The Silent Tide

by Rachel Hore

  By evening, the telegram still sat ominous and unopened on the hall table, and Hugh’s mother fretted about what it might contain. ‘Suppose it’s news about Major Wood? One feels so responsible,’ she kept saying.

  Finally, Lavinia Morton tried ringing Hugh to ask what might be done. It wasn’t until late in the evening that he answered the phone. Isabel, who was passing through the hall on her way up to bed, heard her say, ‘Oh, do you? Yes, it might be as well.’ She replaced the receiver and told Isabel, ‘Hugh’s going round there straight away to try and find her.’

  The telephone rang only a short while later. Hugh’s mother answered. ‘Jacqueline, thank heavens you’ve called.’ From the drawing room, Isabel heard the clunk of the receiver being placed on the table and the older woman’s hoarse breathing as she fumbled the envelope open.

  ‘Oh!’ she said in tones of relief, then picked up the phone and told Jacqueline, ‘Thank God. He’s coming home, dear. I’m so glad. Extended leave stop. That’s all it is. Your husband is on his way back to England.’

  As Isabel lay in bed, waiting for sleep to come, the relief she’d heard in Lavinia’s voice echoed in her own mind. With her husband coming home, Jacqueline would presumably move back to London properly. The oppression Isabel felt with her presence would be gone. They could all get on with their own lives again.

  During the night, she surfaced from sleep to hear Lorna wailing softly. She waited a minute or two, but the crying subsided. As she lay trying to sleep again, she found her thoughts take a darker turn. It was as though a formless shadow of a nightmare swept over her, stifling all hope and happiness. For a while she could hardly breathe, but finally the shadow passed and she fell once more into a troubled sleep. When she was dragged out of it by her child’s more urgent cries, it was dawn, a pale and cold one.

  During the day, Jacqueline telephoned again to say that instead of returning that evening as planned, she was staying in London to wait for her husband. to meet you aid=" like movement

  Hugh wasn’t due home for another two days and he, too, rang that evening. He had a meeting with his editor, he told Isabel, some contacts to look up and a couple of Christmas parties to attend, if he could. The fog’s getting very bad here,’ he went on. ‘The traffic’s at a standstill. It’s very difficult to get anywhere.’

  It was early the following morning before everyone was up that Isabel was awakened by the ringing telephone. She grabbed the receiver, fuddled with sleep. It was Hugh.

  ‘Jacqueline’s just called,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I have bad news. There’s been an accident.’

  He went on to explain that Major Wood’s plane had landed at a military base in Norfolk late the night before, but that instead of waiting until morning, Michael Wood had insisted on being driven to London straight away. The car had run into thick fog in Central London and had driven off the road at Piccadilly and overturned. Major Wood was gravely injured and in hospital. The driver had died at the scene.

  Emily

  Sixty years later, Emily looked up from Isabel’s account and gazed out of the window. The accident must have happened just down the road from her offices. She glanced back at the pages. There weren’t many more but, as she read, she sensed she was coming closer to the dark heart of Isabel’s marriage. Isabel’s voice resounded in her head, passionate, urgent. She had written:

  Our little household was thrown into a subdued mood, not helped by the shroud of fog. Hugh telephoned again later and announced that he’d be staying up in London to be of assistance to Jacqueline, and although I knew he was right to do this, at the same time something in me cried to him to come home. The day inched past in freezing gloom. No one went out. We lit the fire in the living room, but the damp fog must have come down the chimney, for the flames were desultory and the fire smoked. Lorna played happily enough in her pen. Even Hugh’s mother agreed that the weather was too bad to put a baby outside.

  I tidied a bit upstairs and laid the table for lunch, all the time weighed down by this awful knowledge that there was nothing to be done but to sit with Hugh’s mother and Lorna, waiting for news. We tried not to mind a disgusting smell of burned chicken bones. All the upset had put Mrs Catchpole’s mind right off the soup and when it came it was only vegetable.

  At six o’clock that evening, I was pouring Hugh’s mother a glass of sherry when he telephoned at last. There was, however, little to say. Michael Wood had taken a serious blow to the head and the doctors were doing all they could.

