The Letter, page 10
Eileen Patterson had decided to visit a friend of hers in Scarborough and had left the bookshop for the station halfway through the morning. This gave Alice the opportunity to ask Godfrey if she could use the shop telephone.
‘Of course you may, Alice,’ he said. ‘I’m excited to think you have won such an imaginative prize in a draw.’
‘Well, I’ve no idea who this Mr Reeves is but, as Bella said, if I don’t like the sound of him, I can always pretend I have to go and then not ring back.’
‘Oh, come now, it will be wonderful,’ said Godfrey enthusiastically, and went into one of the other rooms while Alice made her call.
‘Baybury three six one,’ announced a woman in clipped tones.
‘Good morning,’ said Alice. ‘Please may I speak to Mr Reeves?’
‘I’m afraid he’s not here at the moment. Who’s calling, please? Can I help – or take a message?’
‘My name is Alice Marchant, and I won the ride along the coast in the floral clock fundraiser draw.’
‘Ah, excellent,’ said the woman. ‘I’d almost given up on anyone coming forward to claim it. Now, when would you like to go?’
‘Oh, on Sunday, please, if that would be all right?’
‘Ten thirty suit you?’
‘Yes … that would be fine, thank you.’
‘I hope it will be – fine, that is. Always better along the coast when it isn’t shrouded in fog or raining sideways. Where would you like to be picked up from?’
Alice was about to say the Imperial Hotel, a place everyone around here knew, but it occurred to her it would be better if Bella and Millie saw this Mr Reeves, whoever he was. If she was abducted or something equally awful, at least they would be able to describe him to the police.
And whatever am I thinking? Ridiculous, neurotic idea. This woman is perfectly friendly.
‘Oh, er, Chapel Lane, Theddleton. Number eight.’ Alice briefly gave directions from the High Street.
‘Got it,’ said the woman efficiently.
‘Thank you, Mrs … Miss …?’
‘Reeves,’ said the woman. ‘Goodbye, Miss Marchant.’
‘Goodbye.’
Alice put down the receiver. The woman must be this Mr Reeves’s wife. She seemed to know all about the prize, anyway. That was good: Alice thought she’d be perfectly safe if the man’s wife knew all the arrangements.
She felt excited to have an outing lined up, even though it was with someone she hadn’t even met. It would make a change from staying in with Thomas, spending the time reading or going for walks or attending book discussion groups and classical concerts at the town hall with Vera and her brother, Mike, friends she had known all her life.
‘All organised?’ asked Godfrey, coming back in, smiling with expectation in a way that made Alice suspect he’d been listening.
‘Yes, thank you. Funnily enough, I wasn’t that bothered about the prize until I telephoned. Now I’m rather looking forward to it.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
LATER THAT WEEK, with everyone else at work, Millie was feeling at a loose end. Alice had looked out some books for her to read, with a promise to hear her reading them and to help her with any difficult words, as she did every evening now, but Millie was bored with this. She preferred drawing to reading. She decided to take the notebook and coloured pencils and go to the beach hut. She hadn’t asked to take the key, but she’d seen where Alice had put it back the previous Sunday and she saw no reason not to help herself.
There was much for her to think about: her uncle Thomas, for a start. Far from being mean and sly, the kind of person who would split on his sister and allow her to be thrashed, he was kind, mild-mannered, tolerant. Bella and Alice, although sometimes exasperated by him, clearly loved him dearly. This went against everything Millie had imagined before she came here, but she had had vague thoughts of revenge on her uncle Thomas for his betrayal of her mother for so long that it was difficult to set those aside so soon. It was early days for forgiving and forgetting.
Then there was Bella and Sidney Bennett. Millie could see that he was very handsome, but even having met him only briefly, she realised that he was not clever, but rather the kind of person who spoke out of turn because he was too dim to know that he was being inconsiderate, or perhaps too dim to care. Obviously Bella saw something more in him, but it would be such a shame if she were to marry someone so far below what she deserved. Would she be able to see this before it was too late?
