by Barbara Vine
‘Ah, Helen!’
Me he does not recognize. He never has. He takes me for a daughter of Helen's, not Patricia, one whose name he has forgotten. I used to try to talk to him but I have given that up. What he likes is for me to hold his hand. He lays his right hand palm uppermost in his lap, takes my hand in his other and places it in the palm, finally gripping it quite hard. We sit like this, hands clasped, for the whole of our stay. We do not talk at all, for talking to each other seems unfeeling. Gerald faces the television, often with his eyes closed. I stare out of the french windows at the tall, brown backs of houses behind, the narrow canyons between them through which, occasionally, a red bus can be seen passing, the gardens where nothing grows but plants and trees ugly enough and tough enough to withstand lead and petrol fumes, dirt and dehydration. Half-way through our visit, tea comes for the residents and cups of tea for us, though, mysteriously, we are never offered a cake or a biscuit.
Yesterday, just as tea arrived and our cups had been handed to us, a wrapped sugar lump in each saucer, a man came into the room and stood looking about him, looking for Gerald as it turned out, and not immediately realizing he was the occupant of the wheelchair between two women. When he did, he came over, as unsmiling as his father. It was Francis. It is twenty-five years since last I saw him. On that occasion I met him by chance with his wife and children, Giles and Elizabeth, at the open-air theatre in Regent's Park. I saw them again, Liz and her children, but not Francis, for soon after the Regent's Park encounter he had left them and gone off to South America looking for bugs. Francis has published two popular science books about the ways of insects. I wrote to congratulate him on the success of one of these which I had enjoyed reading, which seemed to me to have nothing of Francis in it, but he didn't reply.
He looks like Vera now. The Anthony Andrews look has faded, the Sebastian Flyte ambience gone. He is thin to emaciation – how could he be otherwise with those parents? – and perhaps because he is an entomologist the comparison that suggested itself to me was with a praying mantis. There is a dried-up wizened worn-out look to Francis, a bleached-to-greyness look like one of those trees that have died and the wood been stripped of bark and abraded by weather. I think I only recognized him because this visitor could not have been anyone else.
Helen shifted herself into a vacant armchair in order to give him the chair next to his father. He kissed her, holding his face against hers for a little longer than is usual for a merely formal kiss. I remembered he had always liked her. Francis is the sort of person who can greet one woman with a kiss and the other whom he knows equally well with a glance of indifference. He was wearing a grey velvet suit, very old and shabby, with an extremely expensive new-looking shirt, Per Spook (I guessed) tie and shoes from Tricker's. He gives the impression of being prosperous, the suit a rich man's eccentricity. Helen told me afterwards that he has remarried, this time the widow of a millionaire MP assassinated in Ireland. Why hadn't she told me before? I asked. She had forgotten, she said, and the new wife's name and almost everything about her. Now, if I had asked for his first wife's name and where they had married and when…
I said, ‘How are you, Francis?’
‘I am well.’ I don't know why this should be an affectation, not qualifying the ‘well’ with a ‘very’ or a ‘quite,’ but it is. If he ever writes letters Francis probably begins them with a name and no ‘dear’. He didn't ask me how I was. He sat down next to his father and, to my astonishment, took his other hand.
Does he always do this? Does Gerald always hold hands with whoever comes under the age of ninety? He never holds Helen's hand. Or is it that Francis, who seemed to me incapable of love and to Chad Hamner capable only of the love of evil, loves his father? People are a mystery, an enigma. Gerald never changed his name. Hillyard was his name, not hers, and he stuck to it, but Francis, who seemed to care for the opinion of no one, who snapped his fingers at the world, called himself Hills from the day of his mother's arrest, anticipating the worst, as he would; and lecturing at his university, writing his books, collecting his bugs, he is Professor Frank Loder Hills.
