We've Come to Take You Home (11 page)

TWENTY-SEVEN

T
HEY CLEARED THE DINING
room and then washed and dried the glasses, the decanters, the china and the cutlery. Standing, side by side, they scrubbed, dried and polished the saucepans before hanging them back on the hooks above the range. When they talked it was a whisper, a question, an answer, a word here and there.

And now the clocks were chiming two o'clock and all that could be done had been done; everything had been put away, either on shelves or in cupboards, the kitchen sink and table scrubbed, the floor swept and wiped down, the range stoked up and the copper filled.

‘Go and get some sleep, Jess, you must be exhausted…'

She turned off the gas lamps, lit a candle, and then, together, she in front, he following behind, they climbed the narrow stairs from the basement up to the ground floor of the house. They slid the bolts across the front door, switched off the electric lights and then walked together, side by side, the candle flickering, up the wide, wood-panelled staircase towards the first floor landing.

A floorboard creaked. The Major was a heavy sleeper; the two double whiskies he had after dinner guaranteed that. But, over breakfast, the Major's wife would complain that her husband's snoring had kept her awake, tossing and turning through most of the night, until, exhausted, she fell into a deep sleep just as Jess arrived with their morning tea. They waited, nothing, the Major snored on.

They continued on up to the second floor. Eyes down, she bobbed a curtsey and turned to walk away. She had one more flight of stairs to climb. His hand slipped into her hand, gently pulling her back.

‘Jess, you will always have a home here.'

His fingertips slid over her fingertips.

‘For however long you want it…'

And they parted. Tom, the son of the house, to his bedroom, squeezed between the bedrooms of his two dead brothers. And Jess, the maid-of-all-work, up the stairs to her room in the attic where her mother, now her dead mother, had once slept.

She'd left the window open when she got up that morning, over twenty hours ago now, but the room was still unbearably hot. She stripped off her clothes and threw them down on the chair. She pulled on her nightdress and blew out the candle. She lay down on top of the bed and looked up, out of the window, at the stars in the night sky.

This room, this house, the people in it and Ellie next-door were all she had. There was no one else. No brothers, no sisters, nobody. She was quite alone. Everyone she had ever loved, her father, her brother, and now her mother, was gone. She would never see them again.

But she still had a job, food on her plate and a roof over head, and she owed all that to her mother – and Tom. He had said nothing to his parents about what had happened, her rudeness and the loaf of bread she had given away, that morning.

Just under three hours later, as the clocks started to chime five o'clock, she dragged herself off the bed, stumbled over to the washstand, poured water out of the jug into a bowl, picked up the cloth, soaked it and washed her face. She unbuttoned the top of the long-sleeved nightdress and, reaching down inside, gave each armpit a good scrub. She did the same
between her legs. She dragged a comb through her hair and then tied it back in a ribbon.

Her clothes lay in a crumpled heap on the rickety chair beside the bed where she'd thrown them the night before. She rolled first one thick, black, wool stocking, then a second, up her leg and over her knee. She pulled on her knickers, took off her nightdress and then tugged the slip over her head. She stepped into the corset, jerking it up, bit by bit, over her hips until the metal stays were digging into the skin beneath her breasts. She tightened the laces, forcing her chest out and her waist in, and then knotted and tied them together in a bow.

The long-sleeved brown dress had ten buttons. She did them up, one by one. She tied the floor-length apron securely around her waist and then slid her feet, one at a time, into the lace-up, black leather ankle books lying on the floor next to the chair.

She straightened the sheet and blanket, plumped up the pillow, and walked over to the door. She opened it. The narrow, low-ceilinged, windowless corridor, running along the length of the attics, normally smelt of sweat and dust, of mould and mildew. Today it was filled with the scent of roses.

She looked down. On the floor, directly outside her bedroom door, was a glass jar. Inside the jar was a single white rose. She leant down. She picked it up and carried it into her room. She placed it on the chair beside her bed.

When Tom had insisted on helping her to clear up last night, downstairs in the kitchen, he was just being kind. But going out into the garden, picking the rose, putting it in the jar, and then creeping through the house up to the attic, in the middle of the night, to put it outside her bedroom door, was something altogether different.

Back home, in her village, it would only have meant one thing. Her parents would have smiled and, when she asked them, would have agreed that she and the boy could walk
out together. But, up here in London, working as a servant in the Major's house, there was a line between those who lived upstairs and those who worked downstairs. And that line should never be crossed, not by anyone, whether master or servant.

