—39—
After the dinner party at Nina’s, Peter and I took our chance to hurry home.
He was not drunk, and protectively took my elbow more than once when gunfire rattled overhead.
When we entered the foyer, our neighbor Mrs. Cotton, who’d come in to sit with Mother, was waiting.
“Your mother is quite unwell, my dear. You need to go right up.”
I handed her my bag and coat, dropped my hat on the tree, and hurried upstairs. “Mother, I’m here. Are you all right?” I sat at her side and took her cold hand. The palm was red, and I stroked it lightly.
She did not answer, only shifted restlessly. Her belly beneath the blanket was larger than ever, as if she were growing a new baby instead of her death. The thought made me blink hard. “Mother, would you like me to read to you?”
The doctor had been in two days ago, and would no doubt be in the hospital with newly injured people tonight. Outside, I could hear the raid continuing, distant, then closer, and my heart fluttered. How could I help her?
As if she heard my unspoken plea, she turned and tightened her fingers around mine. “I can’t find the letter. I had it just now, and I can’t find it.”
“What letter, Mother? Perhaps I can look for it.”
“From William, of course. He promised to write when he arrived in Africa.”
My brother. “I shall look for it.” On her desk was a basin of cool water Mrs. Cotton had left.
I squeezed out the cloth within and folded it to press on her forehead.
Quietly, I began to sing a soft lullaby, and for a moment, it gave her no peace.
Her legs moved restlessly, and she scratched at her forearms, which were already marked by her nails.
I washed the length of them, hoping to give her some relief, and smoothed lotion over the dry skin.
Finally, she began to settle. Bastet jumped up on the bed and curled up at her side, purring as if it were her duty.
“Good girl,” I said, stroking her head. A ball of kitten tumbled out of the basket on the floor, yelping loudly, and I picked it up to cuddle.
Another waddled over, and I picked it up, too, taking comfort in their motor-like purrs.
I held them against the chasm of pain in my heart.
I rested my gaze on my mother’s face. I could barely even imagine a world without her.
In the morning, I had a phone call from Betty’s niece, alerting me at last to her whereabouts.
She’d been taken to hospital the day she’d gone missing, but it had taken her sisters many days to discover which one.
The number of injuries had been so substantial that day that medics had taken her across the river to St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, one of the last places her sisters stopped.
Mrs. Cotton from next door was more than happy to come in again and sit with Mother while I made the journey to visit Betty.
The weather was dreadful, pouring down rain from low clouds.
My feet were wet within minutes, but I was grateful for the respite from bombers, who wouldn’t be able to fly in such weather.
As I made my way to the Tube, I pondered the absurdity of that—once the clear, dry weather we prized during autumn was anathema, while the rain and dark were valued.
It took two diversions to make my way to the hospital as trains were looped around the damaged stations.
Eventually, I emerged above ground to find a landscape I didn’t recognize.
The bombs had done their work here, often with every other building in ruins or half ruins.
Some shops still offered tea and cakes on signs painted on cardboard taped over the shattered windows.
In some places, the pavement had been swept, debris and rocks shoveled to one side to offer a clear walkway; in others, the building had fallen so entirely that a path was impossible.
I wondered where the residents had gone. Did they all go to the country? Pile into rooms with relatives?
A pencil of light caught my eye in the debris, and I bent to pick it up.
A silver haircomb with inlaid coral, hardly scratched.
I held it for a moment, wondering who it belonged to, and if she missed it, amid missing all the other things lost under the rubble.
A particular cup, a jumper, a book carried from another country.
I thought of the paintings I’d done after the last war, the memories of domestic life I’d painted after all the losses. It was the only thing I could bear for a time—painting the remains of breakfast, or a homey vase of flowers on a windowsill, a length of fabric over the back of a chair.
Tucking the comb into my pocket, I kept moving, mulling the idea that we all thought about death and injury and staying safe during war, but equally terrible was this enormous loss of homes.
I looked at the gaping windows overhead, the revealed privacy of a bathroom, the tiles still on the wall, the tub shattered.
I imagined a young woman washing her hair before a man came to take her to the pictures.
A kitchen with stove still neatly pressed against the wall yawned nearby, and I thought of a mother making soup, now disappeared.
How could I paint this feeling?
The hospital was an assault—patients tucked into every nook and cranny, beds in the corridors, four or six crowded into rooms meant for two.
Weeping visitors, stalwart nurses, physicians hurrying through the crowds.
I managed to track down an information desk, and the harried volunteer looked up Betty’s name, and directed me to the basement.
“The basement!”
“Safer,” she said curtly.
At last I found her, in a room with two others and a bed recently vacated by the look of it.
She was asleep as I approached, her face battered, one eye swollen closed even this many days after the event.
