A Winter's Child

by Brenda Jagger

  Leaning across the table she kissed him, a friend’s kiss of understanding and sympathy and then a lover’s kiss, disarranging the cutlery and almost putting out the candles, which said to him ‘I wish I could give you that.’

  ‘She’d be proud of you.’

  He sighed wryly and shook his head. ‘No she wouldn’t. When I was butler at High Meadows she’d have been proud of me then. She’d worked under butlers all her life and she understood that. But now all she’d see is that I’m doing something above my station which is the same as heading for a very bad end. She believed in knowing one’s place and keeping one’s place, my mother. She’d die all over again with shock if she heard me offering Emma Roe a job. And as for being so bold as to lay a hand on you Mrs Swanfield …’

  ‘Lay a hand on me again, Kit.’

  Emma Roe, standing in the doorway with a hot dish of bread pudding in her hands, raised pained eyebrows, set the dish down between them and marched off, her stiff back registering only token outrage, accustoming herself slowly to this tragic, tumbledown new world in which she served duckling to Sally Hardie’s bastard son and had been glad of the five-pound note he gave her.

  They walked the lake path again after dinner in the dark, waiting to make love, drawing out the moment of their return to make the anticipation finer, the appetite keener and then lingering on the verandah so that the waiting became a longing they had only to climb the stairs to satisfy.

  ‘Lay a hand on me, Hardie.’

  ‘With pleasure, madam. And I’ll take you by the hair too when I’m ready – and force you.’

  ‘I expect I’ll come quietly.’

  ‘My mother would never believe this, Claire, but I’m the right man for you.’

  ‘I think I’m beginning to believe it.’

  ‘Good. So what we have to do now is decide the ways and means.’

  They made love and then, lying on his back, his arm across her stomach in a gesture of possession which did not press heavily upon her but was not, for all that, in any way casual, he swiftly outlined his plans. He would buy the house as soon as he could raise the money. And then he would make it his house. Wansfell Howe, rescued from decay to make, not his fortune perhaps, and certainly not at once, but an ample living, a satisfying living, chancy – like everything that was worth anything – but rewarding, challenging, fun. And for the first time in his life he’d be his own master. That was what mattered. He’d always kept faith with himself and he wouldn’t let himself down now. This was what he wanted. He was going to have it.

  ‘You really don’t need me, do you?’ she said.

  ‘I want you. That’s better. Come adventuring with me, Claire. I suppose that’s what I’m asking.’

  ‘It’s a fair offer.’

  ‘I’ve never made it to anybody else. Shall I make you take it when the time comes?’

  They slept late the next morning, Mrs Roe having failed to call them early because, she explained primly to Kit, she had judged them to be tired out after their ‘exertions’, walking up and down so much on the lake path.

  He smiled, gave her another five-pound note for her trouble and her impudence and – although he did not say so – in memory of his mother and asked her to make sure the pony-cart was ready to take them to the next train.

  ‘Why don’t you ask me to stay another night?’ asked Claire pertly, knowing his answer.

  ‘Because, my darling, I have an urgent appointment at my bank.’

  Once again Mrs Roe, who had thought his mother a flighty, feckless woman and had not judged Kit himself, in his youth, to be worth much, raised her eyes to Heaven.

  ‘The pony-trap is waiting – Major Hardie.’

  What a world, she thought, although gradually, grimly, she was becoming resigned to it, where all three of her young gentlemen, had they lived, would have been obliged to salute Sally Hardie’s son.

  The journey in every way had been a success. They had put into it all they had intended and got out of it everything they had desired. A rare achievement, one of life’s bonuses which didnot come readily to hand and for which – knowing such bonuses to be in short supply – they were properly grateful. And returning to Faxby, it did not surprise them to see the Crown still standing, nor did it interest them quite so much as it would once have done. They had other concerns now. They were, imperceptibly but surely, not quite the same people who had left Faxby three mornings ago and so, walking back into the full flood of a chaotic Friday night, it took them a moment to register at any significant level what Mr Clarence and Mrs Tarrant, then Gerard and a badly shaken, far-from-sober MacAllister all whispered to them.

