Ursula's Secret

by Mairi Wilson

  Dear Helen. Nothing is guaranteed, but I feel certain that she will come to you. She was so disappointed before when you wouldn’t let me talk to her. It’s why she walked out and refused to speak to me for all those years. All those lost, long years. She wanted to know the truth then and now she can. Whatever has happened to her in the intervening years, I know that desire will not have changed. She spoke of feeling incomplete, and needing this to complete her. Of needing to tell her daughter.

  So it is nearly time, and I wait, as you do. This is something I must do if I am ever to rest easy in my grave. And I fear that rest is closer than I would like. For me, Izzie’s visit will bring closure, but for you, I pray it will be a beginning.

  Your repentant and grateful friend,

  Ursula

  Helen let the letter drop to the ledge beside her, stared into the half-light and remembered. Another letter, waiting for another child. Another lifetime. The same knot of anticipation. Would it be different this time or would she be punished again? She was afraid to hope for too much, in case she was disappointed, as she had been on that day some fifty years ago. In her mind it was as vivid, as fresh as yesterday had been. No. Fresher …

  * * *

  It had been early afternoon that day he’d come, the air still and calm. She heard the car climbing the slight hill before she could see it tip over its brow. She’d been sitting sewing a button back on one of Izzie’s blouses, expected the car to be the battered white Peugeot, to see the florid face of Sister Agnes set in concentration behind the wheel as she brought Izzie back to her from the Mission clinic. Izzie would be tearful and tired, no doubt, after the journey and the shock of the inoculation. Sister Agnes would have done her best to soothe the disgruntled child, but Helen knew Izzie in that mood would take comfort from no one but her own mother. She smiled to herself as she dropped the cotton blouse back into the sewing basket and flipped the lid closed with her foot. She stretched and stood, swallowing a yawn. Her hand shielded her eyes from the sun as she sought out the car.

  And there it was. Black. Black and growing bigger as it neared the house. Not white, not whining the way the small Mission car did, not lurching over the bumps and dips, but slithering, gliding, invading.

  Helen’s hand flew to her mouth as she turned and made for the door. Hide. She had to hide. Whoever this was, it wasn’t good. But too late for that: she would have been seen, would be seen disappearing through the screen door. And the house was full of Izzie’s things; she mustn’t let them see, whoever it was, they mustn’t know there was a child. Whatever they’d come for, they could do what they liked to Helen, but not to Izzie. Not her. Her heart was thudding, drowning the sound of the car as it came.

  Her eyes flickered over the verandah. Hide anything that suggested the presence of a child. Of anyone other than herself and an absent husband. Brazen it out. She had to. She could do this. She’d practised with Evie. Oh God – she swept up a tiny knitted shoe fallen from Izzie’s favourite doll and rammed it into her pocket. She was Anna, she must remember, the Dutch pastor’s wife. She spoke little English, heavily accented but just comprehensible enough to send any visitors on to the Mission— No. No. She’d have to change their plan. Not the Mission: Izzie was there. She couldn’t do that, she’d have to think of—

  “Helen, my dear. How nice.” She spun round and was instantly mesmerised by cold reptilian eyes. Familiar eyes. But the voice itself was enough to snare her, petrify her.

  Cameron.

  Cameron had found her.

  Helen turned on the light in the tiny kitchen at the back of the house. Its small, north-facing window yielded little enough light at the best of times, and the shadowy, not-quite night of summer was hardly that. The water from the creaking tap splattered against old metal like rain battering the corrugated-iron roof of the workshop next door. She’d found that comforting once, something to break the solitude of her exile as she turned the wheel and threw her pots. Something other than Ross and his childish moods. The rhythm steady and sure in the midst of something so elemental and unpredictable.

