We've Come to Take You Home (6 page)

FOURTEEN

‘C
OME ON,
J
ESS, LOOK
sharp. He'll be here soon.'

She slipped out from under the blankets. The bed, which had been originally shared by four, then three, was now only slept in by two. Soon it would be just one.

She took a sip of tea. The primroses had long gone, the bluebells were fading and the elderflowers were almost out. Summer was just a few weeks away but inside the cottage, tucked away in the valley at the bottom of the hill, the mornings were still bitterly cold.

‘These tea leaves are the ones I used the morning your father left…'

The last breakfast the family had eaten, sitting together round the table, her mother bouncing the screaming baby up and down on her lap.

‘I dried them, saved them up for the day he was coming home…'

Her mother stood up.

‘And now you're going…'

London wasn't that far away.

‘I'll come and visit whenever I can. They'll let me do that, won't they?'

Her mother poured water from the jug into the chipped enamel basin.

‘I won't have you going up there dirty…'

She picked up a cloth.

‘Come on, stand over here, where I can get at you…'

Jess walked round the table to her mother.

‘Up they go.'

Jess raised her arms. With no money, coal too expensive to buy, and with only a few twigs left for firewood, having a bath, even one every two or three months, was no longer possible. A quick scrub with a piece of cloth had to do. But in the winter it had been too cold to do even that. Her mother had sewn Jess into her winter clothes in November and, she'd stayed in them, day and night, never taking them off – until now.

‘I met your father at the house. He delivered the vegetables, in his barrow, fresh from the market at Covent Garden. We ate a lot of vegetables, all those people in a big, grand house like that…'

Jess winced. She wouldn't have any body left if her mother kept scrubbing so hard.

‘There would be potatoes and onions and leeks for us servants, and asparagus and beans and peas, for the family, the Major, his wife and the boys. Boxes and boxes we had delivered. Didn't know where to put them there were so many. The artichokes were the worst. Nasty prickly things, all leaves and stalk and worms…'

Her mother rinsed out the cloth.

‘And in the summer we had lettuce, all sorts, floppy ones, crinkly ones, and radishes and tomatoes and cucumber. The Major was a meat man but if his vegetables were wrapped up in pastry or hidden away under a sauce where he couldn't see them, a white one with nutmeg, sometimes cook would add cheese, or onions, cooked long and slow, then he would eat them.'

The water in the basin was now black with over six months' dirt. Her mother held out the cloth.

‘You finish yourself off, properly now, while I get your things ready.'

Jess lifted her shift and scrubbed.

‘You might meet your own husband there.'

Her mother knelt down beside the shiny, new leather suitcase sitting on the floor. She lifted the lid.

‘Like I did.'

What chance did she, Jess, have of finding a boyfriend, let alone a husband? There were no young men. There were none left. They were all out in France fighting the war. Or dead.

‘Come on, take off that shift…'

Jess hesitated. When she'd been a little girl she'd never been embarrassed about running around, in front of her mother and father, as naked as the day she was born. But her body had changed.

‘You'd best be quick…'

She pulled off her stained and torn shift and took the one her mother was holding out. She'd never seen anything so white.

‘You're a fine girl, Jess.'

Her mother looked her up and down and smiled.

‘Some might even say pretty…'

Jess pulled on the shift.

‘It's scratchy…'

‘A couple of washes will soften it up.'

On went the woollen dress, the black stockings and the ankle boots, all bought with the money sent down from London.

‘Wrap the bottom lace over and through the top lace…'

She watched, and tried to remember, as her mother looped, knotted and tied a bow.

Lastly, she pulled on, and buttoned, the black wool coat.

‘It's so big…'

The sleeves reached down over her fingers. The bottom almost touched the floor.

‘You'll grow into it. That's what happened, when I went up to London, to a big house, with decent food to eat.'

Her mother picked up the suitcase.

‘Get off the train and don't move, just stay there. The Major's a big man, big all over. And he always swings his arms like he's marching. And no hair, even when he was young…'

And there was the cart drawn by the horse, its head sagging, eyes rolling, ribs sticking out, crawling along the mud-choked track towards them. It was the same cart and the same horse, with the same driver wrapped up warm inside his coat, which had taken them to the church for her brother's funeral less than three weeks ago.

His death was a blessing. He had gone to heaven. It was the end of his suffering. This was what her mother had repeated, again and again, as they trudged, slipping and sliding in the mud, out of the village, up the hill and then down the hill back to the cottage.

There was no heaven. At least not like the one preached about in the church on Sunday. How could there be angels with haloes and wings? How could Jesus rise from the dead? How could anyone rise from the dead? It was all impossible. How could you believe in a God, or anything like a God, with the war out in France, and all the men and boys dying, and all the women and children sick and starving?

