by Nicola Slade
‘A what?’ Startled at first by his unaccustomed endearment, she suddenly interpreted his cautious euphemism and swept a comprehensive glance round the hall. There were still a few visitors, Saturday being the only day when relatives and friends were welcome after dinner. Not everyone was allowed to entertain guests in their rooms but Matron had been happy to make an exception of Sam, who traded shamelessly on his cloth when it was politic. Before Avril’s death he had pandered happily to his legion of adoring female parishioners, keeping them all from squabbling by the exercise of his charm, but nowadays he tended to steer clear of women who could be described as fancy free and might be suspected of having designs on him.
‘Don’t be silly.’ She gave him a kiss and a little push to send him on his way. ‘I’ll be all right, don’t worry.’
His words haunted her however, as she made her way towards the drawing-room, passing the Buchans as she did so and encountering Fred Buchan’s pale, frozen stare. Doreen Buchan started to rise from her nervous perch on the edge of her seat when she saw Harriet but just at that moment the Colonel made a beeline for them.
‘Ah, there you are, Miss Quigley. How about a game of Scrabble, eh? Just a quick one, I’ve wiped the floor with the girls over there.’ He pointed to a smiling quartet of women clustered round a small table. ‘I’m thirsting for new blood.’
Doreen Buchan subsided unnoticed as Harriet smiled and accepted, glad of a challenge to use her brain in a mental exercise not connected with death or disaster. Thank goodness he didn’t suggest we play Cluedo, she thought, that might be a bit too close to home.
There was a hand over Harriet’s mouth, holding her down, stopping her breathing.
‘Urgghh!’ She struggled to free herself, her arms flailing wildly as she struck at her attacker. As the grip on her jaw slackened a little Harriet managed to sink her teeth into the other’s flesh.
There was a shocked, half-smothered scream and the other person fell back with a whimper. Even at such a time Harriet had a fleeting moment of complacency that she had all her own teeth. Gums, in such a situation, she reflected, would hardly have been so effective.
Shaking with fright and with a righteous indignation Harriet reached out and snapped on the bedside light.
‘What the hell is going on here?’ she demanded, glaring ferociously at Ellen Ransom, an incongruous assailant in her pink, brushed-nylon dressing gown and her hair screwed into curlers and tied up in a chiffon scarf. She was nursing her injured hand and examining the marks of Harriet’s teeth, clearly visible in the fleshy mound at the base of her thumb.
‘What did you do that for?’ she asked, sounding unreasonably aggrieved.
The affronted tone penetrated Harriet’s red mist of anger and shock and she hauled herself up to a sitting position. She scrabbled for her glasses then reached out for her watch.
Midnight.
‘How did you get into my room?’ Harriet demanded and saw that the other woman looked suddenly shifty.
‘There’s a spare key to each room,’ she shrugged, not meeting Harriet’s angry stare. ‘I just borrowed it for a while. I’ll put it back tomorrow morning. Nobody will notice.’
‘So – you stole the key. But why were you trying to kill me?’ Harriet snapped, still shaking. She was savagely glad, though startled, to see the colour drain from the other woman’s sunken cheeks as she recoiled as though Harriet had smacked her. Then the colour rushed back until she was scarlet-faced with indignation.
‘Kill you? Don’t talk such nonsense. What on earth are you talking about? I just wanted to talk to you in private. All I did was put my hand over your mouth so you wouldn’t scream and wake up the whole house. There’s no harm in that, is there? And you didn’t have to bite me like that, it was a stupid thing to do, it really hurts.’
She managed a flounce even though she was actually standing still, rather too close to the bedside, and she examined her injured hand with a sulky ill grace.
‘So get a tetanus jab,’ Harriet had no sympathy for her. ‘Why on earth couldn’t you have told me earlier that you wanted to talk to me? We could have got together downstairs some time, at a civilized hour. No need for all this ridiculous cloak and dagger stuff.’ She was speaking in a reasoned tone now as she began to calm down, feeling her thumping heart slow to a more acceptable rate.
