The Butter Cross
Part 2
Daisy Lascelles spent most of the afternoon in our kitchen, drinking tea laced with whisky she had brought herself and crying to my mother about Nigel – not that she had been to see him yet.
Well, we can go, said my mother, look – I’ll come with you. Just get in the car and off we go.
No — o — ooo.
Well, how about dropping him a line, then? Just to show him he wasn’t forgotten? Here, we could find a postcard — Nellie would have one with a nice picture, she was sure.
Omigod no. What could she possibly say?
There are pieces of the truth, said my mother, that you can say and they don’t sound insincere – you just have to pick them. You hope he’s keeping well – getting plenty of rest — wanted him to know you were thinking of him —— that kind of thing.
Daisy said something in a low, vehement tone. She seemed to have become very bitter. I thought: how many Daisies were there? How many Nigels?
How my mother could sit there and be civil to her when she thought she had stolen her sweetheart, I don’t know. It must have cost her a lot. But she and Daisy went back a long way together, and loyalty counted – didn’t it? That and the fact that my mother was a very private person. That was how Harry had got in under her guard – because he was even more shy than she was. Well – shy wasn’t the right word perhaps, because in other ways she was so brave; but reserved, then. Till something tapped her natural warmth, and she let it flow without stint.
As she had to Harry; as she was doing now, to Daisy. Listening to Daisy’s heartache, saying nothing of her own. Daisy, her old friend: the woman who had thrown away a perfectly decent husband, and taken-up fornicating with the only man my mother had let herself care for in a dozen years. Daisy, who had so airily broken her heart.
Daisy was wearing a green frock with eau-de-nil beads. That was important, later, which is the only reason I mention it. She smoked away like an exotic hookah at our plain old deal kitchen-table. She was smoking so fast she had dispensed with her tortoiseshell holder, I observed. That had been prettier, but she couldn’t suck hard and deep on the end of it the way she could when the little white tobacco-stick was right there in her red mouth. She seemed to find doing this a comfort. That was why the ends had lipstick on, now. We had no ash-tray in the house, so she put them out on one of our saucers – which I minded very much.
Their voices rose and fell, my mother’s calm, Daisy’s veering between hysteria and shrill laughter. No no no, cried my mother suddenly, urgently, you mustn’t do that — Daisy, promise me you won’t! You’ll manage, I’ll help you, we’ll ——
All right for you to say, wailed Daisy, you’ve done it — I can’t, I can’t!
Yes you can, said my mother, firm and reassuring again: Daisy, you know you can!
Can what? What was the matter now? Hadn’t she made enough trouble? What was she, pregnant now? And my poor mother sitting there thinking it might be Harry’s —? Mummy, do your sums, look at the dates: it couldn’t be – she wouldn’t even know yet, would she? How soon do you know? Not this soon! I tried to remember snatches of her conversations with Gladys over the years, for specifics, but I couldn’t. I just knew that people who did it got caught with babies, whether they wanted to or not — which was (I presumed) why my mother and Harry had been so careful; why Harry had been so forbearing in accepting the gift of herself my mother offered him. Why (as far as I could tell from the day in our granary) they hadn’t ‘done it.’ Because he loved her too much to get her into trouble, no matter how badly he wanted it.
Which made Ivy wrong, didn’t it? – about what men wanted. He wanted something more than that; Harry Oliver wanted my mother’s wellbeing, most of all. He wanted not to hurt her.
I couldn’t help re-living the last time I had seen Daisy. It made me feel queasy, so I slipped away. I left my mother a note where she would find it later, propped-up between my uncle Stephen in his silver frame and the silent clock, just to reassure her.
I’ve gone out, it said.
I went to meet all the trains from
Harry stepped-off the carriage as if the platform under his feet was dry land after a voyage round the Horn. He didn’t see me right away. He reeled a little, and got as far as the end of the waiting-room. This he held on to. Fishing a handkerchief from his pocket, he mopped his brow and dabbed at his mouth. He was waiting for the train to pull out again with its piercing shriek, which it did. His nerves were so ragged that he pressed the hanky to his mouth tightly.
Then he saw me. He just nodded a bit. I ran up and gave him my clean hanky too. “Look,” I said, not allowing myself to ask him any questions till he was settled-down and in command of himself again, “ – there’s a bench. Why don’t we sit?”
He allowed himself to be led a few yards to a glossy dark-green bench with the insignia of the GWR on it. I loved those grand curling letters and the way they intertwined.
He sighed once or twice and gave his head a little shake. “All right — I – I – I’m all right. Thank you v-very much.”
“And you did it!”
“Sort of. I have to g-go back.”
“What?”
“I l-left it with him. The Director. He s-signed a r-receipt. I’m to g-go back tomorrow and s-s-see him about it. He’s g-going to show it to some p-people in the m-morning – he’s c-calling a special m-meeting. O-o-oxford Dons – the l-lot!”
“He thinks it’s something, then!”
Harry flashed me a weary smile. “Yes — he d-does.”
“Oh, aren’t you excited?”
“I s-suppose,” he said, his voice flat and forced.
“You’re still upset about my mother, aren’t you,” I said.
“Oh, Helen,” he said. “F-f-f-foolish — g-got to move on —— ”
“No!” I cried. “I know what it meant to you — don’t give up!”
“Oh, d-do you,” he said.
I looked him straight in the eye. His were bloodshot, red-rimmed from the smoke
and grit of the journey and
“W-well th-then you know I’ll always think the w—w—w-w-orld of her, then,” he said. “B–but it’s no use, Helen, I’ve b-begged her to s-see me — and sss-she won’t. So it’s over, pyari.”
Darling; he had called me darling, in the tongue of his earliest love.
“No,” I wailed.
“Yes,” he said sadly.
“I can make it all right,” I said. “I’ll talk to her.”
“P-please d-don’t,” he said.
“No, you don’t understand,” I told him. “There’s things in particular — things she doesn’t know! You don’t, either – nobody does! Only me. I have to tell you everything – everything I know, what I saw –— ” It felt like a boil inside me, right on my soul. It was poisoning me. He didn’t even know about Daisy and Nesbitt yet. He didn’t know anything. I hadn’t had a chance to tell him.
I was trying to get somewhere safe. I took his hand and we left the station and walked down the hill towards the square and the Butter Cross, and that was where it came out. I couldn’t hold it in any longer, because that was where we had met him and all of it started, and it was the last straw. I sat down on the steps and put my head in my hands and tried to hold it in a bit longer.
He put his arm around me, and then I couldn’t any more. I wept a few hot, painful sobs into his shoulder.
He held me, gave my shoulder a little squeeze.
I made some of those raggedy sounds you do when you’ve lost your breath and not got it back again yet.
“Helen,” he said, “H-helen, dear.”
“I can’t bear it,” I whispered.
“W-w-what?”
“You and my mother — how happy you were — and now it’s all spoiled — and when I tried to tell her I knew it wasn’t you, she h-h-h-hit m-me,” I said. “She d-didn’t r-really mean to – ” the emotion was making me stammer, too. “ – but she wouldn’t let me tell her. I have to just go up to her and say it, that’s what I’ve got to do, I don’t care what she thinks or does.”
“There isn’t a-anything you c-can say, Helen,” he said.
“Oh yes there is,” I retorted, looking him right in the eye again. I had to keep my voice low and I did, because we were where we were, but it had been festering inside me all this time and it had to come out. “I knew it wasn’t you we heard by the folly that day, banging away inside. I knew it! So I waited there and they came back and did it again. On your bracken bed, on your blanket, in your folly! It was so disgusting!”
“W-w-wait,” he said, “you heard what?”
“Me and my mother,” I said, “we were out and we heard it, we actually heard it, two people – you know – doing it, actually doing it – fornicating – so of course she thought it was you because it was there, and because of the lipstick — but I didn’t believe it, I knew it wasn’t you! It didn’t sound like you, you sound so sweet because you are sweet and you sound like you mean it because you do — not that I’ve heard you very much, but you do – and they didn’t — just a load of old grunting —— and it wasn’t you at all, it was her and Jack Nesbitt. That’s why he blew his foot off, because he was late home for his dinner.”
“G-good god,” he said.
“So that’s what I have to tell her!”
He shook his head. I could see him taking it all in, everything I had blurted-out. Everything — including the bits about him and my mother.
I could even see him trying to imagine it – me overhearing himself and her together, enough to characterize their lovemaking even. He was so transparent, the way the expressions moved in his face. He had been right, that day under the table in the thunderstorm – he didn’t have any skin. And then his eyes narrowed, and he shook his head over the sordid rest of it: my mother and me hearing what we heard that day in the folly; me going-out and lying in wait, to prove his innocence; Daisy and Nesbitt.
All of it.
“Oh, Helen,” he said. “H-h-elen, H-helen.”
“I’m going to tell her,” I promised, “tell her all of it.”
“I d-don’t think y-you should do that,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because she’ll h–h-hate hearing it from you. If anyone’s g-going to talk to her, it had b-best be me. If she’ll listen…. God, I tried so hard to be discreet – Helen, I’m sorry if you ever heard me and your mother –! That w-wasn’t right — I would never —!”
“That night when you brought the gramophone,” I told him, not wanting him to think about the other times I might have meant, “you couldn’t help it — you had a nightmare and you were screaming and that’s when I heard. I know you didn’t stay, even. I heard you leaving. Don’t even worry about it — please, Harry. You’ve done nothing wrong!”
He had gone as red as a beetroot. “We d-didn’t want to g-give you anything to — god! That’s why I d-didn’t spend the night, not after then – I never even k-kissed her, if you were anywhere near! And all this time — you knew… ”
“Of course I did,” I said, grinning now. “Harry, I’m not stupid!”
“No,” he said, “n-not by a long chalk!”
“So you will,” I said, “you will talk to her, right?”
He breathed a long, long, sigh, and then another one. “I th-think it’s too late,” he said. “L-let me think about it. H-how to g-get her to listen, even. I d-don’t know if I can – D-don’t cry again. L-look, here’s your hanky. C-come along, l-let’s go and h-have a toasted teacake, shall we?”
That meant going into the tea-shop by the Butter Cross. We sat in the back, away from the window. He paid and we shared it. I gave him the prettier half, with the delicately browned edge and the most currants. He was hungrier than I was. It was just like that first time, when we had shared one outside. He hadn’t had anything to eat all day, he told me.
Silly, I said, pushing the rest of mine towards him, that’s not good for you!
Well, he said, clearly not wanting to be disgusting, but honesty winning-out — it was better that way, in the most difficult times: to have an empty stomach so there’d be nothing to throw up.
I asked him to tell me more about what happened at the National Portrait Gallery, to change the subject.
“The D-director s-said it c-could be very important indeed,” he said. “He w-was cautious, but you know h-how they were – they just s-sang, right there off the p-page — h-he had to see that as well as I did!”
I reached across the table and touched that thin strap crossing his breast from shoulder to waist, and straightened the collar of his tunic a little. “Good,” I said.
He looked at me. “People don’t always d-do what you w-want them to, Helen,” he said.
I stared at him. My belly ached. Did that mean the Director? Or that he wasn’t going to go through with it – about talking to my mother? Or did he think she wouldn’t listen to him? The thought of losing him made me hurt inside.
“What’s this for, anyway?” I asked him, touching the strip of ribbon above his pocket now there was nothing left to lose because he thought it was no use any more, that it was too late and I could see it in his eyes.
“It’s the MC and b-bar,” he said, “I thought you kn-n-new that.”
“I do,” I said. “What did they give it you for?”
He thought for a second. “K-killing some people and s-s-saving others,” he said.
His honesty finished me off. I cried again, but silently, this time for him, into my tea.
We walked back to Rookswood
together. We agreed that he was going to
get the next day’s trip back up to
Oh, he said, and there was one more thing.
What?
He reached in his pocket and fished out a key. “I h-happened to go past a c-clockmaker’s,” he said. “They had y-your clock in the w-window, or one just l-like it. It’s m-missing this, isn’t it?”
“Harry Oliver,” I said. That said everything he was, in a nutshell.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just — I love you. That’s all.”
“Th-that’s all?”
“Mm,” I said. “’Bye!”
I had to run away then, so he wouldn’t see my face. I didn’t have any skin, either.
When I got home, Daisy was gone – which was a relief to me. “Where were you?” asked my mother.
“Oh — ” I didn’t want to raise any red flags yet. “I was – just out. I went into town. All over.”
She looked at me a bit sharply, but I wouldn’t be drawn.
“It’s time to set the table for supper,” she said, “in case you hadn’t noticed.” That was her way of telling me it was late, and I had better not stay out like that again unless I wanted a good talking-to.
I obliged quickly.
“It’s just cold sausages,” she said, “Daisy didn’t leave till almost six. I didn’t have time for anything else.”
“That’s all right,” I said, wishing our kitchen didn’t stink of Daisy’s cigarettes.
My mother put the food out – the promised plate of leftover sausages from dinner the day before, a fresh pot of mashed potatoes, the butter-dish and our bottle of HP sauce, and that was our supper.
Afterwards I really wanted to listen to my Gilbert & Sullivan again, but I had second thoughts when I realized the only reason the gramophone was still here at all was because my mother had been too distracted and upset to think about sending it back to Harry Oliver. That being the case, I wasn’t about to bring it to her attention. I sat and read instead, my latest library-book. I had selected J. Meade Faulkner’s Moonfleet, because I liked the way it started. It was as gripping as I had hoped – the thrilling twists and turns, the fright and the pathos together proving almost enough to keep my mind away from all my own preoccupations and concerns.
So Harry was off again to
We went to see Nigel Lascelles again the next day. If Daisy wouldn’t, we could. He didn’t deserve to be neglected, said my mother with a sharp edge to her voice. I made sure to bring back Three Men In A Boat, and this time my mother had planned better what sort of a treat to bring him – fresh home-made lemonade, in a stoneware jar with a cork, and plenty of straws.
