“And I don’t want to join your harem,” said Jenny surprising herself with her anger. She pushed him away and began to run down the slope. Robert called something but she couldn’t hear what it was. Presently, she looked back. He wasn’t pursuing her, but strolling down the track almost parallel with her, while she stumbled among the scattered boulders. She couldn’t be too independent, she reminded herself, she had to go home in his car whether she liked it or not. Well, she’d made her point, perhaps she should go back now and make at least a temporary peace.
Then Robert shouted something and this time there was an unmistakable urgency in his voice. She immediately thought of bogs, moors were treacherous with them, she searched the ground ahead with anxious eyes; it seemed firm enough. She turned toward him.
“Look out!” he shouted and this time the wind brought his words to her while, at the same moment, a crashing noise warned her that the danger came from behind. A large boulder was lurching and thudding its way down the slope, gaining speed as it came, heading straight for her. She stood for a moment, transfixed with indecision, which way should she run? Robert was shouting instructions, wind-borne and inaudible. She started to the right, changed her mind, for there was a group of boulders against which she might be trapped, and fled left toward Robert, in terror now for the great rolling stone was almost on her. Then she tripped, catching her foot on a half-submerged rock hidden in the heather. She fell at full length. She began to struggle up, staring, almost mesmerized with horror at the boulder. It had gained such momentum that even the thwacks and scrapes of its stationary fellows failed to divert it from its relentless course, straight toward her. It seemed too late now to escape, there was no time to get up, to run. She crouched, her arms held protectively across her face, consciously afraid of death, of pain and waiting for the blow, the crunch of stone on bone. The thudding, harsh, rattling noise thundered upon her. She heard Robert shouting and felt a hefty push spin her around, topple her over and then the noise passed and when she took her arms from her face, she could see the boulder rolling on, gradually losing speed as the ground leveled. It had all happened in seconds, but she felt as though a lifetime had passed on that hillside, as though she had died a thousand deaths in that short space of time.
White-faced, Robert ran to her.
“Did it hit you? Are you hurt?” He helped her up. “You little idiot, Jenny, why the hell didn’t you run when I shouted? God! I thought you’d had it. Are you sure you’re all right? Nothing broken?” Jenny shook her head. “Or bruised or even grazed?”
“No, no damage,” she was shaking with fright. “I did try to run,” she explained, “but I tripped and then I thought – well, that I was done for, but it sort of brushed me aside and as I was half up, squatting, I fell over again.”
“It was a bit of luck you were all screwed up like that,” said Robert grimly, “if you’d still been lying there flat on your face you’d have two broken legs by now and I’d be dithering about trying to decide whether I ought to stay with you or go for help.” He shuddered. “God! That gave me a fright.”
“And me,” said Jenny ruefully.
“Poor Jenny,” he put an arm around her. “Let’s get back on the track. You know I’ve never seen or heard of anything like that happening here before; I suppose the wind and the rain between them dislodged the boulder. It’s the sort of danger you expect if you’re really climbing, but not here. Jenny, you’re crying,” he added accusingly. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”
“Yes, positive. I’m not crying about that, well, the fright has set me off, it’s about what you were saying earlier, you would keep on about boyfriends, don’t you see I came here and took the job with Margaret to get away from boyfriends, especially Colin.”
“Colin,” repeated Robert. “Look, wait a minute, we’re almost at the car. This combination of howling gale and female tears makes conversation impossible.” He dragged half the pitifully short story of Colin from her as they sat in the car in the midst of the windswept moor and the other half as they drove back to St. Marla.
Jenny felt better when she’d told him. She stopped crying and inspected her face. “Oh dear I’m all blotchy. What am I going to tell Margaret?” she asked.
“The truth of course. Never tell a lie when the truth will do. I’ll tell her for you if you like and, you must know Margaret by now, she’ll be delighted to give advice.”
“I don’t really need advice,” Jenny pointed out. “I burned my bridges when I came here and I’m not going to rush into anything else.”
“No?” asked Robert.
“Definitely no,” said Jenny as the car plunged down the Kilruthan drive.
“We need help,” Robert told Margaret as she let them in. “We’ve had a horrible fright; Jenny missed death by, well not even inches, a hairsbreadth, I should think. An enormous boulder came toppling down on top of her; I think we’re both suffering from shock.”
