‘But when it came it was – all right?’
I cast my mind back to a particular moment – the strain of waiting in darkness – waiting for the order to move forward … the sick feeling in the pit of the stomach …
I was truthful.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t describe it as all right. But I found that I could more or less take it. That is to say, I could take it as well as anybody else. You see, after a bit, you get into the way of feeling that it’s never you who are going to stop the bullet – it may be the other fellow, but not you.’
‘Do you think Major Gabriel felt like that, too?’
I paid Gabriel his tribute.
‘I rather fancy,’ I said, ‘that Gabriel is one of the rare and lucky people who simply don’t know what fear is.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I thought that, too.’
There was a queer expression on her face.
I asked her if she had always been afraid of death. If she had had some shock that had given her a special terror.
She shook her head.
‘I don’t think so. Of course, my father was killed before I was born. I don’t know if that –’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think that’s very likely. I think that would account for it.’
Isabella was frowning. Her mind was on the past.
‘My canary died when I was about five. It was quite well the night before – and in the morning it was lying in the cage with its feet sticking up stiff – like that bird just now. I took it in my hand,’ she shivered. ‘It was cold …’ She struggled with words. ‘It – it wasn’t real any more … it was just a thing … it didn’t see … or hear … or feel … it – it wasn’t there!’
And suddenly, almost pathetically, she asked of me:
‘Don’t you think it’s awful that we have to die?’
I don’t know what I ought to have said. Instead of a considered reply I blurted out the truth – my own particular truth.
‘Sometimes – it’s the only thing a man has got to look forward to.’
She looked at me with blank uncomprehending eyes.
‘I don’t know what you mean …’
‘Don’t you?’ I said bitterly. ‘Use your eyes, Isabella. What do you think life is like, washed, dressed, got up in the morning like a baby, hauled about like a sack of coals – an inanimate useless broken hulk, lying here in the sun with nothing to do and nothing to look forward to, and nothing to hope for … If I was a broken chair or table they’d throw me on the junk heap – but because I’m a man they put civilized garments on me, and throw a rug over the worst of the wreckage and lay me out here in the sun!’
Her eyes grew wide, wide with puzzlement, with questioning. For the first time, or so it seemed to me, they looked not beyond me but at me. They focused on me. And even then they saw and understood nothing – nothing but bare physical facts.
She said, ‘But at any rate you are in the sun … You are alive. You might easily have been killed …’
‘Very easily. Don’t you understand that I wish to God I had been killed?’
No, she didn’t understand. To her, it was a foreign language I was speaking. She said, almost timidly:
‘Are you – in a lot of pain always? Is it that?’
‘I have a good deal of pain from time to time, but no, Isabella, it’s not that. Can’t you understand that I’ve nothing to live for?’
‘But – I know I’m stupid – does one have to have anything to live for? I mean why? Can’t one just live?’
I caught my breath before the simplicity of that.
And then, as I turned, or tried to turn on my couch, an awkward gesture on my part jerked the little bottle labelled Aspirin out of the place I kept it on to the grass and in falling the cap fell off and the little tablets inside scattered far and wide all over the grass.
I almost screamed. I heard my voice, hysterical, unnatural, calling out:
‘Don’t let them be lost … oh, pick them up … find them … don’t let them go!’
Isabella bent, deftly picking up the tablets. Turning my head, I saw Teresa coming through the window. It was with almost a sob in my voice that I cried out under my breath:
‘Teresa’s coming …’
And then, to my astonishment, Isabella did some thing of which I would never have suspected her capable.
With a single rapid but unflurried gesture she loosened the coloured scarf she was wearing round the neck of her summer frock, and let it float down on the grass, covering the sprawled tablets … And at the same time she said in a quiet conversational voice: ‘– you see, everything may be quite different when Rupert comes home –’
You would have sworn that we were in the middle of a conversation.
Teresa came to us and asked:
‘What about a drink, you two?’
