Authors: Barbara Vine
She fried Bertie an egg for his breakfast next morning. Whatever food shortages there might be, eggs were always plentiful in the country. Still without a telephone, she sent Hope in macintosh and rubber boots up to River House with a note for Elspeth asking her, and if possible her husband too, to come to The Larches urgently. Something unforeseen and “awful” had happened.
Elspeth was six months pregnant and the ground was slippery with slush and water. Guy was afraid for her if she went out on foot. Being annoyed with Maud was no new state for him. He would have liked the friendship between her and his wife to end, but he tried never to show his animosity to Elspeth. If she wanted to go to The Larches, he would drive her there, taking it slowly because of the state of the lanes. Hope, who had added to the cryptic note that a man she didn’t know had come to stay, was sent back with the message that they would be with her mother within the hour. Maud was almost hysterical while she waited for them, subjected as she was to confessions of Bertie’s destitute condition, his house decaying around him, the roof leaking, his poverty, and
his utter friendlessness. She alone was left of the crowds of people he used to call his friends, and she was rich and comfortable and well-housed with plenty of room.
To get rid of Bertie the only way she knew would work, Maud gave him two half crowns and ten shillings and, once they were open, sent him to the Fox and Hounds, with instructions not on any account to say he was staying with her. He had barely got to the corner of the street when Elspeth and Guy arrived.
“Who is this man, Maud?” Guy asked while his wife held Maud in her arms, hugging her and patting her back. “And where is he now?”
“Gone to the public house.” Maud failed to add that she had sent him there. “He was a friend of John’s. He stayed with us once, and now he wants to come back because he’s not safe in London.”
“Safer than he’d be in the army, I daresay,” said Guy.
Maud said he hadn’t yet been called up.
“How old is he?”
“John would be thirty-six if he were alive, and Bertie’s a couple of years younger.”
“In that case he’ll get his call-up papers in June, when the compulsory-enlistment age goes up, and you’ll be rid of him.”
Maud burst into tears, rocking back and forth and clutching Hope. She couldn’t have him stay here that long. A single man and a single woman under the same roof for four months. What would people say?
“Ma, il mondo?”
sang Guy, making Elspeth frown.
Maud sobbed all the louder. Without knowing that it meant “What would the world say?” she was seeing this operatic rendering of her own question as deliberate mockery. But once she knew Bertie would be obliged to join the army in June, she began to feel better. Getting into the car, Elspeth said to Guy, “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say something unkind.”
“Is it really? I’ll try not to do it again.”
Bertie stayed and Maud took to her bed more often. How much Guy was aware of Bertie’s relationship with John she knew nothing. Elspeth knew the truth, but had she told her husband? It wasn’t only that Maud didn’t know, she didn’t want to know. It was better that way. It was her philosophy of life. She had a small plaster ornament in her living room of the three wise monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Maud often said she “aped” that, proud of her pun. She forbore to say, perhaps she was unaware of it, that she saw, heard, and spoke little good either. Hope disliked Bertie. He either ignored or teased her, telling her that he had seen her “making eyes” at boys in the village, that she would soon be looking for a husband, and that she had no business to be so tall at her age and have legs like Betty Grable. Hope started spending the weekends at River House, taking Rover for walks and, once the university was down for the long vacation, dreaming and hoping for a visit from the Imber boys.
The weather that summer was magnificent, the temperature reaching ninety degrees in June, but the war was going badly for the Allies. Brussels fell to the Germans, and by nightfall on May 20 they reached the Channel coast. The British Expeditionary Force, Belgian troops, and Frenchmen were surrounded in a pocket inland from Dunkirk. On the twenty-sixth, when the evacuation from Dunkirk had begun, hundreds of small boats from England went out to fetch the troops home.
With the one o’clock news on the wireless in her bedroom—and Guy present at her bedside, much to the doctor’s amusement and the nurse’s dismay, an unheard-of departure from convention in 1940—Elspeth gave birth to her son, Adam. The baby was a healthy and vigorous screamer, weighing eight pounds, and his mother, determined to feed him herself, put him to the breast at once.
