The Decayed Gentlewoman

by E. X. Ferrars

  The side road was only wide enough for one car, had a rough, sandy surface, pitted with holes and was only a few feet above the level of the small sea-loch that it skirted.

  They had gone about a quarter of a mile along this road when Ginny gave a cry, “Oh look—the palm trees!”

  And there they were, familiar enough to Colin for him to have driven past without thinking about them, yet really looking utterly improbable on either side of the garden gate of one of the small houses that more or less adhered to the village of Ardachoil.

  “They look a bit sad and exhausted, don’t they?” Ginny went on. “As if they’ve never truly got over the journey.”

  “Still, they’re alive and growing,” Colin said.

  “You don’t know the trouble they’ve got me into one time and another,” she said with a laugh. “I used to tell the girls at school that palm trees grew in the Highlands and they wrote me off as a liar straight away. I was rather a liar, of course, about lots of things. Colin—” Her voice wavered.

  He manoeuvred the car round a pot hole in the middle of the road and on past a great thicket of rhododendrons.

  “Yes?” He saw that the evergreen of the bushes was flecked with the red of opening buds and that on the hillside above them the silver birches were wrapped in a soft haze of new green.

  “I think I’m beginning to get nervous,” Ginny said.

  “There’s no need,” he reassured her. “The aunts will behave themselves. They’ve got very rigid standards of courtesy.”

  “I’m terrified of courtesy. And what are we going to say about how we got hold of—her?” She jerked a thumb at the back of the car.

  “Leave it to the inspiration of the moment.”

  “Your inspiration or mine?”

  “Mine,” he said quickly.

  “All right.”

  The car climbed successfully out of another hole in the road and slithered through a drift of sand at a bend. Ahead was a small, ivy-grown church, a post-office, a red telephone box, and the Lockies’ white house.

  Ginny bit her thumb and stared straight ahead of her as Colin drove in at the gate. The car had been seen from the windows of the house. By the time that Colin had unfolded himself from the driving seat, the front door had been thrown open and one aunt after another came bursting out, like a row of soap bubbles out of a pipe.

  First came Dolly, then Phyllis and then, a little more slowly and stiffly than her sisters, Clara, who was nearly seventy and at last, Colin thought as he went to meet them, beginning to show it.

  They were all tall, bony women, with curly white hair, bright-blue eyes, and ruddy, weather-beaten faces. They all wore tweed skirts which had been hand-woven by Dolly, and made up by Phyllis. Their twin-sets had been knitted by Clara, as always in the favourite colour of each, blue for Clara, green for Phyllis, pink for Dolly. They all wore a number of brooches and lockets and bracelets, inherited from their mother.

  “Colin!” cried Dolly as he embraced her. “This is a wonderful surprise! The last person we were expecting—”

  “—to see,” said Phyllis. “When we heard the car and looked out—”

  “—we said, ‘That can’t be Colin,’ ” said Clara, “ ‘it’s not his car.’ ”

  “But I thought to myself—” said Dolly.

  “—he could buy a new car,” said Phyllis.

  “As it seems you have,” said Clara.

  All three stood looking at the car with tentative smiles of welcome on their kind, beaming faces, waiting for Colin to introduce the friend who remained inside it.

  He went back to the car and opened the door.

  “Come on out,” he said. “They aren’t going to eat you.”

  Ginny got out and walked towards the three Lockie ladies. They advanced a little way to meet her, but waited for the magic words of introduction to make it safe for them to show their great pleasure in the unexpected visit of a stranger.

  They always loved to meet strangers in this remote place, but they were all very shy women who clung to certain rules of behaviour, as to a stout rope, that would save them, nonswimmers that they were, from floundering out of their depths among the mysterious currents of human relationships.

  “Don’t you recognize her?” Colin asked, putting an arm round Ginny’s shoulders and drawing her forward.

  “Recognize her?” said Dolly. “We ought to recognize her?”

