The clock chimed and I remembered where I was. Just as quickly as it had come over me, the feeling disappeared, leaving me shaking and horrified.
‘Have some sandwiches,’ I said quickly, hoping that Rose hadn’t noticed. ‘I made them for you.’
She piled her plate up high, then began to push the food into her mouth, hardly pausing to chew and washing it down with gulps of tea. I remembered how thin she’d been without the camouflage of her clothes. I sat back in my chair, not wanting to interrupt, cradling the baby and feeling ashamed.
When Rose had finished the last of the cakes, she looked up at me and grinned.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I was starving. That was great.’
I began to feel more cheerful again. The tea had been a success. ‘Would you like to see your room?’ I said.
Her shyness had gone. ‘Yes please,’ she said eagerly, holding out her arms.
I passed her the baby.
‘Will you be able to manage?’ I asked. ‘It’s at the top of the house. There are lots of stairs.’
She nodded. ‘I’ll be fine. She weighs hardly anything.’
I led the way upstairs, steadying myself against the banisters. Now I had cleaned it, I liked my house again. I liked its carefully hung pictures and furniture chosen over the years. I resolved not to neglect it, to make it a home, a place for Rose and her child. For some reason, her opinion mattered to me. I wanted her to like it too. I wanted her to stay.
The effort of climbing made my heart hammer in my chest, and when we got to the top of the stairs, I took hold of the doorknob and stood for a second, recovering my breath. Then I pushed open the door, stepping back to let Rose pass.
The room was warm from the evening sun, which made the polished furniture glow. Rose’s bed looked inviting, covered with a flowered counterpane and I had made another bed for the baby from a drawer, fitting a pillow into it as a mattress. I’d found a crystal vase for the last rose of summer and I was pleased that I’d bothered. The rose was the finishing touch, I thought, something alive and new.
But when I turned towards Rose she didn’t look as I had hoped she might. Her face was pale and her lips pressed tightly together. As I watched, two fat tears slid out of the corners of her eyes. A moment later, others followed, rolling down her cheeks and onto the baby, whom she clutched to her chest like a doll.
I took hold of her arm and led her to the bed. I sat next to her, waiting. Her voice, when she could finally speak, was small.
‘I’m sorry, Nora,’ she said, wiping her face with her sleeve.
I patted her arm.
‘It’s the rose. Mum used to put one next to my bed when I came home from school for the holidays.’
Her voice broke. Timidly, I put my arm around her shoulders.
‘Shh,’ I whispered. ‘Shh.’
We stayed like that until the last of the sunlight had gone and the room was dark.
Later, I settled into the window seat in my bedroom, overlooking the garden. It was midnight, always my favourite time, when the world is quiet for a while, the day has passed and there is space before the next begins. The window was open and the cool night air carried in smells of the garden. I picked up the silver case from the nightstand, turning it over in my hands, tracing the delicate engravings with my fingertips and feeling along the curves of the initials. I pushed in the small catch with my thumb and the case sprung open to reveal cigarettes nestled under a piece of fraying elastic. Carefully, I pulled one out and passed it under my nose as if it were a cigar. I tapped it on the windowsill, then lit it. As the smoke drifted into the room I inhaled it deeply, my eyes closed, and she was there, as always, summoned by the smell. Cigarettes were one of the things that she developed a passion for, one of the things that I hated then but became faithful to later, seeking out her brand in small shops in back streets. Over the years, I developed the habit of burning a single one each night, like incense at an altar, to remember her.
That night I wanted more than memories. I wanted advice.
‘Grace,’ I whispered. ‘Are you there? Are you listening? Something’s wrong. I can see it in everything she does. I don’t know what to say to her. I don’t know what to do. Should I help? I’m frightened of interfering. You know what happened the last time I did it. Tell me what to do, please tell me.’
But there was no reply. I was entirely alone, surrounded by the night. The garden was as still and dark as ever, the only movement coming from the trees as they shifted in the wind, the only sound the rustle of leaves. I wondered if I would last long enough to see them fall.
Six
The war would be over by Christmas, they said, but it wasn’t. By Christmas it had hardly begun. Grace and I helped Mrs Rivers hang blackout curtains at every window in the rectory, passing her pins and holding up the heavy cloth until our arms ached. We waited, listening to the wireless every night for news. They gave it a special name, the Phoney War. We looked up the word in Reverend Rivers’ dictionary.
Fake, it said, a sham.
I did not know then that things are often not what they seem. There were dark places in the countryside with only the birds to see what happened in them. The rectory had carpets to sweep bad news under. There was space for secrets. The war wasn’t the only phoney thing that autumn, but I didn’t notice. I was wonderfully happy, happier than I had ever thought possible. Each morning I woke up knowing that by the time I went to bed again I would have learned something new. At night I dreamed, strange and astonishing dreams of things and places I had never known existed. It was as if I had been born a second time, into a life that was so thrilling that sometimes I found it hard to breathe.
