by Rachel Hore
‘Goodbye, Stephen,’ Isabel said. ‘Come and see us. Please do come.’
Stephen merely nodded. He seems sad, Isabel thought as she followed Jacqueline’s angry figure. When she looked over her shoulder for one last sight of him, he was still standing watching her, turning his cigarette packet in his hands.
‘Did you enjoy yourselves?’ Hugh asked later, coming into the breakfast room where afternoon tea was laid out.
‘Yes, we did,’ Isabel said firmly, glancing at Jacqueline, who was making goldfish faces at Lorna in the high chair as she fed her gloop from a bowl.
‘Lorna had a lovely paddle, didn’t you, precious?’ was all Jacqueline said.
‘Jolly good.’ Hugh smiled at Lorna, sat down and started to pile up a tea plate with sandwiches and cake.
‘We saw Stephen McKinnon,’ Isabel said, sipping her tea. Jacqueline shot her a look of dislike, which gave Isabel a sense of satisfaction. They’d hardly spoken on the drive home. Jacqueline was furious at Isabel’s disappearance and Isabel was cross at being humiliated in front of Stephen. There was something else swirling around, too, something darker that neither of them could even begin to broach.
‘Did you now?’ Hugh said mildly, taking a bite out of a scone. He could be impossible to read, Isabel thought with annoyance.
‘He was staying in Reginald’s chalet,’ she said.
‘Oh really? Did you tell him I’d finished the book?’
‘No.’ She felt angry with him, for reasons too numerous to mention.
Hugh looked surprised. ‘Well, what did you talk about then?’
‘Just general matters.’ She didn’t want Jacqueline to hear about Penelope and Berec and everyone. On a wicked impulse she added, ‘I didn’t know you knew Stephen, Jacqueline. Apart from meeting him at the wedding, I mean.’
‘I don’t know what he was implying . . .’ Jacqueline started to say.
The door opened and Hugh’s mother came in.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘the travellers return. Jacqueline, dear, I think you’ve caught a touch of the sun.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Berec?’ Isabel asked Hugh later, viewing him in the dressing-table mirror as she brushed her hair. He was already in bed, reading. ‘He’s in prison. That’s simply dreadful.’
‘Oh, Stephen let that cat out of the bag, I suppose,’ Hugh said, pencilling a note in the margin of his book. ‘I wish he hadn’t.’
‘Hugh, I needed to know,’ she said, putting down the brush. She studied her reflection, her face drawn and thin, the dark shadows under her eyes exacerbated by the poor light. ‘He was my friend. Is my friend,’ she amended.
‘It’s all exceptionally sordid. I don’t like the idea of you knowing about that sort of thing.’
‘I shouldn’t worry, I’m pretty ignorant. What I do know is that Berec is a good person. He helped me and I want to help him.’
‘Well, you can’t. He’s beyond anyone’s help. That type have to face the consequences of their actions.’
Isabel was astonished. She hadn’t known he held such strong views on the subject. ‘That’s harsh, don’t you think?’ she gasped.
‘I don’t feel it is. Now can we leave this unpleasant subject.’ He sounded quite angry, and Isabel’s eyes prickled with tears. She hadn’t stopped thinking about Berec since she heard the news of his arrest, and Hugh was dismissing him as if he didn’t matter. She wondered where he was in prison and whether it was possible to visit him, but she had no concept of how to find out. The whole thing was like another world to her. Anyway, if she did try to visit Berec, Hugh, obviously, would be furious. Probably try to stop her. What should she do?
In the end she pursued the obvious path and telephoned Penelope, to discover that Berec was in Wormwood Scrubs prison in West London. Penelope told her that she had been to see him and found him outwardly cheerful, but thin and hollow-eyed, which worried her. After thinking about it for a day or two, Isabel packed up a parcel of essentials and sent it to him with a newsy letter. She hoped he received it safely for she didn’t hear back.
By the end of October 1952, Hugh had finished the revisions to his novel and typed it up. The top copy he sent to his agent, Digby Lane, the carbon he kept.
