by Nina Bawden
I said brightly, “I phoned from the station but there was no answer. Evans said you were in the eighteen acre but I missed the way across the stream in the dark. The bridge down there is quite rotten—shouldn’t something be done about it?”
There was a silence. “He said uneasily, “It’s a bigger job than it looks. I’ve always been meaning to find time for it. But we haven’t turned the milking herd into the lower meadow for years and it didn’t seem worth while.”
It wasn’t very convincing. The farm was painstakingly maintained, the hedges and gates regularly attended to. It was as if he had not wanted to think about the bridge, as if it were something that he needed to shut away in a dark corner of his mind and forget.
We walked back across the field. He held my elbow lightly. He cleared his throat. “It’s wonderful to have you back. Wonderful. Why did you decide to come before the end of your holiday?”
“I missed you.”
“Darling, did you really?” The words tumbled out eagerly as if a barrier had been broken. He kissed me. I longed to be safe in the lighted house; I stiffened in his arms, and he let me go. He said gently, “Poor love, you must be tired.” He did not try to touch me again; we walked apart from each other.
He said, “I had a little surprise for you. Now, I’m afraid it’ll be an awful flop.”
He sounded rueful; he set considerable store by the correct timing of his gestures.
“Tell me.”
“I suppose I might as well. It doesn’t look particularly impressive so it won’t burst upon you with any sort of glory.” He swiped at the long grass with his walking stick. “I painted the bedroom. Had to find something to occupy myself.… Really, I hoped you wouldn’t be back till it was finished. There was another reason too.”
“Why did they fire the rick?” I asked.
He stopped and stared at me. A cloud had moved over the moon and I couldn’t see his face. “Evans told you, did he?”
“Yes.”
He said savagely, “Blast him. I’m sorry. I hoped you wouldn’t know.”
“But what did they do it for?”
We had reached the dairy door. He held the torch while I took off my gum-boots and found my shoes. “It’ll keep till later,” he said.
As we walked through the big kitchen and into the hall, Maggie was playing Grieg’s piano concerto.
He said, “That’s thing’s out of tune.”
His thin face was white and drawn, his eyes puffy, as if he hadn’t been sleeping.
At the door of the drawing-room he looked across at Maggie, sitting in a circle of light.
“For heaven’s sake, stop that row.” She stopped, her hands lay limp on the keys.
He grinned at me sheepishly. “Sorry. It’s been a long day. Let’s go upstairs, shall we, and light the fire?”
“Oh, no.” Maggie got up from the stool. “Let’s stay here, Daddy. It’s so nice. Look, I found some flowers.…”
Daffodils stood in a jam jar on the piano lid.
I said, “We’ll stay here this evening Maggie, be a dear and go and make some tea.”
She ran out of the room. We sat down on opposite sides of the fireplace.
“Tell me about Paris,” he said politely.
“What do you want to know?” I said sullenly.
“Anything that comes into your head. I’ve lost a whole week of you. There are so many gaps.…”
He was trying so hard; just then I could only see the effort he was making and not the love behind it. We were a million miles apart. After supper was over and Maggie had gone to bed, I talked and talked and all the time I thought: how odd it is to be sitting here, in the great, unused room; does he find it odd? Will he look up in a moment and expect to see her sitting at the piano? Does she live for him in this room? Which was her favourite chair?
After a while, he said, “Sweet, don’t talk. It will keep till to-morrow.”
“I’m not tired.”
“You look it.” He hesitated. “You look as if you’d seen a ghost,” he said.
It was then that the first brick came through the window, making a neat, round, black hole and a cobweb pattern over the rest of the big pane of glass. The second one, flung with more force, hit James just above the elbow and he cried out with pain.
Cyril said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here in time. To stop this.…” He gestured distastefully at the shattered window, the pile of muddy bricks on the floor. I had swept up the worst of the mess. Now I closed the heavy shutters and clicked the bar into place.
Breathing with difficulty, he lowered himself into a chair.
