Linger
The best part of the day. The early-evening light was buttery, and the bus in its cocoon of fogged windows slowly wove through the quiet streets, the untrimmed trees scraping like fingernails on the roof, everything bleak and damp, and waiting for her at home, hot tea and a wedge of cake she’d saved from yesterday, only a little stale, and the last scrape of margarine too, the old stove filling the kitchen with warmth, and out the back the comforting squeaks and flaps of a family of bats. She’d run out of eggs and the only milk was powdered, but it would be fine enough in tea. She didn’t bother to cook when it was just for herself.
The bus window lit the bombed-out houses, shadowed cavities in the mouth of the streets. The reconstructions had been going on for almost a year, but it was slow work, and the farther you got outside the centre, the poorer the area, the more gaps remained. Nettie still spent her days diligently sorting the letters, because working at the post office was her job and her job was important to her, but she did wonder how many of them were addressed to a pile of rubble. There had been a huge backlog of post during the war, which was only now beginning to un-gum. How many of the letters’ senders were nothing more than ghosts? How many of the recipients? Everything seemed so bright now after the years of blackout, the town lit up like fairyland, the cinema marquees and cafe windows and street lights all bright enough to dazzle; though sometimes the new light only served to cast the shadows deeper.
Things had changed in Nettie and Tom’s marriage, and she liked their new routines. She still did all the housework, but only what she deemed vital. She no longer blackleaded the grate. All that labouring with the stiff brush, the tube of Zebrite – what would be the point? By the following morning it would be ruined from Tom sliding all over it, smuts and smears spread to all corners of the house. He was always most active in the dark. Now that Nettie thought about it, there had been little point in blackleading the grate even when she was a single girl. Was her purity really defined by how dark she could get her fire? Was she less proper, less worthy, if a patch of tarnish gleamed through? She was so busy with her job, and her voluntary work, and looking after herself, that sometimes there was only a semblance, a soupcon, left over for her husband.
She turned up her coat collar and hunched her shoulders against the damp chill of the bus. She hoped the parlour would heat up quickly and chase the cold from her bones. She was still on coal, because it was cheaper than electric. It would be all fine and good if she could afford a maid to clean out and lay the grate, and more importantly to be careful enough not to get coal smuts on her elbows and thighs the way that Nettie does. Mrs Tanner, Tom’s mother, had a maid, so Tom is used to much higher standards of cleanliness than Nettie. He’s used to a higher standard of everything, Nettie suspects, but he doesn’t complain about it. He doesn’t complain about anything. Not any more.
Nettie wondered where she would find Tom when she got home. It had become rather a fun mystery for her to figure out. He was somewhere different every day, and he never gave her clues. It was their little game. He could be under the bed, perhaps, or under the couch. Dozing in the stockings she’d hung to drip-dry over the bathtub? Twisted in the curve of the hot tap? She hoped he would stay hidden, and then emerge only when she thought she was finally alone, when she was freshly scrubbed and in her nightgown, slipping tentatively between the chill of the sheets, only to see that the shadows in the corner of the ceiling were not shadows but were, in fact, Tom.
She had not planned for this thing with Tom. Nettie Lightbody was quite happy with her life, thank you. Yes, there was a war on, and it had been going on forever, and every day the newspaper’s requiem for the dead got longer, and it was all very sad and horrible. But rationing didn’t bother Nettie; she wasn’t particularly fussed about food, and this gave her an excuse not to make elaborate meals. The blackout could be a bore, but the dark town made the stars bright and clear, layer upon layer, in a way that Nettie had never seen before. She’d been able to start working, sorting letters at the post office; a position that wouldn’t have been available to her before all the men shipped off. She was busy at the Women’s Voluntary Service every Wednesday, handing out cups of tea amid the air-raid debris, looking rather fetching in her green uniform. She’d even started hand-to-hand combat training at the WVS. She couldn’t see herself thrashing a German, exactly, but it couldn’t do any harm. The enemy wasn’t the only danger on the blackout streets; she knew plenty of women who’d been accosted and didn’t even see the man’s face. When houses were bombed, there was plenty that didn’t get destroyed, and Nettie had outfitted her house very finely through salvage. Her social life was more active than ever, since so many establishments had closed due to shortages: she put on bridge evenings, staged plays, hosted poetry evenings, organised musical concerts. On Saturdays she simply turned up the radio and had a few friends over to dance and drink. Night after night was filled with music and laughter. Nettie was having a jolly old war.
