A stranger to herself, p.14
A Stranger to Herself, page 14
‘Won’t they be expecting you at home?’
‘I told them I was coming here,’ he said.
‘So they know about this – about me?’
‘Not in any detail,’ he said. ‘But naturally I told them I’d taken the lease on a house, where I would be spending a good deal of my time in future.’
Violet hesitated. ‘Just in those very words?’ she questioned.
‘More or less,’ he told her.
There was an awkward pause, during which Frederick was embarrassed, for no reason he could define, and Violet momentarily wondered whether his family knew of her, and what they thought about his absences. But she knew Frederick could not be allowed to feel discomfort on the subject of herself and his family and so said, ‘That’s nice, then. You must be so tired, after all that travelling and then Mr Sturgess. It’s after one. Let’s go to bed.’
He slept. She got up and was sick again, wondering, her head hanging wearily over the prettily decorated lavatory pan, how long she could go on concealing her nausea, worrying if her figure was beginning to betray her condition, always acting a part and somehow managing not to scream. They get paid for this at the Lyceum, she thought with a little surge of hope. Maybe I should go on the stage. Playing what? The pregnant daughter who gets thrown out of the house? said the other voice inside her. Another spasm took her. Then she stood up, dizzy, and bathed her sweating face with cologne, rinsed her mouth and went back to bed.
The next few weeks were slightly easier. Frederick went to the bank at ten and returned ordinarily at five in time for tea, although he was plainly working hard at that point and was sometimes later. He spent one Sunday in two with his family, saying nothing about it when he returned. Violet was made uneasy by this, being fairly sure someone, probably Frederick’s mother, whose power she feared, had been criticising his constant absence from the house. She explained to Frederick she had no money. He’d given her ten guineas from his pocket, and she sent two to Allie at her friend’s house with instructions not to write back unless the matter was urgent.
Meanwhile Violet acted on, day after day, suffocating with boredom and fear, all of which she had to disguise, until at last the moment came when she felt it safe to hint that she might be pregnant. Frederick had again left that Sunday to visit his mother. When he returned, looking awkward, sensing but not expressing the tension between his relationship with Violet and the more substantial parts of his life, she greeted him as submissively as ever. Her fear of Frederick’s mother was not based on any information, but on Frederick’s obvious dread of complaints and criticisms from women, even herself. She suspected the source of this to have been the strong-minded Mrs Sophie Levine, who, she felt sure, also favoured Frederick’s older brother, Laurence. The result was that Frederick could bear almost no comment from her, and was only reassured by the kind of faith and love from her a loyal dog, hand-reared by its owner, might give. To Violet’s mind the odd thing was that this sensitive person was a shrewd businessman, with enormous power outside the home. As far as she could judge by secretly reading the correspondence he sometimes left on the study table, he financed large industries, even small states, and, on occasion, could break them by refusing credit. If he ever applied the same rules to her that he applied to, say, the Gateshead Small Arms Factory, where he had evidently decided a loan should be repaid, and, in spite of the owner’s pleas, had finally bankrupted the firm and thrown seven hundred men and women out of work, then she, Violet, would be looking at an altogether different Frederick Levine.
She had also noticed that although he denied her nothing in the way of clothes, or domestic expense, he instinctively disliked the idea of her having any ready money. After the gift of the ten guineas he had not suggested any regular payments to her, nor had he given her any expensive presents. They had not been out in the evening since the move to Belsize Park. Frederick was luxuriating, she felt, in the kindly nursery he had never had. Consequently, Violet, offering him a whisky and water and telling him it had been warm enough to spend the afternoon reading in the garden, was terrified of the effect of announcing her pregnancy, which she now had to do.
Therefore, as dinner was announced by the maid, she fainted. She was never sure afterwards whether it had been a real faint, or a simulated one, but as she blinked her eyes open on the sofa to which Frederick had carried her, she was so unnerved by her own loss of control she burst into tears. Frederick, at a loss, cradled her in his arms saying, ‘No, no, Violet. Don’t cry. Please don’t cry. What is it, my little darling?’
