‘It looks like she’s alone, although she swears otherwise. Says there’s a husband, no a “partner”, how uncouth! But whoever he is, there wasn’t much sign of him. No, that poor woman is struggling to look after five children on her own, I’d say. The little vermin were running about everywhere. The place was in a terrible state. Old cat, thin as a rake, and the rocking horse – the one we used to have – with its tail pulled out. A bit worse for wear from what I could see. Piles of needlework all over the place and red workmen’s gloves all dried up in buckets. It was like a workshop, yes, like a backstreet sweatshop – hmmph.’ He nodded to himself as if pleased with his summation.
‘Did you see her?’ I said quickly.
‘What?’
‘Did you see the girl?
‘Girl?’
‘Yes, a girl with a birthmark on her cheek.’
‘No, I didn’t see any girl.’ There was a silence and we stared at each other but his expression didn’t change. Then he turned back to his meal. ‘How about green?’
‘Green?’
‘For the box room. I don’t think it suits those childish pastel colours and we can paint over the sheep.’
‘The box room?’ I said. ‘Are you talking about the nursery?’
‘Yes, well,’ he muttered, ‘we can hardly call it that any more, can we? After all, it never really—‘
‘All right, then.’ I nodded wearily.
‘I’m sure Mr Tuttle can find a use for the crib – we’ll make a gift of it. It will make good money sold on.’
‘The woman with TB,’ I said. ‘Mrs. Brown, What will happen to her?’
He shrugged. ‘Well her fate lies in the tests, although I’m sure they’ll be positive. There’s not much doubt when you’re coughing up blood. An impoverished woman in her situation will probably end up in the public sanatorium at Meadowfield. But there’s no issue of quarantine for the moment – she’s pretty isolated up there, plenty of fresh air too. Her children don’t seem to stray too far and they need her at home. There are new treatments of course, surgical procedures, it was a bit of a speciality of mine when I was on the pulmonary ward at Oxworth General. Quite fascinating actually, involves collapsing the lungs.’
I shuddered.
‘The prognosis is bleak though, for someone in her situation. She’s probably better off at home actually, the institutions for the very poor aren’t up to much. I would be doing her a favour leaving her where she is,’ then he added, ‘and saving on some paperwork.’
‘What about chlorodyne?’ I said. ‘My mother used to say that it had helped her aunt when she had consumption.’
He laughed. ‘Victorian marketing, I’m afraid, just the kind of thing I would expect to fool country people—’
‘You use it,’ I said.
He tilted his head, so the light from the window reflected in his spectacles. ‘Chlorodyne is just a mix of sedative and opiates. It can help for an old wound such as mine, or it can give brief relief, but it is no cure for TB. Some make it through, but the odds aren’t good.’
I chewed my food slowly, forcing down each mouthful. George was talking about the Great War now and his time at Amiens. How infections would break out in the field hospitals due to the lack of French hygiene. I nodded and tried to look interested but I saw only the movement of his lips. I remembered how I had suffered when my parents died, but I had been eighteen, a woman, with options and a way out. Ruby was still so young to be left without the woman who had raised her, motherless. There was Clarence, maybe, but this time I found that I could not imagine the farm labourer with the muscled body and the blackened skin, and all that I could picture was the empty rocking chair.
‘It will be so hard for the poor lamb,’ I said absent-mindedly.
‘Mrs Brown?’ said George. ‘Well you seem to be acquainted with the family, maybe you can offer some support.’
I stared at him in disbelief. Could it be that he had not seen Ruby’s face on the day of the garden party? Did he not realize that I had found the girl that I had drawn on the leaflets he confiscated, the one that I had been searching for, our daughter. Maybe the birthmark had not been visible from the window, when he had peeped through the curtains and watched her carry away the rocking horse. And could it be that he hadn’t recognized Henry either? That he failed to remember the little boy who had brought my leaflet to the house, the child he had chased from our front door all those weeks ago.
‘Mmm’ I said, trying to sound non-committal, but thoughts churned in my head.
