Read Online Coventry by Helen Humphreys - Free Book Online Page A

For the first time, Maeve realizes that the tin soldiers are modelled on soldiers in the last war. They are Jeremy’s last station of childhood, and the sight of their frozen combat unnerves her. She turns her attention to her son’s bed, pulling the sheets tight, plumping the pillow, smoothing the eiderdown. The pillow still holds the shape of Jeremy’s sleeping head.
    Maeve had gone to a good school. She was expected to go on to university and, if not that, at least to marry well. She was the only child of older, wealthy parents, and there was a lot of expectation placed upon her.
    She had done nothing of what her parents had wanted and very little of what she herself had wanted. But she knows that she has been happy. Her life has been perfect. Even on the bad days there is always something to cleave to, something small, the way the leaves show their undersides in the rain or the way the rain falls in great veils, sweeping down from the darkened sky.
    Of course, a great deal of the reason for her happiness has been Jeremy. Every time she looked at him he just seemed so solidly good. She was always glad to see him, always interested in his news, always hopeful for his future.
    Maeve sits down on the neatly made bed. She thinks of all the places she and Jeremy have been. What their life has consisted of. There was the pub where she was a barmaid. The Bucket of Blood, so named because it had once been an abattoir. The low stone building still had the stench of death about it. Maeve would sometimes wake in the night and swear she could hear the bellow of cattle, could feel their fear rising up through the floorboards of her bedroom.
    At the plant nursery, where she went next, Maeve and Jeremy lived in a hired caravan in the field just behind the nursery. The caravan had a musty smell that never went away, no matter how often Maeve hung out the bedding in the sun or scrubbed down the wooden walls of the interior. They had to cook over an open fire outside, and Maeve mostly didn’t bother. They ate cold food, and once a week she would take Jeremy to a pub for a hot evening meal. That was the only time they were ever warm, those Friday evenings at the pub.
    The caravan ran with damp. They had to sleep in a tangled knot in the centre of the bed or else the water running down the walls would soak the bedding. Field mice regularly made nests in their stored clothes and chewed through the tea towels. Once, they came home to find a badger sitting calmly on the caravan steps as though he lived there.
    The field they walked through to get from the nursery to the caravan was muddy, full of furrows, and Maeve was forever scraping the thick clods of mud from the soles of their shoes. Water for washing had to be hauled from the nursery, and so they washed less than they should. Jeremy looked feral after a couple of months in the caravan.
    It was better at work than it was at rest. At the nursery, Maeve liked walking between the potted roses, inhaling their scent. She liked the sway of the saplings in the breeze. She liked the way everything flowered, on time, even though nothing was planted in the earth.
    The next job Maeve took was as a dressmaker’s assistant. At the dressmaker’s, part of the work was to make the customers feel good about the dresses they were having fitted. Most of this involved lying. Maeve would stand to one side, with pins bristling out of her sleeves for pinning up the hem of the dress being fitted, and she would have to flatter the woman who was buying it. That colour looks so lovely on you, she would say, when in truth the woman was a hog and had chosen fabric that was the exact colour of hog skin.
    But Maeve remembers the dusty light of the shop at the end of the day when she locked up. She remembers the dresses, half made, holding the evening light inside them, like lanterns, as she pulled the door of the shop closed and looked back at them through the window. They always seemed more beautiful empty than