The Children's Hour

by Marcia Willett

  When she arrives home, she is relieved to see that Mina has already lit the drawing-room fire.

  ‘Mama is restless,’ she tells Nest. ‘It’s this wretched weather. It’s madness to have a fire in August but I think we need it. I’m just getting tea ready so take off that soaking mackintosh and go and talk to her. Try to remain cheerful or she becomes anxious. Nothing specific, it’s just how she is. If only this wretched rain would stop!’

  The rain, however, does not stop; it increases as evening wears on and, at about half-past eight, there is a cloudburst and five inches of rain fall in one hour. Up on the Chains, no longer able to penetrate the unyielding ground, the torrents of water pour off the moor, gathering all before them as they hurtle towards the sea; huge boulders and savagely uprooted trees smash into bridges and carry them onwards so that, finally, the debris represents one huge battering ram. Houses and buildings are demolished as though they are cardboard; the West Lyn – changing course, destroying roadways, a chapel, shops, houses – rushes to join the East Lyn River. They swirl violently together, twenty feet deep, bearing along one hundred thousand tons of boulders, building a dam twenty-five feet high, until the pressure becomes too much and the great tide gives way in a mighty roar, sweeping houses, cars and animals far out to sea.

  At Ottercombe, using old sandbags to keep the water out of the kitchen, watching the swollen stream pouring across the lawn and rising to the bottom of the terrace, Mina and Nest are too anxious for their own safety to give too much thought as to what might be happening further up the coast. It isn’t until the morning that the devastation becomes apparent – on Lynmouth Street hotels and houses have disappeared without trace, the road buried deep in silt and strewn with boulders, whilst half a mile out to sea, hundreds of great trees stand upright supported by their enormous roots, torn from the ground – and the acts of heroism begin to be told, along with the tales of tragedy.

  The women at Ottercombe listen, shocked, to their wireless, read the newspapers in horror and give grateful thanks for their own safety. For Nest, her personal grief becomes a part of a larger mourning and, for ever afterwards, the twin disasters of the Lynmouth Flood and losing Connor are inextricably entwined.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  From: Mina

  To: Elyot

  Dear Elyot

  What a household we are! Lyddie arrived just after breakfast looking haggard. Oh dear! Things are clearly every bit as bad as we feared. I took Georgie off to Lynton – which is another story! – leaving Nest to be quiet with Lyddie. We hoped that Lyddie might be able to talk her problems through with her and, apparently, this was the case although Nest is finding the whole thing very painful, as you might imagine. You won’t know that there has been a long pause between the last sentence and this one. My dear Elyot, it shocks me to think how much I have trusted you. I have made a present to you of so many of our secrets, by so doing lifting part of the burden from my shoulders but putting us all into a vulnerable position. The odd thing is how easy it has been to become intimate with someone I have never seen. I know it took a little while for us to become true confidants but, nevertheless, the ease with which I’ve grown to trust you is frightening and I can see why parents are anxious about their children talking on the Internet. Would it be as easy by telephone? I don’t think so. Or at least, not quite so quickly. We’ve all had those odd moments with strangers, a sudden outpouring of a worry, knowing that each will go her separate path very shortly, but I have come to depend on your advice and encouragement in a quite different way. Writing seems to lend a natural familiarity.

  Anyway, Nest is finding it difficult. ‘How would you feel if the man you adored went off with another woman?’ asked Lyddie, or something like that. Well, Nest told her exactly how she’d felt and is now in a fit of anxiety lest Lyddie should question her more closely. Oh, how deceit and self-image does make prisoners of us all! Yet it hasn’t been Nest’s fault that she’s practised deception all these years. It was forced upon her. Still, we managed to get to bedtime without any more terrors although we’re like cats on a hot tin roof. The thing is, Elyot, I can feel it coming: a kind of nemesis for us all. Nest felt it first, of course. All those weeks ago when Helena telephoned to ask if we could look after Georgie until the nursing home was ready for her, Nest felt the first stirrings of it.

