Winter of Discontent

by Jeanne M. Dams

  “Who’s it for? I doubt if they’ll let Walter have anything that good, not yet.”

  “One pan’s for Nigel and Inga. She’ll be too busy with the baby to cook much. Make another batch for Walter when he can eat it.”

  “Lucky Walter!”

  So Alan and I ate our sandwiches, and I did a little halfhearted Christmas decorating. When Jane came back from delivering her gift, the two of us headed out again.

  “I’m beginning to feel like a traveling salesman,” I complained mildly as Jane negotiated a complicated double roundabout. “I’ve been living in one car or another for the past few days.”

  She emerged from the roundabout, shifted gears, and roared down the road. “Hmph! Not making many sales, are you?”

  “Not a one. Not even a hint of interest. Am I barking up the wrong tree, do you think, Jane?”

  “Turning over the wrong stones? Mixing the wrong metaphors, for certain.”

  “All right, all right.” I sniffed the air. “More gingerbread?”

  “The other pan. For Mr.Tredgold. Most men have a sweet tooth, even at his age.”

  I forbore to comment on her generosity. Jane gets embarrassed easily. “Tell me more about him, Jane.”

  She raised both hands in the air. “Can’t describe him. Have to see for yourself”

  “In that case,” I said in a strangled voice, “maybe you should concentrate on driving. This road is awfully narrow.”

  “Not to worry. Ruts’ll keep the car going where it should.” She grinned, but put her hands back on the wheel and slowed down a little. I tightened my seat belt and tried to breathe normally. The road, little more than a lane, really, had no ruts, but a lot of curves. The high hedgerows on either side reduced visibility to near zero. I wondered what would happen if we met a car, and then decided not to think about it.

  I’d heard about Canterbury House, but had never been there. It was certainly a depressing sight as we approached it that gloomy winter day. The predicted rain had begun, turning the long drive up to the house into a squelchy mass of mud. The gravel with which it had once been paved had given up long ago and sunk into oblivion.

  The house itself was a Victorian monstrosity in dark brown brick. I suppose it had once been red before generations of coal fires had embedded their soot in the very pores of the house. There were wings and ells and bays and various other excrescences, giving the whole place a vague resemblance to a rhinoceros or some other ungainly animal. I couldn’t imagine any family actually living in such a place. Perhaps it had been built as an institution to begin with, a rather nasty school or an orphanage. Certainly it looked enough like my idea of Lowood. Jane Eyre would have felt right at home.

  There were gardens to one side of the house and presumably in back. Those I could see were, like Lowood’s, “all wintry blight and brown decay.” There had been roses, but the bushes were brown and nearly leafless, the beds spotted with coarse grass and tall weeds.

  “What a dreary place!” I exclaimed. “How awful to have to live here.”

  Jane shrugged. “Not so bad inside. Done their best to brighten it up, paint and wallpaper and so on.”

  I personally felt that all the paint in the world couldn’t bring cheer to that repellent place. I shivered as we left the car and scurried through the rain to the door.

  Jane was right. It was a little better inside. Fresh paint and a pleasant striped wallpaper disguised some of the innate ugliness of the entrance hall, and touches of Christmas here and there showed someone’s good intentions, but nothing could remove the institutional smell or the atmosphere of resources strained to their limits. The young woman who greeted us, however, was cheerful enough.

  “Good afternoon! Actually, it’s a wretched afternoon, isn’t it? I do loathe rain at Christmastime. I’m new here. Do you know your way about, or can I help you find someone?”

  I glanced at Jane, but she had folded her arms and retired into silence. I smiled at the young woman. “I’ve never been here before. We wanted to see the Reverend Mr. Tredgold, if it’s convenient.”

  The young face clouded. “Oh. I’m not sure if … well, I’ll ask. He—um—he has good days and bad days, you know.”

  “Oh, no, I didn’t. I’ve never met him, you see. I just wanted to ask him some questions about—about a mutual friend.” That was less than candid, but I didn’t feel I needed to go into a long explanation to the receptionist.

