by Milly Adams
Verity whispered, because she was so busy trying to listen for buzzing over the sirens that were starting up and the ack-ack guns, ‘Stop going on. They’ll never stop until we are at the gates of Berlin and knocking on Hitler’s door with a noose. And don’t talk to me about forgiveness, Sylvia.’
More RAF fighters were heading out to bring down the rockets. The barrage balloons looked as though they were sagging. In the distance they could hear ack-ack.
‘We could always find a shelter, or you could, while I go on,’ Verity said. ‘You’re only here because of me.’
The ARP warden shouted, ‘Get to a shelter.’
The other two yelled back to the warden, one after another, ‘We haven’t time.’ ‘Things to do.’
They walked on, but no more doodlebugs came over and they straightened up, still walking arm-in-arm, trying to chat and even laugh, as others were doing around them as they emerged from shelters, or had ignored them in the first place. The clouds seemed lower, the breeze cooler, though it carried the smell of burning. The tenements took what light there was, and loomed, dark, and childless, because the evacuation programme had begun, again.
‘Left and then right,’ Verity said, folding up the map. ‘Let’s see if the Rivers family – my family – still live here.’
None of them spoke as they followed her directions and headed for number twelve. The house on the corner of the terrace had been hit, but rosebay willowherb was growing in the ruins, so it was an old Blitz wound. The rest of the terrace was untouched. A pack of dogs were snarling at one another, then disappeared down an alley. A bare-footed child in pants and vest was running along with some older children. ‘They should have been evacuated,’ muttered Sylvia.
A chair stood to the left of the doorway of number twelve. Verity moved to stand just in front of her friends and knocked on the door, barely able to breathe as they waited.
A man of about sixty opened the door. He was wearing a dirty vest and had tattoos on his arms. His trousers were filthy, held up by braces. His two top fly-buttons were undone. A roll-up hung from his bottom lip. ‘Whaddya want?’ he said.
‘Mr Rivers?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘I’m Jenny’s daughter, Verity Cl—’ She stopped. Who was she? ‘Jenny’s daughter,’ she repeated.
He peered at her, several days’ stubble on his chin. ‘Better come in then.’ His cigarette wobbled. He turned and walked down the hall. They followed. It smelled of … dirt, but not the boaters’ dirt, just years of grease and grime.
He stood in the kitchen, leaning back against the sink in which dirty dishes were piled, dishes that also spilled onto the draining board. On the Formica table several cigarettes had been stubbed out on a dinner plate, smeared with the echo of fried egg, or something. They stood. He crossed his arms. ‘Jenny’s kid, eh? That makes me yer granddaddy. Well, well. Yer goin’ to see us right, are yer?’
‘See you right?’ Verity queried, searching this man’s face for a resemblance to the woman in the photograph. It wasn’t there. He was her grandfather, and he was awful.
‘Too bloody right,’ he grunted, his cigarette moving as he talked, the ash growing longer, just as Gladys’s did, although she was nice. He went on, ‘Jenny said she ’ad a plan, was gonna to marry His Nibs by ’aving a nipper. He was buggered if he were going ter play ball, but she sticks in and does alrighty, then the silly bitch ups and dies. So, as I says, yer going to see us right?’
‘Plan?’ Verity said, moving nearer.
He laughed, belched and the smell of stale beer was overpowering. She stepped back, into Polly, who gripped her waist. He said, ‘’Ow else do the likes of us get on in the world? Full of suchlike plans, she were, silly cow. But as I said, she upped and died before she could swing it. Got something for us, have you – your old granddaddy an’ all – cos we’re family? And yer done all right fer yerself, with them daft buggers.’ He held out his hand.
Polly pushed Verity to one side and stepped forward. ‘What have you got for us?’
He stared. ‘Whaddya mean?’
‘What have you got left of your daughter’s?’
Sylvia took a step forward, too. ‘Then we’ll see what we have got for you. And shame on your soul, for selling your daughter’s memory.’
The man’s mouth dropped open, his cigarette falling onto the worn and torn lino. He ground it in with his boot. ‘Never sure she were mine. The missus put herself about a bit, and she’s long gone.’
A deal was something he seemed to understand, though, and he stared at them as if calculating some sort of sum. Verity recognised the look; it was in any darts team’s eyes as they worked out the best throw.
