Paper Faces (11 page)

Mrs. Hollidaye and Loopy Lil settled on either side of the bedroom fire with the dogs on the carpet between them. Loopy Lil gently smiled her new even welfare smile while Mrs. Hollidaye darned lisle stockings.

The wind was getting up, rattling against the wooden shutters, and forcing twigs to scratch against the window-panes.

“My dear, aren't we
glad
we're not on the high seas
tonight
!” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “Just think of those poor brave souls out there.”

Dot knew that she had everything she used so much to long for. If only she could will herself strong as a roach. But her legs hurt. So did her neck. A single spoonful of buttered eggs made her feel sick. The clotted cream on the rhubarb had curdled. Her disappointment turned to tears, which dripped into the congealing eggs.

Mrs. Hollidaye heard the sniffing. “My dear,” she said, “limited gray matter Miss Lilian may have, yet still she rejoices to be alive. Sore eyes I may have, but at least I am not blind and can still darn my own stockings. Aching head you may have, but at least you have a head to have aches in.”

She put aside her darning basket and picked up a book whose dark blue cover was patterned with gold leaves.

“In addition, my dear, you still have ears for listening, I trust?”

She began to read aloud.

Dot saw how the gold patterns on the cover caught the flicker from the fire and flared like Very lights. Mrs. Hollidaye's voice was comforting as it rose and fell like the wind. By listening to the story, Dot found she had become brave.

On the breakfast tray the next day was a different flower, a single brilliant pink blossom with dark leaves so glossy, they seemed to have been polished.

“A camellia, my dear. D'you know, the tree hasn't flowered properly for six years. Now it's
such
a sight! Pink all over like an apple tree in May! They seem to shine out like lamps, specially on these gray days. I do wish you could come out and see. Maybe soon. In fact, my dear, we've brought out the old bath chair. From the back of the stables. Lilian's given it a really good dusting down. We've oiled the wheels. And just as soon as you feel up to it, we'll be taking you round the garden for some good lungfuls of God's air.”

Meanwhile, Mrs. Hollidaye revealed to Dot how many things were to be done without even having to move from bed. She hung a piece of mutton fat threaded on to string across the window for the blue tits. She showed where Dot must watch across the ragged grass for when the fox came slinking through the bracken toward the henhouse.

She had shown Dot before how to find pictures in the clouds. Now she pointed out how there were pictures in the trees.

The twigs of the beeches drew black pencil lines against the sky in which were hiding animals and flowers, faces and places. When the breeze rustled the branches, the pictures changed.

With a reel of linen thread and a hooked needle, Mrs. Hollidaye showed how to work a crochet collar. With two needles and a ball of wool, she showed how to knit. She gave her books to look at and explained how the printed letters beneath each picture made words that summarized the illustration. She gave her paper and colored crayons and showed her how she could draw. She taught her how to write her name, how to put the paper in an envelope to be posted to Gloria.

“That's it, my dear. And she'll be so pleased to have it. And put the X's along the bottom and that tells her that you love her and you're thinking of her.”

Dot hadn't been thinking of her. If she thought about Gloria, then she'd have to start thinking about him, too. It was better that she thought of neither.

One evening Mrs. Hollidaye brought to the bedroom a long wooden box.

“A companion for you, my dear,” she said, sliding back the lid. “I had her when I was a girl.”

In the box under layers of tissue paper lay a doll, which Mrs. Hollidaye lifted out and placed in Dot's arms. It had long white skirts.

“Ooh, it's beautiful! I ain't never played with a proper doll before. I had some paper dolls one time, but me landlady got rid of them, said they were messing the place up.”

“She's rather old, so one has to be frightfully careful, but I know you will be. She's made from wax. Just the face and hands.” Beneath the long lacy petticoats was a stuffed cotton body wearing a lace camisole.

“I was given two, and I was told by my nurse never to let them near the fire or they'd melt. Oh, what a naughty child I was! I wanted to see if it was true. So I placed one of them up against the fender, to see what would happen. And then her poor face melted like a candle into nothing, and how I cried at what I had done to make her lose all her features.”

