Sunday, November 7, 1920
Three soldiers emerge from their billets near Arras, northern France: a colonel, a sergeant, and a private. It is sometime close to the middle of the night and bitterly cold. The men make their way to a field ambulance parked next to the entrance gate; the colonel sits in the front with the sergeant, while the private climbs into the back. The sergeant starts up the engine, and drives them out and onto the road beyond.
The young private holds on to a strap dangling from the roof, as the van lurches over the rutted road. He feels shaky, and this jolting is not helping things. The raw morning has the feel of a punishment: When he was woken, minutes ago, he was told only to get dressed and get outside. He has done nothing wrong so far as he can tell, but the army is tricky like that. There have been many times in the six months since he arrived in France when he has transgressed, and only afterward been told how or why.
He closes his eyes, tightening his grip as the van pitches and rolls.
He had hoped he would see things over here. The sorts of things he missed by being too young to fight. The sorts of things his older brother wrote home about. The hero brother who died taking a German trench, and whose body was never found.
But the truth is he hasn’t seen much of anything at all.
In the front of the van, the sergeant sits forward, concentrating hard on the road ahead. He knows it well but still prefers to drive in the day, as there are several treacherous shell holes along it. He wouldn’t want to lose a tire, not tonight. He, too, has no idea why he is here, so early and without warning, but from the taut silence of the colonel beside him, he knows enough not to ask.
And so the soldiers sit, the engine rumbling beneath their feet, passing through open country now, though there is nothing to show for it—nothing visible beyond the headlights’ glare, only an occasional startled animal scooting back into darkness on the road ahead.
When they have been driving for half an hour or so, the colonel rasps out an order. “Here. Stop here.” He hits his hand against the dash. The sergeant pulls the ambulance over onto the shoulder of the road. The engine judders and is still. There is silence, and the men climb down.
The colonel turns on his flashlight and reaches into the back of the van. He brings out two shovels, handing one each to the other men. Next, he takes out a large burlap sack, which he carries himself.
He climbs over a low wall and the men follow him, walking slowly, their flashlight beams bobbing ahead.
The frosted ground means the mud is hard and easy enough to walk on, but the private is careful; the land is littered with twisted metal and with holes, sometimes deep. He knows the ground is peppered with unexploded shells. There are often funerals for the Chinese laborers who have been brought over to clear the fields of bodies and ordnance. He saw five dead last week alone, all laid out in a row. They end up buried in the very cemeteries they are over here to dig.
But despite the cold and the uncertainty, he is starting to enjoy himself. It is exciting to be out here in this darkness, where ruined trees loom and danger feels close. He could almost imagine he is on a different mission. Something heroic. Something to write home about.
Soon the ground falls away, and the men stand before a ditch in the earth, the remains of a trench. The colonel climbs down and begins walking along it, and the others follow, single file, along its zigzag lines.
The private measures his height against the side. He is not a tall man, and the trench is not high. They pass the remains of a dugout on their right, its doorway bent at a crazed angle, one of its supports long gone. He hesitates a moment before it, shining his flashlight inside, but there is nothing much to see, only an old table, pushed up against the wall, a rusted tin can still standing open on the top. He pulls his light back from the dank hole, and hurries to keep up.
The colonel turns left into a straighter, shorter trench and at the end of that, right into another, built in short, zigzag sections like the first.
“Front line,” says the sergeant, under his breath.
After a few yards, the colonel’s beam picks out a rusted ladder slung against the trench wall. He stops before it, placing his boot on the bottom rung, pressing once, twice, testing its strength.
“Sir?” It is the sergeant speaking.
“What’s that?” The colonel turns his head.
The sergeant clears his throat. “Do we need to go up that way, sir?”
The private watches as the colonel swallows, his Adam’s apple moving slowly up and down. “Have you got a better idea?”
The sergeant seems to have nothing to say to that.
The colonel turns, scaling the ladder in a few swift jerks.
“Fuck’s sake,” mutters the sergeant. Still, he doesn’t move.
Standing behind him, the private is itching to climb. Even though he knows that on the other side there will only be more of the same blasted country, part of him wonders if there may be something else—something close to the thing he came out here for: that vague, brave wonderful thing he has not dared to speak of, even to himself. But he cannot move until the sergeant does, and the sergeant is frozen to the spot.
The colonel’s boots appear at the height of their heads; light is flung into their faces. “What’s the holdup? Get yourselves over here. Now.” He speaks like a machine gun, spitting out his words.
“Yes sir.” The sergeant closes his eyes, looking almost as though he may be saying a prayer, then turns and climbs the ladder. The private follows him, blood tumbling in his ears. Once over, they stand, gathering their breath, their beams sweeping wide across the scene before them: great rusting coils of wire, twenty, thirty feet wide, like the crazed skeleton of some ancient serpent, stretching away in both directions as far as the eye can see.
“Bloody hell,” says the sergeant. Then, a little louder, “How’re we going to get through that?”
The colonel produces a pair of wire cutters from his pocket. “Here.”
The sergeant takes them, weighing them in his hand. He knows wire, has cut it often. Apron wiring. Laid enough of it, too. They used to leave gaps, when they had time to do it right—gaps that wouldn’t be seen by the other side. But there are no gaps here. The wire is tangled and crushed and bent in on itself. Ruined. Like every bloody thing else. “Right.” He hands his shovel to the private. “Make sure you light me, then.” He bends and begins to cut.
The private, trying to keep his beam straight, stares at the wire. There are things caught and held within its coils, things that look to have been there for a long time. There are tattered remnants of cloth, stiff with frost, and the light catches the pale whiteness of bones, though whether human or animal it is impossible to tell. The country smells strange out here—more metal than earth; he can taste it in his mouth.
On the other side of the wire, the sergeant straightens and turns, beckoning for the men to follow. He has done a good job, and they are able to pick their way easily through the narrow path he has made.
“This way.” The colonel strides out across lumpy ground that is littered with tiny crosses: crosses made from white wood, or makeshift ones made from a couple of shell splinters lashed together. There are bottles, too, turned upside down and pushed into the mud, some of them still with scraps of paper visible inside. The colonel often stops beside one, kneeling and holding his light to read the inscription, but then carries on.
The private searches the man’s face as he reads. Who can he be looking for?
Eventually the colonel crouches by one of the small wooden crosses, set a little way apart from the rest. “Here.” He motions for the men to come forward. “Dig here.” A date is written on the cross, scribbled in shaky black pencil, but no name.
The private does as he’s told, lifting his shovel and kicking it into the hard ground. The sergeant joins him, but after a couple of spades of earth he stops.
“Sir?”
“What?”
“What are we looking for, sir?”
“A body,” says the colonel. “And bloody well get on with it. We haven’t got all day.”
The two men lock eyes for a moment before the sergeant looks away, spits on the ground, and continues to dig.
Beneath its frosted crust the mud is softer, clinging, and they do not have to dig for long. Soon metal scrapes on metal. The sergeant puts down his shovel and kneels, clearing the mud from a steel helmet. “Think we might be there, sir.”
The colonel holds his light over the hole. “Keep going,” he says, his voice tight.
The men crouch low, and with their gloved hands, as best they can, they clear the mud from the body. But it is not a body, not really; it is only a heap of bones inside the remains of a uniform. Nothing is left of the flesh, only a few black-brown remnants clinging to the side of the skull.
“Clear as much as you can,” says the colonel, “and then check for his badges.”
The dead man is lying in the earth, his right arm beneath him. The men reach down, lifting and turning him over. The sergeant takes his pocketknife and scrapes away at where the shoulder should be. The man’s regimental badges are there still, just, but they are unreadable, the colors long gone, leached into the soil; it is impossible to tell what they once were.
“Can’t see them, sir. Sorry, sir.” The sergeant’s face is red in the flashlight beam, sweaty from effort.
“Check around the body. All around it. I want anything that might identify him at all.”
The men do as they are ordered, but find nothing.
They stand slowly. The private rubs the small of his back, looking down at the meager remains of the unearthed man lying twisted on his side.
Then a thought rises in him, unbidden: His brother died here. In a field like this in France. They never found his body. What if this was him?
But there is no way of knowing.
He looks back up at the colonel. There is no way of knowing if this is the body the colonel’s looking for, either. This has been a waste of time. He waits for the colonel’s reaction, bracing himself for the expected anger on his face.
But the colonel only nods.
“Good,” he says, chucking his cigarette on the earth. “Now lift him out and put him in the sack.”
Hettie rubs her sleeve against the misted taxi window and peers out. She can’t see much of anything; nothing that looks like a nightclub anyway, just empty, darkened streets. You wouldn’t think they were just seconds from Leicester Square.
“Here, please.” Di leans forward, speaking to the driver.
“That’s a pound, then.” He turns his light on, engine idling.
Hettie hands over her ten-shilling share. A third of her pay. Her stomach plummets as it’s passed to the front. But the taxi’s not a luxury, not at this time; the buses aren’t running and the tubes are shut.
“It’ll be worth it,” whispers Di as they clamber down. “Promise. Swear on my life.”
The taxi pulls away and they find each other’s hands, down an unlit side street, dance shoes crunching on gravel and glass. Despite the cold, damp pools in the hollow of Hettie’s back. It must be way past one, later than she has ever been out. She thinks of her mother and her brother, fast asleep in Hammersmith. In not too many hours they’ll be getting up for church.
“This must be it.” Di has stopped in front of an old, three-story house. No lights show behind the shuttered windows, and only a small blue bulb illuminates the door.
“Are you sure?” says Hettie, breath massing before her in the freezing air.
“Look.” Di points to a small plaque nailed to the wall. The sign is ordinary-looking; it could be a doctor’s or a dentist’s even. But there’s a name there, etched into the bronze: DALTON’S, NO. 62.
Dalton’s.
Legendary nightclub.
So legendary some people say it doesn’t exist.
“Ready?” Di gives a blue, spectral grin, then lifts her hand and knocks. A panel slides open. Two pale eyes in an oblong of light. “Yes?”
“I’m here to meet Humphrey,” says Di.
