Broken Music

by Marjorie Eccles

  As he watched, Gervase Hatherley himself emerged from the house, his black retriever at his heels. Even from this distance, he looked self-important and was growing somewhat portly, though he could not yet be forty. He was dapper and correct as always in tweed knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket, a gun over his shoulder.

  Ever since William’s telegram had arrived, Francis had felt an astonishing compulsion in himself to go out and shout the news to the first person he met that his son was coming home, but he had not anticipated that person being Hatherley, and felt quite able to restrain himself. They had known each other a long time, from when he, Francis, had been a frequent visitor to Oaklands and Gervase Hatherley and his father had also been invited to join the shoots there, though at that time Francis had never taken much notice of him, dismissing him as a pleasant enough, mild and rather dull young man, ten or more years younger than himself. He was extremely wealthy, now a Justice of the Peace, and his standing in the community was high. It was nearly five years since he had come to Francis, asking permission to marry Marianne.

  Francis had been more outraged at this than his daughter, who had hesitated, then professed herself well disposed towards Mr Hatherley, though she did not think she could marry him, but please, would her father not speak of it again – a request Francis had been only too happy to agree to. He could not, however, forget it, and had constantly tormented himself ever since by wondering whether his beautiful daughter would not still be alive had she been safely married to Hatherley. Should he not have considered the material advantages such a match would have brought, and tried to persuade her into it? It might have been possible. For all her sweet dreaminess, that daughter of his had not been devoid of common sense, when it came to the essentials of life.

  Marianne…the one of all his children who had done most to capture his heart. Marianne, with her dreams and ambitions. Who had died without ever knowing how proud he was of her, what his hopes were for her future.

  There in the cold, dying light, out there alone on the empty hillside where nothing moved but the sheep, and the branches of the bare trees as the wind soughed its mournful music through them, he felt his familiar grief touched with a pang that was almost a physical ache. He did not at first recognise it as emptiness and loneliness, but as he turned and walked home in the gathering dusk, and saw the lamplight glowing from cottage windows, he thought of his solitary supper and his books awaiting him in his cold, monastic study, and decided suddenly that he would join his family that evening within the warm circle of firelight in the little parlour the girls had made their own.

  He took his boots off in the porch at the side door. The fur underneath Queenie’s belly was thick and tangled with drying mud, and she patiently allowed him to clean her up and towel her dry, pushing her black button nose into his face and trying to lick it, her long ears and fringe almost obscuring her blunt face. There were lights in the kitchen, and a dim lamp that was always left burning in the hall. The house was only relatively cold after the iciness outside and there was a smell of food, and he saw a light from under the dining room door which told him they had already started supper. Florrie would bring him something into his study, as soon as she was aware he was home, and for a moment he was tempted to leave it like that. But then he quickly cleaned himself up and popped his head round the kitchen door to let her know he would be joining the rest of his family.

  Marianne had come to Francis quite unexpectedly, one day, when they had been living in Broughton Underhill upwards of five years and he was at his favourite occupation, dressing the leather bindings of his books. There had been a small but determined rap on his study door. ‘Come in,’ he called, not looking up.

  Queenie the First had lumbered up from her blanket in the corner of the room she had appropriated as her own and loped across the floor, swinging her short bobtail to show her welcome. Since coming to Broughton, she had made it clear she was Francis’s dog, sitting patiently by the door, waiting for him to take her out on one of his long, solitary rambles, following him everywhere and taking up permanent residence in his study. She was not as boisterous as she had been when she was a puppy, but all the same, her huge shaggy bulk nearly knocked Marianne over, tall as she’d grown lately.

  Francis looked up. ‘Well, Marianne?’ He had a book on the desk in front of him and was patiently working oil into the smooth leather with his thumb, then polishing it with a soft cloth. The only things Father Dorkings had taken with him when he went to live with his niece at the schoolhouse were his books, leaving rows of empty shelves in his study. But Francis had more than enough of his own to fill them, books precious to him which had been carefully packed and transported here. The orderly rows of morocco bindings gleamed opulently, a silent reproach to the rest of the room, which was monastic in its austerity. A desk and chair, a table and a battered old sofa that had belonged to Father Dorkings, and that was all.

