Mum went quiet. Then, to my amazement, she continued.
“Mrs. Eastfield started to give it all up after that. Her family, the Guerdons, farmed all the land round here. It went as far as Daneflete and the river, then over to Hilsea, and nearly to Fairing the other way — a lot of it marshland, of course, not much use to man nor beast. The Guerdons were a titled family many years ago, but sometimes titles go sideways or get lost, and the Guerdons ended up wealthy gentleman farmers. There’s no lack of money, never has been.
“When I was a child, I remember seeing Mrs. Eastfield quite often driving a tractor along the main road. During the war she had some help from land girls and labourers, but none of them stayed for long. It was all too much for her. Gradually she sold off some land to other farmers, and what she didn’t sell, she rents out.”
“Well, if she’s got money, why doesn’t she sort the blinkin’ house out, then?” said Cora. “It’s falling to bits.”
“Oh, Cora,” said Mum, twisting Cora’s hair around her fingers. “Sometimes, when an awful lot of rotten things happen to a person, they — they sort of lose heart, I suppose. It must be hard. After hundreds of years, with that old house never going out of the family in all that time, she’s — well, she’s the last of the Guerdons, the only one left to have been born with that name.”
That’s what old Gussie had said — the last of the Guerdons.
“She probably just couldn’t be bothered,” Mum went on, “and anyway, why should she? It isn’t worth wasting money on, is it? After she’s gone, who’s going to want to live down there, in that lonely place, near that funny old church … all those weird stories. Nobody in their right mind would choose to live down there. It’ll be pulled down or left to fall down all on its own.”
“Why don’t she move away, then?” asked Cora.
“Where would she go?”
Cora wouldn’t stop. “Why don’t people round here want their kids to go down the church, then, Mrs. Jotman? What’s the matter with it? What are them weird stories you said? And why doesn’t anyone like Auntie Ida? Why do they all whisper behind her back? Why do they go quiet when she walks in anywhere?”
“That’s an end to it, Cora! Quite frankly, they’re not the sort of things children should be asking. That’s enough now!”
“Why don’t grown-ups tell kids nothing?” Cora cried. “Like we’re stupid.”
Mum sighed. “It was the same when I was little.”
She tied up the end of the first plait, then busied herself brushing and then sorting the rest of Cora’s hair into three strands.
“Look,” she went on. “People around here are funny about the church, always have been. It’s probably a lot of old superstitious nonsense, but, well, some strange and, to be honest, awful things have happened down there that just haven’t ever been understood. As for your Auntie Ida, people are funny with folks who’ve been touched by tragedy. I suppose they think it’s catching or something, so best to keep your distance. People can be very self-righteous, especially in small villages like this. You have to know how your neighbours stand, what they think. You have to know where you are with them. It makes you feel safe. Folk can be uncomfortable with someone who is different, or odd or unpredictable. And, of course, it gives them something to talk about. All right?”
“But it’s cruel not to talk to Auntie Ida,” said Cora. “It’s bad enough if your whole family’s gone and died, without people gossiping about you —”
“Well, it’s other things as well, Cora,” said Mum. “It’s not just Mrs. Eastfield’s husband and son. I mean, more recently, during the war — Look, I’m really unhappy telling you this. It isn’t my place —”
“So you keep saying.”
“There’s no need to be rude, Cora. It’s awkward.”
“Sorry — sorry, Mrs. Jotman.”
“There are people who would be horrified that I’m saying all this, especially your aunt. If you breathe a word —”
“Promise, cross me heart.”
“Well, during the war …” said Mum, and I leaned right in. “Not so close, Roger, I can’t breathe. During the war, two sisters were evacuated to Mrs. Eastfield’s from London — relatives, I think, a bit like you and Mimi, I suppose — one older and the other much younger, just a toddler really. Well, the little girl disappeared just like little Edward Eastfield.”
“What happened to her, then?”
