A Dark-Adapted Eye

by Barbara Vine

  His letter stops quite abruptly. It is as if he realizes he is beginning to write on the assumption that I shall approve, I shall want to contribute. But how very much I dislike having to read a book for some set purpose. The days when I had to do that are so many years behind me and then, at that time, the time of the murder at Goodney Hall, the books I had to read seemed to me worthwhile, they were literature, the best that had been written. What a judgement I am making on Stewart's work! And it is not a bad book, not bad at all, clear and simply written in plain language without contrived sensationalism. There was enough sensationalism in Starr's life without exaggerating it, as there was in Vera's. I shan't finish it, though, I don't need to, for I know already that I shall write back and tell him yes. I have read enough to tell – to hope – he will be sensitive, he will not be too harsh, he will understand the terrible pressures of love.

  She has come back into my life after an absence that extends over more than a third of a century. Helen and Daniel Stewart have brought her to me and she is here in the house, the awkward guest she always was when she stayed in the homes of other people. I almost fancy that I can see her – not the Vera of the photographs in ‘the box’, young, fair, earnest-eyed, but my thin, nervous, pernickety, often absurd aunt, performing that strange, uniquely characteristic action of hers, as unconscious as a tic, as unconscious as Jamie's flick of the hand, of pressing her palms together and bearing down on her clasped hands as if in some inner anguish. Time and time again these past days she has driven me to our unused littlest bedroom where ‘the box’ is and made me lift the lid and turn over the contents, pausing to look at a picture or read a line from a letter, or simply staring in a daydream of nostalgia at the memorabilia of his sisters my father left behind him.

  What would poor Vera make of the moral climate of the present day? I can imagine her look of mulish incredulity. A sexual revolution took place and the world was changed. What happened to her and Eden could not have happened today. The motive and the murder were of their time, rooted in their time, not only impossible in these days but beyond the comprehension of the young unless that moral code is carefully explained to them. Because Vera is with me, is in my house like the sort of ghost that is visible to only one person, the one with the interest, I have tried to tell my daughter something of it, I have tried to elucidate.

  ‘But why didn't she…?’ is the way her interjections begin. ‘Why didn't she tell him? Why didn't she just live with him? Why did she want to marry him if he felt like that?’ And, ‘But what could anyone have done to her?’

  All I can say, lamely, is, ‘It was different then.’

  It was different. Does Stewart, also young, know how different it was? And if he doesn't, will he take my word? Or will I find myself, as I begin to think most likely, giving him the bare facts, correcting his obvious howlers, reminiscing a little, but keeping the real book that is Vera's life recorded on a tape run only in my own consciousness?

  The deed is done and they have pinioned Vera and taken the knife from her, the knife she wanted to turn on herself, and they have tied her hands. In the nick of time Jamie has been carried from the room. Was he crying by then? Did he cry out or call to his mother? No one has ever spoken of that as if it had been a passive stunned little creature Mrs King snatched up in her arms – and perhaps it was. Stewart has got it right, all of it, even to the clothes Vera was wearing, clothes contrived from cot blankets and pre-war remnants, even to the nursery frieze, even to the flying blood that splashed on to the blue and white and the shining fireguard.

  As far as I know. As he says, I wasn't there.

  The nucleus of this mystery I see he has handled in the conventional way, repeating the accepted version. Can he be left to these innocent assumptions of his? Or shall I tell him there is a huge question still left unanswered?

  Jamie knows the answer. Or so he tells me in the letter I have had from him today. This belief of his I began to have some inkling of when we met in the English Cemetery, but since he must be the most injured and most vulnerable actor in this drama, he can hardly be deemed an impartial judge. That, of course, is the last thing he would want to be but what then of his claim that he remembers nothing before he was six? His conviction, surely, is based solely on an inclination of the heart, on nostalgia for an adored and adoring presence that he sees in dreams but of which he has no waking recollection.

