by Barbara Vine
Vera was left alone at Goodney Hall with Jamie, with Mrs King, the housekeeper, and a woman from the village who came in twice a week to clean. What happened she told me herself one rainy evening two days before I returned to college. I had half complied with my father's request and was spending two nights with her, not at Goodney Hall but at Laurel Cottage. Upstairs Jamie was asleep in his newly decorated bedroom. Some time during the night, Francis would return. To Vera's dismay and anger, he had taken advantage of her absence to have a honeymoon in her house with a girl she said was a barmaid he had picked up in Ipswich. The village shuddered with the scandal and disgrace of it. The girl had gone and next day Francis too would depart but she expected him back that night – in the small hours, doubtless.
‘The doctor said Eden must go into hospital or he wouldn't be responsible for what happened,’ Vera said. She lowered her voice a little, glancing about her, as if the house were full of people who might hear her and be disgusted. ‘She was unable to pass water. She simply could not pass urine. The doctor said whatever it was had affected her kidneys. It's my belief it was the result of whatever it was they did to her when she lost the baby. Anyway, we don't want to talk about that. It's not the kind of thing I ought to talk about in front of you.
‘They had an ambulance come for her. I phoned Tony at his father's and he said he'd come home straightaway. Jamie was at school. He'd just started school two weeks before. I didn't say anything to Mrs King. I packed our cases, Jamie's and mine, we'd accumulated so much stuff, you wouldn't believe, and left them in the hall with a note for Mrs King asking her to send them on. I walked down to the village and fetched Jamie from school and we just escaped together, it was really funny, we did laugh. It was such a lark, like a childhood prank. I kept thinking how cross Eden would be. And it's so nearly impossible getting from Goodney to Sindon without a car. We had to get three buses and it was eight before we got home. And then of course I found Francis here and the place in the most outrageous mess. I was exhausted but I didn't care. I put Jamie to bed in my bed and I crawled in with him an hour later and we just slept like that all night, it was such bliss.’
Next day Tony came. He told Vera he couldn't understand why she hadn't just stayed on at Goodney Hall. Vera had laughed and told him she wasn't coming back and Jamie wasn't coming back and if he thought she was going to visit Eden in hospital, he could think again. She wasn't going out to give him the chance to come in and take Jamie from her. Tony must have been aghast, a conventional, rigid person like that. He didn't know what she meant, either, he really didn't then. Eden had told him nothing at that time except that she wanted to adopt Jamie. He had consented, to placate her, presumably.
Vera told me all this with glittering eyes, laughing sometimes at her own cleverness in outwitting Eden. I was unpleasantly convinced she was going mad. It was uncomfortable to be with her. But I had no idea then, no one had any idea, that she was herself responsible for making Eden ill. I thought I understood everything, that Eden had pressurized Vera into letting her adopt Jamie on the grounds that it would be in Jamie's own best interests, that Vera, though torn by her love for Jamie, had consented but later had had second thoughts and had seized her opportunity. What I never considered was the effect all this might have on the child. I was too young, I suppose.
Next day I encountered Francis. Most of the time he lived with his father and was about to do a postgraduate course at London University. The descent on Laurel Cottage had come about because Gerald would not have consented to his taking the girl home to sleep. Gerald's own relations with his new woman were circumspect and he would be fixing the evidence for his divorce with a girl he was hiring for the purpose. Francis I had not seen since Eden's wedding day when I came upon him with Chad in the candlelit dark and I felt embarrassment.
‘She ought to be certified,’ Francis said. ‘She's doing the same to that kid as she did to me.’
‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘She seems to have pushed you out. She's doing her best to pull Jamie back.’
‘It's all symptomatic. She's a paranoid schizophrenic.’
Jamie had come into the room. He was very quiet. I had noticed how extraordinarily quiet and ‘good’ he had become. At night he slept from the time Vera put him to bed at six until quite late into the morning. This morning it had been after nine. He came in holding a small tractor with caterpillar rubber wheels and he proceeded to run this thing all the way round the room, over chair backs, bookshelves, window sills, trundling it slowly, keeping up an apparently fierce concentration on what he was doing.
