Rosie

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘Are you married?’ she asked.

  He grinned wolfishly. ‘Was once, but I dumped her while I was in the army. I saw no sense in paying for a woman back home while I could get them for free anywhere.’

  Rosie winced. It was very odd that she had likened him to Seth the first time she saw him, as physically there wasn’t even the faintest resemblance. But that brutish remark was exactly the kind Seth would have made. Linda’s warning that she should keep her distance from him rang in the back of her head, but she needed to stay beside him a little longer to try and build up some kind of trust.

  ‘Could I clean the office?’ she asked. ‘I’m bored with nothing to do. I’m not used to it.’

  ‘Aylwood doesn’t like anyone poking around in there,’ he said, giving her a sideways glance. ‘I can find something to stop you being bored if you like!’ he added with a leer.

  Rosie shuddered. She was sure that was a sexual innuendo. ‘I’m not that bored,’ she said quickly and got up and walked away to go and check on the patients.

  It gave her a pang in the heart to see them. Monica was sitting on the floor hunched up in the corner, her shorn head on her knees with her wasted arms protectively round it. She was calm today, and her face had lost that bestial look she’d had yesterday. Rosie wondered if she was still under the effects of the powerful sedative she’d been given then, or whether she fluctuated between rages and silence all the time. She wished she knew the patients’ case histories. She thought it would help to understand them, but she guessed that both Saunders and Aylwood would scoff at that.

  There was a puddle on the floor, so Rosie went back and asked Saunders if he could let her have the keys to go in and mop it up.

  ‘You’re kidding!’ he said looking at her scornfully. ‘We don’t open the door again until dinner time.’

  ‘But she’s almost sitting in it,’ Rosie protested.

  ‘Serves her right,’ he said, and picked up his paper again.

  ‘Why can’t they have a chamber pot in there?’ Rosie said, trying very hard to keep her anger under control.

  Saunders glared at her over his newspaper. ‘Are you an idiot or what?’ He sounded exasperated now. ‘Would you like a pot of shit thrown at you when you opened the door?’

  Rosie turned away. He could be speaking from experience of course, but that still did not excuse his not allowing her to go in and clean the floor. She wondered how he’d feel if he had to sit in his own pee all morning.

  At each viewing panel her heart sunk lower. Bertha was pacing up and down muttering, pounding on the door now and then. Angela was sitting on the floor twisting and untwisting a lock of hair in her fingers and cackling to herself. One of the old men was standing facing the corner, making strange faces; another was playing with himself for comfort. Mabel was now lying on the floor wailing, rocking herself to and fro, her shift soaked with urine. Rosie fixed all these scenes in her head so she could write them down later. She wished she could get into the office and search that filing cabinet. She doubted she’d ever get in there once Aylwood was back.

  At around three that afternoon Rosie was almost falling asleep in her chair in the corridor when Saunders prodded her. It was very hot and airless and for the first time that day it was quiet everywhere. She thought perhaps the patients were affected by the heat too.

  ‘Go on in the office and get your head down,’ he suggested. ‘I’ll sit out here for a while.’

  Suddenly she was wide awake, seeing a golden opportunity which was unlikely to present itself again. Even when Saunders went downstairs for his dinner, Gladys Thorpe had come to relieve him. She’d always thought Gladys to be a caring person, even if she was a bit slow, but when Rosie attempted to draw out her opinions about this ward, the nurse’s face tightened and she said, ‘It’s not for me to discuss it.’ Rosie was more shocked by Thorpe’s attitude than she was by the chargehands’; she was after all a trained nurse. If Rosie hadn’t been afraid it might get back to Matron, she would have torn her off a strip.

  ‘It’s so hot up here,’ Rosie said, waving her hand like a fan. She had a strong feeling Saunders was offering a favour which he’d expect to be returned. ‘Is it always like this?’

  He shrugged and his small pale eyes looked vacant. ‘I suppose so. You get used to it. I could try and get some windows open. It’s turned much warmer outside. I think the summer’s come at last.’

