They began to drink up their tea rather more quickly than either Mrs Darling or myself had wanted. If only Mr Watkins, Miss Driver and Cissy had done likewise. About fifteen minutes passed before Mrs Darling finally said, ‘Oh, for Gawd’s sake, this man’s been waiting for over an hour! Don’t you people have shelters to go to?’
Neville and Esme Robinson headed for the door immediately. Mr Watkins, Miss Driver and Cissy followed reluctantly. In the hall, Cissy said, ‘But don’t you need me, Mrs Darling? On the door or . . .’
‘You get yourself home, Cissy,’ Mrs Darling replied. ‘A raid could start at any minute and I don’t want you walking the streets when the Jerries come.’ Then, turning to Mr Watkins, she added, ‘Will you walk Cissy and Miss Driver home, Mr Watkins?’
The boy mouthed a reluctant yes. But his heart wasn’t in it. Cissy looked more like the pale, dried-up image of the spinster that since the Great War we’ve come to see as an object of pity, rather than the widow she said she was. Miss Driver, though young, was so washed out she was almost grey. They all shuffled forwards just as Mrs Darling reached out and grabbed Esme Robinson’s hand before she could reach the front path.
‘Oh, Esme,’ she said, ‘I need a word . . .’
True to form, when Esme Robinson was called back by the medium, so, by extension, was her husband Neville. Cissy, Miss Driver and Mr Watkins I noticed were still talking in the hall when Mrs Darling finally shut the door on them.
‘I haven’t seen Nancy Hancock for years,’ Esme Robinson said when Mrs Darling told her who I was.
Neville, frowning, said, ‘I have heard of your firm, Mr Hancock. But living in Forest Gate as we now do . . .’
‘Esme, dear,’ Mrs Darling cut in, ‘Mr Hancock needs to talk to you about Nancy before,’ she stole a quick glance at Neville, ‘before he has his private sitting. It’s about, er, it’s about when we knew Nancy, years ago. He’d like a word, in private . . .’
Neville cleared his throat and then his wife said, ‘Oh, there’s nothing I can’t talk about in front of my husband. I wouldn’t want to.’
The medium looked at me, I looked at the medium and the Robinsons looked at both of us.
‘Mrs Robinson,’ I said to Esme, ‘you, Mrs Darling, my sister Nancy and some other women were . . . well, you got together in the Great War . . .’
‘Oh, we were White Feather girls together,’ Esme Robinson said with a smile.
I looked across at Neville Robinson, who was by this time beaming with something that looked like pride.
‘Sterling job they all did too!’ he said. ‘Sterling job!’
I felt rather than saw Mrs Darling’s shock. I was too fixated on Neville. Two or three years at the most older than me, he must have been involved in the First Lot in some capacity.
‘Are you interested in what we did when we were White Feather girls, then, Mr Hancock?’ I heard Esme Robinson say so breezily I swear I could have slapped her face.
Tearing my gaze away from Neville’s grinning features, I said, ‘No. Not exactly.’
I clammed up then. I do sometimes when I’m angry. The medium looked at me again and then she said, ‘Esme love, you know that poor Violet passed on a while ago. Like her, your cousin Nellie died a horrible, violent death. Then there was Dolly O’Dowd, and now this latest, Marie Abrahams . . .’
‘All spinsters or widowed or living with terrible drunks,’ Esme Robinson said. Then, suddenly becoming excited, she went on, ‘Margaret, you know that Marie was getting interested in the spirit world just before her own passing. I reckon if we tried to contact . . .’
‘Esme, Mr Hancock thinks that the person killing our old friends is doing so because they was White Feather girls.’
‘It is the only thing all the victims have in common,’ I said.
There was a silence. For just a moment the relentless good humour of the Robinsons came to a halt. But only for a moment.
‘Well, Esme has me, doesn’t she?’ Neville said with a smile. ‘I mean, as you said, Esme dear, the rest of the women have been on their own, or as good as.’
His wife smiled adoringly. ‘I’ll be quite safe,’ she said.
Coldly and without shouting, I lost my rag. ‘Oh, so that makes everything all right, does it?’ I said.
The Robinsons looked at me as if I was speaking in a foreign language. I felt one of Mrs Darling’s plump hands on my arm.
‘There’s still a lady out there called Fernanda Mascarenhas,’ I said. ‘Don’t know what her situation is. My sister Nancy is a spinster. I know that your sister, Mrs Robinson, is away in Canada. But then there’s Mrs Darling . . .’
