The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  That night, as their three younger sisters slept, Alice told Grace in a whisper about the letter.

  ‘So, what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to do what Jo told me. I’m going to start again.’

  Grace looked at her big sister, impressed. And then Alice grabbed her hand and said urgently, ‘But you’ve got to help me.’

  Grace couldn’t help but say, ‘Oh, no! What now?’

  ‘Don’t ever, ever, mention Jo again.’

  ‘What, never?’

  ‘No, never. If I’m to do what he says, I need to forget. I need to pretend it never happened, and if I pretend hard enough maybe it will start to feel like it.’

  Grace studied her sister’s face. She could see she meant it.

  ‘All right. I won’t mention him again. But if you change your mind …’

  ‘I won’t.’

  Grace nodded and they hugged.

  Grace remained true to her word and never mentioned Joseph again. Her sisters and parents never knew, and neither did their children, and when Alice went on to marry and have children, they never knew that their mother had been married before, either.

  It was only in the very last year of her life that Alice told her daughter-in-law about Joseph. Just the once, and not even her own daughter. And it was only after she died and her son Brian went into her attic and started to go through her things that he found Alice’s and Joseph’s marriage certificate.

  I wonder why she told anyone at all. If you go through your whole life keeping a secret, why do you feel the need as you approach the end to tell the story, just the once? Speaking it out loud, hearing the words, having a witness … perhaps all these things make it true.

  Two months later, when Grace and Bill’s wedding went ahead as planned, Alice played the part of the dutiful bridesmaid. She was helped by the fact the wedding was so different to her own. There was no secrecy about Bill and Grace’s engagement. Bill was the son of a school teacher, a clever boy who’d won a scholarship to the grammar school in Grays. When they got married, he was working as a clerk to the South Eastern Water Company and therefore technically lower-middle class, and acceptable to Clara. Moreover, unlike Joseph’s first visit to the Swain house, Bill had charmed everyone with his ease and gregariousness, and his ability to play the piano. Clara always did put a high premium on musical ability as, in fact, they all did. It’s something else I inherited and might be one of the spells that needs to be broken …

  I look at the photos of Alice at Grace’s wedding and wonder. She’s standing between Katie and Bertha in her cloche hat, wearing her bridesmaid’s dress and smiling. It must have taken every ounce of strength to pull off that day and I feel a wave of admiration. No one would ever know that, during the service, she had felt a wave of complete desperation. There was a pain in her heart that actually was just that – a real, physical pain. At one point she wondered whether she wasn’t having a heart attack herself. But she held on and the way she did it was with the thought that she must do everything possible to find herself another husband. This was the only way to stop the unbearable feeling. Until that moment she had been hibernating – leaving work late, going to bed early, avoiding her friends and staying away from the dance hall. But at Grace and Bill’s wedding she resolved that she would put on her dancing shoes the very next day and begin her campaign to get a new life.

  Bertha, Alice and Katie

  And that’s how she met Thomas Corbett. He was dreadfully good-looking: tall, slim, dark, with sharp blue eyes. A Welsh miner from the valleys who had come to London looking for work, he was currently a milkman. And then the important thing – he was a champion Charleston dancer. He didn’t say much but he danced beautifully, and when Alice danced with him it was possible to forget. Alice was the opposite of the girl in the red shoes. In the fairy tale the girl can’t take off the shoes and is condemned to dance for infinity. It’s a terrible, exhausting fate. But Alice didn’t see it this way. As long as she kept dancing, she was happy. As soon as she took the shoes off, the pain would start again. So when Tom asked her to marry him six months later, the answer seemed obvious. This way she could dance for ever.

  Of course, it wasn’t at all obvious to her mother. Alice was under no illusion that if Joseph had been unacceptable, there was no hope for Tom. But she was determined that this time there was to be no secrecy. She arranged for Tom to come round for tea with her parents.

