The Misadventures of Margaret Finch, page 26
‘Where’s the ambulance? Is there a doctor? Anyone who can help?’ The girl is frantic. Shouting at a small group of men who are standing a few feet away. But no one is moving.
Oh God. Margaret stumbles towards him, crumpling onto the ground.
‘He’s still with us,’ the girl says. ‘Harold, your friend is here. The young lady. Harold, wake up. The ambulance is on its way.’
Margaret leans over him. She can see puncture wounds either side of his face. ‘I thought … I thought it was …’
She can see the blood draining out of him, the colour from his face.
‘The Lord sent an angel to prise them open.’ His voice is so soft she has to bring her ear to his mouth to hear him. But the intonation is there: the fire from the pulpit, lines delivered from a stage. ‘And they all saw it, didn’t they? They were all watching. They’ll tell the papers what happened.’
Oh God. They were all watching. Even the children. They saw everything. And it wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t for show.
‘I’ll recover and then they’ll come.’ His eyes are flickering open. ‘They’ll all want to see the man saved from the jaws of death. It will be a sell-out!’
She takes his hand. It is cold and limp in her own. ‘You must stay awake, Harold. Don’t shut your eyes.’
Two men run in carrying a stretcher. ‘We need to get him to hospital.’
She stands and steps back and feels a hand on her shoulder. ‘James?’ As soon as he catches her arm her knees give way. ‘I thought it was … But his face, it’s …’
‘I know. Don’t look.’ He pulls her into his chest. ‘Don’t look.’
A small crowd of backstage staff has gathered. No one says a word as the two men position themselves – one at Davidson’s feet, one at his head – and lift him carefully onto the stretcher. Margaret’s legs buckle again. ‘Can somebody pass that crate for her to sit on?’ James calls out. ‘And something to calm her. Margaret, no, please, don’t look.’
The woman they’d seen at the ticket booth steps forward with a hip flask.
‘No … I …’ She mustn’t. She has stopped that. She doesn’t want to go back.
‘Just a sip. It’ll do you good,’ the woman says, pushing the flask into her hand.
The metal is cold against her skin but the sensation warms her. She can feel the weight of the liquid inside, can hear its surface shifting: small waves inside the chamber.
‘Go on,’ says James. ‘You’re shaking.’ This time is different. As she lifts the flask to her lips, the fumes reach her nose. She can already taste it, can already feel her body shiver, her skin prickle. As if every nerve is keening for the numbness that will be delivered. One sip. ‘That’s it,’ he says gently.
It burns her tongue. She should swallow it down but she can’t. It is as if her throat has closed up. Liquid and fumes trapped in her mouth. Eyes watering. A spasm in her stomach. She tries again to swallow but it only makes her cough, retch. The burn of acid rising in her neck. Liquid forced out between tight lips.
One, two, three, up. The men lift the stretcher and Davidson reaches out a hand to her.
‘Margaret,’ his eyes are wide. ‘Get word to the papers. We might still make the morning edition.’
Epilogue
The air is surprisingly still; the breeze has dropped. A single russet leaf floats soundlessly onto the carpet laid by last night’s storm; trees shaken of their newly deepened colours before they’d had fair chance to wear them. The melted frost has turned the paper of the leaves to pulp and Margaret holds tight to James’s arm. If one of them should slip, they’ll be kept upright by the other. Either that, or they’ll fall together. Both options bring her comfort.
It is four months since she has seen him – neither of them stayed in Blackpool once the season was over. Her work on Davidson really did get her noticed: Harrisson mentioned her research to an old school friend who works for the government, and Margaret was invited to Whitehall to discuss opportunities to help her country. They need researchers with an eye for detail and an instinct for recognising patterns. And though she is not allowed to discuss the specifics with James, when he told her he had been recruited as a meteorologist for the RAF, they already knew that war was coming.
He has been posted at a base in Norfolk, and she is working for a government department at a large house at Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, sharing digs with three other women in a nearby village. Within the company she keeps, she is not considered unusual, and does not feel herself to be different. She can sit alone and lose herself in a book in the canteen at lunchtime, without judgement or censure. She can spend a whole day barely saying a word to another worker, without disappointing any expectations. If she misunderstands a comment or misreads a situation, she feels perfectly at liberty to ask for clarification.
