PREVIOUSLY in LARCHFIELD: Wystan and Dora meet for the first time. In 1930, Wystan attends a party thrown by the Wallaces, tackles some oysters and finds what he’s been looking for.
EPISODE NINE: In which Sorcha the Health Visitor pays an uncomfortable visit, and Dora retreats from the cold into bed, where she loses herself in Dante’s Inferno. She wakes to find herself with Wystan, and learns a valuable lesson about Limbo. Back in the present day, Dora discovers a wormhole in Paradise, where she can almost hear what the Divines are saying.
Chapter twenty-two
Dora
The winter was a cruel, endless cold that seemed to defeat even the house. Something had happened to the earth beneath the drive, a brimming of water whose origin Dora and Kit could not find, there being, apparently, no burst pipe, but water that had turned the outside to slurry for weeks now froze into a solid, filthy lake. It was lethally slippery and thick.
Every day, they took a jar of salt and sprinkled it uselessly over the expanse of ice. Inside, the house was perishing. Paradise was built in a time of servants; even divided, the rooms were over- powering spaces, sucking warmth away. The fireplace in the sitting room remained a decorative hole into which the wisps of warm air produced by the radiators flew.
Beatrice had a constant snuffle because of the cold, but was other- wise thriving. She wriggled herself around her playpen and grinned up at her parents, covered in whatever she had found: cobwebs, dust, dead insects. The house was too big to clean effectively. It needed a small army of people and tools: telescopic feather dusters for the cornicing; the patience and time to wipe the carved skirting boards. The old vacuum cleaner collapsed under the strain and they had no money to buy a new one, so dust and dog hair evolved into new ecosystems in the corners.
Did it look as if Dora wasn’t coping? She was. In fact, she was coping vigorously. With unbroken regularity, their child was fed and laid down to sleep. She was the hungriest creature Dora had ever encountered, slurping her way through bottle after bottle, and gobbling her way through pureed fruit and rice. The hours when she slept passed in an instant. Dora washed nappies (Bea was now big enough to wear them), or pureed food, or did nothing at all, simply staring at the shadows crossing the walls. At bedtime, she and Kit sang to the baby, or read her a story, side by side, with the baby between them.
While coping vigorously, Dora wore a peculiar concoction of what was left now she had thrown out RJ’s smart jackets and boots. Photographs captured a woman dishevelled and overwhelmingly dressed in brown maternity tops and paint-stained jogging bottoms, her face always turned away, staring at the baby to the side of her.
Into this ensemble of ice and determination, the health visitor arrived. Dora had never been sure what Sorcha would be able to do to help, but the small flame of hope that she would be able to help in some way persisted. Someone kind to talk to, perhaps. Someone to reassure Dora she was doing well.
Sorcha slithered up the drive in her purple Beetle, setting Virgil off into his usual yapping frenzy. She was a woman in late middle age who had taken the road some women do at that point, of becoming girlish. So, a teddy bear hung from her windscreen and sparkly brooches adorned her coat. Her scarf was Scooby-Doo themed. Her nails were painted bright red and she was immaculately made up.
‘Helloooo!’ Sorcha called from the doorstep, rubbing her hands together. ‘Quite an ice rink you’ve got out here! I nearly crashed into your car.’ Her breath clouded round her. It was 8.30 a.m., Kit was about to leave for work, and Dora had, by Herculean effort, got dressed. All Sorcha’s visits were at odd times that suited her, not Dora or Beatrice. Dora soon gave up trying to get appoint- ments that fitted in with the sleep routine she was following for Bea, started at the hospital to help her growth. A sigh would greet Dora’s attempt to negotiate around Sorcha’s schedule and an edge would appear in her otherwise cheery manner. Latterly, Dora had begun to think the visits were random on purpose, to catch her out in her bad mothering.
