As Little As Nothing, page 1
As Little As Nothing
A Novel
Pamela Mulloy
Contents
Dedication
Epigraphs
1 September 1938: Awakening
1 September 1938: Imbalance
1 September 1938: Languor
1 September 1938: Alive
1 September 1938: Roses
4 September 1938
5 September 1938: Frank’s Diary
8 September 1938: The River
9 September 1938: Miriam’s Diary
10 September 1938: Recuperation
14 September 1938: Flight
18 September 1938: Celebration
20 September 1938: Edmund’s Daily List
20 September 1938: Half Normal
22 September 1938: The Caravan
26 September 1938: Working to Scale
27 September 1938: The Meeting
28 September 1938: The Mechanics of Flight
1 October 1938: Miriam’s Diary
2 October 1938
3 October 1938: The Tour
20 October 1938: Stains
22 October 1938: Miriam Reads Her Body Like the Weather
25 October 1938: A Responsible Man
26 October 1938: Propaganda
31 October 1938: Counter Beats
3 November 1938: Secrets
7 November 1938: The Chain Home
20 November 1938: The Abortionist
26 November 1938: London Fog
28 November 1938: The Long Cold Night Into Winter
2 December 1938
4 December 1938: Small Tentative Gestures
13 January 1939: Sabotage
26 January 1939: Frank’s Feel for Mechanics
20 January 1939: All at Sea
11 February 1939: The Germans
26 February 1939: Danger
28 February 1939: Strength and Goodness
16 March 1939
17 March 1939: Fallen
25 March 1939: Perspectives
30 March 1939: Too Much to Ask
10 April 1939: Fly Fishing
16 April 1938: Love
19 April 1939: Edmund’s Daily List
22 April 1939: Reunited
24 April 1939: Gypsy Moths
26 April 1939: Frailties
30 April 1939: Bravery
1 May 1939: The Scent of Flowers
1 May 1939: Withholding
5 May 1939: Friendship
6 May 1939: The Pond
20 May 1939: A Higher Purpose
25 May 1939: Edmund Makes a Suggestion
2 June 1939: The Past That Is Always Present
5 June 1939: Edmund Considers His Neighbour
8 June 1939: Irrelevance
20 June 1939: The Practice Run
20 June 1939: Agitation
20 June 1939: An Encounter
21 June 1939: Observations
13 August 1939: A Celebration
1 September 1939: Edmund in His Garden
3 September 1939: Audrey in London
4 September 1939
8 September 1939: Frank Packs His Bag
1 November 1939: Miriam in the War
9 September 1941: Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Dedication
For Darren and for Esme
In Memory of Terry Mulloy,
a passionate gardener, a remarkable man
Epigraphs
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
—Wislawa Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning”
Sometimes there are days, moments, that seem to fall out of the tight mesh of time and obligation, where we can live outside of our lives, slip the leash.
—Helen Humphreys, The Ghost Orchard
1 September 1938
Awakening
Miriam knew she needed to fly when she lost her fifth baby. Those luminous nights, the pearl moon casting shadows across the village as she took flight, her arms spread, her body soaring, undulating through the air currents as she went higher. Higher so that she could no longer see the village; the space in which she existed seemed at once foreign and yet her own. This was her nightly journey, the one that might save her. For seven nights she existed in this liminal space, anchored to her bed, anchored to the idea that there was another Miriam who had overtaken her, one who existed in the bed of clouds that blindfolded the moon.
It was on the eighth morning that she heard the airplane she knew to be in trouble. Roused from a morning nap, she was startled by the sound, despite living so close to Hackley Aerodrome and Flying School. They’d become accustomed to the planes, but this sputtering was new, and it pulled her, still weak from the blood loss, from her bed. She grasped the heavy curtains that kept her room as night and squinted at the intruding light. She opened the window, surprised at the soft, balmy air, and looked skyward for the airplane that now seemed elusive. There it was; a choking sound that told her it was still up there somewhere.
She reached for a dress from the wardrobe and was soon clothed, the first time in over a week. She thought to take a cardigan, leave a note for Edmund, put an apple and two digestive biscuits in her bag. She barely knew where she was going as she stumbled down the stairs and outside to her bicycle. Her cardigan pulled on the metal sign on their gate, Hawthorn Cottage, as she passed through and she reached back to release it. There had been much discussion on the naming of their house; how important it was to Edmund, what with their own hawthorn tree in the back garden, while she’d wondered if it were too showy.
