The House Across the Street

by Lesley Pearse

  Katy’s eyes prickled and tears spilled over. ‘But it’s so unfair,’ she managed to get out. ‘Dad is the most honourable person in the world. He wouldn’t have skipped off.’

  ‘I think the judge was aware of that, but he had to be seen to be upholding the law. Your father is on his way to Lewes gaol tonight but he could be moved to Brixton prison in London, as that’s where they send most of the remand prisoners who are charged with a serious crime. At least it will be easier for you to see him when you move to London.’

  ‘How will he bear it?’ Katy sobbed out.

  ‘He answered that for you. He said, “Remind her I was in the army and it won’t be that different.” He also said you were to take the job in London and enjoy a new life.’

  ‘He surely doesn’t think I’ll forget him?’ Katy asked, her voice rising in agitation.

  ‘That wasn’t what he meant. I think he meant for you to have a good time with your friend, to be young and silly for a change. He’s glad you are getting away from home at last.’

  Katy pulled herself together and told him about meeting Edna and what had been said.

  ‘I’m not surprised she feels that way; she is right, there is virtually no protection for women who have violent husbands,’ Bonham said. ‘I can order her to court as a witness, but I’d rather she gave evidence of her own free will.’

  ‘I did give her my address and phone number – and yours, too – in case she changes her mind,’ Katy said. ‘Maybe on Friday, when she’s thinking about the funeral that she isn’t brave enough to go to, she’ll feel ashamed and want to help.’

  ‘Yes, maybe,’ he said. ‘I fully understand why she is afraid; goodness knows, her friend dying in a fire is enough to terrify anyone. Getting men punished for cruelty to their wives is the only way to change our society and send out a message that it won’t be tolerated.’

  Rob called from a telephone box on Tuesday night, and it was lucky that Katy answered, as Hilda might not have let her speak to him.

  ‘I wish I had phoned on Sunday, like I always used to do,’ was the first thing he said, his voice shaking with emotion. ‘I only got your letter this morning, and I could hardly believe they’d arrested Dad. Why didn’t Mum send me a telegram?’

  ‘She’s still doing that stubborn thing,’ Katy said cautiously, as she was sure her mother was listening. ‘I’m so relieved you’ve phoned at last. I only found out about the arrest when I got back from London. Dad wouldn’t let me go to the bail hearing, as I told you in my letter, but I’m sorry to say he didn’t get bail, after all. He’s in Lewes gaol on remand.’

  ‘What a nightmare this is,’ Rob said, and Katy was fairly certain he was crying. ‘What can we do, Sis?’

  Katy told him about seeing Edna and how she hoped the woman would speak up for their father. She also said how kind her boss had been. ‘But word had got around about Dad already,’ she told him. ‘I saw a couple of the neighbours chatting in the street, and they stopped as I went by. Clearly dishing the dirt.’

  ‘How can people be like that?’ Rob asked. ‘Over the years, Dad has helped so many of the neighbours. Are their memories so short they’ve forgotten how kind and generous he is?’

  ‘Is that Rob?’ Hilda barked out from just behind Katy. ‘Let me speak to him.’

  Katy handed over the receiver. There was no point in saying anything further to Rob, she’d told him all she knew, and maybe he could influence their mother to go and visit Dad.

  She went upstairs, wishing Rob was here with her. Something told her that the incident with the gossiping neighbours wasn’t going to be the only one. So little ever happened in this town, people enjoyed having something juicy to talk about. Katy was fairly certain that by the end of the week every person who knew her father would be convinced he’d had a torrid affair with Gloria. Perhaps they’d even suspect her of blackmailing him, just as that stupid policeman had suggested.

  On Thursday evening Katy was just thinking about having an early night, as she’d promised to go out with Jilly the following night, her friend’s last one in Bexhill, when the phone rang.

  Katy went into the hall to answer it as her mother grunted it wouldn’t be for her.

  It was Edna, and she sounded as if she’d been crying. ‘I’ve been thinking about Gloria and your father all week,’ she began. ‘I want to go to Gloria’s funeral tomorrow, but since her death was reported in the newspapers I’m scared who might be there.’

