Aunt Letitia Read online

  Hugh felt a frisson of pleasure, his heart leapt. She felt sorry for him! She actually felt sorry for him! But then he had to look away, feeling like a fraud.

  ‘I didn’t really miss my father,’ he confessed. ‘I didn’t really know him back then. It’s a pity, because I think I rather like him. We have wasted so much time, but now we have an opportunity to put that right. He’s going to settle down at last.’

  ‘And where on all his travels did your father marry?’

  ‘He has only just got married. He met his bride in the Argentine, or somewhere like that. But she is not Argentinian. She is American. A widow by the name of Mrs Daffodil Mertens. Now the second Mrs Arnold Benham, of course.’

  ‘Daffodil Mertens!’ Megan giggled, and for the first time Hugh felt a real connection between the young woman sitting opposite him, and the little girl he had known ten years before. She had been prone to giggles, that little girl; and she had been mischievous, instigating all sorts of pranks and naughtiness which had been disapproved of by the grown-ups. Hugh and the Lambton boys had been delighted by it all and had competed to take the blame for all the wrongdoings. They had been knights and she their lady.

  Megan was still curious about the wedding, so Hugh told her all about it. The letter had come out of the blue, telling Hugh that his father was coming home. At the end of the term just gone, Arnold Benham and his intended bride had collected Hugh from Harrow and then all three had gone to Aunt Letitia at The Firs.

  ‘Whenever I go back there,’ said Hugh, by way of an aside, ‘I always look out for you. I hoped you might have come back to the Manor one day,’ he ended wistfully.

  ‘I only made one visit to the Lambtons. I was there rather under false pretences as it happened. But go on. You went to The Firs with your father and flowery Daffodil. What next?’

  ‘Father and I had some long talks. It was very strange. Rather like meeting one’s housemaster for the first time. Father said he is jolly proud of the way I’ve turned out. It’s odd, because all this time I felt that I didn’t much care what his opinion of me might be, but now I feel awfully bucked up that he approves of me.’

  ‘I think he is quite right to feel proud.’ With a sly smile, she added, ‘That’s not to say, of course, there is no room for improvement. Some of that schoolboy priggishness could be rubbed off for a start.’

  She was looking at him with amusement, her green eyes wide and laughing, freckles across her nose, a faint tinge of colour in her cheeks. Hugh couldn’t meet her gaze for long. It made his head whirl. He lowered his eyes, watched as she crumbled the cake on her plate. Her hands, by Hugh’s fastidious standards, were decidedly grubby (his own were carefully manicured); but at that moment even her imperfections seemed perfect.

  ‘You’re blushing.’ Megan had laughter in her voice.

  ‘Am I? I mean, yes, I am. It’s because you are making fun of me.’ Honesty was the best policy – the only policy. It was either that, or talk gibberish.

  There was a pause in which he knew she was daring him to look at her, but he did not have the courage. Then she spoke up, asked him to complete his tale and he was happy to do so, seizing on the facts of recent events to stop himself being swept away completely. The wedding had taken place on Easter Saturday. Afterwards, he had spent a few days with the happy couple in the New Forest. They had both pressed him to accompany them, which had rather touched him.

  ‘From there, we went to Southampton where Father and my stepmother embarked on the new White Star liner for New York. They are going to Boston to visit my stepmother’s family, and afterwards they will come back to England, and we are all to live together like a proper family.’ He was surprised as he said this to realize just how much he was looking forward to it.

  The story brought up to date, Megan got to her feet, and Hugh jumped up too, his heart beating fast, terrified she might be about to leave him again; but she merely said it was time they gave their table to someone else and that she felt like walking. They left the Lyons Corner House, negotiated Piccadilly, entered Green Park. Their pace slowed as they walked beneath the plane trees. It was, thought Hugh hopefully, as if they were both equally reluctant to reach the moment of parting.

  Suddenly, Megan skipped a few paces ahead along the path and then turned, blocking his way. She asked where he intended to stay.

  ‘A hotel, I suppose.’ He had not actually given it any thought until now. His trip to London had been spontaneous, a madcap escapade. ‘Or there’s a chap from school. His people live in Hammersmith.’

