The Cobweb Cage

by Marina Oliver

  She shrugged. In many ways she preferred to have as little as possible to do with the formidable woman who had persuaded her it was her duty to come here. She was here for Dick's sake, to give him the sort of life he would have had if Richard were here to order it.

  'Would you like me to send supper up to you on a tray tonight?' Sophia asked. Marigold tried to hide her relief at this reprieve.

  'If it's no trouble, yes please. I must unpack and get Dick settled in.'

  'You will need to be with him most of the time, I fear, since we could not find a suitable nanny. I had hoped you would be able to join us for meals, and learn how we go on,' she added smoothly, and Marigold could see no trace of embarrassment in her face. 'Perhaps later, if Betty proves reliable enough to be left in charge.'

  Marigold moved to the window, which was partly obscured by the parapet in front of it.

  'This is the side overlooking the private garden, I think?' she asked. 'When may we use that?'

  'Any time, my dear. Unless, of course we have visitors, when naturally young children should be out of sight.'

  And their unsuitable mothers, Marigold added silently. But what did it matter? She would be happier that way. And the park, which no doubt the suitable officer convalescents would be permitted to use, was large enough for her and Dick to explore when he was old enough to walk.

  She caught up her thoughts in dismay. That would be at least another year. She had fallen into a trap of assuming either that the war would still be dragging on for so long, or Richard would still be missing. It was not possible, and she vowed that from now on she would never look so far ahead, but treat each day as if were the last before she saw Richard again. And she would see him. She knew he was alive somewhere.

  ***

  Chapter 12

  Fortunately he heard them talking before they realised he had come to. Even more fortunately, he realised they were talking in German, and replied in that language when they spoke to him.

  'Good, you're awake. Name and number?'

  Richard groaned. He was not acting. The pains in his leg and abdomen were excrutiating. They deflected attention from the raging fire in his chest and arms, and the heaviness of his head.

  'What? Who are you?'

  'Name and number!'

  'Why are we rocking? Where am I? What is it?'

  'You are on an ambulance train, being taken back to the Fatherland. You have been wounded. Your identification tag was lost. Now, name and number!'

  'I can't remember! God, what happened?'

  He squinted up at the man, a hospital orderly by the look of his clothes.

  'A bomb dropped by those damned French maniacs, it blew up in front of your motorcycle.'

  'Motorcycle?' He was genuinely puzzled. He had no recollection of any motorcycle.

  'The one on which you were riding pillion. The driver was killed. Where were you going?'

  Richard shook his head, then wished he'd kept it still.

  'I can't remember a motorcycle, let alone being on one or where I was going.'

  Mercifully a doctor then appeared and injected Richard with some drug which sent him to sleep. He knew no more until he woke up in bed in a large room filled with other beds. The ceiling was rather incongruously covered with paintings depicting indecorously clad, suggestively frolicking nymphs.

  The pain had subsided to a dull ache. When he tried to move Richard discovered that he was heavily bandaged from neck to knee, with another bandage wound round his head.

  A nurse, dark and petite, came across to him when she saw he was awake.

  'Good, I was beginning to think you would never wake up. How do you feel?' she asked in German.

  'Terrible. What's wrong with me?'

  'One broken leg, several internal injuries, burns to your arms and upper torso, and a lump on your head which seems to have affected your memory. Can you remember who you are now?'

  Richard stared blankly at her.

  'I can't remember anything. Where is this place? What is it? A hospital?'

  She grinned and glanced up at the ceiling.

  'Some patients think they could be in heaven when they wake up and see that. It's a country house near Berlin, which has been turned into a hospital for officers. It was assumed you are an officer from your uniform. There was no form of identification on you or the motorcycle rider. He was badly burned and his papers also. They didn't know which unit you'd come from. So your name is Franz?'

  Richard blinked. 'I don't think so. I've told you, I can't remember.'

  'It will come back.'

  'How long is it since – it happened?'

