Paper Faces (5 page)

“You wouldn't like it, pet. Some of them don't look too good, not after they been burned like that, specially when it's their features what have gone. That's worse than legs.”

“Are we nearly there?”

The thin string handles of the paper carrier cut deep into the palm of Dot's hand. Gloria kissed it better and carried both bags.

When Dot began to stumble and fall over with tiredness, Gloria gathered her up and carried her, too.

Clinging piggyback to her mother's back, Dot felt the curtain of bunchy black net on the side of Gloria's hat flick at her face. She felt the two paper carriers swinging where Gloria had put them over her wrists. Dot's eyes were growing used to the dark just like they had to in the shelter when the warden's lamp went out. Now Dot could see the shapes of trees beside the track, of fences, of a white gate. There were no tanks, no fifth columnists disguised as Sisters of Charity. They were going up a stony drive. Gloria was walking faster, almost striding on her high heels as though she had finally refound her way.

“Here it is, then,” said Gloria, setting Dot down.

“What's this, then? Another blooming hospital?” She saw the dark looming bulk of a large building.

“Course it's not.”

“Looks like it. It's got windows all over.” She didn't want to be left to stand alone in some dark nighttime corridor.

“You got hospitals on the brain. Come on, follow me. Round the back.”

Dot clutched tight to Gloria's coat as they made their way through the dark rustling leaves of some tall shrubs. Across silent grass showed the faint light from a downstairs window.

“That's her in her drawing room,” said Gloria. “This way now. Side door'll be open.”

Gloria led them along a brick path, across a cobbled courtyard, past outhouses and a dripping water butt, then into the big house and along many passages.

Dot knew what was going to happen. She was going to be left in the care of a woman she didn't know, just as she'd been left with them before. “Only an hour,” Gloria would say. “She won't be no trouble to you. She's ever so good. Shan't be gone long.” And then the hour would turn into a long space of empty time, then into a whole evening, once even into an entire night before Gloria came back.

Now that they hadn't Baby to visit anymore, all that was bound to start again.

Dot thought, I won't let her. I'll stick with her. I'm all she's got now.

Gloria knocked on a paneled door before pushing it open.

“Here we are, then, Mrs. Hollidaye. Dot and me, come to visit you,” she said brightly.

“Come on, come in. And who have we here?”

“It's me, Gloria.”

The large room was lit by a paraffin lamp on a table. Two gray-haired ladies sat on either side of a fire, eating green soup from wide dishes on their knees.

The fire was burning large branches of wood, some still with twigs attached like fingers.

“Don't they have no gas?” said Dot. “Them's trees they're burning in there.”

“Shh,” said Gloria.

“Why, Gloria, my dear!” said one of the ladies, putting aside her soup dish and hurrying across the wide room to welcome them almost, but not quite, as though she had been expecting them.

“There, see, Dot,” said Gloria. “What did I say? Told you she'd be pleased, didn't I?”

“Why it's a delightful surprise! We were only thinking of you the other week. Weren't we, Lilian?”

The other lady went on spooning up her soup, and Dot noticed how frequently she missed her mouth. She had a brow so low that her hair seemed to begin sprouting from just above her eyes, which moved independently. She appeared to be looking in two directions at once, and Dot couldn't tell whether or not she was being stared at.

She remembered Hitler's eyes, which Mrs. Parvis had once said were hypnotic. “Must have been, otherwise why would all them nice Germans have done all them wicked things what he told them?”

Dot avoided the danger of the swiveling eyes in case they had the same compelling powers. She looked down at the patterned rugs on the floor and edged in more closely behind Gloria, gripping her skirt.

“So this is your little Dorothy?”

“That's right.” Gloria pushed Dot forward. “This is her. Large as life and twice as natural.”

Mrs. Hollidaye bent down and held out her hand. “Why, how
do
you do, my dear,” she said.

“Shake hands nicely,” Gloria hissed in Dot's ear. “Show her you're pleased to be here.”

“But I ain't.”

“My poor dears, come and warm yourselves by the fire. You must be most awfully tired. Why, Gloria my dear, you should have called from the station. We could have harnessed up the goat cart and come and fetched you. At least the little girl could have ridden. Never mind, the main thing is you're here now.”

