* * *
The words had been dropped into the air and now Edith wanted Archie gone.
Edith’s heart had given a little flip as she saw the tall figure in the tweed jacket walk with his usual assurance down the corridor. She was just back from a session at occupational therapy. Drawing actually, something she had absolutely no talent for, but she didn’t want to rock any boats by objecting to anything the hospital suggested. She had glanced behind her and seen Archie. He hesitated for a split second and then came to where she was standing by the ward door.”
“Hello, Edie, you’re looking a bit more chipper, I must say, Julia told me you were on the mend.”
“Archie.” She touched his sleeve. They didn’t go in for much hugging or kissing in their family, but it was comforting to see him and silly as it was, to touch the rough fabric of his sleeve.
They went into her side room. Every day, she felt thankful she didn’t have to sleep in one of the dormitories. She hadn’t questioned her good fortune in being granted this privilege, but suspected it might have something to do with her brother’s profession. She led the way into the room and perched on the side of the bed, and offered Archie the high armchair, but he walked across to the window.
“Not a bad view,” he said.
“I suppose. How are you, Archie? I thought, well, I thought you might have been in to see me a bit sooner. Sorry, I suppose you’ve had a lot on your plate.”
Edith sat on the edge of the bed, tried to relax her shoulders and keep her head from drooping. It was a strain trying to avoid looking depressed all the time.
“Yes, a couple of more visits from Greene and Brown—unfortunate combination of names there.” He laughed hollowly. “I can’t help thinking it’s only by the skin of my teeth that I haven’t been arrested. It seems like I’ve committed the cardinal sin—getting too close to a patient. Not in the usual way, but maybe this is looked on as even more suspect. Anyway, that’s enough about me. Julia tells me they’re talking about weekend passes or something soon. Seems a bit stupid to me.”
Something was happening in Edith’s chest. Her heart was jumping about all over the place. This used to happen to her in the time leading up to her breakdown, as she called it now. “They do think I’m better, Archie. This is a step along the way, according to Dr. Uxbridge, a trial run, I suppose. If I cope with this hopefully I might be released soon.” She looked at him and tried to keep the pleading out of her eyes. But, somehow, his words did not surprise her. “I think it’s a bad idea, the worst possible idea. In fact a recipe for disaster—like a relapse and being back to stage one. But, if Uxbridge thinks it’s right for you, then I don’t suppose there’s a lot of point in me putting in my tuppence worth.”
With every word he spoke, Edith’s spirits plummeted a bit more. In fact, it went deeper than that. With every word he spoke, Edith told herself she had been living in a fool’s paradise to think she might be getting better. After all, who knew her better, Dr. Uxbridge or her brother, who also happened to be a doctor? But more than that he was the person who had seen the way she’d been in the weeks and months before her descent into the hell that propelled her into this place.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said eventually. She wanted him to go even more than she’d wanted him to visit. “Archie, I’m very tired, I’m sorry, it’s this medication, it catches me like this, and the only thing to do then is to sleep.”
* * *
“I’ll be in again very soon Edie. Is there anything I can bring you? The new novel by Agatha Christie?”
“If you like, yes, thank you, Archie.”
She opened her mouth to say that Dr. Uxbridge had wanted a chat with him, but changed her mind. What was the point? That was about weekend leave and Archie had made it plain as day, he didn’t want her home. Since she had been in here, since she had begun to feel a little like herself again, this was, without doubt, the lowest she had felt.
* * *
She had begun to emerge from herself, like an animal after hibernation. Small curiosities about the other patients—where had they come from? What on earth had happened to them that they had ended in this place?
By now, for all that she was quiet and caused no trouble she had been put in a long-stay ward. She didn’t think that was a good sign. But life, some sort of life had to be lived out, even in here. She couldn’t keep her legs bent up and her arms wrapped around her forever.
