– Mina gasped, pulled all the
blankets and covers out of the pram, the baby must be hiding
somewhere in the depths of the baby carriage. Mina threw the
pillows out, would have turned the carriage upside down and shaken
it if it hadn’t been so heavy. Mina’s screams were so ghastly, so
unearthly, that even Agatha and Bradley realized they must have
been caused by something more than a jilted heart and came running
across the park.
Herbert had seen the newspaper
headline the day after the baby was first brought in the house,
BABY HEIRESS KIDNAPPED. Maude told him she’d found the baby
abandoned in the park and he’d wanted to believe her, he hadn’t
seen the lacy clothes or the aristocratic baby carriage, nor the
earrings (taken out straight away by Maude, rather to the baby’s
distress), was willing to believe that poor Maude had done a good
deed by rescuing the poor little thing, but then he’d seen that
headline and he’d had a funny feeling in the pit of his
stomach.
He bought a copy of the paper and
read the description. ‘Four months old, dark hair, dark eyes?’ he
said, waving the paper in front of Maude’s face. ‘Was this the
baby?’ She ignored him, rocking the baby on her knee, singing a
little song to it. ‘Was it?’ he shouted, and the baby began to
cry.
‘Father,’ Maude said in a gently
reproving voice, ‘don’t upset Baby.’
Maude lay in her bed, propped up on her
pillows, the baby feeding at her breast. Herbert averted his eyes.
‘God has been very good to us,’ Maude sighed happily. ‘Now a name,
Father – what shall we call her? Violet Angela, I think,’ she said,
without waiting for an answer. ‘That would be a lovely pretty name,
for a lovely pretty baby.’
Herbert sat at the table, his head
sunk in his hands. Maude gurgled at the baby, whose cradle wasn’t a
nutshell at all, but the bottom drawer of a tallboy. Herbert
wondered if he could just shut the drawer and forget about the
damned baby. It wasn’t going to go away – day after day, the
newspapers screamed about the ‘Breville Baby’. The same grainy
photograph was reproduced of the baby’s christening – a minor
member of the royal family present as a godmother – the baby’s
parents, so rich, so beautiful.
It was too late to confess, they
were too far in it now, they’d go to jail for life. Maude would be
destroyed. It was too late to take the baby back, Maude would go
mad if she was robbed of the little thing now. Herbert tried not to
get fond of it, told himself it wasn’t his, but it had his heart in
its little plump hand already. ‘Them Brevilles can have plenty
more,’ Maude said dismissively. Herbert sighed, ‘The neighbours’ll
notice. You go into hospital nine months gone and come out two
weeks later with a four-month-old baby—’ The mathematics of it were
a nightmare for him.
‘We’ll move then,’ Maude said shortly.
Herbert had never seen his wife so powerful. Maude gave him all the
baby’s expensive finery and he burnt it on a bonfire in the
backyard.
‘Pretty little kiddie, in’t she?’
Mrs Reagan said, looking at Violet Angela playing at ‘house’ in the
corner of the room with Mrs Reagan’s daughter, Beryl. Mrs Reagan
had just moved into a bottom flat in the big ugly house that the
Potters rented a part of now.
‘How old d’you say she was?’ Mrs
Reagan asked as Maude handed her a cup of tea.
‘Three – nearly four,’ Maude answered
proudly.
‘Bossy little thing, in’t she?’ Mrs
Reagan said, casting a doubtful eye on the way Violet Angela sat on
a stool and got Beryl to do all the work in their pretend house.
‘Oh, she knows what she wants, our little Vi,’ Mrs Potter said.
‘It’ll be nice for her to have a little friend in the
house.’
Violet Angela offered to sing Mrs Reagan
a song, which she lisped very prettily, Mrs Reagan agreed. ‘Quite a
little actress, in’t she?’ she said stiffly. Personally, Mrs Reagan
didn’t like children that were allowed to show off, but there you
are, each to their own.
