The wool shop was closed, for the duration. There was no getting hold of all sorts of fine-sewing essentials, and in any case fine-sewing itself had suddenly become deeply unfashionable, its pleasant uselessness no longer arty but unpatriotic. The shutters facing the street were padlocked, had an unkempt look, and Grace was not surprised, when she went round the back of the shop to the small garden at the rear, to see that the house blinds were still drawn.
It was not the first house she had seen that morning with its windows still shrouded. She took out the leather book, which she carried everywhere now in her handbag, and stopped by the gate to write in it, with some difficulty as she was also carrying a small bouquet of late daisies, and wearing her special gloves; the false fingers were slightly in the way.
The houses eyes kept shut with grief, she wrote, and this was unsatisfying, wrong, not at all what she had felt on seeing them, but it would have to do for now; at least the outline of the thought was recorded. She put everything back in the bag, rearranged the flowers, and opened the gate. The paint was peeling on it, the path untidy with patchy weeds. Mrs Ticknell, poor thing, could have no time for gardening now; she had taken work at Thornby’s Department Store in the market square, a humble enough post behind the workaday haberdashery counter, mainly because the smart girls Thornby’s usually employed were away coining it in city factories, wearing trousers, it was rumoured, and tying up their hair in turbans, because so many men were at the Front: it was all women’s work these days, or no work done at all, or so Aunt Bea had said, and with a certain triumph.
After a long pause the door opened to Grace’s knock, and an old woman peered out. She was shrunken and grey-faced and dishevelled, and it was thus several seconds before Grace recognized her, and that was only because the old woman smiled.
‘Oh, hello, my lovely, hello, Gracie – why, have you come to see me, ain’t that kind, ain’t that a kindness!’
Mrs Ticknell began at once to cry; at any rate tears appeared on either side of the unfamiliar nose, though her voice did not change. Her whole face was altered, scoured thin and bony, and the arms she reached out to put round Grace were stringy, the hands ancient, all great knuckles.
‘Come in, my own dear, there’s a girl,’ said Mrs Ticknell, and Grace, her own insides all churned with horror and sadness, followed her old employer into the darkened back kitchen.
There was the green enamel stove, that Grace had set the kettle on so often, her heart as light as the pretty feathers on sale in the shop outside; there was the gas light, dimly burning, though it was near midday. The kitchen smelt stale; maybe a drain was blocked somewhere.
‘You heard, then, my dear?’ said Mrs Ticknell, and her eyes overflowed again.
‘I make you some tea, Mrs Ticknell? Do let me,’ said Grace. Mrs Ticknell was starving herself, she thought. She remembered how tight the dress had been across her plump shoulders on the day Gerry had gone to join up. Now, embracing her, Grace had felt Mrs Ticknell’s spine start through the cloth. I’ll come back tomorrow with a couple of pies, she promised herself.
The kettle on, she understood what Mrs Ticknell had just said; until then, she thought afterwards, the words seemed to have hung in the air, as if waiting for her. Heard? But she had written a letter of condolence at once, and had Mrs Ticknell’s anguished little note back. Mrs Ticknell had simply forgotten this, she told herself. Naturally enough. She said, gently: ‘Heard what?’
Mrs Ticknell made no answer, but instead opened her left hand, which lay upon the table. There was a folded piece of paper in it. ‘Come yesterday,’ she said. Grace took it, unfolded a telegram, which regretted to inform that Gerald Ticknell had been killed in action the day before.
‘Both my boys,’ said Mrs Ticknell. ‘I’ve lost both my boys, Gracie. What am I to do? How am I to bear it?’
Just then a neighbour opened the back door and came in, a woman Mrs Ticknell’s age, and presently another. They were mothers, Grace saw, they understood. They had had such telegrams too.
This is just one street, thought Grace, as she made her way back home afterwards. One street in one town. She remembered Mr Vowles, and the white streaks in his beard, how his voice had cracked when he talked of the war and its conduct and its folly.
