by Lizzie Lane
So here they were standing beneath the ceremonial crown that stood in the middle of the Centre. The crown’s four sturdy legs were decorated with flags and paper flowers and straddled the wide path that formed a cross between walled flowerbeds where blooms of red, white and blue danced in the breeze.
‘Ships used to tie up here,’ Colin explained to the children.
‘There’s no water,’ Peter wailed.
‘No,’ Colin remarked sardonically. ‘Them that planned this preferred concrete and their own glory to water. Shame! They took no account at all of Bristol’s maritime history.’
‘A bit like ripping out its heart,’ said Edna sadly.
Colin smiled at her equally sadly and stroked her hair.
‘I’m inclined to agree with you,’ Charlotte remarked. She kept her gaze fixed on the crown, feeling a little uncomfortable at their public show of affection. It was not something she and David indulged in – even in private. She went on, ‘Perhaps one day a more enlightened corporation might reinstate the water and have the boats mooring again as far as Colston Avenue.’
Colin’s pale complexion turned pink as he burst out laughing. ‘Have you ever come across an enlightened corporation in your career as a professional busybody?’
Edna sucked in her breath. ‘Colin!’
Charlotte waved the remark aside. Colin liked goading her. ‘You’re probably right, Colin. At some time in the future they’ll probably replace it with an even worse concrete construction – despite busybodies like me.’
‘I hope I won’t be around to see it,’ said Colin. ‘Bloody corporation!’
Charlotte shook her head and smiled. She enjoyed Colin and Edna’s company and admired their resilience in the face of Colin’s disablement. Normally, she’d be exuberant, talking louder, running around the flowerbeds with the children, but the existence of the letter lay heavy. What if she disclosed its existence and their marriage broke up as a result? Anything could happen. She shivered.
‘It’s much larger than I expected,’ Colin exclaimed, breaking into her thoughts, his head tilted back, face turned upwards to study the underside of the elaborate construction. ‘Good job the Queen, bless her, didn’t wear anything this big on her head.’
‘She could live in it,’ said Edna, gazing up at it from underneath.
‘Is it a house?’ asked Susan.
‘No. It’s a crown,’ Edna explained.
Charlotte and Edna stood on either side of Colin looking up intermittently and ready to catch him should he lose his balance though he was using the handle of Pamela’s pushchair to keep him steady. Edna held the hands of the older children.
‘So there you are,’ said Charlotte in the same sort of voice she used when giving a talk to the Townswomen’s Guild, ‘a wonderful tribute to our new Queen. I promised to walk underneath it with you and I have.’
Colin eyed her speculatively, a hint of a smile playing around his mouth. ‘But I have seen it before, Charlotte. Me and Edna do have a car now, you know. So come on, what’s on yer mind?’
A blushing Edna tapped his arm in admonishment. Charlotte saw the gesture and almost blushed herself. Of course she had an ulterior motive and rebuked herself for underestimating Colin’s astute nature. The blush retreated in the face of her usual self-control and she laughed. ‘How clever of you. You’ve found me out. How did you guess?’
Colin grinned, winked and tapped both his tin legs. ‘I’ve got built-in radar.’
‘Colin!’ Edna’s blush inched over her jaw and down her neck.
‘It’s all right, Edna.’
It never failed to amuse Charlotte that Edna thought her vulnerable to Colin’s challenging sense of humour, as though people from Clifton with plummy voices never laughed or told rude jokes. She asked, ‘Can I buy you tea? The Civic Restaurant’s open.’
They made their way to one of the wartime facilities that had not as yet faded away with the last of the rationing. Civic restaurants had been around almost since war was first declared and seemed likely to linger – perhaps as long as the prefabricated houses. The latter were fast approaching their ten-year dismantlement date. Charlotte thought it a shame. For the first time a lot of people had inside bathrooms, a big improvement on an outside lavatory and a tin bath hanging on the back wall.
