Miss Purdy's Class (13 page)

‘She won’t last the night, I don’t think,’ she whispered, eyeing the children.

‘What shall we do? Lena’s not right either.’

‘I know. We can’t leave them. I’ll stay here the night. I don’t think the end can be far off, looking at her now. But if you need to go, dear, I’m sure I can manage.’

Gwen thought about Ariadne and Harold Purvis sitting over the latest sample of Ariadne’s cooking and speculating about why she was missing. She had no way of letting them know, but how could she leave? She felt somehow bound to Joey Phillips, awed and moved by what he had already endured.

‘I’ll stay,’ she told Lily Drysdale. ‘Of course I will.’

‘That’s very good of you, dear.’

‘Not at all. Shall I cook up some of that bacon?’

‘Oh yes – that’s why I brought it,’ Lily said and moved over to sit at the table with the children, sipping carefully at her soup. The bacon was soon ready and Gwen cut more bread and butter to go with it. Joey ate ravenously, though Lena only managed a little of the soup.

‘Now,’ Lily said, ‘when we’ve eaten our tea, how would you two like a nice scrub in the bath?’

Lena’s eyelids looked heavy, as if she was ready to fade out, but she beamed with delight. Joey nodded grudgingly.

‘And Miss Purdy and I will give your clothes a wash and put them by the fire to dry. Miss Purdy, let’s get some water on the boil now, so it’s ready.’

Gwen went out to the tap in the yard and filled the kettle and a pan. The lamp was lit now and she could hear voices from the other houses along the yard. It was a cold night and all the doors were closed. Inside, she settled the pans on the gas and wondered how the fire was doing for drying clothes. When she went to look, she saw that Joey had accumulated quite a little pile of coal.

‘Where d’you get all that from?’ she asked, joining them at the table again.

He gave a backward jerk of his head. ‘Over the wharf.’

‘There’s a coal wharf just behind here,’ Lily said. ‘Lumps of it lying about for anyone who’ll take the trouble to fetch it – and get away with it. This young man is obviously an expert.’

Once the food was finished Lily went out into the yard and came back dragging a tin bath. She set it by the fire and they poured hot and cold water into it, refilling the kettle to heat up again. Gwen found tears in her eyes at the sight of the children’s bony little bodies. Their skin had an unhealthy greyish tinge and they were dotted with bites. Joey’s head looked too big for his body and the bones stuck out down his back, pathetically incongruous when set against his tough, manly way of carrying himself. He was a beautiful child, Gwen observed, as Lily set about him with the coal-tar soap, with those big eyes, strong brows and prominent cheekbones. But what sadness he had in him! She wanted to wrap him in something soft and warm, take him to her and cuddle him, but she knew he wouldn’t let her. They dried the children on the cloth with which Lily had covered the food, then Gwen put all their clothes in the bath water and scrubbed and pounded at them.

By this time Lena was almost unable to keep her eyes open.

‘She’s running a high temperature I’d say.’ Lily laid her hand on the child’s forehead. ‘Poor little lamb. We must get her into bed.’

Gwen had her first sight of the upstairs floor. Lily went ahead with a candle, led by Joey, who was wrapped in her coat, and Gwen carried Lena, swathed in hers.

‘Watch it,’ Joey said when they neared the top of the twisting staircase. To her horror Gwen saw that the third tread down was missing altogether. How easy it would be for a small child to fall right through, she thought.

There were two rooms upstairs and Joey led them into the back one, a small space in which there were two single iron bedsteads each pushed to a wall. There was nothing else. The candle threw their shadows huge on the bare walls. Joey climbed onto one bed and pulled the cover over him. Gwen went to lay Lena down on the other.

‘No!’ Joey’s head shot up. He was all scowls again. ‘That ent her bed, it’s Polly and Kev’s! Lena sleeps here with me.’

Gwen put the little girl down at the other end from her brother. This was what they were used to, of course, and they would help keep each other warm. She and Lily left their coats on the bed for extra warmth.

‘Goodnight, dears,’ Lily said, face shadowy in the candlelight.

‘Goodnight, Joey,’ Gwen said tenderly. She knew Lena couldn’t hear her. She was already asleep.

Joey didn’t reply.

