Paper Faces (12 page)

And Dot saw something else alive and moving out there too, brown yet larger than a hare. The huddled figure shambled alongside the yew hedge toward the wicket gate. A curious tramplike person wrapped against the weather in an old shawl. Mrs. Hollidaye's shawl. But it was not Mrs. Hollidaye.

It was Loopy Lil. What was she doing? Where was she off to before her breakfast?

After Loopy Lil's lurching figure had disappeared, her footprints were left behind in the lawn, not soft white marks like all week, but brownish foot-shaped prints. Plod, plod, spoiling the tidiness.

Downstairs the range was blazing, porridge steaming, eggs coddling.

“Snow's still here!” said Dot cheerfully. “And I seen two gulls. Blackheads. Long way from home, ain't they?”

“I expect they're hungry,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “And searching for food, the poor mites. There you are, my dear.”

She placed the porridge bowl in front of Dot with a dollop of honey in the middle and some cream on the edge. Dot watched the honey and cream dissolve and trickle like two rivers to join in a silver-and-golden spreading lake.

“That's the way, a good breakfast. We'll need it today. Long drive.”

The porridge changed. The honey and the cream disappeared into a mess of gray.

“That snow, it don't look no better,” Dot said. “Still blinking bad.”

“I believe it
is
relenting, my dear, just an iota, and the forecast is certainly more optimistic. We should be fine on the road if we leave plenty of time. I've sent Miss Lilian to do a recce.”

Mrs. Hollidaye, supping porridge with her back to the flaming range and her face toward the window, exclaimed, “Why, do look, Dorothy! Here's our friend Mr. Coal Tit back again. Now, I do wonder where he's been.”

The small birds clustered tightly on the swinging coconut were fighting for a firm grip. And beneath their feeding place, where yesterday had been snowy white, was today damp and brown with mud and warm droppings.

“Ready for your eggs now, my dear?”

But a distant sickness, a mild headache, had taken Dot's appetite. The pain in her jaw had come back. Or was it in her ear? Or in her throat? She never could locate it. Her spoon dropped listlessly back into the dull porridge lake.

“Never mind, Dorothy. You sit cozily by the range till we're ready. Ah, and here's Miss Lilian back now like the angel of good tidings.”

Loopy Lil blew in through the side door like a bundle of old rags with tiny crystals of white on her woollen hood.

“What's that if it ain't snow?” Dot demanded.

“Sleet. Yes, the weather's definitely taking a turn for the better. Well, don't just stand there, Lilian dear. Come on in. We need that door closed.”

The bearer of bad tidings fumbled with her layers of damp shawls, and Dot felt fear on all sides till she was suffocated, as though lying beneath collapsed building rubble. She was trapped. She could do nothing to help herself.

The driveway was still snowed up, but once they reached the road there was a narrow track between high mounds on each side.

Loopy Lil came too. Someone had to wipe the inside of the windscreen clear of condensation and clear the outside of the buildup of brown slush.

The journey began but wouldn't end. Dot pulled the tartan rug up over her face to breathe the smell of dogs. She had to have something to hold on to when she disappeared into the black hospital pit.

Mrs. Hollidaye was not her next of kin, so she wasn't allowed to take Dot farther than the main entrance, where she handed her briskly over to the care of a nurse.

Dot would have liked to have had a hand to hold. Instead, she clutched tightly to the handle of the suitcase Mrs. Hollidaye had lent her and followed the nurse along broad passages to a bright room where a group of children, all with suitcases and well wrapped in outdoor clothing, stood huddled like refugees from a foreign land waiting to be told where to go next.

“Come along, children, we can't stand around like lost dogs all day. We've got work to do! Come now, coats off!”

Two were giggling together and seemed to know each other. Dot envied them. She glanced toward the window to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Hollidaye's car, but the windows, though clear glass, gave on to an enclosed garden with bare rosebushes poking up like black twigs through the slush.

Dot was shown to her bed, where a notice was taped with pink sticking plaster to the end rail. She recognized her name but not the other word.

“What's it say?” she asked the nurse who was smoothing out fresh sheets.

