“Whatever’s the matter, darling?” he demanded. “Is it the kids? If you feel like that about Oaklands we’ll take them away at the end of term.”
“It’s you,” she sobbed.
“Me?” ejaculated John.
“You’re quite right, I wouldn’t have listened to you. I didn’t listen when you said you didn’t want Margary to go to school today. Why do I always think I know best about everything? It isn’t as though I’d ever brought off a single thing successfully.”
“Surely, many things,” said John gently.
“No,” said Daphne. “Even our marriage is not what you’d hoped it would be.”
She was still sobbing. The roaring behind the study door was now intermittent, but still going on. John felt distracted by so much distress, and puzzled too. Daphne, like Margary, never cried.
“Darling,” he said helplessly, “our marriage is everything I hoped it would be. What is the matter with you?”
“Thinking back over things,” she said breathlessly.
“Then don’t,” he said. “Now stop crying and let’s go and tell the kids you’ve got a sleeve dog for your Chinese coat.”
Chapter 13
It’s Michael who’s made me think back over things,” said Daphne to herself as she bathed Winkle that evening. “Why has he got to turn up like this? Why? Why?”
It did not seem possible that it had only been two days ago that he had opened the drawing-room door and walked in; it seemed more like two weeks. “Keep still, Winkle!” she said a little impatiently, for it was Winkle’s fault that he was staying. Winkle had made a mother of her and it was the mother in her who had seen Michael as a child. What nonsense. He was two years younger than herself, and she was forty, and should be ashamed that after ten years of marriage the reappearance of an old lover should have thrown her completely off her balance. It was both infuriating and humiliating. Why could she not have been let alone to jog along as before?
For she had gone on fairly steadily since she had married John; not very happy, but steady. She had achieved a certain pattern in her life and thoughts, forced it down upon her inner discontent and restlessness, and subconsciously she knew that a changing pattern might mean a changing outlook; and her outlook had not until tonight allowed for the possibility of error in her own judgment. It had been a sustaining outlook, that had kept her well afloat upon the surface of things, and she did not want to lose it.
There is a certain kind of weather which can come in spring with the east wind; blue sky and sunshine, bird song and blossom on the trees, but day after day the same, beautiful but parched, beautiful but going nowhere. Then the wind shifts into the southwest, and a tremor passes over the hard bright world as it waits for the wind and the rain that will break up the old pattern and make a new one holding within it the power of growth.
Daphne felt this same tremor in herself. There was to be change. Michael’s return, the mistake she had made over Oaklands, even the coming of the little dog, had all shaken her. Against her will her outlook was veering like a weathercock. The wind and the rain were coming and she did not know what they would do to her.
“Look at your feet, Winkle!” she cried in exasperation. “Why is it that you look like a coalheaver at the end of every day? What do you do?”
“I just live,” said Winkle serenely. “Living is dirty work, but I like it.”
Her mother paused and looked at her. Winkle was a pleasant sight at any time but at bedtime she was particularly attractive. Bunchy and creased up in the bath she looked like a gloire de dijon rose. Where the sun had not touched her skin it was the pinkish cream color of the inner petals, but her face and neck and fat arms and legs had the golden tinge of the outer ones. The pink of her cheeks, over the gold, was a color so freshly lovely that Daphne’s heart suddenly sang for joy. She laughed and kissed her and forgot her fear.
Winkle in bed and asleep it was time to help Harriet to bed, to get the supper, to shepherd Pat and Margary to bed, to put Baba to bed in her big old work basket beside the stove and then to do the washing up alone because John had been sent for to a dying old man at the far end of the parish. “It would be tonight with all these saucepans,” he had lamented in departing. It was always he who got backache over the saucepans, while Daphne, sitting in the kitchen chair, took the weight off her feet and dried; except when, like yesterday, he forgot to come home to supper.
“What a brute I was about it,” she thought. “Most men, expected to wash up every evening, would forget to come back to supper more nights than they remembered. Would Michael have washed up for his wife?”
