‘Mother coming back,’ Albert chanted happily, and Ada felt for her mother’s little silver locket that she kept hidden in her apron pocket where she could touch it like a talisman because she didn’t believe it possible that their mother could have gone and left them for ever.
Rachel sat rocking the big wooden crib back and forth with her foot. They kept the baby in the kitchen by the range like a loaf of bread, but this was one loaf that was never going to rise. Mrs May was a regular visitor right into the winter, bringing other women from the village with her who all had their different ideas as to what to do with an ailing baby like Samuel who was as small as Ada’s old doll and almost as lifeless.
In the cold evenings of Samuel’s one and only winter they would sit in the kitchen, Rachel on one side with the crib, the children on the other, huddled together on the big oak settle, and between the two factions the lamp threw a pool of yellow light that seemed to make the darkness blacker. Frederick was out most evenings again now, drinking in the village. Sometimes Ada would hold Nell in her arms like a baby and Ada and her stepmother would face each other across the kitchen like rival queens. This night Ada had been forced, after a real set-to, to do something useful and was darning stockings. Every so often she looked up and stared at Rachel as if she was looking at an empty space in the kitchen. ‘What are you looking at?’ Rachel snapped eventually and Ada smiled that false smile she had, that made Rachel want to swipe at her and said, ‘Nowt,’ and when Rachel persisted said spitefully ‘Nobbut a big, fail fuzzock,’ and Rachel knew enough of their stupid broad dialect by now to know that she was an ugly donkey.
Next year, Rachel thought, they would send the girl into service and that would be the end of that. And there would be some kind of justice at work when Alice Barker’s daughter was having to black-lead and empty slops. Rachel had grown to hate this place. She felt landlocked and out of her sea-salty element in this green land. She missed the screech of seagulls and the potent reek of fish and boiling whale-blubber and if it wasn’t for Samuel she might have packed up and gone home. She wasn’t sure which she disliked most – husband or children.
‘It’s time you were all in bed,’ she said without looking at any of them.
‘Can we wait for Feyther to come home from t’Fox and Grapes?’ Lawrence asked, his voice sliding into a whine that irritated Rachel.
‘If I say it’s time for bed, then it’s time for bed.’ Rachel spoke with a heavy measure, stressing every word through her gritted teeth. A cleverer boy than Lawrence might have sensed she was eager for a set-to.
‘Why not?’
Rachel moved her foot from the rocker and reached across, grabbing Lawrence by the hair and pulling him into the lamplight, but when she saw him she let go as if his hair had burned her skin and gave a gasp of horror. They all gathered round Lawrence with interest – his face was erupting in vicious little red spots. ‘Is it t’plague?’ Tom asked, looking up at Rachel, who shook her head in disgust and said, ‘No, yer big lump – it’s chickenpox.’
The fire in the grate of the range had been well banked and still glowed red even at two in the morning. Ada had listened to the hours and half-hours chiming on the mahogany-cased mantel-clock that had belonged to her mother even before she was married to Frederick. Her mother had loved that clock. Ada crept over to the door and lifted the latch, holding her breath in case it squeaked or rattled. She pulled the door open wide so that a sudden inrush of icy air lifted the edge of the crocheted runner on the mantelpiece and wafted a piece of blue sugar paper off the table. But outside the air was still and cracking with frost. Ada was still flushed and hot with the chickenpox and the cold air felt almost pleasant on her skin.
An enormous, cold moon hung above the fields, turning everything blue beneath it. The hoarfrost on the trees glittered like sparkling sugar-icing. Ada wished on the white moon, the only wish that any of them wished – that Rachel would die and her fat body rot and disappear into the ground. She was like one of the great beasts in the field, only that wasn’t fair because the beasts in the field meant no harm and were God’s creatures, but Rachel was surely the Devil’s own.
