Family Chorus

by Claire Rayner

  Above her head the whistling sound started, grew louder, more peevish, more shrill, and then almost casually hit the corner of the hotel with a roar. She felt the shock wave rock her on her heels and she fell awkwardly on to her back, but she was lucky, for there was someone behind her to break her fall and it didn’t jar as much as it might have done. After only a moment she was up again, trying to pull Bessie to her feet, for she too was lying on the pavement.

  All round them the shouting started. People were calling to each other, telling each other to phone the ambulances, call the fire brigade, get the wardens out, and somewhere someone was swearing comprehensively in a loud Brooklyn voice and she wanted to giggle, for it sounded so incongruous. Then there was a warning shout from ahead and as she turned her head to look she saw that a whole corner of the huge building had been shattered, and pieces of masonry were still falling, making slow, ominous shapes in the air as they tumbled.

  There was a smell now, a mixture of explosives and dust and burning and a whiff of coal gas. Then at last bells were ringing and fire engines were thrusting their scarlet way through the cluttered street. Wardens appeared from nowhere, pushing people along, urging them away from the corner where the masonry was still tumbling.

  ‘Oh, God, Barbara!’ Bessie said, urgently. ‘Barbara’s in there.’ Moving with a speed that didn’t seem possible from so small and frail a body she darted across the street, almost under the wheels of a fire engine, and into the building. After one startled moment Lexie followed her, almost wrestling with a warden who tried to hold her back and shouting at him, ‘I’ve got to go in there — I’ve got to get my sister —’ She ducked under his arm and plunged across Sherwood Street and through the big revolving doors into the building.

  It was bedlam inside. She stood blinking in the dust and smoke, trying to spot Bessie, but there was no sign of her. She pushed through the crowds towards the desk which was besieged with people, all trying to reach the telephones, while one desperate clerk was trying to hold them back as outside the noise reached a crescendo of shouting, fire brigade bells and wardens’ whistles.

  There was still no sign of Bessie in the hubbub, but it would be unlikely she could be seen among so many people, small as she was. Lexie stood uncertainly for a moment, then as the clerk turned his head towards her she called desperately to him, ‘Hey — my sister — we came to find my cousin. She just arrived at the hotel, I think — Miss Marks —’

  The clerk stared at her, then shook his head, wide-eyed with bewilderment and terror. She saw he was just a youngster, probably barely sixteen, not old enough to be in the services and therefore able to do this job. She wanted to reassure him, but all she could do was shout. ‘New arrivals — have you had new arrivals this morning?’ After a moment he nodded dumbly and said, ‘Winter Garden — someone went to the Winter Garden — said to tell anyone looking for her Winter Garden — I just told someone — the Winter Garden —’ Someone else suddenly leaned over the desk and seized him by the lapels of his jacket and he threw one despairing look at Lexie and tried to understand what the excited Frenchman wanted who was holding him so tightly.

  The crowds in the lobby were thinning now as people were cleared away by the wardens and the initial shock of fear receded as those who weren’t hurt tried to get out to the street and see what was going on.

  At last Lexie saw the sign to the Winter Garden, pointing off towards the right, and she pushed her way into the corridor as fast as she could, but stopped short. Over the heads of the milling people she could see a wide conservatory, glass-lined, where windows hung shattered in their webbing of crisscrossed strips of gummed paper, and the floor was piled with rubble. She felt sick as a new wave of fear rose in her. It made her rougher than she meant to be as she shoved through the knot of men and women standing staring and craning and someone said indignantly, ‘Hey, no need to push people around, for God’s sake —’

  But Lexie didn’t care and pushed on till she was in the front of the crowd. There were ambulance men there, busy with stretchers. She saw them carrying a laden one out on to the street through the door on the far side, and looked round frantically for someone to ask, someone who would know, who had been here in the Winter Garden when the blast hit it and then seized on a man in the hotel’s uniform.

