by Lorna Gray
She was lounging on the bed with the dog, which had adopted a kind of boneless lean with his forelimbs sprawled across her lap. It was an arrangement they’d obviously enjoyed before on other days and in other houses on other pieces of furniture, and I was expecting, I think, another one of those conversations where strategic wordplay tried to disguise that the dog’s presence was real at all. Only he was there and Phyllis had stolen him from Danny’s parents’ house after she’d taken the trouble of hobbling all the way round there, only to find that Danny had gone out with Richard in the car.
She also informed me that Danny Hannis was arrogant, childish, infuriating, pedantic and an idiot. The only thing she didn’t include was that he was young.
Then she added while I blinked and tried to battle my way into stockings, ‘He’s the sort of man who will happily ignore the fact that you’ve told him you never want to speak to him again when it suits him, such as when he happens to arrive first at the scene of a crisis to find you in a state. Then, he was the sort of man who could willingly set aside every injunction for the sake of wading in and acting all caring and dependable just because I’d come off my bicycle and was suddenly in such a blasted mess. On that day he even managed to work in a few calming words while he handed me a handkerchief because I was sobbing a bit and bleeding all over the leather seats of that ridiculous car. It suited him perfectly to set aside my wishes then, presumably because it allowed him to demonstrate what I was missing. But now, just as soon as I’ve managed to get out of hospital and I’ve decided it might be a good idea to clear up a few misunderstandings, he’s immediately decided that my former wishes are set in stone and he’s sticking to them so bloody rigidly that I can’t get within twenty yards of him. He’s a pig. And this poor little dog here is the leverage I need to force his master’s hand.’
The dog didn’t seem particularly concerned by his fate. He was very hairy and had wonderfully mobile eyebrows. He’d raised them quizzically at her and she was smiling down at him as she said, ‘Would you believe Danny and I actually rowed about the hanging of some new curtains?’
As the dog wasn’t the one who was supposed to answer, I stopped fighting with the cake of mascara that was stubbornly refusing to soften and asked kindly, ‘Well, what sort were they? I suppose you were trying to choose a design that would go with all the ceramic ducks, or the commemorative plates or something?’
‘Not the ducks, you nit. The curtains were symbolic. I was trying to let him know how I felt … I was trying to hint that he should tell me what he thought about the idea of living with me.’
‘Oh. Oh, dear.’
I wasn’t sure that sympathy was the right thing to give. Phyllis shot me a wild-eyed look. ‘Don’t say it like that. Please. I know it was a clumsy way of giving him the idea he might make a home at the cottage, but what was I meant to do? He’s been living in his mother’s attic ever since he was demobbed and it amazes me that he even fits. It makes him feel hemmed in when he’s perfectly capable of setting up his own home somewhere and, lately, he’s been talking about moving away, emigrating even. Perhaps Australia. So I thought I should at least try to have that conversation with him. But women like me aren’t meant to have company. It seems we had a choice back at the beginning of our careers. Either we could opt for the life of an intellectual female and abide in splendid but respectable isolation forever more, or give way to an aggressive kind of femininity and work up to becoming one of those wildly confident women who will perpetually lust after the young man who comes in to fix the plumbing … It seems romance isn’t meant for the academics. It isn’t for the women who grew up thinking they could contribute in this way and still rank as a female. And it seems you certainly don’t get it by making an offer to a man to join you in a mad little cottage. Particularly,’ she added bitterly, ‘when all along the man in question has had his own house and gone to great lengths to avoid mentioning it.’
‘Dear Phyllis, I am so sorry.’ I didn’t really know what to say.
‘And,’ she added more soberly, ‘it’s his fault I was horrible last night. I wasn’t myself. I didn’t mean to be rude.’
There was a rather weighty pause and I felt compelled to say, ‘I thought you were impressive last night. Your style of debating with the Colonel after dinner was a vital distraction. Is vital.’
‘I prefer to use the term terrific.’
