by Nicola Slade
‘I certainly do, you look smashing, Dor,’ he told her. ‘Ten years younger and good enough to eat. Here, what on earth has brought this on?’
‘Oh,’ she shrugged and fobbed him off. ‘Time for a change, I suppose.’
The explanation had satisfied him and somewhere inside she felt a tiny glow of pleasure as she caught him looking at her now and then during the morning, admiration and – yes, mounting desire – written clearly on his face.
So what had brought it on, she wondered, as she walked slowly along the lane? Vic was right, it was completely out of character for her to buy any clothes that drew attention to herself. Sensible navy-blue, plain black, beige – oh yes, plenty of beige, that was what Doreen Buchan usually wore. Beige was safest of all. But yesterday morning something had snapped and while Vic was busy out on a site visit, Doreen had jumped into her car and headed for Southampton and the huge West Quay shopping centre.
As she queued to park she had felt her courage begin to fail. What possessed me, she wondered, to decide to go shopping this close to Christmas and on a Saturday too? Whatever it was that drove her, had made her go on. John Lewis, she thought, they’re bound to have what I want, so she had found herself on an escalator to the women’s fashion department. The place was packed with heaving bodies and she was jostled at almost every step, people everywhere chasing their tails in a desperate attempt to finish their present-buying. As she stood irresolute, diffidently fingering a soft woollen dress in a light, glowing turquoise, an elderly woman shopper beside her, elegantly kilted out in a classic style, turned to her with a friendly smile.
‘Go on,’ she urged. ‘Try it on! That colour would look beautiful on you; your eyes are almost the same colour.’
As Doreen hesitated, looking surprised, the other woman nodded towards the dress. ‘Do it,’ she said in an encouraging tone. ‘If you like, I’ll wait outside the fitting rooms and you can show me, if you’d like a second opinion. Yes, honestly, I’m not in a hurry.’
Now, on Sunday morning, Doreen paused to look up at the sky. No, it wasn’t going to rain, thank goodness. Oh, but it had been such fun, she recalled, shopping with her new friend. Together they had collected skirts and tops and jackets in colours and styles that the aloof, awkward Doreen Buchan had never dreamed of trying, and time and again, the other woman’s taste proved spot on. She had been in fashion all through her working life, she had confided, and adored clothes, so it was a pleasure to help Doreen find things that suited her so well. The two of them had exchanged telephone numbers over coffee in the panoramic restaurant and Doreen had driven home with her new friend’s promise to meet up again soon ringing in her ears.
Whatever got into me? Why did I do that? She struggled to understand the impulse that had shaken her out of her lifelong caution. After much heart searching, something, some kind of explanation finally occurred to her. I used to wear all those dark colours so nobody could see me, she realized, remembering how, at school, she had hidden in the girls’ lavatories every day at playtime, lest her tormentors find her and start their chanting and bullying again. Later, when she was safely married to Vic and they were making their way up the ladder, the habit of concealment had remained with her. Be discreet, be a good wife, be a good mother; don’t draw attention to yourself, don’t behave in a common way, don’t let them see you. If nobody can see you, nobody will ever know. They’ll never find out about … that.
She squared her shoulders and walked quite briskly past the part of the churchyard that she found distressingly untidy. She had to keep quiet about that, though, when discussing it with the locals. Visiting the village some months earlier, during the negotiations about the purchase of White Lodge, she had been surprised and perturbed to notice that a section of the churchyard had been left apparently untended, the grass long and strewn with weeds.
When she had remarked, rather acidly, on this to Neil, he had explained that the parish was involved with the Living Churchyard scheme, whereby the growth of grasses and other plants was encouraged in the hope that it would provide a habitat for birds, wild flowers, insects and small animals. Doreen supposed it was a good idea, but it had certainly looked a mess at that time and she dreaded to think how high the weeds would be in the middle of summer. She soon realized she dare not comment adversely when she discovered that the rest of the village thought it was a wonderful scheme and took every opportunity to boast about it like anything.
She and Vic had a light lunch together in the kitchen, and as she cleared away, she enquired casually what he planned for the afternoon.
