Grace was barely aware of this complexity of muddled guilt. She only knew that while Miss Lawrence unloaded the tray she felt dreadfully uncomfortable, a common enough feeling for her, and that it was better, safer all round somehow, to keep her eyes down. She did not notice that Lily too was keeping her own head down, and hiding her work-thickened servant’s hands.
‘Cheer up,’ said Tommy to them both, when Miss Lawrence had gone, and he had pointed out her Owlish qualities. ‘Don’t mind her – ol’ ratbag.’ It was like a gust of fresh air, his irreverence. And so male. What is this nonsense, his frank tone said.
‘Got any scones left, please?’ he asked the thin one, Miss Jane, as she scurried past to another table, and presently she brought them a plateful, with a pot of cream and some home-made strawberry jam in a little crystal bowl.
Then they talked and ate and laughed, not too loudly, and there was no one near enough to notice if they held the knives in the wrong way, or that Lily finished up the milk jug by swigging directly out of it. They talked about the Picture Palace, and the best films, and Miss Pyncheon’s new hairstyle, which was as short as a man’s, and Lily’s oldest sister’s place over in Plymouth, where the husband and wife sat at opposite ends of a gloomy great table as long as a cricket pitch, and never spoke to one another from one week’s end to the next. Tommy talked about his own sudden if temporary rise through the office ranks, with so many older chaps out at the Front. He only hoped the whole thing wouldn’t be over by the time he was old enough to go to France himself, he said. Two of Lily’s brothers were there already, said Lily, and her mother was that pleased, the money coming in so regular.
‘Any more tea in that pot, Gracie?’
When they were ready to leave Miss Lawrence brought the bill, and Tommy counted out the money a little showily, perhaps.
‘Do keep the change,’ he said drawlingly, as he put away his wallet. Punishing her, Grace saw, for all that she had so silently conveyed to them, even to him, in the set of her shoulders. Lily sniggered, but Miss Lawrence merely thanked him, and put the sixpence in the pocket of her apron.
‘You didn’t have to do that,’ said Grace, when they were back outside. From the corner of her eye she saw the sign in the Little Owl Tearooms door turned swiftly about, to read CLOSED.
‘Oh, it’s quite the usual thing,’ he said, pretending to misunderstand her, and after a second’s hesitation she pretended to be reassured.
‘I got to be getting back,’ said Lily, ‘or they’ll have my guts for garters. Thanks for the tea.’
‘Pleasure,’ said Tommy, grinning. ‘Dear ladies!’ and he gave them each a separate wildly exaggerated bow, bade them good night, and walked quickly away into the gathering darkness: not seeing either of them home. Well, perhaps it was for the best, thought Grace, though she had been hopeful, even let herself picture the two of them walking back towards Market Buildings together, slowly, in the lamplight.
But in any case this had been a sort of public declaration. She and Tommy and Lily; the gossip would be all over Silkhampton by this time tomorrow, that he was, in all likelihood, courting one of them. It was just that Silkhampton could not yet be sure which one. There was safety in that, she saw. For them all.
Violet decided to try cunning first. She wrote inviting Bea to visit, not a word of reproach, going into some detail about a film she herself had lately seen with Grace at the Picture Palace.
It was a special camera, Grace had told her. They set it up beside the rosebuds or whatever else they wanted, filmed the buds opening, and then speeded the film up later so that what really took hours seemed to take no time at all. This sounded convincingly mechanical enough. But somehow the sight of the young roses seeming to exhale as they held out their petals to the light gave Violet a tremendous lurch at her heart. The movement of the flowers like a turning dance, the fresh unfolding petals so eager, so unaware of their own fragility! Violet, sitting in rapt forgetfulness beside Grace in the fourpennies, had been startled back into herself by the sudden realization that she was near tears.