  It was a challenge. All the aunts had long memories. It was their pride that they never forgot a face or the name to attach to the face or anything else important about anyone whom they had ever known, down to how many lumps of sugar they liked in their tea.

  “You’ve taken us so completely by surprise,” Dolly went on. “But it’s a fact I had a feeling as soon as I saw her…”

  “I believe we all had a feeling…” said Phyllis.

  “That we knew her very well,” said Clara.

  “And if you’ll just give us a moment…” said Dolly. “Why, yes, of course—!”

  “Of course we know!” cried Phyllis.

  “It’s little Ginny Jerrold,” said Clara and held her arms out.

  “My dear,” she went on a moment later, with Ginny hugging her, “you must forgive us for not recognizing you at once, but you’ve changed considerably since we saw you last.”

  “Far more than we have ourselves,” said Phyllis.

  “Dear me, yes,” said Dolly. Her eyes suddenly misted with tears. “You were just a wee bit of a girl and we were already old women. Or no doubt you would think so. It’s so long ago, perhaps we weren’t really so old. But we’re very glad to see you after all this time.”

  “We’re all very glad,” said Phyllis.

  “You’ve arrived just in time for tea,” said Clara.

  She led the way into the house.

  As Phyllis followed her and Ginny was taken into the house by Dolly, who had put an arm through hers and seemed to cling to her, Colin went to the car, took out the picture and carried it into the sitting-room, where the aunts and Ginny had gathered round the fire.

  It was a small room, packed tight with furniture that had come from a much larger house, but was all too much beloved to be thinned out for the mere sake of convenience. The windows looked out on the hillside covered with the daffodils that Ginny had remembered.

  Exclamations of amazed delight came from the aunts when they saw the picture.

  “But this is one of the great days of our lives,” said Dolly. “And to think that when we got up this morning we never knew—”

  “—anything at all unusual was going to happen!” cried Phyllis.

  “Today is Tuesday,” said Clara. “The butcher calls on Tuesday, but that’s all that happens.”

  “The Decayed Gentlewoman!” Dolly gave a happy laugh. “Do you children remember how you used to call her that? We couldn’t think whom you were referring to so rudely.”

  “Unless indeed it was one of ourselves,” said Phyllis.

  “Only why one of us, more than another?” said Clara. “So it hardly seemed to fit. Colin must hang the picture up for us after tea.”

  “Where did you find it after all this time?” Dolly asked.

  Colin brought out the answer to this that he had prepared.

  “Ginny saw it in a saleroom and recognized it. She got in touch with me—I was in London at the time—and we managed to get it back.”

  “You bought it, Ginny?” said Dolly. “How kind, how very kind!”

  “We’ve always missed it so,” said Phyllis.

  “You must tell us what you had to pay for it,” said Clara.

  “Of course,” said Dolly. “We must pay you back.”

  “At once,” said Phyllis.

  “Oh, it was nothing,” Ginny told them, avoiding Colin’s eye. “Really nothing.”

  “But we insist—” the three sisters began together.

  “I won’t hear of it,” Ginny said firmly. “Truly, it was nothing at all.”

  Saying t
hat they would not argue the matter now, but would return to it later, which Colin knew they most certainly would, Dolly went out to lay the tea table and make the tea.

  This was always done by Dolly, as the scones and cakes were always baked by Phyllis and the table presided over by Clara. In their life together, the aunts had long ago arranged a certain division of labour and each clung jealously to her own duties, only demanding of the other two that they should frequently express their gratitude and admiration of the skill and devotion with which she performed her tasks.

  As soon as Dolly had gone, Phyllis said to Ginny that she was sure she would like a wash and bore her away to the bathroom. This left Colin alone with his eldest aunt, a situation which he had known would be brought about pretty quickly. For he could see that the aunts were boiling over with questions which they were too polite to ask in front of Ginny, and the asking of questions, the getting to the bottom of things, was Clara’s department.

