Abdication: A Novel

by Juliet Nicolson

  May’s mother Edith had been born and brought up in considerable hardship in the Hebrides in the North of Scotland and when she reached her twenties, she had gone south to Liverpool with her elder sister Gladys. The girls hoped to find both their freedom and their fortune and, with those aspirations in mind, they found employment in the kitchens of a transatlantic cruise ship. Two months later they had reached the port of Bridgetown in Barbados in 1911 and Edith had been enchanted by the fertile abundance of the island, a landscape in arresting contrast to the bleak beauty of the Scottish moors. Not long after Edith’s arrival she had met Duncan Thomas, a fellow Scotsman. Duncan’s great-grandfather had made little money from trading in peat and wool and, hating the cold and the damp of Scotland, had emigrated to the West Indies in the 1850s. There Mr. Thomas had established a life of relative affluence, and incomparable warmth, as the proprietor of a small sugar plantation.

  Two more generations of Thomases followed the first Mr. Thomas into the sugar business but by the time the third owner, Duncan’s father, had succumbed to a fatal dose of malaria, the world sugar market was suffering and the Thomas plantation was no longer so prosperous. Duncan was in his early twenties when he inherited the family business and met the lovely young woman who had recently arrived from the Scottish Highlands. The charm of the palm-covered island, the lure of its balmy water and the prospect of financial security convinced Edith to accept a proposal of marriage from a man she barely knew. Gladys, her feisty elder sister, the fight for women’s suffrage powering the blood through her veins, decided that life on an island in perpetual sunshine was not for her. She returned to England, saddened by the parting from her much-loved sister and burdened with the task of telling her parents that they would probably never see their younger daughter again.

  Back in England, Gladys married Bob Castor, an ex-miner and a Scottish trade unionist. Their only son, Nathanial, was born in London shortly before Edith gave birth in Barbados to her own son, Sam. Three years later Edith became the mother of a daughter, May. At the outbreak of the war Duncan had joined the British navy and, apart from one brief spell on leave in 1915, did not return to the island until 1917, when the seriousness of his wartime injuries ensured his future permanent exclusion from national service. A year after the war ended Gladys had died in prison, where she had been detained for her militant role in the suffragette cause, leaving her sister Edith shattered by the news. Shortly afterwards Bob also became fatally ill with tuberculosis, a casualty of years of inhaling the noxious air of the mines, and within eighteen months Nathanial Castor had become an orphan.

  Seventeen years later, May and Sam set off on the sea passage to Liverpool on one of the plantation’s regular sugar cargo ships. The decision had not been without its challenges, especially as May was leaving the island of her birth for the first time. If it had not been for Sam’s repeated assurances to their mother that he would look after May on the ship, and deliver her safely to Bethnal Green and the front door of cousin Nathanial, their only remaining family member in England, May would not have found the courage to leave and her mother would not have found the strength to let her go.

  Both children had longed to come to England for as long as they could remember. Sam had been working on the plantation since he left school at the age of sixteen. He had grown up around ships and had accompanied his father several times on board the sugar consignment boats to England. His ambition was to join the British Royal Navy, just as his father had before him.

  But while Sam was motivated to follow the profession of his father, May thought of little other than how she could escape Duncan. On the face of it, Duncan appeared to be a doting father. He encouraged Sam with his studies and insisted on reading bedtime stories to May every night. As a very young girl May had lain in her bed, too hot to tolerate a nightdress, as her father had pulled up a chair beside her. Only May had known that those bedtime stories were accompanied by a “little nip,” the term of endearment, or so Duncan made it sound, that he reserved for those sneaky tots, upended in one swift movement into his mouth from the silver flask he kept in the pocket of his cream-tea planter’s jacket.

  “Just one little nip to oil the wheels before we get going,” Duncan would whisper through the gap in his teeth, half speaking to himself, his small bloodshot eyes looking down at May’s body in her bed, as soon as he heard Edith’s shoes receding down the stairs.

