by Ruth Wade
She laid her hand on his forearm. The thrill was only mildly muted by the alcohol in his veins. He dropped the cigarette that was beginning to burn his fingers and fished in his pocket for the half-empty packet.
‘Want to talk about it? They can be getting on with the cocoa round without me. Sometimes I think I’m nothing but a glorified housekeeper instead of a medical practitioner as it is.’
‘Why don’t you get a woman from the village to take on the chores?’
‘Can’t afford to. The money we get is nearly all used up subsidising the farm. Besides, bustling around like Mrs Mop gives me the opportunity to winkle out any residents who’ve slumped into depression, on the pretext of needing to give their rooms a good going over.’ She sighed. ‘But I doubt our efforts at frugality will be enough to keep us going for much longer ... That isn’t a flask you’re scrabbling around for is it? Because I could do with a drink right now myself.’
‘I wish it was – didn’t think to take precautions against my skinful wearing off before morning. Have one of these though?’
He held out the cigarettes. They both took one. He bent his head to within kissing range as he lit Helen’s. But she appeared to be a world away as she sucked down a lungful of smoke.
‘We’ve a team of inspectors from the MOD coming down next month and I know they’re expecting to see more evidence of attempts at rehabilitation – no matter how often we tell them it’d be counterproductive. Peter’s going into Lewes tomorrow to see if he can get anyone to take on the more able residents for a few hours a week. If any agree – and why shouldn’t they because it’ll be free labour – then I’ll be spending all my time counselling and supporting them through the trauma of being back in society again. So perhaps we will have to get someone in then, and maybe the farm will have to go. Peter will be heartbroken.’
‘At losing playing his starring role as Son of the Soil?’
She squinted at him as she pulled on her cigarette. ‘Why do you always hold such uncharitable opinions about him? Peter will be devastated at seeing his noble experiment undermined by petty bureaucrats who’ve no idea of what we’re trying to do here.’
‘And you?’
‘Oh, I’ll be angry. And probably take it out on him. Then we’ll both be miserable.’
She walked to one side, bent down, and examined a spider’s web spanning the bare branches of a bush.
‘Still, I suppose we’ve had a good run at it and even good things have to come to an end.’
Stephen didn’t know whether she was referring to Beddingham Hall or the disintegration of her marriage. And he didn’t want to ask. The thought of it being either made him feel queasy: the first on behalf of Edith, the second for himself. ‘Seeing as we’re on the subject of things that are worrying us, I’d like to take the plunge and ask your advice.’
She straightened up and stepped a pace closer. ‘Is this why you plied me with a cigarette? So I’d stay out here because we both know Peter thinks a woman smoking is irredeemably ugly.’
‘You always look beautiful to me.’ He’d tried to throw the line away but it hung in the air like the spider’s sticky thread. ‘It’s to do with Edith of course. Obviously I can’t tell you what’s at the root of her problems except to say I don’t think it’s dissimilar to the trauma you say the men will have to go through when they have to face the brunt of society’s rejection again. Hers is compounded, however, by a deep and abiding rejection of herself. With due cause, I may add. That I can help her overcome – or come to terms with at least. My quandary is whether to reveal to her something that she doesn’t consciously know at present, but could destroy her equilibrium if she does.’
‘Then what is the point in telling her?’
‘There is a chance the truth may emerge from her subconscious at a later date.’
‘Do you think that likely?’
‘No ... I don’t think so ... I don’t know. She has dissociated it from the moment she was old enough to have any awareness of her self, and her conscious mind is actively repressing that a secret may even exist at all.’
‘If she does come across the truth …’
‘That will never happen. I’m convinced that no one else can possibly know about it.’
‘Okay, so if it does resurface of its own accord then; how do you think she will deal with it?’
‘She’ll weave an alternative story with plausible facts and motivations that will satisfy her rational mind completely.’
‘Then why can’t you work on helping her to do that?’
He dropped the neglected cigarette on the stone slab at his feet and pulverised it under his heel. ‘Withholding from a patient is a clinical judgement whereas to replace self-deception with an actual deception is negligent, unprofessional, and unethical.’
