Eighty years ago, or thereabouts, Nell had shared a governess with the Dixie girls, Vi and V. and May, the daughters of a Major in the Blues and Greys.
It was V. who had been the particular friend. Vi had been five years older and bossy, May, three years younger and rather sharp. Nell, the landlady’s daughter, had been in awe of all three of them and fearfully in awe of the parents; Mrs. Dixie, a remote, enduring woman sitting upright and frowning at her sewing in an uncomfortable chair, pursing her Scottish lips; and the Major, a voice, a moustache a lubricious gleam, an Olympian shadow springing down the stairs. Major Dixie had been often from home.
The Dixies had been long-term lodgers with Nell’s mother in the North Yorkshire town of Pickering, a high cold blowy place near the garrison in the middle of moors. It had suited the Dixies well, for they had come from bracing Peebles. Peebles they had so loved that in Nell’s ears it came to be confused sometimes with heaven. She would wonder if she would ever get there.
The governess one day went hastily home to it and after that the governess was Vi, who kept a page or so ahead of V. and May and Nell, reading everything up an hour before the lesson. Nell’s mother was not charged for her daughter’s education but the rent of the Dixies was reduced from twenty-five shillings a week to sixteen (family rate, food, heating inclusive) though this was never mentioned. The Dixies somehow made it clear to Nell that they were being good to her.
They saw to her Yorkshire accent for a start. Nell at over eighty, lying in the dark sometimes, and thinking of her days in the schoolroom—that is to say in her mother’s dining room; cruets on the sideboard, woolly mats, a malicious, razor-toothed plant, dry as buckram on a tall jardinière in the window—Nell saw more clearly than her recent landscapes the Dixie girls all twisting and squirming with glee at her voice. ‘Bread and serrip. Bread and serrip.’ She remembered her blush and sometimes so intensely that she blushed again. Blushing is rare in the old. She saw again behind the rosy bobble curtains and the governess’s wretched face the white light of the moors. She heard the north wind over the scratchy black heather.
The Dixies all went away, following the flag, following the Major. Nell lived on for years in Pickering and kept on with helping at home where officers’ families were always coming and going. During the Great War she married a batman of one of these officers and afterwards settled with him in Leeds. He was a cobbler, a silent man who had survived the Somme. They had a baby daughter.
Nell however did not lose touch with the formidable Dixie family since the one thing that the white-faced governess had instilled in her—apart from the unacceptability of the Yorkshire accent—was the necessity of Correspondence to a civilised life. The first duty of the day for a woman—unless of course she were of the servant class—was to attend to her letters.
This as it happened was entirely to Nell’s taste and she would probably have done it anyway, for she was a creature so formed that she felt nothing to have properly occurred unless she had communicated it in writing. Writing to people about other people was her relish and her huge delight and though she could not manage to write as she had been taught, straight after breakfast and for the first post, after the slop-pails, the scrubbing brush, the possing-tub, the mangle, the range, the scouring of pans with soda, the black-leading of the grate, the brasses, the making of dinner for herself and the cobbler and Hilda the robust baby and the clearing of everything up, down she would sit to her letters. She wrote with a smile upon her face or with lips tight with emotion, with frown-lines of righteous indignation and sometimes even with tears a-flow. The most minute events of the terrace in Leeds were made radiant by Nell and born earlier or later she might well have been advised to branch out and become a novelist, brimming as she did with such immediacy.
As it was, she had a very happy time and the Dixie girls as the unselfconscious pages flowed forth from Leeds into India, Kenya, Malta, Basingstoke, Cyprus, Aden, Cheltenham and Singapore called out to each other, ‘Here’s dear Nell again,’ raising amused eyebrows. They always read the letters, often two or three times, and V. who was the chief recipient kept many of them in a box. ‘Dear Nell,’ they all said to each other. ‘Such excitements.’ There was a slight uneasiness in their voices sometimes—or at least in the voice of Vi or May—that Nell should be so entertaining, so articulate, so full of gusto. Was it not just a bit forward of her to write with such self-confidence? But V., who was nice, said not at all. She looked forward to dear Nell’s pretty handwriting on an envelope. ‘Well, she owes that to us,’ said Vi.
V.—it was short for Victoria—replied to Nell’s letters very dutifully, as she too had been taught; never starting a paragraph with an I, always answering information received point for point before presenting anything new, always remembering to send messages to the cobbler and the baby—never forgetting the baby’s birthday. Sometimes she enclosed sprigs of colonial vegetation—a silken purple poppy-flower pressed almost transparent like a butterfly’s wing, or a squelched hot orchid from Kuala Lumpur or a dry little shower of bay. The Dixie girls communicated best in symbols, being not much hands at describing. V. alone could now and then wax voluble on the subject that meant most to her, which was her health—or rather her sickness and the sicknesses of others.
