by Rebecca Ley
‘I’m not sure.’
‘You sound strange, are you all right in bed like this?’
‘I have a fever, I’ve gone funny in the head. But I’m better now I know you’re safe. You are safe aren’t you?’
‘For now, for a few hours. I need to leave.’
‘Oh, Jaminder,’ I said. ‘You can’t leave me. You’re my dearest friend.’
‘I have to, Mathilde. We know what the other option is.’
‘Have you heard anything about Gloria? What have they done with her?’
‘She’s in the hospital. She pulled through, despite all the sores in her mouth and her stomach. She should’ve used a razor and a hot bath.’
‘There’s no sense to any of it.’
‘I have to go, Mathilde.’
I cried through the phone, shaking the receiver. ‘You can’t, Jaminder, you can’t. Let me come with you. I love you, Jaminder, what would I do without you?’
A hand extended towards me and I realised it wasn’t my hand, and I wasn’t holding a phone. It was the middle of the night, and not a candle was lit, but I could just make out Jaminder’s face, and she was looking at mine. She sat in my grandmother’s chair, and was reaching out her hands to calm my own. She was as beautiful as she’d ever been like that, in the darkness, the only light coming from the embers of her cigarette. She took another drag. She coughed slightly.
‘Oh, Mathilde,’ she said, exhaling. ‘I lied to you.’ I looked at her face in the dark, I grasped her hand that laid itself on mine. ‘I’m nothing.’
‘Jaminder, no,’ and I was desperate now, clinging to her hand like that, desperate for her to be all right. ‘I love you, Jaminder, I love you.’
I tried to move towards her, to reach out to her. I wanted to tell her that she was something to me. But my hands padded the air and felt nothing, and she moved away from me, retreating into the darkness.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette on my grandmother’s painted chair. The image of her face extinguished with it. ‘And George is the father.’
It was dark, and I tried to make out the lines of her face, or at least the remnants of embers on the chair, or where the cigarette butt had fallen. These were the trivial things that travelled through my mind, instead of what should have registered. I felt as though my arm had been severed but it was still feeling its way for her fingers.
I heard her clear her throat, swallow. ‘Will you look into my eyes and tell me that you love me now?’
3
I lay still in the darkness and I listened to the sound of Jaminder’s breathing, making sure she was still there. I reached my arm out to her, and it caught her hand, but she retracted it.
‘No,’ she said, ‘It’s no use now.’
‘Oh, please light a candle, I need to look at you.’ I tried to sit myself up but I was weak, and I felt my stomach couldn’t support the small movements in my upper body to try and lift myself. I laid my head back down on my pillow and turned desperately towards her. I wished she was closer to me and I could touch her. She clattered on the table next to me and with a small hush a candle was lit. She held it in her hand, and I saw for the first time that her eyes were hollows and her face was a small tear of worry.
‘It’s too late for me,’ she placed the candle in its holder back down on my bedside table. ‘But not for you. I just wanted to say goodbye.’
‘It’s not true is it?’ I said to her, and wondered what I looked like in the foggy candle light, my face a blur of itself.
‘I wanted to tell you before,’ she said, and fiddled again in her pocket for a cigarette. ‘But there was no right time.’ She struck another match and held it up to her cigarette, inhaling slowly, giving herself time. ‘I didn’t know how to warn you, I didn’t know how to get you away. Then I realised I simply couldn’t – because if he got wind of the fact I’d told you, I’d told anyone, I’d be done for and so would you. So long as you didn’t know, and George held you next to him, I thought he wouldn’t do the same to you. I thought it meant you were safe. As a woman with no children, you were safer being close to him than with anyone else, than your doctor or your grocer or your grandmother or anyone walking down the street and knowing you didn’t have children and that the act of them giving you children would be applauded. With him you’d sort it out and you’d never have to worry. I didn’t think he’d hurt you if he wanted to be with you. If he thought more of you than he thought of me.’
