Alice's Girls

by Julia Stoneham

  The Bridesdale Civic Museum in the North Riding of Yorkshire had a charming history. When, in 1876, Henry Ormshaw inherited his father’s manufacturing business, he built rapidly on its success and became a seriously rich man. He indulged his wife, Edith, by commissioning a mansion a few miles outside the grimy heart of the industrial town where his clattering factory loomed, polluting and darkening the northern skies with fetid smoke, and where the family fortune continued to accumulate. Edith, daughter of a haberdasher in Leeds, craved Gothic towers, oriel windows, stained glass, balustraded terraces, an Italian garden, velvets, damasks, Aubusson carpets, a ton or two of elaborate mahogany furniture, gilt-framed mirrors and a suit of armour – and she got them.

  Three sons reached manhood, prospered and made excellent marriages. A daughter, Eloise, was less fortunate. From infancy her health was poor. Unsuited to the harsh North Yorkshire climate she spent her childhood indoors, seldom venturing further than into the vast and overheated conservatory where, like the exotic blooms it contained, she blossomed delicately. Eloise learnt to play the pianoforte and to sing in a small but tuneful voice. She embroidered in silk and painted in watercolour, became intensely interested in art and, as the years passed, indulged her hobby by putting together an increasingly significant collection of the work of respected local painters and sculptors. She was particularly interested in work depicting the industrial north and, long before his matchstick figures had become well known, had acquired paintings by the young and as yet undiscovered Laurence Stephen Lowry. When the weather was mild, Eloise drove in the brougham with her ageing mother to deliver soup, soap and cast-off clothing to the families of her father’s employees who had fallen on hard times. She lived longer than expected but it was on one such visit that she contracted, at the age of thirty-eight, the typhoid fever which killed her. Her ageing parents and her fond and prosperous brothers, wishing to commemorate her life, were persuaded to donate the family pile to the town of Bridesdale and to fund, within its solidly ornate walls, the establishment of a civic museum where, as well as housing local artefacts, Eloise’s collection could be permanently displayed, and over the years and with the benefit of carefully invested family money, it increased in size, scope and importance. In June of 1945 the trustees found themselves seeking a new curator. Hector Conway, seeing the potential for a museum featuring the art of working-class Yorkshire, applied for the position, was interviewed and found suitable. Part of his remuneration consisted of a modest grace and favour apartment.

  ‘Hector’s asked me to marry him!’ Annie announced to Alice and proudly gave her the details of Hector’s appointment, his salary, his responsibilities and the accommodation that came with them. With Annie’s permission Alice announced this news to the land girls at supper time that night.

  ‘What’s a curator, then?’ Winnie asked, spooning up stewed plums and custard.

  ‘Sounds like it’s someone as works in a bacon factory,’ Marion giggled. ‘When you getting wed, then, duck?’ Annie wasn’t exactly sure.

  ‘Some time before the end of September,’ she smiled. ‘That’s when Hector has to take up his appointment.’

  ‘Ooh! “Take up his appointment”, indeed! There’s posh!’ Gwennan said, her clipped Welsh voice cutting across the background murmur of approval. Even now that her personality had mellowed, Gwennan was still unable to resist a sneer when an opportunity arose.

  A small package had arrived for Annie that day and was waiting, on the dresser, for her to claim it.

  ‘It’s from Hector!’ she announced happily, recognising his handwriting and stripping off the brown paper wrapping.

  ‘It don’t look like it’s a ring, though,’ Winnie said. ‘Not in a box that shape, it don’t. Could I have a drop more of that custard, Mrs Todd? Ta.’

  ‘No, it won’t be a ring, cos we’re not having a ring,’ Annie said, and then exclaimed at the sight of a slim, leather-bound book, ‘Robert Browning’s poems! It’s not a first edition, obviously, but it’s a very early one! Oh, it’s lovely!’ She ran her fingers over the worn leather and turned a radiant face to Alice. ‘Look, Mrs Todd!’

  ‘A book?’ Marion exclaimed in disbelief. ‘You get engaged to ’im an’ ’e gives you a bloomin’ book!’

