Wake: A Novel (20 page)

“I promise you,” he says. “I’m a very honorable man.”

The floor stretches to dark-paneled walls, smelling of polish and old, expensive wood.

He
is
rich, then.

Hettie stands on the limit of the parquet, as though on the edge of a deep, chill lake. His flat is vast. Five of her mother’s Hammersmith living rooms could fit easily inside.

Ed makes his way about the room, turning on lights. “Hope you don’t mind. Been in that damn foxhole all afternoon.” He looks over to her. “Come and stand over here. Give me a minute and I’ll warm the place up.”

He seems different now that he is inside: steadier, less drunk.

She steps over to the fire, where he has bent, adding coal from a scuttle in the hearth. Beside the fireplace, a door to another room is open. She can just see the corner of a bed.

A
man. A girl. A bed.

“Right,” he says when the fire is finally roused. He moves to a low table where glass-stoppered bottles catch the light. “I’ve got…whiskey, gin, and…
vodka
!” He lifts a bottle filled with clear liquid and turns to her. “Ever tried vodka before?”

“No.” She’s never heard of it, but doesn’t like to say.

“All anarchists should know their vodka. Know what they’re doing, those Russians. Let’s have a vodka, then.” Humming, he turns back to the cabinet, takes out two glasses, and pours.

Hettie holds her hands to the fire. On the mantelpiece stand two photographs. One is of Ed, serious in uniform. The other picture is very different: Here he is younger, his hair longer, wearing a cricket sweater. Beside him is a beautiful young woman, looking straight at the camera and laughing. Hettie feels a small contraction in her chest.

“My sister.” Ed comes up behind her, gesturing with his glass.

“Oh.” Her chest releases as he hands her the drink: clear liquid, ice.

“Probably about the last time I saw her smile.” He takes a swig, rocking on his heels, staring at the photograph. “She’s bloody miserable. All the time. You got any?”

“Any what?”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“Oh. One brother.” She tries a sip of her vodka. It is cold and clean.

“And is he bloody miserable, too?”

She laughs. “Actually, yes, I think he is.”

He lights a cigarette and offers one to her. “Did he serve, then?”

“Yes.” She leans in to his light.

“Whereabouts?”

“In France.”

“Know where?”

She racks her brains but cannot remember if he has ever told her. Even during the war, they never spoke about France. She feels terrible suddenly. She ought to know this, oughtn’t she? But Ed just nods.

“Here.” He puts down his drink. “You look as if you’re about to run away. Let me help you with your coat.”

He takes it from her and puts it over the edge of a chair. And now, finally, when she had almost forgotten she was wearing it, the dress is revealed. The fabric shushes as it falls back into place. The sequins catch and glitter in the low light, and she can feel her skin flush in the heat; acres of it, it seems, are suddenly exposed.

“Goodness,” he says.

She pulls off her hat and holds it in front of her dress. When she finally looks up at him, his expression is confounded.

“You cut your hair,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Why’d you do that?” His voice is oddly flat.

“Because”—she puts her hand to the tapering point at the back of her neck—“I wanted to. I’ve been wanting to for ages, and I…” She trails off. Behind her the fire crackles and spits.

There’s a pause, and then “It looks nice,” he says, in that same dull tone.

You’re lying.

“That’s not true,” she says, heart thudding.

“I’m sorry?”

For a moment she sees something in him, anger? A quick flash and then it is gone.

“You said—before,” she says. “You said we wouldn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”

“Very good.” He points his cigarette at her. “You’re right. I did. But you’re wrong. It is true. You look beautiful. I’m just—”

“You’re just what?” It is as though he is twisting her insides.

“Nothing.” He turns away, throwing his cigarette onto the fire. “Don’t pay any attention to me.”

She laughs. It sounds harsh, and hurt.

“Here.” He rummages in his pockets and takes out a small round cardboard box. “I’ve got some of this. Know what it is?” His tone is coaxing, soft.

She has no idea.