She is putting on her posh voice. Standing behind her, Hettie is filled with the urge to laugh. But the door opens. They have to squeeze to get around. On the other side is a small entrance area, little bigger than a cupboard, where a young doorman stands behind a high wooden desk. His gaze slides over Hettie, in her brown coat and tam-o’-shanter, but lingers on Di, with her dark eyes, the shorn points of her hair just showing beneath her hat. Di has this way of looking, down and to the side, and then slowly back up again. It makes men stare. She’s doing it now. Hettie can see the doorman goggling like a caught fish.
“You’ve to sign in,” he says eventually, pointing at a large book lying open before him.
Di pulls off her glove, leans in, and signs with a practiced sweep. “Your turn,” she says, handing the pen to Hettie.
From below comes the throb of music: a giddy trumpet. A woman whoops. Hettie can feel her heart: thud-thud-thud. The ink of Di’s signature is glistening and has sprawled out of its box and onto the line beneath. She takes her own glove off and scratches her name: Henrietta Burns.
“Go on, then.” The man pulls the book back, gesturing behind him to unlit stairs.
Di goes first. The staircase is old and creaky, and as Hettie puts a hand out to steady herself, she feels damp wall flake beneath her fingertips. This is not what she imagined; it’s nothing like the Palais, where the glamour is all out front. You wouldn’t think these musty old stairs led anywhere much at all. But she can hear the music properly now, people talking, the sound of feet fast on the floor, and as they reach the bottom, a wave of panic threatens to take her. “You’ll stay close to me, won’t you?” she says, reaching for Di’s arm.
“Course.” Di catches her, gives her a squeeze, and then pushes open the door.
The smell of close, dancing humanity assails them. The club is no bigger than the downstairs of Hettie’s mother’s house, but it is packed, each table crammed, the dance floor a roaring free-for-all. Most people seem to be in evening clothes—the men in black and white, the women in colored gowns—but some look as though they have come in fancy dress. Most astonishing of all, the four-piece band crashing through a rag on the tiny stage has a Negro singer, the first she has ever seen. It’s dizzying, as though all the color missing in the city up above has been smuggled underground.
“Killing!” Di grins.
“Killing!” Hettie agrees, letting out her breath.
“There’s Humphrey!” Di waves to a fair-haired man weaving his way through the crowd toward them. Hettie recognizes him from that night at the Palais two weeks ago, when he hired Di for a dance—and then another, and another, right up until the end of the night. (For this is their job: Dance Instructress, Hammersmith Palais. Available for hire, sixpence a dance, six nights a week.)
“Capital!” says Humphrey, kissing Di on the cheek. “You made it. And this must be…”
“Henrietta.” She holds out her hand.
He is not much older than them, has an easy handshake and a pleasant, freckled face. He looks nice, at least. Not like some of the ones Di has been with in the past. After a year at the Palais, Hettie has a compass for men. Two minutes in their company and she can tell what they’re like. Whether they are married, sweaty-guilty, sneaking out for an evening alone. That glazed look they get when they’re imagining you without your clothes. Or sometimes, like Humphrey, when they’re actually sweet. “Come on,” he says with a grin, “we’re over here.”
They follow him, picking their way as best they can through the crowded tables. Hettie makes slow progress, since she keeps falling behind, twisting to see the band and their singer, whose skin is so astonishingly dark, and the dancers, many of whom are moving wildly in a way no one at the Palais would dare. Eventually they arrive at a table in the corner, not far from the stage, where a short man in tails scrambles to his feet.
“Diana, Henrietta,” says Humphrey, “this is Gus.”
Hettie’s companion for the evening is thickset and doughy, barely taller than she is. His hair is thinning, his scalp shiny in the heat. Her heart sinks behind her smile.
“May I take your coat?” He hovers around her, and she shrugs it off. Her old brown overcoat is bad enough, but beneath it she is wearing her dance dress, the only one she has, and after a double shift at work already tonight it is none too fresh.
On the other side of the table, meanwhile, Di unwraps, revealing the dress she bought with Humphrey’s money just last week. Hettie sinks into her seat. The dress. This dress has a physical effect on her; she covets it so much it hurts. It is almost black, but covered with so many sequins, so tiny, so dazzling in their iridescence, that it is impossible to tell just what color it is. She was there when Di bought it, in the ready-made at Selfridges. It cost six pounds of Humphrey’s money, and she had to swallow her envy and smile when afterward, for fun, they rode up and down in the lifts.
Both men stare until Gus, remembering his manners, takes the seat beside Hettie’s, pointing to a plate of sandwiches in the middle of the table. “They’re rather grim,” he says with a smile, “but they have to serve them with the drinks. No license, you see. We’ll just pile them up on the side.” He lifts them away, and she watches them go. She could murder something to eat. Hasn’t had a thing since a ham-and-paste sandwich in the break between shifts at six.
“So”—Gus pours from a bottle on the table and hands her a glass—“I s’pose you’re awfully good, then. You pair, Humph told me, dance instructresses at the Palais, aren’t you?”
“Oh…” Hettie takes a sip. The drink is fizzy and sweet. She can’t be sure, but she thinks it might be champagne. “We’re all right, I suppose.”
They’re better than all right, really, she and Di. They’ve been practicing their steps for years, in carpet-rolled-back living rooms, singing out the tunes they’ve memorized, poring over the pictures in Modern Dancing, taking turns being the man. They’re the best two dancers at the Palais by far. And that’s not boasting. It’s just the truth.
“I’m a terrible dancer,” says Gus, sticking his lower lip out like a child.
Hettie smiles at him. He may not look like much, but at least he’s harmless. “I’m sure you’re not.”
“No, really.” He points downward, grimacing. “Left feet. Born with two.”
There’s a raucous cheer from the dance floor and she turns to see the singer goading his band, urging them on. They are American, they must be. No English band she knows looks or plays like this; definitely not the house band at the Palais, not anymore, not since the Original Dixies left, with their cowbells and whistles and hooters, to go back to New York. And the crowd—they’re dancing crazily, as though they don’t care a fig what anyone thinks. If only her mum could see this. Respectable is her favorite word. If she could see these people enjoying themselves, she’d throw a fit.
Hettie turns back to Gus. “It’s just practice,” she says, taking another sip of the drink, her body itching with the beat.
“No, no,” he insists. “I’m terrible. Never could get the hang.” He gives his glass a couple of brisk twists, then, “Up for a go, though,” he says, “if you’d like a turn round the floor?”
“I’d love one,” says Hettie, throwing a quick glance at Di, whose dark head is bent close to Humphrey’s, deep in a whispered, intimate conversation that she cannot hear.
The crashing chords of the rag are fading now, and the band is moving into a four-four number, something slow. They shoulder their way through the crowd and find a spot on the edge of the packed dance floor. Gus takes her hands in his and then looks up to the ceiling, as if the mysteries of movement might be written out for him there. Then he bounces a bit, counting under his breath, and they are off.
He was right. He is a terrible dancer. He has no sense of the music, is already two beats ahead, snatching at it, not letting it guide him at all.
Listen! Hettie wants to say. Just let it move you. Can’t you hear how killing they are?
But it won’t help, so she tries to fit her feet to his awkward steps.
(They have a rule at the Palais: Never dance better than your partner. You’re hired to make them feel good. If they feel good, then they’ll hire you again. As Di is fond of saying, It’s all just economics in the end.)
After a few bars, Gus’s grip loosens and he looks up, delighted. “Damned if I’m not getting the hang of this!” They go into the turn, Hettie exaggerates her movements to flatter his, and as the number comes to a close, he takes a victory lap around the floor. “Humph was right!” He beams, coming to a breathless stop. “You girls are really something. Damned thirsty work, though.” He takes his hankie from his pocket and mops his face. “Hang on a tick, I’ll fetch us something cold from the bar.”
He disappears into the crush, and Hettie finds a spot close to the damp wall, happy for a moment to be alone, just to take it all in. A couple squeeze past her, giggling, holding each other up. The girl is young and elegant, her body wrapped in blue silk, her long neck trailing pearls, but her lovely face is blurry, and she keeps slipping off her partner’s arm. It is a moment before Hettie realizes she is drunk. She stares after them, half-expecting someone to come and tell them off. But no one seems to bat an eyelid. She’s not at the Palais now.
Just then someone knocks into her, hard, from behind, and she almost falls, catching herself just in time.
“Sorry. My God. Sorry.”
Hettie turns to see a tall man beside her. He seems distracted, an apologetic smile on his lips. “So sorry,” he says again. One hand tugs at his hair, the other grips an amber-colored drink. “Are you all right? Thought you were a goner, then.”
“Yes…fine.” She gives a small, embarrassed laugh, though whether for him or herself, she cannot tell.
The man’s eyes land on her properly, taking her in, and Hettie feels herself flush. He is a very good-looking man.
“My God,” he says. His smile fades, and a different, shrinking expression takes its place.
Heat stings her cheeks. What? What is it? But she says nothing, and the man carries on staring, as though she is something awful from which he cannot look away.
“Sorry,” he says, shaking his head as though to clear it. An echo of the smile is back. “Thought you were—” He holds up his glass. “Drink? Must let me get you a drink. Say sorry and all that.”
She shakes her head. “Thank you. I’m…Someone’s already buying me one.”
She steps away, wanting to put distance between them, to find a mirror, to check that everything is all right with her face, but the man has his hand on her arm. “Where are you from?”
“Pardon?” she says. His grip is tight.
“I only meant, are you English, then?”
“Yes.”
He nods, releases her. Is it disappointment she can see on his face?
“Excuse me…” She ducks away, escaping him, threading through the crowd, which is even denser now, looking for the lavatories, finding them through an archway, small and damp-smelling, a dark spray of mold clinging to the walls.
She examines herself in the mirror, breathing hard. There is nothing particularly terrible to see, other than a red blotch of embarrassment on her neck and that two of her bobby pins have come loose and her hair is threatening to unravel. She pushes the offending pins back into the bristling porcupine it takes to hold it up. Her long, stupid hair that her mother won’t let her cut.