Of course, her house might be bombed and blast her to pieces in her sleep, but then one could get hit by a bus or drop dead of a heart attack, so really what was the difference?
She was still alive.
She was not mourning anyone in particular.
And it was perfectly possible to have a party in the dark.
But here was the problem: everyone. Oh, how they talked . The foreign spies had nothing on Nettie’s neighbours. There was so little to do on those endless blackout nights, and even the tiniest blink of light from the opposite window was enough to spark a new piece of gossip. Mrs Veal wears red lace. Mr Valdemar keeps odd hours. Mrs Jessel had her baby only six months after Mr Jessel came back from duty. Miss Lightbody keeps company with various doubtful people.
The situation was becoming tedious. Nettie was the only one left of her family after her mother died, so she had inherited the house, and saw no problem with living there alone. But she knew what people thought about a single woman. What was the point of keeping a house if a man wasn’t coming home to it? The last few times she’d tried to use her ration coupons for treacle and sausages, Mr Van Tassel at the shop had told her they’d run out. He said they’d run out of gin, too. She knew it was a lie. It would be so much easier if she could be married – or even better, engaged – but then there would have to be a man around. There were so few men left, for a start, and while they might be fine for a night or a weekend, after that they grew tedious. Nettie had eyes and ears, and she’d seen perfectly well what a marriage was. Cleaning, cooking, lying back and thinking of England, listening to a man grumble on and on and on. Shaking out doormats and polishing door handles. No thank you.
Nettie’s neighbour to the left was old Mr Umney, who seemed to be at the kitchen window no matter what time Nettie passed, his hands in the sink, peering round the net curtains. Nettie had been throwing her milk bottle tops and chicken bones in the rubbish rather than keeping them for salvage, because honestly it had come as a surprise to her that bones could be used to make soap and milk bottle tops to make fighter planes, and she was a little dubious about the whole thing. Mr Umney was probably thrilled to think that his saucepan or his shilling were part of a bomber. But it seemed to Nettie that sorting the cereal boxes into one pile and the ripped wellington boots into another was just a way to keep everyone busy. Turn off your lights, grub around in your own remnants, and don’t ask any questions. Mr Umney had acquired some rabbits, which he intended to use for meat and to sell to a furrier. That, however, was months ago, and the rabbits had not reduced in number. Nettie suspected that Mr Umney had made the fatal error of giving the rabbits names, and now couldn’t bring himself to kill them. She understood, in a way; every time she passed his garden, she bent over the fence and stroked the rabbits’ soft ears. How sweet it was, the way their little noses twitched. She imagined Mr Umney was telling himself he liked mock-turtle soup, actually, and wouldn’t prefer a rabbit pie after all, and really wasn’t it better for the war effort to keep the rabbits alive for something or other, to turn into a tank or make toasty little hats for the boys on the front line.
Her neighbours to the right were the Tanners. Mrs Tanner, her three horrible daughters Kitty, Bunny and Lily, and the golden boy Tom, who had enlisted on the very first day of the war and hadn’t returned since. He sent weekly letters to the female Tanners, which Nettie knew because she sorted them. There was something solid and filling about Tom; he was a thick slice of brown bread, a dense meat pie, a brown-black pint of Guinness. He was just the sort of man to be a husband.
One drizzly Sunday, while Nettie drank tea uncomfortably in her mother’s armchair, wishing the horsehair stuffing wasn’t quite so horse-like, a wail came through the front window. Not an air-raid siren, but Mrs Tanner, with a telegram in her hand and an awkward-looking man on her doorstep. Well, thought Nettie. That’ll be the end of Tom.