Finally he nodded. ‘We’ll talk about it when you ’ave a look at what I got.’ He rooted about under the sink and pulled out an old rusted OXO tin. He levered off the lid. Inside was a pencil, a pen and a small notebook. ‘Reckon a tenner’ll do it.’
Verity started to dig in her pockets, but Sylvia took a step closer to the man and gripped the OXO tin. ‘You’ll take a fiver, and that’s it.’ She yanked the OXO tin from his hand, leaving him with the lid. She passed the tin to Polly, with a jerk of her head. Polly nodded, turned and left.
Verity was appalled, and confused. ‘Money,’ insisted Sylvia. Verity dug into her pocket and Sylvia stepped back, then checked her own pockets, as Mr Rivers looked from Sylvia to the lid.
‘Oh dear,’ said Sylvia. ‘We only seem to have three pounds between us. Well, that’ll just have to do.’ She passed over the notes and said quietly – pressing so close, too close, to the man, Verity thought, frightened for her, for them both – ‘You can leave now, Verity. I am right behind you.’
Verity backed to the kitchen door, then waited. ‘I’m not going without you. And I have to ask something important. Mr Rivers, did your daughter, my mother, wear camellia perfume?’
He looked from Sylvia to Verity. ‘Yer what? If she wore anything, it were lavender water, like her ma. Smart girl, Jenny were. Knew what she wanted. Yer look a bit like her, I reckon. Yer could do well, an’ all, if yer got out o’ them clothes and tarted yerself up. Or yer could do well when the men get back, any’ow.’
Sylvia put up her hand and laid it on the man’s chest. ‘You will not move from here, you will not follow us.’
He lifted his arm, his hand fisted.
Sylvia kicked him hard, her boot connecting with his shin. ‘I warned you,’ she said as he yelled, dropping the money. ‘You’d better pick that up,’ she instructed as she backed from him, then walked swiftly in Verity’s wake.
Verity thought she’d been trembling before, but now she was shaking all over, and her legs were jelly as she rushed through the hall to stand in the street, looking at Polly, who was as shocked as she was. Sylvia stepped from the house onto the street, slamming the door, and shouted, ‘What are you doing, standing about? Get a move on, let’s get out of here.’
They ran, crunching over glass, plaster, bricks, faster and faster, with Polly clutching the tin. On the street corner a woman stopped them. ‘You need to keep clear of that Rivers beggar. He’s not like the rest of us. On the take, he is. Well, the world is, but not like ’im. Nasty lot, though there’s only ’im left now.’
They tore on, running over and around the debris, heedless of the sirens and the ack-ack until the ARP warden blew his whistle and yelled, ‘Head for a shelter.’
Sylvia shouted, ‘We are, we’ll get down the Underground.’ At last they reached the Underground station and tore down the steps. It was four in the afternoon, and some inhabitants were already bagging their pitch on the platform, clearly sleeping there overnight, as they had in the Blitz. The girls stood close together, panting, looking at the train lines. Just looking and then turning to check behind. Had he followed?
At last they heard a rumble, felt the movement of air and a crowded train arrived. They pushed their way on. As the train started and they stood, squashed together, the trembling and shaking rea
lly took over and Verity braced herself for the darkness, water, blood. But none came. She breathed deeply and stared at Sylvia, pressing hard into her. The man behind was almost asleep on his feet. Verity said, ‘Thank you. How on earth … ?’
‘I was brought up in an orphanage, but did you think, because it was run by nuns, that we sat drinking tea with our little fingers stuck out? We learned to survive, probably just like you two.’
Verity snatched a look at Polly, who looked as ashamed as she felt. ‘No, not like us; we’ve been spoiled, privileged, safe.’
That evening, safely home and sitting in the Marigold having eaten spam fritters, the other two suggested that they leave Verity in peace to read the notebook.
‘I’d rather you stayed,’ she said. She scanned her mother’s childish handwriting and read out the bits that mattered. ‘She talks of my father – a fool, she says, and I’m paraphrasing this. Apparently Jenny taught herself to read and write, so that she could move on up, but decided instead to do that the easy way. Her mother said she was sitting on a fortune, so Jenny should use what she needed to use. She says that my father had so much, and she “had got nothing and he were soft and easy. He liked it when I said nice things. Men are fools, and that woman can’t see what’s under her nose.”’ Verity looked at her friends, shaking her head.
