Five(20)

But in her heart her greatest success was that Nicholas was free and happy. The biggest accolade she could receive was hearing him laugh easily. The greatest relief was that people liked him. And that he was nothing like her.

Nicholas has never known what made his mother the way she is. She says very little about most things and nothing at all about her past. But he does know it is not easy for her to be around new people. That sometimes she speaks before she should and says things she shouldn’t. That little dogs have always made her nervous. He also knows that she loves him, has always loved him, even though she’s shown it in ways most people would not recognize as love.

So when Mrs. Worth says, standing in her son’s home with his fiancée, “Hello, son. I’ve met the dog,” he ignores her nervous insult, and he puts a hand on her shoulder before he helps her take off her coat. He says softly, “Give me your coat, Mum. Just go straight ahead to the sofa. We’ll be right there.”

And when Livvie declares, “Mothers love me, you’ll see,” Nicholas says, “Of course they do, darling. Just do me a favor and call her Mrs. Worth. Just for now.”



* * *





“Matilda, we’ve got work to do. Prepare the table,” Gerald says. Young Matilda, reading in her room, hears the thud of the sack against the wood of the floorboards in the kitchen where Gerald has dropped it, having just come home from his route. She must try to convince him to have supper first. She always finds it too difficult to eat after they do the work.

Gerald was Mrs. Worth’s father. He gave her the name Matilda. He gave her other things too that were not as easy to name.

Gerald was a postman, but before that he was a surgeon. And because Gerald died long ago, his violence will have to be explained on his behalf, as Gerald was never able to explain it himself, or to himself, or to Matilda, or to anyone else. If he had, things could have been different for his daughter. Of course, things could have also been the same.

Gerald, a talented medical student, trained to be a surgeon before the war and worked as a medic in a field hospital during it. Two years into his service, shrapnel from an explosion left him with partial vision in his left eye, an occasional tremor in his left hand that the army doctors said was all in his head, and an intense desire to never touch another sick, dying, or wounded person ever again. Once he had recovered sufficiently and received a medical discharge, Gerald came home to the burning wreckage of London, with her hollow-eyed widows and old men, her streets empty of children who had been sent away to the countryside, the life he remembered crushed under the rubble of her burnt-out buildings. He found it only slightly easier to live in London than on the battlefields he had left behind.

Gerald, like many of the men who served and survived, was welcomed home as a hero. And like the other heroes, he did not speak of his horror or his fear or his grief. The heroes did not know what words to use or who to tell them to or see what good would come of describing the terror that awaited them in their dreams each night or speaking of the panic that seized them inexplicably at the breakfast table or revealing the shameful need to weep alone because the war still raged within them.

And because the heroes like Gerald did not speak of it, the horror and fear and grief reverberated instead in their harsh words to their children, or their wordless evenings with their wives in their homes where the floors were made of eggshells. They knew their families lived in fear of them and their rage that would come and go without warning, sometimes at the end of a fist, sometimes in yelling at the top of their lungs, sometimes at the bottom of a bottle. The tyranny of their pain made the heroes into tyrants, forcing some of them, like Gerald, to seek control over anyone or anything they could because they could not control their own suffering and they did not know why.

Gerald married Jo, Matilda’s mother, when she was only seventeen years old, in 1947. She was fatherless and brotherless due to the war, and being fourteen years his junior, she knew too little of life to put up much resistance to his ways. She was easy for him to control as she was too afraid to disagree with him, and this was reason enough for him to love her. But she had been a mere child during the war that made him the man he became, so she did not remember its brutality, and this was reason enough for him to resent her.

Jo was dutiful and quiet, having no other choice for her own survival than to keep the house and tend to baby Matilda in strict accordance with Gerald’s directives, staying out of his way, doing as she was told. When he complained that the tea was cold, she warmed it, and then accepted the slap when the next cup she gave him was too hot. When he threw his breakfast across the room because she was a silly, stupid girl who could not even boil an egg, she simply picked up the plate from the floor, cleaned the wall, and boiled another. When he did not come home until after midnight, smelling of beer and cigarettes and other women, Jo pretended to be asleep. She never asked him where he’d been. She wished he would have stayed there longer, wherever it was.

Jo was meek and obedient. There was nowhere else for her to go, and when Matilda was born she became even meeker, even more obedient. The only thing Jo ever did without asking Gerald for permission was to die suddenly in the middle of the night. Jo did not know she had been born with a weak heart, weakened further by Gerald’s rage and abuse, and further still by pregnancy. Left alone now with their baby girl and her little face, so much like her mother’s, was reason enough for Gerald to regret the kind of man he had been to his young wife. Though it wasn’t enough to make him a better one.