She gazed up at him, pleadingly. There was no turning back now. ‘I’ve been feeling so strange,’ she said.
‘I’ll send for a doctor,’ he said.
Violet went cold with fear, and almost lost consciousness again, knowing the doctor might tell Frederick how long she’d been pregnant. She clung to him. ‘Oh, no. I don’t think I’m ill. Not ill.’
‘Then what?’ he said, looking down at the slender little body in the white lace dress, at her small face and huge eyes. ‘How can you not be ill?’ With some relief and some dread Violet saw his face go blank with realisation.
‘I think … I think,’ she murmured, ‘I think I’m expecting your child.’
Greatly to her amazement, Frederick’s eyes filled with tears. He knelt down and covered her face with kisses. ‘Oh, Violet, my little love. What have you done for me? What have you done for my sake?’
She dropped her head to the side, looking at him as he knelt. ‘I thought … I didn’t like to tell you – I thought you might be angry with me.’
But he was not, he was weeping with pleasure and something like remorse. It was as if he had done her an injury, and she had made a sacrifice. It was not the view her father, Arthur Crutchley, had ever taken in the same circumstances. Violet, stunned, realised that Frederick actually felt happiness. She was healing him, helping him to recover from his mother’s favouring of his brother, a life of only half-concealed dislike of his race, at school, where he had been unable, like Laurence, to gain acceptance. She realised if she was careful from now on, she’d be all right. She embraced Frederick Levine in genuine relief and gratitude.
Kate Higgins, April 18th, 1991
I got back tired from Brighton, where I’d gone to after my visit to Rye on another overcast, windy day. I felt depressed all the way on the train, not helped by a view of the big open prison just outside Bromley, where you could see the Portacabin-style factories where the inmates worked, the prisoners in the gardens and armed guards patrolling the perimeters. Last year, when it opened, the Daily Mail had demanded why commuters, not to mention visitors from Europe, should be faced with this spectacle from the windows of trains approaching London. Andy’s paper, The Witness, had complained about the increasing numbers of detention centres, mostly containing remand prisoners and those serving short sentences, being set up all over the country. The Home Secretary, Adrian Critchlow himself, had responded that the high security jails had to be freed for terrorists and violent criminals, while unconvicted men, or those convicted of minor crimes, were better off in the new centres than old, overcrowded jails. As to the siting of these places, there was no reason to transport people sentenced in London courts for great distances to places where they could not be visited by their families. Nevertheless, it was a gloomy spectacle – perhaps it was meant to be – and did little for my mood.
I got on the bus at Victoria. It had to detour a cordoned-off street where apparently the Active Democrats, a left-wing group, had succeeded in half-burning down the Passport Office. Last week it had been Tottenham Court Road tube station, a month ago there, had been a minor fire in the ladies underwear section of the Edgware Road Marks and Spencer. There’d been similar episodes in Liverpool, Glasgow and Dundee. It didn’t make sense, just caused uneasiness everywhere and a lot of grumbling in front of the TV in the evenings.
I pushed through the wind to the flat, dreading that Di’s mood would be the same as when I left. But when I arrived she wasn’t in. I’d just put my bag down on the floor when the phone rang. It was Andy. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘I’ve got ten days until I go to Belize for the elections; they think the Marxists might get in – then a revolution. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Please come to Spain with me. If you haven’t got any money I’ll lend it to you and put pressure on Roger to pay up. All right?’
‘All right,’ I said, my depression lifting in spite of the fact that my ex-husband, Ray’s father, was already in Belize, where there might be danger. That’s obsessive love for you. I’d planned to read Violet’s pseudonymous novels in the British Library next week – I was wondering why she hadn’t mentioned them in I Affirm – but this was more appealing. And Di wasn’t going to miss me, that was for sure. It was cold, wet and windy here but it might be spring in Salamanca, and the suggestion must mean Andy loved me. So I said I’d go. A bit later I found a note on the kitchen table from Di saying, ‘Really sorry about what I said. I’ve taken my Easter break early, gone to Paris. Will bring you back a stick of rock.’ But, as I put my washing for the launderette in the plastic holdall, along with various tea-towels, which should have gone a week ago, I still knew there was an explanation for Di’s attitude and I still didn’t know what it was.
