Lily wriggled, blushed. ‘Oh, well, you know.’ She tried to shrug her shoulders, but her face was alight with eager happiness. ‘Not serious, like. Well – who knows, maybe one day!’
In the bed Grace was all heartbeat. She was one big pulse all over, and felt quite dizzy, but not unpleasantly so. Nothing mattered so very much, she thought cosily, for her most recent dose of opiate had been a large one. ‘Didn’t you used to say it was me he had his eye on?’ she asked. Her voice sounded almost lazy, she was very pleased to hear.
‘Oh come on, Grace,’ said Lily, not at all lazily. ‘You know he’d never –’
‘Never what?’
‘You know.’ Lily raised a hand, and waved it a little towards Grace’s face. ‘He just – wouldn’t, that’s all.’ Her eyes briefly met Grace’s, to make sure she had understood.
‘Oh,’ said Grace, and there was a pause.
‘I mean, of course he likes you and everything,’ said Lily. ‘Course he does. But, you know.’
You know: socially Tommy was well above Lily herself, said Lily’s eminently reasonable tone, so what on earth could Grace have been thinking of, to imagine for one moment that he had ever seriously turned his thoughts to such a one as she?
Look at us, implied Lily’s voice: we may be friends, but come now – we’re hardly equals, are we?
Then the big pulse seemed to hammer all the harder, and Grace finally became aware that the curious discomfort she was feeling all over was actually pain, and that some of it arose from her ruined hand. She was glad when the nurse rang the end-of-visiting bell.
‘I fear there may be some underlying weakness of the lungs,’ said Dr Summers later that evening, as Grace grew increasingly feverish. ‘Given the history. There is certainly some degree of congestion – keep a close eye on her, Nurse, will you?’
Grace was to remember him saying that for the rest of her life, the strangely vivid detail of his face looking down at her from the end of the bed, the faint rime of white stubble on his chin, the wrinkles round his eyes, his straggle of grey hair. She felt as if she had never seen anyone so clearly before. I’m keeping a close eye on you, she thought, but after that thoughts in general became more muddled, and seemed to take on a life of their own, sometimes carrying on like something at the Picture Palace, showing her things she’d rather not see, making people up, and making them disappear.
Apart from him, of course. She’d open her eyes and he’d be there again.
‘What d’you think I’m doing, you silly bitch?’ He said that often.
Strangely the memory seemed rather muffled, as if it had happened a long time ago. Though if she thought back, if she tried, she could remember joy.
‘I come in? Just for a minute.’
There. That was what she had done. She had let him in, the horrible stranger who had looked like Tommy Dando, and then she had led him on. It was all her own fault.
Her right arm was too heavy, so she bent her left instead, and blotted her eyes with her sleeve. Though she understood then that the gown was entirely unfamiliar. Strange. Why was she wearing someone else’s nightie?
Was it a cambric nightgown, very plain?
‘How are you, my own dear?’
Ma?
Often Grace opened her eyes and found no one there. And she was so hot, she was boiling! A kettleful of boiling water: not at all nice to have about the place when you were dealing with this sort of thing. That’s why it hurts so, Grace thought. Did I scald myself?
‘Put the fire on, Gracie, do,’ said Mrs Ticknell, but instead Grace reached up for the flat box with ‘Lewin’ written on it. The pretty pink and white gloves were just as she remembered them, and as she had always suspected – though of course she had never before dared to try them on, nor wanted to – a perfect fit. She held out her hands in admiring triumph, but then the right one began to hurt. The glove was much too tight after all. She tried to pull it off but it was so tight its hard lacy edge dug right into her wrist, and she couldn’t grasp it, though it hurt her more and more, and feverishly she picked and picked at it with the other hand until at last she managed to work her fingertips under the edge and grasp it and tear at it with all her strength and it ripped away taking all the flesh of her right hand with it, a soft gloveful inside-out, bloodily contained.
‘Steady now, there’s a brave girl. Nearly done. Nearly there.’
Who was that? It wasn’t Lily, was it?
