Things a Bright Girl Can Do

  He blinked.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She nodded.

  His mouth worked in silent conflict. Then he said, ‘Look here. I didn’t want to worry you, but I suppose you ought to know. I might not ever get properly better. They don’t know, but … I mean, it’s possible. Things still get pretty sticky sometimes, even now. I might not be able to teach cadets, even.’

  ‘You could still draw, though, couldn’t you?’ said Evelyn.

  For answer, he tipped up his sketchbook to show her. A picture of the soldier in the opposite bed, dozing over a penny paper. She took the book from him and flicked through it. A soldier with his leg in plaster. Another in a bath chair. Six sketches of the same soldier reading a novel, smoke curling up from a pipe. The interior of a hospital train, with soldiers sleeping in bunk beds three high. All the pictures seemed to be of soldiers. Once, not that long ago, they’d been of girls.

  ‘Well then,’ she said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘That’s all that really matters, isn’t it? And your father would always make sure we were all right, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘I expect so,’ said Teddy. ‘I must say, it would be rather nice.’ He tried to sit up, and immediately began to cough. Once he’d started, he didn’t seem able to stop. Evelyn looked at him in alarm, wondering if she ought to summon a nurse, but at last he managed to calm himself. He lay back on his pillows, his face horribly blue, and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again and gave her a pale smile.

  ‘Goodness,’ he said, and, astonishingly, she saw that his eyes were full of tears. ‘We do do dramatic proposals, don’t we?’

  She took his hand and squeezed it.

  ‘Goose,’ she said. But for some reason, she felt rather like weeping herself.

  Mr Moss

  MAY AND HER mother soon got used to Mr Moss sitting in the corner of the back room. He was the very soul of consideration. At first, he insisted on eating his own food; awful-looking meat-paste sandwiches in paper bags, which his wife brought in every morning, and bath buns, and steak and kidney pies with mashed potato from the café around the corner.

  But after a few days of this, Mrs Barber told him not to be so ridiculous, and that nobody who lived in this house was going to eat meat-paste sandwiches while she worked here. After that, he very scrupulously paid Mama a few shillings a week in return for his meals, which he ate in the kitchen with Mrs Barber.

  He spent most of his time sitting in May’s father’s armchair in the corner of the back room, reading a battered copy of David Copperfield. At night he slept in the armchair under his overcoat and a blanket. (He refused May’s mother’s offer of a pillow.) He smoked a clay pipe full of foul-smelling cheap tobacco of the sort Nell favoured, but out of respect for their furnishings, he always took this out into the back yard. There was very little space in their house for another person; the ground floor consisted of the parlour, where May’s mother gave her piano lessons, the back room, where May and Mama sat of an evening, and where they ate their meals, and the kitchen. But Mr Moss, evidently embarrassed by his imposition on such a respectable family, did his best not to impose. When Mama had company he betook himself off to the parlour or the kitchen, though the company invariably found him fascinating and insisted on interrogating him about his life: Did he spend all of it living in other people’s houses? Weren’t people dreadful to him? Whatever did his wife and family think?

  At first, May resented him. It was awful having him sit there, no matter how apologetically, imposing himself onto what little time she had with Mama. She was rather ashamed of this; last year she would have viewed it as her duty to befriend and convert him. But being unhappy seemed to do funny things to a person. It made it harder to be kind. It made it harder to forgive. When you spent all your energy being unhappy and angry and buffeted and bruised, you didn’t have much left for Mr Moss.

  But it was rather rum, having him sitting there in the corner while she tried to eat her rice pudding. You couldn’t just ignore him, or May couldn’t, anyway. Instead, she gave him a copy of Votes for Women, and Jus Suffragii, and Rebel Women, and told him since he was here, he ought to find out about the injustice he was propping up: ‘Because you are a tool of the government, you know, though I don’t suppose you intended to be. Probably you thought you were going to be sitting in the bedroom of some rake like Steerforth, and then you got Mama instead. But I do think now you might rebel against our oppressors and join the suffrage cause.’