She made me smile. And then she undid it again by remarking carelessly, ‘Anyway, it isn’t my chatter about India and politics that’s making all the difference to the old man’s comfort in this house. But you can think that, ‘my young friend’, if it makes it easier. You do know, don’t you, what sort of hard life a woman will lead as a soldier’s wife?’
I choked. And managed to mumble, ‘I don’t know that I’m afraid of that. That’d be the easy part.’
Then, in the wake of that embarrassingly revealing nonsense, I said rather more strongly, ‘Quite honestly, Phyllis, at this moment my very real fear is that the world and all its nastiness isn’t prepared to leave either of us alone long enough to find our own course beyond these first few days of knowing each other; or even let us have a future at all.’
And then, having forced a confession like that from me, before I could so much as recover to the point of making a more coherent explanation, perhaps even to the point of confiding a selected portion of what had happened last night, she was already assuming I meant it as a reprimand to her and was hurrying on to say, ‘Don’t listen to me. What do I know? I’m beginning to suspect I really am the giddy eccentric your mother wanted me to be. And do you know, I haven’t seen our Captain since my father’s funeral, which would have been about ten years ago and around the time that the portrait of him was taken that hangs on the gallery wall just outside this room. Have you seen it? It’s the photograph hidden in the midst of all those very intimidating ones of the Colonel. I can’t imagine why John had to choose that one for the family record. As I recall, it wasn’t long before Mrs Langton’s death and that was why he was home. Their mother developed some awful complaint of the kidneys, poor woman. It was a complication of the scarlet fever she’d had years before. She wasted away no matter how many times the Colonel whisked her off to see one of the Harley Street physicians. That photograph must mark the time her illness reached the point beyond hope. So, actually, I can calculate perfectly well why John insisted on using it. There’s no sign of our Captain’s uniform since he was on leave, it was taken on one of his rare visits home at a time that must have painful connotations for him and I suppose John thought he was subtly underlining his own claim upon this house.’ A sharp glance at me. ‘And that, my dear cousin, is why I am thoroughly expunging that man’s presence in this bedroom by spreading about my clothes.’
She cast a scathing glance about the monumental formality of the room. ‘Although,’ she added, ‘it doesn’t exactly scream of John’s personality in here, does it? Do you think anyone has ever thought to make this place a home? Except perhaps his poor deceased mother whose personal tastes are still to be found everywhere in the wallpaper and paintings.’
Phyllis was looking magnificent as she sat there, enthroned on the vast oak bed-frame with the dog worshipping her. The fussy woman of yesterday who had been seeking retirement in a museum of a cottage had been left there, hopefully never to be reclaimed. Then another doubt struck me. I asked carefully, ‘Phyllis? Did you really say that my mother asked you to play the worthy chaperone?’
My cousin looked first disconcerted, then guilty. Finally she looked reproving and informed me, ‘I wouldn’t say your mother exactly came up with the idea, but she must have guessed my motives when she told me in a letter that you’d caused a row by saying you wanted to go away and I suggested you came here instead. If we hadn’t planted the idea into your father’s head of sending you to me for a display of drab spinsterhood, he’d never have let you go anywhere, would he?’
I must have still been half asleep. I still hadn’t quite man
aged to work myself into my frock. I did so and then discovered that Phyllis was suddenly eyeing me austerely. She scrutinised my appearance, nodded her approval and then remarked thoughtfully, ‘Do you know, the Colonel was right last night when he remarked that we’re in this peculiar state of trying to reconstruct the sort of life we want to live now. But the problem is that everyone’s got their own ideas of the form that reconstruction should take, and it was wrong of me to harass the Captain into explaining his part in it. If he’s anything like the other men who fought and came home, his main wish will be to embed some semblance of calm order into each day. And this isn’t a fresh criticism, by the way. It’s right that he should have it. But for me, order means a return to how things were before and that means the past is a trap.’
‘Is it?’ I asked, thinking rather too closely about her strange relationship with the gallery of dead portraits in her mother’s bedroom.
