Alice's Girls

by Julia Stoneham

  ‘That wretched word again!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Then he asked me if I understood exactly what would be involved if I was to turn my back on what he described as “all of this”. He meant the farms and the land of course. I told him I did understand and that it wasn’t a decision I had made lightly or on an impulse, that I’d thought long and hard about it and that you had too, Georgie, and we both felt it would be the right thing to do, in the circumstances. I thought he might ask what I thought the circumstances were.’

  ‘And he didn’t?’ Georgina queried.

  ‘No. He just sat there.’ Christopher ashed his cigarette.

  ‘And you didn’t tell him?’ Georgina was obviously irritated by Chris’s restraint. ‘You didn’t tell him how impossible he is? And how he makes you feel? And how hurtful it is and how insulting? And how you can’t and won’t put up with it anymore? Didn’t you tell him all that, Chris?’

  Alice, observing the pair of them, was aware of how difficult their relationship might become if Roger continued to feature in it.

  ‘I started to,’ Christopher told her. ‘I said I didn’t feel that he and I were temperamentally suited to working together. That he obviously considered that I always fell short of his expectations and that I was sick of being made to feel second-rate.’

  ‘Hey!’ Georgina said, mollified. ‘Well said, Christo! And what happened then?’

  ‘Then he did a thing he used to do when I was a kid and he considered that my behaviour was out of order.’

  ‘And what was that?’ Georgina asked.

  ‘He got up,’ Christopher said, ‘went to the window and stood with his back to me, staring out. And he said, very calmly, very coolly, “I think that’s enough of that, Christopher.” In those days I was expected to leave the room at that point and not speak to him again until I was ready to apologise for my unacceptable behaviour.’ Christopher smiled at Alice and Georgina, and at their astonished faces. He drew on his cigarette and was still smiling as he exhaled. ‘Well … perhaps it’s more civilised than having a blazing row. I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s it, then, is it?’ Georgina asked him. ‘No attempt to persuade you to stay?’

  ‘Do we want to stay?’ he asked her. There was a pause while their eyes met and held. Then she smiled. It was what Alice had come to think of as a real Georgina smile. Her chin was lifted, her eyes met Christopher’s, fixing him with a straight, strong, positive gaze, her lips were parted and she was laughing.

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ she said. ‘I want to go! It’ll be such an adventure. Just think! Across Biscay, past Gibraltar, through the Med, down the Suez Canal. Aden, India, Ceylon, Perth, Sydney. Then across the Tasman to Wellington!’

  ‘And then it’ll be back to reality, Georgie. What happens if we don’t like it there?’ Christopher asked, watching her face.

  ‘We will like it! And anyway … if we don’t, we’ll come back! It’s not the end of the world!’

  ‘It’s as near as damn it!’ he said, laughing at her. ‘And I shall be committed for a minimum of two years, remember!’

  ‘I know! I know! And I can’t wait, Chris!’ She rounded the table, and standing behind him, lent over him and noisily kissed his cheek. Then she went to Alice, put her arms round her, hugged her tightly and kissed her, too. She was, Alice realised, totally, blissfully happy. Georgina felt Alice stiffen and released her. ‘What?’ she asked her. ‘What’s up, Alice?’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ Alice said, ‘about Roger.’ She looked at them and watched their smiles fade. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Didn’t mean to spoil things.’

  Alice was uncertain whether to contact Roger and admit that she knew of Christopher’s plan. This, it seemed to her, would put her into the possibly difficult position of confessing to having known of it for some time. Would Roger have expected her to pass the news on to him as soon as she received it? Would her failure to do so be perceived as an alliance with the son at the expense of the father? She had waited, hoping that some hostel business or other might result in a meeting between the two of them, but when several days had passed she telephoned the higher farm.

  ‘Mr Bayliss is gone to Winchester for a memorial service,’ Eileen told Alice. ‘He’ll be back Friday. He said to give you the phone number of his hotel if there was an emergency. There isn’t an emergency, is there, Mrs Todd?’ Alice told her that no, there was no emergency.

  ‘Don’t get involved, Alice,’ had been Georgina’s advice.

