Angel With Two Faces (10 page)

They were back on the cliff-top now, and Josephine gathered up her things. Loveday looked intently at her notebook. ‘What are you writing?’ she asked.

Josephine glanced down at the depressing ratio of ink to paper. ‘It’s a mystery story,’ she said, ‘but as you can see, I haven’t got very far with it yet.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘Good question. I don’t really know yet, but I dare say there’ll be secrets in it.’

‘Have you written many books?’

‘One mystery and two other novels, but I’ve done some plays as well.’

‘My brother was supposed to be in a play tomorrow, but now Nathaniel’s going to be him instead.’

‘Are you going to see it?’

‘Yes, Morwenna’s promised to take me. It’ll be nice to see Nathaniel, but I’m not supposed to talk to him any more.’

‘Why not?’

‘Morwenna says he’s a bad influence because he makes up stories and fills my head with things that aren’t true.’ She thought for a moment and looked again at the notebook. ‘Does that mean you’re a bad influence as well?’

‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Josephine, laughing as they started to walk back towards the estate. ‘But don’t worry – I doubt that anything too terrible will happen to you.’

‘It’s not fair, really, because Morwenna makes things up. She told everyone that she was at home on the morning of Harry’s accident, but that was a lie.’ Josephine tried not to look too interested and let Loveday go on. ‘I went out the night before
because they were shouting again, and I fell asleep in the stables. When I woke up, it was just starting to get light and I ran home thinking I’d be in terrible trouble, but there was nobody there. Morwenna didn’t come in until later. She looked in on me and I pretended to be asleep, but I could see she’d been crying. She told people she was in bed all night, so that was a story, wasn’t it? It’s not as interesting as Nathaniel’s stories, but it’s still made up.’

‘I’m sure she had her reasons,’ Josephine said, although she hardly liked to imagine what they could be. Why would Morwenna lie, when she could have easily said that she was worried about Harry and went to look for him? What was she doing that she didn’t want anybody to know about? Was she protecting someone or could it be that
she
wanted her brother dead? She thought again about the locked door and, for some reason, the image of Beth Jacks’s bruised and beaten face came back to her. Morwenna had told Loveday not to talk about the family, as if there were some source of shame that she didn’t want people to know. Perhaps Harry was violent towards her. Had Morwenna suffered for years and finally snapped? She was trying to think of a harmless way to ask Loveday if her brother ever hit her sister, when the girl tugged at her sleeve and pulled her off the main path and through the lych gate to the church.

‘Thank goodness I remembered,’ she said. ‘I borrowed a candle from the altar last night for Harry, and I’ve got to put it back before the fat man notices it’s missing.’

‘The fat man?’

‘The vicar – Mr Motley’s brother. They’re not at all alike.’

‘I’ll wait here for you,’ said Josephine, who had no desire to start rescuing stolen goods from graves at this hour or any other.

‘No, don’t be silly. Come and look at the flowers.’

Reluctantly, Josephine followed. She had been brought up to despise the conventions of mourning, in a family which preferred to keep its grief private and understated, and she certainly had no wish to intrude upon anyone else’s. She knew it was an attitude which people found hard to understand – when her mother died, her father’s discreet instructions in the newspaper that there were to be no flowers, no cards and no mourners outside the family had been viewed at best as selfish, at worst as cold and unfeeling – but she could not help how she felt. The only time she had ever wavered and had a sense of that need to shout goodbye in public was when Jack had been killed in the war and buried under French soil along with thousands of others. Perversely, the fact that his body was forever lost to her made her crave the physicality of a funeral – the tears and the black and the sound of earth on wood. Back then, she would willingly have ordered the flowers, sung the hymns and wept with strangers, but it was not to be, and she had never since felt the need to mourn in that way.

Nothing that she saw on Harry’s grave changed her mind. She admired the flowers for Loveday’s sake, and praised the workmanship that had gone into the carving of the horseshoe, but was glad when the girl picked up the ivory pillar candle and headed back towards the church. It was cold and dreary inside, and the waves streaming past on either side as the tide came in gave the building an unnerving, claustrophobic feel which was entirely at odds with the expansive beauty of the day outside. Josephine stood by the old rood screen, staring into the Moorish faces of the apostles, and waited while Loveday set about her task, talking all the time as she did so.

