Careful, I thought. Don’t give anything away. Be polite.
‘How do you do,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’ll be a great help.’
‘I’m going to show David the rest of the house,’ she said. ‘Then we can all have a cup of tea before he unpacks.’
‘I’m tired,’ I said quickly. ‘Why don’t you two have your tea in the kitchen? I think I’ll take a nap.’
She frowned. ‘Are you all right?’
I forced myself to smile. ‘Just sleepy, that’s all.’
‘Okay. I’ll come back in a bit to see how you are.’
I listened to them tramp around the house, up the stairs and down, my apprehension growing with every footstep.
I’d been confined to my room for so long that crossing the threshold was like stepping into a foreign country. My heart thudded as I made my way along the corridor, feeling like a thief.
The door to the next room was ajar and I slipped through it. On the bed was a large black bag; the nurse’s, I supposed. I crept towards the wardrobe, trying to swallow back my nerves. I pulled the door open quickly, before I could change my mind, and was met by the smell of mothballs. The wardrobe was half empty, with just a few things hanging in it, coats, a couple of cardigans and an ancient dressing gown. My hands shook as I brushed past them, feeling for the opening to the pocket. When I slid my fingers inside they met silk, then the blunt contrast of metal.
Back in my room I looked about, trying to think of a hiding place, aware that nowhere was private any more. I had no place to call my own. I stood, panicking, knowing that I didn’t have much time.
‘Think,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Think.’
And then it came to me. There was a place in the bedroom that was safe. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. I went over to the little bookcase, three shelves behind glass doors. It was where I kept my favourite books, the special ones, like the first edition of Tennyson that George had given me as a wedding present. On the bottom shelf was the serious stuff, thick volumes, too heavy to be read without a table to rest them on. No-one would browse through them just for fun.
I pulled out the biggest one. I put the gun to the back of the shelf, then slid the book back in. It stuck out a little, but not so much that anyone would notice.
I fell into a troubled sleep that lasted until late afternoon, when I was woken by a rustling noise. The nurse was bending over the chest of drawers with his back to me. He had changed into some kind of uniform, loose fitting and made of thin blue cotton. He was sturdily built, almost stocky, and I watched the muscles in his shoulders move as he shifted things about, making neat piles of boxes and packets. There were an awful lot of them.
The smell that I’d noticed that morning was still there and I suddenly remembered what it was. I began to cough, choking on the recollection.
He was at my side immediately, holding my shoulders with strong hands. ‘It’s all right, Nora,’ he said. ‘Easy. Try to breathe. Deep breaths. Slowly now.’
I couldn’t speak. He kept hold of me as I gasped for air, cradling my head until I could breathe again, then he lowered me gently back against the pillows.
‘I’m sorry about the disinfectant,’ he said. ‘I know it’s strong. I was just making sure that everything was ready. Just in case we need it later on.’
I couldn’t bring myself to ask what for, but he seemed to guess what I was thinking.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘They’re just syringes. If it all gets too much, I’ll give you an injection. It’ll make the pain go away.’
I wanted to ask where he and his injections had been for the last fifty years.
I started to go downhill from then on, as if my body were justifying the nurse’s presence. A stale smell hung in the room, which came, I knew, from me. It was as if I were already dead. Each morning brought more strands of hair on the pillow. I seemed to shrink a little more each day. David and Rose handled me carefully, as if they were worried I might break.
The time came when I had been in bed for so long that I began to develop sores. The skin on my feet hardened and then split like overripe fruit, exposing the flesh underneath. My heels stuck to the sheets. The smallest movement made me wince with pain.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ said Rose. ‘This is horrible.’
David nodded, looking thoughtful. He knelt at my feet and peered at them, cupping his hands under my heels and turning them from side to side, his face so close that I could feel his breath on my soles.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Have you got any spare quilts or blankets?’
I nodded. ‘In the bathroom. The airing cupboard.’
‘I’ll get them,’ said Rose.
David lifted me out of bed as easily as if I were a child and set me down on the chair, wrapping a shawl around my shoulders. When Rose came back, her arms full, they stripped off the sheets and piled layers of blankets on the bed. I remembered the fairy story of the Princess and the Pea. I would have detected it, I thought. By now I felt every last little thing.
I turned my head away as they put a rubber sheet on top, ashamed of what it implied.
Not a fairy story, I thought sadly, a cautionary tale.
The newly made bed was wonderfully soft. But that wasn’t the end of it.
‘We need to do something about those sores,’ David said. ‘I’m going to wash your feet and put some bandages on them.’
I stiffened.
‘It won’t hurt, I promise. And you’ll feel much better afterwards.’
I watched as he spread a towel under my feet. They looked like claws, blotched skin stretched tightly over bone. I was becoming something diabolical.
When he’d gone to get the water, Rose patted my shoulder.
‘You see,’ she said. ‘He knows what he’s doing. I feel a lot better with him here. We’re in good hands.’
I didn’t want his hands anywhere near me. I watched warily as David took hold of my right foot, his fingers fitting around my ankle as easily as if it had been my wrist. He rubbed a piece of soap against a sponge, then pushed it between my toes, making little rivulets of water trickle down over my skin. His touch was light and sure, covering every last inch. He did the same to the other one and patted them dry with a towel. Then he brought out the bandages.