  ‘But what if he asks me how long I’ve known about all this? I mean, the two of you being engaged to marry, as well as the New Zealand thing? Do I lie?’ Georgina was apologetic.

  ‘We shouldn’t have involved you, Alice. I’m so sorry. I reckon Roger will guess you knew. But he’ll also know that whatever you did was in accordance with your good judgement and he trusts your judgement and he trusts you. More than that, I think he really, seriously loves you!’

  ‘Oh … why is he so difficult?’ Alice sighed, almost to herself. ‘It’s as though he is on one side of a six-foot wall and all the rest of us are on the other!’

  Roger made no contact with Alice until late on the Sunday afternoon when he arrived, as usual, to drive Edward John to Ledburton to catch the bus back to his weekly boarding school. With the boy in the back seat there was no opportunity for Roger, or indeed Alice, to broach the subject of Christopher’s plans.

  Gwennan and Annie were, at that moment, returning to the higher farm after driving the milking herd back to their pasture. They paused, breathless after the steep climb, to lean on a gate and look out, across Post Stone valley. The water meadows were already in shade and the shallow river meandered through stands of shadowy willow and alder to the point, almost vertically below the girls, where the lane, carried by a narrow, humpbacked bridge, crossed it, and having descended sharply from the west, began to climb, equally steeply, to the east. From their vantage point the two girls gazed down at the solid contours of the granite structure, watching idly for a flash of colour from the plumage of the pair of kingfishers often seen on that stretch of the river.

  ‘C’mon, Annie,’ Gwennan said, slapping at the skin on her bony forearm, ‘the midges is biting!’ At that moment the girls heard the sound of a car’s engine descending the opposite hill and invisible in the deep lane as it rapidly approached the bridge. Annie suggested that the car was probably their boss’s.

  ‘Mr Bayliss usually drives Edward John into Ledburton about this time on Sunday evenings, to catch the Exeter bus,’ she murmured.

  ‘Where ’e gets the petrol from I dunno!’ Gwennan sighed, piously. But the car was not Roger Bayliss’s.

  ‘It’s Mrs Brewster!’ Gwennan murmured, shading her eyes against the low sunlight, as the car came suddenly into view.

  ‘And she’s going way too fast!’ Annie said, her fingers tightening on the top rung of the gate.

  The angle of the lane’s approach to the bridge was a familiar hazard to those who used it. Jack, driving the truck in which he ferried the land girls to and fro between the farms, always slowed, almost to walking pace, before negotiating it, and Roger Bayliss took a pride in precisely positioning his Riley before making the tight left- and then right-hand turns necessary to cross it safely. But, as Gwennan and Annie watched, Margery Brewster barely slackened her speed as she hurtled down the last section of the descent, seeming to sense, too late, that a collision with the bridge was inevitable. Perhaps there was time, even then, to slam on the brakes but, to the horrified girls, Margery appeared not to and her car struck the solid granite with enormous force, buckling and slewing violently sideways against the parapet. The passenger door was wrenched off by the impact and Margery Brewster herself was flung out of her seat and slammed against the stonework on the far side of the bridge.

  Instinctively both the girls began to run down the steep lane towards the wreckage. Then Annie pulled at Gwennan’s arm.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘One of us had best run to the farm an
d call for help! I’m faster than you, Taffy!’ She turned and began striding up the steep incline towards the cluster of grey slated roofs of the higher farm.

  When Gwennan reached the bridge she was conscious of a stillness and an eerie silence in which one wheel of the stricken car continued to spin while the rest of the crumpled metal tilted precariously above the river. Margery Brewster’s handbag lay where it had been flung into the narrow roadway, while she herself sprawled, unmoving, against the parapet of the bridge. She lay on her side, blood pooling from under her head and spreading slowly across the gravelly surface of the lane.

  ‘Mrs Brewster?’ Gwennan said in a voice that was barely more than a whisper. After waiting for a response she went closer, knelt beside the injured woman and put her hand on an inert shoulder. Her touch was light but it was enough to redistribute Mrs Brewster’s weight, and she rolled, like a rag doll, onto her back. Her open eyes were blank and unfocused. A thread of liquid trickled from one corner of her mouth. As Gwennan leant over her, searching for some sign of life, she became aware of the strong, unmistakeable reek of alcohol. Released from Margery Brewster’s hand as she rolled over, a bottle of Gordon’s gin lay, unbroken and half empty, it’s screw top in place.

