Mourning Ruby (28 page)

His piano-playing has been called many things, particularly by his wife, but ‘handy’ is not one of them.

‘I’d tell the padre if I were you. He always wants to know if any of the new chaps have musical talent.’

Frizell smiles briskly, glad to have sorted out the piano-playing, glad to find a way of drawing Will into the life of the Mess. It can be tricky with the old men.

‘If he likes music,’ says Will, ‘I heard a girl play very well yesterday, not five miles from here.’

‘What, was there a concert?’

‘It was in a private house.’

But Frizell doesn’t seem interested. The gap in the
hedge approaches. There is the little plank-and-rail bridge over the stream. On one side of the stream, cricket and sleep. On the other, the smell of oil, the sound of machine-tools, the roar of engines being tested. Runways, hangars, mechanics, the Battery wireless, all the apparatus of war. Frizell steps onto the wooden bridge, waves, and vanishes behind a screen of hawthorn and cow-parsley.

There is nothing that can compare to it. First the climb. The Nieuport’s got a good rate of climb. You can feel the power of it pushing you up through the clouds. They’re wet and clammy and you can’t see anything. They press in on you and you think that the thick white tunnel is never going to end.

And then you burst out into the light.

Story development at 30 September

Dearest Rebecca,

You’ve got this far, at least. The more I write this story the more I see how much there is left to write. But I don’t want to bore you. And it may not be the kind of story you like – you may not feel for Will and Florence as I do.

And then there’s Will’s wife. I haven’t found a name for her yet. She’s pregnant and she writes letters to him two or three times a week. They’ve already been married for ten years. But he’s detached from her and maybe she is detached from him, too. They live together. They sleep in the same bed. She asks him about things that have happened at work, and she listens carefully, frowning. But then she’ll drop a little remark which makes it clear that she thinks Will should be more careful at work. He’s too outspoken, he makes it much too obvious that he’s cleverer than Mr Davidson.

Well, that may be true, but Mr Davidson is the chief accountant, so it’s not very clever. Will was passed over for promotion last time, and that doesn’t surprise her. Can’t he make the effort, for her sake if not for his own? He’s got his pride, she understands that. She knows all about his pride by this time, she should hope.

She nips out remarks that cut him, and she knows what she’s doing, and he knows it, too.

*

Rebecca, I’ve been thinking about Olya. Even Olya, as generous as she is – you can’t imagine how generous she was – she’s been changed by what happened between us. Everything got tarnished. She wanted to give me everything but I wouldn’t take it, that was the worst thing, worse than what I couldn’t give her.

I’ve disappointed her. I’ve played around with her hopes and dreams of the future. And they were hopes and dreams she had a right to have, the hope of being loved with the whole of someone’s heart. She wouldn’t even have minded if it hadn’t lasted. She could have coped with that – even if I’d been unfaithful and gone off with someone else. But not with the way it slowly became clear to her that I’d never loved her in the way she wanted, and I was never going to.

I didn’t mean to do it, but on one level I knew I was doing it. Disappointing her, I mean.

You know that smile she has, the way she gets joy from things that most people don’t bother about – giving away a bottle of fruit she’d preserved herself, or taking the neighbour’s children for an ice cream. I didn’t kill all that but I changed it.

She went to her sister more and more often. She began to criticize me. She would say harsh things but with such a painful look, as if it hurt her more to know these things and say them than it could ever hurt me to hear them.

If we’d had children they would have been her children. I can see it. They’d have had Olya’s eyes. Three pairs of Olya’s eyes, all of them looking at me, all of them baffled and accusing because I hadn’t turned out as they’d hoped. I can just see a son of mine with Olya’s eyes and it makes me shiver.

*

Will’s not a boy. He’s a man in his mid-thirties. He’s thickset and he’s got grey in his hair. He hasn’t rushed into this war straight out of childhood. He’s got an adult life to lose.

