Burning Bright

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘It’s not the sort of thing you want to talk about out here on the street,’ says Trisha. ‘There’s no privacy, is there? Come inside.’ Tony touches Nadine’s arm.

  ‘I don’t want to keep him waiting,’ he warns, and reluctantly she yields to the soft pressure of his hand. They start to move off down the street. She wants to say something, to call back to the boy even if it’s only goodbye, but there’s no one to say goodbye to. She doesn’t know any of them. She doesn’t know the boy’s name.

  ‘We can pick up a taxi at the end of the street,’ says Tony.

  Fourteen

  Enid hums as she skirts the side of the square, swaying slightly, her face silly with pleasure. They don’t know a real song when they hear it these days. Michael Desmoulins’s ‘Surprise’ glides through Enid’s head, perfectly on the beat in each bar. It must be years since she’s heard it. These young girls like Nadine don’t know what they’ve missed. ‘Allons…;’ chunters Enid, knocking into the iron railing, bouncing off, renegotiating the pavement corner. Just across here now. Ooops. Lights on. So you go quiet, Enid girl, quiet-as-a-little-mouse. Got to get the key in, though. Where’s the bugger? Ooh, scrabble, scrabble, how I hate this bloody lock. I ought to put a bit of wire round this key, then it wouldn’t slip in too far. There’s a trick to it. There’s a trick to everything.

  There. No one about. So up the stairs we go, making sure to hold on to the handrail except somebody’s yanked it off the wall. Good girl. And up on to the landing, have a little rest before going up the next flight. That’s right, have a nice little sit-down, you deserve it. Now if Nadine was here, we could have a chat.

  But she’s not. Gone to London with Tony, the silly girl. All dressed up. Dressed to kill. Though it was very plain to my mind, black and white. But stylish, you’ve got to admit. And it’s the sort of style they’d like, Tony and Kai, being foreigners. People get the wrong idea about Italians, they think they like the flash look. But they don’t. Look at their own women. Finns I wouldn’t know about – if he is Finnish. How would I know? I only go by what Nadine tells me.

  Oh, he looked very pleased with himself tonight. I wonder why? When the cat’s away…; But she did look lovely. No wonder they say youth is wasted on the young. If I looked like that you wouldn’t catch me wasting it on Tony’s trips to London. Right, come on, Enid, time to get moving. Can’t spend the night here.

  That laugh. It’s her again. She’s here. In their bedroom too; well, I did try to tell Nadine. But no one listens when they’re young. It’d be me she’d blame for telling her, not him for doing it. Oh, they think themselves safe enough in there. Nadine’s away in London, Tony’s away in London. Not that Tony’d care what Kai got up to, from what I’ve seen of him. Very much a business point of view, Tony’s. You get to recognize the type.

  Only me here. And I’d better make myself scarce before one of them comes out. After all, she’s flesh and blood in spite of appearances, that Vicki. She’ll need to go to the toilet some time, she’d piss bile, that one. They won’t hear me, not with all the laughing. Cackling’s more the word for it, and a very ugly sound if she wants my opinion. Not a peep out of Kai, though – it’s all her. They’ll have been drinking. She’s the sort who gets noisy when she’s been drinking. Look who’s talking. What gets me is the way he acts so holy and gets Nadine to do his dirty work for him. Oh, she was embarrassed, but she thought she’d got to say it. ‘Enid, do you think you could be a bit quieter when you come back from the pub? You see, Kai’s got a bit of a thing about people drinking – it upsets him when it’s people in the house. I mean, I know you only have a couple of ginger wines…;’

  Well, as long as he’s not such a b.f. as to let her stay the night. Nadine’ll know, she’s bound to. You can’t hide the smell of another woman. And it always looks fishy when a man starts changing the sheets after you’ve been away. Except Kai’s supposed to have a thing about clean sheets anyway, which is handy in the circumstances.

  ‘Kai can’t bear to wear things twice. He has to have clean clothes every day. He’s so fastidious. I suppose quite a lot of people are like that really, aren’t they, Enid?

