London Pride (7 page)

They were still whispering anxiously together when the clock struck four and the sky was quite blue, and they
whispered again when they woke four hours later after a ragged sleep.

Mum was up and about. They could hear her setting the table and talking to Baby. Fancy Baby being up before they were.

‘Perhaps he's back,' Peggy hoped, as they rushed to wash and dress.

But when they got downstairs there was no sign of him, no boots by the hearth, no coat on the hook, no morning paper, nothing. His chair had been moved from the fire and set against the wall and, what was worse, there was no place laid for him at the table. Oh where was he? Wherever was he?

‘Sit up to the table,' Mum said, speaking sternly as if they'd done something wrong. The swelling of the previous night had all gone down but her face was set as if it were made of concrete. ‘We're all behind this morning and I've got to be out by ten o'clock.'

They sat down subdued and anxious, wondering whether they could ask her where she was going, as she filled the teapot and set it on the trivet. Neither of them could ever remember eating a meal at that table without their father and worry was taking away what little appetite they had.

It was Baby who said what they were all thinking. ‘Where's Dad?' she piped as her mother put a plateful of eggs and bacon in front of her.

Being Baby she got an answer. ‘Your Dad's ill,' Mum said flatly as she forked two rashers of bacon out of the pan for Peggy. ‘He was took bad yesterday evening at the Club. He's in the hospital block.'

‘What's he got?' Joan asked, her foxy face peaking with concern. ‘Is it the flu?'

‘No, it's not. It's pneumonia,' Mum said, still speaking flatly as though it wasn't important. ‘Now eat your breakfast and don't let's hear any more about it, if you please.'

‘When you go to hospital you're very ill, aren't you?' Baby said. ‘Is he very ill?'

But she got no answer to that. ‘Eat your breakfast,' Mum ordered. And went off into the larder.

The three girls looked at one another in alarm and warning.

New monia, Peggy was thinking. Perhaps that wasn't so bad whatever it was. New things were usually better than old ones. At least it wasn't the flu. But if it wasn't bad why had Mum cried so? And what about that raven? It
had
been on their roof and it
had
croaked. Oh if only it hadn't croaked. Perhaps Mum would tell them a bit more when she'd been to the hospital block and seen him. That must be where she's got to go at ten o'clock. I don't suppose she'd let us go and see him too.

She was right on the last count at least. The moment the breakfast things had been washed and put back on the dresser all three girls were sent out to play.

‘It's lovely weather,' Mum said too briskly. ‘You can play out all day. It'll do you good.'

‘Me too?' Baby said, very surprised.

‘Peggy'll look after you,' Mum said. ‘You stay by Peggy, you'll be all right.'

Baby stayed by Peggy all morning and a horrible nuisance she was. For a start she wanted to play all the games and grizzled when she couldn't, and then she was perpetually whining for something or other, for a hanky or a drink of water or for her socks to be pulled up or to go back home because she wanted a wee-wee. Megan was ever so good about her and said the baby next door was just the same, but Peggy was too worried about Dad to see her as anything other than a burden. She hoped she wouldn't have to look after her all afternoon too.

But she did. All afternoon, and all day Sunday, until her grizzling presence in the Green was an established fact and Peggy her acknowledged keeper. And Mum went to the hospital block three more times without telling them anything about it. Joan and Peggy knew because although she walked the long way round so as to avoid coming through the Green where they'd see her, they'd kept a sharp look-out for her and spied on all her comings and goings. And Dad didn't come home.

The next day was Monday and school and the hope that he'd be home for dinner. Or supper. Or breakfast next morning. But he wasn't and the week went by with the unreality of nightmare, with life at school humdrum and normal and life at home fraught with unanswered questions.
Mum never mentioned their father, even though she visited him every day, and her face was always so stern when she came back they didn't dare to ask how he was, partly because they didn't want to provoke an outbreak of nerves but mostly because they were afraid of what she might tell them.

