The Heaven I Swallowed Read online

  I began to walk toward her, listening to the cascading water and the click of my heels against the stone. How slowly I seemed to be moving. ‘Mary!’ I called, as if to will myself to keep moving toward her.

  She turned to me. I could read the hope, then fright and disappointment, running across her face as clearly as if she had written them down. Who was it she wanted?

  ‘Hello, Auntie Grace.’ She remained sitting, craning her neck up to me.

  ‘You’re in a great deal of trouble, young lady,’ my voice stern and hard, just as Sister Clare spoke after I had run away for the first time, in my attempt to get to Auntie Iris’s house. What punishment would I give Mary for her transgression? More than a simple slap, more than seclusion in her bedroom? I did not want to remember what Sister Clare had done.

  Mary’s gaze went back to the fountain, staring through the leaping jets of water to some dream. She was looking at the spot where the black tramps had sat on our day buying shoes.

  ‘Your feet are filthy,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, so you’ve found her.’ Mr Roper appeared by my side, again without my hearing his approach. He had an earthy smell about him.

  I focused on Mary, afraid she would disappear if I looked away. ‘Put your sandals on,’ I ordered. She uncrossed her legs and as she fiddled with putting on her sandals, her knees fell apart for a moment, her dress riding up enough to show a glimpse of her underwear.

  ‘Hurry up,’ I said, hoping Mr Roper would not see.

  ‘That’s good work,’ he said, sounding a little like Fred after he had gutted a fish or cut up a roast. I glanced at Mr Roper. He had a twig caught on the back rim of his trilby.

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ I replied.

  ‘My pleasure.’

  It hadn’t been pleasurable. The heat had made it stuffy and awkward between us, the shadow in the memorial had made me doubt my place in the world, and Mr Roper’s white shirt was stained with dirt. And all of this was Mary’s fault.

  ‘Hurry up, you stupid girl.’ This was my own voice now, strong and forceful.

  ‘Stupid?’ Mr Roper said. ‘Not so sure of that.’ He was staring at the girl, as if seeing her for the first time.

  I didn’t reply. Mary stood and I took her hand in mine, gripping it in my soaking glove. I had to keep pulling at her, to keep her at my pace as we walked to Mr Roper’s car. She kept glancing over her shoulder, toward the empty space left by her imagined kin.

  I did not invite Mr Roper in when he dropped us at the house. I was sure he would have had enough of me for the day and was surprised when he seemed to hover in the driveway, the engine turning over like a conversation.

  ‘Keep an eye on her, Grace,’ he called out the side window. He rarely used my Christian name. We had always adopted the formality of the church group who insisted on ‘Mister’ and ‘Missus’, crying out our seemingly married state, even while so many of us lived alone. Did he really feel we had become closer? I turned and waved politely, a closed-hand, Queen-like wave, trying to convey a composure I did not feel.

  Once inside the house I immediately peeled off my gloves. My hat came off with a strange sucking sound and I kicked off my heels, lowering my feet back to the ground with a sigh. Mary had already broken free of my hand and ran through the kitchen to the outhouse. She had probably been holding on all day. Though there would have to be punishment I was grateful I did not have to keep myself proper for Mary, even my most uncontrolled appearance was civilised compared to her. She had walked all that way … What had she seen? Tonight I would scrub her clean again.

  The mirror in the hallway threw back my punctured face, hot and deflated. I had found Mary, I told myself, brought her back. I should be proud and exhilarated. What had my ­motivation been if not to save her? Pluck her from a life of darkness? Watch over her? A line from one of the Psalms came to me: I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop.

  ‘Mary!’ I called, standing in the kitchen doorway. She must have been moving already, for she ran into me, her torso colliding with my stomach. She took a step back and her eyes, once again, stared up at me.

  ‘Sorry, Auntie Grace.’ She sounded genuine.

  I held her by the shoulders, at arm’s length. I could feel her bones through the dress. She had washed her hands after using the lavatory, the lemon soap smell drifting up, almost taking away the stink of the night.

