The bells of St Cuthbert’s rang out behind me as I walked. So many chimes! The day was passing quickly. But this time I heard the bells, I did not think about George for my head was crowded with other thoughts and, before I knew it, I had reached the far end of town. This was a place in limbo, where the fields were edged by billboards advertising the arrival of new housing estates – dual heating, tiled bathrooms, large sculleries and separate WCs. The new houses would be grander than those on the Sunningdale Estate, more modern and closer to the station.
I put my eye to a gap in the hoardings. The field behind it had been the place of my happiest memories. It was soon to be concreted over, but not just yet – for now at least the earth was still rich with grass and some memento of my time with my lover remained. For the first time that day I felt a burst of something close to happiness, the same feeling I’d had in my daydream at the lido. Beyond the hoardings, the violets in the field shone brightly.
6
The sun cast long shadows on the pavement as I hurried down the drive of Little Willow. George sat in the lounge, the glow of the low sun staining the room orange and casting his face in shade. He didn’t look up when I entered, just held out a tattered piece of paper. I took it from him, but folded it into my pocket. I did not need to look at the bold letters or the inky teardrops folded into the crease to know that it was one of my hand drawn leaflets.
‘I thought that yesterday was just a little setback,’ said George, as if beginning one of his long speeches. ‘A moment of hysteria – we can expect that from time to time. But I had hoped that a good night’s sleep would do the trick, make you see that yesterday was just a delusion.’
I perched on the window seat, crumpling the paper between my fingers. Doctor’s orders, I thought, doctor’s orders to forget. ‘How did you get it?’ I said.
‘How do you think? It’s got our address on it. Emma, how could you? Can’t you see that putting a Sunningdale Estate’s address on something is just an invitation for any ne’er-do-well and charlatan to call round? This could just be the beginning.’
‘Someone came?’ I said, excitedly. ‘Someone responded to one of my leaflets ?’
‘Yes…no! Not someone, just a boy, looked like a street kid. Dirty fingernails, a flat cap over his eyes – you know the type, probably the one who broke the gate. What if these people choose to exploit your fragile mental state – what then?’
‘What did you do?’
‘What do you think I did? I sent him packing of course.’
‘Did he say anything?’
George pulled his spectacles down onto his nose and rubbed his eyes.
‘Please, George, did he?’
‘What do you mean?’ Then he drew a long breath. ‘You mean did he say anything about a dead baby?’ he said slowly. ‘A baby that was dead nine years ago and is still dead today—’
I gasped. George had never spoken of what had happened, not since the day we got back from the hospital.
‘—Well no, Emma, he didn’t. I didn’t give him the chance!’
‘George, please!’ I whispered. ‘How can we be sure of what happened all that time ago, I never saw the body, did I? Remember, they said it would be too—’
‘No! I have to put an end to this stupidity right now. For God’s sake, Emma, it’s been nine years! Ten! I’ve given you plenty of time – don’t you think it was hard for me too? I’ve been pussyfooting around, walking on eggshells and for what? A baby, a dead baby that wasn’t even normal!’
‘What do you mean by that?’ I cried.
‘You know what I mean,’ he said wearily. Then he put his hand up to his face, his fingers stroking the air around his cheeks as if he couldn’t bring himself to say it.
‘The face,’ he said quietly.
I felt my mouth open and close but no sound came out and he continued to stare at me, knowing just how to hold his head, his chin slightly down and to one side so that the thick lenses of his spectacles caught the light and his eyes faded away under the hard reflection.
‘You think she was better off dead!’ I said at last, my voice breaking. ‘Better dead than disfigured?’
He said nothing, just continued to stare at me, hard glass shielding his eyes.
I sank down and started to cry. I could feel him staring at me, his eyes cold upon my back. Then I heard the rustle of the newspaper opening and the creak of the armchair as he crossed his legs. New tears came, silently this time. George sighed deeply and the pages rustled louder, as if he couldn’t concentrate. Then I heard the pad of his footsteps and saw his slippers in front of me on the carpet. He put a hand on my shoulder, his touch so light that is rested on the fabric of my dress, as if he couldn’t bear any closer contact.
