Alone Beneath The Heaven

by Bradshaw, Rita

  Lady Margaret swallowed deeply when Sarah finished speaking, and her voice was soft when she asked, ‘And you still don’t know who your mother is?’

  ‘No.’ Sarah shook her head slowly. ‘I have no idea who she is or where my natural family are; even if they are alive or dead. The war hit Sunderland very hard, there were whole communities wiped out.’ It was something which had haunted her for the last few years, and this was evident in her voice when she said, ‘But I still want to try and find the people I came from, even . . . even if they don’t want me. I’d just like to know my real surname, something, anything. I feel like there’s no foundation somehow, I can’t explain it. I look in the mirror and my face stares back at me, but it’s just me. I’m not like anyone.’

  ‘Oh, my dear.’ Lady Margaret swallowed again. ‘I understand, I do understand. Undoubtedly the circumstances are different, but I used to wonder how I could possibly have come from my parents. I still do in fact. But . . .’ She paused, and now her voice had a bright positive note to it as she said, ‘But thanks to your bravery in confronting my husband I am actually learning to like myself a little. It’s a good feeling, Sarah.’ She smiled suddenly, adding, ‘And I like to think we have become friends?’

  It was in the form of a question, and Sarah returned the smile, her voice warm when she said, ‘Of course, Lady Margaret. You know I’ll always serve the family to the best of my ability—’

  ‘No, no.’ It was sharp but not offensive, and immediately followed with, ‘I don’t mean that, Sarah, not at all.’ Lady Margaret rose, walking across the room to stand by the fireplace, and she turned, saying, ‘No, I haven’t explained myself very well. I would like you to think of me in the same way you do Maggie and Rebecca and . . . ?’

  ‘Florrie.’

  ‘Ah yes, Florrie. Yes, that is what I would like. Do you think you could do that?’

  Sarah didn’t hesitate when she said, ‘Yes, I could do that.’

  ‘Good.’ Lady Margaret smiled again. ‘I think there are very few people who go through life and meet even one good friend, you know.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘And one thing is for sure, Sarah.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Whoever your mother is, be it fishwife or duchess, she could not fail to be proud of the person her daughter has become.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘I’m sorry, but I still cannot understand why you felt it necessary to go running up there after this girl as though she were a bitch on heat.’

  ‘Vanessa.’

  Rodney’s tone of voice brought Vanessa Mallard’s head higher, and then she raised her eyebrows coolly, her perfectly modulated voice cold and clear as she said, ‘If the simile offends it’s just too bad, Rodney, because that is exactly how it looks to me. The least she could have done was to make contact with you before she left, instead of making such a drama of it all.’

  Why, oh why, hadn’t he rung first to make sure Richard was already home, before he had arrived at their house for dinner? He always did, or almost always, but he’d had other things on his mind tonight - the main component of which was featuring in this present conversation.

  He had seen Sarah twice since her return from Sunderland, and then only when he had called round at the house on his way home from the surgery. His more formal invitations to a meal out and the cinema had been politely, but firmly, refused. Always with a cast-iron excuse, he reminded himself now with a trace of frustrated irritation, but refused nevertheless. But he just couldn’t seem to let go. It would be the sensible thing to do, the logical, and he was a man who had always prided himself on being logical, but such was this feeling that had grown and grown - perversely, it seemed, the less he saw of her - that sense and logic had flown out of the window. And now Sarah was thinking she might leave London altogether and move back up north in the summer over this affair with Rebecca. He could accept that a young mother and child might find it difficult to live in the two rooms Maggie and Florrie occupied, and no doubt it would prove something of a strain for the two older women as well, but the thought of Sarah taking on the responsibility for Rebecca and the baby made it difficult for him to sleep at night. It would be too much for her, damn it. And now Vanessa had the bit between her teeth again . . .

  ‘It wasn’t a case of making a drama out of anything, Vanessa, as well you know. Sarah had just been informed that her dearest friend was seriously ill after being beaten to a state of unconsciousness by her husband. Why should she spend valuable time trying to track me down? Talk sense, woman.’

  ‘Don’t “woman” me, Rodney. He does that and you know I hate it.’

  ‘Then don’t be ridiculous.’ He ignored the reference to Richard, he had already had as much as he could take tonight, and he’d only been in the house five minutes. ‘And anyway, what Sarah does or does not do is of no consequence to you.’ He had been about to say, no business of yours, but knowing Vanessa as he did - and with Richard expected home any minute - it wouldn’t have been wise to push her that far.

  ‘Yes it is, when it affects an event I had been looking forward to for weeks.’ She eyed him coldly, her mouth tight, as she added, ‘As well you know.’

  ‘Vanessa, I had already told you and Richard that I wouldn’t be seeing the new year in with you; Sarah being called up to Sunderland was incidental. Besides which, this happened all of six weeks ago now. Can’t you let it drop?’

  Vanessa shrugged elegant shoulders. ‘I don’t appreciate being let down, so give me one good reason why I should make things easy for you.’

