A Hint of Witchcraft (16 page)

They had met at the airing cupboard. With its doors wide open it faintly warmed the frigid back landing. One could linger there without too much discomfort. Margot had come for a nightdress for her mother. Toria was stacking bed linen: her long arms reached easily to the top shelf.

‘I'm more comfortable, Miss Humbert, than I've been for many a year and I thank God for it.'

Margot murmured that she was glad. Toria's response had discouraged her from asking the direct question she had intended, which seemed on an altogether lower level. Toria's utterances made ordinary remarks seem worse than commonplace. Nevertheless she persisted.

‘How long were you at Miss Burdon's?'

She had been there almost two years and would have stayed longer had it not been for you know what.

‘Another year perhaps,' she added, ‘would have been about enough.'

‘Enough for what?' Margot could not help asking.

‘For the working out of His purpose.'

Her face above the pile of white sheets she held was yellow and worn but her eyes were bright, their whites shone clear. With health – or with the fervid glitter of mania? Did she – or He – plan a similar span of years to be spent at Langland? Margot hesitated to ask, not only from inability to adopt a manner similar to Toria's own but because it might embarrass her, though she doubted whether it was in Toria's nature to be embarrassed. But at that point the postman's knock sent her scurrying downstairs.

It was a few days later that the conversation was resumed, once again at the airing cupboard which was not only warmish but free from class distinctions. Toria rarely appeared in other rooms than the kitchen and then only briefly. Consequently, most of their talk in the winter months took place on landings or in the hall.

‘I wonder what made you choose Ashlaw.' Even as she spoke Margot realised that ‘choose' was the wrong word: Toria had probably been ‘sent' to Ashlaw and to Miss Burdon's in accordance with some obscure divine plan. But Toria's answer was for once straightforward and free of allusions to the Old Testament.

‘I was told that a cleaner was wanted at the shop there.'

A sheet had been carelessly folded; she shook it out. Margot took the other end and they refolded it together.

‘I saw you once or twice from my bedroom window early in the morning. You were in the Dene beside the War Memorial.'

‘Wherever there's a War Memorial I have to read the names.'

That after all was what War Memorials were for; but there it was again, the compulsion to act in an ordained way. Yet Toria did not seem to find the compulsion burdensome. Margot perceived that it would be a support. The sense of being directed gave Toria an enviable detachment from problems that would break the spirit of lesser mortals. Somehow, on her knees for one reason or another, she had kept an independence of spirit, her mind concentrated on the course mapped out for her by a divine Cosmographer.

‘You feel that it's a way of paying respect to the men who died. Or perhaps' – a less public-spirited and more interesting reason occurred to her – ‘you're looking for the name of someone in particular.'

‘Yes.' This time it was pillow-cases. Toria inserted them narrow end first so that two piles could occupy the same shelf.

‘Someone you knew and cared for.'

‘Yes.'

The dead soldier must have been a relative or a sweetheart. But surely in that case she would have known which War Memorial to visit. How many were there? The search for the right one could take a lifetime. Yet if anyone could maintain so hopeless a pilgrimage, Margot felt with conviction that it would be Toria. Nothing would make her waver. She had no ties, no friends, no possessions to undermine her resolution.

‘But you don't know where he lived.'

‘No.'

Margot stepped back as Toria closed the doors of the cupboard. As usual, just as a little progress was being made it was time to part. But Toria did not immediately walk away as she usually did.

‘He promised to come back. He said that nothing but death would make him break his word.'

‘Oh how terribly sad for you!'

Their meeting, Margot thought, may have been as brief as it was poignant: there would be nothing commonplace about it. She imagined a desolate hillside mantled in low cloud and deserted save for two figures emerging from mist to meet face to face for the transfiguring moment. Toria for one would feel that it was destined. Then too soon, almost at once had come the parting: the hand clasp: the embrace? ‘I'll come back,' he must have said. ‘My name is.…' And that was all Toria knew of him?

