cover

CONTENTS

 

Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Helen Dunmore
Title Page
Foreword
The Nina Stories
Cradling
The Towel
The White Horse
Girl, Balancing
The Present
Taken in Shadows
Esther to Fanny
Where I Keep My Faith
A Thousand Roses
Hamid in the Playhouse
Whales and Seals
All Those Personal Survival Medals
A Night Out
Portrait of Auntie Binbag, with Ribbons
About the First World War
A View from the Observatory
Count from the Splash
In China This Would Not Happen
A Very Fine House
Duty-Free
Chocolate for Later
The Medina
Wolves of Memory
The Musicians of Ingo
Frost at Midnight
The Past
Rose, 1944
Protection
A Silver Cigar in the Sky
Dancers’ Feet
With Shackleton
At the Institute with KM
Grace Poole Her Testimony
The Landlubbers Lying Down Below
Writ in Water
Copyright

ABOUT THE BOOK

 

Haunting, uplifting, beautiful: the final work from Helen Dunmore

Helen Dunmore passed away in June 2017, leaving behind this remarkable collection of short stories. With her trademark imagination and gift for making history human, she explores the fragile ties between passion, love, family, friendship and grief, often through people facing turning points in their lives:

A girl alone, stretching her meagre budget to feed herself, becomes aware that the young man who has come to see her may not be as friendly as he seems.

Two women from very different backgrounds enjoy an unusual night out, finding solace in laughter and an unexpected friendship.

A young man picks up his infant son and goes outside into a starlit night as he makes a decision that will inform the rest of his life.

A woman imprisoned for her religion examines her faith in a seemingly literal and quietly original way.

This brilliant collection of Helen Dunmore’s short fiction, replete with her penetrating insight into the human condition, is certain to delight and move all her readers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, children’s author and poet who will be remembered for the depth and breadth of her fiction. Rich and intricate, yet narrated with a deceptive simplicity that made all of her work accessible and heartfelt, her writing stood out for the fluidity and lyricism of her prose, and her extraordinary ability to capture the presence of the past.

Her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, explored the events which led D. H. Lawrence to be expelled from Cornwall on suspicion of spying, and won the McKitterick Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and she went on to become a Sunday Times bestseller with The Siege, which was described by Antony Beevor as a ‘world-class novel’ and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize. Published in 2010, her eleventh novel, The Betrayal, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and The Lie in 2014 was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2015 RSL Ondaatje Prize.

Her final novel, Birdcage Walk, deals with legacy and recognition – what writers, especially women writers, can expect to leave behind them – and was described by the Observer as ‘the finest novel Helen Dunmore has written’. She died in June 2017, and in January 2018, she was posthumously awarded the Costa Prize for her volume of poetry, Inside the Wave.

 

ALSO BY HELEN DUNMORE

Zennor in Darkness

Burning Bright

A Spell of Winter

Talking to the Dead

Your Blue-Eyed Boy

With Your Crooked Heart

The Siege

Mourning Ruby

House of Orphans

Counting the Stars

The Betrayal

The Greatcoat

The Lie

Exposure

Birdcage Walk

Title page for Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

FOREWORD

 

ON THE EVENING of 11th November 2016, when my mother was already very unwell, she asked me to sit with her to discuss the management of her literary estate after her death. Although she lived until June the next year, the unpredictable path of her illness meant we did not know how many more weeks or months she had left, and for her this was the time to get things in order.

We sat on her bed and I noted down what she told me: the processes she followed in doing her accounts, her instructions on what to do with the papers that were stashed away in many boxes in her office, passwords for her email, phone, Spotify account, Facebook, and that we might, perhaps, publish a collection of short stories after she died.

That next year, 2017, would see the publication of her final novel, Birdcage Walk, her poetry collection Inside the Wave and an illustrated children’s book The Little Sea Dragon’s Wild Adventure. Amongst the complex and interlinked feelings of impending loss, a less visceral yet still potent sense of waste was that the flow of Mum’s writing was being cut off long before its time. Mum, though, was more philosophical about this. As always, ideas for the next novel were developing in her mind, but she felt satisfied with where she had got to with her work; there wasn’t something particular that she wanted to achieve which she would not now be able to do.

‘A collection of short stories at some point might be nice, though,’ she said to me that evening.

It is almost twenty years since my mother published a full volume of short stories, but she did not stop writing them. She told me about a file on the floor by the narrow bookcase in her studio, a bird’s nest overlooking Bristol on the eighth storey of a block of flats, and also gave me the passwords for her laptop and iPad. Some of the stories had been printed ad hoc in newspapers or magazines, or had been broadcast, and others had not been published at all. Those could be included, she said, but ‘it depends how good they are’.

As I think is common for many people, the months after Mum’s death were a frenetic period for me, probably trying to counter or mask the loss of our mother with action. Yet I did not think about the short-story collection until visiting Keats House in London one weekend with my father, standing in Keats’s bedroom there and suddenly remembering with vivid recall Mum’s short story ‘Writ in Water’, about Keats’s death in Rome. From that moment, putting together a collection of short stories ‘at some point’ became urgent, a project to focus on.

