by Iona Whishaw
“I don’t have much experience with teenagers, but I was young myself. I think perhaps that is what I’m drawing on,” Lane said, suddenly serious. “She reminds me of me, I suppose. Independent, a little angry, full of blighted hopes. I was only a little older than she is when I signed on, so I didn’t have much time for blighted hopes, and in the end I found that keeping busy doing something interesting took care of it.”
“Perhaps that’s her trouble,” Darling mused. “She’s obviously intelligent. The boyfriend says she’s the smartest student at the school. If she thought she could get away and do something interesting with her life, she’d be less angry.”
The sandwiches were cut and set on plates around the kitchen table when Darling remembered the photo. “Oh, here’s the picture of the locket.” He fished the picture out of the inside of his jacket. It showed a small and simple locket, both closed and open, its chain curving to the edge of the picture.
“Gold?” asked Lane, taking it up.
“Yes. It cleaned up nicely once we got the dirt off it. Nothing inside, alas. It’s odd that a small child would be wearing it, so perhaps someone here remembers an unusual circumstance like that.”
Lane felt something in her falling. The reality of a real child, its life ended somehow, cast away, she thought, and then she tried to pull back from that image. “A little child. It’s so impossibly sad.” She gazed at the locket. “Can I keep this photo?”
Darling, discomfited by how moved he was by Lane’s expression of sadness, cleared his throat. “Yes, yes. It’s a copy for you to shop around, see what you can find out.”
Lane went to the door and saw Erin, seemingly lost in her thoughts, staring at the fire. “Come on. It’s ready.” The girl looked listlessly at her, and then pushed herself out of the chair. She’s bone tired, Lane thought. She must have passed an uncomfortable night trying to sleep in a strange place on her own so far from anywhere. Lane pulled out one of her four kitchen chairs and nodded at Darling to sit down as well. She did not feel he would get anywhere with his young prisoner if he insisted on looming over her while she ate.
Erin perked up at the sight of food. She did not have to be invited to dig in. She seized upon the sandwich with all the enthusiasm Lane would have expected from an adolescent, especially one who’d spent a cold night in an unheated cabin on short rations. Darling, she noted with approval, was also tackling his lunch with evident enjoyment.
Feeling like a society lady whose dinner party is going better than expected, Lane said, “You don’t look like a young woman who has spent two nights in an unheated cabin being startled by sunrise bathers.” Seeing Darling’s look of surprise, she went on, “Erin heard someone on the beach this morning and got a little alarmed, only to find it was an old fellow having an early morning splash.”
“One of the locals, do we think?” he asked.
“I can’t think who would do that, actually,” Lane mused, puzzled. “Everyone here has a bathtub, after all. What did he look like?”
Erin put her sandwich down and frowned. “I don’t know. Old, naked. He had kind of wild hair. Like a trapper or something.”
“That’s no one I know,” Lane said. “The only person we have like that is the prospector, Ponting, and he keeps his hair pretty tidy. He’s also not in the least bit old.” Darling glanced at her, and she flashed him a cheerful smile. “I’ll ask the Armstrongs. They know everyone around here.”
Lunch finished, Erin got up and began to pile the plates on the draining board. “We should head off,” Darling said. Erin looked up in alarm, causing a knife to clatter sharply into the sink.
“Can you help me pack up my things?” she asked Lane, moving down the hall, away from the inspector. In the bedroom, Erin began to fold her clothes. “Here’s a bag for your clothes,” Lane said handing Erin a cloth bag. “Where are your books?”
“They’re still in the car. Can’t I stay here with you? I can’t go back there. I won’t go home and he’ll put me back in jail. My parents will never let me stay at my uncle’s after what happened.”
Lane sat down on her bed and patted a spot next to her. “Look, Erin. It won’t do. You can’t run away from your troubles. You need to be able to talk to your parents, to tell them what matters to you. The inspector is not such a brute. He’ll help you. I’m quite sure he doesn’t want to bung you back in jail.” She smiled and took Erin’s hands, “How much longer have you got to finish up your school?”