“It’s snow,” he says. When she still doesn’t respond, he walks away, over to a sofa in front of a low wooden table. “Come and sit by me.”

She stays where she is, watching as he pours a small mound of white powder onto the chessboard and rakes out two long lines.

“This’ll liven me up a bit. Make me better company, I promise.” He brings a small silver tube from his pocket. “Here.” He holds it out toward her. “You should try first.”

She has a vague memory of a story. Something from the papers. Two years ago; a girl. An actress. Found dead in her bedroom in the West End.

“Go on. You might like it. You never know.”

She crosses the floor toward him. “Can you die from it?”

Ed looks amused. “I suppose you could, if you took enough. But people die all the time, don’t they? Of all sorts of silly things.”

Who is allowed to think like this? To say things like this? To take things so lightly?

Not her.

Not her mother, or her father or her brother, or the people at the Palais. Not anyone she knows. Not even Di. They are all too busy holding themselves in, not stepping on the cracks, not looking left or right in case the world collapses around their ears.

She sits on the edge of the sofa. “How do I do it, then?”

“You sniff.”

“Sniff?”

“Here, I’ll show you.” He leans down and, passing the tube up one of the lines, he sniffs, and the powder disappears. Then he touches his nostril with his thumb. “You have to keep going,” he says. “Keep it continuous.”

Hettie takes the tube from him, her heart racing
.
She bends over the table, puts one finger over the other nostril, and does the same. It hits her hard, burning the back of her throat. “Gosh.” She comes back up, her eyes stinging, half of her share still there on the board.

“Have some vodka.” Ed pushes her glass toward her, bending down and finishing the rest off.

She does as he suggests. The combination is pepperish and strong.

He sits back up. “It’s like the bloody
grave
in here. We should have some music!” He jumps to his feet and goes over to a cabinet in the corner of the room. For the first time she sees he has a beautiful Victrola, the kind that she and Di dream of, all dark wood and glossy gold handles. “What do you like?” he says, winding it up.

“Um—”

“Wait! I forgot. I got something for you yesterday.” He takes a record from the cupboard beneath.
“The Original Dixies!”
he says, straightening up, holding it up like a trophy.

“No…?
Really?
”

“They made a record when they were over here, when they were resident at the Palais. Didn’t you know?”

She crosses the floor, and he puts the sleeve in her hands. The Dixies are all there on the cover
,
Nick LaRocca in the middle, grinning, trumpet in hand. It is like seeing an old friend. And suddenly she feels better about everything; suddenly the night is full of promise again. “That’s killing!” she says, grinning up at him, passing the record back.

“It certainly is.” He slides it from its sleeve, balances the disc on his middle finger, and, bending forward, winds the Victrola a couple more times.

The green baize spins. He puts the glossy disc on top and lowers the arm. There’s a burst of static on shellac, and then the unmistakable sound of Nick LaRocca’s tumbling trumpet fills the room.

Hettie laughs out loud. She can’t help it. Something is jumping through her, asking for release. That powder. That drink. She’s going to have to move.

“Give me a hand,” says Ed. “Quickly, help me move this.” They lift the low table, carry it to the side of the room, and then get down on their hands and knees and roll the carpet away. Now the floor stretches, polished, gleaming, and they come to face each other, and they dance: wildly, crazily, and the small part of Hettie that is aware knows, as she dances, that this is what the people at Dalton’s felt; that this is what she has been searching for, that this is what it feels like to be free, beyond yourself, to move as though you just don’t care. When the number is over they stand, still holding on to each other, laughing, catching their breath.

“Damned fast,” says Ed, shaking his head.

“They played it even faster live.”

He gazes at her, a smile on his lips. “There aren’t many, you know. Not many girls are interested in music. Not many know jazz.”

I could introduce you to ten, at the Palais alone.

“I love it,” she says.

The record scratches into the silence between them.

“You really are most awfully lovely, you know. Do you know?” He leans toward her again, and this time, when they kiss, it is different; it is charged and hard and full of intent.

