by Rachel Malik
* * *
An eighteen-month sentence to be spent at Holloway was announced a few weeks later. It parted them for longer than they had ever been parted – Rene was determined that Elsie would not see her in prison. But they were both practical in their different ways. The distance had to be endured and it would come to an end; eighteen months could be measured: it was not so very long.
The newspapers were kinder than they could have been, particularly to Rene. ‘Little grey-haired woman whose life has been touched by tragedy’ – the Daily Mail’s final verdict. Massey, or Old Nosey, got the harder time, punished perhaps for everyone’s unsavoury curiosity. The physical details about the two women obtruded though – mannish, trousers, crop, masculine – plenty of coded smirk and sneer there; and Rene’s confession confirmed her as the ‘weedkiller widow’ if not the ‘weedkiller killer’. Elsie seemed to present more of a problem, and they couldn’t resist some mirth at her expense.
‘Miss Elsie Boston, long-term companion of Miss Hargreaves, shared her philosophy of life with the court,’ sneered the Daily Mirror. ‘“If you have all you want, you are rich,” she said, “I did not want anything more.”’ The other newspapers also enjoyed ‘we were rich’: headlined and twinned with a picture of the ungainly Elsie on the steps outside the court, beside a story that punished with its details of a pinching day-to-day. This same pattern was repeated in a number of the papers, national and local; but it was beyond Colin Mackenzie to make anything of it: he was too young; Miss Boston was too old.
But judge and press did not constitute the real, the long-lasting, punishment.
Their lives were so very ordinary, except perhaps in one or two respects.
There was little outright hostility to Rene or Elsie but, slowly and carefully, the two women had to be taken to the vantage point from where the court collectively perceived them. It was not a deliberate tactic, and it was undertaken without relish, but common sense was relentless. It was also differential: Rene may have been a chilly customer and too clever by half, but Elsie, poor Elsie, was made to look a bit of a fool. We were rich.
What did Rene and Elsie look like from the top of common-sense hill? In summary: odd, most certainly odd, and probably lesbians, odd and poor and gradually ground down by a situation that tainted them. The court knew how they were trying to do their best, but in the end they had had to ‘make do’. They were certainly respectable, but no one would choose their life. Quillet and Clifford, prosecution and defence, were both convinced that Rene and Elsie wouldn’t have chosen it either, if there had been any alternative. Theirs was, by definition, a second-best life. The two women had never had to think this. And perhaps Elsie’s clumsy ‘we were rich’ was a general retort to the trial, not an answer to Marcus Quillet’s insinuating question; perhaps she sensed an attack. They were both proud of their ways, for all that they were quiet and kept their own company. It was true that over the years they had left much unsaid. People they had lived among had thought they were both widows, or cousins, even, on occasion, sisters, and neither Rene nor Elsie had seen any need to put them right. Since they had taken that train to Cumberland all those years ago, no one had heard them mention Starlight. Mrs Cuff was one of a handful of people who knew Rene had been married. Over the years, for the most part, this uncertainty had served them well; now it had all been blown away.
In their answers to the court and in the police statements the two women gave, their relationship took a number of forms: there were various chords, but no single one prevailed. There was a little history of semi-formal requests and permissions, granted or withheld. ‘With my approval, Miss Hargreaves went to Manchester and brought Mr Massey back to live with us … I don’t know what Mr Massey’s income was, but I, being responsible for the housekeeping, was given the sum of £3 per week by Miss Hargreaves, for his keep.’ Perhaps these requests and permissions were in keeping with their rather precise distribution of labour. There was also the relationship between a Miss Hargreaves and a Miss Boston; though ‘Miss Hargreaves’ was also the name of Rene’s choosing: ‘I have always been known as Miss Hargreaves since that time.’ She was also, of course, Bert. If many tasks were divided, many things were shared in the easy familiarity of a life lived together, hands in each other’s pockets, the morning cup of tea shared in bed, ‘as is our custom’. Coats, gloves, scarves, also shared. But animals were not. Jugger was Rene’s dog – a present from Elsie, his arrival coinciding almost exactly with Massey’s. The chickens and rabbits were Elsie’s, as was Nib, the black cat who sat like china on the windowsill in a police photograph. Yet this division was part of a we: we agreed; our present address; when Mr Massey came to live with us; Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves, Wheal Rock …
The Exeter Mail would title one of their stories about the trial ‘The Old Man with Curious Tastes’, though there was rather little interest in Ernest’s eating habits. Did his tastes include feathers? Wasn’t it the women tending him who qualified as curious?
