Sam sat in the dock, small and drab amid the smart-gowned judge, barristers and ushers. His face appeared older than his years, the last vestiges of his youth driven from him by war and accusation. I could see nothing in him of the spirited boy who had lodged with us at the parsonage and ate with his hands as he sat at our table.
But it was the faces on the screen that were being scrutinised – Iris, with all her youth and beauty and that of her companion, a face which, despite renovated projectors and cleaned cine film, was still hidden under the peak of a cloth cap. It was not just Iris’s image that had haunted me these past few months, but the figure that she leant against – the one who the barristers referred to as the ‘man at her side’. The figure wore Sam’s riding britches and jacket, and I had always thought it was Sam’s face under the peak of his cap, yet now I saw the face of another.
I still believed the person at Iris’s side to have been involved in her death, but it was Nell’s face that I now saw peering from under the cap. The film showed me that it had been Nell who had walked with Iris across the village green on May morning, but it revealed nothing of what had happened.
I had already told the police about Nell’s madness and its causes, but my assertions had been ignored, and they were not something that I cared to repeat in court. I had already betrayed Nell’s memory and I would not do it again. I could not speak about what I now saw on that film. I could not tell the judge, nor the jury, nor the barristers or clerks, but there were people who mattered more – the people who were seated all around me. They were people who I had seen before in the butcher’s or tearoom or church. There was a man who I recognised because of his twisted walking stick and a woman who I usually saw pushing a pram. There was a lady who seemed older now that she was out of her waitress’s uniform and the man who took my money at the grocer’s. They were the people that I had seen on the platform at Missensham station and sat among in the carriage that morning.
They were the people of Missensham and in times past I would have greeted them by name, asked about their families and told them of my own life. But times were different now. The town had been overrun by new featureless housing estates and with them new featureless people.
The barristers spoke of the weather on that morning in 1912, of the type of flowers in the May crown and of the names of the tracks that led to the common. They strutted past the benches with their chests puffed out, hands tucked in their breast pockets. They quibbled details and raised their voices as they discussed the things that mattered so little. Every now and then the shadow of a huge hand appeared on the screen as the angle of the sun, a maypole, or a cloth cap was pointed out, the finger trembling dramatically as if its target held the truth, when the words they spoke said nothing.
Then another shadow crossed the image – one of the dark-gowned ushers – and there were whispers at the front of the room. Then, an announcement: the session was adjourned. The room seemed to let out one collective sigh. The papers on the front desks were folded and packed away and the people around me shuffled in their seats and bent to pick up bags, folding coats and cardigans over their arms. They stood tall around me, coats and legs flashing past me, a hum of voices and clatter of heels, until they were gone and only a lone clerk remained – collecting papers from desks and unplugging the projector, the glowing spindles extinguished, leaving only a skeletal metal carcass.
I turned up my collar and put my hat on, pulling the brim low over my face. It was something I had done every day since the trial began, although there were few people left who would recognise me and even fewer who knew me. I stood up slowly and left the courtroom, my footsteps echoing in the emptiness.
* * *
At Oxworth station I kept my head down, conscious only of the gusts from the passing trains, the catch of electricity echoing along the tracks and the warm bustle of people around me as they exchanged greetings, laughter, and then words – ‘Iris Caldwell’. I realised that I stood among the people from the trial again, the people who had travelled from Missensham and were returning home just as I was. I raised my eyes to watch them but they jostled together, their backs to me, until I could see only one face – a man who was taller than the others and spoke at length. Then I heard more words: ‘Returned, alive!’
I grabbed at a woman’s coat sleeve. ‘Please,’ I began, ‘what did that man just say?’ But she pulled away from me and hurried towards the tall man, standing on tiptoes so she could see over the gathered heads.
I listened to the man’s words as they faded in and out of the hum of voices. I could not make out every word but I heard enough – the trial in Shire Hall had been called off because Iris Caldwell had returned. She had handed herself in at the police station completely unscathed.
The world seemed to spin around me. I saw the tall man, the words still spilling from his mouth and the lady listening on tiptoes, the man with the crooked walking stick and the clerk from the grocer’s. There were women in skirts so short you could see the seams on their stockings, their hair set in waves that barely reached their shoulders, but among them the flash of an ankle-length tea dress or the elegant curve of a corset, a glimpse of a cravat or pocket watch among the suited men.
But the things I now saw were not real, they were glimpses from a time I had once known – memories returning uninvited. These ghosts were everywhere and I moved with them, jostling among handbags and elbows until I was swept along the platform and through the doors of a waiting carriage. I stumbled to a seat and leant my forehead on the window, while people squashed themselves against me, laughing when the lurch of the departing train caused them to stagger in the aisle. As the train gathered speed, I looked out at the passing landscape – the fields, farms and houses that I had once known.
