In the windswept graveyard, high up on the moor, Jo wanted desperately to release the grief building up inside her. She must wait until the meeting with the headmaster was over. It would be a painful interlude. She should have come here afterwards. Holding off her tears, she left the churchyard for her appointment with Marcus Lidgey.
Jo had taken little notice of the heavily buttressed church building two days ago, but a hasty glance revealed that the leaky roof was still in need of renovation. The vicarage nearby seemed every bit as bleak and rundown. There were no funds anywhere in Parmarth for improvement. The grey stone, slate-roofed cottages were shabbier than before. The thatched-roofed public house, flanked by uneven outside steps rising to its upstairs rooms and guarded by a bent iron rail, had not altered or changed hands. Nor had the few other places of business. The Methodist chapel, nestling at the bottom of the hill, was in need of fresh brown paint and plaster.
At one time over eight hundred people had packed into the parish, excavating and dressing tin ore at the Solace Mine. The mine had closed in 1912, two months after Jo’s first presence in Parmarth, and she had been aware of the apathy and depression, the unnatural quietness which had settled over the village like a shroud. Subsequently, as the men sought work elsewhere, the number of inhabitants had quickly halved. The numbers were still dwindling.
It was no surprise to Jo to hear a violent argument coming from number 2 Tregersick Road, a tiny cottage squeezed in between its larger neighbour and Pascoe’s General Store. Without pausing to listen, she heard every word clearly.
‘For crying out loud, you stupid old fool! I told you where I put they blasted matches. What have you got for ears? Old Jolly Retallack’s shirt?’
‘I wouldn’t be asking you if I knew where they bleddy were, would I? You useless excuse for a woman.’
Verena and Abner Jelbert quarrelled on a daily basis. Villagers had acquired the habit of being ready to duck as they passed the Jelberts’ abode, to avoid being struck by a hurtling missile.
Suddenly there was a terrified yelp, the wrenching-open of a door, and Jo turned round to see Scamp, the Jelberts’ wire-haired, long-bodied, greyish mongrel being kicked out of the house.
‘Get out my way, I said, you bastard.’ Jo watched, horrified, as Abner Jelbert delivered two blows, one on the dog’s head, the other on its side.
‘Stop that!’ Jo rounded on him. ‘There’s no need to be cruel to the dog.’
Squat, sallow-faced, unemployed miner Abner Jelbert spat out the dog-end between his fat purple lips. ‘Mind your own bleddy business. I don’t need an outsider telling me what to do with me own bleddy dog.’
Verena, tall, stern-eyed, wearing a cross-over pinny, appeared in the doorway. ‘Who’ve you upset now, you old fool?’
‘Only this fancy bint here. Had the cheek to tell me off for kicking the bleddy dog.’
‘Serves you right. How many times have I told you to leave Scamp be? Anyway, don’t you recognise she? ’Tis Miss Venner, she’s what’s going to be the new teacher.’ Verena smiled self-consciously at Jo. ‘I wish you well at the school, Miss Yenner. You’ll have our twins in your class.’
‘Oh, really,’ Jo replied coolly, ‘I shall look forward to meeting them.’
‘Stuck-up cow.’ Abner spat a ball of black phlegm on the ground. ‘Kids’ll never understand a word she says.’
‘Stop it.’ Verena cuffed him round the head, and the couple went back inside to pursue their current disagreement.
‘Just like old times with those two at it hammer and tongs, eh?’ said a woman, who had come out of the newsagent, sweets and tobacco shop she owned, on the other side of the general store. Paula Hadley, of full and stately bust, wearing round-rimmed spectacles, all the better for spotting quarry to gossip about, had recognised Jo immediately. ‘It seems only yesterday Miss Sayce used to bring you into my shop for sherbet lemons. Be strange having you back here as teacher. What does your mother think about it?’
‘Mrs Venner was rather surprised,’ Jo replied evenly, ready to fend off any more personal questions.
Paula Hadley was gazing intently at her. ‘You haven’t grown much. Good luck to you is all I can say, specially with those Jelbert twins.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Hadley, I’m confident I shall manage them. While I’m here, may I order The Times? It can be delivered at Nance Farm with Miss Merrick’s newspapers.’
