Mourning Ruby (25 page)

Madame Blanche has her eye on Florence, that’s true. She makes an exception of her. She’s grooming Florence. Maybe that offers a way out. But otherwise, if Florence is lucky and she doesn’t start drinking or drugging herself, she might put by enough to start a little business of her own one day. A dressmaking business, maybe. That’s about her best bet. Solange thinks she can start again elsewhere and maybe find a man who will take her on, but Solange is fooling herself, and Florence knows it. The miller has taken her on and he intends to punish her for it.

Florence hasn’t got much choice – not in that part of the field of history in which she finds herself. No housing benefit for Florence, no help with childcare costs.

She’s tough in her way, you’ll have seen that. She’s very controlled and very observant. She makes herself live from hour to hour. Has Claire had her face washed, is the piano tuned, will it soon be time to pick the baby turnips? Her mind is full of those things. She finds comfort in them; at least, she thinks it is comfort.

She will never tell anyone everything. Even Claire won’t guess how much her mother loves her. When she’s older she’ll believe that Florence is too tough on her.

The thing about wartime love stories is that usually there are no boundaries or barriers. War breaks them. But that isn’t going to happen here. A woman so weary, so controlled, so wrapped up in her child, and a middle-aged man who is married and whose wife is expecting a child that he doesn’t want. (I’m going ahead of the story, and telling you what Florence doesn’t know yet.) Will isn’t a boy, he’s not one of those fresh-faced handsome public schoolboys we all know about, with a book of poems in his breast pocket. He’s a middle-aged man. He’s got a wife, and a child coming that means almost nothing to him. He’s not a cold man, but he’s tired, too, like Florence. He’s worked for an insurance company for years. He wanted to be an architect, but he’d never tell anyone that now. It was too big a leap for a boy whose father was a tin-miner.

Will learned to fly before the war. They didn’t have a child for years and he saved and paid for his pilot’s training. He would go off to the aerodrome Sunday after Sunday. His wife hated it.

Florence doesn’t know any of this yet. But I’m letting you into the story.

3

Speaking English Perfectly

The room where I sleep is long enough for a single bed, and wide enough for the door to swing open. It is in the attics, next to Claire. There’s an iron bedstead with a striped ticking mattress, darned linen, a darned white counterpane. There’s a rag rug on the boards, and the walls are white. I scrubbed the boards myself, and polished them with beeswax and turpentine, and I painted the walls white. The dormer window looks out and away, over roofs into treetops and sky. My window faces west, away from the war.

It looks towards England. At home our house faced east, into the morning. We had a courtyard where grapevines grew over pillars. My mother would point north, and east.

‘England is that way, Florence. Over the sea. One day you’ll go there.’

But she said it as if it couldn’t happen, and it never did. My mother told me how the wind always blew in England, even inside the houses, and how dark it was in the winters. She hadn’t been back in more than twenty years. But sometimes in August, when it was so hot that she lay on her bed in her chemise and I lay close, she would say different things. She would say that they had Romans in England, just as we had them in
Orange. But up there they built for war, not pleasure. No wonderful amphitheatres and circuses. They built a wall across the land, from sea to sea, and patrolled it with soldiers.

‘Why did they build it, Maman?’

‘To keep the wild people out, Florence.’

I don’t have blinds at the dormer window, or curtains. When I wake up the sky is there immediately, to let me know what the day will be like. At night the stars come so close you’d think they were elbowing their way through the glass.

My bed is narrow, but not too narrow for Claire to cuddle in beside me when she wakes in the night. I hear her as soon as she stirs and I’m out of bed before I know that I’m awake. I scoop her out of the tangled cot and press her face against my shoulder so she won’t wake anyone. When she was a baby she smelled of mashed potatoes when she woke up red and sweaty. Now she smells of vanilla. In my bed she tucks close to me, at my back, with a bunch of my nightdress in her fist. I lie awake a little longer and watch the stars. Sometimes there’s a moon and the clouds fly over it so fast it feels as if we’re flying too. I wish that time would stop and we would always be here, safe, with Claire curled into sleep and the house still and silent beneath us.

