The Immortals Read online

  You chose wrong, Mother, she thought. You should have cut your losses long ago, and left him. You might have been set back on a more ordinary path. Bella and I would never have been born, and no great tragedy for us.

  Harriet stood and picked up the tray from the bedside table. “I’ll let you sleep.”

  Rosa gave a brusque nod.

  “I’ll leave the landing light on. There won’t be any raids, we checked before we chose this town. The latrine’s at the end of the garden.” She made for the door, but hesitated, turning back again. She was holding the tray too rigidly, the bowl and plate rattling as her hands shook. Her look was bare as winter ground.

  “I do not know what you mean by coming back to us. But please understand – we grieved you, Rosa. We already grieved you.”

  Rosa wrapped her arms around her chest. Harriet’s mouth was tight, her eyes damp.

  “We had to, in the end. We have done our grieving.”

  *

  Without turning out the bedroom light or changing into the nightdress, she curled up on top of the covers. They were rough against her face, and smelled of washing powder. She drifted almost at once into an uneasy doze, waking several hours later with a sour taste in her mouth, woozy and disorientated. The clock on the wall told her that it was two in the morning. Her whole body was stiff and aching from her journey.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Rosa turned the groaning tap to splash cold water onto her face. She peeled back the blackout curtain and looked for a moment at her dim reflection on the window, freckled and frowning, features hard as her calloused hands. Her hair straggled to her waist, first grown that way for her time in the fifteenth, when she had coiled and fastened it with jewelled pins. The memory brought a wave of pride and sadness and longing. She found a pair of scissors in the drawer and, without much care, hacked off everything below her shoulders.

  She stuffed the cuttings into the bin and then stood at the window, holding back the curtain again so that she could look out into the moonlit garden. Bella’s hula-hoop and skipping rope had both been abandoned on the lawn. Wind blew through the cornfields beyond the hedgerow, the silent church tower on the hill. Not a soul to be seen, and the rain still falling.

  Instinctively Rosa scoured the shrubbery for the sight of a pale face. Branches blew to and fro, and there could be somebody hiding in that patch of darkness, beneath the weeping leaves of that tree. As a small girl, in a different home, she had once been terrified by the sight of a man who appeared from nowhere at the bottom of the garden. He had pointed a gun at her, flicked back the safety, and then vanished without trace. She had never spoken of this to her parents, or indeed anybody except Harris Black, who claimed still stranger sightings.

  The thought of the stranger from the garden sometimes caught her off-guard, and set her shivering. Had she really seen him again that time in Reims, in the deep of the cathedral? She was not sure that her mind hadn’t conjured him. It was impossible to reason away the fear that his appearances, real or imagined, awakened in her.

  A noise from above caught her attention, pulling her back to the present. She moved to the bottom of the stairs, and saw a ladder hanging down from the brightly illuminated attic hatchway. The sound of mechanical whirring floated down. She climbed to the upstairs landing and ducked back into the spare room to pick up the tin train from the windowsill, before ascending the ladder.

  She entered through the hatch without knocking. Her father knelt in the centre of a miniature train track, which had been laid out around the room. As well as the trains, there were lines of tiny trees, matchstick houses, model sheep and cows. Everything had been painstakingly hand-painted. Robert looked up when she entered, his spectacles balanced near the end of his nose, caught in the midst of assembling another section of track.

  “Does it work?” asked Rosa.

  Robert pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “One of the trains is just for show. The other’s got a steam engine, though. I had her going full speed yesterday.”

  Rosa moved away from the ladder, and crouched at the edge of the room. A clock ticked dryly upon the wall. The space was lit by a single bare bulb, suspended from the beams overhead. Her childhood had been full of such places, of her father’s glue-smelling workshops, his perfect little towns and villages. At the end of every year, they were demolished, to be doggedly re-built somewhere new.

