Treated as Murder

by Noreen Wainwright

  “Sorry, Edith, I’m being tactless. I didn’t mean that I shouldn’t talk to you. Take no notice, please, I don’t know what I’m saying or doing at the moment. You see…”

  Edith looked at her directly now, and saw the tiniest signs in Julia’s face, in her jaw line. She was steeling herself.

  “Giles has been having an affair.”

  Edith stared at her. She was shocked, but didn’t want to show how shocked, which would only make Julia feel worse. Her instincts had told her that something was amiss with Julia and Giles, but she hadn’t considered this. Poor Julia. It seemed unreal. Giles wasn’t the type, or so she’d believed.

  “How did you find out?” It didn’t matter, but Edith had had to say something.

  “Oh, real Peg’s Paper stuff—I went through his pockets.” Her voice was bitter, with an undertone of cynicism that didn’t fool Edith.

  “Have you talked to him about it?” Edith saw Julia nod, a slight nod and then tears came from nowhere.

  She got a handkerchief from her handbag and apologised. “I’m really sorry, Edie. Goodness me, if a member of the staff came in and sees me, I’ll be thrown out.”

  “No one’s going to see you or throw you out. Oh, Julia, I’m so sorry.” Sorry was inadequate.

  Edith struggled to keep the anger from her face. She touched Julia’s arm. If Alistair had…no, this wasn’t about her, this was about Julia. What had got into the man?

  “The worst thing, well, I think the worst thing is that he was so matter-of-fact about it. That was the point where I felt I didn’t know him. Either he has changed completely, or I never knew him, not really.”

  Edith was silent. She had this nagging feeling. Archie, Matt, all the men who came back, or a lot of them, seemed so damaged by their experiences they couldn’t settle, be happy or at peace or let those around them be in peace. But surely, that wasn’t the case. Eventually, she said, “Have you any idea what you are going to do?”

  Julia rubbed the heels of her hands against her eyes and dragged them upwards. Then she put her hands on her lap and looked at Edith. “That’s the thing, Edie? What can I do? My first reaction was to go. Believe me, I’ve had some wild thoughts over the last few days. I even thought maybe we could go together—go back to London. You know, you said you needed to get away from Yorkshire?”

  Edith nodded. A wild surge of excitement surging through her in a heady wave until she forced herself back down to earth. That was not only selfish, but stupid as well. “Could you maybe take Beatrice, I don’t know, start somewhere again?” It surprised her that she was encouraging her friend to leave her marriage.

  “I tried to get Bea to come to London with me for a few days. I’d planned to stay with Hillary and John, and thought perhaps Bea might be excited at the thought of seeing her cousins and London, but not a hope. Trying to get that child out of her home and away from her pony is like prising a snail from a shell.

  “That gave me an idea of just how impossible it would be to take her anywhere, not to mention unfair. And then there are the boys. It’s their home, the only home they’ve ever known and what’s more, at the end of the day, it’s Giles’ home as well, isn’t it?”

  Edith’s chest tightened at the note of misery in her friend’s voice. What she said was true but surely, there would be a way.

  Julia was talking again—a more brisk note in her voice now. “For now, I have nothing to do, have I? Nowhere to go. But, that doesn’t mean I’ve turned into a doormat. I’m keeping my options open. It might not look as if I have any, but I reckon I must have some. Behind all Giles’ bravado, I bet he doesn’t want his name dragged through the courts. So, I suppose I’ll stay for now—but on my terms. One last chance, perhaps.” Her hand went to her hair and then to her mouth and for a second, Edith saw panic behind her friend’s calmness. “Can you stand it?” Edith was impressed by Julia’s logic and by her resolve. But she had a hard and lonely road ahead of her.

  “Again, I don’t have a lot of choice. But, when I say on my terms, I mean other things too. I’m not cut out for the country wife, doing the flowers and entertaining. Giles got bored. Well, maybe I’m a bit bored as well. I’ll try to do something more constructive than having an affair, to change things.”

  * * *

  Arthur Arbuthnot’s reaction surprised his wife. She’d brought a cup of tea to his study, and knelt to stoke the fire.

