Revelation

By Chris Vobe

Dark clouds are hanging over Little Bassington. Winter is here. A storm is coming.

As the secrets of one woman's hidden past are laid bare, journalist Adam Chapman reaches a crossroads in his life. The devil is at the door. This time, there will be no escape.

With the community reeling, more than one resident finds themselves left out in the cold. Elsewhere, a childhood tragedy is set to be revisited. For those embroiled in the fight to save the Water Tower, destiny is calling. The past is catching up with them. Truths will out.

Meanwhile, as divisions deepen and the ties that bind are torn asunder, newly-elected Councillor Victoria Kendall is propelled into a game of cat-and-mouse with her political opponents amidst a media storm that threatens to engulf the village.

Decision day is looming. The war of attrition is over. Archangel are coming. And, watching from the sidelines, Robert Grainger stands poised to play his hand.

As the cracks begin to show, expectant eyes and hopeful hearts await a sign, an omen...

...and a revelation.

The third in Chris Vobe's five-volume epic, 'The Water Tower' is a raw and uncompromising tale of love, loyalty and allegiance, and offers a candid exploration of the way we deal with loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: May 7, 2023

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(3)

Did you mean it?

The Last Day

Rushleigh Hall, 1967

(i)

Hilda Stanton:

…good to look upon your face again. So many years…

There was a television burning in an empty room. On Saturday nights, they’d gather round it, all of them; the couple and the young girl, like the family they wished they could be. The fire would be lit, of course, the room itself made comfortably warm. Occasionally, one of them – the young girl with the full face and freckles – would watch through her fingers when the monsters came; sometimes only in jest, other times because she’d actually been frightened.

Padmasambhava…

Whenever she hid like that, the man would run a finger along his finely-combed moustache, chuckle in that airily bemused way of his, and tell her that there was no such thing as monsters. His wife – the woman who’d been like a mother to the young girl – would smile too. She always kept her composure; never faltering once as they sat there, week after week, watching monsters and men and unimaginable worlds on that television set. It was only years later that the young girl wondered if, perhaps, the composed woman might too have been scared of the monsters after all.

… Formless in space… astral travelled…

She’d known that the couple didn’t have children of their own. Perhaps it was something that had simply never happened for them; nature’s selection, God’s choice, time or circumstance. Or perhaps work and commitments and other people had all conspired to get in the way. She knew that the man with the finely-combed moustache was older than the composed woman. Perhaps they had left it too late. She wondered whether her own presence there helped to curtail the sense of absence they must have carried; the feelings of disappointment that inevitably surrounded a marriage without offspring. Sometimes, she contemplated whether she was filling a void in their lives, like a surrogate daughter. The young girl with the full face and freckles would never have presumed to think of herself in that way, of course. That wasn’t why she had come here, after all; it wasn’t her place.

They had made her welcome, though; the man with the finely-combed moustache and the composed woman. More welcome than she had ever expected to feel, so young and innocent and far from home.

…made contact with this intelligence?

The television burned on for hours. No one was watching. That night, the men and the monsters on unimaginable worlds played to a room without an audience.

Later, much later, from beyond the door, there came the sound of someone crying. A deep cry, one that sounded not like the sweet release of tears falling with exultation, or the high notes of relief, but something sorrowful; a mournful lament for the dead. There were no triumphs or celebrations here. Just howls of anguish, shock and pain.

The cry echoed across the landing, down the stairs, and through the hallway. It filled the darkness of a November night. It brought the curtain down on what, for each of them – the man with the finely-combed moustache, the composed woman and the young girl with the full face and freckles – would forever be the last day.

(ii)

When she had first come to Rushleigh Hall, she had been in awe of everything. The young girl with the full face and freckles had never been inside a house so big and so spacious before. She remembered admiring the opulent hallway, with its high back chairs and ornately framed mirror. She recalled rounding the spiral staircase that led to the upstairs floor, with its balcony overlooking the gardens and the tennis court outside. She had never understood why there was a tennis court at Rushleigh Hall; neither the man with the finely-combed moustache nor the composed woman had ever played, as far as she knew. She supposed it must have always been there, and so there it had remained.