Beatrice was fast asleep, having just been fed. After leaping round the visitor, Virgil retreated to the kitchen. The knowledge of what was coming filled Dora with dread. First, there would be the gaze upon her baby’s sleeping form. ‘Ah! So small!’ Then the hands going into the cot, grabbing the little girl, who would still be so deeply asleep she would not stir. Bea would be lifted on to the floor next to the scales, where Sorcha would undo her clothes. The baby would wake, then, sleepy indignation would come over her features, and then – plop! – naked, she would be placed into the freezing weighing pan. Sorcha would observe pitilessly as Bea began to writhe and cry.
After an eternity, she would finally take her out, but the torment wouldn’t be over yet. Dora’s baby now completely awake and purple with distress, Sorcha would embark on a battery of tests for reflexes, hearing and percentile measurements. The visit would last forty-five minutes or more and Dora and Bea would spend the whole day recovering.
‘Hello,’ Dora mumbled. ‘She’s asleep, just gone off.’
‘Oh, well, we’ll soon sort that out!’ Sorcha breezed into the nursery and leant over the cot. Out came her greedy hands.
‘She looks well,’ she said. ‘I assume you’ve gone back to demand feeding.’
Dora was too tired to dissemble; exhaustion made her blunt. And, anyway, she was proud of how she’d made her baby grow. ‘No, she looks well because we’re feeding her every four hours, no matter what. The paediatrician is very happy with her.’
Sorcha stared, uncomprehending, just as Mo had done, and scooped Bea up with a defiant air.
‘Put her down, please,’ Dora said. ‘There’s no need to weigh her today. I’m sorry it’s a wasted journey for you, but it’s more important that she sleeps.’
‘What?’ Sorcha paused, half way through unbuttoning Bea’s cardigan.
‘And, actually, I don’t need any more visits. You can see she’s doing really well. I don’t care about her percentiles, and, as I said, the paediatrician is very happy with her.’
Dora had not known she was going to say this, and was almost as taken aback as Sorcha. Her heart pounded at her own defiance. She had loathed these visits from the very first one, when Dora and Kit had given Sorcha a cup of tea and then sat gingerly with Bea on the sofa, as if it were a kind of interview to decide if they could keep her or not. Sorcha had eyed the books on the table. ‘Books! Don’t waste your money! Throw them out and just ask me anything you want to know!’ She had laughed, but it was clear that she meant it.
Sorcha was staring blankly. Clearly, no one had ever refused her visits, or her advice. Very reluctantly, she stopped unbuttoning Bea’s cardigan, but her hand continued to hover, in case she had misheard.
There was now an unstoppable momentum to this meeting. Having surprised herself, Dora was more clear-headed than she had been in weeks. It was time to play her trump card. She called for Kit and he came into the room, smiling affably, but unmistakeably there to back her up. Since the matter of Susie and the Edinburgh trip, he had been making an effort to be around a bit more. He had started cooking dinner more often and coming home early to bathe Bea and put her to bed. This was on top of taking over the last feed of the day.
‘Everything okay?’ he said, wandering over to stand next to his wife.
‘Well, your daughter does seem to be healthy. But –’ and here Sorcha leant in close to Dora, so close that it was clear Dora was the one to whom she was speaking – ‘this baby is your priority now. Do you understand?’
Dora visualised for a long moment the smack in Sorcha’s face that was the only adequate counter to this remark. Then she lifted the baby into her arms and left the room. A silence hung behind her. Sorcha didn’t know what to say to Kit, nor he to her. In this new world of women, men were satellites that simply circled, occasionally landing for meals or special events. They didn’t really know anything. And babies were not their priority. Sorcha sulkily packed away her scales and emerged. ‘I have to report this as a failure to engage with the service. You know that, don’t you?’ she said to Dora.
‘Go ahead,’ said Dora, turning away. She rocked her baby and sang, ‘Go to sleep, Bea; close your pretty eyes . . .’ until the front door closed and Sorcha was gone.
