by Barbara Vine
‘I never heard of anything like it,’ said Vera.
‘Why didn't you come and tell us if you didn't like it ticking?’
‘I didn't want to disturb you.’
‘Surely it would have been better to disturb me,’ said Eden very gently and reasonably, ‘than to have ruined my clock.’
‘I haven't ruined it. It's still going.’
‘There's no need to cry about it,’ Vera said. ‘Crying won't help. Now what's happening to that egg? That egg's been boiling away for at least ten minutes.’
Eden fished it out and put it in my eggcup. ‘I said you wouldn't like it hard-boiled. My goodness, I must fly. Look at the time!’
I was left alone with Vera. She continued to talk for some minutes about clocks, the price of them, the inevitability of their ticking, digressing from her main theme to say what a pity it was I was so nervy at my age. I had never heard of projection then but now I recognize this as projection. My egg would be uneatable. I must let her do me another. Incapable herself of taking offence, she expected me to be unaffected by the drubbing I had received. I dried the dishes for her. When I went up to my bedroom I found that the clock had gone. Where it had disappeared to I never discovered but I did not see it again during the rest of my stay.
My visit was not destined to be a long one. The phony war soon showed itself to be phony, people talked of it all being over by Christmas, and my father came to Great Sindon and fetched me home after a fortnight. It was five months later, in the following March, that Eden sent me a five-shilling postal order for my birthday. Vera had come up to London for the day round about that time and presented me with two half-crowns, so I had been able to thank her in person.
The reason I didn't write to thank Eden was not because I was lazy or badly brought up or disliked writing letters or didn't like getting five shillings. I didn't write because I didn't know what to say. I could think of absolutely nothing to say to Eden beyond the bare thanks. My paramount feeling at that time for her and Vera equally was trepidation. One way and another they had humiliated me and beside them I felt humble, hopeless, unable in any way to match up. If I wrote there would be something wrong with the letter. The grammar would be bad or the handwriting indecipherable or the mode of address wrong. Of course I had written to Eden before, always signing my letters ‘love from’. But would that be changed now we had spent so much time in each other's company and I had received so many lessons, practical and metaphysical, in the conduct of life? Should it be ‘much love’ or ‘lots of love’ or, because of her evident disappointment in me about the clock among many other matters, a cooler ‘yours affectionately’? I didn't know so I did nothing. Eden's blast came to my father a month later.
It made him rather sad. I think it gave him a bad day.
‘I wish you'd written to Eden,’ was all he said at first, but he said it several times, and then, ‘You will write to Eden now, won't you?’
I never did write. The incident upset me. Of course I should never be able to face Eden again or speak to her and as for that inclusion in the sisterhood, it was out of the question. The letter distanced us and for a while seemed to double the six years that separated our ages. At that time I thought only that I must be at fault, I imperfect, seeing in the conduct of their lives only a standard almost unattainable by me.
I thought – yes, it's true I thought about them a lot. In my fantasy they remained eternally the same, following the same quiet daily routine in the sweet-smelling, spotless house, eating the huge teas, stitching and embroidering, kissing each other good-night, two fastidious women behaving as women should. One day, if I tried hard, I might catch up with them, be like them, be welcomed in.
Some of this I have written down for Daniel Stewart, a synopsis of it really, for I have to bear in mind that it is not my story he wants but Vera's. Which brings me to the family secret. Am I going to tell him about it or not?
Of course it isn't really a secret. It is known, it is recorded and documented somewhere. For instance there must be a police record of it. I have no doubt the police keep records of this kind of thing for the sixty years it has been and probably for longer. The little girl's family – or should I say her collateral descendants? – they know it, and so do those surviving members of my own family. Or do they? Francis must, for Francis always knew everything, almost before it had happened sometimes. Neither Vera nor Eden ever spoke of it to me. It was my mother, not my father, who told me. She was angry at something Vera had said or done and suddenly she said she had something to tell me that showed how absurd it was of my father to keep holding his sisters up as paragons of virtue. Poor man, he was to be disillusioned soon enough.
