The dusk settled around her while she waited; cats crept past her knees, searching for food among the ruins. She could hardly stand it. She put her head in her arms: he was late. He was not coming. He had made a promise he did not intend to keep. She was always afraid of the dark, but that night the dark hid her shame. She was humiliated. She wanted him – she wanted him more for not wanting her. She waited. He never came. She was stiff in the morning, helping her mother with the housework. When she finally saw him later in the day, he sought her eyes, took her arm, tried to explain the duties of a soldier. He followed her into her mother’s kitchen and inhaled the scent of the thin vegetable stock that would become soup for the family. He rubbed his stomach. He pointed to her eyes and smiled and said something. Shit-brown eyes, he was saying – she didn’t know what he was saying. Already she could sense his will: that she would believe what he told her.
It was not that her parents forbade the marriage; it was the way Arthur wanted to go about things: no hanging around for her extended family to gather themselves, every last cousin to arrive and the lot of them to file past the table where the happy couple sat with their glasses of Frangelico and millefoglie. It would take months that way. Better to run off and be done with it. So she left with Arthur one night while her family was sleeping, with just a change of clothes and a comb and toothbrush to see her through the long journey. She met him at the bombed-out trattoria and they caught a ride on an army truck that was shipping out. They took buses and trains and finally a boat that chugged across the English Channel, dodging the detritus of vessels that had been shot down or sunk in the war. When they landed in England, Arthur kissed the ground, much to the delight of onlookers, while she hung shyly at his side and kept her mouth shut. He had told her they didn’t like Italians in England – people thought they were all fascists. She gathered his meaning from what little she understood of what he said: Italian Fascismo, he repeated, and she nodded.
She had been reconciled with her family later but she had not seen them again. Her parents were already old when she left – she was the youngest of nine children – and they died before her first year in England was out. She was desolate when those letters arrived, first one and then the other, a few months later. She replaced the letters in their envelopes, as if that would do the trick, and put them away in a drawer. For all she knew, having not looked at them since, the smell of home was still on the pages.
Arthur did not understand her grief, and there was still the language barrier between them. He held her for a bit and then he wanted his supper. They were dead and buried, he said. Times were different. We’re up against it – that’s what people thought. Make do and mend. Carry on. They were down at heel, rationed. Later, from a brother with a camera, came a photograph of the grave her parents shared, along with a snip of the myrtle that had been planted there. Flavia kept both in a polished silver frame by her bed, next to a photo of Arthur in his army uniform, and she bade them all goodnight before she went to sleep at the end of a long day of housekeeping.
Of his own parents, Arthur said little. No point in raking over that old muck. Is that what he said? Her English was very poor and sometimes he spoke so fast, so gruff. Did he have brothers and sisters? Yes, but he didn’t get on with them. His father had been a true Victorian. Arthur didn’t remember him touching or seeming to care at all about his children. Children, for a man like his father, were there to work: daughters to help their mother with the house, sons to learn a trade. Arthur wanted more than that. He wanted to go up in the world. He liked to think of himself as above class. He was, by definition, working class, but it was the company he kept that he felt would come to define him: the kind of men he’d known during the war, when he’d found himself tossed together with every kind of Englishman.
After they married, Arthur and Flavia settled in Kettering where Arthur, who had been a pipe fitter before the war, took a job as a machinist in a boot factory. They found a bedsit and Flavia kept it clean and provided delicious meals with cheap bits of meat: the tongue, the tail, the feet. Everything in one room, that’s how they lived. She cooked on a hotplate. Their milk was on the window ledge. Every penny must go to the future, Arthur said.
One day he went to London to meet up with a few of his army brothers. He had a new suit to wear – he said it would not do for them to see him dressed as a pauper. ‘All we ever talked about was what we would get up to after it was all over. They want to see the big man, I’ll give them the big man.’ He spent a long time getting ready, fastidious with his hair, which had begun to recede despite the tonics and oils he used faithfully – an extravagance he felt he was owed for his hard work in the boot factory.
