Rachel's Secret

by Susan Sallis

  He stared at me not speaking, barely breathing. Then he said, ‘I knew that. Yes. But Gillie is so . . . possessive at times.’

  ‘He . . . pretends. Like Meriel and me. And – I suppose – sometimes, he believes his own delusions. Maxine goes along with it.’

  ‘But, Rache . . . you were our wonderful reconciliation. It was so awful – we both thought we’d scuppered ourselves. And then . . . well, we hadn’t. He can’t not know – he’s got no right—’

  ‘Dad. Stop. The important thing is that we three – you and Mum and me – we still belong to each other in every possible way. Uncle Gilbert . . . is . . . well, he’s Uncle Gilbert!’ I tried to laugh. ‘You said – not long ago – that all that terrible business at the end of the war was no more than a storm in a teacup. And so was this.’

  I saw him swallow. He seemed afraid to take his eyes from my face. He said, ‘You see, Rache, Mum always felt terrible about ditching Gilbert the way she had. I suppose it was awful. They were at this dance together and I was there – a complete stranger – and I asked her to dance and that was that. So she introduced him to Maxine – she worked with Maxine, as you know – and they got on well and they got married. Then he was ill and everyone thought he was dying and Maxine sent a note for Mum and she went and just . . . stayed. I didn’t think she was coming back, Rache. I hated Gilbert. I almost hated Flo. And I went to see Eva . . .’

  ‘Dad, I know. You just told me. But then, afterwards, you and Mum were so happy, so together.’ I wanted him to tell me it had been all right; everything had been all right. Just as I remembered it.

  ‘We were. We really were. We never spoke about it. We were probably both suppressing it – that’s the sort of thing Hermione says about her patients. They suppress things and think they’ve forgotten them for ever. But then . . . they haven’t.’

  He swayed slightly and Tom bounded forward and pushed a chair against the back of his knees. He sat down abruptly. He said, ‘Rache, d’you think Mum ever believed that Hermione was mine?’

  I said swiftly, ‘Of course not.’

  He said, like Rose needing reassurance, ‘Did I wonder whether you were Gilbert’s?’

  ‘Of course not. And you certainly weren’t idiotic enough to let it spoil anything. Remember Beethoven’s Fifth?’

  He looked puzzled for a moment, and then, quite suddenly, he was himself again. ‘Beethoven’s—? Oh yes. Of course.’ He smiled and leaned back and felt Tom’s hands on his shoulders and directed the smile upwards to include him. ‘She was an amazing woman, Tom. No real confidence in herself, yet somehow she radiated warmth and light. That’s why I needed Florida. I couldn’t see properly any more, and I was always cold.’

  ‘Oh Dad.’ I crouched before him and took his hands; they were warm.

  We stayed like that for what seemed like ages, though it was probably only a minute. Then the phone rang in the hall and the sitting-room door opened, letting out a blast of sound from the television, and the next instant Rose was yelling down the hall that it was Hermione. Tom went, giving Dad and I time to collect ourselves, stand up and hug, half-laughing, half-crying.

  ‘I wish we’d done this years ago,’ he said, pushing his chair beneath the kitchen table again.

  ‘That’s the thing about suppression. It works!’ I looked at him and just for a moment I saw an old man; he was, after all thirty-five when I was born, and I was edging up to forty.

  ‘Yes.’ He grinned and slid back into being just my dad. He and I, we’d always been such friends, and I had felt terribly deserted for the ten years he had stayed away. His grin broadened, as if he knew my thoughts, and he said, ‘Prepare yourself, Rache. I might have to disappear again quite suddenly if I do manage to finish off that crazy woman.’

  I shook my head at him. ‘There will be a proper post-mortem on the poor old Wingco. She’s cooked her own goose!’

  We both went into the hall to speak to Hermione. I expected her to sound scared to death by Meriel’s sudden intervention, but she was nothing of the sort. Perhaps she had been scared for years, and now that Meriel had taken over she felt only a glorious relief. What had surprised her – and me, too – was that Meriel had her old boy friend in residence. The doctor who had looked after her when she was pregnant with Georgie sixteen years ago had taken the flat next door to hers in Clifton. As I said to Tom later that Sunday, ‘I suppose we should be honoured that she spends every weekend with us! What the hell do he and Professor Harmsworth do when she disappears?’

