Sure and Certain Death

by Barbara Nadel

  She looked down at the floor and said, ‘I know.’

  ‘My own sister was one of them,’ I said. ‘My own sister! I’ve only just found that out, and Mrs Darling, I still feel shocked and horrified by it. And I will be honest with you and tell you that as much as I fear for these women, I also feel resentful of them too.’ I felt my eyes sting as I attempted to hold back tears of anger. ‘It’s cost me a lot to come here. A lot.’

  It was some time before she answered, and then she said, ‘Esme Robinson, as she is now, comes to sit in the circle twice a week.’ She looked up. ‘She’s here this evening.’

  ‘So if I can . . .’

  ‘Oh, you’re welcome to come. Not to join in the circle unless you want to, but . . .’ She regarded me levelly and, I felt, with sadness in her eyes too. ‘I don’t see you as a man at peace with the world of spirit.’

  I looked away. I didn’t want her to see either the disbelief or the madness in my eyes. Ghosts are something I don’t need to conjure. Ghosts live in my mind.

  ‘But you can come and speak to Esme. Speak to me too,’ she said.

  I looked up at her and frowned.

  ‘Until I married, I was called Miss Margaret Cousins,’ she said.

  For a moment I was literally speechless. Margaret Cousins had been one of the White Feather girls.

  ‘I was in the movement. Never got on with your Nancy, though, like I never got on with Nellie Martin.’

  ‘But I’ve spoken to Nellie’s mother,’ I said, ‘and she never mentioned that her nieces had got into spiritualism through you!’

  Margaret Darling’s face darkened. ‘Well she wouldn’t, would she? Even if she knows!’ she said. ‘I’m the bloody devil incarnate to her! I only knew Nellie and your sister because of the White Feather movement. When it was over, that was that. They never even knew that I was married or that I took over my old mum’s house up here in East Ham. Leastways I never told them. I’ve not spoken to your sister in over twenty years.’

  I sat for a moment then and scratched my head. Mrs Darling offered me a fag, one of her husband’s, apparently, which I took.

  ‘So, Mrs Darling,’ I said, ‘if you are Margaret Cousins, that only leaves two more White Feather girls apart from my sister and Esme Robinson.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said as she leaned over to give me a small Bakelite ashtray. ‘Rosemary Harper, but she went to Canada with her parents. Married a Canadian, I understand.’

  ‘There was a Fernanda somebody too,’ I said.

  ‘Fernanda Mascarenhas,’ Mrs Darling said. ‘But Gawd knows what become of her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Fernanda, pretty as a picture as she was, come from a poor background,’ she said. ‘Oh, she could put on airs and graces, but there was always something desperate about her. I’ll be honest, I liked her a lot, but . . . There was something very hard about her too.’

  ‘Hard?’

  Mrs Darling shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe it was just me. But whenever Fernanda gave a chap a feather, it was done without any emotion, almost I’d say without any belief. Sometimes I used to wonder why she, of all of us, did it.’

  ‘Well we’ll have to find her somehow,’ I said. ‘Like the rest of you, she could be in danger.’

  Mrs Darling looked at me with level, sad eyes and said, ‘I paid for poor Violet’s funeral, you know. She never had nothing. I ain’t paying for no one else’s, mind!’

  Chapter Nine

  I couldn’t get back to Keppel Road until just after five that evening. Because of the risk of raids, Mrs Darling had apparently been in the habit of starting her circles early.

  ‘Oh blimey, we’re just about to go in now!’ she said as she hustled me impatiently into her house. ‘I thought you was coming earlier to speak to Esme.’

  ‘I was,’ I said. ‘But I got caught up at work . . .’

  An old girl on Haig Road had finally given in to the cancer that had caused her to scream her way from this world and into the next. I’d had to deal with the exhausted family left behind. Not any doctor. They hadn’t been able to pay for one of those. Me.

  ‘Well, Esme’s gone in now,’ Mrs Darling said as she waved a hand towards her blacked-out parlour. ‘I can’t break the ambience. You can talk to her afterwards. Now you can either join the circle or you can sit out here in the hall.’

