The Night Raid

by Clare Harvey

  Laura let her hands drop back down to her sides. ‘I’m sorry, dear. This particular portrait is proving an unexpected challenge,’ she said. ‘But when I consider it finished you shall be the first to know, I promise.’

  ‘Thank you. I know I will, Dame Laura. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have nagged.’ And Violet Smith gave her a swift and unexpected hug, before banging out of the bathroom door.

  Laura stood in the empty bathroom, looking at the shut door, feeling like the tugged end of a line of knitting. Unravelling.

  Zelah

  Zelah thought of his house, the parents she had yet to meet – would never meet, now – the army officer brother, a whole tribe of aunts, uncles and cousins: lawyers, engineers, businessmen, magistrates. How could she ever have thought the likes of her could deserve to be part of that world?

  She felt tears rising, unbidden. But it wouldn’t do. Not here. Not at work. But she couldn’t possibly go to the changing rooms now, not with all the other girls and the gossip. They were already asking when the wedding was, who’d be maid of honour, where the honeymoon would be. How could she face them? What could she say?

  The door of the loos was like a sanctuary. She pushed inside. A moment. She just needed a moment, to suck down this despair, wash her face, and paint a smile on her face. One moment alone.

  The door banged open, and there, facing her, was Dame Laura. Zelah faltered, swallowing, blinking, willing the tears to stop. The door fell shut behind her.

  ‘What is it, dear?’ Dame Laura said.

  Zelah shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like nothing to me.’

  ‘I can’t marry George,’ Zelah said, the sour pinch of withheld grief in her jaws. ‘He’s from a good family, and I—’ She couldn’t say it.

  ‘Is it to do with your birth certificate?’ Laura said, and Zelah nodded. ‘Oh dear. Come here, my love.’ Laura opened up her arms and Zelah let herself be enfolded. The tears came in painful jerks at first, and then in a rush. Dame Laura smelled of smoke and turps and eau de Cologne, and her bony fingers rubbed Zelah’s shoulder in a slow rhythm, syncopating her despair. ‘The course of true love never did run smooth,’ she whispered into Zelah’s hair.

  ‘Zelah!’ There came a muffled shout from outside the door.

  Laura gave Zelah a gentle nudge to break free from the embrace, and passed her a piece of tissue. ‘Blow,’ she said, as a mother would say to a child. Zelah wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  ‘Zelah!’ His voice again from outside the door. Zelah felt trapped, numb, incapable.

  ‘Let’s have a look at you.’ Laura took out a clean handkerchief and wiped Zelah’s face with it. Then she spun Zelah around so she could see her reflection in the liver-spotted mirror that was screwed to the wall above the sink. ‘If you’re a bastard, you’re a beautiful one,’ she said, standing behind Zelah with a half-smile on her face. ‘And I would be the proudest mother in the world if you were my daughter. Now for God’s sake, go out there and put that poor man out of his misery.’

  Zelah opened the bathroom door and George was there, waiting. The birth certificate flapped like a truce from his right hand. She stepped forward and opened her mouth to say something, but before she could, his face was close, his lips on hers: soft and urgent. The taste of him. She lifted her arms up and drew him in.

  Laura

  Despite the heat, it made her shiver, seeing them kiss. Young love – so potent. Had it ever been like that between her and Harold, Laura wondered? There had always been admiration, loyalty, and mutual respect, but passion such as that she could not recall – had Harold ever been like that with anyone else?

  Laura closed the bathroom door behind her. So Zelah was an illegitimate child, born in Cornwall in September 1917. She had grown up believing that her paternity was another casualty of the Great War, some fallen soldier in France. There had been so very many of them, after all. Laura sighed to herself and slipped away down the corridor, leaving the lovers to their embrace.

  Laura knew Zelah’s surname was Fitzlord. She knew the girl who’d looked after Harold was called Sarah. Did she dare ask Zelah what her mother’s first name was? Laura shook her head, hurrying along. ‘Oh Harold!’ she said aloud, and tubby Mr Tonks, who’d just come out of the men’s WC, gave her an odd look as he hoiked up his braces and started to re-button his overalls.

