Coronation Wives (3 page)

Feeling cold despite the full skirt and long sleeves of her dress, she wrapped her arms around herself, tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling. She didn’t want to be here. She wished with all her might that she could change things. If only she’d caught the bus instead of walking.

In her head she rehearsed the words she would say to the desk sergeant. He would probably get her tea and offer his sympathy. They might have a policewoman on duty. There were a few of them around nowadays. It might be easier talking to a woman, one who wouldn’t insist on telling her father, talking it through, analysing and dissecting every little detail until everything lay out on the table as opposed to being locked away in her mind. That’s what her mother would do: go over it again and again until it was all wrung from her like water from a dripping wet dress.

The waiting room was dull, nothing to look at except an ancient clock and a few wanted posters with curling corners. Yes, she was doing the right thing. It would be best for the police to break the news to her mother. She could imagine it now, her mother serenely sitting in her armchair with a pink and green chintz cover.

‘Madam, we are sorry to report …’ Who else would they tell? What about the newspapers?

Oh no, she couldn’t stand being front-page news in the
Bristol Evening Post.
For the first time since arriving at Bridewell, her courage began to fail her. What should she do?

The woman in front of her was taking her time, relating in a very deep voice – the sort only acquired by smoking forty a day – of how some man had taken her purse when she’d set it down on a Woolworths counter in order to purchase a doll for her granddaughter.

Janet looked down at the floor and caught a glimpse of the woman’s feet. She was wearing men’s black dancing pumps. They looked too small, the aged black leather digging into the woman’s thick-set ankles.

The minute hand on the wall clock jerked forward. Janet gave herself a deadline. One more minute. If the woman went on for just one more minute … Two, then three went by. So much for setting herself a limit.

‘Next!’

At last she was face to face with a representative of the local constabulary. His bulk filled the square opening above the desk. The opening was set in glass partitioning, a film of old dirt and the curling posters she’d observed earlier, obliterating clear observation of the room beyond the counter. Janet opened her mouth to speak, but her tongue seemed to shrivel up in her mouth.

‘Well, me dear?’

Watery blue eyes fixed on hers. She glanced over her shoulder. How many more were in the queue and likely to listen to what she had to say? There was no one. She swallowed hard. ‘A man attacked me.’

He immediately swapped his pencil for a pen. ‘Name?’

‘I don’t know his name.’

The policeman sighed impatiently. ‘
Your
name, young lady!’

She fiddled nervously with her handbag. It was black patent like her belt and sandals. The sweat from her hands had left moist patterns of palm and fingers all over it.

She cleared her throat. ‘Janet Hennessey-White.’

After dipping the pen into an inkwell and shaking off the residue he began to scratch her name in his ledger.

‘Is that your full name?’

‘Well no, it’s actually Janet Abigail Hennessey-White, and this man—’

‘How do you spell that?’

She told him. The tip of his tongue wavered at the side of his mouth as he wrote her name. She couldn’t believe it. Was he really more interested in getting her name right than finding her attacker?

‘Address?’

A draught of air came into the waiting room as the door to the street opened behind her. Nervously Janet glanced over her shoulder again.

A uniformed constable smiled and nodded at her then opened another door and disappeared.

Thank you.

The sergeant scratched her address line by line. Janet bit her bottom lip as her eyes followed the slow progress of the pen to inkwell and back to the ledger. Her nerve was slipping and if someone did come in, she might lose it completely. She had to hurry him up.

‘My telephone number is—’

His response was immediate, like a bird of prey suddenly spotting an easy meal. We don’t need that. Not everyone has got a telephone, you know. Only them that can afford it.’

Janet hugged her handbag. ‘I only thought—’

He stretched to his full height – far too tall for the opening through which he was speaking. He appeared cut off at the neck. ‘You don’t need to think, miss. That’s what we’re here for. You’ve lost something or had something stolen, and we know how to go about looking for it. Now!’ he said, sliding his wooden handled pen into a groove in the counter. ‘Let me guess. You’ve lost something, though not your handbag I see.’ He pointed to the black patent bag that was looking positively dull with perspiration.

‘I’ve already told you. A man attacked me.’

