The Jeweller's Skin (26 page)

1924

‘A great pleasure to have met you,’ Mrs McIver said, standing at the door.  She had put on her best dress, the yellow-and-brown one, and Violeta could see that her shoes were hurting.  ‘And we are all very pleased about your decision.  Aren’t we, Violet?  I’m sure you won’t regret it.  Say goodbye to Mr and Mrs Caulker, Violet.   We’ll see you on Saturday.  Goodbye.’

Violeta watched them walk down the front path.  Mr Caulker’s sleeve brushed against the rosebush, but he didn’t seem to notice.  Mrs Caulker turned to latch the gate.  She’s got a stupid face, Violeta thought, all fat and line-y.  She looks as if she’s going to cry all the time.  Mrs Caulker waved, then took her husband’s arm.

‘Well,’ said Mrs McIver, closing the door, ‘you’re a lucky little girl.  You’ll have to work hard and be a credit to them.’

She didn’t feel lucky.  When they were washing up, Edie asked, drying the saucers: ‘Here, are you going to be boarded out then?’  Edie had been boarded out, but after six months she had come back.

Violeta nodded.

‘They’re a bit
old,
aren’t they?’

Violeta went on to the cups.  She still had to stand on a stool for washing up, and lean forward into the big white sink.  There was a black, branching crack next to the tap, which made her feel peculiar every time she looked.  Washing-up water splashed up on her apron.  Edie was right, that was what they were, old.

‘And she’s got that weird hair, all grey and yellow,’ Edie went on.  The other girls sniggered, watching Violeta.

‘I don’t care,’ Violeta said, ‘I’m not going.’  She lined the cups up on the rack, handles all facing inward so they didn’t get broken.

‘You’ll have to.’

‘No I won’t.’

‘Yes you will,’ said Margery, who was ten.  ‘If they come and choose you, you’ve got to go.  And you’ve got to stay there till you’re fourteen, then you come back, like Ailsa did, and Dot.  Unless you’re bad, like Edie, and get sent back.’

‘I wasn’t bad,’ yelled Edie, waving a plate close up to Margery’s face, so she stepped back, squealing.  Dot opened the scullery door: ‘Bleeding hell, you’re slow!  Get on with it, will you!’

Ailsa’s name made Violeta want to cry, suddenly.  She rubbed hard at a bit of crust burnt onto the pie-dish.  Ailsa had gone into service in Horsham.  She’d sent a postcard with a picture of a horse and cart; but it was to all of them, not just to her, and Mrs McIver had kept it in her room.

If Ailsa was here she wouldn’t let me be boarded out with them.

‘Edie,’ she asked, when they were getting ready for bed.  ‘You know when you were boarded out?’

Edie was tugging a tangle out of her hair.

‘Well, were they’ - she couldn’t find the right question – ‘were they not old and everything?’

Edie got into bed and closed her eyes.  After a while she said, ‘She had lovely hair.  All blonde, and wavy.’

It’s not fair, Violeta thought in the dark. She was near to sleep.  It’s not fair.  Maybe her mother would come and take her away in time.  Her mum was beautiful, with long black hair, and one day she was going to come and take her away.  Ailsa had laughed when she’d told her, once when she’d been beaten for telling lies.  She didn’t want to remember what else Ailsa had said.  It wasn’t true.

*

In the end Mrs McIver took her there, on a bus.  ‘Go upstairs, go on,’ she said to Violeta, and they sat at the front, looking down at people’s hats.  She could tell this was meant to be a treat, but she felt strange, and was almost glad when they had to get off.

The house had a tall hedge in front, and a lot of windows.  She wondered if she’d have to clean them all on her own.  She hung back at the gate; but Mrs McIver was already ringing the doorbell, and someone in an apron was answering.

‘But Mrs McIver,’ the woman said, ‘doesn’t she have a bag?  Or are you having it sent on later?’

I’ve done something wrong already, Violeta thought.

