‘Christ,’ she said as she held it in her hand. ‘This is so old.’
‘What’s inside?’
She gently unwrapped the muslin and, when she saw what she was holding, the tears came.
15.
Diana, Cheltenham, 1921
As the man in the blue mackintosh comes up the stairs I find myself desperately wishing that Simone were here. She gave me a gift for Elvira when I was feeling downcast – a beautiful silver rattle – and it was so pretty I believed her when she told me the dark times would pass. She’d been a nurse and was always seeking ways to look on the bright side. She’d know what to say to this mackintosh man – all I can think is to run and conceal myself in my bathroom. Even I know that wouldn’t be the right thing to do, although I can’t help feeling the madder I prove myself the better it will be for everyone else.
The man reaches the top of the stairs and holds out his hand. ‘Mrs Hatton, I’m Doctor Williams.’
‘I know who you are,’ I say, recognizing the weaselly, grey-haired man with the watery pale-blue eyes. ‘We’ve met. You’re the madness man.’
‘I am indeed, although we do tend to prefer the term psychiatrist. Shall we?’ And he points at my door, then smiles, arms folded, studying me.
We go in and he settles himself on one of the two chairs beside my coffee table.
The room feels suddenly stuffy and I want to look out of the window, so I walk over there and face away from him, my back stiff.
‘I’m wondering how you are coping with the new medication. Although a little bitter, the Veronal is usually tolerated better than the bromides, and has less of that strong unpleasant taste. You are taking it daily?’
I twist round and nod. Well, everybody lies, don’t they?
‘It makes me feel drowsy,’ I then say, remembering the effect the few times I really had taken it.
‘Anything else?’
I shake my head. He looks at me and I think, I don’t trust you.
‘You have been unlucky,’ he says.
I take an angry step towards him. ‘Unlucky!? Is that what we are calling losing a child, now? “Oh, how unlucky, well never mind, you can always have another, can’t you?”’
‘You did have another.’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘Won’t you come and sit down with me? Tell me what the point is?’
I think about it. Strange, isn’t it, how you can usually tell who to trust? This conversation does nothing to make me change my mind.
‘Mrs Hatton?’ He smiles a difficult, uneasy smile as if smiling is a little alien to him.
‘Very well.’ And I come to sit opposite him with my back to the window, all the while scrutinizing his face. Pleasant enough, I suppose, but drearily ordinary. In a studied, delicate manner, he lifts and then settles his spectacles on his nose again. How I long for beauty, I think, but still manage to smile at him.
‘Your husband tells me you haven’t been out.’
I try to contain my response but, in the end, lose the battle and stand up, bristling with irritation. ‘Telling tales again? Well, he’s wrong. I’ve been out to the park. Often, as it happens. I like to watch the nannies pushing their perambulators.’
‘Really?’
I feel his irritation although he doesn’t show it visibly.
‘You think I’m lying?’ I snap, for how can I possibly tell him the truth? How can I say I dare not go out, that even the thought of it makes me shake so much I must sit on the floor and cling to the legs of my chair to make me feel I am still attached to the earth?
He shakes his head. ‘Of course not. Won’t you sit down again?’
He is too careful with me, wary even, and I don’t like the feeling of … of his condescension, that’s it.
‘I’m fine,’ I say and move towards the door, but with my head half turned, watching for his reaction.
He clears his throat and does that ghastly smile of his again.
‘Would you answer my question, please? When have you been out?’
I gawp at my feet and mutter. ‘I’ve been to the park. Nobody saw me go, that’s why they don’t know.’ I realize I sound like a petulant child and try to moderate my tone. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to be cross.’
He stares at the floor before glancing up at me again. ‘These voices, what do they say?’
I hesitate in surprise. No one has pressed me on this before, so I sit. Usually they want me to pretend they aren’t real. ‘Oh, you know …’
‘But I don’t, that’s why I asked.’
‘They say different things.’
I don’t want to tell him sometimes they frighten me, or laugh at me, or accuse me of dreadful things. Sometimes they whisper, and I must stand perfectly still because I have to hear them. I absolutely have to. There’s nothing worse than knowing they’re there but being unable to properly hear the venom they spout.
He twists his mouth, and there is a longish silence until he speaks again.
‘I wanted to have a word with you about the Grange. As you may already know, it’s a private institution at Dowdeswell. I –’
So, there it is. What he has really come for. How I need Simone now. When, oh when is she coming?
‘No,’ I burst in. ‘I won’t go.’
‘Nobody is forcing you to go. It’s simply that your husband and I feel you are too much alone up here.’
‘And if I refuse?’
16.
The golden pink of the cool early morning had turned into a blisteringly hot day. Belle felt dizzy and a sickly wave of heat passed through her as she stared at the silver and ivory baby’s rattle. The silver ball had tarnished a little but not as much as one might have expected, and the ivory handle, though yellowed, remained intact. She held it to the light.
‘Look, an inscription.’ She traced the tiny letters with her fingertips. ‘Three hearts and the letters, D and D and E. Diana, Douglas and Elvira. My mother, father and sister.’
