The Scarlet Sisters Page 4

  As Charlie got up to make his speech, he suddenly felt quite emotional and unusually nervous. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, today is the twentieth of October. Of course this is my wedding day, but it is also my twenty-first birthday. It seems strangely fitting that I should be getting both the key to the door and the key to my wife.’

  Most of them laughed.

  ‘I want to say thank you, not just to Clara for doing me the honour of becoming my wife – and very beautiful she is too’ – at which point a chorus of ‘Hear, hear’ broke out –‘but I also want to thank you all. Because you have become my family, not just by marriage but long before that, from the day I first came to Lant Street. I arrived somewhat in disgrace, and I shan’t dwell on that. But I was lucky – I had another chance. And it was all of you, but especially your father, Alexander, may his soul rest in peace’ – here there were murmurs of agreement – ‘who took me in. You always made me feel welcome and you became my family. Today has just made it official.’

  At which there were more murmurs of agreement. Except for Sarah, who just stared at her plate.

  ‘I can never repay this second chance you gave me, but I do hope to prove your trust and love was not misplaced. I am going to look after Clara and be a good husband to her. And on that matter I want to announce that I have a new job. Chief engineer of the Wethered’s brewery in Marlow. Clara and I are going to live by the River Thames!’

  There was a collective gasp and then loud cheers from various family members. Clara’s sisters came over and kissed her. It was indeed a great opportunity for Charlie and Clara. A new start.

  When I found the record of Alexander’s death in the workhouse I could have shouted, ‘Eureka!’ Had I stumbled across the Original Sin?

  Like Eve biting into that apple in the Garden of Eden, Alexander’s downfall put Clara in jeopardy, and a train of repetition was put in motion: his female descendants thereafter condemned to a life of searching the world for a man to rescue them.

  I chuckle at my own melodrama, and yet—?

  In the dark of the night, with my three daughters tucked up, safely sleeping upstairs, I sit at my desk with my fire on, just the desk lamp illuminating the beautiful, appropriately Victorian room which is my study, and I start to plot a pattern – well, not really a pattern – a spiral that goes down. I see fathers who, through their own actions or an act of fate, are catastrophically absent for their daughters, who are then rescued by a hero: Charlie rescued Clara, and my grandfather rescued Nanna, and then my father rescued my mother, and then when my father left my mother, I suddenly looked at my boyfriend with new eyes.

  And it really was like that. I remember it. We were just having fun, but when everything crashed he seemed like a rock. He went up in my estimation. That was the point when I started to take him seriously. And I used to tell people this, like it was a good thing.

  But now it doesn’t seem such a good thing at all. Now I think I entered into my marriage needing rather than wanting him. I didn’t know that at the time, and I felt like I loved him – I didn’t walk down the aisle under false pretences, just with a sense of unease. The first time he proposed I said no. Straight off, just like that. It was nothing rational; it was my deep intuitive, instinctive response. But I wasn’t strong enough to walk away.

  I am filled with compassion for Clara. She had no choice. But I did have a choice. I was not a second-class citizen, I did not need a hero. I had the means to be my own hero, the heroine, in fact, of my own story, and I wonder why, at that crucial moment, I didn’t have the courage to follow my instinct.

  Because marrying a ‘hero’ is a risky way out of a crisis: in the end, you are still dependent on someone else – in a way, you might just have jumped from the father’s frying pan into the marital fire. Even the hero has a shadow, and perhaps the greater the capacity to be heroic, the greater the capacity to be destructive.

  Because another thing Clara was clear on was exactly the moment her marriage started to go wrong, and Charlie Swain the hero turned back into Charlie Swain, the black sheep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Crippler

