Mr Clement and Georgina were sitting with their cameras on the table, deep in conversation. Georgina had been shadowing Mr Clement as he had taken the photos of the christening. Knowing they were being done for Tommy’s benefit, and with a small amount of rationed film to use, Mr Clement had taken one of Polly and Artie, and one with family and friends next to the font. He had warned Georgina that not all babies were as willing to pose for the camera as Artie.
‘Looks like Mr Clement has found a protégé,’ Rosie said to Polly as they each took a cup of tea from the tray on the bar. The pub had been turned into a tea room for a few hours to celebrate Artie’s christening.
‘Oh, I almost forgot.’ Rosie opened her handbag and pulled out a white envelope with Artie Watts in swirling handwriting on the front. Lily had asked her to give it to Polly, along with their apologies for having to leave so quickly after the service. Rosie didn’t have to explain that Christmas Eve was always a busy time, and that Maisie and Vivian hadn’t made it to the church as they were holding the fort.
‘It’s from Lily and George.’
Polly looked at the envelope and knew that it contained money.
‘Honestly,’ she said. ‘Please tell them that they shouldn’t have. As if they haven’t given us enough already.’
‘I will, but it’ll fall on deaf ears,’ Rosie said. They both supped their tea and looked around at the mix of guests.
‘Oh, there’s Dr Billingham,’ Polly said, putting her tea down. ‘I best introduce him to everyone.’
‘And I better save Charlie,’ Rosie said, nodding over at Mr and Mrs Jenkins. Charlotte was shuffling about from one foot to the other, something she did when she was bored.
‘Helen …’ Dr Parker managed to squeeze through a group of lively locals. ‘I just wanted to wish you a Happy Christmas before we headed off.’
‘Ah, that’s nice,’ Helen said as Gloria quickly turned away and started talking to Dorothy.
She leant in and gave John a kiss on the cheek. Sensing that someone was watching her, she turned slightly; out of the corner of her eye she could see Claire watching their every move.
Dr Parker returned an equally chaste peck on the cheek.
There was a moment’s awkwardness.
‘You look like something’s on your mind,’ Helen said, thinking he seemed ill at ease; it wasn’t surprising, considering he had eagle-eye watching his every move.
‘Yes, actually, there is,’ John said, loosening his tie, which all of a sudden felt tight. ‘I know we haven’t seen much of each other lately,’ he continued.
Helen batted away his apology. ‘You’ve got work – and a girlfriend.’
‘I know,’ he agreed, ‘but I want you to know …’
Looking into Helen’s emerald eyes never failed to mesmerise him.
‘Yes …’ Helen cajoled.
Suddenly there was a roar of laughter from the revellers behind and someone knocked into her, causing her to almost fall into John’s arms.
‘Sorry,’ she said, stepping back.
John laughed. ‘Looks like everyone’s getting into the Christmas spirit.’
‘What were you saying?’ Helen could feel herself flush at having been so close to him, even if it had just been for a matter of seconds.
‘Well, lately I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘thinking how close we have become these past few years.’
Helen smiled and nodded. Her mind flashed back to when she’d first met John at a charity do she’d attended at the museum, and how she had gone to him for help when she had found out she was pregnant. How much water had gone under the bridge since then.
As if reading her thoughts, John touched her arm briefly.
‘We’ve been there for each other,’ he said, his face earnest.
Helen let out a short burst of laughter.
‘Well, I think it’s been more a case of you being there for me, John,’ she said, thinking of how he had supported her when she was pregnant – and saved her life when she had miscarried.
John knew what was going through Helen’s mind.
‘You’ve been there for me too,’ he said, wanting to add that she had been the light in his life these past few years. When his work at the hospital became so dark he felt it was going to overwhelm him, it was Helen who had brought him light and laughter. And love.
‘But now you have Claire,’ said Helen. She glanced over to see that Matthew was chatting to Dr Eris; she no longer had her beady eye on them.
It was on the tip of John’s tongue to say, ‘And you have Matthew,’ but he didn’t. This was not about Claire or Matthew but about his relationship with Helen.
‘Regardless of that,’ John said, ‘I still want us to continue to see each other – to be friends.’ He paused. ‘I might be sounding a little sentimental here,’ he looked at Helen, who was looking back at him, her green eyes encouraging him to go on, ‘but I think it would be a great shame if we lost the friendship we have – I think we’ve got something special.’
Helen smiled.
‘I totally agree with you.’ Her smile widened. ‘I’m glad I’m not losing you.’
John laughed, out of relief and because he felt happy. He really didn’t think he could imagine a life without Helen in it. Even if it was just as a friend.
If John had read Helen’s mind at that moment, he would have realised she felt exactly the same. And if he had, there was no way he would have left the pub with Claire.
But John was not a mind-reader.
And so they wished each other a Happy Christmas and parted as friends.
