The Lost Girls

by Jennifer Wells

  ‘Promise me nobody will be hurt,’ I said.

  But he no longer looked at me, just nodded and settled back into the seat beside me, staring through the windscreen at the view that was not there, as he chewed his lip.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I said. ‘Take me home now.’

  ‘But the dress!’ he said. ‘You were to deliver the May Day dress to Haughten Hall.’

  ‘You take it,’ I spat, for I really did not care what he thought of me anymore. ‘You take it after you drop me back home. For now you at last have a reason to call on your precious Iris.’

  ‘I will do that,’ he said shortly. ‘For I’m sure that Iris would rather receive a real man than a sapphist.’

  It was the word again, the one I had heard on Iris’s lips when we had spoken of Vesta Tilley, but now I understood more of what the word meant and how he would use it to shame me.

  ‘Take me home now!’ I screamed into the silence.

  * * *

  He dropped me outside the door to Oak Cottage but did not see me inside. The excitement of my first journey in a motorcar did not return to me on the way home and my joy was dulled by the words that Francis and I had exchanged. In my eagerness to leave the house that morning I had forgotten to take a coat and my dress was spattered with mud and grease, but it was nothing compared to how dirty I felt inside.

  I had been taken in by the Elliot-Palmers and I had believed that they thought me capable of influencing an important family. Now I realised that they had chosen me because they had heard of my drunken arrest. They had wanted someone who they could pressure to carry out their deeds – that person was me, Nell Ryland, someone who was no more than a delinquent, a lunatic, and a sapphist.

  27

  It was the sound of a motor vehicle that lured me to the window the next morning, but when I looked out and saw that it was just the butcher’s van I drew my face back from the glass and sat down heavily on my chair.

  I had expected Francis to call again but not wanted it. Over the past few weeks I had come to understand a little more about the people who lived in the world behind the glass – what I had seen of them was not good, and I was starting to understand why my mother wanted to protect me from them.

  I took my shawl off and flattened it over the back of the chair – it was a place that I had become used to sitting as I watched the life that went on through the window. The constant thud of the dolly peg drifted from the kitchen, the sound dampened by the folds of fabric that my mother had stuffed into the washtub. She was washing her best dress for May Day – an outfit that she usually saved for Christmas and Easter but, for the first time, I was not sure whether she would be dressing up for the benefit of God or man.

  May Day was close now, just a day away, and posters advertising the dancing and festivities were tied to lamp posts and nailed on to the oak tree. The maypole stood lonely and waiting, its ribbons woven tightly round the wood as if it was a gift waiting to be unwrapped. Groups of smartly dressed women stood together, waving their hands towards the empty grass, their fingers tracing the shapes of the tables and marquees that they imagined. An old woman with a bag of shopping sat down wearily on the bench and a group of schoolboys ran along the road towards the high street.

  But she was not there.

  I had never seen Iris from the window, but I watched for her now – for the flash of her white mare through the distant hedgerows, or the swish of her girlish dress among the groups of women who stood on the green, even for the passing of her father’s motorcar, or for Dora as she headed to the chemist for more white pills. Anything to tell me that she was still alright.

  Then the chime of the church bell seemed to remind the people outside that they had to be home for lunch, and by the time the last bell had sounded, I was left watching only the stillness.

  It was the nurse that I saw first. She came from the track that led to the cottage hospital, walking with such speed that her cape billowed about her waist. From the stockiness of her build and the way she walked I knew that it was the same woman who had spoken to me outside the church hall – the one who had told me of Iris’s secret. It was not until she got closer, and drew level with the oak tree that I noticed a man – the broad-shouldered figure of Sir Howard – running behind her. When he caught up, he grabbed her arm and tried to take something from her hand.

  She spun round and pulled herself free from him. Then she raised her arm, her fist clenched high above her head and brought it down hard towards the ground. There was a faint tinkle of glass and he jumped back from her in such a way that I fancied I could see the splintered glass on his shoes and little white pills scattered through the grass.

  He drew his hand above his head just as he had done all those weeks ago to warn off the excitable dog, but she did not cower at the sight of his threat – she swung her head forward with such force that I was sure that I could actually see the spit fly from her lips.

  He jumped back, shaking his arms out as if they were dripping wet.

  She shouted, just one word – a curse, I thought, although I could not hear what – and then she turned and walked briskly across the grass, back in the direction of the cottage hospital.

  I watched her as she went, her cape flapping at her sides and her white cap bobbing in time with her hurried steps. Sir Howard did not move, just stood and watched after her, his body rigid and his finger raised in the air as if he was about to scold her, if only she had waited.

  I thought about what Iris had told me – about how her father knew of these women and their unlawful services – and of the look on Iris’s face when she had told me that those services were not something she wanted. There was bad blood between that nurse and Sir Howard but I was not sure why. I shrank down in the chair so I would not be seen.

  ‘Oh! Howard!’ My mother stood behind me, her hands still red and raw from the washing tub. ‘The shame of it! We must invite him in!’

