Reading by Lightning (18 page)

Didn't he wonder why? I managed to ask.

He did, love, said Aunt Lucy. And I told him it was because of my dad, my dad didn't want me riding with the lads. She began to laugh. And then one night it was raining to beat heck and I had no brolly and the boy didn't want to let me out to walk on my own. He was dead set on driving me home. So I named a street in the Crescent and he drove up it, all the while with a queer smile on his face, and I pointed to a house — they're all detached houses up there. I picked a grand one that had a double chimney.
Stop there,
I said to him, and he said,
I don't think that's your house, love,
he says.
Why do you say that?
I asked.
Because it's mine!
he says. (She collapsed into helpless laughter.) And here it was
his
house! I'd picked out his very house! Even Lois and Madeleine had to laugh, even Nan, who hadn't been listening, sent up her shapeless, childlike laugh. Oh, we did laugh! cried Aunt Lucy.

There was a little pause in the conversation. Pass Lily the sprouts, someone, said Aunt Lucy. Lois passed me the sprouts. While Aunt Lucy took a couple of leisurely mouthfuls, I
sensed that the story had another chapter. And I was right, a sad chapter, signalled by a drop in Aunt Lucy's voice. This was just at the start of the Great War, she said. I kept going round with him until he was sent up. By then I was training to be a nurse. And then he died, poor lad, just before Christmas. One of his pals come to the house to tell me.

But that spring he sent you flowers, didn't he? prompted Madeleine.

Yes, he did, love, said Aunt Lucy, giving her a warm look. That year a lovely bouquet of greenhouse flowers come to the shop on my birthday, with no card to say who sent them, just the name of the florist. So I went round to the florist and they looked it up in their book and told me who they was from. And here it was him! Back in October, before he went to France, he asked me when my birthday was. And I told him April 14 and he went to the shop and ordered them. Fancy that! As though he knew he wouldn't be coming back, poor lad. So I decided to go and give my condolences to his mother. I asked my friend Sally to come with me and we went round. And it was his mother come to the door herself. But when she heard we spoke Lancashire she wouldn't let us in the door, she was that snobby.

It's not like that today, said Lois.

Archie's mother's having you over to Sunday dinner, then, is she? Madeleine said brightly.

Lois lifted her chin higher.

Ooh, I wouldn't be young again for a pension, sang out Nan. When I was a girl, my da smeared treacle all round the doorway so I couldn't hide in there and snog with my beaus.

Oh, Nan, he never! said Madeleine.

He jolly did! Nan cried, lifting up her head and looking at us fiercely.

They looked at one another with amusement and fell into eating. These were china plates we were eating off, white
china plates with a rose in the centre, and roses climbed a brown wallpaper all around us, in both the parlour and the dining room. In the hall behind Uncle Stanley, in a framed picture, red-coated soldiers in a dark-panelled room leaned over a map. I picked up my silver knife and fork with hands still brown from the prairie sun and set to work cutting my own meat, watching my cousins covertly.
Lo-is, Lo-is,
I said in my mind, so I wouldn't disgrace myself by pronouncing her name the way we said it at home.

Finally Aunt Lucy lifted her face and said with a little tremor in her voice, This is just the age your Uncle William was when he left and went to Canada to live on his own. He was just the age of you girls, think of it. Going all that way to live among strangers, with just his cousin Boris to turn to.

Oh, the morning they left, I'll never forget it, cried Nan. She reached for my hand, her faded eyes misting up. The crowds of people and all the piles of luggage!
Goodbye, Dolly, I must leave you! God be with you till we meet again!
They had a band, you know. She lifted up her old, hoarse voice and sang,
God be with you till we meet again, keep love's banner floating o'er you, smite death's threatening wave before you; God be with you till we meet again.
She looked tenderly at us one by one as she sang, making her voice vibrate as though she were on a stage, and for good measure repeating the last line before she launched into her story.

The band was playing on the pier, she said, and they was all pressed together on the deck waving their handkerchiefs, our Willie right at the front waving to his mam. And we was waving ours and crying, and then the ship begun to keel over, and everyone started to scream, and they all run over to the other side. And then the ship almost tipped over that way! Poor lad, he nearly died before he even left the harbour.

They'd no ballast, said Uncle Stanley. They'd taken out the ballast and filled the hold up with colonists. Shillingford's
brother was in the party. It was a ship built for seven hundred and they carried three times that.

No one had ever mentioned this to me, the ship almost tipping over. Did you see it, Aunt Lucy? I asked.

No, love, they wouldn't let me go to the port. And Hugh was likkle, our Hugh was just a baby. But I remember the morning Willie left. I can still see his face, poor lad, when he turned on the street to wave to me. Your Uncle Roland wouldn't even get out of his bed to say goodbye, he was that cross. He wanted to go to Liverpool to see our Willie off and Mother wouldn't let him.

Wouldn't
let
him! cried Nan. Wouldn't
let
him!! We was skint. Your da was buying his bootlaces one at a time, we was that poor.

So how did you send Uncle Willie to Canada? asked Madeleine.

Me Uncle Clive died, said Nan. He died and left us a few bob. He was a bachelor and he kep a little shop in Eccles, where he sold ribbons and buttons and such like, and lived above it. One day they found him at the bottom of the stairs, his neck broke. She leaned towards me and said in a fierce whisper, He took fits, poor soul.

Your dad was my favourite brother, love, said Aunt Lucy. I was only seven when he left, but I never forgot him. I had three brothers, and he was my favourite. I always thought he might come back for a visit one day and bring his wife.