“Well — um — she could so easily have wandered off. The marshes can be treacherous. The reeds can grow as high as a house, and there’s hidden pools and thick mud. You’ve really got to know where you’re going as you get closer to the river. Then the creeks come right round the house, and they’re tidal. It’s not a place for a child… .”
“Didn’t they look for her? Didn’t the police send out search parties?” I asked.
“Yes, they gave as much time as they could spare, but it was wartime, of course. They had many more demands on their resources than they could manage as it was. The Local Defence Volunteers got involved — or I think they were called the Home Guard by then. I know, because your Grandpa Bardock went down on the marshes with his unit to look for the little girl, Roger, but they gave it up in the end. I don’t think they actually thought they would find her. I remember hearing Grandma and Grandpa whispering about it when they thought I couldn’t hear. He hoped it would be different this time. Then I heard her ask him, under her breath, whether they’d gone through the door — some door somewhere — to look for the child, but he whispered back that it was bolted. I could hear he was — um — scared, which unsettled me, because your grandpa wasn’t easily upset. Then he said maybe there would be a miracle and she would turn up. But there wasn’t. She never did.
“I — I hate to tell you this, to be honest, but the police took Mrs. Eastfield away for questioning at one point. There was no evidence of foul play, as they say, and in the end they let her go.”
“Crikey!” I said, amazed to think of Mrs. Eastfield being arrested like a murderer.
“What happened to the older sister?” Cora asked.
“Eventually someone came and took her back to London on her own,” said Mum, “and I even remember overhearing some gossip a year or so later that the girl’s mother had just died, on top of everything else.”
“So do people not like Auntie Ida because they think she kills children or something?”
“No, nobody thinks that, Cora, honestly,” said Mum. “There are lots of reasons. She doesn’t need them, for a start. She isn’t interested in being part of Bryers Guerdon. She doesn’t give anything, and she doesn’t take anything, unless she absolutely has to. They probably think she’s a bit uppity as well, speaking with that accent. Anyway, that probably wouldn’t matter if she got herself involved in the community, like Mr. and Mrs. Treasure, for example, but she doesn’t. She chooses to live apart, all alone in that lonely old house, and anyway, the Guerdons have always been thought a really strange lot, from way back.”
Mum tied off the second plait tightly with the red ribbon.
“There have always been stories about Guerdon Hall,” she continued. “And it’s odd that the church is all on its own down there with the village up here. We were always told as children that the marshes bred the plague, and that sometime long ago, the people moved up here to healthier ground. Fear of catching the Black Death was enough to keep us away when we were little, apart from all the other tales.” Mum laughed. “Father Mansell doesn’t bother with All Hallows much. Almost all his services are held at Saint Mary’s, in North Fairing. Even Mr. Hibbert, the sexton, gives All Hallows a wide berth if he can help it. When we were children — I’ve never forgotten — he scared me and your uncle Bill half to death with a ghost story he’d made up about something he’d seen down there in the churchyard. Really gave me the pips, I can tell you. Irresponsible, silly man.
“Anyway, the simple fact is, folks up here in Bryers Guerdon like to think that if you ignore unpleasant things for lon
g enough, they’ll just go away. They’d rather not be reminded of those unwholesome events concerning Mrs. Eastfield, so when she turns up here in the village, they don’t like it. She makes them recall things they’d rather forget.”
“I suppose Mrs. Aylott and her friends thought Mrs. Eastfield wasn’t a fit person to have Cora and Mimi staying with her, then,” I said. “No wonder they were gossiping in the shop.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Mum said. “Were they? Oh, dear.”
“Mrs. Jotman,” said Cora, “you said ‘superstitious nonsense’? What’s all that, then?”
“Oh, Cora, I thought we’d finished,” she said. “Look, when you’re … er … warned about certain things from being very little, when you grow up with daft stories, it’s very difficult to be sensible about them when you’ve got children of your own. It’s always, well, just in case there’s something in it … you know what I mean… .”
“What daft stories?”
“Oh, Cora”— Mum threw her hands in the air —“can’t you leave anything alone? It’s just silly when I think about it.”
“About what?”
