The Shape of Sand

by Marjorie Eccles

  “But they won’t have any wages at all, if you sell Charnley,” said Daisy at last. “What will they do?”

  With an effort, Marcus calmed himself. “I’m sorry, n-none of this is your fault, and it must be as much a shock to you all as it was to m-me.”

  Harriet said, “Just how much money is there?”

  “After death duties, scarcely a penny, apart from your settlements, though they too have been greatly reduced and aren’t what one would have expected. Our father’s income from the Bar died with him, of course, and I have to tell you that whatever was left of the family fortunes has been going down the drain for years – taxes and so on, not to mention the cost of what I see now was an unbelievably extravagant lifestyle. Keeping two expensive establishments going, entertaining so lavishly – Good God, the cases of wine that were consumed – and Mama’s dressmaking bills alone must have been astronomical! More disastrously, it also turns out that Father made some very unwise investments – presumably in an effort to reverse the situation, but which have had exactly the opposite effect.”

  There was an even deeper silence while they tried to digest this unexpected view of their prudent, circumspect father. Marcus went to the desk, opened the silver cigar box and extracted one. He inspected it for a while, rolling it round in his fingers. “I want you all to go to stay with Great-aunt Edina until I finally decide what to do,” he announced at last.

  At this, Daisy gave a little shriek. “We can’t! Her house is like a mausoleum – I should die if I had to live there! She’s a dragon!”

  “She’s also lonely, and would be glad of your company.”

  “Oh, Marcus!” wailed Daisy.

  Harriet rose and poked the fire. A log split in two and fell with a crash into the embers, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. “I’m sorry, Marcus,” she said, turning round, “I know you’re being faced with a difficult situation, but I will make my own decisions. My sisters may stay with the great-aunt in London, but I shall be going to study – in Oxford, if possible.”

  “Harriet? I had thought – you and Kit …”

  “No, not Kit. I have made my choice. I shall go up to Oxford, as soon as may be.”

  “Then I,” said Daisy with a defiant sniff, “shall write to Athene Tempest and ask her if I may join her in London.”

  Marcus ran his hands through his hair. He hadn’t expected rebellion. “That I cannot allow, Daisy! Athene Tempest is a dangerous woman – or rather she puts herself in dangerous situations with this Women’s Suffrage business. I am responsible for you now, and I won’t let you do that.”

  “You can’t stop me!” Daisy cried passionately. “I shall run away!”

  “Let her go, Marcus. Miss Tempest won’t let her come to any harm,” Vita said quietly.

  Marcus looked uncertain, rather taken aback by having what he had regarded as almost insoluble problems solved before his very eyes. These were snap decisions his sisters were making, which he never trusted but perhaps, all things considered, they might work out for the best.

  But of course, there was still Vita. What was going to happen to poor, heartbroken Vita? As if with one accord, they all turned to look at her. She said calmly, “I will stay with Great-aunt Edina. She is my godmother, and she’ll probably be quite nice to me.”

  “You can’t! Think of the food – and that hateful little dog!”

  “Perhaps I can persuade her to change the food, Daisy. And I really don’t object to Floy.”

  Marcus touched her shoulder. Of his three sisters, he was most concerned about Vita. Perhaps she was speaking the truth and really didn’t mind the prospect of the great-aunt’s strictness, the gloomy old house, the terrible food one was always served up with there. She didn’t mind anything, these days, it was as though there was an invisible barrier between her and the rest of the world. She had given that great ass, Bertie Rossiter, his ring back – before he could break their engagement himself. He had accepted her decision, while swearing that if she would wait for him another two years, until he was twenty-five, had control of his own money and could do as he wished, he would still marry her, despite everything. Marcus would believe that when he saw it, and privately thought she was better off without him. Yet losing him had almost extinguished their fun-loving Vita.

  He felt guilty, condemning her to a future with the joyless great-aunt, the prospect of which was horrible for anyone, but he could not believe it would be for long. There were several eligible young bachelors in the offing who would be prepared, as he did not think Bertie’s mother would ever be, to overlook the stain on the Jardine family in return for pretty Vita, though perhaps not so many as there might have been when it became common knowledge that her inheritance was almost negligible. All the same, he was sure Vita would soon find herself consoled by some other young man.

