‘I only heard that she was drunk on one occasion,’ he said, ‘and no more than—’
‘It was here that I found her,’ I said.
‘Here?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In this place. ‘You see it was on the day of her father’s funeral. She had taken a bottle of wine from the wake and she had walked from Oak Cottage in her mourning dress and brought the wine here, where she drank it in the pews with a stable hand. I marched her to the police station myself. All I saw was her disrespect for her father and for God, and the disgrace that she had brought on us. I did not see that she wanted to be close to her father again. I did not see her pain.’
He reached forward and took my hand again.
‘Nell always loved her father more than she loved me,’ I said, my voice wavering. ‘I was scared when his death moved her so much because I thought that, on my own, I could never be enough for her.’ There was so much more that I could have said but I found myself too weary to continue. ‘Nell’s behaviour was all down to me,’ I concluded. ‘Maybe even what happened to her in the end, in some way. I had my flaws.’
Francis looked down at our joined hands, his eyebrows lowered and his large forehead furrowed, and I think we both realised that there could be no words to soothe me. I could not even find God in this place today.
‘There has already been enough suffering over what happened back then,’ he said after a while. ‘There should not be any more. It makes no sense for you to torment yourself this way.’
‘Thank you,’ I whispered, but I was tired and there was really nothing more that I could say, and I feared that I was no more than a lonely old woman off-loading her troubles on the first stranger who would listen. ‘You should go,’ I said, taking my hand back from his. ‘I feel that I should probably take some time alone to reflect.’
He cleared his throat awkwardly and stood up again. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘and I have a train to catch.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You have probably missed it.’
‘There will be another,’ he said, ‘but as I said before I have heard all that I need to.’
I nodded.
He stood up and walked back down the aisle, his footsteps echoing along the pews.
It was not until he reached the porch that I jumped to my feet. ‘Wait!’ I cried. ‘I remember more about you now. You were the one with the cine camera. It was you who took the film of Iris and the man in the cloth cap as they walked across the village green on May Day. You were there. You have to go to the police station. You…’
But he was gone.
Then the bell started to toll and my words were lost in the sound. It was a bell that long ago had rung at the start of funerals, but times were changing and the modern world was a strange upside-down place where nothing made sense. To my ears the bell did not mark the end of Howard’s funeral but reminded me of the old passing bell, which warned of an impending death. I started to worry again, not for the man just buried, but for the one who now faced the noose.
Nell
1912
22
It was the events of just one morning near the end of March that changed everything. There are things about that morning that I remember quite clearly: the little callus on my mother’s finger as she pushed her needle into the cotton irises on the nightgown; the bright green stripe of a tin inside a paper bag and my protests at the errand I was to run; the bulbous silhouette of an expectant woman resting by the wych elms and her warning to me to turn back; the spider hunched on the trembling cobweb and the ripples on the surface of the bucket; the smell of his carbolic soap and the sound of her laugh. For anything else that I witnessed that day, I cannot speak of.
It is what happened after I found them together that I cannot account for. I do not remember walking home, nor going into the house and sitting on the chair by the window. I do not remember the blisters swelling on my heels nor how I got mud on the hem of my dress and tore my stockings. It was only seeing my mother’s face that broke the fog of my memory, for I recall how it seemed to crumple when she arrived home and saw me.
My mother had run in and out of the room – sometimes no more than a blur in the light from the window, and sometimes her face large as she clamped her hands over my ears and stared into my eyes. I do not remember what she said or did, only the little fragments of colour that I saw around me – the vivid green of my shawl on the back of the chair, the red tinge to the water in a little metal pie dish and the spool of white gauze, the silver sheen of the sewing scissors and the rich brown of the strands that choked the blades. I remember my fists in my lap, mats of hair between fingers that would not unclench, and my mother’s hands shaking as she pulled the brush through my hair, wiping her tears on her sleeve.
Then her words cut through the fog at last: ‘I am here for you, Nell. You are home now.’
It was not until much later that I felt her pain.
* * *
‘You are wearing the bonnet again,’ she said.
I looked at Iris’s reflection in her dressing table mirror and then back to my own as I stood behind her but said nothing. It had been hard to return to Haughten Hall after all that had happened, but in the end I could not give my mother a reason to stay away. I had not told my mother a thing about what I had witnessed in the stable yard of Waldley Court and even now, after almost a month had passed, I thought that she would only accuse me of telling lies about her precious Iris.
‘Is it really so cold in here as it is outside?’ Iris tilted her head and looked at me, her eyebrows raised.
‘My mother makes me wear it,’ I said quietly. It was a line I had rehearsed with my mother every day since my ‘little mishap’ as she liked to call it. For a whole month she had regularly scrutinised my scalp and run her fingers through my tufts of hair, measuring them with the width of her fingers as they grew back to something that was not respectable but something that she said suggested neither illness nor madness. These were also days in which she had increased my Bible readings and hidden all the knives and scissors in the cottage. It was a time that she had forbidden me from leaving the cottage because, no matter how caring my mother had suddenly become, what she feared most was village gossip about her daughter.
Iris narrowed her eyes.
‘You must have noticed that my hair was quite short already,’ I recited woodenly. ‘I like it this way but my mother does not so she makes me wear the bonnet. I wanted to look like Vesta Tilley and Mother does not approve of the music halls.’
‘Vesta Tilley dresses as a man, in shirt, tie and top hat,’ she said flatly, ‘and sings songs about her lady loves.’ But there was no malice in her voice, her brow only creased slightly as if I somehow fascinated her.
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I still like her even though I have only ever seen photographs and heard “Burlington Bertie” on the school gramophone, for Mother will not let me go to the music halls.’
‘I have not seen her at a music hall either,’ Iris said, ‘but Francis says that she acts like a sapphist.’
I did not answer for I did not know what the word meant. ‘Your father likes the bonnet,’ I said quickly, remembering his nod of approval when I had worn it on my first visit.