Autumn Softly Fell (18 page)

After a time, Aunt Eloise got up, taking her empty cup and saucer and placing it on the side table. She held out her hand for Dorothea’s. Now that she was standing, she was reflected in the big mirror over the mantelpiece. It was as if there were suddenly two Aunt Eloises in the room.

‘This is where Mr Simcox lives.’ Aunt Eloise put Dorothea’s cup aside, looked slowly round the room as if reacquainting herself. ‘Mr Simcox has worked for your uncle for many years. The house itself belongs to your Uncle Albert. For a time – after we were first married – your uncle and I lived here. Four years….’ The words trailed away, making four years sound like an eternity. She crossed to the mantelpiece, her back to Dorothea.

It was impossible, somehow, for Dorothea to imagine Aunt Eloise established in these surroundings, even though she knew it had really happened. Over the years, she had pieced together the story, how Aunt Eloise had been visiting her cousin in Coventry, how she had met Uncle Albert at some sort of gathering and gone on to marry him, how they set up home in the city. It was in Coventry – perhaps in this very house, incredible though it seemed – that Roderick had been born. Dorothea wondered what sort of a boy he would have been if he lived here still. He claimed to have no memory of Coventry.

The second Aunt Eloise had stepped forward in the mirror, like a ghost out of the past. The ghost’s eyes stared into the room, cold and blue, deep too – and sad, thought Dorothea suddenly, so terribly sad.

‘I—’ Dorothea bit her lip, not having meant to speak.

Aunt Eloise turned towards her. ‘What is it?’

‘I’m … sorry—sorry that you were unhappy here.’

Aunt Eloise looked at her in a way that made her shiver, as if the cold eyes could see right through her. Yet it also seemed to Dorothea that this was the first time in the three and a half years they had lived together that her aunt had really
noticed
her.

Aunt Eloise’s expression changed – softened perhaps. Her eyes grew distant as if a mist had descended. ‘I used, when I lived here, to dream often of home—of Clifton….’

Like me,
thought Dorothea,
dreaming of Stepnall Street.

At that moment they heard the sound of the front door being opened followed by voices in the hall. Aunt Eloise stepped away from the mantelpiece, her eyes straying towards the door. The ghost in the mirror receded, vanished.

It was not Uncle Albert who came into the room but another man, short, slight, with a straggly moustache and a balding head.

‘Mr Simcox.’ Aunt Eloise bowed her head ever so slightly. ‘Forgive the intrusion. I have come to see my husband.’

‘Of course. I … I … we….’

‘And if he won’t see me, he can hardly refuse to see his own niece!’ Aunt Eloise wrenched Dorothea up from the settee, pushed her forward. Dorothea could almost feel the strength of her aunt’s iron
will, transmitted through the long, elegant fingers that gripped her wrist, but she tore herself away, suddenly angry. Aunt Eloise had tricked her, cared nothing for her; she was just a pawn in a game, a decoy.

She stood between the two of them, her cool, calm and collected aunt, and timid Mr Simcox, her chest heaving. They both looked at her. She grew afraid. What would happen next? And whatever would become of her?

Dorothea sat on the stairs in her borrowed nightdress with her hands in her lap, pressing her fingers together, listening to the muffled voices coming from the room with the bay window and the mirror over the mantelpiece. She could not hear much of what Uncle Albert and Aunt Eloise were saying and she felt guilty about listening at all. If only Roderick had been with her! He often said that grown-ups told you nothing, that eavesdropping was the only way to find anything out. In this situation, he would be neither intimidated nor conscience-stricken. But he was miles distant, out of harm’s way at school. He knew nothing of what had been happening.

Last night, Dorothea had eaten her dinner with Mr Simcox and his daughter, a quiet girl of fifteen who wore spectacles and whose name was Peggy. Arnie Carter had been there too. Dorothea had forgotten until she saw him – pasty-faced and famished-looking as always: a worrier, Nora said – that this was now where he lived, ever since the great fire nine months ago. She thought how jealous Nora would be – sitting to dinner with Arnie Carter! But when would she ever see Nora again?