‘No, nothing like that,’ Mrs McIver said cheerfully.  ‘She’s just as she is, all ready for you to care for her.  Oh, there is this,’ and she opened her black handbag.  ‘The birth certificate, you know.’  She handed a big letter to Mr Caulker.

They were sitting in the front parlour, with the fire lit, even though it was still morning.  It was like the parlour at the home, she thought, with lots of dark pictures, though the curtains were red instead of blue.  She swung her legs against the front of the sofa, till Mrs McIver tapped her knee, not looking at her.

‘Violeta Humphreys, eh?’  Mr Caulker said, behind the big piece of paper.  He said it oddly, Vee- instead of Vi-.  ‘Shouldn’t there be two Ts?  Still, I suppose the registrar knew what he was doing.’  He put the paper back in the envelope.

‘We prefer to call her Violet,’ Mrs McIver said  ‘Of course you may want to..?  I know some people rather choose their own name.  You know, to make it, well, a new start.’

‘But her clothes, Mrs McIver,’ the woman said.

‘Oh I am sorry, Mrs Caulker, I should have told you.  You don’t know our system, of course, why should you?’  Violeta stopped listening.  The carpet had a very difficult pattern, not flowers like at the home but bits of colours, like boxes inside each other.  She pretended to play hopscotch, like in the playground, from one dark red bit to the next and then the next.  She wondered if she would go to a new school.

‘Well then,’ Mrs Caulker was saying, ‘I can see I’ll have to call in the dressmaker.  That will be fun, won’t it, Violet?  New dresses?’

‘Oh, I don’t think that..’ Mrs McIver said; but then she seemed to change her mind, and sat back on the sofa.  She took a handkerchief out of her bag, and blew her nose, not as loudly as usual.  ‘You do get attached,’ she said to Mrs Caulker.

They all stood up, then Mrs McIver squatted down and hugged Violeta.  Violeta felt shocked, and then hugged back, hard, feeling sad.  Even Mrs McIver was leaving her.

‘Now be a good girl,’ Mrs McIver said, standing up and smoothing her skirt.  ‘And help Mr and Mrs Caulker and do what they say, and be a credit to all of us.  And no more fighting,’ she bent down to whisper; but Violeta was sure they had heard.  She began to cry.

‘No tears now!’ said Mrs McIver.  ‘I’d better be off.’

By the time they’d come back from seeing Mrs McIver out, Violeta had wiped her nose on the hem of her dress, and was standing on a dark red bit of carpet, facing the door.

*

‘I want Ailsa! she screams, waking night after night in her new bed, in the big room all on her own, with ripples behind the long brown velvet curtains.  ‘Ailsa!  I want Ailsa!’

‘Who is Ailsa?’ Mrs Caulker asks.  She stands in the doorway in her dressing-gown, her yellow and grey hair undone like a witch’s.  On the fifth night she comes in, and sits on the counterpane.  She holds out her hand gingerly, and Violeta, sobbing, clutches the fingers.

‘Your Ailsa is not at the workhouse home any more,’ Mrs Caulker says.  ‘She’s gone out to work, hasn’t she?  In service.  You know that, Violet.’

She does, but hearing it said makes it all the worse.

‘Ailsa has other duties now, to her new employers.  And you’re here with us now, aren’t you?  So you must put all of that behind you.’

She lets go Mrs Caulker’s fingers, and flings herself onto her side, her eyes tight shut.  She is crying so hard it makes her hurt all over.

‘Your job is to learn to be a good girl,’ the voice goes on.  ‘Violet, are you listening?  God doesn’t want us to be too fond of people.  So we have to be brave and say goodbye to them.’

She lies, exhausted, while Mrs Caulker prays: ‘Please God, help Violet overcome her misfortunes and temptations, which you have created to test her, and let her become your worthy servant.  Amen.’

When Mrs Caulker has gone, Violeta’s mother comes out of the curtains, and lifts her.

