I looked, and saw three green shoots, peeping above the earth. I knew I would never see them flower.
‘Aren’t they pretty?’ she said. ‘It’ll be spring soon. You can feel it in the air.’
She began to tell me about the film they’d seen. I’d never heard of it. When David came back her description became a conversation between the two of them. I lay there, silent, unable to join in, feeling as if I’d lost something very dear to me.
Twenty
At first it was as if we were back in the hut behind the church, playing house. I took the old rag-rug out to the street and beat it against the wall, adding to the dirt on the pavement. Grace ran a damp cloth along the tops of the skirting boards and the doors, which came away black. We swept out the rooms and got on our knees to scrub the floors, then we scoured every inch of the bathroom. It was odd to see Grace with a bucket, her hair wrapped up in a scarf. I remembered how Mrs Rivers’ hands had always seemed wrong in the dirty dishwater.
I wondered if Grace ever thought about her parents. She hadn’t mentioned them since her moment of panic when we were lost. I remembered our conversation when she was persuading me to let her come to London and how hurt she had been about their indifference towards her. Perhaps that was why she said nothing now, I thought, and so I didn’t ask. I tried not to think about the rectory. I tried not to think about separating Grace from Mrs Rivers. I concentrated on trying to puzzle out this strange man who seemed to have taken us under his wing.
He came to visit most days, bringing us presents; stockings, bacon, bottles of beer. He brought other things too that weren’t for us, in cardboard boxes that he stacked on the table. They were to stay in the flat for safekeeping, he said, and we shouldn’t worry about what was inside them. One night I looked anyway and what I found made me gasp; ration books and clothing coupons, silver cutlery tangled up together, bars of soap and bags of sugar. I unwound sacking to find bottles of gin and packs of cigarettes. In one of the boxes there was even an electric radiator and an iron, all packed up in newspaper.
From time to time a man would come and take some of the boxes away. A few days later someone else would bring others to replace them. I asked no questions and I said nothing, keeping my own little inventory of goods in my head as they came and went.
One night Bernard brought us another armchair, puffing as he carried it up the stairs. I minded that more than any of the other things. It wasn’t to be kept in the corner until someone came to claim it. It was there to stay. He put it by the fire and whenever he came to the flat, he sat in it. It was as if he lived there too, and there was nothing I could do about it.
‘He looks after us ever so well,’ said Grace. ‘Don’t you think?’
I began to make excuses, bolting down scraps before he arrived, so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat the things he brought. As Grace grew new curves from the unaccustomed pieces of meat and lumps of sugar in her tea, I became scrawny and thin.
I was determined not to rely on him. I found a job in a munitions factory. It was dull work in a stuffy room without windows, but I didn’t mind. I left Grace each morning, still drowsy in the warmth of our bed. When I came back in the evening, we drank tea by the fire. This was what it might be like to be married, I thought, and I liked it.
When I was given my first wages, I felt as if I would burst with happiness. For the first time in my life I was dependent on no-one but myself. I could spend the money however I liked. I hugged it to my chest. I knew what I was going to buy. Each morning I passed an old woman on the corner of our street. She sat on a small stool, selling whatever she had managed to find that day; bundles of fire-wood, old screws, cotton reels or biscuit tins, a little heap of potatoes or carrots with the soil still sticking to them. She had a gentle smile and misty eyes and whenever someone approached her a look of surprise and delight would spread over her face, as if she had quite forgotten that she had anything to sell.
That morning she had a bucket in front of her, crammed with pink flowers. They reminded me of Kent, of our afternoons by the lake, lazy, happy afternoons with just the two of us. They seemed an age away. I would buy a bunch for Grace, I thought, to remind her of them too.
It was evening when I went back with my money and from the other side of the street the bucket looked as if it were empty. My heart sank. The flowers meant something special, something different to a bunch of violets picked from a hedgerow or a daisy chain strung together by the lake. I raced across the road. The woman had her eyes closed and was humming to herself, an old-fashioned tune that I didn’t recognize. I looked down into the bucket. There was a single bunch of flowers left, six stems tied together with a piece of string. I cleared my throat, quietly at first and then louder. The woman blinked, as if she were coming back from a place that she was reluctant to leave.