If you come home looking like that friend of yours, you’ll catch it. Filthy little flapper.
Her mother doesn’t know a thing. Di has the best haircut of any of the girls at the Palais. They are always trying to get her to let on where she has it done.
Hettie steadies herself against the cold rim of the sink. It’s late. She’s been on her feet for hours. The night, which had been filled with promise, is curdling somehow, and the same old doubts are rushing in. She is from Hammersmith. She is too tall. Her dress is old and she cannot afford another since she gives half her wages to her mother and her useless brother every week. She’s scrubbed cleaning petrol and scent on the armpits more times than she can count, but it still stinks and she’ll probably never have a dress like Di’s as long as she lives. She’s got to be nice to Gus. And to top it all off, her breasts stick out, no matter how much she tries to strap them down.
It is that man’s fault, she thinks, finding her eyes in the mirror. The way he looked at her, and his questions. Where are you from? As though he could tell she didn’t belong, here in this club with these people who act so freely in their drunkenness and dancing, as if whatever they do, their life will hold them up.
Come on.
She splashes water on her cheeks, checks that her petticoat isn’t slipping, and stabs a last stubborn pin in her hair. The red blotches on her neck have calmed a little now.
Back out in the fray, she scans the crowd, relieved to see that the tall man has disappeared. There is no sign of Gus either, and when she finally spots him, his shiny bald head is still bobbing in the queue at the bar. Over at the table, Di and Humphrey haven’t moved. Except, perhaps, a little closer together. Hettie can see Di laughing at something Humphrey has said. They don’t look as though they’d welcome an interruption. For a moment, as she stands there alone, her fragile resolve threatens to falter. But something is happening over on the dance floor. People have stopped moving, and the band is slowing, the instruments dropping out one by one, until only the drummer remains, keeping the beat with a lone, shivering snare. Then he, too, comes to a stop, and a hush descends on the club. Over at the table, Di and Humphrey look up.
Hettie, breath caught, steps away from the wall.
For an electric moment it feels as though anything may happen, until the trumpeter moves forward and lifts his instrument to play. It flashes in the low light. A flare of purest sound fills the room. Hettie closes her eyes, letting it in, letting it hollow her out, and then, when the man begins to play in earnest, the notes drip molten gold into the space he has made. And standing here, full of this music, it hits her with the force of revelation that it doesn’t matter—none of it, not really: She is young, she can dance, and it was worth her ten shillings just to see this place, to hear these musicians, to tell the girls at the Palais on Monday that it’s true—that there is a club in the West End, buried underground, with the best jazz band since the Dixies left for New York.
“Are you lurking?”
She snaps open her eyes. The man from before is a few feet away, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette.
“I’m sorry?”
“You’re lurking,” he says.
“I’m not lurking.” Her heart thuds dangerously against her chest.
“You are. I’ve been watching you for two whole minutes. Two minutes constitutes a lurk.”
She can feel that awful flush creeping back up her neck. “I’m not, actually—I’m watching the band.” She crosses her arms, looking away from him, trying to focus on the trumpeter’s fingers, trying to remember how good she just felt.
From the corner of her eye she sees the man push himself away from the wall. “You’re not one of those anarchists, are you?” he says.
She turns to him, incredulous.
His gray eyes are steady. This time he doesn’t smile. “I’ve read about your sort. You go into public places like this.” His hand sweeps over the club. “Hundreds of innocents. Bomb in your coat. Leave it in the lavatories. Lurk a bit, then…boom.” He mimes something exploding. As his hands move up and away from each other, ash falls, scattering in the air. A few flakes land on her dress.
For a moment, she is too surprised to speak. Then, “My coat’s over there,” she says, gesturing to the table in the corner. “And there’s no bomb inside. Anyway, if I were going to blow something up, I wouldn’t lurk. I’d leave.”
“Ah.” He nods. “Well, perhaps I got you wrong.”
“Yes,” she says. “You did.”
They hold each other’s gaze. She tries to keep steady, to read him, but her compass is haywire and she cannot fathom him at all.
Then his face cracks open with a smile. “Sorry.” He shakes his head. “Terrible sense of humor.”
Her heart skips. It is disconcerting, the smile; so sudden, as though there were another person entirely hidden underneath. He looks respectable enough, dressed in white shirt and tails, but there is something odd about the way he wears them. She can’t say just what it is. Indifference? His hair is unslicked. There are purple shadows beneath his eyes.
He reaches into his pocket, takes out a flask, and lifts it to her mouth. “Here, have a bit of this while you wait.”
“No, thank you.”
She half-turns from him, cringing as she hears her voice in her head: No, thank you. She sounds so Hammersmith. So up-past-her-bedtime. So prim.
“Go on. It’s good stuff. Single malt.”
His eyes are laughing now. Is he laughing at her? He is the sort of man who could talk to anyone. So what is he doing hanging around here? It feels like a trick.
She should go and find Gus; he must have been served by now.
She should. But she doesn’t.
Instead, she reaches for the man’s flask, takes it, lifts it to her mouth.
Because she’s only here for tonight, and her companion is useless and elsewhere, and her friend is otherwise engaged.
And so what has she got to lose?
She is unprepared for the sharp hit of the drink, though, and she chokes and coughs.
“Not much of a whiskey girl, then?”
She takes another, deeper pull in reply. This time she swallows it down. “Thanks,” she says, pleased with herself, handing it back.
He looks out over the dance floor. “Are you here to dance, then?” he says. “Or have you just come to lurk?”
“I’ve come here to dance,” she says, as the whiskey flares in her blood.
“Glad to hear it.” He crushes his cigarette in an ashtray nearby then turns to her. “How would you feel about dancing with me?”
“If you like.”
Fewer people are dancing now, and they can walk straight out to the middle of the floor. Once there, the man holds up his hands. It is an odd gesture, not quite the gesture of a man beginning a dance, more that of a man who is unarmed. Hettie puts one hand in his, the other on his evening coat, which is fitted tight against his back. The crease of his collar touches her ear. His hand is cool. He smells of lemons and cigarettes. She feels a bit dizzy. Perhaps it’s the drink.
The soulful, gorgeous trumpet has faded now, and the band is picking up again, the music moving into a rag, a one-step.
One-two, one-two.
The floor is filling, people pressing all around them, cheering, clapping, stamping the music back into life.
One-two, one-two.
He steps toward her.
Hettie steps back.
And it’s there; it’s in that first tiny movement—the flash of recognition. Yes! The rare feeling she gets when someone knows how to move. Then the music crashes in, and they are dancing together across the floor.
“Good band tonight,” he says, over the music. “American. I like the Americans.”
“Me, too.”
“Oh?” He raises an eyebrow. “Who’ve you seen, then?”
“The Original Dixies.”
“The Dixies? Damn.” He looks impressed. “They were the best.” He puts his leg between hers as he goes for the spin. “Where’d you see them?”
“The Palais. Hammersmith.” She comes back to face him.
“Really? I went there once—saw them there, too!” He looks eager suddenly, like a boy.
Hettie considers this, wonders if they danced near each other. They definitely didn’t dance together. She’d have remembered.
“What was your favorite number, then?” he says.
She laughs; that’s easy. “‘Tiger Rag.’”
“‘Tiger Rag’!” He grins. “Crikey. That one’s dangerous. So damn fast.”
The fastest of all. Even she used to get out of breath.
“What was he called?” His face creases. “That trumpeter—Nick something or other.”
“LaRocca.”
Nick LaRocca—the world-famous trumpeter from New York. He used to make the girls go barmy. He’d smiled at her once, in the drafty backstage corridor: Hey, kid! he said, and winked as he was doing up his bow tie. She’s had his picture above her bed ever since.
“LaRocca! That’s it.” He looks delighted. “Crazy man. Played like a lunatic.”
They are on the edge of the dance floor now, where the noise isn’t quite so loud. “So, then,” he says, “tell me. An anarchist with a love for American jazz.”
“But I’m not—” Their eyes catch, and something passes between them, a silent understanding. This is all a game.
“What’s your cover?” he says, leaning close—close enough for her to smell the whiskey on his breath.
“Cover?”
“Day job.”
“Oh, it’s dancing. At the Palais. I’m a dance instructress there.”
“Good cover.” He smiles, then his forehead creases again, as though he’s remembering something. “Not in that awful metal box thing, are you?”
She nods, feels the familiar wince of shame. “Afraid so, yes.”
“Poor you.”
The Pen. That awful metal box. Where she and Di sit, trapped, along with ten other girls, till they are hired, while the men without partners shark up and down, deciding if they want you, if you are worth their sixpence for a turn around the floor.
He leans back, as though to see her better. “You don’t look like the sort of girl who’s for hire.”
Is he making fun of her again? It could be a compliment, but she can’t be sure.
“I’m Ed, by the way,” he says. “Terribly rude of me. Should have introduced myself before.”
She hesitates.
“Right, then,” he says with a grin. “You can tell me your name when I get the thumbscrews out later.”
She laughs. The dance is almost finished. Over his shoulder she can see Gus standing on the edge of the floor, staring out at them forlornly, two drinks in his hands, and as the music comes to its close she is clumsy suddenly, aware of her body, of the parts where it is close to Ed’s. She takes her hands down, steps back.
“Wait.” He catches her wrist. “Don’t go,” he says. “At least, not before you’ve told me your name.” His face has changed again. The smile has gone.
“It’s Hettie,” she says. Because whatever game they were playing is clearly over and, all told, she’s not the sort of girl to lie.
“Hettie,” he repeats, tightening his grip. Then he leans in close. “Don’t worry,” he says, “I won’t give you away. I know how much these things matter. I want to blow things up, too.”
Then he lets her go, and turns and walks, without stopping, without looking back, through the crush of people, across the floor, up the stairs, and out of the club.
The room wheels, a queasy kaleidoscope around her.
And here is Gus, crossing the floor toward her, sagging now, all jubilation spent. “Who was that, then? Someone you know?”
She shakes her head. But she can feel him still, this Ed, this man she doesn’t know, a Chinese burn scalding her wrist.