“Because we don’t know if we’ll be able to get baby milk or any milk at all when the Germans come.”
The people of England believed that the German army would follow the rescued BEF across the Channel and the much-feared invasion would begin. “We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender,” said Churchill, addressing the Commons. But, inexplicably, Hitler failed to invade and his troops turned southwards to the heart of France.
A
S
M
AUD
had predicted, Bertie’s presence in her house gave rise to gossip and disapproval. Worry over the fear of invasion, the erecting of roadblocks and makeshift barriers in the country lanes, the building of gun emplacements in the fields, while occupying minds, still left room for speculation as to the identity of this man who was living with Mrs. Goodwin. It reached the ears of Thomas Cole, a member of the newly formed Home Guard, but his duty, rather than curiosity, sent him to The Larches one evening. Part of the blackout curtain had come down from a downstairs window, and branches of the larch trees were inadequate to screen the blaze of light. Maud had taken to her bed, as she increasingly did these days, and Bertie answered the door. Thomas Cole went in, pinned up the curtain himself, and, noting that the man was drunk but reasonably steady on his feet, asked him for his name.
“What’s it to you?”
“There’s a war on, or hadn’t you noticed?” said Mr. Cole. “I’m in the Home Guard, and it’s our business to know the names of everybody in this village.”
Confused from the whisky and beer chasers he had drunk in the Fox and Hounds, Bertie supposed that the Home Guard was another name for the police. “Albert Edward Webber. Forty-three Bourne Terrace, Paddington, London.” And after a hiccup: “But I’m kipping here now with my friend Mrs. Goodwin.”
It was not the wisest way to describe the situation to a stern moralist and Baptist lay preacher such as Mr. Cole. He delivered his prepared lecture on behaviour which assisted the enemy in its declared purpose to conquer and subdue Great Britain, said that he would be keeping his eye on The Larches in future, and went on his way. This took him along the few more streets which comprised Ottery St. Jude before he went home to his house in Plover Lane.
Maud, who had been in bed listening to the wireless, hearing the raised voices downstairs, had put on her clothes and come downstairs. She would have worn a dressing gown had she not felt that wearing such an obviously bedroom garment could only give support to the view that Bertie was her lover. But although Mr. Cole was still in the house, he was on his way out and did no more than exchange a glance with her.
“You’re drunk,” she said to Bertie. “You’d better get it into your head that I’m giving you no more money.”
“If you’ve got it, I can take it. I’m a man and I’m stronger than a weak little bitch like you.”
“I’m sending for the police in the morning, and d’you know what I’m going to tell them? That your call-up papers will be on the doormat at that hovel of yours in Paddington, and if you don’t go back and get them, you’ll go to prison.” Maud had no idea what the punishment for avoiding “joining up” would be, but prison sounded good. It was the worst penalty she could think of short of hanging.
“You wouldn’t do that, Maudie.”
“Try me,” Maud said unwisely.
Bertie lurched towards her, his fists up, but he tripped over the rug and fell sprawling. Maud poked at him with her foot in its furry slipper. “From tomorrow, I’m not keeping any money in this house. I’m taking it to my friend at River House to look after for me. This is your last chance, Albert Edward Webber”—she
had heard him giving Mr. Cole his name and address—“before I fetch the police. Tomorrow I give you your train fare to London, and you go home and join up.” She quoted his favourite version of
Do you understand?
“Savvy?”
Maud would have had no need to call the police even if Bertie had not gone, for Mr. Cole had his own access to the law and had already written the letter that would set retribution on Bertie’s track. Mrs. Cole had been Deborah Joan Goshawk before her marriage, a London girl and a Baptist, who had been spending a week’s holiday in Teignmouth with other chapel members when she met the man who was to become her husband. Her brother was that Detective Sergeant George Goshawk, now inspector and a famous scourge of criminals, one who had solved several hitherto unsolved crimes. Sergeant Goshawk and his wife had stayed with the Coles in the past; the detective had never met Maud, but had heard the gossip about her and that a man who might have been her husband or her brother had disappeared. The name John Goodwin had stuck in his mind, and he had sometimes thought here was a mystery he would like to solve. Thomas Cole wrote to his brother-in-law George Goshawk at his address in Clapham that evening and posted the letter on the following day.