She was sore, and stiff, and in a weakened state, but the sun was out and this surprised her so much that it was enough to keep her moving, and soon she was out on the road, right onto Wycombe Street, then left on Guildford Road that took her out of town in the direction of the airfield. Out in the open she scoured the sky for any sight of the plane and spotted it ahead, teetering eastward. She pedalled toward it, trying to calculate where it might come down. She had gone nearly a mile when her heart, like a small animal yearning to break free, forced her to slow down. She had barely moved for seven days, in a delirium brought on by grief, by the stillbirth that had left her catatonic, her days and nights blended. Edmund nursing her, his own bewildered sadness set aside.
Miriam coasted to a stop, made adjustments to her position. The air filled with the pungent smell from the nearby dairy farm, giving life to her senses, an awakening that reminded her she was alive. A flap of paper caught her eye. A flyer on the signpost. The Ministry of Agriculture. A meeting in September. She knew what this was about. A grand plan. Her midwife muttering “these times, these times,” and Miriam in her state, not knowing if she was referring to her or the events in Europe.
She peered at the flyer, which welcomed farmers and gardeners alike, anyone interested in the future of their country.
“It’s coming,” she’d told Edmund a month ago, when she was still able to take in the world around her. “What we hear is only a fraction of what they know.” The chatter in the village like constant static.
“It won’t come to that, love.” Edmund so sure, as if he had a direct line to those in power.
“You think they have nothing better to do than prepare for a war that isn’t coming.” They were jittery at the Women’s Voluntary Service meeting she’d attended, intense on the prospects of war.
Now this. The ministry telling them what to plant. It was hard to imagine Edmund giving up his dahlias in favour of potatoes. They were still flourishing, his dahlias, the arum lilies long gone, the hydrangeas muted, drying on the stems.
She stepped off the bicycle and walked until the beating in her chest slowed.
After five minutes, she spotted a stile where she sat after leaning her bicycle into the hedge. She rubbed her legs as if trying to keep awake the muscles she’d so abruptly activated. What would Edmund think of her, out roaming the countryside like this? A week of nursing her back to health only to lose her to a failing airplane.
She pulled the apple from her bag and ate it with her eyes closed, the world suddenly too much to take in. The deep crunch of each bite, the vexing wasp that had caught the scent of the sweet juice that dripped on her hand, a distant crow that seemed overly bothered about something, all sparks to remind her that life goes on. She concentrated on these sensations as she took long, slow breaths because she wasn’t sure she could trust herself to remain conscious, her inclination so clearly driven to another state these days.
The airplane.
The quiet meant the engine was no longer running.
She stood, her mind alert with no thought now to return to her bed. She freed the bicycle from the bushes, hooked her shoe on the pedal, and pushed herself along until she could get her balance, thankful for the downward slope. There were things to be thank
1 September 1938
Imbalance
The sky. The cerulean sky.
What sort of word was that—cerulean? How did it come to mind as he lay on the grass? Had he read it somewhere, this way of describing the sky? It was his aunt’s influence, he knew. She, who would consider him a writer. Her confidence in him pushed him to comb through his vocabulary this morning, plucking words that might please her. He would soon see her, and that alone made him think this way, dredging up words usually reserved for the poets.
Frank was thinking too much, eyeing the sky, his mind in the clouds. That’s what she would tell him, his mind always in the clouds. Anticipating the conversation he would have with her, knowing what she wanted of him. Happiness. Nothing more. He would finally tell her about his airplane that was in the shed, remind her that she was to join him at the air show in Croydon in two weeks. She would meet up with friends for lunch, she’d told him, they would have a lovely time.
Yes, the sky was quite stunning this morning. Cerulean.
He’d drifted off, allowing the sleep that had evaded him in the early morning hours to take him away, a hazy dreamworld that placed him in his shed, pasting the fabric onto the wing, only to have it fall off, drooping like drapery that weighed too heavily on the rod no matter how much glue he used. The frantic repasting, repeated over and again, was like a scene from the silent pictures he’d seen as a boy. She’d introduced them to him, his aunt Audrey, brutal comedies where the laughter was contingent on someone’s failing. Even as a young boy he saw the imbalance of it.
An airplane. Awake now, but the sound of the engine further confused him. He’d never heard one fly over Brackley Wood before. He sat up, wiping his hands over his heat-flushed face, brushing a leaf from his hair, then closed his eyes, focussing on the sound of the engine he immediately knew to be faltering. Jumping to his feet he scanned the sky but saw nothing. He closed his eyes again, concentrating so he could determine the direction. East.
Abandoning the picnic basket under the tree where he’d left it to stay cool, he ran to the road, slipping on dew-stained grass as he went.