‘He did hurt me,’ I said. My sheets felt slick and moist underneath my body, and I tried to count the days I’d been lying in them, and when I’d walk again. I wondered if my grandmother had let Jaminder in, or if she’d slipped through the unlocked front door, and if it was still unlocked. I opened my mouth to suggest we lock the door and as Jaminder spoke again I realised I’d forgotten what she was telling me, and I wish it had just been isolated to me. I wish it had just been me.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘That’s when I realised that none of us were safe. And then with Gwendolyn, and Gloria – but there was no time to do anything. It all happened so quickly.’ She reached a hand up to her head, as though quelling a deep-set headache, as though squeezing it between her fingers would release it and it would leave her.
‘What happened at the police station?’
‘It was only two nights. After they’d beaten me over the head a couple of times, I had to tell them. They took me to the hospital and checked and the doctor told them I was telling the truth and the baby was healthy. That was all they needed to know; they let me out straight away. But it’s only a matter of time before George finds out. Of course he won’t think it’s his, they never do, but he’ll assume we’ve spoken. He won’t let me get rid of it. If you’re lucky he’ll let you stay to have your child, when you have one.’
There was a draft coming through the window and the flame of the candle wobbled in response. I shivered and my wet sheets made me feel even cooler. I wanted to tell her I needed to move, or be wrapped up, or bathed. But I knew that first I had to listen. ‘How did it happen? When did it happen?’
‘I’d known for a while that George had taken it upon himself as a personal mission to procreate, and to send women away. The women he has he lulls into a sense that he can help them, but it’s not true. He knows that Mrs P and the rest will thank him personally if he sets an example like that. He’s been doing it for years.’
I imagined the multitude of women discarded, but found a number like that too large to comprehend or visualise; I tried to count them but it was useless. I thought only of Gwendolyn, and people like us; the rest didn’t have faces and they didn’t have hair and they weren’t women or people, they were just things: piles and piles of things. They were the soil that was tilled and the individual grains of matter that made up the soil and the individual molecules that made up the grains. They were ground down to dust and were so small and so huge in number that they became nothing in my mind. The thought terrified me like nothing else and I still remember this thought as though it had been an actual horrifying event in my life, as though Jaminder had slapped me across the face and cut off my arm. Nothing had happened to me here, only elsewhere and to other people; but to imagine it in such a way chilled me, and to imagine someone you know, or yourself, as one of them was too much to imagine at all.
‘I thought it might happen,’ Jaminder was still talking. ‘But like you, I thought that I was safer as part of that group than being outside of it, and they’d get me in the end. He told me he’d helped me, years ago, taken everything out and my periods were just memories of ovaries and eggs. I didn’t know the difference. They just put me under and scraped around and left me bruised and unchanged. I used contraception for the most part, anyway, because I didn’t want all those men knowing what I’d asked George to do for me. But he knew, of course, and so I suppose for him it was only a matter of time before he took what was his, knowing that there was a chance I would fall pregnant by him easily. That’s why I di
dn’t believe it for months, I thought it wasn’t physically possible. I felt different, I suppose, but I didn’t believe it. I’m still deciding how to end it.’
Her voice started to shake at that, and I’m sure she was imagining knitting needles and coat hangers and whatever else women found, and the doctors who helped them and were sent away, and became dust like that. She put her face in her hands after stubbing out her last cigarette. I could make out the ashen marks they’d made on my grandmother’s painted blue chair and I hoped that if we vanished into thin air, as you could in dreams, that people would one day come into this room and just by looking at those marks they might understand what had happened between us and how desperate we were, and the things we told each other. I hoped they’d understand our foolishness. The smokescreen George and the others had put in front of us, the sweet, sweet smokescreen that looked so much like something we used to see, moving about the flowers in our gardens.
