Rosie looked up with tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t think this one’ll Live,’ she said. Daniel looked down at the cracked skull that was oddly flattened on one side, with its caking of dark blood in the blond hair. He was a beautiful little boy, despite the dirt and poverty that had been his lot, and was no more than six years old. Tears flowed down his cheeks from bright speedwell-blue eyes that stared at nothing, and his mouth worked silently.
The little boy that Ottilie was tending was lying flat on his back, howling with pain, his fierce sobs seeming to echo from the walls of the houses. ‘Both legs broken,’ said Ottilie, when Daniel leaned down. ‘I don’t know if they’ll ever be straight.’
Daniel turned to the drunk and said fiercely, ‘One child dead and one maimed. Are you proud of yourself?’
‘Damned little hobbledehoys, fourpence a dozen. Would have grown up thieves. What about my bumper? That’s what I want to know. Doubt if I can get their mothers to pay for it. Probably haven’t got fathers. Too many damned brats, anyway.’
‘Pay for it?’ repeated Daniel, astonished.
‘Expensive things, motor cars,’ said the man.
By now several people had come out of their houses, or stopped in passing, and were as outraged as Daniel. ‘You are a drunk, and a murderer,’ he said.
‘Steady on,’ repeated the man. ‘Let’s try to keep things decent, eh?’
‘Decent? Decent?’ Daniel felt the rage rise up in him, hatred mixed with contempt, and instinct overtook him.
He took the man’s throat in his left hand, pulled his right fist back past his ear, and drove it straight into the drunkard’s face. There was an explosion of blood from the man’s nose, and he put his hands to his face. Daniel kicked his legs from under him, and he went down on the pavement.
Constable Dusty Miller appeared at that point.
In those days policemen were numerous and ubiquitous, and were able to summon other policemen by blowing vigorously on a whistle. Many was the mischievous child who possessed an Acme Thunderer, with which to decoy the police for the entertainment of their friends.
Dusty Miller had happened to be in the kitchen of The Grampians, drinking tea kindly supplied by Millicent and Cookie. When he had realised that there was a fracas on the street outside, he had been faced with a dilemma: either to get there quickly and give himself away as a covert tea drinker in a forbidden kitchen, or to find a long way round that would save face, but possibly allow the fracas to get further out of hand.
He chose the latter course and ran down to the end of the garden, where he scrambled over the wall, turned right and sprinted round up the alleyway, appearing on the scene, breathless and red-faced, thirty seconds later, just in time to see Daniel felling the drunk.
‘Stand back! Stand back!’ he ordered, wearily resigning himself to having to intervene in a fight. It was the one thing he least liked to do. Keeping calm was impossible, and conquering one’s own fear never became any easier. Fortunately there was no fight. The crowd had gathered round Daniel and the fallen man, wondering with admiring horror what Daniel would do next.
‘What’s all this about?’ demanded Constable Miller, and Daniel gestured towards where the children lay by the wall.
‘One child almost certainly dead, and another with broken legs,’ said Daniel, panting, ‘because this cretin ran them down when he was drunk.’
The policeman hurried to where the children lay and knelt by them. ‘Oh my word,’ he said. ‘Has anyone gone for an ambulance?’
‘We have a telephone in the house,’ said Ottilie. ‘We’ve called for one. And Rosie and I were both with the VAD.’
‘Well, thank God for telephones,’ said Constable Miller. He got to his feet and turned to Daniel, who was flexing his fingers. ‘You were committing an assault, sir. You should know better than to take the law into your own hands. I ought to be arresting you.’
‘He got what was rightly comin’,’ said the cats’ meat man. ‘Poor little kids. He’s a feckin’ murderer, that’s what he is. No doubt about it.’
There was a murmur of agreement, and a respectable woman dressed in a fur coat and a hat with a prodigious feather sticking out of it said, ‘You can’t arrest him, Constable. There aren’t any witnesses.’
‘No witnesses?’ repeated the constable. ‘What? With all you lot here?’
‘We didn’t see nothing,’ said the gaslighter.
‘I saw it,’ said the policeman.
‘No, you didn’t,’ said the muffin man. ‘None of us saw sod all, including you.’
