A quiver all along the shut face.
‘What was it, were you angry with me, was that it? Angry with her? Jealous of a little girl, as died before you were born, is that it?’
‘No!’
‘Ah, so you can speak, can you! Why then? Why did you handle it? So careless! Smashed into a hundred pieces! Twenty-seven years I’ve kept it, as was the last thing my own child held in her hand, and I leave you alone for one night and you take it, and you handle it, and you throw it down, you throw it, the cup I swore I’d take with me to my grave, you cruel wicked girl!’
‘No, I never! I never touched it!’
‘Who did then?’
No reply.
‘No, you don’t get out of it that quick. If it weren’t you – who done it? Who broke that cup? Gracie – tell me, you tell me now!’
Oh, she was crying; Gracie, who had not shed a tear when they showed her the terrible stumps of her fingers. ‘It weren’t me, I swear it, Mammy.’
Suddenly tender: ‘I know. I know it weren’t you all along, course it weren’t. And I’ll tell you something else. I don’t care about it. Not really. What’s a bit of old china? Honest, a bit of old china, that’s all it was. You tell me what happened, and I promise no one will chide you, not me, not no one. Who was it hurt you, eh? Who hurt you, my Gracie?’
The lips quivering so, the effort. As if it was too hard to speak.
‘Don’t you cry, my lamb. You just tell me, you whisper, alright?’
Grace swallows. Makes the tremendous effort, and shakily whispers his name.
Pause. She is held, rocked, caressed. ‘It was all my fault,’ she adds aloud.
‘What was?’
‘I let him in.’
‘What? How’s that your fault? Why shouldn’t you let him in, weren’t he a friend of yourn?’
‘But he –’
‘He what? He was unkind, was he?’
‘Oh, Ma,’ sobbed Grace, ‘he tried to make me. He tried to make me, all of a sudden.’ The last few words made her cry aloud like a child.
‘There, there, my lamb.’ Rocking her. ‘Don’t you fret. Don’t you take on so.’
‘I told him no, but he wouldn’t listen! He wouldn’t take no notice!’
‘My dear.’
‘He pushed me over, he said things, he tried to – he tried, but he couldn’t, I didn’t let him, and then he was all funny! He says afterwards, he says, “Want a cup of tea?” As if nothing had happened! And I didn’t know what to do, I was so frightened, I was so scared, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe, I didn’t know what to do!’
‘Course you didn’t, no one would have –’
‘And he hurts his head, see! He was going, and then he takes and he trips like, and he bangs his head, and he thought I laughed, but I dint! And he was that angry. He threw the lamp at me, he just picked it up, he was so quick!’
‘My lamb. My poor girl.’
‘He found the cup earlier, see, Ruth’s cup, when he was still saying, “Let’s have a cup of tea,” and I pretended! I pretended it was nothing, so’s he’d put it down! And he did, he did put it down, I dint know it was broken, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry!’
‘It don’t matter. Don’t you fret now. It’s alright.’
‘But you ain’t said! All this time you ain’t said it was broken, I dint know, I dint see him, I thought it was safe, I swear!’
A long silence. Grace held and kissed.
‘There there. It’s alright now. Don’t you mind. Now then, sit up, Gracie, do, and dry your eyes. Let me get us both some tea, and there’s a cherry cake yonder just a-sitting up begging to be et. Here, take this hankie. Look, it’s one of your own, from Ticknell’s, see the bee and the violet? Blow your nose. And you sit up now, I won’t be long.’
Nor was she. Barely five minutes had passed before the door opened again.
‘I’ll just set this down, and I’m going to draw the curtains, alright? So’s I can see what I’m doing. Lovely evening it is too, there!’
Grace blinked in the sudden shaft of sunlight; looked; saw. Stared blankly for a moment, and finally understood.
‘Yes,’ said Bea, smiling handsomely. She drew off Violet’s lace neckerchief with rather a theatrical flourish; even Grace, stunned, speechless as she was, could see that her aunt was rather enjoying herself. ‘You keep a darkened room,’ said Bea, ‘you can expect a few surprises now and then.’ She folded the kerchief, and tucked it back into the chest of drawers. ‘Ain’t done that so well for years! Now then. Two sugars, I think, for you. Get your strength up.’
