The Girl in the Letter

by Emily Gunnis

  ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about,’ she had said the last time he’d seen her. She’d taken his hand, curled her fingers around his. ‘I’ll meet you after the match at Fulham and treat us to a hotel in town.’

  ‘You coming?’ said Stan, snapping him back into the moment.

  ‘No, thanks, Kitty’s on her way,’ said Alistair breathlessly.

  ‘You all right, Al?’

  Alistair nodded. The last thing he wanted was to get on the players’ bus and have a full-blown attack in front of the team. To have everyone fuss around him, gawping as he fought for air, full of sympathy to his face then swapping fears for his future place on the team behind his back. He’d scored, he was the hero of the match, and he desperately needed it to stay that way.

  As the final supporters headed off chanting into the fog-filled night, the coach doors hissed closed behind the Brighton players and Alistair hurriedly made his way into the changing room, anxious to inhale his much-needed salbutamol and relieve the tightening in his chest. The room was full of steam as the Fulham players showered away their disappointment at losing, their mood quiet and subdued. Towel-covered bodies traipsed back and forth, and the heat of the room in contrast to the freezing dusk outside intensified his disorientation as he searched for his bag.

  ‘Has anyone seen a blue bag? It was hanging here,’ he asked as loudly as his breath would allow. A couple of the players looked round but said nothing. Having scored the winning goal for the other team, he knew he wasn’t going to be the most popular man in the room. He needed to get outside before he passed out in the heat. It was all beginning to feel like a bad dream.

  He had felt overwhelming uneasiness all afternoon, looking out at the freezing mist forming over the South Downs. Nothing was worse for his asthma than the cold, and talk on the radio of Fulham’s pitch being frozen and unplayable had given him fleeting hope of the match being cancelled. Hope that on his arrival at the ground had proved false. By the time he was in the changing room, a pre-match atmosphere was building and he had resigned himself. He had phoned Kitty just to make sure she was coming, and her flatmate said she’d already left. He had taken several puffs from his inhaler in a cubicle in the toilets, then hung his bag near the entrance.

  The temperature had been plummeting all afternoon, so that by the time the teams ran out, the grass was crunching under his feet, his warm breath hanging over him like a black cloud. He had known half an hour in that it was getting worse. The creeping scratchy awareness of his body telling him to stop, his inability to catch his breath, the prickling feeling of his neck muscles tightening like a noose.

  Giving up hadn’t been an option. Two reserves stood on the sidelines, watching and waiting, biding their time, their warmed-up limbs aching to run, tackle, shine and be chosen; to prop up the bar at the busiest pub in town, pretty girls vying for their attention. ‘It’s a shame,’ his team-mates would say. ‘Alistair’s good but he hasn’t been on top of his game for a while.’ ‘It’s his asthma,’ another would pipe up. ‘He can play all right, but what use is that if you can’t breathe?’

  And what would be waiting for him if he lost his place on the team? A pile of bad debts, a house he couldn’t afford to keep up the mortgage payments on, a car that would be taken away by the bailiffs along with anything else of value. He would be declared bankrupt, probably go to prison, and no doubt lose the love of his life.

  No. He had no choice but to keep playing, to fight and to score, which he had. Two minutes before the end, after pushing himself to the point of throwing up from the exertion of it. And from that moment, as his team-mates rushed at him and his coach yelled his approval, he had sucked the needles of air through his nose into his contracting lungs and begun counting down the seconds until he could get to the tiny pressurised canister at the bottom of his bag. The bag he had left by the hooks by the entrance. The bag that was now gone.

  ‘Damn it,’ he exclaimed to the fast-emptying room, coughing relentlessly in the hot air as he checked each hook and cubicle. His wallet was also in the bag; he had no cash, no way of getting out of there. Kitty needed to turn up soon.

  Someone turned out a light, then another. If he didn’t ask for help soon, he would be in trouble, but he knew that if he did, Kitty would turn up and he would wish he hadn’t exposed his weakness. Trying and failing to keep calm, he began to make his way out to the car park, taking shallow breaths and attempting to think straight. The last of the players were leaving, climbing into their cars, their tyres rattling the gravel beneath his feet.