“Come here,” he says, pulling away from her, taking her wrist. “Will you come in here with me?”

Wednesday, November 10, 1920

Tangled in her blankets, Evelyn struggles to sit. She is hot and terribly thirsty. She soon sees why: Last night she must have gone to sleep in her clothes. She is lying crossways over the mattress, and her pillow has somehow migrated south to the space between her legs. She sits and curses, pulling her cardigan off over her head, leaving only her jersey and her knickers on, stumbles to her feet and out into the corridor. Doreen’s door is ajar. She pauses outside and listens. Silence. She didn’t hear her come home last night; she must have spent the night with the man.

They’ll be getting married before long; she can see it now.

In the unlit kitchen the taps whine in protest before giving up and shuddering forth water. She fills a glass and drinks it greedily down, takes the kettle from the stove, fills it, and puts it on the range, then pulls the curtains aside so she can see the sky. There’s an almost full moon ahead, shaded very lightly away at the top, hanging over the clustered chimney stacks that march east toward Camden Town. She stares out at it, arms wrapped around her chest, hazy from sleep. Behind her comes the quiet
shhh
of the kettle as it rouses the water inside.

Is the moon waxing or waning? She used to know such things. At the beginning of the war, when Fraser was still alive, she would often wake at this time, late in the night but long before the morning, at two or three o’clock, her nightdress stuck to her body with sweat. It was difficult then, in the blackout, to have a light after dark, and she couldn’t distract herself by reading, so the only thing that eased the feeling would be to come in here, put a kettle on the stove, open the curtains, and look out at the sky. Distance contracted in the small hours before dawn, and if the night was a clear one she would look for the moon.

I am becoming pagan,
Fraser wrote, that first winter.
Here, in this muddy brown monotony, where blood’s the only colored thing. There is no God here, only the moon and the sky.

And so I have made a pact with the moon. On clear nights she will bring me to you.

There’s a soft call from the street below. Evelyn watches the milk cart travel around the corner, coming to a halt beneath the gaslight on the other side of the road. The dray horse stamps as its breath streams white into the air. Her eyes light on the window of the terrace opposite, the one belonging to the man in the wheelchair. Looking at it now, blank, unreadable, its curtains shut tight, it’s as though she imagined that alcohol fug of yesterday afternoon.

On clear nights she will bring me to you.

She cringes at the thought of it; as though, in its pure bone whiteness, the moon can see into every cranny of her tawdry self.

What has she become?

The man in the wheelchair. Robin, last night:
Perhaps I could come, after all?

She leans against the side of the counter and breathes out. She misses him. Fraser. Here in the shrunken hours of the night. She misses him still so much. Who is there to share her thoughts with? They wither inside her. She cannot even write them to him as she used to; can’t take a cup of tea back to bed and sit with a candle in the blackout and think of him—trying to imagine where he is, what he sees. She cannot imagine where he is, because he is nowhere, he is nothing. All of the many tiny things that he was: the way he turned his head toward her, the slow breaking of his smile, the laughter in him, the roll of his voice; the way that he eased her, eased her—these are all gone. These are all dead. All of the life that was in him, all of the life that they could have spent together. Gone.

Her heart thuds dully into the silence. Her broken heart, still beating on.

And she is alive. For what? She has endured. Is enduring.
Killing time.
Like all of them; the pathetic women with their adverts in the papers, the palpable desperation behind the cheer:

Spinster, 38. Loving disposition. Anxious to correspond.

Spinster.

Spinster.

Old maid.

She has become one of them. Slowly and then all at once. Those women other women pity. The lucky ones, with rings on their fingers and prams in the street. They cross the street to avoid her. They can smell it on her. Bad luck.

What next for her? For any of them?

Robin? Is he what is next?

Perhaps I could come, after all?

And would it be so bad? After all?

She shakes her head. She will not go. It is ridiculous. Weak. Her life has made her weak.