  ‘It’s a very special book,’ Alice said. ‘An early edition of the love poems of a great man! It’s a wonderful present, Annie, and a very romantic one!’ Gwennan was unimpressed.

  ‘Well!’ she said, her chair scraping noisily back from the table, ‘there’s no accountin’ for taste! But if a fiancé of mine was to give me a second-hand book instead of a ring I’d tell him where to put it! I’m goin’ to ’ave me bath now, before you lot runs off all the ’ot water!’

  With the hostel’s complement of land girls now reduced, there were hours in Alice’s days – and once supper was over, her evenings too – which were her own and in which she and Roger resumed what was, in fact, although they might not have admitted it to themselves or to each other, a courtship. With the relationship between Roger and Christopher no longer shackled by a long-standing secrecy, Alice watched for signs of a relaxation of tension between the father and the son. She did not expect that the habits of half of Roger’s lifetime and two thirds of Christopher’s would melt like frost in sunlight, so she took care, when the subject was broached, not to enquire too closely or pry too eagerly into the state of the fragile contact which, she hoped, was being slowly established between the two of them.

  There were hours each day when, within the routine of the running of both hostel and farm, the lovers could be alone. In the evenings, after Eileen had fulfilled her housekeeping duties, the farmhouse at Higher Post Stone would be their undisturbed territory and they would withdraw to the quiet intimacy of Roger’s bedroom and the soft, double bed in which he so much wanted her to lie as his wife. Sometimes, as the light faded, they rode, she on his mare and he on Talisman – the hunter that had been Christopher’s twenty-first birthday present – up over the higher grazing land and onto The Tops where Dartmoor rolled to the west, wearing the sunset of those summer evenings like a warlock’s cloak, while, to the east, below them, stretches of the Teign estuary reflected the same bewitching colours.

  While each of them was as certain as the other where the depth and intensity of their feelings was concerned, both of them had drawn with them, into this relationship, the complex experiences of their lives; the inevitable legacies which they did not want and had not chosen but which nevertheless existed and could not be ignored.

  ‘It would be so easy,’ Alice sighed, ‘for me to stay here, with you, for ever.’

  ‘And it would be so easy for me to let you.’ This was what they said. This, for weeks, in different ways and using different words, was all they said. But every day, whether together or briefly apart, they were growing closer. More focused on one another. And so they would remain, until their other considerations had found their places in order of precedence and, in consequence, the future became slowly clearer to them.

  With her mind fully occupied by her own affairs, Alice had not, over the last weeks of July, been paying very much attention to Marion and Winnie, whose own circumstances, she knew, had been complicated by the return of Sergeant Marvin Kinski, by his renewed pursuit of Marion and her obvious affection for him. The question was not so much should she or shouldn’t she accept his proposal, but how she could square this with her commitment to Winnie and their long-term ambition to run a pub together, something which both girls had dreamt of and planned for since they were school friends.

  The air of despondency, that had, for weeks, hung between these girls, seemed to Alice to have lifted slightly following a letter Marion had received from her Uncle Ted. The girls had requested a few days of leave in which to visit their homes, and once it had been established that their absence would not leave him short-handed at the beginning of the harvesting, Roger Bayliss had agreed to it. The girls arrived back at the farm bursting with news which needed, without de
lay, to be communicated to the warden.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Todd!’ Marion began. ‘You wouldn’t believe’ow well it’s all worked out! I couldn’t ’ave gone off and left Winnie in the lurch after all our plans, but now—’

  ‘I didn’t want the money, Mrs Todd!’ Winnie butted in, confusing Alice by running ahead of the sequence of decisions that had transformed the girls’ situation from the impossible into a workable, logical arrangement which, while it would separate them geographically, would leave them united in their affection for one another. ‘But she made me agree to take it, otherwise she wouldn’t go and that was that!’ she concluded, expecting Alice to have followed the plot.

  ‘Sit down,’ she ordered them, indicating the chairs around the kitchen table. ‘Sit down, and starting at the beginning, tell me what all this is about.’

