Dead to Me Page 11

  When the time came to set off, Aunt Hazel proved surprisingly knowledgeable at getting around in central London. She led Verity down the stairs from Charing Cross to the underground and knew exactly which train to get to Paddington.

  They arrived at Paddington with twenty minutes to spare, and Hazel bought Verity a bar of chocolate and a magazine to read on the train.

  ‘I want you to travel in the Ladies Only carriage,’ she said. ‘And don’t do anything you shouldn’t do.’

  Verity wondered what naughty thing her aunt could possibly imagine her doing on a train, but she said nothing.

  ‘It’s going to be very strange without you,’ Hazel said just as her train was announced as boarding on platform one. ‘Be helpful and polite to Mrs Wilberforce,’ she added as they walked to the train, looking for the Ladies Only carriage. ‘I’ll telephone at the weekend to see if everything is as it should be.’

  Aunt Hazel walked away the moment the guard blew his whistle, and Verity suspected that was because she was struggling not to cry.

  As the train chugged out of Paddington Station, past the backs of shabby houses and glimpses into mean streets where some of the poorest people in London lived, Verity could almost feel the cares and anxieties she’d been harbouring for so long now leaving her. School and any problems there might be with friends were put aside for now, and there would be no more neighbours pretending kindliness just to inveigle their way into a confidence. She wouldn’t have to see that look of hurt and bewilderment on her aunt’s face for a little while, and there’d be no need to fake grief for Ruby.

  The sadness she felt was not exactly because her mother was dead. It was more because she’d realized that their feelings for one another had been very limited. When had they ever really shared anything? Or talked about anything important? When had they ever laughed together till their sides ached? Or for that matter cried in each other’s arms? How could any child respect a parent who crumpled at the first sign of trouble? How could she truly love her mother when she didn’t believe her mother ever knew what it was to love her?

  In a way she was glad her mother was gone, even though that was an absolutely terrible thing to admit to. If she’d lived, Verity knew her mother would always have been hanging on to her coat-tails, always been a liability, a problem she would have had to find the answer to.

  She was free now. She might have to go back and live with Aunt Hazel for another year, but that was fine. She respected her, she was grateful for all she’d done.

  And maybe that odd little feeling she got when her aunt was sweet, or made her laugh, was actually love.

  Verity relished everything about the train journey. There were three elderly ladies in the compartment with her until Reading, but they got off there and she had it all to herself. Once out of London everywhere looked so beautiful in the sunshine: sparkling rivers winding their way through meadows, herds of cows chewing the cud as they looked with interest at the train passing. There were vast fields of ripe golden corn, wheat and barley, much of which was being harvested. She marvelled at how the farmhands were cutting it, binding it and standing it up in stooks, presumably to dry off. Small children were helping, she even saw one little girl, probably no older than six, riding a big shire horse, and it reminded her that all she knew of farming and country life was when they had Harvest Festival at school.

  The gentle motion of the train and the warmth of the sun through the windows lulled her to sleep, and she woke with a start as the train stopped at Bristol.

  Two ladies got on there, and the way they spoke made her smile. Despite being very elegantly dressed, they sounded the way farmers did when they spoke on the wireless. A little later, when they offered her some home-made chocolate cake, she discovered they were from a village outside Torquay. They were only too eager to tell her all about the seaside town, and that the address she was bound for was in Babbacombe, a village up on the cliffs, a short bus ride from Torquay.

  ‘It has a funicular that takes you down to the beach,’ the bigger of the two ladies told her and then proceeded to explain that this was a kind of train carriage, like a lift, which carried about eight or ten passengers down or up the cliff face. ‘And would you believe? There was a terrible murder there once.’

  ‘Indeed there was,’ the second woman chipped in. ‘The terrible beast of a man strangled the old lady, stabbed her and then set fire to the house. They tried to hang him three times but failed. Up there in Babbacombe they call him “the man they couldn’t hang”.’