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said, stiffly. ‘Look, I think we both need to put all of this behind us. Make some changes. Think of it as a new start. Out with the old and in with the new and all that.’ He laughed awkwardly, a strange little coughing laugh that he had when he thought he was about to say something clever. ‘You know a fellow called round about the garden gate; noticed that it was broken and offered to fix it. A perfectly amiable chap, I found him to be rather pleasant and a decorator by trade. He offered some good prices for redecoration too. I thought that livening up the place might be a good place to start.’
‘The house is only ten years old!’ I heard myself say as if a new coat of paint in the lounge was a natural change of subject.
‘Even so,’ he said, ‘I think some decorating would do us both good and give you a project to set your mind to. It is time you had a hobby outside that blasted garden. I think this could be just the thing – something trifling and domestic for you to manage. There’s little to do in Missensham for a married woman – too much spare time for the mind to wander.’
I sniffed and rubbed my eyes on my sleeve.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ll give the chap a call tomorrow. You can make a start immediately.’
I nodded weakly.
‘All right then!’ he said brightly as if everything was solved. He backed into the hall, smiling all the way and I heard the pad of his slippers and then the chink of the kettle on the hob as he hummed cheerfully, busying himself in the kitchen.
The bell of St. Cuthbert’s struck eight. I put my hands over my ears and stared out of the window. Beyond the privet hedge was the war memorial and the crossroads, and somewhere beyond them was the sprawl of the Sunningdale Estate and the village green of the old town. There was the new main road, the canal and the Tube line cutting across the farmland until they reached other villages and towns and, beyond them, more roads, train tracks and waterways criss-crossing over hills and through valleys, counties and cities. Out there, somewhere, was my daughter, Violet – the girl with the birthmark on her face – and I realized then that I would be alone in searching for her.
7
The next morning George rang his perfectly amiable fellow, the master decorator. I listened to him on the phone – brief and businesslike, as if he was giving orders and expected to be obeyed as he reeled off a list of tasks that made it sound like the house was falling down around our ears. The decorator couldn’t come for a few days – in fact he couldn’t make it until Wednesday week – but that was all fine, George said to me, I mustn’t worry because there was plenty to keep me occupied until then. The front garden was looking rather tired – there were dandelions pushing through the driveway and the privet hedge needed pruning. I found it easier to agree with him than to argue, so I made a start soon after he had left for work.
Ten years had not been enough to mellow the clay and rubble that had been dredged up from the construction of the estate. Everything I had tried to grow at the front of the house always wilted into little husks, yet the weeds seemed to thrive. I spent ages kneeling in the gravel that morning, jabbing my trowel into the hard soil and grasping the weeds with my bare hands until my fingers became sticky with dandelion sap. George’s words from the previous evening’s
quarrel were still fresh in my mind and I worked my anger into the soil until the toll of the church bell informed me that I had missed lunch.
I sat up on my heels and took some deep breaths, wiping the sweat from my forehead with a gritty sleeve and glanced down the street towards the war memorial. A solitary spring of daisies rested on the low plinth, the stalks splayed over the granite. But today was not the anniversary of some battle or great defeat, it was someone’s personal memory – the daisies marked a soldier’s birthday or the day he fell.
The little tangle of daisies reminded me of the flowers at my parents’ funeral, again just a solitary sprig. I had stood at the grave with my flowers, that little sprig, alone and barely twenty years old. Then another mourner had come, a stranger. She said her name was Audrey, drawing out the name in a breathy voice, her huge hand enclosing mine as she shook it. She wore a black cocktail dress shimmering with rhinestones. She had laughed apologetically – it was the only thing in black that she owned, after all, black was such a dreary colour. I had only just met her but she held my hand throughout the service. At the wake she talked about my parents, how they had served her in the shop – the ostrich feathers that my mother had delighted in fixing on to hats and headbands had been for her. I realized she was one of the glamorous ladies that I had imagined dancing in the dresses which I sewed until my fingers bled.