‘What? Oh, sorry, Dor,’ he looked very sheepish and waved a hand at a pile of correspondence on the side table. ‘I’ve got to get on top of this paperwork before it gets on top of me.’
Unusually this feeble pun drew a correspondingly feeble smile from her instead of a moan and she fidgeted around for a few moments before making her tentative suggestion.
‘Shall I … would you like me to drive over to Chambers Forge, then? To spend an hour or so with your dad? I’m not that busy today, I can spare the time.’
He looked surprised but touched and grateful. ‘That’s really good of you, Doreen. I know you find the old man heavy going, and to tell you the truth, so do I. If only Mum hadn’t gone first, she was the glue that kept us all together and without her, well – you know what it’s like, trying to talk to him.’ He pushed back his chair and lumbered to his feet. ‘That’s my girl.’ He planted a smacking kiss on her cheek. ‘You’re looking lovely today – that blue suits you a treat. I did all right when I married you, didn’t I, Dor? Never a bit of bother, eh? And no secrets between us either.’
She could see that he was puzzled, wondering what he could have said to set the colour draining from her cheeks, but she knew how he would settle the question in his mind. Women’s troubles, that’s what Vic would decide. He always did and he always shied away in case she pressed any details upon him.
Sam and Harriet established themselves in comfortable wicker basket-chairs in the bay window of the sun parlour each with a glass of sherry pressed on them by Matron, who liked them both. They had been secretly amused to realize that Miss Winslow thought they added to the cachet of Firstone Grange. Harriet had taken great delight in telling Sam about the conversation she had accidentally overheard a day or so earlier, when Pauline Winslow had described the pair of them to Mrs Turner, as an asset, ‘a very well-known family, of course, and both so tall and distinguished in their looks and bearing’.
Harriet recognized that he was humouring her today, letting her play it her way, in her own time, by his response to her welcome. He gave her a pleasantly expectant smile but said nothing while she fussed over settling the chairs. At last, with the chairs arranged rather forbiddingly with their backs to the empty room, Sam looked at her and waited for her to open up so she took a deep breath.
‘Ellen Ransom regaled me with a surprising story last night,’ she began, then she gave him a concise run-down of what, exactly, Ellen had told her.
At his shocked indrawn breath when she recounted the dreadful conclusion of Ellen’s tale, she gave a slight nod, pursing her lips. ‘I didn’t get round to asking her about Christiane’s death; as you can imagine, it was all a bit much to take in at one go.’ She shifted a little in her seat and avoided his eyes. Best, oldest and dearest of companions that Sam might be, there were still some topics too private for discussion, even with him. Suddenly she felt a sharp pang of regret that Avril was no longer there to share the burden. Harriet too, had her times of desolation without the beloved friend she had met on their first day at their Swiss boarding school, when they were both aged eleven.
She eyed him narrowly. ‘You’d better make sure you don’t start giving her one of your “hard stares”,’ she advised. He responded with a faint grin. It was a family joke. A small parishioner had once accused him, not to his face but via Avril, of being like Paddington Bear in his employment of the ‘hard stare’ as a weapon. He took pride
in the accomplishment; otherwise the gentlest of men, he could make someone with a guilty conscience tremble at thirty paces, with that clear, impartial, blue-eyed stare.
The gong boomed out for lunch and they dropped the subject, both relieved to discover that they were seated some distance away from Ellen Ransom. Even without employing Sam’s secret weapon they felt they would find it difficult to engage in social chit-chat with the woman. They were both fair-minded, intelligent people, accustomed by training and by inclination to giving the benefit of the doubt and looking for the best in everyone, but ultimately they were upright, law-abiding citizens and they were privately appalled by the woman’s confession.
After lunch they retreated with their coffee to their sanctuary and were sitting there in companionable silence, enjoying the sudden burst of pale but valiant sunshine, when a slight cough disturbed them and a diffident voice broke into their peace.