  Gwennan had many failings but stupidity was not one of them. It was obvious to her that the reason the village registrar had crashed her car was because, and not for the first time, she had been too drunk to drive it safely.

  Initially a sense of superiority swept over Gwennan. Here was a woman who had been in authority over her. By whom she had, on one or two occasions, been reprimanded. Whose dominance she had frequently resented. But, as she looked at the spreadeagled body and the blood which was ceasing to flow from whatever appalling wound lay under the smashed skull, Gwennan thought suddenly of the registrar’s support when she had requested leave to visit her dying sister. And of the concern she had shown when, after Olwyn’s death, she had listened while Gwennan tried to explain why, having lost her faith, she would not go home to Wales for the funeral. Yes, she was posh and a bit bossy but she was, at heart, a good woman, and neither she nor her family deserved the spiteful gossip that would sweep the Ledburton area, provoking nods and winks for years on end if the cause of her death was revealed as too much of the gin in the bottle which lay, intact, beside her corpse. Gwennan could almost hear the tongues wagging. ‘Always one for a drop, was Mrs Brewster! Many’s the time I seen ’er tipsy! Standin’ on a chair singin’ “Nellie Dean” she were, at ’er Christmas party! Young Albertine had to help get ’er to bed after!’ Then she pictured the registrar’s husband, the benign Gordon Brewster. Nothing could spare him the grief he was about to suffer but she, Gwennan Pringle, had it in her power to protect him from the scandal and the shame which would follow any suggestion that it was his wife’s weakness for the bottle that had caused the accident that had killed her.

  As Annie had correctly guessed, Roger Bayliss had, that evening, driven Edward John into Ledburton where Alice had seen him onto the bus and waved goodbye to him as it pulled out of the village square. Roger put his car into gear and turned into the lane that led back to Post Stone valley. For a while they drove in silence.

  ‘This news of Christopher’s,’ Roger began, his eyes on the lane ahead. ‘I imagine you knew a little of what was going on?’

  ‘Georgina confides in me so, yes, for a while I probably did know a bit more about their plans than you did. They told me they would tell her parents and you, of course, as soon as things were settled and they had decided what to do.’ She was unable to read Roger’s silence. After a moment she added, ‘Whatever any of us feel about their plans, Roger, it’s their decision, not ours, don’t you think?’ They were at the top of the long, steep descent into the valley.

  ‘Did he tell you why he wants to go? Why he feels strongly enough to sever all connections with the farms and with me? Because that is what this amounts to, Alice.’

  Here the lane was at its steepest, winding down towards the bridge that was out of sight a hundred yards ahead and almost as many feet below them. Roger engaged first gear and descended with his usual caution, positioning his car precisely in the narrow lane.

  At that moment Gwennan heard the approach of a second car, nosing its way down the lane towards the bridge. Closing her mind against further thought, she reached for the gin bottle, unscrewed the cap and emptied its contents over Margery Brewster, watching the liquid splash onto her skin and darken the silk of her blouse. Then she replaced the cap, raised the empty bottle and flung it, hard, against the stonework beside the registrar’s gory head, where it exploded into a thousand shining, emerald-green pieces.

  By the time Roger Bayliss had reacted to the sight of Margery Brewster’s mangled car, brought his own to a halt and, followed closely by Alice, was running towards the two figures on the bridge, Gwennan was kneeling beside Mrs Brewster, anxiously chafing one of the dead woman’s limp hands.

  ‘It’s too late,’ she announced, genuinely tearful. ‘She’s gone to her maker, poor lady.’

  It was slightly later, after Mrs Brewster’s inert body had been lifted onto a stretcher, into an ambulance and driven away, and Constable Twentyman had inscribed all the details of what he called ‘the incident’ into his notebook, that Gwennan asked Alice what was wrong with Mr Bayliss.

  ‘Only he’s gone that white, Mrs Todd, and he seems to be breathing funny.’

