Welcome to this exciting new development of This Itch of Writing. All Things Invisible is my brand-new historical crime novel, serialised here on Substack for paying supporters - and as taster, these first two instalments will be available to all subscribers. I do hope you enjoy it.
PROLOGUE
Now we’re high above Birling Gap, the green grass below bright as a ship’s deck and the white prow of the cliff about to launch into the Channel. I can even tell myself how pretty it is. Then the coast turns away and the only thing ahead of us is sky, and through the window beside me I can see only sea – too far below and yet not nearly far enough – and I’m trapped inside this tin tube – ears blotted by the headset – and—
It’s a fight to stop my cry ballooning out.
I’ll think – then I won’t feel. I’ll think about Dominic. Yes: how he’s almost a different person. His grip is light on the joystick, and his hands are steady as he gazes ahead, and now I can really see the squadron leader in him: the clarity and confidence, the easy command of engineering and the elements – his element – the air.
But then he mutters, ‘To hell with it!’ and pushes the joystick sideways and so we bank, we tilt, turn steeper and steeper, and I’m half-hanging in my seatbelt straps, the engine shrilling. We’re wallowing and wavering, nothing above us, and then we are in a beastly, lurching plummet towards the iron sea below—
—until an aeon later, somehow, we grip the air again, and the engine stops screaming, and we’re even a little straighter.
Dominic’s unruffled. ‘Turbulence, nothing to worry about.’
My terror slackens a bit, and then the plane drops again, flat as a stone. Again I swallow my cry, I think, but he glances sideways. ‘Quiet for a moment, there’s a good girl.’
When at last we’re level and buzzing steadily again, the coast is on my side, not his. And perhaps the massing and piling clouds ahead, yellow and grey, don’t matter, nor the buffets and lurches of the air, nor the iron-dark, grey-scored sea below. And – yes – if the coast’s on my side, not Dominic’s, we’ve turned right round.
Newhaven’s docks – Peacehaven’s bungalows – Brighton Marina. Yes, we’re going back. Brighton West Pier. I’m so relieved I’m having to stop myself crying – and then far ahead Shoreham slides out from behind the plane’s nose, the white airport buildings like the crisp blocks of a child’s building set. Nearly home.
But—
—dear God—
— we’re nowhere near the airfield.
Below me there’s only water.
Chatter jabs at my ears. ‘Hello George–Able-Mike-Love-Victor, Shoreham Tower here. Everything all right, McDermott?’
Dominic glances at me. ‘Sorry, this is the only way.’ Now his voice is tight: hard and half-strangled in his throat.
The sea is slate, nearer and nearer – we’re going to hit it – drown – he’s going to kill himself and me with him – I claw at my belt—
‘Hello George–Able-Mike-Love-Victor, Shoreham Tower here, do you read me?’
My belt won’t undo.
A long spit of land, houses along a road, a lumpy, rock-scattered beach, brutally groined: it’ll rip off the undercarriage – somersault us – smash us.
‘Hello George–Able-Mike-Love-Victor, Shoreham Tower, do you read me? What’s happening, McDermott? Do you read me?’
But he doesn’t answer.
Makes you wonder why any of us bother. Easier just to borrow the Auster from Steele and finish yourself off for good. That was Dominic, that first Sunday night.
No more houses now, only the ghosts of gardens and walls, and we’re flying just above the road, closer and closer …
With a neat bump, a tiny lurch, a long squawk of tyres, and a wrenching scream which is pressed out of me … the plane slows drastically, and then we stop.
ONE
‘Surely you must know how you get into these things?’ Rhoda always says when I fetch up on her doorstep – usually minus one shoe-heel, two earrings, three shillings to pay the cabbie and, worst of all, minus fourpence for the cup of tea that just then I want more than anything else in the world except Nick. Which is why I’ve run to Rhoda.
‘But I don’t know!’ I no doubt wail, as she goes out to fill the kettle at the landing tap and comes back in to plonk it on the gas ring. Because at the time it does always seems like an accident. But… Oh, I suppose I do know, really, how I get into these things. There’s always the moment when I think, ‘Oops, Charley! This is getting tricky! Hadn’t you better stop?’ But by then I can’t stop, so of course I don’t.
Sorry, I’ve done it again, haven’t I: turned up – on a doorstep – already in the middle. But don’t worry, I have actually got quite good at giving statements.
