by Nina Jon
“You must tell me exactly what happened,” Jane said.
“It’s best Lettice explains,” Nellie said, “she opened up this morning.”
II
Lettice Bailey opened her wool shop’s front door that morning as she or one of her sisters had done every morning for the last six decades of their lives and found a bright, crisp morning. All three sisters could remember a time when they would have found customers waiting for the shop to open, but those days were long past. Nowadays, the only people they could expect to find waiting on their doorstep were delivery men.
It was market day, and although only just nine a.m., already busy. Lettice scanned the market square, her eyes falling upon a young man attaching a sign to the lamppost outside her shop.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning,” she replied, walking over to read the sign.
She didn’t understand a word of it. It referred to the Town and Country Planning Act. “They’re going to improve the market square,” the young man explained. “Try and get a bit more trade in.”
“Oh, what a good idea,” Lettice said. “Things are a bit slow sometimes.”
Market day always made the morning a little busier than usual, and by eleven a.m. she’d sold half a dozen balls of wool and two pairs of knitting needles. She’d just written this sale up in her ledger book, when the shop’s brass bell rang announcing a customer. She looked up and saw one of her local councillors stepping into the shop, alongside a young woman she didn’t recognise.
“Councillor Duigan. What a pleasant surprise,” Lettice said.
“The pleasure is all mine, Miss Bailey,” was the councillor’s reply.
“Have you come to purchase some wool for Mrs Duigan, Councillor? We’ve just received a supply of the finest angora, should she wish to knit you a nice warm jumper?” Lettice asked. “February can be a very cold month.”
As she spoke, she threw a concerned glance at his companion. Although young (but to eighty-nine-year-old Lettice, everybody looked young), the girl appeared worryingly short of breath. Lettice had no doubt the poor young thing had been frogmarched across town. Councillor Duigan was known to walk at an alarming pace. She wondered if the youngster was a relative of the councillor, or if there had been a change in the councillor’s personal circumstances which she had not heard about. The young woman herself was so busy gazing around the shop wondering if she’d stepped back into the eighteenth century, that she didn’t realise she was being scrutinised.
Her thoughts were interrupted by Councillor Duigan, saying, “allow me to introduce you to Sarah. Sarah is a social worker who specialises in the care and well-being of the elderly.” Sarah smiled weakly.
Councillor Duigan’s words immediately made Lettice suspicious. She looked at Sarah and back to her local councillor – a middle-aged man with shoulder-length grey hair, who wore bright blue spectacles, permanently held together by a pink sticking plaster after its nose ridge snapped many years earlier. If he ever wore anything other than his hunting jacket, with leather patches at its elbows, she had never seen it. Lettice always thought the councillor rather ridiculous.
“Sarah and I would like a few minutes of your and your sisters’ time, if you could spare it, Miss Bailey?” he continued.
“But who will run the shop?”
“Couldn’t you just close it for half an hour or so?” Sarah said.
Lettice stared at her coolly for some minutes, before replying crisply, “Young lady, this is not an emporium prone to early closing. We didn’t even close early during the war, and you have no idea how difficult it was to get wool then.”
“We won’t take up much of your time,” Councillor Duigan said.
“I’ll need to consult with my sisters,” Lettice said crossly, turning on her heels and disappearing through a door, which led to the rear of the property.
Alone in the shop, the councillor turned to Sarah and winked knowingly. “Told you,” he said.
Sarah took this to be a reference to his earlier description of the sisters as, ‘complete eccentrics. Madder than a box of toads!’
Coming from the councillor, Sarah found the comment ironic. While she waited for Lettice to reappear, Sarah studied her notes. At eighty-nine, Lettice was the eldest of the three Bailey sisters. Dotty was the middle one of the three, at eighty-seven years, and Nellie was the youngest being only eighty-two years of age. The sisters had all been born in the tiny suite of rooms above the shop, then run by their parents, and had lived in this building for the whole of their lives. None had ever married.
