Summer House

by Nichols, Mary

  ‘Yes, and if you bring any of it back here, I’ll throw it out and you alonga it.’

  She had sounded as though she meant it, so ever since then he had found other places to hide the stuff: barns, sheds, even a haystack. It was never hidden for long; there were always willing customers who didn’t ask too many questions about where it came from. It wasn’t only drink, either; there was jam and syrup and chocolate bars, all stuff that was either rationed or becoming scarce.

  He hurried up the road and turned down the lane that led to Beckbridge Hall. The gates of the Hall, once kept closed and only opened by the lodge-keeper to people he knew or was expecting, were gone, taken away as scrap metal for the war effort. Now the lodge was empty and the way lay open. Ian set off up the drive until the big house came into sight. Once a stately home giving work to half the village, it was now badly neglected and occupied only by Lady Helen Barstairs and her elderly butler and his wife. It was in darkness, not a glimmer of light showing, which was as it should be. The blackout was his ally.

  He left the drive and struck off across the park, though you could hardly call it a park now there were no animals to graze in it and no one to cut the grass, which was almost knee high. He had once been employed on the estate and knew exactly where he was going. In the middle, hidden by trees, there was a small lake with an island and a boathouse. It was not the boathouse that interested him because that would be too damp, but a summer house, which stood on slightly higher ground and looked out over the lake. Its door was padlocked, but it had rusted so badly a good wrench soon forced it open. He went inside, dumped the kitbag on the floor in the dust and took a torch from his pocket.

  There was only one room, though it was a fair size. Half a dozen mildewed deckchairs were stacked against one wall. On the side opposite the door there was a long bench with a hinged seat. Ian went over and lifted the lid to reveal cricket pads, also mildewed, some stumps and bails and a couple of bats. There was also a croquet set. He hauled it all out, took the bottles from the kitbag and carefully stowed them inside with the pads, bails and stumps on top. There was no room for the bats and the croquet set, so he piled them neatly beside the deckchairs and shut the lid of the bench. A quick look round satisfied him that his hiding place was secure and he slung the kitbag over his shoulder and left, shutting the door behind him and replacing the padlock so that it did not look as though it had been disturbed. He set off home thoroughly pleased with himself. It could stay there until he sold it, and that should not take long.

  Helen could not sleep. There was nothing new about this sleeplessness; it had plagued her most of her life, but since the beginning of the war it had become worse. She got up and padded across to the window where she drew back the blackout curtains and stood looking out. The familiar scene was bathed in moonlight. A tree-lined drive from the lane to the front door ended in a wide turning circle just below her window. To her right was a swathe of parkland and then a small wood. Beyond that was a lake; she could just see the glint of water between the trees. The summer house was down there too, but could not be seen from the house. It was becoming dilapidated now; she could not remember the last time it had had a lick of paint. She used to go down there a lot at one time, when the dream was still alive, the dream of being reunited with Oliver and her daughter, a dream which she thought had died a slow and painful death. But it hadn’t. The past kept coming back, now more than ever…

  Under the influence of the sedative, she had only a hazy memory of the journey back to Beckbridge after her confinement. Her father drove the car with her mother silently beside him, while she sobbed in the back. She imagined the woman she had seen from the window of the clinic taking her baby home and feeding her from a bottle when her own breasts were achingly heavy with milk. The clinic had given her tablets to dry it up. What had they told that woman? That she didn’t want her child, that she wanted to be rid of her?

  ‘Shut up, Helen, for goodness sake!’ her father said irritably.

  She was tempted to open the car door and fall out. She would undoubtedly be killed, considering the speed they were doing, and that would end her misery, end her father’s embarrassment, too, but then she thought of Olivia and her determination to be reunited with her and subsided into her seat. She did not cry again, not when anyone could see or hear, at any rate.