Sickness and death. These were the enemy. The Dixie girls who had so upsettingly to their parents not been boys had need of enemies, enemies through whom, though they could not be despatched by sword or shot, they could demonstrate their bravery.
How very bravely for instance V. set out to do down the onslaughts of the flesh. She ate little, she lived in cold houses, she walked far in bad weather on fragile ankles, she spent almost nothing on clothes; and after her parents’ death she returned to England to a freezing address on the Kent coast spending her evenings sewing sides-to-middles of old sheets for charity, and darning for herself, and often writing her delicate letters with fingers blue and pleated at the tip. The Major had died of drink and Mrs. Dixie of desiccation. There was no money left. Said V., ‘We are in penury.’ Vi had taken a job as a teacher at a dubious private school near Wokingham and May had ‘taken a job’ moving pieces of paper about in an office that had something to do with a kind godfather, and had a bed-sit in Ealing. ‘We are fallen on hard times,’ wrote V. to Nell from the pretty Kent cottage beneath her father’s fine portrait and before a fire of one small coal. ‘It is a very good thing that we are Dixies, or we could not bear it.’
Nell found this statement totally unsurprising. She had believed for so long that the Dixies were significant that their superiority to everyone she knew was notched in her brain. Dixie to her meant Hohenzollern, Battenberg and Teck. She knew that had the Czar or Charlemagne or the Prince of Wales come riding by and stopped in front of her she would have been perfectly all right so long as the patrician Dixies had been at her side. They knew the rules.
Once, when she was thirty or so Nell was invited to meet V. in London to witness the marriage procession of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. She and V. arrived early upon the Embankment and took up positions in the front row. Nell carried a little flag to wave hurray. V. in her threadbare coat of ancient design simply stood, but as the carriages came by it seemed the merest accident that V. was on the pavement and not bowing and twirling her wrist from the inside of one of them. ‘Such a pity about the hat,’ she said. ‘The Queen knows never to wear a big hat. She knows that we all want to see her face. Poor Marina of course is Greek,’ and she led Nell off to a Lyons tea-shop for a little something. V. had to eat a little something every three hours, otherwise she fainted. ‘Oh poor V.,’ said plump Nell. ‘And you’re so terribly thin.’
‘All Dixies are thin.’
‘But you are really frighteningly thin,’ said Nell. ‘I do hope you’ve seen someone.’
‘Oh, dear me yes. I’ve seen half a dozen. The girls took me to Harley Street.’
‘That must have cost—’ said Nell before remembering that prices are never mentioned. ‘And what did they say?’
‘They said,’ said V. looking across the small sandwiches, ‘they said I was to eat something every three hours.’
‘But couldn’t you eat more?’ asked Nell who after twenty-four hours in May’s bed-sitting room (which had turned out to be a very nice flat with three bedrooms but a kitchen with only a kettle) was famished. ‘Couldn’t I—well, wouldn’t you let me buy you something substantial? Some baked beans?’
V.’s narrow, birdish, sweet face for a moment almost lost its stiff upper lip. ‘I’m afraid there’s no hope of beans,’ she said and went on to discuss train time-tables back to Kent and her mid-week ticket which must not be wasted. She said that there was just time to see a film about Henry VIII that was on at Victoria.
During the bed scene with Anne Boleyn, V. had to leave as she felt a faint coming on, and they went to find a little something in the railway buffet. Nell went to Kings Cross and ate seven sausages and felt disgraceful. As soon as she got home to Leeds she sat down at once to thank V. for the wonderful outing.
‘Particularly the film,’ she wrote and paused. V. had pronounced the film shocking. ‘So realistic,’ she wrote with delighted malice.
‘Laughing?’ asked the cobbler.
‘Oh no,’ said Nell ashamed, ‘I’m very fond of V. She’s so poor you know. It’s just as well she’s a Dixie.’
‘I’d have thought you’d have got all you wanted, down in London.’
The cobbler was a heavy man who sat slumped with a pipe and would never put a bit of coal on the fire or draw a curtain, but he was splendid in bed which had been a glorious surprise to Nell who had expected something unpleasant or just to be endured. Her one experience of sex before marriage had been a fumbling on a landing with Major Dixie in Pickering when she was twelve, an experience she had shared with the governess had she known it (Mrs. Dixie had) and with many others. Her marriage, her female self, she never dreamed of even hinting at in her letters to V. and was delighted and surprised by her confident knowledge that she should not. She had mastered an area of etiquette that would never be demanded of the Dixie girls. And much else unknown to the Dixie girls.