Well, this is as far as I’ve got. I’ll have more of the MS to send you soon, but here’s my outline for the rest of the section. It’s very rough.

Story Development

More on Will’s past.
Will’s father, Joseph Hazell, injured in tunnel collapse soon after Will escapes the rip. He can’t work underground again, though he recovers enough to work as gardener. Low wages & employers who make it clear they are doing him a favour by taking him on. They give him part of his wages in produce.

Will begins to steal from his father’s employers. He’s clever and doesn’t get caught. His mother knows but says nothing – uses the extra stuff as it appears, to feed her family. Will brings her black grapes when she’s ill. She brushes the bloom off them. His father both knows about the thieving and refuses to know. This goes on for years.

After five years Joe Hazell is unable to work because of his injuries. He dies at forty-three.

Will decides that when he is a man he will get himself into a job where no one can tell him what to do.
(But he will not achieve this, because there’s no money or influence to get him into a profession. Will is picked up as an exceptionally clever boy and goes to grammar school on scholarship. His father’s employers pay for his school uniform. He steals from them all the time, gladly.

But he has to leave school to take a clerical job when his father dies, because his mother needs the money. He will work at a higher level than his father and enter a different class, but he will still be an employee and work in a hierarchy where he is not in control.)

My father’s RAF greatcoat.
Mum putting it over me on winter nights, on top of the bedclothes. The weight of it. Heavy wool which I thought had a smell of the war. The way the coat would slip when I turned over in bed, as if it had a life of its own. The weight of it years after Dad died. The way I would think about the stories Mum told me about Dad.
This is important
. This must be how Will feels about his father.

What happened to the coat? Must ask Mum if she remembers. If she has still got it.

Will hates the thought of being in anyone else’s power. He hates what Madame Blanche does to Florence: her grooming of Florence.

Madame Blanche.
She will die when a German plane (Albatros?) drops a bomb wide after raid on local railway station. She’ll be wearing her lilac kid boots. She looks up and sees the Albatros but doesn’t recognize it. She
thinks it’s an English plane. She thinks that Will may be the pilot. She looks up, thinks she recognizes his face through the goggles. The plane dives on her.

(But she’s a tough practical woman, so this scene must not be loose or over-emotional in any way.)

Madame Blanche really in love with Florence. Jealous of Florence’s child, not maternal. Grooming Florence to take her place or more.

Madame Blanche walking in the attics at night, noiseless, spying on her household. Florence and Claire don’t wake.

One night when she is doing this she’ll find Will and Florence together, sleeping. They won’t wake. Clasped, but not sexual. Florence has had a bad dream. Will clasps her. She feels his arms around her as she falls back into sleep. Moonlight falls on the bed but it’s not romantic at all – in fact it is rather desolate.

? Cut the war graveyard scene opening? Have Will live? Florence and Will are together at the end, after the war? The pair of them together, back in Cornwall, at Chysauster. Claire playing hide-and-seek in and out of the ruined houses, above the bones of Will’s ancestors. Violets. Shadows of the past flattened by sun of the present moment –

No. For fuck’s sake.
This is not an idyllic love story.

*

I want to look at how things are remembered. How they are memorialized. How Florence fits Will into her history.

At the beginning she and Claire walk in the raw garden that will become one of the classic graveyards of the First World War. That raw graveyard will become manicured. It will become beautiful because so many crosses stand in line and make different patterns depending from which angle you come upon them. Fifty years later, fifty-seven years later, ninety years. It will be set aside for ever as a place for people to come and remember in a certain way.

Florence remembers Will but her life goes on, forward, into Claire. Will’s wife gives birth to a boy and tells him stories about his father. They are good stories and they present Will in a favourable light. There’s no one to contradict them and because Will is dead he won’t stand in the way of the version she chooses. And slowly, year by year, she forgets how they sat at the same table and slept in the same bed and became strangers to each other. Instead, she remembers odd moments: sponging him down when he had measles, two months after they were married. ‘Imagine a grown man getting measles!’ he whispered, and his cracked lips smiled at her. The first time he flew solo, when he flew low over the house and she ran out, thinking the noise of the engine was the end of the world.

