by Lizzie Page
‘I’ve got blood in my knickers,’ she says. ‘I soaked through my handkerchief.’
‘Oh, Pearl!’ She is twelve now; there shouldn’t be anything mystifying about this, but I am still completely wrong-footed. I did not suspect. She is so small.
‘Are you sure it’s not tomato soup?’
Pearl makes her what-is-wrong-with-you? expression at me. I am an idiot. ‘Sorry, darling, I mean it’s your period. I’ll… I’ll find us a chemist, is that all right?’
‘I want to go home,’ she whispers. She looks tearful. Of course she is. She wants her mum. Poor darling.
‘Oh, Pearl, Mum’s a long way away.’
‘I meant with you, back in Hinckley.’
‘Oh, oh, of course.’
Uncle Sam understands. He walks us back to St Pancras. I feel dreary that our long-anticipated trip has been cut short – will we two ever be lucky? – but I try to be jolly for Pearl. Next to the ticket office, she disappears to the loo and we smoke a cigarette each and Sam tells me to keep his Zippo lighter, ‘until the next time,’ and I smile because it feels like this is his way of telling me we must meet again soon and also because it reminds me of the first time we met.
I’m ashamed at how devastated I feel about going home now. I know it’s not right. I dread the return to Edmund, wishing instead that it was Sam, Pearl and me forever. But wishing won’t get me anywhere. I have to act.
For this evening though, Mrs Burton sorts us out: hot water bottle. Sanitary equipment. Praise for Pearl. What a big girl she is.
I tuck her up in bed. I think she has fallen asleep when she suddenly sits up and says, ‘You really like him, don’t you?’ I know who she means. Silly to pretend otherwise.
‘Of course I do,’ I say. ‘He’s your uncle.’
She nods slowly in that way she has.
Pearl knows it.
* * *
A few days later, I read that Bloom’s Restaurant is another one that’s gone. Direct hit in the dead of night. And the row of streets and the bed and breakfast we would have been staying in were all destroyed too. Turns out we were quite lucky after all.
54
1925 – Then
I didn’t know what to do with myself. Back at home in the cul-de-sac, after they let me out of the hospital, Edmund was surprisingly attentive. He did his own chores, and before he left for work in the morning, he opened the door to my room and called out hesitantly.
‘I’m off!’
Yes, you bloody are.
I was resting and thinking.
I could go to London and live with Aunt Cecily, help her with Uncle Toby maybe? I could go to the city, or I could stay put. Everything seemed such a huge, gargantuan effort.
Edmund didn’t require much feeding. He ate a hot meal at work and he was out most of the time. I could tolerate that.
Edmund’s mother sent me flowers and cards. She offered to visit, but I told Edmund she could visit over my dead body (that’s not an invitation, Edmund).
I considered getting a pet rabbit. I would put a hutch next to the shed, and it could be moved into the shed in winter. I thought this plan would make Olive smile, and I still loved to see my sister’s smile but even finishing a letter to her seemed too difficult a task. I started several but abandoned them all. I knew it would be better to go and make amends with her face to face, but I didn’t have the energy to wash my own pillowcases, never mind take a train and a ship to France.
* * *
It was the end of summer and I was whiling away the hours in the kitchen, gazing out of the back window. There were small mounds of dead leaves that Edmund must have raked. If I had had my baby, we might have been lying out on a rug on the lawn by now. It would be just about warm enough with knitted hats and cardigans with pretty buttons on. Maybe I would have been singing lullabies. I would have walked with my baby in his Silver Cross pram. Maybe, I would have pointed out the toddlers playing on the swings to him. People in the shops would have admired my baby’s chubby cheeks.
The doorbell rang: two policemen were there. They were talking as I opened the door, and I felt like I was interrupting them, not the other way round. When they saw me, one went red and the other stammered.
‘Mrs Vivienne Lowe?’
‘Yes.’
Something ran through me. Not quite a thrill, but a feeling of doom, of fear, of excitement. What had Edmund done now? I knew it had been something abominably disgusting and finally, he had been caught. How fast my mind worked in those few moments. Edmund – a bad man. Edmund in jail? This would be a solution to all my problems. I would visit him once a week. No physical contact. But what would everyone think? No one need know. I would tell them his job had taken him to… somewhere obscure and unvisitable. The Scottish Borders maybe.
A black sedan car was parked outside. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the curtains of the house opposite twitch. I stared fixedly ahead. Edmund could take his chlamydia and ride off in that. Be gone-orrhoea. My own joke. It was the first time I’d smiled in a while.
My good man! Edmund would say to the policeman, while thinking exactly the opposite. My good man, can’t we talk about this? I might get to see him with handcuffs cutting into his wrists, being pulled along, staggering, hopefully, along the pavement…
For a moment, I thought the stars had given me all the solutions I needed. A solution I could never even have dreamed up. But they hadn’t, of course they hadn’t. Things didn’t work that way, not for me. Nothing comes easily to me – I should have realised that by then.
‘Are you the sister of Miss Olive Mudie-Cooke?’
I paused. This was not about Edmund, then.
‘Yes?’
