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Authors: Eliza Graham

The One I Was (9 page)

BOOK: The One I Was
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‘Wasn’t I lucky to fly that beauty? I just pray they let me do it again.’ She tucked one arm into her husband’s and the other into Benny’s. ‘But tell me what’s happening at home.’ Her gaze was on Benny now. ‘How are those poor boys?’ She was studying him. He was expecting her to say how much he’d grown, but she didn’t. The warmth of her arm in his was sending charges through his nervous system.

Lord Dorner told her what the doctor had told them. She listened gravely. Benny hadn’t seen her look so solemn before.

‘I’ve got some leave coming up,’ she said. ‘I was going to carry it forward in case they gave me more … But I think I’m needed at home now.’

‘You need to rest, not nurse,’ her husband said.

‘I don’t like to think of the boys being ill with just Alice to look after them.’

‘You’re always saying how diligent Alice is.’

‘Yes …’

‘There’s Dawes, too. He’s very good with the boys.’

‘All the same.’ She frowned. ‘It’s a lot to ask of him. I’ll come home for a week.’ She gave a last regretful glance over her shoulder at the plane. Perhaps taking leave now would prevent her from flying more Spitfires from airfield to airfield. A fresh batch of the planes might be lining up even now, waiting for pilots. But Harriet Dorner wouldn’t be one of them.

Something of his sympathy must have shown because she gave him a sudden smile. ‘Be good to see the gardens at this time of year.’

‘I’m afraid the borders aren’t up to their usual standard,’ Lord Dorner said. ‘More cabbage than delphinium this year.’

‘Tell them to expect me at Fairfleet tomorrow.’ She gave the Spitfire a last loving glance. ‘I just need to make one last delivery, an old warhorse of a transport plane. Nothing like … this.’

Benny and Lord Dorner probably exchanged conversation in the car on the way to the factory. If so, he didn’t remember it afterwards. Fog oozed through his mind, turning him into an automaton. He sat in the car while Lord Dorner went into the factory. On the way home he managed to reply to Lord Dorner’s comments about the factory visit and the American guests but felt his benefactor’s anxious gaze on him.

‘You must still be worried about your sick friends, Benny.’

‘Friends? Oh, yes.’ He roused himself. ‘But thank you so much for taking me out today, sir. I enjoyed myself.’

Trite words to express his emotions.

Lord Dorner nodded. For a second they seemed to share in a tacit yet complicit understanding of what they had both experienced on the airfield.

*

And so it was that Harriet Dorner returned to Fairfleet just before lunchtime the next day. A young man in RAF uniform dropped her off in a sports car. Apparently pilots could sometimes get hold of petrol. From the window of his new bedroom Benny watched her wave him a farewell. She wore the same flying jacket over a pair of riding breeches and sports shirt and carried a small suitcase.

‘Take me to the patients,’ she told Dr Dawes in the hall, their voices rising to the first floor where Benny sat reading. ‘Poor things.’

Benny wasn’t supposed to go up to the second floor since the diphtheria had struck. It hadn’t been said specifically, but he’d sensed the tacit prohibition. But nobody said anything as he followed the adults upstairs. Harriet sat down on the end of Rainer’s bed and talked to the boys softly. It felt like trespass, listening in, so Benny backed out of the room. Harriet was telling them about a trip she’d made to Austria, years ago, before the war.

‘And all those cream cakes. Just as well we were doing so much walking.’ She seemed to glow with the sunlight she’d attracted while flying through the heavens. Her edges seemed softer today, less those of the warrior-woman.

Rainer muttered something Benny couldn’t hear.

She stood and pulled the sheet up Rainer’s chest. ‘I think your throat is hurting too much for you to talk. Let’s chat again later.’ She bent over the boy and kissed his forehead. Probably the first time anyone had kissed Rainer in years. Unless he too had sneaked off to the woods with a girl. Then she kissed David, too.

Harriet turned and saw Benny still standing there on the landing. He half expected her to tell him off, but she smiled. She closed the door softly behind her.

‘I remembered Rainer once saying his family loved Alpine hikes.’ Her brow puckered. ‘I wish I could make him feel better, Benny.’

‘You will.’ He must have sounded reassuring because she looked at him as though their roles had reversed and she was the awkward youngster and he the adult. The strangeness lasted just a second. Then she was once again the cool and collected pilot.