So we sat there, each of us holding hands with Gerald, with Gerald gripping our hands, for he does grip, closing his hand more and more tightly over the imprisoned fingers until increasing pain directs the time to get up and leave. Gerald did not slacken his grip on my hand when he also had Francis's to hold but held it harder, so that weak and feeble as he is, he nevertheless seemed to be bearing down on our hands preparatory to taking a flying leap out of the wheelchair. I thought of Vera and that curious gesture of hers, leaning forward, pressing, crushing, as if to keep the pain from pouring out. Does Gerald ever think of her now? Does Francis, also fair and lined and dehydrated, not remind him of her, his eyes that same clear sky blue? Sometimes surely, even now, he must think of how she tried to palm off on him someone else's child, a child as dark-skinned as its Puerto Rican father. I had forgotten about the eyes, forgotten how, when in my teens, I had tried to remember or find out what colour Gerald's eyes were. But when Daniel Stewart started on his book I remembered and on my next visit to Gerald, yesterday's visit, looked. They are blue. They are darker than Francis's and are a deep cornflower blue.
We left the Baron's Home for Retired Officers together, all three of us, Helen and I to take a taxi home, Francis to head for the nearest NCP where he had parked his car. He talked to Helen, not about the family, not about his father, but, of all things, about a Russian science-fiction film currently showing at our local cinema, the Paris-Pullman. Apparently, it is his local cinema too now, he and his wife having bought a house in Cresswell Place.
Taking no part in this conversation, I was looking for a taxi. On the opposite side of the street I saw an old man standing in the doorway of a shop, the kind of shop that is not much frequented, this one displaying in its window ceramic tiles. He seemed to be looking intently at us, or rather, to be looking at Francis who had thrown back his head and was laughing at something Helen had said. He was a smallish man, grey-headed, wearing an over-long, unbelted raincoat, a man with an unremarkable face, eyes that seemed even at that distance full of sadness. I had a clutching sensation in my chest. The echo was not yet faint then, the voice not yet mute…
Francis said to me, ‘You've been assisting Stewart with this book of his, I hear.’
‘Yes.’
‘That sort of thing is so vulgar and uncalled for.’
‘Vulgar it may be but not uncalled for. His publishers asked him to do it.’
‘If he uses my name, that is, if he identifies me, I shall sue him. You can tell him that.’
‘I tell him?’
‘That's what I said. It would bring me into hatred, ridicule and contempt, all three of the grounds for libel. That husband of yours is a lawyer, isn't he? You ask him.’
‘That's two tasks you've set me in the past five minutes, Francis or Frank or whatever you call yourself,’ I said. ‘Just as well we only meet once every twenty-five years.’
A taxi came. As Francis was helping Helen into it, I looked once more across the street and saw that the man in the doorway had been joined by a woman, that he was kissing her, that, arms linked now, they were moving off in the direction of Blythe Road. What yearning in me for romantic dramas, even of the tragic kind, had led me for one moment to believe that this was Chad Hamner? There was no resemblance, there was no possibility even that the ageing process could have made Chad look like that. I was positive if he had passed closely enough I would have seen earlobes as unlined as a child's.
And suddenly, though between the two realizations there was no connection, suddenly I knew for certain that the event which Francis was so wrathfully anticipating, which made his eyes dark with rage as he glared at me, would never take place.
‘You needn't worry,’ I said. ‘Stewart won't write that book.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘By the time,’ I said, ‘I've finished assisting him, as you put it, he won't
want to.’
That time he brought the girl to Laurel Cottage in Vera's absence was the last visit he ever paid to Sindon. It seems strange to me that someone who became an entomologist should have shown not the faintest interest, as far as I ever saw, in insects while he was a child. He didn't even pull the wings off flies, which is what one might have expected of Francis. After he went off to London University to do his postgraduate work, he turned his back for ever on Sindon, leaving behind, I was later to hear, a great many possessions, some of which were quite valuable and included presents from Chad. And Chad himself, who (whatever innocence in this matter he might claim) had used Vera as cover and deceived a good many people into believing they were having a love affair, never again went to Laurel Cottage once Francis was gone. That New Year visit when Vera was taken ill was almost the last time. Francis went to Queen Mary College and Chad followed him as soon as he could, covering Townswomen's Guilds and church bazaars in Willesden and living in that room at the top of a house from which Francis threw him downstairs.
