Paper Faces (8 page)

Dot said, “There was a raid in the night, weren't there?”

“A
raid
? Last night?”

“I heard it. Exploding and that.”

“Oh, that! Why, you poor dear!”

“I woke up. There weren't no siren. But I heard explodings and that. I knew it'd all started up again.”

“No, it was the men clearing the marshes. To make it safe. Though goodness knows why they think they have to do it so early in the morning. Oh, dear, I should've warned you, so you wouldn't be alarmed.”

“I weren't afraid.”

“Sound does travel a long way, doesn't it? It must be seven miles off. It's these unexploded shells, quite a number littered about, and we haven't been allowed down there for so long, it's all barbed wire, I believe. There used to be such wonderful blackberries! Maybe they'll finish soon and we can go blackberrying. It
would
be fun, wouldn't it, with a picnic?”

There were so many new things, blackberrying, tasting melon, a picnic, all waiting to be done. And Baby was never going to get to know about any of them.

“The planes used to drop them off over the marshes.”

Dot realized she meant the bombs, not the blackberries.

“Sometimes on their way in to London. Sometimes on their way back. People said it was because they weren't any good at finding their way. That's rubbish, of course. They had maps. And the Germans have always been excellent at map reading. No, I believe those nice young men up there did it on purpose. They didn't
want
to go and kill a lot of people they didn't know. So they looked for somewhere else. Like our marshes. Though I do believe a cow once was maimed. Anyway, the farmer claimed the war damage. And a woman died. Though that wasn't a bomb. Drowned herself in a dike, poor soul. Unhinged in her mind when her fiancé went down with the
Wessex,
poor dear.”

When Mrs. Hollidaye said that she and Miss Lilian had to walk over to fetch the milk from the home farm, she suggested that Dot should stay and rest by the fire. But Dot said she wanted to come too.

“My dear, you are looking too tired. We simply can't use the Ford again today. Because if Mr. Bodger found out, that's our warden, he'd be so upset. I gave his wife some mulberries last autumn and I know he trusts us with the petrol allowance, and anyway this beastly rationing should be over soon, so I know I shouldn't complain when some people have had it much worse up in town. My dear! I've an idea! We'll harness the goat. Wouldn't that be splendid, Miss Lilian? Then, Dorothy, you can ride in the cart.”

When the goat was made ready, Loopy Lil helped Dot up onto the little red-painted cart with the empty milk cans clattering on the wooden seat beside her, while Mrs. Hollidaye took the leading rein at the front.

There were pictures in one of Gloria's magazines of the decorated carriage pulled by plumed horses that Her Majesty had traveled in before she became Her Majesty the Queen, when she was still just a Lady, on her way to be married. Dot thought how it had probably felt like this, jolting yet stately.

Then she thought of the blackberrying and the melon, of the feathered hens that laid eggs, and of the church eagle of glinting metal that glowed like gold. She was finding out many new things that Baby would never know of.

“Would you say,” Dot asked, “it's more like London, or more like round about here?”

“Where, dear?”

“At heaven.”

The goat stopped abruptly and tried to chew at the hem of Mrs. Hollidaye's brown jacket.

“You know, my dear, the gospels are not at
all
clear on that point. Personally I would like to believe it to be peacefully verdant. As it says so clearly in the Psalms. Walking in green pastures. Beside still waters.”

Dot did not know what Psalms were, but she felt she was beginning to understand about quiet and gentle greenness because she saw it all around her. This seemed to be a place where, despite noises in the night and a few dangers like trees that grew inside you and made your throat choke, a person might feel safe for always.

The goat suddenly trotted eagerly forward and Mrs. Hollidaye had to run to keep hold of the leather strap. They passed down the lane between high hedges.

Dot said, “That's all right, then. I'm glad he's at a nice place like this.”

Better than burning in Mrs. Parvis's hot red fires of hell.

The goat stopped again and leaned over to take a bite of springy grass beside the road.

“I think
he's
gone there too,” said Dot.

“What, dear?”

“Him. My old man.”

“Derek? Not to heaven, dear!”

