The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  We are lying on a bed facing each other, naked, eyes locked, smiling. Neither of us moves. Outside, below, the sound of busy, busy Rome – excitable Italians, scooters on cobblestones, bells ringing – a cacophony coming through the open windows with the light breeze and the sunshine of the hot afternoon. But here in our room, with only a large bed, white sheets, and us, all is calm and time has stopped. It is happiness.

  That night we find the perfect bar except it’s a private members club, but they beg us to join and now we have our own club in Rome. Later, as midnight turns into the early hours of the morning, a shadow joins us at our table. We talk about our wedding days and for the first time I realise just how sincerely and deeply he had loved before, and the complete devastation when having invested everything, it still went wrong. Where do you go from there? How do you ever commit again? It’s one of the fundamental questions that hung over Mr D and me (and still does). So we share our pain, our messiness, the inevitable baggage. Because we have those moments too: when the laughter we share stops, and the tears of our experience with another enter the room.

  I guess what I’m trying to say is Mr D was the silver lining. It felt as if the universe, having taken away, might have given back something better. Late into the night we lie in bed and construct the plots of increasingly ridiculous novels together, and I’m aware that in these plots we are sending each other messages. We even start writing them: he writes his version, I write mine. When we are apart we communicate by sending each other the next chapter:

  ‘Did you do this with your other girlfriends?’ I ask him. He’s had a few.

  ‘No.’ He laughs. ‘I can quite happily say I have never had conversations like this with anyone else, especially in bed at two o’clock in the morning.’

  And I kiss him.

  Early on in our relationship, I’m chattering on about a piece of Renaissance music I’m singing with the church choir. The cadences are thrilling, hearing my voice harmonise with the familiar voices around me, the purity of the ancient notes. It’s exquisite to the point where it’s nearly too much, almost sexual. He’s not religious, he doesn’t sing, he’s even less in favour of organised religion, and I realise I’m probably sounding weird: ‘Do you mind about all the odd stuff I do? You know, plainsong, cassocks and vicars and things?’

  He thinks for a minute and then says in all seriousness, ‘No, not at all. You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met before. That’s why I like you.’ He smiles at me with those brown eyes, giving me that look again. And I hear an ancestral echo that makes me shiver, as if someone from the other side has been whispering in his ear.

  So we had our adult romantic relationship but I didn’t think he would want to hang out with my children too. And then it turned out that he did – he taught my middle daughter how to make omelettes, and my little one how to skim stones, and my eldest a new way of looking at Made in Chelsea – a socialist revolutionary way. It was occasionally annoying when he colluded with them – he taught the little one how to kick a ball onto the roof of the house, but he did come over and cook me a Valentine’s meal and made a special chocolate mousse just for me with a heart cut out of a strawberry on top, as the girls danced around his legs. Whenever he left they were bereft too, and it left me wondering what I had done.

  I had brought a man into the house just for him to leave and break our hearts all over again.

  Because there were other times when being with Mr D did not make me happy, when I felt as if all it was doing was pouring salt into the wound and making it too painful, when I sensed he was withholding, drawing away, when he didn’t say the thing I was desperate for him to say – then I felt the gap, and started to fall down it. They were often really tiny, insignificant things, but they left me lying awake as he slept beside me, my back to him and tears streaming down my face.

  I was abandoned all over again.

  I felt the immensity of the wound I was carrying, which actually was nothing to do with him and everything to do with the man who came before. And on these occasions he didn’t bring out the best in me – I became needy, resentful, trying to pull him towards me and in the process pushing him away. I felt my finger on the relationship self-destruct button. I became a person I didn’t recognise and I didn’t like, and it wasn’t his fault – I was the monster of someone else’s creation.

  The problem is the gap – the loneliness, the need to be locked with another in order not to spin into space. This gap was so clear to me I was literally staring into the void. It’s always been there. And I realised my inability to sit with it, to not have the confidence that I won’t fall down it if I am not hanging on to someone else, has caused me to make really bad choices in the past. And I decided that, at the age of forty-three, I should face this gap head-on.

