by Gina Wilson
“My mother used to write …” said Cora. Then she broke off and said instead: “There’s a girl at school who writes, too.”
“Who’s that?” I asked. “Is she one of your friends? I’d love to meet her.”
“She’s called Hermione Phillips. She’s thin, like me … only people think she’s beautiful. She writes poetry about nature. I don’t think it’s any good but everyone else thinks it’s wonderful.”
“Don’t you like her?”
“No. She’s stuck-up. The Phillipses are rich—they don’t talk to the likes of me.”
I felt embarrassed. Certainly I had gathered that Cora didn’t come from a rich family. For one thing she spoke with a sort of local accent which sounded all right to me but couldn’t be called “posh”. In addition, her clothes were a bit scruffy and she never boasted of or produced any major possessions such as a family car or a bicycle. She hadn’t really told me anything about herself at all. I still didn’t know where she lived. When I asked her she just pointed vaguely in whatever direction it was and said: “Over there.”
I said: “Look, Cora, will you tell me a bit about yourself? What do you mean ‘the likes of me’? Who are your friends, anyway? If Hermione Phillips isn’t, who is?”
“I haven’t got any friends,” said Cora. “Unless you … Will you be my friend?”
“Of course,” I said without thinking twice. “We already are friends, aren’t we? But why haven’t you got any friends? Everyone’s got at least one friend.”
“I haven’t,” said Cora. “I’ve never had one.”
I asked her how long she’d lived in Okefield and she said she’d been there all her life. I was very puzzled. “And in all that time,” I said, “you haven’t had a single friend?”
“Not really. Mrs. Briggs, she’s the woman that comes to help your mother cleaning, she was very kind to me when I was tiny but I don’t see anything of her now.”
“Mrs. Briggs!”
“She nursed me when my mother died. She’d had a baby about the same time, but it died, so she took me in till I was about eight months.”
“Mrs. Briggs had a baby …?”
“Yes. The same birthday as mine practically. But she was quite old to have a baby then. My dad said she ought to have died, not my mum. But it was her baby that died—She had grown-up children; it wasn’t her first.”
I sat down on a boulder. It was late afternoon and we were ambling round the common. I had been about to suggest going home, but now it looked as if Cora was ready to tell some of the secrets she’d been holding back and I didn’t want to interrupt her. She might take weeks to get to this stage again. I patted the boulder. “Cora, sit down,” I said, gently. “Tell me about your mother. I didn’t know she’d died.”
Cora sat down. “That’s a wonder,” she said. “I thought Mrs. Briggs would have told you all about that.”
“Not a word,” I said, keeping quiet about what Mrs. Briggs had actually said.
“There’s not much to say about Mum,” said Cora. She didn’t seem sad particularly, just matter-of-fact. “She died just after I was born. I don’t know why, exactly, just something that can happen to women after they have a baby. It happened to her.”
“Poor her,” I said, “and poor you. It must be very hard without a mother.” I could hardly think of anything worse, but I didn’t want to upset Cora by showing the extent of my horror at such a predicament.
“It’s not so bad,” said Cora in her usual flat voice. Her face was equally expressionless. It was almost impossible ever to know what she was thinking; she never smiled but she never looked particularly downcast either. “I’ve never known anything different. It would be nasty for you if your mother died right now, because she means something to you, but mine never meant anything to me.”
I was chilled by these remarks—the suggestion that my own mother could possibly die “right now”, and the terrible, empty space Cora had revealed in her own life. I wanted to argue with her and say that of course her mother meant something to her even if she’d never known her. Surely she must be curious about what she’d been like. But, for fear of hurting her by my prying insistence, I thought it best to follow her lead and make light of the whole thing.
“I see what you mean,” I said. “So Mrs. Briggs took over while you were tiny—and then did you go back to live with your father?”
“Yes. Mrs. Briggs was my wet-nurse—that’s what they call it—till her husband walked out on her. Then I went back to Dad.”
“Good heavens! What an awful time! Poor Mrs. Briggs! Baby dying, husband deserting her.” I felt a pang of sympathy for Mrs. Briggs despite my instinctive dislike of her.