  “Our little secret,” he would say, as May tried to conceal her instinct to draw back at the moment when he began to trail his fingers through her hair, his dirty and broken nails snagging as they made their way down through her ponytail, towards her back, flicking the familiar switch of alarm. But May’s mother had suspected nothing and May had been too frightened to tell anyone, feeling that Duncan’s behaviour must somehow be her fault.

  As May grew too old for the bedtime stories, Duncan left her alone, staying away from the plantation for nights at a time and reappearing with no explanation for his absence. A few years later he had seemed genuinely pleased by May’s interest in learning to drive the plantation car and by her cautious acceptance of his offer to teach her. Her skill behind the wheel led to her employment as the official plantation driver. But during the driving lessons Duncan would stroke the back of her head as May, powerless to stop him, gripped the wheel in revulsion. He would put his hand on her knee as she worked the pedals at her feet. He would appear through the high stalks of sugarcane when she was out talking to one of the women in the fields and offer to walk her home, or he would think of a reason to accompany her on her weekly trips to the bank and the post office in nearby Speightstown. May became practised at avoiding him but she knew that however much she tried to protect herself, one day he would succeed in crossing the final boundary. In the end it had been Sam’s persistent pursuit of his naval ambitions that had opened up the opportunity for escape and freedom.

  In the very early days of January 1936, May and Sam Thomas stepped off the ship, up onto the high Liverpool quayside at Albert Dock. May shivered beneath the inadequacy of her thin, cotton coat. The pale blue, summer-flimsy material had been perfectly suited to the warm climate back home, wrapped around her narrow shoulders by her mother before she had pulled her daughter close to her and kissed her goodbye. But May had been quite unprepared for this feeling of real English coldness. Not only was her skin cold to the touch, but she felt as if her blood had stopped pumping round her body altogether.

  From the warmth of her bed in Mrs. Cage’s house, May thought back over the past few weeks. At home the brightness of the overhead sun could dazzle with a light that filtered scarlet through closed eyelids. But on that first day in Liverpool, the greyness of the early morning had given her the illusion that nighttime was already falling. The sky hung so low that it appeared to be collapsing onto the Pier Head.

  Sam knew his way around the dock from his previous trips to Liverpool. He had tucked his sister’s right hand into that of his own glove and, joined together in that manner, they walked along the vast quayside. The grey water, until so recently their exclusive landscape, had vanished behind the frosty sea mist that rose above the huge harbour walls. The walkway was thick with people, almost all men, all travelling in different directions. The level of noise was nearly as hard to tolerate as the freezing air. Men pushed carts so precariously laden with vegetables and fruit that the weight caused the carts to weave uncontrollably from side to side. Warehouse workers rode bicycles with huge trailers packed with cardboard boxes hooked behind them, and the occasional private car nudged its way through the crush, granted special permission to draw up at the water’s edge only because of the importance of the human cargo it had come to collect. May pulled at Sam’s sleeve to stop. A beautifully kept dark blue Rolls-Royce was parked up against the harbour wall. The plantation car that she loved for the freedom and independence it gave her had been one of the hardest things to leave behind.

  Glad to be on land for a few days before the return journey, Sam’s sailor f
riends were full of good humour, telling the sort of jokes generally too risky to tell in the presence of a woman. They had accepted May as one of them, warming to her on the voyage partly for her brave-spiritedness in the rough seas but also for her unusual and delicate beauty. The ration of rum distributed on arrival in port had induced a friendly boisterousness towards her that bore no resemblance to the threatening, drunken silences that had accompanied Duncan’s lingering looks.

  A couple of the crew offered to help carry their few pieces of luggage and the little group made their way along the bustling fog-draped pier, to the nearby Pier Head bus station. The timetable for the Crosville Motor Services to London was pinned onto the waiting-room wall and a gas fire was sputtering in one corner, doing its best to warm the cramped space. The room began to fill up with people blowing air into their hands. When the squat green and cream bus drew up outside, just visible through the smeary condensation of the only window in the waiting room, the passengers gathered up their bags and cases. The driver, his mood avuncular, stood at the foot of the coach steps.

