My Former Heart

But in the spring of 1944, the commanding officer called Iris into his office to tell her the school would be closing down at the end of the season. Half the staff would go on to Italy, to continue their work there; the remainder would be going elsewhere. He was not able to reveal their destination, he informed her rather pompously. The thing was, there would be no post for her as of early summer. Something could be found for her in London if she liked.

Jimmy already knew of course. He was going to miss the place, his dog especially: a local Alsatian had unofficially adopted him soon after he’d arrived, joining in on training exercises, knocking people over. The dog had become a sort of mascot to them all. The commanding officers came and went, but Jimmy had been here all along; the Cedars was really his thing altogether. He and Iris sat disconsolately in his office, smoking.

‘I don’t know what to do with myself quite,’ said Iris. ‘I’ve grown so used to being here, so fond of everyone.’

‘Mountains have a queer effect on people,’ said Jimmy. ‘I’ve noticed that in the mountains one can very easily come to love almost anybody.’

‘Well, I don’t know about anybody,’ said Iris. ‘I’m not sure if I’d have loved Dumpling, if I’d met him at home.’

They laughed. Dumpling was a thickset Italian who worked in the kitchens. He was notoriously bad-tempered. One breakfast, when someone had asked for an egg cooked for a shorter time, he’d made a fearful scene and shouted, ‘If you no like-a – go lumpy!’ It had become something of a catchphrase about the place.

People were leaving by degrees. Jimmy was the first to go. He was to stop in London before joining some of the others in Canada, he’d confided to Iris. Digby was due to leave the week after. On her final evening, after dinner, Digby knocked quietly on the door of her room.

‘These books belong to you,’ he said, handing them to her. ‘And I’ve brought us a nightcap.’ He produced a flask.

‘I don’t know that I’ve got anything we can drink out of. Will my tooth mug do? We’ll have to share it, unless you prefer to drink straight from that.’

‘No, let’s share your glass. So long as it doesn’t taste of toothpaste.’

Iris fetched it. He half filled it with clear liquid and handed her the glass.

‘Heavens! It’s strong. But delicious. It tastes of raspberries.’

‘That’s because it’s made of them. Chap down at the French club gave it to me. Good, isn’t it?’

She smiled. ‘Very good. It’s wonderful to taste raspberries again, reminds me of England. I’d quite forgotten what they were like. Here,’ and she held out the glass to him.

But instead of taking the glass, he took her wrist in his hand and pulled her gently towards him. Before she had time to protest, his face was against hers. She wondered how his nose would fit, whether it would jab her eye or cheek. Then she noticed the pleasing smell of his skin, like freshly sharpened pencils. As he kissed her, his eyes surprisingly open, she realised that she did not feel indignant or even embarrassed, that in fact she felt nothing but pleasure and did not want him to stop.

‘I didn’t think you …’ she said, as he took the glass from her hand and set it on a table and stepped across the room with her hand in his, pulling her down onto her bed next to him.

‘No, but I do. That is to say, I am,’ he told her, kissing her hair, her face.

They lay side by side in the dark room, their clothes forming puddles of deeper shadow on the floor. Iris could not stop grinning, and she sensed that Digby was doing the same. She felt very wide awake and very, very happy, and the happiness was not a precipice, she realised, but a veranda, somewhere she need not fall from, nor scrabble to hold on to, but a place where she might stay and make herself comfortable. It felt like a sort of homecoming, to be naked beneath the sheets with Digby.

‘Well, there we are,’ said Digby at last, turning towards her.

‘Yes. There we are,’ said Iris. And she took his hand in hers and kissed his knuckles, one by one.

Chapter 3

The air in the house seemed to be heavy with steam and the sweet, rotting smell it carried. The only escape was to stay in the sitting room and open the French windows onto the narrow terrace, even if that did mean letting in the cold Northumbrian air.

‘Goodness, darling! Don’t have those windows open, you’ll make the whole house freeze,’ said Iris, sweeping into the room where Ruth was sitting at the piano. She was pressing single keys with one finger, before singing the eight notes up and then down each scale. She had already noticed, after only three days in the house, that Iris interrupted her whenever she sang or played. The given reason was that the sound might wake the baby, although Ruth wondered if there were not some other motive, as the baby’s room was surely too far for the music to carry. Iris shut the glass doors firmly and went to put a log on the dwindling fire.

