Mourning Doves

by Helen Forrester

  ‘Would it really? The lack of ready money to replace our stock has worried both Edna and me. And, by the way, do please call me Celia – John always does.’

  His eyes twinkled, as he replied, his voice holding a little surprise. ‘Well, thank you – I’m Alec. Now, keep your fingers crossed, Celia,’ he teased. ‘The Ramsay will be a nice find, too, if it is genuine.’

  As he picked up his hat from the sideboard, he paused and, almost diffidently, asked her if, on the following Friday evening, she would like to go with him to the cinema to see a motion picture.

  She blushed to the roots of her hair, and said she had never seen a film. He assured her that they were the coming thing in entertainment. ‘The Birth of a Nation isn’t a new film, but I am sure you would find it interesting,’ he urged.

  As a result, Celia entered a new magical world. She also enjoyed having her hand held during the more exciting scenes.

  She did not tell her mother that she had sat in the dark holding the hand of a man she barely knew. She accounted for being so late home by saying she had spent the time rearranging the books in the shop for a sale the following week.

  She decided that she would certainly never ever mention to Louise that, after the cinema show was over, they had walked along the shore and he had put his arm round her waist, while they watched the waves breaking on the distant sandbanks. And he had kissed her goodbye at the top of King’s Gap, before they ran laughing across the road to the railway station and he had put her on the train for Meols. And she was going out with him again next week.

  Sometimes you have to lie for peace, she decided after much quiet thought on the subject, and she felt so wonderful that she could not bear to have the feeling shattered by an angry parent. Nobody in the whole world, she knew for certain, had ever felt like she did; she was in love.

  Edna laughed, when she confessed this to her, and said she was delighted. She had to have Alec described in detail to her, because she had, as yet, never met him. Celia spent about half an hour on the subject, without even stopping for breath.

  Edna said wistfully that she wished she was as lucky as her sister. And Celia realised that the tables had indeed turned; Edna must be envious, much as she had been on her sister’s wedding day.

  She gave Edna a big hug, and said with conviction that Edna’s time would come.

  Edna nodded with a quiet smile, and went upstairs to her bedroom to smoke and to write to Vital.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  As winter crept on, the shop became quite busy, with fur-clad customers in search of ornaments, pictures and books for Christmas gifts. It was clear that Edna, just as much as Celia, had become a part of Celia’s Antiques and Collectibles. She obviously enjoyed the battle of wits as they bought and sold, whereas Celia found it difficult to maintain a firm stance in the face of some clients who tried to force her prices down. It was Celia, however, who kept carefully the proof of the provenance of particularly good antiques, and, when they were occasionally asked to sell pieces on commission, it was she who kept note of the furniture’s ownership. She also cleaned the store, polished the furniture and kept the accounts.

  Despite her fear of bargain-hunting clients, she spent more and more time in the shop, while Edna bought at estate sales. If driven into a corner on the subject of price, Celia would say that she must consult her partner before agreeing to bring it down by more than ten per cent.

  On occasions, clients would criticise a piece of furniture because it had minor scratches or chips or the upholstery was shabby. This gave the young women a chance to bring John Philpotts to the fore on the subject of repairs, and his salesmanship often clinched a deal.

  They also went half shares with John in the purchase of a handcart and a better trolley to facilitate the movement of both his repairs and their stock. ‘One day,’ John promised, ‘we’ll buy our own van for deliveries.’

  ‘Will you teach me how to drive?’ Edna teased.

  John was unexpectedly silent. Then he said reluctantly, ‘We’ll see when the time comes.’

  It was only later that Edna was told by Eddie Fairbanks that John blamed himself for the death of his fiancée while driving an ambulance in France.

  ‘You see, love, if he hadn’t taught her, she’d probably never have gone to war. Not that the poor girl would have got much comfort from him if she’d stayed at home waiting for him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Didn’t you know? The poor lad’s so wounded he’ll never be any use to a woman. You don’t have to tell every Tom, Dick and Harry, of course.’

  Edna nodded her head slowly. ‘I suspected it from a few hints he dropped, though, naturally, I would never actually ask him straight out,’ she said. ‘But you do hear of men coming home disabled in every way, and their wives and fiancées stay with them and care for them.’ She looked thoughtfully down at her feet, as if shy at discussing such a delicate matter, and then she suggested, ‘I think, at times, that love can be an all-encompassing and forgiving emotion. And his fiancée might well have stood by him, even if the marriage could not have been consummated. He’s a very nice man.’

  ‘Oh, aye. It’s possible.’

  ‘Well, anyway, he’s an excellent friend to both Celia and me – like you are.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Miss Edna.’ The old man grinned and returned to picking rosehips off the bushes in his front garden. What a fine, understanding lady Miss Edna was. He hoped she would find a nice man some day. He snipped three particularly lovely Christmas roses, and then called her back to give them to her.

  Without Ethelred, the women admitted, they would have been lost. Much of the furniture was heavy, and, before it was sold, often had to be moved more than once. Eventually he became their full-time employee, at a very modest weekly wage, and he divided his time between their garden and the shop. As the newspapers reported an increased number of unemployed, his mother, knowing his limitations, was pitifully grateful.

