When Guy was with her she was ready to believe herself the luckiest young woman in the world. He was good to her and Joey; he was good to Mrs Macfarlane; and for old times’ sake he was good to his partner, now virtually retired, her ageing, tippling father. Poor Jimmie was a frequent guest. He and Guy had been useful to each other, but his ambition had been fitful, easily quenched by comfort, and he had lapsed without pain or resentment into the position of tolerated father-in-law and old retainer.
Guy was clever. Guy was goodnatured in his fashion. She was infinitely safe in his keeping. But was there, could there be, a flaw in his perfection? Could he not have been a little more like Charlie? These were questions Nora would not willingly discuss even with herself, and still less with Charlie’s rnother.
§ 10
ANN, in recent days, had studied as never before the changing expressions of Hilda’s so familiar face. Standing in the scullery doorway she stared now with a quiet intentness. Hilda was busy at the sink.
An interested observer would have been struck by the contrast between the two women. Ann was small and neat, with a suggestion of squareness: square shoulders, square face. Her complexion was inclined to sallowness; her eyes and her hair were both of the same dark brown; and she had the habit, which illness had only interrupted, of holding herself very straight and moving with a certain primness. The girl Hilda, compared with her mistress, seemed large, though she was not exceptionally so; seemed ample and uncontrolled in her movements, though she was not that either. She had a fair skin and a high colour, dark eyebrows, dark lashes, and eyes with a gleam of bronze in them. In these years of her brief blooming, for the village girls age quickly in Mershire, she looked a picture of amiable and honest contentment, except in moments of shyness or anger when her features were apt to swell and stiffen into a mask of stupidity.
‘Well, Hilda, can you manage?’
To Hilda, who was always managing, the question seemed meaningless. Instead of attempting an answer she said reproachfully: ‘You didn’t ought to be standing there, m’m. You know you didn’t. What would Mr Elderbrook say?’
‘Nonsense,’ said Ann, though without much conviction. ‘I’m not going to be coddled any more. It’s time I took a hand with things. You look tired, Hilda.’
‘Please to go and sit down,’ said Hilda, turning back to her sink.
‘You’ve looked tired for quite a few days.’
‘I’m not!’ A shrill note crept into Hilda’s voice. ‘Not specially,’ she said, with a droop into anti-climax.
‘Take an aspirin and lie down,’ said Ann. ‘I can finish the washing-up for once. Is it the usual bother?’
‘No, it’s not that,’ said Hilda quickly.
The inference was clear to Ann, though not to Hilda herself. If it was not ‘that’ it was something else. In the old days mistress and maid had been on easy terms, and the work’s routine had been enlivened with many a scrap of talk. Hilda had never been a garrulous girl, but she enjoyed retailing the village news, especially to someone as ready to hear it as Ann had been, and was. That unexacting relationship had been resumed at once on Ann’s return. She had seen no difference in Hilda, for the sufficient reason that Hilda, with her knack of forgetting what she did not choose to remember, felt no difference towards her. But now there were things Hilda could not put out of mind. There was a visible change in her, a change visible indeed to one who was very tired of her own company and for most of the day had no one but Hilda to look at or talk to.
‘Coming nearer to Hilda she said gently: ‘You’re not in trouble, Hilda, are you?’
Hilda, with eyes averted, said: ‘I don’t know yet.’
In the startled silence that followed, Ann felt herself blushing, and she saw that Hilda, too, was burning red. Ann blushed because she had stumbled inadvertently on a secret. In putting her simple question she had forgotten that ‘in trouble’ might have for Hilda a quite specific meaning. She had not meant it so, and was suddenly at a loss. She supposed that something in the way of reproof was called for, or at the least an expression of shocked surprise. But neither would come naturally to her lips and she would not force it. As the moment lengthened, another and yet more startling thought flashed into her mind, creating there a numbness, a silence. It was a new thought, yet it linked up with a number of tiny earlier impressions, too slight to be noticed separately. It suddenly completed a structure, a pattern, which she had been utterly unaware of building. The thing was probable; it was obvious. But she said to her heart not so fast not so fast, forcing herself to recognize that it might not be true.
