The Jeweller's Skin (25 page)

‘Your boys?’  It was a moment before she understood.  Then at once she wanted to end the call.  ‘Never mind,’ she said.  ‘Of course.  It does not matter.’

‘I am sorry,’ he said.  ‘I wish I could.  How nice of you to have had the idea.  Another time.’  He felt bad, she could tell, for reminding her.  ‘Anthony, it is fine,’ she said to stop him.  ‘You are right, I will telephone you again.’ 

Well, there is plenty of work for me here, she thought as she put the receiver down.  The fish-fryers were still to be drained and cleaned.  She would work on Friday; it would be better than being alone.  In any case, she said to herself as she locked the office, and nodded to Miss Fleming who was passing, gaunt and severe as ever, a domestic in overalls trailing along behind her; in any case, I haven’t told him about Violeta, and by Friday maybe I couldn’t keep quiet any longer.  She thought of him at home with his two sons, playing cricket perhaps - was that what they would do?  Outside, in any event, one of the boys starting to look like him, perhaps one boisterous and the other quiet.  And he will see himself in the quiet one; he will remember how he was at that age.  So the younger, the noisy one will be easier for him.  She hesitated before going into the kitchen, and went instead to look out at the weather.  They seemed at that moment like a foreign tribe, whose ways of living together were remote and charming.

1917

-

1934

1917

It was that silence you have at night with heavy snow, the trees sedated, the birds awed and in hiding.  Inside in the ward someone muttered rapidly in her sleep.

The baby was lying spread-eagled in her cot, under the blanket Narcisa had knitted for her.  It had been badly washed and the wool was matted.

At her desk by the door, the night attendant had fallen asleep, head on her arms.

Narcisa got out of bed as quietly as she could.  The floorboards were hard and cold under her feet.  She lifted her daughter up and hugged her close.  The baby turned her head towards Narcisa’s breast.

She walked barefoot down the middle of the ward.  One bed and then another on each side showed itself shadowy against the dark.

At the wide bay window she stepped behind the curtain.  It fell back, dark blue and dusty, sealing the two of them in to the sudden snow-light.

The baby stirred.  Narcisa bent and kissed the top of the head, the black hair.  She felt her wake up and began to croon.

The lawn was dazzling, like bleached damask.  The rose-bushes were outlined in white, in elaborate detail, every rosehip and dried leaf weighted down with snow.  To the right, the villa was like a gingerbread house, snow on the eaves and over each of the windows.  The planetrees down by the fence were black and white cut-outs.

In the morning some woman would come down the lane on a cart, between handfuls of snow falling off the branches, in through the gates and up to the front door; then a little later go back the way she had come, the horse cutting out a new set of prints in the snow, Narcisa’s daughter wrapped in a shawl in her arms.

She rocked where she stood.  The curtain moved heavily against her shoulders.

The Matron had come to tell her in the evening.  The baby was crying and she was walking up and down.  The Matron raised her voice over the wailing.  Already she couldn’t remember what she’d been told, only her own voice screaming ‘No!  No!’ and two attendants running into the room.

‘Better,’ the Matron kept saying firmly.  ‘Better for her.’

She had run away down the ward and crouched on the bed, holding the baby tightly.  The people followed.

‘Madame Taté.’  She begged for the interpreter, but the Matron had shaken her head, smiling.

Wrapped in the curtain she rocked the child in her arms.  If Violeta cried, they would be taken back and scolded; but she lay still, as if reflecting on her choices.  If Narcisa cried, the baby would start as well. 

She remembered how in the week after the birth she had wanted to smother the child to save herself.

An owl called softly out there in the grounds.

She could hold the curtain lightly over the baby’s face.  She lifted a thick blue fold in one hand.  The fabric was faded in long streaks, and worn.

Better to choose to take her away herself, to do it tenderly so she knew Narcisa loved her, than let her be handled by some unknown woman.  She had been baptised: she would not go to limbo. 

She rocked with the child.

Outside the window nothing was going to change.  The lawn would lie untrodden, the rose-bushes stay painted in lead-white.  She made herself stare out at the glaring snow, until she was no longer capable of thinking, and stayed there drugged with light for a long time.

