Paper Faces (6 page)

“Or if you don't care for the porridge, there's some of these new Post Toasties. Such a nice young American brought them for us. Though I'm afraid Miss Lilian and I didn't think a lot of them, did we, Lilian? But do try them if you'd like. It says they don't need any cooking, but I rather wonder. Perhaps with a little fruit?”

She passed a dish of scarlet berries in scarlet juice to Dot.

“Only bottled. The fresh ones are long since gone. But they're from the garden and they really are rather good. And then when all the others went,” Mrs. Hollidaye carried on talking as she removed Loopy Lil's empty porridge bowl and replaced it with a plate piled high with toast, “Lilian was the only one who stayed. You were from the institution, weren't you? For people of diminished responsibility. They tried to put some of them into the Land Army, but Lilian wasn't quite up to it, were you, my dear?”

Dot wondered what an institution was. She said, “Up London, we have the national orange juice on a teaspoon.” She didn't mention the cod-liver oil.

“So how would you like your egg, my dear? Boiled, poached, scrambled? Lilian's having hers soft-boiled today, aren't you, dear? The hens have been doing frightfully well. I rather think they must have known you were coming. I don't suppose you have many eggs.”

Loopy Lil's cooked egg sat, still in its shell, in a small china cup with a spoon lying beside it. Dot had not seen an egg served up like that before. “Up London,” she said, “we get eggs all the time. But we do them different.”

Dot wasn't allowed into Mrs. Parvis's kitchen except at the regulation mealtimes and she wasn't sure about how food was prepared, but she was pretty certain that when Mrs. Parvis cooked what was called a nice egg dish, it was made from an orange-colored powder spooned up from a deep cylindrical tin. Dot wondered how Loopy Lil was going to eat this kind of egg.

“Hit him!” Loopy Lil cried suddenly, attacking the brown rounded shell with the tiny spoon.

Dot was surprised. It was the first time she'd heard her speak.

“She used to pretend her egg was Adolf Hitler,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “Specially when we had those dreadful incendiary bombs dropping on the roof. It made Lilian feel a lot better in the morning, didn't it, dear?”

“Hit him, hit him!” Loopy Lil repeated till the top of her egg was open and yellow yolk pouring down the side.

Dot was pleased. Next time she had a nightmare, she would try imagining smashing, like eggs, the faceless looters and killers of her dreams.

“Maybe you could manage a little bit of bread and butter?” said Mrs. Hollidaye, cutting and spreading a small slice. But Dot couldn't.

“Lovely fresh butter from the herd down at Mrs. Elphinstone's. We'll walk over later, shall we, and catch a look at the milking? Can you taste the clover in it? And a nice little bit of our plum jam? We managed to get some sugar last month, didn't we, Lilian?”

Loopy Lil smiled and nodded.

Loopy Lil, even if she was mental, seemed a good safe person to be near.

“Though do watch out for the stones, won't you, my dear? They're rather dangerous if swallowed. And you don't want a plum tree growing up inside you, do you now?”

There were some things about the country that were difficult to get used to. Flies in the milk, clover in the butter, stones in the jam. Why should people in the country have these in their food?

Perhaps it was for the same reason that Mrs. Parvis, so Gloria claimed, put crushed-up eggshells into powdered egg so that the lodgers would think they were eating something which they weren't.

“Never mind, my dear,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “It takes time to build a country appetite. But we'll see if we can't lend you one before too long.”

Gloria had told Dot she was to fill her boots. Here was all this food on the table and Dot unable to swallow it down. She didn't want Gloria to be angry.

“Up London, where I live,” she said, “we have bananas.”

“Why, do you now. Fancy that!” said Mrs. Hollidaye.

Dot didn't know what a banana tasted like, though she'd heard Mrs. Parvis talk about them often enough.

“D'you know, my dear,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “Down here we haven't set eyes on a banana for years! I must say I've almost forgotten what they look like. Though my son, that's my eldest, in the Royal Navy, wrote that he has them in the Pacific.”

“Up London,” said Dot, “we have them anytime. Ain't even on ration coupons. Bananas is so cheap, Mrs. Parvis says, they're giving them away with a pound of tea.”