  ‘No!’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t think he would want that, not right now.’

  ‘Nonsense, Nell! These women are becoming so violent, we must offer him some sanctuary and report the incident to the police!’ And then I saw what she did – the violent protester attacking the innocent gentleman who was doing no more than going about his business.

  ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘I will go to him,’ she said, wiping her hands on her apron. But as she turned to the door she suddenly stopped and I fancied that only then did she remember the washtub in the middle of the kitchen floor and the underwear hanging limply from the airer. ‘If only we were in a state to receive him,’ she said finally.

  ‘I think we should probably mind our own business,’ I said. ‘Sir Howard would be embarrassed if he knew we had been watching. After all, we don’t really know what just happened – there may be an explanation.’

  ‘Oh, Nell!’ she cried. ‘There is never any excuse for this kind of thing!’

  ‘I just meant—’

  She did not give me a chance to explain myself, but for once it was not me who took the brunt of her anger. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised at that woman’s behaviour!’ she cried, her face quite red and her curls quivering with rage. ‘Those nurses have poisoned the minds of the women in this village for too long.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ I said. ‘Which women?’

  She did not answer me but she did not have to, for I knew then that she spoke of the women who would sew with her in the parsonage sitting room when I was a child – the women with the swollen eyes and the weak smiles. I realised now that they were women who had heard of the services offered from the nurses’ house at the back of the cottage hospital and had come to the vicar’s wife for guidance. My mother had helped them in the only way she knew how – she had warned them away from the nurses’ house and made them repent by sewing a quilt that showed scenes from the life of Eve. Now I understood why my mother had sometimes invited me to sew with them – I was her child and my birth had brought a joy that could
also be theirs.

  She ignored my question. ‘Thank goodness I was able to support them back then,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe you didn’t,’ I said. ‘Maybe those women would have been better off if they had gone to the nurses’ house after all.’

  ‘Nell!’ she cried. ‘How could you say that? Your father would—’

  ‘How do you know that those women are any better off now than they would have been without you?’ I said, trying to keep my voice calm. ‘How do you know that these children that they bore are not starving and beaten by drunken fathers?’

  ‘Well,’ she puffed. ‘I…’ When she could not answer, I realised that this ‘support’ that she had given the women had not left the parsonage sitting room and she had never dared visit these women in their squalid homes or offer them the charity they needed.

  ‘They didn’t need prayers,’ I said, putting my hand on hers as I tried to calm her. ‘They needed money and a roof over their heads and maybe even the vote, for that would surely help.’

  ‘The vote!’ she hissed. ‘You cannot talk of such things.’ She wrung her hands and then added quietly, ‘Whatever would the new vicar think if he could hear you talk like that?’

  ‘The vicar?’ I echoed, taking back my hand.

  ‘And that woman from the Sunday school – oh, yes this would be such gossip for her!’

  ‘You don’t really know her, Mother,’ I said. ‘You barely speak.’

  But she continued talking about these people she imagined gossiping and I realised that she had little concern for what I felt or believed in, only what a few acquaintances might think. I was no more to her than someone who might tarnish her reputation – after all, she was a woman who was once of such high standing.

  ‘And Sir Howard,’ she continued. ‘What if he heard you talk like that?’

  ‘You should not care about what he thinks, Mother,’ I said. ‘He is a bad man – you should not care about him at all.’

  ‘And what makes you say that?’ she spat.

  But I could not say any more because the memory of the way Sir Howard had forced my bonnet from my head was still too raw to speak of, and I feared that if I told her about it she would not believe me. She would surely believe her precious Howard over her own daughter, and that only added to my fear of him.

  ‘I always worried that you would turn out this way, Nell,’ she said. ‘Ever since your arrest, I knew this was the way things would go.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry that I was trouble for you.’ And at that moment I realised that I was.

  But my apology did not seem to matter. ‘I think you do these things to spite me,’ she continued.

  ‘No, Mother!’ I cried.

  But she had not finished: ‘You did it all to disgrace me, didn’t you? The drunkenness, the arrest and getting yourself expelled from school!’

  ‘They were not teaching us anything at school,’ I said firmly. ‘You made sure of that. You even made sure of it when Father was alive. Those women you used to pray with in the parsonage were probably still at school when you and Father arrived in this parish. You made sure that the teacher could not give lessons on human biology – you confiscated all the anatomy textbooks and replaced them with Bibles. It is no wonder that these women ended up in trouble.’

  She opened her mouth but no words came, her glassy eyes blinking rapidly.

  ‘You told me that a man and a woman need to be married to have a baby,’ I said. ‘You told me that my monthly bleeds were nothing more than God’s punishment to Eve. You paraded me in front of those women but you did not tell me why they were with you, praying in the sitting room. All you ever taught me was how to sew stupid Bible scenes on to a quilt and bored me with arranging flowers in the church. I had to work things out for myself. I could have easily ended up just like your praying women!’

