‘And you’re in debt. You would do better to work and stop all this selfpity. Think of your daughter for once, poor little mite. You never see the child, never ask after her. You are unnatural, Henry, unnatural.’
‘Damn you, Fred, you pious bastard!’ shouted Henry, ‘what do you know of real grief, eh! Everything has always gone well with you. You never lost your beloved.’
Fred paled at his friend’s harsh words. ‘I did… I almost did, Henry. And I know how I would have felt if she had died before my eyes. But I would never neglect my children. It’s not their fault that we adults are fools.’
Henry fell silent. He twirled the whisky glass in his hand and after a while he said, ‘What is she like now, young Eleanor? Does she hate her father?’
‘She’s still too young to understand or to have hate for anyone. But as she grows, her nature seems likely to be a sweet one.’
‘Is she like Tippy? Is she like her mother?’
‘She’s the image of her mother, same golden hair and blue eyes. She will be a beauty.’
Henry set down the glass and pushed it aside. ‘I’ll visit her some time. But just now I’m too ill. No one believes me, I know that. Only Bertha understands and doesn’t nag me to death about drinking. She understands how one has to numb oneself against one’s thoughts. She’s had her griefs and her pains too. I don’t care what you say, you don’t understand, Fred.’
‘Why don’t you get Ellie to model for you now and then?’
Henry looked up. ‘A good idea,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t nag me either. Nor does she look down on poor Bertha – but Ellie is busy enough with her own work, her superb work. Plus her children and a demanding creature like you for a husband.’
‘I’m scarcely demanding,’ said Fred nettled, ‘and, yes, she is busy – but I will ask her. Her company will be…refreshing, in your present state.’
Ellie came and sat for a few pictures for Henry and her influence was beneficial. He seemed to cheer up a little, drank less and painted more.
‘I still learn so much from you, Henry,’ she told him. Her interest and enthusiasm re-inspired him.
‘I think I learn from you nowadays,’ he said humbly, ‘you are far surpassing my efforts. Your designs are selling well, I hear.’
‘It’s just luck, isn’t it? The right people come along. Johnson is such a good businessman, unlike our dear, gullible Fred,’ she added with a smile.
‘Luck? Aye… some have it and some don’t.’
‘You have good friends, Henry, you have a dear mother and sisters. Above all, you have your sweet little Eleanor.’
Ellie took her friend’s hands and looked into his eyes. ‘You must come and see your child; she will cheer your lonely heart. She’s your own, your very own. No one else will ever be so close. Tippy left Eleanor as a gift to remind you of her… the little one is so like her mother.’
‘Perhaps that’s what I fear so much. I fear being reminded of what I’ve lost.’
‘Come not to fear your loss, dear friend, but to be thankful for what you’ve gained.’
He looked at her steadily and said no more.
‘I will come then,’ he said, ‘but it wouldn’t be suitable for the child to live here with Bertha and myself.’
Ellie surveyed the littered room, the empty bottles of whisky on the top of the chest of drawers, the grate full of unswept coals, cheerless and sad. The house itself seemed to sigh with a deep aching loneliness. It felt empty of hope, love or happiness.
As if on cue, Bertha entered the room at that moment bringing in a tray of tea and cakes. She was of Germanic origin and had the look of a farmer’s daughter. Half Henry’s age, she was strong, vigorous and despite the drink, rosy-cheeked and capable. Ellie understood why Henry needed this stout but motherly creature. Ostensibly, she was his housekeeper and did the cooking also. The first cook and her husband, who had done odd jobs around the place, had left under a cloud some time ago. Henry had accused them of robbing him of some items, which they strenuously denied. It was hard to keep servants in this house for Henry’s bouts of rage and violence would erupt after he had consumed too many bottles of whisky. In a state of drunken stupidity, his fantasies and paranoia made him think everyone around him was a spy or enemy. No one could be around him for long when he was raging in this fashion. Yet stout, earthy, phlegmatic Bertha seemed to soak up his anger without appearing the least bit perturbed by it and her rough ministrations in the bedroom appeased his aching needs.