  “Come along, ladies and gents,” he said, taking May by the crook of her elbow and helping her up onto the bottom step of the coach. “Mind how you go, my dear.”

  Some of the male passengers saluted as they boarded and the driver returned the gesture of mock-deference, touching his cap, the smartest part of his otherwise shabby uniform. Several of the women around May clutched thermoses, their curlers visible beneath their headscarves. They spread woollen rugs over their knees and soon the driver was swinging the bus out of the station, the large steering wheel sliding easily through his fingers like a seal slipping through a circus hoop.

  May settled back into the velvety moquette seat, tucking her gloveless hands beneath her thighs to warm them up. As a child she had often hidden her hands, not for warmth but in embarrassment, longing for them to turn as pale as those of her brother and mother. Only recently had she accepted the inexplicable, that just like the rest of her body, they would always be a slightly deeper colour than those of the rest of her family.

  The journey to London took up much of the day as flasks of tea were passed up and down between the aisle, and jam sandwiches in little greaseproof packets were offered to those who had come unprepared. May had not eaten since leaving the ship and was grateful when an elderly man gestured to her and Sam to help themselves to his own supply. Each time the coach hit an uneven patch of road the man put his hand to his mouth.

  “It’s my teeth,” he explained. “These new ones cost me an arm and a leg and I don’t want them shooting out onto the floor. Might never find them again.”

  Eventually the soothing sway of the coach encouraged sleep. Every so often the coach stopped in a city bus station to pick up and drop off more passengers and twice the coach drew into the forecourt of a public house where a chatty line formed outside the door to the ladies’ facilities, while the men vanished behind the back of the building, whistling. Each time the coach paused, first at Birkenhead, then Chester, and then Whitchurch, the interruption to the motion woke May from her doze. She watched the tiny breath clouds that hung for a moment in the outside air as more London-bound travellers came huffing onto the bus, visibly disappointed to find that the presence of a group of human bodies had made little effect on the cold inside.

  At Oxford, the last stop before the end of the two-hundred-mile journey to London, May and Sam left the coach for some fresh air. A barely lit cigarette stub was clinging to the corner of the driver’s bottom lip and the front crease down the length of his trousers had disappeared. He looked crumpled and tired, the bonhomie of the early part of the journey squeezed out of him. Sam offered him a Player’s from his own packet and, with an embarrassed shrug of the shoulders, the driver apologised for his dishevelled appearance. He confided that he still preferred his winter uniform to the summer variety. The white linen jacket, compulsory throughout July and August, was never free from oil and smuts and he dreaded the ignominy of being confused for an ice-cream salesman.

  An insipid watercolour sun was setting as the men stood and smoked outside the bus in the half-ghostly light. May stared at the skyline ahead of them.

  “Matthew Arnold says ‘the dreaming spires of Oxford need not June for beauty’s heightening.’” Sam recited. “I learned the poem at school but I never thought I would see the place for myself.”

  May was mesmerised by the dramatic outline of the city and the silhouetted buildings with their towers and spires, which glinted with a romantic beauty. She was barely awake when she felt Sam putting his hand inside her own glove before leading her across the bus terminal at Victoria. The National Omnibus let them off at Bethnal Green Road. Night had fallen and struggling through the darkness with their heavy cases they left the busy main road and soon arrived at a short terrace of small brick houses abutting a park. Children swung off ropes tied to the waists of the gas lamps and May had to step into the street to avoid trampling the chalked-in numbers of a recently abandoned game of hopscotch. All along Cyprus Street, wooden shutters painted black opened out flat against the wall on either side of the ground-floor windows. A brightly coloured display of flags decorated part of a wall opposite the Duke of Wellington pub and a memorial stone had been set well into the brick. Despite her tiredness, May tugged at Sam’s arm to stop for a moment so she could read the words.

