by Susan Sallis
I replaced the receiver very carefully and turned to the others and passed on Dad’s words. ‘He’ll tell us everything soon—’
And Tom said, ‘Is he all right?’ And I nodded gratefully.
A December light began to filter down Chichester Street just before eight o’clock; the girls still slept, and we drooped in our chairs looking rather like three very tired horses. ‘Ready for the knacker’s yard.’ Tom murmured. We hadn’t been able to face our cold bedrooms and had thought we might sleep by the fire, but it had not happened.
Dad arrived just as the street lights went out. I whipped to the door in time to see him park well clear of the glass from the shattered headlights and emerge very stiffly indeed. I ran out and flung my arms around him, and we almost fell over.
‘Hey, hey . . . I’m OK, honey. OK.’
He sounded like an American; he often did. I began to cry. He shepherded me back into the house. It was bitterly cold. Tom was stoking the fire yet again, and Meriel came from the kitchen wheeling the tea trolley, which was absolutely loaded with tea things, toast, marmalade, boiled eggs. When had she done that? Had I fallen asleep and not known it? The sheer ordinariness of the room, the tree, the trolley . . . seemed wrong. It was all . . . skewed. Incongruous. The tired horses had leapt into action, and though we were prepared after Dad’s last phone call, still the meal and the welcoming fire and the much-too-early Christmas tree seemed like a conjuring trick in the good old Victorian melodramatic tradition, and it was made more so when Dad took off his coat, held me again and whispered in my ear, ‘Now we can go back to normal.’
I looked at him wildly, hoping for a few words about normality. He smiled at me and lifted his left eyebrow just like he used to do years ago. And I knew he was going to be all right. Then he ushered me ahead of him, and I followed Meriel and the tea trolley into the tired familiarity of our sitting room, where Tom was now pushing back the curtains and revealing our safe and secure city street with its lamps and its boot scrapers and the damaged hire car . . .
Dad smiled round at all of us with – with – love. More than affection. This love included himself; it started there and flowed out to us. It warmed us. We sat down, smiling too, our backs straight again. Tom said, ‘Are you all right?’ And when Dad nodded emphatically – and we could all see he was very much all right – Tom finished, ‘In your own time, then,’ and grinned widely.
He didn’t launch into things immediately; it came in bits and pieces, gestures with the toast in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. We had to fit it all together slowly. We were tired, our minds were still numb. It was simple enough, really.
Like so much that had happened . . . nothing happened. Not for ages. But as Dad said, through a spoonful of boiled egg, ‘That’s not true. I have been building a relationship with Hermione over the past four weeks but I’ve realized I still hadn’t grasped the essential . . . being! I thought that when she learned about her real mother and father she would have . . . gone into herself. Not a bit of it. She is so proud of being the child of a brother and sister . . . she says it is a – a unique love, this incestuous beginning. It starts in the womb, and only ends in death, whatever the two partners do with their lives. She—’ He spluttered a little laugh into his toast soldiers. ‘She is writing a book about it. Of course!’ He spluttered again and took a gulp of tea. ‘She has this ability to take something intrinsically shocking – to the rest of the world – and make it into something wonderful!’ He looked at Meriel. ‘You’re doing it, Merry. We have to learn to do it, Rache.’ I nodded, I knew exactly what he meant. It was so much more than making the best of things. It was knowing that what was happening was the best.