‘And do you know, the shadow of that plane ran right over me,’ she’ll say to Will’s child.

*

Will and Florence together in Florence’s attic bed. Whispering. Clasped together after Florence’s nightmare. Complete intimacy, like an intimacy after death. Against this moment he will judge all other moments. But she will not.

Will confides in Florence. He wants to tell her all the stories of his life. He tells Florence the story of the rip and his father underground. He talks to Florence about flying. For once he is not angry with Florence because of the sexual failure between them. In the dark he talks and she listens. They are like brother and sister, the same information flowing through both of them.

He understands her withdrawal and her weariness. He clasps her.

The next day, Will’s flight. He’s afraid. Frizell has gone down in a flamer.

(By now it’s clear that Will’s relationship with Florence doesn’t and can never include sexual happiness. That’s been arrested in her, if not destroyed. Everything happened prematurely to Florence. Her first blundering, half-wanted and completely unenjoyable sexual experience gave birth to Claire. Since then she’s traded sex for Claire’s survival. Because of the sex Florence sells, Claire is warm, clothed, cherished. She has her mother close to her. She drinks chicken soup and eats fruit from the orchard. She’s surrounded by flowers, chickens, animals. Florence believes that her daughter doesn’t even notice the sound of the guns.

Will knows what has happened to Florence. But he thinks, maybe, that she’ll change. Given enough time, warmed and cherished, she’ll become again what she might have been. It’s too frightening to contemplate that she can’t change, that life at Madame Blanche’s has destroyed something in her – and that it can’t be undone –)

– So Will dies before he has to know it fully? But there has been that moment of perfect intimacy between them. He has held her and they have exchanged their stories. He loves her. He loves what she is in his life.

The graveyard. It comes back to that at the end of the story, as it was in the beginning. Claire and Florence hand in hand again, just the two of them. Will inside the ground. They walk above him but he doesn’t know it.

Claire and Florence, hand in hand. The sensation of Claire’s hand inside Florence’s, in the field of the dead. (Ruby’s hand.)

PART THREE

Flight

By the time I finish reading Joe’s story, it’s dark. Late and dark. I put the manuscript on the bed and lie back.

It’s too frightening to contemplate that she can’t change
.

I think about this for a long time, and about all the stories that cover us – me and Adam and Joe – and weigh us down. I think about Florence and Will lying together, whispering.
Like an intimacy after death
. Yes, that’s possible. I know what it means. Me and Adam in bed, when so much sex had washed through us that it seemed to leave us sexless, beyond ourselves. The night that Ruby was conceived.

She had her life and it was her own life.

Hours seem to pass but it’s still only eleven-thirty when I look at the clock. I get up, and take the piece of blue and yellow silk that Mr Damiano gave me. I spread it over the bed. I want to sleep on it tonight. I spread it out carefully, and lie down again, on the piece of fairground silk that’s been travelling with Mr Damiano all his life. I think about the first time the tent went up, and Bella’s eyes watching it billow.

There are footsteps on the stairs. It’ll be Marie. I snap out my light and Joe’s manuscript rustles as I roll over onto it. If Marie hears no sound and sees no light she’ll go away. She’ll be wanting to talk to me about her
daughter’s marriage again. Day and night mean nothing to Marie. She’s as likely to clean the house at midnight as at mid-morning. I lie still.

The footsteps stop outside my door. There’s a knock. I don’t answer or move a muscle. Another knock. I still do nothing, but suddenly, all over my body, my skin starts to burn. I know with every cell of myself that it’s not Marie.

And then his voice says my name.

25

Painted Lady

When shall we meet again, sweetheart?

When shall we meet again?