Anticipation (17 page)

The week after that, before they’ve even had time to print the casualty lists, Sarah can’t be frightened for anyone else, because the doodlebugs start coming. Death stuttering from the sky like a dodgy motorbike, and it’s a horrible noise, but you want it to go
on and on, because if you hear it stop, you know it’s you it’s come for.

A letter arrives from Eddie, who says the French countryside isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and you can’t get a decent beer and the girls aren’t as pretty as his sisters and Kate, and he saw Will on D-Day+5, and not to worry too much if they don’t hear anything else for a while because everyone over there is awfully busy.

Sarah stops going out much, because being engaged takes all the fun out of dancing. So she isn’t there with Ivy the night the doodlebug hits the ventilation shaft of the club in Wardour Street, and she doesn’t know why Ivy isn’t at work the next day until Mr Higgins the chemist shows her the paper.

The day after that, there’s a postcard from Brussels waiting for Sarah when she gets home, and the handwriting means nothing to her, but it turns out to be Will’s, and it says he’s safe and not much else, not even
I love you.

Sarah continues to write to Will every week, sitting down in the kitchen with Betty, who now has a new fiancé in the air force, and May, who is not quite nineteen and in love with an army captain. It would be nice to get a reply, like Betty and May, but Sarah tries not to be cross, because it would be awful to be cross with the dead, and perhaps he’s lying somewhere with an injured head, not knowing his own name. May says that happens in hospitals all the time. Or he’s in enemy hands, like Charlie Lucas from Number 14 and Jenny Wyatt’s brother. The Germans eating the week’s sugar ration she used to bake his rock cakes.

One night in December, Sarah walks past a crater where the fish and chip shop used to be, and among all the wrappers and brick dust blowing about there are other papers.
Do you still think
you’re winning the war?
they say. And for the first time, she realises that she does, and the Germans must think so too, and really, they should know. The little British flags on the
Daily Mail
map will be at the Rhine any day now. After that, it’ll just be mopping up. They’re going to win, and it’s going to be over.

All this mess will be cleared away, and they’ll go back to being the way they were, except with shiny new bits. The old things will
matter again. Weddings, and what the neighbours think. Doing things in the right order. There’ll be years and years to be lived. And there’ll be men who don’t come home.

As she turns into Kings Close, Sarah sees that her mother and Betty are right. Which is why, four months later, she hands Will Biggs’ baby to a woman from York on platform twelve at King’s Cross Station.

T
here aren’t many people at Nanny Biggs’ funeral. The orderly from the nursing home. The man from the unit next door. A posse of five unknown upright old men from the RSA, to which Grandpa William apparently goes, though he’s never said a word to us about it.

We bring along a nice bouquet from the Southland branch of the Printers’ Union and put it on top of the coffin. It’s less frightening than I thought it would be, that too-shiny box. There’s no proof at all that Nanny Biggs is really inside it.

Maggie looks around at the empty rows of folding chairs. ‘She didn’t know anyone,’ she explains, to herself mainly, and I wonder how that could be, after sixty-three years in the world. I think you’d have to try quite hard. But maybe it’s not that difficult after all. Maybe you just go on, and all the people get left behind you.

The service is brief and not at all like the ones on TV. Grandpa William, hands on his knees, pays close attention to every word, as if there might be a test on it at the end. I feel sad for him, but he’s not the sort of man you touch, so Maggie and I just sniffle a bit, sitting there on either side. No one else gets up to speak. We don’t say any prayers.

The one decent thing Grandpa William can’t do, it seems, is cry. Even when they start playing ‘We’ll Meet Again’ as we trundle Sarah out between an RSA guard standing to attention.

But there’s a moment — is there? — outside when I accidentally catch his eye, and it’s as if the blinds have slipped and I can see inside, and it’s just a derelict shell, scorched brick and matchsticks. Chimney bones and shredded curtains. And no reason — none at
all — why the wall that is William Biggs should have stood up all these years. Or maybe I’m just imagining it. What do you expect to see in an old man’s eyes?

They drive Nanny Biggs off to wait her turn at the crematorium. In the foyer of the funeral home, the veterans drink whisky.

When they’re finished, Maggie and I take Grandpa William home. We tread around him carefully for the rest of the day, and it’s funny, in retrospect, to think we thought there was anything we could do that might upset him.

The next morning is a bit early, you might think, to start sorting out Nanny Biggs’ things. But we need to get back by Monday, so we don’t have very much time. Maggie has a column due. ‘Dear Dinah’ readers can’t wait.

