“What’s got into you?” he asked. His head disappeared a moment and his hand slid up the banister. I wanted him to stop, to stay where was and not come any closer. I needed to think, to unmuddle my head, to remember the questions I most wanted to ask. I thought about running to the POW’s room.
“Does she work at the desk?” I said. “Nancy? Is she the one that wrote Sukey’s name in the register?”
“What are you talking about, Maudie?” Frank asked, just a hand on polished wood slowly following the curve of the staircase. His voice curled towards me, sinister and momentous without a body, and I felt the banister like a conductor, sending a current of electricity from his hand to mine. “What are you doing here? Did you come to find me?”
“No.”
“But you’re angry with me.” The hand disappeared and he took the few remaining flights at a run. They weren’t too much for him, after all. “What is it? What’s happened? You’ve discovered something?”
I stepped back, disturbed at having to look up at him instead of down, and crumpled the letter in my pocket in answer.
“What have you got there?” he asked with a half-smile, as if I were a child playing a game.
“A letter.”
“From who?”
“Sukey. She sent it before she disappeared.”
I had expected a conversation, I thought he’d ask what the letter said, that I’d have time to question him, but I didn’t even see his expression change before he lunged at me. With a single movement I found I was bent back over the banister, and he was trapping me there with one hand on my collarbone. The sudden strength of him was a shock. I squeezed my fist around the letter and pushed deep into my pocket, the fabric grazing my skin. He gripped my wrist and tried to jerk it upwards, dragging my skirt up with it.
“The letter says she was going to tell you something,” I said, clamping my arm to my side, determined to ask my questions anyway. “Did she tell you something?”
“Give me the letter, Maud.”
His hand slid above my elbow, forcing it to bend, and my arm rose helplessly. “Tell me,” I said, trying to hang on to my thoughts, to remember what I was supposed to be asking. It seemed odd to be talking still when I was so like a ragdoll in his hands.
“How can I when I haven’t read it?” He had clenched his teeth and was twisting my arm back, his skin hot through the material of my school blouse. That moment, I scrunched the letter into a ball and dropped it over the banister the way you’d drop a penny down a well.
Frank swore as it fell, and tried to snatch it from the air. The action forced me further over the banisters, and my feet left the floor. I tried to catch at the handrail, but missed. Sickness rushed up as I felt the ground far below do the same, and then Frank’s hands were on me again. He pulled me roughly on to the landing, and it took a moment before I realized I was safe, not falling.
When I looked, his face was white. “Thought I’d lost you,” he said, and it was unnerving to see how thoroughly the blood had drained from his skin. “I thought I’d lost you.” He made light grabs at my limbs, like an incompetent doctor checking for broken bones; he seemed to have to prove to himself I was really there.
“Don’t worry, I’m not a ghost,” I said, though my heart was still beating so hard it was difficult to draw breath, and I wondered what my face had looked like when he touched me. He hung over the banister and his shirt clung to him, showing the muscles in his shoulders and back. I took a step towards him.
He breathed out heavily and started down the stairs. “No, stay where you are,” he said. “I can’t be trusted.”
I stood for a moment, listening to his footsteps as they descended. The blood that had been rushing around my head slowed, leaving the beginnings of a headache, and I let myself imagine, once, what it would have been like if Frank hadn’t stopped me falling. I felt the way my head might have caved in, and how my neck would have crumpled. I pictured blood on the tiled floor, and people screaming. I thought of my parents, already suffering from Sukey’s absence, and I guessed at what might have happened to Frank. He’d have been accused of pushing me, surely? Halfway down the stairs he stopped and his face appeared again between the floors.
“Tell me something about Sukey, Maud,” he said. “Not about this place—tell me something else.”
“What, for instance?”
“I don’t know. Something you did together. That you remember.”
I scuffed my shoe over the sand-sodden carpet. “We went to the beach,” I said, beginning to walk down after him. “The day they removed the barbed wire. That was before you were married. Before the war was even over.”
“I know. Go on.”
“And I buried her in the sand.” My voice echoed off the walls strangely as I followed him down, but I could still hear the way she’d laughed that day and see the sand slipping over itself, streaming into the crevices. “And I pushed shells into the sand to make her a dress. And afterwards, when she’d dug her way out, she shook her hair, and Ma was cross because she got sand on the sandwiches and when we ate them later they were full of grit. But the shell dress was really brilliant,” I said, reaching the bottom of the stairs. “Sukey made me collect white ones for the skirt so it would look like it had a petticoat. I wish we’d had a camera.”
“I wish you had, too,” he said, pulling the collar of my blouse closed around my neck. “Get home now, Maudie,” he said. “I’m going for another drink.”
He bent to pick up the browned and crumpled letter, slipping it into his pocket as he walked away.
“Come and stand under here, Mum.”
I’m wobbling on my feet; it has started to rain and someone’s cigarette smoke lingers in the air. Helen is cowering under a bus shelter. She stands right back against the seat as I get near and seems not to be breathing. I put a hand up to her face and she screws her eyes shut for a second, raising an arm. There is a livid mark on her wrist that looks like it will bruise.
“How did you get this?” I say, taking her wrist as gently as I can, feeling her pulse, strong and quick.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says.
“It matters to me. You’re my daughter. If you’re hurt, it matters to me. I love you very much.”
She stares at me for a moment and I worry I haven’t used the right words, and then I feel a sudden exhaustion. My limbs won’t hold me up. I’m like one of those toys that flop over when you press the bottom in; the wire in my joints has uncoiled. But Helen’s hands are under my arms and I find the seat beneath me. I try to settle the glass pickle jar on my lap, but I can’t get it to stay put. The seat is at an angle and either I or the jar keeps sliding off. The contents jumble and something moves, oozily covering the frog’s eye. It’s irritating. I turn to say something to the woman who is sitting next to me, but tears are running down her cheeks.