But it was wrong to be disrespectful. It
was
terribly sad and alas, Toria had over-simplified her plight. Thousands had died un-named, their deaths unrecorded on any memorial. Perhaps, horribly maimed or blinded, he was enduring a living death in hospital or suffering loss of memory. Even if he had been only slightly wounded he would have been unable to get in touch with Toria, especially as circumstances had doomed her to a wandering life of no fixed address. Worse still, his promise might have meant less to him than to Toria. Would she be cheered by such reminders that he might still be alive?

‘Have you ever thought that…?'

But she was walking away. Her tall and angular form with its plaited coronet of black hair had a regal dominance, fully occupying the narrow low-ceilinged corridor. When she came to the end and disappeared down the back stairs, an emptiness could be felt.

‘She's probably imagined the whole thing,' Sarah said. ‘He had no intention of keeping his promise, if he ever existed. I really wonder if she's quite.…' Much as she enjoyed Margot's versions of her encounters with Toria, she wondered if this was a suitable or wholesome influence for her to be subjected to and how long the present unsatisfactory arrangements at the Hall could be allowed to go on. Her own physical weakness made it wearisome to think of all the problems, much less do anything about them, but she did muster strength to help Margot in framing another advertisement for a resident housekeeper to be inserted in a wider range of magazines.

‘We must find someone who would be pleasant company for you, someone who won't irritate your father.'

It was clear to both of them that Toria must stay presumably – as Margot pointed out – until the allotted span of years was complete, if only because neither of them could bring herself to tell her to go. Indeed it was in their own interest to keep her. For Margot, her splendid eccentricity was a welcome diversion, and though she entertained her mother by exaggerating it, she genuinely respected a woman who might have been pitiable yet was strong, dignified and essentially free.

‘The war was responsible for some very strange things,' Sarah said.

‘But that was ages ago.'

‘It seems so to you. You were just a little girl when it ended. But it doesn't seem so to me – or to Toria. Millions of men died. How could things ever be the same again? It was as if the whole world was rocked by an earthquake and people have never settled back in their old places. When I was your age life was so safe and manageable.'

It was as if Toria typified the folk whose lives had been disrupted in the vast upheaval, like the tramps and the down-and-out salesmen who came to the back door with shabby suitcases of dusters and socks and scarves. Many of them were ex-servicemen who had not found jobs when they were demobilized, who had fought and suffered and gained nothing by it, not even their names carved in stone. Margot's heart sank whenever one of them came trudging up the long cart track. Unwanted goods were bought, but it was generally Toria who came to ask if they could be given bread and cheese and a mug of tea. No doubt she acted from fellow feeling – or was it from normal motherly or sisterly warmth? Did the wooden features conceal a natural kindliness? Margot could not be sure. Despite the size of the Hall its atmosphere could be claustrophobic, especially on winter days as twilight deepened and from an unlit corner or a half-open door Toria materialized with a tray or a letter come on the second post, so that in some inexplicable way she seemed to have become part of the place. And sometimes when she came upon Toria and Ewan together she felt like an intruder. They always had something to talk about though neither was by nature talkative. What could it be?

‘You haven't told anyone what you told me?' she had once ventured to ask.

‘Not a soul,' Toria answered gravely, and Margot believed her without ever shaking off the uneasiness she felt when she heard their murmured voices in the unused butler's pantry or in the dairy or in the woodshed.

But both were strong and capable and the help they gave left her free to look after her mother, often with an aching heart as there was no sign of her recovery. Their relationship, always close, grew closer. Its balance had altered: it was her turn to comfort and advise, to wash the feeble body and comb the hair once like her own, now dull and lank. And as the weeks passed and the days lengthened, as snowdrops pierced the greensward of the priory's roofless nave and the blackthorn came into bloom, she looked forward to Easter with both longing and dread: dread of telling Alex what Linden had done: longing to see Miles who would also be coming home.

