by Pam Weaver
‘That’s nice,’ said a woman who was collecting bits and pieces from the material box. ‘I’m Jenny Bartlett. I think I know you; I used to go to school with your mother.’
‘Did you really?’ Susan gasped.
Jenny nodded. ‘Frankie Sherwood, isn’t it? I’m afraid we rather lost touch. I went to her birthday party when she was ten. I left Worthing just after the war. My mother married a Canadian. I only came back a couple of years ago. I liked your mum. How is she?’
‘Fine,’ said Susan making herself comfortable. ‘On holiday with my dad at the moment.’
They were interrupted by Hazel. ‘I remember your mother for practically saving the village school single-handed. If she hadn’t started the petition and organised all those sit-ins, well, I’m not sure that we would still have a school in Goring by now.’
‘Why was that?’ Jenny asked.
‘The powers-that-be,’ said Hazel, now in full flow, ‘wanted to send all the children to Ferring.’ She reached into a workbox just in front of her to find a silk thread. ‘It would have been such a pity if they’d closed us down. It would’ve taken the heart out of the village and most likely I would have been out of a job.’
Jenny retreated to the other end of the table. Susan took a deep breath as another wave of nausea swept over her. What was wrong with her today?
‘I’m glad you’re helping us,’ Hazel said. ‘Your stitching is really quite neat.’
‘You mean you’re surprised someone who looks as wacky as me could sew?’ Susan teased.
‘Yes,’ said Hazel, completely unfazed.
Susan grinned. She liked Hazel. Her open honesty was blunt but with Hazel, what you saw was what you got.
‘I was talking to Stan on the way in,’ Susan said matter-of-factly. ‘He could do with some help with his garden.’
Hazel’s face coloured but she made no comment. ‘This is June Carter’s square,’ she said pointing it out. ‘I’m sorry she’s not coming back but her stitching is terribly wonky.’
Susan studied June’s square and then looked at Hazel’s next to it. The older woman’s style was completely different but that would only add to the diversity of the quilt. Susan recognised Periwinkle Cottage, Hazel’s little home by the shops. She had even depicted herself working in the garden. The Hall stood in the distance. Today Hazel was unpicking some half-finished lettering.
‘What does that say?’ Susan began, but Hazel put her hand over the script. ‘It doesn’t really matter now. I’ve decided to change it.’
The kettle began to boil and Iris set about making some tea. And that was another thing, Susan thought to herself. She didn’t seem to do much sewing. Iris was always the one running errands or brewing up.
‘Your husband doesn’t mind you spending so much time here?’ said Hazel, deliberately changing the subject.
‘No,’ said Susan, pushing aside the acidic thought that Jack didn’t give a stuff about her these days. She looked around for some scissors. They were going to have to unpick quite a bit of June’s work. Iris came round with the teas. June was one of those people who had been brilliant in her younger days but now that she was in her late eighties, her skills, like her eyesight, were not quite as good. Nobody liked to offend her so it came as something of a relief when she announced to the group that her impending cataract operation meant that she would have to stop coming.
Susan looked for the starting point of June’s work and eventually found it. As she cut the cotton and carefully pulled the thread, she was thinking about Jack. She had hoped that things would have worked out a little better by now but everything was just as bad. When the police took him to the station that first time for questioning, it didn’t seem so terrible. There had been a discrepancy in the books, they said, and naturally, as he worked in the finance department, they wanted to talk to Jack about it. She trusted her husband implicitly. There had to be a logical explanation but when he came back home, he was in a state of panic.
‘It’s like they’re accusing me!’ he’d cried. ‘They’re implying that I must have been embezzling the money!’
She had immediately sprung to his defence. ‘But that’s ridiculous! Why would they say that? Have you done something you shouldn’t have?’
‘Of course I haven’t,’ he’d retorted, completely misunderstanding what she was saying. ‘Well, I must say, it comes to something when even my own wife insinuates that I could be a thief!’
