by Jane Bailey
‘Fake?’ said Pippa. ‘What a shame. I love it, but I can’t have fake diamonds. I don’t want fake!’
She took it off. I stood there, half remembering something important, and the next thing I knew Pippa was nudging me to get out my chequebook. She had gone for the emerald ring, and I purchased it for her in a daze. Later that evening, I placed it on her finger in a fancy restaurant, and she glowed, looking about her in the hope that others would see. I have no memory of what we ate, or even how much it cost. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I felt so distant, but my heart wasn’t in it, and everything seemed a little . . . fake.
54
DORA
That spring, Our Mam developed a thrombosis in her leg and had to take it easy. I cut back my hours to mornings only, and with her pension and my income we managed quite happily.
The girls at the office in Newport were fun. Sometimes I stayed with them for their lunch breaks before heading home, and we used to go out and sit in a cafe drinking tea and swapping stories. They saw my wedding ring, and it wasn’t long before I confessed that I had a child. Far from excluding me, they became intrigued, and they were fascinated by my dead French husband. I was uncomfortable with the lie, because like all white lies it had its own momentum. I preferred to keep the conversation about Helen, because she was true and real. I didn’t like to talk about my ‘husband’ and tried to change the subject any time he cropped up. I think they thought I was still grieving so would respect my wish not to talk about him. No matter how fictitious he was, the man he brought to mind was still very real to me, and he was someone I wanted to forget.
Ralph had not made a return visit, and it seemed unlikely that he would. Helen had nothing to offer him, and no doubt some other gullible woman in his growing ‘commune’ would eventually present him with a son.
As for Arthur, I had been certain he would get in touch with me after my visit. He knew this address, and even if he thought I was living elsewhere, he would know that someone here could tell him where I was. As the first week passed, I pictured him mulling things over. I imagined his confrontation with Pippa, her attempts to deny things, his shrewdness defying her lame excuses; but as the second and third weeks ground painfully by, I had to conclude, reluctantly, that my mission had failed. Had Arthur decided to shoot the messenger? Was it really possible that Pippa had managed to wriggle her way out of things? And was it this thought that was making me so frustrated, or was it that there had been no follow-up from Arthur, no pat on the back for opening his eyes at last? The silence made me nervous, and then it made me resentful, and then I felt certain I would never see Arthur again or even want to see him if he ever bothered to make the effort.
‘What did you want to happen?’ asked Our Mam. ‘Did you want her to face hanging for murder like Ruth Ellis?’
Would she hang? Would they hang someone who had committed murder as a child? ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t want anyone to hang.’ I didn’t want her to go to prison either. ‘I just want Arthur to know the truth.’
‘Well, some people won’t see the truth even if it’s dangled in front of their face, because they don’t want to. If he doesn’t see it now, it’s either because he’s a very trusting sort, or because he loves her. Either way, you’ve done your best and you’ve got to back off now. Keep well out of it.’
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but I felt she was probably right. And then in the middle of July, Ruth Ellis was hanged, and it was all over the wireless and the newspapers. Hanging a woman in this day and age for killing a treacherous lover seemed inhuman. No one had any appetite for such extreme punishment any more. It made me realize what a can of worms I had been trying to open, and I wondered if that had crossed Arthur’s mind too. It must certainly have haunted Pippa all these years, and I wondered if that hadn’t been punishment enough. The hanging sealed things for me. I finally let things go. Arthur would have to draw his own conclusions.
As the years went by and Helen started school, I had a little more freedom. Our Mam’s leg got better, and she was happy to babysit if I went out with the girls in Newport or Abergavenny in the evenings. A couple of them invited me to a cheerful little pub where there was live music every Friday. We went along together and listened to a group who played guitar and concertina and sang folk songs. I loved the songs. They told of star-crossed lovers, rascally lords and innocent maids, broken trysts, and lovers killed at sea or on battlefields far from home. Some of them were mining songs, some of them revolutionary. All of them filled me with a sense of connection to the past: the same old stories, the same patterns of lives, the same challenges.