“You looked as though you knew him,” says Gus. He sounds aggrieved.
Hettie is furious suddenly. With poor, bald Gus. His awkward dancing and that half-cringing look on his face. And then, seeing that he sees this, she is sorry for him. “Perhaps I knew him,” she says quietly. “Perhaps I met him before.”
He seems a little appeased. When she doesn’t say any more, he nods. “Lemonade?” he says, holding out her drink.
“Evelyn.”
Someone is calling her name.
“Evelyn, turn that bloody alarm off, would you? It’s been racketing for an age.”
Evelyn opens her eyes to darkness.
She reaches from under the blanket and gropes for the clock on her bedside chest. There’s a sudden shocking silence, until Doreen grunts on the other side of the door. “Thank you.”
Evelyn curls onto her side, her knuckles in her mouth, biting down, as Doreen’s slippered footsteps retreat.
She was having the dream again.
She lies there for a moment more, then takes her fist away, sits up, and pulls the curtains aside. Thin light touches the face of her clock. The immovable realities of morning make themselves known. It is eight o’clock. It is Sunday, her mother’s birthday, and she has to be in Oxfordshire by lunch.
Bloody hell.
In the bathroom, the pipes clank and creak. She hauls herself out of bed, the soles of her bare feet cold against the floor, and while Doreen hums and splashes next door she dresses in the half-light, choosing her least tatty blouse and her longest serge skirt, slipping into her stockings and shoes and pulling her cardigan tight.
The light is stronger by the time she has finished dressing; still, she avoids her reflection in the mirror on the wall.
Outside, in the scrubby patch of grass that passes for a garden, she pushes open the door of the damp lavatory and squats, shivering as she pees, before pulling the chain and stepping out. There’s a battered packet of Gold Flakes in the pocket of her cardy and she coughs as she lights one up. She looks up at the trees, at their wet black bare branches latticing the lightening sky. As she stands there, a single, tired leaf detaches itself, twirling down onto the path. After a couple of drags she throws the cigarette onto the path beside the leaf and puts her foot over them both, grinding them into the ground at her feet.
In the kitchen, she boils water for her coffee, then pours the coarse grounds straight into her mug, taking it to the table, where she sits and lights another cigarette.
“Good morning.” Doreen’s smiling head appears around the door.
“Morning.” She dumps two heaped spoonfuls of sugar into her cup and stirs.
“How’s you?”
“A-one, darling.” Evelyn salutes. “A-one.”
“Breakfast?” Doreen disappears into the pantry to root around.
“God, no.”
“Off to the country?”
“Paddington. Ten o’clock,” says Evelyn.
Doreen emerges with bread and butter. “Better get a move on, then.”
As much as Evelyn loves Doreen, as much as sharing this flat with her is the calmest, least troubling living arrangement that she can imagine, just now, just this morning, she really doesn’t want to talk. She would rather sit here alone, with the remains of her dream wrapped around her like a stole against the gray morning air.
Doreen pulls out a chair and begins slicing bread. She is humming. Dressed to go out: wearing a pretty frock, her cheeks scrubbed and powdered, her hair up. Though it’s hard to tell in this light, she may even be wearing rouge.
“What are you up to, anyway?” says Evelyn. “It’s Sunday. Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
Doreen looks up from her slicing. “I’m off today, too. The man, remember. I told you last week. He’s promised to take me out of London. Said I was languishing in the smoke.”
“Ah.”
“I know he’ll drag me up a godforsaken hill somewhere and make me look at a view. Still…” Doreen smiles, apologetic, flushed.
Evelyn crushes her stub in the ashtray. “You’re right. I do have to get a move on.” She pulls on her coat. “You look lovely. You are lovely. Have a lovely time. Say hello from me.” She goes to the door, then turns back. “And wish me luck.”
“Luck,” says Doreen, grinning, holding out her buttery knife. “And remember, don’t let the old girl get you down.”
Evelyn stands beneath the clock, tapping her foot against the ground, scanning the Paddington crowd for her brother. No sign. She checks the departures board a last time and then heads off across the station, moving through wide slices of morning light. Irritating. It’s irritating he should be late.
The engine is spitting ash when she arrives at the platform, and she just has time to jump on the last carriage before it pulls away. She walks the length of the swaying train, checking each compartment for her brother’s tall, rangy shape, the welcome of his smile. He is nowhere, though, and the train is full, but in the last carriage of second class she finds a compartment to herself.
Where the hell is he, then? They’ve had this arrangement for weeks.
She feels a brief, worried contraction on his behalf—but then pushes it away. She doesn’t want to think about her brother. Her brother can more than look after himself. She wants to think about her dream. About how it begins.
It begins like this: She’s in the sitting room of the house she grew up in, and she is reading a book. The doorbell rings; she marks her place and stands, moving across the carpet to the door. Now all she has to do is turn the handle and step into the hall, and Fraser will be there, waiting for her on the other side. Her hand is over the doorknob, and she is touching it, can feel the cool brass of it sliding into her palm; she presses down, the door swings open, and—
She never gets any further than this.
These are things she remembers: Light, a morning in summer, Fraser beside her on the bed. The shifting patterns across his face.
The train rattles through a tunnel. When it emerges again into the unpromising morning, Evelyn catches sight of her reflection in the mirror above the seat. Because of the way it’s angled, slightly downward, she can see her hair parting clearly. She hasn’t seen her hair in daylight for a while, and in among her dark hairs are coarse white ones—too many now to count.
And here is the truth of things, she thinks. Even if the dream were real, if he could assemble himself from his thousand scattered parts; if she could open the door and find him standing before her, whole; he would be horrified: She will be thirty next month. She has betrayed him. She has become old.
Outside, London’s suburbs slide on. She thinks of all the people, in all of the houses, waking to their gray mornings, their gray hairs, their gray lives.
We are comrades, she thinks, in grayness.
This is what remains.
When Evelyn wakes, there’s a small boy on the knee of a large woman sitting on the seat in front of her. Both of them are staring. The child has a headful of orange curls and a round, pasty face. The woman turns immediately away, as if caught in the act of something shameful, but the child carries on looking, mouth open, with a thin silver slug trail from his nose to his chin. Three more people sit in the carriage, too: a man and two elderly women over by the door. Evelyn looks out the window. They are pulling away from a station. READING, halfway there.
“That lady’s got no finger.”
“Shh,” says the woman with the child. “Shh, Charles.”
Evelyn raises an eyebrow.
“Look out of the window, Charlie,” says the woman in a high, strangled voice. “Can’t you see the sheep?”
“No,” says Charlie, wriggling and squirming on the woman’s lap. “Look.” He appeals to the man next to him. “Lady’s got no finger.” He is leaning forward now, the line of drool almost touching his mother’s skirts.
Evelyn looks down at her hand. She has indeed got no finger. Or half a finger. Her left index finger ends in a smooth rounded stump just after the knuckle.
“Good gracious, Charlie,” she says, looking across at him. “Do you know what? You’re quite right.” She waggles her stump in his direction. “Did you eat it while I was asleep?”
Charlie jumps back. The rest of the carriage takes a sharp breath, and then, as if in a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, everyone freezes their gaze straight ahead.
“You can touch it if you like,” says Evelyn, leaning toward the little boy.
“Can I?” the boy whispers, reaching out.
“No!” manages his purple-faced mother, yanking Charlie back. “Absolutely not.”
“Well,” says Evelyn with a shrug. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
Charlie slumps back onto his mother’s lap. His eyes flicker from the stump to Evelyn’s face and back again.
“And where are you going to, Charlie?” says Evelyn.
“Oxford,” says Charlie, punch-drunk.
“Perfect. Me, too. You can wake me up when we arrive.”
At Oxford, Evelyn waves good-bye to Charlie, changes trains, and takes the branch line that leads out to the village. She still half-expects to see her brother, emerging sleepily from farther up the train, but she is the only person to alight on the tiny platform. The small ticket window is shuttered up; a few straggling remnants of geraniums survive in the hanging baskets, the brittle skeletons of foxgloves in the beds. She walks out over the crossroads, where the butcher’s and the post office face each other with blank-eyed Sunday expressions, and passes the low, five-housed terrace that leads to the green.
There was a boy who lived here, Thomas Lightfoot, the son of one of the men who worked for her parents; her brother played with him sometimes when they were children. She always liked his name. He was the first person she knew to die. She remembers her brother telling her, one sunny afternoon in London, in the spring of 1915. He had a wife and a child and he lived and died and all before he was twenty-three. She looks into Thomas’s house as she passes now, sees a young woman through the window, back turned, scrubbing at something in the sink.
Evelyn walks on, her feet the only sound on the road, leaving the village behind, until she is passing open fields, where scattered crows pick at the stumps of the crop. The sun is out. She shuts her eyes against it, letting the light dance orange on her lids, and takes a lungful of pure air: glad, despite herself, to be out of London. Ahead of her, the low stone wall that marks the boundary of her parents’ land comes into view; behind it are clusters of high firs, their branches dark against the bright sky.
She takes the road that leads behind the house, so she can approach without being seen. Opening the gate in the wall, she enters and stands on the lawn. In front of her is the house, seen from the side, its Cotswold stone deep golden in the sun. As she stands there, a black-clad maid comes running out of a side entrance and scoots around a tree trunk to where she is lost from view. Soon a small cloud of smoke rises into the air. Evelyn smiles: Good for her.
She sets off across the lawn, heading for the back of the house. The grass is surprisingly tall for November, and by the time she reaches the steps her shoes are soaked. She pushes the door open with her hip and swears under her breath as she reaches to unbuckle her shoes. They are suede, thinly strapped—the only vaguely ladylike pair she owns and a rare concession to her mother’s tastes—but they are too wet, now, to wear. She kicks them off and takes them to the cupboard by the back door, where a familiar smell greets her: damp and cobwebs and the close winter-rubber smell of stored galoshes. She chucks her shoes in between the umbrella stand and an old tennis racket, considers for a moment the merits of wearing galoshes to lunch, thinks better of it, then pads in damp stockings on cold flags down the corridor past the kitchen. A quick glance through the interior window tells her that they are buzzing: a platoon of servants scurrying to and fro.
