by Ellis Peters
Left alone in the house, Suspiria sat gazing at the overcrowded tulips in their unsuitable vase, and sensing the strangeness of that neat, domesticated hand in her affronted possessions. It was late to wonder now what they had in common; perhaps it was too late. Perleman had put it all very plainly, and they had scarcely even heard him, so sure had they been of what they were and what they wanted – then, when it was still out of their reach, and therefore of passionate importance. ‘—the case of the ageing woman of parts, and the man who can match against her culture just two qualities, made overwhelming by the time and the circumstances of their eruption into her life – his beauty and his youth.’ A very intelligent man, Perleman! But limited, too. He saw in obvious terms what was by no means obvious; until he spoke, they had neither of them had any age at all, and for each of them the beauty of the other had been so personal that it needed no standards of measurement or comparison. Now that there was no obstacle between them, they could see each other more plainly, armed already with all the advice and wisdom of the world.
‘—a boy of twenty-two, a garage mechanic, cursorily educated, but without any intellectual resources which could bring him on to the same plane with her – incompatible in age, in temperament, in his whole scale of values.’ She could not forget a word of it now, though at the time it had seemed to pass her by and leave no scar. She had denied it every word, in everything she said and every look of her eyes, and so had the boy, perhaps unconsciously copying her defiance, perhaps producing some magnificent obstinacy of his own out of the violent growth which was taking place in him every moment. ‘It is permanent and safe. It always was.’ And they had maintained their cause and won their case, and the world was convinced. What a curious victory, that in the process they should also have been infected by the arguments they had over-ridden. The world was convinced, and they had lost their conviction. The world was convinced, and had given them its inescapable blessing, from which they would never again find a hiding-place, and from the compulsion of which they would never, with all their late and convulsive struggles, be able to turn aside.
‘I’m being a fool,’ she thought, thrusting her shoulders back, and shutting her fingers against her breast, where his moist lashes had left the faintest and most piteous of stains. ‘I’m Suspiria Freeland, I haven’t changed at all, I still know my trade, I can still make things, and they’ll still be good. I have an existence apart from him! And he exists, too, without my name to prop him up. When we marry, if we choose to marry, it will be on our own terms, not theirs – not as the two broken halves of a pot being cemented together.’
She had not yet been into the workshop, and suddenly her desire to recover her own course seemed to her to have no other starting-point. She rose and crossed the room, and in the doorway the long mirror brought her up short, face to face with her reflection. The wrought-iron frame had been carefully dusted; the attentive hand of Mrs Forbes, heavy and soft, was everywhere in the room. From within the frame her own face looked out, thinner, paler, more translucent than she had remembered it. Did she look, as now she felt, every one of her thirty-six years? She touched her cheeks, curiously; they were smooth but cold, and no colour mantled to the touch. ‘An ageing woman of parts,’ she thought. ‘A woman in her late thirties!’ It was perhaps rather ungallant to thirty-six and seven months, but it was broadly true. She supposed she had always been perfectly aware of her age; how was it that it had never seemed at all important? Apparently these things mattered, were almost a part of one’s identity. She would be another woman, then, would she, when she turned thirty-seven?
She went into the workshop. The managing hand had not been there, perhaps Mrs Forbes had been afraid to interfere where there were poisons. The fine screens stirred along the wall when she opened the door, the draught rocking them upon their hooks. Going undusted and uncleaned for two months made no difference to this room, where no more cleaning was ever done than the minimum necessary to make work possible. Her spirit lifted a little as she stood looking about her, and moved between the wooden racks of shelves, touching the materials of her trade, the wheel, the rough bricks of the kiln, the heaped bats, the fantastic little improvised tools of hoop-iron half-embedded in the cracked white clay of the wheel-table. Only this pervasive dryness hurt her senses with an oppressive sadness. There were green pots standing on the shelves, hard and white now, past reclaiming, some of them cracked with their long waiting. Where there was usually a smooth, creamy pool of slurry there was now a miniature clay desert, a tiny Sinkiang, sterile and desolate.
The first small elation at touching her own again, at re-entering her kingdom, melted away out of her heart, and left her sick with a desperate and senseless grief. She put her head down in her arms over the wheel, and broke into a passion of weeping, all the centre of her being molten into tears.
When the storm had passed, she lifted her head with a weary indifference, and saw the darker traces of her tears softening the desert beneath her hands. She pressed her fingers into the marks, and worked the dead clay into life again. It drank, it was recoverable, it creamed upward between her finger-tips, responsive and alert; but still she looked at it sorrowfully, and could not foresee that it would ever again blossom like the rose.
3
George Grover began to draw on the deposit of the borrowed car as soon as Dennis came back to work. It was not only his kind, inquisitive questions that bore out the very letter of Suspiria’s prophecy, but even more than these the confident assurance of his eyes as he asked them. He took it as his right to know a little of their business now, even a little more than the ordinary man in the street, though he, too, had his rights in them to a lesser degree. Dennis fended him off with monosyllables, and made every excuse to withdraw into the inspection pit, or into the bowels of some repair job too intricate for conversation; but it was a losing battle. He was expected to pay his way. Why should he mind being paraded, being talked about, being sent out unwarily to serve petrol to people who had specially angled to have a close look at him? Naturally they were interested, who wouldn’t be? But all he was asked to do was to serve them with petrol. Nobody was trying to make him dance and sing for them! George was astonished and injured when he flared up in protest.
