by Henry Green
There was a pause. Came again the lump in his throat. Once more he surrendered.
‘I love her. She’s all I have,’ he said. He could have sobbed.
Edge was so distant, so absent that she had forgotten Mary and Merode. What she could do, and did without the slightest sense of shock, was to ask herself if he had meant Moira all along.
‘My dear,’ she murmured. ‘As time goes on one clings to what one has.’
‘She’s all I have,’ he repeated, still about his granddaughter, secure in self pity.
‘But is it wise, or fair, to foul the nest you have built?’ she archly enquired.
‘In what way?’ he demanded, at a loss.
‘Weren’t you complaining of the child’s behaviour?’
‘Never,’ he protested, of his granddaughter.
She remembered she had not brought out the sherry, but let this go. She was too tired.
‘Believe me, I think sometimes you are inclined to misjudge us, Mr Rock,’ she said. ‘We have eyes in our grey heads. And we prize your friendship for the child,’ she lied, a white lie.
‘I don’t follow,’ he said.
‘Why, Moira of course,’ she patiently explained.
‘We are at cross purposes, ma’am,’ he concluded with pride, suddenly and finally disgusted. Then he noticed that she had finished the cigarette. He offered another from his case, as a matter of course. She knew it to be madness, but how was she to refuse? So she lit up, as though this were the last action she would have strength for in life.
‘We are just two old women trying our best, but we do have eyes in our heads,’ she repeated, obstinately gentle, unaware of the effect she had produced.
‘Well, I don’t think this Birt is up to any good here, either,’ the old man said, angry and tart. He had gone back to the doorway, so as to make good his escape, if need be, at a moment’s notice.
‘Where are you? I can’t tell,’ she demanded.
And only an hour since, she would insist she had no trouble at all with her eyes, joyfully he reminded himself.
‘Are you sure you feel all right?’ he asked, after he had narrowly regarded her. He almost hoped she would fall sideways, flat on an ear.
‘I’ll let you into a little secret,’ she said. ‘It’s these smokes. My one small indulgence. They make me rather giddy. But it’s true I had a nasty turn this afternoon.’
‘How was that, ma’am?’
‘Where on earth have you got to, man?’
‘Here,’ he replied, and came forward a second time, betrayed by curiosity, only to sit, without thinking, in her own place, behind the great desk of office.
She did not notice.
There was a pause.
‘You had a fainting spell?’ he hazarded. He had long since learned all about it. He thought, perhaps she drinks all day.
‘Oh, I’ve forgotten. Don’t bother me,’ she said.
‘Was it about this sorry disappearance, ma’am?’ he persisted.
‘Whose? Why, we’ve got to the bottom of Mary and Merode,’ she lied. ‘That did not take long. Absolutely nothing in their storm in a little teacup.’
‘Thank God,’ he said, anxious, of course, to learn about Mary.
‘Why?’ she dreamily wanted to know. ‘Can these children truly mean much to you?’
‘Whatever occurs round this great place affects us all,’ he covered himself.
‘Just one or two small points still to clear up,’ she emended, for, truth to say, she was superstitiously ashamed. ‘Believe me, Mr Rock, but now and again, at the end of a long day, I do get sick and tired of these girls. At their age they are terribly full of themselves, terribly.’
Edge was being so revealing that Mr Rock once more decided he could not lose a minute of her present mood.
‘Have you ever considered the fellow Adams?’ he enquired.
‘I had to see him this forenoon. Yes?’
‘I thought he was hardly himself when we last met.’ Like someone else I could mention, he added under his breath.
‘I couldn’t get sense out of him at all. But I meet so many, so many,’ she said. ‘There was a Mrs Manley,’ she added.
‘It seemed as though he had something on his mind.’
‘Yes?’ she airily replied.
‘A widower who lives alone in his cottage,’ Mr Rock suggested.
There was a pause.
‘Why, so he does,’ she said. Mr Rock could see the gray light begin to dawn within the woman.
‘It had just occurred to me, that’s all,’ he said.
‘And so he does,’ she repeated, but not with quite the conviction for which he listened in her voice.
