Authors: Penelope Lively
Now there was Lucas’s house, which went up and up, and down and down. Right up were their rooms, and right down was the press. Sometimes Lucas let her help him with the press. She had to find letters for him: “Now find me an A. Good. Now an N. Now a D.
Good.
We’ll make a printer of you yet.” Lucas is a printer, he says. So will she get tall and thin, like Lucas, with a beaky nose, and glasses?
She likes finding letters for Lucas. And at school she likes reading. She can read whole words, whole lines of words, a whole page of words. “Mary runs to her mother. See Mary run. Mary runs to her father.”
Father.
When she is seven, quite soon, they are going to go to the zoo. There are no lions and tigers at the zoo now because of the war, but there are other animals, and a place where you can have tea, and there might be a ride on a camel.
There was a life now, at the tall house in Fulham; a determined, stoical, daily kind of life that defied what had happened, what was happening, in the same way that the life of the city itself ignored the gaping windows, the potholes, the sandbags, the blackout, and got on with what had to be done. It was a life without much by way of comforts or consolations: the occasional lucky strike at the butcher, and liver for supper, an extra sweet ration for Molly, a dip into the pub for a beer and a smoke for Lucas. For Lorna, there was just the knowledge that every day you moved on, you moved further from that other day, you moved toward some other time when perhaps you would be whole again, in some way. Getting through time was all that mattered.
Occasionally she felt as though Lucas were avoiding her. They would eat a meal together in the evening, the three of them, but he would quickly make some excuse and vanish up into his own room. If she suggested that he join them for a walk by the river at the weekend, he would be diffident, seem almost unwilling, but then, if he came, he was his old self—an engaging, quirky companion. She wondered if he was regretting the whole arrangement, their presence in the house, and confronted him, one day.
“Lucas, this is just for the moment, isn’t it? You mustn’t feel you’re stuck with us for ever. Sooner or later…”
“Sooner or later what?” He looked aghast.
“Well, sooner or later we must move on.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know,” said Lorna. “Just…we can’t inflict ourselves on you forever.”
He looked away. He took his glasses off and began violently polishing them with a handkerchief, always a sign of agitation. “I know it’s not ideal. You should have a proper flat up at the top, with a bathroom and a kitchen, but it’s no good, one wouldn’t be able to get it done these days for love nor money.”
“Lucas,” she said. “
We’re
all right. It’s you I’m worried about. We’ve invaded you.”
He put the glasses back on, blinked a few times, then said rather stiffly: “It is an invasion entirely to be welcomed. My p-privilege.”
The matter was not raised again. Molly had her seventh birthday, lost a front tooth, rode a camel at the zoo. The year tipped over into the next. It was 1944; people talked now of after the war as a real possibility, not some improbable nirvana.
At Christmas Lucas’s widowed mother came, bringing a turkey. “Don’t ask me how,” she said briskly. “Someone owed me a favor, that’s all.” She was taking a short break from intensive WVS duties, back home in Portsmouth: “The blitz may be over, but we seem to be as much in demand as ever.” On Christmas evening, Molly in bed, she suggested that Lucas take Lorna out for a drink.
They walked down to a riverside pub, stumbling out of the darkness into the noise and light of the interior—the beer fumes, the cigarette haze, the rank of backs waiting at the bar. Lucas found a table, achieved drinks. “Like an eighteenth-century stew, I always think. Something out of Hogarth. Deeply reassuring, in some way—I love it.” There were paper chains and streamers hung from the ceiling, the place was raucous; they had to sit close to hear one another.
Lorna said, “I had never been into a pub until I met Matt.”
“Quite right, too—a well brought-up girl.”
They were silent for a moment—Matt conjured up by her words. Lucas saw her looking across at a group of servicemen in uniform. She said, “We should have been born at some other time, shouldn’t we? Not landed in this.”
“Well, that’s always true for someone, somewhere. The eighteenth century was no picnic.”
“And you’re stuck with what you get.”
