Dead to Me

  Summing up at his trial, just a week ago, the judge said Archibald Wood was ‘a thoroughly reprehensible man who had no concept of honesty, and had preyed on women and then killed them to ensure their silence’. He sentenced him to be hanged, and this was due to take place at Exeter Prison on Tuesday the 4th of May.

  Just before the trial, Verity had changed her name from Wood to Ferris, her mother’s maiden name, in an attempt to cut Archie out of her life and memory. But the reality was that she didn’t believe it would ever work.

  ‘Would you like to see Bevan again?’ Ruby asked. ‘He and Luke are going to be stationed at Bristol soon, and I know Bevan would like to see you.’

  Verity looked doubtful. Because of Archie coming for her, and Miller turning up, Ruby had got Luke to explain the situation to Bevan. She was stuck in a difficult place; she liked him very much, but she felt she was no good to man nor beast at the present time. Bevan had sent her some flowers with a card wishing her well, but he hadn’t come to Torquay with Luke since. Or telephoned her.

  ‘I haven’t got the cheek to rattle his cage again,’ Verity said.

  ‘I’m going to assume by that you’d be happy if he came and rattled yours, though,’ Ruby said with a giggle.

  ‘Do you ever think of anything but pairing people off together?’ Verity asked. ‘Wilby told me you thought that air-raid warden with the plummy voice would be good for her.’

  ‘So he would. He’s a couple of years older than her, a retired lawyer, and he’s got beautiful blue eyes. Besides, he always asks after Wilby, so I know he likes her.’

  ‘Everyone likes Wilby, and she likes him well enough, but that doesn’t mean she wants a romance.’

  ‘She might,’ Ruby retorted. ‘Everyone wants one.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Verity.

  ‘That is a lie. You want and need one more than anyone else I know. You just won’t allow yourself to admit it.’

  ‘Haven’t you got work to go to today?’ Verity said pointedly. ‘Who knows? You might find someone there to browbeat, and give Wilby and me a rest.’

  Ruby gasped. ‘Oh yes, work! I’d forgotten, better go, toodle pip.’

  Verity chuckled as Ruby went back up the garden. She meant well, she wanted everyone to be as happy as she was. But for her, the day Archie tried to kill her friend was the day she found she could walk again, so she tended to see most things from a different perspective than Verity.

  Ruby had a new receptionist’s job in the Imperial Hotel. When this hotel had been built, it was said to be the finest outside London, and many very famous people and even royalty had stayed there. Ruby loved it, even if the work wasn’t as varied as it had been in the Palace. The guests were mainly officers on leave, often with their wives, visiting military personnel, and some wounded officers who were recuperating before going back to their regiments. Verity had been astounded by how quickly Ruby had bounced back to her former self once she was walking again. Verity just wished she too could become the girl she used to be.

  Last night, Ruby was showing Brian and Colin how to jitterbug. Ruby had been to a class run by an American at the Imperial to learn it, and she was finding it quite frustrating that outside her class she had no partner who could dance with her. She’d been bullying Verity to learn too, but by the time Verity got home from work she felt too tired to do energetic dances.

  The war was plodding on. Verity and Ruby went every Wednesday night to the cinema without fail. Pathé News was almost as popular as the main film, although most people thought it was slanted to make it look like the Allies were winning.

  Montgomery had broken through the Mareth Line in North Africa, and with the Allies pressing ahead in Tunisia, it really did look as if they had the Germans on the run. The war in the Pacific appeared to have reached a climax too, as the increasingly outnumbered Japanese had failed to dislodge the Americans from Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

  Luke and Bevan were involved in concentrated bombing raids on Germany’s industrial heartland, something Ruby worried about a great deal. As she pointed out, everyone said how brave the pilots were, forgetting that the other men in the aeroplanes who despatched the bombs, like Luke and Bevan, or those who were wireless operators or navigators, were just as brave and every bit as likely to be killed if their plane was shot down.

