The Darkness of Wallis Simpson (15 page)

‘Shut up, Auntie Merc!' she snapped. ‘I'm going to get peeved with you if you crush me with stuff like that.'

In the nights, I lay in my narrow bed and wondered what to do. I thought of the life Nicolina would have with Gregory Dillon in some lonely city. I wished Aviva were alive to snap her castanets in Gregory's face and send him packing.

I contemplated trying to talk to Victor, but Victor had gone very silent since his time in the Secure Room. He sat by his window, smoking and staring at his feet in bedroom slippers. I took him a transistor radio and he held it close to his ear, like you might hold a watch, to hear its tick. He never asked about Nicolina and she never visited him any more.

And on the green lane, there was never a sign of Paul Swinton. The cabbages grew and the sun shone on them and then, one day, they were cut and gone, and the leaves and roots left behind began to smell sour. It became irksome for me to walk that way.

On my last day at Cunningham's, before the removers came to take away what was left of the sewing silks and bindings, a woman came into the shop and sat down at my counter. It was Mrs Swinton, Paul's mother. She wore a choked expression, as though she found it difficult to swallow. She blinked very fast as she talked. She asked me to persuade Nicolina to change her mind and agree to marry Paul. I invited her to sit down on one of the last remaining leather chairs. ‘Nicolina doesn't know her own mind,' I said. ‘She's too young.'

‘No,' said Mrs Swinton. ‘Paul told me she was planning to marry somebody else. Some boy.'

‘She's saying that in the heat of the moment. Because they dance and carry on. But it won't last. They're children.'

Mrs Swinton stared at me sternly, no doubt wondering how I could allow my niece to ‘carry on' with anybody at the age she was. In her day, said this stare, nobody carried on in this village.

She opened her bag and took out a handkerchief and dabbed her eyes, which were brown, like Paul's. ‘He's so unhappy,' she said. ‘I don't know what to do. He's letting the land go to ruin.'

What came into me then was a sudden white-hot rage with Nicolina for breaking the heart of the man who loved her. ‘Who do you think you are?' I wanted to scream at her. ‘Just tell me who.'

‘I'll talk to her,' I told Mrs Swinton. ‘Tell Paul to try to be patient. It may all work out in the end.'

‘I hope so,' said Mrs Swinton. ‘The power of love to wound is a wretched business.'

After Mrs Swinton left, I stood alone in the shop, which had always been sweetly perfumed with mothballs, until it was almost dark. Then I walked home and found Nicolina in bed, weeping.

I tried to stroke her hair, but it was in a wild tangle, as though she'd attempted to pull it out. She screamed at me to leave her alone.

I went downstairs and, out of habit, melted a Mars bar with milk to make a hot drink. I imagined I was making it for Nicolina, but then I decided she wouldn't want a Mars bar drink right now, so I stood by the stove, drinking it myself. I longed for my dead sister to come alive again and walk in my door.

I switched on the wireless and a programme about the Camargue came on: a wild place full of white horses and bulrushes and empty skies, and I thought how lovely it would be to go there, just for a day, and smell the horse smell and the salt wind. I was so caught up in the programme that I didn't hear Nicolina come downstairs. But suddenly I looked up and saw a figure at the kitchen door and jumped right out of my cardigan, imagining it was Aviva's ghost.

Nicolina was wearing old check dungarees, a bit like the ones we used to dress her Ladies in. Her eyes were burning red.

‘Gregory's gone,' she said.

‘Sit down, Nicolina,' I said.

‘I don't want to sit down.'

‘Come on. Sit down and we'll talk about it.'

‘I don't want to talk about it. He's gone. That's all. It's over. I'm only telling you because you need to know.'

She turned round then, as if to go back upstairs, but there she stopped and stared at me and said: ‘There's something else. I'm pregnant. I expect you'll throw me out now. I expect you'll disown me.'

I spent the next weeks and months trying to reassure Nicolina. I told her I would repaint the little room at the back of my bungalow and make it into a nursery. I said a baby would be a novelty in my sheltered life. I said we would build a swing and hang it from the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. I said there was no chance of anybody being disowned. No chance.