Iris Caldwell was still alive. While others had concerned themselves with the details of what had happened to the girls, all I had ever wanted to know was whether Nell was alive or dead. The amount of blood on the petticoat and nightgown was thought to be too great a loss to survive. One of the girls had died, and I knew that if it was not Iris, then it was my Nell who was dead. I was sure that she was for, if Nell had lived, she would have read about the trial in the papers and come forward to speak up for her beloved Sam.
My thoughts had been riddled with memories that day, but I had not seen Nell. I had not seen her in the chair by the window before I set off that morning. I had not glimpsed her face in the courtroom, nor her figure on the platform, and I could not see her now. I realised that I had not seen Nell since the time, two months ago, that I had sat in my front room and Roy and I had spoken of Sam’s arrest. Over those weeks I had not even seen her shadow or reflection – there had been nothing in the chair with the faded shawl where my companion had once sat. My last connection to my daughter was lost, for I knew that if I could no longer see Nell then she must be dead. At last Nell was gone.
Nell
32
I did not see the film when it was shown in the courtroom of Shire Hall that day. I did not see it when it was first projected on to a bed sheet in St Cuthbert’s Church Hall, and I did not see it all the other times it was played for policemen, lawyers and the hordes of villagers who claimed that they could identify Iris Caldwell and the man she walked with. I did not see the two figures, who appeared only in light and shade as they walked, arm in arm, among the long shadows of the speckled morning light. I did not see the film because I never got the chance to.
I did not see the film, yet I will always be part of it, for it was me, Nell Ryland, who walked across the village green with Iris Caldwell on the morning of May Day 1912. It was my body clothed in Sam Denman’s riding britches and jacket, and my face peering out from under the brim of his cloth cap. Some thought that Iris appeared drunk or drugged in that film, but she was not – she was weakened from losing the baby that her childlike body had been carrying for months. Others thought she was being led away by a man – a villain – but I was no more than a fifteen-year-old girl with short
hair and borrowed clothes.
Someone once told me that the camera cannot lie, but I know now there are things that it does not see. That grainy film did not show my love for Iris and the rejection I felt. It did not show Iris’s grief for the loss she had just suffered, nor the plans that she was making as she stumbled wearily across the grass. It did not show how small and alone we were in the dark of the new morning. It did not show the fear in our eyes, or what we were escaping from, and it did not show Francis Elliot-Palmer as he hid in the undergrowth and slowly wound the crank handle, framing the oak tree and the maypole as he tried to flood the lens with the sun’s early rays.
That camera recorded only a brief moment in time – a time in which the sun became bright enough to enter the lens and for the light to hit the spooling film and capture two girls as they stumbled together across the village green. They walked only for a few seconds, one leaning on the other before she – Iris Caldwell – raised her head for a brief moment, her eyes looking towards the camera as if she had heard something or sensed a change in the air.
Then the film stopped, leaving nothing more than white light projected on to the screen, bed sheet or wall. It did not show Francis Elliot-Palmer, his hand paused on the crank handle, and his head raised to look across the village green. It did not show him watching Iris and me as we headed towards Oak Cottage, took the key from the top of the porch, unlocked the front door and entered the house.
Francis had watched Oak Cottage for several minutes – every twitch of a curtain and every lamp that was lit – observing and planning as he hid in the undergrowth. Then he had packed the camera away, folding the tripod carefully into its long bag. He had walked slowly across the village green, past the long shadows cast by the maypole and the oak tree, as he headed in the direction of Oak Cottage. He had opened the door silently before letting himself into the house, and he shut it quietly behind him.
All of this the camera did not see, and it did not see how that day ended.
* * *
There were more reels of film over the years that followed, more projections on to lime-washed walls and stretched white bed sheets, and moving among the flickering light from the projector was a girl. The colours of her hair and her face were dulled to grey, her words muted, and her movements sharp and jerky, but it was the same girl who had once walked across the village green in the low morning light. It was her, but her alone.
These films were short and silent, no more than hazy glimpses into the girl’s life – but there were many such films across the next twenty-five years. In the first film the girl sat on an unmade bed, her long white nightgown clinging to her ribs, and an untouched meal on the floor by her feet. On the floor was a stack of novels, bookmarks peeping from the pages and a single lace glove resting on top. To one side of her was a door, padlocked and bolted from the inside, and to her other side was a window, the midday sun streaming through a narrow chink in the curtains. She moved shakily, leaning over to nudge the fabric and peer anxiously through the glass, to the world outside that she seemed to fear. There was no more to the film than this, but it was an image that was old and grainy, like a fading memory, and there were more films to come.
In another film the girl stood by the same window, her back to the glass. She wore a smart skirt and blouse, a flag – the Union Jack – clutched to her chest. The curtains were pulled wide and a gust from the open window caught a strand that had come loose from her neatly pinned hair. The walls and ceiling were flickering with the shadows from the street outside, and she smiled excitedly, glancing over her shoulder as if distracted by the world through the window. Then she turned to wave the flag through the open panes, her lips forming calls and cheers to people that she saw below.