Mrs Reagan wondered to herself how two
such dull, drab people as Maude and Herbert Potter managed to
produce such an attractive child. She was like a little sprite, all
quicksilver energy, with those big brown eyes and a head of
jet-black curls that made Mrs Reagan very jealous when she saw it
next to Beryl’s dull brown bob. She was the kind of child who ought
to come to no good, but probably wouldn’t.
‘Pretty little thing, in’t she?’ Mr
Reagan said, taking his braces off after a hard day’s work. Mrs
Reagan joined him at the upstairs window, looked down on the
scrub-by garden where Beryl and Violet Angela and some of the
neighbourhood boys were playing a wild, whooping game. ‘How old is
she?’ Mr Reagan asked his wife, who pursed her lips and said, ‘Too
old for her age, a very forward little thing, eight years old, same
age as Beryl, if you must know.’
‘What are they playing at?
Exactly?’ Mr Reagan asked, a puzzled frown on his face.
‘God knows,’ Mrs Reagan said.
Violet Angela tied Beryl’s hands
behind the tree with the old bit of rope they’d found in a shed.
‘Now you’re going to be a human sacrifice,’ Violet Angela told her.
‘No!’ Beryl wailed. Violet Angela despised little mousy Beryl, she
was so weak and stupid, she wanted to make her see how stupid she was, make her sorry for it. She
put her face an inch in front of Beryl’s and said, ‘Oh yes you
are,’ in a weird voice, rasping and high-pitched, ‘because I’m a
wicked brigand who’s going to tear your heart out and eat
it.’
‘Steady on, Vi,’ one of the boys
said, growing worried by Beryl’s breathless squeals. Violet Angela
stamped her foot and made a fist at him. ‘You are such a coward, Gilbert Boyd!’ Gilbert steeled
himself and said, ‘All right then, tell you what, Vi – we’ll burn
her like a witch instead.’ All the boys wanted to be liked by
Violet Angela, none of them wanted to be thought a coward. ‘Stop
that silly nonsense, Beryl,’ Violet Angela said crossly.
‘Yeah,’ the other boys chorused, growing
excited. ‘Who’s got a match then?’ a voice said. ‘Ere,’ another one
said. They all crowded around the tree excitedly bringing bits of
old wood and packing cases for the pyre. Violet Angela held the
matchbox aloft so that Beryl could see it. ‘This’, she hissed, ‘is
what people get for being stupid.’ The boys were all chanting like
savages, they started to do a war-dance round the tree, Beryl began
to scream.
‘Oswald!’ Mrs Reagan shouted to her
husband, ‘I think you’d better get out there, sounds like our
Beryl’s being murdered.’
‘Changeling,’ Maude Potter said out
loud to herself as she put the week’s laundry through the wringer
in the wash-house out back. That’s what happened when you picked up
a child without knowing anything about it. For all she knew that
baby in its lace-clad finery had been placed in that pram, in that
park, especially to fool them. As some kind of trap.
Violet Angela was twelve years old
and a wicked little thing, she really was. ‘She’s getting beyond
our control, Mother,’ Herbert said, shaking his head in sorrow.
‘That’s what happens when you don’t know anything about the
history, about the parents – they might have been hob-nobs but who
knows their character? They might have been liars, murderers,
thieves – look at her, she’s already been brought home once by the
coppers for stealing, and that thing with Beryl Reagan … she could
have been killed, and I don’t know what she got up to with her
fancy ways … she’s a sinful little thing.’
Maude tried to beat the sin out of Violet
Angela. ‘This is for your own good,’ she huffed and puffed up the
stairs with ‘Father’s’ leather belt. How could this be right,
Violet Angela wondered? To be beaten half to death by your parents?
Weren’t they supposed to love and protect you?
Deep in the night, the walrus body of
Herbert heaved itself between the darned sheets in her narrow
little bed. ‘Now, Violet Angela,’ he said in a hoarse whisper, as
his ink-stained fingers pushed and pulled, ‘this is for your own
good, and if you ever tell anyone then I swear God, who’s watching
over us right now, will kill you,’ and, to demonstrate, his big
hands encircled her thin little neck and when he felt how thin she
was, how young she was, imagined her bird-bones snapping – then
Herbert was suffused with shame at what he was doing. But it was
too late now, he reasoned with himself, he’d already bought his
ticket to hell, and hers with it. And, after all, it wasn’t as if
she was his daughter. He bought her bags of boiled sweets to make
up to her.