  Marianne perched on the sofa, running her fingers through Queenie’s fur, watching the gentle ministrations of her father’s long hands. ‘Why are you doing that, Papa?’

  ‘To keep the bindings supple.’ He indicated the bottle of thick, yellow oil. ‘It’s called neat’s-foot oil, and it’s made by boiling the feet and shinbones of cattle.’

  ‘How perfectly horrid!’

  ‘But that means it’s a natural lubricant for leather.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I see that.’

  There followed an awkward pause. Marianne, very pale, her soft-spun hair, bright as a new penny and making a halo round her face as she looked down at her now clasped hands, said nothing. Queenie laid her big head on the girl’s knee, looking with soulful eyes through her fringe, and nudging Marianne’s hand with her nose, asking to be stroked. For once getting no response, she padded back to her corner and subsided with a sigh on to her blanket. ‘Well, child, was there something you wanted?’

  Marianne took a deep breath. ‘Papa, may I borrow one of your books?’

  ‘A book?’ he repeated as though it was an alien word he did not recognise, surrounded as he was by them. ‘What do you want a book of mine for?’

  ‘Well, I’ve read all the ones we have – hundreds of times.’

  ‘What sort of book?’ he asked helplessly, with a baffled glance at his collection of first editions and philosophical dissertations and religious treatises. Although he had no experience of the sort of literature girls of her age liked to read, Francis could not imagine her wanting to peruse any of the tomes on his shelves from choice. Nevertheless, he felt a distinct stirring of pleasure that she should have come to him to ask.

  His children did not often do this. He endeavoured to be just and fair with them, and as they grew older he found it somewhat easier to talk to them, but in no way could they be said to communicate easily. The situation pained him; it was an impasse he did not know how to break. He felt that sharp little Nella, in particular, as she grew older, had become judgemental. And Amy: Amy, who was growing so startlingly, painfully like her dead mother. The same delicate features, the same curve of the mouth, above all the amazing mane of thick hair, a deeper, richer red than Marianne’s. Also a little silliness, perhaps, which in Dorothea he had smiled at indulgently and rather liked. Sometimes he found it difficult even to look at Amy, at other times he loved her so much he thought his heart would break all over again. As for William, now eighteen – well, that pained him most of all. Something came between them, something awkward and stiff. They had been apart for most of the boy’s formative years, while he was at school, and the gap widened as he grew older. Never having known his own father, who had died shortly after he was born, Francis had no experience of how fathers were expected to deal with their sons, and no instinctive knowledge either.

  And now, here was his eldest daughter, the quiet, dreamy one, the one he understood least of all, asking for books.

  ‘What sort of book were you thinking of?’ he repeated cautiously.

  ‘I don’t really know. One that…one that…well, as
a matter of fact, Papa, I really want to study how books are written,’ she admitted shyly, struggling with her own confusion.

  ‘Doesn’t Miss – er – at Oaklands teach you?’ he asked, taken further aback.

  ‘Not enough,’ Marianne said, quite firmly this time. In fact, Miss Osgood, Eunice’s governess, whom she and Nella shared, had little notion of education as such but had taught them all she had been taught herself, which meant just enough to be useful to them in the social milieu in which they would find themselves when they grew up, and no more. Mostly, this meant being taught how to write polite letters, read the few novels she considered suitable, and learn a smattering of schoolgirl French and the basics of what she called pianoforte.

  ‘Maybe you could teach me, Papa.’

  ‘I?’

  ‘You teach Steven Rafferty,’ she pointed out, referring to the boy he had been persuaded to coach for Common Entrance. This was something instigated by Eleanor, part of her ongoing campaign to induce Francis to take up what she considered some useful occupation, and something, moreover, which would bring in a little extra, and certainly not unwelcome, addition to the small private income which was growing less adequate as his children grew up. She had regarded his acceptance of her idea as a major triumph.

