Family of Women (22 page)

‘There you go –
lad
– ’ He pushed Carol away from him and she fell into Violet’s arms trembling and crying. Violet stroked her shorn head, sobbing heartbrokenly herself.

‘You bastard, Harry. You pathetic, cruel bastard! Oh, babby – my beautiful babby, I’m sorry. Your pretty hair . . . My lovely one, my little love . . .’

Joyce and Linda huddled together, shocked and crying.

Their dad stood looking at them, his own face wet with tears, but wearing an expression of terrible contempt.

‘It’s only a bit of bloody hair,’ he said, disgusted. ‘It’ll grow again, for Christ’s sake . . .’ He sank down into a chair. ‘Go on – sod off out of here, the lot of you, with your blarting, and leave me alone.’

Violet took the girls up to bed. In Linda and Carol’s room she sat on Carol’s bed, holding her on her lap, Carol’s scrawny little body still convulsing with sobs even after she had finished crying.

‘Why did he do it, Mom? What did he mean?’

‘Ssssh,’ Violet held her close, rocking her, weeping into the stubbly remains of her hair. ‘He’s just poorly, and he’s had too much to drink. You know your dad when he’s had too much – he doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

Linda watched from her bed, hugging her knees, face swollen with crying. Mom was clinging to Carol, distraught, quite different from normal. She’d always been distant from her, fending her off as if she was a nuisance, so that Carol had learned to turn to Linda for comfort and they’d grown close as close. But now, there was Mom sobbing over her as if she was the most precious thing in the world. It stirred Linda up. She didn’t know how to feel. She could never make Mom out. She hardly ever showed much emotion, and when she did, it was over things that didn’t matter, like in the war when that family across the road, the Keillors, had moved away, when she hardly knew them: Linda had barely ever seen Mom speak to Mrs Keillor at all, but there she was, crying as if her heart was about to be snapped in two. Nothing ever made sense, like the things Dad was saying downstairs about Germans.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mom was saying, over and over again. ‘It’s all
my fault. Oh, Carol, I’m sorry.’

Linda couldn’t bear it. ‘Mom!’ Her voice cracked. ‘Mom, don’t!’

Her mother looked across at her, as if she had forgotten she was there, and her face changed. She wiped her face, as if stunned.

‘Come here,’ she said gently.

Linda crawled out of bed and sat beside her. Violet put her arm round her and she stretched one arm round Mom, the other round Carol. They sat quietly for a moment, then Joyce appeared in the doorway and came and sat down with them as well.

‘I’m sorry, girls,’ Mom said.

And she started crying again.

Carol came into bed with Linda that night. Linda put her arms round her.

‘I’ll look after you,’ she whispered as they drifted into drowsiness.

A week later Carol came in from playing out on the estate saying she had a bad headache and felt giddy. Before long she couldn’t get up at all.

Carol’s illness had a strange effect on the neighbours. Or at least the women. Everyone was kinder for a start, kept asking if they needed anything.

A few days after the rabbits got into their garden, Mrs Bottoms came round to see Mom. The front door opened on her anxious face. She had on a pale blue shirtwaister, her hair was tightly curled and she held out a bunch of pink roses from the garden. Joyce and Linda stood in the shadow of the hall.

‘Here, dearie, these’re for you. I hope you don’t think it funny of me coming round . . . Only I heard your Carol had been taken poorly.’

There was a pause, then Mom stepped back. ‘Come in.’

Edna Bottoms talked agitatedly as she came through the door. ‘Reg said I shouldn’t bother you – should mind my own business. So I thought I’d come round while he’s at work. Men don’t always understand these things, do they?’

‘Joyce, Linda – outside. Go on.’

They scooted out to where the dogs were lying out on the strip of concrete at the back of the house, basking in the warmth. Tufts of grass spiked up through the cracks in the concrete.

Linda was wandering off to see Snowdrop when Joyce hissed, beckoning. ‘Come ’ere – see what she wants!’

The kitchen window was wide open. The girls squatted under it, backs against the hot wall. Violet was making tea. There was a clink of cups and they could hear snatches of her telling Mrs Bottoms about the hospital, the iron lung, and Mrs B’s concerned noises.