‘I’m a mechanic, not a vaudeville act. I haven’t asked you to let me off anything, have I? If I’m unlucky enough to get that kind of customer myself, all right, it can’t be helped, it isn’t your fault any more than it’s mine. But I’m damned if I’m going to be trotted out like a performing monkey every time some nosey parker misses his aim and gets you, instead!’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said George, wiping his oily hands. ‘You’re feeling touchy about it, I can understand that well enough, but it’s making you imagine things. I haven’t been trying to trot you out for anybody’s benefit. All I’ve asked you to do is take a bit of the serving off my hands when I’m busy with a job. I don’t want to be hard on you, lad, but that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’
‘And you’re paying me! Well, you’re getting your money’s worth out of me, aren’t you? Without trying to turn me into a sideshow. If you think I don’t earn what you pay me, say so, and I’ll go somewhere else, it’s all the same to me.’
‘Now, now!’ said George, soothingly, laying a large hand heavily upon his assistant’s shoulder. ‘You don’t want to take it like that. Have I said you don’t earn your money? You’re in a proper state of nerves, that’s what’s the matter with you. Whatever any of us do just now won’t be right for you. Anyhow, what if these folks do feel a bit of curiosity about you, and want to have a look at you? They’re entitled to come here with their trade, aren’t they? And what harm does it do you? They don’t say nothing to you about it, do they? Well, then!’
‘No,’ agreed Dennis bitterly, ‘they don’t say anything to me about it. They’ve already been tipped off that they’d better not. The first time one of ’em says to me right out: “Good Lord, aren’t you the Den
nis Forbes that was in that murder case?” I’ll know I’ve got an honest man – one you haven’t been talking to beforehand.’
George said, heaving a large, tolerant, fatherly sigh: ‘There you go! Nothing I do’s right for you! If I try to spare your feelings, that’s all the thanks I get!’
But if he went elsewhere, what was to be gained? Not everyone would be as adroit as George, perhaps, in turning his notoriety to account, but the shadow of his reputation would follow him to some extent wherever he went, and the newspaper men and the idly curious and the misguided romantics would find their way after it to his refuge. Even if he went away and used another name for a time, they would probably find him. And at that thought, in any case, his mind drew back, erect and adamant, refusing to approach the idea more closely. His name had never meant all that much to him while it was unblemished and unknown, but it meant the whole of himself as soon as he was driven to considering renouncing it. Nor could he bear to contemplate running away from his difficulty, even under his own name; whatever they chose to do, he could not leave Suspiria here to carry the load alone.
So he stayed, and swallowed his bitterness. In the end the sensation would die a natural death; the trouble was that from his position, harassed and humiliated and sick with frustration, like a bear prodded into an unwilling dance, he could not be sure that the end was even in sight.
He went to Little Worth only every third or fourth evening, not because he did not long for Suspiria day and night, but because he was afraid to go more often until he had recovered his confidence, and left her free to assert her own. Moreoever, he knew that she did not want him for ever on her doorstep. He knew it by the intense and wary tenderness with which she handled him, the care she took to avoid too outspoken, too hurtful a solemnity in their contacts. Delicately, with infinitely fastidious and selective care, they picked their way between the subjects on which their minds were really fixed, and would not notice the daily avalanches of letters with the ashes of which her fire was always choked, or the frequent ingratiating incursions of reporters which left her stiff with detestation and pain for hours afterwards, or the meagre and unsatisfactory results of all the time she put in at her wheel. He admired what she made, she expressed interest in what he did. They were resolute, practical and cheerful, and kept so intent a watch upon themselves that not even their bodies, embracing, made any desperate admissions or any appeals.
But when he did not go to her, when he went firmly home, and sat down to tea with the rest of the family, and wanted to feel the current which moved through them stirring as surely in his own veins, the pulse faltered in him, and the flow was halting and cold. It was then he began to panic. He fought hard to get back, driving his mind and his tongue savagely towards what he felt to be normality, but when he managed to touch it and wrap himself in it again, it did not fit him. He did not recognise the voice, nor the words, and withdrew in revulsion from something which, without any will of his, had become an affectation.
A curious change had come over their attitude to him. The dangerous part of his celebrity exorcised, the disreputable part stood upon its head and turned respectable, nothing remained but a queer, surreptitious pleasure and pride in him. They took a fond interest in his love affair, they preened themselves in his fame, silently but not discreetly. They were his millions of proprietors in a little compass. It was like living in the market-place. And yet what had he to complain of? They were almost exaggeratedly considerate of him, as though he had been an invalid, or a visitor.
