Abdication: A Novel (19 page)

The talk turned briefly towards their father. What must he be feeling? His telegram, except for the one word of “regret,” had revealed nothing of his own state of mind. Would he now wish both children to return to the plantation? They would have to wait for a letter from him if they were to know more. For once May was relieved that there was no telephone at the plantation. The prohibitive expense of the installation had meant that urgent messages had instead been delivered on horseback or by May herself in the car.

Both of Edith’s children had their reasons for wanting to stay in England, but neither was quite prepared to share them with the other. Sam’s motives were more transparent. He was relishing a career in the navy that was already on the ascendant. In February, the government had approved a report calling for the expansion of the navy and Sam, until then a mere volunteer, had impressed the “high-ups” enough to have been selected as a permanent employee of the fleet. He was damned if he was going to be sent back to the confines of the sugary fields of Barbados.

Sam had never discussed with May or his mother the other reason he was enjoying his new life in England. It had to do with Duncan. There was something about his father that made him recoil. On countless occasions Sam had caught him staring at May in a way that unsettled him. And then there was the time when he had burst into his parents’ bedroom to see Duncan’s hand raised over his mother’s head, only for him to lower it as soon as Sam appeared. Although there were four members of the Thomas family Sam always felt there were only three. For some reason Duncan seemed like an outsider. He did not even look like Sam, who had inherited Edith’s blond hair. More curiously, May with her olive skin, did not look like either of their parents but her temperament confirmed conclusively enough for Sam that she was related by blood to himself and their mother. Nothing of Duncan’s abrasive nature was ever evident in his sister.

May knew she would never return to Barbados. The presence there of her father had been one deterrent. Now the absence left by her mother’s death and the opportunities offered by her new life in England gave her two more. As well as the deep affection she felt for her cousins and the endless challenges and excitements of her job, there was her growing interest in one particular individual who occupied her thoughts more every day.

Eventually Sam said he wanted to walk to the river that May had told him about so often. The prospect of being by water always calmed
him, and he set off, oblivious to the irony that it was water which had taken his mother from him so recently. Exhausted by trying to restrain her tears May went to lie down on her bed in Mrs. Cage’s house, where she stroked each of the little forget-me-nots in turn as they hung on the sliver chain round her wrist. At last she allowed herself to weep wildly and loudly and without control, before burying her face in the paisley quilt, soaking the edges of the silky material. Picking up her diary she pressed the blue cloth covers against her face, and knowing how her mother had held the small lined book in her own hands, she willed her mother’s touch to be somehow preserved within the binding.

The storm of crying was over with the suddenness with which it had begun, and May became still, the blue book still held to her cheek. New images began to jostle for space in her thoughts and the previously sharply focused picture of her mother became suddenly elusive as memories of her father returned with a rush. Hard as she tried to will Edith to fill her thoughts, the cold touch of Duncan’s ever-damp hands continued to fill her mind. She remembered how he would interrupt conversations when she was alone with her mother. He had been jealous, she now realised.

“What’s going on here?” he would ask angrily, a pool of sweat gathering across the top of his forehead, from which two tributaries would run down onto his nose. His long tongue would flick out through the gap in his teeth and catch the drip, his lips glistening with the moisture. “Got all the time in the world to waste, have we? All right for some.” His ill-matched front teeth enhanced the muffling of his words.

“Secrets.” May now said the word aloud, slowly. The sound, with its snakelike consonant at beginning and end, contributed a sinister meaning to the word. Her life was littered with secrets, but the story-time nip had been the first.

Opening the blue book she turned to the pages at the back and for the hundredth time, she tried to cheer herself up by reading through
a list of notes she was making for herself headed “Qualities Necessary for True Love.”

Must not rule out short sight, snorers or strange tastes in food
.

Cherish and be cherished
.

Listen as well as hear
.

These initial points had been inspired by her mother, of course, but May decided that now was the time for some of her own additions. First, there were to be no secrets between her and the man she chose to marry. And secondly, she would have to find him infinitely desirable. The concept made her feel nauseous. One man’s body had evoked feelings of revulsion for so long. How could the hairiness of a male body, and the sensation of her skin crawling and pricking as if infected by some termite as he stroked her, ever be a source of pleasure? How could she trust her own nakedness in the hands of someone so much bigger than herself? How could she be sure she would not be hurt? Her curiosity about Julian and her fascination with the beauty of his mouth was invariably eclipsed by the nightmares of those “little nip” moments in her childhood bedroom.

Suddenly she remembered Sam and, standing up, she brushed her hair and washed her smudged face, before going over to the house. Sam was sitting in the hallway pretending to read a newspaper, waiting for her, trying to smile a lopsided smile. She drove him to the station and clung to him on the platform before promising they would be together on Oak Street soon.