A silence fell.
‘Then tell me,’ she demanded, back to her more usual tones. ‘We do so value your counsel.’ And how often have you asked it, he commented to himself? ‘What would you propose?’ she insinuated.
‘I’m only an old fellow who’s well passed his bedtime,’ Mr Rock countered. He had gone far enough. Yet he found that, if one tried, one could forgive this woman, and he wanted to bring the conversation back to himself.
‘Oh, I’m tired too, deathly so,’ she idly agreed.
‘I’m older than you. I’m older,’ he repeated.
She let this pass.
‘I’m not much longer for this world,’ he said, on his dignity.
‘Don’t talk like that, Mr Rock, please. Tonight of all nights.’
He sat, looking straight ahead.
‘They will fiddle faddle so about themselves,’ Miss Edge went on, about the children. ‘It makes for such a deal of bother. I get no help from Baker, none at all,’ she ended.
He said no word.
‘Strictly in confidence we are not certain of much about Mary yet,’ she went on, again in a most languid voice. ‘But we shall be tomorrow. I’ve had experience. Believe me. They will worry over trifles, but it all comes out in the wash, in the end.’
He stayed silent. Contemplating his own death with disinterest, he did not catch what she said.
For her part, she felt so queer she hardly knew what she was doing, but found herself, somehow, committed to the following, as though on top of a hill in a dream on a bicycle with no brakes. ‘Mr Rock,’ she began, then experienced a last titter, or wobble, before it was too late. She threw the cigarette away which had been burning her forefingers. She missed the fireplace. Falling on a State Kidderminster rug it began to glow, unnoticed. ‘Mr Rock,’ she said, a second time. For she knew now she could not go back. ‘You really should have someone to take good care of you. Marry again,’ she said.
At this she giggled, once. What a desperate expedient to gain possession of a cottage, she laughed to herself, almost completely out of control. She must be mad. But then, oh well, what harm was there? Things would all come out in the wash, be utterly forgotten come daylight.
‘Why yes, yes,’ he said from the vast distance of his final, cold preoccupation, not having taken in the drift.
She dreamily excused herself to herself by thinking that, of course, he would not listen any more than he did now, which was not at all. This only proved, so she thought, that the kindest was to pack him off forthwith to an Academy of Science.
‘I don’t believe you bother with me,’ she rallied.
‘How is that, then?’ he asked, coming back to earth.
‘I said, you must marry again.’ She spoke out with a slow simper which allowed of no misinterpretation. This, he at last saw, was an offer, and unconditional at that. He took it in his stride as entirely understandable; unthinkable of course, but not, in her pitiable circumstances, in the least surprising. He proudly ignored it.
At the same time he wished to let her down lightly, the safer course. He cast about him how to encompass this. And almost at once proceeded to discuss his health.
‘I’ve been quite well the last few years. But there’s none can dodge Father Time. Yet I sleep remarkably sound. I take care, naturally. Regular exerci
se every day, fetching Daisy’s swill and so forth. No, it’s just anno domini.’
She despised him for not, as she thought, having heard. Or had he?
‘What age are you really then?’ she asked.
‘Seventy-six next month.’
‘You don’t look it,’ she lied. For she considered he looked more. Too old, too old, she admitted, in another part of her head. But now it was up to him, she knew.
‘Not bad for an old fellow,’ he said, pleased.
Oh, she must have lost her sanity just then, she thought, realising he did not intend to take her up. She would never, as long as she lived, ever indulge in so many cigarettes again. But was that, could it be, a smell of burning? And what had he meant, when all was said, discussing his health as he had?
‘I keep a deal healthier, even, than she does,’ he remarked of Elizabeth.
‘The child looks ever so much better,’ Edge agreed, dreamily, but with anguish. She still thought he referred to Moira. In a dazed state, she began to imagine larger and longer flames, as that smell came through.
‘I am tired. I should go home,’ he said.