  After Lorna had been put to bed, we sat down to the frugal supper Mrs Catchpole had left us and when I’d washed up we listened to a comedy on the wireless, but neither of us felt like laughing and the evening seemed never-ending. Hugh’s mother brooded, and I noticed her breathing, clearly audible in the silence. I sensed her frustration at our situation, the waiting and the worrying about poor Jacqueline, but we weren’t used to discussing feelings with each other, the two of us. I regret that I had never had an easy relationship with her, but her disapproval of me had always been strong. We can’t always help our feelings, but she wasn’t fair not to hide the fact that she cared more about Jacqueline than about me.

  ‘I’m sure it would be all right if you went to bed,’ I told her. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll hear any more news till the morning. Poor Jacqueline.’

  I might not have liked Jacqueline, but one would have to be a very hard person not to feel pity for her now.

  ‘Yes, indeed, poor Jacqueline,’ Hugh’s mother said in a strange low voice. ‘It ought to be her sitting here now, not you.’

  I was so shocked that for a time I was deprived of the power of speech, but a response didn’t seem required, for she continued, ‘They were made for one another, she and my son. You know, when they were quite small, when he was eight and she was only four, he told her he’d marry her.’ She chuckled at what she clearly thought was an endearing memory. ‘They saw a great deal of one another later, when Hugh was home for the holidays. There was a very nice group of young people here. But the war came and of course it spoiled everything – everything. I suppose I should hardly have been surprised when he met someone else. Hugh told you, I suppose, about Anne, the girl he loved who was killed in an air raid.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. I didn’t know anything more than those bare facts, but I wasn’t going to let her know that. Though because I’d read Coming Home, in a sort of way I did know – Anne, of course, being Diana in the novel.

  ‘He was very taken with Anne, who was a sweet girl in her way. But then, of course, poor Jacqueline was left out in the cold. After Anne was killed, Hugh had to return to his squadron, and in the meantime Jacqueline met Michael. I was never of the impression that she was very much in love with him, but he was undoubtedly suitable . . . And Michael was always fond of her, very fond.’ Hugh’s mother, I noticed, was already speaking of the poor man in the past tense.

  ‘So you see there was never a right time for Hugh and Jacqueline – and then, of course, he met you.’

  She said this with such a tone of accusation, it was like a cold blade passing through me. She was breathing very heavily now and I was frightened.

  ‘How can you say these things?’ I whispered.

  ‘You,’ she went on. ‘With your selfish ideas, your dereliction of duty.’

  ‘Stop it!’ I said. We glared at one another and her breath became more laboured.

  Eventually she said in a tight voice, quite choked, ‘Get me some water . . . and . . . my pills.’

  I was glad of the opportunity to leave the room, for I couldn’t bear her to see how terribly upset she’d made me. As I filled a glass at the kitchen tap, my hands shaking, I tried to make sense of all she’d told me, but it didn’t make sense, not quite. It was as though I saw a blurred picture that refused to come into focus.

  I remembered the evening I’d first met Jacqueline, at that party at the London flat, soon after Hugh had moved in there. Michael had been away then, and I’d been struck by how ded
icated Jacqueline had been to making the party a success, but also by how lightly Hugh had treated her. If Jacqueline did indeed adore my husband, as his mother seemed to be saying, then he had seemed completely unaware of the fact – or uncaringse McKinnon. A childhood promise. Surely no one would ever make anything of that? Could Jacqueline really have nursed a calf love all those years? It seemed unlikely, for she was a mature woman now, and yet there was no doubting her steady loyalty to him. And he, what did he feel about her? It was difficult to think straight.

  I returned to Hugh’s mother with the glass and realised that in my upset I’d forgotten the pills. ‘Where are they?’ I asked. She took a gulp of water and said, ‘Dressing table.’ I ran upstairs.

  At first I couldn’t see which ones she wanted, as there were so many powders and potions in the dressing-table drawers. There was, however, a small brown bottle standing on the table by her bed, and when I picked it up and unscrewed the top, I found it contained the yellowish tablets I’d often seen her take. These must be the ones.