‘I’m sorry,’ cried Grace, ‘I didn’t know what he was like, I thought he was nice!’
Where have I heard that before, said Aunt Bea, and she was sitting on the one side of the bed, and Ma on the other, both of them facing one another over the coverlet. They acted being the one girl, see? Like in a looking-glass, said Mrs Ticknell, and Grace opened her eyes again and laughed, seeing them like that, her mother and Aunt Bea, being one woman and her reflection, herself of course the dark glass between them.
How serious they looked, she thought, Ma and Bea, how serious and sad! Well, hadn’t she broken all the rules of sensible conduct, and got herself hurt, and nearly set the house on fire, oh the songs that she had sung all those years ago, the special songs to stop the house burning down, that had to be sung before her mammy Popped In, ‘Bobby Shafto’, ‘Greensleeves’, and what was the other one? She worried herself for some time, trying to remember, but her hand was hurting again, and when she looked at it she saw to her astonishment that she was holding someone else’s: a white slender hand, that was grasping her own too tightly, painfully, and she looked along the other’s wrist and all along the plain cambric sleeve and up the shoulder and at last into the wet white face of Peony Lewin herself. She was standing in the reeds with her ankles in the water, her thin hair dank about her ears.
You wore my gloves, said Peony Lewin.
I didn’t mean to, cried Grace, I’m sorry.
But Peony Lewin held her hand all the tighter, and pulled.
It’s lonely in the water, said Peony Lewin, I want to watch the children but the weeds hold me down.
Let me go, please, I want to go home, help me, Ma, Mammy, please!
‘Hello, my lovely. How you feeling?’
Ma?
Grace opened her eyes cautiously. She saw the end of the bed. No, no one sitting on it. Certainly not the Reverend Mr Godolphin, who had earlier so puzzled her by lying across her legs eating cherries out of a paper bag. She turned her head, aware suddenly of how much the light seemed to hurt her eyes.
‘Hello, Ma,’ she said at last. Croaky voice!
Violet seemed put out about something. Face all odd. She was so angry, thought Grace with a pang, and then to her horror realized that in fact her mother was crying, her poor face wet with tears.
‘Oh I’m so sorry, Mammy, please, forgive me!’
‘No, no – I’m that happy, oh, thank the Lord! Oh my Gracie, we thought we’d lost you!’
‘What?’ For a moment Grace had a confused idea of the sea. Had she nearly been lost in a storm, like Aunt Bea’s Bert and his three-man crew? One of them Mrs Ticknell’s sister-in-law’s cousin’s boy, Davey Bartlett, aged seventeen!
‘Can you take a sip of water now, Gracie? Just a little sip now, my lovely.’ Why was her mother talking like this, as if she were a sick child? She remembered that special tender tone.
She made to sit up in bed and pain riddled all through her, for she had tried to put weight on her right hand.
Then she knew. She remembered. Carefully she drew up her arm and inspected the big bandage. Not big enough, she saw. No normal glove would ever fit her again, let alone a fine one. Let alone Peony Lewin’s.
‘I didn’t want them in the first place,’ she told Violet, but her mother took no notice, just went on knitting string into lace on the other side of the fire.
All these were very hard times for Violet. She could find no peace of mind, even in the garden. She slept very badly and often felt so tired that she could hardly force herself even to do the chores she usua
lly enjoyed, picking blackcurrants, making raspberry jam. The terrible wound to her child was like a steady drumbeat in the background of all her days and nights.
Oh, how dreadful the house had been to come back to from the hospital that first day! The smell alone had made them both feel sick, the scorched-meat tang, the remains of the fatal oil lamp still spread about the floor, the overturned chair, the blackened rug where their poor darling had so bravely, so cleverly, saved herself from even worse horrors! In the sink the potatoes sitting still in cold water, the peeler set down beside them on the draining board, the pie untouched in the larder, one plate in the bottom oven, cold now, the range long since burnt out.