“‘Tonsillectomy,'” said the nurse. “It's what you're in for, isn't it?”

Dot looked at the other children's beds. They all had this word. Everybody was here for the same thing to be done to them.

“What time?” Dot asked the nurse.

“There's a clock up there on the wall, can't you see?”

Dot tried again. “I mean, what time is the time they do it. When they put us to sleep. I got to know.”

“Oh, not today! The docs have all gone off long ago.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

“I daresay. All depends. Can you help tuck in that sheet your side? Thanks. You have to be under observation, all of you, for twelve hours beforehand. Didn't they tell you? Then you have to have twelve hours fasting, too.”

Dot didn't know what fasting was.

“Not eating or drinking anything, not even so much as a crumb. Else you may choke.”

Dot wished someone had told Mrs. Hollidaye this before, then she wouldn't have wasted all that food feeding her up.

“They wheel you down in batches, two at a time, throughout ops day. All right?”

How? Dot wondered. In pairs marching side by side, or one behind the other? Who would be paired with who? Would the two who already knew each other be together?

“Don't look so worried. It may never happen!”

“Why wouldn't it?”

“No, I don't mean it like that. I mean it's not as bad as you think. You won't know a thing about it. You'll be Harry flatters, out like a light.”

Dot already knew about hospitals. Everything you feared might happen, did happen, only worse. Now that she was back in one, it felt as though she'd never been outside.

Soon, all twenty children were in their beds, stiff in their laundered nightgowns, without having been offered any supper, nor even as much as a sly sip of water. The hands of the clock on the wall dragged round. Dot had time to worry. What if she died like Baby? She didn't mind about that so long as she got a lovely little grave like Mrs. Hollidaye's baby daughter. But she knew that Gloria wouldn't think to give her one. Out of sight, out of mind, is what Gloria would say.

Dot wished she'd been given a bed nearer one of the windows so she could see out, or at least by the door. A great big boy was in the bed by the door. When the lights were turned out, he began crying.

“I want my mummy,” he wailed.

“Don't worry, you'll be seeing her again soon,” said a nurse.

Not if he dies, he won't, Dot thought, and felt better to realize that at least she wasn't frightened by that.

Next day, Dot was made to lie on a high hard bed in a glittery room without windows, and they pressed over her face a black rubber bowl that smelled like the inside of her gas mask. But instead of protecting her from attack, this mask forced the gas at her, rushing it up into her face with a sinister hissing. As she began to choke, she kicked and struggled for breath before tumbling down into nowhere.

But after that, life began again and it was easy to feel full of courage and cheerfulness. They gave the children white ice cream and red jelly, and brightly colored drinks clinking with chunks of ice. They let them slide around on the polished floor and listen to music on the ward radio. There was a cupboard full of toys and a shelf of books.

It wasn't at all like staying in the hospital.

16

Marrow Jam for Tea

After Mrs. Hollidaye had fetched Dot from the Princess Elizabeth, she told her, “Your mother telephoned, my dear. She would like you home with her now. Isn't that simply grand?”

“Home?” said Dot.

“I explained it was a bit of a flap to go for the train this afternoon. So we'll pop you on the first one tomorrow.”

Tomorrow was too soon.

“What if I don't want to go?” said Dot.

“Yes, I do know, my dear, it's always difficult, isn't it? Having to do things one doesn't want.”

“I can't go back,” Dot said. “
Please,
Mrs. H., I want to be here, stay with you. And the dogs. And Miss Lilian.” She thought, I don't belong there anymore.

Mrs. Hollidaye said, “Yes, wouldn't that be splendid?” The conversation was over. She said, “High time to start a new pot of jam. Let's see what we have left. Come, will you, my dear, and help choose?”

Dot followed Mrs. Hollidaye into the larder. How could she be concerned about the choice of jam?

“Mrs. Parvis hates me. I heard her say I ain't worth the air I breathe.”

“So which is it to be? Quince, cranberry jelly, mulberry? What a decision.”

“And anyway Gloria don't want me neither.”

Gloria still wanted Baby, the apple of her eye.

“See, she's an usherette now, so she don't have time for me no more.”