He went on, “They cleared off quickly enough when I turned up. The landlord at my local tipped me off. There had been a gang of young hooligans in the public bar who’d had too much to drink and were spoiling for a row. He thought they might make trouble. They’d already left when he told me; I thought the best thing was to come straight here.”
I said angrily, “Why didn’t he ring the police?”
For a moment neither of them spoke. Then James said wearily, “I expect he hoped they’d do a bit of damage before they were stopped. But he wanted to put himself on the right side in case they did too much.”
Cyril coughed and wheezed. The spasm over, he said, “He thought—indeed, he said to me that you wouldn’t want the police dragged into it. Jones isn’t malicious, nor is he a fool.”
James grinned wryly. “No, I wouldn’t want the police.”
I felt frustrated and ignored. I hadn’t wanted to ask James what it was all about in front of Cyril, but it seemed that I had to. I said, “It’s monstrous. Why should they attack you?”
James closed his eyes and winced as he moved his arm. I had bathed it and put it in a sling but it was still painful. “Just boyish high spirits,” he said. “Tell her, Sully, it will come better from you.”
“I don’t see why.” Compassionately, the dark eyes watched me beneath those surprising eyebrows. His painful breathing seemed to fill the room. “Someone’s been spreading dirt. Oh, childish and silly dirt, but there’s always an element that’s looking for trouble and needs an Aunt Sally.” He paused. He said, to James, “This is your job, not mine.”
“All right.” James opened his eyes. His face was bone-white. “It seems, Harriet, that someone has been suggesting, here and there, in the right places, that you might not have gone to Paris at all. I’m not sure whether you are supposed to have left me of your own accord or whether the interpretation was meant to be more sinister—that I’d knocked you on the head and dumped you in the nearest ditch. I don’t think the second proposition was taken very seriously. If it had been I think something more would have happened than a smashed window and a quantity of valuable hay sent up in smoke. I don’t really think you come into the picture at all. It was me they wanted. And it wasn’t difficult to stir up trouble against me, either, it was like setting a match to dry grass. How dare I come back here after what I’d done, what unutterable cheek! You can hear them muttering behind their window curtains. And to pay me out for my cheek, they chuck bricks through my window. Nice and neighbourly of them. The local toughs don’t matter, they’re only the people who throw the stones, the people who always throw the stones. They don’t select their victims, they never do. All they want is to be in the van of a movement, let’s get rid of the Blacks, the Jews. They don’t care about me or what I’ve done, all they want to do is to run with the pack and howl under the moon.”
The tone of his voice was sarcastic, almost archly so, in the fashion of the worst kind of schoolmaster. It made him seem, in the circumstances, a little mad. He stood up and peered at himself in the looking-glass on the chimney breast as if he wondered who he was. He stretched up his uninjured arm and adjusted the curved sword that was hanging above the glass as if its crookedness offended him.
Cyril was spraying himself with his asthma machine. He screwed on the top and put it away in his pocket. His breath came more easily now. “There’s
no need to be brutal,” he said, and looked sadly at me.
I said, “But who started it all up again? It didn’t just come out of the blue.…”
Cyril said, “I think it was her friend Maud.” In response to my startled look, he smiled. “I thought I smelt her. And she and Ann have had an almighty row. Ann said nothing to me, but I guessed it from what she didn’t say. All she told me was that Maud had packed her bags and gone. She was very off-handed about it, but the air was still smouldering; they’d had words and the echo of them still lingered. It takes a lot to make Ann angry, but when she does lose her temper she goes on rumbling for weeks after, like a volcano.” He chuckled. He leaned back in his chair, his thumbs tucked in his soiled waistcoat. “Anyone less lethargic than Ann would have got rid of Maud ages ago. Ann is very easy-going, elastic, you might say, about people. She’s also sloppily sentimental and has a fierce crust of pride over the sentiment so she’d never let on if she thought she’d been sold a pup. And she was, in Maud. She was sorry for her. When she first came here, Maud, I mean, she hinted at a hard life. She also had pretensions to culture, she had got a job at the local primary school which she thought was beneath her. Ann was completely taken in, such a fragile, gallant creature, wasting her talents.… Then Maud accused a local doctor of raping her in the surgery. Nasty business for the poor chap, whichever way it went. Even though Maud was shown up for what she was, he had to leave the district.… Maud got the sack and Ann took her on rather as she’d rescue a blind dog or a sick cat and has looked after her, nasty little spider, spinning her evil little webs, ever since.…” His eyes twinkled, the tension in the room had eased.
