The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  ‘Hello, William.’

  ‘I wondered whether I might walk you home?’

  ‘Well, thank you, but there’s no need. I’ve come with my sisters.’

  She gestured at Katie and Grace being chatted up by a group of lads, although she didn’t really have to point them out – with their hair and bright clothes there was no one else she could have been related to.

  Then Bertha cursed herself for making such a tactical error, because of course his face immediately fell and he said: ‘Oh. All right then.’

  So she said quickly, with that twinkle in her eye: ‘No need to walk me home, but it would be a pleasure to have your company nonetheless, William. Thank you.’

  William didn’t know quite what to do next – she was a bit bolder than he had imagined. And she reinforced this impression when the next thing she said was, ‘Let’s go then, shall we?’

  They started to walk out of the church hall and down the road. To break the silence Bertha piped up: ‘Yes, I’d better be getting back, as my mother will be waiting up. I don’t suppose you have that problem?’

  Bertha said it innocently as a little conversation opener, the sort of manoeuvre she was learning at Miss Faber’s, but she got more than she bargained for.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said. And it just slipped out of his mouth. ‘She’s dead.’

  It was a horrible, tumbleweed moment and William was surprised how affected Bertha seemed.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ she said and tears started in her eyes. ‘You poor, poor thing!’ She took his hand. ‘So, what do you do? Who looks after you? Has your father remarried or do you have a sister?’

  ‘No, I’m an orphan.’

  Bertha stopped in her tracks. Jane Eyre once more popped into her mind.

  ‘So how have you grown up?’ she asked.

  At this William smiled. ‘In the same way you did. Luckily, you don’t stop growing when you lose your parents, otherwise I’d be even shorter than I am now.’

  ‘Yes, of course … that came out all wrong. Not that you are short at all. I think you’re the perfect height.’

  Once again William was taken aback. Now it was Bertha’s turn to blush, and to save her embarrassment William found himself talking quickly: ‘My mother died of TB when I was a baby so I didn’t really ever know her, but then my father died of dysentery a year later.’

  ‘Oh, goodness, you poor thing! So where did you go?’

  ‘Well, my grandmother looked after me, but then she died when I was five.’

  The scale of William’s tragedy was really beginning to feel too much.

  ‘And so where did you go then?’

  ‘I went to live with my old uncle. He’s brought me up. Well, really his housekeeper, Mrs Beesom, has done most of the looking after.’

  ‘Does he not have a wife?’

  ‘No, she died. But he’s a kind man. And he’s a master carpenter. He runs a school for young boys to learn carpentry down at the docks, and he’s teaching me. In some ways I’m quite lucky.’

  Bertha wasn’t sure that was the word she’d use, but this time she kept quiet. ‘So you have an uncle. What other family do you have?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘No brothers or sisters?’

  ‘No. My sister Margaret died last year of TB, too.’

  Finally Bertha was speechless. They walked the rest of the way home in silence, but she had taken his hand and held it tightly all the way home.

  As they reached her house, William turned to her: ‘Can I see you again?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, yes, I’d like that.’

  ‘Good.’ And he turned and walked back down the street, just stopping the once to look round, and see Bertha pausing at the front door, watching him. They smiled and waved at each other and William carried on walking slowly home.

  That night in the confessional that was their shared bed, Katie quizzed her sister: ‘So, what’s with the handsome dark stranger, Bertie?’

  ‘William Kendall to you.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he’s not like anyone I’ve ever met before.’

  At this all the sisters perked up and there was a chorus of, ‘Ooooooooh!’

  ‘She’s going to marry him, you know,’ Dora said to Grace.

  ‘Oh, stop it! You with your predictions. Haven’t we had enough of those?’

  But, actually, as she was about Charlie Junior and Joseph Davidson, once again Dora was spot-on.

  Katie, Bertha and Bill

  From the moment they met, Bertha and William were inseparable. I have a photo of them at a picnic. My grandfather does look incredibly dark and handsome. He has a raffish grin on his face and is sitting on a grassy bank in the sunshine with his arms wrapped around Bertha, who is smiling, happy, in a pretty floral summer dress. In the background, sitting some way off, is her twin sister Katie, who is also giving a cheeky grin. If she’s supposed to be chaperoning them then she doesn’t look as if she’s doing a very good job because they are pretty well wrapped up in each other.

  My great-grandparents had several issues with William, one of which was his predilection for manhandling my nanna in public. ‘He used to pinch her bottom when he went round to visit,’ Mum said. ‘Apparently Charlie took great offence.’

  I can’t imagine Charlie taking out his gun, as he wasn’t exactly a tower of moral fortitude himself, but obviously public displays of affection still crossed a line in the 1930s. However, one advantage of being the youngest in the family is that your older siblings cut a path for you – certainly Bertha’s relationship developed in the slipstream of Alice’s elopement with Tom Corbett. However much Clara and Charlie disapproved of William (and being a penniless, orphan carpenter didn’t earn him any Brownie points) the shock of Alice walking out of their lives meant that Clara was not inclined to make any ultimatums.