It was not until they were on their way home that she made the connection between the busily innocent flowers and her own past. She thought of all the babies she had seen into the world. How lucky she had been, how privileged! Over and over again she had witnessed the moment. She had never thought of birth as beautiful, only as profound. Now she found herself on the edge of a thought that seemed almost blasphemous in its presumption: that the pleasure she had taken in the dance of the quickened flowers, their speedy passage from bud to full-blown rose, might be some faint echo of the divine pleasure of the Creator Himself, as He saw His frail children make their strange cascading entry into His world, then stretch and unfold themselves, turn towards the light, in a span of time only He could properly encompass.
‘I sit down a minute,’ said Violet, for luckily they were passing a low wall at the time.
‘You alright?’ Grace was alarmed. She had never known Violet to have a single day’s illness before, not so much as a headache.
‘Just felt a bit dizzy. There. Alright now.’ She rose, steady as usual. ‘It was them flowers,’ she said quite crossly, to Grace’s surprise, ‘I can’t be doing with them.’
All the same she was sure Bea would enjoy them, their near-magic. She wrote too about how much Grace longed to take her aunt to the cinema – had Bea even seen a proper moving picture yet? The way Mr Pyncheon played the piano too, it was as good as a concert! And the weather still so cold and so wild – why not spend a few days in your own home town, Bea? Perhaps next week? Please to write back and say. She was Bea’s only and loving sister, Violet Dimond.
She would wait a week, she thought. A week was long enough. If Bea made no reply, or wrote with some further excuse, she would take action. She would no longer allow Bea to pretend that things were simply back the way they were, the distant crosspatch way they generally had been, before Grace. We’re past all that, Bea had said then, plain as day. That was still true, thought Violet.
And yet she doesn’t know how much I know. She won’t know May Givens talked to me. She doesn’t know I know about Half and Half.
Half of what, Bea? Half of whom?
A week, Beatrice Givens. And then I come to you.
15
Tommy Dando walking towards Market Buildings one March evening after dark, pausing not outside Grace’s window, so near the lamp post, but a little further on, where he can slip into the shadows of the alley, and disappear from view.
Tommy Dando so tall and healthy-looking, his lively face so often full of laughter. Perhaps only his mother has any suspicions about him. Lately, since she caught him going through her handbag, she’s been keeping her purse in her pocket. But then, she’s never liked him much. Her heart belonged to his elder brother, who died of diphtheria when he was eight. Tommy aged five was ill too, but before he could get out of bed again knew that in his mother’s eyes the wrong brother had lived.
He sleeps badly, always has.
Once, just after his own eighth birthday, he took Sam’s cap from its peg where still it hung, and slipped out of the house with it, coming in only at dusk, and making sure his mother was there in the doorway to see him approach, wearing the cap just the same way Sam had, and trying as best as he could to capture Sam’s distinctive quick-paced walk.
He did not know why he did this, only that it had seemed like a good idea: his mother would see Sam again, even if for just a little while, and be glad – that was the general hazy notion. Afterwards he could not remember why he had been content with so much haziness. It had seemed to him at the time that the haziness had a sort of authority to it.
Sometimes even now Tommy Dando looks in the mirror in the new lean-to bathroom and tries to see Sam looking back. There’s not much resemblance; Tommy favours his father, broad and fair and strapping. Sammy was dark and delicate; his eyebrows had a particular slant to them, flyaway, witty.
He prefers the mirror best after a bath, whe
n the steam has fully blurred his image, and the water darkened his hair; you can certainly see the likeness then, Tommy thinks.
Other times it’s just lumpish Tommy Dando looking back, the one with nothing inside him, nothing at all.
He doesn’t really know why he’s here, in the alley beside Market Buildings. Hadn’t planned it. Was on his way home, just turned left instead of right, and somehow here he is. He’s curious, he tells himself: what’s it like, her place? He can’t imagine, he has so little to go on. There’s his own home, much bigger, on both floors at any rate, and there’s his uncle’s farmhouse; these are the only private houses Tommy has entered, apart from the brief astonishments of Wooton, all those years ago.
