Song of the Skylark

by Erica James

  Once more, minutes passed. Then: ‘Why do you have to have such a downer on my sister? What has she ever done to annoy you so much?’

  ‘What an absurd thing to say,’ Ingrid replied, ‘of course I don’t have a downer on Lizzie.’

  Luke said nothing.

  Again, like that sidelong look he’d given her, Ingrid knew his silence spoke volumes – she was being judged, and unfairly so in her opinion. Righteous indignation made her want to defend herself. Nothing infuriated her more than Luke’s steadfast loyalty to his sister, a loyalty that precluded him from seeing Lizzie’s manifest faults. It appalled Ingrid that he could be so blind. Yet what appalled her more was suspecting Luke might not feel the same loyalty towards her.

  ‘Just once,’ he muttered, as he was forced to slow down behind a tractor on the winding lane in front of them, ‘it would be nice for you to think well of Lizzie.’

  The battle to rein in her indignation was lost. ‘Are you sure this is a conversation you want to pursue?’ Ingrid asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t have raised it if I didn’t think it was time we did.’

  ‘Sometimes elephants in rooms are best left ignored.’

  ‘So that’s your answer, is it, a flat refusal to be honest with me?’

  She sighed, exasperated. ‘Luke, just leave it, will you? You’re turning something that is really quite trivial into something needlessly confrontational. What’s got into you?’

  ‘I saw you roll your eyes when Lizzie was crying, that’s what’s got into me. It was seeing how little you cared. Or more precisely, how little you care for her.’

  ‘Oh, this is ridiculous! Yes, I admit I found her reaction tiresome, because so what that she’s been dumped by a man who’d lied to both her and his wife. Shouldn’t you be only too pleased that she’s rid of him? If I were in her shoes I’d be celebrating.’

  ‘But that’s just the point, you don’t seem able to put yourself in her shoes. Rightly or wrongly, she was seriously in love with the man and is now heartbroken.’

  ‘Nonsense, she was in lust with him.’

  ‘I don’t think you, or I, can speak for Lizzie when it comes to what she felt for Curt.’

  ‘She’ll get over it. We all do. Who hasn’t made a bad choice and then had to pick themselves up and shake themselves down? And, frankly, it would have done Lizzie more good if you’d taken that line with her instead of pandering to her – to her childish need always to be at the centre of any drama.’

  The tractor turned off to the left and Luke sped on. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m glad we have that cleared up.’

  ‘You asked for my honesty, Luke, so please don’t now complain about it.’

  For all the self-assurance of her words, Ingrid felt anything but sure of herself. The righteous anger she had felt before had now been replaced with grave misgivings at the wisdom of speaking so plainly. Why couldn’t Luke have left well alone? And how ironic was it that she, who preferred to take the direct approach, should now be the one wishing Luke had stuck to the Moran script of tiptoeing round what needed to be said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Saturday morning, and Lizzie was trying to do what she knew was expected of her, and that was attempting to pull herself together, but as it was not yet twenty-four hours after seeing Curt, there were too many parts of her that were resistant to the idea to make it a reality.

  She was crushed. Her mind, body and heart were shattered into so many pieces she didn’t think she would ever feel the way she used to. The shock of what Curt had done to her had turned her stomach to a queasy, fluttering hollow. Whenever Mum tried to tempt her to eat or drink something, the very thought of it set off the queasy fluttering and made her rush to the bathroom. She had never known a feeling like it. She was sick at heart. Bereft. She would never love or trust anyone ever again.

  It staggered her now to think how cool she had played it yesterday with Curt. She didn’t know where that strength had come from. It was as if a different person had been sitting at the table opposite Curt while he ruthlessly dispensed with her. How pathetic she now seemed, so eager to see him, so full of happiness that he was going to tell her what she so desperately wanted to hear, that he was leaving his wife.