She glanced around the shop again. Ceiling-high dark mahogany cubicles filled with pyramids of wool, lined the shop’s walls. Gilded glass mirrors, reflecting back the kaleidoscope of colours, broke up the dark wooden interior. A rail ran around the ceiling from which hung a mahogany ladder. Material, laces, ribbons and threads filled shelves behind a solid mahogany counter running along the entire length of one wall. The shop’s till looked as though it came out of a museum, and the sisters still seemed to write their sales up by hand in an old-fashioned ledger book. She’d been told the shop hadn’t changed since the sisters’ parents day, but she was beginning to wonder whether it had actually changed since their grandparents day. Indeed some of the materials stacked high behind the counter looked as though they’d been there since then. How three old ladies managed to lift such heavy rolls down from such a height, Sarah couldn’t begin to imagine.
“You’d better come through. My sisters are waiting for you in the parlour,” Lettice said irritably through the connecting door. “I only hope our customers don’t think we’ve decided to close down permanently.”
In the parlour, Lettice joined her sisters on a tatty Chesterfield, while their visitors sat opposite them. The sisters held hands. Sarah looked around the seldom-used room. Ornaments collected over the years were jam-packed into French corner cabinets. Material, once deep red, but now threadbare and pale, covered the Victorian furniture. Patches were visible on the room’s embossed wallpaper, the rug under her feet, and the carpet it covered. Light streamed through holes in the lace curtains, despite attempts at repair. The sisters couldn’t open the windows anymore, even if the windows were capable of being opened, and the unventilated room smelt musty. To the sisters credit, there was very little dust.
The councillor began by explaining why he and Sarah were there. “You’ve all known me since I was a boy, so naturally I didn’t want you to hear about the proposals we have for the mmrket square from the council’s lawyers. I wanted to speak to you face-to-face about it…”
Lettice interrupted him. “Oh, we know all about that. I read the notice on the lamppost outside the shop. You want to improve the market square. Well, I certainly hope you’re going to do something about the empty properties on either side of us.”
“It doesn’t help our trade one bit, those two ramshackle properties left to rot,” her sister Dotty pointed out.
“We have written to you on the subject,” said the last of the three sisters, Nellie.
“I know you have,” Councillor Duigan said. “Our proposals will include those properties and also the wool shop. You’ll receive a formal letter from our planning department in the next day or two, setting out exactly what we are intending to do, as well as your options which will include the right to make objections should you wish to. More notices will appear about town and in the papers. It’s all very formal, I’m afraid. But let me tell you what we are proposing to do. The Council think it’s in the best interests of the town that part of the market square is redeveloped. The other side of square, where the lovely old Georgian manor houses are, will remain untouched, but your side of the market square will be included in the redevelopment. There are various stages we need to go through. There may have to be a public enquiry, although I doubt it. You’ll receive a letter from us, as I have said, and should you wish to, there’ll be plenty of time for you to put your point of view forward. But I have to say, the coun
cil are confident that the proposal will be passed, and the market square redeveloped for the benefit of the town and surrounding area. This brings us to Sarah. Sarah’s going to help you find somewhere else to live.”
The sisters glanced at each other. “We’d rather stay here when the redevelopment is going on” Nellie said.
“It’ll take more than a little dust and disruption to drive us out,” Dotty said.
Now it was the turn of the councillor and Sarah to glance at each other.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” the councillor said.
“Why ever not?” Lettice asked.
“Because our plans involve demolishing this entire side of the square,” Duigan said bluntly.
“You want to knock our home down?” Dotty shrieked.
“We shan’t go,” Lettice said.
“If the proposals go through, you won’t have any choice, I’m afraid. If necessary we can compulsorily purchase the property,” the councillor explained.
“You can do what you want, my boy, but you can’t pull our house down with us still in it,” Nellie quite rightly pointed out. She got to her feet, impressively quickly Sarah thought, and opened the parlour door. “If you want to demolish our wool shop, you’ll be doing so over our dead bodies. Now I’m afraid, I must ask you to leave our property immediately, Mr Councillor Duigan, and you can take your lady social worker, Ms Sarah, with you, as we shan’t be needing her services.”