‘Can we come inside?’ The speaker looked at his colleague, then added uncertainly, ‘’Fraid we’ve got some bad news.’
My love. My younger sister, my only sister, Olive, had taken her own life.
‘She walked out into the sea. Deliberately,’ the younger man added. For some reason, he thought it was important that I didn’t misunderstand this.
‘As you will know, it’s illegal. But—’
‘Illegal?’ I muttered.
‘But under the circumstances, we won’t be pursuing—’
The older man looked at his colleague. ‘There’s no case,’ he told me gently. ‘Do you have anyone to look after you, Ma’am?’
I lied and told him I did.
Oh God, Olive, let her hear me once more, let us go back in time. Let me fix everything.
A rush, a crush of memories, press on my heart: her laughing, her drawing, her teasing me – and then it’s there too. The other side of the coin: my shouting at her, blaming her, accusing her, resenting her.
I paced the rooms of my stupid house. I had chosen this family – Edmund, the Lowes – and abandoned my own. I had picked wrongly, I had made the most heinous mistakes, and look where it had led me. I will look after you, O, I’d said. And I hadn’t. I hadn’t.
Stupid things had swayed me, stupid, trivial things like family heirloom bracelets and leaping lords at my wedding, and having a husband who was respectable, who went to church and was friendly with vicars.
I had forgotten what was important.
If only I could have told her all of this. Face to face. Her pretty face. Her sheepskin coat and too-flat shoes. Her wide eyes and pointed chin. Her beloved pipe.
‘Did she leave anything? Anything at all?’ I had begged the kinder, older policeman.
A note. A note. Let her have left me a note. Or, no, a painting would have been more Olive’s style. Or a pencil sketch that could have told me what terrible things had taken over her mind or shown me why ending the pain was more important than going on, than living.
‘Nothing,’ he said apologetically. ‘There was nothing. I’m so sorry.’
* * *
Olive’s story was in some of the newspapers, usually on page nine or ten. Small columns, but columns nevertheless. The piece in the Sunday Times began, ‘Death o
f talented female artist’. That would have annoyed her. Why couldn’t they just say ‘artist’? It went on to say Olive had served in France and Spain (Spain?) during the war and her work was eviscerating and brilliant (now that was true).
Another article, this time for the Herald, said that Olive, like many women, had stepped up during the war and didn’t know quite how to step down again. This phrasing made me pause a while. It continued: she had lost people she loved and, unbeknown to the many fans of her art, she had always struggled to come to terms with that. Another thing I hadn’t known about my own sister.
The papers didn’t report how she had died, of course. That absence, that hole in her story, would have told the careful reader everything they needed to know. I saw it, though. My darling, darling girl was as much a casualty of the war as the bodies piling up outside the hospital at Lamarck.
So, I was alone. No babies, no sister, no father, no cousin. No Sam.
Just Edmund.
Edmund, our disease and all my mistakes.
55
1944 – Now
Edmund and I argue whenever we see each other. This is a new habit. I used to repress it, but now I seem to have found my voice. We have gone from silent film to full-blown talkie in technicolor.
Edmund is growing more spiteful. I’ll be boiling some potatoes and he’ll come in like we’ve been having a conversation – we haven’t – and start up.
‘You weren’t the only one who served in the Great War, you know. I do wish you wouldn’t harp on it all the time.’
‘Oh, remind me, what were you doing in France then? Paying poor young girls to sleep with you… Do they give out medals for that?’
He ignores me. That must not be mentioned.
‘I haven’t had it easy—’
‘No one has,’ I persist. I want to say something profound: I want to tell him how he has hurt me, how he has wasted our marriage, our relationship and my child-bearing years. How I had been willing once, to work at this, us, but he had not, and I am losing my patience. But I can’t find the words.
I don’t suppose he would listen anyway.
* * *
Some weeks later, I have been queueing, waiting, stewing and visiting his parents – sitting there while they make their vile comments about the coloured Americans in Birmingham – and it suddenly occurs to me: I can’t do this any more.
I don’t have to do this any more.
That night, I creep out to Edmund’s beloved shed with a torch. I remember nights in France wandering around in deepest blackness and this spurs me on. I wrap my hand in my coat sleeve and smash the window. From there, it shouldn’t be too hard to reach the internal door lock. It shouldn’t be too hard, but it is hard. It takes me eight or nine attempts and the jagged edges of glass succeed in cutting my arm.
I’m in. It is full of – I don’t know how I can describe it – postcards, yes, of women. All women. All shapes and sizes. Every variety. This is pornography. I’m not an innocent – I know how some men behave when they are unchecked, unregulated. Even in France I knew many soldiers kept pretty girls in their pockets. But these were different, these were my husband’s pockets and these girls weren’t just pretty.
This is what he does.
It appears to be, not a hobby, but a profession.
I look at the drawers. Each one is carefully catalogued with a name scrawled on brown paper. Belle, Bertha, Bessie, Bettina, Betty. All the way to Z. I look at V and it is full of Victorian woman disrobes, Victorian woman naked. U, T, S. Saffron, Selina, Simona.
It is the detail, the loving, obsessional detail, that kills me.