Kit appeared. ‘I have to get to work now,’ he said, carefully. Dora nodded.
‘It’s just that . . . however clumsy they are, darling, I think these people are trying to help.’
‘They know better than me, then, do they? All that waking Bea up and putting her in a freezing basin whenever she likes. And being nasty . . . that’s all for my own good, is it?’
‘Is it really doing Bea any harm? To have a visit from a silly bat like Sorcha?’
Dora stared at him.
‘I just think . . . we should try not to antagonise people. If we can help it. Though, I agree; I’d like a pint of what Sorcha’s on, that’s for sure.’
‘I’m curious, Kit,’ said Dora. ‘What about Mo, then? Should we be appeasing her too?’
‘No . . . Although it wouldn’t hurt to humour her a bit, would it? Another old bat. She can’t hurt us.’
‘I didn’t know I had married Neville Chamberlain.’
‘What do you mean?’ He followed her into the sitting room. ‘I stood up for you in there, with that silly woman. I’m just trying to tell you that I am sick of you hating everyone!’
‘We’re all silly women to you, aren’t we?’ Dora snarled. ‘It doesn’t matter to you who is right or wrong.’ She turned away from him and steeled herself against the slam of the front door.
Bea and Dora were alone again, with the day stretching ahead, tight as a wire, dragging the two of them behind.
Dora’s priority? How dare she? Fucking bitch.
It was down to Dora to protect their daughter. No one else was going to.
Dora kissed her little girl and rocked her. The baby’s eyes grew heavy and she fell back to sleep in Dora’s arms.
Would there be consequences to sacking the health visitor? Dora felt only relief that she had succeeded in protecting her baby, and her way of mothering, from interference. She pressed a kiss to her cheek and laid the child back in her cot.
Something opened in her mind, then. While Bea slept, Dora hunted for and found Dante’s Inferno in a pile awaiting a space on the shelf. It was one of Auden’s favourite texts, and he had read it whilst in Helensburgh. Normally, Dora’s concentration was so broken that ploughing through the cantos would have been impossible. But now, something was fuelling the synapses in her brain. Now, she felt as if she could read and understand anything. And there was no one here to stop her, to tell her she was straining herself or doing something damaging. She poured herself a strong coffee, wrapped herself up, back in bed, and began to read. She knew that this book had something important to tell her, that there was a message it was important for her to receive. Her years of study would pay off now. She was diligent and determined and would be successful.
PART THREE
Chapter twenty-three
Wystan and Dora
When Dora opened her eyes, she was sitting beside Wystan at the edge of a sloping field, high above Helens- burgh. This was where Upper Helensburgh ended and the woods
and open moorland began. Some way down to their left was the reservoir, shimmering in the heat haze, and, far below, the Clyde. This was a spot Wystan would grow to love, and would be a setting for his poem, ‘A Happy New Year’. Today, the smell of aviation fuel drifted on the breeze and the sky above them buzzed with distant planes. Cobham’s Flying Circus had come to Helensburgh, making use of the surplus of planes and RAF pilots left after the war. The public could pay to go up in an aircraft, or do as Wystan was doing: simply find a spot nearby and watch the formations in the sky for free.
‘How fantastic to be a pilot,’ Wystan mused. ‘Flying so close to the sun, and coming back.’
‘You didn’t want to take a trip?’
‘Lord, no! I like to admire and observe. It’s research for my long poem.’
They were shaded by a tree and Dora shifted her position against its knobbly bark. Her bare arm brushed something poking out of a hollow in the tree. It was a forgotten Courier, folded and shoved into the space. The headline, from a couple of days previously, caught Dora’s eye:
MAN, 18, WALKS INTO THE SEA AT CRAIGENDORAN.
‘Seen this?’