One lunch hour, we were looking in the window of a second-hand shop. We had just been paid, and our handbags were clinking with money. The girls were admiring the jewellery and the hatstands and the Toby jugs, when I spotted something interesting. One of the girls, Barbara, wanted to look at a necklace, so we went inside.
‘How much is this?’ I said, taking the object of my curiosity to the counter.
‘One pound ten shillings.’
‘I’ll have it.’
At home, I took it carefully out of its lovely hexagonal box and tentatively played a few notes. By Helen’s bedtime, I could play her a little tune I had learnt from an Irishman long ago.
RESCUING
55
ARTHUR
Well, over the next few years, Felicity blossomed and Pippa . . . Pippa became more distant than ever. Beryl left to get married, and we employed an older woman called Mrs Jeffrey. Sometimes Fliss called her ‘Mum’ by mistake. Apart from my cuddles with Fliss, I had no physical contact with anyone in my life. Once, when Mrs Jeffrey was brushing my coat with the clothes brush in the hall, I was so moved by her attentiveness and her gentle strokes to my collar that I had to look away. I couldn’t risk her seeing the tears building in my eyes.
In the summer of 1960, my mother died. It was not totally unexpected, as she had been ill for some time, but my father was distraught. I arranged the funeral in Middlesex and took time off work to go. After the service, Pippa took one look at the piles of paste sandwiches in my parents’ living room and prepared to make an exit. I implored her to stay, but she made some excuse about needing to see her publisher in town and his office would be closed in a few hours. So I stood with my father, a few aunts and uncles and three or four neighbours, and we circled the dining-room table, pouring cups of lukewarm tea and trying to raise an appetite for potted beef.
I was hurt that Pippa didn’t stay. And it really wasn’t so much about her absence as her disdain for my parents’ simple life. Would it really have been so difficult to make that one little effort for me, to stand and make small talk with people she had little in common with, to eat unsophisticated food and pretend it was a good spread?
I think that funeral was the beginning of the end.
After everyone had trickled away – no more than an hour later – my father sat down on the sofa and stared into the fire. He sighed. ‘I’m glad that’s over.’
I sat down beside him. It was easier than sitting opposite, because we were neither of us certain of our faces holding up to scrutiny. This level of emotion was new territory for us. There had been Philip’s death, of course, but I had been a child then, and my father had been able to conceal the worst of it from me. Now here we both were, raw and alone together.
‘She was a wonderful woman, you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘She was a wonderful mother.’
‘I know.’
‘She doted on you, you know. Doted.’
This I had some trouble with. I knew my mother had loved me, but her devotion had always been for Philip.
‘She used to feel hard done by when we were working on those boats in the shed.’ He gave a little chuckle.
‘Hard done by?’
‘Yes. When Philip came along she was always afraid that she’d lose you a bit, that you’d grow away from her. And that did happen slightly, I suppose. You starte
d to grow up and do more things with me once Philip was born.’
I was silent. I tried to take this all in. ‘But Philip . . . Philip was always her favourite. I’m not complaining or anything, it’s just that he so obviously was.’
‘Favourite? Your mother didn’t have a favourite. She loved you both to bits.’
How could he be so blind? ‘I loved Philip too, it’s just that . . . it was so obvious! And then, when I came back without him from the ship . . . I know I let her down so badly. I know she never forgave me. How could she?’
My father turned to look at me on the sofa, moving his head back as if to get me properly in focus. He stared at me incredulously. ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick there, son. We heard you were both “missing, presumed drowned”. That’s what we heard. We grieved for both of you.’ His voice began to wobble, and he stopped speaking for a few moments. ‘We grieved for both of you, and then eight days later you were found. Eight days! And you were found alive. You came back to us!’
I found that my eyes were full of tears and my face was aching with the pain of trying to hold them back.
‘Don’t you ever say your mother had favourites. She loved every hair on your heads! She couldn’t have loved either of you more. You were lucky lads. We were all lucky.’ He broke off and started to cry unashamedly, as if this were something he had become used to in the last few days and he knew there was no point in trying to stem the tide.
