by Henry Green
Concluding (1948)
Henry Green
Mr Rock rose with a groan. Crossing to the open bedroom window he shone his torch out on fog. His white head was gray, and white the reflected torch light on the thick spectacles he wore. He shone it up and down. It will be a fine day, a fine day in the end, he decided.
He looked down. He clicked his light out. He found there was just enough filtering through the mist which hung eighteen foot up and which did not descend to the ground, to make out Ted, his goose, about already, a dirty pallor, almost the same colour as Alice, the Persian cat, that kept herself dry where every blade of grass bore its dark, mist laden string of water. Old and deaf, half blind, Mr Rock said about himself, the air raw in his throat. Nevertheless he saw plain how Ted was not ringed in by fog. For the goose posed staring, head to one side, with a single eye, straight past the house, up into the fog bank which had made all daylight deaf beneath, and beyond which, at some clear height, Mr Rock knew now there must be a flight of birds fast winging, Ted knows where, he thought.
The old and famous man groaned again, shut the window. He began to dress. He put working clothes over the yellow woollen nightshirt. The bedroom smelled stale, packed with books not one of which he had read in years. He groaned a third time. Early morning conies hard on a man my age, he told himself for comfort, comes hard. How hard? Oh, heavy.
When he put the kettle on downstairs he did not lay out his granddaughter Elizabeth a cup because Sebastian Birt might be with her still, in the other bedroom across the landing.
Five minutes more saw him off to fetch Daisy's swill. It was lighter already, but with pockets of mist that reached to the ground. Over his shoulders he wore a yoke. The hanging buckets clanked. He wondered if he should have brought his torch, but it seemed the sun must come through any minute.
He went slowly and was overtaken by George Adams, the woodman, going up for orders.
They did not speak at once, went on together down the ride in silence, between these still invisible tops of trees beneath which loomed colourlessly one mass of flowering rhododendron after another and then the azaleas, which, without scent, pale in the fresh of early morning, had not yet begun, as they would later, to sway their sweetness forwards, back, in silent church bells to the morning.
The man spoke. "It'll turn out a fine day yet," he said.
"Yes, Adams," said the other.
They walked on in silence.
"How's your wife, Adams?" Mr Rock then asked.
"Why I lost her, sir, the winter just gone."
Mr Rock said not a word to this at first. "I'm getting an old dodderer," he ventured in the end, sorry for himself at the slip.
"You're a ripe age now," George Adams agreed.
He never offered to help carry those buckets, the man reminded himself, because whatever the position Mr Rock had once held, this long-toothed gentleman did his own work now, which was to his credit.
"Yet I feel not a day older," Mr Rock boasted.
"It's my legs," the sage added, when he had no reply.
There was another silence. It was too early yet for the birds, or too thick above, because these were still.
"Nothing anyone can do for the bends," Adams said at last, out of an empty head.
At this instant, like a woman letting down her mass of hair from a white towel in which she had bound it, the sun came through for a moment, and lit the azaleas on either side before fog, redescending, blanketed these off again; as it might be white curtains, drawn by someone out of sight, over a palace bedroom window, to shut behind them a blonde princess undressing.
"It's not fair on one to grow old," Mr Rock said.
Adams made no comment.
"And how's Miss Elizabeth?" the man asked, after a time.
"Better, thank you," Mr Rock replied.
"She overtaxed her head where you put her out to work?" Adams hazarded.
"Don't they all?" the old man countered. He adored his granddaughter and, if it had not been for Birt, could have talked readily about her. "Same as those children up at the house." She was thirty-five and they between twelve and seventeen. "Breakdown from overstrain," he ended, cursing Sebastian Birt in his mind, because, although she was not working now, she would never get well while she could meet that man, he knew.
"You'll find her a blessing to have at home. Somebody by you," Adams said in self pity.
A blessing and a curse, the old man thought, then repented this last so violently that he could not be sure he had not spoken out loud.