Not remembering at the time about the file by the narrow bookcase, I started a search of Mum’s laptop, trawling through her many thousands of emails and document files. I was tentative at first, knowing that a person’s privacy does not die with them, and that there would be many emails that Mum would not have wanted me to read. I glanced sideways at emails, skimming for signs that they might be relevant, before seeing that Mum’s careful categorising of her emails made the task much easier. Those labelled ‘personal’ were out of bounds, those labelled ‘work’ I knew she would not mind me reading.

It was some time before I felt certain I had found everything. A number of the stories were already gathered into a collection that Mum had compiled in 2010, but not pursued any further. That was the year of the publication of her novel The Betrayal, of her illustrated children’s book The Ferry Birds, and a year when she was working on the poems that would later be published in The Malarkey. The 2010 collection had sat there, waiting for its time, and clearly this was the starting point of what Mum had in mind when suggesting a collection. The decision on which stories would be included was made by my father, my sister and me, Mum’s publisher and her agent, all of us satisfied the stories certainly met Mum’s criterion of being good enough.

The prospect of editing this collection was daunting, although made much easier by the guidance of Mum’s friend and publisher, Selina Walker, who published Mum’s last three novels. Ordinarily the publisher makes suggestions to the author who then finalises the work. Here, I had to make judgements not about what I thought should or should not be edited, but about what Mum herself would have done. I felt neither qualified nor entitled to do anything to her work, yet once I had started my concerns dissipated. Probably this was because I have followed Mum’s work so closely from the days as a child when she would read draft manuscripts of her children’s books to me. Not that the stories required a great deal of work, almost none for some, and for others merely the lightest polish before publication.

There was also something special about reading work that I had not read before. Throughout my mother’s writing life, I always anticipated the next work, which she would give to me as a finished manuscript or proof copy, or simply as an emailed poem or short story. When I read her final novel in manuscript, I thought as I finished the last page that I would never get to read new work from my mother again. Then, as I read these stories, here was that feeling; the pleasure of discovering something new. This is one of our reasons for publishing the collection, to share this work with Mum’s readers, many of whom, too, must feel that their enjoyment of Mum’s writing has been cut short.

My mother kept her own story to herself, feeling strongly that once she handed her work over to the public, it would take on myriad meanings that had nothing to do with the author. Yet it is inevitable that her writing holds something of her in it. The humour in this collection is very much of my mother. Always kind, she nonetheless had a keen eye for other people’s less than benevolent behaviour, not least when they themselves were unable or unwilling to see it. In the sad, but comical story ‘With Shackleton’, the narrator’s mother-in-law is skewered for her hurtful conduct towards her daughter-in-law. For my mother humour was one of the sides of a good life, especially in difficult times. This is shown beautifully in ‘A Night Out’, a story of two widows whose warmth towards one another and shared laughter give a shimmer of hope in amongst their grief.

The collection itself is Dunmore work through and through. Mum’s writing has always been characterised by a preoccupying interest in the individuals who otherwise may not be noted by the hands that write our shared history. Many of her novels focus on the impact of historical events from the bottom up, but her interest in the individual was not limited to times of great upheaval. She recognised the work it can take simply to exist, for a person to make their way through their own life and the interactions that come together to shape a human experience.

Each of the stories focuses sharply on the individual, perhaps most movingly in the Nina Stories, in which a young woman has to take responsibility for her own protection, her knowledge of how to stretch her small budget to feed herself almost as vital as her instinct for danger. She is a girl, just about balancing. Or in ‘Esther to Fanny’, in which Fanny Burney’s astonishing bravery in undergoing violent nineteenth-century surgery for breast cancer extends her life for twenty-nine more years. The story is Fanny’s, not that of the pioneering surgeons.

Most important, though, is the writing. The poetry of my mother’s observations is as present here as in any of her work, the sometimes ethereal quality of a world seen through a lens that catches minutely the harsh realities of our existence, but also the endless beauty of the world and the people in it. In the wonderfully titled ‘Portrait of Auntie Binbag, with Ribbons’, you sense the hidden riches of life, which perhaps is how you might describe my mother’s philosophy. As she wrote in one of her final poems, ‘The Shaft’:

Who would have thought that pain

And weakness had such gifts

Hidden in their rough hearts?

If you stop to look, as my mother always did with intense curiosity, you will see beauty. We are glad to be able to share these stories and we hope that Mum’s readers, whom she valued greatly, will take as much pleasure from them as we have.

Patrick Charnley, 2018

THE NINA STORIES

CRADLING

 

NINA DIDN’T KNOW that she had earache. She’d woken up in the bottom of her bed, trapped in folds of blanket, on fire. They heard her crying and came in smelling of the time that happened after she went to bed. Their mouths breathed out smoke and cider when they said she must hush now because her sister was still asleep.

Nina batted her hands at her hair because the pain was somewhere inside her head. They pushed back the hair that was stuck to her face with crying, and knew straight away what was wrong.

‘It’s those blessed ears again.’

