Caught, Back, Concluding

by Henry Green

  ‘Well, men of an age,’ she said, ‘I mean really old men,’ she said, ‘who, from what one hears and reads, are more liable to let themselves collapse in that disgraceful way.’ Then she sheered off. ‘If I may refer to what is common knowledge, how in the course of your duties you take particular stock of the inhabitants of your own district,’ she went on with almost a sneer, ‘then what I am getting at is this, that you should warn us of any such sinister person. Forewarned is forearmed,’ she said, and gave a really brilliant smile to hide her mounting irritation.

  He hesitated.

  ‘We’ve been fortunate round about,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t think there’s been a case of the kind you mention for some years past, ma’am.’

  ‘But then, will there never be?’ she enquired, assuming a discouraged voice.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘now there’s a question.’

  Upon which, her point made, she changed the subject, and, not long afterwards, politely dismissed him.

  Winstanley, hastening along a ride, came to where it crossed another. She looked to the right, saw Sebastian with Elizabeth Rock. They were standing within each other’s arms, alternately kissing their eyes shut against an azalea in full flower half fallen across the ride. This mass of bloom in the full sunlight was almost the colour of Merode’s hair in her bath, a slope of deep golden honey with its sweet heavy scent and a great buzz of bees about; caparisoned with primrose yellow butterflies, some trembling spread wings, some clapping theirs soundlessly together, some tight closed.

  ‘Hey, you two,’ she called, but then, as she began to approach, and like wings, they came apart, though still holding one another by the hand, she felt such a distress she halted. It was long since she had been kissed like that, and sometimes she wondered if she would ever be again.

  ‘I was just on the look out for you,’ she continued, in hopes that she had not made a fool of herself, and shown what she felt. But they seemed as dazed as the noisy insect life around, which droned and shuddered while these flowers trumpeted the sun.

  ‘Miss Edge and Miss Baker are back,’ she said. The others came slowly to her. Beastly woman she’s fairly drunk with him, she thought.

  ‘But I’m off,’ he objected, in what he imagined to be cockney, yet hesitantly, as if he had not entirely found his feet, ‘I’ve got the day off, lidy, I’m not ’ere, you ’aven’t seen me.’ And this moment he chose to wink, to cajole her not to speak of what she had just witnessed. She was immediately more than disgusted.

  ‘That excuse would do if this was an ordinary day,’ she replied. ‘But there’s a bit of a shemozzle on, my children. As you may have heard.’

  ‘What’s brought them back so bloody soon?’ he asked, keeping up the part he had seen fit to choose.

  ‘I was wondering if you’d caught what I said,’ she remarked, stubbornly.

  ‘Why you don’t mean, you can’t be trying to explain, what is . . . it’s about Mary, is it?’ Elizabeth asked, with dread.

  ‘Oh no, there’s no news. It appears their Commissions were postponed, so they came rushing back again, that’s all. Evershed says she’ll have to cool their car off like a horse. But they’ve held a staff meeting and you can guess who it was noticed you were absent.’

  ‘But gor’ love a duck, guv’nor, I’m not on today, I’m tellin’ yer.’

  ‘I spoke up to tell her, and then that silly ass of a prisoner’s friend, Dakers, asked if he should go to find you, even went on to say he happened to know you had slept in after all. But it passed, anyway for a time. The thing is, my lad, I think you ought to put in an appearance.’

  ‘That goes for the two of us, then,’ Mr Birt said in a last attempt to keep up his attitude. ‘I seen you dashin’ about the grounds.’

  ‘I made my excuses prettily,’ she answered, again with some impatience. ‘There’s one of the girls still loose, after all.’

  ‘Oh it’s my fault,’ Elizabeth broke out in a wail, while Miss Winstanley observed, not for the first time, how a person’s lipstick, when it was smudged half way to her nose, wounded the whole face like a bullet. ‘We took what’s her name back, you see, then we thought, well it was only natural really, my grandfather’s all alone, I had to get dinner, so the thing is, and of course we didn’t know they were coming, we just began to walk along but as a matter of fact it was my fault. I know I’m silly but you’ve heard, haven’t you, I haven’t been really well, and I asked Seb to see me to the cottage, so foolish when you come to think, as though it was dead of night, in time of course, but then I have been made rather nervous. What I mean is, we none of us know, do we?’