  Laura pushed through the double doors and onto the factory floor. The thunder-heat assaulted her. A white-hot rivet arced like a spark and fizzed into a bucket of water. Gun barrels swung like ship’s booms. The greasy floor was littered with the dirty rags they used to wipe down the machinery at the end of the shift. Laura thought of Bruegel’s ‘Dulle Griet’, a sixteenth-century painting of an army of peasant women pillaging hell: red-orange-black, and all those angry, scurrying figures. She passed the white shower of oxyacetylene sparks and remembered to step over the orange piping, coiled snakelike from the gas cylinders. Finally she made it through to the central lathe, where Vi waited, white-faced, sucking on a cigarette and leaning on a half-finished Bofors barrel.

  ‘All right?’ Violet yelled, and Laura could barely hear her voice above the machine noise.

  Laura nodded and repositioned herself behind the canvas. Keep going, Laura. Come on. It won’t paint itself, you know. Violet sank into position. Laura’s eyes flicked from the girl herself to her painted equivalent, noticing the dark circles under Violet’s eyes. Laura picked up her paintbrush. Should she paint in the evident exhaustion in the girl’s face? Violet had crushed out her cigarette, and her hands lay still, exactly where they should be. But something was very wrong: the dark eye sockets, the faint mesh of frown lines over her forehead, even in repose, and the hard set of her jaw.

  Laura mixed ochre with Prussian blue to create a hazy grey. The oil paint was slick as the machine grease that the girls slathered on the tools. And Laura was suddenly reminded of poor, dear Flora Munnings and how she’d looked that last time Laura had seen her alive, her beautiful face sheared with despair. Darling Flora. If only she’d realised, been able to help her, before it was too late. Was that what she was catching in Violet’s eyes today? Despair?

  Laura stepped back. The painting was so near to completion now. But – it was the faces; there was a hopelessness in those painted expressions. What was it Violet had said on that first day, when she’d demanded to sit for her?

  Laura put down her brush.

  ‘Can we talk?’ Laura had to raise her voice to a shout to be heard above the factory noise. Violet nodded and broke out of the pose. Laura gestured towards the door.

  It was time to sort a few things out.

  Violet

  ‘I’m fine,’ Violet repeated.

  ‘If you’re fine, then I’m a monkey’s uncle,’ Dame Laura said. ‘Come with me; I need to sketch you outside.’

  At the top of the factory steps Dame Laura paused, looking out at the domino rows of grimy terraces. Double summertime diluted the colourless day like tea made from thrice-used leaves. ‘The Meadows.’ Dame Laura sighed. ‘I remember when it really was all meadows round here.’ And Violet thought, who cares? Some of us have got more important things to worry about than where people build houses. But she said nothing; she just let herself be led through side streets and snickets. ‘The River Leen, the River Leen, not the Cut or the Trent, but something in between,’ Dame Laura said, as the alleyway opened out to a patch of green dissected by a thread of water.

  There was nobody about at this time in the evening, although the cigarette butts and glimmer of broken glass in the dewfall were evidence of a thousand lunch breaks for day shifters. There was a line of trees on one side, and to the other side the factory buildings blanked out half the pale grey sky. The river was a precious drizzle between steep banks, underwater weed like sopping hair.

  ‘Where shall I stand? Or should I sit?’ Vi said. There didn’t seem anywhere obvious to go.

  ‘All in good time. Walk with me a while, first.
It’s always good to be outside, get everything out in the open.’

  There was something in the way she phrased it that pricked Vi’s attention. Get everything out in the open? What did she want to find out? ‘Why are we here, Dame Laura?’ Vi said.

  ‘Why do you think we’re here, dear?’

  ‘Well, if I knew, I wouldn’t be asking, would I?’

  ‘Don’t take that tone. You know fine well.’ Her skirts swished as she walked. ‘Violet Smith, something is wrong. I cannot finish your portrait. You fidget and frown and disappear with no explanation. You look exhausted. I know you want this painting finished as quickly as I do. You told me you needed the money for something, remember?’

  There was a pause. The two women continued walking along the path above the river. In the far distance, the rising prongs of the colliery chimneys coughed smoke. There was the sudden roaring shiver of a goods train passing just behind the trees.