And, after a pause to finish his egg, he went on with his story. It was simple enough. As we suspected, at some point during yesterday’s early darkness, Maude had wrapped her cardigan around the headlamps of Gus’s hire car and smashed them. Dad called it her message in a bottle. She had then pedalled like mad through the lanes, and got to the manor ahead of Dad and the others. And she had ignored the cold empty huts and the ones full of sick people and hidden in the attics of the house. Twenty years before, she and Willi had explored the manor inch by inch to find escape routes for him, and one of them was a flat roof above the toilet block with access to the storage tanks inside the attics. She got there easily through a system of fire escapes discovered by Willi during air-raid practices. The locks had never been changed, and she had keys. The attics were rabbit warrens full of old furniture, books, stacks of files, obsolete kitchen equipment; the police had found a camp bed and blankets, a packet of digestive biscuits. There were several trap doors, most bolted from the inside. Two were unbolted, one of them directly above Hermione’s office, so Maude could probably hear and see everything below her. The other was inside a linen cupboard in the corridor outside. The piles of sheets and blankets muffled her exit, and had proved good cover for the half a dozen petrol cans she had been bringing in one by one. She was the same age as Dad, and had been clambering up and down ladders carrying heavy weights every night for almost a week. Dad wondered how she had felt when she had peered through a crack in the office trap door and seen three people. She must have thought Dad and Hermione were already dead, incinerated in Dad’s old home. That must have set her back. She might have been planning to lead Meriel and Tom and me to this place. She had always loathed Meriel, and I had inadvertently been a thorn in her flesh for a long time. How had she felt when she had identified Dad and Hermione, and another man she had never seen before?
Dad reckoned she could have gone over the top then and there; raved and screamed and crashed in on them brandishing her knife – she had a knife, a ridiculous thing in a leather scabbard around her waist. That was part of the horror of the whole thing: Maude Smith, an elderly woman, with a scout knife.
Anyway, she did not go over the top then. She hatched a new plan on the spot. Dad knew this because she told them. She wanted to split them up. Deal with them one by one. Prolong her reign of terror. Show them who was boss.
She started by tapping on the radiator in the cupboard. The internees had done that during the war, using Morse code. Mrs Smith did not know Morse code except for the three longs, three shorts and three longs again of the international call for help, SOS. She thought it would bring one of the three out into the corridor to investigate.
Strangely enough, it was Gus who heard the tapping first, and he assumed that the old heating system was playing up. Hermione was talking to Maude, her words never quite the same, her voice always very calm. He waited for a pause then said, ‘Honey, something is wrong with the heating.’ She clicked off the tannoy and the three of them heard it immediately. Dad knew what it was and therefore who it was.
He said tersely, ‘It’s Morse. SOS.’ He told us that Hermione’s face ‘melted’.
She clicked on the tannoy system again and said, ‘Mum, I can hear you. It’s all right. Come to us. Please come to us.’
As Dad said, ‘She never uses the word Mum. It’s always been Mother.’
We all thought that it was that word – Mum – that brought Maude into the office at a run. And three policemen, called by Dad from the enormous foyer when they had first arrived, must then have started to close in.
Dad said Hermione and Maude had perhaps three or four seconds before the police arrived. Maude burst in and came to a halt about three yards from Hermione, who had stood up and turned to face her. Hermione was weeping, controlling her breathing against sobbing so that the tears simply ran unchecked down her face like rain on a window pane. Maude was dry-eyed, but her face was twisted as if in terrible pain, and she appeared to be fighting for every shallow breath. Dad and Gus could not move; in fact, nobody moved. When I first heard the term freeze-frame many years afterwards, I knew that, just for those seconds, life had frozen so that Hermione and Maude could make contact and say goodbye.
And then the door, still open, was filled with the three policemen. They came in and made
a triangle which enclosed Maude. She saw them and roared. Like a lion, Dad said, throaty, furious. Hermione said, ‘Mum, it’s all right.’ She actually held out her arms, though she must have seen the knife. And Maude launched herself.
The policemen grabbed her, but not before that knife had missed Hermione’s jugular by an inch and blood was everywhere. Dad and Gus piled in, Dad snatching the clean tea towel neatly placed by the tea things as if for just such an eventuality as this, Gus expertly applying pressure with his fingers. But there was still blood, spurting and pouring, and it was not until Hermione reached with her right hand for Maude’s pinioned body that we realized it was Maude’s blood as well.
As Dad said, ‘She was always one for being pernickety. She knew that there was nothing left for her and it would be a neat and tidy ending to the long-drawn-out vendetta.’ He shrugged, there was no relief in such neatness. He added, ‘Hermione does not remember us putting that tea towel there. She wondered whether that might have been her mother’s doing as well.’