It was a much nicer visit than the last one. In the time I had been away, she had been
over to visit him several times and he had been moved-up from the locked ward
to a purely convalescent one. When the
weather was nice he had even been allowed to go outside and sit in the gardens
with her, as long as there were other patients outside too and an attendant to
keep an eye on everybody. We did that
again this time too, taking a table on a terrace behind the main wing where a
big lawn was flanked by attractive herbaceous borders and you could glimpse
in-between the trees a long narrow vista, all the way across the Solent to the
He was in better spirits, too. The shock of being forcibly committed had
worn-off and he was finding that it was not so bad here as might have been
thought. It must have been painful, the
last few months, living with Daisy and her pretences, stuck away down in
He even looked better. Instead of being in his dressing-gown, he was properly dressed in a nice clean shirt and tie, tweed jacket and cavalry-twill trousers. His shoes were polished to a chestnut gloss. He alternated speaking with writing things down on a tablet, as it was less tiring and he could express more complex thoughts that way. Thus I learned, as it passed back-and-forth across the table between him and my mother, that poor old Daisy had been very patient with him, really, honest to god she had – he understood that she wasn’t ready to come and see him here yet.
To read his simple words was shocking, somehow. If you heard him speaking, he was half a monster already, and a cripple – that was all you saw. But his words on the page were those of a man. Someone like us, with thoughts and feelings and wishes and dreams.
“I’m sorry, Nigel,” said my mother, “I spent all yesterday talking to her — but she’s just still so upset about – ”
‘Having me put away,’ he wrote, ‘I know.’ “’sh-hard fuh huh,” he added.
“It was hard for both of you,” my mother said, taking his hand. He closed his good eye and nodded.
‘Nobody wants to come back to their wife like this,’ he wrote after a few moments. I held the tablet still so he could write and still have my mother hold his other hand.
“Of course not,” said my mother.
‘Had six good months,’ he wrote, ‘had to live on that. Not much leave, though. Only the honeymoon, really. Can’t expect a woman to pay with a lifetime of hell for the sake of a few weeks of happiness – past!’
My mother swallowed. I could see what she was thinking. What would she have done, if the man she had vowed to love and to cherish in sickness and in health had come back to her like that?
I knew what she would have done. She would have been devastated for him, yes, that of course — and grateful that he had come home at all. She would have embraced him and expressed her joy that his precious life had been spared. We’ll manage, you’ll see, she would have told him – and meant it. She would have held him through all the screaming times, been at his side after every surgery, encouraged him to start thinking about when he could come home and be a husband again — and a father, perhaps, and all that a future could still hold for them.
If his movements were jerky now, if he was short-tempered and prone to emotional outbursts, she would have found every scrap of patience she possessed to bear with it. That was to be expected after a severe head-wound, it was nothing he could help. You had to cling to that together – and she would have, as families up and down the country did every day, telling themselves that it was the injury shouting, not the man.
And there at home, in the forgiving night, with the light firmly off and no mirrors anywhere, she would have clasped him to her; offered her bosom for his shattered face, just as she had the first day we visited, with no hint of revulsion, and made him whole again to her as often as he needed it – because if he could bear this, then she could; he hadn’t asked for this, he had given himself up for his country, and now she was going to give him what he ought to have in return: tenderness, courage, acceptance.
She would have; she would.
It would be hard for anyone, I knew that – it still made me gag to see him, and I had to get used to it all over again each time. But I knew my mother, and she didn’t give up: not on anything, and especially never ever on people.
Unfortunately for Nigel Lascelles, however, he hadn’t married my mother – even though she was the one here visiting him, because he deserved that much and a great deal more. I wondered if he thought that, too. But he was still thinking about the past, and how he had got here of all places.
‘You don’t think it’s going to happen,’ he wrote. He meant his head, his face.
“Who ever does?” said my mother. “You couldn’t do what you had to do, could you, if you spent the whole time thinking about – this.”
“Righ-’ ” he said.
“Weren’t you afraid, then?” I asked him.
‘All the time,’ he wrote, nodding to me, ‘and never. Yes & no. You just did your duty.’
Duty — a little word, a sacred one. What had not been done, and sacrificed, in its name? Was that what he had clung to, out there when he learned his face had been blown off? Yes, he had done his duty, all right. I could see that. I wasn’t sure we deserved it, but he had. “Thank you,” I said earnestly, “ – for going. For doing your duty.”
His good eye was speedwell-blue and perfectly keen, close-up. It penetrated mine – he must have been a very good officer indeed, before this happened. He held my chin for a moment. Then he picked up the pencil again: ‘you’re the first person who’s ever said thank you to me,’ he wrote on the pad, and tore off the page, and gave it to me to keep.
“shaid lo’s ot’er ’hings,” he added, “ – shorry – all tha’ – g’ateful nghashion shtuff – ’ut obody jus’ shaid ’hank ’oo.”
“I really meant it,” I said.
“’ould shee
oo di’,” he said. “’ood
nghirl.
She took the compliment gravely. He nodded. “Gorgeous day,” she said, “ – quite hot out, isn’t it! Are you comfortable there in the sun?”
‘I like the way it feels on my face,’ he wrote. ‘Always wanted to have a big family. May I share yours? Nice daughter.’
“We’d be honoured,” said my mother warmly, “wouldn’t we, Nellie?”
He pointed to my book. It lay on the table, its cheerful red cover and gilt title catching the light. He had an eyebrow left, on the better side, and he raised it with a nod toward the book. ‘I loved it when you read last time,’ he wrote. ‘Made me laugh —— !’
“Which chapter would you like this time?” I asked.
“’Oo hpick,” he said. “’ike ’em all.”
I went for the story of the packing, and Uncle Podger.
‘You’re a tonic,’ he wrote before we left. ‘I won’t ask anyone to see about getting me out of here yet — but will you help, down the road a bit?’
What, and back to a life with Daisy? “Of course,” said my mother.
‘Tell her she can divorce me,’ he wrote, ‘it would be better, really.’
“Tell her yourself,” said my mother.
‘Do you see her anywhere here to tell?’ he wrote, savagely, quickly.
“You can write,” she said, “if you really think that’s what’s best. It’s none of my business – but if that’s what you want — I’ll come back tomorrow, and you’ll give me a letter for her – and I’ll take it. I promise. And I’ll stay while she reads it.”
‘Should have married you instead,’ he wrote.
“Don’t be silly,” she said tenderly, “we didn’t even know one another.”
‘My bad luck,’ he wrote, and blew her a kiss on his hand.
We got up to leave, and she bent down and kissed him on the brow where he had some unscarred skin left above his eye. “’Bye-bye, then,” she said, “ – you get that letter written. I mean it. Get it off your chest, everything you want to say. I’ll come for it tomorrow. All right?”
“’Esh,” he said. “’hanks for uh ’emonghade.”
“Our pleasure,” she said, “right, Nellie?”
“Oh, absolutely,” I said.
I saw him waving, all the way across the lawn.
At first I didn’t worry, when Harry’s light wasn’t on in his lodge as we passed. It wasn’t particularly late, and he might be in the library, or not back yet, or sitting in the late-afternoon quiet with no light on, recovering from his trip.
I was dying to know, of course, but it would be better to wait till morning.
I lay awake thinking about the drawings, and how simple they were, and how beautiful, until I fell asleep and dreamed of the man with the sad face and the fur in the picture. It was Sir Thomas More, and he had been beheaded, and he turned that face to me from the top of his pike and said, “You have to do what you think is right.” His face was still noble, like in the drawing, but as I watched it went livid and started to rot. I kissed it anyway, because if he could bear it then I could.
It left me with an odd feeling when I woke, the emotion of the dream still strong in my mind and body. It was a mixture of pity and resolution and dread. What there was to dread I didn’t know, unless it was the suffering we had already gone through – but it was there in the pit of my stomach.
I slipped out of the house before my mother was up. I couldn’t wait any longer to hear the news, and I knew I could count on Harry for an early riser.
He wasn’t at the lodge, though. There was no sign that he had returned. His uniform was not hanging in the little wardrobe, his battered leather briefcase wasn’t there, and the plate of ginger-biscuits I had popped over with the previous morning for his return lay untouched on the table where I had left them. His things were still there, his brush-and-comb and his shaving-kit by the sink, his private papers neatly set-out on the table. On the bottom was the scratched marble-covered notebook I had seen there before; it had a small brass weight sitting right in the middle. Under the weight was a slim stack of letters still in their envelopes, which had been slit and the contents replaced after being read; the top one was addressed to him in my mother’s hand. His pen and pencil were in a straight line alongside, with a battered old boiled-sweet tin which I knew to contain his coloured-pencils. A record-catalogue lay parallel to these, with things marked-off on it in pencil.
I felt uneasy. It had the indefinable air of a room that had been left tidy for a day away, a purposeful and thorough ordering – not a place he had come back to, settled-down in for the evening, had quit temporarily and would return to in the morning after his self-imposed nightmare-isolation.
Something stank. In the sink was a cigarette-end of Daisy’s, with her characteristic stain on the end. I narrowed my eyes at it. My mother didn’t use cosmetics – not even powder and rouge. She just didn’t bother with them. Life was too short, she said, and she was who she was and this was the face god gave her and that was that. Daisy tried to look flawless and bold, all the rage and always elegant. Inside it, though, she was empty. The mask stood-in for her.
Why wouldn’t she leave him alone? What had she been doing here? The cow.
Concerned enough to run, now, I went looking for him in
the folly. I was worried something had
happened to him in
I didn’t usually take this route, from Rookswood, and was surprised how directly it led there. The stand of firs had grown-up to block the folly from view and you just presumed it was further than it was. It was far enough away that the people in the Big House and its lodges wouldn’t hear him howling, though, a good five-minutes’ run; ten if you walked it.
I ran.
Outside the folly I stopped. If he was asleep, the last thing he needed was for me to startle him awake.
“Harry,” I called, “good morning! Su prabhat! Harry — ? Hello, pyari!”
No answer.
I went inside.
The smell came to me before I got round the corner all the way in. Daisy’s cigarettes again, and something else – something faintly rotten, faintly sweet in a sickly way. Where had I smelled that before? It was a bit like our compost-heap. I went on anyway.
She lay on the bed of bracken, his blanket over her, huddled-up like a baby. I knew before I touched her that she was dead. Her face was white and livid in blotches; there were bruises on her bare arms.
There was no sign of Harry; no sign that he had been here, either. Her silver cigarette-case lay open and empty beside her, with the stubs scattered about: she had smoked them all.
I went back outside, feeling sick. My heart was doing odd things in my chest. First it would race and then it would seem to stop – and then catch-up again with a great thump, and so on, over and over. My mouth was dry, my hands clammy. My knees felt wobbly. I suddenly wanted to pee, urgently.
God, I thought, this is everything he talked about. The terror – the dread.
Now I knew what it was like.
Harry, oh, Harry.
What now?
I couldn’t leave it be and pretend I had never come – could I? Someone might have seen me coming out here – an early-morning tinker or a poacher still out from the night before. If I started to lie there would be no way out of it. Anyway, what was there to lie about? There wasn’t any way possible that Harry had had anything to do with this. It was just a ghastly coincidence. She wouldn’t leave him alone and she had even gone and come out here to die on him and make more trouble – as if she hadn’t made enough already.
But where was he?
Why hadn’t he come back?
Or had he?
God, had he found her too and panicked, and run away? No – he would have come home to the lodge first, and eaten the biscuits, and put his things away and changed into his soft old clothes he wore to come out here and sleep.
I didn’t think about what I was doing; I just did it. I walked back to the lodge, not running, just walking, and went inside, and took his notebook and my mother’s letters. They were nobody else’s business – and everything here was going to be gone-over with a fine-tooth comb, I knew that much, because Harry was missing and Daisy was dead.
I left the tin of pencils.
The letters I tucked inside the book, for now. I didn’t have much time to hide it. Someone might come out and see me at any moment. I remembered a hole in the wall close by, behind a holly-bush. I had found the hole a year earlier, while gathering holly-twigs for Christmas. A tall pair of holly-bushes stood either side of the gates, old and gloriously berried all winter long. The north one, closer to Harry’s lodge, had the hole behind. It scratched me, but that was good; nobody would come back in here. As soon as Harry came back, I would give it back to him. In the meantime, though, his private journal was nobody else’s business; I had to hide it from prying eyes. He would hate the thought of anyone else reading it.
I stuffed it in. The hole was dry, with gritty brick-dust inside and a few holly-berries. I stepped-back – it was invisible already.
Then I banged on the door of the other lodge and cried, “Help! Please get up – quick! Quick!”
The police came, of course. They gave strict instructions on the telephone that nobody was to go back to the folly and disturb anything till they arrived. Sir Archibald was there in his dressing-gown, looking bewildered. Not too bewildered to think about me, though: “Someone ought to fetch that child’s mother,” he barked to anyone who would hear.
Apparently someone did.
Meanwhile the police came, all piling out of one big Black Maria, and left a constable with us at the lodge while a grim-faced inspector and several men made their way down the footpath towards the folly. They let Sir Archibald come along with them, on condition that he stayed back till they had been inside first – I heard the inspector telling him, loudly and firmly. After all, she was his daughter. And I was not supposed to go anywhere, the inspector said – he would have a word with me later.
My mother came flying down the road on her bicycle, her face a pale blur. She let the bicycle fall over in the middle of the drive right where she got off it, and ran and knelt down in front of me.
“I’m all right, mummy,” I said. She grabbed me and held me close. I could hardly breathe, but I knew she needed to do that, so I didn’t struggle.
“You shouldn’t have come out, even!” she hissed as soon as she let go.
“I had to see Harry,” I said hotly, “I wanted to know what happened with the Holbein drawings!”
I didn’t see the constable standing behind me. “What’s that, Miss?” he asked.
I had to tell them everything I knew about the
commonplace-book and the Holbein drawings. I insisted that he had just gone up to
“He didn’t have anything to do with this,” I cried, “he couldn’t have!”
“Don’t you worry, Miss,” they said, “We’ll sort it out.”
My mother made a statement; so did everyone who knew Daisy at the Big House: when was the last time they saw her, how was she dressed, what was she doing, what did she say, who else was there.