  In Stewart's second chapter, the history of our family, Jamie has no place. Perhaps Stewart shirked it because he did not quite know where to put him.

  The Victorian villa (Stewart writes) in the village of Great Sindon in Essex had been lived in by Longleys for less than thirty years. It was in no sense a family home. Arthur Longley bought it with the money from a small inheritance which came to his wife coincidentally with his enforced retirement from the Prudential Insurance Company. Before that, if the Longleys had roots, they were in the busy town of Colchester. There, since the early part of the nineteenth century, they had been shoemakers in a cottage with a shopfront almost under the shadow of the Castle.

  Colchester is England's oldest recorded town. The Romans called it Camulodunum and there Queen Boudicca fought them. To the Saxons it was Colneceaste, its river being the Colne to this day. The castle is Romanesque, its keep built in 1080, and if you stand and look at its towers and pantiled roofs on a sunny day you might fancy yourself in Tuscany. Today Colchester is approached by dual carriageways, ringed with ‘experimental’ double roundabouts, and has a bypass often more congested than the way through the town itself. It has multistorey car parks inside red brick facades designed, not altogether happily, to resemble medieval fortifications, a relentless one-way street system and, just inside the old Roman walls, a labyrinth of ancient houses that has become a precinct of walking streets.

  There in very different days, in a more peaceful and tranquil atmosphere, William Longley made and mended shoes and later, as he grew more prosperous, employed three men to sit at work in the room behind the shop. William's shop is still there, in a cul-de-sac off Short Wyre Street, the offices now of a firm of accountants. The door between shop and workroom still remains and there too is the circular pane of glass, two inches in diameter, inserted in the oak for William to spy through and check his men plied their needles.

  William had married in 1859 Amelia Jackman of Layer-de-la-Haye. Three daughters were born to them and later a son. The boy was baptized Arthur William, was given a considerably superior education to that his father had enjoyed, but nevertheless was destined to follow him in the family business. Young Arthur was a promising and popular pupil at the Grammar School Henry the Eighth had founded in 1539, and he had other ideas. The lure of middle-classdom, so tempting to the Victorian working man of that particular stamp, the leaning towards what we today call the ‘upwardly mobile’, had ensnared him, and his father put up no opposition. William Longley took his daughter Amelia's husband into the cobbler's shop and Arthur joined the Prudential as an insurance agent. He began humbly enough, working his district on a bicycle and living at home with his parents and his unmarried sisters.

  In spite of his ambitions, Arthur never earned much money. His district was not a prosperous one, so his commissions were small. What affluence he later enjoyed came to him through his marriage. His first wife was the daughter and only child of a gentleman, a landowner of substantial means called Abel Richardson. Arthur met her in a traditionally romantic way. Maud was out riding and her horse threw her just as Arthur happened to be passing through the outskirts of Stoke-by-Nayland on his bicycle. She had sprained her ankle and Arthur, who was strong, young and ardent, carried her the half mile home to Walbrooks. In the weeks that followed, it was only natural for the young man to call and inquire after Maud and natural, too, for Maud to arrange it, via a sympathetic parlourmaid, that next time he came he might choose a time when papa was with the hounds (he was the local Master of Foxhounds) and mamma out paying calls.

  There is evidence that Abel Richarso
n strenuously opposed his daughter's intention to marry a more or less penniless and socially unacceptable insurance agent. After a year, however, he yielded to Maud's entreaties. Yielded sufficiently, in fact, not to withhold the fortune of five thousand pounds which in the past, before the advent of Arthur Longley into their lives, he had promised he would give with his daughter.

  Five thousand pounds was a considerable sum in 1890, equivalent to perhaps twenty times that today. Arthur and Maud took one of the villas that were being built out on the Layer Road and settled down to live there very comfortably. To live, indeed, rather above their income, though this was augmented by frequent monetary gifts from Arthur's father-in-law. Maud kept her own carriage. Their household consisted of a cook and housemaid, a nurse for the child, a charwoman who came in to ‘do the rough’ and a coachman-cum-gardener.