And that’s when it came to her. She didn’t have to be a single woman. She didn’t even have to be a fiancée, or a wife. She could be the best thing of all: a widow.
It wasn’t difficult to be Tom’s ventriloquist. She’d opened many of his letters before, just out of curiosity, so at first she simply mimicked his shallow and simplistic tone. But Nettie’s Tom grew better with each missive. He was brave and strong, glad to be fighting the good fight; but also how he wished that war didn’t exist, and everyone could just stop fighting. He understood that Prime Minister Churchill was holding things together; but also wouldn’t it be so much better for people to share resources in a more socialist way? Women should have more freedoms. The poor should not suffer so. Most of all, how he missed his darling Nettie, and how he longed to be home with her. He promised to seek out an unexploded bomb so that he could liberate its green silk parachute for Nettie to make into an evening gown for one of their many parties. He only hoped that she was keeping busy with her work, and her volunteering, and keeping her friends close, so that she wouldn’t miss him too terribly.
It really was too sad about all those dead boys. Nettie could feel the ongoing war turn her mind to gloom a little more each day. Yes, there was still dancing, and parties, and drinks, and friends, and men. But it was all starting to ring hollow. You’d go out and have a dance and share a joke with a stranger and the next day he’d ship out and never come home. She didn’t know how to feel about the haunting intimacy of knowing that the last human touch that Arthur or Ernest or Peter or John ever had, before their plane plummeted from the sky and burst into flames, burning them right to the bones, was her own.
When she had a decent enough stack of letters from Tom, all backdated appropriately with stamps from her work, she knocked on Mrs Tanner’s door.
‘We were keeping it a surprise,’ Nettie said, a single tear rolling cinematically down her cheek, ‘so we could tell you together when he got back.’
Mrs Tanner stared silently at the letters, as if they were about to explode in her hands, but Kitty appeared from behind her.
‘When he got back! And now he … now he … he never will!’ She dropped to her knees and wailed. Nettie was a little irritated that Kitty had out-dramatised her, but Mrs Tanner swept Nettie into her arms, cooing ‘My daughter, my daughter’, and so thrilled was she that the plan had been a hit, it was all she could do to keep looking forlorn. Nettie rather felt she was a great example of wartime pragmatism. She had outfitted her home from things that dead people no longer needed. She was alive, and she needed things. Tom, now, was a thing that no one needed – except her.
Nettie found, to her delight, that being wife to a dead man was the perfect situation. Mr Van Tassel always had a bottle of gin and a tin of treacle set aside for her, but of course she was already owned by another man, so he wouldn’t be expecting a fumble for it in the back room. Mr Umney still peered through his net curtains at her, but nodded respectfully and kept his gaze strictly neck-up. She could have people round whenever she wished, because there was certainly no funny business now; they were simply helping her to cope with her tragic loss.
The only downside was that she had to go for tea at the Tanners’ every week, to reminisce about Tom and eat fish-paste sandwiches, meaning that her thoughts of poor Tom now smelled rather odious. Her technique was to stay docile and demure, nodding along with whatever Mrs and Misses Tanner said. Over the months, they seemed to forget that Nettie was even there. She did feel she was doing a rather kind public service, for the war had languished into a fifth year, and the mood everywhere was gloomy. Young love was always a balm for the soul.
Mrs Tanner poured the tea, and Bunny sighed and stretched out her feet so that everyone could see how she wore actual stockings, not gravy-painted legs, and not even laddered or saggy-kneed. She must, thought Nettie, be gadding about with an American.
‘I rather feel this war has gone on forever,’ she said.
‘The previous one didn’t,’ replied her mother, ‘and neither shall this one. Now, Kitty, dear, do be generous with the jam. There’s plenty more. I always make two batches, just as the Dig for Victory leaflet says. One for quick use, and one for keeping.’
‘I think it’s useful to have so many heavy glass jars,’ said Lily. ‘Should a German break in.’
‘How oddly your mind works, Lily,’ said Mrs Tanner.