Her corpse had still been wearing the eau-de-nil outfit she had had on two days before. It was creased and rumpled – I remembered that, because it wasn’t like her. I overheard one of the constables whisper to another that the inspector thought she’d been dead at least twenty-four hours, if not longer – people don’t realize that the sibilance of a whisper often carries better than a murmur. They probed us again in great detail, about our whereabouts and Daisy’s last known movements. No-one had seen her alive since Tuesday night, it seemed. I saw them talking to all the servants. A couple were hysterical, the housemaid and the cook; the chauffeur shook his head, as if he was under few illusions what kind of things she’d been up to but wasn’t going to speak ill of the dead. The stable-boy shifted from foot to foot and looked uncomfortable.
I had to go down to the station, because I was the one who had found her. My mother wasn’t at all happy about that, but she understood why it was necessary. I had to be interviewed again, very closely indeed, by the most senior inspector there. He leaned forward in his chair and patted my knee kindly – but his eyes behind their steel-rimmed spectacles were keen as a hawk’s. The other one stood behind me with his arms folded, which made me even more nervous. They might be senior, but they didn’t know much about how to make a child feel comfortable enough to talk freely.
I didn’t tell them about Daisy and Mr. Nesbitt, because he had been out of the picture for two weeks now anyway, and what was the point in bring-down the police all over poor Ivy’s family now?
I also didn’t believe for a second that Harry had had anything to do with it, and I kept saying-so.
“Nobody said he did, my dear,” said the senior inspector, pleasantly, too pleasantly, in what he intended to be a reassuring tone but was really lying in his teeth.
“He’ll be back,” I said, “and then you can ask him yourselves!”
“We’re waiting for him now, Miss,” said the other inspector. “I’m sure he’ll be along any minute — right?” They looked at one another again.
A telephone call came for the senior man, and he took it at his desk with a polite ‘excuse me’ to me. Sometimes people must think children are stupid. My mother sat beside me, again on the condition that she didn’t say or do anything to interfere with their questioning of me, and she kept her hands in her lap and breathed through her nose the way she did when she was very upset indeed.
“I see,” said the inspector. “He did, did he? Did he say if it was recent? Hmm – hmm – I see. Good god, really? He’ll testify to that? I see. Yes. Any sign of — too early to tell, hm? Thank you very much. Keep me informed —!”
He finished his questions for now, which focused not on Daisy Lascelles at all, but the last time I had seen Harry Oliver and what we had seen and done together. My mother looked disapproving as I told about meeting him at the station, and our tea at the tea-shop, but she said nothing, bless her.
“Now, madam, if I could have a word with you?” he asked her.
The other man took me out of the room and sat me down in the corridor outside on a wooden bench, where I dangled my feet and kicked at the floor. The door was not closed all the way. I heard my mother answering questions about the Old Master drawings. “I’m sure you’ll find he had absolutely nothing to do with this,” she said — but her voice shook.
They didn’t miss things like that, not these people. They would know there was more to her story than met the eye. Whether they would get her to admit that she and Harry had been lovers, I didn’t know.
He saw me listening and closed the door.
I kept expecting Harry to arrive, and be interviewed, and tell them about the last time he saw Daisy, and for everything to be as all right as it could given that she was still dead — but at least it would be clear that he hadn’t had anything to do with it.
But he didn’t.
I heard one constable tell the other that they’d already put a warrant out for his arrest – and phoned Scotland Yard.
“What,” said the other, “without hearing back what she died of?”
“However you shake it,” said the first knowingly, “they’re saying they found seed in ’er – you know – she’d been – you know – shortly before she died. No question about it. Too soon to say if it was rape — but by the looks of things — ” – he looked over at me, rather too late, and dropped his voice, though not quite enough: “that wasn’t all – there was evidence of sodomy. Now a nice lady like that – stands to reason, dunnit! Sounds like an attack to me! ”
People forget how much more acute a child’s hearing
is. Sodomy? It sounded biblical – the sin of
“I have to throw up,” I announced, and did.
They were very nice to me, considering. Probably they felt guilty, knowing they shouldn’t have been discussing things when I was there. It was a shocking case, though, with every element of juicy scandal; nobody had come to such a tragic and mysterious end hereabouts for a long time, not since the landlord of the Old Vine shot his entire family and then himself with a 12-bore and they’d had to close the pub at least till evening to wash all the blood off – but that had been a good ten years ago.
One of them got a bucket and a mop and mopped my mess up, not that there was much to mop since nobody had offered me anything to eat or drink since I’d found her; and the other one squatted down in front of me with a bit of a groan and asked if I’d like anything.
“Tea and biscuits, please,” I said, remembering to add a thank-you before he got too far.
“All right, Miss,” he said cheerily, “coming right up!”
It was for ever before I could get back to the hole in the wall.
The first time I tried, that same afternoon, when they’d let me go from the police-station and driven me and my mother home in a black police-car, I walked back down our lane just to see. There was a constable on duty outside the North Lodge. I pretended I was just passing, and waved to him. So they would have found Daisy’s cigarette-end in the sink, then (where Harry NEVER would have left it!) — and drawn their own conclusions.
I felt sick again.
I should have told my mother everything right away, but I was trying to protect Harry. What if — ? Why didn’t he come back, so he could tell his own story?
I should have.
The next morning the bobby was still there, though he was
a different one. There was still no sign
of Harry. People all around were being
asked to contact the police at once if they saw him. A bobby from the next town knocked on our
door to tell us, not knowing that we were already involved in the case. I
listened gravely and promised him I would tell my mother. He left me Harry’s picture on a piece of
paper. It was a photograph of him in
uniform, wearing his cap and his medal-ribbon.
It had no rosette, though, so it must have been in-between the two
awards. The details were grainy, as if
they might have found it in an old newspaper.
He looked much younger in it – too young to have seen and done the
things he must have, at the front. He
also looked straight at the camera, with his honest, transparent face – it was
anything but the portrait of a wanted murderer.
Major Henry Rathburn Oliver, it said, wanted
for questioning in connection with a suspicious death. If seen, contact the police immediately — do
not attempt to apprehend.
I had never known his middle name. They didn’t put MC after his name. I thought they should have.
I didn’t show it to my mother, when she came downstairs to ask who that was. She looked terrible enough already. I mixed her a Beecham’s Powder and told her to go back to lying-down.
“If you’re sure you’re all right,” she said, “my pet — ”
I assured her that I was.
Finally I managed to get out. The guard was gone from the lodge and I slipped in behind the holly-bush and got out Harry’s private book and brought it back home under my cardigan. My mother was still sleeping.
I pushed a chair against the door in my bedroom – a thing I had never, ever done! – and sat down on my bed.
If Harry had been here, I would have given it back to him without even opening it. I knew that I would have, because even now when it was screaming at me to look, I couldn’t. Not for minutes. I just stared back at it, lying on my counterpane.
There was a place in the front for you to write your name, in a little black-bordered lozenge, and he had: Maj. H. R. Oliver.
Underneath, in smaller letters, just to remind any casual
pair of prying eyes, was written:
Why wasn’t he here? What had happened to him?
Was he all right? Did he know anything about Daisy Lascelles being dead on his bed in the folly?
Why wasn’t he here?
Were there answers in here, lying inches away on my bed, or just more questions?
Who was he, really? Had I ever known him?
I had loved and trusted him with all my heart. He ought to be here right now, explaining things — not missing and wanted on suspicion of murder! Hot tears stung my eyelids. I wiped them away with the back of my hand and took out my mother’s letters.
I began with them. Two of them had been mailed and bore stamps; one did not, and was undated. They were very short:
My Dearest Harry,
Is it possible?
You asked me last night and I did not give you an answer. You must know how difficult it has been for
me all these years, and specially now when I have reached some kind of
stability. Yet your question deserves an
answer and god knows my conduct does too!
I am older than you by a few years I imagine also. But I think it is possible, yes. Shall we take our time and see?
I shall never forget that butterfly landing there,
after our joy together. Never thought I shd write anything like that to anyone in my life – which
must be a sign of something.
Most fondly, W
* * *
Dear Major Oliver,
Please do not write to me again.
Winifred Pasley.
* * *
Dear Major Oliver,
You say there is some sort of misunderstanding. It must be yours — I have asked you not to
write to me, yet you persist in doing so.
Please stop. We have nothing to
discuss, and to attempt it can only bring hurt.
That is the only understanding required.
Thank you,
Yours faithfully,
Winifred Pasley
Oh, mummy, mummy, I thought, how could you have closed your heart like that? It wasn’t like you, you always were ready to give someone a second chance, to be understanding. And now when it was needed more than ever, you just locked the door and turned away. Once bitten, twice shy? What had happened to that generous and trusting nature?
Daisy’s smell on your brother’s jacket; the thought of her in Harry’s arms. I had recoiled from it myself, and he was not my lover – how must you have felt, when your most animal sense told you he had been unfaithful? There was no room left for reason, was there, not with that. And then to have heard what you heard at the folly, confirming every worst thing you had thought… so dreadful you wouldn’t even see him, after that. Not after hearing him with Daisy.
Daisy, granting your sweetheart everything you had not.
What was there left to talk about? What good could it possibly do, to hear his excuses? What explanation did he deserve from her, when all the wrong was staring him in the mirror every time he shaved? He had to know it; it was disingenuous of him not to own it, to pretend that nothing was the matter. Mummy, mummy. A simple equation: she had loved him; he had used her and moved-on. Daisy Lascelles had no scruples; Daisy Lascelles did not know the meaning of the word ‘loyalty’ – if she did, she could not have put her husband away. And in Daisy’s fall from grace, she had cracked everything she collided-with on the way. Nigel; Harry; my mother; herself.
Which left Harry, therefore, who could not have been the man my mother had taken him for. He was too damaged, after all. He did not have the strength of character to withstand Daisy’s desperate overtures. Clearly, he was incapable of being faithful — leaving my mother holding to the mockery of her own hope and credulity, not to anyone real (said her heart). Harry was the shell of the man she took him for, then. She ought to have known better.
So now my mother had loved two men, and neither of them had turned-out to be who she had thought. It all piled-up like some incontrovertible mathematical proof. She had been a fool, given herself away, made that leap of faith not once now but twice: Quod erat demonstrandum. How was she to see the fallacy, when the proof that grew from it was so solid?
My poor mother, trying to keep her self-respect when her love was spurned, her heart aching. She had let herself be seduced and taken-for-granted all over again. What a nightmare it must have been. And what could she have been calling herself, for ever giving this glittering snake called love a second chance when she knew better? The first time she was betrayed, she had been left with me. Now it had struck twice, and again she hadn’t even seen it coming; had left herself and me wide-open to the wound. At least she had her pride. The hurt that came up from the stiff few words in my hands was palpable, like a cry.
But I understood it; poor Harry hadn’t had a clue.
And yet he had kept them – these sharp, cold little letters.
That he had done so said a lot. After all, my mother had put his letter to her straight into the rubbish. Harry had not thrown these away, though. He had put each of them back into its envelope, the one that sang and the two that wounded, and laid them out on his desk along with my letter to him from Bea’s Seven Seas.
Slowly, reluctantly, but aching to know more — looking for clues, for pointers, for insights, for anything that would help me understand — knowing I shouldn’t, but having no choice since he wasn’t here to explain himself, I opened his journal.
I was crying long before I finished it.
It was one o’clock in the morning when I was done reading. The passionate bits about my mother I tried to skip over, when I could, but after a while they moved me too much to miss anything and I had to read them too. They were part of the whole picture, after all. And oh – oh – Harry, Harry – what a picture it was. Brave – despairing – frustrated by his condition, and so desperately lonely – by turns dogged and bitter, but always that wry comment waiting in the wings — and god! always, without fail, so unflinchingly candid.
He had no illusions about himself, it seemed. He couldn’t afford to have any; that was what the diary was about. It was a record of being shell-shocked, in all its manifestations as they appeared in him one by one — and then, as he grew ever more used to confiding in it, so much more. The symptoms that began in dry little lists soon became his cross to bear, with asides. His musings made a commentary on the naked soul that wrote the rest. All the things he saw, noticed, delighted-in, was moved by, felt, suffered — all there, page by page. His body’s betrayal, and its exquisite yearnings for my mother — equally so. His tenderness for me; his set-backs and failures; his questions and regrets over his friend Dick; his fresh starts and plans, from taking the bus into Petersfield as soon as he could afford to buy us the gramophone to ‘going over the top’ to London.
His irritation in dealing with Daisy was plain. So was his bewilderment when my mother suddenly turned on him. At every turn his feelings were stripped bare – and utterly without guile. No-one could have sat down to construct such a complex and overwhelming picture – except over the months it had taken him, one entry at a time, as he mined the events of his life for the nuggets of hope that would help him into the future.
It was unquestionably the diary of an innocent man; and more than that, it was the mirror of the man we loved so much it hurt. Furthermore, if he had intended on going anywhere – as in fleeing, running-away – it was just not possible that he would have left this behind, just sitting in the middle of his table. More than not possible, it was unthinkable.
I stared at the wall for a while. My old toys surrounded me, up on shelves; a bear, my mother’s dolls from her childhood, my uncle’s lead-soldiers and the doll’s-house he had made for me with its tiny family. I felt their glassy eyes on me.
Harry was somewhere, with the Holbein picture of Sir Thomas More. I saw it again as I had seen it in my dream, the pitiful severed head, that decent face with its look of knowing and resignation. “You have to do what you think is right,” said Sir Thomas. He ought to know; he gave his life for his conscience.
What was on Harry’s conscience, here?
Not Daisy.
He fretted about what might possibly be left of himself
to offer my mother as a husband; he recalled the blue eyes of the
German officer, presumably before he shot him. He was haunted by a cradle in a
cellar, washing
on a line, Zillebeeke and Zonnebeeke
and Thiepval and Cuinchy
and Ovilliers and Mametz
and Messines and Fricourt
and
And in the end, it was all as transparent as he was.