‘I tried to stop him,’ she said. ‘There was no reason for it and it hadn’t happened before. It was just a party and you weren’t there and he’d had champagne and honey cakes, and the honey cakes I could taste in his mouth, and even then I knew about everything, I’ve always known, and it sickened me, more than the actual act. It was just one of Gloria’s rooms and maybe I’d laughed too much with him that evening or been too afraid not to laugh with everyone who was there. Playing the piano was the only time I was allowed to not laugh with the men when they said something to me. They didn’t expect me to laugh, and I could be as macabre and melancholy as I liked playing the piano like that. Maybe that was one of the reasons I kept coming back, apart from that I knew too much. I don’t think I said no. I didn’t think there was a point to saying no or trying to stop it. The honey got in my mouth and it was like tasting someone’s blood. And I did bite his lip, until it bled, but I think he only liked it. I was thankful he didn’t come near me again after that, and I tried to warn you in some way, only I couldn’t, not really. I racked my brains for days about how to get out of this situation and what to do, and in a way you might be the answer to all of that. You’re the only answer I have left, if there’s ever an answer to anything at all, it might just be you, Mathilde, it might be you.’
I wiped the cold moisture from my forehead and looked at her. She took her hands away from her face and guided them towards mine in the candlelight. My mouth was open.
‘There are only a few ways out of this, and that car might be one of them. Your proximity to him might be one of them.’ She stopped, and looked at me, waiting patiently for my reply.
‘I’ll do anything for you, Jaminder, you know that,’ I said, swallowing amongst my words and lying back, turning my head away from her. ‘But I’m coming with you. I’ll do anything for you, as long as I can come along with you.’
‘No. We could die. We will die.’
‘Is this place not a kind of death?’
She didn’t respond and when I turned my head back towards her she was nodding, ‘All right,’ she said, ‘All right.’
I began shivering again. It had grown colder and we’d lapsed into silence. ‘I think you should keep it,’ I said.
‘I’m not a mother,’ she said. ‘I’ll never be a mother.’
I thought of my own mother, and all she’d done for me; how we’d looked after her when she was sick, how I’d ended up mothering her. ‘I could be,’ I said. ‘Or I could try.’
‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I think we might be able to make something good out of this world. I think we could do it, I think we could try. We might be able to make something beautiful.’
‘I’m scared, Mathilde. I don’t want to die.’
‘I’ll be there, you won’t die. We only need to cross the Scottish border, and then none of this will matter. We need a way to get that far. And then a man will never touch you for the reasons we are touched here.’
‘What would we tell the child?’
‘That we are its parents.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Jaminder said. ‘Why would you want a child? Why would you want his child?’
‘It wouldn’t be his,’ I said, and I stretched out to her again and took her hands. ‘It wouldn’t be his at all.’
I couldn’t explain it, but I’d never been surer of anything in my life. I knew we had to do it. I just knew.
‘Will we love it?’ Jaminder said. ‘Will I love it? How will I love it?’
‘Of course you will, because we’ll love each other, because that feeling isn’t dead yet. There’s still something magical left, there’s still something new, there’s still a feeling they can’t crush out of us, don’t you feel it?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not anymore.’
I kissed her hands, and they were colder than my own. Her breathing became ragged and as I looked up at her, her face crumpled like a sheet of paper, the lines of her skin bleeding into each other. I wanted to reach up my hand to her and smooth them out, and make it better for her.
‘Do you really think we could do it? The two of us?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and I kissed her hands again. ‘We belong together, the three of us. We could be a family.’
She watched my face, she touched my skin. ‘I don’t know, Mathilde.’
‘You do, you do, there has to be something good. There just has to be.’
She studied me for a long time, my breath panting out of me, my mouth open, waiting for her answer. Then she smiled. ‘All right. I’ll do it.’
‘Do you mean it?’ I said, desperately.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If we stay together. If you want it, I’ll keep it for you.’
‘Oh, Jaminder, thank God, thank God for you.’
She took her hands away from my face. She noticed the ash on the chair and wiped it away. ‘We don’t have long. And you need to get better.’
