by Barbara Vine
Counsel: Did Mrs Hillyard then go to Goodney Hall and did you go with her?
Counsel for the prosecution: My Lord, is not my learned friend leading the witness?
Mr Justice Lambert: I think perhaps he is.
Counsel: I apologize, my Lord. I will re-phrase the question. What did Mrs Hillyard then do, Mrs Cambus?
Mrs Cambus: She put on her coat and fetched her handbag and said she would catch the bus to Bures and wait there for the bus to Goodney, unless I would take her there by car. I did not much want to go, I didn't want to be involved, but I agreed to take her, having some idea that I wouldn't go inside but would leave her there and return home. I went home and fetched my car and drove her to Goodney Hall. When we got there she begged me to go to the door on the grounds that if she went they wouldn't let her in.
Counsel: Did you in fact do as she asked?
Mrs Cambus: I refused at first, I didn't want to, but at last I did. Mr Pearmain opened the door to me. He said…
Counsel: You must not tell us what Mr Pearmain said to you unless Mrs Hillyard was present. Was she present?
Mrs Cambus: No, she was in the car.
Counsel: Very well. As a result of what Mr Pearmain said to you, what did you do?
Mrs Cambus: I went back to the car and fetched Mrs Hillyard and we both went into the house with Mr Pearmain. There was no one else present at that time. We went into a room I think they call the drawing-room. Mrs Hillyard said she had something to say to Mr Pearmain in private, something she wanted him to know, and would I go outside for a moment? I said I would go home, I had no reason to stay, but she begged me to wait for her, just to go out of the room for a short time. Mr Pearmain said he thought he knew what she wished to say but he knew already, his wife had told him a few days before. At this point Mrs Pearmain came into the room and said to Mrs Hillyard, ‘I have told him everything…’
I laid the transcript down. I had read this sort of thing before, having been shown such by my husband and in Notable British Trials. They are all much of a muchness, all have that air of unreality in which people converse as if programmed in language confined exclusively to these particular surroundings. Yet I am told transcripts are faithful verbatim accounts of what was said. Strange… From this point, anyway, Josie had begun her own tale to us in the quiet, intimate, rather breathless atmosphere of my parents' overheated living-room. There she began by repeating to us the actual words Eden had used on walking into the drawing-room that April morning.
‘You can't get your own way like that, Vera. I've told Tony everything. I've told him Jamie is my son.’
We knew, of course. We knew by then. The bare facts had reached us even though we chose to take ostrich attitudes to the trial. It was the details we wanted from Josie, the subtleties that clothed the bare facts in kind, veiling disguises. Leaning forward in her chair, not looking at us, but looking into the fire, she said:
‘Vera cried out. I've never been able to make up my mind whether or not it was a denial. Tony – I never knew him as that but that's what I'll call him – Tony looked grim. He looked miserable. He stood there nodding, with his eyes almost closed. Your sister – I mean Edith, Eden – she said, “He's my child. Vera only brought him up. She offered to do it, I admit that, it was generous of her, a wonderful thing to do, but there was never any question of her having him for keeps.” “You liar!” Vera said. Tony was terribly embarrassed. I think he's the sort of man who would be embarrassed more than anything else in a tragic situation. He said, “Mrs Cambus doesn't want to hear all this. This is a private matter, let's keep it so.” “Oh no, we can't,” said Vera. “Everyone's going to have to know. I'm not having you hush it up. I'll shout it from the housetops what she's been to me, a snake in the grass, a cruel tormentor. I want to see my boy,” she said. “Where's my boy?” “He's not your boy,” Eden said. “He's mine. He'll be mine and Tony's. We're going to adopt him legally.” “How can you adopt your own child?” Vera said, and that was the nearest she got to conceding anything to Eden. Though of course you can adopt your own child if he's illegitimate, I asked my son about that.
‘Vera began to abuse Eden. I don't suppose you want to know what she said, the actual words, I mean?’
My father shook his head. ‘The gist,’ he said.
‘Well, I suppose you'd call them aspersions on Eden's moral character. Eden hated it. Tony looked as if he were going to faint but Eden was utterly calm. She told us the whole thing, I mean me and Tony. I'm sure he hadn't heard any of the details before. He sat down and put his head in his hands.’