  ‘You could always stay with me.’ Megan looked demurely from under the brim of her hat. ‘I have lodgings near Victoria Station.’

  ‘Isn’t that…? Would that be quite proper?’ Hugh stammered as he spoke, trying not to look shocked, trying also to dampen down the anticipation which suddenly flared inside him.

  ‘We could take a cab.’ Megan’s eyes widened, at once innocent and very knowing.

  ‘My luggage is at Waterloo.’

  ‘Never mind your luggage. You don’t know yet if you’ll like my humble abode. It is very humble.’

  ‘Somehow I’m sure I shall like it.’ Hugh grinned, daring now to look her in the eye.

  She laughed and took his hand and they ran, reliving the exhilaration of their earlier flight from the police.

  They took a motor cab to Megan’s lodgings. Hugh gave the driver a shilling and afterwards wondered if he had been overly generous. Not that he minded. The mood he was in, he wished the entire world well. What was a shilling? He had others.

  Megan put her finger on her lips as they entered the run-down building. ‘The landlady lives downstairs in the basement. She’s a fearsome old dragon. “I’ll thank you not to invite people up to your rooms, and especially not young gentlemen”.’ Megan imitated the landlady in a whisper. ‘“I keep a respectable establishment here, I do.” This way, up the stairs. If you take your boots off you will be much quieter.’

  As Hugh climbed the stairs in his stockinged feet, he realized that he had never in his wildest dreams imagined just what a whirlwind adventure really was. He was tingling all over; felt as if he was a butterfly crawling out of a chrysalis, stretching its wings, blinking in the new sun. The old Hugh – the Hugh of a few months ago – would never have dared do anything as reckless as this, climbing the boarding house staircase with its peeling wallpaper and bare wooden steps.

  Megan’s room – for that’s all it was, one room – was rather shabby. Hugh sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, too intoxicated by the present moment to wonder what might come next. Megan removed her hat, kicked off her shoes, and arranged her hair, looking in the mirror above the mantelpiece. Finally she turned, looked down at him with bright but guarded eyes, her head cocked at an angle.

  In the same fake cockney accent she had used to imitate the landlady, she said, ‘It ain’t much but it’s home, sir,’ and then she laughed.

  Hugh remembered every detail of that room, even after twenty-eight years. He recalled the washstand and the iron bedstead; the pile of old newspapers in the fireplace; the paintwork peeling off the chest of drawers, the books scattered on top; the crack in the mirror; the flowery pattern of the dirty wallpaper. The window had looked towards the railway but the view had been obscured by the jutting corner of a neighbouring house. All day and night one heard the noise of the engines and the shrieks of their whistles. It had been a rather unpleasant room, he realized, looking back; but he had not noticed at the time. Megan’s presence had brightened it, transformed it. Hugh shivered as, a quarter of a century later, he remembered her voice: alluring yet innocent, full of laughter. ‘Would you like to kiss me? Because I think I would quite like to kiss you.’

  Other details of those April days spent in London came back to Hugh as he sat in Letitia’s kitchen listening to German bombs falling on the docks. At evening, Megan’s room had looked different, the harshness of its squalid reality softened by dancing shadows as the candle flame flickered in the dra
ughts. He remembered Megan’s red hair run riot on the white pillow, how it touched his cheek and tickled his nose when she moved her head. He remembered her wide green eyes looking up at him, her lips parted in a smile. He remembered her succulent white breasts and the unexpected red of her nipples.

  They had been careful not to attract the attention of the landlady, the dragon in the basement. Once, he recalled with a smile, Megan had had to put both her hands across his face to stifle his laughter as he crawled on hands and knees looking for his boots. Why looking for his boots should have been so hilarious he could not now say. It was the laughter he remembered, and the feel of Megan’s hand across his mouth, the smell of her skin.

  Beyond the confines of the dragon’s lair they had laughed out loud and they had laughed a lot: laughed as they tried to light cigarettes in the wind, laughed at the broken windows in the Strand, laughed as they ran to catch buses and hailed cabs. Hugh’s money had paid for their meals, their visits to the theatre and the boat trip they had taken along the river; but Megan had refused to let him buy her gifts, however much he pressed her. The only thing she would accept was his new silver lighter engraved with his initials H.A.A.B. It had been a present from his father, but Hugh had been delighted when she accepted it. She had seemed pleased, had promised to treasure it.

