At the Break of Day (3 page)

Her bedroom was silent, empty. She had no energy to draw the drapes across the full-length window, she just let her clothes drop to the floor in the bathroom and stood beneath the cold water, wanting the sharpness, the intake of breath, the soothing of the pain which could not be soothed.

They walked in Central Park. There were tennis courts.

‘Will the Lake Club raise the money for another one?’ she asked and Frank nodded.

‘They usually do.’

Would Joe take someone else to the next Subscription Dance? Would he kiss her breasts too? If she had stayed, would they have been able to take it all more slowly? Would she have been able to ask him to kiss her gently, to hold her in his arms, not press his lips against her nipples, not yet. Not until she was less of a child. Not until they really knew one another.

Would Frank and Nancy still sit around the pool, would the glasses still stick to the table? Would the world go on?

Frank had stopped and was pointing his pipe towards the grey rocks, the drying grass.

‘This was covered with squatters’ shacks in the Depression but wars are good for us. We make money, we save money. Now we need something to spend it on, so we’ll have a boom. Poor old Europe won’t. It’s been drained white. It’ll be tight back home, Rosie.’

But London wasn’t home, and neither was Pennsylvania any more. She was in no man’s land. Didn’t anybody see that but her?

That night when midnight had been and gone she stood at the window of her room, a strange room in a strange city. She listened to the garbage trucks wheezing and clanking, the air-conditioning humming, the police sirens wailing, and knew that she had felt this lonely before. She recognised the panic which surged and tore into her, gripping her hands into fists, squeezing the breath from her throat. She recognised the pain which tumbled along with it.

It was the pain Grandpa had tried to hug and kiss away so long ago on the wharf at Liverpool but he had not been able to touch the rawness inside her because he was the one saying she couldn’t stay.

He was the one saying those words again.

Rosie held the drape tightly, screwing it up, holding it to her mouth, leaning her head against the glass. All around her was the humming, the wailing, the clanking, and now there were tears too. Tears which turned to sobs and the drape was creased and damp when she turned to her bed, but even then there was no peace because the waves of the lake lapped and rippled and its glare hurt her eyes as she dipped in and out of sleep. In and out. In and out, until she woke, sweat-drenched, the sheets twisted about her limbs.

But it was still night, and the water was cold from the shower as she let it run over her face, her body. She was almost a woman now and had been a child when Grandpa had held her with the cold September wind whirling around them on that Liverpool dock.

‘My little Rosie,’ he had said. ‘My darling little Rosie. It won’t be long, my love. I promise you that. It really won’t be long but I want you safe.’ And he had cried. Tears had smeared – not trickled – just smeared all over his face which had been old even then.

Rosie turned the shower on harder. ‘It’s been too long, Grandpa. It’s been such a very long time and I don’t remember you any more. I don’t belong any more. You are tearing me away from my home again and I think I hate you.’

In the morning they watched the riders exercising their horses in Central Park, then took a steamer which smelt of diesel. They looked at Staten Island, Ellis Island, the ancient ferries which plied to and fro, one with funnels, and it had meant nothing because she was leaving.

They took a cab up to Fifth Avenue, driving past the steam that drifted from manhole covers and came from the cracks in the hot water system carried in underground piping.

They shopped in stores for a crêpe de Chine nightdress for Norah which Nancy chose and Rosie knew should have been flannelette, but then, Norah might have changed. But what did it matter?

She looked up. Behind her, captured by the mirror tilted on the counter, was a red-haired girl, and for a moment she thought it was Sandra. But of course it wasn’t.

They moved on to the candy department and bought maple candies, butterscotch and toffee because, Nancy said, the neighbours would like sweets especially now that the rationing was so intense.

She bought gum and fruit-flavoured envelopes. And stockings for herself, for Norah, for Jack’s mum – and Camel cigarettes, too, because Maisie was a twenty a day girl. She bought a toy car for Lee, Jack’s new brother, but she didn’t mind whether it was a Buick or a Cadillac. None of it mattered. She bought a sweater for Grandpa and another for Jack, another for Jack’s dad, Ollie.

