The Past and Other Lies (35 page)

And school uniforms. They were forever tearing and getting holes in and losing bits of it—except Graham, oddly, who never seemed to ruin or destroy any of his uniform.

Suppose something
had
happened and she, their mother, had missed it?

She smoothed down the duvet cover impatiently. Nothing had happened. They were a normal family. They didn’t have those kinds of dramas. Boyfriends, of course. Jennifer had gone through a few. She had always seemed very keen on that Darryl boy. No, it was Darren. Darren McKenzie, and his mother had worked at Lloyds Bank in the high street. Then it had ended—very suddenly, it had seemed at the time. But that was teenagers. There was no accounting for them. Hopeless to even try.

Charlotte had never had any boyfriends as far as she knew—but did mothers ever know? Charlotte had seemed happy enough. Well, no, not happy; moody. She’d always been one for moods, spending all her time with that Zoe from school. But Zoe had moved away, up north somewhere with her mother who was that presenter from the telly. And that summer Charlotte had insisted—quite out of the blue—that she be allowed to do her A-levels at the sixth-form college in the town and not at the school, even though it meant two buses and none of her friends being there.

Deirdre fingered the creamy frill of the duvet. The black and red and white duvet that Charlotte had picked out of a catalogue twenty-five years earlier was long gone, replaced by a creamy-white carnation design from John Lewis’s.

It didn’t make sense. The bed, the empty bedroom, this creamy-white duvet. None of it made sense. It had made sense before. Now, suddenly, it didn’t.

Why would Jennifer say that? And on television?

For a few days she had actually considered telephoning Caroline.

And now this Mr Milthorpe had telephoned late last night from a hospital ward and she and Eric were about to drive up to Yorkshire. And here she was vacuuming.

From downstairs she could hear Brian Matthew’s
Sounds of the Sixties
on the radio followed by a burst of Roy Orbison then abruptly Roy Orbison was cut off and, from the hallway, Eric called up the stairs.

‘We should be off, love. Traffic’ll be murder. Contraflows round Newport Pagnell.’

‘Be right there,’ called Deirdre, not moving. She looked at the layer of dust that had accumulated in just one week, pulled herself to her feet and turned the FireFlash™ 3000 to maximum suction. The little red light on the body of the cleaner began to flash urgently.

I
T WAS IMPORTANT SHE speak to Jennifer, there was something that needed saying. And Charlotte, Charlotte too. What was it? And why hadn’t they come when she’d called them?

Caroline closed her eyes, opened them again. All she could see were the lopsided venetian blinds at the window, the harsh fluorescent light above her head, the green curtains on metal rails that framed her bed and, on the wall opposite, a large, wistful watercolour of three kittens at play that someone, inexplicably, had gone to the trouble of framing and placing in the ward.

But Jennifer
had
come, she remembered now, only a few days ago. And it had snowed. Mr Milthorpe had cleared the snow off his driveway then done her own, waving to her from the path, and she had just decided to go off and make him a nice strong cup of tea when Jennifer had turned up in her Peugeot, all the way from London. She must have had a day off. People nowadays had all sorts of days off, it was a wonder they got any work done at all. And at the same time all you heard about was people working eighty-hour weeks. How could that be? How could both those things be true? But that was the way of the world now; everything was true and nothing was.

What had they talked of, she and Jennifer?

‘Alright, Mrs Kettley?’

The girl-nurse was back. She materialised out of nowhere and picked up Caroline’s hand, studying the back of it thoughtfully like some amateur palm-reader who hadn’t got the technique quite right.

‘Eh, you’ve had some cuts there, haven’t you, love,’ she remarked, observing the network of fine white scars that showed faintly on both of Caroline’s hands. The girl-nurse adjusted the tube that attached Caroline to a drip, then she tapped the back of her hand. ‘Just move that drip,’ she murmured, not looking up, and she fiddled with the needle that was sticking half in, half out of the vein.

Caroline watched and wondered if she herself needed to be here, or if the girl could do all this on her own without help.

‘There now,’ said the girl-nurse, standing up. ‘Doctor’ll be along presently.’ And she left.