Vera was alone. But she had Josie. She had Jamie. Quite often she also had Helen. After Eden had gone to Formentor, my father went to Sindon and stayed overnight, the purpose of his visit being to attempt to discourage Vera from moving. Without his consent and Eden's, of course, she couldn't move but my father wanted it to seem her choice. She told him rather sorrowfully that she had never really believed he and Eden would consent, indeed she knew Eden wouldn't. It was just a long shot, worth trying, she said.
This conversation was later repeated to my mother who repeated it to me at some time between Vera's arrest and her trial. My father had asked Vera why she wanted to move but she would say no more than that she was fed up with Sindon. He knew she was concealing her real motives.
‘She thought she could run away from Eden,’ my mother said. ‘She thought she could escape with Jamie. The ends of the earth wouldn't have been far enough, not with Eden having money on her side.’
‘And right, I suppose,’ I said.
Having failed with him and Eden as she had guessed she would, Vera tried to get Gerald to buy them out, to buy their shares in the house for her. This was what she told my father she would do and presumably she did attempt it. If he wanted a divorce, he must pay for it, she said. No buying out, no divorce. I think my father was shocked to hear one of his sisters, pearls of virtue and rectitude that he thought them, talk like this. That, at any rate, is what my mother said. But she would, wouldn't she?
He told her that if Gerald offered to buy his share, he would sell it to him but he couldn't answer for Eden. ‘You must make her, you must make her,’ Vera cried, clutching his arm, but she turned away then, saying it would be too late, it was all too late. My mother said Vera said a mysterious thing to him that we thought later we understood, though he, of course, did not at the time.
‘Why did I do it this way?’ she said. ‘I could have done it myself at any time.’
Eden and Tony stayed in Majorca much longer than anyone expected. They had planned on a month and stayed nearly three. I suppose the weather began to get warm and the island pretty just as they were due to leave so they stayed on and on. We had postcards and Helen had postcards but according to my mother – how could she know? – Vera had none. They came back in the middle of April while I was staying at Walbrooks. It was a Saturday when they returned, exhausted no doubt, having flown from Palma to Barcelona and come by train from Barcelona to Paris, Paris to Calais, boat to Dover, train to Victoria, across London to Liverpool Street, train to Colchester. But on the Monday morning, Eden was in Sindon, at Laurel Cottage, prepared to take Jamie away.
No warning of her coming had been given to Vera. She knew Eden and Tony were home only because Helen (in my hearing) had phoned and told her so, herself very surprised that Vera was in ignorance. She had had a whole day in which to prepare herself – well, she had had months really. I have said Josie was the only person to whom she would entrust Jamie but the truth was she scarcely ever left him. Josie had probably baby-sat with him once in the past year and a half and that was when Vera went to a Naughton relative's wedding.
Vera lied to Josie. She asked her to have Jamie because her solicitor was coming to see her about the divorce. Did Josie really believe this? Her own son was in practice by that time and she must have known solicitors don't usually travel miles out into the countryside to visit unimportant clients at nine in the morning. For it was as early as this that Vera expected Eden to come and by then she had already taken him to Josie. When I first heard this, I thought of Moses being hidden by his mother in the bulrushes and I looked up the story in Exodus and found it wasn't like that at all. She made him an ark out of bulrushes and hid it in the flags by the river's brink, flags presumably being irises. But Jamie's concealment wasn't much like any of this, he being five and not an infant. Though he was young for his age in his need for Vera. By midday he was crying and asking for her and Josie, harassed by it, took him home. If there really had been a solicitor and he had come at nine, he would surely be gone by twelve.
Vera had miscalculated. The reason probably was that Eden got up late as a matter of course. She can't have had much to occupy her. Instead of nine, she arrived at eleven. Even today I don't like to think of what Vera's state of mind must have been during those two hours. At least Jamie wasn't there. It isn't hard to imagine the kind of thing Vera would have said, not if you knew her as I did.