The one thing she could understand, really understand, was the need to feel no further pain. To be dead, to be nothing, to disappear into a hole in the ground, had to be better than spitting, coughing and vomiting your life away as her brother had done the last weeks, days and hours of his life. She knew what that was. She didn't need the bible or a preacher to tell her. That was hell.

But this cart with its near-dead horse was taking her away to a new and better life.

‘Now be a good girl, Jess.'

Her mother hugged her tight.

‘Work hard and do what you're told and you'll be well looked after.'

Jess slid her suitcase onto the cart and then climbed up after it. The driver flicked his reins. The cart shuddered forward. Jess turned to look back. And there was her mother, a small, dark figure, standing alone at the bottom of the hill, still waving.

FIFTEEN

T
HEY WERE IN THE
intensive care unit and she was walking, head down, eyes fixed on the scuffed heels of her mother's brown leather boots, because she was scared of what she was going to see when eventually they stopped – and she would have to raise her head and look. They passed one bed, two beds, three beds; there was a scrape, a shuffle, a murmur of voices and then her mother's feet disappeared underneath a chair.

Sam raised her head and stared. She kept on staring in the hope, that if she stared long enough and hard enough, her eyes would swallow up the nightmare; the man, his body punctured with tubes, lying on the bed. She looked more closely. She searched for detail but the more she looked, the more she saw, the pallid skin, the sweat-soaked hair, the blue veins on the back of the hand, the less she could believe, and the less she wanted to believe, that this thing, that was barely human, that looked like a robot out of a sci-fi film, was her father.

Sam glanced over to where her mother was sitting, back straight, eyes wide, her hands clamped onto her handbag as though her life, their lives, the whole world as they knew it, depended on the continued existence of the handbag and everything in it.

Sam recognised that need. It was exactly the same need that had made her get up off the floor, walk over to the sink, pick up the plastic bowl and then go back down to kneel beside her father, holding out the bowl towards him, so that, please, if he was going to be sick, then could he do so, not all over himself,
the cupboards and the floor, but into the plastic bowl – so that everything could be kept nice and neat and clean and tidy.

But nothing was nice and neat and clean and tidy. Her father, the same father who hadn't hesitated to risk his own life in order to save hers, was now lying, hooked up to machines, in the intensive care unit of the local hospital.

Years ago, when she was old enough to have a memory, but not old enough to put that memory into any context, they had gone, the three of them, herself, her mother and her father, out for the day to a village where some distant, long dead, relative used to live. At that age she had very little understanding of how short or long a minute, an hour, even a day, was. A month was completely incomprehensible, a year even more so. Time was measured by how happy, unhappy or, even, how bored she was. An unhappy minute could seem longer than a day, a happy hour shorter than a minute. But Sam knew she was quite happy, even very happy, as happy as she'd ever been, sitting there, looking out of the window, the sunlight flooding in, listening to music while her parents laughed and chatted away to each other in the front of the car.

They got to where they were supposed to be going. They visited a church, stared at a gravestone and then had something to eat. Whether it was lunch or tea she couldn't remember. The next memory she had was walking between her mother and father along a path, then up a steep flight of steps onto a narrow, wooden bridge. A whistle and a hoot echoed up the valley. They stopped to wave as an old steam train rattled past on the other side of the river.

To the right, the river flowed slow and smooth while, to her left, it tumbled down a weir. And then, for some reason, instantly, there and then, she was filled with a desperation that could not be explained. She tugged, hard, even violently, she might even have kicked out, her father let go of her hand and she plunged down, off the bridge and into the river.

She was under the water, and then she was on top of it. And then she was under it again. She surfaced, gulping for air. People were running up and down the riverbank. A motorboat, a white one, was speeding towards her. The last thing she saw, as the river closed over her head, was her father diving off the bridge into the water.

Her next memory was opening her eyes to find herself lying on the ground with a crowd of people looking down at her. There were nods and smiles. Someone asked if they should call an ambulance. Her father said no, everything was fine, thank you. And then the people wandered off – and her mother started. And she went on and on, all the way to the car and all the way home. Sam could have drowned. Her father had to dive in to save her. He could have been killed.

That evening, back at home, her father came up to her room. He sat down on the bed beside her.

‘Sam, you mustn't be upset. Mummy only said the things she said because she loves you and she's terrified of losing you.'

He squeezed her hand.

‘Those invisible friends, the ones you used to see in your bedroom in our old house…'

What they looked like, their names, she had no memory of them, nothing at all.

‘If they do come back, if you see them again, you will tell us, won't you?'

What she could remember was waking up in a bedroom she didn't recognise, in a house she didn't know, and being told that this was her new home.

‘Will we have to move again?'

Her father laughed.

‘I hope not.'

He stood up.

