Joy and Josephine (34 page)

Jo got to her feet crying, knees bleeding through torn stockings, her hat gone, her face as he had never seen it. She clung to him, dirtying his suit with her muddy hands. He held her off a little, trying to hear what she was stuttering between sobs.

‘Something terrible’s happened. Oh, Felix, something terrible. They said … Oh, I saw her! I wish I was dead.’

‘Well, don’t let’s stand here,’ he said. ‘You’ll have a crowd collecting. Get in the car. What you need is a drink.’

‘No,’ she said, as he put her in, ‘no I don’t. I’ve got to know. I must go home and make them tell. I must find someone who knows.’

‘There, there.’ He patted her knee. ‘Leave it to little Felix; he’ll look after you. Drinkie first, then you shall tell me all about it.’

Jo slumped in the seat and stared vacantly as they drove along. She did not know where they were going. She was not thinking properly at all. She had terrible thoughts to think, but her brain would not tackle them yet.

She allowed Felix to lead her into his flat. When he sat her on the couch and drew off her stockings, she hardly noticed, except
to wince as they pulled away from the clotted blood on her knees.

He brought a bottle of antiseptic. ‘Here,’ he said, handing her some cotton wool, ‘you do it. The sight of blood always turns me.’ She held the cotton wool without using it, staring down at her grazed knees as if they belonged to someone else.

He gave her a very stiff drink, then glass in hand, leaned against the mantelpiece, inspecting her. ‘Well, you do look a wreck,’ he said.

‘I don’t care.’ She gulped at her drink, choked, then sipped more carefully, feeling the whisky run like fire behind her breast-bone.

‘Come on, come on,’ he said, ‘give. Tell me all about it, and then you can go and clean up, and we’ll have some dinner.’

‘I couldn’t.’ She shuddered.

‘No dinner? Nonsense, kid, a girl’s got to eat. The chorus girl’s motto.’ He laughed.

‘I couldn’t tell you, I mean. It’s too awful. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’ She looked shrunken and forlorn on the vastness of the sofa which took up almost half the small room.

‘I can’t help you unless you come clean.’ He bent to switch on the electric fire, which purred into the semblance of glowing coals.

‘Felix,’ she leaned forward, not caring what she looked like. ‘Have you ever heard of a place called Bolt Bay?’

‘Strikes a chord. Devonshire, isn’t it? Near Queensbridge? That’s right, there’s quite a decent new hotel there, the Crab and Lobster Pot. Renée and I had lunch there once when we – well, never mind.’

‘Devonshire …’ Jo caught her breath. ‘Felix, will you help me?’

‘Sure thing. Just say the word.’

‘I want you to take me to Bolt Bay to-night.’

‘To-night? You’re crazy. It’s two hundred miles.’

‘I don’t care. I must go at once. It’s probably too late for a train but we could get there in a car.’

‘And stay there at the Crab and Lobster Pot? Rather fun.’
He made his naughty eyes. ‘Let’s go to-morrow, Jo. Have a good sleep and get some pretty things together, and we’ll make a real do of it.’

‘You don’t understand. I want to go there now.’

‘Drive all night? Nothing would induce me.’

‘You said you’d help. I’ve got no one else.’

‘What about your boy friend with the motor bike?’

‘Norman?’ she said, horrified. ‘Oh God, I couldn’t tell him. How could I?’ Suppose he knew, and had been laughing at her, or worse, pitying her all this time? Suppose everyone knew – Violet, the Moores, Billy? But there could not be anything for them to know. It couldn’t be true.

‘No, my dear,’ Felix sat beside her, dropping his voice to velvet persuasion. ‘You get some rest first. You can stay here if you want, and I’ll take you anywhere in the world to-morrow. We might run up to Gleneagles if you like, or I’ll pop you over to Le Touquet and teach you to play Chemi. I’m awfully glad, dear, you’re going to give me a break at last.’

She sprang away from his hand. ‘Oh God, did you think –?’ It was almost funny. She began to laugh hysterically. He wondered whether he ought to slap her. He went through to the kitchenette for a glass of water to make her drink or to throw in her face. When he came back, she was standing by the bookshelf, reading a railway timetable.

She was quiet and controlled now. She banged the book shut and asked where there was a mirror. He put her into the bathroom and she came out five minutes later with her face clean and bravely made up, and a childlike cross of sticking plaster on each bare knee.

She walked straight to the door. ‘Good-bye,’ she said, ‘and thanks for everything.’