  As for Georgie . . . Well, you might not believe this, Elyot, but this morning I lost Georgie! Oh, the horror still grips me, although I find I can’t help laughing too. She was in merry pin, all dressed up for Lynton, and only the sharpest eyes would have noticed that she was wearing matching shoes but in different colours. One black, one brown. We went off very cheerfully, dogs in the back, nice, bright morning. She was sharp too, remembering places very clearly as we went along. Have I said to you that I wonder whether coming to Ottercombe is the worst thing we could have done for Georgie? Well, I think it is. She’s been hauled back into the past and you can see her struggling to remain rooted in the present. It seems to me that it is easier for her to drift back, that she remembers things from forty years ago more readily than she can remember what we did yesterday. Maybe that’s part of the dementia. Of course, nobody has dementia any more, do they? And especially not senile dementia! Oh dear, what a politically incorrect word ‘senile’ is – much better to mask it with the smarter, more acceptable, name of Alzheimer’s. The point is, are the two diseases the same?

  Whatever the truth is about that, Georgie certainly seems ready to slip into the far past and remembers many odd things. This morning we talked of Papa dying just after the war and how she tried to keep an eye on Josie and Henrietta whilst they were still single. Quite lucid, even amusing, and this is the tragedy of it all. So we arrive in Lynton, park the camper and set off to the library. We are at the age, dear Elyot, which brings out the best in our nice local people and we are assisted, waited for, smiled upon. And very nice it is too. The shopping is put into the camper but it is not until we get to the cafe and we are having some coffee that I remember that I need some bread. I tell Georgie that I must dash out to buy some and tell her not to go anywhere until I come back.

  I rush away, buy the bread and when I get back – no Georgie. The waitress, rather surprised by my anxiety, said that she’d suddenly remembered something and went off. Now though I might have been startlingly indiscreet to you, my dear friend, I have not yet made the local people aware of our personal problems so I could do little more than check that she’d paid the bill – she had! – and hurry out onto the pavement. Which way had she gone? I run this way and that, panting along, checking her favourite places. No Georgie. People glance oddly at me and I see myself in a plate-glass window, a bundly old lady, red-cheeked, hat awry, scarf flying. Lynton is not a big town and before too long I have covered all the main streets. I even check the health centre. Suddenly – oh, let it be true! – I wonder if she has returned to the camper. She might, even now, be sitting peacefully inside, waiting for me. I begin to run – why didn’t I think of it before? I never lock the camper lest some accident should happen and the dogs couldn’t be got out. After all, if anyone needs a battered ten-year-old vehicle, complete with dog-chewed seat cushions, then, poor souls, their need must be greater than mine! But she is not inside. Captain Cat barks encouragingly, Nogood Boyo stares anxiously through the window at me, but no Georgie.

  It is only as I make one last desperate search before going to the police station that I see her, standing on the pavement in a small side-road, staring up at a terraced house. Something, the way that she is standing, prevents me from calling out impatiently to her. I walk towards her. ‘I wondered where you were,’ I say calmly, as I approach. ‘Are you OK?’ She turns, her brow puzzled, sad. ‘I’ve been looking for Jenna,’ she says wistfully, ‘but I can’t find her. They say they don’t know her here.’ Jenna, the girl who looked after us when we were children, has been dead for more than ten years. She and her husband moved into Lynton in the sixties – into this very hous
e, in fact, where the curtain twitches aside as a suspicious face peers at us. I take Georgie’s arm. ‘Jenna’s moved,’ I tell her – it’s not altogether a lie although I hope she won’t ask where, it’s a fair step to the cemetery – ‘and we must be getting home.’ She comes along, willingly enough, and I ask if she might like a little trip along the coast or to Simonsbath, to distract her. By the time I’d got her settled and found that Nogood Boyo had gnawed the end off the loaf I could have burst into tears. As we set off, I saw a mind’s-eye image of the pair of us: two potty, white-haired old biddies, wrestling an aged camper round the steep bends – and quite suddenly, I have to say, I began to laugh and laugh. Georgie, bless her, joined in and the dogs barked wildly until I pulled up at Brendon Two Gates to get my breath. ‘That was fun,’ observed Georgie cheerfully. ‘Now where shall we go next?’