Joyce and Linda mimicked her, under the window.
Oh dear, oh Lord
. . . They mouthed like goldfish, crossing their eyes and pulling the grievous expressions they could picture on Mrs Bottoms’ face.
How terrible
. . .
Poor little thing
. . .
Dear oh dear
. . . until they were helpless with giggles and had to move down the garden to explode into laughter, tears running down their cheeks. Linda felt a bit better after it.

‘Come on – we’re missing it!’ Joyce dragged her back by the arm.

They squatted down again. The breeze blew the women’s drifting words back and forth in snatches, but they could catch the sad, confidential tones. Mrs Bottoms was talking about a baby. She and Mr Bottoms had one son, called Frank, who was married now, but it wasn’t Frank she was talking about.

‘She only lived six days. Notlit Aight="0"div> ning. &ls even a week.’ Mrs Bottoms was speaking in a tight, hiccoughy way. Her voice became a squeak. ‘My little Daisy. She was just lying there in the cot . . .’ There was a long silence until they heard their mom say something: ‘. . . ever so sorry . . . terrible . . .’

Linda’s eyes met Joyce’s. They were solemn now.

‘The worst of it is – it’s Reg!’ Words seemed to come out of Mrs Bottoms like a cork from a bottle. ‘If we could talk about her, it might lay her to rest. But he won’t let me. It’s as if she never existed. I don’t even know where they buried her – I was in that much of a state at the time. The police came. They thought . . . They took her away and I’ve never known . . . Reg said he didn’t know – never asked . . . And he’s not the same since the war. If I ever say anything he just says you have to forget everything. Put it behind you. But I can’t . . . I try, but . . .’

When she started crying, really crying, they moved away. Linda went down on to the scrubby grass and picked up Snowdrop out of her run. She hugged the rabbit’s big, robust body, stroking her cheek against the smooth white fur.

They didn’t overhear when the next visitor came. Mom told Dad about it at tea, the four of them round the table, window open and a breeze blowing in.

‘I met Eva up at the shops today,’ Violet said.

Harry looked up, without much interest. ‘Eva?’

‘Kaminski. Next door.’

‘Oh ar.’

‘We were just going home, both of us, with the shopping and she said she’d walk with me. She asked about Carol – she was very nice as a matter of fact. Then all of a sudden she just came out with it. “You know, Peter and Alenka were not our only children.” I mean, I don’t always understand her – her accent and that – and I wasn’t sure what she meant.’

Linda mashed her grey, boiled potato into the gravy. Glancing up, she could tell her father was listening now, elbows on the table, rubbing his hands together as if they were cold. And she could tell also that her mom was pleased he was listening, as if just for once they were talking like people who might like each other.

‘What’d she say then?’

‘She said they had four – another boy and girl. One was called Karol – but I think that was the boy. I didn’t catch the girl’s name. They were younger, she said. Anyway, the whole family were taken off to a camp, in Russia somewhere. Nineteen-forty-one I think she said. Cutting down trees – even the kids working morning till night in the freezing cold. The boy died in the camp and then – it was a bit
hard to follow – but the little girl died somewhere else, after – I think she said in
Persia
? Died in her arms, she said, in a truck they were crammed into. Nothing she could do. Couldn’t even bury her. They just had to leave her.’

Her eyes filled. Everything seemed to make her cry these days. Linda felt close to tears herself.

‘Terrible,’ Harry said. He stared ahead of him for a moment as if seeing things none of them could see.

When they’d finished eating, the girls got down.

‘Go and check the rabbits,’ Mom said. They were trying not to aggravate Mr Bottoms – as much for Mrs Bottoms’ sake as anything.

Harry got up from the table and put his hand on Violet’s shoulder. As she was going out, Linda heard him say, ‘Sorry, love. I’m sorry – about Carol. What I did – her hair. I wasn’t myself.’

And she heard the half-stifled sound of her mother bursting into tears.

‘She’s so poorly,’ she sobbed. ‘I can’t stand the thought of her in that horrible metal thing!’

Linda went with Violet to the hospital for visits even though she had to wait outside.

At first, Carol was very distressed and homesick.

‘I want to come home,’ she kept crying. ‘I don’t like it in here.’

Violet found it terrible to see, and made even worse by the sight of her chopped hair.

‘She looks like a plucked chicken. What must those nurses think?’

She seemed glad Linda was there: someone to talk to and relieve her feelings.

The second time they visited, the two of them were utterly miserable. On the way home, Violet took her into the bomb-scarred middle of Birmingham and headed for the Bull Ring.

