by Barbara Vine
She told me all this in four sessions over two days. Of all the residents at Middleton Hall she had been the one who never talked about the past, but now she'd begun there was no stopping her. It obviously pleased her to have the chance to talk but she got tired as well and sometimes she started coughing. And I had to keep a look-out for Lena. Whenever she caught me she took the opportunity to send me off to wheel Arthur in or out or massage Lois's leg or find a video for Gracie. It must have been malice, or maybe jealousy, that made her determined to keep me away from Stella, I can't think of any other reason. You'd think she'd have been pleased that one of her residents had found a way to be happy, but Lena doesn't want people to be happy, she wants them to be dependent on her. That's why Maud is her favourite now Edith's gone. Maud is always telling her how good she is. She calls her a ‘latter-day saint’, God knows where she got the expression, and says that if there were more like her the world would be a better place. Lena laps it up and I expect Maud is being lined up as the next maker of wills in Lena's favour.
It was Wednesday afternoon and time for me to go home when I got Stella's next instalment. I was a bit preoccupied, thinking of a surprise for Ned who was coming home from Denmark next day – fool that I was! – and though I was sitting there and apparently listening I missed a whole lot of the beginning. I suppose it was about those Conroys and the office because she suddenly said something that got me listening again.
‘Mr Bosanquet died. He committed suicide.’
You don't know what to say when someone tells you that.
‘He hanged himself. His housekeeper found him hanging from a beam in the garage roof. Old Mr Newland said he had a rifle, why hadn't he used that, and Rex, my husband that was to be, he said it was because of all these shortages and he couldn't get the ammunition. I heard them laughing about it.’
She was quite calm but it shocked me. Where her generation are shocked by sex, it's things like that, a thick-skinned way of being uncaring, that gets to mine. It had me wanting to make the sort of face you make when you take the lid off my nan's wheelie-bin before the dustmen come.
‘Didn't they like him?’ I said.
‘Oh, it wasn't so much that. It was that they found out he was a – how shall I put it? Rex called him a queer. That was his word. A lot better than saying pouf like my future father-in-law. Homosexual, I suppose you'd say. Remember that was years before the Sexual Offences Act was passed, the one that made sex legal between consenting adults in private. Oh, Genevieve, don't look so surprised! I worked in a solicitor's office for six years, you know, and one is bound to pick up a little law in that time, not to mention developing an interest in the law. I suppose that if I'd been born twenty-five years later I'd have been a solicitor myself.
Anyway, poor Mr Bosanquet had been caught with a boy in a caravan the boy lived in. The police phoned him and told him they were coming to see him and why – they knew him well, of course, he was always appearing in court, and I think they were gentle with him – but that was one court appearance he was resolved never to make and he was dead before they got there. I don't suppose you can understand what a terrible scandal it was. I think it would be comparable today to hearing that someone you knew had killed a child. People were outraged. They pointed me out in the street because I had been his secretary. I suppose it was silly of me but I thought I'd lose my job over it. I thought I'd get the sack just because I'd been associated with Mr Bosanquet.
‘I didn't get the sack. They made me Rex's secretary. It was quite a promotion for me because old Mr Newland was going to retire at last and Rex would be the senior partner. He had a nephew who'd come into the business and someone else was made a partner and they gave the firm a new name: Newland, Clarke and Newland. Of course the main motive was to get rid of the hated name Bosanquet.’
‘Just because he was gay?’ I said.
‘What a ridiculous term that is,’ Stella said sleepily. She'd leaned back her head and closed her eyes . ‘The Victorians used to call prostitutes “gay” ladies. In my day that word meant light-hearted and happy.’
I was afraid I'd overtired her. It's at times like this that I can see how thin she is, when she's relaxed and her face slackens. Where her cheeks were full a few months ago there are folds of skin now and her eyes are sunk in deep powdery hollows. The hand lying in her lap was like a bundle of ropes, the nails still bravely painted the colour of the top coat Len's just put on the Legion's front door.
A pity it's not Richard but Marianne who's got those photographs. We all know a Marianne. They mean well, they promise to do something, they're really enthusiastic, but they don't do it. They forget. And then they apologize, they're full of remorse, and they promise again, and the same thing happens. Marianne would never bring those pictures and I'd never see the young Stella in the dresses she wore when she was engaged to Rex Newland, the ‘New Look’ with long skirts and peplums, or the full-skirted cotton frocks with nipped-in waists and tight belts. I'd never see Stella in high-heeled shoes with thongs criss-crossed up her legs like Roman sandals or wearing ‘costumes’ and felt hats and twin sets. I'd just have to imagine.
Driving home I went the way that took me past Rowans. Since we'd been using Stella's house I'd got over my feeling about Ned's weekend cottage, it had stopped being the house, I hardly associated it with him any more. For one thing, he and Jane and Hannah hadn't been there for weeks, it was always raining at the weekends, which makes Ned say that God was a Tory. He even talked of giving up the cottage, they only rent it and the lease is up in December. There seemed some point in it, he said, when staying there meant a chance of seeing me, but now our meetings depend on that no longer.
