by Barbara Vine
As the accused in a murder trial Vera was not obliged to give evidence and she did not. Perhaps defending counsel persuaded her not to, knowing that anything she would say could only damn her further, or else Vera herself had no defence to offer and no arguments to put forward. Josie had told us of Vera's total apathy, how when she visited her in prison she had gone into a kind of fugue, retreating into herself and in a deep silence. I am sure she wanted to die. The alternative would have been years of imprisonment and during those years she would have had the daily torment of knowing Jamie was outside and in someone else's less than loving care. Counsel, of course, put up a defence. She had intended only to frighten, then only to wound, her sister. But frenzy had taken hold of her and she had struck again and again…
There is something else which has led to his abandonment of his project, the doubt at the heart of things, for if it is true that an element of mystery as to what really happened may enhance a work of this kind, the unanswered question is always one of who did it or how was it done. In Vera's case there is no doubt about that. The uncertainty hinges upon something quite different, upon a bizarre point of genesis, the kind of doubt rarely encountered in any family in any walk of life, and one to which no amount of research can supply a solution.
Memory is an imperfect function. We are resigned to not remembering things. It is the knowledge, imparted to us by unshakeable outside authority, that an incident we remember never took place, which we find so hard to accept. Jamie told me, when we sat in his garden after dinner, that Eden's blood had flown at him that day, splashing on to his clothes. It was the only thing he could remember. But when he read the trial transcript he saw he had been mistaken. He remembered something that had never happened, for Mrs King had carried him away before Vera struck out with her knife, seconds before. So the mannerism he has kept, the flicking at blood, is founded upon illusion.
Jamie has moved into a little house behind a high wall in the Orti Orcellari. There is a gate in this wall, one of those gates of wrought iron backed with iron, and on the portico, flanked by two urns that are linked by a stone garland of bay, are engraved these lines of Dante:
Ahi, quanto nella mente mi commossi,
quando mi volsi per veder Beatrice,
per non poter vedere; ben ch'io fossi
presso di lei, e nel mondo felice!
Has Jamie, too, been overthrown, his mind in a turmoil, through being shown once more what haunts him? Through seeing and not seeing? Without subscribing to specious psychotherapeutic doctrines of the let-it-come-up-and-it-will-go-away school, he tells me he is glad he read the transcript. At least it has made him face it. Ceasing to be a bugbear, a chimera, a half-imagined thing, it has come out into the open, no worse than what he imagined and no better, but the thing itself, the real thing. To use the jargon of those doctrines, he has confronted it.
He was laughing as much as ever, flicking at his shoulder as much as ever – though now with an impatient shake of the head and a conscious staying of his hand in mid-air – and he cooked for me as he promised, wonderful dishes, farfalle con asparaghi, manzo per un dio biondo (beef with grapes, beef for a blond god, which puts one in mind of Francis), crema d'arancia and amaretti. The sauce for the manzo he makes at the last minute, essential apparently for perfection, and while he stands at the stove I tell him that the pictures Francis gave those absurd titles to have disappeared from the Hotel Cavour. For we are staying there again, Louis and I, and I have looked into that bedroom and seen their places taken by innocuous and even pleasing aquarelles of Venice. Francis's and his new books lie side by side on the kitchen table, each newly published, each fresh from the binders and in glossy, multi-coloured jackets: Nymphs, Naiads and Mayflies and Cucina Ben Riuscita. And I have a sensation of peacefulness, of all things ultimately coming together for good.
Jamie's garden contains no flowers. Of course it doesn't, it is an Italian garden. Between the stone flags grow oxalis and arenaria and these have their own tiny blossoms, yellow and white, but otherwise the garden is the dark moss colour of evergreens and the weathered grey of stone. In urns that remind me of the ones that stood on the terrace of Goodney Hall grow plants that may be aspidistras and also the spike-leaved succulents called mother-in-law's tongue that rise out of beds of trailing ivy. There is a little stagnant pool, full of lilies, free of fish, and up under the walls and behind the walls and in the stone and brick caverns are cats, the feral cats that are everywhere in the cities of Italy. We hear them sometimes, bodies slipping between a branch and a broken pillar, and as the dark comes, see their eyes. Jamie has put a lamp on the table to which the moths come, and I remember Vera asking me to let her sit in the dusk for a while in peace, not to put the lights on and let the moths in.
