by Barbara Vine
‘Later on, of course, after the murder, people who could remember the Kathleen March case said Vera had killed her. They said Kathleen had cried and Vera had lost her temper with her. Vera did have a very bad temper, it was well-known, even my mother said that. But she never would believe that of Vera, not even after she was hanged…’
In the autumn of 1979, Mr George Treves, who farms 600 acres of land between Assington and Cole Fen, hired a contractor called Peter Somers to uproot a hedge. His project was that of turning four small fields into one large one in which he intended to raise a barley crop. After three days of working at the destruction of the hedge with a mechanical digger, Mr Somers discovered, buried at a depth of six or eight feet, an oil drum measuring eighteen inches in height and nine inches in diameter, its open end being roughly sealed with a plug of the yellow clay that runs in strata through the otherwise light, gravelly soil of these parts.
At first Mr Somers and Mr Treves thought it possible the drum might contain valuable artifacts such as archaeologists had recently shown an interest in or even the jewellery stolen from Cole Hall ten years before in a burglary which has become something of a local legend. This included a £10,000 string of pearls among a collection of loot that has never yet come to light. However, what they found inside the drum was a jumble of brownish bones and shreds of cloth. They took their find to the police.
The bones were human. At the inquest conducted on these remains, it was concluded that they belonged to a female child of about two who had been dead at least fifty years. To have discovered this much is nothing short of a miracle of forensic science, and no more was forthcoming. The origins of the oil drum could not be traced. If there were marks of violence on the child's body, time and the decay of more than half a century had obliterated them. The shreds of material mingling with the bones were found to be woollen fibres and Kathleen March when she vanished was dressed in a woollen vest under her cotton dress and a woollen jacket over it.
Was this Kathleen? Certainly the hedge at Cole Fen was no more than half a mile from the wash where Kathleen was last seen in her pram. We remember that this is where Mavis Broughton, née Vaughan, lived, at a distance not too far from Great Sindon for her mother to send her to the larger village on an errand. On the other hand, police records show that during a twenty-year period from 1920 to 1940, no fewer than five female children under the age of three went missing in the Great Sindon/Cole Fen/Sissington area of Essex. And of these baby girls, the body of only the eldest, a three-year-old from Sissington, was ever discovered.
It is unlikely that we shall ever know. But if Vera Longley committed this crime, there seems no possible reason or motive for it. Jealousy of attention given to the child can hardly have entered into it since Vera had only to make an excuse to Adele March in order never to see Kathleen again. Rather than kill her neighbour's two-year-old daughter, she would surely have been more likely to make away with her own infant sister of whom there is reason to believe she was jealous. Reason and motive played so large a part in the later crime that our aim to understand Vera Hillyard's character is not served by attempts to show her as an unreasoning psychopath, for which definition there is no evidence whatsoever.
The March family moved from Great Sindon in the following year, the year of Edith Longley's birth, into the signalman's house which had just become vacant at Sindon Road.
I have written back to Jamie to say I shall be in Florence in May. His mention of his book has struck a chord of memory. When I was about twelve, my mother's aunt died and left me a cookery book. Of course she was no relation to Jamie, being on the other side of my family, the sister of my mother's English mother. She had been a cook years before in a great house called Lytton Lodge at Woodford Green – that is, she had been the cook, a personage of some importance with kitchenmaids under her, an artist creating banquets. I remember her as a handsome old lady, very religious, almost totally deaf, the peak experience of whose life had been when the Prince of Wales, he who became Edward the Eighth and then Duke of Windsor, came to dine.
She died in the little room she rented in Seven Kings, and all the stuff in the room, which was everything she possessed, came to my mother, her only surviving relative. There was a New Testament with passages marked in red, a pair of folding scissors that had hung from her belt with her keys, a lot of framed photographs of people my mother couldn't identify, some ugly jewellery in old-fashioned settings, bombazine dresses and white lawn aprons that would fetch a small fortune today if we had kept them, and the cookery book. So I suppose that strictly it wasn't left to me but given to me by my mother.
It was called Mrs A. B. Marshall's Cookery Book and it had been published in 1884. Unlike Cucina Ben Riuscita, which I suppose Jamie has written for ambitious housewives, Mrs Marshall, who had run a cookery school, had devised this book for cooks with dinners of a dozen courses to prepare for two dozen guests. I used to read it during the war when the worst food shortages were on. I used to read it while eating sandwiches of grey bread, margarine and reconstituted egg. At Sindon I sometimes sat reading it on the river bank down by the wash, though I did not yet know at that time that this was where Vera had been sitting when Kathleen March was lost.
Mrs Marshall gave a menu for a ball supper for ‘400 to 500 persons’ which consisted of three hot dishes, a consommé, lamb cutlets and quails, and no less than thirty cold dishes that included more quails and something called Siamese Twins that were double choux puffs iced with green icing and filled with cream that had been coloured with carmine and flavoured with rum. There was also a menu for a ‘déjeuner maigre’ that presumably means a light luncheon but which I translated as a thin dinner, and then there was what Mrs Marshall and my late great-aunt no doubt thought of as a normal dinner, six courses not counting the vanilla soufflé with pineapple, the gateau Metternich and the Parmesan fondue.