Florence was sitting in front of an empty bowl at the kitchen table when May returned, holding a spoon with the remains of Cooky’s sponge-cake mixture smeared around her lips. Both plaits were in their familiar state of disarray, the coppery strands of hair escaping as ever from their loosened ribbons. Florence put her arms around May’s waist
and then stood on her chair so she was on the same level as May. As Florence kissed her quickly on the lips, May could taste the uncooked sponge mixture on her own mouth. The sudden, intimate, reassuring contact made her feel she could not bear to be alone any longer, so instead of returning to her room she went upstairs to see if Sir Philip had arrived home. She had made a decision about something that had been troubling her for a week. She wanted to ask Sir Philip if she might have permission to drive Julian up north.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

D
uring the night, Julian’s bed in the Wigan boarding house had come to life beneath him. He had been warned about bedbugs and other species of vermin that sprang into action in darkness. Last night in the pub Julian had heard a story about a rat that had recently fallen through a small hole in a tenement ceiling a few streets away, landed on top of a young boy and removed a substantial chunk of flesh from his arm. The child had developed septicaemia and died shortly afterwards. Julian’s eyes scanned the flaking plasterboard above him for rat-size gaps. Meanwhile, he doubted whether the mattress beneath him, or indeed any of the other mattresses in the boarding house, had ever been cleaned and tried not to think about how many transitory bodies they had supported over the years. The stench from the canal that ran along the side of the street seeped through the barely open window. Julian tried to stop up the smell by burying his nose in his arm but the power of damp and dirt had already impregnated his skin.

As he lay on the flea-infested mixture of horsehair and foam rubber, he opened John Gunther’s new book on Europe.

“Adolf Hitler, irrational, contradictory, complex, is an unpredictable character; therein lies his power and his menace,” it began.

But Julian’s concentration was disturbed by the intestinal emissions coming from the snoring occupants of the two other beds. Although
his glasses lay on the floor beside him, he did not reach for them. He preferred for now to leave the detail of his surroundings in soft focus. Julian wondered what the new king would have made of the sights of Wigan. As Prince of Wales, Edward had been so unexpectedly concerned with the underdog and had been applauded for his genuine empathy with the British people. Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, a frequent dinner-party guest at Hamilton Terrace, who with her husband, Fruity, knew the king well, had spoken of how he had on more than one occasion shared a beer with out-of-work men in the makeshift bar of an abandoned church crypt. Had this pleasure-loving American woman stoppered up the king’s concern for suffering? The confrontation at that dreadful dinner party had left Julian sceptical of the worthiness of the man who for such a short time had occupied the throne. Julian liked to think he would never understand someone who put personal feelings in front of moral principle. Of course, the best thing would be if the two sides of the argument could merge but Julian was uncertain in what circumstances that might occur. He wondered for a moment whether he dared risk discussing all this with May before remembering how, not long ago, Philip had emphasised to him and Rupert how important it was not to speak about that dinner to anyone, including the servants. Delicate negotiations with the national newspaper editors had so far ensured that Mrs. Simpson’s name had been kept out of the British papers. The government had agreed to do all they could to keep it that way.

“Best to keep one’s trap shut until things die down or, if we are lucky, fizzle out,” Philip had said with a little knowing tap of his forefinger on the side of his nose.

“What with all the other problems facing the government both at home with Mosley’s fascists as well as abroad with Germany and now the potential for revolution deepening in Spain, the prime minister does not want any … ah … um …
complicated
personal relationship
sending jitters through a public that is just settling down to the idea of a new, modern and popular monarch on the throne.” Looking over the top of his glasses he asked if he had made himself clear.

“Perfectly, sir,” the two friends had replied in unison.

That morning Julian’s main worry, however, was not politics, bedbugs nor the love life of the king but the welfare of May. She was only a flight of stairs away in the cramped room usually occupied by the landlady’s three daughters but he felt as if an entire terrace of houses might be between them. Julian tried to imagine May wrapped up in his spare, grey-flannel shirt, probably the cleanest garment in the whole place. He smiled at the thought of the sleeves of his shirt enfolding her slim, naked body. Julian shifted his weight in the bed, pushing the sleeping figure that lay beside him clean off the mattress and onto the floor where it just missed toppling a nearly full chamber pot. Without a word the still-drowsy man climbed back into bed and resumed his sleep.

As he had explained to May when he asked her to drive him to Wigan, Julian had hoped that a few days in the North would show him something of the poverty in which, so he had read, a third of Britain’s city dwellers lived. But he was beginning to think it was perhaps not as simple as that.

May’s scepticism had been quite obvious in the car on the way up. “Do you really think you are going to understand what it is like to be poor by walking around a few streets and seeing a bit of dirt?” she had asked him.

“Well, it’s a start isn’t it?” he had replied, taken aback by her implicit criticism.

“You may think so,” she said with a shake of her head. “But from what I see of being poor in Bethnal Green it will take a lifetime to really understand what it means to go without. I should introduce you to our
neighbours there. Ten children crammed into two bedrooms with the parents sharing the settee downstairs, and the mother wondering every morning which half of the family she is going to be able to give any tea to that day. Mind you it’s not all gloom. On the contrary. I think you would be surprised by how people keep up their spirits. On our plantation we had to lay off people when orders dwindled or the rains had failed to nourish the sugarcane. But they rarely complained. ‘God will provide,’ they used to say. That’s the mistake some people make, I think. They forget ‘the poor’ are not just some statistic to cause concern to well-off do-gooders, charities and the government.”

Julian had not answered. A memory of something his mother had told him years ago had returned to him with a thump of guilt. He had not forgotten a single detail of the story she had recounted more with amusement than pride. Before the war Mrs. Richardson had travelled down south from her home in Yorkshire to visit a school friend whose wealthy parents lived in London. To fill in the long aimless periods between one evening party and the next the two young women had on a couple of occasions ventured in the family carriage into the East End. Two large wicker baskets containing thermoses of hearty carrot soup had been packed into the back of the carriage by the butler. For several hours the two friends had taken up their positions in a small room in the Bethnal Green town hall and distributed soup to the hungry and destitute of the area.