  Verity liked this story – she bet Ruby did too and would fill her in with even more details. ‘Fancy that!’ she responded. ‘I hope he was locked away in prison?’

  ‘He certainly was, though some say he can’t have done it or he would’ve hung. I think his wife and children still live around these parts.’

  After Exeter the track ran right along beside the sea. Verity could hardly believe her eyes at such a sight, waves breaking on the shore just feet away from the train. Through the open window a lovely intoxicating smell wafted in.

  ‘That’s the smell of the seaside,’ one of the women informed her. ‘It’s seaweed and saltiness. We don’t notice it much, because we live here, but they say it’s good for your lungs. That’s why folk come here to convalesce after they’ve been ill.’

  Verity was glued to the view. The sea was turquoise blue, and the sun on the water made it look like a million diamonds had been sprinkled on the surface. There were lots of boats, mostly small yachts, but some bigger ones too with no sails – like the steamers she’d seen on the Thames.

  As the train went through a place called Dawlish there were dozens of people swimming in the sea, small children paddling holding their mother’s hand, and she saw a man building a huge sandcastle.

  She had seen pictures of the seaside in books and wished she could see it for real dozens of times, but the reality of it was far, far better than she expected. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to live in a grimy city when they could live here.

  Finally, the train arrived at Torquay. Saying only the briefest of goodbyes to her travel companions, Verity opened the carriage door and leapt on to the platform with her suitcase.

  She didn’t recognize the girl with the wide grin on her face walking towards her as Ruby right away. She still had the image in her mind of a pinched, dirty face, shabby clothes and untidy red hair. But this girl had shiny curls and freckles, a pretty blue dress and a smile as wide as the River Teign she’d just crossed on the train.

  ‘Verity!’ she yelled joyfully. ‘I thought you’d never get here!’

  Nothing felt as good as her friend’s warm hug and the way she jumped up and down holding Verity. Somehow, it told her that the misery of recent weeks was behind her now and that the future was going to be so much better.

  ‘I’ve lain awake for the past few nights too excited to sleep,’ Verity said. ‘But I hardly recognized you! You’ve changed so much.’

  Ruby took her arm and walked her out of the station. ‘Wilby has transformed me,’ she giggled. ‘First with a bath, new clothes, good food, and then on to manners and speaking proper.’

  ‘Properly,’ Verity corrected her.

  Ruby laughed. ‘When I’m excited, I lapse,’ she said. ‘But tell me you like the new Ruby or I’ll change right back.’

  ‘I like the new Ruby even better,’ Verity smiled. ‘And I’m so happy for you that something good came to you.’

  ‘Seems we’ve had a bit of a life swap! Wilby told me what your father did. When you wrote and she saw your name, she was reminded of how she’d read it in the paper. Is he still on the run?’

  Verity blushed with shame at the thought of Wilby knowing her background.

  ‘Don’t!’ Ruby put her hand on her friend’s arm, sensing what was wrong. ‘Wilby don’t hold nothing against people – especially someone innocent, like you. Anyways, it’s best she knows, then you’ve got nothing to hide and you can talk to her about it too. Now
buck up, we’ve got to catch the bus, and Wilby will have a special tea waiting.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Archie was very comfortable living with Françoise in her beautiful chateau. It needed a great deal of work doing on it, and the gardens were very overgrown, but in the warm late summer sun, with fruit ripening on the trees in the orchard and the flower beds alight with colour, it was like paradise. She made out to people she was employing him as an odd-job man and that he lived in the room above the stables. When she had visitors, he did sleep in there, but the rest of the time he shared her bed.

  Like so many widows he’d met, she was insatiable and really enjoyed wild sex games, tying each other up or getting him to spank her with a hair brush. For a fifty-year-old woman she looked good, with barely a line on her face, shiny coppery hair and a lovely voluptuous figure. He loved it that she often walked around with nothing on, letting him watch as she masturbated in front of him.