When she reaches the end of the corridor she stops, puts her hand to the wall.
Once she turns the corner, she will be in the main hall, at the end of which is the front door, and behind the front door is where Fraser stands in her dream. And she knows it is stupid, but still…
She closes her eyes, letting the feeling of his nearness fill her, fill her chest, her arms, the air before her face, until—
“Evelyn.”
She snaps open her eyes.
“What are you doing?” Her mother, trussed in cream and gold, rears before her. “Where are your shoes?”
“I”—Evelyn looks down at her stockings, clinging wetly to her toes—“I came in around the back. They’re in the cupboard,” she adds. “Under the stairs.”
Her mother makes that noise: that special, back-of-the-throat click.
“Well, it won’t do. And neither will that blouse. You look like a shopgirl. Is this your latest pose?”
“I—”
“Your cousin is here.” Her mother leans forward, hissing. “And your old dresses are upstairs. Now go at once and change.” She steps back, narrowing her eyes. “Where is your brother?”
“I—don’t know. We were supposed to come together but then—”
“But what?”
“But then he wasn’t there.”
“He wasn’t there? Well, where is he, then?”
Evelyn shrugs, defeated. “I’m sorry, Mother. I really don’t know.”
Her mother pulls herself up to her full height—she is magnificent, really, even Evelyn has to admit—and steers her great Edwardian bosom into the wind.
Evelyn grits her teeth. Occasionally, just occasionally, she can muster the strength to pick her battles. “Mother?”
Her mother turns back toward her.
“Happy birthday.”
Her mother nods once, swiftly, as though acknowledging something painful but necessary, like the removal of a tooth, then pushes open the door to the kitchen. As the door swings shut, the hubbub within dies. Her voice barks out an order—something about fish.
Evelyn turns back again and closes her eyes. But it is useless. The feeling has gone. She walks around the corner. The front door is there, ten feet of impassive wood, but behind its panels: nothing. No one is waiting for her on the other side. There is nothing but the brightness of the day and the dancing patterns made by the sun as it hits the bubbled glass.
Jack pushes his breakfast plate away and stands, then, “I forgot this yesterday,” he says, taking a squash from the bottom of his haversack. “It’s a good-looking one, I think.” He puts it in the middle of the table and shoulders his empty bag. “Right, then. See you tonight.” He stays there a moment, as though there is something more he wanted to say.
Twenty-five years.
Ada stays seated. His wide-shouldered bulk fills her view. He is wearing his old Sunday clothes, allotment clothes, softened and worn with use. She can still see the young man in his silhouette. Just.
“Yes,” she says. “See you tonight.”
He nods, goes, the back door shuts behind him and his footsteps disappear down the path.
Twenty-five years tomorrow. Twenty-five years since they went into the round chapel and said their vows. The day was as warm as springtime as she walked the uneven stone path to the door. Then, in the cool darkness within, she gasped, as though she had been plunged into water. She could hardly breathe, she was laced in so tight. For a moment she had the sense she was alone, until she saw the shape of him, standing next to the minister at the top of the aisle. Slowly, she could make out their guests, too, scattered in the rows on either side. She set her course for Jack and tried to walk straight.
“All right, there.” He took her hand in his and winked. “Here goes nothing, then.”
The morning kitchen is dim, but the squash he left her is a bright orange-yellow color, its skin seeming to pulse with the memory of sun. It will be one of the last pickings before winter attacks the allotment with frost. It fairly hums with life.
She picks up the breakfast plates, puts them in the sink, and goes outside, filling the kettle from the pump in the yard, then coming in and putting it on the range to boil.
From the back window she can see the fences and gardens of seven houses. She knows the names of all the mothers in this street and the next, all the children, all the men, alive and dead. She has lived in this house for twenty-five years. Jack even carried her over the threshold, the neighbors gathered, laughing, delighted at the unexpected show.
When the kettle is whistling she pours half the water into the washing-up bowl and the rest into the teapot, then scrubs the congealed remains of breakfast from the plates. She’ll use the squash tomorrow. A dinner to celebrate. Stew and dumplings. Buy some good meat to go in it. It pleases her, this plan.
When the plates are dried and stacked, she goes to move the squash from the middle of the table and put it in the pantry, and a sound comes from the front: a scuffling almost, as though an animal has come to the door. At first she thinks it must be Jack, come back for something he’s forgotten. But he’d never come to the front. A neighbor, then? Ivy? But she wouldn’t come to the front, either, not on a Sunday. Not on any day.
There’s a knock, and Ada jumps, moving quickly, taking off her apron, smoothing her skirts, and then going to open the door.
“Yes?”
A young man stands on the step. Thin sandy hair, pale eyes, an attempt at a mustache struggling over his top lip. Where his fresh-shaved skin has met the morning air his face is raw. He looks surprised, as if it were she disturbing his peace, rather than the other way around. He takes off his hat, holding it close to his chest. “Morning, missus.”
“Good morning.”
His eyes flicker over her face and shoulder to the hall beyond. He clears his throat. “Do you live here, missus?”
“Yes.”
“Then—w-would it be possible to trouble you for a minute?” He seems relieved when the words are out. What can he want? Then she sees the heavy bag at his feet. They are everywhere now, boys with bags like these: on every street corner, peddling everything from matches to bootlaces. Or begging. Knocking and asking for cast-off jackets or shoes.
“We don’t need anything.”
The boy stares. “Pardon, missus?”
“We don’t need anything,” she says, moving to close the door.
He steps forward, and there’s panic in him. “Can I come in? Just for a minute? Please?” His voice is wheedling. He moves slightly, revealing his left arm beneath his jacket. She catches sight of the yellowed edge of a sling. She stays where she is; the door open a crack, the boy shifting his weight from foot to foot. Then something in her softens, and she steps back, opening the door a touch wider, letting the young man slide round.
The two of them are standing close. She can smell him, sour beneath the clean hard smell of the outside air. There are white flakes scattered over the shoulders of his jacket. They stand there for a couple of awkward seconds. She doesn’t want to take him into the parlor, but one of them needs to move.
“In here, then.”
He follows her into the kitchen. At the sink she turns to face him, arms across her chest. The boy hesitates at the door, seeming to wait for permission, and when she inclines her head slightly, he comes into the room in a series of odd, lurching movements. When he reaches the table he holds on to the back of the chair.
“Nice place you got here.” He is out of breath, as though the small effort has exhausted him. “Nice and quiet.” He stares at her as though he is expecting her to make whatever move has to be made.
“You’d better show me what you have,” she says eventually.
“Sorry?”
“In your bag?”
“Oh, right.” And he bends, lifting brown paper packages onto the table, each movement with a similar careful intensity, as if he cannot rely on his body to carry out the small commands he gives it. He reminds her of her son, when he was small: the jerky unpredictability of his limbs.
Shell shock.
One of those.
She looks at the well-thumbed packages in his grubby hands and knows that there will be nothing but cheap rubbish inside. “I’m sorry,” she says. “We don’t need anything after all.”
He looks up at her, pale face tight, and nods briefly, as though acknowledging the futility of their exchange.
She waits for him to gather his things, but he makes no move to do so. Instead, he carries on, his voice rising a couple of desperate notches. “Dishcloths?” He opens one of the paper parcels to reveal a pile of loose-woven sandy cloths. “Everyone needs those.”
“I’m fine for dishcloths, thanks.”
“What about a tea towel?” He leans toward his bag.
The bag is large. They could be here all morning. “How much are the dishcloths, then?”
He jerks back up. “Dishcloths?” He looks surprised. “They’re—tuppence. Tuppence for five.”
“I’ll take them. Five. That’ll do. I’ll just get my purse.” She goes toward it but then realizes she is trapped—cannot get to her money without showing him where her purse is kept.
“Would it be all right if I had a smoke?” he says; that wheedling voice again. “Just a quick one? I’m fairly done up with the cold.” He moves quickly, before she can say no, taking out a packet with his good arm, shaking a cigarette into his mouth, and reaching into his pocket for a light. “Like one?” He holds them out toward her.
“No, thank you.”
He nods and puts the pack on the table. “Can I sit down?”
Something strange is hovering in the air between them, something beyond the brazenness of this boy. Ada feels a thin sense of dread. But she nods, slowly, and he pulls out a chair.
“Thanks.” There’s the scratch of a match against the box, the small fizz of the flame in the room.
She goes over to the fire, gives it a quick stoke, then walks quickly behind him, toward the drawer that contains her purse. She turns to see if he is watching, but he has his back to her, smoking in quick, jabbing drags. She slides the drawer open as soundlessly as possible, is lifting the purse out and searching inside when there’s a sudden noise, a sort of strangled cry. She turns to see him staring at the air in front of him, curled forward, his whole body straining toward something she cannot see.
“Michael?” he says. Then his head jerks once, twice, as though caught in a fierce current, and is still.
Ada drops the purse back into the drawer. “What did you say?” She moves over to face him.
“Nothing,” the boy flinches, shaking his head. “I never—I never said nothing.”
“You did.” She speaks slowly, though her heart is pounding. “I heard you.”
“I never.” He stands up. Stabs out his cigarette. Takes a couple of crablike steps away from her.
“You said ‘Michael.’”
Then the boy begins to twitch, and the twitching spreads, until he is having a fit, almost, in awful spasms, and it is awful, and she should help him, but he is terrifying, and she cannot, and so she stands, stranded, until the fit has passed and he is still. It is a moment before she can speak.
“Why did you say ‘Michael’?” She tries to make her voice light, easy. She wants to keep him here.
“I never,” the boy says, snatching up his packages. “I never did. I just knocked on your door. I’m just selling stuff, aren’t I?” And he holds his hopeless little packages out to her, before stuffing them back into his bag.
“You said ‘Michael.’ You knew him.”
“No, I never.” His head swings violently from side to side. “I don’t know any Michael. No.”
“Stop it,” she says. “Stop that. You knew him. You knew my son.”
