by Clare Clark
Summer cooled to autumn. In France the Allies were pushing the Germans back all along the line but in England there was a new enemy. As the Spanish flu swept the country, what poor parties and entertainments there had been were all cancelled. In Bournemouth they opened the windows in the cinemas every four hours to air out the auditoria; they sprayed the trains and the buses and even streets with chemicals to stop the infection from spreading.
Sir Aubrey said it was worse in London. He worried about Phyllis. The hospitals were overflowing and medical schools had closed their third- and fourth-year classes so that the students could work in the wards. It was not just wounded soldiers and the poor who were dying. A man from his club had lost his wife and all three of his grown-up children one after the other, like skittles. Everyone was frightened, though they pretended not to be. At the Savoy Hotel, he said, the barman had invented a cocktail made from rum and whisky called a Corpse Reviver.
Jessica knew he only told her the stories to keep her prisoner. She told him she would rather die of influenza in London than of boredom in the New Forest. She did not care if she tempted Fate, not any more. She was eighteen years old, for heaven’s sake. When was her life going to be allowed to begin?
And then, abruptly, it was over. In London the crowds flooded the streets of the West End like a roaring sea, surging through Trafalgar Square and sending waves of revellers over the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields and up against the railings of the National Gallery. The night of the Armistice was wet and foggy but the tops of omnibuses were packed with nurses and office girls and yellow-skinned munitionettes waving and blowing kisses, their hair jewelled with rain, while in the crush below, and half-mad with euphoria, girls wrapped in Union flags kissed drunken soldiers and danced with drunken sailors and sat astride Landseer’s damp-streaked lions to watch the German guns that had been dragged in from the Mall set on fire. As the flames caught the throng linked arms and, at the top of their lungs, belted out the words to ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.
They sang too in the Strand where, for the first time in four years, the street lamps blazed and restaurants threw up their blackouts, spilling a dazzle of light and laughter out onto the teeming pavements. In the Savoy Hotel officers of the Royal Flying Corps swung from the chandeliers, while across the light-spangled river, whooping groups of girls staggered to catch the last trains at Waterloo Station, so intoxicated that they had to be rolled along the platforms like barrels of beer. Discarded on benches and in gutters, the sodden newspapers proclaimed a single word in letters two inches tall: VICTORY.
Jessica was not in London. She walked with her father into Ellinghurst village where the church bells were tolling and let Mrs Holt from the dairy press her against her upholstered bosom. Outside the shop the women gathered in giddy clusters, unsteady as children off a merry-go-round. Sir Aubrey went into the Red Lion and shook hands with the landlord and bought beer for the men inside. Jessica went to see Nanny who cried and laughed and would not let go of Jessica’s hand. Jessica looked at all the childish souvenirs on Nanny’s mantelpiece, the potato pictures and the clay pots and the samplers with the too-tight stitches, and she wondered what Nanny would do all day, now there was no longer any call for socks.
When her father came out they went home.
That night Jessica cried. She had not cried much for Theo, not even after he died. The grief that had encased her was stiff and hard, a plaster cast that held her rigid, and the tears too were solid, packed together like the lumps embedded with rock and pebbles that fell sometimes at Hordle Cliff. She cried for Theo and his friends and for Uncle Henry and Mrs Briggs from the bakery’s three red-headed sons and Hubert Dugdale who served less than a month as a subaltern before he was killed by a gas attack. She cried for all the boys Theo had brought home to Ellinghurst who would never come again, their laughter drifting up from the tennis court and later from the terrace as they danced to the gramophone in the lavender dusk. She told herself she should be happy but she was not happy. Peace had broken open the plaster cast and it was not joy that flooded out or even the lightness of relief but only a bleak grey desolation. The old world would not come back. With the guns silenced and the bloodshed finally at an end, Theo was no longer dead for as long as the War dragged on.
He was dead for ever.
