by Barbara Vine
‘Your mother did what was best for you, Francis. Or what she thought was best for you. Maybe I would have liked to go away to school but I didn't get the chance, did I?’
‘Don't be such a bloody prig, Eden.’
Middle-class people did not say ‘bloody’ much in 1940. To me ‘damn’ was strong language enough and I was shocked.
‘You've made Faith blush.’ It was true, he had, but I would have preferred Eden not to have drawn attention to it. ‘She's bound to tell her father, you know. Every word you've said will get back to her father and of course you won't get the backlash. Vera will be blamed for the way she's brought you up.’
‘Good,’ said Francis, taking Vera's box of drawing-pins down from the shelf. First he pinned the lengths of cucumber peel together at their ends, then made a pattern of pins like studwork so that the peel looked like a belt. He rolled it up, took the belt from the pocket of Vera's raincoat and substituted for it the cucumber and drawing-pin one.
I thought he was mad. I still think I may have been right and he was. It was all revenge, this behaviour of his, in no way a means of drawing attention to himself and thereby hoping to recapture his mother's love. He hated her and it was hatred, not something masquerading as hatred, but the real, vicious, luxuriating thing itself. Eden maintained a subtle neutrality, giggling with Francis and sometimes seeming with her giggles to approve – she knew he would never repeat to Vera anything she said, he was too proud – and with Vera, doing no more than sighing, shaking her head and telling Vera to ignore it, he would grow out of it. She couldn't trust Vera not to go rushing to Francis with a quote hot off her tongue: ‘Eden says you're disgusting, she's never known anyone treat his mother like you treat me!’
No one expected me to take sides. I was never appealed to. By this time I had met Anne Cambus and we were spending all our days together, much of them in her home, and this was good for me, not just for the obvious social reasons but because it showed me a contrast; that not all the world was either like Vera and Eden's household or aspiring to be so. Some people were easy-going and warm and casual, much as my mother was, and it was Vera's home, not mine, that was the exception. So for much of the daylight hours I was with Anne, wandering the fields and woods, going cycling with her on an old bicycle that had been Eden's, playing an involved, absorbing game we called Mary, Queen of Scots, in which was simply enacted over and over the events as we had been taught them in Mary's life, each of us taking it in turn to play the Queen, while the other took all the other roles – Darnley, Rizzio, Bothwell, Elizabeth the First. In wet weather, this took place in the tumbledown cottage at the end of Vera's garden everyone called the ‘hovel’. A lot of the houses in Sindon and the surrounding villages at that time had a small cottage or the ruins of one in their gardens. The place must once have been a warren of wattle and daub shacks, patched with brickwork, huddled together for convenience of building and for warmth, honeycombs of dirt and disease and discomfort. Vestiges of them remained, preserved as storeplaces or washhouses. Whether anyone had ever done washing in the Laurel Cottage hovel I don't know. Certainly it contained an old copper with a bleached wooden lid and a space beneath it, a kind of cave, to light a fire in. The floor was of bricks. As a child, Eden once told me, she had been allowed to use the place as a kind of Wendy house, and that accounted for its less than derelict appearance. The tattered remains of gingham curtains still hung at the small window, there was a rug on the floor, an old gate-leg table, a couple of canvas deckchairs. Vera, being Vera, routinely gave it a clean-up from time to time. Anne and I crowned Mary Stuart and married her, betrayed her and beheaded her over and over again in the hovel that summer and autumn. One night, five years into the future, I was to see enacted there a stranger ritual, but that was distant, impossible for a child to foresee.
By night I shared Eden's room. True to her promise, she undressed and got into bed in the dark but on moonlit nights it was not so very dark and sometimes I was still awake when she came to bed, though feigning sleep. Even with the light off, she undressed with extreme modesty, first taking off her dress or blouse, next pulling the nightgown over her head, then slipping quickly out of her underclothes. All Eden's nightdresses were of fine pink or white lawn, embroidered by her or Vera at the neck and wrists and sometimes at the hem as well. Nylon had been invented by then but it was to take a long time to reach us.