In his heart he knew that he was a disappointment to them. They would have liked him to live continually on the plane of the witness-box. He had led them to expect it, and now he was letting them down badly. After all, they were his family, they wanted a larger share in the excitement and gratification of his headlined romance than the ordinary public could buy for the price of a newspaper, or the inquisitive achieve by patronising Grover’s Garage. Through the first constrained and silent days they waited confidently, humouring him, no more impatient for their entertainment than theatre-goers before the rise of the curtain. But the days lengthened out one by one, and the curtain did not rise. And presently there began to be certain signs of restlessness, some shuffling of feet, not a little whispering. There would have been more and louder manifestations of dissatisfaction, but that they had become, in a curious sense, afraid of him. Only in suppressed whispers can you complain of the stranger in the house.
But when he was not there they discussed him roundly enough. They said that they couldn’t make him out, that he wasn’t carrying on as if he cared all that much about her, for all he’d said at the trial. They said that after the way they’d stood by him, you’d have thought he’d be a bit more appreciative, and make some response. They said that they’d made allowances for the strain he’d been under, but surely he ought to be getting over that by now, and anyhow, they weren’t to blame for it, why take it out on them? Nobody wanted to pry into his affairs, but surely a normal brother would take his family a little way into his confidence. They might have been a bunch of lodgers in the house, for all the acknowledgments he made to their common blood. Marjorie, who had come back into conference as soon as the acquittal eased her of the fear of sharing in his disgrace, led the chorus. Winnie and his mother defended him stoutly; he was still sore, he mustn’t be hurried, the reporters were still persecuting him, how could he be expected to get over an experience like that all in a week or two? They defended, but they did not justify him, for they were as hungry and unsatisfied as the rest.
It was his mother who ventured at last to try to step across the gulf which it seemed he could not bring himself to pass. She had never been wont to hesitate, she was no easily sloughed mother; and finding herself alone with him one night in the kitchen while his father was busy gardening, and the other two were out, was all the opportunity she needed to tempt her. She leaned across the table to him, where he was turning half-heartedly at the knobs of the wireless set, and said straight out:
‘Dennis, when are you going to bring Suspiria to see us?’
He raised his head sharply, and looked at her with blank, astonished eyes. The name seemed so incongruous in her mouth that it was almost unrecognisable; and the attitude, however he tried to adjust his mind to it, would not be fitted upon Suspiria’s person. He tried to think of her as a prospective daughter-in-law, to be brought to pass inspection by his parents. It ought to have been funny, but it was not; it was a distasteful familiarity, almost an indecency.
‘I hadn’t thought,’ he said, ‘of bringing her anywhere. It isn’t quite that kind of case.’ He had meant his voice to remain low and equable, but he could hear its stiffening arrogance for himself, and regret it as he might, he could not change it.
‘Why not?’ demanded his mother, bridling. ‘It seems a queer thing to keep her in the background, as if she was a secret, or something – after all that’s been said in public! Oh, I know! It’s been a bad time for you both, and you want to get over it in peace – but it’s no good letting it get over you! If she’s going to be one of the family, surely it’s only right that we should get to know her. I should think she’d be glad!’
He got up abruptly and turned his shoulder on her, so that she should not see the bitter face he made at the thought of trying to compress Suspiria into a mere member of the family. Over his shoulder he said, rather breathlessly: ‘I don’t know that she is, I don’t know that she wants to. Hadn’t we better leave that to her?’
‘Oh, now, look, that isn’t good enough! After all that’s happened, you really can’t try to tell me that she doesn’t care enough about you to want to have things straight between you. I know you’ve kept all this to yourself, and you don’t want to talk about it, but goodness gracious, child, I’m your mother! I’m not trying to get at you, you needn’t be suspicious of me. What’s the use being so secretive about things, after they’ve been dragged through the courts already?’
He said, with involuntary violen
ce, but very quietly: ‘What was said in court hasn’t given me any proprietary rights in her – or her in me, either.’
‘But, good heavens, boy, you must know what you intend to do! You’re just being stupid, and obstinate, and determined to shut us out, that’s all it is. What have we done to you, I’d like to know, to be treated the way you’re treating us?’
‘Don’t be silly, Mum,’ he said sharply, ‘I haven’t done anything to you. We haven’t made any plans, how can I tell you about them? What are you complaining about?’ He didn’t want to quarrel with her, or to hurt her, but he spread himself angrily between her and Suspiria, because the thought of them together offended him bitterly, though he could not tell why. It was nothing to do with being proud of one or ashamed of the other; it was something infinitely more subtle and complex, but he could not understand it himself, much less explain it to her or anyone else. ‘When there’s anything to tell,’ he said, with careful gentleness, ‘you’ll be told, of course. I can’t say fairer than that, can I?’
She stood facing him for a moment in silence, with a suspicious and disapproving stare. Then she said in a tone of deep offence and concern: ‘I suppose you know what’s going to be said if you two don’t make a move soon? They’ll say there was something in it, after all. They’ll say you’re not so sure as you made out that she didn’t do it, and you’re not keen to go the same way he went.’