  “Are you all right, my dear?” Arthur looked uneasy; no doubt worried she was going to talk about his drinking.

  Dorothea scrubbed at her hands with her handkerchief and looked at Arthur, thinking how shrunken he had become, how living with a person you rarely took the time to look at him properly, as a stranger would. He no longer quite fit the tweed trousers and his jacket hung loose on his shoulders. It seemed cruel to burden him with this, regardless of what had happened in the past. But, she really didn’t have a choice.

  “Arthur, have you heard about anonymous letters going around Ellbeck?”

  “Anonymous letters? What a thing. No, I haven’t—we haven’t have one, have we?”

  There was something in his voice—maybe he wasn’t completely surprised. “I’m afraid we have, Arthur, I kept it from you, maybe foolishly, but I suppose I thought least said, soonest mended, that sort of thing. But, it’s no longer that simple. The inspector, Inspector Greene, well, when he gave you a lift the other night wanted to know if we’d had one of these letters. I felt duty bound to show it to him, though I refused to go any further, tell him any more about what was in it.”

  Arthur was looking at her, stricken.

  “But, and I could kick myself for this, Arthur, the letter got into Helena’s hands. I’ve been carrying it around with me. God knows why. I should have thrown it in the fire. It was so careless of me, but I think it dropped out of my pocket…Anyway, Helena has read it and is demanding an explanation. We can’t blame her, I suppose.” She handed the letter to her husband. As he read the contents, his colour changed, faded away, and took on a bluish tinge, especially around his mouth.

  Oh, God, what had she done? She shouldn’t have shown it to him. “Arthur? Arthur are you all right?” She went to him and attempted to loosen his tie, her own heart racing now. He put his hand on hers to stop her.

  “A whiskey, please,” he gasped.

  She went to the bottle on the sideboard and poured a good measure into a dusty looking glass on the tray alongside the bottle.

  He put it to his lips and sipped.

  Dorothea watched his face closely, ready to call for assistance. To her huge relief, his colour began to return to normal.

  “I’m sorry, my dear. What a burden I am to you. I’m perfectly all right now. It was the shock of it, I suppose. Things that have been buried for years—because that must be what all this is about, wouldn’t you say?”

  Dorothea nodded. “Definitely. But, we must talk to Helena. She’s a grown woman and is entitled to know. Maybe we should have even told her years ago, or, at least when the boys were killed. But, Arthur, what we did, we did for the best of reasons.”

  He nodded his head. “Yes, you’re right, as always, Dorothea, and we’ll deal with this together, talk to her together.”

  Dorothea looked at him, to check that he was looking better. She may have imagined it, but she seemed to see a new strength in him and it gave her a surge of hope. She’d given up relying on Arthur for anything and maybe that had been wrong of her.

  * * *

  Edith stared at the man in front of her. She needed to be careful here. She had got so much wrong, look where she had ended up. Could she be imagining this?

  Don’t be stupid. He was real enough. She looked long and hard at the well-defined features, on the rugged side of the handsome, the broad shoulders, the severely cut dark brown hair. She looked at his hands, strong, reddish brown hairs on the backs of his fingers. His hands were resting on his knees, and his legs were spread apart, at complete ease with the world.”

  “Do yo
u mind if I sit down?” he’d asked as the nurse escorted him into Edith’s side ward. She’d shaken her head, speechless, her hand going to her throat.

  When the nurse had told her there was a friend to see her, Edith assumed it would be Julia or even Henry. When Matthew Taylor walked into the room, she’d experienced a moment’s acute panic, where the walls loomed closer. Cold sweat covered her body.

  No. It was bad enough he should see her here, maybe even think it was because she was so heartbroken at his desertion. He was not going to see her out of control. She took a couple of deep breaths and forced her voice out, keeping it low and ordinary. “I’m a bit surprised to see you, Matthew. You made it very clear we wouldn’t be seeing each other again.” Determination to maintain her dignity was going to get her through this. But, what on earth had possessed him to visit her?