  However, she became even more doubtful. “Questions? He may not—I mean, he isn’t gaga or anything like that. Not like some of them, poor old dears. But he sort of lives in a world of his own, if you know what I mean. Conversations aren’t always—but I’ll ask.”

  She picked up the phone. The call brought another woman, older, with the sort of wrinkles around the eyes and mouth that come from smiling. “You wanted to see Mr. Tredgold?” she asked, looking at Jane and me. “Forgive me for asking, but just what did you want to talk to him about?”

  I opened my mouth, but this time Jane forestalled me. “Old friends,” she said firmly. “Reminisce a bit.”

  “I ask only because there are some subjects that worry him a good deal. He’s a very dear old man, but he feels himself a failure in many ways. He doesn’t like to be reminded of the war, for example.”

  Well, then, what were we doing there? The war was exactly what we wanted to talk about. I looked at Jane.

  “Know about that,” said Jane. “Just want to talk about one of the flying officers, not the war as such. We’ll be careful.”

  “Well—if you’re sure—we have no rules here really, you know, but we do try to keep the residents happy.”

  I would have given up then and there, but Jane is made of sterner stuff. “We’ll be careful,” she repeated. “He still lives on the first floor?”

  “No, he’s had to move to the ground floor. He can’t manage stairs now, and he doesn’t like the lift. I don’t like it myself, if it comes to that. How long has it been since you’ve seen him?”

  “Going on for two years,” said Jane.

  “Ah, you’ll find him sadly changed, then. Physically, I mean. He’s virtually lost the use of his legs, and he’s very thin. He’s over ninety, of course, and quite ready to meet his Maker for some time now.”

  “Can he have sweets?” Jane indicated the plate of gingerbread.

  “Oh, he loves them, and he can eat nearly anything. Shall I show you to his room? I’m afraid the house is a bit confusing.”

  She led us through a maze of corridors; I was lost after the first two turns. Eventually we fetched up at the door to a small room at the end of a corridor.

  “It’s quieter here. He likes quiet. And the view of the garden is lovely in summer. Mr. Tredgold, I’ve brought you some visitors.”

  The old man was sitting in a wheelchair by the window, reading. He was meticulously dressed in a black suit with a gray shirt whose clerical collar, though frayed and much too big for his wrinkled neck, was spotlessly white. His hand, as he extended it to Jane, had once probably been slender and graceful. Now it resembled a claw.

  “Miss Langland, isn’t it? How very nice to see you. And bless my soul, is that gingerbread you’ve brought? Oh, that calls for some tea. Mrs. Hart, might we have some tea, please?”

  Mrs. Hart smiled and nodded and went away to see to it.

  Mr. Tredgold inclined a courteous head to me and then asked Jane, “And your friend is—?”

  “Dorothy Martin.” I held out my hand. His was as dry as an autumn leaf, but his grip was firm. His voice, reedy and fluting, seemed made for intoning psalms. Perhaps it had developed that quality through decades of practice.

  “Have we met, Mrs. Martin? I fear I am a bit forgetful. Were you one of my parishioners in London, perhaps?”

  “No, I’m an American. I moved to Sherebury only a few years ago, and I suspect you were already retired.”

  “Retired. Yes. I still read the offices every day, you know. Now and again someone is kind enough to come an
d read them with me.” He gestured to the book in his lap and I saw that it was the Book of Common Prayer, the old version whose stately language I loved so much.

  “Your eyesight must still be very good, sir, if you can read that small type.”

  “Bless you, my dear, the book is only a symbol. I know it all by heart. Did you come to read Evensong with me? It’s a trifle early in the day, but perhaps, as I retire very early …”

  “I’d love to do that before we leave, but I really came to talk to you about the old days and some of the people you used to know.”

  “The old days?” His voice sharpened. “How old? Not—not the terrible time?”