‘Help me, help,’ whimpered the drunk, and the policeman prodded him in the ribs with his boot. ‘You shut up,’ he said. ‘And get up.’ He took out his notebook. ‘I need names and addresses of all you lot who saw what happened when the kids got hit,’ he said. ‘And as for you, sir, I don’t care if you’re the King himself, you don’t take the law into your own hands. Do I make myself clear?’
Daniel nodded, feeling ashamed. He had not previously realised that he had so much anger and stress pent up inside. ‘I’m sorry, Constable,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I lost control.’
‘Well, sir, it’s understandable under the circumstances. We’ll let it pass, shall we?’
A motorised ambulance arrived. The drunk was led away by Dusty Miller, who propelled him along to the station with frequent prods in the small of the back, and gradually the little knot of people dispersed. Ottilie and Rosie insisted on going in the ambulance with the children, and were not resisted, since ambulancemen did not defy middle-class women who had the habit of command, and vital nursing experience to go with it. They came back two hours later with the news that the little ragged blond boy who looked like an angel had died an hour after admission. Millicent and Cookie cried in the kitchen, and the sisters wept in the drawing room. Daniel went for a walk at high speed, three times around the perimeter of the golf course. Upon his return he started up the AC and parked it in the driveway. Ottilie cut flowers from the garden and laid them on the front wall at the scene of the accident, and Mrs McCosh went to her bedroom. The whole thing had reminded her too greatly of that awful day in Folkestone, when she had seen the child’s severed head looking up at her from a doorstep.
That night, having sobbed again over the death of the boy, Rosie lay in bed clutching her plaster statue of the Virgin, thinking about what Daniel had done. She had found his violence frightening and repulsive, but completely understandable. She had watched it with fascination, and done nothing to stop it. Despite herself, she could not help but admire his moral outrage, his energy and strength. She thought that for him there must have been some catharsis after so many years of strain. She realised that she hated that driver as much as Daniel must have done, and found herself hoping that something a lot worse than a broken nose would happen to him. ‘Sometimes I’m not really a very good Christian,’ she thought, and she fell asleep wondering if Ash or Hutch would have punched the drunk.
55
The Rescue
Rosie went down to the Tarn to sit on her own and think about things, and on the way home she heard a pathetic mewing as she passed one of the houses near the church. At first she could not locate it, but when she peered over the low wall, she saw a hessian bag in the darkness between the wall and the laurel hedge. It was too far to reach by bending over, and she was reluctant to go into a stranger’s driveway.
She looked around hastily, saw nobody, put her bag down and, without thought to her clothes, clambered onto the wall. By lying along it, she could just reach down a hand and lift the bag out. She just had it in her right hand, when a voice said, ‘Are you all right, miss?’
Rosie hastily got off the wall, very abashed, and dusted the moss and grit off her front. ‘It’s all right, Constable,’ she said, looking up. ‘I was just rescuing these kittens.’
‘Kittens, eh?’ repeated Dusty Miller. ‘Let’s have a look, then.’
Rosie struggled with the knot in the neck of the bag, and gave up. ‘You have
a try,’ she said, handing it to him.
Dusty Miller could not untie it either, so he handed the bag back to Rosie and fetched his penknife from his pocket. He cut the bag as Rosie held it, and said, ‘What have we got here, then?’
He took the two tiny creatures out and held one in each hand, showing them to Rosie. Their eyes were only just open and their ears still flat on their heads. There was a ginger-and-white short-hair, and a silver tabby that was clearly going to be long-haired.
‘I just don’t know how people can be so cruel,’ said Rosie. ‘They’re so sweet. How can anyone just throw them away and leave them to die?’
‘I’ve been a bobby for ten years,’ said Dusty Miller. ‘There’s no limit to human wickedness, miss, believe me. There’s nothing some folk won’t do for sixpence.’
‘What are we going to do?’ asked Rosie.
‘One for you and one for me,’ said the policeman. ‘We need a new mouser down at the nick. The old one’s got past bothering.’
‘My mother’ll kill me,’ said Rosie. ‘I’m always coming home with cats. We do find homes for them, though.’