The story that came out was that Eden had found herself pregnant in the autumn of 1943. By whom she made no attempt to say. It was Vera who interjected that she had been with half a dozen men, including a G I, a private soldier who was a Puerto Rican out of Spanish Harlem, and who was the most beautiful thing in Londonderry at that time. Josie had the impression that this must have been told Vera when Eden made the first outpourings of confession. It was true that Jamie, though fair-haired, had eyes of a rich, southern brown and a pale olive skin the sun never burned. Eden herself had, it seemed, tried to make Vera believe (and Vera had believed at the time) she had been having a passionate love affair with an officer in the Royal Navy who died when the Lagan was torpedoed in the September of 1943. Who could forget another naval officer claimed as Eden's lover or would-be lover, he who was the subject of Francis's most spectacular tease, he who also went down with his ship? Vera and Eden, poor things, were snobs to the end.
She had told Francis before she told Vera, I am sure of that. It is exactly what she would have done, and Francis's cryptic utterances to me on the morning before the first kidnap attempt confirm it. Francis probably told her where she could get an abortion, it is the kind of thing he would have known. And he may have given her the money, or some of the money, to pay for it. Francis always had money. I think he prostituted himself. For some reason, then, she didn't have an abortion. Did she tell Vera and did Vera talk her out of it, Vera who wanted a child and had told Helen so but was herself unable to conceive? Eden must have left the WRNS months, years even, before any of the rest of us knew she had. She came to Laurel Cottage and hid herself there.
It is hard today for us to understand, even for people of my age, how terrible it still was in 1944 for a conventional, middle-class girl to have an illegitimate child. And Eden had set herself up so, presented herself and been presented by that arch PR woman, her sister, as such a paragon. She could not have written to her brother and confessed this to him, explained it to her half-sister and her half-sister's husband, have it known in Sindon where she had been the sweet, grave adolescent, orphaned young. But if her sister, that older sister who had been a mother to her, would seem to be pregnant, would seem to give birth, would appear with a baby…?
Not all of this is what Josie told us that winter's evening. Some of it I have pieced together with my own knowledge, with observations I made and could not then account for, from my imagination and from my knowledge of those two women, my aunts, my dead aunts, one murdered by the other.
Vera may have made her offer out of love of Eden, from sheer altruism and a desire to protect her reputation. She may have made it because she wanted a baby. Having failed so lamentably with Francis, she wanted to try again. Or, and this is most likely, it was both. She saw it as being to everyone's advantage. Who knows now what was said between them? Did Vera truly promise only to keep the child till Eden herself wanted him? Or did she take him over unconditionally, to be absolutely her own son? Yes, said Eden to the first. Vera said nothing, Josie said. She sat there, transfixed, listening.
The child was born in a nursing home in Colchester, the one which was bombed in the following year and all its records destroyed. Eden went in as Mrs Hillyard, she said. She has been to a doctor for antenatal examinations as Mrs Hillyard. Vera went away while she was in the nursing home and stayed in a boarding-house at Felixstowe. They arranged things this way: Eden left the nursin
g home in a taxi with the baby. Vera left Felixstowe and they met in Colchester in the lounge of the George Hotel, being driven home together, all three of them, in another hired car. Vera laughed derisively when Eden said this, as if no fiction could be more absurd.
‘Eden went out of the room,’ Josie said, ‘and came back with a long envelope with something in it. It was a birth certificate, Jamie's birth certificate.’
‘Did you see it?’ I asked her.
‘Oh yes, I saw it. It was for James Longley, mother Edith Mary Longley, father unknown. Vera snatched it from me. She said it was a forgery. Then she said Eden had made a false declaration to the registrar and that was a serious offence punishable by years in prison. It was ridiculous, of course. There was the birth certificate with the facts on it plain to see. Vera herself had never seen it before. I think she was afraid to see it, ever to ask to see it. She knew only too well what was on it.’
‘But surely,’ I said, ‘if they'd made this arrangement, they must also have arranged that a false declaration should be made. Why didn't Vera herself, who was well, who hadn't got up from just having had a baby, why didn't she go to the registrar?’