‘I didn’t say that,’ she protested but he wasn’t listening and that had been just the start of their troubles. He’d never been charged but he was still suspended from work and the police were still investigating. It didn’t help that every now and then they’d ask him to come back to the station for more questioning. Jack got so stressed every time – and then he’d started drinking.
Hazel glanced over Susan’s shoulder to look at June’s work. ‘Oh dear, it really is a mess, isn’t it?’
‘I honestly think she couldn’t see properly,’ said Susan. ‘Maybe we should have said something before.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said Iris, putting a cup of tea on the windowsill behind them.
Just then, the door flew open and Iris was immediately thrown into a flat spin as the Hon. Mrs Valerie Melcham – do call me Valerie, the owner of the Old Manor House walked in. She was an attractive woman of indeterminate age, well groomed, well dressed and with an imposing personality.
Valerie normally sat in between Hazel and June to sew her own square. With minuscule, neat stitching, she was working on the family coat of arms but as usual, before she sat down, she walked around the room chatting amiably with the other women, thanking them for coming, offering help and advice where needed and doing a check of everybody’s work. Susan glanced up as Iris followed Valerie like a twittering bird.
‘Why does Iris always have to treat Valerie as if she’s royalty?’ Susan whispered between her teeth to Hazel.
‘You remember your place, my girl,’ Hazel muttered. ‘And don’t forget to curtsey when she comes to join us.’
At first shocked, all at once Susan got the joke and elbowed her in the ribs. ‘You’re wicked.’
Hazel grinned as Valerie and Iris headed their way. The four of them were from different generations and different social backgrounds, but they all got on very well. Valerie may have held the rest of group on a tight rein, but she was a little more relaxed with the people in her own circle.
‘What were you two giggling about?’ she asked, sitting down.
‘Nothing,’ said Hazel innocently in a voice which had suddenly become high-pitched as she stifled a laugh and dived under the table to retrieve some dropped pins.
*
As Valerie settled down in front of her own square, she watched Susan turning over the materials. How she envied her. Young and beautiful, she didn’t have a care in the world. Most girls her age would have laughed at the thought of making a quilt but Susan didn’t seem to care what people thought of her. Valerie loved her colourful clothes, her fantastic hair, her boundless energy and her quick, neat stitching. Susan refused to be bound by convention and respectability. How unlike herself. Valerie shivered involuntarily. This stifling, suffocating life of hers was becoming more and more unbearable, with it’s never-ending demands on her time. This was the only place where she could relax and be her real self.
She knew people envied her lifestyle but what did they know of boring dinner parties or having to ‘put on a show’ for some fete or gala? She would have done it all gladly had she got a loving husband. Oh, he could put on the charm when he wanted to and everyone thought he was wonderful. She could see him now, laughing and joking, the life and soul of the party but at the same time his hand would be under the table secretly stroking some woman’s thigh whilst he played the part of good ol’ pal with her partner. She shook herself. When did she become so bitter, so filled with contempt? It wasn’t a pretty virtue and when she had these thoughts she didn’t like herself very much.
Valerie shifted her position and found herself staring right into Hazel’s face. Thank God the woman couldn’t read her thoughts. Embarrassed, Valerie looked away quickly.
*
On the opposite side of the table, Hazel caught her breath silently. Was it possible Valerie had read her thoughts? She hoped not.
She’d been eager to sign up to make the quilt if only to get a glimpse of the inside of the Old Manor House. After all, she’d grown up with stories of the opulence and splendour of the place. She remembered walking past the gates with her mother when she was knee high to a grasshopper.
‘You should have been brought up there,’ her mother used to say, ‘but hypocrisy and snobbery kept you this side of the gates.’
