A Place Of Strangers (5 page)

Chapter Nine

McCall fell ill with bacterial pneumonia on New Year’s Day.
His forehead was hot and damp, the right side of his chest in spasms of pain.
The white sheets were speckled with a fine spray of blood coughed up during the
sleepless night. A locum drove out to Garth Hall and prescribed antibiotics.

Francis was nowhere to be found as Bea and Evie prepared
lunch.

‘You must think us a family of old crocks, Evie.’

‘No, it’s Mac working too hard that’s the fault and him not
looking after himself.’

‘I’m afraid you’re right. That boy has always worried me.’

Evie was due to catch a late afternoon train back to London.
Part of her did not want to go. For someone who read maths at Somerville and
was an empiricist if nothing else, the indefinable presence she experienced in
the stillness of Garth’s long, low drawing room defied rational explanation. It
was as if she was being led by those who had once dwelt there and now awaited
her, too. She could just about describe the how of what she felt but not why.

Less ethereally, Evie also knew she was being tested,
auditioned to complete Bea’s mission in life. But could she ever measure up to
Helen’s broken promise? Or did the entrancingly painted scenery of Garth Hall
hide a stage door through which it would be wiser to disappear before the
audience whistled her off?

McCall was asleep when Evie went to kiss him goodbye. Bea
drove her to Ludlow Station but the London connection was delayed two hours by
more bad weather. Bea suggested coffee and cake at De Grey’s Café.

Flurries of snow danced around the spangled Christmas
decorations still strung between Ludlow’s narrow streets. Clee Hill loomed in
the distance, pure white against a slate blue sky.

‘What of your people, Evie... your parents?’

‘There’s only my father.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. Your mother’s passed on, has she?’

‘In a way, yes.’

Evie was aware she did not have to reply in these terms. But
like McCall said, everyone has need of a priest some day.

‘How do you mean, Evie?’

‘She left us... I was only little.’

‘How awful. But you and your father must be very close.’

‘Yes... we were, once.’

Again, there was a pause, a silence Evie deliberately left
in the air.

‘But not anymore? You’ve had a falling out?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘Do you want to tell me what it was about?’

Bea leaned across the table and took Evie’s hand in her own.
Evie was suddenly close to tears and looked away.

‘He says he never wants to see me again.’

‘No, surely not. Why should he say such a terrible thing?’

‘It’s my work, you see... he’s never approved of what I do.’

‘What’s he got against it?’

‘He says I’m a traitor.’

‘A traitor? To whom?’

‘A traitor to him, to my class... everything he’s ever
worked for.’

‘And what’s his job?’

‘He’s a miner... or he was till this damned strike began and
his pit closed down.’

‘I see... and your work, Evie – what is it that you really
do?’

‘Can’t you guess? Francis did.’

*

In his fever, McCall wandered through time and space. Garth
had thirty rooms, attics and cellars and poky places where maids once curled up
after each long day.

Some were shut off like graves from where the dead had
risen. Aunt Lavinia’s was one such room, a little bed-sit mured at the end of a
passageway, chilly and unlit and frightening for a child.

He remembered her dressing table-cum-desk and red plush
armchair set by a tiny hob grate. Lavinia was Francis’s aunt, a widow from the
Great War who could go from happy to sad in a second.

McCall could still see her damp old eyes. But she
disappeared from his life one day and they would never tell him why.

The rug by her single bed was worn through to the threads.
Behind the curtains, bleached by the sun till their pattern was almost gone,
the husks of emptied flies spun slowly from broken webs of gossamer.

Her sensible skirts and dresses still lay in the chest of
drawers where she left them, smelling of talc and mothballs. And in the oval
photograph on the wall, she stood in front of Garth Hall, forever twenty years
old and in a pale cotton shift and so bashfully happy shortly before her
marriage. Not long after, a telegram boy would bring the worst of news from
France.

In McCall’s early, bewildered times, he thought Lavinia a
magician – an inventor of games, a teller of stories, the keeper of all the
secrets of Garth Woods.

‘Am I staying here forever?’

‘Would you like to?’

‘Can I?’

‘Of course you can. This is your home now. We’re your new
family.’