  ‘I am trying to help you, Mary. To save you from yourself. Do you understand?’ I tried to adopt a priestly lilt. ‘You must work with me in this, not against me. If you run away again, I will call the police and you will be taken back to the Home.’

  I was amazed at how even I was able to keep my tone, how little anger seemed to be stirring inside me. Perhaps she could sense this because instead of the acceptance or even fear I had expected, she began to cry.

  I continued to hold her shoulders as they shook, not willing to risk holding her any closer.

  ‘I want my mum,’ she said. I released her quickly as if she had caught fire.

  ‘You haven’t got a mother,’ I said. ‘There is no point yearning for her.’

  ‘I do, I do have a mum.’

  ‘No, Mary, she is dead.’

  ‘… not true,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Why do you think you were in the Home? Why do you think you are here with me?’

  ‘They took me. They took me away from her.’ She said it loudly, with the strength of a myth she had been cultivating, the fairytale of a perfect life to be found, just around the corner.

  I remembered my own blindness to Fred’s change. I did not want to see his true form. To me, his decision to stay away longer was simply more evidence of his fervour, his commitment to the Empire. His letters contained no tales of promotion, nor fought-for honours or medals, yet I chose to see longevity of service as a sign of his courage, a covert promise of glories to come.

  Here was Mary’s reliance on the dream of her mother, clinging hopelessly to someone who had long since ceased to exist. How hard it would be to make her see.

  She continued to cry, making no effort to control her sobs. I wished I had removed my stockings before this confrontation. I was trapped inside the nylon as surely as I was trapped with Mary, the kitchen a whirling cauldron of emotion.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, girl,’ I said, though her lack of restraint did not really shock me. After all, she was a baser creature, closer to the primal than me, more connected to passion and hunger. It would take longer to turn her. The Sisters had had their work cut out with me when I was young and I was sure I had the blood of the pioneers flowing in me: strong, able-bodied men who slashed at the rugged terrain to make it their own, dynamited mountains as if they were foothills, dammed the rivers for more water than they could drink. Mary was a thousand steps behind such people, her marrow tainted by those who had simply wandered the country, never settling, never taking control of their destinies. Was it any wonder she had no heart to stop in one place and make the most of the opportunity I had given to her? How many times had I wanted to strike out and find a mythical family? Indeed, how many times had I wanted to go in search of Fred? I had even booked passage on a ship not long after leaving my teaching post, determined to bring him back.

  I was not angry, my mind slipping into a barely contained tiredness. Without thinking, I knelt down and hugged Mary to me.

  For a moment, her body was stiff as she held her breath. Then she relaxed, her head on my shoulder and, to her credit, she stopped crying, sniffing loudly next to my ear instead.

  ‘Your mother abandoned you, Mary.’ I spoke into the quietness. ‘Before she went off to kill herself with drink.’

  This is what I had been told and I could not let Mary live in the fantasy of resurrection. It would only make things harder in the long run.

  Mary did not push away from me, as I had half expected. She stayed in my embrace, her shoulders hunching every now and then as she continued to sniff.

  ‘You must know, Mary,’ I whispered, �
��I am your salvation.’

  6

  The next month passed with various lessons. In the midst of a heatwave that almost melted the city, I taught Mary to clean our clothes by hand in the copper, as I had not yet ordered a smaller electric washing machine to replace my first, too-large order. I taught her to scrub the kitchen floor with just the right amount of vigour to ensure no scratches were added to its surface. I taught her to run the Hoover over the carpets, although her arms lacked the power to really exercise the machine to its full potential. I taught her the proper way to dust and how you could use newspaper to clean the windows without leaving a streak, even if the ink came off on your fingers. Of course, with Mary this hardly mattered.

  She had already mastered the art of making a good cup of tea so we went on to other tasks in the kitchen: how to cook a tasty lamb stew; create the waves of mash on a shepherd’s pie; build up the layers of a trifle. I could have sworn the quality of meat from the butcher was better when I had Mary by my side.

