7
The cottage seemed empty after Roy left. Even Nell did not linger, her features blurring and the colours of her dress fading into the pattern of the cushions until she became part of the grey of the morning.
I sat quietly for a while, the tea that I had made during Roy’s visit cooling in the cup as I listened to the gusts of wind roaring in the chimney and the spatter of rain on the window. Then I stood up stiffly and headed up the stairs to Nell’s bedroom.
Roy was no longer the young constable who had visited me all those years ago, the lanky youth who had stooped awkwardly through the doorframe and forgotten to remove his boots. He was a grown man now with a daughter of his own and a sense of responsibility but he was a man, after all, and I knew I would not be able to bear it if he had left something out of place. Hearing the clunk of the bottom drawer and knowing that a man had been in my daughter’s room left me cold and I needed to see Nell’s room once more for myself, if only for the reassurance that my daughter’s memory had not been violated.
I hesitated for just a second as the door dragged a little against the warped timbers of the frame, and then I looked inside. Roy’s presence had not been enough to rid the room of its mustiness but the sparks of dust circling in the grey light from the window confirmed that the stillness had been disturbed. The room had an air of sadness to it and I regretted abandoning it for so long. There was a halo of soot on the carpet by the small fireplace and the paint on the windowsill was cracked, the small panes of glass choked with moss. There was a dark patch on the ceiling where rain must have leaked in, drop by drop, over the years.
And Nell was not there.
Her Bible lay on the dressing table and I thought of the times we had spent together reading as we sat on the bed, huddled under a blanket because we could not afford to light the fire. I saw the dim glow of light from the little window and remembered how we had knelt on the bed and pressed our noses up to the panes to glimpse the white chests of the house martins as they swooped up to their nest. The quilt depicting the life of Eve that we had made together was folded on the end of the bed, Nell’s needle still in the fabric as if she intended to return to finish her work. I remembered that there had been happy times in this room and thought that I could even feel a little of her warmth and hear the contented sound of our chatter.
I took up her pillow and patted the dust from it. Then I looked to the quilt once more. It was a scene that showed the expulsion of Eve, the woman’s body stabbed with Nell’s needle, a trail of red cotton from the eye, and my mind started to wander again. It was the quilt that we had worked on with the ladies who visited me in the parsonage, the ones whom I had counselled on matters too immoral for a child’s ears while Nell sat in her bedroom only yards away. I worried if the staircase and the closed door had been enough to keep such evils from her or if, now and then, she had overheard a vulgar word or some lurid detail.
There had been other things in the room, things that I knew she had kept from me, hidden at the bottom of her drawers or under the bed. Things that came in striped paper bags from the cheap bookstand at Partridge’s – magazines with silly detective stories and novels with plots that were quite indecent.
I had first discovered these books the day that we moved into the cottage when I had seen one of these little striped paper bags in the middle of the sitting room where her belongings had been dumped, the mud from the removal men’s boots still wet on the carpet. I had screamed her name and run up the stairs with the bag in my hand but when I got to her room I had found her curled on the bed, sobbing in a way that I had not seen before, something quite different from the tears she would shed when she grazed her knee or was forbidden from staying up late. She had seemed to not see me, and when I put my hand on hers, it was cold. Although I feared for her at the time, I never guessed that I would see her that way again.
I remembered Nell’s face close to mine, the movements of her mouth and the force of her shout but not the words. She had held one of her silly novels in her hand, and I recalled snatching it from her, the pages fluttering to the carpet as I tore them from the binding. I remembered my hand on her shoulders as I forced her to kneel and pray. I remembered her in a dress, crumpled from a night in the police cell, the vile words that fell from her mouth and the slap of my hand across her cheek. I remembered, so often, the door shut.
And then there was what I would call her ‘little mishap’, although really it was so much more than that. It was a time that I dared not think of but, after it had happened, I had led her up the stairs to this room and helped her on to the bed where she had lain for hours, neither moving nor speaking.
I went over to the bed and lay down wearily. Then I saw Nell sitting on the stool by the dressing table, quite clear in the dull light of the morning. Her head was turned to me and she watched me in the silent way that she always did.
‘Why don’t you talk?’ I said. ‘Because you do no good just staring at me and following me when you please. You brought me nothing but trouble when you were around, and you were never this demure. You are here, but I feel as if I don’t know you anymore.’
She said nothing.
‘You were so hard to love—’ my voice wavered ‘—which is what makes it so difficult for me. I will always have this guilt that maybe I didn’t love you enough, and I fear that all this mess is somehow down to me – that I drove you to do whatever you did on that day.’
She turned to look in the mirror, for of course, she had not heard me.
‘Please tell me,’ I pleaded. ‘Will you please tell me why I have been keeping your secrets for you? The police now think that maybe Sam and Iris came here, to our home, on May Day morning. But I have always known that you returned here, and I have never been able to tell another soul about it.’
But still she was silent.
I got up slowly and left the room. I walked across the landing to my bedroom and pulled a small wooden chest from under my bed, then sat back on my heels to catch my breath, one hand on my aching back. I carried the chest back to Nell’s bedroom where I set it down on her bed and opened it, the smell of mothballs filling the air.
‘I was going to use this chest to store your wedding trousseau,’ I said, ‘but I have known for all this time that you would never marry. All I could use this old chest for was to hide the mess you had made.’
I opened the chest and tilted it towards where she sat, as if she might somehow be able to look inside.
‘I found this under your bed,’ I said, my fingers tracing a thin layer of cotton inside. ‘I found it there on the morning of May Day 1912, just before the police came to search your room the first time. But you must have known that I would find it, for only you can have put it there. You returned home that May Day morning – even if just for a short while. God only knows what you did!’
She seemed to grow a little clearer, but her eyes were still focused somewhere behind me and I knew that the memory I saw was one from long before that fateful day. She would not speak to me, yet I had no one but her to talk to.
‘I thought that if I hid this away, then I would forget about it somehow,’ I said, ‘but I cannot. You are my daughter and I have to protect you, no matter what you have done. Even if all that I am protecting is your memory.’