George turned back to his meal, and to his memories of the war: gruesome stories of infected shrapnel wounds and burns from mustard gas; of men with severed limbs and hospital ships full of maimed Tommies; of feet soaked so long in mud that the flesh peeled away when the boots were removed; of outbreaks of meningitis, rubella, influenza, diphtheria, dysentery, typhoid, trench fever, gangrene, measles and the final indignity of rigor mortis.
‘I think I will bake the poor woman a cake,’ I said at last.
George looked up. ‘A cake? No, I cannot allow it. I won’t have you exposed to that unsanitary environment, not with all the filth and disease and—‘
‘I won’t deliver it myself,’ I said quickly. ‘I promise.’
‘Well that’s different, then.’ I felt his hand, cold on my knee. ‘In fact, this is wonderful, darling; parties, redecoration, and now charity – all good ways to speed recovery! I thought I’d lost you there for a while but the prognosis is much better now.’ He jabbed his knife in the air. ‘Excellent stuff – no more chasing ghosts!’
I nodded and smiled. ‘No more ghosts.’
21
I thought it best to wait until Thursday before I returned to Rose Cottage. It was for the best, I thought – that way rain that was forecast for the start of the week would have cleared and Maud would be struggling with her new delivery of needlework, if news of her illness had not already reached her nephew in Oxworth. If Maud was as bad as George had described, then she might even be pleased to see me and be glad of some help with the children. This plan would give me a whole four days to plan a cake for the family – something that Ruby would like but not something that a woman like Maud could easily afford, something that would show Ruby how things should be. I wrote out a list of the finest flour, plumpest fruit, whitest sugar then, struck by inspiration, ran into the dining room as if my idea would evaporate if I waited.
The vase of violets was still on the table. The stems were a little wilted but the petals still broad enough to flatten out and crystallize with sugar syrup and a pastry brush. I knew that Maud would never go to such care as to top a cake with crystallized violets. She would not have the time and, having never seen the grand cakes at the Trocadero or Lyon’s Corner House, the idea would never have entered her head. I laughed with glee at my cleverness but the chuckle caught in my throat when I remembered that Maud might be dying and that Ruby would be in turmoil about losing the woman she saw as her mother. It was only then that I realized that any cake, no matter how fancy, would do little to ease her woes.
I could not bear to think of Ruby’s sadness. I wanted to hold her and comfort her and make her happy again, just like I had done on the day we sat together on the hill, the day that she had told me her dream of becoming a grand Missensham lady with a grey mare. But that had just been one day and now that day was just a memory. If only memories could be preserved like violets. My memories from the hill were fresh but others would wilt and die. I closed my eyes and tried hard to remember the good times, but I found that even my memories of 1925 were fading; even they could not be preserved…
*
‘I love Wednesdays,’ said Peter, buttoning his shirt.
Above us, tangles of beech twigs twisted out across the blue. I laughed and wriggled my shoulder into his armpit, resting my head on the hard muscle. He reached into his jacket and took out a cigarette, throwing the case down beside him. A match flared inside his fist. Somewhere, a train rattled down the
track. Silver glinted in the grass and I leant over him and picked up the cigarette case.
‘Ah, so I’m not your only lady friend!’ I said.
‘What?’
I turned the case over in my hands. It was a Victorian design, the silver etched with ornate urns and trailing vines. ‘I see that your taste is for older ladies!’
A gust of smoke wafted over the sky. He passed the cigarette to me. ‘It’s my mother’s. I borrow it sometimes.’
‘Aha!’ I said. ‘So we know that the mystery man has a mother. He wasn’t found in a cabbage patch.’
‘I think I can admit to that much,’ he said.
I rolled onto my side, pressing the silver case into his chest. ‘A man who carries this close to his heart must be close to his mother,’ I whispered dramatically.
‘Oh, I am,’ he said. ‘I tell her everything.’ His voice was steady, his mouth relaxed with not even the hint of a smile.
‘Do you tell her about me?’