  Just the fact she’d telephoned gave Katy hope that Edna might yet help her father.

  ‘There will be police watching, looking for anyone suspicious,’ Katy said. ‘So you’ll be safe enough.’

  ‘Maybe that’s so, Katy, but I don’t think you fully understand what both Gloria and I went through for so many years, and why I am so afraid.’

  ‘I’d like to hear about it,’ Katy said gently, aware the woman’s voice was shaking with emotion.

  ‘Gloria was far more to me than just an acquaintance or even a friend. She was more like the sister I never had, because we went through the same horror,’ she began. ‘You see, we met in the accident clinic of a hospital in central London. It was in 1950. We both had the kind of comfortable middle-class life that others envy, but that night we were both badly hurt, beaten by our well-educated, professional husbands.

  ‘I had a broken arm, cracked ribs and had nearly lost my sight from a punch. Gloria had been kicked so badly all over that she could barely stand, let alone walk. As it happened, our children weren’t with us earlier in the evening when the attacks took place. My two were stopping the night with a friend; Gloria’s were with her parents. If not for the children being away, I doubt we’d have sought medical help; we’d have done what we always did, patched ourselves up and hoped for the best, or waited for the next morning to get medical help when the kids were at school.’

  Katy could hardly believe what she was hearing. She didn’t know Edna well enough to make a judgement about her, but it was truly shocking to think glamorous, kindly Gloria could be beaten by her husband. ‘Oh, Edna,’ she gasped, ‘that is awful. But please go on.’

  ‘I don’t want to keep you, I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than listen to me droning on, but I just want you to understand how it all came about. Gloria and I lived about four miles from each other. I was in Hampstead Garden Suburb, while she was in Primrose Hill. That night, we’d both chosen to go to a hospital well away from where we lived so we wouldn’t run into anyone we knew. That’s how bad it was!’

  ‘But why should you be ashamed, when you were the victims?’

  ‘In general, people don’t see it that way,’ Edna said, her voice cracking with emotion. ‘They think you must’ve goaded your husband, done something really bad. No one understands that this can flare up because of something as simple and harmless as the dinner being five minutes late, or a shirt not being ironed.’

  ‘Then you must’ve lived in fear?’

  ‘Both of us did, always appeasing, trying to smooth things out so our men wouldn’t fly into a rage. To be truthful, I often wished for death. His, preferably, but often the beatings were so bad I thought it would kill me. Yet it’s miraculous just how much punishment the human body can take. But meeting Gloria that night, recognizing that her injuries came from the same source as mine and that she was a similar age and came from the same background as me, was sort of comforting. Like I wasn’t the only pathetic creature unable to fight back. She told me later she felt the same, and as we had a long wait for treatment, we talked. Baring our souls, really. It was the first time I’d ever admitted to anyone that my husband the bank manager was a brute. Gloria’s husband was a dentist. Two men who had gone to good schools, had all the advantages. They couldn’t even be excused because they’d had a terrible time in the war. Both of them had been given desk jobs.

  ‘Anyway, I guess we knew we’d hit rock bottom, sitting there in pain, our faces damaged, wearing expensive clothes and surrounded by drunks with inj
uries from fighting. Then Gloria took my hand and said, “Edna, meeting tonight like this is fate. I believe it means we have to get ourselves and our children to safety.” ’

  Edna paused for a few moments and Katy felt she was struggling not to break down, determined to tell her just what Gloria and she had meant to each other. Katy wanted to hear it; she not only felt that getting close to this woman would help her father, but she needed to know what exactly had made someone kill Gloria and her daughter.

  ‘That night was the turning point.’ Edna’s voice was stronger now. ‘We not only grew tougher and braver together, but we also talked to the hospital almoner who gave us an address of someone she thought could help us.’

  Katy was astounded by what she had heard. If she’d met Edna in any other way, place or time she would’ve thought of her as a middle-class woman who had never had a moment of grief or sadness in her life. Appearances could be so deceptive.

  ‘You became like the woman who helped you?’

