The Italian Girl

by Patricia Hall

  “And Papa either can’t or won’t say anything,” Mower said.

  “Put your foot down, Kevin,” Thackeray said as the sergeant swung the car onto the main road back to the west. “Well, at least we’ve got an ID, which is more than we expected,” Mower said cheerfully, obediently pushing the car up to the speed limit. “That will put a few other families with missing daughters out of their misery.”

  “I doubt that,” Thackeray said. Mower glanced at his passenger’s rigid jaw and cursed himself roundly under his breath.

  Joyce Ackroyd was imperceptible and reluctantly coming to terms with her new home. Her room was on the ground floor on a corridor devoted to patients in need of nursing care, most of them convalescents who had been moved out of the Infirmary into ‘the community’. Having made a nodding acquaintance with some of her immediate neighbours, few of whom seemed ever to move from their beds, Joyce rather doubted that any of them would journey much further than the cemetery when they left The Laurels.

  She herself was determined to go home. She had been given her wheelchair at the hospital and had learned to manoevre herself slowly around the orthopaedic ward there. She saw no reason why she should not continue to become more mobile in her new environment and on her first morning had demanded to be helped out of bed and into the chair as soon as her breakfast tray had been cleared away. The nurse who had arrived to wash her and attend to her toilet looked doubtful.

  “The physiotherapist at the hospital said there was no reason why I shouldn’t walk again,” Joyce had said firmly. “It’ll take a bit of time and effort but then I’ll be going home again, don’t you fret.”

  “I’ll talk to matron,” the nurse promised.

  “You do that, dear,” Joyce said in her most forceful chair of the housing committee voice. Her persistence seemed to have been acknowledged, if not welcomed, when after lunch a sulky young assistant helped her into the chair, tucked a blanket round her legs and steered her out of the room and down the corridor towards the day room where the ostensibly more mobile residents spent most of their time in front of the television.

  “When do I get my physiotherapy? Do you know?” Joyce demanded before she was parked next to a comatose old man whose head had fallen onto his chest. His mouth was open and a thin trickle of saliva dribbled onto his Fair Isle sweater as he snored gently.

  “I don’t know owt about that,” the care assistant had said huffily before stomping off to attend to an old woman who was demanding the toilet at the far end of the room.

  “Three times a week they said I needed,” Joyce insisted, fighting down the faint and increasingly familiar feeling of panic which clutched at her chest. She had lain awake for hours the previous night trying to convince herself that she would be able to leave The Laurels and resume an independent life. She had failed, and not even the comforting daylight had fully restored her confidence. The longer she remained here, the more clearly she could see the trap of dependency closing its jaws around her, every ineffective protest making her weaker rather than stronger and sapping her will to escape. She nudged her neighbour, in the hope that he might hear, but he simply slumped further down into his chair, snoring more noisily.

  “My grand-daughter knows all about it,” Joyce persisted but she knew she was talking to herself by this time and her voice faded as she glanced round for support from the other residents. None of them could or would meet her gaze, and fighting back a treacherous tear she began to wheel herself jerkily across to the door leading into the conservatory.

  “Does this open?” she asked loudly.

  “It’s freezing cold out there, dear,” the assistant said. As far as Joyce could see she was the only member of staff on duty that afternoon.

  “I’m well wrapped up,” Joyce said huffily, reaching out awkwardly to try to open the door and wrenching her hip painfully in the process.

  “Mrs. Ackroyd!” the assistant said, hurrying over to help her. “You’re being a naughty girl, aren’t you?”

  “It would be offensive if I called you a girl, young woman,” Joyce said, her eyes sparkling now. “It’s a good sixty years since I could claim the epithet. Now, I want to go outside for a bit of fresh air. Is there any reason why not?”