They had been unwaveringly kind to her; particularly the composed woman, who had taken the young girl with the full face and freckles under her wing. For reasons she had never fully understood, they seemed to have taken a shine to her; a shine that had never faded. She couldn’t recall ever doing or saying anything particularly noteworthy to justify their indulgence and adoration; if anything, she had been somewhat shy and reserved when she had followed up on the advertisement that had originally led her to the row of mansion houses at the southern end of the quaint little village.

She’d been lodging with a family in the town; they’d been hospitable, but they were both advancing in years and the mundane surroundings of the room they let to her had done nothing to dispel the memory of the equally uninspiring life she’d left behind. The allure of Rushleigh Hall was almost magnetic; from the moment she had set eyes on the heavy oak door – replete with the mellow stone into which it was set – and the Hall’s easterly terrace that revealed itself only when she’d passed the gap in the thick, beautifully tendered hedges that lined the drive, she had sensed instinctively that she would find some measure of belonging here.

That had been, she’d thought later, a presumptuous thought; who was she, after all? Still a teenager, in search of a job amongst the Hall’s housekeeping staff, daring to believe that she had some claim – some right – to a place amongst the grandeur of Rushleigh’s wealthy inhabitants. She’d kept her presumptions well contained, of course; her tone when she’d presented herself was decidedly reluctant and uneven. She hadn’t done as well with words in those days. Her decisive flight from the fields of her childhood in search of something more had set her on a journey that meant she was more now than she had once been, but less than she would later become.

It had been her parents who’d first made contact with the Faircloughs; the family with whom she had been lodging. They had been friends of her father’s. He’d insisted that, if he couldn’t dissuade her from making the sudden leap into the wider world she so desired, he could at least ensure that she had the foundations of stability waiting for her there; a roof over her head and a comfortable room if nothing else. She had known immediately that she would need to find work; to meet her living costs and, she hoped, put a little to one side as she strived to branch out further.

The composed woman had shown her around the Hall when she’d first arrived there, articulating her expectations as they went – but with none of the steel or severity that the young girl with the full face and freckles had anticipated. Instead, the woman had been considerate, open, and reassuring. They had offered her the job without hesitation; from then on, she had worked hard, earning a little more than she had been expecting. The other girls – one slightly older than the rest – had received her warmly. The months that followed had been largely uneventful, yet they were still peppered with striking, extraordinary moments that would live on in her memory.

The composed woman had asked her to come shopping with one day. They had taken the train to London together, where the woman had bought an extravagant pearl necklace for herself. The couple had even invited her to stay late one evening; they’d eaten together on the terrace as the sun went down, relishing a supper of slow-roasted pork belly, roasted potatoes and green beans.

That had been the first time she had really spoken to the man with the finely-combed moustache. He’d asked her about the farm; about her lodgings with the Faircloughs; about her dreams and aspirations and what kind of man she’d like to settle down with. The composed woman had gently chastised him for that, offering a knowing look and telling her husband that the young girl wouldn’t have room enough in her head to think about marriage just yet. She was, after all, still young and full of beginning. There would be time enough for love.

The atmosphere at Rushleigh Hall soon became familiar to her; comfortable even. She felt more at home there, in her work and her routine, than she ever had at her lodgings with the Faircloughs, or amidst the fields of her father’s farm. Over time, she, the man with the finely-combed moustache and the composed woman had begun to think of each other as more than merely employers and employee. Their ease with one another allowed their relationship to evolve into something which none of them would have defined as friendship, but which felt just as contented. They were not a family, but their days together had a familial feel. The man would tell her about deer hunting on the Viscount’s estate, while his wife would share something of the extravagant lifestyle she indulged in, with the other women from the fashionable district.

Perhaps because of the shine they had taken to her, combined with the fact that they had never had children of their own, she came to understand that the composed woman and her husband with the finely-combed moustache had become her guardians. Unofficially, of course, without arrangement or fanfare, but they had nevertheless slipped quietly and unobtrusively into their sea of normality. She, their surrogate daughter, and they, the people who had embraced her and whom she had embraced in return.

Occasionally, she would go out into the town, and allow one of the men in the Black Bull to buy her a drink. The decade through which they were living had been so vibrant and experimental, but she’d studiously avoided the temptations that had offered themselves up to her. When the man with the finely-combed moustache had learned that she was meeting a group of friends one Friday night, he had discreetly slipped some money into her hand when no one else was looking. He was kind to her, and in return she felt a loyalty to him. He’d looked out for her in a way that was comparable to no one else she had ever known.