It could not be true. And yet …
A half-stifled noise came from Hilda at the sink. She was crying, crying and sniffing and vigorously rattling the crocks in her basin. That big girl crying: it was an awkward and unlovely sight, but Ann, because she had always liked her, was touched.
‘Don’t worry, Hilda.’ And what else? ‘Let’s hope for the best,’ Ann said lamely, knowing neither quite what she meant, nor what she was willing to imply.
Her thoughts rioting, she could say no more, but turned away and went slowly back to her fireside chair. It pleased her nowadays to sit in the kitchen, within sight and touch of the things that belonged to her peace, the simple familiar things that spoke of her life with Matthew. The aged oak dresser that he had bought for her at a sale, the gleaming kitchen crockery, the best blue china, the custard glasses, the pewter, the large silver ladle: these could be taken in at one comfortable glance. She had scolded him for extravagance when she heard what the dresser had cost him, but it was specially for her, and the extravagance that shocked her careful soul had at the same time delighted her. On the mantelshelf, above the smart kitchen range she had had fixed in the ancient brick hearth, was a row of squat wooden canisters, each bearing the name of its contents: rice, sugar, tea, coffee, sage, and the rest. The big bread bin and the flour bin dated from earlier times; and so did the grandfather clock and the great iron hooks in the cross-beam from which bacon used to be hung. But they were all hers and all dear to her. Her eyes ran over them gratefully.
She did not sit quiet for long. The silence in her had given place to a murmuring activity. Thoughts too many and too strange for articulation buzzed in her ears. They frightened and bewildered her. They threatened the very centre of her life. What a bad wife I must be to be believing such a thing, she said. And the next minute: but what if it’s true? But a voice from the depths of her being, a quietly insistent voice, was saying something else, was saying that whatever he had done he was Matthew, her husband, a good husband, the best of husbands, a husband to whose faithfulness, whatever he had done, she owed her life. He had wanted her to live when she could so willingly and wearily have died. With that wanting he had sustained and comforted her. He had been with her, whatever he had done, in the valley of that shadow, a strong abiding presence. He had always, whatever he had done, been kind to her, more than kind. Kinder than ever since her homecoming, though of late moody and sometimes abstracted. When he sat with her, and yet was absent, what did that mean? She shuddered away from a possible answer, a possible and all too plausible answer, and rested in the arms of her idea of him, of his goodness. What mattered, she suddenly felt, was not what he did or had done, but what he was; and she knew in every fibre of her being, with a long-matured knowledge, that what he was was good. Pictures rose in her mind which, if she looked at them, would unseat her reason. Yet look she must and did, steadily, with pain, but without ultimate disaster. The conjured fantasy had done its worst and she was still alive. She could look at it and see through it. It was nothing, or almost nothing. It was of no importance. Poor Matthew, she said. Of course. Why not? All that dreary, dreary time. Why, of course!
But her heart answered: what of me, now?
She rose from her chair and went through into the sitting-room in search of a book. A new and astonishing notion had come into her mind. She was not what they called a religious woman. She went to church, when she ha
d time, as a matter of habit and social custom. If she had had children she would have taught them to say their prayers, and in the long ordeal of her illness she had learned things about prayer unknown to her before. But she was not, in the conventional sense, religious. It was years, for example, since she had opened a Bible. Yet she took it for granted that the Bible was what they said it was, a special and a holy thing and somehow (never mind quite how) the ‘Word of God’. She did not doubt that if it spoke to her it would speak with authority.
She found a Bible and began searching its pages. She was looking however, not for a magic ‘message’ that should speak to her condition, but for something specific, a story she remembered or half-remembered from Sunday School days. She judged that it would take a lot of finding, and quite suddenly a great tiredness descended on her, so that it was all she could do to drag herself back, book in hand, to the warmth of the kitchen and the support of her chair. Hilda was there, looking herself again. Hilda’s storm had passed: the question she had dreaded had not been put to her, and she believed she had betrayed nothing. Ann, grateful for the return to normal, thought she detected some effort behind it. But to herself, perplexed though she was, it needed strangely little effort to treat Hilda as if nothing had happened. If what she fancied, if what she half dreaded and half hoped, should prove to be true, Hilda must become an object of burning interest to her. But not now. Not yet. She put all that aside and sat turning the leaves of her Bible.
