by Ann Troup
He kept her waiting for just a minute while he checked that his cravat was straight and that his hair was smooth; he’d gone to a great deal of trouble to impress her and didn’t want to be let down by any imprecision. Impressions were delicate things and needed to be managed carefully. When he opened the door and met her with his most charming smile, he was gratified to see that she had made an equal effort. The dishevelled state she had been in on their previous meeting was no more, and though she was casually dressed in the modern style – something which Lionel thought was a regrettable social evolution – she was clean and neat. He appreciated the effort and greeted her warmly. ‘Edie, how lovely to see you, and right on time. I do like punctuality in a person, it shows such respect. Do come in.’
Edie stepped into the communal hallway and gave Lionel a weak smile. She had been awake all night, tossing and turning on the lumpy sofa, trying to make sense of Matt’s revelations. The only thing that had become clear by the time the early morning light had filtered through the curtains was that she couldn’t ignore what she’d been told. Up and ready by six o’clock and champing at the bit by eight, she’d thought about phoning Rose and demanding answers but had reasoned that if Rose was aware of any nefarious family history she would have told her. Besides, calling a cruise ship would be frighteningly expensive. There had also been some internal debate regarding the wisdom of involving Lionel, a man she barely knew and who’s clear eccentricity had been both endearing and alarming. In the end, she had figured that seeing him could do no harm and might answer her questions in a reasonably unbiased way. Matt was so convinced of her family’s guilt it would be pointless involving him, and something about Lena’s demeanour towards her, a sense of possessiveness that seemed to have spread to Sam, had put her off seeking answers from the Campions.
Lionel led her into his flat, an exceptionally pristine abode that clearly functioned on absolute efficiency. Edie had never seen a man’s home so immaculate; everything shone, the gleam of it resonating the care and pride that he took in his possessions. Edie was both impressed and intimidated, and perched carefully on the edge of the sofa when Lionel indicated that it was her allocated seat. This was not a place in which she felt she could make assumptions, casual comfort and making oneself at home felt as though it was strictly by appointment only. Perhaps she would become like this as she grew old and became even more lonely, regimented and governed by the need for order. It was a sobering thought.
Lionel poured tea from a delicate china pot; Earl Grey if her nose didn’t deceive her, served with lemon and sugar, not milk. She thanked God for that, Earl Grey was the most rancid drink on the planet, completely intolerable with milk and barely palatable with lemon, but she would grin and bear it to be polite. She took the cup and thanked him, eyeing the pile of photograph albums that he had neatly piled on the coffee table.
Lionel followed her gaze and smiled. ‘I thought you might be interested, I always find that a few visual references help to lubricate a story.’
She sipped her tea, resisted the urge to grimace and pondered the word “story”. She didn’t want a story, she wanted the truth but had long concluded that each man’s truth was his own and that the facts were likely to be somewhere in the middle. ‘Thank you, it’ll be fascinating to look through them and see how life on the square has changed.’
‘If I’m right, there is even a picture of you and your sister in there.’
Edie was surprised, she had no memory of ever having met Lionel. ‘Really?’
‘Yes, at the Queen’s Silver Jubilee street party back in seventy-seven, quite an event if I recall.’
Edie had vague snatches of memory of the day, mainly revolving around a particularly itchy dress with a lace collar, margarine in the sandwiches, bunting and being given a commemorative coin which had meant little once she had been told that she couldn’t spend it. ‘I vaguely remember that.’ she said, hoping that her indifference to the longevity of the resident monarchy wouldn’t offend Lionel.
He reached for the stack of albums and selected one near to the bottom, rifling through its stiff pages as if he knew the exact location of every photograph. Given the impeccable order of the room, Edie suspected that he probably did.