‘As if you could kill a German with a jam jar,’ scoffed Bunny. ‘You can barely stomach the red sinews in the chicken.’
‘If I got a chance,’ retorted Lily, ‘I would kill a German with a jam jar. I’d rip out his eyes and stamp on his heart. I’d kill him with my bare hands if I had to. I’d burn their hearts but they haven’t got ’em.’
The grandfather clock’s ticking seemed to echo as the room fell silent.
‘The Germans are just people,’ said Mrs Tanner lightly. ‘People just like us.’
‘They’re not like us!’ said Lily. ‘They killed Tom! They’d kill us too!’
‘And you’ve just said you’d kill them,’ spoke up Kitty, gesticulating with her jam-smeared knife. ‘So they really are just like us. And besides –’ here she pointed her knife at Lily’s delicate little hands, barely meeting around her teacup – ‘you’d barely be able to throttle a mouse with those.’
‘It’s what Tom would have wanted,’ said Lily sulkily.
‘Tom was a pacifist,’ said Nettie.
‘He most certainly was not!’ Mrs Tanner burst out.
Bunny laughed, the same high tone as the china cup tinking onto her saucer. ‘He enlisted to bash the Bosch. He said so himself. I’m sure he took plenty out before they got him.’
Nettie bit her lip, burning with indignation. Bunny’s version of Tom was no more true than Nettie’s. Why did she get to be the authority on him? Nettie was the one who loved him. Nettie was the one who had exchanged dozens of long letters with him. They were engaged, practically married; surely his confidences to his fiancée were more valid than whatever throwaway confessions he might have given his middle sister?
She never visited the Tanners’ again, because the next night it was bombed. Nettie, not yet in bed, sitting by the dark window at the tail end of a party, less than an hour after the last guest had left, consumed by a vague malaise, watched as the sky lit up in fireworks and the Tanner house collapsed like one of her cakes, the soft fruit of the Tanners inside squashed to nothing. Her own house, a miracle, juddering like a jelly but left whole.
The next day, there was a thin and dirty ice over everything. Shattered glass glittered in the ruins. The street held the acrid reek of the bomb and a mean stink of gas from the broken pipes. Somewhere, a tap dripped.
And that would have been it.
But then the war ended, and Tom came back.
The bell rang early. Nettie, somewhat hungover but not enough to stop her going to work, opened the door to a ghost.
‘Hello,’ said Tom Tanner. There was something wrong with his mouth. It twisted to the side, caught up in a mass of scar tissue that spread like a slap across his cheek. ‘I don’t quite know …’ he swallowed, and it sounded painful. ‘I don’t quite know where to go. My house …’
He motioned to the hole in the ground where the Tanner house used to be.
‘The Tanners,’ said Nettie, wishing her head didn’t throb quite so much. ‘They’re dead.’
‘All of them?’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Not you.’
They stared at one another for ten long seconds before Nettie remembered her manners – one really should invite one’s fake fiancé, whose entire family and home had been destroyed, inside. It was too late to hide the gramophone and easy chair she’d salvaged from the Tanner house; she’d just have to hope Tom didn’t recognise them. While picking through the wreckage, she’d felt a surge of fear when she peeped into the cellar and saw it was splattered red; the bodies of Mrs Tanner and Kitty and Bunny and Lily had been taken away in an ambulance, she’d seen it happen; but then she realised it was not blood but jam. Mrs Tanner and her batches of jam ‘for keeping’.
For a moment she’d felt like giving up. Throwing herself down into that filthy, jammy cellar and never getting up again, letting herself starve while weeping over the shards of Mrs Tanner’s plans.
But what good would that do? So she’d dragged the easy chair back to her house, where Tom now sat.
The wedding was exactly as one would expect. Tom was indeed just the sort of man to be a husband. When they kissed, he held both her hands in his, softly rubbing her wrists with his thumb. It was winter, and he wore leather gloves, their tips singed soft from lighting cigarettes. Later, in the dark, she thrilled to hear him toe off his shoes and unbuckle his belt. He smelled of tobacco and bread.