‘I thought, you could help,’ Charlotte began as they drank tea served in thick china cups and bit into hot teacakes smothered in precious butter and real raspberry jam. ‘As you know, I am doing work for the Bureau of Displaced Persons. These people are unable to return to their own countries. Most would be killed if they did. A large number of them came over during the last decade when things were in turmoil after the war. Since the Iron Curtain came down we’re seeing more and more people applying to live in this country. Our aim is to find them adequate accommodation and jobs. At present they are being restricted to the most labour intensive and menial of jobs – mining, steel-making, road-digging. But there are those of us who think this unfair. Some of these people are highly qualified and deserve better than that. We are going to put it to our superiors that there are more skilled jobs needing to be done. I thought you, Colin, might be able to help with this.’
Colin eyed her intently, a knowing smile playing on his lips. Colin was clever at seeing through people and turning comments on their heads. She didn’t want him to do too much of that today. She wanted him to be serious.
‘Where are they from?’ asked Edna, her face clouded.
Charlotte answered, ‘Some are Ukranians, Lithuanians, Yugoslavs – even a few Germans among them. The majority are Polish.’
‘Are they skilled?’ Colin asked.
Charlotte sighed regretfully as if having a skill or profession was some kind of drawback. ‘Yes. That’s why we feel they’re being wasted, but’ – she shrugged and shook her head – ‘I’m afraid that if they wish to settle in this country they are only allowed to take certain jobs. We’re getting enough accusations that they’re taking jobs from our own people. Everyone wants to forget the war, but the problems it left us with won’t go away just like that.’ She shrugged again. ‘I wish it were otherwise.’
Colin met the steady gaze she gave him over the top of her teacup. He grinned and lifted one of his legs with both hands to get it into a more comfortable position. ‘And you’d like me to help you break the mould.’
Her spirits rose. She knew that look, but pretended she hadn’t noticed, sipped her tea and looked round at the place they were in as if it had lately acquired a certain ostentation rather than being pretty basic and smelling of fat fried many times over and still sitting in the pans.
‘So,’ said Colin, ‘if I agree to take some of these people on, you then have to persuade your bureau—’
‘Actually the Home Office,’ Charlotte corrected.
‘ … The Home Office,’ Colin went on, ‘that the jobs I am offering are very menial.’
Charlotte nodded. ‘Yes. At least, to start with.’
They all fell silent as they picked the last crumbs left on their plates. It was all too thought-provoking for words.
‘Funny old world,’ said Colin at last, his eyes following his wife’s gentle movements as she adjusted her daughter’s pillow to accommodate her sleepy head. ‘What do you think then, Edna?’
‘I’m sure we can help,’ said Edna, her eyes bright as her hand covered that of her husband.
Charlotte was suddenly reminded of the old saying that behind every successful man was a very strong woman. Edna’s gentle exterior was deceptive. Charlotte sighed with satisfaction.
Colin agreed to look at the particulars of any people she referred to him.
After that their conversation turned to family matters.
Edna started talking about how well Pamela was walking compared with Susan and her brother at that age. Recognizing that he wasn’t likely to get a word in on this subject, Colin struggled to his feet. ‘Excuse me, ladies.’
He made his way to the lavatory makin
g a loud clanking noise each time one of his legs hit against the metal leg of a table.
Exuberant that Colin had agreed to help, Charlotte didn’t think too carefully about what she was saying. ‘You sometimes get the youngest outperforming the oldest though it isn’t really fair to compare. I mean, are you comparing the right ones?’
Edna looked startled.
Charlotte could have bitten off her tongue. She had sounded as if she were talking about Edna’s children, and in particular the son she’d given up for adoption. She made an effort to make amends. ‘I meant a child of two and one of seven.’
Edna collected herself. Her smile was as soft and gentle as her large brown eyes. Her gaze settled on the child sleeping in the pushchair of tubular metal, a little chipped nowadays seeing as she’d used it for all three of her children.
‘It’s all right, Charlotte. It hurts to remember, but don’t think that I don’t. It’s just that I try not to mention my wicked past and my firstborn child when Colin’s around.’
