Anticipation (16 page)

Sarah is painting her legs with Bisto when Eddie brings Will Biggs home. Despite stringent precautions, she slipped a nail through her last pair of stockings almost two years ago, in the spring of ’42. Her sister May, on hand to draw in Sarah’s seams, drops the eyebrow pencil at the first sound of Eddie’s voice and hurtles off downstairs.

When Sarah makes her entrance — seamless but at least
even-legged
— some minutes later, her mother is already wiping her eyes and brewing up the last of the week’s tea ration, and the moment seems to have gone.

Sarah stands in the kitchen doorway and says, ‘Hello, Eddie’ quite calmly, as if he’s just been out for a packet of Woodbines.
Then he gets up and gives her a hug, and it’s all there, three years of fear and loss on his skin, and he’s warm and whole, just like the old Eddie.

When he sits down again, though, she can see that he’s not. It’s as if he’s been picked up and given a shake, and all the old bits are still there, but they’ve come down in different places. He’s baked stiff and hard-edged as leather under all that foreign sun, and the only time he looks really at ease is when he turns to his friend, who is shaky and gauche and doesn’t say much, and who you might suspect wasn’t all there if you didn’t know what he’d been through.

Corporal Biggs is tall and dark, but not particularly handsome. Sarah feels sorry for him, because he’s poorer than them, and he hasn’t had much of a welcome home, so she doesn’t mind having to go out with him too much, even though he’s only an infantryman and grew up in Haldwyn Street.

Besides, it’s the first time she’s been invited out with Eddie and Kate, and May is dark with envy. Sarah feels, despite her gravy browning and odd shade of melted-together lipstick ends, like a sophisticated woman.

They go to a supper dance at the Berkeley on Saturday night, riding the Northern Line up through stations almost empty except for passengers getting on and off the train. Some stops still have bunk beds on the platform, much to Eddie’s and Will’s amusement. But the Tube sleepers have gone back to their homes, and despite the vast improvement in smell, it feels a bit lonely down here without them, clinical and overly bright, like school corridors outside term-time.

They sit opposite each other, Kate and Eddie, Sarah and Will, and swap funny stories, over the rattle of the train, about being under fire. Kate is wearing a short red dress, and Sarah watches Will Biggs looking at her in the way men do, Kate with her Betty Grable legs tucked between Eddie’s knees and the unmistakeable sheen of real silk on her thighs. Sarah doesn’t mind.

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when things change. Perhaps it’s to do with Will’s transfer up to Pinewood. The thought of the
newly promoted Sergeant Biggs sauntering in through the studio gates, which in Sarah’s head are tall and golden as those of heaven. Or perhaps it’s when Will takes out his camera.

She can see, as he makes the three of them bunch up on one side of their booth, that he’s good at this. This glamorous machine, its mysterious workings. She can see him outside the Empire in Leicester Square, trenchcoated and trilbyed, calling film stars by first names. And she can see that when he holds the camera up to his eye he goes somewhere, somewhere beautiful, she thinks, and in the pop of the flash-bulb she can almost glimpse it herself.

Poof!
go Sarah and Eddie and Kate and battered, smoking London. Through Will’s lens they are stars in a Hollywood diner, shining, young and lovely and alive. As he lowers the camera, the image remains, for a second, in his eyes.

Sarah, daughter of scientists, doesn’t recognise art. But she knows an alchemist when she sees one. So she leans forward, out from under Eddie’s arm, and she looks at Will and smiles.

There’s not much of Nanny Biggs left by the time we get to Nelson. It’s the day before Christmas Eve, and Sarah’s down to her last functions. Even my suspicious mother can see why she had to be put into a home.

‘I didn’t know,’ Maggie-who-never-comes-to-the-phone tells Grandpa William, ‘she was this bad.’

Grandpa William says nothing. The box of cherries we’ve brought up from Central weighs on the room like a poor joke.

The old woman in the bed is thin and dishevelled and her arms and legs don’t sit the way they should. It’s difficult to tell if Nanny Biggs is there inside. Her muscles are making their own decisions now, lazing around or running amok like fourth formers on the last day of term, and she can’t even look at us, let alone say anything, and when her eyes close we don’t know if she’s gone to sleep or is lying awake and blind. I can see, now, how they would
help. All Grandpa William’s shiny words for dying.

The only things Nanny Biggs can still do by herself are breathe and swallow and think, and once you’ve spent ten minutes with her it’s hard to see any of those as a blessing.

Her eyelids open again and her mouth begins to twist.
Dystonia
? Or is there something my grandmother wants to get off her chest?

‘Mum?’ Maggie tries. But Sarah can’t meet her eye.

Grandpa William excuses himself. My mother and I sit in silence beside the bed. I pick at the rough corners of my nails, biting the skin surreptitiously when Maggie isn’t looking. An orderly comes in to change the catheter bag, which is when I realise what it’s there for.

‘Your father’s so sweet,’ the orderly says. ‘He’s here every day, you know. Brushing her hair, reading books to her. It’s lovely to see a couple so devoted.’

Grandpa William gets back from the bathroom, and as they pass in the doorway, she lays her free hand on his arm. ‘How are you today, Will?’

‘Oh, not doing too badly, thank you, Tracey.’

Maggie and I stare across the room at him as if he is a stranger. But we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s the decent thing, and someone has to do it.

‘Mum can hear you,’ he says to Maggie. I wonder how he knows.

We sit in silence for a bit longer.

‘I’ll get us a cup of tea,’ Grandpa William decides. ‘Come on, Janine, you can help me.’