  “Well, around then, I’m afraid, but I didn’t want to talk about the war, only—”

  “I won’t talk about the war. I can’t talk about it. Please don’t ask me to. I’ve given everything away, everything to remind me of the noise, the stench, the death—they all died, you know, all the young men—pain and suffering and death and hell—”

  His voice rose higher. His hands shook. Tears gathered in his eyes and rolled down his incredibly wrinkled cheeks.

  Alarmed, I looked at Jane. “Should we call a nurse?” I whispered.

  She shook her head and moved nearer to the old man. “It’s all right, sir,” she said soothingly. “Don’t talk about anything you don’t want to. Only came to ask if you knew my friend, one of the men who survived.”

  “Survived?” The old eyes looked vague. “One who survived? He didn’t die? But they all died, all—”

  “No, Bill didn’t. Bill Fanshawe.”

  “He died.” Mr. Tredgold’s voice was sharp again, though the tears still coursed down his cheeks. “I read about it. He died just yesterday. I’d given him everything, all those terrible things, for the museum. And he died. Perhaps they killed him.”

  We accepted that and I took over our end of the conversation again. “Yes, but he died full of years,” I said, hoping the biblical turn of phrase would make him feel better. “A full fourscore years.”

  “By reason of strength,” Mr. Tredgold said, nodding. “He was a strong man, a good man. Ah, here is our tea.”

  When tea had been handed round and the maid had left, I took up the conversation again. “You did know him, then?”

  “Know whom?”

  “Bill Fanshawe,” I said, praying for patience.

  “Of course I knew him! He ran the museum. It is only the past few weeks that I have been unable to get about. I visited him there.”

  “But it was earlier that we wanted to know about. When he was a young man. During the—when you were at Luftwich.”

  His face crumpled again. He put down his tea, and the prayer book slipped from his lap. “Luftwich! A terrible place! Death, and deceit, and treachery! War—I won’t talk about the war!”

  It was hopeless. We were torturing the poor old man, and there was nothing to be gained. With a sigh, I took another sip or two of tea and then, picking up the prayer book from the floor, turned to the Order for Evening Prayer. “‘I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me,’” I said, choosing at random one of the several suggested opening sentences.

  “‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.’” Mr. Tredgold responded with another and then proceeded right through the whole service, not missing a word.

  He was calm, even serene, by the time we left. “So good of you to come,” he said gently. “I will sleep now, but I enjoyed having company in my prayers. Come again.”

  We left quietly as he repeated to himself the words of the Nunc Dimittis: “‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word . .’”

  “He’s forgotten that we ever asked about Bill,” I whispered.

  “Likely,” said Jane, nodding. “A blessing, I suppose.”

  “Why did he get so upset? Did something particularly terrible happen to him in the war? Is this lingering shell shock, or whatever they call the World War II equivalent?”

  “Not unless spiritual disintegration is shell shock.” As we drove home, Jane proceeded to explain Mr. Tredgold to me. She’d had the story from the men who came back, the men she talked to in the months while she was waiting for Bill to come home. It was a sad and in many ways a familiar story.

  Mr. Tredgold had joined the RAF almost as soon as the war began, full of high ideals about the purity of sacrificing oneself for one’s country. “Mixture of High Church and Arthurian legend,” was the way Jane put it. One gathered he pictured the men as latter-day knights, mounting their silver steeds to bring truth to the world and save it from Hitler’s godless ways. He would be their chaplain, the devoted priest to whom they could make their confessions before going into battle. He would pray with them, offer them the Sacraments, convert those who saw the error of their ways.

  The brutal reality of war completely undid him. He found the men to be no nobler than most men. They gambled, they drank, they chased skirts, they quarreled with each other, they tried to avoid dangerous duty. They shocked him. Not all of them, of course, but even one would have been too many, given his rose-colored picture of the way things ought to be. He tried to reform them. They laughed at him and went on boozing and whoring.

  And then they started to die, and to kill. He didn’t know which was worse. They killed, and gloried in it, or they failed to kill and came back maimed for life, or they didn’t come back at all. They caught diseases and died cursing the God who’d let them in for this.

  Some few listened to him. Some were comforted. But not enough, never enough to make up for the horror.