‘Like I said, everything.’
I punched his shoulder. ‘You are such a bastard,’ I said. ‘I never know when you are telling the truth.’
He looked at me but his eyes were hard.
‘All right, I give up,’ I said. ‘You will always be a mystery.’
He opened his mouth slightly.
‘Well?’
‘I don’t like to talk about my family much. I am close to my mother but the others are a bad lot…’ He sighed slowly, his eyes fixed on the sky.
‘Go on.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You win. I will tell you all about myself, everything.’
I passed the cigarette back to him. ‘I’m listening.’
‘My name is Peter,’ he said, the smile returning at last. ‘And I am a businessman. I own my own company of tilers, master craftsmen, who tile waiting rooms and ticket offices.’
‘All right,’ I laughed. ‘I will play along - Are these tilers any good?’
‘The best,’ he said. ‘Take the Orient Express and you can see their handiwork – all the way from the Paris to the Bosporus and the Trans-Siberian Express too, Leningrad to Peking, but their work can also be seen by the common customers of Missensham Station.’
‘Fancy!’
‘I have a big red motor car and a house in Sunningdale… No, where was that place you wanted to go? The one where you have to get the boat train—’
‘Le Touquet?’
‘—in Le Touquet. And Charlie Chaplin and Louise Brooks pop round for cocktails. I’m not able to keep them away.’
‘Oh really!’ I said.
‘Well not now maybe, but one day. That’s who I will be one day.’
I laughed. ‘Not one day soon, I don’t think. But maybe when you are really old – maybe when you are thirty!’
‘Well maybe then,’ he said. ‘And what will the divine Miss Violet Garbo be doing when she is thirty?’
I slumped back, letting my head loll on the grass. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I watched the sparks circle the cigarette, burning it down into a worm of ash. ‘My family’s business had to be sold for very little,’ I said slowly, ‘so I won’t have that. Dressmaking was my only skill and no shop or office in town would employ a married lady. My husband spends all his time working at the hospital and has no interest in what I do. I suppose I’ll be just like I am now… only fatter and with more wrinkles.’
He glanced at me, a flash of blue under his lashes, but his mouth was grim, his lips puckered round the cigarette. ‘Well I suppose you are right, Violet,’ he said, his voice suddenly hard. ‘You don’t have much to aspire to. You already have your house on the Sunningdale Estate and your motorcar and a husband too. Yet all that isn’t that enough for you, is it?’
Above me the branches twisted, thinner and thinner into little twigs. I could feel his eyes on me but I didn’t reply.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose it is. No lady from the Sunningdale Estate who had everything that she wanted would go around fucking a labourer she just met.’ He was smoking mechanically, his chest heaving, his lips tight around the stub. Above me the branches shivered and then dissolved into tears, but I sniffed them back.
This was the sixth Wednesday I had spent in the field with Peter; the sixth time we had been together and we had reached it too quickly. One can’t be intimate so many times with another person, not if deep down you know you can’t possess them, and especially if each time you see them you feel closer. I had felt the tension with Peter growing until this point. Little annoyances at first: suspicions when he was ten minutes late; frustration when he laughed off my invitations to dine together in the city; paranoia that his compliments were fewer than last time. Then came my questions about his life, his family, disguised as jokes to start with but the humour draining when each attempt failed to get a serious response. Then there were my dreams, impossible dreams discussed like serious plans, musings which I would run through while I lay in the grass detailing my hopes of escaping to London or Brighton or Le Touquet while I would monitor his responses for acknowledgment or enthusiasm, listening to his answers and hoping that they contained a ‘we’ or ‘us’.
But I could not go on like this forever, not when the days had become weeks and then months, not when our meetings had become the only way for me to break the tension that had built up over the week, when I could release it with lust and intimacy, only for it to return again once the lonely weekdays dragged on and I returned to a boring and passionless existence.
‘Well if you must know, it’s not like I’m fucking anyone else,’ I said, my voice quivering. ‘So I guess that would make me faithful to you. So, as far as you’re concerned, I’m not such a bad person.’