“Gin,” said Margaret, hurrying them to the writing room.
“Sit by the fire, Jenny, you’re shivering. She didn’t hit her head, did she, Robert?” Margaret asked, her hand poised over the bottle, “because if she did alcohol’s the worst thing.”
“No,” Jenny answered for herself, “it only brushed my back, I’m not hurt at all.”
“The fright upset her,” explained Robert, “it really was terrifying, and then I made things worse by indiscreet inquiries into her love life.”
Robert amplified his explanations as they drank their gin and the tea which followed it. Margaret was mystified by the behavior of the boulder and sympathetic over Colin in a general, uninquisitive way. And, by the time Robert left, Jenny felt restored and capable of an evening session at the typewriter, though she was glad when Margaret announced that supper must be early as she had to go out afterward to visit a sick friend. “I do hope you don’t mind being left on your own,” she said anxiously. “I wouldn’t have arranged it if I’d known you were going to have this fright, but now I’ve said I’ll go, I don’t like to let her down.”
“I’ll be quite all right,” said Jenny stoutly. “Really, I don’t mind a bit.” And in truth she wanted to be alone. She badly wanted a chance to think and, feeling vulnerable, she was more afraid of Margaret’s company and the likelihood of her probing questions than she was of solitude in the wind-circled halfhouse.
After supper, when she’d heard Margaret’s car take its dramatic departure up the drive, she crouched over the writing room’s electric fire, more for comfort than for warmth, and relived the afternoon. Why had she made such a fuss? Why had she been so upset by Robert? It was, after all, an everyday sort of situation. She knew really. She, not her mind but her body, was desperate for someone to fill the gap, stop the ache that came from hiding herself from Colin. She was attracted to Robert, but how could you take even the first step toward someone when you could see the seeds of future betrayal so clearly and obviously already sown?
She didn’t feel like bed. She tried typing but made too many mistakes for it to be worthwhile. She washed, dried her hair and made tea. The Forrests seemed to be out as well, there was not even a glimmer of lamplight from the other house. Margaret was gone a long time and the house creaked uneasily with the wind. She decided to take two aspirin and go to bed. As she passed through the hall, she glanced at the blue jar and saw at once that the pole had gone. She looked properly. Margaret must have taken it with her, but it seemed odd to take phallic symbols to a sick friend. Then she thought of Bernard Hawker, perhaps it was really his, left behind on some earlier visit and now collected. He seemed a much more likely owner than Margaret, compensating, she thought, for being a sober old bachelor or whatever it was. She could see his type leering away in a Soho strip club, probably the carved stick was part of the act. Anyway, poor Mrs. Gethin would be able to clean the hall without having the horrors next week.
Jenny took the aspirin, dimly heard Margaret’s return and slept.
Next morning, she was startled
and puzzled to find the carved pole back in the Chinese jar.
5
Pisky-Led?
As the days passed, the wind dropped and the weather became less wintry, the landscape less uniformly bleak. Robert Cavendish took Jenny dinghy sailing in the estuary. They were blown on a sandbank, a halyard broke, sails rattled down. Robert swore with vigor and expertise, but remained calm and coped efficiently.
Jenny had settled into a routine and found various ways in which she could make herself useful. She did the village shopping in the mornings before Margaret was ready for work. She enjoyed wandering up the road with a basket, between banks lost under millions of primroses, looking innocent, smelling seductive. She was glad that she had come to Kilruthan. She felt that she was seeing a life she’d known nothing about, doing unexpected things. Margaret encouraged her to read, thrusting Jane Austen, Dickens, Hardy at her in quick succession. Robert lent her modern novels, paperbacks. “You need to know what life is like,” he told her. “Margaret is a slightly lunatic romantic with her head either in the clouds or under the sand; be a realist, Jenny.”
But the books of which he approved were full of aging and dissatisfied married couples having meaningless affairs with members of other dissatisfied couples. Jenny didn’t believe that life had to be like that. To be soured isn’t to be a realist, she told herself. She believed that love could be thwarted by external circumstances, it could be mistaken, but she refused to believe in the inevitable end, the slow slide through boredom to dislike that Robert regarded as normal!