At this time, and it was the first time, she began to find it difficult to provide material for letters to V. about sickness and death. It was a relief when the baby came and she could announce nappy rash and gripes and the possibility of infantile thrush, even though V. replied imprecisely about these, countering them, fielding them, with her own familiar symptoms, bravely borne.
So the years passed and everyone grew old and Nell’s husband died and Hilda grew to be a large, angry sort of woman very high up in local government. When Nell was eighty-four Hilda retired and they went to live at a sea-side place where Hilda had had meaningful holidays during the menopause with a woman called Audrey, now dead. She took up residence on a pink housing-estate set out in crescents on the ugly edge of a pretty mediaeval town. Gulls screamed, you could hear the waves on rough days and there was a sea-light sometimes in the sky and wide sunsets, but all you could see from the windows were identical windows opposite, very nicely painted, grass well-cut and a shaped hedge.
It was an elderly crescent. Few children played. Nobody much passed by. Nell had one side of a twin-pack semi-det, Hilda the other, an excellent scheme. ‘I can hear her if she knocks through the wall,’ said Hilda, ‘and she’s not incontinent yet.’ Nell was grateful in her way and always waved as Hilda went charging down the next-door path each morning to her clean and glittering little car. Hilda, though retired from London, was becoming politically indispensable to the South-East coast. She shopped and cooked for her mother, bursting in each evening with supper from the microwave under a plastic dome. Sometimes on Sundays they ate lunch together. Nell often now called it Sunday dinner in the old way and in the old Yorkshire voice that had reasserted itself as had some nice old words she wondered at even as she spoke them. Her fitted, hot and cold bathroom basin for example had become ‘the wash-stand’ and the dustman’s crunching-lorry had become a ‘dray’.
When Nell had become ill with bronchial pneumonia one winter there had been a day when Hilda had stayed home from work to see the doctor who had suggested that now, or at least during the winter months, might not Nell move in with her daughter, but Hilda had said, ‘Now about that I have to be very firm. No choices. To be happy and secure, old people must have no choices,’ and the doctor, humbled, had gone away. He called on Nell once unexpectedly and found her writing letters in a chair by the window. ‘Oh, very thankful,’ she said. ‘Everybody’s very kind. I do just wish there was somebody in the day-time and the view is rather poor.’
Outings were suggested. Minibuses filled with doleful invalids arrived at the door. The invalids looked out at Nell on the step with little enthusiasm and Nell said to the woman in authority who was trying to lure her towards them that after all she didn’t feel up to it. ‘I get these little faints,’ she said in a Dixie voice and went in and shut the door and despised herself. ‘Your mother needs mental stimulation,’ the authorities told Hilda.
So one day when it was extremely dark and wet, dark and wet as it can only be in sea-side Kent in winter, and when Hilda had no committees, she put her mother in the car and took her for a drive. They sizzled along the sea-front, windscreen wipers going a-lick, lorries flinging spray all over them and the wind banging. Somewhere along the road beside the invisible white cliffs of Dover Nell said it reminded her of Pickering.
‘Pickering?’ said Hilda. ‘Pickering’s in the middle of moors.’
‘Oh, it’s quite near the sea.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I like the East coast. Pickering’s North East. I’m glad you brought me East again, Hilda. It’s better than London.’
‘I can’t see you in London.’
‘I’ve been down here before you know. V. lived down here for years. Vi and May moved down to join her. They all lived somewhere down here at the end.’
‘Are they all dead now, those women?’
‘I got out of touch,’ said Nell, ‘after V. died.’
‘Awful snobs. I couldn’t bear them,’ said Hilda.
‘I liked V.,’ said Nell and found herself weeping. The tears wetted her round cheeks. She thought of the schoolroom in snow-light, the golden serrip and the Duchess of Kent. ‘V. was the last person to write me a letter every week,’ said Nell. ‘It’s a sad thing when there’s nobody to write you a weekly letter.’
‘Nobody writes me a weekly letter,’ said Hilda.
‘That’s because I live with you. I’d be writing to you if I didn’t.’
Hilda remained unmoved by this information.
‘I have to think to find people to write to now,’ said Nell. ‘It’s people’s children I write to now, and some of them are getting old. I miss V.’