Nellie Bailey folded her arms, and waited for the two to leave. Her sisters moved to stand on either side of her.
“Before you make your minds up, please spend a few minutes looking at the details of the lovely homes, Sarah has bought with her,” the councillor said.
Sarah produced some glossy brochures from her bag, which she held out to the sisters. “There really are some lovely old people’s homes,” Sarah said.
Her suggestion, or maybe her patronising tone, was the final straw for the sisters.
“Nellie, please pass me the fly squat,” Dotty said to her sister.
Nellie passed the wicker fly squat – almost as tall as the sisters – to Dotty who, holding it with both hands, bought it up over her head and down on to the armchair, where the councillor would still have been sitting, had he not leapt up and run behind the armchair, seconds earlier. Sarah hastily moved to his side.
“Drat,” Dotty said. “Missed. Never mind. Try, try and try again, as they say.” She raised the fly squat above her head again, and attempted to hit both Councillor Duigan and Sarah with it. They hurriedly crossed the parlour room, while Dotty took another swipe at them.
Sarah threw the brochures down on the floor with the words, “Why don’t we just leave them here for you to look at?”
She tumbled out of the door, quickly followed by the councillor, and chased after by the three old ladies.
Councillor Duigan and Sarah ran out of the shop, and into the market square, where Sarah doubled over with a stitch.
“Did I hear one of them say they still had some DDT under the stairs?” Sarah gasped.
While they struggled to get their breath back, the property brochures landed at their feet and the front door slammed shut.
CHAPTER THREE
The Failsham Wool Shop
Jane had known that whichever Bailey sister opened the door to her, the sister concerned would be dressed in a faded floral dress under a pinafore, that her stockings would be thick, her shoes flat lace-ups, and her completely white hair worn in a bun. Jane had rarely seen the sisters dressed in anything else in all the years she’d known them. As far as she could tell they hadn’t replaced their clothes since the 1950s, which in her mind made their clothes more modern than their kitchen. As she’d said to Hugh many a time, “It can’t have been refurbished since the property was built. Heaven only knows how they manage!”
All but transported from the Edwardian era, the sisters’ kitchen was a strange looking room. Thick yellow gloss covered both its tiled walls and its wooden cupboards, in which all kitchenware was painstakingly put away by the sisters at the end of the day, even though there wasn’t a piece in the place which wasn’t chipped, cracked, bent, broken or missing a handle or a lid. Although the sisters promised they used the twin-tub and electric oven given to them many years earlier by a kindly neighbour, Jane wasn’t convinced they actually did. The suspicion she’d long harboured that they still washed their clothes on the wooden scrubbing board which hung on the wall, and still cooked on the kitchen’s original black lead, wood-fuelled stove, in situ under an old-fashioned tiled surround, was all but confirmed when she’d surreptitiously opened the stove one day, and found a chicken all ready to cook inside.
The sisters did possess a fridge but nothing as modern as a freezer or a microwave. The water heater fitted above the kitchen’s original Belfast stone sink, remained the kitchen’s only source of hot water.
As usual a flowery plastic tablecloth covered the kitchen table, on which stood a pot of tea and half a fruit cake. On one side of the table, the three old ladies held hands, their eyes red from crying, whilst on the other side, Jane studied them. She genuinely didn’t think any of them had ever been further than the coast their whole lives and even then only on a day trip, and now they are being asked to leave their home.
“We were making plans for Lettice’s ninetieth birthday, it’s this summer, you know,” Dotty told her, “and now we don’t know where any of us will be.”
Was Lettice really about to turn ninety, thought Jane. She could still remember the old lady celebrating her seventy-fifth birthday with tea in the garden, and said so, “Ninety? Goodness. I still remember your seventy-fifth, Lettice, as though it were yesterday. It was such a beautiful day we all sat out in the garden. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.”
