‘Are we to go right on?’
‘With the talk—or with the walk?’
Helen grew deliberately playful. ‘They don’t appear to be separate, darling.’
Mary just said, ‘I can see you’re freezing. I’m awfully sorry. Living here I forget all about it. You should have said. We’ll walk back.’ Walking back and scratching her hands deliberately against the shaggy rosemary hedge she said lightly, ‘Stella’s brother is now at Copdock—you know, that funny school at Stourfriston.’
‘Those babies!’
‘Richard … is the particular baby …’
‘Yes—?’ said Helen distantly.
‘He—I …’
‘Ohhhh?’ said Helen. The utter formality of it! She longed to give one of her high, gay, kind laughs which were her expression of ‘Amen’ to every smoothed-out predicament, because already she saw it as that; ordered, healed or whatever it was that was necessary to view it unconditionally. But she was cautious. Tanganyika, Benin, Freetown, Leopoldville, these torrid places had taught her a thing or two. There one had to be wise or mad. There weren’t all these subtle variations which an old civilization allowed. There you had to grow up—or be a great big baby hankering for the gin bottle. Helen had plumped for wisdom. She and Tony had been so brilliant in the management of their own lives that they had soon become the most sensible people their friends knew. Unfortunately, being so sensible was bound to take its toll of other virtues, and Helen in particular lacked the essential refinement of the rough grace for which she was celebrated. She had a wonderful amount of busy, active kindliness and there was nobody like her when it came to pulling some poor floundering creature out of the mire of his own fecklessness; but beyond this she could not go. She had little sensitivity. This present situation, for instance, the simplicity of it dazzled her. And she could not understand why it didn’t dazzle Mary.
‘I take it he means so much to you, darling?’ she enquired comfortably. And then even her well-meaning insouciance sank under the amount of truth swelling Mary’s brief answers.
‘To me, yes. I wasn’t quite certain at first, but I’m sure of it now.’
Not caring to say another word they walked slowly back to the house.
‘She’s been ringing,’ announced Hibble in a rather satisfied voice when they entered the sitting-room, and to Helen, ‘She thinks that she remembers you, Madam.’
‘I should think so indeed,’ Helen laughed in her best happy-scolding tone. ‘You remember me, don’t you, Hibble?’
‘I never forget no one, Madam.’
‘Good. It’s fifteen years anyway,’ she added reflectively, thinking of Mrs Crawford. ‘Your mother may not like what she remembers, nor care for what she sees.’
‘The room is rather dark,’ Mary said vaguely. She felt apologetic. Helen could be one of those people who go to pieces at the idea of sickrooms. Perhaps she couldn’t face it. She had hoped that her mother would not have insisted, a rash hope, she had to admit. Mrs Crawford’s greed for what was going on at Meridian was on a par with her interest in its kitchen. Mary thought she ought to explain the general outline of her mother’s present ways. They might be rather daunting if she didn’t. ‘The room has shutters—they all have, but Mummy keeps hers closed.’ She waited until Hibble had left and then added, ‘There’s a wine smell: I’ll tell you, because you’re sure to notice it. The shutters make it worse, of course, but being there all the time Mummy doesn’t seem to notice …’
‘I am sorry,’ said Helen. ‘I hadn’t realised how ill she was, to be absolutely candid.’
A dull contradictory expression came over Mary’s face. ‘She’s not ill,’ she said, flat and matter-of-fact. ‘She was. She had a stroke.’
Helen waited. She put out a little feeler of silence before she said, ‘Let me go up now—before we have our tea. That’s obviously the best thing to do, isn’t it? Hibble!’, she called, ‘Oh, there you are. We’ll take Mrs Crawford’s tray up when you’ve got it ready.’
