Spare Brides (26 page)

Dear Beatrice,

What you feel is pity. If not pity for me, pity for yourself.

Don’t.

Yours with respect,

Arnold Oaksley

The words tortured her conscience. Why had he written to her? Why not to his father? There hadn’t been any other note, Sir Peter had reassured her on that point, quite vigorously. There had only been her at the end. Or had she brought about his end? Was it the case that he’d rather be dead than with her? The lofty arches of the museum began to swim in front of her. She needed some air. She might pack up early and walk back to Ava’s tonight. She couldn’t bear the idea of getting on the cramped and stuffy tube. She didn’t want to be so close to so many people. She didn’t want to have to walk past the soldiers with missing limbs who begged outside the tube station. She did not dare do it.

A
VA NOTICED BEA’S
peaky pallor she moment she came in the front door. She looked cold, even though the sun had finally squeezed through the clouds and was still warming the streets now at five o’clock. Ava couldn’t understand how such an insulated person could feel the cold so vitally.

‘I have cake and port,’ she declared. She was feeling munificent. Today she had been with her new friend Marie Stopes and some other interested parties. They’d spent the afternoon trailing from door to door in the East End of London talking to women ravaged with poverty and numerous children about contraception. Marie had written a sixteen-page pamphlet
called
Wise Parenthood:
A Letter to Working Mothers on how to have healthy children and avoid weakening pregnancies.
Even though the pamphlet was distributed free of charge, it was rarely well received. The level of illiteracy and the sustained mistrust the poor felt for the meddling middle and upper classes meant that the women who most needed advice were reluctant to listen. Often these campaigning days were exhausting. The earnest and conscientious could not cut through the fumes of cockney tobacco and the air of exhausted indifference; jeers and catcalls drowned out Ava’s salient points about birth control. However, today she had met and charmed a raucous, bibulous, but undoubtedly influential matriarch, who had insisted that her three daughters, two daughters-in-law and eleven granddaughters (two of whom were already obviously pregnant) listen to ‘What the posh lady says about the shunning of getting one in.’ It had been a great success. If just one unwanted pregnancy was avoided, then Ava had achieved something today. She felt celebratory.

Bea collapsed into a chair by the fire and threw down her hat. ‘Thank you, cake and port is just what I need.’ She ate greedily, as though she was alone.

Ava wasn’t famed for having an especially sentimental bent, but she did see the pity in a girl eating alone; it prompted her to ask, ‘So, how was your day?’

‘Productive.’

‘Can I see?’

Ava had asked the same thing every night for the past four days, but Bea had always baulked at the thought of exposing her work. Today, she was emboldened by Edgar Trent’s comments; she dug around in her satchel and retrieved the sketchbook.

Ava carefully turned the pages and echoed Lydia and Edgar’s enthusiasm. ‘These are quite special, Bea. I’m surprised.’

Bea sighed. ‘I do wish you could have stopped with the first sentence. Why do all your compliments have to come with a barb?’

Ava smiled. Recently Bea had started to say what she thought, and Ava liked it. Everyone assumed that her impatience with Bea came from the fact that Bea was so hopelessly frumpy; it did not. What Ava objected to was her passivity. Now that she was proving to be a little more spiky, Ava was finding her all the more palatable.

‘I’m not trying to be barbed. It’s just these sketches are so unexpected.’

‘What were you expecting?’

‘Oh, you know, wishy-washy landscapes in pastels.’

‘I see.’

‘These are …’ Ava thought about it. ‘Tender, yet angry.’ She had not thought Beatrice was particularly familiar with either emotion. She looked up at her. ‘Darling, what are you angry about?’

Bea glared. ‘How can you ask?’

Ava thought this was unfair. She had a full and busy life. She met hundreds of people through her parties and soirées and hundreds more through her campaigning and charities; most of them were angry. One had to ask. She wasn’t the sort of woman who had time to spare conjecturing and imagining what was on the mind of others. She felt much more comfortable with facts. She took a sip of port. Its velvety taste was too much for such a bright spring evening; she wondered what she should switch to. Gin was vulgar, sherry was ageing, champagne was frivolous and cocktails were lethal. That decided it. She rang for the maid and asked her to mix champagne cocktails.

Once they were furnished with drinks, Ava asked, ‘Are you enjoying your break?’