But she is very often in the mood to seek out her friends (and she has come to consider them as such). Sometimes in the evenings they sit by the wireless and play cards, and occasionally she accepts their invitation to join them at the local pub. For a long time, she avoided going for drinks altogether, fearful that proximity might open up the seam of an old weakness within her. But gradually she built up trust in herself and now, if a bottle of sherry is opened to mark a birthday or engagement, she will join them in a toast. A glass. Just one. To prove to herself that she can.
But the taste never lives up to the thrill of watching it being poured. That first sip chokes her with disappointment and beyond that, memories as sharp as fish bones in her throat. Memories of Other Margaret. Just the smell of it can take her back, can make her feel invisible again. Every swig from a hip flask or a bottle of morphine blurred her thoughts, smudged her edges. But she doesn’t need medicine. Not any more.
She wants to believe this.
She wants to feel every moment. Here. Now. With James. Because just knowing they’ll face the pain of parting again tomorrow makes every moment more precious. They’ve already walked the seafront at Sheringham with the low sun in their eyes. They’ve stopped at a café and warmed up with a cup of tea. And now here they are. This is what they came for.
‘It must be here somewhere,’ he says, stumbling on the uneven ground. They both agreed the church was smaller than they had expected, as they sat at a pew in the back. Margaret whispered Davidson’s story of the day a church mouse had interrupted his sermon and there was something about the silence in the empty church, something about the feeling that they shouldn’t make a sound, that made them both laugh. And tears rose to Margaret’s eyes. Tears of relief.
James never tires of her stories. Especially her account of the day she met Professor Fricke and his fleas. Sometimes in his letters to her he asks her to tell it to him again, to write down memories of their time in Blackpool, just so that he has something to read. Something the censors won’t remove.
‘It’s so peaceful,’ she whispers.
It is. This is the coast. Nothing like Blackpool, which is the seaside. The only chatter here is from birds; the only other souls they’ve seen a group of cocklers walking back to the village with their harvests, skirts tucked into their waistbands.
‘He must have conducted the funerals for a lot of these himself,’ James says, pausing to look at another name on another headstone.
She supposes he must. ‘What about that one?’ Margaret points towards the back corner of the churchyard, where a grave stands apart from the rest.
‘There he is.’ They draw close enough to read the inscription. ‘He’s in a nice spot here,’ James says.
‘Yes.’ Though she can’t help thinking he’d rather be in the thick of it with the others. She lets go of James’s arm and reaches down to scrape away the drift of leaves that is covering the bottom of the headstone.
He was loved by the villagers who recognised his humanity and forgave him his transgressions. Rest in peace.
It’s a fitting epitaph, she thinks. Suitably ambiguous, like the man himself. A man of goodness. A man of weakness. Both things are true. But beyond that she does not know what he might have been. And is it wrong to choose to think of him with fondness, like his parish does? He is remembered in Stiffkey as a man who gave his money to the poor and turned a blind eye to those he knew were poaching. Reporters continued to come, weeks after his death, and the villagers had been keen to share their memories. But over time they refused to stop and talk to strangers; would change the subject if Davidson’s name was mentioned in the pub. Perhaps, like Margaret, they came to realise that he was seduced by something much more dangerous than lust. That he lost his reason, sacrificed his dignity, with a craving far more insatiable.
Margaret too had a taste of it, briefly intoxicated by the same thrill, the same arrogance. She had wanted to rescue him from humiliation, never pausing to see the truth: it wasn’t that he wanted to clear his name. He wanted to be known. Whatever the cost.
He didn’t make it into the morning edition of the papers, and had slipped into a coma by the time his accident made it into the following evening’s edition, the shock of his injuries causing his body to shut down. The coroner concluded that the circumstances constituted death by misadventure. There was scant mention of the girl who had dragged him out to safety, though Margaret read that the sad incident qualified her as a fully fledged tamer, rather than trainee. The irony, lost on all but Margaret it seemed, was that the man who had insisted he had devoted his life to saving young girls had been rescued by one himself.
But by the time she had got him out it was too late. When Margaret and James returned to Blackpool they passed a barrel on the seafront, covered by a blanket like a shroud. There was no need of a sign of explanation. Everyone knew to what it was referring; punters paused to pay their respects for a moment before being tempted into the latest exhibition of starving newlyweds. The show in Skegness closed for two hours on the afternoon of his funeral, just enough time to put up a new banner advertising ‘The Lion who Killed the Rector’ which, as far as she knows, hangs there still.
‘Shall we get back then?’ James offers her his arm and they start to walk. ‘You’re shivering. Here, take my coat.’
‘Then you’ll be cold.’
