‘Yes, I suppose I do,’ I conceded. ‘You are a journalist, after all.’
‘Local newspapers are pretty parochial but patchwork quilts are hardly likely to make the front page even here in Eastchester.’ He laughed again, with that easy chuckle. ‘Look, I may be able to help. I know a former nurse who worked there who might be prepared to talk to you.’
‘That’s very kind, I really don’t want to put you to any trouble. It’s probably a wild goose chase anyway.’
‘Not to worry, wild geese are a local hack’s stock in trade. I’ll be in touch again shortly.’
He phoned again two days later.
‘My contact is happy to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Her name’s Pearl Bacon. I interviewed her some years ago, when Helena Hall finally closed. She’s an old lady now, but she used to work on the women’s wards and she’s got some interesting memories. Would you like me to arrange it?’
‘Perhaps you could just give me her number?’
‘She never answers the phone; too deaf, I’m afraid. But she lip-reads well. You’d need to visit her in person. Do you come from round here?’
I hesitated, still cautious, but then thought to hell with it, I’ve nothing else to do with my time. There was little to lose and I might just find out something interesting about the quilt.
‘I’m in London but my mum lives not far from Eastchester. I’m going down to visit on Saturday. Is that any good?’
There was a short pause, and then he said, ‘Saturday’s fine for me. I’ve got to take my son to football in the afternoon, but I’ll be free from about four o’clock. I’ll see if that’s convenient for Pearl.’
When Mum’s dementia was first diagnosed two years ago I’d been devastated, but she seemed surprisingly sanguine.
‘At least now I know what’s going on,’ she’d said, on the way home from the hospital. ‘It’s got a name. Don’t you worry about me, my darling. We all have to go some time.’
But not like this, in a slow, depressing deterioration and erosion of her personal dignity. At the time she was still living an active, independent kind of life, driving herself all over East Anglia to visit friends, doing yoga, reading voraciously, and singing in the church choir. Now, she was losing confidence: had stopped driving because she was afraid of losing her way, found novels no longer satisfying because she could not remember who the characters were, even forgot to feed herself from time to time. But she refused to give into self-pity and was determined to remain independent, refusing most of my suggestions for making her life easier.
Russell and I had talked about relocating to a house with a granny annexe, but neither of us could face the ruinously expensive daily nightmare of commuting. Besides, we had no desire to give up our city life and Mum would not contemplate moving away from the village where she had lived for fifty years, her friends and the few regular activities she was still able to enjoy.
Last winter, when she’d become very poorly with a chest infection, we’d visited a couple of residential homes nearby which had been recommended by friends. Both places were perfectly pleasant, warm and comfortable with kindly staff and only the faintest whiff of incontinence. Mum had showed polite interest but refused, point-blank, to discuss the matter any further.
So, for now, the daily telephone calls and trips to Essex every Saturday had become part of my routine. Our conversations often turned to past memories, but this time I had a specific agenda: to discover everything she could remember about Granny and the quilt. After lunch I pulled out the family scrapbooks kept in a cupboard under the television.
The earliest photographs, in black and white, are so small that you have to squint closely to see faces.
‘There’s my darling Richard when he was a baby and, look, there he is again,’ Mum said, ‘with Jean and Arthur.’ The angelic boy with the shock of blond hair and a lacy dress is about three years old, beaming at the camera with a wicked grin while his parents hold his hands on either side and stand stiffly still for the photographer.
There were snaps of his first day at school, posing with trophies for various sporting triumphs and, perhaps my favourite, as a moody teenager affecting a look of James Dean, lounging against a sports car with a cigarette hanging from his lip. He’s tidied up for graduation day, peering out uneasily from behind the tassel of his mortar board, white knuckles clutching a roll of fake parchment the photographer had probably thrust into his hand at the last moment.
I paid special attention to the photographs of Granny around this time – a tall, serious-looking woman with only the occasional hint of a smile. She appeared serene enough; certainly not the look of someone who might have had, or was about to have a breakdown.
As we turned the page Mum yelped with recognition, ‘Oh look, there’s me. That was our wedding day, dear.’ The girl on Dad’s arm, in her registry office wedding dress, looks young enough to be his daughter – as indeed she was.