I suggested something rather elaborate. As Teresa was turning back to the house, she half bent as though to pick up the scarf. Isabella said in her unhurried voice:
‘Do leave it, Mrs Norreys – the colours look nice against the grass.’
Teresa smiled and went back through the window.
I was left staring at Isabella.
‘My dear girl,’ I said, ‘why did you do that?’
She looked at me shyly.
‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that you didn’t want her to see them …’
‘You thought right,’ I said grimly.
In the early days of my convalescence I had formed a plan. I foresaw only too plainly my helpless state, my complete dependence on others. I wanted a means of exit ready to my hand.
So long as they injected morphia, I could do nothing. But there came a time when morphia was replaced by sleeping draughts or tablets. That was my opportunity. At first I cursed, for I was given chloral in draught form. But later, when I was with Robert and Teresa, and medical attendance was less frequent, the doctor prescribed sleeping tablets – seconal, I think, or it may have been amytal. In any case there was an arrangement by which I was to try and do without the tablets, but a couple were left handy to take if sleep did not come. Little by little I accumulated my store. I continued to complain of sleeplessness, and fresh tablets were prescribed. I endured long nights of pain wide-eyed, fortified by the knowledge that my gate of departure was opening wider. For some time now I had had enough and more than enough to do the trick.
And with the accomplishment of my project, the urgent need for it retreated. I was content to wait a little while longer. But I did not mean to wait for ever.
For an agonized few minutes, I had seen my plan jeopardized, retarded, perhaps ruined altogether. From that disaster Isabella’s quick wits had saved me. She was picking up the tablets now and replacing them in the bottle. Presently she gave it to me.
I put the bottle back in its place and breathed a deep sigh.
‘Thank you, Isabella,’ I said with feeling.
She showed no curiosity, no anxiety. She had been astute enough to realize my agitation and to come to my rescue. I apologized mentally for having once thought her a moron. She was no fool.
What did she think? She must have realized that those tablets were something other than aspirin.
I looked at her. There was no clue at all to what she thought. I found her very difficult to understand …
And then a sudden curiosity stirred in me.
She had mentioned a name …
‘Who is Rupert?’ I said.
‘Rupert is my cousin.’
‘You mean Lord St Loo?’
‘Yes. He may be coming here soon. He’s been in Burma during most of the war.’ She paused and said, ‘He may come here to live … the castle is his, you know. We only rent it.’
‘I just wondered,’ I said, ‘why – well, why you suddenly mentioned him.’
‘I just wanted to say something quickly to make it seem as though we were talking.’ Then she meditated a minute.
‘I suppose – I spoke of Rupert – because I am a
lways thinking of him …’
Chapter Nine
Up to now Lord St Loo had been a name, an abstraction – the absent owner of St Loo Castle. Now he came into the round – a living entity. I began to wonder about him.
Lady Tressilian came over in the afternoon to bring me what she described as ‘a book I thought might interest you’. It was not, I saw at a glance, the kind of book that would interest me. It was the kind of smartly-written pep talk that wants you to believe that you can make the world brighter and better by lying on your back and thinking beautiful thoughts. Lady Tressilian, her thwarted maternal instincts asserting themselves, was always bringing me something. Her favourite idea was that I should become an author. She had brought me the literature of at least three correspondence courses on ‘How to make a living by writing in twenty-four lessons’ or something of that kind. She was one of those nice kind women who cannot, by any possible chance, leave anyone who is suffering to suffer alone.
I could not dislike her, but I could, and did, try to dodge her ministrations. Sometimes Teresa helped, but sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she looked at me, smiled, and deliberately left me to my fate. When I swore at her afterwards she said that a counter-irritant was a good thing occasionally.
On this particular afternoon Teresa was out on political canvassing, so I had no chance of escape.