Margaret showed no lesbian tendencies, but let it drop that she had been widowed in her thirties. The war? Jenny wondered. There were no “goings-on,” the carved pole gathered dust in the Chinese jar and all her early fears became ridiculous to her; Mrs. Gethin, she decided, was either severely neurotic or had misunderstood some of Margaret’s less orientated conversation about her books.
The Carrs came to dinner, David and Julie. David thin, dark and haunted looking, Julie more practical and a little disappointed with the way things were going. She was the ambitious one, impatient for David to get on so that she could retire, have children. Money was the problem. David had sat in gloomy silence while the women talked of schools, teaching, children. Afterward, Margaret said that the poor dears were going through a bad patch.
Bernard Hawker appeared at intervals wearing a confusing veneer of jolly uncle and wayward child. Sometimes, Margaret hid and told Jenny to say that she was out.
Then, without warning, everything changed again. Jenny had spent the afternoon in Ermeporth shopping and then having tea with Mavis and Robert. Afterward Robert, wearing jeans and an orange, canvas smock bedabbled with paint, had shown her his work – lines of canvases leaning against the walls of the rooftop studio, most of them unfinished. Except for the problem of knowing what to say Jenny had enjoyed the exhibition and Robert, realizing her difficulty, made facetious remarks, sending up his own work and the comments of critics.
It was dark when Jenny reached Kilruthan and she felt guilty at having been out so long but Margaret had said, “Go and enjoy yourself. Forget about the typing, you’re hard on my heels now and I’m sticking. I simply must have a quiet think.”
She put the red Mini in its outhouse, a small, open-fronted barn, which it shared, inconveniently, with a flock of starlings, whose droppings daily decorated the Mini’s roof. Then she ran down the path toward the house. Suddenly, the ground disappeared beneath her, her foot struck space, she was falling. Her face and chest landed painfully on the hard path. Her legs were still falling, the rest of her body began to follow them, slithering downward. She scrabbled frantically. She screamed. Her fingers found an edge and gripped, the rest of her dangling in space, the whole weight of her body on her hands. She screamed again, this time for help.
Margaret had heard the Mini return and had already come to the door. Lights flashed on and her voice called “Jenny?”
“Help! I’ve fallen down something. Quick, I can’t hold on much longer. I don’t know how deep it is.” Jenny was exploring her predicament. Her feet had found rounded brickwork, but no footholds, the surface was smooth, slippery, slimy.
Margaret had a flashlight. “It’s an old well,” she said, “the cover’s given way. Hold on Jenny; we’ll need a rope.” She hurried toward the courtyard calling, “Nigel, Rosemary, help!” The rich voice was high and breathless.
Jenny’s hands gripped an edge of splintered wood and brick, but they were tiring fast, even faster then her aching arms. If only she could ease the weight on them, just for a moment, she scrabbled hopelessly with her feet. The well smelled dank: of cold and dark, of water and fungi. She was afraid. She must hang on. How deep was it? If she let go and fell? She shuddered at the thought of the long fall, the splash, the black waters closing… She felt out again with her feet. Perhaps she could span the well and get a leverage, but the circumference was too great. She couldn’t, hold on much longer; she’d have to let go. She could hear Nigel and Margaret arguing. “A straight pull, two of us, she’s no weight, we ought to be able to do it.” That was Nigel. “Tie the rope around her first, just in case.”
“Oh, very well.” Nigel Forrest bent over her. “All right, Jenny, we’ll have you out of here in no time. Just hang on a moment while I get this rope under your arms.”
It was a beautiful bedside manner, thought Jenny. But she was feeling deadly tired; it was beginning not to matter that she would have to let go. She could feel her hands slipping, relinquishing the wood, sliding over the brickwork.
“Get hold of her, under the arm,” Nigel told Margaret sharply. “There, that should hold. Are you ready to pull?”
But Jenny was sliding away, faster and faster. Then the rope jerked, jabbing her under the arms. The knot held; voices echoed oddly from above. They began to pull her up.
“Use your hands and knees to keep yourself away from the side,” directed Nigel. “Now, pull.” With a painful scrape, Jenny came over the edge of the well. The three of them clustered around her. “Are you all right, Jenny?” asked Margaret, sitting her up.