“You don’t need to feel too sorry for her,” said Cora sharply.
“Oh, I don’t know. That seems hard …”
“You just don’t. That’s all.” Cora jumped up, shaking her fringe out of her eyes. “Let’s go.”
On our way home from the common we passed St. Matthew’s Church. The reddening evening sun brought out a warmth in the stone and gleamed on the clock face on the square tower. The graveyard was grassy and green, dotted here and there with the bumps and mounds of unmarked graves. There was also the usual variety of headstones, old and new, planted haphazardly between dark yew trees. Not a bad place to be buried if that’s what it had to come to.
“Let’s go in,” said Cora. “I love it. My mum’s buried here.”
I wasn’t very keen. The sun was dropping fast; faint breezes were stirring; graveyards frightened me. “I’m late already,” I protested.
“Come on,” said Cora, pushing open the gate. I felt the initiative passing, for the first time, from me to her. “Come on!” She went in and beckoned me to follow. She seemed to come alive, for the first time since I had met her, dancing and pirouetting over the grass with unexpected grace. “Come on, Becky! Come and see!” she called back to me as I hesitated. But she didn’t wait for me; she disappeared behind the church; she knew I’d follow.
I didn’t want to go in. I didn’t like walking over the grass, nice as it looked from the road. I kept thinking I was walking over corpses and of all the curses and bad luck I’d be bringing down on myself as a result. The graves were so close-packed that it was quite difficult to pick one’s way round the marked ones, never mind the unmarked lumps and bumps. Round the corner I came upon Cora sitting cross-legged beside a simple headstone. At its foot was a small rectangular flower-bed planted with rose bushes. “Look!” said Cora. “She’s here.”
I felt quite shaky as I read the headstone. “Myra Ravenwing, dear wife of Ernest and mother of Cora, 1920–45. Rest easy.” I sat down silently while, for the first time, Cora chattered on.
“She’s got such a lovely grave, hasn’t she? Dad organized it all. He works here, he’s sexton—here and at St. Margaret’s in Overoke. Look, I’m making a daisy-chain. She loved flowers. She wrote sort of nature diaries, all about the different flowers of the different seasons and what they looked like and what they could be used for—dyes, medicines. My middle name’s Rose, you know. Dad thought of that. Then he planted roses here for her. It’s a link between us, isn’t it? I like that. Sometimes I lie right down here beside her and I talk to her and sing to her and tell her what flowers are out. She hears me, I’m certain. So I have got a mum too, you see. Not like yours, but real all the same.”
She turned her black-eyed stare on me. Her face was bright and smiling, chirpy almost. The sun was nearly gone; it was getting cool; soon it would start to get dark. “I must go, Cora,” I said. “Mummy’ll be wondering.”
“Don’t go yet,” she pleaded. “Wait for the church bells. See, it’s nearly half-past.” So we sat and waited for the bells and when they sounded I jumped out of my skin because they were so loud at such close quarters. But, by the end, my ears had accustomed themselves to the full, rich tones and I was glad we’d stayed. The predictable chiming of the ancient clock somehow dispelled a sudden fear that Cora’s strange, feveris
h chatter had roused in me.
While I still felt calm, I rose to my feet. “Come on, Cora,” I said. “Time to move. Won’t your father be expecting you?” I knew my mother would be getting agitated by this time.
“He’ll be at the pub,” said Cora. “Look, I live in that cottage over there. He leaves the door unlocked for me.” The cottage was just through the hedge from the graveyard. It looked small and dark.
I thought of my own home, full of light and warmth and people waiting for me. “Oh, Cora …” I began. But what was the point of saying, “How dreadful!” or, “How sad!”? I just said: “What a pretty little house!”
Then I had to dash. Cora ran with me all the way home and left me at the gate to wander back again to the empty cottage.
Inside, my mother was relieved and enraged at the sight of me. “What time do you call this?” she scolded. “Just you get up to bed at once and be glad your father’s not home yet or goodness knows what he’d say.” I went straight up and got ready for bed and when I was writing up my diary she came in and sat on the bed. “Where were you, Becky?” she asked wearily.
