He wasn’t wrong. On her return to Sellington early in the new year of 1919, Meriel remarked on the changes that war had brought to town and country, with the listless indifference of a convalescent. She was surprised to see so few horses, so few men out in the streets. She commented on the sudden proliferation of motor cars and of women drivers; women bus conductresses, women road sweepers, women everywhere in ugly functional clothing. Yet none of it appeared to touch her personally. She accepted the death of her mother, the defection of her father to America and the loss of thirteen years of her own life without visible distress. Any mention of her husband or her children she ignored. Patrick she ignored. And it was heart-breaking to see him watching her day after day for some sign of recognition or affection which never came his way; a relief to all of them when Mrs Ashby returned the boy to school in Seaford as a weekly boarder.
Meriel reminded Simmie of nothing so much as a bored adolescent who’d quite lost interest in her own surroundings. She mooched about. She smoked, stared out of windows, started books, started solitaire and patience but never finishing anything. She was morose and uncommunicative. With her lovely hair dragged back into a lank horsetail and all the bounce gone from her step, she drifted aimlessly from room to room. She played with food, grew thin, hollow-eyed; the pallid little ghost of a lost generation.
‘Now, Missus Edwin, Cook’s sent this up special for yer, an’ I’m sure I ’ope ye won’t let good food go to waste.’ At mealtimes Gladys took to tempting Meriel with special little titbits from the kitchen, a sherry gruel or a mug of savoury beef-tea; coaxing her to taste them, watching her make faces and push them aside, but unwilling to take no for an answer. ‘Cryin’ shame to leave that good gruel, Missus Edwin – wicked, what wiv you so skinny these days. Come on, dearie, jus’ try a little, do.’
‘Do everything you can to keep things on an even keel.’ That’s what the local doctor had advised. ‘Don’t force her, but try to help her to remember small things from those lost years if you can; minor details unconnected with her husband or her son. If you can once demonstrate to her that she remembers something, anything at all – then it may be possible to extend the process over time.’
Simmie and Helen, even Mrs Ashby, had certainly done all that they could think of to engage her interest – in the dairy and the milking herd, in corresponding with her brother Gareth out in South America, and in any number of projects round the farm. But Meriel was proof to everything. She had thrown up a wall around herself that nothing seemed to penetrate.
‘A lengthy business,’ the consultant had predicted. But for someone as hopelessly prone to nostalgia as Simmie, it was so hard to be patient. She saw the old, vital Meriel everywhere she looked – whenever the trap drove out, when a Land Army lass brought up the butter for the house, or when a horse and rider crossed a distant flank of downland. And one winter morning as she walked through the overgrown stable yard on her way to the pig pens, she had a sudden vivid image of Meriel at the gate in her ridiculous motoring cap… ‘It can’t possibly be trespassing when we know Ashby. Not when you’re his landlady for Lord’s sake, Simmie!’ …her bright little face alive with excitement as she shot the bolts back and ran from stall to stall to count the horses, standing upon tiptoe to peer through the bars. … ‘Oh, aren’t they fine, Simmie! Aren’t they lovely! When I marry Ashby you can have that soft old bay cob. He should do all right – and I’ll have this handsome black devil here. Look Simmie, his name’s Balthazar. I bet Ashby rides him!’
The image had remained with her for the rest of the morning.
‘Helen and I thought we might start clearing out the old stables this afternoon, Mrs Ashby,’ she heard herself suggesting over lunch. ‘Meriel could help us too if she would like to. We could certainly use an extra pair of hands.’
While the old lady endorsed the idea with her customary vigour, Meriel was silent – staring at the plate before her, forking the food from one side to the other like a finicky child. Later in the stables she dragged the broom they gave her in exactly the same fashion, sweeping it purposelessly back and forth through the dry litter.
‘When you think what this place used to be like before the war, when you and I first saw it, Meriel, with all those gorgeous horses! Fifteen, weren’t there? You counted them, remember?’ Simmie rattled on bravely, doing her best to jog her memory. She could recall it all so perfectly herself, with golden barley straw in all the stalls and fresh hay in the racks, to mingle their summer fragrance with the coarser scents of horse manure and harness oil. The working hub of the estate, that’s what it was back then – its horsepower!