  Roger had crossed the bridge and was leaning on the parapet. His face was turned away from the place in the roadway where the bright green shards of the broken gin bottle glittered so oddly through the crimson gloss of Margery Brewster’s coagulating blood.

  ‘Roger?’ Alice enquired, going to him and asking tentatively, ‘are you all right, my dear?’ He seemed not to hear her, and although his eyes appeared to focus on hers, he showed no sign of recognition. Then he suddenly turned, spread his hands on the granite parapet, leant out over the river and retched. He stood swaying for a moment before slumping against the stonework of the bridge, drawing into himself great gulps of air while perspiration ran from his blanched face.

  ‘It’s the shock,’ Constable Twentyman announced staunchly. He himself had turned pale when Margery Brewster had been lifted onto a stretcher and the extent of her head injury had been apparent. ‘Best get him home, madam,’ he advised Alice. ‘My superior will be needing a statement, of course. From the witnesses. You two and the young lady,’ he said, meaning Gwennan. ‘And now I must go and break this sad news to poor Mr Brewster. It’s the worst part of my job, I can tell you …’ With his mind already occupied by his next, unpleasant duty, Twentyman heaved his leg over the bar of his bicycle and peddled off. Because of the steepness of the incline he was soon forced to dismount and push the machine up the hill.

  Gwennan stood open-mouthed, staring at Roger Bayliss. ‘How are the mighty fallen’ was the phrase that came suddenly into her strange mind. For here, in the space of half an hour, both the powerful village registrar and Mr Bayliss, her formidable employer, had been struck down by the same tragic incident. An incident in which she herself had played a significant part. She stood, slightly flushed, her own personal disaster forgotten, wondering what on earth was the matter with her boss. Yes, it had all been a terrible shock and some men went funny when confronted by blood, but Mr Bayliss? An experienced farmer and man, presumably, of the world? Reacting like a green girl in a fainting fit? Alice’s voice cut across her train of thought.

  ‘Mr Bayliss is unwell, Gwennan. I need you to go up to the higher farm and tell Eileen to call his doctor. I’ll drive him up as soon as he’s well enough.’ Her tone, together with another glance at her semi-conscious boss, was enough to persuade Gwennan to do as she was told.

  Usually, when required to obey an order, Gwennan felt obliged to make some comment on it. Was the instruction justified? Or was it not? What, in the circumstances, would a better course of action be? What would she have done or said or even thought, if consulted? But on this occasion
, because she herself had just done something of significance, she was almost grateful for Alice’s instruction which meant that she could leave the scene of the accident, and as she walked, as fast as she could, up the steep hill towards the higher farm, consider the implications of her action at the scene of the crash.

  The broken bottle, with its cap in place and the liquid it had contained spilt, would, Gwennan correctly believed, account for the reek of gin that would have been discovered to be emanating from Mrs Brewster’s person and the clothes which had become saturated with it. The accident would be blamed on the narrowness of the lane and the dangerous angle of its approach to the bridge, and with the fact that the driver, familiar as she was with the route, had been seen to be taking the corner just a little too fast.

  ‘Because of me …’ Gwennan whispered breathlessly to herself as she climbed the hill. ‘Because of me, Gwennan Iris Pringle, Mr Brewster and his daughters will be spared the humiliation and the gossip. Their memories of the dear one they have lost will be unsullied by scandal.’ Gwennan’s language, when it came to serious matters, took on the weight and tone of Wilkie Collins, or Galsworthy, or Dickens, whose words had made an impression on her when she had read them aloud to her dying sister. What Gwennan did not, at that time, recognise, was the fact that the decision she had made on the bridge that evening, which would have the effect of protecting the Brewster family from so much unhappiness, was almost certainly the first truly generous action she had ever taken in her life.

  She glanced back from time to time at the scene on the bridge and saw that the warden was still on her knees beside Roger Bayliss.

  Later, after she had done as she had been told and instructed Eileen to telephone for Mr Bayliss’s doctor, Gwennan bicycled down to the lower farm where Rose Crocker was ladling out vegetable soup which, with slices of bread spread with margarine, and followed by cold rice pudding, was Sunday supper. Here Gwennan gave a detailed account of the evening’s events to the group of girls sobered by the tragic news.