  Tom shrugged, then joked, ‘They have a darned good rest, I would think!’ He smiled almost sadly. ‘Strange to think that we take Meriel’s freedom for granted now. But in the mid-twenties it would have been such wonderful blackmail material. Poor George. Poor Flo.’

  Dad stayed with us that night, sleeping in Meriel’s bed until the girls had gone to school and Tom to work. He said he had a lot of catching-up to do. I telephoned Meriel’s flat thinking Hermione would be feeling deserted. I was wrong again. She couldn’t stop for a chat then, because Gus Michaelson had popped in for coffee.

  I replaced the receiver and stood looking down the hall at the layers of coloured light coming from the stained glass on the front door. I seemed fairly good at judging events and people wrongly. Absolutely and totally wrongly.

  I made tea and took it up to Dad, and when he smiled at me I knew that, misjudgement or not, things were all right between us. We could pick up where we left off when Mum was alive.

  Then the phone rang again and I got to it as quickly as I could, because I thought it would be Hermione again. It was Tom.

  ‘Thank God Dad spent last night with us—’ There was no preamble at all. ‘Rough Road Cottage was burned out in the night. It was quite deliberate, neither Hermione nor Dad would have stood a chance.’

  Twenty-one

  THE REALLY AWFUL outcome of that blatant arson attack was that Mr Myercroft died. Dad maintained that he would have had his heart attack fire or no fire. But the fact remained that, when Dad and I failed to get a response to our knocks and shouts, and eventually used his spare key, the familiar bungalow – which Mum had tried to keep clean and tidy after Mrs Myercroft died – was full of the acrid smell of smoke; as indeed was the whole area. And Mr Myercroft was not even in bed. He was sort of neatly folded-up in the kitchen, where he had had a slit of a view through the laurels to our house.

  Dad comforted me, and the two policemen who had come with us suggested that perhaps the old gent would not mind if I made some tea, as I probably knew where to find it. The ambulance men took Mr Myercroft away; Tom arrived; the policemen were talking to Dad in the sitting room where a portrait of Mrs Myercroft smiled at them benignly from above the tiled fireplace. I began the dreary business of making tea. I had known twenty years ago where the Myercrofts kept their caddy, sugar, crockery; they were still there and probably had not been moved since Mum died. The cutlery drawer was full of newspaper cuttings and notes about repairing the greenhouse and buying Jeyes Fluid. I boiled a kettle of water and used it to scald spoons and mugs, filled it again and watched Tom clearing a space on one of the cabinets, where it looked as if Mr Myercroft had done his repotting. Some of the old pots were growing various moulds.

  I said, ‘Mum used to come round and see to things now and then after Mrs Myercroft died.’

  Tom nodded. ‘Even without her he was better off here than in a home. His garden . . . he still loved it. Look at this.’ It was a grubby list of next year’s planting with a plan of the enormous garden. I gazed at it desolately. Mr Myercroft had always been . . . there.

  And he had always been old. He had to have been well into his nineties. Tom said, ‘How is Dad taking the loss of his home?’

  ‘It’s not his home any more, not really. It’s Hermione’s. She had the heating put in and all her things were about.’ I started to cry weak tears. ‘She won’t go off with Meriel now. And she’s got nowhere to live. And she could – so easily – have been my sister.’

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nbsp; I put my hands to my face, and Tom gathered me up and said humorously, ‘I don’t think so, my love. And probably the police won’t object to Hermione going to the States. Why should they? She wasn’t even here at the time of the fire.’ He dried my eyes and held his handkerchief for me to blow my nose, as if I were Rose or Daisy. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘in case they don’t catch up with Maude Smith, who is obviously completely crazy, I think Hermione should be right out of the country. Once Maude knows she wasn’t in the house after all, she will be after her like a rabid dog.’

  We took tea into the sitting room, where Dad was frowning prodigiously over the outrageousness of what he was saying to the police. Mrs Smith, probably insane with grief at the death of her husband, was trying to kill her own daughter? It didn’t make sense. We all knew we had stepped out of the realm of sense, but even in that no-man’s-land how could we – let alone anyone else – accept such an illogical scenario?