Dot looked at the doll and thought of its lost companion with a face of dripping wax. Melting cheeks and disappearing noses was what had happened to brave airmen when they caught fire. Their skin burned, their features dissolved, and they were left faceless. Gloria met men like that at the airmen's social club.

Dot hugged this doll whose face was still whole. She said, “It's ever so real looking, like a person, except it's so titchy.”

Baby had looked like this doll, as though nearly real, yet not quite, with a waxy pale skin, yellow-tinged, bright glassy eyes, and a dainty pink mouth. She remembered how she hadn't been allowed to hold him for more than a moment before he had to go back behind the bars of his crib.

“Don't sleep with her, my dear, will you, for though she would not melt, she would crack if she fell. Real mothers don't sleep with their babies. They might overlay them. There was a village woman overlaid her baby last summer, such a terrible thing for everyone. Nurse Willow had already warned her to put it in the crib.”

Dot wondered, did Baby now look like this doll's melted companion, face and hands gone, only his white clothes left?

“When it's time to sleep, why not set her here on the chair to watch over you?” Mrs. Hollidaye propped the doll on the chair.

So the wax doll sat all night with its eyes wide open staring ahead like a small dead child. And Dot considered her pigeon-hearted father and wondered why she could never recall his face.

Dot began to eat a little more each day. She dressed; she went downstairs to sit in an armchair. In the evening, Mrs. Hollidaye taught her to play Up Jenkins and dominoes and spillikins on a low table by the fire. Loopy Lil hadn't a steady enough hand for spillikins and she couldn't count up to more than three for the dominoes, but she seemed happy to watch and smile.

In the morning when the sun was shining through the mist, Dot was wrapped up to go out. She was surprised how bare the gardens had become, except for the lopsided apple tree in the lower orchard whose branches still carried a crop of apples shimmering like tiny brassy moons.

“I like to leave that one unpicked. For the birds. Otherwise what will they have to see them through till spring? I call it my bird tree.”

The prisoners of war had left the fields and there were different people who now gathered for elevenses round the kitchen range. There was the man demobbed from his regiment who came to do the garden just as he had before he was called to war. There was the young woman and her baby who had moved into the space above the coach house, and there was the noisy couple from Luton who had taken over the empty servants' quarters up the back stairs.

“Poor dears, bombed out three times, didn't know which way to turn. But at least they're together now.”

The young woman from the coach house came in and helped Loopy Lil wash dishes in the scullery while her baby sat on the floor chewing on a bone. The baby was fat and red faced. It roared if anyone went near it. Dot didn't go near. But she went everywhere else, and wherever she went in house or gardens, the grown-ups smiled and said, “Good day!” and asked how she was. Nobody told her to be off, or lay off, or push off, or not to touch, or to be careful. I'm getting sound as a roach, Dot told herself.

The gardener found her a length of binding twine in a shed so that she could learn to skip. And the young woman let her tie the grizzling baby into the bath chair and wheel it around the courtyard to look at the hens.

Dot had lived like this forever. The days of reading and resting, of sewing and eating and growing, merged one into the next. She didn't miss Gloria. This was where she lived now. It would be like this forever, no change, the pattern was fixed. She was stronger than a roach, as strong as an ox. No one would ever cut pieces off her while she slept.

Then came the snow and she had to stay in and watch from the window how it piled up against the water butt, how it lay like a blanket along the sills, how it changed the distance from bluey-brown to white as far as you could see. Her fingertips turned white as bone, her lips became chapped, and the air was so cold it hurt to breathe. The baby went back to its yelling on the scullery floor.

“My dear! Have you ever seen such a fall as this!” said Mrs. Hollidaye as she carried the tea tray through to the drawing room. “I've just measured it with my knitting tape. Six and a half inches! The poor dogs hardly know what to make of it. And the postman says he only just made it through.”

Loopy Lil got stuck in a drift on her way back from the farm with the milk.

“So now, my dears, there's two of you to warm up by the fire!”