‘I’d have been in such bad trouble if I’d forgotten to do this,’
she called back over her shoulder. ‘The vicar’s so mean about buying things for the church, but that’s only because he wants to spend the money on himself. Nathaniel says that he’s no better than a common thief.’

Nathaniel would do well to learn some discretion, Josephine thought. He should keep his jackdaw-like chatter for the play if he wanted to make his way in the Church. Once again, she felt a reluctant sympathy for Morwenna and her efforts to look after her sister.

‘Everybody knows he’s got his fingers in the collection,’ continued Loveday, undaunted by Josephine’s lack of encouragement. ‘I told Morveth that, but it didn’t get me a book. But Nathaniel says there’s something more serious going on, as well. He’s trying to find out what it is.’

At last the candle was positioned to Loveday’s satisfaction, and she came back down the aisle. Josephine turned to follow her out, but a movement in the vestry caught her eye. The door was ajar, and she could see a figure – obviously the fat man – standing quietly in the shadows, listening intently. Loveday’s words had rung bright and clear through the empty church, and it would have been impossible for him to miss anything of what she had said. Josephine put a protective arm round the girl’s shoulders and ushered her quickly from the church. It seemed that Nathaniel would be learning his lesson sooner rather than later, and she certainly wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when the Reverend Motley caught up with him.

Morveth Wearne slowed her pace, as she did instinctively each time she approached Helston’s poorhouse. The Union stood imposingly at one end of the main street – hardly a matter of civic pride, but still managing to dominate the buildings
nearby. Part home for the elderly, part hospital, part refuge for the lost, its stigma loomed as large in the local psyche as the physical structure did over the townscape, and the solidity of its dark, forbidding walls seemed to mock the more fragile cottages and shops which stood around it. Morveth crossed Meneage Street and knocked at the gatehouse, returning a cheerful greeting from the owner of Poltroon’s Garage as she waited to be admitted. She was a familiar figure in this part of town: her mother had taken a job at the Union shortly after it was built, and Morveth had been coming here for as long as she could remember, reading to the elderly, teaching the younger children as best she could, and – when extra help was needed – assisting at births and in the laying out of the dead. She was one of the few who could come and go at the Union as they pleased, and for that she never ceased to be grateful.

She heard bolts being drawn back on the other side of the gate and a well-known face appeared in the gap, smiling when he saw who it was. Isaac – no one knew any other name for him – had arrived at the Union more than twenty years ago and, in all that time, Morveth had never seen him look any different from the way he did now – cheerful, proud of the duties with which he was entrusted, and dressed in a collarless shirt and waistcoat, trousers which were too big for him and tied at the waist with a piece of cord, and an old tweed jacket. Everyone assumed he was a vagrant but his past was a mystery; the only sure thing was that Isaac was one of the rare people whom this managed and ordered life seemed to suit, and God only knew what that said about his previous existence. He greeted her with a small bunch of bluebells, and, before moving on, she spent several minutes admiring the circular flowerbeds and close-cut lawns which he kept immaculate
throughout the year. As she went through the inner archway into the main grounds, passing a toy pram on the cobbles which formed a small playing area for the matron’s young daughter, she could not help but contrast this deceptive scene of happy domesticity with the reputation that the Union had outside its four walls: the luck which brought people here took many forms, but the misery was universal; it was the last resort, a shameful confirmation that you had nothing and no one left – in this world, at least.

A young nurse, dressed in a pale-blue serge dress and starched white cap, met her at the door to the main building. ‘I’ve been looking out for you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for coming so quickly.’

Morveth brushed her gratitude aside. ‘I promised Jane I’d do the last for her when the time came, and she knew she could rely on that. If it brought her some peace, then I’m glad.’ They walked in silence up two flights of granite steps and along a narrow, gloomy corridor, with wards leading off it. Through each break in the lime-washed walls, Morveth caught a glimpse of what passed for life in the Union: in some rooms, the elderly were lying in bed, too feeble to move; in others, children crawled across the floor and found what amusement they could in each other’s company. Metal gratings ran along either side of the walkway, allowing her to see the pattern replicated on the floors below. It was a necessary precaution – only a handful of staff oversaw the welfare of nearly three hundred people, many of them physically weak or mentally fragile – but it added to the feeling of incarceration. Everywhere was spotlessly clean, but Morveth could never decide if that was reassuring or simply another rebuke to the messiness of the lives inside; certainly, the building had no empathy with the untidy,
tainted circumstances which brought people continually to its door.