  ‘I cannot paint a decent portrait of you unless you give of yourself. The painting won’t work without honesty. I need you to be honest with me, Violet.’

  ‘I am being honest.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re not “fine” at all, are you? But whatever is bothering you, you think you can’t tell an old woman like me, is that it?’

  ‘It’s not your age.’

  ‘You can’t tell a “respectable” woman like me, is that it? Worried I’ll have a fit of the vapours or scurry off and tell tales to the King?’ Vi shrugged. Dame Laura put a hand on Vi’s arm, leant in, close enough so that Vi could feel her breath warm and moist on her cheek. ‘It’s a baby, isn’t it, dear?’ Vi nodded, and Dame Laura let go.

  ‘Right, stand there. No, not there, over there, by the fence.’ She pointed. ‘That concrete is pale enough to capture the last of the light, if we’re quick.’

  Vi did as she was told and stood next to the fence. Wood panels were slatted in between concrete posts. The roughness snagged her coat. She stood still and looked out into the fading skies beyond the saw-edged factory rooftops.

  Dame Laura put down her bag on the grass and pulled out a large notebook and a black stub of pencil. She didn’t ask any more questions, but she talked as she worked, and Vi decided to listen, if only to drown out the voices inside her head – the voices that told her she was a silly tart and a slut and her life was over before it had even started.

  ‘I knew a girl about your age called Flora,’ Laura said. ‘Before the last war. She had a kind of calm beauty. It was a long time ago – we were living in Cornwall, back then. We all wanted to paint her – all of us artists – and I suppose we were all a bit in love with her, too. She had this quality of lightness about her, you see? Like sunrise. You know how sunsets can be all showy and brash? But sunrise is understated and serene. Yes, that’s the word: serene. She had a serenity about her.’

  The drawing pad half-covered her face as she worked, hand skittering across the page, eyes flicking from the drawing to Vi, wrapping her in an invisible mesh of observation.

  ‘This girl – Flora – she married an artist friend of mine. He was famous and wealthy, but also somewhat troubled. It’s hard to explain. She should never have agreed to marry him, but a man like that can be terribly persuasive. And she was an aspiring artist herself, so she would have been in awe of his talent. But hero-worship is not necessarily a sound basis for a marriage,’ Dame Laura said. She hesitated, then, cleared her throat, and her gaze shifted momentarily away from Violet and up into the darkening sky.

  ‘Anyway, later on, after the marriage, she discovered she had fallen pregnant, which one would have supposed to be a cause for celebration. The problem was, it was not her husband’s baby. The marriage had never been consummated. As I said, he was a troubled man and we were a tight-knit community, and we were all friends. Harold and I had even joined the couple on their honeymoon. We all knew that Flora and her husband were strangers, in the physical sense.’

  Dame Laura paused again, pulled out a scalpel from her bag, and sharpened the pencil with swift definite strokes. Violet kept as still as she could, although she was getting pins-and-needles in one leg. Dame Laura resumed her sketching.

  ‘The terrible thing was that rather than endure the shame and scandal that this would have brought, the poor girl decided to end her own life. She killed herself. Arsenic poisoning. And I was the one who discovered the body. Of course I tried to revive her, but it was clearly too late – the body bloats and the stench is awful. So beautiful in life, and in death, so grotesque. And all because she was carrying a child that she didn’t want. She felt she had no choice, I suppose, thought she’d squandered her one chance.’

  Dame Laura looked up from the drawing. ‘Do you ever feel like that, Violet?’

  Violet nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Dame Laura held the drawing at arm’s length and squinted at it. ‘Yes, I feel I have caught you there,’ she said, then closed the notebook. ‘I can use that sketch to help complete the painting. There will be no further requirement for you to sit for me. I shall not need you again tonight, and I shall have the sitter’s fee with you first thing in the morning. How would that suit you, Violet?’

  ‘That would suit me very well,’ Vi said, almost not believing what she’d just heard. She stamped her feet, trying to get rid of the painful tingling in her leg. ‘I’d be in the pink if you could do that.’ Dame Laura was going to give her the money! She could go back to Mrs Kirk. It wasn’t too late. Everything would work out.