Ada took out the little silver locket from her pocket and opened it in the moonshine. The hair coiled in the locket looked no colour in this light. She’d disappeared in the night. She’d kissed each of them in turn at bedtime as usual and in the morning she was gone and in her place was the little silver locket slipped under Ada’s pillow in the night by her mother’s ghost. The next morning Frederick gathered them round the kitchen table and told them their mother was dead and Ada was left to make the oatmeal while Frederick went into the village to try and find a wet-nurse for baby Nellie, cursing as he left, ‘She mun have taken t’bloody bairn wi ’er!’ Ada didn’t see how her mother could be dead without leaving a corpse behind – but if not dead, where could she be?
Ada shut the door as quietly as she’d opened it and tip-toed over to the crib, ‘There Samuel, did tha like that? Nice cowd air to haste you to t’Maker.’ The baby made a small snuffling noise. ‘Tha’rt a mardy gowk for all tha cosseting, eh?’ Then, slowly and deliberately, Ada rubbed her finger across the thick crust on top of one of her chickenpox spots so that it broke and she stamped her foot with the pain of it. She took a deep breath and rubbed her finger round on the pus underneath and then reached down into the cot and rubbed it on the baby’s face, like a priest giving a blessing.
‘What are you doing?’ Rachel came across the flags in her voluminous nightgown like a man-o’-war in full sail bearing down on a hapless victim.
Ada jumped and automatically put the offending hand behind her back. ‘Nowt,’ she said, smiling hugely.
‘Little liar! Don’t play the innocent with me – get away from that crib!’ Rachel’s voice was rising all the time, a familiar prelude to her going berserk. ‘If you’ve laid a finger on that baby I’ll rip you limb from limb, do you understand?’
Samuel made a small mewling sound from within the depths of the crib and Rachel grabbed Ada’s arm and spun her away from it, grabbing her hand at the same time to see what she was hiding. ‘There’s nowt there!’ Ada shouted, ‘Nobbut my hand – I was doing nowt to him – I thought I heard ’im bawlin’.’
‘As if you’d care,’ Rachel said, turning her this way and that, searching in her pockets, and Ada suddenly remembered the locket and made a frantic effort to corkscrew her body away from Rachel’s rummaging hands.
‘And what’s this, madam?’ Rachel held the locket aloft, triumphantly. ‘Well, well, I know who gave this to you.’
‘My mother gave it me, it’s got nowt to do wi’ you!’
‘Oh, but it has,’ Rachel said, laughing as Ada scrabbled for the locket. She gave Ada a hefty shove across the kitchen so that she banged into the settle. Rachel fumbled for the catch on the locket, which sprang open suddenly, and she removed the lock of blond hair that was coiled neatly behind the glass and threw it on the embers where it hissed into nothing. Ada was spitting like a kitten and ready to launch herself at Rachel with her nails but at that moment Frederick pushed his way through the door, his face dark from drink and Rachel turned her anger on him, ‘Look at you! You’re a disgrace, a shiftless good-for-nothing drunkard. I can see why she left you—’ but the rest of the sentence was walloped away by Frederick’s vast red fist.
The baby had only been dead an hour but already it seemed to have shrivelled into a deflated thing, yet Rachel nursed her corpse child as if it were still alive. ‘Shall I run and get t’parson?’ Lawrence offered after they’d sat in troubled and guilty silence for a long age. noone had even stirred to put a log on the fire.
‘I’ll go,’ Ada volunteered quickly, and slipped and slid across the icy yard in her clogs and stumbled along the track to the village, praying for forgiveness all the way for although he had died of a seizure without a chickenpox spot in sight, there was no doubt in Ada’s mind that Samuel had been murdered by her wishes.
Diphtheria. She coul
d hear the word being whispered outside the door. It was a pretty word – diphtheria, like a girl’s name. Rachel had sent for old Dr Simpson, who smiled at Ada from behind his mutton-chop whiskers and looked down her throat and said, ‘A-ha, I see, a-ha,’ when he smelt the dreadful odour of her breath and saw, across her throat, the membrane that looked like chamois leather. Then Dr Simpson held her hand and said, ‘We’ll soon have you running around again, Ada,’ and thought how pretty the child was, just like her mother.