1930

‘Please Vi,’ says the child.

It is cold in the big bedroom, and still dark outside.  The children are not dressing fast enough.  Their fingers fumble with sleeves and socks in the cold.  ‘Come on, you won’t get any breakfast,’ Violeta says.

There are too many beds.  Violeta would walk round the room to chivvy them on, but the children dressing take up all the space.  Sometimes it gives her a cold leery feeling: that they won’t stay still, that one of them is missing, that they will stop taking notice of what she tells them.  ‘You’ve done it all wrong,’ she says, and roughly pulls open the child’s shirt buttons to start again.  ‘Look, you’ve got to get the bottom one right.’  The child whimpers.  When she’s finished he tries to put his arms round her neck, but she won’t let him.

It’s the way they press against you.  You keep on feeling it even when you’ve stopped them.

Rain starts beating against the bedroom window.  She looks out.  Over towards the town the sky is queasy yellow.  ‘Two more minutes,’ she says. ‘it’s getting light.’

The children file into the dining-room on time.  It smells of cold anthracite, and porridge.  The bigger girls, already up for an hour, serve out breakfast.  When Mrs Hopkins comes in they are all sitting down.

‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful amen.’
 
Violeta can tell from her voice Mrs Hopkins is tired this morning.  There is the sound of the rain, the children hurriedly slopping porridge, the damp air.  Violeta’s vest sticks to her back.  ‘Use your hanky,’ she says under her breath to Ruby Shorter.

‘No problems last night, Violet?’  The housemother speaks too loudly.  A boy starts to snigger, and is kicked.  Billy Sherwood, who couldn’t do up his shirt, tries not to sniff.

Violeta sees him again, skinny and shivering, at half past three when she ripped off his soaked sheet.

‘No, Mrs Hopkins.’

Later, when they’re counting the coal sacks in, standing inside the back door out of the rain, Mrs Hopkins says, ‘You’re doing quite well, Violet, I’m pleased with you.’

The coalman overhears and winks at her.  ‘Eleven,’ she says, looking down at the coal merchant’s book.  ‘Thank you, Mrs Hopkins.’ 

I won’t do it.  I’m not going to cry again.  I wish she wouldn’t.  Stupid old cow.  Lazy old cow.  She couldn’t get by without me. Why did the coalman do that?  I don’t care what she thinks.  I wish she wouldn’t.                                                       

Rain drips from the lintel above them, from the tiled slanted roof of the coal-bunker, and the ivy-leaves on the tall side fence.    Rain mixes with coal-dust and makes black mud on the path.  The coal smells acrid.  The coalman returns up the path, stooped under a sack, the sacking getting dark with wet.  There is the rushing sound as he empties it onto the pile.  A gust blows rain in her face. 

She stands up straight, and turns a little away from the housemother.  When the coalman comes back with the folded bag, she stares at him.

*

She had almost forgotten about the beatings.

How could she have? she thought when she came back.  But it wasn’t the same; Mrs McIver had gone, sacked someone said, though they didn’t seem to know why.  Anyway, here instead was Mrs Rosita Hopkins: fat, sentimental; clutching the little children, the boys especially, at one minute, so they clung to her, bewildered with touch, and hopeful; then the next slapping, or ordering Violeta to beat them.  ‘It’s the drink, can’t you tell?’ said Louie, who was leaving, going into service in a house in Staines.  Violeta couldn’t tell; the Caulkers were teetotal.  She’d only seen men, lolling on the bench outside the Red Lion, calling out and she didn’t know how to respond to them.  Still she took heed of Louie, and soon picked up the signs, hushing the children and hiding their misdeeds, less out of any kindness than self-protection.

The worst was the beatings.