Isabel again offered to read it.
‘All in good time,’ Hugh replied. ‘I want to know what Lane and McKinnon think about it first.’ He did not sound enthusiastic and for a while Isabel did not ask again.
He went up to London for a few days and when he came back he brought with him a bottle of particularly good wine and wore an expression of smugness, Isabel knew before he said anything that the news was good.
‘Lane is worried that one of the saucier scenes will attract the attention of the Lord Chancellor’s Office, but more importantly, the words “work of genius” have been mentioned,’ he told them all proudly when his mother enquired at dinner if there had been a response. ‘If only in Stephen McKinnon’s reader’s report. We must wait and see what McKinnon has in his company piggy bank. I’ve told Lane he mustn’t take less than five hundred for it, but he doesn’t seem to think the money’s there. “Five hundred,” I said, “or you can take it to another publisher.”’
Isabel thought this was an extraordinarily ambitious sum of money but didn’t like to puncture the exuberant atmosphere by saying so. She drank a large mouthful of the very fine wine and looked down at her food, suddenly unable to eat.
After dinner she took one of her lonely walks in the dusk, past the donkeys and through the marshes to the estuary where she stood for a long time, watching the light disappear from the sky and listening to the cries of the birds. The tide was running now and the river swirled silently past, on to the sea as it always had.
And when she returned home and no one asked her where she’d been, she found some paper in Hugh’s study and crept upstairs like a ghost. There she sat on the bed and started to write. Her thoughts tumbled out on the page.
I feel that I’m fading, becoming transparent – that soon I’ll disappear altogether. In the circle of light from her bedside lamp, her hand moved across the paper. Once she began, she found it impossible to stop. She covered one page then another and another. Only when she heard someone coming up the stairs did she put down her pen and hide the pages in the bedside drawer. Across the landing, she heard the distinctive creak of the nursery door. It must only be Jacqueline looking in on Lorna.
She felt sleepy now. It seemed too much effort to get out of bed to go downstairs and say goodnight to the others. Too much effort even to get up and close the curtains. She took off most of her clothes in bed and snuggled down under the bedclothes, curling up in the warm space she’d made. And there she fell asleep.
She woke briefly when Hugh came to bed, and was aware of the odd disparate noises he made, moving about the room, but the next time she wakened, the room was dark and she was cold without her nightdress. She shuffled herself towards Hugh, for warmth, and realised with surprise that he wasn’t there. She gathered the bedclothes about herself and waited, but it was a long time before he returned.
‘Are you all right?’ she whispered when he got into bed. His heart was racing away and he seemed a little agitated.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I went to the bathroom, then I heard Mother call out. Her breathing was a bit laboured so I fetched her a glass of water.’
‘Is she better now?’
‘Yes, she took something. I’m sorry to wake you.’
‘As long as she’s all right.’ ‘Yes. Go to sleep now.’
He settled down and turning his back on her, seemed to fall asleep at once, but she lay there for some time, staring into the darkness, unable to dispel the sense that something was wrong.
The following morning, Hugh’s mother sent down word that she’d like her breakfast delivered on a tray. Isabel told Mrs Catchpole that she’d take it up.
When she entered it was to find the old lady sitting up in bed, breathing strenuously. Later the doctor came and pre
scribed ephedrine. Her condition improved over the next few days and everyone relaxed once more.
As Isabel suspected, Stephen McKinnon could not or would not raise an advance of anywhere near £ 500 for Hugh’s novel, no matter how highly he rated it. But the sum promised, £ 200, was twice as much as for Coming Home, and McKinnon wrote him such a complimentary letter that Hugh seemed to forget his threat to go elsewhere. Or perhaps the rival publisher had seen the book and not liked it, or not liked the price, Hugh didn’t choose to explain. Three weeks later, he returned from London one day to announce that McKinnon & Holt would publish The Silent Tide in the spring.
The new man, Richard Snow, wants me to make a few adjustments,’ he told Isabel, when she ventured that she hoped she could read it soon. ‘Very small things. Let me do those first.’
