See No Evil

by Patricia Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Evelyn, Gay and Margaret are sisters. When their widowed mother dies, the caring Evelyn is thrust into looking after Margaret, who was born blind. Gay, always pursuing her own interests, is happy to be taken out by the rich Gordon de Verriland, leaving Evelyn wondering if she will ever meet someone herself. Then, when Nicky Marsh comes into Evelyn’s life, could he be the one for her? Or will Gay’s selfishness ruin her hope of love?

Release date: April 9, 2015

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 464

Sample

Evelyn and Gay Challis knew they were going to have a third sister because they had heard Nanny and Cook talking about it.

‘It will be here by August,’ Nanny had said, and:

‘The Missus don’t want it!’ Cook had replied in a voice which made twelve-year-old Evelyn look up from her pastry cutting and say in the soft serious tone of voice which so resembled her father’s:

‘Not want the baby, Cook? But Mummy must want it!’

‘There’s no must about it!’ Cook answered caustically. But a glance from Nanny silenced any further comments on the subject.

Evelyn, tactful even at that age, did not persist in her questioning as she would have liked to do. She continued cutting little rounds of pastry for Cook’s jam tartlets, but her mind was busy with thoughts about the baby.

It could not be true that Mummy did not want it! Why, she, Evelyn, was so looking forward to having another sister that she wanted to shout and sing and tell everyone she knew how pleased and happy she was. It wasn’t that she did not love Gay. She did love her — passionately and selflessly. But her eight-year-old sister was as self-sufficient as she was clever. Dependence was unknown to her and she needed no one — least of all Evelyn, to help her live her life.

‘I can do it!’ she would say resentfully if anyone offered to help her.

And, usually, this was true. She could do almost anything she put her young mind to, and in some ways, she was already far older than Evelyn.

‘Them two’s as unalike as sisters could be,’ Cook had remarked often enough.

Evelyn knew it was true. She and Gay were different in looks as well as in character. Where Gay was all golden curls and sparkling, flashing, blue-grey eyes, she, Evelyn, was pale-skinned, had dark, smooth hair and serious, thoughtful brown eyes. Where Gay was a creature of sudden tempers and spells of infectious good spirits, her sister knew herself to be quiet, even-tempered and reliable.

True to her name, Gay could be sunshine and quicksilver. She could be as generous as at times she was selfish, and there was only one person who really mattered to her — herself.

Evelyn, always easy to manage, always willing to give way to others, was thought by Cook and most people who knew her, to be ‘a dear little thing’ but rather weak and stupid. Actually, Evelyn had all Gay’s strength of character, but it had not yet come to light since she was only to be strong when her strength was needed for others. She loved everything small and helpless, her capacity for giving sympathy and understanding being apparent even at her age. Evelyn admired her sister and wished she were more like her. But she was very much an individual in a class of her own and the very qualities which distinguished her from Gay were to be the chains which kept her shackled. The first link in that chain was forged when Cook said:

‘The Missus don’t want it!’

Well, if Mummy didn’t, she, Evelyn, did! She would take care of it and love it so much that it would not need a mother’s love. And Gay — yes, she, too, must love it because anyone Gay loved would have to be happy. Just to be with her made one realize what a good world it was.

Evelyn finished her pastry rounds and went up to the nursery.

‘Gay!’ she called. ‘Gay!’

‘What is it, Evie? I’m under the table.’

‘What are you doing?’ Evelyn asked curiously.

‘I’ve been Robinson Crusoe,’ Gay said, emerging from under the nursery table with a cloth thrown round her shoulders and her fair hair ruffled. ‘But I’m tired of it now. It’s no fun without a Man Friday.’

‘I’ll be Man Friday for you,’ Evelyn offered hopefully, but Gay shook her head vigorously.

‘You wouldn’t know what to do!’ she said, oblivious to the sudden hurt in her sister’s eyes.

But Evelyn said nothing of her disappointment and returned to the subject foremost in her mind.

‘Gay, you want our baby sister, don’t you?’

Gay looked up in surprise.

‘Gosh, no!’ she said flatly. ‘Why, we will have to share all our toys and the pony and, anyway, how do you know it will be a girl?’

‘I don’t know,’ Evelyn said carefully. ‘But I kind of feel sure… Gay, you will love it — do love it! You see, Cook says Mummy doesn’t want it.’

‘Nor do I!’ said Gay, turning away petulantly. ‘Anyway, it isn’t here yet, so don’t let’s bother about it. I’m going to ride Jeremy!’

