Further Associates of Sherlock Holmes Page 30
“She’s a good girl,” I protest. “She’s very able. She wants—” I pause, aware that Harriet’s ambitions are not mine to share with these terrible busybodies. “She wants to make the best of herself,” I finish rather feebly.
“But those people have their own place, you know,” Elizabeth says. Seeing my look, she quickly adds, “Of course I mean the houses down by the railway line. They don’t belong up here.”
Annabel is indignant. “You’re suggesting an elderly lady should trudge all the way over there to give lessons in some squalid terrace?”
“It’s not squalid,” I protest. “It’s a perfectly nice house.” But Harriet has no space there that is not shared with her brother and sisters; finding a quiet place for our tutorials would certainly be a challenge.
“Then let Miss Hebron correspond with her,” decides Miss Stokes, addressing Annabel as if she were my keeper, “or better still, donate to educational charities, rather than imperilling the value and security of other people’s property with her private projects.”
I am beginning to tire mightily of this conversation. “I can imagine no possible objection to my taking an interest in a young person, nor to my hosting a church picnic in my garden,” I say. “If we were speaking of the congregation of St Oswald’s, none of you would bat an eyelid. There is only one distinction I can see, and I object most strongly to it.”
“My dear Miss Hebron—” Miss Stokes begins in a superior tone, but my patience is exhausted.
I say, “Dear be damned! It’s because these people are the same colour I am—”
Then the front door slams, and a young voice calls out, “Sorry I early, Miss Lucy! Me mother doing her cleaning and she nah want—” It stops abruptly as its owner reaches the door to the drawing room. We all see a teenaged girl, very dark-skinned – a coal-black negress, if you like – with bright intelligent eyes and untamed hair. “I’m very sorry, Miss Hebron,” she says, switching immediately to correct English, though still accented, “I didn’t know you had visitors. Shall I come back later?”
“Not at all, Harriet,” I say. “Mrs Goodge and Miss Stokes were just leaving, weren’t you, ladies? Mrs Finch may stay if she pleases.”
* * *
I do not know how far, if at all, you interested yourself in my life after our fleeting encounter. To judge by Dr Watson’s account, you felt my stepfather’s case to be rather an embarrassment, and may well not have wished to follow it further. (I do wonder, though. You have been in my thoughts so often over the years – did I ever play any further part in yours? When Watson whispered “Norbury” in your ear, like a Roman slave reminding a triumphant general of his mortality, did you remember my laughing face, or only your own discomfiture?)
You may have learned, then, that I did not marry, nor embark on the career I wished for, which was that of a schoolmistress. Though I was academically able, my closest approach to employment was to supplement my generous allowance with intermittent tutoring. However polite they might have been, it seemed my parents’ compatriots were reluctant to entrust their children to a person of my complexion, whether as a teacher or a wife.
In the end my parents’ wealth meant I needed neither a job nor a husband. Since I was in truth a frivolous and unreliable young person, a good many schoolchildren – as well as a few young men – must have had a fortunate escape, but that is scarcely the point.
Instead I lived the life that had been offered to me, that of a socialite. I went to London frequently, for dinner parties and balls, concerts and exhibitions. I danced with young men and smiled at their jokes. I made small talk with young ladies and incurred their friendship. I learned to play whist and gin rummy, and to avoid speaking my mind or behaving spontaneously. Provided I took pains to fit in at all times, society knew my place and so did I.
I travelled, too. I saw the Pyramids and the Parthenon. I visited the northern United States, where a wealthy lady of my appearance was not so great a novelty. During the Great War I drove an ambulance in France.
It was during the war that my stepfather died.
* * *
Annabel stays only long enough to be introduced to Harriet and to powder her nose, before pleading an appointment elsewhere. (The bookmakers’ on the high street, if I know Annabel. She has been falling back into old habits since her younger son Gerald left home.)
She is polite to the girl, friendly even, but I sense a reserve, which is unlike her. I knew before today that she was pro-immigration, but the reality of this dark stranger with her peculiar speech may be more than she is prepared for. I remember, also, that the experience of being the only person of one’s race in a room is a novelty for most white people in Britain, and not a welcome one.
After Annabel leaves, Harriet proves herself as attentive a pupil as always, quick and intelligent. She has learned her latest set of Latin verb declensions with very few errors, and her conversational French continues to improve par excellence.
“Tu fais de grands progrès, Harriet,” I tell her, although in truth I have little idea of what the oral examiners will make of her accent. Passing her O levels will be challenge enough for her, and her ambitions beyond that are considerable.
Her aspiration, which I did not confide to my visitors earlier, is to study law at university and qualify for the bar. Quite why an immigrant child should settle on so specific and so grand an aim somewhat baffles me, but I admire her hugely for it. The obstacles to its attainment are obvious, but if any young woman I have met has the determination and persistence to surmount them, it is Harriet Youngblood. I first met her on one of my rare visits to her parents’ church, and mentioned that my father practised law in the United States, since when she has impressed on me the importance of her goal. I have done all in my power to assist her, although she has never yet asked me for money. I suppose we will cross that bridge when we come to it.