There had been no sign of her uncle and aunt last night. At bed time, Mrs Reade had taken her up to a little room at the front of the house. ‘I hope this will suit, miss.’ The housekeeper had sounded put out, reproachful. Dorothea had wanted to shout at her:
It’s not my fault; I didn’t ask to come here!
She had stopped herself just in time, had got undressed like a lamb, put on the nightdress borrowed off Peggy Simcox. Lying awake, lonely and miserable, she had wondered what Nora was doing, and the mam’zelle and Richard –
Baby, too. ‘But we must,’ she had said out loud, her voice sounding small and flat in the darkness, ‘we must stop calling her Baby. She is growing up. She has a name of her own.’ But for some reason, this thought – that Baby was growing up, was a baby no longer – had brought tears to her eyes.

She had slept at last – though fitfully – to be awoken by Mrs Reade with a breakfast tray. Dorothea had picked at her food as Mrs Reade lingered in the room, opening the curtains, tidying round, taking clothes out of the wardrobe.
Spying on me,
Dorothea had said to herself. But having such uncharitable thoughts made her feel contrite.

‘I will come back for your tray by and by,’ Mrs Reade had said at last, heading for the door. ‘I must just take this clean shirt to Arnie – to Mr Carter, I should say. This is his room, of course.’ She had hesitated a moment longer, adding, ‘When you are up and dressed you might like to come to the shops with me. It will do you good to get out of the house.’

But Dorothea had not wanted to go anywhere with Mrs Reade and when the housekeeper returned she had pretended to be asleep. Mrs Reade had gone away. Dorothea had lain with her eyes shut, listening to doors opening and shutting, footsteps on the stairs, muted voices, water gurgling in the pipes. Finally the front door had banged shut one last time. The house had creaked, settled, lapsed into silence. Had they all gone away and left her? She had opened her eyes, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling. An occasional cart or carriage had passed by outside, wheels rattling, hooves clopping, fading into the distance. She had thought of poor Arnie Carter whose room she had taken. Where had he spent the night?

After a while, she had got out of bed and crossed to the window. Trees were swaying in the breeze. The sky was overcast. On the lawn below, a blackbird had prodded the grass with its sharp yellow beak. It had run a few steps, prodded again, then, with a sudden cackle, it had flown away over the trees in a flurry of wings.

That had been when the voices started, the muffled voices
downstairs
. Unable to stop herself, she had crept out onto the landing and
halfway down the stairs. Here her courage had failed her and she had sat down. Here she was still.

Drawing her knees up to her chin, she listened, recognizing the deep bass rumble of Uncle Albert, the cold, clipped tones of Aunt Eloise. The words were all but indecipherable, like writing blotted by rain.

‘…nothing
improper
… then there
was
something….’

‘…and if I am not to be permitted … an old friend of the family….’

‘…behind my back! Behind my….’

‘…never, I would
never
….’

‘…taken you for a fool, Ellie….’

‘…a mistake, lending him … my head, in such a muddle….’

The disconnected words swirled around, made Dorothea’s heart pound. It seemed, too, that she could hear other voices, voices in her head, voices form the dim past, voices she had listened to as she lay half asleep in the room off Stepnall Street, her papa and Mrs Browning stumbling around on the other side of the pinned-up sheet.

…
I never, I never did, you take that back, you’re a blinking liar
….

…
damn you woman, damn you
….

…
and don’t you damn me; take
that,
you old sod
…
and
that….

…
bloody hell, bloody nora, you just wait, you just
….

Dorothea put her hands over her ears, trying to block out the voices – the voices from below and the voices in her head but they wouldn’t go away and she couldn’t stand it anymore. She scrambled to her feet and ran up the stairs, tripping over the skirt of her
nightdress
, her feet thudding. She didn’t care if they heard or not, she didn’t care that they’d realize she’d been listening. She just wanted to get away.

She slammed the door of her cupboard-like room, flung herself face down on the bed, stuck her fists in her ears, buried her face in the bedclothes, lay silent and still, eyes closed, the sound of her laboured breathing the only sound she could hear.

There was a knock on the door. Uncle Albert came in. Dorothea sat tensed-up on the bed, dressed now, wary. Her uncle’s big frame seemed to fill the little room.

‘Well, child. How do you like Forest Road? Not quite as grand as Clifton Park, eh?’ To her surprise he sounded almost jolly – or as jolly as so serious a man could ever get. ‘I thought this place a mansion when we first moved here. I was still a boy then, a child; your mother wasn’t even born. My father’s watch business was booming in those days. He had money. We started to live well.’ He crossed to the window, looked out, jingling some coins in his pocket. ‘The trees have grown since my day.’ He peered upwards. ‘Looks like rain again.’ Turning, his eyes came to rest on her. Frowning slightly, he said, ‘How would you like to see my factory? We’ve time, I think, before lunch. Then afterwards we have to catch the train.’