  “I s’pose not,” the assistant said reluctantly, and opened the door for her, allowing her to manoeuvre the chair awkwardly into the dingy conservatory, and closing the door behind her again with a clatter. Joyce sighed. She had only demanded entrance to establish the fact that because she was elderly and temporarily incapacitated - very temporarily she told herself firmly again - she could not be treated like a backward child. Now she had got her way and was sitting in triumph amongst the desiccated geraniums she wondered why she had bothered.

  After a few minutes depressed contemplation of her fate, she was surprised to hear the door from the day room open quietly behind her. There was no easy way to spin her chair round to see who had come in so she waited while shuffling footfalls worked their way slowly round her and she found herself face-to-face with a wizened figure in a long drooping maroon skirt, carpet slippers and several layers of cardigans. She recognised one of the women who had been sitting gazing at the television a few minutes before and she smiled uncertainly at her, surprised to meet eyes of piercing blue in the lined and wrinkled face, eyes which were as alert and intelligent as her own.

  “It’s Joyce, isn’t it?” the woman said, her voice still firm even if the rest of her was not. “I thought I recognised you. Joyce Ackroyd, little Jackie’s mother.”

  “It’s been a long time if all you can remember is little Jackie,” Joyce said wryly. “He’s well over fifty and has had his first heart-attack, has my Jack. Getting his come-uppance for a mis-spent capitalist youth, you might say, is my Jack.”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” the woman said, lowering herself heavily into one of the cane conservatory chairs which creaked ominously under her weight. “But I knew you straight off, as soon as I saw you yesterday. You’ve not changed, you know, apart from you’ve lost that lovely red hair. Oh, I know we’re all on our last legs in here, but I’d have known that voice anywhere. And you’re still right bossy. I can remember you laying the law down all them years ago in Peter Street, always on about what the government were doing wrong that week.”

  “Alice?” Joyce said uncertainly. “Alice Smith?”

  “Right. Your lad used to run after our Keith the year we lived at up there. Don’t you remember?”

  “I remember,” Joyce said quietly, recalling Alice’s husband, haunted and haunting, sitting in the sunshine on the stone steps in front of the house gazing out with unseeing eyes over the town which was half obscured in a haze of smoke from the mills in the valley below. Not that the view had mattered a scrap, she thought. Whatever Fred Smith had been gazing at, she doubted that it was as close as the blackened roofs and tall chimneys of Bradfield.

  “You moved out before I did,” Joyce said softly as the memories came flooding back..

  “Aye, we got a place out Eckersley way,” Mrs. Smith said. “My husband were a priority case, they said, but he only lasted six months after we moved. They found him in t’lock on t’canal. Probably fell in, the coroner said, probably got dizzy and fell in. But I knew he’d jumped. He couldn’t escape, you see. He couldn’t escape when he were out there on that railway in Burma, and he couldn’t escape when he came back.”

  “I remember,” Joyce said, suddenly overwhelmed by the long, suffocating shadows of the past. “My man never came back at all,” she said.

  “We’d have been better off if Fred hadn’t come back neither,” Alice said fiercely. “He were no use to me and he frightened our Keith half to death. Years and years we had of it, with him slowly getting worse instead of better. I think that’s why those lads spent so much time together that summer. Keith didn’t want to be at home with his dad. He’d do owt to get out o’t’house.”

  “We were all overcrowded in those flats,” Joyce said. “I do remem
ber.” Did Alice, she wondered, know about the body which had been so recently found on Peter Hill and if not should she tell her? Perhaps that would be better left to the police, she decided.

  “How’s your Keith,” she asked instead.

  “Oh, he’s done really well,” his mother said, pride lighting up her eyes again. “He comes to see me every week without fail, you know. Always bring me flowers. He’s a lovely boy, is Keith. Lives out at Broadley now, with his wife and two children. Well, not children, really. Almost grown up my grand-daughter is, getting married soon, and the lad’s just gone off to university….” Alice Smith’s family history was interrupted abruptly by the door behind them crashing open.