And still nothing changed. Phyllis wrote to say that she was staying at her hospital. Her father went back to the library. Three days after the Armistice, Mrs Johns’ sister received a telegram from the Front informing her with deep regret that her youngest boy had been killed during action on the Sambre. In the afternoon, while Mrs Johns wept in the kitchen, Eleanor went to Bournemouth.
Jessica watched from the landing window as the car swung down the drive and out of sight. Then she turned and walked along the passage. Outside her mother’s bedroom door she hesitated. As a child, on Nanny’s afternoons off, when her mother was out or in London and the housemaid thought she was in the nursery or playing in the garden, she had sometimes crept into her mother’s bedroom. Such trespass was expressly forbidden, of course, but the prohibition had only added to its allure. She had sat at her mother’s dressing table, gazing at her reflection in the three-part glass, scooping her mother’s hairpins from their porcelain saucer and letting them run through her fingers, or stroking with the tips of her fingers the shivery softness of her down powder puff. She had opened the wardrobes and buried her face in the clothes hanging up there. Once she had even put on her mother’s silk wrap and lain down on the bed, gazing up at the silk rose at the centre of the canopy. The thought of her mother undressed and all alone, her hair loose about her shoulders and her day-time self unhooked like a corset, had given her butterflies.
Jessica opened the door and went in. The room was her favourite in all the house, with large windows looking out over the lawn and, through an arch, a circular sitting room in the tower that abutted it, with long thin windows made to look like arrow slits. The furniture had been built for the room, the curved backs of the writing desk and the silk-covered chaise matching exactly the curve of the wall. Jessica ran a hand over the ink well, the box of writing paper edged in black. As a child she had thought that, if she touched the things that her mother touched, if she slipped her arms into her furs and lay as she lay beneath the canopy of the four-poster bed, if she breathed in the same musky, powder-dusted air, the leftover fragments of her, then she might, little by little, become more her mother and less the other person that she was when she was not paying attention, the person that made her mother press her lips together and stiffen when Jessica hugged her goodnight as though she were something dirty that might spoil her dress.
How foolish she had been. This room was no more her mother than the abandoned dresses in her dressing-room wardrobes. How could it be? Theo was dead and most of her mother with him, and the room remained just the same. Apart from a framed photograph of Theo on the bedside table that had once been on the mantelpiece, it looked no different from before. There were still flowers on the tables, a fresh cake of soap in the dish on the washstand. It smelled as it always had, of lavender and beeswax. It was no more the encapsulation of her mother’s true self than Theo’s mummified room with its fading team photographs was the bedroom of a living boy. Whatever remained of Theo’s spirit, or her mother’s, they were not here. All that remained of either of them had long ago been dusted away.
11
Something was wrong. Eleanor was never home so early. From the morning room Jessica heard Pritchard bang open the door to the kitchen passage, his muffled shout as he called for Mrs Johns. She watched from the gallery as together they helped Eleanor into the house. She was shaking and weeping. She could hardly walk. In the hall she screamed and twisted away from Pritchard, her fist raised as though she meant to strike him.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she sobbed. ‘Don’t . . . don’t touch me.’ Her legs gave way beneath her and she sank to the floor, her face pressed against the arm of a chair, clutching at it as though i
t were the one thing keeping her from drowning. Mrs Johns knelt beside her. Very gently she prised her hands from the chair. Pritchard cleared his throat. Mrs Johns looked up to the gallery. Hurriedly Jessica ducked back into the East passage. She was still there when Mrs Johns brought her mother upstairs.
That night, while it was still quite dark, Jessica woke up. She did not know what time it was or what had woken her. She knew only that she needed the lavatory. Sleepily she slid her feet into her slippers and felt her way out onto the landing. A light was burning. She was almost at the bathroom door when she heard her mother cry out.
‘Let me go, you bastard!’
