The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  ‘Well, he has, but he’s got a wooden one and he’s pretty nifty on it.’

  Charlie realised Bill was waiting for a reaction. ‘That’s great,’ he said, and started working on the pump again with great vigour.

  Charlie tried not to think about it but when, a couple of days later, he walked around the corner and bumped straight into Johnny, he found himself staring at the wooden leg. It was as if a spell had been cast on his eyes, forcing him to confront something really unpalatable. He walked straight past Johnny, ignoring him. From then on he went to great lengths to avoid the young man. If he walked into the pub and caught sight of Johnny – usually surrounded by admirers and being bought drinks – Charlie would walk out. In the end, he even stopped going to his local and found a new watering hole.

  But Johnny was not the only war-wounded hero in Marlow: they were everywhere. As Charlie walked along Marlow High Street, a familiar figure would pass him missing an arm, or in a wheelchair. At the end of their row of cottages there was Johnny Gardner who had been gassed and come back not just struggling to breathe, but mentally unhinged. Charlie dreaded walking past his house because he could often be sitting in a chair outside the front door, his face hollowed out and ghastly, as if he were constantly seeing ghosts. Every time Charlie saw him, he felt as if someone had just walked over his own grave.

  There was no respite at home, either, with the girls enthusiastically knitting socks for soldiers. It was the moment when the five-year-old twins learnt to knit. Those evenings spent competitively creating footwear turned my nanna into a champion of the knitting needle. I used to watch her working away, busy chatting, the sound of the needles clicking, not bothering to look at what she was producing, as if the needles were an extension of her arm. Fascinated, I asked her to teach me, and I am now a champion knitter too. But Charlie felt like they were mocking him. As the sisters excitedly compared their efforts, he would shout at them to shut up.

  Clara noticed but kept her thoughts to herself. Again she was picking her battles.

  One day, however, she broke her silence. A regular customer didn’t turn up for her eggs, but a neighbour came in her place.

  ‘Have you heard?’ the neighbour said. ‘Terrible news. You know Fred, her youngest? Well, he’s been killed.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘Yes. She was scanning the newspaper and there was his name in the list of the dead. Killed by a shell. Terrible. The letter came not long after.’

  ‘Poor thing.’

  ‘She’s taken it hard, of course. He was her favourite and she begged him not to go.’

  Clara nodded. She felt the mother’s pain there.

  When Charlie came home, Clara told him.

  ‘And why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because I thought you’d be interested.’

  ‘Why would I be interested in someone else’s son dying?’

  Clara stared at him, not knowing what to say. He moved towards her threateningly. ‘Are you deliberately trying to punish me?’

  ‘Punish you?’

  ‘You don’t understand, do you?’

  ‘Understand what?’

  Charlie teetered on the brink of telling her, but something stopped him. He felt as though if he let it out, the genie would never go back into the bottle. He changed tack. ‘My son never got the chance to serve his country, die a hero’s death.’

  ‘Well, at least he died here in his home, with me.’

  ‘That’s a good thing? There’s no honour in Charlie’s death. It’s shameful. That Fred boy is a hero. He will never be forgotten. How many people have mourned Charlie?’

  ‘But so many have died! And you can’t expect people to mourn Charlie. He never went out. I don’t know about you, but I think about him every day, all the time. And I’m his mother and that’s all that matters. He’s here,’ she said, her voice rising, her finger jabbing at her chest, ‘in my heart. Bloody engraved there, everything he went through, for ever, whether I like it or not.’

  ‘Well, I wish I’d died a hero’s death.’

  Clara looked at him, suspiciously. ‘Really? And why’s that?’

  ‘Why do you think?’

  ‘I really don’t know.’

  Charlie hesitated, then walked out of the house and down the road to the pub.

