We That Are Left (16 page)

That night, while it was still quite dark, Jessica woke up. She did not know what time it was or what had woken her. She knew only that she needed the lavatory. Sleepily she slid her feet into her slippers and felt her way out onto the landing. A light was burning. She was almost at the bathroom door when she heard her mother cry out.

‘Let me go, you bastard!'

Jessica crept to the banisters. On the landing below she saw her father, dressed only in striped pyjamas, and her mother in her nightgown, her plaited hair dishevelled, thrashing in his arms. For a sleep-fogged moment she thought they were kissing. Then she saw that her father had her mother in a kind of lock, her arms held behind her back with one hand, his other over her mouth. Her mother thrashed her head from side to side, trying to escape his grip. She was still shouting but the words were stifled by his hand, Jessica could not make them out. Like competitors in a frenzied three-legged race he dragged her with him along the landing. Even when the stairs hid them from view Jessica could hear her muffled shouts, the thump of her bare feet on the wooden floor. Suddenly there was a gasp like a scream.

‘What do you care?' her mother shrieked. ‘When have you ever given a damn?' And then there was the bang of a door closing and Jessica could not hear anything any more. She closed her eyes, waiting for her heart to stop thumping, and when she opened them, the house was its ordinary night-time self once again, the lamp burning peaceably on the landing and the stairs creaking to themselves as they stretched and settled in their sleep.

The next day Dr Wilcox came. Jessica had always disliked Dr Wilcox. He had bad breath and a greasy nose that looked like it had been pricked all over with a pin. Last summer, when she had been ill with a bad cough, he had placed his hand on the right side of her chest as he pressed his stethoscope to her sternum, his curve of his thumb and little finger matching the curve of her breast and the base of his palm pressing gently upwards into the flesh as though he were weighing it. Afterwards, though she was seventeen, he had given her a humbug from a bag in his pocket. The humbug was sticky, the stripes blurred as though it had already been sucked.

Dr Wilcox was in with Jessica's mother for a long time.
Jessica waited in the morning room. From time to time she heard her father coming out of his study and crossing the hall to the stairs. Eventually she heard feet coming down the stairs, the murmur of Mrs Johns' voice. She opened the morning-room door.

‘But of course,' she heard Dr Wilcox say. ‘My complete discretion.'

Jessica banged the door. Her father turned.

‘How is she?' Jessica said.

‘Quite comfortable now, I hope,' the doctor said smoothly

‘What is it? What's wrong with her?'

Dr Wilcox glanced at her father. ‘She's lucky to have you to take care of her. A fine nurse like you.'

‘Phyllis is the nurse,' Jessica said. ‘Not me.'

Her mother did not get up that afternoon. Jessica went to see Nanny. She did not want to be in the house by herself. When she walked back it was getting dark. The thickening dusk collected like cobwebs in the dips and shadows of the garden and threw a sticky veil of dust over the trees. She went upstairs to change for dinner. When she came down Eleanor was standing in the Great Hall.

She was hatless and gloveless and soaked to the skin. Her feet squelched in her shoes and her hair clung to her scalp, whippy strings of it stuck to her neck and pale cheeks. She stood quite still, her face serene as Mrs Johns peeled the sodden coat from her shoulders and barked at Enid to fetch tea and warmed towels from the range. All the time that Mrs Johns was fussing about her, and even as she hustled her upstairs, her face remained calm, a tiny smile playing around the corners of her lips.

The next morning she came downstairs as Jessica was helping Mrs Johns with the flowers. Though her face was pale, she was very composed.

‘They shall be here at eleven,' she said to Mrs Johns. ‘I shall see them in the morning room.'

A few minutes later Jessica's father asked if Jessica might have a word with him in his study. He told her that the police wished to talk to her mother.

‘What has she done?'

Her father frowned. ‘Really, Jessica. They wish to take a statement. Your mother's Mrs Waller has been exposed as a fraud and I'm afraid your mother was present when it happened. The shock has been considerable.' He shook his head either in pity or anger, Jessica could not tell. ‘It's a wretched end to an utterly wretched business. Let us hope we can finally put it behind us.'