Her mother was already in the kitchen, lighting the gas, fetching out the little bottle of olive oil she’d bought from the chemist last time Nina’s ear hurt. There was a special spoon with a groove where the oil could drip out. Nina kept her eyes shut and listened. Her father carried her into the sitting room and sat back in his armchair, pulling her against him. She cried on but not panicky now, just letting him know how hard it was hurting her.

‘It’s the same ear,’ said her father. She heard his voice through his chest, not through the air. ‘The right one.’

She could sense her mother above her, with the spoon, hovering.

‘I’ll do it,’ said her father.

She felt him free his hands, but she stayed as still against him as if he were still holding her. He was testing a drop of the oil on his hand to see how hot it was. She’d seen him do it before.

‘Keep still, Nina.’

The back of the spoon was hot as it went into the cup of her ear. She moaned although it didn’t hurt. In a moment a warm wriggle of oil went deep inside her. It nearly touched the back of her throat even though it was going into her ear. Her father was holding her arms to his body, not hard but firm enough that she knew she didn’t have to battle. She could let it happen without fear. The warm oil spread inside her. The bolt of pain weakened a little.

‘I’ve put a cloth in the oven,’ said her mother.

Her father held Nina, rocking her so that the oil would find its way deep into her bad ear. She heard the thick, warm sound of his heart inside his body. She curled herself right up so that she was as close to him as possible, like a snail inside its shell. She heard the little pock sound of someone lighting a cigarette. Her mother lit cigarettes for her father when they were in the car, and then passed them to him. She was doing it now, in the house.

Her father smoked steadily, blowing the smoke away from Nina, over her head. The wireless was on in the corner, playing band music. Once she had seen her mother and father practising the cha-cha with the rug rolled back.

She heard her mother dig the shovel into the coal-bucket. She would be getting the right mix of large pieces and small. Coal rattled as it fell back into the bucket, and then there was the sound of it going on to the fire and the smell of coal-dust. Before they went to bed her father would put the slack on the fire and beneath its crust the fire would sleep all night, ready to wake in the morning. The stove in the kitchen had to be fed too or there’d be no hot water. Sometimes Nina heard the noise of riddling and stoking through the floor when she was in her dreams.

‘Hell’s bells, I’ve forgotten that cloth,’ said her mother.

She had to wave it about in the air to cool it. There was a singed smell, but not as bad as burning. Nina had one eye open now, her right eye. The other stayed shut, pressed into her father’s pullover. Her mother did a little dance with the cloth to cool it faster. There was a glass with cider in it on the table and her mother picked it up and drank some. Nina thought: This is what they do at night when we’re not here. They make a big fire and then they dance.

‘Keep still, Nina,’ said her mother. Nina closed her eyes meekly and the warm cloth came all over the side of her face. Ease spread through her.

‘That’s better,’ said her father, as if he knew.

‘It’s such a nuisance, this ear,’ said her mother.

Nina was never ill. She had slept through the night almost from the day she was born. She ate everything. She was a Trojan. But the coils of her ears were too narrow, that was what the doctor said. Sometimes, without knowing it, Nina heard almost nothing at all. She sat behind the bathroom door, looking at her pop-up book, while they shouted for her. In a minute or a minute more, the people in the pop-up book would come alive.

‘It’s hardly surprising this child can hear nothing. Her ears are completely blocked.’ The doctor had pumped warm water into Nina’s ear until it felt as if he was holding her down to drown her. Clots of wax had poured out in a swill of clouded water. Since then Nina had had ear infections, one after the other.

Her father began to sing a little song:

‘Chin Chan Chinaman

Bought a penny doll,

Washed it, dressed it,

Called it Pretty Poll,

Sent for the doctor,

The doctor wouldn’t come,

Because he had a pimple

On his thumb thumb thumb.’

A giggle stole into Nina’s throat. She knew that the last word didn’t have to be thumb. It could be bum.

‘She’s feeling better,’ said her mother.

But her father stayed where he was. He wasn’t rocking her any more, although the noise of his heart made it feel as if he was. It was slow and steady, much slower than her own. That was because he was twenty-eight. Next birthday he would be twenty-nine, and after that, thirty. She had counted all the way up from nought for him, but he hadn’t been pleased.

‘Bloody hell. You might as well put me in my coffin straight away.’

When Nina’s sister was born, her father had had to telephone one of his own sisters, because her mother had never looked after a baby in her life. He said, ‘You’ll have to come, Sheila, because Cathy has no idea which end of a baby is which.’ Her father knew which end was which, because there’d been eleven babies younger than him, but he had to go to work.

‘Are you going to put her back?’ asked her mother. Nothing moved except for a stir of flame in the fire.

‘In a minute,’ said her father. ‘When the cloth’s gone cold.’

THE TOWEL

 

THAT FIRST NIGHT, Nina dried herself on a piece of striped Madras cotton. She’d packed it because she had the idea of spreading it across the armchair. But although the armchair was dark with use it looked worse with the fabric lying limply across it.

The bathroom was down a half-flight of stairs. There was a notice on the door. ‘Upon vacating the bathroom, please leave the door ajar.’ When Nina went downstairs, the bathroom door was firmly shut. She went back to her room, and waited behind the door for sounds. She would give it twenty minutes. That was a fair time for someone to have a bath, even if they were old and had to haul themselves in and out, groaning and sloshing water over the enamel lip.