On one side of the silver ball was a tiny dog with the words Bow-Wow-Wow. The other side was engraved with a bird and the words Who Killed Cock Robin. She suppressed a sob. This lost sister had suddenly become so real.
Oliver touched her hand gently. ‘Let’s go outside. You need air.’
She was glad to leave the damp heat of the house. Outside it was still hot but a little fresher. She regarded the tangled profusion that had no doubt once been a glorious garden.
‘Is this all there is, do you think?’
He shrugged. ‘Hard to say.’
Her eye was drawn to a gap in the bushes that seemed to create a barrier at the back of the long grass.
‘Do you think …’
‘It might lead somewhere?’
The sun was now burning her neck and she could feel it on her back too through her thin cotton dress. As they began to pick their way across the grass, something about being in the garden tugged her into the past. She saw her mother walking in front of her, bathed in sunlight and heading for the same gap between the bushes. Belle longed to lay a hand upon her shoulder and speak her name. Might everything have been different had she been able to?
The moment passed.
Oliver was ahead of her now, pulling back the ivy and overgrown vegetation. ‘There’s a path,’ he called out in an excited voice.
As Belle followed him she hardly felt the pain as sharp thorns in the dank undergrowth scratched her bare arms and legs. Then, as beating wings alerted her to the presence of birds, she could feel herself getting closer to something that mattered.
Beyond the path, as she came out into the light, her gaze wandered over the expanse. They attempted to circumnavigate this part of the garden, but their progress was impeded by a wilderness of tropical plants. Trees too, lots of trees. He pointed out a large, sprawling acacia, its marbled trunk seeming to twist and turn in the air until it finished in a spreading crown that shaded the ground beneath.
‘What’s that one?’ she asked, pointing at a tree
thirty feet high at least and about forty feet wide.
‘They call it the Pride of Burma. It’s an orchid tree.’
She nodded and continued to inspect the garden, brushing the buzzing insects from her hair and eyes. Over in one corner a vine with red flower clusters crept upwards through the canopy of another tree in search of the sun. And beyond lay the remains of a building that looked black and broken.
‘Must have been a summer house,’ she said. ‘Destroyed by fire. What a shame.’
A little further on she gasped at the sight of a tree with the largest girth of all.
‘The tamarind,’ Oliver said.
She gaped at the bright-green feathery foliage of the massive tree, at least eighty feet high. Its trunk had divided into three which meant the canopy had grown gigantic. So much shade for a baby lying in its pram.
He noticed she’d gone quiet. ‘You okay?’
She nodded and walked closer to the burnt-out summer house. Oliver followed and began to rip away the creeper.
‘You won’t find anything there,’ she said.
‘Maybe not.’ But he carried on, only stopping to wipe the sweat from his brow.
‘I’ll help,’ she said. He’d rolled up his sleeves and the sight of his tanned, muscled arms as he worked made her smile. It had been so long since she’d enjoyed being with a man as much as this, and she realized his presence was helping her feel grounded – to have been here on her own might have been a little too much. There was more to him than the easy-going man she’d first met, and that pleased her.
As she stood gazing at the secret garden the noises of the city faded and only the sounds of the birds accompanied Oliver as he worked at pulling more of the creeper away. Feeling soporific, and forgetting her previous offer to help, she watched drifts of yellow-winged butterflies hover over the bushes at the back of the garden, where she spotted the remains of a gate, now smothered by climbing plants. Just then she heard Oliver shout her name.
She ran over and he held out a blackened metal box.
‘Wedged in the earth beneath what remained of the floorboards.’ He passed it to her.
She attempted to open the lid, but it wouldn’t give.
‘I’ve got the pocketknife,’ he said. ‘Might do it.’
‘Are you actually prepared for everything?’
‘Depends. I might be.’ And he gave her a wide smile.
He passed the pocketknife to her and gradually she prised the lid open. When she glanced inside, the first thing she saw was a yellowing photograph of her parents with their arms wrapped around each other, broad, happy smiles on their faces.
She felt a hot flash of resentment battling with the longing she’d always tried so hard to hide. She did not love her mother. She had persuaded herself of it. Steeled herself. Nor did she care that her mother did not love her. But she’d been living with a lie.
As she thought of Diana, she stared at the gently drooping branches of the tamarind tree and shaded her eyes from the narrow shafts of piercing sunlight streaming between its leaves too brightly. The intensity of the light, plus the loud buzzing in the air, made her feel strange and she reached out a hand to Oliver.
As he held her hand for a moment, there was one thing she knew without question. Whatever had happened in this garden, whatever had happened beneath this self-same tree, it had changed her mother, and in doing so it must have altered her father too. She had a sudden uneasy sense of how her mother might have once been before the tragedy destroyed her life and her mind. She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the ache of it because, however much she might have thought otherwise, however much she’d longed for it to be otherwise, their story was her story too.
17.
