Finally, I found what I was looking for. Three headstones in a row, close to the back wall of the churchyard. The first commemorated Isobel Livett and her daughters Nancy, Hilda and Florence, who had died in the wreck of the Princess Alice on 3rd September 1878; the second was for Robert Livett and his second wife, Mary, who had died a year before him in 1925. And the third . . .
Tears pricked my eyes.
The inscription on the stone explained why the journal had suddenly stopped. The third grave remembered Alice Livett and her half-sister Grace, both of whom had lost their lives in the V2 bombing of the Woolworth’s Department Store on New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.
Tragedy had struck this one family twice. Alice, her mother, and all four of her sisters had been killed. No wonder Glaisher Street held the imprint of such sorrow.
I took a pencil from my pocket and added the dates of the day Alice and Grace had died to the front of the journal. It made no difference to the ending, of course, but it finished the story. Their deaths recorded properly, as they should be.
I closed the pages and looked around at the peaceful church, caught between the hum of traffic on Creek Road and the Broadway. I thought of all the lives lived in the tiny streets which lay beneath the modern roads. I thought I might donate the journal to a local history association who’d be glad to have it. And how the everyday lives of women and men mattered every bit as much as those of kings and queens and politicians. Should not be overlooked.
I was now certain that Alice’s house once stood where I had now made my home. That it was her I heard crying at night. How she wanted not to be forgotten.
And as I walked slowly home, I cast my eyes around, hoping again to see a glimpse of the thin, pale girl who had been at the market, perhaps who had even put her diary into my bag. Who had watched me in the café, seen me open the journal.
She wasn’t there.
Later, Rob and I found a restaurant on the water and watched the sun go down. He talked about his day and asked if I’d heard from the university. We shared a bottle of white wine.
At ten o’clock, we settled the bill and walked down Glaisher Street towards home.
‘If it’s really bothering you,’ he said a little awkwardly, ‘you know, the noise, I’ll speak to the caretaker. I’m sure there’s something he can do. No sense having sleepless nights.’
I threaded my arm through his and squeezed. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I have a feeling it won’t be a problem any more.’
I didn’t think she would come again. Now I knew who she was and why she was stricken with such grief, she had no need.
‘You’ve found out where the sound’s coming from?’
‘Not exactly.’
Rob frowned. ‘But you know who she is?’
‘Yes,’ I smiled. ‘A girl who needs to be remembered, just like all of us. A girl called Alice.’
Author’s Note
Although this is a new story, it’s based on notes I made back in 1998. At that stage, I’d published two non-fiction books and two novels, both of them well enough received, but I hadn’t yet found my voice as a writer of fiction. Coming upon these scribbled notes fifteen years later, it’s interesting to see how I was starting to experiment with a style of writing that I was to develop in my Languedoc Trilogy and The Winter Ghosts: namely, the use of real history to inspire an imaginary story, the device of a timeslip – characters separated by more than a hundred years, but connected through living in the same place; the notion that stories come out of landscape (or, in this case, the cityscape); the hope that emotion will speak across boundaries of time and context, one generation to the next, the sense that the human heart does not change so very much.
Behind the notes was a conviction that history should be the story of us all, not simply a recitation of kings and queens and generals. Even the most significant events will, if not written down, fade from common memory. We were living in Deptford, in the south-east of London, when I came across the real history of the wreck of the pleasure steamer the Princess Alice. A huge catastrophe in 1878, and much covered by the contemporary newspapers, it is one of those pieces of local history that has since faded from public knowledge.
IN THE THEATRE AT NIGHT
Shaftesbury Avenue, London
November 1930
In the Theatre at Night
Things have their own lives here.
from ‘Dispossessions’
JANE COOPER
Soft the night and the watchman carries his lamp through the sleeping theatre.
The audience has gone home, in stoles and dress coats and gloves. Carriages and footfall along the Strand and Shaftesbury Avenue, heading to Hyde Park and Soho and Kensington. The velvet red is returned to its pristine condition in the stalls and the dress circle and the benches up in the gods. The footlights are dark, no flare of sulphur or blue spurts of gas. Glass and gilt, cerulean blues and peacock purples, the painted landscape of the safety curtain, all dull and flat without the lights to bring their colours to life.
An empty theatre is a space stripped of purpose. It holds within its hushed air the echo of all the feet that have trodden the space between the rows, the spirits linger. Memory of programmes trimmed with gold ribbon and opera glasses released for a penny, feathers and silver-topped canes, the champagne corks in the boxes and the sweet wrappers in the one and nines. The hush of the pass door between the real world and the glittering artifice beyond. The smell of wood and greasepaint, the brushes and hangers and spirit gum in the wings, the plaster of Paris feasts of duck and fruit that has no taste, the metallic tang of swords awaiting hands to give them purpose.
The minutes pass, midnight tipping into one o’clock. Twenty past one, a quarter to two. The old watchman sits at the stage door, a muffler round his neck and his hands close to the heater, a nip of whisky, and tongue sandwiches made by his wife to get him through the small hours. The bell in the tower of St Anne’s chimes the hour over the streets of Soho. Two o’clock and all’s well.