  Someone pointed out that the only person who will never abandon me is myself. I need to be content with myself. Not just for me, but for my girls. They need to see it is possible to be happy on our own, without a man. Then the spell would truly be broken.

  I decided I needed to walk away. It was time to force myself to be the heroine. It was time for me to part with the lovely Mr D.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Keeping Up Appearances

  I asked Mum how things had changed when the war started: ‘Well, dear, I suppose it was all about bananas.’

  ‘Bananas?’

  ‘Yes. You see before the war we had plenty. And then during the war we didn’t see any. Not one, not for the whole of the war. And then we didn’t even see any after the war. We expected everything to go back to how it was before, but it didn’t, not straight away. I think it was quite a few months before we saw bananas again. And then, one day, there was a rumour going around that there was one grocer in Grays that had them and well … there was a stampede! We ran down there. Even your Nanna. Oh, it was so exciting. In fact, one boy down our road got so over-excited, he stuffed himself and died.’

  ‘Died?’

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  ‘From bananas?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Well, they’ve got potassium in, haven’t they?’

  ‘If you say so, Mum.’

  I chuckled. She makes me laugh, my mum. But then I make her laugh too.

  And then she told me the Tale of The Pear: ‘It wasn’t just bananas. We didn’t have any fruit during the war. Well, only fruit we grew ourselves, and we had a pear tree in the garden. One year it had just one pear. We watched it grow and get ripe. It was there for months. Every morning we used to look out of the window and talk about it. Then, one day, when Mum was out, John couldn’t wait any longer and said, “I’m going to have that pear.” And he ran out and picked it and gobbled it straight up, just like that. Oooooh, he was awful! I couldn’t believe it. Well, when Mum got home from work she noticed straight away and there was a scene. She shouted at us and grabbed the broom handle and chased us round and round the garden, waving the broom at us.’

  I couldn’t imagine Nanna wielding a broom. She’d never been cross with me, ever, even though I could think of a few times when I’d deserved it.

  A memory of me climbing out of the bedroom window at midnight and dancing around her neighbour’s garden in my nightie, frightening them badly – they’d thought there was a burglar and called the police …

  ‘Wasn’t she going to share the pear?’

  ‘No, it was a different world in those days.’

  Which I guess is true. Interesting times perhaps bring out things in ourselves we never even knew existed.

  But then Mum recalled something else which I think is equally telling – not so much about the experience of the war, but about how my nanna, Bertha, dealt with it. She went on more seriously: ‘There wasn’t really much food. I remember Mum telling John and me to go out and pick dandelions for our supper. We had to have greens with our dinner. You know the government was very strict and we did what we were told in those days, but Nanna couldn’t get hold of any
. Anyway, she was determined that if we were supposed to have greens, we were going to have greens. So we had to start in the back garden and then go down the road and have a go at the hedgerows. She told us not to make a song and dance about it. Try not to let the neighbours see. So that’s what we did.’

  I pondered my nanna trying desperately to keep the show on the road. Like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dam, at first trying to keep everything the same, and then at least trying to keep the appearance that everything was the same, even if underneath it most certainly wasn’t.

  The problem was that, before the war came, it had all been going so well.

  On the eve of the Second World War, in the spring of 1939, Bertha’s daughter, my mum, Dianne, was two and a half years old. Her first memory is watching with curiosity as her father, William, made an air raid shelter at the bottom of the garden. Like a giant human rabbit, his great burrowing had resulted in a huge grassy mound piling up on the lawn, which was brilliant for climbing up and rolling down. This kept Dianne amused for some time (entertainment expectations were low in those days), but when this got boring she plucked up courage and tottered down the sloping passageway to the heavy wooden door that was the entrance to the shelter. ‘Peepo!’ William shouted, and a panel slid back to reveal three peep holes and a large, navy-blue eye looking out at her. Dianne squealed with delight. Then an arm came through another hole and fiddled with a lock and the door swung open.