  Rosie went into the office, took the easy chair in the corner by the filing cabinet and put her head back. She could hear Saunders walking up and down the corridor, his shoes had steel ‘Blakeys’ and the keys on his belt jingled. Each time he paused she could mentally picture which one of the rooms he was looking into.

  She knew when he sat down right at the far end of the corridor by the scraping noise the chair made on the floor, and quickly she opened the filing cabinet. The top drawer appeared to be just a place to put old reading matter, everything from back copies of the Nursing Times to a couple of battered paperback thrillers. She silently closed that and opened the lower drawer. To her delight it held the patients’ files. Two sections clearly marked, one as ex-patients and the other current.

  Taking out the one marked Monica Endlebury, she began to skim through it, one ear cocked for Saunders. Right at the back was a typed case history.

  It seemed Monica had been a normal child, though a little highly strung. In 1938 when she was fifteen she was sent to Paris to live with an aunt because her parents thought it would broaden her horizons. A year later when the war started her parents wrote and asked her aunt to send her home. Monica disappeared.

  It was in the autumn of 1944 that people in the rural area around Reims began reporting sightings of a savage-like woman dressed in rags, living in the woods. Two men claimed they’d tried to speak to her but she had sprung at them like a wild dog, then disappeared again. In early January 1945 two young boys out hunting for rabbits heard a moaning sound coming from what looked like a makeshift camp. They investigated and discovered the woman half buried by leaves, on the point of death from cold and starvation.

  She was taken to a local hospital, and as she was nursed back to health they realized that she was English from odd words in her demented babblings. They passed on a physical description of her to the British Embassy, who eventually not only got her back to England and into Friern Barnet Mental Asylum, but also contacted her parents.

  Rosie was just flitting through a long, detailed report by a psychiatrist who believed that Monica had been kept prisoner for some years and subjected to every kind of sexual perversion, when she heard Saunders’s footsteps. Hastily she stuffed the file back into the drawer and closed it, then slumped back in the chair as if she was fast asleep.

  She felt Saunders was standing in the doorway for quite some time watching her, but then just as she felt she must open her eyes and speak, he walked away. She listened for some few minutes before going back to the files. She could hear him unlocking cell doors and a louder babble of noise as he went in. She remembered then how he’d said he was going to try and open the windows a little, and assumed this was what he was doing.

  Once his footsteps were back up the other end of the corridor, she opened the drawer again. As much as she wanted to know more about Monica and how she came to end up in Carrington Hall, she didn’t dare waste any more time reading case histories. What she needed were relatives’ addresses.

  To her disappointment there were none. She could only assume they were kept downstairs in Mrs Trow’s office. She was desperate to read more about all the patients, but feeling certain her luck couldn’t hold out much longer, she put the files away and closed the drawer.

  It was just gone four o’clock when she looked out along the corridor. To her surprise Saunders wasn’t sitting out there, and she was instantly alarmed.

  Her first thought was that he’d come back to the office without her hearing him, seen her reading a file and slipped out to tell Matron. But as she stood in the doorway ment
ally planning excuses for poking her nose into things which didn’t concern her, she noticed that the door of Angela’s room was just slightly open.

  The doors didn’t lock from the inside, a precaution against patients grabbing keys and locking themselves inside. She thought that Saunders must be in there opening the window, but bearing in mind what Aylwood had said about Angela being the most dangerous on the ward, she thought she’d better go and see if everything was all right.

  She was halfway down the corridor when she suddenly realized that Saunders couldn’t possibly open those small high windows without taking something in with him to stand on. Furthermore, if he was occupied with this, how could he prevent the inmate darting out? She stopped short, thinking back to his unusually solicitous suggestion that she take a nap in the office. Why not the rest room? Unless of course it was because it was almost opposite Angela’s room.

  The way he’d looked at Angela in the shower came back to her, and with it came a blinding flash of intuition of exactly what he was doing in her room. She crept forward on tiptoe. She felt queasy, knowing in her heart that she was going to see something appalling, but none the less having to look.

