When Ellie had mentioned that her mother worked as a dresser in a theatre, Miss Wilkins picked up on this.
‘Tell us about it,’ she suggested.
‘’Ow d’you mean, tell ’em about it?’ Ellie asked in surprise.
It was just half an hour until the bell rang for the end of school. Miss Wilkins usually read to the class at that stage of the day.
‘None of us has been backstage in a theatre,’ Miss Wilkins said. ‘We want to know what a dresser does, how you helped.’
Miss Wilkins didn’t expect much from Ellie. Speaking out in a group was one thing, but standing up alone and making it interesting enough to hold anyone’s attention for more than a few moments was hard for any child, even one as confident as Ellie.
But as Ellie began to speak, Miss Wilkins found herself being richly entertained.
Ellie began by describing how her mother put out all the costumes with the accessories for each performer. Unconsciously, she soon slipped into acting it out.
She mimed her mother’s exertions at lacing a fat singer into a corset, then strutted around being the singer trying out a few tentative notes. She described the chorus girls’ pushing and shoving to see in one mirror, acting it out with provocative wiggles and pouts. The children experienced Polly Forester’s rush against the clock, darting around the overcrowded dressing-room, putting a fan in one hand, a feather boa on someone’s shoulders. Ellie kept up the dialogue, too, the plummy tones of some of the actors and actresses, with her mother’s rich cockney voice admonishing them to keep still while she did last-minute running repairs to their costumes. The picture she painted was so vivid that every child in the class was spellbound.
The bell for the end of school ended it all abruptly, but for once not one child leapt to his or her feet anxious to leave.
Since then Ellie had been called on many a time for impromptu performances. She could create a scene on the underground trains, become a market trader bawling out his sales pitch, or a harassed mother with four children in tow. But one memorable sketch Ellie had performed now came sharply into focus: Miss Gilbert preparing a meal, counting out the potatoes and carrots, measuring the loaf with a piece of string in case Mr Gilbert’s apprentice was to nip in behind her back to steal a slice. Miss Wilkins had assumed then it was exaggerated for comic effect. Now she was sure the reality was probably worse.
Miss Wilkins had known Grace Gilbert since they were children. Grace had always been odd – a withdrawn, whey-faced girl who peered out through the gates of the undertakers at other children and ran away when anyone tried to befriend her. Since reaching adulthood, there had always been rumours about her. Miss Wilkins didn’t believe all these tales, because she knew people whispered about her too, for different reasons. But it was certainly true that Grace Gilbert wasn’t entirely normal. She had a well-documented obsession with cleaning, she was a skinflint and she was impossible to like. But if Grace Gilbert was now ill-treating a child in her care, it was time her brother put a stop to it.
Miss Wilkins hesitated at the gates of Gilbert’s yard. It was half past five and already dark and the undertakers yard was a daunting place for anyone.
She knew Amos was in his workshop; she could hear the sound of sawing and smell the woodshavings, even though because of the black-out no lights were visible.
A row of tombstones glowed eerily further into the yard. She had no way of gauging how deep the puddle of water in front of her was, and she couldn’t call at the shop door as she had no wish to run into Ellie or Miss Gilbert just now. This talk with Amos was intended to be a private matter.
Miss Wilkins crossed the puddle, which wasn’t deep after all, and tapped lightly on the door of the workshop.
‘Come in,’ he called back.
She opened the door, went in and quickly shut it behind her. ‘Good evening Amos,’ she said.
Amos was making a tiny coffin on his workbench by the light of an overhanging hurricane lamp. Dressed for funerals in a black frock-coat, wing-collar and top hat he was a formidable-looking man, but here he was just a craftsman wearing working-men’s clothes, rugged, muscular and comfortably ordinary.
His workshop was a surprisingly agreeable place to be in, despite the many different-sized, half-completed coffins standing on their ends like sentry boxes. A small stove kept it warm, a six-foot cabinet of small glass-fronted drawers held all his handles, screws and other equipment and his planes, saws and chisels were hung on the walls with the kind of care which suggested this was where he was happiest. There was still enough harnessing, bridles and other equipment hanging up on the walls and rough beams to show it had once been a stable. The timber stacked up in the old hayloft filled the air with its pungent smell.