  “Here. Watch.” Concentrating intensely now, he pulled a box of matches from his pocket and struck one. He held it inside the mechanism of the larger train, which after a few moments began to emit clicking noises and puffs of grey smoke. Robert held it steady as it began to strain forward, shaking out the match with his other hand. Then, with an eager squeal, the steam train headed off on a rapid loop of the floor, taking the curve so quickly that it almost overbalanced.

  Despite herself, Rosa laughed, sitting back to admire the engine’s progress. But as it completed a circuit of the track and continued to another, looping around again and again with blind urgency, she was aware of her smile fading. As the train stuttered to a halt, she tasted the old bitterness.

  “You’ll find us very much the same,” Robert said. He picked up the spent engine, and dusted it off. He was nervous as a schoolboy.

  “I got you a present.” She leaned over the track and held out the tin train, which he took carefully. “It runs by clockwork. You wind the lever, here –”

  He wore a small smile, now, as he prised the back of the train apart to admire the interlocking cogs and gears. “This isn’t quite like any other I have. A little more primitive. Beautifully crafted, though.” Rosa waited for him to ask where she had got it, but the question did not seem to have occurred to him. It had never been so plain to her that he could not think himself outside the year, outside the familiar sphere of the world he had made.

  She had wanted to slap Harriet to silence her interrogation, but now she felt the urge to shake Robert until he came awake. Until he could see her. The frustration of it was so overwhelming that it made her numb rather than furious. She wanted to say, can’t you try? Can’t you reach a little for just the nearest, the most mundane of the places I have been?

  Her tongue felt thick. “Don’t you want to know how I found you?” she asked.

  Her father didn’t look at her. Unsteadily, he adjusted his glasses on his nose.

  “I had help,” said Rosa. “There’s a place where they know all about us. People like us. You’re in their records.”

  “I see, I see.” Robert was blinking very rapidly, and looking at him, she was surprised by a pang of something resembling pity. If he could not react even to that, perhaps nothing should be expected of him. It was merely that he seemed so old to her, his fair hair thinning, his shoulders hunched. He looked shrunken and small. Somewhere in her hardened heart, she lost another scrap of certainty.

  “When are we at, Daddy?” she said softly.

  “Let me see… March eighteenth. The Yanks almost have it at Iwo Jima. Heavy bombing on Japan, poor devils, though they’ve seen nothing yet. They’ve not had it so bad here, far enough out of London.” He rubbed his hands together vaguely, and a small smile drifted across his face again. “Still a month and a half until my red-letter day.”

  “Yes, I suppose it must be.” Her dinner now sat heavy in her stomach. Nausea came over her, and she no longer wanted to be even under the same roof as her father. The tenderness which had almost blossomed in her moments before withered and died.

  Preoccupied once more with the mechanism of the tin train, Robert began to hum tunelessly. Rosa watched him, and resignation folded in upon her. You’ll find us very much the same. She hugged her legs to herself, resting her chin on her knees, as the clock on the wall parcelled out the seconds. She left him, before long, for her bed.

  *

  She slept at last to the distant, uneasy sound of planes droning overhead. Her newly cut hair scratching at her neck, she tossed and turned, waking frequently in the unfamiliar room. Her drea
ms were filled with skaters who whirled and danced among snow-heaped pines, with the squeals of speared hogs, with city streets which dissolved like sand. With the great fish that had swum in the deepest waters, before the world was old.

  2

  Arline

  Nineteen forty-five had first fallen away from her like an unbuttoned dress. She had discarded that year at her feet, stepped out of it and felt fresh air upon her skin. It had happened when she was seventeen, on the night of the awful row, when she had done what she’d so long threatened to do and gone running from her parents’ house into the night.

  Harriet’s voice still screaming downstairs, Robert’s lower, helpless tones. Still sobbing, Rosa had taken little time to pack. A satchel stuffed with a few necessaries, underclothes and skirts and blouses all haphazard and inside-out. A toothbrush and a bar of soap. Her father’s precious fob-watch in her pocket, because it felt good to take it. She slammed the front door as hard as she could, and then her footsteps were clattering along the Shoreditch lanes where they had lived, that time around.