Ellie realised that Bertha kept him relatively sane. But for how long?
Chapter 41
Southend-on-Sea: March 1883
‘Secret continuance sublime
Is the sea’s end; our sight may pass
No furlong further. Since time was
This sound hath told the lapse of time.’
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Sea Limits
Ellie and Fred stood together in the little graveyard and watched as the dark oak coffin was lowered into the grave. Beneath her black veil, tears ran down Ellie’s cheeks unseen. Fred looked sad and serious.
Close to the side of the grave stood Henry’s mother, his two sisters and his daughter, Eleanor, now a beautiful young woman.
Ellie moved forward as the vicar said the last rites and with others threw azaleas and primroses into the open grave. The faint sound of repressed sobbing was now audible as Henry’s many friends, old and new, paid their last respects to him, remembering his life and the unique, warm, loving man he had been.
As he declined further into drink, his liver became affected as well as his mind. He became even more difficult and seized by a dark, disturbing sense of paranoia that made his waking and sleeping life a misery. His family eventually took him off to Southend and rented a small house there feeling the sea air and a chance of scenery would lift his spirits a little. However, Bertha was dismissed at once and kept away from him.
‘This woman has led my son deeper into his afflictions,’ his mother said to Ellie. ‘She must not be allowed near him. Please do not give away his whereabouts, Mrs Thorpe. I do not want her to come and see him or have anything more to do with him. She was just a servant.’
In vain, Ellie put it to Mrs Winstone that Bertha had been Henry’s faithful companion all these latter years and that he always felt comforted by her presence.
‘Comforted, my dear Mrs Thorpe? I’m afraid you are much mistaken. He says himself that he no longer wants her to be there. He asks for his daughter and rightly so. She will go to stay with him at Southend to nurse him and take care of him.’
‘Well, yes,’ Ellie conceded, ‘that is more fitting. He and his daughter should be reconciled. He has scarcely treated her well and he should be grateful for her. She is the dearest girl.’
Nonetheless, she felt some pity for poor Bertha, now cast aside and left to fend for herself. She had taken care of him for many years but no one seemed to admit to this or recognise that Henry really missed her rough and ready company.
Ellie sought the poor woman out and gave her some money to tide her over till she found another position.
Young Eleanor had gone to live with her grandmother and aunties while a small infant and Henry had become reconciled to her existence as she grew older. She was indeed the image of Tippy with her blue eyes and long golden hair. Sometimes this pained him too much and he would banish the child again muttering, ‘I can’t bear it. She’s too like her mother – take her away!’ On other days, he stroked her hair and gazed at her without speaking for hours at a time. The young girl bore it all with fortitude and even compassion as if she understood his problem. She agreed to go to Southend and stay with her father, nursing him to the end and holding his head in her lap as he passed away.
At the last moment, he opened his eyes and stared at his daughter and a look of joy came over his face.
‘Tippy?’ he whispered and tried to raise his arms to embrace her then fell back with a last long sigh.
Henry had never want
ed to sell Watcher in the Storm, the picture of Tippy gazing over the parapet, though it had been exhibited many times and was considered a brilliant piece of work. In his will, he had donated it to the National Gallery where it would now hang in splendour amongst all the other great painters.
‘You know, Ellie, Henry could have been such a great man. What happened to him?’ said Fred sadly. They turned away while the earth was being shovelled in heavy clunks upon the coffin. ‘Why did he begin to unravel and come apart so easily just when his fame was growing, his paintings so loved?’
‘What great man is at peace? Don’t you see, Fred, he was haunted all the time by Tippy. He loved her very much, idolised her. I shall never forget how his face used to light up with utter joy whenever she entered the room. Yet sometimes I felt he wanted the drama, was in love with love. He liked the tragic role of the great lover.’
Their son-in-law, John Matheson, detached himself from a group of friends and now came over to them.
‘The trap is waiting, are you ready to go back now?’
‘We’re ready.’