Eleven

Downstairs, Gwen and Lily cleared away the bath, bailing out panfuls of water until it was light enough to carry outside to the drain. The exertion kept them warm, but freezing air poured into the house as they went in and out and they were thankful to come in finally and close the door. Steam rose from the children’s clothes. Gwen put the last of Joey’s coal on the fire. As soon as it died the room was going to be very cold.

They moved quietly, respectfully tidying the room, always conscious of the sick woman on the bed close by. Every so often they went to check on her, holding their breath until they were certain that hers was still fluttering in and out of her lungs. She was very quiet, as if she had already surrendered.

‘It’s terrible,’ Gwen said, as the two of them stood looking down at her shrunken face. The woman’s swollen stomach looked terrible against her body. Gwen was deeply shocked by all she had seen. She had had no idea that people had to live like this! The evening had opened up a world of poverty and suffering that she had never known to exist.

‘What a terrible, terrible life. And those poor children!’

‘I only wish I’d cottoned on sooner,’ Lily Drysdale said. Her pale eyes were full of pity as she stared down at the dying woman. ‘Poor thing. All we can do now is try and keep her comfortable until her end comes.’

‘It’s so cold.’ Gwen shivered. Their coats were upstairs keeping the children warm.

‘Yes.’ Lily looked round the room. ‘It’s no good. We’ve got to keep the fire going somehow. Look – this is fit for nothing. We’ll burn it.’ She was sizing up the most decrepit of the wooden chairs. The back was already coming loose from the seat. ‘They won’t be needing it for much longer. Poor little mites’ll be off to the orphanage by the sound of it. There’s no family around them.’

Between them they dismantled the chair and fed the fire. The dry, worm-ridden wood burned well. They sat and drank a cup of tea and after a time, Gwen, rather embarrassed, had to ask, ‘Er, Miss Drysdale – where do we go to spend a penny here?’

‘Oh, you have to go along the yard.’ Lily got up stiffly. ‘There’ll be a key.’ Sure enough, on the mantelpiece there was a key attached to a cotton reel. ‘You’ll have to take a candle, dear.’

Gwen stepped outside, a stub of candle burning on a saucer. It was bitter. The wind had dropped and the night felt still and deadly cold. The dim light from the lamp barely reached the end of the yard, where there were a couple of dustbins and then the toilets. The stench from each mingled together. There were three cubicles and from the middle one, she could hear someone urinating vigorously and a man humming to himself. She was unlocking the one next to it when the middle toilet door opened and he lurched out and started at the sight of her.

‘Christ alive – you made me jump!’ he said cheerfully and made off whistling along the yard.

Gwen stepped cautiously inside. Her shadow squirmed ominously on the rough brick walls. A few squares of newspaper hung from a nail. Closing the door, the full impact of the smell hit her. She grimaced and breathed as shallowly as she could, trying to keep the stench at bay. She put the candle down on the floor and, as she straightened up, saw something horrifying moving along the wall above her head. A gigantic spider! She gasped, feeling her skin all come up in goose pimples, before realizing it was really quite a small spider, its shadow stretched monstrously by the candlelight. Giggles of tension rose in her. Standing over the toilet she realized it wasn’t a flush toilet at all, but a dry pan, everything dropping down into a hole beneath. She shuddered at the thought of it. What would her mother say? This thought tickled her even more, her nervousness came close to hysteria and she burst into unstoppable fits of giggles. She was in such a hurry to get out of there, fumbling at her clothes and almost knocking over the candle as she tried to push the door open. Fresh air at last!

A hard-faced woman was standing outside, an oil lamp in her hand.

‘Something amusing is there?’ she asked snootily.

Gwen sobered up as she went back across the yard. What was the matter with her? Joey and Lena’s mother was dying and here she was tittering like a nine-year-old. Her spirits sank and she felt almost tearful. It was only then she realized how tired and overwrought she was.

‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ Lily said. ‘We’ll need to keep going somehow. I think we could take it in turns to have a doze, though. After all, we’ve both got to stand in front of our classes tomorrow.’

‘All right,’ Gwen agreed, though the thought depressed her even more. She didn’t want to sit up alone in the small hours of the night with a dying woman. The thought frightened her, and she craved company and conversation, had hoped to spend more time getting to know her fellow teacher. Lily had volunteered a few pieces of information about herself. She had never trained as a teacher but just ‘picked it up’, starting, aged fifteen, in the school she had attended in Minworth.

