Absolute Hush Page 2

  Sissy had endured, or even enjoyed, these huggings at first but when she was about four she had begun to wriggle after a moment or so, her eyes wandering to the activity from which she had been snatched.

  After that, Elizabeth took extra care with George, determined that he would not try to evade her embraces too.

  Holding him tightly, she would tell him, ‘Oh, let poor Mummy kiss her baby,’ and she would even weep a little if George showed signs of struggle so that, in the end, George learned to slump supine in her arms, or giggle when the blowings or the kisses were especially tickly. This technique, when tried out on Sissy, had not worked. Sissy stopped wriggling but was too stiff to give Elizabeth any sensory pleasure.

  ‘Cuddling you is like cuddling a bit of barbed wire,’ Elizabeth told Sissy, and gave up and concentrated all her passion on George.

  ‘Your poor mother,’ Mrs Lovage cried once, finding Sissy crouched, pinch-faced, in the corner of the pantry, while from the kitchen Elizabeth’s coos of, ‘My lovely little dumpling! I could eat you up,’ were almost drowned by George’s laughter.

  ‘Why can’t you be loving like your brother? She’s such a good mother to you, and I don’t see you give her any gratitude.’

  Sissy, shouting, ‘I hate you, Mrs Hate-age!’ rushed out into the garden.

  ‘You’ve got to always call her “Mrs Hate-age” from now on,’ Sissy whispered to George later. ‘That’s what she wants to be called from now on.’

  ‘Why?’ asked George, round-eyed.

  ‘Because she’s married a man called Mr Hate-age, of course,’ cried Sissy with sudden inspiration.

  After a pause George asked, ‘But what’s happened to Mr Lovage?’

  ‘He was killed by the Germans – yesterday –’ said Sissy swiftly.

  ‘Oh.’ George sat thinking for a few moments then asked, ‘Do you think Mr Hate-age will give Mummy a cucumber?’

  Elizabeth always smelled of perfumed soap. This, to Sissy, was Elizabeth’s smell. No one else in the whole world, thought Sissy, smelled like this.

  ‘Where do you get it?’ Sissy asked once. The soap in the children’s bathroom was lobster-coloured and called carbolic. It did not smell at all like Elizabeth’s.

  ‘At a special shop in London. It’s been very difficult to find since the war started, so don’t you dare use it. It costs a bomb and I’ve got precious little as it is.’

  Sissy was shocked. It was as though she was being forbidden to wear her mother’s hair, fingernails, skin. ‘I wouldn’t even want to!’ she cried.

  Elizabeth turned a look of reproach on the child and muttered, ‘You just seem to hate everything about me.’

  Sissy stared at her mother and tried to work out what had happened. She said at last in a rather dry-mouthed whisper, ‘I just wanted to know its name. That’s all.’

  ‘Sandalwood,’ said Elizabeth, hurt sharpening her tone. She turned and strode away, setting the tender silk of her dress swishing.

  Elizabeth always wore nice clothes. There being a war on did not seem any reason to go around dressed like a drudge. One might be a drudge, she would tell Mrs Lovage over a cigarette in the mornings, but that was no reason to look like one.

  ‘No, certainly not, dear,’ said Mrs Lovage adjusting her headscarf, and giving her overall a tweak. ‘You always look very nice indeed, if I may say so.’

  Before the war Elizabeth had had her dresses made by a lady in the village. At the time Tim had laughed at her for filling her cupboards with so many expensive frocks.

  ‘Even if you went out every afternoon, as well as every night, you would never manage to wear them all,’ he teased.

  Now with Tim gone she did not go out in the evenings, let alone the afternoons. But the dresses were there, needing to be worn.

  ‘I can’t see any particular reason for not wearing silk taffeta in the afternoon,’ she told Mrs Lovage. ‘It cheers me up to be in something nice.’

  ‘Yes, of course, dear,’ said the charlady. ‘And you just let me clean that saucepan, ducks. You’ll ruin the nice dress if you do it.’

  ‘If I was you I wouldn’t let Mother kiss like that,’ Sissy told George. ‘You stink of her soap, and I don’t like it.’