During November, he shut himself in his study and worked on the manuscript every day.
Unknown to him, upstairs, Isabel wrote too. Page after page she stowed in her bedside drawer. She wrote about everything – her family, her move to London, the people she’d met. All of it poured out of her with freshness and passion.
Chapter 32
Emily
She’d reached the final page now and Isabel’s voice, which had seemed to fill the room, fell silent. Again the story had stopped abruptly and Emily felt disappointment that there was no more. She shuffled the delicate pages together and laid them with the others, some still in their envelopes, on the dishevelled pile on the coffee table.
Arms round her knees, she sat in the pool of light from her table lamp, absorbed in the world of a woman sixty years ago. How fresh and full of hope Isabel had once been, a life of promise spread out before her, and how her bright flame had dwindled. Emily was still not sure what exactly had happened to Isabel in the end, nor how to find out. If she could only discover where these fragments of manuscript came from, then perhaps the mystery would be solved. She’d thought about this a lot. It was probable that they were from some source within the Parchment building, but where? Someone employed at the archives, perhaps, in Gloucestershire? But who there could possibly have an interest in Hugh Morton or even have known that Emily was the editor responsible for the biography? Perhaps the very fact she’d asked for the files had alerted someone. She mulled over that idea. No, the copy of Coming Home had been left in her pigeonhole before her request to the archives. There had to be a different answer.
She considered ways she could advertise for the mysterious person to get in touch, but all the ones she could think of – emails to the whole office, or notices in the lift – had drawbacks. They’d have everyone thinking she was odd, paranoid. Perhaps the thing to do was to play along and see what happened next. Surely at some point the person would reveal themselves.
She picked up her mobile, smiled briefly at a cheerful text message from Megan, and switched off the table lamp. The rest of her living room came drearily into focus. Dirty supper plate on the table. Her office bag, still containing unread scripts, lying by the door. Tomorrow’s problems. She sighed, and taking the plate to the sink, dropped it into the washing-up water and watched it sink to the bottom. She was still in this thoughtful mood when she climbed into bed. She dreamed of diving into deep black water and trying to fight her way to the surface again, her lungs bursting for breath.
Days passed and there were no more mysterious packages. On Sunday, she gave Joel a copy of the latest instalment when they went back to his after lunch with friends in a local restaurant.
Thanks, I’ll have a look,’ he said, putting it down on his desk with hardly a glance. He brought mugs of tea across and sat next to her on the sofa.
Thanks. So what did you think of the last part I gave you? Did you read it?’ she enquired.
‘Of course I did. It backs up my own discoveries,’ he told her. ‘Isabel was unstable mentally. That must be why the marriage ultimately went wrong.’
This puzzled Emily. ‘Unstable? I don’t see that. She was probably depressed. It happened to my sister after Harry. Everyone was worried until the doctor got on to it.’
‘All those hormones sloshing around,’ Joel said, his eyes twinkling. ‘Poor Hugh must have felt at his wits’ end.’
‘Don’t be contemptuous,’ she said. ‘Anyway, in Isabel’s case I think it was more than that. She found herself in a role she couldn’t play.’
He considered this carefully. ‘That role thing must have happened to lots of women then. It was part of the culture. Don’t you think most just made the best of it?’
‘That doesn’t sound very sympathetic.’
‘I’m totally sympathetic. I suppose as his biographer I’m trying to look at the matter from Hugh’s point of view. He must have felt trapped in a situation way beyond his experience. The doctor didn’t seem much use. Jacqueline and Hugh’s mother seemed fairly helpless, too. What could he have done? That’s how things were then.’
‘I see what you mean.’ Emily was thinking how alone Isabel must have felt. She’d been so young, so lacking in advice or any perspective, her own mother struggling with health problems, her mother-in-law rigid and judgemental. ‘So you wouldn’t examine the marriage more – shall we say objectively – in your book?’
