a woman who coughed like a walrus. Cornelius had raised his head at the word.
‘She went to Chapel Market.’
A crowded place, ripe for the spreading of infection.
Eliza’s skin had taken on a strange blue tinge and she fought to draw in air through lungs that audibly bubbled with mucus. The intervals between each breath and the next seemed endless.
Father and daughter stared at each other across the tumbled bed. Neither of them uttered the word, but they didn’t need to. Devil’s face turned the colour of clay.
Through her rising terror Nancy tried to speak calmly. She would have to take charge of the situation; instinctively she knew that her father could not. ‘We must cool her down and help her to breathe. Bring me some water, washing cloths, towels.’
He hurried away, his slippers flapping on the linoleum of the landing.
Nancy slipped her arm beneath Eliza’s shoulders, and her heart twisted with love as well as fear as she supported their negligible weight. Eliza clutched at her wrist. Her eyes were wide and wild with fever.
‘Carlo?’ she gasped. And then another word that might have been Christmas.
‘Hush, Ma. Just try to lie still and breathe. We’re taking care of you.’
Devil returned as Nancy peeled away the sodden bed-clothes.
‘Now bring some dry sheets and a clean nightdress.’
He seemed relieved to do whatever he was told. She heard him fling open the doors of the big linen press on the landing.
Nancy wrung out a washcloth in an enamel bowl. She sponged her mother’s forehead and chest and then drew the sheet from beneath her before wrapping her in the towels. All the time she murmured as if to a distressed child, there, let’s get you dry, we’ll take care of you, I know it hurts.
She held her close, her lips against her burning forehead. Already the skin was pearled with fresh sweat. Nancy’s eyes met Devil’s.
‘You must go for the doctor.’
His nod held all their misgivings. Medical attention was not easy to find. Many doctors were still in France, attending to soldiers who couldn’t yet be brought back home. Others had dispersed to the overflowing military hospitals, and the voluntary nurses as well as the paid ones had mostly followed them.
Devil pulled on trousers over his pyjamas. ‘I’ll ask Cornelius’s man to come, shall I?’
‘Be quick.’
‘Carlo,’ Eliza muttered again, and then ‘Jakey? Jake, speak up. They can’t hear you in the gallery.’
She gave a sudden wild laugh and just as abruptly a spray of reddish foam came out of her mouth. Nancy wiped her lips and chin.
You are not going to die, she silently insisted. Don’t even consider it, because I won’t let you. I need you too much.
She held her until she seemed calmer. Racking shivers followed on from the sweating. Gently she laid her back against the pillows and pulled the hem of the soaked nightdress up to her mother’s thighs. Eliza’s hand descended like a claw and tried to prevent her from lifting it further.
‘It’s not Carlo, Mama, it’s me,’ Nancy whispered. ‘No one else is here to see anything.’
Tears rolled from the corners of Eliza’s eyes but she was too sick to protest further. Nancy lifted her mother’s hips and pulled up the nightdress. What she saw made her catch her breath in shock. Eliza’s belly was a pillow of white flesh scored with deep creases. Nancy knew only her own neat anatomy, and the glimpse of her mother’s damaged body made her gasp with shock.
Even in the grip of the fever Eliza knew what was to be seen. Her lips stretched in a rictus of distress.
‘I’m sorry.’ Nancy removed the garment and threw it aside, then as gently as she could she towelled her mother’s body and dressed her again. She spread a clean sheet on Devil’s side of the bed and hoisted her on to the fresh bedclothes. She covered her with the blankets, smoothed her hair off her face and held her in her arms, wordlessly praying. Eliza’s eyes were half-closed. Each successive breath seemed to be dragged out of her body.
Nancy listened to the steady ticking of the bedroom clock, counting the seconds as they built into slow minutes.
At last she heard the front door rattle and two pairs of boots treading up the stairs.
Dr Vassilis was a very old man with straggling whiskers and a bald domed head. He had clearly dressed in haste. His metal-framed spectacles chafed flaky patches at the bridge of his nose. The Wixes knew that he was kind, because Cornelius was not afraid of him, but he was not the best doctor in London.
He put his bag down on the end of the bed and took out a muslin mask that he hooked over his ears. Eliza saw his half-blanked face and writhed away in terror. Devil and Nancy had to hold her down so the old man could lower his stethoscope to her fluttering chest.
The doctor stepped back after making his quick examination.
‘Spanish influenza is highly contagious,’ he muttered in his Greek-accented English. ‘To nurse her I advise you both, three layers of muslin, so, over the nose and mouth.’
‘To hell with the muslin, tell me about my wife.’
Vassilis shook his head at Devil. He looked like an old sheep.
‘You will do no good to be sick like she is.’
‘What can we do?’ Nancy begged.
‘Aspirins is the best medicine. Keep her warm, if she will drink let her have it, watch her carefully.’
‘Is that all?’
Vassilis nodded sadly. ‘I can tell you, it is in a way hopeful that your mother is older and not so strong. This flu, I don’t know why – and I am only a doctor, perhaps it is God himself who understands these things – it seems to like the young and the strong best of all. They die like this,’ he clicked his bony fingers, ‘and the weaker ones, babies and old people, they stay alive.’ He shrugged.
Devil gripped one of the brass bed knobs so tightly that his knuckles whitened. For once he was completely in the room, no other concern colouring his expression, his face stripped naked by anxiety. Nancy’s thoughts flicked to her mother’s ruined body and just as quickly she steered them away again. She could read love for his wife plainly written in Devil’s face. He would be a smaller man without her. Nancy had always assumed that it was Devil who led the way, charming other people and pleasing himself, while Eliza resented his glamour. Now it occurred to her that he was only trying to deflect some of the power she held over him.
What a complicated measure men and women were obliged to dance, she thought. She didn’t include herself in this company, or even wonder when her own dance might begin.
The doctor took a brown vial from his bag. ‘Two of these for her, every four hours. A high dose but it is best in such a case.’
At the door, as Devil was showing him
