by Rachel Joyce
Enid’s shoulders slumped forward. She made a tiny sound like a doll that you turn upside down. “Muh muh muh.” She reached for her handkerchief very slowly and held it to her nose and blew. Then she made a ball of the handkerchief and told the rest.
“I stayed at home. I brushed my hair and waited for the police to come and arrest me. I knew what I’d done was a crime, and I knew I had to pay for it. Somehow in my head I thought the police would know that, too. But they didn’t come. I don’t really know what happened after that. If I ate or slept, I can’t remember.
“Then something else came. It wasn’t the police. It was your letter. It was your last-minute invitation to New Caledonia, and it was like a special lucky sign. A sign from Perce that I had done the right thing and now he wanted me to get away from Britain, and be safe. So I closed all the curtains, I made his suits hang all nicely in the wardrobe, and I tidied the house before I packed everything I owned, ready to depart. I put on my best pink suit. I wrapped Perce’s razor and put it out with the rubbish. But even as I left the house, a part of me was still waiting for the police to stop me.”
Enid paused. She opened her handbag and passed Margery a scrap of newspaper. A British one. Margery read the headline. SPINSTER TEACHER IN DARK LOVE TRIANGLE. Presumably it was the paper she’d caught Enid reading outside the café. Beneath the headline was a pen drawing. A cartoon.
“Enid? Is that supposed to be me?”
“Yes, Marge.”
“But, Enid, I have no head.”
“You’ve become a bit of a joke.”
“I have?”
“Yes.”
“In Great Britain?”
“I’m sorry, Marge.”
It was like looking at something underwater. At first she couldn’t make sense of it. What she was staring at was a sketch of a large woman brandishing an ax but lacking a head. The artist had, however, given her big legs. And maybe to make up for the lack of head, he had also given her feet the size of planks. Briefly the sketch came back to her from the school. That terrible sketch, all those months ago, with the mad bird’s nest hair and potato nose. She even remembered the British consulate wives laughing at her best frock. She felt hot and smothered with shame, yet also strangely calm. She said quietly, “A joke. Of course I am. A joke.” Then her hands began to tremble, and it was hard to stop them. She handed back the article, and Enid tore it to smaller and smaller pieces that fell to the ground.
“Marge? Has a pregnant woman ever been hanged?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would they let me have the baby first?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who would look after my baby when I was dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“It took two goes to kill Norman Skinner. They had to retie the noose and do it again.”
It was too much. This was not the kind of conversation Margery had the vocabulary to enter. Nothing about her life so far had prepared her: her father had walked away, her mother had spent her life in a chair, her aunts had prayed, while Barbara had mainly bashed things. Margery was so out of her depth she didn’t even know what to call Enid anymore. Surely not Nancy: Enid was the most Enidy person she’d ever met. And yet despite all her inadequacies and shortcomings, she didn’t want to fail Enid. She wanted to be woman enough to meet her. She didn’t want to be that awful cartoon sketch.
Enid reached for her red valise. Slipping her other hand down her bra, she pulled out a key and undid the lock. She rested one hand on the chair so that she could struggle down to her knees, and pushed open the lid. She swiveled the case round so that Margery could see. At first, Margery thought it must be a mistake. Once again, she had to bite on the impulse to laugh. “Pillows? We’ve come all this way, and all you’ve been hiding are two pillows?”
Enid gave a gasp as if she’d run too fast and was about to fall. She lifted the pillows, and crushed them in her arms, keening, pushing her face into them, one cheek, then the other. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I just thought everything would be all right, so long as I kept the pillows safe. Oh, God, Marge. I’m so sorry. Oh, God, what have I done? I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you so many times. But I couldn’t, Marge. It was too terrible.”
Crouched on the floor, she looked tiny. She was the size of a house but so frail now that a whisper of wind might take her away. As Enid cried and dug her face into the pillows, looking for comfort that was not there, Margery stepped forward and helped Enid to her feet, then took her solidly in her arms. She remained braced and poised while Enid howled and shook and cried so hard she seemed made of bone and liquid. Margery placed her feet squarely and did not let go. Her shoulder was sodden, so was her neck. Once Enid even roared and pummeled her with her fists, then fell limp again and sobbed. As Margery held tight, she did something she had not done for a long time. She noticed the smell of Enid. She breathed it in. But no matter how hard she tried, it didn’t seem the same. It wasn’t big and bold and offensive anymore; it was a new kind of smell that was so lonely and frightened she could hardly bear it. She kept taking it in, trying to find something in the smell that would take her back to the way things had been before Enid had admitted the truth about Perce.
But it wasn’t there. Everything was different.