“Oh,” Mum sighed, turning her back and heading for the door, “oh, they used to tell us … Look, I’ll show you something. Won’t be a minute.”
Cora and I met each other’s gaze as Mum left the kitchen with her basket. She returned with her big red scrapbook. I’d never really looked through it, put off by some of the soppy things she’d stuck in it, like tickets for the pictures when she and Dad were courting.
She shuffled through the huge grey pages. “Ah, here we are,” she said, spreading the book out on the table. It was a page of newspaper cuttings, stuck in with old brown Sellotape. They were dirty yellow with age but had come out of the paper we still had delivered every Wednesday, the Lokswood Herald.
Mum laughed a little while she turned the scrapbook round on the table so we could see.
“Most of the reporters around then,” she said, “were either really young juniors, straight out of school, not old enough for active service yet, or old chaps. Really silly things got put in the paper, but with the war on, local stories didn’t last long. Obviously, when that little girl went missing and Mrs. Eastfield was taken to the police station, there was a certain amount of interest, and they sent a reporter and a photographer down to have a bit of a snoop around, but they found out very little because people here tend to clam up when outsiders come poking their noses in.
“I suppose the chaps felt they ought to print something, though, having come all the way down here. They must have picked something up from somebody, some remark. Look at this. Daft, isn’t it?”
It was an inside page of the newspaper. A half-inch-high headline read: A MONSTER ON THE MARSHES?
“The — the grown-ups used to frighten us with it,” Mum said quietly.
I turned to Cora. I wasn’t quite expecting what I saw.
Her face had gone pale. She wasn’t reading the article, but was staring at a small, grainy photograph in the corner at the bottom of the page. The photo had originally been of two girls, standing arm in arm, one much taller than the other, but the paper had only printed half of it, the smaller girl. Underneath the picture were printed the words: Anne Swift, the Missing Child.
Mum noticed Cora was upset. She quickly closed the scrapbook before I could get a proper look at the photo, and took it out of the room. When I went to search for the book later, I couldn’t find it.
Cora didn’t say a thing. She got up and went out into the garden.
I watched Auntie Ida adjust her brown hat in the hall mirror.
“Edith Shardlow and I were at boarding school together,” she said. “We see each other once a year or so, just to keep in touch.”
She picked up an old comb off the small table and ran it through the ends of her hair, then wiped a smudge from her cheek. Who would have thought that Auntie Ida had a friend? I realized how little I knew about her, except that under that chestnut hat, her head was full of secrets.
“Though Edith’s had a better life,” she added quietly.
Auntie Ida would know quite well who the child in the newspaper was, the same little girl who had reached out to me in the graveyard: The Missing Child. Anne Swift.
“We’re meeting at Wren’s Coffee House in Lokswood at eleven thirty.”
Anne Swift. Two sisters. Mum was Susan Swift before she married Dad. Susan and Anne. Dad and Auntie Ida had talked about them in the sitting room that night last week. But surely it wasn’t Mum, that older girl whose arm was still in the photograph in the newspaper, hooked through her little sister’s. If she’d had a sister, I would have known — surely someone would have said.
It couldn’t have been Mum, the girl who’d had to go back to London on her own, whose mother had died not long after — Agnes Swift, Auntie Ida’s sister. Dad always said her husband, One-Eyed Jack, thought he’d get rich marrying her because the Guerdons had loads of money, but he didn’t reckon on Agnes’s father disowning her for marrying him. Agnes Swift — the black sheep. Old Guerdon never gave them so much as a penny.
“I’m going to treat Mimi to a banana split,” Auntie said. “They are very good in Wren’s, smothered in chocolate sauce. Then, as it’s early closing, we might take her to the seaside on the open-top bus, if the weather stays fine.”
Auntie never even asked me if I wanted to go, too. I wondered whether she didn’t want me to come because she’d be ashamed of me in front of this friend from her smart boarding-school days, of the way I spoke or where I came from, or because Edith Shardlow might ask me about my eye, from which the purple bruising had faded to a spreading yellow stain. Maybe Auntie hadn’t asked me because she didn’t want to run the risk of my saying yes.
