Song of the Skylark

by Erica James

  Her hesitation did not go unnoticed. ‘But if you’re too busy,’ Mrs Dallimore said, ‘you can run along. I shall be quite happy left on my own.’

  Suddenly Lizzie felt sorry for this dignified old lady who seemed so frail a gust of wind might carry her off. The poor woman, was she so lonely she was prepared to make do with Lizzie’s far from scintillating company? But then she thought of how different things would be if she had been sent here in her capacity as a researcher. If that were the scenario, she would have any number of questions ready to ask, but more importantly, she would be ready to listen, for, as she’d learnt, it was in listening that you discovered the most about a person, or a subject. And wasn’t it true that all old people, if given the chance, liked nothing better than to reminisce? All she had to do was ask the right question and sit back and listen.

  So, flicking away a scattering of pink rose petals that had fallen onto the wooden seat next to Mrs Dallimore’s wheelchair, she sat down. It was while she sought to think of a suitable opening question that Mrs Dallimore asked one of her own.

  ‘I’m not exactly an expert in these things,’ she said, ‘but would I be right in thinking that you’re new to this type of voluntary work?’

  ‘Do you ask that because I’m so obviously rubbish at it?’

  ‘Not at all. You just seem … a little out of your depth.’

  Lizzie couldn’t help but smile at the understatement. ‘I think you’re being kind,’ she said politely.

  ‘Perhaps I am, but I don’t see that as a bad thing. What job were you doing before you came here?’

  Lizzie turned to look more closely at this strangely inquisitive woman, thinking that, as physically insubstantial as she appeared, there was nothing lightweight about her personality. ‘You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’ Lizzie said.

  ‘Wouldn’t you if you were in my shoes and had nothing better to do?’

  Lizzie smiled again. ‘I probably would. And to answer you, I was a researcher for a radio station in London.’

  ‘That sounds interesting – what made you leave?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘Long stories are always the best kind. Tell me more.’

  ‘Let’s just say I did something which, with hindsight, wasn’t the smartest of things.’

  ‘Were you sacked?’

  Direct with it, thought Lizzie, amused. She nodded. ‘Yes, I’m afraid I was. Unfairly so, in my opinion.’

  ‘Goodness, what did you do?’

  ‘You’d be too shocked if I told you.’

  The old lady visibly bristled. ‘Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that what you see before you now is what I’ve always been. I’ve experienced more shocks than you could possibly imagine.’

  The abrupt intensity to Mrs Dallimore’s voice took Lizzie by surprise and made her try to picture her as a much younger woman. But try as she might, she failed hopelessly. All she could see was this small, vulnerable woman whose slight body was failing her, whose bony hands were covered with a layer of skin so thin it resembled translucent parchment and whose face, pale and unblemished, was etched with a tracery of lines.

  Sensing she had inadvertently caused some kind of offence, she changed the subject and started to explain about having to move back home and her mother volunteering her services here as a befriender. ‘Mum believes strongly in keeping me busy until I find myself a proper job,’ she finished by saying.

  ‘You might want to rephrase that; for a lot of people what you’re doing here is a proper and very worthwhile job, more so because it’s unpaid.’

  Realising how clumsy she’d been, Lizzie apologised. ‘You’re right, but I keep lapsing into feeling sorry for myself.’

  ‘Young lady, from what I can see you have everything going for you, so let’s have no more self-pity. After all, you could be sitting where I am, and think how miserable that would make you.’

  Once more Lizzie changed the subject. ‘Do you mind me asking how old you are?’

  ‘I don’t mind at all, but how old do you think I am?’

  ‘Umm … eighty-five?’

  The old lady laughed. ‘Try adding another ten years.’

  ‘Ninety-five? No! You can’t be.’ Lizzie was genuinely surprised; she didn’t think she’d knowingly met anyone as old.