Somehow, we were both living on the margin, I suddenly thought. Then I opened my letters. The truth was I was so excited about my holiday I was behaving like a child on its birthday. In fact, not having to look after Ray made it easy to go back to childhood, or adolescence. I had no fixed hours, except those professionally dictated, no domestic responsibilities except the shared maintenance of a flat, no one to sustain or care for but myself. I hadn’t noticed, because Andy was exactly the same, though Di, somehow, wasn’t.
The post consisted of an overdue library card, a letter about my overdraft and a letter from the woman I had expensively hired to check birth and death certificates registered at St Catherine’s House. Some of the information I already knew. Violet’s mother, Emily Crutchley, had died in December 1913, Arthur Crutchley, Violet’s father, had died in 1940, her brother Frank had died in 1916, Ben, it seemed, had married and there was no record of his death, although by now he would be eighty-five. Norah, Violet’s older sister, had married Harold Felper in 1913 and died in 1953. There was no record of Violet’s sister Allie’s death. The accompanying letter warned me that the information from St Catherine’s House only dealt with recorded births, marriages and deaths in England, Scotland and Wales, and wondered if I required any further services. I did, but I couldn’t afford them. I could spend time checking the question of whether Ben and Norah had had any children, who might have information for me, whether even Allie was still alive. At ninety-three years old it seemed unlikely, but then, her sister Violet had lived to be ninety-three, her brother Ben appeared to be alive, so perhaps they were all like parrots, or tortoises, and just went on longer than anybody else. There were many things I could do, and probably would, but I realised what I needed, for speed’s sake, was a chat with my mystery informant, Deep Throat, who might have some idea where everybody, including Violet’s missing nephew, Jo-Jo, might be. The skeins were tangled. It was just a question of having the patience to disentangle them, but I knew that kind of patience was not my forte. I supposed that now it had to be. But a call from D.T. would help – where was he or she, now I needed him or her?
The time was ripe for going to the launderette, where a woman can think as her laundry circles round and round before her eyes. But in the launderette I only thought of Andy, though it occurred to me at one point, as I loaded everything into the drier and slammed the door, that if in 1913 Violet’s sister had married, her mother had died, and she herself had married and had her daughter then 1913 must have been a year of years for the Crutchleys. My secret informant had stressed the business of Violet’s marriage being so close to the birth of her child. I’d thought it rather old-fashioned to dwell on the scandal of the bride-with-a-baby. But there might be more to the story than that. Again, Violet, war-heroine and later Labour politician had, in her teens, hooked a millionaire. What did that imply? What had the Levines thought about it? The situation had been covered in one of Violet’s bland paragraphs, in I Affirm:
The Levines greeted their rather unexpected in-law cordially, and after the birth of my lovely daughter, Pamela, with her striking resemblance from the first to my husband’s brother, Laurence Levine, who was later killed in action, all difficulties ended.
But, I wondered, had the Levines been quite so relaxed about Frederick marrying a sixteen-year-old policeman’s daughter from south London?
I stood surrounded by the dead, as the fishmonger handed me a pound and a half of cod in wet newspaper and I turned my mind from Violet’s life to mine. Maybe, I thought, I’d just conceive a baby myself and damn the consequences. I was quite surprised to be thinking this. Previously, the idea of having another child had been connected with some future state of stability I might be able to achieve with a nameless husband. Suddenly I was thinking irresponsibly about it. Andy would be furious. Perhaps I should just do it. But my parents would be anxious for me. I thought of Ray, having a baby, no money, and nowhere to live. Of course, I could go on working, but at present I wasn’t earning nearly enough to get somewhere decent to live, and pay for child care. Perhaps all this was about trying to reject my research, my involvement in the past, all the problems. Perhaps.
