Absolute Hush (2 page)

George, who had safely shrugged off the danger of being punished for the destruction of the cucumber, now began to behave as though he had shrugged off the guilt as well.

‘Sissy's been awfully naughty, hasn't she, Mummy?' he mumbled through a mouthful of bacon.

‘I forgive her,' murmured Elizabeth, giving Sissy a reproachful look. Then she gave a choking sound that could easily turn into sobbing.

‘Here. Have my egg as well,' she told her daughter: ‘Eat it. I might as well starve. I have nothing else to live for now.' With a swift and almost aggressive movement, she tilted her soft egg on to Sissy's plate.

Sissy gazed at the tumbled egg. Its yolk slowly split with a gush of yellow. Her face went red. Her eyes became hot as though tears were stinging to get out, though of course she would never let them.

‘You
know
I hate eggs,' she cried.

‘I am trying to feed you. To nourish my child,' moaned Elizabeth. ‘It is my duty to feed my children.'

Sissy hunched her shoulders and glared into the yellow mess that had leaked over even the food she liked.

‘Eat it up,' cried Elizabeth. ‘I have sacrificed the last egg in the house for you.'

Sissy stared and did not move.

Elizabeth let out a strangled cry and leapt to her feet, tipping the milk so that it splashed across the cloth. Blackberry jam dripped on to the little pat of butter.

‘I can bear no more,' she cried, holding her hand to her throat. ‘I think my heart is breaking. I think it is broken already, in fact.'

She said savagely to Sissy, ‘Don't you have any pity for me at all? Don't you feel sorry for me in the least?' then rushed from the room.

The two children sat stunned, hearing their mother's voice receding up the stairs. ‘What is there for me to live for now? Oh, why was I ever born?'

‘Do you think she'll do it
this
time?' asked George.

After a short silence, during which both children kept their gaze fixed on the doorway, George said nervously, ‘I can't hear her any more, Sis. Perhaps she's dead from hunger by now. She didn't eat any breakfast. She gave it all to you.'

Sissy said nothing.

There fell another long slow pause, then George said, ‘If you don't want it really, Sis, could I have your bit of bacon. And the egg?'

Sighing, yet relieved, Sissy pushed her plate in front of her brother.

‘Have it all,' she said. ‘I can't eat either.'

George let out a little shriek. ‘Sissy! You might die as well as Mummy. If both of you are dead, what'll I do? Who'll look after me?'

‘Oh, you're so selfish, Georgie. All you think of is yourself. Anyway, nobody dies of starvation if they just miss out a single meal.'

‘Suppose she doesn't eat her lunch either?' George whimpered.

Sissy fixed her brother with a stern eye, while he, his mouth tight with eggs and bacon, looked back at her apprehensively.

‘Now,' she said sternly. ‘Why did you slice Mother's cucumber? I want to know, Georgie. I insist you tell me.'

‘I was going to write on it like Mrs Lovage's husband done,' whimpered George.

‘But you don't know how to write,' Sissy frowned. She was ahead of him in this respect. ‘You don't even know how to write on a bit of paper, so how could you write on a cucumber?'

‘That was the trouble,' moaned George. ‘So I thought I'd do quite a lot of it. The bits I knew. So I sort of did the straight bits … I was going to ask you how to spell “love” and … '

‘Yes?' Sissy leant forwards and waited tensely.

George, suddenly confused by her intensity and aware, without properly understanding why, that what he said next was going to be of significance, muttered, ‘I didn't know how to spell the other word.'

‘What other word, George?' There was a growly sound in Sissy's voice that alarmed George.

‘“Mummy”,' he whispered. ‘I was going to write “I love you, Mummy,” on the cucumber.'

Sissy stared at him for what seemed like ages, and the colour drained from her face.

George knew he had said something wrong, but did not know what, and could not think how to make it all right again. He looked down at his shoes while his heart bounced against his ribs.

At last Sissy cried shrilly, ‘I wish I'd never got punished instead of you for it! I wish you had been the punished one!'

When Elizabeth's children came guiltily out of their hiding places after doing something naughty, their faces would be set in rigid masks of sullen endurance, their emergence from shadows emphasising their paleness, the straight heavy bleached hair and the plump whiteness of their skin.