 
‘Are you my Mummy?’

‘No, not quite.’

‘So is Bea my Mummy?’

‘More than me, yes. But you’re very lucky – you’ve got both
of us.’

‘Who is my Daddy, now?’

‘Well, that’s Francis, isn’t it ? He’s your special new
Daddy.’

‘And where’s my other Mummy, the one I used to have?’

‘She’s gone away, my lovely.’

‘Is she coming back one day?’

‘I don’t think she is, no.’

‘Where is she, then?’

‘A long way away so it’s best you forget her. You’re Bea and
Francis’s, now.’

So he does... and he is. They possess him, body and soul and
mould the surrogate son they wanted. But McCall lacks their warrior streak. He
is made of a much lesser clay – easily broken, hard to mend. Why didn’t Helen
realise that?

‘I need to get away from all of this, Mac.’

‘All what? What do you mean?’

‘From London, all these wedding plans. It’s getting too much
for me.’

‘Why don’t we go up to Garth for a long weekend?’

‘No, I want some time for me. A bit of peace and quiet on my
own.’

‘Something’s wrong. What is it?’

‘Nothing’s wrong, honestly.’

‘So where will you go?’

‘I haven’t decided yet... somewhere wild, somewhere by the
sea.’

‘On your own?’

‘Of course on my own. Silly.’

She holds his gaze for a moment longer than needed. Does he
know then? Is this the moment he realises? She touches his cheek and smiles so
he cannot see behind her soft green eyes. A taxi arrives. Her bag is already
packed. Everything is planned. No words are spoken. So what remains fixed in
amber from that day? Her marmalade hair, back-lit by the sun, new jeans,
stone-washed, long legs wherein he would never lie again. Then she is gone with
the life growing inside her.

He would sit in St Mary and All Angels. Here, they would
have wed, have had their children baptised. McCall imagined all the revenant
faces of those whose imbricated lives of farce and tragedy had played out in
Garth, staring down the centuries at him, waiting for the next act... or the
last call. After McCall, there might be nothing. Then he would have failed
everyone.

*

Wintry farmland blurred by the carriage window as Evie made
herself small in a corner seat with a book she could barely settle to read. Her
mind was taken up with McCall, the lost boy, Francis going senile, Bea –
clever, shrewd, wicked old Bea. Bea asked and never told. What a spy she would
have made. Only the vetters knew something of Evie’s background – and now this
old lady. How interesting. It was a question of trust, of unburdening oneself.
And feeling the better for it.

The train came to an unscheduled halt between bare,
tractor-rutted fields and ditches of dirty melt water from the thawing snow.

Evie shivered. She was reminded of home, of Rixton Moss and
the peaty, black earth that heaved and shifted and could swallow a house. Gales
would cut clean across the flat land from the Irish Sea, tearing the
sedge-fringed birch woods and forcing smoke back down their chimney.

She would sit with Dad, still grime-eyed from his shift at
Astley Green but with nothing to get washed for anymore. She had gone back to
Dublin... his wife, her mother. Gone to whoring where she came from. Evie had
not understood. Not then.

Mum had unruly red hair, too. Sometimes, father would look
at daughter and she could not be sure if he loved or hated what he saw. They
said bodies could rise from the peat, sacrificed centuries before with the fear
still set in the face. Evie would dream of this, of finding her mother floating
in one of the long, dark dykes on the Moss, her hair trailing behind like a
wake of blood.

*

McCall had his chest X-rayed at hospital and was told he was
still not fit to go back to work. That morning, he saw Mrs Craven who had
inherited the role of Garth’s cleaner and occasional cook from her mother,
Winnie Bishop. He asked after the old lady’s health.

‘Doing her best but showing her years like the rest of us.’

‘I could do with a walk. Maybe I’ll go and see her.’

McCall’s affection for Mrs Bishop ran deep. It was to her he
looked during Bea’s long trips abroad with Francis. If Bea represented the
manorial, Mrs Bishop was the village. And Winnie had her own reasons to covet
McCall.

Garth Woods were eerily still that morning, dripping damp
with fog. He crossed Pigs’ Brook and walked up the church field to the old
people’s bungalows which backed onto the cemetery. Mrs Bishop greeted him in a
clean white pinny, freshly ironed.