  That wasn’t the end of the rows. Charlie came home later, more drunk, spending more of their housekeeping money in the pub. Clara would wait up for him, sitting by the fire on her own. Sometimes she would just stare into it, thinking hard. There was a gap in her middle: it started as hurt, blossomed into fury and before she knew it, there would be a cauldron of rage waiting to explode when Charlie got home. On those nights, with the noise of shouting ringing in their ears, the little girls in the bed upstairs were so frightened that they would pull the covers over their heads and the bed would shake. Some of the sisters said that on those nights, they thought Charlie was violent to Clara.

  Charlie said strange things during these arguments, like: ‘You blame me for our son’s death.’

  To which Clara replied: ‘No, if anything I blame myself for his death. What I do blame you for is drowning yourself in drink. For not realising how precious your living family is and not looking after them.’

  ‘If I did that then I really would be admitting I killed him.’

  ‘How do you work that one out, then?’

  But he didn’t have an answer.

  This confused Clara. In the end, one day, she said, ‘I think you blame yourself for Charlie’s death.’

  Clara may as well have hit him, because now she had let the genie out of the bottle. Charlie felt that it couldn’t have been just a coincidence that Charlie Junior had died within a couple of months of him returning home, having drunk too much and with a rucksack full of watches stolen from dead English soldiers. He felt the universe had punished him for his war crimes. But of course he couldn’t admit this to Clara, because his war record had to remain a secret. And then there was the fact that Charlie had treated his son as if he had died, and talked as if he had died – and then he had gone and died. For that he could never forgive himself.

  Of course, he might have been able to if he’d known Charlie Junior had contracted Pott’s disease long before he started misbehaving at the Front. It is just one of the many tragedies in my great-grandparents’ difficult relationship.

  There were moments, however, when things looked up.

  The morning after one of those stormy nights, Charlie woke up with an idea and said to Clara, ‘Why don’t you open a shop? I’ve some money saved from the Front.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me! I’ve been struggling all these months. What money, anyway? Where did you get it?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Do you want it or not?’

  Clara did want it. With food still in short supply, prices had gone up and the market for any produce, particularly home-grown, was very lucrative. Clara took Charlie at his word and the next day took out a lease on a shop in the market square, opposite the church. ‘Swain’s Grocers’ was in business. But while it helped their financial position, it did little to ease Charlie’s state of mind. He lost his job at the brewery for deserting his post and being under the influence. A spell as a car mechanic ended the same way. And then somehow he managed to get hired as the keeper of Marlow’s lock. It was a good job and a lovely house came with it, right next to the weir. For once there seemed to be enough space for all of them. Charlie didn’t think his inability to swim would be a problem. Which it shouldn’t have been, except he could not stop drinking. It was hard to operate the winch when you were half cut, especially if you kept nipping off to the pub next door whenever the coast was clear. With Alice gone, Grace helping in the shop and Dora being too nervous, the twins were now sent off with the wheelbarrow to collect their father from the pub when a barge was waiting. It didn’t look good for the keeper to arrive lounging in a barrow. In fact my nanna used to ruefully reminisce about it.

  Charlie’s secre
t – the albatross around his neck – was getting heavier. It was becoming difficult to exist.

  Years ago, I heard a piece of music which I think is the closest I’ve come to what the torture of a guilty conscience might sound like. It was a dark winter’s evening close to the end of the year. I was once again in the chapel of St John’s College, Cambridge. This time I wasn’t performing, only listening. I was heartbroken. I had temporarily split up from the man who was to become my husband and was lost, falling through the void. I did what I do when I’m in that place, and went to commune with my maker, whoever He/She/It might be.

  The chapel was cold and shadowy, lit only by the candles on the choir stalls. I crept into one of the pews behind the choir, wrapped my coat more tightly around me and slunk down, wanting to remain alone in melancholy reverie.

  I was undisturbed until the choir filed in and started to sing an anthem that was unlike anything I’d heard before: a rich deep, deep bass voice calling out: ‘O vos omnes.’