‘They’re padded,’ he said. ‘To take the pressure off.’
I knew I should be grateful but I wasn’t. I couldn’t help myself. I felt like the Chinese women whom I had read about in books, trapped in their houses by their bound up feet. Now I had no chance of escape.
Eighteen
By the time we reached Soho we had begun to despair of finding a place to spend the night. The rain had started again, drenching the streets and making them slippery underfoot. As we made our way along, keeping close to the shopfronts, Grace let out a cry.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘There’s something in my shoe,’ she said. ‘Something sharp. It’s digging into me.’
She balanced on one leg, holding onto my shoulder, and lifted up her foot. When she pulled off her sandal I saw a piece of glass embedded in her heel. She groaned.
‘Pull it out, will you? Please. I don’t think I could do it.’
We sat down on the kerb. I cradled her foot in my hands, looking sadly at the patches of raw skin and blisters. I wondered if she were regretting her decision to come with me to London. It had been nothing but trouble so far. I knew I was about to make things worse. Gritting my teeth, I took hold of the glass. It had gone in deep and I had to pull hard to get it out. Blood began to form around the wound, dripping down her foot into the gutter to be washed away by the rain. Grace’s lips began to quiver.
‘I can’t walk any more,’ she whispered.
The rain was getting heavier by the minute. I peered up the street. At the far end was another road, with cars and buses passing along it.
‘All right,’ I said, trying to sound optimistic. ‘If I wrap my handkerchief around your fo
ot to stop the bleeding, and you lean on me, do you think you could get to that road? It’s busier than this one. I think we’d have a better chance of finding somewhere to stay.’
She nodded. ‘I’ll try.’
I took my handkerchief from my pocket and wound it around her foot. Grace squeezed into her sandal and we limped to the end of the street.
It was there that I saw the sign, for a picture-house. I squinted at the black letters, spelling out the name of the film; one word, hazy through the rain. It was Rebecca! At last we had found something familiar. It seemed like a sign that we would be all right. We would be warm in the cinema, out of the rain, which was getting stronger by the minute. I looked at Grace and she nodded, as excited as I was.
The woman in the ticket booth told us to hurry. ‘The programme’s started. But you’ll have seen it before. It’s an old one. We’re waiting for This Happy Breed. It’ll be here this time next week, if we’re lucky.’
We hadn’t seen it. We hadn’t seen any films since the war began. There was no cinema near the village and even if there had been, Reverend Rivers wouldn’t have approved. We hurried inside.
When I sank into my seat I felt safe for the first time since I’d left Kent. No-one would ask us questions in the dark. Next to Lawrence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, Grace and I would be invisible.
I liked the feeling of knowing exactly what the next few hours would bring. Even if the siren went, I decided, I wouldn’t move. I wanted to stay there forever, in the dark, away from everything. For as long as the film was playing I could sit next to Grace, as close as the servicemen and their girls, who came to the cinema as two people but, as soon as they sat down, became one shadowy shape. I wanted to be like them, to put my arm around her shoulders and pull her close to me. Instead, I nudged my arm next to hers on the narrow armrest between our seats, making do with that.
I sat through the supporting film, the newsreel and an announcement about salvage, but I wasn’t really watching. My senses were quivering, awake like they had been when I had tasted roast beef for the first time at the rectory. I was as excited as I had been then, drawing the smoke from a hundred cigarettes up into my nostrils and looking around, taking in not just the screen, but everything else as well. There were more people in the cinema than there had been in the whole of the village. The newsreel showed soldiers marching in tidy groups, land girls in overalls working in the fields and people sheltering in the Underground to avoid the doodlebugs. I had seen nothing of the war whilst I was in Kent. I felt as if I had been in some other country, a place that was far away from the rest of the world. I hadn’t thought about armies and battles. All I had known was that I wasn’t with Ma and that I loved Grace. All my thoughts had been about her. Mrs Rivers had only thought about her dead Elizabeth. Reverend Rivers had thought about me. But here in the cinema was a new world, a bigger world, presenting itself to be looked at, not hidden away and kept secret. I opened my eyes wide, looking at every detail, drinking it in.
From the moment Rebecca began, I was transfixed. I began to see things in it that I recognized in a way that I hadn’t when I was reading the book. As soon as I saw the driveway to Manderley, winding through the woods, I was back in Kent on that first day, in the motor car driven by Mrs Rivers. When the heroine danced with Maxim de Winter I understood her expression, as if she had been transported to somewhere magical. I had felt like that during our afternoons by the lake, so happy that I felt as if my heart was about to burst out of my chest.
If you should find one perfect thing or place or person you should stick to it, said the heroine, and it was as if she were speaking directly to me, telling me to hold onto Grace and that our luck was about to change.