‘Well, Dora!’ Amos looked surprised but pleased to see her. ‘It’s a few years since you last came in here.’
The teacher smiled. She and Amos had been close friends as small children. As a boy he’d had a great sense of fun and they’d played together up in that hayloft on many an occasion.
Amos had always been quite different from his older sister. He shared her grey eyes and thin lips, but not her pallor or nature. Even now he still retained his ruddy, wholesome appearance and the same shy, warm smile she remembered.
Here in the workshop, Amos was a carpenter, a job she seemed to remember he would have preferred. But considering the serious nature of his profession, the responsibility for the family business and the company of Grace, it wasn’t really surprising he had become a dour and perhaps lonely man.
Miss Wilkins saw the meticulous care he was taking with the tiny coffin, and felt saddened that his craftsmanship was destined to rot away six foot underground instead of making fine furniture for generations to come.
Amos saw her glance at the small coffin and lifted it from his workbench, putting it down on the floor out of sight. ‘The Sawyers’ little one,’ he said gruffly, his grey eyes compassionate. ‘I expect you heard she died. A baby’s death is something I never come to terms with, not even after all these years.’
‘I don’t know how you do it,’ she said. ‘You were always so adamant you wouldn’t follow your father.’
‘You were going to be an actress,’ he replied. ‘Remember us putting on a play up there?’ He nodded towards the hayloft. ‘You were the Queen and I was Sir Francis Drake.’ His words were a gentle reminder that most people’s dreams had to take second place to duty.
‘We had some good times back then.’ Miss Wilkins half smiled at the memory of knighting Amos with a poker as he kneeled at her feet. ‘But this isn’t a social call, Amos, I came to talk to you about Ellie.’
Amos was always gentlemanly. He pulled a stool out from beneath a bench, dusted it off and offered it to her.
‘What’s she been up to?’ he asked, brushing back his dark hair with one hand. Miss Wilkins noted the way his eyes twinkled and she knew immediately that he liked the girl.
Amos hadn’t wanted an evacuee foisted on him. He had no experience with children and Grace had even less. But once Grace knew there was money in it, she was determined to have one. And despite Amos’s reservations, he had grown to like Ellie. She was eager to please, nimble-fingered and when they were working alone out here she made him laugh with her impersonations of neighbours. Inside the house he rarely saw her because of the long hours he worked. Grace was always sharp with her, but then she was with everyone.
‘Ellie hasn’t done anything. It’s your sister,’ Miss Wilkins said quietly. ‘I’m very concerned, Amos, and I’m counting on your help to put things right.’
Amos frowned, sat down on an upturned box and took his pipe out of his pocket. ‘Tell me, Dora.’
Dora spoke first of Ellie’s weight-loss and general condition, mentioning the girl’s work-reddened hands and her suspicions about Grace’s ill-treatment of her. It was excruciatingly embarrassing to bring up the tale of last night’s events to a man, especially an unmarried one, but she managed it with a few euphemisms.
Miss Wilkins could see by the way his face reddened and his eyes couldn’t meet hers that Amos was embarrassed. But there was something more. She sensed she’d struck a sensitive chord in him: she could almost hear his thought processes, and the unvoiced question, Why hadn’t he realised what was going on under his own roof?
‘Girls at puberty are very sensitive,’ she explained. ‘Ellie would be mortified to know I’d divulged anything like this to you, but you must take Grace in hand, Amos. She can’t be allowed to take out her bitterness on a young girl, especially one as vulnerable as Ellie.’
Amos sucked on his pipe thoughtfully. Grace had never been like others, although Amos, being three years younger, had just accepted her oddness in the way any brother would. She was eighteen and Amos fifteen in the summer of 1912, when Sean O’Leary and Meg Butterworth died. Twenty-eight years on he still hadn’t managed to squash those dark suspicions about his sister’s part in it.