‘Certainly. Heard you was staying at Nance. The Times? That’s what the ’master reads.’
‘I’ll step inside now and give you a week’s payment in advance.’
Mrs Hadley’s remark on Jo’s appearance caused her to hope she was suitably dressed to meet the headmaster. There was no reason why she shouldn’t be. Her Hampshire dressmaker had interpreted all the latest fashions to Jo’s satisfaction. Even so, a picture of Katherine’s scathing face entered her mind and Jo was brushing the fur collar of her coat with gloved fingertips. She licked her handkerchief and stooped to wipe off the moorland dirt accumulated on her high-heeled shoes during the walk to Cardhu and the village.
Quickly, she viewed herself in the glass of the shop window. There was nothing misplaced about her clothes, she told herself, and it did not matter how little she filled them out. She was a teacher, not a social butterfly looking for a husband or a lover.
She glanced at the news stand outside the shop proclaiming the day’s dramatic international and local headlines. German Ex-Chief of Staff implicated in plot to overthrow Soviet regime. Man killed by freak wave: St Ives. Jo had once thought the people living in this remote area would take little interest in events outside their domestic boundaries, but Celia had informed her that Paula Hadley made an agreeable profit on all her print trade.
As she progressed to the counter of the dark, cluttered shop, Jo grew nostalgic at the delicious smells of fudge, butterscotch and sherbet lemons, and the sweet scent of good-quality tobacco. Two rows of pipes stood in their accustomed place beside the ornate Edwardian till. Neat shelves of newspapers, magazines and sixpenny love and adventure story books lined the lower regions of the walls. At the head of a small queue was Miss Teague, the infants’ class teacher.
‘Miss Venner.’ She beckoned to Jo. ‘How good to see you. Welcome to Parmarth. Do serve Miss Venner first, Mrs Hadley.’ She raised her chin in the manner of a turkey. ‘I understand she has an appointment shortly with Mr Lidgey.’
‘It’s very kind of you, Miss Teague.’ Jo greeted the three other customers, women of varying ages, as she produced her purse from her handbag.
Miss Teague had a mediocre face, was short and chubby, her age well past forty. Jo had seen her on half a dozen occasions before but Miss Teague had not spoken to her until now.
‘Not at all. I do hope you’ll like it at the school. It won’t be what you’re used to.’ Miss Teague gave an overstretched smile.
Halting at tapping chips of treacle toffee off a tray for Miss Teague, Paula Hadley listened for Jo’s reply, as did her other customers, whom Jo suspected were gathered here to exchange tittle-tattle.
‘I’m sure I shall,’ she said brightly. When she had paid for the newspapers and tucked the day’s edition of The Times in under her arm, she bid the women, ‘Good afternoon.’ She knew, without looking back, they would form a huddle to talk about her.
‘Do you think you’ll get on with her?’ Paula Hadley asked Miss Teague.
‘I have grave doubts,’ Miss Teague told the huddle importantly. ‘She will not fit in easily among us. I was hoping a friend of mine, Miss Martin, who recently lost her place at St Mevan’s primary school when it closed for lack of pupils last month, would obtain the post.’
‘She shouldn’t have no trouble,’ Ellie Blewett, an elderly woman, wearing a thick hairnet underneath her black felt hat, said good-naturedly. ‘She used to run barefoot ’cross the moors with the Trevail boys and my grandson, Mick.’
‘It’s easy to run barefoot when you’ve got umpteen pairs of shoes to put on when you get back h
ome,’ the shabbily dressed niece of Verena Jelbert, holding a newborn baby, remarked sourly. ‘There’s something strange about her coming to the likes of Parmarth, if you ask me. The ’master’s too good for this place too and that’s another mystery. Perhaps she’s his fancy woman. Come here to carry on their affair.’
‘You’ve got an evil and a jealous mind, Biddy Lean.’ Ellie Blewett remonstrated with the young mother. ‘She’s staying with Mercy Merrick. She’s a good judge of character and that’s good enough for me.’
‘Don’t forget who Bob Merrick was meeting in his fields,’ Miss Teague said, making Paula Hadley stop hammering again at the toffee.
‘Well, there is that, I suppose,’ Ellie Blewett mused.