  She had no idea now how she had made the mistake of thinking that was the reason he wanted to see her. Over and over she replayed the conversation they’d had when she’d been on her way home from Woodside and he’d phoned her. But not one word he’d uttered could she now interpret as suggesting things were about to change between them. Certainly not the way she had imagined, or indeed the way it had turned out. Idiot that she was, she had allowed her elation at hearing from him to fill in the blanks of her hopes and desires. It was a mistake she would never make again. Not ever.

  Standing at the open window of her bedroom, she looked down at the garden where her father was mowing the lawn. Up and down he went, stripe after immaculate stripe bringing satisfying order to the garden. With tears filling her eyes, she marvelled at the simplicity of her father’s life. And her mother’s. They lived ordinary lives, but were so happy. By the time they were her age, they’d been married a few years and she and Luke were born. She had never before envied them their lives, but she did so now. How wonderful it must be to have lived through all the major dramas of life and now simply enjoy themselves.

  Except now, she realised, she had dumped her problems onto them, and that was wrong. Because of her, Lorna had frozen Mum out and Keith was probably under orders to do the same with Dad. She should never have come back here. But where else could she have gone? And at the time she had truly believed it would be a short-term solution until Curt left his wife.

  Had he ever really intended to do that? Lizzie didn’t think so. He’d probably lied all along to her. Maybe he’d lied yesterday when he said his wife was pregnant again. He might have said that just to shut her up.

  Some of the things he’d said had been downright cruel. He had almost threatened her at one stage – Do that and you’ll regret it – he’d said when she’d suggested she might talk to his wife. Admittedly that had been the voice of revenge speaking and was something she would never do, but was that the kind of man Curt really was, a man who dished out threats?

  What did it matter anyway? She was never going to see him again, so that was an end to it.

  Downstairs in the kitchen she found a note on the table that Mum had left for her. Typical Mum! Even though Dad was here to explain her absence, she’d gone to the trouble to let Lizzie know that she was at Woodside helping out with a craft session.

  ‘I hope you’re feeling a little better this morning,’ she’d written. ‘Much love. X PS Scotch pancakes in the bread bin, your favourite honey in the usual place.’

  Twenty-four hours ago Lizzie might have laughed at her mother’s note for treating her like a ten-year-old, but now the thoughtfulness touched her deeply; it tapped into her inner child who wanted to be wrapped in a great comfort blanket of parental love and be told everything was going to be all right.

  She was just thinking that perhaps she could manage a pancake, when from nowhere she thought of Simon. Was this how he had felt when she’d dumped him? She hoped not. She really did. Nobody deserved to feel this way.

  Or maybe some people did. People like her, for instance. Was this her punishment for treating Simon so badly? Do unto others, blah, blah. It really hadn’t felt that bad at the time, the way she’d finished with Simon, but now she knew better. Now she could see how wantonly heartless she had behaved when she’d ended their relationship. In her defence she had been so high on the euphoria of her affair with Curt that all that mattered was that she was free to be with the man she loved. She hadn’t really understood that Simon would be desperately upset, for in her selfish need to think only of her own happiness his had barely figured. He would get over it, had been her view.

  But now a sickeni
ng and humbling shame crept over her and gave momentum to a fresh and far stronger wave of nausea. With a hand pressed to her mouth, all thoughts of pancakes were forgotten as she rushed to the downstairs loo.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Clarissa had remembered why she had to keep her friends’ visits a secret. It was because if she were ever to breathe a word about them she would, in the blink of an eye, be shipped off somewhere else, somewhere a lot less appealing. For Woodside, as caring as it was, did not cater for those whose minds had slipped over the edge into the abyss from where there was no return. And though she reluctantly accepted that she experienced periodic lapses in memory and the occasional muddled confusion, she hoped that so long as she was able to keep a relatively firm grip on what was what, she would be safe. As a test, she reminded herself that she knew what day of the week it was – it was Monday and she was due to see the chiropodist later this afternoon.

  But, and it was a considerable but, while knowing full well that her dearest friends were long since dead, when they appeared to her they seemed as real as her own reflection did when she looked in the mirror. They weren’t ghosts; she was convinced of that, moreover she could not bring herself to believe in ghostly apparitions. Which left the only plausible possibility; they resided solely in her head.