But the swinging movement only gets faster and faster, until he takes a couple of steps toward her, grabs one of her hands in his and puts it on his head. “I’m sorry,” he says, pressing her hand hard against his skull. “I’m sorry, missus.” Then he stumbles from the room.
For a moment she is still, feeling the burning, buzzing touch of him against her. Then she runs, down the hall, out of the house, calling after him to stop.
But there is no one on the quiet Sunday street. The boy has disappeared.
As though he were never there at all.
Just outside the small town of Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise, near Agincourt, on the road that leads to the coast, from her room in the barracks of the British Army, a young nurse watches a field ambulance arrive.
It is very odd; it is the fourth such ambulance she has seen today.
The nurse blows her nose. She has a cold and is out of sorts. She has been reading a letter from home, trying to stay as close as possible to the tiny little stove. The letter is from her fiancé. It is a perfectly pleasant letter, full of perfectly pleasant things. He is a perfectly pleasant man.
And yet.
She had her demob papers last week. One of the last left over here. She hadn’t been in a rush to go. Soon she will have to face him. This small, uninspiring man who was wounded in 1918 and whom she tended, and felt sorry for, and agreed to marry when all of this was done.
Since then the nurse had fallen in love. A French captain. She met him at a social. He calls her “Chérie.” It sounds a lot like the fruit.
She knew the French captain was married. He never lied about that. But he did promise he would leave his wife. Then, last week, when she was out shopping on her day off in Saint-Pol, the ugly, bruised little local town, she saw them: the whole family. Two dark-haired little children, the Frenchman, and his pretty young wife. All of them laughing, holding hands, jabbering away in a language she couldn’t understand. She hid in a doorway, mortified, till they were gone.
The nurse puts down her letter and goes over to the window, pulling her cardigan closer against the cold. A coffin is being unloaded from the ambulance by four men. All the other ambulances today have held coffins, too. She watches as the men lift the plain box and carry it into the small chapel that went up last week. That, too, was strange, since no one said why they were building the little Nissen hut, or nailing a cross above the door. They’ve managed perfectly well without a chapel until now.
She wonders who is inside the box.
It is odd to see a coffin nowadays. Not like before, when they loaded and unloaded them like so many loaves of bread. The nurse reminds herself to ask around—find out what might have happened that four bodies have been brought here today.
When the ambulance has gone she goes back over to the stove and picks up the letter. Then puts it down again. She will write to him later. For now, she cannot think of what she might say.
In her old bedroom at the very top of the house, Evelyn sits on the edge of the bed and smokes. She stares balefully at the rack of dresses in the open wardrobe in front of her, tipping the ash into her palm. Then she pulls open the window sash and throws the butt out.
In the distance she can see the blue-gray waters of the lake. It’s not really a lake; she grew up calling it a lake, but really, from up here, it’s an overgrown pond. She can just about make out the red roof of the two-room summerhouse that stands on the reedy little island in the middle. There’s a fireplace in one of the rooms. She could sneak downstairs to the kitchen now and steal some wood, take the little rowing boat over there, light herself a fire, and spend the day hidden and reading. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s ducked out of a family gathering in the same way.
Rather that than enduring her mother’s birthday lunch; rather that than her cousin Lottie and her tiny bites of food, her tiny nibbles of conversation from her tiny, tidy mouth.
It’ll be ten times worse without her brother, too.
There’s a knock at the door. She pulls herself back from the window as a uniformed young woman enters the room. Evelyn doesn’t recognize her. She must be new. Her mother has always gone through maids like other people go through handkerchiefs.
“Yes?”
“I was sent to ask if you want any help.”
“Help?”
The girl blushes. “With changing, miss.”
“Oh, right. No. Thank you.” She waves a hand. “Please tell my mother I’m more than capable of choosing a dress.”
The girl, looking relieved, disappears, and from somewhere deep in the house a gong sounds, insistent and low. Evelyn goes to the wardrobe and runs her palm along the rack of dresses, which bob and jingle on their hangers, pretty, pliant as puppets. She plucks out the most muted dress she can find, a green silk day dress she hasn’t worn for years, and pulls it over her head. It smells of must and mothballs. The color is all wrong, draining her already pale skin.
Bright chatter from the morning room spikes the hall as she makes her way down the wide main staircase of the house. She listens but cannot hear her brother’s voice, and so she heads across the hall to the dining room instead. They’ll all be in here soon enough.
Two young men, little more than boys, are putting the finishing touches to the place settings. They must be new, too, as she doesn’t recognize either of them. They nod at her, then bow and turn and slide away.
She walks to the window, looking out to where the lawn slopes down to the lake. She can just see the little boat, tethered up against the deck, and conjures the damp wood and varnish smell of it, the friction of the oars against the heels of her palms.
“Here she is.”
Evelyn turns to see her aunt Mary, Lottie’s mother, plump and bejeweled, leading the march. She submits to being kissed, and then scrutinized at arm’s length.
“You look tired. Are you still working?”
“Mmm.” Evelyn nods.
Her aunt’s face wrinkles. “And are you still in that horrible little flat?”
Despite herself, Evelyn smiles. “Yes, Aunt Mary,” she concedes, detaching herself gently from her grip. “I’m afraid I am.”
Then here they come, the rest of them, Uncle Alec, Cousin Lottie, Anthony—Lord Anthony—Lottie’s husband. All of them pink and smug and smiling. No sign of her brother. For a brief moment she wonders if something is really wrong, but then they are upon her, and she steels herself, arranging her face to meet them, making the right noises as she progresses down the line, the sudden, reluctant welcoming committee to her mother’s birthday lunch. Her father nods at her, chin set, eyes locked, as ever, somewhere to the left of her head. But next to him, her mother’s gaze strafes her, head to toe. And in it is the inevitable, the illimitable disappointment. Better, says her expression, but still not good enough.
The family members take their places around the table, and the two young men reappear with the soup trolley, moving quietly around the room. Anthony takes the seat across from Evelyn. The space to his right is free.
“So,” says Lottie, to Evelyn’s left.
“So,” says Evelyn, turning to her cousin, who is resplendent in yellow lace.
“How’s London?” Lottie tilts her head to one side, as if London were a wayward old acquaintance she used to run around with but with whom she has lost touch. When she married, two years ago, Lottie moved from a short-lived flat share in Chelsea into Anthony’s ugly, crenellated Victorian pile. She is a Lady now. Lady Charlotte. Lady Lottie. Evelyn can only guess at the fury that engendered in her own mother’s breast.
“London seems well,” says Evelyn, taking a sip of wine. “Bearing up. Shall I pass on your regards?”
Lottie gives an indulgent smile. “And are you still living with Doreen?”
They were all at the same school: Lottie, Evelyn, and Doreen—Evelyn and Doreen three years ahead, fused in friendship by their mutual loathing of everything the school stood for. When Evelyn inherited a small sum from her grandmother at the age of twenty-one, she bought a flat in Primrose Hill and invited Doreen to live in it, too. Her family couldn’t have been more scandalized if she’d announced that the two of them were planning to keep a brothel.
“Still living with Doreen,” says Evelyn.
“And is she still”—Lottie pauses delicately—“unattached, too?”
Evelyn meets her cousin’s watery gaze. “Yes,” she lies. “She is.”
There’s a flurry in the corridor. Her brother’s voice. Finally. She looks up to see him handing his coat to one of the young men.
“Edward!”
“Sorry, Ma. Got caught up. Missed the train. You’re looking divine.”
As Ed embraces their mother, her skin registers pink delight. He’s not looking his best—his jacket is creased, and his hair looks as though he wet it in the kitchen on the way through—yet, somehow, he carries it off. As the ripples from his arrival spread across the smiling room, Evelyn is struck, not for the first time, by her brother’s easy grace, his seemingly limitless ability to dispense charm. If it were she, late for a family gathering in this way, she’d have been cut out of the will.
She is the last to be reached. When he leans in to kiss her he smells of alcohol—not fresh, but saturated, as though he’s been drinking for a long time.
“I thought we were supposed to be coming down together?” she hisses into his ear.
“Sorry, Eves.”
“Where’ve you been, anyway? You look like hell.”
“Out.” He shrugs.
She rolls her eyes as he takes his place diagonally across from hers. Her mother knows better than to seat her two children together. The young men resume wheeling the soup trolley and start to serve.
“And what about you?” Evelyn says, turning to Lottie. “Country life treating you well?”
Lottie picks up her spoon. “I am rather well, actually. I mean, in a manner of speaking. I’ve been a little sick, too.”
“Excuse me a minute.” Evelyn tries to catch her brother’s eye, but he is already in conversation with Anthony, so she leans forward and steals a cigarette from his case on the table in front of him. She turns back reluctantly to Lottie. “What was that you said?”
“I’m going to have a child.” Lottie’s wispy little voice rises at the end of the line, as if she is unsure herself about this state of affairs.
Evelyn lights up.
“I’m going to have a child,” says Lottie again, a little louder.
“I heard.” Evelyn blows out a lungful of blue smoke. “Goodness me.”
To her right, at the top of the table, she can feel without looking that her mother’s eyes are upon her. She turns properly to Lottie, giving her mother the back of her head. “That’s wonderful,” she says, too loudly. “Congratulations. What do you think you’ll have?”
“Excuse me?” Lottie looks confused.
“What do you think you’ll have? Cannon fodder? Or the other kind? What shall we call it? Drawing room fodder? Tedium fodder?”
Lottie puts down her spoon. “I’m not sure I quite know what you mean.”
“Boy,” says Evelyn slowly, “or girl?”
On the other side of the table, as though alerted by some chivalrous instinct, Anthony and Ed look up. Anthony clears his throat and leans forward. “So. How are you, Evelyn old thing?”
He looks even plumper, thinks Evelyn, while Lottie looks thinner than ever. Perhaps they’ve got things confused and it’s Anthony that’s eating for two. For a brief, horrible moment an awful mental picture assails her: Lottie and Anthony, deep in the act. He smiles encouragingly. “Coming along with us on Thursday, then?”
“Thursday?”
