The Relfe Sisters

By Richard Herley

Clive Wilson is a diffident young man much influenced by his parents. Late one Saturday afternoon just before Christmas he crosses the High Street and is about to proceed when for some reason he feels an urge to look back. A young boy is stepping into the road, apparently unaware of an oncoming Range Rover.

Clive dashes out to scoop him back but has misjudged: with a split-second decision he shoves the boy out of harm’s way but is himself hit.

‘The impact threw him into the air. The trajectory he described seemed to last an age, without pain, offering a crazy view of the High Street, its festive shop-windows, its stars and angels. He just had time to say to himself “I am being killed” before he collided with the merciless solidity of the roadstone and knew nothing more.’

Weeks later, convalescing, he reflects that getting hit by that Range Rover might have been the first real thing that has ever happened to him.

And so it proves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Herley
• Release date: Nov 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005740740

Richard Herley

I was born in England in 1950 and educated at Watford Boys' Grammar School and Sussex University, where my interest in natural history led me to read biology.My first successful novel was "The Stone Arrow", which was published to critical acclaim in 1978. It subsequently won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, administered by the Royal Society of Literature in London, and was the first in a trilogy. This was followed by "The Penal Colony" (1987), a futuristic thriller that formed the basis of the 1994 movie "No Escape", starring Ray Liotta.The main difficulty for the author is making his voice heard in the roar of self-promotion. I believe that the work I am producing now is of higher quality than my prize-winning first, and ask you, the reader, to help spread the word by telling your friends if you have enjoyed one of my books.

Book preview

The Relfe Sisters

THE RELFE SISTERS

Smashwords Edition

© Richard Herley 2022

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover image adapted from a photograph by Hauke Musicaloris; licence.

The film referred to in Chapter 19 is the 2004 version of Le Silence de la Mer.

Table of Contents

1 Stars and angels

2 A bit of all right

3 Verity

4 Sophie prepares

5 Oscar’s party

6 Clive asks for a date

7 The Lion and Unicorn

8 Pittsford Pond

9 To Portugal Place

10 Two bifurcations

11 Spider

12 Breakfast in Paddington

13 ‘The Stolen Child’

14 Gerry dissuades

15 Canary Wharf

16 Easter Saturday

17 Eostre

18 The egg-hunt

19 Le Silence de la Mer

20 Pimlico

21 Sophie’s letter

22 Uncle Jerome

23 Diana in the gazebo

24 Housework

25 Marianne

26 Millie

27 Cavendish Avenue

28 Vulcan’s wife

29 A new mother

30 Moving day

About the author

Other novels by Richard Herley

There are two kinds of women – you ought to know it by this time – the safe and the unsafe.

— Henry James, Roderick Hudson

1

The December dusk had turned to darkness when Clive finally got into Spurling’s. He made his way past the counter with its sweets and cigarettes, past the newspapers and magazines, to the stationery department at the far end of the shop, where, from the racks of disposable pens, he selected a rollerball and tested it on the squiggle-covered pad provided.

The pen would do. He decided to buy it and moved off towards the greetings cards, where he set about choosing a birthday card for his brother. He found some of the cards insulting or vulgar or even obscene; Julian would find them yet more offensive, for he conducted himself with scant concession to modernity. Clive was content to use a rollerball, while his elder brother wrote only with a pencil or fountain pen, still called the radio the ‘wireless’ and wore such things as sports jackets, overcoats, brogues, and a watch that needed winding. Not that Clive himself was much more au courant: the influence of their parents had been, and still was, too strong.

Still browsing the birthday cards, he came upon those intended for a brother. Most were impossibly sentimental. Even so he was tempted to send one meant for a boy obsessed with football, fishing, train-spotting or cricket. But that joke, too, alas, Julian might not appreciate.

In the end he chose a blank card with a view of Venice by Canaletto. He would write the greeting himself, no doubt with his new rollerball.

