Dead to Me (39 page)

Sitting
on a bench in the garden Verity read a section of Miller’s letter for the third time, with tears running down her face.

I understand that you feel unable to make a commitment to me just now. But what I can’t understand is why, if I so much as hold your hand or put my arm around you, you freeze up. You must know I wouldn’t try to force you into anything, we were good friends for a long time before I so much as kissed you.

So, after weighing everything up, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I repel you that much, I just have to give up on you …

She didn’t blame him for saying this. During the week after rescuing her from Archie, he stayed locally and called every day. They’d been to the pictures together and to the pub, and God knows she had tried so hard not to freeze on him, but it happened involuntarily.

It was early Saturday morning and a beautiful warm, April day. The letter had arrived just as she was putting the kettle on. She had intended to take Ruby and Wilby a cup of tea in bed, but once the letter plopped on to the doormat she forgot the tea and came out here to read it.

The rest of the letter was just like all his others – newsy, warm and funny – until she got nearly to the end and came to the sad part. She thought he had probably started out
writing it several days earlier, then all at once he’d seen the hopelessness of his situation. Who could blame him for saying what he felt?

Ruby came out into the garden wearing just her nightdress, carrying a cup of tea in her hand. She was walking almost normally again now, and the belief that she was going to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair now just seemed like a bad dream.

‘I looked out of the window and saw you were crying, so I guess it isn’t a real love letter?’ she said, holding out the cup of tea to Verity.

‘No, it isn’t.’ Verity lifted a tear-streaked face to her friend, took the tea and tried to smile. ‘He’s got fed up with trying to woo me. I bet you think he was a mug for being patient that week he was here?’

‘Miller is no mug,’ Ruby said reprovingly, sitting down beside Verity. ‘He’s a kind, decent man. I wish – as does Wilby, and everyone else who met him – that it would work out between you two. But I can’t help thinking he was never right for you, and perhaps you instinctively know that. I mean back when he lived in your house in Weardale Road, why didn’t anything ever happen between you? Two people who are meant for each other usually can’t help themselves.’

Verity said nothing. She had thought back to that period in her life so many times and although she remembered having odd little daydreams about Miller, she couldn’t claim to have been, as Ruby would say, ‘lusting’ after him. But then she’d never lusted after anyone in her entire life, and maybe the truth of the matter was that she was frigid?

‘Well?’ Ruby prompted.

‘Maybe I’m just frigid,’ Verity said with a sigh. ‘You’ve always been the physical kind, right from fourteen you were keen on boys. I was never like that.’

‘I don’t believe that. Wilby thinks that you are kind of frozen, waiting for the whole Archie thing to be resolved. Once he’s hanged, you’ll feel completely different,’ Ruby said. ‘It’s only just over a week now, and then you’ll never have to think about him again.’

At first when Archie was charged with the murder of the two women and the attempted murder of Verity, he denied everything vigorously. But as the weight of evidence built up against him, not just for the murders but being cashiered from the army, accused of embezzlement, and with dozens of counts of dishonesty, he folded. He knew he had no chance of being found Not Guilty in a trial by jury with Verity as the principal witness, so he made a full confession.

Summing up at his trial, just a week ago, the judge said Archibald Wood was ‘a thoroughly reprehensible man who had no concept of honesty, and had preyed on women and then killed them to ensure their silence’. He sentenced him to be hanged, and this was due to take place at Exeter Prison on Tuesday the 4th of May.

Just before the trial, Verity had changed her name from Wood to Ferris, her mother’s maiden name, in an attempt to cut Archie out of her life and memory. But the reality was that she didn’t believe it would ever work.

‘Would you like to see Bevan again?’ Ruby asked. ‘He and Luke are going to be stationed at Bristol soon, and I know Bevan would like to see you.’

Verity looked doubtful. Because of Archie coming for
her, and Miller turning up, Ruby had got Luke to explain the situation to Bevan. She was stuck in a difficult place; she liked him very much, but she felt she was no good to man nor beast at the present time. Bevan had sent her some flowers with a card wishing her well, but he hadn’t come to Torquay with Luke since. Or telephoned her.

‘I haven’t got the cheek to rattle his cage again,’ Verity said.