  “Mrs. Ackroyd!” Joyce recognised the voice of Betty Johns, matron of the Laurels, whose regime she had already concluded was more suited to a jail than a nursing home.

  “Mrs.Johns?” Joyce responded as firmly as she could while she struggled to turn her chair to face the new arrival. Alice Smith, she noticed was looking distinctly uncomfortable, almost cowering back in her frail wicker chair in the face of the matron’s evident displeasure.

  “You ladies are going to get pneumonia sitting out here in this freezing cold,” Betty Johns went on, taking hold of the handles of Joyce’s chair and pushing her none too gently back into the day room. She was a tall, well-built woman with a luxuriant head of dark hair, who favoured tight, navy blue dresses which emphasised her substantial bust, not quite a formal uniform but allowing ample space for her nurse’s watch which swung from the pin in her cleavage like a badge of office.

  “Come along, Alice dear. You should know better,” she threw over her shoulder. Alice Smith pulled herself painfully to her feet and did as she was told.

  Without any further discussion Joyce found herself being pushed smartly back to her room, spun round beside the bed and helped back beneath the sheets by ungentle hands.

  “I wanted to talk to you about my physiotherapy,” she said, with as much dignity as she could scrape together after this unprovoked assault was complete. Mrs. Johns looked at her coldly.

  “I’ll have to make inquiries about that,” she said. “I don’t recall physiotherapy in the contract with the local authority.”

  “But the hospital said…” Joyce began.

  “But the hospital’s not paying the bill, are they dear?”

  “I need to learn to walk properly again,” Joyce said faintly, realising with agonising clarity for the first time that she was no longer in control of her fate and loathing the weakness which had brought her to this pass and the feeling of utter helplessness which threatened to overwhelm her.

  “I want to go home as soon as I can,” she said, her voice faltering slightly. She bit her lip in annoyance and attempted the glare which had curdled Tory blood in its time but now, she realised, seemed to have lost most of its power.

  “Well, we’ll have to see about that, won’t we, dear?” Mrs. Johns said. “We’ll just have to see whether you can cope with that again. It may not be as easy as you think. Now have you had any pain-killers today?” Joyce shook her head and Mrs. Johns reached into her pocket and took out a bottle of pills from which she shook two into Joyce’s hand.

  “These aren’t what I usually have,” Joyce said doubtfully. Betty Johns handed her a glass of water from the bedside table.

  “Don’t you worry about that, dear,” she said. “I think you’ll find these are even better.” And the matron closed the door behind her with ominous finality.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Mercedes purred sweetly as it climbed out of the valley of the Maze into the high Pennines beyond Arnedale and gradually Laura Ackroyd began to relax and enjoy the views of rolling moorland which opened up on each side of the winding road. There had been a time when she had walked up here with her grandmother but the hills were shadowed now with darker memories.

  “That’s High Clough,” she said, nodding towards a village obliquely above them in the lee of the highest fells. “There was a nasty murder there last winter. A grim place, one way and another.”

  “Do you write about crime?” Blake asked.

  “Not really,” Laura said. “That business was more personal. I was working in Arnedale and got to know the woman who was killed.”

  “So you do get involved with your subject matter,” Blake said with a knowing smile.

  “Not in the way you mean,” Laura said sharply but she could see from her companion’s expression that he did not believe her. Irritated, she stared out of the window in silence as the road twisted to the top of a long incline and opened up a sudden view of a valley, its fields dotted with sheep and a village nestling far below in a fold in the hills. John Blake glanced at his companion with a faint smile revealing his gleaming white teeth.

  “There’s a pleasant pub down in the village,” he said. “We can have lunch there and then go on up to the old farm which I think will make a very convincing Moor House, where Jane Eyre meets her cousins.”

  “It’s certainly bleak enough up here,” Laura said, as they slowed to let a pair of shaggy sheep, gaze fixed on some grassy titbit indiscernible to the mere human eye, amble across the road in front of them. The road was unfenced and on the other side of the valley the moors rose steadily in undulating folds, yellow, green, bronze, finally fading to purple on the far horizon.