Constable Miller gave them to Rosie and took a look under their tails. ‘One boy and one girl,’ he announced. ‘What do you fancy, miss?’
‘I like the ginger,’ she replied. ‘That must be the boy, I assume.’
‘I’ll have the girl, then. I expect we’ll call her Fluffy.’
Rosie smiled and said, ‘Constable, don’t you think you should go for something more original?’
‘Original, miss? What’s the point? The cat don’t know any better, do she?’
He tucked the tabby into the pocket of his uniform, and hurried back to the station, leaving Rosie to carry hers in her cupped hands back to The Grampians.
Mrs McCosh was less delighted. ‘Another kitten? My dear, this is too much. Why do you keep coming home with kittens? You brought back five once. The mayhem! It was like being overrun with tiny mad horses, all practising for the Grand National.’
‘Rosie’s very serendipitous when it comes to kittens,’ said Sophie. ‘The rest of us never find any. Do let’s call it Caractacus.’
‘Caractacus?’ repeated Mrs McCosh. ‘Whatever for?’
‘It’s full of cat sounds. There are three “a”s and three “c”s, and a “t”, and it even rhymes with “puss”. Couldn’t be better.’
‘It’ll just end up being called Cracky or Cracker,’ declared Mrs McCosh. ‘A cat needs a name with dignity, with cachet. We should call it Prince.’
‘Oh, Mother,’ cried Rosie, ‘that’s a dog’s name!’
‘Let’s call it Rover then,’ suggested Sophie, ‘and teach it to bark. It could be Eltham’s premier guard cat.’
‘I perceive I am outnumbered as usual,’ said Mrs McCosh.
‘No one’s to call it Ginger,’ said Rosie.
56
The Séance
The Reverend Captain Fairhead and the four sisters arrived at the house in Glebe Avenue with a quarter of an hour to spare. Rosie was having deep pangs of doubt, and kept repeating, ‘I’m sure that we shouldn’t be doing this.’ Sophie was saying, ‘What fun! Isn’t this naughty of us? So apprehensible!’ Fairhead was keeping a grave and thoughtful silence, and Ottilie and Christabel were arm in arm for mutual reassurance.
They were shown into a sort of anteroom by an elderly maid who radiated a powerful sense of disapproval, and they sat on hard wooden chairs in a ring around the walls, in the company of six other nervous characters who all carried with them on their faces the stresses and losses of the last four years. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke.
The sour-faced maid served them with tea and langue de chat biscuits served up on delicate porcelain that was decorated with pink roses and sprigs of greenery. They stared dumbly at the dark green flock wallpaper as outside the rain began to patter against the windows.
‘Turned out wet again,’ said one of the six strangers, and everyone nodded in wise agreement and sipped at their tea.
‘Been raining for days,’ offered someone else.
‘The garden needed it,’ offered another. ‘It was about time.’
Christabel thought, ‘Well, what are you supposed to talk about when you’re hoping to talk with the dead?’ and decided not to contribute. She felt sombre and subdued. She had dilemmas of her own to worry about.
At last they were shown into a wide, dark room, at the centre of which was a large round mahogany table that had clearly been distinguished in its time, but which had become scuffed and scratched. The same could be said of the Chippendale chairs that surrounded it. In one corner of the room stood a cello on its stand, with Ernest Bloch’s Schelemo open on the music stand before it, and propped against the back of an armchair was a violin. Against the wall was an upright piano, with the names of the notes written on the white keys in thick blue chinagraph crayon.
The moment they were seated, Madame Valentine entered, exuding a heavy scent of lavender. She was a voluminous woman with a bust so massive that, had she ever attempted to walk down a mountain, she would not have been able to see her feet. She was dressed in swathes of gauzy and floaty chiffon, and upon her head she wore a pink turban with a white cockade exactly in the middle, above her nose. On her fingers she wore enormous rings in silver and gold, with topaz and ruby predominating amongst the stones. Her long nails were painted crimson, the same shade as her lips, and her cheeks were highlighted with rouge, somewhat hastily applied.
She would have appeared comical, the mere stereotype of a medium, had it not been for the dignity of her bearing and the authority in her voice.
