Her hair was hacked roughly about her scalp, patches of bare skin milky white against the short clumps. It was not like before – there was no thought for fashion, music hall stars or rebellion this time. There were swollen areas on her scalp where the hair had been torn from the roots and seeping scratches in her skin.
I looked away, watching the raindrops on the window, waiting for the image to fade, but it did not. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine Nell as I wanted her to appear, with a smile on her lips and curls about her shoulders, but when I opened my eyes again the room about me seemed to have darkened and it was not only Nell that I could see but the little silver sewing scissors in her quivering hand, their blades choked with mats of chestnut hair, and the dark crescents of fallen curls in her lap.
But it was her eyes that told me the daughter I knew was gone. This Nell would glance to me and then away again as if she neither recognised me nor anything around her, and she stared into empty space as if something else was playing out in front of her, something that I could neither see nor understand.
Dora’s visit had changed things. She had told me what I should have seen all those years ago. I should have recognised the loss of her first love in my daughter’s face. Sam was never a reliable sort, so I should have guessed that the day would come. I should have pieced it all together, but I could not have guessed that it would happen in that way, and that Nell’s hopes would be lost in the arms of another. I could never have foreseen Iris Caldwell.
I had not scolded Nell on that day in 1912, but I remember the shrillness in my voice when I saw her: ‘What have you done, Nell? Oh, what have you done?’ But the words were spoken in haste and I had not waited for an answer. I had not said anything more about what she had done to herself. I had just drawn the curtains and lit a lamp, then I had gone to the kitchen for a basin and the meat scissors.
Her hair had barely been long enough to scrape back into a bun, yet only a few of these straggled strands remained that day. I’d feared she would look like an invalid if I left them, so I’d steadied her head with one hand and cut them short, for I was sure that it would make her hair look thicker – after all it is what we woman are always taught, and I remembered my own mother had told me that cut hair will always look thicker. So I had done my best to cut the strands to an approximation of a style that was planned and wanted. I could do no more for her back then.
But so much time had passed since that day and now I knew what had caused Nell her sorrow and I was sure I could be more of a comfort.
‘Everyone suffers a loss like this,’ I whispered. ‘The first time is the hardest. Time will heal.’ But the words seemed empty because I knew that the girl I saw in front of me was just a memory. She could not hear me or touch me – even her sobs were muted. It was a silence that still separated us even after all these years.
I reached out to her but the arms that stretched out before me wore the long sleeves of an old-fashioned day dress. The hands were smooth and the fingernails short but not yet yellowed, and I realised that I saw my hands as they had been on that day in 1912, as I had offered them to her. It was an embrace that she had not returned and I remembered the feeling of her hard shoulder against my bosom, as if I had done nothing more than crush her arms to her chest. I do not remember her warmth, because there had been none.
‘I am here for you, Nell. You are home now.’ They were my words but it was not me who spoke them. I heard my voice as it had been over two decades ago when it was softer and still had some depth. It was a voice that I had used to sing Nell to sleep when she was a baby, to read her fairy tales when she was a child, and to scold her when she was a young woman – a voice that had scolded her too often, I thought. It was a voice that was no longer mine.
And then Nell lifted her head and I felt that maybe she saw me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for everything.’ But now the age had returned to my voice once more and the grate of the words sounded hollow as I spoke them to a memory I could see but not touch.
‘Why, Nell, why?’ But my lips were only tracing a memory because twenty-five years later I finally knew the answer. It had been given to me by another – the words had slipped out so carelessly, but now I could link what Dora had said to the girl I had found that day in 1912 when I had walked in through the front door with my Bible still under my arm, and found her with my little sewing scissors in her hand.
If I had been a better mother to her, she might have told me what had happened to her that day, but I was not and she stayed silent. I had spent sleepless nights worrying about the day that she had set out for Haughten Hall with a bag of liver salts for Iris Caldwell. It was something that I had wondered about even when she was long gone.
‘Why, my love?’ I pleaded. ‘Why did you not tell me?’
But Nell did not answer me because she was just a memory and never made a sound.
* * *
It took some time for Nell to fade completely. She lingered for a while, her striped dress blurring to grey, as really I could not remember the colour of it, and the boots that had rubbed her ankles fading back into the fog of my mind.
It was her head that remained the longest – the non-seeing eyes and the stark outline of her naked scalp. They were things that had robbed her of her gentle softness and made her seem more creature than girl. It was a memory that I had tried to forget for so long, but now that it had returned I did not move from my chair because Nell was my daughter and I could not leave her alone at a time like this. I stayed with Nell until she was gone and only her essence remained.
I thought of my meeting with Dora and the knowledge it had brought me. I had always suspected that Nell had been in love with Sam but now I was sure. I was certain that, on the day I remembered, Nell had found out about his attachment to another – to Iris Caldwell, the girl I had always so openly praised when I never had a kind word for my own daughter.
But it had not just been words that I had used against Nell. It had been every act, every command, every betrayal: I had stood by while Nell led Iris’s horse just as a servant would; I had forced her to deliver liver salts to a house that had both a housekeeper and a motorcar; I had belittled a cause she believed in, ripping apart the suffragettes’ leaflet in front of her so that it would not offend the Caldwells.
Then Iris Caldwell, the girl who I had favoured over my own daughter, had stolen Nell’s sweetheart, the only true friend she had. Together Iris and I had driven Nell to disfigure herself. Maybe we had driven her to do whatever she did on May Day – the crime that Sam Denman had always been blamed for.
I blinked my eyes in the faded light but neither Nell’s shadow nor outline remained and I could feel her no longer. Then I got up slowly, my knees painful and clicking. I went upstairs to my bedroom, crouched down by the bed and took the bloodied nightgown out from the chest once more.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said into the darkness, for what I was about to do would betray her at last. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and carried the nightdress downstairs, stopping at the bottom for a few minutes while I wiped away more tears. Then I straightened my skirts, smoothed my hair and held my head high. Without stopping, I went to the front door.
I crossed the village green, towards the distant blue lamp, and I opened the front door of the police station and walked right up to the constable on the front desk.