"Why, that's strange," Adams said. "Did you hear summat?"
The sage looked blank at his companion. But it was too dark with sudden mist to read the expression on his face.
"I heard a call," Adams volunteered.
"I'm a mite deaf," Mr Rock answered.
"And I caught the echo," Adams insisted.
Which reminded Mr Rock of the argument he had had with Sebastian on this very point, not long since. "It would be from the house, then," he said in a determined voice, referring to the great sickle-shaped sweep of mansion towards which they moved like slow, suiciding moles in the half light.
"It's the trees throw back the sound, sir."
"Yet if you face about, Adams, call away from the place down this ride behind, you won't get a whisper in return."
"I never heard that," the woodman said, politely disbelieving.
They walked on. Then the old man took the buckets off his yoke.
"I'll have an easy now," he announced, laying the heavy object by, to one side. He put the buckets bottom upwards, and they sat on these.
"You don't want to rush it when they're full," Adams said.
I do this for Elizabeth, Mr Rock told himself, but out loud he exclaimed, "I hope I have more sense." His glasses were misted, fog still hung about, but the sun coming through once more, made it for a second so that he might have been inside a pearl strung next the skin of his beloved.
"It's what them younger ones haven't got, sense," Adams said. Elizabeth, Eliza, Liz, Mr Rock thought.
"And what age would you be, sir?"
"Seventy-six come March."
"That's a tidy sum to be still carrying swill around," the man complimented him, and noticed it a second time.
"What would that be, again?" he asked.
Mr Rock did not answer.
"I thought I caught what I heard before, twice over," Adams insisted.
"Was there an echo?" Mr Rock asked, his mind adrift.
"Not that I reckon."
"They must have faced away from the house, then," the old man said, and let his love for Elizabeth, and fear that he might lose the cottage, sap what ability was left him. Then he tried not to start on this subject, but could not help it.
"Adams," he began, "how d'you hold your house?"
The woodman stopped listening to the woods or to Mr Rock. He took in what was being said, but he had heard it so often these last ten years that he barely paid attention. From habit he answered, "The same as the rest. It goes along with the job to the estate."
"They'd like to have me away," the old man said.
"Well, I heard tell that you were goin' on your own, sir?"
"How's that?" Mr Rock demanded, turning his eyes full on Adams, with such a glare of alarm the man was startled.
"Why it might be just talk up at the house, like."
"What was?"
"Some up at the house has made out there was likely an honour for you," the woodman offered.
"Yes, and I don't doubt," Mr Rock exclaimed, with violence. "The paltry intriguers," he said. "But they didn't tell you, did they, about the other?"
"I don't follow, Mr Rock, sir."
"It's the Academy of Sciences," the sage elaborated, b
oasting but frantic. "There's an election yesterday or today. If they elect me, I can spend the rest of my time in their Institute, or scientific poor law sanatorium, but I can't take my girl. Otherwise I may have some money, thank you. And then, of course, I can refuse. Would you hesitate in my place?"
"How's that, sir?"
"What's to happen to Miss Elizabeth?" he asked, talking as if to a servant in the days of his youth. "She's sick with her mind, Adams. Anyone can tell it."
"So you'll have the money, sir?"
"What do you think?"
"And good luck to you I say, Mr Rock."
"They'd like to have me out, this lot would, Adams," he said, calmer now. "It wasn't Mr Birt said about me, was it?"
"Why never in the world," the woodman answered. "Likely enough one of the girls only caught a word Miss Baker or Miss Edge let drop."
"Those two won't be sorry when my time comes," Mr Rock announced. "But I'll tell you. So long as she remains single I'll see they let her keep on at my cottage, the State I mean. I've some friends still in high places haven't forgotten the services I rendered. Why, when the State took over from the owner, and founded this Institute to train State Servants, it was even in the Directive that I was to stay in my little place."
"That's right, so you've often said," Adams hastily agreed.