  I sat up. They were singing in Latin, but I understood the words. They were the lamentations usually sung in the week leading up to Easter – always my favourite time of year for sacred music, I like my tunes miserable:

  O all you who walk by on the road, pay attention and see,

  if there be any sorrow like my sorrow.

  Pay attention, all people, and look at my sorrow,

  If there be any sorrow like my sorrow.

  Unaccompanied, the clashing chords twisted and turned and went down and then twisted again and went down further – it was dark, and I loved it. On top, the clear boy trebles were repeatedly swallowed up by the deep, sinister bass, and then remerged again over the top, pleading, ‘O vos omnes.’ But help wasn’t to hand, and down the music went again, clashing in minor. My senses shivered. Who on earth had written something so chilling?

  Afterwards I tripped across the road to the pub where I knew I’d find the answer: there was the choir propping up the bar.

  ‘What were you singing?’ I asked Tim the bass.

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘It was fabulous. See? Goosebumps!’ I pushed up my sleeve and held out my arm.

  Tim was a good bloke. He laughed. ‘Let me buy you a drink. And how are you?’ he asked. He knew about the break-up.

  I was determined to save face: I gave him a practised grin and brought the subject back to the music. ‘So, who wrote it?’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘No idea. That’s why I’m asking.’ He raised his glass to me and in return I said, ‘I think it’s either very early or very late.’

  ‘Interesting. Everyone agrees he was certainly way ahead of his time. A musical Hieronymus Bosch.’

  ‘Oh, early then. Wow! … So?’

  ‘It’s Gesualdo.’

  ‘Who’s Gesualdo?’

  ‘You’ve never heard of him?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Oh, well. You might find his life story even more exciting than his music.’

  ‘I knew it. He must have had something truly dreadful happen to him to write such spooky music.’

  ‘Well, not so much what happened to him as what he did. He caught his wife in bed with her lover and murdered them both. I think he cut off the lover’s knob and stuck it in his mouth.’

  ‘Blimey!’

  ‘Yes. The good thing is that after that, he went on to write the most weird and wonderful music.’

  I finished my pint and strode off to the college library to look up Gesualdo. I was not disappointed. Formerly a composer of mediocre love ballads in fifteenth-century Naples, after murdering his beautiful wife and her young aristocratic lover, he escaped to his castle in the wilds of Puglia and locked himself in a room and wrote increasingly desperate religious music. He remarried and then murdered his son. He then commissioned a mural on the roof of his Great Hall (which still exists), where he is shown receiving forgiveness from God while his first wife and her lover are burning in the flames of hell. It didn’t relieve Gesualdo’s torment, however, because he went on to don a hair shirt and hire twelve monks to whip him three times a day. In the end, the wounds from these whippings went septic and he died.

  It seems a guilty conscience can indeed be fatal.

  Gesualdo was obviously not a very nice man. But was it him, or what happened to him? Did the shock of the deceit send him into a violent spiral from which it was impossible to recover? Of course Charlie didn’t murder Clara – he only cut down her washing line. He didn’t turn to flagellating monks – he tried to find absolution in the bottom of a beer glass. In the end, neither worked.

  Shakespeare was perceptive when he wrote Macbeth – a guilty secret doesn’t bring a couple together but drives them apart. I know this. It happened to me too.

  We both felt guilty about the part we played in our daughter’s birth and death. It was guilt that involved and implicated each other, and we couldn’t look at each other. Partners in an unforgiveable crime. The fault line grew into an unbridgeable fissure in our marriage.

  And when he disappeared, those long nights waiting for him to come home, never answering his phone, like my great-grandmother sitting by the fire in the silence with the children sleeping upstairs, I would tackle him when he finally crashed in. But he turned it back on me: I was too demanding, I didn’t understand his job, it was his lengthy absences that enabled me to live in the style to which I was accustomed. And I took it and blamed myself for asking too much. And I trusted him and now I feel stupid. But is it wrong to trust the person you love?