Vera took umbrage. She saw my reading Mrs Marshall as a reflection on her own culinary efforts, as indeed it was, though through no fault of hers as I eagerly pointed out. Reading it in these circumstances was, of course, an odd thing to do, I knew that, and Vera did not like people, notably her own family, doing odd things. One was expected to conform, yet within that conforming to excel or at least do rather better than the standard set. She was a snob, professing to have had no idea that ‘ancestors’ of my mother's had been in service.
‘I hope you won't say anything about where that book came from, Faith,’ she said to me when its provenance had first been explained to her. ‘I mean in front of people who come here. The Morrells, for instance.’
I already knew why not. Richard Morrell's cousin was the Master of Balliol. And somewhere in his background, related to him by a tortuous route among the by-paths of second-cousinry, removes and marriages, was an earl's daughter.
‘What shall I say if they ask, then?’
‘You can say you don't know, can't you? You can say you found it on the bookshelves at home.’
Francis said, ‘You mean she's to lie about it?’
‘No, of course not. You always twist my words. It's true anyway. It would have been on a bookshelf in her home before she brought it here.’
‘They were very good psychologists, those old lawyers,’ said Francis. ‘They had people like you in mind when they formulated the oath. I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They knew all about leaving bits out and putting bits in.’
I wonder if Vera remembered that conversation when she stood in the dock at the Central Criminal Court and took that oath. Probably not, she had other things to think about. I never did lie about the cookery book, for if anyone came while I was reading it, I quickly took it away to my room. This room was mine exclusively now Eden was gone – to Portsmouth, we all guessed, though we were not supposed officially to know.
I was at Sindon for the long summer holidays only for, blasé now about raids, my parents had had me back home for Easter and there I had stayed, reverting to old school and
old friends. I was never again to ‘live’ at Laurel Cottage, only to go back for holidays, drawn by the prospect of time spent with Anne. Vera, too, had written to ask me. I was surprised by this and immensely gratified. Why is it that when people are never specially nice to us or warm, we long all the more for their affection so that the least little crumb they let fall is bounty? I didn't like Vera, I didn't admire her, and I'm sure she never liked me, and yet I was inordinately pleased at her inviting me. Why, soon she would be letting me stay up till ten and confiding in me the truth behind all those secrets!
‘Now Eden has gone,’ said my mother, ‘Vera will want a young girl in the house to mould into a true Longley woman. Not so much Kinder, Küche, Kirche as Kauf, Klatsch, Kettelnadel.’
We were all in the habit in those days of quoting Hitler's more hackneyed sayings. But only my mother, being half Swiss and a German speaker – something she concealed outside her own home in those war years – could be witty about them. She laughed and my father looked cross. I looked up the words in the German dictionary and found they meant ‘shopping, gossip, embroidery needle’.
Was that what Vera wanted me for? Certainly the crochet squares, uneven pieces of work and no longer very clean, were awaiting me. So was Eden's room, virginal as ever, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens up on the wall, poised on that curious ant hill he stands on, still communing with the wild creatures. The white lace mats lay on the dressing-table but the hairbrush was gone and so was the cleanser, the toner and the skinfood. Eden's bed was not made up, not even apparently made up which is what one would have expected at Laurel Cottage, but counterpane and blankets and pillows in plain white slips lay on the mattress in a neat pile, to keep me out, presumably, in case I had had any ideas of getting in there instead of into my own. That evening, while Francis was off doing his disappearing trick, and Vera, incapable of learning from experience, was running round the garden calling his name, I succumbed to temptation and explored all the drawers in Eden's dressing-table. Of course it was wrong of me, it was spying and a betrayal of hospitality and I was quite old enough to know better. The truth was that I was bored stiff with crochet, not a bit tired at eight, and outside it was still broad daylight.
The drawers were full of aids to beauty. The objects in them represented not only a great deal of money but also the time Eden must have spent queueing for these things and the effort put into wheedling, cajoling and bribing shopkeepers to keep them ‘under the counter’ for her. Very little was what a young girl would have today. Nothing for the hair or the eyes and very little for the body. The scent that emanated from those drawers as I opened them and peered in and sniffed was a mingling of talc, rosewater, lemons and acetone. There were dozens of lipsticks, literally dozens, for I counted one evening and made it a hundred and twenty-one. They were of all possible reds and there was one that was orange and only went red when you put it on your mouth. I knew that because I tried it out. I tried out most of the things in those drawers during the following weeks – the toners, the skinfood, the gloriously scented stuff mysteriously called ‘mercolized wax’, the Creme Simon, the Evening in Paris rouge. The notion in the forties of woman's role, the ideas of what constituted women's lives, were reflected in the quantity of preparations for the hands and nails. Such a collection today would consist mainly of shampoos and conditioners, body lotions and deodorants. Daringly in advance of her time, Eden had one deodorant, a red liquid in a small bottle that you put on and allowed ten minutes for drying while you held your arms up above your head.
