by Diana Powell
Esther Bligh
by
Diana Powell
www.hhousebooks.com
Copyright © 2017 by Diana Powell
Diana Powell asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this book. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-910688-65-6
Kindle: 978-1-910688-66-3
Cover design by Jo Dalton: Studio 59
Typeset by Polgarus Studio
Published in the USA and UK
Holland House Books
Holland House
47 Greenham Road
Newbury, Berkshire RG14 7HY
United Kingdom
www.hhousebooks.com
For my four Davids – always
Table of Contents
Title Page
Start
Acknowledgements
About The Author
It is dark again. I prefer the darkness now. Perhaps I always have.
‘Night-bird’, he called her, ‘Esther, my little nightingale.’
Outside is wiped away.
Outside, with its treacherous sunlight, its mocking colour, the insinuating rumour of the sea; outside, where the crones gather in the square, whispering behind their claws, and the gargoyle children grimace and gibber.
What do they know? What can they know? Nothing. They have no proof. There is no proof. Is there?
I can draw the curtains, shutting it – them – out. Now I am safe inside and inside is all that matters. I can build up the fire, eat my meal, then retreat to bed.
Not that bed; she doesn’t sleep in that bed, that room, any more.
Soon I will be lying there, and will pull the blankets higher, and the pillow lower
Not that pillow, she burned that one; she remembers the feathers melting inwards, crying weakly, as if she were killing the birds themselves.
until I am comfortable and snug. I will be safe. I am safe in here. (Am I safe? Truly safe?)
Tomorrow, I do not have to go out, or the next day, or the next. Enough food for a week has been delivered to my door, so I can stay in bed as long as I like, away from the windows, away from the light, away from them all.
And in the morning, when another letter comes, I will put it on the fire straight away, burn it,
just as she did to that pillow, and the sheets, the blankets, and her gloves, and…
as I should have done with the first one. I should never have read it. I should never have allowed the words to reach me, to follow me inside. Let them stay in the darkness out there.
From the moment the driver left her, the village has been cowled in gloom, cloud seeping down the mountains to meet mist rising off the sea; rain, rain and more rain. Now it is dark again, so she pulls the curtains. Once upon a time, Grace craved the dark, seeking it out in the furthest crannies of her old home, delving deep under the bedclothes, leaving lights and fires unlit; she wore black and buried herself in the dark house.
When she came out, a red hat, topped with a peacock’s multi-coloured feathers sat proudly on her head, while its shimmering eye cast a disdainful look on the dark plumage beneath – her plain grey dress. For grey was wrong – too dull. Still, it was all she had, until she found yellow and scarlet and emerald green, pushed to the back of the ancient armoire in the bedroom not opened in twenty years. A purple dress, shawls, scarves in rainbow hues. Clothes from her trousseau, bought long ago, but fitting her still. She smiled at that.
People noticed her then as she strutted down streets she had forgotten, to shops she did not recognise. ‘Where has she come from?’ perhaps they said. But she had always been there. Just locked away.
‘I am Grace. I was grieving for my husband, John, lost in the mud and the gas,’ she might say, if they asked. But they kept their words for behind cupped hands, offering mocking shrugs and scornful laughs instead.
But she didn’t care. She was happy. John had come back. Not to have and to hold, as he once said, but to talk to her, and listen, putting different words in her head, besides her own; a companion, a friend. There were others voices, too, some she had known, some she had not, but knew them now – old, young; from different ages or distant lands. A few were strange and fearful, at first, gruff and growling. Others, always pleasing to her ear, like the most familiar, who trilled like a nightingale. So, now, she was no longer alone. There was no need for wailing, rending of garments, and despair of the soul any more; no need for the dark, and the black, and burying herself away. She was alive again, just as they were.
A murmur of air. A sigh – her sigh. Or—
– Light the fire; turn on the lights, make some tea.
– But nothing I do warms the place, or brightens it. Look at me, wearing my coat indoors, look at these cheerless rooms.
As soon as she stepped through the door, fingers of ice reached around her, and held her tight. But it was the same outside: the cold and rain; the buildings of grey stone topped with black slate, blurring back into the mountains; the people, with their dark countenances, and strange language.
– What kind of place have I come to? You told me it was beautiful. ‘A picture postcard’, you said.
– But you said it, too. That was how you remembered it.
Two days she and John had spent here. Their honeymoon, where she had first worn the rainbow clothes and been happy.
– It will be different when the spring comes, and the summer. That’s what they tell you, anyway.
– The difference between summer and winter, a half circle of the earth around the sun. Is that all it is? Perhaps I should have waited; perhaps this was a foolish time to move. And the house – you said… and the people, you told me they were friendly. And…
– Shhh, now! Ssshh!
‘Whore.
…bitch
Slut.’
The words follow me inside the bed now, creeping through the floor-boards, climbing through the gap between the clasped shutters, worming their way beneath the quilt, the sheet, the pillow pulled low, to where I lie curled tightly like the centre of a moon snail.