‘Wicked? I’d hardly call it that.’
Edna grimaced. ‘You haven’t heard my mother. Despite her mind being weak nowadays her views on my eternal shame have got worse rather than better.’
‘I thought she might have mellowed with the years.’
‘Oh no! Not her. I close my ears to her as much as possible. Sherman was a part of my life, just as his father was part of my life. I don’t advertise the fact that I have an illegitimate child – people being the way they are. But I don’t forget it either.’
Charlotte sipped her tea and thought of the letter locked in her bureau. She felt compelled to ask the obvious question. ‘What would you do if something from your past suddenly caught up with you?’
Edna looked at her questioningly. ‘What are you getting at?’
Charlotte gathered her thoughts. She purposely inverted the situation. ‘Let’s say Sherman’s father wrote to you and wanted to meet you again?’
‘I don’t think that’s ever likely to happen.’
‘But what if he did. What would you do?’
Edna looked towards the restaurant door. It rattled as though it were about to fall off its hinges every time a bus went by. The whole place was beyond its best. Before very long it would be no more than a pile of dust and jagged wood.
She waited for the buses to go by and the door to stop rattling before she answered.
‘Sometimes at night I imagine how it would be, how I’d tell him about Sherman and then about Colin and me. And then I think of Colin.’ She turned to face Charlotte. ‘And then I feel scared. I couldn’t be sure that someone wouldn’t get hurt.’
Chapter Nine
Janet stared through the office window over the rooftops to the misted skyline of the city centre. There were plenty of reports, letters and patients’ notes to be typed, taken for signature, and the filing was brimming from the tiered wire trays sitting on her desk. She hated office work. Its only redeeming feature was the fact that she was fascinated by medicine and the hospital. Sometimes when she was out of the office she wandered along the hospital corridors chatting to medical staff, but mostly to patients. It felt good to talk to them about their ailments, to calm their fears, even to try to explain a surgical procedure or a course of medication. The more she did it, the more she wanted to do it. Paperwork, especially typing, was another matter entirely.
The office which she shared with Dorothea and two other secretaries was plain but not dark. On the contrary, the fact that they were on the fifth floor meant the office was bathed in light from a sky that seemed almost touchable. Because they looked down at it from St Michael’s Hill, the city seemed like a counterpane left rumpled by a recent sleeper into hillocks of varying shape and size.
Her reverie was disturbed as the door swung open. Dorothea entered and twirled into her chair, slapping a pile of papers and a shorthand notepad onto her desk.
‘One of these days Doctor Bailey is going to ask me to take down more than shorthand – mark my words,’ she said with a ribald giggle.
Why wasn’t it Dorothea that got raped? Janet gazed out of the window, no longer seeing the panoramic view but a kind of map, a table of possibilities and probabilities. She answered her own question: availability. She’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Dorothea had been elsewhere, willingly surrendering to Henry’s sexual advances.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Dorothea asked from over the top of an Imperial typewriter, a squat object of black metal and brass-edged keys.
Janet eyed Dorothea’s round face and the permanently parted red lips. Her permed hair bounced in curly bangs as she rested her chin on her hand and her elbow on her typewriter. She had a willing look about her, of course she did. Dorothea had the reputation of being a jolly sort who had a way with even the most crotchety of the senior surgeons. She was a coquette, a girl who promised and quite often delivered.
‘Of course I am. Why do you ask?’
‘It’s ten forty-five,’ said Dorothea.
Janet looked at her blankly.
Dorothea jerked her chin at the untouched cup of tea still sitting on Janet’s desk.
Janet shrugged. ‘I didn’t feel like it.’
Dorothea grinned wickedly. ‘I always feel like it – and I don’t mean tea.’
Janet raised her eyes to heaven and got up from her desk, cup and saucer in hand. Just as she got to the door, Grace Argyle, Secretary to the Chief Medical Officer and self-appointed Mother Superior to the secretaries and the typing pool, entered. She was a grey person, though not in the light, fluid way that the sky is grey. Iron-grey hair cropped close to her head, steel grey eyes, and lip colour resembling unpolished tin made her seem solid and unyielding, which she was. She was also built like a battleship.