Mrs Bersted had shown Nina how to use the geyser, but only once. Nina was not quick with things like that. The pilot was always alight, she remembered that, and there was a whump as the flame shot up and filled the geyser window.

She knew, even from upstairs with her own door shut, that the bathroom door hadn’t opened. She would go down again with her sponge bag and the Madras fabric. The turn of the stairs was dark and a heavy smell of food hung in it. There was a smell of Jeyes Fluid too. She went right up to the bathroom door, put her ear against it, and listened. Nothing. Perhaps someone had drowned in the bath. She tapped once, very lightly, on the oily dark green paint. Nothing. It ought to be like a public toilet, with a slot where you pushed in the penny. You’d know where you were then.

Far below in the house, a door opened. Nina took fright. If someone came up and saw her standing here—

She rapped smartly on the door, and when no one answered she turned the handle and pushed it open. The bathroom was quite empty. She put her stuff on the chair, and quickly bolted the door.

The bath was bone-clean.

‘Turn the knob of the geyser until the flame ignites, then adjust until desired water temperature is achieved,’ said the notice on the wall which Nina had failed to notice earlier, in her panic of attention to what Mrs Bersted was saying.

She took off her clothes and folded them carefully on the chair, as if someone were watching her. Her legs looked very white and naked. Gingerly, she took hold of the knob, and turned it as she thought Mrs Bersted had done in her demonstration. Nothing happened. She turned the knob a little farther. There was a sudden, frightening hiss of gas, but no flame. Only the puny pilot light, crouched down in the heart of the enamel geyser. She fumbled in her rush to twist the knob back. There was sweat prickling in her armpits and her lips moved as if she was explaining herself to someone.

She would have a cold bath. That would be much better than trying the geyser again. Nina ran a few inches of water and swished it about to make it warmer before she climbed in. She could not sit down; it was much too cold. She knelt, shivering, sweeping a little water over her skin with her flannel. The soap slipped out of her hands. She wanted to mew like a cat from the cold but there might be someone else on the landing now, waiting silently. She stood up and rubbed the Madras cotton over herself. It seemed not to dry her but to spread the moisture more evenly over her body. Her nipples stood out, hard and dark. The bath mat was slimy under her feet but she had her flip-flops under the chair and soon she was wriggling the rubber thong back between her toes.

The bath emptied itself with a noise like an old person clearing catarrh in the morning. Nina swilled the tub with cold water, and then she noticed a tin of Ajax and a bath-scourer on the windowsill, beneath another notice, which read: ‘Please leave this bathroom in the state you would wish to find it.’ She shook the tin cautiously over the enamel. Nothing came out, so she shook again, harder. The cardboard lid flew off and a cascade of dirty white powder dropped on to the bottom of the bath. A hot wave went over her skin. She began to shovel the powder back into the tin, using her hand and the lid. It gritted her finger-ends but she captured most of it, forced the lid down again and replaced the tin on the shelf so that it faced the same way as before. The bottom of the bath was covered with dull grey streaks. She let loose another flood of cold water and was still scouring at the enamel when there was a bang on the door.

‘Anyone in there?’ called a man’s voice.

‘Just a minute,’ she called, scuffling into her pants and bra. Her jeans were splashed all over with water and some of the white powder had fallen on her T-shirt. She looked around quickly. The bathroom had lost its pure dry cleanliness and she didn’t know how to put it back. The doorknob rattled. Nina pulled back the bolt and opened the door, keeping her eyes down on her heap of wet Madras cotton and sopping flannel.

‘You’ve forgotten your sponge bag,’ said the man as he barged into the bathroom. He held it out to her backwards, as if it were something contaminating. ‘Thank you,’ she said, not looking up at him. She smelled his sweat. He’s just come in from work, she thought. He had his right to the bathroom, ahead of any schoolgirl, and he knew it. She backed away into the stairwell, clutching her possessions, and waited until the bathroom door slammed before she went upstairs. She didn’t want him to know where her room was.

But he would know anyway. The boarding house wasn’t that big. She was right at the top. Opposite, there was a blank door.

‘Oh no, that room’s not let,’ Mrs Bersted had told her with a grim smile. ‘It’s not fit for habitation.’

Nina spread the Madras cotton out over the back of the wooden chair she was to sit on when she ate. There was a table-flap which came down from the wall with a sudden bang; but she had mastered it. She had spent 14/6 on food: tonight she would have baked beans, with some cheese grated on top. There was a food safe outside the window for ‘perishable items’. You had to pull the sash right up, then open the little wire cage door and slip in your bottle of milk or a piece of cheese. Nina’s room faced north, so things would keep nice and fresh.

Nina had two saucepans: her mother’s old milk pan, and a new, thin, shiny aluminium pan for everything else. She stabbed the tin opener into the baked-beans tin, twisted it and, after a false start, she found the steady jagging rhythm that would take her all the way around the tin and open it.