“Quite so,” said Lucas. “Unless you believe in reincarnation—an idea that always rather appeals to me. I favor being one of those Indian gods with many arms, next time around. So convenient for operating a press.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m tediously rational. Perhaps you do?”
She considered. “No. I don’t think so. Not as such. But I can’t believe people just disappear.”
“Well, they don’t, do they?” He hesitated, looked away. “Matt is in one’s head, isn’t he?”
She nodded. Then she reached out and put her hand on his for a moment. “It’s getting a bit easier, you know. I sniff the air sometimes. Thanks to you and the Press, in many ways.”
He stared intently into his beer, shook his head. “Well good…Anything I can…Anyway, good.”
“Eventually,” she said, “I’ll have to sort things out. After the war. Goodness, I’m starting to say that now. Like everyone else. After the war, I’ll have to think seriously about…well, about what I’m going to do, and where to be, and what’s best for Molly. Find us somewhere permanent to live. I’ve wondered about looking for jobs in publishing. Or an art gallery. I thought maybe…”
He sat there, gazing at her; what she said floated above the background racket of the pub—the medley of voices, bursts of laughter, “Last orders, please!”
Now? he thought. No, not now. When? Soon? Never? No, no. Soon.
“Time, gentlemen, please…”
Give me time. Give me strength.
He unfolded himself from the low seat, held out his hand. “Maybe we should be getting back.”
When Molly draws a house, it is high and thin, lined up between similar houses. Many windows; smoke curling from chimneys. Occasionally a different house appears—lower, more squat, attached only to a mirror image on one side. And from time to time there comes a house that stands alone, a little house; this house has a row of chickens in front of it, and a tree alongside. When Molly shows this house to her mother, Lorna goes quiet.
Molly likes to draw. She likes to write, too. In the evenings, after school, she writes in her exercise book. She is writing a story. Lucas says that when this story is finished he will print it, like a real book. But how do you know when a story is finished? Molly’s story goes, “And then…and then…and then.” She cannot find a way for it to stop.
She takes this problem to Lucas.
“Perhaps some stories never end,” he offers.
“If the person dies it does.”
Lucas looks disturbed. “Well—not absolutely. Aren’t there other people in your story?”
“Actually,” says Molly. “My story isn’t about people. It’s about cats.”
When Lucas comes back to the house at night, if he has dropped into the pub for a quick snifter, or has visited his friend Toby at the art gallery, he sometimes sees a tiny crack of light at the top window. As the Warden, he should come down on this like a ton of bricks, but he does not, and, anyway, everyone is more lax about the blackout these days, and one tends to turn a bit of a blind eye.
He looks for that sliver of light as he gets near, and when he sees it he has the most incredible sense of uplift. In all his life, he has never known this. He did not know that you could feel thus.
Lucas said, “I have loved you since first I saw you. But it was out of the question, then.”
She had not at first understood that he was asking her to marry him. When the realization arrived, she was filled at first with astonishment, then with a strange sense of comfort.
She knew that she was not in love with him. She would never be in love again, that was over and done with now, forever. She liked him—oh, she liked him as much as she had ever liked anyone, more than she had ever liked anyone. He was Lucas, he was entirely familiar, he was a part of the landscape of her life. And, when she came to think about it, she knew that she did not at all care for the idea of Lucas with some other girl, with a wife.
She told him. She said, “I can’t love you like I loved Matt.”
“I know. It doesn’t matter.”
“And there is Molly.”
“I want Molly, too. If she will have me.”
So Lorna was married once more in a Register Office. She and Lucas stood before the Registrar, Lucas in a crumpled suit, she in her gray flannel skirt and her only jacket, blue tweed from a village jumble sale long ago. A wartime wedding. But most wartime weddings featured a bridegroom in uniform. Lucas was an oddity, in his awful suit, blinking furiously behind the glasses, which were of course the reason he was a blatant civilian, but the Registrar was probably not aware that Lucas had severe myopia and astigmatism and was useless material so far as the Army was concerned. Both Lucas and Lorna fancied that the Registrar treated him with a certain coolness. He offered perfunctory congratulations, followed by a dismissive look that suggested they should make way for the next couple.