The keys of Dorothea’s typewriter immediately clattered into life.
Janet stood to one side of the door to let her pass, hoping that once she was through she could slip out quickly herself without too many questions. Grace Argyle stopped and looked her up and down. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To empty my cup,’ said Janet raising it slightly and half-wishing she had the courage to throw it over her.
‘Don’t be long!’
Once outside, Janet took a deep breath. The antiseptic smell of the hospital corridor was preferable to Miss Argyle’s mix of musty tweed and lavender water.
Maude, the other secretary with whom she shared the office, was coming along the corridor, shrugging a short box jacket from off her shoulders having just returned from the dentist. On seeing Janet, she glanced at her watch. ‘Is the old bat on the warpath yet?’ she asked with rushed nervousness.
Janet smiled wanly. ‘Don’t worry. You’ve got a legitimate excuse.’
‘Don’t be long emptying that teacup,’ Maude called after her.
Janet opened her mouth, meaning to say that it didn’t take very long to empty a teacup. But she was out of the office and, although Miss Argyle had verbally warned her not to do it, she couldn’t help herself. The hospital was full of patients who appeared to appreciate her presence.
‘I’m going to visit a friend of my mother’s in Logan Ward,’ she lied.
‘Watch out,’ Maude shouted after her, the sleeves of her jacket dragging on the floor as she rushed towards the office door.
I’ll be careful,’ Janet shouted back. For the first time in days she smiled at someone other than a child. Grace Argyle was a Harpy who liked to be in control of her ‘girls’. Janet had already been warned by her not to go wandering around the hospital.
‘Once more,’ Miss Argyle had said, ‘and your employment could very well be terminated.’
It was a dire warning, but Jonathan’s words rang in her ears. ‘Do what you think is right.’ Well, that was exactly what she was going to do. Visiting the ‘proper’ hospital, getting away from the offices, was the best part of working here.
No one questioned her as she wandered around. Few of the nursing staff knew the secretar
ies, so she could pretend to be a visitor, one who had travelled miles, but could not, because of distance, visit at the normal visiting hour of seven p.m. to eight p.m.
The corridor adjacent to the geriatric ward was empty except for what appeared to be a bundle of laundry buried inside a fawn and brown dressing gown. She thought she heard groaning. On further examination she noticed the wisps of hair and was instantly reminded of ‘old man’s beard’, the cotton soft growth that clings to September hedgerows.
The thin skin of the hand hanging over the chair arm was peppered with liver spots. His fingers flicked convulsively as she approached and he lifted his head, his face contorted into a pain-filled grimace.
Concerned, she dropped to his side so that her face was level with his. ‘Are you all right?’
Blinking as if trying to focus, he screwed up his face so that his eyes were no more than glistening dots among wrinkly folds. ‘I don’t like it here. I like flowers. I like fresh air. Can you take me to the garden? Can you? Can you?’ He was like a wilful child, repeating until someone gave in to him.
Janet patted his hand and smiled up into the half-hidden eyes. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’
‘Fresh air? Can I have fresh air? Please?’ he whined.
There was no point in explaining that there was no garden, but she couldn’t help but pity him. She could understand him wanting fresh air. The wards were stuffy.
‘I can’t promise you a garden, but I think I know where we can have some fresh air,’ she said finally.
After getting to her feet, she released the footbrake on the wheelchair and pushed him off along the corridor. They stopped at a place where it widened, glass windows in thin metal frames forming an enclosed balcony with casements that opened. Like the window frames, the handles had been painted recently and were difficult to open.
The old man muttered loudly behind her, ‘I grew marigolds, gladioli, tulips, cabbages, kidney beans, Brussels sprouts …’ The litany of flowers and vegetables went on and on. It was as if his achievements in the garden were being used as encouragement for her to use greater strength to satisfy his needs.