  When she peeped through the viewing window it was almost like a flashback to the terrible scene impressed on her mind since childhood. Different characters perhaps, and shot from a different angle, but the same equally brutal act.

  Saunders’s large body almost concealed the small woman trapped beneath his bulk. His mottled bare backside was pumping up and down, and Rosie had to stand on her toes in order to peer down to get the whole picture.

  His trousers were round his ankles, and he had Angela forced on to her face on the bed board. She was holding her hands awkwardly above her head and her wrists were tied together with a cord. As she wasn’t making a sound, Rosie thought he must have gagged her with something, but she couldn’t see Angela’s face, only the storm of black curly hair.

  Saunders’s grunting was so disgusting she retched, and that moment of enforced hesitation as her mouth filled with bile gave her just enough time to think before rushing in to intervene.

  It felt like the worst kind of cowardice as she crept back along the passage away from the cell: again another guilty reminder that she hadn’t tried to stop her brothers using Heather either, or told the police what they’d done, but common sense told her that she was no match for Saunders inflamed with animal lust.

  Standing in the office doorway she shook from head to toe, not knowing what to do. She had no doubt the man had been using the girl on a regular basis for months, probably ever since she came here. Maybe others too for all she knew.

  A sudden clinking of keys alerted her that he had finished his horrible business, yet she couldn’t move from her position in the doorway. She watched him coming out, turning to lock the door behind him, and suddenly Angela began to scream.

  Rosie had never heard a scream like that one. Her blood curdled at the savagery in it, and involuntarily she moved closer.

  ‘Don’t look so worried,’ Saunders said in a hearty voice as he walked towards her, hands out to ward her off. ‘She’s always the same if you go in there unexpectedly without food in your hands. I tried to get her window open but she started pummelling me. Had a nice kip? You were well away when I looked in earlier.’

  Rosie had to turn away. Her face would have told him she’d seen everything. She couldn’t wipe out the look of contempt which she knew was in her eyes, or the angry red flush on her cheeks.

  She vomited later in the lavatory. Angela was still screaming and she’d set off some of the others and Rosie knew now what Bedlam must have been like. How could she stay here after seeing that?

  ‘Bad day?’ Linda asked over tea. Everyone else had gone, and apart from Pat Clack in the kitchen they were alone.

  Rosie could only nod. She couldn’t eat anything, it all seemed to stick in her throat. She needed to tell someone, anyone, but yet she knew there was no one she could trust.

  ‘Come out with me tonight, that’ll cheer you up,’ Linda said with a grin. ‘We could get the tube into the West End and wander about eyeing up the blokes.’

  Rosie appreciated Linda trying to cheer her and defying the order not to speak to her. It was kinder still to offer her a night out, but she didn’t think she ever wanted to look at another man in her entire life. They were all despicable, her father, brothers and now Saunders. For all she knew Thomas might have some secret perversion. She thought she might come to hate all men.

  Chapter Eleven

  Thomas ushered Miss Pemberton up the stairs and into his living-room before saying anything more than the usual pleasantries. Mr Bryant was about to close the shop, but he was an inquisitive man and Thomas didn’t want his employer quizzing him about who she was, or listening to their conversation.

  A week had passed since Rosie came to Thomas with her shocking story and although he and Miss Pemberton had spoken twice on the telephone in that time, she hadn’t given him any warning that she was coming up to London today. He was even more taken aback by her rather fetching appearance. When they had met at Easter she had looked the embodiment of a social worker, middle-aged, a touch masculine in a tweed suit and stout shoes. But today she looked ten years younger in a very feminine lilac short-sleeved summer dress, dainty shoes and a pretty straw hat.

  ‘If I may be so bold, you look stunning, Miss Pemberton,’ Thomas said once he’d closed his living-room door. ‘And I’m very grateful to you for coming all this way.’

