Paper Faces (7 page)

It wasn't far. The bent lady with the bad legs was helped out. Mrs. Hollidaye parked beside a stone cross, under which lay a brown dog sleeping. Mrs. Hollidaye adjusted her hat pin, gathered up the flowers, and took Dot's hand firmly in hers. She paused by the brown dog on the ground.

“Why, here's Mr. Honeysett's old Bess,” she said, bending down to stroke the dog's muzzle.

Dot thought how strange it was to be able to recognize a person's dog even when the person wasn't there, and then to know the dog's name. It wasn't like that in London. People didn't even know most other people's names, let alone their dogs'. In fact, Dot wasn't at all sure if the dogs in London had names. Dogs' names wasn't something Mrs. Parvis had yet spoken about.

“Dear old thing. She must be thirteen at least. That's about eighty in dog years.”

Mrs. Hollidaye's dogs were left inside the car, bobbing up at the rear window.

“I'm afraid their noses are a little out of joint,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “Never mind. They'll just have to learn.”

The old dog on the ground yawned and seemed almost to smile at them.

“Up London,” said Dot, “we don't have dogs so much.” She wished they did. It would be good to be greeted as you walked along by smiling creatures lying along the pavements. It would give Mr. Brown a surprise when he went to night school.

In the village shop, Mrs. Hollidaye introduced Dot to the man in a brown overall who stood behind the wooden counter.

“Good morning, Mr. Bob,” she said. “This is a young friend, Dorothy. She's come to visit us from London.”

“From London!” said the grocer. He made it seem important and special. “Well, just fancy that! She must have seen a few sights in her time.”

A lady in a black straw hat, who was being weighed out a pound of grits by the grocer's assistant, overheard.

“A tiny child from London!” she repeated. “Why, the poor creature! Oh, you little angel!” She darted over to embrace Dot so tightly that she couldn't breathe.

Dot had never been hugged by a stranger. Mrs. Parvis gave no sign of being interested in her, let alone liking her enough to want to touch her.

“What
can
we give the little child?” said the lady. “Just think what she must have been through! If only there were a little chocolate bar we could give her. Do you remember those peppermint creams we used to be able to get? Mr. Bob, you must have
something
under the counter.”

“What Dorothy needs is a breath or two of good fresh air,” said Mrs. Hollidaye sharply. “And that's exactly what we can give her. To put a few roses back in her cheeks.”

“The little lamb,” said the lady.

After the shop, Mrs. Hollidaye took Dot down a shady footpath, moist with ferns and ivy, heavy hedge tops meeting overhead. At the end, in sunlight, was a large building with high windows and a big main door.

Mrs. Hollidaye put her flowers in a tin bucket of water in the porch, where other bunches of flowers were being collected.

“Is it a hospital?” said Dot. “We had the flowers where my baby was.”

“St. Michael and All Angels, dear,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “It's our parish church. Though I daresay, long, long ago, sick people probably came here to seek a cure.”

Dot liked the sound of the name, Michael. She wished that Baby had been a Michael.

“At Baby's hospital, you could buy a bunch from the flower lady near the gate. People took them in for them other people what was sick but we didn't never have no dosh.”

Dot wanted to point out that Baby had died anyway, but remembered Gloria's warning to mind her p's and q's.

Inside St. Michael and All Angels, women were arranging the flowers in golden tubs. There were tall gleaming candlesticks, a glittering cross so bright it seemed to burn, and an enormous golden eagle with hooked beak and shiny dangerous eye.

“Gold!” whispered Dot. “I ain't never seen so much real gold before! Bet they ain't got this much even up the palace.”

“No, not gold. Brass. But it's all awfully nicely polished, isn't it? Mrs. Buss and Mrs. Cheese, that's our two brass ladies, come in and see to it on Fridays. Provided they can get hold of the Brasso. We'll say a little prayer for your baby, shall we?”

Dot didn't know. So she grinned vaguely in a way that could have meant yes or could have meant no. “He died and all,” she said.

“Yes, my dear, that's why I thought it would be nice to say a little prayer, to remind our dear Lord to take care of him.”

“Them nurses took care of him,” said Dot.

