Three Times Removed

by M K Jones

  James called out to Maud, and their children. They would soon be here, expecting to see her at her place in the kitchen with Cerys, darting around, directing the preparation of breakfast. With a firmness of purpose that she struggled to feel, Ruth breathed deeply, planted her feet on the floor and stood.

  Ten

  Two hours later, the house was silent. Breakfast had been muted, the shock of John’s death still causing them all to speak hushed voices. During prayers, as well as remembering John, Ruth added another name. “We remember Alice and pray that she is well.”

  This was a sudden decision. Ruth saw the looks of surprise dart between Maud and James, and the puzzled look on Evan’s face. The children knew that their grandpa was gone and that they must be quiet to respect the adult grief. So they didn’t ask who Alice was. Nana Ruth didn’t offer any explanation, and the expressions on their parents’ faces told them that this was not a time for being inquisitive.

  James left first for his law office, kissing Maud and quickly whispering something to her. Maud herself departed shortly to take the children to school, followed finally by Evan, who still wasn’t speaking much.

  As the youngest child, born fifteen years after his closest sibling, Evan had to fight hard for his parents’ attention, and soon stopped trying. A naturally quiet boy, he rarely confided in them. John worried about him, but Ruth recognised that the boy had inherited his father’s implacably decisive nature.

  Evan decided to become a teacher and only a catastrophe of immense proportions would prevent him achieving his ambition. One more year at school and he could attend Cardiff College, the first of his family to do so. Ruth was so proud of his achievements. Her father, William, and John’s father, Old John, had both been unable to read or write. Ruth herself had not had the benefit of schooling but had been taught by John after they married.

  By the time the clock chimed nine, Cerys had finished washing the breakfast dishes and could be heard upstairs singing to herself as she made beds and tidied the children’s toys. Ruth returned to the sitting room, back to her favourite position at the window.

  The sun was now high above the front of the house lighting the crest of the mountain. It was a particularly clear day, the air cold and clean, which meant that Ruth could see the mountain in detail. She could make out the paths that ran from the base of the medieval mound at one end of the mountain range. Others ran in and out of the copses, whose trees were turning a deep shade of green. Her eyes followed the dark brown lines into and out of the trees, winding across and up to the far end of the ridge where no trees grew, until they disappeared into what she knew was a narrow gulley away to the right. In the centre of the fold was the mountain pond. There Esme Ellis had drowned.

  It had been so long since Ruth had thought about Essy’s death, and deliberately so. John had been relentless, as always, his voice rising in what sounded like anger, but Ruth suspected was fear. “We will not discuss it, now or ever, wife. We have to accept that Esme’s death was an accident and that Alice has gone. There is nothing to be gained from constantly looking backwards. It troubles the other children. I forbid it!”

  Eventually, Ruth put all questions from her mind. At John’s insistence, she tried to find peace and forget – accept that her daughter had died and that they would never know what had happened. But every year something brought Alice’s memory back to her.

  Ruth never forgot Alice’s birthday or special events. Like the day she would have finished at the board school and moved to the senior school. Or her and John’s summer outing on the Waverley, the trip Alice had been so excited to make across the Channel. That had been Alice’s twelfth birthday. Ruth had enjoyed the day, but neither spoke of the shadow that sat on the deck between them. Secretly, Ruth had never accepted. As time went by she forgot more often, but never completely. John never spoke of his lost daughter. It was the one subject in their lives that was a barrier between them. The younger children were told that they had a sister who died. None of them pursued the subject. Most families they knew had lost at least one child, through accident, sickness, or other tragedy. It seemed normal.

  Now, John was gone and Ruth could think about Alice again. She expected to feel some disloyalty, some guilt, planning this so soon after her husband’s death. She was surprised to find that she felt no such emotion.