“We’re finished at the end of June, but I don’t see the point. They’re only going to make me marry. Do you know my aunt qualified as a doctor and my uncle made her give it up? I just found out. It’s why I ran away. If even my favourite uncle thinks like that, I have no chance. They’ll support my parents.”
“Do you want to be a doctor?”
“I want to be a chemist, like Madame Curie. I want to do something, to discover things. I want to get away from here,” she finished angrily.
“I’m sure that if you explain—”
“You don’t understand!” Erin burst out, standing up. “I’m underage, as they keep pointing out to me, and they can move me around like a pawn, doing anything they want. There’s nothing left for me but to run away.” She seized her bag and angrily pushed her arms into her uncle’s brown sweater, which had the effect of making her look small and lost.
Darling had moved into the hall and was standing respectfully away from the bedroom door. Erin walked out, the cloth bag slung over her shoulder. “Inspector, I’m ready. And before you ask, I’ll answer your stupid questions and go back to my stupid parents and appear for my stupid court case.”
OUTSIDE, LANE STOOD by the car. Erin insisted on sitting in the back “more like the prisoner I am,” she’d said, and was now looking angrily away from them at the landscape outside her window.
“Good job calming her down,” Darling said to Lane.
Lane gave him a “very funny” look and leaned in the driver’s side window to address Erin, fuming in the back seat. “Look, Erin, here’s my phone number. Please call me any time. I’m always happy to talk. I’d love to know how you’re getting on. Will you promise?”
Erin looked around at her and, maintaining a completely uninterested expression, reached for the piece of paper, and then turned away again. Lane moved back, suddenly aware of how close her face had been to Darling’s.
“I hope you won’t live to regret that offer,” Darling said under his breath, and turned to back the car onto the road.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GWEN NEVER INTENDED TO BE nosy. She told herself this very firmly, partly to exculpate herself from what in a more honest moment she would know was snooping, and partly to still her imagination, which threatened to take flight. The clothes she had pulled from the trunk that served as a bench under the bedroom window now lay on the bed. Mabel had gone into town with their mother in search of some vegetable seeds, and so Gwen had the house to herself. Even so, a part of her mind was scrabbling about, looking for a reason for this shocking intrusion.
Ah! She could look for her pale yellow silk blouse, she decided. The one with the tie at the neck and the shimmering buttons. She hadn’t seen it for fifteen years. She could hear Mabel in her head demanding to know why she imagined it would be in her trunk, in her room, but she soldiered on, pulling out clothing: sensible skirts, hand-knit wool sweaters, a grey suit, a pair of brown lace pumps, all neatly wrapped in yellowing paper.
She had little idea what she expected to find, or even why she was violating her sister’s privacy so completely, but Mabel had been acting so weirdly since the horrible business of the body began. Brooding, silent. Gwen had been thinking about when the cellar had been built, and something stuck in her mind about Bob Anscomb and her sister.
She had been sitting on the high stool by the kitchen table, a cup of tea in her hand, enjoying the quiet, and looking out at the garden in the pale spring sunlight, trying to remember the day they built the cellar. Goodness, she and Mabs had been girls.
She herself had been, what, seventeen? You always imagine that memories will be like they are in books, or at the pictures, where you see yourself and the others you were with, dressed as you dressed then, talking, moving about.
But it wasn’t like that. She couldn’t look at their garden and see what had been there all those years ago. She could only see the garden as it was now—partially turned over by her that very morning. But she knew that they had put out a table, and she had a fleeting feeling about it, something just on the edge of her memory. Sunlight, the ghost of a scent . . . She was filled with a sudden longing to close her eyes and have it come back to her whole, to be able to be there again. Young, full of that sense of possibility. She remembered being animated, happy; the very air carried a sense of some girlish dreamed-for future. And then another feeling arose, surprise and anxiety. A sense that something she couldn’t see or understand was going on, and that it was in some way . . . what was the word she wanted? What would she have thought then? Sinful, maybe.