‘I’m going to assume by that you’d be happy if he came and rattled yours, though,’ Ruby said with a giggle.

‘Do you ever think of anything but pairing people off together?’ Verity asked. ‘Wilby told me you thought that air-raid warden with the plummy voice would be good for her.’

‘So he would. He’s a couple of years older than her, a retired lawyer, and he’s got beautiful blue eyes. Besides, he always asks after Wilby, so I know he likes her.’

‘Everyone likes Wilby, and she likes him well enough, but that doesn’t mean she wants a romance.’

‘She might,’ Ruby retorted. ‘Everyone wants one.’

‘I don’t,’ said Verity.

‘That is a lie. You want and need one more than anyone else I know. You just won’t allow yourself to admit it.’

‘Haven’t you got work to go to today?’ Verity said pointedly. ‘Who knows? You might find someone there to browbeat, and give Wilby and me a rest.’

Ruby gasped. ‘Oh yes, work! I’d forgotten, better go, toodle pip.’

Verity chuckled as Ruby went back up the garden. She meant well, she wanted everyone to be as happy as she was. But for her, the day Archie tried to kill her friend was
the day she found she could walk again, so she tended to see most things from a different perspective than Verity.

Ruby had a new receptionist’s job in the Imperial Hotel. When this hotel had been built, it was said to be the finest outside London, and many very famous people and even royalty had stayed there. Ruby loved it, even if the work wasn’t as varied as it had been in the Palace. The guests were mainly officers on leave, often with their wives, visiting military personnel, and some wounded officers who were recuperating before going back to their regiments. Verity had been astounded by how quickly Ruby had bounced back to her former self once she was walking again. Verity just wished she too could become the girl she used to be.

Last night, Ruby was showing Brian and Colin how to jitterbug. Ruby had been to a class run by an American at the Imperial to learn it, and she was finding it quite frustrating that outside her class she had no partner who could dance with her. She’d been bullying Verity to learn too, but by the time Verity got home from work she felt too tired to do energetic dances.

The war was plodding on. Verity and Ruby went every Wednesday night to the cinema without fail. Pathé News was almost as popular as the main film, although most people thought it was slanted to make it look like the Allies were winning.

Montgomery had broken through the Mareth Line in North Africa, and with the Allies pressing ahead in Tunisia, it really did look as if they had the Germans on the run. The war in the Pacific appeared to have reached a climax too, as the increasingly outnumbered Japanese had
failed to dislodge the Americans from Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

Luke and Bevan were involved in concentrated bombing raids on Germany’s industrial heartland, something Ruby worried about a great deal. As she pointed out, everyone said how brave the pilots were, forgetting that the other men in the aeroplanes who despatched the bombs, like Luke and Bevan, or those who were wireless operators or navigators, were just as brave and every bit as likely to be killed if their plane was shot down.

Verity sat for a little longer in the garden. April was such a lovely month, all the greenery so vivid and new against the yellow of forsythia and daffodils, a reminder that winter had gone for another year and soon there would be the long, hot days of summer to look forward to. The chickens were clucking away in their pen beneath the fruit trees, and the white pear blossom was just unfolding. Her thoughts turned to Miller again, and how their last evening together had ended. He’d kissed her as they were walking back from the pub, nudging her back into a shop doorway, but it was too desperate a kiss for her to cope with. He pressed his body hard against hers, and she could feel his erection. His tongue seemed to go right down her throat, reminding her of something she wanted to forget.

To be fair to him, he’d stopped the minute she protested, but he was sulky, and she knew then that it wasn’t going to work out. Her sadness now wasn’t because of losing him exactly, more that she was afraid she would always feel that revulsion towards men. She also feared she was destined to spend her entire life as a spinster like Aunt Hazel.

‘Luke and Bevan are coming down on a twenty-four-hour pass on the
27th of May,’ Ruby announced a few days after Verity got the letter from Miller. ‘They are going to drive down from Bristol.’

‘Bevan’s okay about me?’ Verity asked, suddenly feeling a little anxious.

‘His words were, “It’ll be great to see her, I’ll embarrass her with my appalling efforts at the jitterbug”.’

