The Crimson Rooms (4 page)

“Please open the door,” I said.

“She’s not fit to be let out, I warn you.”

“I cannot speak to a client through bars.”

“On your head be it.”

When the door was thrown open, Leah Marchant stared at me for a moment. I tried to smile into her eyes, to offer my hand as Breen would have done, but too late I sensed her implacable rage. Springing forward with a kind of grinding roar, she fell on me with such force that I was driven back against the jailer and felt the full weight of her chest on mine and the flailing of her muscular arms across my head and shoulders. She tore at my jacket collar, then my hat, which went flying despite the pin, allowing her to grab a fistful of hair so that I yelped with pain. Her breath was damp and fumy with alcohol. “Fuck off. Fuck off an’ all. Give me my fuckin’ baby. Where is he now? Give him back, you whore. An’t you got no babies of your own?”

The noise in so confined a space was ear-piercing; the woman clung like a cat, and I ducked my head just in time to avoid her fingernails, which fortunately scraped my cheek rather than my eye. I was rescued by the jailer, who tore her off me and dumped her back in the cell. “Maybe come back later when she’s calmed down,” he said. “Or fetch Mr. Breen. She insisted she would only see Mr. Breen. It’s probably because you’re a lady.”

“Did she say how she knew Mr. Breen?” I fumbled in my briefcase for a handkerchief to staunch a trickle of blood.

“Met him once years ago when she was charring for some couple in Marylebone. He was a regular visitor to the house, and kind to her. She’s never forgotten his name, apparently. Begged us to have him fetched here.”

I sat bolt upright on a bench, prodded a strand of hair back into its coil, put my hat on, and pressed the handkerchief to my torn cheek. My first battle wound, I thought grimly.

The jailer disappeared, so I was alone with the locked door separating me from the woman in the cell, her fury palpating through the walls. After ten minutes or so, it was still quiet on the other side of the door, so I went to the jailer and asked if I might approach Leah Marchant again. When we peeked through the wicket, she was sitting on the bed with her head in her hands. “I am here to help you, Mrs. Marchant,” I called. “The police asked me to come. I am a lawyer. I work with Mr. Breen.”

“I don’t want you. I want Mr. Breen.”

“Mr. Breen is away, I’m afraid. He’ll be back tomorrow. So can I help until then?”

“Fuck off. I don’t need no ’elp. I want my baby.”

“
Your
baby? But you are charged with kidnapping.”

“My baby. My baby. Mine. Mine,” she sobbed.

“Mrs. Marchant, if you would only calm down and tell me . . .”

“Don’t tell me to be calm. I won’t be calm no more.”

“I am here to listen. I’ll not go away until you’ve told me the whole story.”

“I’m not tellin’ you nothing.”

“Very well. But I shall sit here and wait, nonetheless.”

I seemed to have won the jailer over, because a few minutes later he set a tray on the bench beside me and handed me a sheaf of papers. “A sup of tea might soften her up,” he said. “It’s a terrible case. They’ve brought down the notes at last. Her own baby. It was put with a foster mother and she couldn’t get it back by legal means so she snatched it while it was left outside a butcher’s. Bet you’ve never come across anything like this before.”

So I read the notes and sipped my tea. Then I called through the wicket: “Mrs. Marchant. Please let me help you.”

This time she said nothing at all, so the jailer opened the door and passed in an enamel mug of tea. I then sat beside her on the bed while he leaned on the door frame. “I gather that Charlie is your own baby, Mrs. Marchant, who has been placed with a foster mother. And your two daughters are in a children’s home, is that right?” She took a slurp of tea and ran the back of her hand across her eyes. “Can you tell me why the children are in a home, Mrs. Marchant?”

“Because I took them there. I used to pass it when I worked the buses and I thought it looked like a kind place. I had nothing to give them to eat. I’d borrowed till I couldn’t borrow no more. I thought if I gave them up for a bit, I could get work. Nights. Anything.”

“Is your husband alive, Mrs. Marchant?”

Mirthless laugh. “Gone to sea.”

“Does he send you money?”

This, apparently, was an inappropriate question. The mug went flying across the cell, hit the wall, ricocheted against Mrs. Marchant’s foot, and was given a kick for good measure.

I sprang up; the jailer picked up the mug, ushered me out, and slammed the door behind us. “That’s quite enough for one day,” he said.

I
t was six-thirty before I
reached home in Clivedon Hall Gardens, but my step slowed when I came to our railings where the Monday smell of reheated roast crept up from the basement. As on every other evening, I climbed the steps reluctantly and my hand faltered as I inserted the key in the lock. And yes, here it came, the familiar tremor of apprehension because now, as always, would begin the series of events that had brought the telegram telling us James was dead.