Look at all these clothes, Gwen thought, shaking her head at her own foolish imagination. What fantasists young girls are, she thought. Look at these. All our dreams crushed and folded in layers of paper. What are we keeping them for? She and her mother each had a similar trunk—full of clothes she could not imagine they would ever wear again. It was a journey through time, this trunk. All the most recent clothing, from before the war, was piled on top, and then the few dresses from the twenties, frocks from the years of the Great War, a white pinafore with lace trim from the early teens. She shook her head. How they had maintained the social niceties! Dinner parties, summer high teas for the church. There had even been dances in a community hall in Balfour. She chuckled. It had all come down to dungarees and wellingtons and the one dress pulled out for the few special occasions.
An emerald silk frock lay on the very bottom. Gwen pulled it out, revealing the pattern of tiny flowers that made up the cotton lining of the trunk. The paper the green dress was wrapped in felt brittle, but she opened it carefully and pulled out the gown, the green silk pouring though her hand like a waterfall. She held it up to herself and walked to the vanity, leaning down to see herself in the narrow mirror.
Mabel would have looked lovely in this, with her golden hair, her neck and shoulders framed by this roll of chiffon around the curved neckline, she thought. God, look at them both now! Haggard, with white hair escaping in undisciplined wisps from the pins that kept their buns in place.
As she turned to put the gown back on the bed to fold it, she heard something fall to the floor. Thinking that the gown was falling apart, she cursed tamely and pulled the dress up to see what was wrong. At first she didn’t see it, camouflaged by the design in the rug, but then there it was, a bundle of dried flowers tied with green garden string. Had it been attached to the gown? She picked it up gingerly and saw that it indeed had a rusting pin through it. She put the gown on the pile of clothes and looked closely. The pin actually held a rolled paper attached to the string. Her heart beating, Gwen pulled gently on the paper. A roughly lettered note written in pencil read simply, “For another kiss? B.”
It felt as though time had stopped. She could hear the music now, out of nowhere, as if it had never left her and waited only for this moment to come to mind again. She had had eyes for no one but John. John who had danced nearly every dance with her, who bade her to come outside and sit with him on the back stairs, looking up at the sky. John who had held her hand and said, “I’m going to marry you one day, Gwenny, when we get older.” What had she worn? Pale blue. It would no doubt be at the bottom of her trunk, she thought, coming to with a bump.
She closed her eyes and tried now to recall more about the dance. Children had been there, running up and down, spilling punch, taking cookies. Isabel. She remembered Isabel, so small and pretty with her dark hair and pale skin. She saw her standing against the wall in a simple dress, watching the dancers go ‘round in the flickering light of the lamps. And there was Mabel, in her emerald gown, giggling by the punch with Bob Anscomb. Gwen struggled to see it, but the memory had become a picture that captured only a moment. Mabel must have danced with Bob, must have received this posy from him. It was unimaginable. She shook her head. Bob Anscomb was as rough as they came. She could see the dance ending, people leaving in wagons and on foot, lamps held aloft to give some light. Then came the shouting and cursing, the angry blows. Bob had Robin Harris pinned on the ground and was about to hit him. Isabel was screaming at him to get up, to let him go.
Gwen was on the edge of bed, leaning on the brass bedstead, holding something that she could never have believed possible, a token from Bob Anscomb to her sister. In a panic she looked at her watch. If Mabs came home and caught her . . . fear propelled her now. With shaking hands she folded up the emerald dress, wishing she’d remembered how it had been arranged in the paper in the first place, and trying to imagine where the dried flowers had been. It didn’t matter. No one would go into these trunks anyway. As she bent to replace the dress on the bottom of the drunk she saw another folded paper. Her heart beating, she opened it carefully, and in the same rough hand was written, “You better not tell.” She thought of the ways one could read such a message, but the heavy, ungainly letters seemed to her to contain only one message: a warning. Hastily replacing the rest of the clothes in order, she closed the lid of the trunk, repositioned the pale peach embroidered runner that had graced the top, and looked around the room to see that it looked untouched. This had been the room she and Mabs had shared as children and young women. It was only some years after their father had died that Gwen had been given one of the two bedrooms on the main floor off the hallway. She retreated now to the safety of this much smaller room, shutting the door behind her.
