Page 13

For three days after Beth’s arrival in Dunmore it rained incessantly.

Unable to go out to explore, inspect the village shop, or just walk around, Beth turned out the cupboards and drawers.

She found enough old letters to fill a small dustbin, which she put to one side to go through later, plus some notebooks which Miranda had used like a diary but with many of the entries far apart.

It seemed she only jotted things down when the mood took her.

There were just as many boxes and albums of photographs too. A quick flick through them suggested they were unlikely to be of any use in shedding further light on Miranda, as few had dates or labels to say who the people were.

With that job done and room to put her own belongings away, she lit the fire, made herself some beans on toast, and settled on the sofa to read the notebooks.

Beth smiled at that, it seemed a perfectly good plan to her, but would Miranda reveal what her own plan was?

Sometimes weeks or months could go past without an entry.

Then there might be something she’d been to, a show, concert or party.

She often wrote rather waspish remarks about her companions, what they wore, how they looked, and her opinion on how they could improve themselves.

Again and again Beth found herself wincing at the young woman’s scornful attitude to others.

As the years moved on, and Miranda was working as a governess, she excelled at brief, insightful observations about people, which also revealed quite a lot about herself. She was intelligent, opinionated, perhaps bigoted, generous to those she cared about, scathing about those she saw as fools.

The men who wafted in and out of her life got short shrift: ‘Too dull. Lazy. Can’t dance. No sense of humour. His breath smells. I hate the way he looks at me, it’s like he wants to devour me. No ambition.’

She thought Mr Boyle had been right about Miranda coming from a grand but impoverished background.

Her lovely handwriting, references to famous works of art, ballet, theatre and going to concerts were all pointers to a genteel upbringing.

She even made a little aside about being like Jane Eyre, forced to get out into the world and work for a living.

Beth thought most women in that position would be happy to marry and let their husband support them. But maybe Miranda was too forward in her thinking for most men of that era. If she had any other family members, she never mentioned them.

She also read a great deal, and there were endless lists of books, often with her opinion of them.

Beth had read very few of these, but of those she had, she agreed with Miranda– they were either terribly dull or brilliant.

She liked painting, jigsaws, and now and then embroidery.

Walking, gardening, swimming and playing tennis all got a thumbs up from her.

But Beth liked best Miranda’s views on her role of governess.

She clearly resented having to be subservient to her mistress, a crashing snob who called the wife of her gardener ‘vulgar’ purely because her legs were tanned through not wearing stockings.

Miranda wrote beneath this: ‘If I’m to believe Mrs W’s opinion, then I must be truly vulgar, I daydream of lying completely naked in the sun.

Mrs W would have heart failure if she caught me doing that. ’

However dismissive she was of adults, she seemed to like and understand children, which was at odds with what Aisling had said.

She took pride in not just their reading and writing, but paintings they did or other handicrafts.

Beth was indebted to Auntie Ruth for teaching her so much, yet Miranda was clearly an even better teacher, such a stimulating, intelligent woman.

She made references to letters from Honor quite often.

She was disappointed her old friend was always writing about her baby, how beautiful she was, never cried, smiled constantly.

But Beth was surprised by Miranda’s waspish reaction to Honor writing to say her husband Corporal Alfred Manning had died in action.

She copied out her friend’s words on the subject: I’m trying to be proud he died a hero fighting for his country, yet I can’t help but be dismayed that I have to bring our daughter up alone .

Miranda felt her old friend sounded so very distant and cold, considering she was writing to the godmother of the child left fatherless.

‘She could write reams of sappy, emotional prose on a cat being run over, or the old lady down the road never getting a visitor,’ Miranda wrote, ‘but not show grief and horror at her husband’s death. I find that very odd.’

Beth wiped a tear away as she thought of all those women who lost their men in the Great War.

She thought perhaps Honor was trying to be stoic and brave.

But in the end she was with Miranda on this, for surely it was more normal to wail and cry to your oldest friend than to take all the grief inwards?

Yet however sarcastic and dismissive Miranda was of Honor, there was a tangible taste of the close friendship they’d had as young girls, even if they hadn’t managed to hold on to it in later life, probably because Miranda moved in different circles and was often in other countries.

Yet they carried on writing to each other for what had once been between them.

By the time Beth had read all the notebooks, or at least skim-read them, it occurred to her it wasn’t Miranda she really needed to know; after all, the last time she saw her god-daughter was at her christening.

With that in mind she went through all Miranda’s letters, and picked out the ones from Elizabeth.

She seemed to be on a charm offensive with her godmother, considering she hadn’t met her.

But then she had been schooled in the value of a well written letter.

Beth had never been trained like that, she never had relatives that wrote or sent presents, but Mrs Bradley used to go on and on about such things, often showing Beth examples of bad letter writing.

Elizabeth had written some amusing bits about plays and concerts in London.

Perhaps she felt being entertaining was the best way to her godmother’s heart.

In one letter she had humorously described a customer trying to squeeze herself into a skirt a size too small.

‘Mother often told me you believe in keeping yourself in trim and are always perfectly dressed. She said too that you used to call fat women hippos. I love that image.’

Reading another person’s mail soon lost its appeal. Beth had hoped for men pledging undying love, or even admiration. A bit of scandal, or secrets. But most of the letters were very dull, from women who listed people they’d seen and places they had visited.

All of these she put on the bonfire heap, keeping only the ones from Elizabeth to read again later.

Even though she didn’t really need to know about Miranda, she was still curious about her.

How did a young woman from Tunbridge Wells who left home to be a governess come to live here in Ireland?

Strange that she didn’t ever refer to that move in her notebooks, when she had named all three places where she was a governess.

Surely if someone had died and left her the cottage, or she’d bought it herself, it would be worth noting down?

Perhaps it was as Mr Boyle claimed, a man from Waterford.

She went to a church school in Tunbridge Wells with Honor, and presumably had a quite average upbringing, but she only mentioned her parents in passing twice, and never after she’d become a governess. Her parents must have died. But odd that that wasn’t noted!

In books, writers often referred to women with many of Miranda’s traits as ‘gentlefolk’.

Was this learned behaviour from her years of being a governess?

Beth was well aware she’d picked up a lot during her time with Auntie Ruth, and then the Bradleys.

Not just things like how to lay a table, or the correct way to iron a shirt, but to drop her Cockney accent, and to use correct grammar.

About six months earlier, Mrs Bradley had remarked on that.

‘I wouldn’t have even allowed you to greet people at the front door when you first came here,’ she said in that superior manner she had.

‘But I must hand it to you, Mary, you speak excellent English now, no one would suspect you came from the gutter.’

Saying she came from the gutter really rankled, and she had wanted to retort that a real lady would not be so rude or insensitive. But of course she nodded and said nothing. Hoping that one day the woman would get her comeuppance.

Turning back to Elizabeth’s diaries, it struck Beth that when Miranda died, Honor would’ve talked about her to her daughter.

That would be natural behaviour, recounting things they got up to together when they were young, their hopes and dreams, tales about family members.

Yet nothing was jotted down by Elizabeth.

Not even that she was to inherit the house.

It seemed as if she was only interested in the present, not the past, nor the people who had influenced her, or been good to her.

As Beth sat staring into the fire, the notebook slipped off her lap onto the floor and she didn’t bother to retrieve it.

She felt she was done with trying to unravel other people’s pasts.

Maybe she should stick with her present.

Jack Ramsey sprang into her mind, and as she relived his kiss, she had a little tremor in her belly which she suspected was what people called desire.

‘Write to him,’ she said aloud. ‘You’ve got to stop thinking all men are like Ronnie.’