Hannie Richards

by Hilary Bailey

  There was a silence. Then Julie said loudly, ‘You got it. Hannie, you got it!’

  Elizabeth said, ‘It’s workable.’

  They all looked at Margaret, who said, ‘They started Oxfam in one house in Oxford. Now it’s our turn.’

  ‘What if the men take the money?’ Julie said. ‘That’s the usual thing.’

  ‘The person with the purse,’ said Hannie, ‘is the person with the power. If we supply small looms so that women can make more cloth, we’ll expect to find them there when we get back—right? It won’t take the men long to find out what we’re doing, for the women will help everybody.’

  There was another silence. Hannie stood up and went into the long room. It was full of women. She crossed over to the bar and said to Mrs Knott, ‘Champagne?’

  ‘Of course, Mrs Richards,’ Mrs Knott said. ‘Celebrating?’

  ‘Hope so,’ said Hannie and took the tray and carried it back to the others.

  ‘Well,’ said Margaret with a grin, raising her glass, ‘to Womanfam, or something like that.’

  ‘And Hannie, smuggling for a good cause,’ Julie added.

  They all raised their glasses.

  The next day Hannie telephoned the house in Devon and spoke to her husband. She said that she must come down soon to see the children and to talk to him. Sounding nervous, he suggested he bring the children to London to see her. She told him firmly that she was coming that day and he had better make up his mind to it. She set off immediately.

  The door was opened by Victoria Hughes-Brown. Hannie, looking briefly at the face of her erstwhile friend and neighbour, realized that while she felt nervous, Victoria was as determined, and as desperate, as any of the people she had met on her adventures. She thought suddenly, My God, it’s like a jungle—and then stepped inside saying, ‘I don’t intend to have a row. I hope you don’t either.’

  Victoria, who was tall and fresh-faced with long, dark brown hair, said, ‘Of course not,’ but Hannie was not sure. Her children, she discovered, were out riding. She walked ahead of Victoria into the sitting room. The furniture had been rearranged, and in one corner there stood a small cabinet of china she recognized as having come from one of the rooms at Lanning Hall, where Victoria had lived with her father.

  Adam stood by the fireplace, where a log fire burned. He said, ‘Hullo, Hannie.’

  Victoria advanced into the room, poked the logs in the fireplace a little, added another log, and sat down. Hannie, still standing, said, ‘Hullo, Adam. I came because I thought we had a few things to sort out. Sooner the better. Would it be too much to ask if we could talk in private?’

  ‘Victoria has said she would like to be here,’ Adam said. ‘She is involved, after all.’ He was very embarrassed.

  ‘Oh,’ Hannie said. ‘I should have liked to see Flo and Fran when I arrived,’ she added.

  ‘They’ll be back in an hour,’ he said.

  ‘They’ve arranged to have lunch at the Woodalls’,’ Victoria said. At this, Adam looked even more embarrassed.

  ‘Oh, sod you, Adam,’ Hannie said, forgetting she had meant to be cool and sensible. ‘Did you have to do all this, Adam—have Victoria around stressing her ownership of my poker, hiding the children? This makes me feel sick. It’s disgusting.’

  Adam said nothing. Victoria said, ‘Adam offered to meet you in London, to spare you the upset of coming here. If you had agreed to that, of course the children would have been there. They’re not simply because we thought you might get upset and upset them.’

  ‘Shut up, Victoria,’ Hannie said. ‘You’re here in my house, with my husband and my children. You’re lucky I didn’t come here earlier, with friends, to disrupt the atmosphere. As for you, Adam, you might as well not be here. All you’re doing is standing commandingly by the fireplace, doing nothing.’

  He said, ‘You can’t imagine how much I hate this, Hannie.’

  ‘That,’ Hannie said, ‘is a very weak remark. I’ve protected you too long, Adam Richards.’

  Victoria said, ‘I told you she’d become abusive.’

  Hannie said, ‘I think I’ll pour myself a drink. Don’t worry—I know where it’s kept.’ She poured herself some whisky at the sideboard and asked, ‘Anybody else? No? I’ll just say what I’ve come to say, after which you, Victoria, can just telephone the Woodalls and say there’s been a mistake and will Flo and Fran come home to see their mother. When I’ve seen them, I shall leave. So, here goes. I want the children to live with me in London and come here for holidays. I want a divorce, simple and straightforward with no complications. If you like, Adam, I’ll divorce you for adultery quickly. I’ll make no financial claims on you. You can sit here and fester like gentlepeople in this nice house in this nice part of the country for as long as you like.’

