City of Hope (27 page)

Charles had opened the door of my heart, only a few inches, but as he went I had carelessly left it ajar.

For days there was nothing but the pain. “John, John . . .” His name repeated itself over and over and over again—the only word I could say, could think. There were no “what ifs,” no regrets, no memories, only the four letters of his name—“John, John . . .”—speaking them out loud, murmuring them through my breath, calling him back, bringing him into the room. My John, not some other. “John is dead, dead, dead and he is never coming back.”

Noisy, painful tears hammered through me, burning my eyes and salting my skin to a mottled red; shuddering sobs that made the bedhead clatter against the wall. The whole house heard me, but I did not care. There was nothing else—nobody else but him. Nothing but the raw, untethered hugeness of this terrible emotion.

Bridie ran in shortly after it started.

“What's this racket?”

“It's John,” I said. I wanted her to know I was not crying over Charles.

She came and sat next to me on the bed and stroked my head as I put my face to her bosom.

“There there, girleen,” she said. “Let it all out now there, like a good girl.”

I did not move from the bed that day, or the day after, or the day after that, until I lost count.

Bridie brought me up meals and kept everyone away from me. She did not judge me, or chide me for not eating her food, or nag me to pull myself together. In that sense she helped reassure me that what I was going through was the natural route of a widow's grief. Although it felt anything but natural.

I could see, feel, hear and taste nothing but the sharp bitterness of my loss. My eyes would well up, my jaw tingle and my mouth fill with water. As the days went on, my tears lost their jagged edge and became automatic, inevitable, commonplace. With that familiarity the pain changed shape and became a dull ache.

I emerged from my cave of crying and came back downstairs, but the color of the world looked different. The carousel had stopped spinning and its bright, whirring colors had dulled to a still monochrome. Everything looked ordinary and gray: the faces of my friends, new exoticisms they had introduced into the shop, the garish autumn leaves that littered the porch—all were reduced to a dull, joyless symptom by my depressed mood. Everything was an effort. Getting dressed, washing myself, putting on the water to boil for my tea—even the smallest, most everyday actions were weighed down with my all-but-crippling sadness. The crying had stopped, and I was coping. But that was all I was doing.

It seemed that, while to all the world I looked alive, something vital inside me had died. Not my love for John; that ember still burned gently at the base of my soul. It was my love for this life that was gone—my interest in being where I was, or anywhere that was not with him.
I could die tomorrow and join him,
I thought.
If I were to die, what would it matter?
Some days this bleak thought was the very thing that got me out of bed and down the stairs: the ludicrous idea that I might get run over by a streetcar or be murdered in an alley—that I might die, and see my darling John again.

Everyone was glad to have me back. The women cautiously re-involved me in the shop and the running of the house, anxious that I should feel neither left out nor under pressure that they could not cope without me. Bridie managed their concerns, presiding over my recovery with her matronly assertiveness. For once I was happy to let somebody else manage me, and was glad of her bossiness.

“You might bring some dinner home from the store tonight, Maureen? Save us cooking. Anna—I'd be grateful if you would get in early tomorrow and start the ovens. I want to stay here and help Ellie get the washing started.”

I couldn't take charge of anything, and Bridie took over, while still giving the impression that I was holding the reins. She knew I'd want them back. She made sure all the other women were in the shop all day, and she stayed at home with me on some pretense of helping get back into the swing of my work. In reality I wasn't doing the washing, nor did I have any interest in the house, the shop or anything beyond simply getting myself from one end of the day to the other without losing my mind. Everybody knew that I had had a kind of emotional breakdown after Charles left, but Bridie made sure they were all put straight that it had been a bona fide illness brought on by exhaustion and overwork: “Thanks to taking it upon herself to offer charity to a bunch of feckless, ungrateful vagrants,” was how I think I heard her describe it to one of the men, who had the temerity to ask after me one evening as I lay upstairs in my bed, “who saw fit to thank her by starting up a union!”