The Union’s mortuary was at the back, tucked away from the main public areas, and the nurse showed her into the familiar room where the body of Jane Swithers was waiting for her. ‘She wanted these with her,’ the woman said, handing Morveth a small box. ‘Make sure that Mr Snipe takes them when he comes to collect her, will you?’ She left quickly, closing the door softly behind her, and Morveth put her bag down on the floor. She removed her hat, and walked quietly over to the slab.

Jane Swithers could only have been in her early forties, but she was old before her time and even death had not been able to return any sort of youthful lack of care to a face transformed by misery and pain. Her skin was pale, almost translucent, and the sunken cheeks and pronounced line of her jaw testified to the self-neglect of recent years, when neither the anxiety of friends nor the more managed concern of an institution could make her care whether she lived or died. Sadly Morveth remembered how many times the young Jane had come to her for advice, and wished now that she had offered something more tangible than words which always went unheeded.

A bowl of water, some soap and a towel stood ready on the bench which ran the length of one wall. She brought them over to the middle of the room and rolled her sleeves back, glad to feel the warmth of the water on her hands. Gently, she unbuttoned the well-worn nightdress and began to wash the body, tenderly lifting Jane’s breasts and trying not to be shocked by how visible her ribs were beneath the fragile skin. Morveth was used to people looking to her for guidance and she had always given it willingly, confident of her own judgement, but now,
past the threshold of her three score years and ten, she was growing weary and beginning to doubt the wisdom which others took for granted in her. Perhaps it was the shock of Harry’s accident and the memories of that terrible fire which it reawakened, but it seemed to her now that she had sometimes been too ready to manage other people’s lives. Her own past was comparatively free of emotional complications: she had never felt the need to marry or have children but, in preferring to remain detached, perhaps she had been blind to the internal conflicts that most people experienced, and had overestimated the ability of good common sense to wage war against the power of love and hate.

Her intentions had always been good – that was true enough, but how must she appear to an outsider? Just a do-gooder, with no life of her own, meddling in other people’s relationships to compensate for her own solitariness. Remembering what she’d said to Archie yesterday about interference leading to unhappiness, she was brave enough to face the unintentional hypocrisy of her words: how easily wisdom could lead to vanity and a foolish belief in your own infallibility. She crossed Jane’s thin arms over her chest, then went to her bag again and removed a stretch of bandage, but paused with it in her hand, forgetting her task for a moment as she thought back to the night before Harry had ridden his horse into the Loe. He had come to her in despair and the advice she offered was meant to protect those he loved, but it had only served to bring more sadness to the family. It had seemed the only way out at the time, but was that really true? The look on Harry’s face came back to her as she washed Jane’s legs and wound the bandage around the toes to keep her feet together. How could she ever have believed that his death would bring
comfort to anyone? Morwenna was inconsolable, and Morveth’s heart was full of dread when she considered Loveday’s future.

She picked up a comb and began to tidy Jane’s auburn hair, which felt dry and brittle between her fingers. There was a big difference between strength and a need to be in control, she thought, as she arranged the collar of the nightdress to hide a stain on the material, and her situation – which was increasingly the latter – was beginning to get out of hand; one decision was forcing another, and she was losing sight of the kindness that had motivated her behaviour in the beginning. Just look at the way she had behaved towards Archie, whom she had loved since he was a boy. He was her best friend’s son and she had promised his mother to look out for him, and here she was treating him like a stranger, keeping him at arm’s length from his own community and playing people off against each other to protect their secrets and mask her own involvement in their lives. Sadly, Morveth took one last, long look at Jane’s face and stroked her cheek gently before tearing off four small pieces of cotton wool to plug her ears and nostrils. She wound another stretch of bandage around her head and tied it securely under the chin, then took two pennies out of her own pocket and placed one reverently on each eye. This final part of the ritual had always struck her as particularly poignant, but today it seemed more relevant than ever, and carried a silent accusation: if only she had kept her eyes closed and her mouth shut all these years, might she and those around her know the meaning of true peace?