I was sick with worry for him. Where could he be? Did he have any idea he was wanted on suspicion of murder? What had Daisy gone and done in her dying, to implicate him? She had been selfish when she was alive; it seemed only more so in death.
What if he stepped off the train all jittery, as he had the other day, and they arrested him? If he peed on himself, would that make them think he was guilty?
My toys and my mental Sir Thomas watched me make my mind up. There really wasn’t a choice.
I put my dressing-gown on and went downstairs quietly to make us a pot of tea. When it was brewing on the table under our old cosy, I knocked on my mother’s bedroom-door. “Mummy,” I said in as firm and clear a voice as I could, “there’s something you’ve got to see.”
Once I had started I just didn’t stop. First I told her about Daisy and Nesbitt in the folly. I said it very bluntly. There was no point in beating around the bush or playing games of who knew and who didn’t any more. She had to listen to me – and she did.
Then I gave her Harry’s diary.
It took her an hour or so to read it. Now and then she looked up at me; at other times she shook her head, or made a small whimper. Occasionally she put her hand over her mouth.
Finally she got to the most recent page.
Tuesday a.m. Here it is, then – the big day. Stand-to & over the top. But they’re not shooting people in
When will this business with W not make me feel sick?
She stared at that for a long time. Then she closed it and looked at me. Her brown eyes were wet, but they didn’t waver.
“You’ve read everything in here?”
“Yes,” I said.
She gave a deep sigh.
“He didn’t do it, Mummy,” I said. “They’ll have to see that, won’t they?”
She looked down at this confessional that listed lyrically, ecstatically each time she had touched him – and frankly each time he had pissed his trousers.
“Yes,” she said, “they will.”
“Should we wait till they find him?”
She shivered. The true Harry was restored to her love in these pages; Harry as he had always been, had she not been too blind and unsure of herself to see it — and he was missing, in harm’s way, wanted for murder.
“No,” she said, “I think they need to see it now. And for you to tell them about Daisy and Mr. Nesbitt.” She looked sick when she said that. “I didn’t want you mixed up in all this — ” she said, helplessly.
“But I already was,” I said, to console her.
She sighed. “Yes,” she said, “I see that now.”
“Mummy,” I asked her, “are you still cross with me?”
She shook her head emphatically. “No, Nellie, love, no no no. Absolutely not. Never!”
“I couldn’t help knowing,” I said. “I was trying to make it all right again.”
“I see that now, too,” she said. She paused. I saw the look she wore when she was doing something difficult but vital, like going to visit Captain Lascelles. “Nellie,” she went on, “I have two big ‘sorry’s’ to say. And I’m saying the first one now – to you.”
I nodded gravely.
“Will you forgive me?” she asked, “for doubting you?”
I gave her a hug and we held tightly to one another for a while.
“The other one’s to Harry, when you see him, isn’t it,” I said.
“Oh, god, yes,” she said.
* * *
There was one thing she wanted to do before she brought Harry’s diary to the police. We went to see Nigel. We hadn’t been since the bad news – though he had been told, of course. It was a short visit, but it was the least we could do. She had to see him to his face, she said – as it were – or to his what-was-once-a-face, to be precise.
She sat in front of him and took both his hands in hers. “I am so sorry,” she said.
He nodded.
“Nigel, there’s going to be – a lot of things come out – perhaps – that will be hurtful.”
He took the tablet. ‘Not compared with this,’ he wrote. “’Nghdaishy,” he said, for emphasis.
“They’ll have to have an inquest,” said my mother.
‘I know,’ he wrote. ‘They told me yesterday.’
“Harry Oliver’s in trouble over this – and he’s missing. Nigel, I swear to god he couldn’t have had anything to do with it.”
He replied: ‘Trust you. You have never said anything to me that wasn’t the truth, Winifred Pasley.’ He repeated: “Nhtrusht ’oo.”
“Captain Lascelles,” I asked him, “can I ask you something?” Harry’s words to me in the tea-shop had haunted me – I had to know more than that. Captain Lascelles had said something the first time, about what Harry had done – about No-Man’s-Land – did he know?
‘Of course,’ he wrote, ‘Ask away, my little reader.’
“Harry was so modest – about his decorations – he never would talk about them – how do I find out? What they were for?”
“Eashy,” he said. His hand was writing at the same time: ‘Gazetted.’
“Oh, of course!” said my mother. “You mean we can just look in the library, through all the London Gazettes around the right time, and he’ll be listed?”
Nigel nodded. Reaching for the pencil again, he added generously, ‘Hope he’s all right.’
“When did you say you saw him in hospital? You talked about it, the first time I mentioned him to you.”
‘September 1917,’ he wrote. “She’temer she’nteen,” he repeated, “’Oo ca’ ’ook.” ‘Look several weeks later,’ he added. ‘It took a while.’
The he stared off into space and I knew he was thinking about Daisy. He shook his head slowly. “’E didungh’ ’ow wha’ uh do,” he said, “wi’ mhee.”
She didn’t know what to do with him – wasn’t that the truth. Would it have been too much just to love him as he was?
“No,” said my mother, “she didn’t. Oh, Nigel.”
‘You do though,’ he wrote. ‘You tell the truth. Is it that hard?’
“Apparently,” said my mother, “it is. For some people – it seems to be impossible.”
‘That’s a shame,’ he wrote: “ — sshaymh.”
“We must be off,” said my mother — “please forgive such a short visit.”
‘When’s the funeral?’ he wrote. Dear God, wasn’t anybody keeping him informed? He had to ask us?
“I’ll find out,” she said. “I’ll be sure to let you know right away. I’ll telephone to the ward sister, or else I’ll come over. I’m sure they’ll send a car for you.”
‘Like that,’ he wrote. ‘Tell Harry Olliver I wish him well. If you think he wasn’t involved.’
“What a good man you are,” my mother told him.
‘No,’ he wrote. ‘Was always a bit flashy. Liked attention, god help me. Harry was the real thing. It’s the quiet ones that surprise you.’ “Hongishly,” he added.
I hugged him before leaving. He squeezed back firmly, warmly. His arms were stronger than I had thought. Basically, he wasn’t here because of anything he couldn’t manage. It was other people. They couldn’t manage him – not the way he was.
Shame on them.
Half-way back, my mother turned her head and asked me if I would mind us stopping at the library before we did what we had to do. “I don’t know when we’ll get another chance,” she called over her shoulder.
Mind? I was as desperate to turn the pages of those copies of the London Gazette as she was. It would be another piece to fit into the precious unfolding mystery that was Harry.
The librarian was very helpful. She sat us down at a long oak table under a window, and brought out the bound copies for the autumn of 1917 and the winter and spring of 1918.
It took a while to find it. There were so many names, so many acts of extraordinary courage and sacrifice. While the War was still on, my mother had sometimes read them out-loud to me from the paper, especially if one struck her particularly; but to see them all together like this was overwhelming. The citations tended to be formulaic, using similar phrases over and over in various combinations; I supposed the circumstances tended to be similar too, whether naval or on land – ‘under heavy fire’ ‘under extremely heavy fire’ ‘under constant machine-gun fire’ ‘under an artillery bombardment’ ‘during heavy shelling’ ‘position was heavily shelled’ ‘grenade fire’ ‘attacked the enemy with his bayonet’ ‘destroyed an enemy machine-gun post’ ‘recaptured the sap’ ‘held the position’ ‘maintained the line’ ‘splendid leadership’ ‘example of courage’ ——— it was almost more than I could bear, to think of all that was represented by these little black-and-white words.
Finally we found his.
He had been invested at
The two citations read:
On 3 September 1916 at
MC
For conspicuous gallantry and resource in
leading his platoon, which was on the extreme right of the corps attack. Lieut.
Oliver worked his men forward section by section in face of heavy fire and
in spite of heavy casualties for several hundred yards, personally seeing that
every advantage was taken of cover with reckless disregard for his own safety.
He then led the final rush, capturing the front and three machine guns. The
platoon occupied the position and held it without re-supply of rations or
ammunition for two days and two nights, until relieved. On the second day he
drove back three counter-attacks, inflicting heavy losses.
15-17 August 1917 near
M.C., BAR
For gallantry and devotion to duty. Despite his own wound, Capt. Oliver went forward repeatedly from the advance position into open ground to rescue wounded officers and men while under heavy fire. The forward trenches were subsequently flooded and he was cut-off with his small party. Refusing to leave the wounded who were lying out on the ground in front of enemy lines and gathering two more wounded from a shell hole 25 yards from the enemy’s forward trench, he attended to them for three days and carried a number of badly wounded men over heavy and difficult ground under artillery and machine-gun fire. On several occasions he was knocked down and partially buried by enemy shells. His courage in carrying out this rescue in spite of exhaustion, lack of food and incessant heavy fire undoubtedly saved many lives.
His breakdown had been almost another full year after that: his hospital diary began in the summer of 1918. He had been invalided-out, in fact, not long after his promotion to Major. Was that the last straw? He had cared about his men, I knew; how many more men did a Major have to feel responsible for than a Captain? And if they were wounded or killed, carry that? Or perhaps that had nothing to do with it at all – the diary had been silent on that point, and I was only a child: I couldn’t imagine. Men like him did what they did and gave what they gave so I wouldn’t ever have to know. Still, I could almost hear his voice saying, “I wasn’t any bloody use after that.”
We stared at one another. My mother’s face was the saddest I had seen it since the telegram came about my uncle Stephen. “Where do you think he is now?” she asked me, her hands pleating themselves in front of her.
“I think something happened in
“God,” she said.
“I’m afraid he’ll come home and step off the train and they’ll arrest him and he’ll wet himself and they’ll think he did it,” I told her, seeing once more as I said it the vision playing over and over in my head like a moving-picture.
People turned and hissed at us to shush.
She winced: she could see it too. “Let’s copy these out before we leave,” she said.
We did. I wrote the shorter one – the earlier one, that was – and she copied the second.
“Mummy,” I whispered, “I didn’t tell you what he said when I asked him, did I?”
“No,” she whispered back, “what did he say?”
“He said he got them for killing some people and saving others.”
“Oh, Harry,” she said, “Harry.”
When we had our copies word-for-word, we closed the big bound volumes. Fricourt and Beaumont-Hamel and Mametz and Hill 60 and Flers and Jutland and Gallipoli and the 1916 offensive and all the rest of them went quietly, shut between the dark-blue boards again – a chronicle of courage and sacrifice that beggared words — and more loss than that, even. We thanked the librarian and left.
At the police-station my mother asked to see the inspector. He was rather busy just at the moment, we were told.
“I think he’ll see me, if you would be so kind as to ask him,” she said. “Tell him it’s Winifred Pasley, and I have some fresh information about Major Oliver.”
This got us ushered into the inspector’s office within two minutes. He stood behind his desk to greet us. “Been in touch, has he?” he asked.
“No,” said my mother. “It’s something else. Have you heard any more?”
I could see him deciding whether to answer her question, or treat us as fellow-suspects. She looked innocuous enough – and she had been a friend of the dead woman. Nothing we had told them the day before had implicated us at all – and he was looking for cooperation with the search for Harry, not to draw a line and put himself on one side of it and a possible information-source on another. So he told us, briefly. Scotland Yard had interviewed the director of the National Portrait Gallery. He confirmed that Major Oliver had been back to see him and had picked-up the Old Master drawings. That was the last he had seen of him. They appeared to be authentic, he added, which made them extremely valuable.
“Well he wouldn’t have brought them to the attention of the biggest names in the country if he was going to make-off with them, now, would he?” asked my mother sharply.
The inspector looked at her through his glasses with those accipiter eyes. She had just given-away her allegiance. Oh, mummy, I thought. Can’t you see he’s dangerous?
“Perhaps he didn’t decide to make-off with them till that day,” he said drily. “Peoples’ plans change, Mrs. Pasley.”
“No,” she said, “not his. They wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. That’s what I’ve come to see you about.”
“I see,” he said. “Go on, please.”
First she told him that I had something to tell him I hadn’t wanted to talk about before. “She was too upset by it,” she added, “and it’s not very nice. She didn’t want to say anything bad about Mrs. Lascelles, even more so after she’d seen her dead, poor thing. But she realizes now that you need to know – so she’s come and told me. And I’ve brought her here to tell you.”
“Very good,” said the inspector, looking at me and moderating his voice to something with a patronizing edge. “ – that’s the right thing to do. We need all the information we can get.”
“I know,” I said.
“Well, what is it, then?” he asked. The slight impatience he betrayed didn’t help me to get it out – but it did help me decide that I was going to be direct with him from the start and not worry about shocking him, or feeling too shy to say the things that had to be said. I just had to find the words to tell it.
“I saw Daisy Lascelles having intercourse in the folly two weeks ago,” I said, “and it wasn’t with Harry Oliver.”
His expression changed. Those eyes turned harder. “Go on,” he said.
I told the story – about how I’d lain in wait to catch them at it.
“Whyever would a nice little girl like you do a thing like that?” he asked.
“Because my mother thought it was Harry and Daisy and she was very upset,” I said.
He looked at my mother for confirmation of this and she nodded, her lips clamped shut.
“Please explain,” he said, “Mrs. Pasley?”
“I was — he and I had — we were sweethearts,” she said.
He looked at me. Perhaps she didn’t want to say more than that in front of me. He would ask her more pointedly later. “So what exactly did you see?” he asked me. “Don’t be shy: there’s a lot at stake here.”
I kept nothing back. I told him Nesbitt said to turn over so he could give it her in the arse. His eyes narrowed further, and he tut-tutted in spite of himself. I told him about Nesbitt blowing his foot off and that was why I hadn’t said anything, because he couldn’t have been involved in her death either.
“What else?” he asked me.
“Nothing,” I said. “You have to read his diary. We’ve brought it. Then you’ll see it wasn’t him.”
My mother took it out of her bag and handed it over.
He took it, noting the name on the cover. “Where did you get this?” he asked.
I didn’t want to say.
“Nellie, you’ve got to tell the truth,” said my mother. “That’s all you can do now, to help him. Everything. What you did, what you thought, and why.”