“The burial. Westminster Abbey. Got a friend with a place on Whitehall,” says Anthony. “Good view of the Cenotaph. We’ll be having some drinks. You’re most welcome.”
The burial. Few drinks. He makes it sound like a trip to the West End.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “I’m not really one for funerals.”
Anthony looks at her, seeming to weigh the relative truth of this.
“Still fighting the good fight?” he says eventually. “What is it again? The labor exchange?”
“Pensions, actually,” says Evelyn.
She knows that he knows this. They have had this conversation before.
“Pensions.” He shakes his head. A loose flap of skin already hangs beneath his chin. Soon he will be one of those men with necks like farmyard fowl.
“I don’t know how you stand it,” chimes in Lottie, giggling, braver now that the reinforcements have arrived. “I’m sure I never could.”
“I know why she does it.” Anthony leans forward.
All the other conversations around the table appear to have ceased.
“And why’s that?” says Evelyn.
“Men,” Anthony cackles, leaning back in his seat. He slaps his leg and holds out his arms. “All of those men. Just the thing for a girl like you. Cripples, most of them—can’t run away. Must be able to just pick them off.” His lifts both his hands and mimes shooting. “Fish in a barrel, what?”
Lottie sniggers.
Evelyn feels her skin flare. “Hardly,” she says. And finally, now, she manages to catch her brother’s eye. He is smiling, but the look is a faded version of the one she has seen so often before: of mingled awe and humor, that dares her to go on. He looks tired, as though he hasn’t the strength for whatever is about to unroll. And she is furious then, more furious with him than with the whole lot of them put together. “Hardly,” she says again, a little louder this time.
“And why not?” Anthony smiles encouragingly.
“I think we all know where I stand on this.”
“And where is that, Evelyn?” says her mother from the head of the table. “Where exactly is it that you stand?”
Evelyn turns toward her mother. “Why, on the shelf, of course.”
“The shelf?” says Lottie.
“Yes. The shelf. You know the one. The dusty old shelf.” She looks around the table, none of them quite looking at her, none of them quite looking away. “Haven’t you heard of it? It’s quite comfortable up here, I assure you. The view’s not bad. You wouldn’t understand, though, any of you.” She lifts up her fish knife. “You’re all on the other side. What’s the opposite of the shelf? In the mix? In the cake mix? Look at Lottie.” She waves her blade at her cousin, who gasps. “Isn’t she lovely? She’s a veritable little currant, wouldn’t you say?”
“Evelyn,” says her mother slowly.
She turns her head. “Yes, Mother?”
“Would you like an ashtray?”
She looks at the cigarette in her other hand, whose precarious length of ash is on the cusp of falling into her soup. One of the young men slips an ashtray under her arm.
“Evelyn?” repeats her mother.
“Yes?”
“When are you going to learn?”
“Learn what?” She crushes out her cigarette.
“Bitterness is simply not very attractive.”
Evelyn opens her mouth. Closes it again.
When she was growing up, she used to imagine her mother as a savage with a blowpipe, dispensing poison darts. She never missed. One had to learn to duck.
She puts down her knife, lining it up with the side of her plate.
Bitter?
She isn’t bitter.
Bitter is the last thing she is.
Ada is on the other side of the small park when she sees Jack heading home, his back slightly hunched, head bent against the cold. She has been out here longer than she intended, trying to calm herself, breathing in the chill afternoon air, walking looping circles of the patchy grass, one end to the other, avoiding the piles of fallen leaves. She sets off toward him now; if she walks fast enough she can catch up.
Jack lifts his head as she approaches. “Ada.” He looks surprised. “What are you doing out here?”
“I just”—she tries a smile, but her cheeks are numb—“fancied a bit of air.”
“You could have come to me.” He adjusts his pack. “There was plenty to do on the allotment today.”
Is his tone resentful? She cannot tell, but they fall in step beside each other anyway, crossing the park toward home. Ahead of them the sun is hanging low, in a sky the color of tin. Between them is the slight, constant distance—the distance they cannot name or broach. She takes a breath. “Jack?”
He slows, turning to her. “What’s that?”
She comes to a stop, hands clenched in her pockets.
“What is it, Ada?” His eyes seek hers out. “What’s wrong?”
“Earlier. Just after you left, a boy came. He knocked on the door.”
His brow creases. “Who?”
“I don’t know. He was—just one of those boys, selling things. Rubbish, most of it. But I—let him in.”
“You let him in?”
“He was wounded,” she says.
He nods, accepting this. “What was it? Did he do something to you?”
“No, nothing like that. No.”
“Well, what then?”
She breathes in the scent of the leaves held in piles around them, the sweet beginnings of their decay. “There was something about him,” she says. “Something not right. I said I’d buy some dishcloths, just to make him go. But when I went to fetch my purse, when I was standing in the corner…he said it.”
“Said what?”
The old flicker of danger.
Their marriage is trip wired.
You can still stop.
“Michael,” she says.
The fuse is lit. She can feel it, fizzing in the air between them.
Jack is suddenly very still. “He said ‘Michael’?”
“Yes.”
“Michael Hart?”
“Just ‘Michael.’”
He takes a step away from her. “Well, who was he? Did he give you his name?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“What did he look like, then?”
A young couple walk past, heads bent toward each other. Ada waits until they have gone, and then speaks in a low, urgent voice. “He was small. Wounded. Had his left arm in a sling. I was standing with my hand on my purse and—he said ‘Michael,’ and when I turned around he was looking in front of him. As if he could see something.”
The wind troubles the plane trees. A shower of leaves falls to the ground around their feet.
“He was sitting in your chair.”
“What happened then?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I asked him why he’d said it. He said I’d imagined it. He said I was wrong. But I wasn’t wrong.” She feels her heartbeat increase. “I heard it,” she insists. “Plain as anything. ‘Michael.’ That’s what he said.”
Jack holds her gaze a moment more, his eyes searching, his face lined and reddish in the afternoon light. Then he looks away.
“What?” Ada says. “Say something. What?”
“It’s cold.” His voice is flat, controlled. “I’m going to go inside. Are you coming?”
She is silent, furious.
“Right, then.” He walks a couple of paces away from her.
“Jack! He said his name, Jack.”
He doesn’t reply, only shakes his head before setting off across the park.
Ada takes one breath. Two. She looks up, to where the sun is setting, bleeding into one of those glorious autumn sunsets that stain the sky. Then she puts her head down and follows her husband inside.
For some reason the light in their compartment doesn’t work. Evelyn fiddles with it, growing increasingly cross, and then goes out into the corridor. The lights are off there, too. There’s no sign of the conductor, but the next carriage is bright. The middle-aged man occupying it looks up from his crossword, catches her eye, and smiles out at her. Frowning, she turns and goes back to her carriage, and sits back down in the dark.
There isn’t even any decent conversation to be had, since in front of her Ed sleeps, just as he has since the train left Oxford, with his mouth open and his face slack. From the look and the smell of him at lunch, he probably didn’t sleep at all last night. She thrusts her hands into her pockets. It’s freezing in here; the heat must be run on the electric, too. The fields beyond the window are blue in the fading light. She used to like this time of year. The run-up to Christmas. Now it makes her uneasy. There’s nothing but darkness till spring.
The train jolts and Ed wakes. He rubs his face, giving her a vague, sleepy smile, before turning to look out of the window. “Where are we?”
She peers out. They haven’t passed a station for a while. “No idea.” Her breath is beginning to cloud in front of her face. “Sleep well, then?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“So.” She can’t help it. “That was well played.”
“What’s that?” His eyes find hers.
“Turning up late.”
He chuckles. “I wasn’t really late though, was I? Not in the end.”
“Where did you get to, anyway?”
“When?”
“This morning. You were supposed to meet me at ten, remember? Paddington Station? Under the clock?”
He yawns. “Sorry, Eves. Had a late one.”
“Whereabouts?”
“About.”
She thinks of what she did last night. Came back from a walk to an empty flat, read till her fire gave out, and went to bed. He has never invited her on one of his nights. She can only imagine where he goes. She studies his silhouette in the gathering dark. The easy lines of him. For years they were close. Now they rarely speak. She wonders what goes on beneath the surface. Even the war has hardly seemed to scar him; he barely appeared to miss a step, his face and body unblemished—his charm, if anything, increased.
He turns back, catches her looking, and smiles, taking out his cigarette case and offering one to her. “Funny,” he says.
“What? Your night?”
“No. Well—” He rummages in his pocket for a light. “It was, sort of, but that wasn’t what I meant. I meant today.”
“Really? What was funny about it?” She can’t think of very much that was funny at all.
“I remembered something, when I went for a smoke, in the garden earlier on.”
“And what was that?”
A flame flares, hollowing his face. She leans in to light her cigarette.
“The summerhouse. On the island,” he says. “Remember when you hid there for a night?”
“It was two actually.” She feels a small sting of pride.
“You’re right.” He chuckles. “I remember now. They were beside themselves in the house.”
“I was only eleven. There were hardly many places I could go.”
“I knew you were there, though, all along.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Well, why didn’t you come sooner, then?”
“I thought you’d rather be on your own.”
She pulls her coat tighter around her. “I’m sure I probably did.”
She didn’t use to mind, then, being on her own. She used to do things like that all the time.
“Eves?”
“What?”
He stretches. “You all right, old thing?”
“Fine. Why? Shouldn’t I be?”
“You just seemed a bit…”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Just a bit—offish at lunch.”
“Offish?” She bridles. “That’s rich. Coming from you. You looked like death warmed up.”
“Fair enough.” He holds up his hands. There’s a silence, then, “Come on, Eves,” he says quietly. “How long can you be like this for?”
“This? What does ‘this’ mean?”
Someone passes in the corridor outside.
Am I bitter? Am I?
Tell me. Please. I’ll listen to you.
Ed leans forward, and she can just see his eyes in the plummeting light, the halo of blue smoke around his head. “It’s just—it’s not a crime to be happy, you know.”
She whistles. “Really? Gracious. What an incredibly facile thing to say.”
“I’m sorry.” He sits back. “Sorry, Eves. I suppose it is.”
She turns away to the darkness thickening outside.