He’d smiled warmly, run a finger along his moustache in the way he tended to do, and suggested that she could buy herself a new dress and make a night of it. He’d warned her to be careful, though, of the overly-enthusiastic men she would meet, and she’d heeded his advice. She’d made herself up that evening in one of the rooms at Rushleigh Hall, applying makeup that the composed woman had allowed her to use, covering some of her freckles and decorating her lips in a coral-pink tone that she was sure she would never have been able to afford.

The other housekeeping staff knew that she was the couple’s favourite. They had come to realise that she was sometimes invited to stay for meals, and that Saturday nights would see them grouped together around the television in the sitting room favoured by the man with the finely-combed moustache – the one with the softly-hued fabrics and the Persian granary oak table – where they would revel in stories of monsters and men and unimaginable worlds. The other girls had listened patiently as she’d talked, her full face a bounty of eagerness and enthusiasm as she’d cleaned the copper-clad walls of the kitchen and told them excitedly that the man with the finely-combed moustache had enjoyed the episode with Marius Goring most of all.

She, for her part, had detected little to no resentment from the others; largely, they kept their peace, which didn’t altogether surprise her. They had lives of their own, after all. The eldest even had a little boy at home. Between them, she decided, they had other considerations – other priorities – that kept them from taking offence at the fact that, somehow, the newest among them had quickly become the apple of their employer’s eye.

When she was alone, when she’d had time to think about it, she assumed that she must simply have been lucky; that the couple had seen something in her that had been missing in all those who’d come before. It had been mere chance, she determined. A happy accident of fate. The man with the finely-combed moustache and the composed woman had taken her by the hand and led her delicately into the new world she now inhabited. A world which, first and foremost, was still her place of work but which, after hours, had become something more.

She knew that the man had a reputation for getting whatever he wanted. The other housekeeping staff had told her as much. Some, she’d learned, disliked him – despised him, even – but she couldn’t understand why. She’d vaguely considered the notion that these occasional flickers of resentment might have been designed to act as warnings, but she’d dismissed the thought. The man with the finely-combed moustache had been nothing but sympathetic and generous to her. She understood the lifestyle he led was one in which he wanted for nothing; where he could afford to pursue whatever interests he chose. He had been unstintingly open-handed to the church in the village. He had even taken an interest in the Water Tower – the one that was currently being refurbished – on the far side of the old Market Square. They would soon be building more houses, he had told her, beyond the fields the Tower guarded, close to where the drab, dirty blocks that had been thrown up after the war currently stood.

She was in one of the bedrooms when he found her. She’d changed the sheets, brushed the smoked oak flooring, and cleaned the decanter of Glendfiddich whisky that had been left to rest on the wooden chest beside the far wall by the time he arrived. She knew that the composed woman was out for the afternoon, and that the other girls were clustered in the pantry next to the kitchen; one of them had managed to knock two bottles of raspberry jam onto the tiles, where they’d smashed. The man with the finely-combed moustache hadn’t been angry; he’d just told them to ensure it was cleaned up before the composed woman returned home.

That left her upstairs, alone, in the bedroom. The man closed the door behind him as he entered; a heavy sound that resonated in her memory long after the event. She asked him all the usual questions; if everything was alright, whether he needed something from the room, or if she should leave. Everything was alright, he told her. He didn’t need anything from the room. She didn’t have to leave.

She knew why he had come; she saw the suggestion blazing like a beacon behind his hungry eyes long before he spoke a word. She could have – should have – offered some measure of resistance, but even the thought of doing so seemed fruitless to her. It was as if destiny and inevitability had both come calling.

She closed her eyes as she fell backwards onto the bed, with its carefully pressed sheets and its soft white fabric. His voice was the epitome of perfect calm as he told her what he wanted her to do. There was no hint of a storm there, in the movement of his hands, or in his delicately controlled motions. For her part, she surrendered herself to all that took place.