Really, Violet Angela thought, I
must have been stolen from my real parents, I wasn’t meant to be
with these ignorant, dreary people, I was meant to be a princess
wearing expensive finery and beautiful dresses, and living in a
castle on top of a hill with hundreds of
servants. It wasn’t fair.
It was Mrs Reagan who discovered
fourteen-year-old Violet Angela with Mr Reagan. In the wash-house.
Mr Reagan could fluster and bluster all he liked, but Mrs Reagan
knew what she’d seen.
‘Why, Vi? Why?’ Mrs Potter whined
poetically. ‘Why have we been given such a wicked monster for a
child?’ overlooking the fact that Violet Angela was not given but
taken.
‘I’m not a monster,’ Violet Angela
sneered. ‘Mr Reagan promised me things.’
‘Things?’
‘Pretty things,’ Violet Angela said
stoutly. ‘He said he’d give me pretty things if I let him have his
way.’ Mrs Potter slapped Violet Angela’s face and Violet Angela
screamed, ‘And he was only doing what he’s been doing [she pointed
dramatically at Mr Potter] for years!’ Mr Potter slapped Violet
Angela’s other cheek. ‘You little liar!’
‘You little whore,’ Mrs Potter yelled and
Violet Angela ran from the room before she got slapped to
death.
Violet Angela was locked in her
room upstairs. ‘What are we going to do?’ Mr Potter asked, his head
in his hands at the parlour table.
‘Maybe we should give her back,’
Maude offered.
‘Give her back?’ Herbert said, scratching
his head.
‘To where she come from – those
Brevilles,’ Maude said. ‘Let’s see them
deal with her wicked ways.’
‘We ain’t got nothing to prove who she
was,’ Herbert says glumly.
‘All I ever wanted was a nice little girl
what I could dress up and show off,’ said Maude sadly. ‘This is all
the thanks we get for bringing her up.’
‘She’ll come to a bad end, that one,’
Herbert said, shaking his head.
They were all mad for it, her
father, Mr Reagan, even Gilbert Boyd who’d stolen a diamante
hair-clip of his mother’s to give her, just so he could poke about
inside her one wet Saturday afternoon. They’d give you anything to
do it with them and then when you did they called you all the names
under the sun.
She’d been locked in her room for
days now, food shoved round the door at regular intervals as if she
was in a condemned cell or something. If they could, they’d sell
her into slavery rather than service. It was ridiculous. They kept
telling her what a bad daughter she was, but had they no idea what bad parents they’d been? She couldn’t
forgive them. She could feel the wheals where Maude had hit her
with the belt. Knew that all this had to stop. Now.
‘I got her an interview, Mother –
for a position,’ Herbert said excitedly over a tea of kippers and
bread and butter. ‘Scullery maid – big house in Norfolk, what d’you
think?’
‘I think you’re very clever,
Herbert.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Locked in upstairs still,’ Maude said
proudly. ‘I’ll take her up her tea.’
Violet Angela picked up the plate
of kippers and hit her mother in the face with them and ran full
tilt down the stairs, slamming into Herbert, blocking her way at
the bottom. ‘Not so fast, milady!’ he grunted as he grabbed hold of
her, but she dodged and swerved and got past him and sprinted for
the front door.
But she hadn’t done yet. Later, much
later, when the whole world was asleep, Violet Angela slipped in at
the back gate, opened the outhouse door where the tools were kept
and picked up the heavy woodchopping axe. She tiptoed up the stairs
to Maude and Herbert’s bedroom. They lay sleeping on their backs.
Ugly. Vulnerable. Maude snoring like a trooper. She had a hair-net
on, like a bonnet, and her teeth were on the bedside table. A
dribble of saliva trailed down Herbert’s silver-stubbled chin.