  The Swanfield engagement had been broken off.

  And Toby Hartwell was dead.

  Claire knew she would have to go to High Meadows. In common decency and humanity she could do no less than that. She also knew that Kit, who would never be a Major to Miriam, could not go with her. Who then? Dorothy perhaps to provide the safeguard she ought not to need – not now – against Benedict. Borrowing John David’s old Talbot she drove to Faxby Park finding her mother more than ready to pay a visit of condolence, sorry for Toby of course who had always been very kind to her, but all agog at the rumours that were flying around all over Feathers’Teashop and every department of Taylor & Timms about Roger and Polly. And there seemed no doubt that Roger Timms’desertion of glorious, golden Polly for a brazen harlot, well over thirty they were saying, from the Crown, had moved Dorothy rather more than the lonely ending of Toby Hartwell early that morning on the road to – well, Dorothy could not say just where he had been heading.

  Neither – when they were shown into the drawing room at High Meadows – could Miriam. It was inexplicable. Dreadful. Sitting alone in the middle of a wide sofa, perching rather on the edge of the cushions like a child, her diminutive feet just touching the ground, she looked smaller than Claire had ever seen her, the rouge and powder she was supposed never to employ quite visible on her round, smooth cheeks, her need for a mask outweighing, today, her concern for propriety. Yet, however badly shaken, she was able to offer a choice of tea or sherry, perhaps a wafer of fruitcake, not only to Dorothy and Claire but to the elderly second cousins and aunts and ‘dear friends one has known forever’who were gathering like crows behind a storm, her brave smiles, the grave but steady tone of her voice, making it clear that the social niceties of bereavement would be obeyed.

  Eunice was upstairs in what had been her girlhood bedroom, heavily sedated, a nurse in attendance. Polly, too, had collapsed at the tragic news and was, therefore, better off in bed, particularly as she, poor child – and here the elderly relatives pricked up their ears like so many inquisitive terriers – had suffered a setback of her own. Benedict was – well, at the scene, ten miles away, taking care of the appalling details, doing what had to be done in cases of accident where … Oh dear. It was by no means so straightforward as when one died in one’s bed. And for a moment she sounded just a little aggrieved with Toby for driving that extravagant, highly-powered car of his off the road and over the edge of a disused quarry instead of ‘going’more conveniently at home, like Edward Lyall, of a heart attack.

  No. She had no idea where Toby had been going at that hour of the morning. Perhaps Eunice, when sufficiently recovered from the shock, would be able to throw some light on the matter. No one else knew anything about it. Most distressing, the more so since Toby had spent his last evening here, in her house, at High Meadows. Yes indeed. He had come specially to cheer up Polly who – well, perhaps it was no longer a secret – had good cause, alas, to feel down in the dumps. A shocking business. How could they, she wondered, have been so mistaken in that young man? She could only feel that Edith Timms, his mother, had a great deal to answer for. But there it was, and she saw no point, now, in being other than brutally honest about it. Her daughter had been wronged. What other word could one use to describe it? The young man had promised marriage and had then jilted her in the most humiliating fashion, had gone o
ff with a person about whose reputation all that seemed certain was her lack of it. Perhaps Edith Timms would know how to deal with creatures of that class. Miriam rather prided herself on the fact that she did not. Polly, of course, had been distraught. Utterly and absolutely shattered. Her mother had found her, in the early hours of yesterday morning, pacing about the upstairs corridors in her dressing gown, staring and wringing her hands and weeping – such tears, good Heavens – looking for all the world like that tragedy queen – whoever she was – oh yes, Lady Macbeth. Such grief. One wondered, really, how any man could possibly be worth it. Particularly someone so – well – ordinary as Roger Timms. And she had kept it up throughout the day, pacing and moaning and staring so that Miriam had been quite worn out by it and rather grateful when Toby had arrived at about five o’clock to take the strain. Miriam remembered the hour because it had been her teatime and such a relief, after that long day of storm and tempest, to be able to drink her Earl Grey and eat her buttered scone in peace, and then close her eyes for half an hour or so while Toby bore the brunt of Polly. The dear man. He had always been so kind to Polly and so understanding, so ready to put up with her whims and fancies and those occasional little tantrums, Polly’s mother being quite ready to admit that Polly could be difficult. When she had woken up, with rather a start, about an hour later it was to find that he had taken Polly for a drive, an excellent idea she’d thought, the very thing to distract her and draw her out of herself. But when they came back – oh, she supposed about eight o’clock – Polly had looked worse than ever and Toby himself a little strained, which was not to be wondered at surely, after a three-hour exposure to Polly’s heartbreak? Miriam, having endured a whole day of it, had felt much inclined to sympathize, had thanked him for his trouble and stood, waving at the doorway, until his car was out of sight.

