Separation, The (14 page)

Jack stared at her. ‘Sweetheart, I know, but you are going to have to find your own meaning now.’

Despite his kindness, she felt a familiar surge of heat. ‘How can you say that? Emma and Fleur were my meaning.’

‘There has to be something else, Lyddy.’ He spoke gently, stroked her cheek, looked at her with eyes as blue as the bright Malayan sky.

She pushed his hand away. ‘More than my children? Are you crazy?’

‘There’s still Maz and me,’ he said, his voice so soft she needed to strain to hear.

‘I don’t know, Jack. I want to phone George again. Ask him if there’s anything new.’

He pressed his lips together, let out his breath. ‘Okay, if that’s what you want.’

But both of them knew that once she faced the loss, she’d either sink or swim. She hoped Jack was wise enough to know she wasn’t ready to say in which direction.

Maz sidled up, with eyes so swollen it was clear he’d been sobbing his heart out. She picked him up and hugged him to her.
‘I’m sorry, darling. It’s just your children aren’t supposed to die before you.’

She stroked his hair, and over the top of his head, noticed tears in Jack’s eyes too.

After Jack went to deal with one of the tappers, taking Maz with him, she went to phone George.

When she explained what she wanted, he sighed.

‘Look, Lydia, I’m sorry, but there’s no point clutching at straws. Alec and the girls perished in that fire, and the file is closed. And by the way, old girl, no need to concern yourself about the paperwork. I can deal with that, and if I need you for anything I’ll get in touch.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Not that there was any estate. As you know, Alec didn’t own a property in England or over here, and he hadn’t even had time to open a new bank account up at Ipoh. So, unfortunately for you, all his cash must have gone up in flames. The police, here in Malacca, have your car. Shall I arrange to have it sold?’

‘Please. I’m going to need the money. But George, how can you be sure they were there?’

‘The facts are the facts. No sightings of them since, and as I told you already, everything tells us they were there. Alec had not been allocated a house yet. Now come on, chin up, old thing. In due course we’ll be able to start the job of obtaining death certificates, but with no actual bodies it can be a lengthy process. Sorry to be blunt.’

Lydia swallowed, only able to mutter her thanks. She put down the phone, then sat outside and opened Em’s notebook for the first time since the fire, and read.

One of the angels sits on my bed. She has wavy red hair, pale skin, and a white gown. No wings. Not even folded up. There is only air behind her. Jack came to our house today. I wish he wouldn’t. He’s bigger than my dad and I’m scared they’ll have a fight. I liked him at first. We were in the street buying our new flip-flops. Mine had a bright orange flower
in the middle. Jack came over and put a hand on Mum’s shoulder. Then he gave Fleur and me a lollipop. I prayed to the angel to make him stay away, but he came again. That was the night I saw them in the bed.

She shut the book and watched a large moth spiral upwards into the lantern. She stared at it until her eyes stung. Sitting on the veranda in the moist warm air, watching faint clouds swim like one of her children’s watercolours, she couldn’t bear to read any more. She had known. Emma had known.

It was a cold September day, fields lost in white mist, so thick that as we approached the school, the building was completely hidden. I wished it would stay that way. Disappear for ever. My father drove up a driveway lined with oak trees that gradually showed themselves, their leaves bright red and gold.

Autumn was something Fleur and I had never seen. On my last day at home, my sister had raced about the lawn with a broom, chasing the leaves as the wind whizzed them along the wire fence where the nettles grew. There was a bright orange beech tree at the bottom of the garden. Ours was the only garden in the row with a big tree like that. Granddad had fixed a swing to it at the start of summer and Fleur swung for hours.

The night before, Gran had helped me pack my case. Two changes of clothes the list said, school uniform and a casual outfit, my slippers, pyjamas, my notebooks and pen. There was also Mum’s folded note, and the one framed photo of her that I’d managed to take from our house in Malacca. They weren’t on the list, so they had to be my special secret. Gran hugged me close when we finished. Her skin smelt of lily of the valley and I saw tears in her eyes.

Penridge Hall was a large Victorian building on three floors. Gran said it was used as a hospital during the war and now it was a boarding school, especially for ‘problem’ children, and partly run by nuns. That’s what I was now. A problem.

I tried to stop myself as Father parked his Morris Oxford. I tried to hold back, knowing it’d do no good, but in the end, I clutched hold of his jacket, and the words burst out anyway.