Now we arrange that Harriet and I will meet again the next morning; she says she needs some extra coaching in mathematics, and I agree to give it my best, though my recollections of the subject are somewhat hazy. In truth, I suspect that, as much as my teaching, she appreciates my company, or perhaps, given the size of her family, the imperfect solitude of conversing with one person, rather than with a crowd.
As soon as I am alone, I find myself worrying once more about Annabel. I wonder whether Maud Stokes’s unkind comments have unsettled her. She is, I know, feeling lonely and somewhat at a loose end in her sons’ absence, and it may be that the family home has become rather too large for her.
I should be sad if she felt she had to move elsewhere; she is the only one of my close neighbours whom I truly like. And I have lived in this house for so long I can no longer imagine moving away. Even when I was roaming the world, my home was always here.
I suppose that when I die, or move into a nursing home – I am still fit and healthy, but that cannot last forever – my house will be sold, to be broken up into flats or demolished. It is out of character for the street now, among all these smart modern houses, and it has no great architectural or historical value. Even those peculiar devotees of yours, who contact me occasionally to clarify details of your exploits, which I could not possibly know, have shown no interest in the house that you never even entered. (Did you know, one of them even asked me once for the address of your retirement home in Sussex, so that he could search the nearby parishes for your grave! It is undocumented, apparently – a holy grail for these enthusiasts. The foolish fellow imagined that in your final years you might have kept up an active correspondence with a child you met once during the 1880s. Can you imagine it?)
* * *
I am awoken, in the depths of the night, from a confused dream. It had me at a cocktail party, back in the twenties, where Maud Stokes had just thrown a champagne flute in anger at the young Louis Armstrong, with surprisingly loud results. In my befuddlement, it takes me some moments to understand that the crash of breaking glass was a real sound, and came from a window on the sam
e floor as my bedroom.
Some further furtive thumps and bangs assure me that someone is in the house.
To my shame, my courage fails me and I cower under the bedclothes – not daring even to cross my room and turn the key in the lock, remembering my mother and the terror of racial violence that arose so horribly in her old age. My earlier idle thoughts about the future now feel like a reckless invitation to fate.
I hear no more movement, but as I lie paralysed in panic I imagine someone – a thug, a burglar, an assassin – creeping silently towards my room, a gun or knife in his hand. I cringe, and try not to imagine how badly it will hurt.
* * *
My stepfather was not a combatant, of course; when the war broke out he was sixty-five. He died five minutes from home, run over by a brewer’s van while taking an awkward corner on his bicycle. I mourned him, of course, but when I returned from France I found that my mother had succumbed to a heartbreak that would break her down gradually, mentally and physically, over the next twenty years.
Towards the end of this prolonged decline, she would not leave the house, or on some days even her bedroom. She believed that we were both back in Atlanta; that a lynch mob had murdered my father (who in fact died of yellow fever – I have his death certificate still); and that they would come for us next, to kill her for her crime of miscegenation and myself for being its product. In her last years she refused even to open an envelope, for fear of messages from the Ku Klux Klan.
I stayed at home to care for her, of course – although it did occur to me from time to time that she had shown little of the same solicitude for my health, when I was an infant suffering the same ailment that killed my father. Her needs meant that the vistas of my youth shrank back to the landscape of my childhood. My friends of those days had left the area long since, and our new neighbours had no sense of Norbury as a place of its own, rather than an outflung limb of London.
When Mother died, I was not yet an old woman, but it became clear to me that it was only a matter of time. For a while I had hopes that I might travel again, but the last war put paid to that. My social round had settled into an endless cycle of bridge clubs, jumble sales and church coffee mornings.
* * *
“I heard the window break,” Annabel Finch tells me, settling a blanket around my shoulders as she bustles around my kitchen looking for the wherewithal to make hot, sweet tea.
Five minutes ago, as I lay in bed quavering in terror, I heard a hammering downstairs at the front door, and Annabel’s voice shouting, “Miss Hebron! Lucy! Are you all right in there?” When no sound of alarm or surprise came from outside my room, I finally realised that the intruder must have left already. I fled my bed and on shaking arms and legs I half-crawled down the stairs to let my neighbour in.
Now she continues with her own story as she hands me a small glass of the brandy she has found in my cupboard (more restorative than tea): “I was awake – insomnia, I suppose. I heard the noise. I looked out of my back window, and I saw a man climbing down your trellis. He had two others waiting for him in the garden. The buggers made off through my hedge! I’d left the side-gate unlocked, I’m afraid. I waited till I was sure they were gone, then I dashed round as quickly as I could. I thought he might have murdered you in your bed!”
“He didn’t come near my bed,” I murmur, sipping timidly at the warming liquid. I am not much of a drinker these days, except in the youthful parties of my dreams. “I heard the window too – it must have been in Mother’s dressing room.” That room faces onto the back garden, and is directly across the corridor from my own.
“We must look and see if anything’s been taken,” Annabel says. “Once you feel up to it, of course. What do you keep up there?”
“Oh, just some of her old jewellery,” I say vaguely, then I remember: “Oh!” I try to stand up, but my legs are not yet ready for such a pioneering venture. “Oh, but her locket! The one with Father’s photograph! It’s in a drawer up there. I don’t even keep it locked. Oh, I couldn’t bear to lose it! Oh, Annabel, go and check for me, please.”
