Eva Moves the Furniture Read online

  Catherine answered the door wearing a dark green dress which made her look more like a tree than a bird. She did not seem to notice the box, and I was too shy to hand it over directly. While she hung up my coat, I set it on the hall table. In the dining room, Mrs. Grant was waiting to meet me. She was nothing like my idea of a grandmother. Her curly hair was the colour of a new penny and her lips were scarlet. Lily called women who used makeup Jezebels, but I was thrilled.

  At tea Mrs. Grant made me sit on her right and insisted on serving me first. She asked about Lily and David, what was happening at the Women’s Institute, whether David’s office was busy. Across the table Catherine asked questions of her own. Did I ever ride Mr. Wright’s cart horse? No. If I could visit any country I liked, where would it be? The Congo.

  To my surprise there was no cake. Indeed, neither Catherine nor her grandmother mentioned her birthday. Could I have misunderstood? When tea was over Catherine took me not to her bedroom but to the back garden. After the rambling sprawl of Ballintyre, the square of paving stones surrounded by straggly flower beds seemed pitifully small. The only object of interest was a birdbath standing in the middle of the square.

  Catherine lifted a twig out of the bowl; it was almost full of water from the recent rain. “What shall we do?” she said. “It’s hard to play games with just two.”

  “I have a friend.” I watched her pale hands moving over the bowl. “Maybe we could—”

  A loud splash finished my sentence. Catherine screamed. I leapt forward.

  In the bowl lay a stone the size of an apple. Raising my eyes, I saw the girl sitting on the wall at the end of the garden. Beneath her hard stare the distance shrank until I could have counted the freckles on her nose, eight of them, and the loose hairs pulling out of her braids. She stuck out her tongue and slid down the far side of the wall.

  “Cripes,” muttered Catherine.

  Had she seen the girl, I wondered, but she was wiping her face with the skirt of her green dress. “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  “Stupid! Why did you do that?” Her hair was dripping and her bodice patterned with dark stains.

  “I didn’t do anything.” Instinctively, I stepped back. “It’s only water. I’ll get a towel.”

  She pointed to the stone. “I suppose a ghost threw this?”

  The following year when Isobel taught me hockey, she often chided me for procrastination. “You have to tackle the minute they get the ball, not wait for a better chance.” That afternoon, in Catherine’s garden, I recognised my chance and was afraid. My earlier fantasies had fled. All I could imagine was her calling me daft. Or worse. Speechless, I gazed at the incriminating stone.

  She led the way indoors and, with a quick parting nod, disappeared upstairs. On the hall table lay the forgotten milkmaid. I longed to reclaim her, but how on earth would I explain to Lily? I let myself out of the house and started to run through the gloomy streets towards Ballintyre.

  On Monday, to my surprise, Catherine smiled as we took our seats. At break she thanked me for the milkmaid. “She’s lovely. I put her next to my bed.”

  I fidgeted my feet back and forth in the gravel.

  “I still don’t understand,” she continued, “why you threw the stone. I didn’t even see you pick it up.”

  She was looking at me, not hostile but curious; again I let the occasion pass. I muttered something about an accident and hurried to join the other girls playing Lady Queen Anne beneath the chestnut tree. Shona Pyper stood in the centre, bouncing the ball, while the circle chanted:

  “Lady Queen Anne she sits in her stand,

  And a pair of green gloves upon her hand,

  As white as a lily, as fair as a swan,

  The fairest lady in a’ the land;

  Come smell my lily, come smell my rose;

  Which of the maidens do you choose?”

  “I choose Eva,” called Shona.

  As I took my place inside the circle, I felt Catherine watching from across the playground. All my daydreams were gone and I was terrified to think that she had nearly seen the girl. At home it was easy to overlook the strangeness of my situation. But in Catherine’s garden I had understood that the presence of the companions in my life was like a hidden deformity: ugly, mysterious, and incomprehensible. If my schoolmates found out, they would never choose me.

  3

  Samuel told me the story of Fiorovanti the summer after we met. “And, abracadabra,” he concluded, “plastic surgery. Must have looked like hell, but better than nothing.”

