The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  ‘Well, she did give up work. And I never had to go to the Barratts again.’

  ‘Perhaps that shows that, at some level, she did believe you.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’ Mum didn’t seem convinced.

  So Bertha gave up her job and looked after Dianne for the last few months before she was ready to start school.

  But going to school still involved a daily torment: the Barratts’ home was right next to Dianne’s new school, and she had to walk past their house every day.

  And there was Mr Barratt watching the young girls going backwards and forwards. He would lean over his gate and leer at Dianne. There was no other way into school and there was only pavement on the Barratts’ side of the road. Despite this, Dianne would run past on the other side, in the road, and was nearly knocked over several times.

  What would happen today? Perhaps nothing different, but at least there is a chance that Dianne would not have been silenced; perhaps Mr Barratt might have been prosecuted and not been able to continue to leer over his garden gate; perhaps the damage my mum suffered might have been alleviated at least a little. Because knowing this, I now understand her much better. There are the obvious effects: the claustrophobia, the inability to speak in public, the hating to be the centre of attention, but then there are other things which I now know are common for someone who has had an experience like this. It makes me angry. I think about Mum: her cleverness and her humour, and how her fear of the outside world has held her back. That’s not her, but what happened to her.

  We went back to the subject of Nanna again.

  ‘You know, she never spoke to me about it,’ Mum said.

  ‘I know. It must have been awful.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean, Nanna never having had the relief of saying sorry,’ I said, and then I thought that was disrespectful to my mum’s greater trauma. But I needn’t have worried.

  ‘No, I know what you mean. I agree. All those years, because I’m sure she thought about it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘She must have felt awful, and a terrible burden to carry to your grave.’

  ‘Yes. There’s a lot to be said for saying sorry, and meaning it and it being heard,’ I reply.

  And Mum gave me a look. ‘Yes, indeed.’

  There was a moment of tension between us. I immediately thought of the sorry I long to say to Poppy, and I wondered what sorries Mum might feel she wants to say. But I didn’t ask, and the moment passed.

  I think Mum has forgiven Nanna. It was a very different time: all keeping up appearances and stiff upper lips; a belief that the less said the better. It must have been really hard to be a single mum, struggling to make ends meet, keeping going with bombs dropping around you and no idea when and if it all might end, and whether you were going to have a husband at the end of it. And to have to part with the life you had always dreamt of, so soon after achieving it – well, you would fight to hold on to it, wouldn’t you? I certainly would. And I did. For many years I knew something was wrong, and I asked the right questions but I allowed myself to believe the wrong answers, because the consequences of the truth would have been so catastrophic – it meant losing everything I had worked so hard to build. And when I had discovered the right answers, for a year I tried to make it work; I tried to forgive and make a new go of it, but living with someone you no longer trust and loving someone who has treated you so badly ultimately destroys your soul. Besides which he was still lying and cheating. And, actually, the moment when I faced the truth – that my marriage was over and he had to go, and I told my children and my family and friends, and I no longer tried to keep up appearances – was the moment when everything started to get better.

  In Bertha’s case, the price of trying to hold on and keep up appearances was very high. And the conversation with my mum got me thinking. About Bertha’s house and what it represented and how much holding on to it had resulted in so much damage. Because I realised I hadn’t let go of everything.

  The girls and I were still living in our family home. It was beautiful, Victorian, double-fronted, with elaborate fireplaces, high ceilings, stained glass and mad, original tiles. We had bought it as a wreck and I had transformed it into our perfect home, with a kitchen extension and a penthouse in the loft. Like Bertha, I had filled it with chandeliers and old paintings, oriental wallpaper and bright colours everywhere. But it was expensive – it was the home of the family of a City lawyer, and we were no longer that family. In fact, we had never been that family, ever since we had moved in. It was a bit like walking through a field of flowers and then looking more closely and seeing it was a field of snakes.

