Where Earth Meets Sky

by Annie Murray

  ‘You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,’ he would murmur, hovering on the threshold. Bolder, he would then come in and close the door. ‘God, what a woman you are, Miss Waters. Come here, my dear. Come and sit beside me.’

  ‘No – I really must go and see if Lizzie has settled,’ Lily would say, or some similar excuse, and flee to the nursery. She became frightened and did not answer the door, pushing a chair up against it. Harold Arkwright took to mooning about outside the door. At first he was hesitant, polite. Then, as his ardour for her grew, it became extreme.

  Lily endured several very lonely, desperate weeks at the Arkwrights. Though she never once succumbed to Harold Arkwright’s advances, she felt under continual sexual threat. Once only he pushed his way into her room one night, begging her to let him lie with her, but she threatened to scream and wake up the children and call his wife. He seemed surprised and very offended at her resistance to him. He never tried it again although she went to bed with a chair pushed under the nursery door handle. But she was not sleeping well, and was jumpy day and night. It felt like revisiting a nightmare.

  Though she scarcely knew it, she was not very well. She was still in a raw state after all the grief and shocks she had endured. Also, she was not used to England, to the grey drabness of the city streets after the loveliness of Mussoorie, and she did not know another soul in the place to call a friend.

  Worst of all, here she was once again being pursued in this gross way. Why did men behave like this to her? Was she giving them some abnormal signal which she did not recognize? She felt lost and contaminated, and at times like those she could believe all the cruel accusations those religious women had made in the Bethel Home, that she was dirty and shameful. Sometimes she looked in the yellow tinted mirror in the nursery and even though her same wide, dark eyes looked back at her, her strong brows and thick, waving hair, she could barely recognize who she saw. At night she lay in bed and wept until she was so tired that sleep had to come.

  At the height of her desperation, one evening, while Harold Arkwright patrolled the carpeted corridor outside the nursery, she sat on a cork-seated stool in the children’s bathroom beside the nursery. It was quiet, except for a persistent drip from one of the bath taps, and for the first time she allowed herself to think, to remember.

  In the dark winter gloom she often pined for India. Taking leave of it had been so painful and made all the more fraught because she had had the dreadful Eustace in her care. Unless actually asleep he couldn’t sit still for more than a few moments at a time and he fidgeted ceaselessly. He needed constant entertaining and, whether entertained or not, was rude and aggressive. The train journey to Bombay had entailed some of the most exhausting and trying hours she had ever experienced. She sat sweating by the window of the train as they chugged for endless hours south-west to the coast, intermittently trying to engage Eustace in games of ‘I Spy’ or noughts and crosses, or in his story books. It was only when he was actually asleep, in the afternoon, that she had enough time really to look out and think about her own farewell to India, and in doing so, she ached with sadness.

  Five years she had been in this country, but England now felt a lifetime away. She thought about all her time with the Fairfords, and with a shudder the strange, dream-like months with the McBride household, yet all amid the loveliness of Mussoorie which had stolen her heart. She thought of Sam with an agonized longing which never left her. But, she reasoned, if he had really loved her and wanted her, he would surely have found some way to let her know. Had things been different, had Sam not changed her, opened her to her feelings, she could have made her life in India. But what would have become of her? She might have floated from post to post in the houses of British families whom she might admire or despise, but she would always be a servant, forever a foreigner, an old maid growing scrawny and strange. And now she was carrying a child and only difficulty and disgrace could follow. She had no fellow feeling, then, for the infant. There was no sign of it except sickness and exhaustion and all she could think of was that she had to be rid of it. She had to survive and struggle to find a new life. Staring out at the endless skies and plains of India, she felt her own aloneness and a surge of determination. She would go back to England; she would not let herself fall prey to maternal feelings – that would lead her only to disaster. She was going to survive and make something of herself, no matter what it took.

  But when the P&O steamer pulled majestically away from the port at Bombay, Lily found tears pouring down her face. The hotchpotch of streets of the city, the ghats and hills all faded as they moved away on the deep green water, until the coast with its smells and sounds was lost to her, its colours only a line of blurred umber in the distance.

  It all felt like a dream now: India, Birmingham, the bedstead factory. She could have found more genteel work, but she wanted something anonymous, where she’d be one of a crowd, and could disappear again almost without comment. These frightening, lonely months of waiting were something she just had to get through. She took a cheap room with a Miss Spencer, who, while haughty in manner, was also clearly very particular about cleanliness. Lily could not bear the thought of anything less, after all the lovely houses she had lived in. When she went back alone at night to her little attic, her legs and back aching dreadfully, her hands burning sore from handling wire all day, at least it was to an atmosphere of order and cleanliness even though it was poor. Even so, the musty smell of these houses, their dampness, the odour of boiled cabbage and potatoes spoke to her of a familiar poverty and meanness, so that sometimes when her eyes were closed she could believe she was back in Mrs Horne’s house, with Ann and Effie about to torment her the moment she moved.