‘Oh, there’s always people in and out of this house,’ Esme Robinson replied with her now completely fixed smile.
Mrs Darling’s broad face took on a cynical look. ‘Esme,’ she said, ‘apart from sitters, there’s my old man, but he’s either at work or fire-watching. He’s never in! Then there’s my son’s missus over once a week to help with the polishing, if I’m lucky. Cissy’s in and out as takes her mood, but she ain’t exactly Kid Berg, is she?’
‘Oh, no one would want to hurt you Margaret!’
‘I was a White Feather girl, Esme! That’s what we’re trying to tell you! And if Mr Hancock here is right, then someone may very well want to hurt me!’ She sat down, taking her considerable weight off her feet. ‘Some of them men what we gave white feathers to was sick or on leave or . . . None of them boys deserved to be called cowards by little bits of girls like us! We could’ve made any number of poor souls go out to the trenches and get theirselves horribly injured or made sick in their heads.’
‘Yes, but you don’t . . .’
‘Oh, come on, Mrs Darling, you girls were only doing what was right.’ Neville Robinson cut across his wife’s words with a smile upon his face. ‘The Great War was not a time for cowards. Couldn’t afford them. We needed heroes, and in the main we got them too.’
I wanted to hit him so hard that his head would come off. But I don’t do things like that, not now, and so I said, ‘And what did you do in the war, Mr Robinson?’
No one who was there ever talks about heroes. No one.
‘I served my country,’ Neville said, even then still wearing his bloody irritating smile.
‘What service were you in?’ I asked. ‘Where did you see action?’
But I knew before the smile finally died on his face and Neville turned away. No one who had even been in a trench for a day could talk in the way that he had!
‘Oh, Neville wasn’t fit enough to fight,’ Esme Robinson said. ‘He’s a delicate chest . . .’
‘I served King and country in the police force,’ Neville said, grave now, but his head held high in the air. ‘Islington. On the home front.’
‘Yes.’ I looked into his eyes and saw them shift away quickly to anywhere that was not near me in that room. ‘Want to know what I did in the First Lot, Mr Robinson?’ I said. ‘Want to know about when I came home on leave and got a handful of white feathers?’
A copper! He knew nothing! Coppers after all hadn’t been given white feathers. Coppers had been serving ‘King and country’. They’d had the uniforms to prove it. And deep down Neville Robinson knew it. He didn’t say another word.
‘Mr Robinson,’ I said, ‘I joined Kitchener’s New Army to fight the Hun with my pals. I swallowed it all, the glory and the patriotism and all that business! All my pals went – I had a lot of pals, Mr Robinson – but only me and my mate Ken came home. Two of us!’
Neville Robinson looked down at the floor. I was not, however, prepared to let him off yet. I was in my stride. It happens rarely, but when it does, it really does.
‘Do you know,’ I said, ‘how many British casualties there were on the first day of the Battle of the Somme?’ No one answered and so I just carried on. ‘Fifty-seven thousand, four hundred,’ I said. ‘Imagine. All that death. I don’t have to imagine of course, because I was there. I went over the top at Gommecourt. Half past seven in the morning, me and a load of my mates walked –
walked
– into no-man’s-land. Through smoke and into the German guns we walked shoulder to shoulder because our idiot generals didn’t trust us, amateur soldiers, men they had encouraged to join up and fight, to do anything more intelligent. And we didn’t! Three of my mates died before the battle was even five minutes old. The bloke next to me, a grenadier, trained to throw Mills bombs into the enemy trenches, just froze. Mid-throw!’ I could feel the tears that always come into my eyes when I tell this tale, and I waited for the shocked expressions on the faces of my listeners it would later elicit. ‘He stood there and then . . . then he disappeared. There was a . . .’
Mrs Darling looked at me, puzzled, and then said, ‘Disappeared?’
‘There was an explosion and then he was gone!’ Because that was how it had been. That was exactly what I had seen. No agonised last words on the bloke’s lips, no bits of arms and legs and head flying about in all directions. ‘He vaporised,’ I said. I looked at Neville Robinson, who was still staring down at the floor, as now was his wife. But Mrs Darling looked shocked, genuinely horrified.
‘God help us!’
‘I hadn’t realised that bodies did that,’ I said. ‘What did I know?’
‘And so . . .’