"Well then," Mr Rock muttered, and fell silent.
"There's gratitude," he added after a moment, "Throw him out in the street."
"That's the way things are," Adams agreed, glad to let the matter drop.
"But are you safe, man?" Mr Rock demanded.
"Houses are that short there's no-one safe," Adams replied. Mr Rock was silent, for an entirely fresh idea had struck him. This woodman was a widower, living alone, and his was a five-roomed cottage. This had never occurred to Mr Rock before. Perhaps because he never could remember Mrs Adams was dead. And as long as Elizabeth was alive he would not let her be turned out, not if he had to hang for it.
Then the cry came a third time, much clearer, so that even Mr Rock heard, and the double echo.
"Ma-ree," a girl's voice shrilled, then a moment later the house volleyed back "Ma-ree, Ma-ree," but in so far deeper a note that it might have been a man calling.
"There's one been out on the tiles," George Adams remarked to make a jest, because he was relieved to hear just a girl hollering. But the sage made no comment. He had been struck by a second notion. What he asked himself now was, could Miss Edge and Miss Baker, in order to get him out of the house, have set Birt onto Elizabeth, be in league with the man to break a poor old fellow down by simply driving his sad girl out of her wits? To have her straitjacketed even, muffled in a padded room?
Up at the great house Miss Edge switched on lights in the sanctum to which she had risen in the State Service, hand in hand with Miss Baker. It did not surprise her to find this lady not yet down.
Edge was short and thin. Baker, who hardly cared for early rising, fat and short.
Both, at this time, were also on separate Commissions in London, sitting Wednesdays each week, which necessitated a start that day very much in advance of the usual hour. On such mornings their breakfast was taken in this seventeenth-century, grey-panelled room, under a chandelier, on furniture which included two great desks set side by side, and equal to the authority these two whiteheaded women shared.
The panelling was remarkable in that it boasted a dado designed to continue the black and white tiled floor in perspective, as though to lower the ceiling. But Miss Edge had found marble tiles too cold to her toes, had had the stone covered in parquet blocks, on which were spread State imitation Chinese Kidderminster rugs. As a result, this receding vista of white and black lozenges set from the rugs to four feet up the walls, in precise and radiating perspective, seemed altogether out of place next British dragons in green and yellow; while the gay panelling above, shallow carved, was genuine, the work of a master, giving Cupid over and over in a thousand poses, a shock, a sad surprise in such a room.
In spite of summer and that it was dawn, there was already a log fire alight as Edge moved across to draw one pair of curtains, merely to look at the weather, or to lower a window perhaps, she did not know, but the room influenced her to act on graceful impulse. She took hold on velvet, which had red lilies over a deeper red, and paused, as she gently parted the twin halves, to admire her hands' whiteness against the heavy pile. Delicately, then, she proceeded to reveal window panes, because shutters had not been used the night before, to disclose glass frosted to flat arches by condensation, so that the Sanctum was reflected all dark sapphire blue from electric light at her back because it was not yet morning. She could even see, round her head's inky shade, no other than a swarm of aquamarines, which, pictured on the dark sapphire panes, were each drop of the chandelier that she had lit with the lamps switched on in entering.
She also caught a glimpse of matter whisk across behind, then dart back to hide. She turned. Held her breath, or she might have screamed. And it was, as she had feared, a horrid bat.
She made one dive for the wicker basket and put that on her.
The anonymous letter she had torn into little pieces the night before, now lay like flakes of frost on her white head.
She crouched down in case this new thing could nicker up her skirts. And Miss Baker entered.
"My dear," Baker said, cutting the lamps off at the switch, going across to the window which she opened. A light came through, so grey it was doomed, together with a wisp of mist. The bat flew outside at once. Whereupon Miss Baker turned lamps on again. Edge rose, delicately took off the basket.
"If we could as easily rid ourselves of Rock," she said. Over one eyebrow, caught in a mesh of hair, was a torn piece of paper with, printed on it, the word "FURNICATES".