  ‘Don’t you fuss, my dear,’ Mr Birt said in his natural voice, which Winstanley heard so seldom that she was not sure to recognise it, ‘I’ll take you, then I’ll nip along and go on duty,’ he ended, lamely.

  ‘Look Sebastian,’ the other woman said, ‘If I were you I’d get there right away. Make some excuse to show yourself.’

  ‘But gor’ love a duck, what went on, then, at their extry special meeting you’re so wrought up about?’ he asked, returning to his best cockney, which he knew only from books.

  ‘It was old Edge,’ Winstanley told him. ‘Studying her as I have to I think it was to set her mind at rest. Baker’s not much in a crisis. She wanted our support, or so she said. If you ask me, I think she just had us all in to explain what she intended not to do. In other words, to cover herself by being able to say she’d had a staff meeting to discuss “this unprecedented occurrence”, and that we’d all decided, in an ad hoc committee, to proceed on a certain course.’

  ‘Which is?’ he enquired, in his ordinary voice.

  ‘Why to do nothing at all,’ she answered. He came out with a disgustingly high, screamed laugh. ‘Seb,’ Miss Rock protested sharply. He broke off at once.

  ‘Well Sebastian, I don’t know what else they, or we, can be about. They can’t set the girls on to search,’ Winstanley said. She was distressed. ‘Well now we’re not sure what they’ll find, are we? We don’t want general hysterics. And they’ve told the police. Dakers has it for a fact the roads are to be watched within a radius of twenty miles. The sergeant left an hour ago after he’d seen Edge. Besides I believe Merode’s told some story which doesn’t sound too improbable and is reasonably reassuring.’ Most of this was false, if Miss Winstanley had only known. The child had said nothing. ‘But you’d better make a show. I would if I were you. We’re all to keep our eyes sharp open, she says.’

  ‘I won’t ask what else I’m a’doin’ of,’ he commented, ‘an’ in their Park into the bargain, where it will likely do most good,’ he said.

  ‘No Seb,’ Elizabeth Rock spoke out. ‘You’re not to . . . I can’t imagine why . . . it’s so silly after Miss Winstanley’s been so kind. Go back at once, I’m sure Gapa would say that, yes, at once, don’t clown.’

  ‘Look here, let me walk you back,’ the other woman offered.

  ‘All right then,’ Birt said, and went off fast towards the Institute, without another word.

  ‘I haven’t been quite well, I had a breakdown at work,’ Elizabeth told Miss Winstanley, as they set out along a great hill of rhododendron twelve foot high with flowers the colour of blood, and the colour of the flesh of bathers in open air in sunless country. Winstanley, as she bent her head to listen, took her companion’s hand in hers as a sort of tribute to this woman’s being drenched with love. But after a few yards she let go of that hot hand.

  ‘Would you like my mirror?’ she asked, and rummaged in her bag.

  Lunch at the Institute this day was cold, to allow Mrs Blain time to prepare the buffet for their dance. The students waited at long linen covered trestles for Miss Baker and Miss Edge. The noise of their talking was a twitter of a thousand starlings.

  The hall in which they took their meals was that used whenever there was an entertainment. The tables could be removed, were lightly constructed, as also High Table, on a dais at which the staff were served, and which could
be taken to pieces although built to a massive, shining, mahogany front. Behind it, neatly stacked in a great pile or pyre on the floor, was a mass of cut azalea and rhododendron the seniors had gathered to decorate the room later, but in time for their gramophone when this was set to endlessly repeat one valse.

  When the staff filed in, Edge and Baker bringing up the rear, that clatter of conversation stilled as, with a rustle of a thousand birds rising from willows about a warm lagoon, the girls stood in silence to mark the entrance. Then, after Miss Edge had been last to sit down, the three hundred budding State Servants, with another outburst of talk as of starlings moving between clumps of reeds to roost, in their turn left to collect plates of cold meat and vegetables ready laid out in the kitchen.

  ‘Ah Marchbanks,’ Miss Edge called out above the bustle, ‘I see they have not neglected our tamasha.’ She was looking at the mass of flowers.