“We’ll go together,” she says sternly, helping me to my feet. “You’ll need to see the room, so you can describe the state of it to the police. My impressions won’t be any good. I don’t know what it looks like normally.”
“Oh, I suppose so,” I agree, grateful for her clear thinking. With her support I climb the stairs.
It does not appear that the room has been ransacked. Of course the floor is showered with glass shards, glittering in the moonlight coming through the denuded window-frame, but everything else looks as it should. Only the drawer where I keep Mother’s jewellery is a little open. I stare anxiously while Annabel hurries about and eventually finds some heavy bath-towels, which she lays down between the door and the dresser. Gingerly I cross it, glass crunching beneath my feet like snow, and open the drawer.
My mother’s locket, the silver one with the cameo photograph of my handsome father, is gone. So great is my distress I barely notice that the rest of her jewellery – more obviously expensive, but with none of the locket’s value to me alone – is still in place.
“They’ve taken it?” asks Annabel from the doorway. “The bastards.”
“You said you saw them,” I say weakly. “What did they look like? Will you be able to tell the police?”
“Well, there were three of them, as I say.” She seems suddenly hesitant – reticent, even. “I didn’t get a good look at them in the moonlight, but from the way they ran I would think they were young men. Two were tall – one was slim, one had broad shoulders. The other one was shorter. I—” she stops abruptly.
“What else?” I ask.
“Oh, Lucy,” she says. “I didn’t see them clearly, but I can be sure of one thing. All three of them were black.”
* * *
During the years that followed the war, West Indians began to arrive in London.
I have never visited the Caribbean, and my earliest experiences of its émigrés were not promising. Every few months, some young Jamaican or Trinidadian or Barbadian man, come to London to make a living by honest work or otherwise, would come to hear that there was a rich old coloured lady living in Norbury, and would turn up on my doorstep with a carefully prepared tale of woe – asking either for money that I was disinclined to offer him, or a job that I was in no position to. I turned them away politely; if they persisted, I shut the door in their faces, and on one occasion even called the police.
Later, though, when others like those young men had established themselves, and begun to bring their sweethearts, sisters, mothers, aunts and nieces to join them, and these immigrant families began to congregate in particular parts of London – when, in short, the coloured population ceased being a loose scattering of individuals and became small villages within the patchwork of our capital – then I began to introduce myself, cautiously, to those who lived nearby, and to extend such offers of help as I was willing to make.
It is not that I feel especial spiritual affinity with the newcomers. Though American-born with African ancestry, I have been English since I was a little child, and Caribbean culture has little attraction for me. Weak tea, not spiced rum, flows in my veins. There is no mystical quintessence of “blackness” that I share with these people: that is nothing but the segregationists’ view in a more insinuating guise.
Among them I can be myself: a self neither “English” nor “American”, nor “black” or “coloured”, but simply Lucy – Miss Lucy Hebron.
Among them, I can set aside my second mask.
* * *
Harriet arrives the next morning just as Annabel and I have finished giving our statements to Detective Inspector Critchley of the Metropolitan Police. If her family had a telephone I could have warned her not to come, but their only link to the exchange is a telephone box at the end of their street.
“What’s happened, Miss Hebron?” Harriet asks me with great interest, speaking careful English in deference to the
other people present. “I saw a policeman outside in the road.” She looks cautious, yet also excited, as well a budding lawyer might on finding herself at the scene of a crime. “Has there been a break-in? Are you all right?”
“Ah. Harriet Youngblood, I presume,” the detective inspector says. His tone is not a sympathetic one. “Miss Hebron has been telling me about you.”
It was Annabel who first mentioned the poor girl, of course, impelled by her conscience when DI Critchley, noting her description of the burglars, eyed me cautiously and asked how common it was for other coloured people to call at this house.
Harriet looks mildly alarmed, so I do my best to reassure her: “I’ve told him we’re friends, and that I’ve been tutoring you. He was asking about the visitors I have here, so he can eliminate them from his enquiries. I’m afraid there has been a break-in, dear, yes. Some of my mother’s jewellery was stolen, but I’m quite all right.”
“Oh, good. Hello, Mrs Finch.” Harriet waves hello to Annabel, who gives her a weak smile. “I guess we won’t be doing any maths this morning, then. But I can stay if you’d like.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I tell her. I have just seen the self-satisfied expression on DI Critchley’s face.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Critchley says pompously. “You’ve got some questions to answer, miss.”
“Me?” Harriet looks indignant at first, then scared. “What questions?” Her accent is suddenly far more pronounced. I feel faintly sick.
“The young men who broke in here last night knew exactly what they was looking for,” Critchley tells her sternly. “They knew what room a certain item was in, and even what drawer. That room’s right next to the lavatory on the first floor. I expect you let her use the lavatory here, don’t you, Miss Hebron?”
“Of course I ‘let’ her,” I say indignantly. “Why ever wouldn’t I?” He studiously fails to meet my glare. “What on earth do you mean by this, Inspector?” I demand, although I can guess all too well.