Consequences by Penelope Lively
Lorna said, “I had never been into a pub until I met Matt.”
“Quite right, too—a well brought-up girl.”
They were silent for a moment—Matt conjured up by her words. Lucas saw her looking across at a group of servicemen in uniform. She said, “We should have been born at some other time, shouldn’t we? Not landed in this.”
“Well, that’s always true for someone, somewhere. The eighteenth century was no picnic.”
“And you’re stuck with what you get.”
“Quite so,” said Lucas. “Unless you believe in reincarnation—an idea that always rather appeals to me. I favor being one of those Indian gods with many arms, next time around. So convenient for operating a press.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m tediously rational. Perhaps you do?”
She considered. “No. I don’t think so. Not as such. But I can’t believe people just disappear.”
“Well, they don’t, do they?” He hesitated, looked away. “Matt is in one’s head, isn’t he?”
She nodded. Then she reached out and put her hand on his for a moment. “It’s getting a bit easier, you know. I sniff the air sometimes. Thanks to you and the Press, in many ways.”
He stared intently into his beer, shook his head. “Well good…Anything I can…Anyway, good.”
“Eventually,” she said, “I’ll have to sort things out. After the war. Goodness, I’m starting to say that now. Like everyone else. After the war, I’ll have to think seriously about…well, about what I’m going to do, and where to be, and what’s best for Molly. Find us somewhere permanent to live. I’ve wondered about looking for jobs in publishing. Or an art gallery. I thought maybe…”
He sat there, gazing at her; what she said floated above the background racket of the pub—the medley of voices, bursts of laughter, “Last orders, please!”
Now? he thought. No, not now. When? Soon? Never? No, no. Soon.
“Time, gentlemen, please…”
Give me time. Give me strength.
He unfolded himself from the low seat, held out his hand. “Maybe we should be getting back.”
When Molly draws a house, it is high and thin, lined up between similar houses. Many windows; smoke curling from chimneys. Occasionally a different house appears—lower, more squat, attached only to a mirror image on one side. And from time to time there comes a house that stands alone, a little house; this house has a row of chickens in front of it, and a tree alongside. When Molly shows this house to her mother, Lorna goes quiet.
Molly likes to draw. She likes to write, too. In the evenings, after school, she writes in her exercise book. She is writing a story. Lucas says that when this story is finished he will print it, like a real book. But how do you know when a story is finished? Molly’s story goes, “And then…and then…and then.” She cannot find a way for it to stop.
She takes this problem to Lucas.
“Perhaps some stories never end,” he offers.
“If the person dies it does.”
Lucas looks disturbed. “Well—not absolutely. Aren’t there other people in your story?”
“Actually,” says Molly. “My story isn’t about people. It’s about cats.”
When Lucas comes back to the house at night, if he has dropped into the pub for a quick snifter, or has visited his friend Toby at the art gallery, he sometimes sees a tiny crack of light at the top window. As the Warden, he should come down on this like a ton of bricks, but he does not, and, anyway, everyone is more lax about the blackout these days, and one tends to turn a bit of a blind eye.
He looks for that sliver of light as he gets near, and when he sees it he has the most incredible sense of uplift. In all his life, he has never known this. He did not know that you could feel thus.
Lucas said, “I have loved you since first I saw you. But it was out of the question, then.”
She had not at first understood that he was asking her to marry him. When the realization arrived, she was filled at first with astonishment, then with a strange sense of comfort.
She knew that she was not in love with him. She would never be in love again, that was over and done with now, forever. She liked him—oh, she liked him as much as she had ever liked anyone, more than she had ever liked anyone. He was Lucas, he was entirely familiar, he was a part of the landscape of her life. And, when she came to think about it, she knew that she did not at all care for the idea of Lucas with some other girl, with a wife.
She told him. She said, “I can’t love you like I loved Matt.”
“I know. It doesn’t matter.”
“And there is Molly.”
“I want Molly, too. If she will have me.”
So Lorna was married once more in a Register Office. She and Lucas stood before the Registrar, Lucas in a crumpled suit, she in her gray flannel skirt and her only jacket, blue tweed from a village jumble sale long ago. A wartime wedding. But most wartime weddings featured a bridegroom in uniform. Lucas was an oddity, in his awful suit, blinking furiously behind the glasses, which were of course the reason he was a blatant civilian, but the Registrar was probably not aware that Lucas had severe myopia and astigmatism and was useless material so far as the Army was concerned. Both Lucas and Lorna fancied that the Registrar treated him with a certain coolness. He offered perfunctory congratulations, followed by a dismissive look that suggested they should make way for the next couple.
Molly sat in the front row with Lucas’s mother, flanked by the witnesses—Toby Shanks from the gallery, and the mother of one of Molly’s schoolmates, with whom Lorna had struck up a friendship. That was the full complement of the wedding party. The Bradleys were not present. Lorna had not suggested that they attend. She had written to tell them that she was to marry again. Her mother’s evident relief saturated her reply. “I am so glad for you,” she said. “Now there will be someone to look after you and Molly.”
