by Sue Gee
‘Very good,’ Steven said, and didn’t know what else to say. How could he tell them it had made him want to weep?
People were moving away from the table with their plates.
‘And what do you want?’ Heslop asked his dog, nosing over to him. He patted the hopeful head. ‘You’ve had your supper.’
Steven looked down, felt a lift of the heart, and bent to stroke him.
‘What a beautiful creature you are.’
Despite the formal phrase, it felt like the first natural thing he had said all evening, and as everyone laughed, small talk and courteous questions evaporated, in talk of dogs, of walking them, breeding them, feeding them. By the time they reached the table, where George and Diana were handing plates and glasses, he felt he might be among friends.
‘Glad you came?’ asked Frank, as they drove away. Rain gleamed in the headlights and pattered down hard on the roof. The wiper was swishing like mad.
‘I am.’ Steven was trying to get his legs organised: it was tight as a drum in there. ‘It was good of you to ask me.’
And he was glad – unexpectedly so. How isolated he had become. An evening he had viewed with apprehension, with music which had both interested him and plunged him back into grief and longing, had ended in talk and laughter. For a little while he had been diverted.
‘My sister enjoyed meeting you – everyone did. You must come to another.’ Frank slowed as they came to the village, the headlamps shining on unlit cottages, then drove on past the church, picking up speed again. On this wet night only the cars of the concert guests were out, and most had left long before them.
‘Thank you.’ Steven yawned, and leaned back in the little bucket seat, closing his eyes. His mind was full of smoky candlelit rooms; of Margot’s dark head bent over the keyboard, of her passionate engagement with the music; of fair hair falling in a mesmerising mass as Diana Embleton bowed low. Amidst all his impressions, he found himself recalling particular glances.
One was the swift Yes: now! which ran with a nod between the trio. But also: those two gazes across those crowded rooms. In the interval, Margot’s father had let his eyes rest sombrely on a laughing girl in a sheen of taffeta. And at the end of the concert, George Liddell, lit up with applause, had searched in the audience for one especial face. Then he had found it, had flushed with a smile, and looked rapidly away.
‘Frank?’
‘Yes?’
‘I—’ He stopped himself, though he didn’t know quite why. ‘Nothing.’
They drove slowly on past the darkened fields.
It was very late. Nellie and Grace had piled up plates and glasses. ‘Leave it, leave it,’ said Margot, seeing them yawn. ‘It can all wait until tomorrow.’
‘If you’re sure, Miss Heslop.’ They pulled on their coats and galoshes, took their umbrellas and gazed at the rain from the open door. A mile down the road to the village. ‘Our dad’ll walk up to meet us,’ said Nellie.
‘Nonsense. I’ll take you home.’ Margot’s father was beside them in the hall. ‘Keep the dog in,’ he said, and to the young women: ‘Wait there.’ And he put up his own umbrella and strode out to the stable yard.
Grace and Nellie stood shifting from foot to foot in the porch, until the engine started up, and the Ford came bumping out over the cobbles. ‘In you get!’
They hurried out over the flags. ‘Bye, Miss Heslop!’
‘Goodnight! Thank you again!’
Margot closed the door behind them, drew the great curtain across. And stood there quite still for a moment, logs breaking up in the hearth, the grandfather clock ticking steadily, the dog beside her.
‘What a beautiful creature you are.’
She said it aloud, bending to stroke his dark head.
‘Sweet of you to say so.’ George appeared like a sprite, his bow tie loosened. ‘Cocoa is served.’
They sat round the kitchen table, where a candelabra burned. This was one of the best moments, always: the concert done, everyone unwinding. And especially when, as tonight, they had played not in a church, or village hall, not in the drawing room of someone else’s house, with separate journeys home; but here, where it had all begun: here, where Diana could stay the night in the nursery, and George in the guest room, breakfast in dressing gowns, everything easy and known.
‘Pretty good?’ said George, tipping his chair back. ‘Are we agreed?’