Wystan tore his attention away from the sky to look at the short, sensational article. His expression saddened. ‘Silly boy,’ he said, and indicated to Dora the section where the paper posited reasons for the young man to take his own life. He had struggled to get over the loss of a close friendship with another man in Cardross. The friend had recently got married and moved away. The victim had always been something of a misfit and the other men in his family, his father and older brother, had been killed in the war. The piece insinuated that a weakness of character and lack of male leadership in the family had resulted in this tragedy. Police had found a collection of dried flowers in the young man’s bedroom afterwards, many of them pressed into fond letters written to his friend, none of which had been posted. His family was quite well-to-do, with naval connections, which was per- haps why the article writhed beneath its twin compulsions to shame and not to upset further an influential local. It ended by expressing surprise that such a tragedy would happen in Helensburgh, with its tough shipbuilding history, its military heritage.
Wystan sighed and looked away. ‘At least it’s not Gregory,’ he said.
‘Your friend?’
‘Yes, my new Helensburgh friend. I met him at the station. It was as if . . . he was waiting for me to come here. I’m very fond of him.’
The boy in the paper had tied stones to his wrists and ankles, and he had picked a high tide on a windy night. Had there been a moon? Dora wondered. Had he been afraid? Or had he numbed himself in some way before he set off on his last walk? Alcohol?
Or had his sadness been enough to keep him walking into the freezing black water?
Had he changed his mind when finally submerged, and struggled to remove the rocks around his feet and hands? Or did peace descend, the waters closing over his image of his friend in his mind’s eye?
Dora said, ‘His mother must be beside herself.’
‘Oh, no,’ Wystan said firmly. ‘She will be relieved that at last it is over. The shame will have destroyed her.’
‘Really? His own mother?’ Dora found she could not stop imagining the boy and the deepening water. There was something seductive about it, as well as shocking. How cold and terrible the world was to those who were in despair. Dora could almost feel the water around her own body, lapping in a way that was both painfully cold and soothing. Would she be brave enough to keep walking?
‘You mustn’t worry,’ said Wystan, looking up at a toy-sized Gypsy Moth glittering as it dipped to make a turn. The heads of the pilot and his passenger behind shone like beads.
‘Why not?’
‘Because you have found me.’
Wystan was so solid, so young, squinting in the sunshine. The tree was rough against Dora’s dress, and the sky was the blue of a child’s drawing: high and cut with vapour trails, as if the white of the paper were showing through the crayon strokes. Aeroplanes were such audacious, optimistic machines. Pilots and their passengers were audacious, optimistic people, conquering a new element, flying high above ordinary mortal lives.
And at the same time, a person walked into an opposite element, to be dragged down into darkness, weighted. There was no flash, no show, just a different kind of audacity . . . the determination never to return.
And here she and Wystan were, in the middle, neither dragged down, nor set free. She opened her mouth to articulate this thought and instead her eyes fell on her friend.
He turned to her and said, with a smile, ‘Don’t you think it’s per- fect, that we are here? In a place divided into Upper and Lower Hel? Hasn’t it struck you as completely marvellous? Who’d have thought the Wimbledon of the North would turn out to be the New Jerusalem!’
The breeze rustled the leaves above them. Birds cheeped invisibly in the branches. When Dora peered into the depths of the tree, she could see the dark outline of a nest, then a magpie pushed itself out of the foliage and launched itself on to the air, a wonderful noisy tumult of black and white.
‘And which direction are we going?’
Wystan laughed, pointed down to the estuary glinting far below. ‘Well, I’m off down there, with the lustful and the gluttonous. Our young friend in the paper galloped on ahead to the wood of suicides.’
‘No . . . No, I can’t imagine that.’
‘Of course, you know that between Heaven and Upper Hell is Limbo.’ He leant in closer, studied her face. ‘I think you’re staying here. I don’t know . . . Limbo suits you. You look . . . rested.’
Her fingers went to her face, as if she might be able to feel what he could see. Wystan took out a cigarette – not offering her one, as he knew now she did not smoke – and exhaled some smoke with a sigh.
