24

Maison Dieu. The House Struck by Fire. Ruin, destruction, deception.

At first Julia unleashed her anguish to coincide with the noise of the trains rumbling on the main line out of Paddington, then she stopped bothering. It was around then that she understood she had fetched up in what amounted to a brothel.

Fetched up.

That sounded involuntary, a beaching or a washing ashore, so much flotsam and jetsam from shipwreck. It was not. It was deliberate. She could have afforded better lodgings, but she had chosen not to. She put as little value on herself as she felt valued.

Down the brown-wallpapered passageway day and night came the brisk clip of heels and the heavy tread of shoes. Through the thin walls, thuds and the protesting shrieks and squeals of mattress springs. False cries of pleasure – Oh oh oh oh – and the grunts of pleasure paid for. Sometimes, there was a slap or two and a tumbling about. After, the heavy tread of shoes rapidly walking a shamed, satisfied appetite away.

There was a greasy floral counterpane on the sagging bed, a cheap chest of drawers, one drawer missing a handle and half clinging on to the other, a bar fire that ate sixpences and smelled of singed dust, and a washbasin from whose lime-scaled tap she drank. She didn’t unpack her case. There was no need: she didn’t get dressed.

Marie, who was one of the working girls, rapped on her door sometimes. She was sixteen or so and hardened, her youth arousing pity, which her hardening kept at arm’s length. (Her real name was Joan, she confided, but she thought Marie ‘suited her better’.) Once, she brought Julia brandy in a tooth mug. Other times, at Julia’s request, cigarettes from the tobacconist at the corner. She had spots, which she thickly powdered.

Marie went on the streets in the late afternoon, but the trade only really picked up a bit later, she explained. Tuesdays and Thursdays her pimp came round, collected the cash and left his receipts in the purple bruises on her temples and the cigarette burns on her wrists and ankles.

Julia did not go out. She didn’t eat – or much – and after a while the hard little knot of her self-rationed stomach dissolved into its own emptiness and the swimming lightness of her head seemed like the most beautiful and finely wrought veil of misery anyone could ever hope to drape between themselves and the great, yawning caverns of misery the world had concealed from her until now.

Grief – and what was this if not grief? – was stupefying, exhausting. No one ever told you that. You could cry yourself to sleep, hiccoughing, nose streaming with snail trails of mucus, as perhaps you had once done as a child after some small monstrous injustice, or you could simply let the grey wash over until lifting your head from the flat dead pillow and remembering your own name was more effort than could be borne.

Yet there were times when you woke suddenly at half past four in the morning, heart hammering, into a perfect lucidity, and all that stopped you from throwing yourself out of the window was the fact you weren’t high enough from the ground to be certain of killing yourself. These times were the worst although admittedly the competition was stiff.

It was impossible – logically impossible, it seemed – not to think. Round and round went her thoughts and, each time, each circuit, they bumped into Dougie and what he had taught her.

Each memory was a mine and there were triggers to all of them. Sometimes, in this Paddington boarding house rumbling with trains, a line from Rimbaud would float to the surface of her mind to torment her – La vie est la farce à mener par tous (‘Life is the farce we are all forced to endure’). Or a scene from one of the many films she and Dougie had watched together and exhaustively analysed afterwards; he was very keen on the Marx Brothers.

He was teaching her still. He was teaching her what it felt like to have a black pulpy hollow where your heart had been torn out, its edges seared and crisped.

Vagina dentata. And here, the mermaid’s purse she had picked up on the shingle the day she had met him tumbled out of the pocket of her summer dress, that very first time.

Protect my family.

From what? The war? Dougie was the bomb that had gone off in her life. He was the explosion. Now only pieces remained.

Every afternoon the organ grinder played in the street outside. The first time she had taken pity on this poor man living off the coppers of the poor and thrown coins out of the window. Or perhaps it was self-pity that she had felt. A mistake, at any rate, because he had been back every day since and she had to keep away from the window until he was gone. He wore an old dusty topper with pheasant’s feathers stuck in the hatband and a frock coat coming apart at the seams. No animal beggars, however. A tethered monkey or a moulting parrot would have been too much to take. It was hard enough to hear the jarring, tinny music, out of tune and out of time: ‘After the Ball is Over’, again and again and again.

Who am I? she interrogated the mirror, not bothering to make the ‘best face’ she had made in mirrors all her life.

Nobody, was the honest answer she supplied on the mirror’s behalf. Not wife, not lover, not daughter, not mother.

Nobody at all. All sense of herself had gone down the rabbit hole of these other vanished identities. She lacked even the substance to haunt her own room.

Later she was not certain how long she spent in the boarding house. She remembered watching a fly buzz on the windowsill several mornings in a row and wondering if it was the same fly; she remembered the brandy in the tooth mug and the organ grinder. Time didn’t matter. There was so much of it.

Days went by. Sleep, once her friend with the velvet cosh, began to be a problem. The mutations of grief shifted to wakefulness of such a stark and uncompromising variety that it seemed to exist outside herself as a bullying kind of invigilator or interrogator, hoicking her back from the brink of unconsciousness with the painful glare of a bare light bulb shone in the eyes.

A rap on the door.