She must not wait up, he said. What they wanted to do was drink and talk late into the night and he would take the milk train home. But Flavia waited. She had no choice in the matter: she was afraid of the dark. She had never told him; she had pretended otherwise, and about other things, too, she had pretended she didn’t mind, like him going to the pub after work without sending word home to her, when she had cooked all day to make him something he liked. And when he came in late and followed her around, lifting her dress, she always let him have his way.
But that night, every time she put her head down on the pillow she thought she heard footsteps on the stairs, an eyeball to the keyhole roaming the cool dark: an intruder, come to get her. When Arthur finally appeared at dawn, she was frantic, in tears. He didn’t seem to notice but scooped her into his arms and whirled her around until she laughed. Then they went to bed. They slept the day away. She had never done that before, stayed in bed all of a day and through the night. When Marie came to be.
*
Marie, not Maria, as Flavia had wished, but the flatter, more English Marie. Arthur liked the name. She was a ten-pounder, one of those: gigantic, ruddy from the moment they squealed, great rolls of fat in their arms and legs, having been reared inside on Sunday roasts and sticky toffee pudding, stuffed like ducks for foie gras; who came out hungry for lamb and potatoes, carbonara, melanzane alla parmigiana, fillet steak, pork chops – but learned to content themselves with mother’s milk and drained their mothers dry.
When Marie was born, Flavia didn’t know where Arthur was. She hadn’t seen him since he dropped her at the hospital that morning; he found her a porter and fled. Her pains were bearable at first; then, in the evening, the pattern tightened – drew into a wailing prayer that she would die, and at that moment the baby crowned. Arthur briefly appeared to learn he had a daughter and to touch her small head. He kissed Flavia and told her she had done very well and he would see her in a few days, when her confinement was over. He reminded her that he didn’t like hospitals or doctors; they made him sick – he, who was the picture of stout good health.
Flavia and the baby, Marie, eventually went home and began their long life together. By then Arthur lived away during the week, having gone into business in London with an army friend, only returning home at weekends. Things had happened quickly for him: by the time Marie was born he had left the boot factory, earning enough in six months to buy them a semi-terraced house, pebble-dashed, north-facing, with a magnolia tree out front. Fully furnished. London was no place to raise a family, in his opinion; better to settle in Kettering, where there was plenty of affordable housing, not blown to bits as it was in the capital. Arthur didn’t know then that he would work in London all his life.
All week Flavia waited for him. She tended to Marie ceaselessly – a colicky baby, whose crying and coughing gave Flavia much worry. By the time Arthur arrived home every Friday night, shortly after nine o’clock, she was on her knees. Then, blessed relief, just to have him there.
She poured him a drink in the fine glass bought just for that purpose – whisky, three fingers – eased his shoes from his feet and helped him with his slippers. She retrieved his supper from the oven, steaming under foil, and watched his face while he ate. She sat up late with him, until he was ready for bed, then double-checked the l
ocks and turned out the lights: Arthur home again, safe, her family under one roof, asleep. Flavia said a prayer of thanks.
Saturday morning she cooked him breakfast while he put the baby on his knee and bounced her until she cried. After breakfast, Flavia showed him her weekly housekeeping and he examined the bills and receipts. He admired her way with money: how well they ate on so little. It did not occur to her to ask him for more than he gave. She made a big lunch, eaten in silence, before he settled into his chair with the newspapers. At five o’clock sharp she handed him a glass of whisky and fed Marie her tea while ‘Tampico’ played on the gramophone. He wanted peace and quiet when he didn’t want ‘Tampico’.
After Marie had eaten her tea, Flavia bathed her and chose a pretty nightdress, all lace, then showed her off to Arthur: a sallow comma who didn’t suit pink. Later, Marie howled while they ate.
‘Leave her,’ Arthur barked at Flavia. ‘You spoil her.’