  ‘I assure you I am, and you know, until not so long ago I subscribed to the view that there was plenty of time yet for me to grow old, but it pains me to admit that the spectre of old age has finally caught up with me.’

  Quickly working out when she must have been born, and all the changes this woman had lived through, Lizzie’s inner researcher sprang into life. What sort of life had she led? Had it been a happy and fulfilled life? Had she done anything she regretted? Was there anything she wished she had done?

  Her curiosity fully piqued, and resorting to a question she had found to be both an icebreaker and revealing when carrying out an interview, Lizzie said, ‘Mrs Dallimore, can I ask you a personal question?’

  ‘You may.’

  ‘Would you say there had been a defining moment in your life, a moment when you knew that your life was never going to be the same again?’

  The woman fixed Lizzie with a long hard stare from her faded blue eyes, but then, as though distracted by something out of the corner of her eye, she turned to look towards the trees in the distance. Seconds passed, during which a radiant smile swept over the old lady’s face – a smile that magically transformed her features, stripping away the years and giving Lizzie a glimpse of what she hadn’t been able to imagine before.

  Then, as if remembering she was still there, Mrs Dallimore slowly turned to face her again. ‘I was nineteen years old when my life changed forever,’ she said. ‘Would you like to know how?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lizzie said simply. ‘Yes, I would.’

  Chapter Eight

  April 1939, Boston, America

  On a chilly spring morning and wearing her favourite red coat with a cream beret and silk scarf tied at her throat, Clarissa stood between her parents’ graves to say goodbye.

  It was 1939 and she was about to embark on the unknown. Her mother’s approval was implicit; Fran had always urged her to take her courage in both hands and fear nothing. ‘Uncertainty sees only obstacles,’ she had told her from a young age, ‘hope and courage will help you to soar on wings of faith.’

  It was a message that Clarissa would hold dear to her heart the day after tomorrow when she would board the SS Belle Etoile and cross the Atlantic to England. She was making the journey, in part, to right a terrible wrong, but also because she had always known that one day she would leave to discover her roots in a country she had only ever heard about, lovingly described by her mother in the greatest of detail. ‘Remember,’ she used to say, ‘you’re as English as you are American.’ Actually Clarissa felt more English than American, mostly because her mother had been such an enormous influence on her, even insisting that she spoke with an English accent.

  Her mother had been brought up in England, the only child of Charles and Lavinia Upwood of Shillingbury in Suffolk where there had been Upwoods since the days of the Crusades. They were a family who cared deeply about appearances and their standing within society, so when Fran ran off to France with Nicholas Allerton, an American soldier she had met at the end of the First World War when she’d been working as a nurse, her family were furious at her scandalous behaviour and threatened to disown her if she didn’t come to her senses. But Fran remained where she was and revelled in her bohemian life on the Cote D’Azur in France where Nick started work on the novel he wanted to write.

  The only son of a prominent Boston banker, Nick was able to afford a comfortable existence for the two of them on an allowance provided for him by his parents. But that allowance was abruptly stopped when, back in Boston, Franklin Allerton and his wife, Ethel
, received a letter from their only child announcing that he was soon to be a father and was planning to marry. It was bad enough that their son was playing at being a writer instead of joining the bank as was expected of him, but now to flaunt a child conceived out of wedlock was too much for their Roman Catholic sensibilities. A telegram was despatched demanding he return at once to Boston. ‘Under no circumstances are you to marry!’ he was instructed. ‘Do so and we will cut you off.’

  It was the last communication he received from them until five years later when he was informed that his father had died. Not without a sense of duty, Nick now knew the time had come for him to relinquish the dreams he’d had for himself and return to Boston with his wife and young daughter, Clarissa. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but he was tired of the daily struggle to scratch a living together from his writing – to his shame, his earnings allowed for only the basics, a roof over their heads and a very meagre diet which Fran supplemented by growing vegetables in the terraced garden at the back of the house and keeping chickens.

