by Ros Franey
EIGHTEEN
1926
On the day the abductor was caught, the news was all around school like a wind.
‘Did you hear?’
‘They took him to the police station in a Black Maria.’
‘He was wearing a mackintosh.’
‘He had a limp.’
‘Ivy in the kitchens saw it.’
‘She never, but her husband’s a policeman. He saw it.’
‘It must be true.’
Marjorie caught up with me in the playground at break. ‘They didn’t come for your dad, then?’
‘Of course not!’ I felt my face turn red and glared at her. ‘It’s not funny, Marjorie.’
‘I think it is! Had you rattled, didn’t I!’
‘You wouldn’t like it said about your father.’
Marjorie shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t bother me,’ she said, ‘’cos I’d know it wasn’t true.’ She threw me a dark look.
‘I knew it wasn’t,’ I retorted.
She laughed. ‘Wouldn’t have mattered anyway,’ she said. ‘My dad could have saved your dad.’
‘What d’you mean?’ I asked.
‘They’re ’Masons, stupid!’ She looked at me as if I was being exceedingly thick. ‘That’s what ’Masons do: they help each other.’
Her father wasn’t a policeman; he was something at the Players factory. I couldn’t see how that would help, but I didn’t want to talk about it any more, so I said nothing.
Besides, I was uncomfortably aware that for all I knew, ‘they’ might have come for Daddy; he hadn’t appeared at breakfast. I hurried home after school and was relieved to find the house seemed reassuringly normal.
‘Have you seen Daddy today?’ I asked Maisie, trying to keep my voice casual.
‘No, duckie, he went to Derby with Mr Gibson, your mother said.’
And I had to be content with that.
Feeling listless, with the butterflies again, which I didn’t know why I should be feeling them, I wandered into the front room and sat down at the piano. From my seat on the piano stool I could see our front path, and as I practised the Chopin prelude I was learning, I found myself sneaking a look for the paperboy, who was surely late today.
Mother put her head around the door. ‘Annie, have you taken Nana out yet?’
‘No, Mother.’
‘Well don’t leave it too late, will you?’
‘I’ll go when I’ve finished this,’ I promised (and once the Evening Post arrives, I added silently). No sooner had she left the room than the familiar squeak of the front gate announced that here it was. When I sensed the coast was clear I darted out into the hall, scooped it off the mat and retreated to the front room again.
The story was not on page one, which surprised me given its importance all around our school, but a large headline on page three announced, ‘Man Arrested in Missing Girls Mystery’. Four young women, it said, had been
discovered last evening at a house in the Meadow Lane area and a 47-year-old man arrested at the address. The girls, whose names have been withheld at the request of their families, are said to be recovering at the City Hospital where they are undergoing medical tests. One of them has been missing for two-and-a-half years, another for 14 months; these two were thought to have been kept in Beeston for some time. The remaining two were taken more recently. Their eager families are expecting them home as soon as doctors are satisfied they are fit to leave hospital. The man is helping police with their inquiries, but at the time of going to press no one has been charged …
Well that ruled out anyone in my family, then. We lived nowhere near the Meadows, which I always thought sounded lovely but the others said was a foggy slum near the River Trent. Anyway, if Daddy was at the police station then he couldn’t have gone to Derby with Mr Gibson, could he? I felt better – or thought I would very soon. I was sure one of the released young women must turn out to be Miss Blessing. That would be wonderful news indeed! Feeling rather smug at knowing something not revealed to the general public, I played the Chopin prelude once more for luck, picked up my coat and went to collect Nana from the yard.
When I returned from our walk, I was relieved to see Daddy’s coat and hat hanging on the hall stand. Well, of course he was home. Why on earth would he not be? I went upstairs to wash my hands and tidy my hair. At tea, I waited for an opportunity to find out more, though the arrest of a man for kidnap and abduction was not the kind of subject generally discussed around our family tea table. First, I asked Beatrice if she had read the paper that evening. She looked at me oddly.