  Lily lay on her back and stared despairingly at the crack running along the dingy ceiling.

  Dear God, she thought. What on earth am I doing back here? All she had tried to be, and here she was, a fallen woman carrying the child of a man who she thought had loved her, but who had left her with no message, or hope of seeing him again. And now she was back where she started in the squalid Birmingham streets. But she pushed these thoughts away. She would not think. She would not feel. If she did, she would go mad.

  She allowed herself, now, to remember the horror of the home, and to think of Victoria. Supposing she worked hard and earned herself enough means to try and get Victoria back . . . ? Abruptly she stopped this fantasy, leaning against the edge of the bath, shaken by racking sobs. It was far too late. Victoria had been taken away for adoption. They had told her this and at the time Lily had been pleased at the chance of a home for her instead of knowing that she would just be handed over to the orphanage. But that meant Victoria was even more completely lost to her. She couldn’t go snatching her from her home even if she could find her. There was no use in thinking about it. Victoria was better off with a family who could give her a proper life. She must think no more about it and look to the future.

  She let herself weep for a time, then dried her eyes, back in the present with the drip-drip of the tap. What on earth am I reduced to? she thought. Spending my evening hiding in the bathroom from Harold Arkwright? This was madness. She got up, resolved to find another post where she could feel safe.

  Such a haven presented itself with a Mrs Jessop and her two little girls, whom Lily had cared for all through the war in a house in Surbiton. Mr Jessop was away for most of the war and Lily found a female household in which to pass the shortages and endless bad news of those years. Daisy Jessop was a kindly, timid, rather dull woman who, unlike some, did not flourish when her husband was away but came to rely more and more on Lily. She became very fond of the two girls, Cissy and Margaret, and Mrs Jessop kept her on longer really than her help was required and after Mr Jessop had returned, looking ill, but otherwise unharmed. But Lily started to feel as if her life was slipping past in this quiet, suburban life, and that there must be more on offer, even for someone like her.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  The Larst
onburys’ house in Hampstead, an imposing brick mansion of four storeys close to the heath, impressed Lily immediately.

  When she arrived in June 1921 the walled garden behind was a feast of colour with pots of tobacco plants and daisies and geraniums, the white pom-poms of guelder roses and mauve clusters of wisteria blossoms hanging from the back wall of the house.

  Inside, the big, light rooms were richly furnished to exotic taste, with large mirrors giving a sense of space and light, the rich colours of Persian rugs and elegant furniture gleaming with care and smelling of beeswax.

  Lily, loving children as she did, became very quickly fond of the two Larstonbury infants, Hubert, aged five, and little Christabel, who was two. Virginia Larstonbury, a willowy, intellectual redhead who spent much of her day buried in books, had named her daughter after the suffragette Christabel Pankhurst. Virginia had also come from a moneyed family. She had a taste for hangings and drapes in rich, eastern colours and Lily felt at home with the silken touches of India, the echoes of Benares and Rajasthan that she saw about the house.

  She did not dislike Virginia Larstonbury exactly, but she found her intimidating. Virginia was a woman of ‘interests’, the chief one apparently being ‘theosophy’, and she attended a great many meetings, some of them held in the front parlour of the house in the evenings, when a strangely dressed, intense collection of people arrived and sat talking for hours on end. Virginia was twenty-nine, and, as Lily discovered, fifteen years younger than her husband. She was also not his first wife. Piers Larstonbury had been married and widowed before the war, leaving him with his first two children, Elspeth, now seventeen, and Guy, fifteen, who only appeared from their boarding schools in the holidays. Guy, Lily gathered from the servants, was a sensitive, artistic soul rather like his father. Elspeth, on the other hand, was a firebrand who resented Virginia and had an explosive relationship with her.

  Hubert was pale, with Virginia’s colouring and wide, rabbity blue eyes. He was very delicate and sweet-natured, prone to being set upon by other more robust boys, and Lily felt protective towards him. Though he was not as heart-meltingly beautiful as Cosmo had been, she found him easy to deal with, a child who responded easily to affection. Christabel was more solid, dark-haired like her father, but with a much more temperamental nature than her brother. She was, however, a particular favourite of Virginia’s mother, Lady Marston, who adored girls and had very little time for boys, so on the day Lily took Hubert to Brooklands, Christabel was with her grandmother in South Kensington.

  Virginia Larstonbury, beautiful in a languid way, with her tresses of straight red hair and pale, freckled skin, was a woman of moods and strong tempers.

  ‘I don’t believe in the difference between human beings,’ she proclaimed one day from the couch, looking up from her book. Lily caught sight of the book’s title: Married Love by someone called Marie Stopes. ‘We are all equals, no matter what our state in life, and should be treated as such. Do you not agree, Lily?’

