Sapphire Battersea (28 page)

I counted each house until I found number eighteen. It was cream, with white window frames and a blue door, very fresh and pretty, with pink hydrangeas in tubs on either side of the doorstep.

I was utterly delighted to see that Mama’s house
was
the prettiest in the whole lane. I went up the neat tiled path, shaking with excitement. I knew better now than to knock at the front door. There were no area steps, so I slipped down the side of the house and rapped lightly on the back door. I waited, my heart thumping.

Then the door opened. There was Mama! I knew she was my own dear Mama – of course I did – but she looked so different. She had always been little and slight, like me, but now she seemed somehow to have shrunk. Her dress hung loose on her, and her tiny wrists and hands stuck out of the cuffs, looking like little claws. Her dear face was so thin now that her cheekbones showed in sharp lines.

‘Oh, Mama!’ I said, throwing down my case and clasping her close.

‘Hetty! Oh, Hetty, is it really you? You look a picture in that dress! Darling, what are you doing here?’ she gasped, and then she started coughing.

She thrust me away from her quickly, putting a handkerchief to her mouth. She coughed and coughed, her faced reddening, the veins standing out on her forehead, her whole body racked.

‘Oh, Mama,’ I whispered.

I steered her very gently inside and sat her down on a kitchen chair, then fetched my case from the doorstep. I ran the tap at the sink, pouring Mama a glass of water, and gave it to her. She tried to drink,
the
glass clinking against her teeth, and gradually the terrible coughing stopped. Her eyes were watering, and little beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. I took a teacloth, held it under the cold tap, and then pressed it against her burning temples.

‘You’re ill, Mama, very ill. You definitely have a fever – and that cough! Why aren’t you in bed? Come, let me help you. Where do you sleep?’

‘No, no, I can’t possibly go to bed,’ Mama said weakly. ‘I’m fine now. It was just a coughing fit. The surprise of seeing you!’

‘But you’ve got so thin! Why didn’t you
tell
me you were ill when you wrote?’

‘I didn’t want to worry you. I’m
not
ill, not really. I just have a troublesome cough, but I’m in the best place possible, breathing in this good sea air. Some days I feel really well, truly.’

‘Will you stop trying to be so brave! It’s
me
, Mama! You can be honest with me.’

I knew next to nothing about sickness and disease, but even so I knew that Mama was gravely ill. ‘Is it – is it influenza?’ I whispered.

I had suffered a bout of influenza once myself and had been very ill for days, along with many other children at the hospital. My crippled foster brother Saul had died from the disease. So had Cedric, Mr Brown’s little boy.

‘Oh, Mama, don’t die! You can’t die!’ I said, bursting into tears.

‘Don’t, Hetty! I’m perfectly all right, I swear I am. I haven’t got influenza, I promise you.’

‘Have you seen a doctor?’

‘Well …’ Mama hesitated. ‘There’s nothing a doctor can really do for me, dear. But I go to the pharmacy and he makes me up a cough linctus. That helps considerably. But never mind
me
. What are you doing here? How did you get Mr Buchanan to give you permission to visit me?’

‘Well …’ It was my turn to be evasive now. I didn’t really want to tell Mama the whole story, especially now she was so fragile. ‘Mr Buchanan is – is an unusual sort of employer. He knows how much you mean to me and how badly I’ve been missing you. He said I could have a little holiday with you. Isn’t that lovely?’

But I could never fool Mama, ill or not.

‘A little holiday, my eye! Oh, Hetty, child, what’s happened? You haven’t lost your position already, have you? He has given you a character reference, hasn’t he?’ Mama started coughing again in her agitation.

‘Let me make us both a pot of tea and then I’ll tell you all about it,’ I said.

‘Oh Lord, I must take Miss Roberts
her
tea. She’ll be waking from her afternoon nap any
moment
, and she gets agitated if I don’t have it ready for her.’

‘But doesn’t she realize you’re ill?’

‘No! Well, she must hear me coughing sometimes, but she doesn’t comment. I take a spoonful of linctus every time I have to talk to her, and that helps a little.’

‘But doesn’t she see how pale and thin you’ve got?’

‘She’s an old lady, Hetty. She has cataracts and can barely see her own hand in front of her face.’

Mama looked like an old lady herself as she shuffled around the kitchen preparing a tea tray. She let me make the pot of tea, but she cut waferthin slices of bread and butter and arranged them in tiny triangles on the plate, with a pot of blackberry jam.

‘I gathered the blackberries myself and then made the jam,’ Mama said proudly. ‘You shall have a big slice in a moment, darling. Though I don’t think you deserve it. You’ve clearly been a very bad girl. I thought you were happy working for this Mr Buchanan. You liked it that he was a writer.’

‘I’ve never liked him. He thinks he’s a great writer, but his stories are dull dull dull. And then he took my memoirs, Mama –
my
story,
our
story – and was using it to write his own story. So I confronted him.’

‘Hmm! You don’t “confront” your employer, Hetty.’

‘
Sapphire!
Won’t you call me by my true name, Mama?’

‘Sapphire, Hetty, whichever name. You’re still my dear, headstrong, wilful daughter, and goodness knows what I’m going to do with you!’ said Mama.