‘Hello, dearie,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you?’
Her voice suited the way that she looked, soft and faraway.
‘Please, I’d like to buy the flowers.’
‘You’re in luck,’ she said, picking them out of the bucket and handing them to me. ‘This is the last bunch. I’ve done well today.’
‘What are they?’ I asked.
She smiled. ‘They’re sweet williams. I grew them to remember my son. That was his name, William. He was killed in the last war, at Passchendaele.’ Her right eye fluttered. ‘He was about the same age as you are. He would have liked you.’
I felt myself blush.
‘Off you go,’ she said. ‘Hurry home to your sweetheart. He’ll enjoy that bit of colour.’
I reached into my pocket but she shook her head. ‘I don’t want money for them. You’re my last customer. Take them for luck.’
But I insisted, pressing the coins into her hand. I wanted to pay so that the flowers meant what they were supposed to, even if I were the only one who knew what that was.
‘Good luck!’ she called as I left her. ‘God bless!’
I was so excited when I got back to the flat that I could hardly get my keys in the lock.
‘Grace!’ I called, ‘Where are you? I’m back. I’ve got you something. ’
There was no reply. I called again. ‘Grace!’
‘Wait a minute.’ Her voice came from the kitchen. ‘I’m coming. I’ve got something to show you too.’
I perched on one of the armchairs, hiding the flowers behind my back. We didn’t have a vase but we could use a milk bottle, I thought, and put it on the mantelpiece. I wanted Grace to see them, to hold them to her nose and run her fingers along the pink frills of the petals. I wanted her to like them and to be pleased with me.
‘Come on!’ I shouted. ‘What’s keeping you?’
A hand pushed aside the curtain between the main room and the kitchen and she appeared, holding a vase made of cut glass. In it were red roses, blowsy heads on long stalks. I counted them quickly: a dozen.
‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she said. ‘They’re from Bernard. I can’t think where he got them. They must have cost the earth.’
My hands tightened around the sweet williams behind my back. I didn’t trust myself to speak.
‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she said again, her eyes shining.
I made myself nod.
‘He’s awfully generous,’ she said. ‘I’ll put them on the mantelpiece so he can see them when he comes.’
As she carried the vase to the fireplace I stuffed my flowers down the side of the armchair, feeling the stems bend and then snap. Later that night, after Grace had gone to sleep, I pulled out what was left of them. They drooped, as if they were hanging their heads in shame, the dark pink petals crushed and limp. I crept downstairs and threw them in the gutter.
Grace had always liked Bernard, right from that first day in the café. She took to him as she had taken to me when I had arrived in Kent. He had saved us from the streets, she said. He had been kind to us. But after he gave her the roses, her liking for him started to become something else. Grace had always been
frank about her feelings but now she tried to hide them. She was no good at it. As soon as she mentioned his name, which she did clumsily and often, two red spots would appear, high up on her cheekbones. Whenever it happened, a sour, dull fury crept over me, making my stomach twist and clench. She didn’t seem to notice. I had to listen to what Bernard thought of
Mr Churchill, the war effort and everything else, right down to the price of fish in Billingsgate market. I knew when he had been to the barber and what he had eaten for his lunch. I knew what he thought of the latest film at the cinema around the corner and I knew the price of a matinee seat. I knew far more than I ever wanted to know, and she kept on telling me.