Jessica crept to the banisters. On the landing below she saw her father, dressed only in striped pyjamas, and her mother in her nightgown, her plaited hair dishevelled, thrashing in his arms. For a sleep-fogged moment she thought they were kissing. Then she saw that her father had her mother in a kind of lock, her arms held behind her back with one hand, his other over her mouth. Her mother thrashed her head from side to side, trying to escape his grip. She was still shouting but the words were stifled by his hand, Jessica could not make them out. Like competitors in a frenzied three-legged race he dragged her with him along the landing. Even when the stairs hid them from view Jessica could hear her muffled shouts, the thump of her bare feet on the wooden floor. Suddenly there was a gasp like a scream.
‘What do you care?’ her mother shrieked. ‘When have you ever given a damn?’ And then there was the bang of a door closing and Jessica could not hear anything any more. She closed her eyes, waiting for her heart to stop thumping, and when she opened them, the house was its ordinary night-time self once again, the lamp burning peaceably on the landing and the stairs creaking to themselves as they stretched and settled in their sleep.
The next day Dr Wilcox came. Jessica had always disliked Dr Wilcox. He had bad breath and a greasy nose that looked like it had been pricked all over with a pin. Last summer, when she had been ill with a bad cough, he had placed his hand on the right side of her chest as he pressed his stethoscope to her sternum, his curve of his thumb and little finger matching the curve of her breast and the base of his palm pressing gently upwards into the flesh as though he were weighing it. Afterwards, though she was seventeen, he had given her a humbug from a bag in his pocket. The humbug was sticky, the stripes blurred as though it had already been sucked.
Dr Wilcox was in with Jessica’s mother for a long time. Jessica waited in the morning room. From time to time she heard her father coming out of his study and crossing the hall to the stairs. Eventually she heard feet coming down the stairs, the murmur of Mrs Johns’ voice. She opened the morning-room door.
‘But of course,’ she heard Dr Wilcox say. ‘My complete discretion.’
Jessica banged the door. Her father turned.
‘How is she?’ Jessica said.
‘Quite comfortable now, I hope,’ the doctor said smoothly
‘What is it? What’s wrong with her?’
Dr Wilcox glanced at her father. ‘She’s lucky to have you to take care of her. A fine nurse like you.’
‘Phyllis is the nurse,’ Jessica said. ‘Not me.’
Her mother did not get up that afternoon. Jessica went to see Nanny. She did not want to be in the house by herself. When she walked back it was getting dark. The thickening dusk collected like cobwebs in the dips and shadows of the garden and threw a sticky veil of dust over the trees. She went upstairs to change for dinner. When she came down Eleanor was standing in the Great Hall.
She was hatless and gloveless and soaked to the skin. Her feet squelched in her shoes and her hair clung to her scalp, whippy strings of it stuck to her neck and pale cheeks. She stood quite still, her face serene as Mrs Johns peeled the sodden coat from her shoulders and barked at Enid to fetch tea and warmed towels from the range. All the time that Mrs Johns was fussing about her, and even as she hustled her upstairs, her face remained calm, a tiny smile playing around the corners of her lips.
The next morning she came downstairs as Jessica was helping Mrs Johns with the flowers. Though her face was pale, she was very composed.
‘They shall be here at eleven,’ she said to Mrs Johns. ‘I shall see them in the morning room.’
A few minutes later Jessica’s father asked if Jessica might have a word with him in his study. He told her that the police wished to talk to her mother.
‘What has she done?’
Her father frowned. ‘Really, Jessica. They wish to take a statement. Your mother’s Mrs Waller has been exposed as a fraud and I’m afraid your mother was present when it happened. The shock has been considerable.’ He shook his head either in pity or anger, Jessica could not tell. ‘It’s a wretched end to an utterly wretched business. Let us hope we can finally put it behind us.’
The police were polite and plainly embarrassed. The younger one took notes as, sitting very upright in a hard chair, Jessica’s mother answered their questions in a small, clear voice.
It was Mrs Coates who had brought Mr Jessop, a middle-aged gentleman with a mournful face and so unassuming in his manner to be almost meek. Mr Jessop was her brother. He had sat with the others as Mrs Waller received the messages from the spirits, the table listing heavily to one side and then to another to spell out its answers. Mrs Waller had announced that the older of Mrs Coates’ two sons was clamouring to come through, that he wanted very badly to say something. Frenziedly, as though it were dancing a jig, the table spelled out
H-A-P-Y-B-I-R-R-H-D-A-Y-D-E-R-S-T-M-A-M-A.
