The Perfect Daughter (12 page)

‘What?'

‘That she was probably going away to London. She said it wouldn't be for a few weeks and I wasn't to talk about it because her mother would be upset.'

‘Did she say why she was going?'

‘She thought probably art school.'

‘Was she interested in art?'

‘She did a very nice painting of our puppies once, except she couldn't get the paws quite right.'

I'd heard that the Slade's entry standards had been slipping, but they couldn't be that low.

‘Did you have the impression there might be other reasons?'

‘Other reasons?'

‘Was art school just an excuse for getting away from home?'

‘I don't know.'

‘What did you say when she told you?'

‘We … we quarrelled.' She tugged at the hat brim, close to tears again.

‘You didn't want her to go?'

‘I wanted her to wait for me. We were going together, you see. I'd start training at a hospital and Verona would do whatever she was going to do and we'd stay friends. So I said why not wait until we'd both persuaded Daddy.'

‘And she wouldn't wait?'

‘No.'

I gave her my handkerchief and waited until she'd dried her eyes.

‘But you made up your quarrel before she went?'

She stared at me.

‘Your father told the inquest that she called on you before she went to London.'

‘She called, yes.' Her voice was doubtful.

‘But she didn't make up?'

‘No. I don't know. I mean she … she was different.'

‘How different?'

‘More … grown-up. I mean, she talked to me as if she were a grown-up and I wasn't.'

‘What about?'

‘Normal things, like how were my family and her family and so on.'

‘Did she talk about London?'

‘She said she'd finished her packing and was going in two or three days. Her mother had found lodgings for her.'

‘Was she excited about going?'

‘I'm not sure. She was just, well … odd. There was something she wasn't telling me.'

‘Did you ask her?'

‘No. The way she was, I couldn't ask her the things I wanted to.'

‘Perhaps she was nervous. It was a big step, after all.'

Prudence thought about it. ‘I think she might have been. She was keyed up. You know, like at school, when it's your turn to sing the solo.'

‘When she got to London, did she write to you at all?'

‘Yes. Once before Christmas and once after.'

‘What did she say?'

‘The first letter said she didn't like London and she was missing the sea, but she was working hard and it would be worth it one day.'

‘The second one?'

‘That was just a few weeks ago. She said she was making a lot of friends and having an interesting time.'

‘I wonder if you'd let me see the letters.' I gave her my card. ‘I'd take great care of them and post them back to you.'

She considered. ‘Would it be alright if I copied them and sent you the copies?'

‘Of course. Thank you.'

A man wheeling two bicycles came along the path between the flowerbeds.

Prudence stood up. ‘I'll have to go and see about Daddy's dinner.'

‘Prudence, one thing. If you really want to be a nurse you should do it. I'm sure that's what Verona would have wanted.'

I was sure of no such thing. There was hardly a person on the planet I understood less than Verona at that moment. Still, it seemed to be what Prudence wanted to hear. She gave me a tear-stained smile, jammed her hat on her curls and went. The man propped the bikes against a seat opposite and came striding across.

‘Bill, what in the world are you doing with those machines?'

‘Getting us out of here. Come on.'

*   *   *

It's a long uphill ride from the sea to the edge of Dartmoor. We arrived late afternoon, hot and so thirsty that before anything else we had to find water. We propped the bikes against a boulder and followed a sheep track uphill until we came to a stream pouring itself into a little pool. There was bright green sphagnum moss round the pool and white quartz sand at the bottom. We knelt on either side of it and gulped moss-tasting water from our cupped hands, splashed it over our sweating faces.

‘How did you know this is what I needed?'

‘You can have too much of the grieving friends.'

‘Poor Prudence.'

‘You don't have to talk about any of it. We could just walk for a bit.' My hair had come down. I must have been shedding hairpins all along the road. I put it up again with the few I had left and decided to carry my hat. Bill had left his trilby with the bicycles, but we were both wearing city clothes, suitable for inquests but not hiking. Heather shoots and bits of pink bilberry leaf clung to my skirt as we went on uphill. It was a beautiful day, the sky clear blue, shrilling with skylarks. After a while we came to a cluster of granite boulders where the heather gave way to thin sheep-cropped turf and, without saying anything, decided to stop. Bill sat on a boulder and lit his pipe.

‘It may not be the Pennines, but it will do.'

We sat for a while looking out over the sea in the distance. The ships on it were as small as toys. I told Bill about Prudence.

‘She said Verona could recite all the ships of the line and their tonnage.'

‘So could I, when I was about nine and wanted to be Lord Nelson.'

‘Could she have known anything that a spy would want to know?'

Bill looked at me through a cloud of pipe smoke, sceptical.

‘Why in the world should you think that?'

‘Just something a friend said.'

‘Nell, these things are published in the papers and discussed in Parliament. If Germany doesn't already know how many dreadnoughts we've got, all they need to do is enquire politely and enclose a stamped-addressed envelope.'

‘The point is, it shows Verona was seriously interested in naval affairs and until a few months ago she lived in a household where her father and godfather would be talking about them all the time.'

‘Just because your cousin's a commodore and her godfather's a retired admiral, that doesn't mean the Admiralty would be consulting them about their secret plans.'

‘Prudence says the admiral's sometimes away in London.'

‘Anyway, if either of them did know naval secrets, they'd surely have more sense than to chatter about them in front of the children.'

‘Isn't that just what they might do? They'd assume the children wouldn't understand.'

‘But you've just been proving to me that Verona would have understood down to the last marlinspike or whatever they use now. You can't have it both ways.'

‘You think I'm getting spy mania?'

‘I think that complicated brain of yours is doing anything rather than think about what really happened. That's understandable.'

‘Oh? So what really happened?'