‘It’s the smell of the nappies,’ said Ruth. ‘It’s like boiling beetroots mixed with cabbage. It’s worse than school.’

‘It is rather foul,’ Iris agreed, speaking as she always did, as though anything concerned with the practicalities of the baby had nothing to do with her. ‘But the draught’s not good for Birdle, is it, darling?’ she said, addressing the corner of the room, where a pale-grey parrot was watching her from a cage on a tall wooden stand. The bird was treading from foot to foot in agitation at the sight of Iris, who usually opened the cage directly she came into the room, allowing its occupant to clamber beak first out of its confines and about the room at will.

‘Do pipe down!’ said Birdle. The intonation was unmistakably Iris’s. She and Ruth both laughed.

Birdle had been Digby’s wedding present to Iris. The parrot had become extravagantly fond of her, sitting on her shoulder in the evenings, constantly attempting to feed her pieces of seed or nut, quite possibly regurgitated ones. When she played patience Birdle often sidled down her arm to the table and picked up single cards with his beak, one after another, before distributing them at random across the thick felt, spoiling the game. If Digby came near his wife, if he tried to sit beside her on the yellow sofa, Birdle scuttled along the back, head lowered, and bit him. He shrieked whenever Iris came into the room, but only looked slyly and in silence at everyone else. The sole words he spoke were imitations of her. Ruth was secretly rather afraid of Birdle. She had held him once or twice, at arm’s length in case he tried to bite, and been amazed by the lightness of him: it seemed remarkable that so forceful a personality could be contained within so light a frame. Digby found Birdle endlessly comic, despite having been given a bleeding ear lobe on more than one occasion.

Ruth had never been close to a baby before. She had caught glimpses of them, of course: pink little faces buttoned into knitted bonnets, their lower halves neatly tucked beneath ribbon-edged blankets, in their passing prams. But she had never held an infant, or even looked closely at one, until now. It was the Easter holidays of 1948, she was fourteen, and she had come to stay with her mother, to meet the new baby, a child who was, it still seemed astonishing to her to realise, her half-brother.

It was remarkable how little babies could do, except expel repellent things from every orifice, and sleep. The baby couldn’t sit up, or even hold on to anything for more than a few seconds, before the object fell out of its grasp. Neither could it – he, Jamie: she had always to remind herself he would become an actual person, in future – say a word. His limbs waved about, like an upturned May bug. Yet Iris and Digby seemed untroubled by these deficiencies. Ruth did find the infant’s smiles winning, and the way he wriggled his legs in delight when smiled back at, but she dreaded being asked to hold him, dreaded the feel of his squirming body, stronger than you’d think and uncoordinated. Her uncle had once taken her fishing to Lake Vyrny, and her tiny brother reminded her of a fish, flailing in a landing net, as if he were in the wrong element. She didn’t know what she was meant to do with him.

It was all rather disgusting. Luckily Ruth was not expected to attend to the actual care of the child, since Mrs Lockyer came in from Hexham every day to help. But she had been asked to lend a hand here and there. She’d learned that whenever the baby’s nappies were changed, its faeces had to be scraped from the muslin Harrington squares into the lavatory, before the soiled cloths were put into a special bucket with a lid, containing a solution of bluish liquid which smelled like a public swimming bath, only worse. A second bucket, with borax, came next, while the towelling outer nappies went into another, dry, bucket. Thrice a week, Mrs Lockyer boiled the muslins in a large enamel bowl on top of the stove, creating the pervasive brassica-tainted vapour from which no room was spared. It filled the house, like the steam from a suet pudding of dung. When sufficiently boiled, the muslins were reunited with the towelling squares in scalding water, to which soap flakes were added; a thin, waxy film formed on the surface of the milky water as it cooled. Once scrubbed, the squares were rinsed, then squeezed through the wooden rollers of the mangle. Before the squares were pegged out to dry, each one was firmly shaken out – snap snap – with a sound like a flock of pigeons’ wings as they picked up speed in flight. And the infant went through four, sometimes five, nappies every day! It was extraordinary to Ruth that anyone would knowingly have a baby, considering the sheer work hours involved. The rewards seemed too meagre.