Climbing the staircase behind Mary gave Helen a chance to reflect. This was supposed to be a nice white, airy house, she thought. And just look at it! Everything as brown as toast in the passages, doors, papers, floors, curtains; all of them rich and still in the dark. She admitted that they were good, in fact rather splendid. But so morose! Odds and ends of things told her that this was a passage she had walked down before; that, a door she had stepped through; this, a window in which she had sat and waited—for Mary? For Stella? Stella had half-lived at Meridian in those days, she remembered. Helen saw them all bouncing up and down in this long corridor, dressed in prickly gym slips and heard Mrs Crawford calling out in her big, jolly way, ‘Come o-o-on!’ This memory comforted her particularly. People did not alter to that degree. But Meridian had. She must admit that. Meanness had set in, not smallness. The spaces, especially after Cheyne Row, were enormous. These great shiny doors, and the giddy cornices which should have been all very sweet and Pompeian if they didn’t rather remind her of an ambitious railway restaurant. Mary went on in front, the tray tinkling pleasantly. Faintly ashamed of herself, Helen was thinking, too many chairs, too many pictures, books, rugs, ornaments; too many walking sticks in the tea-jars on the landing. And drawers everywhere. Full of knives and forks and spoons, she supposed. Even napkin-rings with dead people’s initials on them, she shouldn’t wonder. Nothing ever got rid of. Nothing ever given away. But to whom could you give a chalk and charcoal Crawford to—or a greatly inflated Crawford described in a billion photographic dots? There were dozens of these. They watched from every wall in pale maple frames the colour of speckled honey.
Suddenly Mary disappeared and Helen heard Mrs Crawford say in her surprisingly vibrant voice.
‘Come in, my dear. Of course I remember you.’
She has the advantage! thought Helen recklessly as she followed Mary. She traced in front of her something long and white and billowy which grew faintly animated as Mrs Crawford talked.
‘I loathe a hard light,’ she was saying. ‘I expect you can remember that from the old days. Why, there’s only one cup. There’s only one cup, Mary. Tell Hibble will you?’
‘Our tea is already by the fire downstairs, Mummy. Helen has just come to say how-do-you-do now and will come and have a longer chat a bit later on.’
‘Oh …’ said the voice from the snowdrift of pillows, sheets and sprawling novels, ‘if that’s the case, don’t let it get cold on my account …’
‘Just a few minutes,’ said Helen soothingly. Things were introducing themselves from the shadows, a cluttered dressing-table topped with an oval, smeary, powdery looking-glass. A tallboy festooned with gilded drop-handles and on top of this, yet another prodigious photograph which turned out to be of Mrs Crawford herself heightened by feathers and fettered to a studio palm by yards of velvety train.
‘Delhi,’ explained the richly clotted voice.—‘I came out in India.’
Helen could see her now. She lay massively on her back in an attitude of stranded luxury. Her head was a little twisted to see the chair for visitors set towards the right of the bed. Her plump, strong hands nestled on the eiderdown like contented rabbits.
‘You are a tiny little thing,’ Mrs Crawford said, reaching out for her spectacles and holding them briefly against the spritely bridge of her nose.
‘I must have grown a bit since I was last here!’
‘I suppose you must have.’
‘Well sit down for a second, anyhow,’ said Mary. She tugged the chair and there was a muffled squeal of castors.
‘I can’t begin to tell you how much this house has always meant to me. It was part of my childhood for one thing and that’s always frightfully precious, isn’t it? All the scraps one has saved up from it I mean. I always did adore Meridian.’ Nerves always had a yeastlike effect on Helen’s superlatives. In a social quandary she stressed and strained. The nervousness was rarely on her own account, but because of her desire to please.
‘That must
be why you come here so frequently,’ Mrs Crawford said.
‘Fifteen years,’ Helen lamented, ‘isn’t it ghastly!’
‘But you do write—? At least that’s what I’m told.’
‘Mary has always been the more consistent about that, I’m afraid. She writes wonderful letters. I read them, Tony read them—in fact nearly everybody in the bungalow used to read them. They became our despatches from Suffolk …’ She chattered on. Mary, pressing her hair back from her forehead, rather confusedly interrupted with, ‘Helen!’ and ‘No!’ and little uncertain laughs. Now and again Mrs Crawford interposed with a loud sound that was not quite a word and for a minute or two the trio of talk drove out some of the room’s darkness. Too confident by far—wasn’t she breathing new life into this ridiculous situation?—Helen cried, ‘But everything is just as I remember it …!’ and then she stopped, appalled that she had left out Mrs Crawford’s normally abundant health.
There was a pause and then Mrs Crawford said, speaking in a rough, half-smothered voice, ‘Including Mary? Don’t you find a difference there?’
‘Mary? No—how? Of course not.’
‘Well she’s thirty-two for one thing.’
‘I’m thirty-two, Mrs Crawford.’
