Absolute Hush (3 page)

‘I don't mind going to school,' said Sissy. ‘I'd quite like it, actually.'

Elizabeth tried to clasp her daughter to her breast and said, ‘You aren't going to abandon poor Mummy when she needs you so, are you?'

Sissy held herself rigid, so that after a moment or two Elizabeth gave the girl a little shove of irritation.

‘You are so unloving,' she said tartly. ‘Anyway, what school could you go to? I mean you could hardly attend the village school, could you?'

‘Why not?' asked Sissy.

Elizabeth let out a light, contemptuous laugh. ‘Well, dear, only village children go to the local school. You wouldn't like to spend all day among the village children, would you?'

‘At least they learn something,' said Sissy woodenly.

For several weeks Elizabeth made spasmodic efforts to educate her offspring, but the lessons too often ended in stormy rows with Sissy.

‘That's enough!' Elizabeth cried in the end. ‘Why should I ruin my life and make myself miserable for your sake, when you aren't even grateful.'

George, who had been getting on quite well with his maths, told Sissy rather crossly, ‘Why do you have to spoil everything, Sis?'

‘Me?' cried Sissy outraged. The colour rushed out of her cheeks, leaving her even paler than usual. ‘Me spoil everything?' She felt utterly betrayed.

She felt even more betrayed when, a week later, Elizabeth announced, with just the slightest little nod of triumph, that
she had arranged for Sissy to attend Elizabeth's old school as a boarder.

‘Because I was there, and because of your father being missing, they have been very understanding about the fees,' she said.

‘But it's a girls' school,' said Sissy. ‘How can I go to a girls' school?'

‘Because you are a girl,' said Elizabeth.

‘How can George go to a girls' school?' Sissy felt her skin begin to prickle as understanding dawned.

‘George is not going. You are going,' said Elizabeth icily. She felt amazed that she had not long ago thought of this marvellous solution to the Sissy problem.

‘I won't go without George,' said Sissy through wooden lips.

‘You will,' said Elizabeth.

On the day Sissy was due to go to school she had to be forced, shrieking, into her school clothes by Mrs Lovage and Elizabeth. George stumbled after the car, howling, as Sissy, white-faced and horrified, was driven away.

Sissy's last view of her brother was of him being seized by Elizabeth. Just before the car turned the corner, she saw Elizabeth sink her face into George's cheek and begin to kiss him.

‘She looks like a wolf eating a fat baby lamb,' Sissy muttered aloud. And then began to scream again.

There is a limit to how much screaming and crying any school can endure. After a month Elizabeth received a phone call from the headmistress who said that Sissy had not settled down at all, was upsetting the other children, and not learning anything herself.

‘She is extremely backward. She is so far behind the other children that she needs remedial help to catch up and we are not equipped to give such teaching at this school. But, quite apart from that, the child herself is utterly uncooperative. I do not feel that we can get anywhere with her.'

Elizabeth wept and described how hard life was for a widow. The headmistress said she would give it one more try.

But it was really hopeless. Before the term was finished, Sissy came triumphantly home.

Neither Sissy nor George went to school at all after that. The inspector submitted a report describing the children as educationally subnormal, and a lady who specialised in the teaching of such children came once a week to check that Elizabeth was keeping them to the mark. Elizabeth made great efforts and even Mrs Lovage, spurred on by pity for her employer, heard the children's tables sometimes and let the polishing go a bit.

Sissy, after the shock of the boarding school episode, made violent efforts to be co-operative, and pinched her mouth tight a dozen times each lesson to prevent herself from saying things that would upset her delicate but vital relationship with her mother.

Across the road from the Plague House was an acre of Nissen huts in which lived nearly a hundred young airmen whose songs and shouts would sometimes be heard in the night. Tim had been attached to this base and flown his last flight from here, and Elizabeth knew many of the men there because of him and would ask them over sometimes. The children knew several of them, too, for the young men would often sneak, uninvited, up to the house for a swim in the moat, or a skating session, according to the season.

George and Sissy had, however, never before met the tall young airman who appeared one day while they were doing geography.