  She had no one she could talk to, no one to tell how miserable she felt, no one to commiserate with her, not even Kathy. They had once been close, told each other all their secrets, but now all her cousin could manage was a frosty ‘Hallo’ when they met in the village. Life went on as if she had never been away and the baby had never been born, though her father no longer invited servicemen to the house. Oliver’s name was never mentioned, nor Olivia’s. She asked her mother once, and once only, the name of the woman who had taken her daughter, but Mama had assured her she did not know it, that it was not the policy of the clinic to divulge such information. ‘Better that way, darling,’ she said. ‘No good tormenting yourself over it. Think of Richard coming home. You will enjoy setting up home with him and you will have more children.’

  Richard coming home worried her. Could they possibly make a life together? Would she be able to live with him in any kind of normality and keep her secret?

  She didn’t have to. Richard was taken prisoner in the summer of 1918, but it was not until the war was drawing to a close that she was informed of his death in captivity. She did not know how that had come about until a fellow officer who had been with him in the POW camp came to see her. Richard had spotted a column of enemy infantry on the road and dived to tree-top height to strafe it with a Lewis gun. His engine had been shot up by a German plane, his observer killed, and he had been forced to land behind the German lines. He had been wounded and taken to a dressing station and from there to a POW camp, where he died of his wounds. ‘Thought you might like to know he was constantly thinking of you and talking about you,’ her informant had said. ‘He would not contemplate not coming home to you even when he was dying.’ She was touched by that, but wickedly relieved he would never learn about Oliver or Olivia.

  She pretended to put it all behind her, celebrated the Armistice with everyone else, spoke civilly to her parents, went to social occasions with them and engaged in charitable work, almost as if she were treading water, waiting for something to happen.

  Three months later both her parents died in the space of a week, struck down by the influenza epidemic that was sweeping the whole of Europe, leaving Helen feeling… She did not know what she felt. Abandoned? Lonely? Left to her own devices to make what she could of a life already blighted? Freed to do what she most wanted to do? Or tied by convention, promises made under duress, the futility of it all?

  The funeral was attended by Great Aunt Martha, brought down from Scotland by Cousin Cyril; countless distant relatives she hardly knew; friends of her father and mother; William and Kathy, who was hugely pregnant, making Helen feel sadder than ever; Kathy’s parents; villagers; the local doctor and the family lawyer. They stood around the double grave in driving rain turning to sleet while the parson murmured the words of the interment, then returned to the house to be plied with sherry, tea and food, and talk over the lives of the two who had died. ‘Together in life, together in death,’ someone said. ‘Better that way. They were so devoted.’

  None of the mourners asked how she would manage without them, how she would cope with this great mausoleum of a house with its depleted number of servants and the need for repairs becoming urgent. She supposed they assumed she would marry again. Great Aunt Martha even said it aloud. ‘You shouldn’t have any trouble finding yourself another husband, Helen,’ she said. ‘You can’t manage this great house all on your own. There would be no need to say anything about you know what.’ The last sentence was said in a whisper.

  Marriage was the last thing on her mind. Her baby daughter filled it to the exclusion of all else. Olivia would be a year old in two weeks’ time, a year lost to motherhood
, never to be recovered, a year in which she had missed her first smile, her first baby tooth, her efforts to sit up and crawl, perhaps hauling herself to her feet. She might even have been trying to say her first word. Would it be ‘Mama’? She ached for her, ached even more than she had for Oliver, though she still dreamt that he would turn up one day and claim her, and together they would find their daughter and bring her home to be a proper family. It was a dream that slowly faded as month followed month and the surviving servicemen came back and dispersed to their homes. She had no idea whether he was alive or dead, but if he were alive he had made no attempt to contact her.

  But now her parents were gone, was she any longer bound by that promise not to try and find her daughter? She gave no thought to how that was to be achieved, nor the legal consequences or the effect her sudden arrival would have on the adoptive parents, nor, for that matter, what her friends and relations in Beckbridge would make of it. Olivia was hers and no one had the right to take her child from her.

  After a week spent with the family lawyer sorting out her father’s affairs – there was no new Earl of Hardingham, the title had died out with her father – and discussing her inheritance, which was barely enough to keep the house going, she was on her way to London.