  ‘Good game, Alistair,’ said one of them. ‘Hopefully your bad run is over.’

  Alistair half smiled at the insult disguised as a compliment. He watched the car heading out to the main road, its headlights joining the stream of traffic in the distance. Kitty had just been held up, he decided. She was on her way; there had been no message to say otherwise. He would head out to the gates and wait for her. He could always flag down another car if he got really bad; a stranger was a better prospect than a Fulham player for keeping this whole episode a secret.

  ‘Stay calm, stay calm,’ he mumbled to himself as he pushed back the panic overwhelming him.

  As he trekked past the floodlit pitch towards the road, the lights began to go out one by one. With each step, he was plunged further into darkness. Memories of his first attack came flooding back. He could see his fourteen-year-old self on the pitch, pushing himself to his limit at try-outs for the Brighton youth team. Halfway in, he had started to realise that he couldn’t catch his breath. As his legs grew as weak as his breathing, he’d collapsed in the grass, the other boys standing over him until he’d eventually lost consciousness.

  Dr Jacobson had told his father it was unlikely he would be able to play professional football. He would never forget the look on his father’s face, the colour visibly draining from his cheeks at history repeating itself. It was the first moment he knew how much it mattered to him to make it, that if it came to it, he would rather die pursuing his dream than live a half life, a life of drudgery, like his father had resigned himself to.

  As he staggered on through the bitter cold, feeling as if he were trying to breathe underwater, the headlights on the road beyond the gates started to become interconnected. There weren’t many cars, but when one did come, the light seemed to linger after it, so that when the next vehicle arrived, it was as if it were taking the baton of light from the last one.

  ‘Please help me,’ Alistair wheezed under his breath as he trudged on. With every second that passed, he prayed that he would hear the crunch of a car pulling up, feel Kitty’s arms around him, helping him into the car, rushing him to the hospital. Comforting him, saving him, as she had from the moment they met.

  She was the only one he had ever told about Ivy. Thirteen years had passed since she had got pregnant, and in all that time, he hadn’t told another soul, apart from Father Benjamin. It was 1956 and he was on the cusp of signing with Brighton FC. He had loved Ivy, but he was young and on the crest of the biggest wave of his life. His father had warned him repeatedly that beautiful smiling girls turned into miserable nagging wives who made you give up your dreams. So when he had confessed his sins at church and Father Benjamin had offered him a solution, he had taken it.

  But Ivy wouldn’t let him go. They had shared some great times and he had been fond of her, but he hadn’t promised her anything. She wrote to him for months after she’d had the baby, letters full of such fabrication he stopped opening them. It made him angry that she was putting such pressure on him; she had clearly lost her mind and he’d had a lucky escape. She wasn’t the kind of girl he wanted to marry, and he soon realised he’d been right to feel that way. She had no class, no composure or restraint. The pregnancy had been a mistake; why couldn’t she just accept it and move on, like all the other girls at St Margaret’s? The letters became so disturbed that he began to fear what would happen if she ever got out, and he decided to speak to Father Benjamin about
his concerns. He couldn’t have a young girl bad-mouthing him to his manager and the press. He and Father Benjamin had agreed: for a generous contribution, St Margaret’s would find a way to hang on to Ivy for a while.

  Alistair could see the road now, only feet away. A series of hacking coughs tore at his throat; he couldn’t stop, couldn’t gather his breath. Breathe hard. Breathe. He sank down onto a bench by the entrance, pushed his head between his knees and managed to gasp a few shallow breaths. He needed to get out of this freezing-cold fog; it felt like fire in his lungs.

  Disorientation began to take hold. As he tried to stand, his legs buckled under him and he collapsed, hitting his head on the bench and knocking out any air he had left in his body. He lay on his back on the ground, helpless, like a beetle unable to flip over, clawing at the gallons of air surrounding him, unable to take in a single breath.