‘Look, see,’ he told her, scooping something from the sand. A shell. Nothing more. She had thought it must be treasure, a ruby, at least. ‘A moon snail, or necklace shell. See the perfect spiral. So beautiful… like you.’
Sometimes, they burrow deeper, and reach inside me – dreams where disembodied faces pass in front of me, their twisted mouths spitting their bile. ‘SSSssslut!’ quick and slippery; or, through smacking lips, BB/ChCh ‘Bitttchh…chch’. Or night-terrors when words unhook themselves from the page one by one, the letters drifting loose, H A G S P A W N, separating into black tendrils that sssstretch longer and longer, and swarm around me, snaking around my throat, tighter and tighter, until I can no longer breathe.
Dreams, or not dreams. It is the same when I am awake. There is no escape.
I knew the words long ago. From… before. And later, from the streets of London, the soldiers calling at me, where I stood in Piccadilly; laughing – those who did not want me.
And then he came, older, uglier than most, with his wrung-out face, and threads of salt-and-pepper hair. Still, he took my hand, and led me away.
‘Same as the others,’ I thought. ‘He’ll take me to a cheap room, or a filthy alleyway.’
But no. He took me to the nearest Lyons, where I could be warm.
He bought me food and drink, because I looked so thin. He talked. About the war. About his home.
‘Look,’ he said, pulling a postcard from his notebook.
A quiet sea lapping towards the tall, elegant houses, with gentle mountains rising behind. ‘In Wales,’ he said. ‘The most wonderful place.’
‘And this – where I live.’ A house not joined to others, windows on either side of the door; trees, a lawn – things I hardly knew. ‘Cross the road, and there is the sand, the sea. Heaven. Bliss!’
‘Why’s he gabbing?’ I wondered. Most of the bastards said nothing, except to make it clear who I was and what they wanted of me. That I was not the same as the strawberries-and-cream girlfriends they had left behind, or their saintly mothers, their rose-tinted sisters. ‘Get on with it,’ I thought. There was no need for conversation like this. Still, I talked back, in my sweetest voice, as it seemed to please him.
‘…like the song of the nightingale,’ he told her. ‘That is what I will call you. My night-bird.’
And then, stranger still, could I meet him tomorrow? For lunch, perhaps, as if I were the kind of woman who dined at the Criterion at midday, between her morning and afternoon tea. And I said ‘yes’. Why not? A free meal, in a warm place. And there was money there, I knew, with the house so grand, the way he talked. A gentleman. Perhaps something might come of it.
‘Whore.’ Sometimes the word would snigger after me, as I walked arm in arm with him down Oxford Street. A soldier I had serviced? A jealous ‘friend’? There were plenty of those.
‘Take no notice,’ he would say. ‘They don’t know you,’ he would say, as I raised my eyes to his, and clutched him tighter.
‘I know you, Esther, I know your true self. You are better than you think you are.’ She laughed. ‘Let me tell you what I did,’ she said, and whispered in his ear.
‘It will be different when we are married,’ he said. ‘It will be different when you are Mrs. Edmund Bligh, when we are in Wales – the people are so friendly there. You will be welcomed and respected. You will love it!’
This is what had come of it.
A rushed ceremony in a back-street office. They were used to it then, with the soldiers and their floozies, wanting their weddings before France, the trenches, death. Witnesses pulled off the streets. It was easy. But there was to be no death, he was sure. ‘The war is all but over. This is no more than information-gathering. I’ll be back before you know it, and then I’ll take you home.’ Home. The word always wrapped in smarming breath. So special, so meaningful, as if that were how all homes were. As if he had no knowledge of rats grinning at you from corners, black mildew serving as patterned wallpaper, the stench of week-old stew mingled with stale piss.
‘Still, I’ll make provision, just in case.’ Another office, a solicitor’s, this time; another two witnesses. And then a night in a hotel room. I made sure of that. I needed to make sure of that.
Then he was gone, to return even sooner than expected, coming back even less of a man than before, twisted and torn here, there and everywhere, in body, mind and spirit.
‘Home,’ he mouthed, that same word again, as if it would make everything right, when all was wrong already.
There had been no need. The bleeding had come the day after he had left for France. The bleeding I had looked to buy with the money he’d given me for ‘a new coat to keep you warm/New shoes, because those are worn/New lodgings, while I am gone, where there is no damp, no mice.’ But the money hadn’t bought what I wanted from it. The expensive ways turned out to be no better than the ones I had always used, and had been trying for weeks. I knew them all, and they all failed me. And so I had said ‘yes’ to the marriage.
I had said ‘yes’ to a broken man. I’d said ‘in sickness and in health, till death us do part, as long as we both shall live.’ ‘Yes’ to a place on the other side of the country, where I would live with a fool.
I had said ‘yes’ to here.