But perhaps they hadn't cared enough? Perhaps our dear Lord would have a better chance.

“Anyway, I think it was a bit our fault, like. See, we used to visit him every day. But then there was that day she gave me the brooch what she said I wasn't never to forget. And we didn't go to see him. That's what done for him.”

“Nonsense, my dear, that's just superstition. He died of pneumonia. There was nothing anyone could have done.”

Mrs. Hollidaye took off her leather gloves and laid them neatly on top of her handbag on the pew beside her, straightened her hat, and unhooked a cushion that hung from a brass hook beneath the shelf. The cushion was embroidered with a pattern of golden keys. She knelt down on the cushion, placed her ungloved hands together, closed her eyes, and appeared to be either thinking or sleeping in an upright kneeling position.

Dot decided she had better copy Mrs. Hollidaye. She found a similar cushion hanging in front of her place, sewn in neat wool stitches. Hers had an embroidered picture of a lamb standing in a field of flowers with yellow light sprouting out from around its head. The lamb had a nice expression rather like a kitten's. Dot didn't want to hurt its face, so she placed her knees carefully to one side of the lamb so that they pressed into the sewn field of flowers on the edge.

Dot closed her eyes. She could see nothing except a vivid scarlet blur, the color of a London bus. So she thought about Baby, not sad thoughts but ordinary ones. She remembered him propped up by the nurses, waving his little hands about. That was before he became too ill even to be propped. She remembered one time when a nurse had beckoned Dot into a side room, pulled over a metal chair for Dot, and brought the bundle to her wrapped in a bulky scratchy blanket. She had laid him in Dot's arms and let her hold him on her own.

Even though he was small, he'd felt heavy. He had seemed to be sleeping, yet even in sleep his closed eyelids quivered and his tiny fists were half clenched. When he woke, he gazed up at Dot almost as though he knew her, yet she couldn't be sure if he really saw her, for his eyes had a distant faraway look like a sailor in the navy staring across the Pacific seas.

After that, the other nurses always made her wait in the corridor. Perhaps they'd known all along what was going to happen to him. Perhaps they hadn't wanted her to see.

Dot opened her eyes to glance sideways at Mrs. Hollidaye but she was still in the same position, kneeling, so Dot lowered her lids, and though she hadn't meant to, she found herself thinking about Gloria, still asleep in that high bed with the soft eiderdown. Poor Gloria, who hadn't had breakfast. No cooked egg inside its shell and served on a plate patterned with a picture of cauliflowers, no rich fruit lying in sweet juice, no butter, no bread, no yellow cream. And no coming to this gold place to see the green and multicolored flowers.

When Mrs. Hollidaye had finished her praying and they were leaving the church, she stopped at the back and showed Dot a book with writing in it.

“It's very sad when a baby dies,” she said. “But at least when they are so very young, they have no chance to sin and bring more wickedness into this world. Well, that's how I comforted myself. We could put your little brother's name in here. It's our parish record of who is specially in need of prayer each week. The sick and the departed. What was his name?”

Dot found to her surprise that, just as she often could no longer remember what her father's face looked like, now she couldn't remember Baby's name. How could it go so quickly?

She said, “He didn't have no name. He did have something official because the nurses, like, said he had to. That's the law, they said. But me mum weren't there, so them nurses had to invent it themselves. Anything they could think of.”

“I expect they wanted to make sure he was baptized,” said Mrs. Hollidaye.

“Me and Gloria, we always called him Baby.”

“‘Baby.' That's lovely.” Mrs. Hollidaye handed the pen to Dot. “Would you like to write it?” She pointed to the place on the open page of the book. Dot thought it was the loveliest book she'd ever seen. Around the edge of each page was a pattern of angels' heads with blue wings. St. Michael and All Angels. It would have been nice if Baby's name could have been Michael.

Dot shook her head. “Can't do writing,” she said.

“Very well. I'll do it.”

“Can you write his name ‘Michael' as well as ‘Baby'? I just remembered. I think that was his name what the nurses give him.” She knew that writing his name was never going to get him back, even if they wrote it hundreds of times in the most beautiful book in the world. But she liked Mrs. Hollidaye. She didn't want to upset her.

