36

It wasn’t just the baby that died.

Janet’s miscarriage was the turning point of the whole business. Until then, I’d never thought much about miscarriages. They were something that happened to queens in the history books whose husbands were desperate for an heir. Or to characters in novels. Or to quiet little women I didn’t know very well because they didn’t go out much. A miscarriage was hard luck for all concerned, I assumed in so far as I thought about it at all, but not the end of the world.

It was a day or two before I learned the full story. On Friday morning, after I had left for London, Janet had finished the housework before going into the garden to mow the lawn. The pains started coming at teatime. They grew steadily worse in the early evening. David was late home, and both Rosie and Mr Treevor were demanding food and attention and I wasn’t there to share the load. Janet meant to sit down and rest for a moment, but every time she was about to do so there would be another demand.

‘Anyway, I thought I was just having a few twinges,’ she wailed to me when I went to see her on Saturday morning in hospital. ‘It’s like the curse – you carry on and sooner or later they go away. But this time they didn’t. They got worse.’

Janet had gone to the lavatory and that was when she realized that things were very wrong. Even then, she wouldn’t phone David. She phoned the doctors’ surgery instead, and was lucky enough to catch Flaxman as he was about to go home. That was the only piece of luck she had that day.

‘It’s all my fault,’ she said in the hospital. ‘I killed him.’

‘Look,’ I said awkwardly, ‘that’s nonsense. It wasn’t your fault. And in a way it wasn’t a proper baby yet. You don’t even know it was a boy.’

‘Of course it was a proper baby,’ she snarled at me. ‘And I know it was a boy, I always did. His name was going to be Michael. Michael.’

For a moment she held my eyes with hers. She looked as if she wanted to strangle me. Then she started crying again and held out her arms, asking for comfort.

Later she told me what Dr Flaxman had said when he had visited her earlier in the morning. ‘He told me I had to put it behind me and get pregnant again. What does he know? He made it sound as if I’d had a tooth out and another would grow in its place.’

No matter how often I told her not to be silly, no matter how often I told her the miscarriage was nobody’s fault, no matter how often she said that she quite agreed, she still felt she was to blame on some level I couldn’t reach. In the end, no one reached her there.

In the meantime I rather enjoyed myself. I had the agreeable sense that other people thought I was rising to the crisis. I tried to comfort Janet. I looked after Rosie and Mr Treevor, whose needs were almost identical. I ran the Dark Hostelry after a fashion. And I listened to David when he needed to talk.

‘I had a note from the bishop this afternoon,’ he told me on Saturday evening. ‘Asking after Janet, and so on. But he said that there’s a combined living becoming vacant at the end of the summer. Asked if I might be interested.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Tattisham with Ditchford. It’s about thirty miles away. Near Wisbech.’

‘So it’s in the depths of the Fens?’

He nodded. ‘You can’t get much more remote. It would be a struggle financially too – the stipend’s nothing special and one would have to run a car. I don’t know how Janet would manage. There would be no one for her to talk to.’

Nor for David, I thought, who was one of those people who wherever they live never quite leave university.

‘Still, perhaps she would like the change,’ he went on. ‘A chance for a new start. How’s Rosie, do you think? This must be very unsettling for her.’

‘She’s OK, I think,’ I said with the assurance of the childless. ‘Of course, she’s very young, and children that age are self-absorbed.’

‘Does she know about the baby?’

‘I told her Mummy had to go into hospital, and that she wouldn’t be having a baby after all.’

‘How did she take it?’

‘In her stride.’

This was entirely true. When I told Rosie the news, she smiled up at me and said, ‘Good.’ I thought David might find this upsetting. Now I’m old and times have changed, I see things rather differently. It strikes me as faintly ridiculous that Janet and I, two grown women, should have spent so much time and effort worrying about David’s feelings. We treated him as if his heart was made of eggshells.

Janet came home on Sunday morning with orders to rest as much as possible for a few days. She was very weak and still depressed. Flaxman told us that the best thing to do was to try to jolly her out of it, and David and even I colluded with this. I think this was probably the worst thing we could have done. Every time David or Flaxman said, ‘Never mind, Janet, you’ll soon get over it, and then you can get pregnant again and have another baby’, he was telling her that she wasn’t allowed to mourn for the one she’d just lost. No one else was mourning, not really. We were being relentlessly bloody jolly. So Janet had to grieve inside herself, and confined griefs grow bitter.

On Sunday afternoon Janet said to me, ‘I’m worried about David.’

‘Because of Tattisham with Ditchford?’

She shook her head. ‘Because I’m ill, I won’t be able to – well, he’ll have to do without it for a while.’

‘I’m sure he’ll manage.’ It would have grated if either of us had used the word sex.

‘It’s different for men, I suppose.’

‘Each to his own,’ I said, wondering whether Henry was doing without it at present and why he hadn’t phoned me. I’d tried to phone him at Brown’s on Saturday but he had already paid his bill and left the hotel. He had not left a forwarding address. Perhaps he’d had enough of me.

Sunday went from bad to worse. Mr Treevor went to bed early, Janet had her supper in bed, and David and I ate in the kitchen. Afterwards David went upstairs to collect Janet’s tray. A moment later I followed him up because he had forgotten to take Janet’s coffee. I found David ushering a whimpering Mr Treevor across the landing. The old man wasn’t wearing his teeth and his face had collapsed in on itself.

‘What’s up?’