I expected to see Rowans as it usually was, all the windows shut and the front grass in need of a mowing, but there was a car on the drive, Jane's car, and Hannah's wellies standing on the step to dry. Half-term, I thought, or perhaps she only went to a nursery as yet. I'd been intending to go round the Legion in the evening, see Mum and have a drink with some of the regulars, but I changed my mind. Jane might be in there and I didn't want to have to talk to Jane.
The next day was my day off and I was going to drive to Stansted and meet Ned. He'd sent me two postcards while he was away, one with a picture of the Little Mermaid on it and the other of a statue of two people blowing long tubular musical instruments. The writing on them was disguised, meant to look as if they'd come from a girlfriend in case anyone but me saw them. One said he'd been to a bar called the Song of Songs which was heated entirely by oil stoves, the fire risk was horrendous, and the other was about buying red Christmas candles with holly and mistletoe patterns. He'd signed both ‘Edwina’. I thought they were silly but they made me long for him. The Christmas-candle card said he'd be at Stansted on this flight that got in at five and as soon as he had the chance he'd phone me. I looked up the Little Mermaid in my encyclopedia and learned a bit about Hans Andersen.
Stansted isn't that far from here. I drove down to Bury, then Bury to Long Melford, Long Melford to Haverhill and down the M11. I'd got Stella's house all prepared for us, with more flowers in the vases and more wine and I'd bought the sort of food he liked and I was getting used to, Italian focaccia bread and pâté and a mad-sounding French cheese called Terroir, peaches and bananas and Greek yoghurt. I got to the airport half an hour early, that's the way it is when you're in love, you're always early for meetings, always laying up half-hours of excitement and longing and fear and disappointment for yourself.
I'm not used to airports and I didn't really know what to do but I caught on to the telly screen thing that tells you when flights are expected and when they've landed, so I went to the gate where there were lots of men, hire-car drivers I suppose, standing around holding up cards with people's names on them and the names of companies and I waited behind the barrier. I'd been there ten minutes and the sign was saying the baggage from the flight from Copenhagen was in the hall when I saw Jane crossing the arrivals area, holding Hannah by the hand.
All in a flash I understood. She'd stayed the night in Tharby because it was that much nearer Stansted than Norwich was. She'd arranged to meet Ned. Probably she always did when he went abroad.
I didn't stay. For a split second I weighed it up, whether it was better to see him and have him see me and pass me by, or better not to see him at all. I think that what decided me was my feeling for him. I didn't want to embarrass him, have him be forced to decide whether to acknowledge me or pretend to ignore me. So I went back to my car before the first people started coming out of customs. It was my own fault, wasn't it? It was me that had been the fool. He wasn't to blame and nor was Jane. If I'd said yes to all the times he'd begged me to leave Mike and let him leave Jane, I'd have been the one with the right to meet him off the plane, I could have held up one of those cards and written ‘Ned, I Love You’, on it.
Well, not quite. But you know what I mean.
Maybe they stayed the night in Tharby. I don't know. I didn't go down to see. I went round to Philippa's and we watched a video of Brief Encounter, her choice. Of course I'd seen it before but a long time ago and when it started I thought I'd identify with the characters and see it as ‘my own story’, if that doesn't sound too mushy and daft, but it was too old, it was made too long ago for that. The people just seemed silly with a lot of pointless moral scruples. I couldn't really understand why she wouldn't sleep with him in his friend's flat and I didn't believe in her being put off because she thought it was sordid. All right for Stella, I thought, but it's too old-fashioned for me.
Rex Newland asked Stella to marry him when she'd been working for him for six months. He'd taken her out to dinner three times and then he got his mother to invite her to their house. They had a big Georgian place on Angel Hill. Stella said she thought he was being kind to her because her uncle had died, Auntie Sylvia's husband that is. It surprised her very much when he proposed. He'd never kissed her, he'd never even said anything very personal to her.
She didn't know what to say, so she asked him why. He said she was very beautiful and she knew how to dress and she had the manners of a lady. And then, while she was staring at him, he said, I'm using the words Stella used, ‘I want to go to bed with you so much it's killing me, and I know you won't unless I marry you first.’
Times have changed. People must have changed too. If anyone had said that to me I'd have given him a clout round the face. Stella said it decided her. Can you credit it? It decided her. She said it showed real emotion, it showed he had real feelings. And, besides, the words excited her, they made her shiver, they made her wonder what it would be like, going to bed with such a passionate man.
Also, though she wouldn't have married for money, she liked the idea of marrying someone who had it. She didn't know Rex Newland was mean. All she could see was the big house he lived in and the Lagonda car he drove, and she knew the business was flourishing. Marrying him wouldn't be a come-down but a leg-up. On the debit side was his age. He was twenty-two years older than her. And then there was the question of why he'd never been married before.
People didn't get divorced much then and Stella said that, in any case, she wouldn't have wanted to marry a divorced man. She had genuinely thought he was a widower, she seemed to remember from before she worked for the firm, while she was still at school, seeing him in Bury arm in arm with a woman, and was rather surprised to learn that he'd never been married.
‘Did you ask him why?’ I said.