From behind the seal of her eyelids, she could picture him; running a finger along his finely-combed moustache one Saturday night, chuckling lightly as she and the composed woman flinched at the unfolding drama playing out on the television screen. Some people hid behind the sofa, apparently, but she’d always thought that something of a cliché. It was silly when you thought about it. A sofa wouldn’t stop a monster, after all.

She thought of the composed woman next, chastising herself as she did so for the way in which she had so readily complied with the man’s request. Sometime during the few minutes that followed – minutes that felt never-ending – she realised how foolish she had been to believe that there were no such thing as monsters, and how easy a lie it had been for him to tell.

(iii)

Push!

The word was swirling through her mind, like an everlasting echo cascading through the hollow tunnel of her thoughts. She heard it long after the pain was over, after the agony had faded, when the world had calmed and the heavy drumming of her heartbeat had settled back into its usual rhythm.

The composed woman was smiling, then laughing. The young girl with the full face and freckles lay sweating on the bed where they had brought her after her waters had broken, so suddenly and unexpectedly.

She had started bleeding soon after; she’d felt the contractions, her heavy panting becoming steadily more sustained as she tried to breathe through the pain that accompanied a labour beginning far too early. Now, she watched the composed woman, cradling the child she had just delivered, her joyous expression faltering, only to be replaced with a look of pale uncertainty.

The baby wasn’t crying.

At the side of the bed, the man with the finely-combed moustache observed events, stoically. He had been present for the birth, holding her hand as she’d screamed; as her blood had seeped into the sheets; as she had clenched her teeth and tried to repress the gnawing sensation that something was terribly wrong. He had watched, as she had, his wife wrapping the new-born child in a shawl they’d bought for its arrival; an arrival that had not been expected for another two months. At the foot of the bed, there were towels and hot water in a bowl. The old Edwardian cast iron fireplace was not lit. Behind the grate, the flames had been doused; the pokers resting in the cylindrical stand to one side.

The composed woman had cut the umbilical cord with customary precision; her former life working on the wards of a Home Counties hospital, before she had fallen into the orbit of the man with the finely-combed moustache, reasserting itself.

Still, the baby wasn’t crying.

The young girl asked why; finding her voice through the heat and the aftershocks of the pain; pain which had felt to her like a hand had gripped her insides as though they were fabric, tightening and then tearing through them in a mindless hurricane of vandalism. She asked again why her baby wasn’t crying, but no one answered. The man with the finely-combed moustache closed his eyes in solemn acceptance. He’d relieved himself of his waistcoat which, at some time during the course of the evening, had become spattered with blood. The composed woman did what she could; she searched for a heartbeat, tried to clear the baby’s airways, working frantically to reveal some signs of life.

But she knew.

Her baby wasn’t crying.

And he never would.

It was a boy. A child born too early who would never take his first breath. The young girl had spent weeks preceding the birth trying to fix upon the name she would give him; she had settled on Matthew. In the hazy moments that followed her realisation, she searched the room with her eyes, shaking her head in a stubborn refusal to accept the condolences, the remorse, the sympathy she was offered. In scant seconds, she scanned the ceiling, circled the lightshade, examined the bookcase, became aware of the old, rustic shotgun hanging in its usual spot on the wall, felt an urge to smash the decanter that sat beside the bed; hoping against hope that the answer might lie somewhere in her surroundings, if only she could find it.

She grabbed a pillow, clamped it against her mouth and sobbed into it. Her cry was a desperate wave of anguish, a flood of pain far worse than the physical discomfort she had endured just minutes before. The composed woman tried to console her; before allowing the young girl to hold the baby, who she had wrapped in the beautiful shawl with its scalloped edge that the couple had bought for him. His cherub-like features were wrinkled, his face a mask of silence and serenity to which he would be forever confined. He lay in the arms of his mother, drifting in a dreamless sleep towards the gates of Heaven. Lost, now. Forever.

Time passed; no one measured how long, because it didn’t matter. They spoke in hushed tones, exchanged words of sorrow and mourning. Tears ran down the cheeks of the normally composed woman and flowed like fountains over the face of the young girl with the freckles, until her eyes were red and raw. The bleeding had stopped; they had attended to her and made her comfortable. As they talked – the young girl still holding her baby – darkness draped itself across the grounds of Rushleigh Hall. She whispered soothing words into the ear of her dead child, told him stories of men and monsters and unimaginable worlds, talked of how brightly the stars were shining that night, and assured him of her pride and everlasting love. She knew, she told him, how brave and handsome and successful he would have been. She knew, because mothers know.