He came into the nursery, smiled, ran his fingers through George's hair and patted Sissy on the cheek.

Elizabeth, looking flushed, said, ‘This is Mummy's new friend. His name is Teddy, children.'

‘Good morning, George and Sissy,' said Teddy.

‘Teddy was a teacher before the war,' Elizabeth explained. ‘So he will help you both with your lessons. It's not very comfy at the airbase so I have told him he can stay in our house, as we've got so
many rooms. That's all right, isn't it?' She smiled diplomatically at the children.

Sissy gazed at Teddy thoughtfully, while Elizabeth watched her, and seemed nervous.

‘Good morning, Teddy,' Sissy said at last. ‘Yes, we have got lots of rooms.'

‘Uncle Teddy,' said Elizabeth. ‘You must call him Uncle Teddy.'

Sometimes Teddy would become irritable and snap at the children if they made the least mistake. This phase would be followed by Teddy giving them long passages of homework to do. He would tell them, ‘This should keep you going till I get back.' At this stage, Sissy noticed, there was always a little nerve jumping in the corner of his eyelid. Then he would vanish for a day, two days, three perhaps. And return with dark rings under his eyes, but flushed and happy, as though he had endured some awful ordeal and survived.

Once, on handing Sissy three pages on trade winds ‘To have off by heart when I get back,' he added, through rather tight lips, ‘
If
I get back.'

In the days before his departures he would snap at Elizabeth as well, and once the children heard her shout, ‘I don't care if you are a bloody hero! You can get out of my house if you are going to talk to me like that,' to which Teddy yelled something which ended with the words, ‘I'll kill you!'

Sissy was shocked, but George said calmly, ‘She's always saying she's going to kill herself, so she probably doesn't mind about dying as much as other people would. Me, for instance.'

‘He is flying over France, like your father,' Elizabeth told the children. ‘I think he is losing his nerve.'

During the days Teddy was away, Elizabeth would devote herself wildly and spasmodically to the cuddling of George, snatching him up without notice, so that he took to slinking furtively round the house trying to avoid being spotted.

‘It's OK sometimes, when I'm not busy,' he confided in Sissy. ‘But all the time like this makes life really impossible. I
wish Teddy would come back. She doesn't hug me half so much when he's here.'

Sissy, after about a year of not being embraced by her mother, began to hang around her, trying, after their long careful truce, to awaken some physical contact between them again. Once she stood firmly in her mother's path as though offering herself, but Elizabeth brushed her aside saying, ‘Don't keep getting in my way,' before hurrying on with a whistle of silk frock and tick of good shoes.

Sissy stood frozen for some moments after, her mouth dry, her heart beating with dismay.

She could not understand this new desire to be embraced.

‘Give me a kiss, Georgie,' she would say, trying to waylay the boy among the apple trees and he would briefly extend his cheek, obviously anxious to get the matter over as soon as possible. His cheeks felt hard and smoky nowadays, Sissy thought, and were losing that soft yieldingness of chubby babyhood.

George had become obsessed with fire. During the winter he was constantly poking the logs, or burning things in the open grates.

‘I wonder what hair burns like,' he would say, and chop off a chunk of his and have it in flames before anyone could stop him. Hardly anything in the house was safe from George's scorchings. His desire to see chintz burn had produced brown holes along the hems of the drawing-room curtains, and his efforts at melting lead had created gaps round the ancient window glasses.

‘I'll eat a hundred aspirins and die and be free of all my troubles,' mourned Elizabeth, surveying the scorches on a previously very nice Victorian papier mâchétray.

‘Did you know that Hindu widows burn themselves when their husbands die,' George informed his mother when they were working on the geography of India. ‘Teddy told me.'

If flames were visible, George was unable to put his attention to anything else, so that in the end Teddy instructed that no fire be lit in the nursery while the children were having their lessons.
Because of George's obsession, the trio was forced to work huddled under eiderdowns.

‘You smell so smoky, I bet if a cannibal ate you you'd taste like bacon,' Sissy told George.