‘Tell me about my mother,’ he says to me, his manner calm, his voice steady.
It is a catch question, isn't it? I remember what he said to me in the English Cemetery, about his mother being a good cook. The proverb says that it's a wise child that knows its own father. I get my courage up and tell him it is less usual to be in doubt as to one's maternity.
‘I'm not in doubt,’ he says. ‘Whatever the family may think, whatever the world may think, I know Vera Hillyard was my mother.’
How can I argue with him? In a way it would be presumptuous of me to argue. I am not even sure if I want to. In the dusk, the dark now, with the moths around the lamp, I tell him about Vera, the nice things, carefully editing my memories: how much she loved him, her doting care, her selfless love of Eden, her housewifely skills, her dutiful life. She emerges from my descriptions as a perfect woman, nobly planned. Gone is the sharp tongue, the snobbery, the prejudice, the preoccupation with trivia, the coldness. I don't mention such rules as eating with the left hand, drinking with the right. I say nothing of her fear and dislike of Francis. And perhaps those virtues of Vera's did outweigh her faults and when I tell Jamie she was more sinned against than sinning, I am not far wrong.
‘I'm glad Stewart has given up the idea,’ he says. ‘His book would have been written from the other point of view, of course, or at least he would have devoted his last chapter to pros and cons that don't really exist. I may write a book about her myself one of these days. Would you help me if I did?’
‘No, Jamie,’ I say to him. ‘No, I don't think I would.’
A fine golden moon is rising behind the dark trees in the gardens of the Orcellari. I tell Jamie it is time for me to go and we have a little argument, he insisting he will go with me to find a taxi on the rank up by Santa Maria Novella, I determined on walking back to the Via Cavour. This time we kiss goodbye and I have the sensation of a brown bear snuggling up to me. But the illusion vanishes fast as he steps back frenetically to sweep invisible blood from his shoulder. In the end, he does come with me as far as the top of the street. From there onwards, it is light and busy, crowds thronging the Piazza della Stazione, and I persuade him I shall be safe. It is the menu outside the Otello that distracts him. I look back once and see him still studying it, for all the world as if he were without cares and without a history.
My husband has said he will walk part of the way to meet me and there he is coming from the corner of the Via Nazionale. After all these years, the clutch at the heart which comes to me when we see each other and wave is good to feel. His evening has been passed with a businessman, English but resident in Florence, bent on suing a newspaper for libel. Louis specializes in litigation, or rather, as he puts it, stopping people engaging in litigation. It was to him I went to be made free of Andrew, having chosen Josie's son because he was the only solicitor I knew of. I went to escape from one trap and immediately fell, though this time with a conviction never proved wrong of future happiness, into another. Out of the frying-pan into the fire. How lucky I am that the fire still burns so brightly!
I take his arm. I tell him about Jamie and what Jamie has said.
‘What do you think?’ I ask him.
‘As to whose child Jamie truly w
as? Edith Pearmain's, surely.’
‘For years,’ I say, ‘I didn't believe that, and then for years I thought so.’
‘The point,’ says Louis as we come to the hotel, ‘is that it wasn't really relevant to the case against your aunt Vera. Or shall I say that it was wise of neither side to have anything to do with it. It was more just.’
‘How can you say that!’
‘Remember Edith Thompson in the twenties. She was certainly innocent of the murder of her husband. Bywaters stabbed him and not at her instigation. But Bywaters was her lover, she was a married woman, and that was what executed her. Remember Ruth Ellis a few years after Vera Hillyard. The climate of feeling still hadn't changed. It has been said that Ruth Ellis was hanged not because she had shot her lover but because she had a lover. If the defence had insisted Jamie was in fact Vera's child – instead of allowing it to be assumed he was Edith's – it would also have had to be made clear he wasn't Gerald Hillyard's. Do you see now?’
