by Ros Franey
I fiddled with the lid of my pencil case. I still don’t understand why I just couldn’t say, Well actually she shut me in the cellar and locked the door and I was there half the night. It sounded unreal and unbelievably dramatic. Marjorie’d think I was making it up. I mumbled, ‘She took my teddy away.’
‘Took your teddy? Did you get him back?’
‘Afterwards, yes.’
‘Well that was all right then, wasn’t it.’
‘S’pose so.’
She didn’t ask me anything else, and I didn’t tell her.
But the dread feeling lingered. I couldn’t face being alone with Mother and would make an excuse and leave the room whenever I could. I was longing to talk about it, but terrified of talking to her. I felt I was being squeezed until I couldn’t breathe properly. That night and the next, I stopped going downstairs for Nana. I had lost all my courage. Walking her round and round the reservoir at the top of the Oaks one mild afternoon after school, I whispered the whole story to her. We met a lady in a fox fur who luckily I didn’t know, and I had to bend down and pretend to adjust the lead on Nana’s collar so the lady wouldn’t see how much I was crying. Then I put my arms round Nana’s neck and sobbed. I told her why I’d stopped going down to get her at night-time. I told her I loved her just as much and begged her to understand. Nana leaned against me. We stayed like that a long time.
After a couple of days, Beatrice noticed something was up.
‘You’re looking peaky,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’
I took a shaky breath and tried to tell her. When we got to the bit about the cellar, she stared at me, appalled. ‘I can’t believe this. You’re saying she locked you down there. Are you sure you’re not making this up?’
‘It seems impossible now, Bea, but it happened, I promise. I tried the door,’ I told her. ‘You were at choir. Daddy was out.’
‘Daddy’s always out!’ she said.
‘She locked the door. I swear to God—’
‘You mustn’t say that,’ she flashed. ‘It’s blasphemous.’
‘I’m sorry. But she did lock the door. I was down there hours.’
‘How’d’you get out, then?’
‘I fell asleep in the end. When I woke up the door had been … unlocked.’
Beatrice looked at me warily. ‘How d’you mean the door was unlocked – did some fairy come and unlock it? Are you sure you didn’t dream the whole thing, Annie?’
I shook my head desperately. ‘Beatrice, I swear – she must have thought better of it and come down and unlocked the door in the night or something, and not told me.’ Because she’s evil, I added silently, but you can’t say things like that to my sister.
Beatrice was shaking her head. ‘I’m sorry. It doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t she tell you? I don’t know what to believe.’
And that was the end of that, really, except I did tell one person: I told Fred when he came home for the holidays. Fred knew how I felt about Miss Higgs and he felt the same, so I knew I could tell him what had happened in the cellar because he would believe me and would keep it to himself. And I just sort of went on and told him about the blue shoes as well, though I didn’t think he’d be interested. But Fred listened carefully, which was not like him as a rule. Later that day he came back from the Oaks with Nana. I was cleaning my boots on the back doorstep. Fred walked past me into the kitchen, and seeing no one was around, he came back and sat beside me on the step.
‘I’ve been thinking about that Thing,’ he said after a few moments.
I knew immediately what he was talking about. I turned and looked at him, but he was staring straight ahead. ‘About the cellar?’ I whispered.
‘Yeah. About the blue shoes.’
I waited, a blob of black polish poised to rub into the toe of my boot. Fred said softly: ‘“The curious incident of the dog in the night-time”.’
‘What?’
‘Hang on a sec.’ He jumped up and ran into the house again, returning a few moments later with a book.
‘Sherlock Holmes,’ he explained. ‘Have you read it?’
‘Fred, you know we’re not allowed.’
‘I read it at school,’ said Fred softly. ‘There’s this story about a racehorse which goes missing. And Sherlock Holmes, who – as I’m sure you know – is a very clever detective, solves the mystery immediately, because he notices that on the night of the disappearance the dog that lives in the stable doesn’t bark. Listen—’ He found the place. ‘The racehorse owner asks what’s on his mind, and Holmes replies:
“… The curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.”’