  ‘I dare say you do,’ said Mr Moss, very seriously. ‘But I dare say Mrs Moss would have something to say about it if I lost my job a-protesting for her freedom. Come, miss! Can’t you have a word with your mother about this bankruptcy business? I hate to think of you ladies living here without all your nice things.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said May. This was the sort of conversation she was used to, the sort she’d once relished. It was rather cheering to have someone to lecture on the importance of principles again.

  In return, Mr Moss told her about his wife, Esme, and their two grown-up sons, one of whom was in Belgium and the other in France. May asked if his wife was lonely at home without him, and tried to persuade him to invite her around for dinner, but this he would not do.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t want to impose, miss,’ he said.

  It was nice, when Mama was away, to have someone to talk to. She found it hard to take the threat of him seriously. Surely the government wouldn’t really take all their things away.

  Would they?

  And then one day, they did.

  Everything

  THEY TOOK EVERYTHING.

  Two men – not Mr Moss – came and loaded it all into a cart. Everything except their beds and their clothes, and Mrs Barber’s personal effects. (May’s mother argued for May’s personal effects, but unsuccessfully). They took the carpets and they took the curtains, they took the books and the saucepans, the waste-paper baskets and the dinner plates. They took the family photograph album with all May’s baby photographs, and the pictures of May’s father.

  That was the one thing that did make May’s mother cry.

  They took the piano.

  ‘But I need the piano!’ said her mother. There was panic in her voice. They’d known this was coming, of course, and they’d both done all that they could to prepare themselves. But Mr Moss had assured her she’d be allowed to keep the piano, just as workmen were allowed to keep their tools.

  Without a piano, she couldn’t earn a living. They could, May realised, be in serious trouble.

  They were already in serious trouble.

  • • •

  She went upstairs and into her bedroom. They had left her the bed, with a heap of clothes piled on top of it, and the fashion-plates and the picture postcards stuck up on the wall. Nothing else. Without the bookcase, the wardrobe and the chest of drawers, the room looked strange and shabby and surprisingly large. There were dustballs where the furniture had stood, and a large, rectangular patch on the floor where the carpet had been.

  She felt almost nothing.

  That wasn’t true. She didn’t feel devastated, or bereft; May had never cared very much about possessions. In fact, she was surprised by how little she minded. You should care more than this when your whole life was carted away, shouldn’t you?

  Mostly what she felt was bewilderment and a realisation of how impossible it would be to live in the house without all the small, essential objects that kept it in motion; dishcloths and lavatory paper and waste-paper baskets and armchairs, none of them very difficult to obtain in themselves, but to put them all together from nothing! It seemed a monumental task. And not just armchairs, but her father’s armchair, and the picture of her mother that one of her aunts had painted when she was eighteen and the dear old print of St Isumbras at the Ford that her father had put up in the nursery when she was a child. All gone. As it often did, the thought of Nell flared into her mind. She remembered those days after war was declared, when Nell’s mother had gone to and from the pawn
shop, her perambulator piled high with china dogs and rag rugs and candlesticks and picture frames. Had they ever got any of their things back? She had never asked, and the thought made her hot with shame. There hadn’t ever been much in those rooms that wasn’t useful. She should have bought some of it back. It wouldn’t have been charity. It would have been a romantic gesture; she could have found a way of doing it that Nell wouldn’t have minded.

  Or could she? She and Nell had always seemed to rub each other up the wrong way. Probably she’d have done it wrong, and instead of being a grand romantic gesture, it would have ended in a row.

  She should have tried though. She should have done something.

  She sat on the bed. A small but insistent voice in her head was asking, Is it worth it? If every woman – or even every Suffragette – in the country had stopped paying taxes, it would have meant something. But this? Who would even care? It might be news for a few weeks, if her mother was lucky, and then it would be forgotten.

  It won’t make any difference, said the voice in her head. It’ll cause a frightful lot of upset, for you and Mama and Mrs Barber, but it won’t get us the vote.

  It made her uneasy, that little voice.

