by Barbara Vine
‘Of course I didn't promise that,’ Vera said. ‘Would I promise that?’
The General hated Eden. He was all for going to law.
‘If I got hold of my solicitor,’ he said, ‘I know what he'd do. He'd take the lot of us along to a judge in chambers and get an injunction. He'd get an injunction to restrain that little harpy from ever coming within a mile of you and the boy again.’
‘Now, General,’ said Helen, ‘she's my sister too, you know.’
‘Only of the half-blood,’ he said, forgetting no doubt that this also applied to Vera.
However, nothing else happened that day or the next. Eden had become ill again. Not in the same way this time, not with her kidneys. The prosecution at Vera's trial said that Vera had made a second attempt to murder her by giving her some noxious substance in a cup of coffee at Laurel Cottage on the Monday morning. The two objections to that seem to me that this time Eden had sickness and diarrhoea, which at any rate argues a different kind of poison, and secondly that one simply cannot imagine Eden taking anything to eat or drink in those circumstances.
We found out about Eden because Helen phoned up to ‘have a straight talk with her’. She didn't have any sort of talk at all. Mrs King answered and said Eden was in bed and the doctor had been sent for. Vera laughed when Helen told her and said in a mad kind of way that God was not mocked. She talked like this a lot or in disjointed non sequiturs rather like Ophelia does. She stayed on at Walbrooks, alternating her behaviour between an almost cataleptic calm and excited, frenetic bursts of energy. I was due to go home in a few days' time and Andrew was coming with me for the rest of our holiday. It was to be our last term and Finals were looming. Now I felt for the first time I couldn't wait to get away from Walbrooks to London. One of the things Vera did during one of her energy peaks was offer to lengthen all the kitchen curtains for Helen. They had been badly washed and had shrunk. There are five windows in the kitchen at Walbrooks so it would be quite a task. Ever since then, the sight of a woman sewing on a large piece of work, the stuff spread tapestry-wise across her lap, her head bent and pursed fingers dipping back and forth, brings Vera back to me. Perhaps it is why I never sew, never dreamt of making curtains for my own homes.
On the Friday morning, Andrew and I went off to London in the fifth-hand car Andrew had bought, an old Morris Ten. Helen told us not to stay and wait for Vera. She and the General would take her home. She had a feeling, she said, that we had heard the last of Eden's claims on Jamie. It was all over, it had been a try-on. The General had probably hit the nail on the head when he talked of promises made when Vera was ill and feeble.
So we went, relieved but with no reason to feel relief. I told my father nothing about it and Andrew said nothing either, though we had made no pre-arrangement to avoid the subject. I think now that what we both felt, what we onlookers all felt, was that there was so much more to this than met the eye, so many submerged secrets contributing to it, things deliberately kept from us, that we should be making fools of ourselves if we expressed opinions and advised courses. Andrew and I didn't even discuss it with each other during those few days but when we were in the train taking us back to Cambridge, alone in the carriage, he said to me suddenly, in the manner of a man making a confession:
‘I haven't told you this, I didn't tell anyone, I didn't want to cause concern. It's been on my conscience, after all that talk of solicitors and injunctions. While we were at home, the day before we left, I saw June Poole at the top of our drift.’
‘Drift’ is what they call a lane in that part of the country. This one led from the road down to the house, passing Walbrooks cottages on the way, passing a boarded-up house no one had lived in for twenty years, passing barns and the stables.
‘She might have been to one of the cottages, you know. She could have a cousin or an aunt there. It always seems to me that everyone down there is related to everyone else.’
Andrew said, ‘She had her back to me, she was walking away, but I had the feeling she had been standing just inside the hedge, waiting. And then she saw me.’
I asked him how he could be absolutely sure it was she. How far away had she been?
He was glad to clutch at any straw. At least a hundred yards, maybe more. If it had been a matter of swearing to it – well, no, he couldn't have done that. He was never asked to as it turned out but he came closer to doing so than he could have dreamed of when he made that dramatic-seeming declaration. I didn't think he should tell his father, then?
‘What good would that do?’ I said.