  He had never talked so much in his life, he remembered. He had never felt the need before. But with Megan hanging on his every word, he had found himself telling her everything. He had told her how he had thrown Raggety Peg into the stream at Buckly Priory, and he had told her of his unhappiness there, the bullying and bed wetting and cold, cold baths. He had found unexpected solace in dragging up every hated detail. In doing so, he had come to realize later, he had expunged those details from his memory.

  Megan had stroked his hair and held his hand and said, ‘How awful to be a boy! How despicable those schools are!’ And she had listened, properly listened, and not just from politeness. It was only years later that he had come to understand how rare this was.

  When they weren’t talking, he was happy just to sit and watch her. He had felt that he could watch her forever, dazzled by her beauty and by the amazing chameleon way she adapted to her surroundings, so that she never seemed out of place wherever she was. And yet, looking back, he found that one of the most vivid memories of all was of a moment when they had briefly parted. She had been off at some meeting or other, plotting ways in which to force Asquith to give women the vote. He had stood on the Embankment, waiting for her, the ground trembling as the trams trundled past behind him, before him the wide brown river slowly rising with the tide, tugs labouring downstream against the oncoming current. He had been supremely content, basking in this brief interregnum, knowing that in an hour he would be with Megan again.

  But a real parting had come eventually, as he had known in his heart of hearts that it must. He had just never expected it to come about in the way it did.

  In Letitia’s kitchen, Hugh stared at the dregs of cocoa in his mug and said, ‘After Father and my stepmother died, I believed I had killed them. Divine retribution for my sins.’

  ‘Tush, my dear boy!’ At her age, Letitia could get away with calling a forty-four-year-old man a boy. ‘What terrible sins could you have possibly committed? You were only a child, fifteen. Their deaths were an accident.’

  Hugh said nothing, for one could not talk of the sins of the flesh to one’s great-aunt. Instead, reaching back into his memory, he tried but failed to recall the particular street along which he and Megan had been walking when they saw the terrible headline scrawled on the side of a newsstand: ACCIDENT TO TITANIC.

  Megan had been bewildered by his reaction and Hugh, intolerant in his distress, had shouted at her. ‘Don’t you see! That is the name of the White Star liner my father embarked on for America. It has hit an iceberg.’

  Megan had tried to reassure him. ‘There’s probably nothing to worry about. It is still afloat. Look, it says here in the newspaper that it is practically unsinkable.’

  Twenty-eight years later, Hugh had come to believe that he had known from the first moment that his father had perished, but at the time there had been a brief moment of uncertainty and hope. This had been shattered forever as the later editions came out, detailing the full horror of the tragedy, the deaths of over 1500 people on a calm night in the Atlantic. Graven on Hugh’s mind was the scene outside the White Star offices in Cockspur Street, people gathering, waiting, clinging to straws: desperately wanting news and receiving news they did not want. And amongst the dead had been Arnold Benham and his wife of less than a fortnight. Hugh could not now remember how or when he had learned for certain of their deaths. Nor could he recall at what point during those nightmare days Megan had left his side, vanishing, never to be seen again. There were jumbled images in his mind, a hint that he might have broken down in Megan’s room, wept and wailed, beaten his fists against the shabby walls, though he preferred to put that down to imagination, choosing to believe that Megan had not held him in her arms as they lay on her bed, that he had not sobbed into her red hair and felt that the world was ending. In his forties, Hugh was firmly convinced that he was a man incapable of extreme emotion.

  ‘It was such a shock, of course, when Titanic went down.’ Letitia’s voice seemed to come from a long way off, summoning Hugh back to the surface from his deep-buried memories. ‘One had assumed that man had conquered nature irrevocably; but the sea conquered Titanic, just as the Antarctic conquered poor Scott. Somehow, those events shook one’s belief in progress.’