She broke off a discussion she was having with the wallpaper, which was threatening to become a little heated, and listened.

Another rap. ‘Are you there?’

Julia opened the door a crack.

Marie said, ‘I heard voices.’

‘Have the Germans come?’

‘Not the last time I looked.’

‘You don’t have any more of that brandy, do you? I’m having a little difficulty sleeping.’

‘No,’ said Marie. She fanned a hand in front of her face. ‘Phew. You want to have a wash, smarten yourself up a bit.’

Julia opened the door wider. ‘Perhaps you might suggest a few outfits.’ She indicated her suitcase, open but still unpacked. The wallpaper quietened at her audacity.

Marie ventured into the room and knelt on the floor. ‘This is nice,’ she said, tugging out the frock that Dougie had always liked.

‘Have it,’ said Julia. She went on saying ‘have it’ until all her best clothes were gone. That felt good.

‘Who’s he?’ Marie held up a photograph.

‘I think you’d better go now,’ said Julia.

Marie put the photograph back. ‘He looks like you.’

‘He’s my son.’

‘Is he dead?’ She gathered the clothes in her arms.

‘Only to me,’ said Julia.

Mattie followed Marie up the stairs. ‘She’s here?’

‘I told you she was.’

‘Did she ask you to ring me?’

‘No,’ said Marie. ‘You was the only one who was in.’ She handed over the small red address book she had taken from Julia’s case, although not the money she had taken from her handbag. ‘Well, what else could I do? All this carry-on is bad for business. The punters don’t like it one bit.’ She twisted a finger on her temple. ‘If you ask me she belongs in the loony bin.’

‘Mattie,’ said Julia, opening the door. Frank’s sister, she reminded herself. Wren. Plain-speaking. Square-built. Dead fiancé.

‘Get yourself dressed,’ said Mattie. ‘Quickly. I’ve a taxi waiting.’

Julia went over to the window. The cabbie had switched off the engine and was reading a newspaper.

Mattie said, ‘Hurry up.’

Julia came away from the window. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Good question.’ Mattie held up a jumper and skirt. ‘Put these on.’

Julia untied her dressing gown.

‘I don’t understand.’

Mattie eyed her. ‘That makes two of us.’

She put on the jumper, then the skirt. Then her shoes, then her coat.

Mattie picked up the dressing gown by one of its sleeves and dropped it in the bottom drawer of the chest. Kicked it shut. A handle fell off.

In the cab, Mattie told the driver to take them to 43 Marlborough Road.

Out of the window the hectic streets changed from poor to middling, from middling to comfortable, then back to middling again. Where were they going? thought Julia: a clinic, an institution of some kind? For she seemed fit for nothing else, and part of her welcomed incarceration, doors slamming, shot bolts, straitjackets.

The taxi came to a stop.

‘Where are we?’

‘My place.’

Time passed no faster or slower at the Marlborough Road flat than it did anywhere else. But a few decent meals and a few baths later, Julia was no longer talking to wallpaper. (Mattie’s wallpaper kept its views to itself, unlike Mattie.) She still wasn’t sleeping much, but you couldn’t have it all.

‘He’s left me with nothing,’ Julia said, one evening during supper.

‘Eat your soup,’ said Mattie.

‘I was an ordinary person before I met him. I had an ordinary life.’

Mattie broke off a bit of bread. ‘We’re all ordinary. Dougie included.’ She paused. ‘Dougie especially.’

Julia went on, ‘It was as if I was living in a shell and he cracked it wide open. And now –’ She fluttered her fingers.

‘He must have heard you tapping on the inside asking to be let out,’ Mattie said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Simply that like most men of his type he prefers to push at an open door, even if it takes a bit of pushing. You talk as if you had no choice in the matter.’

Julia stared at the table. ‘I’m not asking for sympathy.’

‘I’m not offering you any.’ Mattie was aware she had offered much more, which was most of her current leave. ‘Look, go back to him, if that’s what you want. I gather there’s a vacancy. He’s sent that continuity girl packing, whatever she’s called. Go back to him. On past form, he’d probably have you. You could be another Caro, hanging about for years like a dog begging for table scraps.’

Oddly, the news he had got rid of the bitch was no comfort. ‘I don’t want to be another Caro.’

‘Then you have to be very careful how you represent this to yourself. You will only move on when you are brave enough to admit you played a role in it.’

Later, when Julia lay sleepless in the tiny back bedroom where Mattie had put her up, she understood for the first time that she had tried to pay for happiness with other people’s misery. This was how the gods punished you, she finally realized. They made you live with what you had done. If Richard had felt one tenth of the pain she felt now, that was still agony. As for Peter – didn’t she owe him a better version of herself? Whether he wanted any version of his mother at all was a different question that only time would answer.

The next day Mattie went back on duty. She was no longer a plotter and now worked office hours for a commander at the Admiralty. Julia cooked a meal and had it ready on the table for her when she came home.

‘If this is the best you can do in the kitchen, no wonder he chucked you,’ said Mattie, regarding her plate.

Julia’s mouth dropped open. Then she began to laugh.

Mattie laughed too. ‘So what else did you do today, apart from waste our rations?’

‘I enlisted.’

Mattie put down her fork. ‘That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said since you came here.’