I cleared my throat. The girl looked up. She was frowning.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, not meeting my eyes, ‘I can’t sell you any more painkillers. It’s too soon. You bought some last week.’
It was true. I knew all the chemist’s shops on the Holloway Road, flitting between them to get enough pills. This one sold the best and strongest medicine, in plain white packets with instructions in a script I couldn’t read. I guessed at the dose, taking the pills until the pain went away. I was never sure if I’d left enough time between my visits to the shop. Usually, I began to tremble at the prospect of a refusal as soon as I went in the door. But this time I held my head high, buoyed up by my morning with Stephen.
‘I don’t want medicine,’ I said. ‘I’m here to buy things for a child. A baby.’
‘A baby?’
‘Yes. A small one, just born.’
For the first time in all the months that I had been going there, she smiled.
‘A grandchild! Is it a boy or a girl?’
I seemed to have become respectable. I decided not to contradict her.
‘A little girl. She was born two days ago.’
‘Has she got a name?’
I was eager with my reply. ‘Yes. She’s called Grace.’
The girl nodded approvingly. ‘That’s a lovely name.’
‘I chose it myself,’ I said.
It was as if I had given her some sort of password. She came out from behind the counter and led me to a part of the shop I’d never seen before, a whole wall crammed with packets and bottles, cartons and jars, everything pink or blue or white. I didn’t know what Rose needed. I had no idea what was in the holdall she’d brought with her. I wondered how prepared she’d been. She might have had all these things already. But then I thought of the shabby little room I’d found her in and I doubted it. I bought everything the girl suggested and she packed it all up into bags. By the time I left we were almost friends. She even held the door open for me as I went.
When I got back to the house, Rose was in the kitchen. I unpacked my bags and laid out what I had bought.
‘This is for you,’ I said. ‘I mean, for the baby.’
Rose touched the packages one by one, looking dazed.
‘But Nora,’ she said, ‘you didn’t have to buy anything for us.’
‘I wanted to,’ I muttered, embarrassed. ‘I wanted to help. She needs those things. And who else is there to look after you?’
That night I couldn’t sleep. Memories tumbled over each other, almost faster than I could think them, jostling for attention, clawing me back from my new preoccupations as if they were jealous of the baby and Rose. I tossed and turned, and then the night sweats came, terrible sweats that smelled of disease and decay. The sheets grew damp. In the early hours of the morning, I decided to take a bath.
I didn’t switch on the light in the corridor. I’d made my way along it in the dark often enough. When I felt tiles against the soles of my feet I knew I’d reached the bathroom. I closed the door behind me and leaned against it, relieved. As part of my preparations for Rose, I had polished and scoured, pouring bleach over every surface, scrubbing between the tiles with a toothbrush, ruthless with the germs. Now I inhaled its icy cleanliness, liking the smell.
I took a towel from the airing cupboard and put it on the heater to warm. I turned the hot tap as far as it would go and went over to the window-ledge, where my cold cream and talcum powder stood next to Rose’s collection of bottles and tubes. I flipped open the tops of some of them, squeezing out small smears onto the back of my hand. I sniffed at unfamiliar scents.
It was a long time since I had let myself open the box but the new scents made me think of it and once the thought was there, I couldn’t help it. I went back over to the cupboard, felt under the piles of linen and took out the old blue tin. I traced its battered edges with my fingers then lifted the lid, releasing a sweet, dusty smell. I handled the contents carefully, like relics, running my fingers over the lipstick and the matching powder compact in its golden case. Although I knew it had dried up years before, I took the stopper from the bottle of scent and touched it to my throat.
I switched off the light so as not to see myself as I pulled my nightdress over my head and stepped into the bath, wincing at the heat. I lowered my body down slowly. I sat for a moment, feeling the steam rise up around me, then lay back in the darkness.
The radio was in its usual place on the stool next to the tub. I switched it on. A woman spoke, her voice soothing and low, reciting the familiar list.
