Wish Her Safe at Home (2 page)

As before, this book is lovingly dedicated to my family—

with, now, a special thank you to Prue, for suggesting minor but useful alterations for the present edition.

(Also, a thank you to your cohorts, Katie and Pascale).

It is dedicated, too, to Charlotte Barrow.

I’ll always be grateful that—back in 1982—

you rescued my manuscript from the slush pile.

And, lastly, to my partner John. Thanks, doll.

My great-aunt in middle age became practically a recluse and when she died I remembered very little of her, because the last time I’d visited that stuffy basement flat in St. John’s Wood had been thirty-seven years earlier, in 1944, when I was only ten. So perhaps my most vivid recollection was of hearing her tell us, my mother and me, on at least half a dozen occasions, like a favourite fairy tale, the full unchanging story of a play called
Bitter Sweet
. Looking back I couldn’t rationally believe it was the only show which she had ever enjoyed but she nearly made it sound like that: still spoke of it—some fifteen years after she had seen it—as though she had been present just the previous night. And then unfailingly she entertained us with the same two songs. She would stand up, this rather dumpy woman, and either with hands touching her bosom or else with arms thrown wide, her eyes intense and misted, her full voice slightly husky, would render these ballads so throbbingly that my mother and I had to gaze into our laps and I would drive my nails into my palms—surely providing, for both of us, a rare moment of togetherness. And almost forty years later I could still hear, very clearly, my Aunt Alicia as she sang, “Although when shadows fall I think if only...
” There’d be a brief and sacramental hush:

...somebody splendid really needed me,

Someone affectionate and dear,

Cares would be ended if I knew that he

Wanted to have me near...

Unremarkably those few lines stayed with me without my making any effort and one afternoon, during break, I surprised all the other girls in the playground by suddenly bursting forth. The most popular songs of the period were “Swinging on a Star” and “Don’t Fence Me In” and morale-boosting, lump-in-the-throat things like “The White Cliffs of Dover,” but this one became an instant hit, a curiosity, and I was frequently asked for it: “Rachel’s party piece.” It seemed to bring me both acceptance and renown and I used to do some wicked take-offs of the old lady (fifty-seven, when I last saw her), my exaggerations growing ever more exaggerated. Often, of course, I’d feel guilty; vowed I would put an end to it. Back in the light of day, though, I’d tell myself it didn’t do my great-aunt any harm and it certainly did
me
a fair amount of good, of a kind. I could uneasily reconcile it with the knowledge I had even then: that I very much hoped, one day, to find my place in heaven.

Each time my mother and I came away from Neville Court my mother would say something like, “Poor Alicia. One can only humour her.”

“Is she mad?” I once asked.

“Good heavens, no. Or at least...
”

I waited.

“Well, if she is,” she went on, “she’s perfectly happy. There are many who’d even envy her that type of madness.”

To myself Aunt Alicia didn’t seem a template for perfect happiness: stout, downy-cheeked, heavily dusted with powder; wearing dresses which, as my mother said, must have hung in her wardrobe forever and had probably been unsuitable even when new; a woman, as it appeared to me later, who was always searching for something unattainable in the dark corners of that lush and overheated room, possibly for somebody splendid, affectionate and dear. No, when I was ten years old I didn’t regard her as being in any way enviable. Nor, indeed, when I was twenty years old. Or thirty...
or whatever.

And then my mother said:

“Actually your father did once mention a strain of insanity in his family.” Pause. “So all
naughty
little girls had better watch out, hadn’t they?”

She laughed, so I knew this last bit was a joke. In any case I wasn’t particularly naughty. By and large I was a quiet child who didn’t seek attention. I’d have been appalled—and terrified—to think of what was shortly going to emanate in the school playground.

Aunt Alicia was looked after by a large and blustering Irishwoman called Bridget, who may once have saved my life by crying out as I was about to turn the kitchen light on with wet and soapy hands; and when my great-aunt moved away from St. John’s Wood without informing anyone of where she was going, or of why she was going, Bridget went with her. Even the porter hadn’t been left a forwarding address; nor could he bring to mind the name of the removal firm. We received no Christmas or birthday cards and gradually I forgot all about Neville Court and the weird, reclusive life being led there. Both that snatch of song and the impersonations—if that’s what they could ever have been called—became things of the past.

