Authors: Reginald Hill
"Best way to be. It's always midnight somewhere, my dad used to say. So if it weren't hope that brought you here, how come you're squatting on my bed end?"
"It is the Kindertotenlieder. I agree with the others. I think you should not sing them."
"Which others?"
"Arne. The fat policeman. Walter."
"Walter's said nowt."
"When does Walter ever say anything in contradiction to you? But I see the way he is when you sing them."
"Oh, aye. That's a clever trick when you're banging the piano. Got eyes in the back of your head, have you?"
The woman on the bed didn't answer but just sat there, monumentally still, face impassive, her unblinking gaze fixed on Elizabeth, who made some unnecessary adjustments to her wig.
"So what're you saying, Inger?" she asked finally. "That you're going to take your piano and play in some other street?"
"No. We must all make our own choices. I will not make yours for you. If you will sing, I will play."
"Then everything's champion, isn't it? Ist'a coming down to breakfast or what?"
Without waiting for an answer, she left the room and ran down the stairs. In the kitchen she found the back door open and Chloe standing on the patio, drinking a mug of coffee. The garden, long and narrow, flanked with mature shrubs and shaded at the bottom by a tall pear tree, showed the effect of the drought everywhere, with the rectangle of lawn looking as cracked and ochrous as an early oil painting.
"Morning," called Elizabeth, switching on the electric kettle. "Wet the bed, did you?"
"That's an idea. If we all peed on the lawn, do you think it would help?" said Chloe. "Walter went out very early and woke me, so I got up. And I've come out here in hope of seeing a bit of dew, but even that seems to have stopped."
"Mebbe it's been banned, like hose. I'd not try a pee. Likely that's been banned too."
Chloe came back inside, smiling. There could never be a motherstdaughter closeness between them, but sometimes when alone together their bond of Yorkshire blood allowed them to relax into an earthy familiarity which threatened neither.
Just as common were the times when she felt she'd given house room to an alien.
"I've been talking to Inger. She reckons I owtn't to sing the Mahler cycle. What do you think?" asked Elizabeth suddenly.
Chloe pretended to drink from her empty mug and wondered how someone so direct could be so inapprehensible.
"Why are you interested in what I think?" she prevaricated.
Elizabeth chewed on a handful of dried muesli, then washed it down with a mouthful of black coffee.
"She said Walter and Arne and yon glorrfat bobby thought I shouldn't. But she didn't mention you. So I thought I'd ask if them songs bother you."
"Because of Mary, you mean? The part of my mind which deals with that has long been out of the reach of mere songs," said Chloe.
"That's what I thought," said Elizabeth. "Oh, by the way, thanks."
"For what?"
"For bringing me up."
Chloe opened her mouth in a mock gape which wasn't altogether mock. Before she could say anything, the door opened and Inger came in. Elizabeth finished her coffee, grabbed a handful of fresh grapes, said, "See you," and left.
Inger said, "Does she eat enough?"
"For a singer, you mean?"
"For a woman. This morning I saw her naked. She has strong bones, so I had never realized before how little flesh is on them. She was anorexic once, I think?"
Another member of the unreadably direct tendency, thought Chloe wryly. The only way to respond was either silence or a directness to match their own.
She sat down and said, "After Betsy had been with us some time--she was still Betsy in those days--she was diagnosed as being anorexic. She had treatment, both medical and psychological. Eventually she recovered."
There. How easy it was to be completely direct and yet give next to nothing away!
"So she went through a phase many modern children go through, you spotted it, had it treated. Why do you feel so guilty?"
Give nothing away! Who was she fooling? Not this sharp-eared woman, that was for certain. She'd once asked Arne what made Inger tick. She'd been a little jealous of her in those long-ago days when the young singer had surprised her body onto levels of pleasure her experience with Walter had hardly even hinted at.
Arne had laughed and said, "Inger is gay, so no need to feel that kind of jealousy, my love. But don't feel superior, either, which, though they will deny it, is how straight women feel about lesbians, because they think they offer no threat. Inger hears more in the silence between the notes than most of us hear in the music itself."