Winkle’s robin mug dropped to the floor with a crash and she found herself in tears again; she who never broke anything and never cried. She had always prided herself upon control of thought and attention; John’s woolgathering had always annoyed her. She snatched up the robin remnants and carried them out to the dustbin, and taking the lid off was confronted with the bits of the sugar-bowl that had been missing over the weekend. They were placed as conspicuously as possible upon a pile of tins. . . John. . . Her tears turned to laughter and slightly hysterical she laid her own fragments with his. Then changing her mind she picked all the broken bits out of the bin, carried them to the drawing room and put them away in the sandalwood box in the Chinese cabinet. “They’re not past mending,” she thought. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She went back to the kitchen, finished the washing up and prepared Harriet’s hot milk. It was supposed that if Harriet had a soothing nightcap the last thing it helped her to go to sleep. Harriet disliked hot milk and longed for a cup of tea instead, but she liked to foster illusions about her sleeping. Also it was part of her code in illness to accept whatever was done to her, given to her and said to her in the way of treatments, medicines, food and advice, with equal gratitude, dislike it or not. Illness was admirable training in the creative art of grateful acceptance. Pain accepted was just pain, and heavy, but Harriet believed that pain gladly accepted took wings, went somewhere and did something. She based this belief on her experience of hot milk, which just drunk down lay heavy on the stomach but gratefully accepted settled well. Harriet was not a naturally pious woman, and she was not sentimental. She merely went by results.
“Thank you, dearie,” she said to Daphne, as the cup was put in her hands. “That’ll do me a power of good. Sit down, love. It’s early yet.”
It was generally John who took Harriet her milk and Daphne had a sense of unfamiliarity as she sat down in the little armchair by Harriet’s bed. She lived her life in such a rut of routine that the unusualness of what she was doing was yet another thing to make her feel jolted out of herself. Living as she did in a state of perpetual nervous exhaustion, always driving herself beyond her strength lest the tasks of home and parish accumulate beyond her ability to cope with them, afraid to relax lest she collapse altogether, she had largely lost the power of wonder, and with it the power of looking at familiar things with fresh appreciation. She had not really looked at Harriet’s room, or at Harriet herself, for a long time, but now her shaken thoughts were captured by them.
The furniture was Harriet’s own and had come from her father’s Cornish farm. There was a bow-fronted mahogany chest of drawers with brass handles, and a little swinging mirror with a surface spotted by age on top of it. On one side of the mirror hung a blue crochet hair tidy and on the other a pink heart shaped pincushion with a frill round it. There was a mahogany wardrobe and a small three-cornered washstand that fitted in the corner of the room. Harriet did not like painted walls and her wallpaper was cream with a satin stripe, and had a frieze of rosebuds and forget-me-nots to match the hair tidy and the pincushion. She was much attached to her old-fashioned bedstead and mattress. She did not hold with modern divan beds with no rail at the foot to keep you in; they made her feel she was floating downstream and might at any moment slither over the edge of a waterfall. Nor did s
he like mattresses that could not be persuaded to sink in the middle; you might roll out either side any minute, if you hadn’t already slid over at the bottom. But though Harriet was decided in her preference she was not arbitrary. If John had wanted her to endanger her life in a divan bed she would have done it. If Daphne had wanted her to sleep in a room with plain white walls like a greenhouse or a lavatory she would have done that, but as they gave her her choice in these matters her choice, like her personality, was her own.
Daphne looked at her, dainty and fresh in her snowy shawl and frilled white nightcap, charming and serene. “She’s got something,” she thought. “I wouldn’t know what it was, but something—some sort of wisdom.”
It struck her suddenly that, in the possession of Harriet, so had she. She leaned back and relaxed and through the uncurtained window saw the first stars above the trees.
“You’re wise, Harriet,” she said, and there was appeal in her voice as well as the statement of a fact.
“No,” said Harriet. “I never had no education. If you was to ask me where Buenos Aires was I’d have no idea. Though I feel I don’t care for the place.”
