Wake: A Novel (7 page)

I’ve been watching you for two whole minutes.

A sharp ache floods her. It frightens her, the force of it.

“What about you?” says Di. “Did you like Gus?”

Hettie opens her eyes, breathing out into the dark. She danced with Gus for hours in the end but can barely resurrect him now—the pieces of him indistinct, the shape of him too blurred. “He was”—she searches for the word—“nice.”

“He liked you,” says Di. “I could tell.”

“Mmm.”

There’s a silence.

“I’d better go.” Hettie slides reluctantly from the bed.

She slept in her dress, since it was freezing when they got back, and so has only to put her feet in her shoes and pull on her hat and coat. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

They hug, briefly, Di’s body warm and heavy, already slipping back into sleep.

Hettie makes her way to the door, where Di’s dress is tossed carelessly over the back of a chair. She reaches for it, lifting a section of its black, diaphanous material, feeling the delicious crunch of sequins beneath her fingertips. Behind her, Di turns in the bed.

“Ta-ra, then,” says Hettie, bringing her hand away.

Outside, she pulls her scarf tight, passing the plate-glass windows of the furniture shop, eerie in the twilight, its beds and chests and chairs in small, clannish arrangements, as if they didn’t need humans to intrude in whatever dark business they are upon. At the end of the street she turns left onto the Goldhawk Road, where the tang of fish and the iron smell of meat, and the soft, sweet pall of vegetable decay still hang over the shuttered-up stalls. Then, hurrying now, she walks the low-housed streets that separate Shepherd’s Bush from Hammersmith. She can see people sitting down to dinner, house lamps spilling light as curtains are closed against the coming night. Everything in its right and proper place, everything with that ordered, stultifying Hammersmithness that sometimes, in her darkest thoughts, makes her wish that the zeppelins had dropped their bombs here rather than carrying on to the East End.

It is because she doesn’t fit. Ever since she can remember, she has felt it, this hunger for something more. Something that thought it would be happy with the job she used to have at Woolworth’s, but wasn’t, no matter how well paid or how smart the uniform she was given to wear. That thought it would be happy at the Palais, but instead feels she is just going in circles, round and round the floor. Di has it, too, this same desire; Hettie knows she does. But Di has transformed it into angles of the head and lowerings of the eyes that bring her men and money and means of escape. Hettie doesn’t have those skills—doesn’t know how to flatter and flirt, doesn’t even know if she wants them—and so it stays inside her, this hunger, ragged and raw.

The smell of boiled mutton hits her as she opens the front door, and she checks herself in the mirror in the hall, sending up a small, silent prayer that the adventures of last night will not be written on her face.

“Het? Is that you?” Her mother’s querulous voice comes from the kitchen.

“Coming.” She takes off her hat and goes down the narrow passage to the kitchen. Her mother is standing by the stove. Her brother, Fred, is in shirtsleeves, leaning his elbows on the table, the windows are misted with cooking and heat, and a thick mutton smell lies over everything. Fred lifts his head, giving her the usual glassy-eyed, empty stare.

“Hello, Mum. Fred.”

Her mother gives her the up-and-down. Fred murmurs hello.

“You’re late.”

“Am I?”

“We were wondering where you’d got to.”

“I was at Di’s.” She picks one foot up, touches it to the back of her opposite calf. “I said, remember?”

“You took your time coming home. We thought something might have happened. Didn’t we, Fred?”

Hettie casts a look at her brother, who doesn’t seem as though he’s wondering much at all.

“Why didn’t you come home earlier? I don’t like to think of you coming through that market at night.”

It is safer to say nothing.

“Take off your coat, then, and carry these over for me.”

She does as she’s told, taking two plates and putting one in front of her brother’s place.

“Thanks,” says Fred softly.

Thanks,
he can manage.
Please
and
thank you,
and sometimes, if you’re lucky and you ask him a direct question,
yes
or
no
. Anything else is a push. Ever since he came back from France. He speaks enough at night, though. Cries and shouts out the names of men in his sleep. She can hear him through the walls.

