by Dominic Luke
‘I won’t go this time. I’ve had enough. I want to stay here with you.’
‘Don’t be an idiot, Megan. You know you can’t stay here. I shall lose my job, and then what will become of us?’
‘You care more about your job than you do about me! I’m sure my father wouldn’t be as cruel as you are. Who is he? Tell me!’
‘For the last time, no.’
‘I shall go. I shall leave. But not where you’re sending me.’
‘Go, then, and see how far you get!’
But she had got all the way to London, her heart in her mouth the whole journey long: for she’d had barely sixpence to her name and had been kept on her toes, evading the guards and the ticket inspectors. She had made her way to Aunty Eileen’s in the East End where her brother Jack was still living.
She had never seen her mother again. Bridget O’Connor had died unexpectedly less than six months later.
‘Such an inconvenience,’ Lady Mereton had bewailed; but to give her her due, she had arranged and paid for the funeral, one last perk for the most efficient housekeeper she had ever had.
Aunty Eileen, with eight growing children of her own and now receiving nothing by way of Jack’s keep, had shown them both the door. They had been homeless, penniless, on their own.
‘Now don’t you cry, Meggie. I’ll look after you, you’ll see.’ But Jack had been little more than a boy.
They had found somewhere to live eventually, had taken what jobs they could find, did their best to survive. Jack had grown up quickly. He had taken after their mother, with an eye to the main chance; but not having Bridget O’Connor’s charm and feminine wiles – being a rough-and-ready sort of lad – he had chosen a different path to the one taken by their resourceful mother. A little pick-pocketing and burglary, he’d discovered, was much more remunerative and far less monotonous than slaving all hours for a pittance.
‘Oh, Jack, you mustn’t! Say you won’t steal again! You’ll get caught and put away and I’ll be left on my own!’
‘I promise, Meggie. This will be the last time. I’ll never do it again after today.’ But he always did. ‘Don’t be so hard on me, Meggie. I’m doing it for us. And I only ever nick stuff off of toffs. They don’t miss it. They’ve got plenty: more than enough, if you ask me.’
She had been exasperated by him, had despaired of him – but she had loved him, the only family she had left. If she was honest, looking back, something of his rumbustious nature had rubbed off on her so that, in due course, she had found herself ready to take up the mantle of a suffragette. Smashing windows on the Strand had been just as illegal as any of Jack’s nefarious activities; but she had never got caught, unlike Jack.
Jack had been fourteen when he spent his first brief spell in prison. It had seemed like the end of the world at the time; but later she had come to think of it as the work of providence, for it meant that Jack was not around when, in April 1912, she had met Hugh again. Jack would not have approved of Hugh, one of those toffs whose possessions were fair game. Nor, she felt, would Hugh have taken to Jack. It would have been a clash of opposites. She had been glad in retrospect that the two of them had never met.
It was when Jack had been caught for a second time and hauled up in court that her path had crossed that of Julian Lambton once more. Julian that day had been doing his level best to have Jack locked up and the key thrown away; but as the case progressed, his eyes had begun to stray more and more towards the gallery where Megan, glaring at him, had been calling him all the worst names she could think of under her breath.
I was naive, idealistic, and I saw things in terms of black or white, thought Megan looking back in 1944: and of course, I had no idea then how thin the line that separates hate from love.
The bath water had grown entirely cold. Megan got out of the tub, pulled the plug, dried herself, began to get dressed, thankful for the peace and privacy that Eleanor’s house afforded. What would Eleanor’s son make of the arrangement, she wondered, whereby his father’s mistress availed herself of the comforts of the Paddington house with the connivance of his own mother? One thing was sure, said Megan to herself, laughing as she pulled on her stockings: Jack would have heartily approved of her taking advantage of the toffs in this way.
Hugh ventured down to the kitchen next morning once the Mansells had vacated the house for the day. He was wrapped in a blanket.
Letitia laughed. ‘Now we are two old crocks together.’
‘I am sorry, Aunt. I should be taking you out and about in that ridiculous chair instead of sitting here shivering and sneezing.’