Grace had blighted his life. As a young lad he’d taken stick from his friends at having such a queer sister. Because of her he’d felt compelled to stick to the family business rather than break away and become a carpenter.
Even if the First War hadn’t taken most of the young men from the village, no man in his right mind would have wanted a mean-spirited woman like Grace for a wife. She flew into tantrums about nothing, she drove shopkeepers wild with fury when she picked over their goods, and if Amos hadn’t been firm enough to keep her away from bereaved relatives, her abrupt, cold manner might have lost them the family business too. But it was her cruelty that had always concerned Amos. He had seen her once strangle a kitten with her bare hands because it made a mess on the floor and the last apprentice that lived in the house had run away when she flogged him for helping himself to a slice of meat pie.
Because of his profession, Amos saw life from a different perspective to other men. He rarely met his neighbours except under circumstances of grief and distress and his sister’s temperament made it impossible to have any kind of social life. He was thirty before he fully realised he was trapped. His father died, leaving him not only the business, but also the burden of Grace. One by one he watched his old classmates get married, but girls shunned Amos not only because of how he made his living, but because of his sister. If he popped into a pub for a drink after a funeral, Grace became hysterical. If he even arranged to play a game of cricket on the long summer evenings, something would be damaged when he got home. Years ago, when Amos had been forced to call the doctor to sedate her during one of her hysterical rages, he’d been advised to have her committed to an asylum. Yet Amos couldn’t bring himself to do such a thing to his own sister. Instead he just humoured her and hoped she would improve with age.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ Amos said eventually. ‘I rarely see Ellie except when she helps me in here. I like her, Dora, and please believe me, I had no idea Grace was ill-treating her. Why hasn’t she complained before?’
Ellie had in many little ways made his life more comfortable. During the bitter winter she often warmed his coat by the stove in the mornings, and many a cold night he’d come home late at night to find she’d put a hot-water bottle in his bed. She helped him clear the snow from the yard, she sorted his drawers of handles and screws, swept up the floor in here and often brought him a mug of tea when he was working, unprompted by Grace.
‘I think she felt obligated to keep quiet,’ Miss Wilkins said. ‘She knew there was no other available billet in the town. She didn’t want to make her mother anxious. But above all Ellie’s a practical girl, Amos. She likes our school and loves the acting class and perhaps even believes she’s doing her duty for the war effort by accepting Grace’s tyranny.’
‘I wish she’d said something at the outset,’ Amos said. ‘I hope she isn’t afraid of me too.’
‘I don’t think she’s afraid of anyone,’ Miss Wilkins said firmly. ‘She’s a brave, conscientious girl who tries hard to please people. That makes Grace’s behaviour even more despicable.’
‘What do you suggest I do about it?’ Amos asked. He was mortified that he hadn’t looked closer. ‘Are you saying Ellie should be taken away?’ He dreaded more gossip about his sister and he would miss Ellie too.
‘I wish I had room to have her with me,’ Miss Wilkins said, her soft brown eyes deeply troubled. ‘But I haven’t, and as childhood friends I don’t want you to be shamed further by this getting out. But if Ellie is to stay with you, you’ll have to change things. Ellie must have more food, more freedom to socialise with other girls, and she mustn’t be humiliated and used as a slave. Unless I see a dramatic improvement in the next few days, I’ll have no choice but to report Grace.’
She stood up, anxious to get home now she’d said her piece. She felt sorry for Amos; his life was bleak enough with such a sister, without her adding to his burdens. But she knew he was an honourable man and she trusted him to act fairly.
‘I’ll do what I can, Dora.’ Amos stood up and held out his hand. ‘I’m sorry about all this.’
‘We have to pull together.’ Miss Wilkins smiled as his big calloused hand gripped hers. It was unfair that people had such aversion to undertakers. There was a great deal more to the profession than a man in a black frock-coat, driving a gleaming hearse filled with flowers. His role was akin to doctors’ and priests’ as he offered consolation and organisation at the lowest point in people’s lives, yet he received no praise or admiration. ‘I’ve got a feeling that this war is going to get tough soon for all of us. The children are England’s future and it’s vitally important that each one of them is cared for, emotionally as well as physically.’