  Charlie Junior, Alice and Grace

  I am staring at a photograph on my desk of three children. Its faded sepia tones can’t hide the look of mischief in the eldest girl’s face as she peers through the bow covering half her head, at someone standing to the right of the camera. Maybe it’s her mother, Clara. ‘There’s trouble,’ I think. She makes me smile and I know without needing to read the inscription on the back that this is my great-aunt, Alice, the eldest of the Scarlet Sisters, Charlie Swain and Clara Crisp’s children. I can’t see the face of their second daughter, Grace. She’s looking down at a book on Alice’s lap. But I can see her beautiful, shiny, thick ringlets, pinned back from her face by two huge bows. I wish the photo had been in colour so I could see the famous chestnut shade of her hair. Both girls are dressed beautifully, as I would expect from Swains about to have their photo taken: big, fluffy, white dresses with many layers, and an overkill of lace and embroidery. I know what nimble seamstresses the Scarlet Sisters were, and I wonder whether they inherited their talent from Clara. They certainly don’t look poor – they’ve all got beautiful ankle boots with buttons up the side.

  But the person I study longest is the boy, Charlie, who was named after his father. With his chin on his fist and his mouth turning down at the edges, Charlie looks a bit cheesed off, as if he’d rather be running around outside. He’s got a big moonface like my nanna and what looks like sandy hair. I turn over the photo and read the inscription. It says: ‘Charlie, Alice, Grace 1910’ and I feel a chill.

  It’s the date – 1910. Now the photo has taken on a whole new significance.

  It was a warm, sunny day at the height of the particularly languid summer of 1910. Three children were trying, and largely failing, to spin their hoops along the towpath by the banks of the River Thames in Marlow. It was not an obvious location choice for chasing hoops – the wider, flatter street outside their house in Station Road would have been better. But nine-year-old Alice Swain had fallen foul of their neighbour and local busybody, Mrs Dossett, and was still smarting from the clipped ear she got for playing ‘Knock Down Ginger’. This was a popular pastime for bored Edwardian children and involved knocking on a neighbour’s door and then running away. Being Charlie Swain’s daughter, Alice could never resist a wager, and when Johnnie Best bet her she couldn’t do it to the ‘Old Dossett Dragon’, she had been put in an impossible position. Nor was she helped by the fact that when Mrs Dossett went to answer the door and found no one there except the hem of a gingham smock poking out from behind her front wall, and then chased the gingham smock down the street, Mrs Dossett’s currant buns were left too long in the oven and burned. All of which meant Alice got an extra blow from the belt of her mother when she got home.

  So now Alice had taken her little sister, Grace, and the baby of the family, Charlie, down to the banks of the River Thames and out of harm’s way – or so she thought.

  ‘Oi, Charlie, look out, yer great lump!’

  Charlie was standing right on the edge of the bank, peering over at the perilous eddies which swirled around where the water plunged over the top of the weir. But the sound of the rushing water at Marlow lock swallowed Alice’s shouts, so she threw down her hoop in frustration and ran over to where five-year-old Charlie was teetering on the brink, as if mesmerised by the whirlpools. Alice had a vision of him tumbling into the water, ginger head first, his loose shirt all untucked, button-up boots following the knee britches that she’d watched her mother make with such pride.

  Charlie was blessed with his elder namesake’s ginger hair, freckles and fair skin; his sisters, however, were a little darker: Alice did have strawberry-blonde hair, but her skin was more golden, while Grace, like her mother, Clara, had been blessed with the most extraordinary mop of chestnut ringlets, which today were elaborately tied up in big floppy lilac ribbons. Only a month into the school holidays,
her skin had already turned the colour of toast on a grate.

  Alice’s stomach lurched. Sometimes there were advantages to being the eldest, but today the responsibility was making her feel ill. In a family that only seemed to produce girls, the only son was treated like they’d found the needle in the haystack.

  She pulled Charlie back from the edge and pinched his arm. ‘You great nincompoop! What are you doing? Do you want to get me thrashed?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  Charlie gazed back at her with glazed eyes. She pinched him harder, but for once he didn’t hit her back.

  ‘Is ’e all right?’ Alice’s sister, Grace, had trotted over and was peering at him too.

  Charlie’s eyes were rolling slightly. Despite the hot day, his pale, greyish face was reminding Alice of the trout she’d seen pulled out of the river, and he was sweaty.

  ‘Dunno. It’s like he’s gone all balmy on the crumpet.’