  “Bog and mountain and bitterly cold in winter,” Blake said following Laura’s gaze. “But Charlotte Bronte and her sisters seemed to like it.”

  “I shouldn’t think your film crew will. And Lorelei will have to buy herself a pair of wellies if you come up here in winter. She won’t like that,” Laura said bitchily.

  Laura had been slightly thrown when Blake had turned up alone to collect her that morning. She had expected to have to disentangle the actor from the American woman’s protective embrace and was not sure how to interpret his decision to face her questions without assistance. Was it an indication that he did not rate her forensic skills highly enough to need support? Or that he preferred a tete-a-tete for other reasons? He was certainly arrogant enough to try charming her off her perch, she thought, and could hardly be aware that she was not for charming.

  “Lorelei,” Blake said pensively. “She’s having a bad hair day, she says. You know, I’m not at all sure Lorelei and I will still be together when we get around to making this film.”

  Laura raised an eyebrow at that, recognising a chilly finality in his voice which she suspected indicated that Lorelei had served her purpose, and that her purpose was not by any means only a professional one. But Blake turned his attention back to the twisting down-hill road, leaving her his classic profile to study, and did not expand any further on his future plans for Lorelei.

  “We’ll need to shoot some of this moorland scenery, of course,” he continued at length. “Jane’s passage over the moors until she finds herself starving and destitute on the Rivers’ doorstep is the nadir of the film for her, the point at which she almost despairs, don’t you think?” Laura, who had not read the book since she was at school, shrugged slightly, not wanting to admit her ignorance.

  “Jane’s not a droopy Victorian heroine,” she said, sure of her ground there, at least.

  “She’s a tough cookie,” Blake agreed. “Like the Jane Austen heroines. She’s a survivor with a firm line on morality.”

  “Did you come up here when you were a boy?” Laura asked, much more interested in discussing Blake’s line on morality and more.

  “I think so,” Blake said vaguely. “My mother used to take me up on the moors near Broadley, and over to Ilkley sometimes. She liked to take tea at Betty’s Cafe. But I heard about this place, amazingly, from a Yorkshireman I met in LA. I was talking quite casually about the prospect of doing Jane Eyre and he said he knew exactly the place to film the country scenes.”

  “So it’s not a boyhood haunt?”

  “Oh, no, I was never a great one for traipsing round in the mud. I was a town boy at heart. I still love cit
ies, you know? People moan about LA, but to be honest, I love it, traffic, smog, race riots and all. At least it’s alive and full of zip. Exhausting of course, and unforgiving, but alive. Not like this God-forsaken country.”

  “Can I quote you on that?” Laura asked quickly.

  “I think not,” Blake said wryly. “I’d like the Brits to flock to see my Jane Eyre, I guess.”

  “So can we talk in a little more detail now about your life in Bradfield?” she persisted. “That’s what I really need for the piece for the Gazette for when the museum opens. Can you get me a preview, by the way? I’d like to have a look round tomorrow, if that’s possible.”

  “I’m sure we can arrange that,” Blake said smoothly. “I’ll talk to Keith Spencer-Smith when we get back this afternoon. He’ll lay on a visit for you.”

  “Was he a boyhood friend, then?”

  “Not really, although he went to the grammar school, of course. But he’s a few years younger than me so I wasn’t really aware of him. He wrote to me out of the blue about his new museum, said he’d read about the Bronte project and remembered I came from Yorkshire and was I interested in opening it for him. I wouldn’t have considered it except that I was going to be over here anyway.” Blake hesitated as the road took a steep turn down into a cleft in the moors just above the low stone-roofed houses which huddled amongst scrubby trees.

  “This is the village,” he said. “We’ll have lunch here.”

  “You don’t have any particularly warm feelings about Bradfield, from the sound of it,” Laura hazarded. Blake looked at her for a moment, his eyes blank.