  ‘I’d thought pine branches with salt,’ that woman answered with a blush. ‘So cool, in this hot weather, for the Dance. A soupçon of snow,’ she elaborated.

  ‘Indeed,’ Edge said, unenthusiastic, while conversation, for the moment, became general around High Table.

  ‘In their white dresses,’ Marchbanks explained, painting the picture.

  ‘I hesitate to think what our Supervisor would say,’ Edge objected, referring to a Government Inspector whose visits, in order to check up, were exhaustive and unannounced.

  ‘Yes, there is that of course,’ Marchbanks agreed.

  ‘What a time they are being, Baker, with our luncheon,’ said Miss Edge. And her confidence was now such that she continued, having for the moment forgotten, ‘What can have happened to Mary and her girls?’

  It was Mary whose privilege it had been to serve them, each day almost. Right from the very first she had shewn such diligence.

  Miss Baker winced. Once more she closed her eyes. There was a noticeable pause.

  Winstanley offered up a topic to bridge the awkwardness.

  ‘Ma’am,’ she said. ‘Have you ever thought of Chinese pheasants for our grounds?’

  ‘Chinese?’ Miss Edge enquired.

  ‘The plumage,’ Winstanley explained. ‘A perfect red and gold. They aren’t any trouble either, they live off the land.’

  ‘I seem to remember Mr Birt telling us there was no such thing,’ Edge expatiated, with a glance of malice at this man.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, bowed in her direction, and assumed a close imitation of Mr Rock’s party manner which they could all recognise. ‘We admit of no domestic animal as self sufficient under the State. But it would certainly add a touch of Babylonian splendour to the walks.’

  ‘It might startle his goose,’ Edge objected with a knowing look. All laughed at this allusion, Sebastian Birt excessively.

  ‘They need no attention, ma’am, for sure,’ Winstanley insisted. ‘They roost in the nearest tree, and feed off acorns.’

  ‘Like cats and pigs then,’ Miss Edge said, with a smirk benign.

  ‘Where I was brought up there used to be a black and white farm,’ Baker announced. ‘A half timbered place, piebald horses, black and white poultry and so on.’

  ‘I often wish I had been reared in the country,’ Edge said, throwing a bright smile at her colleague to mark this lady’s return into the fold of conversation. ‘Sometimes I wonder if our girls appreciate how fortunate they are to find themselves in magnificent Parks and Woodlands.’

  ‘Oh they do that, I’m sure, ma’am,’ came from Marchbanks.

  ‘And someone like Mr Rock, again,’ Edge pursued, her eye on Sebastian Birt. ‘How truly privileged.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘The amenities of urban life in sylvan surroundings,’ the young man said at last, still with an exact imitation of the sage.

  ‘More, I think,’ Miss Edge said. ‘Indeed I fancy that taking Youth, as he has it round him now, and in this beautiful great Place, one of the State’s ornaments, a veritable crown of Jewels, a man could be expected to live out his life at rest with himself, and the world.’

  ‘But it must depend on one’s physical condition. There can be no comfort in age as such,’ Winstanley, who loved an argument, objected.

  Miss Edge looked gravely at her. ‘In that case,’ she said, as though to refer to incurable illness, ‘there is another alternative. The State looks after its own. There are Homes of Repose for those who have deserved well of their Country and who, with advancing years, find the burden of old age detracts from the advantages of a life of quietude they have been permitted to lead at large.’ Sebastian squirmed. She saw this, then turned to Baker, who looked woodenly at her in warning.

  ‘There are great mercies,’ Miss Marchbanks said.

  ‘And great responsibilities, Marchbanks,’ Edge corrected, upon which she swept over the hall of students with an imperious slow swing of her eyes. She did not, at once, go on with what she had been about to say, for here and there, below, she could perceive a mood she particularly detested, and which today she could not have after all that had occurred, girls whispering. She was unable, of course, to hear this. But it was the heavy heads leant sideways into one another’s hair, the look of couples as though withdrawn upon each other, in one word, the air of complicity, which startled and disgusted Edge.