  I said I’d take the hall if it was all the same to her. As I sat down on one of the hardback chairs I looked into the room just before Mrs Darling disappeared. There wasn’t enough light to be able to see any details of who was in there, but in number there were probably five plus the medium, who made six. For quite a while after Mrs Darling closed the door on her circle there seemed to be no noise coming from that quarter at all. Although quite what I had been expecting, I hadn’t really known. I hadn’t, with the exception of Aggie, told my family where I was going. Neither the Duchess nor Nancy would have approved. Aggie, however, I knew had been to see a couple of mediums and such like in her time.

  ‘They don’t all go on about “is anybody there”,’ she’d told me just before I left the flat. ‘They’ve all got their own methods for contacting the dear departed. Some of them just sit in silence and let the spirits come to them. All Tommyrot, of course.’

  ‘If you didn’t believe it, why did you go?’ I asked her.

  My younger sister isn’t given to tears, but I’d seen one start in her eye then. She’d swallowed hard. ‘I wanted to talk to Dad again,’ she said in her familiar matter-of-fact way. ‘I missed him. Still do.’

  Then before I could get sentimental in any way, she’d pushed me out the door and told me to ‘get to your spooky meeting’. In the hall outside said spooky event, I thought about my old dad. I had no expectation that he might suddenly appear in front of me or anything like that. But what Aggie had said had made me think. I missed and miss him too. He had a keen sense of humour, Tom Hancock, or ‘the Morgue’, as some of the local ’erberts had it. He’d never minded. He could find the funny side of most things, old Tom Hancock. I thought about him sitting where I was, outside a seance, and I imagined how hard it would have been for him to keep a straight face. Just the thought of him busting to giggle made me want to laugh. But luckily I did manage to hold on to myself and not break into laughter even when, just over an hour and a couple of very noisy sighs later, a very odd collection of people came out of the seance room with Mrs Darling.

  As well as pale Cissy there was an equally pale, if rather younger woman, called Miss Driver. A boy in a tight black suit was apparently a Mr Watkins, and then there were the Robinsons, Esme – Harper as was – and her husband, Neville.

  I’ve always been of the opinion that opposites attract. But I know that isn’t always the case. When the very similar come together, however, it is odd. Esme and Neville, from the look of them, could have been brother and sister, both tall, thin and lugubrious of both speech and movement. Looking at those two standing side by side drinking tea out of Mrs Darling’s best china was a strange and disturbing thing. The medium had told everyone that I was there for a private reading I had booked for after the seance. The idea was that Mrs Darling would hold Esme Robinson back so I could talk to her once she’d shown all the others the door. But I doubted even the formidable Mrs Darling would be able to shake Neville off with any kind of ease.

  And I was right. What I hadn’t, however, even thought about was the possibility that all of the sitters might want to stay on in the parlour almost indefinitely.

  ‘My late mother came through tonight,’ Mr Watkins said in a voice that was so put-on posh that I honestly wanted to thump him.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Her name was Gwyneth,’ he declaimed. ‘From a very good Welsh family. Very educated. Very tasteful.’

  ‘Mr Watkins’s mother was very chatty tonight.’

  I looked down and saw that Cissy, carrying a plate of very few, very plain biscuits, had joined us.

  ‘Mother prefers to communi
cate via the planchette,’ Mr Watkins said as he first looked disgustedly down at and then rejected the biscuits.

  The planchette as I understood it was like a pointer on casters that spelt out words with the aid of letters of the alphabet that were arranged around the outside edge of the seance table. Use of this device meant that the messages from the dead did not have to come via the medium’s mouth. Quite a relief, I imagined, for a large, weary-looking woman like Mrs Darling.

  ‘Well now, we really must break it up as I have to give this gentleman his time,’ Mrs Darling said as she addressed the room in general and smiled at me.

  ‘Oh, but of course!’ I heard the nervous voice of Esme Robinson say. ‘Oh, Margaret dear, we don’t want to hold you up.’

  ‘No indeed,’ Neville agreed.