I find it in an old white leather handbag. Not locked in the trinket box which, in the absence of its key, Grandpa William flicks open with a screwdriver and potters off again without waiting to see what’s inside. Just zipped up in the lining pocket of a patent clutch on the top shelf of the wardrobe. The last place, really, you’d look. But that’s what it comes down to, in the end. Every crevice of your life fair game for the fingers of sulky teenagers, for strangers and relations. Never keep a secret. Because once you’re dead, nothing’s yours any more. It all belongs to them.

An aerogramme that begins
Dear Madam
, and then gets right to the point.

I believe you are my mother.

Was Sarah alone when she read it? Or was Will Biggs sitting there across the breakfast table, buttering his toast? Nothing between them but a sheet of blue paper so thin that if he looked up, he might see right through it to the words on the other side. In the bright sun of Sarah’s new world, on a warm southern summer’s day for carrying white handbags.

But no, he can’t have been. Because as soon as she opened it, the photograph would have slipped out, as it did just now. And he wouldn’t have needed to ask who it was. A slightly different
arrangement of the same parts, a variant answer to Sarah x Will. It’s all of us. It’s Maggie.

What do you do with something like this? When Grandpa William walks in, you stuff it in your handbag.

If you’re Sarah Harding, you leave it there, zip it away down deep where you don’t have to see it again. Pour yourself a gin and pretend it was just another nightmare.

And if you’re Maggie?

You whip it out again, as soon as he’s gone, and read it over and over. Because it’s a short letter, and there are a lot of things to think, and they won’t all fit at the same time. And when you do put it away at last, it’s not because you’ve finished with it. Any fool, looking on, could see you’re just getting started.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she hisses at me, ‘say anything about this. Understand? Not to anyone. Especially your grandpa.’

Her name is Vivien. Maggie’s sister. Like the film star. And I wonder which of her hopeful mothers gave her that name.

On Sunday, as we negotiate the right-angle bend into Tarras, I look across and see that Maggie’s crying. Big fat silent tears that must be making it difficult for her to see the road. I’ve never seen her do this before, and it seems an alarming loss of control, like wetting your pants in public. I decide it’s kindest not to notice.

I don’t understand, back then. Not yet. We hardly ever saw Nanny Biggs, and Maggie didn’t seem to enjoy it very much when we did, so I’m not sure why she’s suddenly so upset. Maybe it’s Grandpa William. Leaving him up there all by himself. Really alone now, not just pretending.

The hills close in around us again. I watch the Clutha swirl between red branches, and I don’t know why, but it comes to me that Maggie is crying for us. Me and her, snagged up in sadness. And maybe Vivien too, still out there somewhere, waiting for a reply. Her hopes resting, now, in the rear footwell of our car, transferred to another handbag.

It’s a beautiful day here on the island. The kind you don’t often get in a northern winter. Not crisp, but golden and soft, like a windfall apple in long wet grass. Ella’s keen to get outside, and I’m tempted to leave Maggie where she is for a while, because back in Invercargill in ’84, random bouts of weeping aside, she’s actually quite happy.

For starters, Sarah Harding makes a lot more sense to her now. All those days with Evelyn at Kings Close. The endless afternoon naps, the not remembering, the never quite meeting your eye. The bitterness in every birthday cake, the sting in each school prize.

Plus, I suspect, it’s more the idea of a mother that Maggie misses. And at last she’s free to construct the one she wants, without the real thing wavering in, gin in hand, to stub a fag butt through her bubble.

But most importantly, there’s her very own sister to search for. We’re both excited. It shouldn’t even take long, since we have her address. True, it’s nearly twenty years old, but Kenton Hall doesn’t sound like the sort of place a family leaves in a hurry. We look at Vivien’s photograph, Maggie and I, and we can’t feel too sorry for her, because imagine growing up in a place like that, all honeyed stone and hahas. Like ugly sisters, we count the fairy tale windows behind her head and sigh. I bet Vivien had a pony.

Ah yes — Maggie in 1984. Motherless, but not alone. Hot on the trail of someone to halve her troubles, a heart built to the very same plan as her own. Hoping her big sister might know how to use it. Even on those days she does feel unhappy, it’s okay now — she has a licence. Maggie-whose-mother-just-died. You don’t have to hide that kind of sadness. It’s the kind they bring you cakes for.

Ella noses my elbow. She’s quite right, it’s a good time to stop. Waiting for Vivien to write back. My mother suspended in autumn light. The leaves still on the trees.

