Five(21)

With his one good eye and the tremor that was all in his head, he continued to deliver the post. With Jo gone, the sad target of his cruelty buried, he did not, thankfully, turn his ire on Matilda. She’s only a baby, he’d remind himself; She’s just a little girl, he would think as she grew, when he could feel rage rising; She doesn’t have a mother, he’d mourn to himself on behalf of his daughter.

Then he would remember Jo, lying cold and placid beside him that morning he found her dead. He would remember touching her gray cheek and understanding that she was gone. The guilt gnawed at him that he had made the short time she had on earth a misery. Gerald’s anger would then become sadness, which was safer for Matilda because it made him silent. And his silence, though it was thick and heavy and impenetrable, at least protected her from his wrath.

But it did not protect everyone. Because Gerald sometimes purposely delivered the wrong letters to the wrong people. He sometimes sat and smoked a pipe in the front room while he put strangers’ letters on the fire one by one and watched them burn.

Gerald did his best to suppress, to dampen, to extinguish his pain. But then he found a new way to smother his anguish. He sometimes brought home a sack stamped Royal Mail that did not contain any letters at all, but something else entirely.

He brings home such a sack tonight. “Matilda,” he says, “we’ve got work to do. Prepare the table.” So dutiful and quiet Matilda, fifteen by now, sterilizes the kitchen in strict accordance with her father’s directives as she has many times in the past five years since he began this strange work, following Gerald’s orders and ignoring her own instincts, avoiding looking at the sack until it is time. She covers the table with old newspapers kept for their evening’s work. She stands on a stool to get her father’s surgical tools from the high shelf.

“Shall we have supper first, Father, before the work?” she asks, hopefully, her stomach grumbling at her.

“Have you found the scalpel?” Gerald says, ignoring her question, placing the sack on the table. Matilda notices that tonight’s sack is heavier than usual and that her father is more determined. There is an edge to his voice that it did not used to have when he started all of this. Her heart sinks and her nerves go on alert, but still she stays quiet, and she does as she is told.



* * *





If what they did together was not love, then Matilda did not know another name for it. She knew it was all the love that Gerald knew how to give.

Matilda had been held as a baby by the kind neighbor women who helped Gerald in the early years when she was left motherless. By her aunt, Gerald’s sister, before she got married and moved to Yorkshire. By mothers in shops who saw Gerald struggling when Matilda fussed, by mothers in doctors’ waiting rooms when they saw he didn’t know what to do about her crying, by women along his postal route the one day when the neighbor was sick and he couldn’t find anyone to mind her so he’d just made a sling and carried her inside his uniform coat while he worked. At the depot when clocking in and out, he put her inside his mailbag for a few minutes so she wouldn’t be detected. She didn’t cry. She seemed to understand what a bind he was in.

But the loving, motherly hands of strangers that come and go are not a substitute for the hands of one’s own mother, always there, open and waiting. Matilda had the hands of her father for practical support: transport, feeding, changing. He did not hold her longer than was necessary. He did not hold her just because she was his own. He let her cry through the night until she learned there would be no point to it.

She started walking before she was a year old, not from precociousness, but from a sense even in her infancy that she needed to make herself more convenient for her father to live with. She cried little, and all her minders called her a “good baby,” but if she could have spoken, she would have pointed out that she was just being pragmatic, because she had to be. Because life for her father was already hard enough.

As she grew, he bought her things to play with, he even smiled sometimes when he saw her joy, but he did not play with her, although she wished he would. He didn’t know how.

When books replaced toys as her prized possessions, he bought her those too, realizing a few years too late that perhaps he should have read to her in the evenings, perhaps she would have liked that, and feeling sad that she was now too old for it. Except that she wasn’t, and had he asked, she would have said, “Yes, Papa,” she would have loved for him to read to her, she would have gladly curled up under his arm and listened to Anne of Green Gables or The Famous Five. But she knew that he wasn’t capable of that. Although he could not hold her or hug her or kiss her on the forehead in the way of fathers, when he stood in a bookshop and thought of her and bought her a book and left it on her desk without a word, she knew that what he left there was his love.

Gerald spoke little to Matilda, and he looked at her even less as she grew and Jo’s eyes started looking back at him. He did not ask her questions about school or friendships or her dreams and aspirations. It did not occur to him to ask, as a mother would, and even if it had, he would not have been able to endure her answers, delivered with the same rasp in her tone that Jo had. Matilda would have volunteered small anecdotes from her small life, but she was never sure whether it was safe to disrupt her father’s quiet moods, whether if she spoke to him he would nod, or grunt, or simply withdraw further to the place she knew he went sometimes where she could not follow him.