On November 21, 1917, I arrived home
just after half past seven, chilled by freezing smog and sore-eyed from too much close reading at the censorship office. I stuffed my gloves in a pocket, hung my hat and coat on the stand, gave James’s panama a flick for good luck, and threw open the drawing room door. Grandmother urged me to sit by the fire and Mother poured tea as they plied me with questions about my journey and workmates, taking care not to delve further; my task of reading hundreds of postcards a day was grindingly humdrum but they were impressed because it was top secret. Mother said she had been busy at the church hall, packing relief parcels for war widows and orphans. She was wearing a gauzy evening blouse under a long, bottle-green cardigan knitted by Grandmother, whose sight was much better in those days, and fastened at the bosom by two iridescent mother-of-pearl buttons.

We were fragile still from the news a month ago that James had been injured, and we treated each other with great care as if we were all convalescing from a dangerous illness. There was a slight air of self-congratulation among us, because we had come safely through a crisis and thought we had behaved well. At one point, we’d been informed that James’s injuries were so severe he would be sent home, then that he was being treated in a military hospital and would soon return to the front. All in all, it has been a tumultuous time, but we had ended by convincing ourselves that he was now immune from harm. Surely nobody could have two brushes with death in quick succession?

I leaned toward the fire, took hold of the toasting fork, and wondered if it was too near supper to ring for a couple of slices of bread. My mouth watered at the prospect of buttered toast. There was a knock on the front door.

I threw down the fork and crossed the drawing room, calling over my shoulder: “I suspect it’s Father, forgotten his key. How many times must we tell him the girls hate being disturbed when they’re in the midst of mashing potatoes . . . ?” Then I was in the hall, my hand was on the latch, and, all unsuspecting, I threw open the door.

The telegram was succeeded, a couple of weeks later, by a letter from James’s company commander: . . .
sad duty to give you details of how Captain Gifford died . . . climbed from the trench in full view of enemy snipers in order to rescue one of his men trapped in deep mud . . . exceptional courage . . . Mentioned in dispatches . . .

I was not satisfied. The picture was too vague, the choice James had made too extreme. In my mind, I roamed across a sea of mud searching for him, unconvinced that he was dead.

I wrote letters to everyone I could think of, and in the end got the truth from an officer friend of James, invalided home after Christmas.
The story I heard was that one of Gifford’s men, or rather a boy not yet eighteen, had been wounded on no-man’s-land and was crying out. It was a frosty night and therefore murderously clear, but in the end Gifford simply climbed out of the trench and clambered the hundred yards or so to the boy. Miss Gifford, you ask me specifically about his injuries, you tell me not to spare you. He lost an eye and was severely wounded in the right shoulder. He was still alive when they finally reached him the next night, and died when they tried to move him.

Night after night, after reading the letter, I stood in the fusty gloom of the dugout, listened to the boy crying in the mud, and tried to fathom my brother’s decision to step outside and die. What absurd, feckless, reprehensible courage. I used every possible argument to change his mind but out he went time after time, under a clear sky. Try as I might, I could not preserve him.

When I showed the letter to my father, he said we should keep the details to ourselves. Meanwhile, Grandmother shrank into a corner of the sofa and knitted sock after sock, Mother took to her bed, Father the bottle, and I continued as usual. But two months after James’s death, on the last Sunday of January, I found myself with an unexpected opportunity to be alone. The girls were to spend the afternoon with an ancient aunt in Tooting, and we had been invited to lunch with Prudence, who at that time was still living in Buckinghamshire. As soon as the trip was mooted, I knew I wouldn’t go (“Mother, I’m under the weather. Please explain to Father. The time of the month . . .”), even though I had an inkling of what would happen once the house was empty.

And how right I was. The instant they’d driven away and I had closed the front door, the absolute quiet surged back and I was alone with James’s hat and summer blazer. Limp as a puppet, I waited to be engulfed.

I was seized by anguish that twisted my guts so that I choked and retched and slumped down to the brick-red and yellow tiles of the hall floor, voiceless and gaping. The only words that formed in my mind were, I want him back. I saw him, instead of the smart youth of the photographs, lying in a swamp of gore and mud with his shoulder blown off and an eyeball hanging from its bloody socket.

When I got up at last to wash my face, I was a hundred years old.

But by the time my parents and grandmother came back, I was composed. Rose served us hot milk, which we drank together before bed (Father’s laced with a stiff whiskey). They reported that Prudence’s hens weren’t laying, presumably the time of year, and that her cottage was always ridiculously chilly, because though Father ensured she was well provided for, she
would not
spend money on creature comforts (this from Mother). I sipped my milk, jolted by an occasional shuddering breath, and realized with an unexpected pang of regret that my opportunity for mourning was over.

Those memories never went away:
each time I returned to the house, back they all came, the toasting fork, the telegram, the frantic letter-writing, the prostration on the hall floor. But on the evening after Meredith’s arrival and the interview with Leah Marchant, I was distracted the instant I stepped through the front door, because a well-traveled trunk had arrived, along with various other items of luggage stacked in front of the potted fern, including a hatbox with racy stripes. Even before I’d removed my hat, Mother shot out of the drawing room, gripped me by the wrist, ushered me inside, and closed the door.