When he left the room Ada could hear snatches of his conversation with Rachel, ‘You must keep the other children away from her . . . a rapid deterioration . . . in cases like this one . . . be over.’ Rachel said something shrill but Ada couldn’t make out the words, then there were footsteps going down the stairs and silence broken only by the tick-tocking of her mother’s mantel-clock which she’d asked to have in the room and which Rachel, numb and penitent in the face of death, had agreed to. After a minute or two, Ada heard the hooves of Dr Simpson’s big bay in the yard below. As he rode off into the glimmering winter light he found himself thinking about Alice Barker’s curls, a thought which kept him happy until the bay shied at a hare as they went past the home farm and he nearly lost his seat. Ada listened as the clip-clopping grew fainter and fainter and then the snow began to fall.
Ada could hear the rattling sound in her throat, which may as well have been her death rattle, for she knew that when you heard that it meant you weren’t going to get better. The sister of a schoolfriend had died of diphtheria last winter so she knew what happened. Death wasn’t such a dreadful thing when you got close to it. The church bells were ringing a muffled peal as if they knew she was coming, although really it was for a local lord who had died a few days ago and was being buried today. Christmas had come and gone without the sick-room even knowing about it. The cold weather that had helped to carry off the infant Samuel had intensified and the ground was as hard as iron and cold as lead. They had dug his grave but they would have to use picks to break the ground for Ada.
There had been a blizzard, ‘A white over,’ Rachel said, trying to get her to drink barley water but her throat hurt too much to swallow. The light coming through the window was dazzling, reflected off the snow, and it seemed to shiver and wave like water. Albert and Lillian and Nell were playing in the snow outside and their high voices broke the deep silence that snow brings.
It began to snow again, lightly at first, but gradually the flakes got bigger and bigger until they were like the downy feathers off the breasts of soft birds, or angels’ wings. Ada was standing outside, her bare feet in the crisp, sugary snow and only her white shift on, but she wasn’t cold. She looked around to see where the little ones were but there was no sign of them. When she looked at the trees she could see that the snow-heavy branches were full of white birds and even as she looked at them they all rose in the air at once, with a great shoosh shoosh of wings, dislodging feathers that drifted and turned into big, lazy snowflakes. Ada watched them in the air, snowflakes melting on the cheeks of her upturned face. The snowy flock wheeled round and flew back overhead, so that Ada could hear their wings beating through the air and from somewhere far off the noise of muffled bells and, nearer, the tick-tock of her mother’s clock and the sound of Dr Simpson’s big bay horse, trotting across the yard.
Then the birds described great descending circles in the air as they came down towards her and the next moment without her knowing how it happened she was flying with them towards a bright Arctic sun and there at the heart of it was her mother, her arms outstretched to welcome her.
Lawrence disappeared two years later, slipping out of the house one summer morning to run away to sea. Tom was hysterical, convinced that his brother had been removed by some supernatural force. ‘Tha daft bugger,’ Frederick said, cuffing him on the side of the head. Tom, however, continued to believe that Lawrence had been spirited away into thin air, infecting the younger children with the idea so that for ever afterwards when they remembered Lawrence they remembered him as a mystery, for they never heard from him again, although he did try to write but the family had moved on by then. He landed up in Hull, his shoes worn out and his stomach shrunk to nothing, and he was standing in the middle of the Land of Green Ginger wondering what kind of a place it was to have streets called names like that when an old sailor took pity on him and took him aboard his tramp steamer. For the next two years Lawrence wandered up and down the east coast and across the North Sea to Holland and Germany before taking a job as a stoker on a boat bound for South America. He stayed on that far-flung continent for some fifteen years before home-sickness drove him back to England. By the time he reached home waters the Great War had begun. Home itself was a place he never reached though, as he was blown up in the North Sea by a German mine just as the English coast was sighted.
A year later, one freezing February night, Frederick died of hypothermia, outside his own cottage door – too drunk to reach up to the latch to let himself in. Rachel decided that she’d had enough of country living after this and decamped back to urban civilization. For preference she would have gone back to the coast but she was offered a position as a cook in York by the vicar’s sister-in-law and thought she’d be a fool not to take it. First they rented rooms in a slum in Walmgate, but once she’d got the family back on its feet, they had a decent terrace in the Groves. The children went to church, had clean handkerchiefs, had lost their broad accents and had almost forgotten about the country.
