The Ebony Hand

The Flyover The Ebony Hand Rose Tremain In those days, there was a madhouse in our village. Its name was Waterford Asylum, but we knew it as ‘the Bin’. It appeared to have no policy if selection or rejection. If you felt your own individual craziness coming on, you could present yourself at the door of the Bin and this door would open for you and the kindly staff would take you in, and you would be sheltered from the cruel world. This was the 1950s. A lot of people were suffering from post-war sadness. In Norfolk, it seemed to be a sadness too complete to be assuaged by the arrival of rock’n’roll. Soon after my sister, Aviva, died of influenza in 1951, my brother-in-law, Victor, turned up at the Bin with his shoes in a sack and a broken Doris Day record. He was one of many voluntary loonies, driven made by grief. His suitability as a resident of Waterford Asylum was measured by his intermittent belief that this record, which had snapped in half, like burned, brittle caramel crust, could be mended. Victor was given a small room with orange curtains ad a view of some water-meadows where an old grey-white bull foraged for grass among kingcups and reeds. Victor said the bull and he were ‘as one’ in their abandonment and loneliness. He said Aviva had held his mind together by cradling his head between her breasts. He announced that the minds of every living being on the earth were held together by a single mortal and precarious thing. I had a lot of sympathy for Victor, but I also thought him selfish – selfish and irresponsible. Because he abandoned his daughter, my niece, Nicolina, without a backward glance. It was as though he simply forgot about her – forgot that she existed. Nicolina walked home from school that day and did her homework, and ate a slice of bread and jam and waited for her father to turn up. There was no note on the table, no sign of anything out of the ordinary. Nicolina fed the chickens and did the ironing, and by that time it was dark. There was no telephone in the house. Nicolina was thirteen. She’d lost her mother less than a year back. Now, she sat in that Norfolk kitchen, watching the clock tick and listening to the owls outside in the black night. She told me that she sat there wishing she were five years old once more, eating salad cream sandwiches on her mother’s lap. Then she found a torch and put on her coat, and walked the two miles to my house. ‘Auntie Merc,’ she said, ‘my dad’s gone missing.’ It was a cold November. We knelt by the gas fire, wondering what to do. We made ourselves sweet drinks out of melted Mars bars and milk. We wished we had a telephone or a car. We hoped that when morning came, normal life might be resumed. But some things are never resumed, not as they have been before, and my life was one of these things. Nicolina was too young to live on the own in an empty house where her beautiful mother had once practised flamenco dancing and baked tuppeny silver charms into Christmas puddings, where her father had once come home from the war with gifts of nylon stockings and wind-up toys. So she stayed with me in the little brick bungalow where I’d lived alone for more yeas than I bothered to count. And I, who had no children of my own, or a husband, or anybody at all, tried to become a mother to Nicolina. I was forty-one years old. I had no idea how to be a mother, but I thought, well, in five or six years’ time, Nicolina will find a husband and then I can hand her over to him. All I need to do is make sure this husband is a good one. I thought I’d begin looking for him right away. And until then, I’d wash her hair on Friday evenings and save up for a radiogram. I’d tell her stories about Aviva and me when we were girls. I’d show her the picture of our Spanish grandfather who owned a bakery in Salamanca. I would try to love her. She always called me Auntie Merc. Aviva and I had both been given Spanish names and mine was Mercedes. She – who had died at thirty-six – had been christened after life itself and I – who was unable to drive – had been christened after a car. Some of the people in our village still laughed aloud when they said my name. Despite this, I was very fond of the village and never wanted to leave it. I couldn’t imagine my life as a liveable thing anywhere outside it. I had a part-time job in a haberdasher’s shop called Cunningham’s. I enjoyed measuring out elastic and changing the glove display on an ebony hand which stood on the counter top. When Victor said what he said about our minds being held together by peculiar things, I thought to myself that the peculiar thing, in my personal case, was this wooden hand. It was well made and heavy and smooth. I polished it with Min cream once a week. I enjoyed the way it had never aged or altered. And I began to think that this hand was like the kind of man I had to find for Nicolina: somebody who would not change or die. * On Saturdays, Nicolina and I would walk down to the Bin to visit Victor. We always took exactly the same route, through