The old woman made sure that I got up every day, and craftily kept me busy with small tasks so that I did not draw to a complete halt. She treated me with the careful patience reserved for a child, and I followed her around the house like a clueless acolyte. Bridie would give me a pile of three pillowcases to iron, instruct me to set milk and sugar on the table for tea, to roll the pastry out for a pie, to fold the dish towels into a neat pile and to clear out a cutlery drawer for sorting.

“Why don't you sit down there and read the paper for a few minutes while I make us a sandwich,” she said. “Read out the crossword clues to me, why don't you?”

Bridie had never done a crossword in her life, but I was afraid to offend her by pointing this out. I read out two clues, one of which came to me as I was asking. The following day I read two items from the news section, and the day after that I took an unopened letter from Katherine and placed it on my desk upstairs.

Day by day, bit by bit, Bridie introduced me back into my own life. I started running the shop again. I colored my hair a deep brown and had it cut back into my old bobbed style. I bought myself a smart new coat, and instructed Matt in various small improvements to the house: a doweling rail under the sink, presses to be painted in the scullery, and a washing line on a pulley system for the bathroom upstairs.

Matt's relief that I had emerged from my “illness” was palpable. Those first few weeks after Charles left, Matt irritated me so much that I could not bear to be in his company. He was, I knew, worried for my welfare, but I found his concern fawning, his affection stifling. He fussed about, pulling my chair back out before I sat down to dinner, fixing a cardigan about my neck, jumping up and down to fetch me salt or to fill my glass with water, and all but lifting it to my lips for me. In those few days I understood that Matt was in love with me. He treated me like a precious, delicate orchid—yet he only made me feel like a cripple.

As the weeks passed, life returned to normal. Bridie snapped back to her gruff self, and I gathered back my poise and assertiveness, although happiness remained a distant relative that I could not imagine seeing again.

Then one afternoon I found myself alone with Nancy's baby, Tom.

Nancy had turned out to be a natural mother and, mindful of my own losses, I had been careful not to get overinvolved with the infant.

For all that, he was no stranger to me and I easily agreed to watch the charming, bubbly, fat baby while she ran down to the shop to collect some groceries for our evening meal.

As soon as Nancy left, the baby began to cry. Tom was less than three months old and still nursing. I wrapped him up in his blanket and bundled him downstairs and out onto the porch, thinking the cool autumn air would settle him. But he continued to cry, his mewling giving way to an almighty screech as I stepped outside. I walked him around, jogging him and shaking him gently, trying to find a motion to comfort him, but his cries just rose into a continuous siren of objection—“Mwaah, mwaah, mwaaaah . . . ha, ha, ha, ha”—until it seemed he had lost his breath in all the sobbing and might choke. I started to panic.

The baby's screaming was so persistent and ear-piercing that I worried the neighbors might think he was being killed. So I went back into the house and up to Nancy's room. Perhaps if I put him back down into his cot, he would settle. But he thrashed wildly, his fat legs pumping at the side of the cot that he had almost outgrown, until I thought it would topple over.

I was desperate. I knew I could not feed him, so I picked him up firmly and held him to my beating chest. He howled out as he felt the rough wool of my working shirt, so I quickly unbuttoned it. He grunted and squawked, his tiny hands thrashing at my breasts, searching out milk.

“Ssshh,” I hushed, pushing air through my teeth so that it sounded like waves on a pebbled beach, “sssssssshh.” I rocked from side to side and held him close to me, asserting my calm strength over his petulance. After a few seconds his wail went down to a whimper. Still holding him, I lay down on my side on Nancy's unmade bed.

I could smell the bitter tang of mother's milk from the sheets as I held my lips to his silky scalp and whispered, “Ssssh—ssshhh, little baby.”

After a while his limbs loosened in mine and his face softened into sleep. I continued to lie there, letting his short breath warm my neck, his wet mouth pressed open against my bare skin, vaguely sucking, and I drank in the exclusive baby scent of his velvety head.

