At the Break of Day (4 page)

She bought tea from a trolley and handed over a sixpence.

‘That’s swell,’ she said, picking up her case, shrugging so that her bag wouldn’t slip from her shoulder, moving to one side to let the man with the cap buy his.

‘Yank, eh?’ said the woman, passing the man his cup without looking. Her headscarf was knotted at the front and her hair hung down her forehead. She looked tired and thin.

Rosie sipped the thick stewed tea and looked at the woman, the man, all these people who spoke in a thick scouse that she could barely understand.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, putting the cup back down on the trolley and moving towards her platform, tears stinging the back of her throat. I don’t know goddamn anything. I only know I’m hurting. I only know I shouldn’t be here. And nobody has come to meet me.

The train shuddered out along the tracks, through suburbs which were torn and jagged, splashed with purple from the rosebay willowherb. There were great gaps in the streets and bomb-damaged houses with rooms hanging open to the air, their damp and peeling wallpaper still clinging to the plaster. She had seen photographs in the newspapers but nothing had prepared her for this.

The train was taking her further from the sloping lawns, making her see what she had escaped. But that wasn’t her fault, was it? Grandpa had made her come back and he hadn’t even come to meet her, and neither had Jack.

She wiped the train window clear of condensation, felt the wet on her skin as she made herself count the telegraph poles, made herself smell the train, taste the tea thick on her tongue and teeth, watch the rain, because all this was England. The raindrops jerked down the pane as the train rattled slowly over the points.

Poor little country. Poor goddamn little country – and she saw tired brownstone buildings where no jazz played.

Guilt came then and it was shocking in its forgotten strength. It was the same guilt which had come on heavy heat-laden nights when she was safe and thousands of miles away from the bombs, the rationing, the grind. But the feeling had faded with the years and she had forgotten it until today. And now there was so much pain, so much anger, so much guilt that she thought her head would burst, but then this too faded. All of it faded. Nothing stayed. She was too tired. Right now she was too tired but it would all come again, along with the panic. She knew. It had been the same six years ago.

She wiped at the window again then sat with her hands clenched. She watched as the man opposite took out a packet of Woodbines, and struck a match. The smell of sulphur filled the carriage before being swept away in a rush of noise and wind as he hauled on the window strap, flicked out the match, then snapped it up again.

She watched as he drew deeply and read his paper again. She watched as the woman opposite took out sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. The tomato was warm and had stained the bread. The child in the corner was kicking his leg against the opposite seat. He had soft brown eyes like Jack’s. She looked away quickly.

Why hadn’t Jack met her? She pressed her hands together tightly in her lap. Why? He had written all through the years and had said he would come. Frank had cabled Grandpa telling him the time and date. Why hadn’t one of them come?

She looked at the boy in the corner again and then out at the fields, so green, so lush, even in the greyness, even in the rain. She had forgotten how green it was, how small the fields were. They passed old houses made of deep red Cheshire stone, and copses. She’d forgotten there were copses.

Yes, why hadn’t either of them come? She had known Norah would not. ‘Norah’s walking around like a flaming great purple bloodhound,’ Jack had written in his first letter to her. ‘She’ll not forgive you for going, leaving her here with iodine and impetigo. It’ll be your fault that the programme was scrapped before she could come too. Just shrug her off.’

Rosie had, she’d forgotten about the older girl who had increasingly pushed, shoved and scowled her way through life the older she became, but now they would be meeting again. Would it be any better?

The man opposite stubbed out his cigarette on the floor, grinding his heel down, squashing it, mixing it with the dirt from the floor.

Rosie remembered salvaging dog-ends with Jack before the war then rolling them into new fags and selling them for two-pence a pack. She and Jack had done that together and his mum had laughed but Grandma had never known. She would not have laughed and now so much of the past was coming back. Grandma would have told Grandpa he was a fool not to tan ‘that girl’s backside’. He had always loved Rosie so much, but he hadn’t come to meet her, had he? He had just issued the order.

Rosie hadn’t cried when Grandma died beneath the rubble of the bank. Norah had cried while the funeral guests were there and then she had gone up and sorted through Grandma’s mothballed clothes trying on the coat with the fox fur and the paws and the head with eyes which followed you around. It hadn’t suited her purple face, Rosie thought.

