by Jane Johnson
She left Mary to walk to and from school on her own, rolling herself in the paisley quilt beneath which she and Hamid had slept, and done many other things too. She kept the pillowcase on which his head had rested unwashed: she could still smell the spicy, male scent of him on it, though it seemed to fade a little with each passing day.
The house became grubby and unloved, which was much the way she felt, and so did Mary, whose springy ginger hair soon became as wild and matted as the coat of one of the feral cats that hunted in the orchard. One day she was sent home with a note from the school secretary which read: ‘We know that things have been difficult, but we would ask you to please pay more attention to the cleanliness and neatness of your child and her clothing or we shall be forced to contact the authorities.’
Your child. Olivia closed her eyes in an excess of misery barely tempered by fury. Then she marched Mary down to the scullery and subjected her to an hour of soaping and scrubbing, punctuated with bites and scratches (by Mary) and slaps and vicious shaking (by Olivia). She broke a comb dragging it through the child’s tangled hair and eventually resorted to lopping great hanks of it off with the kitchen scissors, which needed sharpening, when the knots defeated her.
‘I hate you! I hate you, you fat cow!’ Mary shrieked when at last she was set free.
She fled upstairs to her room, whence there issued a piercing wail a minute later as she caught sight of her ravaged head in the dressing table mirror. For the next week she refused point-blank to go to school, which was why when the telephone rang in the middle of Wednesday afternoon, it was Mary who answered it.
Olivia emerged from the parlour, where she had been feeding the parrot, which was also looking rather the worse for wear. ‘Who is it?’
Mary just thrust the receiver at her.
Olivia put it to her ear and listened to the hiss of ocean sounds. ‘Hello,’ she whispered in dread. The school, demanding where Mary was? The authorities, demanding to visit? Hamid, from wherever in the world he might be? Or a relative of his, reporting his death? She began to shake.
‘Livy? Is that you, chérie?’
‘Mummy!’ The relief was so great, she had to sit on the floor before her knees gave way. ‘Mummy, where are you?’
‘Making my way home, darling. I’ll be on the train from London on Saturday afternoon. Would you ask Jago to meet me at the station with the car?’
*
‘Peace offering?’
Jago tucked the bar of Fry’s Chocolate Cream into his top pocket and patted it with satisfaction. ‘Peace offering.’
The purchase represented the last of her sweet rations for the month, but Olivia had decided it was worth it.
‘No one will say anything, miss, I’ll make sure of that. I already give Nipper a piece of my mind, and Jem knows better than to blab on thee.’
‘It’s not as if I’ve done anything wrong,’ Olivia said defiantly.
He held her gaze for just a beat too long and Olivia felt something twist inside her – not shame, exactly, but some form of recognition and embarrassment.
The train was late. Rather than wait in awkward silence with Jago, Olivia waited at the barrier, watching as the engine huffed its way across the curving sweep of track skirting Mount’s Bay. She remembered how she had seen her father off here, for the last time. How he had ruffled her hair and given her the Leica. It seemed to have taken place in another age, in a time before the tarnished present, when she had still been a child, and innocent. It occurred to her with a pang of guilt that she wished it were her father whose train she was here to meet, but that was a wicked thought and she tried, not entirely successfully, to push it away.
Minutes later, she picked her mother out in the crowd of arrivals, the feather in her hat bobbing as she strode down the platform, a porter at her side carrying her bags. Even at this distance Olivia could see that she had lost weight. Surreptitiously, she pulled the belt of her gabardine mac tighter till she could hardly breathe.
‘Darling!’
Estelle Kitto enveloped her daughter in a cloud of perfume, then held her by the shoulders and regarded her critically. ‘Gracious me, we really must get you to a hairstylist, you look as if you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.’
Olivia folded her arms like a buffer zone between them.
‘And it’s much too warm for that old mac!’ Estelle laughed. She herself was immaculate in a tailored suit and high heels, looking as if she had stepped out of a photographic shoot for a magazine.
‘It’s the only thing I’ve got that fits me,’ Olivia said mulishly. ‘I’ve had to use all the clothes rations on Mary. She just keeps on growing.’