T
HE
B
ATTLE
of Britain began on July 10, 1940, the first battle fought over British soil since Culloden some two hundred years before. The aim was to destroy Fighter Command, this achievement to be followed by invasion. Neither of these attempts succeeded, and the German aircraft were finally routed. Churchill made his famous speech about never before “was so much owed by so many to so few.” One fighter pilot was said to have remarked that this must refer to mess bills.
But German aircraft had retaliated, and for the first time Greater London was seriously bombed. The southern suburbs suffered, and while George Goshawk’s house near Clapham Common escaped any more damage than broken windows and tiles blown off the roof, houses in the neighbourhood were destroyed, reduced to heaps of rubble. A versatile man, Inspector Goshawk set about mending his windows himself while his children scoured the streets for shrapnel to add to their growing collection.
Goshawk was an ardent patriot. But he hadn’t allowed the war to deflect him from his principal job as hunter of those he termed “villains.” He specialised particularly in men and women who had, he believed, escaped justice through what judges and magistrates and coroners called lack of evidence. John Goodwin had been a victim in such a case, and his name had lingered for years in Goshawk’s memory. Out of curiosity only, Goshawk had attended the adjourned inquest (which took place on his day off) and was
struck by one fact that emerged. Though terribly disfigured by its long immersion in water, the body bore signs on its forehead of a blow, made before death. The doctor giving evidence was asked what in his opinion caused this severe abrasion, but said he would not care to guess. The coroner asked him if it could have been caused by Goodwin’s head being struck by the stone coping bordering the canal, and the doctor said he supposed it could. The verdict of death by misadventure seemed to Goshawk to take a lot for granted, but he did nothing about it until alerted to the case by this letter from his brother-in-law. Whatever Goshawk did would have to be done on his own time as he rightly guessed, since his immediate superior would have nothing to do with it.
“A coroner’s court is good enough for me, George,” said Detective Superintendent Horlick, “and should be for you.”
So it had been early in the war that Goshawk set out along the south bank of the Grand Union Canal. He had a week off, had sent his wife and children off to Bournemouth for a holiday with her sister, and, using his “own time,” began the walk along the canal towing path from Fermoy Road in the east to Kensal Green Cemetery in the west. Goodwin’s body had been found in the water near Kensal Road where the canal passes under Ladbroke Grove. The district was not the kind of area, Goshawk decided, to which a young man would come on his own for a walk or with a friend (a girl?) for a picnic, but a sluggish, dirty waterway between clusters of soot-blackened warehouses and the backs of shabby, four-storey houses whose rear walls came down to the canal’s edge without intervening gardens.
Walking back the way he had come, Goshawk took it more slowly. He noted rowing boats tied up alongside jetties that led to tumbledown cottages, but at this point no smart houseboats. Looking northwards, he could see beyond the dirty alleys and throughways a red bus moving along the Harrow Road. The water here was coated in green weed, the covering it made only
broken where a pair of geese or a coot swam doggedly along, heading to the grassy spaces and sheltering trees of the great cemetery. As far as he could tell, no shops or pubs or any pleasant diversions were available to the visitor, and then, rounding a shallow bend in the towing path, he came upon a small café tucked between an abandoned, boarded-up cottage and the blackened timbers of some sort of windowless factory. This kind of place was commonly called “a pull-up for carmen,” meaning the drivers of lorries, but no lorries were here or roads to drive them along, only boats and boatmen. The name above the window was Teds Caff, the apostrophe missing from the first word and the second misspelt. Goshawk, a stickler for such things, noticed the mistakes with pain.
Inside, to his surprise, it was clean, the four tables covered with red-and-white-check cloths. Goshawk asked for a cup of tea, milk but no sugar, and when it came, brought by Ted himself, the detective asked him if he had heard about the body of a man dredged up out of the canal.
“Nasty, that,” said Ted. “Didn’t do my business no good either.”