Norah had kept that and the cardigans and given the jumpers to Rosie to cut the arms off and sew into blankets. They had smelt of sweat until Rosie had washed them. Norah had sold the rest to the rag and bone man and kept the money.

Rosie shifted in her seat. Surely she had changed? They were grown up now, things were different. The seat prickled and the view of Arundel Castle on the wall above the man’s head was faded.

Jack had unscrewed the one of Weymouth on the evacuee train carrying their school down to Somerset when war first began. He had sold it to the owner of the village pub to get them enough money to travel back at Christmas when the bombers still hadn’t come.

His mum had sent him again though, after Rosie had gone and the bombs were falling night after night and after old Meiner’s house down the road was crushed. Rosie had liked Mr Meiner. Jack had fiddled them both a job lighting fires at his house on the Sabbath by saying they were older than they were. ‘Meiner left Germany but the buggers killed him anyway,’ Jack had written and his mum and dad had sent him back to Somerset then. But it was to a different area. Norah had gone too.

Rosie watched the woman next to her peeling off the crust of her last sandwich, eating it piece by piece, licking her finger and stabbing up the crumbs. Then she folded up the paper and put it away again in her bag.

Rationing was still on in England. They had debts to repay, the country to rebuild, and Rosie couldn’t take out her great slab of cheese, or the fruit, and the biscuits prepared on the ship. Instead she put her hand into her bag and pulled out a bread roll she had saved from breakfast.

They were passing through towns now and these were damaged too. They pulled into stations; doors slammed, whistles blew, and there was never the long mournful hoot of the American trains.

The man smoked another cigarette and this time the sulphur filled the carriage, and Rosie remembered the oast-houses and the hops, and smiled. Then there were the candles which the fumigation man lit when she and Norah had scarlet fever. How ill they had been, how the bed bugs had bitten, how they had tossed, turned, sweated, ached.

Rosie threw the little boy a sweet and his mother smiled.

‘How old is he?’

‘Seven.’

Their father and mother had died in the year of Rosie’s seventh birthday. She knew she was that age because her grandpa had said Martha, his daughter, her mother, ‘had seven years of sunshine with you, my little Rosie’.

Grandpa had bought the house then, because the landlord wouldn’t improve it. How he had managed she didn’t know. He wouldn’t tell, he had only muttered that his daughter hadn’t worked herself to death in that laundry and he hadn’t worked two shifts twice a week to see it all slip through his hands. So he had bought it off the landlord and together he and Ollie, Jack’s dad, had chipped at the plaster, stripping it down, disinfecting the bricks, replastering, reflooring both houses, because Ollie had bought his too.

Since then there had been no cockroaches to scuttle from beneath the wallpaper and no bed bugs. No tins of paraffin at the foot of each bed leg. Rosie scratched herself as the train gushed into the blackness of a tunnel.

There had been no more bed stripping, mattress scrubbing, but there had been … what was it? Oh yes, roses. Roses whose fragrance filled the yard. She had forgotten those until this moment.

The train slapped out into the light and Rosie put up her hand to shield her eyes. The rain had stopped. It was four p.m. and they would be in London in an hour.

She leaned her head back, letting it roll with the train, watching the man opposite tap his knee with his newspaper. The child was asleep, his head against his mother’s arm, and she missed Nancy and felt the pain again, raw, savage, and the sky seemed darker.

There was no one to meet her at Euston either and she gripped her case more tightly as she queued for a cab. ‘Putney, please,’ she told the driver, leaning forward, easing her case into the taxi. The trunk was tipped on end by the porters and juggled upright in the front. She tipped them half a crown.

‘Bloody Yanks,’ she heard a man say behind her, and his voice burst through her pain.

She turned as she got into the cab. ‘Bloody Britishers,’ she said. But she wished she hadn’t as they drove through a ruined London. The skyline was different and there was uncleared wasteland where there had once been streets.

