Alison Moore: The Pre-War House and Other Stories

Grandmother did the family’s washing in a big, metal tub with a corrugated board and a bar of soap, and then she threw the dirty water out of the front door. It dashed on the steps and hit the slabs four floors below, and dried in the sun. The sometimes damp pram was kept at the bottom of the staircase. Every trip out was four flights down and four flights back up carrying the baby. Tina seemed to be forever on those slick steps with the baby in her arms.

Grandmother showed her how to scrub the men’s shirts against the washboard, how to hang them out to dry on the lines strung from window to window, and how to cook pulled pork. At suppertime, Father sat down quickly and ate hungrily.

‘You made his favourite,’ said Uncle.

Grandmother touched her on the arm and said something which Uncle translated. ‘She says you can be his girlfriend,’ he said, indicating Father, who did not look up from his meal. Tina laughed before she realised that Grandmother was making a genuine proposition. Grandmother spoke again, and Uncle said, ‘She says if you do not like him, you can be my girlfriend.’ He did not smile.

‘But you have a girlfriend,’ she said.

‘She lives in London,’ he said. ‘You can live here.’

After supper, after the pork scraps had been scraped into the dog’s bowl and the greasy plates had been washed and dried and put away, Tina went outside to watch the day ending. The bone-dry washing hung in the sultry air, the dusk beginning to settle in its folds. Uncle was sitting on the top step of the staircase, eating a bag of aniseed balls. She sat down beside him and asked, ‘Where is the baby’s mother?’

For a long minute, he did not answer or look at her. He moved an aniseed ball around in his mouth; she heard it clattering against his teeth. He rubbed at the dark circles under his eyes. And then he said, ‘She left.’

‘She left her baby?’

‘She tried to take the baby.’

‘Where is she?’

He worked the aniseed ball until it was nothing, and then he looked at her and said, ‘She’s gone.’ He smiled; she saw his teeth, his saliva stained red, and the flash of a flat-cut diamond on his incisor.

‘But without the baby?’

‘A man must have an heir,’ he said. He put another aniseed ball in his mouth and did not look at her again.

She wondered about the diamond; she wondered whether it rubbed against the inside of his lip, and whether it hurt. She could almost taste the blood.

Every other evening, when the baby was asleep, Tina had a bath. She took very little hot water, not wanting an incomprehensible scolding from Grandmother, nor a comprehensible one from Uncle. She sat in the deep tub with lukewarm water lapping at her bare knees, bathing warily. There was no lock on the bathroom door. At first she pulled the shower curtain across, in case anybody should come in by mistake, but she found that she preferred to leave the curtain drawn back, so that she could see there was nobody there.

Halfway up the iron staircase, she pauses. She stands still, her arms aching, her legs shaking, nausea swelling in her stomach. She listens to the distant buzz of life, the sounds coming from the market and the factory — a noisy, windowless box of a building in which Uncle works on the production line. She has often wondered what it would be like to spend so much of your life like that, without daylight, without sunshine, without fresh air. The night shift has ended and the day shift has started, and Uncle will be home soon. A mile away, the road is choked with cars and buses, and the streets are full of people coming and going. But here, now, it is dreadfully quiet.

They watched her as she went about the house. They were watching when she went out and they were watching when she returned.

She went to the kitchen to make Father a cup of tea and found Grandmother and Uncle in there. While she filled and boiled the kettle, and fetched a cup and saucer from the cupboard, and made the sweet, black tea, she felt their eyes on her back, felt their gaze following her as she carried the full, hot cup slowly across the kitchen and down the steps. She recalled reading somewhere that if a woman is carrying a cup of tea down the stairs and falls, she won’t drop the cup because she will think it’s a baby. As Tina stepped carefully from the bottom stair into the hallway, Uncle, close behind her, said, ‘She wants to know if you have children.’ Tina turned, and the cup rattled on its saucer.

Tina looked at Grandmother, who was standing behind Uncle in the kitchen doorway looking at her, at her figure, at her hips.

‘No,’ said Tina. ‘No children.’

Grandmother spoke, and then Uncle said, ‘But you can have children, yes?’

Tina hesitated, thrown, but she said, ‘Yes,’ although she wondered how she would know — she didn’t know that she couldn’t have children.

In the living room, she gave the cup of tea to Father and he watched her pick up the baby, who smelt of cigarettes.

She gave the baby a bath in the big tub, crouching on the concrete floor, while Grandmother sat on the toilet seat lid with a towel, looking at her. It made Tina nervous, being stared at like that. Grandmother’s gaze made her clumsy, made the baby feel particularly slippery and squirmy. He tipped out of the cradle of her arm and headbutted the surface of the water before she righted him. Grandmother stood quickly and, scolding her, intervened, taking the baby out of the bath, out of Tina’s hands. She wrapped him in the towel and jiggled him up and down, and he began to cry. Tina drained the shallow bath, and the baby’s jagged crying became screaming, scratching at her raw nerves.

One evening, carrying a full glass of water down the kitchen steps, Tina stumbled. The heavy, cut-glass tumbler fell out of her hand, clipped the stone step and whumped down on the carpet, where it lay in the dark puddle of its own spillage. She inspected the glass, and found a crack. There was nobody around — nobody in the hallway, nobody in the kitchen. Tina dried the wet patch on the carpet as best she could and put the glass at the back of the cupboard, behind the rest of the tumblers.

Later, walking through the market, stopping to look at a stall full of glassware, she saw some tumblers very similar to Grandmother’s, though not quite the same. She decided she would buy one and secretly replace the one she had dropped, but when she looked in her purse she found she had only small change. She went back to the flat to fetch more of her money, but when she opened the drawer of her bedside table it was empty, her valuables gone.

She went to confront Grandmother, who pretended not to understand her, dismissing her with a flicking, shooing hand. Tina turned to Uncle, who said, ‘We will keep safe your money and your passport.’ Tina tried to argue, to insist that they return her possessions, but Uncle calmly repeated, ‘We will keep safe the valuable things.’

She sat quietly through supper, her stomach knotted, unable to eat. She did not know what she could do, apart from going into their bedrooms to look for her belongings, but there was always someone in the house.

When everyone had finished, Tina cleared away the dirty dishes, scraping the uneaten pork from her plate. Grandmother and the men remained at the table, talking and watching her. Tina washed up. She did not care now about the glass she had broken and hidden in the cupboard. She handled the cut-glass tumblers roughly — they clinked in the water and squeaked in her wet hands in mid-air. Grandmother spoke sharply to Uncle, who said to Tina, ‘They are heirlooms. They are valuable.’ He thumped his fist twice against his big chest, against his heart, to suggest their sentimental value.

Tina dried the glasses and opened the cupboard to put them away, and immediately she could see that the one she had pushed to the back was gone.