Over the next hour, everyone chatted, drank tea and ate sandwiches, and little Artie was passed around like a parcel and didn’t seem to mind one bit. Gradually, the guests left and were replaced by the pub regulars, who didn’t object to their local being invaded as Bill had told them they could finish off what was left of the sandwiches.
As Dr Billingham had the entire day off and wasn’t on call, he’d swapped his tea for brandy and was in good spirits. When he said his goodbyes, he thanked Polly for making him Artie’s godfather – something, he said, he hoped she wouldn’t regret when he began trying to persuade the little boy that a life in medicine was the one to have.
Polly laughed, telling him that was fine by her.
‘And one day, hopefully, I’ll meet Mary,’ she said, giving him a farewell hug. ‘You’re welcome to bring her to the house to meet Artie any time.’
Polly saw what she thought was sadness cross his face as he wished her a Happy Christmas and made his way a little unsteadily out of the pub.
Dorothy had been in high spirits, which was not unusual, but what was surprising was that she had left earlier than she’d have done normally, so determined was she not to miss the return of the ‘lovebirds’ – or rather, a couple she hoped had become lovebirds since leaving the church.
Vera and Aunty Rina were not far behind as they were set on making tomorrow’s Christmas dinner the best ever – or at least the best to be had during a war and with an ever-increasing list of rationed goods. Everyone had enjoyed a good chuckle on hearing that Aunty Rina had recently been introduced to Albert and, on learning about his allotment, had offered him a place at the table if he allowed her to raid his vegetable patch. Albert had, of course, agreed, but warned Rina that in December there was not much to raid – apart from sprouts and potatoes, which Rina said was exactly what she wanted.
Helen had been disappointed that John hadn’t stayed longer, but after their brief chat, Claire had dragged him back off to Ryhope.
Matthew, on the other hand, wanted to stay until Helen was ready to leave, but she told him she had a personal matter to sort out and that he’d fulfilled his duties, thank you very much, and now she wanted shot of him. He hadn’t taken offence and, after shaking just about everyone’s hand in the pub and telling Polly he wished her and her handsome baby a very merry first Christmas together, had left a generous christening gift behind the bar, telling Bill that it was to toast the baby’s health. Helen knew it was a lot by the way Pearl’s eyes had come out on stalks.
Watching him leave, Helen realised that, much as she had fought against it, she liked Matthew, although much as she hated to admit it – and despite the conversation she’d just had – her heart was still very much with John.
Making her way through the tea drinkers, now being infiltrated by a growing swell of regulars and workers who had finished early for Christmas, she reached Bel.
‘Sorry, can I borrow you for a minute?’ Helen looked at Bel and then quickly at Agnes, who was holding Artie.
‘Of course you can,’ Bel said, putting down her cup of tea and following Helen. ‘You going back to work?’ she asked as they walked out of the main lounge bar and into the hallway.
‘I am,’ Helen said, ‘I wouldn’t dare leave it all to Harold. God knows what we’d come back to on Boxing Day.’
Bel laughed. Harold was more a hindrance than a help these days. She watched as Helen started scrabbling around in her handbag.
‘I really hope I’m doing the right thing,’ Helen said, her face serious as she found what she was looking for and pulled out a brown envelope.
Bel saw it had the words Private and Confidential on the front, then her name, Mrs Isabelle Elliot.
‘It looks official,’ Bel said. She felt apprehensive.
‘It is … and it isn’t,’ Helen said. ‘I hope you’re not going to hate me for this, but I thought it might be something you’d want. It’s been locked away in my drawer at work for the past seven months. I’ve been dithering ever since I put it there as to whether or not to give it to you. Whether you would want it. Whether it was right.’
It was true, Helen had thought long and hard about what she was now doing with the report. She had argued the case for and against giving it to Bel, wishing more than anything that John had been there to help with the decision, playing devil’s advocate, as he was wont to do.
‘Either way, I decided I didn’t want it near me any longer. So I thought I’d give it to you as a gift of sorts – or perhaps it would be better described as a poisoned chalice … I don’t know. It’s up to you to decide what you want to do with it. Keep it, use it, burn it – do whatever you wish with it.’
Bel looked at Helen, her face showing her confusion.
The door to the lounge opened and Maud, one of the old ladies who owned the sweet shop a few doors down, shuffled past.
‘What I mean,’ Helen said, ‘is that it’s something that I think you will want. I feel like we’ve got to know each other since – well, since I realised we are …’ she looked round and dropped her voice ‘… related.’
Bel nodded. She would say that they’d become friends. She certainly felt more like a friend to Helen than her aunty.
‘Here you are,’ Helen said, putting the envelope in Bel’s hands. ‘Please accept my apologies for employing someone to find out the truth for me, but as I’ve already told you, I just had to know. Curiosity killed the cat and all that.’ Helen let go of Georgina’s report, which had been neatly folded in two and put into a sealed envelope. ‘Do what you want with it.’ She paused. ‘And know that whatever you do with it, it’s all right by me.’