Bea nodded tightly. Ava had invited Beatrice to London because Sarah had asked her to. No one ever said no to Sarah because everyone felt bad about Arthur dying and all that effort Sarah put into caring for her disabled brother. Sarah had suggested that Bea needed a change. Ava had, for once, bitten her tongue and not said what she was thinking – which was that Bea certainly didn’t need a rest; what did the woman do all day?

She considered Bea’s tight nod. It was obvious that the girl was churned up about something; her eyes bulged, she blinked rapidly. Was she about to cry? Ava hoped not. A good hostess couldn’t ignore tears, but they were terribly dull.

In many ways Bea was proving to be an easy guest to accommodate: she ate anything, at any time, was quiet and grateful; as long as there were chocolates, hot water and a fire, she seemed to be in heaven. Ava could provide all of these without inconveniencing herself at all. A rare breeze of guilt blew across her; admittedly she hadn’t done much to entertain Bea. They hadn’t actually spent any time together alone, they had so very little in common. Manners dictated that she’d seen to it that her invitations to lunch parties and dinners were extended to Bea, but other than that she’d left Bea to her own devices. She could have, perhaps, taken her to the Birdcage in Piccadilly, a famous but very tame underground dancing club. It oozed nostalgia in a way that Ava found a little nauseating – the men wore white tie and tails, they all kept carnations in their buttonholes. Alcohol was not permitted. Obviously alcohol was illegal in a number of dancing establishments, but the Birdcage had rather a quaint view of rules: they abided by them. Iced coffee and a brilliant soft pink drink were served with tea-time cakes and sandwiches. They played pre-war waltzes and one knew the evening was over when the band struck up the National Anthem. Ava sighed to herself, admitting it was quite likely to be Bea’s idea of perfection. Ava herself only ever condescended to attend if the Prince of Wales asked her personally.

‘Your sketches really are quite exhilarating, Bea.’

Ava’s belief that one ought not to be too sympathetic and nice was given credence when Bea immediately burst into tears, something she’d always resisted doing despite enduring years of Ava’s spiky comments. No doubt embarrassed by her lack of control, she quickly became hysterical. Some people were beautiful weepers; Bea was not. Her face looked like a world map, with purple blotches of shame drifting like continents. Snot, saliva and tears poured forth. Ava wondered whether she ought to offer her handkerchief, but she was worried that any further act of kindness might aggravate the situation. She was relieved when Bea retrieved one of her own from her bag.

‘I’m so very lonely,’ Bea gasped. Ava initially misheard her and thought she had said, ‘I’m so very lovely’. She’d wanted to giggle because, well, frankly, the girl had a face only a grandmother could love; Ava often found mirth in the most inconvenient of places. When she finally understood, she sagged. It was a stark, barren confession.

‘But, darling, how can you possibly be lonely? Since you arrived in London we’ve dined out nearly every evening and lunched twice.’

‘I don’t mean this week.’

‘Well, absolutely, the countryside is dreary. If you must live in the sticks, then a certain amount of isolation and boredom has to be endured,’ commented Ava, who thought anywhere without a London postcode was nowhere at all. ‘But you are often invited to someone or other’s for the weekend, and house parties are always heaving. One often struggles to find five moments of peaceful time. I can never keep up with reading the newspapers at the weekends.’

Bea shook her head, indicating that Ava didn’t understand.

‘Well, what do you mean, then?’

‘I think I’m just beginning to understand that I’m never going to marry.’

Ava wondered how it had possibly taken Bea so long to reach this conclusion. She was twenty-six, plain, strapped for cash and inadequately educated. The country was down almost a million marrying-age men; how could she ever have thought her chances were good? Then Ava’s quick mind made an unconscious connection. A vision flashed into her head, brutal and unwelcome. The men had tried to keep her away from Mr Oaksley’s room. Her father had insistently yelled, ‘Keep back, keep back!’ and someone had intercepted her, dragged quite roughly at her arm in an effort to lead her away from the mess. But she’d seen him, or rather the shape of him, just for an instant. He’d already been cut down from the rafters and was lying on the polished floorboards. They’d tugged a cover off the bed and pulled it over his face, but she’d seen his legs, sticking out from under the makeshift shroud. They were at an awkward angle, like a fallen fawn; in all the confusion and panic, no one had yet thought to lay him straight. His shoes were shiny, glossy like a child’s hair. Ava had wondered who polished them. Who took care of him. Before he took care of everything.