  “I’d heard you were in here and thought I should drop in. Is that all right? That I should visit, I mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure. That depends on why you are here I suppose. You are the last person I expected to see, though.”

  He grimaced, as if he had been caught with his hand in the till. “Guilt then, I suppose. I’m very sorry, Edith. I shouldn’t have lied to you. Maybe I didn’t take it all seriously enough. I let myself get carried away in the moment, as is my wont. It was even in one of my school reports, if I remember right, “Matthew has a tendency to fantasise. This sometimes leads to unfortunate consequences.” His laugh was short and uncomfortable.

  “So, that’s what I was. A fantasy. That’s what it all was Matthew? Getting carried away and I’m an unfortunate consequence?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But, for God’s sake Edith. I didn’t intend this. I may be a bit of an idiot, but I’m not a complete cad. I didn’t intend to be the cause of you losing your mind.”

  Overwhelming anger rose in Edith. It was a good, clean honest feeling and she welcomed it. “Matthew, don’t flatter yourself. Your behaviour contributed to this, but it didn’t cause it. Don’t be stupid. We didn’t even know each other all that well.

  Yes, all right, I believed you. I even thought we might have a future together. I wrote letters, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing about you, that my judgement had been so wrong. But, the worse thing, Matthew, was that people thought it was all in my mind, that I was writing these letters out of the blue. Even my own brother didn’t believe me, you know?”

  “Well, he does now,”

  Two pairs of eyes went instantly to the doorway, where Archie stood, his hand still on the door. “Archie,” said Edith. Her head was reeling; she hadn’t expected him. That he should arrive at this moment, when he’d hardly visited her in the weeks she had been here. “Horton. Oh my God!” said Matt.

  “You may well call upon the Lord’s name. So, what the hell are you doing here—doesn’t exactly tally with what you told me, does it?”

  “No, look,” he raised both hands in a gesture of something…defeat, supplication? “There’s no way I can come out of this looking any less than a bounder of the first order, so I suppose I’d better stop digging myself a deeper hole. Edith, I’m genuinely sorry and I hope maybe in time, you might blame me a bit less.”

  Archie snorted. “Get out, Taylor, while you still can. If the circumstances were different, if we weren’t here in a hospital room, I’d wring your bloody neck.”

  “Archie, stop, please,” said Edith. “There’s no point. You see the truth now, that’s the main thing. I wasn’t imagining it all. It wasn’t all in my head.”

  Matthew Taylor walked quietly out the door.

  * * *

  She discovered it wasn’t possible to remain in disgrace forever, or to disassociate yourself forever. Well, at least for her, it didn’t prove possible. In time they even allowed her to work again, and eventually she’d even got her wish and been allowed to work in the sewing room. There were no Phyllis-types in there and life settled down, until most of life outside these walls seemed irrelevant. There were fewer nights now when she was awoken by vivid memories, thinking she was still free and suffering blind panic when she realised she was not.

  If someone came up to her in the dormitory and offered her the chance to leave, she didn’t think she would take it. No one could hurt her in here, not really, and she didn’t have to endeavour and endeavour and still get it all wrong.

  But then Dr. Willis came to work in the hospital and started showing concern, and interest in her and her story that no one had shown for years. She heard the nurses sneering and knew what they thought. Here came another new broom that was going to do wonders and prove all the other staff knew nothing. Then he would become disillusioned or the novelty would wear off and they would be left to pick up the pieces.

  * * *

  Henry Wilkes wished he had a wife. Not a friend, a companion, or a relative to turn to, but someone of his own to come home to. He was normally fairly happy with his celibate state, though not committed to it in the religious sense. He had perhaps written off that part of his life, feeling there were things about his calling, facets of his own character, which made him bachelor material.

  But there had been something about the walk in the countryside—the tiredness, the light-hearted fooling about with food—that made his encounter with Prudence Sowerby particularly difficult. While he’d been listening to her story and trying to help her deal with it, he’d been all right, all his energies taken up with her, engrossed in trying to make things better for her. He’d finally driven her back to the shop. He hoped and prayed that she would be able to work things out with her sister.