My name then was Charlotte Ranger. I’m vicarage-born and bred, my father’s most recent parish being St Benedict’s, in the Landport area of Portsmouth. Though my brother James was packed off to board at prep school when he was ten, my older sister Samantha and I were schooled at a very education-for-young-ladies sort of day school a short train-ride from Portsmouth, which I’ll call St Frideswide’s, though it wasn’t. When I persuaded my parents to let me move to a very swotty High School instead, I somehow ended up being made Head Girl. Why, I’ve no idea, because up till then I was hopeless at hockey and usually in trouble, either for arguing with teachers who were being unfair to someone, or for missing half Biology because one of the cleaners had dropped her bucket all over the junior locker-room and I’d helped her mop up. My parents wouldn’t have dreamt of saying that I ought to keep out of that kind of trouble– but they were thrilled that finally the Powers That Be seemed to have decided I was more use than I was nuisance. An honourable life clearly beckoned.
So what, instead, went wrong?
In the unlikely event of her hearing about it, my High School headmistress would have said (in the voice she kept for high moral outrage and failed exams) that, one April a few years after the Second World War, aged twenty-four, I embarked on a career of vice.
About six weeks later, I was sitting in a shaft of June sunlight with the man who paid for the flat in which we were breakfasting, and also paid Mrs Morgan who had just brought in a fresh pot of the best coffee you can imagine. He paid, too, for the coffee itself and the cup to put it in, and even for the jar of marmalade I was handing him. Although not – I was very firm about this – for the embroidered silk dressing gown which slipped off my shoulder as I did so.
Luckily, Mrs Morgan was on her way out, but I still hitched it back. ‘Don’t bother,’ said Nick, with a grin.
‘But you’ve got to go to work.’
He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘Not quite yet.’
‘In that case—’
But before I could put what I had in mind into practice, out in the hall the telephone jangled, then the kitchen door flapped as Mrs Morgan emerged again and picked up the receiver. ‘Belgravia 2359.’
Have you noticed how, until you know that the phone call isn’t for you, it’s impossible to go on with whatever you were doing when it rang? Even though it was probably only the butcher saying he hadn’t after all got lamb cutlets and would chops do, or of course there was always liver off the ration, we sat in suspended animation until we heard the click of Mrs Morgan lying the receiver down on the hall table.
‘It’s Chambers for you, Mr Purvience.’
Nick went to the phone and I spread marmalade lavishly, and wished there were more butter to go with it. Still, the first, crunchy, tangy bite was lovely – and more so because when Nick had gone to work I wouldn’t be pulling on a faded, let-down cotton frock and often-darned cardigan to spend the morning plodding the streets of Portsmouth delivering the parish magazine. Nor would I be spending the afternoon making sandwiches for the Young Mothers’ Tea. Instead, I had the whole day in front of me in which to do… well, whatever I pleased.
True, I’d no idea what I pleased, and Rhoda was away, dragging a bunch of restive finishing-school girls round the galleries and sketching sites of Florence, and trying not to lose them to the local young men. But no doubt something would turn up and it was Friday, so I was about to have two whole days with Nick.
In the event, I was spared even that effort, because Nick came back to say that Gerry Gordon had booked a weekend in Deauville with his wife, but his Senior was dragging him down to a case conference in Berkshire, and could we use the reservations instead? Nick had said yes – was that all right? We’d need to be at Shoreham Airport by four – it would be more fun to take the car – and Gerry would wire the Hôtel Le Royal Deauville to expect us instead of them.
‘Shoreham Airport? We’re flying?’
‘Gosh, yes, of course – there’d hardly be a weekend left if we went by train,’ said Nick. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all very easy and comfortable these days.’
‘I’m not worrying, I’m excited. When I was little, if we were went through the airport station on the train I used to say that one day I’d get off there and fly to Australia. But it never re-opened after the War.’ I kissed him, and we had the usual hunt for his spectacles – without them he can read every last misplaced comma on an affidavit and the lies between the lines, but not catch the right bus or recognise a colleague – and then he whisked off to Chambers to deal with whatever couldn’t wait till Monday. I told Mrs Morgan I would do my own packing, thank you, and set about it. Not that actually owning the clothes I’d never let myself dream of made the dithers of packing any easier: my grey-blue Hartnell coat and skirt for the flight, of course, but would slacks for the mornings be too workaday? My frock with the Indian print for the afternoons, but what for the evenings? But it did make it all much more fun. And of course I had my heavenly birthday-present fur wrap.
***
By two o’clock we had the Triumph out and the roof down, and were bowling out of London on the Brighton road, me snuggled up against Nick’s left side, and the sunshine soft on our faces.
It was just a pity that over the North Downs the sky clouded up and then, as we purred up into the South Downs, the road ran straight into as thick a sea fog as I’d ever known even on Portsmouth Point. On the crest of the next hill Nick stopped to put the roof up before his spectacles were completely blotched with damp, and when we reached the last crest the sea was nowhere to be seen.
