8 Belinda

Whatever Mama does all day, she is always harassed.

Since nobody has much time to play with me, I play alone or with the sister I am sure I should have had. Mama has sewn me a doll, which she calls Belinda. I want to call her Susie, but Mama thinks the name is inappropriate for such a beautiful doll. She refers to the doll as Belinda so persistently that I forget my own name for her. If I had a sister, she would be called Susie, I decide.

The most sensational part about Belinda is that she is brown. She has the china face of a sunburnt cherubim and her hair is painted onto her smooth head in shiny, jet black, inky crinkles. She is dressed in a pink lace smock with bows, sewn specially for her by Mama, and she is my favourite plaything, despite her name.

I take her everywhere until one day the most terrible thing happens. I am running across the garden path when I trip and fall headlong, crushing poor Belinda. When I dare to open my eyes and look at the devastation, her head has a huge hole in it. I can see inside to where the eyes are fixed and where the neck joins the brown satin of her stuffed body.

I sit on the garden path and mourn. What am I to do? And what kind of punishment awaits me for such a terrible crime?

I gather Belinda up in her blanket and we go into the potting shed, where no one can see our misery.

I look around. There is a wide gap between some garden tools and the wall. I wrap Belinda in some old rags and push her out of sight. Then I make a sausage out of the blanket and holding it like a baby rush into the house and into my bedroom.

From now on I will never play with dolls ever again. Not ever.

I find a painting book and some pencils and go downstairs into the living room. My misadventure has gone unnoticed. Belinda is safe, and so am I.

At first it is very hard to imagine life without Belinda. I pretend it is my sister who I have lost, and spend long hours on the garden swing singing all the sad songs I can think of. But as the days pass, I am ashamed to say that I have all but forgotten her, and I assume that everyone else has, too.

Then, one day, when I am sitting at the kitchen table drawing a particularly nice princess in a pink crinoline with yellow corkscrew curls reaching almost to her waist, Mama asks out of the blue:

"Where’s your dolly?”

"Which dolly?" I reply, my heart lurching suddenly in my throat.

"Belinda, of course.”

Mama looks at me closely.

“Don’t you like her any more?" she queries.

"Oh, Belinda. She’s asleep," I lie.

"Where is she asleep, Faith?" Mama asks. ‘She’s not in your room."

"In...in the shed," I tell her, quite truthfully.

My face feels red and I think I’m going to cry, but just then the phone rings and Mama hurries to answer it.

Again I push the issue of Belinda’s smashed head to the back of my mind. I am practising something that is to stand me in good stead in years to come: escapism. I sneak into the front room, which is cold and smells unused. It’s the room with the old, upright piano Mama likes to play when the housework leaves her space to do so. She does not heat the room unless we have visitors, which is seldom, because that would mean making a fire with wood and coal and time is too precious to be wasted on home comforts such as a warm room. An extra cardigan will warm me up, she always says.

Mama does not know what I do in the front room when I am not playing the piano standing up. It’s my secret pleasure to draw more pictures, one after another, all of them showing the same princess with wild corkscrew curls and crinoline with bows. I draw most of them on the inside covers of Mama’s books.

Since Belinda is no longer here to share my life, I am deeply fascinated by the secret shadows that keep popping up in the shaft of light issuing from the hallway through my open bedroom door. I’m not really afraid of the dark. I talk to myself and Susie and the shadows. I tell us stories about princesses and witches and talking animals and God.

I am a fervent believer in God. Up to now he hasn’t really disappointed me. I tell him all the things that have bothered me during the day and make fervent wishes for the future. Going to Sunday school, which means I am old enough to be briefly somewhere beyond parental supervision, is making a deep and lasting impression on me. Dada always tells me that God loves everybody. I take that idea on board with deep credulity, for love is word we do not bandy around in my family. Mama never uses it at all, since her idea of God is essentially Old Testament and bound up with eye for eye and tooth for tooth mechanisms. I never find out if God is involved in revenge. My idea of God in those days is benevolence and goodness, though there is a corner of me that does not believe anyone or anything can exist that is the fantastic idea of humans. I ask myself what people did before they learnt to talk words for all the thoughts I have.  

Despite Mama’s mistrust of anything bordering on tenderness, Dada never seems to lose patience. He just soldiers on, and his fortitude is a noble example to me, impatient and impulsive as I am. But I still don’t manage to confess to him my mishap with Belinda.

When the birds are singing in the trees and the sun is shining and somebody smiles at me, I am relieved that I can believe that God must be out there somewhere, so warmed am I by their smile. If only Mama would smile a bit more often, she could bathe in the warmth of people smiling back at her, too.

Aunt Jane smiles a lot. She imparts warmth and kindness to strangers at the baby clinic. She advises distraught mothers how to cope on a shoestring, handing out free orange juice and plenty of sound advice. Mama thinks helping others is too much to ask of anyone who finds just coping with her own life is too arduous most of the time.

Mama just goes about her daily routine, never finishing, seldom pausing, and avoiding any Good Samaritan actions, or even plain friendships. She gives me my first lessons on how to be a recluse, warning me never to outstay my welcome anywhere, so that I spend most of the time wondering whether I am doing just that, though I don’t really know what it entails.

Unsurprisingly, I become more silent and morose as time goes on, and my features seem to frown like my alabaster bust of Beethoven. When I later discover his piano music, it is as though I have arrived at a safe haven. But now the war is still raging, and Tin Pan Alley is the usual fare. Beethoven and all his illustrious German colleagues have been banned by the War Office, for fear of musical contamination, I suppose. Fancy banning music that was written donkey’s years ago just because of fighting the enemy. I do not even know what an enemy is and no one bothers to explain.

I often ask myself how my sister would have behaved in my place. Then I remember that she did not want to come with me into this world, and resolve to forget her. But I can’t. Just when I think I am being a good girl, I do something totally unexpected, and have to admit that I couldn’t possibly have thought of it by myself, so my lost sister must be responsible.

And then something else happens, and I wonder if my sister has changed her mind and means to be part of our family after all. Time will tell that this is only empty speculation.