This was the penultimate Saturday before Christmas so he had to queue at the cash desk. Eventually, however, adding these purchases to his shopping bag, he was able to emerge into the air.

The High Street made an attractive scene, what with the illuminated stars and angels strung across it, in diagonal rows, by the Chamber of Commerce and perhaps also the Rotarians, or the Round Table, or the Lions, or whoever they were. Clive knew almost nothing about such matters and rarely so much as glanced at the front page of the freesheet that was his only source of news about these goings-on. But Christmas was coming and this afternoon he was feeling more than usually benevolent towards the inhabitants of his little home town.

As usual during shopping hours, parked vehicles lined the kerb on the far side of the High Street. Clive had left his car in the council car park, reachable by an alleyway between two shops.

At the moment the traffic was being held up by the pedestrian-actuated lights further down towards the War Memorial, so with appropriate circumspection he was able to cross, threading his way between two queueing cars to gain the empty half of the road.

Having passed between a big, mud-spattered Hilux parked on his left and a silver Mercedes estate car, he gained the pavement and was about to proceed when for some reason he felt an urge to look back.

The traffic lights had turned green. Concealed from that direction by the Hilux, a boy of about ten, in jeans and a dark hoodie with the hood down, wearing white earbuds, had entered the gap Clive had just negotiated and was showing no sign of caution. Either he had not realised that the lights had changed or he was misjudging the speed of an oncoming Range Rover – because he was keeping straight on, into the road.

It made no sense to shout a warning. Nor did Clive think much about that. Purely from instinct he dashed out to scoop the boy back, but then he saw that there was no time for them both to change direction and retreat, because the Range Rover was still accelerating, and so, with a wild lunge, made clumsy by his bag, Clive shoved him forward and out of harm’s way.

The driver of a Transit van coming from the left, towards the lights, must have seen what was happening: by braking hard he had managed to stop short of the place where the boy, arms outstretched, was falling headlong to the tarmac. The car behind the van could not stop soon enough and piled into it with a crump.

These things Clive saw and heard in the last moment before the Range Rover hit him.

The impact threw him into the air. The trajectory he described seemed to last an age, without pain, offering a crazy view of the High Street, its festive shop-windows, its stars and angels. He just had time to say to himself ‘I am being killed’ before he collided with the merciless solidity of the roadstone and knew nothing more.

・・・

He was extricating himself from a dream involving the disassembly of a piece of furniture – a wardrobe perhaps, or an armchair; he couldn’t be sure. It was finished in dark oak and comprised in part a number of inexplicable spindle-shaped objects holding it together. He had been taking it to pieces because, vaguely, a house-move was either in progress or mooted. Verity had been behind him, silently, somehow, egging him on.

The dream faded, its texture and details dissolving, leaving him with nothing more than a sense of obscure and morbid nonsense involving his former girlfriend, such dreams being frequent with him of late. It was supplanted by the realisation that he was in bed, a hospital bed, and in pain, more or less all over, but chiefly in his midriff and, most particularly, in his right thigh.

Besides all that he felt queasy, light-headed, just as he had felt on that wretched ferry to Jersey – again with Verity – when the rain had intensified and with it the swell. She had sat beside him, in the window seat, digesting her breakfast of bacon and egg and sausage while his had rebelled inside him. With rain sheeting down the glass he had stumbled to his feet. The vast cabin, full of holidaymakers and unnaturally subfusc on that June mid-morning, had seemed to present him with endless obstacles on his way to the lavatories, which were themselves crowded with vomiting passengers. That too had been a nightmare. His will had failed at the last moment: he had wanted to get into a cubicle, but none had been vacant and he’d had to make do with a basin in full view of everyone else.

Clive was seasick now, all right, but he seemed not to be undulating and his stomach felt empty.

Then he recalled what had happened opposite Spurling’s.