  From the moment they arrived in America, Nick became a different man, weighed down with the responsibility now thrust upon him. He started work at the bank – the bank his grandfather had founded – and against his every instinct threw himself into the role that had been carved out for him since his birth. It was a role that made him thoroughly miserable, so desperately miserable he shot himself soon after the Wall Street stock market crashed in October 1929. He left a note for Fran in which he apologised for his cowardice, begging her to forgive him, but he simply couldn’t go on.

  His death brought about an unexpected change in Clarissa’s grandmother, Ethel. As if suddenly realising Clarissa was the only link to the son she had lost, Ethel took it upon herself to show more of an interest in her granddaughter. She showered Clarissa with gifts and summoned her to visit where she lived alone in regal splendour, an army of servants at her beck and call.

  When she was twelve years old Ethel informed Clarissa that she was to be sent away to school. ‘You are to attend Noroton Convent of the Sacred Heart,’ her grandmother explained. ‘It’s the school I attended when I was your age. Your education,’ she went on, ‘including vital religious instruction, is woefully lacking, and I feel it my God-given duty to make good the damage that has thus far been inflicted upon you.’

  When Clarissa went home and told her mother that Grandma Ethel was anxious to save her mortal soul, Fran was livid. It was the only time Clarissa could recall her mother being so angry. ‘You’ll go to that school over my dead body!’ she fumed. ‘And the only soul in danger right now is your grandmother’s!’

  There followed a protracted period when Clarissa didn’t visit her grandmother’s gloomy mansion; instead her Saturdays were taken up with playing tennis with a group of school friends and learning to play the piano. But then one Sunday afternoon Grandma Ethel turned up unannounced at their apartment. The sight of this imperious woman hovering awkwardly in their sitting room, refusing all offers to sit down or to have a drink, made Clarissa think that the decision to visit had not been an easy one. She observed her mother trying to make polite conversation and waited for the purpose of the visit to be revealed – was she to be forced to go to the school her grandmother believed would save her from the flames of hell?

  It turned out that she was to be spared an education at the hands of nuns dedicated to the cause of lost souls, her grandmother promising to forget all about it if she could just be allowed to spend time with her granddaughter again. She claimed she missed the young girl’s company. To prove her love for the child, she explained that she had created a trust fund for Clarissa – when she reached the age of twenty-one she would become a wealthy young woman.

  With this new level of mutual respect achieved, Fran decided to try again with her own parents. To her disappointment she received nothing in response to her letter.

  It was that same year, with Clarissa’s thirteenth birthday just around the corner, that she and her mother were invited to spend the summer with Grandma Ethel at her summer house in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod. Nick had often spoken of his childhood holidays spent at the beach and, although curious to see where he had played as a boy, Fran declined the invitation as she couldn’t take that amount of time off work. For the sake of her sanity, and much to Ethel’s disgust – she was firmly of the opinion that a lady of proper standing in the community should apply herself to nothing more taxing than charity work – Fran had found herself a job writing a weekly column for a magazine.

  The piece was a light-hearted take on family life from the perspective of an upper-class English woman living in America. It was called The Vicissitude of Lady Cordelia Fanshawe and was growing in popularity. But Ethel insisted that she should come, and that if she brought her typewriter with her, she would be able to work as much as she needed and her column would be taken to the office personally by Brodie, the chauffeur. It would have been churlish to refuse the offer, and so Fran and Clarissa packed their things and joined Ethel for the month of August. The same thing happened the following year, and from then on it became a tradition. Fran’s only concern was that she strongly suspected Ethel now saw these summer vacations as a means to draw Clarissa into a world where she would meet a suitable future husband, a husband of Ethel’s choosing from amongst the sons of her fine upstanding friends. However, there was one family with whom she would have nothing to do, and made it very clear that Clarissa was to avoid socialising with any of the Kennedys, who, in her opinion, were entirely the wrong sort and had brought nothing but havoc to the neighbourhood since buying a house there.