It was possible she didn’t want to take Mimi, either, and was just suffering her because she didn’t trust me to keep an eye on her properly.
I’d never had a banana split smothered in chocolate sauce or been to the seaside.
Auntie had smartened herself up for the occasion. When Mimi, in the little white dress with the pink and green smocking, came into the hall from the kitchen and Auntie bent down to do up her shoe buckles, I caught the whiff of mothballs.
“I’ll take Mimi up to the bathroom,” said Auntie. “Father Mansell is giving us a lift to the station in Daneflete. If there’s a knock at the door, make sure it’s him before you answer.”
I watched Mimi’s little figure, her hand locked in Auntie Ida’s, lifting her knees high to climb the treads, Auntie moving slowly, patiently, alongside her.
Had Auntie taken little Anne upstairs just like this? Had Mum watched the two of them, just as I was doing now?
The knocker thudded dully on the door. I opened it to Father Mansell, who smiled, touched his hat to me like a gentleman, and said the chauffeur was ready and waiting to take Mrs. Eastfield and the little girl to the station in Daneflete.
“You’ve got a load of dust on your hat,” I told him as he came through the door.
“Oh, so I have,” he said, taking it off and giving it a good brush. Then he ran his fingers nervously round and round the brim while he stood there, not quite sure what else to say to me. I was pretty sure he’d forgotten he’d met me before until I asked if he had drunk up all the Sanatogen he’d won in the raffle.
“Ah, yes, the tickets, the raffle tickets …” he said, his eyes taking in the cobwebs, the thick dust, the shredded curtains at the window on the stairs. “By the way, did you know there was a bowl of tomatoes in the porch, and a dead rabbit?”
“I’ll tell Auntie,” I said. “Erm — at the cricket, you was telling me about Mr. Scaplehorn, the rector before you,” I reminded him.
“Ah, yes, so I did. He came to this house a great deal, I believe. He and Mrs. Eastfield were great friends, you know.” He looked up the stairs to see if there was any sign of Auntie Ida and Mimi.
“You was saying he knew a lot about this place, and the church an’ all.”
“Er — yes, he — um — carried out a great deal of research into the history of this area, travelled to county record offices and up to town and all sorts of other places in his spare time — bicycled everywhere, so I’m told.”
He took his handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his forehead. I got the feeling he really didn’t want to talk about Reverend Scaplehorn, or about anything really, with me.
“What did he do with all the stuff he found out, then?”
“Goodness, I’ve never known such a child for questions. Well — er — when Mrs. Mansell and I first moved into Glebe House,” the rector continued uncomfortably, “most of his papers were left behind. In one of the drawers in his desk, I found notebooks, letters, and copies he’d made of historical documents connected with Guerdon Hall, the rectory, and the church. I barely glanced at them, to be honest. I’m more of a mathematician than a historian. I’m not a great one for dwelling on the past.”
He folded the handkerchief and replaced it in his pocket, then took a sideways glance at his watch while he rocked backwards and forwards, creaking in his shoes.
“I suppose you chucked it all out, then, seeing as you wasn’t interested.”
“No, no,” he continued, taking another sneaky look up the staircase. “You can’t throw things like that away. No, I popped it all in an old tin box and gave it to Mrs. Eastfield. I thought she would be the only one who might remotely want it, as most of the material concerned her family. You should ask her if she still has it. It would be a jolly thing to do on a rainy day, have a look at what’s inside, as you seem to be so fascinated. It may be lying around somewhere. You’ll know it because I painted JS, for Jasper Scaplehorn, on the lid. The box is black. Of course, it might all be frightfully boring. When Mrs. Eastfield comes down, I’ll ask her about it.”
“No, don’t worry,” I said. “If a rainy day comes, I’ll look for it.” I went up three stairs and shouted, “Father Mansell’s here! He’s been here ages! There’s a rabbit and some tomatoes in the porch!”
Long Lankin Page 16