She ate carefully, sopping her bread in the sauce. The Baby Belling didn’t have a grill, but there were two rings on top, and a small oven. Next time she would slice the bread and put it into the oven, which would be just as good as toast. She had bought three tins of beans, one of which had pork sausages hidden in it, two of tomatoes, several packets of dried soup and a Vesta chow mein. She had even remembered about washing-up liquid, and had already tried out the Ascot water heater with success. It occurred to her that if she could never get the geyser to work, she might carry pans of Ascot-heated water downstairs to take the chill off her baths. At least that way she would be able to wash her hair.

The street lights were coming on outside. They were a rough, angry orange. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the street and its lights would have disappeared. She would hear an owl.

‘Now, are you sure you’re going to be all right, Nina?’ her mother had asked. She was already picking up her things, and the empty suitcases which she was taking back with her. Nina could not remember packing. There were gaps like that all over her memory at the moment. But she had thought ahead: in a side pocket of her case there were four packets of her father’s cigarettes. She had slid them out and into a drawer while her mother was talking to Mrs Bersted. Four moist, yielding packets which would release the sweet breath of tobacco as soon as Nina stripped off the cellophane.

‘Now, are you sure you’re going to be all right?’

They looked at each other. Her mother’s eyes were evasive, pleading. The family was leaving again, only this time Nina wasn’t going with them. She was too old to be crammed into the back of a car with the little ones and driven a hundred miles to the next home. She had found a bedsit and would get a part-time job.

There was nothing to say. Nina turned and smoothed out fresh sheets of newspaper to reline the drawers before she put her clothes away. One day people would take out those sheets and read the paper and marvel at how long ago it all was.

Her mother’s hands were moving quickly into her purse. Nina watched through her hair as her mother took out four pound notes, put one back and placed three on the bed, for Nina to find when she was gone.

Nina chased the last baked bean on to her knife, ate it and pushed the plate away. She would have a cigarette now. She fetched the heavy Senior Service ashtray, her cigarettes and matches. The cellophane was off, and then the guardian strip of silver paper. Nina breathed in. She took out a cigarette, feeling the others loosen in the packet, and struck her match.

The first drag, that moment of calm, of absolute release. From the time she was fourteen it had never failed her. Nina drew in the smoke. But there was something wrong this time: the smoke tasted sour, the peace spilled away, her lips twisted as if she’d put something vile into her mouth instead of the virgin cigarette. She got up with the cigarette in her hand and went to the window. All she needed was some fresh air. But she still couldn’t smoke, and after a while she returned to the table.

Nina stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. For a long time she remained quite still, watching the yellow nicotine mark in the middle of the filter as if she expected something to happen. It was quite dark outside now, and the draught was cold. In a minute she would close the window and draw the curtains. She had plenty of shillings for the gas fire: six at least. It was just that she didn’t feel like putting it on yet.

She had to buy a towel. That was the real problem. She hadn’t thought ahead. But she had money: the three pounds. If she had a towel she could wrap herself up in it.

Her gaze crept back to the window. How orange those lights were. She could feel it beginning in her shoulders. Alone now, the dark of fear was rising. She closed her eyes and listened for the owl. It was a crisp cold night and she was running down the lane, her satchel banging, late home from school. Soon she would come to the turn, out of the trees. A long race downhill, along the wall, and then she would see the house. Lights would be on in the kitchen. She would pull open the back door and shout, ‘I’m home!’

She would go out, now, this minute. There was a late market on a Wednesday night, not the proper market but a few stalls huddling over by a wall. They were kept by big, hard women who were always calling and laughing to each other even while they were selling something to you.

Nina thought of them and the darkness inside her began to retreat. She had her money. She would buy a towel.

THE WHITE HORSE

 

TONY WAS STANDING outside Yates’s Wine Lodge, his hands deep in his pockets. The fog was thick now. His head was wreathed in it.

‘Have you seen the others?’ he asked as Nina came up. She wasn’t sure what others he meant. With Tony, she rarely asked questions, in case they were stupid ones which would make him whistle through his teeth and then say, ‘Little Nina,’ in a way which even someone who wanted to couldn’t possibly think was affectionate.

‘They’re probably inside already,’ he went on, moving towards the entrance.

Inside, the man with the violin was playing. He wore a shabby loose-sleeved coat which he never took off. His face was morose, but when his bow whipped and skidded, the music which came off it was bright. You would imagine a quite different player if you closed your eyes.

‘He’s getting past it,’ said Tony.

‘What?’ Nina was too much astonished, and so the question jumped out of her mouth. It was Tony who’d told her that the violin man had played with Toots Thielemans once. Yates’s would be nothing without him.

‘Little Nina,’ said Tony. His eyes were scanning the upper floor. ‘There’s Chris.’

There were five or six of them at the table, but to Nina it was dozens. Maggie moved up and made room for her, and a packet of cigarettes was thrust towards her. She took one and sat back, hidden in smoke. Bodies pressed in on either side.

‘Did you move in all right?’ asked Maggie.

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

Maggie was twenty-five. She was in love with Tony, or at least Nina thought so.

‘You want to get your own stuff up on the walls,’ said Maggie. ‘That’ll make it feel better.’

‘Posters, you mean?’