Light from the corridor revealed that he had been placed in a ward of six beds, his bed being the second, clockwise, from the door. To his left rose two tall windows, now covered with pale blinds. Sundry small noises – congested breathing, faint wheezing and low, intermittent and almost inaudible groans – were issuing from his fellow patients. Judging from these noises most if not all of them were elderly men.

His right leg had been encased in splints and suspended from a gallows-like frame. The different parts of his body hurt him differently. The dull, deep, heavy aching in his thigh provided a basso continuo for sharper pains from his ribs, though these too seemed muffled, robbed of their highest frequencies, as it were, which suggested that he had been given, or was still being given, painkillers: beside the bed stood a drip attached to his right forearm. He was unpleasantly sure that he had been fitted with a catheter.

Clive’s dismay deepened. Not only had he landed in the clutches of the Nosocomial Horror Show but the nausea and various other sensations told him that he had been anaesthetised and operated on. What were his chances of avoiding sepsis? Or even of walking again? He was gripped by fear for the future. Would he even be able to return to his flat, still less look after himself?

He felt parched. There may have been a jug of water on the bedside cabinet he could just discern to his right but it hurt him too much to turn his head further in that direction, though not in the other. With his painful left hand – bruised and abraded where it had hit the road – he groped about in the bedclothes for whatever they provided to summon help, but found nothing.

His fellow patients seemed to be unconscious. No one yet knew he had come round. For a time, then, he could be alone with his thoughts.

In a single reckless moment it was possible that he had ruined his life. Given half a second to consider the consequences he would not have behaved like that. That boy was old enough to have known better. If he had been run over instead, it would of course have been a tragedy. Given his size he would probably have been killed. Cruel, regrettable, and so on, but such things happened all the time.

Clive saw again the oncoming LED headlamps, the looming radiator grille and bumper, the massive, uncompromising, box-shaped body – in some dull colour, grey, most likely – and wondered what had been the aftermath. At least one bystander would have called for an ambulance. An appalled but fascinated circle would have gathered round his sprawling form. If anyone had had knowledge of first aid, the rubberneckers might have been told to stand back and await the arrival of the paramedics. The police would have been called too. The High Street and perhaps surrounding roads would have become gridlocked, this spreading, even, to the bypass, which begged the question of how an ambulance had got through. Nonetheless through it must have got, or he would not be here.

The driver, in distress or otherwise, might have pleaded, to anyone who would listen, his, or her, inability to avoid the collision.

And what of the boy? Had he been hurt too? Had his family been present?

The nausea was diminishing somewhat. Clive turned his mind to practical matters. In the short term at any rate he would be unable to return to his flat, which was on the second floor and accessible only by stairs. Assuming a long stay in hospital, he would have to ask Julian or Father to empty the fridge-freezer and switch it off, leave the central heating on its frost setting, shut off the water, and visit now and then to collect the mail and check that all was well.

An unanticipated inspection of his flat by a member of his family might prove embarrassing. He recalled the reply he had written to Verity, which he had never posted but kept in his bureau, together with the even more caustic letter to him that had ended their affair; she had refused to respond to his phone calls and emails or even the doorbell. Then there was his laptop, which held certain data he would prefer to keep private, nothing pornographic, but personal, such as his correspondence, especially with Verity, together with details of his financial affairs.

Julian, he knew, was too honourable to pry, but Father might be another matter. Access to passwords would be needed to deal with the utility providers and to respond to email. And what had happened to his phone? Had he broken it in his fall?

Then there was his car. One key had been in his pocket, while the other was at home, so it was unlikely that anyone could yet have retrieved it for him. Would he have to dispute the excess charge the council would already have levied? Might they even impound the car?

And what of his job? How long would he be off and would it even be open for him, if and when he recovered? What were the chances of someone – that reptile, Bewlay, for example – easing himself into Clive’s place?

Clive’s mood rose a fraction when he remembered that as part of his package he was entitled to private medical care and fell again when he remembered that, as one of the junior employees, he was covered only for minor procedures. There was small chance of his being moved to a private clinic.

