Thursday's Child (Alien There Is None)

235 Pages·2013·1.07 MB·English

by  Forrester Helen

HELEN FORRESTER
Thursday’s Child
DEDICATION
When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut.
Gitanjali-Rabindranath Tagore
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER WORKS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
CHAPTER ONE
‘Dawn’t be a fool,’ shouted James as he slapped me hard across the face.
I stopped shrieking and began to weep, rocking myself backwards and
forwards, my hands clutching at my nightgown as if to tear it.
James, with tears running down his face, was saying: ‘Now, dawn’t take on
so, luv.’
His Lancashire accent, usually carefully suppressed, was homely and
comforting, and gradually my weeping lessened and I lay back on the pillow.
The medicine bottles on the mantelpiece changed from red blobs to definite
shapes, and James’s face, so like Barney’s, ceased to be a blurred mirage and I
saw how exhausted he looked.
That last winter of the war had seemed particularly long and cold. Although in
Wetherport bombing raids had ceased some time before, most of its inhabitants
were worn down by overwork and poor food, and Mother was not surprised,
therefore, when at the end of March I caught influenza. On the morning that
James called, I was feeling better, and, with the promise that on the following
day I should get up, Mother had tucked me up in bed with two hot-water bottles,
and had gone out to shop. She had been gone only five minutes when the
doorbell rang.
I let it ring twice, in the hope that whoever was at the door would go away,
but the third ring was such a prolonged one that in desperation I got out of bed,
hastily wrapped myself in a blanket and pattered along the icy upper hall and
down the equally icy Victorian staircase to answer it.
On the doorstep stood James, looking as white as if he had just seen the sticky
result of a direct hit on an air-raid shelter. Mist had formed little globules of
moisture on his red hair and on his muffler; his face was blue with cold.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked apprehensively, and shivered in the draught from
the open door.
‘Get back into bed and ah’ll tell thee,’ said James.
In spite of ten days of illness, I ran up the stairs and scrambled into bed, my
heart pounding with foreboding.
‘It’s Barney,’ I muttered, my teeth chattering. ‘Something has happened to
Barney.’
James limped slowly up the stairs, drawing off his gloves as he came, entered
my bedroom and sat down heavily on the bedside chair.
One of my hands lay on the coverlet and he took it in his.
‘Peggie, dear, Barney was killed the day before yesterday. Mother got the
news this morning.’ The words came in the precise, clear tones he used when
clarifying a point of law for one of his clients.
Although the news was something I had feared daily for months, I was
stupefied by it and could not for a moment grasp the implication of his words. It
was said that lightning did not strike twice in the same place, and it seemed
impossible to me that in one war a woman could really lose two fiancés.
Jackie had gone down in the Swallow in 1939, a month before our wedding,
and it broke my heart, but I was young then – and young hearts mend – so that
when Barney proposed to me four years later life once more became worth
living.
I had known Barney all my life. He was big, red-headed and impetuous, and I
fell in love all over again. His only sorrow seemed to be that his twin brother,
James, was lame and could not, therefore, join the Army with him. This had
separated them for the first time in their lives – and now they were separated for
ever.
‘Kill me, Lord, kill me too,’ I had shouted in my agony, as James’s words bit
into my heart and mind.
I must have had hysterics; otherwise James would never have struck me, but I
remember only an enveloping, physical pain. Barney was dead, and the
knowledge of it killed part of me.
I clung to James’s hand: ‘Why did he have to die?’ I sobbed. ‘Why not take a
useless fool like me, not a good man like him? Why couldn’t I die instead?’
James loosed his hand and put his arm around me. He smoothed the hair away
from my eyes: ‘The good God must have other work for you to do,’ he said.
James was not the kind of man to talk about God, and his words stuck in my
mind, but at that time I just lay in his arms with his face close to mine, and
thought only of my own misery and not of his. He and Barney were identical
twins, and he must have felt as if one of his limbs had been amputated without
anaesthetic – yet he never mentioned his mother’s or his own suffering.
James was still nursing me against his damp overcoat when Mother returned
from shopping. She could never tell the brothers apart unless she saw James
limp, and she thought it was Barney sitting beside me.
‘Barney, how nice to see you. Leave at last!’
James said, ‘I’m James,’ and Mother understood.
‘My poor darlings,’ she said. ‘Your poor mother.’
In her time, Mother had faced many crises, and she was wonderfully patient
with James and me that day. It was she who remembered to telephone James’s
office – James was a solicitor, as was Barney – to ask his clerk to cancel his
morning appointments, and it was she who later bundled him off to work, after
letting him talk to her about Barney while she prepared lunch for him.
‘Is someone with your mother?’ she asked.
‘My aunt is with her.’
‘Then when you have eaten this, go away and work. Work is a good opiate.’
