Matthew did not go regularly to church; but he went sometimes, for it seemed right and proper to do so, and he would not have it said that he had broken with the tradition of his fathers. Moreover, it was a pleasant and vaguely comforting occasion, pleasant to nod and say How-do to the neighbours, to Jack Stevens the village tailor, his twin-brother George who sang in the choir and filtered his booming bass through a copious white moustache, old Mrs Merritt and Jimmy her undergraduate grandson who was the apple of her eye, the Vicar himself, and the butcher and the baker, and the village lads and girls stiff and strange (yet still familiar) in their Sunday best. Obscurely buried in Matthew’s mind was the dumb thought that whatever one believed or didn’t believe, a question it would have puzzled him indeed to resolve, it was right to keep up the churchgoing custom and so set an example to the children. For in that part of him whence came his deepest feelings he blindly assumed the existence of the children who had never been born, never conceived, and now never would be.
‘Nice bright morning, mister.’
A lean fellow was this Caidster, lean and sandy. His eyebrows were fair to the point of invisibility: which gave his face an odious baldness, like that of a bird of prey. He was all eyes and nose: the eyes small, the nose at once sharp and fleshy. The eyes were dark and piercing, too close together, and not quite straight in their regard. It was something far less than a squint, a more subtle and suggestive crookedness. So close were they together, those eyes, that they gave the nightmare impression of two lost spirits seeking union (and almost achieving it) across the top of the dominating putty-coloured nose.
‘Nice morning, Mr Elderbrook.’
Matthew, briefly assenting, was for moving on; but the jaunty figure planted itself in his path.
‘You and me’ll have a little talk,’ said Caidster.
It was a statement, flat and confident, asking no consent and brooking no denial.
‘What do you want?’ said Matthew sharply.
The man smiled, almost pleasantly. ‘P’raps you know, mister. P’raps you don’t. Work’s what I want, and a free run. A little job about the place. And a free run. No harm in that, is there?’
‘I’ve told you,’ said Matthew, ‘more than once. There’s no job for you on my farm. Try somewhere else. No one’s stopping you.’
‘Ah, but,’ said Caidster, with an air of sagacious reproof, ‘I wouldn’t be hasty if I was you, mister. I know I don’t look so much. I’d never get a job on me looks. But I know quite a bit, one way and another. I know more than what you might think.’
Matthew found nothing to say. He gripped his stick tighter, waiting for what was to come.
‘Not only about pigs neither,’ said Caidster, as if making casual conversation, ‘though I could handle your pigs for you a treat if it comes to that. But I know more than that. I know gentlemen and their little ways, and what they do when there’s a neat bit of skirt about the house, and the wife away. I’m a treasure, I am, mister. I’d be worth standard wages as pig-man, and all friends together.’
With a specious air of finality Matthew said: ‘I’m not in need of a pig-man, thanks. They look after themselves very well.’
‘With the girl’s help they do, I don’t doubt,’ said Caidster quickly. ‘Useful wench that. But I could help her, don’t you see? And I will, mister. Believe me. Teach her a thing or two that some gentlemen don’t know, eh? She’ll be a good learner, I lay, with a figure like that. Summick a smart man can get hold of there and no error. See here, I’m not blind, mister, and I’m not dumb, and what I know there’s others can know bloody quick. Poor suffering ladies and all. But I’m not a man to pick quarrels, see? Friendly’s my way, and do as you’d be done by. See?’
Matthew managed a laugh: a harsh, unconvincing performance.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Caidster, but perhaps the police will. You’re going the right way to get yourself locked up.’
‘Now that’s silly talk,’ said Caidster sorrowfully, as though he had expected better things of Matthew. ‘You think I’m bluffing. But I’m not. Not me.’
‘If you take my advice,’ said Matthew in a loud voice, ‘you’ll clear out of this district while you still can. And now get out of my way.’