‘You must be, of course, only I can see you are being sensible about it.’ She heaved herself up suddenly to a sitting position and said loudly, like somebody correcting a child, ‘Do keep still!’
Mary shrank away from the tallboy in agony. Her face and throat were ruled with reflections cast by the locked shutters.
‘Hibble left your handkerchief drawer open, darling.’
‘Then Hibble can close it. I hope Mary’s behaviour won’t irritate you as it does me, Mrs … er, Mrs Gaskell. If it does you must make allowances.’ The fat, bunny-like hands trotted up her steep bosom and played a game with her necklace. ‘It’s love,’ she said. ‘But I expect you’ve been told all about that with all the rest of the gossip from this part of the world!’
Helen felt misery pressing against the back of her eyes. And compassion. Where was funny, nice Mrs Crawford who taught them croquet? Where was the Mrs Crawford who took so many things away for a picnic the car would hardly start? And the Mrs Crawford who sat at the head of her own dinner-table like a rather splendid bird and enjoying everything so? Where was she? Where had she disappeared? Even the furniture at Meridian had changed and grown malicious. The chair she sat on nipped her cruelly, and a hidden clock ticked away as maddeningly as it could.
But Mrs Crawford was still enjoying herself. In a different way, that was all. ‘No scones? I thought Hibble said scones?’
‘I—I’ll get them, Mummy.’
‘Hibble can get them.’
But Mary insisted and after she had left the room, Mrs Crawford said, ‘She will try and do everything herself! One of the first rules the Admiral instilled into me was ‘give every person a job and let them get on with it.’ She just won’t—Mary, I mean. I think that must be half her trouble. You know she’s most frightfully anxious about something or other? Well she is. I know, of course. Mothers always do. How long are you staying—I might be able to tell you about it and when I do, you will see that I am absolutely right.’ Then she switched the conversation adroitly as Mary returned with the scones. ‘And then we thought we’d get all the Virginia creeper off this side of the house; it must be that which is making it damp shouldn’t you imagine …?’
‘I think Mummy must be getting tired,’ Mary was saying from the door, it might be almost satirically. She had brought up another cup and saucer for Helen and some more cake, but nothing for herself. The door, caught against the thick rug behind it, had to be pushed and leaned against before she could get through with this second tray.
‘There—you see!’ insisted Mrs Crawford triumphantly. Hibble can get through that door without your knowing it but Mary heaves herself against it … Oh, but what is the use of talking!’
Sense, sense, Helen told herself. Do what you can. Stay a few minutes and see it out. That would be a real kindness. ‘How nice,’ she said. ‘I can pour out and I’ll join you downstairs in a few minutes, shall I, Mary?’ She divided her comforting look between them and refused to see the apology in Mary’s own eyes.
But Mrs Crawford shouted, ‘The door! the door!’ in what seemed a deliberately uncontrolled way and fell back on her pillows slack and puffy with self-pity. When they were quite alone she added, ‘That’s nothing to what she’s like sometimes,’ in a quiet, pleased voice. And then she began to cry.
‘Don’t … you musn’t. Here let me …’ What should she do? Ring for Hibble? Punch the pillows, but that was hardly necessary. They were enormous and ebullient. There was a bitterly stale cobwebby substance pressing against her teeth. ‘I know,’ she said in a cheerful voice which she knew must sound despicable, ‘we’ll have a window open, shall we! Just one and only for a minute or two.’
She waited and heard a sound from the hunched-up bedclothes, a sort of rustling grunt. It might have meant yes, no—approval, resentment—anything. That decided her. She clacked the shutter back against the mesh of naked stalks where the leafless creeper sagged against the plaster and colour. A warm river of brightest yellow and heady blues poured in. ‘Is it too much?’ she asked anxiously. The transformation of the room was drastic.
‘She wants to leave me,’ said Mrs Crawford. Her eyes were closed tight.
‘No,’ answered Helen, slowly, but with certainty. ‘You must understand that I know few of the facts as yet, but I do know—I feel—that Mary would never leave you.’
‘Then what?’ The eyes opened and conducted a sort of haggling bargaining from the stillness of their surrounding flesh. They winked and flickered, partly with tears and partly with the unaccustomed light.
‘I’m still supposing, but I should say she just wants to marry.’
‘And go off, of course?’