In the dark too, or in the half-light, Eden sat at the dressing-table and ‘cleansed’ her face in the way the women's magazines then used to (and for all I know, now) recommend to their readers, finally massaging in the skinfood. Her hair was wound up and pinned in sausage curls, this confection covered with a pink chiffon scarf. Eden, as Helen has told Stewart her own mother did, slept in white cotton gloves to keep her hands nice. Pretending to be asleep, even to the extent of maintaining a loud regular breathing, I watched the nightly procedure with admiration and, I'm afraid, with envy.
Sometimes, of course, as the autumn came on, it was too dark to see for both her and me and all this must have been performed in the bathroom. And later I was moved into Francis's room, for Francis had gone back to school, having ended his holidays with a mother-tease coup.
This was on the evening of the day he tried to put an end to that left-hand/right-hand business once and for all. He didn't succeed but I think what he said shook Vera, for though she continued to point to our hands across the tablecloth and push our plates to the left-hand side of us, I felt that her heart was no longer in it.
Francis asked her if she knew that Muslims always ate with their right hands because they used their left hands for performing personal hygiene after defecation. I have put that euphemistically which wasn't at all what Francis said. He told her that they used their left hands to ‘wipe their bums after they'd shat’ and that was why cutting off a Muslims right hand by way of punishment for stealing, say, was an even more cruel mutilation than it seemed. The victim was likely to starve to death.
Vera screamed with shock. She shouted that he made her feel ill, he made her feel sick with disgust. Later she said that there were no Muslims here, thank God, so why did he think we would be interested in their revolting customs?
‘It makes you see what bringing people up by these rigid rules can lead to,’ Francis said, and he was right there, in more ways than one.
A gloom seemed to settle on him as the day went on. He grew abstracted and silent and though it was a yellow day – Vera, on his instructions, had truculently served him with pease pudding and an omelette for lunch – he forgot about eating only madeira cake and lemon curd for tea and absent-mindedly got through a slice of date bread before he remembered. He got up and left the table without a word. Vera, missing him as usual that evening, found a suicide note left by him on his pillow when she turned down his bed. She drew back the counterpane – hours earlier tucked by her under the pillow and then smoothed over it and under the bedhead – to find an envelope inserted there by fingers that had ever so slightly disturbed her handiwork, making a wrinkle in the folkweave that was the first thing she saw as she entered the room. ‘Mother’ was printed on it in Francis's presently favourite mauve ink. (How colourful Francis was, how I remember him in colours, his mauve ink, his yellow days, his transformation of blue flowers into green.) The note told her he was so miserable he had decided to end it all.
Vera believed it. I certainly did, of course I did, I was aghast and afraid. Eden seemed to believe it, at any rate it was she who said Vera should get the police. The village constable came on his bicycle, later more policemen in a car. Vera went to get the note to show them but it had gone, Francis, of course, who was hiding in the house, having abstracted and destroyed it. When the fuss was at its height, three policemen in the house, the rector's wife – who had called about something to do with the Mother's Union – Vera crying, Eden pacing, Francis walked in quietly to ask what all the fuss was about. He denied writing any note, denied the existence of a note, and the result was that everyone
started doubting Vera. I hadn't been shown it but Eden had and it was extraordinary how cagey she was about it, never affirming that she, too, had read it, never coming out quite on Vera's side, but rather adopting the pose of nurse, confidante and general calmer-down, telling the police and Mrs Morrell that she would take care of Vera, Vera would be fine in no time, she was overwrought, she would soon be better. You could see the police thought Vera was a hysteric and that they had been called out over nothing. But Francis got what he had aimed at and went off to bed well-satisfied with the success of his culminating tease.
That autumn, though, someone in Great Sindon really did commit suicide. I have often wondered how significant this death was in what came afterwards. In other words, how much it contributed to the events that led up to the murder.