Madame Blanche didn’t want me to have this room. I have a perfectly good room downstairs with a thick red carpet, green silk curtains, a washstand and a wide bed. Madame Blanche is very proud of our rooms. Everything in them was chosen by her. They are elegant, restrained, tasteful, she thinks.

‘Except for the mirror,’ said Gabrielle. She was in my room, leaning over the dressing-table, fixing her back-hair. ‘Look where she’s put it.’

I looked. ‘Dressing-table mirrors are always like that.’

‘Not that mirror,’ said Gabrielle in her quick, cutting voice. ‘The one over there.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, smiling, as if I’d known and understood all along what the mirror over there was for. And the china figures in Mariette’s room that I’d never looked at too closely. A book here, a picture there.

‘She makes me laugh. Like they haven’t got the point already. Like they don’t know what kind of house they’re in.’

That was when I first came. Gabrielle remembers what I was like then, but the others don’t. They all came after I did. There’s a lot of coming and going here.

But Marie-Claude thinks her bedroom is lovely. She dusts it and polishes the furniture herself, and when she has a day off she washes all her ornaments in soapy water, rearranges them, and replaces their labels if they’re stained or faded. Marie-Claude collects china baskets of flowers. They all have different names and Marie-Claude makes labels for each basket, in her best handwriting, decorated with curlicues and sprigs of flowers.
Country Garden
,
Rose Bower
,
Maiden Dreaming
,
Sweet Violets
. Marie-Claude is saving up for
Bridal Posy
.

I told Madame Blanche I couldn’t sleep downstairs. It gave me bad dreams. She didn’t like it, but she gave in. She doesn’t come up here. No one does, except Claire, and sometimes Marguerite.

*

‘You’ll have a room of your own,’ said Madame Blanche the first time we met. It was late December, the first winter of the war. I was five months pregnant with Claire. I was on my way north, to find work.

The question is, what was Madame Blanche doing in the third-class carriage? I didn’t think of it until much later. She had plenty of money. What was she doing on those hard, dirty seats which smelled of coal?

Now I believe that she had spotted me as I changed trains, among the market women and close-faced men and boys with raw faces going to be soldiers. I must have given so much away, while I thought I was hiding it all.

The young woman is travelling alone, late in the evening, in a third-class compartment of the Paris train. She is wearing a dark-blue woollen skirt and jacket, edged with black braid, well-cut and obviously hand-made. Her hair is dark, thick, smooth, drawn into a knot. Her hands are gloved and her expression composed. (This is what I saw in the mirror as I stood in my bedroom at home for the last time. I looked perfectly calm, even serene. Perhaps a little pale, and it’s true that there was a rash on my neck, hidden by my high-collared blouse, and a cluster of tiny spots on the left side of my chin. I never have spots. My lips were pressed firmly together. I took a good look at myself, like a burglar checking that no signs of his intentions will give him away as he strolls casually down the street, whistling and glancing up at shuttered windows.)

As she changes for the Paris train, the young woman signals a porter to transfer her luggage, which consists
of a valise, a large basket and a hatbox. The porter heads up the train to the first-class compartment, and she has to pull at his arm and tell him that no, it is the third-class compartment she wants. He becomes surly after this, expecting a small tip or none. He slams the luggage into the third-class compartment in a way that conveys his disrespect. She flushes, scrabbles in her bag, over-tips him. He walks away, flicking the coin she’s given him.

Once in the compartment, the young woman reaches up to stow her hatbox safely in the rack. The movement shows that her waist is thickened by pregnancy. When she has reassured herself that the hatbox is not going to be crushed, she squeezes into a seat between two market women who smell of wine. She closes her eyes and appears to fall asleep as the train jogs north. But her gloved hands are not sleeping. They clutch the small black bag on her lap as if it contains her whole life.