‘He was in Rosie’s room again.’ David glared at me as if it was my fault. ‘I’m not having this.’

Suddenly Mr Treevor flung himself on his knees and embraced David’s legs. ‘Don’t send me away,’ he wailed. ‘Please don’t put me in a home.’

I tried to help him to his feet but he dung to David.

‘Come on, Mr Treevor,’ I urged him. ‘Why don’t you get into bed and I’ll bring you a nice warm hot-water bottle and a cup of cocoa?’

‘Don’t send me away!’

I noticed that Rosie was watching from the doorway of her room. It could only be a matter of seconds before Janet appeared.

White-faced, David bent down, gripped Mr Treevor’s wrists and broke his hold. He pulled the old man to his feet. David’s eyes were so bright that it seemed to me that it wasn’t him looking through them but someone else.

‘Get back in your room,’ he said softly, and his fingers squeezed the frail old wrists until Mr Treevor squealed. ‘You’ve caused enough trouble.’

He pushed Mr Treevor away from him. The old man would have fallen if I had not put out an arm to steady him. He stared at David as if he was seeing his son-in-law for the first time, which in a sense of course he was.

‘I wish I was dead,’ Mr Treevor said. ‘Please kill me. I don’t want to live.’

‘Of course you do,’ I said briskly, taking him by his arm and drawing him towards his room. ‘We all love you very much, Mr Treevor, but we’re all a bit upset now because Janet’s not well. But things will seem much better in the morning.’

Suddenly the fight went out of him. I led him into his room. He allowed me to put him into bed. I tucked him in.

‘Night, night,’ I said. ‘Don’t get out of bed again, and I’ll come and see you soon.’

He held up his face to me. ‘Kiss,’ he ordered.

I bent down and kissed his forehead. It was like kissing an old newspaper. Then I went back to the landing, which by now was empty. I peeped into Rosie’s room. She was in bed, pretending to be asleep with Angel on the pillow beside her. Rosie had never held up her face and asked me to kiss her. Janet and David’s door was closed and I heard voices on the other side.

I felt very sorry for myself. So I went down to the drawing room, mixed myself a large gin and Angostura, stretched out on the sofa and lit a cigarette. Things would get better, I told myself without conviction. I thought that David had behaved appallingly. And I also thought that, given the right circumstances, or rather the wrong ones, I might have behaved in exactly the same way.

After a while, he came downstairs. I didn’t bother to take my feet off the sofa or try to hide the glass. He sat down beside the empty fireplace.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I lost my temper. I shouldn’t have done that with anyone, but with poor John it’s even more inexcusable.’

I lit another cigarette and let him stew.

‘You won’t know, but I’ve caught him in with Rosie before. It’s – ah – not normal behaviour – a symptom of course of the dementia.’

‘But it was all harmless, really, wasn’t it? He wasn’t hurting her.’

‘I don’t think we need discuss this further. It’s a medical matter. In point of fact, Janet and I had already decided he would have to go into a nursing home. There’s no question about it now. I’ll ring Flaxman in the morning.’

There was a silence. I searched desperately for something worth saying.

‘Are you sure it’s the best thing to do?’

‘Are you implying it isn’t?’ His voice hardened, and the stranger looked out of his eyes. ‘John can only get worse. He needs trained help. And Janet and I have to think of Rosie as well.’

I nodded. ‘I know. And you’re right. But he’s going to be so upset.’

‘It’s a question of what’s best for all concerned.’ David’s voice was gentler now. ‘Naturally we’ll visit him regularly. But the probability is that he soon won’t recognize any of us, so it really doesn’t matter where he is.’

This time the silence was longer.

‘I never asked,’ David said abruptly. ‘How was Henry when you saw him the other day?’

‘Much the same. He sent his regards.’

‘And is he helping with your researches?’

It was odd that David couldn’t mention my search for Francis without sounding patronizing about it, even when he was trying to be nice to me.

‘Very well, thank you,’ I said primly. ‘But now there’s another puzzle. Someone else is interested.’

‘In Youlgreave?’

‘Yes. They’ve hired a private investigator called Harold Munro to dig around.’

David frowned. ‘But that’s absurd. You don’t hire a detective to find out about a dead poet.’

‘No. Henry said much the same thing on Friday evening.’

‘So he knows about this?’

What David meant was that if Henry knew about Harold Munro, then the private investigator couldn’t be dismissed as a fantasy created by a credulous woman.

‘It was Henry who followed Munro and found out who he was,’ I said.

‘In London?’

‘Yes. But Munro’s also been to Rosington. It may have been him watching the Dark Hostelry the other day – you remember when Mr Treevor saw a man staring up at the house?’

‘Do you think he might be interested in you rather than Youlgreave?’

‘He borrowed one of Youlgreave’s books from the public library. He took cuttings about him from the Rosington Observer. He’s even been pestering Mrs Gotobed and Mrs Elstree.’

‘How very odd. Perhaps we should have a word with the police.’

‘And tell them what?’ I asked. ‘Has anyone committed a crime?’

Once again David shrugged. I knew his mind had wandered off to something else, probably the Theological College or his brilliant career rather than Mr Treevor, Janet or the dead baby. So I sat there nursing my glass and wondered if there had in fact been a crime, not in 1958 but over fifty years earlier.

David would have said I was imagining things. But I hadn’t imagined Nancy Martlesham, who to all intents and purposes had vanished in a puff of smoke from the lawn of the Theological College on August 6th, 1904.