  ‘The most tragic thing of all is that it was so needless,’ Dame Laura went on, putting her pencil and notepad away in her bag. ‘Dear Flora felt she had no choice. But she did have a choice. There were those very close to her who could have helped.’

  ‘Who? You?’ Violet said, walking back across the grass towards her.

  ‘Come on, now, we should be getting back. Wasn’t it good to get out into the open air?’ the older woman said, not answering the question. ‘Mind your step, this path will be slippery in those clogs, especially now the dew is falling. Let’s get back to the night shift.’

  Violet thought about the story she’d just heard. Dame Laura couldn’t help that Flora girl, and she wished she had, and now she’s helping me.

  ‘Thank you,’ Violet said, as they began to walk back towards the factory.

  ‘Don’t thank me, thank the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, for giving us both a chance to deal with our mistakes,’ Dame Laura said. And Violet didn’t quite know what she meant, but she didn’t care, because by this time tomorrow she’d be rid of the baby and life could get back to normal again, couldn’t it?

  Chapter 20

  Zelah

  ‘You’ll be back for the wedding?’ Zelah said, pulling away from the embrace.

  ‘I’m only going to Malvern for the Easter weekend,’ Laura replied, grappling with the heavy train door. ‘I’m keen to get back as soon as possible and get the painting finished so you two lovebirds can fly off on your honeymoon.’ She stepped up into the train, slammed the door shut behind her and pushed down the window, reaching out one of her bony hands for Zelah to take.

  As they held hands Zelah looked into Laura’s eyes and wondered how she’d managed to get so close to this old woman, whom she’d only known a few weeks. Perhaps that was why Laura was such a good portrait artist, Zelah thought, because people felt they could be their real selves when she was painting them. Perhaps all her models felt the same way. There was the sound of slamming doors and the hiss of steam from all along the platform – the train was about to leave. She gave Laura’s hand a last squeeze and let her go.

  Zelah followed along the platform, seeing Laura safely into her carriage. Through the glass she saw Laura smile and nod as she met her fellow passengers. An airman lifted her Gladstone bag into the netted luggage rack, two women with knitting shifted across to let her have the window seat, and a man with a newspaper lowered it half an inch and nodded as she sat down opposite him. She’ll have sketched them all and heard all t
heir life stories by the time the train reaches Birmingham, Zelah thought.

  The engine growled and the train jolted forwards a notch. Laura looked out of the carriage window and, seeing Zelah, lifted a hand in farewell. Zelah put a palm onto the glass, wishing she could reach through and clasp Laura’s hand again.

  The guard’s whistle shrieked; steam billowed. Zelah pulled her hand away and stepped back from the platform edge. The train began to move, and she watched Laura’s seated figure shrink and slide from view as the train jerked and clattered out of the station. When the train had gone, the smoke and steam cleared, revealing an arch of blue sky between the two platform roofs. Zelah turned to go. The hand that had been on the carriage window was smeared with smuts. Zelah wrung her palms together, getting rid of most of the dirt, and started to walk slowly back towards the steps. A woman in a burgundy coat in front of her was tugging along a tearful little sandy-haired boy, his gulping sobs sounding loud on the empty platform. ‘Nah then, you’ll be all right, Teddy,’ the woman said in a weary voice, but the boy continued to cry, stumbling along behind.

  Zelah walked past them and started to climb the steps to the concourse. A couple coming down in the opposite direction were quarrelling openly, their bodies all sharp angles and their voices jabbing consonants: ‘Dirty little slut,’ the man spat out as they passed on the steps, and Zelah saw him try to grab the woman’s arm, and how she wrenched herself free.

  She walked out into the high-roofed concourse, where pigeons nestled and cooed in corners, and the mass of busy passengers nudged and sidestepped each other. She checked her watch as she walked. If she was quick she could catch the quarter past.

  ‘Zelah!’ She turned her head, not seeing at first.

  ‘Zelah!’ The shout came louder.

  ‘George?’ There he was, shove-running through the crowds towards her, his undone coat flapping. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, pushing forwards to meet him. ‘I’m sorry, excuse me, could I pass, please?’ shunting and apologising her way to meet him. She could see he was smiling, rushing towards her.