by Jessica Mann
‘Dreary. Narrow-minded. Everything that was worst about England. I got away as soon as I could.’
‘But you came back.’
‘You know what really made it change? Television. Brought us kicking and screaming into the modern world. Made humbuggery more difficult.’
‘But you came back here long before television,’ Zoe said. ‘Mrs Wiseman mentioned it today. She said it was in 1930.’
‘Lawrence all right?’ It was the third time the old man had asked the question. Zoe said again, ‘He is very well, thank you.’
‘Did what I could. Doing my best. Tell him I’ve decided. Tell my sister today. Going to look after the boy.’
The old singer approached the open door of Basil’s cell. ‘Georgie Porgie pudding and pie, kissed the girls . . .’
Basil’s eyes, palest blue, yellowed at the edge, the only colour in his bleached face, rested mildly upon her. ‘Good day, Milly my dear.’
‘Batty Basil,’ she said, in a disconcertingly grand accent. ‘Who’s this then? Always getting off with sexy girls.’ She pronounced it awf.
‘Let me introduce.’ Basil said his visitors’ names, and the two young women shook the hand of the old one. Zoe was appalled at her own reactive shrinking from the soft, damp palm. She forced herself not to snatch her own away, but to smile warmly down at the ruined face, to accept her shared humanity. ‘Mrs Maclennan and my sister were childhood friends,’ Basil said.
‘Viola!’ The old woman cackled. ‘I shall never forget the day you took her away. They all tried to stop you. The vicar and the headmistress and the doctor. Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.’ Her voice rose again in the reminder of a tune, but then she went on lucidly, in the light, amused tone that she would have used as a party giver and guest two generations before, when strangers did not see her in a gaping, dirty dressing gown, when white strands of hair did not part over the pink scalp underneath. ‘Basil came down and said he was taking Viola away to live with him and there was nothing they could do about it. Away from Carmell, away from school, and there was nothing the old fogies could do about it. Oh, how jealous I was. I wished I was an orphan with a grown up brother. And then when I really was an orphan . . . Mummy?’ Her cry, an octave higher than the preceding words, was the sound of a lost child. A nurse left her trolley of teacups and urn and came to put her arm round Mrs Maclennan.
‘Come along Milly, let’s get you a nice cup of tea.’
‘Such a pretty woman,’ Basil Hutber said. ‘She married well. I remember her as a proud young matron with feathers and fur and great gusts of perfume . . . ah well.’
‘I’ll suggest to Mr Jenkin that he asks her about you,’ Zoe said.
‘Why?’
‘Oh, Mr Hutber, I’m sure Lawrence mentioned the idea of writing about your career for the prospectus. He thought it would be something special. There can’t be many schools that had the same head for so long.’
Basil Hutber spoke with sudden energy. ‘All this looking backwards! Pulling things up by the roots. Unnecessary. It’s all done with, over and gone. Things weren’t the same, we weren’t the same. Different places, different habits, different people. New skin and nails, new ideas. Pointless to think about it, you should concentrate on the future. Biographies, pamphlets, all rubbish. Nonsense. Wasting your lives on it.’ His eyes closed and his head tilted back against the pillows. The bones were prominent under the skin and the hair thinner, but he was still recognisably the man whose portrait decorated so many of the public rooms of Carmell. He was not changed beyond recognition like his old friend Milly Maclennan.
Zoe and Tamara tiptoed from the room, and out, side by side, through the ward. Most beds were empty during the day, uninvitingly tidy and uniform. In one a male nurse was trying to shave a recalcitrant patient, who knocked his cardboard urine bottle to the floor shouting, ‘Damned pansy.’
The chairs set around the walls of the day room were all occupied, mostly by women. The walls were decorated with pictures and models made in occupational therapy by patients whose own grandchildren already surpassed them in dexterity and invention. The television set was tuned to Playschool.
‘I suppose it’s worth it,’ Zoe sighed, standing in the courtyard to breathe in the welcome air.