She began to look at the warders, study them and wonder why they did this work. Was it a job, just a job to keep the wolf from the door? But, they differed. One, a woman called Flora had a gentleness about her, a soft voice that encouraged you to talk. But, Flora was unusual—others got the only satisfaction that seemed available to them by provoking and mocking.
She began to eat, to beg to be allowed to work. It became an obsession, this need to work. Other, trusted patients left the ward every morning to go to the gardens, the laundry, the kitchens, or the sewing rooms to pass the time and to enable this huge place, this self-contained world to function. She often thought that it was a distorted version of one of the big country houses, with all this work going on in the background to keep up appearances. The gardens here too, were productive and pristine and the hallways and stair banisters shining and smelling of lavender polish.
When she’d convinced them that she was calm now, she was allowed to work in the hospital laundry. She hardly slept the night before despite the bromide, so excited was she at the thought of going to work—work had always been something good, despite all that had happened. If only she could do a job, then maybe, in time, other things might become normal too.
* * *
All the way home, driving his Austin Seven unheedingly through the lanes that divided St Bride’s from Ellbeck, Archie chided himself. Yet again, he had not thought things through—considered about the consequences of his behaviour. He’d been unable to cope with the prospect of Edith under the same roof as himself and that was the truth.
“You are very single-minded,” Bridget had said to him once. They had been having an argument. After her death, he hadn’t been one of those people who had gone around claiming that they had never had a cross word. He and Bridget had exchanged plenty cross words. She had been Irish, and well able to fight her corner.
He had been, as she pointed out, single-minded, which was another way of saying, stubborn. In fact, part of her attraction for him, secretly, was that fire and the fact she had trained as a doctor, when that had been a tough thing for a woman to do. That took steeliness and a level of commitment he believed, at some deep level, augured well for their future together.
So, shame then about the explosion that hit the hospital where she’d been working. People, on hearing she had been killed, questioned it, he’d heard afterwards, saying surely it had been Archie. He was, after all, the Doctor Horton who was near the front lines. I always thought it was referred to as the singular, but I may be wrong!
He could hear Bridget’s voice now. Funny, he couldn’t properly see her face in his mind’s eye, but he could hear her saying, “Archie Horton you are a selfish bastard. Your sister has given up her life to help you up here in this backwater. In her hour of need, the one time in all these years she’s the one needing a bit of support and care, you spectacularly turn your back on her.” That’s what Bridget would have said—he could hear her. He drove a little faster in a bid to drive the voice from his head.
* * *
Brown sat across the table from Stella Satterthwaite and drank in the sight of her. Lucky old beggar, Rob Satterthwaite, coming home every night to a dish as tasty as this one. She looked as good close-up as she had when he’s seen her in the distance. The trademark red lipstick emphasised the pale, flawless skin. She wore a deep-blue dress, low enough to excite a glimmer of interest, but not too low, really, to perturb the vicar if he happened to call round to the neat-as-a-pin terraced house behind the church in Ellbeck. He’d caught a glimpse of two little boys in clean sh
irts, shorts and braces playing a game involving a board as he and their mother had passed through the kitchen.
What did old Mrs. S. think now? She had literally broken down in tears in front of several villagers when Rob had returned with this different type of girl. “She’ll break his heart, nothing but a flibberty-gibbet and painted hussy” had been some of her milder comments.
But contrary to her mother-in-law’s opinion, Stella had been as good as her name, a bright star, who lit up the village. Rob and the boys were happy and on top of all that, she was the type of woman who would set to and do a job to supplement the wages Rob earned as a farm worker. “So, Mrs. Satterthwaite, how long had you worked at Mrs. Butler’s and what was it you did, exactly?”
She had a different accent from the country folks, not as broad. “I worked there coming up two years. As to what I did, I suppose you might call it light housework, like. Not all that light if truth be known, big old place like that and only us two women, myself and Mary Whitchurch to do the cooking. Then there was Braithwaite, the swine, takkin Mrs. Butler about and keeping the garden in order and so on, and that sourpuss Esther Kirk. So, I suppose we didn’t stand on ceremony, me and Mary. We set to and did what ‘ad to be done. You’ll ‘ave a cup of tea, lad?”