Through the snow strode a visitor. He came in at the side door as though he knew his own way.

“You'll find her in the drawing room,” Dot heard Mrs. Hollidaye say. “Yes, she's simply full of beans now.”

He didn't wear a white jacket like hospital doctors but a heavy greatcoat with the collar turned up and boots dampened with slush. But Dot knew he was a doctor because his hands smelled clean and soapy.

First he sat on the sofa and talked to the dogs. He knew them both by name. Dot took no notice of him. But then he asked her what she was knitting, so she had to answer him, and after that she agreed to let him tap her chest with his rubber hammer, peer into her ears with his pencil light, and press the back of her tongue with one of Mrs. Hollidaye's silver apostle teaspoons.

“Say aah!” he said. Then he said, “Aha, definitely harvesting time. Ripe and ready for removal, I'd say, and not a minute too soon. Miss Dorothy, you've done very well.”

When the doctor had gone, Dot said, “I got to go back in the hospital, ain't I, Mrs. H.?”

“Yes, my dear. Dr. Trees thinks you're ready.”

“Well, you want to know something? I were just pretending to him, because I ain't really full of beans. Truth is, I'm still ever so peaky. And them other doctors said I weren't to go back up London for no operation not till I was A-one, else I'd be dead as a herring.”

Mrs. Hollidaye seemed not to have heard. She merely suggested there'd be time for a game of spillikins before supper.

After Dot had won two rounds, Mrs. Hollidaye said, “We'll have supper early this evening. You'll need to take a bath tonight, won't you, my dear, so as to be clean as a new pin for tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow! Ain't I going back up London then?”

“No, dear. Dr. Trees has most kindly arranged your admission to our local hospital.”

“Oh, no! I ain't going there. Not on your life.”

To have to submit to having a part of one's body removed while one slept was going to be bad. But to have to allow it to be done in a strange place was impossible. Dot knew she couldn't be brave enough for that. “If I got to have it done, I'll go back to the place I was before, back down the Duke's Ferry Road. Where Baby was and all.”

“You'll find they're very good. Miss Lilian had her teeth done there.”

Mrs. Hollidaye steadily poured tea.

“You're booked into what we call the Princess Elizabeth Children's Annex. We had a silver subscription for the bedspreads and curtains. That's Elizabeth, after our royal princess, you know.”

“Course I know,” said Dot. “She lives at Buckingham Palace.”

“Then I daresay you also know, my dear, what Princess Elizabeth said during the blitz? How splendidly full of cheerfulness and courage all you young London children are. So that's why they've named the new wing after her. To remind you. For that is exactly how you are going to face tomorrow, aren't you? Full of courage!”

It was all so planned. Dot could see no way out. Only a raid could save her now. Or perhaps there was something else? She ran from the room and up to her bedroom, where the windows were kept open all day to destroy the germs. It was as cold as an old grave.

Dot stood by the open window. “God in heaven,” she said, for Mrs. Hollidaye had explained how you could speak to the good Lord and sometimes the good Lord spoke back. “God in heaven, let it snow. And snow and always snow and block up all the paths and roads, fields and ditches.”

15

At the Princess Elizabeth

The snow stayed. It was her friend. Dot woke on that morning that could have been the last morning of her life and knew by the brightness reflected across the ceiling that she was safe, for the roads would still be blocked.

She slid joyfully down from the bed and hopped across the cold carpet to the window. The lawns were as smooth and white as yesterday, and the meadow as white, and all the fields away to the marshes on the faraway horizon. And even beyond would be snowbound, perhaps right as far as the sea.

The snow had made the gardens silent, though not inactive. Mrs. Hollidaye had pointed out how one could see creatures even more clearly when they were silhouetted as in a shadow cutout. A blackbird, with its beak gleaming golden against the white, scuttled out from under the rhododendron bushes, making a flurry of snow slither off the broad leaves. Then the brownish scurrying of a hare across the top of spiky snow-blown grass. Overhead a sea gull circled the treetops, pale feathers shining against the dark gray of a flat sky.