There’s nothing in it, it’s all my fancy, she said, when Matthew stamped into the kitchen, very ready for his tea. That was the line she had decided to take with herself. Behave as if one knew nothing, suspected nothing. Behave as if nothing had happened. And believe so too. All I want is a little time, she said. A little time to myself to be quiet in, to get upsides with everything. With everything, no matter what.
It was high tea, high and late: the last meal of the day except for the hunk of bread and cheese he would cut for himself before bed and probably eat standing, letting the crumbs fall anywhere, as men would. The lamp was lit and the curtains drawn. The kitchen was very warm and snug.
‘Well, Nanny, how d’ you feel this evening?’
Calling her Nanny was a private joke between them. Her part in the game was to pretend to take offence and put on a sulky look. But tonight she could not respond. She could see that there was something on his mind and was hurt that he chose that way of hiding his preoccupation.
For the first few minutes he was talkative and persistent, unlike himself. To Ann’s sharpened perception his remarks sounded rehearsed. Soon he lapsed into an equally restless silence. He picked up the current issue of the Farmer and Stockbreeder and turned over its pages, glancing idly from column to column. She knew he was elsewhere. When he read a book that interested him he became dead to the world: it was one of her little grievances. He had to be shaken, sometimes, before he could attend to other things. But now, when Hilda came into the room carrying a second lamp, he needed no shaking. Ann could not help observing that he was at once aware of her entry.
Never mind, she told herself. I mustn’t think about it.
‘While I think of it,’ said Matthew. Ann wondered which of them he was speaking to. ‘While I think of it, Ann. If I ‘ma bit late to bed, don’t worry, there’s a good girl. Take one of your tablets.’
‘What is it? That wretched book-keeping again?’
‘That sort of thing,’ said Matthew.
She looked at him, puzzled, anxious not to ask too many questions.
‘You won’t be going out again, will you?’
Supposing he was, what was there to be afraid of? Yet afraid she was.
He hesitated. His answer hung fire. ‘Shouldn’t think so. Still, you never know.’ He laughed, trying to laugh the subject away. ‘Might do a bit of rat-shooting, last thing.’
For the fraction of a second his eyes rested on Hilda, who (Ann noticed) was conscious of the glance but did not meet it.
§ 11
AFTER both women had gone to bed Matthew got out of his chair, fetched his gun from the gun-rack in the kitchen, and went cautiously out of the house. The sky was a dull silver, neither clear nor very dark. A dim diffused light hovered in the quiet fields. Leaving by the front door he hurried down the road, keeping to the grass verge. Though there was plenty of time in hand, he hurried. Though the world about him seemed empty, and the chance of his being heard was remote, he muffled his footsteps in the grass. The hurry was in his blood and the stealth was in his heart. His coming out into the road was itself reasonless, the expression of an instinct to get away from the house. To get away from the house in order to get back to the house. To approach the invisible event from outside, and take his enemy by surprise.
Two hundred yards down the road he turned left, broke into one of his own fields, and so made his circuitous way back towards home. He was approaching the back of the house, where Hilda’s room was, that attic room in which almost by inadvertence he had become her lover, and where in times more placid she had so often fallen asleep with the pleasant noise of the great beech in her ears. The tree stood in a plat of rough grass, a kind of no man’s land, neither garden nor field, kept in reasonable trim by occasional scything. It merged eventually, twenty yards or more from the house, into a region of fruit bushes, which itself merged into a section of close-planted orchard. The orchard afforded good cover for a careful man, and Matthew took his stand in a shadowed corner, from which he commanded a view of every approach. His visitor had two alternatives: to enter by the front gate and make his way round to the back in the shadow of the house, or to enter by way of the farmyard and come up past the pigsties along a narrow cobbled path ending at the wash-house. Whichever he chose he would be visible to Matthew, and Matthew invisible to him.