She got a sniff and a sneer in reply.
‘What? And let that load of busybodies get an earful? No thank you, I haven’t discovered a single spot in this place where you can be completely private, not during the day.’
Harriet’s experience of Firstone Grange differed considerably from Ellen’s in that respect. The house had plenty of semi-private corners where the chairs were arranged into comfortable conversation spots, but she let it pass. After all, Ellen Ransom had spent most of her time here in the toils of Christiane Marchant, never knowing when that hateful presence would manifest itself over her shoulder. She might well have had difficulty finding a place of private sanctuary.
‘Oh all right,’ Harriet heaved a grudging sigh. ‘You’re here now.’ She indicated the light but comfortable armchair by the window. ‘Pull that up if you want to and then you’d better get it off your chest if you must. Are you warm enough? Want a blanket or something?’
Ellen shook her head and pulled the chair up close beside the bed. Harriet retreated a little. It was no good: try as she might she really could not like Ellen Ransom, no matter how distressed the woman might be; no matter what it was she was about to confide to her.
‘Are you comfortable?’ Harriet sat up in bed feeling quite magisterial, wrapped in her own warm red dressing gown, bought from John Lewis in Southampton expressly for the period in hospital and the subsequent convalescence. ‘Well, Ellen, get on with it.’ She took a deep breath and plunged in. ‘Tell me what it was that Christiane Marchant was holding over your head? What it was that made you want to kill her?’
‘Ohhh!’ It was a long-drawn-out sigh and Ellen cast a glance of astonishment mixed with awe at Harriet. Years of practice, Harriet reflected complacently, had made her an artist in her ability to appear superhuman, with paranormal powers of deduction. There’s not a lot of difference between little girls and very much older ones, she decided, disguising a slight smirk as the old magic worked yet again.
‘I never thought I’d see her again,’ whispered Ellen, twisting her hands in nervous anguish. ‘It was at the end of the war. I never thought.…’ She raised haunted eyes to Harriet, as if pleading with the other woman for understanding, for mercy.
Harriet managed a kindly nod, but said nothing, waiting for Ellen to continue.
Ellen bent her head and went on. She explained about the munitions factory near Poole and how she had lived with her sister. She told Harriet about Douglas being sent out to the Far East, about his injury, about her first casual meeting with Christiane in the spring of 1945.
‘Douglas and me only had the one night together when we got married in 1942, then he had to go. He was on embarkation leave when we met and he only plucked up courage to pop the question right near the end of his time.’ She had a nostalgic look in her eye as she described the wedding. ‘I was only eighteen, poor silly little cow, but I did look nice. My sister borrowed a dress for me from her neighbour, a rose-pink crêpe it was, with a lovely draped bodice and somebody else lent me a really classy fur stole. What with that and a pale-grey hat I already had, with a pink rose pinned to it, I looked the bees’ knees.’
Harriet waited quietly, a reluctant pity wrung from her as she too contemplated that young bride and her shy bridegroom, about to go off to possible death and even more possible injury.
‘I did love him,’ Ellen said abruptly, almost to herself. She sounded resentful as she remembered her younger self. ‘But he was away for three years, the war didn’t end in the Far East till the August of 1945 and then he had to wait for ages till they were sent home in the transport ships.
‘I had three years of having to live like
a nun. I was married but not married, not really. You could only go out with a crowd if you wanted some fun but you couldn’t really go out with a crowd because they all paired up and there you were, like a lemon, all on your own. So – I ended up having some fun of my own.’
Decades later the defiance was still there. Harriet could hear it quite clearly in the other woman’s voice. Would I have felt like that, she wondered? In the same circumstances. If – what was his name? David, that’s it, if David had been about to go abroad, perhaps to die, would I have married him when we were only eighteen, just to have a moment’s happiness? To give him a taste of a normal life, knowing – both of us knowing – that a taste might be all he would ever have?