‘In that case, goodnight,’ Edge answered from her deep chair, coldly, more of an enemy than ever. She had finally decided there would be nothing. ‘Look after yourself,’ she added with tired venom, while he dragged his body out of the Principal’s rightful place, to take leave. She did not, of course, get to her feet when the old man came over. He, for his part, ignored the taste of burning. ‘Goodbye,’ she ended, gave him a slack hand. He turned his back to leave.
‘Gracious,’ she remarked, as though to make conversation, having seen the cigarette at last. ‘Quite a blaze,’ she said, rose up in no haste, and stamped it well out.
Either he did not catch that, or could not be bothered, but he just stepped outside, closing the door behind him.
In the passage he gave one short, sharp laugh.
She heard.
Elizabeth, her thoughts on Sebastian, waited for Mr Rock outside the Principal’s lavatory under a lighted bulb. She was watching a moth dab its own shadow up above. ‘It kisses,’ she said inside her.
When the grandfather came along, he remarked, ‘There you are, my child.’ Mr Rock’s calling her his own as much as the old man allowed himself to show of how surprised and touched he felt that, after all, she should have spared time off to see him home. She gave no answer. She continued to watch the moth while he went past. She was concentrating on Sebastian.
Mr Rock bolted the door, sat on a seat, and laboriously took off those oldfashioned pumps. Then eased his toes. But when he got up to step into rubber boots, he trod right on the torch, which, so that he might not lose it, he had slipped down to a heel in one of the legs at the start of the evening. At once he remembered another time that same thing had occurred, when Julia was still alive and, for a further moment, was sorry for himself, heavy and bleak.
Then the old man sallied out, said ‘Come,’ and went to open the front door. It had two catches so that, for some minutes, he fumbled between his torch and door-handles. She did not lift a finger.
When, at last, the sage had it wide, the moon was so full and loud, that stored light he used fell altogether dimmed. What had been a round pat of yellow over brass knobs and keys became oval at his moonlit, shovel feet, but like cream on milk, a skim of one colour over something the same, and so faint he was able to switch the torch off at once. Indeed, he thought he could now see tolerably well, and was almost sorry he’d begged for her company. Not that he had, in actual words, ever asked her to come along, but at least he’d not, once again, denied what she knew perfectly, his age-long fear of the dark. Because, now they had left the house, his relief caused him to forget the pitch black between trees at night, which they were yet to meet in the ride leading to their cottage.
He even turned round to view the hated mansion which the moon, plumb on it, made so tremendous that he spoke out loud the name, ‘Petra’.
Elizabeth followed in silence, struck into herself by the man she had left, deeply promising she would come straight back. She had no eyes for what was lavished from above, nor ears for what her grandfather expressed, astonished at the sight.
Lovesick, she walked as someone will who, in a dream, can find herself on frozen wastes where the frost is bright then black, but will still keep warm with the warmth of bed, although that imagined world outside stayed cold, dead cold.
Her grandfather, again in difficulty on account of the treacherous light, but glad of his escape, waded much as though the moon had flooded each Terrace six inches deep. For the spectacles he used seemed milk lensed goggles; while he cautiously lifted boots one after the other in an attempt to avoid cold lit veins of quartz in flagstones underfoot because these appeared to him like sunlight that catches in sharp glass beneath an incoming tide, where the ocean foams ringing an Atlantic.
So much so, that when he came to the first flight of stone steps Mr Rock turned completely round and went down backwards.
Upon which a faint cry came from those beechwoods he had been facing. The great crescent of the moonlit house received and gathered the sound, sent this back in a girl’s voice, only deeper. ‘Mar . . . eee,’ the gabled front returned.
He was halted by it between two steps, ‘What was that?’ he asked, peering over a shoulder at moondrenched trees, starched, motionless in the distance he had yet to traverse.
When his granddaughter did not deign to reply, Mr Rock assumed it must have been a noise in the head from his old heart, the sudden twang on a vein. He sighed. He began the climb once more, down his cliff face, grabbing at the balustrade each step he took.
Next he sneezed. Fumbled after a handkerchief. ‘Careful you don’t take yourself a chill, dear,’ he called. But she ignored him. She warmed herself at the blaze in her heart for Sebastian.