Fred looked up triumphantly. ‘What does that tell you, Annie?’
‘I dunno.’ What was he on about?
‘Think!’ His voice had dropped to a whisper. ‘Nana was in her kennel, wasn’t she? If Miss Blessing was in our yard outside the cellar, Nana would have heard her.’
I hadn’t thought of this. Nana had become an excellent guard dog since being banished from the house. She barked at the dogs down in the street, the cats on the neighbours’ walls and everyone who came to the back door. A familiar sense of unease started to well up from my stomach. If Nana hadn’t barked, maybe I had imagined it after all. ‘So what are you saying?’ I hissed. ‘You think she wasn’t here? That I’m making it up?’ I felt I might faint if not even my own brother could believe it.
‘You might be making it up,’ said Fred lightly. ‘But there’s also another explanation.’ He laid his hand on my arm for a moment. ‘Listen. In the story, Sherlock Holmes realises that the person who stole the racehorse must be someone the dog knew, because it didn’t bark when the thief entered the stable.’
I thought about my night in the kennel when Nana didn’t bark at the burglar. ‘So?’
Nana, hearing her name, had wandered over to Fred and stood listening with her head on one side. ‘So Nana must know whoever was in our yard. The person must have been here other times, too. Eh, Nana? Isn’t that right, old girl?’
‘But she doesn’t. She hasn’t! Miss Blessing’s never been here. Why would she be in our yard at all, Fred? That’s what I can’t understand.’ Then even as I said this, I remembered how when we met Mildred Blessing and her sister near the Arboretum that time, Nana had gone up to her, wagging her tail almost as if they were old friends. That was the thing I was trying to recall afterwards, the odd thing about our meeting. I reached out and stroked one of her floppy ears. Nana knew everything: the dog that didn’t bark in the night.
But comforting as it was to know that Fred took my strange vision seriously, this did little to get rid of the Dread. I felt I was in a small dark box. Everywhere I turned, there was silence and nothing. If I cried out, my voice came back to me in a whisper. Lying in bed at night, I tried to tell my real mother about it, but I couldn’t get near her. Heaven was just too far away and smothered in foggy clouds, like the sausages of cotton wool in the top of the milk of magnesia tablets. So instead I began to make up stories about things that were going to happen to Miss Higgs, as I had gone back to calling her. They were terrible things. At first, they were about witches and evil demons dragging her into the burning fiery furnace like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. But that didn’t work because, of course, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego didn’t burn in the furnace on account of being delivered by Our Lord; Miss Higgs was a very devout Christian so presumably He would deliver her, too. Next, my mind turned towards things that were more practical, like putting glass in her dumplings, so she wouldn’t realise it until the dumplings were digested and the glass ripped up her insides. Or I read that you could kill people by dropping ball bearings on a staircase and the person would tumble down to the bottom and die. We didn’t have any ball bearings, except in my skipping rope, but we did have silver balls that Maisie used for decorating the Christmas cake, and in
my mind it would be the perfect crime because the silver balls could have fallen by accident. Why, if you timed it right, you could even eat the murder weapon afterwards! I tried taking a couple of silver balls out into the yard and treading on them experimentally, but they squished under my boots so that was no good. Next I considered turning on the gas taps and then leaving her alone in the kitchen, but when I tried it on the quiet, the gas came out with a sinister popping hiss and the reek of it was so strong that I knew she’d smell it before it did her any harm. So after considering all these things darkly in my heart at night, I decided the only thing would be for me to expose her in her True Colours and I began to watch, and to plot, how this might be achieved.
Days passed, and Miss Higgs did nothing. She must have been minding her Ps and Qs. We circled around each other politely. She even tested me on my G. K. Chesterton without making any reference to the fact that he was a ‘Papist’, which is what she had said last year. However, this display of good behaviour on all sides made me feel no better, and again the box enclosed me. One night after supper when Beatrice and I were knitting blanket squares for Auntie Francie’s mission in Tai Yuan-Fu, I could bear it no longer.
‘Beatrice,’ I said. ‘D’you think Mother is really Saved?’
Beatrice replied that yes of course she was, because she had had the total immersion and entered into His kingdom.
