The Other Side of Midnight (30 page)

The years before and after the First World War saw a wave of interest in spiritualism and the occult, fueled by those grieving for their loved ones lost in battle. With such a large market of customers, fakes and frauds made an excellent profit.

The New Society for the Furtherance of Psychical Research is fictional, but it is loosely based on the British Society for Psychical Research, a group that gathered scientific minds determined to prove the fact or fiction of psychical phenomena; a well-known member was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The actual society performed extensive tests on those who claimed psychic ability, and at times those tests included tying the subject’s hands and legs to a chair in order to prevent toe or finger taps. They also attempted a countrywide census of the supernatural, encouraging the populace to write in with its experiences in hopes of compiling usable data.

The slang words used in the world of psychics, including
skimmer
,
showgirl
, and
fortune-petter
, are my invention. Many psychic frauds
did (and still do) use audience plants to appear trustworthy. The “rules” of séances, including using a round table and staying in one’s own environment, are of my own making but are an extension of the kinds of tricks con artists have always used.

Many Americans associate the flappers of the 1920s with the USA, but the flapper culture in 1920s London was deliciously wild. The media called them the Bright Young Things and breathlessly reported their exploits.

The woman Ellie envisions while seeing from Colin’s point of view is fictional but was inspired by Edith Cavell, a British nurse who was convicted of treason by the German (not the British) government for helping Allied soldiers escape German-occupied Belgium. She was executed by firing squad in 1915.

E
NGLAND
, 1921

B
y the time we left Calais, I thought perhaps I hated Dottie Forsyth. To the observer, I had no reason for it, since by employing me as her companion Dottie had saved me from both poverty and a life robbed of color in my rented flat, the life I was failing to live without Alex. However, the observer would not have had to spend the past three months crisscrossing Europe in her company, watching her scavenge for art as cheaply as possible while smoking her cigarettes in their long black holder.

“Manders,” she said to me—though my name was Jo, one of her charms was the habit of calling me by my last name, as if I were the upstairs maid—“Mrs. Carter-Hayes wishes to see my photographs. Fetch my pocketbook from my luggage, won’t you? And do ask the porter if they serve sherry.”

This as if we were on a luxurious transatlantic ocean liner, and not
on a simple steamer over the Channel for the next three hours. Still, I rose to find the luggage, and the pocketbook, and the porter, my stomach turning in uneasy loops as I traveled the deck. The Channel wasn’t entirely calm today, and the misty gray in the distance gave a hint of oncoming rain. The other passengers on the deck cast me brief glances as I passed them. A girl in a wool skirt and a knitted cardigan is an unremarkable English sight, even if she’s passably pretty.

I found the luggage compartment with the help of the porter, whose look of surprise turned to one of pity when I asked about the sherry, and from there I rummaged through Dottie’s many bags and boxes, looking for the pocketbook. I didn’t think Mrs. Carter-Hayes, who had been acquainted with Dottie for all of twenty minutes, had any real desire to see the photographs, but despite the pointlessness of the mission, I found myself lingering over it, taking longer than I needed to in the quiet and privacy of the luggage department. I tucked a lock of hair behind my ear and took a breath, sitting on the floor with my back to one of Dottie’s trunks. We were going back to England.

Without Alex, I had nothing there. I had nothing anywhere. I had given up my flat when I left with Dottie, taken the last of my belongings with me. There wasn’t much. A few clothes, a few packets of beloved books I couldn’t live without. I’d sold off all our furniture by then, and I’d even sold most of Alex’s clothes, a wrench that still made me sick to my stomach. The only fanciful thing I’d kept was the case with his camera in it, which I could have gotten a few pounds for but simply hadn’t been able to part with. The camera had come with me on all of my travels, on every boat and train, though I hadn’t even opened the case. If Dottie had noticed, she had made no comment.

And so my life in England now sat before me as a perfect blank. We were to go to Dottie’s home in Sussex, a place I had never seen. I was to stay on in Dottie’s pay, even though she was no longer traveling and my duties had not been explained. When she had first written me, declaring starkly that she was Alex’s aunt, that she’d heard I was in London, and
that she was in need of a female companion for her travels to the Continent, I’d imagined playing kindly nursemaid to an undemanding old lady, serving her tea and reading Dickens and Collins aloud as she nodded off. Dottie, with her scraped-back hair, harsh judgments, and grasping pursuit of money, had been something of a shock.

I tried to picture primroses, hedgerows, soft, chilled rain. No more hotels, smoke-filled dining cars, resentful waiters, or searches through unfamiliar cities for just the right tonic water or stomach remedy. No more sweltering days at the Colosseum or the Eiffel Tower, watching tourists blithely lead their children and snap photographs as if we’d never had a war. No more seeing the names of battlefields on train departure boards and wondering if that one—or that one, or that one—held Alex’s body forgotten somewhere beneath its newly grown grass.

I would have to visit Mother once I was back; there was no escaping it. And I did not relish living on another woman’s charity, something I had never done. But at least at Dottie’s home I would be able to avoid London, and all of the places Alex and I had been. Everything about London since he’d gone to war the last time had stabbed me. I wished never to see it again.

Eventually I gave up the musty silence of the luggage department and returned to the deck, pocketbook in hand. “What took so long?” Dottie demanded as I approached. She was sitting in a wooden folding chair, her cloche hat pulled down against the wind and her feet in their practical oxfords crossed at the ankles. She looked up at me, frowning, and though the cloudy light softened the edges of her features, I was not fooled.

“They don’t serve sherry here,” I said in reply, handing her the pocketbook.