“South America,” said Daphne, smiling. “There’s a big meat-canning factory there.”
“Fancy that,” said Harriet. “I never did hold with tinned things. Nice for that young fellow to be staying with Miss Wentworth.”
Harriet’s abrupt changes of subject could be disconcerting and Daphne was disconcerted. Harriet noticed it. Why was Daphne the way she was, sitting there so quietly, yet unstrung, not like herself? She finished her milk, put her cup down on the bedside table and adjusted her shawl. But she was not feeling as serene as she looked. She felt as though she and Daphne were in a boat together, heading for that waterfall. She fixed her eyes for comfort on the rail at the foot of her bed.
“Did Mrs. Wilmot tell you about him?” asked Daphne.
“Trust Alice Wilmot,” said Harriet. “Got it all out of Jane Prescott. He’s paid his bill at the Wheatsheaf now. Must have borrowed it off Miss Wentworth for he hadn’t paid it when he left. It’s sad so young a chap should have tuberculosis.”
Daphne turned suddenly in her chair. “Harriet, how can Jane Prescott possibly know he has tuberculosis?”
“She’s observant, is Jane. He coughs a bit and keeps his window open. Rain all over the floor on Saturday morning. Miss Wentworth calls him by his Christian name so Jane says he’s likely to be the son of an old friend. Miss Wentworth set him to work in the garden on Saturday but he gave her the slip and went into the library. Jane said the way he handled those dirty old books she was sure he’d kept a secondhand book shop. Now that was a silly thing to do in a place like Manchester. Poring over dirty old books in a town full of dirt and smoke. No wonder it went to his lungs.”
“Manchester?” asked Daphne weakly.
“Jane, she heard him mention Manchester in conversation with Miss Wentworth. He had an old book open in his hands and was talking about the Knight of Manchester. His father, Jane thought. Mayor, perhaps, and knighted at a royal visit. You’ll let him stay, dearie? Summer’s coming on and out in the open he won’t infect the children. Do him a power of good to stay at Belmaray.”
Daphne’s head reeled. The knight of La Mancha. So he still loved Don Quixote. And why was Harriet’s voice so pleading? “What do you mean, Harriet?” she asked.
It was Harriet’s turn to be disconcerted. “I have queer fancies,” she said. “Seeing you out in the garden with him I felt you had it in your heart to send him away. As well as fear for the children you’re a proud woman.”
“What’s my pride got to do with sending him away?” asked Daphne sharply.
Harriet’s hands trembled a little as she fumbled with her shawl. Never in all these years had she spoken a word of criticism of Daphne, either to Daphne herself or to anyone else. What had come over her? “Proud folk separate themselves from others, judging them,” she said at last. “You can’t help it, love, but you’re too critical of John, too critical of the children. To criticize others we must hold them from us, at arm’s length so to speak. And then before you know where you are you’ve pushed them away and you’re the poorer.”
“This time, Harriet, you’re wrong,” said Daphne. “I’m not pushing Michael away. The fool that I am told him to stay.”
“I don’t think you’ll regret it,” said Harriet. “Why should you?”
“I was engaged to him when we were young, Harriet,” said Daphne, and then stopped, aghast at herself. She had not meant to say that to Harriet. She seemed to be passing beyond her own control.
There was a deepening of the kindly lines in Harriet’s face. “Does John know he was not your first fancy?” she asked lightly.
“Yes,” said Daphne, smiling. “But what he does not know is that my first fancy was Michael Stone. And he’s taken a liking to Michael and thinks he can help him—you know what he is—and so I can’t tell him.”
“Why not?” asked Harriet, a twinkle in her eye. “Knowing the poor young chap had been jilted by you, dearie, would surely make John more pitiful-like than ever.”
There was a silence. Daphne’s lips were folded in a hard line and Harriet’s eyes became extremely penetrating.
“I told Michael I wouldn’t,” said Daphne. “He likes John.”
“Ah,” said Harriet, so much in the tone of one who has at last found out the riddle of the universe that Daphne looked up, startled. “Now why, dearie, should you still dislike a young chap who jilted you so many years ago that it’s a wonder you even recognized him?”