  The years I tried to reach out and repair our marriage. Now I know it was impossible, because he was carrying a secret, another family, and the secret was a barrier to us ever meeting authentically. The thing is, knowledge is power and because he never told me what was really happening, I had no choice. He kept me (probably inadvertently) jailed in a gilded cage. As soon as I knew the truth, I had a choice and it was an enormous relief. I had the permission and power to kick open the door, which I did.

  Someone once described marriage as being like a house: once secrets are not shared within the house or, worse, taken outside to others, it is no longer secure. The windows are open, the door unlocked, burglars get in.

  With a toxic cocktail of guilt and secrets, we had no chance, and by the time the tangled web of his other relationships was exposed, the damage of those years of lying was too great for us ever to meet again. I tried for over a year but trust had gone, and with it respect and love. He couldn’t look at me because when he looked into my eyes he saw what he’d done. I was the inconvenient truth. Tragedy, stupidity and waste, and a family broken apart. Like taking a glass; no, actually something heavier – a china vase – and throwing it at the ground with such force that it smashes to smithereens, sharp splinters everywhere.

  I feel like I’m being melodramatic, but am I? Because what words are there to describe the pain and messiness of the break-up of a long relationship and the family unit?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  If A Job’s Worth Doing …

  Charlie didn’t mean to fall in the river in March 1919. It was a beautiful night, cold but clear. He was meandering home along the towpath from the pub, watching the moonlight ruffling the river. The rushing sound of the water tumbling over the weir filled his senses. And with all this nature going on, he must have wandered from the path straight into the river.

  It was exactly as they said. His life flashed past him in slow motion, starting from the day before and then winding back – past every birthday, every Christmas, every birth, death – good and bad, there was no mercy. And just as they said, Charlie did bob up to the surface three times, and then when he went back down under for the third time he knew he wouldn’t be coming back up again and he was filled with a sense of peace. It was exquisite – the shock of the cold water, numbing his pain and washing him clean. Charlie had been running really hard and now he’d escaped. A bit like when the fourth pint hit his senses, washing away the bad stuff. But compared
to drowning, alcohol was just a temporary fix. Suddenly Charlie realised this was the real thing, there was a way out.

  But just as Charlie got close enough to touch his nirvana, he saw a face peering through the surface of the water and an arm reaching down and grabbing him by the scruff of the neck, hauling him back to earth whether he liked it or not.

  Mr Wilkinson, a local town councillor, couldn’t understand why Charlie was not more grateful to him for having saved his life. As Charlie lay on his back, his body struggling for breath, while his mind was cursing, Mr Wilkinson said, ‘Good thing I was walking past. I heard a splash. And there you were. I reckon I got here just in time.’

  Charlie just coughed and stared back at him. Mr Wilkinson helped him to his feet and supported him the short distance back to the lock keeper’s house. Charlie didn’t look at him, didn’t say goodbye as he walked in and shut the door in his face. Not one word of thanks. The next day Mr Wilkinson reported him to the authorities for being drunk.

  Charlie was hauled before a committee and told that he had lost his job. In shock and terror, he had to have a drink and went straight to the pub. When he was finally chucked out and had to stagger home and tell his wife that he had been sacked again, Clara greeted the news with surprising calm. All those nights sat alone by the fire, waiting, had not been wasted. Because Clara had been making plans. There came an evening when, for no discernible reason in particular, Clara suddenly saw her situation in a whole new light. In short, she decided to take control of her own and her daughters’ destinies. For the first time she saw that she had a choice. And as soon as she realised that, everything felt better. Outwardly nothing had changed, but inwardly there had been a revolution. And when Charlie staggered in and told her he had been sacked, she was ready for him.

  Clara stated her position clearly so there could be no misunderstanding: ‘I’ve written to my sister Rosie. Remember her? She’s the one in East London. She says there’s a job going at the Seabrooke’s Brewery in Grays. It’s simple, Charlie. You can either move with us to Essex or we go without you anyway. Your choice.’