  “And you, Marcus,” said Harriet, “what do you intend to do?”

  “Me?” For a moment, he looked rather embarrassed. “Oh, when everything is wound up, I intend to go to Egypt. I am going to try and find Iskander …”

  And, hanging in the air, was the unspoken but very clear intention that he was going there to find their mother.

  9

  The demolition gangs had gone. The Anderson shelters were no more than a memory. After two world wars, Charnley was almost back to its former self, the builders ready to move in to begin the last phase of the remedial work on the fabric in the west wing, containing the guest rooms which had come to be known as the Jessamy rooms.

  Although the windows had been flung open for weeks, to allow through draughts to dry off the walls, Rose Jessamy’s paintings were in a woeful condition, for the most part peeling off the walls and now beyond hope of saving. The English climate was at the best of times unkind to frescoes, which need dry, airy conditions to survive, and in this case the walls had been running with damp for many years. Thankfully, dry rot hadn’t made its slimy-fingered encroachment, and though mice had nibbled away at the wainscotting, and bats and birds had occasionally found their way in through missing window panes, the structure itself had suffered hardly at all, maybe because the wing was the only bit left of the original Elizabethan building, a manor house built in the days when solidity was more important than style.

  It was just before the builders’ break for elevenses that a discovery was made which halted proceedings and put several of the husky labourers right off their tea and Spam sandwiches, and a few of them off their lunch as well.

  The foreman plasterer, arriving to size up the job, pushed back his cap and was scratching his head and staring at the vestigial paintings of crocodile gods, cow-headed goddesses, frogs and jackal gods, a winged sun and a symbolic eye. “Blimey!” His eye unerringly picked out an almost hidden but graphically explicit fertility symbol surviving among all this abundance. “Cop an eyeful of this lot, Sid – but don’t let young Mick see. We don’t want him excited.”

  Young Mick, however, who was twenty-three, strong as an ox but believed to be only ninepence in the shilling, was more engrossed in the bony remains of a bat he had just picked up; a pipistrelle, minuscule, perfectly-formed. He gazed at the tiny creature’s skeleton as it lay on the palm of his hand, its claws no more than an eighth of an inch long, its teeth, and even the fragile structures supporting its wing membranes still intact. Ah, the beauty of it! “I’ve seen worse when we were serving in Italy, I have so,” he answered, barely giving the wall painting a glance.

  “Oh you have, have you?” Ernest the foreman gave him a sardonic glance and pulled his steel rule from where it was wedged between his cap and his ear. “Well, ne‘er mind, eh? More to the point – this whole flippin’ place’s going to need replastering! Look at this chimney breast, for a start.” He gave an experimental poke to a sphinx. It disintegrated and fell in damp, loose flakes around his feet, releasing the distinctive, dirty smell that comes only from old plaster. “What did I tell you? Perished right through! Here, move over and let’s have a proper shufti.” He leaned
his hand on the wall and a great deal more plaster came away, revealing crumbling brickwork. Another prod, and several of the bricks fell with a soft thud into a cavity behind. “Would you credit that, not a bit of mortar? No wonder it’s fell down! OK, get cracking, Mick – get them bricks out and piled up.”

  Removing the bricks was easy, since they had simply been laid on top of one another, without any attempt to cement them together, with only a skim of plaster in front. As they were moved, there appeared the gaping hole where the fireplace aperture had formerly been. When they were finally cleared and the cloud of choking dust had subsided, the hole was seen to be blocked with a little mountain of twigs and ancient jackdaw nests that had fallen down the tall chimney, together with a mound of soot and all that was left of the nests’ unfortunate occupants. A few hundred skeletons, a pile of fragile bones, beaks and feathers. The smell was appalling.

  Ernest and Sid moved on to the other walls, knocking and prodding, while Mick desultorily began to stir aside the debris in the fireplace with a broom. After a moment he leaped back. “What’s up, mate?” asked Sid.