‘Here we are, that’s you, and that’s your sister.’ He passed the album over, forcing her to abandon her tea and a have a moment of anxiety about where she should put it. Back on the tray seemed the safest place and she placed it there with a worrying rattle of cup on saucer, which threatened a spillage. Mission safely accomplished, she took the album and followed his finger to the two small figures in the photograph. Edie and Rose, all dressed up, being force fed orange squash and meat paste sandwiches while Dolly hovered anxiously behind them. They were the only two children not waving a plastic flag for the camera. Sam was there too, waving two flags and commanding attention even then. A younger, but equally harried looking Lena stood behind him, her arms folded across her aproned bosom, her gaze not on her son, but on Edie. For some reason it gave Edie the creeps. She smiled at Lionel and passed the album back. ‘How funny it is to see myself as a child again.’ she said. ‘We don’t have many photographs, my mother was never a fan of recording the past.’
Lionel frowned. ‘No, I don’t suppose she was. I remember her as a very pragmatic woman, which wasn’t surprising I suppose.’
If cold, hard, distant and demanding equalled pragmatic then Edie might have agreed, but she understood the word to mean practical. Rose had always been the practical one; her mother had just been a strain. ‘Why wasn’t it surprising?’ The words were out before she’d had time to think the question through and she hoped that she hadn’t put Lionel on the spot. Having been told all her life not to ask so many questions, she had always been loath to appear nosy, even about her own family. It occurred to her that she might not be in this quandary if she had questioned more, not less.
Lionel set his own cup back on the tray, taking a second to align the handle to his satisfaction. ‘I assume that you know that your mother was your father’s second wife?’
Edie didn’t and was grateful for the fact that she wasn’t still holding her own cup because the jolt of adrenaline that shot through her at this news would surely have made her send it crashing to the floor. If she hadn’t been so shocked at Lionel’s words she could have sworn that she saw a look of satisfaction flicker across his face. ‘No, I didn’t. She never talked about him, he was always a taboo subject, even here.’
Lionel pursed his lips. ‘Equally understandable, a man who abandons his family is always a sore subject. In the old days we dealt with things by putting them away and ignoring them, not airing them for all to see. Well, anyway, Shirley married your father in 1962, I didn’t go to the wedding, we weren’t on friendly terms by then, but it was a quiet affair done quickly in a registry office if I recall. If I’m honest I always thought that it was a marriage of convenience, he needed a mother for Rose and didn’t want her brought up by his sister and mother. They’d failed him badly all round really.’ He paused for a sip of the foul tea.
Edie’s mind was reeling, not only had she just discovered a previous marriage that she’d never known about, but now he was telling her that Rose was only a half-sister! She gulped, afraid to ask more, afraid to know.
Lionel set the cup back down and poured himself another, keeping her on tenterhooks and extending her agony for what felt like an aeon. ‘More tea?’ he asked. She shook her head, still dumbfounded and sitting on her emotions as if they were spilling out of an overfull suitcase and needed to be restrained by force.
‘Right, where was I? Oh yes, poor, unfortunate Frank and his loss. He and Mavis had been childhood sweethearts and married in the fifties. She was a poor specimen of a thing though, had rheumatic fever as a child and it left her heart weakened. Suffered from terrible asthma, and back then the air around here was none too healthy I can tell you. Well, Frank was called up for National Service, I couldn’t go myself, this damned leg.’ He pa
tted his left leg, explaining the use of the cane, which rested at his side. ‘I was born with it, foot all twisted when I popped out apparently… anyway, Frank went off to do his duty, Palestine I think, and left poor Mavis pregnant and wheezing in the care of his mother. When he came back she was gone, and Dolly was bringing up Rose.’
‘What happened, did she die in childbirth?’
Lionel shook his head. ‘Oh no, a little after Rose was born I think, though Mother always said the birth had weakened her. Mother did the laying out back then.’
The look of confusion that Edie knew must be on her face forced him to pause and rewind.