‘Nonsense. Rest is what you require. Rest, and a little something to perk you up.’
Hugh looked apprehensive. ‘Not cabbage soup?’
Letitia laughed as she put the kettle on. ‘No, not cabbage soup. Hot toddies are called for, I think. For medicinal purposes, naturally.’
‘Isn’t a bit early in that day for that sort of thing?’
‘In my experience it is never too early for a good thing. And never too late, either.’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Aunt.’
‘I am talking about Megan.’
‘Oh, that.’ Hunched over the table, disconsolate, Hugh said, ‘I sometimes think it would have been better had we never met again.’
‘Oh, tush!’ Letitia brought the hot toddies across to the table, eased herself into her chair. ‘You were meant to meet again. You are meant to be together.’
She took a sharp breath, hearing her own words, knowing that she was going to break her own cardinal rule. Now, she thought: now I have shot my bolt. Either my meddling will produce results, or it will blow up in my face. Either way, I am too old to be treading on eggshells.
‘There is something holding you back, Hugh.’
‘Oh? Do you think so?’
‘I may be physically decrepit, but my mind has not entirely ceased to function.’
Hugh was silent for a time, playing with the spoon in his glass of whisky and water; but the alcohol, working on his empty stomach, began to have the effect that Letitia had hoped for: it began to loosen his tongue.
It was Megan’s past he was worried about, he admitted. He was vague on details, but Letitia didn’t need to be told. She had heard those rumours before.
‘I don’t believe a word of it. Connie Lambton told me a similar story once upon a time. It was only later that one began to realize how Connie embellished her stories, exaggerating the truth, inventing where she felt it was necessary.’
Hugh looked up. ‘What on earth did Mrs Lambton know about Megan?’
‘Megan stayed at the Manor once, if you remember.’
‘But that was years ago, when we were kids.’
‘And it was under false pretences, too. Connie was most put out when, a long time later, she found out she’d been duped. Naturally she did not have a good word to say about Megan after that. Possibly it was with Connie that those absurd rumours you seem to have heard started.’
‘Possibly,’ said Hugh, not sounding convinced, fingering something in his pocket.
‘Well? Does that lay to rest any lingering doubts?’
‘Not … not quite. You see, Aunt, there’s this.’
He took from his pocket whatever it was he’d been fiddling with and handed it across to her. She took it in her gnarled hand and looked at it curiously. It was a lighter, a cigarette lighter, and—
Her heart lurched, for there engraved in the metal were Hugh’s initials, just as she remembered.
It’s a going-away present for Hugh. There was a voice from the past in her head, clear as day. You know him better than I, Aunt. Do you think he will like it?
Arnold, in the garden at The Firs, long ago.
Letitia remembered gripping Arnold’s arm, reassuring him, telling him that of course Hugh would like the gift, it was perfect. But she had never known in the end if Arnold had passed it on or not – if he had balked at the last moment, reticent of any display of emotion.
She had not liked to ask Hugh about it, given the circumstances, and had never seen him use it. She had come to believe that Arnold had taken it with him to his watery grave. Seeing it again now, over thirty years later, was somehow disquieting, as if a ghost had risen from the depths of the Atlantic and come to haunt her.
‘I don’t understand. This is the lighter your father gave to you on the eve of his wedding. It must be.’
‘Yes it is, Aunt. And I gave it to Megan in April 1912.’
There were still things one couldn’t tell her, things one could never say to one’s aunt: details of those spring days in London that he kept to himself; but it was a relief to finally confess, to have it in the open, to expunge the residue of guilt he felt at having deceived his grandparents and his school friend in order to seek adventure in the metropolis.
Letitia had not been entirely in the dark about that episode, he discovered. Megan had mentioned it in her letter of 1915, the letter he had never seen. But of course his aunt had no idea of the significance that meeting held for him – unless, of course, she could read it in his face as he spoke about it now. He wouldn’t have put it past her. Not a lot escaped her; he had learned that over the years. But she tended to keep her own counsel: he knew that too.