‘Don’t make me. I’ll be good, I swear. Please, Dad.’

He brushed my hand off, but softened a little. ‘It’s for the best,
Emma. You can’t expect not to be punished after attacking Mr Oliver.’

‘But I didn’t do anything wrong all summer. I promise I’ll never do anything like that again.’

His jaw tightened, and the skin round his eyes turned white. ‘We’ve been through that. It’s too late for promises. I asked you why you did it, and you could not answer me. You are not to be trusted. Hopefully they’ll bring you to your senses here. Now, out you pop, and don’t scowl, Emma. It’s most unbecoming.’

I stuck out my chin and ignored the row of staring eyes that gazed down from an upstairs window, though the fear inside me made my hands go clammy. As we walked past the cropped lawn and up the front steps into a square hall, I felt I was being gobbled up. The cloudy glass door swung behind us, and a woman stood waiting, her hands clasped round a little terrier.

‘Headmistress,’ my father said, and held out his hand. He’d obviously met her before.

‘I’ve called for Sister Ruth,’ she said.

‘How kind.’

She spoke in a horrid neighing voice. I kept my head lowered but looked up through my lashes. She was a funny-shaped lady, with square black hair, and patches of red skin on her face. Behind metal-framed specs, her eyes watched me.

I stuck out my hand to stroke the dog.

She glowered at me. ‘Do not touch the hound. Sister knows all about you, and I’ve given her explicit orders to keep a strict eye.’

I hung my head.

‘And the head will report to me on a monthly basis and we’ll see how you get on,’ Dad added.

‘Does that mean I’ll be able to come home again?’ I felt a flutter in my stomach and held my breath.

‘We’ll see.’

Father handed the headmistress my case. He shuffled from foot to foot. He seemed embarrassed to be there and kept looking at the door. Then he pasted a smile on his face, nodded at the
woman, and left. I blinked rapidly, trying not to cry. No kiss on the cheek. No hug. Nothing to make me feel better. The headmistress told me to wait, swung round on her heels, and went into an office.

I found the courage to lift my face properly and look about the hall. Three ladies were having a good old gossip in one corner. They had baggy tweed skirts, navy cardigans, loose white blouses, and fat ankles spreading over tight lace-up shoes. And a girl was standing with a placard round her neck declaring she was lazy. After I’d read it, I glanced at her face. She winked and I winked back.

When an ear-piercing bell rang, the ladies left.

‘Who were they?’ I dared ask the girl with the placard. ‘Someone’s aunties?’

‘English, French and Music.’

‘Teachers?’ I gasped, accustomed to the smart teachers at the Holy Infant College.

The bell rang again, the hall emptied, and the girl was gone. I shut my eyes. Had my father never done anything really bad? Couldn’t he understand at all?

The first night in the cold greasy building, I wore all my clothes at once. They kept the windows open at night, and chill seeped into my bones. With just a narrow cellular blanket and a thin eiderdown for cover, I shivered in my metal-framed bed. When I couldn’t sleep, thoughts of my mum warmed me, like a full bowl of porridge with Lyle’s golden syrup. I couldn’t believe it was nine months since I’d last seen Malaya
and
my mother. I thought of our house and garden there. The purple bougainvillea, the pale orchids, and the creeping lizards. It was never chilly, nothing like here.

The school was almost as cold in the day as it was at night. The radiators made a clunking noise, but none of the rooms warmed up. The girls huddled in little groups, mostly ignoring me, except for two mean ones who snatched, and then hid, my satchel for a
whole day. On Saturday, after one of the longest weeks of my life, a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate arrived in the post from Granny. She’d even taped a two shilling coin to the back. Many of the girls came from far away, and were as likely to have been sent from India as to come from Worcestershire. Not all of them were lucky enough to be sent chocolate, so I offered to share mine with the placard girl. I was glad I did, because she looked at me with her hands on her hips and grinned.

‘I’m Susan Edwards,’ she said.

My new friend had very frizzy brown hair, quite a large nose, and deep-set brown eyes.

We sat and shared the chocolate on the step outside.

‘How do you get used to it?’ I asked.

‘You just do,’ she said.

‘What about the food?’

She shrugged. ‘Awful. No getting away from that.’

She was right. The smell of boiled cabbage crept everywhere. That day we’d had lamb and potato stew with gristly meat and a layer of grease floating on top, and then tart, with grated coconut and jam on soggy pastry.

