Alone Beneath The Heaven (41 page)
Read Alone Beneath The Heaven Online
Authors: Rita Bradshaw
‘Lucy-Ann.’ Rebecca smiled shakily before adding, ‘It was my mam’s name.’
Sarah willed her face not to change, she didn’t want anything to spoil these moments for Rebecca, and her voice was soft as she said, ‘Was it? You’ve never said. That’s a lovely name.’
‘Lucy-Ann Sarah Dalton,’ Rebecca grimaced as she laughed, ‘Bit of a mouthful but she won’t mind when I tell her why.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’
It was the evening of that same day when Sarah made a telephone call to Rodney to let him know she couldn’t make their dinner engagement. She had spent the afternoon sitting at Maggie’s side, Florrie having gone home to rest. The old warrior was in a lot of pain, and the painkillers were making her lightheaded and drowsy, but the doctors had satisfied themselves her injuries, although severe for a woman of Maggie’s age, were not life-threatening. It had been the concussion Maggie had sustained when her head had hit the wooden floor that had worried them the most, but now that was clearing and all the signs were positive.
When Sarah had told her about little Lucy-Ann she wasn’t sure if the news had permeated the fog, but then Maggie had smiled, her face lighting up, and her hands going out either side of the bed to Sarah and Florrie, as Florrie had said, ‘A little lassie, Maggie, a little lassie, isn’t that grand? Oh, there’s good days ahead, lass. You just think on about them, eh?’
Once Florrie had gone home, Sarah had sat quietly without speaking and let Maggie sleep, as she herself had dozed on and off for most of the afternoon.
Before calling Rodney that evening, Sarah spoke to Lady Harris and informed her employer of Maggie’s condition, and the birth of Rebecca’s child, her voice mirroring her emotions, which were mixed.
‘Be resolute, child, be resolute.’ It was the sort of thing Lady Harris liked to say, and Sarah could picture the old suffragette as she had been in her heyday. ‘What will Rebecca do now her child is born?’
‘That’s something I need to talk to you about, Lady Harris.’ Sarah took a deep breath as she continued. ‘Until the baby was born we weren’t sure how much circumstances would need to change, but now she is here, and she’s healthy and well, Rebecca can’t go back immediately to the sort of work she did before she got married, but of course she needs a roof over her head and employment nevertheless.’
‘Yes?’ It wasn’t particularly encouraging.
‘Lady Margaret is getting more and more involved with the business of the estate at Fenwick, and your other properties’ - another deep breath - ‘which means Constance, and William to a certain extent even though he’s now started boarding school as there’ll be the holidays, will need extra supervision from a third party; a nanny, in fact. Rebecca is more than qualified to fill such a role.’
There was a long pause. ‘You are suggesting that I employ your friend as a nanny for my grandchildren?’
‘Yes, I am.’ The butterflies in her stomach were rife. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for some time, and I think it would benefit everyone, Lady Harris.’ Well, she
had
told her to be resolute.
had
told her to be resolute.
‘Do you now.’ Another pause and then, ‘I would need to discuss this in some depth with Lady Margaret, and if she feels the suggestion has some merit, we can perhaps consider it further. That is all I can say for now.’
It was as much as she’d dared to hope for. Sarah tried to stop her elation from sounding in her voice as she said, ‘Thank you, Lady Harris.’ She felt sure Lady Margaret would be prepared to give her idea a try, it had been Lady Harris she hadn’t been sure about.
‘And you will be returning on Saturday?’
‘Yes, Lady Harris.’
‘I will discuss this with Lady Margaret before then, and we can speak again. Please give my good wishes, and those of Lady Margaret, to both Rebecca and Maggie.’
‘Yes, I will, and thank you again, Lady Harris.’
The telephone call to Rodney proved less satisfactory. It was Richard’s voice that answered her call, his professional tone mellowing when he realized who it was. ‘Sarah, I’m sorry, you’ve just missed him I’m afraid, he’s been called out.’
‘Oh, I see.’ What on earth was Richard doing visiting Rodney’s house? she asked herself silently. She would have thought that in the circumstances Rodney was the last person his brother would want to be with. Or had Richard gone there to sort out some of the more unpleasant legal connotations arising from the divorce, maybe even to pick a fight?
Her thoughts made her voice flustered when she said, ‘Do you know when Rodney will be back?’
‘Not really.’ There was an awkward pause, and then Richard said, ‘I can get him to phone you when he comes in if you like. I’m staying with him at the moment.’
‘Are you?’
She was too surprised to be tactful, and her voice must have expressed her bewilderment, because Richard answered, ‘Yes, well it isn’t general knowledge at the moment, so I would appreciate you keeping it under your hat, but Vanessa and I have parted. I’ve put the house on the market, I never liked living there from day one, and when Rod suggested I move in with him while I look for something smaller, a flat maybe, I took him up on the offer.’
She didn’t believe this. Was it one of those modern arrangements she had read about in the papers where everyone was terribly civilized, and adulteress, lover and wronged spouse were the best of friends? No wonder the divorce rate was rocketing.
In view of the fact that Richard had intimated his marriage breakdown was still something of a secret, she didn’t like to say his wife had been round to see her with all the discretion of a charging bull elephant, but neither could she pretend she hadn’t known either, so her voice was stilted as she said, ‘I’m very sorry, Richard.’
‘These things happen.’
Yes, but the other point of the triangle isn’t usually your own brother. Even if their marriage had been floundering for some time, surely present circumstances made it doubly hard for Richard? ‘You needn’t get Rodney to call me, but I’d be grateful if you could give him a message?’ She gave Richard the bare bones of what had happened, hearing his astonished ‘Good grief!’ as she thought wryly that his own life was only slightly less surprising, and concluding with the promise that she would call Rodney after the weekend when she was sure she would be back in London.