There are warnings of gales in Tyne, Dogger, German Bight, Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Biscay, Fitzroy, Sole, Irish Sea, Shannon and Rockall. The general synopsis at 0100: Low Malin 992 expected Northern Ireland 996 by 0100 tomorrow. Low 200 miles west of Fitzroy 1008 expected Thames 996 by same time.
Everything about it was right, the words and the way that she said them, like a poem or a song. The music came afterwards, a waltz for the end of an evening. I brought my hands to my face, spreading my fingers, feeling my skin stretched tight over my jaw. I moved them down, tracing the tendons in my neck, two knotty ropes tied to my collarbone, attached to shoulders that fitted easily under my palms. I touched my chest, flattened like pillows after a sleepless night. My belly, in contrast, was a hard, high mound. I rested my hands on it, feeling a pulse beat clear and strong. I held on tight, as if it were a lifebuoy bobbing about on the sea.
Stormy waters ahead, I thought, wondering if I would manage to stay afloat.
On my way back to the bedroom, I bumped into Rose, who was standing at the top of the stairs in the dark. I felt myself flush, as if I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t. Rose was awkward too.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she stammered. ‘I was going to get a glass of water.’
She looked like a little girl in her pyjamas. I felt a sudden rush of tenderness towards her.
‘I can’t sleep either,’ I said. ‘Come on, I’ll make us something to drink.’
When we got to the kitchen, Rose stood by the table, looking ill at ease.
‘Sit down,’ I said, ‘I’ll do it.’
She sank down onto one of the chairs and I brought a blanket, tucking it around her. I pulled the old bolster across the bottom of the door to keep out draughts, then poured milk into a pan and stood at the stove, stirring it with a wooden spoon. The faint hiss of the gas was the only sound in the room. When the milk began to pucker, I poured it into two mugs and carried them over to the table.
‘Drink it whilst it’s hot,’ I said, pushing one of the mugs towards her. ‘Go on. It’ll help you sleep.’
She picked it up and took a sip. Her hands were gripping the mug so hard that her knuckles were white. She looked miserable, her shoulders hunched and the colour drained from her face.
‘Rose,’ I said. ‘Why are you so unhappy? What’s wrong?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Mum used to make me hot milk when I couldn’t sleep.’
‘Where is she?’ I asked.
Rose shrugged. ‘At home, I suppose.’
‘Does she know about Grace?’
Rose shook her head. Her voice was fierce. ‘She didn’t want me to have her. She wanted me to get rid of her. She said that having a baby would ruin my life.’
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair.
‘She told me I was making a fool of myself,’ Rose went on bitterly. ‘And that he’d taken advantage.’
I looked at her in horror. ‘You don’t mean that the baby’s father—?’
‘No!’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like that. I was in love with him.’ Her eyes were dark with anger. ‘I thought he loved me too.’
She wouldn’t say anything more about it. After those first furious words, she drank her milk quickly and went to bed, saying that she was tired. I stayed at the table for a long time afterwards, thinking.
Eight
Almost as soon as I had decided to stay in Kent, the war be
gan in earnest and everything changed. Mrs Rivers stopped baking on Saturdays, and Sunday lunches were no longer feasts. Food was counted up and measured out into rations not big enough to cover the pattern on our plates. I dreamed of the end of winter and the arrival of summer, when Grace and I would climb trees again and swim in the Forgotten Lake but it didn’t happen like that. By the time it was warm enough to stop wearing pullovers we had a new Prime Minister who said the Germans were getting closer. We followed their movements on Reverend Rivers’ globe. France wasn’t far from England. Like the Germans, evacuees were on the move but this time they weren’t coming to Kent. They were leaving the apple orchards and the sea behind and heading north.
Grace and I kept quiet, hoping that no-one would think of sending me away but I soon began to understand that we didn’t need to worry. What we did mattered very little. Reverend and Mrs Rivers were so wrapped up in their own unhappiness that they hardly noticed us. When I had first arrived at the rectory, I had been so captivated by my new world that I hadn’t noticed the peculiar tension that hovered between them, but now I saw that something wasn’t right. I was beginning to see how words left unsaid often meant more than ones spoken out loud. Solemn voices on the wireless at night told us to keep our eyes and ears open for things that were suspicious or kept hidden.
