So Many Ways to Begin

They sat in silence for a while, Julia smoking one of her long menthol cigarettes and staring out of the window. He didn't know what to say. She'd always done the talking when he was growing up and it had been enough for him to listen, to say, really? or, what happened next? or occasionally, can you tell me about . . .? but since moving into the home she had mostly just sat and waited to be spoken to. His mother was much better at doing what was needed, skating briskly over the cracks in the conversation, the inconsistencies and the repetition and the hard-to-understand, seeming to always find a way of stopping the whole thing sinking into the icy chill of who are you, and where's Laurence, and why haven't we had breakfast yet?

How are you feeling Julia? he asked eventually, not knowing what else to say.

Bored, she said sharply, turning to look at him. Bored, and tired. She stubbed her cigarette out in a glass ashtray and gestured at him to empty it. He leant across, and as he picked it up she whispered, loudly, the trouble is the other people staying here are a little sub-normal. He emptied the lipstick-tinged cigarette ends into the bin.

Really? he said.

Oh, yes, she said. Some of the things I hear about, you wouldn't believe your young ears, really. There's an old man out there, she said, haven't a clue who he is but they have to put plastic sheets on the furniture when he sits down, due to his tendency. She said tendency with pursed lips and a note of disgust, as though the word itself was somehow unhygienic, and she nodded delicately, to confirm what she was saying.

His tendency? David asked.

She leant towards him, mouthing the words: he wets himself if he laughs too much. She took another cigarette and lit it with a quick flourish. Not really my kind of people, David, she said.

He smiled and said no, I'm sure, and for a moment the Julia he'd grown up with was back there in the room. She turned to look out of the window and they both watched a young boy kicking a football up and down the gar

den path until a woman opened a window and told him to stop it. The boy sulked slowly back into the building, and when Julia turned to speak he could see that she'd already slipped back into vacancy and confusion.

She said, I wanted to go home but they wouldn't let me, can you believe that?

He tried to explain, gently, that there were reasons she couldn't go home just then but she didn't seem to hear. And that bloody lot in there are no good either, she said, pointing through the door to the main room where most of the other residents sat and watched television. Half of them are stone deaf, she said. He nodded. Mind you, that's often a result of the explosive impacts, she said, and the shock, you know, and suddenly she was talking about the war, talking as though the mist had cleared and she'd found herself twenty years younger, working in the hospital through years of air-raid sirens, walking home in the morning to find whole streets flattened, seeing doodlebugs droning their way through a bare blue sky.

They were all given cigarettes for Christmas and he kept on to his you see, she said. Sometimes even the bandages were in very short supply but we did what we could. Your mother used to get back from a shift exhausted and we'd just have time to eat together before it was my turn to go out, she said.

He wondered whether to interrupt her, to bring her carefully back out of her confusion or to let her just chatter on. He heard footsteps in the corridor and his mother nudged the door open with her foot.

Julia said and of course we never saw the poor girl again. He moved to clear a space on the table for the tea tray, stacking the magazines to one side, taking his mother's cardigan and laying it on the bed, putting the radio back on the shelf. Julia said Mary, wasn't it? His mother looked up at her. She was all for insisting that it only be for a few days, Julia said, but of course we never saw her again, she disappeared off the face of the earth. Very sad for the poor girl, she said, and she turned and looked him clearly in the eye. She said so when your mother asked me what to do, I said well Dorothy my dear, you'll have to keep the little darling now, won't you? She said you were such a lovely baby, and anyway we couldn't very well give you back, could we?

He sat back down, looking at Julia, looking at his mother, looking back at Julia, gripping the arms of his chair as if he was afraid he might fall to the floor. He heard his mother putting down the tray, the cups and saucers shaking against each other.

Oh Julia, she said.

The poor girl hadn't even left you with a name, so we chose David, after that actor, you know the one, what was his name? said Julia, and she looked up at his mother on this last question, smiling fondly, trying to remember, looking for help. His mother was holding both her hands up to her face, covering her mouth.

Oh Julia, she said.

They left soon afterwards, catching an earlier train than they'd planned, leaving Julia in her room, asking did I say something wrong? Dorothy did I say something wrong? They didn't even drink the teas, leaving them on the side table for a member of staff to clear away while they walked quickly and silently down the corridor. He heard his mother crying as they walked from the home to the tube station and he reached back to hand her a clean handkerchief from his pocket. She tried talking to him a few times, asking him to slow down as he paced through the tunnels at Whitechapel and Euston, and later, on the train, asking if they could talk, if she could explain, if he would at least say something. But he kept his face to the window and he didn't say a word, seeing nothing, hearing only the sound of Julia's voice, fragments of it repeating over and over again.

Of course we never saw the poor girl again.

You'll have to keep the little darling.

She disappeared off the face of the earth.

Did I say something wrong?

When they got back to the house, they sat in the lounge and looked out into the garden. The rose bushes had been in full bloom for a few weeks and were in need of dead-heading. The lawn was starting to yellow. The spade had been left out, sunk into the earth. They drank cups of scalding tea, and finally looked at each other.

David, his mother said.

She looked smaller than he'd always thought of her as being, and suddenly much older. As she spoke, her words came out on the back of long sighs, as if she'd been holding her breath all those years and was finally able to let it go. David, she said, you mustn't be angry with us.

Later, he realised that by us she'd meant only her and Julia. But at the time, it sounded as though she was saying us to include Susan, his grandparents, Laurence, his aunts and uncles, his teachers, the neighbours, anyone and everyone he had ever known or met. He had a sudden feeling of the walls of the house being pulled down, and of everyone he knew standing there behind the settling clouds of masonry dust, sniggering and smirking behind their hands.

Please, David, let me explain, she said. The room, the whole house, felt very quiet. He looked at the photos of his father on the mantelpiece, the one taken during the war, the one taken shortly after they moved to their new home, the one taken a few years before he died. He looked at her. Later, he would go for weeks without speaking to her, without looking her in the eye or even acknowledging that they were living in the same house. But for the moment, before Julia's words had properly begun to settle into his ruptured thoughts, he wanted to talk.

Is it true? he asked her first. She looked surprised that he was asking. If she'd been quicker, then, or on the journey home, or in Julia's room, she could have laughed the whole thing off, putting it down to the confusion and muddle of Julia's illness. Perhaps if she'd been ready, she could easily have convinced him that the whole idea was ridiculous, and perhaps he would have thought little more about it. But her immediate reactions, and her reactions in the days and weeks that followed, were a helpless confirmation of what Julia had so casually and forgetfully blurted out. Is it true? he asked her, and what he actually meant was: tell me yourself, say the words, I want to hear it from you.

The story was simple enough, and, when it came down to it, not so unusual. There was a girl; she had a baby she wasn't supposed to have; she gave the care of the baby to someone else and she disappeared. It happens. It has always happened. In those days, his mother said, it was considered neither unusual or fit for discussion. It was kept a secret, or else it was ignored, unstated, denied. Children grew up to realise their sister or their aunt was actually their mother, or they grew up with the names of orphanage directors who had taken them in, or the name of the street where they'd been abandoned. The tale of Moses, floating downstream in his woven rush basket, would not once have seemed so strange, in the days when baskets and blankets placed on doorsteps could turn out to contain wrinkled babies still dazed from the shock of birth. David's story, or the fraction of it which Julia and his mother had known between them, and kept to themselves all those years, did at least have a little more detail than those tales of early morning finds.