I gobbled down my lessons as greedily as my first Sunday lunch. From the moment I walked into Reverend Rivers’ study, I was bewitched. It wasn’t like the rest of the rectory, polished and perfect. I had never seen so many books in one place, squeezed onto shelves and piled up on the floor in great wobbling stacks that looked as if they might fall over at any moment. The room smelled of paper, a thick, satisfying smell that mingled with the scent of tobacco from Reverend Rivers’ pipe. I felt as if anything was possible in this room, as if I could take all the words in the books and make them into whatever I wanted. I stood and stared at them, spelling out their titles, trying to guess what they might be about. Reverend Rivers must be very clever, I thought. I wondered what it was like to know so much. I felt a strange excitement flicker inside me at the thought that one day I might know some of it too.
‘You may touch them.’
I jumped, suddenly shy at the sound of Reverend Rivers’ voice, but after a moment my curiosity got the better of me and I moved closer to the shelves, running my hands over the leather bindings as if I could absorb the information held inside them through my fingertips.
‘So you like books?’ Reverend Rivers asked.
I nodded, my attention still focused on the volumes in front of me.
‘Then we shall enjoy our lessons.’
Grace let out a snort. I was shocked. No-one I knew would ever have dared to make a sound like that in lessons. It would mean a ruler against the back of your knees, or worse. Reverend Rivers sighed.
‘I don’t know how they managed to teach you anything at that school of yours, Grace. You’re a savage. Still, we will try to make the best of it. Sit down, both of you, and we’ll begin.’
Grace and I sat at Reverend Rivers’ desk, whilst he paced about the room and asked us questions. I did my best, ashamed of how little I knew. Grace knew lots of the answers but gave them automatically, in a bored voice.
‘There appear to have been some gaps in your education, Nora,’ Reverend Rivers said finally.
I hung my head. He was right. The questions he had asked were beyond me.
‘You can’t be blamed for that. You have a logical mind. You can think. That is what’s important. It’s a good start.’
The study quickly became the room in which I felt most at home, soothed by the
smell and excited by the books. Like me, Reverend Rivers seemed to be more at ease there. Outside, he was distant, as if his thoughts were somewhere else. He didn’t speak much. He spent most of his time in the church or walking in the graveyard with his arms behind his back, looking like a tall ghost in his black gown, which I learned was called a cassock. Sometimes he came to the sitting room at night to listen to the wireless, hunched in the big leather armchair and looking into the fire. But when he taught us he was suddenly alive. When he showed us countries on the globe or explained a mathematical problem his eyes were bright and his voice strong, like it was when he read out his sermons on Sundays. Our lessons were nothing like the ones at school had been. We never recited multiplication tables or spelled out words on a blackboard. Instead he took down books from the shelves and read to us. We looked up words in the big blue dictionary that he kept on his desk and checked our facts in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was heavy and important and filled a whole shelf. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I came to understand that there were possibilities that I had never thought about because I hadn’t known the words to think them. Reverend Rivers lent me books that I devoured in bed by candlelight, staying awake for hours after Grace had gone to sleep.
Grace didn’t feel like I did about lessons. She found them dull. She always took the seat that faced the window so that she could stare out at the garden whilst Reverend Rivers talked. It was the only time I ever saw her be still. She was subdued, all her usual energy drained away. She never picked up a book outside the schoolroom. I wondered if that was the reason for the strangeness between them. When he asked questions he looked at me for the answers, not her. He didn’t ask if she wanted to borrow any books. When he looked at her handwriting he sighed. I felt bad for stealing his attention but also for the way that, when the clock in the hallway struck one o’clock, she would begin to shuffle and shift in her chair. It made me sorry to see Reverend Rivers realize that she was waiting to be dismissed. His eyes would lose their sparkle, the curious blankness would come down over his face and he would give a nod. Grace would hurry out of the room as fast as she could and I would follow her, feeling divided and uncomfortable.
But my regret never lasted long. It went as soon as we opened the door at the back of the rectory and stepped out into the garden. The afternoons were ours. Just as I loved being in the study, Grace loved being outside. It was where she belonged. The minute she left the house she seemed to grow taller.
‘Come on, Nora!’ she would shout, and we would run through the meadows, throwing back our heads to feel the sunshine on our faces, laughing out loud and whooping with pleasure. She knew every inch of the fields and woods around the village, every path and every hidden place, and she shared them all with me. It was our own private kingdom, where we ruled and there was no-one to tell us what to do.
Reverend Rivers spent the mornings teaching me how to think about the world but in the afternoons Grace and I lived it. He taught me how to use my imagination; she liked to do things with her hands. She showed me the rabbit warrens on the side of the hill, the badger setts in the woods and the stinking secret place where the farmers left dead sheep to rot into skeletons. She taught me to build dens by balancing branches against a tree-trunk and weaving grasses amongst them to make walls. We dammed streams, piling up rocks in the water to make it cascade down.
She wasn’t like the girls I knew in London. We had all been rather timid, always told to be good. There wasn’t much trouble to be found in our cramped backyards and our mothers didn’t let us out onto the streets. I had liked my friends because we were the same. I liked Grace because she was everything I wasn’t. When I was with her I felt as if I could do anything. Nothing scared her. She looked like an angel but she liked to do things that were bad. She took me scrumping in other people’s orchards, shinning easily up the trees and throwing apples down to me. We would race back to the woods and sit in one of our hideouts, cramming our mouths with sweet fruit until our stomachs ached.