  So, Elyot, a thumbnail sketch of our day. How has yours been, I wonder?

  From: Elyot

  To: Mina

  Dear Mina

  I have to say, dear old friend, that I laughed too, although I felt such a twinge at the picture of Georgie outside Jenna’s house. This kind of situation is one with which I can identify only too easily. This flipping between normality and – well, what shall I call it? – ‘losing the plot’, as William would say. For us, sadly, those periods of lucidity are decreasing. We have hours of repetition: the same question or a single word, which is utterly maddening yet so pitiable.

  However! I have taken your advice and stopped trying to persuade Lavinia that her wild imaginings about our GP are simply not true. I go along with it now, and merely murmur something agreeable or nod or look suitably shocked. I have to say that it goes against the grain – which is foolish, I know – because it seems that I am colluding in lies against an admirable, hard-worked and very tolerant man. At the same time, I suspect that he wouldn’t be the least bit surprised at how poor Lavinia is feeling about him. He’s seen it all before, no doubt. My real anxiety is that she refuses to see him. At present we drift along in this twilight world but, like you with your nemesis, I fear that something will happen shortly over which I shall have no control. The point I want to make, though, is: yes, you were right about accepting the situation and ‘going with the flow’. Lavinia is calmer and, because she no longer has to persuade me to believe these horrors that cloud her mind, she dwells on them less and is more readily distracted from them.

  My dear Mina, I too am amazed at the ease with which we’ve slipped into such comradeship. We’ve come a long way from that chat-room, haven’t we? To be honest, I believe that we’ve both managed better in our different situations because of this ability to let off steam. Perhaps it is because we cannot see each other that we are able to confide in each other so openly. Like you, I have wondered about the aspects of disloyalty and have decided that what we are doing is no different to being ‘counselled’ or other like things. We discovered that we are of the same generation, of like mind, and our friendship developed quite naturally from there. Maybe it was foolish to be so trusting but I think that time has proved that we were justified and you have nothing to fear from me. You have given me far too much comfort for me to begin to contemplate the possibility of harming you. Not that I can imagine how it could be done. But I know how you feel. We haven’t just told each other about ourselves; we have told about those who are close to us and sometimes we feel we are betraying a trust. Well, so be it. We have done it out of love and concern for them, in an effort to understand and to gain strength to continue with the task.

  So, I offer you a toast: to family life.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘The thing is,’ Lyddie said, ‘the really unbelievable thing is that I still love him.’

  Her three-day sabbatical was nearly over and she planned to return to Truro after lunch. Meanwhile she was kneeling on the kitchen floor, business-like in jeans and thick roll-necked jersey, brushing the recumbent Bosun. He groaned occasionally, and stretched luxuriously once or twice, but for most of the time he lay passively, tired by a long early-morning run over Trentishoe Down. After breakfast, Mina and Georgie and the dogs had walked down to the beach whilst Nest remained with Lyddie in the sunny kitchen, watching the grooming process.

  ‘Well, of course you do,’ agreed Nest. ‘It would be odd if you didn’t. Love isn’t nearly so convenient as that. I’ve often wondered how it must be for those poor wives of serial murderers, suddenly discovering this whole other side to someone they love. How do they deal with it?’

  ‘I suppose it doesn’t have to be a partner.’ Lyddie was distracted from her own pain for a moment. ‘It might be a parent.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nest, after a moment. ‘It might be. Or a child.’

  ‘The helplessness of little children is appalling,’ said Lyddie. ‘Jack said that he lives in terror of something happening to Toby and Flora. The worst thing is, he said, that you’re constantly having to encourage them to do things that might hurt them so that they extend themselves otherwise you would make them prisoners. Having to decide whether they’re ready for the next big step. How terrifying the thought of parenthood is!’

