Chain Reaction

by Gillian White

  Did Dougal know this was going to happen? Did he? Could he? And not tell her? Or has he been trying to warn her and is it she who refused to listen? Now, somehow, reduced to this poor, defeated creature, she must either end it all or carry on with her life… the clinic tomorrow… facing friends and family… that lonely big house in Lancashire…

  The clinic! Arabella sits up straight. Why are They planning to pay exorbitant prices to take her to a clinic when Jamie isn’t remotely interested in the welfare of her, or her child? She’s been getting medical attention from the start of her pregnancy, on the National Health. She has her own midwife to contact whenever she needs her. They have taken any number of specimens and samples and tests, her weight has been checked, the baby scanned. There can be no possible reason for any further involvement, unless… unless…

  No! She is going mad! All this must be driving her mad. How could she even think such things, even They wouldn’t dare, not in this day and age. They wouldn’t find a doctor who was willing to…

  … To do what? Abort the child—or drive her mad? Or both. So she ends up in some asylum drugged out of her mind. And if they are prepared to do this, what else might they be prepared to do?

  Flight? Why not—it need not be difficult. The more she puts her mind to flight, the more the ache inside her subsides. She could lose herself somewhere in the city until the child was born. If she gets away, all might be well. If she stays and does nothing, if she goes obediently along with Them, her worst fears might come true. She could spend the rest of her life regretting that she had missed this chance. The more she thinks about it, the more inevitable it seems until it becomes a longing, a longing to escape, to get away, even if she has to take this pain with her. For her baby’s sake she must flee.

  She is mad with grief.

  In turmoil Arabella paces the floor, one hand rubbing her back. She’d be a fool to hesitate; she should leave before the others come back. They would insist that she went to the press and that would make her even more frightened. It is essential she keep her mind on this and not the other matter, that of James’ betrayal. She is better keeping moving, doing something. And she need not disappear into some dire hotel, she could quite easily go to Tusker at The Grange. Tusker would have her, Tusker would understand and look after her and help her to fight them all for the life of her child and whatever else They might be threatening. She won’t ring up, she’ll just appear. She’ll hurry straight to the station and ring Tusker when she gets there. Yes, yes, this is what she must do… and Arabella Brightly-Smythe peers fearfully out of the window, for out there in the darkness, one of the Queen’s Men could even be watching her now.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Flat 1, Albany Buildings, Swallowbridge, Devon

  IT’S WEIRD. MOTHER IS behaving very strangely indeed. No more sulks or sobbings, no moans or protests or accusations of theft or abuse. She’s even taken to saying a cheery good morning to Miss Blennerhasset and Nurse Mason, the little redhead she hates most. It is such a relief because visits pass so much more quickly when they can sit and chat about old times. ‘Well, there’s not a lot you can say about the present,’ was the only jaded remark Mum made on Frankie’s last visit and Frankie is grateful.

  Miss Benson’s steady involvement is obviously paying off. She has a calming influence; just to be with her sometimes, merely to listen to her voice with its Psalm-like modulations, can send you into the kind of myopic state you have to pay for through the nose if you visit a hypnotist. And Frankie knows all about the prices of alternative therapies. Since Michael left her two years ago she has been through the bloody lot. Seaweed massage. Reflexology. Shiatsu. Group and drama therapy and psychotherapy at £40 an hour while you talk yourself to sleep with boredom. A load of rubbish. No one can really help you when you’ve finally gone down that slippery slope. It’s no good shouting for help; nobody’s got a rope that long—you have to scramble out yourself.

  It was pride, of course. Pride was at the heart of it. As it usually is.

  Anyway, she’s over all that now and she hears about Michael’s turbulent new relationship from friends with a satisfactory glow. The more miserable that unlikely couple—she could be his daughter—the stronger Frankie feels. If he thinks he’s going to come back someday, cap in hand, expecting to find all sweetness and light then he’s got another think coming.