Josie couldn't tell us that but I thought I knew the answer. I could imagine the way it was. Not so much Eden hedging her bets, making contingency plans just in case one day she would want Jamie, as simple fear at making a false declaration. The warnings against so doing are very stern in registrars' offices. Did she get there determined to register Jamie as the son of Vera Hillyard and Gerald Hillyard, yet when she got there, lose her nerve? But that doesn't answer the question, why didn't Vera go herself? Most likely because Eden simply got there first, went out alone a couple of days after they were back in Sindon and returned to present Vera with a fait accompli.
‘Vera had it in her hands,’ said Josie, ‘and she tried to tear it up. Those things are made of reinforced paper and they're hard to tear but she tore a bit of it before Tony took it away from her. Not that it would have done any good, destroying it. A copy of it would have been there in the records at Somerset House.’
So Vera took Jamie to be her own son and Eden went away to London to this job she had lined up as companion to old Lady Rogerson. How much easier things would have been for Vera if Jamie had been born just a month earlier! Gerald would never have accepted a ten-and-a-half-months child. If she had told him the truth, would he have refused to let her claim Jamie as her own? Perhaps. Perhaps, even, he would have told people Eden was Jamie's true mother. In a way, I think, once she had lost Gerald, Vera wasn't displeased at having people suspect Chad of being her lover and Jamie's father. It gave her identity, it gave her youth. And she had Jamie. She could never have foreseen how devotedly she would come to love him.
Eden hardly ever came near her. She didn't inquire after Jamie, she didn't want to know. There is a Jewish joke concerning the man who says of an enemy: Why does he hate me so? I never did him any good. Was that how Eden felt towards Vera now? Vera had done her too much good, had done her a supreme service. It was too much for her to handle, the guilt was too heavy, and she transposed it into dislike for Vera. And then she met Tony and became engaged to him. She would have more babies now, Vera must have thought. It was all right, safe, for she would never want a husband to know about Jamie. But when no babies came, when there was a miscarriage, the result of an ectopic pregnancy, and the chances of a safe pregnancy, a delivery at term, looked unlikely, what then? It was then that Vera began to be afraid. She might never have seen the birth certificate but she would guess its contents. If Eden made a claim on Jamie, she wouldn't, as Francis said to me, have a leg to stand on. Perhaps it was made worse for her by Eden's evident indifference to Jamie. That would not prevent her taking him for the sake of having a son, of having an heir for Tony and his shop empire.
‘Vera jumped up quite suddenly,’ Josie said, ‘and ran out of the room. No one was expecting it, least of all Eden. Eden sat there victorious, you know, her marriage in ruins, her family alienated, but triumphant just the same, unassailable, if you know what I mean. That was the feeling I had, anyway. She got up quite slowly and said, “I suppose she's gone to find him. I don't precisely know where he is.”
‘We followed her. I have often wished I hadn't. What was it to me, anyway? I was just Vera's friend who had driven her to the house. I should have gone home and I don't know why I didn't. It wasn't unwholesome curiosity, I had had enough of revelations, soul-baring. I expect it was a feeling that I shouldn't desert Vera there in the house of her enemies – for they were all her enemies, weren't they? Down to June Poole, that minion of Eden's.’
I could not look at my father nor he at me… In a curious, unwise way, he had made his idealization of Longley womanhood, embodied in his mother, then his sisters, a cornerstone of his life. It was all founded on illusion as idealization mostly is and it was very foolish of him to have sacrificed his marriage to it, to have made himself ridiculous by investing his sisters with qualities they not only did not have but which were the antitheses of what they did have. But how dreadfully sorry one felt for him! He had little left now because his world was altered. He even had to re-think his conception of his wife and daughter because hitherto he had seen them through Longley spectacles, one lens being Vera, the other Eden. He had seen them only in the light of comparison and contrast. I will say for my mother, much to her credit, that from the time of the murder and Vera's arrest, she uttered no word of disparagement of either of his sisters, and when she did speak of them, it was always with pity. But, for all that, she became a silent woman.