Harriet had always been singularly clear-sighted and logical, even as a teenager, but given Ellen’s circumstances, with a war raging round the world, she knew that however much her head might have recognized the inevitable pitfalls, she would have done just the same. But if I had married David, she thought, I don’t think I would have gone out looking for fun. Still, not everyone felt like that, she conceded, trying to recapture the fleeting moment of sympathy she had felt.
Ellen went on talking, more confident now, her words tumbling over themselves sometimes; at others, halting and faltering.
‘There was this bloke,’ she admitted at last. Harriet waited, concealing a sigh, for the inevitable corollary. Was this what it was all about? Guilt about an illegitimate baby still so shameful that it could cause that amount of pain more than sixty years later?
‘I got caught.’ Ellen spoke bluntly. ‘In the family way,’ she elaborated and Harriet nodded.
‘Somehow or other she, Christiane, spotted it. I don’t know how she knew. I didn’t show and I’d managed to hide it from everybody, even our Mavis and I was actually living with her. Still, one day Chris said to me that she knew lots of old country ways of getting rid of my little problem so that nobody would ever find out.’
Harriet pricked up her ears. Not a baby then, whose existence had been concealed from Douglas Ransom, but an abortion. It had been illegal in those days, of course, but still … even allowing for the change in attitudes, was it so heinous a crime? Enough to contemplate murder?
Ellen was still spilling it all out, speaking quietly, almost to herself.
‘We went down to the beach, near Canford Cliffs it was, between Poole and Bournemouth,’ she explained. ‘You couldn’t actually get on to the beach itself because they still had the barbed wire and concrete blocks all across but they weren’t so strict about keeping watch at that time. I suppose they thought the Japs were unlikely to be invading up the English Channel.’
She bit her lip, clearly shocked at her own temerity in actually making a joke, at such a time. ‘It was really early on a Sunday morning, about the middle of May I suppose it would have been. I’d stayed the night with Chris, who worked as a live-in chambermaid in a hotel just outside Bournemouth; we picked that night because we knew she had the whole day off. We hitched a lift in a lorry with some bloke she had met locally: he was driving to Poole, down to the Quay, and he did a bit of a detour and dropped us off in the village. He made some crack about wishing he could see us in our bathing costumes and we just played along, joshing him, you know. It was all very light and jokey. If only he’d known.
‘Chris had brewed up this drink and she made me swallow it when we woke up, long before we went out. Horrible stuff it was, herbs and so forth; I don’t know what it was – she said she learnt all sorts of things like that, herbal remedies and medicines, from her grandmother. She came from somewhere quite primitive, I always reckoned, for all her airs and graces and the little hints she used to drop about being landed gentry. Mind you, I never believed that, not for a minute, though she fooled the rest of them. She never said, but I got the idea that she’d used it herself and that’s how she knew it worked.
‘Anyway, it was pretty powerful stuff, whatever was in it, and I’d already started having some contractions by the time the bloke put us down near the top of the hill. It was horrible, I could hardly walk down towards the shelter for the pains, and then the waters broke. It made an awful mess.’
Her eyes closed briefly on the memory of that ancient pain and the shame of it all.
‘I didn’t dare scream out loud, even when we stumbled into the shelter, so Chris broke off a branch of a tree and gave it to me. I bit right through it, even though it was quite thick, it was a dreadful labour, even though it was very fast. When it was nearly over, and the head and shoulders were out, Chris made a funny noise, a sort of shocked gasp. ‘I thought you said you were only about four months gone?’ she said to me.’
Harriet scarcely drew breath, not wanting to distract Ellen from her narrative but she watched her narrowly through half-closed eyes.
‘I had no idea what she was talking about but at that moment I gave another great push and the rest of the baby came out; then there was another contraction and the afterbirth followed almost straight afterwards. I just lay back, completely exhausted and gasping and crying, just relieved it was all over. The only thing I wanted to do was have a rest then get away and forget all about it.
‘That was when I heard her.’
Ellen’s eyes darkened at the memory of the long ago horror. ‘Christiane said … she said: “This baby is alive! You lied to me, you stupid bitch, you were at least six months’ gone. What on earth are we going to do now?”‘
Harriet jerked upright, staring at Ellen, her attention entirely focused now. What had happened? Was this what had given the Breton woman such a hold over her English friend?
