Cressida Connolly - My Former Heart

She seemed to be gone for a long time. The film started and Ruth was a bit frightened because the story began with a lot of thunder and lightning and she was afraid of storms. She consoled herself by trying to concentrate on not chewing her sweets, holding them against the roof of her mouth with her tongue until they dissolved and her mouth was flooded with their sugary flavour. On the screen big birds with long beaks brought baby animals down from the clouds, wrapped in what looked like towels. This troubled her. No one had ever mentioned to her the role of storks in bringing babies into the world, so she did not understand what these gawky birds had to do with the arrival of children. It was all very quick and muddling. Next there were animals going two by two, which made her think the film was going to be about Noah and the Flood. But the story turned out to be about a circus, travelling along in a little train. The train got puffed out when it went uphill. Ruth put another sweet into her mouth. Still Iris had not come back to her seat.

Now there was a baby elephant with big ears, who made friends with a mouse. The mouse was kind, but the other elephants were not. They were standoffish and then they ganged up. It wasn’t fair. The baby wasn’t allowed to see its mother because she’d turned fierce, but the kind mouse took the baby to where the mother was – in a sort of prison – and the mother reached her trunk between the bars and rocked her funny little baby. This was so sad that Ruth began to cry.

The one thing she could never remember was at what point her mother came back to her seat. ‘There was a funny – I mean funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha – bit in the film, when suddenly the proper story stopped and there were lots of pink elephants with empty eye sockets doing dances together, and what looked like ice-skating,’ she told her own daughters many years later. ‘I felt scared of them because of the eyes being hollow, like a skeleton’s. My mother must have been back in her seat by then, because I remember putting my hand on her arm for reassurance and it was then I noticed that she was crying. She wasn’t sobbing or anything, but she had tears on her face. She hardly ever cried. She rubbed her cheek with her fist, roughly. I guessed she was crying about the poor baby elephant, as I had. “Don’t worry, Mummy,” I whispered, “it’s only a film, it’s not real.” Pathetic, really, to have thought she was crying about the cartoon. And she smiled a little smile.’

The baby elephant became a tremendous success in the circus and was allowed to be with his mother again, in a special railway carriage all of their own. That was the end, and everyone got up to go, buttoning up their coats, the women pulling on their gloves, but Iris stayed in her seat. ‘They’re going to show the newsreel again now,’ she told Ruth. ‘I must just have another look, you see.’ She lit a cigarette and sat back, while a new audience in different coats shuffled into their seats. Before long the same newsreel started. Landing craft, troops waving, tanks, the Prime Minister, the desert, the same men standing in the same queue outside the same tent, smiling, with the same men behind them around the truck. Suddenly Iris leant forward and tensed, as if she were a cat about to pounce on some buzzing thing.

At once Ruth guessed why. It must have been because her mother had seen Ruth’s father, Edward, on the newsreel. Ruth herself had not spotted him on the screen, and over the months that followed she wondered why not; why Iris had been able to see him and she had not. She was sure she loved him quite as much as her mother did; wanted to see him just as much. She thought she must have looked away, at the precise moment, to have missed him. Perhaps she had been looking down into her dwindling sweets, licking her finger to catch the grains of sugar sprinkled in the bottom of the bag, concentrating on not spilling any onto the knobbly wool of her coat.

After that they did not stay until the end of the newsreel. They went out into the foyer and Iris spoke to the cinema manager. On their way home she told Ruth that she’d already talked to this man, when she first went out, before the cartoon had started. She’d wanted him to show the newsreel again, then, straight away. He had told her that this often happened to people: they thought they recognised a husband or a brother or a sweetheart. He always asked them to stay on and watch the newsreel again, at the end of the feature, to make sure. Sometimes – usually, he was sorry to say – it turned out not to be who they thought it was after all. But if, after a second viewing, they were quite sure, then the manager would try and obtain a still photograph from the newsreel company. So after she’d seen it for a second time, Iris was able to describe the scene in the newsreel exactly, to make sure he’d get the right picture. She gave the manager her name and address. He said he would do his best.

Ruth was used to her mother getting what she wanted; it was just another thing about Iris. Ruth supposed it was because her mother was pretty. She had long arms and legs, with the thinnest ankles and wrists, like a whippet; and wide pale-hazel eyes with gold flecks in them. Once a friend of her father’s – his name was Bunny Turner – had come to lunch and stayed on for most of the afternoon. Iris had gone upstairs to the drawing room to get a second bottle from the drinks tray. As he was leaving he’d taken Ruth’s shoulders in his hands and looked her intently in the face. ‘You must take good care of your mother,’ he’d said; ‘she’s a captivating woman.’ Ruth didn’t like that word: it sounded like captive-taking, like the poor boys Captain Hook had taken prisoner in Peter Pan . But she was used to people thinking that her mother was wonderful.

Before the incident in the cinema, it had never occurred to Ruth that her mother might have been worrying that Edward was dead. She had certainly never said so. Anyway, people protected children from such fears. Ruth knew from talking to her friends that grown-ups didn’t tell children very much, certainly not bad things. During the worst of the bombing raids, when Ruth was six and seven, Iris had bought a pale-green silk moiré box full of rose and violet creams from Fortnum’s, to take into the coal hole in front of the kitchen, where they waited out the raids. They never ate the chocolates otherwise: they were a treat reserved for the shelter. Iris had taken an eiderdown into the coal hole – it had been ruined, covered in black smudges – and a blanket for them to huddle under, and they’d eaten the chocolates together, waiting in the cramped blackness for the all-clear to be sounded. Iris had made a game of it: which was more delicious, the soapy rose or the chalky, fragrant violet? Ruth had had to concentrate, taking tiny nibbles out of first one then the other. They could never decide. Iris never said anything about being frightened in all those times, even when bombs landed nearby, which had happened more than once. She never seemed afraid of anything.

Courage came easily to Iris, but happiness was more difficult. This was something that Ruth sometimes glimpsed in her mother: a sudden plunge, as if the temperature had dropped, when Iris would sit smoking in her chair, without a book or sewing, hardly speaking. Ruth’s father, Edward, had an aptitude for happiness – a gift, Iris called it – like being musical, or having a good head for numbers. For Iris happiness was something delicious but hard to keep hold of, like the almost-pins-and-needles sherberty feeling when summer air dries seawater on your skin. Ruth thought this was why Iris made decisions so abruptly, in the same way as she snapped shut her powder compact. It was as if she were trying to catch happiness in a trap.