Perhaps also she had heard things from Arne that should not have been spoken, or at the least listened carefully to the silences between his words.
Ironically it had been the crisis with Betsy which brought Arne back into her bed. After Mary's disappearance she had broken off relations with him for reasons too incoherent to merit the term, but which included a sense of being punished for her infidelity and a revulsion against anything which even threatened to dilute her pain.
But the Betsy crisis had been different. This time she needed escape from herself, and had found it in the singer's company and caresses.
She couldn't remember now exactly how much she'd revealed of her feelings to Arne. But, if he'd spoken of it to Inger, then even a little was probably enough.
So let her have it from the horse's mouth now, why not? The human heart can only shut so much away, and her dark cavern was full.
She said, "I never wanted Betsy to come to us, you know. We'd moved away to the south, I had used every ounce of my will to close a door on Dendale and the past, and now here was this child threatening to open it all up again. I'd never really liked her, she was such a plain child, dark and fat, and strange, too, you'd get this uneasy feeling and turn around and there Betsy would be, watching you, waiting till you noticed her, then asking if Mary was coming out to play. We put it down to her mother, Lizzie, my cousin, who'd always been highly strung, and had the baby blues after Betsy was born and never seemed truly to get out of them. It didn't surprise most people, I think when she took an overdose. The inquest said it could have been accidental, but I think they were just being kind. Jack, that's Betsy's father, was much more of a shock. He was real down-to-earth Yorkshire, hard as nails, he'd see off anything, so most people thought. So when he drowned himself ..."
"There was no doubt this time?" asked Inger.
"Not a lot of people go swimming with their pockets full of rocks," said Chloe. "So there was Betsy. Eleven and a half years old. An orphan. Without a relative in the world, except for me."
"So you took her in?"
Chloe shook her head.
"I took to my bed. I screamed and shouted and blubbered gallons of tears every time the possibility of her coming to live with us was mentioned. It was Walter who persuaded me ... no, not persuaded ... that implies an appeal to rationality ... he just worked on me, you know the way the sun can still be burning you even when you think you're protected by a thick layer of cloud? Well, I put up my layer of cloud, but all the time Walter was up there, burning through. And in the end, he won."
"You think he was right?"
"Of course he was right. The child needed a home. And when she came, it was a lot easier than I thought. Far from bringing a pressure to open that door I'd worked so hard shut, the girl showed no desire to talk about her parents, or Dendale, or anything in the past. In fact she talked very little at all, and less and less as time went by, and I thought (if I thought at all) Oh, good, she's closed a door on the past too. And it seemed to me we could coexist very well in this untroublesome silence."
"She was a child," said Inger in a neutral tone that was nonetheless judgmental.
"I know. I should have ... but I didn't. She seemed fine to me. Okay, she lost a bit of weight, but that pleased me. I used to tell her sometimes she shouldn't eat so many sweets and cakes and stuff, and I thought she was just growing out of a puppy-fat stage."
"How old was she when you realized there was a problem?" asked Inger.
"Realized?" Chloe laughed bitterly. "I never realized. One night there were these terrible screams from upstairs. I rushed up to find Betsy in the bathroom. Her head ... oh, God, what a mess. She'd decided to turn her hair blond, and she'd mixed a hideously strong solution of bleaching powder. ... I got her under the shower and screamed at her to keep her eyes closed and held her there far longer than I should have done, because all the time I was holding her there, I felt I was doing something right and I didn't have to start thinking about what I had done wrong. But finally I got her to hospital. They sorted her out, said she had damaged part of her scalp so badly that her hair would probably fall out and might grow back in patches, but that wasn't what they were worried about, it was her anorexia, and they wanted to know what treatment she was getting for it."
"And you had no idea of this?"
"I don't know. Perhaps I did, deep down, but just didn't want to let her be a trouble to me. Walter had been away on a long trip, a couple of months. Perhaps he would have noticed. He was always closer to her than I was."
"It does not seem so now," said Inger.
