The House of Women

by Alison Taylor

  ‘I think your mother was too busy punishing herself,’ suggested McKenna.

  ‘Probably,’ Phoebe agreed. ‘And you’ll go on doing it even more now, won’t you, Mama?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’ll do.’ Edith fumbled with her lighter.

  ‘World in freefall again,’ Phoebe sighed.

  ‘Well,’ Edith said, her cigarette glowing, ‘I won’t go back on the pills, so you can stop worrying.’

  Phoebe clasped her mother’s free hand, stroking the fine skin on the back of it with her thumb. ‘I know you won’t, Mama.’

  Smiling, Edith squeezed Phoebe’s fingers, holding tight. ‘But there’s such a very thin line between things being tolerable, and even good, and things being absolutely and unimaginably bloody terrible, you see. All it needs is one small step, one little omission or neglect, one tiny, tiny shift.’ She looked across at McKenna. ‘And I seem to be going willy-nilly backwards and forwards over that line all the time.’

  ‘The winds of circumstance,’ Phoebe said. ‘Uncle Ned talked about them a lot. A breeze one day and not a leaf moving the next.’

  ‘And a vicious storm blowing up from nowhere the day after.’ This from Edith.

  ‘It makes life exciting,’ Phoebe added, ‘and the storms don’t really come out of the blue. You can always see the clouds on the horizon.’

  ‘Only if you care to look,’ Annie said. She turned to McKenna. ‘Solange says she’s failed Mina, too. She told us what Mina did to Uncle Ned, not that we didn’t already know in our hearts.’

  ‘Mina did exactly what Jason told her to do,’ stated McKenna. ‘No less, and no more, and perhaps in her mind, only to prevent something worse.’

  ‘I didn’t know criminal stupidity was a defence,’ Phoebe commented. ‘It wasn’t when Derek Bentley was topped, was it?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Annie exploded. ‘Are you a couple of valves short of an engine, or is there just a swinging brick where your heart should be?’

  ‘Too much emotion interferes with creative thinking,’ Phoebe said mildly.

  ‘And not enough kills it stone dead,’ Edith countered. ‘Ask your Uncle Iolo if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘If that’s the case, he wouldn’t know, would he?’ Phoebe prattled on. ‘Will Minnie go to prison? That’s what’s screwing up Mama at the moment, and not so much because Minnie wouldn’t survive there, but because Mama couldn’t survive it for her.’

  ‘Don’t presume too much.’ Tears glinted in Edith’s eyes. ‘You’re not the only one to know Ned’s death for the tragedy it is.’ She looked across at McKenna again, and he wondered where she found her strength. ‘Have you found the rest of his papers yet?’

  ‘Jason had them hidden at the Merlin yard.’ He pulled the long envelope from his briefcase. ‘And I found Ned’s will.’

  ‘So I was right! I thought he’d made one.’ Fingers shaking, Edith reached into the envelope, her daughters clustered at her side and reading with her, and as the last page was turned, Phoebe choked, blundered from the room and crashed upstairs. Alarmed, the cat streaked after her.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Edith said, left hand flattening the folded papers. ‘Oh, dear.’

  ‘She’ll wake Bethan.’ Annie sighed, making for the door to quell the thuds and bumps coming from above.

  Again, Edith read the last few paragraphs, scrabbling blindly for her cigarette, then put the document in its envelope. Behind the veil of smoke, she asked: ‘What does he mean about Iolo? Why can’t he forgive him?’

  From somewhere at the top of the stairs, McKenna heard Annie’s voice, urging quietness on the cadences of Phoebe’s distress.

  ‘The recovered mediaeval manuscripts on which Professor Williams built his career are no such thing,’ McKenna told her. ‘He faked them when he was a student.’

  ‘I see.’ She nodded, as if to herself. ‘Why aren’t I surprised?’

  ‘He claims Ned was involved in the chicanery, and that both of them wrote the poetry under the influence of Ned’s sleeping tablets, but I don’t believe him.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ decided Edith. ‘Isn’t it amazing how one little thing makes everything else fall into place? All this secrecy! And for so long!’ Dousing the cigarette, she added: ‘And for what? I know I said otherwise when you asked, but I always felt there was an atmosphere between Ned and Iolo, even though I couldn’t think of a logical reason for it. If my common sense hadn’t been so befuddled by drugs, I might have challenged them outright, and perhaps none of this would have happened.’

