Mask of Innocence

by Roger Ormerod

  ‘Oh yes...yes. But I was seeing him through a young girl’s eyes. He was the master. We looked up to him — with awe. The real meaning of awful, I suppose. Or would it be awesome?’ She was talking round it, sliding her mind away from the memory.

  ‘But, I gather, he didn’t act the part of the master?’ I asked, leading her on.

  ‘It was all on the surface, you know,’ said Mary to my wife. ‘That’s all I ever saw. And he did think so much of himself. Poor Rowley, so weak and inoffensive, and he tried to act like a Regency...what’s the word?’

  ‘A Regency buck?’ I suggested.

  ‘Oh yes, that’s it.’ Mary smiled at Amelia, who would understand. ‘He used to walk the grounds in his riding breeches and boots, so that he could slap them with his crop. But never a severe word. D’you know what I think, Richard?’

  I shook my head. She was relaxing now, and lowered herself into the creaking chair. ‘How could I guess?’ I asked, when I already had.

  ‘I think, inside, he was a very insecure man,’ Mary went on. ‘No self-confidence. He couldn’t give orders, if you know what I mean. He asked. Will you do this, do that? I never saw him angry. Worried and confused, yes. But never angry. And he always smiled at me. Whenever we met in the house...that smile! “And how are we today?” he would ask. Meaning me. And, “No, no, my girl,” when I gave him one of my curtsies. Mrs Hughes trained us to curtsy. And he’d reach over and put a finger beneath my chin and lift me to my full height, then stand back and say, “A beautiful young woman should stand firm, with pride.” And I could do no more than smile. I was absolutely tongue-tied.’

  Amelia flicked me a quick restraining glance. It was women’s talk. ‘Not the thing to be said by the master to a serving girl, Mary,’ she suggested.

  ‘It wasn’t the normal thing at all,’ Mary murmured. But her eyes were not focused on anything in that room; she was way back in her youth. And her eyes shone. ‘Of course, I was madly in love with him,’ she went on. ‘I’d read all the latest romances, and I knew how it would be. He would snatch me away in his coach-and-four, and we’d fly abroad...all the nonsense that goes through a young girl’s mind. And there was no coach-and-four. There was the Rolls Royce, and Perkins, the chauffeur, and there was no romance in that, and no possibility of Rowland taking me away. I knew that. Knew it. But a young girl lives on her dreams.’

  She was caught in them now. There were no secrets to be restrained.

  ‘Go on,’ Amelia whispered.

  ‘Well...Amelia...it had to come to an end, or a beginning. I saw that in his eyes. “We cannot talk here, in this corridor,” he would say, and he was quite right about that. We could not. I would have been dismissed on the spot if any such...intimacy should have been detected. But he said, “I will arrange something.” And that something was the gamekeeper’s lodge. My own brother’s home! And now, when I look back to it — the risks you take! But I was way beyond thinking about risks. Or if I did, it only increased the thrill of it. There was a word for it. I found it in one of my books. Clandestine, that’s it. I was thrilled, and afraid, and flattered, I suppose, the master wanting me. And this — now I come to remember it, think about it — good heavens, Amelia, this would have been about 1950. We were living in the past. But the whole estate, the Park, it seemed to be in its own little world, cut off from the reality outside. I didn’t care about that...I had my Rowland, my Rowley, my lover.’

  She was breathless, the words having poured from her so fluently, so fast. She was lost in it. Still was, I realised, that sad smile on her face stripping the years from her.

  ‘But Charlie must have known,’ I said. ‘Must have.’

  ‘Oh yes. I realised that. I don’t know what Rowley did — sent him off to a far corner of the estate, I suppose, to feed the grouse, or whatever he was supposed to do with them. With a crackly pound note in his pocket, perhaps. But what did I care about that? I was insanely in love with Rowley.’ She shook her head. ‘And then there was Jennie on the way.’

  ‘That would’ve been a shock,’ murmured Amelia.

  ‘I don’t know...don’t know what it was I felt. Really, I was just a stupid, ignorant girl. I didn’t know what to do. I was frightened and confused, frantically excited...oh, I don’t know. I had these wild dreams, you see, that now he would have to go away with me, take me away, where we could live...together.’