  ‘Where are they taking them?’ she said urgently. ‘I was meeting my cousin here. I think she may be — where are they taking the injured?’

  The man peered at her and then lifted his head and called. ‘Hey, lady — this the lady you’re looking for?’ Lexie whirled in a great upsurge of hope, but as she saw Bessie pushing her way towards her her face fell.

  ‘No,’ Bessie said. Her face was crumpled as well, for she too had looked incandescent with hope until she saw Lexie. ‘No — we were both meeting her — can’t you find out if she was here? Can’t you, please — find out if —’

  He shook his head at them, clearly sympathetic, but helpless. ‘Sorry, lady, really I am, but we won’t be able to know where we are for a bit yet — I mean, we’ll have to check the hotel register against the people here. I’d go up the hospital if I was you, lady. They’ll be going to the Middlesex, I reckon. It’s the nearest. I’d go there. They’ll be able to tell you who they’ve got in there — just cut through Berwick Street and then up to Oxford Street and cross over. They’ll tell you who they got there from here —’

  As they turned to go he said awkwardly, ‘I wish you luck, lady, I really do. They’re buggers, these doodlebugs. I do wish you luck —’ But he looked bleak as he said it.

  38

  They had been sitting in the echoing waiting hall of the casualty department all afternoon and into the early evening before they had been given the bag, and now they sat with it on the bench between them, staring ahead at the tiled walls, silent and alone in their loss.

  They were free to go but didn’t want to. It was as though they’d reached a tacit agreement that leaving the hospital meant leaving Barbara for ever. And they didn’t want to do that yet.

  Daylight was only just beginning to fail, and a hospital porter began to put up the old blackout shutters ready to switch on the lights. Some of the waiting people, the alert and cheerful ones, called encouragement to him, warning him with heavy jocularity that the doodlebugs hadn’t got eyes to see where they were going, but could smell out lead swingers at forty paces. It was as though nothing special had happened, as though it were just another ordinary day, as though Barbara was still alive.

  ‘Should we phone her?’ Bessie whispered. Lexie turned and looked at her uncomprehendingly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Molly. Shall we phone her? Or —’ The question dangled, unaskable, between them.

  ‘She’s got to be told,’ Lexie said. ‘You can’t keep it from her. She’s got to be told — but not on the phone.’ She moved stiffly, tensing her aching buttocks against the hardness of the bench. ‘I’ll go and see her. Oh, God damn it all to hell!’ She stamped her foot on the terrazzo floor so sharply that the slap echoed, and people turned their heads and stared at her curiously.

  ‘I know.’ Bessie’s voice was thin and very tired. ‘I know. It seems so — all these years outside London to keep them safe and now when it’s all supposed to be nearly over, the second front happening and all, now — it’s so stupid. Stupid —’ She began to weep helplessly, letting the tears slide down her face unchecked, just sitting with her hands resting on her lap.

  After a while Lexie looked at the handbag on the bench between them. ‘Is this all there is?’ she asked, and Bessie nodded, reaching in her pocket to find a handkerchief and scrub at her reddened nose.

  ‘The nurse said her clothes were too ripped to be — I said we didn’t want them. I suppose she used it as an overnight bag. It’s a big one, isn’t it?’ She too turned her head to look at the bag and they sat in silence a little longer. And then, moving sharply, Lexie picked it up.

  ‘I’ll have a look,’ she said, twisting the clasp that
kept its plump sides closed against the bulk of its contents.

  But once it was open she couldn’t put her hand inside. She looked at the change purse and folded envelope that lay on top of a neatly folded cotton nightdress, and remembered something she’d read somewhere, and found herself saying it aloud.

  ‘And they saw those things ’a didn’t want seen, and they touched those things ’a didn’t want touched —’ Bessie caught her breath and turned her head away.

  ‘I’ve got to,’ Lexie said. ‘Haven’t I? Help me, Bessie — I’ve got to!’ Bessie laid a hand on hers and then reached into the bag for the change purse.

