I went off to the sewing room and the day dragged by. I had to wait until teatime before I could go to the patients’ sitting room, where there was paper and pencils, and even envelopes in the desk drawer, what we could use if we asked the supervisor. The place had got a lot more civilised by then. From what I remember, I wrote something like:
‘Dear Nora, I am so happy to hear from you. Yes, I am still here, and not going anywhere fast, so please come to visit as soon as you can.’
And signed myself off:
‘Your little sister, Maria.’
It seemed like months passed before her second letter arrived, though it was probably only a few days. It said that she was coming to visit the following Saturday, on the bus. It was only then I began to believe it, and started to panic. The last Nora had seen of me was as a young thing of twenty-one, round in me belly but otherwise sweet-faced and innocent. The years of madness, and drug treatment, chain-smoking and neglect had done for my looks and I took care not to look in mirrors any more. If I couldn’t face myself, whatever would Nora think? She might even take one look and run away, terrified by the old witch that had once been her childhood friend. I still had four days to pull myself together and remedy the mess I was in, but I couldn’t do it without Matron’s help.
The old dragon come up trumps, bless her cotton socks. When she learned I was to have my first visitor for thirty years her eyes softened and she broke out into a great gap-toothed grin.
‘Well, my lovely,’ she said, ‘We’d better get you smartened up then, hadn’t we?’
Our visits to the hospital hairdresser’s was usually just a matter of seconds for them to chop off the ends, pudding-bowl style, but this time Matron had given them the wink, and I was there well over an hour. After the cut they daubed on some colour to cover up the grey, then rollered it all over and lathered on some foul-smelling perm lotion to hold the curls in.
By the time I was done they said I looked like Rita Hayworth.
‘In her coffin, you mean,’ I said. ‘Get along with you.’ They laughed, but I was secretly so bloody thrilled I could hardly stop from smiling. When I got back to the ward my friends hardly recognised me, and they didn’t half tease.
‘Ooo-er, look at Madam,’ they called. ‘Got a fancy boy has yer?’
‘Got a few of ’em, looks of her.’
‘Where’d yer get the cash to pay for that, then, Queenie?’
‘Doin’ someone a favour, I’ll be bound.’
But I didn’t care, and I certainly wasn’t telling anyone why.
Matron pulled me aside and showed me a couple of dresses and three pairs of shoes she’d found in a store room. There was even a new bra and a suspender belt and nylons, still a scarcity in them post-war days, and usually banned in mental hospitals because they was just right for hanging yourself.
‘Get in those toilets and have a little try-on,’ she said. ‘But don’t tell the others or they’ll all want fancy new togs.’
The curious thing was, once I’d put on the bra and nylons, and the best of the two dresses – I still remember it, a little cotton shirt-waister in a flowery print – what with that and the new hair-do, I looked like a normal human being again. My figure was still there and my waist still small from the years of poor rations, and it give me a picture of the woman that I might have been, had I not been so naïve as to fall for the blue eyes and soft words of a handsome boy.
So, instead of being happy I got a bit depressed, and by the time Matron came in to see how I was getting on, she found me sitting on a toilet seat blubbing me eyes out.
‘It’s a shock, dearie,’ she said. ‘But this could be the start of something, you know? A new kind of life for you. They’ve changed the rules.’
Changed the rules? What did that mean?
She went on, ‘Depending on your friend, how she feels, and how we feel about her, you could go for days out, or even spend a night out, get a feel for the world outside, you know, ready for leaving.’
‘Leaving here?’ You’ll hardly believe it, dearie, but the thought of leaving the place after all those years was bloody terrifying, ’scuse my French. So I shouted at her, ‘No! I don’t want to leave. What about my friends?’ and I started sobbing all over again. She put her arm round my shoulders then, the first time I remember a member of staff had ever showed physical affection. Margaret had given me hugs, but never anyone else.
‘Don’t worry, Queenie,’ she said. ‘Nothing will happen unless you want it to. Now, take off those clothes and put them in this bag – I’ll keep it safe till Saturday.’