Uncle Charlie and Aunty Connie came round nearly every night and she talked to them for hours and hours but in voices too low for the listeners above them to catch more than the odd word or two. ‘After the crisis …' ‘It must go one way or the other …' ‘Poor old Joe …'

The only time they heard anything clearly was on the second Thursday night, when Dad had been in the hospital block for thirteen days. Uncle Charlie was in the hall saying goodbye. ‘If there's anything we can do, Flossie,' he said, ‘you've only to ask. You know that, don't you?'

And Mum's answer was clear too, clear and weary. ‘There's nothing anyone can do now except wait. Oh Charlie, I don't know what will become of us.'

The cold wind blew icy into Peggy's heart again. ‘I wish that raven hadn't croaked on our roof,' she said.

‘Shut
up
about that raven,' Joan said furiously. ‘You make me sick, always on about it. I don't want to hear about it ever again.'

‘I wish she'd tell us what's going on,' Peggy mourned. ‘You ask her, Joanie.'

‘No, you,' Joan said. ‘She wouldn't tell me.'

‘She wouldn't tell me neither.'

‘She's coming upstairs,' Joan warned. ‘Pretend to be asleep.'

So Peggy closed her eyes obediently, resigning herself to sleep and continued ignorance.

The next day when she and Joan came home to dinner they found Mum and Baby waiting in the hall in their outdoor clothes, hats, gloves and all. And Mum had something to tell them.

‘Your Dad's asked to see you,' she said. ‘We'll have dinner when we get back. I shan't send you back to school this afternoon. We'll go the long way round. We don't want everyone gawping.'

‘Is he better?' Peggy said as they followed her out of the house again.

‘We'll see when we get there,' Mum said. But she looked so stern it wasn't an encouraging answer.

They walked between the great stones of the inner and outer walls, and the sun was warm on their heads and shoulders, as a fearful ice expanded in Peggy's chest. Please don't let him be worse, she prayed. He can't be worse. Not here. Not in the Tower. People are protected in the Tower. Please dear God, protect my dad. Make him be better.

The porter on duty at the hospital block that morning was an old friend. He used to throw balls back for them when they were playing on the Green and sometimes, when he wasn't too busy, he could be persuaded to take one end of the long rope for skipping. But now he looked as solemn as Mum.

‘Come to see your poor Dad ‘ave yer?' he said to the girls. ‘Sister Turner'll be along presently.'

They stood together in the unfamiliar hall, shuffling and embarrassed and growing steadily colder now that they were out of the sunshine. Sister Turner was a long time coming and every second diminished the hope of good news. Joan and Peggy shifted from foot to foot and tried not to look at one another or their mother, and Baby sat on the bench by the wall feeling small and staring at the floor. But at last Sister Turner approached, skirts swishing. It was a surprise to all three children when she took Peggy and Baby by the hand, signalled with her eyes that Joan was to follow, and led them away, leaving Mum on her own in the hall.

But they didn't say anything because you didn't argue with doctors and nurses. They simply followed her meekly up the stairs and along a corridor smelling of disinfectant and gleaming with floor polish and full of brown doors, each with its own neat label and some open enough to allow them a glimpse of a heaped bed and a pale face against a pillow. They knew that they were foreigners in this place, interlopers who had to be on their best behaviour to survive, so when Sister Turner opened one of the closed doors, they hesitated, unsure whether they were
supposed to go in or not. She smiled at them quite kindly and as they still didn't move, she ushered them round the edge of the door with one hand placed briefly but firmly against their necks.

They were in a white brightly-lit space with white curtains and a table with a spittoon on it and a dish full of cotton wool and a plain, glass jug full of water, and a white bed with three red cylinders standing beside it like bombs.

It was a few seconds before any of them realized that the person in the bed was their father, even though they were expecting to see him. He'd changed so much.

He was lying limply against a triangular mound of pillows, with his hands resting on the coverlet and his eyes shut tight, and he looked frail and small as though he'd shrunk. His skin was greyish-yellow, his cheeks had caved in, his hair and moustache looked like dried grass, and there was an angry cold sore at the corner of his mouth oozing into the pepper and salt stubble on his chin. But worst of all was the awful noise he was making as he breathed. It was a sort of knocking and bubbling and wheezing, like a kettle boiling, or as if he had pebbles in his chest, and they could see that every breath pained him for even though his eyes were closed they were wincing at every rattle.