  Sitting quietly in her chair in the calm peace of her home, Ruth accepted that the incident at the funeral had come from her exhausted grief. She had been thinking a lot about Alice during John’s last days and the incident at the graveside confirmed to her how much she always hoped that Alice would return. But Alice would be thirty-six years old now, a mature woman. Not the child that Ruth had seen.

  “I do not believe in ghosts and spirits. These are ungodly thoughts,” she told herself sternly. But something in the deepest, most secret part of her mind wouldn’t let it go. Perhaps this was Alice’s spirit returning to be with her dada?

  “No!” She spoke out loud, emphatically, much to the surprise of Cerys who had just come down the stairs and dropped the dusters she was carrying.

  “Should I not have come down, Mrs Jones?” the girl asked with a sob in her voice, as she crawled around on her hands and knees at the bottom of the stairs gathering up the pile of dusters into her apron.

  “I’m so sorry, Cerys,” replied Ruth, hurrying out to her. “I was just thinking aloud, not shouting at you.” She saw the tears. “No need to upset yourself.” She patted the girl gently on the back and gave her a handkerchief. “Come, now. Nothing harmed or broken. Take the dusters back to the pantry. We’ll put the kettle on the hob and make ourselves a pot of tea.”

  Nodding and smiling, the girl blew her nose and trotted into the kitchen.

  “So like her sister,” Ruth thought, “as far as I can remember. And just as quick to tears.”

  Five minutes later they sat in the kitchen, at ease, facing each other across the farmhouse table. The table was too big for this new kitchen, but Ruth found that she couldn’t bear to part with it when they left the farm. Alice had sat there, once.

  “Cerys, how is your mamma going along?”

  “Much the same, thank you, Mrs Jones. She doesn’t know any of us no more. But she talks a lot about the past, before I was born.” Cerys paused for a moment, her head down, peering at the bottom of her cup. Without looking up she continued, “She keeps calling me Esme.”

  Ruth could see that the girl looked worried.

  “You look a lot like her, Cerys,” Ruth smiled at the girl. “And your characters are much the same.”

  “I… I didn’t know her, of course, me being born so long after she died. What was she like, Mrs Jones? Dada would never speak about her. He got angry if anyone mentioned her name. But lately Mamma has said some funny things, so I wondered, you know… what was she like, our Esme?”

  “What kind of funny things, Cerys?”

  The girl looked embarrassed. “Just odd things, Mrs Jones. She keeps saying that she wasn’t there.”

  “Who wasn’t there?” Ruth’s legs trembled, hearing this again after so long. She wouldn’t miss her chance this time.

  “I don’t know, ma’am. That’s what she says. She calls out, ‘Essy, Esme Ellis, are you there,’ and then says, ‘she wasn’t there’. But I don’t think she was talking about our Esme.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “There’s a funny tone to the ‘she’, disapproving. Different to when she calls out for Esme. Then she sounds a bit frightened. And she talks about other people, and school, Mrs Jones. Names she says. Mr and Mrs Pugh, Miss Probert, Mrs Morris, Elsie Morris. Then she says again, ‘She wasn’t there’. It seems to upset her.” Cerys paused, turned her head away and sipped her tea, still glancing nervously at Ruth out of the corner of her eye. “She said something to me yesterday, too. Can I tell you?”

  “Of course.” Ruth was riveted. After so much time, just hearing the names brought it all back. And she had a feeling that she was abo
ut to learn something important.

  Cerys drew in a deep breath. “She grabbed my arm and said to me that I mustn’t tell anyone, because all of her children would be taken away. I couldn’t understand why she was saying that, because I’m the only one left at home.”

  This was not what Ruth had expected and she fell silent. Cerys was staring at her, eyes wide, expecting some kind of reaction, worried that she had told when she wasn’t supposed to, but clearly needing some reassurance.

  “I think, Cerys,” Ruth replied, choosing her words carefully, “that your mother thought she was back at the time of Esme’s death and this might have been something that someone said to her. Did she seem to think that she was talking to you, or to someone else?”