But as the film went on, there were other things that I recognized, other less welcome moments, like Mrs Danvers’ expression as she showed the heroine Rebecca’s things, laid out untouched in her bedroom as if she were still alive. Her pride at having known her was like the way I felt about Grace, as if knowing her made me somehow better. I didn’t want to catch glimpses of myself in Mrs Danvers. I didn’t want to be like her. But I could understand her. When she burned down the house I could see why she had done it. It reminded me of the time I had shot down the scarecrows. I decided that from now on I would be careful not to let my temper get the better of me.
It was after eleven when we came out of the cinema. We lingered outside for as long as we could, but the crowd quickly scattered into the night. We stood and watched people disappear into the darkness and it was not until the street was empty that I realized we should have followed them.
‘Most of them went that way,’ I said, pointing. ‘If we hurry we might be able to catch them up.’
We set off, stumbling as we tried to follow the grubby white line that was painted along the kerbside. London at night was not as dark as Kent. Chinks of light crept under doors and the sky was lit up by the beams of the searchlights. Although it was late, there was a strange wakefulness about the streets. As we walked further into Soho I began to feel as if we were being watched. I heard scuffling and low voices. Grace heard them too and took my arm. We made our way along nervously, peering into the darkness and as my eyes became accustomed to it, I began to make out shapes in the doorways, standing still for the most part but sometimes shifting. Red tips of cigarettes glowed brighter as the shapes drew on them.
‘Who are they?’ whispered Grace. ‘What are they doing?’
‘I think they’re women,’ I said uncertainly. There had been women like that on the corner of our street. Ma had always pulled me past them quickly, holding my hand. ‘I think they’re waiting for men.’
‘We shouldn’t be here,’ she said. ‘We’re not men. We should be somewhere else. We should be in bed. Oh, Nora, where are we going to sleep?’
We kept walking, more quickly now, hurrying to the end of the street. We had nearly reached it when I heard a hissing sound, like an angry cat. A sudden flash lit up a doorway, then another, and another. I caught sight of women’s faces as they switched torches on and off.
As we passed, one of them muttered something that made the others laugh. Grace’s hand tightened on my arm. When we finally turned the corner we were out of breath. The moon had come out from behind a cloud and I caught sight of her face. She was very pale.
‘I’m scared. I want to go home. I want to be in my own bed. I want Mummy and Father to be sitting downstairs.’ Her voice shook and for the first time since I had met her, she looked as if she were about to cry. All her old recklessness, her flirtatiousness on the train, her excitement at being in London were gone. I wanted to go home too, whatever that meant. I felt utterly lost, as if I were twelve years old again, sitting in the cattle-pen at the station. But I knew I mustn’t let her know that I was frightened too.
I thought quickly. ‘We could always shelter in the Underground, like they were doing in the newsreel. It would be dry, at least, and there would be other people down there. Then we could look for somewhere else tomorrow.’
She had started to cry, great fat tears that rolled down her cheeks and dropped down into the road. I choked back the panic that was beginning to rise up from my stomach.
‘Please don’t cry,’ I said. ‘I’ll find us somewhere to go, I promise.’
I decided to head back to the big street that we had crossed on our way to Soho. It was the kind of street that would have an Underground station, I was sure. I would lie next to Grace on the platform and hold her until she slept. The next day we would wake early and find a place to stay. Once I had made the decision I felt better. I would make sure that she was all right, whether God wanted to help us or not. Grace followed after me, sniffling. As we turned a corner I saw a man coming quickly towards us, like a flying bomb towards its target, and we froze like we had done earlier in the horrible silence before the explosion.
‘You don’t suppose he thinks we’re like those women, do you?’ said Grace.
I wasn’t sure. As he approached I saw tha
t he was tall and well built, and that he was wearing a hat and an overcoat. As he came closer still and stood in front of us, I knew that I had seen him before. It was the man from the café.
He could give us a place to stay, he said, just around the corner, a flat that he used to store things for his business. I saw Grace’s eyes light up at the thought and I knew that I was no longer the one in charge. Compared to this man with his overcoat to keep out the chill, somewhere to sleep and money in his pockets, I was nobody, just a girl, and like a girl, I did as I was told, following him along the street, around the corner, through a door and up two flights of stairs to a flat. I sat on a sagging bed and watched him light a candle. I heard him say that he would be back to see us in the morning and I waited for the door to slam as he left, then peeled back the blankets and slipped between the sheets. I fell asleep immediately, still fully dressed, next to Grace.
I woke early, disturbed by the unfamiliar noises from the street. I climbed out of the bed, wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, and went to sit in an armchair by the fireplace, trying to think. I didn’t want to be in debt to this man. I didn’t like the way he looked at Grace and I didn’t believe that he had just happened to be in the same street as us. I didn’t like his flat. Most of it was covered with a thick layer of dust, although the sheets on the bed were clean. Light patches on the walls suggested that pictures had hung on them not long before. There wasn’t much furniture; a bed, an armchair and a table pushed against a wall, piled high with boxes and packages, all of them sealed tight, leaving no clue as to what they held inside. I tried to swallow down my curiosity, telling myself that it was better not to know anything more about him. I knew that before long he would be back and when he came I wanted us to leave. I thought hard as I waited for Grace to wake, planning what I would say to get rid of him.
Days of Grace Page 18