by Iona Grey
‘I bought it to be near to the hospital,’ Stella said. Her voice still held a flavour of her London roots, faint but unmistakable. ‘Georgina will have told you that my daughter Daisy was also a patient there, when Georgina was quite tiny? Now Jess, would you be a love and carry this teapot? Arthritis has made me a liability with things like that.’
While Jess got up, Will studied the photographs that stood on the little white table beside the chair. The newspaper and magnifying glass as well as the well-worn cushions proclaimed that it was Stella’s favourite sitting place, and the photographs were placed where she could see them easily. One was a grainy shot of a young woman smiling broadly at the camera, her slanting eyes creased with infectious happiness. In another a faded bride and groom stood side by side, the bride’s blonde hair swept up into a style that seemed so dated now that it had a distinct retro-cool.
‘Ah, my daughters – Daisy and Vivien,’ Stella said, catching the direction of his gaze as she lowered herself carefully into her chair. ‘Chalk and cheese, aren’t they? Daisy was so sweet, so loving, so happy, even though most people would say she didn’t have much to be happy about. But the simplest things – watching the birds on the bird table, or buying an ice cream from the van would make her brim over with delight. It was such a precious gift, that, and especially wonderful to me when I’d been used to Vivien’s high standards. Even as a child, if you bought Vivien a dress she’d pout because she wanted a skirt as well. She was just like her mother in that respect.’
‘Her mother?’ Will asked, thoroughly puzzled.
‘Forgive me – I’m confusing you. Vivien was Nancy’s child. Nancy Price. When Georgina said you had news of an old friend I thought it must be Nancy. We lost touch a long time ago, but it would be just like her to reappear as if nothing had happened.’
Will leaned forward, lowering his voice respectfully. ‘As a matter of fact, I do have some news of her. I’m afraid she died, a couple of years ago. She’d been living in a nursing home for some time before that, and the house on Green fields Lane was empty. No one knew who owned it.’
Reaching across to hand out cups, Stella stilled for a moment. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. We were close once, Nancy and I. As close as sisters.’
‘What happened?’
Stella’s smile was sad and soft, hinting at hurts suffered long ago but never quite forgotten. ‘That’s a rather long story.’
Beside him, Jess straightened up. She had been sitting with her bag on her knee, clutched to her chest, but she unfolded it now and took out the bundle of letters. ‘I’d love to hear it, but can I give you these first? It doesn’t seem right, me holding on to them a second longer when they belong to you. You’ve read all of them, except the top one. The one that arrived a couple of months ago and started the search.’
‘Oh . . .’ Stella took the letters and stared at them for a second, her hand flying to her mouth. Then she closed her eyes and held the tattered bundle against her heart. The lines on her forehead had deepened, and two grooves of pain were scored between her brows, giving her face an expression of intense private suffering.
Will got quietly to his feet and held out his hand to Jess. ‘Mrs Daniels, you have a beautiful garden. Perhaps we could go outside for five minutes and admire it properly?’
‘I’m so sorry, do forgive me. It was seeing his writing again, after all these years. It brought it all back, I suppose.’
Will and Jess had come in from the garden and they were all drinking tea that was just a little too strong and too cool. The letters were in a neat pile on the table beside Stella. She hadn’t read them: she would do that slowly, luxuriously, when she was alone and could immerse herself completely in the memories. Except for the newest one – that one she had read. She held it in her hands now, touching the paper that he had touched, hearing his voice in her head saying the words he’d so recently written.
Darling girl . . .
She managed a smile. She felt their curiosity, and was touched by their courteous attempts to conceal it. ‘We were so in love,’ she said, and laughed at the wistfulness in her own voice. ‘ We truly believed it would conquer everything. Except death perhaps: we thought that was the only thing that could separate us.’
‘But it didn’t turn out like that,’ Jess said, reaching across to put her teacup back in its saucer. She had slipped one foot out of her little ballerina pump and tucked it up beneath her on the sofa and her body was angled so she could lean against Will beside her. Stella remembered that imperative to touch. Almost like a magnetic force.