  He pointed towards his own unremarkable nose and raised his glass. We were in the pub, the White Hart, and most of the other customers were women from a nearby munitions factory, still in their overalls and kerchiefs. In fact Samuel probably didn’t say, “Abracadabra, plastic surgery.” He almost always used the term reconstructive, although before the war he had done his share of society women. “I can picture the whole scene,” he said. “The two chaps quarreling over some trifle and old Fiorovanti waiting to have a go. Then the patient complaining nonstop until the bandages came off.”

  Across the table, I watched him flex his hands. I had seen other surgeons make this gesture, as if to reassure themselves; yes, it was still there, the suppleness, the steadiness. In the silly novels Lily read, the doctors had elegant musician’s hands, but Samuel’s were more like a plumber’s. “Pound of sausages,” he would joke, flinging his pudgy fingers down on the counter. Still, he had a reputation for making the neatest stitches in the infirmary. When I saw him at work in the operating theatre, I was amazed at the patience with which he would close an incision, attach a graft.

  “And is that why you became a surgeon?” I asked.

  “You mean, I learned about Fiorovanti at my mother’s knee and decided to pick up a scalpel? Heavens, no. I wanted to be a pilot, then an archaeologist.” He smiled a little sadly, as if envying his younger, carefree self.

  “I used to want to fly,” I said, trying to cheer him up. “So what happened?”

  “My father. He said I could always fly later but I must study first. And visiting Hadrian’s Wall cured me of archaeology. Everything was so hypothetical. The guide would point to a pile of stones and say maybe this was the bathroom, or perhaps they kept their spears here. Nobody seemed to know the answers.”

  “Out on the town again, doctor?”

  “Ethel!” Samuel jumped up, nearly toppling the table, to pump the hand of a barrel-shaped woman dressed in factory overalls. “Eva, this is one of my prize patients. Ethel Donaldson. Nurse McEwen. Have you time for a drink?” he asked, pulling out a chair.

  “Love to,” said Ethel.

  And that was how all our early meetings ended, with an interruption, so that soon I came to hate what I most admired about Samuel, his kindness. It spilled out, like air or rain, getting into everything, everyone, and drawing people to him. Even at our most intimate moments, I felt one of a crowd.

  For a while after the disaster with Catherine, I tried to avoid the companions, but my loneliness was like the slow gas bubbling up from the pond in the woods, poisoning even the sweetest of days. How could I turn away those two who wanted to be my friends when no one else did? And they, as if they took my forgiveness for granted, sent what I thought of as their shadows. Later, at the infirmary, I overheard a couple of nurses talking about poltergeists, but whether that was the nature of these odd gusts and tremors that shook the curtains and moved the furniture I cannot say. Their connection with the companions seemed capricious, like a broom with dust or an umbrella with rain.

  At first I doubted my eyes and ears. They came as I was falling asleep; in the half-dark I would glimpse a chair rocking, hear the wardrobe door creaking. Just my stupid imagination, I thought. By now I had learned to condemn the dense daydreams of childhood in which teachers still sometimes caught me ensnared. But in the morning I would wake to see the chair on its side, the wardrobe door open wide.

  One afternoon, when David and I came home from vis
iting Barbara, Lily was making pancakes. Usually this treat indicated good humour. Today, however, she frowned and beckoned me to the stove. “Didn’t you tell me you’d tidied your room?”

  “This morning.”

  “Well, it’s not what I call tidy. There are books everywhere. Your hairbrush was in the middle of the floor. Really, Eva.” As she listed my misdemeanours, the pancakes bubbled. Lily flipped them, one by one.

  From the top of the sixteen stairs, I could see my school atlas lying in the doorway of my room. The flesh of my arms rose in a thorny mixture of fear and rage. “Why do you do this?” I asked.

  I bent to pick up the atlas and found it open to the map of France. Dépêchez-vous, I thought.

  That winter groups of shabbily dressed men loitered outside the labour exchange; a number of shops closed; the windows of Larch House were boarded up. At tea David claimed the government had forgotten there were people north of Newcastle. “The whole of Scotland could starve,” he said, “for all they care.”

