by Rachel Malik
‘Close shave, close shave,’ called Colonel Pinkie.
‘Whose is it?’ shouted Rene.
‘Don’t know, doesn’t matter.’
And then Elsie and Rene had rushed into the dark, into the house, frightened but laughing all the same.
‘Goodnight,’ Rene had called to the colonel. It sounded wrong somehow.
Dear Elsie,
I’m sorry to write and not speak. I have wanted to tell you, I’ve planned to. Only last night I nearly did but my nerves gave out at the last. So I decided to write to you instead. You have been so very kind and I haven’t told you about my life before I came here, before I joined the Land Army. I should have explained.
I told you I was a widow and it’s true. It’s what I told the Land Army too when I joined, but when I left Manchester, Alan, my husband, was still alive. He was sick, though no one knew it then, but I didn’t leave because he died. It was more the opposite – not because of him exactly, but because I could not cope with being married. I ran away.
But it’s worse than that, much worse …
Elsie paused for a moment, forced herself to look up and away from the letter. She mustn’t rush. Smoke’s blanket was folded on the chair beside her – Rene must have tidied up before she went out. Last night they had let the old dog in to sleep in the kitchen – it didn’t seem right to leave him outside on his own. Rene had been pleased. Elsie took a slow breath and went back to the letter:
But it’s worse than that, much worse …
I have three children. Can you believe it, Elsie? They’re lovely and I left them all. The youngest, Mikey, was just a baby when I left. He’s hardly more than a baby now. But that’s not the worst bit. I planned everything out so carefully. I sent Jessie and Stevie, the two eldest, to stay with their nan in the country – that’s what I told Alan too. I put them on the train, they were so excited. That was the worst bit, the cunning, the cold of it. The baby, Mikey, was too little, so I left him with a friend to look after. It was before the war.
I joined the Land Army just after. I didn’t think I was running away at the time – I told myself I had to be on my own for a little while. And then the war started and everything seemed to go a long way away. I should never have got married, Elsie, and I can never go back. I realized that quite soon, because of what I’d done. The older two know that I left them, that I lied – just a little journey, I said, a holiday with your nan. I could never face them. The baby’s still with my friend. She has no children of her own and she’s raising him. It’s so good of her, but I hate it. Jessie and Stevie are with their aunty now, Alan’s sister. They’re still in the country, safe from the bombs, but I never liked Alan’s sister. I wish I could explain it better – I thought a letter would help. I miss the children – I can’t say how much – but I know I can never see them again. Elsie, I’m sorry to write and not to speak to you. You have held out such a kind hand to me. I wanted you to know.
Rene
Strings that pull, ties that bind. Elsie read the letter again, sitting quietly at the table. Upstairs a window was banging: it was Rene’s room – there was a problem with the catch. She found some nails and a hammer and went up, glad of something to do. It was a fiddly task and took a while, but the catch was fixed finally and she lingered at the window, staring out at the road. She could see the new postmistress cycling slowly up Sheepdrove. She still wobbled a bit.
Back in the kitchen, Elsie sat down again and read the letter a third time, sipping her tea. It was bitter and dry on the back of her throat but she drank it anyway and, as she drank, she remembered Celia Marshall’s wedding cake – such a long time ago – the yellow rose, the little white bows and curls. Such a long time ago, but she remembered it all so clearly: the rough sugar of that yellow rose, slowly melting smooth; the paler yellow of the marzipan, concealed like a shock between the cake and the icing.
‘I always wonder what happened to her, where she went – Celia Marshall. It was just after the first war. I read your letter, Rene, I read it three times. It must be dreadful to feel you can’t make things right …’ She dried up. Rene was watching her, wondering what she would say next.
‘You are not hard-hearted, Rene, I can see that. You are kind to me, even though I am nearly a stranger. If you had to leave, then you had reasons – even if you don’t know quite what they were. I don’t know what else to say.’
Rene carried on looking at her; her face, for all the summer heat, was pale.
Oh yes, of course, the cake. The dry burnt raisins and the sour edges of peel. She had never tasted such a beautiful cake, and she couldn’t understand why it came with shaking heads and sly murmurs – crocodile smiles, Moira said.