  She didn’t really want more tea, but the ritual soothed her. The feel of the warm mug cupped in her hands thawed the cold, piercing fear that threatened to harden into denial, refusal. To keep the bolts fastened tight against hope. The hope that this daughter might still love her and want her in her life. Helen hadn’t realised how badly she wanted this opportunity. This child, her lost Izzie, was the only child who might have the capacity to love her, to know her, to understand and forgive. Ross loved her, as far as he was capable of love, but guilt not innocence was what she saw when she looked into his still childlike face. And her heart lurched not with mother-love but with self-loathing every time he smiled at her in that slightly puzzled, vague way of his.

  The mug she cradled was too hot in her hands. Not comforting but scalding. She hooked her fingers through the handle, raised it to her lips, blew tremulous air across the mud-brown surface. A cloud of steam rose, quivered for a moment and then dissolved as she set it back on the table. She’d read Ursula’s letter over and over again, before she let herself acknowledge even the slightest hope. She’d been too quick to hope before, all those years ago, and wouldn’t make the same mistake this time round. Back then, Evie’s letter should have warned her. She only had herself to blame. The clues were all there when she reread it later. But she hadn’t seen them. She’d been too distracted by the miraculous news. The promise of the redemption she’d sought even then seemed to lie in Evie’s words, but she’d learned the hard way that you can read what you want to read into anything if you’re desperate enough. A leopard doesn’t change its spots. Nor a vindictive, mercenary brute of a husband either.

  She should have known Cameron wouldn’t do what he’d promised Evie. There was always a price to be paid with him. A deal to be done, a double-cross. But she’d never been so desperate to believe something before. Now, she was wiser. Expect the worst from everyone, everything, and you’re rarely disappointed.

  The tea was cooling in the cup now. A thin, darker skin on its surface broke up and floated towards the edges, where they clung to white walls like brown liver spots staining the back of an old woman’s hands. Like the spots on the back of her own. All her beauty gone. A relief in some ways, although it hardly mattered here. Beauty: disturbing the effect it could have on people, that it had on her husbands. Both, in different ways, had been overwhelmed by it. Intimidated, even.

  She pushed her chair back from the table and went out to the small mottled mirror inset in the uprights of the art deco hallstand. Like all the furniture in the house, it had been here when they came. Someone must have chosen it, liked it once. If it had been old then, it was ancient now. But Helen had grown used to it, had no idea what fashionable decor might mean these days and no interest in finding out. It suited her, this old furniture. It was as familiar, as unremarkable, as her own features had become. She rummaged in the single narrow drawer beneath the stand’s shelf and pulled out a hairbrush, pulled it through her short hair, then rummaged further until she closed her fingers round the metal tube of a lipstick. Pulling off the cap, she swivelled the base until a nugget of rose-coloured cream surfaced. Peering forward into the dim mirror, she ran the nub across her thin lips, stretched them, smacked them softly together, dropped the lipstick back into the drawer. That, these days, was as good as it got. But she wanted to make an effort, for Izzie. In case she remembered something of the glamour of Helen’s younger years, although lipstick hadn’t been a feature of her disguise as a pastor’s wife, nor would the nuns at the Mission have approved of sophistication and adornment. But Helen remembered finding Izzie one day looking into the box on her dressing table where she kept her make-up and brushes with awe on her face. “Mummy’s box of magic,” she’d laughed, and her daughter’s eyes had grown wider still.

  “Oh for God’s sake, woman,” she muttered in disgust, turning away from the mirror and pushing the drawer shut with her hip. She dragged th
e back of her hand across her lips, smudging pink across her cheeks, stretching skin until her lips felt tender and dry. The last thing Izzie would notice would be lipstick and brushed hair.

  Back in the kitchen she rubbed the smears from her hand and cheeks with a dishcloth, scrubbing harder than needed. Idiot. She was an old woman. A recluse. A woman who’d given up her daughter to another’s keeping. No amount of lipstick could put a gloss on that. She should be wearing sackcloth, smearing herself with ashes not 1960s Dior.

  There was a noise from upstairs. Heavy feet thumped across the ceiling above her head. Ross appeared, stumbling down the stairs, not really awake. He passed her without a word, without a trace of acknowledgement. She stood in the shadows and waited, heard the door to the bathroom off the kitchen close, the bolt shot, then the creak and rattle of the chain as it was pulled and the echo of rushing water. A moment later, Ross reappeared, saw her this time.