‘Oh yes.’ He sounded unconvinced and eyed her cautiously.

Janet was disappointed. Somehow she had expected him to spring into action, take quick notes and order a bevy of police constables to scour the streets – and that before she had given a description of either the man or what had happened. The rest of her words came tumbling out.

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut.

Please, don’t let anyone come in. Please don’t let anyone hear this.

At last she found her voice. ‘A man dragged me onto the waste land and then he …’ She fought to say the word, half-hoping that he would say it for her. He did not. He was unsmiling.

She managed to blurt it out. ‘He raped me!’

Sounds from the world outside, traffic, footsteps and the cry of ‘
Evening World
and
Evening Post
’ came in with new arrivals. She was vaguely aware of a brightly coloured dress, a man smelling of pipe tobacco and stale sweat. They took their place in the queue behind her. The door opened again. Someone else joined the queue, then another, and another. The place was filling up.

The sergeant glanced at the door each time it opened before turning his attention back to her. ‘So where and when did this
alleged
offence happen?’ He stressed the word ‘alleged’, so it sounded almost criminal.

‘On Friday night when I left the Odeon. I decided to cut up through—’

‘What time was this?’

Having caught the gist of the sergeant’s questioning, the newly arrived were silent. She could feel them watching her and passing instant judgement based on what the policeman was saying.

She couldn’t stop her voice from shaking. ‘After ten – about ten thirty.’

The sergeant let out a heavy, knowing sigh. ‘Right! It was after ten, getting dark and you had decided to walk home alone and a man forced his attentions on you in a sexual manner. Don’t you think you were asking for it?’

He had not lowered his voice. Janet felt the colour racing up her neck and onto her cheeks. She could feel the gazes of those behind her piercing into her back.

‘No!’

‘An old boyfriend, was it?’

‘No! Of course it wasn’t!’

Her face was on fire. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry, but most of all she wanted to get out of here, away from his accusations and those of the people standing in the queue.

His expression smug, he leaned on the counter, brawny hands clasped before him. He eyed her up and down as though wearing red and being attractive was a far bigger crime than the one she was reporting.

‘Girls like you ruin a lot of blokes’ lives, so before you go making accusations I suggest you consider your own actions very carefully indeed. You were walking home in the dark all alone. What were you hoping for?’

She couldn’t believe what he was insinuating. ‘I’m not a tart!’
Angry tears filled her eyes. If she didn’t get out of here they’d soon be running down her cheeks. She mustn’t let it happen.

A pin could have dropped and sounded like an atomic bomb in that dingy room. Ears were straining, eyes watching with avid interest. The Bristol Old Vic would be hard pushed to present something as dramatic as this.

The sergeant smiled, as much in response to the avid attention of his audience as for her benefit. ‘Perhaps not, but no respectable woman should be out alone after ten o’clock at night. Now go home, forget what happened and be a good girl in future.’

Her patience snapped and she stamped her foot. ‘How dare you! I’ll have you know that my parents have influence in very high places.’

The sergeant, his features leaden, slammed his ledger shut. ‘I don’t care who they are or where you’re from. High class you may be, but there’s an old saying … the colonel’s lady and Rosie O’Grady are sisters under the skin …’

Janet was speechless. She turned and fled.

Outside, fresh wet air slapped against her hot face. An overcast sky had burst with rain and water dripped from her hair, down her face, from her nose and trickled down her neck. Pavements empty of pedestrians shone with water. Such was her anger that she never thought to question where everyone was. She simply ran through the downpour, oblivious to the headscarves and umbrellas barricading shop doorways.

Her headlong flight might have continued except that a small figure bounced out of the entrance to the Arcade, an enclosed avenue of semi-derelict shops that connected one street with another. It provided a little shelter even though most of its roof was missing.

The figure bumped into her and blocked her path. ‘Boo!’

She spun, holding the small shoulders of the interceptor until
they both came to a standstill. Rain and tears blurred her vision, but the smiling face was familiar.

‘Janet! Janet! We’ve been to see the Coronation Clock. It’s got lots of colours and wooden people walking around when it strikes the time.’