  Her first stop was the St Mary and Martha Clinic, but they would tell her nothing. ‘That information is entirely confidential,’ she was told by a haughty matron who refused to let her see the doctor himself. ‘You undertook never to enquire into what had happened to the infant; that promise is binding. In any case, I am not sure we even keep records of that nature.’

  She tried examining the register of births in every parish in the area close to the clinic. Her father would not have registered the baby under her own name and so she tried the name she had been given in the clinic. Mrs Jones! There were several of those, but none with a child called Olivia and none on the right date. She returned home to Beckbridge weary and frustrated, wondering if she was on a hiding to nothing. But the search was becoming something of an obsession and a few days later she was back in London, widening her enquiries to neighbouring parishes. When that failed to produce results she simply looked for girl babies born on the right date. She found a few but when she investigated further, none proved to be the right one.

  She spent weeks going back and forth, and after each trip she made her way home, tired and miserable, made worse when she learnt from the local newspaper that Kathy had had her baby. ‘To William and Katherine Wainright, a girl, Jennifer Alice, sister to Steven, seven and a half pounds. Mother and baby are both well.’

  Reluctant to give up her search, she advertised in the personal columns of the newspapers, wrote to the governors of the clinic, decrying their methods and demanding answers, but received no replies. It was then she decided she had better sort out her mother’s clothes and personal belongings, something she had been putting off doing and then wondered why she had not thought of it before. Among her mother’s letters she found the account from the clinic for arranging the baby’s adoption. The amount made her eyes goggle and simply proved how desperately anxious her parents had been to rid themselves of the shame she had brought upon them. But more than that, there was an accompanying letter from the doctor who ran the clinic.

  ‘I can assure you, my lady, that your concern that the infant should never be in a position to be seen and identified by anyone in your circle of family and friends has been fully taken account of. The home she is going to is in Stepney in the East End of London. The family are poor, but we have been assured that she will not be ill-treated. I have taken the liberty of asking Mrs Bates, the midwife who attended the birth, to keep an eye on her and report to me if she has any reason to suspect the child is not well cared for. She knows the family. That being so, I consider I have done as much as could reasonably be expected and therefore submit the enclosed account as agreed. Yours faithfully…’

  Why had her mother kept it? Why had it been addressed to Mama and not her father, who was the one who had dealt with the clinic? Had she thought that one day she might show it to her? Poor Mama, she would never have dared do it, but she had left it for her to find. Helen lost no time in following it up.

  Locating Mrs Bates was not difficult. Any mother of childbearing age in Stepney could have told her where the midwife lived. It was one of a terrace, tall and narrow, only one degree above the dockland slums a few streets away. Mrs Bates came to the door in answer to her knock. Helen recognised her immediately as the woman who had taken her baby out of her arms and carried her away. ‘Mrs Bates, do you remember me?’

  ‘No, should I?’

  Helen smiled. ‘Perhaps not. You were more interested in the lower half of me and it was eighteen months ago.’ She paused while the woman puzzled over her identity. ‘I’m…’ She stopped. ‘No, you would not have been told my real name. Never mind. I need some information. May I come in?’

  She was admitted into the sitting room and invited to be seated. ‘What information do you want?’

  ‘I am trying to trace a child born at the St Mary and Martha Clinic on the fifth of March, 1918. You were there at the time. In fact you helped to deliver her.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘I was there, breaking my heart at having her taken from me. We had a real fight and she was forcibly removed from my arms and handed to you. Look at me. Do you remember me now?’

  Recognition dawned. ‘Yes. But you undertook not to trace the infant. You signed a paper.’

  ‘It was signed under extreme duress, as you well know.’

  ‘I can’t tell you where to find the child, even if I knew.’

  ‘You do know. The doctor wrote a letter to my mother saying you would keep an eye on her to make sure she was well looked after.’

  ‘And I did and she is. I can tell you no more than that.’

