by Helen Slavin
At one, Harvey and Mrs Milligan returned from their joint lunch break and I burrowed down into the archive to take mine. I was still trawling the church registers from time to time looking for Mary-Ann Penny. If any new records arrived to be catalogued or preserved I was first on them but she had not appeared. She was huddled in the darkest corner of my mind, some feeble tallow candle guttering on a cheap table as she breastfed the child I imagined had been her downfall, the illegitimate heir to Viscount Breck.
Not that I had ever found a child either. I had worked on dates from six months after Mary-Ann’s disappearance from the ledgers but there were no babies registered to a mother by the name of Mary-Ann Penny. That lunchtime I stopped trawling for them and it seemed to me that the candle guttered out. I couldn’t look. I had to leave them in the dark.
Lady Breck let me out into the chemically captured sunlight of her photographic passions. The journal showed not only how she worked around the restrictions placed on a woman of her status but also how keenly she felt the need not to intrude too much, not to make the Travellers seem like dolls for a well-bred lady with no children of her own.
* * *
My interest in the children is accepted. After all, are not women supposed to be delighted by babies in much the same way as they are delighted by a basket of kittens or a barrel of monkeys? Am I not a ‘gorjer’ with no child of my own and therefore to be pitied? This role works to my advantage. As I stage the tableaux of Roma children, so the background scenes are revealed openly to me and no one thinks to tidy away the campfire or to shirk from their tasks Not all are successful but there was a splendid one of a group of the women peeling vegetables and preparing a meal. I hover for as long as I can flitting about the camp trying not to be noticed, trying not to get in the way but grasping the smallest opportunity. If I could only paint, I might be able to put down the pictures that are saved in my head, and oh for a manufactory that might bottle the smells!
* * *
The portraits of the children would be the ones we could use for an exhibition. Lady Breck had captured them, grubby and suspicious. In order to show that I was still busy with my project I took the journal and the relevant photographs to Mrs Atkinson in her office.
She didn’t mention how her County Hall meeting had gone and it was impossible to tell whether the stress that vibrated out of her was down to County Hall or Mr Atkinson and their dastardly divorce proceedings.
She took a long time over each image, examining the faces. ‘These are perfect. This exhibition is going to be larger than you think, Ruby. We’ll need to tackle all the aspects of life that Lady Breck caught on camera, not just the Travellers. The domestic staff are going to be of interest and these…these are just…perfect in their imperfection.’
She handed them back. I mentioned the other finds I’d made, the informal photos of the upper class, Lady Breck’s guests and visitors. Mrs Atkinson nodded.
‘Tradesmen?’ was her only comment. I promised to look around once I’d finished scanning in the children and the journal entries.
It was down in the basement, as I turned the book over to sit the relevant pages on the lightbed of the scanner, that I saw the imprinted gold lettering on the back of the journal.
* * *
Chas. Goodrich and Daughters
Stationer and Paper Merchant Totnes Devon.
* * *
I took out the box and began to look over all the journals. Some were plainly marbled with black and grey and white but others were thicker, the paper more a clotted cream golden yellow. These were all marked Chas. Goodrich and the covers were stouter, marbled elaborately with a leafy green and a deep purple the colour of Advent robes. I ran my hand across the pages where the journal I was scanning had fallen open and it was creamy beneath my fingers. Cool, breathing. I riffled through, letting the paper cascade and release its old scents. There was something captured in there. I riffled again and woodsmoke breathed out at me.
I checked over the journal I had been scanning and found no mention of a trip to Totnes but I felt sure that somewhere here there would be a strand of Mary-Ann Penny’s life. Her history was hidden somewhere in these pages. I moved over to the boxes and sorted the Chas. Goodrich journals from amongst the others. Nothing was in date order here. Mrs Atkinson had told me that she hadn’t had time to go through it all. I took the Totnes notebooks and began to put them into chronological order. They began in 1888. April. But they did not begin with any mention of Devon.