“If it’s no trouble.”
“No trouble and I’ll check on them two rascals while I’m about it. They’re a bit too quiet for my liking.” She returned with slices of Victoria sponge on a china plate and what looked like the best cups and saucers.
While she was pouring, Brown glanced around at the small parlour. He supposed that’s what you’d call it. It wasn’t really like any parlour he’d seen before, nothing like his own mother’s for instance, with her antimacassars and brass plant pots. No, this was more like a scaled down version of some of those elegant drawing rooms you see in grand houses, not that it was trying to be something it wasn’t—it was…tasteful, he supposed. Nice wallpaper, not too much clutter and cushions she’d obviously made herself.
Brown noticed things like that due to being an only child raised by a widowed mother. He would never have commented on that sort of observation to the inspector, or indeed to any of his colleagues. “What sort of a woman was Mrs. Butler?”
She smiled, her teeth white between the red-painted lips. “She were different, that’s what she were. So, maybe that’s why some of the local ladies didn’t know what to make of her. Maybe it was because she’d spent time in America, maybe because she had been in business. I don’t know, but it was like she didn’t quite fit in. She was forthright, in her views. Equal rights for women, that sort of thing. I think that kind of talk, in a quiet place like this, can ruffle feathers, make people feel they’re too set in their ways, missing out on something. I think maybe the local ladies didn’t feel comfortable around her.”
“Not the case with the local doctor, though I believe.” He’d made a mistake, her face tightened and she looked displeased with his flippant comment. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have put it that way. What I meant was that Doctor Horton spent a good bit of time at Brook House, that they were friends—that’s all.”
She shrugged. “Fair enough. I don’t like some of the gossip that’s going round the place lately. I was saying as much to Rob this morning. I’ve been at the receiving end of gossip myself, Sergeant Brown. It makes me angry.
She enjoyed a talk with the doctor, that was it. And he enjoyed a talk with her, an intelligent woman who had seen a bit of the world. Ellbeck is a lovely place, Sergeant. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, but it can also be a bit…well, close-minded at times. Anyway, it wasn’t only the doctor. The vicar, Henry Wilkes called on her at least once every week. Then there were guests up from London, from the firm and their wives. She was a bit restricted by her heart trouble, but she hadn’t given up on people and company, quite the opposite, I’d say.”
“Then, there are the stepchildren, not that you can talk them children, Caroline and Roderick. How did you find them?”
Again, Stella shrugged. “They were my employer’s family. I was polite to them. I can’t say they made much of an impression one way or another.”
“Come on, Mrs. Satterthwaite, you strike me as a very intelligent and observant woman. I can’t believe you didn’t form an impression.”
“All right, Sergeant. Flattery will get you everywhere. I was not overly keen, especially on Roderick. But then, maybe seeing my husband work seventy hours a week, and having lost my own father to lung disease because of coal mining, I’m probably a bit biased against the idle rich—especially when they don’t even make any pretence at doing a day’s work…”
“And the step-daughter, Caroline?”
“All right, I suppose, she maybe acknowledged our presence…the staff I mean, a bit more than her brother. Head stuffed full of all this film nonsense though.”
“I believe they hadn’t visited their stepmother for quite a while before her death.”
“Not all that long, a couple of weeks, I’d say, definitely no more than three weeks.”
Brown puzzled over that one as he thanked Mrs. Satterthwaite for the tea and ruffled the hair of the youngest boy as he went out through the kitchen. She’d been quite definite about the time lapse between the stepchildren’s visit and Mrs. Butler’s death. They had been equally adamant.
Someone was forgetful or lying and he was pretty sure it wasn’t the woman he just left. Then would Caroline and Roderick tell such a blatant lie that could be easily disproved if they had something to hide? He’d have to take it to Inspector Brown and he could already hear him say, “We all have something to hide, lad.”