Slowly, she came crawling out of her misery shell. She told me she was grateful for what I was doing. And, one Saturday morning in October, she agreed to come with me again to visit Victor.

We followed our old route over the fields. Nicolina made no protest about this. As we drew level with Paul Swinton's land, my heart began to beat unsteadily, wondering if he would be there, wondering if, when he saw Nicolina with her pregnant belly, he would try to do her harm. But there was no sign of him. The field was ploughed and empty soil. Yellow leaves from the hedgerows lay fallen there. It was as if Nicolina had known this is how it would be: just the blind earth, waiting for winter.

We went on, saying nothing, carrying our gifts for Victor, which consisted that day of some slices of cold pork and a bag of pear drops. We'd decided not to tell Victor about the baby. If you told Victor anything in advance of its being, he was unable to grasp it. It was as though the future were an enormous mathematical equation that had no meaning for him. Or perhaps time itself had no meaning for him any more. He hadn't seen Nicolina for months, but when we went into his room and she handed him the pork slices wrapped in greaseproof paper, all he said was: ‘Aviva's hair was dark, but yours was always fair. I prefer the dark.'

She kissed his stubbled cheek and we sat down on the bed. Victor unwrapped the pork slices and began eating them straight away. Between mouthfuls he said: ‘We've got a new resident. Younger than the rest of us. His name's Paul Swinton.'

I looked at Nicolina, but her face was turned away. She was holding on to a hank of her pale hair.

‘I'm all in favour of new residents,' Victor continued, crunching on a sliver of crackling. ‘They cheer me up.'

That night I couldn't sleep. Sorrow makes you weary, but never gives you rest.

I really didn't know how I was going to get through my future: the baby, the dirt and noise of it and having no money to buy toys. All I'd ever wanted was quietness. A life spent measuring elastic. I'd had forty-three years of a life I'd loved and now it was over.

The following day I took a bus to Stratton. A long time had passed since Amy Cunningham had sold the ebony hand to the antique shop there, so I told myself that it would be gone by now. But it wasn't gone. It was standing on a marble washstand, with a price tag of seventeen shillings tied round its thumb. And when I saw it and picked it up, a surge of pure joy made my head feel light.

There was only one problem. I didn't have seventeen shillings. I said to the shop owner: ‘I'll give you what I have and pay the rest in instalments.'

The shop owner had a little chiselled beard and he stroked this tenderly as he regarded me, clutching the hand to my breast. ‘How much have you got?' he asked.

I counted out eight shillings. He looked at this money and said: ‘I'll take eight. It was sold to me as ebony, but it's not, of course. It's mahogany. It's just gone a bit dark with time.'

He offered to wrap the hand in brown paper, but I said this wasn't necessary. I carried it away, just as it was, held tightly in my arms. And when I got home, I brought out the Min cream and a duster and polished it till it shone, as it had always shone in the Cunningham's days. Then I placed the hand by my bed, very near my pillow, and lay down and looked at it.

I asked it to give me courage to go on.

Loves Me, Loves Me Not

Frank Baines arrived in London from the USA on a fine September morning in 1985. He put up at a hotel in Piccadilly and dozed awhile, and then he went down into the lobby and stared out at the red buses and the tides of people, hurrying along in the sunshine. And he felt wary of stepping out and joining them, because they seemed too vivid and noisy, too purposeful, knowing and bright.

Frank remembered England dark. Dark and slow and quiet. Dark railway carriages, on slow trains, where silence was preferred. Dark pubs. Dark little homes with, under the stairs, some deeper, incredible darkness in which a dog or a cat – or sometimes a child – lay sleeping. And that strange, end-of-the-world darkness that was a London wartime dusk . . .

Frank took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He realised now that to have gone on imagining England the way it had been in the 1940s was dumb. Years had come and gone. There had been the Beatles and Mary Quant and pale-pink lipstick. There had been Julie Christie with her shining teeth. Now, there was Mrs Thatcher in all her shades of electric blue, and her yellow hair. But Frank had only ever seen these people in magazines or on the TV, and so it was almost as though he'd never believed they were quite as they seemed, never believed they hadn't been enhanced by some clever, artificial light. Because the England that he'd once known had stayed in his mind through all these decades of change: a monochrome world, hushed and wintery and pure of heart. And it was only now, in 1985, standing in the lobby of the expensive hotel he couldn't really afford, that Frank saw how stubborn and wrong his vision of this country had been.