Not that she hadn’t been beaten at the Caulkers’.  When she was little there was Uncle William, solemnly counting out the strokes of the cane; making her stay down in his cold study to pray with him afterwards.  There was the cold fear, the pain that she wanted to run away and cover; the understanding that God too would have beaten her, if only he’d been on earth again; and then Aunt Beatrice, sad, coming heavily up the stairs.  Nothing could be so bad, she remembered thinking, crying silently for Ailsa, who never came, or her mother who they said was dead but mustn’t be, mustn’t.  Then when she was, what, eleven?  and had done something, told a lie no doubt and been found out for it, she remembered standing in the drawing room, sullen, head down; and Uncle William stood up, and Aunt Beatrice said, ‘William, perhaps, I think, no.’
 
They both had looked at her, horrified, she thought, so she stood there and went hot, full of shame, too tall in her school smock.  Aunt Beatrice was going to take over the beatings.  They went up to Violeta’s bedroom, but Aunt couldn’t do it.  ‘I can’t bring myself to,’
she almost apologised, and made Violeta kneel beside her.  From then on they kept to telling her off and praying.  It was as if God too couldn’t bring himself; without the pain she began to imagine him greying, as they both were, not knowing quite what he should do with her.  Which was what Aunt Beatrice said, round-shouldered in her armchair: ‘Violet, I don’t know what to do with you.’  She was a disappointment, she understood: whatever she did (and she’d never quite stopped trying) she was not the child they’d wanted to take in.

Perhaps I got soft, she thought, those last three years.  Mrs Hopkins’ beatings were a different thing.  In some ways better; there was no questioning, no
How could you, Violet?
or
You’ve upset your Aunt again.
  Mrs Hopkins would stay unreachable in her room, so that Violeta had to deal with everything, the boys tormenting a pigeon, the food, the cleaning; and then sweep downstairs, her thin brown hair flying up from its bun, throw open the door to wherever they were working; and look for something, look around for some mistake, then grab her arm and steer her out of the room.  Perhaps what was so bad was being beaten by a woman.  Ailsa and Mrs McIver had beaten her, but she was so little then, it was quite different.  Mrs Hopkins’ fat little hands grasped onto her, her beery breath made her gag, she leaned close, the belt flailed in the narrow space between them, there were the smell of sweat, the pain going deeper and deeper,  the cold air on her skin.  Each time she swore she wouldn’t cry.  She would start off saying in her head
Stupid old cow, bloody drunken tart,
as if the bad words might protect her; but each time she was defeated, could only pull away as soon as possible, while Mrs Hopkins gasped and looked triumphant; pull her clothes back right and run up to the bedroom, and push the cabinet up against the door.  What would the Caulkers say? she wondered once; but there was no help there.  They might disapprove of drink and anger, but they too would be certain she had done wrong, and that beating -
chastisement
- was the way to alter her.  Only she knew that she couldn’t change.

*

‘Get on with it, then,’ she said to Harry Silver: who was standing at the foot of the step-ladder, the bucket full of hot water in his hand.
‘I ain’t got all day,’ and she lifted her hand to slap him.

He still didn’t move.  ‘Go on,’ she shouted, ‘What the heck’s wrong with you?’
 
The windows all had to be cleaned today; and it got dark by six, they’d never make it.  The others at least seemed to be doing something, four other boys, all of them due to be boarded out, in the country, on farms, where they’d be useful.  ‘You ain’t left yet,’ she told Harry. ‘Now earn your keep.’

He was queasy, she guessed: had no head for heights.  But what good was that when he’d be working soon?  Eddie Jukes had come down for some more hot water, and was standing watching.  ‘And you mind your own business,’
she snapped at him.

He was out of her reach before he started chanting; just loud enough that the others boys would hear.

‘Violet’s a loony, born in the loony-bin.  Violet’s a…’
but by then she had run, fast as she could, and caught him, knocking the bucket out of his hand, hitting both sides of his head at once, but it felt hard, hard, his cropped red hair, the tough flaps of his ears against the flat of her hands, so she had to go on trying to beat him down, till he cowered, whining, covering his head as best he could with his arms.