In the next film she appeared under an ornate stone archway, the sun casting a halo around her long white dress. She wore a thick band of lace across her forehead, a rose fixed in her hair and she held a bouquet – a cascade of lilies from her hands. A tall man with dark hair stood next to her, his arms linked with hers. They laughed as the wind caught her veil, and he brushed the waves of taffeta from his morning suit.
She appeared again sitting on a packing crate, wiping her hands on her paint-spattered overalls, a patterned scarf knotted above her forehead. There was no furniture in the room but it was grander than the one she’d had before with high ceilings, a large hearth with an elegant mantelpiece, and bay windows that looked out across a city of pale stone gables and pointed spires. On another packing crate tin mugs were clustered round a champagne bottle, and she took one mug and raised it in a toast to the man who sat beside her.
But these were not all of the films, for there were more – films that showed birthday parties and Christmases, a new motorcar pulling on to the driveway and a tabby kitten in a basket. There were friends who smiled and waved, elderly relatives clutching gifts, babies and children – events both big and small captured forever on to film.
And as the girl’s surroundings changed, so too did she. Her hunched and bony body became strong and upright as she grew into the woman she was meant to be. Her face became more rounded and she began to hold her head high. Her clothes changed from skirts that fell to her ankles to ones that barely covered her thighs, her hair falling fashionably to her jaw line.
Then the films themselves changed – the images suddenly crisper as if seen through different eyes. The cine camera that filmed these new images was a newer and better model, the movements on the screen now smooth and natural with no jerks and flickers.
And then the woman appeared for the last time. In this final film she sat on a settee, the luxurious velvet fanning out behind her in the shape of a scallop shell. She wore a skirt that fell just below her knees and a single string of pearls around her neck, her hair framing her face in soft waves and her cheeks darkened with rouge. Then she was joined by the man she’d married, his dark hair now shot with a wide streak of grey and little round spectacles perched on the end of his nose. He took her hand and they smiled, not just for the glassy lens, but for the people they knew would see them in the years to come, their eyes gazing out to a future they could not see.
And then there was no more.
* * *
It was Francis who told me that the camera cannot lie. Yet there are things that his cine cameras did not see. In all the films that were shot over the years – from the girl in the nightgown glancing nervously to the window, to the smart woman on the scalloped settee – there was always someone who stood behind the camera, slowly cranking the handle or framing the shot. It was to this person that the woman turned when her husband looked away – and when she was sure that he was not looking, she would dip her shoulder to show the jut of her collarbone under her blouse, raise her eyebrows, or blow a kiss from her painted lips. These little gestures would be seen as daring or playful to the people who would view the film over the years, but they hinted at a secret side to this woman – something that was hidden away from the respectability of married life. For there were so few ways that she could express the kind of love that she felt for the person behind the camera – a love that had to be kept private in an age when society had forbidden it.
Then there were the details caught on film but never noticed: three tin mugs on the packing crate next to the bottle of champagne, three places set at the dining table for Christmas dinner, and the three pairs of slippers set out in front of the fireplace. And after a while these items started to appear in fours.
And there were the things that always appeared in the background of the shot or were so small that they would never be seen as more than tiny blurs on the screen, yet it was often these unremarkable items that held the most meaning. There was the lucky rabbit’s foot that the girl held in her hand as she glanced through the curtain on to the world that she feared. There was the pile of envelopes tied with a ribbon that sat on the coffee table by the scalloped settee – letters written and addressed but never sent. There was a postcard propped up on the elegant mantelpiec
e – a village green with a church, maypole and a row of small cottages, the windows of the last one hidden by the branches of an oak tree. These were mementos from a place that the woman had once fled – a place she could only return to when she no longer feared it.
And sometimes the woman’s eyes would lose their focus and a smile would flicker across her face, as if her thoughts were lost in a place she had once known and people she had once loved. Then her smile would fade as she thought of the years that had passed since she had been to that place and lived among the people she now missed so much.
When the time was right, she would return.
Agnes
1937
33
That afternoon I saw Waldley Court again. It flashed past my carriage window, speeding away from me into the distance, but I was able to look upon it for just a moment and glimpse the tall, twisted chimneys and the hollow window frames, the long brick wall and the charred rafters of the old stable building. Then just as quickly as it had appeared, it was gone again as the train plunged back into the darkness of the cutting.
The morning in the courtroom had left me exhausted and my journey home had been plagued with memories so vivid that I had fancied the past was somehow all around me. I had been glad to see Waldley Court again, though. It was a place that had always remained remote from the new housing estates that were overrunning the town and, with just a glimpse of its twisted chimneys, I could recall a time before I had lost my husband and daughter – a time that I had once felt safe before the country was ravaged by the Great War and influenza, a gentler era that could never be recaptured.
The Lost Girls Page 25