  ‘If you’re bold enough to say I look stunning, you are quite bold enough to call me Violet,’ she said with a smile. She liked Thomas Farley. Although she had only met him in person once before and the rest of their acquaintance was through telephone conversations and letters, she found him rather alluring. This quality had come across without seeing him, via the interesting and intelligent statements in his letters and the rich, deep tone of his voice. It grew stronger still when she saw his warm brown eyes, and the way his full lips curved into a half smile while she was talking to him, as if he was secretly amused by her. She very much liked the lines on his face because they told tales of hardship, adventure and experience and also confirmed why he had this wealth of compassion and sensitivity. He was amusing too; somehow he’d managed to hang on to that irreverent, sharp humour that East Enders were renowned for. In truth he was more of a real man with just one leg than most able-bodied ones. And if she’d been fifteen years younger she’d have been tempted to make a play for him.

  ‘I don’t know why you should be grateful I called. It is I who am indebted to you, Thomas, for helping Rosie in her hour of need. Besides, I like to think we are friends,’ Violet added.

  Thomas grinned at her forthright statement. It evoked good memories of other equally plain-speaking Queen Alexandra’s nurses he’d known. He owed his life and sanity to such determined women. He was touched she considered him a friend.

  ‘Do sit down,’ he said, removing a shirt from one of his two chairs. ‘Had I known you were calling I would have tidied myself and this place up a bit. Would you like some tea? Or something stronger?’

  ‘Tea would be lovely,’ she said as she sat down and removed her hat.

  Thomas felt a little foolish offering her alcohol at five in the afternoon. He had come a long way from his slum-child roots but he still felt he had a great deal more to learn about etiquette. ‘Rosie has compiled us quite a dossier,’ he said quickly to cover his embarrassment. ‘She called last night with yesterday’s report. But she won’t be coming again this evening as she’s got a date.’

  He half expected Violet to look disapproving, but instead she smiled with real warmth and her soft grey eyes twinkled. ‘Well, that is good news. I’ve been so worried about her. Who is this young man?’

  ‘Gareth Jones. He’s an engine driver. She met him on Coronation day – apparently Donald got lost and Gareth helped her find him. I’m very glad she has someone to take her mind off this awful business, the
strain is beginning to tell on her. But let me give you her notes to read while I make the tea.’

  As Thomas made the tea in his tiny galley kitchen at the back of the house, his mind was on Rosie yet again. In fact when he came to think about it, she’d hardly been out of his mind for the entire week. He hated the thought of her in Carrington Hall, especially since he’d read her report about Saunders. Again and again he’d been tempted to call a taxi and go over there to get her out. He kept wondering why he felt this way about her; it wasn’t rational or normal to feel so attached to a girl who was no relation, especially one so young and with such a background. In dark moments he wondered if he needed to see a shrink.

  ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ he said aloud, his voice drowned by the sound of the kettle whistle. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you that couldn’t be put right by a few pints in friendly company. You spend too much time alone, that’s all.’

  Violet was just finishing the last page of Rosie’s report as Thomas came back in with the tea tray. ‘Rosie would make an excellent reporter,’ she said looking up at him. ‘She writes so clearly and concisely, one wouldn’t expect that really from a girl of her background.’

  ‘She’d make a good detective too,’ Thomas grinned. ‘The way she managed to find out that Aylwood had been injecting patients with insulin to keep them in a coma, without it being written up by Dr Freed. And then that bit about how she waited in the bathroom watching out for Saunders impressed me. Did you notice she timed his visit exactly: arrived at 9.20; left at 9.52. Fancy him having the nerve to come back during the evenings via the fire escape to carry out more evil deeds!’

  Violet blushed. She was mortified to think she’d sent Rosie to Carrington Hall without checking it out first, and felt terribly guilty because she’d dismissed the girl’s complaints and suspicions at Easter. She should have taken them more seriously, Rosie wasn’t one to be hysterical or exaggerate. Now the poor girl was being robbed of the last of her girlish innocence by Saunders. She felt totally responsible.