The Girl from the Savoy (26 page)

They let me hold him for a while; a feather in my arms.

T
he hotel laundry is in Kennington, a reasonable distance across the river and south of the city. Mademoiselle Delysia's dress sits in a packet of tissue paper on my lap as I rest my head against the side of the laundry truck and watch the boats on the Thames, barely visible through the fog. We rumble across Waterloo Bridge and on, along Waterloo Road toward the Elephant and Castle. It is an uncomfortable ride, the truck throwing me around like a rag doll as we judder over potholes and cobbles. I blow warm breaths onto the glass at the window and draw a butterfly absentmindedly into the mist. I think of the butterfly at Teddy's hospital window and wonder if it ever did fly away.

The truck trundles on, the driver humming and whistling at the same time—a noise that sets my teeth on edge. My nerves are rattled as it is. I can't throw off thoughts of Snyder; his touch, his threats, the stench of Virginia tobacco. I'm glad to be away from the hotel for a while and breathe a little easier knowing that he isn't around the next corner or behind the next door.

As we approach Kennington I stare more intently through the window. The buildings and shop fronts begin to look familiar and when we turn down Walworth Road, I know exactly where we are.
I sit up straight and rub my breath from the window. There it is, right in front of me. Lime House. The Salvation Army Mothers' Hospital. The place that has haunted me since I first walked inside it four years ago.

M
onths before the Armistice was announced, rumors were rife that the Germans would surrender. None of us dared to believe it, not for a second, but the day we thought would never come finally arrived on a wet November morning. An armistice was declared. The war was over.

Before the month was out, the munitions factory was closed and I was back in my maid's uniform. I hated going back to Mawdesley Hall and the restrictions of domestic service, which felt stricter than ever after the relative freedoms of factory work. Mam couldn't manage on the widow's pension from the War Office, so off I trudged with reluctant feet, back along the sweeping driveway to ask the housekeeper if they were looking to hire staff. They were.

Madam was delighted. She couldn't wait to fill her home with domestics and reinstate the proper order of things. Women like her were unbalanced during the war, their staff numbers depleted, their grand homes invaded by nursing staff, their privileged daughters required to nurse the sick and injured. The foundations of their superior status had been thoroughly shaken. But the narrowing of the gap was only temporary. Too quickly I settled back into my old routines. Any sense of independence I might have felt as a munitionette disappeared into the slop bucket along with the contents of the ladies' chamber pots. I was back at the bottom. When it came to “Them” and “Us,” war had changed nothing at all.

Demobilization was a complicated and lengthy process. Our men came back in drips rather than the great emotional flood
we'd imagined. Teddy was one of the first to come back, just after Christmas. Sent from a clearing station in London, he was admitted directly to the military war hospital in Maghull, denying me the romantic reunion of my dreams. The doctors said that Teddy was “Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous” (which my cousin told me was hospital speak for shell shock). We were warned that it would be a long recovery process. I didn't care how long it took. I would be by his side.

On my afternoons off I traveled the long round trip to visit him, taking the bus to Rufford and then the train to Maghull. The doctors encouraged me to read my letters to Teddy. They thought it would help him remember. We'd communicated through letters for so long it felt normal to continue. I tried to be as cheery as possible, sitting beside his bed, reading my letters to him, my own words. He'd kept them in a bundle in the pocket of his greatcoat, close to his heart, just as he'd promised he would. It was strange to hear the war-torn emotions I'd ripped from my heart, to hear the words I'd struggled to find in the privacy of my bedroom, now read aloud in the stark daylight of a sterile hospital ward.

Occasionally there was a glimmer of recognition, but mostly there was only silence as Teddy stared out of the window. His voice, his words, had been stolen from him. He was locked in a horror too stark to release himself from, even though the trenches were miles away.

As the weeks passed I began to dread my weekly trip to Maghull. The hospital was exhausting; the sight of so many injured men was disturbing. But I kept visiting, kept reading my letters to him, kept hoping when there seemed to be nothing left to hope for.