the village and out the other side on the road to Mincington, then made a short cut along a green lane than ran down to the water-meadows through orchards and fields. There was one cottage on this lane, where a young man, Paul Swinton, lived with his mother, and it was often the case that when Nicolina and I came along, on our Saturday morning visits to Victor, Paul Swinton would be out working in the cabbage fields which bordered the lane. He would stop work and raise his cap to us and we would both say ‘hello, Paul’ and walk on. But one Saturday, after we’d walked on, I looked back and saw him staring at Nicolina. He was leaning on a hoe and gazing at her, at her pale hair tied in a ribbon and at her shoulders, narrow and thin, beneath her old green coat. And what I saw in this gaze was a look of pure longing and infatuation. And it was then that I thought that perhaps I had found him – before I’d officially begun my search – the good husband for Nicolina, whose feelings for her would stand the test of time. I said nothing to my niece. On we went, down the hill to the meadows where the bull trudged round and round, then up the tarmac path to the gates of Waterford Asylum, alias the Bin. We always took some gift to Victor, a jar of honey or a bag of apples. It was as if we couldn’t let ourselves forget that Victor had to come back from the war with his kitbag loaded up with presents cadged from the Americans. And I remember that on the day when I looked back to see Paul Swinton staring at Nicolina, we were carrying a basket of eggs. When we gave the eggs to Victor, he took them all out of the basket, one by one, and arranged them on the windowsill in the sunshine, beside the orange curtains. ‘They’ll hatch out now,’ he announced. ‘Don’t be a nerd, Victor,’ I said. ‘They’re for eating, not rearing.’ He looked puzzled. His eyes darted back and forth from the eggs to Nicolina and me, sitting side by side on the bed, which was the only place to sit in Victor’s tiny room. I looked at Nicolina, who would soon be fourteen and who was managing her life with fortitude. ‘The eggs will go bad if you leave them in the sun, Dad,’ she said quietly. ‘No, no,’ said Victor, ‘your mother used to hatch eggs. In the airing cupboard. Turn them twice a day. She was full of wonders.’ Visits to Victor seldom went marvellously well. Sometimes, he seemed lost in a dream of an imaginary past. On the day of the eggs, he told us that he and Aviva had taken a cruise on the Queen Mary and that they had won the on-board curling championship and afterwards charvered in a lifeboat. ‘What’s “charvered”?’ asked Nicolina. ‘Dear-oh-dear,’ said Victor, looking at his daughter with anguish. ‘I see your mind is already turning to smut.’ ‘Shut up, Victor!’ I said. ‘If you can’t control what you say, then don’t talk.’ We sat in silence for a while. Nicolina took out a handkerchief from her pocket and wound it round and round her finger, like a bandage. Victor reached out suddenly and snatched the handkerchief from her hand. ‘That belongs to your mother!’ he bellowed. ‘No…’ said Nicolina. ‘I will not put up with people appropriating her things!’ ‘Calm down, Victor,’ I said, ‘or we’ll have to leave.’ ‘Leave’, he said, folding the handkerchief very tenderly on his knee. ‘Get the fuck out of my nest.’ When we got back to my house, Nicolina sat at the kitchen table, playing with two cardboard cut-out dolls she’d had since she was nine. These dolls had a selection of cut-out clothes that could be attached to their shoulders with paper tabs: polka-dot sundresses, white peignoirs, check dungarees, purple ball gowns. Nicolina referred to these dolls as her ‘Ladies.’ Now, taking the dungarees of the Ladies, leaving them in their pink underwear, she said: ‘I wish I was a Lady. Then I wouldn’t have to visit my father anymore.’ I didn’t reply directly to this. But I crossed over to the table and picked up a ball gown and paper tiara. ‘These are lovely,’ I said. After her fourteenth birthday, I began to notice a change in Nicolina. She was gradually becoming more beautiful. When she came into Cunningham’s, the old Cunningham sisters stared at her, like they sometimes stared at advertisements for millinery they couldn’t afford. And now, every single Saturday, even when it rained, Paul Swinton waited for us, pretending to hoe his cabbages, and we would stand and have long conversations with him about the clouds or the harvest or the ugly new houses they were building along the Mincington road. As we chatted, I would watch his brown eyes wander over Nicolina’s body and watch his hands, restless and fidgety, longing to touch her. Nicolina and I never spoke about Paul Swinton. Though I knew he would one day become her kind and immovable husband, and believed I saw, in the way she stood so still and contained in front of him, that she knew this too, it seemed too soon to mention the subject. And I didn’t want her to think I was counting the years until she left my bungalow, for this was not the case. My efforts to