Violet Angela imagined lifting the axe and letting it fall down
under its own heavy weight, cleaving Herbert’s head in two on the
pillow without him even waking up. His brains splattering the wall,
splattering Maude’s face. Maude waking up drowsily, opening her
mouth to scream at the sight of her husband’s brains spilt
everywhere, Violet Angela stopping her scream with the
axe.
She could do it, Violet Angela
thought, feeling the weight of the axe in her thin arms, but she
wasn’t going to risk going down just for killing them. Instead she
took the rent money out of its hiding-place in the tea-caddy and
left the axe at the foot of the bed to give them a fright when they
woke up.
Same man every Friday afternoon. He
always got the table, table 2, by the window, even when it was
really busy. ‘How does he do that?’ Mavis asked and gave a little
screech as she scalded herself on the hot-water jug. ‘Three teas,
three teacakes, one fruit scone, table 16,’ Deidre muttered to
herself as she rushed past. ‘He looks like an oily sea-lion to
me.’
“E’s a villain,’ Mavis said,
‘that’s a well-known fact.’ It was raining cats and dogs, ‘and
bloody great stair-rods,’ said Deidre. It was grey and miserable
outside, bright and steamy inside, but the rain brought melancholy
with it wherever it went. ‘I’ve had no tips today,’ Violet said.
‘Three teas, one coffee, two Eccles, one Jamaican finger, one
coffee jap, table 8.’ Deidre said, ‘You wanna go to the flicks
tonight, Vi?’ The man at table 2 made a little gesture, almost
imperceptible, to Violet.
‘Nah, don’t feel like it, let me get
him.’
‘Who?’
‘The sea-lion.’ Violet tripped over in
her black and white, white broderie cap pulled low on her forehead,
thick black stockings. Violet could see something in the sea-lion’s
eyes, knew it might be good for her. He was
like a sea-lion, blubbery in an overcoat, old-fashioned really,
‘Good afternoon, sir, what can I get for you today?’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Violet.’
‘What a pretty name. How old are
you?’
‘Eighteen, sir,’ Violet lied sweetly. She
was only sixteen.
‘Imagine that,’ he said with a smile and
raised a small plump hand and touched her on the forearm. ‘My
name’s Dickie Landers, sweetheart – have you heard of me?’ and
Violet said, ‘Yes, of course,’ although she hadn’t. ‘If you work
very hard,’ he said, half-closing his lazy eyes, more salamander
than seal, ‘I’ll tip you very, very well, my dear,’ and out of
sight of the rest of the tea-shop, he reached out and stroked her
thigh, just in case she was in any doubt about what he meant. She
wasn’t.
Dickie installed Violet in a flat
in Bayswater, nothing fancy – a living-room, a bedroom, a scullery
and her own WC, gas fires in the old-fashioned hearths and a gas
water-heater over the sink. He called himself an ‘entrepreneur’,
which, as far as Violet could see, meant that he had his fingers in
lots of pies, and most of them very shady, if you could call a pie
shady. He stayed at the Bayswater flat most of the time and bought
her a lot of nice things. What did it matter? Violet thought. You
did it for boiled sweets, you did it for a new dress, you did it
for a roof over your head. And Dickie Landers was powerful, he even
got her a new identity after she’d had a spot of bother with the
law.
‘Easy,’ Dickie said, handing her a
new birth certificate.
‘Who am I then?’ Violet asked. Eliza Jane
Dennis.
‘She was real,’ Dickie Landers grinned,
‘little girl, died before she was two.’
She made a mistake, falling
pregnant and not managing to do anything about it, beyond gin and
hot baths and jumping off the table. Dickie was furious and sent
her to an ‘acquaintance’ of his, a struck-off surgeon, but he was
so sleazy and his instruments so terrifying that, unusually, Eliza
turned coward and left and had to pay the consequences four months
later in the shape of a little boy. Dickie took him from the
hospital and when she asked what he’d done with him, Dickie lit a
cigar and laughed. ‘Sold him back to the baby shop, sweetheart,’ he
said and when he saw the grimace on Eliza’s face he patted her
hand, rather awkwardly because Dickie wasn’t too comfortable with
emotion, and said reassuringly, ‘Very respectable couple, a doctor
and his wife, Dr Lovat.’
