Cordelia

by Winston Graham

  ‘Thanks, I’ll have a cigar; it’s a brand I always carry.’ Stephen sat in an armchair and smoothed his hair. Robert thought his visitor was ill at ease. He felt conscious of his own shabby clothes.

  He said: ‘It’s some years since you were in this neighbourhood, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nearly three. I’ve been in America most of the time. But I happened to be here for a couple of days and thought I’d be looking up some of my old friends.’

  Robert was a little surprised at the description as applied to himself, but he said: ‘I’m very glad you did. Have you seen the Fergusons?’

  ‘No.’ Stephen lit his cigar at the taper offered him. ‘ Thanks. I called round but they were out. I’ll try to fit in a short visit tomorrow. How are they getting along?’

  ‘All very well. You heard about the old brother’s amazing success?’

  ‘I did not.’ Stephen listened attentively to the story. ‘And I always thought him a bit weak in the head. Perhaps that’s an asset in modern science.’ They talked for some minutes, then: ‘And that other old boy, Slaney-Smith? They tell me he’s committed suicide?’

  ‘Yes,’ Birch said. ‘He’s got entangled with spiritualism as a result of that sham séance you held at the Fergusons’ house.’

  ‘I know. And from what I’m told everyone would like to put the noose round my neck as if I’d pushed him under the train.’

  The doctor smiled and fondled his spaniel’s black velvet ear. ‘Well, hardly as bad as that.’

  Stephen said: ‘Oh, I’m sorry it’s happened, very sorry indeed. But, on my faith and soul, it’s nonsense to reason like a Hebrew prophet. If we all weighed the consequences of everything we did down to the third and fourth generation we’d all have to retire into monasteries and let the world run down, we should indeed. You’re a reasonable man, Birch.’

  ‘I see your point.’

  ‘It’s just fine and silly. I can’t follow the reasoning of these people. I could never understand Ferguson and Slaney-Smith getting on together in the first place. I suppose the old man will be at the bottom of all this bad feeling?’

  ‘Not entirely. And I don’t know that one would call it exactly that.’

  ‘I wonder he doesn’t think of the harm Slaney-Smith may have done in his life, lecturing against religion, talking blasphemy, spreading his own lop-sided doctrines. I wonder how many people he might have driven into atheism, even into suicide, if he happened to come upon any with the sort of shaky mind that only needs a push to send it toppling over.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Robert said, ‘you can’t blame a man for proclaiming his faith or his lack of it – only if he does it with his tongue in his cheek.’

  ‘He came to see me, you know. He came when I was just back from the States. I didn’t notice anything at first. When he told me he’d seen Clodius on the stage I knew the game was up, so I told him the truth. He didn’t believe in anything supernatural; I thought he’d be amused. It just shows. And talking of having your tongue in your cheek, what of the lectures he’s been going on and giving these last two years while dabbling in spiritualism? Is that a sign of sincerity?’

  ‘It was a sign of the conflict,’ Robert said. ‘His suicide was a sign of his sincerity.’

  ‘Good Lord, man, and a sign that he’d got no humour in him at all! Must we all jump under trains when our pet theories go awry? It would be a poor world!’

  ‘I’m not trying to defend him. I’m merely pointing out what may seem to be the difference.’

  ‘Oh, they were so pompous! That first evening. You weren’t there that first evening, were you? So self-important with their beliefs and disbeliefs. Just begging to be taken down a peg.’

  ‘Was that why you did it?’

  ‘What? Well, more or less.’

  There was a brief silence. Each was annoyed with the other. Then Stephen said, trying to change his tone but falling:

  ‘How’s Mrs Ferguson?’

  ‘Very well, I think.’

  ‘Is Brook all right now? Recovered from his pneumonia?’

  ‘Yes, he’s pretty well for him.’

  ‘What does she do with herself these days?’

  ‘Mrs Ferguson? I don’t know. The usual things, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s a drab sort of a house for a woman to be in, don’t you think. And with a sickly husband.’

  ‘The Fergusons have been very good friends to me.’

  Stephen flicked his cigar impatiently. ‘I’m not asking you to be disloyal to them. But I came to have a weak spot for Mrs Ferguson. You know how it is. You’d think she’d want a brighter life than she gets.’