Things are not always what they seem, they said. Look beyond what you see.
But it was difficult to see through closed doors. Mrs Rivers continued to spend most of her time at the piano, practising scales for hours on end, and Reverend Rivers shut himself up in his study. The sound of her piano and the smell of his pipe smoke would drift under the doors of their rooms and hover uneasily in the hallway, as if even those disconnected parts of themselves couldn’t bear to be together. I didn’t know how married people were with one another. I couldn’t remember Pa at home in Bethnal Green. I only knew Ma and me, who sat in one room together and slept in one bed at night. If being married was like this, I thought, I couldn’t understand why people did it.
Saturdays were the worst, when we had no lessons because that was the day when Reverend Rivers wrote his sermon. As soon as breakfast was over he would hurry to his study and stay there until late at night, not even coming out to eat. Mrs Rivers would go to the drawing room and start her scales, stabbing her way up and down the keyboard. Grace and I would wash the dishes as quickly as we could and then slip out of the house to our new hiding place. We no longer dared go to the lake. The birds that I had watched from its banks the summer before had been replaced by fighter planes that swooped and dived, so low that they seemed close enough to reach out and touch. The newspapers called it Spitfire Summer after them and they were always there, roaring as they chased the German aeroplanes across the sky, their machine guns rattling in frantic bursts. Swarms of enemy bombers flew over like deadly black beetles, with fighter planes as escorts. The Spitfires danced among them, trying to shoot them down. We watched their sharp wings cut across the clouds, slicing through them, twisting like courting birds, and we tried to work out how they stayed up in the sky. Birds flapped their wings; we could understand them. The Spitfires were a raging, noisy mystery.
One Saturday at the beginning of July, Grace said that she wanted to show me something. As she led me through the graveyard to the back of the church, I began to feel uneasy, as if all the sadness of the people who had lost someone was hovering in the air. It was Reverend Rivers’ territory, and I felt him there too, almost expecting him to come out from behind one of the gravestones.
‘Where are we going?’ I said.
Grace put her finger to her lips, bent down and began to rummage in a pile of flowerpots. After a moment she brought out a key. She turned to me and smiled.
‘Here it is! I knew I’d find it.’
‘I don’t think we’re supposed to play in church,’ I said uncertainly. ‘God wouldn’t like it.’
‘It’s not for the church,’ she said. ‘And we’re not playing. We’re keeping safe from the Spitfires. We’re finding sanctuary, like in the Bible. You should know, you’re the one who likes reading and God.’
‘Well then, where’s it for?’
She led me to a little hut that was built onto the side of the church. ‘Here.’
I was nervous. ‘We’ll be in trouble if anyone finds us.’
‘But they won’t, not if we only come here on Saturdays. Father’s always busy with his sermons then and the only other people who come are the ladies to do the flowers on Fridays. We’ll be perfectly safe, I promise. It’ll be our special place.’
She put the key in the lock, turned it and pushed open the door. I followed her inside. It smelled like the church; of dead flowers, damp and old wax. Vases that I recognized from Sunday services stood on a shelf that ran along the back wall. The floor was covered with leaves and twigs. In the corner were buckets, a dustpan and a brush.
‘We can clean it up,’ Grace said. ‘We’ll make it nice. It’ll be a house all of our own.’
From then on, every Saturday, as soon as Reverend and Mrs Rivers had shut themselves up in their rooms, we would slip out of the rectory, through the vegetable patch, into the graveyard and around the back of the church to the hut. We swept out the leaves and brushed away the cobwebs, using upturned buckets as chairs as we played at being ladies from the village drinking tea.