‘You –’ Grace began, but then she saw what else was on the tray Bea had just carried in. Sitting with the cake in its toasted lining of grease-proof paper, the two cups and the everyday saucers, the matching basin, the glass milk jug, and not so much as chipped, was the small blue and white cup, Ruth’s cup, that Grace had last seen set down so heedlessly on the dresser by Tommy Dando.
‘You said it was broken!’
‘Now don’t get all airiated,’ said Bea, taking off the tea cosy. ‘The real one was broke right enough. That’s another one just like it, that’s all.’ She smirked. ‘Its twin – see?’
‘What? What?’
‘No, don’t try to think yet, you have a bite to eat. You can’t think on an empty stomach. And drink your tea, that’ll put a bit of heart into you.’
‘Can I have it?’
‘Have what? Oh – yes, alright then, here.’ Bea picked up the cup, and set it carefully in Grace’s outstretched good hand.
It was almost too small for a grown-up, Grace thought, turning it slowly in her fingers, and made of the thinnest bone china, the painted bird clearly visible from the milky inside. He was just in the act of spreading his delicate wings; his plume of tail hung down behind him, echoing in shape the feathered coronet upon his head.
‘Ain’t hardly touched it before,’ said Grace, and she gave it back.
‘Makes me nervous too,’ said Bea, and presently she got up and went to put it back in the kitchen cupboard. As she poured out she said: ‘I just thank my lucky stars it was me found it, all the bits, I mean. Under the side table. And your Ma just in here! I never crawled about so fast. Like a scared beetle, I was.’ She laughed a little.
Grace remembering: ‘I think he threw it at me, afterwards. I was – he threw it at me.’
‘Eat up, go on.’
‘He’s seeing Lily Houghton now.’
‘I thought she was your friend. Ain’t she?’
‘She was.’
‘Well, you were wrong about him, weren’t you? ’Spect she is too.’
‘D’you think I should – warn her?’
‘Maybe. D’you think she’d listen?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more.’
Bea looked stricken. ‘I’m sorry I pretended to be my sister; I dint do it to make a fool of you, Gracie. I dint know what else to do. See, soon as I found that cup all smashed I knew things weren’t right. I never thought you broke it. Only I couldn’t let her see it, Gracie. So I hid it, and then I dint know what to do!’
‘So – where did the other cup come from?’
‘Same place as the first.’
Grace smiled; she had no idea, of course, how this struck her aunt, who had to look away for a moment before she said, ‘From the Home. You know, where I work. Well, live, really.’
‘You mean, you just took it?’
‘That’s about it.’
‘So, you – you stole it?’
‘No, indeed, Missy, I did not. Plenty of other sins I’ve committed but not that one, not yet. How could I steal something that belonged to me?’
‘But you said it come from the Home.’
‘That’s right. Used to be Rosevear Manor, along of the lake, sold on a long lease. Ain’t so much longer to go on it now, only about another fifteen years, still, it was cheap at the price at the time.’
‘You – bought it? You bought the Home?’
‘I bought the lease, which ain’t exactly the same thing.’
‘But –’
‘A lease is money lost, in the long run,’ said Bea. ‘But I got enough to be going on with. I got other places as are mine. This ain’t for your mother to know, Gracie, by the way. What I own is my business, and none of hers. And come to think of it – might be best for her not to know anything about who come in here that night, see? Maybe best she goes on thinking you fell off of the table, some things she got very particular ideas about. If you know what I mean. Besides, one thing might lead to another, and believe you me I’d just as soon she never finds out about that blessed cup!’
‘So I shouldn’t tell her? About – Tommy and all?’ Said it! Said his name out loud! And the skies had not fallen.
‘That’s up to you. I wouldn’t, if I were you. But you’re not to talk about my business, if you please; not to her, not to no one else.’
‘I promise.’
‘That’s alright then.’
‘Aunt Bea – you won’t – do anything, will you? You won’t go to the police?’