“I took it from his room,” I said, “after I found Daisy. Because he wasn’t home and she was dead in his folly and I was afraid he’d be in trouble and I’d already seen it there.”
“You removed evidence,” he said.
I bit my lip. “Yes,” I said.
“Why?” he asked me. I felt skewered. Whatever I said would get me or Harry further into trouble.
“Because I knew you would come poking around,” I said, “and you’d find it and be reading all his business. And about my mother and everything. And it wasn’t anybody’s business but his. It was private. So I was saving it for him. For when he got back and everything was sorted-out. But he hasn’t come home yet and I’m worried about him. So I told my mother and she read it and we agreed you had to see it.”
“I see,” he said.
“It contains — rather a lot about me,” she said quietly. “Nellie was reluctant to show me, but I knew it was necessary. To clear him.”
“Who said he was a suspect?” he asked. “He’s just wanted for questioning, that’s all.”
Right, I thought, and I’m the Queen of Sheba. “Though I must say,” added the inspector, “that the longer he stays missing, the worse it looks for him.”
“Has there been an autopsy?” asked my mother.
He looked from her to me. Would he tell us, or play more games?
“You can answer in front of Nellie,” she said. “At this point she knows more than any of us.”
“Well, we’ve confirmed what you’d told us about the pregnancy,” he said. “Three months gone with child.”
“So it couldn’t have been his,” I said.
He gave me another one of those looks.
“Well, it couldn’t, could it?” I asked.
“It is very regrettable, young lady,” he said, “that you have become tangled-up in this to the extent that you have. I see I shall have to be asking you some more questions — very unpleasant questions indeed. And you too, Mrs. Pasley.”
“Ask away,” I said. “But I think you should read his diary, first.”
“It’s Miss,” said my mother: “Miss Pasley.”
God, I hated when she did that. But it was the whole truth, wasn’t it. And only that was what would save Harry — if he ever came home.
“Have you established a cause of death?” asked my mother.
“No,” he said shortly. He flipped through the pages, estimating how long it would take him to read it, no doubt. “I shall have you taken home,” he said, “but please stand by to come in again for more questioning after we have had a chance to review this – er – diary – fully.”
“Of course,” said my mother. “We want to cooperate completely – in any way we can.”
“As I should hope,” he said. He leaned forward and fixed me with that glare again. “It would have been a lot more helpful if you had left this for us to find in the first place, wouldn’t it, young lady? Hm?”
I squirmed. “Yes,”
I said. “I’m sorry. I was upset – I wasn’t thinking. I was already worried about him – that’s why
I went over in the first place. To look for him.
Because I was afraid he might have had an awful time in
“Well,” he said. “We shall see, won’t we? ”
We got up to leave.
“Oh, one more thing, Mrs. – er – Miss Pasley,” he said. “Apparently you haven’t been very forthcoming with me either. About your relationship with Major Oliver. Why would that be?”
“I’m telling you now,” she said, “because of everything Nellie told me last night. Before that I didn’t know what to think. I was hurt. You’ll see it all in there.” She motioned toward the notebook with her head. “Please,” she said, “just read it. And then you can ask me anything you want and I’ll tell you. Whatever you ask.”
“I should hope so,” he said again, a shade testily. “About time, too.”
“Yes,” she said, white-faced. It didn’t look good for Harry that she hadn’t come forward right away; she realized that now. But there was nothing she could do about it – it was spilled milk.
He had to leave her with a parting salvo: “I must say again, Miss Pasley,” he said, “that I think it’s most unfortunate – most unfortunate indeed — that a little girl has had to be mixed-up in anything like this – sordid business.”
“I agree,” said my mother, with some dignity, “it is. But now I’ve found out that she is – far more than I’d thought. I am heartsick, yes. And of course I blame myself. But it’s too late to protect her from it now. And we don’t believe any good will come of pretending otherwise.”
“No,” he said. “Regrettably, you are right.” He leaned forward to address me. His tone was a little kindlier. “You did the right thing,” he said, “telling your mother so that the two of you could come forward.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He looked at my mother over my head. “I’ll do all I can to see that she doesn’t have to give evidence,” he said. “If she does, we’ll ask for it to be in chambers.”
My heart felt like a stone. Evidence — ?
Against whom?
Against Harry, of course.
I thought it was very brave of my mother to turn all that private stuff about her over to the police, and I said so on the way home.
She looked at me. “No good ever comes of lying,” she said, “haven’t I taught you that?”
“Yes,” I said slowly, “but it’s one thing to say something and another to do it. I mean, to really set the example for the thing you are saying. In a hard way, like this – that hurts you so much. And looks bad for you.”
“Yes,” she said.
We had left her letters in the front of the diary – and our copies of Harry’s citations for his decorations. The inspector would see that she had tried to do the right thing, too – about breaking it off when she thought he wasn’t a decent man after all. And about protecting her daughter. The right thing – whatever that was. She had tried, with all her heart — she just hadn’t known what it was.
Well, she did now.
We waited at home to be summoned again. I wondered why he hadn’t made us wait there and put a policeman in the room with us to make sure we didn’t cook up a story, or anything like that.
I said so.
“I think he can tell when people are telling the truth,” said my mother.
I hoped she was right.
“Mummy,” I asked her a bit later, “now that you know it wasn’t him – you will marry him, won’t you?”
“If he ever asks me again,” she said, choking. “If he comes back —!”
“He’ll come back,” I said. “He promised me. And he’s got the drawings. He’s far too honourable not to come back. Even though he’s heartbroken over you.”
She closed her eyes.
“Well, he is,” I said. “I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“I’ve said I was sorry,” she said.
I saw how sorry she was, and let it go at that.
The clock ticked. She noticed after about the third chime that it was going again. She had heard all the others, but they had been part of our lives for so long that she had forgotten the period of silence in-between. “What — ?” she said. “Nellie, the clock’s going again! Did you wind it?”
I grinned.
“Did you find the key?”
“No,” I said, “Harry did.” And I told her about that, too.
She put her head on her arms and cried a bit, then. I made her another cup of tea. Bringing it into the room, I had another idea. It might hurt her feelings, but she needed to hear it.
I put on the Haendel’s ‘
She really sobbed, then. I felt as if it did her good to let it all out.
“I played it for Harry’s sake, mummy,” I said when she had dried her eyes and blown her nose. “We’ve got to have faith in him. He is going to come back. I know he is. And he really loves you, and now you know he does. And everything is going to be all right. And you can give him everything he wants and if you have another baby you can call him Stephen.”
She looked at me with red eyes. “I think it would be better,” she said, “for both of us, Nellie, if we didn’t talk about all the things in the diary that weren’t really any of your business.”
“No,” I said. “Sorry.” I was lucky she hadn’t told me off about it. Most mothers would have. But then, she wasn’t most mothers; she was mine.
“All right,” she said.
I started fretting about Daisy. Was anybody to blame? “Do you think they know yet,” I asked her, “what killed her? I mean, couldn’t she have just died? Or swallowed something? She was very upset about being in trouble – I mean, you know, pregnant.”
“I hope that’s what it was,” said my mother, “for everybody’s sake. I hope so. Poor Nigel.”
Yes indeed, poor Nigel. I still had his note to me about my saying ‘thank you’ folded-up in my treasure-box, along with the tawny-owl’s feather and the blue shell from Harry and the tiny gold cross on a chain my mother had given me last birthday. Why was Daisy running-around after other men, anyway? “Was he wounded so badly he couldn’t be her husband any more?” I asked.
“Nellie, these are grown-up things you are asking,” she said.
“I want to know,” I said.
“No,” she said after a while. “He wasn’t. He really wanted — that part of their marriage. And she tried. But it got harder, not easier — that’s what she told me – he was so very difficult – she couldn’t bring herself to – to keep her vows — it upset her too much.”
“I think that’s awful,” I said.
“So do I,” she said. “After everything he’d sacrificed, to refuse him a little creature-comfort — the joy of having a family — I’m sure he was very difficult – I mean, she said he flew into rages — but – she was his wife, after all!”
“I won’t say anything,” I added hastily. “I know it isn’t my business.”
“Right,” she said sadly. “Though just about everything seems to be your business, at the moment, doesn’t it, Nellie?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I couldn’t help it,” I added – “it all came to me. I was just in the middle of it all. Trying to understand – because I care – because I love you!”
She squeezed my hand. “My pet,” she said.
The clock chimed again. This waiting was awful. I felt close to breaking myself. “Mummy, what do you think has happened to him!” I burst-out.
“I don’t know,” she said.
The police-car came back for us again. They took me into a room and the grey-haired inspector came in. His hair was crinkly at the edges and thin on the top. I could see that this was distasteful even for him – to be involving a little girl.
“I need to ask you some more questions,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
They were about Harry and the Old Master drawings, and Harry and the folly, and Harry and Daisy.
“Read what he wrote,” I cried, “read it for yourself! He couldn’t stand her!”
“I have,” he said. “Now, answer the question – please.”
I did, as best I could. He took a note here and there. “Why don’t you talk to Mr. Nesbitt,” I said then, “and ask him all these questions? And the stable-boy? You saw what Harry wrote! He wrote ‘Daisy you might as well wear an advertisement!’ Talk to them!”
“I have,” he said.
“And Captain Lascelles,” I said, “he told us to let her know she ought to ask for a divorce.”
He made a note.
“This is awful,” I said. “We came to you because we thought you’d help set it all straight!”
“That’s what we’re trying to do,” he said, patiently. “One little piece at a time. And I must say it’s getting very difficult, with your Major Oliver not being here to answer these questions for himself.”
“Have you telephoned all the hospitals in
“They’re doing that now, Miss,” he said. “Scotland Yard is taking care of it.”
There was a knock at the door, and a woman came in. She had a severe face. She bent close to his ear and murmured something. She knew the difference between whispering and murmuring; I only caught a word. “ – the station.”
“Just now?” he asked.
She nodded.
He left the room immediately.
They had arrested Harry.
He had got off the 2.23 from
When he said yes, they told him he was under arrest in connection with the murder of Mrs. Nigel Lascelles.
I was afraid he would wet himself; but he didn’t, so I heard.
He fainted.
I was standing in the police-station, watching through the front desk to the back door where all the important things happened, when they half-walked, half-dragged him in. One copper each side of him held him roughly under the arm-pits. His face was grey. He looked lost and in shock. He was dripping-wet – they must have thrown water on him to bring him round. I didn’t know he had fainted, then – I only knew he looked as if he couldn’t walk by himself.
“Harry,” I called-out, “it’s all right! It’s all right, Harry! We know you didn’t do anything!”
He looked up at the sound of my voice. It was like the first time I ever saw his face, half-way up the Butter Cross: a man hunted to exhaustion and clinging on for dear life. I saw his eyes focus on my face and change to recognition.
“H–Helen,” he managed to say, “W-w-what are you d-doing here?”
“You don’t ask the questions, sir,” said the older of the bobbies, “ – you just answer them.”
Then the woman with the strict face came up and grabbed my elbow and pulled me away, and they pulled him stumbling in the opposite direction, and I couldn’t see him any more.
I didn’t understand what was taking so long. I saw them bring his briefcase up to the front-desk, and take the drawings out of it just as I knew they would. Weren’t the people who cut-up Daisy’s corpse supposed to be able to tell what she had died of? I mean, it looked for all the world to me as if she had just crawled there the way a wounded animal does. She had definitely been looking for Harry – her cigarette-end in the sink at the lodge told that much. And she had spent long enough out at the folly to smoke her whole case-full – hardly the act of an unwilling victim.
The stable-boy was brought out of one of the side-rooms and led away to the back where the cells were. I avoided catching his eye. What had he done!? — I mean, besides yield to the temptation of taking something every lad wants desperately at his age when it was offered him? That woman made trouble for everybody she touched!
They brought my mother out then, and I told her they had Harry. “Oh, thank god!” she said, “thank god, thank god, thank god! He’s all right, then? He’s safe?”
“Well if you count being arrested safe, yes,” I said. “He had a bandage on his head, though. A new one. And he couldn’t walk properly, mummy!”
She turned to the officer behind him. “I want to see him,” she said, “Major Oliver. I really need to see him as soon as possible.”
He tried to be polite in answering. “I wouldn’t go holding your breath, mum,” he said. “He won’t be talking to nobody except us for a very long time. Mebbe when we’ve finished with him – before they take him over the Assizes.”
The Assizes! It sounded mediaeval! Did he mean Winchester Crown Court, the Winchester Assizes? He hadn’t done anything!
“I’ll wait,” she said. “You don’t mind, do you, Nellie?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Mum-my!!!”
“Could be days,” he said grimly. “And you can’t go hanging about here, mum.”
“We’ll see,” she said quietly, “thank you very much.”
“Welcome, mum,” he said.
They all knew I was the little girl who had found Daisy’s body, and that it wouldn’t do to go upsetting me. I might need to testify. So they had to be polite, even when they wanted us to get lost while they put the thumb-screws on Harry and made him confess to something he didn’t do.
That’s what I imagined them doing, anyway. The inspector with the hawk’s-eyes looked as if he didn’t have an ounce of compassion in his body. After a lifetime of police work, seeing everybody at their absolute worst, I supposed I might not have a lot left, either.
So now Harry had offered himself up to the Lions’ Den.
They did call the doctor to look him over, though, apparently — which was the least they could do for a twice-decorated officer with a bandaged head who had folded-up at their feet when told he was being placed under arrest – and probably cracked his noggin again on the platform, if they hadn’t been quick enough to catch him. I recognized the doctor’s old shooting-brake when he pulled-up in front of the station, even before he came in with his bag. Oh! I was so relieved to see it. He was our doctor too, and I waved to him. He gave me a wink in return, on his way to the front desk, where he rested his bag. “I understand there’s a prisoner to see?” he asked.
“This way, sir, please,” said the sergeant behind the desk, and lifted-up the swinging lid to let him through to the back.
For the first time since I had found Daisy I started to feel that perhaps one thing might be going right for Harry.
And he was alive – safe – and had come back here, just as any innocent person would — so now they could sort it all out and let him go.