  We saw the Wolsley draw up outside. Never were Uncle Gilbert and Aunt Maxine so welcome. The thunderous knock on the front door, Maxine’s voluminous fur coat which enveloped the two of us, her fluting enquiries about Frou-frou . . . we gladly let them take over, and I am fairly certain the two policemen were just as glad. The Carfaxes appeared to know exactly what had happened, and what should be done about it.

  Strangely enough, the only thing to survive in our old home was Hermione’s car, mainly because the garage was right away from the house and was made from panels of asbestos. She had let Dad have the keys before she left, and we phoned the local garage, who sent round a mechanic to check that the car was in its usual pristine condition. We left Gilbert telling the police that he had insisted on a full post-mortem to be carried out on Mrs Smith’s husband, and we drove slowly back into town. We were all nervous; even Dad kept glancing out of the rear window as if he expected that sit-up-and-beg bicycle to be following behind. I was terrified Mrs Smith had booby-trapped the car, which was just as ridiculous: Hermione had had to change fuses since she was seven years old because Mrs Smith couldn’t do it – and besides, Mrs Smith would not have been able to lift the car’s bonnet.

  Tom said, ‘I’ll ring Miss Hardwicke when we get in. It might be as well to keep the girls home until the police pick Mrs Smith up.’

  Dad said, ‘Why don’t you go down to Bristol tomorrow – take the girls?’

  We were making Maude Smith into some kind of evil-genius, ready to pop up at any moment and finish off the whole family!

  Tom lit the fire in the sitting room, Dad made tea; I took Frou-frou into the garden, and almost laughed at the look of relief on her small woolly face as she squatted among the chrysanthemums. Then I sat by the fire and cuddled her until Gilbert and Maxine arrived. There was another flurry, somehow typical of Gilbert and Maxine. Gilbert said he had told the police ‘everything’. We didn’t question him; we desperately wanted him to take it all on and tell us what to do. They left an hour later after he had telephoned the insurance people.

  ‘I’ll leave you to get in touch with Hermione,’ he said, accepting a cup of coffee and sipping it appreciatively as he stood in the hall. ‘I don’t know the girl all that well but she must be in as much danger as you are, George. Why don’t you get yourself down to Bristol for a couple of days? You could probably live in Meriel’s flat, couldn’t you?’

  Dad said, ‘If Maude Smith can’t find me or Hermione, she’ll doubtless go for Rachel and her family. She’s tipped over the edge, Gillie. I think we should all go somewhere – anywhere, really – until they catch her. It can’t take long. Where will she go? She’s not in her house. Her bike’s not there either. She’s going to be fairly conspicuous cycling anywhere in the county.’

  Hovering in the sitting room, I said to Tom, ‘It’s absolutely ridiculous. All of us terrified of one elderly lady on a bike with nowhere to go!’

  Tom frowned. ‘She’s got the advantage of not caring any more about anyone at all. She must have stopped enjoying her role as wife to a wing commander. Perhaps he found out about some of her dealings during the war and threatened to expose her . . . who knows? Whatever happened it has made her into the equivalent of a Japanese kamikaze fighter. She just wants to take as many people with her as possible.’

  I shivered.

  Tom met the girls from school while I cooked an enormous stew, then telephoned Meriel’s flat. She was at the final seminar of the term and Hermione sounded very awkward. I was in the mood to panic.

  ‘Are you on your own – is someone with you?’

  She said, ‘No to the first question. Yes to the second.’

  My heart was leaping around already. ‘Just say yes or no . . . is it your mother?’

  She did not answer immediately; my heart stopped leaping and threatened to stop. At last she said slowly, ‘You must know that my real mother has been dead for nineteen years, Rachel. The person who is with me is Meriel’s doctor. Gus. From what you have said, I gather that my foster mother has . . . disappeared?’

  I heard my own breath leave my lungs in sheer relief. I simply said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah. Then it seems Meriel was right to practically drag me here.’ I could hear the smile in her voice and she seemed to be including Gus in her next comment. ‘I am constantly surprised by Meriel’s intuitive perspicacity—’ there came a gurgle at her own pretentiousness. ‘All that frantic packing as if the Hound of the Baskervilles were after us!’ She laughed; her flippancy was annoying, to say the least.