‘Just a minute,’ said Caidster softly. ‘A word in your majesty’s ear. If you wanted to keep your bit of fun and fancy to yourself you oughterov felled that tree first.’
‘Tree?’
But he knew very well what the man meant. He meant the old beech that grew within ten yards of Hilda’s window.
‘Very pretty view a man can get from up that tree,’ said Caidster, smacking his lips with relish, ‘and I was always a lad for climbing. So long, Mr Elderbrook, sir. I’ll be along first thing in the morning, to see to them pigs.’
§ 8
BEFORE going in to his midday meal Matthew sauntered round to the back of the house and had a look at that tree. He had known it all his life, climbed it as a boy a hundred times. But it had been a comparatively young tree then: now it was large and venerable. He noted its height and position, its distance from Hilda’s attic window. He judged that Caidster must have been lying in what he had salaciously hinted, but dared not trust that judgment far.
The tree had a history. It was the eleventh tree. One day in the early eighteen sixties little Joe Elderbrook had shot a couple of wood pigeons, and in the crop of one of them had found eleven beech nuts. To please Joe’s mother, Joe’s father had planted these seeds, disposing them at intervals round three sides of the house. But the eleventh was somehow mislaid. It eluded all search for a day or two, and when it unexpectedly turned up, in a fold of Mrs Elderbrook’s apron, they decided to plant it at the back, and so did. There, unaccountably, it developed a vigour and a character of its own, made better growth than its fellows, and was now a taller tree, and nearer the house. Too near the house.
Matthew stood staring at it for some minutes; then turned away and went thoughtfully indoors.
His imagination was not naturally quick, but it was capable of being quickened. The sluggish flow could become a raging torrent. Since Hilda’s first hints of danger an obscure process had been going on in the depths of his being, a process that threw up from time to time, not thoughts, but intimations of a formless terror. Now, in its simplest outline, it emerged as a fear of being found out; but that was only a hundredth part of the truth of it. And with the gradual, the imperceptible emergence of this fear his attitude to himself and his behaviour, his view of the brief (impulsively begun and hastily ended) amour with Hilda, insensibly changed. If he looked straight, with a normal mind, at what he had done, he saw it not as sinful or hateful, but as something exciting, pleasant, and altogether good. He was conscious of a goodness in it beyond sensual delight. But now, with the threat of exposure hanging over him, he saw himself through other eyes than his own: the evil eyes of Caidster, the grief-stricken eyes of Ann. He saw lust furtively indulged and trust shamefully betrayed. He could not hold this vision steady in his mind. It flashed and faded. When he looked at it squarely it seemed silly and melodramatic. But though he shook off this new sense of guilt again and again, it came back. As often as he thought of Ann, and Ann’s knowing, it came back. In those moments he hated himself. All roads in his thinking, his now almost feverish thinking, led back to Ann. He was not much afraid of scandal. Little as he relished it he was not afraid of that, except as it affected Ann. He was not the first married man to take his pleasure with a servant-girl, and he would not be the last. Many a man had done worse, and been found out, and not died of it. Such things were common gossip in this not conspicuously ungodly rural area; and though respectable people shook their heads over it and said it was disgraceful they also shrugged their shoulders and few, very few, seemed to think much the worse of the sinners. So far as loss of reputation went, Matthew had little or nothing to fear. But for Ann, and for himself through Ann, he had a fear intolerable. Ann’s Matthew, the conception she had of him, was the Ma
tthew he wanted to be and in part believed himself to be: to see himself sometimes through her loving but not blindly loving eyes was a refreshment to his spirit, a ministry to his diffident self-esteem. Ann’s knowing what he had done, the shattering of her childlike faith in him, would be agony for them both such as he dared not contemplate. Her life, he thought (knowing her dependence on him), would be desolated; and he himself would suffer a double desolation, hers and his own, hers and the destruction of her image of him. Ann’s life would be broken. Ann’s Matthew would be dead. To avert that double catastrophe there was nothing that he would not do.