Josie told us the rest of it. She went on to the end and finished. Jamie was upstairs in the nursery. He was old to be in a nursery, he was old to have a nursery, but those two between them, in their different ways, had kept him a baby. The room was beautiful, Josie remembered. Of course she had never been there before, had never seen it when it had the fairy wallpaper, the carpet with the ivy leaves. The new carpet was pale beige and the furniture was white. Yachts sailed in a frieze along the walls on pale blue wavelets and seagulls flew above the sails. There was a print of the Boyhood of Raleigh, another of Stubbs horses and one of the Fighting Temeraire.
It wasn't a cold day but it was still only April and there was a fire with a fireguard in front of it. June Poole was at the far end of the room, folding linen. Jamie stood on the blue and white rug in front of the fire and Vera knelt in front of him. Josie had the impression he had had no occupation, was doing nothing at all when Vera came in, had just been standing or sitting there bewildered by the recent violent events. They burst into the room – Eden, Tony, Josie and Mrs King, though why she had joined them and at what point no one seemed to know.
‘Eden said, “If you won't get out of here I will have you put out,” and she looked at Mrs King and June. Mrs King did nothing but June Poole put down the pillowcase she was holding and came towards us, it seemed to me in rather a menacing way. Tony said, “Eden, this has got to stop,” and Eden said, “I quite agree with you. I'm stopping it now,” and she put out her arms to pick Jamie up.’
I shall quote from the transcript now. It is the official version, after all, and what Josie said in court pre-dates by six months what Josie said to us.
Counsel: What happened then, Mrs Cambus?
Mrs Cambus: Mrs Hillyard had a knife in her hand.
Counsel: What do you mean, a knife in her hand? Did she pick the knife up from somewhere? Did she bring it with her?
Mrs Cambus: I suppose she must have done. She took it out of her handbag. It was a long kitchen knife.
[Mrs Cambus was shown a knife, Exhibit B.]
Counsel: Is this the knife?
Mrs Cambus: It was like that, yes.
Counsel: Had you ever seen it before?
Mrs Cambus: Must I answer that?
Mr Justice Lambert: Certainly you must answer Counsel.
Mrs Cambus: Well, yes, then, I had seen it.
Counsel: Where?
Mrs Cambu
s: In Mrs Hillyard's kitchen. She used it for cutting vegetables. I have seen her sharpen it with a stone.
Counsel: So Mrs Hillyard took a knife from her bag. What happened?
Mrs Cambus: Mrs Hillyard lunged at Mrs Pearmain with the knife. Someone picked the boy up, Mrs King I think it was, yes, it was Mrs King. She picked the boy up and took him out of the room. Mr Pearmain tried to get hold of Mrs Hillyard. She stabbed him in the arm, the right arm. Then she attacked Mrs Pearmain, wounding her in the neck and the chest. There was a lot of blood, blood everywhere. Mrs Pearmain screamed and fell over, she fell on to all fours, she was bleeding dreadfully.
The blood went over the blue walls and the yachts and the wavelets and the seagulls. Eden vomited blood and died. She rolled over dead on the rug in front of the fire. Vera would have turned the knife on herself, almost did, but June Poole took her by the arms and tied her with the belt of her own dress.
Instead of Vera's story, Daniel Stewart is to write an examination of the Kirby Theiston case, tying the murder of Sunny Durham in with the disappearance of Kathleen March. This will be a reappraisal in the light of the new evidence he found while researching my family. And he will be able to use a great deal of what I have told him when he writes of the part Vera played. I think he is happy about it, quite excited even, and relieved to be free of Longley and Hillyard complexities. So I was right – though not wholly confident at the time – when I told Francis his mother's story would never be written.
The trial transcript I have destroyed after reading it twice. Morbid temptation might draw me back to it on wet afternoons or evenings when I am alone and I don't care to be so directly reminded of poor Vera's pain or, indirectly, of my own failures, my sad first marriage, my poor degree, results of a dread that Vera's notoriety would dog me for life. At twenty-two I was as lacking in foresight as Francis's daughter Elizabeth lacks judgement, believing that in the nineteen eighties the name of Vera Hillyard would arouse more than indifference. Having no fires or furnaces, I have given the transcript to my husband and he has handed over this particularly exciting and exotic morsel of food to be devoured by the paper shredder in his office.