Alice's Girls

by Julia Stoneham

  ‘Oh Alice!’ he spluttered, eventually. ‘You are in desperate trouble, my dear! What will Rose say? What will Gwennan think of this?’ Alice, beyond speech and still struggling to stifle her own laughter, put her finger against his lips to silence him. This sobered him and suddenly they were still. He took her hand, turned it and kissed her palm. After a moment she reached for the key, took it from him, leant towards him and kissed him on the mouth.

  ‘You will tell me everything,’ she whispered, ‘everything you want to. When you’re ready to. But not tonight.’ He watched her until she had gone quietly through the farmhouse gate, along the cobbled path into the porch and had closed the heavy oak door behind her.

  Chapter Six

  ‘Mr Bayliss all right, is ’e?’ Rose enquired next morning, entering the kitchen where the warden was going through the ritual of preparing breakfast.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Alice said, pushing a wooden spoon through the porridge. ‘Doctor Talbot said it was the shock. It takes people in different ways, doesn’t it. And poor Gwennan. Awful for her. First on the scene and everything. Was she all right last night?’

  ‘Bit quiet,’ Rose answered. ‘But not as bad as Mr Bayliss be all accounts. Vomiting, Gwennan said. Pale as a ghost and breathin’ funny. You’d think he could cope with a bit of blood, what with the cattle and that.’

  ‘But this was Margery Brewster’s blood, Rose! Someone he’d known for years!’ The girls, by this time, were slouching sleepily into the kitchen and dropping into their chairs, depressed by last night’s news and by the fact that it was Monday and the start of another gruelling week of labour. Alice, grateful for the fact that their arrival put an end to Rose’s interrogation, turned her attention to Gwennan.

  ‘Yes, I’m all right, thank you, Mrs Todd,’ she assured the warden, taking her place at the table and picking up her porridge spoon. ‘There’ll be policemen, I suppose?’ she said. ‘Askin’ questions about the accident?’

  The inspector arrived after supper that evening, and Alice led him into her sitting room and sent Annie to fetch Gwennan who, after some time, arrived from the bathroom with a towel wrapped round her damp hair.

  ‘I were havin’ me bath,’ she announced, defensively. ‘There’s only so much hot water here, see, so you ’as to take it when you can get it.’

  ‘From Wales are you, love?’ the officer enquired, identifying Gwennan’s lilting accent. ‘My wife comes from there. Dolgelly, she were born.’ Gwennan was unimpressed. ‘Right,’ he finished lamely. ‘Well, Miss …’

  ‘Pringle. Gwennan Pringle.’

  ‘Miss Pringle … If you’d just tell me, in your own words, what happened?’

  Gwennan appeared to Alice to have rehearsed her account of the accident, which she delivered concisely and without hesitation, describing it from the moment she and Annie had seen the registrar’s car careering downhill to the point where Mrs Brewster’s body had been driven away in the back of the ambulance.

  ‘So, until Mr Bayliss arrived with Mrs Todd you were alone at the scene, right?’

  ‘Yes. Like I said. Annie had run back to the higher farm for help. I would of gone on’y Annie can run faster than me.’

  ‘And you approached the victim?’

  ‘Yes. Like I said,’ Gwennan sounded slightly impatient, ‘I went to see if I could help her.’

  ‘Did you touch her at all?’

  ‘Yes, I touched her shoulder. Then I took one of her hands.’

  ‘Did you think the poor lady was dead?’

  ‘Yes, I was certain she was, what with her not breathin’ and all the blood.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘I just told you!’ Gwennan snapped, irritated by his apparent lack of attention to the precise account of the sequence of events on the bridge which she had already given him. ‘Mr Bayliss’s car come down the hill from the direction of Ledburton, and he and Mrs Todd got out and took a look at Mrs Brewster but there wasn’t nothing they could do for her, no more than what I could have. After a while the ambulance people came and they fetched her away, and that was when Mr Bayliss come over funny – because of the shock, the policeman thought – and Mrs Todd said I was to go up to the higher farm and tell Eileen to call Mr Bayliss’s doctor. Then I was to come back here. Which I did,’ Gwennan concluded, staring soberly at the inspector, who thanked her for her account which matched both Alice’s and Roger Bayliss’s.

  ‘Will that be all, then, Mrs Todd?’ Gwennan asked, pointedly directing her question to the warden. The inspector closed his notebook, slid it into a pocket in his tunic, and glad to be relieved of the necessity of any further dealings with Gwennan, nodded to Alice.