  He became a pacifist. He urged the men to lay down their arms, to cease the carnage. The men didn’t like his attitude, and the military authorities threatened him with court-martial. They probably wouldn’t have done anything—imagine court-martialing a chaplain!—but he was then shunned by everyone. In despair he volunteered to go with the men on a particularly dangerous mission, hoping he would be killed. The next-best thing happened. He was so severely wounded that he was invalided out. By the time he recovered from his wounds, the war was over and he was a civilian again.

  He asked for and was given a slum parish in London, where he buried himself in unremitting toil and began to recover his sanity.

  “Thought himself a failure. Hoped to work himself to death, I suppose,” Jane concluded. “Didn’t manage it.”

  “It’s amazing that he never lost his faith. Men have lost it over far less.”

  “Slums saved him, he used to say. Real work, real needs to be met. Saw some real courage and compassion amongst the parishioners. Spent the rest of his working life there, then retired to Canterbury House. Been there for thirty years, more or less.”

  “Waiting to die, I suppose.” I shuddered. “He must wonder why the Lord’s taking so long to release him.”

  Jane looked at me a little oddly, then shook her head. “Kept himself busy for years. Took his turn at the chapel altar, helped the feebler residents, wrote devotional tracts. Even took services at the Cathedral now and again, when the canons were indisposed or away. He’s from these parts and knows everyone, and quite clearheaded, even now, except for the one little quirk.”

  I nodded. “King Charles’s head.”

  Jane took her eyes off the road and gave me a sharp look. “Know your Dickens, do you?”

  “I’m pretty good at David Copperfield. It’s always been one of my favorites. And Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities.”

  And we quoted Dickens to each other the rest of the way into town, but the back of my mind was thinking about the great sorrow this world could dole out to its idealists.

  EIGHTEEN

  “MAKING ANY PROGRESS?” ASKED ALAN CHEERFULLY WHEN I RETURNED home. I set a plate of gingerbread on the kitchen table. Jane had managed yet another batch before we’d taken off for the afternoon, and had, typically, refused any thanks for it.

  Alan was in his study, t
rying to work on his memoirs. I say “trying” because one cat was lying on the desk on top of a stack of papers he needed for reference, and the other was in his lap, meowing crossly whenever his typing happened to disturb her slumber.

  I looked over his shoulder at the screen. “I’d say I’ve made just about as much progress as you have. Emmy isn’t much help, is she?”

  He grinned. “I typed nearly a page before I looked up to check my work and discovered my right hand had been one key over. It looked like comic-book swearing, with quotation marks and semicolons all over the place. So you didn’t learn very much from the good padre?”

  I dropped into Alan’s comfortable, squashy old chair and sighed. “He’s a sweet old man, but he can’t talk about the war years without breaking down.” I related our conversation, such as it was. “And he wouldn’t say a word about Bill, or Luftwich, or any of the people there. He nearly went into hysterics. I had to stop asking, out of pity.”

  “Poor chap.”

  “Yes, there must be some terrible memories buried in his mind.” I fell silent.

  “This business is depressing you, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it is, a little. Oh, a lot, actually. Jane and I have been talking to so many old people. And, Alan, I call them old, but some of them aren’t all that much older than we are. Ten, fifteen years. I keep wondering what’s going to happen to us.”

  Alan got up from his desk and came to sit on the arm of my chair. “It’s something to think about, isn’t it?”

  “Do you think we’ll age gracefully? Or will our minds turn to mush and our bodies to a collection of painful, nonfunctional parts? Because if that’s what lies ahead, I don’t think I want to live much longer.”

  He took my hand. “Well, it isn’t our decision to make, is it? And of course we don’t know what lies ahead. We can make some guesses, though. For example, I have no Alzheimer’s disease in my family. Do you?”

  “Two of my cousins, but they inherited it, I think, through their mother who was my aunt by marriage, not by birth. My own parents lived into their nineties, and though their minds failed at the end, they were fairly sharp until the last few months. My grandparents all died rather young, though, so I don’t know what would have happened to them.”