  ‘We did eventually, but that was several years later. Right then we had to focus on our own problems. A few days later, Gloria and I went together to meet a Miss Dunkin in King’s Cross. She was old, at least sixty-five, quite frail, but she was a real heroine. She’d quietly been assisting beaten women for years, using her own money to help set them up in a new life.

  ‘She told us that many of her women didn’t have a penny; they’d often run off with their children in just what they stood up in. Fortunately, both Gloria and I had nest eggs. We’d had the foresight to put a little away before we were married, and we’d been siphoning money from the housekeeping, even from our husbands’ pockets when they were drunk, into Post Office accounts.’ She paused and gave a humourless laugh. ‘When we admitted that to each other we began to laugh, because we’d always felt so guilty about doing it. Yet after what our husbands had done to us it was nothing!’

  ‘So this lady, Miss Dunkin, what did she do for you?’

  ‘She knew of a house in Hastings we could go to for two weeks. She said it was a bit rough. But if we went together, with our kids, she thought it would give us time to think about what the next step would be.

  ‘She was right about it being rough. It was! An outside lavatory and no bathroom, but the sun shone the whole two weeks, and to us it was heaven. The kids loved it, they had so much fun on the beach together. But for Gloria and me it was heady stuff, we were free at last. No more tensing up when our men came through the door, afraid of another row that would end in a beating.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone where you’d gone?’

  ‘We rang our parents to say we were in a safe place, but didn’t tell them where in case they accidentally let it slip out when our men contacted them, as we knew they would. The kids couldn’t contact their friends, either. Not that they seemed to care. Not one of them asked after their father.’

  ‘And when the two weeks were up?’ Katy asked.

  ‘By then we’d already made up our minds we weren’t going back to London. We found a house to rent nearby, one with a bathroom, booked the kids into a local school for September. I got a job in a hotel, Gloria in a shop in Hastings. We shared everything: our children, food, and what little money we had. We lived like that for four years, and we were all very happy.’

  ‘How did you end up in Bexhill, both in nice houses?’ Katy asked. She imagined the only way to get a nice house was to get married, so she thought perhaps both women had met someone else.

  ‘Gloria was the lucky one, her husband died suddenly of a heart attack. She said she ought not to gloat that she was lucky, but I said gloat away, he deserved death after all he’d done to her. Anyway, the house and everything went to her. She then had the wherewithal to buy the house in Collington Avenue, and later to start her dress shop. As for me, I rent that little house you came to, and I got a job as an almoner at the hospital.’

  ‘Ironic when it was an almoner who helped you?’

  ‘That wasn’t a coincidence. I had always known an almoner dealt with many social problems, and I felt I was made for the job. I was, in fact, a trained nurse before my marriage. I did another couple of courses to get the extra qualifications needed. Gloria and I were so fortunate compared with other women in our position, we were able to have a brand-new start. Not all families are as supportive as ours were; many people still believe it is a husband’s right to discipline his wife and she should grin and bear it.’

  ‘So did you plan then to seek out beaten women?’

  ‘Not at all, at least not consciously. But a few years ago in the hospital I was called down to Casualty to talk to a woman, because the nursing staff had said she was very badly hurt, and they needed me to sort out someone to look after her children. She had a six-week-old baby in her arms, a toddler clinging to her coat, and her face was so bloody you couldn’t see her features. She really needed hospitalization, but this would mean the children being taken into care. I’d seen other women in this state get themselves patched up and go home, just as I had in the past, because they couldn’t bear the thought of their children being taken from them.

  ‘So all at once I knew what I must do; help this woman in just the way I’d been helped. I took her and her children home with me. I rang Gloria and we agreed that we needed to do this. Someone had to.’

  It struck Katy then that, as Gloria’s husband was dead, the finger of suspicion for the fire was pointing right back at her father. Edna was happy talking about herself and Gloria, but would Katy be able to get the woman to agree to help Albert?

  ‘That was very noble of you, Edna,’ she said.

  ‘No, not noble, we both needed to do it. Often the women would stay a day or two and then go home. It always made me mad when they said, “But I love him,” like that was a good reason to allow someone to beat and frighten you. But now and then we would get a woman who was ready to really start again; all she needed was encouragement, and being shown the ropes to get National Assistance and a place to live until she could work again.’