And even when my mother died I heard nothing. I vaguely supposed Alicia too was dead.

But she wasn’t. At that time she’d have had about a dozen more years to go.

Later I learned that she and Bridget had repaired to Bristol; and that there, when Bridget had committed suicide at the age of eighty-four, Aunt Alicia, ten years her senior, had gone on living in the same house with Bridget’s body: a state of affairs which had come to light only after two weeks—two weeks of sleet and snow and freezing temperatures. Bridget had then been removed to the mortuary at St. Lawrence’s, and Alicia to a geriatric ward in the same hospital.

“Tragic,” said Mrs. Pimm, the almoner, when I finally took it into my head to make enquiries. “Tragic,” she said, her round face shining with health, and now, all this time later, even with enjoyment, with a storyteller’s relish. “The old lady only lasted for a month or two. And to end up like that: too awful to be thought about, much less spoken of! And when you consider her background! Well, it was obviously well-to-do, middle-class, solidly Victorian. A nanny. Little bottom lovingly powdered with talc...
A pretty child I’d think; and probably made much of...
”

Mrs. Pimm pursed her lips and shook her head and there was silence: an unconvincing moment of requiem. Her small office, white and functional for the most part, contained a framed photo of her family on the desk; and two large watercolours on the wall, both depicting gardens. “Like the woman with the cats,” she said.

“Cats?”

“Oh, yes, didn’t you read about that? Nine of them. Pets. But when she died—and she, too, was a ripe old age—poor things, they couldn’t get any food, so they started eating
her
...and, afterwards, one another. Well, that’s nature, I suppose, but as the youngest of my kiddies said to me, “Mum, what if they didn’t
wait
?” Well, I soon shut her up, of course, but just the same I couldn’t stop imagining.”

I shuddered.

“And I often think of
her
little bottom being dusted as well, her rosy little lips being kissed by scores of doting relatives—the flesh, you see, had all been torn away around the mouth.” She closed her eyes and gave a series of solemn nods.

“Horrible.”

“I’m sure she never thought she’d come to that.”

Her laugh in some way wasn’t callous. It was aimed against the irony of life itself, rather than at the poor woman with her nine sharp-clawed cats.

“Linda Darnell—such a beautiful actress—dying in a fire,” she said. “C B Cochran slowly scalding to death in his bath. Up till then, you know, nearly anybody would have envied them...
the glamorous, successful lives they’d both enjoyed.”

She clearly had a catalogue of such disasters. And yes, too, there
was
almost a relish: a compensatory garment to wrap about herself to make up for the lack of beauty or glamour or success she felt existed in her own life.

The office had grown increasingly claustrophobic: walls closing in on you, ceiling moving down. You couldn’t like her. She told me of a man who had jumped from a window in New York. Oh, yes, he had certainly meant to kill himself and he’d succeeded. Poor fellow. He had also killed the gentleman he’d fallen on top of. “He must have thought that nothing could get any worse. But he should have listened to William Shakespeare, shouldn’t he? Things can
always
get worse.”

No, you couldn’t like her.

And yet I sat there, and yet I listened. Why? Eventually I drew her back to the subject of my great-aunt.

“Naturally,” she said, “you realize she was gaga? The mystery is...
how she and that Irish woman ever managed to survive; survive for thirty-seven days, never mind thirty-seven years! Sometimes, according to the neighbours, they could be sweet as pie; but sometimes you would hear them scream and it was just like they were doing each other in! Like Bedlam, said the neighbours—well, only thank heaven for such good thick solid walls! There were endless complaints to the council.”

I asked what had become of these complaints but Mrs. Pimm may not have heard me.

She said: “You’d expect to have a bit of peace, wouldn’t you, when you’ve nearly completed your voyage? The start of a golden age. The rays of the evening sun reflected on the water. And the filth,” she added, “the squalor. The mountain of rubbish in one of those nice big airy rooms...
”

But I had already heard about that;
and
witnessed the effects of it.

She saw me out—insisted on escorting me to the main door.

“Still, there you are,” she repeated. “I suppose none of us can say what lies around the corner.”

I think that, somehow, she intended this to be reassuring. While she went back to her coloured photograph of a similarly apple-cheeked husband and three gormlessly grinning daughters, went back to her summer gardens filled with roses, I reflectively made my way to the bus stop and remembered Bridget letting me run my finger round the mixing bowl as she transferred the cake tin to the oven. I remembered her telling me of the pictures she’d seen on her days off, and about her two strapping nephews in Donegal who were both waiting to marry me.

Naturally, I remembered my great-aunt, as well. Heard again her account of swirling ball dresses—all of them in different shades of pastel—and of Lady Shayne, the erstwhile Sarah Millick, flouter of convention and runner-off to happiness (and tragedy, too, yet would she then have sacrificed the one in order to avoid the other?), now white-haired and seventy but retaining her youthful figure and dressed in an exquisite gown.

During the final moments of the play, due to the self-absorption of all those who had earlier been surrounding her, she is left alone on stage.

Slowly, she moves across it to the centre. At first she stands quite still. Then she begins to laugh. A strange, cracked, contemptuous laugh. Suddenly she flings wide both her arms—

“Though my world has gone awry,

Though the end is drawing nigh,

I shall love you till I die,

Goodbye!”

And I thought of this as I waited patiently for the bus to move off: the one matchless evening in my Aunt Alicia’s long but disappointing life: an evening of empathy, transcendence, exhilaration; and almost surely—at forty-two or forty-three—of hopes of a romance.

“Oh, Sylvia! I don’t believe this! Listen!”

It was a Saturday and we were sitting over a late breakfast, she with that morning’s paper, myself with the previous day’s. I had been reading some of the Personal Ads: “Love is a red silk parachute. Take care. Swarms of kisses.”

”Divorced? Separated? Single? Meet new faces at private parties.”

I had been uncharitably assessing the happy couple shown issuing this invitation—especially the man—when my eyes, seemingly one step ahead of my mind, slipped across to something familiar in the next column. I gave a gasp. I had caught sight of my own name.

“No!”

And it was as if I’d been imprisoned in a glass booth, with a heavy fog swirling about it.

“Oh, Sylvia! I don’t believe this! Listen!”

My flatmate, having lowered her own paper, noisily, was now staring with a frown, her eyes screwed up against the acrid smoke from her Marlboro. “Well, come on then! Give!”

I read it out carefully. “Would the person born as Rachel Waring, last known to be living in Marylebone in 1944, please contact Messrs Thames & Avery (reference Wymark), Bristol 5767, whereupon she will learn something to her advantage.”

There was a pause.

“Christ!” said Sylvia. The humming continued in my ears—how I felt distanced from reality! “Lovie, don’t just sit there! Bloody well get on the blower!” She started to cough—almost automatically—yet for once my stomach didn’t tighten.

“It must be Aunt Alicia,” I said.

“You’ve never mentioned any Aunt Alicia.”

“I didn’t realize she was still alive.”

Sylvia spluttered with laughter and the laughter turned into another of her coughs. “Let’s damned well hope she isn’t!”

I looked at the paper again. “Whatever made her go to Bristol?”

“Oh, who cares? Jump to it, Raitch! Make a dive for those solicitors!”

But it soon transpired that Messrs Thames & Avery didn’t practise law upon a Saturday.

During Monday lunchtime Sylvia rang me at the office. “Well?” she demanded. I could picture her flicking the ash off her jumper as she spoke; you can often come close to hating someone for the most shamingly trivial of reasons.

I confirmed that it had indeed been Aunt Alicia.

“And
was
she filthy rich?”

“No. It seems she left a pile of debts.”

Yet the debts weren’t really so large and a sale of some of the furniture, Mr. Wymark had suggested, would more than cover them. Although he wasn’t an expert, he had said, he believed there might be a few good pieces beneath the cobwebs and the dust.