It was suddenly very important to bring him back from whatever train of thought was taking him away. As if she were tugging at his sleeve to distract him from a dangerous conversation, she pulled her notebook from her bag. ‘I’ve been writing,’ she said. ‘Just like you said I would.’
‘Of course you have!’ Wystan said, and looked at her expectantly. ‘And may I see?’
She passed him the notebook, with its frenzied but neat hand. She flipped through the ramblings that were more of a diary and pointed to the places where she had begun to form her ideas into lines.
As he read, Dora gazed out to the west, glimpsing a tiny jigsaw of streets far away, and beyond, the deep sapphire sea with its crust of shore. And there, the spit of land at the furthest reach of Lower Hel, where the houses grew more separate, picked out like a train-set landscape . . . She shivered with an apprehension of how far away it was, and how far down.
Wystan spoke, his voice possessing the words. How strange it was to hear someone else’s voice speaking your most private, perfect thoughts.
‘All the sadness of the hills
was on fire. The swan-galleons
set sail across the grey.
And I ran the length of the loch
to press into your hand this –
for the shining silver of my life.
‘Interesting . . .’ he said. ‘Of course, the silver . . . ambivalent, is it not? As much about betrayal as it is about thanks. Pieces of silver?’
Dora nodded uncertainly.
‘Dora, darling, this is a poem about limbo. Neither happiness nor sadness, but actually both at the same time. That is what limbo is to you: two things at once. And whether you know it or not quite yet, that is your subject. It may make you desperately unhappy, but this, here, is where you belong. And we are all, always, drawn inexorably to where we belong.’
‘And you? Where do you belong?’
Wystan finished his cigarette and flicked it into the grass. ‘Well, I don’t know. But it’s not looking good, is it?’
Chapter twenty-four
Dora
Wednesday, 11 a.m.
I have found the third wormhole – the cupboard at the top of the stairs. My notebook rests on my knees and I am curled up among paint tins and mouse poison. This does not trouble me, for the wormhole is my salvation.
Expert in not sneezing, I have almost learnt to breathe through my skin. Aches and pins and needles do not trouble me.
They do not know about this wormhole.
The space adjoins their hall and often they talk here before one or other is leaving the house. When Mo is away, Terrence often sits in the hall, barely eighteen inches from my face. He chats on the phone.
Today could be the day. Today there will be something to tell Kit, something that means the world will make sense again.
I have been here for nearly two hours, for the whole of Bea’s lunchtime nap. It has passed slowly, with a constant pain in my chest.
I see myself for what I am – a woman, a mother, hiding in a cupboard, eavesdropping. It is shameful. No wonder my husband treads carefully around me; no wonder officials are circling my child. And yet I remain convinced that somewhere in the endless indecipherable noise lies the answer, the explanation for why my life has come to this.
The conversion of Paradise included many invisible gaps in the insulation which let all kinds of sounds through. It was a feature of Dora’s life there that she spent a lot of time listening. There is something maddening about a sound that can be heard but never quite resolved. It never becomes language, but nonetheless promises it will.
In the early days, Terrence and Mo did a lot of talking – at first, mostly in their sitting room, directly above Dora’s. Terrence’s grav- elly voice was the dominant one. Mo’s was much fainter and danced around his, clearly laying down some law or other. Their discussions would often be quite heated in those early days, their dialogue so often on the verge of meaning something and revealing something that Kit and Dora would turn down the television and strain to hear.
One evening, Terrence and Mo and some of their family were in their sitting room having a heated discussion. It was so boomingly loud that Dora and Kit could do nothing in the room below, yet, of course, it was too muffled to make out the words. Kit said he had an idea and went out to the tool shed, appearing a few minutes later with a plastic pipe about ten feet long. Laughing so much they didn’t think they could see it through, Kit pressed one end of the pipe against the ceiling and held it so that Dora could listen at the other end. But the pipe was so thin and the ceiling so high that it wouldn’t stay steady. Kit got the stepladder and they tried again, Dora hefting her bump to the ground to press her ear to the listening end.
