crying and stupid, and she’d say, ‘Hello Edward,’ and he would say, ‘Oh, there you are, Victoria, it’s you.’ But another woman came, who had a couple of older kids with her, and Thomas rushed towards them, shouting. Victoria was so hungry: at lunchtime she had gone over to Mr Pat’s, who would give her a big bag of crisps and let her pay tomorrow, but he wasn’t there, only a girl she didn’t know behind the counter. If her aunt’s friend Phyllis came perhaps she would buy her a bit of chocolate or something. But it was Phyllis Chadwick’s daughter Bessie, older than she was, and Victoria was ready with apologies for the mixup others had caused, but Bessie said, ‘Shame, poor little thing, your auntie’s very sick, you’re going to stay with us till she gets home.’
Running along beside the big girl Victoria said, ‘Please, please, have you got some chocolate or something?’
‘Didn’t they give you anything for lunchtime?’
‘They forgot – they didn’t know,’ Victoria begged, all apology for noble Edward.
Bessie swerved off into a fish and chips, bought chips for both of them, and they ate as they walked along.
Mrs Stevens, auntie Marion, came home from a stay in hospital an invalid, her formerly large body already gaunt. She was always being rushed back for treatments that left her sick and weak. Victoria looked after her. After school she did not go to other children’s homes to play, but came straight back to be a nurse. At school she was diligent and often praised. Victoria’s evenings were spent doing homework or watching television programmes that told her about the world.
One afternoon, she was sent by her aunt to fetch urgent medicine, and she took a wrong turning and found herself in a street she felt she knew. The house of that evening when the tall kind boy had looked after her was in a part of her mind that corresponded to her dreams of it, floating in another dimension, nothing to do with the quotidian, the ordinary. She remembered warmth and glowing colour, a room piled with toys. Sometimes she stopped in front of shops in the High Street and thought yes, it was like this, the richness, the abundance.
If that house had a geographical location, then it was far off, in a distant part of London. Her legs had ached – hadn’t they? Edward had pulled her along – oh, for ages. Yet wasn’t this the house, just in front of her, not ten minutes’ walk from her aunt’s flat? Yes, it was that one, that very one there – was it? – yes; and at that moment a child came running along the pavement towards her but he turned in at a gate and up the steps. Thomas. He was larger than he had been, no longer a little kid. He reached up to a bell and almost at once the door opened and he dashed inside. She had a glimpse of that room she now knew was a hall, from seeing them on films, full of light and colour. After that she often secretly went to the house and stood there, or walked up and down outside it, hoping no one would notice her, as much as she wished that someone would. This was not an area where black people lived, or not in this street. Once she saw Edward, who was even taller. He strode along not seeing her or anyone, passing so close she could have touched him. He bounded up the steps, letting himself in with his own key. Well, she had a key, Victoria did, tied around her neck on ribbon, so that her aunt wouldn’t have to get up and struggle to the door. More than once she saw the tall woman whose hair she remembered as being like Goldilocks, but now it was in a heap on top of her head. She was untidy. She was always worried, seeming in a struggle to keep hold of her bag, shopping bags, parcels. Victoria was critical, feeling that from this house only perfection should come. If she had hair like that, she couldn’t let it be in a great lump, with wisps falling down. Then, again, she saw Thomas. They did not recognise her. What Victoria told herself was. They don’t see me. Once, as Edward came striding along, no longer a boy, to Victoria’s eyes, but a man – he was sixteen – she was tempted to call out, Look, I’m Victoria, don’t you remember me? Then she told herself that if he and Thomas had grown out of what she remembered, then she must have too, tall for her age, shooting up, no longer in the junior school.
To her the most extraordinary thing was that the house, a dream, so far away she had never expected to see it again, was so close – only a short walk away.
In her aunt Marion’s flat she still slept on the day-bed in the lounge. On nights when her aunt was poorly, she pulled it into the bedroom so she could be there when the sick woman woke and called for water, or a cup of tea, or said in her frightened thick voice, ‘Are you there, Victoria?’ Victoria had broken nights, and was finding it hard to keep up with her lessons. Her aunt’s best friend, Phyllis Chadwick, Bessie’s mother, came to see how things went along: she was supervising Victoria, on behalf of the Authorities. Victoria did not resent it. She longed for help, from anyone. Sometimes Bessie came, and sat with aunt Marion while she went shopping or just to get out. In the day when she was at school, home helps or nurses dropped in. But really, Marion Stevens should be in hospital, she needed proper full-time nursing: it was what Phyllis Chadwick said, and what Victoria thought. ‘If I wasn’t here, they’d have to do something, but I am here and so they don’t bother.’
Now four years had passed since that night when the tall boy had been so kind – so the event stayed with Victoria, in her mind and in her dreams – and her aunt was really very ill. Cancer. There was no hope, Marion herself told the girl. The nurse who came from Jamaica too, had said to her, ‘There is a time to live, there is a time to die. Your time is coming soon, praise the Lord.’
Marion Stevens had always gone to church, but not to the same one as this nurse. Yet they prayed together often and Victoria had even heard them singing hymns. She was not sure about praising the Lord, with this dreadfully ill woman here in front of her eyes day and night. She enjoyed church, when she had time to go, because she liked singing, but now she had to stay with her aunt. The nurse said to Victoria that she would be rewarded in heaven for what she was doing for her aunt, and Victoria kept silent: the things she wanted to say were too rude.
It was so difficult, all of it, trying to get to school, doing her homework, when she was being interrupted every minute by her aunt’s, ‘Victoria, are you there?’ Sometimes the sick woman could not be left, when it didn’t look as if the home help would come: she often didn’t, they were overworked, with too many helpless people on their hands. And often the nurses didn’t stay, they checked pills or perhaps washed that smelly sick body and then they were off. ‘I won’t be a nurse, I won’t,’ Victoria promised herself. At school they suggested she could easily be a nurse, she could manage the exams. She was clever, they said. ‘It’s time to think what you want to be,’ they told her. Bessie was going to be a nurse. Well, let her, Victoria would rather die, so she told herself.
The teachers were proud of her: not so many children at that school were likely to be anything much – on the streets, more probably. When she couldn’t get to school at all, they forgave her and made excuses. They knew what her situation was, asked after her aunt and were sorry for her. One teacher offered prayers, and another actually dropped in to visit, to check on her of course, the girl knew, but it meant Victoria could go out to the shops. The home help never seemed to get things exactly right, though Victoria left lists on the kitchen table, in her neat handwriting, headed Food, or Medicines; and what had to be fetched from the chemist was longer than from the supermarket.
‘You’ve got to eat, girl,’ said Phyllis Chadwick, bringing her bits of this and that, some soup, some cake, but Victoria felt permanently nauseated from the smell of her aunt’s illness. Sometimes she felt she was slowly submerging in the dark dirty water, that was the illness, down and down, but up there, far above her head, was light and air and good clean smells. When she could no longer bear it, she told her aunt she would be back in a minute and she ran through the streets and stood outside the Staveney house and thought about what was inside. Space, room for everyone. She had understood by now what had been so confused in her mind, and for so long: in that house was one family, the fair woman, who was the mother, and Edward, and Thomas. She had never questioned that there hadn’t seemed to be a father. None of the families she knew had fathers, that is, real fathers,