He took her out – to the theatre (‘That’s
you,’ he laughed when they saw Pygmalion),
to night-clubs, to restaurants, even to the opera. There wasn’t
anybody that Dickie Landers didn’t know, from high court judges to
common criminals. Dickie himself was an aristocrat amongst
criminals. He owned a West End club called the Hirondelle. The club
was where he did ‘business’, reaching over the tables to murmur
things in willing ears, rubbing his greasy fingers together to
illustrate what he meant, leaning back and laughing expansively,
stretching the stiff shirt of his evening suit. Eliza perched on a
stool at the bar, drank gin, learned who was who. And what was
what. She learnt to do all kinds of things, things that nice girls
didn’t know about, wouldn’t have believed if they’d been told. ‘But
then I’m not a nice girl, am I?’ Eliza said to her
mirror.
Eliza wasn’t just one of Dickie’s girls
any more, she was special. ‘You’re special, darlin’,’ he laughed
and hired her out only to his best customers (‘top whack’). Eliza
learned to talk properly, learnt from films and from the
aristocracy who slummed it at the Hirondelle, draping themselves on
the arms of semi-criminals, wishing that Daddy could see how wicked
they were being. ‘I’ve made you into a lady,’ Dickie Landers said
to her and Eliza laughed and said, ‘Darling, you’ve made me into a
high-class tart, that’s all.’
‘If you say so,’ Dickie said,
running his hands up her back.
‘I’m just like this bloody war,’ Eliza
sighed, ‘a phoney.’
A nice town house in Knightsbridge
(‘top whack’), the owner in America for the duration. ‘Got the
lease, legal and proper,’ Dickie said. ‘God, I love this war, you
know that?’ Dickie smelt of money. Eliza went to the house two or
three times a week. It was always someone high-ranking, an English
general, a visiting American here in secret, a Free French officer,
a Polish colonel. Dickie was working for the government, he thought
it was a great joke. ‘You’re doing your bit for the war effort,
really, that’s how I look at it,’ Dickie said to her.
Eliza was getting fed up with this
life, she wasn’t going to give up the money but she wasn’t going to
open her legs for it the rest of her life. Was she?
Sometimes, not often, faces became
familiar. A little runt of a politician who couldn’t manage it, a
fat Belgian, an admiral who only wanted to dress up in her clothes.
There was an English colonel, Sir Edward de Breville, very
upper-crust, who was a big-wig in the War Cabinet (‘top whack,’
Dickie said, ‘give him anything he wants’), he always brought her
stockings and whisky and called her his gorgeous trollop. He said
she reminded him of someone. ‘That’s what they all say, darling,’
Eliza laughed. He kissed her ear and said, ‘If my wife were dead,
which unfortunately she isn’t, I would marry you.’ Sir Edward
didn’t have any children, except for ‘some little by-blow by a
nursemaid’ that he paid the upkeep on. ‘You’d give me a son and
heir, I bet,’ he said. Sometimes Eliza daydreamed about taking
Dickie’s gun and going down to the de Brevilles’ house in Suffolk
and shooting Lady Cecily in the head. Then Sir Edward – very
handsome and very, very rich – might really marry her. But then
gentlemen rarely married their whores and Dickie would never let
her go, she was his golden egg-laying goose and he’d probably kill
her before he’d let her go. Life wasn’t fair, it really
wasn’t.
The shelter was cold and damp and
smelt of wet earth. It was completely dark. At first Eliza thought
she was the only person in there and when she heard a slight
shuffling she wasn’t sure whether it was a rat or a person. She
flicked her cigarette lighter open, the gold monogrammed one that
Dickie had given her, and in the yellow haloed flame saw a man in
uniform shrinking into the corner of the shelter, his cap pulled
down. Eliza said, ‘Good evening,’ and he mumbled something in
reply. A distant thud of bombs outside. ‘I don’t bite, you know,
darling,’ she said and lit a cigarette, ‘Want one?’ ‘Thanks,’ he
said hoarsely. ‘Why are you so shy, darling?’ Eliza asked as he
came reluctantly closer to take the proffered cigarette. She
expected there were government warnings about flirting in air-raid
shelters, but she enjoyed it.