  It suggested that doing the right thing was a lot more complicated than she’d thought it was, and she wasn’t at all sure that she liked it.

  The Rest of Your Life

  SECRETARIAL COURSE, SAID the advertisement. Evening class. It started at seven thirty, which was a bit of a rush from the factory, and it wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t prohibitive either.

  Miss Swancott, Secretary. Nell tried out the words in her head. They felt rather grand. Would she have to wear a skirt and blouse? Would they let someone who talked the way she did (and looked the way she looked) work in an office? Although secretaries didn’t just work in offices, did they? They organised the affairs of gentry, and catalogued things, and …

  They’d never let you anywhere near the gentry, Nell told herself firmly. She wasn’t sure they’d let her on the course, even. At least she wouldn’t be the only woman there, the way she might have been before the war. Female secretaries weren’t so uncommon now. But would she be able for it? Shorthand, and typing, and whatever else secretaries learnt?

  If it’s awful, I don’t have to stay, she thought, but of course she did. You couldn’t pay all that money and then quit because you were frightened.

  You aren’t afraid of a typewriter, are you? she said. And she wasn’t. But she was afraid. And although she filled out the form, and took out the postal order and addressed the envelope, she didn’t post it. She carried it around with her for days, in the bottom of her pocket.

  It was still there on Friday, when, as they were coming out of the factory, another girl caught up with her.

  ‘It’s Nell, isn’t it?’

  She was dressed like Nell in the munitionette’s uniform and, like Nell, her hands and face were stained canary-yellow. Unlike Nell, however, her nails were carefully trimmed and varnished. And unlike Nell, she was smiling.

  ‘I’m Jane,’ she said. ‘Jane Percy. Listen, what do you think about football?’

  She was older than Nell, but not by much – she looked perhaps eighteen or nineteen.

  ‘I dunno,’ Nell said, rather taken aback. ‘Cricket’s my game. But I like it well enough.’

  Jane looked pleased.

  ‘Do you?’ she said. ‘That’s good. I rather thought you might. Look here. They’re wanting to start a football team – for the munitionettes, you know. They’re trying to set up a league with the other factories – just for fun, you understand. We’ve got ten girls, so I thought you might like to be an eleventh.’

  Nell looked at her suspiciously. Was she being insulted? But Jane’s face showed nothing but honest interest.

  ‘Well …’ she said.

  ‘You needn’t stick it if you don’t like,’ Jane coaxed. ‘But I thought of you at once when I heard about it, and I did hope you might have signed up.’ She opened her eyes a little wider. ‘I rather fancied playing on a team with you.’

  Was she flirting? Nell looked at her hard. She looked back innocently.

  Confused, Nell stammered, ‘Oh – well – I mean—’

  ‘Good-o!’ Jane beamed at her cherubically. ‘I’ll let you know when we’ve got somewhere to practise. I used to be in a girls’ football team before the war, and we had ever such a jolly time.’ She winked at Nell, raised a hand in airy farewell, and headed off back the way she’d come.

  Nell watched her go. She was tall and muscular, and walked with the easy grace of someone who works hard for her living, but has never had to go hungry. Her munitionette hat dangled loose from her hand, and her hair hung long, dark and shiny down her back.

  Nell, watching her, realised she was grinning.

  She put her hands in her pockets and touched the edge of the envelope. The thought of it still made her nervous, but now she thought perhaps she would be able to cope. As if Fate were trying to tell her something, she turned out of the factory gates and saw the pillar box on the corner. Quickly, before she could change her mind, she took the envelope out of her pocket and put it through the slot.

  There.

  It was done.

  Dizzyingly, Deliriously Happy

  SEPTEMBER, AND WITH it, Teddy, home at last from hospital and installed in Christopher’s bedroom for a giddy, glorious two-week-long leave. At the end of it they would be married, and then Teddy would go off to a convalescence hospital on the Isle of Wight, and Evelyn would go to the perfect little doll’s-house cottage that had been found for them in a village on the edge of Oxford. She had never cared about decorating before, but she found it was rather fun to go through the cloth in her mother’s sewing chest, trying to decide if red or green curtains would be best in the living room. And then when Teddy was well enough, he’d come and join her and start his new job training recruits at Cowley Garrison.