  So William was tolerated and Bertha carried on seeing him. What Bertha liked best was going round to his uncle’s house. It was a gloomy house, filled with the dark furniture that he had inherited as the last survivor of the doomed Kendall dynasty. Old Uncle came from a different age, a true Victorian, never speaking unless necessary and uncomfortable around women. Absolute silence was required at mealtimes. William, however, had been a naturally quiet, well-behaved child, so had lived a surprisingly harmonious existence with Old Uncle, especially as they both shared a common interest – carpentry.

  With air travel still in its infancy, most people travelled long distances by boat. The large, luxurious cruise liners would arrive from crossing the Atlantic and Old Uncle would go and make repairs. Often he would remove and ‘acquire’ bits of furniture that were being replaced. William went to live with Old Uncle when he was six years old, but from the first day he arrived, Old Uncle started teaching him his trade and it was not long before he and William, with intense concentration on their faces and in absolute silence, would spend their spare time lovingly restoring these pieces of furniture and selling them on. I still have the most extraordinary sprung rocking chair, which Old Uncle ‘rescued’ from an American cruise ship. It reminds me of the rocking chairs you see on porches in New England. Intricately carved and quite bouncy, it is extra-heavy so as not to roll around on the ocean waves. I bounced on it as a child and now my girls enjoy it – although I’ve replaced the old tapestry upholstery with lime-green velvet.

  When William was older, Old Uncle took him onto the ships. As the principal port of London, Tilbury Docks was the final stop for many of the boats that crossed the Atlantic, or went to Australia. It was also the headquarters of the oldest cruise line in the world, P&O. It was the principal point of immigration into the country. William loved watching the liners come and go, people embarking and disembarking, with bands playing and streamers thrown, tearful goodbyes and joyful hellos. It made him think about his own parents, who had disembarked there from Africa, only to pass away soon after. He wondered about that and felt that inherited wonderlust biting at his heels. He fantasised about
stowing away, starting a journey where he didn’t know the end destination. He dreamed of sunshine and wide open, wild spaces, childhood fantasies that were to have consequences for his family later on.

  It took everyone by surprise that Bertha fitted in so easily with this unusual domestic arrangement. Somehow sunny Bertha managed to break through to Old Uncle and make him smile. As they sat in silence around the table, Old Uncle couldn’t help watching this elegant, colourful, young child, with her perfect manners and deportment. He was touched to see the sweet looks that passed between William and Bertha as they silently nibbled at Mrs Beesom’s apple cake.

  And then there was Mrs Beesom herself. She was a widow with a married daughter. A short round pudding of a lady, with her hair always scraped back in rows of plaits pinned around her head, there was never a hint of impropriety between herself and Old Uncle and yet everybody wondered. It wouldn’t be the first time that this housekeeping arrangement was more wide-ranging than the job description implied. She rather took to Bertha and treated her like a lady when she came to visit, ushering her in, taking her coat, serving her the best cakes.

  ‘What a lovely young lady she is! She’s a keeper,’ she would say to William, and ruffle his hair.

  And there we have the key to their whole relationship.

  ‘You’re very special,’ William would say to Bertha.

  ‘Oh, really?’ she said.

  ‘You sound surprised.’

  ‘Well, I’ve never felt special before ever. I’ve always felt like the bottom of the barrel.’

  ‘You will never be the bottom of the barrel to me. You are the top of the barrel. Actually the whole barrel, the one and only barrel,’ William said.

  And so she married him.

  Years later, when Nanna cried on Dora’s shoulder and said how much she envied Dora her happy marriage and her love for her husband, she said that she had married William because she felt sorry for him and she wanted to have children. Indeed, she always referred to her marriage as ‘The Quest to Have Children’. ‘The gap creates desire,’ so they say. Bertha didn’t feel loved at home, so at the age of twenty she married William and built her own.

  And this meant not only leaving her family but her job. At the time the BBC prided itself on being a modern organisation and that included equal promotion and pay for its women employees. However, with a few stellar exceptions, women were confined to the switchboard, typing pools and the cafeteria. Clara’s hopes for Bertha at the BBC were never quite fulfilled. And then in the wake of the Depression, in 1932, the Corporation brought in the Marriage Bar that decreed that only those married women of special importance were entitled to stay. So when Bertha married William in December 1933, this was the end of her career. She never spoke about it again. In fact, none of us knew she had worked there until I got my first job at the BBC sixty years later as an assistant producer. She took me aside and said, ‘I am so proud of you. And making programmes too. I never would have believed when I worked there that a woman, never mind a granddaughter of mine, could actually make programmes. You have done everything I ever wanted to do. I am so proud.’

  But when I carried on working part-time after I had my eldest daughter, Amber, and I was explaining my complicated child-care arrangements, she surprised me by saying, ‘Well, I have no idea why you want to go back to work, anyway. If I were you, I’d stay at home and bring up my child.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s a way I can do both.’

  ‘Why do you want to do both? You’re very lucky – you don’t have to work, do you?’

  She was right – I was in the fortunate position that my husband could support the family. It wasn’t about the money.

  ‘No, but Nanna, I’ve worked so hard to get where I am and I really enjoy it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t understand you.’