  ‘Come and have a look inside, snooky nose.’ William grinned at his intrepid, pint-sized daughter.

  Inside it was just like a burrow, reminding Dianne of Peter Rabbit’s home in her favourite Beatrix Potter book. There were bunk beds on each side and a shelf at the end. It was rather cold and dark, but a lot more than most people had. To have your own custom-made shelter in Grays was quite a thing, but then their whole home was quite a thing too. That was the bonus of being the daughter of a master builder.

  When William and Bertha married, William bought a large corner plot of land and promised to build Bertha a house as her wedding present. ‘Just say what you want and I will build it,’ he said. And he did. It was a bungalow, which might not seem that glamorous now, but in the 1930s bungalows were a new phenomenon and the height of fashion. It was designed in the Art Deco style, with a grand heavy front door that had stained glass windows, and marble pillars either side. It opened into a wide hall with shiny parquet flooring. Bertha had a statue of a nymph on a plinth in the middle. One day Dianne slipped on the shiny floor and crashed into it and in one of those awful slow-motion moments, had to watch as it slowly toppled over and smashed on the floor. Obviously this was not a house built for children, but for Bertha. The kitchen had beautiful black and white floor tiles and all the latest appliances: a gas oven, a sink with running water and a telephone. They had a bathroom with not just running water but gold taps.

  Bertha’s show home bungalow became quite a talking point among the sisters, and their private feelings must have trickled down to their children. In the sitting room there was a green velvet sofa and Bertha had made kidney-shaped green velvet cushions to match.

  When Alice’s children came to visit, her son Brian jumped on the sofa and to Dianne and John’s horror grabbed one of these cushions, held it above his head and said with great Swain drama: ‘Look! A big green dollop!’

  Bertha’s children were horrified. The word ‘dollop’ was used in the same way that the ‘S’ word is today, and not a word that ever passed John or Dianne’s lips.

  ‘Put it down. Shut up!’ John said, sensitive about his mother’s soft furnishings. He had picked up the slight edge that was felt towards Bertha’s unexpected good luck.

  The mumblings started when William took Bertha on a surprise honeymoon to the Isle of Wight. This may not sound that special, but in those days it was the equivalent of going to Bali.

  ‘Who’d have thought it?’ Alice said as Bertha and William drove off in William’s car in a shower of confetti.

  ‘Yes. No Margate for Bertha,’ Grace said and then regretted it as a shadow passed over Alice’s face.

  Bertha was supposed to have married a penniless carpenter but, by 1939, William was not only a master builder, but had found himself a partner called Sparky, and set up his own building company. William had turned out to have greater potential than anyone realised, but the clues had been there from the beginning. He wasn’t an orphan in the Dickensian, destitute sort of way – William’s father had been a highly respected engineer, and had been hired to go to Africa and design one of the great railways of the world, the Cape to Cairo Railway. William’s grandfather had been a teacher, and one of his uncles, an artist. William himself had won a scholarship to the local grammar school, but there was no money for his uniform and Old Uncle had been determined that William would follow him into carpentry.

  Although he left school at fourteen, William was a great reader. He was a committed atheist, but the early death of everyone he loved left him in a permanent state of existential angst. He spent hours searching for the meaning of life – unsuccessfully, I think – in the histories of the world’s great religions and the works of the famous philosophers.

  Not staying on at school turned out to be a good move for William. The 1930s saw the biggest boom in house building in British history. Bertha married William in December 1933; in the next two years, nearly 600,000 new houses were built, most of these in London and the South-East, and most of them were houses for the prosperous working-classes: the bungalows and semi-detached houses that William specialised in. Money was cheap to borrow and there were few planning restrictions. The cost of materials and labour had fallen and the government had a policy of clearing the slums. Grays doubled in size, with semi-detached houses and bungalows stretching out along the roads out of town, many of which still exist and were built by William.