  For the first time in his life he had exactly what he wanted: a really sexy woman who was ready for anything he desired, at any time. She was a good cook too, with a well-stocked wine cellar, and she didn’t seem at all interested in his past, only enjoying the present with him. He even felt he was falling in love with her.

  He had been with her for three weeks when, late one morning, while he was fixing a shutter that had been banging in the wind, Françoise drove up the gravel drive in her old Renault like a mad thing. She had gone into Rouen to do some shopping and her usual flower arranging in the church.

  Thinking perhaps she had rushed back for sex, Archie hurried forward to open the car door for her.

  To his astonishment, she looked furious with him.

  ‘Tu es un gredin,’ she spat out at him, followed by a volley of French delivered so fast he couldn’t follow any of it. But he had understood the first few words – ‘You’re a scoundrel!’ – so he guessed she had found something out about him.

  She picked up an English newspaper from the passenger seat and thrust it at him. There, to his shock, he saw a small picture of himself, with the headline above: ‘Missing Embezzler’s Wife Commits Suicide’.

  Françoise could read English better than she could speak it, so there was no point in trying to lie about the news story. It seemed Verity had found her mother gassed in the kitchen. It made plaintive reading: the wife and mother who couldn’t live with her husband’s crime or the loss of her home.

  Yet even as Françoise raged at him, all Archie could think of was that Cynthia and Verity had snatched away the first really good thing that had happened to him in years. He could see by Françoise’s anger that she would never forgive him for being married all along and being on the run from the police. Even if he spoke French well, he knew he could never find the right words to talk her round.

  ‘You want me to go?’ he asked.

  She slapped his face hard. And before he could stop himself, Archie struck her back, twice as hard.

  ‘Get out now,’ she roared at him, holding her cheek which was bright red from the slap. ‘I hate you!’

  He had to run to grab his belongings and get out quickly, because he knew she would call the police. Five minutes later, as he hurried down the drive with his suitcase, with Françoise hurling abuse in rapid French from the front door, Archie cursed Cynthia for stirring up his name again in the press. But he put all his hate on to Verity, just because there was no one else to blame.

  Verity opened her eyes and, for a split second, was confused to see a window straight ahead of her instead of the bedroom door. But then she remembered she wasn’t at home with Aunt Hazel, but with Ruby in Babbacombe.

  She sat up and rubbed her eyes. Ruby was still fast asleep in the bed next to hers. The last thing Verity remembered about last night was her friend telling her the gruesome story of John Lee, the man who had strangled, stabbed and then set fire to the house of an old lady down by Babbacombe Beach. They tried to hang him on three separate occasions but the trapdoor didn’t open, so he went to prison. Verity thought she must have fallen asleep then, but she half remembered Ruby telling her she’d show her around the place today.

  Nothing about meeting Ruby and Mrs Wilberforce had been as she had expected. Firstly, she had been scared Ruby would be different to how she remembered, maybe shy and uncommunicative. Then she had imagined Mrs Wilberforce to be stern and forbidding, her house to be spartan, the food very plain. But how wrong she was on all counts!

  Ruby was even more fun than she remembered. She was really happy, which could have just come from being clean, well fed and nicely dressed, but it was more like she’d found something inside herself to be proud of, and liked her new self.

  The house in Higher Downs Road was around the same size as Verity’s old home in Daleham Gardens, but not so old. It was detached, with five bedrooms and a lovely big garden. The sea was just behind the houses on the opposite side of the street. They were on the cliff edge, with the sea far below. Ruby had immediately shown her friend how they could see the sea from upstairs, but only had glimpses of it from the rooms downstairs at the front.

  The furniture was a mixture of very old and beautiful handed-down items, and modern pieces. Maybe the scores of children who had stayed here over the years had scuffed the paintwork, marked the wallpaper and made the carpets thin, but the house still had a classy, gracious yet very homely appeal.

