Page 104 of The Stranger in Room Six
Mabel can hear something dragging on the ground, as if the stranger has a stick. Then the door opens and slams back on itself again.
‘Help, help!’ she calls out.
Nothing. Where the hell is everyone? Then again, there are only two staff on night duty and alarms are always going off. It seems like an age before someone finally comes. She’d hoped it might be Belinda but it’s one of the new night staff.
‘Everything all right, Mabel?’
‘No, it bloody isn’t. Did you see someone going out of my room?’
‘No, dear.’
‘Don’t “dear” me. It was a woman. At least I think it was, although she had a deep voice. She said she wanted something.’
Instinct tells Mabel not to go into details.
‘There, there. I expect you were having one of your nightmares. Let me give you something for it.’
Too tired to argue, Mabel sinks into a deep sleep into which her past comes too; each memory jostling with another in its impatience to get out.
When she wakes the next day, Mabel can’t wait to tell Belinda what happened. But her mind feels fuzzy and she can’t quite grasp the memory. As the morning passes, she begins to wonder if everything was quite as she remembered.Had someone really asked about the list? What would any intruder want with her, after all?
Perhaps she should keep quiet about the stranger in the night, in case they think she’s lost her marbles and dose her up again.
So instead, when Belinda comes on shift, Mabel continues her story from where she’d left off.
71
1943
Mabel felt numb with grief at the thought of returning to the Old Rectory. The fact that it was nearly Christmas, a traditional time of celebration, made it worse. She had left with a child inside her and now she was returning with an empty heart. Somewhere out there in the world was her little Antonio, being brought up by a properly married couple.
Now she was expected to get on with her life, as though she had never given birth to him. Never held him in her arms. Never felt his downy little cheek against hers or his rosebud mouth sucking at her breast.
‘Why did my love desert me?’ she asked herself on the long drive back to the house, her breasts leaking now that they had no baby to nourish. ‘Surely some of my letters must have arrived.’
Cook took one look at Mabel’s face and put her arms around her.
The two women sobbed.
‘I am so sorry for your loss,’ said Mabel, thinking of Cook’s sister.
‘You dear child, always thinking of others. I am so sorry for yours.’ She spoke as though the baby was dead. In a way he was.
‘Is there any news of Antonio?’ Mabel asked hopefully.
‘I’m sorry. Like I said when I wrote to you, he was moved to a different camp and then moved again. But no one seems to know where.’
Cook stopped as footsteps approached.
Her aunt’s face was furious. ‘This is highly inappropriate of you, Cook, to comment on a personal situation. Besides, Mabel is a grown woman now. She needs to learn to be responsible for her actions and their consequences.’
‘If I am now a grown woman,’ retorted Mabel, ‘why couldn’t I have kept my baby?’
‘Because I am not allowing an illegitimate child to grow up in this house. Now stop this impertinence and go upstairs.’
Gladly, thought Mabel as she climbed the stairs and snuggled down under the counterpane in the hideous Red Room. There, she rocked herself back and forth, weeping at the thought of little Antonio crying out for her, and for his father who had clearly deserted them.
Slowly, Mabel’s return to the Old Rectory established an unfamiliar pattern as the days went on. Christmas Day was miserable. Her aunt, after insisting she went to church with her ‘to keep up appearances’, immediately retired to her room, leaving Mabel to have lunch alone in the dining room.