I said darkly, ‘I don’t think Jesus would have done what Miss Higgs did.’
‘Mother,’ Beatrice corrected.
‘She’s not our mother. I’m going to call her Miss Higgs from now on.’
‘She is our father’s wife, Annie. We call her Mother.’
We knitted in silence for a few minutes. ‘Anyway,’ I went on. ‘I don’t think Jesus would have done it. It was a cruel thing to shut a child in the cellar.’
Beatrice looked up sharply over her spectacles. ‘What have I told you about the S-P?’ She reached across to jab me in the ribs with her knitting needle, but I dodged.
‘I don’t care,’ I retorted. ‘I’m just saying the truth.’
‘Well we know the truth now, so you don’t need to go on about it.’
‘You still don’t believe it happened, do you?’
‘I do if you say so.’
This was not good enough. If I couldn’t even make Beatrice see the truth, how was I to open the eyes of Daddy and The World? I cast around desperately for something to say that would convince my sister. I needed bruises. I needed scars. I needed proof. When Beatrice went for more wool, I stabbed myself experimentally with the knitting needle, but I was too scared to do it properly. I ought to have hurled myself down the cellar steps to the bottom and been discovered half dead next morning by Nana, briefly allowed into the house to search for me. Nana could have saved me, condemned Miss Higgs and won her way back into the household at a stroke. I realised I had missed an opportunity.
But then I remembered there was still something I hadn’t told Beatrice. Sticking my needles into the blanket squares and letting them fall to the floor, I began to explain what I’d seen through the grille at the cellar head, finishing with the blue shoes of Miss Mildred Blessing. I knew this was a detail too ludicrous to make her believe in the rest of it, but the suffocating feeling was rising up inside me demanding to be let out. As I finished, I shrank away from my sister and examined the white bits in my thumbnails, waiting for the torrent of derision that must surely follow. But there was silence. After a few moments I raised my head and looked at her.
Beatrice was sitting with her needles in mid-air staring at me fixedly. She had gone as white as a sheet and I saw that at last, and for the first time, I had her full attention. Laying the knitting aside, she breathed, ‘Who have you told about this?’
‘No one.’ I shook my head. ‘I’ve told nobody.’
‘You said nothing to Daddy?’
‘I told him about being late from Goose Fair and tried to explain it wasn’t my fault, and why.’
‘Did you tell him about the cellar?’
‘No. He didn’t want to hear any of it anyway. He wasn’t interested.’
‘You said nothing about Miss Blessing?’
‘Of course not! Miss Blessing in our back yard in the middle of the night? – I could scarcely believe it myself, Bea. I thought maybe I dreamed it, but I didn’t. I didn’t.’
‘Shut up!’ Beatrice leaned forward and put her fingers on my mouth. ‘I never said you did.’ She was silent again. Then, in a little voice I barely recognised as hers, ‘Annie, I’m scared.’
I was so surprised by this, I didn’t know what to say. ‘Why?’ I asked.
Beatrice said nothing. She was suddenly looking at her knitting very carefully. ‘I don’t know.’ After a moment, I saw a large tear drop on to her clenched hands. She wiped it away. ‘Annie,’ she whispered fiercely. ‘You’re to tell no one about this.’
‘About Miss Blessing, you mean?’
‘Don’t even say her name in this house, not to Mother, or Daddy or anyone.’
‘Why not?’
‘Or Marjorie Bagshaw. You didn’t tell her, did you?’
‘She’s no idea who Miss Blessing is. I didn’t tell her anything.’
‘Well, don’t.’
I shook my head. But I was still waiting for an explanation. When none came, I asked, ‘Miss Blessing’s not a bad person, Bea, is she? She’s our teacher!’
‘I’m not saying she’s bad. We’ve just got to not talk about her. I mean it, Annie.’ She looked at me fiercely.
‘All right. But I wish you’d tell me why.’
‘I can’t. It’s a secret. Well, I don’t know really. I just know we mustn’t.’
A sudden thought popped out before I could stop it. ‘It’s nothing to do with Roebuck’s Biscuits being in trouble, is it?’