  Verity sat for a little longer in the garden. April was such a lovely month, all the greenery so vivid and new against the yellow of forsythia and daffodils, a reminder that winter had gone for another year and soon there would be the long, hot days of summer to look forward to. The chickens were clucking away in their pen beneath the fruit trees, and the white pear blossom was just unfolding. Her thoughts turned to Miller again, and how their last evening together had ended. He’d kissed her as they were walking back from the pub, nudging her back into a shop doorway, but it was too desperate a kiss for her to cope with. He pressed his body hard against hers, and she could feel his erection. His tongue seemed to go right down her throat, reminding her of something she wanted to forget.

  To be fair to him, he’d stopped the minute she protested, but he was sulky, and she knew then that it wasn’t going to work out. Her sadness now wasn’t because of losing him exactly, more that she was afraid she would always feel that revulsion towards men. She also feared she was destined to spend her entire life as a spinster like Aunt Hazel.

  ‘Luke and Bevan are coming down on a twenty-four-hour pass on the 27th of May,’ Ruby announced a few days after Verity got the letter from Miller. ‘They are going to drive down from Bristol.’

  ‘Bevan’s okay about me?’ Verity asked, suddenly feeling a little anxious.

  ‘His words were, “It’ll be great to see her, I’ll embarrass her with my appalling efforts at the jitterbug”.’

  Verity laughed. She could imagine Bevan saying that; he wasn’t a great dancer, though he was an enthusiastic one. ‘Did you tell Luke that Miller has broken it off with me?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Ruby screwed up her face. ‘You see I didn’t want you to look like the abandoned one, so I just said it fizzled out.’

  ‘It never fizzed in the first place,’ Verity said. ‘I hope you aren’t going to hope for it fizzing with Bevan either?’

  ‘All I ask is that you laugh and have a good time,’ Ruby said. ‘And you must help me make a gorgeous dress out of that stripy material Wilby dug out.’

  On the morning of the 4th of May, Verity got up early and went for a walk. At eight, the time she knew Archie would be executed, she was in the church praying.

  She didn’t consider herself to be religious at all, but she and Ruby went to church most Sundays with Wilby. She couldn’t bring herself to admit it to anyone, but she’d got the idea in her head that Archie wouldn’t hang, in just the same way as John Lee, ‘the man they couldn’t hang’, hadn’t been executed all those years ago.

  Maybe it was because Ruby used to tell her creepy stories about John Lee, about how the trapdoor failed to open three times. It was the same prison, so presumably the same trapdoor, perhaps even the same hangman. She kept getting the strange feeling that she’d open a door one day, or turn a corner, and Archie would be there.

  She’d said, ‘You are dead to me,’ umpteen times when these thoughts came to her. She had never forgotten how powerful those five words of Ruby’s had sounded to her, and she half believed that by saying them to Archie they would act as a kind of amulet against it ever happening. But today she’d decided she needed God’s help, and she was here today to thank him for keeping her safe, and to pray that Archie really would die at Exeter prison.

  As she came out of the church and saw the sun shining, and beautiful cherry blossom in so many of the gardens, all at once she felt lighter, as if a burden had been lifted from her shoulders. Somehow, without any confirmation, she knew Archie was dead now; she could put him, and all he’d put her through, to one side.

  A new era was about to begin.

  ‘She’s so much better now s
he knows he’s dead,’ Wilby whispered to Ruby that evening as she prepared their supper. ‘It’s almost like she’s shed a skin, there’s a new lightness about her.’

  Ruby glanced towards the hall. She could hear Brian and Colin playing some noisy game in the sitting room, and Verity was in there with them. ‘I’m really hoping that she and Bevan will enjoy being together at the end of the month. I’m not expecting true love or anything like that, but just to see her having fun will be wonderful.’

  ‘Well, we’re all united in that hope. I have been worried that there might be a lot of upsetting gossip about the hanging from neighbours, her work colleagues and so on. But when Verity got in from work she said people were kind, just the odd sympathetic smile, offers that if she wanted to talk they were there. But then I suppose the newspapers have printed so much about him, and what a monster he was, that most people just feel glad it’s all over.’