Evelyn watched her stride out of the nursery, knowing better than to try and detain her. Gay would feel differently when the baby came. She was sure of it.

But Evelyn, precocious though she was in an understanding of other people, was blind where her emotions were involved. And she loved Gay. Therefore Gay could do no wrong, and if she did, Evelyn usually found an excuse for her. When she had come upon Gay severely thrashing the pony in one of her fits of temper, she had, before condemning her, asked in her gentle voice:

‘But why were you doing it, Gay? It didn’t kick you, did it?’

Gay, staring at her sister with flushed cheeks and bright eyes, said furiously:

‘He wouldn’t jump.’

‘But you didn’t just hit him because of that, did you, Gay?’

The child avoided Evelyn’s steady gaze and said:

‘Yes! He’s got to learn to do what I want.’

Evelyn, explaining aloud that it was the wrong way to treat a dumb animal, excused her sister’s cruelty to herself with the thought:

‘She was only trying to teach Jeremy a lesson.’

In the same way, she excused her mother to herself and Gay.

Ella Challis was a spoilt, hard, selfish product of society. She had no love or use for her children and her dealings with them were both unjust and thoughtless.

‘Mummy’s a beastly pig!’ Gay had cried when they had not been allowed to go to a children’s party on Nanny’s afternoon off because their mother wanted to go to a cocktail party. ‘If she couldn’t take us, she could have let us go alone.’

‘No, she couldn’t, Gay,’ Evelyn had said. ‘She would be afraid all the time that we would get lost or something.’

‘But why couldn’t she come to our party?’ Gay had challenged.

‘She told you why,’ Evelyn answered. ‘She didn’t want to disappoint Daddy.’

‘Rot!’ Gay retorted rudely. ‘You know Daddy doesn’t like parties.’

Evelyn knew this was true.

‘Then Mummy must think he likes them,’ she answered.

Gay was not convinced. Like a bright, inquisitive squirrel, she had observed the differences between her mother and father and knew instinctively that they did not love each other. She knew, too, that her father saw through her own wiles and respected him even while she was thwarted by him. She passionately wanted his love because she knew he did not care for her or pay her the attention she could usually get from grown-ups, and was frantically jealous of Evelyn because she seemed to inspire their father’s affection with no apparent effort. She had to study the things which pleased him; Evelyn did them naturally.

For her mother she had neither love nor respect, and would have been considerably put out to know her father considered her to be her mother’s daughter — selfish, spoilt, temperamental, difficult. But he also pitied her because there was good in her — a gay simple side to her nature and a desire to be happy which he thought could not triumph over that other side.

Had he lived, he might have helped her, but he died before he knew he was going to have a third child.

Mrs. Challis made no pretence of being heartbroken inside her own home when her husband died suddenly of pneumonia. She had never ceased to regret the day she married him, and she was relieved to be free of him. He left her and the children a considerable sum of money, and at thirty-five, she was a very attractive woman and knew it. She grieved for her husband to the outside world, and in her own home, she gloried in her freedom.

When she discovered she was going to have a baby, she quite lost control of herself in her rage at being frustrated in such a way. Cook, who had been with her eleven years and still stayed — not because of her faithfulness or devotion to the family, but because of the high wage she always received from them — locked her mistress in her room where she was powerless to do any harm to those around her.

Nanny, who had been Lionel Challis’ nurse when he was a boy, hurried the children out of the house where they could no longer hear their mother’s hysterical screams, thinking for the hundredth time since Mr. Lionel’s death that if it were not for her love for little Miss Evelyn and her promise to look after Miss Gay, she would leave the house for good and all. That any lady — and Mr. Lionel’s wife! — should have to be locked in her room to prevent her harming her own children…

But while her two daughters were watching the other children sail their boats on the pond in the park, their mother was throwing herself about the large, luxurious bedroom, trying in her rage to so harm herself that the coming child should never be born.

Cook was a moral, though unscrupulous woman, and such behaviour was intolerable to her righteous mind.

‘If you do harm to the baby, it’ll be murder,’ she said with an outspokenness that surprised Ella Challis into momentary silence. Then she started to whimper like a child.

‘I won’t have it! I won’t! I won’t!’ she cried.

But in spite of her violent treatment of herself in succeeding months, the child within her continued to grow, and Cook, with a smile of triumph, said:

‘Nature will have her way, no matter what.’