CHAPTER XIII

In April sunshine the ruined priory lost its air of brooding melancholy, its ancient stones paling to a lighter grey. Passing under the gatehouse arch, Margot found green turf starred with daisies and beyond the northern porch where pastures sloped down to the river, there were primroses. She had already located the path she would take but she had never walked that way. Fortunately the mud that made it impassable all winter had dried. It was the first day of Miles's Easter holiday.

He had written to say that he would walk to Langland through the priory wood. She planned to meet him halfway or at the stone-pit. Overhead, larches were green. It was too soon for bluebells but sunlight through the branches fell on their fresh leaves and picked out glints of gold in her hair. Her face was serious. She was realizing that though there would be much to hear there was much that she was not free to tell. Concealment permeates the mind and puts weight on the tongue. She had unconsciously become guarded and had lost a little of her natural vivacity.

She had Miles's letter in her pocket and took it out more than once to glance at bits she already knew by heart.

‘If you happened to be walking to Bainrigg,' he had written, ‘and I happened to be walking to Langland.…' He had paused, pen in hand, to look down through budding trees at the college garden. It was time for evensong. The bell's measured strokes drifted with strains of organ music on the mild air, bringing the reassurance he constantly needed. A fellow student crossed the green – and then another – to disappear under the cloister arches: timeless figures in an unending procession ages long. ‘We might just happen to meet,' he continued and smiled, picturing her as she would come from the shade of the wood into full daylight; she always walked lightly, head erect. She would call his name, and this time he would take her in his arms at once as he had so often longed to do. There was no need now to wait: she was no longer a child. He had taken the precaution of asking his grandmother how old she was when she married.

‘I was twenty,' she told him. ‘We had been engaged for a year.' Seeing his smile, she had asked, ‘Are you thinking of someone special? It's time you did think of marrying.'

There was that charming girl, she recalled, whom he had brought to Bainrigg one day last summer, such a polite and graceful girl. She had forgotten her name but remembered having met her and her mother once at the Humberts, years ago. Her father had been in the regiment.…

For Miles there was a special appeal in the thought of meeting in priory wood. He was rather glad, despite her disappointment, that Margot would not be coming to Oxford: he wanted her at Bainrigg. The old place had become dear to him on her account. She had kindled his love for it at the very beginning when she had mentioned the surreptitious raids on the bluebells. He liked to think of her among flowers. His was a fleshless, visionary love. It possessed him even in his absence from her, perhaps most powerfully then when uncomplicated by the doubts and fears of actuality and obligations to other people.

He had thought continually of this most important meeting, hoping the day would be fine. Would she come if it rained? Whatever the weather, rain – mist – wind, he would find her, hold her close and pour out all that he had wanted to say and had so long suppressed.

The day was fine and Margot did walk lightly, head in air. Never slouch, Alex had said in the days when for her own good he had licked her into shape – the shape of Tom Merridew, one of the heroes in
Boys' Own Paper,
those dauntless lads unflinchingly preferring death to dishonour. (‘Yielding not an inch, he smote the cobra with his machete. No second blow was needed'.) It had been an uphill task as well as a dismal failure though she could now think with amusement that in one respect she did resemble the gallant fellows. No matter how stormy the sea, how frail their boat, how fierce the mutinous natives, how deadly the snakes, they always survived – and so had she, so far.

It would amuse Miles to hear of these childish ordeals and occasional triumphs. She wondered if he too had read the
Boys' Own Paper.
With luck she would reach the rendezvous before he did. Swerving to avoid a low birch bough she came out into hazy sunshine and a flurry of birds in the hedge, and there on the left were the naked stones of the stone-pit.

She could see across the fields where lambs tottered and leapt, to the path leading down from Bainrigg House and presently a figure appeared at the double iron gates – a man's figure. Happiness warmed her whole being from head to toe. In a few minutes they would be together. But she would go no further; she would wait and let him come to her. He was coming quickly – and running.