Beatrice looked at me with her what-on-earth-are-you-on-about face. ‘Why ever would it be?’
‘Dunno.’ I shrugged. I didn’t know why I’d said it. ‘Except that’s a secret too, isn’t it? We’re not supposed to know that’s why Daddy has to keep coming home so late.’
Bea’s face relaxed. She wiped her tears. ‘Yes, that’s a secret, too. But I promise you …’ She stared hard at me again. ‘There is absolutely no connection between Roebuck’s Biscuits and Miss Blessing. D’you understand?’
I said I did, but I didn’t. What on earth was the secret, then, about Miss Mildred Blessing?
TWELVE
1932
Thursday, June 9
Just over a week after my return from France, I’m walking through the iron gates of Mapperley Hospital, past a sort of cottage, which is the gatehouse where I give my name to a person in uniform, and up a wide driveway towards a large Victorian gothic red-brick building. I’m clutching a paper bag full of grapes, which is already going soggy. The main building has three floors and there’s a tower, four storeys with a steep roof and a turret higher still, topped by four small pillars. It ought to have bells in it, and I wonder if it has. I’m doing this, counting the storeys and the pillars, to take my mind off what’s ahead. I have been approved by Sister Bellamy, who seems to be a very important person, and at last I’m going to see Fred. Maisie (who knows everything) told me who to write to, and almost by return a note came back informing me that if I attended between half-past one and two-fifteen any weekday, I would be able to visit him. But will Fred want to see me? The fact he won’t see Daddy suggests his mind is very disturbed. Mother has kept me on a tight rein of sewing circle and sick-visiting, but here I am at last: eight whole days since I got home. With so many questions to which I need answers, this delay is hugely annoying.
I reach the front door, which is under an arch, and ring the bell, a long lever with a handle that sets off a jangling somewhere inside. After a minute, the door is opened by a nurse in a cream uniform and a complicated cap. She looks at me expectantly and I hand her Sister Bellamy’s note.
She stands back and I edge past her solid apron into a wi
de hall with maroon and grey tiles and stained glass. There’s a large fireplace with a polished copper jug standing in the hearth.
‘Wait here,’ instructs the nurse. She wheels around with a jangle of keys and sails away, holding the precious note before her: the note that opens doors.
The hall is cool. Well, no, it isn’t cool; there’s a creeping chill despite the summer sun outside. Somewhere in the interior, a bell rings. I become aware of a distant clatter of knives and forks and the mixed smells of cauliflower and carbolic. Five minutes pass; it seems like an hour. I nibble a grape and rub at the goosebumps on my arms. A cleaner comes through the hall. She’s wearing a shapeless grey smock and carries a mop and bucket.
‘Yer all right, duck?’ she asks. ‘Did you get to Goose Fair?’
‘Not yet,’ I say, laughing. ‘It’s in November, isn’t it?’
‘Aye, but it was, though.’ She shakes her head. ‘And them meat pies. I haven’t been since 1919, of course. Too busy, you see, in here. Me mam threw me out for it. But I were a good girl really.’
I look at her again, a small woman with bright brown eyes. She could be thirty-nine? Fifty? I’m no good at ages.
‘Said he’d only just been discharged from the army. Never clapped eyes on him since,’ she says. ‘Have you?’
I wonder if they’ve forgotten me and am on the point of asking her if she knows Sister Bellamy, but there’s something … Anyway, at that point the nurse returns. ‘Run along, Carrington. Don’t go bothering the visitors.’ Then, turning to me, ‘You may follow me now.’
She flaps off down a long corridor, cap bobbing dangerously on the back of her head and her formidable apron creaking in the draught. I can barely keep up. We turn down two side corridors, past a poor soul in a grey shift like Carrington’s, on her knees silently polishing the tiles. ‘Let you loose with the jumbo, did they, Bennett?’ the nurse calls to her as we swish past. I’m wondering if I’ll ever find my way out, when she turns abruptly up a flight of stairs and pauses at a brown-panelled door at the top. Deep in the bowels of the building, another bell rings.