“So,” says her mother, taking her seat, “shall we give a bit of thanks?”

Hettie rests her chin on her clasped hands.

This was what her father used to say.
Shall we give a bit of thanks, then?

He was Irish, and kind, and he used to look at them sometimes in a startled way, as though astonished he should have washed up here, with this English wife and these English children, sharing a life with strangers masquerading as his kin.

Hettie closes her eyes, and for a flashing moment she is back in the club, as though it were projected there on the back of her eyelids—the Negro singer, the frenzy of the band, the way they all danced as if they truly didn’t care.

“For what we are about to receive.”

Are you here to dance, then?

“May the Lord make us truly grateful,” mumble Hettie and her brother.

She opens her eyes. On the plate in front of her a piece of mutton sits beside a lump of marbled bubble, the lot of it surrounded by a pool of sticky gravy. Her mother makes her gravy on a Sunday night with the bones of the joint, so that by next Sunday dinner, having been eked out over the week, it mostly resembles what it mostly is: glue.

Her mother takes up her knife and fork and quiet descends, lumpy, Sunday silence, broken only by the squeak of knife and fork on plate.

“Saw that Alice at mass. The one you used to work with at Woolworth’s.”

Hettie pokes at her food.

I’ve been watching you for two whole minutes.

“Hettie?”

“What?” She looks up. Her mother is staring over at her.

“That Alice? The one whose sister died of the flu, same time as Dad?”

Hettie sees her father, lying on the bed. One day he was fine, the next he was dead, his skin shining and purple, a terrible blooming; the color of the heliotrope flowers in the garden out back. She misses him. He more than made up for her mum. “I remember,” she says quietly.

“She’s married. Expecting now.”

“Oh.” She knows what’s coming.

“Says her job’s coming up.”

Her mother has never forgiven her for leaving the household goods section of Woolworth’s, where she’d worked since she was fourteen, and taking the job at the Palais. It was as though she had bought a ticket for the next train to hell. Nonstop, no changes.
All the way down.
Her mother wasn’t interested, or happy, or proud when Hettie told her how many other girls had gone for the job.
Five hundred, for eighty places,
whittled down in the course of a day. All she said was,
No
respectable girl would be seen dead in a place like that.

“I’ve got a job, thanks, Mum.”

Her mother grunts.

Hettie pokes at her mutton with her fork.

“How’s Di?”

“Fine.” Hettie sighs. “Di’s fine.”

A well-rehearsed conversation:

But why’s she got to live alone?

She doesn’t live alone, Mum. Her landlady’s in the room next door.

Still. There’s something about it. It’s not right, is it? Anything could happen.

There’s no use in explaining that was the
point;
and if Hettie had her way she’d be living there, too.

She looks up at them: Her mother, thin hair pulled back in a bun, wearing the wraparound overall that Hettie hates, because it makes her look like what she is—a charwoman who has to go out every morning and clean other women’s homes. The tidy little kitchen. And Fred, chewing, eyes glazed—so pale you can almost see the wall behind.

For this she has to give over half her pay. Fifteen shillings a week for this. On the table on a Monday night. Every week since her brother came back useless and her dad died and left them in the lurch. She’d be able to board at Di’s for less. And have some money left over for clothes.

You’re not one of those anarchists, are you?

They’re not real, she thinks. Neither of them. Her mother or her brother. Neither is this kitchen. None of this is real.

I want to blow things up, too.

Hettie imagines an explosion, enormous, the house made rubble, the street in flames, the wide sky and stars above her, and walking out into the vastness with ashes fluttering in her hair.

“What?” says her mother.

“What?” says Hettie.

“You were smiling.”

“Was I?”

Her mother’s face darkens. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” she says, shaking her head.

Then she looks down at her plate, and lifts a forkful of mutton to her mouth.

