Rosamund, looking over her shoulder, now said, ‘Finish the floor.’
‘Don’t be facetious, you know what I mean.’
‘Well, since you’ve guessed so much, why can’t you guess the rest?’ Rosamund’s voice was tart. ‘If you want to know, I’m going over after lunch today and every day until the child is better—she’s got measles.’
‘Don’t be a fool. You’ve never had it, you’ll likely catch it.’
‘All right, I’ll catch it.’ Rosamund was halfway up the stairs.
‘It’s contagious, you could bring it here.’
‘Well then, I won’t bother coming back until she’s over it, you can see to things.’
‘Rosie!’
‘Oh, be quiet, Jennifer! And stop it.’ Rosamund had turned and was looking down towards Jennifer, ‘I’m tired of your grizzling and snapping. What you want to do is go over and see Andrew, swallow your pride and you’ll feel better…and leave me alone. If I want to use my time by looking after the child, I’m quite at liberty to do so. My main work in this establishment is the cooking and chores, and I can get through those in the morning. Now…have you anything more to say before we close the matter finally?’
As Rosamund watched Jennifer’s lips trembling she chided herself sternly for going for her, and she was about to apologise when Jennifer, jerking her head up, went hastily towards the workroom.
When she was once again on her knees polishing vigorously at the floor, she said to herself, It’s the best thing that could have happened—it will take me out of the house; we’re getting on each other’s nerves.
For at least the sixth time Rosamund made an effort to leave the child’s room, but was stopped yet once again by her sitting up in bed and giving vent to an almost blood-curdling sound of protest.
Rosamund, pressing the hot head back on to the pillow, said patiently, ‘I’m coming back, I’m just going to make you a drink.’ She made the motion of lifting a cup to her mouth and repeated, ‘For Susie…a drink for Susie.’ But again there was the scream, so ear-splitting this time that she closed her eyes and screwed up her face against the sound. Then from the doorway came Michael Bradshaw’s voice.
‘I’m sorry…I’m sorry you’re having a time of it. I heard her over in the field.’ He advanced swiftly to the bed and, bending over the child, said sternly, ‘Susie! Listen!’ He held up his finger before her eyes and again he said, ‘Listen! She’s-not-going-to-leave-you-just-going-downstairs.’ He now pointed his finger rapidly towards the floor, then said quietly, ‘I’ll stay with her until you get the drink.’
Rosamund took an empty jug and glass from an upturned box that served as a table to the side of the camp bed and hurried out of the room and downstairs.
In the kitchen Maggie greeted her with, ‘She won’t leave you be, will she? God in heaven, but you’re in for a time of it. An’ I’ve had me share. She’d wear out the devil and all his imps, she would, that one. God help her…You want more lemon water?…Give us the jug here. If that man doesn’t get a break he’ll end up as fey as the wee folks themselves. It’s beyond human endurance, it is that.’
Rosamund made no comment. She watched the old woman pour the boiling water on to the lemon, and when she was about to hand it to her Maggie paused in the operation, and, still holding on to the jug, she said, ‘She wasn’t half as bad as this across the water. Two years I’ve had her over there. Of course I had only three bits of rooms and she was never out of our sight, and she could go out of the cottage door and play on the front and still know you were near, but in this godforsaken house of misery, upstairs must be like another world to her. I remember back to when I first came here, I was only a slip of a girl of thirteen and I was petrified at the whole set-up—the house, the land and everything.’
She relinquished the jug, and Rosamund, saying no more than ‘Thanks, Maggie,’ left the room.
So Maggie had been here when she was a girl. That’s what she had meant by saying the other night that she had brought him up. He must have taken the child to her in Ireland. As she climbed the stairs again she had a mental picture of a man travelling from one country to another, a child by the hand in search of what?…Peace? A solution to his problem? Rest? She didn’t know.
At the bedroom door he was waiting for her, and he said under his breath, ‘If she falls off to sleep, leave her; don’t stay in the room any longer than you’ve got to—it’s very wearing.’