  “Nonsense,” said Lily. “The king was up at Balmoral in August. Eva, have another biscuit.”

  I did, grumpily. Although she often scolded me for having my head in the clouds, Lily herself, I’d begun to understand, was on awkward terms with reality. All kinds of topics—money, jobs, romance, religion, politics—were to be avoided, except in their most hygienic forms. When I asked an awkward question, she would purse her lips and bring the conversation back to my homework.

  As the days grew shorter, the streets grew increasingly crowded, not just with men but whole families. After Christmas the weather turned bitterly cold. The sheep huddled together in the fields, and the birds were so hungry they tried to hop into the house. It had been freezing hard for a fortnight when one morning on the way to school a woman stepped in front of me with outstretched hand. “Excuse me, miss.” She wore a man’s jacket, the sleeves frayed and torn.

  I backed away, shaking my head; I never had money during the week. Then, as she kept holding out her hand, I remembered my lunch. Hesitantly I offered the bag of sandwiches, and before I could change my mind she snatched it from me.

  I was too shy to ask the other girls to share their food, and by the end of school my stomach was growling ferociously. I ran home, skipping over the icy puddles. At Ballintyre the kitchen was empty. I hurried to the bread bin. I was on my second slice when the back door opened and Lily appeared, the frozen sheets crackling in her arms. “What’s this,” she said, “an early tea?”

  Between mouthfuls, I explained. I hadn’t thought of my behaviour as praiseworthy, but neither had the possibility of blame occurred until Lily burst out, “Goodness, Eva, haven’t I told you not to talk to strangers?”

  “I didn’t talk to her. She talked to me.”

  For years Lily had urged me to clean my plate by reminding me of the starving children of India; now she was obdurate. I was to walk with Shona and Flo. On no account was I to give away my lunch.

  The following morning I took the long way round to catch up with the girls. Fortunately they welcomed my company. When we reached the corner of the terrace, Shona was dramatising the fishmonger’s painful shingles. The beggar woman made no move, simply stood, watching us, empty-handed.

  On Saturday on our way to the churchyard, I told David what had happened. “Poor woman,” he said. “I’ll give you a shilling for her. You must explain that you haven’t any more. She can always get a meal at Saint Cuthbert’s soup kitchen.”

  “What about Aunt Lily?”

  “I’ll talk to Lily. It’s her duty to worry about you and I wouldn’t want to contradict her, but you did right, Eva. The three of us are lucky. We should share what we have.” His words hung in the air, little puffs of frozen breath, almost edible.

  Barbara, he said, had done the same thing. Early in 1917, after two years at Larch House, she had gone to work in a munitions factory, a dangerous, noisy job she much preferred to housework. One week she gave her pay packet to a man who’d lost a leg in France. “I scolded her,” said David, “like Lily scolded you, but I was proud. We went dancing that night at the Palais. I remember her hair smelled of explosives.”

  “What do explosives smell like?”

  “Bitter, not unpleasant. I grew to like it.” He smiled down at me. “Months after the war ended I could still smell the gunpowder when we waltzed together.”

  The first day I laid eyes on Samuel, he waltzed a sister around the ward. He had just examined the hands of a pilot and discovered two thirds of the graft healed, a result so pleasing that he’d seized the sister in her starchy uniform and begun to dance. I had stood there with the other doctors and nurses, staring, dumbfounded, while the patients stamped their feet or banged their lockers. It was September 1943, ten in the morning, and in my four years of nursing I had never seen such pandemonium.

  On Monday the ragged woman was in her usual place. I handed her David’s shilling and started to explain about the soup kitchen, but she was already trotting down the street. Later that day the temperature rose slightly. Walking home, I was caught in a stinging, cold rain, and by the time I reached Ballintyre my teeth were chattering. Lily sent me straight to bed. The next thing I knew, she and David were standing over me and the room was filled with the painful light of a new day. “Tell the doctor her temperature’s over a hundred,” Lily said, “and her glands are swollen. See if he can come right away.”