‘Yes, posters.’ Nina heard a tang of impatience in Maggie’s voice.

‘I know a guy who works in advertising,’ said Chris, leaning forward out of the noise. ‘He could get you a poster, Nina.’

‘You don’t know anyone who works in advertising,’ said Maggie, half closing her eyes.

‘He pastes the adverts on to billboards,’ said Chris.

‘They’d be a bit large for Nina’s room.’

‘They come in sections. He’s pasting up whisky ads at the minute.’

‘Whisky ads,’ repeated Nina.

‘White Horse,’ said Chris.

‘Oh!’ She thought of a white horse, as big as the side of a building, galloping across Mrs Bersted’s wall. Or even a section of a horse. Its head, perhaps, or a pair of flashing hooves.

‘I’ll ask him for you,’ Chris promised. ‘What’ve you done with Mal?’

Nina said nothing. She hadn’t heard from Mal for a week.

‘He’s gone to Leicester to score some dope,’ said Tony.

‘I shouldn’t have thought there was any necessity for that,’ said Maggie. ‘All he has to do is walk around the corner.’

‘Afghan gold,’ said Chris, and tapped the side of his nose. ‘Are you not drinking, Nina?’

‘She’s waiting for someone to buy her a drink,’ said Tony.

‘I’m not!’ said Nina eagerly. ‘I’ve got money, I’ll buy you a drink.’

‘We don’t want her going up to the bar,’ said Maggie quietly.

Nina took one of the pound notes out of her bag and pushed it across to Tony.

‘What do you want, then?’ he asked her.

She couldn’t think of a drink in the world that she wanted to put into her mouth. She stared at the walls for inspiration. There was a metal plaque with ‘Stone’s Ginger Wine’ embossed on it in curling letters.

‘I’ll have a glass of ginger wine.’

‘Don’t waste your money, it’s not even alcoholic,’ advised Chris.

Tony shrugged. ‘It’s her money,’ he said.

‘You have a drink too, Tony,’ said Nina hastily, ‘and Maggie and Chris – and everybody.’ She had forgotten the others’ names.

Tony took the order for the table, and went to the bar.

‘You don’t want to go buying drinks for everyone,’ said Maggie. ‘It’s not as if you’re earning.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Nina, but already her mind was making quick, panicky scampers. If each of them had a pint of beer, that would be ten shillings, and then her own drink too. She didn’t know how much ginger wine cost. Maggie would only have a lemonade or something like that. Perhaps it would be all right. She could get by for a week on a pound, as long as she ate as much as possible at school dinners. She would have two bottles of milk at break.

Maybe Mal would ask her to Sunday dinner at his place. She’d been there once before. His mum served up the roast and then they all took their plates through to the lounge so they could watch a film while they ate. Mal’s mum put her feet up on a leather pouffe which was seamed with deep cracks. Sometimes she made a comment about the film, and Mal’s thin dark face eased into a smile. Nina kept very quiet, on the sofa next to Mal.

‘Here’s your ginger wine,’ said Tony, and put down the glass in front of her on the table. It was full up and had an oily wobbling surface. ‘First time I’ve ever asked for that.’

He had carried four pints to the table first, balancing them carefully, frowning when Maggie moved to help him. Then there was a small glass of tonic water for Maggie, who never drank alcohol.

Nina waited for Tony to reach into his pocket for the change, but nothing happened. She stared down at the surface of her drink. Her ears hummed. With a flourish, Tony produced a bag of crisps and dropped it in front of Nina.

‘Little Nina,’ he said.

Maggie eyed him, but said nothing. Tony smiled, as if he was waiting for something. Nina sipped from the top of her drink.

After a minute Tony said, ‘It’s Peter Stuyvesant you smoke, isn’t it, Nina?’

‘Number Six.’ She was not going to explain that she only smoked Peter Stuyvesant when she had taken them from her father.

‘Pity,’ said Tony. Like a conjuror, he produced four packets of Peter Stuyvesant and held them in front of Nina. She made no move. ‘Don’t you want your change?’

Nina’s lips hurt. Probably it was the ginger wine. She swallowed down the taste. ‘Thank you, Tony,’ she said. Maggie shot Tony a dark look.

It was two days later that she met Chris in the Black Olive. He was carrying four long rolls of heavy paper.

‘Here’s your white horse. No, don’t unroll it now.’

Nina was sitting alone. She knew Chris wouldn’t stay. He hated cafés like this, full of students. She stroked the smooth back of the paper. It was time for her to go. Last time she’d sat for more than two hours over a cup of coffee, doing her art homework in the warm, before the owner came over and asked if she was going to pay him rent for the table, seeing as she wasn’t buying anything. There were some friends of Mal’s over in the corner, but they didn’t speak to her and she didn’t speak to them.

Nina looked up. Through the window she saw a girl coming down the narrow passage to the entrance of the café. Her head was bent over something she was holding. Nina saw a smudge of white through the fuggy glass. The girl’s face was small, narrow and very calm. It was a girl called Sarah, who’d had to leave in Upper Sixth because she was pregnant. She was two years ahead of Nina. She came in through the door and looked around the café. From the corner table a man raised his hand and beckoned.