  'A week. You have had to have several operations, and you have been unconscious for most of the time in between. Do you feel hungry?'

  'Thirsty,' Richard realised.

  'I will fetch a cordial. No tea or coffee for a day or so.'

  After slaking his by now raging thirst, Richard feigned sleep. There was too much to think about before he decided what to say.

  Clearly he had been mistaken for a German in his borrowed uniform. It would be wisest to continue to maintain loss of memory. If he tried to invent a name and background it would be far too easy to disprove anything he claimed.

  With his injuries it would be weeks, probably months before he could hope to try to escape again. It was a blow to find he was so much further away from the front, but he would have plenty of time to think of ways to overcome that. He must concentrate on getting well again.

  He thought of Marigold, and wondered if her child had yet been born. Had he a son? When would he see his beloved again? Was she distraught at knowing he was missing? Did she think he was dead?

  As he drifted off into sleep again he concentrated on willing her to know, somehow, that he was alive, to believe he would eventually return to her, however long it took. Their love was too rare, too precious and new for it to be lost, buried and forgotten in the muddy Flanders trenches.

  *

  Marigold contemplated the dress length of black silk which was her Christmas present from her mother-in-law. The elder Mrs Endersby had resented from the very beginning Marigold's utter refusal to wear mourning clothes for Richard.

  'I don't believe Richard is dead,' Marigold insisted. 'If I wore black it would be admitting something I can't believe.'

  'Something you won't accept, rather. You are a very stubborn young person. Being a mother does not give you experience and wisdom. You really ought to allow that we who are older and have been about the world for longer do know best.'

  Christmas of 1915 at The Place had been a very different affair to the time, so long ago it seemed, but only three years earlier, when she had first met Richard. There had been no parties for the servants, no entertaining for the family.

  This could be excused either by the death of Henry and Richard's continued absence, or by the state of war, for things were not going well in France. But surely some effort could have been made to be cheerful?

  Not that The Place was ever a cheerful house. Mr Endersby went every day to his pottery, apart from Sundays which were spent mainly in his library. Marigold rarely saw him. If they happened to pass on the stairs he gave her an embarrassed smile, and at dinner he spoke only about his business.

  Mrs Endersby ensconced herself in her boudoir, making no calls and receiving no guests apart from the local vicar once a month. Marigold had not the slightest idea of how she occupied her time. On Sundays she went to church twice, always swathed in deepest black, with a profusion of veils.

  Marigold was expected to remain with Dick most of the time. For half an hour in the afternoon Dick was taken to see his grandmother, and she was politely but firmly dismissed. She had no idea what Sophia did then, or how she behaved with her grandchild, but Dick emerged from these sessions smiling and laughing, clearly content. Marigold wondered with some amazement whether Sophia relaxed and smiled and played with the baby. It was not easy to envisage.

  In the evening Betty was delegated t
o watch over Dick, by then asleep in his cot, and she was summoned to join the others for dinner. She would have preferred to forgo even this restricted contact.

  This was the worst part of the day, with Marigold tense, the older Endersbys making strained conversation except when Sophia made grudging personal references to Marigold's behaviour or appearance.

  'Your voice is quite pleasant, and your speech good,' Sophia said to her when she had been at The Place for a week. It was her first sign of unbending, a determined stretching of the smile on her lips. But she bit the compliment off short and Marigold silently added 'for a former servant.' That was what she meant.

  'My mother always insisted we spoke correctly,' Marigold replied mildly.

  'Your table manners are excellent, considering you have not had much opportunity to move in elegant society,' was another patronising remark a week or so later. Or had she meant it to be complimentary? Marigold could not tell. With a rising sense of hysteria she wondered if she was expected to pick up the cutlet in her fingers and gnaw at the bone. Or how long, at this rate, it would take before Sophia catalogued all her virtues.

  It was the ludicrous aspects of the situation which saved her sanity, she sometimes thought. Sophia was so isolated from ordinary feelings she had no conception of how offensive her remarks were. And Marigold still could not decide whether they had in fact been intended otherwise.