People had differing views on suicide. Some said it was selfish or sinful, others were dangerously close to understanding it too well; everyone agreed it was bitterly sorrowful.

‘I proposed to Mr Oaksley, you know,’ muttered Bea.

Ava had not known this. She paused for a moment and tried to think of how best to respond. Clearly gasping, ‘After just two days of acquaintance?’ was not that.

‘Did he give an answer?’

Bea met Ava’s eyes, her expression spitting out pain and exasperation. For possibly the first time in her life, Ava was conscious and regretful of saying a tactless thing.

‘I think his reply was loud and clear,’ Bea said flatly.

‘No, Beatrice, you can’t think that. You don’t imagine his death was somehow your fault?’

‘How else can I think of it? He clearly considered death a better alternative to living with me.’

‘No, Bea. No.’ Ava made her voice firm. She needed to be convincing.

‘Or at best he thought he would be a burden to me and didn’t want that, so you know …’ Bea couldn’t finish the sentence; a fresh tsunami of tears overwhelmed her.

Ava thought that, despite Bea believing the contrary, it was good luck that she had alighted on a maimed soldier thoughtful enough not to exploit a willing girl who so wanted to subsume her own needs; it was a narrow escape. She considered. Frankly, she thought that the timing of Arnie Oaksley’s death, coming so soon after Beatrice’s proposal, meant that the two things were probably somehow related, at least in the dead man’s head, but she could not allow Bea to believe such a thing. Not for a moment. It had irritated Ava that in the past Bea had made so much of the death of her beau at the Front. The loss of the young man – any young man – to the dreadful war business was undoubtedly lamentable, but as their relationship had amounted to one chaperoned trip to a tea shop, Ava could not allow Bea the right to grieve. She’d been impatient with what she saw as excessive parading. Now she was beginning to reappraise; to burrow more deeply into the source of the grief. What did these losses really mean to Bea?

Bea’s face was buried in her handkerchief. She was trying (and failing) to blow her nose delicately. It was a lost battle. There was nothing delicate about Bea; she was a robust woman, the sort that had shored up the corners of the Empire for generations. A respectable girl brought up to expect marriage and motherhood; without one, she could not hope for the other. Ava thought she would have made what was conventionally agreed to be a good wife. She’d have been supportive and loyal; instinctively she’d have known when to probe and when to turn a blind eye, and she’d have been a good mother, particularly to boys. She had that no-nonsense approach about her that meant she would not have been distressed by the experimental stages, such as worm-eating when they were infants or excessive drinking when they were adolescents. Bea had shared a nursery and schoolroom; she was of the bracket of women who were discouraged from having private or independent thoughts. She was bred for companionship. Her future had been smote on the French battlefields along with those of nearly a million British men, not to mention the further nine million men born on other shores.

It was futile to suggest that Beatrice ought to make more of herself. She was not that sort of girl; not a flimsy silk sort. She was a black cashmere stockings, liberty bodice, dark stockinette knickers, flannel petticoat, long-sleeved, high-necked, knitted woollen spencer sort of girl. Like many sheltered women, she’d been bred ignorant, romantic, idealistic, utterly unsophisticated.

Ava downed her cocktail and then left her chair to join Bea on the sofa. She wondered how close she ought to sit. They didn’t do physical intimacy as a rule. Ava wasn’t sure that either she or Bea would be comfortable if hugging was involved. She settled on putting her hand on Bea’s arm. ‘Listen to me, Bea darling. You had nothing to do with what happened. I’m quite sure that Mr Oaksley had planned his suicide for some time before that weekend. His situation was beastly.’ She didn’t dare risk saying the words she felt truly fitted the unfortunate man’s situation. Unbearable. Intolerable. Insufferable. She felt any one of them would be too distressing for Bea.

‘I could have helped him,’ groaned Bea.

‘Maybe, but some people don’t want to be helped. I imagine he was very tired. He’d been brave for quite a few years. He’s at peace now.’ Ava was surprised to find herself settling into the accepted platitudes that so many millions had doled out for years now. She didn’t believe the clichés about bravery or peace, but they were all they had so she coughed them up. ‘Do you know what I think?’