Chapter 18

 

Much as she hated to admit it to herself. Dorothea Arbuthnot was finding the presence of Helena in the house a huge strain. Helena was restless and Dorothea sensed there was some sort of crisis looming with this man, this Tom York. The unexpected trip back home was probably all about time to think or one of those inane things people decided they needed to do when they were locked in an impossible situation, unhappy but also revelling in the drama. Dorothea chided herself for her cynicism.

At least Arthur was occupying himself, though the way he was doing this was possibly not the healthiest. In his smoke-filled, yellowing, wallpapered study, with cracked leather furniture, Arthur had set up a mock battlefield. He had scrapbooks of newspaper accounts and now some published war memoirs. Immersed in this, he mentally fought the battles, and probably tried to change the endings.

She felt uneasy about this pastime of his, which had started very shortly after the armistice, but what could she do about it? For all she knew, Arthur may derive some consolation from his preoccupation and it was better for his health and her dignity if it kept him away from The Dalesman.

She hadn’t said anything about the police inspector bringing him home, but she didn’t need to. He would be feeling bad enough about it—what he could remember of the night. He’d been his sweet self to Helena and as always, courteous to her, so maybe she should be happy with that. The inspector’s words had disturbed her though, and she wondered how much pressure he actually could put on her to talk and how much could she resist him?

Then her daughter came into the room and Dorothea turned to look at her. She put her hand to her throat, which suddenly felt restricted.

Helena was holding an envelope in her hand and on her face was an expression Dorothea didn’t like. For a split second, she was afraid, but that was ridiculous. How had she been so criminally careless though?

“What does this mean, Mother?” Helena’s voice was crystal-clear, each word perfectly enunciated, but then a tremor crossed her face. “This must have fallen out of your cardigan pocket while you were in the garden, this morning. I don’t understand what it means.”

Dorothea swallowed hard. Why did I carry it around in my pocket, like some ridiculous talisman?

The evil letter was the opposite of that, aimed to bring misery and bad fortune. Dorothea cleared her throat. It was difficult to speak. She rang the bell. “I need some tea, my throat is dry.”

She held out her hand for the letter and after a few seconds hesitation, her daughter handed it to her. “Sit down, please dear. I’ll do my best to explain it to you.”

“Do your best to explain. I should think so, indeed. So, I’m a whore, and my brothers, Charles and Edward…what is all that about. Tell me mother. Don’t even try to fob me off.”

Dorothea heard the hysteria in Helena’s voice and was glad when, after a light tap on the door, Betty, the parlour maid came into the room carrying a tray.

“Mother, you can’t leave it hanging. You must tell me what this means?”

Helena was all big eyes and pallor, and Dorothea recognised the vulnerability beneath the brittleness. But, she couldn’t tell her. All this was too big. She had to, at least attempt to talk to Arthur first. For all his withdrawal from life, all the drinking, this was as much his business, as hers—more so, in fact. She wasn’t going to say anything until she’d spoken to him and Helena was just going to have to accept that. All she could do was buy a little time.

“Trust me, Helena, I will talk to you. I won’t lie to you and say that this letter is based on complete untruths, though some of it is. But, I must talk to daddy first. We’ll both talk to you later.”

Helena, for once in her life, chose the easier option and nodded her head. She obviously understood this was serious and not the time to begin haranguing her mother for information.

* * *

“How did your parents react when you decided to train as a VAD?

Edith shifted in the chair. This was so contrived and she was losing patience with this vague amble through her life, in a search for clues, because that’s what this was. She could only hope that there was method here somewhere, that one of the two of them knew where all this was going. It was tiring, though.

“They were not in favour of it. But, I was a grown woman and they couldn’t exactly stop me. To be honest, I can’t blame them. I don’t think they had a clue what exactly it was that I would be doing, for all that my father was a doctor. After all…well, I don’t suppose any of us had a clue what was coming, did we?”

He didn’t answer her rhetorical question. “And you met your fiancé after the outbreak of war.”

Edith shifted again in her chair. Her heart was pounding too fast and she began to feel hot. Blotches appeared in front of her eyes and she thought for a moment that she might faint. She took some deep, ragged breaths.

