Mary couldn’t remember was what had made her say it that night, after she’d found her father drawing the map. They had been finishing supper and she had asked Matthew, ‘Is Christie’s mummy your mummy Daddy, only she’s not my gran?’
Stella had laughed but it hadn’t been a happy sound, more as if she’d dropped the plates in her hands and they were bouncing and breaking on the floor. Matthew had picked up his knife and fork again, although the dishes had been cleared. Then Stella was in the kitchen, banging things.
‘She’s a family friend, sweetheart. Iris was my mother’s friend and after my mother died, she was my friend. Now she’s sick in the hospital, I try to comfort and help her.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’ Mary remembered how this old woman, in her whiteness and softness, was like snow in winter and fleece in summer, and whose bright eyes had held all colours.
‘She has cancer.’
Mary thought cancer … canker … conker … and saw a spring cloud shrivel and darken to a hard brown shell. ‘Will she die?’
‘Yes, she will.’
‘Then how do you help her, Daddy?’
‘We talk. We tell each other stories just like you and me, Mary Fairy.’
‘And do you brush her hair, like you do mine?’
‘Her hair’s gone. The medicine … you see, her body needs all its strength to get better and hasn’t got time to be growing any more hair.’
A shell. Smooth and empty. Mary ran to her mother.
The winter that Iris Hepple lay dying was a time of locked cold, in which everything held still. Mary would be woken by Stella climbing the stairs with a paraffin heater, its liquid slopping against its sides. She would bring it into Mary’s room and turn the stiff dial that cranked up the wick. She’d strike a match and the room would fill with something warm but so dry it made Mary’s eyes sting before she’d opened them. Bundled up in her dressing gown and slippers, she would follow her mother downstairs and crouch by the fire. The coal smoked and changed colour. There would be porridge, and a trip back upstairs again to wash and dress in the damp bathroom where a single electric bar on the wall gave off a weak glow. Before and after school, it was dark. Even when the snow came and everything was white for weeks on end, it was still dark and her father never seemed to be home. All Mary thought about, though, was trying to get warm.
On Christmas Eve, Mary was woken by shouting. She crept to the top of the stairs and there were her parents in the hallway. She couldn’t tell if they were holding onto each other or pushing away. Stella was as tall as Matthew, as broad as he was, and as fair. Even though their faces were close together, they were shouting.
‘Why go tomorrow?’ Stella’s mouth stayed open after she’d finished speaking. Mary could see her teeth.
‘Because neither Christie nor Tom will.’ Matthew looked down and shook his head. Stella put her hand in the hair at the back of his head and tugged, forcing him to raise his face.
‘I know Tom can’t, he hasn’t left the house in years … but Christie? Have you really thought about why he doesn’t visit his own dying mother?’
‘Can’t face the state she’s in, I don’t know …’
‘Can’t face the disappointment when she sees it’s … not … you …’ And Mary’s gentle father had taken his wife’s head in his hands and knocked it hard back against the front door, three times, echoing her words.
There was another week without school after Christmas during which Stella went away to London. Matthew and Mary did jigsaw puzzles by the fire in the mornings and went over to the Chapel in the afternoons. Mary loved the paper on which he drew his plans, the big squares filled with smaller and fainter squares. Matthew would use a Swiss Army knife to whittle his pencil to a fine, long tip. Then he would adjust his right-angled rulers and fill a blank sheet with rooms, doors, roofs and windows. It was freezing in the Chapel, so Matthew brought the paraffin heaters from home and Mary, who was still too cold to keep still but didn’t want to bother him, would scamper between the heaters and his desk, where she would stop to consider his progress and ask to borrow a word: ‘Axonometric, axonometric …’
On the second day of Stella’s absence, Matthew put Mary in the car and drove into Camptown. For two hours, they walked up and down the High Street in the cold, going in and out of shops but not buying anything – no meat from the butcher’s, no bread from the baker’s, no buttons from the haberdasher’s, no chairs from the antique shop nor buckets from the ironmonger’s. Mary enjoyed it all but was puzzled. They walked back to the car but didn’t get in. Matthew turned to the big building next to which he had parked.
‘I must see a friend, sweetheart.’ He took her hand and they went into the building and through a number of heavy doors like the one at school only they swung open and shut so easily, sweeping the rubber floor with a rubber strip, making only the faintest noise, a suck and a sigh. They walked down a very long corridor with the quietest floor Mary had ever come across. There was another set of doors with three chairs to one side. Mary was more properly warm than she had been all winter.
‘You’d best wait here,’ said Matthew, without looking at his daughter. He was gone through the doors before she could respond.
After that, they went to the hospital every day, without bothering with the shops first. Matthew brought her colouring books, even sweets. Mary hated his smell when he tucked her up at night. It was confusing; it made her think of an attic.
One day, Mary got bored with swinging her legs in the corridor. She pushed open the doors and went in. She could see some beds and blue screens arranged like tents. She didn’t know where Matthew was but then she heard his voice coming from a small room at the end and he was singing a song she loved, ‘My very good friend the milkman says …’ Mary rushed in smiling to find him but couldn’t see him because he wasn’t there in the room, but there on the bed, curled up with a tiny old woman in his arms, his mouth against the bad egg of her head. She was as brown as a stain. She had tubes coming out of her arms and her bones stuck out everywhere. Her white nightgown was rucked up around the long bones of her thighs and a flat yellow breast lay nestled in the folds of its open bodice, beneath which Mary thought she could see her father’s hand. Machines on either side of the bed bleeped and whispered. Mary screamed.
When they got home, Stella was there. Mary was sent to bed but kept seeing faces without teeth, eyes or hair in the dark. Stella held and rocked her, and tried to tell her stories but kept stopping. Mary felt as if she were in the grip of an earthquake. She pretended to be asleep so her mother would leave. Then she sent herself away, in her head, off to a cloud or a cave, where, nonetheless, some words reached her: ‘… sick … mother-love … lover …’
Mary had never seen her mother cry, and could not have imagined the ferocity with which she did so now, remembering that winter. She was sitting on the edge of Mary’s bed, as upright as ever, staring out of Mary’s window. She didn’t look at her daughter who, even if she wasn’t sleeping, could not be reached. Stella knew Mary wouldn’t hear what she said, but she was talking for her own sake. ‘You saw … heard … things and the trouble is now you know and I don’t know, do I really? I know he took you to see her. I expect she liked you. She must have done, Matthew’s only child …’ Her body shook violently, as she sobbed but made no sound. ‘Poor Tom, now he’s come back and the trouble is he’s found you. Matthew’s gone and now that damned family want you, too … his “angel” is what Christie says he’s calling you, as if you can make everything alright for him. I told Christie, I said, That girl can’t see beyond the end of her nose! How’s she going to find a drowned house! Wasn’t it demolished, anyway?’
On this point, Stella was uncertain. She had always thought of the reservoir as a concrete bowl beneath which everything had been flattened or removed. ‘But tell me, tell me again about Daddy and Iris. You don’t have to keep their secrets now they’ve both gone and I want to … help