Daughters Of Eden: The Eden Series Book 1 (10 page)

Chapter Four

Marjorie and Aunt Hester both kept an eye on each other, through a long and mostly silent train journey up to London. Marjorie had never been to London, about which she had only the haziest of notions. At first she found the journey exciting, only once having been on a steam train before. For half an hour she watched the countryside rushing past the window of their Ladies Only compartment while Aunt Hester sat reading an old copy of the
Church Times
, glancing up every now and then to note various landmarks as they passed them. But then the landscape began to change, turning from pastoral dignity to dingy urban, a seemingly unending sequence of the backyards of all but identical terraced houses, bisected only by regular level crossings where motor traffic waited for the London-bound train to pass. So did errand boys on their bicycles, cheerily patient as, elbows propped on handlebars, cigarettes stuck in mouths and caps turned backwards on tousled heads, they waved lazily to the train and its passengers as they passed.

From her seat facing the engine Marjorie watched everything, her heart sinking as she realised that London spelt dirt and grime, crowds
and noise. Once she had alighted, she could hardly believe the bustle, smoke and cacophony that greeted her as she stepped on to the platform at Victoria Station. In all her short life she had truly never realised there were this many people in the world, so huge were the crowds surging and hurrying in all directions as trains pulled in at other platforms, dropping people, picking up others. Her newfound aunt strode on ahead of her, umbrella used both as a walking stick and a sort of lance to cut a swath through the disorderly crowd. Despite the chaos Marjorie hurried quickly behind, ever anxious not to lose her.

From the main station they took something that Aunt Hester called ‘the underground'. Buried in the bowels of the city, its curved walls seeming to propel Marjorie towards its tracks, it seemed a hellish kind of place, filled with dour-faced individuals who sat staring straight ahead of them, like the living dead. As the train swayed and bumped its way in and out of tunnels, Marjorie found herself longing to ask her aunt how far below ground they might actually be. But it seemed her hatchet-faced relative was too immersed in the same old copy of the
Church Times
to pay any attention to her niece, other than to check now and then that she was still seated beside her.

The train swayed and clattered through the dark, sooty tunnels, stopping without warning between stations, arriving at places with strange names. In the tunnels Marjorie sat upright in the dark staring around her, but since no one she could see seemed to be showing any sign of panic she remained seated, silent and afraid.

At last they arrived at another main station, and after a thankfully brief journey they climbed out of a station taxi to confront a narrow, redbrick terraced house in a row of almost identical narrow, redbrick houses. The street was so lacking in any sign of human life that it seemed to Marjorie that even the sound of Aunt Hester putting her key in the front door lock reverberated in the silence of the late afternoon. Only the sight of a cat moving slowly down the street, hugging the low, red-bricked walls, was witness to any kind of life, while not a leaf on the trimmed trees moved, not daring to disturb the suburban stillness, as if frightened that by doing so they might offend the unseen beings that lived behind the net-curtained windows.

Inside, the house was narrower than suggested by its exterior, with three rooms downstairs, a living room, a dining room and a kitchen, a short staircase with a shaky cream-painted balustrade leading up to two bedrooms and a bathroom, and yet another staircase that led up to two tiny rooms in the attic, one of which it seemed had now been designated as Marjorie's bedroom.

Marjorie set down her case and, tired out from the journey, looked around her with dismay. Her new bedroom, although neat as a pin, was little more than a boxroom, with only a small window and a truckle bed that had to be let down from a rickety old cupboard. Standing properly upright was only possible in the middle of the tiny space, all other areas requiring whoever was in the room to stoop to avoid banging their heads on the rafters.

‘I understand you do at least know how to
wash up – and cook, up to a point, at least so Mrs Reid told me,' Aunt Hester said, when Marjorie reappeared downstairs on her first evening.

Marjorie nodded, her large, dark-circled eyes fixing themselves on her relative's face. It was so odd hearing Pet called ‘Mrs Reid', for a moment she hadn't know whom Aunt Hester might be talking about.