Curious was like remote. In this case, remote didn’t measure yards or miles, just two women living alone, two women in some ways remote from the values of the court. A big house, a great house, ten miles from the nearest public road was never remote, but well appointed in its parkland acres. It was not the cottage that was remote.
‘She is fond of reading and also has some rather masculine interests’ – part of Dr Lane’s report, which he didn’t repeat in court. In his Who’s Who entry for the same year, Lane’s own interests included shooting, fishing and fell-walking. Were these masculine interests? Lane declared on his best authority that Miss Hargreaves was not capable of murder. Was he surprised by the turn of events?
One person was not at all surprised: Prison Officer Susan Lyle. Neither the confession nor the temporary disruption of proceedings surprised her one bit. In her view, it was typical. Miss Hargreaves was the kind of person who didn’t care what trouble she caused. And Susan Lyle was pretty sure they hadn’t had the whole truth, even now: Miss Hargreaves had told too many stories, she’d seen that sad look before and she wouldn’t be taken in. Susan Lyle was the guard who had accompanied Rene in the van on her journey from Holloway. Lyle could have forgiven her for lying about being married, it was a long time ago. She could have forgiven her for leaving her husband and lying about that – at a pinch. No, the biggest, the worst lie was that she became a husband herself. She knew about Bert and Elsie and it made her sick. Officer Lyle felt betrayed because she had liked Rene. She remembered thinking it, how normal she had seemed, how nice, before she knew about Elsie (and Bert).
One of the newspapers chose to reproduce the sketch that the court illustrator made of Rene. He was more observant than most, though he had to work from memory. His sketch showed the long, narrow jaw, rather fine; the nose slightly sharp, not large; skin weathered rather than lined. And her hair of course: the grey Eton crop. If Elsie had seen it in some other circumstance, she would have thought it a very good likeness.
* * *
Settled on his homeward train the evening after the verdict, solicitor Thomas Walker watched the land flatten, before the light disappeared completely. He was looking forward to getting home, though he would miss his evening conversations with Marcus – they had been the highlight of the past days. It was raining heavily again and there was a wind up. The rills made surprisingly steady traces on the glass of the window before being blown suddenly away. At Wichley Halt they seemed to wait an age. With his fellow passengers he shared an unwilling tension – everyone wanted to yield to day’s end. But finally they moved off, the train picked up, and as the man sitting opposite him dozed, Walker gazed out once more into the dark.
A painting came into his mind; it was a long time ago, he’d been a young man. The Ravilious exhibition, his first visit to London after the war. It was one of the chalk horses viewed from a third-class train window. Train Landscape was its name. The horse was the first thing you looked at, high up in the left-hand window of the train carriage; b
ut it was the large 3 – nearly the same colour as the horse – in the foreground that your eyes really fixed on: once you’d seen it, it was somehow the pivot of the painting. He still wondered why it was a third-class carriage. The horse had also bothered him. With its arched neck and carefully raised foreleg, it was elegant but stagy. It was clear to anyone that the horse wasn’t going anywhere, but somehow it still managed to look like a wish.
Epilogue
Homecoming
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep
Robert Frost, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’
Dear Elsie, there was no getting to the phone today so this is just a note to say I will be arriving at Penryn at four tomorrow and will take a taxi. I know it will be dear but I cannot wait to be home. Your Rene
Rene took a train from London on the morning she was released from prison. It would take her most of a day to reach home.
Paddington. A shock of recognition. She stood for some moments under the clock in the chill early morning, trying to get her bearings. This was the station where she’d bought her ticket to Lambourn, all those years ago, the station that had taken her to Starlight and Elsie.