But it just made the edges of the language sharper and louder, and, as they were getting comfortable, footsteps signalled the guests were leaving. If they walked past the window, it was quite a sight that would greet them. So they gave up and took the failed device back into the tool shed.
It had been funny then. Dora was in the I-can’t-believe-it stage, which lies quite a way before the no-one-believes-me stage.
Another day, Dora was clearing up in the hallway when she sud- denly heard Terrence say, ‘Aye, well, she said she’ll be over later,’ as clearly as if he were standing behind her. Dora froze, the disembodied voice seeming to speak directly to her. There was frenzied muttering from Mo, and Terrence said, ‘What?’ Then more muttering and the closing of a door and the voices returned to being indistinct. This was the first ‘wormhole’, as Dora christened these odd gaps in the conversion’s soundproofing. Were there others? Where were they?
Dora tried to work out where exactly the gap was behind the wall, but it had vanished as perfectly as it had appeared. Refusing, from then on, to have any conversation of importance in the hall, Dora started whispering whenever they were in it, and insisted they cross the garden to the tool shed to say anything that might be of interest to the neighbours. Kit resisted this, especially when it was raining and cold, and so the conversations were hissed in the spare room, or, gradually, not had at all.
Surveillance, both as an idea and an explanation, began to take over Dora’s mind. When Kit returned from work one day, she presented him with printouts, from the internet, of easily obtained bugs and cameras. They discussed drilling a tiny hole from their sitting-room ceiling into the upstairs and popping a microphone into it, or installing CCTV outside to record who was coming in and out. Kit was willing to have the conversations, but did not appreciate that his wife was deadly serious. All day, Dora was surrounded by half-formed noise, the strangers driving in and out, and the sense of them listening at this wall or that. Yet, when she stepped out of the door and encountered any one of them, they ignored her as surely as if she were invisible.
Meeting Mo on her drive, she screwed up all her courage and said, ‘Hello, Mo!’ But, even then, Mo never met her eye, scuttling away like a spider.
Turning once more to the internet, Dora found Nightmare Neigh- bours, a site for the victims of anti-social neighbours (was this what she was? A victim?), and she tried to articulate her story in the hope of finding some reassurance or comfort.
But then she became certain that Mo and Terrence, or their children, had already found the site and knew who was posting. Inhibited and censored all the way through her mind, like a stick of rock, Dora began to find words difficult to form at all. Instead, she scoured the site for advice on what to do to survive.
Ignore your nightmare neighbour, the site advised. You may find this difficult. If necessary, wear sunglasses. This brought brief relief, but the problem with the advice was the grey weather: it was impossible to see in sunglasses. And, worse, catching sight of herself in a window, she looked completely mad.
the walls and ceilings confirm with their reverberations that something is up; something is going to happen. The urgency of the conversations increases, interspersed with odd creaking silences, which can only mean Mo and Terrence, and whoever is with them, are listening at one of the wormholes.
Only this one has remained a secret. The hours my baby sleeps are spent patching together, as best I can, the snatches of conversations held in their hall, usually with someone far in the house, whose reply cannot be heard.
Madness is brushing my skin already, with seductive softness. As I sit, I feel something in my pocket – a folded edge. I take the paper out, unfold it silently.
It’s a child’s drawing: three people, man, woman and child, with a house behind them. Jamie’s drawing . . .
I run my fingers over it, momentarily transported back to the little room. I know who he has drawn, of course. It is Wystan, and me, and our child, Jamie. We are so happy.
When it is time for Beatrice to wake, I extricate myself and carry her into the sitting room and try Kit on his phone. No answer. I hold Bea in one arm, the silent phone in the other, and run Friends back-to-back on the television. Virgil trots up and down, whining, the only one able to hear as I do.
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