  ‘Well, they’re always off to concerts or entertaining at home. The old man’s very hospitable. Then she has her baby to think about and–’

  ‘Her baby?’ Stephen looked up quickly. ‘By all the Saints, I’d no idea. I hadn’t heard that.’ A bitter expression crossed his face. ‘I hadn’t heard that.’ There was silence. Then with a sudden glint in his eyes he said: ‘How old will it be?’

  Robert had been watching him. He bent to his spaniel again. ‘Ian? Oh – nearly two.’

  The dog got up, shook himself, then curled against his master’s leg again.

  Stephen said: ‘Oh, well – in that case, of course … Yes, I fancy she’ll have plenty to occupy her time. I can hardly think of Cordelia with a child. I expect it will have made a difference to her?’

  ‘I haven’t noticed any difference.’

  ‘… And I imagine Brook is very pleased with himself? Another little Brook to follow in the shadow of the old man.’

  ‘I don’t think Mrs Ferguson is the sort of person to let her son be brought up in a way she doesn’t want.’

  Stephen looked at the doctor with a long glance. ‘You think she’s got a mind of her own, eh?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  They talked then of general things for some minutes. But the interest had gone out of the visitor’s manner. He was casual, asked Birch things, and then lost interest in the answers. He finished his cigar and tossed it into the grate with an impatient, angry flick.

  ‘Well, I won’t waste your time any more. I don’t want to keep you from your wife …’

  ‘I’m not married.’

  They eyed each other.

  ‘Not? That’s unusual, isn’t it?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I thought you might have taken it in self-defence.’

  ‘No.’

  Stephen got up.

  ‘And you?’ said Robert.

  ‘Oh, I was – not now. My divorce went through a few months ago.’

  ‘Bad luck.’

  ‘Yes … It was queer the way it turned out. A funny world, Birch.’

  ‘Are you staying in Manchester long?’

  ‘I’m going tomorrow or the next day.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I shall be in London for a time. And then it may be back to the States. A good country. I haven’t yet made up my mind.’

  As he was shown out, Stephen said:

  ‘Are you a cynic?’

  The doctor said: ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I try to take things as they come.’

  ‘That’s been my outlook. But how d’you take things when they don’t come?’

  Robert hesitated. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps you learn to do without. I’m a doctor, not a philosopher.’

  ‘I suppose you couldn’t know anyhow. Nobody has the answer to that. I wonder if Slaney-Smith knows by now.’

  A few dry leaves drifted downwards in the breeze.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Stephen, pulling on his hogskin gloves, ‘I’m not going to take his way of finding out. Not just yet.’

  Robert Birch stood on the top step watching the other man until he was out of sight. Then he went in and upstairs and re-lit his pipe. After a minute or two he let it go out again.

  He didn’t know quite why he had lied about the age of Cordelia�
��s child. He had done it on impulse, in the act of speaking, and while a monstrous cloudy suspicion had loomed in the back of his mind. The suspicion had been blown away almost before it was properly formed. But he realized that if he didn’t take care, if he didn’t prepare his mind to reject it as an absurdity, it might well come back and try to stay.

  BOOK FOUR

  Chapter One

  ‘Have you got a bustle trimmed with blue?

  Do you wear it? Yes, I do!

  When I go to meet my John

  Then I put my bustle on.’

  Three little girls in pinafores with coloured ribbons in their hair sang this as if their lives depended on it, their thin, breathy, solemn, over-articulate little voices not quite getting hold of the jigging polka rhythm of the thing. Sitting and standing round listening were the eleven other members of the Christmas party, stiff with frills and shiny with food. At a distance, feeling slightly self-conscious and out of place, like liners escorting tugs, were the grown-ups: Essie, Mrs Blake, Aunt Tish, Mrs Thorpe, Mrs Trant, Mrs Slaney-Smith – still in weeds after fifteen months – and Mrs Shrike, the Vicar’s wife, in a bustle trimmed with yellow and stuffed with the Manchester Guardian.