In my very first week in Kent, when it was still warm enough to seem like summer, Grace taught me to swim. She took me through the woods to a pool that she called the Forgotten Lake because nobody knew about it but her. It was her favourite place in the world, she said, and I could see why. The water was a deep green, the colour of ivy, and very still, apart from a few small ripples on the surface from the wind. It was perfectly secret and silent and as soon as we were there, it was as if the rest of the world didn’t exist.
As I stood on the bank, wondering how deep it was, Grace began to pull off her clothes. Soon she was at the edge of the water, dressed only in her knickers. I looked away. I had never seen another girl without her clothes on. Ma had always taught me to be modest. Even when she washed in the tub in front of the fire, she was careful what she revealed. And at any rate, she was my mother. Seeing her didn’t make my cheeks grow hot and my heart beat fast.
‘What’s the matter?’ Grace said. ‘Come on. I can’t show you how to swim if you don’t get in.’
‘I’m cold,’ I said.
‘Don’t be silly! The water’s had all summer to warm up. Look at me. I’m not cold, I promise.’
‘Someone might see us,’ I said, knowing that she wouldn’t accept the excuse. She laughed.
‘Don’t worry about that! Nobody ever comes here. I told you, I’m the only one who knows about it. There’s no-one to see you but me.’
I didn’t know how to tell her that she was enough to make me ashamed. Six months before it would have been all right. I had looked just like her, skinny and simple like a boy. I didn’t like the way I’d changed since then. I wanted us to be the same. She had chosen me at the railway station because of it. I didn’t want her to see that under my clothes I was different.
‘I’ll cover my eyes if you like,’ she said. ‘But hurry up! It’s no fun standing here on my own.’
I knew there was no way out of it. As she put her hands over her eyes, I took off my blouse, my skirt, my socks and my sandals, until I was standing like her in only my knickers. I folded my arms over my chest.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m ready.’
She took her hands away from her eyes. ‘Come on!’ she shouted and I followed her into the pool, deeper and deeper until the water was up to my armpits. It was achingly cold.
‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Grace said.
I nodded, pressing my teeth together to stop them chattering.
That afternoon she was patient, teaching me to swim, explaining how I should kick my legs at the same time as I pushed forward with my arms. She held me up in the water and didn’t mind when I panicked and splashed.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I won’t let you drown.’
The feeling of her hands under my ribs as she helped me keep afloat was as good as having Ma’s arms around me in bed. We swam every day after that until the trees began to drop their leaves into the water. I soon came to understand why Grace loved it. When I was at the lake, floating on my back and feeling the sun on my face, I felt perfectly peaceful and happy, as if nothing else in the world mattered. It was hard to believe that there was a war going on at all.
One day when we were at the lake, I heard someone cough. I looked around quickly, treading water. A man was standing next to a tree, a tall man whose arms hung loosely at his sides. He didn’t seem to have noticed me. He was looking into the distance, at something or somebody else. I swam over to Grace, who was floating on her back with her eyes closed. I touched her arm.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said, opening her eyes.
‘There’s a man over there, in the trees. He looks strange.’
‘Where?’
I pointed to where the man was standing.
‘There he is,’ I said. ‘Can you see him?’
But Grace was waving in his direction and smiling. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s only William,’ and she began to swim towards him.
I followed her, my arms and legs h
eavy. Before I had seen him, I had been enjoying the feeling of the water against my skin. Now I felt naked and ashamed. The water felt much colder than before and I shivered at the thought of him seeing me through my underclothes. But Grace stopped swimming when the water was still deep enough to cover her chest.
‘William!’ she called. ‘Come and say hello to Nora.’
He didn’t move.
‘Come on!’ she said. ‘There’s no need to worry. She won’t bite. She’s our evacuee.’
As he came closer I saw that he was not quite a man, but older than a boy. He moved as if it cost him a great deal of effort and when he got to the water’s edge he stood like I had done that first time, awkwardly, as if he didn’t know what to do next. I looked at him closely, trying to puzzle out what it was that made him odd. It was partly to do with his clothes. His trousers flapped above his ankles and he wore an old tweed jacket that was too small for him. His wrists poked out of the cuffs, thin next to his stubby hands. The rest of him looked strange as well. His hair stuck up in clumps as if it had been chopped with something blunt, but his face was as smooth as if a barber had shaved it that morning. His skin was dark from the sun and his lips looked like a girl’s, soft and full. He was chewing the bottom one, staring at the ground.
‘I haven’t seen you for ages,’ said Grace. ‘Where have you been?’
He looked up. ‘I’ve been hiding from the bombs, Miss.’
His voice was deep and cracked, as if he didn’t use it very often.
‘But there aren’t any. That’s why they’re calling it the Phoney War.’
He smiled, looking shy but at the same time proud.
Days of Grace Page 6