Molly sat in the front row with Lucas’s mother, flanked by the witnesses—Toby Shanks from the gallery, and the mother of one of Molly’s schoolmates, with whom Lorna had struck up a friendship. That was the full complement of the wedding party. The Bradleys were not present. Lorna had not suggested that they attend. She had written to tell them that she was to marry again. Her mother’s evident relief saturated her reply. “I am so glad for you,” she said. “Now there will be someone to look after you and Molly.”
And your father and I can stop wondering what we could do about you: that was the sub-text. A cheque for £25 was enclosed: “To buy something nice for your new home.”
The Faradays sent warm good wishes. Lucas’s mother was quietly exultant: “It was high time he settled down. Good for you, Lorna.”
This is my mother’s wedding, thought Molly. But mothers are not supposed to get married; they already are married. And brides wear long white dresses and veils and carry flowers. Mummy just has a rose in her buttonhole. Now Lucas is my daddy, thought Molly. Except that he is not.
She could remember her father a bit—the look of him and the sound of him, the feel of him and the smell of him. She remembered him drawing a picture of a cat for her, she remembered that he came off the train, wearing soldier clothes. Except that all this was getting fainter, weaker, she had to summon it up.
She liked Lucas. If pressed, Lucas would sing “Old Macdonald had a farm,” all through, making the right noises. He could do paper airplanes out of brown paper, that flew across the room. Lucas listened when you told him things.
So this is my mother’s wedding, thought Molly. Afterward they were going to have a special lunch in a restaurant; she could choose what she wanted—there might be trifle.
That summer of 1944, the bombs began to fall again. At first they were just a rumor. People were saying…Over in Pimlico, something had happened…And then they became a truth, an acknowledged new horror, the doodlebugs, these mean little engines that puttered across the sky, and when the sound went dead, your number was up. A new exodus began, the flight from the city. A neighboring family left. There were fewer children around.
Lucas said, “I think you and Molly should go to Matt’s parents.”
“It’s not as bad as the blitz. Is it?”
“It’s different. And we don’t know if it will get worse.”
“The war’s almost over. They say.”
“Even so.”
She was torn, anxious for Molly’s safety, but reluctant to abandon a place that was now home, or as close to home as anywhere ever could be again. And Lucas, who was the center of this home. In the end, she took Molly to the Faradays for a few weeks in the summer, and then returned in time for the new school term and, as it turned out, the advent of the V2s—more devastating, more sinister.
“I’m not going back. We can’t keep coming and going. It’ll be all right. The war could end by Christmas.”
This was peacetime. This was after-the-war, that the grown-ups had talked about. There were parties in the streets, with flags everywhere; everything was lit up now, and she had been with Mummy and Lucas to see Buckingham Palace in the night.
It should be more different, Molly felt, this peacetime. She had not thought that everything would go on pretty well exactly as before—had expected transformation, a world that was strange and new, like the glowing landscapes of Heaven, in the Bible storybook at school, peopled with ecstatic figures in robes. But everything was the same, and nobody seemed all that much happier, they still grumbled about rationing, and queues, and you still had to do gym at school in your vest and knickers, and the boys still waited at the corner and tried to bang you with their satchels.
She was going to have a little brother or sister. Now that would be different, she thought, really different. She did not know what she would feel about that, because you cannot know what you feel about something that has not yet happened.
It was not like last time, with Molly. She said to the midwife, “How long has it been now?” and the girl looked away. That look meant: too long. She was very young, younger than Lorna, and new to the district, and frightened: Lorna could see that, through her own fear and pain. And then another contraction came, and another. And now there were no longer minutes, or hours, but one extended roaring present spiced with faces, voices, frozen moments.
Lucas, at the bottom of the stairs, standing aside for the ambulance-men and the stretcher. She saw his anguished face.
The screaming siren of the ambulance. She thought: that is for me. She could still think. She thought: it has all gone wrong, terribly wrong. The midwife was still there, beside her. She was holding Lorna’s hand.