  It shook my belief in me, thought Hugh, remembering how he had sat in the library at Overton, trying to make sense of the tragedy, looking for some sort of meaning in book after book until, reading the righteous polemics of his great-grandfather the Bishop of Chanderton, he had come to believe that he had killed his father by earning God’s wrath. He had sinned and now he was paying the price. He had even begun to wish that Megan O’Connor had never existed.

  ‘But of course, accidents do happen,’ Letitia continued, ‘and that is all they were, the sinking of Titanic and the death of Scott, accidents. Recriminating and laying blame gets one nowhere, though it was a favourite ploy of my father’s. If anything bad happened, it was always Divine retribution, according to him. I believe he even published some of his awful sermons, explaining his tendentious view that one always gets in life what one deserves, and that everything good is a sin, and that everything bad is retribution for it.’

  ‘There were some of his books in the library at Overton,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Those are books the Nazis could have burned and welcome.’

  Hugh looked up from his mug, unprepared for the vehemence of Letitia’s remark. Her face was set, her eyes sunken, she looked cadaverous in the electric light. Was she in pain, he wondered? Was she ill? Or was it merely the effects of the war, the disturbed nights, the constant fear?

  ‘For us, of course, Titanic had personal significance. Not as a spurious act of Divine vengeance, or a symbol of man’s frailty, but as a terrible accident, the tragic loss of three lives.’

  ‘Two lives,’ Hugh corrected. Letitia was abnormally vague tonight, he thought: another sign of age. ‘Father and my stepmother.’

  Letitia’s eyes slowly focusing on him. ‘Yes, of course. Two lives.’ She smiled.

  ‘At the point when he sailed for America,’ said Hugh at length, ‘I felt I was really getting to know my father for the first time. I was looking forward to us being a family, living in one house together: me, Father and my stepmother. Up until then I had always been under the impression that he was running away from me.’

  ‘It was not that. I just think he was never very sure of himself as a parent. He did not have a good relationship with his own father, and he was afraid of making the same mistakes with you.’

  ‘Why did he not get on with his father?’

  Letitia, going conveniently deaf again, did not answer. Instead, after a moment, she held up her ha
nd. ‘Listen. The all clear. We can at last retire with impunity.’

  But when Hugh did get back to bed, he found it difficult to get to sleep. He lay awake, twisting and turning, his mind a jumble of memories. When finally he drifted off, dawn was breaking outside and London was stirring after another night of pounding by the Luftwaffe.

  Chapter Three

  HUGH DEPARTED AFTER lunch to catch the train from Euston which would take him back to his hush-hush work in Buckinghamshire. Clearing away the lunch dishes, Letitia washed them and left them to drain. It was Mrs Mansell’s day off. Since May, when the war had started in earnest, the daily woman had become a four-times-a-week woman. Not that there was much that needed doing in the house now. Most of the rooms were closed off, the furniture covered with sheets, gathering dust and dead flies.

  As she pottered around the kitchen – polishing the cutlery and putting it away, wiping the table, sweeping the floor – Letitia gave herself a dressing down. She must learn to be more circumspect. Old age was no excuse for a loose tongue. She had kept her secrets all these years: now was not the time to start letting things slip. It was all very well to tell a complete stranger – that policeman yesterday, for instance – that one had hated one’s father, but when it came to one’s friends and relatives, one had to be more careful. Careless talk not only cost lives, it also led to awkward questions. Last night, Letitia said to herself, I very nearly told Hugh that his stepmother was carrying Arnold’s child when they embarked on Titanic that April day long ago. Perhaps Hugh ought to be told; perhaps they ought to have told him at the time, if indeed Arnold himself had known; but it was too late to bring it all up now. It would serve no purpose, merely open old wounds.

  Letitia sighed, putting away the broom and lowering herself slowly into a chair, pulling up her legs to prop them on another chair. A real secret, she thought, is one that is never told, one that is taken to the grave. All this deathbed confessing is so much bunkum. It is the coward’s way out, offloading one’s burdens onto the next generation. And there is always the possibility that, the confessing over and done with, death’s door would refuse to open. One would have to go on living, seeing the damage one had done. The very idea was intolerable. Unthinkable.