‘I feel better,’ I said.
‘We need to make a plan. Tomorrow night. We need to get that car. And until then, you have to act to everyone like everything’s normal. Do you see? Everything is the same. Just act normal.’
‘Yes, I can do that.’
‘You need to go to him, can you do that? You need to distract him, so he doesn’t notice the car disappear. So he stays inside and doesn’t leave. When the time is right, you leave, and you meet me on Piccadilly. Do you know where the old Ritz hotel is? They kept it open for politicians. It’s one of those places where there are cars, so it won’t look odd, parked up there. We’ll hide in plain sight. Be there at six. And then we’ll get as far as we can with whatever’s in that battery. I have family in the Midlands, we’ll go there first, for a night maybe. Then we need to cross the border.’
‘What if he doesn’t let me go? I’m scared, Jams.’
‘He will. Just say you’re going to the park for your constitutional. You’ll be back soon.’
‘How do we cross the border? In a car?’
‘If we’re lucky and the battery hasn’t run out. No one goes that far. It’s madness to leave the city, the electricity and the food just to try find a pocket of civilisation up there. They don’t need to monitor it, because who would go that far?’ She looked at me, her eyes still and round, like a wild animal in the dark. ‘You still have a choice,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to come. If you can’t leave her.’
‘No,’ I said, thinking of my grandmother, alone in that house. She’d saved us from France and found a way for us to live, and I had obliterated it. I thought of her muddling through on her own, having to let me go the way we let my mother go. But the alternative: my life, crushed, in his hands. ‘I never had a choice.’
Her eyes closed, softened. ‘Do you know where he keeps the car keys?’
I thought about the night driving over Westminster Bridge, his pride, my fear. ‘It doesn’t have keys, you just need the code.’
‘Do you know it?’
I nodded. ‘It’s his birthday.’ I told her the date. ‘He tol
d me when we went driving. He said it was safe with just a code because no one knows how to drive a car anyway.’
‘Be at his at five, meet me at six o’clock,’ she said, ‘Thereabouts. Six.’
I paused. ‘You do know how to drive, don’t you, Jams?’
‘My grandfather taught me more than just the piano,’ she said. She moved away into the dark and I didn’t ask where she was going. I was afraid by everything she had told me, but the idea of something that was hers and could be ours and was growing inside her electrified me. I felt like I could blow every fuse in London.
4
Gloria didn’t die. There were no more parties after that, of course, and I’m sure there were none after we left. She did live with a limp, and had a walking stick when she left the hospital.
We found a London newspaper months after we left, in a solitary town. It was lying on a table in someone’s home, two months old, and when we opened it, starved for news, there was a picture of her, walking stick in hand, with Frank. The incident was described as an ‘accident at home’. We tore the page out and kept it. We never saw a newspaper like that again.
I think of Gloria often. I worry after her, as I worry after all the living people I can’t touch or hold, or care for. But I imagine her as gathering herself up and towering above all of them, still. I like to imagine her like that, as the force she was. After everything, it might seem strange, but I do like to imagine it.
I spent the next day preparing to leave while my grandmother was at work. I packed a small bag that I hid in St James’s Park on the way to George’s and would collect on my way out. I put small things in it: a book my mother had given me with her inscription; a recipe she had written for tarte tatin; a hairbrush; a toothbrush; all the money I owned.
I thought of my mother, dying slowly and us waiting for her to go so we could leave, too. The drought and famine that prompted the riots, that tipped her illness over the edge. The rebel forces trying to take control. She told both of us to go. But we couldn’t, not until we’d been with her, not until we knew she wasn’t alone. I thought of the civil war and foreign bombing we narrowly avoided, our country obliterated while it boiled. My mother was French for as many generations as there had been generations. And what was I? In England since the age of nine. Was I to be blamed? I wanted to be. Did we call people French after that? Can you be French if there is no France?