The Hours Before Dawn Read online

  ‘Mummy, can I have an ice-cream cornet?’ began Harriet piercingly, and Edna looked up.

  ‘Hullo, Mrs Henderson,’ she said, a little awkwardly, and with a sideways, doubtful glance at her companion as if he was a piece of luggage that she wasn’t sure if she could carry. ‘This is Al,’ she explained laconically. The youth stumbled shyly to his feet, murmuring some inaudible greeting. Louise responded equally unintelligibly, as seemed most conducive to the comfort of all parties, and turned back to Edna.

  ‘Have you seen Michael?’ she asked. ‘With my husband? He’s dressed in a blue knitted suit – the baby, I mean – and we’ve somehow missed each other—’

  Edna shook her head slowly. ‘Not in a blue knitted suit,’ she observed, as if debating in her leisurely way whether Mrs Henderson might not be prepared to accept a baby in a pink knitted suit instead, if it was presented tactfully. ‘Not in a blue knitted suit. But I think I saw Mr Henderson,’ she added, more brightly. ‘Down by the station. Where they start the pony rides,’ she elucidated, in a fresh burst of helpfulness.

  ‘Down by the station? Are you sure? Then they must have gone home,’ exclaimed Louise in relief and then, with a tiny stirring of doubt: ‘But he did have the baby with him, didn’t he?’

  Edna looked bewildered. ‘He must have done,’ she said, ‘if they were together. Al—’ She turned suddenly to her speechless admirer. ‘Al, that gentleman we passed down by the station. Did he have a baby with him?’

  Poor Al, bubbling over with wordless desire to be helpful, looked rather at a loss – as well he might, since they must have passed several hundreds of gentlemen, with and without babies, down by the station. However, he was not a boy to give in easily:

  ‘Um!’ he contributed eagerly. ‘I reckon so. Um!’ Further speech seemed to fail him, but this was enough to satisfy Edna.

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ she said comfortably; and the boy glowed with pride. ‘I hope you didn’t mind, Mrs Henderson,’ she went on. ‘Last night, I mean, when I had to go early? You’d said you’d be back by half past six, you see, and besides, the little girls told me their Daddy would be in any minute. I hope you found everything all right?’

  ‘Oh yes, splendid,’ Louise assured her. ‘That was quite all right. I didn’t even know you had gone early. And thank you so much for feeding Baby and getting him to bed so nicely.’

  But Edna was looking blank again. Was she perhaps wondering if anything could be done to induce her monosyllabic admirer to attempt another sentence? Or was she making calculations about the decreasing for the armholes of that mauve garment in the bag? Either way, there seemed no point in prolonging the conversation; and Louise was soon hurrying her two charges towards the station.

  The journey home, ordinarily accomplished in fifteen minutes, took well over an hour today, and it was nearly six when the three straggled wearily up the garden path.

  ‘Where on earth did you get to?’ Mark greeted them cheerfully. ‘I couldn’t find you anywhere. You said you were going to the whelk stall.’

  Tired though she was, Louise controlled the impulse to point out that not a word had been said about the whelk stall the whole afternoon; that never, in all these years, had any of them bought, or even suggested buying, any whelks; that it was the one place in the whole fair-ground where neither she nor the children could have any motive for going.

  ‘I’ll make some tea,’ was all she said; adding: ‘Was Michael all right coming home?’

  ‘I’ve made some,’ said Mark proudly, with a flourish of the hand in the direction of the kitchen. ‘I just about needed a pot of tea, I can tell you! I expect it’s still warm,’ he added, rather deflatingly, as Louise turned towards the kitchen. Then, suddenly, the last half of her speech seemed to register:

  ‘Michael? What do you mean?’ he exclaimed. ‘He was with you. You had him!’

  Husband and wife stared at each other in absolute silence. Sensing disaster, though she had not listened to a word her parents were saying, Harriet burst into noisy sobs, and Margery into non-stop enquiry: ‘What, Mummy? What’s happened, Mummy? Who, Mummy? What is it, Mummy?’ – over and over again.