As he struggled forward once again, he blamed the girl for what he took to be a fit of sulks because, after all, she was not much company if she would trail five foot behind, and never open her mouth. Upon which the cry came a second time, ‘Mar . . . eee.’ The house received this, drove it forth louder, as before, and twice.
‘Could someone be calling from the Institute?’ he asked in his deafness.
When she paid no heed, he sharply demanded, ‘Well, is it?’
‘Oh I don’t know, you know,’ she answered in a preoccupied, low voice. ‘I expect that’s only some of their girls out amongst the tree trunks.’
‘But it came from behind,’ he objected.
‘The echo did,’ she replied, as languid as Miss Edge.
He hesitated onward, silent in his turn.
‘Would they be after Adams, then?’ he enquired at last, and received no answer. The stars above were bright. She was vowing herself to Birt.
The trouble Mr Rock had with his eyes, under a moon, brought him back to where he left off with Miss Edge, to health. Had he tried, he would have been unable at this precise moment to remember more of his latest talk with the Principal. He slowed up, to let Elizabeth draw level.
‘I keep well in myself for a man my age,’ he boasted. ‘Of course I have difficulty with my eyesight, and I wish I’d thought to bring the stick along. You might have reminded me when we started.’
She made no comment.
‘No, I have been very fortunate,’ he went on. ‘Few men of my years could conscientiously boast of health like mine. I enjoy my food, I get my sleep all right in bed, I have few of the usual aches and pains. No-one asks me if it will rain tomorrow, which I always consider the ultimate insult to a man’s white hairs. True I’m a bit deaf, naturally. That can’t be helped. No, I’ve a deal to be thankful for. And if they would only trouble to pronounce, or even sound, their consonants, I’d hear as well as the next man. Too much, even, on occasion,’ he added, half remembering the girls below.
There was a pause.
‘Your grandmother always did say there could be no deaf people if those who condescended to open their
mouths away from a plate would bother to be distinct.’
She received this in silence. He started on another tack, as he painfully began to negotiate steps down to the third Terrace.
‘Have you seen Alice?’ he asked.
She did not answer.
‘I said, had you run across my cat?’ he insisted.
‘No, Gapa. Why?’
‘Because I’m worried about the animal, of course,’ he explained. ‘I would not put it altogether past those two dangerous fanatics to do away with Alice. You know how foully underhand they are. A pet could be fair game. Damn this moonlight. I can’t see where to put my feet.’
How frightfully unreasonable he is, she thought. Just when it was light as day. Quite the sort of thing Seb wouldn’t ever believe, if he still resented her seeing Gapa home, when she got back. Oh Seb!
‘Daisy still out. No-one can tell what’s become of me Ted. What a day. Too long by half.’
‘But they’ve been off before,’ she protested. ‘I mean, there’s nothing new . . . this isn’t the first time, Gapa, after all, on their own, is it?’
‘I wouldn’t know about that, of course,’ he said, tart.
‘You’ll find them when you get back.’
‘You surely do not propose to leave me walk through the woods all by myself?’ he cried out. Indeed, these were now much nearer.
‘Why Gapa dear, how could you think? Of course not.’
‘Work one’s fingers to the bone and fat thanks in return,’ he grumbled.
She said not a word.
‘Pay no attention, Liz,’ he said, at last.
‘I got hot up there. I’m glad of a breather,’ she lied, to meet him half way.
‘The ludicrous female would have upset me if I hadn’t kept control,’ he went on, suddenly remembering Miss Edge at last.
‘Then you did speak? Oh, you are good.’ Elizabeth was dreamily enthusiastic. ‘And what did she . . . you know . . . was it, I mean did you smooth things out?’
‘Smooth what out?’
‘Why, everything.’
‘How can I tell yet?’ he demanded, in an exasperated voice. ‘But I swallowed my pride,’ he muttered. ‘Yes, I had to do that,’ he said, to make all he’d done into sacrifice. Then he at last entirely recollected the proposal Edge had just made him. He gave one more short, sharp laugh. He’d nothing other than contempt for the half crazed harpy. ‘The trouble with drunkenness is that it will not realise the other party can be sober,’ he added, aloud.