Helen was looking at him, her head tipped to one side so her scar appeared silver in the moonlight. ‘So the view from your moral high ground is that you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t?’
Could he sprint up the turret stairs and liberate a bottle of something from under Peter’s nose? The pleasant numbness he’d been experiencing at the beginning of this encounter had evaporated to leave his mind, nerves, and skin, as prickly as hell.
‘Do you realise that whenever we’ve ever discussed your treatment of any patient it’s always revolved around your fear of failure and not their welfare at all?’
‘That’s not fair.’ He sounded like a wailing schoolboy. His fingers fastened around the cigarette packet in his pocket.
‘Fair or not, it’s accurate. Peter and I were only talking about it the other day.’
‘So now I’m the subject of idle gossip? Thank you very much.’
‘I don’t feel inclined to coax you out of yet another bout of self-pity, Stephen, so grow up. It was nothing of the sort and well you know it. We are your oldest friends – possibly your only ones given your inability to accept anything you deem to be criticism; you really should learn to stop being so over-sensitive.’
‘Self-absorbed, defensive, blinkered ... is there anything else you want to add to the litany of my character assassination while you’re at it?’
He hit her with a challenging stare but, in the end, couldn’t hold her gaze.
‘I’m probably the only person in the world who can say this to you ... Believe me, it doesn’t give me any pleasure and I don’t want to hurt you. I care about you. Very deeply. And I hate to see you punishing yourself so much ...’
Stephen lit another cigarette, dragging down as much smoke as he could with his first puff.
‘You appear to have no comprehension of what it’s like to take a risk and get it wrong. Most of us mortals do it all the time, and are better people for facing up to the consequences. Oh, it’s painful and humiliating at the time but it makes us appreciate other people’s frailties, as well as our own. All the doubts you revel in expressing over clinical choices aren’t really doubts at all: they’re intellectual arguments to rationalise after the fact. The things we live to regret aren’t the things we do, they’re the things we don’t do. Because we’ll never know how they would’ve turned out ... Do you remember the night of the medical school dance?’
How could he forget? He turned away so she wouldn’t be able to read his face.
‘We were in the rose garden. You were looking very handsome in that borrowed dinner suit, and I had on that terrible frothy creation that Susan ran up for me from a pattern book of her mother’s. God, I must’ve looked a sight.’
‘I thought you so lovely it took my breath away.’
Hardly louder than a whisper but her chuckle said she’d caught it all the same.
‘I know you did. Your eyes shone with it. And that’s the point: in that moment I knew you loved me more than anything else in the world. You’d even have changed your career path for me. I was certain of it then, and I’m certain of it now.’
He nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak again. Although he could no lon
ger keep his back to her. Helen had closed her eyes, a soft smile making her look every bit as young as they’d been then.
‘I stood there on the terrace, the music from the orchestra floating past whilst I plucked the petals from that rose you’d picked for me. I was doing he loves me, he loves me not and waiting for you to ask me to marry you.’
He felt as though she’d punched him in the stomach. His breathing turned shallow.
‘You were? ... I didn’t realise ... I thought ... I assumed ... you and Peter were always going off on those bicycle rides together ... I didn’t think I stood a chance ... I couldn’t have borne it if you’d turned me down ... or worse, if you’d patted me on the cheek and laughed ... I had no idea ... it was beyond my wildest dreams that you might’ve wanted me to ...’
His voice cracked. He stared at the smoke from the cigarette’s glowing tip as it spiralled up in the still air. ‘What might you have said, do you think?’
‘That’s one of those things we’ll never know now. The moment has gone. The people we were then have gone. Don’t you see, Stephen? Because you didn’t possess the guts to taste failure all you are left with is the hollowness of an unanswered question.’
He could hear the pop of ping-pong balls on bats through the open window of the Hall’s games’ room. Not for the first time in his life he envied the men who wore their wounds on the outside.
‘Tell me this then: if you loved me, why did you accept Peter?’