Well, from that moment onwards on all my waking thoughts were about Nora’s visit. Would she even recognise me, I wondered, after thirty years? Would I recognise her? I knew how I had changed – even in spite of the hair-do and the clothes – but had she? Would she be afraid, as some were, dearie, that madness could be catching? What if she turned around at the last moment, before I had the chance to prove that I was not crazy?
Then I remembered the old tough, rebellious, funny Nora, whose shoulders would break into the shakes whenever she was nervous, who had stood by me all those years, but stood up to me when she knew I was treading the wrong path.
She’d never take fright.
I was in such a lather waiting in the patients’ sitting room that morning, I tell you, but soon enough she arrived and we fell into each other’s arms like long-lost family and from that moment on we chattered and laughed till we was hoarse, and all my nerves disappeared like the years we swore had surely never passed, we was so familiar to each other. She was just as before, towering over me all gangly limbs and big hands, pointy nose and sharp features but a sweet expression under that mop of grey hair. She swore I hadn’t changed one bit, though of course our eyes were doing that usual deception; because we had aged together we could not see what changes the passing of time had brought to us both.
While I’d been stuck in the Hall, Nora had had a very exciting life. After the first war, once she got over poor Charlie, she met a palace coachman called Sam Kowalski, a Pole whose parents had come to Britain to avoid the pogroms. Sam fought in the trenches and happily returned unscathed, but once they were courting, of course, she had to leave the palace as they didn’t allow couples to work together. By the time she and Sam had got themselves hitched, she was already up the duff and the second arrived a couple of years later.
Sam wasn’t getting any promotions – it was dead man’s shoes and they never had the courtesy to bloody die, Nora told me with that big gale of a laugh. In any case the family had taken to using motor cars most of the time which meant they needed fewer staff, so he got himself a new job as driver for an East End wheeler-dealer, and for a few years they was in the pink, till the second war came along.
The wide boy’s business was booming in the black market, but Sam could see it was getting dodgy and decided to quit. He was too old to fight by that time but he signed up as a spotter and went off to the Essex coast each night to look out for bombers, except one night when the bombers spotted his station first and he never came home, leaving Nora with two boys just coming up for conscription.
To cut a long story short, one of them got himself killed in the trenches, and after the war the other son – that’s Sam junior, who you’ve met – came back from North Africa to marry his sweetheart, so Nora was now living on her own with her son and daughter-in-law just up the street and a grandchild on the way.
‘I miss them both so much,’ she told me, ‘but I count myself blessed that little Sam came home, and I still have my eyesight so I can carry on with the needlework to supplement me war widow’s pension,’ she said, putting away the photographs of Sam and the boys. ‘That’s enough about me. What about you? I tried so hard to find you but no one would tell me where they’d sent you, and it was like they closed ranks.’
‘How
did
you trace me, in the end?’ I asked, dead curious.
‘The oddest thing, it was,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I got this through the post.’ She reached into the handbag again, pulled out an envelope originally addressed to the palace but forwarded to her Bethnal Green address. Inside was a scrap of paper and on this, in the same careful italic handwriting as the envelope, there were just five words:
‘Queenie Romano, Helena Hall, Eastchester.’
Nothing else.
After a moment it dawned on me; the only other people I had told about Nora were my psychiatrists, and … Margaret. I’d never discovered why she had deserted me without saying goodbye, but this made me realise that she must have felt guilty and tried to make up for it by putting Nora in touch with me.
When I tried to explain this to Nora she shook her head: ‘People do the strangest things,’ she said. ‘But it turned out right, didn’t it? At least I’m here now. But why did she call you Queenie?’
‘It’s my nickname in here,’ I said, ‘because when I arrived I was trying to tell them about where I’d come from – though of course they never believed me. Told me it was all fantasy – no one like me could ever have worked for the queen. Someone called me Queenie to mock me, I suppose, and it kind of stuck.’
‘Did you tell them about the prince, too?’
I shook my head. ‘Only at the very beginning, talking to the psychiatrists. But I soon gave it up, ’cos they only went and took it as proof that I was insane.’
She paused and looked at me close in the face then, trying to judge whether to ask the question, so I decided to tell her right out.
‘It was a boy,’ I said. ‘I never got the chance to hold him. I heard him cry but later they told me he was dead.’