“He hasn’t changed,” said Daphne. “And I can’t think one kind thought about him.”
“Fancy that now,” said Harriet. “What are you letting him stay for then?”
“He suddenly seemed such a child. I lost my head.”
“Well, there you are then,” said Harriet. “If you lost your head, you lost it, and no good crying over spilt milk. And you don’t feel emptied of kindness when you’re with children, surely?”
“It was only for the moment that he seemed a child,” said Daphne. “His calculating cruelty, once, was not that of a child.”
The tone of her voice shocked Harriet, but she gave no sign. “Children can be cruel,” she said. “Though not our children. But ours can calculate. Pat wasn’t more than three when she had it all worked out as to when was the best time to go after the sugar. I’d be making the beds and you’d hear the postman and have to go to the door. She knew.”
Daphne smiled. “Harriet, you’ve lived with children all your life. Except for John, who does not count, you don’t know men.”
“Don’t I?” said Harriet. “I’ve dealt with a few in my day. With some, it always helped me to concentrate on their perambulators or their deathbeds. And why should John not count?”
The question shot out with such sharpness that Daphne was taken aback. “You know what I mean, Harriet,” she said weakly.
“I do not,” said Harriet. “Is a man less of a man because he’s learned to hold his tongue? Though mind you, dearie, I think he’s wrong. If John had given as good as he got it might have done you a power of good.”
“I have no idea what you mean, Harriet,” said Daphne coldly, but with two angry spots showing on her cheekbones.
“There are some people,” said Harriet, “who don’t realize what it is they are doing to others until they are paid back in their own coin. But those are not the worst. The worst are those whose unkindness is calculated; as you said, my dear.”
Daphne thought to herself that Harriet’s forthrightness really passed all bounds. But one could not be angry with her, and she mastered her anger and tried to listen.
“I know it says, ‘Do as you would be done by,’ ” said Harriet, “but I’ve known times when ‘Do as you are being done to’ has had such good results you’d be surprised. Of course, lo
ve, John would be shocked to hear me but I’ve never been as good a woman as he thinks I am.”
“Nor have I, Harriet,” said Daphne.
“You’ve been sharp-tongued,” said Harriet, “but you’ve been faithful, you’ve stuck at it. There now, love, you must forgive me! I’ve never been accustomed to speak right out to you this way.”
“That’s all right, Harriet,” said Daphne. “It’s my fault for bothering you with my past.”
“Bothering me!” ejaculated Harriet. “If you think, dearie, that arthritis cripples a woman’s curiosity as well as her body that’s where you make your mistake.”
Daphne leaned back in her chair and thought about Harriet. The old woman’s plain speaking had been very plain but behind it she was aware of Harriet’s love, not only for John and the children but for herself too. Surely that was odd. Harriet idolized John and one would have expected her to be jealous of John’s wife. But she was not. She seemed incapable of jealousy, self-pity, or self-assertion. It struck Daphne suddenly that she was one of those rare people who have ceased to revolve around themselves. That was her special wisdom, the “something” that she had. She had been a children’s nanny and in the children’s world selfish women are soon broken on the wheel. . . Yet how safe had been those nurseries of the big houses when Harriet had been young, how gloriously secure and safe. Perhaps Harriet had never known what it was to be hideously afraid.
“Fear can make you very selfish,” she said slowly.
“It has a lot to answer for,” agreed Harriet. “What you call calculated cruelty has its roots in fear as often as not.”
Daphne smiled. It was obvious that Harriet had been attracted to Michael and would be lynx-eyed for extenuating circumstances. “For my generation all our days have been uneasy when they haven’t been downright terrifying,” she said. “But I don’t think fear that you share with the whole world warps you. It’s personal fears that do that. Michael could not have known those for he was always healthy and successful. I was neither, and I was afraid of failure, and so he was not only the man I wanted but the success I wanted too.”
The Rosemary Tree Page 25