Ruth wondered whether Helen would have a baby, too. Despite the manifest disadvantages, she rather hoped that she might; it would give Helen something to occupy herself with. As it was, her stepmother was tremendously busy, but to no apparent purpose, like a bluebottle on a windowsill. She belonged to endless committees; she was a botherer. Ruth tried to like Helen; she wanted her father to be happy and, to judge by Digby’s reaction to the infant Jamie, a child would bring him joy. But sometimes it seemed to his daughter that Edward had plumped for Helen only because she was so unlike Iris. Helen wasn’t sophisticated, or beautiful, or even especially good company, but neither was she selfish or wilful or sharp. Ruth secretly thought that Helen was bossy and rather dull.

On the other hand, Ruth was surprised to find herself very fond of Digby. She knew she shouldn’t be: if it had not been for him, her parents might still have been together, whereas poor Helen was blameless. But she couldn’t help liking him, because he was quiet and clever and kind and he looked like some odd bird, a crane, perhaps. He reminded her of her uncle Christopher, though not to look at: Christopher had a small, straight nose and broad shoulders, like his brother. She had been touched to notice that when Digby came with Iris to take her out from school, or to meet her off a train, his face glowed with pleasure the moment he caught sight of her. He was thoughtful. It was Digby who had installed the piano, even though she was hardly ever at their house, because Ruth was good at music, and liked it. He never told her what to do, whereas Helen made her feel as though she were a small but obdurate problem, which could be solved only by a programme of constant intervention, like repeatedly dabbing at a stain.

Digby’s mother lived nearby with her sister, both of them widows. They were known, collectively, as the Hillbillies. The aunt – Hilary – had been a widow for many more years than she had been a bride, her young husband having been killed during the final weeks of the First World War. There had been no children and she was devoted to Digby, and would keep arriving unannounced to coo at the new baby. She knitted moss-stitch matinée coats for him, with matching rompers. The idea was that she might look after the baby in the mornings, once he was a little bigger, so that Iris could go back to work, arranging Digby’s appointments and driving him on his visits.

‘Do look! Isn’t he killing?’ said Hilary to no one in particular, whenever the baby so much as wriggled.

Ruth was surprised and rather relieved to see that her mother was insensible to this baby worship. She seemed fond of her new son, but she didn’t coo. Iris liked Digby’s relations, especially her mother-in-law Billa, who was bookish and rather gruff and made no secret of the fact that she was fonder of dogs than of babies. But then Iris always liked people who felt no need to apologise for themselves.

Ruth was meant to live up here with Iris half the time and with Edward, near Tewkesbury, for the rest. But she really spent only about a third of the time with her mother. Most of her life seemed to take place at school. On weekend exeats and at half terms it was so much simpler to go to her father’s, because he was less than half an hour away. And then she still stayed in Malvern with her grandparents sometimes. They kept her room for her with her childish things – her teddy and doll’s house and old books – and took her out for tea at the Abbey Hotel on those Saturdays when she wasn’t allowed to stay the night away from school. She didn’t like to hurt their feelings by not visiting, even if she would have preferred to be with Iris.