It seemed her daughter was murmuring in her ear.  She would escape; she would grow up, out in the world, and run on a snow-laid lawn in leather boots.  She could see the girl running from her, across the grounds.

She wrung the folds of curtain in her left hand.

Snow began delicately to fall again.  The stems of the rose-bush seemed laden already, but the sky dropped more and more flakes onto it, and instead of toppling the lines of snow grew higher, a kind of protection.

*

The curtain flapped up.  ‘Humphreys!’ somebody said, and shook her shoulder.

She was very cold; but the baby was still breathing.  She got to her feet.  The white light from the garden poured into the ward.  The women standing at the ends of their beds seemed to have been painted in cruel greys.

She remembered.

The attendant hustled her back into the room, scolding.

She would not leave the baby for a moment.  She put her down only when she had to, pulling the uniform dress over her head, or splashing her face.  The attendant, a young woman with smallpox scars, watched nervously.  Narcisa wondered if this girl might help her.

The other women went off to their duties.  She folded all the baby-clothes she had made, and piled them at the foot of the cradle, under the blanket.  Then she walked again, holding the child, to the window.

Out of sight, to the left, she heard a man’s voice call out, and the creak of hinges; then the half-muffled steps of a horse.

Narcisa opened her dress and fed her daughter.  She shook her head hard so her hair fell around the child, who sucked steadily, with little satisfied sounds.  She felt already the bereavement of her nipples.

‘Mrs Humphreys.’  It was the Matron’s voice.

She didn’t turn.

‘Mrs Humphreys.’  Shoes clattered towards her.

She took the child from her breast.  Violeta wailed.  Narcisa held her and did her dress up quickly.

‘Come on, Mrs Humphreys.’

She kicked hard at the window, hoping to break it.  She pulled the curtain behind her again, but it was yanked back.  The child cried desperately and she held her tight.  She ran along the bay window, to an empty bed, and pushed it hard towards them, then stood with her crying child behind the bed-head.  There were voices and movement, and the Matron in her navy-blue uniform.  She shoved over a bedside cabinet with her foot, and moved behind the next bed, and began to throw things, a Bible, a comb, a glass, which broke on the floor.

She saw a nurse lifting a hypodermic.  ‘No!’  she shouted and got down to the floor.  Under the bed she tried to soothe her daughter, rocking.

The shoes and long skirts were standing all around them.

The whole cramped space was shuddering with her weeping.  The baby cried with her, rigid with fear in her arms.  They rocked together, warm, for the last time, as if while they went on crying nothing could happen.

Slowly the bed was pushed out from above them.  She bent her head and sheltered the child with her hair.

There is cold around her face, and sometimes, when she looks beyond the woman, a mushy snowflake settles against her skin.  The woman is wearing a dark brown cloak; the cloth is harsh and smells musty.  Violeta is lying along the woman’s arm, held down - or held secure - by a broad hand in a brown woollen glove.

Beneath the woman and Violeta the cart jostles.  It has two counterpointed rhythms, the regular bobbing over its axles, and the jolts and shakings as it trolls along the lane.  Both are bewildering to Violeta, who has scarcely before been in the open air, and then only in her mother’s arms.  Her mother’s arms are smaller, thinner, more insistent than this woman’s; they mind, they want her to be there, they hold her urgently at times.  Her mother’s clothes smell of laundry soap and skin, which is like vanilla.

There were great white spaces of hunger and isolation, but still when she waited long enough her mother.

*

Field is away from work again.  Rhoda Woodruff says Field sent her little sister with a letter; but the sister, a poor timid little thing with stringy hair, didn’t dare ring at the door, and gave the letter to Rhoda to bring in.  ‘My sister is very ill,’ the girl said.  ‘Out too late with her fancy-man, more like,’ says Rhoda.  ‘Unless it’s the morning sickness got her already.’  The women disperse to their tasks around the building, more than one of them thankful the morning sickness hasn’t yet got her; or half-wishing it had, so that like Ellen Field she could stay in bed, while the others did her scrubbing and scouring for her.