‘No,’ she said, screwing up her face in an are-you-mad? sort of way. ‘Why, should I?’
‘Everyone in our class was talking about those girls today,’ I said. ‘You know, the ones who disappeared.’
Mother looked up sharply. Beatrice bit her lip.
‘We’ll have no tittle-tattle around this table,’ Daddy cautioned. I looked at him.
‘But Daddy, it’s good news, they’ve found them!’ I thought it would be all right if the news was good. ‘They’re going home to their families soon.’
‘Of course they’re going home,’ said Mother. ‘As I’ve kept saying ever since the first girl was taken, I’ve always known where they were – safe in the arms of Jesus. I never had any doubts’
Beatrice threw me a scornful look: Trust you to pick up fag ends, it said.
This annoyed me so much, Mother’s smugness and Beatrice’s scorn, that I couldn’t help myself: I looked from Mother to Daddy. ‘D’you think Miss Blessing could be one of them? Do you know if she’s safe?’
Mother turned pale. Beatrice’s head jerked up, as if she’d seen a ghost. Daddy went icy still, his blue eyes drilling into me. Then he threw back his chair, its legs screeching on the floor. ‘Didn’t you hear me, Annie? We won’t discuss it.’ I had never heard this voice before. I thought he might come round the table and hit me. There was an awful silence.
Then Mother said, ‘More tea, Harry? Pass your cup.’ And Daddy’s eyes flicked away from me. He drew his chair back in to the table and pushed his cup and saucer across to Mother. I watched as she filled it with thick brown tea and then went slowly back to my egg. No one spoke. Then Daddy looked over at Beatrice and grinned. ‘Good weather for the Robin Hood trail tomorrow,’ he said. I daren’t catch Bea’s eye. We finished tea in silence.
When it was over, I ran upstairs. I didn’t want to speak to anyone, but Beatrice was at my heels muttering, How many times have I told you? I was in tears, and shaking, as she pushed me into my bedroom and shut the door carefully behind us both.
‘But how am I to know what I’m not supposed to say if no one’s told me why?’ I gasped between sobs.
‘I’ve told you never to utter the name of Mildred Blessing in this house. I’ve told you that.’
‘But he himself talked about her after I’d seen them in the street!’
‘That was then.’
‘Well why not now? What’s happened, Bea?’
That was when my all-knowing wise sister collapsed on to my bed in tears. ‘I don’t know, Annie. I don’t know. I just know we mustn’t.’ We clung to each other. Beatrice crammed the eiderdown into her mouth to stifle her own sobs. For a moment, I felt it was me who had to take care of her, but after a while, she quietened and sat up. ‘I must go downstairs. Stay here: do your homework. Just keep out of their way tonight.’
*
This was typical of rows in our family: people may get punished or sent to bed without supper, but if you tried to write down these rows, nothing would actually have been said. So the argument-that-never-was would be squashed under layers of whatever happened the next day, and the day after that, until it would be a tight, cold mass in the pit of your stomach and the middle of your brain that would never go away.
Over the next few days, I searched my family for clues. You had to become expert at this, or there would be no chance at all of discovering what on earth was going on, or how anyone felt
about it; but I was almost eleven now and good at spotting them. What I observed was as follows: Maisie returning the bottle of calcium lactate to its place on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard, so Mother must have been having one of her headaches; Daddy missing his Masonic evening and going off somewhere else in different clothes – highly unusual; Mother herself planting bulbs, pressing them down into the earth as if she were trying to put their eyes out; and Beatrice absent-mindedly singing grim hymns around the house, when it was not even Good Friday or anything:
O Sinner, lift the eye of faith
To true repentance turning:
Bethink thee of the curse of sin,
Its awful guilt discerning …
These dismal hymns depressed me more than I could say, because they also signified a drawing-back from my newfound closeness to my sister. And just as Beatrice had seemed to be standing up for herself and even defying the Mission – why, she had actually told a lie to get Miss Blessing’s address! – Mother suddenly announced on Beatrice’s fifteenth birthday that she would be baptised the following Summer. I think this was quite young to have the total immersion because you’re supposed to do it from a position of wisdom and stuff, but it must have been Mother’s idea of a special birthday treat. I felt sorry for Beatrice because it’s a bit of a disappointment, when you could be getting a visit to the ballet or a Fair Isle jumper, but Bea turned pink and lowered her eyes and looked quite holy, so I didn’t dare make a joke about it.