  ‘A community at peace within itself,’ she went on, but her attention was no longer directed onto those immediately around, ‘can well be a corrective,’ and then she saw how many of these whisperers seemed to watch someone at High Table, ‘can canalise,’ she said, in wonder could it be Sebastian Birt? ‘will influence all those who come under the sway,’ she continued haltingly but no they seemed intent on someone or something beyond, ‘must bring out the best,’ she said, then realised it could only be the mass of flowers, ‘can but . . .’ she continued, and there she stopped. Her colleagues, who turned in surprise, saw Miss Edge go pale. It was one of these deadly rumours had taken hold of the students, the Principal knew, was spreading through their ranks in poison. She pulled herself together. ‘Can but turn all those who come under its influence upwards and onwards to the ideals, to the practical politics, that is, the High Purposes of the State,’ she ended in a forced rush.

  She blew her nose, then, to hide her face a moment. What idea could it be had taken hold, she asked herself?

  ‘The greatest good of the greatest number,’ Sebastian echoed, in a peculiarly servile manner.

  ‘I think your suggestion about these Chinese pheasants excellent,’ Baker said to Winstanley, with a nervous eye on Edge, who, at that precise instant, rose up from her place. She went slowly over towards the mass of flowers. The staff’s anxious conversation covered the guv’nor’s halting step. But they began to keep their girls in view also, and could see those who whispered fall silent the better to watch Miss Edge. Then, when this lady reached the pyre of azalea and rhododendron, which towered well above her head, and which must at once have assailed her with its burden of hot scent, one child even rose to her feet she was so curious about Miss Edge, only to be brought back by a neighbour tugging on her skirts at which she subsided, rosy cheeks covered by blushes, and in a fit of giggling which she managed to choke off too easily, too soon.

  It was uncanny for Edge to leave her place at mealtime. But, having found little at fault with the pile of blooms, not even a nettle, she came back as though nothing were the matter. Only, once she was seated in her chair again, she fairly glared out over the students.

  ‘The scent’s so strong it quite puts one off one’s feed,’ Miss Baker remarked, to offer Edge a motive. She pushed her plate away untasted.

  ‘My dear,’ Edge said, almost as though from a dream. ‘This excellent cold roast beef! You surely do not propose to forgo your luncheon?’

  But she paid no real heed to Baker’s antics. It was the girls. That whispering had spread once more. Several, like her colleague, had ceased to eat. Fifty or sixty, even, sat heads bent, their thick hair, dark, gold or red hanging across eyes which,
behind this warm screen, watched the flowers, or watched herself so Edge sensed, as well as whatever else it might be had attracted them, unfortunate children, and that drew sharp jewelled eyes this way, and muted voices.

  On a sudden Edge felt deathly hot.

  ‘Are all our windows open, I wonder?’ she asked. Dakers half rose from his chair, which was entirely unnecessary because their table on the dais was raised well above the three hundred heads beneath.

  ‘It’s stifling,’ Baker agreed.

  ‘No, I’m sure they’re wide as can be,’ Miss Marchbanks said.

  The eyes, Edge asked herself, and then came over deathly cold.

  Because she knew, now.

  It could only be the body under the flowers, a corpse.

  ‘Sip some water, dear,’ Baker suggested.

  ‘The early start,’ Marchbanks murmured, while Sebastian was on guard as though to see the hag die before his eyes.

  Then Edge made a stupendous effort and came through.

  ‘What?’ she asked. ‘Yes of course,’ she said. ‘Yes, I daresay they may be a trifle overpowering.’ Then she began to address herself under her breath. Mabel, she murmured, Mabel, pull yourself together, this is ridiculous. After a short time she looked guiltily over the girls and was relieved to find they did not appear to have noticed, indeed they already seemed to talk more freely.

  ‘Azaleas can bring on hay fever,’ Miss Winstanley suggested.

  ‘And pine branches asthma,’ Edge said, rather wild, not yet herself quite.

  ‘Oh I don’t think Adams cut any in the end,’ Marchbanks protested, intolerably nervous and sensitive at one and the same time.

  ‘It was the salt,’ Miss Edge explained at random, recovering poise. She fanned herself with a handkerchief. ‘The Supervisor would never pass it.’

  But, as often as her thoughts turned to the absent Mary, who, she knew well, could never be under those flowers, they reeled away back to Mr Rock and his granddaughter Elizabeth.

  ‘Mr Birt,’ she began once more. ‘You have seen our sage this morning. Has he news of his election?’