Page 49 of Little Wing
Sylvie and Nell quietly imbibed it all, Sylvie waiting for Nell’s next question to whisper its way to her.
‘I’m very tired with all this remembering,’ Wendy interrupted. ‘I should like to watch my programmes now.’
Sylvie plumped the pillow on the armchair and helped Wendy off the bed. ‘Nice cup of tea?’
‘But of course Marjorie had her studies, her research, her university life. All of itveryimportant and none of us were to forget it. I think what Marjorie found far more difficult than any of her science and studying was that she came from a family of thickies.’ Wendy started to giggle.
Sylvie looked over to Nell who was standing as still as she could against the wall behind her mother.
Wendy sighed away the last of the laughter. ‘So the baby came to me.’ She shrugged. ‘Who else was going to have her? Certainly not my mother, certainly not Marjorie. And I was married, you see.’ She paused. ‘In a manner of speaking.’ She fidgeted with an edge of the tissue poking out from her sleeve and then regarded Sylvie, wagging her finger. ‘Don’t marry a man just because he makes a delicious Martini and offers you a ticket out of home.’ She paused. And repeated it. And then she took the remote control and started zapping.
Out in the corridor, Sylvie and Nell stood in steady silence a while.
‘Thank you.’
To Sylvie, Nell looked more depleted than when she’d arrived.
‘Not entirely sure what help I was – seems to me you didn’t get your answers.’
Nell thought about this. ‘I don’t think I ever will. There’s no one to ask. There is nobody who’d know that I’m looking.’
‘Well, I’ll keep listening,’ said Sylvie. She linked her arm through Nell’s and walked her along the corridor and back down the stairs. ‘Really – that’s what they want, people like your ma, at this stage. For people to just keep listening without prejudice.’
In her flat, a bowl of Heinz tomato soup on her lap untouched, Nell sat looking at the white walls quite peaceably. Shadows whispered in with the encroaching dusk like an audience to her thoughts, a soft and quiet company that stayed awhile and then moved on. A tear or two: from pure tiredness and because she was that plump blonde cheruby pudding baby, a secret in a pillowslip between sisters. Nell scratched and scratched for memories. Nothing. Only Frank, hazy on the horizon of her mind’s eye. The Chaffinch crew, coming into focus in the foreground. Tomorrow, she’d be back in the land of the living with Danny and Debbie and the blackbirds and the walnuts. For now, though, she’d stay just here and wonder about the little dolly baby who came from Scotland, a hand-me-down from one sister to the other.
Nell wasn’t going to eat the soup, it had gone cold and there was a skin on the surface now. She’d have an early night. She’d have a bath, light a scented candle then go to bed with the radio on. She hadn’t slept well for days. She took the bowl through to the kitchen and tipped the contents down the sink, running the hot tap on full. She glanced at her montage by the fridge and alighted on a photograph of herself at sixteen, holidaying with her school chums in Greece after their GCSEs. She touched the photograph and smiled. All that retsina and miscalculating the drachma their entire trip. And they sunbathed slathered in baby oil and snogged unsuitable boys and they came home in love or heartbroken, all with peeling shoulders. And Nell thought, I liked the summer when I was sixteen. She remembered how her mum had laughed and cried and couldn’t hug her for long enough when she returned. And then Nell realized that Florence would have been pregnant with her at that age and she couldn’t even get close to imagining what that must have been like. Too tired to think more on any of it. Nell turned off the lights and went to run a bath. On her way through, in the corner of the room, the red blink of the answering machine. She detoured across the navy darkness and pressed play. Thinking, Philippa.
You have two new messages.
The first was the loaded crackle of active silence and then the bluntness of someone hanging up.
But then they tried again.
It was Marjorie. Marjorie clearing her voice. Marjorie about to hang up. But then she spoke.
‘Harris,’ she said. ‘Florence,’ she said. ‘Florence was sent to the Isle of Harris.’
To Harry’s.
Nell had one answer now and it pointed north.
I need to look ahead.
I have to focus on the horizon. Someone – a woman briskly patting my back – has been telling me to do so. The sea swell is awful and I feel so sick, the lurch and the pitch is worsening. The cold metal railing is sticky with saltwater and my fingers are reddened and wet, clinging on. A bad smell of boat. The sea is called the Minch and it is churning, sucked black and splattered with spume. I’ve already thrown up. My guts feel shredded. I’ve been travelling since yesterday. Trains and buses and boats, journeying away from the only home I’ve known, towards a strange island I’m being told is the only door now open to me.
This place is still over an hour away, somewhere over there on those lumbering mauve humps of land that seem to float and wail into view every now and then before disappearing behind the chucking rain.
What kind of a place is this?
Which idiot thought to colonize land surrounded by such wild water?
I can’t believe I have to live there now. I’m livid about that. It’s 1969 – what’s the problem? So I’m young and unmarried and pregnant – it’s just different, it’s not uncool, it isn’t a sin and I’m not wicked. Why didn’t I just ditch the train and stay in London where everything would have been fine?
Instead –
the middle of bloody nowhere
in the middle of a hostile sea.