‘She’s likely just as immoral as her mother and Celia Sayce,’ Biddy Lean muttered, adjusting her baby’s washed-out, passed-down clothes. ‘That sort sticks together. High and mighty in their fine houses but common as muck underneath.’
‘We’ve no right to judge Joanna Venner; she probably didn’t know Celia Sayce was a fallen woman,’ Paula Hadley said in a superior tone. ‘This Mr Ustick died in the war. He might have been a hero. Miss Sayce spent many years alone. I think she was very lonely, and it was good of Miss Venner to want to come to live with her in her old age.’
‘Of course, you’re bound to take a stand for Celia Sayce,’ Miss Teague replied tightly. ‘She spent good money in your shop. But it isn’t you who has to work with Joanna Venner, who, I fear, may share some of the radical ideas I heard Celia Sayce express.’
There seemed to be a lot of men loafing about the village and most of them spoke to Jo. Looking into their faces, she witnessed the despair and humiliation of men out of work. The redundant miners and their sons and daughters still in the area had turned to farm work, fishing, stone-breaking, service in a big house, or the docks at Penzance to earn a living, but there was a chronic shortage of jobs. Jo saw facial resemblances among them. Many of the villagers had intermarried. To offend one of them might also offend a brother or a cousin.
Sally Allet left the schoolhouse front doorstep she was scrubbing to talk over the garden gate. ‘Hello, Jo. This is a turn-up for the books, you coming here to teach. I’m the headmaster’s maid, well, housekeeper really. There’s not many of my old class round here now, most have moved away.’
After what Lew had gloatingly told her, while drinking the teapot dry in Mercy’s kitchen, Jo felt uncomfortable facing the girl who had occasionally joined them and Russell in their childhood pranks. ‘You’ll have to watch yourself with that headmaster,’ he had said. ‘I reckon he’s knocking off Sally Allett. Got her all to himself, which is a pity, ’cause she used to be very obliging to me and others, up in the mine ruins.’ But Lew wasn’t likely to see innocence in any situation involving a man and woman.
‘You’ve turned out very pretty, Sally. Just like everyone said you would.’ Jo glanced at her wristwatch. ‘I’m afraid I can’t stop. I’m meeting Mr Lidgey at the school.’
‘I know,’ Sally said bluntly, and Jo thought she detected a trace of possessiveness in her demeanour. ‘He left the house a few minutes ago.’
Jo set off again with fast steps. She was not late but it would appear bad form to keep Mr Lidgey waiting.
Sally returned to the doorstep, knelt down on the sacking and slammed the scrubbing brush on the hard granite, thoroughly disgruntled. She should have ordered Beth Wherry to do this, then Joanna Venner would not have seen her working at something so menial. Even though Marcus admired her femininely moulded body, the other woman’s fashionably neat, almost curveless figure, clad in tailored clothes, made her burn with envy.
Jo saw Marcus Lidgey standing outside the school gates. He was rubbing the back of his neck, twisting the briefcase in his hand. Although casually dressed, he seemed a little flustered.
Before Jo reached him, she had to pass another young woman she did not particularly want to look in the eye: Gweniver Pascoe, wife of the proprietor of the general store, whom Lew had boasted to be his latest conquest. Kizzy Kemp had come inside the farmhouse kitchen at that moment and confirmed it. Shifty in features, Gweniver Pascoe crept past her.
‘Good afternoon, Miss Venner.’ As Marcus Lidgey came forward, Jo noticed he had a studied, slightly stooped walk. ‘I understand you are living at Nance Farm. I trust you had a comfortable journey there and have settled in.’
‘Thank you, Mr Lidgey.’ She returned his firm handshake. Jo took a moment to drink in the rather bleak, single-storey building of the Church of England primary school. The rab playgrounds, one each for the boys and girls, were both indicated by thick letters carved out of the front wall. Lew and Russell had crowed about breaching the high surrounding walls many times to skip lessons.
‘You will find it a completely different environment to what you are used to, Miss Venner,’ Marcus said as he unlocked the teachers’ diminutive entrance.
‘I’m sure I shall find it agreeable.’
He ushered her inside the infants’ classroom. ‘You know already there will be sixty-one pupils on the registers for the new term. Miss Teague takes the infants’ class. You will be taking over the middle class from Miss Choak. I, of course, take the upper class. Did you know Miss Teague and Miss Choak at all?’