  Mick crossed himself. “Jasus! I think you’d better come and take a look.”

  Daisy Tempest – who had been Daisy Jardine – threw down her pencil and abandoned the hopeless task of trying to make the week’s rations for fifteen women and girls into a passably interesting menu. She stared glumly out of the window overlooking the Whitechapel Road, nibbling the end of her pencil. Can’t do it, she thought, and it wasn’t the food coupons and the availability of liver to eke out the meat ration she was thinking about. Can’t just send the girl away to support herself - and her child. How would she ever manage? Barely seventeen, a child herself, but her respectable middle class parents in Ruislip wouldn’t even consider taking her back, not with the shame of an illegitimate baby. Yet Lorna was adamant that she wasn’t going to give up her child for adoption: the result of a few so-called romantic nights with a young man her parents knew nothing about, who’d persuaded her to ‘go all the way’ because they were going to be married anyway, weren’t they? A circumstance which had turned out not to be on his agenda when he found out she was pregnant. She was a soft, pliant girl who had shown herself to be biddable and willing during the weeks she’d been at Hope House, but in the matter of giving away her child, she had a core as hard as steel. “I’ll kill both of us first!” she’d announced dramatically. Their charges, here at Hope House, were often graceless and ungrateful, hiding their shock and despair with bravado or bad behaviour. One poor girl had come to them only last week after being fished out of the Thames, just in time. Looking at Lorna’s pale, obstinate little face, her declaration wasn’t something Daisy was prepared to put to the test.

  “Why don’t they just take the kids away at birth without the mums seeing them? Better all round, in my opinion,” declared Athene Tempest.

  “You don’t really think that.” Daisy knew that her former governess liked to see herself as plain-spoken and no sentiment. Blunt yes, she might be, but underneath, she was like one of those pre-war Charbonnel et Walker liqueur chocolates, with an easily melted shell and a heart-warming centre.

  “Well, what else do you suggest, then?” Athene asked now. “Soft talk isn’t going to persuade Lorna.”

  Daisy shook her head. She hadn’t a clue. It could be a dispiriting business altogether, this caring for unmarried mothers. She did try to be more like Athene, who never let it get her down, but Athene was helped by her dim view of men in general, and in particular the ones who, in her own words, got these girls up the spout and then buggered off.

  “Well, nor is emotional blackmail.” Easy enough for Athene to point out the benefits of having the child adopted, but dismissing the mental anguish such a situation could cause was beyond Daisy. We’re getting too old for this sort of thing, both of us, she thought, though at fifty-three, she didn’t feel old, not in any sense. All right, she’d put on weight, taking after her generously proportioned mother, and she didn’t have Beatrice’s outstanding looks. She couldn’t be bothered to do anything more than scrape her faded blonde hair back from her face with a slide, and she knew, really, that she ought not to wear those heavy woollens and tweed skirts that were not kind to her hips. But they were so serviceable. Like me, she sometimes thought, one of that unsung band of splendid women who voluntarily gave their time to public service and were capable, unflappable, hard-working and unfailingly good humoured. Which did feel rather dispiriting.

  Athene was rubbing a hand across her face and saying, “I don’t know, I really don’t! Why do we carry on?” It was a rhetorical question, one that Daisy had heard her ask so often that it didn’t need an answer. In any case, they both knew that this settlement in the East End was both Athene’s passion and her raison d’être.

  In 1920, the Great War over and the fight for women’s suffrage won, Athene had been looking round for something else to occupy her formidable energies, with Daisy not far behind her. Daisy had wanted nothing more than to put the anguished years of that first war right out of her head: too much meaningless suffering, too many dead. She and Athene had been directly involved, driving ambulances in France, to and from the field hospitals behind the front lines, while men and boys they had known were being picked off like flies. Like Peter Houghton-Vesey, who had danced with Daisy on the night of her mother’s birthday, and to whom she’d almost become engaged a few years later, who had been blinded and burned by mustard gas, and died before they could marry.