  Segregated in the nurseries with her son, apart from when she had to endure these agonising visits to the dining room, with the company only of the dim-witted, adenoidal Betty, Marigold craved congenial or at the very least rational conversation.

  Her salvation came when, bored with the formal paths which bisected the shrubbery at the end of the private garden, she had wheeled Dick in his perambulator into the large, now neglected park.

  In front of the main section of the house was a spacious lawn, bounded by a belt of trees. Beyond these, out of sight of the windows, a path wound down through a wooded valley until it came to a stream. It reminded Marigold of Old Ridge Court and her walks with Richard, when they had first begun to discover the delight and enchantment of being together.

  She began walking there every day when it was fine enough. It was several weeks before she met anyone else. Then one morning she almost pushed the perambulator into the legs of a man who sat, heedless of the wet, cold mud, with his back propped against a fallen tree.

  'Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see you!' she exclaimed, and he looked up at her with lack-lustre eyes.

  'I'm sorry,' he muttered, and shifted his legs out of the way without attempting to get up.

  'Won't you get horribly wet and cold sitting there?'

  'Wet? This is paradise after the trenches. It's almost as good as sitting in the sun beside the Mediterranean.'

  'Nevertheless, it's a wet and damp and muddy English wood, and the doctors wouldn't appreciate your undoing all their work just because you are indulging in foolish comparisons,' Marigold said sharply. 'They have enough to do mending men injured by the Germans.'

  He grunted, smiled at some private joke, but slowly rose to his feet.

  'I suppose you are right. Who are you? I haven't seen you about the hospital.'

  'I'm staying in the private wing. My son,' she indicated Dick, 'is their grandson.'

  'What an odd way of putting it. I presume your husband is their son? Does he live there too, or are you visiting?'

  'He's – lost somewhere in France. He was shot down, but no-one found him. They all think he's dead. I know he isn't.'

  He looked at her curiously. 'You are so certain?'

  'I would know if Richard were dead. He is part of me, as little Dick here is. I'd know at once if he were dead. People don't understand that, or won't admit it.'

  'You're very young. Where do you come from? How did you and Richard meet?'

  He was very easy to talk to, and Marigold was starved of friendship. Time passed unheeded until he glanced up at the sky, which had clouded over.

  'Do you mind if I walk back with you? It's going to rain soon, you ought to get back indoors.'

  After that first meeting, when she discovered he was not a patient, as she'd thought, but a doctor specialising in caring for the victims of gas attacks, they frequently met and walked together briefly.

  Dr Carstairs was in his thirties, had initially served at the front, and witnessed horrors which still, he confessed, disturbed his dreams at night.

  'People here cannot imagine what conditions those poor devils live and sleep and die in. I have to get away into the peace of the country for a short spell, to refresh my soul.'

  'And I am disturbing you,' Marigold said remorsefully.

  'Of course not. Do you think I could not avoid your company if I wished? But the talk amongst my colleagues in the hospital is all of war, and medical matters, horror, gloom and death. You glow with life and optimism, both in your care for your son, and your determination to believe your husband is alive somewhere. It's a refreshing change.'

  His obvious admiration, and the interludes of normality, made Marigold wonder how she could lighten the gloom in the house. When she tentatively suggested that Lexie might come to stay with her Sophia fixed her with a pained stare.

  'Surely you cannot endure the thought of gaiety so soon after your husband's death?' she demanded, scandalised.

  'Richard is not dead. And having a friend to stay for company is hardly indulging in wild excesses,' she had replied quickly, and Sophia had barely spoken to her for a week.

  It was the same when she proposed taking Dick to visit her parents.

  'Quite impossible for the moment, my dear. I cannot spare Kemp to drive you there, and you surely could not contemplate taking my grandson on the train, with all manner of rough people jostling and fighting for seats.'