Field is the one who doesn’t mind the infants.  ‘Must have given her the idea,’ Rhoda mutters to Nancy O’Brien, under the eye of the receiving officer.  ‘I mean, if you’re going to wipe bottoms.’  Rhoda is engaged to be married to fat little Wilfred Parsons, the postman, and intends to remain pure till her wedding day.  ‘And after
,
’ Nancy said to Ellen Field one evening.  Knowing she will be transported out of employment makes Rhoda Woodruff superior at times.

The latest one is being bad, as usual.  Rhoda holds the baby to her shoulder with one hand, and with the other tugs away at the soaked sheet.  The latest baby only wails the louder.  ‘Bad-tempered little thing
,’
says Rhoda, and hands the child to Nancy while finding a clean sheet.  This one has been turned sides-to-middle, and the seam will rub.  ‘Still, that kind of parents, what can you expect?’

Nancy, who claims her father died at Mafeking, puts the baby back quickly, and moves on.  For at least half an hour, the imprint stays with her as she cleans up the children’s room: the sturdy body squirming against her chest, warm and determined.

For Violeta the morning is patterned like this: the acid smell and the cold wet sheet; abrupt clutching; two successive kinds of overall cloth, the second smelling faintly of lavender; and then the cot again, the dark green paint on the walls and the grimy white ceiling.   She lies still.  The back of her head, the scant flesh on her back and her upper arms, hold a long way down inside them the recollection that there was something more.

1921

Her ear hurts where Mrs McIver slapped it.

‘And stop that snivelling!’

She wants to stop crying but she can’t quite.  Her nose is running.

‘You know there’s no clean clothes left on a Friday!  You’ll just have to go round in your under-things.  Then they’ll all know what a wicked girl you’ve been.’

It’s true.  They will all know, and the boys will shout
Violet’s a baby, Violet’s a baby,
like last time. 

‘Now get out of here.  You know quite well I’m poorly.   Go and tell Ailsa to give you some work.’

She goes down the stairs slowly, one step at a time, one hand on the banisters, the other one still pressed to her ear, for comfort.

They are laying the table.  Her job is the knives and forks.  She’s late.

Ailsa is in the kitchen, making the porridge, a big white apron tied round her middle.  The steam is making her round white face wet and hot. 

Violeta stands just inside the door.  She doesn’t want Ailsa to know that she’s been wicked.

‘Violet Humphreys, why haven’t you got a frock on?’

She tries not to cry again, but can’t manage.  The other girls in the kitchen start laughing at her.

‘Shut your mouths, all of you; get on with your work!’

The girls are quiet but they are still watching her.   She says: ‘In the yard a boy hit me,’ - she won’t say it was Arnie -  ‘so I hit him back and I tore my frock and it was all dirty.  And there aren’t any clean frocks, Mrs McIver says.’  She lets the words stop.  She can’t bear to tell the rest of it.  Her legs are cold, and her arms.

‘Well,’ says Ailsa, so maybe it’s all right.  ‘We can’t have you running round in your smalls, can we?’  The little girls giggle, and this time Ailsa lets them.  ‘We’ll see what we can find.  Edie, come here and stir the porridge, and make sure it doesn’t burn, or you’ll be for it.  Come
on,
Vi, if you’re coming’ - and she’s out of the door. 

When they are safely out of sight, on the stairs, Ailsa holds out her sticky hand, and Violeta takes it.

*

The Board is coming.

‘What’s the Board?’ she asks Ailsa, who takes no notice.  The house has to be tidy, because of the Board.

‘They’re people all made out of wood,’ Arnie Smith said, before he punched her.  They were in the yard, the big girls out of hearing.  ‘And they walk like this,’ - he did a scarecrow lurch – ‘and they’re all flat like floorboards.  And they say:
Has he been a good boy, Mrs McIver?’ 
They all laughed at Arnie’s floorboard voice; but Violeta thought Mrs McIver would come, and was scared.

She is carrying the kindling.

The front parlour is cold, and dark, with shadows.  It smells of dust.  Ailsa goes over and pulls back the long blue curtains.  Little blobs of red glow on the parlour wall, between the pictures.  She puts down her kindling, then goes over to touch one.  The red jumps on her hand.  Then she moves her hand to the side, and it jumps back.