  ‘You’ve given him pride in himself, like nobody else would have bothered to do,’ she told Celia almost tearfully, as one day she brought in the sandwich lunch which he had forgotten to bring with him to work.

  ‘Well, he’s the sweetest person to work with,’ Celia replied. ‘And he is so honest – I never have to worry about that. Of course, the shop isn’t making very much yet – but we hope to improve his wages as time goes on.’

  Alec Tremaine did not bother Celia with details of the convoluted situation he found himself in, as he sought to prove the origins of the two paintings he had taken away. Because he would not entrust them to anyone else, he had to wait for opportunities such as his pre-Christmas holiday to take them personally to show to various experts to hum and haw over.

  The Ramsay was indeed a Ramsay, he was assured at the Tate, and the two women agreed, when asked, that it should be auctioned in Edinburgh.

  During a weekend when Alec begged a Friday off he took the train to Scotland. He was armed with an introduction to the Director of the art gallery in Edinburgh. He was agreeably surprised when the gallery itself made an offer for it.

  He made a long-distance call on a crackling telephone to his new-found friend at the Tate. His friend pointed out that the price seemed a little low. If he wanted to try for a better price, the gallery could bid at an auction.

  Thoroughly out of his depth, Alec said he would consult the owner, and went back to Hoylake.

  ‘Take it,’ said Edna. ‘We could get the finding of it written up in the Chester newspaper and even in the Scotsman, perhaps. It would give us wonderful publicity, that we made a find like that – and anyway, we need the capital.’

  And so it was arranged. She was right about the publicity.

  Instead of using the money for the Ramsay to buy stock, Alec suggested that it would probably more than pay a first-class specialist to clean the Turner.

  ‘It would have to be done by a most reputable firm,’ Alec warned. ‘Because it could be easily damaged – it would have to be
taken out of its frame, which nobody has tried to do up to now.’

  He looked at Celia, and said, ‘As I told you, the chap at the Tate is dead sure it is genuine. But he did say that to sell it on the international market – and it would be international – you’d do better if you had provenance to support the claim that it is a real Turner; otherwise, it is going to cost you a lot, with insurance and transport, while other experts nod their heads over it.’ He paused to whistle under his breath, and then added, ‘I suspect that, if it were cleaned, all the glorious Turner colours would come up and it would look more convincing.’

  Celia was loath to chance losing what they had gained. She protested gently that they needed the money so badly.

  ‘Tush, Celia. We take chances every day,’ responded Edna. ‘We make all kinds of blunders when we’re buying and selling. Let’s take this one big chance. It could be the best investment we ever made.’

  Finally, they all crossed their fingers, and, once more, Celia packed the painting up very carefully.

  The decision entailed two more visits to London, the first, a day or two later, to deliver the painting to an art restorer recommended by the Tate. The second, for which he took a day’s leave one Friday some three months later, was to collect it after the cleaning was completed. Alec began to think that he was buying the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company with his own small salary. ‘The things I do for love.’ He smiled at his predicament, and began to give earnest thought to engagement rings and to introducing Celia to his mother.

  When the picture was finally returned to its owner, it glowed with colour. The man who had so painstakingly cleaned it had raved over it, and for the first time Alec was himself completely convinced that it was a genuine Turner.

  While all three of them were in doubt as to what they should do next, Great-aunt Blodwyn became the unexpected source of confirmation of the picture’s origins. When Celia wrote to her aunt for her birthday at the end of March, she mentioned her adventures with the shop and the good news about the portrait by Ramsay. She also said how much she wished the Turner was a real one.

  She received by return of post a registered letter.

  ‘I have preserved a lot of my grandfather’s letters and papers, because he was an interesting man,’ her godmother wrote. ‘He did a considerable amount of writing about the state of the arts in his day. I always knew that Turner painted that picture – only Louise never seemed to realise that it was valuable and should be taken care of. I am glad you have more sense.

  ‘Grandpa loved the picture – he said Turner did it from memory. I believe it was my grandfather’s single biggest investment in a painting, though, as you know, he had quite a collection, some of which ended up in your house.’

  Attached to her letter was another, rather crumpled epistle, in which in faded copperplate Joseph Turner acknowledged the safe receipt of a bank draft from Sir Thomas Gilmore in full settlement for an oil painting called Hoylake Sands.

  Alec looked stupefied when he was shown the letter.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ he exclaimed, and sat down, so flabbergasted that he forgot to apologise for using a swear word.

  ‘This will do it,’ he said with a satisfied grin. ‘It will do it! You’ll have plenty of capital to do whatever you want.’

  Deeply moved, he got up and put his arms round Edna and hugged her, kissing her on either cheek. Then he smiled down at her little sister, and took her in his arms and did the same.

  She blushed profusely as he held her for a moment before releasing her, and Edna decided that it would be very nice to have a brother again. As they discussed the moves they must make to put the painting on the market, she lit a cigarette and longed for Vital.

  Epilogue

  Timothy George stowed his godmother’s wheelchair in the back of his van, and drove her and her thin graceful companion, Rosemary, back home from the ceremony at the cenotaph to Celia’s old-fashioned house in Hoylake.