‘So what?’ said Francis. ‘I don't like the kid. Why shouldn't he suffer? That's not the point. She is sick in her mind, her mind is warped. I'd like to have the pleasure of putting her away. That would be a gothic thing to do, wouldn't it? Consigning one's own mother to a madhouse.’
He no longer intimidated me. I didn't care what he thought of me either. Mine was a kind of indifferent repulsion.
‘Why bother?’ I said. ‘What's in it for you? You don't live here. It's not as if you cared about Jamie and his future.’
‘I'll tell you what his future will be. Eden will get better and come here and take him back and she won't have a leg to stand on. You'll see.’
‘I shan't. I shan't be here either. And you're wrong. Vera will never let him go back. She never lets him out of her sight for more than five minutes. She'll be in here in a minute keeping an eye on him.’
He smiled, slowly shaking his head. He has hooded eyes, has my cousin Francis. The effect had become more pronounced as he entered his twenties, as if the eyeballs had protruded more and the eyelids stretched to cover them, taking on at the same time a purplish, bruised colour like eyeshadow. The hoods lowered and he smiled.
‘I told you she hasn't a leg to stand on. Eden will come for him as soon as she gets out of hospital.’ He looked at the child. He looked at him penetratingly and Jamie continued running that tractor along the window sill, up the architrave of the door. ‘I'd take him over to Goodney myself only I wouldn't trust that fool Tony to hang on to him.’
‘You'd do that?’
‘You are so naïve,’ he said.
We all were. I came to believe that the family favoured Eden's keeping Jamie because everyone openly or secretly thought Vera mentally unstable. This seemed unjust to me. She could not have been kinder to him, gentler, more caring. It wasn't till I was back at Cambridge and thinking about Vera and her problems one day, wondering what the outcome would be, that I realized Jamie had not been to school while I was staying at Laurel Cottage. True, I had been there only two days and two nights, but the village school's term had begun. Had he not been attending school at Goodney Parva for two weeks before Vera snatched him away? But perhaps it was only that Vera hadn't been able to get him into Sindon School.
While I was there I met Josie Cambus again. Anne was at teacher training college in London and we had seen each other for a while the week before. She told me she had come to like her stepmother. I had never known Vera to have such a close friend. She and Mrs Morrell, for instance, had always called each other Mrs Hillyard and Mrs Morrell, and as for Chad Hamner – he had extended his friendship with an axe to grind. But Josie and Vera saw each other almost every day. They confided in each other – though not absolutely, as I was later to learn. Josie was the only person Vera would entrust Jamie to. Intense in the few affections she had, Vera seemed to have transferred to Josie the love she once lavished on Eden. Of Josie and her achievements she was proud, at the same time denigrating poor Donald Cambus whom she castigated as undeserving, ungrateful, totally unworthy of his second wife. Josie was an excellent cook, a Cordon Bleu cook according to Vera, she sang in the church choir, was no mean watercolourist, taught a yoga class before anyone had ever heard of yoga. Vera bragged about her unremittingly. What she saw in Vera I never knew and though, later on, I had ample opportunity to ask, I never did. If I never came to love Josie as I loved Helen, I did like her very much. I got on w
ith her. But with her I discussed Vera only the once and on that occasion my father was present. We had all – strange trio of drinking partners! – drunk too much by design so that we might without too much pain, too much shameful suffering, hear from the only witness what happened at the end.
Josie gave evidence at Vera's trial but I was not there, I read no newspapers at the time, and only now have seen the transcript.
She has been dead ten years. When I first knew her, she was about fifty, a tall, heavily built, dark woman whose hair only began to turn grey when she was in her seventies. Her voice was very beautiful – I mean her speaking voice for I never heard her sing – and she was one of those people who are very calming to be with, very easy, so that you can relax in their company and never feel they have expectations of you that you can't fulfil. These two qualities her younger son has inherited as well as her handsome Spanish looks, though he, as his mother was, is English through and through.
