The tall woman took a step back, but persisted. “Come on, give it to me, I know you’ve got it. Come on, I want to see what you’ve got up there.”
“What, and show everybody me knickers? I will not. There’s men in here, case you haven’t noticed.”
The tall woman had been joined on the platform by three men, who crowded round Mrs. Mason, demanding to see the doll. Turning swiftly, she picked up the chair and began wielding it as a battering ram. “I’ll brain the whole bloody lot of you, bloody buggering bastards!” And then she simply yelled, a great battle cry that seemed to require neither words nor intake of breath.
Paul was pushing his way up the steps onto the platform. Perhaps he should have been pleased to see such cynical fraud exposed, but three men jostling one woman was altogether too much like bullying for his taste. Surprising himself, he fought his way to her side. “Mrs. Mason.” Her eyes stared at him without recognition. So she had been in a trance—there was no other way she could have forgotten that encounter downstairs. “Calm down, now. Deep breaths.” He turned. “And you lot, back off. Can’t you see the state she’s in?”
After a while, she seemed to grow calmer. She would get undressed, she said, but only if the men left the room.
The three men who’d been crowding her looked at each other, but made no move. A few others, Paul included, retreated a few paces, though nobody moved very far. Mrs. Mason squatted down and pulled her dress and petticoat over her head. Tangled up in the folds was the doll’s head, which fell and rolled across the floor, its china-blue eyes startling in the bristling light. Mrs. Mason tried to kick it behind the cabinet, but was too slow. The tall woman pounced, scooped up the doll’s head and held it up for all to see. “There.”
The sight seemed to enrage Mrs. Mason, who began tearing at her clothes. One enormous breast, the size of a savoy cabbage, escaped her camisole and, despite swearing no man on earth should ever see her knickers, she was now whirling them about above her head, looking, Paul thought, like a corpulent version of Liberty leading the people.
“I’m keeping this.” The tall woman waved the doll’s head at her. “It’s evidence.”
“You give that here, it’s mine.” And, seizing the chair again, Mrs. Mason launched another attack.
Paul tried to restrain her, but she was so beside herself he was beginning to think the whole farcical episode might end in murder.
A short, stocky man with a military mustache said: “Why doesn’t somebody ring the police?”
“No,” Mrs. Mason said. “There’s no need for that.”
Slowly, she put down the chair and, after a minute or so, began to get dressed. Her lips were blue. Then, just as everybody started to relax, she charged again, seized the doll’s head and ran out of the room.
Paul followed her and found her in the downstairs room, with a group of supporters gathered round her, like drones round a termite queen. One woman pressed a cup of tea into her hands; another fanned her with a copy of Spiritualist News, while the randomly chosen one held out a dress for her to put on.
There was a stir in the shop. The forces of law and order had arrived in the form of one bewildered police constable with a fresh, young, freckly face. There wasn’t a great deal he could do. Nobody wanted to press charges, though the one man she’d caught a glancing blow with the chair was still bleeding. The tall woman introduced herself as Miss Pole, which amused Paul, though no one else seemed to think it was funny. Fraud was mentioned. Mrs. Mason turned her eyes to the ceiling. “As God is my witness, I know nothing about it.”
“What do you mean, you know nothing about it?” Miss Pole demanded. “You had a doll’s head in your knickers.”
Wisely, Mrs. Mason burst into tears. One of the attendant women touched Paul’s arm. “Eh, dear God, that poor woman, she’s a martyr, she is. She’s been to prison, you know.”
Paul could quite believe it.
People were starting to leave. Nobody asked for their money back, perhaps feeling that one way or another they’d had a good show. The policeman left. Somehow, in all the turmoil, the doll’s head had vanished, no doubt safely ensconced in somebody else’s knickers. And not only the doll; cheesecloth, broomsticks, papier-mâché heads: all spirited away. Miss Pole glared at Mrs. Mason; Mrs. Mason smirked. She’d got away with it, not for the first time, nor probably the last.
Paul looked around for Angela and Sandra, but they’d gone, so he set off to walk alone. A raid had started, so there was no question of going back to the studio just yet. He was alternately amused and nauseated by the events of the evening, or so at first he told himself, but then as he walked, he realized he was once more separating himself from the experience, which at times he’d found deeply disturbing. Albert’s voice, the young man dying on the beach at Dunkirk, stood out from what would otherwise have been blatant fraud, and nothing else but fraud. Papier-mâché heads on broomsticks, fishy cheesecloth—fishy in every sense of the word—but was that the whole truth? He didn’t think so. He thought she’d been doing something else, though he didn’t believe the something else had much to do with contacting the dead.
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.