‘No. No, it didn’t. Not for us. It wasn’t a foreign enemy that tore us apart in the end, but something much closer to home.’ Stella traced her fingertips over Dan’s writing on the envelope, and wondered how to explain to these young people, who had grown up in a world of equal opportunities and emancipation, the situation she had found herself in. ‘Things were very different back then. Women were out there, doing men’s jobs in factories and on farms, but we were still the property of our husbands. We bore children, took sole responsibility for caring for them, and yet the law gave us few rights to them.’ She took a sip of cold tea, and grimaced. ‘And a woman like me had none at all.’
‘A woman like you?’
‘An adulteress. A disgraced wife. An unfit mother. Back then there was no such thing as a blameless divorce. To end my marriage I would have had to admit to being unfaithful, which would have instantly removed any chance I might have had of being allowed to keep Daisy.’
Jess sat upright, bristling with indignation. ‘But that’s so unfair!’
‘Especially as Charles had been unfaithful too.’ Seeing surprise flit across their faces Stella went on with a wry smile, ‘Oh yes, Charles was in love with someone else when we married, though I was too naïve to see it. In fact, his lover was actually best man at our wedding.’
Will stopped, his teacup halfway to his mouth. ‘Charles was gay?’
‘Yes, though no one would ever have suspected it, or believed me if I’d told them – he was a vicar, and a family man, and he had all the parish ladies eating out of his hand. Nor would they have believed that he’d hit me, or forced himself on me. For years afterwards I would go over and over the afternoon when Dan came back, trying to work out how I could have done it differently – should I have been braver and shouted out the truth? But by then it was already much too late. I’d been silent for too long. I hid away with my bruises when Charles hit me. I let everyone treat me like an incompetent mother. I didn’t even tell Nancy the truth about our marriage. I thought I was being good and loyal, but really I was sealing my own fate. I—’
She stopped.
For years it had felt like she was tiptoeing along a cliff edge, stumbling sometimes and losing her footing, focusing all her energy on not looking down onto the jagged rocks and churning sea below. Gradually it had become easier; the ground had become firmer and her steps more assured. Now it was as if she had just opened her eyes and found herself right on the edge of the precipice again, looking down.
‘It’s OK,’ Jess said gently. ‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’
Stella nodded. She’d never spoken about what had happened. As far as possible she’d tried to avoid thinking about it. The memories were sealed in an airtight box that she’d pushed to the back of her head. Perhaps it was best – safest – to leave it there, unopened. She looked down at the letter she held, and her heart clenched at the sight of the familiar, beloved handwriting. Pretty soon none of this will matter, and our story will be history . . .
But it did matter. It mattered so much.
She took a breath in and let it out slowly. And then she began.
As she talked, the shadows stole in from the garden, blurring the edges between the present and the past. The birds finished evensong and the world settled and stilled.
Stella told the story about how Dan had come back, just as she’d prayed and longed for, and how Charles had stol
en their hope and turned it to ashes. She told them about the choice he’d forced her to make and the agony of watching Dan leave; about Dr Walsh and the pills that had eased that pain a little, but cost her her daughter.
‘That was the summer the V1s started,’ she said softly. ‘Just after D-Day, when things seemed to be going so well for the Allied forces, a new terror began at home. We’d been bombed before, of course, in the Blitz of ’40 and ’41, and it was awful, but you almost got used to the nightly ritual of the sirens and going to the shelter. This was different. They came out of nowhere – just a dot in a clear blue sky – and you didn’t know where they were going to land. I’d taken Daisy to the shops in her pram one day. It was hot. The pills had made everything . . . blurry and I couldn’t think. I heard that noise – the buzzing. I thought it was inside my head, that I was going mad, and I had to get out of the shop and try to get away from it. I . . . I left her. And then the explosion came.’
‘But she was all right? The bomb didn’t hit her?’
Will’s gentle prompting brought her back, and she opened her eyes. She hadn’t even realized they were closed.