‘You look so much in love, Mum.’ I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of envy.
‘We were, dearest, I couldn’t believe my luck. He was such a handsome man. And those eyes! Bluer than the Mediterranean and so deep you could drown in them.’
More recent albums were crammed with photographs – in colour now – of my own childhood, and for a while we reminisced happily about my first tooth, first day at school, my gang of friends and the surly, rebellious adolescent that I turned into.
‘You were such a worry,’ she murmured.
‘I didn’t turn out so badly, after all, did I?’ Apart from no boyfriend, a huge mortgage and no job.
‘No, dearie,’ she said, patting my hand. ‘You turned out just fine.’
As I closed the album, on the very back page after several blank sheets, were two colour snaps I’d never seen before. They must have been taken in the mid-1970s; one of them shows me as a child aged about three, sitting on Granny’s knee. Although you can’t see her face, she is holding a book, apparently reading to me. In the other, Granny is alone on the sofa, looking directly at the camera with a notebook in her hand. Something bright in the corner of the photograph caught my eye – slung over the back of the sofa. I squinted more closely.
‘That’s the quilt!’ I nearly shouted. ‘The one we found in the loft, Mum.’
‘She was very attached to it,’ she said. ‘Used to have it on the spare bed most of the time. Wonder what it’s doing there?’
Behind Granny, in the doorway, is the shadowy shape of an elderly woman, as if the photographer had caught her just entering or leaving the room. The figure is so slight that she could be a child, were it not for the grey hair cut in a simple, straight bob. Her hand, lifted to the door knob, is also tiny, and her face half-turned away from the camera, looking at something in the corridor beyond. Even so, it is possible to make out an expression of lively amusement, as if she’s reacting to a joke.
‘Who’s that, Mum?’
She squinted more closely and sighed. ‘The face is familiar, dear, but the name’s gone missing.’ Another long silence and then, ‘It might be Maria.’
‘Maria? Granny’s housekeeper?’ I’d never paid much attention to the person who’d lived with Granny for a while, and then seemed to disappear as quickly as she had arrived.
‘Queer old thing, not really a housekeeper, more a houseguest; pretty hopeless she was, couldn’t even make a proper cup of tea,’ Mum said. ‘Jean met her at the hospital, as far as I remember, but she wouldn’t hear a word against her, said she’d had a hard life. Always had a needle in her hand …’ she tailed off.
‘Perhaps it was
her
who made the quilt?’
‘Could be, love. She was a bit of a mystery, that Maria. Only lived with Jean for a few years till the heart attack carried her off.’
She yawned, her shoulders starting to droop. ‘Are we finished now, dear? I think it’s time for my afternoon nap.’
I tucked her up in a rug on the sofa, left a sandwich for her tea and headed off for my appointment with Ben Sweetman.
The café in Eastchester was packed with weary shoppers. Past the queue of people waiting to be served, towards the sofa area at the back, I spied a man sitting alone, his head in a newspaper.
I cleared my throat, tentatively. ‘Mr Sweetman, erm, Ben?’
‘Caroline?’ He stood up and we shook hands. He was younger than I’d expected, with less belly and more hair. ‘Pleased to meet you. Have a seat and let me get you a drink. What will it be?’
He was an imposing man, well over six feet tall, and broad-shouldered with it, clean-shaven and, while not as overweight as I had imagined, certainly well-covered. I guessed he was in his early forties with a full head of thick, wavy brown hair going to pepper-and-salt at the temples, in a style I could only describe as
au naturel.
Definitely not my type, although there was a boyishness in that face, something open and unguarded, that warmed me to him.
I watched him in the queue and wondered what his wife was like. Probably petite and pretty, who loved to feel protected by this big bear of a husband. I visualised the family together, the sporty son in his early teens, and perhaps a younger daughter. The perfect family unit.
‘It’s good of you to see me on your day off,’ I said, as he returned with the drinks.
‘I’d only have been at home depressing myself, watching Eastchester United lose again.’ He laughed, in that genial, open way. ‘Anyway, it’s just exchanging one sofa for another – no great hardship there.’