The old men continued to groan and wheeze. He began to distinguish one set of noises from another and speculate as to the age and affliction of its source. At long intervals NHS bods passed to and fro along the corridor, but none entered the ward.

Clive now perceived that what he had done could be viewed as heroic rather than what it was, idiotic. Might it even make the local news? Not the freesheet, which was only published monthly, but one of the regional TV programmes.

Although Verity owned a television she watched the news only to scoff at it as a specimen of propaganda. She had firm opinions on such matters, as indeed on many others. For example, she had memorably defined voting as the adult equivalent of writing to Father Christmas. Such opinions were something he still missed almost as much as he was missing her body. Rather against his better judgement, he had been mulling over the idea of proposing to her when the end had come.

Clive had never been good with women. He didn’t understand them and his shyness had prevented him from asking out more than a handful. Besides Verity he had only ever slept with one girl, during his first year at the university, and that too had ended in recriminations. She had accused him of various crimes abhorred by the left, such as being an unreconstructed member of the patriarchy and interested only in getting between her legs: the latter charge, at least, being valid.

When Verity had come along she had taken him over and he was still not sure how that had happened or how she had regarded him; he had feared becoming henpecked and worse in later life. On the other hand, she was pretty, she had brains, and she had independence of mind. So independent was she, indeed, that she was working towards starting her own business.

Besides, she was a good social fit for him. Her family and his were compatible. His parents approved of her, without, he was certain, being aware of how uninhibited she could be under his duvet or hers, for she had her own flat as well.

The thought occurred to him that if she learned of the accident she might relent, just a little, and come to see him here.

For a long time he lay there fantasising about this. At last he admitted that she would not be coming, full stop, and fell into a troubled doze, only to be aroused, along with his companions, at six o’clock when a nurse entered the ward and turned on the lights.

2

Of the other five men in Clive’s ward only three were at all communicative and, of those, Ralph didn’t say much. As for Graham and Eddie, they lay almost entirely inert.

Monty, in the bed on Clive’s left, was the most forthcoming. He was recovering from a heart attack and had been fitted with a stent. Stuart, on the right, was less chatty but Clive liked him better and soon learned to respect him as well. It was Stuart who had broken the news that Clive was indeed being represented as a hero, not only on local television but in at least one national newspaper, the Sun, her copy of which Stuart’s wife bestowed on her husband whenever she visited. Later Clive learned that he had been featured in two other tabloids. All had used the same photo of him. For that he had to blame his mother.

It seemed the boy was eleven years of age and named Oscar Northfield. Among parents these days such retro forenames were quite the fashion, Clive believed. His own name, however, was more than retro enough. He hated it, but his middle name, Norman, was even worse; though it did suit his father, the original owner.

On the Wednesday morning after Clive’s admission, once the drugs trolley and breakfast were over with, Stuart related what had brought him here.

He was a burly, grizzly fellow of about sixty, almost bald, and owned, he said, a skip-hire business. He drove one of his three lorries himself and was used to heavy lifting, so he had been surprised to learn that he had developed a hernia in his groin; at first he had thought the lump was a tumour.

‘What is a hernia, exactly?’ Clive said. The conversation was awkward only in that it still pained him somewhat to turn his head to the right.

‘Far as I can make out, there’s a natural weakness in your abdomen just there, in the muscle wall what holds it all in. A big strain can rupture it so part of your intestine comes through.’

‘Sounds horrible.’