“You are feeling unwell, Edith?”

She nodded, not able to speak. But, she was beginning to feel better, her body returning to normal.

“Can I get you a drink of water?”

The doctor’s voice still sounded strange, as though he was speaking from the other side of a tunnel. Edith shook her head, trying to return to normal. “Yes, please.”

He poured a glass and handed it to her and she sipped the cold water. It was like nectar. It restored her further. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she was. Why on earth had she had this extreme reaction to a quite innocuous question?

She had spoken about Alistair before. Not a lot, perhaps, but she was capable of talking about him without this reaction. He was long dead. She’d reached some sort of acceptance of that fact. It was no longer newly raw, agonisingly painful. It was a sadness—a sadness at the waste of it all—but no different from the grief suffered by countless others.

“Would you think it might be better to leave this for this session? I will see you again, when you return after next weekend’s leave—when I think we can seriously discuss your discharge.”

Edith’s shoulders relaxed and her breathing slowed. She had been carrying such tension. She could not completely relax, though. “Dr. Uxbridge, I have no idea why I reacted like that when you asked about Alistair. To tell the truth, it has disturbed me, upset me. I thought I had come to terms with all of that a long time ago. I don’t know why mention of him just now had such an effect on me.”

“Let me reassure you, Edith. It is normal. You have been visiting again something that was a major event in your life, a very unhappy time. Trust me. Your reaction is normal. I may even go so far as to say, healthy.”

* * *

They allowed her back onto the ward eventually. She could never figure out whether her time in the padded room had been about punishment or to keep everyone else safe. She could have told them she wasn’t a danger to anyone else. All she asked was to be left in peace. If everyone left her alone, she would be the model patient. That Phyllis woman had pushed and pushed.

Though back on an ordinary ward, she could tell that things had changed. The staff were no longer so relaxed around her—her card had clearly been marked. Oh, well. She didn’t need friends in this place. She did want to work though, but the ward sister made it very clear that wasn’t going to happen in the foreseeable future. Once she had seen Phyllis in the distance, along the corridor. The woman flinched and she had felt a mixture of shame and power.

* * *

Beatrice was, as usual, uneasy at being expected to sit still. She was wriggling about in the chair, the need to be off doing something obvious in every line of her skinny body.

“Mummy, Beauty will be wondering where I am. I’m already half an hour late taking her out. It’s not fair. What is it, anyway? Am I in trouble?”

Julia sighed. She was dreading this. “No, you’re not in trouble, Bea. I was wondering if you would like a trip to London with me. Just for a few days, to see Auntie Hillary?”

“Why?” Beatrice had the characteristically set look on her small brown face. The severe plaits added to her air of self-sufficiency.

There was going to be no easy way out of this. “Because I want to go away for a few days, and I thought it would be nice if you came with me. I think Miss Fortescue will be fine about it. You don’t often have time away from school.

“Is Daddy coming too?” There was a look of anxiety now on her face.

“No.”

“Well I don’t want to go.”

Beatrice’s stubbornness, a cause for amusement when she’d been a toddler, could now be a real nuisance. “Please, Bea, I do need to get away for a few days, and it’s not fair on Mrs. Hardcastle to leave you here. She’s a housekeeper, not a children’s nurse.”

That was the wrong thing to say. Beatrice wouldn’t think she needed anybody to look after her, let alone a nurse.

“Anyway, I don’t want to go, Mummy. I don’t want to be away from school, or Beauty, or daddy either, actually. I heard you arguing last night. Why are you being so horrible to him? And now you’re going off and leaving him.”

Julia held onto her temper with difficulty. She hadn’t been prepared for this. She chased around in her mind for where the child had been last night when she confronted Giles. “Go back to your riding, then, Bea. I’ll talk it over with daddy, and we’ll decide what’s best.” She wanted to put an arm around this the youngest and most difficult of her children, but it would be unwelcome.

Her anger of a few moments ago had been replaced with desolation. She’d done everything wrong last night. Everything. Gone against all she had so carefully planned. A mood of destructiveness had come over her as soon as she’d seen his car in the drive.

