“I’ll do that, Dory.” Doreen’s sister stepped forward.
“No, you sit down, Ada, you need to take the weight off.”
Doreen Beale busied herself at the stove, stoking the fire. She was about to pick up the coal scuttle when Billy stepped forward.
“No you don’t. I’ll do that.”
“Billy, I can do it! Now then”—she snatched back the coal scuttle—“you talk to Miss Dobbs. It’s very kind of her to call.”
Maisie remembered the days that followed her mother’s death, days when father and daughter could barely speak to each other. They kept busy, both of them going about their daily round without talking about their loss, avoiding contact because neither could bear to see despair feasting upon the other. And it had taken years to heal the wounds of the soul that mourning had visited upon them.
“We went back to the ’ospital yesterday evening, early-ish. Turns out she’d taken a turn for the worse, so we went in to see the poor little mite—there was nothing of ’er, Miss. Poor little scrap.” Billy paused and reached for the cold tea, just as Doreen turned to pick up his cup. She nodded for him to continue talking as she took the cup and washed it in the sink. The air in the kitchen was smoke-filled and stale, steam from a kettle adding to the damp discomfort. “The doctor was there, and the nurses, and they tried to make us leave, but we wouldn’t go. ’ow can they expect you to leave when it’s your own flesh and blood lying there?”
Maisie whispered thanks to Doreen as cups of fresh tea were set on the table, and she patted the chair so that Billy’s wife would sit down again. Ada remained seated next to the fire, silently rubbing her swollen belly.
Billy continued. “Seemed to go on for ’ours, the waiting, but it was—can’t remember the time now, to tell you the truth—”
“Eleven. It was eleven o’clock. I remember looking up at the clock,” Doreen interjected as she stirred her tea, and then continued stirring without stopping to drink.
“Anyway, at eleven o’clock, the nurse comes to get us, and when we got to the ward, the doctor told us she was on ’er last. That there was nothing more that could be done.” He choked, putting his hand to his mouth and closing his eyes.
They remained in silence for some moments, then Doreen sat up straight. “We just stayed there, Miss Dobbs. They let me hold her until she was gone. I reckon I won’t forget that, you know, that they let us in to hold her, so that she didn’t go alone.” She paused, then looked at Maisie. “They said she never would’ve known anything, at the end. They said she wasn’t in pain. Do you think she knew, Miss Dobbs? You were a nurse, do you think she knew we’d come, that we were there?”
Maisie reached for Doreen’s hands, looked at Billy, then his wife. “Yes, she knew. I know she knew.” She paused, searching for the words that would say something of what she had come to feel, to know, when in the presence of death. “I used to believe, in the war, that when someone dies, it’s as if they’ve shed a thick woolen coat that has become too heavy. The weight those men released was a result of wounds caused by guns, by shells, by terrible things the dying had seen. Lizzie’s weight was a disease that was stronger than her body, and even though the doctors did everything they could to help her overcome the attack, the fight was too much for her.” Maisie’s voice cracked. “So, you see, I believe she knew you were there, that you’d come to hold her as she took off that heavy coat. Yes, she knew you’d come. And then her little spirit was free of the struggle and she slipped away.”
Doreen turned to her husband, who knelt down beside her. They clutched each other, weeping together, as Maisie quietly stood up, signaled to Ada that she was leaving and stepped lightly along the corridor to the front door. She turned to Ada as she opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement.
“Tell Billy not to come to work until he’s ready.”
“All right, Miss Dobbs.”
“Has your husband found a job yet?”
She shook her head. “No, though he thinks he might get some work down on the docks at the end of the week. Mind you, what with the unions…”
Maisie nodded. “When will Lizzie be laid to rest?”
“Not for a few days yet, might even be over a week, what with one thing and another.”
“Please send word to me. And if you need anything…” Maisie handed her a calling card.
“Right you are, miss. You’ve been good to Billy and our Doreen. They’re lucky he’s in work.”
Maisie smiled, then said good-bye. She left the East End with her hands firmly on the steering wheel, her attention on the road, her eyes smarting. But instead of going directly to Fitzroy Square, she was compelled to make her way toward the Embankment, where she parked the MG and walked down to the water. She leaned on the wall and watched the Thames, an even deeper gray today as it reflected clouds overhead. The damp smog had barely lifted and Maisie pulled up the collar of her mackintosh and rewrapped the scarf around her neck. She closed her eyes and remembered Lizzie Beale, felt her head in the crook of her neck when she had taken her in her arms on the day that Doreen had come to the office last year, her worries, then, about Billy. Maisie folded her arms around her body, felt herself fighting the tears that she knew would come, as she pushed back from the abyss that might draw her in all too quickly if she succumbed once again.
She stood watching over the water for some moments longer, then turned to walk back to her motor car. That Billy and Doreen had reached out to each other gave succor to her aching heart, and she found herself wondering about Emma and Piers Bassington-Hope. Had Nick’s mother and father turned to each other upon hearing of his death? The character of an artist suggested an ability to demonstrate emotion and that both were artists supported an assumption that they had readily shared the joy and heartache that comes with bringing up a family. But in terms of the heart, what if they were mired in the behavior of their parents before them and given to sheltering their innermost feelings from each other? Was that why Emma had broken down in Maisie’s company, searching for the arms of a complete stranger to comfort her? If that were true, and the Bassington-Hopes had created a wall of silence between them regarding the loss of their son, then the weight of their bereavement must be intolerable, especially given that their daughter had cast suspicion on the circumstances of his death.
SLUMPING DOWN IN her office armchair, Maisie looked at the cold, damp weather outside and felt a wave of fatigue wash over her. Yes, it was still early days. If Maurice were with her, she knew she would be admonished for pressing on so soon following her recovery. She leaned over to ignite the gas fire, then reached into her old black document case for her diary. Flicking through the pages, she reconsidered her week. Georgina Bassington-Hope was paying her handsomely to compile a report in which she would list evidence that either supported the fact that her brother was killed in an accident of his own causing or that he died as a result of a deliberate act by another. Knowing that few outcomes were a case of black-and-white, a case of guilty or not guilty, Maisie allowed that the artist’s death might well have been an accident, with the actions of another being the cause. And it was possible that fear of the consequences kept that person from coming forward. There again, Nick Bassington-Hope’s death might well have been premeditated murder, which begged the question as to whether such an intention was connected with the seedy element that Harry—always on the edge, Harry—had taken up with. Or, if it was murder, what if it had nothing to do with Harry’s activities and everything to do with Nick’s connections or his work?
His work. Maisie pondered Nick Bassington-Hope’s work, from those early days at the Slade, then in Belgium, to the graphic depictions of patriotism evident in the propaganda he developed for the Office of Information. Instinct told her she had barely seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of his war paintings, and from what she had been told, Nick had almost made it his business to upset people since he returned to France as a war artist. Had America really saved his soul? Or had the fire in his mind been only temporarily tempered by the grandeur of a natural environment that clearly captivated him? Was Randolph Bradley correct, when he suggested that, in the piece that was missing, Nick was laying the war to rest? Had the path he’d taken placed another relationship at risk? Maisie knew that when people changed, when something conspired to render their path different from those who were closest to them, those others often felt abandoned, left behind. Was the fact that he would not compromise the integrity of his work—as he saw it—a reason for his death?