  He wasn’t the only casualty from that lost world of Charnley. Men went away and many never returned, or returned maimed for life. There was Teddy Cranfield, amazing everyone with a posthumous VC. Dolly Dacres, Vita’s friend, left a young widow with two children. Copley, Hallam’s cheeky half-brother, with his saucy grin and the broad wink at you when he thought no one was looking – he’d inveigled himself into driving one of the London omnibuses shipped to France to convey troops to the front line, had been blown up and lost an arm and thereafter lurched around with the empty sleeve tucked into his jacket pocket – until later, ruined, he had died of drink. While Joe Jimson, the handsome, cheerful young porter at the railway station, had come home severely shell-shocked, unable to speak a word, and finally hanged himself in the outside privy. After that, Polly Cheevers, the parlourmaid at Charnley, who had gone to work in a munitions factory where the picric acid dyed her hair and skin yellow, had left Charnley forever, to learn typewriting in London and live in a YWCA hostel.

  And Marcus. Daisy kept the last photograph she had of him on her desk. Taken in uniform, in 1915, just before he died, one of the hundred-thousand killed or missing in the appalling fiasco of the Gallipoli landings – The Glorious Failure – a young army captain leading his men into certain death. The photograph showed a face, still young but serious and responsible; the eyes giving nothing away of those unspeakable experiences he’d already gone through. But her brother had become unknowable before then, parts of his life after Charnley had been a closed book to the rest of the family. That long ago tragedy had affected Marcus perhaps most of all of them.

  “Well?” Athene broke into her reverie, putting her teacup down in a businesslike way and standing up, ready for the next thing awaiting her. “Something’s got to be done about that child. No ideas at all?”

  “I’ll see if I can’t find her a room somewhere, get her a job and someone to mind the baby while she does it. Not ideal, but what is? I’ve tried all the usual things, telling her what she faces, that her baby will have a better life with parents who can provide for him, but she doesn’t believe it.”

  Truth to tell, Daisy sometimes wondered if she believed that herself. Certainly the child would be better provided for, materially. For how could even that sort of undemanding, unstinting love Lorna had now for her baby withstand the constant strains of a life with all the odds stacked against both of them? Daisy recognised the terrible choice, even though it had never been one she’d had to make. She’d never been a
lone, and friendless. She’d never had a child of her own.

  She’d been over forty, already too late for that, though she hadn’t known it, when she married Guy Tempest. But she’d still have married him, even if she had known.

  She’d first met Athene’s brother several years before. He had married late, his first wife, Cécile, being a Frenchwoman from Epinard, with whom he’d fallen in love while serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps. She had died suddenly when their child, Nina, was eight, and Guy had seemed permanently set in the role of grieving widower. It had taken Daisy some time to realise that when he had finally asked her to marry him, it had been for her own sake, not simply as a replacement mother for his by-then thirteen-year-old daughter; for after Peter Houghton-Vesey had been killed she had, like so many women of her generation, accepted that she was doomed to spinsterhood. Other things had taken the place of marriage in her life – she’d slaved with Athene to set up Hope House, she’d poured all her considerable energies into battling with authority, striving to overcome the stigma of her own privileged origins and spending her spare time and enthusiasm closely affiliating herself with the Labour Party and lobbying for better conditions for the working class. She’d even been persuaded to think of standing for Parliament, right up to the point where she’d allowed her name to be put forward as a candidate when a constituency in the north east became vacant. Her forthrightness, integrity, sympathy for the underprivileged - and not least her easy camaraderie – had made her possible selection almost certain. Her prospective coal-mining constituents loved her, she loved them. She had walked with them on the Jarrow hunger march to London. And then, Guy had proposed to her.

  Daisy saw no contest between marrying Guy and becoming a career politician. She’d immediately withdrawn her candidacy. It was the one thing over which she and Athene, strongly supported by Harriet, had ever radically disagreed. She didn’t need either of them to point out – though Athene did, often and vociferously – that Guy had enough respect for her intelligence to support her pursuit of a career, and would loyally back her up – she knew that, but … well, there had still been a chance that she might have a child of her own.