I have been sitting at home feeling sorry for myself, scribbling stuff; the world has been coming to an end while I have been worrying about grammar. I must work. I must look after Mrs Ticknell, and I must get a job; writing can just fit in somewhere.
The writing will always be there, Grace thought to herself, and began to tremble a little with fresh emotion, for it was the first time she had recognized something important, essential, about herself. That’s what I want to do most.
But not only that, not yet. I have to help with the war somehow. I’ve been fiddling while Rome burnt. No, worse: I’ve just been tuning up.
She liked that; presently she had to stop, and make a note of it.
So it felt like fate when Violet came back from her own work at the bakery, full of excitement. ‘See here, Gracie, suppose you had a little job to go to, how would that be, eh?’
Grace looked up from the potatoes she was peeling. She had spent the rest of the afternoon making lists, and writing various letters of application in her head. ‘Little job’ sounded altogether too lightsome for the dutiful hardships she had envisaged.
‘What sort of little job?’
‘Well, the Redwoods are opening a convalescent hospital, up at Wooton – turning almost the whole place over to it,’ said Violet. ‘Remember that time you went there, for the Coronation?’
‘I remember,’ said Grace, after a pause. ‘We ran races,’ she said lightly.
‘That’s right, and you won, you was a fast little runner. Anyway, I’m to go there, helping out with the baking, Frank can’t be in two place at once, like, and they’ll be needing a lot – there’s so many away at the war, they’re putting a cart on, bring us all out of a morning, take us all home again at night, no need to sleep in, see? I wouldn’t want to do that, I says to Frank right off. I got my own place, I says, and I’m too old to leave it. That was when he said about the cart – Gracie, we could both go! What d’you say? You could do just a few days, one or two a week, at first, if you like, see how you get on – you’re just as good as what I am, baking and so on, bread and that for the poor lads. Earn a bob or two, and – and it’s a hospital, Gracie; they need the help. Maybe in a month or thereabouts, setting up, what d’you say?’
Grace said nothing. She thought about that day at Wooton so long ago, about trying not to laugh with the other top winner, Tommy Dando, Spindleshanks. She remembered Barty Small, the little brown boy beside the painted white-haired lady in silks. How strange, how wonderful it would be, to see Barty Small again!
‘Will Mr Billy be there, Billy Redwood?’ she asked at last. ‘He showed us the ballroom that time.’
Violet’s face changed. She hesitated.
‘What?’ asked Grace.
‘I thought you knew, Gracie.’
‘Knew what?’
‘Well – he’s dead. Mr Billy. And his brother, they’re both gone. Mr Billy at the Somme, two months ago; Mr Henry at Ypres, last year. I’m sorry, Gracie, I thought you’d a heard, I don’t know why, I’m sure. Anyway there ain’t no heir; no one but some chap in America, they do say, over to New York.’
Grace thought of Lady Redwood, her face quite hidden at the fete in the shade cast by her vast flower-bedecked hat. She thought of Mr Billy Redwood standing at the side during the races, jumping up and down with excitement, his smooth cheeks flushed.
‘What’s your name again, little girl?’
He had noticed her, of course, and he had taken her and showed her Barty Small. He had seemed quite a man to her then; though he had probably been the age she was now, she thought, still in his teens. He had been kind and beautiful, and now he was dead.
‘I knew about Mr Henry,’ she began to say, but found suddenly that she was cr
ying. She had hardly thought of Billy Redwood from that day to this, yet it was unendurable that he was dead. His pink cheeks, his smiling eyes: ‘Look here, jolly, don’t you think?’ And now she must tell Violet that Gerry Ticknell was dead too, her mother’s long-ago triumph, the baby she had saved by hanging.
As she wept Grace tried to think. It was hardly nursing or the sort of dirty essential war work she had earlier been considering. But it was still helping, and at a hospital. And if she took it she would not need to leave home, she would not need to find a new place to live. The burden of leaving Silkhampton, of being noticed and stared at and commented on and insulted over and over again, by hosts of unpredictable strangers, all that extra difficulty would be avoided. And she would be able to keep a close loving eye on Mrs Ticknell.