I don’t need telling twice. I push my chair back carefully, not wanting to show how eager I am to get out of there, and follow him, shoes squeaking, down the long linoleum corridor that smells of ammonia and indeterminate things boiled slowly. He seems to know his way around.

‘They’ve got a lovely garden here,’ he says, as we approach an open fire-door. ‘Beautiful, now the roses are out.’

We step out onto the old bullnose verandah, Grandpa William already reaching for the packet of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. He has one in his mouth and lit so quickly it’s almost a magic
trick, and when he takes it out again he holds it backwards, lit end cupped in his palm, like Annabel and I try to do when we’re hiding in the hedge around our school.

I look obediently at the rose beds, two half circles cut into the lawn, a riot of apricot and pink under the warm blue Nelson sky.

‘You mustn’t be frightened,’ Grandpa William, frowning, tells a spot on the verandah boards in front of his left toe.

(Easy for him to say. He didn’t share Sarah’s genes. He was bound to her by nothing more than the sticky dust of time, and that, unlike blood, can be shrugged off.)

‘She’s still your nanny.’

Okay, but the problem is I’ve never been sure what that meant at the best of times. Something, clearly. Maybe Grandpa William knows, but this doesn’t seem like the moment to ask him.

‘We have to think of the good times. Remember how she used to be.’

I think hard. She used to send me a card with ten dollars inside for my birthday every year — that was nice. Even when ten bucks stopped buying as much as it used to. And when she made me go down to the dairy for cigarettes, she always let me keep the change. What else?

Gin and fag ash. Spam and chips. Stories about Eddie.

Grandpa William’s mind seems to have wandered off somewhere else, and I wonder (then, and now) what Sarah he is seeing, here at the end, beneath this foreign sky.

I know I should say something. But it’s hard to think what. The things I really want to know — When is Nanny Biggs going to die? Is there some kind of schedule? — can’t be asked.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘No,’ he says quickly, and then, ‘They say not.’ He drops his cigarette butt into a bucket of sand. ‘Better get on with making that tea.’

When we get back to the room, Maggie has the hairbrush out, but Nanny Biggs isn’t keeping still. They both seem agitated.

Eventually, visiting hours are over, and again we follow Grandpa William’s little hatchback through the strange streets, retracing
our path to the yellow brick unit by the park that looks exactly as I’d expected. My mother sits down on the sofa like it’s the edge of the world, and Grandpa William opens the curtains to the midsummer sun and pours two whiskies without asking. I’d quite like one myself, not to mention a smoke. I mix myself another glass of Tang.

The clock on the mantelpiece above the fake fire reads quarter to five. The house is silent except for its
tick tick tick
and the far-off shouts of somebody else’s children. Fifteen minutes later, I begin to see why Grandpa William rings.

We stay for a week. I send Annabel a postcard.

It’s a long drive home to Invercargill. All the way down SH6 to its pale beginnings, crossing the rivers high, the Mataura a shallow brown stream beneath our wheels, incapable of harm. Nine hundred and seventy-six kilometres south of Hope, I have plenty of time to work out.

We go back in April for the funeral.

Sarah Harding walks down Knightsbridge with the summer budding around her, the first warm day curling up from the pavement towards a soft blue sky. Her arms are bare. Everywhere there are pale-armed girls in sleeveless dresses and men admiring them and everyone is smiling, and nobody cares if the dresses are five seasons old and it’s bound to rain before evening.

Most of the servicemen — infantry and navy boys — have melted away from London without a word, and no one’s supposed to ask where they’ve gone or say anything about it. But Will Biggs is still here.

He’s waiting for her in his fifth-floor mansion flat with a bottle of champagne. Like something out of a film. Because today — 24 May 1944 — is Sarah’s twenty-third birthday.

As she climbs the first two flights of marble stairs she’s Vivien Leigh, and there’s still a chandelier overhead and tycoons and duchesses, not clerks, behind every door, and if a bomb should
crash through the Art Deco ceiling now, how sad and romantic it would be. On the third flight, Sarah decides that if she’s dying today, there are two things she’d like to do first, and one is to drink champagne.

Will opens the door. Behind him, there’s a gramophone playing Cole Porter. Will is holding the bottle and two glasses in his hand, and the windows are open and full of warm air and sky, and if she leans out Sarah can see the shaggy green of Hyde Park across the rooftops. Who’d have thought she would ever be twenty-three, and here? She turns for the camera, breeze in her hair.

It could stop there. There’s no real need for the rest. Declarations, promises and rings. It’s all a bit overwhelming.

She says yes, of course. Cries happy tears. And doesn’t mind the least little bit that the ring in question is modest and dated and scratched and has been on a corpse’s finger. But as Will unzips her dress, she feels slightly cheated. Because what was going to be an adventure is now almost a duty.

Next time, Will takes a photograph of her there in his bed, and Sarah plays up to the lens. Gives him something to remember her by. They’ve run out of records, so he turns the radio on, and it’s playing ‘We’ll Meet Again’, and they dance, Sarah’s cheek pressed into Will’s chest, because they don’t know if they will, and neither of them is the betting type, but if they were, they wouldn’t put money on it.

And they don’t, it turns out. Not for sixteen months. By which time so many things have happened.

When Will disappears like all the rest, Sarah isn’t worried. Ten days later, she wonders which of the D-Day pictures are his, and she isn’t frightened for him, because he’s not fighting, just taking photographs, and the Germans won’t be aiming for him. They’ll be trying to kill Eddie.