Reading by Lightning (19 page)

Now I was haggard with conversation, with seeing and being seen. We sat on the garden wall and they told me about their school, Ward Street Grammar School, from which Lois had been sent home twice for turning her waistband over to make her skirt shorter, and Madeleine asked me about my school and marvelled that students of all ages studied in the same classroom. I closed my palm over my thumbnail, which was black where I'd caught it in the hinge of the feed bin the day before I left the farm. The bruise had just begun its journey up my nail. My beautiful cousins lounged on the garden wall, stockinged legs crossed gracefully in front of them, feet in slight black leather slippers. What were your subjects? asked
Lois, and I thought of Miss Fielding with her hair wreaths. I was a stiff girl with a forced laugh, I became Gracie. Lois took the clip out of her hair and dangled her head forward to catch her hair up again, and Madeleine cocked her head towards me and said, Tell us about your brother. Is he very handsome? Is he very clever? And after a while I abandoned even Gracie, left her shivering on the garden wall laughing breathily; I became a pair of eyes a little apart, glazed with the effort of watching.

Then from the street in front of the house a car horn sounded. It was time to go to Nana's in another town, in Salford, where I would live. We all got up and followed the garden wall around to the front of the house to see Aunt Lucy helping Nan into the car. Aunt Lucy put her hand on my arm and said, Oh, lovie, you're freezing, and it was true, I was all clammy.

Don't you have a jumper? she asked.

I didn't understand that she meant a sweater and I said, I just have this suit and two dresses.

Well, we'll find you sommut, she said. My girls have all sorts they aren't wearing.

I'm going to ride along and keep Lily company, Madeleine said, climbing into the car.

By the time we were at the bottom of the street, rain had begun to bounce off the cobblestones. Nan dozed in the front as though she were asleep at the wheel, and from the passenger side Uncle Stanley steered the car expertly onto the main road. Outside a public house our headlights picked up a man with no legs on a low, flat trolley, pushing himself along with his hands over the rough stones, his head bent to the rain. Poor lad, sighed Nan, waking up briefly to the sight of him.

What happened to him? I asked.

The war, my uncle said. Lungs'll be dodgy too.

When I was little I used to play that I was
you,
Madeleine
confided in my left ear. We always made you the brave one!
I'll be Lily-in-Canada,
I would always say.

She reached across the seat to squeeze my hand and I knew that I would be all right, that my terror sitting on the garden wall was just a fit of nerves.

It was dark by the time we rolled into Salford. Madeleine took Nan's key and unlocked the door of a narrow row house right up flat against the pavement and ran in to get the umbrella from behind the door. We scuttled in under it and Uncle Stanley carried my trunk upstairs. After they'd driven away, Nan and I took our hats off and I stood in the soot-stained kitchen, my father's kitchen. She put the kettle on and set cups and a sugar bowl on the table and turned towards me, squeezing my cheeks between her hands, crooning, Oh, they're lovely, aren't they! My grandchildren are all so lovely! They're the image of their nana, every last one of'em!

My room was the boys' room in my father's day, his room. Narrow and dim and with a row of boxes lined up against one wall. I opened my trunk and a faint smell of home (of sour milk and dust and mothballs and mouse) rose from the folded things, along with the face of my mother, hovering self-consciously in the hall back at the farm, waiting for me to find the gifts she'd added to my trunk. I took them out, a new towel and facecloth, blue. A New Testament, with a motto from Ephesians inscribed on the flyleaf
(Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil).
I crawled into bed and lay on my stomach with my arms tucked under me because the bed was as cold as river mud in April. Boys passed under the window, their shouts gradually dwindling, and a bicycle horn hooted. A carriage went by, the horses' hooves hammering the set stones. I felt pity and chagrin and something that was almost tenderness for the girl I'd been at home. I was in England now, where the
fires of hell had been dampened to wet cinders by fog and rain, where people went complacently about their lives, entitled to their songs and their small comforts. I lay in my narrow room and listened to the rain on the roof and the horses' hooves and thought of the sea, the vast swelling plain I'd watched from the deck of the
Franconia,
its restless, random waves no colour at all that you could name. The rain patted on the window and the sea washed over me, the unmanageable sea, and I sank into sleep.

I never met my granddad, but I recognized him everywhere, in the smell of pipe smoke, and the cribbage board, and the pile of yellowed
Manchester Guardians
knee-high on the floor in front of the window. Nan kept thinking he'd just gone down to the Woolpack for a game of darts. At night she set her teacup on the newspapers as though they were a proper side table and settled herself in her chair by the window, and I got the wireless down from its hiding place and put music on (very low, so her neighbour Mrs. Crisp wouldn't hear and tell the inspector, as Nan had not bought a licence since Granddad passed away). But tears would begin to course down her cheeks, which already looked like the leaves of a book damaged by rain. So I would sit with her, because I'd nothing else to do. I'd want to ask about my father, and at first I did. Oh, he was a lovely lad, she'd say vaguely and start to tell me about him crawling through a hole in the wall into the next house, and then she'd get confused as to whether that was Willie or Hugh or Roland, or even her own little brother when she was a girl.