I worshipped her back then. She took my mind off what had happened in my life and soon I joined her, wearing ostrich feathers and sipping martinis as we danced together at the nightclubs in London. To me she was the height of sophistication. She was married to Walter, a psychiatrist, and seemed to have many glamorous friends. It was Audrey who introduced me to Doctor George Marks, a friend of her husband from the hospital. She said how lucky I was when he proposed – he was a respected doctor and, although a little older than me, he was still quite the eligible bachelor. He was good-looking too, she had said and I thought that, if I looked hard enough, I could see moments of handsomeness. But George was already in his late thirties by then, the last flush of youth draining from his body. I had told myself that Audrey must be right but I could not ignore the slackening skin under his jaw or the way his scalp reflected light from under his thinning hair. Audrey went ahead and arranged everything. There were flowers at the wedding of course, blooms and bouquets and petals everywhere. But as I looked at the war memorial, there was just one solitary sprig, and somehow, at that moment, those sorry little daisies seemed to be so much more meaningful to me.
The gate creaked loudly and I jumped to my feet. A little boy stood on the path, his eyes widening when he saw me. I dropped my trowel and trug, quickly forgetting my musings about martinis and flower-strewn weddings. The boy was small, his head barely level with the top of the gate. He was dressed in an oversized shirt, shorts that skimmed the bruises on his knees and a man’s flat cap which he had to hold up so that he could peer from underneath the brim.
‘It’s you!’ I gasped excitedly. ‘You’re the one who came yesterday.’
He didn’t answer, but backed away slowly.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I won’t shout at you like the man did. What’s that you’ve got there in your hand?’ It was a page from George’s notepad, the ink furred through the paper where the clumsy oval of a face had been drawn. ‘Yes!’ I smiled. ‘Yes, this is the place.’
He nodded.
‘Do you know who she is? Wait there, I’ll get a pen, you can write down the address. Have you come from there? How long did it take you to get here?’
He didn’t say anything, just turned on his heel.
‘Wait!’ I shouted. Then, fearing that I’d startled him, added, ‘I just need to get my hat. Can you take me to her?’
*
The boy walked quickly, sometimes trotting, I hurried behind, forced into long strides just to keep up.
‘I wish you would say something,’ I said, irritated, but he only quickened his pace.
At the war memorial he took the dirt track that led up into farmland. The orchards gave way to fields and copses, the slope of the path getting steeper where deep ridges of cart tracks scored into the hard earth. As the brambles grew higher I imagined George’s ne’er-do-wells waiting for me behind the bushes, but the lane was empty, birds calling out in alarm and rabbits scattering as we passed. All the same, I wondered at the sense in following a stranger.
‘Please,’ I said, glancing at my wristwatch. ‘We’ve been walking for over quarter of an hour, are we nearly there?’ He started to run. I tried to grab his collar but it slipped through my fingers. Then he was gone. I went to hurry after him but my ankles buckled on the cart tracks, the back of my shoe slicing into my heel. My stockings caught on the brambles and laddered all the way to the knee, but I trudged on, the dust from the lane dulling my shoe leather.
I was about to turn back when I came to a sharp bend in the track where, behind an old, twisted oak was a small cottage, its front door opening out onto the lane. Its walls were bright but the thatch was low, darkening the windows. ‘Rose Cottage’ was stencilled on a tired sign above the door. Shouts came from inside, a woman’s voice, loud and harsh, as if children were being scolded and I hoped that this was where the little boy had gone.
I knocked tentatively and the door swung open. A woman stood in front of me, her face furious: ‘What?’
I hesitated. ‘My name is Mrs Marks,’ I said. Then, when I saw the wildness in her eyes, I drew myself up tall and added, ‘I live on the Sunningdale Estate.’