She sat beside me on the sofa and put her arms around me again.
‘The bastard,’ she said quietly.
I’d accepted it in my head long ago but it was harder to admit it to my best friend, so I stayed silent. Somehow, in here, I’d managed to put all that behind me, but talking to Nora reminded me of the hurt and deception, the way my life had been wasted, because of a few short hours. And because I had been foolish enough to believe what he told me: that he loved me and would protect me if anything should happen.
The fury came over me all of a sudden, then. ‘Yes, he
was
a bastard,’ I hissed under my breath, not so loud as the other patients and visitors could hear it. ‘Tricking me with his beautiful eyes, Nora, drawing me in and making me feel something special so as he could have me with the click of his fingers. That’s what he did, and I was too young and foolish to realise what was happening.’
I was wringing my fingers so fiercely it made them hurt. Nora put her hands over them to calm me and then the tears came, angry, bitter tears, shaking my shoulders till I could hardly draw breath, like a waterfall that had been shut up in some dark underground lake for years and years and the dam was now broken. I was that hysterical the nurses rushed over to us and started saying they needed to give me a pill but Nora sent them away and suggested we went for a walk around the gardens instead. We headed out into the sunshine, where the birds were singing and the roses glowing red in their beds, the sound of a lawnmower chugging in the distance, and she told me to take deep breaths of the sweet afternoon air until the sobbing settled and I could talk again.
I told her all the things I had been through in the Hall, the narcosis and losing my speech, about Margaret and the war, the bombing and the bodies. All those horrors stored up in my brain, festering, like rotting fruit, pouring out their poisoned gases. I could tell she was pretty horrified, believe me, but went on listening without giving her own opinion. There was little she or anyone could do to right those past wrongs, not now.
‘He took away my life, Nora,’ I said. ‘None of this would have happened to me if he hadn’t existed and I hadn’t fallen for him. I should feel angry about it, but we was like children, both of us, and even now I do believe that for those short moments he loved me.’
It felt so good to talk to someone who understood – someone who actually believed me – and we took several turns of the gardens as I gabbled on. After a bit it started to rain, but we both ignored it and, even though we were soon soaked, we went on walking. It was like the rain was washing away my horrors, and I began to feel there might be hope in the world after all. When we reached the front door for the fourth time, Nora turned and looked at me, and I looked back at her, with her straggly hair, the rain dripping down her face, the dark patches of damp on her clothes, and her shoes squidgy with water, and realised that I must look the same. She started that big gale of a laugh that she’d always had and, as per usual, it set me off too, and we were soon hooting so much we couldn’t get any breath, so bad we had to sit down on the step to recover ourselves.
‘It’s like we was girls again. Like those years never passed.’ She stopped laughing then and looked at me, then gave me a soggy hug.
‘Perhaps that’s the best way,’ she said. ‘Put it behind you and look forward.’
‘What’s there to look forward to?’ I said, feeling miserable again. ‘Stuck in here for the rest of my life, more than likely.’
‘Things are changing here, you told me. Let’s just see what happens, shall we?’ she said mysteriously. ‘Listen, it’s time for me to head off but I’ll be back again soon, promise, in a few weeks, if I can. Just hold on for that, and we’ll see if something can be sorted out.’
I couldn’t imagine what she might be thinking, but Nora was good as her word. A letter arrived a few days later and soon enough she came to see me again. Those visits became my lifeline. It felt as though we’d turned back the years, we was like sisters again, talking nineteen to the dozen from start to finish. And though the sadness seemed to hang over us like thunder clouds when we recalled the difficult times, we always managed to laugh them away. We’d been raised to expect nothing, and I suppose the fact that we’d lived so long, and were still alive, was probably good enough.
But there was one cloud even Nora’s laughter couldn’t chase away. Inside, with few visitors, we was that cut off from outside life we never saw or spoke of children. For Nora, her sons were her life, and as she showed me photographs and described the joyful days of their childhood – the one she had lost, and the one she was now pinning all her hopes on – my heart seemed to hang so heavily in my chest that I could barely breathe. As much as I tried to show interest, I could not find it in myself to share her pleasure.