Monday, November 8, 1920

In Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise, just past midnight, Brigadier General Wyatt climbs down from a military car. He is the director of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the man charged with organizing the burial of the dead of the British Army. Beside him is his deputy, Colonel Gell. The men walk toward two soldiers standing guard in front of a makeshift hut. The more senior of the soldiers steps forward and salutes. “They’re ready for you, sir.”

“And have the selection parties gone?”

“Yes, sir, they have.”

“And their arrivals were staggered as ordered?”

“Yes, sir, they were.”

“Very good.” Wyatt steps around the man and through the corrugated metal doorway. Beyond a small paraffin lamp, barely visible in the dim light, lie four stretchers. He stands, listening to the wind as it lifts and whistles through the sides of the hut. To his left, standing open and empty, its lid beside it on the ground, is the shell of a plain wooden coffin. On the stretchers before him are four shapes, each of them covered with a Union flag.

They are very small bundles. These cannot be bodies. These are just scraps of things; they look like little more than rags.

He is seized with the sense that something has gone terribly wrong.

But then he shakes his head. Of course they are not bodies. They have been in the ground for far too long for that.

He thinks of what has brought him to this spot, barely three weeks since the Cabinet’s decision to go ahead: of the flurry of telegrams; the brief, rushed meetings of the emergency selection committee; the work it took to persuade a reluctant king that this might be a good idea.

He hopes it is. He very much hopes that they have judged the country right, and that, in four days’ time, this will be seen to have been worth it, after all.

Outside, he hears one of the soldiers cough.

Wyatt gazes out over the stretchers as though to fix this moment in his mind. Then he closes his eyes and, very briefly, reaches out, touching his hand to one of the stretchers. He knocks on the wall of the hut, and the colonel steps inside. Without speaking, Wyatt indicates the stretcher he has touched. The two men lift the bundle, still wrapped in its sack, each end tied up with string, and lower it into the waiting coffin. They screw the lid in place and cover it with its tattered flag. Then they leave, climbing back into their regimental car, which backfires once, twice, into the night, and drive away.

In the early hours, while the sky is still dark, two more men approach the hut. They exchange salutes, and the guards stand aside.

The men see the closed coffin with the tattered flag draped across. They pause for a moment before it, and then move to the other stretchers, the three that were not picked. They lift the first and load it into the ambulance. Then they come for the second stretcher. Then the third.

A chaplain, roused from sleep, an army greatcoat thrown hastily over his robes, joins the men in the front of the ambulance. They drive south along the road leading to Albert. When they have been driving for twenty minutes or so they stop. By the side of the road is a large shell hole. The men came past here, earlier in the day, and marked the place.

They light a storm lamp and place it on the ground, where its flame illuminates a medium-sized hole, about ten feet wide. A sharp wind cuts across their faces. They are eager to be back inside, in bed. They slide the first sack into the hole. It hardly makes a sound as it falls. When all of the sacks are lying in the earth the chaplain climbs down from the vehicle. He stands beside the shell hole with his leather-covered Bible in his hand. The shapes of the sacks are just visible at the bottom of the pit. Standing at the lip of the hole, the wind whipping his hair across his forehead, he says a short prayer. When he has finished, the soldiers take up their shovels and hastily cover the bodies with earth. Then the three men climb back into the ambulance and drive away.

Ada rises and dresses quickly, going over to the window and pulling the curtains wide. The street below is quiet, the sky brightening. It is early, and though Jack has left already, some of the last men are still making their way to work. The light of morning fills the room, finding familiar things to fall on, lifting the shadows of the night before.

She has hardly slept. All yesterday evening, she and Jack circled each other, and it seemed to her as though that boy were there still, in the room between them, as well as their son, Michael, his name echoing in the space, the first time it has been spoken in more than three years.

But there is something about standing here, in this ordinary light.

Perhaps she heard the boy wrong. Perhaps she heard only what she wanted to. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Whatever the explanation, from the way he left, the boy isn’t likely to come back.