  ‘Yes, Gwennan. Thank you,’ Alice said. After bestowing a cool smile on the inspector, Gwennan withdrew from the room.

  Alice showed the inspector out, but as the glow from his dimmed headlights moved away down the lane, she heard a voice behind her.

  ‘Could I have a word, Mrs Todd?’ Gwennan asked. ‘Somewhere private, if you don’t mind.’

  Gwennan’s expression, when she had seated herself in Alice’s room, had changed from the one she had worn for the policeman. She now appeared concerned and ill at ease. Alice asked her what was wrong.

  ‘It’s about Mrs Brewster,’ she began. ‘I did something, see.’ Gwennan’s breathing was audible in the quiet room, her face was pale and she kept clenching and then unclenching her fists. ‘It was on the spur of the moment and I’m not sure why I did it! It just came over me in a flash, and before I knew it, I’d done it!’ Alice asked her what it was she had done. ‘It was the gin.’ Gwennan began.

  ‘The broken bottle,’ Alice prompted, nodding.

  ‘Yes. On’y it wasn’t broke when I got there, see! It must have been caught up somehow, in Mrs Brewster’s clothes, and when she rolled over it slid out onto the road.’ Alice waited for more information, a puzzled expression on her face.

  ‘But the bottle was broken, Gwennan. It was shattered. There were fragments of glass all over the—’

  ‘No!’ Gwennan interrupted, her voice low and urgent. ‘Not when I got there it wasn’t! Honest! I broke it, see? I smashed it!’ Alice stared incredulously.

  ‘But … Gwennan … Why?’

  ‘’Cos when I leant over Mrs Brewster she was reekin’, Mrs Todd! Reekin’! Of gin! You could smell it on her and some of it was runnin’ out of her mouth! But the bottle wasn’t broke! It was half empty and the top was on! Screwed on tight it was! Caught in her sleeve, I reckon. Like she’d had the bottle on her lap, where she could get at it to take the odd swig! If they’d found her like that …’ Gwennan’s eyes searched Alice’s face. ‘With the bottle half empty and her smellin’ like …’

  ‘Like a distillery.’

  ‘Yes, like that, Mrs Todd! So I tipped the gin over her clothes and on her poor face and her hair! Then I smashed the bottle so it looked like it got broke in the accident! That was when you and Mr Bayliss come. I thought you might of seen what I done. but you didn’t, did you?’ Alice shook her head.

  ‘But … Gwennan …!’ she said. Her concern was huge.

  ‘I know, Mrs Todd! I know I prob’ly shouldn’t of! But it flashed through me mind how awful it would have been – everyone knowing it was the drinking that killed her and laughing at her behind their hands the way folk do in these parts! And her poor husband! I could hear a car coming, so if I was going to do something I knew I had to do it quick! And before I could think any more I done it! And it worked, didn’t it! Everyone thought she stank of gin because her clothes got soaked in it when the bottle broke. That’s what you and Mr Bayliss thought, didn’t you?’ Alice admitted that it was. ‘And I never told no lies to the inspector, Mrs Todd! I answered his questions truthful! Like I’d been under oath!’

  With the cause of death undisputed, no other vehicles involved and reliable witnesses to the whole tragic sequence of events, Mrs Brewster’s body was released for burial, and a week later the Post Stone girls, impressive i
n their Land Army uniforms, formed a guard of honour along the path from the lychgate to the door of Ledburton church. They followed the coffin into the dim interior, took their places in the pews and soberly sang ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’. Gwennan kept her eyes on the highly polished toes of her regulation shoes, glancing only briefly at the flower-covered coffin as it was carried slowly past her, the flower heads of the wreaths nodding in time with the footsteps of the pallbearers, out into the sunny graveyard and on, under the shade of yew trees, towards the newly dug heap of earth beside the grave.

  In her head Gwennan asked the dead woman, ‘D’you know what it was I done, Mrs Brewster?’ Maybe Mrs Brewster did not know. Certainly her husband did not. Nor her daughters or the local newspapers, the gossips and the scandalmongers. Perhaps it was to be something between Gwennan herself and her maker. And Mrs Todd, of course. Mrs Todd knew. Alice had said that as Gwennan’s action had no bearing on the accident itself, and that as the police had not enquired about the circumstances of the breaking of the gin bottle, she was not obliged to tell them. And it was possible, Gwennan told herself, whenever her conscience worried her, that the smell of gin on the registrar’s person might, just possibly, have gone unnoticed. But in her heart she doubted this and was proud of what she had done. Perhaps, as Sergeant Kinski had told her, she was, after all, a kindly and well-meaning person?