“Why, isn't that splendid of them!” said Mrs. Hollidaye.

8

Country Appetites

Halfway through the morning, once the hens had been fed, and the tomatoes in the greenhouse watered, it was time for another meal. Mrs. Hollidaye called it elevenses.

Dot sat in her coat at the kitchen table and watched Mrs. Hollidaye heaping thick slices of bread spread with yellow butter onto a plate while Loopy Lil set out pretty teacups patterned with roses onto matching saucers.

“You get ever such a lot of meals out here, don't you?” Dot said. “Up London, we don't do this one.” All things were done differently in London. “Up London,” Dot explained, “we waits for our high tea what Mrs. Parvis makes till evening when the real people get back from their work. And Mr. Brown has to have his straight off, no hanging about, because he wants to be an engineer, so he goes to night school. Mrs. Parvis says he'll never make it. I know he will. He's ever so nice.”

On the dresser, Dot noticed a framed picture of a man in uniform. It was a black-and-white photograph that had been partially tinted with pastel colors so that though the young man's face was paper-white, his eyes were sky-blue and his medal ribbons bright as a rainbow.

Dot said, “Your husband was ever so brave, weren't he? That's what Gloria says. That him, up there?”

“Do you know, it almost could be. Actually, that's another of my sons. In the merchant navy. Though people do say he's very like my husband.”

“Has he had it too, your boy there?”

“Not as far as I know, my dear. Though I must admit, we'll be glad when it's all over in the Far East and they can come back safe and sound.”

So it wasn't over yet. Dot had been right all along and Mrs. Parvis wrong when she'd insisted that it was all over bar the shouting.

“Is he brave, too?”

“Well, there's so many different and wonderful ways of being brave, aren't there, my dear? That's the admirable way our good Lord arranged it, didn't he? So that everybody can have a stab at it. Even Miss Lilian has shown great fortitude in her own way.”

Loopy Lil was arranging and rearranging the teacups on their matching saucers.

“And your mother, too, is a most courageous young woman, isn't she? The way she's carried on.”

Dot wished she knew what it felt like to be brave, and wondered if she'd ever get the chance to find out. She wondered if eating when you didn't feel hungry was brave. She wondered if her father was brave. Was he a secret hero and was that why Gloria never talked about him?

She said, “I think maybe my old man had a stab at it.”

The pale young sailor in the silver frame stared serenely out across the wide spaces of the kitchen with faraway forget-me-not eyes. Dot tried to remember her father's face from the brownish photo that Gloria kept in her handbag. She wished she could recall it more clearly. Even when she had the picture in front of her, she seemed only to see the flat bloodless paper. She wished her father was like this young man who sat in his own shrine on a country kitchen dresser among used OHMS envelopes and sprigs of dried white heather.

She said, “We don't ever talk about my old man. But I think he liked bananas.”

A group of men and women came in to share the meal called elevenses. They had muddy boots, which they kicked against the kitchen step, and muddy hands, which they washed at the sink. One wore a sack round his shoulders like a shawl; another had it round her waist as an apron. They didn't sit but stood around the table. The china teacups seemed too dainty in their dark working hands. There wasn't much talking between them, apart from pleases and thank-yous when Dot heard how two of them spoke awkwardly with unfluent foreign accents.

The huge kitchen suddenly seemed too crowded. Dot felt the room lurch away, while the milk jug with its bead-decorated muslin cover, the flypaper dangling from the lamp above the table, the rosy faces of the gathered people, flew round through the air. Dot knew from their voices that those two young men who'd been working in the fields must be prisoners.

“You all right, my dear?” she heard Mrs. Hollidaye say.

Them's Germans, Dot wanted to say, but the words wouldn't come out.

“She's too hot, poor little scrap, in that tight coat,” said the woman in the sacking apron. Loopy Lil clucked anxiously around like a pigeon.

Mrs. Hollidaye led Dot outside. “Of course it's not your coat. You keep your coat on if you want to. It's eating. That's the trouble. We've got all the wrong food for you, and you're just not used to it, are you? But I daresay you like apples. Come along, we'll go and find the very nicest apple there is for you.”

“I ain't never met a German before,” Dot said. “Not close up.”