‘Surely, Hugh, if Megan has kept this lighter all these years, it tells you something?’
‘But that’s just it, Aunt. She didn’t keep it. She gave it away – or had it stolen from her.’
‘Then how did you…?’
‘I met a man – a soldier – in the war: the first war.’
Hugh closed his eyes, trying to sort out his jumbled memories of that incident, trying to decide what was real and what his subconscious had invented later, tormenting him as he lay in hospital week after week, month after month, with his wounded leg. He had been in shock, lost in no-man’s land, losing blood: it was no wonder it was all so hazy in his mind. Or had that come later? Had he blotted out what he didn’t want to know – what he couldn’t bear to know? It was impossible to get to the truth after so long.
‘He was a petty thief, this soldier. He’d stolen that’ – he pointed – ‘that lighter. That’s how I came to have it again. I … I took it from him. But before I did, he as good as told me that he’d stolen it in London from a … a prostitute.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘I don’t know what to believe. I thought of asking Megan. I thought of showing her that.’ He pointed again to the lighter in her hands.
‘What if you’re wrong? It might destroy everything, asking such a question.’ She dropped the lighter onto the table, reached over to grasp Hugh’s hand in both of hers. ‘Hugh. Ask yourself. Does it matter? If you love her, does it matter what she did in the past, what lengths she went to in order to survive? If she did sink so low – and I don’t think she did: I don’t for a minute – but even if she did, would it matter? Would it matter now, knowing her as you do?’
‘Great-grandfather would have said so. The bishop would have said it mattered.’
‘I am not asking the bishop….’ Letitia’s voice wavered, then grew firm again. ‘I am not asking him. I am asking you.’
Me, thought Hugh: she is asking me. It is my opinion that counts.
The only opinion that counted.
Why had he not seen that before? It seemed obvious now. But he had been young, confused, grieving for his father. He had wanted answers. He had thought there had to be answers.
But what if there were no answers?
He remembered suddenly, at the beginning of the war, sitting here with Letitia in this very kitchen as the Luftwaffe rained bombs down on London. They had been talking about his father. The Titanic, she’d said, had not been an act of Divine vengeance or a symbol of man’s frailty: it had been a terrible accident. Simply an accident. No one had been to blame, she’d said. Why hadn’t he listened to her? Why hadn’t he seen it for himself? He wouldn’t make that mistake again. His aunt was right about Megan. Knowing her as you do…. It was impossible that she could ever do anything he couldn’t forgive. It wasn’t in her nature. He knew he was right about that. He had to trust his own instincts. That, in effect, was what Aunt Letitia was telling him.
He took a deep breath and, as he did so, it was as if he could hear the last echoes of the bishop’s polemics – the polemics he’d read so avidly in the library at Overton long ago – fading away, fading to nothing.
He pointed to the lighter one last time. ‘What about that?’
Letitia pushed it away from her across the table. ‘Get rid of it. Forget about it. All these years, I thought it was at the bottom of the Atlantic. Send it into deep water now. Throw it into the Thames.’
In the Thames? And yet why not?
Hugh nodded. ‘I will. I’ll do it.’
He would throw all his doubts and suspicions away with it, too. It was the perfect solution. Aunt Letitia had come to his rescue once again.
Even after all these years, she never ceased to surprise him.
After lunch, when Hugh had gone back to bed to sleep off his fever, Letitia sat in the half-light of the kitchen thinking of Arnold whose life had come to an untimely end on a cold calm night in the mid-Atlantic thirty years before. Poor Arnold. Yet he had known love in the end with Daffodil, and he had been reconciled with Hugh, the son he had almost grown to fear.
She remembered sitting by the fire at The Firs in 1902, Arnold slowly coming to terms with the loss of his wife and child. To be hated by one’s son, he had said, as well as one’s father, would be too much.
Poor Arnold. And poor Jocelyn. Poor, poor Jocelyn.
Letitia used unsteady fingers to wipe away the tears from her parchment-like cheeks, knowing that she could never have told Arnold who his real father was.