  Very soon Bertha found herself the wife of a man of substance in the town. They had a beautiful white Lancaster car – the only one in Grays. On fine Sunday afternoons the new Mr and Mrs Kendall would take a spin with the roof down, Bertha’s red hair escaping from her pink chiffon scarf so that there was no mistaking who the passenger was. And soon she had a baby to take with her.

  Bertha gave birth to John in 1935. Boys were, of course, a premium in the Swain family and he had a big head full of wonderful Swain curls (only blond). The picture was complete when, two years later she had a little girl, Dianne (not such a bonny baby, though – tiny and bald). But it all seemed rather perfect, especially when she had the home to match.

  And Bertha did her bit to maintain the image. She was very fond of making the children copies of her own clothes, so they could walk around together turning heads – her very own, stylishly groomed tribe. Of course, having a boy put a limit on how far she could run with this concept, but at least she made them all matching coats. Dianne, meanwhile, had more potential. One spring Bertha spent hours creating herself and Dianne matching dresses for the coming summer, with white Peter Pan collars, low-slung waists and box-pleat skirts. The first outing of the dresses was during a visit to Alice’s.

  Bertha and John

  The sisters had taken advantage of the holidays and fled from the bombing in London to stay in the Buckinghamshire hills with Alice, who had moved there a few years earlier. One hot afternoon they decided to walk from Alice’s house in High Wycombe over the hills to the river at Marlow – a bit of a trip down memory lane. Of course, the sisters had always dressed competitively and now they included their children in their competitions, but on this occasion Bertha felt she had trumped all of them with her and Dianne’s head-turning matching frocks.

  ‘Golly, Bertha, did you make these?’ Grace asked. ‘You’ve put a lot of work into this pleating.’

  ‘Pity she’ll be grown out of it by next summer,’ Katie chipped in.

  Bertha knew with that comment that she’d scored a direct hit. But things didn’t quite turn out as she’d planned.

  It was a hot day an
d about halfway to Marlow the children started to complain; even the sisters started to feel a bit faint.

  ‘What about we pop into the Crooked Billet?’ Alice said.

  ‘Yes, think of the poor children,’ Grace replied, with a twinkle.

  So they trooped into the pub garden, deposited the children, and came back with a few trays of orange juice, and gins and tonic. All was peace until there was a crunch, a squeal, and Dianne spewed her juice all over the table.

  ‘Dianne! What are you doing?’

  ‘Mum!’ she screamed and spat out a whole load of blood.

  ‘Look! She’s bitten a great lump out of her glass!’ John shouted.

  A ‘scene’ commenced which involved lots of spitting, shouting, hankies, a hysterical Dianne and an even more hysterical Bertha, who kept shouting for an ambulance. That is, until it became clear that Dianne was not in mortal danger, and Bertha’s distress turned to rage because she had managed to well and truly ruin the new dress. There followed a period of disgrace for Dianne.

  Things never did turn out how Bertha expected.

  At first it seemed as if the war wasn’t really going to change things that much. Bertha refused to contemplate evacuating her children, despite the fact that Grays was right in the firing line, being on the eastern edge of London. ‘I want them here with me,’ she said, and that was that.

  Meanwhile, with an echo of what had happened at the beginning of the First World War, William insisted on volunteering, and met with nearly as much horror from Bertha as Charlie had from Clara. However, William wasn’t immediately sent into the army – he was put on the reserve list – and so, for the first couple of years the family stayed together, and William carried on building houses, while Bertha stayed at home bringing up John and Dianne, and found ways to adapt to the rest.

  Once it became difficult to buy fabric, due to rationing, Bertha just cut things up – like the old orange blanket out of which she made John a double-breasted coat, with matching floppy flat cap – it was huge, due to the size of John’s head and crowned with an enormous button.