A flash in the sky at the top of the downs, the sun glinting off the frame as if the plane itself were sending messages. A biplane. Frank slowed his pace, made calculations on speed, trajectory, trying to determine where the plane would land, the engine coughing, wavering as it descended. He assumed the fear of the pilot, put himself in the cockpit, imagining the landscape before him, the need to determine a place to crash land increasingly urgent. There were too many trees, too many hedges. Frank was running now, past the flax field recently harvested, which appeared level but he knew was lined with irrigation troughs that might sink the plane. Past the grazing field, the land uneven there as well. He was nearly at the road that separated the two fields, the plane now dropping so that it appeared to barely miss the trees.
Frank flapped his arms and pointed to the road with no idea if the pilot could see him. He felt an exhilaration as if he really were both in the cockpit and on the ground. His body feeling large and commanding as he waved him in, knowing the road was narrow, a lane really, but also knowing the grade was solid, and as long as the pilot kept a cool head, he could lay it down between the hedges.
The plane swooped over him, propelling him forward with a whoosh of air so that he scrambled toward it as it touched earth, bumping along with great precision until it hit a pothole, which tousled its wings and tossed it into the ditch.
The propeller jammed, and the silence that remained brought Frank to a stop. Above, a crow flew by, squawking, as if to reclaim the airspace.
“Hello?” Frank called out as he walked to the plane. He feared what he would find in the cockpit. He looked for movement, for the gentle rise of shoulders or an intake of breath.
“Hello.” His voice quieter this time. He held his hand out to the airplane to steady himself, the ache in his foot now noticeable, already beginning to shoot up his leg, and he was limping.
He looked in at the body slumped over the controls, and his mind flipped back to when he was a boy, out in the field alone, waiting for the return of his brother, who had taken one of the horses for a ride. His brother had sneaked out when the stable boy had gone to eat his midday meal, because he was a good rider, if a bit cocky, and yearned for some act of independence. Frank had trailed after him that day and saw him saddle the horse and disappear into the field. He knew that his brother’s constant bravery would forever leave him behind. He’d walked as far as he could and waited until he could wait no longer, finally trudging across the field until he came upon the horse, riderless. Frank knew enough to get help before looking for his brother, knew there were rules of logic that he should follow, so even though he could not ride, he mounted the horse and returned home to fetch the stable boy. The search party found his brother face down in the bush near a stream, his body lifeless, or so it seemed to young Frank, whose own breathing caught in his throat, just as it did now as he looked for life in this pilot. The idea that accidents could happen, that they could kill you, hardly a thought that had entered his mind in those early years when his own deformed body seemed to define all conditions possible.
He stumbled around to the propeller that was nose-down in the ditch, trying to free it enough that he could get at the man, who was now enmeshed in the shrubbery that had fallen over on him in the open cockpit. But no part of the plane would budge, and Frank cursed it as though it were willfully stubborn, as though it were actively working against him. He heard a sound from down the road and looked to a woman approaching on bicycle.
“Is he alive?” she asked.
1 September 1938
Languor
How was it she was still here, Audrey wondered, at this place by the river, the clear water bathing her feet, the warm balm of sun directly overhead, not on her but around her as if draped across the willow tree. She was reading the newspaper, waiting, her eyes occasionally casting off to a branch floating downriver.
Chamberlain’s Great Peace Plan: Striking Proposals for Hitler. The headline everyone had been clamouring for. Chamberlain would make it right, Audrey knew, the meeting with Hitler would surely put an end to it all. The sun seemed to have gripped her, brightening her mood on the riverbank as she reimagined her life at just this moment, the news sanguine at last. This was a changed outlook after days and days of hooded gloom. A reprieve.
They were not new to this tussle of war, and perhaps that’s why she felt it so; scar tissue never healed. And now the giddiness of its release. She could return to life, to her lectures, to the campaign. She picked up her notes and pressed them against her lap as a rogue breeze threatened to send them flapping off.
She willed herself to think of good things ahead with her work, the progress they could make on reproductive rights. And yet this was a funny thing, progress. How could they measure the changing of minds, determine a way forward when so many held views that marched in the opposite direction? It was not an adjustment of the dial that was needed, it was a complete turnaround of thought in this world she now occupied. There were stubborn minds that needed changing.
She pulled at her sleeve, smoothed the nap of her skirt.
Would Frank find her here, away from their meeting spot? A note left under a rock in case he showed up should direct him. But really, an hour was long enough. She’d waited this long only because she’d been preoccupied with next week’s lecture, “Women and Peace,” working through the argument in her head, testing phrases out loud as birds twittered in the background.
The wind was picking up and she knew she should go home, but the day was so giving with its sun, with the silky breeze that rolled over her, keeping her cool. Sweet serenity by the river, the quiet a sense unto itself.
It was not so earlier. In these past weeks she’d gotten used to the sound of airplanes, used to the fact of them but not so the disruption. They came as a swarm, the RAF moving about the country like confused and frantic insects. But this morning it was just one, a choking motor that eventually faded into the distance.