Lifting buckets of water all day long, her back ached that much she didn’t even realize she’d started till her waters broke. The supervisor told her to walk—walk? Was she joking?—across the yard to the infirmary, where she got undressed and hauled herself onto the bed. Sister Mortimer stood at the end, watching her. “Not as much fun getting it out as it was putting it in, is it?” Wasn’t that much bloody fun putting it in, she wanted to say. Didn’t, of course. Oh, and you didn’t dare groan. “Shut that noise up. You’ll be worse before you’re better.” Not a shred of sympathy, not a grain. Oh, she could’ve told them a thing or two, might’ve done, only another pain was building, and she needed every bit of breath…And then, amazingly, all in a great rush, there he was.
Purple. Was he supposed to be that color? Oh, but what a pair of lungs, couldn’t be that much wrong with him. She wanted to hold him, but they wouldn’t let her. She watched as he was wrapped, expertly, in a white cotton blanket and taken away. She caught one more glimpse of him, just the top of his head, as Sister Mortimer turned to push the door open with her hip, and she whispered, but only to herself: Good luck, son.
Back on the streets, with leaking breasts and a craving for sweetness no amount of cake could satisfy, she palled up with a lass called Millie and they went to Glasgow together. Back in munitions, earning good money, she thought Albert might disappear, just fade away, but he didn’t. If she got upset—oh, and she did, she couldn’t stop thinking about the baby—Albert was there. Some days he was in and out that often she lost track of things. There were holes in her memory, so many holes it was like lace, or a cabbage leaf when the caterpillars have been at it.
But then she met Howard. The best thing that ever happened to her. And the worst. In the twinkling of an eye—Howard’s eye, needless to say—she was pregnant, only this time she knew what to do. Howard was more or less disabled—gas, he said, though forty fags a day didn’t help much, either the budget or his lungs—so she had to work. So there she was, walking round the back streets looking for an address. Mucky old woman come to the door, you could’ve planted a row of tatties in her neck—now there was a warning—but really there was no choice. Up on the bed, spread your legs. Sometimes, looking back on her life, she thought she’d never done anything else. Well, yes, she had—she’d opened her mouth and let the dead speak through her.
Five days after, she collapsed in the street. Temperature sky-high. “You silly, silly, silly girl,” the ward sister said. Bit more sympathetic than most.
No more babies after that. Not that Howard minded—he was a baby himself.
Last bed now, last basin. She was free to go, get her hat and coat from the cupboard. Nice hat, she was very fond of it, it always made her feel good—and it hadn’t cost a lot, she’d picked it up for a penny in a jumble sale. Still, with a bit of green ribbon and some artificial roses it didn’t look too bad. Cheered her up, anyway—she could see the roses bobbing as she walked. She was passing the door of his ward now. Perhaps she better leave it? Just walk past? But no, she couldn’t do that.
The bed was empty, stripped, the screens folded and pushed back against the wall. Of course, she’d known he was going—but still, it was a shock. For a minute, she just stood and stared, then rested one hand lightly on the mattress. Mam. Probably the last thing he’d ever said. Ah, well. Never any hope, not with a head wound like that, the only mystery was why he’d lasted as long as he had. She patted the bed and turned away.
She was just leaving the ward when Sister Wilkinson caught up with her. “Would you mind taking this down to the laundry?”
&
nbsp; “This” was a trolley loaded with soiled sheets. His sheets, probably. She could’ve said: ’Course I bloody well mind, I’m off duty. Still, it paid to stay on the right side of the sisters—and Wilkie was nicer than most.
So she took the trolley and began trundling it along the main corridor. Like a lot of the trolleys, it had a mind of its own and would keep veering to the left. Like a bloody wrestling match, sometimes. So she lurched and swayed along, the roses in her hat bobbing, thinking how nice it would be to put her feet up when she got home, have half an hour on the bed…At least, though, she could take the lift—you were allowed to, if you had a trolley.
She hated the basement: so dark, gloomy and deserted, though not, of course, the laundry: that was the same hellhole of hissing steam and clanking buckets she remembered from the home. As she pushed the swing doors open and pulled the trolley through, she was breathing in smells of soap and disinfectant, her eyes were watering—horrible stuff, that disinfectant—and she was remembering the girl whose waters had broken all over the damp floor. And they’d made her mop it up. Had they? Now she come to think of it, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t always remember things right, on account of Albert.
“Can I help you?”
The supervisor, drying her red, wet hands on a towel. Friendly words, but not a friendly tone, no, not at all. Bertha pushed the trolley in her direction and turned, wordlessly, away. Outside, in the corridor, she stopped to consider. No conveniently empty trolley to take back to the ward, so she was going to have to face the stairs. And she was feeling a bit peculiar, the way she sometimes did when Albert was on his way. Perhaps she could chance the lift? No, better not. She started to walk the length of the corridor towards the staircase at the far end. No windows, no natural light, the strip light overhead kept flickering, keeping time with the pulsing in her head. She had a headache starting—always one-sided, her headaches. The throbbing turned to muttering, low, at first, but getting louder. She must be passing the morgue. Normally, she’d have said: Sorry, love, not working. But not today. After a second’s hesitation, standing outside the door, she pushed it open and walked in.