  They began to drink up their tea rather more quickly than either Mrs Darling or myself had wanted. If only Mr Watkins, Miss Driver and Cissy had done likewise. About fifteen minutes passed before Mrs Darling finally said, ‘Oh, for Gawd’s sake, this man’s been waiting for over an hour! Don’t you people have shelters to go to?’

  Neville and Esme Robinson headed for the door immediately. Mr Watkins, Miss Driver and Cissy followed reluctantly. In the hall, Cissy said, ‘But don’t you need me, Mrs Darling? On the door or . . .’

  ‘You get yourself home, Cissy,’ Mrs Darling replied. ‘A raid could start at any minute and I don’t want you walking the streets when the Jerries come.’ Then, turning to Mr Watkins, she added, ‘Will you walk Cissy and Miss Driver home, Mr Watkins?’

  The boy mouthed a reluctant yes. But his heart wasn’t in it. Cissy looked more like the pale, dried-up image of the spinster that since the Great War we’ve come to see as an object of pity, rather than the widow she said she was. Miss Driver, though young, was so washed out she was almost grey. They all shuffled forwards just as Mrs Darling reached out and grabbed Esme Robinson’s hand before she could reach the front path.

  ‘Oh, Esme,’ she said, ‘I need a word . . .’

  True to form, when Esme Robinson was called back by the medium, so, by extension, was her husband Neville. Cissy, Miss Driver and Mr Watkins I noticed were still talking in the hall when Mrs Darling finally shut the door on them.

  ‘I haven’t seen Nancy Hancock for years,’ Esme Robinson said when Mrs Darling told her who I was.

  Neville, frowning, said, ‘I have heard of your firm, Mr Hancock. But living in Forest Gate as we now do . . .’

  ‘Esme, dear,’ Mrs Darling cut in, ‘Mr Hancock needs to talk to you about Nancy before,’ she stole a quick glance at Neville, ‘before he has his private sitting. It’s about, er, it’s about when we knew Nancy, years ago. He’d like a word, in private . . .’

  Neville cleared his throat and then his wife said, ‘Oh, there’s nothing I can’t talk about in front of my husband. I wouldn’t want to.’

  The medium looked at me, I looked at the medium and the Robinsons looked at both of us.

  ‘Mrs Robinson,’ I said to Esme, ‘you, Mrs Darling, my sister Nancy and some other women were . . . well, you got together in the Great War . . .’

  ‘Oh, we were White Feather girls together,’ Esme Robinson said with a smile.

  I looked across at Neville Robinson, who was by this time beaming with something that looked like pride.

  ‘Sterling job they all did too!’ he said. ‘Sterling job!’

  I felt rather than saw Mrs Darling’s shock. I was too fixated on Neville. Two or three years at the most older than me, he must have been involved in the First Lot in some capacity.

  ‘Are you interested in what we did when we were White Feather girls, then, Mr Hancock?’ I heard Esme Robinson say so breezily I swear I could have slapped her face.

  Tearing my gaze away from Neville’s grinning features, I said, ‘No. Not exactly.’

  I clammed up then. I do sometimes when I’m angry. The medium looked at me again and then she said, ‘Esme love, you know that poor Violet passed on a while ago. Like her, your cousin Nellie died a horrible, violent death. Then there was Dolly O’Dowd, and now this latest, Marie Abrahams . . .’

  ‘All spinsters or widowed or living with terrible drunks,’ Esme Robinson said. Then, suddenly becoming excited, she went on, ‘Margaret, you know that Marie was getting interested in the spirit world just before her own passing. I reckon if we tried to contact . . .’

  ‘Esme, Mr Hancock thinks that the person killing our old friends is doing so because they was White Feather girls.’

  ‘It is the only thing all the victims have in common,’ I said.

  There was a silence. For just a moment the relentless good humour of the Robinsons came to a halt. But only for a moment.

  ‘Well, Esme has me, doesn’t she?’ Neville said with a smile. ‘I mean, as you said, Esme dear, the rest of the women have been on their own, or as good as.’

  His wife smiled adoringly. ‘I’ll be quite safe,’ she said.

  Coldly and without shouting, I lost my rag. ‘Oh, so that makes everything all right, does it?’ I said.