She sensed Joel’s discomfort. He got up and started to pace around. ‘I feel I have done,’ he said. ‘I don’t think that you’re being unbiased yourself, Emily. You seem set on turning Hugh into the villain of the piece.’
‘No, really. I understand that Hugh was a man of his times.’
‘Exactly – that’s how people like him thought then. You can’t blame them for that, can you?’
‘He was quite selfish.’
‘Perhaps we should blame his mother for that.’ Joel smiled. ‘She was awful, wasn’t she? No, what I meant was that you can still tell Isabel’s story.’
He sighed. ‘Where it’s relevant, yes, and where I’ve got sufficient evidence. That ragbag of a memoir is not reliable, especially since it was written when Isabel was depressed. And I’m certainly not going to run some present-day feminist viewpoint on the matter.’
‘Joel, you know that’s not what I mean.’ Emily stood up and went to the window, trying to hide her frustration. There was an injustice to be righted here. Isabel’s story was not generally known and it had become increasingly obvious to her that Jacqueline Morton and Joel were happy to keep it that way.
Joel said, ‘Of course I’ll read all the new stuff you’ve given me. And take a judgement . But it’s me writing this book and I’ve got to follow the way I think best.’ There was a sharpness to his tone and she sensed she was offending his pride.
‘Of course,’ she said wearily, turning to face him. ‘I don’t mean to interfere, but . . .’
‘But what?’
‘I don’t know.’ He was right about it being his book, but she was his editor . She felt justified in giving him advice and she did genuinely feel that Isabel deserved a prominent part in Joel’s biography. But it was more than that.
The quest for Isabel had become a personal mission of hers and Joel seemed to be standing in her way; their whole relationship was becoming a battleground in this struggle. What was she to do? She looked out of the window In the street below, a young man was crouching to soothe a screaming toddler, struggling to get out of its pushchair.
She felt Joel move behind her, his arms enfolding her waist, drawing her back into the room. He nuzzled her neck and she shivered with desire. ‘Let’s not quarrel any more ,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘It’s not worth it.’
‘I’m not quarrelling,’ she murmured, turning in his arms and raising her face to his. ‘I’m arguing. That’s different. Arguing can be good.’ It’s silence that is bad. Who had said that to her? As Joel bent to kiss her mouth, she gave herself up to the very delicious feelings running through her body, but when his hands began to move over her breasts through her delicate cashmere top, arousing her, she suddenly remembered. It was Matthew.
‘Shall we . . . ?’ J
oel’s breath was hot in her ear.
‘Mmm . . .’ she said, closing her eyes, her body arching towards him. Their mouths met in a deep searching kiss that banished all thought but of the here and now as he lifted her up and carried her to the bedroom.
On the bus home that evening she wondered why, despite the thrill of their love-making, she felt so at odds with herself. It was months since she’d broken up with Matthew and here was Joel, who she was so attracted to, was free to be with and wanted to be with. And yet memories kept getting in the way. Matthew. What if she never got over him, could never love anyone else as much ever again? It didn’t bear thinking about.
The argument that she’d had with Joel about Isabel bothered her, too. She didn’t know Joel very well, yet couldn’t feel sure of him. She wondered what his feelings were for her, apart from the obvious physical attraction, that is. He seemed so self-contained, even in his love-making, never whispered her name . . . Oh, it was all so confusing.
She was still distracted by all this when she arrived at work the following day, but when she found another tranche of Isabel’s story lying in her pigeonhole she snatched it up eagerly. At lunchtime, with the office quiet, she read it as she ate her sandwich, quickly absorbed by Isabel’s world.
Chapter 33
Isabel
One morning at the beginning of December 1952, Hugh left for London, giving Jacqueline a lift. He was going for professional reasons he said, and would stay several nights in Kensington. Jacqueline would stay one night only, to check on her house and do some Christmas shopping. Later the same day, Isabel opened the front door to a young man with a telegram for Jacqueline.
‘Mrs Wood isn’t here at the moment, but I’ll let her know,’ she told him. She telephoned Jacqueline’s London house several times during the course of the day, but there was never any answer.