Chain Reaction (25 page)

‘A small crowd assembled outside the gates of Buckingham Palace this evening after the news of the engagement of Prince James was announced. The Prince’s fiancée is twenty-one-year-old Lady Frances Loughborough, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Loughborough. Both sets of parents are said to be delighted.’

The conversational tones of the newscaster penetrate the dreams of Arabella as she lies on the sofa with her arms round her cushion—or her baby?—in a state of semi-wakefulness. Is this a dream? Her tired eyes focus on the screen in the corner, first to see the familiar sights of the people outside the Palace gates, more wandering around, lost, it would seem, than grouping together to form an actual motivated crowd, but now the picture moves to the hills of Scotland and there, calm and smiling in an open-neck shirt and a kilt with a sporran is James Henry Albert himself with his arm round the waist of a woman in white.

She appears to be carrying a basket of berries. Frances Loughborough?
Lady Frances Loughborough?
Arabella sits stiller than stone.

‘How do you feel on this happy day, Lady Frances?’

‘Thrilled! Absolutely thrilled to bits. Naturally. Don’t we, James?’ A fuzz of loudspeakers thrust towards him. ‘Of course we do.’

‘How long d’you think before the marriage?’ shout the excited press.

‘A Christmas wedding, we hope,’ says jaunty Lady Frances with her horsy teeth pushing out her smiling upper lip, ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’

‘Very romantic!’ chortle the men and women of the press.

She licks her very dry lips. Watching, riveted to the TV, Peaches turns white. Her ringers twist and pull at her hair. She is the only inhabitant left in a dry, burnt-out world. All she can hear is a panting sound and it’s her, a figure crouched round herself, pressed in agony against the back of the sofa as if shielding her body from more twists of the merciless knife.

‘So how long have you known each other?’

‘What is it, darling? One year? Two?’

‘It must be two by now,’ smiles the Prince. ‘Didn’t we meet at one of your mother’s charity balls?’

Peaches doesn’t know how much longer she can keep from being sick. Why is he doing this to me? she wonders weakly. I am prettier than her. She looks silly in that flimsy white dress, much too feminine for such a stocky figure, and look at the size of those breasts! There’s a terrible hardness about her features and a preoccupation with herself. Arabella crosses the room to turn down the TV. The air in this confined space threatens terror and madness. She feels ready to choke, to beat her fists against the door. Her eyes circle the room wildly but they are so full of tears they see nothing. Damn! Damn! Where is Dougal’s phone number? Somewhere there on the table.
I love him,
she screams to herself silently.
I love him and he is breaking my heart! Please, please God let this not be true. Make it some mistake…
She looks up at the screen again and sees James and Frances laughing.

She tries to dial, stabbing at the phone so it falls off the table and she has to start all over again. Dougal will have the answer, she tells her trembling hands. Dougal is a kind, gentle man, he would not see her treated this way. Hasn’t he promised to take care of her future, even bothering to accompany her to the hospital tomorrow? ‘Bitch!’ she cries feebly, uttering that profanity for the first time in her life. ‘The bitch!’ she screams, beating her head with her fists, but it still doesn’t help.

Wait,
a voice warns her.
Wait. Do nothing you might regret. Sit down quietly and think.
Dulled, defeated and blunted like an edgeless knife, she puts down the phone and sits back on the sofa sobbing, her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped tightly. She must try and collect herself before she speaks to Dougal. Upset like this, she won’t be able to make herself heard. It’s funny, isn’t it? This morning she had woken up feeling nothing but hope and joy that this might be the day when Jamie came to claim her. Tonight she will toss and turn unable to sleep for this blinding desolation where no one can reach her, where the comfort of friends won’t even help her. And there’d been no premonition, no sign, not the slightest warning that today would be the very worst day of her life.