  ‘She never liked carrying a lot of cash,’ she said. “You never know who’s going to hold you up or anything,” she used to say. I told her, this is London, not Chicago like on the pictures. People don’t have guns and do hold-ups here, I said. But she used to say, “You never know”, and she used to work out just how much she needed and that was all she carried with her —’ Again the tears began to trickle down her thin cheeks.

  ‘The envelope — it’s got nothing written on it and it’s sealed,’ Lexie said, turning it over in her hand. ‘Shall I open it?’

  Bessie almost snatched it from her. Her cheeks had developed uneven patches of red and her eyes looked very bright. ‘In a minute,’ she said, and folded the envelope and set her hands over it on her lap. ‘Do the rest first.’

  There wasn’t much to do. The nightdress was the bulkiest item. They found a toothbrush, a tin of pink tooth powder and a sliver of soap wrapped in a dry flannel inside its neat folds. There was a small comb and a mirror and a clearly much prized powder compact, a stub of lipstick in a matching tube, and, staring at them, Lexie could remember seeing them on Barbara’s dressing table at home in Manhattan. She said, ‘It’s my fault. All of it. If I hadn’t come back she’d still be safe in New York. So would Molly — it’s all my fault —’

  ‘Don’t be so silly,’ Bessie said sharply. ‘Don’t be so silly. You start talking like that, you start blaming yourself for the whole damned war. It’s just the way it is. That doodlebug could have hit any one of us. Only it didn’t. It was meant for Barbara. Nothing you did or said would have made any difference.’ Lexie looked at her, at the sudden ferocity in her face and the glitter of anger in her eyes, and reached forward and took her face in both hands. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thanks. I know I’m stupid but — thanks.’

  ‘We’d better go, Lexie,’ Bessie said after a while, when they’d repacked the bag with its pitiful contents, apart from the envelope which she still held in her hand. ‘There’s nothing else we can do. I’ve told them what they have to do about the funeral and all —’ Lexie whitened, and she said gently, ‘It’s something you have to think about, isn’t it? I’ve phoned the synagogue and explained. They said she can go near Momma and — she’s family, so she should be near the family. She’ll like that.’

  ‘She’ll — she’s dead, Bessie! How the hell can a dead person like where she’s buried? Don’t talk that way — I can’t stand it —’

  But Bessie shook her head, unusually stubborn. ‘People know,’ she said. ‘They do. When they buried Momma and I saw it was right in the middle of a row and there were people she’d known near her, I thought then, Momma knows. She’ll be happier here. People don’t just disappear. Even when they’re dead you have to look after them —’ Lexie opened her mouth to argue and then wearily closed it again. There seemed no point in puncturing Bessie’s fantasy of happy dead people. If it helped her, who was Lexie to take away the comfort? If I could believe something like that myself, I’d feel better, she thought, as slowly they made their way out of the hospital, Bessie leaning rather heavily on her arm now. But I can’t. Barbara’s dead. I never told her I was sorry, and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it. I timed it wrong again.

  She found a taxi to take them home, ignoring Bessie’s protests at the expense, and as they sat side by side in its dustiness, watching London unravel alongside them, she tried to remember how she had felt that morning, sitting in the bus on the way to meet Barbara, and she couldn’t. It was as though she were a different person in a different world. Whoever that Lexie had been this morning she was gone now, as dead as Barbara was. I’m just a lot of dead people, she told herself as the taxi at last reached the flat. I perch on top of a great pile of dead Lexies, the small Lexie who was a searchlight and this morning’s Lexie who was so remorseful, and all the others in between. She began to laugh at the thought, and then, as Bessie looked anxiously at her, took a deep breath and managed to control the incipient hysteria.