* * *
So we are still in Wiltshire on the pretence of chasing duck. Monty is a bewhiskered buffoon who rules over his estate like an Ottoman Despot, and in that description I am including his wives—do, Dearest Diary, note the plural! Monty was put out of humour shortly before our arrival over a spate of poaching. Consequently instead of hunting duck we found ourselves on the trail of a poacher! I am almost certain that I glimpsed someone in the wood and was thankful he outwitted us and evaded capture.
* * *
Evening:
GHASTLY. Monty and Breck and the other dullards ensconced with the brandy and cigars after dinner, the ladies, myself, part of the company, retiring to the drawing room. Here, perched upon an uncomfortable chaise I was left to the mercies of wife Edie and mistress Miranda. Spite reigned. Their situation is unenviable, Monty’s good favours are bestowed turn and turn about. Each aired the most personal resentments towards the other with no regard for my presence in the room. I was forced to sit, a blank-faced witness to all their domestic torment, managing, in the uncomfortable final silence, a feeble compliment regarding the roast lamb at dinner.
How I would love to sit in the kitchen and hear what the servants make of this trio!
* * *
Something was beginning to tug at the edge of my memory. Some of the names were familiar to me now, they were part of the social circle, but I felt there was some tiny detail I’d overlooked. It was important, and I knew it would come to me. I headed downstairs to steal yet another cup of library tea and let my thoughts sift and surface.
The book club were still talking together. As I. walked through the library it was like hearing a familiar tune that I couldn’t quite place. Their voices were lowered, concerned, not the usual banter and disagreement and literary passion at all.
I had my hand on the door to the staffroom when Angharad spoke, her voice almost a whisper, ‘Is it true?’
My brain, fuddled and time-travelled as it was, snapped back into reality. I looked round. The book club were all turned towards me.
‘Is it true, Ruby?’ White haired Deirdra, the small black rectangles of her spectacles perched elegantly on her roman nose, stood up. ‘We thought you might know.’
Know what? Ellen Freethy read my baffled face.
‘About Tierney’s wife.’
Mrs Atkinson, keys clipped to her belt, spoke decisively, a rhetorical question. ‘Tea anyone?’
I let them all move past me into the staffroom.
Angharad brewed tea in the huge steel pot she dug from the very back of the cupboard under the sink. There were spiders in it which she chucked out of the window into the darkness of the flowerbed outside. Mrs Atkinson revealed a secret hoard of biscuits concealed in one of the old tin lockers in the far corner.
I did not sit down, I could sense that if I did I might not be able to get back up again. I needed to stand, to lock my knees out against disaster. Mrs Atkinson seemed to sense this, and handed me the unopened packets of biscuits. ‘Plate them up, Ruby.’
In the more confined surroundings of the staffroom everyone relaxed and spoke more easily. It seemed that Deirdra’s daughter, on a ceramics course at the college where Tierney’s wife taught, heard that Anita Winstanley had been offered a university teaching job in Stockholm. She had taken most of their savings and put their house on the market, but left Tierney the keys to the car and his ‘shag-pad’ at Dry Dock.
As they talked about why a woman of Anita Winstanley’s intelligence would
link up with a man like Mac Tierney, Mrs Atkinson kept her face almost hidden by her mug. Her eyes glazed as if contemplating how a woman of her intelligence could have hooked up with someone like Mr Atkinson and ended up camped out at the library.
Amid the background noises of their reasoning (the lure of masculinity, its deceits and disappointments, power, strength, disillusion) my mind was going over the fact that Martha had been absent since the day Anita Winstanley abandoned post and husband and flew off to new opportunities in Sverige.
Possibilities began to riffle and shuffle through my head. She might genuinely have been laid low by the bug going around. Instantly I had a terrible mental image of a vulnerable Martha puking into the toilet whilst being taken from behind by the recently freed/bereft/emasculated Mac Tierney.