  Her mouth dropped open a little and she sat silently staring out of the window for several minutes, her body limp as if she was broken.

  I thought of apologising, but the words did not come because truly I did not mean them.

  Then, at last she spoke. ‘I thought you liked quilting,’ she said simply.

  ‘Quilting?’ I echoed because of all the words that we had flung at each other, I could barely remember what I had said.

  ‘I thought you liked quilting,’ she repeated. ‘I never liked it myself but I liked sitting in front of the fire while we shared a pot of tea and chatted about our sewing. I just liked being with you.’

  ‘It’s not about—’

  ‘And the flowers,’ she continued. ‘I thought you came with me to arrange the flowers because you liked to collect the fallen petals and because being in the church reminded you of the days that we had spent in there with your father, when we were a family.’

  ‘I didn’t like it,’ I said, ‘because it reminded me of Dad and that made me sad again. I didn’t think that I had a choice. You never asked me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I was just trying to take care of you the best way I knew. All those things I did with you were because I wanted to keep you close to me – to remind me that you were my daughter, because as long as you were with me then I still had a little bit of family left.’ She sighed, and I noticed a heaviness to her voice. ‘There are things that I should have taught you and things that I should not have kept from you, I can see that now, but these are things that are usually discussed between women, and I could not bear to think of you becoming a woman.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, but nothing more, because I realised then that I understood so much more about what had happened between us since my father’s death, and every little quarrel, denial, or cruelty seemed to have new meaning.

  ‘Without your father to guide me, I became blind to so much,’ she said. ‘All that I could ever think of was making sure that you grew up to become someone he would have been proud of.’

  ‘You have told me enough times that I am not,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘I never meant—’

  ‘You never speak of what I might want,’ I said. ‘Only of what my father would want me to be.’

  ‘Well,’ she began. ‘That is important because your father had a certain standing in this village—’

  ‘Do you not see that it does not matter what my father would think?’

  ‘Nell!’ she spat, her eyes blinking furiously.

  ‘Whatever standing he once had, none of it matters now,’ I cried, ‘because my father is dead!’

  28

  ‘My father is dead.’

  They were words that I had never said in my mother’s presence before, yet they were the words that coloured everything we did, their weight hanging heavy in the air between us. They were also some of the last words that I ever remember saying to her as we sat together in the little front room of Oak Cottage on the last day of April of 1912.

  My mother said that she always felt my father among us – that sometimes it was as if she could see him with us, watching us. I just thought that she was sentimental and fanciful, because I had only ever felt the space where he was not. It was a feeling that I had tried to numb with the wine from my father’s wake and with the company of Sam – someone who lived in a world where my father did not linger. It was a feeling that caused me to bury my head in fantastical novels and made me realise that things such as long hair and fancy clothes did not matter so much.

  But while my mother felt that my father was still with her, when he died she had lost a part of herself. As she sat and talked about her old life of raising funds for repairs to the steeple and hosting society events with the mayor, I realised that her insistence on arranging the church flowers, Iris’s religious instruction and her jealousy of the new vicar’s wife was all she had been left with. She had not only lost a husband but also her home, her role in the village and her social standing.

  She apologised for our ‘squabble’ as she put it, and for the mistakes she said she had made over the years – the confis
cation of the biology textbooks, her lack of understanding when she had found me drunk in the church after my father’s funeral, and the way her reaction had got me expelled from school – but it was too little, too late.

  And she said that I should not see Sam again.

  As she said the words I realised how little she knew of my life and how little we talked, and that through everything that had happened, I had completely forgotten about Sam and not even realised it. The Sam that I now thought of was not the young man I had got drunk with, who had put his hand inside my drawers and the one who had betrayed me so painfully, but the boy who had been part of my family for a short time who slept with the window open in all weathers and ate with his hands at the dinner table. Sam was also the one who had been there for me after Sir Howard had threatened me – he had been with me when I had needed him most.

  Sam had asked for my forgiveness but I had not given it. Soon he would be gone and I might never see him again. I needed to tell him that there was no bad feeling between us. I was ready to forgive him now, so seeing him again was exactly what I planned to do.

  When I went to bed that night, I left the curtains open so that the first light of morning would wake me.

  * * *

  The girl stared back at me from the mirror, a girl that I did not recognise, her long white dress glowing in the dim light of morning. She wore a frilled bonnet to hide the blunt ends of her hair, little lace gloves on her hands.

  May Day morning was here at last and I had a plan. I would meet Sam at the stables before he left to catch the omnibus and return to the village at sunrise. My mother would be up early, spending most of the morning in church, and had promised not to wake me. Once Sam had left, I would return to the village and slip into the procession unnoticed, claiming that I knew nothing of the whereabouts of Iris Caldwell who, by then, would be long gone.

  I looked back at my reflection once more, at the girl I did not recognise. She stared back at me then she leant forward and took a little lace bag from the dressing table and put it over her arm. I left the room as silently as my reflection.