‘Well,’ my mother said, ‘shall we have some tea?’
She picked up the pot and successfully communicated some tea into her best china teacups. They were the ones she put out when she wanted to impress someone. I was wary of the cups, associating them as I did with doctors’ visits, with unpleasant and non-biologically related ‘aunts’ and my least favourite grandmother, who, unable to continue searching for her son within my father, had moved back to her house by the sea.
My mother sipped her tea and I felt a wave of guilt wash over me. I was doing this to her. I was leaving her alone with only my father for company. But that was what people did. They met someone and they got married. That was what we were taught to do. Mine and Johnny’s courtship was long for the time. As we sat at my mother’s kitchen table, Christabel was almost a year into her marriage and living in Australia with a soldier she’d tripped over at a tea dance. So, it turned out that her future husband hadn’t died in France. Or, at the very least, she’d taken someone else’s.
‘Perhaps, once we’re married, we could live here?’ I said to my mother.
Even that didn’t work.
‘No, pet.’ She patted my hand and the emerald winked in the light. ‘A married couple need a home of their own.’
I nodded, knowing there’d be no hope of a smile now.
She half stood to take the tea tray to the sink when the creak on the fifth stair announced a fourth presence among us.
My mother stopped, glanced to the hallway and sat back down. Johnny gave my leg a squeeze.
My father, topless, tired, came into the kitchen, his stomach hanging over the waistband of his stained striped pyjama bottoms.
‘Margot’s getting married,’ my mother said, looking to my father for eye contact, but finding that he didn’t have any to spare.
He took a dirty glass from inside the sink and filled it with water.
‘I know,’ he said.
‘You do?’ my mother asked.
‘The boy asked for her hand.’ He waved his own hand in the general direction of Johnny, but he didn’t turn to look at us.
My mother smiled weakly at us. ‘Oh, of course,’ she said. ‘How sweet of you to ask for her hand in marriage. Traditional. I wasn’t thinking.’
The thousand-yard stare was one of the things I’d read about in the book on what they called ‘combat stress reaction’. My father would sit and stare for hours. He was doing it then. Staring down to the garden, to the patch of brown earth where the Anderson shelter used to be. Where my mother and I and my least favourite grandmother had sat and waited for death or morning.
Watching him at the kitchen window, I marvelled at the idea that this man whose pyjamas we were not allowed to wash, this man who hadn’t left the house in weeks and who had been sleeping on the sofa since the bomb came through the window, was responsible for giving away my hand in marriage. And now that hand wore a ring.
Father Arthur and the Sandwich
FATHER ARTHUR WAS sitting at his desk eating an egg and cress sandwich in complete silence.
‘You eat the crusts first?’ I asked.
‘Christ!’
As Father Arthur pushed his chair backwards in surprise, some of the nonsequential sandwich crust caught in his throat.
‘Lenni!’ He wheezed, his face swelling red.
He coughed and lowered his head between his legs.
‘I’ll get New Nurse!’ I shouted.
I was almost at the door to his office when he weakly said, ‘No, I’m all right.’ He wheezed again, unscrewed the lid of his red thermos flask, and poured out some tea.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and he waved me back into the office as though it were all fine.
As he sipped more tea and wiped tears from under his eyes, I inspected his office. He had two dark wood shelves with Bibles and songbooks and files. A picture of Jesus looking exhausted on the cross, in a frame with the remnants of a price sticker stuck to the corner of the glass. A photograph of a black and white dog, and a photograph of Arthur with other people, in which he is wearing an inordinately colourful jumper.
Arthur’s office window was tiny and there was a grey layer of dust on the slats of the half-open blinds. When I pulled one back, I could see the car park. But that didn’t seem right. How could the car park be outside the window of the chapel office and also outside the Rose Room and also outside the window in Margot’s room? When I first came here, the car park was only on one side of the building.
‘The other day I read,’ Arthur said, as he noticed me staring out at the car park, ‘that there are more cars in the world than people.’
‘You need to dust your blinds.’
I drew an L in the dust.
Arthur took a tentative bite of his sandwich and I compelled myself not to try to make him jump a second time.
I drew an E beside the L.
‘Do you think if Jesus had had a car, he’d have driven it around?’
Arthur frowned and smiled almost simultaneously.
‘I mean,’ I said, ‘it would have saved him the work of appearing everywhere.’
‘I don’t—’
‘It’s odd that he didn’t tell the folk in Jerusalem about cars – you know, give them a heads up of what’s to come. Give them a clue that would lead to the invention of the motor car. Help them get there quicker.’
‘How do you know he didn’t?’
I gave Arthur a smile to let him know that was a good response.
I waited for Arthur to speak again, but now that he had the chance to not be interrupted, he didn’t say anything. I drew two Ns in the dust on the blind.
‘To tell you the truth,