It reminds me now, all this, of Sunny Durham and the Kirby Theiston murder, though I hardly know why. There are few similarities. At the time I thought of Kathleen March, spirited away while in Vera's care and killed. Was it really June Poole that Andrew had seen and had she been waiting in the hope of snatching Jamie?
I never saw Vera again. That Friday morning, I dutifully kissed her goodbye, or rather, we laid our cheeks in juxtaposition and kissed the air.
‘Give my love to your father,’ she said. ‘I might come up to London and surprise him one of these fine days.’
The last words she ever spoke to me apart from goodbye. Longleys never say ‘bye-bye’ – did I mention that? There is a prohibition on it, strict as the ban on eating with one's right hand.
‘Goodbye,’ said Vera, waving, standing beside Helen on the drift and waving, ‘Goodbye!’ Jamie waved, too, both hands up, pinching his fingers open and shut the way I once saw an American professor, while lecturing, demonstrate inverted commas. The last time I looked back, he and Vera were walking back to the house hand in hand.
The rest I know from Helen and Josie. The General drove Vera and Jamie home to Sindon in the afternoon, by now convinced that all was well and that a great deal of what had happened had been in Vera's, if not Josie's, imagination. He stayed half an hour and went off home. Helen rang Vera next day and found her cheerful and calm. She rang Eden. Eden was much better, was expecting six people to lunch, refused to discuss the future guardianship of Jamie. There was nothing to discuss, she said, it was all settled. Helen took this to mean Eden had given up and was being haughty in defeat.
Nothing happened on Sunday. I have sometimes tried to imagine a day in Vera's life and Jamie's together at this time. It is hard for me to do this for I have never lived such a life myself, alone in a remote country village, with few friends, without a car, in genteel poverty. Vera couldn't afford to ask six people to lunch even if she had wanted to. What did they do? Got up early, I have no doubt, Vera to do housework, the dusting and polishing that was done every day while I stayed there, Jamie to play with his toys. Then for Vera, the Sunday Express, a walk perhaps; lunch, always a piece of roast meat, a tiny minuscule piece, the whole week's ration in 1950, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, a green vegetable, and jam tart or custard trifle to follow. Another walk afterwards? A sleep? The wireless? Sewing or knitting, of course. She would have read a story to him, perhaps several stories, talked to him and played with him. But still the imagination is defeated by the task of filling those long hours, especially when it was cold or wet or got dark early. Vera never read except for the children's books she read aloud. The bookcase in the living-room was stocked with a non-reader's collection, school set books and surely unwelcome presents.
If I close my eyes I can see that bookcase now. I can see Jamie running his toy tank along the lower shelf and up the spines of the books. Was Bulletin No. 23, Edible and Poisonous Fungi there at the time? I don't think it was. I can see what was there: Precious Bane, Anthony Adverse, Sesame and Lilies, that had been a school prize, Black Bartlemy's Treasure, Frohawk's Complete Book of British Butterflies… So was I wrong in saying Francis showed no interest in entomology when young? Was this Francis's book? Was it possible, then, that the fungi book was also his and at that period was upstairs in the bookshelf in his room? Wuthering Heights, The History of Mr Polly, Lamb's Tales… and is this dark green spine next to it perhaps Bulletin No.
23? It can't have been in two places at the same time. It may not even have been in the house at all then. But I know that once I saw it there, in that bookcase, in Vera's living-room, dark green with the gold chantarelle on its cover and the fascinating mycological lore within.
That particular Sunday – I don't remember whether it was wet or fine – was in Cambridge. At that particular time I was ‘growing out’ of my family, and this by leaps and bounds, making decisions that as a soon-to-be-independent person I would in future have no more to do with my father's sisters, regretfully contemplating, too, a breach with Helen which would be inevitable if I gave Andrew up. Since I gave a good deal of thought to all this, I was probably thinking of it that Sunday in between re-reading Spenser's Faerie Queene and meeting Andrew. I don't suppose, though, that I thought of Vera as a suffering person, drawn into the worst kind of the converging of human lots. Like the rest of us, I believed she and Eden had settled their differences. And fancying myself in those days as a sprightly feminist intellectual, I am afraid I probably also thought their petty squabbles beneath me.