  Frankie was surprised to discover that Miss Benson was an animal nurse. She didn’t expect anything that interesting; she was convinced the shy, inoffensive young woman worked in a bank or a building society. She has a building society face with features like an audit book, sensible, calm and organised. She could look into her driving mirror and not be phased out by her own starting eyes. She would never pick her nose while driving, or talk to herself, or wear yesterday’s knickers because she’d forgotten to put the machine on. The only subjects on which Miss Benson gives vent to her feelings are her own mother’s demise and the export of live animals.

  In the short time she has known her, Frankie has gathered that Miss Benson was unusually close to her mother. They lived together for some years in a village in the Dales, until Miss Benson came south to take a job with a vet in Swallowbridge. ‘I should never have done it, of course, I know now,’ Miss Benson said, ‘but at that time I felt I ought to be more independent. I didn’t want to be, you understand, I just read modern novels and magazines for the new young woman and I felt that I shouldn’t be living at home. They suggest there’s something odd about you if you’re still at home by the time you are thirty.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Frankie, lulled by Miss Benson’s voice, sitting in her plain, utilitarian flat with the shire-horse slate nailed above the fireplace, having a quick cup of tea before she left with a few more bags of Mother’s belongings.

  ‘Same as getting married,’ Miss Benson droned on, not a crease in her starched cotton dress, not a line on her face, but a few beads of sweat slowly appeared over her top lip as her words gathered pace. ‘They say you don’t have to these days, but the message is still that you ought to. I mean, who wants to grow old alone, having to visit friends’ houses at Christmas just because they feel sorry for you, and send birthday cards to other people’s children? Who really wants to do that?’

  ‘I think you’re making it sound much worse than it is,’ said Frankie, who was beginning to value life without Michael and his finicky food fads, his awful sporting pretensions and his overbearing manner. OK so he was a lecturer and she a mere secondary-school teacher, but anyone would think he was the mega-intellectual Dean of some University, the way he gave voice in public. ‘Lots of women don’t marry these days and if they do and it doesn’t work, at least they have the sense to get out, not like in Mother’s day.’

  ‘But your mother had a happy marriage.’

  Frankie turned down the Rich Tea finger. Miss Benson was dunking hers. She raised her eyebrows. ‘She would call it happy. I would call it a life of slavery and hero-worship. Not an adult relationship at all.’

  ‘But if she believes it was happy…’

  ‘The tortured can be reduced to idolising their torturers in that twisted emotional wilderness… it’s incredible what the mind can do. She was numbed into submission by that appalling poetry—a woman called Faith Steadfast. It is only lately I’ve realised that was not the woman’s own name.’

  Sitting here and chatting about nothing induced a companionable sort of intimacy between these two unlikely women. ‘But poor Mrs Peacock wasn’t tortured!’

  ‘No, no, of course she wasn’t actually tortured, but I do think she tortured herself, and that can’t be right.’

  ‘She talks about William with nothing but love.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Frankie after a pause. Miss Benson should really open a window. The sun was streaming through so that Frankie’s cheeks were burning and she felt sweat pricking her hands. ‘If she was honest, she would say she loathed him for dying and leaving her. She hasn’t got anything else, you see
, not even me and the children. We were never important. There was only ever Father. Mother deliberately denied herself, like a nun entering an enclosed order. I’ve always considered that a fishy business.’

  ‘Oh, I thought about taking the veil myself once.’

  ‘Don’t we all when we’re little and being dramatic?’

  Miss Benson hesitated before admitting, ‘I wasn’t little and I am never dramatic. I thought of going into a convent after my own mother died.’

  ‘Well, there you are, that proves my point,’ said Frankie, like a teacher slamming down a book on her point. ‘It was cowardice that motivated you. You couldn’t face reality so you wanted to find a sanctuary. That’s understandable, if not very admirable. Certainly nothing to do with the selfless ideal of those supposedly called by God.’