‘Excuse me, Miss Quigley?’ It was Doreen Buchan, nervously clutching her tan leather shoulder bag in both hands, twirling the strap into a spiral, her face looking drawn and grey against the pretty light blue dress that showed under her open dark coat. ‘Could I … do you think I could possibly have a word with you?
‘Do sit down, Mrs Buchan.’ Sam rose, offering her his seat as he prepared to leave, but she gestured to him to sit down again. ‘No, please stay, Canon Hathaway.’ She spoke with a quiet dignity but her eyes were dark with despair. ‘I’d like to talk to both of you, if you don’t mind. There’s something I have to say, to tell somebody before I go mad, and I thought you might agree to help me. To listen to me.’
Sam pulled up another chair for her and she sat between them, primly upright, the bag lying on her lap, her hands resting on it, folded tightly.
‘Go ahead, Doreen,’ suggested Harriet quietly. ‘I think you want to tell us just why you were so afraid of Mrs Marchant, don’t you? What was it that she threatened to tell your husband?’
Doreen’s gasp of astonishment was followed by a ragged sigh as she visibly relaxed the rigid control of her body. Harriet knew the phenomenon, recognizing it from a thousand guilty children who had come to the conclusion that Miss Quigley would know what to do. Sam, too, had seen this before, when someone let go and handed their conscience over to a person in authority, a clergyman, for example.
‘It was my mother,’ Doreen Buchan began in a quiet, unemotional voice. ‘She was always a bit moody and one day she got very upset about something so she took the coal hammer and battered my father to death while he was dozing beside the fire. Then when my baby brother woke up and cried, she hit him too.’
‘Oh, my dear!’ Harriet put out a swift hand to Doreen’s arm desperate to comfort her, but Doreen just went on speaking in that quiet, frozen voice.
‘I wasn’t there at the time because she’d sent me down to the shops to buy some bread. I was about six at the time. I found her when I got home; she was sitting there amid all that blood, cradling the coal hammer in her arms and singing to it like a baby. With her real baby dead in the hearth and my dad making terrible, gurgling sounds as he died.’
She raised her eyes and looked at Harriet. ‘It turned out that my grandmother had ended up in an asylum and her mother had jumped overboard off the Isle of Wight ferry. They put my mother away for the rest of her life and I was passed round all the aunts on my dad’s side of the family.’
Her listeners had no idea that her head was filled now with the sound of children chanting, holding hands in a circle, hemming her in so that there was no escape from their words. ‘Loony kid.’ ‘Murdering bitch’s brat’, and the chorus of shrill young voices singing: ‘Dippy, dippy Doreen, your mother is a moron.’
‘I worked and worked and I got out. I got away. Nobody knew, I could have sworn it. I was sure there was no way they could find out, but it turned out she knew … I changed my name and moved to Portsmouth, away from Bournemouth where it all happened. Maybe I should have been braver, gone to London, or to Scotland, or even abroad, but I would have felt too strange. Anyway, in the end Portsmouth was far enough and it worked out well, all those years, it worked like a dream. I met Vic and we got married and had the children and we got on, moving up in the world and now we’re really well off. I’ve got everything I ever dreamed of.
‘And then Vic’s mother went and died and his father started to go downhill quite fast, so we got him to try out this place.’
Her eyes were tragic as she stared bleakly out of the window.
‘And then I came here. And saw her.’
‘But how did she know?’ asked Sam in a gentle voice.
‘She knew one of my aunts,’ began Doreen, her face twisted in anguish so Harriet interrupted to spare her the difficult story.
‘Of course, Christiane Marchant worked in Bournemouth when she first came over to England. I expect she kept up with some of her acquaintances and must have seen you, heard about you, or rather your mother, sometime when she was visiting them. Your aunt must have let something slip and Christiane seems to have had a taste for scandal.’ She patted Doreen’s hand with great kindness and sympathy. ‘It sounds more like post-natal depression, you know, than some kind of hereditary insanity; that can certainly run in families too. You haven’t told your husband and children about your family history, I suppose, have you?’