*

Benny told me about my grandmother landing her first Spitfire and coming home the next day to nurse the sick boys. I saw her through his eyes: the female warrior in the butter-soft
flying jacket, sun gilding her fair hair. Then Harriet, the gentle presence back here at Fairfleet, comforting a sick boy who’d no family to nurse him.

We sat in silence, both of us rewinding images and playing them through again, freezing frames to examine details. He seemed weary, picking up his paper as though he wanted to shield his face from me. I was only his nurse; there were emotions he didn’t want me to see.

‘Read me some more
Great Expectations
, Rosamond.’ He laid down his newspaper and looked at me very intently, his eyes remaining on my face while I reached for the book.

I read a chapter and saw that Benny was sleeping. Perhaps in his dreams he’d gone back to 1943, to watching my grandmother land her Spitfire again.

I set the book aside. There were calls I needed to make, to the district nurse, who would want to visit in the next day or so. And to the nurses we had on standby for when Benny needed more night-time care. But I fell into a trance, still thinking of Magwitch, of interlopers, people who turned up where they shouldn’t and upset everything.

An interloper had slid his way into this very house thirty years ago. I’d been a bit older than Pip when he’d arrived. Our interloper hadn’t been a convict, not quite. But he’d caused damage and it had been irreversible.

The sunlight Benny’s memories had brought into this bedroom seemed to dull. I might have been miles below the surface of the sea, where all was murky and dark.

I was Rose, not Rosamond, once again, nearly thirteen, living here with my mother, my brother Andrew. And my grandmother. My grandmother whom Benny had known as Lady Dorner.

And Smithy, too, Alice Smith, as Benny had known her, had still been here. Smithy was good with my mother. Her presence, an awkward, prickly one, occasionally illuminated by demonstrations of genuine affection, had provided ballast for Mum.

God knows, Mum had needed all the ballast she could get.

13

Rosamond

My mother, Granny’s daughter by her second husband, had moments when she was normal. Her light-blond hair would be brushed and silky, her make-up applied discreetly to her apricot-gold skin. And she looked like Granny.

‘Peas in a pod,’ Smithy would say. ‘Beauties, both of them.’

When she passed through this serene and radiant stage you’d never guess Mum was mental. That’s what some of the children in my old school called her after she appeared at the school gate one afternoon wearing a silk evening dress paired with Wellington boots, talking loudly about a letter she was writing to Margaret Thatcher, how it was already fourteen pages long and she hadn’t finished yet.

But I’d left that school now, which was good, because over the last few months the fibres in Mum’s brain had twisted themselves into even thicker knots. We’d come to Fairfleet for the summer because Dad had left home. He said he was going to work in the Middle East for a while, but both my brother and I knew it was because he found living with Mum so hard.

‘You all need a holiday at Fairfleet,’ Granny said. ‘And your mother can rest.’

At first the change seemed to suit Mum. She hadn’t rested, though. She’d fizzed with energy, rising early every morning to go out into the gardens and trimming the box-tree animals with a small pair of secateurs. When she’d done all she could outside she spent the afternoons sticking the photographs stored in shoe boxes into photograph albums for Granny. Smithy, Granny’s housekeeper, observed the photo-sticking with approval.

‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’

On one of these afternoons I admired a photo of Granny herself in a flying jacket, standing beside a fighter plane. Mum stuck it into the album and wrote ‘1943: Spitfire!’ above it.

But a few days later Mum started spending more time in the four-poster bed in her room, sometimes drawing the curtains round it so that she was hidden from the world. She slept in until late and didn’t get dressed until teatime. She was calm and gentle with Andrew and me, but her eyes looked flat, like torches whose batteries were running out.

This morning I hadn’t been able to find her anywhere, not in her room, not downstairs, not in the basement. ‘She can’t be far away,’ Granny said. ‘We’ll find her. Don’t worry.’

Eventually I found her out among the box-tree animals, sitting on the still dewy grass, propped up against the elephant.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mum said. Her hair was all limp over her brow and eyes and the buttons were done up wrongly on her shirt, as though she were a little girl just learning to dress herself. ‘I just can’t seem to cope.’

Granny rushed up now, slightly out of breath. She helped me lift Mum to her feet.