  On the Saturday night following the hanging, Ruby and Verity went to the pictures in Torquay to see For Whom the Bell Tolls. They came out with tear-stained faces, as the ending was so sad. At Ruby’s suggestion they went on to the Imperial Hotel, as she knew all the staff there.

  It was a very jolly evening. A couple of American officers insisted on plying them with drinks, they had a few dances, and by the time they made for home both girls were a little squiffy.

  They walked back a little unsteadily, arm in arm, giggling about the two Americans who had been over fifty, balding and had a high opinion of themselves.

  ‘I loved the way you kept bringing the subject back to their wives and children,’ Ruby said. ‘It completely stopped them trying anything on.’

  ‘I don’t think I ever want to go to Iowa now, it sounded as dull as ditchwater,’ Verity sniggered. ‘I wonder if all Americans are like that? Constantly bragging about their wonderful country, and pointing out England’s shortcomings.’

  ‘Most of the ones I’ve met have been,’ Ruby said. ‘But then I’ve only met officers, I’m sure the rank and file are a darn sight more exciting.’

  Wilby had gone to bed, and the house was in darkness when they got home. Ruby made them both a cup of cocoa and put a drop of brandy in each cup.

  ‘Like we need any more drink,’ Verity said. ‘My legs seem to have a mind of their own.’

  Once up in their beds, with the curtains drawn, cocoa drunk and the light turned out, Verity suddenly began speaking about Archie.

  ‘Do you think he was scared at the end?’ she asked.

  ‘I hope he was scared witless,’ Ruby said. ‘I think a priest sits with them till the end. I’d love to know if he said he was sorry.’

  ‘I expect he did, in the hopes of getting the priest on his side. But really I don’t think he had any kind of conscience. He just did what he wanted to do and didn’t care who it hurt.’

  ‘How old were you when he first hurt you in any way?’ Ruby asked.

  ‘About five, I think. He pulled down my pants and smacked me hard on my bottom for taking his pipe and using it to blow soapy bubbles. Mum heard me scream and she came and pulled me off his lap. She said he hit far too hard.’

  ‘It’s true, men do hit far harder than women,’ Ruby said. ‘I used to laugh at Ma when she hit me, it never hurt, not even when she was really mad with me. But I was hit a few times by her men and, my God, that hurt – and they always left a big bruise too.’

  ‘Did any of her men ever try to do anything else to you?’

  ‘You mean interfering, touching me in private places?’

  ‘Yes. Did they?’

  ‘Sometimes they tried, but I would get out of the way. As I got bigger I made sure I was never in when she was doing it.’

  Ruby suddenly realized that Verity was trying to tell her about something. Being a bit drunk was loosening her up, and that could only be a good thing.

  ‘Did Archie do something?’ she asked gently, almost holding her breath in the darkness for fear Verity would clam up.

  ‘Yes, it was so disgusting –’ Verity stopped abruptly. ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘You can,’ Ruby whispered. ‘Remember, I grew up with a mum who brought men home to our room for sex. I used to pull a blanket over my head so I didn’t see, but I knew what was going on by the noises.’

  Ruby heard what she thought was a sob, and her instinct was to get out of her bed and climb in with Verity to comfort her, but she was afraid that would stop her friend from continuing. ‘Did he rape you?’ she whispered.

  Verity didn’t answer for a moment but she was breathing very heavily. ‘No, not that,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Did he make you take his thing in your mouth?’

  She knew immediately that was exactly what had happened by the muffled sob.

  ‘Oh, Verity, what a terrible thing to happen to you! Can I come over there and give you a hug?’

  Again just a sob. But Ruby got out of her bed and got into Verity’s and held her tight. ‘That is a horrible picture to keep in your head,’ she said gently. ‘But now you’ve told me, it will fade.’

  ‘It made me gag, I thought it would choke me. And the smell of him, it was vile.’ She was crying now, her whole body shaking.