A cloud crossed Estelle Kitto’s lovely face. ‘Oh yes, Rosemary,’ she said, and her expression became shuttered.
Jago secured the suitcases on the pull-out storage rack on the back of the Flying 8 and off they went, Mrs Kitto chattering brightly all the way back, asking the farm manager for the news on all the locals – the incidents, deaths, scandals. Jago, in his usual taciturn way, gave her little to get her teeth into, leaving Olivia to break the news of the bombing of Penzance, the crash of the German plane, the death of Mamie Roberts and the escape of the POWs.
‘Never did find that Nazi, nor that coloured fellow,’ Jago finished.
Estelle caught her daughter’s eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Good lord, such drama! I shall want to hear all about it when we get home.’
Olivia looked away.
They passed the cottages at Raginnis and Jago pulled the car up beside the sea gate, then with remarkable composure and a considerable show of strength, carried the two heavy cases up the steep steps, kicking aside the brambles and nettles that had colonized the garden following Olivia’s summer of neglect.
All the way up the path Olivia tried to think of a good excuse for the presence of the parrot and came up empty. But just as they reached the front door it opened and there stood, pale against the gloom of the hallway, Mary – her white shift-dress and her shorn hair making her appear like the shade of some Victorian urchin.
At the sight of her Estelle became very still. Then she gestured for Jago to set the bags down in the hall and instructed him to secure the car in the garage and drop the key back through the letter box. When he was safely out of view and earshot, her shoulders dropped and she said sharply to the child, ‘Why are you still here?’
Mary’s pale eyes filled with alarm. ‘I… I don’t know.’
‘Why hasn’t your mother taken you away as soon as it was safe to do so, as we agreed?’
Mary wrapped her arms around her torso in an attempt at self-comfort and dropped her gaze to Mrs Kitto’s elegant shoes. ‘I don’t know,’ she repeated in a bare whisper.
Estelle was merciless. ‘Where is your mother? Does she think she has some claim on me now that Tony’s dead? She can think again!’
Olivia felt pieces of a puzzle click together in her head, making an unwelcome shape. But surely her father would never… not with the awful Winnie? She found herself looking at Mary anew, registering the sandy fairness of her hair, the distinctive pale blue of her eyes as Mary looked up in panic. How had she never seen the resemblance before?
‘She went away,’ the child choked out. ‘She went away and left me.’
‘Mrs Ogden said her mother was dying,’ Olivia said quietly. ‘Then she took the train upcountry and we never heard from her again.’
Estelle’s scarlet mouth became a long, hard line. ‘Well, the child can’t stay here. I don’t want anything to do with her.’
All these long months, Olivia had dreamed of the time she would be rid of the little sneak. But as her mother uttered these cruel words and she saw the child’s chin rumple, something broke inside her. She took a deep breath. ‘She has no one else in the world. Only us. Only here.’
Mrs Kitto turned away. ‘I shall speak to the authorities.’
While her mother unpacked upstairs, Olivia put the kettle on and made tea. She stil
l hadn’t come up with a good excuse for the presence of the parrot and feared that in her current mood her mother was likely to banish him with Mary, but just as she was pouring out the second cup she heard a long whistle emanating from the parlour. Putting the teapot down, she fled up the hallway and peered nervously around the door-jamb. Estelle Kitto was staring into the cage, where Gabriel was lying winsomely sideways across his perch, all but batting his uppermost eyelid at her.
‘How on earth did you come by this gorgeous creature?’ she asked, without turning.
Relief made Olivia’s knees sag. By the time she had recounted how she had saved the parrot from the village fishwives, who’d been threatening to pluck and eat him, her mother had the cage door open and Gabriel was sitting on her arm, clucking softly to himself like an oversized hen. ‘Meshy moose key,’ he muttered. ‘Messy mush key.’
Estelle went very still. ‘What did you say?’ she asked the parrot, but he had closed his beak. She turned to her daughter. ‘He’s saying “no problem” in Arabic.’ Mrs Kitto’s brow wrinkled. ‘How in the world has he picked up Arabic?’