  ‘But, but, but!’ whimpered George.

  Sissy shrugged. ‘Oh well, it’s up to you. But all I can say is I won’t hug you if you smell of her.’

  ‘Would you hug me if I smelled of treacle?’ asked George.

  ‘Don’t be silly. That’s got nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Horse manure?’ George persisted.

  ‘Silly!’ cried Sissy.

  ‘Dog’s mess?’ shouted George.

  Sissy paused, looked at him thoughtfully, then said, ‘Even dog’s mess smells better than her scent.’

  The smell of George was something Sissy had always known, milky, salty, hot. Sissy wondered if anybody else apart from George smelled like this, and sometimes would imagine herself blindfold in a room full of boys sniffing out the one that was her brother. She was certain she would recognise him.

  ‘Why does everyone want to cuddle me?’ George asked. ‘Even Mrs Lovage – I mean … what did you say her new name was now, Sis? Even she made a grab at me this morning, and told me I’d got chubby cheeks. I expect I won’t get any peace till I grow thin.’

  In desperation, he tried to only eat a single biscuit for his tea. But, after ten minutes of fierce struggle, he was forced to capitulate and polish off the rest.

  When the twins were ten or so a man appeared at the frontdoor.

  ‘Education officer,’ whispered Mrs Lovage. ‘He don’t look too well, ducks. So I’m brewing him a nice cuppa.’

  ‘I understand your children are not attending school,’ the official said to Elizabeth.

  ‘Oh! My dear!’ Elizabeth sat down at the end of the big scrubbed table, and pressed her hands to her throat.

  The inspector stared hurriedly into his steaming mug of tea, for he had noticed tears beginning to well up in Elizabeth’s eyes.

  ‘They are all I have,’ murmured Elizabeth. ‘Since my husband … went missing … over France two years ago, I have had no one but the children.’ She paused, passed her palms over her eyes. ‘I send them when I can,’ she said in a choking voice. ‘I send them when I can bear to. You don’t know what it’s like.’

  The inspector sipped his tea in silence and felt ashamed because he had been considered too ill to risk being lost over France. He coughed softly, then said, ‘They will be disadvantaged when they are grown up.’

  Elizabeth shook her head. ‘One cannot imagine things ever being the same as they were before the war.’ She sighed.

  The inspector waited, felt tired, felt he had done his duty.

  ‘I mean what will the world be like when they are grown up? Will there be a world, even?’ asked Elizabeth.

  ‘One must not lose heart,’ the man said dispiritedly. ‘You will have to make some arrangement for their education, you know. It is compulsory … ’

  Elizabeth gave him a long, close and conspiratorial look, before saying softly, ‘I need them so. Surely you can do something? … I will send them when I can bear to, I swear.’

  The inspector pressed his lips together and stood up. He felt slightly dizzy. These official visits took too much out of him.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he told her drily. ‘Perhaps you can arrange to give them some lessons at home on the days they can’t go to school. Something like that … ’

  Elizabeth followed him to the door. ‘Tim … that’s my husband … had wanted to send the little boy to Eton. But of course there’s no hope of that now. I can’t afford that any more.’

  The man nodded and walked carefully off down the drive.

  ‘I don’t mind going to school,’ said Sissy. ‘I’d quite like it, actually.’

  Elizabeth tried to clasp her daughter to her breast and said, ‘You aren’t going to abandon poor Mummy when she needs you so, are you?’

  Sissy
held herself rigid, so that after a moment or two Elizabeth gave the girl a little shove of irritation.

  ‘You are so unloving,’ she said tartly. ‘Anyway, what school could you go to? I mean you could hardly attend the village school, could you?’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Sissy.

  Elizabeth let out a light, contemptuous laugh. ‘Well, dear, only village children go to the local school. You wouldn’t like to spend all day among the village children, would you?’

  ‘At least they learn something,’ said Sissy woodenly.

  For several weeks Elizabeth made spasmodic efforts to educate her offspring, but the lessons too often ended in stormy rows with Sissy.

  ‘That’s enough!’ Elizabeth cried in the end. ‘Why should I ruin my life and make myself miserable for your sake, when you aren’t even grateful.’