Nina hadn’t expected the unwieldy rollicking of the posters as she unrolled them on the floor. If she could get all four of them laid out flat together, like a jigsaw, she could see how big the whole picture was and work out how to fit it on her walls. But as fast as she weighed down a corner with a book or a bag of sugar, another corner broke free and began to roll up. The room filled with a sickly smell of printers’ ink and new paper. The posters would never fit on her walls, even if she could get them to stay there. She decided to concentrate on the rectangle which showed the horse’s head with its mane flying free, and blue sky behind it. The wallpaper was old and pitted, and had come away from the skirting board. She would stick up the fresh new poster with Sellotape.

She crisscrossed it at the poster’s corners, and ran strips along the edge. She had to bend down to fix the bottom and when she straightened up her head filled with blackness. She stood quite still, waiting for her vision to clear. When it did, there was the white horse, nostrils wide, glaring at her. Its head seemed angry at the separation from its body.

But it was better than before. Now she would boil her egg. The reason she felt dizzy was that she was hungry.

The eggs looked smaller than Nina thought eggs ought to look. ‘Pullet’s eggs’, her father would have called them. They were dead white, and cool from being outside. She cradled one in each palm, then lowered them carefully into the roiling water. A plume of white ran out, coagulated and began to whirl as she quickly turned down the ring to two. She buttered three slices of bread and cut them into fingers. It was three minutes for a just-set egg, she knew that, but these were so small that perhaps she should allow less time. Her alarm clock had no second hand, so she counted aloud, ‘one and two and three and …’, and then she lifted the eggs, one by one. The best thing to do would be crack them open and mash the soft-boiled egg.

She took her plate over to the table counter and began to eat ravenously, cramming the food into her mouth. Egg dripped off her fingers and she wiped up the drops and licked them. She finished both eggs and took another piece of bread out of the packet to wipe the plate. Suddenly her stomach clenched. Sweat started out on her forehead and she sat very still, clutching the sides of her chair.

There was a sound. A corner of the poster detached itself and began to roll up, slowly but with an authority which could not be interrupted. The poster moved across the wall like a wave, cleansing it. The horse’s head had almost disappeared. There was a final small sound and then the last bit of blue sky vanished as the poster fell right off the wall and disappeared behind Nina’s bed.

She had left the saucepan of boiling water on the ring. The Sellotape had steamed off. There was a fine film of moisture all over the surface of the wallpaper.

Nina went to the window and opened it as wide as it would go. The iron smell of the eggs left her. Outside, the fog that had hung over the city for days had all blown away, and there was a cold, wild look to the sky.

GIRL, BALANCING

 

THE WARDROBE WAS sticky black, as if someone had tried to polish it with cough mixture. Nina looked inside and racks of old-lady clothes bulged into the room. She shoved them back, forced the door shut and locked it with the rusty little key.

She had picked the wrong room. The house was tall and narrow and there were six bedrooms. It belonged to her friend Edith’s great-aunt, and Edith had been coming here for holidays all her life. Now the great-aunt was dead, and the house would soon be stripped and sold, but Edith could have it for Christmas week. It was better than having it lying empty, for squatters and thieves.

Nina went to the window and looked out over the surging sea and the broad empty promenade. A gull flew and then sank down almost to the water. The wind was cutting the tops off the waves. It came straight from Siberia, Edith had told her that. The house creaked coldly and the windows rattled.

She would choose another room. Nina scooped her stuff off the bed, crammed it back into her bag, and went up to the attics. The stairs were bare wood and her feet clopped on them. At the top there were three doors, all closed. She tried the knobs, one by one. Locked. Locked. But whatever happened she wasn’t going back into that room which smelled as if someone was still dying in there. And then, like a sudden warm miracle, the china knob of the third room door turned. She paused. Far below in the bowels of the house she could hear Edith singing and banging pots. The sound gave her courage and she pushed open the door.

It was the smallest, whitest room. It looked as if someone had scrubbed it bare from ceiling to skirting boards. It was like being on a ship, Nina thought. Up here the house was left behind and you were halfway out to sea. She went to the round window. The glass bulged and distorted the line of the horizon and the iron railings of the promenade. From here she could see the humps of boats hauled on to the shingle bank.

There was no bed. She would drag a mattress upstairs, and she had her sleeping bag. Edith had said to bring it. Nina began to spread out her stuff in neat piles at the side of the room. Her clothes, her hat with her money tucked inside it, her roller skates. She had plenty of money. She was working at the Gaumont cinema and, with all the Christmas shows, there had been plenty of extra shifts. She could more than pay her way. They would have to buy bags of coal, and wood. There would be the gas for cooking, and the food.

She heard Edith’s footsteps coming all the way up the house.

‘I’m here!’ Nina called down. ‘I’m in the attic.’

There was a pause, and then Edith clumped upwards again. She stood at the door, her cheeks flaring scarlet. ‘I’ve got the stove lit,’ she announced.

Nina stared at her in admiration.

‘There was coke in the cellar, but there’s no coal. You brought your skates, then.’