‘If Miss Renner saw you do that she’d have something to say.’ Diana tapped on the table. ‘“That chair could slip and you could crack your head open, George Liddell, and then where would you be?”’
‘Sorry, Miss Renner.’ He leaned sharply forward, and the mugs of cocoa shook.
‘“You’re over-excited,”’ said Margot, in Nanny’s reproving tones.
‘I am, I am!’ He scraped the chair back again over the tiles; he danced round the kitchen, declaiming. ‘It was good, it was good, it was very very good.’
‘There’ll be tears before bedtime.’
He pulled out his handkerchief and made to sob.
Diana was stirring her cocoa. ‘An audience of over thirty on a dreadful night.’
‘And who,’ asked George, pulling his chair back and sitting down again, ‘who was the shy new chap with Frank?’
‘He teaches at Kirkhoughton,’ said Diana. ‘Steven something.’
‘Steven Coulter,’ said Margot.
Both of them looked at her. She reached for the sugar bowl. George moved it away.
‘Give me that bowl.’
The front door banged, and a tail thumped beneath the table. Footsteps came along the passage.
‘Father! We didn’t hear the car.’
‘You can’t hear anything in this rain.’ Heslop bent to the dog as George got up. ‘Hello, boy, hello. Do sit down, George.’ He pulled out a chair. ‘Well, that was splendid. Well done, all of you.’
‘Thank you, sir. Cocoa?’
‘If there’s any left.’
‘I’ll make it,’ said Diana, picking up the jug.
He smiled at her. ‘That’s very kind.’
‘I wonder what you thought of the Schubert,’ said George, passing Margot the sugar bowl at last. ‘The second movement – I’m afraid we missed a few notes.’
‘You mean I did.’ Diana was at the range, pushing back her mass of light hair, pouring milk into a battered old pan she had known since she was six. In the candlelight, her bare arms were creamy against the taffeta.
‘Sir?’ George asked Heslop. ‘Did you notice anything?’ And then again: ‘Sir?’
3
The rain poured on and on. The boys came pelting across the playground as the bell rang out each morning, clamping their caps to their heads. The doormats were wet and muddy, there were puddles in the corridors, the cloakrooms smelled of wet wool and gabardine. The football pitch down across the burn was a sea of mud, and football was cancelled. The burn itself rose to the top of the bank. At this point in the long winter term everyone was tired and the wet gloom made them irritable.
‘Quiet! Quiet, boys!’
It was only Straughan whose very presence had them silent at once, striding into the assembly hall, announcing the morning hymn.
‘For all the Saints who from their labours rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy name, O Jesu, be forever blest . . .’
A rousing one like this got everyone going, Miss Aickman pounding away and the boys shouting out at the tops of their voices.
‘A-a-le-LU-ya, A-a-a-le-LU-ya!’
Lessons afterwards could feel interminable; they were cooped up at break-time, gazing moodily out through the streaming windows, playing endless games of Hangman on the board.
‘Music doth soothe the savage breast,’ said Frank in the staffroom, thick with tobacco smoke. ‘I’m
sure we could do with more of it.’
Molly-on-the-Trolley rattled in. No one was really listening.
‘I’m having a word with Straughan,’ he said to Steven. ‘Margot might come in and give lessons. The Trio might give a concert – do you think that would go down well? At Christmas?’
Steven said he was sure that it would. He got out his stuff for the third years: essays to return on the Wars of the Roses. Since the concert, he had been preoccupied with practicalities, waking in the cottage next morning to the sound of pouring water, stumbling downstairs and opening the kitchen door to see broken tiles strewn across the grass. He set buckets beneath the leak in the bedroom and hauled the mattress downstairs to sleep in the kitchen. It might be days before he could get up to the roof.
Returning on dark afternoons, he got out his torch as the bus swished away, and checked the wooden letter box on the tree at the foot of the track. He dug out damp envelopes once or twice a week: letters from his parents, Margaret’s parents.