Easy.
Easy for you to say.
Everything’s always so bloody easy for you.
“Di?”
“Mmmm?”
“You awake?”
“Mmm.”
There’s no fire here in Di’s small room, and Hettie’s nose is cold.
“What’s the time?” Di yawns, her voice thick with sleep.
“Don’t know. But it’s getting dark.”
Di rolls onto her back, and Hettie has to shift. Her right arm is dead anyway. She dangles it down the side of the bed, and the blood returns in pricks and swells of pain. “I’ll have to get back,” she says. “My mum’ll kill me if I’m late.”
Their breath blooms in soft clouds above their heads.
“You could just stay here instead.”
Hettie brings her arm back under the covers. It’s tempting. Given the choice, she would. Stay here in Di’s rooms above the furniture shop, where there are no mothers to look you up and down, or sniff out the traces of the night on your clothes.
“Can’t. Told her I’d be back for dinner, didn’t I?”
But she doesn’t move. Not just yet. It’s cozy under the covers, here in their body-scented warmth.
“It was a killing night.” Di stretches, and Hettie can hear her smile.
They stayed for hours, and when they left it was morning: startled pigeons eyeing them, the men in overalls sprinkling the roads. Humphrey gave Di the money for a taxi, which they rode through half-deserted streets, upon which the pink autumn sun was just starting to rise.
There’s a silence, then, “Humphrey wants me to go away with him,” says Di.
“What?” Hettie turns so they are lying face-to-face. “When?”
“Next weekend. To a hotel.”
It is too dark to see Di’s expression, but Hettie feels something cold take possession of her insides. “And will you go?” she whispers.
“Yes,” says Di. “I think I will.”
Hettie’s heart thuds into the space between them. They have spoken of this, endlessly. Of what it would mean, to finally be with a man. Not the boys they grew up with, or those they work with at the Palais, who are always trying to get them round the back of the stage door for a cigarette or something more. Not most of the men who hire them, in their shabby lounge suits, pressing themselves up, always that bit too tight. But a real man. Someone you liked. Two girls they know have done it already—one with a soldier in the war, who had to give the baby away, and another, Lucy, from the Palais, who did it with a man from Ealing, for five quid—the deposit on a sealskin coat.
It is here, then. The future, come for Di.
“But what if you…you know…what if you get caught out?”
“I won’t,” says Di, lightly. “I know what to do.”
Hettie closes her eyes and sees a darkened hotel room, a bed. A girl and a man. But it is not Di and Humphrey inside.
I’ve been watching you for two whole minutes.
A sharp ache floods her. It frightens her, the force of it.
“What about you?” says Di. “Did you like Gus?”
Hettie opens her eyes, breathing out into the dark. She danced with Gus for hours in the end but can barely resurrect him now—the pieces of him indistinct, the shape of him too blurred. “He was”—she searches for the word—“nice.”
“He liked you,” says Di. “I could tell.”
“Mmm.”
There’s a silence.
“I’d better go.” Hettie slides reluctantly from the bed.
She slept in her dress, since it was freezing when they got back, and so has only to put her feet in her shoes and pull on her hat and coat. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
They hug, briefly, Di’s body warm and heavy, already slipping back into sleep.
Hettie makes her way to the door, where Di’s dress is tossed carelessly over the back of a chair. She reaches for it, lifting a section of its black, diaphanous material, feeling the delicious crunch of sequins beneath her fingertips. Behind her, Di turns in the bed.
“Ta-ra, then,” says Hettie, bringing her hand away.
Outside, she pulls her scarf tight, passing the plate-glass windows of the furniture shop, eerie in the twilight, its beds and chests and chairs in small, clannish arrangements, as if they didn’t need humans to intrude in whatever dark business they are upon. At the end of the street she turns left onto the Goldhawk Road, where the tang of fish and the iron smell of meat, and the soft, sweet pall of vegetable decay still hang over the shuttered-up stalls. Then, hurrying now, she walks the low-housed streets that separate Shepherd’s Bush from Hammersmith. She can see people sitting down to dinner, house lamps spilling light as curtains are closed against the coming night. Everything in its right and proper place, everything with that ordered, stultifying Hammersmithness that sometimes, in her darkest thoughts, makes her wish that the zeppelins had dropped their bombs here rather than carrying on to the East End.
It is because she doesn’t fit. Ever since she can remember, she has felt it, this hunger for something more. Something that thought it would be happy with the job she used to have at Woolworth’s, but wasn’t, no matter how well paid or how smart the uniform she was given to wear. That thought it would be happy at the Palais, but instead feels she is just going in circles, round and round the floor. Di has it, too, this same desire; Hettie knows she does. But Di has transformed it into angles of the head and lowerings of the eyes that bring her men and money and means of escape. Hettie doesn’t have those skills—doesn’t know how to flatter and flirt, doesn’t even know if she wants them—and so it stays inside her, this hunger, ragged and raw.
The smell of boiled mutton hits her as she opens the front door, and she checks herself in the mirror in the hall, sending up a small, silent prayer that the adventures of last night will not be written on her face.
“Het? Is that you?” Her mother’s querulous voice comes from the kitchen.
“Coming.” She takes off her hat and goes down the narrow passage to the kitchen. Her mother is standing by the stove. Her brother, Fred, is in shirtsleeves, leaning his elbows on the table, the windows are misted with cooking and heat, and a thick mutton smell lies over everything. Fred lifts his head, giving her the usual glassy-eyed, empty stare.
“Hello, Mum. Fred.”
Her mother gives her the up-and-down. Fred murmurs hello.
“You’re late.”
“Am I?”
“We were wondering where you’d got to.”
“I was at Di’s.” She picks one foot up, touches it to the back of her opposite calf. “I said, remember?”
“You took your time coming home. We thought something might have happened. Didn’t we, Fred?”
Hettie casts a look at her brother, who doesn’t seem as though he’s wondering much at all.
“Why didn’t you come home earlier? I don’t like to think of you coming through that market at night.”
It is safer to say nothing.
“Take off your coat, then, and carry these over for me.”
She does as she’s told, taking two plates and putting one in front of her brother’s place.
“Thanks,” says Fred softly.
Thanks, he can manage. Please and thank you, and sometimes, if you’re lucky and you ask him a direct question, yes or no. Anything else is a push. Ever since he came back from France. He speaks enough at night, though. Cries and shouts out the names of men in his sleep. She can hear him through the walls.
“So,” says her mother, taking her seat, “shall we give a bit of thanks?”
Hettie rests her chin on her clasped hands.
This was what her father used to say. Shall we give a bit of thanks, then?
He was Irish, and kind, and he used to look at them sometimes in a startled way, as though astonished he should have washed up here, with this English wife and these English children, sharing a life with strangers masquerading as his kin.
Hettie closes her eyes, and for a flashing moment she is back in the club, as though it were projected there on the back of her eyelids—the Negro singer, the frenzy of the band, the way they all danced as if they truly didn’t care.
“For what we are about to receive.”
Are you here to dance, then?
“May the Lord make us truly grateful,” mumble Hettie and her brother.
She opens her eyes. On the plate in front of her a piece of mutton sits beside a lump of marbled bubble, the lot of it surrounded by a pool of sticky gravy. Her mother makes her gravy on a Sunday night with the bones of the joint, so that by next Sunday dinner, having been eked out over the week, it mostly resembles what it mostly is: glue.
Her mother takes up her knife and fork and quiet descends, lumpy, Sunday silence, broken only by the squeak of knife and fork on plate.
“Saw that Alice at mass. The one you used to work with at Woolworth’s.”
Hettie pokes at her food.
I’ve been watching you for two whole minutes.
“Hettie?”
“What?” She looks up. Her mother is staring over at her.
“That Alice? The one whose sister died of the flu, same time as Dad?”
Hettie sees her father, lying on the bed. One day he was fine, the next he was dead, his skin shining and purple, a terrible blooming; the color of the heliotrope flowers in the garden out back. She misses him. He more than made up for her mum. “I remember,” she says quietly.
“She’s married. Expecting now.”
“Oh.” She knows what’s coming.
“Says her job’s coming up.”
Her mother has never forgiven her for leaving the household goods section of Woolworth’s, where she’d worked since she was fourteen, and taking the job at the Palais. It was as though she had bought a ticket for the next train to hell. Nonstop, no changes. All the way down. Her mother wasn’t interested, or happy, or proud when Hettie told her how many other girls had gone for the job. Five hundred, for eighty places, whittled down in the course of a day. All she said was, No respectable girl would be seen dead in a place like that.
“I’ve got a job, thanks, Mum.”
Her mother grunts.
Hettie pokes at her mutton with her fork.
“How’s Di?”
“Fine.” Hettie sighs. “Di’s fine.”
A well-rehearsed conversation:
But why’s she got to live alone?
She doesn’t live alone, Mum. Her landlady’s in the room next door.
Still. There’s something about it. It’s not right, is it? Anything could happen.
There’s no use in explaining that was the point; and if Hettie had her way she’d be living there, too.
She looks up at them: Her mother, thin hair pulled back in a bun, wearing the wraparound overall that Hettie hates, because it makes her look like what she is—a charwoman who has to go out every morning and clean other women’s homes. The tidy little kitchen. And Fred, chewing, eyes glazed—so pale you can almost see the wall behind.
For this she has to give over half her pay. Fifteen shillings a week for this. On the table on a Monday night. Every week since her brother came back useless and her dad died and left them in the lurch. She’d be able to board at Di’s for less. And have some money left over for clothes.
You’re not one of those anarchists, are you?
They’re not real, she thinks. Neither of them. Her mother or her brother. Neither is this kitchen. None of this is real.
I want to blow things up, too.
Hettie imagines an explosion, enormous, the house made rubble, the street in flames, the wide sky and stars above her, and walking out into the vastness with ashes fluttering in her hair.
“What?” says her mother.
“What?” says Hettie.
“You were smiling.”
“Was I?”
Her mother’s face darkens. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” she says, shaking her head.
Then she looks down at her plate, and lifts a forkful of mutton to her mouth.