At this, both men seemed easier about the situation although they still looked as if they might have something to hide.
“Gypsy funeral,” said the first man. “Leastways, they burned the body in Rye churchyard. There was more than a hundred present – some of them must have set off before she died, they reckon. But they broke her pots and pans and burned the van. It’s their custom, see.”
“Ah,” said my father. “Of course. Was it the old woman, Urania Heron, who died?”
“That was her,” said the first man. “Urania – some called her Queen of the Gypsies, though maybe that was to get custom. They have a fair old number of Kings and Queens, the travelling people. Died a rich woman, so they tell me.” The other man was looking at my father shrewdly. He had him placed as some kind of official, in spite of his denials. He said, “If you’re from the Inland Revenue, even you can’t catch up with her now. And you’ll have no luck with the survivors, either.”
“Mm,” said my father. Turning to me he said, “She said I’d never talk to her.”
I just nodded. The two men stood silent. The second one said, “Well – if you want to find them they’ll have flown to the four winds by now.” It became plainer and plainer they were waiting for us to leave. In the end the second man said, “Come on, then. Let’s get on with it.”
The other looked at my father and muttered, “As a matter of fact, we’re here for the horse.” And he nodded at the patch of earth.
Light dawned on Father’s face, “Ah,” he said. “I knew it couldn’t be a human grave. This is where they’ve buried the horse?”
“They normally kill the horse, see,” the man told him. “Not that hers was good for much anyway – old as she was, it looked. So we thought we’d come for the carcase – sell it, like. No good to anyone stuck where it is, is it?”
“No,” said my father. “Don’t worry – I’m not from the Inland Revenue. I came to have my fortune told,” he continued boldly. “They say the old woman could tell the future.”
Both men stared incredulously at my father. A less likely customer for the crystal ball and mumbo-jumbo of the gypsy’s tent could not have been imagined.
“The women reckoned she could,” was all the stubble-faced man could say. “I don’t go in for a lot of that myself. What’s the good knowing if you can’t do anything about it, that’s what I say?”
“I expect you’re right,” said my father.
“If you’ll excuse us now,” he said, “we’ll get on. In case by chance they come back. They can get very nasty, them Romany men.”
“We’ll leave you to it, then,” Father said. “Thank you for the information.”
“You’re welcome,” they said, and turned to their grisly work.
We walked away from the sea, hearing the gulls’ noise overhead and the thud of the spades behind us. We walked across the soggy marshland to the car. “That’s that, then,” my father said into the wind, “– no fortune-teller for me. Pity.”
“I expect it’s all nonsense anyway,” said I.
“I daresay,” he said. “But I wish I’d met her.”
1945
The war was over and Mary Waterhouse was sitting on the same train which had brought her to Framlingham four years before. Then she had been nearly five years old. Now she was nine. Then she was with all the other evacuees. Now she travelled with Mrs Gates, who was sitting opposite her. And then she had been a poorly dressed cockney girl while now she had about her the indefinable air of a nanny’s child, sitting up nice and straight in her highly polished brown sandals, very white socks and slightly starched pink and white striped cotton dress, with a small white collar. Her blonde hair was done in two plaits, which ended in pink bows.
She stared doubtfully at Mrs Gates. Then she dutifully picked up the green-bound volume of Gulliver’s Travels, which, with its companion volume, Robinson Crusoe, had been Sir Frederick Allaun’s sad parting present to her, and began to read. Mrs Gates sat there like a stone with the waves of semi-formulated resentments going through her head, as they had now for many days and weeks. Why hadn’t those shiftless parents of Mary’s come and collected her straight away, as soon as they got Lady Allaun’s letter? It wasn’t good enough to send an ill-written scrawl a week later, saying they were having a street party and couldn’t spare the time to come down with the baby – a baby which must be three years old by now, by her calculations. A party, indeed – not to mention the suggestion that Mary should be put on the train, alone, and that they’d meet her at Victoria. What sort of people put a child of nine on a railway train alone, with the trains and streets full of demobbed soldiers and goodness knows who? And the cheeky suggestion that Mary should stay on and come home with the others in the care of a welfare worker. What business was it of theirs to make such a suggestion, when Lady Allaun had told them in so many words that Mary’s room was needed for a relative, a convalescent naval officer? They must be a trashy, common lot, these Waterhouses. Advantage-takers, that’s what they were. Not that poor Mrs Twining’s heart wouldn’t break when she had to part with Jack. And his friend Ian, but Mrs Gates had the idea that it was young Jack Bessie Twining was particularly fond of. She was herself, for that matter. Still, what had to be, had to be. She just wondered if these Waterhouses would appreciate what a good and clever lad he was when he got back. Of course, Twining could make the excuse that he needed the lads to stay on for the harvest – she just hoped that when they got to the station this “Mrs Ivy Waterhouse”, as she had signed herself, would be there on time, to meet them. They sounded like a badly organized lot, with their parties and late replies to letters. All she could say, Mrs Gates thought to herself, was that if there was any confusion at the station she’d turn straight round, with Mary, and get the next train back. Let Ivy Waterhouse arrive late and she could whistle for her daughter. They’d be on the train back to Framlingham in a flash and home in time for a late tea.
