The Perfect Daughter

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Also by Gillian Linscott

Copyright

 

For Celia Haddon, with thanks.

Chapter One

T
HE
TIDE HAD TURNED AN HOUR OR SO
ago and was on its way up again, but not enough to make any difference yet. The river was still no more than a streak of silver between the mud banks of the estuary and everything was becalmed in the early afternoon sun. The reeds in the inlet were motionless, long collars of dried grey mud round their stems, not a shiver of breeze to move them. In the middle of them the streak of brighter grey and white that was a heron dozed, stiff and upright as the reeds. It hadn't moved in the half hour I'd been sitting there. Neither had the rowing boat in mid-channel between the gleaming slides of mud. Probably a salmon fisherman and also, quite likely, asleep.

‘You'll hear the motorcar when he goes.'

That's what Verona's mother had said. Since then I'd been sitting on a rock outcrop in a wood of stunted oaks overlooking the estuary. I'd heard seagulls yelling and curlews gurgling. I'd heard little ploppings of mud falling as the salt water started pushing its way up again. But no motor.

‘He won't stay. Just long enough to pick up his golf clubs, then off again.' Alexandra's eyes were anxious, begging me to understand. A Siamese cat, draped over her shoulder like a long spillage of Devonshire cream, looked a command at me from its squinting blue eyes: Go!

‘Ten minutes at most,' she begged. ‘You could wait in the summerhouse.'

I'd been tempted to stand my ground. I hadn't come all the way down from London to scurry away from a commodore, especially not one who was my least favourite cousin. But Alexandra was desperate.

‘Ben doesn't even know I've written to you. Please, Nell.'

In the face of her panic I'd given in, let myself be hustled out of the garden door and pointed to a wooden summerhouse that perched on the far edge of the lawn with the sweep of the Teign estuary behind it. As she closed the door after me I heard Ben's voice from the front of the house announcing to wife and world that he was home, dear.

*   *   *

Commodore Benjamin North. There's a respectable strain in my family that I usually prefer not to think about, and he was its pride and joy. One of my mother's sisters married a diplomat and gave birth to an infant who'd probably insisted on three rings of gold braid round the sleeves of his christening robe. Ben was ten years my senior. In twenty years we'd met at precisely three family gatherings and quarrelled at two of them. Ben made a highly suitable match with Alexandra, a general's daughter who whiled away his long absences at sea painting watercolours and breeding Siamese cats. The cats were superb examples of their kind, which was more than you could say for the watercolours. Still, I preferred Alexandra to my cousin. There was just a hint of the unconventional about her that being married to Ben hadn't entirely smothered. They'd produced two children, a boy who was currently a cadet at the Britannia Royal Naval College just down the coast at Dartmouth and his elder sister, Verona.

Verona North, nineteen years old, was the reason I was sitting on a rock watching the tide go out. Her young perfections had figured in the interrupted conversation with her mother.

‘Always totally fearless. When she was seven she galloped her pony at a wall that must have been all of three feet high. I froze. I thought she'd break her neck. She went over it laughing.'

When I stood up on my rock I could see that very pony, pensioned off now, knee-deep in grass and buttercups in a field below the house. A solid little bay, sensible enough to save a spoilt seven-year-old from her folly. The house itself was solid too, built of granite blocks, door and window frames outlined in fresh white paint that caught the sun – all very shipshape. The granite, like the pony, came from Dartmoor. If you looked inland you could see the blue outline of the moors and Hay Tor perched on top like a jagged molar. The sea and the moors – a good place to grow up.

‘And she handled the dinghy better than her brother did. Out in all weathers. Archie Pritty used to call her his little midshipman.'

I didn't ask who Archie Pritty was, for fear of setting off even more Verona worship. Alexandra's little sitting-room was crammed with photographs, including one of two curly-haired moppets in sailor suits with a black labrador lolling at their feet. Senior moppet had a protective hand on junior moppet's shoulder and beamed at the camera, sure of the world's approval. That was Verona. If you looked round at the surface of the baby grand piano, the windowsills, the little tables, there were more of them. Verona standing beside the pony festooned with rosettes, Verona in a rowing boat with her father as passenger, Verona and brother in sailing dinghy – and the same confident smile in all of them. I tried not to be irritated that for this girl's sake Alexandra had begged me to come down here to Devon, two hundred miles from London, and thirty-four shillings return by Great Western. Alexandra should have known, even in this backwater, that the world was falling in pieces around me and my friends.