An electric shock ran through Olivia’s body, a sudden sharp joyous-painful memory of Hamid talking to the parrot in his strange foreign language, Gabriel making clicking noises with his tongue and occasionally repeating what he heard.
‘I thought he was just saying nonsense words.’
‘It’s not even classical Arabic, either – that would be maafi mushkil. That pronunciation sounded more like darija…’ her mother went on thoughtfully.
‘Gosh,’ Olivia said with forced brightness, trying to deflect the dangerous direction this conversation was taking. ‘I didn’t know you were such an expert on Arabic.’ And then something dropped into place. ‘Were you with Daddy in Algeria?’ she asked suddenly. It seemed mad: Mummy had been working for the bank on Threadneedle Street, hadn’t she? But suddenly she felt sure she had stumbled on another inconvenient truth. She recalled the phone calls, her mother’s excuses for not visiting, the birthday gift of French luxuries, the crackles on the line, the sense of immense distance she had intuited on those rare occasions on which they had spoken.
Estelle shot her a narrow look. ‘Don’t be silly. Now go and take that coat off and make yourself a bit more presentable. I can see you’ve let the house go to rack and ruin while I’ve been away, but it’s time to get everything back on track, and that includes dressing like a young lady again and not some shabby tomboy. I want to see you in a dress.’
‘I haven’t got anything that fits me,’ Olivia repeated.
Estelle Kitto sighed. ‘I’ll take you into Simpson’s in Penzance tomorrow. Go upstairs and do your best.’
Olivia rooted desperately through the chest and wardrobe and at last settled on a tweed skirt and an old shirt of Daddy’s worn loose over the top of it. This, she topped off with a garish scarf tied at a jaunty angle which she hoped would distract her mother’s eye from her other shortcomings, the least of which was the fact that her legs were as hairy as a caterpillar. But despite not being the most maternal of parents, Estelle was sharply observant.
‘How in the world have you managed to put on so much weight during rationing, chérie?’ She shook her head. ‘That shirt looks terrible. At least tuck it in, here—’
There followed a short scuffle as Estelle attempted to neaten her daughter’s silhouette and Olivia did all she could to resist her mother’s strong hands at the already-unsecured waistband of her skirt. When it became clear that nothing was to be achieved without violence, they reached an impasse. Olivia released her mother’s wrists and stood back. She was going to find out sooner or later: might as well grasp the nettle now.
Estelle Kitto’s gaze ranged over her daughter’s body. ‘My God, Olivia, what have you done?’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’
The sound of the slap echoed off the wooden panelling. Olivia did nothing to protect herself, just stood there, her cheek reddening from the blow, breathing heavily.
Mary stared at the two women through the banister rails. ‘I saw her naked with a man in the orchard.’
Estelle regarded her husband’s child with cold eyes.
‘He was trying to kill her, just like he killed Mamie,’ Mary went on in a rush. ‘His skin was black, as black as the devil.’
28
Becky
‘SHE WAS A PROPER LITTLE SNEAK,’ OLIVIA SAYS WITH A sigh. ‘Always spying and creeping around, bringing trouble down on me. I suppose she thought she’d ingratiate herself with Mother, but that woman was no fool.’
I stare from Olivia to Rosie – Rosemary – as we sit together in the parlour. Half-sisters, caught up in a web of lies and secrets like two species of fish dragged up out of the ocean in the same net.
‘You brought trouble down on yourself!’ Rosie says furiously. ‘I thought he was trying to kill you, like he killed poor Mamie.’
‘He didn’t kill Mamie, and he wasn’t trying to kill me, you goose!’
‘I was only a child then,’ Rosie huffs. ‘I didn’t know what was really going on. All I saw was this coloured chap lying on top of you. I couldn’t imagine you wanted that. It was disgusting.’ She slides a glance at me, then away. ‘Dirty. Going with someone not your own kind.’
Olivia draws herself up. ‘You ignorant old toad. Hamid was a good man: the best I ever met, and the colour of his skin doesn’t come into it.’