Whatever happens, Ann mustn’t know. Whatever happens …
But what could happen? The man Caidster, true to his promise, arrived next morning and with no word said began busying himself about the place almost as though it belonged to him. Conceivably he felt that it did, or that it would in due time. Meanwhile he exhibited, surprisingly, a certain tact; did not obtrude himself upon his victim; offered no show of offence or aggression; was almost, in effect, self-effacing. But if for some purpose of his own he tried to make it easy for Matthew not to notice his presence, he did not succeed. For the first two or three days Matthew was conscious of almost nothing else. Of Caidster and the problem of Caidster he thought continually, his thoughts going round and round in a circle like birds of prey oddly reluctant to swoop. Swoop they must, sooner or later. A decision must be come to. Angry and ashamed he asked himself again and again, during that first week, whether when pay-day came he would sink so low in the scale of moral courage as to give this rat, this prickworm, this creeping conscience, a wage. That would be the last humiliation, the crowning irony. The last? By no means the last. There were plenty more to come. And what was the good of ranting? What option was there but to pay at the week’s end for services he had less than no use for? Wasn’t it in fact simpler and wiser, wasn’t it in the end better strategy, to pay the fellow and ignore him, pay him and ignore him, for so long as he remained content to be ignored?
Weeks went by before Caidster showed his hand again. He had adopted, it seemed, a policy of ingratiation. But in spite of the absence of incident they were weeks of nagging anxiety for Matthew, anxiety that flared up and died down, was never quite the same for two days running, was not studiously ignored, now in a frenzy cosseted and re-kindled between cupped hands, so that sleeping or waking it scattered and consumed his peace. He relied on Hilda to bring him news of the enemy’s approaches; but the reliance was unspoken, for while private talk with the girl had never been easy to contrive since Ann’s homecoming, nor indeed had he wished for it, it was now doubly difficult, with Caidster shadowing the house. She had already, in this short time, lost her allure for him. He did not stop to ask why or how, because he was only briefly aware of the loss. Both she and he were preoccupied, and not with each other. He knew, it was obvious, that she was worried. Her eyes, once so candidly benign, were now misted, heavy, ringed with darkness. It was as if that blithe buxomness of hers had been the first casualty in the Caidster war. What else was to be sacrificed in it?
That question came to a head at last, when Matthew, seizing a chance opportunity, suddenly confronted her.
‘Everything all right, Hilda?’
She put on a sullen, mulish, self-defensive look.
‘Has Caidster left you alone?’ His tone was quick and peremptory. He was nervously angry with her long silence, though he knew she was not to blame for it. ‘Has he?’
‘Oh yes, of course,’ she said, with bitter sarcasm. ‘It’s likely, isn’t it? A perfect gentleman like him.’
‘Well?’ he said impatiently. ‘What has he done, or said?’
She turned an angry, flushed face towards him. ‘What did you let him come here for? You might have known!’
‘I couldn’t prevent it. You must know that, girl. Be reasonable. What does he want?’
He saw, too late, the ineptitude of the question.
‘Don’t talk so silly,’ said Hilda. ‘“What does he want?” What did you want? Well, he wants the same, I shouldn’t wonder.’
He stared at her in wonder. The shock of finding her so changed showed in his hurt eyes, and she was suddenly contrite, her anger spent.
‘I didn’t ought to have said that. You’re good, you are. Always was.’ After the briefest pause she said: ‘He wants me to go out with him.’
He shuddered at the euphemism. ‘And you won’t,’ he said, with decision.
‘Seems I shall have to,’ she said, with a pretence of indifference.
‘Why?’
He knew the answer, but he must bear it, must have it pat, solid, unmistakable.
‘If I don’t he’ll tell her.’
‘Tell her …?’
‘What he knows, or guesses. Or what he makes up. Anything. It’s all one.’
‘Then it would be our word against his.’