She took the handkerchief Violet was holding out to her and dried her eyes. ‘Will they take me on though? Do they … know me?’
Violet understood. ‘Of course they do – well, the cook there’s Joy Berenger, known her all her life. Played with her, when we were children! Course she knows you. They all do.’
‘Tell them I say yes, then,’ said Grace.
Mrs Berenger knew about Grace, true enough. As a little girl she had played hopscotch in the streets of Silkhampton with those famous minxes the Kitto twins, Violet and Beatrice. All the same, she was one of those people careful to use a special slow voice when speaking to Grace Dimond, so that the poor darkie might more easily follow normal English.
‘But they must have put them somewhere, the pictures, I mean,’ said Grace, measuring out flour.
‘They wrapped ’em all up,’ answered Mrs Berenger, demonstrating the wrapping process with her red gnarled hands, ‘and put ’em in the attic. They ain’t hanging up nowhere.’
A pity; it would have been good to see Barty again, thought Grace. How strange it was, how sad, that the young masters had been so summarily dispatched, while Barty Small had been wrapped up carefully, and kept safe at home. Barty at least would survive the war.
He featured by now in several of her latest writings, leaving the only family he could remember, venturing out on to the dark lane towards manhood. But what on earth did he find on the way? There is so much I don’t know about how the world works, thought Grace, adding salt to the flour in the bowl. How much could she learn from books, without ever seeing it?
She visited the Silkhampton library herself now, and read all she could, whenever she was not actually trying to write something herself. Mainly these were attempts to record things that had happened to her long before, though she was finding it more and more difficult to stop herself inventing when memory failed. It was interesting, she thought, how much had happened to her because of her colour. The account of the fair, she saw, had started out being about defiance, foolish courage, and unexpected delight; but it had still ended up being about her otherness, as soon as she saw the giant, as soon as he saw her.
Was that bad, or inevitable? Was there another way for her to remember, another way to write?
‘How’s your auntie, now, Bea Givens?’ said Mrs Berenger, in the same warm cooing tone. ‘She still working over at Rosevear?’
If you can call it that when you own the place, Grace thought of smartly saying, though aloud she only said demurely, ‘Oh yes.’
Because sooner or later she’ll forget to talk like that, Grace reminded herself. They all forget eventually, nearly all of them. For better or worse.
More than once she had been present, at school or at the sewing group or choir practice or some other generally neutral gathering, when someone had said something complaining or angry about dirty lazy natives, or the benefits of Empire for the lesser races; said that sort of thing in front of her, then noticed Grace sitting there too and added, usually without obvious embarrassment, ‘Oh, sorry, Gracie – you know I don’t mean you, don’t you!’
Or not even noticing she was there at all, still being black.
Once, wondering whether the place still had a library – for Wooton had once been reputed to have the best private collection in Cornwall – she had ventured up the backstairs and out into what she had been told might be the right corridor, carrying a tea towel over one arm as camouflage, and ready to pretend to be lost, should anyone question her.
There were several private rooms, here, for officers, and for their visitors; rooms above them for the medical staff, for the nurses. The Redwoods had spent a fortune turning the house into a hospital, installing all the most modern equipment, from the full operating theatre to the fleet of wheelchairs, and on medical salaries and drugs and bandages, on medical assistants and qualified nurses; no one added, now, that the Redwoods had always had more money than sense.
She did not dare turn any doorknobs, or knock; she was far too afraid of who, what, might open up. There had been plenty of kitchen stories about the wounded men, the ones who had lost their noses or jaws or lips, been burnt or blown up into monstrosity; injuries that made her own wound a trifle.
No, this was hopeless; if there was a library here she would have to ask outright, and first find someone who really knew. Turning a corner to go back Grace almost walked into a soldier. He wore an approximation of uniform, and was standing looking blank at the top of a short flight of stairs. He was the first patient she had actually met face-to-face. Usually she arrived before the men were up, worked all day in the kitchens at the back of the house, where they were forbidden access, and went home on the cart with Violet and the others who lived out while supper was being served. Of course she preferred things that way.