The rector of the parish of Great Sindon was called the Reverend Richard Morrell. I had spoken of him as the vicar for which I was roundly reproved by Vera and told not to be so silly, but in my ignorance I thought all clergymen of the Church of England were vicars, I thought of it as a generic term like ‘butcher’. Vera went to church most Sundays, usually to Evensong. For some reason never made clear to me, my father did not want me to be confirmed. I suppose he had lost his faith or had ceased to accept formalized religion. At the time I rather resented missing this surely indispensable part of my education. A large framed photograph, much admired by me, of Eden in her white confirmation dress with a veil over her hair stood on the piano in the living-room at Laurel Cottage. Though lacking this positive entrée to the elect, or even the promise of it, I sometimes went to church with Vera, especially on the evenings when Eden came too. To walk along the village street with my two aunts, each of us carrying a Prayer Book – for no reason that I can fathom since a copy was placed in front of every pew seat – helped me towards that ‘belonging’ for which I was ever striving. After the service, we all shook hands with Mr Morrell, big, heavy and unkempt-looking, with the reputation of keeping the communion bread unwrapped in the pocket of his surplice. He was first cousin to a very eminent man who had been the Master of Balliol. I called him ‘a master at’ Balliol because I thought I had misheard and if he was head of a college he would have been called a headmaster, an error for which I again got the rough side of Vera's tongue.
The Morrells had a maidservant called Elsie. People still had live-in maids then, though they were soon to disappear into munitions or the Women's Land Army. Great Sindon Rectory was an enormous house with eight bedrooms and very old-fashioned. Elsie, who was sixteen, the daughter of a farm labourer living in a village three miles away, did all the rough work of the house, leaving dusting and bed-making and ironing and, of course, the cooking to Mrs Morrell. I knew her by sight. Anne and I, coming home from school, used sometimes to meet her on her afternoon off walking home to visit her mother, but we never spoke. We were dreadful little snobs. Although we knew we were not gentry in the way that Mrs Deliss at the Priory was, we considered ourselves several cuts above the village people. Elsie, moreover, came not only from labouring stock but was a servant. Vera expected her to call me Miss and address her as Madam. She was a thick-set, florid girl, her skin always looking pink and weatherbeaten, with very bright reddish-gold hair that I am sure was naturally that colour. Mrs Morrell used sometimes to call at Laurel Cottage and, in conversation with Vera, grumble about Elsie, calling her lazy and slatternly. I think they enjoyed talking about what they called ‘the servant problem’.
‘You are so lucky not having that to contend with,’ I heard Mrs Morrell say. ‘What wouldn't I give for a house this size.’ She wouldn't have given much in fact. Secretly, she, who, Anne told me, had been an unqualified teacher in a private school in Ipswich, adored living in a Georgian mansion bigger than Great Sindon Priory.
Once or twice when I had been there with Vera, I came across Elsie, broom in hand or on hands and knees scrubbing a stone floor. Vera always spoke to her which meant that poor Elsie had to get up and look respectful.
‘I hope Mother and Father are well, Elsie.’
‘Yes, thank you, madam.’
As far as I know, Vera was totally unacquainted with Elsie's parents. Certainly none of us knew her surname until it came out at the inquest.
On one of her afternoons off, Elsie disappeared. When she didn't come back that night and hadn't appeared in the morning, Mrs Morrell sent to her parents to find out what had happened. By ‘sent’, I mean she got the boy who came in once a week to cut the grass or sweep up the leaves to go over on his bicycle. Elsie wasn't with them either and later that day a farmer found her drowned body in his well.
Real wells that people actually use don't exist any more as far as I know but a few still did then. Most of the cottages and some of the farmhouses had no mains water and no electricity. Piped gas had never been brought to Great Sindon and has not to this day. This well was fed by a spring of fresh water and had very clean-looking weed like streaming green hair growing in it. Some time afterwards, when the well had been emptied and cleansed, Anne and I went to look at it. It was no more than three feet in diameter but reputedly very deep – reputedly, no doubt, much deeper than it really was – with a coping round its edge of small old bricks. Every time Elsie walked that way she had to pass the farm where the well was and in November, when the hedge was bare, it was visible to the passer-by. It was Anne from whom I first learned what had happened.
‘Something awful – Elsie at the Rectory committed suicide. She's drowned herself. Mummy told me. She said I wasn't to talk about it but you don't matter. I mean, she knows I'd tell you.’