  Maud's daughter, Mrs Helen Chatteriss, now an old lady approaching ninety, has written this account of the household:

  I was only five when it all came to an end. My memories will therefore be hazy and incomplete. I remember being driven out with my mother in a very smart carriage drawn by a chestnut horse. My mother used to leave calling cards but I believe that many houses of the local gentry were closed to us on account of my father not being a gentleman.

  The only housework my mother ever did was to arrange the flowers and wash the best china. She lay down to rest every afternoon with white cotton gloves on to preserve her hands. My nurse was called Beatie. She was sixteen, the daughter of one of my grandfather Richardson's tenant farmer's labourers, and she used to take me to see her parents who lived in a one-room cottage with a brick floor. My mother found out and dismissed her.

  I was told that my father had an important position in business but I remember him as usually being at home. He had a study where he would shut himself up for the morning. Now, looking back, I think he spent his time there reading novels. When he went out collecting insurance business, he would ride the second horse we kept, a roan gelding. I don't remember parties, dinners, that sort of thing, only my Richardson grandparents calling quite often and my Longley grandparents and aunts less often. I think my mother may have been ashamed of them.

  This lifestyle came to an abrupt end in 1901 when Helen's mother died in childbirth. The baby, a boy, also died. Maud Longley's fortune, or what remained of it, was settled on her daughter, a careful provision insisted upon prior to the marriage by Abel Richardson, and by his wife's death Arthur Longley was left a poor man. He gave up his house, carriage, horses, and moved into what was hardly more than a cottage on the western outskirts of the town, dismissing his staff and keeping only a maid of all work.

  Also dismissed was his daughter. At any rate, she was parted from her father and sent to live with Abel and May Richardson in Stoke-by-Nayland. It was a separation that still rankles with Mrs Chatteriss after more than eighty years, in spite of the happy childhood, sheltered, indulged and luxurious, she enjoyed with her grandparents at Walbrooks.

  ‘I suppose he thought I should be too much of a responsibility,’ she says, ‘and it may be, too, that my grandfather and grandmother persuaded him. I would have minded more except that my grandmother was so marvellous and I came to love her more than I had my mother. I seldom saw my father after my mother died.’

  In 1906 he married again. The first Mrs Chatteriss knew of this second marriage was as a result of an unexpected encounter in Colchester, near St Botolph's. It was there that she attended a private school, being driven from Stoke and back in a pony carriage. Two years were yet to go before Abel Richardson made himself a pioneer in the neighbourhood by buying a Rolls-Royce sedan, its hide upholstery buttoned in ebony and its dashboard of rosewood. One afternoon, after school, she found her father and a strange lady waiting for her at the gates. The lady was introduced to Helen as her ‘new mother’ but thereafter no attempts were made to reinforce the relationship. Her grandparents knew nothing of it for months and were angry when they found out, more from having been kept in the dark than from Arthur Longley's having remarried.

  He was thirty-nine. In the twenty-two years he had worked for the Prudential he had received no promotion and, his fortunes having dwindled, he had returned to going about his meagre business on a bicycle. His parents were dead, the family business had passed to his brother-in-law, James Hubbard, and what very little money there was to his two unmarried sisters. Nor had his bride any money, though she was not without expectations. Ivy Naughton was twenty-eight when she married Arthur, having been governess in a family who were his clients. She had neither training nor qualification for this post, other than having attended school until the age of sixteen and being able to play the piano. But the people she worked for, known to the Richardsons, were seed merchants with pretensions, to whom the boast of having a governess for their three daughters satisfied them independently of what educational benefit the girls might derive from it… For this service Miss Naughton received her board and lodging and fifty pounds a year.