‘Silly,’ says Ailsa: ‘it’s the stained glass.’  She points high up to the top of the bay window.  There are coloured pictures, red, yellow and brown.  She can see an apple and a big yellow flower.

‘It needs a good dust in here,’ Ailsa says.  ‘Never mind, I’ll lay the fire first.’

Violeta helps her, handing pieces of kindling.  Some of them make little trees, with branches; one even has an old brown leaf.  She would like to keep it, but it has to go and be burned. 

‘I can dust,’ she offers.

‘You’re not big enough.’  Ailsa finishes stacking the bits of coal.  ‘Mrs McIver said I was to light this now, and get the room warm before they get here.’  She puts a match to the paper, and they watch it flare.  Violeta holds out both hands; the palms get hot quickly, even though the rest of her is still cold.  She hugs herself, spreading the heat through her arms.

‘Now you be careful, you know you’re ever so clumsy.’  Ailsa picks up the coal-scuttle.  ‘I’m going to get the feather-duster.  You sit quiet, eh?’

The twigs are being wrapped round by the flames.  The one with the little leaf is sticking out.  She squats down to watch.  The leaf catches, and almost at once goes black and crumbles.

‘Now you be careful, Violet,’ she sings to herself.  ‘Now you be careful.’  She stands up and goes to look for the red patch.  Instead she finds a yellow one, further up.  She can’t reach.  She stands on tip-toe, and the end of her middle finger goes bright yellow.  She can’t keep it.

Now the flames are all round the heap of coal.  Some of them are coming up in between.  The fireplace smells like the coal-hole under the steps.

I’m meant to be sitting quiet.  She squats down right beside the wooden fender.  Here I am, Ailsa, I’m sitting quiet.  A long flame wavers up at the dark chimney.

Her ear is hurting again.  She puts her hand over it.  Then, testing, she reaches the hand out towards the fire, gets it hot, and puts it back tight over her ear.  That’s nice. 

Only it gets cold too soon.

She is doing the same thing again when a flame jumps up, and she is scared and falls forward, and then the hurt, all the way up her arm, and her hair burning right next to her face, and it smells awful, and she is screaming, she mustn’t scream but she does, and Ailsa is running into the parlour shouting, ‘Oh my god Violet oh you stupid girl oh what are they going to say?’ and pulling her.

*

She is in the dark.  Her arm hurts right inside, all the way up. 

‘The devil’s got into you today, Violet Humphreys.’
 
That’s why she’s been send to bed without her dinner.

‘What can you expect?’
she heard Mrs McIver say to Ailsa.  Has Mrs McIver always known she’s wicked?

She wriggles further down under the blanket.  Her feet are cold.

Ailsa said: ‘I don’t love you any more.’

She cries again; it keeps making her cry.  Only she’s tired.  She aches with having cried too much.  Maybe that’s why they tell you not to.  What will she do if Ailsa doesn’t love her? 

The boys will all punch her and pull her hair.  I’ll fight them back.  Fighting’s wicked too.

Ailsa doesn’t love her because she cried too much when she fell in the fire, and Mrs McIver came down, with the doctor.  And Ailsa was doing something to her arm, and the doctor said, ‘No, no, you ignorant girl.’

Then she was sitting on the kitchen table, only it was all right because the doctor had put her there, and he was wrapping a big bandage round her arm.  And he said, ‘You’re a brave girl,’ and patted her head.  The doctor was very tall and thin, with a brown coat.  It was nice when he wrapped the bandage round and round, and played peep-bo with it, like you do with babies. 

But she wasn’t brave, she was wicked.  When the doctor had gone, Mrs McIver said ‘Well, Ailsa Jordan, you’d better explain.’
 
Ailsa said, ‘She came out of the room with me but she sneaked back in.’   Violeta didn’t tell, but Mrs McIver sent Ailsa upstairs anyway for a beating. 

The curtains are drawn.  There is a little scratching sound under the bed.  She watches the mouse come out into the space between her bed and Edie’s, and pause, twitching its front feet, and then run quickly in the dark towards the light at the bottom of the bedroom door, and squeeze under.