  Rising, he put the will away, leaving her with the copy. ‘I’ll let you have the original for probate as soon as possible.’

  She smiled wryly. ‘Are you sure you’ll know which is which?’ She too stood up, holding the edge of the table for support, and, like him, listened to the voices from upstairs. ‘Phoebe hasn’t even begun to feel the loss of Ned yet, you know. She’s still in that wonderful limbo which opens up after a terrible shock, then closes around you, so you just function, but scarcely feel. I only pray she’ll be able to grow through the sorrow instead of letting it wither her humanity.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m in limbo, too.’ Her voice was tinged with irony. ‘And perhaps if I pray very, very hard, God will let us both stay there, but I doubt it. Sooner or later, the feelings batter their way through, and when that happens, Phoebe will think she’s been hit by a ten ton truck.’ Still leaning on the table, she added: ‘And then I’ll have another damaged child, won’t I?’

  ‘Life marks all of us in one way or another. Phoebe has the means to make something good from the bad.’

  ‘Like Ned.’

  ‘Like Ned.’ He nodded. ‘You don’t have a copy of his Eisteddfod essay, do you?’

  ‘Phoebe has one.’ She made for the stairs, McKenna behind her, and called softly to her daughters, who sat in a huddle beneath the landing window, its colours now leeched by the moon. ‘Mr McKenna wants to borrow Uncle Ned’s essay, dear. Will you get it for him?’

  ‘Why?’ Phoebe whispered, rubbing her eyes.

  ‘To read again,’ McKenna said. ‘I’ll make a copy and let you have it back tomorrow.’

  As Phoebe scrambled to her feet and padded away around the dog-leg, Annie dragged herself upright by the banister rail, came downstairs, and stood on the bottom step hugging the ornately decorated newel post, her face almost as aged as her mother’s, her eyes almost as dark. ‘You haven’t told us what’s happening with Mina. Have you arrested her?’

  ‘I questioned her, but I didn’t tell her she was responsible for Ned’s death.’ He paused. ‘We can’t proceed further without a proper psychiatric evaluation, and not just because of the wrist-slashing.’

  ‘But she can’t come home, can she?’ Annie persisted.

  ‘She’ll stay in hospital until we’re in a position to make a decision, and she’ll be transferred to the psychiatric unit when she’s medically fit.’

  Edith took a deep breath, which rattled in her chest.

  ‘Tell me what you think will happen. Please!’ She touched his arm. ‘We won’t say a word, and we won’t hold you to it.’

  He found it hard to think straight, to be guided only by professionalism. ‘Jason will be charged with Ned’s murder, and the car thefts. He’ll also be charged with assaulting Mina.’ He paused again. ‘Her evidence ties him to the murder, but of course, it implicates her, too. If she’s found unfit to plead, for whatever reason, we could have a problem.’

  ‘And if she isn’t?’ Annie demanded.

  ‘There would still be much to consider in the way of mitigating circumstances, and, given the situation, I don’t think the Crown would press too hard.’

  ‘For what?’ Edith asked, frowning. ‘Press for what?’

  ‘Imprisonment, Mama,’ Annie said.

  ‘Some cases are better resolved with probation and an order for psychiatric treatment,’ McKenna said.

  ‘All the treatment in the world won’t make
her understand the devastation she caused,’ Edith said. ‘She’s like her father!’ Then she shook herself angrily. ‘Oh, God! I’m passing the buck, just like him.’

  ‘Come on.’ Annie let go of the newel post to take her mother’s arm. ‘You’re going for a bath, and I’ll make some cocoa.’ She began to tow Edith up the stairs. ‘D’you mind if Phoebe shows you out? I expect we’ll see you again soon, in any case.’

  ‘I expect so,’ he agreed, his heart lurching on its moorings. Phoebe waited on the half-landing, papers drooping from her fingers, until Annie and Edith disappeared, then came down and handed the essay to him. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I won’t break my promise.’