But Meriel just went on swishing her broom mechanically from side to side across the bricks; and the old stables went on smelling of dust and decay, just as the empty house in Harpur Street had done. Limewash that would have been renewed each spring was peeling, flaking from the walls. Keys rusted in locks that would no longer turn, and a barrier of brittle nettle stalks grew round the doorway. The horses had all had gone long since; all but Archie and old Caesar, who’d been transferred to more convenient quarters by the fatstock pens – and standing empty, the building had accumulated cobwebs and every kind of refuse.
But life went on, of course it did, even in the bleakest ruins; although paradoxically, the evidence of new life that Simmie had hoped to find in the old stables that afternoon, had shown itself not in poor Meriel, but in her sister-in-law – in Helen.
While they had toiled that afternoon to introduce some order to the place, Simmie began to sense a difference in Helen; something she’d noticed earlier but never stopped to question. For all the disappointment and frustration that the war had brought her, Helly had thrown herself into the farm these past few months, and clearly the work agreed with her. There was something animated, even eager, about the movements of her stocky little figure, Simmie thought, as it emerged with another barrow-load of ancient bedding straw. The bitter twist had gone from Helly’s mouth. There was colour in her face where there had been so little – and as she trundled down the building to where Meriel was leaning on her broom, it was as if the will to live had passed from one woman into the other.
‘I say buck up, Meri, or we’ll never get this clear.’ Helly smiled at her good-naturedly as she brushed past. But Meriel wasn’t looking. She was peering at the tarnished brass plate on the stall beside her, spelling out its name in a flat, toneless voice. ‘Bal – thaz – ar… Balthazar; whatever happened to that lovely horse?’
‘Remount boys took ‘im, Missus Edwin.’
It was Dan Goodworth in the doorway, standing just as he had stood there all those years before. ‘’E died though, poor ol’ Balfy. Bought it in a rail smash-up at St Omer ’afore ’e even reached the front.’
Meriel didn’t look up at him or seem to hear. But someone else did. Watching Helen carefully set down the handles of her barrow, to pull in her spine and brace back her shoulders as she turned to catch Dan’s eye, Simmie understood at last.
Meriel returned to her slow ritual sweeping of the stable floor. But for Dan and Helen life had other plans.
In April at bluebell time Vicky Baxter swept down to Sussex in her new bottle-green Bentley tourer, with the declared intention of spiriting her sister back to Bedfordshire for a much-needed change. But Meriel had stubbornly refused to recognise the matronly figure who hurried forward to enfold her in fox fur and velveteen, much less return with her to Biggleswade.
She’d been no better with their father when he arrived in Sellington the following summer, during haymaking. The respectable Mrs Baxter had deliberately lost contact with her remaining parent back in 1917, when the Ministry of Munitions had effectively put him out of business by taking over his American purchasing function. But Simmie had finally obtained his address in Philadelphia through Gareth in Colombia. She’d written out of duty to inform him of his grandson’s death and Meriel’s reaction, adding as a postscript the news of her decision to put his mother’s old house in Harpur Street on the market, and make over the major portion of its selling price to Patrick.
It was not until July of 1920 though, long after she had given up all hope of an acknowledgement, that the youngest Caldwell boy had cycled from the village with Robert’s telegraphed response: ARRIVED YESTERDAY TRANSATLANTIC STOP PLEASE MEET ELEVEN FORTY TRAIN AT SEAFORD STOP RL
‘But he isn’t coming to see you is he, you old goose?’ Simmie reminded herself sternly after her first flutter of excitement. ‘He’s coming to see his daughter.’ And after they’d sent Cheal off to Seaford in the trap, she spent the waiting time on Meriel’s hair and clothing, not her own.
‘She didn’t recognise me.’
Robert found her in the flat, in her own little sitting room with the familiar clutter of her things around her, darning a grey sock of Patrick’s. ‘She didn’t recognise me, Simmie.’
‘Oh but that’s nonsense, surely? She started talking of you the moment your telegram arrived. Only this morning she was telling me about the time you swam the Brisbane river with your breeches on. Why she could hardly wait for you to get here.’
But Simmie hadn’t really been surprised Not after Meriel’s treatment of her sister. The thing that surprised her was her own reaction to this man – the curious detachment that she felt; like a third person watching two old lovers meeting.
She let go of his hand to return to her dear old button-back and watch him sit in the chair opposite, heavily for the man she remembered.