Ssshh… Hushhh. Shusshh… Most of the voices are quiet today. This is how they can be – no more than a distant humming, the buzzing of a wasp trapped in a honey-jar. Today, it is as if a group of women has gathered in the attic above her, to put their heads together, their hands in front of their mouths, and whisper. Not unlike the women she has seen gathered in the Square, not unlike the women in the old place, until they could no longer stop their words escaping and flying towards her.
‘Mad,’ they said.
‘Poor soul!’ – those kinder ones.
Soon, they had dug out the tale.
‘John Marlowe’s widow, Grace…’
‘I thought she was dead…’
‘Crazy old bat…’
Not so old, she thought: middle-aged, maybe, but still young enough to have a life now John was back, together with all her other companions; now that she knew there was an after-life, or some other dimension, where all could live happily ever after. If only she had known it sooner, if only they had come to her sooner.
But this is how they were – a kind of coming-and-going motley crew, mainly women, except for John, of course. And the old Red Indian chief who appeared now and then.
When the new war came, they grew quiet for a while, cowed by a conflict that was not supposed to happen. She was afraid, then, that they had gone for good. Perhaps they were needed elsewhere. Or what if the connection between them was lost amongst the falling bombs, the guns firing and the aircraft screeching? There had been talk amongst the crowd who gathered in the shelters of radar, and other strange devices… perhaps these things ‘interfered’?
John was quiet, too, then. She understood why. How hard it must be to see all this death, again, when he had fought to put an end to it! Surely even a spirit would be silenced by such injustice.
Still, there was one voice that stayed with her – a sweet, sympathetic voice. A woman who understood her past pain. She had also lost her husband, in the last war, she said; she, too, had shut herself away.
– A mistake. I see it now.
– I should have left there, moved away.
– A change of scenery is good.
– A change is as good as a rest.
– A new start, and all that.
I should have.
I could have.
You could…
You should…
Yes.
Why not? Other people were leaving the cities for places where they might be safe from the war. But where to? And then she remembered.
Or she thinks she remembered. What she knows is that she came across a postcard as she was clearing out the wardrobe. Strange, she hadn’t noticed it before, when it seemed so obvious, lying there, in full view. Strange, too, that there was no dust on it, when everything around it was grimed with the years of neglect. But she was used to ‘strange’ by then.
She picked up the card, and looked at it closely. Golden sand, and bright blue sea. A row of houses stood just beyond the beach, with green hills reaching to a cloudless sky. The colours were harsh, and of a different time. Still, despite this strangeness, she knew at once where it was.
Where it was was here.
– Go out. Put on the peacock hat, and the brightly coloured clothes; walk across the road, to look at the sea. Then carry on along the front, to the post-office/shop, and buy a loaf of bread; talk to the post-mistress.
She has done this a few times now – only a few, the weather has been so unkind, there has been no pleasure in it, with sea murk so thick the view stays invisible. And she has never been one for idle chatter, but likes to be polite. Besides, she is determined to be different here, to start afresh and make new friends.
– Smile at all the people you meet, if they can be seen through the gloom, and they will smile back, this time, surely, and say ‘hello’ – or ‘boar ray da’, if that is what they say. Something like that.
– Go out. The weather is better, or not so bad. The rain is no more than a constant drizzle, the wind no more than a fresh breeze, the cold no
more than a steady chill.
– I am going out.
– Is it wise… The weather? Better to stay in, perhaps.
– I cannot stay in another day. I cannot go back to how it was before. I—
– But it would be foolish to catch a cold. Easily done in this dampness, inside and out.
It is true, the corners of the house are mottled grey; strips of wallpaper sink idly to the floor, her breath mists in front of her. The windows are misted, too, inside and out, blocking the light and the view to the sea. The place smells – of damp, and mildew and rot… and something else that Grace cannot identify. Nothing has changed here in years. The dark panelling, the heavy furnishings all add to the gloom. The fires she lights sputter and sag; she cannot get them going. The range falters on vaguely most of the time, but the living room hearth is full of charred sticks, curled paper, the relics of her forlorn attempts.
‘A mistake, perhaps, in coming here?’ John, now. She has noticed this, how John will interrupt the other, as if… what?
– As if he is jealous, perhaps?
– No, it is not that, surely. As if…
‘But you said. You told me we would come back.’
They had sat on the wall, looking out at the sea. She can see the place, if she strains forward from the dining-room window. A sheltered spot, closer to the cliffs. ‘Do you have to go?’ she whispered, knowing, of course, that he did. She had known it from the moment she first met him, proud in his uniform. A chance meeting, outside the bank Daddy had once managed. Love at first sight for both of them, they agreed later. Before she knew it, they were married. There was just time for a honeymoon. Here.
‘We’ll come back,’ he said. ‘Once the war is over, for longer. Perhaps, even, one day, we could live here. Buy one of the houses on the front, raise a family.’