Diary of an Ordinary Woman

by Margaret Forster

  3 September

  Terrible day, from every point of view. Torrential rain and a howling wind so that we were soaked before we’d checked the first half dozen bed-and-breakfast places. The rain was the sort that stings, and it drove against us with such force, coming straight off the sea. My umbrella was blown inside out and I had to abandon it. Every time we rang a doorbell, and the door was reluctantly opened, we presented such a wretched picture and were given short shrift. The photograph of Grace is beginning to look dog-eared, especially after it was twice dropped on a wet doorstep. It was all so depressing and also pointless, I felt sure. I tried to say so at lunch-time but Will grew quite fierce and insisted there was nothing else we could do. To my alarm, he started worrying aloud about what to tell Claudia, who comes back with her friend’s family the day after tomorrow. He is right, of course. Claudia will have to be told something, and she will take it very hard. Then Will asked if I would be there when she arrived home and do the telling. He says it would be better coming from me: he would be unable to keep his fears out of his expression and voice. I can see that this is true, but all the same I don’t want to be the bearer of such tidings. Will says I have known Claudia since she was 4 and have a better understanding of her. I don’t think that is correct. I don’t think anyone except Grace is close to Claudia. She is so reserved, almost inscrutable, and I am never at ease with her. But I suppose I will have to do what Will asks. At any rate, I am going home tomorrow even if he stays. I’ve agreed to go to his house to relieve Eileen a little, though it isn’t something I have much enthusiasm for. Sam is sweet but he is exhausting and I feel I’ve done all that, done the looking after small children. The thought of school starting again in three days’ time dismays me – I will not be able to concentrate on anything if Grace has not returned.

  4 September

  Left Dover early afternoon, by train, leaving Will to continue his pathetic search. He suggested that I drove Grace’s car but I didn’t feel up to it. More than that, I felt superstitious about taking over her car – ridiculous, but a strong feeling that it would bring bad luck. Went to my own home first and had a bath and changed my clothes, then drove over to Will’s place where Eileen was very glad to see me. There were no messages. She, too, is concerned about the return of Claudia tomorrow, telling me that the girl had taken some persuasion to go on holiday with her friend – the first real friend she’s made – because she’s never left her mother before, not even for a night. Grace has apparently tried to persuade her to accept invitations, not that there have been more than a couple, but she had never agreed until now. I remembered that when Grace and Will married they didn’t have a honeymoon but went to Sardinia later with Claudia. How odd. But then, this being the case, isn’t it surely a sign that Grace will return for Claudia? If, as Eileen says, she urged Claudia to make the huge step of going away without her wouldn’t part of her persuasion have been that she’d be right here when she returned? Grace knows better than anyone her daughter’s dependency on her and would surely never let her down. But on the other hand, maybe it shows that Will is correct to believe Grace has had some kind of massive breakdown – in her right mind, she wouldn’t let Claudia return to find her missing. Eileen and I went over all this then I insisted she had a day off, well, an evening, and she phoned a friend and went out about six o’clock, after she’d put Sam to bed (thank heaven).

  This left me alone in the house, except for the sleeping baby, and I was irresistibly drawn to Grace’s sewing-room and those damned letters. I took the whole drawer out and only then saw that it was twice the length I’d realised – pulling it out that first time I’d taken the thick piece of wood at the back to be the end of the drawer but it isn’t. The drawer runs under the whole length of the table and is divided into two compartments. There were more letters in the back section. All in French. All from Henri. The date of the last one was two days before Grace disappeared. I know I will have to tell Will. Even before I’d hurriedly read them, trying simply to get the general sense, I knew that. I read the most recent letter, the crucial one, carefully, though with no dictionary to hand I made a poor job of it. So far as I can make out, Henri has discovered where Grace works. He says he has never given up his search and his love for her. He says ten years is too long to punish him and he doesn’t know why she has made him suffer when nothing that happened was his fault: it was the war. He asks for one meeting with her, just one chance to see her beautiful face again, surely she can grant him that. Then I think the tone changes, his words sound threatening. He writes that he knows the truth about the child and one day she will need to know and he hopes he will not have to be the one to tell her. So it seems that here in these letters is some kind of explanation, or the beginnings of one, for why Grace left so abruptly. Did she go to meet Henri? Or to evade him? I can’t work out what she is so frightened of, but maybe I am missing vital clues. The postmarks on the letters show them to have been sent very regularly since 1946. I am certain no letters arrived while Grace and I were living together in that cottage in Blockley. The first arrived there, if it was the first, after I’d returned with the twins to London. And she has kept his letters, as though they are precious or at least significant. I will have to tell Will, and perhaps the police. It is all so complicated, so hard to understand, so much is at risk.

  5 September

  Grace arrived home this morning, at ten o’clock, in a taxi.