  George, who had been getting on quite well with his maths, told Sissy rather crossly, ‘Why do you have to spoil everything, Sis?’

  ‘Me?’ cried Sissy outraged. The colour rushed out of her cheeks, leaving her even paler than usual. ‘Me spoil everything?’ She felt utterly betrayed.

  She felt even more betrayed when, a week later, Elizabeth announced, with just the slightest little nod of triumph, that she had arranged for Sissy to attend Elizabeth’s old school as a boarder.

  ‘Because I was there, and because of your father being missing, they have been very understanding about the fees,’ she said.

  ‘But it’s a girls’ school,’ said Sissy. ‘How can I go to a girls’ school?’

  ‘Because you are a girl,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘How can George go to a girls’ school?’ Sissy felt her skin begin to prickle as understanding dawned.

  ‘George is not going. You are going,’ said Elizabeth icily. She felt amazed that she had not long ago thought of this marvellous solution to the Sissy problem.

  ‘I won’t go without George,’ said Sissy through wooden lips.

  ‘You will,’ said Elizabeth.

  On the day Sissy was due to go to school she had to be forced, shrieking, into her school clothes by Mrs Lovage and Elizabeth. George stumbled after the car, howling, as Sissy, white-faced and horrified, was driven away.

  Sissy’s last view of her brother was of him being seized by Elizabeth. Just before the car turned the corner, she saw Elizabeth sink her face into George’s cheek and begin to kiss him.

  ‘She looks like a wolf eating a fat baby lamb,’ Sissy muttered aloud. And then began to scream again.

  There is a limit to how much screaming and crying any school can endure. After a month Elizabeth received a phone call from the headmistress who said that Sissy had not settled down at all, was upsetting the other children, and not learning anything herself.

  ‘She is extremely backward. She is so far behind the other children that she needs remedial help to catch up and we are not equipped to give such teaching at this school. But, quite apart from that, the child herself is utterly uncooperative. I do not feel that we can get anywhere with her.’

  Elizabeth wept and described how hard life was for a widow. The headmistress said she would give it one more try.

  But it was really hopeless. Before the term was finished, Sissy came triumphantly home.

  Neither Sissy nor George went to school at all after that. The inspector submitted a report describing the children as educationally subnormal, and a lady who specialised in the teaching of such children came once a week to check that Elizabeth was keeping them to the mark. Elizabeth made great efforts and even Mrs Lovage, spurred on by pity for her employer, heard the children’s tables sometimes and let the polishing go a bit.

  Sissy, after the shock of the boarding school episode, made violent efforts to be co-operative, and pinched her mouth tight a dozen times each lesson to prevent herself from saying things that would upset her delicate but vital relationship with her mother.

  Across the road from the Plague House was an acre of Nissen huts in which lived nearly a hundred young airmen whose songs and shouts would sometimes be heard in the night. Tim had been attached to this base and flown his last flight from here, and Elizabeth knew many of the men there because of him and would ask them over sometimes. The children knew several of them, too, for the young men would often sneak, uninvited, up to the house for a swim in the moat, or a skating session, according to the season.

  George and Sissy had, however, never before met the tall young airman who appeared one day while they were doing geography.

  He came into the nursery, smiled, ran his fingers through George’s hair and patted Sissy on the cheek.

  Elizabeth, looking flushed, said, ‘This is Mummy’s new friend. His name is Teddy, children.’

  ‘Good morning, George and Sissy,’ said Teddy.

  ‘Teddy was a teacher before the war,’ Elizabeth explained. ‘So he will help you both with your lessons. It’s not very comfy at the airbase so I have told him he can stay in our house, as we’ve got so many rooms. That’s all right, isn’t it?’ She smiled diplomatically at the children.

  Sissy gazed at Teddy thoughtfully, while Elizabeth watched her, and seemed nervous.

  ‘Good morning, Teddy,’ Sissy said at last. ‘Yes, we have got lots of rooms.’

  ‘Uncle Teddy,’ said Elizabeth. ‘You must call him Uncle Teddy.’