“I remember,” Lettice said. “You gave me a book as a birthday present. I did so enjoy reading it. What was it called now? Oh yes, I remember – Spinsters in Peril! I ended up reading the whole series, I enjoyed it so much.”
Jane smiled. The choice of the novel had been her late husband’s. He’d gone to his grave convinced the eccentric old ladies routine no more than a clever ruse, concealing the sisters real identity as undercover sleuths: “Like in the Spinster Sister Sleuth Series,” he’d always say.
“We made a pact long ago that the last of us to leave here would do so feet first,” Dotty announced and on either side of her, her sisters nodded in agreement.
“We won’t allow the council to knock the wool shop down,” Lettice said, stamping her tiny foot as she said this.
“We shan’t have it,” Nellie said. “We look after what is ours, and the shop is ours.”
“No, I don’t suppose you shall,” Jane replied, wondering whether anyone on the council had even considered they might actually have a fight on their hands over this one, and they would, they could be sure of that.
There was little else she could do at this stage, but advise them to take legal advice on their grounds for objecting to the redevelopment, and this is what she told them. As she spoke, she thought them rather disappointed in this. Something confirmed when Dotty said, “We were hoping for something more than that, Mrs Hetherington.”
“Such as?” Jane asked.
“Well as you’re a private investigator…” Nellie said.
“… We thought you could find something out about the council that we could blackmail them with,” Dotty said.
“Blackmail?” Jane said.
“To make them back down,” Lettice said.
“We appreciate it might take you time to find something, with just about anything going nowadays and no one embarrassed by anything they do,” Dotty said, seemingly seriously.
“But we just haven’t got enough money to bribe the whole council,” Nellie said.
“That’s why we’ve determined upon blackmail,” Lettice felt the need to explain.
“Blackmail’s illegal,” Jane said hurriedly, “as is bribery. There are also the pract
icalities to consider. We’d have to unearth something against everyone on the council, most of whom you know far more about than I ever will. Even if we did, they’d probably only resign, forcing a by-election, putting us back to square one. Let’s rule out blackmail or bribery. Tell you what, you make an appointment with your family lawyer, and I’ll have a ponder and see what else I can come up with?” Jane got to her feet.
“If necessary we’ll lock ourselves in the cellar,” Dotty said.
Jane glanced towards the door to the cellar. She’d never seen inside the building’s cellar and dreaded to think how steep its stairs were. Was there even a light down there which still worked, she wondered.
“We must buy in meats we can preserve for the siege,” Nellie said, on the front doorstep.
“And I’ll make jams and pickles,” Lettice said.
“We can buy some hens and a goat for milk,” Dotty said. “Then we’ll need for nothing.”
Jane imagined their sisters huddled around a candle in their dark, dank cellar, surrounded by jars and cans, cold meats hanging from the ceiling, chickens running around their feet and a goat chomping something in the corner. Good Lord, she thought, shaking her head at the image. She turned to say something but realised the sisters were lost in their own world, and she quietly slipped away.
Out in the market square the promised snow was falling. Jane watched a bus pull up at the bus stop and a group of youngsters got off it, led by a teenage girl. Whilst her friends danced and swirled in the thick white haze, their hands outstretched to catch the snowflakes, the girl, the smallest of the group, brushed snow away from the stone body of the white lion guarding the White Lion Hotel.
This scene reminded Jane of the winter she’d been pregnant with Adele. Failsham had been snowed in. She and Hugh were meant to attend a wedding, but the weather made driving impossible and they’d ended up donning Wellington boots, wrapping a blanket around themselves and walking to the market square to await a tractor kindly laid on by the bride’s father (a farmer) to transport them to the wedding. Jane could still remember the exhilaration she’d felt marching arm in arm with Hugh through the falling snow, and her joy upon finding the square, its old dark red, Georgian townhouses, and its Christmas tree complete with twinkling lights, covered in snow.