None of them knew what to say and Baby's mouth turned down as if she was going to cry.

Sister Turner swished to the bed and stooped until her white cap was almost touching the pillow. ‘Mr Furnivall,' she said. ‘Your girls are here.'

He made a harsh muttering sound and his head rolled to one side.

‘Mr Furnivall,' Sister repeated. ‘Your girls. You asked to see them. Remember?'

To Peggy's relief, he opened his eyes and became himself again. Oh those lovely greeny-brown eyes. Neither one thing nor the other. ‘Peggy?' he said looking at her.

‘Yes, Dad,' she said, tiptoeing to the bedside. ‘We're all here.'

Joan followed her, pulling Baby by the hand.

‘Good girls,' he said, but his voice was harsh and husky as if he had a throat full of spit. ‘Got somethin' ter say …'

Then he started to cough, and Sister Turner put the spittoon deftly under his chin and supported him with her arm until he'd coughed up a long sticky strand of awful brown spit and wiped his lips with a piece of the cotton wool.

They waited full of horrified sympathy for him.

‘Somethin' to tell you,' he gasped. ‘Can't talk much ‘cause of the … I want you ter promise …'

‘Anything,' Peggy said as he was panting too much to be able to go on.

‘Anything,' Joan echoed.

The panting went on as they waited for him, strained and afraid and yearning with pity.

‘Look after yer mum,' he said. ‘She's – not strong – with her nerves an' everythin'. Look after her – eh? – when I'm gone.'

The icy wind blew into every corner of Peggy's mind and body. She was cold from the hairs on her head to the tips of her fingers. Her dad was dying and there was no way she could either avoid the knowledge or take it in and make sense of it. ‘We promise, Dad,' she said, passionately. ‘We promise.'

‘All of yer?' he said, looking at them one after the other.

Joan said yes in a voice that sounded almost as if she was angry, and Baby nodded.

‘Good girls,' their father said. ‘Give yer ol' Dad a kiss.'

They kissed him solemnly, one after the other, appalled by the awful smell that was rising out of his mouth and trying not to look at that spittoon, and loving him with a terrible desperation.

Then Sister Turner's hand was on Joan's shoulder and they were being suggested towards the door. Peggy followed obediently even though she was torn with the need to run back to the bed and plead with him not to die, to kiss him once more, to tell him she loved him, that she'd do anything to save him. But all she could manage was to look back at him once and briefly before the door was shut between them. And he looked back at her, once and briefly, smiling his lovely old smile even though he was keeping his eyes open with an effort.

‘That's my girl,' he said.
Long afterwards Joan and Peggy confessed to one another that they had no idea how they got through the rest of the day. They supposed they must have eaten their dinner or Mum would have got shirty and they'd have remembered that, and after dinner they had a vague recollection that they helped clean the parlour, because Peggy could remember smelling the wax polish. But they were numb with emotions too strong for them, terror and pity, revulsion and anger, and lurking most hideously behind them all the monstrous fear of death.

All three of them slept fitfully that night, and Joan and Peggy took Baby into the double bed because she cried so much when she was in the truckle bed on her own. And in the morning they came down to a house even more unreal than the one they'd left when they went to bed.

The curtains were all still closed as though it was the middle of the night and Aunty Connie was in the kitchen making lumpy porridge by gaslight.

‘Your Mum's gone to the hospital,' she said when they came quietly into the room. ‘They're bringing home the coffin at ten o'clock. She's gone to see to it. Eat up quick. I want to get clear in here before they come.'

Coffin, Peggy thought. Oh Dad. Are you in a coffin already? But although the awful question filled her throat she couldn't bring herself to ask it.

It was Joan who spoke. ‘Then he's dead,' she said flatly. ‘That's it. He's dead.'

‘Yes, my dear,' Aunty Connie said, speaking quite kindly. ‘I'm sorry to have to tell you. He is. Eat what you can a' this porridge. You'll need your strength today.'