  “Get up?” His brow was knotted in concentration, in puzzlement. This was not part of their morning routine. She shouldn’t be standing in the hallway, dressed in yesterday’s clothes, not yet. Not when the sky outside was green in anticipation of the rising sun but there was no glow over the slope of Ben Mor, no shimmer off the surface of the sea at its foot.

  “No, Ross. I couldn’t sleep. You go back to bed now and I’ll wake you when it’s time.”

  The frown fell from his face and it resumed its customary blandness. Helen leant forward, pulled the cord on his pyjamas tighter, tied a bow.

  “Go on, Ross. Back to bed.” She turned him towards the stairs and gently pushed on a thickset shoulder, sighing to herself as she watched his clumsy climb, his feet disappearing up the staircase. What would Izzie make of her brother? What would Helen tell her? The truth? Would Izzie believe her if she did?

  The jaundiced pre-dawn light was fading to a cooler shade of yellow now and, driven by a sudden sense of imprisonment, Helen reached up and grabbed the jacket hanging beside the door. She shrugged it on at the same time as she reached for the doorknob, its worn surface cool against the heat of her palm. She needed air, space, escape.

  She pulled the door behind her, thrust her hands into deep pockets and lifted her face, eyes shut, to the sky. It was happening again. She couldn’t stop it. The horror film playing in her mind. Not the one where a mother shoots her child. Its sequel. The one where she gets what she deserves.

  * * *

  She’d struggled to keep her face neutral when she saw he was alone.

  “Where is he?”

  “Darling,” Cameron reprimanded, “no soft words of greeting for your beloved husband after all this time? No passionate embrace? Surely you’ve missed me?”

  “Where is he?”

  “Not even a little? Oh darling, you do disappoint me. And here’s me, absolutely heartbroken at the loss of my adored wife, positively overwhelmed by my struggle to cope with my grief despite, I should say, the very best efforts of the good ladies of Zomba, not to mention the Blantyre coterie, of course. In fact, so many of your pretty little friends, now that I think of it, have been so very, very kind.”

  His laugh was brittle. He leant in close to Helen, who was standing, fists clenched by her side, eyes fixed on a knot in the mahogany floorboard at her feet.

  “Yes, my dear,” he whispered, and she felt the heat of his breath on her skin, flowing like liquid venom into her ear. “So very … enthusiastic in their efforts to comfort me.”

  Helen winced, repulsed, as he tilted her chin to force her to meet his eyes.

  “I wonder what they’ll say when they realise I’m not the widower we all thought after all.” He laughed again and released her, wandering away towards the far end of the verandah, peering through the windows that looked on to it as he went. “Really, Helen, it’s too, too naughty of you to have deceived us all like this.”

  Helen breathed a quiet prayer of thanks that the bedrooms were at the back of the house, that she always pulled their shutters against the day’s heat in any case.

  “Aren’t you going to offer me tea, dearest? Or some of that divine lemonade you always had the kitchen boy make. So refreshing and it’s been such a tedious journey. I’m positively parched.”

  Cameron settled himself on the rattan sofa Helen herself had only recently vacated. “Do call someone, darling. Have them bring something … Unless … ah. All alone are we?” He arched an eyebrow in that mocking way he had. She forced herself to look away, not to watch his foot idly swinging above the lid of her sewing basket, the hidden blouse of a child, praying the foot wouldn’t dip an inch or two lower, catch and flip the lid.

  “Of course. Fugitives probably don’t run to servants, do they? Having to get those dainty little hands dirty, are you?” Still the foot was swinging. She had to distract him, get him to move.

  “Don’t settle, Cameron. You’re not staying.” She walked over to the top of the steps, leant against the balustrade and extended an arm out behind her towards the car. “If you haven’t brought Ross then I want you to leave, now.”