‘It is. Painful too, ’cept when you’re lying down. I went to the quack and he said I should get meself a truss while I waited for the op. That helped a bit. In fact I couldn’t have done without it, because the waiting-list was eleven months. The hernia got worse, of course, and I’d have gone private if I’d had the money. Finally the big day arrives and they do the deed. Local anaesthetic, I was awake the whole time. They mow your pubes that side, open you up, stick a bit of mesh in there to keep your pipework in, then sew you up again. I was a day-patient and the missus drove me home. Soon after that my bollocks turned purple and the whole area was bruised yellow and black. That’s normal, they said. Anyway, a week later the dressing comes off and I go back to work like they said I could, only I wasn’t to lift nothing heavy for a few months. First day back, I’m just getting in the cab and there’s this terrible pain in my groin. Fuck me, I thought, what the fuck is going on? I was in agony. Never felt pain like it. One of my blokes drove me to A&E and I was kept waiting for eight hours before anyone would see me. Long story short, they’d botched the op and I’d got what they call a strangulated hernia. That means a loop of your intestine comes through the hole and gets trapped. It’s deadly dangerous. They did the op again. Full anaesthetic this time. They’re keeping me in for observation. Might get infected. The doc says I’ll have a permanent weakness there now. That means my business is fucked. I can’t afford to hire another driver, times are that bad.’

‘I’m sorry. How awful.’

‘Yeah, well. And my bollocks are still purple. My missus says I should sue, but I’d just be suing the taxpayer, that’s you and me.’

The story did not inspire confidence in Clive’s own prognosis, but of more immediate concern was his growing fatigue. One was routinely awoken during the night by nurses talking or even laughing in the corridor and of course there were the groans and occasional shrieks of other patients, both here and elsewhere on this floor. He had asked his mother to bring him some wax earplugs, being the only sort that halfway worked, though he detested them. With the help of these he was able to snooze during the day, sometimes snatching fifteen or twenty minutes of actual sleep, but by Wednesday night his fatigue had grown much worse. He was sure it was retarding his recovery and longed for the blessed day when he could escape. That day, according to Mr Ghalil, who had operated on his leg, was as yet some way off.

The chief problem with the NHS, Clive thought, was that one had to pay for it up front, with the threat, moreover, of imprisonment if one would rather not. The patient was no longer a customer upon whose satisfaction final payment was contingent. There was, therefore, no need for the Service to mind whether the customer were satisfied or not. Indeed, so divorced from commercial reality was it that it was permeated by the idea that the patient was being done some sort of favour. This was of course never articulated. It was also permeated by the faith of the medical profession in its papal infallibility.

So far Clive had met instances of kindness and compassion from the doctors and nurses that made these reflections seem mean-spirited, but he had also observed indifference, neglect and even hostility bordering on the cruel. It was of the first importance that a recovering patient should not be deprived of sleep.

Because Clive’s sleep-pattern had been so badly disrupted he was awake on Thursday morning at about four o’clock when he noticed a marked change in Graham’s breathing. It had become hoarser, gasping, and even more laboured.

Clive reached for his buzzer but even as he did so there came a vile noise from the opposite bed. It ceased, and he realised he had just heard a death-rattle, something he had only read about and whose existence, if he had considered the matter, he would have doubted.

The buzzer eventually brought Nurse Owusu, who did not hesitate to turn on the overhead lights.

Graham was – or had been – in his late eighties, a man whose ill health had rendered his aspect ghastly: grey-skinned, fleshless, with only a few wisps of hair and a prominent nose like a parrot’s beak. Now he looked even more gruesome, his mouth hanging open to reveal decayed spigots of teeth and a yellow tongue.

‘You pressed?’ said Nurse Owusu accusingly, coming further into the ward.

‘It’s Graham there. Just now.’

Monty said, ‘Poor old bleeder. Amazing he lasted this long.’

Nurse Owusu inspected the dead man. She felt for a pulse, let his arm fall and, before departing, drew the screens round the bed.

‘See that?’ Monty said to Clive. ‘See the way she dropped his arm?’

‘She didn’t mean anything by it. Must be routine for her. You can’t expect …’ and Clive searched for the right word ‘… reverence from someone, from a ward nurse. She must deal with scores of dead patients in a year.’

‘She hates us. Know she does. Resentment, that’s what it is.’

Stuart said, ‘Ferfuxake shut up, Monty.’

‘Yes,’ said Ralph, ‘would you mind?’