‘Celia Marshall, she lived in the village. She was going to get married too and then she ran away.’
Everything was ready, everything was planned. Moira and Cally had been full of glee.
‘What?’ said Rene, she was confused.
‘Celia Marshall. She ran away on the day of the wedding. No one knew where she went. She never came back.’
Everyone had had a slice of that cake. The sweet bright taste of the decorations – ribbons and curlicues of sugar plaster that melted to nothing. And Elsie had never understood, till now. Now she understood Celia Marshall’s cake perfectly.
(Celia Marshall’s mother didn’t stop screaming for three weeks. ‘If anyone asks, tell them that I never had a daughter.’)
‘They called her the runaway bride,’ Elsie said. ‘She didn’t want to be married either, did she?’
‘No.’
‘But she found out more quickly.’
‘Yes.’
For a moment Rene looked as if she was going to cry, then she bit her lip and burst out laughing. Elsie laughed too. And then for a while they couldn’t stop.
The cake had been handed round the village, like a rumour, like a mocking, a beautiful cake and Elsie had never understood it.
‘Thank you,’ Rene said, when they finally stopped laughing. ‘No, Elsie, I mean it, really I do.’
For Elsie had already stood up, brushed down her apron.
‘Goodness, how late it is,’ she said.
* * *
They didn’t talk about Rene’s letter in the days that followed, most things continued as before, but there was a slight change to Rene’s movements, an uncoiling. Not visible to Elsie, but she did notice that there was more of the laugh she liked, more of the quick words and quick wit she didn’t always follow.
They spent more time together. The workday reasons that drew them into step – a check on the oats, another incursion of Phil’s errant sheep – multiplied. These joint undertakings took their place alongside events which had no precedent, such as when Rene carried a chair out into the front garden one warm evening and sat down to read the paper while Elsie was busy with the plants. When Elsie thought about it afterwards she couldn’t be sure why it had been so pleasant. She hadn’t wanted help, for she trusted no one else in her garden work. And yet, how nice it had been, getting on with her usual pulling and trimming and trailing with Rene sitting there, and then Rene had brought out tea and cake and a second chair and they had sat together till Rene got cold and they both went inside.
A ‘we’ was creeping into their talk, sometimes an ‘us’. Shall we take a walk up Inkpen Hill? Let’s go back through Cole’s wood, it’s lovely in the rain. This ‘we’ belonged to Elsie first, and was usually a question; not an old habit, but a placing of the two of them side by side. And Rene, quick and cautious, took it up, sometimes in questions but more often to reprise – This is where we saw the hawk with the rabbit or We should tell Colonel Pinkie about that bird we saw – do you think he’d lend us his binoculars? – so that the couple of months she’d been at Starlight, quick in some ways, slow in others, grew thick with incident and memory.
‘Who used to lived there?’ Rene asked.
It was the middle villa, the one between Colonel Pinkie’s villa, with its veranda, and Mi
ss Troughton and Miss Lyle’s, with its black and white angles and round rose-glass window.
‘Oh, there were lots of different people, none of them stayed very long. Most of them came from London, I think.’ The connection with the capital made Elsie wary.
They were coming back up Sheepdrove after a long walk. Rene had never taken much notice of the house before: the door was boarded up. It was the only one of the three with a name, recorded in a small wooden plaque on the gate, Orchard Rest. What a silly name. Rene looked through the gate and up the path. There were red curtains in the windows.
House and garden were minimally maintained by the owner – Phil Townsend. One of his schemes, Elsie said.
‘He advertised for tenants in the paper. Not the local paper. Colonel Pinkie showed me. He described it as a “weekend getaway” in the advertisement. What do you think that is?’
‘I don’t know, it sounds a bit silly. How long has the house been empty?’
‘Oh, a good while. Three or four years. None of the tenants lived here continuous. I remember one coming and asking if I had a telephone in the house. Fancy!’
Rene smiled. She could just make out a clutch of pictures on the wall above the mantel.
‘Oh yes,’ Elsie was getting into her stride now, ‘I think one of them was an actress.’
‘An actress?’