For that I was to be punished. Murder reaches out through a family, stamping transfers of the Mark of Cain on a dozen foreheads, and though these grow pale in proportion to the distance of the kinship, they are there and they burn into the brain. A question, a chance word, will discover them, as invisible writing appears shimmeringly when exposed to fire. Only time bleaches them away and makes it possible to reach back into the past in a kind of tranquillity.
Monday came. Vera contemplated running away. Later in the day she told Josie she had thought of running away. She had even begun to pack a bag, to gather together Jamie's clothes and certain of his books and toys. As a refugee she saw herself – in the past years, however ignorant we may have been before, we had come to know what refugees were – fleeing ahead of an invading army, uncaring of what she left behind, taking with her the only precious thing she had. But where could she go and how would she live? She had no money and no means of earning any and nothing to sell.
At ten o'clock, Eden arrived with June Poole and Mrs King. June was wearing the grey dress we had seen her in and a grey felt hat, requisite nanny's garb. Mrs King had a box of Black Magic chocolates. Sweets were still rationed in the spring of 1950 (and were to be for years longer) so these chocolates would have been accounted a rare prize, if a rather unsuitable choice as bribe for a child of six. It was a sunny morning, quite warm, and they found Jamie playing in the back garden of Laurel Cottage in a sandpit Vera had made for him up near the house. In my childhood and Eden's, the sandpit had been down at the bottom of the garden near the hovel, now irrevocably associated in my mind with the loves of Chad and Francis – but this would have been too far away for Vera. She needed him within her sight.
She soon saw what was happening for she was in the kitchen doing the washing. It was Monday, so Vera was doing the washing. It was to be the most terrible day of her life, and I think she knew it would be, but it was also Monday and therefore washing day. From the window she saw what was happening. June Poole, in her grey uniform, was squatting down on the edge of the sandpit with her arm round Jamie and Mrs King was bending over him, showing him the chocolates. How had Eden enlisted them in her private army? By convincing them, no doubt, of the rightness of her cause.
Vera didn't immediately see Eden. She ran out of the house with dripping hands, literally to be caught by Eden who was standing on the path that went past the back door. Eden took her by the shoulders and said:
‘Now, Vera, be sensible. You know you're going to have to give in, so why not do it now without a scene?’
Vera let out a scream, struggled and ducked under Eden's arms. She ran to Jamie but June had picked Jamie up and was carrying him back the way they had come.
‘That's the way, June,’ Eden said. ‘Just get him into the car as fast as you can and we'll be off.’
It was at this point that Josie arrived, calling as she did most mornings to see if Vera wanted any shopping or merely for a chat and a cup of coffee. At first she couldn't believe what she saw. That is the way it is when we witness sensational acts that seem unreal in the context of a humdrum life. Josie thought, someone is acting, it's a game. But these feelings lasted only seconds. She could see Vera hanging on to June, being dragged away by the combined efforts of Eden and Mrs King, hear Vera screaming and crying. She shouted at Eden:
‘What on earth do you think you're doing?’
Eden said, ‘Stay out of this, please, Mrs Cambus. This is a matter between my sister and me.’
‘Don't let them take him, Josie!’ Vera screamed. ‘Don't let them!’
By now Jamie was in the car. He also was screaming. Two or three of Vera's neighbours came out, though she had no very near neighbours, it was not like it would have been in a London street. Josie's first thought was for Vera whom she tried to take in her arms, but Vera threw herself on to the car, beating her hands on the windows and shouting Jamie's name.
Eden jumped into the driving seat. Josie thought she was going to slam the door on Vera's hand. She just missed. She started the car with a roar, turned once to look at Josie. The awful thing, Josie said, was that tears were pouring down Eden's face. Mrs King and June sat in the back, keeping hold of the by now nearly demented Jamie who was thrashing about screaming, ‘Mummy, Mummy!’