  I didn’t have to move but, financially, it was a chance for me to have a clean break from the man who had hurt me so badly. Our new home would be smaller, but it would be completely ours, a new start for me and the girls: real, with no mistresses haunting it. And if I had made a home before, I could make one again. So I put the house on the market.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Staying Alive

  It’s the middle of July and as hot as it gets. I’m dashing through West London in my purple Mini with the roof down, shades on, music blaring, my hair – unfeasibly long (sorry, Nanna) – flying in the wind. I am hurrying to pick up Dora’s twin daughters, Jackie and Angela, from the station. They may be nearly seventy-four, but they’ve come all the way from Stafford on the train and negotiated the rather fiddly tube journey with bravado.

  ‘They’re a game pair,’ I say to my mum.

  ‘Indeed,’ she says, with eyebrows raised.

  They’ve come to my house to have lunch with us. It’s been years since the cousins have seen each other. In fact, they haven’t met since my nanna’s – Bertha’s – funeral, ten years ago. As I screech into the bus stop outside the tube station, they are waiting for me, all jaunty scarves and big sunglasses. They wave enthusiastically and shower me with kisses. They are very stylish. Yes, the Mini definitely suits them and the occasion.

  As we speed along by the banks of the Thames, the sun shining down on us, even more hair flowing in the wind, there is constant chatter and laughter. When we reach home and my daughter, Amber, meets them, she is fascinated by their exuberance, in tandem, like a walking soap opera. They look identical and say the same things at the same time. They hug her as if they want to break her: ‘Ooooooo, aren’t you lovely?’

  Amber grins at me and shakes her head in disbelief. ‘They’re amazing!’ she mouths.

  Mum with Angela and Jackie

  Amber witnesses a classic fit of the Swain giggles when I bring out the photos that I’ve collected from various cousins. My little mum is seated between these two tall, slender, identical ladies, but it feels as if she’s just a smaller, older, toned-down version. And because they have the same intonation, the same expressions, the same humour, and it’s infectious and reminds me of my nanna, it feels very comfortable. Am I like that too? I look at my eldest daughter who looks so like me, and I feel the shared mitochondrial inheritance. We are all at home here. And it manifests in the banter.

  An example: a photograph of one of the uncles on the beach in his trunks.

  ‘Oh, dear, he’s rather letting it all hang out,’ I comment, and pass the photo over to Angela.

  ‘Ohhhh, I say!’ The twins gasp in unison, their hands go over their mouths and they start giggling.

  ‘Where?’ Mum snatches the photo. ‘Oh, dear, I haven’t got the right glasses.’

  ‘Shall I get the magnifying glass, Nanna?’ Amber says, trying to be helpful.

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, I say!’ the twins say again in unison, at which point Mum is chuckling too.

  ‘Oh, I wish I could see it.’

  ‘Trust me, Mum, you’re not missing much.’

  ‘The photo, I mean!’

  ‘Mother!’ Amber says, but now we’ve all lost it and there’s banging of heads on the table, and a bit of ch
oking and eyes being wiped and swigs of pink prosecco being drunk, and I do wonder whether our departed ancestors can see us, and I send a little apology heavenward: ‘Just a bit of fun …’

  Meanwhile, the twins have picked up another uncle.

  ‘I always thought he was a bit strange,’ Mum says.

  ‘Yes, but he had some nice suits,’ says Jackie.

  ‘Nice suits?’ I say, and then we all lose it again and Mum, choking, says, ‘Well, you know what your Nanna used to say about him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ooooo, what did she say, Dianne?’ The twins ask together.

  Mum looks a bit abashed and I prepare myself for what’s coming. ‘Well, I don’t know whether I should say this …’

  ‘Go on, you know you want to,’ I say.

  ‘Go on, Nanna,’ Amber says. ‘You’ve started so you have to finish.’

  Mum pauses for effect and then comes out with it. ‘Well, she used to say he wasn’t a real man.’

  There’s a stunned silence. And then we all burst out laughing.

  ‘What on earth did she mean by that?’ I ask.