Behind her, the kettle whistles and jiggers on the stove. She pulls it off the flame, makes her tea, and then carries it into the bedroom and climbs back into bed.

When she worked at the munitions factory, she no longer woke in the night. She was too tired. They made her a machinist first. There was a grim satisfaction to it: punching holes in metal over and over again. Five holes in each sheet. Twenty-odd sheets an hour. She got up from twenty-four to thirty in her first week, working on a large bench with fifteen other women from eight till five o’clock. It was tiring, but she made sure that she never leaned against the bench, never ran the risk of being thought soft. At ten o’clock they all marched downstairs to drink a glass of milk. They stood in two long lines: one formed of the machinists, like her, and the other with women from different parts of the sheds. On her first day she noticed that they had bright yellow skin on their faces, their arms, and their hands.

“Canaries,” whispered the woman in the queue behind her. “Some of them haven’t got long left.”

Evelyn turned to her. “How do you know?”

“They’re sick, aren’t they? That’s why they look like that.”

The canaries sat at different benches on the other side of the room.

At the end of her second week she skipped lunch and went to the office of the overseer. “I’d like to move sheds,” she said. “I’d like to work with the TNT.”

The man stared at her over his glasses. He had a mild, distant face. He looked as if he might have been a schoolteacher before the war.

“Women like you don’t work on shells,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Women like you don’t work on shells.”

“What do you mean, women like me?”

The man took off his glasses; without them his eyes were pouched, tiny things. He rubbed at them. One side of his right eye was pink and irritated. He sighed. “Miss?”

“Montfort.”

“Miss Montfort. The TNT sheds are a wholly different place from the rest of the factory.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. That’s why I’d like to work there.”

He eyed her. “Why are you here, Miss Montfort?”

“Why is anyone here?”

“Money, Miss Montfort. Money.”

“Then money is why I am here.”

He stared at her. He looked unconvinced.

“I should like,” she said crisply, “to work with the TNT.”

“All right,” he said, putting his glasses back on his nose, dismissing her with a wave of his hand. “As you wish.”

The girl she shared her bench with looked all of fifteen. On her first morning she passed Evelyn a stump of something. The girl had a round child’s face and plump lips. “Cordite,” she said. She spoke with a lisp. “We’re not supposed to eat it. But it’s ever so sweet and nice.”

Evelyn touched it to her lips. It was true. It was sweet.

“If you suck it,” said the girl, “it’s nice.”

The TNT buildings were on the far side of the factories. To get to them you had to pass through other sheds, full of older women: barefoot, thin, bent over their pots of molten lead, ladling the scaly liquid out; they looked liked Gypsies, or witches, with their long hair unbound.

When daylight savings time began, and the world was plunged even further into blackness, Evelyn volunteered for the night shifts. To sleep in the day at least had novelty to it. So she lived her life in the dark. Coming on to the night shift in the blackout, the women would call to one another, holding each other’s hands to walk from the railway station to their buildings, forming long, snaking chains.

She was given the job of examiner, which meant she had to test the gauge of the calico bags filled with the TNT. She would handle up to a hundred bags a day. After two weeks her hair had turned a bright ginger hue. If she were ever out in the daytime, people would stare at her in the street. They would nod, as though they were acknowledging some unspoken debt, but were frightened nonetheless.

The yellowness spread to her skin—first her face, then all over the rest. She watched her hands turn with creeping fascination. Her eyes were tinged with bronze. She hardly recognized herself in her mirror. After her bath, the water was the color of blood. But she felt a strange, creeping power from this subterranean life. She felt she was getting closer to something real. She felt she might be turning into a witch.

Then she started to become sick. She noticed a peculiar taste in her mouth after meals. She was sick, often, and the vomiting would relieve the taste. Her urine was the color of strong tea. She began to lose weight. Her temperature rose. A rash broke out all over her body. When she fainted at work they took her out of the sheds and sent her home. The doctor came and examined her in bed. When he had finished, he made a few short notes on the pad in his hand. She listened to his pen, scratching into the silence, as she stared at the faded flower pattern that was papered to the wall.