‘Enough’s enough, Clarissa,’ she said, with a note in her voice I hadn’t heard before. We led Mum back to the house. She shook as though she were an old woman, older even than Granny. Her arms felt cold in my hand. We met Smithy coming out of the kitchen door.

‘You’re heading for a fall,’ Smithy told Mum. Unlike her to say anything less than flattering to my mother. Dad always said Smithy’s devotion to Granny and Mum bordered on the fanatical, which apparently meant being too fond of them.

‘All right, all right,’ Mum muttered. ‘Not now. I just want to sleep.’ She lurched as we steered her through the kitchen door. Something in her pocket clinked against the kitchen table. ‘I took this.’

She pulled out a large, ancient-looking key which I didn’t recognize.

‘It’s from the old garden door down in the basement.’ Smithy took it. ‘That’s how you managed to get outside without us seeing.’

‘I needed fresh air and I didn’t want to worry you.’

Smithy snorted.

‘I’m calling the doctor for you,’ Granny said. ‘No ifs or buts this time.’

‘If it makes you happy.’ Mum grabbed the back of a kitchen chair as though she was on a ship lurching around in a storm. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I know you’re right. I’ll go down to the surgery today if they can fit me in.’

The family doctor sent her on to doctors with long titles in Oxford. Mum had to stay in the hospital for a few nights. She came home and packed a small suitcase but forgot to put in anything useful, so it was just as well that Smithy was there to remind her to take nightdresses, a comb and a toothbrush, not just writing-paper and pens.

Granny drove her in and returned a few hours later. She smiled at me and Andrew and we knew everything would be all right. ‘The doctors are tinkering with the dose,’ she said. ‘We can pick her up on Wednesday afternoon.’

It was hot on the Wednesday. Andrew developed a headache. ‘I want to go and collect Mum with you,’ he complained.

‘Stay here in the cool, darling.’ Granny ran one of her manicured hands over his brow.

Mum was clutching a white paper bag outside the hospital entrance when we arrived, her face almost the same pale colour as the bag. But she smiled when she saw me. ‘How lovely.’ She hugged me. It was like being embraced by someone made of card.

‘Where’s your case, Clarissa?’ Granny asked.

‘Oh.’ Mum’s face crumpled. ‘I must have left it on the ward.’

‘I’ll get it.’ Granny pointed to a bench. ‘You two stay here.’

Mum and I sat on the bench, next to a man reading a newspaper. Mum was still holding the white paper bag very tightly.

‘Are those your tablets?’ I asked. She nodded. I could see a labelled bottle inside the bag.


Lithium
,’ I read aloud. ‘
To be taken three times daily.

‘I’m sure it will be ghastly. But better than …’ She glanced at the man reading the newspaper and fell quiet.

The newspaper dropped. I caught sight of a pair of dark-blue eyes, concerned-looking, conveying the impression that their owner knew how Mum felt and was silently wishing her well with her Lithium tablets. Then the man, who was about Mum’s age or a little older, went back to reading his paper.

‘There’s Granny.’ I stood up.

‘Let’s get back to Fairfleet, Clarissa,’ Granny said, in that clear-as-a-bell voice of hers. ‘I have work to do in the garden. Those lilies by the tennis court are starting to droop. They need staking up.’

Mum looked as though she needed staking up, too. Perhaps the tablets in the bag would act like Granny’s bamboo sticks?

‘You’ve got the charity tea party coming up.’ Mum took the paper bag back from me. ‘I must be well to help with that.’

‘I don’t want you wearing yourself out, darling,’ Granny said. ‘Just take it easy.’

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the newspaper drop slightly. I felt the man with the dark-blue eyes watch us as we walked to the car.

Mum was quiet for the first few days. I almost preferred this reflective state to the times when she would say odd things and write her long letters.

*

Old friends of Granny’s from her wartime flying job came to dinner a few days after we’d collected Mum from the hospital. Mum cooked vol-au-vents, rack of lamb and lemon soufflé. Nobody could cook like she could if she was in the mood. The soufflé smelled like a sweet citrus cloud. The night had stayed warm and I couldn’t sleep. I sat by my open bedroom window. Granny and one of the guests, Reggie, came outside.

‘Smell those tobacco plants,’ Granny said. ‘Heavenly, aren’t they?’

An in-breath of appreciation. ‘Forty years ago all this would have seemed like a lovely dream,’ Reggie said.

BOOK: The One I Was
2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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