She smiled quietly at him. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t mind. I don’t find it wearing. When I do, I’ll tell you.’
As her smile broadened, he turned his eyes away and then his head. Looking across the wide bare landing, he said quietly, ‘If I believed in God I would be thinking at this moment that for every sore in life he provides a salve.’ When he brought his eyes back to her again she could not look at him. She turned from him and went into the room, and as she stared towards the child, sitting up once more, she put her hand to her throat. She was disturbed and the disturbance was creating a feeling not quite new to her. Again she wanted to run, run until there was a great distance between her and the owner of this house.
She set the jug on the box, then sat down on the side of the bed, and the child, as if at last reassured, flung herself back on the pillow and, turning on her side, stuck her thumb into her mouth and sucked on it avidly.
It was nearly half an hour later when Rosamund eased herself cautiously from the bed. The child was sleeping now, breathing noisily through her mouth. Moving quietly to the window, she stood looking down on the tangle of growth that had once been the garden. To the right of her, in the distance she could see a gleam of silver appear where the sun was reflected for a second on a blade of steel. The effect occurred with rhythmic regularity. Michael Bradshaw was hacking at the stubble. Her eyes now swept the land around her, and she shook her head as if in dismay as she thought, How on earth will he ever get through this by hand? Taking in the land as far as the pond, and to the extent of Andrew’s boundary on the south side, there must be at least a hundred acres. And when the winter came, what would he do? What would the three of them do in these cheerless, damp, high, bare rooms? In this moment the problem was weighing on her as much as if it were her own.
She was turning from the window when the sight of a figure hurrying round the perimeter of the wood brought her eyes wide. That was her father. What could he be doing here? Had anything happened to Jennifer? She turned now swiftly but quietly and tiptoed past the bed and out of the room. She was still on her toes as she ran down the stairs. By the time she had crossed the wide hall and had opened the front door her father was nearing the end of the stone wall. She went down the drive towards the broken gate, and while she was still some distance from him she called, ‘Is there anything wrong?’
‘No, no, don’t worry.’ He came up to her breathing rather heavily. ‘It’s this.’ He held out an airmail letter. ‘Mr Brown brought it over. He was in the village, in the post office, and Mrs Yorke, thinking it might be important, asked him if he would send one of his girls down with it. It had just come in. It…it’s from America.’
As her father nodded down at the envelope in her hand she said to herself, Yes, it’s from America, and she turned it over without opening it. She knew the writing; it was from Clifford. He was already in America. Always she had opened Clifford’s letters while sitting above the world on the platform at the top of the mill, but even if she had been at home she would not have kept this letter to read at the top of the mill. Moreover, she knew that her father was waiting for her to open it. As she looked at him he smiled and said softly, ‘Perhaps he’s writing to ask you to go out there.’ Even as she said, ‘Oh, Father,’ she knew that something of the same thought had flashed through her own mind, and she also knew that it had brought her no excitement. She slit open the envelope and began to read, but she had not covered more than three lines when, jerking up her head, she gazed at her father and cried, ‘Uncle Edward. Oh no! Oh, Uncle Edward.’
‘What’s happened?’
She looked down at the paper again. ‘He…he had a heart attack almost as soon as he left the plane.’ She was moaning aloud almost as she read the remainder of the short letter. When she had finished she handed it blindly to her father and turned away, cupping her face in her hands.
‘My God! He was no age. Poor Edward. And he was a good man, was Edward…Why?…Oh.’ He came to her side and put his arm around her shoulders. ‘Don’t take it like that. There, there, don’t worry. You were fond of him, weren’t you? And he was the only one who ever did me a good turn in my life. Now, now. Oh, don’t give way like that.’ He pulled her into his arms and patted her head. ‘You’ll only upset yourself…I wonder if they’ll bring him back—for burial I mean. Not that we would be invited to go, not when she’s in charge. Things will be different now.’