‘Ever hear of Frankenstein’s
monster?’ he asked, taking the cigarette.
‘Why, is he in here with us?’ she
laughed.
‘Yes,’ the man said and pushed his cap
back on his forehead. He flinched away from the lighter flame when
she held it up to his face. One side of his face was livid and
swollen, the skin stretched tight and shiny over the flesh. The
shrunken eye had been dragged downwards by the scar tissue. ‘Shot
down on fire,’ he said apologetically. In the flickering light she
saw ginger hair, pale gold eyelashes and russet freckles that
charted his unscarred skin. He was just a boy. A line of bombs
thudded closer and the boy looked as though he was going to cry.
Very gently, as if he was a wild animal, Eliza reached out and
stroked the scarred skin. She extinguished the lighter and said,
‘Well, all cats are grey in the night, darling.’
Afterwards, after he’d pushed her
up against the brick wall of the shelter and moaned his gratitude
to her, drowned out by the noise of the docks being blitzed, he
kept apologizing because she was crying, and he ‘felt an awful
heel’, and he was sorry because he’d ‘never done it before with
anyone’, but Eliza sniffed back her tears and said, ‘That’s all
right, neither have I.’ Because really, she thought, it felt like
the first time – tender and loving and, well – enjoyable, which
wasn’t how she usually thought about it at all. ‘Top whack,
darling,’ she murmured sweetly into his hair when he was
finished.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Dickie said when she
came in. ‘I thought that bloody raid had got you.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling, just
doing my bit for the war effort.’
One of Dickie’s sleep-dead arms was
pinning Eliza to the bed. She moved it as she leant over to get her
cigarette pack. She slid up the bed and rested on the pillows. The
room was lit by moonlight, dull silver patterns moved around the
walls as the net curtains billowed. Eliza searched for a match.
She’d lost her lighter in the shelter. It was time to get out of
this whole sordid business, become a normal person. She wanted a
man who loved her, protected her, children she could dote on. An
ordinary life. She dragged hard on her cigarette and thought about
the ugly, scarred boy. She could still feel his cool hands on her,
still smell the damp bricks of the shelter, still feel the liquid
warmth of him inside her.
She was awake when the siren went off.
She was dressed. She had on a suit, a coat, a hat and her best pair
of shoes. But that was all she was taking with her. She needed a
grand gesture, walking out in the clothes she stood up in. So she
made sure they were expensive clothes.
She jumped at the siren but then
thought that, on the whole, she couldn’t really care less if she
was blown up by a bomb. Dickie rolled over and said, ‘Bloody hell,’
but it was already too late.
The whole house shook and then again,
even more violently. The noise was unbelievable, Eliza felt the
house falling down round her ears, she couldn’t breathe, she kept
trying to take in lungfuls of air but all she could take in was
dust. The shock-wave of the blast was still vibrating in her chest,
she knew she was going to die –
– she wasn’t dead. The front wall
of the house had gone and she was on the ground floor, where a few
minutes ago she’d been on the second. Far away, at the back of her
head, Eliza could hear bells ringing and people shouting. She could
smell burning. Someone was walking through the dust towards her.
For a moment she imagined it was the ugly red-haired boy come to
rescue her and she smiled. But it wasn’t, it was someone else. He
snatched her up and carried her out of the house, straight out
where the front wall had been, and placed her on the pavement. ‘Are
you all right?’ he asked, his voice full of concern. Eliza put out
a hand and felt the cloth of his RAF greatcoat. He took it off and
wrapped her up in it, very tenderly. ‘My hero,’ she said. She
looked down at her feet, she’d lost a shoe. ‘My shoe,’ she said
helplessly, ‘I’ve lost my shoe.’ She’d heard of things like this,
escaping death by a cat’s whisker and being obsessed with
irrelevant things. It was shock, she was in shock. ‘I’ll get it,’
he said, and moved as if he was in a dream. ‘Would you?’ she
smiled. ‘They were so expensive, darling.’