Susan, one of Edna’s children, beamed up at her. ‘Come on. We’ve saved a place for you.’

Janet allowed herself to be dragged towards the crowd of sheltering shoppers. She saw Edna waving. ‘Over here,’ she shouted.

Edna’s face was shiny with rain, her cheeks were pink, and her eyes sparkled. There was not a trace of make-up. ‘What a downpour!’

She wore a silk headscarf which Janet recognized as being a present from her mother many Christmases ago. Goodness, but Edna really knew how to make things do: Typical of that generation; the war had made people more careful.

‘I’m pretty wet already,’ Janet said almost apologetically.

‘Pretty wet? Is that what you call it? Yer own mother wouldn’t recognize you.’ Polly had been hard to spot, sandwiched as she was between the pushchair in which reposed Edna’s youngest and a lady with large bosoms wearing a man’s raincoat and a checked cap. As usual Polly was dressed in black and white. It was an odd thought at an odd time, but Janet found herself presuming her underwear to be white. Black wasn’t so much decadent as almost unavailable and Polly never wore any other colours than black and white.

‘Stand in a bit. You’re still getting wet,’ said Edna pulling her close just as if she were one of her children. ‘Goodness, I can feel you shivering. How about a coffee or a cup of tea in Carwardines once it’s dried up?’

Under the circumstances, Janet wasn’t sure that she wanted company. ‘I don’t really—’

Polly cut her short. ‘Good idea.’

‘Can I have a cocoa?’ asked Susan who was proudly hanging onto Janet’s hand as if she were a treasured find.

Edna said she could and asked her son, Peter, if he too wanted cocoa or lemonade. He slapped his side as he thought about it. At the same time he stamped his feet, not angrily, but as though he was getting ready to run.

‘You can bring Trigger,’ Edna added with a brief pat of his shoulder, ‘but he has to be quiet. Carwardines only let in well-behaved horses.’

She gave Janet a wink. Strange how it made Janet feel that little bit better, as though anything could be got over if you really tried. Look at Edna’s husband: no legs, but still he coped.

Despite the dreadfulness of her day, Janet felt less ashamed, less indignant. Normal people living normal lives who knew nothing of what she had been through surrounded her. She was still Janet as they’d always known her.

Suddenly the crowd began to disperse and Susan began to dance. ‘It’s stopped raining! It’s stopped raining!’ She tugged Janet out of the Arcade entrance. At the same time Peter spurred on his invisible mount and let out a loud neigh of appreciation.

‘High spirits,’ said Edna with a mix of pride and embarrassment, and when Janet didn’t respond she touched her arm. ‘Are you all right?’

There was genuine concern in her face and, for a solitary second, Janet had a strong urge to tell her what had happened on Friday night and where she’d been today.

Just when the urge was at its strongest, Susan piped up, ‘We’ve left Aunty Polly behind.’

Everyone gathered in a huddle and looked around. ‘Window shopping, I expect,’ said Edna. Janet stretched her neck and studied a spot in front of a window that had been hidden by the crowd sheltering from the rain.

‘There,’ she said pointing.

‘Not that again,’ Edna muttered.

Janet didn’t question to what she was referring. Her own problems pressed too heavily so she only glanced very briefly in Polly’s direction.

Sharply attractive in her black and white flowered dress, Polly was standing quite still, her attention fixed on a poster that seemed mostly to consist of blue sky and an arched iron bridge crossing an equally blue bay. Edna called out to her. ‘Polly?’

Polly seemed oblivious to everything except the poster. Edna called again. This time Polly seemed to hear. It was as if someone had turned a large key to get her going again. Despite her age – mid-thirties – Polly maintained a girlish exuberance, especially now with her hair tangled to curls by the rain.

She seemed to bounce rather than walk towards them and her smile stretched from ear to ear. ‘Did you know it’s only ten pounds to go to Australia?’

‘Yes, I did know that,’ snapped Edna and turned away abruptly. ‘Let’s get to Carwardines.’ She began to push her way through the crowds, Janet following right behind, pulled along by Susan.

‘You didn’t tell me!’ Polly grumbled as she trailed along behind.