* * *
—
Margery persuaded Enid not to go to the French police. She helped her to undress and wash her face, then put her to bed. Enid asked what they should do, and Margery said she didn’t know yet, but she was going to work it out. Afterward she stayed on the veranda, watching the trees in the dark, whitened by the moon, which hung high and so full it looked like a cutout. It struck her again: a life was such a short thing. All those things people carried, and struggled to carry, yet one day they would disappear, and so would the suffering inside them, and all that would be left was this. The trees, the moon, the dark. The stars were a mesh of holes, so many you could have sewn them together and made a blanket. She thought of the museum. Her beetle collection. The day her father had walked away. And she put those stories together, just as she’d tried to link the stars, and it occurred to her that where she was now was not the ending she’d written in her mind. And even though the not knowing inside her would mean nothing one day, for now it meant everything, and she must do something.
Throughout her life, she had treated grief like a powerful engine that she could avoid if she got out of its way. But this time was different. Deep inside, she’d sensed for a long time that Enid was running from something terrible. She had sensed it in every way except with her brain. And now that she knew, it seemed obvious. Suddenly there was nothing she remembered that didn’t hold a clue. Even the first time she saw Enid, smoking nervously across the concourse at Fenchurch Street station. Her story was so full of wild bad luck it was hard to believe it had happened, yet Margery did. She believed every word Enid had told her.
Morning came, and it was small and blue. The moon turned from silver to chalk. Margery knocked on Enid’s door and crept inside. Enid was asleep beneath her mosquito net with her mouth wide open, like an animal that had been chased down a hole. Light lay across the room in strips like bamboo and the only sound from outside was the gentle flapping of palm fronds.
Margery knelt at Enid’s side. She whispered, “Enid?”
“Yes, Marge?”
“What do I call you? Do I call you Nancy?”
Enid kept her eyes closed. She seemed to want to remain as close to sleep as she could. She barely even opened her mouth. “No. Call me Enid. I’m Enid now.” Her voice was low.
“Is there anything else I don’t know? Because you have to tell me. If I am going to help you, I have to know everything.”
“I’ve told you everything. Are you going to turn me in?”
“No.”
“What will you do?”
“Sta
y with you.”
“Are you angry?”
She couldn’t even answer that.
“Do you think my baby is still okay?”
“Yes, Enid.”
“What about the ship? It leaves in a less than a week.”
“I won’t take it.”
“But what will happen to your collection? How will you get it to the museum?”
“I don’t know, Enid. I don’t know yet. Get more sleep. You look pale. I’m going to buy food. We need to eat, Enid. Then I can work out what to do next.”
* * *
—
The sun was high already. It was good to be on her feet. It was good to have a task. The dirt track was soft and red beneath her boots. Either side, the treetops were bright green clumps, and the sharp smell of pine was in the air. Beyond the trees stood the mountain, its two prongs piercing the great blue of the sky. She had no idea how they would keep going. She had no idea where they would hide, or how she would get her collection home. She didn’t know what they were going to do for money. They couldn’t even sell their tickets for the RMS Orion. The boys from the shantytown ran out to say hello, but seeing her alone—and, more significantly, not in the jeep—they politely turned away.
The gold beetle was nothing anymore. Her ambition was nothing. Her only thoughts were of Enid. Last night her mind had felt slow to keep up, but now it was filled with scattered thoughts, like a hundred birds in a tree. If only she could talk it through with someone.
In the end she spoke to her shadow. Given the present circumstances, it was the best she could come up with. It hung behind. A bit sulky.
“No one knows where Enid is right now. That’s good. But the police are searching for her. That’s not good. She stole the collecting equipment and the jeep. That’s not good, either.
“It’s not safe to go back to Nouméa. But she’s going to have a baby in May. There’s also the problem of the visa. And Enid doesn’t have a passport. Even if we could leave the island, where would we go next?” Lie low for the time being. It was the best she could think of. Stay on at the Last Place until she had a better plan. No one knew where they were. And hadn’t Mrs. Peter Wiggs said it at the British consul party? People got lost in the far north. The best thing they could do for now was absolutely nothing—the very thing she had once been so good at. Before she knew it, the dirt track had ended and she was in the middle of Poum, such as it was. She passed some goats and some old men and made her way to the shop, where she bought eggs, fruit, yams, and salt for Enid. She hunted the shelves, but there was no sign of a British newspaper.
Outside, Margery caught sight of her reflection in the shop window. She paused. It was the first time she’d seen what she looked like in weeks, and she barely knew herself. Just as Enid had seemed smaller on the veranda, Margery seemed to have grown again. And not in terms of weight or width—she’d lost both those. Despite the bandages on her calves, the muscles in her legs appeared firm and strong. Enid was right. She had good legs. They had carried her up and down the mountain, and she loved them. Her shoulders were sturdy and capable. They had borne her haversack every day without complaining. She had the look of someone she’d known about but never met. And then it occurred to her that the person she looked like was Margery Benson. She removed her helmet for a better inspection. She took in her big yellow hair—thank you, Enid—she stared at her bright eyes, her solid jaw, her dark, round cheeks.