  It was shortly after Clarissa’s seventeenth birthday, while staying at Hyannis Port, that Fran admitted she had been feeling unwell for some time with excruciating headaches. Ethel sent for her own personal physician who immediately admitted Fran to hospital for tests. The diagnosis was not good; there was a tumour pressing down on Fran’s brain and an operation was out of the question. She wouldn’t see Christmas.

  In the unbearably sad final weeks of her life, when Clarissa rarely left her mother’s side as she slipped in and out of consciousness, Fran’s memory repeatedly drew her back to her childhood in England, in particular to the simple pleasures she had enjoyed while growing up – of autumn walks breathing in the smell of burning leaves, of filling her pockets with shiny conkers, of eating blackberries picked from the hedgerows, of summer picnics, of lying in the grass listening to the song of a skylark. They were all things her mother wished she had been able to do with Clarissa.

  Then out of the blue she made Clarissa promise that she would go to England. ‘Make things right with your grandparents,’ she said, ‘and before it’s too late. Succeed where I failed. Promise me you’ll do that.’

  Clarissa had made the promise willingly.

  Her mother’s death meant that she had to go and live with Grandma Ethel in her large and gloomy mansion. Although she had become attached to her grandmother, Clarissa did not enjoy living with her. She disliked the house and saw it as a suffocating prison from which she longed to escape.

  On her nineteenth birthday she announced her intention to sail to England and meet her grandparents. Ethel was completely against the idea. ‘I forbid it,’ she said, adding, ‘you’re too much your mother’s daughter, headstrong and stubborn.’

  Any word of criticism of her mother was not to be borne. ‘If I’m my mother’s daughter then you must know that I shall simply defy you and run away,’ Clarissa retaliated. ‘After all, I have the money my mother left me which I can use. I don’t need anything from you.’

  The more her grandmother resisted her desire to go to England, the harder Clarissa pressed to go, even when she read in the newspapers that there was talk of war brewing in Europe. In the end, Ethel gave in and took control of the situation. She booked a first-class passage on the SS Belle Etoile and insisted that Clarissa travel with a chaperone, a friend who happened to be embarkin
g on a tour of Europe.

  Her parting words to Clarissa were: ‘You must at all times be on your guard against those who will take advantage of you, assuming that for one so young you have no social sense. Do not, whatever you do, let me down.’

  Still standing between her parents’ graves, Clarissa said one final goodbye to them and turned away, knowing that it would be a long time before she returned. She needed to be free, and she couldn’t be free if she stayed in Boston with her grandmother dictating the terms of her life. She had no choice but to go.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘The next day I set sail for Southampton from New York and so that, my dear, was the defining moment of my life, as you put it.’ Mrs Dallimore smiled. ‘And I can assure you that from then on nothing was ever the same again.’

  Lizzie shifted in her seat to move into the shade. She had been so absorbed in Mrs Dallimore’s story she hadn’t noticed the sun had climbed higher into the sky and had become quite hot. Checking that the old lady wasn’t in too much sun either, she said, ‘You were only nineteen and yet so much had happened to you already. It was a lot to cope with,’ she added after a moment’s reflection.

  ‘I never saw it that way. I simply got on with life, just as my mother had. Now then, after all that talking, could I trouble you to fetch me a cup of tea, please?’

  Wishing she could stay put and hear what happened next to Mrs Dallimore’s nineteen-year-old self, Lizzie reluctantly stood up. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘How about a biscuit to go with it?’

  ‘A nice piece of shortbread would be lovely, thank you.’

  With Freddie strapped into his pushchair, Tess hurried along the main street of the village in the direction of Orchard House. She had noticed Lorna’s car driving by when she’d been buying a loaf of bread in the community shop and had been seized with the sudden urge to speak face to face with Lorna. It was ridiculous that their friendship should be jeopardised because Lizzie and Simon had split up – they’d been friends before their offspring had met, so why shouldn’t they continue to be friends?