  That he had gone home then was quite certain, all the boys had seen him and presumably Eunice herself, although she was too incoherent at present to say so. He had gone up to his room without speaking to anybody, presumably to change for dinner. And then, at five o’clock this morning, his car had been found horribly smashed to pieces in a Pennine quarry. No. No one knew for certain. His car had left the road at a particularly dangerous bend and had been spotted by another motorist – hours later one supposed – who had noticed that the quarry fence had been broken down. He had alerted the local constable who, very fortunately, had in turn alerted someone in the Faxby constabulary who had had the good sense to inform Benedict, not Eunice. He had gone at once to confirm that it was Toby – unnecessarily painful, she’d thought – and then, of course, Eunice had had to be told. Benedict had brought her back to High Meadows in a state bordering on insanity. Miriam, for as long as she lived, would never get over the sound of those terrible cries. They had pierced her – how else could she express it? – through the heart. Indeed, she had had a pain in that region ever since. And then Polly, too, falling down right there in the hall by the main staircase and banging her head, over and over again, against the banisters. What a spectacle! Miriam, as perhaps her friends would readily admit, rarely encountered a situation she could not command. But standing there, watching Polly smash her head repeatedly against solid wood, she had not known what to do. It had shocked her deeply. The memory of it shocked her still. Yes, she was rather tired. How kind of everyone to notice. Perhaps if she could just close her eyes for a while, dab a little cologne on her forehead, she would be quite refreshed.

  Claire attended the funeral not as a member of the family but as an employee of the Crown, preferring, since it was there she had known Toby best, to stand at his graveside with Kit and Mrs Tarrant, MacAllister and Mr Clarence, and the considerably subdued Adela Adair who had got much more than she’d bargained for by accepting a lift home from Roger Timms. Under the circumstances neither Edith Timms nor Roger were present, the family being represented by Mr Timms who stood about awkwardly, clearly feeling at a serious disadvantage in the presence of the girl his son had jilted and the woman – definitely over thirty – Roger had so suddenly taken it into his weak head to marry. Greenwoods and Templetons and Redfearns were there, quite naturally, in force, along with the departmental managers of Swanfield Mills and certain other gentlemen of a more sporting appearance, Toby’s bookmaker among them, sincerely mourning the loss of a favourite client.

  ‘A bad business.’ Everyone said it, agreeing absolutely with each other, declaring him to have been an excellent fellow, no one wishing to be the first to wonder just what he had been doing on that lonely road.

  It was a bleak March day, a cold wind blowing. A bad business. Bury it then, quickly, and get it over. Much better so.

  Claire, her arm through Kit Hardie’s, raised her eyes and looked across the open grave at Benedict, seeing him, for the first time in months, surrounded by clutching, clamouring women as he had always been; Miriam, invisible beneath her old-fashioned mourning veils, leaning heavily against him at one side; Polly, likewise invisible, collapsed against the other; Nola hovering just behind, unsuitably dressed in a tweed suit and cape and a strange deerstalker hat, refusing to interest herself in any grief which did not emanate from All Saints’Passage, her conversation liberally peppered now – to the dismay of Greenwoods and Redfearns and Miriam – with references to ‘one of my prostitutes’, ‘one of my pickpockets’, ‘a girl of mine who was so brutally raped by her father at thirteen’.