He turned his head, his eyebrows raised.
I sighed and wiped my cheeks. ‘My husband and I… we don’t do it, not generally speaking,’ I said. ‘I… I mean, we did do it once, in Brighton, but it’s not something that we do any more.’
He watched me for a long time, but there was no hardness in his stare. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. ‘I know things aren’t working between you and your husband but it doesn’t stop me from being jealous. He has you in ways that I don’t.’ Then he took the cigarette from his mouth and offered it to me.
I waved it away.
‘Oh shit, Emma!’
He sank back into the grass and rested his palm on his forehead. His face became still as if he was no longer aware of the sky or the branches or me as I watched him. Then his eyes closed tight, the skin pinched at the corners as if reminded of some lingering pain. I put my hand on his chest but he did not move.
‘Peter?’ I whispered, but he said nothing. He was not in the field any more. He was in some dark place. I watched my hand rise and fall with his chest then I lay back next to him. Above us the boughs circled gently in a gust of wind and a cloud dissolved into wisps. Violets, smaller now, but still in the hedgerows, watched us like the bright eyes of little creatures. Somewhere, far from us, a train rattled down the track – Missensham, Oxworth, Waterloo, Dover, Calais, Le Touquet: bank clerks, secretaries, travellers, adventurers, bathers, sea nymphs and mermaids.
Then he sat up suddenly. ‘What was I thinking?’ He flicked the cigarette away. ‘I’m sorry, Emma, really I am.’ He leant over me and I felt his hand cup my breast. ‘Come on, turn over again, we may not have each other all the time but we can still make the most of what he do have.
22
That morning I knew something was different; that change that all creatures can sense when the wind brings the first chill of autumn. The hedgerows on the Evesbridge Lane had faded to grey and the hard furrows underfoot had softened to mud. Autumn seemed to become harsher the further I walked from Little Willow, the air colder and the ground wetter.
I had got up early that morning, the smell of the evening’s baking wafting through the house with the morning light. When George caught me rummaging in the cupboard for a basket and an overcoat, he had flown into a panic, forbidding m
e to enter a quarantine area. I had only managed to leave the house by promising that I would leave the cake on the cottage doorstep and cover my face if I so much as glimpsed a farmhand on the lane.
As I rounded the bend by the old, twisted oak, I saw Rose Cottage for the first time in weeks. It seemed smaller than I had remembered, the thatch heavy with rain and the lime walls, once so bright, now muffled by a haze of drizzle. An old woman was pushing a bicycle out from the yard, the tyres shearing soft furrows into the mud. She was a plump woman with a round face, her bunched skirts and heavy cape making her an ungainly figure as she stepped cautiously over the puddles. I was sure that I recognised her face, although I could not think from where, so I smiled and nodded, but the woman did not acknowledge me and just set her mouth grimly, her eyes fixed in front of her as if concentrating on her balance. I knocked on the door, then covered my face with a handkerchief as I entered.
The kitchen was dark, the windows streaked with rain. As with every Thursday, a large pile of fabric covered the table but, instead of whirring, the Singer lay idle as if stopped mid stitch. Maud was slouched in the basket chair, her body swaddled in an old grey blanket that was tucked under her chin. She lifted her head and stared at me with eyes like broken egg whites and tried to prop herself up on the arm of the chair, her wrist shuddering with the effort.
‘Yes?’
I lowered the handkerchief just long enough to show my face.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she sounded disappointed.
‘I heard about… I thought I would come to see if there is anything that I can do to help.’
‘Oh, so it was your George was it? The doctor that came to see me? I thought as much, the bald head and the awkward manner and the funny little glasses, just how you described him.’
‘I brought a cake,’ – I glanced round – ‘for the children, they must be hungry.’ But seeing nobody else, I added, ‘And for you, to keep your strength up.’
‘If you’ve come to see Ruby, she ain’t here – they’ve all gone up over to Evesbridge to play in the barns.’
The Liar Page 13