‘I met Miss Choak once, briefly. I’ve just renewed my acquaintance with Miss Teague.’
‘Miss Choak has retired to be with her family at Morvah. I’m sure Miss Teague will do all she can to help you settle in.’
He took three sheets of foolscap paper from his briefcase. Jo noticed the initials ‘B. Mus.’ engraved on it – he was a Bachelor of Music. ‘This is a suggested timetable for you and a report on each child in the middle class, Miss Venner. I like the pupils to be well turned out. If a child is going to make something of himself it starts with him taking care of his appearance.’
Jo carefully folded the papers and put them into her handbag.
The infants’ classroom was cramped. There was a sandpit and redundant household oddments for use as toys. A sprig of dried holly left over from Christmas threatened to fall off the top of a happy picture of Jesus with small children at His feet.
As the tour of the classrooms continued, Jo found the interior not as cold and forbidding as she had imagined it would be. The walls were painted in cream, pink and blue. Mercy had mentioned a temperamental, smoking, black stove which heated the ancient, creaking water pipes running along the walls, but it had been replaced by open fireplaces.
A folding wooden screen, which looked new, divided the middle and upper classrooms. There was the inevitable large map of the world with pink areas denoting the British Empire, which all the pupils would view each day at morning assembly. Some inspired artwork adorned the walls. Jars of what looked like very basic scientific experiments, labelled with boys’ names only, sat on the high, deep window sills. Jo frowned at that.
She silently admired the harmonium which replaced the out-of-tune piano she had heard being played when she had passed this way with Celia.
‘The school has an orchestra of sorts,’ Marcus said with some pride, ‘with a few new instruments. Shortly after I took over as headmaster, Miss Celia Sayce, with whom you were acquainted, made a generous donation to the school.’
Jo bit her bottom lip to forestall a show of emotion. In this little school of no repute, she was overwhelmed with the reality of Celia’s death. ‘The donation was typical of her kindness. It was Miss Sayce who encouraged me to follow my chosen profession.’
‘I see. Please accept my condolences on your sad loss,’ he said softly. There had obviously been a very close relationship between the two women; sympathy of this kind could only endear him to Joanna Venner.
‘Thank you, Mr Lidgey.’ If his remarks were a true representation of his character, Jo was confident she would achieve a good working alliance with the headmaster.
‘I hope you will find your desk comfortable, Miss Venner,’ Marcus said, as he motioned for her to lead the way
round the other side of the screen. He made sure he did not follow her too closely. He was sure it was unintentional, but she was wearing a sensuous perfume. It stirred him. God damn his wretched mother! It was difficult for him to form a natural association with any woman, but when he was supposed to quickly seduce the one he was presently with to secure a large portion of her money, it was well-nigh impossible to act with the desired formality. He hoped his nervousness was not on show.
‘I’m sure I shall, Mr Lidgey.’ The wooden floor was polished and she could see her reflection in the brass lamps on the walls.
‘Good. The usual offices for the staff are connected to the children’s cloakrooms. I think this is all you need to know for now. I shall look forward to seeing you here at eight o’clock next Wednesday morning.’
He moved away. Jo thought she had been dismissed. Before she headed for the door, she allowed herself a covert glance at him, to see if there was anything about him that matched Lew’s crude assertions that he was a libertine in regard to his housemaid. His features were well drawn and held a natural sternness, his wide mouth was given to tension. He looked closed, singular, but rather than scandalous, hinted of being a constant, dependable character, if somewhat fidgety.
He turned back almost immediately, having picked up a folder off her desk. ‘Y-you have a question, Miss Venner?’
‘No, no,’ she said quickly, castigating herself for her impropriety. She should not have been staring at him. Her memory had served her right: he was an attractive man.
Her apparent interest in him gave Marcus a little hope. He smiled, releasing some of his unease. ‘Miss Venner, will you be free to dine with my mother and me on Friday evening? I will send Davey Penoble, the blacksmith, in my motorcar to collect you.’
‘I would be delighted to, Mr Lidgey.’ She would look forward to the occasion. If it was a success it would consolidate her new position.
Listening to the Quiet Page 6