Josie, having her own car, offered to drive me to Stoke-by-Nayland the evening before Andrew and I were due to return. Vera, though Helen had invited her, refused to come with us. The road to Stoke, she said, passed through Goodney.
‘All right, we won't go that way,’ Josie said. ‘We'll go the long way round.’
The bypasses that have now made main roads out of lanes and left the villages in peace were not built by then. If you didn't go through Goodney you would have to go miles round through Langham and Higham.
Vera pointed this out. ‘I should see the signpost,’ she said, from which we were supposed to infer that even the printed name ‘Goodney Parva’ would upset her. ‘You stay and have a cup of tea with Helen, though. I should like Helen to see you.’
This was very Vera-ish. It was not that she wanted Josie to see Helen but Helen to see Josie, just as in the past she had wanted to show off Eden and, more recently, Jamie.
In the car, why didn't we talk about Jamie and his future? We didn't, though he must have been uppermost in our minds. Perhaps Josie thought me too young. Not too young to discuss this but too young to be interested. She asked me about my final year at college instead, about what I wanted to be. Only when we were at Walbrooks, in sight of Helen, who had come down the front steps to greet us when she heard the car, did Josie say:
‘I would give a lot to hear that the Pearmains had decided to emigrate to South Africa after all.’
‘I didn't know they'd thought of it,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, but not any more, I'm afraid,’ and then she was saying how-do-you-do to Helen and shaking hands.
Just after Christmas my father had a letter from Vera asking his permission as owner of one third of it to sell Laurel Cottage and move away. This letter doesn't survive and I remember nothing of it except the gist. He and my mother had spent a weekend with Vera during the autumn and while there, had visited Eden in hospital. She was in hospital for weeks and weeks, months even, while they tried to work out what was wrong with her. I don't know what happened that weekend. Did Vera go with them on the hospital visit, for instance? Did they see Tony? Was anything discussed about Jamie's future? My mother wrote to me only that they had been, that they had stayed with Vera, that Eden would be in hospital at least another month and that it had rained the whole weekend. Vera's letter put the cat among the pigeons. For a while my mother must have declared a truce in order to stay with Vera and visit Eden, but it was war again now.
‘If that house is to be sold, we're taking our share out of it and she can buy a place for herself with the rest.’
My father immediately demurred. ‘What could poor Vera possibly buy with a thousand pounds?’
‘Let Eden make it up then. She's rolling in money. Why should you subsidize your sister when she's got a husband who is making good money in the army and a son who's old enough to support her and I haven't even got a refrigerator?’
My father, in his way, also objected to Vera's moving. In this, at any rate, they were united. She had lived in Sindon all her life, he said, forgetting the India years, all her friends were there. By ‘all her friends’ he meant Josie and I did rather wonder how she would feel about leaving Josie behind.
‘Why does she want to move?’ he kept saying.
I was dreadfully afraid the answer might be to take Jamie out of Eden's reach. Eden was still in hospital, though she was better and expected to come out very soon. They had never found out what went wrong with her kidneys. They were back to normal now, for Eden was basically very strong and healthy. Once she was out and home again, would she do as Francis said she would, come to Laurel Cottage, perhaps with a supporting retinue of Mrs King and June Poole, and snatch Jamie back? It seemed unreal, a lawless, antediluvian thing comparable to rustling a neighbour's cattle. But when I was staying in Essex, someone had told me of a cattle-rustling incident that had taken place on a nearby farm only just before the war. Why not a kidnapping?
‘Why does she want to move?’
‘Doesn't she say in the letter?’ said my mother.
He had given up reading them aloud, finally conquered by her relentless sarcasm.
‘She says she feels like a change.’