Chapter Ten
HUGH, HAVING SURVIVED Mrs Mansell’s cabbage soup, headed back to Buckinghamshire to resume his hush-hush work, while in Europe Paris was liberated and General de Gaulle entered the city a hero. The Germans were everywhere in rapid retreat. A day came when there was neither sight nor sound of a doodlebug, no alerts. Another followed. People hardly dared to think that that menace of the air raids might be over. They had been cheated of this hope before. But this time there was a real sense of optimism bubbling under the surface. One could sense it everywhere.
The war will soon be finished, thought Letitia. If only Hugh and Megan would get a move on, stop beating about the bush. At least then she would know Hugh was settled, would need her no more. It had happened once before. She had prepared the way to fade into the background of Hugh’s life, thinking he had found happiness with Cynthia; but Cynthia had been a blind alley and Letitia had suddenly found herself centre stage again as his marriage dissolved. This time it would be different. Megan was different. Letitia was sure of Megan, whereas she had always had lingering doubts about Cynthia.
It was the fifth anniversary of the start of the war and Sunday had been designated a day of national prayer. As she put on her Sunday best – the habit of a lifetime – Letitia imagined grimly the sort of prayers her father would have declaimed on such an occasion, prayers not of reconciliation but of retribution. Thankfully the bishop had long ago mouldered away in his grave and the long reach of his authority was finally failing.
She dismissed the bishop, thinking instead of a previous day of national prayer, in May 1940, when things had looked so bleak: Europe conquered, the British Army shattered; it had seemed at the time like the end of everything. But now, looking back, those events had paled into insignificance, like one of the intense catastrophes of youth from which one believes one will never recover. May 1940 now seemed a time of sunshine and heroism when she had still been nimble on her feet, always dashing off, visiting or shopping or merely walking for the fun of it, perambulating round London as newspaper placards proclaimed the miracle of Dunkirk and the new prime minister roused the nation with his stirring speeches.
All the same, Letitia said to herself as she lowered herself
onto the stool in front of the dressing-table, all the same, those catastrophes leave scars, and the scars never fade. She picked up her hairbrush, avoiding scars of her own and considering the scar of May 1940: the once mighty empire of the Victorians reduced to ferrying its defeated army across the Channel on pleasure boats. The world would not forget.
She looked at the face staring out at her from the mirror: the sunken eyes, the wrinkles. Was that really her? How had she got so old?
It seemed to her that she could hear gulls mewing, the sea crashing onto rocks; that she could smell damp; that a bewhiskered doctor in a frock coat was standing over her.
Pleurisy and pneumonia, Miss Benham. You might have died.
I wanted to die. I thought I had nothing to live for. But when you are young, you can’t see ahead, you don’t think about what might be waiting round the next corner.
She put her brush aside, straightened her pearls. There. She was ready.
Getting to her feet, she made her way slowly downstairs to help Mrs Mansell with the Sunday lunch.
Running for the bus, Megan tripped as she jumped up onto the platform.
‘Whoopsie daisy!’ The conductress put out an arm, saved Megan from falling flat on her face. Bottles chinked in her basket.
Smiling her thanks at the conductress – one professional woman to another – Megan mounted the stairs to take a seat on the top deck, lifting the cloth on her basket to check that no bottles had broken. As the bus patrolled the quiet Sunday streets, Megan looked out of the window, slowly sponging away the detritus of another busy week from her overtaxed mind, a week taken up with patients: patients queuing outside the consulting-room, patients waiting in their homes for a visit. Megan smiled her way through it, taking pulses, writing prescriptions, offering advice. Today, though, belonged to her. She regretted that her bicycle was out of service, but there had been no time to fix it, and taking the bus had its compensations. She relaxed into her seat, watching as London flitted past, recognizing all the familiar landmarks: not the great public buildings which everyone knew, but the landmarks of her life. In that street, she had broken windows in her days as a suffragette. And there, in that house, she had once lived for a few weeks in the 1920s. On that corner by the theatre, she had rowed with Julian Lambton in the early months of the first war.