When they reached their lodgings at a small seaside house nearby, they met up with their daughter Mary, pushing her youngest child in a perambulator. Her other little girl walked next to her, holding the hand of a nursemaid. They came over to greet them.
‘Was it awfully harrowing, Ma?’ asked Mary as she hugged her mother and kissed her cheek. Mary disliked funerals and felt them unsuitable for young children to attend. She had made this an excuse to remain with them at the hotel.
Ellie felt the tears rise to her eyes again. ‘It was, darling, it was.’
‘Mr Winstone was special,’ said Mary. Her own eyes filled with tears in sympathy. ‘I always liked him so much. He was fun with us children and spoke to us as if we were grown up and interesting. He made us laugh and drew little pictures of Charlie and me. I shall always keep them.’
Later, they all sat in the parlour while the landlady brought them tea and cakes. The funeral had been a quiet affair.
Mary was now a very tall and elegant lady of twenty-six, her hair dark auburn and eyes hazel-green like her mother’s. She had married John Matheson about five years ago. John was a friend of her father’s, a highly respected and wealthy art dealer in his own right. They had set up house in Belgravia and kept a beautiful country home in Gloucestershire, which always reminded Ellie of Oreton Hall. When she was there, Ellie always kept to the house and gardens and refused to walk in the woods or near the river. To do so was to invite the ghosts of Alfie and Dillie to come to her, ghosts never far away from her dreams and always quivering on the edge of her consciousness.
It was being aware of her own ghosts that helped Ellie to understand Henry when he assured her that he felt Tippy’s ghostly presence. She knew too that he had sometimes attended séances and that he had sworn to see Tippy’s ghost by his bed at night while he lay sleepless in the dark. Then he would rise and pace about the house or go for long walks in the night by the river.
Tippy had been no saint but death casts a cloak over memory and in Henry’s eyes she was now sanctified just like Beatrice Portinari was to Dante and Lizzie Siddal to Gabriel Rossetti. Tippy was now the Blessed Damozel leaning from Heaven and calling to her lover to join her. She would always be his spirit-bride. His last painting of her had incorporated all the love he had felt and the intuition they had both had over her imminent death in childbirth. It was almost as if he drank himself to death on purpose.
‘Death, Ellie, is but a state,’ he told her some days before he died. ‘I want to leave this business they call Life and find her and be united with her. I want that, Ellie! You were so right. It’s Hell down here alone.’
Now he lay in peace at last, rested far away from them all in the quiet little graveyard at Southend-on-Sea, near the sound of the crashing waves and the wailing wind. Far from all the fears, hates, loves, longings and sorrows of his short and brilliant life.
When Mary married, Ellie had said, ‘You will want to have the bed now, Mary.’
Mary had known all her life that the old four-poster bed was meant to come to her, it was almost a family joke. She had never really given it a good deal of thought but when her mother said these words, Mary’s heart sank.
‘I don’t want to turn you out of your own bed, Ma,’ she said.
‘I said that to my own mother,’ chuckled Ellie. ‘We’ll just have to get another bed, that’s all.’
Mary sighed. The fact was she really hated the bed. It was dark, oldfashioned and gloomy. She had always felt just a little bit afraid of it as a child and afraid of her mother in it. Her mother always seemed another person, sitting up in that bed with the glass of chocolate on a tray on her lap and a strange smile on her face.
‘Maybe Charles would like it?’ she said hopefully. ‘He’s getting married soon.’
Ellie looked at her daughter and sensing her reluctance, seemed hurt.
‘But Mary, you know it passes down in the female line,’ she said.
‘Yes, yes, I do know,’ said Mary hastily, ‘but truly, there isn’t room for it in our house.’
‘Nonsense, there’s plenty of room in these huge old houses. It will fit in beautifully and lend grandeur to the bedroom. It is so very old, Mary, such an antique, so venerable.’
But I hate it, thought Mary and felt a little crushed by the weight of her mother’s eagerness and of the whole of this female ancestry that seemed to have been absorbed into the carving, the hangings, the very presence of that huge dark bed as if it was a living being. It almost made her shudder.