‘Oh yes, yes, she kept the place up quite well. Mrs Cannell at the butcher’s told me. Quite a … quite …’
‘Famous?’
‘Yes.’
Elsie turned to look back for Smoke, who was dawdling as usual. All of a sudden, it seemed, she had reached the limits of her interest.
Close by, a bird was calling, bright and insistent – a blue tit, Rene thought, but she couldn’t be sure. The bird’s call sounded like an announcement. Here I am, it seemed to say. Another replied with the same song moments later from somewhere behind the villa. Here I am. It sounded to Rene as if they were looking for each other. She should ask Elsie what the bird was – she would know what it was saying. How silly it all was though. An actress on Sheepdrove, between the sunset colonel and the spinster teachers. And Phil Townsend for a neighbour. And Elsie. She’d been here long enough to appreciate the strangeness of it.
‘Can you remember her name?’
‘Her name? Oh no.’
Elsie seemed to find Rene’s interest surprising – surprising and not very welcome. She turned away from Rene and the house and carried on walking. ‘Smoke, come on, come on now.’ The dog looked up briefly from his sniffing and barked happily. After a moment Rene turned too and followed Elsie, but Elsie was walking fast and she didn’t catch up with her long stride till they reached Starlight.
Elsie relented later. She couldn’t recall the name, but she thought that the actress was from the pictures. It all came back then. The place got quite packed out sometimes. Mrs Cannell at the butcher’s had been run off her feet, and some deliveries came direct to the house from London in liveried vans. Too many comings and goings. They had a gramophone as well, and it could be noisy. And then Elsie seemed to have forgotten the middle villa and was talking about the walkers. Phil Townsend had talked about setting up a ramblers’ tea room at the weekends, but he never did anything about it. Groups of walkers, occasionally they ventured up to the gate to ask about eggs and butter. And Rene could see the ramblers, see them coming up Sheepdrove in little clusters, heading for the very top of the hill where the track became a shadow and faded to nothing on the Downs. She could see them so clearly, see them striding out with quiet vigour, grouping and regrouping as they went, sometimes pausing to check their way, pulling out a big map, good-humoured, talking. She could even see Elsie watching them from the gate, smiling perhaps and wondering.
4.
Rene, Vicky and Pearl
I should like to mention one little point with regard to the film which, I have no doubt, would be a great improvement in the eyes of the audiences in our picture houses … My suggestion is this. That after each film of any importance, a few feet of film be used to show the chief actors and actresses as they appear in real life. I have mentioned this point to several of my friends and they approve of it … If, in any way, we could influence the taking-up of this idea, I’m sure it would improve the kinema greatly.
Letter from a film fan to Picturegoer, December 1924
Vicky McCrane first came to prominence in the silent age as Mona Verity, a name she always insists she chose herself. In those days she was sometimes spoken of as the British equivalent of Pearl White, the American Serial Queen, a comparison she now laughs off. She has never been one to seek out the attentions of movie fans or photographers, slipping back into the shadows as soon as the furore about her latest film has died down …
Interview, Film News, March 1936
Rene peered through the dirty glass of the window – the looped red curtains seemed to give her permission, though she didn’t like the idea of Elsie finding her here. Elsie, she thought, would not approve of her interest in Orchard Rest. She couldn’t make out any of the pictures on the mantel wall, except that some of them looked like photographs. There was a big comfortable armchair by the fireplace, covered in a shiny fabric – it didn’t look like Phil Townsend’s choice – and beside the chair a round table with an ashtray: a swirl of thick blue glass. On the windowsill was a pile of Picturegoer magazines; the top one had a cover of Bonita Granville, Nancy Drew – she remembered it from a few years back. Rene stood there looking through the grey glass; there wasn’t much else to see but she lingered, trying to make more of the photos on the wall, hoping to catch something she had missed. If only Elsie could remember the name of the actress. For Rene adored the pictures. She carried on looking through the glass as she remembered her trip to the Imperial all those years ago. The Imperial Picture House, the papers had called it a wonder. She’d been to grander since, but no visit had ever been so exciting. Her first and only proper visit to London, staying with her aunty Nora. She’d travelled down from Manchester all on her own, not much more than seven – it was just before the first war. The big house was covered in plaster, white and high as a cake. She and Nora slept in the basement – Nora was the housekeeper – and Rene could hear careful footsteps and long silences above her head when she was lying in bed. Up on the second floor lived a princess, Vicky; she even had golden hair. It was Vicky who took Rene to the Imperial.