  ‘I have no idea! That was typical of your Nanna. She always made these cryptic pronouncements and then left the rest up to your imagination.’

  Later, when the whirlwind that is the twins has departed, Amber says: ‘I love them. Can’t we keep them? Put them in the mini fridge?’

  There is a running joke in our house: I have a mini fridge in my bedroom, used to house diet Cokes and half-bottles of champagne. Metaphorically, we put all sorts of people we like in the mini fridge too, someone for every occasion: the girls’ jolly singing teacher, for when we need cheering up; my salsa teacher, with the perfect derrière, when I need to feel most like a woman; David Tennant in his Dr Who incarnation for those moments when the universe seems a bit frightening … it’s getting a bit crowded in there.

  But Amber is right. The twins are lovely, warm, kind, happy creatures that defy the way they came into the world. Because they made their surprise entrance in perhaps one of the darkest moments of our family story.

  Jackie and Angela are the only children of my Great-Aunt Dora – the fourth child, third daughter, and therefore the middle Scarlet Sister. Dora was born within a year of Charlie Junior being diagnosed with polio, a bit different to the others. She didn’t like dancing and she didn’t like going out; she stayed home, close to her mother, Clara. She had always been a nervous child, and once Charlie Junior died, she suffered from terrible nightmares, waking her sisters at night with her screaming. Dora suffered from what they used to call, in those days, ‘nerves’. Today there might be more scientific labels applied, but in some ways ‘nerves’ feels a kinder, looser and actually better description for Dora’s general state of mind.

  In families where there has been a trauma (Charlie Junior’s death would definitely qualify), and there is a pretence that nothing has happened, one of the family members can start to act out the effects of the trauma; sometimes they become the black sheep. Dora definitely wasn’t the black sheep, but she did seem the one sister who showed the symptoms of the family’s bereavement; as if the family had made her the hired mourner at the funeral, to do the wailing for all of them, so they didn’t have to. It was as if she turned all the pain in on herself.

  I pondered why Dora should be the one who carried the family’s shadow. And then I thought about my own daughter, Scarlett. Dora was the middle child, and it was my middle child who did the grieving for us when her dad left.

  As Amber, Daisy and I concentrated on building a new life through gritted teeth, Scarlett looked at us in disbelief and wept. ‘How can you all act as if nothing has happened?’ she would shout. ‘Because we have no choice,’ I would reply. But Scarlett is nothing if not persistent. She ran away from home, she cried at school and failed exams she should have walked, she phoned her daddy at all hours and, waiting up for me to come home, she cut off her fringe.

  Scarlett was like a lightning rod for the grief in the family, the wise fool at the family court, determined to point out that her mother was living in denial. Her grief was so bad there was little room for our own. But, gradually, somehow, the grief became a bit more evenly spread: Scarlett settled down and the rest of us became a bit more shaken up – Amber fell out with her friends and got into trouble at school, I had some filthy rows with my ex and injured my ankle, the six-year-old Daisy refused to see her dad with the immortal line: ‘You can’t just get sick of one and go and get another.’ It all became more messy and probably a bit more healthy. We took turns to cry. We cuddled under a blanket late at night and tried to make sense of it all. It was better for all of us.

  By the age of thirty, Dora still hadn’t married, and she was the only sister left at home. Clara was only too happy to have one daughter to keep her company. Like many women of her generation, Clara’s daughters were her best friends. Having Dora helped dilute the endless disappointment that was living with her husband. While Charlie spent long hours in the pub, Dora sat beside Clara next to the fire and entertained her with tales of the patent office and the women who worked there – what they were wearing, who didn’t like who, who was kissing who. Dora had inherited the Swain ability to tell a story and could always make Clara laugh.

  In turn, Dora would listen patiently as Clara confided her worries about her married daughters and their children: Alice’s tiny cottage; Grace’s husband Bill’s erratic mood swings; Alice’s struggle to make ends meet; the smallness of baby Dianne; Alice’s over-working because that Tom Corbett was only a milkman – actually, almost every aspect of Alice’s life, for which Tom Corbett got the blame.

