The Realms of Gold (45 page)

On the key ring, there was a key to the black desk. She lit her candles, for it was now dark, and unlocked the desk, to see what was there. She didn't know what she was expecting, Harold Barnard had said there was nothing of value, but it was full of things, every little drawer and pigeon hole was full. Bits of paper, letters, photographs, medals, buttons, sewing eggs, bobbins, brooches, rings, old tickets, coins, pins, and bits and pieces of a life time—of more than a lifetime, she realized, as she started to go through them, for here were records reaching back into the dim reaches of the dusty Ollerenshaw past, before dead Constance had been born. Ill-spelt letters in spidery script announced a death in the family in Lincoln in 1870, a birth in Peterborough in 1875. Nearly as indecipherable as hieroglyphics, nearly as sparse in their information as Phoenician shopping lists, they contained a past, a history. There were a few Ollerenshaw birth certificates, some signed with an X by illiterate parents: there was her own great-grandparents' marriage certificate. Pitiful documentation, of a family which had not set much store by the written word. The objects were more eloquent: outdated coins (a little heap of farthings, a silver threepenny bit), a tin Jubilee spoon, a child's enamel Coronation badge. A worthless collection. She thought of the prosperous relicts of Tizouk, which had brought her so much wealth: she thought of the elaborate leavings of the Chadwicks, the papers, the letters, the books, the heirlooms, the albums, the investments, the posthumous intrigues, the rings and houses that changed hands when even the most obscure member of the family died. The Ollerenshaws had lived quietly like mice hoarding scraps, in their dark cottage. In one of the drawers she found a curious little pile of wooden pegs. She did not know what they were. She put one in her pocket. She would take it to the Museum, perhaps, for identification.

And out of this darkness, her father had clambered, oddly gifted, oddly persevering, a freak escape. Or so she had always thought. But of course, there had been other Ollerenshaws who had climbed too. They had learned to write their names, they had managed to rise above the twelve shillings-a-week wage, the suppers of dry bread and onions. And as proof of their success, Joshua Ollerenshaw, shoemaker, had managed to buy the tied cottage from the estate, in 1880, for the sum of £64. In the heart of the agricultural depression (Frances knew a few dates, from Karel), the Ollerenshaws had managed to become independent. They had risen from the slavery of agricultural labour: they had become shoemakers, smallholders, small shopkeepers. Ambition had propelled them, as it propelled her and her father. They had worked long days amongst the beet and potatoes: they had worked long nights, men, women and children, at piece work stitching shoes, ill paid, persevering, thrifty, as she too had worked hard, she the blessed and the lucky, the winner at cards, the finder of gold, unembarrassed by riches.

(The greatest stroke of luck in the family, though Frances was never to know it, lost as it was beyond the possibility of research, had been the marriage of an Ollerenshaw daughter to a shoemaker from Kettering in 1854: the shoe trade had prospered at that period, and the shoemaker had his own machine, and was able, from the fruit of his own labours, to buy another such machine for his in-laws. It had not made life easy, but it had made it possible. There was more hope for a working man in a stitching machine than in a spade or a needle.)

Constance, too, might have been one of the lucky ones. There were photographs of Constance, proving (as Janet Bird already knew) that she had been a handsome girl; even the poorest of women, carefully posed in their Sunday best for formal studio photographs at the end of the nineteenth century, managed a touch of style. And Constance had plenty of style. She had learned to read and write, at the village school: there were certificates to prove it. Later, she had admirers: there was a little bundle of love letters, tied with a blue ribbon. She had not used these to light the fire: she had not, in her final hunger, eaten these. And here, too, was the record of Constance's retreat: a birth certificate for a daughter born to Constance Ollerenshaw, June 15, 1914, in a Nursing Home in Lincoln: a death certificate for the same child, who had died eighteen months later. Bills for another nursing home (a mental home?). Postcards from her mother addressed to Aberdeen, where Constance had gone to work, in 1918. It was all there, the whole story.