And your father and I can stop wondering what we could do about you: that was the sub-text. A cheque for £25 was enclosed: “To buy something nice for your new home.”
The Faradays sent warm good wishes. Lucas’s mother was quietly exultant: “It was high time he settled down. Good for you, Lorna.”
This is my mother’s wedding, thought Molly. But mothers are not supposed to get married; they already are married. And brides wear long white dresses and veils and carry flowers. Mummy just has a rose in her buttonhole. Now Lucas is my daddy, thought Molly. Except that he is not.
She could remember her father a bit—the look of him and the sound of him, the feel of him and the smell of him. She remembered him drawing a picture of a cat for her, she remembered that he came off the train, wearing soldier clothes. Except that all this was getting fainter, weaker, she had to summon it up.
She liked Lucas. If pressed, Lucas would sing “Old Macdonald had a farm,” all through, making the right noises. He could do paper airplanes out of brown paper, that flew across the room. Lucas listened when you told him things.
So this is my mother’s wedding, thought Molly. Afterward they were going to have a special lunch in a restaurant; she could choose what she wanted—there might be trifle.
That summer of 1944, the bombs began to fall again. At first they were just a rumor. People were saying…Over in Pimlico, something had happened…And then they became a truth, an acknowledged new horror, the doodlebugs, these mean little engines that puttered across the sky, and when the sound went dead, your number was up. A new exodus began, the flight from the city. A neighboring family left. There were fewer children around.
Lucas said, “I think you and Molly should go to Matt’s parents.”
“It’s not as bad as the blitz. Is it?”
“It’s different. And we don’t know if it will get worse.”
“The war’s almost over. They say.”
“Even so.”
She was torn, anxious for Molly’s safety, but reluctant to abandon a place that was now
“I’m not going back. We can’t keep coming and going. It’ll be all right. The war could end by Christmas.”
This was peacetime. This was after-the-war, that the grown-ups had talked about. There were parties in the streets, with flags everywhere; everything was lit up now, and she had been with Mummy and Lucas to see Buckingham Palace in the night.
It should be more different, Molly felt, this peacetime. She had not thought that everything would go on pretty well exactly as before—had expected transformation, a world that was strange and new, like the glowing landscapes of Heaven, in the Bible storybook at school, peopled with ecstatic figures in robes. But everything was the same, and nobody seemed all that much happier, they still grumbled about rationing, and queues, and you still had to do gym at school in your vest and knickers, and the boys still waited at the corner and tried to bang you with their satchels.
She was going to have a little brother or sister. Now that would be different, she thought, really different. She did not know what she would feel about that, because you cannot know what you feel about something that has not yet happened.
It was not like last time, with Molly. She said to the midwife, “How long has it been now?” and the girl looked away. That look meant: too long. She was very young, younger than Lorna, and new to the district, and frightened: Lorna could see that, through her own fear and pain. And then another contraction came, and another. And now there were no longer minutes, or hours, but one extended roaring present spiced with faces, voices, frozen moments.
Lucas, at the bottom of the stairs, standing aside for the ambulance-men and the stretcher. She saw his anguished face.
The screaming siren of the ambulance. She thought: that is for me. She could still think. She thought: it has all gone wrong, terribly wrong. The midwife was still there, beside her. She was holding Lorna’s hand.
A high white room, in which she lay on a high bed; people went to and fro, their footsteps tapping on the lino; a face came swooping down over hers: “Push, please, push now.”
She pushed, and the pain swept her up, took her away to some awful private place.
The face came back: “Here’s your little boy.”
Silence. They have all gone. No, there is a back at the far side of the room; someone in white is doing something at a sink. And she can see a metal cot, and the baby—a small dark head. But she cannot really see; everything has gone gray and misty. And she cannot move; she tries to turn her head, and cannot. She knows that something more is wrong, and she must tell them. But she cannot speak; she tries to tell the person over there at the sink, but nothing comes. And then the person turns around, walks across, leans over her. She hears a bell start to ring.
The room is once more full of people. They seem to crowd around her. Faces; voices. But she is floating now, she is so weak that it is as though she were dissolving, and then she can neither see nor hear, the people ebb away. She is alone.
Lucas sat in the hospital corridor, outside the room with swing doors that sometimes opened or closed as someone hurried in, or out. Nobody looked at him, or spoke to him. Once, he tried to waylay a nurse as she came out: “Can I see my wife?” The girl smiled and was gone.
He sat on, and on. At last a man in a white coat appeared. He had a stethoscope round his neck, and there was a splash of blood at the hem of his coat. Lucas stood up: “C-can I…” He wanted to say can I see her now, but the doctor interrupted. “Let’s go in here, shall we?”
He led Lucas into an office. “Please sit down. I’m afraid I’ve got to tell you something.”
The baby, thought Lucas. The baby is not all right.
And the doctor told.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so very sorry.” He said some more, about a hemorrhage, and shock, which Lucas did not take in. No, he was crying out—no, no, no. But he did not speak.
The doctor said, “The baby is fine. He has come through well.”
Lucas nodded.
They both got up, and the doctor touched his shoulder. “I expect you would like to see her.”