"No?" Chloe smiled to herself. Perhaps after all the pianist, by listening so closely to the silences, missed some of the notes. "Ah, well. Certainly back then, it must have been very clear. She was treated by a child psychiatrist, Dr. Paula Appleby, you may have heard of her. I believe she's quite well known. Walter never settled for anything but the best. Dr. Appleby treated Betsy for eighteen months, two years, I don't know how long. I sat back and let Walter take care of all that. I felt guilty now, yes, but I still didn't want to get involved. I had closed a door on Dendale to shut it out. Betsy, too, had closed a door, but it seems she had shut herself in with it, and I didn't want any part of opening all that up again. And when Dr. Appleby said that the business with the hair and the anorexia was her attempt to turn herself from a little fat dark-haired girl into a slim blonde so that she'd be like Mary and we'd love her, I just felt sick. Do I sound like a monster?"
"You sound like you needed help as much as Betsy. I am surprised that Walter did not understand this."
"He was too busy seeing Betsy through her trouble. Dr. Appleby got her talking about the past and wanted us to see the transcripts. She said it was a family problem, we all needed to know all about each other. I refused point blank and I don't think I'd have let myself be persuaded, but it turned out Betsy herself said she didn't mind Walter seeing them, but she didn't want me to have to read them. I think when I heard that, for the first time I felt something like affection for her."
"Because she wanted to save you pain?"
"That was the only reason I could see. After the treatment was over and she was back to normality, if that's the right word, we got on much better. I think we both felt that even if she could never be a daughter to me, on the other hand there was a tie of blood between us which couldn't be denied."
"But despite being normal," said Inger, "she kept on dieting and took to wearing a blond wig?"
"Her hair wouldn't grow back properly. She needed a wig. She asked if I would mind if it was blond. I said, why should I? As for the dieting, I did get worried about this and used to fuss her at mealtimes. Then one day she showed me a chart with all the calorific values of the stuff she ate carefully worked out and said, "No way am I going to stuff myself with cakes and such fodder. This is what I eat, and it's enough, and I don't go off to the lavvy to stuff my finger down my throat and spew it all up either. So never rack thyself, I'll be fine." After that I stopped worrying. She started taking the singing seriously about then. She'd always had a voice, that you know. Now she said she wanted to find out if it was good enough to make her living with. It was about this time we formally adopted her. We'd called her Elizabeth from the start, and when she went to school, it had seemed easier to say her name was Wulfstan."
"She didn't mind?"
"Who knows what goes on in Elizabeth's head? But she said nothing. And when Walter suggested we make it legal, she seemed almost pleased."
"And you?"
"I didn't mind. Somehow it made her less of a reminder of the past. I think that was why I quite welcomed the blond wig and the change of shape too. All that remained of Betsy Allgood out of Dendale was the accent."
"That bothered you?"
"No, but I thought it might cause her trouble, with her classmates, I mean. And later, as she grew up. I once suggested she have elocution lessons. She said, "Why? There's nothing wrong with my voice, is there?"' And I realized she was speaking perfect BBC English. Then she went on, "But I'll not be shamed to crack on like Mam and Dad, and them as don't like it can bloody lump it!" That was the last time I brought the subject up."
"So you became friends."
"I'd not put it strong as that," said Chloe. "But, as I said, we're blood, and you don't need to like your relations all the time, do you? She helped me, I think. Or perhaps it was just time that helped me."
"To get better, you mean?"
"Not really. Like Elizabeth's scalp, there's no cure for what was damaged in me. But you learn to live with a wig. Whatever, four years ago when Walter seemed to be spending more and more time up here at the Works, I heard myself say, wouldn't it make more sense for us to live up there? It took him by surprise. Me too. He said, "You're sure?"' And I said, because I am after all a woman and we must seize our chances, "Yes, but only if we can buy a house in the bell." And here we are."
"You did not want to live in the country?"
Chloe's face went dark and she said softly, "No. I'm a country lass born and bred, but now I can't even bear to look out of the train or car window when we're passing through empty countryside. Now, is that all, Inger? Have I quite satisfied your curiosity?"