Mrs Gates gave a deep sigh of anger – and found tears in her eyes. Mary looked up from her book and said, “Oh – Mrs Gates –”
“None of that,” said Mrs Gates in a firm, cross voice. Mary went back to her book. She was very nervous. Mrs Gates sat up, ramrod straight, fighting her misery at parting with Mary by overlaying it with rage. There was another battle in her breast, too, where old-fashioned loyalty to her employers quarrelled with dislike, even bewilderment. For what Mrs Gates could not quite acknowledge openly to herself was that it had been wrong of Lady Allaun to write so summarily to the Waterhouses, more or less ordering them to remove the child within three weeks. The reasons behind it were shoddy and Mrs Gates also knew that. Who should know better than she, who had begun in service at the Towers when she was sixteen, and Sir Frederick only a child? – she who had looked after them, sick and well, for nearly forty years – who had been one of the only two servants invited to Sir Frederick and Lady Allaun’s wedding at St James, Piccadilly? Mrs Gates knew the eddies and currents of the house as she knew her own pulse and the beating of her heart. But she could never truly admit what she knew to herself, even in thought. Servants should not talk of what they know about their masters; good servants are well advised not even to think of what they know. So Mrs Gates, in the railway carriage, trained her mind on the misdeeds of the imaginary Water-houses to prevent the sadness and disillusion she felt from welling up. Unfortunately, matching the puffing of the engine as it took them remorselessly towards London, came the word “adoption – adoption – adoption,” as though it were hissing out of the funnel of the train. For the word had, and she knew it, been mentioned between Sir Frederick and Lady Allaun. An important letter had been written and the reply, which Mrs Gates had not seen arrive, had given support for the idea. The family solicitor had been summoned. Mrs Gates, without listening at a single door or laying eyes on a single letter which had not been put away, knew all this. She knew, too, that Sir Frederick had been strongly in favour of trying to adopt Mary and Lady Allaun not so keen. That squared with what M
rs Gates knew of both of them. She, for her part, had no doubt that the Waterhouses would agree to the adoption and that Mary would shortly be the legal child of the house. So what had gone amiss?
Mrs Gates’s thoughts, as the train got closer and closer to London, started coming with a rush. The summerhouse – it was what had happened in the summerhouse which had put a stop to everything.
The summerhouse lay at the very edge of the lawn at the front of Allaun Towers. It stood to the left, where the hedge surrounding the kitchen garden met the rhododendron bushes. If she had not been picking peas at the time, Mrs Gates would have seen nothing. As it was she had just flung a handful of pods into her basket, which lay on the ground, and was straightening up for a moment to ease the pull on her back when she saw, over the hedge, through the rather dirty panes of the octagonal summerhouse, the child, Mary, and Sir Frederick. Mary was sitting on Sir Frederick’s knee, that much she could make out, and he was apparently reading to her. The sight was not unusual. Sir Frederick often took Mary out of the house on days when she was not at school – and there had been many of these days, in April, when she had been away for three weeks with an obstinate throat infection. They would walk about the estate or, as now, go and read in the summerhouse, where there was an old basketchair, lodged in front of the doorway, which was wedged wide open due to the condition of its hinges. These reading sessions – in fact, Sir Frederick’s association with Mary in general – did not entirely please Isabel Allaun, Mrs Gates knew. Truth was – and that, at least, Mrs Gates was prepared to admit about her employer – Isabel Allaun was one of those women whose jealousy of other women was profound. It was not just a question of disliking women in genuine rivalry with her. It was automatic for her to see any woman, old, ugly, poor or nine years old as a challenge and to look on them with disfavour. So even her husband’s affection for a little girl threatened her. In addition Lady Allaun had been jumpy ever since Sir Frederick came back. He had arrived in a strange condition, vague, tired and absent-minded. It was as if he wanted to block most things out of his mind. He slept a great deal, avoided company and read a great many detective stories. He also, as Mrs Gates knew, for she heard him, prowled about the house at night. In the morning she would find he had made tea, eaten a couple of slices of toast and then, presumably, gone back to bed without washing up his cup and plate, which stood on the kitchen table in the morning, witnesses to his lonely night. It was not surprising