She pushed two dogs off an armchair.

“Come, darlings, make room for our visitors while I go and fetch them some supper.”

Dot remembered how Mrs. Parvis had said dogs were insanitary vermin and had no place in the war effort and the Chinese were quite right to eat them.

“I believe there's a little soup left. Runner bean. All our own. We salted down simply pounds and pounds. And Lilian, look sharp. Help the little girl out of her coat. Poor child looks more dead than alive.”

Dot felt herself freeze with fear as the swivel-eyed Lilian lurched toward her, arms outstretched, to try to remove her coat.

“Don't mind her,” Gloria hissed in Dot's ear. “She's just a bit mental. Always has been. Don't mean no harm.”

Dot held her arms stiff as bayonets, for she knew it would be safer to keep her coat on, then they might not have to stay so long.

In the night, Dot heard the low thudding of explosions on the ground somewhere in the faraway distance and knew there must be a raid on. She had a sinking feeling. The grown-ups were wrong as usual. The war had come back, just like she knew it would. Yet she wasn't afraid and didn't even bother to open her eyes to find out if she would have to get up and run with Gloria for the shelters. She couldn't remember where she was, nor why, yet for some reason that she didn't understand, she felt they were safe here.

7

A Morning in the Country

Dot was surprised to find herself wearing a large pink woollen nightgown with an embroidered collar whose gathered sleeves were so long that her hands were lost. Somebody must have undressed her the night before. It couldn't have been Gloria, for Gloria knew that Dot always slept in her vest and knickers.

Dot was in a wide high bed with white sheets, two pillows, two blankets, and an eiderdown. Dot saw the curly mass of Gloria's dark hair lying on the pillow of a similar but separate bed alongside.

The room was like the train compartment again, their two matching beds, windows on two sides, blinds
and
curtains, pictures on the walls, a mirror and a place to hang clothes, but everything bigger, and they weren't traveling, and there was more light in the room. Blue light, and silver and bronze, streamed and bounced and danced through tall windows.

Across the gap between the beds, Dot whispered her mother's name.

“All present and correct,” Gloria mumbled, then rolled back to sleep.

A soft animal noise like gargling Dot thought at first must be Gloria's breathing. Then she saw that it was a gray bird like a station pigeon, yet not trapped beneath a glass roof but sitting freely outside among fluttering leaves.

In London colors were red and black. Here Dot saw that green and blue were the colors of the outside world. Green leaves festooned the window, green trees, green ground beyond, giving way to the blue. Blue distant trees, blue faraway hedges, rounded blue hills of the horizon millions of miles away. Dot thought, If only noble eight-fingered Mr. Brown could have this outside his window. Better than a view of cardboard panes and the next-door privies.

There were toys in one corner of the big bedroom. Whose toys? Dot slid down from the high bed and sat on the carpet and looked at a wooden dollhouse, a painted rocking horse, but she didn't touch. They weren't hers, and she knew there was always a danger in wanting other people's things for oneself. Like looters after a big raid who tried to steal the mangled possessions of shattered houses. Like Hitler, who wanted all the countries of the world for himself. Even when the first owners were crushed and dead, their things were not for you.

Dot peered in through the tiny curtained windows of the dollhouse and saw quiet furnished rooms, the playroom, kitchen, parlor, waiting to be lived in, a table set for tea, beds to be slept in, armchairs to be sat on. She hoped that the child to whom this home belonged would let her stay and watch him play.

But a thump at the door made her scramble back up onto the bed for safety. Gloria, from under her covers, mumbled sleepily, “That's only Loopy Lil, pet. Not to worry.”

The lady with the upright hair, who Gloria said had a screw loose, clattered into the bedroom holding out a steaming jug on a tray.

Dot thought it must be tea. She'd have liked a nice cup of milky tea. But they had no cups to drink from. So she shook her head. “No, thanks,” she said.

But Gloria said, “That'll be the hot water, pet. For washing yourself.”

“We don't do that,” said Dot.

“Well, you do here.”

Reluctantly, Dot slid down from the bed while Loopy Lil beamed kindly, eyes swiveling in all directions, and tried to help wash Dot's face at the washstand and brush her hair.