  'I shall take him for a few days after Christmas, then,' Marigold said quietly. She was determined not to bow to Sophia's domination in everything. 'One of the doctors at the hospital has promised me a ride in his motor as far as Stoke.'

  Sophia was distracted from the purpose of Marigold's journey by her scandalised reaction to this information.

  'When did you make the acquaintance of one of them?' she demanded.

  'I met him in the park one day. He was at the front for a while and we talk occasionally,' Marigold informed her calmly.

  'You flirt with him!'

  It was an accusation, not a question.

  'I do no such thing,' Marigold began indignantly, but Sophia ignored her, speaking in such a bitter, hysterical manner Marigold stared at her in astonishment.

  'Your husband, my son, is scarcely cold in his grave and you are seeking to replace him in your bed! I always said you were no better than a trollop, and how you ever enticed my boy into marrying you I can only guess! I forbid you ever to speak to any of those people again! We have to have them there! If I hadn't offered, they would have forced me, and probably sent uncouth privates who would have done untold damage to the house, and lived there like pigs!'

  Marigold was incensed, both at her insensitive response and her utter selfishness.

  'Those uncouth privates, like my brother, are being killed in their thousands in France! When they're lying there, riddled with bullets, cut to pieces with flying pieces of metal, choking on horrible gas, do you think it matters to them whether they were born to luxury and privilege or grew up in squalor? It's the same death for Henry and for the most uncouth private! Don't the ones who do survive deserve something better than your contempt, Madam?' Marigold demanded, her voice shaking with passion.

  Afterwards she marvelled at herself. She, the placid, competent and never ruffled Marigold, who had for years dealt calmly with Ivy's tantrums and Poppy's woes without getting flustered, had dared to tell the imperious Mrs Endersby some home truths.

  It was an aspect of her character she thought of a great deal later, when she had leisure. She was uncertain whether to be horrified or gratified at this evidence of her willingness to fight back
against injustice.

  She had immediately apologised, but had been treated with polite coldness ever since. She thought with immense gratitude that it was only two more days before Dr Carstairs drove her to the station, and she would be with her family for a few days of blessed relief.

  *

  Poppy pushed some loose strands of hair under her mob cap, and eased onto her other foot. She had never worked so hard in her life. At least at home she'd been able to sit down when she wanted to, do an easier job if she felt like a change. Even Mr Downing's drapery shop was more interesting. Here it was the same monotonous motion of lean, push, twist, lean, push, twist, all day long.

  She was so tired that although the other girls were friendly and asked her to go with them to the cinema, or the dance hall, she never had the energy. All she wanted to do was crawl back to her room and fall into bed.

  When she left home, all those weeks ago, she'd been wildly miserable. Her puppy had meant so much to her, a living creature she could call her own who depended on her and owed his life to her. And then had come his death, horrible and lonely, and her dark thoughts against her sister.

  It was fury and suspicion of Ivy which had sent her to search Ivy's private drawer in their combined chest. They each had one, and it was understood the other would never look inside. But she had to find some evidence to prove to the others that Ivy had knowledge of poisons. Perhaps she could find a recipe copied out, something she'd learned from all the reading she did in her plant book.

  When she'd picked up the old tobacco tin and it rattled she'd been no more than mildly puzzled. It felt heavy, but she had her own few shillings saved towards Christmas. The tin had slipped out of her fingers and fallen to the floor, opening and scattering its contents.

  Poppy had been astounded, wondering how Ivy could possibly have come by such a huge sum, several pounds by the looks of it. Then she had been seized with a bout of renewed fury at the deception Ivy must, somehow, have practised. It would serve her right if she lost it all!

  With that thought the plan was born. Here was enough to keep her until she could find a job. She felt little compunction in taking what was Ivy's, telling herself Ivy had probably come by most of it dishonestly. It was justice, retribution for the death of poor innocent Scrap. Within days Poppy was installed in a cheap lodging house in the Nechells district of Birmingham, and had found herself a job in a small factory nearby.