‘It was a scandal,’ Rosie mutters stubbornly. ‘It was then and it always will be.’
‘But she loved him, what’s so scandalous about that?’ I can’t help myself.
‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ Olivia says sadly. ‘It’s all so long ago.’
‘Scandal never dies.’ Rosie folds her hands sanctimoniously. ‘I could have married better if it weren’t for you. All those years of not even being able to show my face at church, people muttering about you in the village, children saying things at school.’
‘You think you could have done better than poor Jem, do you? Who else would have taken on such a vicious baggage? I don’t know how he’s put up with you as long as he has.’
‘At least I’ve not spent my life as a withered old spinster pining after a man as dark as the devil who left her in the family way!’
I ignore Rosie’s nasty invective. ‘Cousin Olivia, were you pregnant?’
She nods slowly. ‘I found out just after Hamid left. All those times we slept together – I thought we were charmed, or that I couldn’t conceive. By the time Mother came back there was no hiding it.
‘“Who did this to you?” she demanded. “Was it a soldier? One of the farm boys?” I wouldn’t tell her but of course Rosemary couldn’t help but blab about Hamid, how I’d kept a murderer hidden in the house, and then somehow helped him to escape.’ She turns to Rosie. ‘It must have been embarrassing for you, dragging Sergeant Richards and Mr White up to the house, but there being no sign of their suspect, eh? I expect they thought you were a proper little tittle-tattler.
‘Anyway, Mother listened, of course, especially when Rosemary – dear Rosemary – showed her the drawings I’d done of Hamid, the sketchbooks she’d stolen. Your chance to show her which of us could be her best daughter, wasn’t it? Look: Olivia’s a harlot – I’m a good girl.’ Her hands are balled into fists as she remembers. ‘Mother took all the sketches and burned them, without a word.’
‘When she found out I was pregnant I thought she was going to kill me: she had a wild look in her eye. She drafted in Mrs Tucker to come and take care of Rosemary and the house and drove me up to London in the Flying 8, with her foot down the whole way. Said we couldn’t take the train in case anyone saw me. Then she left me up there with some people she knew and I stayed with them for six months or so, till my due date. But the baby was stillborn.’
Her dark eyes are wintry. ‘After a while when I was recovered enough they put me on the train back to Penzance. By the time I got home Mother was already sick. She came back from the war with somethi
ng wrong with her lungs; she’d caught some sort of flu and deteriorated day by day. It took months for her to die. That was when it all came out, when she was so weak. I was ruthless, made her answer my questions. It wasn’t Winnie herself but her sister Imogen that my father had an affair with, but she died in childbirth and Winnie was left to bring the child up; I suppose that’s why she was never really attached to her. Daddy arranged for the two of them to come to the safety of Cornwall after the bombing of Exeter, but Mummy never accepted it, so when Winnie arrived with Rosemary in tow it was just the excuse she needed to cut and run. I don’t think she ever really wanted children – she certainly wasn’t very maternal. It was Daddy she wanted, and excitement. So she volunteered for the SoE and got sent to Algiers to serve near him, but then he was sent to Sicily during the Allied invasion, and was lost in action there. After that she didn’t care about anything any more. She went to France to work with the Resistance, became one of their boldest operatives, got decorated for it. She came back a different person, though. There was no love left in her at all, and I suppose that was why she treated us both so cruelly.
‘When she died she left the house and everything in it to me and nothing at all to Rosemary. I tried to do right by her and Jem, but there’s no such thing as happy families, is there?’
She gives me a small, sad smile. ‘It was such a strange time. All sorts of things went on: society turned upside down. People went a little mad – with fear, with freedom, with defiance. Scratch the surface of any family history and you’ll find a story that’s been buried – babies born out of wedlock, affairs with visiting servicemen, bigamy and couples living together under an assumed name, illegal abortions and children adopted by the parents as their own. All sorts went on under cover of the war. It was a desperate time and people behaved as if they might die at any minute. But then they didn’t and peace came and somehow society had to get back to being ordered and normal and all those untoward things got swept under the carpet and we weren’t supposed to speak of them.