When the summer came George lit a bonfire with Teddy's cigarette lighter.

‘Did you steal it from his pocket?' Sissy asked suspiciously.

George smiled and did not reply. The little heap of dried rushes that had once been a duck's nest flared up with a wonderful crackling and a perfume of menthol.

‘Don't you dare do that,' Elizabeth cried, rushing to the moat and waving her arms so that the silk of her blue dress shimmered in the sunshine. ‘In this dry summer you'll set the garden on fire.'

Because they had had no gardener since the beginning of the war, the long grass in the Lady Walk was waist high.

‘I'll get Teddy to whack you when he comes back if you ever do anything like that again.'

‘
If
he comes back,' said George softly, so that Elizabeth, shouting across the khaki water, could not hear him.

After that, George lit his fires in remote parts of the garden where the smoke and flames would not be noticed from the house.

‘I think, when I grow up, I would like to be a bomber best of all,' he told Sissy, as he held a magnifying glass under the sun and fanned the developing smoulder with a piece of newspaper. ‘Just imagine, Sis …' he made some nasal sounds to indicate plane engines. ‘Then, boom! Boom! It must be absolutely thrilling to see the great flames roaring up as the bomb explodes.' His little magnified flame let out a short crackle and sprang into life.

Teddy never heard Sissy's revision on the trade winds. He never came back. His plane was shot down over Germany.

‘I expect he burned to death,' said George. ‘Do you think our father burned to death as well? I wonder what a person who's burning to death smells like … '

‘Shut up!' said Sissy.

It was April. Elizabeth brought tea into the garden because the weather was so mild.

‘This is the most perfect day,' she said to her children, as lilac flowers floated into their milk. ‘The doves, oh, the sound of the doves in our garden. Does it sound so beautiful anywhere else, do you think? And there are ducks on their eggs among the reeds so we'll soon have ducklings.' She breathed in the exceptional air that was perfumed with earth and blossom and the warm cuddle of nesting ducks. There were satisfied deep quacks from the frogs in the water two feet away, and, in the trees across the moat, a cuckoo shouted.

Sissy watched her mother, warily trying to see past her eyes if there was a picture of Teddy burning in her mind.

Elizabeth threw out her arms across the plate of potato cakes and cried, ‘Isn't this absolutely glorious? Could one ask for any more from life?' Then she crinkled her nose, and said, looking suspiciously at George, ‘I smell smoke on your clothes. I hope you haven't been lighting any more fires?'

‘Oh, no,' said George, almost a year older and so better at lying and concealing.

George and Sissy had always shared a bedroom, though now they were eleven Mrs Lovage had started saying things like, ‘You've got plenty of rooms. They should sleep apart.'

Elizabeth had considered, briefly, taking Mrs Lovage's advice but a vision of Sissy's tight face and eyes bright with anger came into her mind, and she dropped the idea. It was not exactly that Elizabeth was afraid of Sissy. More that she could not bear the unpleasantness. Sissy would freeze into an angry
mood, and remain in it for weeks. It was easier to leave the girl alone.

That night Sissy sat up, looked at George sleeping, and felt a shiver of thrill at the idea of this plump, quiet boy being filled, unknown to anyone but her, with a desire to destroy. She gazed into his pale wide face and tried to understand his motives. She stared at his closed eyes and wondered what they were seeing behind their heavy pale-lashed lids. She leant her ear to his nostrils and listened to the soft child breaths passing in and out. Perhaps he was dreaming of crackling flames and people screaming. It excited Sissy to imagine fat George quietly moving through the world and sowing destruction. One day, she knew, it was going to end in trouble, and the idea made her glad. She thought this must be because the adults in her life were so destructive. They tossed bombs on to each other's towns, killing children, and thought nothing of burning to death young men with nervous eyelids and bushy eyebrows.

Once she and George had lain on their stomachs, looked through the warped ceiling-boards of the room below, and watched their mother embracing Teddy. They had both been naked, had grasped each other not only with their arms, but with their lips and thighs as well, and the tangle of nude body had rocked and thrashed and tossed as though on the waves of some violent sea.