  ‘Get up, Al! We’ll be late!’

  He slowly opened his eyes and looked up. Standing over him was Ivy, her red curls tied up with dead flowers, a huge beam across her pale face, which was covered in streaks of grime.

  ‘Ivy?’ He strained to speak.

  ‘The service starts in a minute; everyone is waiting. What are you doing on the ground, silly? You’ll get your suit mucky!’ As she leant forward to take his hand, he saw her stomach straining her white silk dress at the seams so that in places it had torn. Her fingernails were full of dirt, and she had no shoes on her blackened feet.

  ‘I can’t move,’ he whispered.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Ivy, her eyes filling with tears, ‘Father Benjamin is waiting to marry us. We need to go!’

  Another girl appeared from behind them. She was wearing a light blue bridesmaid’s dress covered in mud and grease and holding a tiny crying baby dressed only in a soiled nappy.

  ‘What’s wrong, Ivy?’ she said.

  ‘Alistair said he won’t come with me,’ said Ivy, wiping her tears away with the back of her grubby hand.

  The baby started to cry more loudly and determinedly.

  ‘Get up!’ the girl shouted. ‘You’ll break Ivy’s heart.’

  Alistair looked over towards the phone box further down the road. If he kept pushing on, he might be able to make it.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked the girl.

  His head snapped back: she was standing over him now, angry and intent. He had no more strength to move, no more air to breathe, no way out. Tears began to pour from his eyes.

  ‘Shame on you.’ She was straddling him now, covering his nose and mouth with her hands. He struggled at first, clawing at her arms, trying to push her off, but he was no match for her.

  ‘You never cared about Ivy. You don’t care about anybody but yourself,’ said the girl, slapping him hard around the face.

  No air, no strength, no fight. He looked at Ivy cuddling the baby she had taken from her friend, singing a song and making it laugh. ‘Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear, one step, two step, tickle you under there.’

  Get her off me. Help me. HELP ME. Alistair struggled, trying to kick his legs, but they lay motionless, as if trapped under a fallen tree. The girl stayed focused, pressing harder and harder on his nose and mouth until a searing pain began to radiate through his chest, up his neck and into his brain, where it exploded over and over like a firecracker. Darkness slowly started to creep in as a tunnel formed around his vision, narrower and narrower. Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear . . .

  The baby’s laughter grew muffled, and Alistair’s efforts to breathe became futile, as if he were underwater. He felt as though he was weightless, sinking further and further down, and tipped his head back to suck in the last few pitiful bubbles of air before he disappeared for ever.

  It was then that Kitty’s face swam into his vision.

  His eyes fixed on her face as he floated down, further and further, until a bright light suddenly pierced the blackness and filled the tunnel.

  Her voice, crying his name.

  ‘Alistair. ALISTAIR!’

  Kitty, is that you?

  He tried to open his eyes, but he had sunk too deep, it was too late. He was tired, so very, very tired.

  Just let me sleep now. Please, let me sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Monday 6 February 2017

  After a two-hour train journey back to Sussex, Sam collected her car and drove to Jane Connors’ house, as she had done less than forty-eight hours earlier, when the world had felt like a very different place.

  She pulled her notebook out and the page fell open at the list of names: Father Benjamin, George Cannon, Mother Carlin, Alistair Henderson.

  She felt her stomach knot as she took a deep breath and drew Ivy’s letters from her bag, clutching them as if they were the key to a secret world she was both terrified and desperate to enter. Then she stepped out of the car and walked up to the gate of the house next door, the house where the old lady had stared at her so intently it had made her uncomfortable. The wooden plaque on the gate said Rose Cottage, but the pergolas over her head were bare. She walked slowly, wary of the icy paving stones, her legs unsteady from lack of sleep.

  As she reached out and pressed the bell, her whole body was trembling. She waited, tying her coat tighter round her waist. And waited. Her nerve began to slowly ebb away and she suddenly felt ill equipped to deal with whoever was on the other side of the door. She rang the doorbell again, then stepped back, looking up at the house, and down again just as the curtain in the front room twitched.