‘Home sweet home!’ Grace would say in a high, refined voice, holding out her little finger as she pretended to drink from a vase, and I would giggle. I loved the way she could mimic anyone she wanted, from the grumpy woman in the village shop to her own father when he read out his sermons in church. I knew it wasn’t proper to laugh at a priest but she made it so funny I couldn’t help myself.
As the summer went on, there were so many dogfights between the aeroplanes that we grew used to them and stopped being frightened. When we heard the sound of aircraft engines approaching we brought out our buckets and sat in the doorway with our hands held to our ears, waiting to catch the first glimpse of them. They were beautiful as they wheeled and turned, the sunlight reflecting off their silver wings. The vapour trails that came after them made patterns in the sky. But one day they came too close and we were frightened all over again. We heard them before we saw them, a low humming noise becoming louder by the minute and then they were suddenly there, two planes chasing each other. It was impossible to tell who was after whom. The roar of the engines filled our ears as we hunched on our buckets, frozen at the noise, then the machine guns started, clattering like a thousand hailstones smashing against a roof. Spent ammunition bounced off the gravestones, then there was an almighty crash and Grace screamed as one of the planes swooped over our heads, so close that it seemed about to fly straight into the church. I looked up and saw the pilot in his leather helmet and goggles, his eyes wide and staring straight at us.
‘Run!’ shouted Grace and we sprinted as fast as we could, over the graves, through the gate, across the rows of cabbages and peas and into the rectory through the back door. We leaned against the wall, gasping for breath.
‘We were lucky,’ I said. ‘I thought that was it. I thought—’
Grace shot me a peculiar, warning look and I stopped talking. She was frowning, her head tilted to one side, listening to something. Two voices became clearer until we could make out every word. Reverend and Mrs Rivers were arguing. I had never heard either of them raise their voice before but now they were practically shouting.
‘I cannot understand why you find it so hard to allow me any comfort,’ said Mrs Rivers. ‘You know perfectly well that playing my piano is the only way I can forget.’
‘But I have specifically asked you not to play on Saturdays. It’s distracting. I need to concentrate on my sermon,’ said Reverend Rivers. ‘Tomorrow the congregation will expect me to attempt to make sense out of these attacks. I have to give them some sort of reassurance.’
‘Reassurance!’ Mrs Rivers sounded bitter. ‘It’s all very well your reassuring everyone else in the
village. What about me?’
‘I have a duty to the parish. Terrible things are happening. Men will be called away to fight and some of them will be killed.’
‘I wish they’d drop a bomb on this house. And on the church,’ said Mrs Rivers. ‘At least that would put a stop to all of this.’
‘Evelyn! That’s a wicked thing to say. I refuse to believe that you mean it.’
‘I do mean it,’ Mrs Rivers said in a flat voice. ‘You know I do.’
I looked at Grace. She had gone very pale. I decided that it was better to be outside with the bombers than in the rectory listening to this. She let me pull her to the door and through the graveyard back to the hut. We walked slowly, not caring any more about attacks. Once we were inside, we sat on the buckets. Grace was trembling.
‘Are you all right?’ I said carefully.
Her voice was bleak. ‘I can’t decide what’s worse, them not talking to each other, or shouting like that. It’s horrible.’
‘But what was it about?’
‘I don’t know. She’s been sad for as long as I can remember. And sometimes she gets so angry, like she was just now.’
Her shoulders began to heave. I put my arm around her and held her as she cried, feeling her tears soak into the thin material of my blouse.
We stayed in the hut until evening, when we were too hungry to wait there any longer. It was a warm night and the air was so calm and still that it was hard to believe what had happened that afternoon. A haze of heat hung over the fields and my nose twitched at the smell of freshly mown grass. The only sound from the skies was the call of a cuckoo, somewhere far away. Nothing bad could happen on an evening like this, I thought. And sure enough, when we walked into the kitchen, Mrs Rivers was waiting for us, smiling as if nothing had happened and buttering bread for our supper. Her eyes were red but she had put powder on her face and combed her hair. I thought of the pamphlet that had come in the post from the new Prime Minister, Mr Churchill.
Days of Grace Page 8