  They sat on the sofa together holding hands, facing Clara and Charlie, with Clara looking daggers at Tom all the while, and then finally Alice found the courage to say: ‘Mum, we’ve got something to tell you. Haven’t we, Tom?’

  Tom looked defiantly back at Clara. ‘Yes, we have.’

  ‘Tom has asked me to marry him and I have said yes.’

  Clara was aghast. ‘What, him?’

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘Are you mad? Are you going to give up your job to settle for him?’

  ‘What do you mean “him”?’ Tom’s eyes were flashing.

  Alice desperately tried to defuse the situation: ‘Do you mind not speaking about Tom like that.’

  ‘I’ll speak how I find.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And what do you find?’ Tom said.

  ‘I see a man who’s come to London to see what he can get. And you see a good thing in my daughter. Much better than what you’d get back home. And Alice is too nice to see through you. But I’ve got your number. And I’m telling you, you are not marrying my daughter, not over my dead body.’

  ‘Mum, I love him.’

  ‘Rubbish! You love his blue eyes and his smooth talking. That won’t last, my girl. Once he’s got you, all that will stop. Mark my words, it’ll be a life of misery and drudgery, at his beck and call.’

  She turned to Tom. ‘How dare you? How dare you take her away from a good job and a good future? What have you got to offer her? A ride on your milk float?’

  Tom was clever enough to stay quiet and let Alice do the work.

  ‘He loves me.’

  Clara snorted.

  ‘Look, Mum, I don’t want anything else. I don’t want the job in the bank. I want a husband and a family and I want that with Tom.’

  ‘Well, you can’t.’

  ‘Mum, I’m twenty-nine. I can, and I’m going to.’

  Clara turned to the silent Charlie. ‘Are you just going to sit back and let this happen?’

  ‘It seems there’s nothing I can do about it.’ He got up with tears in his eyes and went over and put his hand on Alice’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m sorry, love.’ Casting a mournful look at Tom, he walked out of the room.

  Clara had been frustrated many times in her life: if she’d had the iron ladle, now was the moment it would have got thrown, but today there was nothing to hand. She found herself playing the only card she had left: ‘Well, you’re not getting my blessing. If you marry him, I don’t ever want to see you again.’

  There was a dreadful silence in the room and then Tom spoke. ‘Come on, Alice, pack your bag. I don’t think there’s any point in us staying here.’

  And Alice, the good girl, the general, who as far as Clara knew was the only one of her daughters who did what she was told, got up in tears and went upstairs, packed her bag and left for Wales that night.

  Almost two years to the day after Joseph died Alice remarried, and a year after that she had her first baby, Charlie and Clara’s first grandchild, Jean.

  Clara never forgave Tom Corbett for this elopement. Often it’s easier for parents to blame someone else – usually their child’s partner – for their actions, rather than accept their child’s behaviour and decisions as their own. As we are all tempted to do when someone close to us, child, partner, parent, whoever, behaves in a way we find difficult to accept, denial slips in: it wasn’t them, of course, it was that dreadful … (fill in the blank).

  Clara never spoke to Tom directly again, which was awkward later on when she found herself living with him. There was a ban on his name
and a sense of disapproval, unspoken but felt, not just by the sisters, but by their children too.

  I sat in the back row of a conference on inherited trauma and struggled to stop myself weeping. All the time Clara and her ten years of endless work were in my mind. Actually, there were all sorts of family members in my mind, not least myself. But Clara’s efforts to escape the family curse were particularly clear and targeted and heroic.

  The distinguished psychoanalyst giving his paper described a traumatic event in a family as having the effect of stopping the clock. Unless the trauma is faced and worked through, the family is condemned thereafter to experience reruns. Time stutters. You move forward a little and then whoops, you are back where you started: Sisyphus endlessly condemned to push his rock up the hill only to have it roll straight back down again or, perhaps a more contemporary way of describing it, an eternal Groundhog Day.