  She and Arthur set up house together. Nine months after the wedding, in the spring of 1907, twin children were born to them. Ivy's aunt, Miss Priscilla Naughton, who had her own house and a small clientele as dressmaker, was one of the godparents and another was Arthur's daughter, Helen, who had been confirmed a month before. The twins, a boy and a girl, were christened John William and Vera Ivy. Like her husband, Ivy Longley was a great reader of novels – it was ‘talking about books’ which had brought them together – and by coincidence, the heroine in each case of their favourite novel had the same Christian name.

  ‘My father used to read Ouida,’ Helen Chatteriss writes, ‘and Moths was his favourite of her books. The heroine's name is Vera as is the name of the heroine of Marion Crawford's novel, A Cigarette Maker's Romance. According to my father, this was my stepmother's favourite book. And that was how they came to name Vera.’

  Vera Longley and her brother, being of opposite sexes, were not, of course, identical twins. They bore no more resemblance to each other than if they had been born at separate births, but both had the very fair hair and intensely blue eyes which were distinctive features of the second Longley family. Arthur, his mother, and two of his sisters were fair-haired, and his second wife was a blonde with extremely fair skin and light eyes. Ivy Longley's forebears were fisherfolk from the coast of Norfolk and it was said that one of her grandfathers, a seafaring man, had brought home a wife from the Faroe Islands. John was a handsome boy, Vera a plain child whose looks underwent a transformation as she grew older. A photograph shows her at fourteen as a pretty, sharp-featured girl with a mass of nearly white blonde hair, large eyes and a serious, rather severe, expression.

  Four years before that picture was taken, her father had been pensioned off by the Prudential, a medical examination having shown him to have a weak heart. He was fifty and the Great War in its third year. That war was not to touch the immediate Longley family directly, although Amelia's son, William Hubbard, lost his life in it at Vimy Ridge. Soon after Arthur's enforced retirement, Priscilla Naughton died, leaving her house and £500 to her niece, Ivy. The Longleys moved out into the country and by the spring of 1919 were settled in Great Sindon, a village some ten miles from Colchester in the Vale of Dedham.

  It was in no sense a ‘gentleman's house’, which is how Arthur's villa on the Layer Road – now vanished to make way for a block of flats – might have been categorized. The agents through whom Arthur bought it described it as a cottage. Today we should consider this to diminish its status. Paul and Rosemary Oliver who now own the house have changed its name from ‘Laurel Cottage’ to ‘Finches’ and undertaken structural alterations to the ground floor so that the dining-room and kitchen have been converted into one large living-room, the dairy has become the kitchen and the drawing-room the dining area. But in the Longleys' day, and subsequently in Vera's, there were four rooms on the ground floor with the staircase running up through the centre of the house. When Arthur and Ivy moved in with their two childr
en, there were four bedrooms. The smallest of these Arthur had converted into a bathroom, leaving the principal bedroom for his wife and himself and a room each for the son and daughter.

  Externally, Laurel Cottage was built of the iron-free brick, yellowish-grey in colour, that is known as ‘white brick’, with facings of cream-painted plaster, and roofed in slate. It is a symmetrical house, the front door in the centre, a sash window on each side and three above. Similarly, the front garden is accurately bisected by a path which runs straight to the front door, or doors, for there are two, an outer of panelled wood and an inner of glass. The garden at the rear is large, containing, by the gate in the rear fence, an outbuilding that was apparently once a disused cottage in which the Longley children played on wet days, now converted by the Olivers into a garage.

  What kind of childhood did Vera Longley have in Colchester and later in Great Sindon? What, if anything, happened to traumatize her? Two days after her twelfth birthday we find her writing to her half-sister, Helen:

  Dear Helen, Thank you very much for the postal order. I am going to put it towards buying a tennis racquet. Tomorrow I am going on holiday to Cromer in Norfolk. I hope it will be fine as it is by the sea. With love from Vera.

  And in the summer of the same year, 1919:

  Dear Helen, Daddy showed me your letter. I should very much like to be your bridesmaid. I hope you will be very happy married to Captain Chatteriss. Thank you for asking me to be your bridesmaid. It will be nice to meet soon and I am looking forward to it. With love from Vera.