‘I don’t want to go back to how things were before the war. Given my expertise and the credibility I’ve won in these past years, I could take work now lecturing at my old college. But because I am a woman of a reasonable social standing and because of how things were before …’ She was speaking slowly, as if she were almost tasting the insult. ‘Normal order dictates I should only keep the work if I never marry. If I marry, my husband ought to keep me on his income and direct me to make way for others who would be in greater need of the work. But I am permitted to keep myself, if I remain a spinster.’
The word was cast between us to land on the bedspread and linger there positively, simmering with revulsion. She told me, ‘I suppose it’s a bit of a moot point now after all that nonsense about curtains, and anyway, I don’t think I actually want to lecture. But I don’t think people should be allowed to call a woman a spinster. It’s an awful way to dismiss all that a woman is and all that she does and recast her in the image of a dithering old fusspot whose words needn’t be listened to. Unless she’s a forthright intellectual, in which case she’s permitted, grudgingly, to be an eccentric old battleaxe instead. It’s a ridiculous kind of straightjacket to put upon any person and it’s making me flounder. It’s been hard enough to reconstruct an ordinary life for myself after all those years of living to someone else’s orders. I wanted to move forwards. I wanted things to be different now. But exciting still. And you—’
She made me jump with the force of the sudden focus of her attention upon me. She told me curtly, ‘I thought you were caught in the other end of the same trap. Your parents’ description of a war-befuddled, rudderless girl destined for marriage to some smothering boy made me think I only had to get you here to give you room to say what you really wanted. I thought I would draw out the young woman I believed I knew from your letters and teach you to make tougher choices. But I don’t think you need anyone to do that.’
She surveyed me with another of those peculiarly shrewd glances. But then, when she finished, it was on an unnervingly uncertain note.
‘As I say,’ she added, ‘I thought this was a rescue … But now I’m not sure what this is.’
I might have thought that she meant to gratify me with the suggestion that she didn’t quite know who was rescuing whom here, whether in fact I was aiding her, or even the Colonel or Richard. Then it occurred to me that she had detected at last some of the larger complications that were tugging at my hand, and this was her caution. It was a deeply unsettling way to be launched into a new day.
Chapter 24
The feeling had grown worse when I had arrived downstairs and found an old man in a state of urgent bustle about the condition of his dining room. He was worrying about his dinner-party plans and this was tension, not temper. Whatever parental concerns had motivated his late-night discussion with Richard, it hadn’t translated into rudeness to me today. Instead, I got the impression that he was clutching at tradition because he didn’t know what else to do. So now I was at the village shop on his behalf again with his list of ingredients for his dinner party because it seemed to be what he needed most.
I had travelled by bicycle for the sake of avoiding the easier but rather more isolated walk through the lonely woodland as Danny had once suggested, but I did, however, take the precaution of going by the little green lane that ran just beyond the farmyard with the ponies in it. It had seemed to me that I would be unlikely to run into Duckett by going that way, since he couldn’t have taken his car.
As it was, I didn’t run into anyone. And it turned out that nine o’clock on a Saturday morning at the shop was a scene of happy activity. It was full of women, men and boys with empty baskets who all, it seemed, had picked up the idea that I had taken employment at the Manor. It was a repeat of the conversation I’d had with Mrs Abbey, except without the undertone of accusation, and it was then that I noticed the woman at the counter with the three lively children. I couldn’t help observing how much she had been transformed by the change out of her usual threadbare work-a-day housecoat into a vivid green day dress.
She was the beaten-down slum survivor from the squatters’ camp and she was shyly dismissing compliments by drawing attention to the tightness of the waist and enjoying the unexpected gift of clothes and marvelling that such a frock had ever fitted a woman of Mrs Abbey’s stature at all.