The woman was silent, blinking her eyes quickly like a classroom dunce faced with a hard question. ‘Well what are you doing out here then?’ she growled. ‘Don’t go telling me that the Depression has hit the Sunningdale Estate!’ Then her face suddenly softened in to a broad grin and her voice became low and gravelly. ‘Come in, my dear.’
There was only one room at the front of the cottage and a door leading to what appeared to be a bedroom at the back. From what I could gather, the room was supposed to be a kitchen, but the random assortment of furniture suggested that it was used for anything and everything. At one end was a fireplace, and a couple of chairs round a dining table laden with mounds of green linen. At the other end was a large window, looking out over a dusty yard, a large stone sink and a draining board wedged under the sill. In a recess by the front door there was an old rocking chair and a pot-bellied stove with the grill hanging off at an angle, with a thin grey cat curled round its base in the hope of a fire. The sound of children’s laughter drifted in through the back door, a small face sometimes peeping round the frame.
The woman squeezed behind the table and started to sort the linen. She had seemed large when her face was thrust up to mine but now I saw that she was slight, her collarbones jutting from beneath her tight brown dress.
‘So, you’ve come about my advertisement,’ she wheezed.
‘Advertisement?’ I echoed.
‘Yes, but you don’t look much of a seamstress to me – you’ll have to prove yourself.’ She picked what looked like a green chambermaid’s apron from the pile of linen, holding it flat against her sunken chest so that I could see a large red monogram for the Grand Union Hotel, Oxworth stitched on the front. ‘I can only pay you for one day a week: Thursdays. And I’ve only got the one machine – I get to use that, but there’s an embroidered part’ – she pointed at one of the mounds on the table – ‘needs doing by hand. Think you can cope with all those?’ She gave me a hard look.
‘I’m sorry,’ I began, ‘but there’s been a mistake. I was following a little boy and I seem to have got myself lo—’ Then I saw her – the little girl from the lido. She was lingering behind the doorframe, watching us through the gap. She wore a short grey pinafore, her exposed limbs twig-like, with no difference between calf and thigh. Her hair was fair and fine, the kind of custard yellow you only get in children, before it is muddied by age. Her eyes were bright, the birthmark on her left cheek like a rain of red tears.
I t
ook a little step towards her but stopped myself quickly. What if she recognised me from the lido? What if she ran away again? I wanted to go to her. I wanted to speak to her. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to tell her everything. I--
‘Are you all right, Mrs Marks?’ said the woman. ‘You seem to have gone pale. If you want to change your mind…’
‘No!’ I said quickly, breaking my gaze from the girl. ‘Everything’s fine.’
‘Good!’ The woman rubbed her hands. ‘Seeing as you are here, you all right to start today?’
*
We stood together at one end of the dining table, a mound of green service aprons between us. The woman sat down heavily in an old basket chair, pushed aside the aprons to reveal a large Singer sewing machine and immediately started bunching swathes of green fabric behind the presser foot. I perched opposite and took up a needle and the top apron from the pile she had pointed to. Soon the room was filled with the clatter of the sewing machine.
The woman talked constantly, never breaking to look up from the machine, her words racing along with the rattle of the mechanism. Her voice was hoarse, peppered with screeches of laughter, as she amused herself with her own jokes. She said her name was Maud Brown. She took in work from a company called Walker’s Fine Garments that had a big clothing factory in Oxworth, right up in London, but had a lot of ladies working from home. She could do more than most because her nephew lived near the factory and owned a delivery van which meant he could deliver work all the way out to her in the country. She had five children, she said proudly; four boys and a girl. Andy was the eldest at fourteen down to Henry, almost eight years old, but a simpleton and practically a mute, she added, as if the punchline to a joke. I guessed Henry must have been the boy who had led me to the cottage, the one with the flat cap. She had a man – I noted that she did not say husband – called Clarence. One who she hardly ever saw because he held down several jobs – a bit of this and that, she said; helped up at the farm, fixed tractors, dug roads, that sort of thing.
The Liar Page 4
