Life: An Exploded Diagram

  Tommy said, “Mum, she’re wet herself!”

  “No, she hent,” Chrissie said. “And mind yer bleddy manners. Ruthie, I reckon yer waters hev broke. D’you know what that mean?”

  Ruth shook her head. She had a hot wet cup and hot wet legs and didn’t know what to do with any of them.

  “That mean baby’s ready to come,” Chrissie said. “You got to get upstairs. Tommy, get you home and get the bike and fetch Nurse Salmon up here. Thomas! You hear what I say?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then dunt stand there lookun like a bleddy fish. Do what I told yer.”

  Tommy ran the thirty yards home pretending that the sky was full of Nazis and that he was dodging their bombs. His mother’s bike was leaning against the wall of the outside lav. It was a woman’s bike, without a crossbar. Tommy was too short to sit on the seat and reach the pedals, so he rode it standing up with his face almost level with the handlebars, machine-gunning everything that crossed his path.

  District Nurse Salmon had retired in the summer of 1939. Bad timing. Ten months later, the Cottage Hospital outside Borstead started to fill up with damaged soldiers and airmen, and she found herself called upon to tender to the needs of the civilian population. The local doctor, a depressed and alcoholic Scot, steadfastly refused to visit civilian patients who could not pay his fees (in guineas). So instead of gardening and reading and walking her fat little terrier, Miss Salmon spent the first six years of her retirement cycling hither and yon, dealing with fevers and earaches, tweezering gravel out of boys’ knees, dressing ulcers, lancing boils, strapping up broken wrists and fingers, dabbing antiseptic on dog bites, stitching cuts, blitzing head lice, and, very occasionally, delivering babies. When she was paid for her services, it was usually in kind: a dozen eggs, half a week’s ration of tea, a rabbit (unskinned), a bundle of carrots, a bottle of parsnip wine. She lived in a tidy little Victorian house a mile and a half from Bratton Morley, set back from the Cromer road. The house suited her; it was plain but slightly posh, as she was. She was in the kitchen frying a slice of belly pork for her lunch when Tommy Slender pounded on her door. She didn’t get to eat it until ten hours later.

  Ruth had imagined any number of fearful things about what they called labor. Chrissie had told her it would hurt. (“Thas like havun yer top lip pulled up over yer head.”) But she’d had no idea that it would go on for hours and hours, the pain rolling through her time after time. Even so, it was not the physical agony that almost unhinged her brain; it was the embarrassment. Lying there, spraddled and heaving, with Chrissie holding her down, and old Nurse Salmon peering and poking at the parts of her that not even George had ever had a close look at. Her own language shocked her. When the pain roiled in, she swore and blasphemed in a voice that didn’t seem hers. It was like she was possessed by some raging, goaty old Satan.

  Her mother used this as a pretext to excuse herself from the proceedings.

  “I ent gorna stay here an lissun to any more of yer language, Ruth,” Win said. “If you can’t get ahold of yerself, I’m off downstairs.”

  In truth, Win was more frightened than offended. She noisily cleared up the soot and shards of chimney pot that had spilled from the fireplace, then busied herself in the garden. When it got dark, she sat in the living room with her fingers in her ears, humming hymns. At eleven o’clock, she was shaken awake by Chrissie Slender, who said, “Win? Come you upstairs an say hello to yer grandson. He’re had a helluva struggle gettun here.”

  Win followed Chrissie up the stairs. Ruth’s bedroom smelled of sweat and disinfectant. Nurse Salmon was putting things into her leather bag. A stained sheet was bundled at the foot of the bed. It would need a salt-and-soda soak, Win thought, and even that probably wouldn’t do the job. Ruth’s face was yellow and slick in the lamplight. The child lay on her chest, wrapped in a towel. From where she stood, Win could not see its face.

  “So. How’re yer doing, Ruth?”

  “Dear God,” Ruth said, “I ent gorn through that again.”

  “I should hope not,” Win said.

  In accordance with George’s wishes, Ruth named the baby boy Clement, after Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party. Win thought it was absurd.

  AS FAR AS Win was concerned, men were coarse and troublesome when you didn’t need them and gone when you did.