  6 September

  The events of yesterday were so dramatic that I couldn’t think about describing them, everything had to settle, and I am not sure it has done so even now. Grace came into the house looking pale but quite composed. Eileen and I heard the door open and thought it was Will returning, but there was the quick pitter-patter of high heels on the hall floor and then in came Grace, straight over to Sam’s high-chair in which he was sitting, eating toast. He screamed, Eileen and I exclaimed, Grace picked him up and cuddled him and then she wept a little and used his bib to wipe her face, and then she said would one of us make her some coffee, she’d be grateful. Eileen made it, and we sat in stunned silence, waiting, while she drank it. The waiting went on and on, and finally I could stand it no longer and said, Grace, for heaven’s sake, where on earth have you been, we’ve been terrified . . . Don’t, she said, and, I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Then she asked where Will was and I said he was on his way back from Dover where he and I had spent two days searching for her after her car was found. She closed her eyes and groaned. Yes, I said, the car, you can imagine what we feared. She said she was sorry, and then asked Eileen if she’d put Sam down for his nap, but of course the baby wouldn’t be parted from her and she herself had to go off with Eileen to settle him. It seemed ages till she came back and I was beginning to feel angry with her and working myself up into a great state of indignation now that the relief of seeing her back, apparently unharmed, had passed. At last she came into the kitchen again, without Eileen, and said she didn’t know where to start, she didn’t know how to explain, something had just come over her and she’d had to get away and she knew it was inexcusable to have gone off like that. She thought maybe she’d had a breakdown – she couldn’t even remember driving to Dover, or leaving her car there – she would go to the doctor’s. On and on, and all of it lies. I let her ramble on, watching her wander about her own kitchen fiddling with things, and then I’d had enough. What about those letters, I said. What letters? was all she would say. The ones in your sewing-table drawer, from Henri, I insisted. Who is Henri? I asked her, and told her not to lie. It was strange how afraid I felt, asking that question, demanding an answer, and yet dreading what I thought could be the only possible reply. What a mess this is, I kept thinking, what a mess, how many lives are spoiled – because, of course, I assumed she must love this Henri and had gone to him and now her whole life was going to be turned upside down. Was she now going to leave Will for Henri? He would be devastated. It seemed to me so wicked of Grace to wreck what I’d thought was a happy m
arriage, one I’d envied, and make so unhappy a husband who had made her feel secure, and, worst of all, damage her children’s future. All this was going through my head as I watched her and the tension was unbearable. She told me to sit down. I sat, and glad to, my legs quite weak all of a sudden. I thought she might be going to say that I had had no right to read her letters, but she didn’t. She spoke very quietly, in a composed way which surprised me and made me feel my own voice and manner had been strident – it was as though she were the elder sister and I the younger and the one in the wrong.

  She said Henri was a man she’d known when she went to Paris to work in 1938. They hadn’t lived together ever, but they were in love and she thought that if it had not been for the war they would have eventually married. Then the war came. Paris was occupied. They got separated. Something terrible happened. She had Claudia. Then she came back to England. I knew the rest. She hadn’t forgotten Henri but she never expected to see him again, nor had she wanted to. Nothing that had happened had been his fault but he belonged to the past and she’d wanted to forget she’d ever been in France. He’d written to her after the war and his letter had been sent on and she’d written back, just once, telling him how she felt and that the clock couldn’t be put back. But he wouldn’t accept this. He went on writing. When she left Blockley, his letters had gone on being forwarded for as long as her redirection arrangement worked and after that they had stopped, or perhaps had been returned to him. She’d thought that was the end. But then he’d seen her name in a fashion magazine and had started writing to her through it. She’d asked them not to forward any more letters but by then he’d discovered where she worked and wrote to her there. She’d written back, telling him she was now happily married and asking him to stop writing. He’d agreed, on condition she met him just once. So she had. They’d met in Dover, and he’d driven her to an hotel a few miles away. Afterwards, she hadn’t been able to find her car and realised it had probably been towed away, but she didn’t try to trace it – she was in a hurry to get back for Claudia. She’d come back by train. It was all over. She was very tired. She would tell Will everything. She knew she should have told him before. She knew she’d behaved foolishly. She’d panicked. She should have left some sort of message, she should have made something up. I am writing this in the way she spoke, in a flat, staccato, almost monotone fashion. It took my breath away. There were so many gaps in this unsatisfactory tale that it hardly made sense to me, and yet she seemed to think she’d told me all she needed to. I wanted to press her, but on the other hand there was that same reluctance to do so which I always felt with Grace. ‘Something terrible happened’ was not enough, but if I asked point-blank what this was, I would feel brutal. Grace had never asked me details about my affair with Robert or about our baby and what happened, though I knew Tilda had told her something. She’d always understood that this was my ‘something terrible’ and that I didn’t want to talk about it, ever. So I should respect Grace’s privacy. But all the same, because of her disappearance there were consequences going right back to her ‘something terrible’ which surely couldn’t be kept to herself. What would Will say? How much did he know? I felt I shouldn’t be there when he arrived back. I said I was going home. I said I hoped everything would now be all right. Grace said it would. She saw me to the door. She looked drained, very, very tired and sad and I wanted to embrace her but didn’t. I should have done. Whatever the ins and outs of all this, she is miserable and has been through a hard time, and it is not over yet.