  ‘She needs fattening up,’ the butcher said as if she was being prepared for Abraham’s slaughter.

  While Mary did eat a great deal, she did not ‘fatten up’, just became more sinewy. Even with the amount she ate we often had leftovers, stretching the Sunday meal across the week. My own stomach ballooned out with so much food though I had stopped worrying about my figure, settling into the matronly rotundity I saw around me, trying to pretend I too had rolls of fat left over from childbirth.

  Once we had washed the dishes after dinner, we would sit in the front room and I would read to Mary, as a step towards her own learning. I chose Jane Eyre because I had always loved orphan stories. Mary seemed to listen, obedient and polite. I suspected, though, that the seed of hope for her mother was still within her. How often had I created a fantasy family as a child—the perfect mother and steady father, the gaggle of brothers and sisters who would laugh with me as we made daisy chains or surround me in bed on the morning of my birthday? Impossible to monitor the imagination. Even as she sat placidly on the leather footrest, she could be creating a whole other future for herself with a plethora of dark faces. I did not need to ask her why she had made her way to Hyde Park, nor did I have the desire to find out if the shadow in the war memorial had been her or not. Sometimes ignorance is a warmer place to inhabit.

  Strangely enough, in this period of what should have been calm, I was on edge. I would jump at the postman’s whistle (always for next door, never for me). I would wake in the middle of the night with vague recollections of distressing dreams and feel their residue haunting me even in daylight hours. I found it difficult to keep my fingers from constantly knotting together into a tight ball.

  Mr Roper, who had begun to drop in at regular intervals, always with the excuse of a basket of excess fruit from his backyard trees, noticed my unease and asked one afternoon if anything was upsetting me.

  ‘Is it the girl? Has she done something else?’

  Seated at the kitchen table, he had the eagerness of the gossip in his question and I wondered how much of our conversation would end up in pieces around the church lawn. A great deal of my information came from this stoic man. At the same time, I knew almost nothing about him. I had only known him since the war, always as a widower, his wife having died over ten years beforehand.

  One night I had walked past his house and seen his porch light burning. I remembered his dishevelment at his front door, his haste to find out who was knocking unexpectedly. I recognised the wildness of hope. But hoping for what exactly? Waiting for whose love to come home?

  ‘It is nothing to do with Mary,’ I lied.

  Mr Roper bit into one of his brown apples. ‘Somethin’ else then?’ he spluttered through the juice coming from his mouth.

  ‘It’s nothing at all,’ I said, not even sounding convincing to myself. Mr Roper’s question was a little too close to an intimacy between us, an intimacy I couldn’t allow. Having Mary at my house meant his visits were not altogether inappropriate but they could still get church tongues wagging.

  I saw regret in his face. He knew we would only ever have conversations about the state of the fruit or the unpredictable weather, safe, quiet discussions that did not intrude into the borders of our knowledge of each other. A part of me also regretted this. I would not learn for whom his porch light burned, nor the reasons behind the frosty landscapes running down his hallway.

  These were small prices to pay to be left alone with my unease. To not have to explain how Mary’s arrival had churned me up, to the point where I no longer felt safe with myself. Me, who had managed to fool them all, sent into shivers of panic by a little black girl wearing shoes too big for her …

  ‘How much are you being paid for her?’ Mr Roper asked with an abruptness not helped by his choosing to throw the core of the apple down his throat directly after the question. A cold thing to enquire, perhaps he thought it was cold enough to be inoffensive.

  ‘One pound five a week,’ I answered.

  ‘You think it’s worth it?’

  ‘It helps.’

  ‘Makes up for what she … uh … is?’

  ‘She is a child of God.’

  I became aware of Mary standing on the other side of the screen door. She had been out there, in her new Vinnies hat, digging up the bulbs. She could barely understand my instructions to coax them all out of the soil and rebury them in another part of the garden. ‘Why do they need to move, Auntie Grace?’ she had asked and I foresaw another conversation similar to our one about the penny. I’d told her to simply do as she was told.