Evelyn’s quiet gentle ways and worried, concerned looks, reminded her mother too much of the husband she was so glad to be rid of, and she refused to allow the child near her. Gay, on the other hand, she asked for continually.

The months she spent as her mother’s close companion influenced Gay’s character for life. Nanny could do nothing with her because Mrs. Challis spoilt her and allowed her to stay up until all hours at night so that she would have someone to amuse her. She would not go out to parties because she did not wish her condition to be guessed by her friends.

‘Mummy does not mean to spoil her,’ Evelyn said to her nurse. ‘It’s just that she needs someone bright and sweet, and Gay is both.’

Nanny looked down at the pale, serious face and stooping suddenly, she caught the child fiercely to her.

‘You come away with me, Miss Evie,’ she cried in a low, urgent voice. ‘You come away with me, dearie, and I’ll take care of you.’

Evelyn drew away from the protection of the kind, plump arms about her, and looked up in surprise.

‘But Nanny, I couldn’t leave Gay — and Mummy. They may need me.’

‘Your mother only wants Miss Gay!’ the old woman cried, still swept away by her desire to save this child from a woman she was fast believing in her old-fashioned way to be a witch. She was too blinded by her own emotions to see how much she had hurt the child by referring to her mother’s preference for Gay.

‘Well, Gay needs you,’ Evelyn said quietly. ‘And perhaps if Mummy and Gay really don’t want it, the baby will need me to love it.’

The old woman’s face softened suddenly and she coughed and blew her nose and went bustling round the nursery doing nothing very much but making a big job of it.

‘Of course, I didn’t really mean it, dearie,’ she said in her usual motherly voice. ‘I just meant to go away for a little holiday.’

‘Oh, a holiday!’ exclaimed Evelyn, instantly credulous.

‘Yes, but of course, we can’t go now with the baby coming and all.’

‘No,’ said Evelyn. ‘No, we can’t go now.’

During the last month of her confinement, Ella Challis refused to leave her room or to allow anyone but Gay into it. Nanny did not like to think what state of filth and untidiness it would be in, and Gay’s descriptions were not very lucid or encouraging.

‘It’s a fairy palace!’ she told Evelyn. ‘Mummy’s the queen and I’m a royal princess.’

‘How lovely!’ Evelyn said. But Nanny only snorted.

‘She ought to have the doctor,’ she told Cook. But the one time they had sent for him on their own accord, Mrs. Challis had flatly refused to let him enter her room. She shouted through the door that it wasn’t her first child and she could look after herself.

‘She will call for me when the time comes,’ the doctor had said calmly. ‘Women often get these peculiar ideas if they are highly strung.’

Nanny would have liked to tell him that this eccentricity was no mere nervous complaint and that she feared her mistress intended harm to the child, but her loyalty to Lionel Challis’ wife kept her lips closed, and she did her best for her in her own way.

When Evelyn was out of earshot she would corner Gay and promise her extra sweet biscuits and chocolate if she would give any information of the ‘Palace’ and the ‘Queen,’ and in this way, found out that all seemed to be progressing well and normally, and reckoned that the baby was due to be born any day. She watched and waited anxiously.

Evelyn never forgot the night her second sister came into the world. It was not a wild, rainy night as so often colours such scenes in films. But it was a hot, sultry summer’s night, with the air almost hollow in its stillness and any small sound doubling its volume in an uncanny way.

Lying in her little room, Evelyn looked at Gay’s empty bed (Mrs. Challis had had a camp bed put in her own room for the child) and wished that her sister were there with her. Her sensitive nature was alive to something unusual in the air… not just the weather, but something else she could neither define nor explain.

After an hour she fell asleep, and the fiery sky darkened and clouded, but without bringing any welcome breath of wind with it. The sudden slamming of a door downstairs started Evelyn into instant wakefulness so uneasy had been her sleeping, and she sat up in bed, listening to the footsteps running along the passage, up the stairs that led to her room.

‘It’s me, Gay!’

‘Is anything wrong?’ Evelyn asked, jumping out of bed to greet the small, pyjama-clad figure which had just broken into the room.

Gay burst into a sudden storm of tears, throwing herself face downwards on Evelyn’s bed. Her crying was difficult and uncontrolled and there was no doubt about the genuineness of her tears. It was some minutes before the elder girl could make any sense of her gasped words. Then at last she understood her mother was in great pain and thought the baby was coming.

Evelyn hurriedly flung a dressing-gown round her shoulders, and with a last order to Gay to get into bed and keep warm, she went off to find Nanny.