  On the day after the funeral Gwennan was, herself, involved in an accident. A laden cart, having been backed into a byre where its load of straw had been pitchforked into the loft, was being moved out into the yard when Prince, normally the most even-tempered of the carthorses, was startled by something and had shied, taking the cart a few yards with him, back into the byre. Gwennan, who had been behind the cart, found herself caught off balance and flung heavily against the solid granite of a drinking trough. Winded, she felt her ribs crack and a searing pain went through her chest. The skin on her sternum was grazed and blood began to seep through the dark-green Aertex of her shirt. Moments later she was sitting, white-faced and gasping, on the steps of the mounting block in the yard, shaking her head and refusing to be taken to hospital.

  ‘But you have to go, Taff!’ Annie said. ‘It’s the law!’ Unable to resist the hands that were easing her to her feet, she was carefully lowered into the passenger seat of Roger Bayliss’s car. With Annie in the back seat he drove, as smoothly as he could, to the hospital in Exeter and then sat, waiting with Annie, while the doctors examined Gwennan’s injuries.

  ‘No!’ she protested when a nurse and a young doctor approached her. ‘I’m all right! It’s on’y bruises, see! Don’t touch me! I don’t want no one touching me.’ They fetched an older woman whom they referred to as ‘Matron’. Whether it was the result of the pain or in response to the woman’s authoritative manner, Gwennan allowed them to take her into a cubicle where they removed her shirt, exposing torn skin and a vivid discolouration across her chest and right shoulder. When it was obvious that no amount of protest on her part would prevent a thorough examination of her injuries, Gwennan became subdued, lying still, while they X-rayed her and moved their fingers carefully across her sternum, pressing against her chest, assessing the tenderness of each rib and exploring the tissue of her small, flat breasts. She lay, staring passively past them into space. Then they left her.

  When the matron returned, together with the young doctor who carried in his hand a sheaf of X-ray photographs, she was smiling encouragingly at Gwennan.

  ‘No bones broken in the shoulder, luckily,’ she announced, ‘but it will be very sore. You’ve cracked three ribs, which will hurt a lot to begin with and will take about six weeks to recover. So, no heavy work for two months and complete rest for a couple of days. After that you should do what you can to get moving. Your ribs won’t let you do more than is good for you. So, let’s get you dressed and we’ll put a sling on that shoulder.’ ‘What about the other, though?’ Gwennan asked, dully.

  ‘What other, dear?’ the matron asked as she folded fabric for the sling.

  ‘The other thing that’s wrong with me.’ The matron was puzzled. She had seen no evidence of any other injury.

  ‘What other thing?’

  ‘The cancer.’

  ‘Cancer?’

  ‘Yes. In me breast. You must of felt it when you touched it.’ The matron, who while assessing the damage to Gwennan’s ribcage had thoroughly palpated her chest and felt nothing abnormal under her sensitive and experienced fingers, repeated her examination with the same result.

  ‘Did you feel a lump?’ she asked her patient.

  ‘Yes. The size of a gooseberry it were. And me nipple looked sort of funny.’

  ‘Funny?’ the matron asked, continuing to work her hand over Gwennan’s breasts, first the right, then the left. ‘Well it isn’t now. They both look exactly the same to me. And there are no lumps. None at all. When did you say you found one?’

  ‘A bit more than a year ago,’ Gwennan told her. ‘It were just after my sister died of the cancer. Like my Auntie Rhiannan had. It runs in the family, see. I know what’s going to happen to me. I seen it all before.’

  ‘You thought you had symptoms and you didn’t see a doctor?’

  ‘What was the point?’ Gwennan said. Her mind had not yet fully absorbed what the matron’s words suggested. ‘My sister Olwyn saw doctors. So did Aunt Rhiannan. They cuts bits out of them and sent ’em home. Didn’t do them no good. They got ever so ill and then they died.’

  ‘Give me your hand,’ the matron said, and she took Gwennan’s hand and moved the fingers over the contours of her flat breasts. First the right, then the left. ‘There,’ the matron said. ‘Nothing but perfectly normal tissue. Now. Sit up and look in that mirror over there.’ Gwennan looked. ‘See? Two identical nipples.’