‘Come and sit down,’ Felix said. ‘Here’s a drink for you. Where are you going to in such a hurry?’

‘To Bolt Bay, of course. I told you. I can just get the last train to Queensbridge to-night.’

‘Oh, now, hold on, Jo,’ he said, going to her. ‘I’ll take you there if you’re really set on going. We’ll call round at the Piccolo and get Luigi to put us up some cold lobster and bubbly. Rather
fun. The wireless will keep us awake all night; God bless Radio Normandy.’

‘No,’ she went out into the tiny hall. ‘I don’t want you to take me. I want to go alone. I’m all right.’

‘Oh, be sensible, Jo. Well then, let me run you to the station.’

‘No, please, Felix. I’ll get a taxi. Good-bye.’

‘When will I see you?’ he followed her to the lift.

‘I don’t know. Sometime – never – ’ she called through the golden grille, and was gone from him.

The train reached Queensbridge at six o’clock in the morning. It was the end of the line; nobody called out the name of the station, and Jo slept on for a while in the empty carriage. She woke to the sound of milk churns and seagulls, and smelled the tangy air. The bright morning light hurt her eyes. She still had the headache that had started in the flat, hours and hours ago, and had drummed to the train’s rhythm all night, even while she dozed. Who am I? Who am I? The torment went with her through the dark counties.

Swinging her legs to the floor, she frowned at the pain in her grazed knees. She walked stiffly along the empty platform to where a porter, collarless in an unbuttoned waistcoat, was thudding wads of newspapers out of the van.

‘How can I get to Bolt Bay?’ she asked him.

He stopped work and leaned against the side of the van. ‘Let’s see now,’ he mused. ‘First bus don’t go till eleven. Or later if the down train aren’t on time.’

Jo began already to feel a little calmed by the slow Devon voice which she had not heard since her holiday at Seacombe. She had hardly been out of London since then. She had forgotten that there were still people in England who were not in a hurry.

‘I suppose I couldn’t get a taxi?’ she asked.

The porter laughed. ‘Not yet, you couldn’t. You won’t get Bill Edwards out, not for two hours nor more. You best go on up to the hotel, Missy, and wait there.’

Jo rang at the locked door of the hotel, but no one answered. She walked down the sleeping street to the creek, which was
rank with law tide. There were some fishermen about, and a man tarring a boat and two boys digging in the mud for worms. No one paid any attention to her as she wandered about on the littered shore, unable to rest. It was like one of those dreams in which you watch a scene without being part of it. These were dream people in a dream landscape. She was the real, sleeping person who was creating the dream in her head.

She was cold and hungry. Presently she went back and pealed the hotel bell again. A maid let her in and flopped straight down again to polishing the floor. Jo stepped over her and penetrated in search of someone who would give her a bath and breakfast. She had been through too much to be daunted by the off-hand reception of an English hotel out of hours. She got what she wanted.

As soon as the shops were open, she bought stockings and a jersey, for she was not dressed for a spring morning. She was dressed for dinner in town, in a silk dress, black fur fabric coat, and thin high-heeled shoes. She found Bill Edwards pottering about a tinny old upright car. He was obese and amenable.

Would he take her to Bolt Bay? Surely. She was for the hotel, no doubt. All the London-clad ladies was for the Crab and Lobster Pot, as they called it.

Oh no,’ she said, with a fleeting memory of Felix, ‘isn’t there some place where they have babies – an orphanage or something, I suppose it is? That’s where I want to go.’

‘Would it be Bolt House? They’ve got babies enough there. Some kind of mental home, that do be.’

‘What?’
The pain in Jo’s head hammered anew at this climax to the nightmare. Bumbling in the car up and down the narrow lanes, she scarcely heard Bill Edwards’ friendly conversation.

Who am I?
What
am I? I’m all right; I did all right at school. I’ve never felt different to other people, except – she pressed her hand to her head. Was that why she had these headaches? Was that what her mother meant by ‘nerves’? But I’m normal, I’m clever, I’m Jo! Yes, but there might be some taint, and that was why they would not tell her who she was.

When they slipped down the valley road into Bolt Bay, she was too upset to notice the beauty of the little sunny harbour in
its nest of cool hills thick with bracken. She hardly noticed the great glaring hotel, usurping the cliff edge, where Felix and someone called Renée had had lunch. Her eyes were set on the white many-windowed house, towards which they were snaking up a private drive.