‘Yes, Aunt Hester. I can wash up, and I can cook.'

‘Well, cooking is as cooking does. We'll soon see if you're as good as your boast. Now what you need to know is the geography. Where the aunts are, and so on. There's one in the first floor bathroom, and one out in the yard at the back. Baths are twice a week, Tuesday and Friday nights only. The geyser won't run to more than half a bath without causing a problem, so we'll soon know whether you're being obedient, because if you aren't you'll be blown clean out of the bathroom. Now follow me through to the kitchen and I'll show you what is what, and how I want everything kept.'

Mrs Hendry wanted everything kept perfectly. Nothing was allowed out of place. The tea towels must be hung up just so, the lines on them touching exactly, so that when you stood back and looked at them they looked as if they were for sale in a shop. The soap for washing up was cut into cubes and kept in a tin. Toilet paper was handed out in rationed amounts, as was toothpaste, which was kept locked in the bathroom cabinet. Also supplied in measured doses was the soap for Monday washday, the supply of digestive biscuits
for teatime, and the Sunday cake that was put away in a Coronation tin after a slice measuring no more than a few inches had been cut. By the end of her first full week at Number 32 Castle Gardens, Marjorie found she was missing not just Billy and Maisie, but Mrs Reid's school, and more than she could ever have imagined.

Monday was the worst day, because it was the start of another week that was bound to end in another ghastly Sunday, a day when there was nothing to do, once church was over for the day. Indeed Aunt Hester was so religious that even after attending church on a Sunday she would sit and read the Bible after lunch.

The rest of the day was spent in silence, the radio being forbidden, as were board games of any sort. There wasn't even a good lunch to look forward to, Aunt Hester's idea of a weekend treat being to put custard on the apple pie. Faced with such unending boredom, Marjorie soon learned to use her imagination, and would spend most of Sunday inventing a totally secret life for herself, finding out on the way that the better she got at doing this, the more quickly Sunday would pass by and turn into Monday.

At least on Monday there was something to do. First she had to heat the water up for the enormous zinc bucket which held the wash, boiling it up in kettle load after kettle load, all of which was poured into the bucket which was left simmering on the stove. Once there was enough water, the soap was added and stirred in with a long wooden spoon until completely melted, after which the first batch of sheets, towels and
other whites was added, prodded well into the foaming suds until completely submerged. The wash was then agitated with a long thick stick with a brass end used to pummel the laundry. As it was summertime, the laundry was pegged out on lines slung across the narrow back yard where it soon dried in the sunshine. At Mrs Reid's school, where in fine weather Pet was only too relieved to chase her charges out of doors and leave them to their own devices, laundry had been done by a service. Now all Marjorie wanted was an escape from the heat that followed her everywhere, from her tiny little boxroom in the roof of the house to the sweltering kitchen with its boiling laundry, to the Turkish bath that was the scullery where Marjorie laboured to get as much of the ironing done as she could while it was still damp. At the end of a Monday Marjorie was exhausted, ready only for her truckle bed.

‘When should I be going to school, Aunt Hester?' Marjorie dared to venture, as the long, hot summer was finally drawing to a close.

‘If your mother sent me money perhaps you
could
go to school,' Aunt Hester replied, giving her a skein of wool to hold, ‘but I can't be expected to keep you as well as educate you.'

‘There's that school down the road. The one everyone goes to round here.'

‘Out of the question. I'm not sending you to a school like that, free or not. The pupils when not setting fire to each other's uniforms are only too happy to be fighting each other behind the bicycle sheds. No, you can put that out of your mind, young lady. There's only two things that girls from
that school become, and neither of them would be what we want for you.'

‘Can I ask you about my parents—'

‘I've told you everything you need to know, Marjorie,' her aunt interrupted, beginning quickly and skilfully to wind the thick red wool into a ball. ‘Your father was gassed in the war and died when you were a year old. And your mother went to Australia with a gentleman who is now her husband.'

‘Do you have a picture of them anywhere?'