‘Ben's taken the motorcar to Shaldon to see him. When he gets back you'll have to keep out of the way for a while, Nell. You won't mind, will you? Only all this with Verona has hurt him so much and although I don't think you're to blame in any way – no, of course I don't – the fact is he…'

Stated more baldly than Alexandra would ever bring herself to do, the fact was that in my cousin's opinion his darling horse-riding, dinghy-sailing daughter had gone totally off the rails and it was entirely my fault. Eight months ago, a few weeks after her nineteenth birthday, she'd shocked the family by announcing her intention to go off to London to study art. Up to that point she'd shown no signs of talent or enthusiasm, but after all there were Alexandra's watercolours to prove art ran in the family, plus the rooted belief that Verona could do anything if she set her mind to it. When she announced she'd been accepted at the Slade, they found her lodgings in a respectable house and probably hoped she'd be back home by Christmas. One more thing. Alexandra wrote to me, presumably as the supposed expert on London and the Bohemian life, and asked me please to keep an eye on Verona. Cousin Ben didn't know about that. He'd have rather put her in the care of the bears at London Zoo.

*   *   *

I hadn't been pleased. I didn't know Verona. I'd only seen her once in my life when she'd been a bridesmaid at a family wedding, all silk roses and sugar-pink satin. Admittedly it was unfair to hold that against the girl as she would only have been eight or nine at the time, but there was nothing in her life to make her a soul mate of mine.

Still, with a lot of other things on my mind, I'd done what Alexandra had asked. Back in December, a few weeks after her arrival in London I called at Verona's lodgings with a pot of hyacinths and a fruit cake substantial enough to keep a student fed for days. I found a slim, polite girl with wary brown eyes and hair the colour of beech leaves in autumn. She'd struck me as subdued and I guessed that she might be finding student life in a London winter grimmer and colder than she'd imagined. To my surprise, she wanted to talk. She asked me about the suffragette movement and socialism and pacifism, and sat there taking in the answers with an intent, hungry look. Then she wanted to know how you joined – as if all the whole quarrelsome lot could be rounded up in one nice tidy party, entrance tickets two shillings and sixpence with tea at the interval. I explained that things were more complicated than that and added that if she were really interested in the fight for the Vote she could join the Women's Social and Political Union, address Lincoln's Inn House, Kingsway. Whether she wanted to get involved or not was her decision alone. That was all. That was the extent of my sin against Family and Duty and Pure English Girlhood and goodness knows what else. A few weeks later, in the early days of 1914, I received a letter from Cousin Ben written like fifty strokes from a cat-o'-nine-tails. Verona had joined the suffragettes, got in with a bad crowd, ruined her young life, worried her mother into a decline, blighted her brother's naval career – and it was all my fault. I didn't answer it. I had a lot more on my mind at the time than other people's rebellious daughters.

Then, in March, another pleading letter had arrived from Alexandra. She'd heard from Verona, who'd left her respectable lodgings and moved in to a house in Chelsea with some other students. Would I please, please, go to the address given and see that she was still all right? Cursing, I'd done as ordered. It was a chaotic place, that student house, but Verona had struck me as a lot happier there than when I'd seen her three months before in her respectable lodgings. When I went in she was sitting on a broken-down chaise-longue, feet bare and hair down, smoking a cigarette. She was watching a short man with a ginger beard trying to juggle three oranges and pretending not to notice a tall dark-haired man who was perched on the windowsill, sketching her, not saying a word. She said ‘Hello, Nell', very assured and woman-to-woman, and talked about a march she'd taken part in, as if she'd been deep in suffragette activity for years. I suspected it was as much to impress the men as for my information, and tried not to be annoyed. After all, she was young, thrilled with her independence and probably convinced that she and her fellow students were the first rebels in the history of the world. I remembered how it felt. We'd chatted for a while.

‘I'm learning ju-jitsu too.'

She'd said it off-handedly but gave me a challenging sideways look.

‘Ah, Mrs Garrud's Suffragettes' Self-Defence Club, I suppose. Do give her my regards.'

If Verona thought that was something new, she was wrong. Edith Garrud's classes had been going for years and most of us had learned to swing an Indian club or twist out of an armlock under her tutelage. She was under five feet tall but I once watched her throw a thirteen stone policeman – by way of demonstration, not in anger. When I'd had occasion to try the technique in earnest on a policeman of my own it wasn't so successful. I didn't notice his nine stone colleague creeping up behind with a truncheon. Still, I was glad Verona was getting out and taking exercise. I didn't mention the suffragette march or the ju-jitsu lessons when I dropped Alexandra a note to let her know that Verona was safe and well.

After that, I'd forgotten about Verona again. My friends and I had more serious things on our minds, including fighting the government's iniquitous ‘Cat and Mouse Act'. It worked like this. If we were sent to prison for suffragette activities, we went on hunger strike. When the authorities decided we were likely to die on them, we'd be released on licence until we were well enough to be re-arrested, then the cycle would start all over again. Our response was to do our damnedest to see that once a woman was let out, the police didn't get their hands on her again. It was wild work, involving disguises, deceptions and sometimes downright confrontation, and it was taking most of our time and energy. Even today, when I'd been listening to Alexandra talking about Verona, half my mind was on something that should be happening back at home in Hampstead.