"You have something on your head," Baker calmly told her. Without a word Edge removed it, reread, and let the word drop from her fingers to spiral to destruction on the flames.
"What's for breakfast?" Baker asked. Edge looked at a wristwatch. "They have five minutes," she said, referring to the ten girl students whose turn it was to do orderly duties, that is to wait on these two Principals. Then she slightly yawned. She began, "Each Wednesday that you and I go up to Town," she said, "the weather we have here, Baker, is exquisite, truly exquisite. There may be black fog outside, just now, this minute, but we shall be cheated, dear. The sun will shine."
"I dread Wednesdays for that reason," Baker untruthfully agreed.
"And the day of the Dance on top of all," Edge mused aloud.
"Oh well," the other said.
"So much still to be done," Edge insisted.
"Least said soonest mended," Baker gave a hint. She moved over to warm her fingers at the blaze.
"If the whole routine is not upset already," Miss Edge complained, fidgetting with tableware. "Till we even have to go hungry up to our labours in London because they are going to Dance." There was no reply.
"And such a day of it altogether, with the tamasha this evening," Edge continued. "Particularly now when at any minute we ought to hear about that dreadful Rock's election."
"Well Edge," Miss Baker objected. "I warned you, you know, last night. Didn't I? Don't lay too much store. It may not eventuate."
"I cannot believe Providence will not provide the key after all that you and I have done," Edge argued. "You know what this means. Why, I have literally set my heart on it. And such a happy way out, dear. To go where he will be properly looked after, and we shan't have to see that granddaughter trail herself around."
"They won't take her, Edge," Miss Baker said. "Whatever happens."
Before Edge could answer, the door was opened by a tall girl with long golden hair, and who had been in tears. She was followed by another student bearing breakfast dishes and the toast.
"Why, Marion, where s Mary?" Edge broke off, for Mary had been so punctual in her attentions that these two ladies had let her wait on them out of turn, in fact almost without a break, so th
at she was readily missed.
"She's to go to Matron, ma'am."
"What's the matter with the child?"
"It's nothing, ma'am, I think."
"Will you tell Miss Birks from me I shall want to hear when I get back. We cannot have Mary away, can we?"
"What's for breakfast," Baker said again, getting with difficulty off a low footstool over by the fire.
"You have your especial favourite this morning," Miss Edge told her, after she had lifted the silver cover off a dish. "Kedgeree, my dear."
"And scrambled eggs to follow if you will just touch the bell, ma'am," the girl who had been crying said, as, with her companion, she left the room, and the door gently, gently closed.
"Well, if it is scrambled I trust the bacon's crisp," Baker hoped, and spooned her kedgeree onto a plate. Miss Edge, however, did not seem able to settle down. She went over to the curtains, shaping as though to open these once more. But her dread of bats returned, so, lest there should be another nested within the heavy pelmet, she barely disturbed those folds with a forefinger, but peeped at the day as if by stealth.
"We are going to have such a wonderful morning," she announced.
"Come and take breakfast, Edge," Miss Baker said.
"I told you it would be, just the one day in the week we must go to Town. Oh, how really aggravating," Edge went on. "Baker, I wonder if you would mind? But it does seem rather stuffy here, now they've lit our fire. Could I trouble you to help with this window?"
While Baker came to lend a hand without a word, Miss Edge put long fingers up to her hair, as if to ward off another flittering animal about to be let loose. However the two ladies soon had the window open, and Baker went back to her place at table. But Miss Edge could not at once leave the scene spread out afresh. Because, with the coming of light, the mist was rolling back, even below her third Terrace, all the way to her ring of beechwoods planted in line with the crescent of her House; although, off to the left, where beech trees and azaleas came down over water, her Lake still held its still fog folded in a shroud.
"I love this Great Place," she announced.
"You have your breakfast or you'll regret it, Edge."