  I should think quite a lot of people would be like that, dear, if they went where Kai goes, and did what Kai does. You’ve obviously never read Macbeth. But I don’t say anything. I’ve no proof, and anyway, what’s the point? It’s no good telling people things until they’re ready to hear them. Let her believe all that stuff about sheets and her Kai being fastidious.

  It’ll be a miracle if those two in there don’t hear my knees cracking. My joints go off like pistol shots, even when I’ve only been sitting five minutes. Now up we go, one at a time and take it steady. Pity there’s no carpet. If we had a bit of carpet no one’d ever hear me. I might as well not be there at all. That carpet at the Manchester Ladies. Nearly there. That’s the way. I’ll have another sit-down before I make a cup of tea. Just a small cup. You don’t want to be washing out sheets again, do you, Enid?

  Lucky I didn’t tell Nadine what happened to Caro. But she’s bound to ask. Why did I tell her any of it? I should have kept it to myself, the way I always have, till it’s just words you can say over in the night when you hear noises going on downstairs. Or that woman laughing.

  ‘Manchester Ladies. Manchester Ladies.’ I say it over to myself, and I see Sukey’s sweet smile and I feel her combing my hair like she was my mother. No, much more than my mother. I don’t think of what happened after. What’s the good? And who’s to say that terrible things are any more real than good ones, just because they get into the newspapers? I know what was real. The cab and the rain and the Manchester Ladies. And Sukey in her kimono, then me in her arms. That’s the sort of thing that never gets wiped out, no matter what happens after.

  ‘Tillnext time, darling.’

  Darling, she always called me that. And sweetheart. No one’d ever used those words to me before. Nor afterwards. All the Americans called us honey. ‘Hon’, Clyde used to say, but it didn’t mean much. There wasn’t any feeling in the words. You can always hear it if it’s there, like something alive in the voice. When Sukey spoke I used to melt inside. When I talked to her on the telephone, it was, ‘See you tomorrow, then, darling. Good night, sweetheart.’ Next time. Come again. And I did. Again and again and again. There was never a time like it. She bought a tobacco-brown silk dressing-gown for me, because it went with my hair. ‘You look marvellous, darling. If you went out on the streets like this you’d stop the traffic’ But we weren’t out on the streets, we were on Sukey’s bed and I was curled up in the silk dressing-gown and it slipped open over my legs and then she was touching me there. I didn’t even have words for the places she touched or the things she did. Down there, that was what mother called it. Make sure you keep yourself clean down there, Enid. We had to hide our sanitary napkins so Father and the boys never saw them. We’d slip past with our brown paper packets like thieves. It was a crime to be a woman. Never with Sukey, though.

  ‘Oh, darling, you’re just exactly like silk. I can’t tell which is silk and which is you.’

  She taught me all the words. I used to wonder how she knew them. And she’d talk straight out about things I’d only ever heard whispered about. She’ll had a baby – just one. She knew how to stop having them. I didn’t know anything about things like that. People thought it wasn’t decent.

  Sukey’s bed was a world of its own. Once I was there I’d forget everything, even what time of day it was. Except suddenly I’d notice things more sharply than I’d ever noticed them before. The colour the sky really was at dawn. There was a blackbird in a quince tree below her window, and I got to know every note it sang. I could have written it down, if I’d known how to write music. The only way you knew time was passing was when the sun came round to the window late in the afternoon. Sometimes it woke me up and I’d feel it on my face. I’d look up and Sukey would be there.

  One week she had a bowl of Kent cherries by the bed and we ate them all
day long until there was a heap of dry white stones piled up like a volcano. There were things I’d never tasted: melon, and white peaches, and crystallized ginger. Then we’d bath. We were always going to get up and go out somewhere and have dinner, but it never seemed to happen. I wasn’t hungry anyway. Sukey would walk about naked – at first I was too shy even to look at her, then after a few weeks I was doing it myself. I’d tie my hair up so it wouldn’t get wet, then after the bath I’d powder myself all over – Sukey had a bowl of Floris powder by the bath and a big powder puff. I loved the smell and I’d always use far too much so that it flew out in a cloud round me – then I’d let my hair come down over my shoulders and sit cross-legged on Sukey’s bed and she’d look at me and I’d smile at her. What a change. A changed girl, that’s what I was.