  The sisters looked at each other and giggled. They were both aware of the comical effect of too much drink. Their father, Charlie Swain, had a habit of crashing into their bedroom after a long night in the Two Brewers, collapsing on the bed and proceeding to tell them all, but particularly his son, how much he loved them.

  ‘Maybe he’s had too much sun?’ Grace was only seven, but she was already practical.

  ‘Yeah. Crikey, I’m hot.’ Alice mopped her brow and, in a movement her mother would not have approved of, undid the sash around her waist, dropped it on the ground, picked up the hem of her pretty smock, and vigorously waved it up and down in an attempt to cool down.

  ‘Alice, don’t! I can see your drawers!’

  ‘Keep your wig on! No one can see.’

  ‘I can and that’s enough.’

  ‘Stop cheeking me, Gracie. Respect your elders.’

  At which point Charlie, who’d been forgotten in the frequent, small-scale warfare between the sisters, collapsed to the ground.

  Alice squealed. ‘Oh, lordy! Charlie!’

  Grace snatched up Alice’s sash, dipped it into the river, and put it on his brow. But Charlie still didn’t wake. His eyes were rolling and he’d gone all limp.

  ‘Quick, go and fetch Mum. ‘E’s not right,’ Grace pleaded with her sister.

  Alice set off at a pace to the shop just off Marlow High Street that her mother owned.

  A hundred years ago, it was a badge of pride to be able to stay at home and dedicate yourself to being a wife and a mother – a signal to the world that your husband (and, by marrying him, you) had made it. But Clara was not like most women. She had experienced the shame of a family running out of money and she was quietly determined to do everything possible not to find herself in that position. And so, despite the fact that Charlie was doing well at the brewery, she had taken on extra baking and needlework and saved up enough money to take a lease out on a small shop around the corner from their house. Darn It! was her pride and joy. As well as basic needles and thread, she had filled it with beautiful ribbons, unusual fabrics and knobbly wools. It was a shrewd move. Marlow’s high street did not yet have a department store, and most women still made their family’s clothes. Clara had a steady stream popping in to make little purchases. As she walked around the town she got a sense of deep satisfaction when she spotted people wearing the distinctive fabric and ribbons from her shop.

  Alice flung open the shop door, making the bell ring urgently. ‘Mum! Quick! Charlie ain’t right. He’s lying on the ground and we can’t get ’im up.’

  ‘What? What have ya done?’

  ‘I ain’t done nothing. Honest. One minute ’e was up, next ’e was down. Please come quick.’

  Luckily no one was in the shop, so Clara tore off her apron and hurried out after her daughter.

  By the time she reached the river, Grace’s ministrations with the sash seemed to be working. Charlie was still lying on the ground, but he was awake.

  ‘Charlie, what’s the matter?’

  Charlie looked dazedly at Clara and mumbled, ‘I wanna go home.’

  She felt his forehead. He was hot and clammy.

  ‘Yes, love. Let’s get you home.’ Clara was short but strong. She picked her son up and carried him the quarter of a mile down the road, Grace and Alice trotting behind in a sombre silence. Every so often she’d bump into a neighbour or a customer: ‘Ohhh, little Charlie don’t look too good.’

  ‘No. Just getting him home, Mrs Waites,’ she would reply, a fixed smile on her face.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’

  ‘Just a bit hot.’

  She hoped Charlie was just a bit hot. A visit from the doctor cost the equivalent of a day’s wages.

  As she turned the corner to Station Road, old Mrs Cadwallander stopped scrubbing her doorstep and looked up. ‘All right, Mrs Swain?’

  ‘Yes, he’s just got a bit hot.’

  ‘It’s that red hair of his. Pity he took after his father, eh?’

  Clara ignored this comment and quickly opened their front door and shut it behind her. Her reluctance to join the street gossips and persistence in getting her own shop, not to mention the fact that she came from ‘that London’, had not endeared her to the female community.

  Charlie spent the next couple of days in a made-up bed in the front room. He seemed to have the ’flu. Clara went to the chemist and bought him some Beechams Powders and left him in the care of his squabbling sisters but, back in the shop, she had to work hard to keep a smile on her face for the customers.