They had arrived there just after lunch, and Vicky had bought nuts and a syrup and soda in the foyer. Then into the dark and half out again as they made their way towards the screen. As they walked down the aisle, a man in an absurd bathing suit waded out of the sea right in front of them, legs wobbling. The audience roared with laughter, and she and Vicky paused to watch. Clearly exhausted, the swimmer was quickly wrapped in blankets, the screen flickered a stitch of white and he’d gone.
They found two seats next to each other and there was a fair now, on the prom, and all manner of hairy-scary things in a sad little caravan museum. And at the end of the pier, the sea again – ‘Can’t you smell the sea,’ Vicky said, laughing, and poured the caramel nuts into Rene’s hand, and Rene was quite sure she could hear the sea, hear it splashing out of the doors of the cinema on to the street outside. The screen cycled on – Rene thought it would never stop. The man in the absurd bathing suit appeared again; this time he strode into the sea firm-legged – he was going to swim the Channel, no wonder his legs were wobbly afterwards – she never caught his name. The woman next to Rene was peeling potatoes into a bucket. Some children pressed past on their way out and she caught the smell of lemon sharps among the sweat and potato peelings. ‘Again?’ she asked, squeezing Vicky’s fingers, and they settled back into the crowd to watch Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline for the second time. This time, Rene knew that Pearl would escape the man with long and frightening moustaches. As soon as he locked the door of her attic room and went downstairs to set fire to the house, Pearl would pull out the knife she kept hidden in her sleev
e, cut her feet free and jump out of the window. Yes, Pearl would escape again: she would always escape. And on it went till they returned at last to the swimming man. ‘It’s getting late,’ Vicky said.
They had lingered in the foyer, getting used to the light. Vicky bought Rene a present, a little picture-card of Pearl White, ‘the Serial Queen’. They walked back along the streets, the dipping light still strong; it was very quiet. Back at the Imperial, that silly man was still swimming, still puffing his way across the Channel.
* * *
She had run down to the wall at the end of the garden – it was a big garden – and scrambled up on to it somehow. ‘Come on,’ she’d called to Vicky. She crawled along for a few moments, hands stinging, before she stood up and started to walk, gingerly at first, but soon she was bold again, striding and hopping, arms out. This way and that she went – she wasn’t afraid of falling. This way. This way. But it was tiring all the same, her legs felt heavy and her arms, held out like a tightrope walker. She stopped and crouched down, noticed a tear in her pinafore and remembered what she was supposed to be doing. The cat, she was looking for the cat. ‘Tibby,’ she called, but quietly. A plaintive mew, she was sure of it. ‘Vicky, this way, Tibby’s here.’ She jumped down into the back of a very overgrown garden; the ground was soft under her feet. Some way behind she could hear Vicky but she didn’t look back. She pushed her way through bushes, then the bushes ended and she found herself standing by the remains of an old building of some kind: a little stone ruin with no roof and an empty hole of a door. There was rubble round her feet and she had to tread carefully, eyes to the ground. Once she stumbled and nearly fell, grabbing at a tall, thin stone to balance herself – her hand came away from paper-dry ivy, powdery white. There were sounds ahead, of water and chatter and, somewhere further away, children playing. There was a strong smell of paint. Then, quite abruptly, the dusty world ended and she saw a young man sitting in a deckchair, filing his nails. He had the blackest hair she’d ever seen, and there he was sitting on a deckchair. He was in profile and a mass of dark leaf behind him exaggerated his sharp nose, like a silhouette, like the pictures. Suddenly she was closer. Had she stepped forward? His lashes were thick and impossibly long and quivered occasionally on the white, white mask of his face. Sadness surrounded his face like an aura, but when he looked up at her, it seemed to float away into the air behind him. He didn’t seem at all surprised that a little girl had stepped out of nowhere.