That day, and the day after, when the master's son walked into a room, she walked out of it. When she had to ladle out his soup or pour over his gravy, she kept her eyes firmly down. But the harder she worked at ignoring him, the harder he worked at getting her attention.

She'd never ever seen or eaten a chocolate. But there they were one morning when she came down to the kitchen, three of them, nestled up together on a plate in the larder. And beside them was an envelope with her name written in ink on the front. It was from the Major's son. The chocolates were a gift. And could she, please, eat them quickly before they melted away in the summer heat.

All through the day, every time she went into the larder, she stared at them. Should she? Shouldn't she? Was eating a chocolate, a gift from her employer's son, crossing the line?

That evening, at dinner, after she'd cleared the main course and taken the dirty plates and cutlery down to the kitchen, she opened the larder and took out the chocolates. She carried them upstairs and placed them in the centre of the dining table.

‘Jess, what a surprise, chocolates, my favourites, wherever did they come from?'

She bobbed a curtsey, keeping her eyes down, and said nothing. The Major's wife turned to her son.

‘Tom? Is this you? How lovely. The last time I had a chocolate was before the war.'

The Major's son picked up the plate.

‘Granaches of strawberry with rum, hazelnut praline or crème mocca?'

‘The strawberry, it's my favourite, so clever of you to remember…'

Jess turned towards the door. She would leave the family, upstairs, eating their chocolates while she went, downstairs, to get on with the washing up.

‘Father?'

‘The hazelnut praline. Delicious, Tom, thank you.'

The Major's son pushed back his chair.

‘Which leaves the crème mocca for you, Jess.'

He was walking towards her.

‘And I won't take no for an answer.'

She stared down at the single chocolate sitting on the plate.

‘Jess?'

She turned and ran out of the door, along the hallway and down the stairs into the basement. Right or wrong, whether the Major's son was just being kind, or whether he had some other motive, she could have said, ‘Sorry but I don't like chocolate,' even if it was a lie. But, instead, she'd run out of the dining room without a curtsey; enough in most houses to get an instant dismissal.

The next morning, at breakfast, everything was as usual. No mention was made of what had happened the evening before. She served the family their poached eggs on toast, went upstairs, made the beds and opened the windows to air the rooms. She cleared the table, did the washing up and gulped down a piece of toast and a mug of lukewarm tea. The Major's wife gave her that day's shopping list and then left, with her husband, to go out on a call. They would not be back until after lunch.

Raindrops were splattering down on the pavement when she opened the front door. It was just a summer shower, the sort that would stop as quickly as it had started, but heavy enough to do some damage. The Major and his wife would not be pleased if they came home to find their curtains and carpets soaked through.

She went back into the house. She closed the front door and climbed the stairs to the first floor. She closed and bolted the windows. She climbed up the stairs to the second floor. She'd presumed that the Major's son had gone out, alone or with his parents. She walked down the hallway. She was wrong. His bedroom door, usually open, was closed.

TWENTY-EIGHT

T
HERE WAS AN INTERCOM
to the right of the door. Mac pushed the button. There was silence and then a crackle.

‘Hello.'

Where was he taking her? This was more like a prison than a hospital.

‘Hi, it's Mac.'

‘Hi, Mac. Come on in.'

There was a buzz and the doors hissed open.

‘I come here every day. To remind myself…'

Water cascaded over a cliff face down into a fern-edged pool below. A mother monkey, cuddling a baby monkey to its chest, dangled from a tree. A snake, curled round a bunch of bananas, slept on, a smile on its reptilian face. Frogs with orange webbed feet sat, red eyes bulging, on enormous, tablesize, lily-pads. Parrots darted from tropical flower to tropical flower.

Mac reached a finger out towards a cloud of yellow and green butterflies shimmering in the sunshine. There was a buzz. A door opened.

‘The special baby unit.'

On all four walls and across the ceiling, shoals of rainbow-coloured fish swam through glimmering coral. There was no thumping on keyboards, no barking out of orders or crashing and slamming of doors. It was so quiet, so peaceful, that the special baby unit, and everybody in it, might well have been swimming along the bottom of the ocean floor.

‘Many of the babies that come here are pretty close to the edge…'

Two people, a man and a woman, were sitting beside a clear plastic box the size of a microwave. It was surrounded on all sides by row upon row of machines.

‘The little girl, inside the incubator, is Ruby. Ruby was born at twenty-three weeks, seventeen weeks premature. She's been here, in the special baby unit, for two weeks now…'

The wrinkled lump covered in tubes, with a huge head and tummy and skinny arms and legs, looked more like a premature alien from outer space, an infantile ET, than a human baby.