So, as you see, I left plenty of clues. Half of them would have been enough for Madame Blanche.

It was a corridor train. There were people standing in the corridor and among them was Madame Blanche. At the next station, the two market women got out, barging the other passengers with their empty baskets. This was the stopping train, not the express. I leaned forward and watched the two women clamber down the steps, hoist their baskets and go off down the tracks together. They were home. It was a halt in the middle of nowhere, no lights. They would cross the cinders, find the muddy lane that meant home. It was a fine night, with a moon. There would be cottages where
they were expected, maybe even welcomed. They would talk of prices and how the market had gone. Maybe they’d lie about how much they’d made, and keep back a few sous for a jug of wine the next time.

I wanted to be them. They looked as if they’d already barged their way through enough suffering and sorrow to get the measure of it. Now they’d be lifting the latch of the door, scolding the dog, checking that the fire had not been allowed to go out.

In the train window my face looked back at me. My hair was still smooth from the brushing I’d given it that morning.

If I went north I would find work. I could cook, or sew, or work in a laundry. I knew how to do all those things. I would look for a job where accommodation was provided.

I would become a widow. My husband had died in the first days of the war, before I knew I was pregnant. He had left me nothing to live on and his family had never liked the marriage.

– But if you are a widow, why are you wearing blue?

– I have not got enough money to buy mourning.

– Silly girl, doesn’t she know that half the world hasn’t got money to buy mourning? Stick your clothes in a vat of black dye, that’s what you do. When they try to come up, bulging and roiling in the inky water, thump them down with a stick. That’s the way to get the dye even.

It was a good, easy story, but it had holes in it already.

The north was where I was going, close to the war. People wouldn’t ask so many questions there. There
would be plenty of work. There were new factories opening, to make munitions. They wanted women workers there.

I shivered. It was getting cold already. This was the north. The smell of the engine smoke nauseated me, and the smell of sweat and onions. I must get out to the corridor.

The door was heavy and my vision was starting to break up into patches of blackness. There was sweat on my face. I tugged the door but it wouldn’t open. I pulled again as hard as I could, hurting myself.

It gave way and I was in the corridor. The noise of the train was fierce out here. Every vent rattled but there was more air. Two men crouched on their haunches, playing cards, and they looked up at me as I pushed past them. I had to step high, between them, and I held my skirt close so that they could not see my legs.

There was a draught. I got as close to the window as I could and pressed my forehead to the glass. I breathed deeply and the clean air pushed down the nausea that was trying to swamp me. I was getting the better of it –

‘Here,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘Have some of this.’

It was the silver cap of a flask. The smell of brandy made me gag and I pushed it away.

‘No. Drink it. You’ll feel better immediately.’

Her voice made me follow the instruction. I lifted the silver cap and drank, and as the brandy went down my gullet, my nausea dissolved into fire.

‘That’s not enough. Drink more.’

I drank more. I drank off the capful and she refilled it. I drank that, too.

‘You haven’t eaten,’ she said.

‘No –’ It was true. The ham and cheese sandwiches at the buffet had looked stale.

‘I have some biscuits. They’re very good. They’re oat biscuits.’

I thought her eyes were black. They were hard to read, but her face was concerned, and I thought it seemed kind. Rain had begun and it made runnels which joined and parted on the black windows. We seemed to be going faster now, banging and rattling into the night.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I feel much better.’

‘You should be careful, in your condition,’ she said. ‘Are you travelling alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re going all the way to Paris. You won’t be there until morning.’

‘I know that.’

‘It’s a very slow train. No matter. As long as you have someone to talk to, it’s tolerable. And something to eat and drink.’

‘Are you going as far as Paris yourself?’

‘Beyond Paris. Towards Béthune, do you know it?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘You’re a southerner, of course. But from where?’

‘From Aix,’ I said. ‘Aix-en-Provence.’

‘Ah, yes. I know it well.’

Better than I do, in that case, I thought, and nearly smiled. She caught it.