“And was
this
the something to your advantage?” exclaimed Sylvia. Yet, notwithstanding her disgust, I thought I detected a faint note of relief. “So you’re telling me you
haven’t
come into millions?”

“Not quite.”

“Well, damn and blast! Bang goes that whopping great present I was hoping for!”

So I might have been mistaken.

Then common sense reasserted itself. “But there must have been something?”

“Yes, something,” I conceded.

“Well, out with it, for Pete’s sake!”

“Her house.”

“Her house? Her
house
! Rachel Waring—my, my—aren’t
you
the wicked tease!” She gave a whistle, then a laugh. “Did they say it’s in a decent area?”

“In a decent area; but far from in a decent state. Well, two old women on their own—and I gather they were senile. You can imagine.”

“Christ. That does sound like a cosy setup. But never mind. When are you going to see it?”

She added, almost immediately, “Next weekend? And that’ll give me a valid excuse to miss that do of Sonia’s.”

But I had planned against this moment; and in spite of feeling apprehensive, had planned against it with some satisfaction.

“Well, actually I was thinking of going tomorrow. Taking the day off.”

Several seconds elapsed.

“Are you still there, Sylvia?”

“Yes, just as you like, my dear. It’s your house, of course.” Her tone suggested funeral.

“Saturday, you see, wouldn’t be quite so convenient for Mr. Wymark.”

Oh, weak, weak!

And Mr. Danby wasn’t much happier about it than Sylvia. Well, Miss Waring, my congratulations! This could hardly have happened to anyone more deserving. I couldn’t be better pleased.

But why such a rush? I assume that—with any luck—your house won’t have fallen down by Saturday?

In all the eleven years I’d worked in Mail Order, in all the seven that I had been his second-in-command, I hadn’t once asked for more time off than it took to have a tooth filled or a symptom diagnosed.

All right then, Mr. Danby, so this is where you’ll have to learn. Learn about every dog having its day and every worm its turning point.

Therefore I went in as usual on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday I telephoned to say I was unwell.

Then ordered my taxi for the station.

Not much difference, you might say, between a Friday and the Saturday. But you’d be wrong.

In the first place it expressed a newfound sense of independence; I was a person of property. It also meant I could travel alone. It meant I could read a novel during the journey; go to any type of restaurant I fancied; have a silly little sense of adventure.

It meant I could be me.

And the hitherto dull, diffident, middle-aged woman who said to the taxi driver, “Paddington, please,” felt in some respects more like a girl of seventeen setting out for exotic climes. At seventeen I might have gone to Paris. This would have been in a party of five other girls and could have been momentous: leading to the kind of opportunity that only comes from getting to know the right sort of people. The girl whose parents had placed the ad was certainly one of the right sort of people. During the hour or so I spent with her at Richoux she was self-assured and kind and charming. It was impossible not to imagine all her friends being very much the same.

Yet I had never been away from home—not without my mother—except once when she was ill and our upstairs neighbours had volunteered to look after me. Irrationally (and I knew it was irrational) anywhere more than fifty miles from London seemed to me un-normal, lacking in amenities, almost hostile; and at the very last moment I did what I had sworn this time I wouldn’t do—I lost my nerve. I felt so grateful to my mother as she came away from the telephone, and yet, at the same time, already disappointed and even resentful: grateful she didn’t look displeased, resentful for practically the same reason. That afternoon she took me to see
The Lavender Hill Mob
at the New Gallery in Regent Street. But at seventeen I might have gone to Paris...
and I was convinced it would have changed my life.

“It’s obviously a moneyed sort of family.” (I had said this, sullenly, next morning over breakfast.) “I’m surprised you didn’t try to make me go. I know how much you idolize the rich.”

My mother had come round the table and slapped my face. But she hadn’t suggested I should ring again to ask if I could change my mind. I waited for her to do so, in timorous suspense.

I hadn’t suggested it, either.

Thirty years later, however, embarking on my first real escapade I was seventeen once more; and I was setting off for Paris.