Reading by Lightning (35 page)

I can't cry in front of Mother, she said when she sat up. You're such a pillar of strength, Lily.

Oh, Madeleine, I said, shaking my head. I couldn't say what I was thinking, that in a funny way those days suited me. It was a relief to just do what was expected of you, to be free to be good. Or maybe it's that I was more prepared than most. I never had imagined the future as an ordinary, flat road running off towards a vanishing point. This was the world as I knew it, a fearful struggle between good and evil.

It was the last four years that began to seem unreal, the unconscious days when I lived only for romance. Strangely, it was then I began to think about home, to worry about my father, that he was (to use Nan's term for it)
taking fits,
something my mother's letters never hinted at, but they wouldn't, would they? Home came to me freshly while I sorted through barrels of mouldy clothes at the WVS depot: the barn, where the dry, dusty hay and the moist, rotting manure were two strands of the same smell, my father's cheek resting on the breathing side of a cow while he milked. The path the cows had worn deep into the turf of the prairie. Thinking about walking with Dad to the pasture, I sorted shirts, walking back and forth between rows of garment stands in the damp old depot. My mother I could only really picture in an uncharacteristic moment: when she laughed, like the day we were picking saskatoons and she made her hair into a horsetail
to drive away the flies. No one in our family made a sound when they laughed, but Mother's face would crumple and her eyes would stream as though laughter were so alien to her face that it completely dismantled it. How pretty she must have been as a girl! Before the light in her face was put out. By things never being quite what she wanted them to be.
By me
I thought as I dumped out a crate of flattened shoes. By my nature being something she was bracing herself to resist, by my turning out as she had feared from the moment I was born or even before.

It seemed my father loved me, but my mother's attitude was based on a clearer grasp of who I was. But who was I, what was so bad about me — what was the sin that stained me as a child, when Satan used me to distract listeners from the word of God? I could see the hungry little girl I was, the fidgety, yearning child.
I never did anything that bad,
I protested to myself,
I never did anything.
And this seemed very true, it still seemed to be true: I saw how careful I was not to do anything, not to have a self that anyone could lay hold of or blame. Better a series of gestures, better no self at all than a self who would be held responsible. And that took me to my long afternoon on the streets of Manchester, to a shame I turned away from.

Aunt Lucy asked us gently to pray for George, but I didn't even try. I was free to be good, but I couldn't pretend to pray. That particular canopy over the world, I saw now, had been dismantled and packed away. It wasn't George's science that had done it and it wasn't even the war. It had started before that, as long ago as George saying,
Oh, you're low church
(the way he said of Russell,
Oh, he's a Marxist),
putting a name on the thing, making it one thing that others looked at from the outside, the way the prairies were now one thing and not the whole world. Or before that: it was seeing the ocean, its mind closed, indifferent to the ships plowing along its surface
and the ships rotting below with skeletons bobbing in their cabins. It was the size of the world, so much bigger than I'd imagined when I signed on to save it. And it was people such as Aunt Lucy, who were kind to me because they were kindly disposed, with no thought of attracting God's attention.

Prairie turf with all the sand dug out from under it, that's what my faith was like. As for the moment when it did collapse, I could picture myself out walking alone on Oldham Edge and seeing the face of God in the clouds with rays of sun shooting out behind him. A petulant, disagreeable face, like in the frontispiece from the Lutheran Bible: things have slipped beyond him. I look at the face of God and then I'm distracted by my thoughts and look away. A breeze blows across the moors, and when I look up again it's rearranged the clouds a little. The face is slanted, distorted, as though God's been stricken by palsy. And then the face blurs a bit more. The next time I look up it's gone, the clouds are just white clouds against a sky the colour of harebells, and I'm still walking along the Edge, a cold wind biting at my ears and, laid out at my feet, the fields along the Yorkshire border, where a batch of new conscripts in straggling columns charges at scarecrows.

They started evacuating people from London again, and Aunt Lucy got notice we'd be hosting
four
and she was to go down to the church hall to pick them out. All us volunteer girls were issued tin helmets and put on a rotation to patrol the roof of the hospital one night a week, watching for incendiary bombs and raising the alarm if one landed. Jenny and Madeleine were placed on the first shift. That same day, September 15, George came home on a forty-eight-hour leave — news everyone heard with heavy hearts because it meant this was his embarkation leave, his regiment was finally going to see action. By the time he made it home with two mates they'd had a fair
bit to drink and there were just eighteen hours left (although I don't think that was entirely their fault, it was hard to get transport).

I stood in the kitchen and we said a grave hello to each other. I had nothing to say by way of explanation; silence was the truest thing I had.