Obviously Stewart doesn't know of it. If he did, he would hardly have left it out of that biographical chapter of his. Re-reading this chapter, it seems to me that he has left out a lot of things I think important, things essential to a true examination of Vera's character. I suppose he doesn't know of them and I must tell him. An example would be her illness at the age of fifteen, a few months after Eden was born. For a while the doctors thought it was meningitis. Today they would be more likely to diagnose one of those viral infections that do such strange things to people. Vera lay in bed for weeks (my father once told me), at first with a high temperature and delirium, later with her temperature normal each day but rising steeply in the evenings. One of her lungs collapsed. She lost a stone in weight. And then, quite suddenly, she was well again, with no after-effects except perhaps that extreme thinness that never changed. My grandmother had nursed her devotedly, necessarily depriving the new baby of attention in order to do so, but once she was well Vera took care of Eden more and more, becoming a second mother to her. And that brings me back to the secret again. Is it possible that Vera's illness had nothing to do with a virus and if it was psychosomatic nothing to do with jealousy over the new baby but brought about instead by the Kathleen March business? By guilt or remorse, possibly, but more probably in my view by simple misery that she had been blamed and ostracized.
Nor does Stewart mention the storm. It was Eden who told me about it, for this was a story she was fond of repeating. The first time I heard it – it was to be told me again on her wedding day – we were in the garden at Walbrooks one summer in the middle of the war. Eden must have been home on leave. She was wearing a dress made out of two old ones which Vera had contrived for her. It had a pink and white floral skirt and a blue bodice with pink and white collar and cuffs. Her hair was rolled back from the forehead and pinned while the rest of it hung down in a page-boy bob. On her right hand she wore her mother's wedding-ring, Eden being the kind of girl who always does wear her dead mother's wedding-ring.
Helen and Vera had gone into the house. Eden and I sat on the terrace in deckchairs. It was a sultry day with thunder rumbling and no doubt it was the sound of this which brought the story to Eden's mind.
‘You see that hummock down there at the bottom of the lawn?’
I had sometimes wondered what it was, a swelling under the turf as if rocks were pushing through the soil, though there were no rocks in that countryside of gently undulating hills.
‘There used to be a tree there, an enormous horse chestnut – you know, a conker tree. Well, when I was a baby in my pram – has nobody really ever told you this, Faith?’
‘I don't think so. I don't know what it is yet.’
‘You would if they'd told you. Naturally Vera wouldn't but I should have thought your father – aren't people peculiar? Anyway, as I said, I was a baby in my pram and the pram was under that tree. Helen was in India, of course. This was her grandparents' house then. I expect you knew that, didn't you?’
I wasn't sure but thought it wiser not to admit this.
‘Mother and Dad and Vera and your father and me had all come over on our annual visit. They used to walk – can you imagine? – all the way from Myland. It must be six miles. Mother put me under the chestnut tree. It started to thunder and suddenly Vera had a sort of
premonition of disaster. They were all eating their tea in the kitchen – trust those Richardsons to make them eat in the kitchen, they always looked down on Dad – and it had a window you could see the lawn from. Well, Mother was keeping an eye on me through the window as you can imagine, more or less deciding to run out and get me if it started raining, and they all thought Vera had gone mad when she jumped up and dashed outside without a word. You know what perfect manners Vera has, so you can see it would have to be something exceptional to make her leave a table without asking her hostess's permission. She went tearing down the garden and snatched me out of my pram and started to come back again when there was the most enormous flash of lightning like a bomb falling in the garden. That's what Mother said, though she hadn't really seen any bombs; I mean, they didn't in the first war, not like we have. Well, the lightning struck that tree and shattered it into thousands of bits. It knocked Vera over with me in her arms, but she wasn't hurt and I wasn't, apart from a few bruises. There was nothing left of the pram and nothing of the conker tree except that stump you can see under the grass and about two feet of trunk but they kept on picking bits of tree up out of the flowerbeds for years. Still do, I expect.’