She pulled herself forward, looking out. It was drizzling now. It would be hot at home in Pennsylvania. But no, that wasn’t home. This was home. She pushed the strap of her bag from her aching shoulder, remembering the same ache from her journey to Liverpool so long ago. But then it had been her gas mask which was heavy, filled with sandwiches and fruitcake.

A man with a long nose and dark suit had taken the gas mask away from her. He had given it to Grandpa to take home because she wouldn’t be needing it where she was going. Had Grandpa given it back to the Town Hall?

They were getting closer now. The streets were clustering. The lampposts had cracked bulbs. There was rope on one of them. So children still swung on them as she and Jack had done. Why hadn’t he or Grandpa come?

She sat back, pressing herself deep into the leather seat. She didn’t want to go on. She didn’t want to reach Middle Street, leave the cab, see Norah, see Grandpa. She wanted to go home.

But they were there now, turning into Middle Street, and the taxi slowed.

‘Which one, miss?’

She didn’t know. It was all so small, so narrow, and the far end had gone; flattened into piles of bricks, tiles, rosebay willowherb. Grass spurted out of the hard-packed earth and there was a surge of sadness within her for the people who had once lived and laughed here where children were now scrambling, shooting guns made out of wood, cowboys shooting Indians.

‘Your grandpa’s been watching too many bloody Hopalong Cassidy films at the flicks,’ Jack had said when she had told him she was leaving for America.

‘Will you write?’ she had asked, sitting on the kerb rolling marbles, trying to get his tenner, and he had, though he hadn’t come to meet her. But she mustn’t keep saying this, she must try and remember which house had been her home. She must try and stop the panic.

‘Which one, miss?’ the cabbie asked again, almost coming to a halt, and then she saw it. Number 15, with a front door which had once been bright red and was now dark, dirty, almost colourless. It was only now, with the taxi halted and the meter still clicking over, that she remembered the colour it should have been. It was all so small.

The panic was gone. There was nothing in its place, just an emptiness.

She couldn’t leave the cab. She couldn’t move. She fumbled in her bag, looking for money. But it wasn’t money she was looking for, it was just time, and then Norah came out, standing by the open dirty door, leaning back against the wall, staring at her, her face just the same but her hair frizzed up into a perm, tight like her face. She looked more than her eighteen years and Rosie felt a rush of pity for the sister who had been left behind.

She pulled on the handle, pushed open the door and walked towards her.

‘Hi, Norah,’ she said, leaning forward, but Norah stiffened and so Rosie pulled back without kissing her cheek and the emptiness was filled again.

‘You’re back then,’ Norah said, and her voice was the same too. Sharp and hard. ‘Grandpa’s asleep, don’t disturb him.’

Rosie could hear the children playing on the rubble at the end, where Mr Sims and Mr Elton had lived, Mr Meiner too. She looked down there, not at Norah. She had come back as she had been told to, and Grandpa was asleep, Jack was nowhere and Norah had not changed. So this was it, was it? This was goddamn it. But she wouldn’t cry. Not yet. She had no right to in this ruined street.

‘Mr Sims died then, did he?’ she asked. ‘It seems kind of sad. He used to give us toffee, do you remember?’ It was better to talk, to drawl out the words slowly and make sure her voice did not shake. It was better to do that than stand here making no attempt to reach out and touch this girl she had not seen for over six years.

Norah moved back into the house. ‘That trunk will have to go into the yard. There’s no room in the house,’ was all she said.

Rosie knew there was no room. The small hall ran into the only downstairs room and upstairs there was just a bedroom and a large boxroom which she and Norah had shared, head to toe. Would that be the case again?

‘Hey, miss, how’re we going to get this lot in?’

The cabbie was out now, heaving at the trunk, and Rosie called after Norah, but there was no answer and so she dumped her bags on the sidewalk and tried to help him edge it out and lower it to the road, but it was too heavy for the two of them.

‘I’ll see if those kids will help,’ she said, running on down the road, calling to them, wishing that she was running back to Liverpool, back to Frank and Nancy. But then she heard her name, and then again, and footsteps sounded behind her, closer, catching her. Then a hand caught her arm, slowing her, stopping her, and it was Jack. At last it was Jack, turning her to him, gripping her shoulders, shouting, ‘Where the hell have you come from?’