It must have been quite a mess in the end. But perhaps Maude would have liked that, too. Hermione pronounced her mother dead. She used her doctor’s voice. Then said shakily, ‘It’s what you wanted. Goodbye, Mum.’ Then she asked Gus very politely if he could help her over to the self-harm ward where there were ‘oodles of sterile dressings’. Gus picked her up bodily and carried her down the corridor – she directed him. He was still with her. Dad thought Hermione would like it if Tom, Merry and I went to see her later. After the morning rounds.
Dad went to bed. The twins got up. Merry got their breakfast and told them briefly what had happened, and they were stunned and frightened and just a little bit intrigued. Daisy said, ‘Roland will say I told you so.’
Rose sighed, ‘Well, he did.’ They wanted to know how we were, and Merry told them we were in the sitting room, and probably asleep on the sofa.
We weren’t asleep. We sat side by side and shared our thoughts silently as we so often did. Then I said, ‘Where will they take Maude?’
‘You know where they will take her, Rache.’
‘Will it be in the same place now?’
‘No. That would have been the final irony, wouldn’t it? Maude ending up where Willi and Eva did.’
We thought of that day when we had found the temporary morgue in the hospital. The heavy sheets soaked in disinfectant, the anger of the pathologist.
Tom said – exactly mirroring my own train of memory, ‘Maybe the Gaffer shouldn’t have sent a couple of kids like us on a job like that.’
I said, ‘He didn’t know how good we were!’ and we snickered an imitation laugh. I added, ‘He’s not going to be able to do a cover-up job about this.’
‘Not fully, no. The Clarion will report that Doctor Hermione Smith failed to prevent her mother’s suicide attempt, and as a result sustained injury to her shoulder. Her mother took her own life while the balance of her mind was disturbed after the death of her husband, a director of Smith’s Aircraft Company . . . you know the sort of thing.’
I nodded. ‘It’s raining,’ I said.
Tom glanced out of the window and groaned. ‘And here comes Mr Dawson, wanting to know what the police made of the damaged car.’
I followed him to the front door, I could not bear to let him out of my sight. I could hear Merry and the girls behind us.
Mr Dawson stood there, the few hairs over his bare head miserably bedraggled.
‘Thought you might be wondering about my cat. He was run over last night, you know.’ He turned to look at Gus’s car. ‘No luck with the police? They’re not interested in the likes of us.’ He hunched his shoulders into his coat and shook his head. ‘Better get back. The vet’s coming for the body. He’ll want me to have another one. I can’t. Not yet, anyway. That old moggie, he was a faithful friend.’
I realized belatedly what he was saying and made a sound of distress. Tom said, ‘Come in and have a cup of tea, Mr Dawson. We ought to tell you what has been happening here. You’ve always been such a good neighbour . . .’
It’s strange, but after weeping with Mr Dawson, normality . . . happened. Our unhappiness was permissible. And our recent terror simply showed how much we cared about each other. I tried to tell Meriel this, as a kind of apology for ever imagining that she had taken Dad from me – yes, I could admit it at last.
She looked at me in astonishment. ‘You need to face up to the fact that he felt rejected by you, Rache!’ She gave me a quick hug. ‘I’m fed up with tea, hon. Let me make you a proper cup of coffee. Then we can clean up. I reckon there will be a full house here for Christmas. We’ve got to get cracking.’
And we did.
Twenty-three
IN THE END we went to Clarion House for Christmas lunch and it was wonderful. Maxine did ‘the works’ and wore her waitress’s outfit with aplomb. The girls pestered to be her assistants and she got out her old uniforms, which had been beautifully pressed and layered with tissue paper, and they looked like ‘a million dollars’, to quote Gus. Poor old Gilbert got misty-eyed because he said they reminded him of Flo when he first knew her. I caught Dad’s eye and winked, and after a second he waggled his eyebrow at me.
Hermione was with us. Her left arm was in a sling, and she was even paler than usual but she insisted the whole dreadful experience had been good. ‘It helps me to know the other side of the coin,’ she maintained.
I still felt we were related in some way, and I said like an anxious aunt, ‘You were already rather good at that, Hermione.’
She thought about it. ‘I could see the other side, yes. But now I know it.’ She touched her shoulder briefly and smiled right at me. ‘I know it, Rache. With my muscle and bone!’