  ‘He was vile. But you mustn’t let the thought of what he did put you off other men,’ Ruby said. ‘No decent man would force a woman to do that against her will.’

  ‘I’ll always be scared it will happen again. I was twelve when he did it first, and then again before he put me in that cage.’

  Ruby closed her eyes, hoping for some divine enlightenment as to what to say about this.

  ‘So all this time, this is what has stopped you having a boyfriend?’ she asked. ‘And it put you off Miller too?’

  ‘I didn’t consciously let it stop me, but I guess I put up some kind of shield which stopped men getting close to me,’ she admitted. ‘I did feel something for Miller, but then kissing someone goodbye on a station isn’t a real test. The one time he came back after leaving for Scotland, Amy was there and so there was no chance of anything happening.’

  ‘You’ve kissed Bevan, and he didn’t make you want to run away, did he?’

  ‘No, but I didn’t feel anything else, either. If he’d so much as touched me anywhere private, I would probably have screamed and run away.’

  ‘He’s a true gentleman,’ Ruby said. ‘He knew Archie had hurt you – although not that, of course. Men can be very sensitive to women’s needs. They aren’t all brutes.’

  ‘But imagine if I got to like a man, and even married him, and then he did that to me? I’d be a basket case.’

  All at once Ruby realized that, although her friend knew what made a baby, her knowledge of what happened during love-making, and how women could feel, was non-existent. Frightened badly as a young girl, she had just shut down her natural curiosity, and had probably never even explored her own body.

  ‘Love-making is beautiful, special and very tender when you love the man,’ Ruby explained, holding her friend tight and hoping she wouldn’t get upset by what she was going to say. ‘Sometimes people do things to each other to give extra pleasure that some would think was nasty or even perverted. But it isn’t, if you both want to do it. Men kiss and fondle our breasts, and that makes us feel wonderful, they fondle us and put their fingers in down there too, and often kiss and lick us there.’

  Verity stiffened.

  ‘Stop doing that “plank” thing, you need to know this,’ Ruby said sharply. ‘I told you that first day we met what “up the spout” meant, same as I told you about pawnbrokers and Ma selling herself. So you can stand me telling you something you really need to know now.

  ‘So what I was going on to say is that when a man makes us feel wonderful, we want to do stuff to him like that too. And taking his penis in our mouth comes into that.’

  ‘No!’ Verity said forcefully, remembering how Angie had said if Ruby had done that, she wouldn’t have got pregnant.

  ‘Yes,’ Ruby said firmly. ‘There’s no law
that says you must, and some women wouldn’t dream of it. But I promise you that a man who loves you would never be a brute about it.’

  ‘Have you done it?’

  ‘Yes, I have, and I promise it isn’t disgusting when you love a man. There’s lots of wonderful experiences lying in wait for us, Verity – getting married and having babies, to name just two! But for that to work and make you happy and content, you need to embrace sex. You must let yourself feel desire, and explore the wonderful feelings it gives you. God could have made us like animals, so we just mated to procreate, but he gave us love, and all this amazing sensuality in love-making to bond us tightly together in couples. He knew what he was doing! It is designed to hold us together so we bring up our children together and keep them safe.’

  ‘I don’t think my mother ever saw it like that,’ Verity said doubtfully.

  ‘I don’t suppose mine did, either; to her it was just a service for which she got money. No wonder we’ve fallen off the rails sometimes! But let’s look to Wilby, shall we? She’s the way a real woman should be. Loving, devoted, and I bet she and her husband were at it like rabbits.’

  ‘I’m not sure I like the idea of that,’ Verity said. ‘I won’t be able to look at her tomorrow.’

  ‘You will, and you’ll see what I see. She’s been the best role model either of us could ever have.’

  ‘Yes, you are right about that. But let’s go to sleep now, or we won’t be able to get up in the morning,’ Verity said and kissed Ruby’s cheek. ‘Thank you for telling me a few home truths.’

  Ruby disengaged herself from her friend. ‘Sleep tight in that bed I’ve warmed for you. Only a real pal would do that!’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN