The Second-last Woman in England (42 page)
But Dad had shaken his head. Dad had not wanted to fight. ‘Wallis won’t change his mind. Why should he? You don’t know these people.’
No, they did not know these people.
But they knew their names. Jean knew his name: Wallis, the supervisor from the Ministry. Mr Cecil Wallis. And she remembered that name just as she remembered the man who had designed the V2 rocket, though she did not know his name, and the men and the women who had worked in a factory in Holland to build it—slaves, she now knew they had been, and yet still she blamed them—and the soldier, some young man whose mother loved him, stationed in northern Holland who had operated the equipment that sent the rocket up and over the coastline and across the North Sea and over Kent and all the way to Malacca Row, Stepney, so that it could destroy her family and her home. Oh yes, she remembered them all.
But she knew only one name. And she had come across that name again in the most unexpected place—the Festival of Britain.
Mr Cecil Wallis, a director of Empire and Colonial Lines
. Right there in black and white.
She had needed to know, all these years later, if Mum was right:
did
he have fine suits and an office in Whitehall?
Did
he live in a big house with servants? The office, it had turned out, was off Chancery Lane, a big important office in the city, easy enough to track down; and the house—she had followed him home from work—was big, and elegant, with many storeys and many rooms, situated in a tree-lined street in a very smart suburb. And yes, there had been servants, for on a certain day last September she had observed Nanny Peters emerge from the house.
God had led her here as surely as He had led the Israelites out of the desert, yet she still did not know why.
This morning Mr Wallis had asked her what her family were doing to mark the Coronation. Then, barely an hour later, he had dismissed her from his employ, as carelessly, as summarily, as he had dismissed Dad eight years earlier. He had hoped that she would not be too substantially inconvenienced.
Outside the rain continued to fall and a police car drew up in front of the house and two policemen got out. The two policemen came up the steps and knocked on the Wallises’ front-door. A moment later they emerged from the house with Mrs Wallis and led her down the steps and into the car, then they drove off.
Jean realised she was missing the Coronation.
Harriet and Freddie had travelled home to England from India in the June of 1924.
On the evening of their embarkation their escort, Mr Stephens, had suggested they have tea and cakes at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club. It had been his treat. He had escorted the District Officer’s two children on this long and fraught journey from their home in Jhelum to the dockside in Bombay. Now, his mission accomplished, he had poured the tea and handed round the Battenburg cake with an air of satisfaction.
They were due to sail to England on the ten o’clock tide.
‘Well, time we were off,’ Mr Stephens had said as the sun set in an orange glow in the west, and they made their way back to the ship.
Only they hadn’t returned directly to the ship. Instead Mr Stephens had turned away from the quayside and taken them on a path that led into an ornate garden.
Night had fallen, instantly and without warning as it did every night in India, though that never prevented Mother and Father and just about every European who had lived in England remarking upon it in wonder.
‘My God, the night falls quickly here,’ Mr Stephens had remarked, and yet they had continued into the gardens and a thick foliage of orchids and casuarinas, bamboo and tamarinds reared up on either side of them, making the night darker still. Over their heads mahogany trees towered and on the ground creepers snaked across the path. The cicadas shrilled so that the very air vibrated.
Freddie was moody, hanging back, dragging his heels and not allowing anyone to hold his hand.
Mr Stephens went back and spoke to him then he rejoined Harriet.
‘Freddie needs to spend a penny. I’ll take him to a discreet spot. Will you be all right here, Harriet?’
Harriet wasn’t at all certain that she would be all right there on her own, in a strange garden, in a strange city, in the pitch dark. But she nodded because that was what one did. Then she had watched as Freddie and Mr Stephens stepped off the path and were swallowed up in the undergrowth.
Now what?
She waited. There was no one else in the gardens, so surely they would not have to journey too far to locate a discreet spot for Freddie to spend his penny.
She waited.
The shriek of some animal nearby made her jump and she whirled about trying to locate it. Tiny yellow spots of light flickered in the undergrowth—a mongoose perhaps. The air was thick with tiny flying insects, with animals. But this wasn’t the jungle—she had been in the real jungle where a snake, a scorpion, a leopard, a tiger, might jump out at you at any moment. This was just an ornate garden in a big, important city.
The animal shrieked again. It was a monkey, most probably.
Where
were
they? Ages had passed, simply
ages
!
A sudden flurry of wings filled the air and a dark shape flew out of the trees. She jumped and for a moment the only sound was her heart beating. But it was only a bat.
And then she heard another sound, a sound that wasn’t an animal at all. It was a thud, like something solid falling onto the ground, then a voice. A man’s voice. Distant. She couldn’t tell whose voice or what was said, but it came from the same direction that Freddie and Mr Stephens had taken.
Harriet hesitated. Ought she to wait here as instructed? But if they were only a few yards away, why wait here? And what if something had happened?
She waited for the length of another breath then set off down the path and into the undergrowth from where the sound had come. Her heart thudded uncomfortably in her chest as she pushed her way through the overhanging fronds. She would never have run through a real jungle in the dark, never! But this was just a garden in a big city. There were people all around. She only had to call out and someone would come running to help.
She kept on pushing, blindly, her arms before her face to stop the fronds brushing against her. Then, quite suddenly, the trees parted and she was in a clearing. At the same moment the clouds slid apart and a near-full moon cast a pale yellow glow so that she could see quite clearly. And what she saw was a strange figure, a man—she assumed it was a man, it was a man’s height and wearing a man’s hat—standing in the centre of the clearing. And indeed the figure was wearing Mr Stephens’s hat and Mr Stephens’s umbrella was lying on the ground beside him. But the figure was misshapen. Horribly misshapen.
She paused and a call, a greeting, froze on her lips. The figure groaned, put its head back—Mr Stephens’s head—and groaned.
And then Freddie cried out. And that was the misshapen part of the figure. There was another figure—a much smaller figure, a child’s figure—on his knees before Mr Stephens.
Again Harriet nearly called out and again the words froze on her tongue. The child’s head was buried in Mr Stephens’s lap, in his trousers, and the child was crying, sobbing, but something held him there, the man’s hand held him there, held him firmly at the back of his small head, held him firmly in place and the child was gulping for breath, sobbing.
Freddie was sobbing.
And Mr Stephens put his head back and gasped as though he had been hurt, but he didn’t let go.
The umbrella, which until a moment ago had lain on a fallen palm frond, arced through the heavy darkness with the force of a hammer, handle first, and connected with Mr Stephens’s temple, making a sickening thud. Mr Stephens crumpled and fell sideways.
Behind him stood Harriet, the pointy end of the umbrella still in her hands.
On the ground Mr Stephens lay quite still and his eyes gazed up at her, reflecting the light of the moon. Harriet stepped back in alarm. But the eyes didn’t follow her.
She dropped the umbrella and grabbed Freddie’s hand, pulling him to his feet, and together they ran blindly through the garden and emerged suddenly onto the well-lit esplanade not far from the big hotel.
Freddie was hysterical, alternately sobbing and trying to sit down on the pavement and refusing to move. But there was no time for this. They
must
get away!
Half dragging, half carrying Freddie, she made for the big black silhouette ahead of them that must be the Gateway. They reached the Gateway at last, somehow, and there beyond it was the
Tiberius
! It was flooded in light. And suddenly there were people, glorious, wonderful busy people all around! They could get lost in all the people and no one would ever find them. Officials from the ship strode about the quayside barking orders. Coolies scurried about loading on the last of the luggage, and last-minute passengers hurried importantly up the gangway.
Harriet had their papers—Mr Stephens had entrusted her with them when they had first boarded the ship. Now she pulled them out and showed them to the official at the top of the gangway. The official looked at them both with a long frown and made an agonising show of inspecting the papers, humming and hah-ing before finally announcing, ‘Everything looks to be in order, miss. Welcome aboard.’ Then he had frowned again. ‘Everything all right? What’s wrong with the little chap?’
‘We’re leaving our parents to go to school in England,’ Harriet had replied, the words already rehearsed in her head.
The official had nodded. ‘Yes, we get a lot of that. Chin up, young man; don’t want your big sister to think you’re a sissy, do you?’
Freddie hadn’t replied and it was debatable he had even heard the man’s words.
There were other passengers waiting to board and Harriet dragged Freddie to their cabin. People were looking at them, she knew, but it didn’t matter. She closed and locked the door behind them and finally let Freddie go. For a moment she let him fall as she leant against the door, catching her breath and trying to think. She
must
think.
But Freddie was hysterical.
She picked him up and put him on the bed, stroking his head.
‘Freddie, stop! Please stop, it’s fine now. We’re safe, we’re on the ship, in our cabin. There’s no one here. We’re safe!’
Eventually he began to calm down and then, in a broken, sobbing voice he spoke.
‘I didn’t w-want to do it, b-but he said Father would be angry with me if I r-refused. He said Father would be angry if I didn’t do w-whatever he said!’
Harriet held him tightly and listened and her heart seemed to turn black with hatred.
‘He was
lying
, Freddie. Father wouldn’t want you to do that. Father would be very,
very
angry with Mr Stephens if he knew. He was a bad,
bad
man. An
evil
man. He
lied
to you.’
‘I didn’t want to do it!’ sobbed Freddie, though more quietly now. ‘I thought Father would be angry with me.’
‘I know. But it’s safe now. Mr Stephens will never hurt you again.’ She placed a finger beneath his chin and lifted his head up, looking at him silently for a moment, then she made herself smile. ‘And if anyone asks, Mr Stephens took us back to the ship, then left us. That was the last time we saw him, wasn’t it?’
Freddie listened, then he nodded silently.
Up on the deck she could hear the shouts from the sailors as the gangway was removed and mooring ropes untied. The ship’s funnel boomed loudly and repeatedly. Above them the passengers crowded to the ship’s deck to cheer and wave goodbye to friends and family.
Think
, she must think. Mr Stephens wouldn’t return to Jhelum. Father and Mother would be worried. ‘You can always send a telegram,’ Father had said, ‘in an emergency.’
Well, this was an emergency, though Father would never know about it.
She opened the drawers in the little writing desk and found a telegram form and after a number of false starts wrote: ‘
SAFELY ABOARD STOP LOVE TO BOTH STOP H AND F STOP
.’
Then she pulled out a sheet of writing paper and began her letter.
Dearest Mother and Father,
I hope you are both well and that Mother is feeling much better. I am writing from the cabin of the Tiberius as it disembarks. A lot of people are up on deck waving and cheering and dear Mr Stephens is standing at the dockside waving to us. He was so kind to bring us here and he looked after both Freddie and I most attentively …
Three or four months after Father’s letter announcing their Mother’s death she had received a second letter from Father, this time relating the sad death of dear Mr Stephens. He had, it appeared, never made it back to Jhelum, but had been brutally murdered in a park in Bombay by person or persons unknown later that same night—presumably only hours after seeing the children off at the quayside. It was a sad and tragic loss, Father had observed. A young man with such potential, so cruelly struck down in the prime of his life. He would be sadly missed. His replacement, a Mr Downey, had arrived the previous week, and was already showing himself to be a fine worker.
They had never returned to India, she or Freddie.
‘Is this him?’
A police inspector sporting a seedy little moustache and a rather cheap raincoat asked this question, and he looked at Harriet rather than at the figure lying motionless on the bed.
‘Yes,’ answered Harriet.
She wanted to add, Yes, this is my brother, but the words stuck fast in her throat.
A small glass pill bottle lay empty on the bed, another larger bottle still with an inch or so of some clear spirit in it was on the floor beside the bed. There were no signs of violence, no blood. Just a man lying on a bed. He could be asleep or drunk.
‘There’s a note,’ said the policeman. He handed her a small unsealed envelope. ‘Looks pretty straightforward—well, as far as these things ever are.’ He paused to frown as though picking his words carefully. ‘There’ll be an inquest of course. Standard procedure. Nothing to worry about.’
