Jon McGregor: So Many Ways to Begin

In the morning, in Liverpool, they put her on a train down to London. They stood on the platform for a few moments to be sure she'd got a seat, watching her put her bundle up on the luggage rack, watching her smooth out her skirt as she sat down by the window. Her brother William opened the door and jumped up on to the step, leaning in to wish her a good journey, telling her to say hello to Cousin Jenny and the rest of that shower, telling her to tear up London town, laughing as he ran his hand across the top of her hair and pulled it out of its carefully pinned place. She reached out to catch him a clip round the ear but he leant away, jumping down and slamming the door shut as she said goodbye and the guard blew the whistle with his flag raised high. Her father and her other brother had already turned away.

She spoke to no one on the journey, as she'd been told, and waited under the clock at Euston station for her cousin, who came running up to meet her a half hour after the train had arrived. Sorry I'm late, she said, out of breath and a little red in the face. The bus depot was bombed last night and I had to walk all the way. You had a good crossing?

The house was in Hampstead, close enough to the Heath to see the tops of the trees from an upstairs window, its large front door reached by a broad flight of stone steps she was never allowed to use. Her room was at the top of the house, squeezed in under the rafters at the back somewhere, overlooking wash-yards and alleyways and gutters. The room was just big enough for a bed, and for a fireplace that was never lit, and for a small chest under the bed where she kept her clothes and a biscuit tin for her wages, ready to be taken home the next summer. But the size of the room was unimportant because all she ever did was sleep in there. If you were awake you were working, she said when she told someone much later what it was like. Cleaning out fireplaces, scrubbing pots and pans and boots and steps, washing and drying and ironing the clothes, lighting the fires in the family's rooms. On her first day off she stayed in her room, counting the bruises on her knees and shins and the angry red chilblains on her fingers, sleeping, looking out of the small window and wondering where she would go if she dared to leave the house.

She lived in the attic and she worked in the basement, and part of her job was to get from one to the other without being observed. You want to be neither seen nor heard, Cousin Jenny had told her, standing at the wide stone basin scrubbing potatoes and carrots that first evening. And you want to not see or hear anything neither. Mary nodded, pushing her paper-white cap back where it kept falling down over her eyes. She learnt how to time her trips through the finely panelled rooms and corridors of the main house, going downstairs before the family had risen, waiting for their mealtimes before going back up, or for the evenings when they sat together in the drawing room. She learnt how to tip her head a little if she ever did meet someone, to say Sir or Ma'am before quickly walking away.

The thing was to make yourself invisible, she said, many years later, so that everyone could pretend you weren't even there. You would do whatever piece of work you had to do and just slip away out of the room. Eyes down, ears closed, mouth shut. That was the thing to do, she said. So if you went in to light a fire one morning and your man was getting dressed, it wouldn 't matter because you were invisible, and he wouldn't even know you were there. And if he asked you your name you 'd tell him, and if he asked you to come closer you'd go, but you could pretend you hadn't because really you didn't hear or see him and he didn't hear or see you. It wouldn't matter at all. I was a pretty child though, she said. It wasn't always easy to be so invisible. I tended to catch people's eye, you know?

She would speak these words softly, eventually, but she would speak them.

Jenny took her out on their days off, showing her round London, walking through the parks if the weather was good, hiding in a picture house if the weather was bad, walking right up to the West End to look in through taped shop windows and watch out for boys. They talked about what they would do when they went back home, whether they would go back home at all, and they talked about marrying, about children, make-believing extravagant farmhouses to go with the size of the families they imagined into life. Sometimes they finished those days off in a pub in Kilburn or Camden or King's Cross, and there were so many cousins and young aunts crowded into their corner of the bar that Mary could half close her eyes and think they were all squeezed into the lounge bar at Joe's, with her parent's house only a few minutes' moonlit walk away. She saw people she hadn't seen since she was young, and others she 'd seen only at Christmas for the last few years, and they all asked for news of Fanad. She told them about Cathy's wedding, and about the new priest, and about how her brother Tommy had gone off to work that year.

And how's that other brother of yours, young William? a friend of Jenny's asked once, a girl Mary remembered from church.

Oh he's fine, she said, and the girl lowered her voice and said aye he's more than fine, he's very good indeed, the whole crowd of them shrieking in shocked laughter and Mary not knowing quite what they meant but laughing along all the same.

On days when it wasn 't as cold, another girl would have laid the fire the night before, sweeping out the ashes and piling up the kindling, and it didn't take a second to slip into the room with a box of matches and set it going. But on colder days, when the embers had been left to smoulder halfway through the night, it was a much longer job. The grate had to be swept out, the ashes scooped into a metal bucket, the hearth wiped over with a damp cloth when it was done. Taper had to be screwed up into little twists and laid over with twigs and splints and pieces of kindling, and the first flares of flame had to be watched over for a few moments to see that they caught, to see that it was okay to lay on the larger lumps of log and coal and close the door softly behind her. It was too much of a job to be done silently, or invisibly; the brush would bang against the side of the grate, or the bucket, the newspaper would crackle as she screwed it up, the match-head would spit as it burst into flame. She tried very hard, but it seemed impossible not to wake whoever was sleeping in the bed behind her, not to make some small disturbance that meant she would hear a voice saying her name. A man's voice, asking for her.

They sent her to light the fire in each of the rooms by turn, but mostly she was asked to go to the father's room, and it was here that she found it hardest to not make a sound. After a time, she went to the housekeeper and said that if it was at all possible she would very much prefer not to go into the rooms to light the fires any more, please.

She kept it hidden the whole nine months. She wore bigger clothes. She ate as little food as she could. She stopped going out with Jenny and the others, spending long evenings and days off in her room with the chest under the bed and the small window, saying she was tired, or poorly. She learnt, too late, how to make herself invisible.

Later, this would seem the strangest part of it all, that no one noticed, that no one asked, that she was able to keep it so well hidden while she carried on with her work, the cleaning and the sweeping and the scrubbing and the pressing. I suppose I was stronger then, she would say, one day, when she was finally able to talk. A girl that age, I suppose they're built for it, aren't they? Young and supple and all. You do what you have to do, I suppose, she would say.