But she couldn’t, she just couldn’t leave Marie to cry it out. ‘Her colic,’ she pleaded with him.
Arthur did not understand. He wanted things the way he wanted them. Once Marie was settled, Flavia sat with him while he drank another whisky. They listened to the Third Programme on the wireless or they listened to ‘Tampico’, whichever he preferred. Flavia tried to stay awake – how she willed herself and shook her head and rubbed her eyes – but more than once she woke alone in the dark sitting room, Arthur having taken himself off to bed and left her there in a chair: cold, uncovered.
On Sunday there was another meal to prepare and Flavia rose early, taking Marie downstairs with her. Later, Arthur would appear, having had a bath, and smile at them both and drink a cup of tea and eat his eggs and toast while he read the papers, and Flavia would think to herself that all was well in the world.
After lunch, if the sun shone, they sat out in the garden on a rug with one of Flavia’s cakes cut into generous slices, the baby asleep in her pram. Arthur snored, his head in Flavia’s lap. She stroked his cheek, ran a finger over the smudges of his eyebrows and sighed with contentment.
Sometimes he wanted to watch the cricket in the park and she might go along provided she kept the baby quiet. She watched, proud at her husband’s side. The game was incomprehensible to her: young men windmilling their arms and finally throwing a ball, all of them aglow in whites. When Arthur’s eyes followed other women, she flushed, made a fuss over something – a kamikaze wasp, stinger erect, headed in their direction, or the wind that struck up like a band, the sun in the baby’s eyes – just to draw his attention again.
Love me, she begged silently.
Then it was time to think about Arthur going back to London. By mid afternoon on Sunday he was ready to go. She felt his readiness: it was palpable. He could hardly sit still. The baby was of no interest. He wanted to get dressed – where was his suit? His shoes? Everything was ready upstairs in the wardrobe. She heard him brush his teeth and then he was a long time before the mirror, his feet creaking that particular floorboard. Flavia tried not to cry. Sometimes he wanted her to clip his nails. Sometimes he called downstairs for her to play ‘Tampico’.
She made him sandwiches for the train from whatever roast they’d had. A hard-boiled egg. A slice of cake. An apple, cored. Flask of tea.
He pecked her on the cheek the same way he stamped the baby on the head: hard, dry lips, mouth sealed, nothing thrilling about it. Then he was off.
*
The doorbell rang. Marie, with a bowl of porridge before her on the tray of her high chair, startled and let out a siren wail at the sound of the bell.
Flavia, who was tired, always alone with a baby who would not sleep; Flavia, all nerves, jumpy like the skin had been flayed from her; Flavia could not think who was at the door. The gas man? The fishmonger? It wasn’t Thursday. Was it? When she was so tired, it was hard to think. It wasn’t Friday – she knew what Fridays felt like. Was it June already? The birds sang so early, the sun set so late, or so it seemed to Flavia, who only wanted to sleep.
Flavia was a prisoner, a hostage. She adored her keeper and dreaded her just the same: a knot in the pit of her stomach. Marie never slept, never smiled, often screamed as if she had a pain. Flavia knew she must go to her, put Marie over her shoulder and walk her again, the jigging walk that quieted her; a joyless baby always wanting to be held, always needing something, wet, tired, hungry, but only taking a little bit. ‘Drink,’ Flavia urged her daughter, giving her a bottle. ‘Please,’ she begged, but Marie would only take a fraction of what her mother thought she needed. Flavia watched the kitchen clock all day. She tried to get the housework done but found she couldn’t; Marie needed picking up and soothing, her nappy changed, the whole of her stripped of soiled garments and dressed all over again. There seemed always to be some kind of leak from Marie. Sometimes Flavia was glad that Arthur was not there to see the state of the house and his wife so rumpled, her housedress spotted and stained where she wiped her hands all day, her black coils of hair sprouting grey.