  ‘But nothing’s ever like your dreams,’ said Amelia softly. ‘Poor Mary, you must have felt absolutely lost.’

  There was a silence. Mary seemed unable to go on. Then she said, ‘And suddenly he was a stranger, a man I’d never seen before. I was going to have his child, and he didn’t know what to do about it. And the love went out of his eyes. If that was what it’d been — love. By then, I was becoming doubtful. Had it been love? I’d suddenly grown up, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Amelia softly.

  Mary looked out of the window. ‘He’s been here a long while,’ she commented.

  ‘Pardon?’ I glanced at Amelia, who hadn’t heard the last remark. ‘Joe. He’s been here a long while — and they haven’t come up to see me.’

  At that point I nearly surrendered, nearly called an end to it. Mary so desperately needed her daughter’s happiness, to reach out and touch it, to retrieve a little something from the past.

  ‘They’ll be along, Mary,’ I said. ‘But you haven’t said...is that when you first found the Lady Chatterley in Tessa’s drawer?’

  Amelia turned and stared at me. I shrugged. I couldn’t even try to explain.

  ‘About that time,’ said Mary, her voice now empty of all emotion.

  ‘So the two came together, your reading of bits of Lady Chatterley, and the realisation that you were going to have Rowland’s baby?’

  ‘Yes. Together. Almost. But it took me quite a while to understand what it meant.’

  ‘Until you put it all together,’ I helped her along.

  Mary sighed. ‘Yes, Richard. As you have, I see.’

  And Amelia was looking at me with hard, cold eyes. How dared I link the two!

  But I had by no means put it all together. It was no more than a multiple trickle of background facts, not quite meeting into a single stream of logic.

  ‘Mary,’ I asked her, ‘when did you realise that Jeremy is your brother’s child?’

  Amelia made an explosive sound of protest. I didn’t respond. I was talking intimately with Mary, whose eyes were wild.

  ‘But it’s my secret,’ she whispered. I had stolen it from her.

  ‘It’s a secret that’s become far too obvious, I’m afraid. Your mistress, Mary, had been reliving Lady Chatterley. And she had her own husband’s gamekeeper to pad out the illusion.’

  ‘That’s quite ridiculous, Richard,’ said Mary, but there was no conviction in her voice. ‘What on earth could she have seen in our Charlie?’

  I almost laughed at that, but it would have been inappropriate, even insulting. ‘Mary,’ I said, ‘you might better ask yourself what she saw in Rowland. It was an arranged marriage. She might very well have disliked the partner who’d been chosen for her, right from the day of the marriage. If only because he hadn’t been her choice. And Rowland — what did she see but a weak and ineffectual man, lost in his own futile dreams that he was the squire, the lord of his little Penhavon Park — and unable to live up to it? That’s what she saw in her husband, somebody beneath contempt. And there was Charlie, completely the opposite, uncouth, almost a savage, and you must admit that. She chose him, Mary, probably nearly instructed him to be her lover, simply because he was her dream of what a man should be. To take her and to use her. Old-fashioned language, Mary, but everybody’s living in the past around here. And the union resulted in Jeremy. She would be certain of that — but would Rowland? Would he be sufficiently certain to disavow the child? Would he have been able to assert himself so forcefully? No. I think not.’

  Amelia said sharply, ‘Are you saying that Jeremy can’t inherit the baronetcy, R
ichard? That he isn’t Sir Jeremy?’

  ‘No. I think that’s all right. It’s too late now to dispute it. He’s been accepted all these years as a child of the marriage. It’s too late at this time to do a thing about it.’

  ‘Then why are you making so much of it?’

  I shook my head.

  Amelia was staring at me blankly, coldly. ‘Then how does it affect anything?’ she demanded.

  I said nothing. I nodded towards Mary, whose hands were clasped over her face. She was weeping wildly.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done!’ Amelia cried, anger in her voice, and she rushed to Mary, putting her arms round her. ‘Mary, love, Mary...’

  I waited miserably. I wasn’t wanted around there any more. At last the sobbing ceased. Mary sniffed herself to silence. Then she made a great effort, stiffened her shoulders, and stared straight ahead of her at the opposite wall.