  ‘Darling. Sweetheart. Keep still – let me –’

  And I would.

  Then it all went wrong. She was such a silly girl, Caro. Yes, that’s the word for her. Silly. Though that’s not the word they used in the newspapers. They called her evil. But it was silliness to be jealous of Sukey. Sukey wasn’t the kind of person you needed to be jealous about. It didn’t matter what she gave, there’d always be plenty left. She was a bit like the sea – if she went out, she’d come in again, you could be sure of it. Of course she was naughty. Poor Caro, really, you had to feel sorry for her. Even I did. But she fooled herself. Sukey had never pretended Caro was the only one for her. She wasn’t going to be either, no matter what she did, no matter how much she raged and begged. I suppose what I saw was Caro realizing it. Caro couldn’t pretend any longer that she was going to have Sukey all to herself, the way she wanted. Sukey was never going to draw the curtains and lock her door with Caro inside and be glad that the rest of the world was shut out. It wasn’t in her nature. I could tell that straight away, so why couldn’t Caro? She wanted all of Sukey. But Sukey wanted all of everything.

  That’s what it was all about, the Manchester Ladies. I don’t think Caro understood when they started up the club with April and the others. She thought it was going to make them more of a couple because they had created something together. But that wasn’t the way it turned out, and it couldn’t have been, ever. It was a place for people like Sukey who wanted everything and didn’t mind where it came from. And the thing about Sukey that made her different was that she gave everything too. Nothing was held back. Caro would have glanced at me in that shop doorway and put me straight out of her mind. But not Sukey. She brought me back out of the rain in her cab. That was what the Manchester Ladies was for; at least, that was Sukey’s idea of it. But not many people would’ve thought like that, if they already had a warm place of their own to go back to, and friends, and someone to love them. Fires, that thick green carpet, tall lilies in jars, brandy…; she had everything. Tea that tasted like smoke in cups so thin you could see your finger through them. I had to learn to like it. Lapsang Souchong. Sukey had everything already, according to Caro – what did she want with more? But Sukey had to open the door, never mind if it let in the wind and the rain until there wasn’t any warm place any more.

  She showed me the secret door and then she opened it. You’d never believe how beautiful it was inside. I’m not talking about the Manchester Ladies now. It was Sukey herself; her body, her heart. What she was. Oh, she used to make me laugh. Laugh and laugh – we didn’t care who heard us. But she could be so gentle. Some people would say bad things about Sukey, because she was older and she had all that money. And I know I was lovely then, though no one else knows that now; not a soul in the world. But what does it matter? Everything goes away. Sukey knew that, but Caro didn’t. Sukey never made use of me.

  Caro was always watching us when the three of us were together. You’re cruel when you’re young, you don’t think. You don’t care for anyone else when you’re happy; it’s one rule for you, and another for them. Or else no rules at all. I was happy. I didn’t mind people seeing I was happy. I wanted Caro to feel that she was outside, just people, and that I was – well, what? Inside. With Sukey. I was as bad as Caro, really, only I couldn’t feel jealous of her. Perhaps that was the worst thing I did to her, not being jealous of her. If we’re talking about cruelty. And when it comes to a murder trial, you’ve got to talk about it.