  ‘And we’ll all live happily ever after,’ said Evelyn.

  She was dizzyingly, deliriously happy. This last year at Oxford had been gorgeous, of course, but there had always been that worry about Teddy (and, to a lesser extent, Christopher) gnawing away behind it. And now it was gone. Now Teddy was coming here, to her own house, for the first time in years. And in two weeks’ time they would be married, and then they would be living together, and be together for always. She felt quite un-Evelynishly giddy about the whole thing.

  It had been decided that Teddy would spend almost all of his leave with the Collises. The war had been disastrous for Teddy’s father’s factories, which made cheap porcelain figurines of shepherdesses and cherubs and so forth. Nobody wanted shepherdesses in wartime, which was just as well, as Teddy’s father had lost half his workers to the forces. He was busy trying to diversify into something more practical, but this meant much of his time was spent in his offices, and he had little to spare even for Teddy. Teddy’s mother was out all day too, running a National Kitchen, and everyone agreed it would be dull for Teddy all alone at home.

  And so you’re coming to us! Evelyn wrote. Huzzah!

  She felt like a child on Christmas morning, breathless and excitable, and inclined to giggle.

  ‘Why!’ her mother said in astonishment. ‘You look almost like a real girl for once.’

  Another day, Evelyn would have been insulted, and probably furious. Today, she just wanted to laugh. Who cared what her mother said any more? Teddy was coming home!

  The wedding was to be held in the church where Evelyn had been christened, the one they’d gone to as children for Christmas Day services and summer fêtes. Evelyn’s mother had made her dress, in white organdie, from a pattern from Vogue. If she’d expected gratitude, she was disappointed, Evelyn found it hard to care at all about the dresses, the flowers, the music, or the food. Everything was going to be so pinched and scrabbled-together anyway. Why waste your time worrying about it? Evelyn thought she could have been married in a paper bag and it wouldn’t have mattered,
so long as Teddy was there.

  Teddy, they quickly realised, still wasn’t very well, even now. He tired very easily, and spent much of that fortnight asleep on the drawing-room couch, while Evelyn tried to interest herself in her neglected Ovid. Besides his parents and Herbert, they saw hardly anyone at all. They spent their days quietly together (when Hetty and Kezia would let them) Evelyn reading aloud, Teddy drawing. (He still drew mostly soldiers, even here in her drawing room. Soldiers marching, soldiers sleeping, soldiers stumbling through the mud. It was a little disconcerting.)

  ‘Draw me, won’t you?’ she said, and he said, ‘Eh? What? All right,’ but he left the drawing half finished, and she didn’t have the heart to remind him.

  When the younger girls weren’t there, they would talk about the life they’d have together in Oxford. Teddy wanted four children, she two, so they agreed three would be fair.

  ‘Horace, Augusta and Algernon,’ said Teddy, and she said, ‘Beast!’ and he laughed, delighted.

  ‘I’m terrible at housework,’ she said. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I never expected anything less,’ he said. ‘Hurrah for slatterns, say I. We’ll eat currant buns, and potted shrimp, and Gentleman’s Relish in bed, and to hell with the washing-up.’

  ‘That does sound rather heavenly,’ she said. ‘And we’ll never, ever make the bed. Except on Sundays.’

  ‘Naturally on Sundays we’ll be perfectly respectable,’ Teddy agreed. ‘We’ll go for constitutionals on Christ Church Meadow, and tip our hats to the dean.’

  The wedding was the last Saturday before his leave was over. Evelyn had been disappointed that they wouldn’t have a honeymoon, but they’d had so little notice of the leave that even this last Saturday had been a scrabble to organise in time. And actually, now she’d seen how ill he still was, she was rather relieved.

  ‘We’ll have a real honeymoon when the war’s over,’ she told him. ‘We’ll go to Italy and look at the ruins of the Colosseum.’