So he
had
gone to that other place where, so Mrs. Parvis said, red-and-orange fires burned day and night so hot that glass and brick and even solid rock melted to liquid.

“Gloria and me went to see him once,” said Dot. “I don't reckon he's there no more. She don't talk about it. We had to go on the Green Line bus.”

It had been a long ride to an enclosure full of low single-storied huts of corrugated iron with cinder paths around, and all set in a large flat field of sparse graying grass.

“It was military, Gloria said. She was blinking right. There was soldiers everywhere. They was at the gate, so we couldn't go in. Gloria had to show this special letter what she had about him before they'd even look at us.”

Dot wasn't used to talking so much about her father. Usually Gloria told her to shut her trap. Mrs. Hollidaye didn't.

Some of the men inside the hut had peered out like timid ghosts. She hadn't seen what her father looked like. He hadn't come out and she hadn't been allowed in. Gloria had gone in and a person at a window had waved once, but Dot hadn't known if it was him. She'd sat on the stubby grass, cut short as the back of a soldier's head.

Afterward, Gloria had said, “That grass were clipped flat so there weren't nowhere for a running man to hide.”

They reached the big white gate at the entrance to Mrs. Hollidaye's driveway. The goat twisted its neck to make a grab at a fallen twig on the ground.

“No one never comes back from there, do they?” Dot said.

“From heaven, dear? No, I'm afraid you won't see the baby again. Not till you reach heaven. But you never know, maybe your mother will be able to have another one later.”

Dot hadn't meant where Baby was. She knew she'd never see
him
again. She meant that place where her father was, wherever that was. She'd begun to guess he was probably dead too and they'd forgotten to tell her, just like nobody told her straight when Baby died.

She was glad. She didn't ever want to have to see him.

Gloria came down, bright and freshly lipsticked, in time for tea. They were in the glass-roofed, glass-sided room that Mrs. Hollidaye called the conservatory. The conservatory was warm, light, and moist, filled with growing plants in pots. Through the glass and the vines overhead could be seen the blue sky and the white clouds, so that it was like being both indoors and out at the same time.

At teatime, there was honey, sour-milk scones, and plum jam where you had to mind out for the stones. The bread and butter was served not in huge chunks like at elevenses, but on a pretty dish with a golden edge, in thinly cut slices.

Gloria was hungry.

“I'm telling you,” she said, “when I heard that big clock in the hall striking the five, you could've knocked me down with a feather! Seems like I been dead to the world for weeks! I'm telling you, Mrs. Hollidaye, you'll get plenty of work out of me tomorrow. Anything you need doing around the place. And that's a promise. Come on, pet, put that where the flies won't get it.” She urged Dot to drink a glassful of fresh milk. “Does you good, that does. Oh, well, please yourself, ducky. Me and Lil, at least we know how to trough up good and proper, don't we, Lil?”

Loopy Lil, with plum jam already streaked like blood round her mouth, grinned cheerfully and went on tucking in.

By the end of that first day, Dot knew, despite her throbbing head, her painful neck and throat, that this was a good place. She didn't mind how long they had to stay. She wouldn't even mind if Gloria went away and left her.

Loopy Lil began piling the tea things onto the tray to carry back to the kitchen, and Mrs. Hollidaye suggested Gloria should go and help bring in the vegetables from the shed for supper, when an insistent bell began ringing out somewhere within the house. It clanged urgently, like a fire engine dashing toward a disaster, like the ambulance thundering along behind to retrieve the bodies. It would not stop.

“Oh, bother!” said Mrs. Hollidaye, calmly putting another teacup on the tray, not at all upset by the persistent clamor. “Telephone. It's Nurse River, I'll be bound, someone needs to be driven somewhere. And I did so want to dig up a few artichokes this evening. Jerusalem artichokes, they make a lovely cream soup so long as you don't mind the flatulence.”

The telephone was in her hall.

Mrs. Hollidaye got up and went to it. Then Gloria was called. After that, everything changed and everything that had seemed to Dot to be all right disappeared. Just when she thought they'd got away from it, change and disruption had caught up with them again.