The fear of the difference making itself felt, he released her, and, patting her shoulder, said, ‘Come on, away home.’
It was some moments before Rosamund could speak, and then, drying her face, she muttered, ‘I…I’ll have to go and tell him.’
‘Go on then, I’ll wait here for you.’
She went in the direction of the field and Michael Bradshaw, and some time before she reached him he straightened his back and looked towards her. Then, throwing his implement aside, he came quickly to her, saying, ‘What is it? What has she done?’
Rosamund closed her eyes and shook her head swiftly. ‘She…she’s all right. My father has just been with a letter for me.’ The tears sprang from her eyes again as she ended, ‘My uncle, he’s died…They…they had just reached America.’
He did not speak for some seconds, and then he offered no condolences but asked, ‘Was he the one who bought the mill?’
She nodded her head.
‘Is it legally your father’s?’
‘What…what d’you say?’ She raised her face to him.
‘You said the other night it was your father’s for his lifetime. Is it in black and white?’
‘Yes. Yes, I think my uncle saw to that, but…but it doesn’t matter. He was quite young, and so nice, so nice. He was good to me.’
‘That wouldn’t take…’ He cut off his words roughly, then added, ‘You’re going home?’
‘Yes, my father’s waiting.’
‘Will you…will you be going to see them—to the funeral? Are they likely to be bringing him back?’
‘No, no, I don’t suppose so.’
‘Will you be across tomorrow?’
‘Yes, I’ll be across tomorrow.’
You could not blame him for worrying whether she would come and see to the child or not—he had not known her uncle—but at this moment she could not think of the child, or him, or anyone else. Her heart was sunk deep in the loss of the man she had coupled with God. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’
He did not accompany her across the field, neither did he resume his work, but he stood watching her.
It was evening now and they were in the sitting room. They had all been together for the last three hours, drawn close, as it were, by the shock of this tragedy, for tragedy it was in more ways than one. On the outside of her grief Rosamund was keenly aware that such security as they had enjoyed would be almost nil in the future. Even if her uncle had made a statement in black and white regarding the mill, there was the vital matter of the allowance.
It was the allowance that was on all their minds, and it was Jennifer who at last brought it into the open. She asked quietly, ‘Do you think the allowance will stop, Rosie?’
Rosamund let out a small sigh before she replied, ‘It’s nearly sure to.’
‘Yes, as you say, it’s nearly sure to.’ Henry Morley moved his head in pathetic little jerks. ‘She never knew anything about it, that’s why it wasn’t paid through the bank, always in registered notes. His life was difficult enough, poor blighter, without her knowing about that. But now…’ He spread his hands wide and looked towards Rosamund.
Jennifer, too, was looking at her, and Rosamund had the desire to turn on them and cry, ‘Why look to me? There are solutions for both of you.’ She was tired, tired of thinking, of feeling responsible for them all. Jennifer, if she hadn’t been a fool, could have been married to Andrew by now, and her father, with just that little bit more self-control, could have been in a decent job. She was sick of thinking for both of them. Again the feeling of youth had fled. She was no longer a girl of twenty-two. The future, their future, was piling the years on her once more, and she protested inside herself. Uncle Edward had been her one support both financially and morally, and now he was gone. She was sick of being leaned on. She herself wanted someone to lean on. Oh, she was tired of it all. Rising from her chair, she forced herself to say evenly, ‘I’m going to bed.’
‘Yes. We’ll all go.’
When they followed her from the sitting room like lambs, still wanting to keep close to her, to the one who had always managed to work things out, she again had the desire to run. This time, strangely enough, across the river, towards Thornby House and…and…This last thought, checked at its telling point, carried her up the stairs to her room actually at a run, and, dropping on to the bed, she clutched tightly at the pillow before burying her face in it.
Chapter Seven
It seemed to Rosie that from the time she had heard of her uncle’s death she had never been able to get away from the close proximity of Jennifer and her father. Even when she was over the river with the child so great was their need of her that she was drawn back to them almost against her will. Of late they had both become feverishly active in the workroom and always insisted on her being with them, although they knew that her skill was negligible in this line. She looked at them now, with their heads bent over the bench that her father had constructed roughly to the pattern of the first one he had worked at. There were the two semicircular openings with the jeweller’s ‘skin’ attached to them. This skin, originally a receptacle for small particles of dropped filings of silver and gold and small tools, was merely a decoration in this instance, for never had her father been able to work with a piece of real silver since coming here. The space between him and Jennifer was strewn with wires of different thicknesses, and a conglomeration of imitation stones, all glass, ranging from deep rubies to emeralds. There was a hacksaw, and a range of tinsnips and shears. Pliers, both round-nosed and flat. Top-nippers and side-nippers. In fact most of the tools required for the work of a craftsman in silver. There were pieces of flat metal, showing variations of patterns done by punch and hammer. But there was no plating vat, no gas to supply a blowpipe. There was no modern electric drill. Henry Morley supplied the heat he needed from a furnace he had concocted in the old chimney breast of the room. But even with the lack of modern tools he could have turned out some fine work had the materials been forthcoming, and, if he hadn’t been working against time, the time it takes to create a work of art in silver. Yet even now he couldn’t hurry over what he termed in his own mind the trash. And Rosamund, knowing this, pitied him.
Her job in the process was to select and set the stones, and give the final burnish to the finished article before placing it on its bed of cotton wool in the little gilt cardboard box. As she now looked at the row of such boxes on the table before her she had a strong desire to jerk her hand and sweep them into the air. Her mind had been in a turmoil all morning, and not only this morning, but for days past, and she knew now that she had come to the point of decision. One of them had to go out to work, and obviously it would have to be her. There was absolutely no money in this work. She flicked a box with her finger. This kind of thing had to be mass-produced before you could make a profit, or you had to find a market that would pay well for good imitations, and that’s what they hadn’t been able to do. Yesterday she had wanted to shout at them both, ‘Let’s drop this, it’s like flogging a dead horse. We can go in the fields and help; the farmers want workers.’ But there lay the rub. The farmers did want workers,
but could Jennifer with her limp last out a day walking, bent double most of the time, up and down the rows of beet or celery, or potatoes? And could her father, who had used his fingers as an artist all his life, numb his touch by grappling with the earth, even if he had the stamina to stand up to farm work? No. Then there was only herself left, and there was a job waiting for her. On this last thought she seemed to be pulled to her feet, and so quick was her movement that both her father and Jennifer looked at her enquiringly.
Wetting her lips, she stared back at them before saying, ‘I’ve had enough of this. You know it’s no use, I’m going after a job.’
‘A job?’ Her father’s mouth was puckered with the word.
‘Yes, I said a job.’
‘But you’ll have three miles to walk to the bus unless you can get a lift.’ Jennifer was standing now and she added, ‘Unless he’—she jerked her head—‘lets you cross his land.’
‘I won’t be going to the bus. Mr Bradshaw is looking for someone to see to the child, and he’s offering three pounds a week. He went into Hockwold yesterday to interview a woman he had heard about. If he hasn’t got her I’m going to take it on.’
‘Rosamund…No. And three pounds a week!’
‘All right!…I know it’s practically nothing, but tell me what we’re going to do for money. Profit on this—’ She now actually did swipe the boxes aside. ‘We’ve sold so little recently it won’t pay for bread and milk let alone anything else. Can you think of any other way? Or you, Father?’ She was now glaring accusingly at her father, and as she saw his head droop she chided herself sternly, saying, Enough. Let up.
Her voice was quiet now as she went on, ‘There’s no disgrace in taking such a job. Why should either of you be so shocked? What’s more, I’ll be doing some good, I’ll be useful. And it’s only part-time.’
The Fen Tiger (The House on the Fens) Page 11