  The arrangement was a simple one. Uncle Ted was to take the lease of a pub called the Red Cow and invest some of his own savings in the deposit, the bulk of which would come from the funds that Marion and Winnie had jointly accumulated in their post office savings account. Ted would undertake the bookkeeping and Winnie would be the landlady, running the bars and the bed and breakfast accommodation for ‘commercial travellers’, a lucrative arrangement which added considerably to the income earned in the public bar and the ‘snug’. The viability of this plan depended on Winnie’s acceptance of Marion’s share of the money the girls had jointly saved. If Winnie would not agree to this Marion would reject Marvin’s repeated and insistent proposals.

  ‘I would of turned ’im down flat, Mrs Todd, no mistake, and for a while I thought I’d ’ave to, Winnie was that obstinate! But in the end she agreed to take it on, all of it! The pub and the money! Time was when there was no way she could of ’andled it all on ’er own, could you, Win?’ Winnie smiled and shook her head.

  ‘No, I couldn’t of!’ she agreed. ‘When we first joined the Land Army and come down ’ere I was that under me parents’ thumb I’d never thought for meself! Even bein’ a land girl was Marion’s idea!’ She glanced at her friend. ‘Yeah, it was, love!’ she said, wagging a finger at Marion to prevent an interruption. ‘I just tagged along! But I reckon I’ve grown up a bit, since I bin ’ere, and seen the other girls takin’ charge of their lives and that.’

  ‘But you always wanted the pub, though, Win!’ Marion said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Winnie agreed, thoughtfully. ‘I did … but it was you as first thought of it.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. It was always you as first thought of things, Marion!’

  ‘And you just tagged along, did you?’

  ‘Yeah. To start with.’

  ‘You mean you wasn’t so keen on runnin’ a pub as what I was?’

  ‘Not right at the start, I wasn’t. Not as mad keen as what I am now, anyroad! I could no more of thought of doin’ it on me own then than I could give up on it now! And I’ll ’ave Uncle Ted to ’old me ’and, remember. I’ve got plans, I ’ave!’ She turned to Alice, her face sharp with determination. ‘When I’m rich, Mrs Todd, I’ll ’ire a manageress and I’ll go to America and visit Marion and Marvin, I will! You’ll see! I’m not sayin’ as I won’t break me ’eart when she goes! ’Cos I will! I’ll be in floods! But I reckon I’ll soon be that busy with me pub I’ll be glad to see the back of the bossy cow!’

  Winnie’s acceptance of her changed prospects was not quite as wholehearted as she implied. A few days after the two girls had broken their good news to Alice she discovered Winnie one evening, alone in the bedroom she shared with Marion, who had just left the hostel for a night out with Marvin.

  ‘It’s nothin’, Mrs Todd,’ Winnie protested, when Alice, seeing the tears and the red eyes, asked her what the matter was. ‘But I ’as to keep smilin’ when Marion’s around, see, so, tonight, while she’s out, I’ve took the opportunity for a good blub. Don’t tell ’er, Mrs Todd, or she’ll start on about not goin’ to America and I couldn’t go through all that again!’ They sat in silence for a while, one on each of the two narrow beds.

  ‘You are a good friend, Winnie,’ Alice told her. ‘A really good friend.’

  ‘She’d of done the same for me, Mrs Todd.’

  ‘Yes. I think she would. And what’s more, I believe she might even have rejected Marvin if you’d let her. But I think you would have regretted it – both of you – if you had.’

  ‘That’s what I reckon, Mrs Todd! But it’s still touch and go, sometimes. That’s why I got to get me miseries over and done with when she’s out! If she caught me at it …’ Her throat closed on the words. Alice leant forward and patted Winnie’s arm.

  ‘Good thinking,’ she said, getting to her feet, and absent-mindedly straightened the counterpane she had been sitting on. She suggested that Winnie should join her in the kitchen for a mug of cocoa.

  ‘Yeah, I’d like that, Mrs Todd. I’ll be down in a mo.’ Winnie glanced at her pink nose and swollen eyes, reflected in the dressing table mirror. ‘When I seen to me face!’ she added. ‘What a sight, eh!’