I think if it hadn’t been for Gus, the two of us would have embraced then, but he got in first and she did not protest. In fact after a quick glance at Meriel she darted a kiss at his cheek that landed on the tip of his nose.
Meriel chuckled. ‘No need to check up on me, Hermione. Gus and I finished ages ago.’ She looked at him. ‘He’s been a good friend. Saved my life – certainly my reason – once or twice.’
Gus was unembarrassed. ‘You’re welcome, Ma’am,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I told Eve here that you wouldn’t mind. Been telling me for ages to lay off.’
We almost missed the last few words because we were saying in unison, ‘Eve?’ Rose and Daisy came in carrying vegetable dishes swathed in towels, and they said, ‘What?’
Hermione was bright red. Gus said, ‘Hermione has never liked her name, apparently. And she thought she would like to take two-thirds of her real mother’s name. So she is now Eve Smith; soon, I hope, to be Eve Michaelson.’
Hermione gasped like a schoolgirl. ‘You never said – this is the first time—’
‘Well, do you like it?’ he persisted.
She swallowed, and then coughed, and then said, ‘Yes.’
Meriel said, ‘It sounds like a famous psychiatrist’s name to me.’
Daisy put down her dish and looked at her sister. ‘Was that a marriage proposal?’
Rose said, ‘I think it was.’
Daisy turned swiftly towards Hermione and said, ‘Eve . . . sounds OK . . . do you want to have two bridesmaids?’ I was suddenly so proud of her. Actually, neither of the girls had ever voiced a wish to be a bridesmaid. I knew that Daisy’s plea amounted to a confirmation – of Hermione’s new name and Gus’s marvellously opportunistic proposal. I glanced at Tom. He waggled his eyebrow. Of course he did.
We sat around the enormous fireplace until it was dark. All of us still looked desperately tired; but at least we were now warriors talking about our battles, not poor old horses waiting for the knacker’s yard. Daisy and Rose sat at Hermione’s feet – it was going to take a long time for me to think of her as Eve – and talked weddings. Tom, Gus and Dad went to sleep in their chairs and Gilbert became maudlin. Meriel smiled and nodded at him. Maxine and I made tea and warmed mince pies.
We left at five, six of
us in our car, leaving Gus and Hermione to drive to Gloucester in Hermione’s car – they wanted the rest of the day to themselves. We drove a little way down the road, then turned off to visit Daphne. She was laying up a tea for a regiment of soldiers; it seemed it was for us. Roland came in rather sheepishly and apologized for ‘starting this whole thing off’.
‘Not entirely his fault, my dears,’ Daphne said briskly. ‘If his dad knows about something the whole of Gloucester soon does, too. Tom, I hope your boss can make a comprehensible story of it. Sounds ridiculously complicated to me. After all, at the end of the day, Hermione Smith’s mother committed suicide. No need to drag up old sins, surely? Justice has been done, and has been seen to be done.’ She looked confused and amended her words. ‘Or is it “and has to been seen to have been done?”’ She shook her head. ‘Who knows? Is Hermione all right?’
We told her about Hermione’s change of name, and Tom said something about Gilbert Carfax being used to inventing the news, and Meriel held my arm and said, ‘Just like we used to do, Rache, huh?’
Daphne took off her apron. ‘Oh, come on. He couldn’t have invented the war – he couldn’t have invented any of what has happened, not really. He just sort of . . . tidied it up a bit. And you two—’ she glanced at Meriel and me dismissively. ‘You were just a couple of bored schoolgirls who should have joined the drama club.’ She flapped her apron at the boys. ‘Take Rose and Daisy into the playroom, Roland.’ She turned to Tom. ‘We’ve set up a ping-pong table. Good practice for next summer’s tennis tournaments. You and I’ll have a go later on, Tom. Do you good.’
Actually, it did. Daphne beat him every time, but he went back for more after tea, and she told him graciously he was coming along nicely. On the way home Meriel said from the back seat, ‘You’ve got to beat her, Tom. Is there somewhere you could practise in your lunch hour? Miss Hardwicke used to have that table up in the old attics, Rache. I’ll give her a ring and explain the situation.’