And Alice: the sensible grown-up. She was more reserved, more considered, than Bella. She had friends in Theddleton and Baybury, yet she seemed to have no one special in her life, which was a surprise … Millie tried to concentrate, to think really hard, in the hope of being able to imagine what was ahead for Alice, but failed to find an answer.
Millie knew that sometimes the pictures she drew or painted were hard to explain. Uncle Thomas had been upset that she had drawn Grandma Marchant, as if she were playing a trick on him, but the image had just flown into her mind. It was a kind of gift, but one she could not explain. More complicated, more worrying were the pictures she made that were fuelled by her anger. It was as if her rage had the power to shape events. That horrible picture she had painted on the day Mum and Dad had been killed … how she wished with all her heart that she had not allowed that stupid, hateful, throwaway thought to have entered her head: I wish you were dead. Now she had to live with the consequences, the terrible suspicion that she might actually have killed them herself, just by allowing that brief, mad, angry thought loose into the world.
Sitting at the kitchen table, having finished her breakfast, Millie put her hands to her mouth, anguish shooting into her heart. It had been only a stupid, petulant, momentary lashing out before her parents had set off that last morning without her – I wish you were dead – but even a flash of a wish could be dangerous if you had this frightening and strange gift – or curse – to make a picture full of significance.
She dashed away threatening tears and turned her thoughts back to her cousins, hoping to foresee happiness, not only because she wanted that for them, but also to offset the guilt she felt for the horrible end she had so angrily conjured for her parents.
She tried to think what to do about Bella and Sidney Bennett, to see how that might play out, but her mind was a blank, as it was over Alice. This power was not something that could ever be controlled or exercised to order.
Feeling she was wasting the morning, Millie packed up the basket with a picnic, including some chocolate from Bella’s supposedly secret stash in a Cadbury’s tin in the sideboard, and put the notebook and coloured pencils in, too.
She had just let herself out of the cottage when she saw a woman come out of the house next door. She was wearing a pair of wellingtons, and her skirt and jacket were well worn and crumpled. Her hair was tied up in a woollen headscarf, and she had big leather gloves on her hands: work gloves, not fine ones. She had a comfortable, motherly look and a kind face.
‘Hello,’ she called. ‘You must be Millie. Your uncle Thomas told me about you, love.’
Millie racked her brain to try to remember whether she’d been told the woman’s name.
‘Mrs Cook,’ said the neighbour, as if she knew what Millie was thinking. ‘I’ve been a friend of your uncle’s for years – and the girls’, of course. I’m just going to the allotments – do you want to come with me, or are you off somewhere particular?’
Millie decided that the friendly Mrs Cook might be a useful person to know, so she put her picnic basket in the little front porch, out of sight, and said she’d come along.
‘They’re only just over there,’ said Mrs Cook, ‘down that ginnel.’ She pointed to a narrow path down the side of the meadow opposite the cottages.
They set off in single file, due to the width of the path, Mrs Cook chatting over her shoulder about her numerous children.
‘You must get to know our Edwin,’ she said. ‘He’s not much older than you. He works at the bakery on the High Street – gets up very early, but then he’s free for most of the afternoon. I don’t know how he has the energy, but he just seems to manage a longer day than most folk. Now, here we are.’
There was a gate and, beyond, a large plot of land divided up into rectangles, each with its own layout and character. Many had funny little sheds at one end, some standing on a slant, clearly made out of old doors or even kitchen cupboards.
‘This one is mine, over here in the corner,’ said Mrs Cook.
Her allotment was very neat, although her shed was as ramshackle as any of the others. She unlocked it to show tools hung up on hooks, string and labels in a box on the floor, and a wheelbarrow upended.
‘Now, I have some weeding to do and I need to mark out a seed bed for some cabbages. Do you want to give me a hand?’
‘All right,’ said Millie, ‘if you show me what to do.’
They chatted as they worked, and Millie told Iris Cook about the garden at the house in Cornwall, with the fat little hens in the orchard.
‘I wouldn’t mind summat like that,’ said Mrs Cook. ‘The eggs would be useful. Now, Millie, if you’d like to take the weeds over to the compost – over there, look – that’d be a help while I pack up.’