  In the end, she recovered some of her composure. ‘You still don’t really understand, do you, Richard?’ she asked quietly. ‘In some way, you know, I knew Rowley had no resolution in him. I could just about manage to excuse him, that he did so little for me — in the end. Adopting Jennie, that was as far as he would help me. Help, he called it! When she was born. His little girl. Then, he tried, but not much. But her adoption didn’t help me, did it? If he’d tried to help me leave, but with Jennie in my arms, and with somewhere we could live, with a roof over our heads, and a little money to live on...Then, I could’ve forgiven him, and perhaps loved him still. But you see, I’d found that book. That book...’

  ‘You said you were sixteen, Mary, at that time.’

  ‘Yes, Richard.’ Mary was impatient with me now, that I would not listen to what she had to say, only to what I wanted her to hear. ‘When I found the book, I didn’t understand it at first. The pencil notes, they meant nothing to me. And, you see, they were in pencil, and pencil doesn’t fade. At first, I thought they were quite recent. Well...the book was there, in the bedside table. I thought; she must be reading a little every night...and was making notes. But gradually I came to understand. Oh, Amelia, I was so slow, so silly.’

  ‘Just young, Mary. You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘And then, it gradually came to me. The notes must have been written long before. Since before Jeremy’s birth. And all those nods that Charlie gave me, all the winks, all the dirty grins...suddenly they made sense. My wonderful, beautiful mistress had had an affair with my own brother! With Charlie! And Charlie, I knew, had a reputation all round the district. And Lady Theresa Searle had had an affair with him! And Jeremy was the result. You’ve only got to think...the tempers, the unreasonable behaviour. Oh yes, Jeremy was Charlie’s lad. And that meant...’

  She faltered, biting her lip to silence it before it betrayed her. Then she took a deep breath, and sighed heavily. We waited.

  ‘It meant,’ said Mary in a small flat voice, ‘that everything Rowland had whispered in my ear was false, and every touch he’d given me had been unfeelingly given. I was his revenge. He just hadn’t had the courage to face her, his Tessa, face her and charge her with it. He’d smiled and accepted it, and then he’d used me as a kind of...of rebound. There’s a word. I knew it once. Oh yes. Rancour. That’s what he’d used on me, when the object of it was really Tessa. That was what did it for me. That was what upset me most, so that I couldn’t think of anything logically any more for the distress, and couldn’t think of a better thing to do but get away from there — from him — even if I had to leave without Jennie. Even that!’

  Then she buried her face in her hands and wept hysterically.

  Amelia turned and stared directly at me. Could I be blamed for this? I thought not. Mary had volunteered it. But I knew that expression. It meant: leave this to me, and I’ll be having a word with you, later.

  ‘I’ll be a minute,’ I said quietly, and if Amelia saw me pick up the Lady Chatterley, she said nothing, certainly gave no sign of understanding what I intended.

  I closed the door quietly behind me and stood in the corridor, my mind racing. It was difficult to decide how to tackle what I now had to do.

  Then, resolutely, as befitted a big, tough ex-copper, I went along and tapped gently on Tessa’s door.

  She called out, ‘If that’s Richard, please come in.’

  I did so. She was standing at her window, which overlooked the rear of the house, the view embracing the whole, magnificent spread of the valley, the Park that she would share with Geoffrey Russell, which then, apparently, would no longer be a prison.

  She was now in complete control of herself, was even mildly amused at my persistence.

  ‘Somehow, I thought you would be back,’ she said. ‘So now you know the sordid truth. Mary will have told you. Know it, I mean, not guess it.’

  ‘Most of the truth.’

  ‘As she knows it, or as she’s imagined it?’ She nodded to herself. ‘What gems of knowledge has she trusted you with? Tell me, Richard. I can’t wait to hear.’ There was arrogance in that, even contempt.

  It was something of a relief to realise that I was not going to have to force it from her. It was with a touch of dismay that I felt I was going to hear more than I could easily digest, and that she was going to thrust it at me with pride.

  ‘I know now that Jeremy is Charlie Pinson’s son,’ I told her flatly.

  ‘And you’re finding that difficult to accept?’ She spoke derisively, but whether the contempt was for me or for Rowland I couldn’t be certain. ‘What part of it do you find difficult to accept, I wonder? That I could force myself to any sort of intimacy with a foul animal like that?’

  ‘That thought occurred to me.’