What if he’d arrived on her doorstep, homeless and single, eyes raffish with charm. Would she let him over the threshold?
‘No.’ Angharad did not even have to consider her answer. She shook her head and the others all agreed. ‘She wouldn’t get back with him. There is no way on God’s green earth that she wants anything to do with Tierney. Not after the Thai Palace evening. Not after that.’
But the decision might not be hers. The words whispered in my mind. I daren’t say them aloud. Mrs Atkinson had tried calling her flat several times in the last couple of days but the answerphone was permanently on and her mobile was switched off. ‘I just put it down to the bug. When you’re laid low with that kind of thing, you don’t want to talk to anyone do you?’
My sweat was now liquid nitrogen trying to supercool the scared heat of panic. Just as it seemed my breathing was going to shut down, I had a thought.
‘Has anyone called her sister?’
Iris’s number was in Martha’s file. Angharad called from the front desk. At first it was the answerphone and then as Angharad was part way through her message Iris picked up. Angharad listened for a moment and said her farewells. She put down the phone and gave us all a triumphant smile.
There had been a run-in with Tierney the night his wife left. She had fled to Iris’s flat, Tierney kerb crawling beside her in his sleek Audi. Iris had helped her to send him on his way and thought it best that Martha stay with her. The lease was up on Martha’s own flat at the end of the month and they had decided that when Iris moved to her new house next month, Martha would move there too. They had already lugged her stuff out to Iris’s storage unit.
* * *
It was cold when I finally stepped out of the library. The night was clear and the light from the streetlamps glittered the frost so eerily that you could be convinced that there were faeries. I thought about the first time I had ever seen Iris. After the first day that Queen Victoria set her stony gaze upon me and I landed the library job.
I had found myself walking past the Galleon coffee shop more times than I now care to remember. I couldn’t muster the courage to push open the glass door. There was always a reason not to. The woman with red nails seated in the window. The bad weather. Excuses.
When I did finally push open the door, the masts on the etched image of the galleon seemed to creak as it gave inwards. There was the sound of the ocean, only later, sitting down, I realised it was just the rushing of panicked blood in my ears.
The panic. A tsunami of unstoppable magnitude. The money in my purse that seemed like foreign currency, my brain unable to cope with the mathematics of a pot of tea plus a round of toast, already the black stars imploding in my sightline. It had been a mistake. A terrible mistake. Then, an elegant white hand reached forward, the only colour an amber stone set into a chunky silver ring.
‘Let me.’ And her coins fell like glitter.
I looked up. Her face, the white skin and dark eyes beneath sculpted brows. The dark tint she had painted her lips, not blood, not plums. She smiled and as I fumbled my purse back into my bag she took my tea and toast and settled me at a corner table. An arrangement of stark twigs spangled with fairy lights beside me.
Her hair, past her waist, was drawn behind her head to drape down one shoulder. Like a scarf, only not like. There was a shiny blackness to her, like patent leather. I had never seen hair like that, the sheen to it. I watched the drape of her coat as she reached for a napkin, the boots beneath her long, lean, black skirt, buttery leathered and chunky soled.
I had breakfast every day there after that. Just to be in the same room with so much sheen and self-assurance. A few weeks later she came into the library one evening to pick up Martha and the connection was made. We exchanged greetings and niceties about the weather each morning after that, until she got her new job at the university. That was Iris.
She lived towards the other side of town in a Victorian conversion, past Queens Park. It was a huge old detached house, complete with sympathetically done conservatory. There was a turret-style room, a Lutyens knock-off, first floor front. I could imagine Martha up there sitting at the breakfast table with her hair pinned awry, looking out over town. I approached very carefully, trying to stay close to the walls and fences and hedges as I made my way up the hill from town.
There were odd lights on here and there, a copse of trees lurked behind a sooty black wall, carrying with them a deeper darkness as if, if you happened in there you might be blotted out. In a kitchen window a woman in a dressing gown cradled a yawling baby. A man, revealing himself naked in an upstairs room before the light blinked off in embarrassment.