  ‘Well. Well,’ said Francis, endeavouring to digest the notion that he might have fathered a bluestocking, ‘that’s a little different, child. Unless you’d like to learn Latin and Greek, like Steven?’

  ‘Oh no, no, that wouldn’t be any use to me.’

  ‘It will if you want to get into Oxford, or Cambridge – and if you want to learn, I assume that’s your aim.’ He had no objection to women being educated, as long as they didn’t expect to be allowed to take a degree, as the boy Steven’s mother, Mrs Rafferty, seemed to think they should.

  ‘No, Papa, I don’t want that. I thought if I read what other people write, I may find out how to write properly, myself,’ she explained. ‘I’ve decided, you see, that it would be a good thing if I became a writer, and I want to learn how to do it.’

  If she had said she wanted to become prime minister, Francis could not have been more astonished. ‘My dear child.’

  He found himself in a dilemma. What was he expected to offer her, then, if not the classics and other subjects dear to his heart? All this was quite beyond him. And then, he had an excellent idea. ‘Why don’t we ask Mrs Rafferty?’

  Steven Rafferty was a brilliant boy, despite the slightly goofy appearance caused by the bottle-bottomed spectacles which constantly slid down his nose, to be pushed back with an absent forefinger, his unruly hair and the peculiar clothes his mother made him wear, but which Steven himself never noticed.

  ‘She hasn’t an atom of sense, that woman, look at her own clothes,’ declared an exasperated Mrs Villiers, who liked yet despaired of clever, opinionated, high-thinking, eccentric Mrs Rafferty, who worked with her husband – making pottery, of all things. Nothing of any use, mind, just odd-shaped vases and bowls which Joel Rafferty threw on his wheel and put into the big kiln and Amarantha decorated with slip in funny patterns, though village rumour had it they sold for a fortune in London. If this last were true, which Mrs Villiers doubted, then it certainly wasn’t reflected in the way they lived – in a tumbledown, higgledy-piggledy cottage down Hoggins Lane, near the brickworks.

  But the house, where kindly Mrs Rafferty, in an embroidered velvet tabard over a linen smock, made lovely soups and scones and other delicious food with her droopy sleeves dangling messily over the mixing bowl, was a magnet for Steven’s friends, as fascinating as the pottery itself, with its dominant kiln, the heavy, magically malleable clay, and the big wheel. Mrs Rafferty never minded what you did: she let you eat bread hot from the oven, or made big jugs of lemonade which she generously dispensed with chunky squares of sticky gingerbread, and when she wasn’t working in the pottery with her husband, or cooking, was usually too busy reading to mind what Steven or any of his friends got up to. She let it be known that she had studied for three years at St Hilda’s College in Oxford, and had the university allowed her to take a degree, who knows where she might have been by now? But she had married Mr Rafferty (a silent man who had once been something in the City and had given it up to be a latter-day William Morris, with the idea of founding an artists’ colony, though so far they hadn’t been able to persuade anyone else to join them) and life had brought her to where she was, and she would make the best of it. She was a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union and from the moment she arrived in Broughton she had harassed the village women to join in the struggle for the vote. Not for them? Nonsense, even the mill girls in the north were joining in, some of them actually making speeches. Her pleas fell on deaf ears. She had only one ally in the village: Miss Bertha Dorkings, the schoolmistress, the rector’s niece, who wore tweed costumes, sensible felt hats and a collar and tie.

  His parents’ liberal views had meant that Steven had been educated by her at the village school until a worried Amarantha told Mrs Villiers that her friend Miss Dorkings had been reluctantly forced to admit Steven had outstripped her ability to teach him anything further. And that was when Mrs Villiers had suggested Steven might come to Francis for coaching for his Common Entrance, something Francis had occasionally done in his Worcester days.

  ‘But Mrs Villiers, the expense…’

  ‘My son-in-law would not overcharge you, I am sure, but of course, I realise there would be the school fees afterwards…’

  That problem was solved by Miss Dorkings confidently asserting that she would eat her bally hat if Steven didn’t get a scholarship, which would take care of the fees. In view of Miss Dorkings’s hats, one hoped that would not be necessary, and of course, Steven had disappointed no one, taking the exam and passing it with ease.