  ‘She’s burned down the house, Hermione—’ I meant to sound angrily strong, but my voice was a bleat. ‘And Mr Myercroft is dead!’

  There was a shocked silence, and I regretted my words and started to add that we had no proof as yet, and though the ‘fire people’ knew it was arson they could not know who was responsible.

  She said – almost calmly – ‘I had better come home immediately.’ She must have slightly tipped the receiver as she added, ‘Will you take me, Gus? She’s after me. My friends must not be involved like this. Rachel and Tom, Rose and Daisy and dear George – nothing must happen to them – you do see, don’t you? Nothing must happen to them.’

  I didn’t hear what Gus said, of course, but even if I had it would not have impinged on that moment of . . . what to call it? Comprehension is not sufficient. It was a moment of sheer enlightenment. It was a moment when the events of l944, l953, and l963 came together and made sense. So much love . . . so much pain and hatred, too . . . but we had all overlooked the love.

  I blurted, ‘No – you mustn’t, Hermione. You mustn’t.’

  She had very gently replaced her receiver. And anyway, I knew that she must.

  The three of them arrived in Gus’s hire car two hours later. Tom had fetched the girls from school, and we had laid a sort of buffet in the kitchen, and Dad had stoked up the sitting-room fire. And though it was still much too early we had fetched the tree decorations from the attic and were all taking turns at hanging on the baubles. Gus hung about in the hall, shaking Tom’s hand again and again. The girls stayed by their creations on the tree and peered at the pantomime of Hermione, Meriel and me hanging on to each other desperately. It wasn’t for long; we broke off and talked to them in very obviously normal voices, which did not fool them for a second. But they were good girls, well-trained by Miss Hardwicke, and they played along with us and explained to Gus that there was a story behind nearly all the baubles, then proceeded to tell him the best one of all: the glass swan that Daddy’s daddy had bought for him when he was five years old and that had been made for Queen Victoria. Gus, totally out of his depth, registered astonishment. ‘Say! Is that something! Queen Victoria herself, huh?’ And Daisy gazed at him adoringly and said, ‘You speak proper American, Mr Gus!’

  She brought the house down.

  Strangely, everyone was hungry and we ate some stew and then opened four tins of apricots and a tin of condensed milk – Daisy’s favourite, and just for tonight she was belle of the ball. Then I shepherded her and Rose upst
airs and superintended the washing and the hair-brushing; I hung up their clothes and tucked them both into Daisy’s bed.

  ‘Is everyone staying here, Mum?’ Rose asked rather anxiously. ‘There’s only one packet of cereal left for breakfast.’

  ‘I don’t know, really.’ Actually, I had envisaged us sitting up through the night . . . just in case. I didn’t want the girls to know that, of course.

  Daisy said, ‘Why are they all here? I thought we were going to see them off on Wednesday!’

  ‘Well . . .’ I bit my lip. ‘I didn’t want to tell you but, actually, Grandee’s house – Hermione’s Rough Road Cottage – has been almost totally destroyed. There was a fire in the early hours of this morning. We didn’t hear about it until after you’d gone to school.’ I cupped their faces. ‘Don’t look like that, my lambs. It can probably be rebuilt, and the insurance will see to it, and Grandee and Hermione weren’t there . . . but probably Hermione won’t go to the States just yet. There will be things to sort out. So Meriel brought her home. And Gus – he was her doctor when she had Georgie – was visiting, and came too.’

  I made it sound quite normal, and of course they hadn’t had the experience of actually seeing the smoking ruins. I kept quiet about Mr Myercroft. They held my gaze, shocked but not horrified, then Rose leaned forward and pecked my cheek comfortingly.

  ‘It’s where you grew up, Mum. Where you and Aunt Merry . . . were.’

  ‘Yes. But this is where I am now. With you and Dad. And, thank goodness, with Grandee!’

  Daisy said very practically, ‘I think they should go and stay with Aunt Daphne. She’d love it and she’s got a big freezer full of food, so she won’t have to worry about shopping and everything.’