  She paused, and Katy could hear her breathing was heavy.

  ‘But, Katy,’ she began again, ‘once wife beaters are alone, without their punchbag, they can’t function. They will move heaven and earth to find their woman. They say it’s out of love. They even believe that with all their heart, so much so they convince others too, and that is the danger point. Neither Gloria nor I ever attempted to get a divorce, because that would’ve meant our husbands finding out where we were. It’s been fifteen years, and yet I still shake in my shoes at the prospect of Graham knocking on my door. He escaped paying me maintenance, he got to keep our house for himself, and most people would say he came out of it well. But I know he will never see it that way. By now he’ll have turned it into grief that I took his two children from him. Never mind that he often hit them too, and they never want to see him again. He will have rewritten his story now, and he will fervently believe he is the injured party. And I would bet he’s still trying to find me.’

  Katy thought that was the saddest thing she’d ever heard: a grown woman terrified of a man who had once promised to love and protect her, the father of her children.

  ‘I take your point, Edna, and I fully understand why you are scared. But you must go to Gloria’s funeral tomorrow. Imagine how upset Gloria would be that you weren’t there, after all you’ve been through together? You’ll just blend in with her customers and other friends. You will be safe.’

  There were a few moments of silence before the woman spoke again. ‘You know, Katy, you sound a lot like Gloria, she was always able to talk me round. That first night in the hospital, I would’ve gone back to Graham but for her. She held me steady until we made our plans to go to Hastings. She didn’t let me waver.’

  ‘Well, hold that in your heart tonight. And tomorrow whisper to her that I would’ve come too, but I was afraid her children wouldn’t want me there.’

  Edna sighed. It sounded to Katy like resignation.

  ‘Okay, I’ll go,
’ she agreed. ‘Thank you, my dear, for listening to me going on. Will you come and see me before you go to London?’

  ‘I’d love to,’ Katy said, thinking that would be the time to tackle Edna about helping her father. ‘Now stay strong tomorrow.’

  ‘Who was that?’ Hilda shouted as Katy put the phone down.

  ‘Just someone from work,’ Katy called back. She felt emotionally drained, and she certainly had no intention of sharing Edna’s story with her mother. Hilda would never understand what would possess a woman to risk her life to help others.

  She went up to bed then, and as she lay in her warm, pretty bedroom, she couldn’t stop thinking about women who were trapped between giving their children a secure life and needing to keep quiet about the beatings they had to endure.

  ‘I want to do something to help,’ she whispered to herself as she turned out her light. ‘But first I have to find some proof about who really did kill Gloria.’

  Michael Bonham mingled easily with the mourners as they gathered at St Peter’s for Gloria Reynolds’ funeral.

  It was another very cold grey day, and many of the women wore fur coats; he noted at least three minks. Given what he now knew about Gloria, it was hardly surprising there were so few men. About eight of pensionable age had plainly just come along because their wives had expected it of them. He counted around ten businessmen – maybe suppliers for her business, because they appeared to know one another – and two other men who he was sure were plain-clothes policemen keeping a watch. But the majority of the mourners were women.

  A few other older couples arrived; he suspected they were neighbours by the way they reacted to one another. Then the two hearses arrived, and another car behind them.

  Bonham watched the undertakers carefully remove the two flower-covered coffins, placing them on trolleys, and at that point it brought home to him the scale of the tragedy, a mother and daughter consumed by fire.

  The young woman clinging to her equally young husband’s arm, her eyes swollen from crying, was clearly the remaining daughter. He knew her name to be Janice Plowright, and that she had two small children, though they weren’t with her today. As he looked around further he saw another young man arrive. He was slender, with untidy, too long dark auburn hair, wearing a dark suit that looked too big for him. He was out of breath, as if he’d run some distance. He thought that must be Paul Reynolds, the son who was at university in Manchester, because he was making a beeline for Janice and her face brightened a little to see him. Bonham guessed his suit was borrowed; no young man in his twenties anticipates his mother dying and has something suitable to wear for the occasion.