A bell on the wall suddenly jangled, making us both jump. Mama started coughing again, holding her handkerchief over her face. ‘She’s … awake! Wants … tea!’ she gasped.

‘Oh, Mama, you poor thing, don’t try to talk. Look, sit down. Can’t I take the old girl her wretched tea? If she’s half blind, maybe she won’t notice it’s me and not you.’

‘Don’t talk … so daft,’ said Mama. She gave one last cough, clutching the handkerchief, then crumpled it up quickly and tucked it in her apron.

‘Mama?’

She ignored me, took the tray, and carried it out of the kitchen, her poor stick arms taut and straining. I couldn’t bear it and tried to take the tray off her, but she glared at me ferociously and I had to give way. I watched her walk slowly up the stairs, her breath rasping, shoulders hunched. Oh dear Lord, this was my lovely young mother, my Ida, who had raced up and down the steep stairs at the hospital and lugged great vats of porridge around.

When she came back, scarcely able to draw breath, I sat her down and poured her a cup of tea. I urged her to eat her own bread and jam, but she said she wasn’t hungry.

‘You
must
eat, Mama. Look how thin you are,’ I said, taking her poor little hands in mine. They were cold, though when I felt her forehead, it was still burning.

‘Mama, please. I can’t bear to see you looking so frail and exhausted. You’re very ill, no matter what you say. You
must
go to bed – and
I
must call a doctor.’

‘I can’t go to bed, Hetty dear. I have to make the supper. And we certainly can’t call the doctor. He charges a fortune! There’s nothing he can do for me anyway. I shall take another dose of my linctus. The only other medicine I need is you, my darling girl. Oh, Hetty, I still can’t believe you’re actually here!’

I stopped trying to press Mama and helped her cook supper. I made an apple pie to show off my pastry skills, and basked in Mama’s praise.

‘Perhaps we might get you a job as a little cook after all!’ she said. ‘Miss Smith might be able to set you up again.’

I kept quiet. I wasn’t going back to Miss Smith. I wasn’t going to be a cook. I wasn’t going anywhere now. I was going to stay right here and look after Mama.

MAMA LET ME
stay in her room that night. I crept quietly up the stairs, my shoes in my hand, while Mama gave Miss Roberts her nighttime cup of cocoa and settled her in her bed.

Mama’s room was up in the attic. It made me want to weep, seeing all her modest possessions again: her little violet vase, her brush and comb, her special soap, her bundle of letters from me. She had a narrow iron bed, but I was sure there was just about room for two, especially if we wound our arms around each other. But Mama wouldn’t hear of it.

She fetched fresh linen from the press, a cushion from the sofa in the drawing room, and a thick cashmere shawl belonging to Miss Roberts.

‘Here, Hetty, I’ll make you up a separate little bed fit for a queen,’ she said.

‘It’s lovely, Mama, but I’d sooner sleep with you.’

‘No, darling.’

‘But why? I used to creep into your bed sometimes back at the hospital.’

‘I don’t want you too near me, in case … in case you catch my cough,’ said Mama, and she wouldn’t be swayed.

So I bedded down in my cosy nest on the floor, and Mama lay on her bed. I edged nearer in the night and put my arm up, so that I could just about reach her hand.

‘You’ll give yourself dreadful pins and needles,’ she whispered.

‘I don’t care if I get pins and needles all over. I need to hold onto you. Oh, Mama, I’ve missed you so.’

‘And I have missed you, my Hetty,’ said Mama.

We clung tightly to each other’s hand. I think Mama might have been crying. I know I was.

I woke very early. Mama was coughing, her hands clamped over her mouth to muffle the sounds. I got up and propped her up on my cushion as well as her pillows. It eased her chest slightly and made her cough less.

‘Better now, Mama?’

‘Much better, sweetheart,’ she whispered. ‘Now, I have been trying to work out the best way to get you a new position. I’m wondering whether I should write to Miss Smith to explain the situation, though I know my spelling leaves a lot to be desired. I don’t want to let you down, Hetty.’

‘You could never let me down, Mama! But I don’t see that there’s much point telling Miss Smith. I am
sure
she will take Mr Buchanan’s side, I just know it. He’ll tell her lies about keeping my memoirs to help improve my grammar and writing style.’

‘But she must be fond of you. She’s taken such an interest in you these last few years, and she’s been so kind forwarding all our letters. I’m sure she might give you a character to help you find another position.’

‘The only position I want is right here, Mama. I want to be with you.’

‘And I want that too, darling, with all my heart, but I’m not sure how we can keep you hidden away day after day. Miss Roberts is infirm, but she still totters from room to room using her walking stick. If she were to come upon you unawares, she’d be very shocked – and then
I
would lose my position.’

‘But you’ve said she’s a kind old lady. If you told her you’ve been reunited with your long-lost daughter, surely she’d be happy for you and
want
us to be together? I could work for her too. I would fetch and carry and do her sewing. I could even write her letters for her.’

‘Hetty, Hetty, you still don’t understand the ways of the world. I am her
servant
. I’m not expected to have a daughter, especially one born out of wedlock. She would think it terribly lax and immoral to condone such a situation.’