Authors: Monica Dickens
‘Well – ’ Miss Tillings spread her hands jauntily, slapped her knees, and sprang to her feet. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help you any more. I would if I could, honestly, old thing. I can see it matters a bit to you.’
‘Matters a bit! It matters more than anything in the world. How would
you
feel if you suddenly heard you were not who you thought you were and nobody knew
who
you were?’
Miss Tilling whistled like a thrush. ‘I say, put like that it is a bit of a facer. Poor old lady, I say, I
am
sorry. Wouldn’t you like a cup of tea? I say you know, I tell you what, it’s a pity old Lossie isn’t still here. She was in on the fire and everything.’ She whistled again. ‘Come to think of it, she was always on about that baby afterwards – or rather
you,
I suppose I should say.’ She giggled.
‘What did she say?’ Jo jumped up and shook her arm. ‘Miss Tillings, you
must
tell me.’
‘Careful, careful. That’s my vaccination arm. Don’t you see the red light?’ She touched a red ribbon bow. ‘Government order – all part of this Balkan scare, though if you ask me – ’
‘I don’t,’ said Jo desperately. ‘I’m asking you what this Lossie, whoever she is, said about me.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, dear.’ Miss Tillings was fast losing interest. The sun was shining, and it was time to take the dog for a walk. ‘As far as I can remember, she was always hinting that she knew something nobody else did, but we didn’t pay any attention. She was a poor moithering thing, old Lossie was; we used to rag her no end.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘They pensioned her off years ago. She may be dead for all I know. I could find her address in the forwarding book, I suppose. Lily Loscoe, that was her name.’
‘Loscoe? Did she have a sister in London?’
‘Gracious, I can’t remember. She may have; lots of people do, don’t they?’
‘Look here,’ said Jo. ‘I must see her; Please give me her address, and then I won’t trouble you any more.’
‘Well, not to be rude dear, but I am a little busy this morning. However, we’re always glad to see old inmates. Any time you like to pay us a call … only too glad …’ She prattled on, and Jo stood biting her nails in impatience, while Miss Tillings went through her desk like a whirlwind, slinging out books and papers in her search for the right one.
She took Jo to the door and they waited while Bill Edwards made a wide turn like a battleship on the gravel drive. A child of about seven years old with an enormous head was playing baby games in a pen on the lawn.
‘Are they,’ said Jo nervously, ‘are they all mad?’
Miss Tillings frowned. ‘Tut-tut, dear, a little backward. Yes.’
‘Would it be possible –I mean – has there ever been one here, who wasn’t – who was quite normal?’
‘No, they’d go somewhere else. This is what they call a special institution.’ She suddenly saw Jo’s face. ‘Oh, I see!’ She could hardly speak for laughing. ‘I see what you’re getting at. Oh, it’s too funny, really. No, no, my darling, you’re not potty just because you were here twenty years ago. You may be, of course, but that’s no fault of ours. It’s only in the last five years we’ve turned to mental cases.’
Bill Edwards opened the rear door. ‘I’ll go in front, if you
don’t mind,’ Jo said. She was rattled and unnerved. She wanted his calm solidarity near her.
‘Good-bye, good-bye.’ Almost helpless with laughter, Miss Tillings pumped her hand. ‘Oh, wait till I tell the staff about this! You’ve been thinking all this time you must be mad! Oh, it’s a scream – oh, ha-ha-ha!’ She stood in the doorway, shaking like a jolly jelly, laughing at Jo as Bill Edwards rattled her cautiously down the drive, and the idiot in his pen laughed too, mimicking her. This was something he could understand.
At intervals during her journeyings, Jo wondered what they would be thinking at Denbigh Terrace and at the Grand Metropolitan. If she lost her job through not turning up to-day, it would not matter. She was not going back there anyway. She was not Jo Abinger; she wanted nothing of her old life. She must start again, that was the only hope, but how could she? Where should she start, not knowing who she was? She was in a vacuum. She was nobody.
It seemed that Miss Loscoe’s sister was the only person who could help her. If it had not been for that, she would never have gone near her, for she dreaded that she might ask some question that would recreate the horror in the basement flat.