  As the sisters left, home became a very different place – it was transformed into a haven of space, order and harmony (as long as Charlie was out). Clara, who was naturally a maternal woman, finally had the time and means to enjoy (some of the sisters used the word ‘spoil’) one of her children. Clara made sure Dora went to work on a full stomach, and came home to her favourite meals every day. She kept Dora’s clothes in the best condition: every loose button was tightened and pin tuck faultlessly ironed. When Katie got married, Clara bought Dora a pet Cairn terrier, called Suzi, so that she wouldn’t be lonely.

  Suzi was a pampered doggy – her hair was brushed every day and Dora made sure she was dressed in the latest pooch fashion with a big blue bow and jackets in a variety of colours that co-ordinated with Dora’s outfits. Unfortunately, Suzi’s jackets had to be altered because she was fed too many cakes. But Dora was a bit of a secret squirrel.

  I have a studio portrait of her looking like a film star: long eyelashes, painted lips in an enigmatic smile, hair coiffed in rolls framing her face. She has signed it in the bottom right-hand corner: ‘Love, Swainy!’ Indeed. I wonder for whom it was destined.

  Unbeknown to Clara, Dora didn’t plan to live at home for ever – she wanted her own wedding, house and children, like the rest of her sisters. It was just that Dora was not going to marry the first man who came along. Having witnessed the dramatics around her various sisters’ relationships, she was determined to wait until she was sure she had found The One. And in order to make sure he would notice her, Dora always dressed immaculately – still elegant in black or navy.

  Dora

  And it was effective. She worked as the secretary to a top patent lawyer in Lincoln’s Inn who was so taken with her that he asked her to become his mistress, even offering to set her up in a smart address in town – a request she turned down on several occasions: ‘Thank you for your most generous offer. I am deeply flattered’ – he was her boss, after all – ‘but I must decline on account of there already being someone who has filled this position for you. If it becomes vacant, then let me know. But until then, I’ve always been hopeless at sharing!’ And she would give him a coy smile that made it impossible for him to take offence.

  Of course, being a married man’s mistress was not going to be good enough – solicitor or no solicitor, she was not going to sha
re her man with anyone, particularly a legitimate wife and family. Dora was smarter than that, and had more self-respect.

  Years later, it was a lesson she was to pass on to her daughter, Angela, when she became entangled with her own solicitor boss. He was clever and charming, with a name that sounded like a hero from a Mills & Boon novel. He was already promised to someone else, and Dora warned Angela to stay away from him and insisted she moved back to the family home. Angela was a good girl and did as she was told, and waited, and in the end married Ellis, with whom she has been happy for many years.

  The solicitor – married with children – was to turn up on her doorstep a few years later, asking to rekindle their affair.

  ‘Well, I knew then I’d obviously done the right thing. He wasn’t a nice man, was he?’ Angela said.

  ‘These sorts of men never change,’ Jackie nodded sagely.

  ‘Gosh, I wish I’d met your mum,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Helen. Ahhhhh, bless you! You’ll see, it’ll all work out for the best … he’s not worth it … you’re better off without him … your prince will come, I know he will!’ they chimed.

  ‘If he hasn’t already,’ Amber murmured archly, and under her breath sang the cheesy seaside pier tune that she’d hacked into my phone and put as the ringtone for Mr D.

  I shot her a look.

  Meanwhile, the twins took my hands and squeezed them and I was overwhelmed in a wave of female Swainy love.

  As if to prove that all good things come to she who waits, Dora’s patience was rewarded when she came to the attention of one of her fellow commuters on the 8.10 train from Grays into Fenchurch Street.

  Spencer Sier was a trainee manager for The Co-operative Bank, working in their Fenchurch Street branch. He was a clever fellow – a scholarship boy at Palmer’s Grammar school in Grays – and he had always wanted to become a doctor but, like so many members of the family, there wasn’t the money for him to continue his education. However, his excellent grades had got him a prized place at the bank.