Reading by Lightning (42 page)

Scapa Flow,
she says to herself, thinking that George must have liked the feel of that name on his tongue.

Betty's bangs are cut straight across her forehead and her hair hangs in a long pale curtain down her back. She sits at the kitchen table resting her hands on her belly, and Lily stands behind her and braids her hair into two gleaming whips the colour of ripe wheat. Who taught Betty this way pregnant women have of hoisting themselves out of a chair? She's the same age as Lily and she thinks nothing of all of this, she never complains, her expression doesn't change when some sudden subterranean flailing lifts the cotton of her apron. Lily comes back from the barn and catches her hauling a pail of water in from the pump, swinging the axe over the chopping block. It doesn't seem to occur to Betty that she could ask for
special treatment. The first Mrs. Stalling, Betty's mother, died in childbirth, when Rose was born.
Are you afraid?
Lily wants to ask Betty, but what good would it do to ask?

It takes her a long time to write to Madeleine and Aunt Lucy. She can't bring herself to say,
I feel as though my heart is breaking,
and really, there is nothing else. Every time she picks up the mail she sorts through it, breathing fast, but there's never an envelope with George's spiky writing on it. Every morning she goes out to the henhouse to feed the chickens, stepping over the sill because her dad never got around to building a step. Then she goes to the barn and holds the pitchfork where her dad's hands wore the handle smooth and pitches clean straw down for Molly. Morning and night she dresses up warmly, wishing for her dad's grey wool jacket, and walks out to the pasture. One cow could forage in the barnyard, but soon there will be snow and she won't be able to take Molly out, so for now she does it to remember her dad. She calls Blue and leads Molly out of the barn. She sees herself from the sky, a cow and a girl and a dog walking single file across the yard, like the premise for an Aesop's fable. In the evening when she goes to fetch Molly she cuts across the fields, holding the barbed-wire fence down to swing her leg over the way he used to hold it for her, breaking off a willow switch and slashing at the dry, leaning skeletons of Russian thistle. During the day she remembers her dad, during the night George.

The new year comes, 1941. There's no enterprise to make anything at all of this year, how could there be? I'm almost twenty-one. I'm five feet seven inches tall, I have blue eyes and brown hair past my shoulders, splitting at the ends because it hasn't been cut since England. I wear a blue sweater that was once Lois's, trousers my brother wore when he was half grown, with muslin blouses from England stuffed into the waistband. I have a wary, even-featured face, possibly severe, possibly interesting. No one cares, why should they? Lily and 1941 are going to roll on anyway. January, February, March, I'll squat cantilevered over the icy plank of the outhouse with my pee hissing down in its momentary passage towards steam and ice, I'll find a rusty stain on my underpants. Business as usual, while German tanks roll into Greece. I'm not consulted about this or anything else — I can't choose not to breathe.

As far as everyone around me is concerned, January 1941 is about William John Piper, born at nine in the morning on January 3, an infant only a mother could love. He's born in the Burnley hospital, and it's Betty's dad and sister who go in to
town and bring Betty and the baby home to us. (First a widow and now a grandmother, my mother sighs.) The new nephew is comely enough, with fair skin and hair and a strong little body. But he has a rackety cry, like a badly tuned engine starting up, and his diapers have a smell beyond foul. Try to rock him and he stiffens and looks frantically away as though hoping for salvation from another quarter. They name him William, but five minutes with that baby reminds me my father's sweet nature is gone from this earth forever.

Now it's Billy who cries in the night and brings people hurrying to his side. He cries in the late afternoon as well, from the first sign of light fading until he falls asleep four hours later. After supper I take him. I show him the picture of his father on Betty's bureau, I sing him the song Joe Pye learned on the ship, shaking his little hand to its military beat. I'll be the one in charge of teaching him irony, I decide. He reacts to everything with the same outrage, letting out that terrible mechanical cry. I hold him warily. I keep expecting him to turn himself into a piglet and run away, I keep hoping he will. One evening when there's no wind I tie him into a shawl against my breast and go outside. As we walk down the road his crying subsides and his blue eyelids slide halfway down over his eyes and he turns his face up with his lips in a little pout. I'm happy for the warm weight of his body against my breasts and walk for an hour, not sure whether he's asleep or just dangling suspended over his grief.

By March he seems a little more reconciled to life, but Betty, wandering pale and puffy out of her bedroom for morning coffee, is not. March is about Betty, who's talking less and praying more. Phillip is gone. He saw his new son and then he had to leave, and Betty is inconsolable. March is three stories about Betty, the first of which I'll call
The Provocation.
This story begins when she spies me sitting cross-legged on my bed playing solitaire, and cries, Oh! and rushes from the
room to conduct a fraught, whispered conference with my mother. Then, while I'm outside, my demonic playing cards disappear from my bedside table and a trash fire is set in the burn barrel. When I come in, the two of them are flushed and defiant, waiting for a confrontation. While they're waiting, prayer sessions begin in earnest, and further notes and religious tracts appear on my dresser. These I carry ostentatiously out to the burn barrel.

