Alex Brown - A Postcard from Italy

Pressing the palm of her right hand into the small of her back, Connie carefully lowered herself into the high-backed chair next to her bed in the spartan bedroom. Aunt Maud was a frugal woman who saw no virtue in home comforts or niceties, preferring to live a martyred existence that Connie was also expected to endure for the duration of her incumbency. Her punishment, it seemed, for falling in love and then allowing Jimmy to be intimate with her that one time. If only she had known their moment of passion would make a baby, then she would have held out until their wedding night.

So now the joy of being with Jimmy, the music and gaiety, cushions and comfort and glorious indoor bathroom that Connie had grown up with at home in London’s exclusive Blackheath, were all mere memories. There was no softness or joy in Aunt Maud’s world. With an outside privy at the end of the long garden, which even in the summer months was grim and cold, making the chilblains on Connie’s toes itch and throb with pain. The inside of the cottage was no better either, with its hard stone floor and damp walls, and so it was as if all the colour had drained from Connie’s life. When she had first arrived in Tindledale, Aunt Maud had let Connie take a walk out into the village where she had met a couple of farm girls sitting on a bench in the village square sharing a bag of chips. Sisters Winnie and Edie were around the same age as Connie, and so she had enjoyed chitchatting with them and pretending, if only for a short while, that everything in her life was still the same. Happy and gay. But Aunt Maud had stopped the trips to the village as soon as Connie’s fecund belly had started to round, and so she hadn’t had the pleasure of Winnie and Edie’s company since. Aunt Maud had even instructed Connie to remove her jaunty but ‘sordid’ magazine cuttings from the bedroom wall, so they were now confined to an envelope inside her diary that she kept hidden in the groove behind the headboard of the bed.

At least it will all be over soon.

I’m going to be a respectable married lady.

Mr and Mrs J. Blake.

And a mother, to boot!

Connie held on to these thoughts as she felt around the headboard. Then, after slipping the diary from its hiding place, she propped it up on the mound of her swollen belly and took the fountain pen from its holder. She checked the date before drawing a line through another day. Only a few more weeks to go. She couldn’t be sure though. Her mother had said it would take nine months, or thereabouts, for the baby to be grown enough and ready to be born, but Connie didn’t know when to count from. Was it afterwards when she had lain in Jimmy’s arms feeling all dreamy and on top of the world, with her body still tingling from his touch? Or the first time her monthly didn’t appear? And she hadn’t dared to ask.

But Jimmy would be home soon, bringing with him an end to her feelings of fear and shame. She had to believe this. It was all she could do, because Connie had never felt so alone as she did right now …

London, England, present day

Grace Quinn loved her job at Cohen’s Convenient Storage Company. In fact, it was the only thing that gave her real pleasure these days. Alongside her knitting and a large mug of hot chocolate with a dash of cherry brandy dropped in of an evening as she escaped into one of her favourite old films. She loved the classics. The feeling of being swept away into a world of nostalgia and glamour, where nothing bad ever happened, or so it seemed. Musicals especially, with plenty of dancing. Fred and Ginger. Doris Day. Whipcrackaway! She was a big Doris Day fan and had learnt so much about timing and precision from watching Doris, which in turn had helped Grace hone her own dance skills. Gene Kelly too. Singin’ in the Rain . She’d never grow tired of watching that masterpiece. Although her absolute all-time favourite was – of course – the legendary Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. It really was ’S Wonderful, ’S Marvellous , as Audrey and Fred sang in the Technicolor scene where they floated down the river in the grounds of that idyllic chateau in Paris. But the magic could never happen for Grace until her bedbound mother, Cora, had eventually fallen asleep, which recently had been getting later and later.

So, slipping her shoes on as she brushed her hair, and then wound her rumpus of copper curls up into a more manageable bun, Grace kept one ear out for Cora upstairs in her bedroom, silently praying that she’d make it out the door to work without her mother bellowing again for more breakfast cereal and toast. Grace had already taken her a large bowl of cornflakes and two rounds of butter and jam, but the shop had run out of the extra-thick crusty bread, ‘so it takes more to fill me up, Grace’ is what Cora had said on calling out for yet more toast. And recently, Cora had been yelling too for the lamp right beside her on the cabinet to be switched on because her own hand, mere millimetres away, was ‘playing up’ again. That had happened four times last night.

But it wasn’t to be.

‘Grace. Grace. Grace. For the love of God where are you? ’ Cora thundered in her dense Irish accent, thumping the floor with her walking stick and making the plastic lightshade, hanging from the ceiling in the lounge, sway precariously above Grace’s head.

She put down the brush. Gripping the edge of the mantelpiece with both hands, she closed her eyes, dipped her head momentarily and inhaled deeply before letting out a long breath, searching every fibre of her being just to find another iota of resilience somewhere within her. She was tired. So tired . After opening her eyes, Grace inspected her face in the mirror and saw bloodshot flecks around her green irises from lack of sleep and her fair, freckly skin seemed even paler, if that was even possible. Cora had had a bad night and Grace had been up until almost 3 a.m. This would be the third day in a row now that she would be late for work; even though her boss, Larry, was very understanding, he was also getting on. And after his knee surgery last year it wasn’t so easy for him to do the rounds, walking the length of the warehouse corridors, checking the temperature controls and pushing the heavy metal trolleys back to their place in the bays beside the lift. Yes, he had been good to her, so the least she could do was to turn up on time. Grace really didn’t feel it was fair to leave it all to him.

But then nothing much was fair these days as far as she could see. Not for Larry. And not for her. How could it be fair when none of her siblings helped out? Cora had four grown-up children, yet it had been left to Grace, the youngest, to care for their extremely demanding mother, single-handedly. Apart from the occasional visits from her best friend, Jamie. He lived in the terraced house next door and they had grown up together here in Woolwich. He worked as a midwife now at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and popped in whenever he could to help turn Cora and pick up a pound to buy her a scratchcard. Cora loved a scratchcard and was convinced that her ‘big win’ was just around the corner. And when that day came she was going to ‘employ an expert carer and book into a suite at the Savoy Hotel in London where they know how to do things properly’.

Grace had heard it all before a million times over and, if the truth be told, she really hoped that ‘big win’ would hurry up and happen soon for both of their sakes. Cora flatly refused to consider a council-run care home, claiming only a high-end one, akin to a five-star hotel, would do for her, and she wouldn’t let ‘riffraff’, aka strangers, in the house to help out either, so it really had all been left to Grace to deal with. And Grace knew that she was crumbling under the strain of caring for her mother and trying to hold down a full-time job, but couldn’t see another way. Especially since Cora had flatly refused to be assessed for any sort of carers’ allowance, so Grace’s income was all they had to get by on. Grace had tried getting her siblings involved, but they had moved away or had important jobs in banking in the City of London … well, more important than her job at the storage company on an industrial estate in Greenwich and only ten minutes to get to on the bus, is what they really meant. So Grace ploughed on … because she couldn’t just abandon her mother, turn her back on her when she was unable to leave her own bed unaided due to her health problems exacerbated by her bulk.