When Lady Tressilian had sighed and asked me how I was and told me how much better I was looking and I had thanked her for the book and said it looked very interesting, we dropped into local chat. At the moment all our local chat was political. She told me how the meetings had gone and how well Gabriel had tackled some hecklers. She went on to talk of what the country really wanted and how terrible it would be if everything was nationalized, and how unscrupulous the other side were, and exactly what the farmers felt about the Milk Marketing Board. The conversation was practically identical with one we had had three days ago.
It was then, after a slight pause, that Lady Tressilian sighed and said how wonderful it would be if Rupert came soon.
‘Is there a chance of it?’ I asked.
‘Yes. He was wounded – out in Burma, you know. It is so wicked the newspapers hardly mention the Fourteenth Army. He has been in hospital for some time, and he is due for a long spell of leave. There are a lot of things for him to settle here. We have all done the best we can, but conditions are changing the whole time.’
I gathered that with taxation and other difficulties, Lord St Loo would probably soon have to sell some of his land.
‘The part by the sea is good building land, but one hates to have more of those dreadful little houses springing up.’
I agreed that the builders who had developed the East Cliff had not been overburdened with artistic sensibility.
She said, ‘My brother-in-law, the seventh Lord St Loo, gave that land to the town. He wanted it to be saved for the people, but he did not think of attaching specific safeguards, and consequently the Council sold it all, bit by bit, for building. It was very dishonest, for it was not what my brother-in-law meant.’
I asked if Lord St Loo was thinking of coming here to live.
‘I don’t know. He has not said anything definite.’ She sighed. ‘I hope so – I do very much hope so.’
She added, ‘We have not seen him since he was sixteen – he used to come here for his holidays when he was at Eton. His mother was a New Zealander – a very charming girl – when she was left a widow she went back to her own people and took the child with her. One cannot blame her, and yet I always regret that the boy was not brought up on what was to be his own estate from the beginning. He is bound, I feel, when he comes here, to be out of touch. But then, of course, everything is changing …’
Her nice round face looked distressed.
‘We have done our best. Death duties were heavy. Isabella’s father was killed in the last war. The place had got to be let. By clubbing together Addie and I and Maud could manage to rent it – and it seemed so much better than letting it to strangers. It has always been Isabella’s home.’
Her face softened as she bent towards me confidentially.
‘I daresay I am a very sentimental old woman, but I have so hoped that Isabella and Rupert – it would be, I mean, the ideal solution …’
I did not speak and she went on:
‘Such a handsome boy – so charming and affectionate to us all – and he always seemed to have a special fondness for Isabella. She was only eleven then. She used to follow him about everywhere. She was quite devoted to him. Addie and I used to look at them and say to each other, “If only –” Maud, of course, kept saying that they were first cousins and it wouldn’t do. But then Maud is always thinking of things from the pedigree point of view. Lots of first cousins do marry and it turns out quite all right. It’s not as though we were an RC family and had to get a dispensation.’
Again she paused. This time her face had that absorbed, intensely feminine expression that women put on when they are matchmaking.
‘He has always remembered her birthday every year. He writes to Asprey’s. I think, don’t you, that that is rather touching? Isabella is such a dear girl – and she loves St Loo so much.’ She looked out towards the battlements of the castle. ‘If they could settle down there together …’ I saw tears gathering in her eyes …
(‘This place becomes more like a fairy story than ever,’ I said to Teresa that evening. ‘A fairy prince may arrive any minute to marry the princess. Where are we living? In a story from Grimms?’)
‘Tell me about your cousin Rupert,’ I said to Isabella when she was sitting on the stone seat the next day.
‘I don’t think there is anything to tell.’
‘You think about him all the time, you said. Is that really true?’
She considered for a moment or two.
‘No, I don’t think about him. I meant – he is there in my mind. I think – that one day I shall marry Rupert.’
She turned towards me as though my silence disquieted her.
‘Does that seem to you an absurd thing to say? I haven’t seen Rupert since I was eleven and he was sixteen. He said then he would come back and marry me some day. I’ve always believed it … I still believe it.’