He stood very still, looking at the day's brightness, but not moving. People swept by him, going in and out of the revolving hotel doors. Some of them stared at him, as if they understood how painful and profound was this hesitation of his. He thought, with affection, that they might be fellow Americans, but he wasn't sure about this. Some might have been Germans.

Frank was an average-sized man with a freckled face. He'd never been handsome, but at seventy-one, his sandy hair was still wiry, his hands strong, his eyes a watery but flirtatious blue. He had a son who'd followed him into the motor trade. He had a wife, Barbara, and a white-painted house in the small town of Sweetwater, Maryland, USA. He was not unhappy. He loved his dog, whose name was Jeff.

But there was a thing that had always nagged at Frank Baines, an important event in his past which had kept on and on, through forty years, visiting his dreams. There had been an explanation for it, but Frank had never quite believed in this explanation, just as he'd never quite believed England was precisely as it appeared to be on his TV screen. He knew this was pig-headed of him, even weird, some might have said. But he just couldn't lay it to rest in his heart.

So now, at seventy-one, he'd decided – without mentioning it to a soul – that the time had come to find this rest. He got on the plane in an optimistic mood, not caring that Barbara was hurt he didn't want her along. He told her there was a War Veterans Reunion in London he wished to attend on his own, in the hopes of meeting up with a few old pals from the US 9th Armoured Division.

Frank had never been on a transatlantic airliner before. But he managed to enjoy the flight, with all the miniature things he was offered – toothpaste, whisky, nuts, socks – and the way the British flight crew pronounced the word ‘sir'. When the plane landed at Heathrow, in a pale and luminous dawn, he wondered whether, at his age, he was too old to hold a stranger in his arms.

Frank walked out at last into Piccadilly, turned right and paced slowly along. The traffic, bunched up and fumy, barely moving but nevertheless travelling recklessly on the wrong side of the road, made him nervous. He suspected that he looked like a convalescent, like someone let out too soon from protective custody, and, in a way, this was how he felt. And he had no idea where he was headed. Part of him wanted not to be here.

When Frank saw the Ritz Hotel across the road, he decided he would cross over towards it, because it was a place he remembered, a place that looked as if it hadn't changed. But he saw immediately that crossing Piccadilly would be difficult. He stopped and considered what it involved, but couldn't reach a definitive answer. He imagined that the traffic lights might slow the traffic but not be certain to halt it, that there would be some code of safe behaviour understood by Londoners, but not by him.

He stood for a while at the crossing's edge, letting a girdle of other pedestrians cluster round him, and when they moved to cross, he moved with them. Despite the shield these others formed, Frank kept turning his head, left and right, left and right, right and left, right and left, to make sure he wasn't going to be run over. His heart was pounding all the while.

He considered going into the Ritz – but for what? He'd eaten what felt like five meals in a row on the plane. At his hotel, he'd gulped down some cold foreign beer. He stood in the shade of the Ritz's arches for a few minutes, gazing into the carpeted lobby, remembering some of the old music that was once played there; then he walked on. This walking on brought him to Green Park, where, though summer was past, a few deckchairs had been set out, amid the yellowing and falling leaves.

He felt grateful to see grass and trees. He sat down in one of the deckchairs with a sigh so deep it almost caused him pain. Not far from where he was, a young couple were throwing a frisbee back and forth, back and forth between each other, and Frank marvelled that each time they caught it and held it and launched it again in a perfect arc. He wanted to applaud them. Precision was a thing he'd always admired. He'd been happy in the US Army for this very reason.

Watching the frisbee, Frank felt himself gradually begin to relax and his heart slowed. With the sun warm on his face, he closed his eyes. And there she was again. As if she lived there, between his eyes and the world. His first and only love, Marie.