I was shocked and somehow overawed. We stood waiting for the school bus. It was a cold morning, the air, the wind, everything, the world, full of floating, blowing, falling leaves. Never before had I been in a place where the falling of leaves was so apparent, for the village heart was planted on the green and in divergent lanes with huge chestnuts, planes, sycamores and beeches. All of them were shedding their foliage, helped by the driving wind, so that to this day when I see leaves falling in autumn I am reminded of Elsie and her death by water.
I asked Anne why. Why had she done it? Sixteen is not the contemporary of twelve but sixteen is young still, not like twenty-six, say, which we considered well over the hill. How could anyone of sixteen want to die?
‘Mummy said she could guess. I heard her say to Dad, I can guess the reason for that, but when I asked her she wouldn't tell me.’
‘Well, I can't guess, can you?’
‘Unless she was very miserable working for old Mrs Morrell,’ said Anne. ‘But if she was, I don't see why she couldn't have left and gone into a factory.’
Nothing was said about Elsie' death at Laurel Cottage. I mean nothing. It was not even mentioned with Anne's mother's warning not to discuss it with anyone. Secretiveness was an important feature in Longley family culture, even when there was no real reason for it. Information was not given and news was not told. One was expected to know it already or not to wish to know it. Often Vera and Eden seemed to have secrets for the sake of having them, to delight in the lowered voice, the over-the-shoulder glance, the whispering behind hands. I fancy there was rather more whispering than usual about the time of Elsie's death, more entering of rooms and closing the door on me with a ‘Just a moment, Faith.’ Certainly they must have known about it, there was no possibility they could have failed to have heard either from Mrs Morrell or from reading the local paper. Besides, the village buzzed with it. The stray bomb, last of a stick dropped by a damaged Dornier, which fell on a field near Bures and killed a cow, had been entirely superseded as current gossip topic by the death of Elsie. Vera and Eden knew and knew, too, the result of the inquest at which the reason for Elsie's suicide came out. Again, it was Anne who told me, though she was unable to say whether her mother's guess had been correct. We spent a great deal of time that winter speculating about Elsie, the whys and wherefores, and Elsie's state of mind.
Meanwhile London was being destroyed by German b
ombs. And not only London – Coventry, Bristol, Birmingham. Terrible fires raged in the City and there was little defence against night attacks. The fear of invasion apparently was still strong. It is said of the novels of Jane Austen how remarkable it is that while giving an accurate picture of the social life of her day she chose so thoroughly to ignore the war in which Britain for a greater part of her life was engaged, to omit entirely mention of the Battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Anne and I could have understood. We were not involved. The war did not interest or affect us. It was a long way away, not audible, not even known about if one chose to be out of the room when the wireless was on. The torpedoing of Italian ships by British planes in Taranto harbour, the situation in East Africa, the German infiltration of Romania – all this was as nothing to us compared to our fascination with the plight and wretched end of Elsie.
It may seem strange today but then, when I was twelve, I had never actually known anyone not married to have a baby. To be married was the prerequisite of having a baby. Anne and I, though mystified by the emotions involved, could understand perfectly the disgrace of being a single girl and giving birth to a baby in England in 1940.
‘She couldn't have had it, could she?’ said Anne. ‘You can see that.’
I could see that. What would she have done with it in practical terms? An unmarried Elsie pushing a pram along the village street was unimaginable. Mr Morrell would surely have refused to christen it or else have had to do so under cover of darkness.
‘What did she do it for?’ I said.
By ‘do it’ I meant engage in the sexual act that had led to her pregnancy. Anne couldn't tell me. The facts of sex were known to us more or less accurately but of the emotions we knew nothing, we scarcely knew emotion would be involved. Sex was something we thought of as being entered into for the experience alone, for the sake of knowing what it was like. The identity of one's partner seemed unimportant while we did not know of the existence of desire. Elsie's conduct was therefore baffling to us, for though we understood how someone might wish to ‘do it’ – we had confided in each other that we would like to ‘do it’ at any rate once in the course of life – we were mystified by anyone's taking so serious a step without due preparation and the forethought necessary to prevent conception.