‘Was she the one who was always having little rests? Frustrated spinster?’ A container truck from Belgium bore down on Hilda’s car and tried to fling it into the sea but she stuck to the wheel and held her course, thrusting upward her jaw. ‘Those women needed a good analyst. Idle. Depressed. We’re almost there. I’m not sure it’s not too wet to get out.’
They were visiting Walmer castle where the Duke of Wellington had breathed his last. It was one pound fifty, seventy-five p. for old-age pensioners and open until six o’clock. Both Nell and Hilda were old-age pensioners so that it was a cheap outing, and also there were few steps, which suited Hilda who had a hip. The gloom of the afternoon had turned to the dark of evening for it was after five o’clock. The rain fell.
Hilda let her mother, whose hips were in order, unlatch herself from her seat-belt and watched her walk light-footed to the ticket-office inside the dark stone keep. Then she went to the car-park, for the tickets were to be her mother’s treat.
The ticket-collector looked surprised to see Nell. There was no sign of other visitors. ‘What weather,’ said Nell, but he turned his shoulder from her and went on reading the East Kent Mercury. Nell went to wait for Hilda on the half-landing of the shallow staircase between the portraits of Wellington and Napoleon after Waterloo. ‘Such a proud nose, Wellington’s,’ thought Nell. ‘So strained you can almost see the bone shining through. It’s a bit like Major Dixie’s.’ She turned to Napoleon who was surveying the world that had bowled him over the cliff. The pale, pale face. The wisps of blown scant hair. The plebeian neck. Too big a hat, like Marina of Kent. The eyes burned with the desolation of the eternal dark. Hilda coming up, dot and carry, said it was an upsetting picture.
They walked along a cold corridor in to the Duke of Wellington’s death chamber where the shabby chair he died in stood untouched since he had last sat in it. Near it stood his iron camp-bed with its single dreary blanket. ‘It’s very austere,’ said Nell. ‘Of course, that’s the Army.’ Standing in the greenish shadow of the window alcove was a woman, lean, shoulderless, colourless, in faded clothes. She seemed to be part of the texture of the scoured grey wall behind her. Nell thought, ‘It’s V. She is not dead,’ but as the woman came forward she saw that it was only May.
They stared at each other for a moment and then May said, ‘Why, it’s little bread and serrip. I thought you were gone long ago Nell.’
They walked together round the Duke’s apartments. They examined the furniture that had belonged to an assortment of the great—William Pitt, Lord Byron. ‘It’s rather damp here,’ said Nell. ‘It needs some warmth to put the bloom back in it, and a warmed wax polish.’
May said that Queen Victoria and all her children had used the castle for sea-side holidays. ‘Just think,’ she said, ‘all the little crinolines swinging about.’ Conversation waned.
‘I expect there’s central-heating now,’ said May. ‘In the State apartments. Where the Queen Mother stays. She often comes here you know. But then, she’s used to draughts in Scotland.’
‘I’m sure they must have done something about a radiator for the Queen Mother,’ said Nell.
‘Of course the Duke had no need of it,’ said May. ‘The Army doesn’t hear of it.’
‘Well, I do,’ said Hilda, ‘and I think we should be hurrying up.’
The two old women went out by the draw-bridge, Hilda limping behind. ‘I’ll write,’ said Nell. ‘It has been wonderful. When did—? Did Vi—?’
‘Vi went seven years ago. Two years after V.’
‘Time goes,’ said Nell. ‘I’ll write. You have my address? We’re in the book.’
‘Goodbye,’ they all said. ‘Goodbye,’ and left May in the dark rain looking autocratically about for a taxi.
As Nell had forgotten to ask May for her address, nothing came of this meeting. No telephone call came to the crescent and Nell found that somehow she didn’t want to look up May’s address. Hilda forgot. In the Spring, though, another outing took place and as Nell and her daughter flew between the tall trees and the sea near St Margaret’s Bay Nell said, waking from some dream, ‘The Dixies. They used to live here. This is where I stayed with V. and Vi. Oh—in the forties. Oh, I could take you straight to the house.’
‘Well, all right. Something to do,’ said Hilda swinging seawards, missing a cat. Up and round the sandy curving road they went, past good houses in wide blowy gardens. ‘It reminded them all of Brittany,’ said Nell. ‘One year the Major took them all to Brittany. It was before tourists.’ She felt proud to have known people who knew where to go abroad without being told. ‘Not many knew Brittany before the War,’ she said.
‘I suppose the Bretons did,’ said Hilda. ‘I don’t know why you’re so in love with those Dixies.’