Though he would have to know about them reading his diary, though – even the most personal bits, everything.
If he had felt like someone with no skin before, how would that make him feel?
This thing was not going to have any nice, clean, tidy conclusions, no matter what happened – I started to see that now.
My mother had too much sense to wait right under their noses where they could throw us out. She went outside and led me to the front wall of the next house, which was exactly the right height for sitting on and was backed by a tall laurel hedge that shaded us from the sun. The police-station was just a big old Victorian house, painted cream, with an old-fashioned pillared porch and a blue sign above it, POLICE – and underneath in smaller letters, Royal Hampshire Constabulary.
When the doctor came out, we got up quickly and met him on the way to his car.
“Oh, Doctor Mackey – I’m a friend of Major Oliver,” said my mother, “and I just want to tell you – whatever they’re thinking in there – he hasn’t done anything, doctor!”
“I see,” he said, “and good afternoon to you too, Miss Pasley!”
He was a Scot with a dry sense of humour. I hoped this was an example of it.
I tugged at his hand. “Is he all right?” I asked. ‘That’s all we care about – what happened to him? Is he hurt? What was that bandage?”
He relented. He was always very kind to me in his surgery, in an amused way, and let me choose my own lollipop out of his jar. “My, my,” he said, “Nellie. Such concern! Well it’s my understanding he had an argument with a tram outside Waterloo Station. Didn’t win it, of course – foolish to try. Just a glancing blow, fortunately for him, no lasting damage. But a concussion, yes – he’d still be a bit light-headed from it, and another shock just now – absolutely. Exacerbated by the old wound, of course, there’d be a tendency…”
“What!” we both cried.
“Oh, did ye not know?” he said. “He had a crack on the head in the War, so he told me. Scar’s mostly under the hair, it grew back nicely. Doesn’t need but a wee plaster, now, for the new split.”
“God,” said my mother. I remembered the citation, where it said he was wounded.
“Did he have one of his attacks?” I asked, “ – is that why he had the accident with the tram? He freezes, you know, he stops being able to walk and sometimes he panics altogether – from the shell-shock — ”
“Aye,” he said, “from the looks of it and what he said, yes.” He pronounced it yairs. He had been a medical officer at the Front himself till he got a piece of shrapnel in the shoulder, so he would understand.
“Why were they dragging him like that?”
“He fainted – did ye not know that either? That’s why they called me, to take a look at him — apparently they walked up to him at the station and told him he was under arrest and he just folded-up like an old deckchair. No’ a surprise, really, under the saircumstances.”
“That doesn’t mean he has a guilty conscience!” I
cried. “He’s always in a terrible way
after he gets off a train! He hates loud
noises! His nerves are all in shreds! Last time he got back from
“I see,” said our doctor, kindly. “That’s not what I meant, m’dear. I meant from the concussion, it would be hardly surprising for a man to faint again, yes – specially wi’ a shock like that!”
My mother put a hand on his arm. “Did you hear anything about Daisy?” she asked, “I mean, what happened? How did she die?”
“I haird they were looking at poison,” he said.
I felt sick myself.
We waited five hours. My mother sent me off to go and buy us some buns to keep us going. The bakery still had a Cornish-pasty left over from the dinner-rush, too, and they let me have it cheap as it was almost closing-time, and we shared that as well. It was rude to eat in public, but what were we to do?
The inspector came outside about seven o’clock. “I heard you were still here,” he said.
“Well naturally,” said my mother, “we’re waiting to see the Major!”
“That’s quite irregular,” he said.
I looked at him. “I brought you the diary,” I said. My tone was one of reproach.
He softened. He must have been thinking about the diary, and the way things had been left between these two. And now, the man was wanted on suspicion – but this woman clearly believed in his innocence, enough to wait hours to see him. It might make a useful prying-tool, in further examination, to get him off-guard — and then shame the suspect into feeling sorry he had duped such nice people. That was what I thought he was thinking, anyway. I didn’t trust him. “Very well,” he said. “Just for a couple of minutes.”
My mother breathed-in sharply and straightened her shoulders.
“I shall have to be present,” he said. “Don’t discuss the case with him, please.”
My god! What else were we supposed to talk about?
They had him in handcuffs. The inspector went in first and he looked up. “There are two ladies here to see you,” said the inspector. “They’ve been waiting all day. I told them they could just have a few words.”
My mother went first. She took his hands, ignoring the steel shackles. “Harry,” she said, “I never should have doubted – please, I’m so sorry —!” She choked.
So did he.
He tried to say “Win,” the way he did, but it wouldn’t come out past the W.
“Harry,” she told him firmly, “whatever happens – I know you didn’t do anything wrong, anything! We believe you – don’t forget that – we’re on your side, Harry love – !”
“Don’t discuss the case, if you please,” said the inspector sharply.
“W–w–w-w-win,” he croaked, “Win —!”
“Are you all right?” I asked him. “Your head – Harry, we’ve been sick with worry about you – I knew you’d come home if you could, I knew you would!”
“H-h-here I am,” he said. “God, I — ”
“I know,” she said.
“They – they even have my d-d-d-diary — ” he said.
“I know,” she said again, her eyes filling with tears. “Darling, it’s all right. Everything’s going to turn out for the best, I know it is.”
“B-but there’s things about you in it, Win… ” he croaked in an anguished tone. “I–I–I n-never thought — n-never —! God, I w-w-wouldn’t h-have — ” He squeezed her hands – I saw his knuckles white over hers. His trembled.
“I told you,” she said firmly, “ – never you mind. It’s all right. Everything. I’ve nothing to be ashamed of, and neither do you.”
“That’s enough,” said the inspector. “You’ve seen him. Off you go, then.”
Harry stood-up. My mother touched his medal-ribbon, with its little rosette; then cupped his face.
It was all she had time to do; a constable came and led him away, and we were shown the door.
At least we were free to go home.
My mother was in a state of shock. I helped her draw a bath. We were both starving and there was not a lot of food in the house; we had been too upset and preoccupied to think about things like groceries. We had been living on tinned baked-beans and corned-beef for two days now. Our milk had gone sour despite being in the coolest part of the scullery in the unglazed jug that breathed, our end of butter had turned a bit rancid, and the potatoes we had in the house had sprouted from their eyes. Daisy’s death had run through like a small earthquake, it seemed, leaving nothing undamaged – not even our wretched spuds.
I found a heel of cheese and trimmed-off the whitish bits; cut the stale loaf-end into slices for toast, and made us toasted-cheese.
“Helen, you’re a treasure,” said my mother.
I looked at her. She had always called me Nellie. Helen was for school and our family bible.
But to Harry I was Helen, because I had told him I preferred it, and he never forgot that I did. And she had just spent all that time reading his diary.
We listened to our phonograph records together, to keep our spirits up. Before we went to bed, I reminded her to leave a note for the milkman.
They brought Harry up the next day in front of the magistrate, to be remanded into custody. He had brought back the Holbein drawings and everything else in his briefcase, so he couldn’t be charged with theft, and it was still not at all clear how Daisy had met her end, or at least not clear enough to let him go; but he had not yet been formally charged with her murder. It was also not clear to what extent his detention was involuntary, since he said at every turn that he wished to do all he could to assist the police with their inquiries. The appearance was brief. There were still many questions unanswered. They dangled in the air, silently.
If he was innocent, why did he faint?
If he was guilty, why would he have returned to the place the crime was committed after he had got away with it, and bring back the Holbein after he had escaped with that, too?
What time had Daisy died? Did he know anything about it? Why was she still in her clothes from the day before, in a place he routinely spent the night, if he didn’t?
They had questioned the ticket-clerk at the station. Yes, he said, he remembered the major. Second day in a row, off up to
It was all in his diary, though, including the phobia of
loud noises and his fear of the
I clung to the belief that somehow it was all going to be all right, as I had already promised him it would.
The police had questioned Mr. Nesbitt too, and the stable-boy. I would have liked to be present at those interviews. Well, I wouldn’t, because I was sick of Daisy and her intrigues already, her pathetic appetite for anyone other than her husband. I was disgusted with her for leaving him to rot there and not even visiting him and running around here instead making a mess wherever she went.
We heard that Harry had woken-up shrieking in the night, in the police cells.
Well, what did they expect?
It didn’t mean anything about Daisy, anything at all. It never had. He had fought their war for them and it had broken him inside, couldn’t they see that?
He looked better than I expected in the dock, pale and composed. Very strained, of course, great hollows in his cheeks and circles under his eyes, but carrying himself still with that indefinable officer air; the one that said I am not going to break down. He was only there long enough for the prosecutor to say they had not yet brought formal charges, but that these might be pressed at any time and he was to be remanded. The magistrate made notes to himself and nodded. I may have been confused about who was who and what they were doing there and why he had to stay, but they led him away again. At least he wasn’t handcuffed, this time.
“We need to get him a solicitor,” said my mother.
“Who’s going to pay for it?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” she asked.
And then suddenly, just like that, it was all over. We went home from Harry’s court appearance to find that Sir Archibald had sent his driver over to wait for our arrival. Captain Lascelles had placed a telephone call from the hospital, he said, leaving an urgent message, and we were asked to go over to Knowle to see him right away. He had instructions to take us.
I washed my face quickly, and my mother attempted to pin-up her hair, and we put on our gloves and hats again and off we went.
Nigel Lascelles was waiting for us out on the terrace. My mother shook his hand. “I haven’t heard anything yet about the funeral,” she said, “I understand they haven’t released her body to the undertaker’s yet. I’m sorry.”
He hadn’t flinched.
“’On’t ’e ngheshshary,” he said.
“What won’t be necessary?” my mother asked.
“Ngho ’ore hmysht’ry,” he said.
“I’m sorry — ” said my mother. Usually she could follow him – but she was so distraught today that it was beyond her when he slurred his words badly.
He picked-up the pencil. ‘No more mystery,’ he wrote. ‘Didn’t want to talk to police. Don’t like talking to anyone I don’t know. Can you deal with it – please?’
“Deal with what?” asked my mother.
He pulled a letter out of his pocket. “Caimhge ’oday,” he said. “’Ostage
dhue.”
He pointed to the stamp, ‘postage due,’ on the envelope. It was a small blue one, addressed in an
unformed scrawl to ‘Capt. Nigel Lascelles, c/o
My mother took it from him.
“’ead i’,” he said.
She read it.
Dear Nigel, it said,
I have made a rotten mess of everything. You would be better off without me and I
would be better off dead. I wasn’t
strong enough. You were – but not
me. So I’m taking the coward’s way
out. Just like me. Couldn’t hack it. Please tell daddy I’m sorry — Daisy.
My mother put her hand over her mouth.
Nigel wrote: ‘steady on, old girl.’
She looked up at him. “Nigel, I’m sorry,” she said.
“’E hoo,” he said, and wrote it for her: ‘ – me too. But this helps your friend, doesn’t it.’
“Yes,” she said, “god, yes, it certainly does — yes, it does.”
“O’ ’oo ngho, ’en,” he said. She didn’t catch it. Shaking his head, he wrote ‘You couldn’t hear because I was smiling at you. Forgot I can’t. Off you go, then.’
We went.
My mother walked straight into the police station and asked to see the inspector. This was getting to be too familiar, I thought.
“Sorry, mum,” the desk-sergeant began.
“This is urgent,” she said. “It won’t wait.”
He disappeared.
The inspector came out of his office, and invited us back down the corridor. He closed the door and waved at the visitor’s chairs. We sat down. He returned to his side of the desk. “Things may be breaking for the major,” he said. His face wasn’t quite as fierce as it had been, as if some of his certainty had been removed with Harry’s unwavering insistence and the delay in determining how she died. I knew there couldn’t be any mark of violence of her, at least not the kind that would kill; I think he did, too. “We’re just now getting a preliminary report back from the laboratory,” he said. “I thought you’d want to know. Besides all the alcohol she had in her, they’ve done a thorough analysis of the stomach-contents and the other organs, and it’s possible – just possible – that no-one else was involved. Though it’s far too early to say,” he added, since he was after all a copper and couldn’t go letting anybody off the hook just because they hadn’t done anything.
“I know,” said my mother, and put Daisy’s letter down in front of him.
He read it through once.
His reaction was swift, though masked. His eyes widened; his nostrils clamped. “I see,” he said. “Where did you get this?”
My mother pointed to the address on the envelope.
“I see that,” he said, “but did Captain Lascelles give you this?”
“Yes,” said my mother.
“He should have called us,” he said, “not you.”
“Did you go out to question him?” asked my mother, “when she died?”
“Haven’t taken the time yet,” he said, “ – man can’t speak, can he? Hadn’t seen her in three weeks?”
“That’s why he didn’t send for you,” she said.
He frowned, as if there was a bad smell in the room. “Well, obviously,” he said, “this clears everything up. There’ll still have to be an inquest, of course. But no charges. Shouldn’t be too long – I’ll try to see that nobody else is involved that doesn’t need to be. I mean — ”
“Thank you,” she said. “And I think the least you can do is to have him driven home with us in a police-car.”
“Of course,” he said. He was not a cruel man; he had merely been doing his job. “I shall just have to telephone the magistrate, to explain – ” he said, thinking out-loud. “I’ll have him brought out to you in a few minutes. Why don’t you wait in my office?”
He picked up Daisy’s letter.
“She might have put a stamp on it,” he said. “Saved us all a lot of bother — ”
“Yes,” said my mother.
God, yes.
But that was Daisy.
When Harry came in we both flew up and hugged him. He had an arm round each of us and he was trembling. He looked dazed – but pleased, though. Relieved to be freed; pleased that he was no longer under suspicion of murder – and most relieved of all that we were there and we knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, anything at all. And that (it went without saying) he was as dear to us as ever, if not more so — precious as we had become to him.
“It’s over,” said my mother.
“So they t-told me,” he said. “They s-s-s-s-said I c-could go. N-no hard f-f-eelings – n-not a st-stain on m-my character – all an unfortunate m—misunderstanding — ”
“Let’s go home,” she said.