It was the usual family skeleton. Hazel had been born illegitimate, at a time when that sort of thing brought shame. Her mother had been a fourteen-year-old maid working in the Old Manor House at the beginning of the 1930s when young Thomas Melcham was fresh out of boarding school. His parents had gone to the South of France for the summer but he’d persuaded them that he needed to have some extra tuition to prepare himself for university. Of course, he had no intention of working during the summer. Good-looking and lazy, he spent his time binge drinking and having wild parties with the locals. No respectable upper-class girl would risk her reputation by keeping company with him, but with his eighteen-year-old hormones raging, he’d found an outlet in young Mildred Radcliffe.
Hazel had heard the story so many times. Without going into intimate detail, her mother told her how exciting it was to hear Thomas’s footsteps coming up the back staircase. He’d arrive, candle in hand and a bottle of wine tucked under his arm, just to spend a few hours with her. He looked so handsome in his nightshirt and, watching her mother’s eyes glow as she told the story, there could be no doubt that he was a wonderful lover. He’d filled her little maid’s head with promises that because he loved her so passionately, one day they would run away together. She believed every word but of course, when the inevitable happened, he’d left her to her own fate. In this day and age, it was the stuff of Mills and Boon books, but in real life there was a far from a happy ending. Thrown out of her job, losing the roof over her head and being sacked without a reference, Mildred was forced to go to the workhouse to have her child.
Although by the 1930s only a few workhouses remained, there was one at East Preston. Mildred had ended up there for the birth of her baby. When she was older, Hazel had been back there to see the place where she had been born and where she’d spent the first six years of her life. She only remembered a few things, like playing hopscotch in the winter and the vile-tasting stew they had every other Tuesday. Hazel had no idea what it was but she’d hated it. The workhouse itself was a forbidding building set behind a high flint wall and with a single tower in the middle. An infirmary and nurses’ home had been added in 1906, but by the time Hazel went back to see it, the workhouse itself had been taken over by Sussex County Council. Nevertheless, it still sent a shiver down her spine.
Her mother had been forced to leave Hazel behind in the nursery when she finally got out of the place. Mildred’s mother, Hazel’s grandmother, wouldn’t allow her back home because she had brought shame on the family so Mildred had taken another live-in job, this time with a crotchety old woman. Funnily enough, that had been the silver lining to her cloud. She worked for the old woman for several years and to her immense surprise, when she died, her employer had left her enough money in her will for Mildred to get a rundown place of her own. Hazel was seven years old when she went to live in their two-up, two-down cottage and her mother worked as a ward orderly in Worthing Hospital to support them.
Mildred called herself Mrs Radcliffe and Hazel was told to pretend that her father had died, but that didn’t stop her from carrying the pain of being known as Melcham’s bastard all her life. It left her bitter and angry. It also blighted her own relationships with men. Although she liked Stan the security guard, she wouldn’t encourage him. She simply didn’t trust anybody.
Hazel steadily unpicked the stitches she had completed only last week. This had been part of her revenge on behalf of her mother. She’d selected the Bible verse carefully. Exodus 20 verse 5: Punishing the children for the sins of the father. She knew people would ask her about it, and then she’d tell them about those dreadful Melchams and the sufferings Thomas had wrought.
The one thing she hadn’t bargained for when she devised this mild plot was her growing friendship with Valerie. Hazel really liked her. As they’d worked together on the quilt, they’d enjoyed a good laugh and a joke. It slowly began to change Hazel’s perspective on the past. Her mother was long gone. What did it matter what happened nearly fifty years ago? The past is the past. Hazel had to get rid of this stitching before Valerie saw the quotation. She glanced up again and as she did, she and Valerie exchanged a shy smile. Yes, working on this quilt had given Hazel something she hadn’t bargained for … a warm friendship.
*
At last, Susan had decided what to create in the space that had been June’s square. June, a stalwart of the community, had been a teacher in the primary school during the forties and fifties so Susan planned to create a playground with children skipping and playing football. She searched for some material which would be suitable and found a little piece of pink and white gingham cotton and some soft leather. Ideal, she thought, for a dress and a pair of old fashioned boy’s shorts, or maybe the football itself. She delved back into the box; that piece of brown cloth would be ideal for a wall or part of the playground.