‘You just have to find a way to have a laugh,’ she said. ‘I’m adopted. What about you?’

‘Sometimes I wish I was.’

She laughed. ‘Like that, is it?’

I made a face.

Dad didn’t come, though he wrote stiff letters, signing himself
Your Father
with no hint that I was missed. He never mentioned the letter from Malaya, and Mr Oliver was not spoken of either, as if he’d simply stopped existing, though I often thought of the stream of blood trickling down his neck. The letters put into words Father’s approval or disapproval, depending on which nun or teacher had reported. But there was one letter that was different from the rest.

It was a cool clear day when it arrived and I’d been hoping to
play outside at lunchtime, but they told me to read it in the office, and a secretary brought me Ovaltine and one of her own jammy dodgers. Because of the biscuit, I knew the letter had to be important. I worried for a moment and didn’t dare open it, but the secretary was hovering over me, so I had to just get on and do it. Inside was just a single sheet of blue Basildon Bond and I nibbled the biscuit as I read that my granddad had gone. At first I didn’t understand, but when I did, what went through my mind was that I felt really sorry for my dad. They’d never got on, and now with Granddad dead, it was too late to make it better.

I thought of Granddad’s old man’s face, covered in liver spots, his shock of white hair, and the hairs sprouting at his nostrils. I was quite upset and didn’t feel very well. The secretary was called away, so they sent for Sister Ruth, the pale nun who looked after me. She had gentle grey eyes in quite a plain face, but when she smiled she was beautiful. She didn’t go on like the other teachers. She was kind, and that gave you the feeling she cared, and really was on your side.

They took me to sickbay and the next day when I woke up, she was leaning over me, light streaming in from the tall windows behind her. ‘What’s the matter with me?’ I said, terrified I was dying.

‘It’s the flu.’

‘I never had this in Malaya,’ I croaked.

‘No, it’s a particularly British illness. The weather doesn’t help,’ she said with a smile. ‘Sit up a minute. I’ll sort out your pillows, then give you a wash.’

The hard soap they allowed us for strip washes morning and evening only made me feel worse, but I put up with it for her sake.

‘You’ll feel better for it,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

She had a terrible cough herself. It shook her body and took away her colour.

‘Have you got it too?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘Why can’t I stop shivering?’

She covered me with an extra blanket then sat down. ‘What was Malaya like? I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be a missionary in the East.’

I gulped, feeling my eyes dampen.

‘Would you like to tell me about your mother?’ Sister Ruth wrung out a flannel in tepid water and ever so gently put it on my forehead, then sat quietly, hands clasped together in her lap.

I wondered why she was asking about Mum, and thought about what I ought to say. But then I felt pleased she’d asked, because I never got the chance to talk to anyone about Mum.

‘She’s beautiful, and her name is Lydia.’ I thought for a moment. ‘She’s always singing, and she makes brilliant fancy dress costumes. At least she did. My little sister, Fleur, was Miss Muffet, and I was a snowman.’

‘That must have been fun.’

‘Yes. I won a prize. And Mum and Dad won too, for Peter Pan and Captain Hook. She learnt to sew at the convent. But it was sad for Mum to be there.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Because she never knew her own mother, only her name. Emma. I’m named after her.’

She looked at me and smiled. ‘Do you know what happened to her mother?’

‘No. Mum was actually born in the convent you see. She was at school there and the nuns brought her up.’

‘Do you know which convent it was?’

‘I’m not sure. It might have been St Joseph’s. Or was it St Peter’s?’ My face must have been glum because Sister Ruth kissed me on the cheek.

‘If it is the same place, there is a St Joseph’s not so very far from here. Though they run Christian retreats, not a school. Now I think that’s enough talking. You need to rest.’

I looked in her eyes and knew that in Sister Ruth I had a friend.

She became my registration teacher and, when well, taught us
Religious Education and History. When ill, she appeared thin and nervous with bright red spots on both cheeks, and light shone in her eyes. If Sister Ruth was ill, Mrs Wiseman took over. She was a dwarfish Welsh lady with black eyes, straight salt and pepper hair and a stubbly chin. She had a red nose, and an accent so strong it took me weeks to understand it. But now with Susan Edwards and Sister Ruth on my side, I was happy that at least I wasn’t completely alone. They weren’t Mum, but nobody was.