  Gordon Brewster had, as Roger Bayliss’s solicitor, drawn up the agreement between him and Rose, concerning her use of the old bakery, and more recently, the contract between him and the proprietor of the riding school which proposed to stable some of its ponies in an unused barn at the lower farm. Roger had ridden down, partly to see Alice and partly to check on the alterations to his barn, when the conversation turned to the subject of the solicitor’s recent bereavement.

  ‘How is he?’ Alice had enquired. She had last seen Gordon Brewster at his wife’s funeral when, flanked by his grown-up daughters, he had appeared dignified and even resigned to his grief.

  ‘Doing pretty well, I would say,’ Roger told her. ‘Difficult time for him, obviously. Thought I might give him dinner one evening. The Rougemont, perhaps.’ He was adjusting his mare’s girth and Alice, who had noticed a burr caught in the animal’s mane, was picking it delicately out with the tips of her fingers. ‘Wondered if you’d care to join us,’ Roger added, enjoying the sight of her and the way the sunshine lit her hair. Alice considered and then refused, suggesting that in the circumstances of Gordon’s loss, a man-to-man occasion might be more appropriate.

  ‘How was your evening?’ she quizzed Roger, some days afterwards.

  ‘He talked about Margery a lot. Only to be expected, I suppose. Turns out he was becoming quite concerned about her.’

  ‘In what way concerned?’ Alice asked.

  ‘It seems she’d come to depend very heavily on her Land Army work. Apparently it meant a great deal to her and she was worried about what she was going to do with herself when it all came to an end – as it inevitably would have done.’ It was late afternoon and they were standing at the gate of a barley field, watching the old binder trundling round, the girls lifting the loosely bound stooks and propping them in rows across the stubble. ‘Then, out of the blue,’ Roger went on, ‘he started talking about her drinking.’

  ‘Drinking?’ Alice queried, hoping she had misheard him.

  ‘You yourself mentioned it to me once.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes. Must have been around Christmas time. After a party, I daresay. You said you thought she was hitting the bottle a bit!’

  ‘I’m sure I never put it as crudely as that!’

  ‘Maybe not. But, as I remember it, you were a little concerned. No?’

  ‘Well she certainly enjoyed a “snifter” as she called it, and she always wheedled a sherry or two out of me when she came to “inspect” the hostel, but …’

  ‘Seems it went a bit further than that. After the funeral, when her daughters were sorting out her clothes, they found a stash of gin in her wardrobe. Eight empty Booth’s bottles and two full ones, in fact!’

  ‘My God!’ Alice was genuinely shocked. She had regarded Margery’s drinking with little more than a passing concern and was unaware of the depth of the problem.

  ‘And it seems that the car accident that killed her was not
the first,’ Roger continued. ‘There had been several bumps and dents recently, one involving another vehicle on the Exeter road and which poor old Gordon didn’t know about until his insurers contacted him.’ Roger caught Alice’s look of concern and patted the hand with which she was gripping the top rail of the gate. ‘So you were right, my love, to have identified a bit of a situation there.’

  Alice was uncertain whether Roger, reacting as he had done to the scene of Margery Brewster’s fatal accident, had been aware of the smell of alcohol which had, at the time, been attributed by the policeman, and indeed by Alice herself, to gin from the smashed bottle. Had he been, Gwennan’s attempt to protect the Brewster family from embarrassment had clearly succeeded. But perhaps, his own reaction to the accident having been so extreme, Roger was, and now remained, unaware of the details of the scene which he and Alice came upon at the bridge that day.

  While Alice’s conscience would have been eased by a confession of all she knew, part of her mind explored the effect such a disclosure would have. Would Roger feel compelled to reveal the facts not only to the police but to the Brewster family? And if he did, what would happen to Gwennan? Would she be accused of withholding evidence? Would the police constable, who had taken that evidence, be reprimanded for his inefficiency? And how, Alice wondered, would Roger have regarded her own part in the conspiracy? At the time it had possibly been his own condition that had obscured from him the complexity of the accident. How would the situation be improved, for any of those people who were directly or indirectly involved in it, by the disclosure of facts which would inevitably damage them?