She was lying on a trolley, and the baby was beside her in a cot on wheels. Lucas stood looking at her for a long while, and then he put his hand for a moment on the baby’s head, which was warm and furry. Then he went.
Presently a hospital porter came across this long lanky fellow sitting on a bench in the car park with his head in his hands and his shoulders shaking. “You all right, mate?” the porter said. “Anything you need? You’d find a cup of tea in the canteen.” He was not unused to this sort of thing; that’s hospitals for you.
Part 3
THERE WERE THREE OF THEM, in the tall house: Lucas and Molly and Simon. At first Simon did not count, as a person, then gradually he began to do so, acquired personality and language and inclinations. Sometimes, Lucas’s mother was there. She would arrive and instantly set about a whirlwind rescue operation, scrubbing and dusting, cleaning out cupboards, filling the washing line in the garden. “Lucas lacks any domestic instinct,” she would tell Molly. “But he has a lot on his plate, poor dear.” And Molly, sitting at the kitchen table in her school uniform, eating a rather better tea than was usually on offer, would nod. It seemed best to agree all around.
These incursions were something of a relief. Mrs. Talbot would make an assault on every front; Lucas’s shirts would acquire buttons once more, Molly would no longer have to keep her school skirt up with string, her knickers would have new elastic, her socks would be darned. Simon would be systematically cleaned and aired, for as long as the visit lasted. Normally, he was in the care of Mrs. Selwood, who came in by day, supervised Simon and did some perfunctory cooking and cleaning. She was fond of reminding Lucas that she had looked after more children than he had had hot dinners, and Simon was devoted to her, but there was no escaping the fact that Mrs. Selwood’s methods were slummocky; Simon had dirty ears and was fed on much bread and jam. As Molly got older, and looked at the world beyond, she made comparisons. She revised her own standards and tried to do something about both Simon and the general state of the house, which did not go down well with Mrs. Selwood.
“Madam here doesn’t seem to care for my way of doing things,” she would say to Lucas, tight-lipped, and Lucas would squirm in distress, and then take Molly aside, imploring her to tread carefully.
Lucas is like a heron, Molly sometimes thought. Is that why the press is the Heron Press? Stalking about the place on his long legs; his thin beaky nose. He was all length and angular movement. Sitting down, he seemed to fold up. On the rare occasions when he put an arm around her, it was an edgy, bony hug. But Lucas was not a hugging and kissing person; his physical awkwardness extended to dealings with the world. His stammer got more pronounced when he had to engage with strangers. He blinked a lot, words rushed out, but disordered and apologetic. With those he knew, he was calmer, quieter, often quite silent. When he was sympathetic, he seemed to twist up into a state of vicarious distress, his legs knotting together. “Oh dear, oh dear,” he would say. “What a bother. Oh, dear…” And then he would busy himself violently with some task.
Much later, her most abiding memory of that time was of being cold. She was cold without and cold within. The internal cold was a great chill void, as though some essential part of her had gone missing. She would come to recognize this as extended grieving; at the time it seemed merely an appropriate complement to the all-pervading external cold—the frigid house in which there was localized warmth only from the kitchen range when it was going, and the little hissing gas fire in the sitting room. In the winters—the brutal winters of 1946 and 1947—she scrambled into her school clothes as fast as she could, washed in cold water, waited shivering for the b
This was a disheveled world. A landscape of bomb sites and houses with flapping tarpaulin roofs and boarded windows; households depleted by the war, minus their men. There were plenty of women without husbands, children without fathers—families that were glaringly incomplete.
Like them. Like Lucas, Molly, and Simon. Except that wifelessness, motherlessness were not the norm. They stuck out. They attracted sympathy, expressed with small gestures by way of some discarded toy for Simon, or an invitation to tea for Molly, but they lacked the official status of the war-damaged. Lucas was not an ex-serviceman, he was just another civilian; the circumstances of Lorna’s death owed nothing to the war. Theirs was not a historic misfortune—just something that could have happened to anyone, at any time.
Lucas’s role as an Air Raid Warden was remembered on the whole only by those with whom he had had words about infringements of the blackout or inappropriate shelter behavior, exchanges that were long held against him. He had relished the job of Warden, had felt that at least he could compensate in some way for his inadequacies as military material. He had been indefatigable, racing from post to post and shelter to shelter during those menacing, noisy nights, doing without sleep, without food, losing track of everything except the requirements of the job. He had known every street of his patch, every house, who lived where, who should be accounted for when the bombs came this way. He had coped with incendiaries, with burst gas mains, with an old man who had a stroke in one of the shelters. He had stood alone and exposed, watching the dark shape of a descending land mine, to know where it would fall and thus whom to alert. He had had to subdue drunks and sort out shelter disputes—the most taxing area of his duties. Bombs were less daunting than recalcitrant people. He lacked authority, and knew it. His uniform gave him formal power, but his natural diffidence was at once apparent to anyone at all combative. “Come along now,” he would say, wavering head and shoulders above some beer-sodden fellow causing mayhem in a shelter. “Pull yourself together and stop being a nuisance.” And the other shelterers would collapse into laughter, seeing him as a moment of much-needed light relief.