‘What else?’ Tamara Hoyland asked. Neither could think of an answer. They put out the conversational feelers that allowed them to discover very soon that they had several acquaintances in common and that Zoe had once shared a flat with Tamara’s sister Alexandra. Firmly placed in the same social context, they were at ease. Zoe was more comfortable with Tamara than with anyone she had met in Carmell. With her she did not need to think before speaking. They spoke the same language.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Agitated by the revelation that Rex had survived, Lawrence automatically opened the letter that he had put in his pocket along with the edition of The Stroker, since it was addressed to the Headmaster, St Uny’s School.
The writing paper was headed, ‘SS Mauritania’. Flamboyant writing covered five thin sheets of paper, beginning with the date: August 2, 1939. At sea.
*
With half his mind on Rex, Lawrence read on.
*
Dear Headmaster [it began, adding three exclamation marks after the title],
Not much of a kingdom but thine own. Congratters, I suppose. When I saw it in the Morning Post’s appointments I nearly had a fit! Hardly what we’d have predicted when I last saw you! Have you turned out all smug and goody-goody? I bet you’re a bore now. Do you whip little boys on their bottoms and are you tempted by them? Do you tell them they’ll go blind if they play with themselves? Do flappers pose for you? If there isn’t a war I’ll come to see for myself. I’m on my way to NY now because I can’t say I fancy Armageddon. I mean, you couldn’t really imagine me and bombs in the same continent, could you? Handsome German Junkers are one thing, total war quite another.
I thought it would be amusing to send you a pupil. What a joke when you meet him every day. I bet you never dare tell him why it’s funny. I haven’t let the foster parents know anything, don’t worry, the laugh is between ourselves, though they probably guess it’s me paving the fees, because they know I produced the baby in the first place. I’m sure they think it was mine. Everyone in that godforsaken place always thought the worst of me anyway.
I never heard another word from Stella which I think is a bit much considering all I did for her. God knows what happened to the little bitch.
I often think of you. Wasn’t it fun reading all your obituaries? I might almost have explained the joke if I’d known how to get hold of you, but your vanishing act was very efficient and I only found you now because I was reading the Morning Post at the hairdresser. Stella mentioned the name. She said the baby had a Hutber nose, which was nonsense of course, a more disgustingly indeterminate object you never saw, but it might have improved. I haven’t looked. Shall you claim him with the long lost father act? It might be rather fun. But I suppose we shall have to keep quiet for a while longer. My God, darling, has there ever been such an awful warning? How ever could we have known the man would go and die on us? We hardly touched him. It wasn’t as though we’d been very rough. I always thought he did it on purpose to cause us trouble. I do miss our sessions in that caravan though, nobody else is as much fun as you, and now Evelyn has got religion or something boring, and as for Peter Munvies – well, I can tell you it’s just as well he was involved that day too or he’d leap at the chance to queer my pitch. I had to drop him, and that class of person always takes it badly, they go all sour and vengeful.
Anyway, darling, I often think of the old days and all the games we played. When I get back to England I’ll come and see if the headmaster still has some spunk in him, so be careful not to get too boring and schoolmastery even if it would suit the child. He’s probably very stodgy and dull after being brought up by those awful people so you can concentrate on livening him up a bit. I sent him all your books as a joke, do yo
u think they will let him see them?
I hope you’re flattered, this is the longest letter I have ever written in my life, but people always behave oddly on board ship and I’m bored. Chantal.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Zoe Cory and Tamara Hoyland had been walking together for several minutes when they realised that they were in the middle of a crowd, consisting mostly of women, who were laughing, talking and behaving as though they shared a common purpose. Zoe recognised women who had been at meetings to which Gillian had taken her as part of the programme of introducing her to Carmell and Carmell to her, of the Women’s Institute, the Townswomen’s Guild, the Inner Wheel and Watchwomen.
Tamara was bumped against one of them, who dropped her parcel. The brown paper fell back to reveal a flag on which a blue flower was embroidered on a purple background.
‘Goodness, I am sorry. Here, let me help . . .’