  “I couldn’t tell, ma’am. She wanders so much in her mind, these days. What do you think?”

  Ruth didn’t want to disturb the girl any further, but wanted to know more. “It was a very bad time for all of us, Cerys. I had a living child before William, you know, a girl, called Alice.” It was clear from Cerys’s widening eyes that she hadn’t known. “We don’t talk about her because she didn’t die. She disappeared.”

  Cerys’s mouth turned to an “ooh” then opened to ask something, but Ruth pushed on.

  “Your mamma was made very ill by Esme’s death, and then by my Alice disappearing. Your dada had to look after all of the children and keep working. I know he found it very difficult and sometimes he had to leave the children alone when he was at work. So someone may have said something cruel to your mamma. You wouldn’t expect such things when someone has lost a child, but at such times you find out what a cruel place this world can be.”

  Ruth found herself thinking back to the reactions she and John were subjected to when Alice disappeared. “There are good people, of course, kind and generous and helpful, like so many at our chapel. But there are also those who get pleasure from hurting. I wouldn’t be surprised if your mamma found this. I remember it, as did my husband.”

  She could see that the girl was hanging on every word. “Don’t worry yourself about it, Cerys. As you say, your mamma wanders in her mind. Would you like me to come and see her?”

  Cerys’s small heart-shaped face lit up in a great wide smile in which Ruth at once recognised Essy. And it reminded her of something that she had forgotten for many years.

  “That would be lovely, Mrs Jones, if you are ready to go out, that is?”

  Ruth nodded. “I think I may leave the house to visit your mother without anyone feeling too scandalised.”

  “Aunty Bella is there all day till I get back. I’ll let her know you’re coming.” Cerys went to get up from the table, but saw that Ruth was about to speak again and paused, half standing.

  “Cerys, would you like to see what Esme looked like?”

  The girl looked surprised, and puzzled. “I would, Mrs Jones, but how can that be?”

  “Because I have a photograph. I haven’t looked at it myself for many years. I have it locked away. I’ll visit your mamma tomorrow, after you return home and I’ll bring the photograph with me.”

  “Lovely, Mrs Jones.” Cerys beamed. “Shall I get on, now? I still have to finish sweeping the bedrooms.”

  “Yes, thank you, Cerys. Let me know when you have finished.”

  The girl stood, rinsed her cup and saucer in the sink, and left them on the draining board. Then she skipped out of the kitchen and went upstairs, humming to herself.

  Ruth sat motionless at the kitchen table. She was taken aback by the forwardness of her own proposals. She shouldn’t be going out, even to visit a dying woman, for at least a month. And then there was the shock of remembering the photograph.

  She had put the photograph in the trunk with Alice’s things, at John’s insistence, never to be looked at. She had looked at it, secretly, many times before they moved from their old farm, but it gave her so much pain. As the months, then years went by, she decided to put it away for good. Now she realised that was at least ten years since she’d last seen it. As much as she retained an image of Alice as she was when she disappeared, getting the photograph out again was not going to be easy.

  But she had promised Cerys and was now bound to find it. She would have to do it today, before everyone came home, so she could regain control over herself before they realised that anything had happened. She allowed Cerys to finish her work early, sending her off after lunch with a promise to return home with her the next day. With a smile the girl waved goodbye, the other hand clutching at her black hat, which the wind was trying to whip off her head. Ruth waited until Cerys was out of sight, then closed and locked the door. She had about two hours before the children and Evan came home.

  Eleven

  When she had composed herself, Ruth took the key from behind the kitchen door and walked upstairs. There was no light in the attic so she took a small candle. The entrance to the attic was always kept locked, to deter the children from exploring where they might hurt themselves. At least, that had always been their excuse. In truth, she was afraid that someone would go up and find the trunks.

  The door had not been opened since shortly after they had moved into the house, and the large iron key was stiff in the lock. With a few forced turns it clicked. Ruth opened the door and began to make her way up the stairs. As she rounded the bend at the top and faced the second door, to the attic itself.With a shaking hand, she turned the knob. The attic door swung open.