The innocent flirtation with Madam's nephew was a harmless distraction; something to take my mind off things. That was all.

It started as a bit of harmless fun. An occasional smile, a wink,
a careless hand trailed along the back of my skirt. All the maids talked about how handsome he was, an officer recently demobbed from Belgium, visiting from Scotland for rest and recuperation. His accent alone had us all giggling in the staff kitchen. Men were like precious gemstones after the war. We were dazzled by their presence, by the musky smell of them, by the sound of their deep laughter booming off the library walls. We'd forgotten how easily our hearts could be turned by the hint of a smile or a knowing look. We heard him cry out in his sleep sometimes, screaming as if he were still in the middle of the fighting. It made him seem vulnerable. It made him seem like one of us.

I was folding dinner napkins when he found me.

Napkins.

He was drunk and aroused. I told him I had to get on, things to do, that I'd be in trouble if anyone found us, and that he shouldn't be hanging around in the kitchens anyway. He laughed and something changed in his eyes. He was oddly gentle at first, taking me by the hand and pulling me into the butler's pantry. He smelled of brandy and Virginia tobacco. My feeble protestations were like fuel to a fire, and something snapped. He grabbed my hair roughly and put his fingers to my lips. He told me if I made a single sound he would kill me. “I've killed men. Watched them die in agony. What does a kitchen maid matter?” I begged him to stop as he pulled up my skirts. I begged and pleaded, my words so quiet and weak and useless. His hands were so cold against my skin.

He wept like a child as he pushed himself inside me, the leather of his shoes squeaking against the linoleum floor, his hand smothering my screams. It was over quickly. In the distraction of his relief, I took the chance to bite down hard on his palm, earning myself a punch in the face. I remember the crack of his knuckles against my cheek, the jarring of my head as I fell to the floor,
slumped against the riding boots I'd carefully polished earlier that evening.
Don't get blood on them. Don't spoil your hard work, Dolly.
He zipped up his trousers, straightened his waistcoat and cravat, and left as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all.

I lay there for hours. Too terrified to move. When I eventually did, I drew water from the pump outside and washed myself in the dark, the freezing water like tiny daggers piercing my skin, turning every part of me numb. It was as if my body belonged to someone else. It did. It belonged to him.

I told no one what had happened.

He was back in Scotland by the time I missed my monthly. I knew I'd be ruined if Madam found out I was in the family way. Nancy, the parlormaid, told me to drink quinine and take hot baths in Beecham's Powders, but it was no use. I lifted the heaviest baskets of laundry I could find. I even threw myself down the scullery steps. Nothing worked. The bleeding and cramps I longed for wouldn't come. My skirts tightened around my waist as my belly began to swell and the sickness came over me in great waves. He had taken my dignity, broken my soul, and left me alone with the secret shame of a fatherless child.

I continued with my weekly visits to the hospital. All the time I sat beside Teddy, reading my letters full of love and hope, another man's child was growing within me. I stayed in Mawdesley as long as I could, until I couldn't conceal it any longer. I knew I had to take my shame and my secret to a place where nobody would know me. London. The perfect place to become invisible. The perfect place to become nobody.

Without telling a soul, I wrote to an aunt of mine who worked in service at a house in Grosvenor Square. I told her everything. She said she knew of a place out Kennington way, a Salvation Army hospital for unmarried mothers and that I could stay with
her until my confinement at the hospital started. She made it sound like a prison sentence.

Mam and my sisters were heartbroken when I told them I was leaving to take up a position in London. Mam couldn't understand why I had to go all the way to London when I had a perfectly good situation in Mawdesley. I used Teddy as an excuse. Told her it broke my heart to see him that way; to know that he couldn't remember me. I showed her my scrapbooks, my collection of dreams. I told her London offered great prospects for a girl like me. After everything we'd been through, she couldn't deny me the opportunity to chase a better, happier life.