Eden drove away and Vera would have been sent flying except that Josie caught her. With one arm around her, Vera's head buried in her shoulder, Josie led her back into the house.
This morning's post has brought from Daniel Stewart part of the transcript of Vera's trial. Until now I have kept myself in ignorance of what went on at the Central Criminal Court during that week in the summer of 1950. My father, too, died in ignorance of it. What we had instead was a first-hand version of what took place that Monday at Goodney Hall from Josie herself. But an account of the evening Josie and my father and myself spent closeted in our living-room, a stiff whisky inside each of us and more to come, I shall postpone until a little later.
Stewart wants me ‘to add your own comments, please, Mrs Severn’. What comments can I have? I wasn't there. I was in Cambridge and that term I never read the papers. My father, in London, cancelled the Daily Telegraph from the day of Vera's appearance in the magistrates' court until a week after her trial ended, and when he came back to it found the crossword too difficult after this lapse of time ever to complete again. I tried to banish Vera from my mind, to cut myself off from her, but for all that I took a less good degree than was expected of me. That one paragraph I had read before I banned newspapers from my sight haunted me, coming often between my eyes and other, more literary, printed pages.
Vera Ivy Hillyard, 43, of Bell Lane, Great Sindon, Essex, appeared today at Colchester Magistrates' Court charged with the murder of her sister, Edith Mary Pearmain…
Andrew and I married in a panic, to keep it in the family. So many people knew Vera and Eden were our aunts. I imagined them gossiping and their gossip putting out tentacles to reach out as far away as London, as Cambridge. My resolution to shake off my family, to leave it behind like the snake's worn-out, no longer useful, skin had to be given up. What they had done made that impossible. I was stuck with them, tumbled with the other siblings and cousins, niece and nephew, into a kind of ghetto. It seems to me now that I married Andrew to be saved in much the same manner as someone may marry for citizenship or to avoid being deported. Or perhaps it was as the blind marry the blind or the crippled the handicapped. Two years our marriage lasted before we parted by mutual consent.
Soon after our divorce he married someone else who quickly gave Helen a granddaughter. Helen was a widow by then and Walbrooks sold and Tony gone God knew where in the Far, having with the approval of higher authority planted Jamie in boarding-school. Jamie had been made a ward of court, being like Melchizedek, the Priest King, without father, without mother and without descent.
More than anyone I ever heard of, in fact.
N
ext week I am going to see him. He is going to cook the promised meal for me and we shall sit in his garden in the warm Florentine dusk and – compare notes.
Meanwhile, am I going to read this transcript? Why give myself the scratch of pain, the inevitable wincing, it is bound to bring? If this were the nineteen forties and a fire burned in my grate, might I not do as my father did with the winter letters, and drop these sheets of paper in the fire? Ah, but, I remind myself, he always read them first and often read them, considering from whom they came, many times.
So here goes, then. At least it isn't all here, only the vital bits, says Stewart. Josie was principal witness for the defence and this was part of her evidence. Counsel had asked her to describe what happened after Eden and her henchwomen took Jamie away.
Josephine Cambus: I went back into the house with her. She was hysterical, screaming and crying. There was some brandy in the house and I gave her some in a glass with water. I said to her that I would phone the police but she told me that would be useless so I said I would speak to my son. He would know what to do.
Mr Justice Lambert: Is your son a policeman?
Mrs Cambus: No, my Lord, a solicitor.
Counsel: Did you speak to your son, Mrs Cambus?
Mrs Cambus: I tried to. I had asked the operator for his number. Vera, Mrs Hillyard, took the phone out of my hand. She said lawyers and policemen would be useless.
Counsel: Did you ask her why?
Mrs Cambus: She said only she and her sister knew the ins and outs of it. Those were her words. She said she would go to Goodney Hall and talk to her sister and her sister's husband. It was important, she said, to speak to her sister's husband, and she would wait there, on the doorstep if necessary, until he came home. She was quite calm by then. She seemed fatalistic. She seemed…
Mr Justice Lambert: Never mind what she seemed, Mrs Cambus. The jury will wish to know what you saw and heard, not what you surmised.