Aunt Hester glanced up at her for a moment, before continuing to wind her wool.

‘I'll see what I can find. I can't promise anything, mind. But I'll see what I can find. Hold the wool up higher, dear, please.'

‘I'd quite like to go to school.'

‘You're fifteen. There's no real need for you to go to school any more. There are enough books in the house that aren't getting read. And what you think you can't find, I can always get from the library.'

‘At Mrs Reid's we used to play out of doors—'

‘Much more of your complaining and you'll find yourself
back
at Mrs Reid's, my girl. Girls like you should learn the domestic arts – cooking and sewing and so on – practical things, but in the meantime, you can read. And after all, if you can read, you can learn. Reading is learning.'

Later, Marjorie took down some of the books from the shelves in the sitting room and examined them. They were books by old-fashioned authors she knew nothing about, with handwritten dedications on the flyleaves to people whom she imagined
must have been long dead, but since she never knew when to expect Aunt Hester she would quickly return the book to its place, fearing that her aunt would take exception to seeing her reading instead of doing something more practical. The truth was that she had little time to herself either to read or to sew, or any other thing, except on the days, and sometimes evenings, when Aunt Hester went out.

‘Business' was what Aunt Hester called it.

‘I'm out on business tonight, Marjorie,' she would say, before she left the house. ‘Don't expect me back for a few hours, will you?'

Sometimes she went out at night, sometimes in the morning, sometimes, quite suddenly, at late teatime. As a consequence Marjorie never really knew when it was safe to do whatever she wished, without a mind to her aunt's possible disapproval.

Once or twice, thankfully, Aunt Hester announced that she wouldn't be back until after half past ten at night, so Marjorie was able not just to listen to a comedy show on the radio, but to sit in the living room wearing her best clothes, a floral dress and the pink cardigan her aunt had purchased for her birthday, along with a pair of new sandals and knee socks, her hair washed and dried in front of the electric fire, with a book on her lap and the radio playing in the background.

Sometimes she would imagine she was having a visitor, and would conduct a make-believe tea party with her invisible guest seated opposite her at the dining table under the front window. On one occasion so well did the party go that Marjorie and her invisible guest ended up dancing to Jack
Payne and his orchestra, remembering only just in time Aunt Hester's imminent return.

Occasionally Aunt Hester would have visitors of her own, sometimes to play whist, more usually for a cup of tea. The most frequent was Mavis Arnold, a small, rounded woman who wore a permanently cheerful expression, despite the fact that she was a piano teacher.

‘It would be nice if she had some young company, don't you think, Hester dear?' Mavis would wonder on each successive visit, with an increasingly wistful look at Marjorie. ‘Company of her own age, you know what I mean?'

‘I hardly think it's necessary, Mavis.' Mrs Hendry's eyes would narrow in return as she stared at her friend over the top of her teacup. ‘And I don't hear her grumbling.'

‘Every child needs company their age, Hester. It's only right.'

‘She's fifteen years of age, she has no need of school.'

‘It's not the education, dear, it's the company, girls of her own age. Least you should do, dear, is send the girl to school.'

‘There isn't the money, Mavis dear, really there isn't. We've been into this over and over. If I can't afford a fee-paying school, then school is out of the question, and there's an end to it. I'm not having her dragged downhill at St Mark's. Not a girl her age. Those girls at that school. I think we know how they're all going to end up, without a doubt, don't we?'

Whenever she visited, Mavis rarely let the subject alone, returning to it with a persistence that
alarmed Marjorie, making her suppose that there must be some reason for their neighbour to want her out of the house. Her suspicions were alerted even further when one day, after Aunt Hester had disappeared into the kitchen to make a fresh pot of tea, Mavis moved over to sit at the table where Marjorie was reading. For a few seconds she said nothing, staring out of the window beyond them, and then she spoke.

‘Been into the spare room yet, dear? The room next to your aunt's, that is?'

Marjorie stopped reading and stared at the round face staring into hers.

‘It's kept locked. It's always locked.'