‘My lamb. As if I would. Now then. Another little sliver? There. Where was I? Oh yes – see, Rosevear, the family took all they wanted, left the old stuff they dint want behind, piles of it, curtains, rugs, books, pictures, junk mainly, some of it not so bad. But that cup of your mother’s: it’s a coffee cup really, there was a set of ’em, but the pot was broke, and a lot of it cracked – too fine to use really, daft; but I give one to your mother, ’cause her Ruth saw it on a visit, and she liked that blue bird, poor little dab. I got two more; but I wouldn’t want to smuggle another of ’em past your mother, Gracie, my love. Practically give me a heart attack as it was.’
Violet, coming in much later from her Bible group, where she had made a wretched showing, hardly able to manage a word, found Bea dozing in the chair beside the range, and Grace sitting up tidily in the bed, the lamp lit beside her, reading.
‘Hello, my lovely! You feeling better?’
Grace drew a long sighing breath, and laid the book down on the coverlet. ‘You know – I think I am, a bit.’
Normal face! Looking her mother in the eye!
‘You hungry? Bit a supper, scrambled egg maybe? Toast?’
‘Ooh yes please, Ma,’ said Grace. ‘And can I have a bit more a that cake? Please?’
19
Mr Godolphin had left tracts and a list of suggested Bible readings, but he had also given her The Time Machine and The Invisible Man. His wife had contributed Around the World in Eighty Days, which had been lying on top of the pile, and which Grace had thus picked up first. To begin with she read it as she had read books at school: slowly, occasionally dropping two lines instead of one and getting confused, or forgetting, in the toil of reaching the end of a lengthy sentence, how the thing had begun. She skipped hard words, left out anything that looked as if it might be about scenery, and in general tired very quickly.
But now she was too weak to jump up to take a turn with the weeding, or nip out to the shops, or see what was showing at the Picture Palace. Nor of course could she pick up her sewing or mending. Perhaps one day she would recover some of her old dexterity; she still had fingers enough for that, she thought. But not yet, not for a while. There was nothing for it, unless she wanted to go back to not-thinking about Tommy Dando or Lily, or longing versions of what should have happened that night (‘No you can’t. Night, Tommy.’) Nothing for it but to pick the book up again, find her place, and read on.
Propped up on pillows, she sat beside the open kitchen door while Violet worked in the garden. The days that passed had a dreamy full quality to them. Grace’s only household duty for a long while was eating; her employment was reading, her leisure she spent asleep. She seemed to have missed an entire season, she found; spring had passed by while she lay oblivious. Now it was almost the end of summer. Soon she could walk about the garden, even as far (thank heaven) as the outhouse; she could get up to help with the washing-up, she could, most wonderfully, have a real bath in front of the fire instead of the shallow zinc bowl beside the bed, and what Bea called ‘a lick and a promise’.
Meanwhile she read all the books in the pile, and when the vicar came round asked him, with a proper shyness, whether Mr Wells had written any more.
‘You liked him better than Jules Verne?’
Grace was startled. The Bishop’s Road Council School had taught her to read, to write a clear fine copperplate hand, to add up in her head and quickly work out the price per dozen or gross of items costing, say, a penny ha’penny, or thruppence-three-farthings, but the notion of reading for pleasure had never come up at all. She did not really understand him, for to her a book was a book, and it was hardly her place to like one of them more than another.
‘Quite right too,’ said Mr Godolphin, while she hesitated. ‘I mean, it’s not bad for a translation, is it, but Wells is – well, he’s just so readable, isn’t he?’
A translation? Readable? What could he mean?
‘I’ll have a quick look at home, but in the meantime I’ve brought you one or two others – look here, see how you get on with this – don’t whatever you do mind about the first chapter, it’s awful stuff, it only gets going in chapter two!’
The book was The Pickwick Papers, which Grace knew to be a serious gloomy grown-up book, by Charles Dickens. Grace had heard of him because the headmaster had often reverently mentioned him; in the last year at school her class had waded very slowly through the opening chapters of A Christmas Carol, taking it in turns to read all round the class, though Mr Vowles always made the worst readers do the most, for the practice. Clara Collier and Tim Bineham especially had been required to drone and mumble on for page after page, stumbling over even quite simple words, while Mr Vowles twitched or sighed or made sarcastic remarks at particularly inept bits of guesswork; it was dangerously easy to lose track and get caught staring out of the window, to be roused by a sudden bark of ‘Carry on – Grace Dimond!’