Her rescuer disappeared back into
the building, came out with the shoe. Two firemen brought out
Dickie Landers and no-one cheered. He was very dead. ‘Did you know
him?’ her rescuer asked, taking off his RAF cap and wiping his
brow. ‘Never seen him before,’ she said. He offered her his arm,
‘Can I take you for a cup of tea? There’s a café round the corner.’
It was nearly dawn.
‘The age of chivalry is alive and well,’
she laughed, tears in her eyes, ‘and is called?’
‘Gordon, Gordon Fairfax.’
‘Wonderful,’ Eliza murmured.
And now there was a problem.
He was the problem. She’d never meant to
take him as a lover, never meant to be unfaithful to Gordon. The
Widow and Vinny, of course, thought she was out committing adultery
every night, but she wasn’t, this was the first time. Really. But
it was a big mistake, she had to stop it. She didn’t even like him.
He wasn’t a nice person, he wasn’t … kind.
It had just been a game really,
she was bored and he was there, so nearby, so keen. And the sex
with him was so … dark, there was a certain attraction in that.
Gordon was so … wholesome. And that had been so wonderful at first,
she had really loved him. Such a hero. But he couldn’t keep on
being a hero, more’s the pity. She got restless. That was why she’d
taken a lover, a little bit of fun, a little bit of power. Now it
was a game she couldn’t stop. She hadn’t realized how inflamed he
was by her, how obsessed. How mad.
He wouldn’t let her go. She couldn’t tell
Gordon, couldn’t tell anyone. She wanted to tell Gordon, wanted him
to look after her, the way he always did. She was choking, she had
to get some air. Maybe she could just leave, walk away and leave
the whole sorry mess behind?
She loved Gordon, really she did, but he
got on her nerves. He was so bloody good. And he made her feel so
bloody bad. He followed her everywhere. Really, in her heart, she
thought that the only person she’d ever truly loved – apart from
Charles and Isobel, it went without saying – was that scarred
red-headed boy in the air-raid shelter. She didn’t even know his
name, had only been with him for half an hour. Less. She’d
half-expected Charles to be born with scar tissue on his face, was
relieved when he wasn’t. An invisible hand squeezed her heart when
she thought about her children.
The old witch was driving her mad, a pair
of witches, come to that. It was Gordon this and Gordon that, they
had to get away from this house, live their own lives. Maybe she
should kill the old witch, and Vinny too. This was ridiculous. She
was going mad.
A picnic, it’s half-term, after
all, and we’ve done absolutely bloody nothing all week. We’ll take
the bus into town and meet Daddy at lunchtime and give him a
surprise.
Gordon and Eliza were having this
tremendous row. He just wouldn’t leave her alone, would he, chasing
after her in the wood, when she needed to be on her own. ‘You’re
having an affair, aren’t you?’ he shouted, his words echoing in the
silent autumn air. ‘Be quiet,’ she said sharply, ‘the children will
hear. Leave me alone.’
‘I don’t understand you, I don’t
bloody understand you.’ Gordon was weeping. Eliza hated him when he
was weak. He pushed her up against a tree.
‘Stop it,’ she hissed at him.
‘Why should I bloody stop it? Admit it,
you’re having an affair.’
‘You’re hurting me. Gordon!’ He was hurting her, he had his hands round her throat,
pressing her windpipe, she began to struggle, he was frightening
her. ‘Admit it,’ he growled, his voice unnatural. He let go of her
throat. ‘Admit it, you’ve been unfaithful, haven’t you? And before
me,’ he said suddenly, ‘were there a lot of men? There must have
been a lot of men, weren’t there?’
‘Yes,’ she spat at him, ‘there were
absolutely hundreds, I’ve no idea how many!’
He slapped her face, ‘Liar!’ and she
kneed him hard in the groin so that he crouched down on the forest
floor, gasping. Immediately Eliza felt sorry, gave him her hand,
pulled him up, said, ‘Oh, Gordon,’ sadly, ‘you’re such a fool.’ She
wanted to tell him everything, sink onto his breast, feel the
shelter of his arms around her, find redemption in this awful
world. She leant her back against a tree and said blankly, without
emotion, ‘I was a whore, a common or garden whore who got paid for
it. I fucked anyone who paid me, darling.’ She could hear her
voice, knew her tone was all wrong, couldn’t do anything about it,
she was so tired.