The police were polite and plainly embarrassed. The younger one took notes as, sitting very upright in a hard chair, Jessica's mother answered their questions in a small, clear voice.

It was Mrs Coates who had brought Mr Jessop, a middle-aged gentleman with a mournful face and so unassuming in his manner to be almost meek. Mr Jessop was her brother. He had sat with the others as Mrs Waller received the messages from the spirits, the table listing heavily to one side and then to another to spell out its answers. Mrs Waller had announced that the older of Mrs Coates' two sons was clamouring to come through, that he wanted very badly to say something. Frenziedly, as though it were dancing a jig, the table spelled out

H-A-P-Y-B-I-R-R-H-D-A-Y-D-E-R-S-T-M-A-M-A.

Mrs Coates began quietly to sob. Immediately Mr Jessop jumped to his feet. The dazzle of his torch was blinding. There were screams as he pushed his chair backwards, swinging the beam around the table as he moved towards the door.

‘Stop it!' someone cried. ‘You'll kill her!'

Mr Jessop switched on the electric light. Mrs Waller jerked, her eyes bulging from her head, and fell like a stone to the floor.

They had thought she was dead. It was not unknown for spirit mediums roused so violently from trance to die, Eleanor
said, their hearts stopped by the shock of sudden awakening. Even the striking of a match across the table could burn a hole in the flesh of a sensitive when she was in a transported state. Miss Harmsworth pleaded with Mr Jessop to let her run to the hotel at the corner where they might call for an ambulance but Mr Jessop refused to allow it. He said that no one was going anywhere and when Miss Harmsworth demanded of him what authority he had to tell them what to do, he said the authority of Her Majesty's Government and took a badge from the inside pocket of his coat.

After that everything happened very quickly. Two policemen who had been waiting outside searched the premises and took the details of the sitters. Several, including Jessica's mother, had been too shaken to speak but they had succumbed at Mr Jessop's insistence to an inspection of their clothing. During this inspection it was discovered that two of the group's most regular sitters, Miss Hillsborough who had lost her brother in East Africa and Mrs Carley whose two sons had been killed at Verdun, were wearing special wristbands concealed beneath the cuffs of their dresses. The wristbands were fitted with metal hooks which, as they placed their hands on the table, slid into special slots cut for the purpose beneath the table's edge. When required the two women lifted their hands, so that the table moved without them so much as lifting their palms from its surface.

As for Mrs Waller she was found to have, concealed inside her left sleeve, a rubber bulb containing a clear liquid. The bulb was filled with alcohol. When Mrs Waller leaned her left arm on the cushion on her lap, the alcohol sprayed onto a sealed envelope was sufficient to make it transparent so that, with the red lamp placed conveniently beside her chair, Mrs Waller could read her sitters' questions quite easily for herself.

When she had finished Eleanor rose from her chair and asked if the policemen would excuse her.

‘One moment, Eleanor,' Sir Aubrey said. He turned to the taller of the two policemen. ‘You mean to prosecute, I hope?'

‘That is currently the intention, sir.'

‘Surely it's an open-and-shut case?'

‘I'm not sure it's ever quite that simple, sir, but I can assure you that Bournemouth Constabulary is very hot on this kind of thing. Well, it's like the black market, isn't it? Scoundrels profiting from other people's troubles.'

There was a pause. Eleanor turned and looked out of the window. The taller policeman cleared his throat. Then, shaking Sir Aubrey's hand, he said they would see themselves out.

On Tuesday the men came back and resumed work on Theo's memorial. No one sent them away. At tea time they went home, leaving a spade in the top of the heap of sand, its handle sticking out like a flagpole. Jessica walked around the hole, then sat on a stack of stone flags, her legs dangling. The building was to be a kind of Greek temple with a cupola. It did not sound to Jessica like Theo's kind of thing at all.

She had already clambered to her feet when she saw her mother, picking her way towards her across the lawn. They stood side by side in silence, staring down at the muddy foundations.

‘I'm sorry,' Jessica said at last. ‘About what happened. I hope they lock that woman up for a long time.'

Her mother shook her head. ‘Don't say that.'

‘Well, I do. What she did—it's terrible.'

‘Not terrible. Just terribly, terribly misguided.'