‘Thank you. It’s the Watchwomen flag. Our President is coming.’
‘Dame Viola?’
‘Oh, you know about her?’
‘Indeed I do,’ Tamara said warmly. ‘I am a member myself.’
‘Welcome to Carmell, then. It’s her birthplace, you know. She’s a local girl. Oh, it’s Mrs Cory. Good day to you. Isn’t it exciting?’
‘I didn’t know there was to be a rally,’ Zoe said.
‘It isn’t a formal rally, that’s why you wouldn’t have had a notice about it. We’re just turning out to welcome our leader. If you wait here you’ll see her go by.’
Tamara and Zoe stood on a shop’s step, and craned above the crowd as best they could. Nearly a thousand women, Tamara realised almost incredulously, were crammed into the street. No traffic could pass, and only with determination could a pedestrian do so. Some members of the crowd might have been there unwillingly, caught up while they tried to go about their normal lives, but nearly everyone within her view looked as though they were enjoying a pleasant excursion. In the distance where side roads joined this main street, bobbing police-helmets rose above the massed heads, but attempts to regulate the crowd were thwarted by its amiable inertia. Women would draw back in obedience to official gestures but then return imperceptibly towards the middle of the carriageway, not in disobedience or hostility or even as a show of strength, though it was one. It was an unstoppable tide of respectable women with a common cause. There was nothing of which the policemen could specifically complain. Each individual moved away when asked to do so, and spoke pleasantly to the officers, asking after their mothers or wives, telling them that they looked peaky or congratulating them on a promotion, praising them for doing a wonderful job. It was obstruction by goodwill, there could be no justification for arrests or for the use of force, no need for riot shields or dogs or mounted police. None of the increasingly familiar paraphernalia of crowd control could be brought out against these virtuous citizens. All the same, the officers could be seen to speak into their communicators with growing agitation.
The women within earshot were talking about the normal small concerns of neighbours – the weather, each other’s health, the price of food. They waited, good-tempered and cheerful, as they might for a bride to pass beside them to her groom.
‘They may not frighten the enemy,’ Tamara muttered, ‘but by God they frighten me.’
Lawrence Cory often quoted the Great Duke of Wellington and Zoe recognised the words, but she could not see their point. She was accustomed to the kind of crowd in which a fan’s emotion might turn to hysteria and thence to violence. She saw no such threat here.
‘Do they frighten you?’ she asked.
Tamara’s answer was oblique. ‘It certainly isn’t Rentacrowd, anyway.’
A rented crowd would have been told to cheer. When Dame Viola’s transport came into sight, showing that she was waving like benevolent royalty, there was no unseemly lack of control, merely sporadic clapped applause for the performance, or perhaps for its chief actor’s very existence.
Watchwomen’s equivalent of a popemobile was a camper-van with a raised roof that had been altered to fit transparent panels in its sides. Through them showed the face of the President of Watchwomen, who stood on a central plinth. It was practical, inelegant and endearingly makeshift. The van was a standard shade of factory green, with Watchwomen’s flower logo painted on each side panel. It was usually used as a runabout by Noelle Stephenson, Dame Viola’s assistant, who complained about its petrol consumption. Now Noelle drove it inch by inch through the enthusiasts, who gave way to it and closed ranks behind it again. Two of the plastic panels were rolled back to allow Dame Viola to reach out to shake hands or to accept small bouquets of flowers, or prettily wrapped parcels, or loaves of home made bread, which she handed to Annie Hamilton Routley, who added them to the pile of offerings in the back. Annie’s face was proud, and still beadily observant. She was experiencing a personal and professional triumph.
The van’s brightwork twinkled in the sunshine, and its loosely rolled panels flapped in the wind, so that to short sighted eyes it looked like a boat sailing across a brilliant sea, Dame Viola the figurehead.
‘So many women,’ Zoe said, awed by the throng. ‘“And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered/you heard as if an army muttered/and the muttering grew to a grumbling/and the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling.” It’s like Hamelin.’
‘They would be invincible,’ Tamara realised.