  Sometimes Teddy would become irritable and snap at the children if they made the least mistake. This phase would be followed by Teddy giving them long passages of homework to do. He would tell them, ‘This should keep you going till I get back.’ At this stage, Sissy noticed, there was always a little nerve jumping in the corner of his eyelid. Then he would vanish for a day, two days, three perhaps. And return with dark rings under his eyes, but flushed and happy, as though he had endured some awful ordeal and survived.

  Once, on handing Sissy three pages on trade winds ‘To have off by heart when I get back,’ he added, through rather tight lips, ‘If I get back.’

  In the days before his departures he would snap at Elizabeth as well, and once the children heard her shout, ‘I don’t care if you are a bloody hero! You can get out of my house if you are going to talk to me like that,’ to which Teddy yelled something which ended with the words, ‘I’ll kill you!’

  Sissy was shocked, but George said calmly, ‘She’s always saying she’s going to kill herself, so she probably doesn’t mind about dying as much as other people would. Me, for instance.’

  ‘He is flying over France, like your father,’ Elizabeth told the children. ‘I think he is losing his nerve.’

  During the days Teddy was away, Elizabeth would devote herself wildly and spasmodically to the cuddling of George, snatching him up without notice, so that he took to slinking furtively round the house trying to avoid being spotted.

  ‘It’s OK sometimes, when I’m not busy,’ he confided in Sissy. ‘But all the time like this makes life really impossible. I wish Teddy would come back. She doesn’t hug me half so much when he’s here.’

  Sissy, after about a year of not being embraced by her mother, began to hang around her, trying, after their long careful truce, to awaken some physical contact between them again. Once she stood firmly in her mother’s path as though offering herself, but Elizabeth brushed her aside saying, ‘Don’t keep getting in my way,’ before hurrying on with a whistle of silk frock and tick of good shoes.

  Sissy stood frozen for some moments after, her mouth dry, her heart beating with dismay.

  She could not understand this new desire to be embraced.

  ‘Give me a kiss, Georgie,’ she would say, trying to waylay the boy among the apple trees and he would briefly extend his cheek, obviously anxious to get the matter over as soon as possible. His cheeks felt hard and smoky nowadays, Sissy thought, and were losing that soft yieldingness of chubby babyhood.

  George had become obsessed with fire. During the winter he was constantly poking the logs, or burning things in the open grates.

  ‘I wonder what hair burns like,
’ he would say, and chop off a chunk of his and have it in flames before anyone could stop him. Hardly anything in the house was safe from George’s scorchings. His desire to see chintz burn had produced brown holes along the hems of the drawing-room curtains, and his efforts at melting lead had created gaps round the ancient window glasses.

  ‘I’ll eat a hundred aspirins and die and be free of all my troubles,’ mourned Elizabeth, surveying the scorches on a previously very nice Victorian papier mâchétray.

  ‘Did you know that Hindu widows burn themselves when their husbands die,’ George informed his mother when they were working on the geography of India. ‘Teddy told me.’

  If flames were visible, George was unable to put his attention to anything else, so that in the end Teddy instructed that no fire be lit in the nursery while the children were having their lessons. Because of George’s obsession, the trio was forced to work huddled under eiderdowns.

  ‘You smell so smoky, I bet if a cannibal ate you you’d taste like bacon,’ Sissy told George.

  When the summer came George lit a bonfire with Teddy’s cigarette lighter.

  ‘Did you steal it from his pocket?’ Sissy asked suspiciously.

  George smiled and did not reply. The little heap of dried rushes that had once been a duck’s nest flared up with a wonderful crackling and a perfume of menthol.

  ‘Don’t you dare do that,’ Elizabeth cried, rushing to the moat and waving her arms so that the silk of her blue dress shimmered in the sunshine. ‘In this dry summer you’ll set the garden on fire.’

  Because they had had no gardener since the beginning of the war, the long grass in the Lady Walk was waist high.

  ‘I’ll get Teddy to whack you when he comes back if you ever do anything like that again.’

  ‘If he comes back,’ said George softly, so that Elizabeth, shouting across the khaki water, could not hear him.