  But then he was back at home and like a bolt, his own need for company and succour hit him, testing him, as much as he had ever been tested and bowling him over with its strength.

  Prudence had been ready, more than ready to talk and he’d seen it as a positive sign she had returned to Ellbeck of her own volition.

  “I needed to go away for a few days. I went to my friend Mabel in Bath. I got the train back this evening. It didn’t seem enough to telephone, somehow. I got a taxicab from the station, but lost my nerve. I talked it all over again and again with Mabel. She was so good to me. But all the same when I set foot back in Yorkshire, all the doubts came back, all the questions about whether I could live the rest of my life with my sister, who had betrayed me.”

  He sighed, but quietly. This might seem trivial to him and all so long ago, but for the two sisters on the other side of middle-age who’d each had one big romance and that with the same man, who had gone out to India and died, leaving one openly broken-hearted and the other nursing a secret, the story was complicated. But Prudence’s version was searing and straightforward, her memories destroyed with an anonymous letter.

  Marjorie had denied it, said the writer of the letter had got hold of the wrong end of the stick, that Marjorie’s relationship with this man was nothing, was over before he got involved with Prudence even. But the worst thing of the lot, in Prudence’s view, which was admittedly extreme, was where the letter writer had got hold of the information. All of this had happened years ago, and Prudence was sure as sure she hadn’t breathed a word to anyone. So, as far as she was concerned, someone had and the only possible person who could have done this was Marjorie. But Marjorie, just as adamantly, swore she hadn’t. So, Prudence did the only thing she could in the circumstance and had left home.

  It had taken a lot of persuading on Henry’s part to get her to agree to be driven back to the post office. He had the advantage. She must have wanted to be persuaded, somewhere inside or otherwise, why would she have returned to Ellbeck? He was shameless in the end; evoking any bit of sentiment and manipulation he could, to persuade her.

  “Prudence, she’s distraught. Whatever did or did not happen all those years ago, why on earth allow this letter writer disturb your lives like this. I should say, destroy your lives. This person knows exactly the strings to pull to upset people. Believe me, Marjorie, you and your sister are not on your
own, receiving a letter and being upset.

  “No good will come of allowing this thing to fester between you. I’m not saying that you should forget and forgive, overnight, or that you and your sister don’t need to talk more, but until you return home, there is no hope of putting things right.”

  In the end, he’d persuaded her she should return home for tonight at least. He promised he would call in the morning. He had sat in the car as she went to the back door, he could see the two figures through his mirror. After a minute, he’d seen the door open and Prudence go inside.

  Letting out a breath of relief and exhaustion, he drove home, scrabbling in the back of his mind to resurrect a conversation he’d had with the retiring rector of the parish when he had first come to Ellbeck. There had been something about a breakdown, but he couldn’t be sure if it was even Prudence. Then, there had been so much information to absorb, so many new parishioners to meet he could no longer completely rely on his memory.

  But wishes weren’t horses, there was no wife waiting at home, and in his heart of hearts he didn’t believe that was what life had in store for him. He drew the curtains against the dark and the rain and poured a glass of Bordeaux and then picked up his bible.

  Chapter 20

  “Stop apologising, Archie. Stop castigating yourself. You didn’t believe me, and yes, my affair with Matthew was not in my mind, but it isn’t as black and white as that, is it? I’m not even sure if I’d been in your shoes that I’d have believed me. I know I wasn’t behaving calmly or rationally. I know that there was a short period when I lost touch with reality.”

  Archie shook his head. “So would anyone if they were being called a fantasist, if they weren’t being believed…”

  “Archie, please, I know you’re trying to make amends, but there’s no point in going to the other extreme. I’m in St. Bride’s. You’re not the reason I’m in here, neither is Matthew Taylor, though he was a trigger. It’s not going to help me to get better to shove all the blame onto you, him, or anyone else. Don’t you see? I have to work things out for myself. The doctor, Dr. Uxbridge is good, really good, I think. I need to look at the reasons, inside myself, not at other people, do you see?”