“Just with Cora,” I said.
“Oh, that Cora!” she said. “I don’t know—perhaps Mrs. Briggs was right—she’s leading you into bad ways. You’ve never been so late before.”
“Oh, it wasn’t Cora’s fault,” I said. And I told her about Cora’s mother and about her lonely life in the cottage. But, for some reason, I didn’t tell her then about Mrs. Briggs’s part in her story or about our visit to the churchyard.
“Dear, dear! Poor little thing!” said Mother. “Don’t some people have it hard?” She seemed as moved as I had been by Cora’s plight and after she’d kissed me and turned my light out she wandered off downstairs murmuring, “Poor little mite! What chance does she have?”
All the same, after that I began to notice an ambivalence in Mother’s attitude to Cora. Certainly she had every sympathy with her, deprived of a mother’s love and neglected, as she saw it, by the father, but, at the same time, I suspected that she didn’t want me to befriend Cora too exclusively. Perhaps Mrs. Briggs’s words had made an impression on her, despite her own judgement, or perhaps she feared that if Cora became too frequent a visitor at our house she would find herself, whether she wanted it or not, becoming almost a substitute mother. She’d say things like: “Cora’s fine, Becky. I’ve nothing against the child at all—I’m very sorry for her—but you must have other friends too. There’s no point tying yourself up completely before you’ve even met the others.”
I thought it very strange myself that Cora had no other friends. She didn’t seem all that bad to me. She did have a musty smell about her and she wasn’t very pretty, but lots of us weren’t, and she was often rather dreary company, but she was a good listener. The most off-putting thing about her as far as I was concerned was the strange vitality that came over her in the graveyard. It was alarming to see her transformed from her usual drab lifelessness to such lightness and brightness amongst all those corpses. At her insistence I went with her to the graveyard several times, and I tried to be brave and told myself that this was Cora at her best and that if only she could bring all this vivacity and sweetness out of the graveyard and into the rest of her life her problems would be solved. But she never seemed able to do that. This side of her personality was reserved solely for her mother’s graveside. When we were there she spoke vividly of how her mother had been so beautiful, so at one with nature and its ways, almost a fairy woman. “I’d like to dance like a fairy,” she’d say and skip round and round the grave with surprising agility and speed.
One day, when we were sitting there, she said: “That Hermione Phillips writes dreadful poetry. It’s just phoney. She writes about nature all the time and she knows nothing about it at all. She doesn’t know the names of the flowers or where they grow or anything. My mum knew all that sort of thing. And she could paint. You must see her diaries one day when you come to our house …”
“You do spend a lot of time thinking about her, don’t you, Cora?” I said quietly. “Remember you told me at first you never gave her a thought?”
“Mmmm,” said Cora. “But I don’t always. It’s just when I’m here I almost want to be her. I think how marvellous it would be if she could somehow come alive again in me. Dad would love it. But he says I take after him—he says I’m nothing like her at all.”
“Is he nice to you?” I asked.
“Yes, he’s very good to me. He loves me. But he’s sad about her all the time. Sometimes I think it’s my fault she’s dead. If she hadn’t had me …”
“You mustn’t think that, Cora,” I protested. “It wasn’t your fault at all. Nobody’s to blame.”
“That’s what Dad says,” she said in a low voice. “But it’s a fact all the same. If I wasn’t here she still would be and it’s obvious which of us Dad would rather have.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said desperately. “He’d rather have both of you. Apart from that it’s not a question of choice.”
“Mum says that,” murmured Cora, staring at the soil of the flower-bed. “I’ve heard her say that.”
Again I felt a shiver of fear run up my back. I glanced round to check that we were on our own, no sudden appearance of anyone else, real or imaginary. “I get the creeps when you talk like that, Cora,” I said.