  ‘But that was the whole point of the exercise, Richard.’ She lifted her chin. ‘And it was an exercise. An experiment. I had to know that my secret dreams could after all become reality, and that I wouldn’t recoil from them. Recoil! Can you believe it if I tell you I welcomed every physical approach that Charlie, the animal, made to me? Yearned for them — joined him in experimenting in every foul deviation he could conjure up! But no...you could never imagine that. You would’ve needed to know my Rowland first. My Rowland! I’d barely met him before I found myself engaged to marry him. It was such a good match, I was told. Oh dear me, yes. But he was no man, believe me. He was a paltry imitation of a man. Ineffectual, incompetent, impotent. He could face nothing, only retreat to that weak smile of his. His every action, gesture, comment, everything was an apology. He was forever apologising for pretending to be a proper husband.’

  ‘I don’t think I want—’

  ‘D’you imagine that poor creature could have fathered the son I wanted?’

  ‘He fathered Paul.’ I said that very quietly, now praying it should be true.

  ‘Oh yes. But he’d had a bit of practice by then.’ It was delivered like a whiplash, viciously cracking.

  Could she possibly be referring to Mary? Of course not. Paul was two years older than Jennie. No — there must have been another maid before Mary. Or maids. Heavens, I’d better not allow Mary to know that. If it were true, of course.

  ‘But no...’ Tessa was saying. ‘I wanted the son Charles Pinson might give me. With all his multiple faults.’

  ‘And Rowland knew this?’ I asked quietly. ‘Knew that Jeremy was not his own child?’

  ‘I don’t think he had the gumption to realise.’

  Yet poor Mary had been caught up in the middle of it, and she’d had to live with the result of Rowland’s knowledge, his rancour. Oh yes, he had known.

  ‘Of course he knew,’ I said impatiently. ‘Your wonderful animal, Charles Pinson, he would have known, too. D’you imagine that wasn’t what he’d hoped for? Just think what that meant to Charlie — the power it gave him, the confidence. The future Sir Jeremy Searle would be the next baronet, and he was illegitimate. How he would dangle that beneath Rowland’s nose! Almost jeering at him. I’m surprised Rowland didn’t disavow Jeremy. But it gave Charlie something of a lever, powe
r. How he would dangle that beneath Rowland’s nose!’

  ‘As you’ve said,’ she put in sourly.

  ‘Yes, I’ve already said it. Dangle it, and use it for blackmail. On and on, through the years. Until at last, poor Rowland, older now and perhaps a little more confident, would have had to do something about it.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me what happened, Richard? As though I haven’t been here, all the time! Of course I knew Charlie was blackmailing him. A little at a time — which he no doubt drank away or gambled away. But Rowland — tcha! Can you imagine him facing Charlie? Face to face! Never. No guts, that was my husband...’ Her eyes narrowed, a frown traced itself across her brow.

  I wondered what had caused her to pause. To pause and think. I waited.

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ she said at last. ‘We used to go away for a month for the winter sports. Val d’Isère. And Rowland was a skier. Quite expert. He used to take place in the downhill racing. That, surely, must have taken some nerve. Can you understand that? I can’t.’

  ‘Yes. I think I can.’

  ‘Then please explain.’ This was an instruction.

  I shrugged. ‘How can I? Two different kinds of opposition, physical and emotional. Something like that, perhaps.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’ There was impatience now. Was I to blame for her lack of understanding, now and in the past?

  ‘Perhaps he was a man who was concerned about giving offence,’ I suggested. ‘About creating trouble, about the smooth passage of human relationships.’ I watched, but there was no lightening of her fixed distaste. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t explain what I mean. But something does occur to me.’

  ‘Yes?’ She was suspicious.

  ‘A man who’s done downhill racing on skis would surely not break his neck by falling downstairs. His natural reactions would save him.’

  She tilted her head at me, giving me a sour smile. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she said calmly.

  ‘Then how was it, for heaven’s sake?’ How many versions had she kept in reserve?

  Now her smile was delicate, secret, for her own amusement. ‘It was Rowland, at last working himself into a fury. Oh, it was so strange to see that! He was tired of the Mary business being flung at him — not by me, of course — and tired of the Jeremy business being dangled in front of his nose by Charlie. And I knew it was an empty threat, after all these years.’