  Stuffy, musty air attacked her nostrils. At first she could see nothing, so stood for a minute to accustom herself to the faint light given out by the flickering candle. Across the attic she could just make out the shape of the trunks.

  She knew that the floor was steady and there was nothing to trip over. But even so she walked across the floor tentatively as her legs were now trembling so badly that she had to force one foot out in front of the other.

  It seemed to take an age to walk the few yards of the attic to the far end, her goal becoming clearer with each step. By the time she stood in front of them her breath came in sobs and shakes. Emotion at what she was about to see engulfed her, and she sank to her knees in front of the larger trunk of the two before her, placing the candle carefully on the floor. She knew she would have to open it quickly and look into its contents. If she didn’t act now she would be lost, and be forced to make an excuse to Cerys. With shaking hands, she snapped the lock and flung back the lid.

  “Oh, my dearest child!” The words burst from her in a flood of emotion, escaping like a vent of steam.

  The first thing she saw was Alice’s school dress and pinafore, the clothes they had found in the pigsty where Alice must have waited and changed after school, before setting off. Ruth was transported back and the old pain stung like a hot needle as she remembered how she had heard a noise and gone outside, but done nothing. If only she had called out, perhaps Alice might have come out of her hiding place and run to her.

  “We could have dealt with anything, Alice,” she wailed quietly in the darkness, “however bad it was.”

  But she had done nothing and was now left with only a set of neatly folded clothes, locked in a trunk for thirty years. She began to sob but caught herself and wiped the tears from her cheeks.

  Ruth knew that the photograph was here. The other contained keepsakes that had been precious to Alice and a copy of the newspaper in which Alice had seen the advertisement for the Waverley. She remembered now that she had put the photograph in the very bottom of the largest trunk. She rummaged through the clothes, finding stockings, dresses, boots, and hats, each one with its own memory. She dug further in and searched frantically with her fingertips, until at last she found the edge of a piece of stiff paper. She pulled it out and stared at it in the gloom.

  Even after over twenty-five years, with almost no light, her eyes instantly found Alice, second row up, third from the left, in her school clothes, hair combed neatly, staring solemnly into the camera. She gently ran her fingers over her face. Unchanged in her memory, sma
ll and beautiful, her first and most beloved daughter. Just as she had seen her three days before at John’s graveside. And there, sitting next to her, with her small, heart-shaped face and dark hair tied back off her forehead, was Esme Ellis.

  “Side by side, as always,” she whispered.

  She couldn’t make out any other details. Making sure that the clothes were all neatly folded again, she closed the trunk, put the photograph in her pocket, blew out her candle and made her way back downstairs.

  She placed the key on its hook behind the kitchen door, just as she heard the sound of the children chattering as they walked up the path to the front door. Composing herself quickly, Ruth put on a smile on her face, and Alice to the back of her mind, as the children began to tell her news of their day.

  Twelve

  After supper, Ruth read Bible passages to the children until bedtime, then Maud took them upstairs. James went out to a chapel meeting. Evan was in the kitchen, studying for his forthcoming examinations.

  “Say goodnight to Nanna Ruth,” Maud instructed them as they stood in the doorway of the living room, where Ruth sat, as ever, in her chair.

  She smiled at the children and beckoned them for a kiss each before they ran up the stairs to their rooms. She pulled her shawl, which she realised she had not taken off since the early morning, tighter around her shoulders. Now she was alone and unlikely to be disturbed for at least an hour. The light was fading, the hills turning a deep green. A barge slid silently past the house at the bottom of the garden pulled by a strong white carthorse. Ruth watched as the carter led the horse along the canal path, expertly navigating under the bridge and out of view on its journey to Newport. There was no sound now except for the hollow ticking of the clock in the hall. Ruth reached into her pocket, fighting her own sobbing breath as she stared at the photograph.