As her liking for him grew, she changed in other ways, including her appearance. Bernard started to take her out at night to restaurants and dancehalls. I would come home to find her sitting at the table, peering into a mirror propped up against the cardboard boxes. He had given her a red lipstick and she would run it over her mouth, pursing her lips at her reflection as if she wanted to kiss herself. She would take a piece of cork and hold it in the flame of a candle, then rub it over her eyelids and lashes to darken them. When she heard his key in the lock she pinched her cheeks to bring colour to them. I thought she looked like a doll, stiff and artificial. I hated to see her like that. I took to running to the bathroom when I heard him climb the stairs, locking myself inside until I heard her call goodbye. While I was waiting for them to leave I would hunch myself up on the seat of the lavatory, looking at the mess that Grace had left behind her, the fine yellow hairs in a ring around the bath, and in the plughole the pumice stone that she had used to scrape them from her legs. I pressed my fingers into the white dust on the floor, bicarbonate of soda, which she used under her armpits to stop her from sweating, spelling out her name.
I wondered where she had learned these tricks, to paint her face like the women who stood in the doorways on our street. During the long evenings when she was out with Bernard, I turned out the lights and pushed aside the blackout to watch them, calling out, shifting this way and that to show themselves off, welcoming the cat-calls and whistles from the passing servicemen and the glances from the other men who hurried past. I saw quick bargains being struck on doorsteps. A bit of paint and a smile was all it seemed to take. They did it, Grace did it and so did the girls in the factory. At the end of each shift they crowded about the cracked mirror in the lavatory to comb their hair and put on lipstick. They all seemed to share the same secret, one that was somehow off-limits to me. I didn’t understand it and it made me feel stupid and unworldly.
The worst of it was her hair. One night when I came back to the flat, it smelled of something different to the usual stale tobacco. She had taken up smoking as wholeheartedly as everything else in our new life. She smoked when she was happy and when she wasn’t, when she was waiting for Bernard to arrive at the flat and late at night when they came back from the dancehall. When she couldn’t think of something to say she would light a cigarette instead and when she did speak she would gesture with the little white stick balanced between her fingers. Crumpled stubs were all over the flat, pushed into plant pots, ground out in saucers and thrown into the fireplace. But that night the usual fug was gone and the flat smelled of something sharp and clean. I sniffed at the air, wondering what it was.
‘Grace? I’m back,’ I called.
There was a clattering in the bathroom. ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’
‘What’s that smell?’
‘You’ll see,’ she shouted. ‘Don’t come in! Wait there.’
I stayed where I was, wondering what it would be this time. A minute later the door to the bathroom opened.
‘You’ve changed your hair,’ I stammered.
She twirled about, showing herself off to me.
‘I’ve gone blonde!’ she said. ‘All the actresses in the pictures are doing it. Platinum blonde, it’s called. Isn’t it lovely?’
All I could think of was the prostitutes in the street below, twisting and turning like her, to be seen. Her hair was too bright, its colour harsh.
‘But your hair was already blonde,’ I said.
‘I know, but Bernard was storing some hair-dye here and he said that I could have some if I liked. I thought it was a good idea. You know, whenever he takes me to those places, I can’t help but look at the girls there. They’ve got a sort of glow about them. I thought that if I dyed my hair I might feel more as if I belonged.’
I stared at her, searching for the old Grace. Her new hair stood for everything that had gone wrong since we had come to London, I thought sadly. It was deceitful and false and made her look older and hard-faced. Together with the lipstick and the cork on her lashes, it turned her into someone I didn’t recognize, an altogether different sort of person, someone who, I realized, was not a girl but a woman. I was skinny and plain, my face bare and my cheeks scrubbed. I wore my hair pulled back for neatness at the factory. I felt like a school-girl still, stuck in the past while she was moving on, pulling away from me to somewhere I couldn’t go, a place where I wouldn’t be able to reach her.
She said he wanted to take her out for her birthday, somewhere special for turning eighteen. My own had passed unremarkably a few days before. I hadn’t wanted to do anything to celebrate. I had begun to take a sour sort of pleasure in keeping things to myself. It was easier, I thought, to keep people at a distance. As Grace changed herself to suit new places and new people, I stuck stubbornly to the clothes that I had brought with me from Kent, trying to hold onto the happiness I had known there before it all went wrong.