Jake’s back today. From the fuss Ella made, you’d think he’d been off up the Amazon for a year, not for a week in Melbourne. Still I have to admit it was odd, him not being here, part of our routine. The grind of his outboard swinging in to the jetty steps.
The rhythm of hammer and power tools I’ve come to expect as the soundtrack to my day.

He brought me a bottle of duty-free Scotch. A really good single malt, not the cheap rubbish Grandpa William drank. If the sky stays this clear tonight, it might be cold enough to drink it. No frost, of course. Just icy stars, and a white mist blanketing the water. A night for forty-year-old whisky and flannel sheets.

But right now there’s still some kick in this midwinter sun, and it’s warm outside — warm enough to be spring, if you ignore the long shadows and heavy grass, the sullenness of the garden. I follow Ella round to the back of the house, behind the sheds and down to the old vegetable patch where she hunted cabbage whites all summer, but must now make do with the flash of a thrush’s breast among the rotting stems — the closest she’ll ever get, here, to a rabbit.

The vegetable patch is mostly weeds these days, but something of the spirit of self-sufficiency lives on. Despite years of benign neglect, odd things continue to spread and seed, rogue marrows and feral carrots popping up in the unlikeliest of places. You have to admire their perseverance. I clear the ground around those I find, give them a bit of space and light. Water them, if I remember. You could hardly call it gardening — I don’t have the discipline for that. I suppose I could get someone in to restore the whole thing, but I know perfectly well I’d never look after it, so really, there’s not much point in starting.

There’s a rustle up ahead and Ella’s off, a bolt of blue, into the fennel. She backs out a second later, wet and disappointed, and starts heading for the boatshed.

‘No,’ I tell her firmly. We’ve been down there once today already.

I think I’ll make lunch for Jake. Just to say welcome back. And thank him for the whisky.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘I’m never going to finish this job if you keep feeding me like this.’

I spear my last two fusilli and wonder if he’s joking. Maybe he’s sick of all the interruptions. Finishing the boatshed does seem to be taking a long time. I’m glad, now I come to think of it, that he’s not getting paid by the hour.

‘This silverbeet’s good. You grow it?’

I shrug. ‘It sort of grew itself.’

He grins at me. ‘Feral silverbeet, eh? Who knew?’

‘I’ll make us a coffee.’ I stop. ‘Unless you’re in a hurry to get back?’

‘Nah.’ He stretches back in his chair, arms over his head, eyes closed, his face turned up to the slanting sun. Lean as Ella, and just as laid-back. I wouldn’t be surprised if I came back to find him draped elegantly over my outdoor sofa, dozing in a patch of sun.

I turn the coffee machine on, and think it’s a nice feeling, knowing a builder I trust. That if something needs doing, I’ve got just the guy. I should really try to hold onto him if I can. Never let a good tradesman go. It’s just common sense. Every developer knows that.

But I think it’s too late. The house is done. I needed to find Jake four years ago, when it was all cubicles and prayer rooms. There’s nothing for him to do now, unless I start over again. Rearrange the plan, pull down old walls and put up new ones.

I look around at my house, and I don’t want to do that. There’s nothing, really, I want to change. Not that there aren’t mistakes, but they don’t seem worth undoing. I like what I’ve made here.

We’re going to tell Grandpa William. Of course we are. He has a right to know. Maggie just wants to wait until we know a bit more, so we can tell him the whole thing at once. All of Vivien’s story.

Which turns up on a Saturday afternoon in May that can’t be mistaken for anything but winter. It must be after Opening Weekend, because the lake in Queens Park is rowdy with hiding mallards — I’ve been hanging out there with Annabel after netball, smoking and striking Madonna-esque poses on the bronze seals, trackpants under our skirts.

When I get home, I find that Maggie, caught up in the yoke of a tricky Fair Isle, hasn’t been out to check the mail.

‘Two letters from England,’ I tell her, nonchalantly putting them down on the dining room table.

‘Two?’ The big circular needle hesitates. ‘Does it say who they’re from?’

I shake my head.

Maggie’s fingers pick up the pace. ‘I’ll just finish this row.’

One of the envelopes looks official — A4, heavy and white and franked, with our address typed on it. The other is small and thin and blue and says
par avion,
and the handwriting looks a little bit like Nanny Biggs’, if you use your imagination.

Maggie, stickler for duty that she is, opens the boring one first. I watch her eyes move over the page. ‘What is it?’