It was Wilf and their new mate Tom Tipperton whom George brought with him. Tom Tipperton was known as Tommy the Tommy, or as the Tool. Madeleine offered them some bread pudding made with powdered egg and he said, Don't mind if I do, and before she could serve it he picked up a spoon and started eating straight out of the dish.

Madeleine smiled gently and reached down saucers for Wilf and George. You're a machinist, then, are you? she said to Tom. In peacetime?

I don't get you, love.

Well, I thought from your nickname.

They all laughed. Tell the lass, Tool, said Wilf, and George said, Tom was caught in the bathhouse in a state of priapic lubricity.

Tommy opened his wide mouth, displaying a quantity of chewed bread pudding, and screamed with laughter. Pricky lubricky, is that what you call it? he screamed. Is that what you had the night they debagged you?

Madeleine stood resolutely by the sideboard and asked if they'd like to have their tea with us that night, seeing it was their last night and they were on their own. But Wilf said they were planning an outing for their last night, to a riding academy in Manchester.

There's a riding academy in the
city?
Madeleine said, and Wilf and Tom acted as though they were choking and ran out into the garden bent over double with laughter. George stood by the window drinking his tea. Several of his fingernails had been broken almost halfway down, they looked ever so sore.

To get him to look at me, I said, Have you seen any of the bomb sites?

Yes, he said. He did look at me then.

Imagine bombing civilians like that! I said.

It wasn't intended, George said.

What do you mean?

The first time, he said. Back in August. They were after the air base at Thameshaven and in the blackout they missed it. So then Churchill bombed Berlin. And now they're retaliating for that. He tipped up his cup and finished his tea. Although, when it comes down to it, he said, we were the first to bomb civilians. At Westerland on Sylt. Back in January. Not that there's much strategy involved, from either side. They dump their payload and hope for the best, and then the citizens on the ground dream up the strategy.

He put his cup on the counter. On a different point, he said, have you heard from Russell Bates lately?

No, I said.

Last I heard he was in hiding, George said. It's quite the thing, what's happening in Canada. They've outlawed their Communist Party. Do you know which other countries have done that? Germany. Italy. Japan.

Is that a fact, I said. We looked directly at each other and I saw something measuring me, a look I was familiar with, but not from George.

His mates had come back in. Taperleg's talking politics, said Wilf. We're going to have to have a chat with the captain when we get back.

By tea Tom and Wilf were gone, but then Aunt Lucy came back with our evacuees, only three as it turned out, a Mrs. Whitelaw and her two children, so then
they
were there for tea. Mrs. Whitelaw talked through the whole meal about the bomb that fell on their terrace while she and the children were in a shelter under the railway bridge and about the terrible
cries they heard from under the rubble of their neighbours' house when they went back in the morning. It was the
G-R-A-N-D-D-A-D
, she spelled, while her children watched her intently.
Wouldn't leave,
she mouthed to Aunt Lucy.

When she finally took the kiddies up to the attic Aunt Lucy turned to George (who had not uttered a word all through tea) and took his hand on the table. Can you say where you've been stationed, love? she asked.

He said he hadn't been stationed anywhere, he'd spent the last month driving back and forth over the south of England, pulling a field cannon, a twenty-five-pounder that was brought back from Dunkirk against orders.

What is the sense in that? Madeleine asked.

Look, Auntie Mabel,
cried George in a high, false voice,
there goes
ANOTHER
one of them big guns! If that nasty Mr. Hitler tries anything on — we'll give him what for!

Uncle Stanley shoved his chair back from the table. You never change, do you? he shouted.

He had to make sommut up, said Aunt Lucy soothingly. He can't say what they're really up to. Forgive me, love, I shouldn't of asked.

After tea George wanted to go down to the pub to have a word with his mate Horace, his newspaper friend. Just for an hour, he promised Aunt Lucy. When he was gone we turned the wireless on for the six o'clock news. London was bombed that day in broad daylight. Wave after wave of German planes filled the sky, a hundred planes coming over and then a hundred more, and then the
RAF
came out and there were dogfights over the Strand. Buckingham Palace was finally hit. Then Madeleine was truly frightened about rooftop duty, but we all said, no, it's probably better, the planes will be down tonight.

I put on my mackintosh and walked out with Madeleine
and Jenny just as darkness fell. They went down the street wearing their tin helmets and I stood breathing in the damp air, watching until they disappeared into the darkness halfway down the street. The mill was down there, but it had vanished. The houses were closed and shuttered, everyone had given up their torches and lanterns, the valley'd been given back over to the fog and the hyenas. I wondered what George would have to say about the news from London. I needed George, I longed for George to reach into his storehouse of theories and tell me what this was. But George was so determined to see what nobody else saw — could he even see what
was
?