For lunch they put nickels in a slot in a diner and she saw a boy who she thought was Joe. But of course it wasn’t and by this time tomorrow she would be drawing away from Manhattan, hearing the gulls, losing Frank and Nancy, losing them all.

Now Rosie, standing by the rail, looked up at the sky. She hadn’t noticed the gulls before.

They hadn’t been able to eat their meal and had taken a bus to the Rockefeller Center and Rosie had watched the coins clink through the driver’s change machine, like the hours and minutes of these last few days. They had stood on the sidewalks as Nancy told them of the cleaner employed full-time to keep the Center floor clear of gum and she had thought of her Grandma who had worked as a cleaner at the bank. It was there that she had died when the bomb had fallen just before Rosie left for America.

That evening they went to Chinatown and she bought a jar of spice from a shop which had varnished ducks hanging in the open shop-front. An old woman passed with shoes that slopped as she walked.

They sat and drank cold tea at an outdoor café and Rosie bought a book of Chinese art from an old street vendor. Maybe Jack would like that. And still the minutes clicked away.

The cloud layer had not dispersed with the coming of night and reflected the Manhattan lights. The London skies had been aglow on the nights before she left. Not with light but with flames.

It was nine o’clock now. It would soon be the fourth. They flagged down a cab and drank Manhattans in a restaurant which spilled seats out on to the pavement.

They sat and watched the women in hats, the men in smart grey suits, the boys in shirtsleeves, the girls in cotton dresses. Each girl looked like Sandra, each boy like Joe. She picked out the ice-cube from her drink. It numbed her tongue, but not her pain.

‘I’m saving the best for tomorrow,’ Frank said, taking her hand in his. ‘It’s somewhere you’ll never forget, somewhere that’ll warm you on the long trip home, on the nights when maybe you can’t sleep.’

Nancy touched her shoulder and smiled.

Frank continued. ‘It’s a place I always think of when times are tough. It’s the street where Bob and I used to visit to soak in jazz. Real original jazz.’

Rosie looked at him and saw that his eyes had lost the shadow of pain which he had carried over these last days.

She stood at the window again that night listening to the lorries, the garbage truck, the sirens. She showered, she cried and drifted in and out of sleep and there was Joe, his wristwatch glinting, his hand on her skin, his mouth too. There was Grandma, lying beneath the rubble. Jack reaching out to her. Then Frank and Nancy holding her, sure and strong, then Grandpa calling her from their arms but she couldn’t see his face.

They didn’t talk over breakfast. The pecan waffle looked good, the celebrations in the street outside were loud for the fourth of July but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

It was hot again, so hot. They took a cab to Frank’s favourite place. She stretched out her arm along the window, loosening her fingers, breathing slowly, keeping the panic in, mixing it up with the pain. They passed in and out of shadows and the noise of the streets was loud. Life was all around them but not in her. Not with her.

Frank was clenching his unlit pipe between his teeth, his fingers tapping on the armrest of the door.

‘Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie played in clubs next door to one another down fifty-second Street, this goddamn great street. I heard them. Billie Holiday sang too. Dixieland and New Orleans just roared out across the street all day and into the night.’ He was stabbing the air with his pipe now. ‘There was nothing to pay, just the price of a beer and the love of the music. It’s stayed with me. It’ll stay with you, keep you warm. It’s special for me, and for Nancy, and Bob. Now it’ll be special for you.’

The cab slowed, turned into the street and Rosie watched as Frank leaned forward, his face eager, and then she saw the bleakness begin in his eyes and his mouth set into a tense line. She had looked then, out of the window, at the clubs which would warm her, remind her, and she saw what Frank had seen.

She saw the smoky brownstone buildings which were still there, but without the clubs. There was just paper which scudded about the street and paint which was peeling off doors and window glass which was cracked or gone. Dented cars lined the street, a trash can rolled on the sidewalk.

They drove down slowly and where there had once been jazz sweeping out of the windows were groups of men lounging, staring. There were more standing in dingy doorways, buying drugs, selling drugs, taking drugs, and Rosie held Frank’s hand and told him that it was jazz sweeping across the sloping lawn that she would remember. It was Uncle Bob’s groups, the barbecues, the baseball target, the maple syrup on pancakes at breakfast – those were the things that would warm her.