  Do you mean we are, or we ought to be? Lily wanted to ask. But she usually found it better to appear to agree with people, so just said quietly, ‘Oh yes, I’m sure you’re right.’

  However, Virginia Larstonbury’s ideals of equality did not seem to extend as far as her servants, some of whom she treated arrogantly. And she was sure she was right about almost everything, which was one of the things that made Lily begin to pity Major Larstonbury, wondering why he allowed his wife to speak to him so contemptuously. After all, he was an architect with a successful practice in town, but because he did not share her lofty notions she sometimes treated him as if he never had a thought in his head.

  ‘Oh, it’s no good talking to you, Piers,’ Lily sometimes heard her say. Yet she seemed to like Lily, who was nine years older than her, and who was genuinely fond of the children.

  ‘I don’t know how you do it,’ Virginia often said, on her rare visits to the nursery. She would throw herself languidly into the cane chair and pick up Christabel to swamp her with a cuddle.

  ‘Hubert never behaves as well as that for me. Oh, but I just couldn’t spend all day with them, much as I adore the little darlings. It would drive me quite frantic! One must have a place for learning, for cultivation of the inner life. Or perhaps it’s not necessary for everyone. Some of us are very sensitive to life. Are you sensitive to life, would you say, Lily? After all – you’re very pretty,’ she finished, rather inconsistently.

  ‘I don’t really know,’ Lily said, blushing because she really did not know how to conduct such a conversation. ‘Not like you, I don’t suppose.’ Although in some ways she thought Virginia Larstonbury was very insensitive, especially when it came to her husband and children. Almost anything else seemed to matter more, most of the time.

  Piers Larstonbury had not behaved to Lily the way most men in her life had – far from it. Months of her employment in his household went by before he did more than pass the time of day with her. He worked a great deal and was not much in the house, but when he was at home, he was always very well-mannered to his wife, however irritable and impatient she could be with him.

  For the first five months of Lily’s time in Hampstead she scarcely saw the master of the house, except during those after-tea visits each evening with Hubert and Christabel into the cosy drawing room, and even then her task was only to take the children down, well cleaned and dressed for their parents, and to fetch them away again at the appointed time. Her main exchanges with Piers Larstonbury consisted of ‘Good evening’, ‘Goodnight’, and little more. He seemed to her a pleasant man, very good mannered, in particular to Virginia, a man who treated his servants with respect and his children with affection during the brief times he was with them. Other than that she had little impression of him, except from some of the servants like Lottie, the tweeny, who always said he was ‘ever so nice. Much nicer than her.’

  That winter, though, Lily had an unexpected visit from Piers Larstonbury in the nursery. It was a miserable November night, bitter outside, with drizzling rain and the wind whipping meanly along the London streets. The children were not well. As the afternoon darkened early into evening, first Christabel and then Hubert began to complain of sore throats and to run a high temperature. It was not long before they both obviously needed to be put to bed and to miss the evening visit to their parents. Lily sent a message down with Lottie to say that the children were ill.

  ‘Lor’,’ Lottie said, with a frightened face. ‘I hope it ain’t that influenza! Any rate, she’s not in, for a start, so I don’t know as anyone’ll come.’

  The thought of the Spanish influenza made Lily even more worried. So many people had died from it and there seemed to be no cure. The fever took a grip on both children quickly. Lily only managed to snatch a quick bite to eat and spent the evening wiping the two feverish infants down with a cool flannel, as she had done for Cosmo when he was poorly in India.

  At eight o’clock or so, when she was sitting on Christabel’s bed, stroking the child’s forehead and worrying about whether they should call the doctor, there came a discreet tap on the door.

  ‘Come in!’ Lily called softly. Startled, she saw the master of the house in the dim light of the doorway.

  ‘May I come in?’ He spoke softly, thinking the children were asleep.

  Hubert was lying in a twitching slumber, but Christabel cried ‘Daddy!’ and immediately tried to sit up.

  ‘No, Christabel – lie down!’ Lily quietened her.

  Piers Larstonbury came over to his daughter’s bed and stood looking down as she lay with her teddy bear beside her. Lily was touched by the look of tenderness on his face.

  ‘I thought I’d pop up and see my little dears. I don’t like to think of them being ill and Virginia’s gone out. I hope I am not causing a disruption?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Lily said shyly. She felt a little overwhelmed by his presence so close to her but glad of someone to share her worries with. ‘I was wondering whether we need to call the doctor
. I’m worried it might be influenza.’

  Piers Larstonbury adjusted the tails of his jacket out of the way and sat down on the edge of the bed, opposite Lily.

  ‘Hello, Chrissie. How’re you feeling, dear?’

  ‘Feel poorly,’ Christabel said.

  ‘Oh dear, well we can’t have that, can we? Do we need a special fairy to come and make you feel better?’

  He laid his hand across the little girl’s head and gently felt around her neck and throat with his long fingers. Christabel winced as he touched her throat.