Did Dougal know this was going to happen? Did he? Could he? And not tell her? Or has he been trying to warn her and is it she who refused to listen? Now, somehow, reduced to this poor, defeated creature, she must either end it all or carry on with her life… the clinic tomorrow… facing friends and family… that lonely big house in Lancashire…

The clinic!
Arabella sits up straight. Why are They planning to pay exorbitant prices to take her to a clinic when Jamie isn’t remotely interested in the welfare of her, or her child? She’s been getting medical attention from the start of her pregnancy, on the National Health. She has her own midwife to contact whenever she needs her. They have taken any number of specimens and samples and tests, her weight has been checked, the baby scanned. There can be no possible reason for any further involvement, unless… unless…

No! She is going mad! All this must be driving her mad. How could she even think such things, even They wouldn’t dare, not in this day and age. They wouldn’t find a doctor who was willing to…

… To do what? Abort the child—or drive her mad? Or both. So she ends up in some asylum drugged out of her mind. And if they are prepared to do this, what else might they be prepared to do?

Flight? Why not—it need not be difficult. The more she puts her mind to flight, the more the ache inside her subsides. She could lose herself somewhere in the city until the child was born. If she gets away, all might be well. If she stays and does nothing, if she goes obediently along with Them, her worst fears might come true. She could spend the rest of her life regretting that she had missed this chance. The more she thinks about it, the more inevitable it seems until it becomes a longing, a longing to escape, to get away, even if she has to take this pain with her. For her baby’s sake she must flee.

She is mad with grief.

In turmoil Arabella paces the floor, one hand rubbing her back. She’d be a fool to hesitate; she should leave before the others come back. They would insist that she went to the press and that would make her even more frightened. It is essential she keep her mind on this and not the other matter, that of James’ betrayal. She is better keeping moving, doing something. And she need not disappear into some dire hotel, she could quite easily go to Tusker at The Grange. Tusker would have her, Tusker would understand and look after her and help her to fight them all for the life of her child and whatever else They might be threatening. She won’t ring up, she’ll just appear. She’ll hurry straight to the station and ring Tusker when she gets there. Yes, yes, this is what she must do… and Arabella Brightly-Smythe peers fearfully out of the window, for out there in the darkness, one of the Queen’s Men could even be watching her now.

I
T’S WEIRD. MOTHER IS
behaving very strangely indeed. No more sulks or sobbings, no moans or protests or accusations of theft or abuse. She’s even taken to saying a cheery good morning to Miss Blennerhasset and Nurse Mason, the little redhead she hates most. It is such a relief because visits pass so much more quickly when they can sit and chat about old times. ‘Well, there’s not a lot you can say about the present,’ was the only jaded remark Mum made on Frankie’s last visit and Frankie is grateful.

Miss Benson’s steady involvement is obviously paying off. She has a calming influence; just to be with her sometimes, merely to listen to her voice with its Psalm-like modulations, can send you into the kind of myopic state you have to pay for through the nose if you visit a hypnotist. And Frankie knows all about the prices of alternative therapies. Since Michael left her two years ago she has been through the bloody lot. Seaweed massage. Reflexology. Shiatsu. Group and drama therapy and psychotherapy at £40 an hour while you talk yourself to sleep with boredom. A load of rubbish. No one can really help you when you’ve finally gone down that slippery slope. It’s no good shouting for help; nobody’s got a rope that long—you have to scramble out yourself.

It was pride, of course. Pride was at the heart of it. As it usually is.

Anyway, she’s over all that now and she hears about Michael’s turbulent new relationship from friends with a satisfactory glow. The more miserable that unlikely couple—she could be his daughter—the stronger Frankie feels. If he thinks he’s going to come back someday, cap in hand, expecting to find all sweetness and light then he’s got another think coming.

Frankie was surprised to discover that Miss Benson was an animal nurse. She didn’t expect anything that interesting; she was convinced the shy, inoffensive young woman worked in a bank or a building society. She has a building society face with features like an audit book, sensible, calm and organised. She could look into her driving mirror and not be phased out by her own starting eyes. She would never pick her nose while driving, or talk to herself, or wear yesterday’s knickers because she’d forgotten to put the machine on. The only subjects on which Miss Benson gives vent to her feelings are her own mother’s demise and the export of live animals.

In the short time she has known her, Frankie has gathered that Miss Benson was unusually close to her mother. They lived together for some years in a village in the Dales, until Miss Benson came south to take a job with a vet in Swallowbridge. ‘I should never have done it, of course, I know now,’ Miss Benson said, ‘but at that time I felt I ought to be more independent. I didn’t want to be, you understand, I just read modern novels and magazines for the new young woman and I felt that I
shouldn’t
be living at home. They suggest there’s something odd about you if you’re still at home by the time you are thirty.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Frankie, lulled by Miss Benson’s voice, sitting in her plain, utilitarian flat with the shire-horse slate nailed above the fireplace, having a quick cup of tea before she left with a few more bags of Mother’s belongings.

‘Same as getting married,’ Miss Benson droned on, not a crease in her starched cotton dress, not a line on her face, but a few beads of sweat slowly appeared over her top lip as her words gathered pace. ‘They say you don’t have to these days, but the message is still that you ought to. I mean, who wants to grow old alone, having to visit friends’ houses at Christmas just because they feel sorry for you, and send birthday cards to other people’s children? Who really wants to do that?’

‘I think you’re making it sound much worse than it is,’ said Frankie, who was beginning to value life without Michael and his finicky food fads, his awful sporting pretensions and his overbearing manner. OK so he was a lecturer and she a mere secondary-school teacher, but anyone would think he was the mega-intellectual Dean of some University, the way he gave voice in public. ‘Lots of women don’t marry these days and if they do and it doesn’t work, at least they have the sense to get out, not like in Mother’s day.’

‘But your mother had a happy marriage.’

Frankie turned down the Rich Tea finger. Miss Benson was dunking hers. She raised her eyebrows. ‘She would call it happy. I would call it a life of slavery and hero-worship. Not an adult relationship at all.’

‘But if she believes it was happy…’

‘The tortured can be reduced to idolising their torturers in that twisted emotional wilderness… it’s incredible what the mind can do. She was numbed into submission by that appalling poetry—a woman called Faith Steadfast. It is only lately I’ve realised that was not the woman’s own name.’

Sitting here and chatting about nothing induced a companionable sort of intimacy between these two unlikely women. ‘But poor Mrs Peacock wasn’t tortured!’

‘No, no, of course she wasn’t actually tortured, but I do think she tortured herself, and that can’t be right.’

‘She talks about William with nothing but love.’

‘I wonder,’ said Frankie after a pause. Miss Benson should really open a window. The sun was streaming through so that Frankie’s cheeks were burning and she felt sweat pricking her hands. ‘If she was honest, she would say she loathed him for dying and leaving her. She hasn’t got anything else, you see, not even me and the children. We were never important. There was only ever Father. Mother deliberately denied herself, like a nun entering an enclosed order. I’ve always considered that a fishy business.’

‘Oh, I thought about taking the veil myself once.’

‘Don’t we all when we’re little and being dramatic?’

Miss Benson hesitated before admitting, ‘I wasn’t little and I am never dramatic. I thought of going into a convent after my own mother died.’

‘Well, there you are, that proves my point,’ said Frankie, like a teacher slamming down a book on her point. ‘It was cowardice that motivated you. You couldn’t face reality so you wanted to find a sanctuary. That’s understandable, if not very admirable. Certainly nothing to do with the selfless ideal of those supposedly called by God.’

Miss Benson’s voice suddenly rose a notch. It broke towards the end of her speech. ‘You don’t understand. She was driven out of her home, driven into care by fear, by the programmes she watched on television, and the News she would never miss, and
Crimewatch,
her favourite programme. By the end she truly believed there were people with criminal intent surrounding her cottage. She didn’t even dare write to me in case her letters were being intercepted. Her neighbours, people who had known her for years, were gone, there were only newcomers in the village. Yes, she was driven into that awful Home and she died there of a broken heart.’

‘Surely not,’ cried Frankie, appalled. ‘Where were the Social Services?’ How terrible for poor Miss Benson. No wonder she wears such a wounded look; what a shocking burden of guilt she must carry.

Miss Benson closed her eyes for the next bit. Her words hung in the quiet room like slicks of fog over water. ‘Nobody knew it was happening until it was too late.’