Helen forced a smile, then turned and hurried down the tiled hallway and out of the front door.
As she stepped carefully through the snow, dodging the local children who were running around, chucking snowballs at each other, she took a deep breath.
She just hoped to God she had done the right thing.
Bel turned and walked to the toilet, passing Maud on the way and pasting a smile appropriate for a Christmas christening on her face. As soon as she got through the door to the Ladies and saw no one else was there, she dropped the smile, walked into the cubicle and locked the door.
Putting the toilet lid down, she tore open the envelope and started to read the two sheets of neatly typed notes.
‘’Ere, Maud.’ Pearl waved the old woman over to the bar. ‘Did yer see Isabelle when yer went to the lav?’
Maud looked puzzled for a moment before she realised that Isabelle was, in fact, Bel. No one else ever called her by her full name.
‘Yes, I did,’ the old woman said. She tried to keep her dealings with Bel’s ma down to a minimum. Waste of space. Next to no morals. And common as muck.
‘Well, what was she deeing out there?’ Pearl had seen Bel leave with Helen and had been watching the lounge door like a hawk, but neither of them had returned.
‘She was talking to Miss Crawford, one of the godparents,’ Maud said.
Pearl felt herself bristle. If Helen had been a girl from down the street, it would have been ‘Helen’, not ‘Miss Crawford’.
‘And then,’ Maud continued, ‘when I was coming out of the lavatories, Bel was going in.’
‘What? On her own?’
Maud nodded.
Pearl took off the pinny she had been wearing to make the tea and sandwiches and stuffed it under the counter before lifting the hatch and coming through to the other side of the bar. She caught Bill’s eye for a second before weaving her way across the lounge and out of the door. Turning left, she headed down the hallway and into the Ladies.
‘Isabelle!’ she shouted out, even though there was no need. There were only three cubicles.
‘Ma!’ Bel’s voice could be heard from behind the only door that was shut.
‘What yer deeing in here?’ Pearl demanded.
Bel unlatched the door and walked out.
‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ Bel snapped.
Pearl saw the toilet lid was still down and Bel hadn’t pulled the flush.
‘Isabelle, if there’s one thing I know for certain about yer – yer never use a public lavvy, never.’ She scrutinised her daughter. ‘The number of times yer used to have the screaming heebie-jeebies when yer were a bairn if I even dared suggest you use a loo for the great unwashed. I used to think yer had a cast-iron bladder, yer could hold it for so long until we got home.’
Pearl watched her daughter wash her hands, even though there was clearly no need, and it was then she saw the envelope that had been stuffed in Bel’s handbag.
‘So, what’s gannin on?’ she demanded. ‘Yer thick as thieves with that Havelock girl ’n now yer squirrelled away – in the lav of all places – with what looks like a letter of some sort.’ Pearl nodded down at Bel’s handbag.
Bel turned to face her mother, drying her hands on paper towels and chucking them in the bin. She pulled the envelope out of her bag.
‘Here,’ she said, giving her ma the report. ‘Some bedtime reading.’
And with that she walked out of the Ladies and back to the Christmas christening cheer.
There was no way Pearl was waiting for bedtime to read what her daughter had just handed her – and which, it didn’t take a genius to work out, Helen had given to Bel.
Walking back through the lounge bar and ducking under the hatch, Pearl shouted over to Bill, ‘Am just gannin for a break.’ Bill nodded. He knew something was up.
Pearl poured herself a whisky and went through to the back room. Grabbing an ashtray, she lit a cigarette and took out the two sheets of paper that had been folded into the envelope. It wasn’t a letter, as she had expected, but a document of sorts. A typed report. And it only took her a few seconds to know what it was about.
Her. And Isabelle. And her daughter’s father.
As she started to read, she felt the pull of the past. A past she had tried most of her life to blot out, to run away from – to forget. Now, here it was – right in front of her – typed out in black and white. And whoever had done it, had done a thorough job.
Pearl’s eyes widened.
Her employment at the Havelock residence had been confirmed by the housekeeper, Agatha, and the butler, Eddy, who had relayed how she’d started work as a scullery maid in September 1913. Even though there had not been a vacancy, the lady of the house, Mrs Catherine Henrietta Havelock, had employed Pearl ‘due to her resemblance to the Hans Christian Andersen character “The Little Match Girl”.’
Pearl, a ‘young and pretty fifteen-year-old girl’, had worked hard and ‘seemed to be happy in her employ’ until the following Easter, when she was asked to work ‘upstairs’ to cover for a young girl who had to take time off due to a dying relative.