  “Do you indeed? Don’t you want to hear what I have to say? No?” He stood and walked towards her with that same hideous grin on his face. “Well, what my darling wife wants—” He grabbed Helen’s outstretched arm and twisted it high behind her back, pulling her in towards him at the same time. “What my darling wife wants,” he hissed, spittle flecking her face, “she’s not going to get. Not until I say so.”

  “Let go of me.” Helen struggled, but the more she moved the harder Cameron wrenched her arm. “You’re hurting me—”

  “That’s the general idea.” She saw the gleam in his eyes, the excitement.

  “Let me go!” Her voice was thin, shrill, as she struggled against the pain.

  “Manners, darling: let me go, please.” He pushed her away, lowering her arm and pulling on her wrist to spin her round. Stepping in behind her, he grasped the back of her neck and pushed her face into the screen door.

  “Let’s go inside, shall we? We need to talk, you and I. Do what I want and I’ll bring you your precious boy. Try to resist me and you’ll never see him again. No one will. After all, like you, he’s already dead.”

  Helen’s ankle twisted beneath her and the jolt of pain brought her back to the cool Highland morning. The pebbles of the beach crunched beneath her as she sat down heavily and rubbed at the pain, erasing it with gentle rhythmic pressure. She flexed the foot, rotated it and, when the pain ebbed, dropped it back down beside its partner. Then she hugged her knees into her chest and rested her forehead on top of them. It was all so long ago. Still so vivid. Would she have the courage to tell Izzie? Extending her legs in front of her, Helen stretched her hands back behind her and propped herself up, rolling her head on her shoulders, listening to the cricks and creaks snapping as the tension of waiting and wondering took their toll. Breathing deeply, she tried to focus on the serenity around her, let the natural beauty soothe her, heal the memories that consumed her.

  The sea was calm and glistened like granite in the dawning sun, islands like lumps of glittering coal scattered on its surface, disrupting the clear line of the horizon. Far out in the distance she could see a single fishing boat chugging out to deeper waters. Even this early, the day held the promise of heat. Not African heat, that deep, drenching, bone-melting fire that seeped through walls and windows, bringing its smell of burnt dust and ripe fruit with it. No. This was different, this Highland heat. A soft glow like the warmth that lingered in a bed, a hug that held you close and then let you go. A heat that let you breathe, that let fresh air wash the spaces in-between its waves, a heat that left shade cool and breezes fresh. Helen had come to love the Highland heat. She no longer pined for the brazen strength of tropical sun. But even more, she’d come to love the wind and the wet. The rain that washed and cleansed, the snow that covered tracks, the gales that howled and screeched in catharsis. She’d been purged clean by the climate of her adopted home and she welcomed the shelter it afforded her. Africa was th
e past. But when Izzie came, she’d have to allow it room in her present.

  Turning her face to the east, to the rising sun, Helen looked up at the croft and its outhouses up on the slope above her. Ross would be up by now, wondering where she was. Perhaps he’d come out front, look for her, call on her in that plaintive, frightened way he had when he couldn’t find her. Like a lamb bleating for a lost ewe. She should get back. He needed her. He needed the comfort of the familiar, of the routines they’d established, the patterns they lived by.

  Small pebbles gave way to larger, and seaweed crackled under her feet as she climbed up the beach to the machair that edged it, the soft bounce of white clover and yellow rattle beneath her feet muffling her step, a welcome respite from the grating rub of shifting stone. She followed the sheep trail that etched a narrow path through the bracken up to the track. She was fit, but still the climb was hard, and her hip troubled her. She’d left her walking stick in the hallstand, her eagerness to get outside overcoming pain, the distraction of her memories giving her the power to walk unaided for a time. She’d pay for it later, though, she knew, just as she’d paid for everything else.

  She paused to catch her breath, caught a shadow slipping between the cottage and the workshop. Ross? Too quick, too slight. But who else could it be? A seagull screeched overhead and she smiled as its shadow flitted over the path in front of her, vanished, then danced across the red roof of the shed. She was jumpy, nerves tight as she anticipated what the day might bring.