‘And you say this woman who attacked your friend can do no more harm?’ Richard asked somewhat bemusedly.
‘No, she’s had a major stroke and is completely paralysed. She’s in the same hospital as Maggie and Rebecca, actually.’
Richard said again, ‘Good grief,’ but there was no disbelief in his tone, just sheer unadulterated amazement.
Sarah stood for some moments by the pay phone in the hospital as she tried to make head or tail of the conversation with Rodney’s brother, but after a while she shook her head slowly. It was nothing to do with her if they all wanted to behave like that, but she found the whole thing . . . astonishing. It was a weak word for what she was feeling, but she didn’t want to examine the way she felt at the moment, not when she needed to be strong.
The last sentence or two of her conversation with Richard had clarified something in her head. She was going to see Matron Cox. She didn’t want to, in fact she would have given the world to avoid looking at the monster from her childhood, but somehow, especially after this last outrage, she felt she would never be free of her fear of this woman until she did.
It took her three attempts before she could force herself to knock on the door of the little room off one of the main wards where Matron Cox had been taken. She had checked with the sister on that ward first, explaining who she was and that she needed to see for herself that this woman could do Maggie no more harm, and after checking with the nurse who was detailed to Matron Cox, the sister had indicated for her to go along to the room.
Sarah entered slowly, nodding at the nurse who was sitting by the bed, before walking round to the far side and gazing down at the sleeping figure who seemed skeletal under the hospital blankets. ‘How is she?’ She barely recognized the frail, pathetic old woman in front of her as the formidable ogre of former years, but the fact that right up to twenty-four hours ago or so Matron Cox had still had the power and determination to corner Maggie in her own home and attack her in a mad frenzy couldn’t be ignored.
‘Very poorly.’ The nurse was uneasy. She had been told most of the facts about the patient under her care, and the police had been in and out of the room all day like yo-yos, but she still found it difficult to reconcile the fiend they were talking about with the helpless old woman who had been like a lamb under her ministrations, and who had lost control of all her bodily functions as well as her speech and movement. ‘It’s only a matter of hours.’
A matter of hours.
Sarah looked at what frustrated hate and rage had done to a human spirit and felt a moment’s sadness and regret that a life had been so wasted. Maggie was alive, and she and Florrie would go on being happy in this, the autumn of their years. Rebecca had her child now, a healthy bonny daughter who would be a comfort to her after the misery of her years with Willie, and a blessing to Maggie and Florrie to boot. And she . . . she would continue to forge her own destiny and one day root out her beginnings, follow that dream to its conclusion along with others. And she would go into nursing. It was what she wanted to do, and she
would
do it.
would
do it.
She turned from the bed, nodding her thanks to the nurse and leaving the room with unhurried, measured steps. The Matron couldn’t hurt them any more, she had lost and they had won, but oh . . . She gazed ahead down the long straight hospital corridor as the sense of sadness gripped her again; the waste of it.
And then her steps quickened as she made her way to Rebecca’s ward to say good night before she left the hospital for the night, and there was already a smile on her lips as she entered the room and saw Rebecca, her face bright, cradling her baby daughter in her arms.
Chapter Nineteen
Sarah came back from Sunderland on the afternoon of Saturday, the twentieth of March, on the day when Mr J. Proctor’s Sheila’s Cottage won the Grand National at Aintree amid cheers and shouts from the crowd, and the Soviet delegation walked out of a meeting of the Allied Control Council, the body officially charged with governing Germany, claiming the Western powers had snubbed them by holding a secret meeting in London to discuss Germany’s future. The first event was on the lips of most Londoners, the second - which had a part in precipitating the start of the Cold War with Russia - passed unnoticed by everyone, including Sarah, who was more concerned with the coming meeting with Lady Harris. The sun was shining and the sky was blue as she walked down Emery Place, and there was a scent of spring in the mild London air.
She had left Maggie feeling a lot better, although the old woman was going to be in hospital for a few weeks. Apart from severe bruising and cuts and grazes, her right leg was broken in two places, which, when added to her fluid retention problems and general poor health, constituted something of a problem, and one the doctors wanted to monitor carefully.
Rebecca, on the other hand, would be able to leave fourteen days after her confinement - if she had somewhere to go to, that was, and Sarah intended that she should have.
On entering the house, she made first for the kitchen, where she found Hilda and Eileen in the middle of one of their little skirmishes, which immediately emphasized she was back, and then to the morning room where Lady Margaret was sitting at Lady Harris’s desk sorting through some official-looking documents.
‘Sarah.’ Lady Margaret’s face expressed her delight. ‘How is everyone?’
Sarah filled her in quickly on the latest developments, enthusing first over little Lucy-Ann, before going on to say how Maggie was and finishing with the news that Matron Cox had died, as expected, the night she had phoned Emery Place. ‘Apparently the police went to her brother’s home, once they’d established who the Matron was, and the . . . the bodies of her brother and his wife were in the bedroom. She had obviously attacked them while they slept. The police think she used the same implement on them as she did on Maggie.’
‘How awful.’ Lady Margaret stared at her aghast for a moment before shaking her head and saying, ‘What a dreadful woman.’ And then, ‘Well, on to brighter things. I think your suggestion of Rebecca for the children’s nanny is a sound one. Of course, Lady Harris is insisting on some sort of probationary period, perhaps a month, something like that? But I have been thinking for some weeks that Constance needs more attention than I can comfortably give her. There are two free rooms on the staff landing, and one in particular is quite large, with room for a crib and so on. Have a look and see which you think is suitable anyway, and get Eileen to air it and make up the bed. The cot I used to use for Constance and William when we visited here is up in the attics, perhaps Eileen could see to that too, and there is plenty of bedding for the child.’
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