When he had gone, she came and sat on my bed and talked to me. She did not
talk about Barney, but about James, of his brilliant brain, his sensitiveness and
the sorrow he must be feeling. She said firmly that Angela, who is my younger
sister, and I must help to comfort him and his widowed mother.
I listened dully. At that moment I did not care about anybody except Barney,
and every time I thought of his lying, blown to pieces, in a German field, sobs
shook me and I writhed in my bed, so that the pillows grew damp and the sheets
became hopelessly twisted.
When Mother realised that it was too soon to divert my thoughts to other
people, she sat quietly by me until Father and Angela returned from work.
Perhaps she knew what I had not realised, that James loved me more than
Barney did; and maybe she hoped that when the pain had worn off, I would
transfer my love of one brother to the other.
Father came in and stared down at me with pitying eyes.
‘I am sorry, child,’ he said.
He bent and kissed me: ‘Have courage, little girl.’
He went away to eat his dinner, and I heard the quiet murmur of his and
Mother’s voices in the room below.
I heard also Angela’s key in the lock of the front door, and the patter of
Mother’s slippers as she went to meet her in the hall. I heard Angela give a little
cry of anguish; Mother must have told her the news immediately, so that she did
not blunder when she came up to see me.
There was a pause and then Angela’s dragging footsteps up the stairs.
Enwrapped in my own misery as I was, even I thought how tired she must be to
come so slowly.
Angela came into the room. She had taken off her hat and coat, but still wore
the slacks and the overall she used in her work as a ‘back-room girl’. She had
studied electronics, but none of the family really knew exactly what she did in
the closely guarded Government laboratory where much of her life was spent.
She shut the door behind her and leaned against it. Her face was an unearthly
white and, despite the heat of the sickroom, she was shivering.
‘Pegs.’ Her voice was only a whisper.
She looked so stricken that I motioned her to come to me. I had not imagined
that my elegant, sophisticated sister had so much feeling in her, and I was jolted
out of my self-pity.
She came and sat down on the bed, her shoulders hunched and her hands
dangling hopelessly between her trousered knees. This ugly posture was enough
to tell me how deeply she had been affected by the news of Barney’s death;
usually she sat very gracefully, with straight back and ordered hands.
Suddenly she flung herself across me and wept, her breath coming in harsh
gasps. I said nothing, feeling too full of grief myself to speak.
‘Dinner’s ready, Angela,’ called Mother.
‘Give me a handkerchief,’ said Angela, looking up quickly, her sobs hastily
stifled.
I gave her a very wet handkerchief and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose.
She tried to smile at me, as she said: ‘Woman must eat as well as weep.’
She went across to the dressing-table and powdered her nose with my puff,
then came back to the bed, and in almost motherly fashion, straightened my top
sheet and kissed me on the forehead. I could feel her lips trembling as they
touched my skin, although she looked fairly composed as she walked to the
door.
As she went out, she said: ‘I’ll come up after dinner and keep you company
while you eat your supper.’
‘I can’t eat,’ I said.
‘My dear, you must. In times like this, one must keep strong – and you have a
long way to go yet.’
‘I wish I was dead,’ I said.
After Angela had gone downstairs, I lay for a long time, thinking of Barney. I
had always had a great affection for him, hot-tempered and ruthless as he often
was; when we were younger, I had imagined that he preferred Angela to me as
he had taken her out frequently, but it was to me that he proposed during the last
Christmas he had spent at home. I had been so happy; it seemed as if the war
could not possibly last much longer, and we planned to be married as soon as
Barney was demobbed. He had survived the invasion of France safely and had
enjoyed one more leave when his badly mauled regiment was brought home to
be reformed. He had been tired and morose during that last leave, as if he had a
premonition of what was to come, but after he was rested he became more
cheerful and we spent two or three happy days together before he went back to
his barracks.
I had begun to collect linen and china for the small flat we hoped to find. I
wanted Barney to enjoy all the comforts I could scrounge for him in a tightly
rationed country. I had bought sheets on the blackmarket, made pillowcases out
of bleached flour bags, begged old curtains from Mother, and had bought from
auction sales pieces of painted china and prewar silverware. Even now, on the
bedside table, lay a half-finished tablecloth, which I was contriving by faggoting
together tiny pieces of linen left over from the manufacture of aeroplane wings.
In a paroxysm of rage, I sat up and flung the tablecloth and the coloured
embroidery silks across the room. Unfortunately, I flung the water glass as well;
but the explosion it made when it crashed released the tension in me, and when
Mother came running into the room, I was crying with steady, hopeless sobs.
Mother picked up the cloth and folded it carefully. It was to be a long time
before I would spread it on a table, and if some, self-appointed prophet had told
me where the table would be, he would not have been believed.