Presently. You didn’t hear people say that often; it was a word that had gone out of fashion.

Jennifer had driven up and they had talked of Charlotte. Jennifer had been worried about Charlotte. No, not worried, annoyed. There had been a television program. There was always a television program nowadays. You did what you could to escape them but it was a battle you could never win.

High up in the corner of the room was a small television set on a long metal arm suspended on a sort of platform. Mercifully the screen was blank, the set switched off, but as if on cue, from the room across the corridor, came a sudden burst of studio audience laughter. It didn’t sound like real laughter, it sounded like people trying too hard to enjoy themselves.

What had Jennifer done? Or was it something Charlotte had done? She had needed to speak to them, it was important, and Jennifer had come but all they had spoken of was the television program then Jennifer had said it was getting late though it wasn’t even three o’clock and she had only been there an hour and a half, perhaps two hours. But it was a long drive back to London and in that snow. So Jennifer had left and Caroline hadn’t said what she had meant to say.

And Charlotte hadn’t come at all.

It had seemed important. But perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps to anyone else, it wasn’t important at all. Most things that seemed important weren’t important to anyone else.

Dad had said,
Look at that sparrow trying to build her nest before her eggs are laid—do you think she cares if there’s a war going on?
He must have said it more than once, for her to remember it all these years later. Funny, it sounded peaceful, almost wistful, when she said it to herself, like a homily you might see beneath a watercolour of a dove stuck on the wall of a church office. But when Dad said it, it was said angrily, resentfully, it was aimed at someone—probably Mum, as though she were the sparrow and she had no business building nests when there was a war to be won.

Yet it was Dad who had died and the war had ended and it was Mum who had lived to build her nest for another thirty-five years, so there you were.

A second burst of studio laughter erupted from the room across the corridor, accompanied, this time, by a titter of laughter from whoever was visiting the old lady in that room. Sad to think of someone coming to visit you and then sitting there and watching the television.

Where was Mr Milthorpe? She realised she hadn’t seen him for a while. Perhaps he’d gone home. The snow would be banked up on the path again by now. Little point in clearing it when she wasn’t going to be walking up the path for a while. Still, people liked to keep busy, especially at a time like this. People liked to feel they were doing something useful. She’d done it herself when Mrs Milthorpe was ill in the hospital, baking a casserole or a lasagne and leaving them on his doorstep. He’d especially liked the lasagne, she remembered.

A time like this. What sort of a time was this? There was no other time in her life when she had had a stroke and found herself helpless and uncertain in a hospital bed. It was not an experience she could draw on from her past. There was no ‘time like this’ to fall back on, it was all new.

She didn’t need new experiences at this time of life. She wanted to sit back and enjoy routine, mull over the past—well, parts of it—and know with some certainty what each day would bring. The past, somehow, had become comforting. Which was odd, when the past meant growing up in the war, and people dying.

She thought about William.

FEBRUARY 1945

T
HE RUSSIANS HAD CAPTURED Warsaw, Dresden was being bombarded, fighting had ceased altogether in Athens and the nightshift at the aircraft factory was finally coming off duty.

It was the last of these circumstances that had any meaning at all as Caroline stepped out of the sandbagged doorway and into the frozen dawn to begin the long trudge home.

It was Tuesday morning—just.

She waved a vague farewell to the other girls of Orange shift, not caring to whom she was waving or in what direction they were trudging, concerned only with pulling the collar of her coat up and the brim of her woollen hat down.

The factory was housed in a vast underground bunker in a disused goods yard, the remains of an aborted underground railway tunnel extension to the District Line that had been abandoned thirty years previously. The bunker now contained machinery, sandbags, workbenches and generators for forty women, a handful of engineers, two inspectors and enough propellers, undercarriages and gun emplacements to maintain a hundred Lancaster and Wellington bombers.