‘And so I was supposed to carry on walking,’ I said. ‘Captain Southern, our officer, came over and shouted at me and told me I was to keep walking. But . . . I couldn’t move. The Germans hadn’t stopped firing, there was smoke and blood and screams everywhere and me and Captain Southern could have been hit at any time. But I just couldn’t move!’
I couldn’t cry in front of someone like Neville Robinson. I couldn’t cry in front of his White Feather girl wife – and I didn’t. I became bitter and my voice I knew twisted with my hatred, because now was the part of the story where that really began. ‘He could see that every part of me was shaking in terror, but Captain Southern still shouted at me to get on and walk forwards,’ I said. ‘He told me that if I didn’t I would be shot.’
There was a silence. I obviously hadn’t been shot but I had disobeyed an order.
‘I hit him,’ I said. ‘Punched him straight in the face.’
The silence became a room holding its breath.
‘Mr Hancock . . .’
‘No one saw, or if they did, they didn’t take any notice. Who cares what goes on when death is looking you in the face? Captain Southern could have shot me then and there, but to his credit he didn’t. What he did do was probably worse,’ I said, ‘because he dragged me forwards into the guns, screaming at me, telling me I was a worthless wog who didn’t know his duty. Somehow I began to function again. If you can call what I did functioning. But I shot Germans, which was what I was supposed to do. With Captain Southern beside me, I shot two in the face and God knows how many more in other parts of their bodies. I still see the heads of those I shot in the face. I . . .’ Suddenly aware of the fact that I had probably gone too far, that people don’t want or need to know what I see in my waking nightmares, I paused, and then I took a breath and said, ‘I don’t know when Captain Southern died. But suddenly he wasn’t pulling at me any more, suddenly he was just gone. Vaporised maybe, like that grenadier. I don’t know. But I never saw him again. You, Mr Robinson, probably feel I should have handed myself in to my superiors. You maybe consider me a coward.’
Neville Robinson said nothing.
‘But we captured the German positions we had been told to fight for, us, a load of rank amateurs. It was considered one of the few victories of that day,’ I said. ‘Not that I consider it so even now. The whole thing was a farce, from beginning to end. The Great War! What a waste of life and time and sanity!’
Still Neville Robinson said nothing. But then what could someone like him say? I feel different from most people, but from him – it was almost as if he was from an alien planet.
‘So when a young lady tried to give me a white feather when I came home on leave after all that, I just ran away,’ I said. ‘I ran and I ran and I’ve been running ever since. Not because I was afraid of her and her feather, but because I was afraid of myself, what I might do.’
Exhausted, I stopped speaking and panted to catch my breath. Everyone looked at me.
Then, in a burst of what felt like spite, Esme Robinson said, ‘Well, if you’re so angry about all of that, then maybe it’s you who’s been killing all our old friends, Mr Hancock.’
Mrs Darling shot me a warning look. I think she thought that I might just explode, but I was too tired by that time, so I said, ‘Well maybe I am, Mrs Robinson. But then if that’s the case I’m a bit of a bloody fool, aren’t I, warning you? Why should I warn you in particular? What is so special about you?’
‘Well, nothing. Myself and Neville are modest people. We . . .’
‘Mrs Robinson, you and your husband can heed my warning or not, but apart from your sister in Canada, we still have to find one more White Feather girl,’ I said. ‘Now, do you know where Fernanda Mascarenhas might be?’
I didn’t stay long with Mrs Darling after the Robinsons had gone. I hadn’t wanted to go into my history at the Battle of the Somme and was still cross that the way Neville and Esme – self-satisfied and blindly patriotic – had in effect forced me to do so. I also didn’t feel as if they had really taken my warning about the possibility of Esme being in danger seriously. But Mrs Darling assured me that she, at least, would take care and would also look out for any sign of the elusive Fernanda Mascarenhas.
‘Portuguese her people was,’ she said. ‘From down Canning Town somewhere. Not that none of us ever saw her place, I don’t think. She was a proud girl, she wouldn’t have wanted us to. As I told you before, poor they was, her family.’
Lascars or sailors originally from India have lived in Canning Town for years. Mostly Hindus, some of them were also natives of the old Portuguese colony of Goa. They were Christians to a man and tended to have taken Portuguese names too. I wondered if Fernanda’s family had been one of those. Not that Mrs Darling or anyone else who’d known her had ever mentioned that Fernanda was anything other than a white girl.