When they came out from under the cow-parsley after the cucumber episode, for instance – and the comparison was no sooner in her mind than she banished it – the soft white children with their peevish expressions reminded Elizabeth of maggots.

Mrs Lovage often commented on how the children seemed to have entirely favoured the father, and said, ‘It must be such a comfort to you, in your great loss, dear, still to have him so strongly in his little ones.'

George and Sissy's father had been a short, plump man, whereas Elizabeth was tall and slim.

Elizabeth had said, ‘It would have been nice if they had taken after me a little bit.'

‘They will, dear, when they're bigger,' Mrs Lovage soothed her. ‘Children are always changing. They go from one phase to another like yo-yos.'

To Elizabeth, these children when they were very small – even though they did not look like her yet – had been utterly hers, and she liked to hug and kiss them and press her face into their yielding cheeks and stomachs. She would suck, wet-lipped, at their skins as though deriving nourishment. She breathed into their tummy buttons and blew vibratingly behind their ears. These passionate kissings aroused sensations that eased some wild appetite in her that was neither for food nor sex
nor love, yet somehow a mixture of all three. To her, the children, George and Sissy, were equally kissable. She got the same satisfaction from kissing, hugging, either one. The yard or two of child body was all one to her. It smelled and felt the same, it satisfied in the same way.

Sissy had endured, or even enjoyed, these huggings at first but when she was about four she had begun to wriggle after a moment or so, her eyes wandering to the activity from which she had been snatched.

After that, Elizabeth took extra care with George, determined that he would not try to evade her embraces too.

Holding him tightly, she would tell him, ‘Oh, let poor Mummy kiss her baby,' and she would even weep a little if George showed signs of struggle so that, in the end, George learned to slump supine in her arms, or giggle when the blowings or the kisses were especially tickly. This technique, when tried out on Sissy, had not worked. Sissy stopped wriggling but was too stiff to give Elizabeth any sensory pleasure.

‘Cuddling you is like cuddling a bit of barbed wire,' Elizabeth told Sissy, and gave up and concentrated all her passion on George.

‘Your poor mother,' Mrs Lovage cried once, finding Sissy crouched, pinch-faced, in the corner of the pantry, while from the kitchen Elizabeth's coos of, ‘My lovely little dumpling! I could eat you up,' were almost drowned by George's laughter.

‘Why can't you be loving like your brother? She's such a good mother to you, and I don't see you give her any gratitude.'

Sissy, shouting, ‘I hate you, Mrs Hate-age!' rushed out into the garden.

‘You've got to always call her “Mrs Hate-age” from now on,' Sissy whispered to George later. ‘That's what she wants to be called from now on.'

‘Why?' asked George, round-eyed.

‘Because she's married a man called Mr Hate-age, of course,' cried Sissy with sudden inspiration.

After a pause George asked, ‘But what's happened to Mr Lovage?'

‘He was killed by the Germans – yesterday –' said Sissy swiftly.

‘Oh.' George sat thinking for a few moments then asked, ‘Do you think Mr Hate-age will give Mummy a cucumber?'

Elizabeth always smelled of perfumed soap. This, to Sissy, was Elizabeth's smell. No one else in the whole world, thought Sissy, smelled like this.

‘Where do you get it?' Sissy asked once. The soap in the children's bathroom was lobster-coloured and called carbolic. It did not smell at all like Elizabeth's.

‘At a special shop in London. It's been very difficult to find since the war started, so don't you dare use it. It costs a bomb and I've got precious little as it is.'

Sissy was shocked. It was as though she was being forbidden to wear her mother's hair, fingernails, skin. ‘I wouldn't even want to!' she cried.

Elizabeth turned a look of reproach on the child and muttered, ‘You just seem to hate everything about me.'

Sissy stared at her mother and tried to work out what had happened. She said at last in a rather dry-mouthed whisper, ‘I just wanted to know its name. That's all.'

‘Sandalwood,' said Elizabeth, hurt sharpening her tone. She turned and strode away, setting the tender silk of her dress swishing.