‘She started to scream at me, but then she hushed up in a hurry. We hadn’t seen anyone but it was too risky to draw attention to ourselves.’ Ellen’s tone was resentful, even at this distance in time, clearly aggrieved at the way her companion had spoken to her. ‘She was a hard, unfeeling cow of a girl, even then, Christiane, but she really went right over the top when she heard that baby cry. I think it was the only time I ever saw her look almost mad, she was usually so controlled, but her eyes looked all fiery and she reached out, went to pick it up but I grabbed at it first. ‘What are you going to do with it?’ she asked again. I didn’t say anything at first, I was trying to think what to do, thinking about Douglas and what he’d say, all the scandal. I knew I couldn’t face it.
‘I was in a mess so she went off to look for some water, to see if there was a stand pipe anywhere near by; there was a café there though, of course, it was shut at the time. “You’d better start thinking fast,” she snapped at me. She had found the tap and managed to spot an old jam jar half buried in the sand. I think she had a bit of a hunt round but that was all she could find, and then when she came back she was still in a black temper. I was almost frightened of her but I’d been thinking hard while she was gone.
‘I’d decided by then and I knew what to do.’
Something in her tone sent a chill right through Harriet. There was a manic gleam in the other woman’s eyes as she recalled that long ago desperation. In the end, however, she spoke in the most matter-of-fact voice imaginable as she told Harriet what she had done, what her solution to her little problem had been.
‘I realized I couldn’t rely on Christiane to do another hand’s turn to help me,’ she said calmly. ‘She told me straight that I was on my own now. The baby was barely breathing so I took out my handkerchief and wadded it into a pad, then I pressed it over the baby’s nose and mouth until it stopped breathing. I remember I was surprised; it didn’t take much doing. Like I said it was only very little and very weak; then when it was definitely dead I got another stick and scratched out a hole in the sand and buried it.’
Chapter Eleven
* * *
Around six o’clock the next morning Harriet reluctantly opened heavy, swollen eyelids knowing that once she was properly awake she would have to allow the previous night’s revelations and horrors to come flooding back.
She had managed to get rid of E
llen Ransom quite easily. The other woman had obviously felt a great weight fall from her shoulders as she confessed to her actions and she explained volubly that from the moment Christiane Marchant had arrived at Firstone Grange, she had been blackmailing her erstwhile friend. Apparently, Ellen explained, Christiane had recognized Ellen’s name and photograph from the article in the local paper, when a carefully posed picture had appeared, of Matron Winslow welcoming her first guest to Firstone Grange. This had been the circumstance that had reconciled Christiane to Alice’s desperate venture and made her decide to stay.
No, there had been no suggestion that she wanted any money, that wasn’t it at all, Ellen said, as Harriet had pulled herself together and thrust her out of the room. It had been power that was Christiane’s heady brew. ‘Mind you,’ Ellen had glowered with anger as she recalled the circumstances. ‘She made the most of it at the time. The stuff I had to hand over to that bitch. Silk stockings that I got from some of the boys in the American Army, extra clothing coupons, any treats I got from friends; I had to hand them all over to her, because she threatened to tell the police. She said I’d made her an accessory to murder and it was a small price for me to pay, coughing up all those luxury items. ‘Specially – she used to smirk at me as she said it – when a word from her could have got me arrested.’
Closing the door on the woman had been the last thing Harriet had managed to do before she collapsed on the edge of her bed in a storm of tears. Why was I so upset, she wondered now, still glue-eyed from that breakdown.
After some difficult introspection she came up with a painful diagnosis. If I had been in Ellen’s situation, left alone, married yet not married, and if I had taken the same course and had what Ellen had referred to as fun – what would I have done, faced with the same terrifying outcome? For terrifying it must have been, she acknowledged, for a young wife to be faced with the prospect of living, breathing evidence that she had betrayed one of the country’s heroes.