‘There is even a Mayor in an ermine gown,’ Zoe added. She had acted the Pied Piper at school.
The van came level with their vantage point. Tamara applauded, as did Zoe. Annie and Noelle, always self-effacing in public, smiled primly, but Dame Viola waved expansively, and called, ‘Hullo, my dear, got your tape recorder?’
A woman nearby said, ‘Isn’t she marvellous? Not stand-offish a bit.’
‘She is one of us. She’s at home here.’ Mrs Wiseman, who had been edging her way along in the wake of the van, came to stand near to Zoe. ‘I remember her when she was just a girl.’
The first woman said, ‘My mother used to talk about her too. She said she hadn’t changed at all, in the photos. But she knew her from a baby, of course. She was nursery maid at the doctor’s house. I’ve often heard her talk about Miss Viola.’
That was obviously a major status advantage: to have dandled the President of Watchwomen on one’s knee. They will be cutting up her sheets as holy relics next, Tamara thought. Mrs Wiseman said, ‘Of course, I didn’t meet her until she came back here with Mr Basil in her teens.’
‘Oh, I never saw her myself,’ the first woman said hastily. ‘I am not nearly old enough for that. This is my first time. It’s just what Mother always says, about the baby, how sweet she was even then, with a great cloud of curls and so sturdy and bonny. She had a birthmark on her thigh, otherwise she was flawless, my mother always said. Perfect. It was star-shaped.’
‘Star-shaped?’
‘The birthmark.’
The van had at last turned the corner into the hospital drive. With the same mysterious speed with which it had assembled, much of the crowd dispersed. Women resumed their everyday personalities and preoccupations, checking their shopping lists, looking for car keys, moving purposefully towards the car parks and bus station. Some women were speaking to the policemen and policewomen, whose large numbers were now the only visible evidence that anything unusual had been happening, for the crowd, unusual if not unique, had left no litter behind it. ‘All over now,’ a motherly woman said to a young constable, patting him as she might have comforted a child after a trip to the dentist.
Many of the women followed the focus of attention, and Zoe and Tamara went with them.
The open space in front of the old workhouse, once a green for the indigent old, had long since been coated with tarmac and at this time of day was always full of parked cars. Now the metal could hardly be seen through the people who were crammed between the rows of machines, and through others perched upon them. Was it an audience, Zoe wondered, and Tamara said it w
as more like a congregation.
‘No,’ Zoe said, ‘It’s more like Catholics seeing the Pope, or soldiers being reviewed by the Queen. These people have been enchanted.’ For the massed faces were not worldly and everyday. They were transformed.
‘My father had a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,’ Tamara said, reminding herself to re-read it. What had changed these women? What turned individuals into the components of an organism that would behave, collectively, as none of its parts would separately?
Zoe watched Mrs Wiseman waving and calling to the person she had once known as an obscure teenager. Mrs Wiseman’s mouth was wide, her hair released, the sobriety of a pillar of the community dissolved into chaos. Tamara knew nobody here by name, but recognised their types. These were people who presented themselves to the world in a chosen role, as country women or county ladies, as young mothers or grateful grandmothers, as business women or housewives, all labelled by their tweeds or denim as precisely as those clothes themselves carried the labels of their suppliers beside the laundry instructions. The limit of shapes and materials that could clothe the human body perhaps defined some limit to human diversity itself, so that the citizens of Tamara’s home town in the south-west might be, if not interchangeable, at least correspondent to those of Carmell. Both, she was forced to realise, would be equally susceptible to the spell that one person could work. And when they saw their own attitudes and actions, now being recorded by film and photograph with an objectivity like Tamara’s own, would these women be horrified at what unison had made of each of them?
Viola Hutber had been helped down from the van and was standing on the top step of the hospital’s grandiose entrance, its great doors opened for this visitor. A cluster of uniforms could be seen within the shadowed hall. Other members of the staff hung from windows to hear the impromptu speech. The practised phrases rattled out like a burst of electrical charge to the adherents powered by it.