Hearing them come in, Next Door, late though it was, had knocked almost straight away, with a pot of strong tea and much exclamatory talk. How they had realized Something Was Up, how they had hesitated, who had said what to whom while they thought about it, how they had actually left their plates on the table, how their eldest had run like a hare for the doctor! and how Dr Summers himself had driven Gracie off in the dog-cart, her looking as pale as – well, as pale as she might do, in a manner of speaking, Mrs Dimond.
Deaf old Mrs Skewes too had hobbled down from above, offering her condolences while trying to see over Bea’s shoulder.
‘To think I were upstairs all the time!’ she piped in her cracked voice, several times, until she could at last be induced to hobble back upstairs again. Missed all the excitement, muttered Bea.
Only trying to be kind, said Violet. Bea seeing the worst in folk as usual, she thought. Still it was a profound comfort to know there was someone else in the world who felt about her child as she did herself. Bea was with her as often as she could manage that first week, more than once catching the train to visit the Home in the morning and back again in the afternoon.
‘I can’t stay away,’ she said. ‘You know I can’t.’
Every now and then, in those early days, Violet remembered the strong possibility that her own parents’ blood flowed in Grace’s veins, and felt something she still found indecipherable, a lurching inside her too complex to name. She was aware sometimes of a sense of loss; all those nights she had slept beside her darling, or held the little girl in her arms, and never known that this was her own kin! Every memory needed re-visiting, to see how it looked from behind these disconcerting new spectacles.
And would she have done anything differently, if she had known?
But there was no time to ponder these questions. There were so many others, more pressing and far more terrible: the grim interview with Mr Hargreaves from the city hospital, and then the operation to get through, over an hour helpless in a corridor, Violet sitting on the wooden bench, Bea pacing the marble floor, both of them aware all the while that in a room upstairs something permanent and terrible was being done to their child. And afterwards, not the expected and promised quick recovery, but instead a daily increasing fear, while Dr Summers talked of congestion and the possibility of constitutional weakness. Soon they moved Grace from the open ward to a room all by herself near the nurses’ desk, with one high window through which the tops of trees were just visible.
The walls were pale green, the floor linoleum, the bed high and narrow, its iron legs ending in small hard wheels. Voices and footsteps outside were muffled. The nurses came in and out quietly, often, looking like nuns in their starched headgear; early one morning, waiting outside the ward for news, at the final end of one of those near-interminable nights, Violet had peeped through the wired round window on the ward door and seen all four of the day staff, Sister and all, kneeling in prayer about the nurses’ desk, and taken some consolation in the sight.
They set up a sort of tent about the bed, with a softly clanking mechanical contraption piping gas into it, so that the air Grace breathed so fast would be strengthened in some way. Now Violet and Bea took it in turns to sit beside the bed, allowed, by kind permission of Dr Summers himself, to stay all they pleased, despite the prevailing strictness about visiting time; because, as both suspected but neither said aloud, Grace by that time was not expected to live.
Mr Godolphin came many times, to pray with Violet. Once she spoke of Ruth, and told him that she did not know how she was to bear this added burden. But Grace survived that day, and the next, despite her temperature, despite her ragged panting breath. Another day passed, and another. The breathing slowed, her pulse steadied; she slept as if peacefully, and at last she opened her eyes.
‘Hello, Ma!’ Her own self awake, after so many days and nights of delirium! Violet could not remember what she said herself, at this wonderful heart-stopping moment, but she thought often afterwards of how Grace had answered her.
‘Oh I’m so sorry, Mammy, please, forgive me!’ It seemed to Violet at the time that Grace had slipped back almost straight away into her fever-dream. But later she remembered that cry for forgiveness. It came back to her more and more as the illness receded, and Grace grew almost well again, well enough at last to come home.
Because it was at home that Grace had become such a mystery, a face turned steadily away. Violet had expected sorrow, of course; who wouldn’t grieve for their own friendly fingers? Especially a pretty young maid like Gracie, so careful all the time to look her best. She had expected tears, anger, bitterness; but never once foreseen this resolute withdrawal. What had she to be sorry about, poor girl?
‘She say anything?’
Bea coming out with the supper tray almost untouched, shaking her head.