There were even mementoes of the child's father, a little bundle tied with a black bootlace, and pushed into a large envelope with a black funeral border and a motif of green printed lilies. Frances looked at them, and wondered whether she should read them. It was growing cold; the candles flickered in the dark room. She wondered if the paraffin lamp still had any paraffin in it, but it was rusted and dry. She knelt by the hearth, and ignited the dry halfburned sticks in the grate, building herself a little fire: smoke poured up the long-disused chimney and billowed into the room. Doubtless the chimney was full of birds' nests, by now.

The child's father had been a married man, a seaman from the dwindling port of Boston. A limp cutting of the announcement of his death in the local paper was the first thing that fell from the sad packet. He had died young, aged thirty-five, crushed in a fall from his ship at anchor in the flat waters of the peaceful harbour of Boston. He had left a widow and two children. His singing would be much missed by the choir and congregation at St Stephen's Church the paper said, and there were two lines of appreciation from the vicar, George Wyatt Edmonton. He might have been a singer, but the scraps of his correspondence which had survived were not eloquent: on cheap much-thumbed paper, in faded pencil, they declared: Meet me at the Fortune of War, Skegness, Friday night: Can't make next weekend, try next: I miss you, my dearest dear. Some were more revealing in tone—Be brave, my dear, all will be well. When I return I will speak with the vicar. Be brave, my own Connie. And so on, and so on. Poor man, seducer, con man, vacillator, lover, traitor, how could one tell? Connie's letters were not there; they might have told more. He thanked her for them, in the much folded scraps. And did not leave his wife, as he seemed at times between the laboriously looped lines to promise. He had died three years after his child's death, three years that Constance had spent in and out of mental homes, three years of which the packet held no record, no word.

Frances, by the blue fire, thought of Karel, as she read of Constance. She was sniffing hard, and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Had Constance loved him, where had she met him, had they been happy, how had she got to be so mad? Lost love, rejection, puerperal fever, guilt, interfering vicars, the death of a loved child, persecution by parents. (She had as yet found no record that the parents even knew of the child: Constance had left home and stayed from home, returning, it would seem, only after the baby died, up in Aberdeen.) Had it been slow, had it been sudden? Would it ever have been curable?

The last letter in the packet was from the vicar, George Wyatt Edmonton. It was addressed to Miss Constance Ollerenshaw, care of Mrs Ollerenshaw, Mays Cottage, Hags Lane, Barton, Barton-by-Tockley. It was still in its original envelope. The date was a week after Constance's lover's death. It said:

 

The Vicarage
St Oswald's
Tockley.

 

Dear Miss Ollerenshaw,

I am hoping that this letter will reach you, and that God may have restored you to a mind to read it. What guilt I bear for this death, God knows, and I repent. I wished you also to know that I repent of my hasty words to you. I was a young man then, and myself single. Forgive me, if you can, and my shortcomings will lie more easily upon my conscience. Only the wise know all ends.

Yours in Christ

George Edmonton. (Burn this).

 

Frances stared at this interesting missive with curiosity. The rural plot was thickening, to include vindictive vicars—possibly homosexual vicars, who can tell? John Lincoln, seaman and singer, must have been quite something to have spread so much confusion around him. She wished there were a photograph.

The fire was going out: she crouched by it, feeding it with leaves and twigs. She thought of feeding it with George Edmonton's letter, obeying its original instructions, but her archaeologist's training was too strong. He had requested a burned offering, but had probably not deserved one. On the other hand, Constance herself must have forgiven him, or she would not have asked for the Vicar of St Oswald's to preside over her funeral, now somewhat overdue. As Harold Barnard had pointed out, the present Vicar of St Oswald's was a sprightly young man called Fox, nothing at all to do with his predecessor but one, Mr Edmonton, who had died in 1948, but Constance had clearly been in no mind, when drawing up her will, to ponder on that kind of development. She wondered if the elder Mr Barnard had known anything about the connection between Constance and Edmonton. Even if he had, he too was now dead, and she could not imagine Harold knowing anything at all about such far-off events. He looked as though he would be more at home with property development and industrial estates. His business was clearly booming: he too had risen in the world, his clients would no longer include, except for old times' sake, such small fry as Ted Ollerenshaw and old Connie.