But every night she'd tell me about how Granddad's hand was cut off in the mill when they were engaged, and how her father came home and broke the news to her.
You get over to
that hospikal,
he said,
and you take that ring off your finger and give it back to that lad. He can't be expected to support a wife and family now.
From the voice she gave my great-grandfather, I pictured someone stout and self-satisfied, the sort of man who enjoyed delivering bad news and managing its aftermath. But when Nan went weeping into Granddad's room at the hospital and saw his face white as the bedsheets, Granddad said (and his voice was so faint she had to lean her ear over his mouth to hear it),
You put that back on your finger, I'll show them.
And he did, love, he did show them! she would cry. We was never well off, but we was no poorer than the rest of them, and there was never an unkind word!

And then her tears would start again. Stories about Grand-dad would lead to stories about Isobel and Florence, my dad's two little sisters, who died in the flu. And these were sad too, so I would try to steer her to earlier days, to her father, a spoiled, artistic man (and here I pictured a tall, pale, romantic father, a different father altogether from the previous story), a man who never worked but went off on holidays with his snobby sisters and left his family without a bit of food in the pantry. But how they all doted on him! Her mother would boil him a chuckie egg when there were no eggs for the children, and he would cut the top off his egg and give it to whichever child had been good that day. He died soon after she was married. He was in the hospital, and she went alone to see him, and he asked her to fetch her mother because he wanted to be shaved. And when her mother got there he had died. So she was the last to see him alive, the very last. And she would tell me how his hearse drove by the Gaping Goose and the cellar men came out and stood in the street with their hats over their hearts. After a time she would say, Put kettle on, duckie, and so I made us a cup of tea and filled the hot-water bottles. Then I took the wireless (which was very heavy) and panting and gasping I climbed on a chair and pushed it up
through the ceiling hole in Nan's bedroom to hide it, in case the inspector came round first thing in the morning. And then Nan came in from using the loo and planted a big soft kiss on each side of my face, crying a little and saying, Oh, pet, it is hard, but we'll manage, and we crawled between the clammy sheets in our two beds and went to sleep.

When Dad first came back from town with the news that another telegram had arrived, saying that Nana was in a bad way and was asking for me, my mother had scoffed and assumed he would scoff. Imagine plucking the one daughter out of a farm family in these hard times and sending her alone across the ocean. To look after an old woman she's never met! When there were scores of other relatives living nearby! Why don't they get one of Lucy's girls? I remember Mother asking. I get the impression that Madeleine may not be quite right, was what my dad said (a baffling comment when I thought about it now). Well, I've never heard
that
before, my mother answered.

My father just sat on the backless chair beside the house, scraping the soles of his boots with a stick. Finally my mother flew into a temper. For someone who thought Leithwood was too far away, she cried, you're awfully eager to send her halfway around the world! It was apparent that he had no intention of answering.

My father's implacable decision, something we had never witnessed before, threw us all into a tizzy. The morning I left, my mother's hair was neatly braided but the bun a little off-centre. But she had a new air of purpose. Don't forget that you are witnessing to them, she said to me at the station while Dad fixed the CPR sticker to my trunk. With everything you say and with everything you do. She had managed to find a logic for sending me — I was a missionary to a foreign land.

Well, we did go to church, didn't we? On Sundays when we didn't go to Aunt Lucy's in Oldham, I went with Nan to the service at St. Ambrose Parish Church. The church was dark and cold and smelled of mould and there was organ music and little benches for kneeling. In the jewelled windows saints knelt to have their heads cut off with swords, and two men laboured to stuff Jonah head first into the mouth of a large fish. Nan was not at all abashed that she went to church only if she had nothing better to do. There she sat, with a big orange silk flower pinned to her bosom (it had fallen off her hat that morning), savouring her own goodness for having put in an appearance at all. The vicar stood in a booth that jutted from the left front corner of the church, and while he declaimed in a voice that is never used in real life (which is something you could also say about Wesley Moore, of course), Nan rooted around in her pocketbook and gave me a humbug covered with fuzz. I sucked it through the sermon, hot saliva leaking down on either side of my tongue. God had not caught up to me yet and seemed no likelier to do so in the Anglican Church than anywhere else.

As we walked home we passed a humble hall that bore the sign PRIMITIVE METHODIST. Families streamed out, carrying Bibles. They were poorly dressed and had more children about them than God allotted to Anglicans. I recognized the signs of a more dangerous religion, but no one gave any sign of recognizing me.

Every morning we ate bacon butties for breakfast, and then Nan poured the bacon fat on the coals to make the fire burn better and set about making soup.
After the ball is over,
she crooned as she stirred,
after the break of morn, after the dancers' leaving, after the stars are gone.
Tin curlers dangled from hair the colour of turnips. I jumped up to catch one at the point of
dropping into the soup. The smell of mashed pea rose from the pot.

Watch, Nana, I think the soup is burning.

She turned in my direction and lifted her tangled eyebrows. I was not to look away, but to let her lock eyes flirtatiously with me while she swayed and shuffled her feet, dancing with the soup pot.
That's why I'm lonely, no home at all. I broke her heart, pet, after the ball,
she sang, lifting the spoon from the soup and waving it like a conductor. Bits of green pea splattered the cooker and the floor.
Join in, join in!
her baton cried. Part of me wanted to join her, but the other part stubbornly did not and smiled patiently at her, as though she were a charming child.