  ‘Is that what you really think?’

  Startled, Clarissa turned sharply to see Ellis leaning nonchalantly against the side of the rose arbour where she was sitting. ‘Yes,’ she said ‘I do.’

  He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

  ‘I will. Just as you always did.’

  ‘My, but you’re snappy today.’

  ‘As snappy as you always made me feel.’

  ‘Good to know I’m not losing my touch.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll never change; you’ll always be the same old Ellis. I must say, I might have expected death to mellow you a little.’

  ‘Surely you wouldn’t want me to be any different?’

  Clarissa laughed. ‘No, I don’t suppose I would.’

  He drew nearer to her, his green eyes as bright as emeralds in the brilliant summer sunlight. ‘If I were any different you wouldn’t love me, would you?’

  ‘I think it’s safe to say I’ll always love you,’ she said softly, ‘just as Artie and Effie always will.’

  He stared off into the distance, across the lawn to some faraway point. He began to hum. It was a refrain from so long ago, yet at the same time felt so near and tangible she could reach out and grasp it within her hands.

  ‘Love is the sweetest thing …’ she sang along with Ellis, her eyes closed, her body swaying to the music she could hear in her head, and picturing herself dancing with Artie as she had that night on board the Belle Etoile, ‘… what else on earth could ever bring such happiness to everything as love’s old story?’

  She was halfway through the second verse when she felt the coolness of a shadow fall across her. She opened her eyes to find not Ellis standing in front of her, but Lizzie.

  ‘That was nice,’ the girl said, ‘but it sounded sad. Is it a sad song?’

  ‘It can be whatever you want it to be,’ Clarissa said, disconcerted. She turned to see where Ellis had gone. There was no sign of him.

  ‘At the moment everything seems sad to me,’ Lizzie said with such feeling that Clarissa stopped thinking about Ellis.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘that doesn’t sound good, not for a young girl like you. I’ve missed you these last few days. Where have you been?’

  ‘I had the weekend off feeling sorry for myself,’ she said morosely. ‘But never mind me and my knack for attracting trouble. I came to ask if there was anything you needed.’

  ‘I don’t need anything, thank you, other than to see you back to your normal happy self,’ Clarissa said, noting how pale the poor girl looked. She patted the seat beside her. ‘Why don’t you sit down and tell me what’s wrong? The last time I saw you, you were going to see your boyfriend. How did it go?’

  The girl visibly shuddered. ‘Not well. Not well at all. And if I told you what happened you’ll tell me I’ve been the biggest fool on the planet. You’ll say there’s no bigger fool alive.’

  ‘I hate to contradict you, but I think you’ll find plenty of us who can equal, or outdo, whatever foolishness you think you’re guilty of. What have you done?’

  ‘You’ll tell me I should have known better,’ Lizzie said as though Clarissa hadn’t spoken. ‘I guarantee it.’

  ‘What flummery and tomfoolery! Stop telling me what I’ll think or say and get on with it. At my age I haven’t the time for unnecessary prevarication.’

  Lizzie frowned. ‘If you’re going to be so impatient with me, I’m not sure I want to share anything with you.’

  ‘Fair enough, but just so as you know, I’m not in thrall to childish histrionics.’

  ‘That’s not very sympathetic of you.’

  ‘Ah, so it’s my sympathy you want, is it? You should have said. How’s this for my best sympathetic face?’ Clarissa tilted her head to one side and fixed her features into an exaggerated expression of empathy and compassion.

  Lizzie smiled. ‘Stop it, you’re scaring me.’

  Clarissa smiled too. ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Now shall we talk about something else, or do you want to unburden yourself? Yes or no?’

  ‘Please don’t ever think about a career in counselling, will you? I’m not sure it’s quite your forte. But if you really want to know what a mug I’ve been, here goes. My boyfriend, my so-called boyfriend, was married and after promising he was going to leave his wife, he dumped me on Friday. Apparently his wife is expecting their second child. And I know what you’re thinking, that I had no business having an affair with a married man and that I got what I deserved.’