‘Catch the train?’

‘The train to Welby, of course. There’s one around half past four, if my memory serves. That will give us plenty of time.’

‘But, uncle—’

‘Your aunt, of course, won’t want to come to the factory. It’s not in her line at all.’

Dorothea jumped up, threw her arms round him, because suddenly she knew it was going to be all right. They would all be going back together. In the inexplicable way of grown-ups,
everything
had been settled.

‘What’s all this, eh?’ Uncle Albert sounded amused – rather taken aback, too. He patted her head, stroked her hair. ‘Such a fuss, child. I’d have taken you to the factory long ago if I’d known you felt like this about it! Sometimes you’re a mystery to me, you really are. I never know what to expect. But your mother would have been proud, no two ways about it. She was no fool, your mother. She’d have been proud as punch.’

The bicycle factory was in Crown Street, a stone’s throw from the city centre. There was a signboard with big bold letters: BRANNAN BICYCLE COMPANY.

It had started out as a simple workshop, Uncle Albert told her, little more than a lean-to propped against one of the last fragments of the old city wall. Over the years the place had grown in an ad hoc way so that now there was a forge shop and a turnery, workshops for wheel and gear making, departments for finishing and packing, store rooms, mess facilities, offices – not to mention the corner that was now given over to the BFS Motor Manufacturing Company. This was where all the Eves were made, as well as bicycles.

They walked in through the gateway and across an untidy yard, damp from the rain. He held her hand and she gripped his fingers tightly as they entered one of the buildings – a vast place, it seemed to her, with long grimy windows and a high wooden ceiling held up by iron girders. There were long trestle tables with bicycles in various stages of completion, and lots of men in caps and aprons who were busy about their work – but not too busy to smile and wink at her as she passed. She blushed and hung her head.

The noise and the dust and the dirt, the smell of oil and metal and sweat made her head swim – made her feel out of place. But Uncle Albert seemed entirely at home here, relaxed and uncommonly garrulous as he pointed here and there, explaining what was going on in various parts of the room, giving her snippets of the history too, the long story of the works, how he’d built it all from nothing.

‘My father – your grandfather, that is – his business was watches, as you probably know. He made his fortune, such as it was, from watches, him and his two partners. But by the time he passed on and I stepped into his shoes, the market for British-made watches was falling away. People had started buying foreign watches, Swiss and American. It was cheapness that counted, not craftsmanship. I wanted to modernize, branch out. Sewing machines might have worked as a side line. But old George Taylor – he was the last of the original partners – he wouldn’t hear of it. He was a watchmaker, he said, watches were all he knew.
Stick at it,
was his motto. And he stuck at it until the business nearly died under him. When I came to sell it, after he’d gone, it was worth only a fraction of what it had been. But by then I had this place, something I worked on as a hobby to start with, but which became a business in its own right.’

He’d started alone, he said, but had soon poached Simcox from the watch business, his first employee. Ever since then, Simcox had been his right-hand man. They had worked together through thick and thin. Now, nearly twenty years later, there was a workforce of over a hundred. Dorothea could well believe it. There were men everywhere she looked. It seemed amazing to her that out of such apparent chaos, something as intricate and functional as a bicycle was produced.

In the relative quiet of Uncle Albert’s office – merely a
partitioned
-off corner of the big workshop – Dorothea sat on a chair by the door. This, she thought, watching as her uncle sorted through a jumble of papers on his desk, was where he belonged. Here you could see all of him, every facet, not like at Clifton where he was merely an adjunct, an interloper:
Mr Brannan, not from round these parts.

On the face of it, Dorothea said to herself, Uncle Albert and Aunt Eloise were worlds apart, had nothing in common; yet they seemed to fit together in some mysterious way like the parts of a bicycle. They worked as a whole. And the bond was strong, had brought Aunt Eloise all the way to Coventry, the place where she’d been so unhappy. She was willing to use any method – she’d been willing to use even her own niece – in order to bring Uncle Albert back to Clifton. As for Uncle Albert, he must know in his heart – Dorothea was sure of it – that Aunt Eloise was a pillar of virtue. How could anyone think otherwise – unless you were Nanny or Cook, picking over old bones, or Bessie Downs telling taller and taller tales?