‘I thought . . . maybe . . . I let her down – let you both down – when I married Pippa.’
He blew his nose loudly in his handkerchief. ‘Children do like to feel sorry for themselves, don’t they?’ He laughed. ‘She liked Dora. She would have loved it if you’d married Dora, but that’s all water under the bridge. She didn’t take to Pippa, it’s true, and she would’ve liked to have seen more of Felicity growing up, but these things can’t be changed. She wished you could have been happier. She wanted you to be happy.’ He blew his nose again and said, ‘Whatever happened to Dora? Is she happy?’
I said I didn’t know. Evidently there was a lot I hadn’t known all my life. We sat chatting together as the dying light leached all the colours from the room, and I was stunned at how self-indulgently ignorant I had been.
I sat at a table by an open window and watched the passers-by, waiting for my old friend Len to turn up for a drink in Bristol. I had about an hour before I picked up Fliss from a Brownie convention. After a while it began to get chilly, so I ordered another pint and went to sit in a corner with a newspaper. I wondered what Pippa was doing. She spent so much time in London now we were practically separated. I knew she would come back soon for a shot of affection, because next month was the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, and she would be anxious about my going to the reunion.
I sat and nursed my beer, musing on the state of my marriage. It was one incident in particular that I couldn’t quite get out of my mind. It had taken place at a dinner party we’d been invited to about two months earlier. The most senior aero-engineer was there (I was pretty senior myself, but he was a real big-wig) as well as some fellow engineers and their wives. I was proud to have Pippa with me; I knew the other men found her attractive and thought I’d done well for myself. Anyway, on this particular occasion – which was quite an important one for me – Pippa really surprised me. The senior engineer, Walt, who was sitting opposite Pippa, took out some cigarettes at the end of the meal and offered them round. I was a little shocked that Pippa took one, as I had no idea that she smoked, assuming that the occasional reek of her clothes was from smoke-filled bars and not from her own habits. And it had been a long time since she’d given me the sort of kiss that would have afforded any clues. So then Walt took out his lighter, but it didn’t work. He tried it a couple of times and, quick as a flash, Pippa took a golden lighter from her handbag and offered it to him. He took it, lit people’s cigarettes and his own, and then he turned the lighter over in his hands as though admiring it. ‘To Flippy from The Beast,’ he read out loud from the back of the lighter. I couldn’t tell you Pippa’s reaction because I couldn’t look at her. Walt looked at me straight away and raised a knowing eyebrow: ‘“The Beast”, eh? There’s a whole side to you I didn’t know, Arthur!’ and everyone laughed. It was a relief to hide in that laughter. I think I gave an abashed smile, but you can imagine how I was feeling.
When I confronted Pippa about it later, she insisted that Walt had simply made it up. ‘There’s no such thing on the side of my lighter. He was just getting a cheap laugh.’ I believed her. It sounded plausible, but when I asked if I could see it, she said she’d lost it. She must have left it on the table or something. I believed that too. I needed to believe it. Of course, it didn’t turn up.
Sipping my beer, I suddenly thought how cruel she had been to my mother, of the throwaway hurtful remarks that Pippa made without thinking. I remembered my mother’s expression as she put on a brave face and made my wife welcome. For me – she did that for me. To my horror, my eyes filled up and I lowered my head further and further over my pint.
The pub was full to bursting, and music was playing in an upstairs room. I stood up to go, feeling uncomfortable, and I decided to meet Len outside and head off somewhere else. Then I spotted him at the bar, miming a drink of beer with a questioning look. ‘I’ve got one!’ I shouted, showing him my glass.
He paid for his pint and steered me out into the corridor. ‘Let’s have a quick pint here and then go somewhere quieter.’
It was less rowdy in the corridor, and we exchanged news. The sound of singing boomed down the stairs intermittently, as people joined in with a raggedy chorus: ‘She wore no jewels, no costly diamonds . . .’
