The Perfect Daughter Read Free

fight had been to keep lists of who’d been hurt or arrested. It wasn’t easy, because most of the sixty-six women who appeared in Bow Street police court the next day refused on principle to give their names to the magistrates. But I was satisfied we’d got everybody accounted for, and Verona’s name hadn’t figured anywhere.
    â€˜She might have dragged herself off to her lodgings and be lying there hurt, too ill to write. I think I’ll come up to town with you, whatever Ben—’
    â€˜Don’t bother. She isn’t there. I checked two days ago.’
    I wasn’t quite dead to family duty. When Alexandra began her bombardment of letters to me, I’d found time to go back to the student house. There’d been no sign of the dark-haired man or the ginger-bearded orange juggler. When I described them the other residents thought they were away somewhere, but had no idea where or for how long. As for Verona, they were pretty sure she’d moved out some weeks ago.
    â€˜One of the girls there thought she might have gone home.’
    â€˜Home? Here?’
    It was spring, so they were all feeling migratory. Gone home, gone to roam, gone to Paris, gone to Rome. People strolled out of the door with sketch pads in their rucksacks and a few pounds in their pockets, and came back when it suited them. I’d liked their attitude, it brought back memories, but I knew it wouldn’t appeal to Alexandra.
    â€˜But it’s not like her, Nell. She wouldn’t behave like that.’
    I was saved from having to say anything to that by the sound of the motorcar drawing up on the gravel outside and her urgent need to hide me away from Ben. The one advantage of the situation was that it gave me time to work out whether to tell Alexandra about my guess.
    *   *   *
    I’d been fidgety, couldn’t settle on the knobbly rustic bench in the summerhouse, so had come down to this rock outcrop nearer the water. The heron still hadn’t moved. When you looked closely it was standing beside a stream that showed as no more than a dark crack in the field of reeds. Where the stream joined the river there was a neat boathouse of brick and timber, probably commissioned by Ben to keep the family rowing boats and dinghies. With the tide so low, it was separated from the water by an expanse of shining mud and brown bladderwrack. I thought I might have to tell Alex, or hint at least, about what I’d guessed on that second visit to Verona, when she’d been so much happier. That woman-to-woman air had more to it than shared politics. She’d given me a smile that … well. It was the quality of that smile that I was wondering how to explain to her mother. ‘Alex, do you remember when you and Ben first…?’ Not good enough. I couldn’t imagine any woman ever smiling that way over anything cousin Ben might do. ‘Alexandra, when you stroke one of your cats on a wall in the sun and you can feel it practically melting with smugness…’ Safer perhaps, but would it tell her what I was sure was the case, that sometime between December and March her daughter had begun her first love affair? Now I asked myself – as Alex would ask more forcefully if she knew – whether I should have done something about it. I was a relative after all, however distant, nearly twice Verona’s age. She was away from the protection of her home and parents and – I could almost hear her father spluttering – ‘in moral danger’. But, looking at it another way, she was an independent and healthy young woman in the second decade of the twentieth century, in love for the first time and starting to live. She and her man – orange man, dark man or perhaps somebody else altogether – had probably run off to a warmer more southern sea than this one. They’d be back when love or money ran out. There was no point in moral cluckings even