She turns to the dresser, where there’s a photograph of her and Jack, taken twenty-five years ago today. The pair of them are staring straight at the camera and laughing. She picks it up and brings it closer. It had been her idea to have it taken. In giddy spirits, straight after the ceremony, she’d dragged him into the studio on the High Road, where a fussy young man showed them into his back room and held things up for them to look at: a stuffed teddy, a feather duster, a bicycle horn. When he honked it they laughed out loud, as the camera exploded in a burst of light.

They look so young. She brushes the top of the dresser lightly with her sleeve and puts the photograph back. She remembers how she felt, walking up this street for the first time, toward their house: the future unrolling before them, waiting to be stepped into, sunlit, wide.

Twenty-five years of marriage. Of learning to live with someone. Learning to love them. Learning to bury the things they cannot bear to face.

It is Monday, and so, as she does every Monday, she strips the bed down. But today, before lifting the sheets, she stops, caught again by memory. They would spend whole mornings here, Sundays, when they should have been in church, his fingers twined in her hair, their legs wrapped around each other, speaking low. She gave birth in this bed, with a midwife from the next street. The shock of it. The astonishing, red-bawling jubilance of her son.

She turns, catching herself in the mirror. The sideways light from the window is not kind. What does he think, her husband, when he looks at her now? She puts her hands to her face, pulling it so that the heavy skin around her jaw tightens, briefly, before she allows it to fall.

What is wrong with her today? It is the anniversary, making her remember, keeping her from her work. She bundles the laundry into her arms and goes downstairs, filling the buckets at the pump in the yard, putting the sheets into the copper to boil. She makes up the starch, stirring it first with cold water, then hot, then rinsing the sheets, and turning them through the mangle. It’s hard work, and as she turns the handle, another sudden memory assails her: her son, as a small boy, standing beside her, helping her, holding the sheets as straight as he can, while she turns the roller, feeding the sodden cotton through.

Michael.

It winds her, this memory.

After a moment, forcing herself to breathe again, she pushes it away.

The queue is a long one this morning. Evelyn can see it as she passes the entrance to the Underground, all the way around the corner and halfway down the street. She needs to cut through the line to reach the back door of the office, so she pulls the brim of her hat down and lifts up the collar of her coat. “Excuse me.”

A fair-haired man makes room to let her through, and she squeezes past him, shoulders hunched. She’s relieved when she reaches the office door; sometimes some of the repeat visitors see her, and it doesn’t do to be recognized in the street. She takes off her hat and coat and hangs them in the hall, then goes through to the cramped little kitchen. Despite the chill of the day, she opens the sticky window that gives out onto the courtyard at the back. For a moment, in the quiet, she thinks she must be the first one in, until she hears the door from the office open and Robin moving down the corridor toward her.

“Good morning.” She turns to see Robin standing in the doorway, his broad frame encased in a tweed jacket and trousers, smiling, as though he knows something pleasant about what today might have in store.

Irritating. Immediately irritating.

“Good morning.” She makes her voice as neutral as she can. There’s little point making much of an effort. He is still quite new—has only been here a week or so. There have been many Robins. They come for a month, for two; sometimes, the sturdy ones, for as many as six, armed with their smiles and their good intentions, and then, after a month or two, they leave, defeated by the monotony, the misery, and the men. One of them lasted only a day, a small, red-faced man who’d been a teacher before the war. Someone had made him cry. As he was leaving, he turned at the door and told her she was a fool, that this was worse than being in France.

Robin picks up the battered kettle and leans over the sink to fill it. “Nice day,” he says, nodding appreciatively at the open window. “Good and crisp.”

“I’m not sure that you have enough time for that.”

He looks surprised. “I suppose not.” He puts the kettle down on the other side of the sink. “How are you this morning?”

He looks so fresh and rested. So
friendly.
He actually seems as though he’d like to know.