He reaches the end of the alley, turns left, and slides up the catch to the garden door. It opens without a sound. Henhouse, silent. The cinder path leads straight between the dark leafy beds to the door at the back of the house. Of course the old hag upstairs, Mrs Skewes, may well be vigilant at the back, though all seems in darkness up there. Lucky she’s stone deaf though, the cinder path so noisy underfoot. He crunches unhurriedly up the path in the manner of one expected, just in case the hag is watching anyway, and knocks softly on the downstairs window. A few moments’ wait, then the blind is cautiously pulled to one side, and he catches quick sight of Grace’s startled eye, her eyebrow. He pulls off his hat.
Will she let him in?
She shouldn’t, of course. He knows that Violet Dimond is out, for this is Tuesday, her Bible-group meeting; she won’t be back for over an hour. But he is not visible to anyone, standing here. If Grace refuses him, he won’t lose any public face, at any rate. If she lets him in, well, who knows what might happen, how far he might get?
The door opens.
‘What you doing here!’ she whispers joyfully.
‘Just visiting,’ he whispers back, trying for casual, then looks away before adding: ‘I had to see you.’
‘Why?’ Breathless.
‘It’s been so long!’
Three days. She smiles up at him. He smiles back, in some confusion. A familiar confusion. When they’re apart he thinks about her all the time. He longs for her. He can’t help wanting to see the line of her cheek again, to check it, as if it might suddenly have changed and not be as precious as he dreams it is. He needs to check too on the curve of her lips, and the delicious little crescents that appear on either side of them when she smiles.
These things always turn out to be as wonderfully enticing as ever, and yet each time he sees her, her colour takes him by surprise. She isn’t white in his daydreams; but in the flesh she’s so dark that every time he first sets eyes on her again he hears Ma say what she said the first time he mentioned, in passing, what a pretty girl Grace Dimond was growing up to be: ‘You bring that creature here, my boy, you don’t call this place home no more. Nor me your mother.’
Not raising her voice, not even looking up from her sewing; though said with relish.
No point pretending not to understand her, no point asking why. Though it soon occurred to him that he had rarely heard such talk from her before. He knew that plenty of locals didn’t mind Grace Dimond, took no notice of her difference, hardly saw it any more, even downright liked it; though plenty felt otherwise, of course.
He saw his mother being careful which of her cronies she spoke to, relaying her speech, enjoying the stern drama of it. I told him straight, you don’t call this place home no more! The chosen gossips all gravely nodding, backing her up, helping her feel certain. When all the time, Tommy suspects, she is merely seizing on Grace Dimond as a reason to be angry with him, to get rid of him. She yearns to be implacable. She longs with all her heart to unmother him.
Hardly a new idea to him, but not one he has ever looked at closely. Every time he feels it approaching he shies back from it, and turns his attention to something else. It’s quite easy to do, for now. Especially when all he has to do is relax his guard for the tiniest half-second and he’s dreaming about Grace Dimond again, about her narrow waist and cloud of strange exotic hair, that he has not touched since they were children.
He has forgotten how hard he pulled it in those far-off days.
‘What you doing?’ he asks now.
‘Peeling spuds, if you must know.’
‘Miss Pert. I have a cuppa tea?’
‘No!’
‘Go on. Ask your Ma, bet she won’t mind,’ he adds, with conscious cunning.
‘She ain’t here,’ says Grace, as he knew she would.
‘Well then, where’s the harm? Only stay a minute. Eh? Gracie?’
She thinks about it for a few seconds more, then opens the door a little wider, and lets him in.
It wasn’t that there was no answer at all. That would almost have been preferable, Violet thought. But her sister had sent her a postcard, a trade one, the sort she used to stock in the saloon at the Red Lion, views of the harbour at Porthkerris, with all the general mess of fish crates and rags and surly dirty-faced old fishermen entirely tidied away, and on the back she had written in her loopy handwriting, which still took Violet some effort to translate, that she did not herself care for the moving pictures, and that there was sickness at the Home, they were that short-handed, she had hardly any time to herself at the moment. She would be sure to let Violet know when that changed, she was, affectionately, Beatrice Givens.
It was the strange slackness of the lie that most dismayed Violet. Where did Bea think she was living, Paris again, perhaps, or the far side of the moon?