When Nell came back from her Lake District honeymoon and discovered that Rachel was dead and buried (‘I saw no sense in spoiling your honeymoon by telling you,’ Lillian said reasonably), Lillian had already thrown out most of her things, but not the silver locket which she knew had belonged to their mother because in the one and only known photograph of her, which their brother Tom had, the locket was clearly visible. Lillian gave the locket to Nell because, she said, ‘You were just the baby, she never even held you,’ and they both wept over the empty locket and other things too. They didn’t know, of course, that even as they sat together in the parlour in Lowther Street, crying over the locket, their mother was screaming and throwing a vase across a bedroom in Whitby, a vase which had the misfortune to hit Monsieur Jean-Paul Armand square on the temple so that a maid had to be sent for to bring hot water and cold compresses for the huge bruise, growing like a flower on his head.
CHAPTER FIVE
1958
Interlude
BUNTY AND THE PARROT WENT MISSING ON THE SAME night and it was only later when they were both safely returned that we realized this was a coincidence and that Bunty had not run away with the Parrot. Or, for that matter, the Parrot hadn’t run away with our mother, an idea firmly lodged in my own mind because Patricia had recently been reading the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights to me and I imagined the Parrot flying through the skies with Bunty hanging grimly, like Sinbad, onto one of its scaly, reptilian legs. The extreme unlikelihood of the Parrot being the only thing that Bunty would choose to take with her when she ran away from home did not, somehow, occur to our childish minds.
It takes us some time to realize that Bunty is missing at all. She is our living alarm-clock and when she doesn’t go off we all simply sleep on. We don’t wake in fact until a quarter-past nine when a customer, anxious for his Sherley’s conditioners, bangs loudly on the Shop door below, waking all the Pets, who have also overslept, and a furious Patricia who hates being late for anything (Patricia is the kind of girl who arrives at school before the caretaker). The information trickles down the house – Patricia wakes Gillian, Gillian wakes me – by bouncing on top of my sleeping body and screaming that I’ve purloined her Rosebud doll, Denise (Denise has ousted a dejected Sooty and Sweep from her affections), and I wake George by running into the parental bedroom in hysterical tears, displaying the rapidly blooming bruise on my cheek where Gillian’s foot has caught me. This is all too much for George who lurches out of bed in a daze, picks up the clock by the s
ide of the bed, stares at it uncomprehendingly, stares at the empty space on the other side of the double bed where Bunty should be and then flops back into bed and mutters, ‘Go and find your mother.’
Not such an easy task, as it turns out. We all three of us play ‘Hunt the Mother’ for at least half an hour before returning to George to admit our hopeless ineptitude at this particular game. ‘What do you mean you can’t find her?’ He is by this time up and shaving with his electric razor while standing guard at the toaster. Occasionally the Shop bell clangs and he has to go through and serve. Although he has his trousers on, he is still in his vest and pyjama jacket and we can hear the usual sophisticated level of Shop humour being exchanged, ‘Overslept then, Mr Lennox? Ha, ha, ha.’ ‘Well, well, George – find something to keep you in bed, then? Ha, ha, ha.’ This last being the unmistakable smutty East London of Walter, buying a cuttlefish for his mother’s budgie. Even this purchase is transformed into an occasion for a lewd joke, but George it appears is in no laughing mood.
‘How’s Doreen?’ Walter asks, making a peculiar gesture as if he was pushing up a large, invisible bosom. George mutters something dark about Bunty. ‘Lost the wife?’ Walter repeats incredulously, ‘You jammy bugger, mate!’ The expression on George’s face does not reveal jamminess as he casts a glance around the Shop – discovering two things almost simultaneously – an absence of Parrot and a presence of Ruby. ‘Get some clothes on!’ George says instantly as if I was performing a striptease rather than standing in nightdress and slippers forlornly holding aloft a piece of charred toast.