  Cordelia flitted about keeping the party going. She looked very young today, much more like the elder sister of Virginia than the mother of Ian. Essie, although only two years her senior, had matured with marriage and motherhood. Cordelia, for all the stress and strain she had been through, had changed very little. She had authority and had used it for five years, managing a house half a dozen times the size of Essie’s; for twelve months, too, as part-time working partner in Ferguson’s Dye Works – to the astonishment of her family and the scandal of the city; but when she had no need of it her authority dropped from her and she seemed to her mother’s benevolent glance to be just the same slip of a girl who had somehow got herself married into this important family years ago.

  The only notable absentee today was Uncle Pridey. His long-promised visit to London had come off in October, and a week after his return he had casually announced that he had taken rooms there for a few months and would be leaving shortly.

  Mr Ferguson had very much resented the idea of someone moving out of the orbit of his influence. He argued that it was a waste of money, was inconsiderate towards the family, would make Pridey a cat’s paw in the hands of ambitious Southerners. He predicted disappointment, heart-burning, probably a break-down in health; and to his increasing annoyance, Pridey cracked his fingers and went on packing.

  Pridey left early on Friday morning in two cabs, one carrying his suitcases, his books and his papers, the other himself and his cello and eight cages of rats, mice, shrews, and things in pickle. He had dressed for the journey in a long tight frock-coat thirty-eight years old, a white waistcoat, and yellow check trousers. He had also bought a yellow bowler hat while in London, but this was small and sat oddly on his thick grey hair.

  ‘Well, good-bye, Uncle Pridey,’ Cordelia had said tenderly, kissing one bristly cheek. ‘You’ll come back and see us some time, won’t you? We’ll all miss you, you know; especially Ian.’

  ‘These cages,’ he said doubtfully. ‘All home-made, put together as you might say in bits and pieces. Hadn’t enough nails for the side of that one and you can see the string is gnawed. I shouldn’t have let ’em play about on top. Now what’s troubling me is, will they stand the journey?’

  Dozens of sharp patient little eyes watched him as he spoke.

  ‘I’ll get you some string.’

  ‘It’s an experiment, y’know,’ he said, pulling his hat absent-mindedly to a rakish angle. ‘Don’t think I should like to live in London for ever. Can’t understand the people. Too polite. But what you must do is come and see me. Bring Ian up. I hope my shrews won’t be train-sick.’

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be able to manage at the station or shall I come that far?’

  ‘My landlady seems an amiable woman. Understands some of the basic principles of cooking, which is rare. A cockney voice, though. Like a fret-saw. Goes on and on. Good-bye, m’dear. I’ll write you the moment I get there.’

  The moment he got there proved to be three weeks later, which was the earliest, he said, that he’d been able to get round to writing. As she went about the room encouraging the children to join in a game of ‘Shy Widow’ her thoughts moved towards this letter – perhaps inevitably, for Essie had been talking a lot about London this afternoon, about the theatres she went to with Hugh in his professional capacity and how well he was thought of on his paper.

  Pridey hadn’t bothered to put his address or ‘Dear Cordelia’, or any of the usual things.

  ‘You will have given up,’ he began, ‘expecting a letter from me, which is clearly the appropriate time to receive one. My days have been over-occupied since I came, and this is the earliest I could bring myself to the business of literary effort. It was a tiresome journey. I was fortunately able to gain a carriage to myself – one or two people looked in at Crewe but went away again – but there were several incidents. Mr Gladstone, whom I should not have suspected of wishing to put me to anxiety, slipped away while I was dozing. This prank nearly cost him dear. Some foolish ill-tempered old man in the carriage next but one – a general, he said he was, and just home from India, and no doubt his liver was puckered with tropical excesses; if he is the sort of man, I reflected, who officers our overseas army one cannot wonder at the Indian mutiny, and I found myself breaking a lifetime’s habit and sympathizing with the underdog – tried to stab him with a Sikh hunting knife. Fortunately the train stopped as I intervened, because the general’s wife, a hard-faced woman whose appearance would have suggested a different calling if I had met her in Albert Square after ten at night, was lowering the window to pull the emergency chain. I was able to recover Mr Gladstone, who was sitting quietly enough on the luggage shelf, and so explained. There was however no courtesy on their side and therefore little shown on mine.