Polly said, ‘Don’t go on. It’ll upset you.’
Sylvia shook her head. ‘She should. It will show her the truth.’
Verity read on silently for a moment, then she read aloud again:
‘Like mum said, when his bloody lordship weren’t going to chuck the missus out: get yourself up the duff and kick up a fuss, saying you’ll make it known he’s the father. He’ll pay yer off or turf Lady Muck out, then you can have a tidy pile either way. Ma wanted to share the money, to get away from the old man. But his bleeding lordship wouldn’t turf her bloody ladyship out, and he wouldn’t pay me off. She, that bloody missus, said NO. She said I wouldn’t take care of the brat. Wouldn’t bring it up nice. She said she was frightened for it. She said they’d pay me to stay here, with the baby. All I had to do was to look after it and everyone would be kind to me, no matter what had gone on. Like some sort of bloody saint, she were. Couldn’t ’ave none of her own, I reckon. She said she could, but wouldn’t, cos the brat must have her full attention.’
Verity looked up, leafed through the notebook and read on. It was like a novel, but it was written by her mother – her mother. She stared at the badly formed letters and thought of the house that Jenny Rivers had known; of the father she had lived with. Why wouldn’t she think this way? And she was right: Lord Henry Clement was a bloody fool. She read on:
‘I had the little house by the stables. All smartened it were. Bloody boring, cos I had no duties, I was a sort of Lady Muck too. I walked the nipper in a pram they bought. I left her outside, cos who wants to hear a brat crying? How were I to know it would rain again. She’d been left before, and the wet didn’t hurt her none. Should have heard the bloody fuss. That Rogers hates me, so do the cook. They said I weren’t looking after her. That Lady Muck showed me how to bath her, but I don’t want to know how; so she does it if I let her, but she nods and says I have the right to say if she can. That’s what she says: you have to say I can, she says, because you are her mother – all posh like, trying to be kind. He don’t even look at me, but he likes the kid.’
Verity had come to blank pages. She looked up. The other two were staring at her, shocked. Verity said, ‘She stopped there.’
Sylvia took the book and flicked through. ‘No, look, there’s this scribble. She’s put a date: 1926. You’re twenty now, so you must have been two. Have you read enough? Shall we put it away?’
Polly said, ‘It’s awful, and sad; and oh, again, just awful. What on earth was she thinking? What were any of them thinking?’
Sylvia handed the book back. ‘The only one thinking with their heart was poor, poor Lady Clement. Her concern was for you, Verity, and to some extent Jenny, and even your father. For the family, I suppose. Perhaps for what people would think, but I don’t think so. I think she cared.’
Verity put up her hand. ‘Let me read this:
So I’m goin, when they’re not here. I’m taking the silver and what I can find, and I’m going. But Mum says I have to get rid of this chest first, cos I’ll need me energy to get set up again, even with what I can take. But I want a man of me own, and I don’t want a kid, not now, so they can ’ave her and good luck with it. I had a plan, but it’s all gone wrong.’
*
They went the next day to tell Ted the orders would have to wait, just for one day, then caught the train to Sherborne. They took a taxi from the station this time and arrived with a rattle of gravel at the front door, at the time Verity had insisted upon in the telegram she had sent. The emergency kitty paid, and it tipped the taxi driver, too. Verity mounted the steps beneath the portico, with the girls some paces behind.
Her confusion was still there, still chaotic, still exhausting. She ran through the hall, over the silk carpet – what did she care about that? She burst into the sitting room, where her father stood at the fireplace and her mother sat on the sofa, as always. ‘Come in,’ Verity called to the girls.
They refused. ‘No, this is between you and your parents.’
Verity barely heard them, but left the door open and sat on the sofa opposite the woman she had thought of as her mother. She didn’t look at either of them, but said, ‘I have been to Jenny Rivers’s home. I have spoken to her father, I have read her diary. It’s like some appalling, sad mess of a story.’ She looked at her mother, and then at her father, to whom she said, ‘How dare you do that to your wife? How could you be such a fool? Jenny was also a fool, with idiotic plans, but you …’ She shook with rage. ‘You were older, her employer, in a position of privilege. Yes, Jenny plotted, but oh, how easily you joined in.’ She handed him the notebook. ‘Stop looking so puzzled – read this.’