She made herself stop.

‘Upstairs and no dinner for you, and I’ll tell Mrs Hopkins.’
Though of course she wouldn’t; he would know she wouldn’t.  She turned back, but Harry was half-way up the ladder, his bucket shaking and slopping out hot water.

*

It was true, she thought that evening, sitting darning with Mrs Hopkins and two of the bigger girls.  Uncle William had given her the birth certificate to bring back, but she’d opened the envelope the first night and read it. 
Name, if any:
what on earth did that mean?  But her name was written, just like that:
Violeta,
and
Girl
in the next box.  Then
Name and surname of father
, but nothing there.  No father; I didn’t ever have one. 

The next part told her something she hadn’t known. 
Narcisa:
her mother was called Narcisa.  A weird name; she wasn’t sure how to say it.  Then again, she’d always known her mother was foreign; it was why she was Violeta, not Violet.  Vee-oleta, she tried saying to herself, the way Uncle William had the first time.  Perhaps that was how you said it if you were foreign.  My name is Veeoleta Humphreys.  She liked that.  No point in trying to get anyone to call her that, not here at the home anyway.  Veeoleta, she said, sitting on the bed.  Nar-cisa.

Back to the certificate.  The first box said:
Third July 1916 Holywell Asylum
. 

Did it mean her mother was a lunatic? 

It was what Ailsa had said to her, years ago.  Ailsa had been fed up, and made her cry: ‘Your mum ain’t coming, she’s in the loony-bin.’  ‘She ain’t, she ain’t,’
Violeta had screamed, and hit Ailsa with her fists; and Ailsa had been embarrassed almost, and stopped arguing.

She sat hunched over her darning, working fast, while Mrs Hopkins read them some daft story.  The Caulkers said her mother had gone to heaven.  ‘Jesus has forgiven her,’
they said.

She had lost her temper with Eddie; almost gone mad.  What if I’ve got the madness from my mother?

She picked up another grey sock.  It was darned already, but the heel had gone again, right next to the old darn.  Was it bad enough to throw out?  She’d have to ask.  She put it aside, and took another one.  ‘The castle was tall and dark and said to be haunted,’ Mrs Hopkins read.

Was what the Caulkers found wrong with her really madness?

Her mother was bad because she’d had Violeta.  The Caulkers thought that.  They didn’t have children; probably they thought it was a sin even if you were married to sleep together.  But everyone did it, that was what she’d learned, at school where the girls and boys all laughed at her, because she didn’t know why Bessie Garner was fat in the face, and sluggish; and then Bessie had marched down Market Street proudly, pushing her pram.  Though someone, she’d heard, had turned and spat at her. 

I wonder if I could try and find my mother.  At least then I’d know. 

I wonder what she looks like.  Why did I always think she had long black hair?

She waited till Mrs Hopkins paused for breath, then made an excuse and put down her darning.  The paper where she’d copied out the certificate was still folded safely inside her prayer-book.

Narcisa Humphreys, formerly Gashi, of 102 Camberwell Road, SE.

She put the paper back and ran downstairs.

*

Dear Miss Humphreys

I have taken the liberty of opening your letter of 12th January.  I regret that this reply will be disappointing to you.  My former wife, to whom you addressed the letter, has not lived in this house for many years.  I am therefore unable to provide you with information. 

I do not know how much you have been told about the circumstances of your birth.  Please believe in my sincerity when I suggest that you would be better served abandoning this plan.  I am sure that those people who cared for you in your childhood, as your mother was unfortunately unable to do, deserve your continuing affection and respect.

You are clearly a person of intelligence, and I am sure you will lead a useful and fulfilling life, once you are able to give up this distressing search.

Believe me,

Yours sincerely

Edwin Humphreys

PS.  My wife is at present expecting our second child. In view of her fragile health, I am sure you will understand when I ask you not to contact me any further.