She kissed her baby’s forehead and allowed a single tear to fall from her eyes onto his precious, starlit skin. A single kiss and a solitary tear that would bind them together for eternity. All the while, the man with the finely-combed moustache stood by the window, his hands plunged deep into his trouser pockets, his back to her.

Soon enough, there were questions about what would happen next. They each understood the need to keep the situation closely contained. When the composed woman left the room, the man with the finely-combed moustache turned to the young girl and offered to take the child; to ensure that he was safely laid to rest. He would do so that night, he promised. No one would ever know. The security of the agreement they had entered into together would remain in place.

They had decided, months earlier, never to speak of what had occurred in the other room, on the bed, just paces from where she now lay. Whether it was guilt or shame that sat draped across his guise after the event, she never knew. Perhaps he understood that he had crossed a line from which there could be no retreat – or perhaps he simply feared for his own reputation, his marriage and his future should their liaison ever be revealed.

When she’d learned that she was expecting, they had devised a story that would satisfy the questions that would inevitably be raised, one which simultaneously secured her child’s future in ways she could never have anticipated. They would tell the other girls at the Hall, the meagre number of friends she had made in town, and even the composed woman, that her circumstances had been arrived at accidentally (that much, at least, was true); that she had fallen into the family way after a rendezvous with a man from the village, following one of those evenings she’d spent in the Black Bull. She had not been careful, they would say; she was embarrassed and ashamed of her recklessness, but determined all the same to see the pregnancy through to term.

When the baby was born, they decided, the man with the finely-combed moustache and the composed woman would take the infant, adopt them as if they were their own, whereupon they could give her child the life that the young girl so fervently believed they deserved. The young girl with the full face and freckles had agreed; numbly and dazedly at first, as she struggled to process the sudden, startling route her life had taken, the abrupt change in its fundamental construction that she was now left to wrestle with. Given time to consider the situation more closely, she devoted herself to their unholy covenant, concluding that she would be doing so in service to a greater good. Her child would, like the man with the finely-combed moustache and the composed woman, want for nothing. She would still be able to see them, to be part of their life; she would, after all, be retained at Rushleigh Hall. They would ask her to live there full time to help them care for the new-born. All that would be required from her was a commitment to the vow of silence she shared with the man.

That had left them with the problem of the Faircloughs; desperately, she had told the man that she wanted to hide the pregnancy from her family – who would, she was certain, insist that she return home were they ever to learn of it. The Faircloughs maintained a regular correspondence with her father and, were they to discover her situation, would surely convey the facts of her pregnancy to him. The man with the finely-combed moustache brought forward the permanency of her residence at Rushleigh Hall; she was given her own room, into which she moved the select belongings from her lodgings, settling her debts with the elderly couple and accounting for her swift departure by explaining that the opportunity afforded to her was too good to pass up. She had left, and she had never seen the Faircloughs again.

Few outside of the other staff at the Hall had seen her while she was pregnant; despite the full face she had inherited from her mother, she remained slight of frame for months after; slight enough, at least, to avoid attracting unwanted attention. There had been no outward sign that she was expecting for some time but, when the pregnancy had at last begun to show, she had reduced her journeys into the village and the town lest word of her circumstances should reach the Faircloughs; instead, she’d travelled with the composed woman into the neighbouring district for anything she’d needed or desired.

Now, as the night edged on, she was faced with another choice, as the man with the finely-combed moustache presented her with his latest proposal. She longed desperately to give her son the funeral he deserved; to lay him to rest with the proper respect, to fully mourn his loss with due care and attention. Yet she knew that if she did so, there would be no way of keeping her pregnancy hidden from the village, from her meagre friends, or from the busy tide of neighbours that occupied their surround. From the Faircloughs or her family.

So she agreed, as she had agreed months earlier.

For the greater good.

The man with the finely-combed moustache lifted his son – their son – from her arms and left the room. Before the door closed fully, she saw him raise the baby up to offer a solitary kiss of his own.

The composed woman was waiting for him when he returned.