‘Not in love,’ said Nell, ‘I don’t know what it is. Here. Up here,’ she said. ‘That court-yard.’
And so it was. ‘You’ve still a memory,’ said Hilda accusingly. ‘But you’d better take a grip I’m afraid, Mother, because you’re going to be disappointed. I very much fear,’ and she crashed the brakes and hobbled from the car to ring a door-bell with authority. She gazed about her as if the courtyard needed dealing with, which it did not.
The door opened, Nell saw, on pine walls, an Aga cooker, dried herbs in bunches, a wine-rack and a girl who looked fourteen with a baby under her arm and a tail of hair swinging cheerfully about behind her as she turned to look for an address. Music and a smell of garlic and warmth floated out towards Hilda’s car.
‘Moved,’ said Hilda, returning, buckling herself in, ‘four months ago. Can’t find the forwarding address but it’s a nursing-home down the road. She described it. Not far from the castle. D’you want to go and find it?’
Nell, surprised by choice, said yes, she did and looked sideways at Hilda’s strong profile, grateful. ‘After all, nothing else to do,’ said Hilda, ‘unless we go back for another look at Wellington’s death-chamber. Shouldn’t take long.’
But there were several candidates for May Dixie’s latest resting place. At least six large, gable-ended houses that could only be nursing-homes flanked the castle and the sea. Hilda disappeared inside the huge unlocked front door of one of them, a grey-green flaking edifice with shutters drawn across many windows and heavy net obscuring others. Nell sat in the car in the silent circular drive. In one window stood three drooping peacock feathers. From another a white monkey-face peeped. Nell looked at the empty flower-beds.
After some time Hilda returned, looking shaken. ‘No reply,’ she said. ‘Nobody there.’
‘Nobody?’
‘Knocked on five doors. Great big doors. Golf-clubs in the hall—awful, sandy-looking old tiles. Golf-clubs had spiders’ webs in them. Everything silent but after you’d knocked it grew more silent. Listened at one door first and there was a medical sort of voice. I knocked and it stopped. You could smell the hypodermics. And that other smell. That rich, geriatric smell.’
‘I don’t like a poor geriatric smell,’ said Nell who had once lately been in a public geriatric ward. ‘It doesn’t sound like the Dixies. I didn’t know you had such a fancy, Hilda.’
‘You’re never to go to a place like that, Ma, never,’ and Nell in sudden joy looked at her with love and said she didn’t intend to and thank goodness she had no money. ‘I wouldn’t mind a nice State home though, where you all sit round nodding off or watch the telly. And you get your meals brought on trays. And all the respectable ones change their characters and start swearing.’
Hilda rolled the usual hostile glance.
‘And you all wear old bits, and have nips of sherry.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Hilda. ‘God help us all at the end, that’s all. All I hope is that I go fast and soon.’
‘Oh, not too soon,’ said Nell. ‘Not too fast.’
‘Couldn’t be too fast for me,’ said Hilda. ‘Here, what’s this one? This looks more like Dixies.’
A very spruce, large house on a corner, newly-decorated in rich deep cream which showed off the red brick, stood before them. A brass plate announced The Grove and beneath it a brown plate added ‘Retirement Home. No tradesmen.’ Along all the pretty french windows on the ground floor only the top of one white hospital screen was sinister. Polished fat bulbs were coming up in all the borders and on one of the balconies upstairs, facing the sea, there already stood a summer basket chair. ‘I remember that chair,’ said Nell.
Hilda marched up the path and a smiling, very clean young man with a gold earring and holding a bright orange duster answered the door. There were two or three moments of intense conversation and Hilda came back and sat firmly and sensibly behind the wheel again. ‘Bad news,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid, Mother. Bad news. She’s only just died. About a month ago.’
‘So odd,’ said Nell. ‘Coming to the door with a duster. She wouldn’t have liked that.’
‘They’re very upset,’ said Hilda. In her new vulnerability after the cobwebbed golf-clubs, the whispering demon doctors, she looked warily towards her mother to see how she had taken it.
‘D’you know, I thought she might be dead,’ said Nell. ‘Somehow I had a feeling. I never really liked May. She had a mean little face when you come to think about it.’
They drove more slowly away. ‘She didn’t die there,’ said Hilda. ‘Not at The Grange. They’d had her temporarily moved while they were being re-decorated. They sounded genuinely upset. That man said she was one of the old school. Proud she was going to go through with something. The young man said it had been a big shock to them.’