  R.I.P. In loving memory of the men of Cyprus Street who made the Great Sacrifice 1914–1918.

  Erected by the Duke of Wellington’s discharged and demobilized soldiers and sailors benevolent club.

  Spelled out clearly beneath the plaque were more than two dozen names.

  Turning the corner onto Oak Street they saw a broad-chested man, his curly hair breaking on his shoulders, standing at the open door of number 52.

  “At last,” he said, beaming at May and Sam. “I am Nat. And you are really here at last.”

  Nathanial Castor, the son of their mother’s adored elder sister Gladys, had been expecting his cousins for an hour or more and even though this was their first meeting, he enfolded May in his arms before embracing Sam with equal warmth.

  May looked back in the direction of the Cyprus Street war memorial.

  “We call it the shrine,” Nat told her. “It commemorates the highest number of men from any one London street to have died in the war, and reminds us all how they did their duty to their country.”

  “It’s beautiful,” May said.

  “Yes, isn’t it?” Nat agreed. And then he said, “Come in, come in, Sarah is longing to meet you.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  As Miss Evangeline Nettlefold reached across the dining room table for a second piece of toast, she felt the seam at the side of her woollen dress give way.

  Despite her size, Evangeline often surprised her friends with her stylishness, particularly when everyone knew she was all but penniless. Her often admired hats, the straw boaters, berets and feather-decorated combs, changed as frequently as those pictured on the pages of fashionable magazines and were thought by some to be a little jeune-fille for a woman who had just entered her fifth decade. Beneath the hats were a variety of wigs that cunningly concealed the ravages of alopecia and gave Evangeline a little of the confidence she craved. However, the current trend for close-fitting clothes was not making her life easy. She wished she had been born in an earlier era of flamboyant, floaty gowns, which must have conveniently masked the evidence of too many rich desserts. She had registered with a wince that the American fashion pages had pronounced waistlines to be “in” in 1936 and had been debating silently whether the discomfort would be worth the effort.

  She reflected with some regret on how she had indulged herself royally in the ship’s first-class dining room on the way across the Atlantic. And now that she was here in England, those pounds continued to amass in the most disconcerting manner. She comforted herself that what might look like a small lapse of self-discipline was often beyond her power to change. How was she expected to
refuse the exquisitely rolled balls of butter that the British invited their guests to unfurl onto a piece of bread? What control did she have over the volume of cream-filled pitchers they stirred into their puddings? She remembered with nostalgia how in the summer they served a particularly delicious cream-and-fruit-based dessert that resembled melted ice cream. Fool, they called it, but there was no fooling Evangeline with the amount of calories it must have contained. Calories interested her. Back home she had been following reports of some scientific experiments with rats whose lifetimes had been significantly extended when their calorie intake was reduced. Something to bear in mind for another day, perhaps, Evangeline thought as she buttered her toast. She had recently become aware of her zipper catching the small but disturbing pinch of flesh beneath her armpit and had prayed that the already weakened stitching would hold up—at least until after breakfast.

  She had an inkling of what it might feel like to be slim. She had once been left alone in a fitting room when the dressmaker had gone to fetch a measuring tape. Seizing her chance she had run her hands along the sides of a small-size tailor’s dummy, beginning just below the bust and travelling all the way down past the neat indent at the waist and further on to the pleasing gentle swell at the hips, closing her eyes as she did so. Her hands encountered no lumps or rolls, simply smooth, straight lines. That, she thought to herself with envy, is what it must be like. The evidence of her ill-fitting clothes was becoming impossible to ignore, even though the height that she had been lucky enough to inherit from her father helped to spread some of the extra weight across a larger area. Such a bonus would not have been hers if she had been born with her mother’s diminutive stature. Even so, there was no avoiding the truth: several of the dresses she had brought with her from Baltimore would soon have to be altered. Altered? Dear God! What was she thinking? If she was being truthful what she meant was they would have to be let out. Evangeline felt sure that Wallis would be able to give her the name of a good English dressmaker.