‘Perhaps she will come round to you,’ she suggested. ‘Perhaps if you reminded her of your adventures in Colombia, and that tremendous journey through the mountains? We’ve been told that it would help if she could be made to recall anything from her earlier life, however unimportant…’
‘She didn’t know me,’ he repeated dully. ‘She said I was too old to be her father.’ He was crouched forward in his seat with his shoulders rounded and his belly resting on his thighs. He had been forty-three when Simmie met him to receive the deeds of his mother’s house; a man still in his prime. Now he must be was sixty, sixty-one? The excesses of his life had left their marks in his grey hair, and in the lines and pouches of his coarsened skin.
‘You think that health and energy and all the good things of life will last forever, Simmie,’ he said, as if he could read her mind. ‘But they don’t.’
And Simmie saw that she’d been wrong for all these years in thinking that his daughter was just like him. Because the walled-up grief that had made Meriel what she’d become was generated out of love for people most dear to her; love of her husband and her little boy. This man mourned only for himself.
‘We all of us have to grow old, Robert,’ she told him, fumbling for her reading glasses. ‘Look at me, a dull old spinster with nothing to show for my life but laundry receipts and memories.’
‘And regrets?’
He raised his brows at her in an attempt at his old irony, and she thought of how they’d once reminded her of the wings of a black bird in flight. Now they were untidy, tangled with white hairs. Even the splendid darkness of his eyes had faded to a bloodshot, muddy brown; lifeless as bottle glass. ‘Are you sorry, Beatrice, that you never came out to me in Anaime after all?’ he asked.
No one had called her Beatrice. Not for years – not since she’d last seen her own father in the year that she had lost this man’s baby. Now here he was to tell her that he’d known all along how close she came to joining him; had known it all this time but never told her!
He smiled at her surprise, a painfully lopsided smile. ‘Did you think I hadn’t heard? Young fellow had the decency to tell me that at least before he stole my little girl away.’
The smile wavered and then faded. Simmie noticed that his hands were trembling on his knees – ‘and that will be the drink,’ she thought.
‘But it isn’t too late, Beatrice.’ He used the name again, although he dared not meet her eyes. ‘I still have investments in the States; enough to set up a decent home and to make an honest woman of you.’
For a moment Simmie didn’t know whether to laugh, or to hit him – to whack her darning mushroom into his pathetic, debauched old face! But then she’d never thought it fair to kick people when they were down. So she settled in the end for feeling sorry for him. In her memories and her imagination he’d always been so self-assured; so strong. Now she was stronger, and perhaps she’d always been in ways that mattered. In any case there was no choice for her to make, any more than there had been that day in Richmond Park, when he’d seduced her with a chain of daisies.
She rose again and crossed to the old Harpur Street bureau where she kept her papers and writing things. The 1890 journal was there in the bottom drawer exactly as she thought.
T. J. & J. Smith’s Large Quarto Manuscript Diary with almanack. Interleaved blotting.
The front cover was coming adrift. The ink of her own neat entries had faded to sepia and the whole thing smelt of musty paper. She found the June entry almost at once, and with it the daisy that he’d tucked into her hat-brim – pressed now and colourless. Desiccated. Thin as a wafer.
‘Do you remember the daisy chain that you made for me, Robert? It bound me to you in a way you know, through all those years you were abroad,’ she told him quietly. ‘And this little daisy? The one you put in my hat?’
She lifted it for him to see, and as she did so Simmie was conscious not only of the withered flower, but of the age, the veins and wrinkles of her own hand. Then, when she was quite sure that he understood, that he remembered how it had been all those years ago in Richmond, she crumbled the brittle flower between her fingers and let it fall onto the carpet at his feet. ‘Memories and dust – all that’s left of our grand passion,’ she said, smiling at the melodrama of her gesture. ‘Whatever we might have had once, believe me we have nothing to offer each other now, my dear. Nothing in the world.’
After he left her, Simmie carefully repaired the cover of the old journal with a strip of gummed calico, and then replaced it in its drawer.
‘So that’s that,’ she thought. ‘He is a shallow, selfish man and always was.’ She faced the truth of it as she had always faced it in her heart. ‘He’s feckless. You knew that didn’t you? He used you like a whore, abandoned you when you most needed him, and only came back in the end because he was afraid; because he needed someone for himself, to warm and comfort him in his grey hairs.’
It was all true. Yet as she lay in bed that night Simmie couldn’t help wondering if Robert Llewellen hadn’t loved her just a little all those years ago, when she’d loved him so much? Not that it mattered, she assured herself, or could make any great difference now. One simply wondered.