But the check-in clerk’s professional smile was unwavering. Our flight was unfortuntely delayed, but the fog was due to lift by seven o’clock, so would we like to take a seat upstairs in the Aerodeck Bar? As soon as there was any news, we would be told.
The bar was dimmed by the fog and thinly populated: the seats at the bar itself were empty, the shaded lamps were already lit, and beyond the plate glass windows the steady figures of such air- and ground-crew as were visible were no more than chance thickenings in the grey, with beyond them the grounded ghosts of a few small aircraft.
‘To our first holiday, darling,’ said Nick, touching his champagne glass to mine, and our eyes met and locked, and I knew what he was thinking – because I was thinking it too.
To steady myself, I said lightly, ‘Fingers crossed for the fog!’
A woman sitting a couple of tables away, with a man’s jacket slung over the other seat-back, caught my eye and smiled. She was rather older than us – a very stylish forty, perhaps? – but her smile was so warm and friendly that I wondered if they were on the same flight, and for the same reason.
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ she said, and Nick turned to see who was talking to me. ‘It can be hard to believe this fog will go, but you’ll see – my husband says that in a couple of hours it’ll be as if it had never existed, and you’ll be on your way. He was a pilot, so he does know. It won’t even be bumpy.’
‘That’s very cheering,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘But do forgive me for interrupting.’
‘Not at all,’ said Nick. ‘It was kind of you to reassure us. Is your husband flying today?’
‘No, not today,’ she said, a little sadly, as a lanky figure slouched through the bar towards us. ‘Dom, darling—’ Her voice brightened in a way that reminded me of the check-in clerk’s ‘—I was just telling these two charming young people that soon the fog will be gone.’
‘Yes, should be.’ He cast himself into the chair opposite hers and the slanting light of the table-lamp struck his face: his left cheek was wrenched and puckered by scars, while his right was taut and shiny, as if the skin had melted onto it. His nose was a stump.
He turned towards us. ‘Introduce ourselves? Dominic and Veronica McDermott.’ One of his ears was little more than a hole.
‘Nicholas Purvience,’ said Nick steadily. I didn’t think my shock showed either: I hoped it hadn’t. ‘And this is Charlotte.’
‘How do you do?’ I said. Mr McDermott’s face was no worse than I’d seen a hundred times on the streets of Portsmouth – but though I’d learnt to hide my reactions, I’d never learnt not to feel them.
Nick invited them to share our champagne, and when the waiter brought the extra glasses, we drank to the weekend. I asked where they were travelling.
‘Oh, we’re not, we live down here,’ said Mrs McDermott. ‘Dominic can’t be happy without the scent of kerosene, so we settled in a village up in the Downs – and this bar makes a nice change from the Red Lion, which is—’
‘Rustic,’ finished Mr McDermott, and I thought he was smiling, but because of his face I couldn’t be sure. I wondered if it hurt him. Then he flickered a wink at me. At least his eyelids could close.
‘Do you fly at all?’ I asked, then could have kicked myself for tactlessness.
‘Sometimes,’ he said without noticeable offence and the conversation turned to London and Nick’s work.
‘If you’re at Gray’s Inn, you must know my father,’ said Mrs McDermott. ‘Arthur Ormesby?’
‘Indeed I do. Though Sir Arthur being a Bencher,’ said Nick firmly, ‘I wouldn’t dream of claiming more than humble acquaintance.’
‘Veronica’s father is a very distinguished man, Purvience,’ murmured Mr McDermott, his voice by now a little slurred. ‘And very proud of his daughter.’
‘Oh, nonsense,’ Mrs McDermott laughed. ‘Dom likes to ascribe all sorts of silly ideas to my father, Mrs Purvience!’
‘I’m not—’ I stopped.
It wasn’t absolutely the first time, but it was the first time it had happened with someone I wanted to make friends with. It was a hollow sort of feeling.
‘Let’s have another drink,’ said Mr McDermott, catching the barman’s eye.
Veronica shook her head but the barman had already popped the cork. With a sigh, she smiled at me. ‘Charlotte is such a nice name.’
Not so very long after that – though long enough for Dominic to drink a good bit more – our delayed flight to Deauville-Saint-Gatien was announced.
I got up to go to the Ladies and, to my surprise, Mrs McDermott came with me.
© 2024 Emma Darwin. All rights reserved.
Excellent! Do we really have to wait until next week?
Loved it!! Can't wait for the next instalment, thanks Emma xxx☺️💜