  ‘I believe you can.’

  ‘Well, I won’t. What do you think it would do to the poor child and her mother if you went barging into their lives? The home is a stable one and they are a happy family. Do you want to destroy that?’

  ‘No, of course not. I only want to see her. She is my daughter and I can never forget her or the cruel way she was taken from me.’

  ‘You agreed to let her go.’

  ‘I never did. I was forced and you knew it, and so did that doctor. Good heavens, I kicked up enough fuss.’

  The midwife smiled. ‘Yes, you did, didn’t you? More than most.’

  ‘So are you going to tell me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I have no choice but to go to the police and complain about the way the clinic is run and how newborn babies are bought and sold and poor pregnant girls exploited.’ She stood up to go. ‘Even if the police are not keen to act, I think the newspapers will be interested.’

  Mrs Bates looked worried. ‘It was done with the best of intentions. Mrs…the mother was desperate for a child. I had no idea that you had not agreed, not until you struggled so hard to keep her, but your parents were there and I couldn’t go against them, could I? And you can’t expect her to be handed back, just like that.’

  Helen supposed that was just what she had hoped for, but was sensible enough to realise it would not do to admit it. ‘I wouldn’t ask that, but I would like to see my child, to judge for myself that she is well cared for and if I can help at all, even secretly, that’s what I want to do. Can’t you understand that?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ It was said reluctantly.

  ‘Then tell me where I can find her.’ She opened her handbag and took out a bundle of five-pound notes as she spoke and watched the woman’s eyes widen.

  ‘You promise, you promise faithfully not to upset them, to stay out of sight and never, ever attempt to take the little girl from the woman she thinks is her mother? If you don’t swear it, I’ll be damned if I’ll tell you anything.’

  ‘I promise.’

  Money changed hands and she was given a name and address: Mrs Anne Drummond
, 18 Prince Albert Street, Stepney.

  When Helen made her way there after asking directions several times, it was to find a narrow street full of slum dwellings, with dirty steps and grubby curtains. There wasn’t a blade of grass to be seen. She was appalled. Her baby, her beloved daughter, was living here in squalor. She stood across the street from number 18 and stared at it, willing someone to come out with a child. Perhaps it wasn’t her daughter; perhaps Mrs Bates had got it wrong? As she stood there, uncertain what to do, a man in overalls came down the road and opened the door. She glimpsed a woman holding a baby, ready to welcome him home. The baby waved a chubby hand at him and he took hold of it and bent to kiss her, laughing at something his wife had said. Then the door was shut and she saw no more, would not have done anyway because her eyes were full of tears. It was only afterwards she realised the house was cleaner than its neighbours, its step was scrubbed and the net curtains were snow white. The baby had looked well fed and, she had to admit it, loved. She turned away and went home, back to her empty mansion, knowing she had achieved nothing except more heartache…

  There was a man walking across the grass, from the direction of the lake and the summer house, carrying something over his shoulder. Helen’s heart began to pound. Coming on top of her foray into the past, she immediately thought of Oliver. But of course it wasn’t Oliver. The man looked nothing like him. Was he an enemy spy who had landed by parachute to create mayhem? Or a fifth columnist? Could it be an English airman who’d had to bail out? But she hadn’t heard an aircraft, much less the sound of gunfire. The idea of going down to challenge him she dismissed; he was too far away and she was unarmed. She could always fetch her father’s shotgun, but would she have the guts to fire it if she had to? As she watched, he turned and looked up at the window and she shrank back out of sight, but not before she had recognised Ian Moreton, who had once worked for her father before being dismissed for dishonesty. What was he doing? She noticed the sack over his shoulder and smiled suddenly. He had been after rabbits or perhaps fishing; he had come from the direction of the lake. In the old days, when her father’s keeper raised pheasants, he would have been prosecuted for poaching, but what did it matter? There were no pheasants now, nor trout come to that, but a rabbit in the pot would be a welcome meal for his family and she did not begrudge it. She went back to bed.