‘“Go off” isn’t the right term, is it? She wouldn’t leave you if you needed her.’
Mrs Crawford pounded the bed to demonstrate her position. ‘But she did—she does; she’s always going off, my dear! Using polite sentences won’t make it sound any better. She’d gone off when I was taken ill, for example. Did you know that? And lots of times since—afternoons, evenings. I hear the motor turning out of the drive and that’s about all. Isn’t that worrying enough? If it isn’t, what is?’
Helen filled the cups. A dozen sensible district-visitor things occurred to her, things she realized that might give comfort to most situations, yet curiously not this one. Meridian might be sawn in half, for example. Why not? It was big enough. Mary, single or befriended (somehow Helen could not think of her as married), could have one bit and Mrs Crawford the other. There would be independence and interdependence; the isolation and the nearness. Why on earth did people think it was in the sphere of loving to be on each other’s toes all the time! Mary might have a job—like Stella—and be home for weekends. Would not that lessen this fretful tension? Or! and how to begin this Heaven alone knew—Mrs Crawford might be cold-shouldered out of her invalidism. If so many little comforts did not come up to her, might she not begin to creep down to them? The spring was coming and there were few places which knew how to be as dazzling as Lafney in May. All these ghastly magazines with their sleek pages upon which the mind slipped, the sedatives in their various guises on the bedside-table which so soon took on the role of sacraments; the apologetic narcissi, three feet tall in their shallow grey pots; the past distorted by a camera-flash and the present shut out by Venetian blinds; they were the sickness. It was all as simple as that. And as difficult. Very much despising herself, Helen listened to her own voice saying, ‘Of course it is, but worrying won’t help, will it?’
‘It’s her not confiding, her not telling me anything,’ Mrs Crawford complained.
‘Isn’t that a natural thing—when a person’s still a little unsure herself, I mean?’
‘Are you taking her part?’
; ‘I told you, I don’t know her part—not all of it.’
Mrs Crawford grew sprightly. ‘It’s hardly necessary to be word-perfect to have the gist of it.’
‘Well I know she’s in love, if that’s what you are implying.’
‘That must strike you—as a woman of the world, I mean—as pathetic.’
Helen did wince at this. The pure, unadulterated selfishness of Mrs Crawford’s intention grew plain. It was so basic that it was almost admirable. She had even dispensed with guile. Mary was as much a part of her life as that Boule chest, for example, which had come to Mrs Crawford so properly through aunts and cousins. It was hers. Her argument was as simple as that. Why go in for niceties to prove what was so indisputedly one’s own? Why be tricked out of possession—particularly when you knew that the other person had no real interest in the article in the first place? Here you became more than the owner. You were the guardian, the cherisher, Love came into it. You were more than the proprietor, you were the protector. Therefore it could only seem pathetic that Mary should not only want to haunt the brink of this unknown, but to plunge herself into it! Sincerely shocked by all this, Mrs Crawford had searched about her for means to stay such an action and had discovered it, fortuitously at first, in the guise of her bed. But in a very short time she realised that there is nothing easier to get into than the routine of other people’s illnesses. That, after all, is half the secret of a successful hospital. Mary, Mr Yockery, Edwina—in fact most of Lafney fell in with her new ways. They called when they knew they should, and left when they felt they ought. They knew when she ate and when she slept and when she would want her library books changed and that she couldn’t stand the light and that Hibble was a darling, and that by being this she was promoted in some way. Hibble, at any rate, enjoyed her extra circumspection. She inflated the sense of sadness by a word, or by her head-shaking lope. Entering Mrs Crawford’s room made people lower their voices as a matter of course. All this was perfectly splendid—she would be a hypocrite not to get some kind of pleasure from it—except for Mary. And she, who should have had her hands full enough with all this, had contrived to possess, and indeed did possess, a greater freedom than ever. When Mrs Crawford heard the Alvis grind and turn at the gate her desperate affection for Mary soured to a wild determination. She wouldn’t be robbed! Blast those Brand boys with their quirks and graces! Blast Mary’s secure six hundred pounds a year … And now blast this pretty little creature with her burnt face and not quite considerate ways. If she didn’t know everything, Mrs Crawford felt certain that she soon would. She was so patently the confidence-receiving kind.
A Treasonable Growth Page 18