A paperback novel is open on his lap. Henri Bencolin keeps him company. A locked room in a Paris gambling house, a mangled body on the floor, a severed head staring from the centre of the carpet, it’s a good puzzle. He reads, turning the pages with cold fingers, and the time between one circuit of the theatre and the next, the time stretches wider.
In the dead of night, there’s not a soul about. All the doors are locked and the customers have gone home. The actors are tucked up in bed or drinking with the girls from the Palace Theatre round the corner or with the poets and the playwrights in the Wardour Street gambling houses.
His head starts to droop. The book slips from his fingers to his lap, then onto the floor.
This is when it happens. When there’s no longer anyone watching or clapping or breaking the spell, the theatre comes to life.
In Wardrobe, the costumes begin to move. The kirtle and the peplos, the chiton and the farthingale. The colours of the past – madder for red, woad for blue or walnut for brown. Crinolines and corsets, feathers. First French empire, boots and neckties, plus fours and Fair Isles, all the ages of woman and of man, held on wooden hangers ready for the next time they are required.
They carry within them the imprint of every actor, each actress, who has pushed their arms into the sleeves, who has been stitched or pressed or ironed or sculpted into the cloth. No human ear can hear the music, but now they are moving, the costumes of every production that has graced these boards, coming back to waltz and to polka and to molly dance across the stage. They know each other well. For season after season, they have found themselves dyed and taken in and let out, cut and refitted to suit the players who are passing through.
They outlive us all, the wool and the silk and the cotton. Within their seams, they know how Desdemona died or Brutus betrayed, they know the outline of Mrs Malaprop as well as they know an Elyot Chase. They do not stay in one place, any more than do the actors.
Now the stage is alive aga
in. With dancing, with movement, with speech and thought. The shadows, the ghosts, of all the women and men who have stepped into the spotlight and spoken words of love and of regret, of hate and humour, every sentiment and sentence remembered is now played out again upon these boards.
Around and around they coil and weave and twine, remembering their friendships and love affairs, gentle about the people who have inhabited the costume, knowing that each one has left an imprint. The band plays on, one minute brassy and coarse, the next falling into gentle and sinuous melodies. Major to minor, the beat changing with each tap of the conductor’s baton on the stand.
It is six in the morning and the watchman is stirring. He jerks awake, stretches, sees the novel on the floor and realises he dozed off as usual.
On the stage, the costumes sigh and look at one another. Like children to bed, they regretfully take their leave. A bow, a cuff unfurled, a skirt curtsied, a gentle withdrawal. The cue has been given. The light of another day is seeping through the gaps in the window frames, beneath the door frame and the skylight.
Soon, it will be morning. Soon, the coopers and the milk boys and the barrow boys will be out, wheels over the cobbled stones, the pale yellow sunlight rising over London.
The watchman staggers to his feet and stretches, prepares to do his rounds. As he wanders through the empty passageways of the theatre, he thinks things don’t look quite as he left them. He chalks that down to his memory. It does not occur to him that the objects we surround ourselves with have lives of their own.
Author’s Note
I’ve always felt that one of the most exciting places in the world is backstage in a theatre.
At school and university, I spent a great deal of time backstage – being ‘helpful’. Moving props, negotiating for the hire of scaffolding or clothes, wine or printing of programmes. I had no talent as a performer, but that sense in theatre that every night something unique, something special, might happen – and wanting to be part of it – has never left me.
Thirty years later, a fledgling playwright now, I am still beguiled by the idea that the fixtures and fittings of a theatre – the costumes and wigs, the props and the armoury – might know more than the people who come to direct and produce, act and usher. The sense of a secret life, the belief that the fabric and architecture of a place is more important than the transience of people who come and go, is very attractive.
This is both the shortest of the stories in the collection and the most gentle. It is deliberately old-fashioned, inspired by a belief that possessions carry an imprint of all those who have come into contact. What Neil MacGregor calls ‘the charisma of things’*, it’s the beguiling idea that we could pick up a brooch or a sword, put on a coat or pick up a bus ticket and be connected to someone decades, centuries, ago.
* Neil MacGregor, Shakespeare’s Restless World (Penguin, 2012)
THE YELLOW SCARF
Minster Lovell Hall, Oxfordshire
October 1975
The Yellow Scarf
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies
from ‘Church Going’
PHILIP LARKIN
Once she was sure nothing was going on, Sophia pushed open the door and went inside. A pleasing smell of must and antiquity – parchment and stone, candles with the wicks burnt low. The air infused with the scent of incense long gone.
The chapel was empty. She slipped into the pew closest to the door, feeling the hard press of the wood through her thin summer coat, and exhaled. Five minutes to herself.