He did so, flicking over the pages, his colour rising. He read to the end and slapped the notebook shut.
Staring at it and nothing else, Verity ordered, ‘Now pass it to your wife.’
Lady Clement took the notebook. She began to read, looked up at Verity, her gaze so sad, and then she read on.
Verity said to her father. ‘Were you insane, or just cruel?’
He said nothing, just turned his cigarette case over and over on the mantelpiece. Then he muttered, ‘Yes, I was – insane, I think. No excuse, except the war. It was so dark, so bad, so many dead and injured. I seemed lost. I kept feeling strange, as though I was back there. It was as though Jenny was another place. Away from everything – a sort of pause in the hell. She was kind.’
Verity thought of the freezing cut, and the feelings that had come over her, the darkness. But he had a wife, one to whom he should have turned. ‘And your wife wasn’t kind?’
Her father looked at Verity, and then at his wife. ‘She was – and is – strong, and my equal, and very, very kind. But …’ It was as though he was thinking aloud, struggling for words, even fighting for thoughts. ‘I was a fool, you’re right; insane, and cruel. And I fear I have been so frightened of facing it that I have continued to be so. It is I who held on to the letters your mother wrote to you, fearing that at last she would tell the truth. She has long felt you deserved to know and that, if we told you, perhaps we could stand between you and the pain of the knowledge.’
‘Oh, Henry dear,’ her mother said, with such a measure of compassion that Verity was astonished.
She turned to the woman she had known as her mother. ‘How could you let him do this to you? What about me?’ she wailed. ‘Where was your compassion for me? If you forgave him, stayed with him, loved him, why were you always so angry with me? It wasn’t my fault that Jenny was my mother. You hurt me in the bath, you slapped me. Why couldn’t you see …?’ Verity pressed her lips together. No, she would not cry. She saw the shock on Lady Clement’s face quickly replace
d by an even deeper sadness.
There was silence as Verity, at last, saw the truth that had been written in the notebook, but which had not registered. Why had it taken so long? What the hell was the matter with her? She leaned forward. ‘Did you once wear camellia-scented perfume?’
Lady Clement rose, her face impassive, but not her eyes. ‘Follow me, if you would.’ Her voice was like tattered thread. She looked at her husband. ‘You, too, if you would be so kind, Henry.’
She walked out into the hall and up the stairs. Sylvia and Polly stayed sitting on the upright chairs, looking stressed and pale beneath their boaters’ weather-beaten tan. Verity and her father followed Lady Clement into her bedroom, adjoining his. She led them to the dressing table, on which were several perfume bottles. None were of camellia scent. She opened a drawer and pointed. There lay a perfume bottle, on a baby’s cardigan. Verity reached in and took both, holding them close to her face, smelling camellia, just like the shrub that old Matthews had grown.
She gripped them so tightly it hurt. She looked in the mirror. Lady Clement stood behind her, her father next to her, not meeting his daughter’s eyes. Verity said, ‘It wasn’t you who slapped me, was it? You were the kind lady. It was my mother who wasn’t.’
Lady Clement nodded. ‘I loved you then, I love you now. I kept these together because I wore camellia-scented perfume at that time and, once Jenny died, wearing it made me feel sad for her. Somehow, though, I couldn’t just throw it away. It seemed like throwing away her existence. I kept the cardigan because Jenny liked it; she thought you looked sweet in it. Oh, Verity, believe me when I tell you that your mother did care. She even chose your name, but she was young and life had been hard, and she had learned the wrong lessons.’ She shut the drawer.
Verity opened it and replaced the perfume and the cardigan. ‘They should stay here,’ she whispered.
Her father moved to stand by the window, as Lady Clement talked to Verity’s reflection. ‘Your father made a mistake, and we couldn’t find a way out. I chose not to have children, for I never wanted you to feel you were not like them. You were a child in need of protection. Therefore when your mother died, we hid the secret. But it just grew bigger, and so too did my fear that every time you were rebellious you were turning into Jenny and, if so, would I be able to protect you against yourself? Then came Tom Brown, and I feared that he was like Jenny had been, and I couldn’t bear either the hurt for you or a resurrection of the hurt that I endured. I behaved badly. And yes, I was cruel. You must know by now that Tom would not take a penny. But I was out of control, fearful, angry, worried …’
