Daughter of the House. Rosie Thomas

again, and then ‘Jakey? Jake, speak up. They can’t hear you in the gallery.’

      She gave a sudden wild laugh and just as abruptly a spray of reddish foam came out of her mouth. Nancy wiped her lips and chin.

      You are not going to die, she silently insisted. Don’t even consider it, because I won’t let you. I need you too much.

      She held her until she seemed calmer. Racking shivers followed on from the sweating. Gently she laid her back against the pillows and pulled the hem of the soaked nightdress up to her mother’s thighs. Eliza’s hand descended like a claw and tried to prevent her from lifting it further.

      ‘It’s not Carlo, Mama, it’s me,’ Nancy whispered. ‘No one else is here to see anything.’

      Tears rolled from the corners of Eliza’s eyes but she was too sick to protest further. Nancy lifted her mother’s hips and pulled up the nightdress. What she saw made her catch her breath in shock. Eliza’s belly was a pillow of white flesh scored with deep creases. Nancy knew only her own neat anatomy, and the glimpse of her mother’s damaged body made her gasp with shock.

      Even in the grip of the fever Eliza knew what was to be seen. Her lips stretched in a rictus of distress.

      ‘I’m sorry.’ Nancy removed the garment and threw it aside, then as gently as she could she towelled her mother’s body and dressed her again. She spread a clean sheet on Devil’s side of the bed and hoisted her on to the fresh bedclothes. She covered her with the blankets, smoothed her hair off her face and held her in her arms, wordlessly praying. Eliza’s eyes were half-closed. Each successive breath seemed to be dragged out of her body.

      Nancy listened to the steady ticking of the bedroom clock, counting the seconds as they built into slow minutes.

      At last she heard the front door rattle and two pairs of boots treading up the stairs.

      Dr Vassilis was a very old man with straggling whiskers and a bald domed head. He had clearly dressed in haste. His metal-framed spectacles chafed flaky patches at the bridge of his nose. The Wixes knew that he was kind, because Cornelius was not afraid of him, but he was not the best doctor in London.

      He put his bag down on the end of the bed and took out a muslin mask that he hooked over his ears. Eliza saw his half-blanked face and writhed away in terror. Devil and Nancy had to hold her down so the old man could lower his stethoscope to her fluttering chest.

      The doctor stepped back after making his quick examination.

      ‘Spanish influenza is highly contagious,’ he muttered in his Greek-accented English. ‘To nurse her I advise you both, three layers of muslin, so, over the nose and mouth.’

      ‘To hell with the muslin, tell me about my wife.’

      Vassilis shook his head at Devil. He looked like an old sheep.

      ‘You will do no good to be sick like she is.’

      ‘What can we do?’ Nancy begged.

      ‘Aspirins is the best medicine. Keep her warm, if she will drink let her have it, watch her carefully.’

      ‘Is that all?’

      Vassilis nodded sadly. ‘I can tell you, it is in a way hopeful that your mother is older and not so strong. This flu, I don’t know why – and I am only a doctor, perhaps it is God himself who understands these things – it seems to like the young and the strong best of all. They die like this,’ he clicked his bony fingers, ‘and the weaker ones, babies and old people, they stay alive.’ He shrugged.

      Devil gripped one of the brass bed knobs so tightly that his knuckles whitened. For once he was completely in the room, no other concern colouring his expression, his face stripped naked by anxiety. Nancy’s thoughts flicked to her mother’s ruined body and just as quickly she steered them away again. She could read love for his wife plainly written in Devil’s face. He would be a smaller man without her. Nancy had always assumed that it was Devil who led the way, charming other people and pleasing himself, while Eliza resented his glamour. Now it occurred to her that he was only trying to deflect some of the power she held over him.

      What a complicated measure men and women were obliged to dance, she thought. She didn’t include herself in this company, or even wonder when her own dance might begin.

      The doctor took a brown vial from his bag. ‘Two of these for her, every four hours. A high dose but it is best in such a case.’

      At the door, as Devil was showing him out, he asked, ‘How is Cornelius?’

      ‘The same,’ Devil told him.

      But that was not quite true. When daylight came and it seemed that Eliza was poised on the very margin between life and death, Cornelius slipped into the room.

      Nancy got up from the bedside to try to warn him or perhaps to shield him but he gently put her aside. He studied his mother’s congested face and listened to her breathing, then lifted her wrist to count her pulse. He was composed, although he understood how ill she was. Eliza opened her eyes and saw him.

      ‘There, Ma,’ Cornelius soothed. ‘I’m here.’

      The winter light crept across the floor. The three watchers sat in silence until Devil’s chin drooped on to his chest and he fell into an exhausted doze. Nancy tensed with Eliza’s every breath but Cornelius remained impassive. When Eliza coughed so hard that she retched up mouthfuls of pink mucus he wiped it away and afterwards moistened her lips with a few drops of water.

      An hour passed and then another. There was no change, but Eliza still breathed.

      ‘We should send for Aunt Faith,’ Nancy said at last.

      Devil lifted his head. ‘I will do it.’ He was glad of anything that was not just waiting.

      It was time for another dose. Cornelius took the bottle from Nancy and administered the pills, doing it more deftly than she could have done. She saw that he had somehow been hooked from his despair into the detached state that must have allowed him to do his work in France. It was odd to feel any satisfaction on this terrible morning but she did feel it, and it grew stronger when her brother touched her arm and said in a voice that was almost his own, ‘She is holding on, you know.’

      When Faith arrived two hours later in response to Devil’s telegram, Eliza had fallen uneasily asleep. Her features were sharp and her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets.

      Nancy and Faith wordlessly hugged each other.

      Faith was wearing the dark clothes she had put on after Rowland was killed on the Somme. His death had come only a little more than a year after Edwin succumbed to his wounds at Ypres. Faith’s happiness now was all in her grandson, Lizzie’s child, although there had not been so much satisfaction when the baby came far too soon after Lizzie’s hasty wedding. The marriage had not lasted many months into the war and the whereabouts of little Thomas Shaw Hooper’s father were not now known.

      Matthew Shaw said, ‘You couldn’t trust that man as far as you could throw him. I knew it the minute he walked through my front door.’

      Nowadays Lizzie never spoke of Jack Hooper, although when she first met him she had talked of nothing else. She had breathed in Nancy’s ear, ‘God, he’s so handsome. He makes me feel like a queen and a she-devil, both at the same time.’

      And then she had laughed, a strange glittering laughter that made Nancy jealous. Nancy had not then been able to imagine what passion must feel like, but now it occurred to her that she had experienced the softest premonitory whisper of it. Was it only a matter of hours ago that she had sat talking to Gil Maitland? Yesterday evening seemed to belong in another life.

      Devil made room for Faith at one side of the bed and Cornelius sat opposite them. There was no space for Nancy, so at Faith’s suggestion she slipped away to make tea. The fire had gone out and the kitchen was chilly. She brought in a basket of kindling from the lean-to in the back area, lit a twisted horseshoe of newspaper and set the kettle on the hob. Her chilblains