Gwen went out to the icy yard again to fill the kettle, and when the tea was ready they both sat close to the fire.

‘Goodness me, what a cold house,’ Lily Drysdale said.

‘No wonder the poor woman’s so ill,’ Gwen agreed. ‘I don’t know how they’ve survived at all.’

Lily put her head on one side. ‘Are you all right, dear? A shock, all this, isn’t it?’

‘It is rather.’ Gwen sipped her tea, glad it was sweet and warm. ‘Those poor children. There’s something about Joey, isn’t there?’

‘Pathetic. And rather striking somehow, I agree.’

Lily asked Gwen a few questions about herself, and her family, things they hadn’t had time to talk about in the staffroom. Gwen wasn’t sure whether to ask questions back. It seemed nosy. But Lily was happy to talk. She told Gwen that she spent all her spare time painting.

‘I’ve a little studio in the attic, you see. We go on trips every summer – somewhere glorious like Assisi or the south of France and I paint there and store up all the images in my mind for the winter. Not the most accurate method of reproduction, but it’s my way.’

‘How lovely,’ Gwen said. It explained why Lily’s nails were so often stained with colour. She wondered if the ‘we’ who went on these journeys was the lover Millie had talked about. Or had Millie been spinning fantasies and Lily really lived with a spinster sister?

‘Do you have any artistic interests?’ Lily was asking.

‘Er – no, not really.’ She wondered what her interests were, apart from daydreaming about aeroplanes and other means of escape. As hobbies went, this felt a little inadequate.

‘Never mind – there’s time yet,’ Lily was saying. ‘I suddenly discovered painting when I was nearly thirty. It’s been a great pleasure.’

Later, once they had finished their tea, Lily told Gwen to sleep first, in the old horsehair chair by the fire.

‘I’ll keep an eye on Mrs Phillips for now.’

Gwen watched as Lily settled herself on one of the remaining two wooden chairs by the bed. Her rounded presence was comforting. Gwen was quite keyed up and she thought she would not sleep, but after a time staring into the red glow, she felt drowsy and dozed off, head resting on the arm of the chair. It felt quite a while later when a hand shook her shoulder.

‘Miss Purdy? I think I should like a rest now.’

Gwen was immediately wide awake, heart pounding. ‘How is she?’

‘No change I think, dear. It could just go on like that, but if anything happens come and wake me.’

Gwen sat on the chair by the bed with her arms folded, shivering. What time was it? There was no clock in the room. The still watches of the night, she thought, glad of the one gas mantle still alight. It was so cold. She eyed up the other chair. That would have to be turned into firewood soon.

Dora Phillips’s face seemed to Gwen to be even more sunken than when they had first arrived, as if she was being pulled down towards the earth. Gwen tried to imagine her looking young and well, or to make out some resemblance between her features and those of her children, but found it impossible. The woman’s face was too ravaged. She wondered what her life had been, but only knew that it had been so different from her own as to make it impossible to guess.

In the stillness, and the dim light, it was hard not to imagine things. For a second she thought she saw the woman’s eyes flicker open and she jumped violently, her heart racing. But there was nothing. How would Dora look if she opened her eyes? What would she say if she could speak? She seemed scarcely human now and Gwen found her frightening. She felt ashamed. What was there to be afraid of in this pitiful wreck of a person? She leaned towards her, wanting to make some contact with her.

‘I hope you rest in peace,’ she found herself whispering. ‘After all you’ve suffered.’ She almost hoped there would be a reply, but there was nothing and she sat back again.

The night seemed endless. After a time Gwen’s eyelids grew heavy and she was fighting sleep. She could not tell whether a minute or half an hour had gone by. Lily Drysdale was breathing heavily across the room. Gwen clenched her hands in her lap, feeling the soft wool of her skirt. She was really beginning to shiver. It was too cold to fall asleep: she ought to get up, make tea and see to the fire.

Some sounds broke the quiet. Gwen jumped and held her breath. A wheeze followed by a tiny grating noise which it took her a couple of seconds to understand was coming from Dora Phillips’s throat. Her body lifted slightly from the bed, went rigid for a moment, then fell back. The sound stopped. The silence grew deeper, became an absence. Gwen leapt up and pulled the cover back, reaching for Dora’s hand. It was ice cold. She could not find a pulse. Leaning down she listened to hear her breathe, felt for her heartbeat.