“Fine,” she says. “I’m absolutely fine.” She leaves him standing by the window, picks up her satchel, and makes her way into the small office, where the hunched shapes of the waiting men are visible outside. The first few in the queue are slumped on the ground, asleep most probably; they will have been there for hours. When she switches on the light those who are sitting on the ground haul themselves to their feet amid a general pushing and jostling about. She can hear their muffled expletives through the glass.

As Robin enters the room behind her, she checks she has everything she needs for the morning’s work: pens and enough of each of the differently colored forms that she must fill in for each case, each comment, each complaint. Pink for officers, green for the other ranks. Then she looks at her watch. Three minutes to nine. She takes her bundle of keys from the top drawer of her desk and goes over to the door.

“Early,” says Robin.

“Yes, well.” She turns back to him. “Are you ready, or not?”

He maneuvers his tall frame around his desk, and when he’s settled in his seat, salutes her. “Ready or not.”

She rolls her eyes and opens the door.

There’s a surge from the back, and some of the sleep-dazed men at the front topple, before regaining their balance. Evelyn steps out into the chill morning air. “Any men caught making a nuisance will be asked to leave or go to the back of the queue. Is that understood?”

A bit of heckling rumbles from farther down the line.

“Is that understood?”

The heckling quiets. A few sheepish
Yes, miss
es float toward her. Evelyn goes back to her desk, feeling the familiar tug of concern for this shabby bunch of men. But compassion is a swamp. It’s better not to get stuck in it. Especially not at nine on a Monday morning. She’d never get through the week.

As her first man makes his way over toward her desk she gives him a swift look.
Amputee
. From the way his right trouser leg is pinned it looks as if it has been taken off all the way to the hip. There’s no false leg; the stump was probably too small to fit against. He takes his place on the seat before her. It’s a game with her, to guess a man’s rank before he speaks. In this post-khaki world, the extremes at either end of the scale are easy to spot, and have remained, so far as she can see, as rigid as they ever were, but the middle ground is different; it has not yet settled. The temporary gentlemen are the trickiest: those who were promoted from the ranks for their service in the field and are now stuck between society’s strata.
Temporary gentlemen:
such a mean-spirited little phrase; still, it just about sums it up. This one, she is sure, is no gentleman, temporary or otherwise; from his dress and bearing, he is a private through and through.

She dips her head and takes out the first of her forms.

When her fourth man approaches the desk, she knows that he’s trouble without looking twice. “You ready for me now, then?” he says, sitting down before her.

There’s something about him, a confidence, a posture.
Officer?
His accent is indeterminate. She lines up the form against the side of her desk.
Rank?
Difficult to say; she can’t call this one.

“Name?”

“Reginald Yates.”

“Rank?”

“Second lieutenant, as was.”

She writes “Reginald Yates” on the top of a pink form.

“And is this your first visit to the Ministry?”

“No,” he snorts. “I’ll say it’s not.”

He has a sharp face, brown hair greased tightly back from his forehead, and a neat mustache. It’s difficult to tell his age. He could be twenty-five, but he could be ten years older. There’s something restless, something bristling, about him. Evelyn is used, now, to assessing the potential danger that might come her way; a woman was attacked once, a year ago, by a man with a knife. Her last female colleague. The woman spent the night in hospital and never came back.

“I’m getting less,” he says, extracting a packet of shag from his pocket and rolling himself a quick, expert cigarette.

She slides the ashtray in front of him. “Less money, you mean?”

“Yes.” He lights up and blows smoke into the air between them.

“This happens I’m afraid, Mr.… Yates.”

His eyes find hers through the smoke.

“May I ask what your injury was?”

“No, you may not.”

At this, she sees that the sheen has come off his cockiness somewhat. “All right,” she says. “That’s up to you.”

Buttocks then, or groin; those are the ones that never want to say.

He leans forward, jabbing the air with his finger as he speaks. “The only thing you need to know is I was on seventeen bob a week, and now I’m getting less.” His accent, she notes, is slipping a little now.