Terrible weather, love. How are you managing up there?
He read them as he stood, dripping, close to the range. The mattress with its tangle of bedclothes lay on the floor and made everything feel wrong and out of sorts.
There were days when he wondered if it was madness to go on living up there. Then he thought of leaving and knew that everything that had brought him happiness was in the cottage. ‘Margaret,’ he said aloud. He still did that.
‘Father?’ She knocked at the library door. ‘May I come in?’ No answer. She went in anyway. ‘Father?’
He swung round in his chair. ‘I didn’t hear you.’ Music was on the gramophone, the room full of rainy light.
‘Schubert,’ said Margot. ‘This is the trio we played.’ She stood listening to the record hiss and scratch, as her father took off his spectacles. He was at his desk in the window, overlooking the stable yard. Rain blew across it, the door of a loose box banged.
‘Must get Barrow to see to that.’
The desk was piled high with letters and ledgers. Framed photographs stood at the back. Beneath it, the dog lay snoring. Schubert wound slowly down.
‘I’m interrupting you,’ she said, crossing to lift the heavy head. ‘Just wondering what you might like for lunch. Will leftovers do?’
‘They will. Thank you, darling.’
For years they had lived together, she and he; for years had had such conversations.
She keeps house for him, they said in the village. The Barrows go in, of course, but she keeps it all going.
There were other households like this, though more where an unmarried daughter cared for an elderly mother. Look at Emily Renner, living in Lynn Cottage with old Mrs Renner all these years, since poor Captain Gibson was killed, his name on the memorial in Kirkhoughton with all the others. The Hepplewick children had been sent away to school, Miss Renner went home to her mother.
Sometimes, fed by the Barrow girls, the talk turned to wondering how it was that Miss Margot had not found a husband yet. Of course, she was musical: that might put them off.
‘What do you mean?’ A shopping basket was shifted from one arm to another. ‘Some men like it. Songs round the piano.’
‘I mean she’s professional.’
‘Oh. Oh, I see what you mean.’
The dog came out from beneath the desk and stretched. Margot sat down by the fire and put her hand out.
‘Poor old boy. Cooped up all the time.’
‘I took him out first thing.’
‘Yes, I heard you.’
She heard it every morning: the bang of the front door as she lay in bed, footsteps and pattering over the flags, a whistle. Her bedroom overlooked the drive, the lawn, the cedar, whose sigh in the wind she had listened to every night since she was sent away to school and returned to find herself moved out of the nursery, into this vast strange room at the front.
‘You’re a big girl now,’ said Nanny, who had packed her trunk and now had come home for the holidays. She pulled open drawers and showed her the neat piles of underwear, nightclothes and woollens; pulled wide the huge doors of the tallboy to reveal skirts and dresses on hangers. ‘Your uniform can go in here, my duck. You’re growing out of that school coat already, I must tell your father. Going to be tall, like him.’
Margot stood in the middle of the carpet. The room felt forbidding and enormous, like everything else: the great high bed, the towering furniture, the curtains which fell to the floor, that huge dark tree beyond the window, where the swing swung to and fro like a ghost. It was different when you were on it, looking up into the branches, somebody giving you a push.
‘Higher! Higher!’
Along the landing lay the emptiness of where her mother used to be. Her father was in there all alone; there was no one to sit at the dressing table, put on an earring, reach out an arm as she came running in.
‘Look at us!’ Their faces, pressed together, had been reflected endlessly, on and on. Now the porcelain boxes and bottles of cream and scent which had stood so prettily on the top had gone.
She swallowed. ‘Can Diana come and stay?’
‘Of course she can.’
‘Will you call me “My duck” again?’
Nanny closed the wardrobe doors and turned round.
‘Oh, don’t cry, my duck, don’t cry.’
She sobbed, and was enfolded.