‘Of course I haven’t.’ The younger woman looked appalled and ignored Harriet’s suggested diagnosis. ‘How could I do that? What could I say? How can you tell a man that your mother was locked up in an asylum for murder and that your grandmother was mad and your great-grandmother must have been too, except that she killed herself before she could be locked up.’
A harsh sob broke from her. ‘I’d have lost him if he’d known, he’s so proud of us, so proud of what we’ve achieved, this would kill him; he’s very set on things being done properly, everything has to be normal. And what about my son and daughter? What kind of an inheritance is that to wish on your children? I can’t tell you how I’ve watched them, panicking when they had tantrums, wondering if it was coming out in them.’
Her lips were pressed tightly together to stop them trembling. ‘When that woman started to taunt me about it, something seemed to snap inside me,’ she volunteered. ‘I knew then that I was just like my mother after all. I wanted to see her suffer. I wanted to kill her.’
Chapter Twelve
* * *
The words hung in the air. Harriet looked at Sam, schooling her face to be absolutely blank, then she turned back to look at Doreen Buchan. She had seen her cousin stiffen with shock, as she had felt herself do also, during that confession of an old and dreadful anguish. As they took on board the horror of it all, so, she realized, did Doreen begin to relax. She seemed quite composed now, her burden laid on other shoulders, much of the coiled spring tension eased and as she rose to her feet with unhurried movements, she held out a hand to Harriet, with a grateful smile.
‘I can’t tell you how much better I feel now,’ she said quietly. ‘Thank you so much for listening.’
‘I … we haven’t done anything to help,’ protested Harriet rather feebly, while Sam held his tongue, but Doreen waved the disclaimer aside.
‘Yes, you have,’ she insisted. ‘You let me talk and it’s helped me to sort out things in my head. I’ve decided to tell Vic.’ For a moment the anxious look was back, doubt lurking in her eyes, then her face cleared and she gave a brisk nod.
‘I don’t suppose I’ll tell him all of it, not about my grandmother and her mother perhaps, but I could sort of gloss over what my mother did. I could say something like: she had a breakdown, something of that kind. He needn’t know about my little brother, he’s never heard that I even had one. I told him I was an only child. And he already knows that my father died when I was little; I don’t have to go into detail about how he actually died.’
She pulled on her suede gloves and hitched the shoulder bag up over her left shoulder. Giving them a bright social smile, she prepared to leave, with j
ust a parting comment at the door.
‘Of course, everything I’ve told you today is in the strictest confidence,’ she said.
‘Naturally,’ Sam assured her, speaking for both of them.
Doreen nodded graciously. ‘As long as you understand that,’ she said and walked out of the room with a spring in her step, leaving them thoughtful and silent.
At last Harriet let out a long, sighing whistle. ‘Am I alone I sensing the tiniest hint of a threat in that parting thrust?’ she queried, regarding Sam with an intelligent interest.
‘No, I should say you weren’t,’ was the response. Sam’s piercing blue eyes were alive with eager calculation. ‘Good God! What on earth are we to make of that little lot? Did she do it, Harriet, do you think? On balance I’d say she had the strength of resolve, not to mention the inherited talent.’
‘Ouch, that’s hardly fair,’ protested Harriet. ‘That’s exactly the kind of crack she must have lived with all through her childhood and dreaded encountering again since she made her escape. She must have been living on a knife edge all through her married life, in case Vic should discover her secret. No wonder she’s such an awkward creature. Still,’ she frowned at a fingernail that needed filing. ‘Did you notice how she was dressed? I’ve never seen her wearing anything other than dull beige or brown, or navy but today she had on a dress that looked brand new, and in a lovely glowing light-blue. I wonder why? Perhaps something has just snapped? I have to admit you could be right. I’m beginning to wish we hadn’t started this burrowing into the past, Sam. God only knows what we’re going to dig up next.’
‘Poor old Harriet.’ His grin was sympathetic. ‘I’m not sure, though, that we actually did any digging for that latest effort. Doreen Buchan wished it on us of her own free will. But you do have a point. Here we are, both of us quite convinced we witnessed a murder and all of a sudden we’re confronted with two perfectly plausible suspects.