  Miss Benson’s voice suddenly rose a notch. It broke towards the end of her speech. ‘You don’t understand. She was driven out of her home, driven into care by fear, by the programmes she watched on television, and the News she would never miss, and Crimewatch, her favourite programme. By the end she truly believed there were people with criminal intent surrounding her cottage. She didn’t even dare write to me in case her letters were being intercepted. Her neighbours, people who had known her for years, were gone, there were only newcomers in the village. Yes, she was driven into that awful Home and she died there of a broken heart.’

  ‘Surely not,’ cried Frankie, appalled. ‘Where were the Social Services?’ How terrible for poor Miss Benson. No wonder she wears such a wounded look; what a shocking burden of guilt she must carry.

  Miss Benson closed her eyes for the next bit. Her words hung in the quiet room like slicks of fog over water. ‘Nobody knew it was happening until it was too late.’

  ‘You didn’t visit home?’

  ‘Not for a whole nine months.’ Miss Benson’s voice was choked with shame. You could tell she hadn’t shared this knowledge with many people, and it was obviously too great a burden to carry alone for long, festering in her mind. Frankie was glad that the shy young woman felt she could confide in her.

  ‘I had an affair, you see.’ Miss Benson smiled sadly. ‘Oh, it was nothing, but I thought that it was. He filled my whole life. My every waking hour was given entirely to him, if I wasn’t with him I was thinking of him, if I was asleep I was dreaming of him, and I really believed we would marry one day and I’d have him beside me for ever.’ She looked away and closed her eyes, ‘And there was Mother all alone and going mad with fear. And she never wrote, and she never said, and I never knew. You see, she believed that I ought to be independent, too, and she knew I’d come straight home at once if I realised what was happening. I rang her up every night, you know, I never missed, not once, but she thought that her phone was bugged.’

  Frankie, such a practical person, found it hard to understand. ‘Couldn’t she have moved house?’ she enquired bluntly.

  Miss Benson seemed amazed to have to go on to explain. ‘She couldn’t cope with that sort of thing, not without my help. And anyway, the problem was all in her mind. If she’d moved house it would have moved with her.’

  What a sad tale. And how guilty Miss Benson must feel. ‘It’s easy, when you’re in love, to forget there’s anything else in life.’

  Miss Benson turned away. ‘It wasn’t just love, it was an obsession. I was a woman possessed and in the end it was my obsessive behaviour that mined the whole relationship. Martin found somebody else. That was more absorbing even than the love had been. I nearly took my own life: I never realised such pain could exist.’ She lifted her head and breathed in deeply through her pinched-looking nose. ‘If I’d only visited my mother I would, have known instantly that something was going very wrong and I would have moved back to the cottage with her, and taken care of her, and protected her. Mother used to love that village. She’d lived there all her life.’ She lowered her voice to a sad murmur, her breath catching on the edge of her tears. ‘She was found by the police, driven almost witless and suffering from hypothermia, hiding in a copse on the ridge above the village. It was winter, you see. She didn’t know me when I arrived to see her. She never recognised me again, not before she died. And I blame myself. It just shows you what can happen when a frightened, impressionable old woman is left all alone with only the TV for company. And how easy it is to become a victim if you’re alone and afraid.’

  ‘It must have been a living nightmare.’ Frankie looked down at Miss Benson’s bowed head and fancied that she could see pieces of broken shell lying around her feet. ‘Where were the Social Services, where were the neighbours, the church, the charities?’

  ‘It’s no good, I can’t blame anyone else. It was my fault and it is me who should suffer the consequences,’ said the undemonstrative Miss Benson. ‘It’s a crime, of course, but some would call it society’s crime, the way we treat elderly people today.’