‘When I die, I want it to be among my own people,’ said Monty defiantly, but remained silent thereafter.

Nurse Owusu returned with the young, bulky, deep-voiced Nigerian doctor on night duty. The pair disappeared behind the screens and Clive could hear a brief, low and heavily accented discussion.

They emerged and left the ward.

Two orderlies arrived with a trolley and wheeled the corpse away. A male nurse Clive had never seen before stripped the bedding and removed the dead man’s few pathetic effects, and it was as if Graham had never been.

The ward went dark again.

O Lord, Clive inwardly prayed, get me out of here!

・・・

It was not until Friday that he was deemed well enough to receive visitors other than his parents and brother. The previous day his mother had sought, or rather required, his permission for a visit from the boy and his mother, a prospect Clive did not welcome. He felt uncomfortable when meeting new people and this encounter promised to be specially embarrassing.

Today was 22 December, one of the shortest days of the year, and even now, at five past two, the light from an overcast sky was being bested by the six illuminated panels set in the ceiling of the ward.

Monty’s mother, a crone even older than Monty himself, proceeded at a crouch through the double doorway. She had just started across the floor on the laborious journey to her son’s bed when Clive saw his own mother appear behind her – alone, thank goodness.

She acknowledged the gestures of recognition offered by Stuart and a couple of others and drew the visitors’ chair into a less inconvenient position. ‘How are you today, Clive?’

‘Fine. Fine. I’m fine.’

‘Surely not,’ she said, placing a hand on his wrist.

‘I’m mending rapidly. Really I am.’

‘We all pray that you are.’ Then she said, ‘They’ll be along in a minute. The Northfields.’

He wanted it confirmed. ‘Just the two of them? The mother and son?’

‘Yes, just those two. They’re in the waiting room along the corridor. I asked them to give us a minute alone.’

‘Do I really have to see them?’

The reproachful look she would otherwise have given him was kept in check, he supposed, by his injuries and his elevated status. She said, ‘It would be churlish not to receive them now.’

‘Being churlish’ would never do. That was one of the crimes his parents anathematised most.

‘What have you told them?’

‘Nothing of substance.’

‘Nothing medical?’

‘Heavens, no!’

‘What’s she like? The mother?’

‘A perfectly nice woman. You’ll see. I’ve asked them not to stay long as you’re so poorly.’

‘I thought you said you’d told them nothing medical.’

‘Nothing specific. You must be poorly or you wouldn’t be here.’

That was an unusually logical statement, for her. The NHS had a policy of ejecting patients as soon as it reasonably – and quite often unreasonably and indeed unseasonably – could.

She stood up and Clive’s apprehension grew yet more. ‘I’ll fetch them now, shall I?’

‘Yes. Let’s get it over with.’

‘You will be gracious to them, Clive?’

Whether that statement merited a question mark he could not decide.

All too soon his mother returned.

‘Mrs Northfield, may I present my son Clive? Clive, this is Mrs Diana Northfield and this is Oscar.’

There were no handshakes: he was an invalid. ‘How do you do,’ Clive said, his mood instantly tempered by the fact that Mrs Northfield was not only amazingly beautiful but, under her fashionable winter coat, wearing a skirt, signalling an ethic of which Clive strongly approved. The only other women he knew who wore skirts with any frequency were his own mother and Julian’s wife.

Mrs Northfield looked just about old enough to have produced a boy of eleven, suggesting that she had devoted herself early to matrimony and eschewed the habit of today’s young women of putting it about all over the place until they hit The Wall and, panicking, scrabbled around for a mug to pay the bills. And while Mrs Northfield might be approaching, or even have one foot in the penumbra of The Wall, it was possible that maturity had made her even more desirable today than she must have been at seventeen. Her collar-length hair, almost chestnut, with a slight wave, had been most skilfully cut. Above all he noticed her intelligent, luminous eyes, hazel in colour.

‘Mr Wilson,’ she said, and with those soft