Dottie’s eyes narrowed perceptibly. I thought she often convinced herself that I was lying to her, though she could not quite figure out exactly when or why. “Sherry would have been most
convenient,
” she said.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I know.”

She turned to her companion, a fortyish woman with a wide-brimmed hat sitting on the folding chair next to hers and already looking as if she wished to escape. “This is my companion,” she said, and I knew from her tone that she intended to direct some derision at me. “She’s the widow of my dear nephew Alex, poor thing. He died in the war and left her without children.”

Mrs. Carter-Hayes swallowed. “Oh, dear.” She looked at me and flashed a sympathetic smile, an expression that was so genuine and kind that I almost pitied her for the next three hours she’d have to suffer in Dottie’s company. When Dottie was in a mood like this, she took no prisoners—and she’d been in this mood more and more often the closer we came to England.

“Can you imagine?” Dottie exclaimed. “It was a terrible loss to our family. He was a wonderful young man, our Alex, and I should know since I helped raise him. He spent several years of his childhood living with me at Wych Elm House.”

Her glance cut to me, and in its gleam of triumph, I knew that my shock showed on my face. Dottie smiled sweetly. “Didn’t he tell you, Manders? Goodness, men are so forgetful. But then, you weren’t together all that long.” She turned back to the bewildered Mrs. Carter-Hayes. “Children are life’s greatest joy, don’t you agree?”

It would go on like this, I knew, until we docked: Dottie speaking in innuendos and double meanings, cloaked in polite small talk. I moved away and stood by the rail—there was no folding chair for me—and let the noise of the wind blow the words away. I hadn’t bothered with a hat, and I felt my curls come loose from their knot and touch my face, my hair tangling and my cheeks chapping as I sightlessly watched the water.

This wasn’t her only mood; it was just one of them, though it was the most vicious and unhappy. I had learned to navigate the maze of Dottie’s ups and downs over the last three months, not finding the
task unduly hard as I was well versed in unhappiness myself. She was fiftyish, her frame narrow and strangely muscular, her face with its gray-brown frame of meticulously pinned-back hair naturally sleek, with a pointed chin. She looked nothing like Alex, though she was his mother’s sister. She was not vain, and never resorted to powders or lipsticks, which would have looked absurd on her tanned skin and narrow line of a mouth. She ate little, walked often, and kept her hair tidy and her shoes practical. All the better for chasing and devouring her prey.

I glanced back at her and found that she was now showing the photographs to Mrs. Carter-Hayes. She kept six or seven of them in her pocketbook, on hand for occasions in which she had cornered a stranger and wished to show off. From the softening of Dottie’s features I could tell that she was showing the picture of her son, Martin, in his officer’s uniform. I had seen the photograph many times, and I had heard the accompanying narrative just as often.
He is coming home to be married. He is such a dear boy, my son.
The listeners were always too polite, or too bored, to question the fact that the war had ended three years ago, yet Dottie Forsyth’s son was only now coming home. That she still showed the photograph of Martin in uniform, as if she hadn’t seen him since it was taken.

I turned back to the water. I should quit. I should have done it long ago. The position was unpleasant and demeaning. I had been a typist before I married Alex, before my life had fallen apart. My skills were now rusty, but it was 1921, and girls found jobs all the time. I could try Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds. They must need typists there. It wouldn’t be much of a life, but I would be fed and clothed, with Mother’s fees paid for, and I could stay pleasantly numb.

But I would not quit. I knew it, and, I believed, so did Dottie. It wasn’t the pay she gave me, which was small and sporadic. It wasn’t the travel, which had simply seemed like a nightmare to me, as if I were taking the train across a vast wartime graveyard, the bombed
buildings just losing their char, the bodies buried just beneath the surface of the still-shattered fields. I would not quit because Dottie, viperish as she was, was my last link to Alex. And though it hurt me even to think of him, I could not let him go.

I had last seen him in early 1918, home on leave before he went back to France and flew three more RAF missions, the final from which he did not return. His plane was found four days later, crashed behind enemy lines. There was no body. The pack containing his parachute was missing. He had not appeared on any German prisoner-of-war rosters, any burial details, any death lists. He had not been a patient in any known hospital. In three years there had been no telegram, no cry for help, no sighting of him. He had vanished. My life had vanished with him.

He died in the war,
Dottie had said, but it was just another sting of hers. According to the official record, my husband had not died in the war. When there is a body, a grave, then a person has died. But no one ever tells you: When you have nothing but thin air, what happens then? Are you a widow when there is nothing but a gaping hole in what used to be your life? Who are you, exactly? For three years I had been trapped in amber—first in my fear and uncertainty, and then in a slow, chilling exhale of eventual, inexorable grief.

As long as I was with Dottie, part of me was Alex’s wife. He still existed, even if only in the form of Dottie’s innuendos and recriminations. Just hearing someone—anyone—say his name aloud was a balm I could not let go of. I had followed her across Europe for it, and now I would follow her to Wych Elm House, her family home. Where Alex had lived part of his childhood, something he had never thought to tell me.

I stared out to sea, uneasy, as England loomed on the horizon.

Photo by Adam Hunter

Simone St. James
is the award-winning author of
The Haunting of Maddy Clare
, which won two RITA Awards from Romance Writers of America and an Arthur Ellis Award from Crime Writers of Canada. Her second novel,
An Inquiry into Love and Death
,
was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel from Crime Writers of Canada. She wrote her first ghost story, about a haunted library, when she was in high school, and spent twenty years behind the scenes in the television business before leaving to write full-time. She lives in Toronto, Canada, with her husband and a spoiled cat.