  ‘We must phone the police at once,’ exclaimed Mark, when he had heard the essentials of Louise’s story. He moved towards the telephone. Stopped. Looked at Louise. It was as if he had said, in so many words: ‘How can we? It’s less than forty-eight hours since you went to them with a cock-and-bull story about a lost baby. They’ll merely think you’re crazy. And, really—’

  Aloud he said, gently: ‘You stay here and get the girls to bed. I’ll go back to the fair and make enquiries. Don’t worry, I’ll find him.’ And giving her a pat on the shoulder meant to be reassuring, but conveying, somehow, nothing but pity, he strode out of the house.

  It was barely half an hour later when he telephoned to say that he had found Michael straight away, in the Lost Children tent. No, the man didn’t know when he’d been brought in – nor by whom – since he had only just come on duty. Yes, the baby was perfectly well, a bit hungry and fretful, that was all; and they were both coming home immediately.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It was exactly as if they had been giving a party that evening. All the world seemed to have heard of this second mislaying of the Henderson baby, and one after another they came ringing on the bell to make anxious enquiries. Mark’s mother; Mrs Hooper and Magda; Miss Larkins and Edna; Miss Brandon; one after another they had to be invited into the sitting-room, assured that the baby had been found, and offered cups of tea to atone for this anti-climax. And then they had to be told, over and over again, the same bald, inexcusable story. Louise felt that she could have repeated it in her sleep: ‘I left him in the push-chair for a minute while I took the children on the Caterpillar. I thought I’d be able to keep an eye on him, but it went too fast…. When I got off, he wasn’t there….’ At intervals, Mark would intervene obstinately with: ‘You must have left him by the whelk stall’; and at intervals, too, Margery and Harriet, still not effectively in bed, would say: ‘Who did, Mummy?’ or ‘Which Caterpillar?’

  ‘Well, all’s well that ends well,’ remarked Miss Larkins brightly. ‘Isn’t it, dear?’ She appealed to her niece, who was frowning dreadfully over the spacing of the buttonholes in the front ribbing.

  ‘What?’ said Edna; and it was all Louise could do not to say, ‘Go to bed, dear,’ to her, likewise.

  ‘Psychologically, of course,’ pronounced Magda, stretching out her rather dirty toes with their chipped scarlet nails, ‘psychologically, it’s been proved that nothing is ever lost by accident. It’s always because, subconsciously, the loser wants to lose it.’

  She stared challengingly at Louise, and Mrs Hooper looked on admiringly. Both waited, with tongues poised to counter the expected protests with a few well-chosen poly-syllables. But Louise was silent. For one thing, she knew the rules of this onesided game too well to play into their hands by protesting; and for another, her attention had at that moment been distracted. Glancing across the room, she had intercepted a look from Miss Brandon – a look meant not for her, but for Mark. A long, meaning look. ‘What did I tell you?’ it seemed to say. ‘Now do you believe me …?’

  For a second Louise felt a little sick. But Magda was speaking again, reduced by Louise’s silence to supplying the indignant protests for herself:

  ‘Of course,’ she was saying, ‘most mothers are terribly shocked when you show them that subconsciously they hate their children and long to get rid of them. They won’t believe it. They just won’t face up to their subconscious dislike and resentment.’

  ‘I don’t see what’s subconscious about it,’ put in Mark’s mother cheerfully, ‘particularly during the holidays, or on Sunday evenings. And as for a baby like that, who keeps everyone awake all night – well, if I was Louise I’d curse the day I had him.’

  ‘Mummy found him under a gooseberry bush,’ put in Harriet brightly, feeling that she had been left out of the conversation l
ong enough, and knowing very well how best to shock the modern adult. ‘She did. She found him under a gooseberry bush!’ She was rewarded by a gasp of horror from both Mrs Hooper and Magda.

  ‘Do you mean to say you haven’t told her?’ they both breathed in unison to Louise. ‘You mean to say you’ve kept the Facts of Life from her—?’