  I returned to the drawing room to find her in quite some discomfort, and when I shook out the pills, she took two quickly and swallowed them, without looking closely at them. After that, she leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. When I asked her how she felt, she gestured that I should be silent.

  ‘Shall I call the doctor?’ I asked, but she shook her head.

  We sat together for quite some time until, to my relief, her breathing un sombecae presme calmer. Eventually I persuaded her to turn in for the night. In the bedroom, I placed the pills once again by her bed. She wouldn’t allow me to help her change into her nightgown, so I left her to manage as best she could and went downstairs to damp down the fire and lock the back door. Then I looked in on Lorna, who was sleeping peacefully. All this while, though, I was thinking over and over everything my mother-in-law had said. I wanted to dismiss it as the ramblings of a bitter woman with deluded ideas, but too much about her account struck me as plausible. I was beginning to see Jacqueline as a threat to my marriage.

  It was late now, but I was too agitated to sleep. So instead of going to my own room, I did something I’d never done before. I opened the door of Jacqueline’s room and switched on the light.

  The Magnolia room, which had been mine when I stayed here before our marriage, would have been more pleasant without the cold pink aura imparted by the wallpaper and the hangings, a colour delightful in the garden against the fresh green leaves and dark twisted wood of the tree in late spring, but less so in a bedroom, especially in the yellow glow of the ceiling light. The bed was neatly made up, and although Jacqueline had departed to London with a suitcase and a vanity case, she’d left behind copious marks of her presence: a lacy shawl around the back of a chair, a pile of her favourite ladies’ magazines under the bedside table.

  There was a dusting of talcum powder on the dressing table. I ran my finger through it and stirred up its faint, sweet aroma, Jacqueline’s scent. On the chest of drawers was a photograph of her and Michael on their wedding day. I picked it up and tilted it towards the light. She was looking directly at the camera with a slight smile on her face, a smile that, with the knowledge I now had, was sad. I should feel sorry for Jacqueline, I told myself. Life hadn’t turned out quite the way it should have done for her. A husband who was her second choice, and who, after several years of marriage, had given her no child of her own. And yet I couldn’t.

  She might not have me to meet younli McKinnonant it, but her presence here in this house, making up for my many failings, looking after my child, cast a pall over everything. And yet my husband and my mother-in-law seemed to collude in all this, couldn’t understand why I resented it. On the one hand I knew that this past year or so I wouldn’t have managed without Jacqueline, but I couldn’t find it in me to be grateful.

  As I made to leave the room, there came a noise from the landing, the sound of a door opening. Fearing I’d be found in the wrong room, I switched off the light and stood motionless, waiting. I could hear Hugh’s mother shuffling past, then the bathroom door opening and the mysterious sounds of water in the pipes. I dared not move in case she walked out suddenly and caught me, so I stayed, breathing in the scents of talc and old wood, and something else – an oily chemical smell, not unpleasant, in fact very familiar. My hand brushed against cloth; there was a dressing gown hung on the back of the door. The other scent was coming from this, but I couldn’t think what it was.

  After Hugh’s mother returned to her bedroom, I escaped to bed myself where I lay exhausted, trying to calm myself by cuddling Hugh’s pillow. There was that familiar aroma again. As I fell into sleep I realised what it was – the scent of my husband’s hair cream.

  It was after seven and still dark when Lorna woke me by calling out. I changed her nappy and took her downstairs while I warmed her milk, but as I passed the telephone it began to ring. It was Hugh, with the news that Jacqueline’s husband had survived the night.

  When at half past eight there was still silence from upstairs, I ventured up with a cup of tea to convey the news to Hugh’s mother.

  When I opened the door, I was shocked to find her lying on the floor in her nightgown, staring sightlessly, her body as cold and unyielding as marble.

  Shocked by this tragedy, sixty years later, Emily read on.