‘It made no difference in the end.’
‘No. There's no penalty worse than hanging. But it might have done, there was a chance.’ Louis looks at me, one eyebrow up. ‘He was Edith's – Eden's – wasn't he?’
‘I don't know. No one will ever know now.’
I don't know. And that is the heart of the mystery that has frustrated Daniel Stewart and let him down.
It is perhaps most likely that Eden was Jamie's mother, but there is a great deal against that, isn't there? Certainly she became pregnant sometime in the summer of 1943 and the first person she went to in her trouble was Francis. There had always been close, secret things between them, arcane things. But if Francis told her the name of an abortionist and gave her the money, or some of it, for an abortion, why didn't she have one? Because she was afraid, because Vera talked her out of it? A post-mortem, according to Stewart, was carried out on Eden's body but not in order to discover whether she had ever been pregnant – that is, carried a child to term and delivered it.
And there is a very good argument for her having, in fact, had that abortion. Eden miscarried in 1948 as the result of an ectopic pregnancy. One of the principal factors contributing to an ectopic pregnancy, or the implantation of the foetus in one of the Fallopian tubes rather than in the uterus, is a previous abortion badly carried out and causing infection and the subsequent blocking of a tube. Of course other possibilities here are gonorrhoea (as my mother scandalously hinted) and a previous, carelessly attended birth. Perhaps we can't quite dismiss the venereal disease but surely we can the carelessly handled delivery. The nursing home where Jamie was born, to whichever woman it was, was a reputable one. I never heard the staff there impugned for any sort of negligence.
So perhaps the baby whose father was some Londonderry GI Eden did have aborted – and later bitterly regretted her decision. For that autumn she heard that her sister, her much older sister, was expecting a child, and she almost envied her. It was not Gerald's, though, that much is evident. Did it happen as I had earlier believed? Did Vera encounter some old boyfriend home on leave and in her loneliness make love with him? Anne Cambus once told me (not apropos of any of this) that a Sindon family, the Warners, owed their dark colouring to the fact that the children's grandfather, an old seafaring man, still alive when I was a child, had married a wife he brought back with him from Agadir. Two of their sons were in the army during the war, both officers. Is this too far-fetched? Am I being absurd? Perhaps.
Vera suckled Jamie, she fed him at her own breast. I saw it. I can't be mistaken here. And since then I have read accounts in newspapers and magazines – a whole book has been written on the subject, I believe – of women who, adopting or taking over other people's babies, have induced lactation. By the intensity of their love and by their determination, holding the child to the dry breast, persevering, they have done it. So why not Vera? She was exactly the sort of woman to achieve it, intense, conscientious, prone to obsessions, driven by a self-formulated notion of duty. Taking over Eden's child, she might very likely have held him to her breast, let him suck, seen one day a drop of milk exuded from the nipple, and then persevered for a variety of reasons: to make him more her own, to do what was best for him, to allay doubts in others that he was not her child.
But it is more probable, isn't it, that Jamie was her natural child and that lactation happened as it normally does from the action of the emptying of the womb? Vera was a prudish finicking woman who would have pulled a face and said ‘How disgusting!’ if told of the book by the self-induced lactator. She had never breast-fed Francis, though she was very young when he was born and nursing a baby would have come more easily to her. She would never have attempted to breast-feed a child not her own, for the idea would never have occurred to her.
You will say that if Jamie was Vera's own son, why did she allow Eden to name herself his mother on his birth certificate? The answer may be that she didn't, that she knew nothing of it until it was too late. Or she may, of course, have approved this false declaration. In her own eyes, after all, she had done a terrible thing. She had had a child by a man not her husband. That was bad enough. Was she to compound her wrongdoing by telling her husband Jamie was his? She lacked the nerve to confess he was not. Just to be on the safe side, why not let Eden do as she had offered and register Jamie as her own son? Neither of them wanted him at that time, anyway, he was an encumbrance to both, but their mutual devotion was great. Eden would do this generous thing for her so that one day – when and if Gerald came back, if he doubted her, if the child looked very unlike him or very like someone else – she could show Gerald that birth certificate and explain she had adopted Jamie for Eden's sake. At the time of his birth she could not have foreseen how much she would come to love him or that Eden would ever want him herself.