She ought to feel something, coming back like this, but she could not believe she had ever been here. She could never have been one of
those.
She stared fascinated at a nurse in a cape wheeling out a packed pram, with other children in pixie hoods trotting along tied to it by reins, like gipsy ponies to a caravan.

The wind blew into the porch, but the hall was warm, and smelled of central heating. ‘I’d like to speak to whoever is in charge here,’ she told the maid, hardly able to control her voice now that she had reached the moment for which she had travelled two hundred miles.

‘The Matron? I’ll see if she’s free.’ Jo heard her talk to a loud, cheerful voice, and then the maid came back for her.

She did not know that this was the sitting-room where Mrs Abinger and Miss Loscoe and Rodney Cope had once had tea; that she was sitting now on the sofa where she had once lain bandaged in a stupor of shock and brandy. She did not know that the nut-brown, jolly woman who now wrung her hand had once dandled and giggled over her, for the present Matron of Bolt House was the very junior Nurse Tillings, matured, but not subdued. The responsibility of authority had quashed her high spirits no more that Mrs Jessop’s terror tactics had ever managed to do.

‘Trying to trace a baby who was here long ago?’ she cried. ‘What fun!’ Jo did not think it was fun. She was tired, and Miss Tillings exhausted her.

‘Harbinger, you said? I’ll look in the records,’ She dashed at her desk. Her movements were those of an overgrown schoolgirl. Jo waited quietly, holding her breath.

‘About twenty years back, you said?’ She dropped the big ledger on the floor and laughed at herself as she picked it up. ‘Nineteen twenty, nineteen nineteen, nineteen eighteen – oh,
do
you remember the Armistice? No, of course, you’re too young. Heyday!’

They said that mental doctors and nurses sometimes became slightly cracked themselves. Jo grew a little nervous, not realizing that Miss Tillings was simply a child of nature, who, living all her life among children, had never met enough grownups to learn their creed of dissembling. She uttered what she thought, and did what she felt like doing. Jo thought she was a little mad, until she recollected with horror that to think others mad was supposed to be a sign that you were mad yourself.

‘Nineteen eighteen … No Harbinger here. Oh,
Abinger.
Now you’re talking. Here we are! Adopted by Abinger. Called Josephine Abinger. October the tenth, nineteen eighteen. I must have been here then – a very green junior – but I don’t call the kiddie to mind. But there’ve been so many since, by Jove, so many. If all the nappies I’ve ever changed were placed end to end, they’d reach from here to – ’

‘Who was the baby?’ Jo interrupted her. ‘Does it give the name of the parents?’ She leaned forward, breathing fast, and tried to look at the book, but Miss Tillings clapped it shut.

‘Private document,’ she chided. ‘Now, now! Official secrets. I’ll tell you though, it says: “Parents unknown”. Oh, never fear, lots are – abandoned, you know. By Jove, I do remember this one! She was found in a church porch, just like a story.’

‘Who found her?’

‘The old Priest at St Joseph’s up on the hill. Poor old man, he brought her down late one night and we gave him a cup of tea.’

‘I’d like to go and see him,’ Jo said urgently. ‘Does he still live here?’

‘Good Lord, no, the poor old soul went away years ago. Probably dead. He had one foot in the grave then.’ She suddenly clicked her fingers, and lolloped down on the sofa beside Jo, making the springs bounce. ‘I do remember, that was the night of the fire. That baby got burned, and another one was killed. Old Jessop – that was the Matron we had then, a proper old tartar – was in a fearful lather about it.’

‘Tell me.’ Jo turned to her.

‘Oh, I can’t dear, really.’ Miss Tillings thumped her forehead. I don’t remember. Anyway, I’m not supposed to give away
confidential information. I’ve told you too much already, but I couldn’t help it. I like you. You’re a nice girl, what the French call
sympatico,
or would that be Spaniards? But I expect lots of men have told you that,’ she ended rather wistfully, as if she regretted the men who had not told it to her.

‘You must tell me,’ Jo urged, ‘because I’m that baby. Honestly, I’m Josephine Abinger. Look, this will prove it. Here’s the little cross thing they found on me.’

‘I don’t remember anything about that,’ said Miss Tillings, ‘but I say, how rum. Are you really one of our babes? It must feel funny to come back to a place after twenty years. Did you come to recapture old associations, like Old Girls’ Day at school – best years of my life and all that?’

Her unbridled laugh infuriated Jo. Things were bad enough without this creature making a nightmare joke of them. ‘No,’ she said, tersely, ‘I came to find out who I am, and you aren’t much help.’