That was a long time ago. And now – now she loved her room, as she had always loved the house. When she was fifteen, her father gave her a desk, a slender rosewood thing with a soft leather top and a set of three drawers on either side. It stood at the window and she prepared for the School Certificate there, looking out on summer days past the cedar, down the long lawn with its rose beds and summer house and shrubbery, to the ha-ha and the fields beyond, where cows swished their tails in the heat.
In the evenings Diana and George came over to practise, down in the drawing room, the windows pushed up high till dusk fell. Sometimes Frank joined them, sprawled in an armchair, listening, or outside hurling a ball for the dog – a different dog then – over the grass.
‘Fetch! Fetch!’
When she was sixteen, her father asked if she would like to have her mother’s dressing table, still in his room.
‘I could easily move it. Barrow could give me a hand.’
She thought of the dusty space it would leave in her father’s bedroom, of the dents in the carpet its legs would have made, of how it must comfort him, having it there. She shook her head. And night and morning, when she brushed her hair, she went on looking into the mirror above her chest of drawers, into the dark eyes so like her father’s, though her mouth, she knew from photographs, was her mother’s mouth, shapely and soft.
When she was seventeen, Frank kissed her. They were walking back from the tennis court, long summer shadows darkening the grass. His arm went round her, his lips met hers, gently and then insistently. She pushed him away, very hard.
‘You’re like my brother,’ she said, though part of her trembled.
‘You’re not like my sister. Come here.’
‘No.’
‘Please, Margot. Please.’
‘No.’ She ran through the open door of the house as the grandfather clock struck six.
It struck the half-hour now, on this rainy morning: they could hear it out in the hall, the chimes like the heartbeat of the house. Each week her father stood on a chair and took down the key kept on the top of the casement. He turned it thirty-one times in the beautiful, round, calm face, with its glimpses of sun or moon. When she was little, and watched him get down and ease open the door, it had felt as if she were seeing the clock’s secret life: the huge heavy cogs on their chains, the soft brass gleam of the pendulum. He touched it, and the slow steady tick began. Life came back.
Life came back!
Dah-dah-dah-
dah! The chiming ended. Rain streamed down the library windows. After lunch, her father would take the dog out again, as always, rain or shine, and she would practise until it was time for tea. Tomorrow her students would come. This, like the weekly winding of the clock, was the pattern of things, had been for a long time now.
She said, stroking dark silky ears, ‘Frank has suggested I might do some teaching at Kirkhoughton. He’s made an appointment with the Head.’
‘Harry Straughan,’ said her father, putting his specs on again, turning back to his desk, where a photograph of the Trio stood by a pile of papers. He gave it a glance. ‘Good idea.’
The rain blew away at last. With a great gust of wind over the hills it was gone overnight, and then the world was all shining puddles, gleaming wet grass on moor and garden and football field. With a whoop, the boys were out. More mud on shirts and shorts, but a good strong wind to blow the washing lines out in the gardens and cobbled back yards of the town.
For a day or two it was almost spring-like, the November sun pouring through the school windows, lighting the scratched veneer of the piano at Assembly, and the plates set out on the dining hall tables for lunch, which most of the boys called dinner. It poured into Steven’s third-year classroom in the afternoons, and with the huge old radiators roaring away it was almost too hot in there, one or two boys taking off their jackets, please, sir, and Moffat coughing at the back.
‘The Battle of Tewkesbury,’ said Steven, up at the blackboard. ‘The end of the Lancastrian cause. Who remembers the date?’ He turned to the class. ‘Moffat?’
Another cough: he coughed too much, that boy. Then another, and one or two heads were raised, and Johnny Mather said all at once, ‘Sir? Sir!’
Everyone’s head went up. Stephen strode down the aisle between the desks. A blood-stained handkerchief was clamped to Moffat’s white face. And then it was suddenly soaking, flooding the open exercise book and the Wars of the Roses.
Chairs were scraped back, boys got to their feet.