  She was the youngest of five children. The others were all boys.

  John, the eldest, died of diphtheria before she was born.

  James — Jimmy — was a dark-haired unruly boy. His love for his little sister, which was awkward but genuine, took the form of teasing, of comedic tormenting. He would carry her to the top of the dark staircase and leave her there. Then he would creep into the understairs cupboard and make spooky noises while scratching his nails against the underside of the treads. Not long after Win had started to sob in terror, he would emerge and bound up to her, saying, “Blas’ me, Winnie, if there ent a big old wolf come and et up mother! But dunt yer worry; I’ll save yer.” He’d scoop her up and leap, whooping, down to where lamplight and safety and a scolding awaited.

  Jimmy fought with their father. Verbally and then physically. One night in 1902, when Win was four and fast asleep, Jimmy kissed her good-bye. He had blood on his teeth, which left a smear on her chin. Then he walked all the way to Lowestoft and got work on a trawler. He was fourteen years old. Five years later, he wrote a short letter to his family from Nova Scotia, in Canada. They never heard from him again.

  The next boy was Albert, who was born with his brain askew. As a baby, Win would be laid for her daytime naps in a pulled-out drawer of a chest in her parents’ bedroom. Albert would go up there and watch her sleeping. Then he would put something he’d found outdoors — a snail, a special stone, the part-rotted corpse of a bird — next to her and push the drawer back in. He’d coffin her. Death interested him. Not long after Jimmy set off for the coast, Albert did something to another little girl and got taken off to an institution the other side of Norwich.

  Then there was Stanley. He was a year and a half older than Win. She wore his hand-me-down nappies and jumpers. Later, she walked with him to school, holding his hand until they met up with other children along the lane. Then he’d let go of her and join the other whooping boys, throwing stones at gateposts or stamping on horse-chestnut shells to expose the unready conkers nested within.

  School was a room behind the church. The teacher was Miss Draper, who had a mustache and was usually angry about nothing that Win could understand. Once or twice a week, the vicar came in and talked to them until he was as angry as Miss Draper, then blessed them and went out in a swirl of coattails.

  Strangely — unnaturally, almost — Win quickly learned to read. She helped her elder brother with his lessons, which were mostly passages from the Bible. She moved her finger along the text while he stumbled across words that had no meaning for either of them: epistle, foreskin, Jericho, abomination, deliverance.

  Stanley looked like his mother: soft and pale and worried.

  The father of these ill-starred children was a small, hard, bearded patriarch called John Sparling. He was the head stockman for the Mortimers, who owned that part of the world, including the cottage the family lived in. Sparling wore brown leather boots and gaiters, which his wife cleaned and oiled every night before going to bed. He smelled of cow. (Until she died, Win would picture him whenever she got a whiff of manure.) The death, disappearance, and madness of his first three sons shamed and angered him. The gentleness of the fourth dismayed him. He blamed his wife: some wrongness in her bloodline or a crookedness of her womb. The late birth of a daughter was a sort of irrelevance, a mishap. But, surprising himself, he came to love her. Winifred was sharp and watchful, like himself. By the time she was four, she was standing on a stool alongside her mother, peeling potatoes at the sink with the second-best knife. She ran to greet him on his homecoming, asking after the sick calf he’d spoken of the night before. In the parlor, after dinner, Stanley w
ould say, “Tell that rhyme we learned at school terday, Win.” And she would recite it, word-perfect, and Sparling would take her on his knee and say, “Yer smart as a whip, gal. Smart as a whip.”

  But Win grew away from him. She got older before he wanted her to, before he’d noticed. By the time she was ten, she had outgrown his rough advances. She had sided with her mother, had come to regard men as A Cross to Be Borne. She was keen on chapel, singing clearly and accurately the hymns her father mumbled.

  In 1914 John Sparling died of what was then called farmer’s lung. His persistent light cough had deepened during the autumn of the preceding year. By Christmas he was spitting blood into his handkerchiefs, and he died just before Easter.