James said, “She wasn’t really important. Whatever she said or did, the mud was there. She only stirred it up.”
He sounded tired and crushed. I said, “Nice neighbours we have here.”
Cyril felt for his pipe. “They’re no better and no worse than people anywhere else.”
James looked at me with distant kindness. “Harriet wouldn’t know. It’s her first experience of adult life.”
Cyril drew his brows together. “James, don’t distress yourself too much. It’ll die down in time. Really, you know, you should have foreseen something of the sort. Why on earth did you both come back to live here?”
He regarded James with amiable inquiry. There was no sign that he felt anything for James other than old-established friendship. I thought: how can he look at James like that, as if he cared for him, cared tolerantly and deeply, when he believes that he killed his wife? Can he forget that, is it possible that it doesn’t matter to him?
I said, “Why shouldn’t we live here? Could we have run away, knowing, always, that we hadn’t had the courage to face up to what was waiting for us here?”
Cyril said gently, “Why do the young always have to be so high-minded and torture themselves in the process?”
James’s voice was bitter, his eyes blazed. “What he means, Harriet, is that he can’t understand why a murderer should bring his second wife back to the scene of his crime, especially when she is young and soft and innocent.”
Cyril stood up, sucking his pipe, he faced James with lowered head. “Don’t be a fool. I meant nothing of the sort.”
James ignored him. “Oh, yes, he did. He believes I killed her, he’s sure of it. You know everything, don’t you, Sully? But you’re prepared to forgive and forget, welcome the lost sheep.… The kindly, peace-at-any-price family friend who knows nothing and understands nothing, nothing. And your magnaminity is partly relief—there, but for the grace of God, go I.” He turned on me savagely, like an enemy. “And you think, don’t you, like the rest of them, that I killed her?”
The shouted words echoed and died in the big room. I was terrified. Not only because I did not know the truth but because of the sudden, humble revelation of my own appalling ignorance. I was young, I knew nothing. I was not equipped to understand or judge anyone or anything. I had thought myself grown-up, an absurd, precocious child parading in her mother’s clothes, imitating maturity. I was lonely and afraid. I put my hands to my face and wept.
James went out and slammed the door. I called, “James,” but the front door closed and the house was silent.
Cyril was standing beside me. I said, “He’s gone. I should have said something. Stopped him.…”
He let me cry on his shoulder, he smelt of tweed and tobacco and whisky.
“My poor, dear child,” he said, “what could you possibly have said?”
I went to bed. I sat up against the pillows with my dressing-gown huddled about my shoulders. In spite of the open window, there was still a smell of paint; the room looked clean and strange.
I wondered what James was doing, why he didn’t come. Did he hate me so much? The clock on the mantelpiece had developed a tinny, whirring sound between each tick as if there were something wrong with it. The wind was high; the curtains billowed into strange shapes and then collapsed emptily. The trees were stirring, a branch scraped against the window-pane.
I thought: I know so little about him. I don’t know what he thinks about when we are together, still less when he is alone. To find out, I would have to be inside his body and look out through his eyes. We were apart for a week and he said there were so many blank spaces—would he have said that if he had not been aware of the gaps in his own life, the long years that he must hide from me? He has never talked to me about what has happened to him, he wants me to accept him as he is, the past hidden by a dark cloak and never questioned. Does he know how much it is to ask? What will he do, now that he knows I am afraid of him?