‘So Vera saved your life?’
‘Oh yes, I owe her my life. I do wonder John didn't tell you, it's quite peculiar of him.’
So if that illness of Vera's was psychosomatic (as now for the first time occurs to me it might have been), a way of diverting her mother's attention from the new baby to herself, a disease real enough in its physiological symptoms but brought on by jealousy, she was over that resentment within a few months. By then she loved her sister enough to risk her own life to save the baby's. She even loved her enough to forget her table manners.
I shall tell Stewart about the storm and I shall tell it as Eden told it to me so that he can use direct speech, a much more effective way, I should think, of writing a book like his. And I may also tell him about Vera finding old Mrs Hislop dead, even though this may not be really relevant. Why were none of these stories ever told to Chad Hamner? Or were they told him but he didn't listen or quickly forgot what he had been told, his attention, as I later knew, being elsewhere?
Vera used to go about visiting old people, a kind of survival from the days of the gentry doing good works in the parish (though the Longleys could never have aspired to gentility) and forerunner of community service. One afternoon she went round to Mrs Hislop's and found her dead. It must have been a bad shock for the girl who had arrived with a bundle of cast-off clothing and the cakes she had just made. Vera told me about it one day when she was in a rare expansive mood.
We were out walking with Jamie in his pushchair, just she and I, Eden at this time being in London with old Lady Rogerson. I was doing the pushing and Jamie had fallen asleep, the way he always did the moment the pushchair started to move so that he inevitably missed all the things you wanted to point out to him – horses in a meadow, a cat on a wall, a fire-engine. I can see him now, his round, peach-like cheek and the thick, dark lashes lying on it, his hair the true Longley gold, as yet uncut because Vera couldn't bear the idea of cutting off his curls. We came back home a way I had never been before, though by then I had regularly been visiting Sindon every year for five or six years. This was a lane that led nowhere, that petered out after a hundred yards and became a footpath. Vera and I had been forced to take this path after finding the road we intended to use blocked by flood water. It wound along the edge of a dreary meadow, past disused gravel workings, but this wasn't why Vera had shunned it so long. The cottage came in sight and she laughed a little to hide her embarrassment or perhaps some more powerful emotion.
‘I never come this way if I can help it. It's silly after so long but I can't seem to alter my feelings.’
Today Mrs Hislop's cottage has been smartened up, all the studwork exposed and the roof, which used to be tiled, thatched. A teacher at the University of Essex lives there with his wife and son. When I saw it that first time, just after the war, it was a tumbledown lump of lath and plaster, the windows patched with corrugated iron, the garden overgrown with nettles and an old black and green Morris Ten disintegrating among them. Vera said Mrs Hislop used to collect all sorts of fungi in the fields and cook them for herself and people warned her it would be the death of her, she would kill herself. And when Vera found her, tip-toeing fearfully into the silent cottage, calling out, knowing there was going to be something dreadful behind the bedroom door, the old woman's body was bloated and swollen up with what they used to call dropsy, though she had never shown signs of this in life.
Mrs Hislop hadn't vomited or shown any of the usual signs of fungal poisoning. There was an inquest and the verdict was death from natural causes, though the village all knew she had poisoned herself, Vera said, if they didn't know how or what with. She hurried me past the cottage, not looking back. I think this shows her as a sensitive person, someone to whom place and atmosphere were evocative of painful memory, so why was she apparently indifferent to the spot where the little girl's body was found? For years she kept clear of Loom Lane and Mrs Hislop's cottage yet never attempted to avoid Church Meadow or the churchyard itself and when she went to church entered the churchyard as often by the lychgate as by the drive between the avenue of yews. An explanation could be that she felt some degree of guilt over Mrs Hislop, for not calling on her the evening before as she had promised, for instance, or for failing to tell anyone what she, and perhaps she alone, very well knew, that Mrs Hislop's eyes were shrouded with cataracts by then and she was too blind to tell one fungus from another. Guilt might account for her revulsion from the cottage whereas she might feel no guilt over Kathleen March, being entirely blameless in that matter. But how could she be entirely blameless when the child had been in her care?