A bandage circled her head, which gave me pause.
A head injury? Her body was covered with a blanket, but one leg was thick with plaster.
Gingerly, I took her hand. It was cold, and I covered it with both of mine. She didn’t stir.
“She won’t know you,” the woman in the next bed said. “She’s drugged right to the gills, she is.”
“Do you know what her injuries are?”
“Broken this, broken that,” she said. “Same as us all.”
I nodded acknowledgment. Holding her hand, I said quietly, “I’m here, Betty.
Your sister tracked you down, and we all know where you are now, so you are not alone.
You just get well now, all right?” I stroked her dry fingers, wishing I’d thought to bring a book to read aloud to her.
Looking around the room, I didn’t see any, and then, tucked behind a curtain, I saw the spine of one. “I’ll be right back.”
It was an old book, with faded gold letters on a blue cloth spine. Oroonoko, by Aphra Behn. “Does this belong to anyone?”
The other two patients simply shook their heads.
I found a chair and sat between Betty and her roommate, then opened the book and began to read. I could not help but remember reading to the injured soldiers near the end of the last war, H. G. Wells and Gulliver’s Travels.
For a moment, I was washed with acute despair, the ghosts of those soldiers lying beneath the bodies of these humans, also grievously injured by the cold tools of war.
What was the point to any of it, a war to end wars, and then another war to gulp it down, on and on and on forever?
My despair only lasted a moment, for wasn’t I still whole myself, and wouldn’t I want to be read to if it were me in the bed, suffering? I picked up the book and continued to read.
October 26, 1940
London
[In Urdu]
Dear Tanveer,
It’s 2:00 a.m. Bombs have been falling in rounds all day, here and then farther away, then close enough to rock the house and rattle the windows.
One small beauty is this circle of lamplight and my hand on the paper, writing to you.
I am buoyed by the knowledge of you reading this, far away, but real.
Alive. If I think of your face, reading the words I’ve written, I can take a breath.
A bomb just shook the walls, and I heard shrapnel rattle against the window. It is nerve-racking. I hate being above ground, and wish to run to a shelter, but Mother cannot even manage the stairs. Here we will stay.
Betty is in the hospital, and I suspect she will not be well enough to return to us, though where she will go is a mystery, as her sisters were displaced the first night of the blitzkrieg.
I do not know if I can manage another invalid on my own, either.
Perhaps I might find an able-bodied refugee. We have a little space.
But that is a task for another day. Tonight (this morning) I am weary in every bone in my entire body, and I cannot imagine there is a soul in this city who does not feel the same.
Reading helps quite a lot. When I visited Betty, I found a copy of Oroonoko, by Aphra Behn.
It’s an old novel, and there are predictable colonialisms about the “natives” and their innocence, but in ways, it’s also critical of those same systems. I believe you would enjoy it, although there is a female narrator.
I admit I grew so engrossed in my reading that I brought the novel home with me.
When I am able to leave Mother with Peter for a few hours again, I shall take it back and read to her some more.
I’m sorry to hear that Channan still struggles.
Please give her a kiss from my heart and tell her that I think of her every day and wish I could send my strength to her.
It must be difficult to live in a body so riddled with injury, and she is a woman of great courage to have carried her pain so valiantly. I treasure my paintings of her.
Mother is also in poor health, and growing more so.
Recently, she seems to forget where she is, or when she is, and mentally wanders through her life, dropping into a timeline that pleases her and stays there for a time.
I have been with her girlhood self at a tea where she met my father, and rather too vividly in the arms of her husband in America.
I care for her as well as I am able, but I see her fading by the day.
How could it be otherwise in this madness of endless raids? It infuriates me!
In truth, Tanveer, I find it difficult to maintain a sense of optimism of any kind.
How can London survive this onslaught? There will be nothing left by the end.
The papers speak of the enemy’s losses, but I know they don’t report the full truth.
I see the damage of a bomb nearby or on a notable landmark, and often the papers mention nothing about it.
It only feeds my sense of certainty that London will fall, just as the rest of Europe has—and then what future will we face?
Forgive my pouring this darkness out to you. There is no other. I must keep a brave face for Mother, and Nina suffers terrors of her own. I barely see anyone else. Peter weaves in and out, here long enough to bathe and sleep, then back to work.
Tell me a story, if you please. Give me a fable I can cling to. I keep thinking of the last war, of the telegrams that arrived, over and over. Of your suffering. Of my brother’s. Remind me there is also good in the world, and that we will know it again.
Your friend,
Elsie
PS: The book made me remember that ridiculous picnic Nina staged on the beach, complete with curry sandwiches. (!) Now I’ve made myself laugh. It was absolutely terrible, and do you know, I am quite certain she does not realize it to this day.