‘This is nothing. This doesn’t matter.’ But then she could speak no more and her pain was gone as she saw his in the tears which were smeared across his face, as Grandpa’s had been. Frank looked old too.

And now, standing on her toes again at the rail, she could no longer see Manhattan. They were gone and she finally turned from the wind and wept. It was over. All over.

Frank and Nancy stood hand in hand now that the ship had quite gone and Frank didn’t look at Nancy as he said, ‘When I saw those clubs had gone and everything had changed I felt my heart break. It looked like us with her gone.’

Nancy put her arms around him, holding him.

‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘Those six years are gone and I love that girl more than I ever thought I could love anyone, other than you.’

Nancy said into his jacket, ‘We knew she had to go back. We chose to forget. That wasn’t fair on her. We let her down, but maybe we could go visit in a few months, make sure she’s OK?’

They were both crying and the sun was too hot.

Frank said as he looked back to the ocean again, ‘No, she must settle back with her family and only come when it’s right for her. She’s had a safe war and it’s over now. We all just have to get on with the rest of our lives.’

Neither could speak any more and they caught a cab, and then a train and then drove back to the lake, but Frank did no more fishing that summer. He and Nancy just sat and listened to the waves on the shore.

For the first three days of the voyage to England, Rosie lay on her bunk, not eating, not sleeping, just pushing the sheet into her mouth to smother her tears. The other three girls thought she was seasick.

On the fourth day she dressed, showered and walked the deck, feeling the rise and fall of the ship. There were loungers lined up near the rail, quoits to play, music in the evening, and space. She leaned against the rail, the sun was hot, the wind fierce. It tore at her hair. She was going back to England because she had been told to and that was that.

But there was all this anger and pain which seemed trapped inside her body, inside her mind, and she wished it would break free and be swept into nothing by the wind. Hadn’t Grandpa realised that she’d grow to love her new life? Didn’t he know how she would feel being dragged away again? But then he didn’t know her any more. She didn’t know him.

She walked on, holding the hair back from her face, watching as a child threw a bean bag to his mother, and then to the father. Some others were playing French cricket. There was room for that on the upper deck.

On the trip six years ago there had been no room, no parents. Just children with labels pinned to their lapels, wearing plimsolls, gumboots, their faces grown wary and tired. There were destroyers and other ships ploughing through the grey waters, not the space about the ship that there was now.

One morning Rosie had come with the others to the rails to wave but the destroyers were gone and each ship had to make its own way. It was that dull grey expanse of sea that Rosie remembered because that was when she realised that she and all the other children really had left their homes. They had to make their own way too. There had been a bleakness in her then, deeper than tears, and anger too.

But that night some of the boys had rolled marbles across the dance floor and the children’s escorts had fallen, in mid foxtrot, on to great fat bums. Rosie and the boy who reminded her of Jack had laughed, along with so many others. The escorts hadn’t laughed, they had gripped the children’s collars and with red angry faces had told them of the dangers of a cracked coccyx. One lad had said that he didn’t know you could break your flaming arse on a marble and they had laughed again.

Rosie stopped now, near the stern, watching the flag streaming out and the wake frothing and boiling. Yes, they had laughed a lot, and cried with despair and anger, but in the end it had been all right, hadn’t it? She looked down at her shoes – open-toed, leather – and the tanned foot, and remembered the plimsolls, the child that she had been.

Yes, that had turned out all right, and so would this. Wouldn’t it? But the child was almost a woman, and the pain seemed deeper, more sharply etched, and she wondered who would be there to meet her when the ship docked.

There was no one to meet her at Liverpool. She took a cab to Lime Street. The streets were so small, the sky so grey, the rain so heavy and no one had come to meet her.

There were no gold letters above this station, no drawling men in short-sleeved shirts, no women in slacks and dark glasses. No one who called her honey and showed her a bulbous clock under which they would meet when she came back. No one to meet her here at all. She wouldn’t cry, not here, in this strange land. Later she would though – in Grandpa’s house in Middle Street, but only when it was dark and everyone else asleep.