  The night was thick with chimney-smoke. The streets in that place were still cratered and scarred; washing was strung between the windows; boys on bicycles teetered past her. Outside the Mission, an old woman hunched on the steps, drinking from a brown paper bag. People heading into the pictures for Blithe Spirit. Rosa wiped her eyes on the backs of her hands, but her tears would not stop.

  She could barely see where she was going. Past a huddle of wardens and across the path of a swerving motor-car, past a row of allotments and within sight of St. Paul’s. A stitch forced her to slow, gasping. Along the river, Big Ben was visible through the falling darkness, its face illuminated. It was past the end of April, and the blackout was ended.

  Rosa kept running, and as she ran it seemed to her that the air had changed, or that her body had become painfully sensitive to the hardness of the ground and the beat of her own heart. She tried to stop, grabbing hold of a street-lamp, but dizziness carried her to her knees.

  Her whole baffling lifetime rose up in her. Her throat burned, still, with the hot words she had flung at her mother and father. I won’t forgive you. I hope that you die here. There on the pavement, with the city spread out on every side, she came loose from all that she had ever known. A wave swept her forward, stomach dropping into free-fall and limbs flying, the buildings on the darkened street dissolving like so much sand.

  *

  And re-forming again. She had journeyed before, of course, but never like this. It was daylight. She tasted the new century before her other senses had caught up, rolling it to the back of her tongue. Everywhere the noise of engines, car horns, musical tones, a ceaseless hum and roar which seemed to be carried on the air. She understood at once what had happened, but the shock of it kept her pinned to the ground.

  She was still on the pavement, still on a street near the bank of the river beside a grassy verge. She fought the shaking in her knees to stand up, hugging the overflowing satchel tightly to herself. The place was the same, and it was all altered. It was like hearing a familiar song played on a broken record, verses skipped, the melody distorted. As to how far she had come, she could not begin to guess. Bruised, every part of her body trembling from the fall, Rosa cast about for some clue. Pulling a newspaper from a bin to glance at the date, she was overcome by dizziness again, and sank down again by the side of the road. She let out a hoarse laugh.

  Not one passer-by spared her a glance. She drank the sight of them in greedily. The brightness of their clothes, the women with their exposed legs, so purposeful and swift, their faces made up so radiantly. Some of the men had long hair, too, or loose shirt collars, and none wore hats. They spoke not to one another but to devices held in the palms of their hands.

  The road was so full of motorcars that they were barely moving. Signal-lights flashed, and people on bicycles wove their way between the traffic. Some of the buses were plastered with posters showing beautiful faces or exotic scenes. Television screens half as tall as buildings flashed moving advertisements for perfume and beer and who could tell what else. On the opposite bank of the river, a slowly turning white wheel dominated the skyline. After the drabness of nineteen forty-five, it was too much to take in.

  Rosa waited until the century had solidified beneath her before standing up again, clinging to a rail for support. It was then that she noticed the dome of St. Paul’s, serene and unchanged amongst all the towering, gleaming new structures. She laughed aloud again. Her father kept a cut-out newspaper picture of that dome surrounded by clouds of black smoke, lit in a glorious white blaze as though heaven itself had preserved it from the bombs. During the Shoreditch year, and in the Camberwell year when she was twelve, she had crept inside several times. Played hopscotch on the chessboard floor. Lingered among stone statues of saints in the fusty quiet.

  She looked down at herself, brushing off her clothes with new self-consciousness. She was wearing a brown coat over her dress, stockings and patent leather shoes, all plain enough to draw no glances. If she was sharp enough, bold enough, nobody need know where she had come from. She needed only to stay safe, to watch until she was ready to become one of them.

