He’d been afraid she’d tell him about Kenny, describe his last moments in the basement of the school. How could he be so frightened of something he didn’t believe was possible? How could that woman, who was in so many ways pathetic — and also, it had to be said, repulsive — have such power? He remembered seeing her in the downstairs room, naked, eyes glazed, fag end stuck to her bottom lip, an image by turns embarrassing, pitiable and nightmarish. He tried to erase it from his mind, but it drew strength from darkness. As he walked from street to street, he found it easy to believe they were leading him to a secret chamber, right at the heart of the blacked-out city, where a white, bloated figure sat enthroned, a grotesque Persephone, claiming to speak for millions of the mouthless dead.
EIGHTEEN
You weren’t supposed to talk to the patients. The one time they’d caught her at it, Sister Matthews had come down on her like a ton of bricks. “You are a ward maid.” Lips pursed like a cat’s arse. “The patients are nothing to do with you.”
Aye, right. But when there’d been a rush on, after Dunkirk, she’d done all sorts, changed beds, emptied bedpans, pushed trolleys full of filthy sheets down to the laundry in the basement — and none of that was her job. Oh, and in between times, yes, she’d talked to the lads, and nobody pulled her up over it. Poor sods, they’d nowt to do all day except watch shadows moving on the walls, check the time to see how long it still was till visiting, strain to hear familiar footsteps coming up the ward.
Once things had settled down a bit, they played cards, talking through lips that hardly moved about stuff that had happened, some of the things they’d seen. Guardsmen forced to shave in seawater before they’d been allowed to get on a boat. “Only in England,” one lad said. And then on the train coming back how people had thrown cigarettes in at the windows, treated them like conquering heroes, but they weren’t heroes, not in their own estimation. Bloody cock-up — that was the general verdict. She’d never seen so many men so angry.
This poor lad here. Babbling away, but not making a lot of sense, poor soul. God knows what was going on in his head — and his breathing. And she thought hers was bad. First time she clapped eyes on him, she thought: You’re not long for this world, son. But he had, he’d hung on. And he’d talked, my God he had, how they’d lain in the open under the hot sun, no water, not a British plane in sight. Chap next to him showed him a silk scarf he’d bought for his fancy bit—“bought, my eye, bloody nicked it”—and then he’d died, lying there in the sand. “And I took the scarf. Wasn’t stealing, was it?” “ ’Course it wasn’t, love. It was no good to him.”
And that’s when Sister Matthews had pounced. Things were back to normal now, apparently. She was just the maid.
So now, though he went on babbling, she turned her back on him, kept herself busy polishing the taps, only then he said the one word that would have made any woman turn round. “Mam.”
He was staring round him, wild-eyed, not a clue where he was, poor lad. “Mam?”
She put her hand over his. “It’s all right, son. You go off to sleep, now, it’s all right.”
He closed his eyes. A few minutes later the fluttering behind his lids stopped, and his mouth fell slightly open. Had he gone? Still touching his hand, she watched his chest, saw the almost-imperceptible rise. No, not yet, but it wouldn’t be long.
Mam. She knew it was stupid, but the word kept catching in her throat. He could be, she told herself — well, just about. Her son had been born bang in the middle of the last war, so that would make him, what — twenty-four, twenty-five? About right. Of course, it wasn’t him, she knew that, but…Well, no, actually, come to think of it, you couldn’t know, could you? Not for certain, you couldn’t. She needed to go back and see him again, look for resemblances, but she couldn’t. There was another ward to clean, and another. Far too many. Seemed to think you could work bloody miracles.
So she trudged from bed to bed, basin to basin, ward to ward. All the time, floating in front of her eyes, was the memory of the purple, howling dwarf they’d torn out of her all them years ago. She’d never seen a newborn baby before. Little babies, yes, a few days old, but not newborn. And my God it come as a shock, she’d no idea they looked like that.
She’d gone into the home the minute she started showing. For a long time you could cover it up with cardigans and jumpers, but not forever — and you weren’t allowed to work in the munitions factory if you were pregnant, something to do with the chemicals, so she more or less had to go in the home. Where was she going to find another job with a belly on her like that? No, it was the home, or starve.
They put her to work in the laundry — laughable, really — lifting buckets, twelve-hour shifts, wonder they didn’t all lose their babies — and probably better if they had. But at least the work tired you out. She was asleep the minute her head touched the pillow. And what a lumpy pillow it was. The pillowcase was always spotless — matron saw to that — but the pillow smelled of other people’s hair, all the girls who’d slept on it before her. But there it was, lumps or not, she’d drop off to sleep like falling over a cliff, only she didn’t stay asleep, not properly asleep. She was aware all the time of the ward: the iron bedsteads, humped bodies under pale green coverlets, gray light seeping through threadbare curtains — and then it all faded, and she was somewhere else.
A place she seemed to know. For some reason, in her dreams — well, she supposed she was dreaming, she didn’t know what else to call it — it was always winter. Men huddled under waterproof capes, sheltering from the sleety rain that fell ceaselessly from the evil, yellow sky. On cold nights their eyebrows were rimed with frost. After a while, she found she could hear them speak, taste the chlorine in their tea, feel the heat of the fire — even tell from the sound a shell made as it was coming over how close it was going to land. They weren’t aware of her, these men. Stared straight through her. She was the ghost.
And then, one night, it all changed. She was with them, watching them, as usual, but now a dark man with heavy eyelids was looking back at her. Watching her. She was so used to being the watcher, it came as quite a shock. At first she didn’t believe it, but then, when deliberately she moved a few yards to the right, he turned his head to follow her. She was so new to this, so ignorant, it took her a long time to cotton on that he’d passed.
Next morning, she washed her face as usual, brushed her hair, clumped across the yard to the laundry, where the steamy heat made her nose run. Exactly the same as every other morning, except this time she didn’t go alone.
She didn’t know Howard then, otherwise she might have sorted it out a bit sooner. Though Howard got things wrong too. He always said Albert was an officer, that he’d been killed on the first day of the Somme. But it was always winter when she saw him, and he wasn’t an officer: he crawled out of a funk hole in the side of the trench every morning along with all the other men. Anyway, whoever he was, whenever he died, from that night on he was part of her. Not that he was there all the time, she could go days without a squeak out of him, but he generally took over when things were bad. Gave her a bit of a break — and my God she needed it, because the last few weeks in the home things were very bad.
Mind you, bugger didn’t show up when she was in labor. He kept well out of the way then.