Millie set off with the wheelbarrow, weaving and wobbling between the plots to get to the far side. The communal compost heap was enormous, a series of smaller heaps making up a mountain range over six foot tall in places. She couldn’t tip the barrow high enough to add the weeds to the top, and in the end she had to deposit them at the foot of the vast stack.
She was about to turn away to wheel the barrow back when a huge man, grizzled and unkempt, with tramp-like clothes, his trousers held up with twine and his jacket worn through at the elbows, suddenly sprang out from behind the heap. He was armed with a broad shovel, which he hefted with menace and brought crashing down with lightning speed just where Millie had been standing only a second before.
‘Aah!’ Millie fell back into the barrow in shock, from where she struggled to escape, kicking her legs and screaming.
‘Got you, you little bugger,’ yelled the wild man, raising his shovel again.
As he smashed the shovel down a second time, Millie, struggling like an upturned turtle in the barrow, realised, despite her panic and her screaming, that he had no intention of hitting her.
He bent down and picked up a huge brown rat by the tail, its bloody and oozing head horribly crushed, and displayed it proudly to Millie. He was grinning widely, and Millie saw that his gappy teeth were discoloured with decay. She didn’t know which was worse: the gory sight of the murdered rat or the man’s repellent smile.
‘Got it first time,’ he said slowly. ‘Second was just to make sure, like.’
Alerted by Millie’s screams, Mrs Cook came panting up as fast as she could.
‘William, what on earth are you doing frightening the lass like that?’ she said, helping Millie out of the barrow.
‘Sorry, missus,’ he said, hanging his head. ‘Meant no harm.’
‘I should think not, indeed. Not to Millie, anyway. That rat looks like it won’t be bothering anyone again, though.’
‘Got it first time,’ William said again, showing his ghastly grin.
‘That’s grand, William,’ Mrs Cook said. ‘Now, put that shovel down – yes, and the rat, too – and say hello to my new neighbour, Millie.’
‘How do, Millie?’ he said, woodenly extending his filthy hand, the same hand that had held up the dead rat.
‘Millie, this is William Gladstone,’ said Mrs Cook. ‘William looks after the compost heap for us here at the allotments and keeps the rats down. He’s also a mole-catcher and the scourge of slugs and snails.’
‘Hello, William,’ said Millie, eyeing him carefully, her hands behind her back.
‘Right, now, let’s get this barrow put away and then we can be off home,’ said Mrs Cook bracingly. ‘Goodbye, William.’
‘Bye, missus. Bye, M …’
As she helped tidy Iris Cook’s tools away, Millie kept glancing over at the compost heap, trying to keep an eye on where William Gladstone had got to. He wasn’t the kind of person she wanted creeping up behind her.
‘It’s all right, love,’ said Mrs Cook. ‘He’s harmless unless you’re a pest to the allotments. He claims his name is William Gladstone, but I have my doubts. Maybe he is called Gladstone and was then named after the prime minister of the time he was born, when I reckon he was dropped on his head. But it’s just as likely he’s heard the name and thinks it makes him sound important. Mostly you’ll hear him called Slow William. He’s pretty quick with that shovel, though, I’ll give him that.’
‘What’s he doing here? Seems an odd sort of a job,’ said Millie.
‘The Allotment Committee employ him to keep away the pests. He comes and goes as he wishes, but he seems to do a very good job.’
‘Who are the Allotment Committee?’ asked Millie.
‘Well, it’s me, mostly, but there’s a couple of others to keep me in check.’ Iris Cook laughed to show she meant this as a joke. ‘Now, Millie, love, I’ll pull you some of those leeks and you can take ’em home. I know your Bella’s pretty handy in the kitchen.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Cook.’
On the way back up the path, Mrs Cook continued to chat about her family and her ‘old man’, by which, Millie soon realised, she meant her husband, not Slow William.
‘There’s the boat moored at the jetty, down the far end of the beach,’ she said. ‘You might want to ask our Edwin to take you out in it one day.’
‘A boat of his own?’