  ‘Give me strength.’

  ‘I could give you a lot of things, Rodney, but you seem determined to hang on to some outdated concept of right and wrong. You want me, you have always wanted me, you just haven’t the guts to follow through, have you?’ Her head tilted slightly, her silky hair swinging across one pale cheek as she said, ‘You have committed mental adultery with me from the very first night I married Richard. You know it and I know it.’

  He looked at the exquisitely beautiful face, which was as perfect and as cold as a sculpture in fine marble, and found it the very antithesis of Sarah’s warm, vibrant loveliness. How could he ever have thought himself to be in love with her? He must have been mad. And it was in that moment, when he acknowledged the end of his obsession with this woman who had haunted him, in one way or another, for years, that his brother’s voice just behind him said, ‘Is that true, Rod?’

  It was his worst nightmare come true, but as Rodney swung to look at Richard standing in the open doorway, Vanessa laughed, a tight brittle sound that had no humour in it at all.

  ‘Eavesdroppers never hear anything good, Richard, you should know that.’

  ‘This is my home, Vanessa, and I’m entitled to go where I please in it.’ Richard’s face was white but his voice was steady as he looked at his wife.

  ‘Your home.’ She curled her lip as she glared at the man she loathed, but before Vanessa could say anything more, Richard spoke to Rodney.

  ‘Well, Rod? Do you want her?’

  This macabre little tableau had been played out in his darkest moments from the first time Richard had announced his intention to marry Vanessa, and now a grim sense of déjà vu filled Rodney’s mind. He didn’t want to lose Richard. Oh, God, if you are up there, listen to me. I don’t want to lose him.

  ‘Tell him, Rodney.’ Vanessa’s voice was of a quality that could have cut through steel. ‘Tell him the truth.’

  Rodney took a breath, looking Richard full in the face as he said, ‘No, I don’t want her, Richard,’ and then, as Vanessa spoke his name, he turned to her. ‘That’s the truth, Vanessa, and at the bottom of you you know it, don’t you? You’ve known it for some time.’

  She stared at him, standing very still before saying, ‘I don’t believe you, you have loved me for years - we’ve loved each other for years.’

  ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word.’

  ‘Oh, and you d
o? Since you met your little slut of a housekeeper, I suppose?’

  ‘That’s enough, Vanessa.’

  ‘Enough? I haven’t even begun!’

  ‘Vanessa, admit defeat.’ Richard’s voice was amazingly steady. ‘He doesn’t want you, but I am sure it won’t take you long to find someone who does. You’ve had enough practice over the years, haven’t you?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t want to have to spell it out but I will if you make me.’

  ‘Oh I see, I see it all now.’ Her furious gaze swung from one to the other of them as she spat, ‘I’m to be the sacrificial lamb, is that it? How cosy, how very cosy and convenient. Rodney is whiter than white, and I’m to clothe myself in sackcloth and ashes. Well, no thanks. The pair of you are cowardly hypocrites, that’s the truth of it. He knows and I know that he has lusted after me for years, and while we’re on the subject, it didn’t worry you too much that Rodney and I had been lovers before we got together, did it? In fact, you couldn’t get me up the altar quick enough, and don’t tell me it was because you appreciated my mind. Your thinking was motivated by what’s between your legs, and it still is. That’s the problem now, isn’t it?’

  She had risen and walked across the room as she had been speaking, and now she paused in the doorway, turning to face them both as she delivered her parting shot. ‘Now I can’t stand you touching me, now you disgust me, it’s all suddenly coming out into the open, isn’t it?’

  ‘I want a divorce, Vanessa.’ Richard’s face was like lint, the scarred flesh standing out in angry contrast to the surrounding skin. ‘Any terms you like, but I want it settled and done with.’

  She didn’t answer him, beyond a slight shrug of her shoulders that spoke of utter indifference, then she swung round and disappeared from their view.

  They stood quite still, neither of them saying a word, but Richard was breathing heavily through his nostrils, his hands clenched at his side. It was a full minute before he said, without glancing Rodney’s way, ‘I’m going to ask you this once, and then that’s the end of it. Did you ever try to touch her after we were married?’

  ‘Not once, I swear it.’

  ‘You knew about her lovers? You knew you could have been one of them, that the offer was always there?’

  ‘Richard, for crying out loud, you’re my brother. I wouldn’t do that to you.’

  ‘No, I know you wouldn’t, but I had to ask.’

  When Richard walked across to the sofa and sat down, his back bent and his brow almost touching his knees, Rodney joined him, his arms going instinctively round his brother in much the same way as Richard’s had used to do when he was small and had hurt himself. How long they sat there, Rodney didn’t know, it could have been minutes or hours, time seemed immaterial; but when they both rose it was still without another word being uttered. And even when they collapsed in the two winged armchairs in front of the gas fire, Richard having fetched a full bottle of whisky and two glasses from the cocktail cabinet en route, silence continued to reign.