And later, when I ventured to tell her I thought it was a bit mean because she must have known she’d be baptised sooner or later, it became clear that Beatrice didn’t see it like that. She said she was happy because when you’re baptised it means you’ll be saved.
This confirmed some of the doubts I’d been having. ‘D’you mean that until I’ve had the total immersion I’ll go to hell?’
‘Well you will have it, won’t you,’ she reassured me. ‘So it won’t arise.’
‘But supposing I died tomorrow? I thought we were saved anyway because of the Mission and all the punishments and everything?’
Beatrice seemed hazy about this. I told her she’d better get it straight because I needed to know. ‘If that’s true,’ I went on, ‘do you have to go absolutely under the water, every bit of you, for it to count? I mean, supposing your finger doesn’t go under, does it mean your finger’s not saved?’
Beatrice frowned. She obviously thought this was irrelevant, so I shut up, but it was an unsettling thought. It would be like Elise and the Swans: Elise had to weave shirts out of stinging nettles in order to break her wicked stepmother’s spell and turn her brothers from wild swans back into human boys; but she didn’t have time to finish the final shirt, so her youngest brother, the one who took most care of her, always had a swan’s wing instead of one arm. Elise could make it better, but she couldn’t take away the evil completely.
A short while ago, when we were plotting to save Nana, we might have had a reasonable conversation about this, but that’s what I mean about Beatrice sort of closing down again. Now she was getting baptised, I realised miserably that I just could not expect to talk to my beloved sister about all this any longer. And the worst of it was that even though we had joined forces for those few brief weeks, we hadn’t saved Nana. With the mystery of Miss Blessing, we simply hadn’t had time to worry about our poor dog. Perhaps we had been lulled into a sense of false security because Mr Holley and his gun had not appeared. But the danger was just as real, and time was passing: we had failed to come up with a rescue plan, and at any moment we could lose her.
On the nights it felt safe enough to collect Nana from the kennel and stow her in her secret bed underneath my own, I took to sleeping on my tummy so I could reach down and cradle one of her ears. Sometimes I would wake in the morning still clutching it and, bless her, she never protested. I felt as if Nana and Little Sid were the only loyal people in my world, and I was getting too old to depend on Little Sid. Well, Beatrice was loyal too, of course (most of the time), and Fred when he was there.
After one of these nights I awoke in the dark as usual and sensed it must be time to return Nana to the yard. We crept downstairs, the same as all the many other mornings, and across the kitchen to the back door. I was just about to fit the key into the lock, feeling for the keyhole in the dark as I always did, when to my horror the lock slowly turned on the outside and the door swung open. I had to jump back to avoid it hitting me, but there was no possible chance of escape. Frozen to the floor I waited for the electric light to switch on, fearing it would be Mother again. But it was Maisie.
‘Lord save us!’ She clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘Annie, what on earth—’ Then she looked down and saw the dog. Nana wagged her tail uncertainly, then stopped. We all sensed the seriousness of this moment.
Maisie was the first to recover. She nodded slowly. ‘I knew it,’ she said. She held the door open. ‘Get that dog out of here, Annie, now.’
I gave Nana a little push and after looking up at me, as if wondering whether I needed protection, she trotted out.
Maisie shut the door. I stared at her. I couldn’t speak. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ she muttered. ‘As well you might.’ She glared back at me. I could tell she was angry. I had a sudden vision of what would happen now: Mother told. A punishment to end all punishments. And – worse than anything – Nana destroyed. This must be certain.
