Page 76 of The Stranger in Room Six
49
Belinda
My mouth is open in shock. ‘You lied for your aunt? Why?’
Mabel shakes her head. ‘I’ve often asked myself that. I think it’s because I wanted her approval, despite everything.’
‘Did they charge her?’
‘No. There wasn’t any evidence. Even when I heard that it was a spy that the police had shot dead, I persuaded myself that they’d got it wrong. My aunt and Jonty wanted to make Britain great again. They kept saying so. It was only later that I pieced everything together and realized they were on Hitler’s side.’
Mabel grips my arm then. ‘Don’t tell anyone, will you? When I look back, I feel so guilty that I tried to help the enemy. I shouldn’t have told you, but you’re such a good listener, Belinda, and it’s been so long since I’ve had anyone to talk to. It just came out.’
I know I should pass on this information to Mouse but I’m torn. I don’t want to cause Mabel any trouble. She clearly doesn’t mean harm and never has. If I can just find this list, maybe Mabel will be spared. But the locket has given me an idea. Lockets can hold pictures or even a note, can’t they? Suppose the list is hidden inside? Could Clarissa have deliberately passed on incriminating information to her niece, perhaps to save her own skin if it was found on her? Heaven knows, I’ve searched everywhere else inthis room for this list and I can’t think of anywhere else it might be.
‘Where’s your locket now?’ I ask. ‘Do you still have it?’
‘I put it somewhere safe but I can’t remember where,’ says Mabel.
‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’ I suggest. ‘It would be nice for you to have it again.’
So we search. We go through her drawers. Or rather I do, under her watchful eye. I even go on my hands and knees inside her wardrobe in case it’s fallen out of a pocket. I get a chair and climb to search the pelmet in case it’s hidden there. I look everywhere.
‘It’s very good of you, Belinda,’ she says after a bit. ‘But I’m sure it will turn up at some point.’
She doesn’t seem very bothered about the piece of jewellery, which surely has sentimental family value. Is it possible that she’s deliberately hidden it?
‘Come and sit with me, Belinda,’ she says. ‘I’d like to carry on telling you my story.’
50
Mabel
1943
Somehow Aunt Clarissa endured the stares from the village folk. She brazenly went to church as usual. She held her head high. And slowly, Mabel heard whispers that maybe her aunt had not been involved after all. That she had been taken in by the Colonel, as indeed had they all. And no wonder! He had seemed so warm, so generous, so affable.
‘I’m not fooled,’ Frannie said one day when she and Mabel were foraging for mushrooms in the woods. After her cold words about the Colonel, they had managed to make up, though it wasn’t the easy relationship it had been before. ‘I still think your aunt knows more than she’s letting on.’
‘I don’t,’ said Mabel defensively. ‘My aunt might not be an easy woman but she’s not a traitor.’
‘So speaks a girl who’s fallen for an Italian prisoner of war,’ retorted Frannie in a disapproving tone. ‘I’ve seen you chatting to him.’
‘I haven’t “fallen for him”,’ protested Mabel, conscious that she was blushing.
Yet it was true she had spent some very pleasant hours with Antonio in the meadow, helping him bundle up straw under the watchful eye of the groom or mending the church roof. For a man who had intended to train as a doctor, he was very practical. ‘My grandfather taught me,’ he explainedto her. ‘He lived with us when my grandmother died and we were very close.’
Mabel had never had a male friend before. But it was so easy to talk to Antonio! They shared more than she could possibly have imagined, yet the most important link was that neither knew if their father was alive.
Then one morning, just as she and her aunt returned from church, they saw the telegram boy cycling up the lane. ‘Dear God,’ said her aunt crossing herself in a manner that was quite unlike her.
Mabel felt her knees buckle. A telegram in wartime meant only one thing. Missing or dead.
‘I’ll open it,’ said her aunt, putting her arm around Mabel. Her tone was gentler than usual too.
‘Your father is in a prisoner-of-war camp! The Red Cross has traced him. He is in good spirits.’
Mabel burst into tears of joy. Her aunt’s eyes glistened too.