“What a very nasty thing to happen,” said Rosemary.
“I never knew I had a well,” wailed Margaret.
“In actual fact it isn’t a well. It’s a rain water storage tank, it took the rain off the stable roofs which was then pumped into a trough for the horses.” Nigel sounded irritable. “When the stables were pulled down the pump went for scrap, but the tank cover was renewed so I can’t think why it should suddenly give way like that. Most mysterious,” he added, flashing his light into the tank. “You’d think we’d have seen some preliminary sign of damage or rotting.”
“But it didn’t give way,” said Jenny thinking back. “There was no sound of cracking, or anything; I just went straight in as though it was open.”
“Well it certainly gave way because here it is in the tank floating on the water. There’s a possibility that it broke under someone else; I hope we haven’t got stray cattle in the garden again,” he added. “I’d better look around.”
“Come on Jenny, let’s take you in and revive you with a drink,” said Margaret.
“A cup of tea with plenty of sugar might do more good,” said Rosemary as Jenny got to her feet.
“No sign of cattle,” called Nigel. “I’ll find some filing to cover the tank temporarily, Margaret, and I’ll get hold of Trelawny in the morning and see if he’s got any rubble he wants to dump. The only thing to do with these disused tanks is to fill them up.”
In the hall, Margaret gave cries of horror at Jenny’s appearance. Her red pants suit was torn over one knee and covered in green slime, her lip was swollen, her hands scraped. They began to talk of doctors and bed.
“I’m all right,” Jenny told them. “I am, really. Just a bit stiff and sore. The fright was the worst part; I didn’t know if I could hold on till you came, or how deep it was, or if one can tread water in wells. And now, well I can’t help wondering if someone did it
on purpose.”
“On purpose,” said Rosemary, “what do you mean?”
“Well it didn’t give way under me, I know it didn’t. There was a hole there, waiting…”
“But obviously the cover had been rotting quietly, those storms we had last week hurried the process and today it gently disintegrated of its own accord,” said Margaret calmingly.
“If it was as rotten as all that I would have noticed on my way out; it was daylight and I used the same path. Anyway, Nigel thinks it was odd, he said so,” argued Jenny.
“I expect he’s upset by your accident and, as landlord, feels just a little responsible,” suggested Margaret.
“Which of course is absurd,” Rosemary said sharply, “he couldn’t possibly be responsible for the day-to-day upkeep of a…”
“There was that boulder on the moor and now the well, I wonder what the next ‘accident’ will be?” said Jenny screwing herself into a hurt and defensive ball.
“I believe you’re right, Rosemary. Tea and aspirin are what she needs, I’ll put the kettle on,” said Margaret.
*
In the light of morning, Jenny’s fears looked a little ridiculous, though her scrapes and bruises and the rope burns under her arms made it impossible for her to put the accident out of her mind. She went out to inspect the water tank, but it was covered with old doors, and Nigel, evidently up early, had knocked in four posts and twisted barbed wire around to keep off the unwary. But why should anyone want to kill me? Jenny asked herself for the hundredth time. Margaret could just say “Go, you are not satisfactory.” And really, she could see no way in which her presence might annoy the Forrests. It always came back to Robert. She’d walked on the moor with him and the boulder had hurtled straight for her the moment she had moved away from him. Perhaps it was the wind, but supposing there had been a hidden watcher who’d found the stone conveniently poised and pushed… And then yesterday, she’d been out to tea with Robert and the cover had broken while she was there. She imagined someone coming at dusk. Someone who knew that Margaret would be at work in the room overlooking the valley. A few sharp blows with a heavy mallet, or, better still, an axe and the cover would have collapsed into the water. Mavis? But she was said to turn a blind eye, not to mind what Robert played at so long as she was securely ensconced as wife. But she could have done it; she could have smiled sweetly all through tea and then driven to Kilruthan and smashed the well cover while Jenny and Robert were in the studio. “Mavis seems to have vanished,” Robert had said and Jenny had left a message, thanking her for tea. Then there was Bromwyn, introverted and, Jenny suspected, passionate. Those dark brown eyes gave nothing away. It could be Bromwyn, frantic with jealousy at even the suggestion of a rival; but had she left her shop?
A Place With Two Faces Page 5