  *

  She had no clear plan. It had never been possible to make one, with no clear idea of what lay beyond nineteen forty-five. Now, caught up in the bustle of this miraculous new London, she knew that she wanted to go wherever these people were going: to wear what they were wearing, to be swept along in the flow of the age.

  But first she must pursue more immediate needs. She found a pawn shop, and without looking to the left or right approached the counter and took the fob watch from her pocket. It was examined by a slow-moving man who grunted and shuffled across to the till. Rosa stood on tip-toe to look at the display in the cabinet - diamond earrings, a rack of gold rings, an array of items which were completely mysterious to her. Were those cameras? They were small enough to be slipped into a pocket. She misted the glass with trying to stare more closely. When paper was handed over and clutched in her clammy hand, she exited quickly. She paused on the threshold to look over her spoils. Two red notes, printed with the head of a curly-haired queen.

  Making a quick list in her mind, she squeezed in and out of shops until she had bought sturdy waterproof shoes, a thick coat and small supply of food. When darkness fell, she found a doorway. She stayed awake, chewing hungrily at a chocolate bar, the hood of her new coat pulled up. Turning her head to follow the progress of every passer-by, her eyelids began to droop. It was not until the pavements had emptied that it occurred to her to be afraid.

  Rosa had lived in many places, but she had never slept a night anywhere that was not a Hyde home. She huddled as far back into the shadows as she could, turning her head at every sign of movement beneath the street-lamps. Don’t be a baby, she told herself. A trio of drunken figures lurched too near after a distant clock had struck three, leering, too loud. One of them urinated in the corner of her doorway.

  The next morning, stiff with cold and tiredness, she bought a small knife and kept it tucked into her belt.

  She used it, in the nights which followed, to threaten a man who trailed her in her search for a sleeping place, a too-curious dog, and a stringy woman who approached her with an aggressive tirade she couldn’t understand. She witnessed many thefts – some furtive, purses snatched from handbags, others ending with fists raised and blood on the pavement – and held her precious satchel all the closer. Not much longer, she promised herself, and when her money ran out, put out a cardboard carton to collect coins. She washed in public bathrooms and drank from the fountain in the park. Soon, I will find my feet.

  Sitting in the corner of a cafe, she listened, rapt, to the conversations on every side. A group of girls talked about their boyfriends, whispers punctuated by gales of laughter. Two businessmen blew on cups of black coffee; a young boy bent his head over a flickering screen. A lone woman in green sat wholly absorbed in her book, marking pages with the
pen in her hand. Rosa did not have a very clear idea how such people occupied themselves, and as she watched them, she attempted to imagine how their days might be arranged. They must have houses which they left in the morning and returned to at night, homes which remained theirs, year after year. They might have families who were waiting for them there. They might have studies or work or pastimes which filled their hours and their minds.

  She settled arbitrarily on the thought of her mother’s profession. Harriet had been a teacher before her fateful encounter with Robert, dress tucked between her knees as she bicycled to school along the lanes, arriving in the classroom to put frogs in jars and scratch Latin grammar onto the blackboard. I could do that, thought Rosa, once I’m accustomed to this place. Her heart lightened.

  She balanced along the narrow safety of this idea as though walking a tightrope. There will be more, things will be better. It was autumn, and as she strode through the streets to St Paul’s, brown leaves whirled about her feet. Head down, shoulders hunched, hands tucked in the coat’s deep pockets. Approaching the pillars around the cathedral door, she saw a crowd of people with cameras and leaflets. They formed an orderly queue inside the entrance hall, and Rosa saw them handing over money to a man in a booth.

  She sat on the steps and watched the bustling streets below, chin resting on her hand. The noises and the smells of the city crowded her senses, this place that had changed almost beyond all knowing. She welcomed every alteration as a bracing gasp of air.

  Sixty years, she thought, barely more than sixty years forward. I would have lived this long, in a lifetime like one of theirs. I might have still been here, a silver-haired old woman shuffling down the street with my shopping. Mumbling memories of our last year at war, of our red-letter day.