Mrs Coates began quietly to sob. Immediately Mr Jessop jumped to his feet. The dazzle of his torch was blinding. There were screams as he pushed his chair backwards, swinging the beam around the table as he moved towards the door.
‘Stop it!’ someone cried. ‘You’ll kill her!’
Mr Jessop switched on the electric light. Mrs Waller jerked, her eyes bulging from her head, and fell like a stone to the floor.
They had thought she was dead. It was not unknown for spirit mediums roused so violently from trance to die, Eleanor said, their hearts stopped by the shock of sudden awakening. Even the striking of a match across the table could burn a hole in the flesh of a sensitive when she was in a transported state. Miss Harmsworth pleaded with Mr Jessop to let her run to the hotel at the corner where they might call for an ambulance but Mr Jessop refused to allow it. He said that no one was going anywhere and when Miss Harmsworth demanded of him what authority he had to tell them what to do, he said the authority of Her Majesty’s Government and took a badge from the inside pocket of his coat.
After that everything happened very quickly. Two policemen who had been waiting outside searched the premises and took the details of the sitters. Several, including Jessica’s mother, had been too shaken to speak but they had succumbed at Mr Jessop’s insistence to an inspection of their clothing. During this inspection it was discovered that two of the group’s most regular sitters, Miss Hillsborough who had lost her brother in East Africa and Mrs Carley whose two sons had been killed at Verdun, were wearing special wristbands concealed beneath the cuffs of their dresses. The wristbands were fitted with metal hooks which, as they placed their hands on the table, slid into special slots cut for the purpose beneath the table’s edge. When required the two women lifted their hands, so that the table moved without them so much as lifting their palms from its surface.
As for Mrs Waller she was found to have, concealed inside her left sleeve, a rubber bulb containing a clear liquid. The bulb was filled with alcohol. When Mrs Waller leaned her left arm on the cushion on her lap, the alcohol sprayed onto a sealed envelope was sufficient to make it transparent so that, with the red lamp placed conveniently beside her chair, Mrs Waller could read her sitters’ questions quite easily for herself.
When she had finished Eleanor rose from her chair and asked if the policemen would excuse her.
‘One moment, Eleanor,’ Sir Aubrey said. He turned to the taller of the two policemen. ‘You m
ean to prosecute, I hope?’
‘That is currently the intention, sir.’
‘Surely it’s an open-and-shut case?’
‘I’m not sure it’s ever quite that simple, sir, but I can assure you that Bournemouth Constabulary is very hot on this kind of thing. Well, it’s like the black market, isn’t it? Scoundrels profiting from other people’s troubles.’
There was a pause. Eleanor turned and looked out of the window. The taller policeman cleared his throat. Then, shaking Sir Aubrey’s hand, he said they would see themselves out.
On Tuesday the men came back and resumed work on Theo’s memorial. No one sent them away. At tea time they went home, leaving a spade in the top of the heap of sand, its handle sticking out like a flagpole. Jessica walked around the hole, then sat on a stack of stone flags, her legs dangling. The building was to be a kind of Greek temple with a cupola. It did not sound to Jessica like Theo’s kind of thing at all.
She had already clambered to her feet when she saw her mother, picking her way towards her across the lawn. They stood side by side in silence, staring down at the muddy foundations.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jessica said at last. ‘About what happened. I hope they lock that woman up for a long time.’
Her mother shook her head. ‘Don’t say that.’
‘Well, I do. What she did—it’s terrible.’
‘Not terrible. Just terribly, terribly misguided.’
‘But she lied to you! She . . . she made you think it was real.’
‘Yes, and it was very wrong of her. At first I could hardly . . . well, it was . . . incomprehensible. Unbearable. That was before Theo came to me, came to me right here, where we are standing now, and explained everything.’