  She turned to a fresh page in her notebook.

  To the lady who left the picture of Ivy on Father Benjamin’s coffin.

  We have never met, but I feel I know you. I have in my possession some letters that I believe were written by the same Ivy as is in that picture, but I am desperate to meet you to find out.

  I’m sure you believe, as I do, that pain and injustice on the scale that Ivy lived through should not be ignored and forgotten.

  I would love to talk to you. I am a reporter and think the world needs to know about St Margaret’s, but I respect your need for privacy. As your neighbour Mrs Connors will testify, I will take this at your pace and share nothing that you feel uncomfortable with.

  Ivy would be very proud that you have reached out; she would have wanted others to know what happened, and I believe that you do too.

  Please call me today, for Ivy’s sake. As I think you may already know, we don’t have much time before her story will be buried for ever when St Margaret’s is pulled down tomorrow.

  Samantha Harper

  She scribbled her number at the bottom, then folded the page and posted it through the letter box. She walked back down the path knowing she was being watched, aware that as she climbed back into her car, the elderly lady was reaching down to her doormat and picking up the note.

  She started the engine and stared at her phone, willing it to ring. In the eerie quiet, the events of the past two days thundered round her head. Despite time galloping past at an alarming rate, she felt unsure about her next move. The conversation with Kitty Cannon felt like a dream. If Elvira had existed, Ivy would know.

  She looked back down at the letters, longing to pull Ivy from their pages. Was the grey-haired lady in the cottages Ivy herself? Her head spun with tiredness, with thoughts of Emma and Nana. And Ben – she missed him so much. She would do better; they’d been through a rough patch, but they had to try harder for Emma’s sake.

  She knew she was running away from it all, but she didn’t know how to stop herself. If she could just speak to the old lady, unravel this mess, she might find some peace in her own life.

  She was startled by the sound of her phone ringing. She looked at the display.

  ‘Hi, Fred.’ She couldn’t keep the disappointment from her voice.

  ‘Listen, Murray’s on the warpath, wanting to know where you are.’

  ‘I told you to tell him I was sick,’ Sam said, panicked.

  ‘No, you said you�
��d call in sick later.’

  ‘Shit. Can you tell him I’ve got a migraine and won’t be in, I don’t have the strength to talk to him.’ She looked in the mirror and began running her fingers through her hair in an effort to tidy it.

  ‘You sound terrible. Are you okay?’ said Fred quietly.

  ‘Not really,’ said Sam, rubbing the mascara away from under her eyes.

  ‘Well, I’ve done some digging like you asked and according to the Sussex Times’ report on the inquest, Helena Cannon was on a prolonged stay on the renal ward at Brighton Hospital due to acute kidney failure. At some point in the early hours of 3 July 1968, the needle of her fistula became dislodged and she bled to death.’

  ‘How did that happen? Who was on duty that night?’

  Sam heard Fred tapping his keyboard. ‘A nurse by the name of Carol Allen. She gave evidence at the inquest saying that Helena Cannon was having her dialysis through the night at the time. Apparently she was on the machine for long periods, as she was in the late stages of kidney failure. Nurse Allen stated that the last time she checked on Helena, she was sleeping peacefully and all was well.’

  ‘What about Dr Jacobson?’

  ‘He died in 1976; drowned in the pool at his house. It wouldn’t be hard to track him down – he was a GP in Preston for years – but I can’t really do any more on this, Sam. I’m one cutting away from my P45.’

  Sam sighed. ‘Please, Fred, is there no way you could maybe pop into Dr Jacobson’s house this afternoon and speak to his wife? I really need to get home to Emma.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, I’m not promising anything, though,’ said Fred.

  ‘Thank you, thank you. I’ll make it up to you.’

  Sam threw her phone on the seat, where Ivy’s letters lay in a heap, then looked up again at the house. She flipped back to the page of names and added two more: Helena Cannon and Dr Jacobson. Six people dying unexpected deaths, and apart from George Cannon, all mentioned in Ivy’s letters.