Despite my efforts to stay out of it, she made me get involved in her birthday preparations. I was reading, trying to distract myself from the sight of her in her petticoat as she flitted about the flat, getting ready for him. When she came to me with a reel of cotton and a needle I was surprised. I had never been much good at sewing, despite Mrs Rivers’ attempts to teach me.
‘What do you want me to do?’
She handed me the cotton reel. ‘I want you to pierce my ears,’ she said.
I was startled. ‘What?’
‘I need you to pierce my ears with this needle.’
‘But why?’
‘So I can wear earrings.’ She sat down on the arm of my chair and smiled. ‘Bernard and I went past a shop yesterday, on Bond Street. It was ever so smart. We looked in the window at lots of things. He asked me if I’d like some jewellery for my birthday. He said that he could picture me in pearl earrings. He thought they’d look nice next to my hair. I think he might give me them tonight.’
‘It’ll hurt, you know,’ I said.
‘But it’ll be worth it.’
This was the old Grace, reckless and sure, determined to do as she pleased, regardless of the consequences. I glanced up at her earlobe, a soft sliver of skin peeping out from under her hair and I shivered. I didn’t think I could push a needle through it, just so she could wear some jewellery that he’d given her. I didn’t want to be part of it.
She stood up. ‘I managed to get some ice from the fishmonger,’ she said, walking over to the kitchen. ‘It was a big piece. There should be enough of it left.’
When she came back she was carrying an inch of candle in one hand and the ice in the other.
‘I’ll hold it against my ear,’ she said. ‘You light the candle and put the needle in the flame to burn off the germs. Then when my ear’s gone numb you push the needle through.’
‘I can’t,’ I said.
Her face fell. ‘Nora, please.’
I folded my arms and shook my head.
‘But I need them to be pierced,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’ll do anything.’
I was beginning to feel a nasty sense of satisfaction at making it difficult for her. I was curious to see how far she would go, what she would promise and how much she would beg, simply in order to please him. I shook my h
ead.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’
For a moment we were both silent, staring at each other and I wondered what was going through her mind. Then she smiled, a sly, not altogether pleasant smile, as if I had infected her with my nastiness.
‘I may as well get used to pain,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard that it hurts the first time.’
It took me a moment to understand what she meant, but then it was horribly clear.
She shrugged. ‘I thought that if he was going to give me something so expensive I should give him something in return.’
I felt a queer, wrenching sensation in my chest.
Damn you, I thought. And damn me as well for loving you.
I hated her then, and I wanted to hurt her in any way that I could. I scrambled to my feet and grabbed a matchbox from the mantelpiece. I struck a match, which flared briefly, then went out. I threw it down onto the table, not caring if it burned the wood, and struck another. I put it to the wick of the candle, then I took the needle and held it in the flame, feeling the heat against my fingers.
‘You’d better be ready for this,’ I muttered under my breath.
I pulled her skin taut. Holding the needle in my other hand I chose a spot and then without any hesitation, drove the needle through her earlobe and then out again.
I stepped back, breathing hard. My desire to hurt her had gone as soon as I pushed the needle into her. She was very pale but she hadn’t made a sound. I understood that she had known that I wanted to hurt her. She had provoked me into it deliberately and I was suddenly ashamed at having risen to the bait. For one brief moment I had wanted her to know what it was like to feel pain. Now I was left with a terrible emptiness. I pierced her other ear as quickly as I could and neither of us seemed to feel a thing.
After she had left I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, fixing my eyes on a stain from a leak in the flat above. It was no good. I couldn’t help but picture them, laughing in a dim booth in a restaurant, somewhere in the centre of town, eating hunks of meat and drinking dark red wine. They would have all the things that were difficult for ordinary people to get. He would insist on the best. After the meat, before their puddings came, he would bring out a box and push it across the table. When she opened it and saw the earrings she would pretend to be surprised. She would take one of them and push it into the hole in her ear, taking care not to wince at the pain, then do the same with the other. She would smile at him and he would think her lovely.
Days of Grace Page 20