Well, never mind, duckie, said Nan, patting my hand. He's sent you and that's what matters. And Boris never come back neither. What do you see of Boris and Trudy and the girls?

Trudy and the girls? I said helplessly. Joe Pye I was eager to talk about, but my nana didn't seem to remember him at all.

You girls show Lily the garden, said Aunt Lucy after the pudding. Nan and I will do the washing up. You girls go out and get acquainted.

Their house was the last house at the end of a steep street in the middle of Oldham, a semi-detached red brick at the top of a long row of terraced houses. It had a bow window in front and a fanlight over the door, and ragged roses still blooming against the iron railing in October. What was called the garden was a backyard covered with flagstones, the flagstones littered with husks fallen from a tree on the other side of the low stone wall. The garden looked out over an open space with a view of the hills. Madeleine called this open space Oldham Edge. Across the way you can see the Pennine Chain, she said. That's Yorkshire we're looking at.

Do you walk in the hills? I asked.

Not a great deal. Sometimes we go with Mother to pick whim berries. But George does. George walks everywhere. George wanted to walk home from Durham this term holiday, but Father wouldn't let him, he said he had to take the train. So he's not coming home at all, he's going on a tramp on the moors, to some dreadful wild place.

We wandered towards a red-brick outbuilding at the end of the garden, with a square window set into the bricks on its corner to look like a diamond. That's George's den, said Madeleine. Mother couldn't bear all his gear in the house, so they gave him one end of the potting shed. But slowly he's taken it all over. Father whinges about it, but he never did much potting anyway. She bent over and picked up a glossy brown nut that lay among the husks. In the catalogue of family features, Lois had got the best ones, yet it was Madeleine I found myself wanting to watch, for the listening tilt of her head and the play of expression on her face. On prairie roads in the spring little round potholes opened up and water collected in them and mirrored back the blue of the sky.
Madeleine's eyes were like that, two round blue pools in a face with no worry or pretense — just lively interest.

I put my face to the window of the potting shed. Inside among a lot of clutter I made out the unmistakable curve of a human skull. What is that? I asked.

I'll show you, said Lois. She flashed me a smile and ran back into the house. Madeleine frowned. She tossed the nut away and stood against the garden wall, pulling with both hands on the red-trimmed cuffs of her grey sweater. Are you in school? she asked, turning her blue eyes towards me.

No, I said.

They must let you stop earlier than they do us, she said.

You can finish when you want, I said. I stopped two years ago.

That's like Mother. She went until she was twelve and then Nana needed her so she stopped. She would never have been a nurse but for the war. She would have stayed a shopgirl. Or ended up in the mill.

Lois came back down the path carrying a long skeleton key.

Where'd you get that? Madeleine asked.

Never mind, said Lois. She stuck the key into the lock and opened the door.

George would have a fit, said Madeleine.

Bugger George, said Lois, stepping boldly inside. The potting shed had an earthen floor and smelled of clay like our cellar, but also of mould and paint. There's the skull, she said carelessly, picking it up. It's not real, although George will tell you it is. He'll tell you he found it in the cemetery in Hollin-wood when the sexton was digging a grave. If you call him a liar, he'll back down and admit he got it from the stage manager at the theatre in Durham. That they had it for Yorick's skull.

But that's a lie too, called Madeleine from the garden, and they both laughed.

Torn, wanting to please both of them, I stood in the doorway, waiting till my eyes adjusted to the dark. Where
did
it come from? I asked.

He made it out of clay and paid them to bake it at the kiln in Failsworth. She thrust the skull at me. I'd never seen a skull, but it looked as I thought a skull would, although browner, especially with regard to its teeth. I put my hands behind my back. Lois and Madeleine laughed and Lois drew me farther into the shed. The shelves all around were crammed with jars of chemicals, chains with heavy locks at the end, fluted seashells, a stuffed bird with a long, pointed beak, masks with feathers on them, bones, a bow and arrow, a ship in a bottle. Hanging everywhere were drawings I couldn't make out in the dim light, charts or plans for buildings.

What a tip, said Lois. What a filthy mess. It's a wonder we don't have rats. And his bedroom is just as bad.

You can see George in every one of his phases, said Madeleine. When he was a junior chemist, when he was an architect.

When he was Michelangelo, said Lois.

When he was Charles Darwin, said Madeleine.

When he was
Erasmus
Darwin, said Lois, which was apparently funny in a cruel way.

He's not your real brother, is he? I asked.

Yes, of course he's our brother, Lois said sharply. He's been our brother since he was one day old.

It had been sunny when they'd picked me up at the port, but by afternoon, when we sat on the garden wall, a cold wind had packed clouds the colour of pewter tightly into the sky. I'm in
England, I thought, looking up at the fat grey clouds, homesick suddenly for the train, for the impersonality of the train on the first stage of my journey, when everyone was hurrying to different places on their own and I was invisible from both worlds, the world I'd left and the world I was going towards. Once I boarded the SS
Franconia
it was different: there we were all held in a little society in which it seemed I had to account for myself. Sometimes I thought the other passengers were piqued by my naïveté, and during the cool, sunny days while everyone strolled on deck I leaned against the railing and looked out to the horizon as though this were my habitual attitude, gazing across endless fields of rippling wheat. That's how I made my way across the ocean, playing the role of the unspoiled, forthright farm girl. One night in the dining room a man in a shabby brown suit talked about the drought on the prairies. It's a sign of the end times, I said boldly. It's in the Book of Revelations. There's a drought on the prairies every thirty years, said the man. It's a natural cycle. He didn't bother even to glance at me again. And then my longing for England was fierce, for England, where I could be someone else, although I didn't know then who that would be.