She had dressed as smartly as she could, with a dark green jacket over the blouse she had worn in court and brown lace-up shoes. She carried her own big bag. She didn’t like the cheap board suitcase she’d been given by the prison – it let her down, she thought – but at least it wasn’t heavy. It was odd being on her own. After she’d checked her ticket she took a walk about the station. She was early for her train, which added to the sense of freedom, and she liked the feeling of walking about, not quite knowing where her feet would go. It wasn’t a demanding liberty: the arched horizon of crossing tracks and wires was as good as the open road for now.
Everything seemed bright and colourful and dirty. Over by the great mouth of the cloakroom counter were black and gold posters for Petter Oil and the red and green livery of Swan Vestas: USE MATCHES SPARINGLY. The posters were pasted all round the counter window and then spread out along the walls. Most were familiar, but one showed a man and a dog waiting at a busy road crossing. TRAIN YOUR PETS, it said. The dog sat beside the man on the pavement, looking very patient and rather like Jugger. Rene walked on past a smart tea room and the ticket office, continuing on till she came across a fancy grocer’s shop where she lingered at the window. She’d counted out the money she needed for the journey and she wanted to buy something nice with what she had left. Eventually she decided on a tin of shortbread, Elsie loved shortbread, a half bottle of brandy and a fancy box of chocolates. The chocolates were so pretty. There were just six of them, arranged like the petals of a flower in a white oval box. Each one had a dainty sugar flower on top too, rose and violet.
After she’d made her purchases, and still feeling oddly light-footed, she walked back to the departure board on the main concourse to check the platform again. As she stood watching the board, there was a sudden outbreak of clickety-clacks and times and places began to disappear. For some minutes there was nowhere; everything seemed suspended; odd strings of letters flittered across the board and the tiles clicked as one departure after another was spun away. The ripples of sound grew quieter and louder as journeys moved along the board; others appeared from nowhere. Rene held her breath, finally the clickety-clacks slowed and stilled, and she saw the train to Penzance again – it had moved some way across the board. Time to go.
She was first into the carriage and she popped her case up on the rack, settled herself in a seat by the window and placed her bag with her lunch (courtesy of HM Prison Holloway) and purchases carefully on the seat beside her. She prayed no one would come and sit next to her. There were still fifteen minutes to go. Looking out of the glass, she noticed that some young women, just a few, were wearing trousers, though the cut was very different from her own. She wouldn’t have worn them herself, she didn’t like the style, but she liked the way they were striding out. One was wearing plimsolls. How young they were. She wondered if Jessie dressed like this, in trousers, perhaps in plimsolls; she hoped that she was striding out too, somewhere in this city, striding into the future. Finally the whistle went and the train smoothed out of the station and Rene took out her cigarettes from the generous pocket of her jacket, and a book, borrowed from the prison library. They continued slowly for a time, passing into a long tunnel; she lit a cigarette and watched the flame flare and gleam in the glass. Blowing out the match, she caught sight of herself in the window, drawing on the cigarette, her face pale and angular above the dark of her jacket. She watched herself carefully for a few moments, assessing. Elsie would say she was too thin and she would probably be right. But I don’t look old, she thought, old-fashioned perhaps, but not old, not yet. The train passed out of the tunnel and started to pick up speed.
The first part of the journey wasn’t too bad. She dozed a little over her book, the train stayed quiet, no one tried to talk to her. All in all, she thought, she hadn’t handled her time at Holloway so badly. She’d done what she had on her land-girl training, thrown herself into it. Quick to grasp the rules (official and unofficial), she had rarely needed reminding: almost a model prisoner. She had worked in the library and helped some of the young girls with their reading and writing. She felt sorry for them, some had been in twice or three times already, some would be back within the year. She had also worked in the grey, sunless plot called the garden, trying to grow carrots and potatoes in the waterlogged ground – she doubted even Elsie would have succeeded. Throughout her time in the prison, her highlight of the week had been the television they got to watch on Sunday afternoons. A group of them were taken to the smaller of the two ‘recreation’ rooms, where the chairs were already put out in semicircular rows. They always got to see a film and sometimes part of a serial as well; they’d had The Moonstone and David Copperfield. She always made sure she sat at the front, right up near the screen, because not everyone paid attention.