Stewart will want pointers in the early life of Vera to what came later, to the long, slow course of poisoning she embarked on and, when that failed, the sharp, savage finality. His postulation, I suppose, will be that murderers don't murder out of the blue. There must be something to lead up to it, a tendency to violence, an indifference to the value of the lives of others. But both Vera and Eden have descendants who have a better right than I to decide whether the secret should or should not be told, a better right even though they may not know the story. Rather than speak Kathleen March's name to Stewart (who, with that to guide him, would begin his own research), I must find out how Jamie feels about it and perhaps how Elizabeth and Giles feel. Writing to their father will be useless as Francis has never been known to answer letters from anyone in the family.
The Battle of Britain, the few in conflict up there above the heads of the many (in which Andrew took part), was what sent me back to Sindon in August, 1940. I wanted very much to go, though most people would find that hard to believe after what I have said about my previous visit. My reasons had nothing to do with Vera, or rather, Vera as drawback was to be weighed off against the obvious advantages, seeing Eden, sleeping in a bed in a bedroom – at home we had an air-raid shelter in the house which I slept in while my parents' bed was in our living-room – the countryside. It was this last which had reconciled me to staying on last time. The rapturous pleasure some children, especially girls I think, take in a beautiful countryside in summertime is passed over or forgotten altogether by adults. Of course it is what Wordsworth is talking about in the Immortality Ode. Growing up destroys it. Meadow, grove and stream, the earth and every common sight lose the dream's glory and freshness in adolescence and after that one is just fond of country life. At least, so it was with me. I took intense delight in the fields and woods of Sindon, the birds and butterflies, when I was eleven, the fruits borne on trees that many would say bear no fruit – sycamores and field maples and alders – the formation of leaves, the life cycles of small creatures, a spider trundling its great egg, a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, a string of toad spawn, a cinnabar moth alighting on a ragwort flower. All gone now. I do not see these things, or if I d
o there is no joy in them; I have no time to stand and stare. But then I did. I found them, or some of them, in the open areas of our still half-built-up suburb where further development had been stopped by the war. Even then I was very good at the art of half-closing my eyes and thus not seeing what I did not want to see, in this case, houses, in others, disquieting manifestations of the emotions. But at Great Sindon there was no need to close one's eyes. Laurel Cottage was one of the last houses to have been built there. It was all unspoilt pastoral glory.
And I wanted to be with Eden once more. It seems an eleven-year-old must have a crush on someone. Separation nourished my hero-worship. I even began to see the letter as just. After all, it was a reproach to my father, not me. Perhaps he should have taught me manners, had me taught to cook and sew and be womanly. Vera had once or twice said she could not see what good all those Latin declensions would do me, and although I would have taken very little notice of that, coming from where it did, Eden had smilingly agreed, telling us with Vera's very obvious approval how she herself had been so hopeless at Latin that she had stopped it after two terms. She was beautiful, elegant, poised, self-confident. Although a young girl, only eighteen, she was the sister, not the niece, of grown-ups and treated by them with the respect due to a contemporary. She had left school and got a job. On her I would model myself. Travelling down to Colchester on the train, I wondered if her hair were still as gold and if it was, whether I could put peroxide on my own without anyone finding out.
Somewhere over Essex a dogfight was going on. A fighter with smoke streaming from it tumbled out of the sky, its motion like a leaf falling. The passengers crowded to the windows, peering out and up. There was no man floating down on a parachute. He was still inside, whoever he was, burning inside there. It was a Messerschmitt, the passengers said, not one of ours, not a Spitfire or Hurricane. The sky emptied and the sun went on shining. Vera was at the station to meet me, to kiss the air an inch away from my cheek, to pronounce on my increased height, to grumble afresh about the weight of my suitcase.