  ‘I know I would want revenge on someone,’ said Frankie. ‘I couldn’t rest until someone was punished for what was clearly a case of neglect.’ She thought of Michael and how, for so long, she had wished for revenge, the bastard. After all she had done for him, cared for him, made love to him, worked and shared the family expenses, feeding him, respecting him, and then what does the swine go and do? Takes off with a sly little whore with breasts too large for her body and nothing between the ears but acne, someone so moronic it would be easy to impress her. And that’s what Michael craved more than anything, the appropriate awe for his gigantic brain.

  Revenge. Once it was the only emotion which allowed her to sleep at nights, and the sweet dreams of accomplishing it. How utterly weary she was in those first awful weeks after he left her. And for months her conversation was nothing short of a monologue of venom. Her friends grew weary of hearing it. They started to leave their answerphones on when she knew damn well they were in.

  Eventually, of course, the rage burned down enough to live with, especially when tempered by juicy gossip about their present plight… The bitch is never in, apparently, and Michael has to do the cooking! According to welcome reports, their flat looks like a Persian slum, hung with ethnic curtains and beads and hairy mats coming unwoven.

  Oh yes, revenge, when it comes, is a sweet soothing balm, but hers came a little late, unfortunately, for total satisfaction.

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Benson piously, back to her old gentle self again. ‘It is a question of values. I not only blame myself but this callous world we live in.’ The strain showed in her face and in the muscles of her neck and her rigid bearing. There was something alarming in anguish so carefully checked, as if, under that mild and gentle exterior, whatever festered there was intensified to the utmost.

  And Miss Benson is a woman of action, Mother told Frankie that. She demonstrates and protests quite fiercely over live animal exports and vivisection. So is Miss Benson really the best person to befriend Frankie’s angry, bewildered mother?

  Because of Mother’s improved behaviour Matron is more amenable to her outings with Miss Benson. She is always back at Greylands before nine o’clock, in time for her bath and bed. She is less frosty with the staff and even exchanges little jokes, helps to lay the tables, to dust the mantelpiece, things like that.

  ‘She is settling in at last, Mrs Rendell,’ Matron told her when last she visited. ‘It does take some more time than others. In your mother’s case it was longer than usual but I’m sure the drugs are helping. They invariably do, you know.’

  ‘Is there any chance my mother could be taken off them now?’

  ‘Best not,’ said Miss Blennerhasset, with a professional smile. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘And she seems to have accepted the sale of her flat. She doesn’t talk about it much, of course, not to me. I wondered if she had mentioned anything…?’

  ‘I think that’s where Miss Benson comes in,’ said Matron confidentially. ‘Mrs Peacock seems to have taken to sharing her little problems with her young friend, and that’s no reflection on you, Mrs Rendell. We al
l know how much easier it often is to confide in those who are uninvolved. And Miss Benson does seem to have a wonderful way with the elderly. I did wonder if she might be interested in working in that capacity, there are so few people around these days with the patience. I myself find it hard to attract the right kind of staff. Old people in general are not particularly appealing.’

  ‘Miss Benson works with sick animals.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Miss Blennerhasset profoundly. ‘That would explain it, then.’

  There’s an underlying smell of gin in the room but Frankie decides to ignore it. ‘You seem much happier, Mother, though I hesitate to say it. You’re bound to contradict me.’

  To Frankie’s disgust Mother lights another of Miss Benson’s cigarettes. ‘Oh no, Frankie dear, you are quite right, I do feel more relaxed. It is probably the medication Matron gives me. It seems to suit me. I feel much better.’

  Do Mother’s eyes look slightly shifty as she sits here so much more perky than usual on the chair by the bed in her day clothes? Is she up to something?

  ‘And you are enjoying your little outings with Miss Benson?’

  ‘I certainly am,’ says Mother, prodding the floor with her stick.

  ‘Angus and Poppy asked when you were next coming to have tea with us.’ This is a lie. Angus and Poppy rarely, if ever, ask about their grandmother. She has never been their favourite person. But there’s no harm in pretending if it might make Mother feel better, and once the flat is gone Frankie feels she owes her mother more consideration, more attention. ‘I told them I’d ask you.’