‘I know. I know that now, but not then. I tried to get back to her, you see, but it was impossible. Everywhere was in chaos. A house had been hit, and a bus full of people, and I couldn’t get through. If I’d have been thinking clearly I would have realized that the shops where I’d left her were in a different direction, but I couldn’t think at all. It was dark by the time they found me, down by the canal. I don’t remember how I got there or what happened, but I was soaking wet and covered in mud. I remember being so cold, and Dr Walsh giving me an injection. I could feel it going into my blood, warming it up.’ She listened to her own voice, and was vaguely surprised by how matter-of-fact it sounded. ‘I was taken to a hospital. An asylum. I was locked up, just as if I was a prisoner, and I was glad because it was what I deserved for killing my daughter.’
‘But did no one tell you that she was safe?’ Jess said, horrified.
‘No one mentioned her at all. And I didn’t ask, because I was afraid of having to listen to someone tell me what I’d done. They kept me heavily sedated so for weeks I was barely awake. I wanted to die, and I think I probably would have if it hadn’t been for Nancy.’
It was almost dark now. Stella leaned across and turned on the lamp beside her. Its glow fell on Jess’s face and showed up the anguish written on it.
‘What did Nancy do?’ she asked.
‘She came to see me one day. She was in trouble; the oldest kind of trouble a girl can find herself in,’ Stella said ruefully. ‘She had no one else to turn to and she needed my help. She knew about the house, you see; the one at Greenfields Lane that Dan had bought for me. She wanted to go there. At first I didn’t want to let her – the house was my last connection with Dan, and the time we’d spent there together was so precious – but I think I felt that if I helped her with her child it would be the first tiny step in atoning for what I’d done to my own.’
Understanding lit up Jess’s face. ‘So that’s how Nancy came to live there.’
‘It was only supposed to be for a little while in the beginning, until she’d had the baby. In fact, the original idea was that we’d live there together, but of course, that never happened.’ Stella laughed softly. ‘I’d just about been strong enough to get out of hospital, but I couldn’t begin to work out how to get out of my marriage. So I went back to that miserable Vicarage.’
‘And Daisy was . . . gone?’
‘Yes. Her room was empty, her things packed into a tea chest in the attic, her cot all folded up. There was so much I longed to know – had they found a body, had there been a funeral? – but Charles wouldn’t discuss it. I thought it was because he was too upset and I didn’t press it because it was all my fault. I got through the days by focusing on the arrival of Nancy’s child, and . . . Well, I suppose what started out as a penance gradually became a lifeline . . .’
Ruby the cat appeared, stretching up and plucking her claws into the arm of the chair with the delicacy of a harpist before jumping up onto Stella’s knee. She put Dan’s letter on the table with the others and began to stroke her, as she told Jess and Will how Nancy had given birth to her daughter in the front bedroom at Greenfields Lane, and about her indifference to the baby, her revulsion with the physical realities of motherhood.
‘The whole process disgusted her from the start. I had to go to the welfare clinic to get milk and bottles because she wouldn’t entertain the idea of feeding her herself. About a week after Vivien was born it was VE day and Nancy bitterly resented missing out on all the fun. She wouldn’t pick the baby up and couldn’t stand to hear her cry, and of course she had nothing for her – no clothes, or nappies or anything. It made sense for me to get out Daisy’s things. And then, as it became apparent that Nancy was set on giving the baby up, it made sense for me to take her, too. London was overflowing with abandoned children in those days – refugees, orphans of the Blitz, GIs’ accidental babies – and the welfare bodies could barely cope.’
‘Didn’t Charles object to the idea of taking care of her permanently?’ Jess asked.
‘No, actually. It was the perfect solution for him too.’ Beneath Stella’s rhythmic stroking the cat had started up her rattling purr. ‘Appearances were everything to Charles. They gave him something to hide behind.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘He wanted a family, but he certainly didn’t want to do what was necessary to create one. Nancy’s baby gave him a chance to appear charitable – giving a home to an innocent victim of war – and like a conventional family man. And so that was that; the deal was made. I gave Nancy my house and she gave me her child. Nothing signed, nothing official, but there it was . . .’ She paused. Those had been the years when she had been closest to the cliff edge. When sometimes the idea of just giving in and tumbling over had been horribly seductive. ‘I had a daughter. She wasn’t my daughter, but . . . we did our best.’