  She opened the front door, and crunched beside him down the drive, their shadows falling over the gate and into the road, the night-scented stock sweet and nostalgic in the cool air. ‘Why d’you want it?’

  ‘I have a need to read it again.’

  She scuffed the toe of her sandal on the pavement. ‘You must have found the pictures of the slaves, then. The old ones with the bond numbers.’

  ‘We found everything you and George told us about, and you should take great care of those engravings. They could be valuable.’

  ‘Anything connected with Uncle Ned is priceless.’ It was a statement of certainty. ‘And George’ll be over the moon. I’ll ask Mama to let me ring him tomorrow.’

  Unlocking his car, he said quietly: ‘Try not to hate Mina too much.’

  ‘I can’t hate her, can I?’ She folded her arms, and leaned against the wall. ‘She’s my sister, well, my half-sister, and I’ve always known she’s stupid, but now I know why.’ Above her head, a breeze began to snatch at the leaves. ‘And I feel sorry for her, like I would if I’d heard about something awful happening to someone I don’t know and can’t help, but I don’t really want to go down that road, even though it might be easier than admitting at least half of me is blood kin to a psychopath.’

  ‘Which road, Phoebe?’

  ‘Pitying her. Uncle Ned said pity amounts to arrogance. He also said it lets the other person off the hook, and it lets you off the hook of having to feel kinship for them.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And I agree with him,’ she added, pushing her body away from the wall. ‘So I’ll no doubt have a few nightmares about her before I come to terms, or whatever the saying is, and I’m absolutely sure I’ll find it very hard to stop myself giving her a dose of her own medicine.’

  ‘As long as that remains a dream.’

  ‘And I really hope Jason rots in hell,’ she added, her voice hard with intent. ‘But there’s a problem with that ending, too, because Minnie’s so besotted she’d happily go to hell with him.’

  14

  McKenna’s street was overhung with an acrid pall of smoke, as Bangor Mountain burned once again, flames crackling and leaping through the trees, sparks bouncing down roof tiles all along the terrace. He put his briefcase and Ned’s relics on the parlour table, closed the windows on the shouts of fire-fighters and the sizzle of water on flame, then went to the kitchen to feed the cats, who appeared to have spent the afternoon and evening without the company of friends. A large brown moth fizzed round and round inside the parlour lampshade, and another had flattened itself against the outside of the window, eyes red, underbelly caterpillar-furred.

  He made a pot of tea, opened his last pack of duty-free cigarettes, and sat in the kitchen reading the paper. The name discs on the cats’ collars pinged against their dishes, reminding him of the tolling bell-buoy in Dun Laoghaire harbour, where only last week, waiting for the ferry home, he had watched the huge catamaran come in to dock, its wash setting the old South Rock lightship heaving against its mooring. The lightship occupied a well-thumbed place in the internal library of his childhood memories, and he still half believed the rusting hull was where the Irish marooned the pox-ridden and mad, like the smallpox boats which once bobbed on the Thames, or the Ships of Fools cast out on the oceans of history.

  Scanning newspaper storylines, he was struck by coincidence to find an article about the late Iris Bentley’s lifelong fight to clear her brother’s name, and realized his own internal narratives had been dominated all week by women, and looked set to continue that way. The letter from Denise’s solicitor demanded a response, and, noting how the stain in front of the cooker was creeping back, he knew there could be no freedom from the haunting, threatening misery of her and their marriage unless he released himself from bondage.

  He cooked two slices of Welsh rarebit, eating at the kitchen table and looking forward to a day without mail, then stacked dishes in a bowl of hot sudsy water, the sights and sounds and scents of Edith’s kitchen potent in his mind. A fresh pot of tea to hand, he slumped on the worn chesterfield in the parlour, cats by his feet, and finished reading the paper. Struggling as usual with the crossword, he found himself writing ‘FE’ and ‘EF’ in the margins, Mina Harris in mind, any compassion he might find for her blighted by the thoughtless destruction she had brought about. He scribbled over the rough letters, the clue resolved, sure that in the last cataclysmic moments of life, Ned betrayed her, scoring his nails across blistering skin to write the first letters of the Welsh words for ‘Eddie’s daughter’.