  ‘There’s something worse than that,’ said Nest grimly – and fell silent.

  Lyddie looked at her curiously. ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Watching other people making those decisions for one’s own child,’ answered Nest at last.

  Lyddie, looking thoughtful, resumed the long sweeping strokes so that the Bosun’s black and tan coat gleamed.

  ‘That’s twice,’ she said. ‘First you talked about your lover being unfaithful and now you say that, about children, as if you really know.’

  Nest stared at her, as she crouched beside the sleeping dog. Her small face, pale beneath its shining mop, was full of innocent affection – she looked like a child herself – yet Nest knew instinctively that the moment had come at last. Her hands clenched upon her lap in terror but she spoke out bravely.

  ‘I do really know,’ she said. Her heart seemed to flutter in her throat. ‘I had a child, you see, years ago.’ She looked away from the expression of surprise on Lyddie’s face, concentrating on her story lest she should lose courage. ‘It wasn’t so simple, in those days, to be a single parent. Apart from the stigma there was none of the financial support that can be claimed now and you had to be very well off to provide child-care while you earned a living. I taught English – well, you can remember that – and at the time I worked in the private sector . . .’

  ‘Did they throw you out?’ Lyddie sounded so indignant that Nest managed a faint smile.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘The headmistress was a very fair woman. And very sensible. She gave me a sabbatical. I became pregnant in the autumn and took the spring and summer terms off. If anyone at the school suspected they never said anything and I was very glad to have work to go back to the following September.’

  ‘But what did Grandmama say?’ Lyddie was sitting back on her heels, the grooming forgotten, shocked but full of sympathy for this beloved aunt. ‘And Aunt Mina? Did she know?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Mina knew. Your grandmother was horrified, to begin with, but it was Mina who calmed her down. As much as anything it was the terrible stigma of having an unmarried pregnant daughter. That’s probably so difficult for you to imagine in these enlightened days, but even in the middle sixties it was a disgrace . . .’

  ‘But the father,’ interrupted Lyddie. ‘Couldn’t you . . .? Was he . . .?’

  ‘He was married.’ She spoke so low that Lyddie got up and came closer, sitting down on the chair beside the table, the brush still in her hand.

  ‘Oh, Nest . . .’

  Nest looked at her. ‘It wasn’t an affair,’ she said with difficulty. ‘Nothing like that. It was just once. But I loved him, you see.’

  Her face crumpled a little – and then she smiled again, shaking her head at Lyddie’s quick impulsive gesture.

  ‘You mustn’t be sorry for me,’ she said. ‘Wait. I’m trying to think
.’

  ‘So Grandmama made you have the baby adopted?’ Lyddie prompted her gently, full of compassion.

  Nest took a deep breath, her eyes looked unseeingly out into the courtyard and she nodded.

  ‘Mmm.’ She steadied her voice. ‘It was agreed that . . . the baby must be adopted. Even Mina pressed for it. Everyone decided that it was the best thing for— The best thing.’

  Lyddie got up, dropping the brush, and came to kneel beside Nest’s chair: in the face of this pain her own suffering receded.

  ‘How awful.’

  ‘It was awful.’ She stared down at Lyddie’s hand, warm upon her own, and then into the green-grey eyes that watched her so lovingly.

  ‘But who was “everyone”? Did all the family know?’

  ‘No, not all. Josie and Alec had gone to America by then and Georgie was with Tom doing some kind of exchange posting in Geneva. Timmie was with the army in Germany but he knew. Timmie was a great comfort.’

  ‘And Mummy? Did she know?’

  Nest stared round the kitchen, out into the courtyard and, at last, back at Lyddie.

  ‘I’ve thought this through a million times,’ she said, ‘and there is no way except plain truth. Yes, Henrietta knew. She knew because it was she who adopted my baby girl.’ She watched confusion give way to realization and the sudden wash of colour flood into Lyddie’s cheeks. ‘Forgive me, if you can, for breaking the silence now. It’s just—’