Charles Dickens was crawling tense boredom; oh dear, thought Grace, trying to look pleased – ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘And this one – well, my wife enjoyed it. Thought it was pretty hard going myself. See what you think!’ said Mr Godolphin, without any idea of the profound meaning, for Grace, behind these careless friendly words.
The book Mr and Mrs Godolphin had disagreed about wasn’t by Charles Dickens, so she tried Ben-Hur first. It was the usual battle for concentration, but with a difference: now Grace had some idea that her difficulties might not lie only with herself. Perhaps she wasn’t such a dunce, such a poor reader after all. Perhaps sometimes a book was just hard going.
But some parts of Ben-Hur enchanted her. Over and over again she read the glorious moment when the Nazarene stopped as He rode into Jerusalem, and blessed Ben-Hur’s gruesomely leprous Ma and sister with a cure that went on for nearly half a page.
There was first in the hearts of the lepers a freshening of the blood; then it flowed faster and stronger, thrilling their wasted bodies with an infinitely sweet sense of painless healing.
Grace read that part over and over again.
Mr Vowles himself came to call, with Mrs Vowles. They too brought gifts, one or two more books, several copies of a magazine called The New Age and a basket of late plums from their own garden.
‘How are you, my dusky maiden, my nut-brown maid!’ boomed Mr Vowles, as he always had at school.
‘Delightful!’ said Mrs Vowles, looking about her as she sat herself down. Violet was frightened, and hung back, so that Grace was forced to do the talking. ‘Will you have some tea, Mrs Vowles, Mr Vowles, sir?’
He was a surprise; he looked so much older, his beard well-streaked with white. It soon became apparent that he could talk of nothing but the war. What, he asked Grace angrily, as she stirred his tea, was supposed to be the point of it all – was Germany to become part of the Empire? No! Was Belgium? No! And as for the conduct of the various generals in char
ge –
Mrs Vowles at length gently interrupted him: ‘Perhaps you’ve heard, Mrs Dimond, Miss Dimond, that our son Hector was wounded at Amiens? We are very proud of him, aren’t we, John?’
‘His wound bad?’ Violet asked.
‘He has lost his right leg, I am afraid,’ said the mother. ‘But he will be home very soon, I think – we heard, possibly next week. So of course we are looking forward to seeing him very much.’
Hector Vowles; not someone Grace had ever met, as he was so much older than she was, some eight or nine years, she knew, which would make him twenty-four.
After a short pause Mr Vowles took up one of the books he had brought. ‘This one here, Grace,’ he said heavily, ‘is for you to write in, d’you see? I always suspected there was more in that fuzzy little head of yours than you were ever prepared to let out. Know that?’ He showed her the blank pages.
Grace took it from him, into her good hand. It was a beautiful book, she thought, covered in soft dark green leather, with a broad band of brown ribbon at its spine, and a silky green bookmark sewn in. It was far too beautiful to write in, she thought immediately. But it was a very nice thing in itself. Meant kindly.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘It’s to write your thoughts in,’ said Mrs Vowles, smiling. ‘A journal, perhaps, of your continuing recovery.’
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Grace.
Mrs Ticknell came to visit. How was Grace doing now? What a treat it was to see her up and dressed, like, and nearly her dear old self again! No, Gerry was doing well, thank you, she’d had a postcard only the day before, and Jim was still supply-side, thank the Lord.
She brought with her several fashion magazines. Shapes had entirely altered since last year, she said. And ostrich feathers were Out, just like that! It was the war, of course; sweeping about in a big hat all feathered just felt wrong – no, lines were simpler these days.
‘Look at that hemline! Look at the hat!’
Business had altered so, Gracie! Embroidery giving way to knitting, especially army socks, women who didn’t know one end of a needle from the other at it day and night – as if they didn’t have enough to put up with as it was, poor lads limping about in blisters all over France!
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