“What about the Holbeins?” I asked.
“They’ve b-been returned already,” he said, “to Sir Archibald, I th-think. They w-want them for the N-national P-portrait Gallery, if he’ll s-s-sell them — !”
“Harry, Nellie, let’s go home,” my mother repeated.
And so we did.
In the back of the car we kept him between us just as we
had on the train to
His voice was hoarse, but he overcame it to answer her. “Win, d-don’t even m-mention it again. It’s p-past — l-let’s l-leave it there, shall we?”
And she leaned her head against his shoulder and he put his arm round her and held her there.
We asked the police driver to stop at the corner-grocer’s on the way so we could get a few things to eat. It was my suggestion, my mother being far too overcome still to think about anything like food. I popped in, leaving my mother and Harry in the back of the car. I bought us half a pound of nice ham, a half a pork pie, a jar of pickle, some butter, a tin of sardines, a tin of peaches, a packet of ginger biscuits and a farmhouse loaf they were good enough to get in from the baker’s for those in too much of a hurry to shop all over in the square. I asked them to put it on our account and – word must have spread fast – they said to tell the Major well done and of course. Nobody thought he’d done it, they said, decent fellow like him. When I got back in the car my mother was cradling Harry’s face in one hand, and her other one was clasped in his on her lap, and they were looking at one another and not saying anything, and his face was still white. The driver was staring straight ahead out of the windscreen.
And so we went home.
The tires crunched on our gravel. We might go weeks without a motor-car here – and today we had had two come and go! I had the groceries in my lap, in a string bag they had lent me at the grocer’s, as unprepared as I had come. I held on to them – it would have been all too easy to forget them, in all the excitement, and then later we should have missed them – a lot.
The driver came round to open the door for my mother.
We got out of the police-car and walked into our house. Everything looked the same, but everything felt different. We had come so close to losing all that mattered that I felt as if everything there was a present.
Harry stood in the middle of the front hall and shivered. It had been a few headlong weeks since he had walked through that door for the first time, to find himself unexpectedly within the circle of our love.
“We’re home,” said my mother softly. “You’re home, Harry love.”
He looked all around — at the wallpaper leading up the stairs, at the hallstand, at the doorways leading-off to kitchen and front-room; at the creamy-painted wainscoting, the tiled floor, the pretty amber-glass lamp in the ceiling.
At us.
“I d-don’t deserve th-this,” he said.
We pulled him into the kitchen to sit down at our dear old table and prove once and for all with tea, milk, sugar, ginger-biscuits and long looks of love that he was wrong.
We didn’t need to mention just yet about his diary, and the fact that before the police read it all, we had – though, my mother being the truthful soul she was, he would have to know sooner or later. But just for now he was naked enough, fragile enough, tired enough that he didn’t need to start thinking about all that.
I thought about it, though. About his feelings for my mother. As we drank our tea and I saw his shoulders slowly go down and a little colour come back into his wan cheeks, I saw him steal an incredulous glance or two her way, and not at her face either. Just a flicker of the eyes – if I hadn’t been so keenly attuned to him, and known from his own admissions just about every thought that he had, I would not have noticed it, even. Now and then he rubbed his face, as if he didn’t quite believe it.
There was a little whirr from the doorway. It was so tiny that no-one would have paid it any attention, but I knew what was coming next. I didn’t want to take any chances. “Harry, don’t jump,” I said, “the clock’s going to chime.”
It did. Actually, it was just pleasantly loud enough to make itself heard – but not so sudden as to startle.
“Thanks for the w-warning,” he said.
“Don’t ever leave,” I said.
He shook his head. “H-helen, p-please — d-don’t p-put your mother on the spot. Let’s take a day at a t-time, shall we? This – this – this is e-e-e-nough, for now. M-more than enough.”
“I don’t want you to leave, either,” said my mother softly.
He couldn’t answer that.
I got up from the table and cleared-away the tea-things. None of us had been hungry enough to face more than the biscuits, so there were only a handful of small tea-plates with crumbs. Later, when the emotion had subsided, we would tuck into the rest. Pensively I heated the kettle again, washed the cups, the spoons, tipped out the tea-leaves in our bucket under the sink for the compost-heap, rinsed out the tea-pot. It was time for me to make a graceful exit.
And not to slip away, this time. Oh, no. I was done with slipping. I would make it very clear that I was going out and not coming back for a very long time. More than long enough.
I cleared my throat. “Well, then,” I said, “I need some fresh air. And a nice long walk.”
“Where to?” asked my mother automatically.
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” I said. “And I won’t be back till dinner-time,” I added – then thought that that sounded as if I expected her to have it all cooked and ready, which was not at all what I had in mind. “And I’ll make sandwiches,” I said. “When I get back. And we’ve got pork-pie, and peaches, and a whole feast that you don’t have to cook. So don’t worry. About a thing. All right?”
Harry looked up at me. I was drying the last of the tea-spoons. I smiled at him. A wink would have been too heavy-handed by far. His eyes widened, then briefly closed.
“Bye-bye, then,” I said.
I passed his chair as I went from the sink to the back-door.
“Thank-you,” he breathed.
Oh, Harry, Harry, you were so very welcome.
I gave them two hours. I thought after that amount of time they’d at least be expecting me. I knocked softly at the back-door and my mother opened it.
She had set the table for tea, with a cheerful cloth spread, and was buttering bread.
“Oh, those are lovely,” she said. Her face was softer than I had ever seen it. Her eyes danced.
I put my big bunch of daisies and queen-anne’s-lace and chicory in water in our old creamy jug, on the windowsill. “Where is he?” I asked.
She raised her eyebrows: “Upstairs,” she said, “ – he’s asleep. Exhausted. Worn-out.”
I just had to ask. “Was everything all right?” I whispered.
She nodded, then put her hand to her mouth just at the thought.
“I won’t ask any more,” I said.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I mean, ever,” I said.
“Right,” she said. Her hair had been re-pinned, I saw; it was done more simply than before, and was freshly-brushed. I felt pleased that she had let it down for him, even though it was the middle of the afternoon. He was always gazing at it when he thought she wasn’t looking. I thought about the ways he had described it in his diary – and then the other things he had said, that he had longed for so ardently, and turned aside before my blush gave my thoughts away.
She had put the kettle on again, and it slowly started to rumble. I didn’t quite get there in time to snatch it off before the whistle began.
It wasn’t loud, but it must have penetrated his sleep upstairs. “Stretcher-bearers,” he cried-out suddenly, his voice breaking on the word – not stammering, just cracking the way a soldier’s does when he is shouting at the top of his lungs: “Stre-etcher bear-ers!!!”
We looked at one another. My mother reached the top of the stairs before me.
He was sitting up in bed, screaming hoarsely: it sounded like orders.
“Get a wet cloth,” she said to me quickly, and went in to him. I thought: oh – of course – so this is going to be part of our routine, now? And I thanked god, if it was, that we could be here to do something.
“Harry, wake up,” she was saying. She shook him. He didn’t have on any pajamas, as far as I could see. Well — he wouldn’t, would he? Not here, not now, anyway. It was hard to drag my eyes from him and run for the wet flannel. I did love him, after all, in my childish way – and I had never seen or hoped to see so much of him as this. I did run, though, because he needed me to.
I can still see him now, if I close my eyes. I knew his chest was bare like a boy’s from the day of the thunderstorm. It wasn’t a boy’s, though; even from the doorway I could see the line of dark hair that led your eyes from the middle of his chest all the way down his belly and to below the sheet – though I hoped in his flailing he didn’t throw that off, for all our sakes, since he didn’t seem to be wearing anything at all. There were dark tufts in his armpits, too, just like my mother had. He was strong for his slightness; my mother had her work cut out to hold him as he thrashed. He was still prisoner in the dream when I came back with a clean face-cloth from my own room, wrung-out in my basin. “Wake up!” she said again, loudly, firmly, “ – it’s only a dream. Here, Nellie, the cloth!”
I gave it to her and she wiped his face with it – not gently, either. Gently wasn’t what was needed.
“Orderleeey!” he cried, still shouting. “Orderly! See to this man over here —!”
“Get another one,” she said to me over his head, “ – don’t wring it out so much. We’ll get this right, won’t we?”
“’Course we will,” I said. We’d have to keep a stack handy, and a jug by the bed. We’d need lots, more than we owned: I would gladly cut and hem them.
The second wet cloth did the trick. I ran back with it really dripping and cold, and he gasped and shuddered and came round spluttering. She was sitting on the bed holding him.
“There,” she said. ‘There – there, now. Look, Harry. You’re here with us. It was a dream. You’re all right, now.”
His chest was heaving. He looked round the room wild-eyed; recognized it slowly. He had thought he was in hell – and woken to find himself here instead. I saw his memory and the recent present come back as my mother stroked his face. Here must have looked like heaven to him, in that moment.
“God, W-win,” he said.
She kissed his brow. “It’s over,” she said. “Get your breath – calm down – and then come and have a bite of supper.”
He looked down. “B-but I don’t h-have a stitch on,” he said, dazedly.
Her eye caught mine unintentionally and she blushed and had to bite her lip not to burst out laughing. “No, love, that’s right, no, you don’t,” she said. “You’ll have to get dressed, first. Look, here’s your uniform. I folded it for you.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I – b-be patient, W-win, I’m n-not used to being here — I’ll g-get the hang of this.”
“I hope so,” she said with a twinkle.
He looked at me. “H-helen,” he said, “I b-beg your pardon — ”
“Don’t be silly,” I said.
“Have I w-w-wet the bed?” he asked then, still coming to himself. His voice was hoarse, failing him altogether on the word that hurt.
No, love, no, she reassured him, no —
“Thank god for that, anyway,” he murmured. His shoulders dropped a little.
She kissed him on the forehead. “It wouldn’t have mattered, Harry,” she said, “when are you going to see that?”
“Never,” he said.
“You are a silly,” she said, stroking his face; then she kissed him again, in front of me, even, on his cheek right by his mouth: “ – my darling – after everything you’ve been through, to care about a little thing like that! As if you could help it —!”
I wondered when he would believe her. One day he will, I thought. One day he will let himself not mind.
I finished making the pot of tea that had been interrupted by the call for stretcher-bearers, and set-out the rest of the food. They came downstairs together and she sat close to him. He had dressed properly – of course; Harry would never have put-on his uniform and not tied the neck-tie. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a brown envelope. It still said ‘Prisoner’s Personal Property – H. Oliver’ on it. Opening it, he shook a small box out onto the table. “Here,” he said, “I th-think it’s t-time for this, Win — specially now – I d-don’t want H-helen thinking I t-take it for granted – s-sleeping in your b-b-bed — ”
That was the very last thing I thought, and I said so.
“S-s-still,” he said, “I w-wanted — I’d m-made my mind up — to insist on sp-speaking to you when I got back — to s-set things straight – even if you d-didn’t w-want this — I st-still w–w–w-wanted to h-have it… in c-case you did… ”
He put the box in my mother’s hand. It was the type that comes from a jeweler’s, just the right size for a ring – and nothing else.
“I-it’s not very impressive,” he said, “b-but it was all I could af-af-aford — ”
Inside as she opened it there was a piece of paper,
folded. She unfolded it. On it he had drawn a small blue butterfly,
and written: ‘Marry me, Win! ’
“Th-that w-was in c-case I c-couldn’t g-get it out,” he said, “t-to ask you. If I w-was too n-nervous after t-trying to exp-p-plain, about D-d-daisy. They can ch-change the size,” he added, “I wouldn’t have b-bought it otherwise. Th-they tell me any jeweller can.”
So he had hoped, and trusted – even in his hurt and despair – that things might yet turn out all right. All right enough to bring this back, as proof of his intentions.
It looked as if it might be a little too loose, but that was better than too tight. A chip of a diamond sat in the middle of a circle of modest sapphires – the same colours as the butterfly. It was an Adonis, wasn’t it? How did I know that? Oh, god, from his diary. I blushed, thinking of all it meant.
My mother said nothing. I think I mentioned, as on the night of the gramophone, that she could on occasions of great emotion find herself unable to speak.
He raised his eyebrows. “I am t-trying to make an honest w-woman of your m-mother, Helen,” he said, “and she won’t answer me.”
“Try it, mummy,” I said.
She picked it up with fingers that trembled. “I thought I already said yes,” she said, not to me.
“Then p-put it on,” he said.
She did.
“I d-don’t have m-much m-money,” he said, “b-but I th-thought we’d manage, for now?”
“Neither do I,” she said, “only the income from my father’s investments – and I’m sure we will. Three can live as cheaply as two, I’m sure.”
“I’ll p-provide,” he said, “W-win, I know I c-can. I’m n-not totally useless.”
“God, Harry,” she cried, “nobody ever said you were!”
“No,” he said, “n-not here they didn’t. Here I always felt wh-wh-whole.”
We toasted our future in mugs of tea (no saucers), helped down by generous helpings of ham-sandwich, pork pie, bread-and-jam, and tinned peaches.
The inquest returned a verdict of suicide, of course, noting that Mrs. Nigel Lascelles had taken her own life while the balance of her mind was disturbed. The police had turned-over their files regarding the last person to have seen her alive – that was Theodore, the stable-boy (no surprises there), who hadn’t wanted to admit what they’d been up to till he was confronted with it. He said she’d been acting wildly and he’d almost been worried she’d set the stable alight with one of her cigarette-ends. He took it hard, poor lad, between the shame and the guilt, both of which were more her fault than his – but that was Daisy. Fortunately there was no need for any of this to come out, of course, since there was little to be gained from distressing the husband or father of the deceased any more than they already had been. Nigel attended, with us on each side of him. No wonder, people said in whispers – it would be enough to disturb any nice young woman, that.
Sir Archibald did sell the Holbein
drawings to the nation, and closed-up Rookswood House
and sold that too. His surviving son,
who had fought with the Australians in Gallipoli, ended-up in a nursing-home in
He did have the screen put-up in the church, though, as he had promised, with Charles and Alec’s names on it. Daisy’s was on a small tablet on the wall underneath her mother’s. I supposed that in her way she too had made a sacrifice for her country, beyond what she had to give.