‘You mustn't worry. But what happened today, on the bridge, was a bit strange…'

She didn't then, all those years ago, translate into words the feeling of desperation that had flooded through her while she was walking across that bridge on that sunny Saturday afternoon. Everything had been so perfect, so peaceful, and then suddenly, without any warning, out of nowhere, all that had mattered, her mother's laughter, the touch of her father's hand, the warmth of the sun on her face, all of it became meaningless.

Yesterday, the three of them had been a happy family. And now the same thing had happened. Joy and pleasure had, in a blink of an eye, been replaced by misery and despair.

‘It would be best if you went home now. Have something to eat, get some rest.'

The young doctor who had talked to the two of them so briskly in the accident and emergency department was standing, sleeves rolled up, stethoscope still draped round his neck, at the head of her father's bed.

‘Tomorrow at ten we'll go through the results of the scan. We'll ring if there's any change.'

SIXTEEN

H
ER MOTHER REMAINED SILENT
, not speaking a single word, eyes fixed on the road ahead, all the way back from the hospital.

When they passed the angel statue and turned left, off the promenade, to drive up the hill, the house was still there, standing in a row, with all the other houses. It was identical to the one she had left earlier that afternoon with her father in the ambulance.

It was the same height, and the same width, it had the same number of windows, the same front garden, and the same path leading up to the same front door. But at the same time it looked and felt completely different – it was a stranger to her. Another family lived there, another mother and father with a spiky blonde-haired daughter called Sam, not her own.

The curtains, which her mother had sewn together out of material she'd picked up at a car boot sale, were still hanging downstairs in the front window. In the summer, when all Sam wanted to do was spend every minute of every day down on the beach, the multi-coloured stripes fluttering cheerfully in the sunshine had encouraged her, waved her on, as she trudged up the hill after a very long and very boring day cooped up at school. Drooping there in the window, the same curtains now looked dreary, even desperate.

Her mother parked the car in the usual place. Still in silence, her mother ahead, Sam trailing along behind, they walked up the garden path towards the front door. Her mother put her key
in the lock. Sam expected it to jam, the door to be opened by a woman who would look at them in puzzlement before telling them that they must have come to the wrong house.

The key turned and the door got stuck where it always got stuck. Her mother kicked and it opened. They walked into the hallway. There were the boots piled up in the basket to the right of the front door and the same coats, her dark blue one and her mother's red and her father's brown one, hanging up in their usual places.

The same poster of a white house with a scarlet door, and a balcony with a table and two chairs, looking out towards a turquoise sea, hung in its frame on the wall opposite the bottom of the stairs. Sam remembered her mother buying it. They'd been on holiday in Greece, staying on an island the name of which Sam couldn't remember. Her mother had said it was the sort of house, in the sort of place, she'd like herself and Sam's father to grow old in.

They walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. Sitting there sipping coffee and eating great big, thick, slabs of toast smothered with peanut butter was a Sunday morning tradition. Especially if Sam had stayed out late on Saturday night – it would be the glue that stuck her sleep-deprived body back together again. But that happy, homely, lounging around, doing nothing in particular Sunday morning sort of smell, and all the memories that went with it, had been swallowed up by another that was far stronger and more insistent.

‘Don't bother to put the chicken into the fridge. Just leave it out. I'll make that casserole. You must be starving. You haven't eaten anything since breakfast …'

Sam slammed out of the kitchen and up the stairs. She ran along the landing and into her room. She threw herself down onto the bed. Her father was in hospital, lying there in the intensive care unit, hooked up to machines, and all her mother could talk about was food.

There was a knock.

‘Sam?

The door opened.

‘Are you all right?'

No, she wasn't.

‘Shall I make you some tea?'

Tea was the last thing she wanted.

‘I'm fine, just really tired. I'll come down later…'

The door closed.

She checked her mobile. The first message was from Katie asking if Sam was feeling better, that Leo really liked her and wanted to see her again. The next message was from Lou saying, in her own dreamy I'm-here-but-I'm-not-really-here sort of way, pretty much the same thing. The third was from Shelly and it was all about the boy at the fair, the short, stocky one who kept punching the air, what he'd said, what she'd said, what he'd done, what she'd done, on and on it went. Sam was about to turn the mobile off when she realised there was a fourth message, one she'd missed earlier:

“Sam. It's Dad. I don't know whether you'll get this message – suspect you're still in bed, fast asleep – which is where you should be at this time on a Sunday morning. Wish I was. But if you don't it doesn't matter because I'll ring you again as soon as I get to the airport. It's just that after what we talked about last night, about what Mum said, about me leaving, I just wanted to tell you that you really mustn't worry. It will be all right. We'll sort something out. Traffic's moving so I've got to go. Love you lots. Always have. Always will.”