  David bent down. “Eva, darling, you’ll feel better soon.”

  His pale, anxious face made me suddenly afraid. Only twenty-four hours ago I had played netball and conjugated Latin verbs. Now even getting out of bed was unimaginable. Was this how Barbara felt in her final hours? The corners of the room grew dim.

  When Dr. Pyper arrived, he diagnosed measles.

  “She doesn’t have any spots,” Lily protested.

  “Give them time. Isobel Henderson was ill last week, and Grace O’Connor broke out yesterday.”

  At once I felt a little better. I was on a predictable path. As if by magic, spots did appear, and Lily became reassuringly brisk. The hardest part of being ill was not being allowed to read, but whenever possible David sat with me, telling stories. How Flora MacDonald saved Bonnie Prince Charlie by dressing him as her maid. How Barbara helped her father, the gamekeeper, set snares. And, my favourite, how she had rescued Keith Hanscombe from drowning.

  Her first summer in Troon, Barbara went down to the shore every Sunday after church. She had grown up in an inland valley, and even though the beach was lined with barbed wire the sight of the sea fascinated her. One Sunday a boy slipped through the wire and, clambering on the rocks, fell in the water. Although she could not swim, Barbara had followed him onto the sand and waded out, thigh deep, to tow him back to shore. The boy was Keith Hanscombe and his mother, Marian, became Barbara’s firm friend. She died in November 1917, an early victim of the flu epidemic, and her husband and two sons had moved away to Edinburgh.

  While he spoke Lily had climbed the stairs. Time to sleep, she said, and they both kissed me good night. As soon as the door closed, the companions appeared. My illness made them gentle. On windy nights they quieted the windowpanes, and when the girl danced a Highland reel not a floorboard creaked. The night of the Mrs. Hanscombe story, she recited Burns’s “To a Mouse” in a squeaky voice that made me giggle until the woman said, “That’s enough. Lily’s right. You should be asleep.”

  “Just five more minutes,” the girl wheedled.

  She produced a length of green wool and began to play cat’s cradle. To my surprise she knew the difficult later stages of the game, which were the closely guarded secret of the older girls. A fortnight later when I returned to school, I enjoyed a brief wave of popularity. Then Shona asked where I had learned my new skills and a familiar anxiety pinched my pleasure.

  Samuel told me about a philosopher, his name escapes me, who believed we are doomed to repetition; over and over we commit the same errors or those of our forebears. At the time the notion stru
ck me as nonsensical. Now, sometimes, I wonder if my difficult birth is partly responsible for the trouble I’ve had crossing other thresholds. The first year of grammar school was as hard as, if not harder than, my first year at Miss MacGregor’s; I was fourteen that spring, not yet filled out, in Lily’s phrase, and with no aptitude for the easy banter of friendship. As the weather improved, the crowds outside the labour exchange dwindled. The farmers needed help, Mr. Wright hired six men to clear his ditches, and work commenced on a new town hall. Solitude made me a good student, and in July, when school finished, I had come third in my class. But I was glad to return to the safety of my days with Lily.

  Together we went for picnics, made an expedition to Glasgow, gardened. When the red-currants ripened on the bushes where I had once made a doll’s house, Lily announced the jelly would be our contribution to the church fete. We set aside a whole day for this project, beginning after breakfast with stripping the bushes, then cleaning the fruit, putting it on to boil, washing the jars, straining the jelly. By the time David came home, I was writing the labels: Red-currant jelly, August 1934.

  After tea, Lily said she would do the washing-up and I fetched my book and set off for my favourite willow tree. It grew on the riverbank near the pool where David liked to fish, and in summer I spent many hours lying in the leafy shade, reading or daydreaming. That evening when I parted the branches, I discovered two men, one dangling his feet in the river, the other propped against the tree. I shrieked and dropped my book.

  “Good evening, lassie,” said the man leaning against the trunk. He was older and, to my astonishment, wore a gold earring, like Lily’s only larger. The other was scarcely more than a boy, though his stomach bulged beneath his torn shirt, and his teeth, when he grinned, were sparse and walnut-coloured.