She was not the face she’d seen reflected all those years ago in the glass cases of the Natural History Museum. Neither was she a woman with no head. But she was possibly a woman who had not held it very high until now. And she liked it. She liked how strong it was, how intelligent, how kind. She even liked her yellow hair. She wetted her palm and smoothed it around her ears. This head was not the kind of head that gave up, or failed her friend.
Margery made her way along the dirt track back to the bungalow. She would do the unthinkable. She would sell her entire collection of beetles. She would not present it to the Natural History Museum. It contained rare species; she knew that. There were private collectors who would pay good money and not be fastidious about the paperwork. She would pin every specimen and label them, and get the whole collection in perfect order. She would write to the Royal Entomological Society about a buyer. Within a month, she would have enough money to get Enid away from the island. She would find a way to put her flat on the market. So, even though she had believed a few hours ago that she was staring catastrophe in the face, she found there was still this small place in which to hope. Far away a bird whooped, as if its insides were being scraped out with a spoon. She slowed to listen.
Her blood stopped. Everything inside her stopped. It wasn’t a bird. And it wasn’t whooping. It was Enid. Enid was screaming.
Margery dropped the eggs. The salt. The yams. She ran.
Mrs. Pope was in full flow at Friday craftwork. The wives were surrounded by cut-out felt Easter bunny pieces that they were assembling for the orphanage. There were separate ears and tails, as well as little gray rabbit bodies, but no one had touched them. They had barely touched their coffee, either. “You mean,” said Daphne Ginger, “she is not who she said she was?”
“That is exactly what I mean.”
“How do you know, Mrs. Pope?”
The expectation in the room was as sharp as lights. It was like stepping onto a stage. Mrs. Pope took her cue.
In brief, there had been another significant development. She had heard from the Natural History Museum. Or, more specifically, the Natural History Museum had heard from her. Frustrated with waiting for a reply—and frustrated also by her Valentine’s Day party, which had been a disaster: barely anyone had come, let alone bothered with fancy dress; worse, Maurice was openly flirting all night and had even disappeared for a while down in the garden—Mrs. Pope had taken matters into her own hands. She had made use of her British consulate connections and requested a long-distance trunk call to London.
No one from the Entomology Department of the Natural History Museum had heard of Margery Benson. No one had sent her on an expedition. There were no women working in the department. As for New Caledonia, they weren’t entirely sure where it was.
The wives collectively gasped.
“You mean,” said Daphne Ginger at last, “that they are not real?”
“Of course they are real, Daphne. They are here.”
“Are they spies, after all?”
“No.”
“Are they Communists?”
“I doubt they have one political bone between them.”
The British wives continued to stare at Mrs. Pope with open mouths, like helpless chicks waiting to be fed. “What are they, Mrs. Pope?”
Mrs. Pope put down her sewing. She drew her head tall. She paused, she paused, she paused. Then she delivered her line: “They are Nancy Collett and Woman With No Head.”
The wives sat, stunned. Even more stunned than before. Mrs. Pope took advantage of their shock to produce a dossier of newspaper clippings. She had got hold of every British journal she could find; fortunately everything was delivered to the consulate, even the lower-class rags. She swept aside the craftwork from the table, and where there had been needles and thread and pieces of cut-out felt, she now laid out her articles, side by side. A picture of Nancy Collett getting married; another with her husband at a chimps’ tea party; a third in a hat with cherries. The women peered closer.
“It’s terribly difficult to tell who it is,” said Coral Pepper. “There isn’t really a close-up of her face. Mostly she’s hidden by other things.”
“And who is that other one? The cartoon?” asked Daphne.
“That is Miss Benson.”
“But she has no head.”
“It’s an artist’s impression.”
Mrs. Pope thumbed through her newspaper cuttings, searching for
the only one that actually revealed Miss Benson’s full name. The wives picked it up and read, and passed it round, then the other articles, one by one. They took in the headlines carefully, the details of the crime, the witness accounts, the stories from Nancy Collett’s lovers.
WHERE IS NANCY COLLETT?
THIS WOMAN MUST HANG.
BRITAIN’S MOST WANTED CRIMINAL.
What should they do? Go to the French police? Phone the British government? Write to the king?
Mrs. Pope said, “These women must be arrested. They must be taken back to Britain. They must be tried. They killed a war hero. We simply cannot sit here and allow them to get away with it.” The women nodded.
Then a girlish voice said: “Victoria.”
A sudden hush. You could have cut through it with craft scissors. No one ever called Mrs. Pope by her actual name. Not even Maurice used it—though presumably he didn’t call her Mrs. Pope in bed. But if anyone had that thought, they ran away from it. It wasn’t something anyone wanted to dwell on.
The voice came again. A little bolder. “Victoria, you are getting carried away.”
Mrs. Pope turned. “Mrs. Wiggs? Are you questioning my judgment?”
Dolly had flared the red of a tulip. Even her neck was red; so were the lobes of her ears. “Victoria. I’m sorry. But when Daphne suggested this a few weeks ago, you warned us all to be sensible.”