  But as nice as the house and garden were, nothing had prepared Verity for the jaw-dropping, spectacular view of the bay from the Downs, which Ruby had shown her before they got to the house. The Downs was a flat, grassy sort of promenade on the cliff with pretty flower beds and lots of benches for people to sit down and admire the view. The sea below the cliff was turquoise, small yachts scudding around with the wind, the odd fishing boat and pleasure steamer drifting by. The cliffs going down to the beach far below were covered in trees and greenery, though here and there red soil showed through. Ruby told her that sometimes there were rock falls and the sea turned brown with the soil.

  Verity thought she could stand and look at that view every day and never grow tired of it.

  As for Wilby, she was just such a lovely welcoming lady, the kind Verity had imagined only lived in works of fiction. Ruby said she was over sixty, but she seemed much younger, even if her face was lined. She was tall, a little stout, with snow-white hair and very bright blue eyes, but still very elegant in both manner and dress. Yet the best thing about her was her warmth; Verity felt it wrap around her the moment she walked through the door. Wilby had dedicated her entire life to taking in children who for one reason or another needed a temporary home, and Ruby said she believed she had loved every single one of them.

  ‘She’s helping to fund-raise now with a group of people who plan to get Jewish children out of Germany to save them from Mr Hitler,’ Ruby had informed her that first evening. She then proceeded to tell Verity all about what a nasty man Hitler was and how he hated Jews.

  Verity had heard the news on the wireless back in March that Hitler was threatening to remilitarize, and she knew there was widespread condemnation of this. She didn’t really understand what this meant, any more than she understood the rumblings of violence in Spain, or what it would mean if the Prince of Wales continued his affair with Mrs Wallis Simpson. Both items were constantly referred to on the news.

  However, she did understand the talk, not just on the wireless or in the newspapers but also on the street, that there might be another war against Germany. She was inclined to dismiss it as just talk, hoping that the problems which were causing this anxiety could be solved. She had often wished there was someone who knew about such things and could explain it properly to her.

  Ruby, it seemed, did know a great deal about world events; she said it was because Wilby thought all young people ought to know about such things, and she had explained it all very clearly.

  Before they began supper, as Wilby called the evening meal – back home Aunt Hazel had always called it tea – Wilby had included in the g
race a prayer for the poor people in America’s Dust Bowl.

  Verity hadn’t known what that was, and asked.

  ‘My dear,’ Wilby addressed Verity, ‘surely you must have heard about the catastrophic dust storms back in April, which swept across the country from Canada south to Texas?’

  Verity shook her head.

  ‘Oh dear, schools are so lazy about important world news,’ she tutted. ‘Anyway, since then there has been a terrible drought with temperatures rising to 120 degrees in places, resulting in failure of crops and livestock dying. As if it wasn’t bad enough that there is no work for so many men! People are dying of hunger, Verity.’

  The older woman looked intently from Ruby to Verity, as if checking they’d taken on board what she’d just told them. ‘You two already understand a little about inequality and hardship, and I’m going to charge you both to do what you can in life to show others how wrong it is to ignore the plight of those less fortunate.’

  She went on to say that she believed that it wasn’t just chance that had brought Verity and Ruby together.

  ‘My parents would’ve claimed it was God’s work,’ she said with a little chuckle. ‘But I’m not inclined to believe in a God who allows innocents to suffer, and the greedy and ruthless to thrive. However, I do believe fate can intervene for a reason. You two girls, complete opposites at the time you met, became friends against all the odds. Verity, you gave Ruby the idea of improving her lot in life. And you, Ruby, showed Verity how the poor live. Imagine, Verity, how much worse it would’ve been for you when you had to move from your fine house, if Ruby hadn’t prepared the ground for you a little. And Ruby, if Verity hadn’t influenced you, would you have been able to see I was offering you a lifeline that day in court?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Ruby smirked. ‘Verity made me see some posh folk are good sorts.’