  Chapter Six

  After the surprises and shocks of the previous day – the arrival of William’s letter, the possibility of Duncan Geddes again shooting into her life like an arrow from the past, and not least her father joining them for supper and afterwards round the fire in the parlour (not in one of his silent moods but joining in a game of cribbage and even suggesting opening a bottle of wine as a celebration of William’s homecoming) – Nella had slept rather late, perhaps as a consequence of the unaccustomed wine. But more likely because of the thoughts that would not let her sleep for ages. People, and places. Ghosts. The years in France. The Somme massacre, when the killing turned to slaughter, when the dead numbered not thousands but tens of thousands. The hospital where she’d met Duncan Geddes, a Scot with a relaxed and humorous approach that came like a breath of fresh air into the hitherto unimaginable horror that the war had fast become.

  ‘A humorous Scot? Are there any, darling?’ laughed her friend, Daisy. She made a joke of everything. There was, after all, no call to lose one’s sense of humour, even if being a VAD volunteer had turned out to be less a matter of mopping the fevered brows of handsome young subalterns than finding oneself up to the elbows in blood, guts and other unmentionables, working until you dropped and every day witnessing mutilation, agony and death.

  But like everyone else, Daisy, too, was charmed by Dr Geddes, though the lazy, casual attitude of the handsome, dark-haired doctor with the laughing blue eyes (who turned out to be only half Scottish anyway) was misleading. It was too easy to misinterpret the way he never appeared to hurry, as anyone who worked with him soon found out; then, the blue eyes acquired a direct, searching look which on occasions could be distinctly intimidating. Operating on the wounded, he became a different person: taut, his hands quick and sure, entirely focused, compassionate, as Nella discovered, working hours and hours at a stretch with him, as convoy after convoy of casualties from the latest front-line battle were brought in. Working mechanically, efficiently, in the primitive operating theatres, swabbing, dressing, stitching the stumps of amputated limbs and torn flesh. Afterwards, his stint finished, lines of deep fatigue etched on his face, he would stretch his arms, yawn, crac
k a joke and let his smile conceal his feelings again.

  And later Nella, weary to the very marrow of her bones, would crawl under the blankets with those images of him in her mind and, felled by exhaustion, drop immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep, until she was awakened for yet another endless repeat of the whole appalling, nightmare performance.

  Last night, she had again fallen asleep to the sight and sounds of star shells bursting like fireworks in the night sky, the crump and thud of big guns. She woke late, dragged herself out of bed and made a quick breakfast before leaving for Oaklands, where there was likely to be a heavy day ahead, after which she was due for a spell of night duty. Although some of the men were now almost ready to go home and make what best they could of their lives, the running down of the hospital and the gradual transfer of patients when places could be found for them in other, permanent hospitals, certainly didn’t mean that day-to-day nursing could be neglected. There were still many who faced months, perhaps years, of care, and needed careful nursing.

  Leaving the house, she drew her cloak warmly together as she shut the rectory gate and hurried through the churchyard. It was no warmer than yesterday but the wind had died down in the night and the morning gave promise of a lovely day, fresh, cold and sunny. Frost had crisped the grass at the edges of the path and between the graves, and the tight-budded stems of the thousands of daffodils which had naturalised themselves under the trees stood to attention, a hard and frozen battalion. They would only need a few days of sunshine before bursting into flower and giving the dull churchyard its few brief weeks of glory.

  A movement at the church door drew her glance. Early service at St Ethelfleda’s didn’t start until eight o’clock and the church door would still be locked – Amy said the Gypsies were back again – so surely it was far too early for anyone, however devout, even Miss Aspinall, to be waiting in the porch. It was not Miss Aspinall, but a man who was standing there. When he saw her, he began walking towards her; at the point where the two paths converged he stopped, saluting her as she drew near, drawing off the close-fitting smooth leather motorcycle helmet he wore.