Gordon grabbed hold of her hair either
side of her head and crashed her head backwards against the tree.
She sank down on to her knees, on to the carpet of golden leaves
and Gordon ran off through the trees, wildly, like a mad disciple
of the great god Pan.
Eliza struggled to sit up. Her head
hurt horribly. The back of her skull was bruised and sore. She
didn’t have a watch on, didn’t know what time it was. She was cold.
It would soon be dark. They shouldn’t have fought like that. Gordon
would come back soon and find her, look after her again like he
always did, gather up his family and take them home. She would
explain to him properly, he would forgive her. She’d tell him about
Herbert Potter and Mr Reagan, and Dickie Landers, tell him about
her ghastly adulterous lover who wouldn’t let her go.
Eliza started to cry. She felt
tremendously sorry for herself. It was growing darker and she was
suddenly frightened. She shouted Gordon’s name. Someone was
approaching through the trees, ‘Gordon, oh thank God,’ she
struggled to her feet. But it wasn’t Gordon.
‘Oh it’s you,’ she said coldly, trying to
pretend she wasn’t frightened. But she was. ‘What are you doing here? You’ve followed me, haven’t you?
This has to stop—’ Eliza’s voice grew more high-pitched, terror
crept over her, she broke out into a cold sweat, he was mad,
unhinged.
She tried to pull herself together, to
placate him. ‘Come on, let’s go back and find the path, let’s be
sensible, Peter, darling – please…’ Eliza wasn’t very good at
pleading, she knew it was no good. He had one of her shoes in his
hand. She looked down at her feet in surprise, she only had one
shoe on. He lifted the shoe up, it had a very thin heel, her heart
was fluttering, it was trying to escape from the cage of her ribs,
she was clammy all over, her body felt as if it was going to shut
down with fear.
Her feet wouldn’t move, she had to move,
she turned and started to run but he was on top of her, hitting her
with the shoe on the back of the head. ‘If I can’t have you,’ he
said breathlessly, ‘then nobody will, you bloody whore.’ She cried
out and dropped to her knees and started to crawl away. She looked
back. He was lighting his pipe, very calmly, as if he was in his
living-room at home. Eliza thought maybe that was the end of it,
maybe he’d got rid of his anger now and would leave her alone. She
crawled further away, further into the forest.
She was beneath a tree, kneeling on a
carpet of leaves and acorns. A golden leaf drifted down past her
eyes and brushed her cheek. Eliza struggled into a sitting
position, her back against the stout trunk of the tree. For a
moment she couldn’t see him, but just when she thought he must have
gone, he stepped out from behind a tree. The aura of madness around
him was a sulphurous yellow and he was grinning like a skeleton. ‘I
am older than you, you know,’ he laughed, ‘and I do know
more.’
‘Please,’ Eliza whispered. She was
shivering uncontrollably. She was so very cold. ‘Please don’t,’ but
he grabbed hold of a handful of hair and yanked her head forward
and began to hit her skull again with the heel of the brown shoe,
grunting with the effort. Again and again he hit her, long after
the trees around grew dim and Eliza had slipped into blackness.
Then he walked away, discarding the shoe like an old piece of
paper.
And that was the end of Eliza. Or
Violet, or Violet Angela, or little Lady Esme. Or whoever she
was.
Of course, she wasn’t really the
de Brevilles’ daughter. After the wedding a doctor in Paris told
Lady Irene that she would never be able to have children. Although
she didn’t know it at the time she was already suffering from the
disease that killed her. Sir Edward was so besotted by his new wife
and his new wife was so distressed at the idea of being childless
that he went out and got her a baby. He would probably have lived
to regret corrupting the de Breville bloodline, but then he didn’t
have to, it was taken out of his hands, Esme was taken out of his
hands.
He bought her in Paris. You can always
buy children. Gypsies probably—