I wanted to tell him about my marriage, but I didn’t know how, so I started with the dinner party incident, just to try him out. He went very quiet and looked at me quizzically.
‘Do you ever call her Flippy?’
‘Never.’
‘Know anyone who does?’
‘No – well, except . . . I think her editor rang up once and asked for Flippy.’
Len raised both his eyebrows and put his head to one side, as if to say, ‘There you are then.’
Having thrown the doubt out there, I felt the need to defend her suddenly, to put the other point of view. ‘But it could’ve just been made up, couldn’t it? Like she said?’
‘Mate . . . Arthur . . .’ He sighed. ‘Stop being blind to what’s staring you in the face. I’m sorry, mate.’
I couldn’t really take in what he was saying. I couldn’t bear the thought of change, I suppose, of family life falling apart. He must’ve read my crumpled face, because he said, ‘Get a private detective. I don’t know how much they cost, but it would be worth it.’
‘You think it’s that serious? You don’t think I may have got the wrong end of the stick? Maybe I’m just not exciting enough for her. Maybe if I—’
‘Listen, mate. She won’t take Felicity from you. From what we’ve seen, she’s never been interested in her. And frankly . . .’ His voice petered out, but I thought he might have been going to say, ‘And frankly, she’s never really seemed that interested in you.’
I had to go and fetch Fliss. People squashed past us and pushed into us. Even out here I could hardly hear what Len was saying now, but soon there was something I could hear.
She wore no jewels, no costly diamonds,
No paint nor powder, no none at all,
She wore a bonnet with ribbons on it . . .
‘Listen,’ I said.
‘What?’
. . . And around her shoulder was the Galway shawl.
I made my way up the stairs and he followed.
‘It’s “The Galway Shawl”,’ I said.
‘The whatty what?’
I discreetly opened the door of the upstairs room, and we slipped inside. There were rows of chairs showing people’s backs. A folk group was playing, and I recognized the concertina player straight away.
56
DORA
‘Dora!’ A hand touched the inside of my arm just above the elbow. The voice and the touch sent up a sudden exhilarating current. ‘Dora!’
I turned, and there he was. We stood and took each other in. I knew this was his part of the world, of course, but what were the chances of him being here, in this pub, in this upstairs room?
‘I heard the tune,’ he said. ‘Um, you know Len?’
‘Hello, Len. I don’t think we ever actually met.’
Len greeted me warmly, I asked after his wife and then he made an excuse to go – to the bar or the gents’ or something, leaving us alone.
‘Dora, it’s so good to see you. I didn’t know you played in a folk group.’
‘It’s hardly a group. I know it’s a bit cranky . . . not many people turn up. Just now and then we—’
The guitarist in our group, Cyril, came up and asked if I’d like him to fetch my drink. I said yes please, and he left us. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I picked up the concertina from the chair where I had left it and started to put it in its box, even though I was going to be playing it again after the break.
‘That’s a nice instrument,’ Arthur said, touching the wood as if he were intensely interested.
‘Wouldn’t meet some people’s expectations,’ I found myself saying. ‘No diamonds on it.’ I hated myself instantly.
He said nothing but looked at me intently. Then he touched my arm again, this time with real urgency, as if what he had to say must be said before someone interrupted. ‘Look, I know about the diamond thing – I’ve worked it out. But I don’t understand what that had to do with Philip. Please tell me. What did the concertina have to do with him?’
It was clear straight away that Pippa had not told him the truth, which was no great surprise, but the certainty of it now roused a fresh indignation, a feeling that I’d hoped I’d put away for good. I was caught off guard. I’d had enough of this deceit. Seeing his earnest face, hungry for information, I blurted out the missing piece for him: ‘Philip caught her stealing the concertina from my cabin. She threatened to kill him if he told on her. He told me. He was terrified. I know that sounds ridiculous, but we were children. She was scared he’d report her. She thought she was stealing diamonds. I never thought she’d actually . . .’ His face changed now. I couldn’t look at him. ‘I’m sorry. How does this help? I never wanted to tell you. I shouldn’t have told you.’