  His wife’s fear was greater than her grief. The cottage was tied, which is to say that it came with her late husband’s job. The possibility — the very real possibility — of becoming homeless made her sick with dread. So when she saw Edmund Mortimer awaiting her at the cemetery gate, she faltered and gripped Stanley’s arm.

  Mortimer removed his black hat and held it in front of him by its brim. Win observed the nervous way his fingers toyed with the sleek fabric. It meant that he was embarrassed to be giving them notice, and she was glad.

  “I’m deeply sorry for your loss, Mrs. Sparling.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “And I share it,” Mortimer said. “John was as good a man with livestock as any in the county. I scarce know what I shall do without him.”

  Win’s mother kept her head lowered. “Nor dunt I,” she said.

  It was as bold a thing as Win had ever heard her say.

  “No. I . . .” Mortimer cleared his throat. “What I wanted to say, Mrs. Sparling, is that I don’t want you worrying yourself about the cottage. I’m putting Sam Eldon in charge of the stock, and he and Mrs. Eldon are well settled where they are. So I’ve no need of your place. It’s yours for as long as you want to stay. The rent is something we might talk about some other time.”

  At this point Mrs. Sparling wept for the first time in a week. She snuffled her gratitude, almost choked on her relief. Stanley made an awkward humming noise that was perhaps meant to be consoling.

  Edmund Mortimer looked discomfited and tried to be jocular. He glanced a smile in Win’s direction.

  “Besides,” he said, “from what I hear, your lovely daughter might not be single for that much longer. It wouldn’t do for her to be without a place.”

  Win was not such a fool as to be unable to read the message in that remark. The family would not be homeless, but it would need a man, a breadwinner. And that would not be Stanley. Still working out his apprenticeship to a baker in Borstead, his pay was a pittance. Bread maker, yes, almost. Breadwinner, no. Mr. Mortimer was referring, slyly and benignly, to Percy Little.

  Percy was a year older than Win and had been a nuisance for most of her life. As a boy, he’d been a ringleader of the small mob who’d pelted acorns and snowballs at her. He’d put a toad in her school desk. He’d darted sticky arrowgrass at her skirts, untugged her hair ribbons. Over the years, Win’s tormentors had dwindled away, attracted by younger, softer targets or repulsed by her icy disdain and wicked tongue. But Percy had persevered in his pursuit of her. Gradually his harassment had softened into a rough courtship. When he was thirteen, he’d persuaded Win to kiss him on the mouth. She’d thought the experience peculiar and not worth repeating. Later Win had started to fill her clothes in a way that she found troubling and Percy found interesting. He wanted to touch her in particular places and she wouldn’t let him.

  When he left school, Percy had gone to be a stable-lad for the Mortimers. He discovered he had an affinity with the huge, placid cart horses and plow horses. He loved the careful way they placed their feathery, iron-shod feet on the earth. When they were not working and needed exercise, he led them past the Sparling cottage and hoisted squealing Win up onto their backs. She found it thrilling to be so high off the ground, perched atop half a ton of warm and muscular architecture.

  During the winter, when her father was dying, Percy made repeated efforts to put his hands inside her clothes. She wouldn’t let him.

  He’d said, “If we was married, Win, yer’d hev to.”

  Walking with Stanley and her mother back from the graveyard, thinking about what Mortimer had said, Win understood — or thought she understood — what the framework of her life had to be.

  So the next time Percy put his hand on her leg, she said, “Not till we’re married, Percy.”

  “Yer’ll hev me, then?”

  “If yer behave yerself,” she said.

  Afterward she realized that she’d be called Win Little. A foolish name.

  Their engagement was accelerated by the First World War. Magnificent recruiting sergeants addressed gatherings on village greens and in church halls, speaking of Heroism and Duty and the Vileness of the Huns. From behind them, vicars and squires and chairmen of parish councils glared into the audience, daring cowards to meet their gaze. Men started vanishing from the countryside, marching away accompanied by faltering music. On one Saturday afternoon, six of Mortimer’s men went off and joined up; they came back from the recruiting office beery, puffed up, and boastful.

  Win thought that Percy might not go if he was married.