  It didn’t matter how much she told herself Charlie only had the ’flu, Clara had a very strong feeling that she wanted to be back in the house watching over him, as if just by being there the sheer force of motherly love could fight the image of the Grim Reaper that insisted on appearing in her mind.

  Over the next few days, Charlie would seem to be on the mend and Clara’s world would be all right again, but then he would worsen and that feeling of dread would come back.

  ‘The house is so quiet. It’s horrible,’ Charlie Senior said when he came back home from the brewery. He kept catching sight of the small wooden train engine he’d made his son for Christmas lying abandoned in the corner of the kitchen. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it – you spend your whole time telling him to shut up, and then when he’s not here it’s too quiet.’

  Clara nodded. Having a son had made a disproportionate impact on the noise level in the house.

  ‘Let me take the poor mite his supper.’ Before she knew it, Charlie had taken the tray she was preparing and was heading off to see his son in the front room.

  On the third day, Clara managed to persuade Charlie Junior to get off the sofa. He swung his legs round and tried to stand up but as he took a step, he buckled over and collapsed.

  ‘What’s the matter? Lost the use of your legs?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mum. I can’t feel nuffin’ in me leg.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Charlie started to sniffle.

  ‘Come on, Charlie. You’ve just not used them for a while. Let’s ’ave another go.’ Clara picked him up and held his arm. She noticed that his baby fat had all disappeared. It was like holding on to a twig. ‘Come on now. There we go.’

  Charlie took a little step with his left leg.

  ‘If you don’t use them, you lose them,’ she said and then wished she hadn’t. He couldn’t move his right leg, and she had to stop him from falling over again. She moved it for him, but it seemed to have no strength.

  ‘Dear Lord, he’s like a stuffed toy without any filling,’ she thought.

  ‘Mum, I can’t.’ He sniffed again. ‘I feel real dizzy and my head … it’s got a hammer in it.’

  ‘All right, let’s get you back to bed.’

  Clara kissed the top of his sandy head and gently lifted him back onto the sofa. As she tucked him up, he closed his eyes and seemed to sink into an exhausted sleep.

  Clara sat beside him and stroked his forehead. The Crisps had
never been a religious family but at this point she found herself saying a prayer, and surprised herself with the words that came tumbling out:

  ‘Dear Lord, I know I have been greedy. I have wanted too much. I have been too proud. But please, please save my son. Make him better. Let him walk again.’

  Then she started whispering in Charlie’s ear: ‘Charlie, you need to get well. There is so much for you here – running on the grass, climbing the trees, all your little friends and your sisters … I know they’re a bit bossy, but they love you. Come on, son, for your dad. You make his world go around.’ Then she heard her daughters fly in the front door, fresh from playing, all a-clatter. She quickly wiped her tears and hurried out to prepare tea.

  Although Clara put on a brave face, Alice and Grace watched anxiously as she dropped the pan; and they rolled their eyes at each other when they tasted her stew. Normally it was delicious; today it was awful. There was a battle going on: Clara’s head was telling her it was just ’flu, and her intuition was telling her it wasn’t.

  Her sense of panic had got so acute that when Clara opened the door to the front room after tea, she half expected to find Charlie dead. What she found was an alive Charlie, but not in a condition that put her mind at ease: he was unconscious, sweaty, and lying rather stiffly on the couch. His soaking hair had lost its ginger sheen and looked almost black, his skin a corpse-like grey. He seemed shrunken. But it was his raspy, irregular breathing that sent Clara shouting: ‘Quick, Alice, go and fetch Dr Pincus! Tell him he needs to get here right away.’

  Stunned, Alice hesitated at the threshold.

  ‘Just go!’ Clara yelled.

  Alice had never heard her mother shout like that before. She fled.

  Half an hour later, Dr Pincus was in the Swains’ front room, examining Charlie Junior closely. He asked Charlie to move his legs or his arms, but by this time the little boy was beyond taking instructions. He couldn’t seem to bend his neck and was moaning as if he was in pain. After five minutes examining him, Dr Pincus shook his head and said, ‘Mrs Swain, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I think we need to get young Charlie to hospital. We need to check that he hasn’t contracted something called polio. Have you heard of it?’