The Lost Girls by Jennifer Wells

Author:Jennifer Wells [Jennifer Wells]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786691101
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Published: 2020-04-22T18:30:00+00:00

17

She sat in the chair by the window, her head tilted to watch Dora as she disappeared down the garden path. Then she turned to me and I felt a stab of ice deep inside me as her eyes met mine.

The girl who sat in the chair was Nell, my daughter, but she was now changed. This Nell was not my silent companion of the last twenty-five years – the memory who had given me comfort by filling the space that my daughter had left. This Nell was my recollection of a less happy time, an echo from a day in March 1912 when I had returned home from church to find the girl in the window seat was someone I did not know.

She sat with her head resting on the back of the chair, her cheek nestled into her emerald shawl. She wore the striped cotton dress that she had set out in that morning and the boots that she complained rubbed her ankles. But she did not wear her bonnet.

Her hair was hacked roughly about her scalp, patches of bare skin milky white against the short clumps. It was not like before – there was no thought for fashion, music hall stars or rebellion this time. There were swollen areas on her scalp where the hair had been torn from the roots and seeping scratches in her skin.

I looked away, watching the raindrops on the window, waiting for the image to fade, but it did not. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine Nell as I wanted her to appear, with a smile on her lips and curls about her shoulders, but when I opened my eyes again the room about me seemed to have darkened and it was not only Nell that I could see but the little silver sewing scissors in her quivering hand, their blades choked with mats of chestnut hair, and the dark crescents of fallen curls in her lap.

But it was her eyes that told me the daughter I knew was gone. This Nell would glance to me and then away again as if she neither recognised me nor anything around her, and she stared into empty space as if something else was playing out in front of her, something that I could neither see nor understand.

Dora’s visit had changed things. She had told me what I should have seen all those years ago. I should have recognised the loss of her first love in my daughter’s face. Sam was never a reliable sort, so I should have guessed that the day would come. I should have pieced it all together, but I could not have guessed that it would happen in that way, and that Nell’s hopes would be lost in the arms of another. I could never have foreseen Iris Caldwell.

I had not scolded Nell on that day in 1912, but I remember the shrillness in my voice when I saw her: ‘What have you done, Nell? Oh, what have you done?’ But the words were spoken in haste and I had not waited for an answer.

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