‘A young woman went out into the world and got destroyed by it. Not the first time and I'm afraid it won't be the last.'

‘Yes, I thought that too. Until the morphine.'

‘That's part of it.'

‘No. I'll believe almost anything about what happened to Verona in those few months in London, but I won't believe she'd started injecting morphine.'

‘Evidence, Nell.'

‘A puncture wound in her arm and an empty syringe. It doesn't prove she did it herself.'

‘She was living in a house in London where people talked quite openly about smoking opium.'

‘That's simply the kind of thing art students talk about. It's a very long way from that to being a serious addict. Certainly a lot further than you'd go in the few months she had been there.'

‘But you wouldn't claim to be an expert on morphine addiction?'

‘No, but I do know something about it.' This time I wasn't seeing if I could shock him. I just wanted him to understand. ‘There's an actress I know. I'm not going to tell you her name, but you've probably seen her on stage. She played Nora in
A Doll's House
better than anybody's ever played her before or since. I got to know her because she supported us. Anyway, she took to injecting morphine and it destroyed her. If there'd been any sign of that in Verona or the people she was with, I'm sure I'd have picked it up.'

‘You only saw her at that house once.'

I didn't answer, stubbornly sure that I was right.

Bill said, ‘Even if she wasn't addicted to the stuff, she could still have injected it before she killed herself.'

‘Why?'

‘Do you know what it feels like?' I thought he meant being as desperate as Verona. ‘Morphine, I mean.'

‘No.'

‘I do. A while ago, I fell down a rock face and broke my shinbone in a couple of places. It took a long time to get me to a hospital, so they filled me up with the stuff to ease the pain. Quite a nice effect. You're conscious but you feel as if you're watching yourself from a distance, calm and easy as if it had nothing to do with you.'

I watched a skylark take off and spiral up to the point where it would start singing. Bill went on talking.

‘Perhaps one of her friends had told Verona that. So, if she'd decided to do what she did, she might have known morphine would make it … easier.'

‘If she wanted it easy, why did she do it that terrible way?'

‘I don't suppose she was thinking very clearly. She had a problem and could only see one way out of it.'

‘The pregnancy? But there wasn't only one way out of it. If she'd only come to me, I could have helped her. She could have stayed with me.'

That had been the worst thing about the day – the hard fact that I could have helped Verona, if only I'd seen more of her, got her to trust me. Bill moved closer. I felt his arm round my shoulders.

‘You're not responsible for the whole world.'

But for once, I could see myself through Cousin Ben's eyes and I didn't like it. Nell marching for this and campaigning for that, not caring about anyone's feelings.

I said, ‘That's assuming she knew she was pregnant.'

‘Uh?'

‘Only two months. She might not even have known. I don't suppose you want me to go into details but…'

‘I don't mind. My father was a doctor.'

‘So was mine.'

‘You mean she might not have noticed that she hadn't menstruated?'

It was a relief to find him so unembarrassed and I thought how few men, even among my friends, I could have talked to like this.

‘It's just possible if her periods were irregular, and not all women feel sick.'

‘Alright, granted that's possible, but if she didn't know she was pregnant, why did she kill herself?'

‘
If
she killed herself. Don't you see how neat that pregnancy made it? She's supposed to have committed suicide but there isn't any motive. Then, after the postmortem, she's pregnant and a morphine addict so naturally she killed herself and it can be all wrapped up and put away and we needn't worry.'

Bill said, ‘I'll admit one thing still puzzles me, and that's the speed of it. She leaves home in November, very much the conventional girl from a good family. And by your account, things haven't changed a lot when you see her in December.'

‘No, except she was wanting to get involved with things her father wouldn't have approved of.'

‘And she managed it with impressive speed. Next time you see her, three months later, she's living in a household of anarchists and free lovers and, in your view, has already started on her first affair.'

‘Things do move fast when you're nineteen.'

‘That fast? Then another two months later she's pregnant, injecting morphine – and dead. That's less than six months from beginning to end. I'd guess that whatever happened to her started longer than six months ago.'

‘Prudence said she was keyed up before she went to London “like at school, when it's your turn to sing the solo”.'

‘Poor kid.'

Prudence or Verona? We sat there for a while, looking out to sea – at least I thought he was looking out to sea, but when I turned to say something, he was looking at me instead. To be honest, I'm not sure whether I kissed him or he kissed me, or perhaps it was like one of those decisions in anarchist communities, emerging by popular will without any need to take a vote. I'd told him that things move fast when you're nineteen. Thank the gods, that's true sometimes when you're nearly twice that age.

Chapter Ten

W
E RACED EACH OTHER DOWNHILL ON THE WAY
back to Teignmouth, disturbed the bicycle hirer at his supper to return our machines and managed to get the train back to London that night. It was too late for the friends in Camden, so Bill spent the night with me in Hampstead, not without some fussing about my ‘reputation'. I told him it would give the initials – the way I thought of the watchers after that talk with Max Blume – something to write home about at last.

He had to get up at first light to catch an early train back to Manchester and I went to see him off. There were the usual awkward few minutes before the train left, with me standing on the platform, Bill hanging out of the window and smoke from the engine drifting back into our faces. More to cover the awkwardness than any real curiosity, I asked him about the fashionable woman who'd been sitting next to him at the inquest.

‘The one in the odd hat? No, I don't know who she was. She came in just after things started, a bit breathless and nervous. There was an empty seat beside me and she took it. I assumed she was a friend or relative.'

‘Not a relative that I've met. Did she seem to know anybody else there?'

‘No. One thing I did notice about her was how quickly she got away afterwards, while you were talking to the admiral. She had a sporty little green car in the yard. She drove off so fast a couple of people had to jump for their lives.'