Caroline had worked at the aircraft factory ever since she had left school four years ago: first with Silver shift, stamping, pressing and drilling holes in small sections of aluminium, then with Red shift, riveting, wiring and sheet-metal working. Last year she had volunteered for Orange, which was the nightshift. If you were good—and she was good—you spent most of your time oxyacetylene welding and operating the lathes. It was the lathes and the welding that did the most damage to your hands. After the first week the scabs from white-hot filings and embers covered both hands, despite the gloves. After six months, the scabs had become scars and now she hardly noticed them. She had stopped wondering if she’d ever have beautiful hands again. Or if there’d be anyone left to notice them.

There was always pressure on the Mobiles to do Orange shift. Mobiles were the girls who didn’t have a family to look after, meaning they could be moved to anywhere in the country at a moment’s notice. Caroline didn’t mind Orange shift. The girls tended to talk less and the money was better too—sixty-eight shillings a week, compared to only sixty-three shillings on days. The men, of course—the few that were left—got double that.

She walked head bent, eyes narrowed against the sting of the icy cold air, and thought about lighting a cigarette, but she didn’t want to take her hands out of her pockets so instead she walked more quickly. It was three miles each way and, since her bicycle had been stolen, it was an hour’s walk home.

Who’d steal another worker’s bicycle? It was unthinkable that someone from Orange shift had taken it. Yet there seemed no other explanation given the bicycle was chained up inside the perimeter fence and all that security you had to go through just to get inside the place. Not that it mattered, she realised wearily, at the same time conceding that she really did need that cigarette. She waited till she had reached the shelter of the old iron railway bridge, fumbling in her pocket for matches and cupping her hands to stop the flame blowing out. The cigarette lit eventually but she stayed where she was, sheltered beneath the bridge for a moment or two, before starting once more on her journey.

How quickly you stopped noticing. She could recall nothing, absolutely nothing, about her walk to the factory last night, about her walk home yesterday morning, about any of her walks last week. They were gone. You just stopped remembering, or you stopped noticing in the first place. You switched off.

She quickened her step.

The dawn was a muddy yellow glow on the horizon. It provided little light and no warmth. Yesterday the daylight had barely scraped above the rooftops before sliding back into evening.

Reaching High Street she noticed through the gloom that the vast crater outside the post office still hadn’t been cordoned off. It had been there for over a fortnight, ever since an unexploded bomb that had probably fallen sometime in 1940 had suddenly gone off. If the ARPs didn’t cordon it off soon some poor sod would fall into it. Already a foot of frozen water had filled the bottom of the crater.

Hope the sod who took my bicycle is the one who falls into it, she thought, fleetingly enjoying this gratifying image.

As she turned into Oakton Way and approached the house her pace slowed and finally she stopped a few houses short of her own, and stood for a moment in the feeble dawn light opposite number twenty-eight.

Number twenty-eight was now vacant.

Usually she walked straight past, head down, eyes focused, her mind empty. But this morning she looked across at the house, studying its boarded-up windows, the weeds that already, in a few short weeks and despite the winter frosts, had begun to reclaim the path that led up to the front door. On that front door was a single forgotten sprig of dead holly, left over from a Christmas already six weeks past.

Number twenty-eight was a terrace in the centre of Oakton Way, not far from the corner of Nelson Avenue. The Davenports had lived there. They were a large family, the Davenports. The sort of family that seemed always to have someone coming or going and an endless supply of small children tumbling in and out of the front door, the remains of tea smeared over their faces. The Davenports seemed to have been in Oakton Way forever. Mr Davenport had been injured in the First War—you could see his limp sometimes, particularly in cold weather—and after the War he’d worked for years at the railyard round the back of Gunnersbury Lane. Mrs Davenport had been a tiny woman, all untidy hair and apron strings, a baby on her hip. She had raised that family, and kept on raising it, on railyard wages. There had been six, or perhaps even seven of them. It was difficult to recall the younger ones.

The Davenports. They had been such a fixture of Oakton Way that it seemed impossible to imagine the street without them. But the war changed that, as it changed most things, so that one moment there was Kitty Davenport in a smock, ice-cream dribbling down her chin, and little William Davenport chasing a ball across the street and almost going under the hooves of the milkman’s horse, then the next minute Kitty was engaged to a corporal from Vermont, William lay dead in an airman’s uniform, and number twenty-eight stood empty and deserted.