The Jeweller's Skin (27 page)

The paper was white, and thick, with a wavy edge she thought at first was torn.  The handwriting was very even and elegant, the signature almost as neat as the rest.  He must, she thought, be a very calm person.

It was the most important letter she’d ever had.  She folded it back into the envelope.  Her hands torqued the paper a little, as if wanting to tear it up.  But that was not right; she might need to look at it some time. 

It had taken her three readings to understand it. 
My wife is expecting:
she thought at first that he meant her mother.  But that didn’t make sense; he must have married again.  So she’s dead, she thought, and heard herself whimper.  But if he knew she was dead, surely he’d say so.

Please believe in my sincerity. 
Why should I? 
Damn,
she said under her breath,
damn and blast him. 
Who was he to tell her to give up looking?  And what did he know about the home, or the Caulkers?  Another one telling her she should be grateful.  When I get out of here, no-one is going to tell me what to do, ever again.  But that was stupid; she would go into service.  Well, apart from working.  She sat on the bed and stared out of the window.  The snow was thick all the way along the branches, and down on the square beds of the kitchen-garden.  When I’m sixteen.  Another year and a half here in the home.  She slumped forward a little, over the letter.

He was very polite. 
You are clearly a person of intelligence. 
No-one had ever said anything like that to her.  Was that how fathers wrote to their daughters?  So there, she said in her mind to Miss Mortimer at the school.  I am clearly a person of intelligence, only you didn’t know it.

He’s not my father.  I’m illegitimate, then.  But that was not a surprise; she’d always known.  Only she’d hoped, writing to her mother: her mother and her father living together, a mistake his name wasn’t on the birth certificate.  ‘Violeta!’ they’d say.  ‘We’ve been trying so hard to find you!’

The snow had started slowly all over again, big floppy flakes idling towards the ground, the sky close and brownish like old bed-linen.  No chance of getting the washing done today.  And the shoe-mender hadn’t come; the children’s boots were letting in water.  Better do them over again with dubbin.

She stood up and went downstairs, yelling, ‘Harry! Edward!’

1933

It was a tall house, sooty brick like all of the street and dark inside, with a narrow staircase and high-ceilinged rooms.  In the drawing-room, which was the ground floor front, Mrs Willmore kept the old shutters half-closed: ‘To keep it cool for our guests. Violet,’ she said.  None of the guests was in the drawing-room, though Violeta supposed they must come in, after breakfast perhaps, and sit and talk to each other in the gloom.  Between the wings of the wooden shutters the net curtain was grey, with a mend near the top as if it had got caught.

‘And this is the dining-room,’ Mrs Willmore said, weaving out to the hall and in at the next door down.  She was tall and seemed to sway, like a large tree.  There were four square deal tables, tops ringed and scarred.  ‘It looks very nice when it’s all laid, you’ll see. With the damask.’  She looked down sharply at Violeta.  ‘I hope they taught you how to lay a table. Well, never mind, I’ll show you.  I’m very particular about my tables.’

They went back to the hall and up the stairs.  The oilcloth was dark red, and worn in places, so the backing showed, looking like rush matting.

There was the sound of a lavatory flushing, then a man came out of the back room, doing up his belt.  He looked at them and hurried along the landing.  ‘Good morning, Mr McAllester,’ Mrs Willmore called.  ‘This is young Violet, the new help.’

Mr McAllester turned reluctantly towards them.  He was old, Violeta saw, with a fat discoloured moustache and a double chin.  He looked briefly at her, and said to Mrs Willmore, ‘Well, better luck this time, eh?’ then laughed wheezily and went into his room.

‘A very nice gentleman,’ Mrs Willmore said.  ‘Travels in glass.  Been coming here for years, faithful as anything.  This is the bathroom,’ she added, opening the door.  There were gulping noises as the cistern filled.  ‘Now I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, I want it spotless.  Never mind how you find it.  People judge a guest-house by the state of the bathroom, believe you me.’  She peered down into the bowl at a yellowish smear.