  The wedding took place five days after her eighteenth birthday. Stanley gave her away, fumbling it. Percy moved into the cottage, sleeping with Win in the bedroom that Jimmy and Albert had shared.

  She kept him safe for a whole year. He showed no sign of wanting to fight, and because he was a newlywed, he was not condemned for it. No one handed him a white feather, that soft and silent accusation of cowardice.

  Two days after their first wedding anniversary, Percy was conscripted. He went to Thetford for six weeks’ basic training, then came back to her, a stranger in a manure-colored uniform, his eyes unfamiliar beneath the peak of his cap. He insisted that they have their photograph taken before he went to France. They walked to Borstead, from where they took the train to Norwich. The photographer’s studio was on Prince of Wales Road. They had to queue; other men in uniform with their wives and fiancées were there ahead of them. They posed in front of a painted backdrop of a garden with a fountain. Afterward they had tea and cake at a café in Tombland, in the shadow of the cathedral.

  He came home once more after that. Then in 1918 he was shot in the belly and drowned facedown in a Belgian meadow that battle had turned into a smoking and bloody swamp.

  Win was very angry. She was angry with him for getting killed. She was angry with Edmund Mortimer, who could’ve told the Conscription Board that Percy was an essential agricultural worker. She was angry because she was pregnant. She was angry because there’d been no pleasure in getting that way. (How would there have been? She was a prig; he was unsubtle.)

  When the baby was born, she called it Ruth. A biblical name. Also a word that meant sorrow and regret.

  I’M SENTIMENTAL; I admit that. No, not admit; I proudly declare that. After all, what’s so great about being unsentimental? What are the synonyms for unsentimental? Hard-eyed, hard-nosed, hard-hearted, hard-boiled. Realistic, phlegmatic, unfeeling. Do any of those appeal to you? Fancy sporting any of those on your T-shirt? Besides, scratch a cynic and you’ll find a sentimentalist beneath the paint. That’s as true here in no-nonsense New York as it is anywhere else. Maybe more so. Take my immediate neighbor, for example. She has the awkward name Agnetha Ogu. (The h is silent, the second g a sort of gulp.) She’s a second-generation immigrant. I find it difficult to guess her age and even more difficult to ask. She’s trim and brisk and works in some sort of IT business. The second time we met, I made a cautious inquiry about her origins.

  She said, “I don’t have a past. I have a future.”

  A few weeks later, when Christmas was looming, I invited her in for a drink. She looked around, trying to conceal her disapproval. (Most of my place is devoted to my work, so it looks like an explosion in an art-supply shop or
a library. Agnetha’s apartment is clinical.) The blown-up and framed photograph of Win and Percy caught her eye.

  “This is nice,” she said. “Who are these people? Do you know?”

  I suppose she’d assumed that I’d bought the print in Greenwich Village or somewhere. I told her that they were my grandparents. I told her about Percy and the horses and the war. I told her about Win being widowed before my mother was born and how she’d spent her working life in a laundry. I guess I sounded very matter-of-fact — I was busy fixing our drinks. So I was surprised when I saw that Agnetha was touching the picture with the tips of her fingers and that she had wet eyes.

  “I don’t have anything like this,” she said.

  Sentimentality and nostalgia are closely related. Kissing cousins. I have no time for nostalgia, though. Nostalgics believe that the past is nicer than the present. It isn’t. Or wasn’t. Nostalgics want to cuddle the past like a puppy. But the past has bloody teeth and bad breath. I look into its mouth like a sorrowing dentist.

  In the photograph, Win is sitting on a wicker garden chair and Percy is standing slightly behind her with his hand on her shoulder. She was proud of her long brown hair but knew that this was a vanity. So she wove it into a tight plait and pinned it severely to her head. She’s wearing a pleated floral blouse that fails to conceal the fact that she has a generous bosom. The expression on her face is hard to read. Consider, after all, that she had recently and reluctantly married; that she had traveled to a nearby city for the first time; that her husband was a foolish soldier; that although she’d thought this would be a very special moment, she’d waited in line for it; that the photographer was the first foreigner she’d ever encountered (an Italian called Delmonico); that she had been told to smile. She looks blank.