“So me and Gloria, we won't be seeing Baby no more,” Dot said firmly.

“That's right, my dear. He's in heaven now. Quite safe for always. Better than being sad and sick.”

“He weren't sad,” Dot said, though she liked the sound of “quite safe for always.” She'd have liked that for herself and Gloria. It sounded better than burning in those fires of hell that Mrs. Parvis once mentioned.

“We had better be on our way to pick up Mrs. Squirrel now.”

On their way across the churchyard, Mrs. Hollidaye pointed down to something on the ground. “That's my baby, there,” she said. “Oh, yes, I had some fine sons. But this one was my little girl. She lived six hours. Such a fleeting while.”

Dot looked down and saw only the tussocky grass and a flat square stone.

“There's writing on it,” she said, touching the letters carved in the stone. “What's it say?”

“Rose Davenport Hollidaye. Underneath it says when she was born. And then, ‘Gone to be with Jesus.'”

“Rose,” said Dot. “That's nice. Like a flower. Gloria give me my name like one of them stars. My mum lives for the films. Dorothy Lamour. She been writ up in all the cinemas. But I ain't writ up nowhere. It's good having it writ up like that. Then you can't forget. Our Baby ain't got one of these. Wish he had, though. See, where we live up London, there ain't no grass or garden places you could do this.”

“They have graveyards in London, too. People have to be buried in consecrated ground.”

“Don't think so,” said Dot. “Not round about where we live.”

She knew where London people were buried. Under rubble in bomb sites, and they didn't get any nice flat stone with writing, either. They just got a wooden notice saying L
OOTERS
W
ILL
B
E
S
HOT
.

10

The End of an Afternoon

At lunchtime Dot's ears began hurting inside her head as though they were filling with hot fire. She found she still couldn't eat. Mrs. Hollidaye didn't force her. Dot wondered about the apple tree growing from a pip. Perhaps it was the branches that were spiking inside her ears, grating against the back of her throat?

Afterward, while Loopy Lil cleared the meal, Mrs. Hollidaye put on her galoshes and took Dot round the walled kitchen garden.

“To show you something, my dear, very special. And well worth the waiting for. Till you're really hungry.”

She bent down to lift a domed glass lid lying on a heap of earth. Green leaves and curling tendrils were escaping under the edge of the dome like curly hair from beneath a helmet.

“Take a peek under the cloche, my dear. And you'll see my babies.”

Snuggled in the mass of leaves lay five growing objects, round and green, streaked with yellow. And there was that strange smell again that Dot recognized from the darkness of the night before, of things dying and rotting and growing again. Now, in daylight, she knew it was not something to fear.

“There's my little dears,” said Mrs. Hollidaye, speaking to the fruits. “Melons. And coming along nicely. Just like children. All they need is a warm corner, a nice bit of sun, careful feeding—that's splendid pig manure we put in—and plenty of interest. Then they grow and grow. Ooh, they
are
going to be such a treat! So long as the frost doesn't get to them first. Or the mice. If the frost comes early, I'll just have to bring them into the airing cupboard, won't I?”

Dot wondered what melon tasted like. It looked so green and hard.

“Sweet and juicy when they're at perfection. The nearest taste to heaven, I'd say,” said Mrs. Hollidaye. “Though perhaps not quite as good as the banana.”

Dot wished she'd never made that claim about eating bananas.

“D'you know, the first time I tasted melon wasn't till I was well over twenty? A long time ago. I went on a tour with my sisters to see the frescoes in Florence. At our
pensione,
they gave us melon every day! A whole one each with the top cut off. And what a lovely time that was. With all those beautiful paintings to see. Italy's a really wonderful country. I wonder if I'll ever get a chance to go back.”

“Italy!” said Dot with surprise. “But them's enemy!”

Perhaps down here in the countryside the people hadn't ever known who the enemy was. Perhaps they didn't know that several of the wickedest men had escaped from Germany and were even now pretending to be other people.

Yet in spite of her unusual ideas about Germans and other foreigners, Dot felt that Mrs. Hollidaye was a reliable person. You could talk to her knowing she wouldn't twist what you said like Mrs. Parvis, or fail to understand what you meant like Gloria.