  Eunice, shocked by laudanum into silence, stood rigid and ghastly, propped up like a tragic wooden doll between her elder boys, Simon embarrassed by grief, Justin embarrassed by his mother. He had heard of women – only in books perhaps, but nevertheless – who threw themselves into the grave when the coffin was lowered, refusing to be parted from their husbands. Might his mother do that? The suspicion that she was quite capable of it haunted him. And if it happened – with Uncle Benedict’s hands full of Polly and Grandmother – would he, as her eldest son, the senior male of the family now present after Benedict, be expected to cope with it, go down there and get her out? With everybody who was anybody in Faxby watching him? If she did that to him he would never forgive her. He would hate her, like poison, for the rest of his life.

  But, to his infinite relief, when the ceremony was over and those terrible shovelfuls of earth had started to fall, she came away with him jerkily, but obediently, blank eyes fixed and unblinking, looking quite demented he thought, dangerous even – someone he might actually be scared of if she weren’t ‘just Mother’ – but at least not making a fuss, leaving it to Polly, who had always upstaged her, to fall down very suddenly, the moment Benedict let her go, and there, kneeling at the graveside, to be violently sick.

  ‘My goodness – the poor child.’ There was an immediate thrill of interest, curiosity, speculation, running from Temple-tons to Redfearns to Greenwoods, ending at the embarrassed figure of Roger’s father, Mr Timms, and the bowed, flame-coloured head of Adela Adair.

  They had broken Polly’s heart, between them. Whoever would have thought it? Whoever, if it came to that, had ever credited her with a heart to break? Yet seeing her now, her silk stockings and fine musquash coat daubed with graveyard mud, vomiting and shivering and howling, no one could possibly doubt it.

  ‘Polly.’ Claire made a move towards her but Kit, tucking her arm more firmly in his, said, ‘Leave it, love.’ And it was Benedict who picked her up and carried her through the cemetery to the waiting car, her pale head hanging over his arm like a broken lily.

  Eunice returned to her own home that night, her decision to ‘start as she meant to go on’unopposed by Miriam who really was very tired and who knew that Eunice’s departure would also include her noisy sons. Delightful boys, of course, but only in small doses, smaller than ever just lately when she had not been feeling quite so well as usual. And their presence in the house, these past four days, had been irksome. They were always so hungry for one thing, demanding enormous teas and suppers as well as those terribly inconvenient cooked breakfasts, at a time of
sorrow when Polly was apparently intent on starving herself to death, Benedict had made his own arrangements, and Miriam herself would have been content with something tight and easily prepared, on a tray. Neither she nor the servants ought really to be troubled with steak and kidney pies and suet puddings at a time like this and she made no objections, therefore, when Eunice decided to take her hungry boys home.

  ‘Much better, dear – that’s the only way to get over it.’

  But Eunice’s purpose was not to ‘get over’Toby but to build him a shrine, thus causing considerable disappointment to Justin who had expected to be given the first choice of his father’s wardrobe for himself. Toby, in his eldest son’s opinion, had been a ‘natty’ dresser and it gave Justin great offence to think of those silk shirts and pyjamas, those superbly cut blazers, those Oxford bags and Cashmere sweaters mouldering in a cupboard to suit his mother’s peculiar fancy that her husband’s room must remain exactly as he had left it. She had even refused to clean his hairbrush. Peculiar was the word for it. Justin could think of no other until she flew at him, a morning or two later, spitting fury, and tore from his back one of Toby’s pullovers which he had pinched, in fact, several weeks ago. As she cradled it in her arms the word in her son’s mind was ‘crazy’.

  He realized, without shock, that he did not like his mother. But, just the same, when he found the letter, he would not have given it to her – he was sure of that – if her ‘craziness’had not compelled him.

  It was in the pocket of the camel-hair overcoat he had always coveted, largely because his arrogant Uncle Benedict wore one with a swagger Justin had often tried to emulate. And although Toby had never swaggered, the coat had been a symbol, somehow, of Swanfield authority, a seal of worldly approval. Justin wanted it. Cowing across it hanging on a hook in the now empty garage, realizing his mother had missed it because she could not as yet bear to come here and look at the space where Toby’s car had been, he put it on, finding his father’s driving gloves in one pocket – rather odd perhaps – and the letter in the other.