Sir Archibald left instructions with his agent for Harry to please continue cataloguing the library, and then to sell both it and the Holbeins for a percentage commission.
It was enough to buy the freehold of our house.
Harry did mind that we had read his diary; he minded a lot. Specially that I had. How could he not have? He had to know, because we don’t hide things like that from one another in our house. It came back with the rest of his things in a parcel from the police – but by then he already knew.
He had asked my mother how she had come to have a change
of heart towards him while he was in
My mother was not a good liar, and she didn’t try to be.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’d already read your side of it all. When you were missing, and we were worried sick about you… That was how I knew. I gave it to them.”
“I — I s-s-see,” he said. There was a pause while he tried to understand the chain of events. He had presumed they had it because of having searched the lodge for all his things. “H-how d-did you g-get hold of it, though? I th-thought the p-police seized it …!”
My mother looked at me. I knew I had to tell him.
I did.
It was bad enough that the police had had their hands all over it; but when he heard that I had, he went white.
“I was afraid for you,” I explained, “I thought there’d be stuff in it that wasn’t their business!”
He took a deep breath, and turned away. I had seen him look hurt before, but this was not the same. This time he looked deeply offended. He mastered himself before he spoke, though. “It w-wasn’t anybody else’s, either,” he said, with a great deal of dignity. “N-not yours.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have, but — ”
“No, y-you shouldn’t,” he said. “It said ‘p-private’ on the front, didn’t it?”
I tried to explain about my panic in finding Daisy dead, and not knowing what to do – about trying to protect him.
“I s-see that,” he said. “I j-just w-w-w-wish you h-hadn’t, that’s all.”
I took his hand; he let me. “I only loved you more,” I said, “reading it — !”
“That’s n-not the p-point, though,” he said.
I hung my head. “No,” I said. “Harry, I’m really, really sorry. Truly.”
Then he asked my mother to let us talk alone.
He was trembling as he sat down opposite me. I knew this would be awkward – but there was no way we could avoid it, now. I had taken the decision for him, when I picked up what didn’t belong to me from the table where he’d left it. All we could do about it now was come to terms with what had already happened. That wasn’t so hard for me, but then I was not the one so mercilessly revealed. I deserved to be told-off; he had every right to be angry. It was thoughtful of him not to do it in front of my mother, at least.
“Helen, there w-were things in there you n-never should have seen,” he said, then. “Things that were – very p-private to me — things n-no little girl ought to be r-r-reading about.”
“I know,” I said.
“I’m n-not p-pleased about that,” he said. He looked upset for both of us.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I only did it because I was so worried, when you weren’t here – and then when you didn’t come back — ”
He nodded. He didn’t like it, but surely he understood. “Still,” he said, “I — I don’t even know w-what to think! I mean – you m-must have felt v-v-very strange r-reading about me and your m–m–m-mother like that — it w-was the l–last thing I’d ever have w-wanted for you!”
My feelings – he was thinking about my feelings. I had thought he was going to chastise me. His forbearance only chastened me further.
“I didn’t mind that at all,” I said. I could see that he did, though.
“Oh,” he said. His face was still strained. “Well, I h-hope for b-both our sakes you didn’t understand the h-half of it,” he added, flushing just on his cheekbones.
”I’m sure I didn’t,” I said, “I was just looking to see what could have happened to you – after I found Daisy —!”
I wanted to say: I can tell the difference between feeling and thinking and doing, and you tried so hard always to be a gentleman, Harry — but it wasn’t up to me to be saying anything of the kind, and I couldn’t have expressed it anyway.
“Still, I f-feel even m-more as if I haven’t g-got any skin,” he said, “you c-can understand that, c-can’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. Then I added, “Harry — ”
“What?”
“I think it was the most beautiful thing I ever read — all of it — even the bits you’re embarrassed about — and I think we should never ever talk about it again.”
“You’re r-r-right there, anyway,” he said. “And, H-helen – ”
“What?” I felt guilty and miserable. I had meant well, and I had hurt his feelings anyway.
“It c-can’t h-have been easy, to own up to everything and t-take it to your mother — and the p–p-police. It w-was a b-brave thing to do.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “I didn’t know what to do – I didn’t want anyone to think badly of you — and then I didn’t see how they could after they’d seen that!”
“That’s the only r–reason,” he said, “the only one – that you d-did it out of l–l-love – that’s the only r-reason I can m-manage to accept it. And now l-l-let’s say no m-more about it — ever. All right, p-pyari?”
I came to him shyly, as if we were still half-strangers, and he dropped a kiss on my head.
“All right,” I whispered.
And we never, ever have. Not to this day.
I’m a grandmother now, and as I look back at all this what I most feel is heartache. I see the adults caught-up in painful events they didn’t ask for; I see the little girl I was, gap-toothed and devoted, by turns puzzled and knowing, trying so hard to do the right thing in a situation so very far beyond her.
I do think that children see and feel far more than most people give them credit for – but I also feel that I was perhaps unusual in this respect, at least in the degree to which I noticed things. No doubt this has a lot to do with my mother and the way she brought me up. It was that intuition of hers that captured and comforted Harry Oliver when nothing else could or had. I had inherited a great deal of it and learned more, without even knowing it. I do remember the extraordinary vividness of my experience, a child caught-up in events and tides and feelings more properly kept for grown-ups, so many lives colliding, and doing my best to make sense of it all.
It’s possible I have added some perspectives to my telling that I didn’t have at the time, although I doubt it. Rather it’s that now I can clothe my experience in the words I didn’t necessarily have then. I can go back to any one of those moments and see and feel it as if it were fresh – but now I can describe what it was I only felt, then. It was every bit as piercing and as subtle as I have told it. I do recall seeing things metaphorically, all the time – it was my way of grasping the pattern of everything. Later, when I attended University and studied English Literature, I learned that this was a poet’s gift. At the time it was just how I saw.
My poetry has been quite well-received, within certain circles, and my novels seem to sell extremely well – so I must have something worth saying and people wanting to hear about it.
What happened to everyone else? Well, let’s see.
When my brothers were little boys we had a yearly family ritual, a sort of celebration, at the foot of the Butter Cross. We brought our toasted tea-cakes outside, and sat on the steps together, and on that one afternoon each year Harry would break his silence about the Great War. He’d tell stories about brave men he’d served with, and who had saved his life when, and what all their names were – so many of them, he never seemed to run out of stories – and how he was rescued again, one last time after the War ended, right there on the steps where we sat.
To support us, Harry turned to writing – although I think he would have done so anyway. His booklet series on country churches is regarded as a classic of its kind, and his monograph on the production of monumental brasses in our area is well-known to historians.
His greatest pride, though (and certainly most beloved among his readers) are the Oliver’s Wayside Guides. I can never leaf through one of them without hearing his voice and seeing his earnest face that long-ago summer on Wheely Down or in the church at Southwick as he lost himself for a few gentle moments in what lay before him. They are friendly little books, easy to slip into a pocket, an appealing mix of text and pictures, always with plenty of the latter. He packed them full of sketches, diagrams, maps and photographs: all the whys and wherefores and fascinating tidbits of history, architecture, flora and fauna, the visible traces left by industry or the Romans or the Ice Age, things man-made and natural both. Some are linked by geography, some by subject; some start with a common theme and find more to say about it than you ever would have thought possible. They are him, in essence: curious, delightful, unexpected; approachable, unpretentious; quietly passionate, wearing their learning and research lightly, and delighting most of all in sharing the pure amateur joy of being and seeing.
They started life as his sketch- and note-books, until one day he happened to pull one out in the presence of his publisher; the rest is history, as they say. He was going to call the first one Under Your Nose, Don’t Trip Over It, but we talked him out of that. (I still think he was joking with us and never meant it.) Harry always had a genius for observation – and for communicating his delight. I felt they were the journal he didn’t keep any more, except that these were meant to be shared.
Many a copy became a family treasure, passed on through generations whose eyes he’d opened. He received hundreds of letters every year – and answered them all, of course, kindly, gratefully, modestly.
He dedicated the Guide To The Chalk Country to me
– and the one called simply Spotted Things to
‘my beloved Winifred, for every thing, always.’
(The
They have never been out-of-print.
He still stammers sometimes, and the nightmares haven’t gone away completely, although it’s been forty years. But my mother keeps a jug of water on the nightstand and plenty of folded towels to wake him with, and they don’t seem to trouble him so much.
When they were first married and it happened almost every night, I would sometimes hear them making-love afterwards – though always quietly, of course. It was only because I was awake that I knew that was what it must be, when the muffled sounds went on – voices, sighs, the rhythmic creaking of the bed that made me blush in the dark.
I felt comforted that they were doing it, though, whatever it was. I thought of it as a way of bringing him back to himself – far more natural than some, and kinder than most. His diary had opened my eyes to just how essential was this part of a man’s nature – in his vulnerability, in his loving. Sometimes I will admit it made me ache to know it for myself. I wondered if I would like it. I thought I would, once I was used to it – my mother seemed to. The longer their bed creaked, the more I heard her too.
I thought of the passages in Harry’s diary where he had wanted her so badly – and said so, so frankly. I thought of him in the trenches, wondering if he would ever make love to a woman in his life. Where was the man who would be that to me? Was he lying somewhere now, wondering that too? Would I ever find someone as lyrically, sacredly, humanly in love with me? It was different from the romantic dreams I knew other girls had – because I’d seen more than most. I think all of it dispelled any childish illusions I might have had; but that wasn’t entirely bad. Whatever I learned about real grown-up love from my mother and Harry was worth far more than foolish notions.
If I heard my little brothers stirring, in those days, I used to get out of bed and hush them back to sleep myself, so my mother wouldn’t be disturbed in her comforting of Harry. That was the least I could do. Sometimes then I’d hear her gasp his name out in the hush, as if the kindly night had spread to encompass much more than a one-way solace, afterwards. My little brothers would already be sound asleep again. After all, to them it was normal to have a daddy who sometimes shouted and groaned in the night – no need for a fuss. Everyone was safe, and that was all that mattered.
My brothers? Yes, three, one after the other, two years
apart: their names are Stephen, Nigel,
and Henry. Well – was, in Nigel’s
case: Lieutenant Nigel Richard Oliver, M.C.
He was killed in the Normandy Landings, at twenty-two. It was a posthumous award; he always was a
scamp. When the letter came from his
captain, it spoke of his absolute fearlessness and unswerving valour. We saw the
little boy hanging upside-down by his knees from the apple-tree. His picture has pride of place on the parlour mantelpiece, next to his Uncle Stephen that he
never knew. When one of Harry’s
correspondents asks him about the son to whom the Guide to Early Industry is dedicated, with his
dates and the MC after his name, Harry never fails to reply. He sends them Nigel’s citation, written-out
in his neat hand, and thanks them for asking.
For himself, he never mentions his own; his pride is for his son. Sometimes I think he feels a dreadful grief
that all they sacrificed in the War To End War was not
enough after all. I saw him wearing his
medal once, dangling from the white-and-purple ribbon with its silver bar – it
was the day we went to
Stephen stayed on in the Navy after the war; he went into
signals, and presently is Deputy C-in-C Malta.
His first wife was killed in an air-raid, not long after their
honeymoon. Later he married the widow of
a Naval friend of his lost in the
Henry is a surgeon. For some time now he has restricted his practice to facial reconstruction, doing especially gifted work with burned aircrew.
* * * * * * * * *
Nigel Lascelles came to live next door to us. He bought the cottage just down the lane with his inheritance from Daisy’s investments. His war pension was enough to get by on, and he had some private means we never bothered to talk about. We helped-out in his daily life, just to get by, as any friends would be proud to do, and he insisted on paying my mother generously for it. Otherwise, he said, he would have to refuse the help – which none of us wanted. Of course, my brothers never were afraid of him; they had grown-up with his gargoyle-face and found it merely unusual, not hideous at all. I am sure that had a lot to do with Henry’s choice of work, though, seeing throughout his childhood what difference appearance can make to a person.
This meant I saw him almost every day – Nigel, that is. I grew to appreciate his quirky way of looking at things and his eloquence in those quick notes he would jot. He could get to the heart of something in a couple of words. His courage and lack of complaining taught my brothers by example; nobody whined, in our family. ‘Three Men In A Boat’ was the first of dozens and then hundreds of books we shared, in our reading-sessions that were a dear part of every day. I took a pride in never missing one; God knows it was the least I could give, after all he had. It was a while before I realized I was not only one doing the giving. It is a rare gift, to have a friend so interested in all one has to say; I knew I could tell him anything, and often found myself doing so.
He took up painting; I loved to go out with him to gather things for his still-lifes. His ‘Hemlock’ is quite well-known. He also liked to do landscape and figure-work, and with my mother’s permission I modeled for him. So did she, several times. In recent years he has had quite a number of successful exhibitions. I should also like to say that I do not have a blue bottom, however entrancing and strangely lifelike the work called ‘Blue Helen’ may appear.
When I went away to University I knew that he would miss me; I was unprepared for how much I missed him, too. We corresponded almost daily. I dedicated my first book of poems to him. After I got my degree we still wrote, as I taught here and there living in lonely bed-sit flats and found few friends as honest – or as witty. His writing on an envelope could turn a rotten day into a bright one.
With my mother and Harry’s encouragement, after giving-up years earlier, he had worked with one of the best prostheticians in the country to have a partial face-mask made so he could go out in public and gather only stares and not actual disgust. It wasn’t as rigid and artificial-looking as the old one he hated so. We all told him he didn’t ever need to change the way he looked unless he wanted to, but he was ready to give it another try. It didn’t help his speech, unfortunately, nothing could do that, and he couldn’t eat with it on – but it made a huge difference to his confidence in social situations. I realized later why he got it when he did, after not bothering for so many years: it was so he could attend my degree ceremony without causing too big a fuss.
Two years after that he wore it to my wedding, too.
But perhaps that’s another story all to itself — and I really ought to begin again at the beginning, to give it its due.
He deserves that much, at least.