‘Of my own,’ corrected the head of the Allotment Committee. ‘My old man gave it to me for my birthday the year I turned thirty. He had come into a bit of brass, saved up on top of that, and bought it for me. I’d always had a fancy for a boat, for all it’s just a hobby, sailing up to Baybury and back, mostly. Had it made specially, so I was able to choose the name.’
‘What did you choose?’ asked Millie.
‘She’s called the Hope and Peace. It was just when Mr Chamberlain was declaring he’d secured “peace for our time” and so I thought that was fitting. Fat lot of use that turned out to be – Neville Chamberlain, I mean.’
Millie nodded, which Mrs Cook, ahead of her, couldn’t have seen, but it didn’t seem to matter. She was talking about her elder daughters, Cath and Joan, now, but Millie wasn’t really listening, thinking instead about the boat and also about that strange man William Gladstone.
Millie waved goodbye to Mrs Cook at the gate of number 8, went inside, left the leeks unwashed on the draining board, then collected the basket from the porch as she came out again. The key to the beach hut was safely in her pocket.
Along the High Street, she inspected the shops as she passed them for various opportunities. At the greengrocer’s, she helped herself to an apple, hardly breaking her stride as she slipped it into the basket. At another shop, there was a card in the window asking for an assistant, but she saw the place was a chemist’s, with a very unpleasant diagram of a foot with bunions in the window and a display of verruca ointment. She didn’t even want to think about those things.
The fishmonger was also advertising for an assistant, but Millie looked at the gutted creatures in the window, ice dripping all around them, and knew she couldn’t face the glazed look in their dead eyes, nor dealing with their insides.
It was a shame there wasn’t an art shop or a place that sold flowers or fat little hens. These were the kinds of things she felt she could happily work with. It was very little, she realised, as she passed the bookshop where Alice worked, and looked in at the piles of dusty books, some titles of which she didn’t even know how to pronounce. She had to face it: she couldn’t do very much at all. She was out of her depth. She felt anger at her parents igniting again: why hadn’t they insisted she was educated and prepared for life?
When she reached the Imperial Hotel, Millie saw the commissionaire was on duty, smiling smarmily at arriving visitors and pocketing tips. She dealt him a fierce look, wishing ill on him as she passed. She bet she could do that job far better than he could.
Sullen with discontent, Millie arrived at the beach hut and let herself in. Without the excitement of the shared picnic and Bella and Alice’s enthusiasm for the place that was linked forever in their minds with their mother, the hut felt more desolate than it had on Sunday. Its interior was notably sad-looking today. It really could do with a coat of paint.
Millie set up a deck chair just outside and placed the basket beside her. She took out the notebook and began sketching the view, the railings in the foreground and, beyond them, the strand and the sea. Further along the beach, a young child and his mother were flying a kite with a long tail of coloured paper bows. Millie brought them into her sketch, pleased to add some bright colours in contrast to the grey of the wintry sea. Her bad mood was evaporating now she was working on this view.
‘What an excellent picture,’ said a female voice, and Millie looked up, realising she’d been concentrating so hard that she hadn’t even heard the woman arriving at the neighbouring beach hut.
‘Thank you,’ she replied.
The woman looked quite old – perhaps fifty, Millie thought – with fair hair peeping out from under her felt hat. Her clothes, in keeping with her voice, were smart: a navy-blue coat with deep patch pockets and a pretty woven scarf around her neck, very like the colourful silky ones that Nanette had liked to buy when she could afford to.
‘I don’t think I’ve seen you before, but I’m guessing you’re related to Bella and Alice Marchant,’ the woman said, speaking a little too loudly. ‘Same look about you – very pretty.’
‘Yes, they’re my cousins. I’m Millie Boyd, and I live with them now.’
‘How wonderful,’ said the woman, which Millie thought was exactly the right reaction. Clearly this lady knew Bella and Alice well. ‘I’m Rosemary Hailsham. I live along there, towards Baybury’ – she indicated further along the coastal path with a casual wave of her hand – ‘and I’ve just come to see how the old hut is. I haven’t been down over the winter and, actually, Millie, I rather dread to think what I might find.’ Already, Mrs Hailsham was adopting a confiding tone, as if she and Millie were friends, not people who had met just this minute.