  9 September

  Silence from Grace, and from Will. Not a word. I presume he is back, and Claudia too, and that they have talked and something has been decided. I suppose I feel mildly upset that they have not thought to tell me how things are. Quick enough when they need me – no, no, I mustn’t say that, they are the words of bitterness and I have nothing to be bitter about. It is none of my business what they have said to each other and how things have been resolved. If they have, as I hope.

  10 September

  A note from Will, thanking me for all my help, and hoping to see me soon. That’s all. I tore the note up. So many things I want to know and which are surely askable, such as why did Grace keep Henri’s letters if he meant nothing to her? I feel so intensely irritated not to know. I will ask. I think I am entitled to ask. The next time I see Grace I will ask.

  *

  If Millicent did indeed ever ask Grace to solve these mysteries she did not note down the answers in any diary. But what she quotes from Henri’s letters does suggest that Claudia’s father probably was a German. Why else would the Frenchman say that he knows the truth and he hopes he will not have to be the one to tell it to Claudia? More significantly, perhaps, Millicent reports that Henri, in this same letter, tells Grace she has ‘nothing to be ashamed of and that ‘everyone did what they had to do to survive’. But then there are the burn marks Millicent noted on her sister’s arm which suggest that, whatever her relationship with Claudia’s father, she may have been tortured at some stage. What may have happened, of course, is that her original German protector left Paris, or was killed, and from being protected Grace went on to be persecuted. By 1943, the Germans were arresting huge numbers of Parisians for Gaullist, communist or anti-German activity and Grace could have been rounded up. Having had a baby by a German soldier would not have saved her – 85,000 babies were fathered by Germans in France during the war, making her plight not uncommon.

  At any rate, Millicent seems never to have been told the truth and this fact creates a permanent distance between her and her sister which never entirely disappears. She tries to be sympathetic towards Grace, but her lack of trust, or what she sees as a lack of trust, hurts her. A great keeper of secrets herself, she resents Grace firmly choosing to keep this darkest of secrets.

  But they do see each other again, very soon, ten days after Grace’s return home. Millicent goes to lunch – though there is a long entry in which she debates whether she should, because she is feeling so aggrieved – and is astounded at how normal everything seems in the Baron household. Neither Will nor Grace makes any reference whatsoever to the events of 28 August to 5 September, but she realises this may be because Claudia is present. Millicent makes a determined effort to rise above her resentment by focusing on more important issues. Chief of these is her growing interest in the anti-H-bomb movement. At the time of Harry’s involvement in the Korean War, she had of course written of her fury at the thought of another war in which the H-bomb might be used but this hadn’t at the time led her into allying herself with those who protested against it, though she does record reading John Hersey’s Hiroshima (a book published in 1946 which is a factual account of the deaths of those killed) and wishes she could stop the use of bombs. Then in March 1955, she picks up a copy of the Hampstead & Highgate Express while she is visiting Daphne, and seeing the headline ‘H-bomb Must Be Banned’ and reading of the start of a campaign against it, she wishes she could be a part of it. On 26 August, just before Grace’s vanishing-act she actually attended a meeting in Golders Green, held in a Methodist church hall, to discuss what can be done about trying to get the H-bomb banned. She found herself rather embarrassed to be there and sometimes uncomfortable at the company she was keeping, but her wish to try to do something grows stronger. Millicent continues to attend meetings. She is pleased to be one of the silent, solid supporters without whom the leaders emerging cannot make any headway. The next two years, 1955–7, pass without any dramas, with the twins at university and using the house merely as a base. Then her big moment comes on 12 May 1957 when she is proud to be one of the 2,000 women who marched in silence troughout the streets of London to Trafalgar Square to be addressed by distinguished speakers (among them Vera Brittain whose Testament of Youth Millicent has read and admired).

  *

  13 November

  Connie rang, a rare treat, and I told her I’d attended the meeting about the H-bomb, managing, I hope, to make it sound amusing, though really it
was more embarrassing than funny. There was something so terribly British about us all – not a fanatic among us, but instead sixty or so people, overwhelmingly respectable in dress and bearing, all being polite to each other. The hall was draughty, the seats uncomfortable, and the windows hadn’t been cleaned for months. The man who addressed the meeting, aged about 50, told us he was an accountant and that he’d never done anything like this before, and said how relieved he was to see that far from being hotheads we all appeared to be sensible people who had been brought together through a sense of outrage over what governments might do with a nuclear bomb. At that point, the only light in the hall, weak in any case, went out. Much laughter, then a search for a new bulb followed by another search for the fuse box when the bulb didn’t work. By the time our accountant friend was speaking to us again we were restless and bored. He wasn’t a good speaker. A very ordinary man, but then who am I to talk? That was the point about us all, surely. It was what should have been inspiring.