Miss Lily Loscoe lived in two rooms over a King’s Lynn tea-shop, which was convenient, since she could send down for cakes and scones if she had visitors. She gave Jo tea in a room crammed with the collected knick-knacks of her life. There was a glass-fronted cupboard full of china houses and souvenirs of seaside resorts. Harness brasses flanked the fireplace and the mantelpiece was all over vases and piggy-banks and pipe-cleaner dolls. The wallpaper was mercifully hidden by photographs, mostly of groups of nursing staff, or single nurses with the sun on their teeth, their long skirts blowing and their legs and feet very black and large. Two bookshelves were devoted almost entirely to nursing text books, for the halcyon years in hospital had been the best of Miss Loscoe’s life. Now that she was too old to nurse, she had nothing except the idyll of her sister, with which she bored anyone in King’s Lynn who would bother with her, much as Dot Loscoe had once bored people with her.
It was a shock to her to hear who Jo was. Her memory had never been good, and at first, she did not remember the name or the story of the church porch. But when Jo reminded her of the fire, she sat up, quivering and agitated.
‘Let’s have tea,’ she cried, clinging to something safe. ‘Let’s have tea first before we uncover all these old, forgotten things.’ She knew that she had been very upset about that baby for years – something about some trouble she had got into, wasn’t it? She had long ago forgotten; all she knew was that the memory still rankled, and called to mind some injustice.
So: ‘Let’s have tea!’ she cried, and went downstairs to see Miss Rosa about seed cake.
Jo shrugged her shoulders. She was so tired by now, and she had waited so long to hear the truth that she could wait another ten minutes while Miss Loscoe boiled the kettle and got the best tea-set out of the glass cabinet. The rattle of china made her realize that she was hungry. She had not had much to eat since – when was it? – two days ago, when she had had tea in the hell’s kitchen at Denbigh Terrace before changing to go out with Felix. She had had quite a lot to drink. That whisky at Felix’s flat had been the first of many with which she had buoyed herself up on her travels. She had never been into a bar alone before, but she had grown up years in these two days. She had been in and out of more trains, taxis, hotels, and station buffets than ever before in her life.
Over the seed cake, Miss Loscoe, afraid of the past, prattled of the bulbs coming up in the Municipal Park across the road, and how fortunate she was to have it so near, since her feet were ‘silly’ and her legs ‘stupid’.
‘Miss Loscoe.’ Jo put down her cup when at last she could stand it no longer. ‘I’m sorry, but you must tell me. I must know who I am.’
‘What do you mean?’ Lily Loscoe shied away. ‘How should I know? No one knew. You were a foundling, if you’ll pardon the word. Why should you think I know more than anyone else? Why have you come here?’
‘Miss Tillings said you were always talking as if there had been some funny business about me, as if you knew something.’
‘I?’ shrilled Miss Loscoe. ‘I know nothing.’
‘What about this then?’ Jo showed her the cross. ‘Do you know what B.C. stands for, is that it?’
Seeing the crucifix brought it all back. Miss Loscoe remembered now what had rankled. She clapped her hands to her head, the grey, woolly wreck of the once famous red hair. She saw it all. She felt again her shame at having forgotten to label the babies, the terror of the fire, and the humiliating things Mrs Jessop had said to her. She saw now with conviction what at the time she had only
thought
she saw; Mrs Abinger deliberately placing the cross on the live baby to prove it hers, thus subjecting Nurse Loscoe to the torment of having to tell that young Society man that his niece was dead.
Things had never been the same at Bolt House after that. Mrs Jessop had always held it against her. She had treated her as less than the dust, especially after her interview with the Society baby’s grandmother. It was Miss Loscoe’s private opinion that Mrs Jessop had been quite sorry when she retired, and left her without a whipping boy.
Often and often after the night of the fire, she had chided herself for not speaking up about what she had seen Mrs Abinger do. But having kept her mouth shut in the first place, it was impossible to open it now that the incident was over in all but memory. It was all Mrs Abinger’s fault, and now as one thing after another came back to her over the tea-table with Jo, her resentment of the injustice came back too, stronger than ever, exaggerated by the years.
At last she could get her own back. At last she could tell. She told Jo everything.
She told it in such a muddled way that at first Jo could not understand. She made her go over and over it, until it began to dawn on her that she might be that other baby. She might be a rich girl, of titled family!
She began to be angry. How dared her mother play a trick like that?