If someone had asked Ruth where her home was, she would not have known what to answer. Was it at her father’s house, or here with her mother? She liked both houses, each of which was close to a river. Edward’s house had beams and windows with sills so wide you could sit on them, looking through the lattices of lead. An old orchard of plum and gnarled apple trees stood beyond the garden, between the house and the river. This river was wide and sleepy, with shallow muddy sides where swans rested among the reeds, whereas the river by Iris’s house was rocky and dark and urgent, and the water there gave off a cold smell, like mountains. It took ages to get to Iris’s house, down an endless rutted track, fringed in spring with carpets of violets. Iris seemed to have forgotten that she used to find the countryside dreary. Ruth loved the house, which stood quite alone, framed by three old Scots pines, a low stone wall separating it from the sheep-cropped green field which ran down to the river. It was an L-shaped house with slate floors in the older, lower part and wide wooden boards in the eighteenth-century part, which had tall ceilings and windows which went right down to the ground. It was an improbable house, neither a rectory nor a farmhouse, but with something of the character of each. Iris didn’t have very much furniture, which made her rooms look elegant, and she went in for big dramatic arrangements of flowers, or just greenery: a bowl of white peonies fringed with copper-beech leaves, or masses of pussy willow in a tall jug, or in autumn great arching sprays of blackberry and rosehips. At Edward’s house there were plenty of low armchairs and dark, highly polished oak furniture. There were ladder-back chairs, and place mats depicting hunting scenes, and lots of silver cruets, the saltcellars and mustard pots lined with dark-blue glass. Ruth thought that her father’s made a better winter house because it was cosy, but her mother’s house was lovely in the summer.

When Ruth listened to the other girls in her dormitory talking about their visits home – their ponies and Labradors, their tartan picnic rugs folded just so, their endless cousins coming and going to tennis and croquet parties, or to play mah-jong, or to take tea at shaded tables overlooking the lawn – she envied them the simplicity and order of their lives. They all went to point-to-points, or sailing in the Isle of Wight. They all seemed to do the same things and to know what those things were and when you were meant to do them. In her holidays she just shuttled between her parents’ houses, and was expected to amuse herself.

She told only her two best friends at school (and they were sworn to secrecy) that Edward had won custody of her during the divorce. This was because her mother had, shockingly, deserted the marital home. Ruth preferred the rest not to know that her parents were divorced, because it made her feel slightly ashamed. The fact that her father was a respectable country solicitor, and had been decorated in the war, had endeared him to the judge, while Iris’s desertion had prejudiced things against her. Edward had insisted that Ruth spend Christmas every year with him, where they were always joined by his own parents, but otherwise he was magnanimous in allowing his daughter time with her mother: they would divide her equally between them, he said. It hadn’t worked out like that. Ruth did know one or two other girls at school whose parents had divorced, although not anyone in her actual form. So far as she knew, these other girls lived with their mothers. She realised that there was something not quite right about not living with hers, as if Iris were slightly shoddy.

She had to acknowledge privately that Iris was becoming rather eccentric. Her hair was longer than the other mothers’ and she hardly ever wore any pins to contain it: she had given up wearing a hat. Perhaps it had been living abroad which had made her abandon such conventions. She only wore gloves in the dead of winter now, and she never put on any face powder: her face was shiny. And the awful thing was that Iris having the baby did make Ruth feel guiltily put off her mother. Iris was thirty-six, practically geriatric! It was one thing to remarry, but producing a baby was quite another. It wasn’t quite respectable. It meant that Iris still did It, a thought too embarrassing to countenance. Or anyway had done It less than a year before, although not of course since: nobody could be that revolting. It probably wasn’t even possible, biologically. And the worst thing was that everyone at school would know, when their mothers and fathers probably hadn’t done It for years and years.

‘Funny, isn’t it?’ Iris had said, half to herself, when she was giving Jamie his eleven o’clock bottle in the breakfast room one morning. ‘First I had to get married because I was going to have a baby, and then this time I had to have a baby, because I’d got married.’

‘Mummy!’ said Ruth, shocked. ‘You’ve never said that before.’

‘Haven’t I? Oh, sorry, darling. It doesn’t mean one wasn’t simply thrilled when you appeared. We both were.’

‘But d’you mean to say you were actually having a baby when you and Daddy got married?’ Ruth could feel herself flushing with the horror of it.

‘Well, yes. But I mean it was quite early on. One wasn’t monstrously fat or anything. I had such a pretty dress for the registry office: silk crepe, in a sort of oyster colour. I don’t know what happened to it. Must have got lost during the war.’

‘Is that why there aren’t any photographs from the wedding, because you were pregnant?’

‘Don’t say pregnant, darling, it’s so coarse.’

‘But is it?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Iris. ‘There just wasn’t anyone there with a camera, that’s all. But it was all tremendous fun, on the day.’