It was simple, spotting Effie Hook in the market – Effie, parlourmaid now at Wooton, whose old mother Bet had once passed on a special pair of little outgrown boots from the Hall.
‘Morning, Miss Hook. How’s your mother getting on these days, alright?’
No stopping her: Old Bet always had been rather a handful, of course, but she had grown childish with the passing years, and had lately taken to leaning out of the upstairs window of her cottage, cracking her knuckles and making familiar remarks to passers-by.
Old folk were often such a worry, agreed Violet. And was it true, now, what she’d heard about the new harbour wall?
There was, it turned out, a great deal of other local news, and Effie Hook was pleased to relay it all, with never so much as a mention of sickness; and all the Home staff came from Porthkerris, apart from Bea herself. Most lived out, too; and walked home together every evening, as garrulous and gossipy a bunch, thought Violet, as any other, if not more so.
So it had been an easy lie, easily disproved. Bea had always gone to such trouble before, at least in the wrong-doing Violet actually knew about, constructing deceptions at least as convincing as the truth and often more interesting: the hairy-faced tramp who had hobbled in, transfixed her with his one glaring eye, and swiped all the cheese right off the kitchen table; the enormous spotted dog belonging to some snooty traveller that had run barking out of the George and Dragon and jumped up and knocked her right over on to the grass, thus staining the back of her Sunday skirt; the letter –
– the letter from my young man Ned Dimond all those years ago, addressed plain enough to Miss Kitto that she said was for her, when all the time it was for me, oh, the vixen, thought Violet, and for a moment forgot what it was she was supposed to be feeling, the essential questions that had to be answered, Beatrice Kitto, my trial, my constant burden, my curse!
She would go on the train again, and visit in person, Violet decided, when she was herself again. She would not go empty-handed; she would take gifts. She would take a few other things with her, so that if necessary she might stay the night. Heaven only knew what she would find, what story or stories, indeed, Bea might favour her with. The truth might take time.
But I will discover it, thought Violet, and called in at St George’s on her way home, for a little contemplative quiet, and to ask for strength in resisting her own feelings. It was hard though to maintain her usual respectful formality. She tried her best to offer more regular praye
rs, but the thought that kept forming seemed to have come straight out of her childhood, the shared twinned childhood she and her sister had both been so glad to leave behind:
Oh Lord, don’t let me thump her. Please don’t let me thump her too hard.
He entered warily into a tremendous smell of baking, for this was a Tuesday, and the market box stowed beneath the table was full of the afternoon’s pies, only lately cool enough for Grace to stack into place. It was a largish room, lit with oil lamps, the fire burning low in the range. A tap dripped in the sink in one corner, a newspaper sheet covered with potato peelings beside it on the wooden draining board.
He felt instantly a little checked; the room was so clearly respectable, home of people with standards. It was not so different from his own home, he thought, though of course they had gas, and a proper scullery.
Grace standing looking at him, one eyebrow raised. Everything about her was neat and perfect, he thought. How calm and poised she looked! A little weak quiver of bashful fear ran all over him, as if he were some drip, he told himself scornfully, as if he were Art Coachman or Ted Hall. Stand aside, gentlemen: let me show you how. To deal with a woman.
‘You look nice,’ he said.
‘I am nice.’
‘I know.’
There was a pause.
Inspiration. ‘You going to the dance Saturday?’
‘The Church Hall?’
‘That’s the one. I’ll be there. Come with me?’
She gave him a straight look, made his insides melt quite away. ‘No. We’re too young to be walking out. You know that.’
‘We ain’t children,’ he said.
‘We ain’t grown up.’
‘What you scared of? You scared of me, Gracie?’
I’m scared of the world. I’m scared of everything. Of course I am scared of you. ‘I’m scared of my mother,’ said Grace lightly.
‘Who ain’t?’ said Tommy Dando, and they laughed, though it was not until later that Grace felt a little ashamed, though it was hard to tell whether they had really been laughing at Violet, or just somehow laughing at everything and nothing in particular, because they were alone together, and so in love with one another’s full exchanging gaze.
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