‘Robbing me of my birthright, that’s what it amounts to, doesn’t it?’ She leaned forward, and Miss Loscoe leaned forward too, and they eagerly mingled their protests at the injustice of it
all. The more they talked, the more certain Jo became that she was that other baby. No wonder her mother had never told her she was not their child. No wonder Jo had always felt restless at home, and known herself too good for the life they wanted her to lead. Small wonder that a grocer’s shop in the Portobello Road irked the soul of a baronet's niece!
After a little more encouragement and two more cups of tea, Miss Loscoe made a great effort and remembered his name. Jo got up at once.
‘I must go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a train to catch.’
‘Oh, what a shame, just when we were getting on so well together. I thought you’d stay for a bit of supper, and we could go for a stroll in the Park. It doesn’t shut until eight.’ Miss Loscoe was cast down. She did not get many visitors.
She tried to detain Jo at the top of the stairs. ’Your mother is a friend of my sister’s,’ she said. ’Do you ever see Dot? She’s alone now, since Mother died. I’ve often tried to prevail on her to come here, but she always was a loyal Londoner, was Dot. It’s quite a time since I’ve heard from her. How is she?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jo wildly. ‘Don’t ask me. I haven’t seen her. I must go. Good-bye. Thanks ever so and all that. Goodbye.’
She ran down the stairs, and Miss Loscoe stood at the top and called after her: ’Give her my love if you see her, don’t forget. Tell her to stir her stumps and write. Wait – wait! I’ll give you a note …’
Jo did not stop. She closed her ears. She would not think of Miss Loscoe dead among the furniture in the basement. She need not. Let someone else tell her sister. It was no affair of Jo’s.
The people sipping and nibbling at the little low tables looked up in surprise as she rushed through the tea-room, banged the street door and ran past the window towards the station.
She was in a hurry. She was off to London to see Sir Rodney Cope, Bart.
It had been a satisfactory evening. A civilized evening; the kind of thing to hold on to in these slipping, barbaric times when men went out to dinner in the suits they had worn all day, and people talked of war.
The dinner had been perfect, although there had, of course, been too much salt in the soup. But this incorrigible kink of Alexander’s gave him a certain cachet, a handmade individuality, like a flaw in a priceless piece of glass. The salt in Alexander’s soups had come to be almost a
spécialité de la maison.
As Rodney could not cure it, he exploited it, and forestalled criticism by calling attention to it as a deliberate thirst-promoter for the good wine that was to follow.
Yes, a pleasant evening. It had been worth producing the 1865 brandy for Kenneth. He had drunk it in silence. Dorrie, as usual, had talked fast and wittily enough for both of them. Charming people. And Sheena, with her mother-of-pearl hair and voice as soft as the draping of her mysterious purple-grape dress … Sheena. He might have dallied with her once. She would still be willing, but Rodney had neither the desire nor the energy for that kind of thing. He had all he wanted without that.
They had teased him to-night about his persistent bachelorhood. ‘A waste of this perfect flat. With your mania for detail, can’t you see it needs a woman to complete the picture, to give it the right smell?’
‘I’d rather have gardenias,’ he had said, stretching a hand to the bowl on the table, not quite touching the flowers for fear of browning them. ‘And she might want my bedroom. Besides, she’d upset Alexander.’
Dorrie had screwed up her beautiful short-sighted eyes at him and said: ‘Roddie, I believe you’re neuter. Everyone knows you’re really not a pansy, whatever they say, but apart from
your elegant little abortive affair with Alice Cahill, I’ve never known you lust after a woman. What do you lust after?’
He had winced. ‘Must one lust? Must one strive after the coarser sensations? I’m perfectly happy with what I’ve got. My wants are simple and few.’
Watching him padding softly about the room, turning the Meissen boy and girl towards each other, patting a cushion, straightening a print a fraction of an inch, Dorrie had said: ‘Yes darling, I really believe you are content,’ but she had added: ‘Poor Roddie.’
When they were going, Sheena had murmured at him out of the musky aura in which she moved: ‘Don’t be lonely, Roddie dear.’
Lonely? How could he be lonely with so many friends? How could anyone be lonely in this flat? Only the destitute, waiting for death on packing-cases in tallow-lit basements were lonely. People said that money could not buy happiness. Rodney Cope spent most of his waking hours, and his sleeping ones as well if you count the unconscious influence of silk-smooth linen and a bed like a cloud, proving to himself that it could.