Don’t go out, don’t go out, she’d told herself. Normally, however shaky things were between them, she would have gone out into the hall, asked him about his trip, rang for a drink, seen about food. Instead, she’d remained in the sitting room, turned the wireless on, paced around, looked out the window, picked up a magazine, put it down.

He’d come looking for her. Force of habit, probably. She may not mean anything to him anymore, but she was still the first provider of home comforts. If his approach had been a tad different, she may have said nothing, at least until she’d worked a few things out in her mind.

He spoke to her in the way that had become normal to him recently. Why would he be any different? He had no reason to be on his guard.

“What’s up with you, mooning about on your own, in here? Didn’t you hear me come back? Where’s Bea?”

“Bea is out in the stables with Beauty. And yes, I did hear you come back. And your trip to London. Enjoyable was it? Everything you expected?”

“Do I detect a note of sarcasm, Julia?”

“A note of sarcasm? I don’t know what you mean. What did you and your chums get up to in London, then?”

He was looking at her properly, now and with, perhaps, a flicker of unease in the rapid movement of his eyes. She’d found him out, and he knew it. There was still a moment where she could have pulled back from the brink, and she nearly did.

She could have changed the subject and they could have talked about the boys, or the neighbours, or even the news from Ellbeck. But something had taken hold of her “So, what did you all get up to then, in town? With Herbert and Ronald and James, wasn’t it?” How is old James? I haven’t seen him for ages. And Ronald? Still the dashing airman? Still working for that air company?”

“What’s this, Julia? You’ve obviously got a bee in your bonnet about something.”

She laughed then, couldn’t help herself. That was downplaying things, a bee in her bonnet indeed, typical Giles reaction. “I found a letter from your girlfriend, Amanda.”

His face was a picture. His mouth literally dropped open, but only for a few seconds while he quickly pulled himself together. “You went through my pockets?”

It was a pathetic attempt at righteous indignation. “Yes, I did. You know why, Giles? Because I’ve been tormenting myself, searching for answers for the way you’ve been behaving lately. And then I woke up and the obvious answer came to me. And I was right, wasn’t I?” Even now, there was a flicker of hope he would contradict her, tell her there’d been a mistake. She knew it was a forlorn one.

She looked at him, but he didn’t meet her eye. He had a nonchalant air that made her feel quite cold.

Then he shrugged. “These things happen, Julia. We’re adults. It’s not the end of the world. I’ve no intention of leaving you. Amanda is married too. There doesn’t have to be any broken homes here, as long as you don’t over-react.”

She didn’t respond, and after waiting a few beats, he continued. “Marriages can go a bit stale. That’s a fact. I felt the need for a bit of excitement. Otherwise, well, children, business, the village…it gets a bit monotonous. And is this what we fought a war for kind of thing …”What he said and the sound of that woman’s name on his lips pierced her defences, in spite of what she had told herself, beforehand. The blasé way he spoke…Julia lost her temper and flew at him. She searched around in her mind for the most hurtful things she could find, and flung them at him. But all the time she was thinking bad things about herself. I must not be enough for him. Am I boring, harping on about the children all the time?

But the most devastating of all was the thought it was a lie, all of it. He must never have loved her. All that emotional talk after the war…he must have been caught up with the moment, needing to escape from what he’d been through. All this flooded her brain, but all she could do was shout clichés at him, words that sounded dreadful to her own ears, and which she despised herself for.

“You bastard, how could you do this to me? Don’t think I’m going to be the good wifey at home. Because I’m not, Giles, do you hear?” She said much more in the same vein. She wondered now, what distinct words, if any Bea had heard. She had probably just heard her mother shrieking.

Giles hadn’t raised his voice. “Oh, stop being so hysterical. You’re behaving like a second-rate actress. Is it any wonder a chap would look for consolation, elsewhere?” At that, he’d left the room, no doubt fully recovered from his moment of discomfiture at being found out.

Bea had always been a daddy’s girl. But Julia wasn’t going to just walk out and let Giles have it all his own way. She could imagine him telling their child mummy was a bit overwrought, suffering with her nerves. That was not going to happen.