‘I loved the two of you equally. But only he asked. He took the risk that you could barely look in the face. I know he gets under your skin – he even annoys me sometimes with his irony and cynical teasing – but that’s because you’re both men who believe deeply in things. However the difference between you is that he’s prepared to fail in his quest to fulfil his dreams – like with this place – whereas you play things too safe. You always want the answer before you ask the question; to have worked out all the possible solutions before you address a problem; only to act when you feel yourself to be in the right.’
‘You make me sound like an unmitigated prig and a boor. I do know my failings. I’m not perfect.’
‘No, but you want to be. You feel you should be. You won’t take the chance of finding out that you’re even more fallible than you think you are. There’s a supreme arrogance in that, Stephen.’
She shivered and pulled the rug more tightly around her shoulders.
‘I have to go in. A couple of the men need injections to help them sleep. Are you coming? Peter will open some blackberry wine as a nightcap if you ask him nicely.’
‘No, thanks. I think I’ll take a walk.’
‘Suit yourself. But don’t brood or sulk. And be nice to me over the breakfast table.
I said everything I have because I love you as my oldest and dearest friend, please don’t punish me for my honesty. Soon, if the Department has its way, it may be the only ideal I have left.’
PART V
BEDDINGHAM HALL
DECEMBER 1927
In spite of the mental assertion that we are not going to perform a certain action, the idea of that action, owing to other conditions, acquires and maintains a dominance in consciousness which ultimately leads to its realisation.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Edith slipped on the bulky overcoat. Helen had sorted out an array of winter garments for her the minute the weather had started turning bitter but she’d left them bundled in the bottom of the wardrobe. She’d welcomed the hair-shirt scourge of wearing her thin cardigan over her blouse or the curtain-frock around the cold cottage, but now she had to venture outside and didn’t relish the thought of dying slowly from double pneumonia. In the mournful hours of the night she’d realised atonement was the only way she’d ever be granted any rest from the chattering in her head. Words were the key: those who said too much were always made to suffer but sharing her secret shame would bring its own rewards. She had to seek him out before cowardice got the better of it.
*
The atmosphere up at the Hall was surprisingly festive. Edith had forgotten that last weekend had been Advent Sunday and it would be Christmas in a few weeks. A small group had commandeered the table in the window and were making cards and presents. One, with a billiard-ball smooth head and a fist-shaped dent in the back of his skull, was constructing a theatre in a shoebox. She hovered for a moment at his elbow, pulled by the memory of the intricate illustration she’d devoured in a Gamages’ catalogue as a child and longed to find wrapped as a present under the tree. Every year was a disappointment of course; Granny ignored all her hints and never would have granted her something so nakedly pleasurable anyway. The man wiped his gluey fingers on his trousers before moving to one side.
‘We’re not exactly ready for curtain up as yet; still I reckon you’d be the perfect audience for a dress rehearsal, so you get in here and tell me what you think.’
Edith felt a little shy at the invitation but the model-maker’s sense of pride and her curiosity were irresistible. She bent forward, scarcely daring to breathe in case she dislodged anything not securely stuck down. A portion of the lid had been wedged into the far end for a stage, and protruding from the sides of the box at precisely calculated angles so they fell into view one after another, was a series of painted scenic flats. Fastened with drawing pins pushed into the tabletop, cloth backdrops – probably cut from old sheets – were stretched flat. One was a woodland scene complete with impressionistic oak trees in green and brown, purple dots representing a carpet of shaded bluebells. The tiny head of an antlered deer poked its way onto one edge as if waiting for permission to run across. Another was a seascape whipped into shades of grey and sparkling white by a storm. The third had a pencil sketch in the centre of a fairytale castle perched atop a hill, conical-capped turrets pointing like fingers into a cluster of roughly outlined clouds. They were perfect examples of artistic imagination tempered by a draughtsman’s attention to perspective and perception.