As I approached the house I noticed there were three cars parked nearby. The nearest to me, a black BMW, had headrests that made me stand, hesitating, for some minutes thinking it was occupied. In front of that, a silver Honda pulled out suddenly, a woman in a supermarket uniform at the wheel. That left just the red Mitsubishi on the far side, much further up, the chestnut trees overhanging the pavement making it darker, more difficult to see if anyone might be inside. I edged onwards, keeping to the darker shadows.
No one. No sign of the silver Audi. Tierney was not staking out Iris’s flat.
Later, I stood on the spun steel bridge at Dry Dock, the rain soaking me. The lights were on in Tierney’s canalside apartment. I could see him slumped in the chair the light from the TV playing across his face as he sipped at a beer can. And in the window, in primary colours, a square sign:
* * *
Milton and DuFrey
For Sale.
Fusen wa agaimashita
The balloon ascended
Next afternoon, it was muggily hot in the basement archive, the old-style radiators blasting out heat you could have founded iron with. I hadn’t realised I’d fallen asleep beside the photocopier. I was sitting in my chair, sitting very still as Lady Breck lifted the camera’s cover and the sun shone through the lens in a whiteout of burnished light. In the real world it was a paper jam.
Later I was called upon for a stint on the desk. Martha had been late in the morning and was looking grey and peaky. Her final task of the day was the secondary school history group. Harvey and Mrs Milligan were preparing for Story Time. They were talking in low voices, conspiratorial. No one else took any interest but I kept them in the periphery of my vision. It is not hard to see what is in front of you. They kept close, they were happy invading each other’s space. Something was happening between them. I waited, listening, almost certain that I would hear them clicking together like Lego.
But the sound was obliterated by the unholy racket surging in with the party of secondary school children arriving for their ’History is Our Future’ presentation from Martha. Thirteen-year-old schoolboys shouting ‘QUIET’ and ‘SILENCE’ over the high-pitched drone and whine of thirteen-year-old girls, bored and boring in equal measure. ‘FUCK!’ someone shouted, and the teacher, thick-set and powerful in his shirt and tie, pounced on the culprit like an educated bouncer.
Which was when Martha fainted and all hell broke loose.
The girls divided into the ones who cried hysterically and the others who stood resolutely smug. The teacher was attempting to strugg
le through the boys who had taken on the herd mentality of bullocks, milling and bellowing, punches and kicks flying. A trio of losers up at the front, began shoving the tallest of their number, a bumfluffed bruiser of lad, towards the floored Martha, their feet kicking and scuffing. ‘Go on Beggsy…’ they jeered.
‘Kiss of Life, Beggsy.’ ‘She’s gagging for it Beggs…’ ‘No tongues.’
‘That’s ENOUGH.’ The teacher barked at them and a thick, claggy silence fell as Harvey, knight in woolly pullover that he is, strode quickly over to Martha’s prone body and lifted her up. Mrs Milligan opened the door to the staffroom and they all vanished behind it. I looked at the grain of the door for a moment or two and then the teacher cleared his throat. I looked at him. He smiled and seemed familiar.
‘Would you care to step into the breach?’
I felt as if the contents of my brain had suddenly been flushed down a toilet.
‘Could you give the talk? Or would that not be allowed?’ He was glancing at his watch. ‘Or we could busk something.’
His smile again, familiar and kind. Probably he looked just like some other teacher I had once known; it was a neat, authoritative teacher smile. Wasn’t it?
I had heard Martha give the talk several times and she’d already spent the last half an hour setting up the overhead projector and the flip chart. It had to be done, there was just me and a slide presentation to stave off mayhem. There was a group at the back still talking, sitting turned away from me. How did Martha grab their attention?
‘You. At the back.’ One boy turned, a sly smile on his face, a surreptitious glance to the teacher to see what he could get away with. ‘You’re history.’