Elizabeth always wore nice clothes. There being a war on did not seem any reason to go around dressed like a drudge. One might be a drudge, she would tell Mrs Lovage over a cigarette in the mornings, but that was no reason to look like one.

‘No, certainly not, dear,' said Mrs Lovage adjusting her headscarf, and giving her overall a tweak. ‘You always look very nice indeed, if I may say so.'

Before the war Elizabeth had had her dresses made by a lady in the village. At the time Tim had laughed at her for filling her cupboards with so many expensive frocks.

‘Even if you went out every afternoon, as well as every night, you would never manage to wear them all,' he teased.

Now with Tim gone she did not go out in the evenings, let alone the afternoons. But the dresses were there, needing to be worn.

‘I can't see any particular reason for not wearing silk taffeta in the afternoon,' she told Mrs Lovage. ‘It cheers me up to be in something nice.'

‘Yes, of course, dear,' said the charlady. ‘And you just let me clean that saucepan, ducks. You'll ruin the nice dress if you do it.'

‘If I was you I wouldn't let Mother kiss like that,' Sissy told George. ‘You stink of her soap, and I don't like it.'

‘But, but, but!' whimpered George.

Sissy shrugged. ‘Oh well, it's up to you. But all I can say is I won't hug you if you smell of her.'

‘Would you hug me if I smelled of treacle?' asked George.

‘Don't be silly. That's got nothing to do with it.'

‘Horse manure?' George persisted.

‘Silly!' cried Sissy.

‘Dog's mess?' shouted George.

Sissy paused, looked at him thoughtfully, then said, ‘Even dog's mess smells better than her scent.'

The smell of George was something Sissy had always known, milky, salty, hot. Sissy wondered if anybody else apart from George smelled like this, and sometimes would imagine herself blindfold in a room full of boys sniffing out the one that was her brother. She was certain she would recognise him.

‘Why does everyone want to cuddle me?' George asked. ‘Even Mrs Lovage – I mean … what did you say her new name was now, Sis? Even she made a grab at me this morning, and told me I'd got chubby cheeks. I expect I won't get any peace till I grow thin.'

In desperation, he tried to only eat a single biscuit for his tea. But, after ten minutes of fierce struggle, he was forced to capitulate and polish off the rest.

When the twins were ten or so a man appeared at the frontdoor.

‘Education officer,' whispered Mrs Lovage. ‘He don't look too well, ducks. So I'm brewing him a nice cuppa.'

‘I understand your children are not attending school,' the official said to Elizabeth.

‘Oh! My dear!' Elizabeth sat down at the end of the big scrubbed table, and pressed her hands to her throat.

The inspector stared hurriedly into his steaming mug of tea, for he had noticed tears beginning to well up in Elizabeth's eyes.

‘They are all I have,' murmured Elizabeth. ‘Since my husband … went missing … over France two years ago, I have had no one but the children.' She paused, passed her palms over her eyes. ‘I send them when I can,' she said in a choking voice. ‘I send them when I can bear to. You don't know what it's like.'

The inspector sipped his tea in silence and felt ashamed because he had been considered too ill to risk being lost over France. He coughed softly, then said, ‘They will be disadvantaged when they are grown up.'

Elizabeth shook her head. ‘One cannot imagine things ever being the same as they were before the war.' She sighed.

The inspector waited, felt tired, felt he had done his duty.

‘I mean what will the world be like when they are grown up? Will there
be a
world, even?' asked Elizabeth.

‘One must not lose heart,' the man said dispiritedly. ‘You will have to make some arrangement for their education, you know. It is compulsory … '

Elizabeth gave him a long, close and conspiratorial look, before saying softly, ‘I need them so. Surely you can do something? … I will send them when I can bear to, I swear.'

The inspector pressed his lips together and stood up. He felt slightly dizzy. These official visits took too much out of him.

‘I'll see what I can do,' he told her drily. ‘Perhaps you can arrange to give them some lessons at home on the days they can't go to school. Something like that … '

Elizabeth followed him to the door. ‘Tim … that's my husband … had wanted to send the little boy to Eton. But of course there's no hope of that now. I can't afford that any more.'

The man nodded and walked carefully off down the drive.