For a moment she feels it again, that tipping panic that seems to grip her so often now, and she has to lean against the wall to catch her breath.
It is two minutes past four when she knocks on Rowan Hind’s door. There is only empty silence from within. The temperature has plummeted with the going down of the light. She feels hopeless, suddenly, parasitic. What in the name of God is she doing all the way out here, hounding people in their homes?
Spinster.
Meddling spinster.
The door opens and the little girl stands there, wearing an apron now, and a scrappy piece of blue ribbon tied around her hair. One leg twists around the other. She still has no shoes on her feet. “My dad’s not back yet.”
“I see. I don’t suppose I could wait inside, could I? Just until he is?”