This baby is alive, I realized, and so am I. I am still here to comfort him in this moment, to smell his skin—a fleeting joy, a borrowed pleasure, a temporary taste of the sweetness of existence—but for all that, I am still here, in this moment. John is elsewhere, not here with me, not now, not in this world. He is in my heart and my head, but we occupy different worlds. I am alive, and I am here—holding a child. This still moment of breath-on-breath is all I have, all that matters. This is not John's breath, nor the breath of the child we longed for, but nonetheless it is a beautiful taste of humanity—a dream so small it is barely worth dreaming. A moment worth being alive for.

When Nancy came back, she said she found Tom and I entwined, fast asleep on the bed.

She put a blanket over us both and went downstairs to make a start on the dinner with Bridie.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
ONE

“Surprise!”

I had thought I would never see her again, but there she was. Sheila, standing on my porch.

“Aren't you going to invite me in?”

I opened the door fully and walked through it myself onto the porch, turning my back to her. I was still mad. No, that wasn't true. So much had happened since our falling-out that I had all but forgotten about it, but as soon as I saw Sheila—glamorous as ever in a matching day-suit, hair coiffed, makeup perfectly applied—I felt like slamming the door in her face.

The shallow-minded, vain little madam had abandoned me in my time of need. I had real friends now: good, warm people. I had moved on. I should kick her as she had kicked me—tell her to march back to wherever she came from and leave me alone. Anyway, what in the hell was she doing here?

And therein lay Sheila's power. What
was
she doing here? Much as I was furious with her, I was also desperately curious to hear what adventure had brought her to my door.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked, without turning around.

“It's a long story,” she said. “Will you give me time to tell it?”

She had interpreted my frosty greeting correctly and was at least pretending to be contrite. I took a packet of cigarettes out of my pocket and lit one for us both.

“Sit down,” I said, nodding toward the bench.

She fussily cleared it of leaves, flicking her gloves across it before sitting down. Adopting the affectations of a lady, when she was no such thing. God, she was infuriating!

“Ellie, you were right. Eric and Geoff were complete cads. How I wish I had listened to you.”

She looked over, her eyes wide and coy, anxious to appease me. I gave her no response, so she continued with her story.

“As you know, Eric and I hit it off—but it turned out he was a fly-by-night, and Geoff was the gentleman of the two.”

I huffed sarcastically.

“All right—Geoff was the one with the money.”

That was more like it.

“What can I say—he took me on, but I quickly discovered he was married. Can you imagine?” She spread her hands in shock.

“No, I can't imagine—but I'm sure you can.” Despite everything, I was enjoying myself. “So you milked him for as long as you could, then went looking for more money and he dumped you?”

She puffed hard on the cigarette like a laborer.

“He had me on an
allowance
. Can you imagine the humiliation of that, for a woman like me who is used to spending as she pleases?”

“Indeed,” I said, “it must have been dreadful for you.”

“Oh, and
not
a generous one at that—barely enough to keep me in stockings and suits, and in the apartment he set me up in. Downtown, Ellie, and you're not going to believe what I am going to tell you next . . .”

She put her cigarette out and I lit us both another.

“It had a
shared
bathroom. I had to share a bathroom. Ellie, it will tell you how desperate I was that I stayed there for six full weeks before I could stand it no longer. I went back to Boston—to Alex, of course.”

“Of course.”

“He wasn't there. The sniveling coward left his mother to deal with me. She gave me a ‘payoff'—a piffling amount, an insult. She said it was pointless going after him for a big divorce settlement because they hadn't a penny to their name. They'd moved out of the big house already, and it seems Alex had gone over to Canada, or somewhere desperate like that, looking for work. I said I was just there to collect my things, and she said not to bother, they had sold anything of worth—meaning my jewelry, of course. It took me years to amass that collection, Ellie: my pearls, they had no right, it was stealing . . .”