that Isabel Allaun, who had held the house and grounds, the three tenant farms and the small household together, alone, for five difficult years, was upset. She had looked forward to her husband’s return, an easing of conditions and a return to the good old days of trips to Town and entertaining the neighbours. And what had been sent back to her after five years was a weakened man who avoided leaving his own house and grounds as if he were afraid, refused to visit or be visited, continued to leave all the responsibility to her and could not, so Mrs Gates observed, even seem to look his wife in the eye. It was as if he felt guilty towards her, she thought. And well he might, for he knew what was required of him and could not, or would not, do it. It was not good enough to pass all your time reading or just wandering about hand in hand with a little girl. He would not even pay proper attention to his own son – he often found an excuse to leave the room when Tom came in, during the week he spent at home at half term, and this was also wrong, thought Mrs Gates, who privately considered that Tom was a boy very much in need of a father’s hand.
Mrs Gates had taken it on herself one morning, when getting the day’s orders from Lady Allaun, to introduce the subject of shell-shock. She began by saying that the lateness of the post was probably because the postmistress was having a difficult time with her old father, who had been in the trenches in World War I and had never been quite normal since. At this, Lady Allaun, who knew what was coming, had straightened her already straight back, looked her housekeeper firmly in the eye and said, “How lucky we are that no matter how dreadful this war has been for everyone, that, at least, is one thing we have been spared. There have been no shell-shock cases from this war.” Mrs Gates said no more but she knew Lady Allaun understood what she had been trying to tell her. She had been put firmly in her place. There was nothing else she could do. Nevertheless, if it was not shell-shock, thought Mrs Gates, it was something very like it.
Towards the end of the war Sir Frederick had been sent to France just after the Normandy landings. He had fought his way through Germany, ending up in one of the first parties to enter the concentration camp at Belsen, or was it Auschwitz? Whichever it was, small wonder he was like he was, Mrs Gates thought. Maybe only the presence of little, rosy Mary Waterhouse was enough to drive out the memory of the walking skeletons in the concentration camp.
Still, the mystery of what had happened in the summerhouse remained. All Mrs Gates knew was that, just as she spotted the two familiar figures in the summerhouse and, the ache in her back somewhat relieved, was about to bend down again and pick more peas, she had seen Isabel Allaun running down the lawn with an expression of great rage on her face. Mrs Gates, half-hidden behind the hedge, had stood staring in astonishment. Then Lady Allaun had stopped short, about fifteen yards from the summerhouse door and shouted, “Frederick! Come out at once!” She must have been watching them from the drawing room window but what could she have seen, from such a distance, to make her behave in such an uncharacteristic way – like a street woman, Mrs Gates thought to herself. Had she seen something or had she imagined it? Had her husband been giving Mary a kiss or a cuddle or had he really, because that was the most likely explanation for Isabel Allaun’s behaviour, actually been interfering with her, molesting her, putting his hand too high on her thigh, or under her little white knickers? That was a horrible thought and Mrs Gates did not believe it. Now she was admitting to the thoughts, Mrs Gates examined the situation candidly. She had seen such things before; she knew of things like this, and worse, much worse. But although Sir Frederick was not in his right mind and needed comfort – and pray God, he had not tried to find it in the child – she could not believe things had gone too far. Mrs Gates stole a look at Mary as she sat reading. She did not have the look of a child who had taken part in naughty games with a middle-aged man, but then, with girls in particular, you could seldom tell. Girls learned to conceal things like that from an early age, Mrs Gates knew that. Nevertheless, she was still sure nothing had been too wrong – until, that is, Isabel Allaun started shouting. What a scene for a lady to make. Then Mary had gone white as a sheet as Isabel stood on the grass, shouting, in a cracking voice, uncertain in its pitch, “Come out, Frederick, I tell you.” And, to silence her terrifying voice, Sir Frederick had come out of the summerhouse, over the lawn all dappled with sun, saying something in a low voice, which Mrs Gates could not hear. But she could hear the bewilderment in his tone and he looked very bent, very old, twenty years older than he really was.