Rene carried on with her book and a man came round with the trolley and she had some tea. It was only when the announcement came that they were approaching Plymouth that she began to get excited. Up till then she had tried not to think too hard about where she was going. She knew that Elsie and Wheal Rock were waiting at the end of it, she could see Elsie standing at the window, but she couldn’t quite believe it. But as the train left Plymouth and Devon and crawled across the homely Tamar, the journey caught up with her. At last she was going home. And then as she looked out of the window, everything outside started to come vivid. The tide was well out, and in the sandy sludge of the river she could see waders, probably redshanks, though it was hard to be sure, looking for food. Easier to see but less well adapted were the old folk, picking cockles and God knows what, slow and awkward in the sticky sludge.
At Truro, she changed trains for Penryn and she stood in the corridor from then on. She could have sat down – there was plenty of room – but she was too keyed up, her fingers were tapping, drumming in her pocket. After a while, she pulled down the window and stuck her head out. The quivery, yellowed trees of a few hours ago were gone; so were the empty and faded fields. Here, everything was still green. They passed neat fields with row after row of fat cabbage and potato plants. Above, the sky was so blue, with just a few white whispers of cloud. They went past a cluster of fruit farms, apples mainly, the orchards busy with pickers. The train chugged on, slower and slower; she knew all the stations now and the order: Penwithers Junction, Perranwell, Ponsanooth and, last, Penryn. Each stop seemed to take an age: the train would squeal to a halt just outside the station, and a brief lull of warmth and summer sound would come wafting through the open window. Rene would look out, often she could see the platform, almost within reach. Then the train would inch forward into the station. After that there was the brisk click of a door, a pause and then a tinny slam; at Perranwell she heard the hulking of luggage from the van; at Ponsanooth there was no one, nothing at all. R
ene crossed each station out in her mind as they left it: Penwithers Junction, Perranwell, Ponsanooth. When they came into Penryn, the train was still moving when she opened the door.
She was the only person who got down and she felt light with her half-empty bag and her cardboard suitcase. The station seemed deserted.
She stood on the platform for some minutes after the train eased away. Along the bank the willowherb was in full flower, staking out territory with its fine lily leaves; along the tracks all manner of things were thriving, buzzing, crawling. Ragwort sprouted from the sides of the platform, the flowers were such a pretty buttercup yellow – but Elsie said it was a weed: if you let it flower it would run right through the garden. A ladybird landed on the sleeve of her jacket and she carefully blew it away. She was quite unprepared for the heat: here it still felt like summer, as if she’d travelled back half a season since leaving Paddington. A chaffinch hopped along the rail; proud, with his blushing chest, he twittered his song and then paused, waiting for a reply. Rene whistled back, but she was out of practice, her mouth full of air and too much puff. The little bird stopped in his tracks and looked around, his bright eyes blinking, then he twittered again and flew away.
The little bird’s flight brought her back to herself: she remembered the taxi and walked slowly up the platform. There was no one in the tiny station and she left the building, ticket still in hand, and followed the sign to the road. Down a narrow lane, rather overgrown, and into the little car park – it came back to her now. And there, waiting for her, was the taxi, the driver reading his paper patiently, waiting for her – dear Margaret.
The taxi was the worst part of the journey. She’d travelled these roads many times, on buses and on her bike, and once, like this, in a taxi – with Ernest. She knew all the signs and turnings but nothing was quite where she expected. Well-remembered distances felt shorter, or longer, and while the taxi kept a steady speed, she sometimes had the feeling she was being pressed forward, almost against her will. She didn’t fully get her bearings till they reached the crossroads that led to Rosenys. Here the taxi driver stopped to wait for a cattle truck which was rattling down the hill. Rene wound down the window and felt the faintest trace of a breeze on her cheek, smelt the furze; she could catch her breath more deeply now. From here she could surely count every turning, every house, every gate. The truck approached them at some speed and drove past, rattling and empty. They set off again, the taxi grinding a bit on the hill. But even now she wasn’t quite sure of herself, for the taxi was already halfway up the hill before she remembered Upper Rosenys – her punctured bike on that cold evening, Kat’s van – or thought of looking back.