He spoke musingly, thinking aloud. Caidster’s word against theirs? Where then was the difficulty? She would never accept from a stranger, from Caidster, what he, Matthew, denied. But his heart found no comfort in this specious reasoning. His own guilt was heavy upon him. Could he, if she asked him the question, face her and deny it? Could he save her by a second and deeper betrayal, by lying? He could try. He could, for her sake, try. But if he bungled it, if the lie were not convincing, not believed, if even an iota of doubt remained, then all were lost, his marriage poisoned, Ann broken, Ann’s Matthew dead and damned.
‘So he said that, did he? I see.’
His tone was curiously calm. The case was complete, and there was no hope. First Hilda. Then it would be money. And then, perhaps, the very farm itself. There would be no end to that rapacity.
Two days later he again chanced upon Hilda alone. In the interval he had done much thinking.
‘Look, Hilda,’ he said. ‘There’s something I want you to do.’
§ 9
EVEN with one’s dearest friend there are problems one cannot discuss. Though Nora and Mrs Macfarlane were on terms of unstinted mutual kindness there was one point of silence between them, a question never asked, an assurance never given. By the difference of age and temperament, as well as by human affinity, they were almost perfectly suited to each other. The older woman knew the wisdom of never, out of her ripe experience, offering unsolicited advice; and the younger, with an intuition as quick as it was generous, seldom failed to ask for what she knew her friend was eager to give. Concerning the care of Joseph Charles James Elderbrook, under which burden of names her child endearingly staggered, she asked much from Mrs Macfarlane’s store, and received it gracefully, if not always with the intention of acting on it; and she was glad that in these maternal conferences Mrs Macfarlane was often led to talk about her son. Her memory was so vivid, and the artless art of her narrative so telling, that Nora, who had never seen him, in the course of months found herself thinking of Charlie Macfarlane as a living person, denied to her sight by the merest trick of time. Had she been tempted to make a stock generalized figure of him, the young citizen-soldier fallen in battle, his mother’s racy recollections of babyhood and boyhood would have sufficed to prevent her doing so; yet even in these earlier appearances he wore, for Nora, the tragic halo of his destiny. In her private imaginings, and sometimes in her dreams, he became a dear friend, a symbol of high romance, and her secret consolation.
Consolation for what? Stubbornly, heroically, she refused even to ask that question. She was a happy wife and a proud mother: of that there could be no doubt. Not only did she love and admire her husband: she also liked him, which was a different and equally important thing. At home, though he had dark moods like other men, he was nearly always good company, kind and gay even in his lordly moments. All the thought he could spare from the grand career was hers for the asking; he enjoyed young Joey; and, his imaginative energy being canalized by his soaring ambition, he never, as the saying went, looked at another woman. What from Nora’s point of view could be more satisfactory? What more cou
ld she or any wife hanker after? She would not allow herself to wish him different in any point whatsoever; yet she sometimes drifted into imagining what life would be like if in small significant ways he were a little different. His attitude to the war was something she had never quite understood. Had he been an outright pacifist she would have argued with him at first, and then—who knows?—perhaps ultimately have agreed with him. It was his air of detachment that puzzled her sometimes, detachment that seemed to enclose him in impenetrable armour. That he was safe, that he knew how to look after himself, was surely something to be thankful for, wasn’t it? And to wish that he could have been safe in spite of himself, and in spite of his chafing at safety, would have been not merely disloyal but illogical. To eat her cake and have it, to have him courting danger and at the same time to be sure that he would survive without scathe, this was Nora’s secret, unformulated wish. More frankly, since there was no harm in it, she wished he were in closer touch with his brothers; for Matthew and Felix were still only names to her, less evocative by far than the name of Charlie Macfarlane. The one, unable to leave his farm, had sent a wedding present; the other had been a soldier in France at the time; and now that the war was over, and Felix demobilized, Guy was still too busy, it seemed, to do anything about it.
The Elderbrook Brothers Page 27