She could not shake the fear she felt at imagining Mabs finding out what she had done, and it woke her to the dilemma she faced. She would never be able to ask her about the note, but she’d been right. Mabel had liked him. She lay back on her bed, hearing the familiar creak of the metal frame in the ringing silence. A photo of John Armstrong sat on her dresser. She did not need to look at it to feel its presence. She felt it every minute, even after thirty years. She had always been the one, hadn’t she? The one with the beau, the engagement—a kind of almost-widow of the Great War, who had once been the object of someone’s love. Hers had been the sorrow of loss, the nurturing of memories, the promise never kept. Mabel had been the unlucky one, whom love had passed up. But now, with one small fragile roll of paper, everything had changed. Someone had loved her sister. And that same person had warned her not to tell. Why? How had Mabel borne the silence she had kept? How had she silently borne the suffering of her sister, about her own losses, when she herself had quite evidently suffered one of her own, even if it was Bob Anscomb?
September, 1910
Mabel sat against the wall holding a glass of punch. She had placed what he’d given her a few days before in her bag. She knew now. It didn’t matter if he didn’t dance with her. He wasn’t dancing with anyone. She knew it was her. The note had as much as said so. It would be tonight, on the way home, that he would kiss her again. This time she would be ready. She smiled and leaned back, sipping her punch. The piano player and fiddler had just ended a dance and the fiddle player was tuning up. It was at that moment that he came to her, bowing and smiling in an exaggerated imitation of some fine gentleman. “Dance?” he said. She put her punch and bag on the bench beside her and gave him her hand. A waltz started up. She giggled as they started to dance.
“Something funny?” he asked.
“Did you just learn this? Here. One two three, one two three.” Bob looked down at his feet, counting the beats.
“There, what do you think of that?” he asked, looking up and grinning at her.
“Pretty good, for a boy.” She looked over his shoulder and saw Robin Harris talking to Isabel, leaning close to her, his hand on the wall above her, holding a glass to her. “I guess it’s Robin and Isabel,” she sa
id, indicating with her head where they stood. “I thought he was sweet on her!”
Bob swung Mabel around so that he was facing his sister and Robin. He frowned.
“Robin and Isabel, sitting in a tree,” she began, giggling. She felt his hand tighten. “Ow!”
“Shut up, would you?” And then he turned away to watch the door, silently and clumsily guiding her in a small awkward circle.
When the music stopped, he moved quickly toward the door, as if he were looking for someone. Mabel watched him, feeling a new kind of painful anxiety. Bob disappeared out the door into the dark, and she turned and sat back down where she’d left her bag and punch. The band played one more song and then someone said, “Goodnight, folks!” and she was outside, pulling a sweater over her green silk dress.
Bob walked out of the light being thrown from the windows onto the path and into the shadows by the trees at the side of the hall. “Let me go!” he heard Isabel saying somewhere nearby, and then saw her hurrying up the path, followed by Robin, who was reaching out for her hand. Bob felt his anger rise like a tide. It started suddenly and so near Mabel she had to jump back, bumping into someone behind her.
“You bastard, I saw you! Keep your hands off her!” and then a punch and big bodies propelling frighteningly in the dark, not caring who they ran into, struggling, hitting, grunting.
Isabel began to scream. “Stop it! Stop it!” She tried to go closer, but John held her back. Then the two men were on the ground and Bob had his fist in the air, ready to come down. Isabel burst forward and wrapped her arms around his chest and pulled so that he fell back, over-balanced. Robin scrambled back with an oath and got up, pulling away angrily from someone who tried to reach out to him. Mabel wanted to go to Bob, to pull him away, to kiss his anger away, but she watched as Isabel pushed him into the darkness toward the waiting wagon.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HAVING RETURNED THE RECALCITRANT ERIN Landy to her aunt and uncle, and telephoned her parents to inform them that their child was back in the bosom of her family, Darling went in search of Ames. He felt almost buoyant after the strain of the long drive back to town with the simmering and silent teenager. His few forays at conversation had netted barely the odd grunt, so he’d eventually given up and focused instead on thinking about the child in the root cellar.