Grace had developed a sort of cunning.
Wouldn’t she enjoy a little sit in the garden, get a bit of air? Soon, maybe.
How about sitting here by the window, watch folk going by? Not yet.
Say hello to Lily tomorrow? Maybe.
Never saying No until the last minute, when she would close her eyes, and end the discussion.
‘She can’t go on like this!’ said Violet, and she would try again to get Gracie to see a bit of sense.
‘Don’t you want to get better?’ She had thought the question was rhetorical, so the look Grace had turned upon her in answer was chilling indeed.
‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Dr Summers, when she secretly consulted him. ‘She’s had a terrible shock, a serious injury; she needs time to get used to what has happened to her. And of course she has been very ill, Mrs Dimond.’
At which Violet breathed in hard through her nose; she was inclined to blame him and his nasty anaesthetic gases. He had certainly done his best to save her since, though his tonics were having no effect at all.
The worst of it was that they had thought themselves out of the woods; had counted the days until she was allowed out of hospital and home safe. But she had just gone on getting worse and worse.
When had it started, the turning-away? Was it the day, still in the hospital, that she saw her hand for the first time? She’d managed all those weeks not to see it, turning her head away whenever it was re-dressed. The young probationer usually held her other hand, Grace said, and talked to her of this and that, helping her keep still for Staff while the bandages were untied and unrolled and soaked off, the wounds examined, cleaned. But of course she had not been able to avoid seeing everything at last; and she had not shed a tear, just gone very quiet. No, she was alright, she said, when pressed. It was good she knew what it looked like. She was fine, really.
Had her voice already been flatter, less her own? Now it was as if she were under an evil enchantment, like a girl in a fairy story.
‘Won’t you tell me what’s wrong, Gracie?’
‘What? Don’t you know?’
‘No, I mean – what else.’
‘Ain’t this enough, then?’ The fingers still lightly bandaged. Half a hand.
It occurred to Violet that Grace was somehow using her injury. That it was an excuse. It has all been too much for her, went this terrifying line of reasoning. Her life as the only one, the one that was always noticed and remarked on and stared at and commented on, that life has been
too much for her, and this is her excuse to give up at last, and she has seized it. She is dying because of her difference. And there seemed to be nothing Violet could do about it.
Whenever she could she visited St George’s, trying to let the glass of her mind settle, clarify, so that the Word might be supplied to her. But the mud of her human clay just went on swirling. Why had the Lord spared her daughter, why had He led her to help herself so cleverly, so bravely, stifling the flames when any other girl would have run about in a panic and been engulfed entirely? Months of pain so patiently endured, and had He spared her only for this, for more suffering and decline – for a slower death?
Violet’s attempts at prayer in those days sometimes ended with her getting up, brushing off her skirts, and hurrying out of the church altogether, lest she reproach God outright in His own house.
Finally she came to a decision, and was ready.
‘I’m tired, Ma.’
‘I dare say you are. But it’s time you spoke out.’ She was sitting by the bed in the darkened room. It was four months since the accident. Grace had not got out of bed for nearly a week; there was doubt now whether she could even stand.
‘What?’
‘I want to know what happened. That night. And I don’t see why you ain’t telling.’
Grace closed her eyes.
‘Don’t pretend you’re asleep, I won’t have it. I’ve thought about it and thought about it and I’ve decided: I ain’t going to let you just take yourself off. I said to myself, No! I’ve spent all these years doing my best for you, and perhaps that weren’t good enough, I don’t know. But I ain’t going to stand by and let you do this, no I ain’t.’
‘Leave me alone, do, Ma. I’m alright. I’m just tired.’
‘I should think you are, lying there day after day feeling sorry for yourself!’
No reply.
‘What happened, Gracie? And don’t you give me any nonsense about blackbirds.’
No reply.
‘Alright then. See here then, Gracie my dear. Tell me this, then: why did you break my Ruth’s cup? Why did you take Ruth’s cup out of the cupboard, and smash it hard as you could on the floor? Eh, Gracie?’
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