  The Robinsons looked at me as if I was speaking in a foreign language. I felt one of Mrs Darling’s plump hands on my arm.

  ‘There’s still a lady out there called Fernanda Mascarenhas,’ I said. ‘Don’t know what her situation is. My sister Nancy is a spinster. I know that your sister, Mrs Robinson, is away in Canada. But then there’s Mrs Darling . . .’

  ‘Oh, there’s always people in and out of this house,’ Esme Robinson replied with her now completely fixed smile.

  Mrs Darling’s broad face took on a cynical look. ‘Esme,’ she said, ‘apart from sitters, there’s my old man, but he’s either at work or fire-watching. He’s never in! Then there’s my son’s missus over once a week to help with the polishing, if I’m lucky. Cissy’s in and out as takes her mood, but she ain’t exactly Kid Berg, is she?’

  ‘Oh, no one would want to hurt you Margaret!’

  ‘I was a White Feather girl, Esme! That’s what we’re trying to tell you! And if Mr Hancock here is right, then someone may very well want to hurt me!’ She sat down, taking her considerable weight off her feet. ‘Some of them men what we gave white feathers to was sick or on leave or . . . None of them boys deserved to be called cowards by little bits of girls like us! We could’ve made any number of poor souls go out to the trenches and get theirselves horribly injured or made sick in their heads.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t . . .’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mrs Darling, you girls were only doing what was right.’ Neville Robinson cut across his wife’s words with a smile upon his face. ‘The Great War was not a time for cowards. Couldn’t afford them. We needed heroes, and in the main we got them too.’

  I wanted to hit him so hard that his head would come off. But I don’t do things like that, not now, and so I said, ‘And what did you do in the war, Mr Robinson?’

  No one who was there ever talks about heroes. No one.

  ‘I served my country,’ Neville said, even then still wearing his bloody irritating smile.

  ‘What service were you in?’ I asked. ‘Where did you see action?’

  But I knew before the smile finally died on his face and Neville turned away. No one who had even been in a trench for a day could talk in the way that he had!

  ‘Oh, Neville wasn’t fit enough to fight,’ Esme Robinson said. ‘He’s a delicate chest . . .’

  ‘I served King and country in the police force,’ Neville said, grave now, but his head held high in the air. ‘Islington. On the home front.’

  ‘Yes.’ I looked into his eyes and saw them shift away quickly to anywhere that was not near me in that room. ‘Want to know what I did in the First Lot, Mr Robinson?’ I said. ‘Want to know about when I came home on leave and got a handful of white feathers?’

  A copper! He knew nothing! Coppers after all hadn’t been given white feathers. Coppers had been serving ‘King and country’. They’d had the uniforms to prove it. And deep down Neville Robi
nson knew it. He didn’t say another word.

  ‘Mr Robinson,’ I said, ‘I joined Kitchener’s New Army to fight the Hun with my pals. I swallowed it all, the glory and the patriotism and all that business! All my pals went – I had a lot of pals, Mr Robinson – but only me and my mate Ken came home. Two of us!’

  Neville Robinson looked down at the floor. I was not, however, prepared to let him off yet. I was in my stride. It happens rarely, but when it does, it really does.

  ‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘how many British casualties there were on the first day of the Battle of the Somme?’ No one answered and so I just carried on. ‘Fifty-seven thousand, four hundred,’ I said. ‘Imagine. All that death. I don’t have to imagine of course, because I was there. I went over the top at Gommecourt. Half past seven in the morning, me and a load of my mates walked – walked – into no-man’s-land. Through smoke and into the German guns we walked shoulder to shoulder because our idiot generals didn’t trust us, amateur soldiers, men they had encouraged to join up and fight, to do anything more intelligent. And we didn’t! Three of my mates died before the battle was even five minutes old. The bloke next to me, a grenadier, trained to throw Mills bombs into the enemy trenches, just froze. Mid-throw!’ I could feel the tears that always come into my eyes when I tell this tale, and I waited for the shocked expressions on the faces of my listeners it would later elicit. ‘He stood there and then . . . then he disappeared. There was a . . .’