She seated herself, put her hand to her mouth and coughed for silence.
‘Welcome to you all,’ she said. ‘First things first, for those of you who have not been before. I regret to have to tell you that I cannot charge fees for what I do. The spirits forbid it. However, should you wish to show your gratitude, I am free to accept offerings that may be placed on the tray which is on the table in the hall. I will not be present. Fortunately for me, enough people have been grateful for me to be able to continue to operate.’
‘What would be the normal contribution? Is there a sum that you recommend?’ asked Fairhead, to the surprise of the assembled folk.
She glared at him a little balefully. ‘The most I have ever received is twenty pounds, two shillings, and sixpence, and the least is nought pounds, nought shillings, nought pence and two farthings. If you should wish to contribute, it is entirely at your discretion. Measure your wealth against your gratitude and your credence. And in case you may be tempted to think that I am nobler than I truly am, you should know that we workers in the spiritual world generally believe that to accept payment for our services would cause us to lose our powers. This may or not be a superstition, but I am not prepared to risk it.’
‘Thank you,’ said Fairhead, feeling a little cowed.
‘In addition,’ she announced, ‘the spirit world, is, I’m afraid, somewhat overpopulated by jesters, mimics and mischief-makers. It is sometimes very hard to know which ones to take seriously. I generally find that a prayer before we start is a good idea.’ She looked at Fairhead severely. ‘Perhaps you would be so kind as to oblige?’
‘Me?’
‘You are a clergyman, are you not?’
‘Yes, but…how could you have possibly known that?’ He had come without his dog collar, strange though that felt, and had believed he was in disguise.
She looked at him and replied, ‘Would you be so kind as to oblige?’
Somewhat disconcerted, Fairhead could not think of anything except the blessing. He bowed his head, and the company followed suit. ‘The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you, the Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you and give you peace. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.’
They all intoned the ‘Amen’, and Rosie noticed that Captain Fairhead was blinking back tears. r />
‘Thank you,’ said Madame Valentine. ‘Shall we begin? I expect we shall have rapping noises to begin with. We normally do. Lights off, Spedegue.’
The morose and disapproving servant left the room and switched off the lights as she went. ‘Join hands,’ said Madame Valentine, and the company meekly did as it was told, although with great unease, as the British are not natural hand-holders.
‘Come! Come!’ demanded Madame Valentine in the darkness. After a few moments there was a sudden violent rap right in the middle of the table, and Rosie was one of those who jumped in her seat with startlement.
‘To whom do you wish to speak?’
There was one more rap, and Madame Valentine sighed with impatience. ‘Whoever it is does not wish to speak to anybody,’ she said. ‘Please leave, whoever you are. Now, I would ask you all to concentrate. If there is someone with whom you desire communication, kindly picture them in your mind and try to call them. If they arrive, they will do so through me.’
Rosie began to concentrate her mind on Ash, and Ottilie thought of a nursing friend in Brighton who had quite suddenly collapsed and died whilst changing sheets. Fairhead’s memory was so full of the dead that he was quite unable to focus. Sophie sat, full of wonder, thinking that this was all great fun, and Christabel was wishing that she had asked permission to take photographs. She had a Kodak Brownie with her in her bag, but only because she always carried one, just in case an interesting subject should pop up out of the blue. All of the others were thinking of brothers and sons.
It was then that a series of fantastic and extraordinary events began to take place. Madame Valentine started to moan in a manner that struck some of the married people as positively sexual. The sitters’ eyes had by now accustomed themselves to the darkness and they could dimly see the room and its contents.
The table at which they were sitting lifted slowly from the floor and floated, swaying like a rowing boat at harbour. They were still looking at this in amazement, when the piano too rose in the air and then suddenly crashed to the floor with that cataclysmic noise of which only a falling piano is capable. Then the cello and the violin rose into the air and sailed above the table, where they began to play a very discordant, gypsy-like and sarcastic, but entirely recognisable version of ‘There’s No Place Like Home’, followed by ‘Gilbert the Filbert’, which made the hairs on Rosie’s neck prickle. The most wondrous thing was that they could all clearly see the pale disembodied hands and fingers that were plying the bows and pressing the strings.