  And I didn’t understand her. So I articulated something that had been bothering me since Amber had been born. ‘OK, put it this way – what is the point in having daughters, and educating them and encouraging them to go to university, and have careers, just for them to give it all up to have more daughters to do the same thing all over again? Surely along the way we can leave more of an imprint on the world, do something more than just pass on our genes.’

  ‘Now you’re being silly. It’s not like that,’ she said, ruffled.

  Really? Because it felt like that. But I realised I was in danger of seeming disrespectful of my nanna’s life, which I wasn’t at all. So I changed the subject.

  But the conversation bothered me. Nanna was fifty-seven years older than me and it wasn’t until that moment that I realised how much had changed – and how unbridgeable the gap between her generation and mine was and still is.

  Of course I don’t see it quite like that now. Ten years later, somewhere between losing a child and losing a husband, and changing career and having three more children – actually, just doing a lot of life – I’ve realised there are many ways to leave an imprint, most of which don’t involve paid employment or genetically reproducing. Everyday interactions with each other, small kindnesses and big conversations … I think we leave more of an imprint on the earth and on each other than we could ever imagine. And in that Nanna was a good example.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Mind the Gap

  Research has shown that we are most vulnerable to fall in love when we have just suffered a trauma, particularly a broken relationship. It’s a phenomenon commonly known as the ‘rebound’. Our defences have been attacked and we are weak; our judgement is skewed because what we thought was so, turns out not to be so. We are looking through a mirror darkly and struggling to cope with loss and pain. What better than to project a happy ending on to whoever might pop up in the debris? We desperately want to make it true that things happen for a reason and are for the best in the long run. We fill the gap with someone else.

  But does it work? Is it not pinning our hopes of recovery on another, rather than doing what we should be doing, which is healing ourselves? Sitting tight, licking our wounds, rebuilding our sense of who we are, fixing the mirror before we go out in the world again, so we make a judgement out of strength, rather than weakness. Being with someone because we want to rather than because we need to. Otherwise don’t we risk jumping from frying pans into fires?

  The story of the sisters is haunting me and casting a shadow over my relationship with Mr D. Because the fact that he came into my life when he did, in the way that he did, means that I still have not sat in the gap. My whiskers are dysfunctional. I just don’t know. Are we good together or I am just making us good together? I spend those dark hours before dawn, sleep evading me, fretting that I am just repeating. Am I relying on him to rescue me, when really I should be doing the job myself?

  When I’m in a good place, I am happy, really happy to be with him. It’s easy. He makes me laugh, I make him laugh. We play. He teases me mercilessly. We have private jokes, layers upon layers of them building up from that first day we met, the bricks constructing our relationship. I say something, I anticipate the reply, but he still manages to surprise me. It’s like music, establishing patterns, only to break them and then resolve them. This is our dance of attraction. The Greeks called it ludus, playful love. He calls it Ludicrous Love – he emails me the definition on a wet Monday morning: ‘Ludicrous – or taking-the-mick love: where one partner shows his or her affection for the other by pretending to ridicule them or generally use them for comic effect while actually being incredibly proud of them.’ I smile for the rest of the day.

  I am not helped by the fact that Mr D is short for Mr Destiny. He was christened this by my girlfriends because of the way we met. My friend Tom had bought tickets for my husband and I to go and hear an Icelandic band called Sigur Rós with him and his wife, Aimee. We often did things as a foursome. Such was Tom’s horror at eventual events, however, that he took away my husband’s ticket and gave it to his friend, who was also going through a divorce. ‘I hope you’ll still come, Helen.
I think you’ll like him,’ he said.

  ‘OK, whatever,’ I replied, and then forgot about it. The concert was months away. In the meantime I started dating on the internet.

  About ten days before the concert I was contacted by a man named D. I showed his profile to my friend, Emma. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Hmmm, all right. He says he’s a journalist, so …’

  I wrote back and that’s when the banter started between us, and it became obvious we were going to meet. That is until he asked me what sort of music I liked and whether I’d heard of a weird Icelandic band called Sigur Rós because he was going to a concert next Friday. At which point I screamed and texted Aimee and said, ‘Is this him?’ and she said something rude which meant basically yes. So I emailed him back again:

  ‘Dear D,

  Not only have I heard of Sigur Rós but I’m going to that concert, and I’m going with you.’

  After a whole day of waiting, I received this email back:

  ‘I’m sorry for my tardy reply but I was a bit spooked. I only joined the site the day before and you were the first person I contacted. Do you think we should meet before we meet?’

  So meet we did. And then we found out there were all sorts of coincidences, not least that we had worked in the same unit at the BBC for years, not at the same time, but with some of the same people. And then we went to see the weird Icelandic band and our next date, well, our first proper date really, was at that scene of my ancestral crimes: the Gladstone.

  The thing is, whichever way round, we were destined to meet.

  So it’s a good story that gives my girlfriends goosebumps. But ‘Mr Destiny’ is a hard name to live up to. It’s dangerous, because it’s so powerful it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  In the year after my husband went, I had the best time. I fell in love after years of not being loved; I ran from the chaos of my home into the arms of a playmate; I found myself going to places and meeting people that I had never dreamt of.