‘In that case I’ll have to warm you up myself.’ He wraps both arms around her and pats her back vigorously. ‘There you go, old girl.’ He is still the only person to call her that.
She presses herself close to him, burying her face in his scarf. She still marvels at the change between them; the change within herself. Muscles softening, skin yielding. Something new and yet familiar. His hands fall still and they stand in silence, neither daring to move, his chin resting on the top of her head. And then, the gentlest touch of his lips on her hair. When this war is over, they will be able to be together every day. And not knowing when or where that will be doesn’t frighten her as much as perhaps it should. Theirs is a contract made with hope, with trust. And with patience. It is as if they are unwrapping each other slowly, every letter sent another layer removed. She looks up to him and closes her eyes. An unspoken code they both understand. His lips on hers.
‘Let’s get back, shall we?’ he whispers finally.
Reluctant to leave the warmth of his embrace, she looks up slowly. ‘Let’s.’
‘I’ll treat us to something for supper.’
‘Supper?’ She nudges him with a grin.
‘All right, tea. Fish and chips?’
‘Go on then.’
They drive back to Sheringham with the roof down, wrapped up against the cold, singing songs from Blackpool’s seafront. Melodies lost to the wind as soon as they leave their lips; words snatched up and scattered into flight.
Author’s note
This novel is inspired by several real people and events in Blackpool during the late 1930s and imagines what might have happened had they collided. To set these meetings in motion I have brought them together, in the summer season of 1938, as the country braced itself for war.
The exception is the flight of Jack Hylton and his Orchestra, which took place over Blackpool’s prom more than a decade earlier in 1927.
Mass Observation began in 1937. Though Margaret Finch is a fictional character, many of the details in this story are taken from notes made by its Blackpool researchers, which are held in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex.
The real Harold Davidson was defrocked by the Church of England in 1932 and his Blackpool sideshows entertained crowds, on and off, for four years. He was mauled by a lion in Skegness in 1937, and died of his injuries. His grave stands in the churchyard in Stiffkey, Norfolk.
Acknowledgements
This book is dedicated to my grandparents who, every year without fail, made the thirty-five-mile journey from their home in Wigan to take a holiday in Blackpool.
I’d like to thank everyone who has supported me in writing and publishing this story. Most notably, two of the best in the business, whose wisdom, insight and patience have helped to shape it: Louisa Joyner, my editor at Faber, who has my trust and my admiration; and Laura Williams, my agent at Greene & Heaton, who always has my back.
Thanks to my publicist, Josh Smith, and Faber’s sales and marketing team for spreading the word, Anna Morrison for designing the cover, Anne Owen for overseeing its transformation from manuscript to book, and Hayley Shepherd for seeing the things I failed to spot. The reps who get stories onto shelves; the booksellers who put them into hands; the book bloggers who plant them in people’s minds; and the readers who take them into their hearts.
Natalie Gray, my colleague at ITV News Anglia, first told me about the Rector of Stiffkey and set this story into motion. Dialect consultancy was provided by John and Julie Darbyshire, Northern powerhouses Lisa Timoney and Susie Lynes, and my wonderful mum, Susan, who gave me a first-hand account of her outing to see Blackpool’s Headless Woman as a child.
I am lucky to count many incredible writers as friends, and much of this novel was imagined and written in their company. The Historical Ladies: Jenny Ashcroft, Lucy Foley, Iona Grey, Cesca Major, Sarra Manning, Kate Reardon and Katherine Webb. The Cliterati, including Clarissa Angus, Callie Langridge, Emelie Olsson. Louisa’s Angels: Claire Adam, Ingrid Persaud and (my book wife) Bev Thomas. Not forgetting Elodie Harper – colleague, fellow author and friend – and Lizzie Speller, who is both mentor and inspiration.
Special mention goes to two women who have saved me on more than one occasion. My unofficial Little Big Sis with whom I share every detail of my life. And my dearest S, with whom I share a brain and (often, I might swear) a soul.
Richard – former husband, forever friend.
And, last but not least, K and F – the biggest thanks goes to you, always.
About the Author
Claire McGlasson is a journalist who works for ITV News and enjoys the variety of life on the road with a TV camera. Her debut novel, The Rapture, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge and lives in East Anglia.
Also by the Author
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Copyright
First published in 2023
by Faber & Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House
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London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in the UK in 2023
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© Claire McGlasson, 2023
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The right of Claire McGlasson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978–0–571–36375–9
Claire McGlasson, The Misadventures of Margaret Finch