  Hugh had returned to Suffolk immediately, leaving Jacqueline to watch at her husband’s bedside. Just after lunch, hearing his car, Isabel went out to greet him, Lorna in her arms. She was shaken at the sight of his face, bloodless and exhausted, shocked. He put his hand briefly on her arm and ruffled Lorna’s fluffy head, but otherwise hardly registered either of them at all.

  ‘Where is she?’ he asked, looking up at the house, as though his mother’s face might be seen at one of the windows.

  ‘Oh Hugh, they’ve taken her already,’ Isabel whispered. An ambulance had visited a short while before and Hugh’s mother had been removed on a stretcher covered by a sheet. ‘Doctor Bridges is away and it was a new man who came. I’m afraid he wouldn’t sign the certificate. Hugh, there’s to be a post-mortem.’

  He closed his eyes briefly as he registered this news. ‘Tell me – tell me exactly what happened,’ he said, his gaze now focused on her, penetrating, urgent. Lorna moaned and wriggled in Isabel’s arms, and Isabel hushed her.

  ‘Let’s go in first. She’s due for her nap.’ They went into the house to be met by a tearful Mrs Catchpole, murmuring words of sympathy. Isabel got rid of her by passing her the baby.

  In the drawing room, Hugh paced the carpet as Isabel, as calmly as she could, narrated the events of the previous night: Hugh’s mother’s struggle with asthma, the giving of the pills, how she’d found the woman that morning. She carefully left out all mention of the subject of their conversation, of where she’d been when she heard her mother-in-law visiting the bathroom.

  ‘The other doctor asked to see the pill bottle and I gave it to him. They were her usual ones, I think – the ephe-drine .’ She explained about the cautious way the man had reacted, the questions that had followed. ‘He asked if she was known to have heart problems and, Hugh, I didn’t know. She never said anything.’

  ‘You gave her some pills and you weren’t sure what they were?’

  ‘I was. It’s just the label on the bottle was blurred.’ She was surprised at his sudden anger and the way he twisted her words.

  ‘Why didn’t you ring the doctor last night or try to get her to hospital?’

  ‘Hugh, don’t be like that. Her condition improved after she’d taken them and she didn’t want the doctor. There seemed no need. Obviously I was wrong.’

  ‘She took all sorts of rubbish. Are you absolutely sure you gave her the right ones?’

  ‘I think so, yes. The doctor didn’t say. Anyway, the pills might not have anything to do with it. Oh, Hugh, you don’t think they might?’ She was horrified by the brusqueness of his tone, the accusation in his face, unable to find any sign of the familiar Hugh
who loved her.

  It was several days before the results of the postmortem were known. Lavinia Morton had died of a heart attack possibly brought on by prolonged use or misuse of her asthma treatment, small amounts of which had been found in her body. During her life an underlying heart condition had remained undiagnosed.

  A police detective came to interview Isabel, but her obvious distress, her narrative of what had happened and Hugh’s insistence that his wife shouldn’t be cross-examined in this way, meant that her version of events was accepted. At the inquest, a week after her death, the coroner questioned her and judged that Hugh’s mother had died of natural causes, possibly exacerbated by her medication. The doctor who had attended her after death suggested that more research was needed into the possible side-effects of long-term use of ephedrine. Publically, at least, Isabel was exonerated of all blame. In private, she knew that Hugh was impatient with her muddled account about his mother’s medicine and angry at her failure to summon medical assistance. In short, deep inside, he believed that she was responsible for, or at least might have prevented, his mother’s death.

  Major Michael Wood lingered on for many days in the grey lands between life and death, but the brain damage he’d sustained from his head injury was severe and he never regained consciousness. On the very day that Hugh’s mother was buried next to her husband in the graveyard of the parish church came the news that Jacqueline was now a widow.

  Chapter 34

  Isabel

  Christmas Day 1952 dawned in a doleful manner.

  It didn’t even feel like Christmas, Isabel thought, turning from the window. Outside, a squally wind blew off the estuary and the sky was gunmetal grey. Hugh, to keep up his mother’s tradition, had gone to morning service, but Lorna was fretful and full of cold, so Isabel stayed behind with her. Having got the child off to sleep again, she was glad of the time alone in the house.