The fire had picked up again, but the room was full of smoke. It felt like midnight, though (looking at her watch) she saw it was only six o'clock. She felt curiously at home, and private, feeding twigs into her own hearth. Perhaps she herself would live here, taking over where Con had left off. Soon she would no longer need that large house in Putney. She would live here—tidy it up a little, perhaps, but not much—a lavatory, a telephone? no, no telephone—water, of course, there hadn't been a tap in the kitchen, there was probably a pump out the back somewhere. One would need water. She had had enough, in her desert days, of life without water.

The silence was intense. She sat and listened to it. There was nothing but the occasional rustle, as a bird moved in the boughs, as a draught moved the leaves on the floor. She thought of David Ollerenshaw, who lived alone, or as near alone as makes no difference. From choice, pure choice. She drew her knees up, hugging them, staring into the friendly little flames. She sat there for some time, thinking what a pity it was that she would have to go and have supper; otherwise she might have risked a little adventure, she might have risked sleeping the night there, where surely no ghost would disturb her—she was thinking of this, when she heard a rather large ghost, approaching. At first she thought it was an animal, the lost cat, beneficiary of a lifetime's milk, maybe (though any cat of Aunt Con's would surely be as good a forager as Aunt Con herself had been), but the noise was of something heavier. A cow, a badger? Karel, come from the South East Poly and the Fulham Road to claim her? The Armstrongs with shotguns?

She sat there and waited, her heart beating with something rather like fear. It was after all very dark, she was very much alone, nobody had any right to be there but herself, nobody knew she was there, and yet the footsteps were clearly human. Whoever it was, was making heavy weather of the approach: it was no silent tramp or footpad, she could hear breaking branches and muttering. And, after a moment, a torch shone in at the window, and a face peered at her. She and the face stared at one another with mutual alarm, frozen, until she worked out who it was. For it was, as it obviously would have been, only Harold Barnard.

‘Come in,' said Frances, not bothering to get up from her hearth, and he pushed his way in through the sagging door.

‘
You
gave me a fright,' he said, stamping and knocking the mud from his shoes. ‘You don't half look like the rest of your family. You could have been Constance herself, fifty years younger. In this light.'

‘
You
gave me rather a fright,' said Frances, primly. ‘I wasn't expecting a visitor.'

‘Well, I go past the end of the road on my way home, and when I saw your car parked there, I thought I'd look in to see how you were getting on, see if I could lend you a torch. But I see you're well provided for. You've made it look quite cosy in here.'

‘Was it much worse, when they found her? It wasn't nearly as bad as I'd expected.'

‘As a matter of fact, it wasn't bad at all. There wasn't much rubbish. Of course, she'd burned a lot. And she didn't seem to go in much for cans and newspapers and things like that. No bottles, either. We swept a bit out, but it wasn't that bad.'

‘She must have lived very—simply,' said Frances.

‘You can say that again,' said Harold Barnard, thinking with pleasure of his stereo, his red setter, his trolleyful of bottles and glasses, his hotplate covered with dinner, his shining Chippendale dining table, and his rather sexy wife, all waiting for him comfortably five miles down the road in their large double-glazed country residence.

‘Did you find anything interesting, in the papers? There didn't look as though there was much there, but of course we haven't been through them thoroughly.'

‘Well,
I
think they're interesting,' said Frances, ‘but then they're my family, aren't they?'

He smiled at her, pushing at a corner of the rotting mat with his toe.

‘I wish I had a drink to offer you,' said Frances. ‘But as you see, I haven't had time to settle in properly.'

He laughed. ‘To tell you the truth,' he said, confidingly, ‘as I drove past, and saw your car there, I had this silly picture—ridiculous, I know -1 thought, perhaps she's fallen down those stairs, and broken her leg, and can't get out. I couldn't think what you were still doing here, in the dark, like this. I never thought of candles, or that you might have had a torch in the car. I drove right past, telling myself not to be so damn silly, and then I thought, that's what happened to old Connie, and I came back and had a look. When I saw smoke from the chimney, I didn't know what to think.'