‘That looks promising,’ Hazel said softly as Susan came back to the table. ‘How is your Jack?’
Susan felt herself stiffen. ‘Fine.’ About as fine as he could ever be, she thought to herself, while he’s still traumatised by the events of the past few weeks. Suppressing another wave of nausea, she vaguely wondered why the pieces of coloured cloth in front of her had begun to swim.
‘Are you all right, Susan?’ Valerie’s voice suddenly sounded far away.
Susan nodded, but as she stood to her feet to look in the material box again, she could feel herself losing control of her legs.
‘Look out!’ cried Hazel. ‘She’s going to fall.’
Susan made a grab at the back of the chair but all too quickly, the floor came rushing up to meet her.
*
When Susan opened her eyes again, she was lying on a sofa and Valerie was holding a damp flannel against her forehead. Iris was patting her hand in an irritating way.
‘She’s coming round now,’ said Iris.
Susan swallowed. ‘Where am I?’
‘In my flat,’ said Valerie.
‘You fainted,’ Hazel explained. ‘We got the security guard to bring you in here.’
‘I’ve sent for the doctor,’ said Valerie.
‘There’s no need,’ Susan said as she tried to sit up. Her head was swimming again. ‘I’m okay.’
‘I’d prefer to get you checked over,’ Valerie said as she put a light restraining touch on her arm.
Susan relaxed back onto the cushion under her head and chewed at her bottom lip anxiously. She dreaded what the doctor would say. She laid both hands over her gently rounded stomach. It couldn’t be … could it? No, no, not now. The timing was all wrong.
There was a light knock on the door and Stan, the security guard, ushered a smartly dressed man into the room. ‘Doctor Crawford,’ he announced.
‘Thank you Stan,’ said Valerie. She stood, and looking d
own at Susan she added, ‘Hazel, Iris and I will leave you to it.’ Stan held the door open as they all left the room, but not before Susan saw him giving Hazel a friendly wink. The door closed and Susan looked up at the doctor, who was putting his bag onto the floor next to her.
‘Well now, young lady,’ he said amiably. ‘Let’s see what the problem is.’
When the doctor had gone, the others came back. They could see Susan was looking a bit tearful so Valerie said, ‘I’ll tell you what, you stay here for a moment and relax while we do a bit of clearing up and I say goodnight to the others. They’re anxious about you and will want to know how you are. We won’t be long, I promise.’
*
While Valerie was seeing the last of the team off the premises, Iris and Hazel put everything away. The quilt itself stayed on the table but Hazel covered it over with a dust sheet and Stan was there to lend a hand.
‘I can give you a lift home when you’re ready,’ he told Hazel.
Hazel felt her cheeks go pink. ‘There’s no need,’ she said stiffly. ‘I’m used to the walk.’
‘Oh, well,’ Stan said amiably, ‘if you change your mind, I’ve still got some sorting out to do …’ And Hazel thought he looked a little crestfallen as he left the room.
Iris began to clean the sink area and Hazel took the partly used milk bottle back to the Manor House kitchen. In the hallway she paused in front of the family portraits. There were three of them: Lt. Col. Archibald Melcham 1805-1846, Rev. Richard Melcham 1832-1899 and Thomas Melcham 1912-1970. Hazel caught her breath. There he was. Her father. He wasn’t very good-looking. Heavily built, he had a bulbous nose and a languid expression. She could see nothing of the handsome young man her mother had described so vividly. The portrait must have been done towards his later life and judging by the dates, he was only fifty-eight when he died and funnily enough that was the same year her mother passed away. An odd coincidence.
Lost in her own thoughts, Hazel didn’t hear Valerie coming up behind her. ‘My husband’s father,’ she said matter-of-factly.