“There there, dear,” I say. She sobs and presses the back of her hand to her mouth. I don’t know what to do to help her. I can’t work out who she is. “Tell me what the matter is,” I say. “I’m sure it can’t be bad as all that.” I pat her shoulder, wondering how I got here. I don’t remember getting the bus. Perhaps I’m on the way back from some appointment, but I can’t think what it would be.
“Is it man trouble?” I say. She looks at me again and smiles, though she’s definitely still crying. “He been unfaithful?” I ask. “He’ll be back. Pretty girl like you.” Though in actual fact you couldn’t call her a girl.
“It’s not a man,” she says.
I look at her in surprise. “Woman, is it?”
She frowns at me and gets up to look at the bus timetable. Perhaps she thought I was prying. Two pigeons nod at each other on the branch of a tree; they seem like me and this woman, chatting to each other, as if they are our bird selves. I try to wave at them, but I have to be quick to catch the jar from sliding off my lap. When the woman turns back I look at her face properly. The tears have been wiped away. It’s Helen. The seat seems to tilt under me. It’s my daughter, Helen. I’ve been sitting in a bus shelter with her, not knowing who she was.
“Helen,” I say, touching her wrist, noticing a dark mark on it. “Helen.” I didn’t know my own daughter.
“You’re exhausted,” she says. “You can’t walk back. I’m going to go and get the car. Okay, Mum?”
My stomach seems to have dissolved inside me. I didn’t know my own daughter, and it feels like a reproach to hear her call me Mum. I scrabble about in the jar, for something to do. There’s a bit of mint stuck to a hair band and I nibble the edge, but it doesn’t taste right and there’s some sort of grit on it. An old woman comes towards the bus stop.
“Hello, dear,” she says, sitting and rummaging in her bag.
“Hello,” I say. I notice she has tatty carpet slippers on. She must be even dottier than me.
Helen says hello, too. “I have to run and get my car,” she says. “Would you mind keeping an eye on my mum? It’ll only take me a few minutes.” She looks over at the timetable with a frown. “You won’t let her get on a bus?”
The woman agrees, uncurling a bit of plastic inside the bag. Helen pauses on the curb, biting her top lip, and then begins to leap between the cars, waving back at me.
“Taking you out for the day, is she?” the woman says, unscrewing the lid from a bottle and taking a long drink. “Wish someone would take me out.” She jerks a hand behind her. There’s a stone building with a sign hanging from its façade.
“Cotlands Care Home,” I read.
“That’s it.” The woman’s hair is in tight, white curls, very neat. They don’t match the tatty slippers. “My son asked me to come here. Said it was for the best. I’d be closer to him. He’d be less worried. He could come and visit more, take me for drives in the country. But does he?” She shakes her curls. “And so I’m stuck here. Oh, the carers aren’t bad people, from somewhere foreign, but very kind. Smile all the time. But so tiny! I feel I’ve dropped into Lilliput, you know? And I’m only five foot two.”
She takes another swig from her bottle, and the sound of her swallowing is comforting. She drinks with a focus that makes me think of Frank and the sweaty heat of a pub, and I expect to look down and see my bare knees, but I’ve got trousers on and a jar of jumbled things in my lap.
“And after a while in there you lose yourself. I can’t remember what I like or dislike any more. They say, ‘Mrs. Mapp doesn’t like peas,’ or ‘Mrs. Mapp loves Starburst,’ and then they ask, ‘That’s right, isn’t it, dear?’ and I nod, but I can’t for the life of me remember what peas taste like and I’ve no idea what a Starburst is. Same with TV. They put something on and they say, ‘Like this, do you?’ and I nod. But I couldn’t tell you what the bloody hell it’s about.”
I look back towards the care home. There’s something in that jumble of words, something important, but I can’t grasp on to it. A tiny brown lady is coming out of the gates.
“And worse than that is my name. It’s Margaret, by the way. Margaret.”
“Nice to meet you, Margaret.”
She shakes her curls again. “Yes, yes, you, too. But you see, in there they insist on calling me Peggy. Peggy! I hate that name.”
“Me, too,” I say, thinking of the charity shop.
“Peggy, you no get bus now,” the small brown lady calls, smiling.
“I know that,” Peggy says. “I’m only having a chat. Here, quick,” she says to me, throwing the bottle into my lap, where it clinks against the pickle jar. “Can’t get caught with this. Would get a right old lecture. Pity, because gin’s the only thing I know I like.”
“Inside, please, Peggy,” the little woman says.
“See what I mean? Peggy this, Peggy that. Bloody nightmare. They even put it on my records. So now I’m Peggy Mapp, not Margaret Mapp.”
“They put it on your records?” I say, and feel a little jolt.
“Yes. If you called and asked for Margaret, they’d probably say I didn’t live here. Half of them don’t know my real name.” She pauses to sigh. “You see, there was another Margaret when I first got here and they wanted to make sure they didn’t get us confused. She’s dropped dead since, of course. But I’m still Peggy.”
I watch her go in with the tiny carer, and the bus arrives. I’m about to get on when there is a shout from across the road. The driver calls out of his window to someone. There’s a great to-do over something, and the doors fold shut. Helen is here, too, talking, talking, but I can’t concentrate on what she’s saying. I’m thinking of all the different names there are for Elizabeth. Eliza, Lizzie, Liz, Lisa, Betty, Betsy, Bet, Beth, Bess, Bessie . . .