  “Well, Aunt Clara,” he said with a smile as she sat down in a high-backed tapestry armchair near the fire and rested her long, thin feet on the fender, “what do you want me to tell you first?”

  “What do you suppose?” she asked.

  “Are Ginny and I engaged to be married?” he suggested. “No, we aren’t, dearest Aunt Clara.”

  “Now, Colin, as if I would pry into your private affairs before you’re ready to tell me of them of your own accord,” she said. “No, all I want is the truth about your discovery of this picture.”

  “What we told you was the truth.”

  “I hope so. But my impression is it was not the whole truth.”

  “The whole truth is an awfully long and complicated story,” he said. “I can’t possibly get it in before tea.”

  “Very well then, you and I will go for a walk afterwards and you will tell it me then.”

  “Nothing could suit me better. There are a few things I want you to tell me too, Aunt Clara.”

  “Apart from that, she appears a nice girl, Colin.”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “But I can’t have Dolly upset. That woman, her mother, was Dolly’s friend. It wouldn’t surprise me if poor Dolly still remembers her with affection, in spite of everything. She has a very affectionate heart.”

  “I know she has,” Colin said. “What I don’t understand is what Ginny’s mother did that was so terrible.”

  Clara gave him a thoughtful glance. “Is that a fact, Colin?”

  “Of course, she wasn’t married,” he said, having decided to get this over to his aunt with the greatest possible casualness, “but that was only because Ginny’s father couldn’t get a divorce.”

  “Tt, tt, as if we didn’t know that from the first,” Clara said. “It made us sorry for her and even more so for the child.”

  “Then what did she do?”

  Clara reached out a hand to pat his. “We’ll take a walk together after tea, Colin. My story may be as long and complicated as yours. Meanwhile, not a word.”

  “Not a word, Aunt Clara.”

  They had tea in the dining-room, as they always did, a substantial meal at which a little of everything had to be tried, or Aunt Phyllis’s feelings would have been hurt. Afterwards Colin hung the picture in its old place, where it could hardly be seen because of the shadow cast by the massive, carved sideboard. But the aunts all claimed to recognize signs of positive satisfaction on the dim face of the unknown lady at having come safely back to her old home. They thanked Ginny and Colin again and again.

  Then Phyllis and Dolly started to clear the table and when Ginny offered to help with the washing up, the offer was eagerly accepted, Clara saying that in the circumstances she and Colin would only be in the way in the kitchen and would go for a short walk. Colin could have sworn that the aunts had had no chance to discuss the making of this arrangement, yet each had known what was required of her. This smooth, wordless co-operation had sometimes in the past seemed to him a slightly frightening thing, but he had become so used to it that he accepted it as part of the natural order of things.

  Clara put on her boots and a tweed coat that she had had for as long as Colin could remember and together they walked on along the steadily deteriorating road towards the sea. The sun was going down in copper flames behind the Paps of Jura. A purple haze joined the sky and the sea. The islands, dark shapes of mystery and magic, were slowly vanishing away into the engulfing shadows.

  The road ended at a small ruined croft. Beyond it a rough track led across boggy ground, then up on to the cliffs. Clara took Colin’s arm. They walked slowly, sometimes pausing to look at the deepening colours of the sunset.

  “To answer your question, Colin,” she said, “why we stopped making Harriet Jerrold welcome at Ardachoil—I don’t suppose you ever knew, did you, that Dolly was once engaged to be married?”

  “Engaged?” Colin said in astonishment. “Aunt Dolly?”

  He had to restrain an impulse to say that it would surely be impossible for any man to marry only one of the aunts, he would have to marry all three of them together.

  Clara gave a rather cold smile. “Is that so incredible? In my opinion she’s a very fine-looking woman, and she wasn’t always old.”

  “No, of course not. But—well, why have I never heard of it before?”

  “Because it’s not a matter we care to discuss.”

  “Who was the man? Was it anyone I knew?”