  ‘They weren’t like that when I looked before,’ Gwennan said. She was experiencing a strange sensation. A sort of excitement. A void, where something dark and threatening had been. ‘And there was a lump. There was. I felt it! I did!’

  ‘And you did nothing about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So … for an entire year, you never felt for the lump again? Or examined the nipples?’

  ‘No. No, I never did. Not once.’ The matron seemed almost affronted. It was as though she perceived Gwennan’s reaction to her symptoms as an insult to the medical profession in general and to herself in particular. She sighed and went to the small handbasin in the corner of the cubicle, where she washed her hands as though ridding herself of contact with this strange young woman.

  Gwennan had walked painfully out of the examination cubicle and back to the waiting room. After details of her injuries had been given to her employer, together with a certificate exempting her from work for ten days, and suggesting light duties for six weeks after that, he and Annie led her out to the car. Watching them go, the matron and the young doctor exchanged glances.

  ‘How could that happen?’ the young man asked. The matron shrugged.

  ‘Lumps come and go,’ she said. ‘Nipples can pucker for a variety of reasons. Probably the sister’s death had something to do with it.’

  Some hours later, when Gwennan, wearing her sling, might have been preparing to exploit her invalid status, she had other concerns on her mind.

  ‘Is it very painful?’ Alice asked, glancing at Gwennan, who was sitting, frowning into the cup of tea Alice had put in front of her.

  ‘Pardon?’ the girl said, vaguely, adding that no, since she had taken the two aspirins the matron had suggested, it didn’t hurt much as long as she kept still. ‘Mrs Todd?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Do you believe in miracles?’

  They drove across the Exe valley to a riverside pub which Alice recognised as the place where she had once been lunched by Oliver Maynard, a naval adjutant from a nearby Fleet Air Arm establishment, who had sought her company when she had first arrived at the farm.

  ‘You’ve been here before?’ Roger asked her, noticing her reaction to the terrace where half a
dozen tables were set for lunch. When she told him how it was that she knew the place he smiled. ‘Ah, yes, the commander fellow. I remember him.’ He was recalling, Alice guessed, his own success in beating off a rival. ‘Wonder what became of him? Where shall we sit?’ Alice chose a table, deliberately avoiding the one she and Oliver had shared and at which she had refused his suggestion that they should take their relationship a stage further towards the affair he obviously had in mind.

  The lamb chops were succulent and the home-made raspberry ice cream so delicious that Alice and Roger both indulged in second helpings of it.

  Roger became silent as they drank their coffee. Alice sat, the brim of her straw hat shielding her eyes from the sun, gazing across the valley and very aware that Roger was watching her. He leant forward and covered her hand with his. He was looking at her intently now and she met his eyes.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, Roger,’ she said, sensing that there were facts he wanted her to know but that he was unsure how to broach them.

  ‘I need to explain these things that happen to me, Alice. And why I react as I seem to, to some situations … and people. I’ve been trying to work out why. And I certainly owe you an apology for – yes I do, Alice,’ he insisted, when she smiled and shook her head. ‘I am very fond of you. More than fond. You know that. You’ve told me a lot about yourself and what happened between you and your husband … Not, perhaps, in so many words, but I’ve seen what you went through as a result of his treatment of you and how you’ve coped with it all. And what have I done since we met? Nothing but burden you with my complicated afflictions and lumber you with my incomprehensible behaviour.’ She smiled but he obviously intended to be taken seriously. ‘I haven’t succeeded in asking you to marry me but you are too perceptive not to be aware of my feelings for you. So, why haven’t I proposed marriage to you?’ He paused, uncertain of her reaction. ‘You have obviously sensed that I have problems with my relationship with Christopher and that I react in an unhealthy way to … to … well … accidents, such as poor Margery’s death. And yet I have failed to confide in you. Failed even to pay you the compliment of believing that you would have the intelligence and the …’ he hesitated and then, very quietly continued, ‘the compassion to understand why it is that I have been stupid enough to allow something that happened so long ago that it feels as though it belongs to an altogether other life, to ruin the present and possibly contaminate the future too!’ He called the waiter over to their table and asked for more coffee and a second brandy. Alice suggested they should take the drinks down to the riverbank, where a solitary table and chairs stood on the landing stage. They made their way down the sloping bank and settled themselves at the table. Roger watched the waiter unload the tray, Alice poured the coffee, slid Roger’s cup over the surface of the table to him and sat, cupping her brandy glass while Roger lit a cigarette.