‘But she lied to you! She . . . she made you think it was real.'

‘Yes, and it was very wrong of her. At first I could hardly . . . well, it was . . . incomprehensible. Unbearable. That was before Theo came to me, came to me right here, where we are standing now, and explained everything.'

Jessica bit her lip. ‘Eleanor—'

‘Cynthia Waller is a child, of adult size, yes, but a child all the same with a child's innocence, a child's sensitivity. She should have been protected like a child, not left to struggle on
alone. And she was worn out, we all saw it. Sometimes she could barely rouse herself from her trance and had to be half-carried out of the room. We knew it was too much for her and yet we let her sit, because we drew our strength from hers. In our own way we are as much to blame for this as she is.'

‘She's a fraud, Eleanor. A phoney. She was caught redhanded.'

‘And it was a very foolish and hurtful thing to do. But she's not a fraud.'

‘But you saw her. You said so yourself.'

‘Jessica, Cynthia Waller is possessed of an extraordinary gift. But a spirit medium should sit at most twice a week, it is too exhausting otherwise, the rigours of trance are too much for her. Cynthia was sitting eight, ten times, week after week. Of course she hadn't the strength for it. Not every time, not over and over and over again. There must have been days when the vibrations were weak, when she couldn't see, couldn't hear, but she always sat. Always. She could never bring herself to disappoint anyone. The temptation then to cheat, don't you see? She was a child.'

‘So you're not angry?'

‘Sad, yes, and disappointed. But not angry.'

Jessica pressed her foot into the mud, making a shape like a flat iron. ‘Father says you're to be called as a witness. When the case goes to trial.'

‘If it goes to trial.'

‘So you'll take her side?'

‘I will tell the truth, just as I've told it to you.'

‘Which will help her, won't it?'

Eleanor did not answer.

‘When Theo first . . . when he died, I saw him everywhere,' she said at last. ‘I heard his voice, heard his feet on the stairs or the sound of him whistling. He used to whistle all the time, do you remember? I was sure I was going mad. But I was not mad. All that time he was talking to me and I did not listen, because I was afraid. Cynthia taught me how to listen. To
understand that death is not the end but only another world we have not yet learned how to see. It is because of Cynthia that I am no longer afraid.'

Jessica said nothing. She stared at the ground.

‘It is so terribly hard for them, the ones who have passed,' Eleanor said. ‘They feel alive, you see, just as they always did. They have not changed their form or their character, only their vibrations. And yet they must watch their loved ones weep and weep for them as though they are gone for ever. It breaks their hearts.'

A robin lighted on the handle of the spade. It looked at Jessica, its head on one side. Its black eyes were very bright.

‘You asked me if I was angry with Cynthia and I said I was not. It's not true, not quite. On Thursday Theo will wait for me and wait for me and I will not come. He will think I have forgotten him. I cannot forgive her for that.'

Jessica stared at the robin. Then abruptly she turned. The robin flew away.

‘I'm cold,' she said. ‘I'm going inside.'

They walked together in silence back to the house. Jessica wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing her hands against her sleeves to bring some warmth back into her cold fingers. In the hall Jessica's mother pulled her gloves off, one finger at a time. Jessica watched her lay them on the sideboard, one on top of the other. In a moment, she would be gone and perhaps the longest conversation they had ever had would be over. If I died, she wanted to say, if it had been me, would you have grieved like this for me? Instead she swallowed, forcing her lips and jaw to unclench into indifference.

‘Father says Dr Wilcox has recommended Egypt,' she said. ‘A change of scene.'

‘So I gather.'

‘And what about me?' The question came out more shrilly than she had intended. ‘What will happen to me? Where shall I go, if you go away? Do you mean to leave me here, shut up inside this place like a dungeon?'

Her mother frowned. ‘But I'm not going anywhere.'

‘Father said—'

‘Your father can go to Timbuktu for all I care. I belong here.'

‘And me? Where do I belong?'

Her mother looked at her blankly.

‘I'm nearly nineteen, Eleanor. I should be in London, dancing. Going to parties and falling in love. Instead, I'm stuck here, in the middle of nowhere, with no one to talk to but you and your . . . your bloody ghosts.'