  ‘I think we’d better take sleeping pills tonight, Bessie. Both of us. I think we need them. ‘I’ve still got some I brought from New York. I’ll make you some soup and then you go to bed. We need to, both of us —’

  ‘If you wait for the funeral Molly’ll get agitated,’ Bessie said. ‘One day later coming back than Barbara said won’t worry her — she knows the trains play up. But three days — she’d be frantic and it would be awful to tell her on the phone. Though I’ll have to tell her brothers in a letter, won’t I? Thank God Busha didn’t live to see this day, her only daughter dead — it would have killed her —’ She shook her head at her own foolishness and managed a small smile. ‘You’ll have to go now, Lexie. It’s all right. I can cope with the funeral. Alex — Mr Lazar’ll come, he’ll help me.’ She went pink. ‘He always does when I need him.’

  She insisted on coming to Euston to see her off, despite Lexie’s protests that she could cope perfectly well, but when it came to it Lexie was glad of her company. The train was an hour and a half late leaving. The station was packed with irritable people waiting to get on the few trains that were running, and having Bessie to keep her company as the long minutes crept away helped a lot. They talked little, exchanging only desultory comments about the other people sharing the vigil with them, listening to the conversations of others nearby, exchanging smiles with other passengers, but it helped for all that.

  When at last the train arrived and they were allowed to board, Bessie came with her to the barrier, pushing her way busily forward to make sure Lexie was at the front of the queue so that she’d have a better chance of getting a seat. The long haul to Scotland sitting on a suitcase, or worse still standing against the windows, would be hell on earth, she told Lexie. It was important to push ahead and get herself settled.

  ‘And take this with you,’ Bessie said as they reached the barrier and she pushed her through. ‘Molly’ll explain it. Don’t get angry, Lexie. And phone me when you get there —’ and then the crowd surged forward and Lexie found herself hurrying along the platform to the train, staring down at the envelope that Bessie had thrust into her hand.

  Once she was on the train and had managed not only to get a seat, but that great prize, a corner seat which would give her a firm window surface against which to lean when she fell asleep, she turned the envelope over and over in her hands, not wanting to open it. The envelope that had been in Barbara’s handbag; was it something she ought to open? Even Barbara must have secrets of her own; maybe this was a private letter, nothing to do with anyone else? Maybe it would be better to throw it away unopened. She frowned. What was it Bessie had said? ‘Molly will explain it — don’t get angry —’

  Bessie knows what all this is about, she thought, and remembered the uneasiness there had been when she had asked what Molly was doing in Scotland, the way Bessie had behaved. Secrets again, secrets —

  The train lurched forward, throwing the passengers in the now heavily crowded carriage against each other. The man standing in front of her lost his balance and trod painfully on her feet and she tucked them under the seat as neatly as she could as she slipped her thumb under the flap of the envelope and slit it open.

  At first she was bemused. It was the flimsy copy of a contract. She’d seen plenty of them in her time: just a standard contract for a performer’s services, with a few typewritten additions in the margins, an
d she’d turned it over in her fingers, puzzled, and then started to read it.

  It was as though she were sitting with her feet encased in ice, and the chill was rising in her. The words trembled under her eyes as the train rattled over the points, through Hampstead and Hendon, going north with shrieks from its whistle and great gouts of soot-stained steam painting the night sky, and Lexie had to read the words over and over again to get the sense of them.

  The contract was for the services of Miss Molly Rowan for the next five years. She was to give her services solely and wholly to the company herein described, Carter Enterprises Ltd, for a salary that would be negotiated upwards at six-monthly intervals, commencing at the date of signing at fifteen pounds a week. She was to make herself available for all forms of work on stage and screen, and would consult with the company, said Carter Enterprises, on all matters pertaining to publicity, exploitation of moving picture rights, still photography rights, endorsement rights, etcetera, etcetera — the company offered certain guarantees in exchange to protect the interests of said Miss Molly Rowan in every way necessary, to promote her career to the best of its ability, and would take her to Hollywood for the purposes of film making as soon as hostilities ceased, or shipping lanes were open to passenger traffic, whichever was the sooner.