‘I couldn't do that, not then. We weren't on those sort of terms.’
‘He wasn't gay, was he?’
There's no doubt she doesn't like that word. ‘Of course he wasn't, Genevieve. There was another reason but I didn't find out what it was for a long time.’
It was incredible what she did. She asked him to let her have the weekend before giving him her answer. It's like something out of a Victorian book, isn't it? A far cry from Janis saying to Peter in front of Mum and Nick and me, I've fallen pregnant so we'd best get married three weeks on Saturday. Stella said she thought of nothing else that weekend. She consulted nobody. On the Monday she told Rex Newland she'd marry him and he said she'd made him the happiest man in the world. They weren't engaged for years the way a lot of people seem to be now but got married a month later. The wedding was in the cathedral which wasn't a cathedral then but just a church and Stella made her own wedding dress.
‘Not that anyone would have known,’ she said.
‘What did he look like?’
‘Who, Rex?’ She seemed surprised by the question. ‘Marianne looks like him,’ she said, and then began describing a man not a bit like Marianne. ‘He was tall and rather heavy, you know. Not stout, that came later. He was handsome, very handsome, with a mane of dark hair going grey and rather large features, big nose, full lips, dark eyes, a very sensual face.’
I wanted to ask if she was in love with him – really, if she fell in love with him after they were married, but I didn't quite like to. She seemed to read my mind and answered the question I hadn't asked.
‘I was never in love with him. Sometimes I thought I nearly was and then he'd do something that put me off him.’
‘What sort of thing?’
Oh, something brutal. I don't mean he was ever cruel or violent to me, he never was, but – oh, something in the way he'd talk to lower-class people, as if they weren't people, you know, and the way he was with animals. He hunted, of course, and I didn't like it, but hunting was one of the most important things in his life. I mean, he'd be kindness itself to his dogs, we had two spaniels trained to the gun, but he was capable of picking up a wounded hare and throwing it to the hounds and laughing about it. I hated that.’
I knew the type. We get them in the Legion if the meet's been on Tharby Green. I've seen young kids come in, girls of fifteen, with fox's blood plastered on them and proud of it, the huntsmen laughing about how they dug the poor creature out.
‘He hadn't any time for sensitivity or imagination, if you know what I mean, Genevieve. I don't think he ever read a book. The only music he liked was Gilbert and Sullivan. He was very witty and charming, of course, there was that. He'd tell me about all the cases he had, divorces and so on, and things that came up in court. Things like – well, indecent assaults, and what they called carnal knowledge then, he'd describe all the details to me, I think it excited him. Strange, really, because I never heard a word of that before we were married, but as soon as we were he acted with me as if I were – well, Auntie Sylvia's name for it was a bad woman.’
There's a lot of complaining about the way the world is today and a lot of talk among the elderly about the good old days, but I have my doubts, I reckon things are better than they used to be. I couldn't be doing with the way Stella had had to live. I'd rather go on the streets in Norwich's red-light district.
‘But I was happy enough,’ she said. ‘I really didn't have anything to complain of.’
Stella smiled and paused. I had the impression there was something she was hesitating about telling me and that that was probably to do with her sex life. She hadn't touched on it and I realized that she wasn't going to. Not at this stage, at any rate. Another feeling I had was that I wasn't the first person she'd told this story to, for all her earlier reticence and apparent unwillingness to talk about the past. She got tired, of course, and sometimes her voice grew hoarse, but – how can I describe what I mean? – it was as if she'd rehearsed for this performance. She'd rehearsed once long ago and now she was nearer being word-perfect.
Pauline came in with Stella's tea and put up her eyebrows when she saw me there, long after my going-home time. Stella ate a sandwich and nibbled at a macaroon. She's been eating a bit better, though it's made no difference to her weight and she's beginning to get that transparent look.
I thought she'd finished talking for the day and I really hoped she had because I didn't want her overdoing it. But suddenly she began telling me of her and Rex's hopes for a child and how she'd had a miscarriage and then another. O
f course, she said, it wasn't just a child Rex hoped for, it was a son. They'd been married five years when Marianne was born, on the Queen's Coronation Day, June 2nd 1953. Stella had spent most of the pregnancy in bed she was so afraid of losing the baby, and after Marianne was born she was rather ill for a long time. She didn't say ill in what way but I gathered it was mainly post-natal depression.
Rex had no patience with illness. He was disappointed in getting a daughter. The combination of the two and a housebound wife sent him back where he'd been all those years when she'd wondered why he hadn't married: to the woman she'd seen him with in the town when she, Stella, was still at school, the woman she described, as if Rex had been a king or a dictator, as his mistress.
She meant his girlfriend, his lover. Our history teacher at Newall Upper told us King Charles II had had a lot of mistresses, and that was the last time I'd heard anyone use the word. A dog or cat can have a mistress and Mrs Thorn used to say to Nan that she was the mistress of the Hall but an ordinary man having one made him sound far from ordinary. It made me see Rex Newland as very grand, with a cloak and a sword, and the mistress hanging on his arm, wearing a crinoline.
But of course it couldn't have been like that. I made what I thought was an intelligent guess at the mistress's identity.