I was thinking it was no wonder it looked as if it had never been made to fit Mrs Abbey’s tall figure, because the frock was mine and the fabric that had made it had previously belonged to my mother’s treasured floor-length evening gown, only because of wartime thriftiness my mother had passed it to me to make up anew into a skirt, a hair wrap and this one particularly splendid frock. It had been in my suitcase when Duckett had taken it and until now I’d imagined it had burned with the rest.
As it turned out, very few of my clothes had burned last night. The arsonist had wasted just enough to leave a lasting trace of my presence. The rest had gone to this woman as a gift, yesterday, while I had been in Gloucester tackling Duckett about the return of my case.
Mrs Abbey had been generous enough to make a present of three frocks, a skirt – the twin to this dress – and also a couple of blouses, which the woman from the squatters’ camp was intending to alter for her eldest son, ready for his new term at school. I hadn’t the grit to tell her that the clothes were mine. I let the gift stand and then, I’m afraid, I queued with ridiculous meekness for my turn at the counter to collect the Colonel’s order, and then I left.
But not before a man who I had barely noticed detached himself from the gossiping clutches of the postmaster and followed me outside.
He was not Duckett and he was not Abbey. He was a man I would have said I had never seen in my life, only I had a feeling he was the man I’d passed near the turbine house on the morning after the assault. He’d been eating his sandwiches then and would have passed for any ordinary gentleman on a scenic walk in the midst of his holiday. Yesterday he must have been the man who had tricked the Colonel into giving him a tour of the house. Today the man was broad-shouldered, about Matthew Croft’s age, nearly as tall, and distinctly over-dressed for a warm day in the countryside. Wearing that long cotton raincoat, he might have been taken for an office clerk or a travelling salesman, but his stare gave him away. I’d met that kind of intensity in a look before. I’d encountered it on the street outside my chemist’s shop in Knightsbridge whenever a rumour had circulated that the royal princesses had been put to work in the Lancaster bomber factory which had occupied the great department store next door. All the journalists had got for their trouble on those days were blank screens of boarded-up windows and a depressed air of frustrated greed. This fellow was, I hoped, set to have a similar experience now.
He had learned my name. ‘Miss Sutton?’
I was already loading my purchases into the basket on my bicycle. Somehow the Colonel’s menu had managed to fill quite a package and all without trespassing heavily on items that were rationed. I turned, hands ready on the handlebars. My left foot was on the nearside pedal, ready for the push
from my right that would send the bicycle downhill to that tight bend beneath the shop and allow me to do that hop across the bar people do to claim the seat at speed. The journalist saw I had recognised him and seemed to take it as his cue.
‘Might I have a word? I’m meant to have a quick chat with Captain Langton this morning, but I missed him.’
‘Oh?’ I believe my response conveyed perfectly my disinclination to answer any of his questions.
The journalist wasn’t going to be easily put off though. ‘Yes, he was here asking after PC Rathbone about twenty minutes ago, but he was disappointed because the constable’s not at home. The constable’s been called out to examine a fire.’
I caught the flash of a swift smile. He was a good-looking man and I thought he knew it. I was trying very hard not to show that the news meant anything to me. Then he added, ‘Over at a place called Miserden. Apparently an outhouse got burnt to the ground last night. Did you know about it?’
‘Miserden?’ Suddenly I could speak. Because an outhouse in one of the neighbouring villages certainly couldn’t be mistaken for the turbine house near Washbrook. Then I was shaking my head and giving a hasty answer to his question. It was an honest answer as they go. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve never even heard of it.’
The man was eyeing me with disconcerting boldness. Now his expression didn’t quite fit my memory of the hungry look worn by the newspapermen who had clamoured after a story – any story. This look was rather more calculating. He was seeking something very specific and I felt, with a sudden jolt, he was reasonably certain that he’d found it in me.
While I struggled my way through tangled doubts about multiple arsonists and different fires on the same night, the man before me was flashing me another disarming smile. ‘Actually,’ he said. ‘The Captain was chatting to the man in charge of the wireless station. The fellow buys his lunch in this shop, just like everyone else. They were discussing something about sheds and outhouses and where the station gets its water …?’
