‘This is for you, dear. For your birthday.’ She smiled. ‘I had it on my dressing table, do you remember? The green velveteen cloth underneath and then this runner of lace. I put my tortoiseshell tray next to it, with my two tortoiseshell brushes – the hairbrush and the clothes brush – and my comb.’
The lace floated on my palms. When I shut my eyes I could hardly feel it. In a shaft of interior light I saw the open doorway to her bedroom, the brushes gleaming in the morning sun, and through the sun came a sweet caramel odour, because downstairs in the kitchen Jennie had let the milk catch in the pan.
‘Mother, I’ve had my birthday. It’s ages till the next one.’
Her chin quivered with impatience. ‘I don’t care. I want to know if you remember this lace.’ Her fingers dug into the crook of my elbow. ‘Do you?’
Her eye sockets were an alarming lavender. She was wearing a thick dressing gown over a draggling skirt. Her calves stuck out as thin as young coppice poles. As I looked, she belched surreptitiously and rubbed her hand over her stomach. She had been bilious frequently of late.
‘Mummy, I don’t think you’re quite well—’
‘It’s simply indigestion, a little bit of indigestion, that’s all.’
She was far too prompt.
*
Dr Bell had large, hairless hands of the palest pink, with fingers so fat they appeared to have no knuckles. He laid Mother on his couch and placed the hands over her stomach. One by one, and then in pairs, the fingers gently dug until Mother gave a yelp and drew up her knees. The nurse produced a shining bowl and Mother raised her head to spit into it.
The doctor patted her shoulder. ‘You may rest there on your side, Mrs Calvert, while I ask your clever daughter if she knows what the pylorus is.’
‘Sounds like a kind of snake.’ I spoke unsteadily. Here in the clean room, with its white-sheeted couch and shining bowls, Mother seemed far more wretchedly sick.
‘Ha, ha.’ Dr Bell smiled. ‘Not bad. The pylorus is a ring of muscle designed to keep the stomach closed. With certain digestive problems the pylorus, or pyloric sphincter –’ his fingers bunched like a hand of bananas ‘– goes into spasm, like so –’ the fingers rippled unnervingly ‘– and the result is … nausea!’ The last word spoken triumphantly, as if he’d performed a magic trick. His fingers were white where he had bent them.
My mother was leaning her head on her hand, a whimsical smile on her face. As I watched, her lids fluttered: she was preening at the doctor. Even in these circumstances she had found a way to be embarrassing.
‘Mother, for heaven’s sake listen!’ I hissed.
Dr Bell lifted his head. ‘Nurse, please fetch Mrs Calvert a cup of tea. Miss Calvert and I will sit next door for a chinwag.’
‘The mass is the size of a grapefruit,’ he said. ‘And she’s emaciated. How did it come to this?’
I turned my shoulders away from him. ‘We aren’t big eaters,’ I said finally. ‘And we have to … we both wrap up warm. I couldn’t have seen anything. And she’s never complained!’
Dr Bell sighed, then smeared his bulky fingers over his shiny black-clad knees. ‘Well. I’ll send her to the Borough Hospital in Southampton.’
I had half a crown in my pocket, and nothing else until next week. ‘How on earth will we pay?’
He soothed me. ‘There is provision at the Borough. A board, for funding cases like these. I must advise you to prepare your mother – and yourself, for that matter. We’re not miracle workers.’
‘Look at her. I can’t prepare her!’
Dr Bell’s eyes were blue, watery and devoid of offence. ‘I’m sure you’ll do your best, Miss Calvert.’
Mother became very excited at the prospect of the Borough. Immured in damp, cold and silence as she was, her main entertainment walking to a village where no one spoke to her and whose shops she had no money to patronize, the hospital represented cleanliness, warmth, bustle and, above all, kind people – people who’d take notice of her, care for her, and address her without sneering or poking their tongues in their cheeks. For my part, I was chiefly interested in the possibility of food. When I mentioned it, Mother licked her lips. ‘I’m quite sure they’ll serve liver,’ she said. ‘It’s so nutritious.’ She’d taken to rubbing the top of her stomach tenderly, with a certain amount of pride.
‘You won’t be able to eat before the operation, Mother.’
She snorted, and I looked up. She was smiling at me, her proper smile, not the crooked smirk of recent times, and I saw for an instant the woman she had been years ago, when Daddy was our rock and mainstay and her true love. ‘Goodness, Ellen. That will make a change.’
‘Miss Yarnold wants you,’ said a classmate, a girl called June Broad, as we buttoned our coats to leave school for the day. June gave me the usual up-and-down stare that she and her friends had now perfected, as if to say: What an object. They were all growing busts, June and the other girls, and June’s overflowed the tops of her brassiere cups like dough rising from a bread tin.
‘Did Miss Yarnold say why?’
June shook her head. Her curls were tight today, and they wobbled against her slabs of cheeks. ‘But she doesn’t look pleased.’ Looking very pleased herself. There was very little wrong in June’s world today.
Miss Yarnold was sitting behind her desk, sideways on the chair, lacing her boots. She waited until the boys had gone before doing this, because she needed to flip her skirt up over her knees. Alone of all the women in the village, she favoured these voluminous skirts, full, of an uncertain length. She raised her head, cheeks pink. The room was now empty save for us. ‘Ellen, I hear that your mother’s ill.’
I nodded. ‘The operation’s on Thursday. Dr Bell says there’s a mass.’ I hadn’t spoken that word to anyone. My eyes burned, and I closed them. I felt her hand on my arm.
‘I’m so sorry, my dear.’
‘Thank you,’ I blurted, and opened my eyes just enough to hurry from the room.
I swung through the doorway and clattered down the path. I ran home, faster and faster down the lanes, sobbing and splashing through the puddles, until I was throwing open our gate, with a taste of metal in my throat from panting so hard, and Mother was at the door saying, ‘Whatever is it, whatever is the matter?’
‘Nothing.’ I scrubbed at my eyes. ‘The wind was in my face. I went at a gallop!’
And she suddenly laughed. ‘Oh, Ellen, honestly, you are a card!’
We sat side by side in the front of the bus to Southampton. It was young Mr Staveley driving: he’d not long passed his test, he told us, and took a good run-up at the hills. It amused us, how he leaned into the corners as he turned the wheel. He was lame from birth, and put his whole heart into the driving.
It was mild now and the blackthorns dripped in the sunshine.
I thought of the last time Mother and I had come together to Southampton like this, in quest of Edward and his money. One of his recent letters had contained a photograph of a tall young man with the sun almost bleaching out his head and shoulders. ‘Like a sea god,’ Mother had said, and stroked the face. I didn’t care about the photograph. Edward was alive in every sentence of those letters. I took out the last one and read it aloud to her now.
‘Dearest Ma and Ellen,’ I read, adopting the usual slightly gruff tone for verisimilitude. ‘Today at five in the morning we went through the Sunda Strait. Steaming hot, needless to say. My cat jumped overboard after a flying fish, poor soul. Probably the best fate for him, since the Skipper has ordered a muster of ship’s cats at first light. He will line them up on the quarterdeck and keep the best three mousers. All others will be given their papers and sent ashore.’
I stopped for Mother to giggle in her usual place, but she sat quietly, with a smile, staring out of the window. ‘Go on, Ellen.’