love Nicolina were succeeding fairly well. I began making her favourite fruit crumbles with tender care. When se was late home from school, I would start to feel a weight in my heart, One Saturday in May, Nicolina refused, for the first time ever, to come with me to visit Victor. She told me she had revision to do for her exams. When I began to protest that her father would be upset not to see her, she put her arms round me and kissed my cheek, and I smelled the apple-sweetness of her newly washed hair. ‘Auntie Merc,’ she said, ‘be a sport’. I left her working at the kitchen table and went on my way to Waterford and when Paul Swinton saw that I was alone, and stood and started at the lane behind me, hoping Nicolina would materialise like Venus from the waves of cow parsley. I had no present for Victor that day and when I told this to Paul he took a knife out of his belt and cut a blue-green cabbage and said: ‘Take this and say it’s from me and tell Victor that one day I’m going to marry Nicolina.’ A silence fell upon the field after these solemn words were spoken. I watched a white butterfly make a short, shivery flight from one cabbage to the next. I noticed that the sky was a clean and marvellous blue. Paul cradled the cabbage head in his hands. He stroked the veins of the outer leaves. ‘Watching her grow and bloom’, he said, ‘is the most fantastic thing that’s ever happened to me.’ ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve promised myself I won’t invite her out or do anything to push myself forward until the time seems right.’ ‘I’m sure that’s wise.’ ‘But I’m finding it difficult,’ he added. ‘How much longer do you think I have to wait?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps until she’s sweet sixteen?’ Paul nodded. I could imagine him counting the weeks and months, cold and heat, dark days and fair. ‘I can wait,’ he said, ‘as long as, in the end, she’s mine.’ With Nicolina’s beauty came other things. She put her Ladies away in a box that was tied with string and never opened. She badgered me to buy the radiogram I still couldn’t afford. I found one second-hand. Its casing was made of walnut and it was called ‘The Chelsea’. And after that, Nicolina spent all her pocket money on Paul Anka records. A boy called Gregory Dillon came round one teatime and Gregory and Nicolina danced in my front room to the song ‘Diana’. They played the same record seventeen times. When they came out of the room, they looked soggy and wild, as though they’d been in a jungle. ‘I think you’d better go home, Gregory,’ I said. And he went out of the door without a murmur. It was as though dancing with Nicolina had taken away his powers of speech. He came back a few days later, smelling of spice. His black hair was combed into a quiff, like Cliff Richard’s and his legs looked long and thin in black drainpipe trousers. He brought the record ‘Singing the Blues’ by Tommy Steele, but I told them to leave the door to the front room open while they danced to it. I sat in the kitchen, chopping rhubarb. I’ve never felt more like singing the blues Cos I never thought that I’d ever lose Your love, dear… Half my mind was on Nicolina and Gregory and the other half was on the changes occurring at Cunningham’s, changes which might put my job in jeopardy. The two Miss Cunninghams were retiring and there was talk of the premises being sold to a fish-and-chip bar. That day, I’d gone to see Amy Cunningham and said to her: ‘If the shop closes, please may I keep the ebony hand?’ ‘What ebony hand, Mercedes?’ ‘The hand for the glove display.’ ‘Oh, that. Well, I suppose so. Although, if it really is ebony, then it might be valuable. It might have to be sold.’ ‘In that case, I’ll buy it.’ ‘What with? You spend every penny you earn on that girl.’ I’d never heard Nicolina referred to as ‘that girl’ before. I hated Amy Cunningham for saying this. I wanted to give her face a stinging swipe with a tea towel. ‘I’ll buy it,’ I repeated, and walked away. Yet when I got home and Nicolina and I were eating our tea in the kitchen, I raised my eyes and looked at her anew, as thought I had been the one to call her ‘that girl’, and I saw that in among her beauty there was something else visible, something that I couldn’t describe or give a name to, but I knew that it was alarming. ‘Nicolina…’ I began, but then I stopped because I hadn’t planned what I was going to say and Nicolina looked at me defiantly over her glass of milk and said: ‘What?’ I wanted, suddenly, to bring up the subject of Paul Swinton. I wanted to remind her that his hands were strong and brown, unlike Gregory’s, which were limp and pale. I wanted to reassure her that I had been thinking about her future from the moment she’d come to live with me and that my vigilance on this subject had never faltered. But none of this could be said at that moment, so I started instead to talk about the closure of Cunningham’s and its replacement by a fish-and-chip bar. ‘Does that mean,’ said Nicolina, ‘that we’ll have no money?’ I carried on eating, although I didn’t feel hungry. I wanted to say: ‘I suppose I knew that the young were heartless.’ It took quite a long time to complete the sale of Cunningham’s, but because everybody in the village knew that it was going to close, fewer and fewer people came into the shop. It became a bit like working in a hospice for artefacts, where everyone was dying. I began to feel a sentimental sorrow for the wools and bindings and cars of ric-rac. Every morning, I removed the glove from the ebony hand and dusted it. Sometimes, I held the naked hand in mine and I thought how strange it was that no man had ever wanted to touch me and that I had never had a purpose in life until I became Nicolina’s replacement mother. I stood at my counter, wondering what the future held. I tried to imagine applying for a job at the fish-and-chip bar, but I knew I wouldn’t do this. I didn’t like fish-and-chips. In fact, I didn’t like food any more at all and I saw that the bones of my wrist were becoming as narrow as cards of lace. * Not long after this, some months after Nicolina’s fifteenth birthday, during a time when Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’ wafted out all evening from The Chelsea, I arrived at Cunningham’s to find the ebony hand gone. I searched through every drawer in the shop and unpacked every bag and box in the stockroom, and then I telephoned Amy Cunningham at home and said: ‘Where is the hand you promised me?’ ‘I did not promise it, Mercedes,’ said Amy Cunningham. ‘And, as I thought, an antique shop in Stratton is prepared to give me a very good price for it. The hand is sold.’ I stood in the empty shop, unspeaking (as people did in the novels I sometimes took out of the Mincington library). I unspoke for a long time. A customer came in and found me like that, unspeaking and unmoving, and said to me: ‘Where are your knitting patterns?’ The following day, Saturday, I couldn’t get out of bed. I said to Nicolina: ‘I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go by yourself to see Victor.’ She stood at my bedside, wearing lipstick. She offered to bring me a cup of tea. ‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m going to go back to sleep. Give your father my love.’ ‘What shall I take him?’ she asked. ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘You’re on your own today.’ She looked at me strangely. Her lipsticked mouth opened a little and hung there open and I didn’t like looking at it, so I turned my face to the wall. ‘Auntie Merc,’ said Nicolina, ‘when you’re better, can you teach me the flamenco?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. Your mother was the dancer. Not me.’ The following Saturday, when we passed the cabbage field, there was no sign of Paul Swinton. I stopped on the lane, expecting Paul to appear, but everything was still and silent in the soft rain that was falling. Nicolina didn’t stop, but walked on in the direction of Waterford, holding high a pink umbrella. She looked like a girl in a painting. When we got to the Bin, the Senior Nursing Sister pounced on us and took us into her office, which had a nice view of a little lawn, where an elaborate sundial stood. I saw Nicolina staring at this sundial while the Senior Nursing Sister talked to us, and I understood that both of use had our minds on the same thing: the sudden swift passing of time. The Senior Nursing Sister informed us that Victor had fallen into a depression from which it was proving difficult to rescue him. He had broken his Doris Day record into shards and thrown away his shoes. He’d cut open his pillow and pulled out all the feathers and flung them, handful by handful, round his room. I privately thought that, at that moment, he must have looked like one of those ornamental snowmen, trapped inside a glass done. ‘Why?’ I asked. The Senior Nursing Sister sniffed as she said: ‘Your brother-in-law had become accustomed to watching a white bull that was kept at the water-meadows. Our staff would sometimes be aware that, instead of addressing them, as reasonably requested, he was addressing the bull.’ Nicolina laughed. ‘We knew about that old white bull,’ I said. ‘Victor imagined –‘ ‘The bull has gone,’ said the Senior Nursing Sister. ‘We enquired of the farmer as to why it had been removed from the meadow and we were told that it had been put away.’ ‘What’s “put away”?’ said Nicolina. ‘Gone,’ said the Sister. ‘Put out of its misery.’ I looked at Nicolina. We both knew that the Senior Nursing Sister was unable to talk about death, even the death of a bull. And I thought this could be one of the reasons why so many people came voluntarily to the Bin, because, there, the words which described the things that made you afraid were differently chosen. ‘We’ve become alarmed that Victor might inflict harm on a fellow inmate,’ said the Senior Nursing Sister, ‘so we have had to move him.’ ‘Move him where?’ ‘To a secure room. We hope it may be a temporary necessity.’ Neither Nicolina nor I spoke. We stared at this woman, who