Secondly, there's
The Opportunity,
Betty's attendance at her sister Isabel's wedding to an Aussie airman. I'm not invited, but I do witness Betty trying to find a dress to wear, trying on all her old clothes over her new body, walking back and forth to look in the mirror in Mother's room, and in the end having to wear a maternity dress. She comes back from the wedding looking like a cat that's swallowed a bird. Everyone says hello to both of you, is all she says by way of report, as she picks Billy up from the chesterfield where he's at last asleep.

And then
The Leave-taking,
announced at breakfast the next morning. Betty has decided to move back home. Her father will come for her on Saturday. There's room for me now that Isabel's gone, she says. Her long pale lashes flutter.

Well, I know Phillip was hoping his son could be raised with the family, Mother says, and goes to her room.

But Betty hangs on. Billy seems to do better when we're there, she says, cutting her toast into fingers, her little morning ritual. He settles down faster at night. I don't know why. And I guess . . . I guess I sort of miss living with my sisters.

Betty hates her stepmother, and even with Isabel gone it will be an awfully crowded house. This is down to Mother, who never thinks of anyone but herself. The baby can be crying his lungs out and over the screaming we'll hear Mother: Could one of you girls bring me a cup of tea? But Betty won't talk about it.

She does come to visit, she brings the new catalogue and a letter from Phillip and we have a nice conversation. I ask her if she'll come out to the barn and hold the door level while I tighten the screws of the hinge. When I get her outside I force her to tell me why she left. I was just thinking of Billy, she says. It's not an atmosphere I want him to be in. I straighten up and stare at her, the screwdriver in my hand. You don't even close your eyes when we say grace, she says, her eyes round.

Then she looks away. And the sort of filth you read, I've looked into your books. Well, into one of them, but that was enough.

Which one? I can't help asking.

I don't remember the name, she says. She flushes. I have to think of Billy, she says.

There's a long pause, and then she looks up at me again, clearly terrified at her own daring, her blue eyes blinking rapidly. I hate the way you treat your mother, she cries. I feel sorry for her. Look what life is like for her. She's lost her husband, her only son's gone to war. And she's getting worse every day. She can hardly walk across the room. What's going to happen to her? Tears begin to drip down her cheeks. I feel
terrible
leaving her, she sobs, but I just couldn't stand it any more. I felt like I was going crazy. I know it's not right, what I'm doing. It's
selfish,
I know it's selfish. Phil's going to be so mad. I prayed and prayed for God to give me the strength to stay. And he didn't, it just got worse. So that must mean something, don't you think? Betty reaches for my hand. Maybe I can be more help if I'm not living here, she says. But don't worry. I won't tell Phillip the real reason.

Tell him whatever the hell you want, I say, shaking her off and turning back to the barn door with the screwdriver. Adjectival cow! I add under my breath.

So then Mother and I are on our own, and April and May and the months after are about us, about the way we make do.

Nebo Gospel Chapel, where my dad's funeral was held while I was packing up my trunk in Oldham. I like walking in, I like the moment when everyone standing in the foyer registers my high heels, the upsweep of my dark hair, my slim black skirt and the Haig tartan jacket Lois gave me because she didn't like the way it hung on her. It's red and yellow and it hangs just fine on me.

Mr. Dalrymple-the-church-planter is still there, tending his crop, although he seems to have lost his preoccupation with the Rapture. His belt's risen three inches closer to his armpits and his scalp's coming off in flakes like oatmeal. Other than that he hasn't changed much, but now I've seen a shark in a Blackpool aquarium and I recognize the
mouth
with its collapsed lips and inward-leaning teeth.

On Sunday mornings everything sticks to you. It's the effect of all that silence. Getting ready for church I saw my dad standing in the kitchen in his undershirt shaving, his braces hanging down over his Sunday trousers. That sharp moment is still there, and what I felt when I saw Mrs. Feazel in the entrance, saw how she's shrinking and darkening with age, her eyes getting sweeter and darker, like raspberries you're boiling down for jam. And what I heard in town yesterday, I'm raw from hearing that a ship full of children being evacuated from London was torpedoed crossing the Atlantic. It's an excellent badgering religion Mr. Dalrymple preaches, excellent for the Thirties, but now I want to hear what it has to say about this. We stand (why do we stand?) and Mr. Dalrymple prays at length that God will protect our boys and help them resist
temptation and bear witness to the power of Christ for salvation wherever they go so far from home. That's it then: this business with fighter planes and U-boats and tanks is just a metaphor for the real battle, the battle for
souls
being waged in dance halls and canteens all across the Empire.