Only the cook had tried to protect her, telling her to ‘keep clear of the master’. When she’d asked why, the cook said he could get ‘a bit nasty’ when he’d had a few. Pearl had taken that to mean he had a temper on him, which hadn’t perturbed her. Her own da had been free with his hands; she knew how to get out of the way and avoid a good hiding.
Pearl thought about the young girl called ‘little Annie’.
She hadn’t realised until later that there was no dying aunt to whom little Annie had had to go and pay her last respects. The chambermaid, who looked much younger than seventeen, had obviously found herself prey to Charles’s perverted sexual needs when he had visited the previous Christmas. Had she been the only person in the house not to realise that?
The report stated that Pearl had left the Havelock residence in the middle of the night following ‘a going-away party for the master’, a chief negotiator for one of the big shipping companies.
Pearl’s hand automatically went to her throat, as it always did when she thought of that night.
She had thought she was dreaming that there was something around her neck, stopping her from moving, from shouting out, from breathing. Her panic had intensified as she’d gulped desperately for air. And then she had woken, expecting to be free from what had fast been turning into a nightmare, only to then realise that the night terror was real. She was suffocating. A hand was around her neck and was squeezing it with increasing pressure. Her face was squashed into the pillow. She was choking. She managed to lift her head a fraction and gasp for air, her eyes frantically trying to see who was behind her. She caught sight of a strand of blond hair – then the flash of a man’s profile. It was the master – and he was pressing his whole weight on top of her. He was stronger, much stronger than she would have imagined a man of his stature could be. And he was strangling her and then releasing his grip, allowing her a few precious seconds to suck in air. And then she felt an awful pain – the searing violation of her person. She screamed but her desperate pleas for help were silenced as he pushed her head down into the pillow to muffle her cries. She tried desperately to free herself, but it was hopeless. The hand around her neck squeezed her more tightly, until her vision clouded over and darkness prevailed. Only then did the pain stop.
Pearl took a deep breath, forced herself to concentrate on the report, but it was hard. Images of that night pushed through.
When she had come round, a part of her thought it had been a dream, until she saw herself in her little mirror – the bright red marks around her neck that were already starting to bruise. In the flicker of candlelight, she had lifted her nightie and seen the blood and marks down below.
Pearl took a drag on her cigarette. Her hand had started to shake. The report stated that she had not taken her maid’s uniform with her, which Eddy and Agatha had said had struck them as unusual; the maid’s outfit, ‘a smart navy blue dress with white collar and cuffs, along with a starched white apron and cap, were hers to keep, to take by right’. But Pearl had left them, which was ‘unusual for a young girl with barely two pennies to rub together’.
It had taken her ten minutes to clean herself up, put on her clothes and stuff what few belongings she had into her big cloth bag. She’d left the maid’s outfit that Henrietta had made such a show of giving her. She did not want to take anything from this place. Not one single reminder. And then she’d left. But that night, as she stole out of the tradesmen’s entrance, quietly tiptoeing down the gravel path by the side of the house, her heart in her mouth, her head thumping, petrified that the master would come and drag her back in, she was not to know that she had, in fact, left with something from that godforsaken house – and that ‘something’ would be a constant reminder of the horror, the violence and the injustice of what had happened to her that night.
Pearl took a mouthful of whisky and read on. Eddy and Agatha had been asked if they knew why Pearl had left so suddenly. The pair had replied they’d no idea.
‘Pfft!’ Pearl spat out loud.
Taking another sip of whisky, she continued to read.
The report stated that nine months after Pearl had done her midnight bunk, Isabelle had been born. Eddy and Agatha admitted that Pearl had not had a sweetheart, or any friends who were male. As far as they knew ‘she never even left the house and seemed content to simply work and live on the premises’.
Pearl puffed on her cigarette. How true. She had only ever gone out the back, into the gardens or to the vegetable patch; very occasionally, she had popped into the stables to stroke the horses.
‘In conclusion,’ the last paragraph read, ‘in light of all the evidence above, and due to the striking similarities in looks between Mr Charles Havelock and Mrs Isabelle Elliot, it would seem highly likely that they are father and daughter.’
Pearl stubbed out her cigarette. She was sure she was not the first, nor the last, to have been left with a permanent reminder of the violence that man had enjoyed inflicting. She thought of the maid before her.
Pearl sat back.
She’d always known Isabelle was courting trouble when she’d started work at Thompson’s. The Havelock girl must have seen the inherited resemblance and gone rooting around in her family’s murky past. Got someone professional to look into it. Got a report on it all. And got more than she reckoned for, that’s for sure.
But why had she given the report to Isabelle? That didn’t make sense. Pearl thought she’d have pushed the skeletons back into the cupboard, not got them out on parade.
If all this came out in the open, the Havelock girl would be responsible for hanging her grandfather out to dry.
Pearl finished off her whisky, put the report back in the envelope and pushed it into her skirt pocket.
The time was coming.
As she’d always known it would.