‘Yes.’ Nina lifted her roller skates. They were old and the red leather was rubbed, but her feet hadn’t grown since she was twelve and they still fitted.

‘We’ll go skating before it gets dark,’ said Edith, and her eyes flashed boldly. ‘There’s a shop on the corner that sells bags of coal. We can carry a big one between us.’

They lugged the coal home, grunting and heaving under its weight. The shop man watched them ironically, without offering to help. He seemed to know Edith, but she was cold with him. As they left, Nina smiled back over her shoulder, abjectly.

‘You want to watch yourself with him,’ said Edith before they were out of the man’s hearing.

‘Why?’

But Edith just glanced, sniffed and said nothing.

Nina had the gift for lighting fires. All her life she’d known how to coax flame and make it roar. In her bedsit she was thwarted, because there was only the gas fire with its mean blue jets. But here, there were fireplaces in every room. Even in her attic there was a small black iron grate. Edith was going to make soup, she said, and Nina could light the fires.

Nina found a pile of old newspapers, and began to make coils. First you rolled up a sheet of newspaper, then you coiled it round and twisted the ends until it was as firm as a bird’s nest. She began in the front room, which was the sitting room. The fireplace was big, cold and lined with beige tiles. There were no tongs or shovel; Edith said people had taken most of her aunt’s stuff. Nina laid a pyramid of paper coils, balanced kindling from the shop into a pyre, and placed small lumps of coat delicately all over it. She sat back on her heels, laid several larger lumps of coal ready, and reached for the matches.

She held the match to the edge of a coil at the back of the fireplace. Through the kindling she saw the flame grow from blue to yellow and then stretch up to lick the wood. She dropped the match, lit another and held it to the deepest coil at the right back of the fireplace. Another touch, and another. The flame puckered and crackled on the wood. It was lit. It was going. She leaned forward, feeling its heat, urging it on. The wood settled; the coal slipped. She laid more coal jewels, dropping them on to the cruxes of the kindling. The damper was right out and the chimney was drawing. More coal, bigger pieces. There was heat in it now as well as flame.

Nina went from hearth to hearth, starting fires in the back room, in Edith’s bedroom and in her own. She would get all the fires roaring and then she would bank them down with slack so that they would stay alive while she and Edith were out. She went out to the coal bunker. It was empty of coal, as Edith had said, but there was an old shovel left in there and an iron bucket. Nina scraped for slack on the floor of the bunker and thought of the sound the coalman made when he delivered his sacks, walking to the bunker bent double, then heaving the sack off his shoulder, opening it and letting down the coal with a rattle and then a rush. You could tell how full the bunker was from the sound. Back and again the coalman trod the path until he had delivered all the sacks. And then you were safe for the winter.

They sat over the fire, still in their coats, and ate the soup Edith had made. It was thick with onions, fried until they were brown and meltingly sweet. The smell of coal-smoke and onions was slowly hiding the old, dead smell of the house. Behind it all Nina thought she could still taste the faint tang of the sea.

Nina wouldn’t be allowed to make such soup in her bedsit, even if she knew how. Boiled eggs, toast and baked beans passed muster, but anything fried or foreign was out. Nina had learned that after her attempt at curry brought Mrs Bersted prowling upstairs, sniffing at the doors until she found Nina’s.

‘I’ll get bones from the butcher tomorrow,’ said Edith. ‘He’ll be all right, as long as he thinks we’re getting our Christmas meat from him.’

‘Aren’t we?’ asked Nina.

Edith shifted and looked at the fire instead of at Nina.

‘It’s not really worthwhile getting a bird for one person,’ she said.

‘We could make sandwiches from the leftovers.’

‘I’ll be sick of the sight of a bird by then, after the turkey at my sister’s. One year it was so big she had to break its back to get it in the oven.’

‘That’s only one meal, though. You’ll be hungry again.’

Edith looked deeper into the flames. ‘She wants me to stay over,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t want to drive me back on Christmas Day. And then they always go for this long walk on Boxing Day, so it would mess that up if she had to drive all the way over here first.’

‘With the baby?’

‘Oh, they wrap the baby up and he goes in one of those carrier things, on Simon’s back.’

‘So you’re staying over on Boxing Day too?’

‘I’ll be back really early the day after, Nina. You know what it’s like. Simon’s not much of a one for people. He’s a musician, you know.’

Yes, Nina knew. She looked down, flushing at her own stupidity. When Edith had said, ‘I’ll be going to my sister’s for Christmas dinner,’ she had thought: Christmas dinner, that’s only three or four hours. Edith will be here in the morning, and she’ll be back in the evening. It will still be a proper Christmas.

‘You’ll be all right, won’t you?’

‘I’ll be fine,’ said Nina. ‘I’ll get some sausages.’

She was glad no one else had heard Edith’s words, or her own thoughts. If Tony was here he’d smile in that way of his, a bit mocking, and say, ‘Little Nina.’ If Mal was here he would stretch and yawn like a cat, and walk away because he didn’t want to think about Nina, not when she was like this. ‘You want to keep your feelings inside you, where they belong,’ he’d said to her once. Remembering it, she flushed more deeply.