‘Well, it would be,’ said Nell. ‘Very expensive those places. It must be quite difficult to fill them up. I wonder if she took the old furniture. I expect she left them that chair. I wonder who got the rest? I never really liked May.’
‘But a nice young man,’ said Hilda and thought, ‘There’s something queer here: I’m beginning to talk like her and she like me.’
‘Diamonds in his ears,’ said Nell. ‘There’s a lot of that about. I’d not have thought May would have cared for it. I wonder why she died.’
‘Shock. Heart. Being moved at that time of life. Too old for hotels.’
‘I’ve always had a fancy for hotels,’ said Nell. ‘I never stayed in one.’
‘The Grand Duke,’ said Hilda. ‘Good Lord—there it is.’
‘That!’ said Nell. It was a tall slit of a building painted purple with dark red curtains and dirty brass rails across the inside of the windows, which were grimy. A tremendous noise of shouting and bleeping, the booming of fruit-machines and a general din of youth issued from within. A second door stood beside the open door of the pub. Painted beside it with an arrow pointed upwards was the word ‘Rooms’. Hilda’s car had been halted outside this pub on a roundabout solid with traffic en route eastward for France and westward for the Medway towns. They were greatly intertwined. A frightful place. Nell unclicked her seat-belt and got out.
‘What in hell are you doing?’ said Hilda, reversing.
‘Oh, I must just have a—’
‘Get back in the car at once.’ But behind her the seething lorries bellowed and honked.
‘Park, dear, and come back for me,’ said Nell and vanished inside the pub where she sat down at an iron table in the corner. It was awash with beer. Her feet did not touch the floor. She swung them.
A man came across to her, very fat. The rolls of fat showed through his tee-shirt like the rolls of a brisket of beef. He wiped the table. He had an old-young baby-face. Pouting, he watched the damp cloth moving. Outside, the traffic made the whole of the Grand Duke vibrate. He had to shout above it and above the clashing of the music.
‘It’s nearly closing time.’
‘I don’t really want—’ said Nell. ‘My friend died here.’
‘Not Miss Dixie?’ The fat man sat down. ‘Oh, my dear! She seemed so comfortable. Such a surprise. It had been her own choice to come you know. You can’t blame Gary. Something to do with Wellington. She scarcely spoke. Oh, she was a real old stager. A lady. We took all her meals up.’
‘Well, she wasn’t really my friend, it was her sister,’ said Nell.
‘She had a very old-fashioned voice,’ said the fat man. ‘A pleasure to hear her.’
‘It was the Army,’ said Nell.
A cheer went up. Somebody had won a fortune. A robot pulsated, spoke from a deep throat. Two young men began to fight on the floor and others to shout and laugh. ‘That’s the Army, too,’ said the fat man. ‘The Marines from down the road. When she was here she was on about some Blues and Greys. There’s always been soldiers here. But she kept her distance. She’d only known officers. It wasn’t what she’d expected.’
‘I could live here,’ said Nell. ‘I could just live here nicely. Could I just get a look at May’s room?’
Outside they went and up the steep stairs and inside. The room seemed all to be covered in delicate grey mole-skin. When you touched it, it moved, for it was dust. ‘We found her just over there,’ said the man. ‘All huddled. Right away from the view. One of the few things she said was that at The Grange you had “the Duke’s view”—whatever that meant.’ He pointed a toe about on the dusty Turkey carpet. On the carpet, some of them stacked up, were a great many little red and gold chairs and a high knobbly bed. There were dried grasses in jars and great windows at each end of the room. The sea boomed. Nell said, ‘I could enjoy it here.’
‘It’s the traffic’s the problem,’ said the fat man. ‘The noise. There’s the terrible noise of the roundabout. You can’t deny it. Accidents all the time. There’s one now. Can you hear it?’
She could and it turned out to have been poor angry Hilda who had gone slap into a tanker and was no more. Nell moved to the pub and became a fixture there in her corner seat, living on for some years. She drank sweet sherry all day long and grew fatter than the landlord, rejoicing in the clamour within and without. The Yorkshire accent was gentle and it flew free. She swung her foot in time to the terrible music.
Sometimes she talked to the soldiers about other soldiers and old wars and of her husband who had never once mentioned the Somme. They asked her what the Somme was, and she was unsure.
‘Who is she?’ new recruits would ask. ‘Her in the corner?’
‘Don’t know. She was one of The Dixie Girls or something.’
‘What’s the Dixie Girls?’
‘Don’t know. Some old song and dance act. Nobody’s ever heard of them.’