They had ice cream at Mildmay’s, lunch at Van Tassel, and a film of Nettie’s choice, the content of which Tom never had an opinion about, though he always sat quite happily and watched. Once they got an orange, and shared it piece by piece, the juice so sweet and sharp that Nettie almost gagged on it.
The fishmonger greeted her as dear Mrs Tanner , and gave her the pick of the strange new imported fish: megrim, saithe, witch sole. They all looked repulsive to Nettie, and she couldn’t be faddled to cook them anyway, but she did appreciate the nepotism. A few times she bought the witch sole, then fed it to abandoned cats on the way home. But good times, like war, can’t last forever.
Nettie was not her usual buoyant self when she got in that evening. There had been a peacetime celebration in the square, but it had a desultory air. The streets were mucky with slush, the texture of black pudding. A few bedraggled girls hung on their soldiers’ arms, damp with drizzle, red lips pulled into a grin. People milled about, setting off fireworks, dancing on top of air-raid shelters, climbing on statues and yelling aimlessly. The whole thing made Nettie feel thoroughly depressed.
She arrived home to the worst sort of Tom.
‘We’ve been married over a month,’ he said. ‘And it’s time you stopped working.’
‘Hello to you too,’ Nettie replied, shaking the rain off her coat and hanging it on the peg.
‘You must look after your husband and children.’
‘We don’t have children.’
‘What will everyone say about you, married and working? That I can’t afford to keep you! I forbid it.’
‘Tom, darling,’ she said. ‘You can’t afford to keep me. And you’re on to plums if you think you can forbid me from doing anything. My answer is no.’
But of course, he could. He owned her, body, mind and soul. He could lock her in or out of the house. He had a legal right to her body in whatever way he chose to use it. And he was not pleased with anything Nettie chose to do.
Nettie would have been happy to just eat some stale bread with margarine and Smedley peas – no time wasted over the stove, so you could get on with something else. She’d even be fine on asparagus or kidney soup, which came in tins, kept for months and was not rationed. A small supper and a draught of nerve tonic before bed, and Nettie was content. But Tom wanted meat, meat, meat. And meat needed time and attention and the reading of many women’s magazines to find ration-friendly recipes. Nettie Lightbody had not been a woman who spent her time clipping out recipes, and Nettie Tanner wouldn’t be one either. She served him a tin of soup and some crispbreads, then went off to get on with her hand-to-hand combat training. But Tom made his protest known. Heart, tongue, sheep’s head, trotters, chitterlings: you can, he claimed, get any of them from the butcher without ration coupons. Look, right here, he’d clipped a few recipes himself from Woman magazine, for sheep’s head roll and brains on toast.
‘If you wish to make sheep’s head roll,’ said Nettie, buttoning up her coat, ‘then do feel free. I shan’t need any, thank you.’ But of course, she ended up making the sheep’s head roll, and actually it would have tasted fine if her mouth wasn’t bitter with resentment.
Next, she didn’t use enough dolly blue when washing the whites. There was the wrong sort of white, you see, and also the right white; and the way Nettie liked them, not a startling, blinding white but ivory, like the thick lid on fresh cream, was no good at all. What will everyone say about their creamy, unstarched sheets? The colour of semen and floppy as Tom’s cock? His mother used Fuller’s earth and bran for her cretonnes and fur, ammonia-ed all her bloodstains before anyone even saw them, why couldn’t she, why couldn’t Nettie, why couldn’t she be exactly like his mother except instead of pushing Tom out of her vagina she let him put his cock in it?
Tom slept in the Morrison shelter, which Nettie had only put in the bedroom so that it would be out of the way for parties. One wasn’t meant to sleep in it. She shuddered at the thought. Like sleeping in a coffin. All he wanted to do in the evenings now was stop in and stare into the fire.
If Nettie did insist on him coming out with her, he would act so morose and rude that she became embarrassed and left. If she went out without him, she’d come in to find him standing in the dark between the windows, back flat against the wall, arms at his sides, an expectant look on his face.