Oh, but if he were there just to take the baby off in her pram for an hour, even half an hour, then Flavia could have a bath, the long, hot soak she craved—
Marie didn’t seem to like him much. If ever he held her, she wailed. Perched on his knee, she leaned away from him, eyes wide. ‘She wants you,’ he called to Flavia in the kitchen. He was not one for making nice with babies; he did not pat or talk in a silly voice or blow kisses. He wouldn’t change her nappy. When Marie cried during the night, Flavia always raced to her cot lest Arthur wake. He was very particular about his sleep.
The doorbell. Flavia answered: a telegram. She’d never had one before. She had to get a neighbour to read the message aloud to her. Upon hearing it, Flavia burst into tears. The neighbour said, did she feel well? Did she feel quite right? Was she sure? Flavia nodded and was shown to the door with a biscuit for Marie. Back in her own home, she cried more – Marie pointed at her and laughed, so funny, Flavia’s face like that.
The telegram said that Arthur wouldn’t arrive until the following weekend. Business kept him in London.
Flavia, unclean as a madwoman, hair like a hedgerow because she hadn’t the time to sit with a hairbrush and make it shine; Flavia, who drank cold tea and ate slices of buttered bread because there was no chance to cook something; Flavia, forever rinsing nappies, soaking nappies, washing nappies by hand, wringing them, nappies on a clothes line strung across the kitchen, so many nappies – Flavia suffered.
He wouldn’t be home until next weekend.
A hundred years from then.
*
She counted the days and then the hours. Friday was the longest day; she had everything to do. She cleaned the house from top to bottom and cooked a good meal; all the while Marie howled to be picked up. She would just have to wait, Flavia told her. There were candles and flowers and she had the fire going red-hot in the sitting room. She bathed and dressed carefully after Marie was in bed – she put Marie down early, with finger curls in her hair in case Arthur wanted to see her. Flavia couldn’t recall that he ever did. A sleeping baby should sleep, he said. Once or twice, when he’d had an extra drink, she knew that he looked in on her, but he didn’t wish for her to wake.
He would be home soon. Flavia smoothed the new dress. It was wine-coloured wool crepe with a sweetheart neckline. Sweetheart necklines had been all the rage when she was a girl, and she had been wearing a dress with a sweetheart neckline when she met Arthur – pink batiste, a dress her Aunt Cecelia made for her. She wore it again the night she ran off with him. On the train, three days into their long journey to England, when she really needed a wash, he had led her to a narrow vestibule where the luggage was piled high. He buried his face in her cleavage and lifted her skirt, sticking his hand up there. She had clung to him as the train bumped and swung – she felt as though her knees would give way. His hand, there.
Flavia thought she looked nice. The house shone around her. There was nothing to do but wait.
She
thought that maybe tonight they would be together like they used to, Arthur having reached for her in the dark. He still did sometimes. She was always very quiet, not wanting to wake Marie and hear her fuss and feel that she must go to her. Arthur didn’t like that. Usually by the time she got back to bed he’d sorted himself out and fallen asleep.
That’s how it went. The slights, the hurts, the black marks: not tallied up but left to fade away. It all came out in the wash.
Flavia went to the window. He was late. The sinking sun cast a mellow glow on the men filing up the road, the husbands and fathers who worked so hard, dull in the morning when they set off but now, coming from the pub, jolly with beer, calling out to one another, making plans. Two whole days off, most of them.
She checked on supper – the dark, rich beef stew Arthur liked, a fresh loaf keeping warm in a tea towel, butter going soft on the table. She was hungry. She usually ate with Marie at five, suppers of macaroni in gravy, boiled peas, fingerlings of cod she breaded and fried, baked potato fluffed with a fork. Marie banged the table and shouted in scribbles – not English, not Italian, nothing Flavia could understand, but Flavia always knew what she wanted.
Flavia went upstairs to check on her: fast asleep in her cot. She fixed her blankets, then went into the bathroom and put on more lipstick. Brushed her hair – it framed her face in waves, blue-black in the twilight.
The Ladies of the House Page 12