‘And all that time, Daisy was in Leyton Manor,’ Will said. He was leaning back, so that his face was in shadow and impossible to read, but his voice was low and slightly hoarse. ‘Charles betrayed you in so many ways, didn’t he? He wouldn’t let you leave with Daisy, and yet he . . . got rid of her like that. And he let you go on thinking that she was dead, and that it was your fault.’
Stella nodded, silenced for a second as emotion thickened in her throat. ‘He thought he knew what he wanted, and then he got it and found he didn’t want it after all. Dr Walsh had suspected there was something wrong with Daisy for a little while, but Charles had always refused to accept it. After he found out about Dan I think it planted the seed in his mind that she might not be his daughter, and so the suggestion that she wasn’t “normal” gave him the perfect excuse to get rid of her.’
‘And you had no idea.’
‘Not then. Not for a long time. I found out later, of course, but for twenty years I carried around the pain of losing her and the burden of my guilt. And you see, that was why I couldn’t go to Dan. I had my freedom, but because of what I’d done I knew I didn’t deserve it. I certainly didn’t deserve to be happy.’
She trailed off, remembering what he’d said in his letter at the start of it all. Stella, I don’t want you to feel guilty . . . It poisons happiness and makes us believe that we’re not good enough . . . She’d read that letter a hundred times, and then she’d put it in the box with all the other ones and given them to Nancy. For safekeeping, but also so she couldn’t read them any more. He was offering her a forgiveness to which she believed she had no right.
‘How did you find out what Charles had done?’
‘When he died. He had left all the paperwork – the forms he and Dr Walsh had signed originally, and all the letters he’d received from the hospital over the years, requesting money for new clothes, informing him that she’d had measles, that sort of thing – in an envelope with my name on it. I suppose it was his one act of kindness that he didn’t destroy them as well as
himself.’
‘Himself?’
‘Oh yes. You see, for all those years he had been carrying his burden of guilt too, though he kept it hidden from me. Eventually the burden got too great for him to bear. The coroner was very kind – kinder perhaps than Charles deserved. He said it could possibly have been an accident that Charles took too many of his sleeping tablets. An oversight perhaps.’
‘Death by Misadventure,’ Will said softly.
‘Exactly. Charitable of him, since suicide is an abomination in the eyes of God.’
If Stella had had her way it would have said ‘death by poisoning’ on the certificate: twenty sleeping pills and as many years of toxic guilt.
‘And so you were finally reunited with Daisy,’ Jess said, bringing her gently back to the story. ‘What was it like?’
‘Heartbreaking.’
Stella had talked about this before. In fact, during the long years of campaigning she seemed to talk about little else, to anyone who would listen, waving the truth in front of unseeing eyes like a banner. ‘Putting children into places like that was considered to be the right thing to do at the time, but the conditions they lived in were dreadful. You can’t imagine . . . They were treated like animals, tied up or left in bed because no one bothered to get them up.’
It was familiar territory, but it had never stopped being painful. ‘Of course, I wanted to gather her up and take her as far away as possible, but I couldn’t. I was a stranger to her. She’d grown up without knowing warmth or affection, and it had turned her in on herself. It took a whole year to get her to trust me enough to hug her, and two years to get her to talk. She had simply forgotten how to because no one ever spoke to her. I did what I could – for all of the patients there. I spent as much time as I could with the children, playing with them and talking to them; it became the focus of my life. And when I went home I wrote letters to the authorities, asked questions, made demands, and generally made a thorough nuisance of myself. Gradually things began to improve. Daisy died when she was just thirty-six – she had a heart condition, you see – and the hospital was an altogether different place by then. A happy place. There were so many others that weren’t, though, and so the work didn’t stop there. I set up a charity, and became a consultant for the government on policy – things I’d never dreamed I could do.’