  ‘Not kept them,’ explained Louise patiently. ‘I’ve told her the truth any number of times, but she won’t believe it. She just says it doesn’t sound a bit likely. What can you do?’

  ‘And how right she is!’ exclaimed Harriet’s grandmother. ‘That’s what I’ve always said myself – that there’s not a single one of the Victorian nursery myths that doesn’t sound a lot more probable than the truth. Even after I’d had my own babies, it still seemed terribly unlikely. Don’t you agree?’ She appealed to her rather unresponsive audience – unresponsive, that is, except for Harriet who, enchanted by this easy way to notoriety, began pirouetting round the room, chanting:

  ‘They found him under the gooseberry bush

  The gooseberry bush,

  The gooseberry bush;

  They found him—’

  Her voice trailed away, and she came to a standstill. It was so rare for Harriet to be embarrassed about anything that for a moment Louise thought she must have stubbed her toe on a chair leg. Then she, too, became aware of the dark, almost maniacal excitement with which Miss Brandon was staring at the child.

  ‘How’s that for subconscious insight?’ she cried, in a shrill voice quite unlike her usual measured, scholarly tones. Then, suddenly, she recovered her usual manner, and turning to Magda began talking quietly, competently, about the works of Jung.

  Quietly. Competently. And with evident acquaintance with her subject. And yet Louise knew, with a certainty that she could neither explain nor reason away, that Vera Brandon was talking at random. Talking mechanically, barely conscious of the apt and well-turned sentences which her training enabled her to pour forth so fluently and with such an appearance of interest. Talking to gain time; talking to cover up some gross and disastrous slip….

  Frances Palmer’s words yesterday afternoon echoed suddenly, peremptorily, in Louise’s brain: ‘I had the feeling she was waiting for something.’

  Yes, she’s waiting for something. Ever since she came here she’s been waiting for something, and now the waiting is nearly over. How do I know it is nearly over? How do I know that there is an excitement rising inside her that she can barely control? Is it the brilliance of her eyes tonight? Is it that glance of triumph that she throws at my husband every now and then? She glanced at him like that last night, too, as they stood above me on the stairs. What was it she was saying then? Something about the Medea again – she seems obsessed with the play; is it just because her fifth form are doing it for their exam? What is the wretched play about, anyway? Medea. Was she the woman with snakes in her hair – no, that was Medusa. Anyway, Jason comes into it somehow; what can I remember about Jason? Jason-and-the-golden-fleece. That’s all I know. Eleven years spent at school, and all I can remember about Jason is Jason-and-the-golden-fleece….

  ‘I must get these children to bed!’ she burst out suddenly, unceremoniously. ‘Come along Margery – Harriet….’

  She hurried from the room. Hurried without a glance behind to see if the children had taken any notice of her (which they hadn’t) – upstairs and into the bedroom. Mark’s Dictionary of Myth and Legend would tell her the story of Medea …

  So Medea had murdered her two children in a fit of insane jealousy against their father. That was the sense of those last two paragraphs of blindingly small print at which Louise was staring.

  But she was no longer seeing the tiny, long-winded sentences. She was seeing instead a pram mysteriously wheeled away from her as she lolled asleep on a bench. She was seeing a push-chair whisked out of sight amid the heat and crowds of a Bank Holiday fair. She was seeing a woman sitting in silent hatred staring down at the children in a sunlit garden throughout a whole long afternoon. She saw again a dozen hints and glances which she had barely noticed at the time.

  Not that it made any sense; for where was the faithless lover? Where the jealousy that could drive a woman to murderous madness? Where was there any clue at all as to what it could all mean?

  Under the roof, of course. Under the roof, where Tony, Margery and Harriet had crawled with such unflagging purpose, and with so sadly unintelligible results. Under the roof, where now, if ever, it would be safe to explore, while the party, including Miss Brandon, were settled drinking tea in the sitting-room, their voices comfortably rising and falling, continually, like gusts of day-long rain with no stir of change.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The fading light of the spring evening still shone through Tony’s gap in the slates, and after the choking, dusty darkness through which she had crawled, it seemed to Louise quite brilliant. The stout little notebook was within easy reach among the shadows, and beside it gaped the dark, jagged hole in the plaster which led into the top of Miss Brandon’s cupboard.