It did not occur to me then – nor perhaps would it have done to an adult – what all this would signify to the psychology-indoctrinated observer of today, that Eden was both terribly vain and terribly insecure. I thought only, if she had left all this behind, what had she taken with her? More, surely. The crème de la crème in every sense. Thinking of what was at Laurel Cottage as her rejects or at any rate as her spare set somewhat comforted me when guilt about my use of her Tangee lipstick and Arden's Orange Skinfood got too strong.
Eden had gone but before she went she had brought home a boyfriend. Not that Vera would have used this word (it wasn't in anything like the general use for lover it is today, signifying a sixty-year-old live-in common-law husband, for instance), or even have implied there might be anything remotely sexual in Chad Hamner's interest in Eden or hers in him. Vera would probably have referred to Chad as Eden's ‘friend’ if she had mentioned him at all or introduced him. These, though, weren't her ways. I came home dutifully at seven-thirty from an afternoon and evening at the Cambuses' to find a strange man sitting in the living-room with Vera and – wonder of wonders at this hour! – Francis. They were all drinking sherry, something one never saw any more and had never seen at Laurel Cottage.
I was astonished. I stopped in the doorway in the attitude in which certain novelists of the thirties described as that of a startled fawn. I knew this because Francis said so.
‘The startled fawn,’ he said.
He was drinking sherry like the others and there was a high colour up on his cheekbones. I coloured, too; I could feel it burning my face. Vera always filled stark or awkward moments with bustle, for which one could sometimes be thankful.
‘Well, I'm sure I hope you've had your tea. You never said if you'd be eating with those people. I haven't got anything here for you unless you feel like a sausage sandwich, that's all there is.’
‘Give her a drink.’
This was the strange man. Vera rounded on him, but not at all in the way she would have done on Francis or me. There was something coy and sprightly in her manner when she scolded Chad.
‘Don't you dare! I can't think what my brother would say. She's only thirteen, she's not so old as Francis, and goodness knows, she doesn't even look that!’
‘I don't want any,’ I said, a remark that inevitably sounds sour and indignant.
Chad got up, held out his hand to me and said, ‘How do you do? My name is Chad Hamner and I'm a friend of Eden's.’
‘Well, of us all, I hope, Chad,’ said Vera.
‘Of you all, of course.’
I shook hands with him. I remember what I was wearing at that first meeting, the voile dress of the group photograph, a dress that had been handed down to me by a neighbour's daughter who had grown out of it, the material a little tired and with pulled threads on the faded orange nasturtiums. My hair was in two thick, untidy, long pigtails. Vera had tried to make me wear ankle socks until ankle socks became impossible to buy and I won the right to go about barefoot in old Start-Rite sandals. He treated me from the first as if I were grown-up. There was no cult of youth then, no frightened deference to teenagers. You wanted desperately to be older than you were or at least taken for older. Chad spoke to me always as if I were the same age as he, that is, the late twenties. Nor did he seem to distinguish me as female, any more than he did Vera, something that later was a source of bitterness. But at any rate to him I was a person worthy of respect and this I loved.
Though Vera uttered a shriek, disclaiming all responsibility for results and my possible fate, he insisted on giving me sherry in a small tulip glass. The bottle of sherry had been given him by a man he had interviewed and done an article about in his newspaper, the new president of the Rotary Club or the Horticultural Society or something of that sort. Chad was a reporter with a chain of local papers called North Essex and Stour Valley Publications Limited. He was nothing much to look at, neither tall nor short, thickset nor thin, fair nor dark. In the street no woman would have given him a second glance. Like many such nondescript people, he was transformed by his smile, not a radiant, broad smile but one of mysterious irony that enlarged to total open charm. And he had a beautiful voice that I, in my later dreams about him, likened to that of Alvar Liddell, the radio announcer.
No jeans in those days. No zipper jackets. No plastic synthetics. Young men and old men dressed the same. Young men and boys dressed the same. That evening I was in my ageing orange voile, Vera in a dr
ess made out of two dresses, brown sleeves set into brown and orange spotted bodice, surely in 1941 the prototype of such a fashion, Francis in grey flannels, grey pullover, grey school shirt, Chad in grey flannels, cream Aertex shirt, greyish-blue mixture tweed jacket. He asked if I had intentionally been given the same name as Vera.
‘We haven't got the same name,’ Vera said. ‘She's called Faith.’ This, of course, he might not have known since no one, not even I myself, had mentioned it. She seemed to remember. ‘Didn't I say? Didn't I tell you she was my niece Faith?’
Extraordinary the thrill, the warming sensation, of hearing those words ‘my niece’ uttered calmly, indifferently, acceptingly, by Vera. Why did I care?
‘That's what I said. You have the same name. Vera means faith.’
‘Vera means true,’ said Vera. She seemed a little displeased.
‘Vera means faith,’ said Chad. ‘Russian for faith.’
Vera looked as if she were going to argue. She wore her mulish expression. With the awful scathing savagery he reserved for his mother – he was unpleasant to everyone except Eden and Helen but he was savage to Vera – Francis said:
‘He knows, doesn't he? It's not probable you'd know better than him, is it? Well, is it? You're not going to set yourself up against him philologically, are you? He's been to Oxford, he's got a degree. Well, then. It's rather laughable when someone like you sets up against him.’