  It was Sarah’s full day off, and she had spent it working at the hospital which was fairly buzzing with the news that in a British Medical Association poll, eighty-six per cent of doctors had voted against joining the proposed national health service due to be introduced later in the year. Although the doctors and nurses had been full of it, it hadn’t interested Sarah that much. One of the children she had got to know really well over the last eight weeks had had a relapse, and she had spent virtually the whole day at his side, trying to jolly him along. Besides which, Rodney had already indicated that he considered the proposed changes to be long overdue and essential for the working classes of Britain, so as far as she was concerned they couldn’t be bad.

  It was gone eight o’clock by the time she left the big square red-brick building, and the evening was dark and cold, but she didn’t take the short cut that would have taken ten minutes off her walk home. Since Sir Geoffrey’s threats at Christmas she always kept to the main roads and thoroughfares, walking briskly and keeping alert. Not that she really thought he would try to attack her again, she told herself reassuringly as Emery Place came into view. Lady Margaret had told her that Lady Harris had made it quite clear to her son that the continuation of his generous allowance, along with all the privileges he enjoyed, such as membership of his club and so on, was entirely dependent on his behaving himself. Sir Geoffrey hadn’t liked it, Lady Margaret had reported with understandable satisfaction, but he had known better than to push this new matriarch, who had materialized in his mother’s tiny frame, too far.

  The London air was chilled and misty, the pavements wet and shiny, and as Sarah walked the last few steps she found herself comparing it with the clean, sharp, biting cold of the north. She shook her head at herself, a little smile playing at the corner of her mouth. Fancy her feeling homesick for the raw freezing conditions she had moaned about all her life. But she did. She couldn’t help it - Sunderland was home. Not that there was anything wrong with London, and she was glad she had come and experienced the difference of life in the capital in spite of Sir Geoffrey and everything, but . . . Sunderland was Sunderland. It was where Maggie and Florrie and Rebecca were, and that other shadowy figure she intended to search out one day.

  She stopped, glancing up into the grey sky as droplets of mist attached themselves to her hair and eyelashes like minute diamonds.

  She would never be truly at peace with herself until she had done everything within her power to find her mother, she knew that now, had always known it deep inside. And being down here . . . it was too far away, somehow. Not just in road miles, but in a way she found it difficult to explain even to herself. In Sunderland, when she was under the same northern sky, looking at the same stars, breathing the same air, her mother seemed closer. It was a link. Tenuous maybe, imagined possibly, but it was how she felt.

  She reached the steps of Emery Place, mounting them quickly and opening the front door, then walking through to the kitchen. Its warmth was full of the scents and smells of one of Hilda’s baking days, and her mouth watered even as her brow wrinkled at finding the elderly cook and Eileen in the middle of a tiff.

  ‘I did clean it out.’ Eileen was at her most sullen, a trait which seemed to have developed more and more over the last two months or so. ‘I scrubbed till me hands were raw.’

  ‘Never mind your hands.’ Hilda pushed the offending articles away as Eileen thrust them under her nose. ‘What about my pan, eh? Cleanliness is next to godliness, my girl, and don’t you forget it. Now you have another go at it with a bit more elbow grease before you get yourself off to bed, and I want it clean this time mind. None of your slapdash antics.’

  ‘Huh.’ As always, Eileen liked to have the last word, another thing which Hilda found exasperating, but tonight the cook just gave her junior a scathing glance before turning to Sarah as Eileen flung herself down at the kitchen table and attacked one of the big copper saucepans.

  ‘You’re back late today, and you look all done in. Sit yourself down and I’ll put the kettle on. There’s some fresh fruit buns in that tin by the way, help yourself.’

  ‘Thanks, Hilda.’

  Eileen’s puffing and blowing increased to gale force over the next few minutes as she laboured over the heavy pan, and when Hilda couldn’t stand it a moment more, she said, ‘All right then, off to bed with you, Eileen,’ and the young maid was out of the door like a shot.

  ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen her move her rear end all day. I don’t know what’s wrong with that girl, straight I don’t.’ Hilda’s voice was tart as she served up their cocoa and gestured for Sarah to have another of the delicious moist buns that were packed with fruit and candied peel, and thumbed their noses at even the concept of rationing. ‘She’s too big for her boots if you ask me, and lazy isn’t the word. And I’m not at all sure she’s telling the truth about where she goes on her time off either. Last week, when she said she went to that musical, Annie Get Y
our Gun, with her cousins from Lewisham, and was so late back because her cousin Harold’s car broke down? Well, I asked her a bit about it the next day, just out of interest, you know, and she couldn’t remember hardly any of the songs.’

  ‘You think she was lying?’ Sarah asked through a mouthful of bun.

  ‘I don’t know, but she’s a bit too secretive for my liking. Say what you like about Peggy, but she was as straight as a die, that girl.’

  Sarah had to hide a smile. When Peggy had worked for her, Hilda had done nothing but criticize and complain, but as soon as she had left and been replaced by Eileen, Peggy had achieved sainthood.