‘How did your son do in his game?’
The proud father’s smile lit up his face, crinkling the lines at the corners of his eyes. ‘Thomas’s team lost, but he’s only ten so he bounces back soon enough. I’ve just taken him back to his gran’s for tea, and she’ll spoil him rotten.’
I caught my reflection in the glass behind. In the harsh uplighters of the café and without make-up I looked pale and tired, my roots a dark stripe along my scalp, and I was dressed for housework in a scruffy tee-shirt and my oldest jacket. Why hadn’t I taken more trouble before coming out?
He took a sip of coffee and sat back. ‘So, Caroline – can I call you that?’
‘Of course.’
‘Why are you so keen to find out about Helena Hall?’
‘My granny left me a quilt when she died which she, or someone else, sewed when they were patients there. I just want to find out a bit more about it and who made it.’ I hesitated, the direct gaze of his flecked hazel eyes bringing me back to full alert. ‘I hope you don’t think this is going to make some kind of story for you?’
He looked back at me, one eyebrow slightly raised, his lips in the start of a smile. ‘I admit that I probably wouldn’t have offered to meet you if I wasn’t a little intrigued.’ He held out his hands. ‘But look: no recorder, no notebook. All off the record for now.’
He was a persuasively good listener and, ignoring the whisper of caution in the back of my head, I found myself telling him more than I had intended: that Granny had been a patient at Helena Hall for a short time and, towards the end of her life, a woman called Maria, a seamstress, came to live with her as a sort of housekeeper. That my forgetful mother said she thought the quilt was somehow associated with Helena Hall. I pulled out the photograph. ‘This is my granny. You can just see a bit of the quilt in the corner, and this is probably Maria in the background.’
He perched reading glasses on his nose and peered at the snapshot. ‘Tell me more about this quilt. There must be something special about it for you to be so curious.’ As I hesitated, he cocked his head to one side with that slight smile again. ‘There is, isn’t there?’
It was a good question:
why
was I so interested in the quilt? Yes, there was the strange little verse, Jo’s interest in the royal silks, and Mum’s intriguing snippets of information about Maria and the mental asylum. But there was something more, something I couldn’t yet put my finger on, which drew me to the mystery, made me want to know more, brought me to this crowded café, talking to a stranger.
‘Look,’ he said, checking his phone. ‘You don’t have to tell me now, but this person I mentioned who worked as a nurse at Helena Hall is expecting us at four-thirty. Shall we go and meet her?’
We took a short cut through a soulless modern shopping centre, down a graffiti-splattered underpass, across a small scruffy park and into a quiet residential area of Victorian terraced houses. As we walked, Ben talked passionately about how generations of town planners had managed to destroy the medieval town centre that had been built on the street lines of an important Roman settlement.
‘I lived here for eighteen years and never clocked any of this stuff,’ I said. ‘And you’re not even from round here, are you?’
‘You can probably tell I’m originally from oop north.’ He exaggerated the flattened vowels for effect. ‘But I’ve been here years, too long really.’
‘How long?’
‘Twenty years or so. Started here as a cub reporter, did some shifts on the nationals when I was young and energetic, became disillusioned by the corruption and the back handers, saw the job here as chief reporter, got married and settled down. It’s not a bad life.’
‘What’s kept you here?’ I’d spent my teenage years desperate to get away.
‘Everyone gets bored with their job sometimes, but when you work for a local rag you tend to get involved with people’s causes, and before you know where you are you’re passionate about them, too. Like Helena Hall. Of course the place had to close, but they should have kept the buildings in better nick so they could be restored into flats or whatever, and lots of people cared deeply about that, so I got pulled in. There was a beautiful function room and theatre, with a stage and sprung floor and chandeliers, the lot, but it’s been pretty much destroyed by vandals and fire. It’s a sad sight these days. You’ll have to take a look one day, before they knock the place down completely.’
We turned into a street of small terraced houses, stopped at a door which led directly onto the pavement and rang the bell. A cat glared at us indignantly between lace curtains in the front window as we waited. Eventually we heard a bolt being drawn and the door opened to reveal a round, rosy-faced old lady, squinting at us with a perplexed expression.