‘D’you want a hamster?’ she said suddenly.

‘Ooh, yes!’ Linda said. She knew Mom was trying to be nice. Carol’s illness had brought out a softness in her. And it was her way of finding comfort. She collected animals the way a bird feathers its nest.

‘What about Sooty?’ Linda said doubtfully. He was forever bringing birds in.

‘You can keep it upstairs, away from the cats. Make sure you keep the door shut.’

They went home on the bus with two tiny hamsters in a little cage, one for Linda and one for Joyce. The man said they were sisters and wouldn’t fight.

‘They should behave themselves all right – like you and your sister, eh?’ he added with a wink.

By the time they’d reached Kingstanding, Linda had called her hamster Goldie.

‘You can’t call her that – she’s not one bit of gold on her,’ Joyce sneered.

‘Can if I want.’

Joyce called hers Loretta because she tus Ast her.< heig.&rsquhought it was pretty.

‘They all right?’ Mom came up to see them in Linda’s bedroom. They all knew they were trying not to think about the hospital, and Carol stuck in that machine.

The hamsters turned out not to be a good idea. Within a fortnight Linda woke up to find that Loretta had set upon Goldie in the night and killed her. She was covered in bloody gashes.

‘I don’t think you’re supposed to put hamsters in together, are you?’ Mrs Bottoms said when she heard. ‘He should have told you, really.’

And quite soon after, Loretta died as well. Linda found her curled up in her bedding, cold and stiff. At the time, she thought of it as a bad omen about Carol. Fortunately, she was wrong.

‘Hello, pet.’ Violet bent down and kissed Carol’s cheek, stroking her hair. It had grown back a little now and was like a soft, fair cap all over her head, in varying lengths. ‘You all right?’

Carol gave a little nod, drinking in the sight of her mother. Her father, of course, she did not expect to see.

‘I’m all right. I’m going to get better.’

She spoke with such certainty that Violet gave a faint smile and leaned over her, eyes filling with tears of relief, though she tried to hide it.

‘Is that what the nurses say?’

‘They think I’m better as well. And I told them.’

Carol’s face had changed somehow since the last visit. The look of sadness and preoccupation had gone. Her eyes were bright again.

‘It’s going to be all right. And I’ll be able to walk. He told me.’

‘Who told you? Have the doctors been?’

‘Yes – but it wasn’t them. It was him.’

Violet’s hand stilled on Carol’s head and she frowned. ‘Who? What’re you talking about?’

‘
Him.
There.’ Her eyes looked up to the wall beside her. ‘He comes to see me – at night mostly. And he tells me things.’

‘Oh, I see – you’ve been having nice dreams!’ Violet laughed with some relief.

‘No – not when I was asleep. He’s just there, when I look up. And he smiled and told me it would be all right.’

Violet frowned. ‘I think I’ll go and see if I can talk to one of the nurses.’

She walked off along the ward, a slim, vulnerable figure in her old skirt and cardigan, mac over her arm. She was less intimidated by the nurses now. The thin one they saw the first day often came and talked to her.

‘She won’t believe me,’ Carol told theuo; @yi nurse when they came back together. ‘But you do, don’t you?’

‘What’re you talking about?’ the nurse said impatiently. ‘Who’s this “he?” ’

‘I dunno. But he’s there, and he talks to me.’

‘She’s coming on nicely now,’ the nurse said, ignoring Carol. ‘This week she’s really made quite a stride – everyone’s pleased with her. We think she could spend some of each day out of the lung soon. And of course we’re starting on the physiotherapy with her.’

Whatever had happened, there had been a definite change. When they were in Aston for dinner on the Sunday – one of the last times Harry ever came – Bessie said, ‘Our Carol was looking better. Summat different about her. I’d say she was on the mend.’

That week, for the first time in ages, things felt lighthearted, as if there was hope.

When Violet said goodbye to her that day, Carol was beaming up at her, dark eyes aglow. She looked like an angel.

By the time Carol had been in the isolation hospital for just over three months, she was spending more and more time outside the iron lung. Once they were sure she could manage without it, the hospital told Violet that Carol was to be transferred to St Gerard’s, the Father Hudson’s Hospital at Coleshill, where she would be looked after and given more physiotherapy. Though her arms were little affected, the muscles in her legs were badly wasted and they thought it would take some time. There was also a problem with contractions in her spine. They said she might need an operation when she was older.