  The book was grey with dust, but of course that didn’t mean it hadn’t been handled recently. Dust was thick everywhere; it scattered down in little pattering showers every time you moved. Louise’s heart beat quicker, just as the hearts of her three small predecessors must have beaten quicker as they reached their enchanting spider-haunted goal. Her thoughts, too, followed that same thrice-beaten track: first, the impulse to take the book away and read it elsewhere in physical comfort; second, the realisation that if she did so then there would be no way of putting it back in a hurry should Miss Brandon be heard coming upstairs. The only difference was that the children, telling themselves that they were in deadly earnest, had known in their hearts that they were only playing a silly game; whereas Louise, telling herself that she was only playing a silly game, knew in her heart that she was in deadly earnest.

  Hurriedly, under her absurd little skylight, Louise opened the book and began to read. At first the dust in her throat and the ache of her cramped limbs seemed more important than that slashing, sloping writing before her; but before she had reached the bottom of the second page her discomforts were forgotten. She was no longer aware of the dust pricking and scraping in her throat, nor of the cobwebby darkness that moved in ever closer as the line of evening light grew fainter. She was aware only of a winter wood, the dead leaves thick and silent on the ground, and the snow not yet come.

  ‘Jan. 13th’ she read. ‘Today I am certain. How can I be certain so soon? I am not a young woman. No, that is no longer true. In the last week I have been growing younger, and that is why I am so sure. That, and this strange new feeling in my breasts, and this new, springing strength in my legs as I stride uphill, and neither mud nor brambles nor the treacherous ditches can slow me down. Hermes skimming over the sea at the bidding of Zeus must have felt like this. No, was like this, for now I too am a messenger of the Gods, a bearer of great meanings.

  ‘But what will Edgar say? I wish I could tell Edgar now, today, while I sit on the damp leaves inches thick, and the sun grows red and low and the mist comes up from the ground. If I told him now I could make him understand; I could; I could! and he and I, a pair of staid middle-aged schoolteachers, would dance for joy among the tree-trunks, hand in hand, leaping and laughing, while the red light fails and the twigs grow sharp and black against the sky.

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s Edgar you’re talking about; remember? He will only see the problems, the difficulties, just as he has always seen them during these twelve long years. Twelve years of living in sin so cautiously, so respectably, that respectability itself must surely blush! He has a microscope, has Edgar, through which he examines life most minutely, and analyses all its tiny problems. Of course, it’s only the tiny ones which will go on to a microscope slide.

  ‘“It’s impossible!” he’s always said when I’ve told him I want a child. “It’s absurd!” he’s always said; and “It’s not as if we could get marr
ied,” he’s said. And: “What about your career?” he goes on; and “You’d be ruined” and “You could never keep it dark.” “Mad.” “Ridiculous.” “Out of the question.”

  ‘Poor Edgar. Poor, quaking Edgar. I will tell him on Saturday.

  ‘Jan. 16th. Edgar horrified. Edgar terrified. Stumbling over problems left and right, as he always does, like a man with hobbled feet, when one good stride would clear the lot.

  ‘Why can’t I make him see the wonder of what he has done?

  ‘He is like a child I had in my class once, years ago, who could draw such birds and animals as I’ve never forgotten. Enchanting, brilliant little creatures, that seemed almost to spring out of the paper with their life and movement. And always she would crumple them up, tearful and frustrated. ‘But it’s not like a camel!’ she would wail, thrusting some little masterpiece into the wastepaper basket; or: ‘I haven’t got the legs right’; or ‘I can’t do the ears.’ She wanted to get things right, that child; and so does Edgar. Neither of them will ever know the wonders they created.

  ‘Jan. 20th. So Edgar wants me to get rid of it! The only sensible thing, he says. He’s heard of a man, he says….