  I wondered how long she had been listening to my conversation with Mr Roper. Not that it should matter. Let her know the paltry sum I was given to cover her clothes and food and upkeep.

  ‘I’m done, Auntie Grace,’ she said through the wire.

  ‘“Finished” is the right word, Mary,’ I corrected.

  ‘Finished, Auntie Grace,’ she replied and her dropping of the pronoun made it also sound grammatically incorrect.

  ‘You can rake the leaves now.’

  The rake was technically too big for her and it would take twice as long to complete the task than if I did it myself, a small punishment for her semantic cheek.

  She disappeared from the doorway. A few moments later we heard the scraping of the rake across the grass, as consistent as a heartbeat. There were not many leaves yet and this made it harder, having to get the individual pieces without destroying the grass underneath, and she could take her revenge by tearing into the soil.

  ‘I see she does have her uses,’ Mr Roper said. There didn’t seem to be any snideness in his tone so I simply nodded in agreement.

  We sat in silence. I couldn’t tell if his visit had been long enough yet for me to make moves towards his departure. Strange to think how much I would’ve appreciated his presence during those difficult times when the silence of the afternoon hours almost crushed me. Even recently I had longed to draw out the after-church lunches at Mr Roper’s house, always staying until the last of my fellow widows made to leave, regretting I had to go to ensure the group knew I was not alone with him. Now I had Mr Roper in my house, with only a twelve year old as a chaperone, and all I could think about was getting rid of him. What was it that made me so uneasy? Perhaps his presence simply reminded me of absence. Perhaps the chair was better left empty than filled with a poor substitute for Fred.

  †

  In the third month after Mary’s arrival a letter materialised, always a letter, to unsettle me further. Shown to me by Father Benjamin, irresponsibly I thought afterwards. He should have predicted the consequences.

  When I first read the letter I found myself concentrating on the bad grammar and spelling mistakes instead of the content. Force of habit, I suppose. I could almost feel my right hand twitching with the desire to mark the paper with corrections.

  The import of what the words meant took longer to ­register.

  ‘How is this possible?’ I finally asked Father Benj
amin.

  ‘I am afraid that it just … is.’

  A limp reply, given the circumstances. Perhaps I should not have expected anything better. I had always thought of Father Benjamin as a weak man and his frailty had only increased with his illness, his face now even thinner and paler. I tried not to be irritated that God’s supposed servant could not offer me comfort or, at least, reassurance. Father Benjamin handed over a teacup and looked neither apologetic nor horrified, his sickness having robbed him of the ability to react.

  We were sitting in his living room, a small room with two hard lounge chairs facing the empty fire grate. A desk and chair sat under the one window and there was a tapestry rug on the floor. The only decoration on the walls was a large wooden crucifix above the mantle. I noticed the lack of photos, no family members in sight, not even a long-dead mother. This brought me back to the letter.

  ‘I would have thought these things would have been checked and verified before the arrangements were made.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  I took a sip of tea to stop myself biting back at him. He was my priest, after all, a man whom I had to address with some degree of respect. I was confused and angry, exactly as I had felt when Fred’s letter arrived. I had to control the anger, as I had done then, as I had always done.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked. My hand trembled, putting the teacup back into its saucer.

  ‘I think the best thing to do would be to ignore it. The girl is much better off with you.’

  These were the words I wanted to hear. Perhaps I had sold Father Benjamin short. Of course Mary was better off with me. The improvements I had wrought, even in such a short time, were visible to everyone. She walked with a completely different stride now, had begun to shed herself of the ugly hunch of her race. To let her know the truth would be to undo all of that. What good could it do? A mother, yes, a mother alive and searching for her, but a mother as black as the night, a mother with deficiencies running in her veins. She had been drunk and weak enough to let her child be taken from her. What hope did she have of looking after her? Of creating the calm and ordered home I had provided for Mary?