‘I’ve seen you look better, young Francis. Pneumonia isn’t
to be sneezed at so you take care not to do too much too soon.’

Her kitchen table never lacked for cakes she had just baked.
As she went to boil a kettle for tea, so the mournful church bell rang. Through
the bungalow’s patio doors, McCall could just make out the black-caped vicar
and a string of stooping mourners on a slow march through the mist. Mrs Bishop
stood beside him.

‘There’s another one who’s got the secret.’

She was full of folk sayings and bits of country lore –
could never abide knives left crossed on a plate, would not pass another person
on the stairs. Misfortune needed no encouragement for Winnie Bishop.

Hers was slate and chalk wisdom. Book learning counted for
little but she knew right from wrong.

Mrs Bishop fussed over McCall as she always had, making sure
his plate was full and he was warm before the gas fire, shelved with the Toby
jugs and pot dogs he remembered on her cottage mantelpiece above the cast iron
range where she had cooked and he had felt safe. She handed him a fold of
paper.

‘I’ve been clearing out. You have this... isn’t much.’

It was a crudely printed coloured map of the world at war in
1916, draped with Union Jacks and patriotic servicemen.

‘Got this for knitting a jumper for Empire Day.’

To Winnie Gwilt, who has helped to send comfort to
the brave Sailors and Soldiers of the British Empire who are fighting to uphold
Honour, Freedom and Justice.

‘It’s lovely, Mrs B, but wouldn’t your daughter want it?’

‘Doesn’t like history things, her. You have it, Francis.’

Few people ever used his proper name. Mrs Bishop always had
from those first blank days when she had fed him beef tea and boiled eggs and
let him play with anything he liked in the kitchen scullery at Garth Hall. She
knew about the car crash and told Alf, her husband, she just wanted to take the
poor little mite home because he didn’t weigh more than a ha’porth of copper
and couldn’t speak a word from shock.

McCall smiled at her fondly – smaller than in memory, colour
gone from her pot doll cheeks, her hair no more than a winter frost.

‘It’s really kind, Mrs B. A lovely present.’

‘I’ve writ some words on the back.’

He read them, smiling, knowing she meant every one. Then she
produced an envelope of photographs and spread them across the table like Tarot
cards. McCall had not seen these before – little Box Brownie prints of Alf,
tie-less and tipsy and leaning against the chrome radiator of his Lanchester
outside some pub, Mrs Bishop looking self-conscious on a day out, wearing other
people’s cast-offs and hoping it didn’t show.

And there was a picture of McCall, no more than seven,
laughing on Mrs Bishop’s back step with David, the boy she would lose to
leukaemia and who now lay on the other side of her garden wall. McCall smiled
to himself and shook his head.

‘God fits the back for the burden, Francis – ’

Both boys were in short pants, sandals, home made pullovers
and happy. David was a late baby and all the more loved for that. But in the
picture, his dark eyes were already hollowing out. She must have known, even
then. She would have to give him back.

‘– but Alf was never the same after. Killed him in the end,
it did.’

‘I can just about remember David’s funeral.’

‘I can never forget it.’

‘What a heartbreak for you.’

‘If you’d not been there to look after, Francis, I think I’d
have done myself in.’

McCall thought he should go. But Mrs B kept ruching the edge
of her pinny and clearing her throat. She had more to impart, something bottled
up and corked with age.

‘Never seemed right to me, not fair at all.’

‘You mean about David?’

‘Not just that though the Lord knows it hurt enough.’

‘What then, Mrs B?’

She picked at the tablecloth, biding her time. When her
words came, they were as bitter as only the old can make them, dried in a heart
shrivelled by hurt.

‘Them at Garth... didn’t always want you, you know... not as
much as me.’

‘Bea and Francis? But they took me in when I had no one.’

‘Not your own flesh and blood, they wasn’t.’

‘No, but they were the next best thing – ’

‘– as I could’ve been. I prided in you. I was as close to
you as them, wasn’t I?’

‘Of course – as good as any mother to me, you were.’

‘Well, there’s some that forgot that in all their
goings-on.’