  All three of them were cold and rather dispirited.

  Timothy George went straight upstairs to his apartment on the second floor. He thankfully turned on the electric fire in his bedroom and changed out of his uniform, which was a little tight around his waist. He hung the garments on hangers, and unpinned his medals and laid them carefully on the dressing table. He stood, for a moment, frowning down at them, and wondered if his son, a pillar of a London bank, would keep them after he himself was gone. He doubted it.

  He went slowly downstairs to join Celia.

  Celia’s house, which she and Alec had bought on their marriage, had seen many changes.

  After Celia’s marriage, Louise and Edna had continued to live in the cottage at Meols, until, one day without warning, a glowing Edna had calmly introduced to Louise a small, neat stranger with charming manners. His name was Vital Oliveira, who had just arrived from Brazil to work as a translator for a big Liverpool fruit importer.

  During the long correspondence with his beloved, he had not been idle; he had sought assiduously a post in England, by writing to every British company he had ever been in touch with. It was Edna who had suggested the Liverpool Fruit Exchange as a possible source of work, and through them he had finally reached a company which bought and sold fruit in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries. His excellent references, some of them from British companies, finally got him a decent post as translator. He would have to travel from time to time, but his base would be in Liverpool.

  He had been in England two months, when he and Edna had announced to a startled Louise that they were to be quietly married within a month.

  Since the couple wished to live in Liverpool in order to be near Vital’s place of work, Louise had been thrown into a panic at the idea of being left alone in the Meols cottage.

  Celia had wanted to offer Louise a home in her new house, but Edna would not hear of it. ‘She’ll start to bully you again, Celia, like she did when you were young,’ she said forcefully. ‘She could ruin your marriage. And, if I had her, she would probably ruin mine. Better by far that she should remain in the cottage.’

  Through an employment agency, they found a penniless, cultivated lady to be a companion-help to Louise. Though Louise complained steadily about her, the arrangement actually suited them both very well. They lived out quite productive lives in the cottage by continuing Louise’s interest in the fate of deaf-blind veterans.

  In later years, as she began to interest others in the desperate plight of these unfortunate men, Cousin Albert became a fund-raiser for her, and did much to provide Braille lessons and teachers for them. Their joint compassion was a first step in a journey lasting nearly thirty years, to keep the deaf-blind army privates from being put into mental asylums and conveniently forgotten. Dear Mrs Lou won some battles, but lost many others. She became known to many of the men as a tender presence who smelled of lavender and was not afraid to hug them. She was a much loved lady.

  Warned by the startling sensations caused by Sergeant Richard Williamson’s gentle fingers on her face when she had first met him, she kept her personal feelings rigidly to herself, though, in her heart, she knew that probably the kindest thing she could do for any one of them would be to take him to bed. Upheld by Victorian principles of the nobility of self-abnegation, however, she never took advantage of their loneliness, and simply hoped they might find their own compassionate young women. And a few of them did. For herself, it was a bitter inward battle.

  Louise made generous use of the cottage’s spare bedroom by offering free seaside holidays for anyone who was both deaf and blind. They were specially good about this when they received requests to accommodate tiny tots who were so afflicted. At Mrs Lou’s, a number of children, for the first time, explored the feel of sand in their hands and waves breaking over their tiny feet, and the lovely cosy lavender-scented comfort of being rocked in Mrs Lou’s lap.

  While she had the physical strength, Louise worked steadily to try to improve the lives of deaf-blind servicemen. In
a country exhausted by the greatest war in history, however, there was a tendency to deal, first, with the greater number of men who were blinded but not deafened.

  Over many years, poor Louise was to have considerable problems with the military’s medical community, as she struggled to give a better life to her doubly disabled boys. Steeped in nineteenth-century attitudes towards medicine, abominably snobbish, they might bestir themselves for officers, but, as far as they were concerned, too often the other ranks were born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upwards, and must, like Job, patiently endure their suffering. She had discovered to her horror that the usual way of disposing of them, if they were deaf-blind and had no family to whom they could be sent, was to put them into lunatic asylums. If they were not insane when they went in, they frequently soon became so in their desperate confusion. This tragic information fired her with even greater determination to help them.

  It was only years later, after another war, that she came into touch with the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts, and was able to suggest to others interested that there should be special training for teachers to work with the deaf-blind, particularly in military hospitals. The names of Helen Adams Keller and her wonderful teacher, Anne Sullivan, became an inspiration.

  Celia and Edna ran the antique business until Edna’s marriage, after which Alec and Celia, helped by Ethelred and John and an art student or two, managed to run it, while, in quick succession, Celia gave birth to three healthy, mischievous boys, Peter, Paul and Bertram. They finally sold out in the second year of the Second World War.

  The Second World War had brought them little but grief. When their last-remaining, third son, Bertram, was killed in Sicily, Celia and Alec offered part of their house as a home for his young widow, Margaret, and her twin boys. The second and third floors were made into a self-contained apartment for them. Celia and Alec occupied the ground floor, and, in later years, after Alec’s death, the basement had been made into a living room and bedroom for a carer for Celia.