Sophia was accompanying her aunt on a coach tour of minor stately homes. A week’s holiday from work, all expenses paid. For the most part, she was enjoying herself. A small independent company, designed for ‘the more mature’ traveller, they were visiting the less well-known, less celebrated houses – none of the Blenheims or Chatsworths or Burghleys. The brochure promised four counties in seven days: Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Oxfordshire, the so-called ‘Cradle of England’. Sophia’s aunt was sharp as a pin and self-sufficient – and the other retired ladies and two gentlemen in the party were lovely – but Sophia was finding it a little tiring to be always in company. Also, since most of her aunt’s friends were a little hard of hearing, the constant leaning forward in her seat and shouting over the thrumming of the engine as the coach made its way through Oxfordshire, had given Sophia a headache. Since most of the party had opted to take a look at the famous Charterville Allotments in the village of Minster Lovell, it was a chance to have some time to herself. There were two more visits scheduled for the afternoon – then an illustrated talk with slides (this picked out in italics in the itinerary) over dinner in Oxford that night – it was likely to be her only chance today for a little peace and quiet.
She’d been particularly looking forward to this visit to the ruins of a medieval manor house on the outskirts of the village. There was rumoured to be some distant family link with the place. Like all such stories, it came from the coincidence of their shared surname, rather than anything based in history or fact, but Sophia liked the idea of a connection all the same.
She placed her hands in her lap, shut her eyes and let the timeless calm wash over her. She took deep breaths, feeling her shoulders rise and fall, clearing her mind of schedules and tea shops and ‘comfort breaks’. Gradually, the band of pain behind her eyes loosened its grip. Sophia could hear the song of the River Windrush outside, chasing over stone and branch and bank. And in her mind’s eye, too, half-caught sounds echoing back through the centuries.
There wasn’t much in her guidebook about Minster Lovell Hall. Owned by the Lovell family in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the estate had changed hands after the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. The House of Lancaster defeating the House of York, the fall of the Plantagenet dynasty and the ascendancy of the Tudors, the Lovell family had refused to put their faith in Henry, then Duke of Richmond. Their lands were forfeit to the Crown, passing into the hands of the Coke family, then fallen into disrepair centuries later.
Sophia didn’t remember mention of a separate family chapel – since St Kenelm’s Church and graveyard were so close, she couldn’t see there would have been much need for a place of worship set away from the house. But as she sat now, in the small chapel, she found it easy to imagine flickering candles and a servant going ahead to light the way in the dark to this tiny stone building.
More intriguing was the folklore that a young bride – married to a nobleman called Lovell – was said to have disappeared here on her wedding night. In one version of the story, she had simply vanished during the feast and never been seen again. In another, a skeleton still dressed in bridal clothes was discovered in a hidden space between the walls of the ruined house by workmen in the eighteenth century: a murder or accident, no one knew. A fragment of history, or legend? No one seemed to know. Even so, in the peaceful silence of the chapel, it piqued Sophia’s interest in her surroundings.
Five minutes turned to ten. Feeling a pleasant drowsiness, a prickling at the base of her neck, and knowing she couldn’t allow herself to drop off, Sophia reluctantly opened her eyes. She only had an hour and a half before the coach came back to pick them up and she wanted to explore the grounds and ruins themselves too.
She looked at her watch. Tapped the glass with her fingernail. The minute hand had been sticking for days, but usually she could jolt it back into life. She tapped again, but this time nothing happened. It had stopped. It was a nuisance – their days were organised to the minute – but Sophia didn’t think she’d been in the chapel very long. Promising herself to find a jeweller’s in Oxford later to replace the battery, Sophia undid the strap, put the watch in her coat pocket and then stood to have a quick look around the chapel.
There was nothing of particular merit. Four plaques with the coat of arms of the Lovell family, a hound in flight, and a wooden bas-relief in the c
hancel – Sophia picked out a swan and a dove, an animal that might have been a hart or a stag, and a female figure in long, ornate robes. Sophia peered closely. Here was evidence linking the story of the vanished bride to Minster Lovell Hall. Long ribbons threaded through her hair, a beaded dress, slippers on her feet. In her hands, a wedding wreath of winter holly and mistletoe.
Sophia held the young bride’s gaze for a little longer, then moved on. Two brass candlesticks stood on the modest altar with a wooden lectern standing beside. A standard King James Bible, which suggested the chapel was still in use long after the Lovell family had renounced their claims to the estate.
Sophia gave a final glance, then turned and retraced her steps. At the door she paused, noticing an inscription carved on the wooden frame.
Our brief partings on earth will appear one day as nothing
beside the joy of eternity together
Then she noticed a few words had been added underneath in black paint, almost rubbed away in places:
Lost but not forgotten
A piece of historic graffiti, if the ragged and inconsistent size of the letters were anything to go by. Sophia smiled, carried back to a summer long ago. Herself at seven years old – smocked dress, white ankle socks, the feel of cold metal in her hand – carving her name and the date on the bark of a tree with her brother’s penknife: SOPHIA P LOVELL 1955. Her mother had smacked her, yet it had seemed worth it. That all too human desire to stand out, to stamp one’s mark on a place. The fifteenth century, the twentieth, some things never changed. That fierce need in all of us to be remembered.