  With her ten-year plan, Clara seemed to have started the clock again, but it was just an illusion. She had addressed the material welfare of the family, but the emotional damage was untouched and left to fester. The family grief – which one, it’s difficult to say – had already had an impact on Clara’s daughters, which no amount of shorthand qualifications could reverse: Alexander’s disgrace and early death in the workhouse? The terrible fate of Charlie Junior? The secret shame of Charlie Senior’s war career and subsequent descent into alcoholism? Any one of them would do it. The family legacy of trauma. Because trauma acts to distort the mirror of the psyche, so that you can no longer see things as they really are. You chose people and paths that are not healthy for you.

  And this is exactly what happened when Alice kissed Tom Corbett and agreed to run away with him, thereby setting in motion the boulder running back down the hill and the spell continuing into the next generation.

  What Clara didn’t know then was that Alice’s wasn’t the only secret being carried at Grace’s wedding – the twins had been off having their own adventures.

  My Nanna, Bertha, looks particularly happy in the photo. And this is because she was thinking of her own future wedding, and what she liked about Grace’s and what she didn’t like and how she could make hers better, because what no one else knew, but Bertha did, was that she was already secretly engaged to William Kendall.

  The scout dance where my grandparents met. William is on the far left; Bertha is fifth from the left on the second row.

  Bertha was only fourteen when she first set eyes on William. He was the first boyfriend she ever had and, as far as we know, the only boyfriend she ever had.

  Clara and Charlie were rather liberal parents. It was hard to be strict when the father of the house had so few rules for himself: on the rare occasions he tried to rein them in a bit, he got short shrift. So, from a relatively young age the high-spirited girls, all except for Dora, were out and about courting.

  Dances organised by churches and organisations like The Boys’ Brigade were very popular, as they were a more respectable alternative to the large dance halls. But however holy the umbrella over the occasion, everyone knew they were still a means for young women to meet young men. And while Bertha, at the age of fourteen, couldn’t have skipped off to the Queen’s Hotel without scandalising the neighbourhood, she could go to a Scout dance and walk out with her reputation intact.

  Bertha lapped up an occasion and never missed a party. I loved to watch her working a room. She seemed to have been born with an innate charm. She was never loud, she never pushed herself forward. She didn’t need to. People flocked to her and were enchanted by her. It’s a talent and an enormous asset in life – to be liked and sought out. She was sweet, but there was just enough wickedness, wit and humour – the twinkle in her eyes – to stop her from being sickly. And she was a good listener. In reality she was a terrible gossip and loved the dramas of others, perhaps as a way of escaping her own. People found themselves telling her all sorts of things they probably shouldn’t, and they were rewarded with a listening ear, a nugget of wisdom and then a naughty aside.

  I took an early boyfriend to stay with her one summer holiday. We had a riot. She turned a blind eye to our student antics as we rampaged across the south coast where she lived, drinking, kissing, dancing to an eccentric combination of music at top volume during the day, and rolling around her living room floor at night. She taught us how to play bridge as we played footsie under the table.

  In the end he had to go home. As we put him on the train, Nanna said with that twinkle in her eye: ‘Well, J—. It’s been a pleasure. Please come and stay again soon … preferably with the same girl.’

  I look at my littlest daughter, Daisy, and wonder whether if you are the youngest in a big family you develop a special charm, because you have to.

  Those dances were the playpen for the class act Bertha was to become. First came the excitement of preparation: she would spend the days before gossiping with her sisters about who was going, what they would be wearing and fretting about her own outfit. Her beautiful hair would be prepared the night before, tied up in rags to produce flaming pre-Raphaelite waves. On the day she would spend over an hour changing and rechanging her outfit so the sisters’ bedroom floor would be strewn with assorted dresses and accessories, which she would then fail to put away (being the messiest of the sisters) and drive them all potty. This was not helped by the fact she had the run of all the sisters’ wardrobes. There were inevitable rows as the sisters tried to get themselves ready around the maelstrom of Bertha’s party preparations: tops were never put on the face creams and the kohl pencil would get trodden into the debris.