I chewed at the corner of my handkerchief until it was wet and torn. Fear whispered in the scattering of mice in the attics above my head, crackled in the trees. When he came in at last, it made agony of the closing door, torture of his step on the stair. I lay, still and quiet. I had no way of wrestling with my fear, no courage, no reason.
He opened the door. He said, as if nothing at all had happened, “Sorry to have left you alone but a cow was calving. She was in difficulties but it’s all right now. A nice little heifer.”
There was blood on his hands. He went to the basin and washed carefully, rinsing the basin when he had finished.
“You’re very quiet?” He glanced at me over my shoulder. “Were you scared, on your own?”
His voice was light and social as if we were not husband and wife.
I said, “A bit. It’s a big house—so isolated.”
He dried his hands on the towel and looked thoughtfully at me. “Yes. It can be very lonely at night. A pity …” He stopped.
“What’s a pity?”
He smiled quietly to himself. “A pity Evans hasn’t got a telephone.”
Chapter Twelve
The days were colourless. The cold weather continued, the country huddled under a doomed sky, washed with flat, grey light. It was a hard spring and the barometer showed no change: young lambs bleated weakly in a relentless world, and high in the mountains there was snow.
James and I had severed all contact, the fault, I think, more mine than his. Handicapped by self-pity, I rejected his nervous overtures; alone, the sad tears rolled down my cheeks. He was, for me, a completely different person, as distinct from the man I had loved and married as any stranger in the streets. He had become characterless, insubstantial, a ghost. During the day he was busy on the farm; in the evenings we watched television, using it as a buffer between us, a third person.
Loneliness increased. Janet caught pneumonia and was taken to hospital. Without her raucous, friendly presence, the house seemed empty, oppressively silent.
Maggie was listless and withdrawn. It was impossible to talk to her, she was isolated in her own world. She sat, for hours at a time, quite silent and still, her hands in her lap. Sometimes she went for long walks, leaving the house without saying where she was going and coming back, much later, pale with cold and waif-like.
All feeling, all action, seemed suspended. The hooliga
ns from the village did not trouble us again; we were forgotten by the world, abandoned.
Then, one morning, the lull ended. Fear sprang into sharp relief. A letter came from my mother.
Kneeling on the hearth, I was cleaning the fire. James came in quietly, in his stockinged feet. He was wearing his farm breeches and an old check jacket. The wind had slashed his face with colour; he looked handsome and healthy, a contented country gentleman. Only his eyes did not fit into the picture; they were quiet, watchful, from their expression it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.
“She wants to come for the week-end,” he said.
I took the letter from him, stared at the round, shortsighted script. Relief washed over me, bearing me up the shore like a warm tide.
Joyous, unguarded, I said, “How lovely. I didn’t think she’d come. …”
“Why not?” He looked at me. “Why don’t you get Mary in to help you? You’ve got ash on your face, you look like Cinderella.”
I licked at my handkerchief and scrubbed at my face.
“That’s better. There’s a patch on the left side of your nose. Shall I do it for you?”
I said quickly, “Oh no.” I stood up and peered into the mirror, standing to one side so that I could see James in the glass.
He sat down, crossed his legs. He scraped at the bowl of his pipe. He wasn’t looking at me.
“You know, I’m not sure it’s a good idea. In this weather.… Why don’t you ask her to hang on a bit, wait till it’s warmer?”
My mouth stretched in a bright smile. “Don’t you want her?”
He filled his pipe. His voice was hearty. “Good heavens, why should you think I don’t? I only thought that in the circumstances it might be wiser to put her off for a while.”
He was watching me now, he didn’t know that I could see him in the glass. His eyes were very bright.
“Don’t be angry, old love. It’s so difficult to talk to you nowadays without making you angry. Wouldn’t it be sensible to wait until we’re more settled? She’s a sharp-eyed old basket, she wouldn’t miss anything.”