So Jamie was Vera's son, as he himself believes, and her fears of losing him arose simply from a false declaration on a birth certificate. Never once, in court or at the time of the murder or beforehand or to Helen or my father when they visited her in the prison, did she admit that Eden had been telling the truth and that Jamie was her son. Never once did Vera weaken over her claim to be Jamie's mother.
But all the same he must have been Eden's. Why, otherwise, would she have left the WRNS when she did, telling no one in the family she had done so, virtually disappearing from the autumn of 1943 until the summer of 1945? Would anyone in her right mind make a false declaration to a registrar, and that declaration a claim to be the unmarried mother of an illegitimate child, to save a sister from a possible future contretemps with her husband? She could not then have foreseen that she would one day want to adopt a child. And a husband, not then in sight, might be involved. She was afraid to take the risk of having an abortion, afraid not to have the child, afraid to lie to the registrar, while clinging to Vera as her lifeline, sister-mother-saviour Vera who had offered to take the baby and bring him up as her own. Jamie was Eden's. She would never have said he was if he wasn't, prudent, hard-headed husband-hunter that she was. Those were the days when men still wanted virgin brides, or the kind of men Eden fancied did. At any rate, they didn't want the mothers of illegitimate children.
So it goes on, round and round in perpetual motion without ever coming to rest on Eden's square or Vera's. During these long past years I have come to know other people's beliefs as to the truth of it. They are all conflicting. Helen is for Eden. Jamie was Eden's son, she says, and believes this as firmly as Jamie himself takes the opposing view. Vera would never have been so afraid of Eden, she asserts, if she were truly Jamie's mother and the doubt rested solely on an error in a birth certificate. Gerald, however, once confided in Helen of his own certainty that Jamie was Vera's, for if he were Eden's and Vera in caring for him was merely doing her sister a service, she would not even have waited to tell him this when he came home, she would have written it to him at once. I wouldn't have guessed him capable of such subtlety in character analysis, but yes, he told Helen, Vera being what she was, she would have b
een more likely to tell him Jamie was Eden's when he was in fact her own than claim him as her own when he wasn't for the sake of protecting Eden. What she did in fact tell him was – nothing. She refused to speak of Jamie's paternity and this, ultimately, was why he left her.
Francis told Chad (and Chad told Stewart) that he knows Jamie was Eden's child. She came to him in the autumn of 1943, saying she was pregnant and asking for the money for an abortion. He got her the money and gave it to her with the proviso that if she changed her mind he wanted it back. She had told him she knew she must have an abortion but she was terrified of it, she was afraid the abortionist would kill her or so damage her as to make it impossible for her to have children in the future. But he didn't see her again for more than a year and he never got the money back. Chad himself has never doubted Jamie was Vera's for, like me, he came upon her with the baby at her breast. Josie, my mother-in-law, always said Jamie was Vera's on the grounds that during the long hours they spent together when Vera poured out her terrors, she would have admitted he was Eden's and not hers. Yet Tony was convinced Jamie was his wife's child, knew she would never have dared risk losing husband and home by such a confession unless it were true. And Anne Cambus can remember passing Laurel Cottage in the spring of 1944 and seeing Eden emerge for a moment from the front door, the equinoctial wind blowing her dress taut across her swollen body before she fled indoors. But Anne is not quite positive about this memory, she would not swear it was Eden she saw and not Vera, and she and I have wondered if like Jamie she has innocently distorted the past.
We are back from Italy and the usual mountain of post awaits us, as much for me this time as for Louis, for Daniel Stewart has sent me back all the letters and photographs. I postpone opening the three padded bags until next day, until I am alone. But this time there are no tears, only a feeling of rueful nostalgia, of folly and of waste.