‘The flying glass!’ he whispered. ‘It can be deadly.’
‘Why are you going to break the glass?’
‘Not me! The Germans. A bomb. I heard the sirens.’
‘There were no sirens, Tom,’ replied Nettie with a sigh. ‘And what on earth is this?’ She turned the strange metal object over in her hands. Potato masher? Testicle clamp?
‘Self-locating bomb remover,’ called Tom from the other room, still flat against the wall. ‘You attach it to a broom handle and it swivels and grips the bomb to disengage it. The best part is that you can operate it with one hand, leaving the other hand free for a protective shield.’
‘A protective shield,’ said Nettie. ‘For an incendiary bomb. Your hand.’
But it didn’t matter what she said, because Tom had stuffed cotton in his ears, as well as a piece of rubber in his mouth to protect him from impact. Nettie didn’t speak for the rest of the evening. She realised that she’d happily never speak to Tom again in her life.
Nettie missed the Tom from her letters. Perhaps it was their youth that had made them so light-hearted and idealistic. Their early courtship was imbued with the glow of deep promise and whimsical adventure.
She did not want to admit it, but the Tom she loved had never existed. The quiet, content, idealistic man who wanted Nettie to live her life and be happy: he was dead and gone, a ghost, a figment. That wasn’t Tom.
This was Tom. A needy child. A constantly emptying stomach. An employer who would never promote her. A bomb that could go off at any second and take her down too. The war was over, but not in this house.
Nettie still cooked all the food, such as it was. There was a type of poison that tasted of nothing.
They had rats, she’d say if anyone asked. But they never did.
As Nettie stepped off the bus she glanced up at the sky, but there was nothing to see. The streets were brighter than before the war, everything lit up in desperate celebration. The moon was still discernible, but not a single star.
To the right of Nettie’s house, the hole that was the Tanner house remained. To the left was Mr Umney’s, its intact windows dark. She bent over his fence and tangled her hands in a dozen soft rabbit ears. Mr Umney had died, she didn’t know of what, and his house was still empty, but the rabbits remained. They’d chewed through the mesh of their hutch and taken over the garden, doubling in number over and over until the grass was barely visible beneath the heaving, hopping mass. Nettie reached into her bag and tore several leaves off a cabbage, tossing them into the garden. Then she heaved the whole thing like a rugby ball, enjoying the empty feeling when it left her hand. It would mean a smaller dinner for the next few nights, but she didn’t mind. Cabbage made her fart anyway.
She unlocked her door and went into the house, closing the door on all hurting things. She glanced around for Tom, but couldn’t see his shape in the shadows. Perhaps he was in the drainpipes, or curled around a light bulb. He liked those liminal spaces. Landings, corners, top shelves.
She put on a pot of soup to heat, the kitchen lit by a single striving lamp. Nettie wasn’t one to reflect, but in that moment she did. She’d kept on her post office job, but her other activities had rather fallen by the wayside. The camaraderie of the WVS had faltered, and instead of something fulfilling and exciting, it now seemed to Nettie nothing more than a haggery of housewives who talked only of the best ways to boil up a pudding, and the wild abandon with which their neighbours squandered butter. With no bombed-out ruins from which to serve tea, her green uniform just felt silly. Every task felt like busy-work. As the years receded, Nettie felt herself recede with them.
But, she thought, perhaps that’s no bad thing. She realised that she’d settled, after all, into domesticity. But she found she didn’t mind it. Companionship was a boon, and there was a lot to be said for the familiar rhythms of marriage. At times she missed the bright flutter of her butterfly friends, but she found she preferred the dark and slow-beating moth wings of Tom’s company. It had been hard to love Tom when he was alive. But she loved his ghost so very, very much.
She went to the window and lifted the curtain. Let the soup boil over. It doesn’t matter. Soon Tom would come out from wherever he was hiding, and they would have a lovely quiet evening together. Look at the town, lit up like a fairyland. It’s nice that the lights are on now. Though one does rather miss the stars.