Dot sat rigid and shivering on the wicker armchair in the conservatory. Loopy Lil went on piling more and more things haphazardly onto the tray.

11

In the Henhouse

Dot could hear them just inside the house. Mrs. Hollidaye was doing most of the speaking.

“Yes, my dear, I do understand how it must seem hard to you.”

Dot knew it was something to do with her father.

“But you've got to try. For yourself. For the child. For him, too.”

And Dot knew that Gloria was crying.

“My dear, he's going to need you more than ever before.”

Dot could hear Gloria saying she wouldn't and she couldn't.

Then Mrs. Hollidaye said, “My dear girl, you have to start making a home. And you know that you will always be welcome back here on another occasion. Now, while you go and dry those eyes, I'll look up the trains.”

Dot in the conservatory watched as Loopy Lil slowly tried to pick up the unsteady tray of china. Dot knew what was going to happen.

The wobbling teacup on the top fell first, the rest followed. Cups, saucers, teapot, milk jug with its little muslin cloth, plates, and splattered jam. The crashing seemed to go on forever as tiny broken fragments bounced with a dainty tinkle across the brick floor.

Loopy Lil stared round at the destruction with a look of hopelessness as though she did not understand how it had happened. Dot knew that Mrs. Hollidaye would come to comfort her, to reassure her that it wasn't her fault. Poor Loopy Lil, she had a screw loose. She'd only been trying to help.

But Dot couldn't do anything for her because she had to escape. She must hide before Gloria found her. She darted for the open doors and down the stone steps to the garden. She ran round the outside of the house, barging past bushes and shrubs. She found her way to the kitchen. She wanted to go along the side passage and up the back stairs to the bedroom with the toys where she could safely hide.

But the house was too big and she lost her way. Instead, she was in a dark lobby full of musty boots. She ran out again through a side entrance. She recognized where she was. This was the yard where Mrs. Hollidaye fed the hens, throwing down the corn for them to peck up.

She could hear Gloria behind calling for her.

She ran back across the yard to the henhouse, through the netting gate, across the muddy enclosure, scattering hens at each step. Then crouching low, she squeezed herself through the hens' low archway and into the dark warm gloom of their hut. More hens sat clucking on their roosts.

The hens were all right. They didn't have to go anywhere. This was their home and they could stay here always.

“Going time, Dot,” said Gloria outside. “Come on out.”

Dot kept still and quiet, head down and hunched like a bird sleeping, hoping Gloria wouldn't know she was in there. But the fowl were irritated by this invasion of their hut and their clucking gave her away.

“Come on, pet. We know you're in there.”

“We only just got here!” Dot yelled, not coming out. “Where we going, anyway?”

“Home now, duckypet. Got to catch the train. Last one leaves at twenty past.”

“No!” said Dot, though she knew she'd have to do what Gloria wanted, go where Gloria went.

“Not coming!” she shouted in the dusty gloom. “Going to stay here.” And when she heard Gloria outside rattling the henhouse door, she screamed it again and again till Gloria managed to get the latch undone and came in and dragged her yelling through the droppings and feathers and washed her face under the water pump and dried it on her hanky.

Mrs. Hollidaye was there too, and more gently than Gloria, asked, “Were there any more eggs in there, did you notice? I collected earlier. But sometimes there's an extra egg or two. Come, we must choose some for you to take back with you. The speckledy brown ones are best.”

Mrs. Hollidaye found Gloria a blue suitcase with proper metal clips to pack their things in. “It's a spare. I shan't be going anywhere for a while. You can bring it back next time you come. Then you can use your paper carriers for these, can't you?”

She gave Gloria two jars of jam, and six fresh eggs packed in a special cardboard box with separate soft spaces to keep each one safe. She gave Gloria money so that she wouldn't have to pretend Dot was a babe in arms.

On the train ride home, the compartment no longer seemed like a compact traveling home. It was just a train with lumpy seats and smuts. Dot sat hunched in her corner, Gloria in another, each far from the other.

Eventually Dot asked, “Was he a brave man?”