Page 124 of The Stranger in Room Six
‘You’re a kind girl. When are you going to settle down? You’d make a good wife.’
‘I’m happy the way I am,’ Mabel would say. No one could replace Antonio.
Over the next few years, Mabel continued to find comfort and pleasure in those who found rest at the Old Rectory. Many called her ‘auntie’. Some returned again and again.
To her surprise, she also found solace in someone else. Until now, Mabel had seen little of Harry – her father and stepmother’s son. Every now and then, Mabel would get the train to London and have lunch with Papa, but always at his club. ‘It gives us time to talk,’ he’d say. Yet Mabel had the feeling that Diana was jealous of her husband’s previous family.
As Harry grew older, and reminded her less of little Antonio, they began to form a closer connection. Harry had grown into a strapping lad who loved cricket and riding. Foam had long passed on and James the groom had retired, but there was another horse now called Sparkle, whomMabel looked after herself. Harry often came down in the holidays, sometimes without his parents. They had wonderful days riding and walking by the sea.
And that’s when it happened.
Now
Mabel pauses at this point and stares into the distance, although there’s nothing there.
‘What is it?’ asks Belinda.
‘I’m sorry?’ murmurs Mabel.
‘You just said “That’s when it happened”.’
Mabel looks scared, shrinking in her chair. ‘I shouldn’t really tell.’
‘Please,’ says Belinda. ‘Let it out. You’ll feel better. I promise.’
86
1961
Mabel had been looking forward to the summer. Somehow, it had become part of the year’s pattern that Harry, now fifteen years old, would come down and spend a month at the Old Rectory. He was away at boarding school and often wrote to say how much he was looking forward to his time with her. Papa and Diana had not had any more children, and Mabel got the feeling that coming down to the sea was a welcome change for the lad. It was the same for her too; her time with Harry made her feel as close to being a mother as possible. Although thankfully, now she was thirty-five, most people had stopped asking her when she might get married.
Despite the fact they weren’t related by blood, Mabel saw a lot of herself in her ‘little half-brother’, as she called him. He loved the open air and riding. He was also keen to please.
When the old Red Room needed redecorating, he offered to help. She could, of course, have paid someone in the village to do it, but Harry insisted that they could do it themselves. ‘I enjoy practical things like this,’ he assured her.
They started by scraping off the red peony wallpaper on opposite sides of the room. Then she heard a cry. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to something low down on the wall. Is that what I think it is?’
‘Yes,’ she said numbly. ‘It’s a swastika.’
‘Why would anyone have painted that here?’
‘My aunt must have had something to do with it,’ she said, crossing her fingers. How could she tell him that she had drawn the pattern on the wall herself as a teenager, in her enthusiasm for ‘the cause’.
‘Why?’ he asked, clearly shocked.
What should she say now? How much had his father told him of the family history? Should she ask him first? Yes, that seemed the right thing to do.
But Harry was standing right in front of her, demanding answers.
‘Sit down,’ she said. Enough lies had been told in life.
So they sat, side by side with their backs against the wall. It was easier not to face him as she told him everything of her childhood at the Old Rectory. Well, not all of it, obviously, but enough.
‘You mean that Clarissa, the woman you thought was your aunt, was actually your mother, and that she was one of the fascists who supported Hitler?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘And your father was murdered for it?’