“Poor boys. Little more than children when they first arrived. They're just yearning to be home.”

This wasn't how Mrs. Parvis used to speak of the enemy.

“One of them plays the piano most beautifully. They used to let him up here to practice from time to time.”

The apple room was dim and scented with a mysterious sweetness like the breakfast honey. Apples of many shades of yellow and red, brown and gold, were laid out on yellowed newspaper, line after line, row upon row, on broad-slatted shelves.

“Don't they give such a lovely smell!” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “They seem to get better and better.” She picked over the nearest of the apples, taking out three that had small brown marks.

“Those'll do nicely for the compost,” she said, then chose a dark gold one for Dot. “We call this one a russet. Have a try. They do seem to be lasting awfully well. Even better this year than last, though maybe that's just an illusion. For I heard
such
an interesting talk on the wireless. It seems we're all losing our taste for sweet things because of the shortages. What do you think?”

Dot bit through the taut and burnished skin of the apple into juicy flesh. The crunchy texture was like a raw potato she had once stolen from Mrs. Parvis's vegetable rack. But the taste was refreshingly sweet. She wondered if this might be anything like the bananas that Mrs. Parvis said were so exceptional.

But when she swallowed, the first mouthful of crisp apple hurt her throat so much, she almost cried.

Mrs. Hollidaye had already warned about plum trees growing inside you. Could the same thing happen with a single bite from an apple?

9

St. Michael and All Angels

Mrs. Hollidaye said, “Would you like to come with me, Dorothy, to help with the flowers?”

What did she mean by that? Flowers didn't need helping. They just were.

“For a little run in the Ford.”

“Dunno about that,” said Dot. She was used enough to being left behind while Gloria went off, but it seemed more dangerous to do it the other way around, for her to leave Gloria behind.

“Sleep,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “That's the best thing for her.”

Dot clutched at the cuffs of her coat, but even the familiar softness of worn velvet was not reassuring.

“Dunno if I'm allowed. See, we don't go about in cars, not up London.”

Then, in case she had given an impression that London was not as good as here, she added, “But there's plenty of cabs.” She couldn't remember having actually been in one, and anyway they rarely came past Mrs. Parvis's lodgings. “Buses too. We have lots of buses up London. And Shanks's pony.”

“It isn't far, just down to the village and back. I have to take Mrs. Squirrel. For her legs. Nurse Willow, that's our district nurse, lovely lady, member of our Mother's Union, holds surgery in the village hall. We have a special petrol allowance for that. It's not unlike a Red Cross run. So I always take my flowers for the altar at the same time. And pick up the groceries. Saves Mr. Bob making the trip with the cart.”

“No, I ain't leaving her behind all on her own,” said Dot. “You got to understand, if anything went wrong, then my name's mud.”

“We shan't be gone long. And Miss Lilian will be here to take her a nice little something on a tray if she wakes before we're back. Won't you, Lilian?”

Loopy Lil clattered at the sink in the back scullery.

“Oh, heck. Might as well.”

“Splendid, my dear. Then you hop in the back to keep the dogs company for me.”

It was more exciting and comfortable to travel in the back of a Ford car than on any part of a bus, even top front. Dot sat with the yapping dogs on either side licking at her hands. The basket of flowers was on the shelf behind them. Not made of colored crepe paper, faded, dusty, and crinkled on bent-wire stems like Mrs. Parvis had in her parlor. But alive and dark and greenish, fragile and fragrant, dew on the petals and the crushed stems dripping with sap.

“Those long ones have a lovely scent, don't they?” said Mrs. Hollidaye over her shoulder. “I'm not sure if the purple ones are my favorite, or the more blue color.”

She drove to a cottage where she helped an old woman bent in half like a crooked stump into the front passenger seat.

Dot tried to imagine that the two women in front were her footmen and she was one of the royal princesses, preferably Margaret because she wouldn't have to be queen, which would be quite a responsibility if you thought about it, going for a drive in a carriage with her regal dogs and her regal flowers. Then she realized she didn't have to pretend to be anyone going anywhere when she already was herself going for a real drive in a car with two dogs beside her and fresh flowers behind.