‘No one thought she would get this far. But she's a real little fighter. She never gives up. If anyone's going to get there she will.'

The man put his arm round the woman's shoulder. He hugged her close.

‘It may be weeks, even months, before Ruby goes home. She's so young she hasn't even got ears, they haven't had time to grow, but they'll come.'

The couple leant forward, heads together.

‘Sophie and Daniel come in every day. They sit with Ruby, they tell her stories, sing to her, paint her pictures, even play her music. Very young babies, even as young as Ruby, always know when someone's there…'

The next bed in the ward was a cot, the sort you would expect to see in any home where there was a very young baby, and it wasn't surrounded by machinery.

‘Noah was premature, exactly like Ruby. At the beginning nobody knew whether he would get through the next minute or hour, let alone day or week…'

A man and a woman were standing, arms entwined, looking down at the baby. And this one did look like a baby, the sort you see in TV adverts crawling around with an angelic, beaming smile on its chubby, pink face.

‘There were days, very early on, when Noah was so sick, he couldn't breathe, he couldn't feed, his whole body was yellow with jaundice. Emma and Jake would go back home to bed not knowing, when they woke up in the morning, whether they would still have a son. But they never stopped hoping. And they never stopped loving.'

The baby gurgled.

‘Today's a special day, for everyone, the nurses and doctors here in the unit who've been looking after him, but especially for Noah's mum and dad. Because, today, Emma and Jake are going to do something they never thought they would be able to do…'

The woman lifted the baby up out of the cot.

‘They're taking Noah home.'

Ahead was another cot and lying in that cot was another baby. But that was it. There were no parents, no mother and father, just one nurse. She looked up as they approached.

‘Hi, Mac.'

‘Sam, this is Jennie. She's in charge of the ward. Jennie, this is Sam.'

‘Hi, Sam.'

Jennie tucked a blanket round the sleeping baby.

‘How is she?'

‘Doing fine. But we're keeping her here, just to keep an eye on her.'

‘And the mother?'

Jennie shook her head. ‘Nothing.'

A phone started to ring.

‘Too many babies, not enough beds. Bye, Sam.'

The little girl lay there, eyes tight shut, hands balled into fists, fast asleep.

‘She was found on Sunday, early morning, in a bag, in the car park at the back of the hospital…'

Sunday, yesterday, the same day her father had been admitted to hospital.

‘We got a phone call telling us where to find her…'

A hand uncurled.

‘It was raining but the bag was watertight and she'd been wrapped up in a towel which had kept her warm. But we're worried about the mother. The police are trying to find her. Not to charge her, just to get her here to the hospital so she can be looked after, get some medical care. She sounded not much more than a child herself.'

The baby wriggled and burped, then opened its eyes.

‘Has she got a name?'

‘Not that we know of. There was nothing left with her, no note, nothing.'

The baby smiled up at Sam.

Light was replaced by darkness, the warmth of the hospital by the cold of a churchyard. She was sitting on a hard stone floor, her back against a wooden door, and something was tugging at her. She looked down – the something was a baby. It was feeding from her breast, a breast swollen with milk, which had to mean that it was her child. In the sense that the body she was inside had had sex with a man, the baby's father, had carried it for nine months, and given birth to it. She, her mind, had no memory of it, none at all. But what she did have, could feel, was a sense of connection to, even love for this tiny scrap of flesh, blood and bone.

Her eyes fluttered, closed, opened and then closed. All she wanted to do was sleep. She couldn't. She didn't know why, only that she couldn't. There was something else she had to do.

She eased the baby away from her breast and laid it, wrapped in its blanket, down on the floor. She hauled herself up. She buttoned her dress, then her coat and walked out of the porch into the churchyard. The body she was inside kept on walking down the gravel path while her mind, trapped inside that body, was shouting, ‘Don't walk away, go back, you must go back, if you leave your baby she will die.'

‘If the police can't find the mother, she'll have to go up for adoption.'

She was back in the special baby unit, standing beside Mac, surrounded by bleeping machinery. Seconds before, she'd been sitting in the church porch, the cold creeping up her body, with the baby tugging at her breast. It hadn't been her imagination, she hadn't been asleep so it wasn't a dream and she hadn't been drunk. On both occasions, in the intensive care unit and down here in the baby unit, she had been here in the hospital. And these slips into this other world, into this other girl's body, had been minutes, rather than hours, or even days, apart.