  “I imagine you remember him quite well. It was Willie Foster-Smith.”

  “Foster-Smith!” A memory came to Colin of a spectacled face, of gentle, bewildered eyes, a hesitant smile, an excitable stammer. “Yes, of course I remember him. He used to come sailing with us. He rented the Robertsons’ cottage here for a time, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, it was after the war,” Clara said. “Dolly was thirty-eight. Not young exactly, but certainly not as old as you no doubt thought her at the time. Willie was a little younger than she was, about thirty-five, I think. Not so much, anyway, that we thought of it as an impediment. He’d been demobilized and didn’t want to go into the family business and he had his gratuity, so he rented the Robertsons’ cottage and tried to become a painter.”

  Colin nodded. “Yes, boats in storms, sea-gulls flying about, lots of very purple heather. I used to think they were terrific. What happened to him?”

  “I’m afraid he didn’t succeed. But that’s beside the point. It wasn’t his painting we had against him. As a matter of fact, I quite admired it. I like a picture to look like something I can recognize. And during the two years he lived here he and Dolly naturally saw a great deal of one another.”

  “I remember that, but I never thought…” He gave a laugh. “I suppose one isn’t very perceptive at fourteen. What went wrong? Why didn’t they marry?”

  “Because of that woman—Ginny’s mother. I don’t like to speak her name. It was only a few weeks after Willie and Dolly came to an understanding, which happened just after you’d gone back to school, I remember. That’s why you heard nothing of it at the time. And they both decided against any public announcement until Willie should have come to a decision about his future—most fortunately, as it turned out. It saved Dolly a great deal of humiliation. But not of pain and disillusionment, of course. She discovered the affair herself. She went to the cottage one day and found them there together…” A deep flush of embarrassment and anger coloured Clara’s lined face. “I need not elaborate,” she said.

  “Poor Aunt Dolly—was this what was behind a mysterious illness she had one summer?” Colin asked.

  “It was. It was all but a nervous breakdown. And she changed very much at that time. She got her cheerful spirits back and her interest in things and she even resumed a friendship of a sort with Willie—as you know, she’s always been generous to a fault—but she’d always been very independent of Phyllis and me before her illness, going off into the A.T.S. and so forth, but afterwards she began to cling to us. Of course, it may have been for the best. Willie
had a weak character and he was an artist. I dare say Harriet Jerrold was neither the first nor the last. But that thought has made it no easier for me to forgive her. In my opinion she had no interest in Willie until Dolly told her of their engagement, then it was more than the creature could bear that Willie, if he was in a marrying mood, had not chosen her.”

  “And Foster-Smith—what happened to him?”

  “Oh, he went into the family business. They manufacture woollens.”

  “Did he quite give up painting?”

  “So far as I know, though he kept up his interest in art. He’s written one or two books with names like Artistic Treasures of Scotland, of which he sent us autographed copies. I may say, I do not read them. I even prefer not to have them on view… What’s the matter, Colin? Why are you staring at me like that?”

  He had not known that he was staring at her. He had been no more aware of her just then than of the fading glow in the sky or the sound of the surf, gnawing at the foot of the cliffs below them.

  “Tell me,” he said, “wasn’t it Foster-Smith who persuaded you to have the Decayed Gentlewoman cleaned?”

  “Why, yes, of course it was,” said Clara.

  * * *

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  « ^ »

  “And now,” she said, “that I’ve told you what you wanted to know, are you ready to answer some questions for me?”

  “Just a minute.” Colin stood still, absently frowning at her. “I’ve got to think something out.”

  She propped herself against a boulder at the side of the path. “If you think it will be too difficult for you to answer my questions, I won’t ask them,” she said. “I have no wish to spoil the pleasure of your visit by pressing you to tell me what you feel you would sooner not.”

  Colin sat down on the rock beside her. He put an arm round her.

  “How would it be if I promise to tell you the whole story sometime, but only some of it now? Only as much as I’m sure of.”