Diana, Cheltenham, 1921
The longer I am not myself, the harder it is for Douglas. He still smells the same as he always has, of Trumper’s Wellington Cologne. I’d know the mix of cumin, orange and neroli anywhere. But we don’t speak to each other now except to argue and I have no chance of winning against his logical mind. That cuts deep. The more I think about it, the more the thoughts tangle in my head. To make them stop I go down the stairs and out to the garden by the French windows in the drawing room. Despite the biting cold of the afternoon, it soothes me to see the birds ruffling their feathers in the birdbath on the terrace. I love my birds. Their song lifts my spirit and I even dare to hope a little. Hope. How wonderful is that little word?
Maybe things can change. Maybe I really will remember what happened in Golden Valley. And if I do, maybe it won’t be as bad as I fear.
The sun is fragile today, pale behind a wispy grey sky. How strange that on this chilly winter’s day, with even a forecast of snow, all I can think of is the bright yellow sun of that Rangoon day. Huge, round, blisteringly hot. It still blinds me now and, even though I close my eyes against it, it remains trapped behind my eyelids.
As for Douglas. Well, one minute I was loved and then I was not. He hides it, of course, but I see beneath the anxious smiles and brevity of his words to the place where grief has burrowed deep inside him. He is empty now too, full of holes, but I remember his lips on mine and the tenderness in his eyes and the way he loved me until I felt we had dissolved into one being.
I tell myself I want to remember what happened, I truly do, but whenever I try a band of pain circles my head and my mind becomes a slippery mess. All the doctors say the same thing. Whatever happened, I cannot allow myself to see it and have blocked it from my conscious mind.
I still dream though. And yet the dreams provide no clarity, as each one is different from the last. I have no recollection of returning to England. All I remember is that one minute I was under house arrest in Rangoon and then the next, or so it seemed, I was back here.
18.
For the visit to the Pegu club on Sunday, Edward wore a well-cut pale linen suit and Belle a blue-and-white-spotted day dress, cinched in at the waist by a red leather belt. She’d tied back her hair and topped it off with a white wide-brimmed hat with a red ribbon to match the belt. Although she hadn’t fully decided what she felt about Edward she still wanted to look her best and create the right impression.
On their way they passed the usual colonial edifices, their facades decorated with ornate arches, corbels and pilasters – buildings absolutely reinforcing power and invincibility over others. Then there came the private houses with deep eaves designed to provide shade from the harsh Burmese sun for delicate English skins.
‘Pretty wonderful, isn’t it?’ Edward said, and before she had time to collect her thoughts, he went on to enquire about how she was getting on, so she recounted her interview with Inspector Johnson.
He narrowed his dark eyes, frowned and then thought for a moment. ‘He’s a sound chap but you really should have consulted me first. I’d have given you a formal introduction. I have considerable contacts, as you can imagine.’
‘You work for the police?’
‘Not exactly. I’m advisor to the Commissioner, among other things. In any case, you’ll be pleased to hear I’ve done a bit of digging.’
‘And?’ she said, thinking he looked pleased with himself.
‘It seems your mother was acting strangely around the time of the baby’s disappearance and that gave rise to accusations of guilt and her eventual house arrest.’
‘How strangely?’
He puckered his chin then rubbed it as if reluctant to speak.
‘Please?’
‘I believe she was discovered scrabbling about in the earth while in her nightdress.’
He went on to explain that her hands and nails had been black with earth, which led to the suspicion she had been searching for the spot where she had buried the baby. Belle pictured the awful scene, her mother on her knees and weeping.
‘The ayah reported that the child had cried incessantly, and the child’s distress disturbed your mother terribly, so much so that more than once she’d flown into a rage. The inference was she had tried to quieten
the baby but went too far.’
Belle shook her head in dismay.
‘The police dug up the entire garden and found nothing save for a single pink baby’s bootee.’
‘Elvira’s?’
‘I imagine so. I haven’t been able to establish what eventually happened, except that your parents went back to England. Didn’t even sell the house before they left.’
‘So, my mother was proven innocent?’
He shook his head and winced. ‘Not exactly. The case remained open for a while. It seems nothing was proven one way or the other.’
‘Why did they let her go?’
‘I reckon the whole affair must have been causing such a stink the powers that be concluded it was the only thing they could do. There was no solid evidence, or at least I haven’t come across any. I think whatever there may have been was swept under the carpet a long time ago.’
Belle sighed.
‘Inspector Johnson told me a fire had destroyed the police records.’
‘Correct.’
‘So how do you know all this?’
He raised his brows. ‘As I said, I have considerable contacts.’
She nodded. ‘I went to see the house, you know.’
He looked surprised. ‘On your own?’
She shook her head, but for reasons she couldn’t explain didn’t want to tell him she had gone with Oliver. Nor did she reveal their plans to meet again on her next day off. ‘It was in a terrible state,’ she said instead.
‘Yes, I believe so. You realize it may well be yours now.’
‘Really?’
‘As I said, they didn’t sell it.’
‘How do you know?’
He hesitated for a second. ‘Pretty much common knowledge. You’d have to go through all the legal channels at the office of the registrar, of course, prove you are who you say you are and provide a certificate of your father’s death, that sort of thing.’
The Missing Sister Page 7