  Clarissa tutted. ‘As I said before, I do wish you’d stop telling me what I must be thinking or what I’m going to say. Now, as far as I can see, the most important aspect in what you’ve just told me is this: do you still love the rotter?’

  Lizzie smiled faintly. ‘Rotter … what a delightfully quaint way to describe Curt.’

  ‘Is there a term you’d prefer to use?’

  ‘Plenty, none of which I’d dare utter in your presence. But to answer you, I don’t know what I feel about him right now. Other than blind anger.’

  ‘Anger’s the start on which you can build constructively, so use it wisely. But don’t let it rule you. Did you love him very much?’

  Lizzie nodded. ‘Crazily so,’ she murmured. ‘I hadn’t experienced anything like it.’

  ‘Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? To have known something so extraordinary.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel good.’

  ‘No, it won’t. For now you’ll be feeling wretched and mostly because you’re blaming yourself for getting involved with a man whose true colours you can now see all too clearly.’ Clarissa reached out and patted Lizzie’s hand. ‘Things will get better, they always do. Trust me on that. I haven’t lived to this great age without learning that the heart mends itself surprisingly well, no matter how deep the cut, or how severe the pain.’

  The girl inhaled deeply, before letting her breath out in a long weary sigh. ‘I hope you’re right.’ Then: ‘Will you tell me some more about your life, when you were young and came to England?’

  Clarissa smiled. ‘If it will help take your mind off things, yes, of course.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  April 1939, London, England

  The Belle Etoile reached the south-west of England two hours later than scheduled, the time lost to the mid-Atlantic storm never having been made up. Clarissa had been warned that the luxurious days spent on board the magnificent ship would remove all sense of reality and when she stepped off the ship at Plymouth she was brought up short by the truth of this. In an instant the real world eclipsed all
that had gone before, and confronted with a busy and boisterous crowd going about the business of dealing with the arrival of so many people, she was sorely tempted to turn tail and flee to the comfort and security of the Belle Etoile. Standing alone on the dockside with a sharp wind tugging at her hat, nothing could have made her feel more isolated as she prepared to fight her way through the throng.

  Eventually, and with the help of a porter, she boarded the Great Western Railway train bound for Paddington and took her seat in one of the Super Saloon coaches surrounded by fellow passengers heading for the same destination: London. No sooner had the whistle been blown and the train began pulling out of the station than she felt the absence of her newly made friends who’d stayed behind for the final leg of the journey to Le Havre. Marjorie had remained on board too, and her farewell to Clarissa could not have been cooler, or more censorious.

  ‘I shall be writing to your grandmother to say that I have carried out her wishes to the best of my ability,’ she’d intoned, ‘but I shall make it plain that I fear for your safety from here on, if for no other reason than you seem determined to act against every ounce of common sense with which you were born.’

  Glad to be rid of the woman, Clarissa had departed from her as good-naturedly as she could before rushing off to find Effie and the others. They had kissed and hugged her goodbye with promises made to visit her in London just as soon as they could. The only person not to promise to see her again was Ellis. ‘I never make promises I can’t be sure I shall be able to keep,’ he said, his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his trousers and leaning against the rail.

  ‘Take no notice of him,’ Betty had said, moving in again to hug Clarissa one more time, ‘of course he’ll see you in London. We all will!’

  Her first impression of England was that it was not the dreary, waterlogged place Marjorie had claimed it to be; instead it more than lived up to her mother’s fond description of a landscape as beautiful as any in the world. And certainly, as Clarissa watched from the window of the carriage, taking in the softly undulating countryside and the lovely villages glimpsed in the distance – thatched cottages with gardens pretty with spring flowers and pink and white blossom, ancient stone churches and endless fields of green – she was filled with an eagerness to explore this country, to feel the earth beneath her feet, to breathe in the cool refreshing air.