‘And Lord and Lady St Loo were married and lived happy ever afterwards in St Loo Castle by the sea,’ I said.
‘You think it won’t happen?’ Isabella asked.
She looked at me as though my opinion on the point might be final.
I drew a deep breath.
‘I’m inclined to think it will happen. It’s that kind of fairy story.’
We were recalled bluntly from fairy stories to reality by Mrs Bigham Charteris, who made an abrupt appearance on the terrace.
She had a bulging parcel with her which she flapped down beside her, requesting me brusquely to give it to Captain Carslake.
‘I think he’s in his office,’ I began, but she interrupted:
‘I know – but I don’t want to go in there. I’m not in the mood for that woman.’
Personally I was never in the mood for Mrs Carslake, but I saw that there was something more than that behind Mrs Bigham Charteris’s almost violently brusque manner.
Isabella saw it, too. She asked:
‘Is anything the matter, Aunt Maud?’
Mrs Bigham Charteris, her face rigid, jerked out:
‘Lucinda’s been run over.’
Lucinda was Mrs Bigham Charteris’s brown spaniel, whom she adored passionately.
She went on, speaking still more jerkily, and fixing me with a glacial eye to prevent me expressing sympathy:
‘Down by the quay – some of those bloody tourists – driving much too fast – didn’t even stop – Come on, Isabella – we must get home –’
I didn’t offer tea or sympathy.
Isabella asked, ‘Where is Lucy?’
‘Took her into Burt’s. Major Gabriel helped me. He was very kind, very kind indeed.’
Gabriel had c
ome upon the scene when Lucinda was lying whimpering in the road and Mrs Bigham Charteris was kneeling by her. He had knelt down also and had felt the dog’s body all over with skilful sensitive fingers.
‘He said:
‘There’s a loss of power in the hind legs – it might be internal injury. We ought to get her to a vet.’
‘I always have Johnson from Polwithen – he’s wonderful with dogs. But that’s too far.’
He nodded. ‘Who’s the best vet in St Loo?’
‘James Burt. He’s clever, but he’s a brute. I’d never trust him with dogs – not to send them to his place. He drinks, you know. But he’s quite near here. We’d better take Lucy there. Mind – she may bite.’
Gabriel said with confidence:
‘She won’t bite me.’ He spoke to her soothingly. ‘All right, old girl, all right.’ He slid his arms under her gently. The crowd of small boys, fishermen and young women with shopping bags made sympathetic noises and offered advice.
Mrs Bigham Charteris said jerkily, ‘Good girl, Lucy, good girl.’
To Gabriel she said, ‘It’s very kind of you. Burt’s house is just round the corner in Western Place.’
It was a prim Victorian house, slate-roofed, with a worn brass plate on the gate.
The door was opened by a rather pretty woman of about twenty-eight who turned out to be Mrs Burt.
She recognized Mrs Bigham Charteris at once.
‘Oh, Mrs Bigham Charteris, I’m ever so sorry. My husband’s out. And the assistant too.’
‘When will he be back?’
‘I think Mr Burt will be back any minute now. Of course, his surgery hours are nine to ten or two to three – but I’m sure he’ll do all he can. What’s the matter with the dog? Run over?’
‘Yes, just now – by a car.’
‘It’s wicked, isn’t it?’ said Milly Burt. ‘They go far too fast. Bring her into the surgery, will you?’
She talked on in her soft, slightly over-refined voice. Mrs Bigham Charteris stood by Lucinda, stroking her. Her weatherbeaten face was twisted with pain. She could pay no attention to Milly Burt, who talked on, kindly, inadequately, rather at a loss.
She said presently that she would telephone to Lower Grange Farm and see if Mr Burt was there. The telephone was in the hall. Gabriel went with her, leaving Mrs Bigham Charteris alone with her dog and her own agony. He was a perceptive man.
The Rose and the Yew Tree Page 7