  ‘At the London station I took a cab to my lodgings, which are central enough, off a square called Soho Square. The cabbie was not unmannerly and made no objections to my little friends being inside with me out of the cold, and when I paid him I expressed my appreciation of this. Whereupon he said it was all the same to him, and the last passenger he had had before me was a woman for the fever wards. It is a curious reflection that in this great metropolis these public cabs should be regularly used to take people to the hospital. If you come, insist on a hansom. I was anxious for more than a week, having been long convinced that both rats and mice can catch the same diseases as human beings. However, they’ve all been well, except that Mr Gladstone is suffering again from catarrh. Before I forget, I met that man Crossley the other night. The one who hoaxed us all, you remember, over his spiritualism and set Slaney-Smith off after his last red-herring. I was going somewhere, I forget where, and did not stay with him long but he said I was to send you his regards. An impudent fellow at heart, but he has a taking way with him. He wanted me to go to some music hall of which he is manager. I could not, so we parted. It is not a small world, though my landlady insists on saying so; it is a very large world but overcrowded with our kind and in the endless permutations which occur one can expect these encounters, I suppose.

  ‘I have no doubt whatever that I shall find plenty to occupy my time here for the next six months. For three successive nights I have been in argument with some friends of Professor Simon’s on Darwin’s hypothesis of pangenesis. I have told everyone repeatedly that I know nothing whatever about this peculiar theory and that I criticize it merely in the light of reason and common sense, but they keep returning to the subject, as I told them last night, like dogs to their vomit.’

  There was a good deal more than this. When Pridey wrote he sent good value for his stamp. She thought when she read it, How strange if I had met Stephen by accident in the street, after all the avoidings, the heart-burnings; so he has not yet gone back to America …

  And now Pridey has gone
and I am more alone than ever.

  ‘Mummie,’ Ian said, his hot sticky hand clutching at her. ‘Can we play Blind Man’s Bus?’ He always called it this despite corrections. It seemed to him to make more sense. ‘Can we? Can we?’

  ‘Yes, darling, if you’d like.’

  ‘Will you play, Mummie? Will you be the blind man?’

  ‘Yes, if you want me to.’

  He darted off, screaming excitedly at his playmates. ‘Stop it! All of you! We’re going to play Blind Man’s Bus, an’ my mummie’s going to be the blind man! Stop it! Stop playing!’ He fairly shook one little girl. ‘We’re going to play Blind Man’s Bus!’

  Later, when she had eventually caught someone, she untied the handkerchief and found that Brook and Robert Birch, who was supping with them, had arrived and were watching the game. She invited them to join in, and Robert at once did so; but Brook smilingly refused.

  ‘I’ve been telling Delia,’ Essie was saying to Brook, ‘how happy Hugh and I are in London, and why don’t you come up and stay with us? Of course we’ve nothing grand like this, but it’s comfortable and it’s easy and right in the centre of things. My dear, we have literary evenings, when Hugh’s brainy friends come in and they talk about Coleridge or Mr Dickens’s last book. I just sit and listen, but it’s quite a treat for me. Hugh’s doing awfully well and he thinks there may be a chance of an editorship soon. D’you know Fleet Street, Brook? It’s awfully romantic at night. I’ve been down twice when Hugh was on night shift. They start printing about seven in the evening …’

  Cordelia wished she would stop. Brook pretended it meant nothing to him; his attitude was that in his own circle and in his own town he had a culture and a literary talent equal to anything London could offer, but underneath she knew that everything Essie said heaped fresh fuel upon his discontent.

  By now the game of Blind Man’s Buff was getting rowdy, so she put a stop to it, and as she did so she heard the front door and knew it was time to close the party. Alderman Ferguson was back.

  Privately Brook was more sure than ever that his father had played a confidence trick on him. He and Cordelia had become full partners in the dye works only to find themselves more under his dominion than before. True he was absent a good deal, but they were more directly responsible to him when he came back. At the time Brook had tried to warn Cordelia. But she hadn’t seemed to see it that way. She said: ‘After all, what have we to lose?’ and to that question he could supply no answer.