Verity laughed. She could imagine Bevan saying that; he wasn’t a great dancer, though he was an enthusiastic one. ‘Did you tell Luke that Miller has broken it off with me?’

‘Not exactly.’ Ruby screwed up her face. ‘You see I didn’t want you to look like the abandoned one, so I just said it fizzled out.’

‘It never fizzed in the first place,’ Verity said. ‘I hope you aren’t going to hope for it fizzing with Bevan either?’

‘All I ask is that you laugh and have a good time,’ Ruby said. ‘And you must help me make a gorgeous dress out of that stripy material Wilby dug out.’

On the morning of the 4th of May, Verity got up early and went for a walk. At eight, the time she knew Archie would be executed, she was in the church praying.

She didn’t consider herself to be religious at all, but she and Ruby went to church most Sundays with Wilby. She couldn’t bring herself to admit it to anyone, but she’d got the idea in her head that Archie wouldn’t hang, in just the same way as John Lee, ‘the man they couldn’t hang’, hadn’t been executed all those years ago.

Maybe it was because Ruby used to tell her creepy stories about John Lee, about how the trapdoor failed to open
three times. It was the same prison, so presumably the same trapdoor, perhaps even the same hangman. She kept getting the strange feeling that she’d open a door one day, or turn a corner, and Archie would be there.

She’d said, ‘You are dead to me,’ umpteen times when these thoughts came to her. She had never forgotten how powerful those five words of Ruby’s had sounded to her, and she half believed that by saying them to Archie they would act as a kind of amulet against it ever happening. But today she’d decided she needed God’s help, and she was here today to thank him for keeping her safe, and to pray that Archie really would die at Exeter prison.

As she came out of the church and saw the sun shining, and beautiful cherry blossom in so many of the gardens, all at once she felt lighter, as if a burden had been lifted from her shoulders. Somehow, without any confirmation, she knew Archie was dead now; she could put him, and all he’d put her through, to one side.

A new era was about to begin.

‘She’s so much better now she knows he’s dead,’ Wilby whispered to Ruby that evening as she prepared their supper. ‘It’s almost like she’s shed a skin, there’s a new lightness about her.’

Ruby glanced towards the hall. She could hear Brian and Colin playing some noisy game in the sitting room, and Verity was in there with them. ‘I’m really hoping that she and Bevan will enjoy being together at the end of the month. I’m not expecting true love or anything like that, but just to see her having fun will be wonderful.’

‘Well, we’re all united in that hope. I have been worried
that there might be a lot of upsetting gossip about the hanging from neighbours, her work colleagues and so on. But when Verity got in from work she said people were kind, just the odd sympathetic smile, offers that if she wanted to talk they were there. But then I suppose the newspapers have printed so much about him, and what a monster he was, that most people just feel glad it’s all over.’

On the Saturday night following the hanging, Ruby and Verity went to the pictures in Torquay to see
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. They came out with tear-stained faces, as the ending was so sad. At Ruby’s suggestion they went on to the Imperial Hotel, as she knew all the staff there.

It was a very jolly evening. A couple of American officers insisted on plying them with drinks, they had a few dances, and by the time they made for home both girls were a little squiffy.

They walked back a little unsteadily, arm in arm, giggling about the two Americans who had been over fifty, balding and had a high opinion of themselves.

‘I loved the way you kept bringing the subject back to their wives and children,’ Ruby said. ‘It completely stopped them trying anything on.’

‘I don’t think I ever want to go to Iowa now, it sounded as dull as ditchwater,’ Verity sniggered. ‘I wonder if all Americans are like that? Constantly bragging about their wonderful country, and pointing out England’s shortcomings.’

‘Most of the ones I’ve met have been,’ Ruby said. ‘But then I’ve only met officers, I’m sure the rank and file are a darn sight more exciting.’

Wilby had gone to bed, and the house was in darkness when they got home. Ruby made them both a cup of cocoa and put a drop of brandy in each cup.

‘Like we need any more drink,’ Verity said. ‘My legs seem to have a mind of their own.’

Once up in their beds, with the curtains drawn, cocoa drunk and the light turned out, Verity suddenly began speaking about Archie.