‘But that means that I’m illegitimate, practically,’ said Ruth, tears gathering.

‘Don’t be silly, darling. Someone either is illegitimate or they aren’t. You can’t be a bit illegitimate, I mean. And you’re not. So there’s nothing to get upset about.’

The thing Ruth liked best about school was the choir. Singing solo wasn’t nearly as good, because it didn’t give you the same sensation; a solo only came from your throat and then out of your mouth, the breath made shallow, even quavery, by nerves. But choral singing went through your whole body, reverberating in your ribcage. With choral singing it was as if you and all the other people you were singing with were one instrument, like the pipes on an organ. A choir was really an orchestra made of voices. When she sang, Ruth sometimes felt a rush of joy, like an extra lung full of happiness instead of breath inside her chest.

There was a feeling she’d sometimes had, out of doors, when she got to the top of the Malvern Hills and there were skylarks dipping above her head, or a lonely kestrel wheeling below. It was an apprehension that she was no different from the cropped grass and the rock beneath it, and the birds, and even their shadows flitting across the hillside. This feeling came sometimes at the river-bathing place across the orchard from her father’s house, when dragonflies touched the surface of the water beside her, their veined, transparent wings catching the colours of light, like soap bubbles. Sometimes the cows would pause to look down from the opposite bank, munching, and she would all of a sudden feel as though she had become invisible, had simply evaporated into the silky greenish water and the cows’ hot breath and the summer air. She could not predict when the feeling would come, but when it did it made her slightly giddy, this sense that she was just another living speck on the surface of the earth. Less than herself, and yet more. This sensation generally happened when she was on her own, yet what it brought was an overwhelming sense that she was not alone after all. When the whole choir was singing well it could feel the same.

Singing was the main reason Ruth decided to stay on at school after her School Certificates. If she stayed on for Higher School Cert., her teacher had told her, she might be able to get into a music school. She knew she wasn’t good enough to become a soloist, either at the piano or the voice, and anyway her ambition did not extend so far. But she also knew she would have to earn her own living somehow. Perhaps she could teach music and continue to sing in a choir for pleasure. She did not know what she might do otherwise. Her father had offered to find someone – another solicitor, or the friend who owned the local auction house – to take her on as an office clerk, but she wanted to get to London if she could.

There were advantages to being in the upper school: she did not have to share a dormitory any more but had a room all to herself. She enjoyed certain privileges, such as being allowed to walk into the town when lessons finished in the afternoons; and, the greatest luxury, having two baths a week, instead of the one permitted to the younger girls. The room next to hers was occupied by an older girl called Verity Longden, who would be leaving in the summer. She was tall, with skin so pale as to be almost transparent, almost as if it might tear. Her eyelashes were very straight and fair, and thick, like the bristles on a toothbrush, and she had big, bony hands that always looked chapped. Ruth could not tell whether Verity was very plain or rather beautiful, but trying to decide one way or the other made her stare at her whenever she had the chance. Verity was a Roman Catholic, one of only a handful at the school. The Catholics walked to Mass every Sunday and when they came back to school afterwards they remained slightly set apart, at least until the lunch bell sounded, as if they were holier or more important than the rest. Verity seemed especially solemn. She was generally rather a serious girl, certainly never giggly. Something about the curve of her mouth, though, suggested a sense of humour.

One Saturday afternoon, just before autumn half term, Ruth knocked on Verity’s door and asked if she’d like to come for a walk. They had barely said more than two or three sentences to each other, but they were neighbours, they might as well be cordial. And anyway, all Ruth’s friends were out on exeat, or rehearsing for the school play.

‘There’s a hotel over in Colwall where we could get a cup of tea if you want to go that far? Otherwise we could just go up to the tearooms at the well, what d’you think?’ Ruth asked her, as they began their climb. Since Verity was older – and, as it were, the guest – it seemed proper to let her decide things.

‘I think Colwall,’ she said, as if it were a matter of some gravity.

‘It’s rather a dismal place, I’m afraid, what my mother calls a brown Windsor. But I love that side of the hills. The view’s even better than our side, and you get the sun for longer.’

‘What’s brown Windsor?’ asked Verity.