From that minute onwards, it was all one long nightmare, punctuated at regular intervals by Ella Challis’ screams and Cook’s hysterics.

‘You’ll have to help,’ Nanny said, turning to Evelyn in desperation. ‘Telephone the doctor again. There must be someone there to answer, even if he’s out.’

And she hurried back to Ella Challis’ room.

Evelyn stood in the hall for ten minutes, shivering and frightened. She thought her mother was dying. But there was no reply from Dr. Wright’s house, and she gave it up and went to find Nanny.

‘It won’t be the first baby I’ve delivered,’ Nanny said, when Evelyn reported her failure to get hold of the doctor. ‘Do you think you can bear the sight of blood, Miss Evie?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ Evelyn said.

‘Then go and put the kettle on, and every saucepan you can find. We’ll need hot water. Bring it straight up to me as soon as it’s boiling…’

By morning the baby was born and Ella Challis would have nothing of it. Weak though she was, she was firm in this decision, and with tears in her eyes Nanny took the baby girl from Evelyn’s arms and carried it into the nursery.

Evelyn ran upstairs to ascertain that Gay was asleep, then returned to the nursery. Nanny was trying to hush the baby’s crying, but without much success.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ Evelyn asked. ‘Is she ill?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nanny answered. She stood up and put the child back into Evelyn’s arms. ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea.’

Evelyn didn’t know much about babies, but she realized now that her mother wouldn’t feed the baby and that it would have to be bottle-fed. In that moment, her heart went out to the small fragment of humanity in her arms, and her young heart was filled to the brim with loving and protective instincts. This was her sister, someone she would care for and cherish all her life. Mummy would learn to love her in time; Gay, too. And she, Evelyn, loved her already, with her whole heart.

She sat rocking the baby until Nanny returned with the tea. Then she climbed the stairs to her own little room and, rather than wake Gay, she made up the empty bed and more tired than she realized she dropped into it and was soon sound asleep.

Downstairs, Nanny took a cup of tea in to Cook. Then she fell thankfully into her rocking-chair by the nursery fire and rocked herself to and fro, her hands clutched together beneath her apron.

‘Poor wee bairn. Poor little mite!’ she said aloud.

Nanny meant the baby, but had she foreseen the future, her pity would have been for Evelyn, too.

Later when she took the infant along to her room, they slept — the old woman whose life was nearly over, and the baby whose life had just begun.

It was exactly one year before war broke out. Evelyn was now twenty-two, but most people mistook her for twenty-four or five. Two years previously Mrs. Challis had been killed in a motor accident and she, Evelyn, had taken up her position as head of the family.

Ella Challis’ sister, their aunt Dorothy, had suggested the three girls should come and live with her, but Evelyn had politely refused this offer and announced her intention of staying exactly where she was, and of looking after Gay and the ten-year-old Margaret herself.

There was more than one objection raised by the other family relatives, but Evelyn had shown surprising strength in opposing them all, and had stuck to her guns, stating that she considered her plan to be better for all concerned.

Gay backed her up with floods of tears and pleadings to be allowed to remain in the house where ‘Poor darling Mummy’ had lived, and had succeeded in softening more than one heart in this way.

Evelyn had reproved her for this later, knowing full well that Gay had had very little love for their mother, and that her death, probably due to the fact that she was by no means sober when she had started out on that fatal car ride, was both a relief and a release for them all.

Mrs. Challis’ bouts of drinking had grown increasingly worse as time went by. She had not married again, and attributed this to the fact that she had lost both her looks and her figure after Margaret’s birth. Nanny had managed fairly successfully to hide from the children the fact that their mother was drinking, but she was herself growing very old and short-tempered, and it was not long before Mrs. Challis dismissed her from service.

Evelyn had been heartbroken.

‘Never you mind, dearie,’ Nanny had said with tears in her eyes. ‘I’ve saved a bit these years and I’ll do with a rest now. It’s not myself I’m a-worrying over, but you and little Miss Margaret.’

‘I shall be all right, Nanny,’ Evelyn said, putting her arms round the old woman and hugging her tightly. ‘And I shall take care of Margaret.’

‘If ever you want help, or a friend, you must come to me,’ Nanny said. ‘There will always be a home and a welcome for you with me, dearie. Remember that.’

Evelyn had cried herself to sleep the night Nanny left, but Gay was dry-eyed and scornful.

‘It’s a jolly good thing she has gone,’ she said. ‘It was always ‘Don’t do this.’ ‘Do t. . .