  ‘You can’t do that, Hannie,’ said Adam. ‘They don’t want to live in London.’

  ‘I can,’ said Hannie. ‘Or you can fight a long, unrewarding and expensive custody case for them if you want to—you’ll only disturb them in the process. Plenty of children live in London and like it—they’re getting older. It wouldn’t be long before they started yelling for excitement and saving up to run away to the city.’

  ‘You can’t get away with it, Hannie,’ said Victoria. ‘We can prove you’ve been in gaol on a drug-smuggling charge and only got out because of a history of mental illness. You’ll never get those children.’

  Hannie had been afraid of this argument. She finished her whisky and said, ‘If you go to court. But is it worth it? You don’t really want another woman’s children hanging about, Victoria. At the moment they’re a way of anchoring Adam to you here, but as soon as you’ve got your own child, you won’t need them. They’ll be second-class citizens once you’ve got a brace of sons. I’m not going to stand by watching Flo and Fran picking up the toys of the son and heir. They’ll be better off with me. If you impulsively go to court and prove me an unfit mother, I shall have nothing to lose. I can go to the police and confess to everything I’ve done—to resurface the tennis court, to buy the ketch in the harbour and the bull in the field. The stink will go on for ever. Then what price your landed-gentry act? You’ll be sunk—and the place will probably go under the hammer. It’s a Mexican stand-off. If anybody pulls the trigger, we both die. Think about it, and while you’re thinking, phone the Woodalls. I want to see the children before I go. I’ll just go out for a walk for the moment.’

  She went out of the back of the house and crossed the wintry lawn. There was going to be little argument about terms, she thought. Victoria needed a good excuse not to have the children there permanently. Without them she would feel less secure with Adam, but as long as Hannie agreed to a speedy divorce she could soon marry Adam and turn to and have children of her own. Safe at last, Victoria Hughes-Brown, she thought. Or will you ever feel really safe now?

  She ducked under the swing, walked across the tennis court, into the orchard. A freezing wind came off the sea. There was nothing here which did not remind her of the past. On the lawn Flo and Fran had staggered and toppled as they learned to walk. She had pushed them on that swing. There, she had caught Flo as she fell off a branch of the tree. Under the oak she and Adam had sat up, all one midsummer night, talking. Just here, in the orchard, where the trees were black and twisted and the grass stood up in frozen spikes, was where she and Adam had walked after dinner, in summer, on the day she had come down for the first time to meet his parents.

  It’s all gone now, for you, she thought to herself. Flo and Fran would have it temporarily, for a while, in the holidays, sharing it with little half-brothers and -sisters until they were old enough to sulk, resent the situation, feel bored and refuse to come. What a mess, she thought. What a horrible series of mistakes. Perhaps, she thought, I should have stayed at home, entertained the neighbours and made jam with Victoria in the summer. Perhaps I should have guarded my threshold the way other women do. Perhaps I should have, she said to herself, but I’d have sulked and had
to open a pottery shop for summer visitors in Porthtrevanion. Swallowing the lump in her throat, she leaned against the grainy trunk of the big, twisted apple tree, the early one, whose blossom always came out first. She felt very bleak under the bare, rattling branches, twisted together like a vast cat’s cradle gone wrong above her. She brushed tears from her eyes and sniffed. She looked up. There, on the black and knotted branches, were the first, faint green swellings which meant the buds were coming. She stared intently at them.

  She was being hailed—‘Hannie!’ from across the orchard. She couldn’t believe her eyes. It was James Carter, plunging across the grass towards her in a huge, flapping coat and long scarf. Her joy and relief were enormous. It seemed too good to be true. She rushed to him and embraced him. They kissed, frozen lip to frozen lip until the warmth came to their faces. ‘Oh, my God, am I pleased to see you,’ Hannie burst out. ‘Oh, James. I’m so miserable in this dump.’

  ‘They told me at the Hope Club you’d come down,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be annoyed I’d followed you.’

  ‘Annoyed!’ she said. ‘I’ve never felt so rotten, till you came.’

  ‘I thought you might need some assistance,’ he said. ‘Anyway, my excuse was that I wanted to tell you who planted those drugs.’

  They started to walk round the orchard. ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind knowing,’ said Hannie.

  ‘I’m sorry I disappeared for so long,’ he told her. ‘I had some things to sort out—deals to conclude, explanations to make—you know the idea. Mine’s not a trade you can just walk out of, not unless you want to bump into somebody nasty on a dark night later on. Basically, that’s how I got on to who did it to you. Not the Rio police or Duncan Kyte the wicked industrialist—nothing like that. No, it was just Kyte’s druggie little girlfriend—Serafina—Serena?’

  Hannie started to laugh, ‘Serena. Of course, why didn’t I think of Serena?’

  ‘The story, is that she’s been having it away with Kevin Coleman. He was, or still is, the lover and the dealer, so he’s got a double hold over her. He gives her love and drugs. Also money. Also, she’s afraid of him, which is hardly surprising because everybody’s afraid of him. She was chatting to him and mentioned what you were up to and that you were going to New York. Coleman couldn’t resist the idea of using you to bring in a few drugs—’

  ‘He got vindictive when I refused to work for him once,’ Hannie interrupted. ‘He told me he’d do me a mischief one day. I thought it was bluster.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t—though I don’t suppose he wanted to get you caught out and the stuff confiscated. Anyway, there it is. Serena innocently finds out from Kyte who you’re going to see and where you’ll be staying. There you are, covered by superior credentials as a member of a scientific expedition. All he has to do is get friends in New York to plant the cocaine while you’re out of your hotel room, and everybody wins. That spot-check on the luggage at Rio was pure bad luck.’

  ‘Serena,’ Hannie said thoughtfully. ‘I ought to have known. Still, all’s well that ends well, that’s what I always say.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said James gravely. ‘I hear you’ve got a new job, smuggling alms. Will you be needing any help?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Hannie replied. ‘Lots.’ She added, ‘Lots and lots of help.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘First things first, then. I suggest we go back to the house, talk to the delightful couple in there and wait for the children. Then we can go back to London for a very long, nice time together, which we deserve.’

  They were standing under the old apple tree. Hannie said, ‘Good.’ But she still wasn’t sure. James looked up into the branches and said, ‘Look—the buds are coming.’

  ‘I know,’ said Hannie. And just then her daughters, wellingtons scudding and flame-red pigtails flying, came rushing across the grass to meet her.

  So HERE ENDS THE STORY OF HANNIE RICHARDS AND the Hope Club. Hannie has her work and her children and, probably, love. The Hope Club has its own premises where women can meet and talk and relax, and now its other purpose, which is to foster the kind of organization for which women run jumble sales and children go out singing carols—all proceeds to other women and children.

  So all ends well for the time being, although there are, as we all know, no final answers for women or anyone else in this world, except those found by courage, effort, love and, of course, hope.

  A Note on the Author

  HILARY BAILEY was born in 1936 and was educated at thirteen schools before attending Newnham College, Cambridge. Married with children, she entered the strange, uneasy world of ’60s science fiction, writing some twenty tales of imagination which were published in Britain, the USA, France and Germany. She has edited the magazine New Worlds and has regularly reviewed modern fiction for the Guardian. Her first novel was published in 1975 and she has since written twelve novels and a short biography. She lives in Ladbroke Grove, London.

  Discover books by Hilary Bailey published by Bloomsbury Reader at

  www.bloomsbury.com/HilaryBailey

  After the Cabaret

  All the Days of My Life

  As Time Goes By

  A Stranger to Herself

  Cassandra

  Connections

  Elizabeth and Lily

  Fifty-First State

  Hannie Richards

  In Search of Love, Money and Revenge

  Mrs Rochester

  Polly Put the Kettle On

  Mrs Mulvaney

  The Cry from Street to Street

  Miles and Flora

  The Strange Adventures of Charlotte Holmes

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,

  London WC1B 3DP

  First published in Great Britain 1985 by Virago Press

  Copyright © 1985 Hilary Bailey

  All rights reserved

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  The moral right of the author is asserted.

  ISBN: 9781448209262

  eISBN: 9781448209279

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