He never wanted me. Why would he have wanted me? When he had all this – this horrible fantasy world versus the reality of me. Twenty-five years, I think. Twenty-five loveless years down the drain.
* * *
Another spur-of-the-moment thing – I seem to be full of them these days. I race into the house and bring out the Zippo that Sam gave me at St Pancras. First, I run around the garden like a madwoman, looking for and finally retrieving Charles from behind a camellia. He is chewing a berry, perfectly oblivious that he has lived through two world wars, through no fault of his own. Better to be a tortoise, I think.
Tucking Charles under my arm, I place him next to the house in safety, then I set light to the shed. I add some rushes and some twigs for an easier catch. Smoke and dust billows. Black clouds and then magnificent, hungry, licking orange flames.
I can hear Edmund running, footsteps in a flap, his heavy breathing suddenly next to me. I want to laugh.
‘What the hell? How—’
‘Bombs,’ I reply. I can’t stop watching the devastation of his temple, it is hypnotising.
‘What? I didn’t hear anything.’
‘Didn’t you?’
I am revolted at him, revolted at myself.
‘Oh well, there’s nothing important in there, is there?’
The look on Edmund’s face.
‘Edmund, a room has come up at Mrs Harrison’s. I suggest you go there. Tonight.’
‘What?’
‘It’s over, Edmund. It should have been over a long time ago.’
I don’t know who is more astonished, him or me. He stares at me mutinously for a few seconds and there are dust and sparks and shouting from Mr Dean next door, and then Edmund walks into the house. I see the lights come on, then when I look up just a few moments later, the lights have been extinguished. I hear the car start up and he is gone.
* * *
Later, Pearl and I sit round our bonfire, warming our hands.
‘I have an idea,’ I say. I run into the kitchen to get our last bits of bread and we treat ourselves to a midnight snack.
56
1944 – Now
Sam writes and this letter is addressed to me alone – and this time he says what I have been longing for him to say: ‘Can I see you?’
And I know what he means this time. He doesn’t have to spell it out.
He means, alone. Just him and me. No Mr Churchill, no Mr Hitler, no Finland, no Japan, no Coventry, no London, no war.
But I can’t leave Pearl alone and Mrs Burton has her own troubles – I can’t allow her to look after mine, I can’t just get up and go. I stopped doing spontaneity twenty-five years ago; even then I was a novice.
But then Mrs Burton says, ‘Did you hear? They are taking the townies – I mean, some of the evacuees – to the seaside!’
‘No!’
‘Yes, they are.’
‘What? All of them?’
‘Yes, all of them. First time for most of them too.’
It feels like serendipity. It feels too much. The hand of fate is propelling Sam and me together.
* * *
I find myself inventing a cousin on the Mudie side. Thrice removed. Usually Mrs Burton would be all over a new cousin like a rash, but she is distracted by Ethel, the impending baby and Sally and Nathan. And the way Sally has started drawing a line up her legs and painting them brown and the way she borrows curlers. Imagine, Sally, the bookworm who was never keen to spend time with bathwater! Now, she is always trying to break the water regulations. And the hassle over the clothes coupons now you would not believe! What a turnaround!
I nod and listen and knit faster and harder, for our troops are still needing us.
Pearl Posner will be building sandcastles in Lyme Regis. Edmund will be at Mrs Harrison’s, doing whatever Edmund does.
And I will be with Sam.
* * *
Sam doesn’t yet know that I’m a filthy woman riddled with the grossest disease of all. That I take medicines for it, and most of them do work. I don’t have symptoms, I am what they call asymptomatic – that’s a kind of compliment, I think – except in that one crucial area, obviously. That place where it had counted so desperately.
How am I going to tell him?
Will he reject me when he knows?
I half-expect he will. I have been groomed to expect rejec
tion, but the other part of me says, not Sam, not Sam. Although I hardly know him, I trust him more than I trust myself.
We can live somewhere quietly in the country, him, me and Pearl. We don’t need much money. I can do without things. I’ve been doing without things for a long time.
* * *
A few weeks later, and we are at a dance hall. Sam has always wanted to take me dancing. Big band, big music. How many of us were in the Great War together? The musicians are the right age, or rather the wrong age. That smiling man on the clarinet, the serious one at the piano, were they out there too?
Sam thanks me again for coming, and I pull out his lighter and say flirtatiously, ‘I had to return this!’
He laughs, putting his arm round me. He says he’s got some important things to tell me, some decisions he’s made. His eyes seem to cloud over at this, so I press closer to him and murmur, ‘Later, Sam, let’s have some fun first,’ and he bites his lip and agrees. I can hardly believe myself!
Sam is a different kind of dancer to Edmund. He is heavier. His hips are less swivelly. He doesn’t get all eyes on him in the way Edmund did. But he throws himself into it; he is dancing with me, communicating with me, with fun and joie de vivre. And he keeps his eyes on me all the time, which makes me forget myself, then have to shake myself out of the dream. I have to tell him first. Don’t take anything for granted. He might not – he might not…
We sit at a table the other end of the room from the band and he drinks the watered-down beer that is double the price that beer used to be – war prices, Sir – and I drink the landlord’s home-made (illegal?) gin.