Chapter 6
Julie Etherington drank her coffee slowly, enjoying the dark, bitter richness.
She stared out through the window to the rain-sodden lawn and trees. Though it was getting towards the back end of the year, the shimmering, multi-shaded green was mesmerising. There was so much green. There was a sudden flash of mud in her mind’s eye and she turned her head sharply to escape from it. A spring of sadness started in her chest, and she sought the only cure that ever worked. She got up from the chair and moved. Inactivity was the troubled mind’s most dangerous enemy, she had discovered.
Gladys, the parlour maid was coming in for the tray. “I’m going to go out into the garden, for a while, Gladys.” Not that anyone was likely to be looking for her. The boys were not due back for half term, for another few weeks, and Beatrice was at the village primary school. As for Giles, well, who knows? When she’d first come to live here she insisted from the start she have some say on the garden. As it was, Paddy, the gardener, and Maurice, the under-gardener, pleased themselves at every opportunity. It might be her imagination, but even after so many years, she still felt an interloper. It frightened her, but there were times when this lack of purpose and occupation played on her mind, even more than the horrors of the hospital, even the field hospital. How could that be?
Julia knew she needed something to occupy her. But what could she do about it? The war had brought about change in the lives of women, according to what she read, and to some extent, saw around her, but only to the lives of some women. It had been different when the children were younger. Despite the presence of a nurse, the children had been much more hers. There had been picnics and games, and they had put on plays and shows in the winter.
“You’re as bad as they are,” Giles used to say to her. She remembered now the smile in his voice, in his eyes as he spoke to her. When had it changed?
The very idea of having such a light-hearted conversation with him, these days, was laughable. Or it would make her weep. A lot of use crying will do, now. She dragged the back of her hand across her eyes, and went into the shed to fetch her secateurs and trowel.
For the next couple of hours she hacked and pruned, and scratched her hands, welcoming the sharp pricks. At least she was feeling something. She didn’t think she had what you would call a gift for gardening. But the activity calmed her.<
br />
Then she cut her hand, on a piece of unseen barbed wire. The cut was deep and ragged, and she couldn’t believe she’d been so careless. She sat on the low wall, her handkerchief clamped tightly around her hand, and wept. But while she cried, it was as though she stood to one side of herself and felt contempt for the stupid woman she had become, and her pointless tears.
* * *
Archie Horton could hear the telephone ringing as soon as he let himself into the house. It would be that bloody inspector again. He was playing cat and mouse with him, Archie had decided. If the inspector was trying to rile him, well, it was working. For two pins he’d put himself on some tranquillizers, but he found a drink did the trick of unwinding him, at the end of the day, and alcohol and barbiturates together were not such a good idea.
“Archie,” it was his aunt’s voice.
Damn, he’d forgotten about all this business about the weekend pass. He hadn’t even mentioned Aunt Alicia’s offer to Edith. Well, come to think of it, he couldn’t possibly have done so. That would only look even more as if he was trying to fob her off.
“Did you see Edith, today?”
“Yes,”
“And how did you find her? Did you ask her about coming to me for the weekend?”
“I’m afraid not, not yet. She got the impression that I didn’t want her home for the weekend. I’m afraid the visit didn’t go well, after that.”
She sighed. “Oh, Archie, sometimes you are not the most tactful …if you don’t mind me saying so.”
He laughed. Trust Aunt Alicia to come to the point, though in this case it probably was the understatement of the year.
“I’ll tell you what, Archie. I’ll visit her myself, tomorrow. Let me ask her.”
“Do you want me to take you?”
“No, I’ll drive myself, it’s not far.”
* * *
Dorothea Arbuthnot read the letter again, the hateful letter that she’d been carrying around in her pocket for weeks. Why on earth don’t I destroy it, burn it? But, something told her not to. She should probably have taken it to the police. This sort of thing couldn’t be allowed to continue. She doubted she was the only person in the village to have received one of these obscene things. Somehow, though, she couldn’t face doing that.
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