‘Let me ask John, Ma – he may not want it, you know.’
‘I’m sure he will,’ said Ellie stubbornly. ‘He loves antiques, he told me so.’
‘Leave the girl be,’ said Fred who had been listening to this conversation from behind his morning paper. ‘If she doesn’t want the bed, then you can’t force it on her, Ellie.’
Mary threw a glance of gratitude in her father’s direction and he nodded at her with an understanding smile. He had never liked the bed either.
‘Your mother has always been obsessed with that wretched bed,’ he said, ‘and her Templeton ancestry.’
Ellie was hurt and baffled. How could Mary not want the wonderful four-poster bed, the one carved for her ancestral grandmother’s wedding? How could she even consider the idea of it passing to strangers? She had promised Maria that strangers would never sleep on that bed.
‘I want something lighter and more modern, Ma, darling,’ said Mary as if reading her thoughts. ‘Don’t be upset about it. It’s only a bed.’
‘It’s more than a bed,’ said Ellie, ‘it’s more than a bed, Mary. But you don’t understand. You modern young girls, you just don’t understand. Promise me that when I die… and I suppose I shall die in that bed as my mother did, promise you will never sell it to strangers.’
‘I promise, Ma,’ said Mary, ‘I promise.’
Epilogue
October 1913
Mary and her brother Charles stood in the garden of their parent’s home in Chelsea.
‘Ma lived to be a good old age,’ said Charles reflectively. ‘She outlived Dad by ten years but she was determined to stay on here and run the place till the end. Such an amazing lady, bless her! And painting her splendid pictures even at the age of eighty. The attic is absolutely full of them.’
‘She was amazing, I shall miss her so much,’ said Mary. ‘I think she had a wonderful, peaceful life on the whole.’
‘Well, I don’t know that she did. That business with Lord Dillinger must have been very nasty and unsettling.’
‘Mum said it brought her and Dad closer together. Do you know, I still remember that day so clearly; it’s imprinted on my memory. I remember sitting upstairs in the old schoolroom on a stool while Mulhall read us a story… Sir Gawain and the Green Knight it was… then the pistol went off. I thought someone was shooting rabbits or something, but Mulhall was all of a flutter and seemed so scare
d that it made me scared as well. Do you remember it, Charlie?’
‘I do. I thought it was really exciting when the policemen came making such a fuss. Then Dad suddenly arrived. I never really understood why Dillinger killed himself but Mum said it was because he was very ill anyway and didn’t want to live to be an invalid and in pain.’
‘Grandma Beatrice once told me that Dillinger was Mum’s lover. I was so shocked that I went straight to Mum and asked her if it was true.’
‘What on earth did she say?’
‘She was furious and said it just wasn’t true. She said Grannie Bea had always hated her and was a nasty old gossip who had nearly ruined their lives with her talk. Grannie was a peculiar old thing, really rambling at the end, wasn’t she? Fancy making up stories like that about Mum!’
‘All the same, Lord P. left us a fair bit of money,’ said Charles thoughtfully, ‘why would he do that?’
‘Well, Mum was his goddaughter and he liked her a great deal, even old Aunt Charlotte says so.’
‘Fair enough, I suppose that must be the answer. Can you remember him?’
‘A little. He was a rather frightening man, I thought. I was afraid of him as a kid; he was always so cross and stern. But I felt he was kind – and sad somehow – underneath it all.’
‘I was scared of him too! But I wonder if it was true? ‘ pursued Charles. ‘True that he was Ma’s lover, I mean.? Suppose we turned out to be his children?’
Mary shrugged. ‘With you looking the image of Dad? Well, we shall never know the truth of it. It’s gone with them all to their graves. And frankly, Charlie, I don’t much care.’
‘Nor I… as you say, better to forget such family myths.’
‘Will you set fire to it or shall I?’
‘You should.’ said Charlie decisively. ‘It’s the female bed, isn’t it? You have to be the one to destroy it once and for all.’
‘I feel bad about it, but I did promise it would never go to strangers.’
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