It was ten o’clock before Violeta got to bed, by the time she’d cleared up after supper and done the stove, which seemed to have been left unscrubbed for a long time.  ‘I expect you’ll want to get that done,’ Mrs Willmore had said; and then, because Violeta had stood still, ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, girl, it needs cleaning.’  So she had scoured it, piece by piece, boiling up more water when the tap ran cold, scraping off something black and hard around the burners.  It was good to have something she knew how to do.  Mrs Willmore wandered away while she was working, and someone, she supposed it was Mr Willmore, stood in the doorway and watched her for a while, and said, ‘Great stuff, good girl,’ when she looked up.  At the end her hands smelled of Vim and were red and sore.  She looked round for some lard to rub on them, the way Dot had taught her; but by then Mrs Willmore had come back in.

In her attic Violeta sat on the bed and looked around.  A little rug at her feet, with faded flowers.  The curtain was flowered too, blue and yellow.  The bedspread was pink, one of those swirly patterns.  There was a washbasin and the bed, and a narrow green-painted wardrobe in the corner.  The room smelled slightly of someone else, cologne and sweaty clothes.  The window looked out over the back gardens.  In the dark she could see the shape of a tree, swaying, and windows, the glow of light through coloured curtains.  One was on a level with hers, another attic.  Maybe there’s another girl in service there, she thought, and stood looking out, until the light went off.

She sat down and began to unlace her shoes.  Now I’m grown-up.  This is my first ever night being independent.  Now I can do what I like, when I’m not working.  She kicked off her shoes, then stood up again and opened the sash window.  The air was still warm on her face and hands.  A little breeze lifted a lock of her hair.  A white cat leapt down from a shed roof and stalked the length of a garden wall.  I could sleep with the window open if I wanted.  But if Mrs Willmore found out, she might complain.

She felt a kind of lightness, something lifting through her like air into a balloon.  This is it, this is what I’ve been waiting for.  That was what she’d been doing, the three years back at the home, and even before, boarded out with the Caulkers: waiting to get out.  The work was hard, but that was the least of it.  You worked so that people would leave you alone.  Out there, maybe in that other attic, there were girls like her; or rather not like her, girls who’d had normal homes and proper families, but girls she could make friends with and learn things from, whatever it was you learned if you’d lived like that.  Clothes, for instance, and make-up, and going out.  She wouldn’t ever tell them about the home, or the rest of it either.  She would make something up.

*

The post office was in a little corner shop, beyond the groceries.  When it was her turn, she leaned forward and spoke under her breath: ‘I want an account.’  It sounded all wrong; she looked down at her hands, away from the woman with steel glasses behind the counter.

‘An account, what? To put your wages in?’

She nodded.

The woman got down from her high stool, stretched, and went to a metal cupboard at the back.  She was short and plump, and walked with a list to one side.

‘Fill this in.’  She pointed to an inkwell and pen at the end of the counter.  ‘Then bring it back to me.  All right?’

Violeta hesitated, looking at the printed paper.

‘Maybe she can’t read and write, poor thing.’ It was an old, toneless voice from the queue behind her.  She spun round.  An old man and two thin women were watching her.  ‘Course I - ’ She made herself stop, and moved over to the inkwell.

The form wasn’t so bad when she concentrated.  The pen-nib was splayed and scratched on the heavy paper, but she managed to write clearly, without blots.  Name:
Miss Violeta Humphreys. 
Address:
Avalon:
but what was the number? 
226 Clapham Road, London SW. 
Date of birth:
9
th
July 1916.

She waited, form in her hand, till the queue had been dealt with.  ‘You should have come back to me straight off,’ the woman said; but she smiled, and read over the form, nodding.  Then she lurched off to the green cupboard again, and came back with a little blue-covered booklet.  ‘Now you guard this with your life,’ she said sternly.  ‘Is it a hotel you’re working in?’

‘Boarding-house.’

‘Right.  Well, I’d advise you, keep it out of the way, in the drawer with your smalls, maybe, and tuck it right at the back.  You understand?  Anyone who gets hold of this can get hold of your money.  I know you think they’re all nice respectable people, but you’d be surprised.  Especially when you’ve got guests coming and going, you can’t tell.  You get me?  Now, what’s this? Violet A. Humphreys?’