In the last twenty-four hours Matthew had done much thinking, and much shying away from his thoughts. He felt like a man in the grip of an alien destiny, forced to act out of character, forced to transcend his amiable limitations and do violence to his nature. The chatter in his mind proceeded not logically but by fits and starts, moved not from thought to thought, from premiss to conclusion, but haphazard, in a region of half-fantasy. Yet it had a curious slipshod logic of its own. It was consistent with an unconscious imperative. At moments, in the night, he would break into a cold sweat, but discovered by experiment that by taking one thing at a time, by refusing to look too far ahead, a certain control could be maintained. Mental excitement alternated with empty-minded exhaustion. The excitement was generated by a game of pretence he was playing with himself; exhaustion was the brake, the resistant will, the reluctance to translate pretence into action or even to admit that it could be so translated. That something must be done was abundantly evident; but precisely what he did not clearly know, though he had certain ideas and at least the beginning of a plan. The tree: he could not in his thinking get away from that tree. The tall, vigorous, beautiful tree which Caidster, in talk if not otherwise, had so grossly fouled. He had given no conscious thought to that tree for years, but it had always been there, part of the place, in a sense part of himself, and now it was as if an old friend had been slandered by venomous tongues, besmirched by an evil association. That friend must be vindicated, that dirt rubbed out. Though he was very clear that whatever he undertook would be for Ann’s sake, Ann’s and no other, the tree too cried out to him. The tree and the spying (whether true or not) were the very head and front of the offence, as well as of the menace it portended: greedy, gloating, malignant eyes, spying out his pleasant sin, making of beauty and pleasure a feast of offal, a rat’s dinner. His enemy was no longer human, was scarcely animal, was merely a diabolical intelligence undermining his peace, sapping his spirit, working his ruin and desolation. He had promised Hilda to give Caidster the fright of his life. That was the root-assumption of his plan with her, and that he would do. That at least.
He gripped his gun firmly and stood rigid, waiting. The night was quiet, with little wind. The
moon was in her first quarter and there was frost in the air. Now that his eyes had become accustomed to the dim light he could see things with a surprising clarity. The moon emerging from a cloud, he could see, where her light fell, the back door, the small back-kitchen window, and high above, in the gable, the window of Hilda’s room. On the blind middle part of the wall, for there were no bedroom windows but Hilda’s looking this way, he could see the pattern of the brickwork and the minute shadows cast by surface irregularities. And he could see, from his lurking-place, the many-branched tree, like a personal presence majestic in its silence, standing alone. He saw, but without feeling, that it was invested with strangeness and a new beauty, had become a creature compounded of moonlight and shadow. Its very stillness, which the small stir of the leaves only emphasized, was somehow mysterious and urgent. Yet, sharply aware though he was of the tree and its strangeness, he could spare it no attention in his mind beyond noting that it was there, where he wanted it.
He was in good time. The waiting seemed endless. He began to feel cold, with a coldness which, creeping slowly up his limbs from the ground, seemed at last to reach his very brain, so that after a while he no longer believed that Caidster would come, would walk obligingly into the trap prepared for him. Hilda had said that he would, but she could not have been quite sure of that. No one could be sure of anything. The man had argued a little about the place of appointment: he would have preferred (but did not tell her so) the barn where for some time now he had been spending his nights, the warm barn where the interview could be conducted in the style he favoured, and without any tedious persuasive preamble. He had argued a little, but Hilda, with an air of take it or leave it, had stuck to her point. The tree was her fancy, she said: it was that or nothing: he could please himself. Matthew, running over in his mind the little she had told him of those exchanges, could not believe that Caidster would come. He pulled out his watch, the old plump silver watch that had been his father’s, but could not read it without stepping a few inches out of cover. Before doing that he stared with great intentness in the directions from which Caidster would come, if come he did. Noting the time he slipped the watch back in his pocket. He felt dispirited, frustrated, desperate. What he was doing seemed unreal, a silly ugly game. In the far distance a dog began barking. Very far away the barking was. It was like the noise of tearing silk. But presently another and nearer dog took it up, and Matthew felt that in a moment the whole countryside would be awake. He cocked his ear towards the small wind and thought he could hear sounds of restless movement in the cowsheds and stables of his own yard. He thought he heard the sound of boots on cobblestones. He stood tense with listening. But now he could hear nothing significant. It must have been fancy. Then, in the shadow of the wash-house, he fancied there was something moving. While he stared the movement stopped. But there was something there, something in the shape of a man, crouching in the shadow. In shadow it was, and crouching, but every second that passed made it more visible.
The Elderbrook Brothers Page 28