My last day in Mawdesley was a warm summer day. I said my good-byes to Teddy in a letter. It seemed we were forever destined to share our hopes and fears in the written word. I left the letter on the table beside his bed in the hope that one day he would read it and remember and understand. I left roses in a vase on the kitchen table and held Mam and my sisters tight against my heart. I didn't know it would be the last time I would see my sisters alive; that by the end of the month the last gasp of the Spanish flu epidemic would take them from us, just as it had taken so many others in its awful rampage across Europe.

As I walked to the bus stop that afternoon, a blackbird sang in a hawthorn bush and I felt the fluttering of my child from somewhere deep within me.

For nine months I tried my best to ignore the baby, concealing its existence behind loose-fitting coats and tightly closed doors, but one cold November night my child bawled its way into the world and took my breath away. I hardly dared look at him, afraid that I would change my mind. I'd heard of women who faltered at the last moment and took their baby home with them, preferring to face the anger and shame of their family than the reality of abandonment.
I closed my eyes and pushed my hands against my ears to block out the bawling reality of his presence. Sensing my disregard for him, he clammed up like an oyster shell. The silence was unbearable.

They let me hold him for a while; a feather in my arms. Only when the moment came to let him go did I feel the immense weight of him. Only then did I realize that I loved him. Despite the painful memories he provoked—despite everything—he was my child and I loved him.

“Don't take him. Please don't.” The words slipped from my lips as the faintest of whispers while my mind was a raging thunderstorm, bellowing across the room, deafening in my defiance. “You can't take him. He's mine.” My panicked insistence was nothing but a whimper; I was too weakened by the efforts of labor to make myself heard.

“You're talking nonsense. The laudanum has you delirious. It's for the best. Now come along, you must let go. It wouldn't do to make a scene.” The matron refused to meet my gaze as she leaned farther across the sweat-soaked delivery bed to tug and pull at the precious bundle cocooned in my arms. I felt suffocated by her sickening stench of bleach and soap, by the sharp sting of her words, by the hot breaths that fell against my cheek as she pressed against me.

“You can't take him. Please. He's all I have.”

My anguished words as soft as goose down from a shaken pillow, drifting around me before slipping out of the open door, unheard, unheeded. And then the awful tugging and pulling, the wrenching and prizing apart of my fingers. It only took a moment, but felt like an eternity. The tiny bundle was lifted and taken from my arms. Taken from the room. Taken from my life. The edge of a blue blanket the last thing I saw as the door clicked shut.

I heard hushed whispers in the corridor and then only a dark, dark silence. Even my cries were muted by the weight of my grief.

I lay for hours, not moving, barely breathing, my arms still wrapped around the invisible form of the child I hadn't wanted and now couldn't bear to be without.
“It's for the best. Now come along. You must let go. It wouldn't do to make a scene.”
Like an unwanted bundle of rags I had given him away, just as all the other unmarried mothers here would, not because they wanted to, but because they had no other choice. The cruel bastards like Madam's nephew who had held his hand over my mouth to smother my screams had taken away all of our choices, our dignity, our reputation, our children.

Sleep came just before dawn, a troubled anxious sleep muddled with distant memories of wounded soldiers and rousing song, the hypnotic whir of factory machinery, and the urge to dance. A dull ache settled in the empty crook of my arms and in my swollen breasts where my child should be suckling. And then the fever took hold.

For three days I lurched in and out of consciousness. The nurses attended to me as I fought against it. In my delirious mind I left the hospital and ran far away to an imaginary river where I filled my pockets with stones and stepped into the water. But I heard something in the distance. A voice, drifting through the open window.
“Wake up, Dolly. It's time now, time to wake up. You have to wake up.”

I opened my eyes. “Is he here?”

The nurse smiled and pushed the hair from my forehead. Such a tender touch. It reminded me of Mam and made me want to cry. “Welcome back, Dorothy.”

“Where is he? Where am I?”

“You're in the hospital. Remember?”

I did. And all I wanted to do was fall into Teddy's arms and forget.

“A cup of tea. That's what you need. Tea will set you right.”

But it didn't. The milk had turned. Everything was soured.