“Don't usually,” Dot muttered to Gloria. “Thursdays. That's our day.” Thursdays, half past five until six o'clock, was when they had the use of Mrs. Parvis's bathroom and as much warm water as trickled from the gas geyser into the tub. Usually enough for Gloria to shampoo her hair, for both of them to swish around in shallow tepid water, followed by their underclothes.

“Well, you ain't at Mrs. P.'s now, are you?” said Gloria crossly. “Washing hands, face, and behind your ears, that's what Mrs. Hollidaye likes, so you'll just do it. Right?”

She pummeled the two soft pillows into shape and lay down to sleep again.

“I'm keeping my coat on,” said Dot. A person felt safer if they kept their possessions close by them. “And I won't stay,” she added as Loopy Lil reached out to take her hand and lead her downstairs.

“Nobody says you got to stay. But right now, you can just trot along and leave me a bit of peace to get some kip while I got the chance. I tell you, it's no laugh sharing with a kid what kicks and turns in her sleep week after week.” Gloria rolled over, pulling the covers up to her head.

“I tell you, you ain't leaving me here!” Dot shouted at the hump in the pink satin eiderdown. “And I ain't leaving you neither!”

“Nobody's leaving nobody,” said Gloria from under the covers. “You dig in and fill your boots while you can. And you don't forget to mind your blooming manners while you're at it.”

So Dot kept her coat on at breakfast time, but Mrs. Hollidaye didn't seem to mind. She was busy stirring the porridge over an open wood range.

“Ah, Dorothy, my dear,” she said. “I hope you've a good country appetite. What do you like best of all for your breakfast?”

Dot had no idea. At Mrs. Parvis's you didn't choose. It was always the same bread and dripping or, when the bread was very old, blackish toast and dripping.

Mrs. Hollidaye said, “Today Miss Lilian is starting off with porridge and honey, aren't you, my dear?”

On the table were a vase of flowers, a square honeycomb oozing liquid honey from its wax holes onto the dish, three jars of jam, each one a different color of dark red, and a jug with a muslin cloth over the top. The cloth was sewn with colored glass beads round the edge.

“That's to stop the flies falling into the milk,” Mrs. Hollidaye explained.

Loopy Lil grinned, and Dot saw she didn't understand much of anything that other people said.

“Miss Lilian has an appetite fit for the good trooper that she is. Lilian, as you can see, was not gifted by our dear Lord with either beauty or brains, but with a willing heart. Weren't you, Lilian?”

Loopy Lil beamed with pleasure but said nothing as she watched Mrs. Hollidaye fill her bowl to the brim.

Dot said, “In London, where I live, we don't have flies.” She was going to explain too how the milk came in glass bottles on a cart pulled by a brown horse, and how sometimes the horse left steaming heaps of brown, oval-shaped droppings in the road which people ran out to scoop up with coal shovels and take for their vegetable plots. But she remembered in time that Gloria had warned her to mind her p's and q's, so she said nothing.

“And Lilian is my right-hand man. I don't know what we'd have done without her in those dark years. Always here to keep up our spirits, weren't you, my dear? She came with the rest of the evacuees, didn't you, Lilian? Will you try a little porridge with some honey, Dorothy, my dear? It's from our own bees. Some people say you can actually taste the clover in it. Or cream? They're not really allowed to make it down at the farm. Agricultural Emergency Committee still hasn't lifted the ban. But this little bit they don't know about. Your mother was among the first batch of evacuees too, like Lilian. But she just couldn't take to it. Village life is rather different from London. Newly wed she was and pretty as a picture.”

Lil swirled her eyes across the table before tucking in.

“And you mustn't mind if I take mine standing up, and with a pinch of salt. Because of my Scottish blood. Then I can keep an eye on the eggs.”

Mrs. Hollidaye was unlike Mrs. Parvis or any of the other people Dot had been left with. Although sometimes Mrs. Parvis talked
about
Dot, she rarely spoke
to
her, except to scold or reprimand, whereas Mrs. Hollidaye went on talking cheerfully to Loopy Lil and to Dot even though neither replied.