‘Oh, I’m sorry my dear, I forget how much times have changed. When people died back then there was usually someone local who would come and lay the body out ready for the undertakers, my mother took the role from her own mother and I thank goodness that times changed and it didn’t pass to me!’ He said it with a laugh, as if there was something amusing in what he’d said. ‘But I digress, Mavis died of asthma, it was a very damp winter that year and the poor thing couldn’t cope. The doctor didn’t make it in time and she was gone by the time they got there. Such a sad thing I always felt. Still, God gathers his own when he sees fit I suppose.’ He paused again and peered at Edie as if scrutinising her reaction. Edie was a consummate under-reactor and though her mind was doing somersaults, she held what she hoped was an impassive but curious stance.
‘Well, what with his mother’s conviction, you do know about that, don’t you…’ he paused again and she nodded, ‘and the death of his beloved wife, plus his daughter being cared for by Dolly, who even you have to admit, wasn’t the most competent of women, poor Frank came back to quite a mess. It hit him hard, he’d never known about his mother’s activities, though I have to say I always thought that was rather naïve of him. I have no idea where he thought their money came from, but before that he would strut about the square as if he owned the place! Such arrogance! Ah well, pride often precedes a fall. Shirley, your mother, who, if I remember correctly, always had favoured Frank, swooped in and saved the day. She married him less than a year after poor Mavis’ demise and took over the running of the house and bringing up Rose. Bit of a rod of iron your mother, very determined.’
Edie could agree with that and gave him a weak, incongruous smile of acknowledgement. She wondered if he knew that Shirley’s will had been governed by mental ill health and not determination…
Lionel peered at her, his eyes full of concern, but his mouth twitching as if amused, an odd mix of reactions, which she put down to some kind of nervous tic. ‘Oh my dear girl, my reminiscences have upset you! I have a feeling I should have laced your tea with a drop of gin under the circumstances.’
Edie already felt sick, and the mention of gin made her stomach roil at the thought. ‘No, I’m fine, honestly. It’s all just a bit of a surprise I suppose.’ she said, laughing it off as if dismissing it all verbally would reduce it to manageable proportions in her mind. Did Rose know? Rose must know, surely? If she did, why had she never shared it? Edie had always felt that she and Rose had no secrets, that they had been a united force against the relentless onslaught of their mother – no, wait, not Rose’s mother, just Edie’s. Somehow that knowledge was the most painful of all, the fact that she had always, though unknowingly, been alone. Now that she came to think about it, there was nothing unfamiliar about it, she had always felt alone, not quite part of things and one step removed. Not that her mother and Rose had been close, but there was a mutual reliance in their relationship that Edie had always felt was impossible to penetrate. Their interdependence had been explained by Lionel’s story but it left her feeling more adrift from the family than she ever had before. She pushed the thoughts away, she hadn’t come to try and understand her place in her mother’s world, she’d come to find out more about her father. ‘You said last night that you used to be a friend of the family, but that changed, how come?’
‘Beattie.’ he said, reaching for the cane and leaning on it like he had in the communal garden the night before. ‘I wouldn’t say that what she had done to make a living was open knowledge, but it was certainly something everyone suspected. I think I mentioned that my mother was a God-fearing woman, very upright, very moral. She’d done some nursing during the war and because of that was often called upon not just for laying out, but for seeing to minor ailments and aches and pains. She made up a few lotions and potions that people found helpful and such. Well, one night she was called out to see a young girl, the mother hadn’t called the doctor for fear of the police getting involved – she’d taken her daughter to see Beattie because the girl had got herself into trouble. Well, things had gone wrong and the girl was very ill, Mother had no choice but to call an ambulance. Of course the police were involved then, and Mother had to give evidence in court against Beattie. I’m sure I don’t need to explain the rift that it caused.’
He didn’t, Edie could quite imagine the shockwaves that would have reverberated around the small community. Knowing that something went on was one thing, having it unavoidably put in front of your face was another. ‘But you said she laid out Mavis’s body, surely that wouldn’t have happened if the family had turned against her?’