  Filling another space in the half-completed grid, he wrote ‘cataclysm’, thinking that Mina, like Ned, had already experienced her own, while for Edith and Annie and Phoebe, and perhaps even for Solange, the nightmares were yet to come. Edith’s would be the most devastating, he decided, when she learned that her carelessness had provided Mina with the God-given opportunity to poison Ned. When Phoebe’s pain grew less excoriating, she would write about her sister, transforming chaos into something lucid and explicable, but until then, he would willingly foster her nightmare, but not to access her wonderful dreams. Iolo Williams would find no peace or redemption because he stole another man’s dreams, counterfeiting the whole currency of their world, and writing ‘degenerate’ on the empty line in the middle of the grid, McKenna wondered if the professor’s whole persona were a fabrication from which he was unable to extricate himself. Take away the unbelievably unremitting nastiness, and what was left but a brittle shell?

  Newspaper slipping off his knee, he dozed, thoughts disintegrating into sleep as a personality might scatter into confusion, without certainty of awakening, either literal or metaphorical.

  15

  For Solange, true pity for Mina came to outweigh futile pity for her husband, and she lingered at the hospital until the girl fell into a deep, untroubled sleep, then clipped along quiet corridors, down staircases to the softly lit reception area and its empty banks of strawberry pink seats, and out through the ever-revolving door. Standing amid more discarded cigarette ends, she looked across the car park for a taxi, then, sighing, returned through the swishing door to ask the night clerk for change for the payphone.

  Call made, she went back outside, and feet amid the litter, smoked another pungent cigarette, shivering occasionally from fatigue, and the dreadful nagging disquiet which grew as relentlessly as the earth turned under the glare of the moon. She started as a figure spilled through the revolving door; another woman, older than herself, and graceless in anxiety.

  Panting slightly, the woman nodded, and Solange wondered why the women of this country so despised their bodies, and hid them inside ugly garments as if they were the source of deepest shame.

  ‘Are you waiting to be picked up?’ the woman asked.

  ‘I wait for a taxi,’ Solange said.

  ‘My husband’s coming for me,’ the other woman replied. ‘He should be here soon.’

  ‘You are visiting at the hospital?’ Solange asked, blowing a plume of smoke into the night.

  ‘My daughter.’ The woman coughed, scrabbling in her handbag for tissues.

  ‘What is wrong with her?’

  ‘She was expecting a baby,’ the woman said, staunching tears, ‘but she lost it. She nearly died.’ She gulped. ‘Still, they say she’s over th
e worst. My husband wept when I told him.’

  ‘Ah, quel dommage!’ Solange patted her arm. ‘But there will be other babies.’

  ‘She isn’t married.’

  ‘So?’ Solange shrugged. ‘It happens all the time. It is nature.’ She dropped her cigarette and ground it to shreds as a taxi came into view, light winking on its roof.

  Only a few yards behind, indicator blinking, Edwin Evans’s car rounded the corner.

  Author’s Note

  This novel was inspired by the story of Edward Jones (1752-1824), born in Llandderfel, Meirionydd. Henblas, his family home, still stands as a working farm.

  A gifted harpist, Edward was in the service of the Prince of Wales (later George IV) from 1775, and is generally known by the title Bardd y Brenin (King’s Bard). Apart from music, his abiding passion was the collection and preservation of the relics of Welsh culture, and he became an important antiquarian scholar. His first significant publication was The Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards (1784).

  He died, unmarried, on Easter Sunday 1824, and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary-le-Bone, London.

  If you enjoyed reading The House of Women you might be interested in Shrine to Murder by Roger Silverwood, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Shrine to Murder by Roger Silverwood

  Chapter One

  14 CREESFORTH ROAD, BROMERSLEY, SOUTH YORKSHIRE, UK 0200 HOURS SUNDAY, 24 MAY 2009

  The sky was as black as fingerprint ink.

  A man in white placed a ladder under the window of a bedroom on the first floor of the detached house. He looked round then climbed rapidly up it. A few moments later he opened the window to its fullest extent and climbed inside.