Then she turned her bright, black eyes on me and reached out a hand, perhaps to comfort me, I don’t know. Her outstretched arm was silhouetted against the sun like a black stick with five bony prongs on the end. It seemed to be coming for me. “Don’t touch me!” I screamed. I leapt up and ran for my life, helter-skelter over all the graves, through the gate and off down the lane to the village. I didn’t stop till I burst in through our own back door.
“Becky! Becky! What’s happened?” gasped Mother, folding her big warm arms round me. But I couldn’t speak for panting and trembling. She sat me down and made sweet tea. As I sipped it and began to recover, she said: “Did someone hurt you, darling?”
“No, no,” I said, seeing the extent of her anxiety. “It was Cora.”
“Cora!” she exclaimed. “What on earth’s Cora done?”
“Nothing really, I don’t think,” I said. “I just felt scared out of my wits—I thought she was a witch or a skeleton raised from the dead.” Just talking about it brought the scene vividly back to me and I quaked with fright again.
Joseph looked up from his building-set on the floor. “Is Cora a witch?” he asked. “A real witch? Can she do spells?”
“Be quiet, Jo, and don’t talk rubbish,” snapped Mother. Then she turned to me again. “Now look, Becky,” she said. “You’re just letting your imagination run wild. Cora is a perfectly ordinary, rather lonely, child. She’s got quite enough to contend with without you using her tragic little life to frighten yourself to death with. Where is she now? Have you just run off and left her somewhere?”
“She’s in the graveyard,” I said, “talking to the spirit of her mother who’s buried there, if you want to know.” I said all this in a rush of hatred for Mother because she was scolding me and blaming me and accusing me of somehow exploiting Cora’s misfortune for the sake of morbid titillation. Then I started to sob and I told Mother all about our visits to the graveside and Cora’s odd behaviour there and how it had always given me the shivers despite my efforts to view it calmly and rationally.
From time to time Mother glanced at Jo to see if he was listening, but he was absorbed in an attempt to construct a crane. Dory was upstairs in his cot, having an afternoon rest. “I’m sorry I was sharp with you, darling,” she said when I’d finished. “Really I was just relieved that it was only Cora who’d frightened you. When you came rushing in I didn’t know what had happened. But I do think you’ve been seeing rather a lot of Cora recently and it seems to be getting you down. It’s sad when we meet people who’re lonely and friendless, and we want to make it up to them somehow. But we can’t always. Just be a normal friend to
her, Becky. Don’t try to make her happy overnight; don’t take her over; don’t think you can compensate for everything she’s missed. Just see her now and then. By all means be open and friendly but make an effort to make other friends too.”
I could see that she was right. I had been thinking I could organize Cora, change her ways, help her to be happier. But during the graveyard visits she almost seemed to be taking me over, compelling me to spectate her strange transformation and become a witness to her communications with her dead mother. It had finally preyed on my mind to the extent that I was just about ready to believe she was in touch with the supernatural, with her black, piercing eyes, her bony, skeletal arms and legs and her weird, gleeful dancing there amongst the dead.
Chapter 4
Stansfield House
IT WAS ALL TO THE GOOD, THEREFORE, THAT A DAY OR TWO after that Mother went to her first meeting of the Mothers’ Union in the church hall and met Hermione Phillips’s mother. She came home brimming with satisfaction and told me she’d solved my problems already. “I’ve had a really good afternoon,” she said, taking Dory on her knee and sitting down on the wicker chair in the kitchen to tell Jo and me her news. “First we had a pleasant talk about flower arrangement and then we sat at tables for afternoon tea. The vicar’s wife made a point of introducing me to several people and I finally shared a table with a Mrs. Phillips …”
“Were there cakes?” asked Jo.
“Er—yes, a few, and biscuits. Now, this Mrs….”
“What kind?” asked Jo.
“Swiss rolls. Now, Jo, let me tell Becky something …” Jo slid off his chair and wandered off into the garden. Mother looked guilty. “Has he been all right while I’ve been away? Do you need a baby-sitter, Becky, or can you really manage the boys?”
“Course I can. Not at night—but I can during the day. Dory’s only just woken up, anyway. Jo’s fine—he’s just bored. What were you going to tell me?”