She sighed as she drew herself upright again. The world of Beddingham Hall came back into focus, rendered less threatening by a dusting of make-believe. Edith turned to deliver her verdict to the man shifting from foot to foot in anticipation. He was one of the ones with port-wine shiny skin stretched drum-tight over his face; slits for eyes – no lashes or eyebrows – and a mouth only defined by it being a hole. Months ago, the sight of him would’ve triggered a shiver of revulsion but now ... now, she merely noted his appearance in relation to the others. It was like a hierarchy of deformities. She mentally slotted herself into the upper ranks of the echelon.
‘This is outstandingly beautiful. You’re very talented.’
‘I was a set designer at the Lyceum before my call-up. Never get to work on the real thing again of course but my eye for detail is as sharp as it ever was. It’s a gift for my Dora and Christopher; do you think they’ll like it?’
‘They’ll treasure it for the rest of their lives, if for no other reason than it’s clear the amount of love that went into the making of it.’
‘Thank you, you’re very kind. I don’t want to be rude but I’d better get on if I’m going to get all the bits and pieces finished in time.’
He gave her a bow in lieu of a smile and set about cutting around the pencil outline of a cardboard dragon with tabs under its tail and front paw so it could stand up and be pushed around with ease by chubby fingers. Edith felt a pang for the children he would never see grow up and whose memories of him would probably fade in tandem with the patterns of bricks he’d inked on the theatre’s external walls.
Shuffling her arms out of the coat sleeves, she moved away and sat in the winged chair beside the fireplace. The blazing log spat an ember at her feet. A chessboard was laid out within reach on a low stool. As she didn’t know how long she’d have to wait, she cast furtive glances for anyone at a loose end who might be willing to help her pass the time with a game. But then the door opened and he came in. It had been such a long time since she’d seen hi
m and in the intervening period he looked to have shrunk in size and confidence. Catching sight of her, he appeared to struggle against an internal resistance before making up his mind to walk over. When he got closer she thought she could taste the layers of his disappointment and disapproval. Except how could that be when he didn’t yet know? Perhaps not everyone was as blinkered in self-absorption as her and he’d guessed. How much worse would he feel when she told him? But he couldn’t hate her as much as she hated herself for what she’d done.
He pulled across a chair and sat opposite her. Edith cleared her throat.
‘I’m so very sorry about the plants, Arnold. I know you were as keen as I was to create something special.’
He tried to articulate something but then pulled a notebook from his pocket and laid it on his knee. He scribbled quickly before holding the page out for her to read.
My fault. Sent to work. Big garden at Firle.
He wrote some more.
Rabbits. Pest. Should’ve guarded until properly rooted.
‘No, it wasn’t rabbits. It was me.’ She couldn’t have him assuming responsibility. ‘I pulled them up. And I shouldn’t have done. It was a very ungrateful thing to do after all the time and trouble you took to make a garden for me. My only excuse is that I wasn’t quite myself. But it was still a childishly spiteful act.’
Arnold gestured for his pad back.
Water under bridge. Enjoyed time together.
‘Can you forgive me?’
This time his mouth worked. Edith watched, fascinated, as the muscles in his cheeks quivered.
‘No ... cause.’
His voice was rusty and the sound was like that made by an ill-practised ventriloquist but the light in his eyes conveyed all the meaning she needed. He didn’t blame her, even after he knew the truth. It was clear he’d felt bad about the fate of the garden, however not distressed at the death of the plants. Schooled by her father to believe that attainment was everything, she’d never considered that the doing of something might be an achievement in itself. Exactly like the set designer who was taking such pride in crafting his theatre even though he’d never get to witness the joy and excitement it elicited. She took a moment to look around the room at those she’d shunned in her arrogance and ignorance. These men – who she’d pitied as shadows of their former selves with nothing to look forward to but an early death to end their misery – were stoic in the true sense of the word: no expectations, only the satisfaction of experience. Happiness, peace, contentment were words too small to contain the rewards of a life lived in such a way. Once upon a time, she’d thought she might have been able to be like them – hoped she could – but for the conspiracy of those hell-bent on making things otherwise. A line of them with a flaming torch of destruction passed from one to the other like a relay team. Her father. Edward. Dr Maynard. The branding iron was in his possession now and if he handed it back to Edward then it wouldn’t be a case of third time lucky.