  As Bertha had only just started at Miss Faber’s this was one of her first dances, and therefore she was learning by a process of trial and error. For now she was very much reliant on her sisters’ advice.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked, holding up a pea-green satin shift.

  ‘Soup,’ said Dora.

  ‘I wasn’t asking you.’

  ‘Hmmmm. Think this would be better for you,’ Grace said, holding up a bright pink satin dress, the same dress, in fact, that Alice had worn to the New Year’s Eve dance in the Queen’s Hotel. I was going to call it the lucky dress, but in retrospect that’s probably not quite right, and unlucky dress is not quite right either. Perhaps it should be known as the Dress of Destiny.

  Bertha took her big sister’s advice and wore the pink satin shift, and this was what first caught the eye of my grandfather, William Kendall.

  With her red hair and red lipstick clashing with her pink satin shift, Bertha couldn’t help but make heads turn. William watched this colourful creature sashay gracefully across the dance floor. She did not look like your average Essex girl and she, in the sweetest way possible, knew it. She’d only been at college a few months, but Miss Faber was pushing against an open door with Bertha. She was drinking up lessons on how to be a lady as if they were one of her baby bottles of Carnation milk.

  It took William the whole evening to find the nerve to approach her; in fact, he didn’t know quite how he was going to do it. In the end, Bertha helped. She had spotted him too, leaning up against the wall at the back, on his own but looking entirely comfortable that way. She took the fact he was not larking about with the other young men as a sign of class and maturity.

  William did look intense and serious. ‘Still waters run deep,’ was the phrase that came into her head, while the fact that Bertha happened to be reading Jane Eyre at the time and was obsessed with Rochester probably has more to do with my arrival on the planet than anything else. William was not tall but, like Rochester, he was dark. Not just dark hair, but that dark skin which only has to have a sniff of sun to brown up like toast on the fire. And he did love the sun.

  An unsubstantiated rumour exists that William was the result of an affair between his mother and an Egyptian whom she met on a long train journey on the Cape to Cairo railway – she gave birth to William within months of arriving back at Tilbury Docks, while his father was still toiling away as an enginee
r at the bottom of the tracks in South Africa.

  I would tease my mum. ‘Of course he was Egyptian.’

  ‘But he had blue eyes,’ Mum would say.

  ‘Ah, yes, but they were very dark blue and lots of Egyptians have dark blue eyes.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Yes. Look at Omar Sharif.’

  ‘He’s got brown eyes.’

  ‘No, he hasn’t.’ Actually I didn’t have a clue, but I was enjoying myself. ‘And you know Grandpa’s hair never went grey? Well, that’s an Arab thing.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But Omar Sharif has white hair.’

  ‘No, he doesn’t.’

  ‘Doesn’t he? Helen!’

  I was giggling, but it has to be said Grandpa did look pretty exotic, and he certainly was his happiest ever rampaging across the Egyptian desert in a tank during the Second World War, which doesn’t seem to have been the majority view of that experience.

  But perhaps the most exciting thing for Bertha was the fact he never took his dark, brooding eyes off her. And Bertha was aware of that all evening. She had to stop herself from looking over at him: she could feel his eyes burning into her back. ‘Come on, come over,’ she started to scream in frustration in her head as she danced past him, looking in the eyes of yet another local boy, and yet at the same time, using every opportunity to catch William’s eye and give the coy ‘Come hither’ yet chaste smile she’d been practising in the mirror.

  By the time the evening was winding down, she was getting a bit irritated. She even wondered whether she would just have to invent an excuse and go over herself. Of course the fact he hadn’t bothered with any other girl made Bertha feel all the more special – something that was a rarity in her life.

  And then, just like that, William suddenly stood up from the wall, strode over and offered his hand. ‘William Kendall.’