‘Violeta.’  She spelled it.  ‘That’s my name, Violeta.  It’s foreign.’

The woman copied it into the blue book.  ‘All right, Miss Violeta, and how much do you want to put in here?’

She reached in her pocket for her pay packet. ‘All this.’

‘Come one,’ said a man who’d appeared behind her. ‘What you got there, the crown jewels or something?’

‘I’ll be with you in a minute, Len,’ the woman said.  ‘You just be patient while I help this young lady.  Now, it’s up to you, but don’t you want to keep some spending money?’

She looked away, flushing, feeling caught out.

‘You’re going to need your bus fares, aren’t you?  Tell you what, how much have you got in there?’

‘Nine and six.’

‘Nine and six.  Well, for this week, why don’t you pay in eight bob, and keep one and six for yourself, and see how it goes?’

Violeta opened the brown envelope, and took out two threepenny bits and a shilling, then pushed the rest across the counter.  The man behind her sighed loudly.  The woman wrote
Eight shillings
in the book, and handed it over.

‘It’s these Poor Law girls,’ she said when Violeta had gone.  ‘Makes me so angry, they send them out all gormless.  Do you know what they’re paying her? Nine and six a week.’

‘Look at it this way,’ the man called Len said.  ‘She won’t hardly have got expensive tastes in there.  Now come on, Mary, let me have some stamps, eh?  Or do you want to keep me all day here chatting?’

*

It gleamed from the plug-hole of the washbasin.

Violeta had got as far as the end bedroom.  The sheets as she peeled them off were still sticky.  She folded the wet part in so as not to touch it.  A hairgrip fell from the pillow onto the rug. 
Dirty bugger,
she thought; what the other women said when a room let as single gave away its secrets.  Tall, a bit tubby, the gentleman from this room, with a port-wine stain high up behind his ear. 
Must have had to pay for it. 
She felt grown-up thinking this, as she pushed the Bissell roughly under the bed, and into the corners.

Just across the corridor, in the bathroom, she didn’t see the ring for some time.  She stood the cork bathmat against the wall, and got down on her hands and knees to scrub the bath.  It was what she hated most, the dirt from other people’s bodies, mixed with the harsh green soap to a thick scum that she felt on her fingers before she started cleaning.  Even back in the home it had made her feel sick.  She held her breath and scoured, as hard as she could, plenty of Vim sprinkled along the tide-mark, the dry bleachy smell masking the rest.  Expertly she ran a finger round the drain, picked up the dark matted hairs between two fingers and leaned across to dump them in the toilet.

When she stood, the gold was the brightest thing in the room, in the grey light through the net-curtained window.  She plucked the ring from the basin hastily; she could have turned on the tap and swilled it down.  Though perhaps it wouldn’t have gone through the plug-hole grating.

She dabbed it with a towel, on the palm of her hand.  A wedding-ring, quite wide, but small, a woman’s.  She bent forward to feel the flat surface against her lips.  It was still cool from the basin, and very sleek.  As she straightened, something glinted inside the circle.

Rita 10 Oct 1928.

The copperplate script, showing white on the reddish-gold, seemed extraordinarily fine and precious to her.  There was also the second of disappointment, as though it could have been her own name in there, on the private surface right against the skin. 
Don’t be stupid,
she told herself, and then was shocked.  How could this woman Rita be on the game, when her husband had had her name engraved in here?

Very carefully, Violeta tried the ring, on her right hand.  For a moment she thought it would be too small; but no, it fitted.  A few flakes of Vim were stuck to the knuckle above it.  Her hand had become another kind of hand, the competent hand of a brisk grown woman, muttering
Dirty bugger
about the guests, and laughing that brief guttural laugh they had.

A door shut.  Someone ran heavily down the stairs.

She took the ring off, delicately, and paused. Then she slipped it under her uniform, into her bra.

All day as she changed the sheets, dusted and scoured, the white cotton bra pressed the wedding-ring against the side of her small left breast.  The metal was warmed by her flesh and settled, so that when she undressed at night she had a brand, a perfect circle, red on her fawn skin.  Awkwardly, she stood before the mirror, and pulled the breast to one side to see the mark.