At that point Mrs Gates had pulled herself together, slipped out of the vegetable garden through a gap in the hedge, leaving the basket of peas on the ground, and, trying to look as if she had just come from the house, went to the summerhouse door, where Mary stood, dazed and rather frightened, and had said, using as normal a voice as possible, “Mary – I’ve been looking for you everywhere. You promised to go down to Twining’s for the eggs.”
“Did I?” Mary answered, looking confused. “I must have forgotten.” In fact she had not – Mrs Gates had made the story up on the spur of the moment.
“You must,” she had told the child. “Will you go down now, before lunch? I must have them quickly.” At that, Mary had run off, with one startled glance at Sir Frederick and Lady Allaun, still talking, in low voices, on the grass, oblivious to the other two, while Mrs Gates had gone straight back to the house.
After that there were high words in the drawing room. Voices could be heard right along the passageway and through the kitchen door, behind which Mrs Gates tried to get on with preparing the lunch. Not that ther
e was any lunch. Sir Frederick took to his bed with a bottle of whisky after the row. Isabel Allaun said that she was going out to see some neighbours. Which, Mrs Gates worked out, must have been when she took the letter asking the Waterhouses to collect Mary down to the post office. So she and Mary ate their chops together in the kitchen. And that was the end of any talk of adoption and the reason why they were sitting together in this stuffy train, now nearly in London, judging by the parade of shabby houses and the gaps in the streets, like mouths with many teeth missing.
Mrs Gates sighed. It was this dreadful war which was to blame. Without the war Mary would never have come to the Towers. Sir Frederick would have been the same bluff, selfish fellow he had once been. Isabel Allaun would have been the same snobbish, not unkind, country lady, with her bridge and her shopping trips. And now Mary had to go back to what was most likely a slum. Probably her father drank, thought Mrs Gates, and there seemed no doubt that her mother was a slut and a slummock, if you considered the state of the child’s clothes when she had arrived. You didn’t have to be dirty, even if you were poor, thought Mrs Gates self-righteously. But all this resentment against the unknown Waterhouses now, as the train got closer and closer to Victoria, had little power to console. If only, she thought miserably, that scene outside the summerhouse had never happened. What could it have been that Lady Allaun saw? And what did that child, reading her book so calmly, really know?
It was very hot that day and the air was sweet with the flowers – I don’t suppose I’d have remembered anything if it hadn’t been for the sequel – Isabel going mad like that, on the lawn, with her body all straight and stiff and her blonde hair coming down out of the big, soft bun she used to put it in and her eyes all hot. She usually had those pale, cold blue eyes, Ice Maiden eyes, but this time they were blazing. But another bit of me wasn’t that surprised. I knew Sir Frederick wasn’t the way he should have been. Even a child, or perhaps specially a child, could spot it. I’d seen him before, remember, when he came back home on leave and then he was like Father Christmas, big and ruddy only with a little toothbrush moustache instead of a beard. After his first leave he always brought me back a present. He was always coming into the room, shouting something and picking me up and swinging me round. Those times, too, he’d try to do something about the work that needed doing because there hadn’t been enough staff for years. So he’d take me with him to mend the catch on the gate to stop Twining’s cows from getting into the grounds, or shoot all the rabbits which had been multiplying cheerfully for years while no one did anything about it. Those times Tom would go too, and be allowed to fire at a pigeon or so. Anyway, the last time he came, after he was released by the army, you could tell he wasn’t the same. He wore the same old grey cardigan all the time. He shuffled. He’d sit in a chair in the library for hours on end, staring into space. Mrs Gates called it shell-shock when she was talking to her friends. Really, it was depression – there was less help for it then. “Mad,” he sometimes whispered to himself when he thought there wasn’t anyone there. “I’m mad.” I walked into the library one day with a butterfly – a Red Admiral – in my hands to show him. He shuffled into the top drawer, which was open just as I came in. I pretended I didn’t know what it was but I did – throughout the years, sneaking around the house opening drawers and cupboards while nobody was about, I’d been fascinated by the revolver in the top drawer of the desk. It wasn’t loaded, of course. I’d tried it. But I think it was that day. I think he was going to shoot himself. Better if he had really. From what I heard years later he never really recovered. The experience made Isabel worse. She was never a big-hearted woman but she must have been a lot nicer in the days when she had the life she wanted.
All The Days of My Life Page 9