And a few days later I was riding round Spain: mountains, and plains, walled cities, quiet village squares with statues of the Virgin in the middle, great olive groves, above everything a mild blue sky. And the day before we had to leave I was sitting with Andy, looking out over the sea, knowing I’d lived a dream, like something out of a romantic novel, but it had been true, and for a time I’d been able to forget my guilt about my flight from Northern Ireland, and leaving Ray with my parents, and my unwillingness to make amends by trying for a straightforward marriage or job.
Andy leaned forward a bit and put his hand over mine. ‘We ought to get married, some time,’ he said. ‘I’m mad not to ask – supposing I lost you?’
‘You won’t lose me,’ I told him.
‘You look so much better. You were getting peaky, living in that flat and dashing about worrying all the time about the book. Now you look wonderful. Why don’t you give it up fast, before Roger pays you?’
‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ I said. ‘It’s getting very complicated, and every time I think I’m finding something out, I run up against another brick wall. My only ally seems to be the mysterious caller and I can’t rely on that.’
‘It’s too hard if you haven’t got the co-operation of the next of kin. No letters, papers, snapshots, no direct testimony. It’s like the story you can’t get, because no one will talk to you. And there’s no one like these influential upper-middle-class families for clamming up. They stick together like glue when they feel threatened.’
‘I’m no threat,’ I said.
‘Well, obviously they don’t want a biography. How would you feel if it was your mother? Anyway, with them against you, there’s no way forward.’
‘It’s been done, though.’
‘I thought you said you were having second thoughts anyway.’
‘I am. I don’t like to be driven off.’
‘I suppose they’ve got a perfect right—’
‘They’ve a perfect right to anything. So have I.’
‘It’s too tough. After all, look what Roger’s paying you. You’ll barely make a profit. It’s not as if Violet Levine’s life is going to sell a lot of copies.’
There was a pause. I said, ‘I know. But you were the person who encouraged me at the start—’
‘I didn’t anticipate all these problems. Look,’ he said, ‘if you want to do it, think of someone else. Get Roger to switch the contract. I’ll back you.’
‘It’s not a bad idea.’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ he said. ‘This one’s giving you aggravation, making you nervous—’
‘Your job makes you nervous,’ I said.
‘We don’t need two lots of bad nerves. Look how happy we’ve been this week.’
‘Yes,’ I said. The sun was going down.
‘Ring him when you get back,’ Andy said, as we went arm in arm along the beach. Andy appeared happier now I seemed to be giving up the idea of writing Violet’s biography. In the end what I learned from her life was that we never know what the results of our actions will be. She didn’t. I didn’t. If I’d rung Roger and cancelled the project when I got back to London whatever else I lost I would have kept my innocence.
Violet Crutchley, 1913
In Belsize Park, Violet, relieved of the burden of concealment, was able to relax to some extent, while Frederick urged her to take glasses of claret and rest more, checking that she had not, during the day, exerted herself too much. He was very distressed that Violet would not see a doctor, but Violet was frightened that any doctor, particularly one known to Frederick, would reveal she’d been pregnant for a lot longer than a month. She told him she was embarrassed, since she and Frederick were not married, but knew that sooner or later she’d have to satisfy him. Finally she found a shabby surgery a bus ride away and, putting on her plainest dress, which unfortunately was not very plain, being a rosebud-sprinkled cotton from Paris, with a big rose-coloured sash, she slid off there one morning. She gave her false name to the overworked maid who let her in, and sat on a frayed leather chair in front of Dr Malcolm Smith, who turned out to be a lean young man in a shabby suit. ‘I think I’ve fallen for a baby,’ she said.
‘How long do you think you’ve been pregnant, Mrs Frazier?’ he asked.
Violet looked at him sharply, noting the old suit was well cut and his manner gentlemanly. What she had needed was a rough-and-tumble, unfussy doctor in a poor area, not this keen-eyed young man. ‘I don’t know. Too long, I think. Would you have to tell my husband?’ She studied his face, which remained calm.