She was sitting on the end of the bed, bathing the young girl with the full face and freckles in a balm of sympathy as they sipped from the warm drinks she’d made them. The disposal had been a simple, clinical act; before he’d left, he’d told the young girl that he knew just the place. That the burial would be a straight-forward, if heart-wrenching, task. He had taken the new-born’s body to the Tower in the village, where work had been under way for several weeks to renovate the grounds.

The concrete flags within the Tower’s boundaries had all been raised; the famously chipped and degenerating surface stripped away in readiness for the new, fresh layer that would soon be applied. The Tower itself had been cordoned off for the duration; fortuitously, the work was not due to start for another few days. The man with the finely-combed moustache had made it his business to know this, a result of his recent interest in helping to secure the Tower’s future.

He had parked his car mere streets away, carrying the bundle past the cordon and into the hallowed grounds, which had lain empty and abandoned under the cloak of the witching hour. Once inside, he had dug a grave in the soft earth left uncovered by the renovation project. He’d placed the child in its final resting place, wrapped in the shawl with the scalloped edge. He would lie there, undisturbed, in the darkness of dreams. For all time.

The man had covered the makeshift grave with the same earth he had scooped away. Then he had departed, unseen and unheard, the site appearing to all intents and purposes as though it had never been touched. In the days to come, the grounds would be covered with freshly laid concrete, and Matthew’s grave would be concealed forever.

The young girl with the full face and freckles dissolved into tears once again. She wanted so desperately to believe that what she had done had been for the best, but she could not quite convince herself of the veracity of that belief. She told the couple how much it pained her to think of her baby, entombed in a makeshift grave beneath the Tower that dominated the village skyline. She questioned how she would ever be able to bear the torment that seemed destined to consume her, or how she would ever be able to turn her eyes skyward and see anything other than the burial place of her son; her beautiful son, whose eyes had never so much as opened to the world.

Time, they promised, would heal all wounds. She had her whole life ahead of her. There was someone out there who would love her, someone who she would go on to marry. Together, they would have children of their own. Those children would never replace Matthew, of course, but she would recover from her loss in the same way that we all do; by filling the void with other people. By compensating for those who have gone by investing in those who are still here and those who are yet to come. There was no other way.

It was the tiredness that weighed most heavily upon her. Perhaps it was the grey mist of her fatigue, the loss of blood she had earlier endured, or the sheer force of grief that pressed down on her during those last hours on that last day, which led to the slight twist of fate which would determine all their futures. The world, she came to know, turns on accidents of chance and fortune. A remark was aired; nothing that, in the ordinary course of conversation, would be called substantial or significant, but one significant enough to cause the young girl with the full face and freckles to stumble over her words, to backtrack, to hesitate and to flounder. It was enough to pique the interest of the composed woman who, initially, could not believe that the young girl had meant what she had said. Inclining her head, she noticed that face of the man with the finely-combed moustache had fallen, his mien had paled. The composed woman searched his expression for some indication that he shared her confusion at the young girl’s turn of phrase, but saw instantly that he did not. Where her own face bore the countenance of uncertainty, his sported an entirely different complexion: fear.

It had been a slip of the tongue, the way these things have a habit of being; such unintentional malpractice when paying tribute to a lie. She had been talking about Matthew, of course, and looking at the man with the finely-combed moustache as she had done so. Our baby, she had said. Our, not mine.

Immediately, the composed woman knew. She understood. The silence that descended on the room dispelled whatever doubts might have remained. The woman comprehended, in that moment, the covenant that had been made between the young girl and the man with the finely-combed moustache, the decisions they had taken together, and the vow of silence they entered into.

The minutes that followed were a firestorm of fury and righteous anger. There were recriminations, of course, followed by words steeped in anguish and wrapped in the dark shroud of betrayal. For the composed woman, there was resentment; resentment at the way their marriage vows had been so thoughtlessly discarded, resentment at the charges of disloyalty – the violation of trust – that she levelled at the young girl with the full face and freckles. Accusations and retaliations filled a space that had, for the past few hours, been defined by its cushion of sympathy and understanding.

The blind rage that now consumed the woman eradicated all trace of her usually composed demeanour. She resisted attempts by the man with the finely-combed moustache to pacify her; rejected the words