‘I've hidden him where you'll never find him!’
And then Josie came. She found Vera and Eden there alone, sitting facing each other in the living-room, each of them with the air of sticking it out as if for a siege. Vera put out her arms to Jamie when she saw him and he ran into them. Eden gave a scornful sort of laugh. She said:
‘I suppose you rehearsed this little bit of drama.’
I know all this because Josie phoned Helen almost immediately after Eden had left. She was very angry and very upset and she poured some of it out to me – I answered the phone – before I handed her over to Helen. Eden had left at last without Jamie but not without promising to come back.
Vera, on seeing Josie, appealed to her to support her in physically repelling Eden's attempts to take Jamie. She seems to have seen everything in physical terms at this time, as if action and the expense of energy would save things while argument and reason wouldn't. She had something there, I suppose.
‘I'll hold Jamie while you make her go,’ was what Josie told us Vera said.
This shocked Josie. She told Vera she wouldn't dream of being a party to what she suggested. There must be no question of Eden taking Jamie from his mother. She had never heard of such a thing, she said. I daresay she hadn't. She asked Eden – very sternly and sharply, I understand – whatever made her think she had a right to take Jamie forcibly away from his mother and his home?
‘He's not being properly looked after here,’ Eden said. ‘He's got no friends of his own age. He's kept isolated like a hermit. He's nearly six and the only time he's been to school is for two weeks while he was with me. She neglects him – look at his shoes!’
The facts were that Vera was poor, she received a very meagre sum each week from Gerald and had nothing else. What was amiss with Jamie's shoes I don't know but no more than that they were unsuitable for the time of year or had the wrong colour laces in them, I am sure. Neglected he never was, rather the reverse, for leaving him to himself more would have done him good. Anyway Josie took no notice of this. She said if Eden was going to adopt Jamie it would have to be decided by lawyers in courts, not fought over like this.
‘Make her go,’ said Vera, holding Jamie in her arms.
‘You hear what she says,’ Josie said. ‘You'd better go.’
The hatred between them hung in the air like poison gas, she said to Helen. ‘Vibes’ was what we called this sort of thing later on. It was terrible to see sisters so at loggerheads, she said. How would she have felt if she had seen them as they used to be, like I had?
‘I'll go now but I'll be back,’ Eden said.
This was the first time Josie had met her. She was not in the least intimidated by her wealth and what Vera called her ‘power’.
‘If this happens again,’ she said, ‘I'll call the police.’
Helen reacted by getting Andrew to drive her to Laurel Cottage and bringing Vera and Jamie back with her to Walbrooks. Once there she did her best to get an explanation of all of it out of Vera. We were all there. Things had become too serious to bother about appearances or excluding people on grounds of age.
Vera was calm by now, almost cool. I think she felt safe at Walbrooks, which must have made what happened subsequently all the worse for her. It was a beautiful day, very warm for April, and we sat in the big drawing-room where Eden's wedding reception had been, with the french windows open on to the garden and the sun streaming in. The great lawn that reached to the lake was scattered all round its edges with drifts of daffodils and up near the house were blue scillas and those little scarlet species tulips that are more beautiful than orchids.
‘If you tell Eden firmly she has to forget all ideas about adopting Jamie, she will have to give it up,’ Helen said to Vera. ‘Perhaps you had better write to her, darling. Why don't we compose a letter now, an absolutely uncompromising one, and you can send it off. Faith and Andrew will walk up to the village and post it for you, won't you, darlings? And that way Eden will get it in the morning.’
Vera didn't seem too keen on this. It would ‘do no good’, she said. It would just be ‘making matters worse’.
‘But why would it, Vera?’ Helen insisted. ‘Did you make Eden some sort of promise when you were ill that she could have Jamie and you're afraid to revoke now? Is that it? Because you shouldn't let that count with you at all, you'll have to forget that.’