Lionel nodded, as if he saw her reasoning. ‘That was down to Dickie, an altogether more reasonable sort than the rest. When Mavis died Dolly didn’t cope too well, she felt very guilty I think, bearing in mind that since Beattie’s conviction she had also become the main breadwinner for the family. Dickie was much like your mother, a pragmatic sort and not one to hold grudges. I can remember him now coming to the door and asking for her help. Of course she went, she was never a woman to shirk her Christian duty.’ More tea was sipped, lubricating both his voice and his story, or so it seemed to Edie. ‘Frank blamed us entirely for the shame of his mother’s conviction, for the loss of his wife and for the fact that he came home to find his life in ruins. He never spoke to me, or my mother, again. In fact he barely spoke to his own when she finally came home.’
It was a very succinct explanation for a situation that must have spawned a million reactions and motivations. Edie mulled it over for moment, trying to imagine what it must have been like for her father to come back to that, everything he’d ever held dear either gone or shattered. She could understand his grudge against the Whites, although she couldn’t agree with it, but had any of it been enough to drive a man to murder as Matt claimed? Even if it had, which she supposed might not be entirely impossible, why would his victims have been random young women, why would he have not taken his rage out on the people who he blamed, Lionel and his mother? It seemed that Lionel had presented her with yet more questions, rather than the answers and reassurance she had hoped for.
The photograph album lay open on top of the others, unexamined since he had shown her the picture of her and Rose at the Jubilee. This meeting had not been the cosy history lesson she’d been anticipating. She pointed to it, ‘May I have a look through?’ She wanted to put faces to the names, see these people that Lionel had talked about in the hope that their pictures would help her make sense of what she’d been told.
Lionel passed it across to her. ‘Of course, let me sit beside you and I can point out who is who.’
She shifted along the sofa to make room for him. ‘Do you know that I’ve never seen a photograph of my father as an adult? I suppose they got rid of them all when he left us.’
Lionel gave her that sly grin of his, the one that looked like a tic, ‘I suppose they must have.’ He flipped through the album.
‘There he is, that’s just before he got his call up.’
Edie looked closely at the young man, in the picture he was lounging against the front wall of Number 17 with his shirt sleeves rolled up and his face squinting to block out the sun. It was strange to look at a man she’d never met and contemplate an affinity with him, yet more strange to search his features and look for murderous intent. It was a picture just like a million others, one in every
family album and there was nothing special that marked him out.
‘I have one of your mother too.’ He flicked through the pages and pointed to another street party scene. ‘The coronation –’ he said ‘– though the square was named for Edward’s, not the current Queen’s.’
Her mother was there, younger and slimmer than Edie remembered, but with the same pensive frown pinching her features that Edie recognised of old. Her father was there too, one arm around Lena’s shoulders, both of them laughing, heads thrown back, mouths open. ‘Is Mavis on here?’ Edie asked, curious about the dead wife, Rose’s birth mother and the woman who Edie was still trying to make real in her mind.
‘There.’ Lionel pointed to the page, his fingertip resting beneath the tiny image of a beautiful, ethereal looking woman. ‘That’s her. Quite the beauty eh?’
She was, and Rose certainly had the look of her, thought she had inherited Frank’s frame and lacked the thinness of her mother. Edie suddenly felt incredibly sad, not just for the woman on the page who had lost her life so tragically, but for Rose, and herself and even her mother. No wonder her own mother had been such a bitter pill, living up to Mavis – perhaps even living with the ghost of Mavis – must have been quite a chore. But could a loss like that and a second, bitter wife turn a man to murder? Edie didn’t know, but something had driven him away and Edie had always believed it must have been her unwanted self and her mother’s personality.
It seemed that no matter how deep she delved there were consistently more questions than answers. She turned the page to another picture of the coronation, this one a group of happy looking women, each bearing platefuls of cake and sandwiches. ‘Who are these, Lionel?’ she asked.