“My dear, it's probably hard for you to understand, but your mother is very young. And confused. And she needs you.”

While Loopy Lil and Mrs. Hollidaye were organizing tea, Dot walked slowly round the gardens, dragging her shoes through crunchy heaps of left-behind snow. Mrs. Hollidaye was incapable of understanding how the thought of having to leave tomorrow hung on Dot's shoulders like a heavy woollen cloak of despair.

Leaving, said the rooks cawing, leaving, said the trees, leaving, said the pigeons, to leave, leave, leave, said the hens behind their wire enclosure. It gave her a dull all-over pain more acute than any kind of real pain. In the fading light, she began to see things she'd not noticed before. How the bark of the oaks was not brown but pale gold; how primroses were nestling safely among tussocks of bristly dry grass. How the leaves that still clung to the branches of the pear tree were silvered on their undersides.

There was nothing like this back at Mrs. Parvis's. Back at Mrs. Parvis's was an indoor world. Dot remembered how each spoon at Mrs. Parvis's was stained a streaky brown in the bowl, and bent crooked at the shaft, with NAAFI stamped on the handle.

She remembered how the table around which they sat at high tea was covered with a sheet of speckled gray lino that had a strange stickiness. When you touched it with the edge of your hand, your skin felt as though it had become attached so that you were in danger of becoming a part of Mrs. Parvis's table forever.

In Mrs. Parvis's parlor there were greasy patches on the chairs, which she covered with little cloths. Along the narrow landing at Mrs. Parvis's were laid pieces of carpet to cover the cracks in the lino. At Mrs. Parvis's the metal meat safe hanging from its nail outside the basement room never contained meat, only sausages and suet, with bluebottles buzzing round.

How could Mrs. Hollidaye consider allowing Dot to return to that unsafe place where the air robbed your cheeks of their roses, where buildings collapsed though the bombs had long since stopped, where there was no glass in half the windows, no water in the taps, where nothing was quite what it seemed to be?

At Mrs. Parvis's, things were often pretending to be other things, like Mrs. Parvis saying one thing when she meant another, things were hiding other things, like scraps of rug concealing cracks, white glass windows concealing sick children.

“And nobody don't want me there anyhow,” Dot finished out loud.

She would stay here, where things were what they seemed to be, where trees were trees, hens were hens.

She went indoors and sat hunched in her coat and mittens on the sofa by the drawing-room fire.

“I ain't going, Mrs. H.,” she said. “A million horses ain't going to drag me back there. And there's
him,
too. When
he
turns up,
he
ain't going to want me neither. I don't even know what he looks like.”

“Bread and jam, my dear?” said Mrs. Hollidaye as though she still had her cloth-ears on. “Lilian dear, what about you? It's the new marrow and ginger; Dorothy and I chose it this afternoon. Or there's just a little honey left. But we'll save the fresh comb for Dorothy to take back tomorrow.”

“What if I go and don't never get to come back?” said Dot. “You'll miss me. Then you'll be sorry.” She sounded like Mrs. Parvis, saying one thing yet meaning another.

“Nonsense. Of course you'll come back. Everybody always comes back. It's going to be exciting to see your mother again. You'll be able to tell her all the news.”

What news would interest Gloria? Would she want to know about the flowering of the pink camellia and its glossy leaves, about the goat running away, about the double-yolked egg? She might pretend to listen, but she wouldn't hear. The two places were quite separate. News of one didn't transmit to the other.

Mrs. Hollidaye spooned some chunks of marrow onto a slice of bread, cut it in half, and put it gently into Dot's hand.

“Eat up, there's a good girl. I know, leaving is always hard.”

Dot took the bread and sniffed. “It hurts. Like real hurt. Much worse than being ill.”

“My dear, that's good. You must hold on to the hurt. It's a sign of growing up.”

“But I don't want it like this. I want it to be like it was before.”

Lying in bed and being looked after and enveloped in love, by day and by night.

“Like I was your little girl. Like the one what died.”

She flung herself crying onto Mrs. Hollidaye's lap, knocking Mrs. Hollidaye's afternoon hat sideways. Mrs. Hollidaye straightened it, but let Dot stay.