“Miss Montfort,” he said. The
s
’s in
Miss
sounded sibilant; they lingered in the air.

“Yes?”

“Are you aware that you’re pregnant?”

She turned to him.

“No?” He shook his head, closed his pad, and put it back into his bag. “You need to stay in bed. To recover from the TNT poisoning.” His voice softened. “I doubt very much that you will keep your child.”

She did as the doctor ordered, and stayed in bed for a week. She told no one, not even Doreen. It was easy not to, since everyone already thought she was ill. She slept late—long strange sleeps, full of dreams—and when she woke, in the late mornings, she put her hands to her belly and thought of the tiny life that was gathering itself there. She thought back to that last morning she and Fraser spent together: the heat of the day, the tang of the salt held in his lip. A small, clear voice in her rejoiced. Whatever the consequences, it made sense, somehow, of everything that had gone before.

But after a week she began to bleed, first brown and scant, then red and bright. A week later the bleeding was finished. The small scrap of life had left her, a tiny addition to the crowded ranks of the dead.

When she was well again she went back to the factory and asked for a job. They put her back in the machine shed where she had started out. Two weeks later, she had her accident and lost her finger.

When the bandages came off she almost smiled. It was eloquent, with its smooth, rounded stump. The proof of absence. The real thing.

She rubs the nub of her finger now with her thumb. In the darkness she can just see the outline of her satchel, hanging from the back of her bedroom door. Rowan Hind’s address is on a piece of notebook paper inside. Today is Wednesday. The office will close at twelve as it always does, and she will have the afternoon free. Tomorrow, Thursday, Armistice Day, is a national holiday, so if she wants to catch Rowan Hind then she should go to Poplar after work today; there will be no chance on Thursday, the streets will be thronged and he will most likely not be at home.

She brings her knees up and clasps her arms around them.

So she said she would go with her brother, to the burial of this Unknown Warrior; to stand on Anthony’s balcony with Lottie and the rest of them and listen as they bray at
the show.

How pleased she is for the scraps that Ed throws her way.

They get ideas. Fixed in their heads. They can’t move on.

You’re meddling, Eves.

Her little brother. Dismissing her. He used to look up to her once. To listen when she talked.

She won’t go. She hates it, anyway, this
Armistice Day;
this new tradition already dripping with oily reverence; another opportunity for those with blood on their hands to play fancy dress in their murderers’ suits and drag their horses and their gun carriages behind them as they parade the London streets. As if there is no other way to honor the dead.

Someone should do the world a favor. They should take one of those great guns that they wheel out for the occasion and turn it around; they should train it on the massed dignitaries at the Cenotaph, in the abbey, on the king and Lloyd George and Haig and the whole lot of them, should shoot them while they sit there, their old heads bent in prayer. Praying for the souls of the dead. Hypocrites; stinking hypocrites all.

She can’t see much between the legs. There are lots of different sorts of legs, though: brown trousers, black trousers, checked, and blue and black women’s stockings. There’s a strong, fusty smell, like her granny’s house, only stronger.

The little girl gives a tug on her father’s hand.

“What’s that?” His big face looms high above her.

“Can I come up again, Dad?”

“All right, chicken.” He smiles. “Come on.” And he lifts her, hoisting her high onto his shoulders, in one clean movement of his strong arms. She puts her hands on his head, the way he taught her to, steadying herself, and now she can breathe again, and see. She can see her family far below, her two older sisters and her mother on the other side of her dad, surrounded by all of the other hundreds of people, who are standing up here together on top of the cliffs. She can see the high, white cliffs, which are not white today, but gray, and the gray sky, and the gray-green sea. And then below, down in Dover where they have come from, the town where they live, she can see even more people. She tried to count them, earlier on, but had to stop, because it made her feel hot and dizzy. Her dad said there are thousands and thousands. The reason there are so many is that all the children have been given the day off school. And all the dads have been given the day off work.