‘I want to talk to you, Grace,’ Amos said once the supper things had been cleared away. Ellie had gone into the living-room to do some homework and he’d noted for himself how pale and drawn the girl looked.
‘What about?’ Grace said sharply. She was taking down some airing clothes from the hoist, and her head jerked round, giving him one of her bird-of-prey chilling looks.
Grace had never been attractive, not even as a child. Her voice was shrill, her features sharp, hair dull and stringy. Even as she slipped into middle age, her body had stayed as flat and unyielding as one of Amos’s planks of timber.
‘Into the parlour. Now.’
‘The fire isn’t lit,’ she snapped.
Amos took no notice and marched on ahead, fixing the black-out curtains firmly, then drawing the curtains over the top and switching on the light.
Grace followed him, but instead of sitting down, began to fuss with the curtains.
Amos disliked this room intensely. Since his parents’ deaths Grace’s personality had stolen the warmth it once had and she had acquired still more ugly furniture and ornaments, making it claustrophobic and almost menacing.
‘Sit down at once,’ he ordered her. ‘We aren’t entertaining the vicar, this is just you and I.’
‘Don’t you speak to me like that,’ Grace wittered, clearly taken aback by her brother’s sharp tone.
She sat down primly on the hard leather chaise-longue. Amos was reminded that she was incapable of relaxing. In twenty years he hadn’t seen her slip off her shoes, or read anything more than the parish magazine or a newspaper. She was like a loaded gun, cocked ready to fire.
‘From what I understand I should have been watching you like a hawk,’ he said. ‘I’ve had Dora Wilkins round this evening and I don’t like what I’ve been hearing.’
Grace’s face was always the colour of old parchment, but at his words a flush of pink crept up her neck. ‘I suppose that girl has been telling lies about me,’ she said quickly.
‘Ellie has said very little.’ Amos tried very hard to control his anger. ‘I suspect if she’d told everything we’d have women throwing stones at our windows. How could you treat a child so heartlessly?’
Grace denied everything, just as he knew she would. She counteracted his charges of starving Ellie by insisting the girl had the same size meals a
s herself; that the only chores she gave her to do were simple ones and that Ellie was bone idle, greedy and stuffed up with self-importance.
‘She is none of those things,’ Amos said, tempted to slap his sister. ‘You on the other hand are crazy, Grace, you always have been.’
‘Me! Crazy?’ She made a cackling noise in her throat which was the closest she could get to a laugh. ‘How can you say such a thing after all I do for you?’
‘You know exactly what I mean.’ Amos gave her a withering look. ‘My memory is almost as sharp as your tongue and if I’d had any sense I should have had you committed to the asylum years ago. You’ve made my life a misery. But I won’t stand by and see you ill-treat a child in our care.’
She flew off the chaise-longue, reaching out to strike him, but Amos was too quick for her, catching hold of both her arms and pushing her back into her seat.
‘I’m warning you now,’ he said, speaking in a low, firm voice. ‘You’ll start undoing the wrong you’ve done. You’ll give Ellie the same meals as you give me. You’ll treat her with kindness, as far as you are capable of it, and she’ll have freedom to see her friends after school and on Saturdays. I’m going to speak to her myself and tell her the new arrangements. I shall make it quite clear she is answerable only to me in future. If there is any repetition of this kind of cruelty, I won’t think twice. I’ll be straight round to see the doctor and get you taken away. Do you understand?’
As Amos looked down at his sister he felt nothing but disgust. Her eyes were wild with fury and she had spittle at the corners of her thin mouth. He wondered if he could trust her not to strike behind his back.
‘Have I made myself plain?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she muttered. ‘I’ll do as you say.’
‘You’d better,’ he said, letting go of her. ‘Now go and make a cup of tea for us. I’m going to talk to Ellie.’
Ellie Page 9