  That description in the newspapers. Those things they put in, they never think of the people who’ve to read them. I suppose you can’t blame the newspapers. I’d read plenty of murders before and forgotten them five minutes afterwards, because they were just stories to me. But when I read those newspaper reports about Caro and Sukey and what Caro had done to her I felt like I was drinking something down so cold there’s a part of me that’s never been warm since. Not even when I was pregnant. It turned into another sort of loneliness, that was all. People say having a baby changes you. I thought it would change me and make me stop loving Sukey and hating Caro. After all, it had been seven years. There I’d be at those bloody clinics they used to have, sitting there with my knickers down. It wasn’t very respectable then, being pregnant, even if you were married. And I wasn’t married. Girls these days wouldn’t believe how they used to talk to you when you weren’t married. I was a fool not to buy a ring from Woolworth’s and say my husband had been killed on D-Day. But I didn’t. I couldn’t be bothered, really. I didn’t care enough about what people thought. I’d got a bit of money saved: we earned plenty in the war. And I knew it would be over soon, and I’d move away and no one would know. Trail trail trail back to my room, pushing my shopping basket on wheels, wondering if the butcher would be able to let me have a kidney with my mince. Lucky the house was nearly falling down with bomb damage so that the landlord didn’t kick me out. He was glad enough to get any rent. Offal was said to be good for you. You couldn’t get anything: it was worse than the war. Austerity, that’s what they called it. I was always hungry. I didn’t know if the baby was growing properly. They didn’t bother telling you much at the clinic in those days. They knew what was good for you. I can’t really remember what it was like having him. I’ve never talked about it to anyone. Perhaps that’s why it doesn’t seem real. I like to tell Nadine about him, just so someone else will know when I die. It doesn’t seem as real as me being young and on my own, outside the Manchester Ladies and thinking it didn’t look anything special, feeling a bit disappointed even though Sukey was there at my side. And here I am in my little room on my own, just like I was then. You can’t escape from things. You can never get away.

  ‘The body had lain undiscovered for two days and the severity of the head injuries added to the difficulties of identification. Dental records showed…;’

  They knew it was Sukey. They must have known, even though they said she’d given a different name at the farm when she rented the cottage. I don’t know why she did that, but Sukey loved secrets. She gave her grandmother’s name, so it was easy enough to trace her once they put their minds to it. And someone like Sukey has always got things with her: jewellery, cheque-book, letters. Lain undiscovered for two days. I felt sick when I read it. When she was at home Sukey always had to take the telephone off the hook when we wanted to be alone, otherwise it’d be ringing all the time. And telegrams, and people coming with flowers. And in those days the post came I don’t know how many times a day, and there were always letters for her. She used to leave them lying about open. Anyone could read them.

  Sukey, do come…; Sukey, darling, we’re absolutely dying to see you…; Sukey, you were a fiend not to come, I’m awfully cross with you…; Sukey, will you be at Eloise’s house-party? We’re absolutely dying to see you…;

  That was the way they wrote, the kind of people Sukey knew. That was a long time ago, though, I expect things have changed. All the letters would be pushed together on Sukey’s writing desk until some of them slid off and fell down the back. I don’t know if she bothered to pick them up and answer them.

  Two days undiscovered. It was almost the worst thing. I just couldn’t believe it. Not Sukey. I kept th
inking, what if she hadn’t died straight away, what if she’d been crawling round, crying out, going in smaller and smaller circles till she couldn’t move any more. I’d seen a dog do that when it was dying. They would have found her less than an hour later if she’d been at home. But she was away, in the little cottage she and Caro had rented in the Lake District.

  ‘It’s not even on a road, Enid. You have to walk up a track, about two miles on from the farm where we get milk and butter. They bring the luggage up from the station on their trap and Mrs Garside has got the most angelic daughter who comes up and cleans when we’re not there. Exactly like Puck. It’s absolute heaven. No servants, no bells. All you hear is the birds, and the sheep on the hills. No telephone, no callers…; You’ll have to come, Enid. You’ll love it. I can’t wait for you to see it. And there’s the most adorable pump in the yard, like a toy pump. I can’t squeeze one drop of water out of it, but Caro got the knack of it straight away. You’ve never felt water like it. It’s just like silk. Caro wants to grow vegetables – there’s a bit of garden with a wall round it. I can’t imagine ever leaving here. I could spend my whole life in a cottage like this.’

  I didn’t mind that Caro was there with her. Caro had said she wasn’t going to sleep with Sukey any more, until she stopped sleeping with me. Well, now I can imagine what it must have cost Caro to say that, how hurt she must have been. Because you could see her wanting to touch Sukey all the time, wanting to put her arms round her and hide her so that no one else could even see her. Perhaps she thought it would bring Sukey to her senses, and she wouldn’t want me any more if she couldn’t have Caro. But it didn’t work like that, not with Sukey. She just said that if that was how Caro felt, then she wouldn’t argue with her. But she was always there if Caro changed her mind. At the time I thought Caro was lucky that Sukey was so generous. Now I’m not so sure.