‘Maisie—’
‘Be quiet and listen.’
Maisie was breathing hard. She unbuttoned her coat and went to hang it carefully on a hook by the back door. Then she removed her hat, patted her hair, took down her pinny, placed its loops over her head and tied it deliberately behind her. Moving to the stove she picked up the kettle and filled it at the tap over the sink, placing it with a clang upon the burner and lighting the gas. I watched her, feeling faint. ‘Sit down, Annie,’ she instructed at last. ‘I need to talk to you.’ We moved into the breakfast room. She turned up the lamp and I sat numbly at the table, scraping the chair with a teeth-on-edge noise upon the tiles. She glanced anxiously at the clock and went to face me across the table. She remained standing.
‘There isn’t much time,’ she began. ‘So you’re not to interrupt. I’ll only say this once.’
I nodded.
‘I blame myself in a way, because of course I’ve known for months this has been going on. How did you think you could smuggle that dog upstairs night after night and not make a mess with her hairs under the bed? Elsie spotted it when she was cleaning. I went and checked. I didn’t know what to do. What makes me so angry, Annie, is that you put me in this impossible position with your stepmother. If I wasn’t going to tell her, I was living a lie.’
‘I’m so sorry, Maisie,’ I whispered. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘That’s what I told myself,’ she said. ‘You’re only a child. You weren’t to understand the consequences. And I also know other things that go on … well, never mind that. But I discussed it with Mr Brown at home. He’s a soft touch. He loves animals. I knew what he’d say. To be honest, I was more worried about what would happen to you if she ever found out.’ Maisie tailed off. We both knew who ‘she’ was. ‘But now—’
‘Maisie, please,’ I implored her.
‘I said you’re not to interrupt. And if you’re going to ask me to do nothing, Annie, then don’t. Because that’s not possible after …’ She spread her hands. ‘Not after this morning.’
I had been trying to stay calm, but at this the tears just started to run down my face. I tried to wipe them on the sleeve of my dressing gown. I was almost choking in an effort not to cry outright. Maisie watched me for a moment, then she took a clean handkerchief out of her pocket and handed it to me. Almost to herself, she said, ‘Bless you, duckie. You love that dog to pieces, don’t you.’
I couldn’t help it then. I put my arms on the table and howled. In between sobs, I told her, ‘Beatrice overheard something. Something about Mr Holley.’ I didn’t d
are mention the gun. ‘We’ve been trying to find Nana a new home. We wanted to save her. I took her down to Miss Blessing’s mother’s house in West Bridgford – she’s our Sunday School teacher – but that’s when I discovered they’d gone.’
‘They have, have they?’ Maisie looked grim at this news (did she know the Blessings, then? This was peculiar in itself). ‘Well that’s as maybe. But you can’t continue like this, Annie. I can’t, knowing what I know.’
‘But Mr Holley …’
Maisie paused and thought for a moment. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Dry your eyes. One thing to put your mind at rest: Reg Holley is an old friend of Mr Brown’s. He’s not a bad man, Annie. He just does odd jobs for your father. Mr Holley doesn’t have a telephone, so if anyone here wants to get a message to him, it goes through me. D’you understand?’ She paused, watching me as this sank in.
‘And had they asked you …?’
Maisie didn’t answer this. ‘So I’ve been talking it through with Mr Brown, and now this has happened I think we’ll have to stop talking and just do it.’
I looked up at her.
‘Nana is getting on Mrs Lang’s nerves, and heaven help her she’s got more than the dog to worry about now. I said to Mr Brown, the only way to solve this is for Nana to come to us.’
I gazed at her in amazement.
She went on, ‘I’ll take her with me when I leave on Monday nights and bring her back Saturday mornings. That way Mrs Lang doesn’t have to have Nana’s smelly old rug in the yard, but you can still see her at weekends. So Mr Holley doesn’t have to come into it, and she can live in our house and sleep in our kitchen weekday nights. She won’t have to live outside. How’s that?’