This soldier wore a clean white bandage round his shaven head. His face was round and pale, his build thick-set, heavy. His blue eyes stared out at her. It was some time before she realized he simply could not speak, not to her, nor, perhaps, to anyone else.
‘Hello,’ she said softly. ‘You alright?’
For a moment or two more he went on staring, then swung his head, as if it were too heavy for him, swung his head like a carthorse beset by flies, she thought, turned his head away from her and then with an odd shuffling movement seemed to follow it round with the rest of his body. He stood for a moment with his back to her. Then he put out a shaking hand to the banister, held it, slowly went back down the stairs again, turned a corner, and disappeared.
Grace let out the breath she had not realized she had been holding. Poor thing, how mad he had looked!
She was hardly to know, of course, how great a part Bowen was to play in her life. Certainly Joe Gilder was never going to be fool enough to tell her.
21
They walked together along the clifftop path one fine afternoon in autumn, very slowly, Joe not needing to lean quite so heavily on the stick by then, though the uneven grass bothered him more than he was willing to say.
Beside and beneath them the sea sparkled in a series of pale blues, with deep swathes of clear green towards the shore. Joe thought of the day he had first seen the sea from his bed, and not known where he was. Cornwall, the furthest you could get from where he’d started out. Cornwall, the county the young men left in droves, if they wanted work.
He had noticed the odd bits of building half-fallen down all over the place, the old abandoned mines. You’d be walking along a footpath, middle of nowhere, and all of a sudden you’d see railway lines in the grass, heading off into a bramble bush.
‘What’s that for?’
‘Oh,’ Grace had answered, ‘they’re all disappearing now, getting overgrown, but there were lots when I was a little girl. I remember some went down a hill and straight into the earth. As if they were meant to be like that, and you could catch a train to the underworld, Silkhampton to Hell!’
‘Direct line,’ said Joe.
They reached the big low rock near the path, and sat down side by side, with a wide view of the sea. Of course he knew a lot more about her by now. Knew a little what it was like to be her.
‘I’m a freak,’ Grace had told him. ‘I’m the Silkhampton Two-hea
ded Lady.’
‘How d’you mean?’
She had looked at him steadily.
‘… Oh, that,’ he had said, at last. ‘But haven’t they – well, got used to it, then? I mean, it’s not the most important thing about you, is it? What? What have I said? What you laughing at?’
‘You, of course. It ain’t the most important thing – but it’s always the first, see?’
‘Not for me.’
‘You think back: you know it was.’
Joe silent, trying to remember. It seemed to him by then that all he saw when first he met Grace was her beauty, her essential heartening smile. Though sometimes when they have been apart for a day or two he finds that he has forgotten quite how dark she is. Some small part of his mind says again, Oh! in surprise at her brownness.
But for him this is only another way in which they are different, and it is these differences, he thinks, that help to make him almost helpless with love and desire.
‘And so I’m famous,’ said Grace, and this seemed to be true; at any rate, wherever they went in Silkhampton they were noted, sometimes clearly stared at, he’d noticed it straight away. She attracted a certain amount of hard-to-quantify attention, and so did he, for being with her.
‘’Cause you’re a stranger,’ said Grace, ‘and I’m me. Famous, see.’
It was unnerving, hard to take at first.
‘They ain’t got nothing better to do,’ said Grace. ‘Ignore ’em, that’s what I do.’
This was true. She could walk through a crowded pavement, heads turning all about her, and appear to notice nothing, unless, as also frequently happened, she was greeted, ‘Morning, Miss’, ‘Hello there, Gracie!’ She didn’t even seem to be making an effort. The turning heads baffled Joe, maddened and bored and perplexed him. What were they looking at? They were nearly always locals, women as well as men, who had known her all her life.
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