Eden would have to be consulted. Hers was the third share in Laurel Cottage. She had a private room in the hospital and he could have phoned her but of course he wouldn't. He wrote instead, asking for her views. It was Tony who phoned us. Eden was home, he had fetched her home that afternoon. She was sitting beside him now, doing the Daily Telegraph crossword… In February he was going to take her to Majorca to convalesce. It sounds commonplace today, the place where everyone goes to if they can't afford better, but in 1950 Majorca was still an unspoilt, virtually unknown Mediterranean island. I had just about heard of it. They were going to Formentor, retreat of French film-stars. Vera's house? Laurel Cottage, he should say? No, they hadn't heard a word about plans to sell it. Eden came on the line and started off by asking him for the answer to a clue. She didn't think Vera ought to sell. At least let her think it over. She should tell her to think it over and when she, Eden, came back from Majorca they could discuss it again.
‘Doesn't want to trouble her pretty little head with her sister's affairs now she's rich,’ said my mother.
In a fury my father screwed up the letter and threw it into the fire, which is why it doesn't survive.
That phone call made me feel better about things. I mustn't give the impression I was constantly worried about Vera and Jamie, I wasn't that altruistic, but it used to nag at me sometimes. I didn't, among other things, want Francis to be right. And now it looked as if he wouldn't be. Eden wouldn't laze around at home, planning a holiday almost a month off, take that holiday, itself a good month long, if she meant to renew her demands to have Jamie. So I reasoned. I had forgotten the hunter who leaves the stopped earth to take his leisurely lunch, the cat who can safely abandon watching the mouse's hole while it is daylight.
Every few weeks Helen and I go together to see Gerald. He is seven years younger than Helen but he is a poor, broken old man, who slobbers and cannot hear in spite of his deaf aid and sits all day in a wheelchair while Helen darts into the room where he is, her movements still swift and graceful, her hearing still acute, only her eyes misted over so that she peers to identify you and last time we went talked for some moments to another old man, mistakenly taking him for her brother-in-law.
I hardly know why I go. I knew Gerald only remotely while he was married to my aunt. He never married the woman he wrote to her about asking for a divorce. The hanging presumably was too much for her, the marrying Vera Hillyard's widower too much to contemplate. It was too much for all of us, driving me into a panic marriage, scaring off Patricia's lover, killing (according to Helen) the General, destroying what remained of my parents' marriage so that they became strangers who seldom spoke. But Helen never lost touch with Gerald. She, of course, had known him while he was a subaltern, long before he met Vera. Both alone and, to some extent, exiled, they used occasionally to meet in London. When he
handed over the house he had bought in Highgate to Francis and moved into the Baron's Home for Retired Officers, she began visiting him there once a week. He chose the Baron's Home because it was in Baron's Court and not too far from Helen's Kensington flat. She goes there less often today because of her great age and perhaps my reason for going with her is that I don't think it a good idea for someone of ninety to be travelling alone about London.
The house is Victorian, red brick with white facing, a noisy place in one of those one-way streets that support a stream of traffic going south to cross the river. The front is more thickly double-glazed than anywhere I have seen but at the back is a big walled garden with magnificent fig trees growing along the walls that seem to like the dirt and the fumes. They are mostly men, the inmates, though not exclusively, which always surprises me. Of course, I know that there were women officers in the armed forces in the Second World War but I still find it odd that two of them should have ended up here among the Western Desert veterans and heroes of the Normandy landings. All of them sit for most of the day in a big drawing-room with french windows on to the fig garden. The television is never switched off, though no one seems to watch it except very desultorily, but if you pass in front of it or attempt to alter a channel, there is a murmur of grumbling. Nothing in the room indicates that these people are old soldiers (old sailors, old airmen), not a map, picture, war book. No one wears a regimental tie, much less a medal. One of the old men has the VC but he is the smallest and shyest of them and once I saw him get up and creep away when ‘A Bridge Too Far’ came on the television.
Gerald is still thin but very shrunken now, his skin wrinkled like hide that has been under water for a long time. He is senile. He has forgotten everything, not merely recent things but long past happenings, too. It is probably just as well. According to the woman in charge of this place, he loves to see us, our visits are high spots in his life, but he gives us no indication that this is so. He never smiles. He keeps his eyes on the television all the time we are there. When we come in, when we are beside him and indeed standing over him, he turns his eyes once and says: