A Judgement in Stone (11 page)

Pheasants were plentiful, and from the kitchen window, then from the kitchen garden where she went to cut a cabbage, Eunice watched the three of them bag four brace and a hen bird. A brace for the Jameson-Kerrs, a brace each for Peter and Paula, the remaining birds for Lowfield Hall. Eunice wondered how long the bloodied bundles of feathers were to be hung in the back kitchen before she had the pleasure of tasting this hitherto
unknown flesh. But she wasn’t going to ask, not she. A week later Jacqueline roasted them, and as Eunice tucked into the thick slice of breast on her plate, three little round pellets of shot rolled out into the gravy.

The shopping was always done by Jacqueline, or a list phoned by Jacqueline to a Stantwich store and the goods later collected by George. It was a chronic source of anxiety to Eunice that one day she might be called on to phone that list, and one Tuesday in late September this happened.

The phone rang at eight in the morning. It was Lady Royston to say that she had fallen, thought she had broken her arm, and could Jacqueline drive her to hospital in Colchester? Sir Robert had taken one car, her son the other, and then, having taken it into her head to begin picking the apple crop at the early hour of seven-thirty, she had climbed the ladder and slipped on a broken rung.

The Coverdales were still at breakfast. “Poor darling Jessica,” said Jacqueline, “she sounded in such pain. I’ll get over there straight away. The shopping list’s ready, George, so Miss Parchman can phone it through when the shop opens, and then perhaps you’ll be an angel and pick it up?”

George and Giles finished their breakfast in a silence broken only by George’s remarking, in the interest of being a good stepfather, that such a brilliant start to the day could only indicate rain later. Giles, who was thinking about an advertisement he had seen in
Time Out
asking for a tenth passenger in a mini-bus to Poona, said “Could it?” and he didn’t know anything about meteorology. Eunice came in to clear the table.

“My wife’s had to go out on an errand of mercy,” said George, made pompous by Eunice’s forbidding presence, “so perhaps you’ll be good enough to get on to this number and order what’s on the list.”

“Yes, sir,” said Eunice automatically.

“Ready in five minutes, Giles? Give it till after nine-thirty, will you, Miss Parchman? These shops don’t keep the early hours they did in our young days.”

Eunice stared at the list. She could read the phone number and that was about all. By now George had disappeared to get the Mercedes out. Giles was upstairs. Melinda was spending the last week of her holiday with a friend in Lowestoft. The beginning of a panic stirring, Eunice thought of asking Giles to read the list to her—one reading would be enough for her memory—on the grounds that her glasses were somewhere up at the top of the house. But the excuse was too feeble as she had an hour in which to fetch those glasses herself, and now, anyway, Giles was crossing the hall in his vague sleepwalking way, leaving the house, slamming the front door behind him. In despair, she sat down in the kitchen among the dirty dishes.

All her efforts went into rousing some spark out of that atrophied organ, her imagination. By now an inventive woman would have found ways of combating the problem. She would have said she had broken her reading glasses (and trodden on them to prove it) or feigned illness or fabricated a summons to London to the bedside of a sick relative. Eunice could only think of actually taking the list to the Stantwich store and handing the list to the manager. But how to get there? She knew there was a bus, but not where it stopped, only that the stop was two miles distant; not when it ran or where precisely it went or even where the shop was. Presently habit compelled her to stack the dishes in the washer, wipe clean the surfaces, go upstairs to make the beds and gaze sullenly at Giles’s Quote of the Month, which would have had a peculiarly ironical application to herself had she been able to understand it. Nine-fifteen. Eva Baalham didn’t come on Tuesdays, the milkman had already been. Not that Eunice would have dared expose herself by asking for enlightenment from these people. She would have to tell Jacqueline that she had forgotten to phone, and if Jacqueline came back in time to do it herself … She glanced up again at the cork wall, and then into her mind came a clear picture of having stood just here with Joan Smith.

Joan Smith.

No very lucid plan had formed. Eunice was just as anxious for Joan Smith not to know her secret as for Eva or the milkman or
Jacqueline not to know it. But Joan too had a grocer’s shop, and once the list was in her hands, there might be a way. She put her best hand-knitted cardigan on over her pink cotton frock and set off for Greeving.

“Long time no see,” said Joan, sparkling. “You are a stranger! This is Norman, my better half. Norm, this is Miss Parchman from the Hall I was telling you about.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Norman Smith from behind his grille. Enclosed by bars, he had the look of some gloomy ruminant animal, a goat or llama perhaps, which has too long been in captivity to recall its freedom but still frets dully within its cage. His face was wedge-shaped, white and bony, his hair sandy grey. As if he were sustaining the cud-chewing image, he munched spearmint all day long. This was because Joan said he had bad breath.

“Now to what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?” said Joan. “Don’t tell me Mrs. Coverdale’s going to patronise our humble abode at last. That
would
be a red-letter day.”

“I’ve got this list.” Looking vaguely about her at the shelves, Eunice thrust the list at Joan.

“Let me see. We
have
got the plain flour and the oats, that I do know. But, my goodness, kidney beans and basil leaves and garlic!” The bad shopkeeper’s excuse came to Joan’s aid. “We’re waiting for them to come in,” she said. “But, I tell you what, you read it out and I’ll check what we do have.”

“No, you read it. I’ll check.”

“There’s me being tactless again! Ought to remember your eye trouble, didn’t I? Here goes, then.”

Eunice, checking and finding only two items available, knew that she was saved, for Joan read the list out in a clear slow voice. It was enough. She bought the flour and the oats, which would have to be hidden, would have to be paid for out of her own money, but what did that matter? A warm feeling for Joan, who had saved her again, welled in Eunice. Dimly she remembered feeling something like this long ago, ages ago, for her mother before Mrs. Parchman became ill and dependent. Yes,
she would have the cup of tea Joan was offering, and take the weight off her feet for ten minutes.

“You’ll just have to phone that Stantwich place,” said Joan, who thought she saw it all, that Eunice had come to the village store off her own bat. “Use our phone, go on. Here’s your list. Got your glasses?”

Eunice had. The ones with the tortoise-shell frames. While Joan bustled about with the teacups she made her call, almost dizzy with happiness. Appearing to read aloud what she in fact remembered brought her a pleasure comparable to, but greater than, the pride of a traveller who has one idiomatic French phrase and chances to bring it out successfully at the right time without evoking from his listener a single question. Seldom did it happen to her to
prove
she could read. And, putting the phone down, she felt towards Joan the way we do feel towards those in whose hearing we have demonstrated our prowess in the field where we least possess it—warm, prideful, superior yet modest, ready to be expansive. She praised the “lovely old room,” ignoring its untidy near squalor, and she was moved so far as to compliment Joan on her hair, her floral dress, and the quality of her chocolate biscuits.

“Fancy them expecting you to hump all that lot back,” said Joan, who knew they hadn’t. “Well, they say he’s a hard man, reaping where he has not sown and gathering where he has not stored. I’ll run you home, shall I?”

“I’d be putting you out.”

“Not at all. My pleasure.” Joan marched Eunice through the shop, ignoring her husband, who was peering disconsolately inside a sack as into a nosebag. The old green van started after some heavy manipulation with the choke and kicks at the accelerator. “Home, James, and don’t spare the horses!”

The van coughed its way up the lane. Joan took Eunice to the front door of Lowfield Hall. “Now, one good turn deserves another, and I’ve got a little book here I want you to read.” She produced a tract entitled
God Wants You for a Wise Man
. “And you’ll pop along to our next meeting with me, won’t you? Sunday
night. I won’t call for you, but you be in the lane at half five and I’ll pick you up. Okay?”

“All right,” said Eunice.

“Oh, you’ll love it. We don’t have a prayer book like those church people, just singing and love and uttering what comes into our hearts. And then there’s tea and a chat with the brethren. God wants us to be joyful, my dear, when we have given our all to Him. But for those who deny Him there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Did you knit your cardigan yourself? I think it’s smashing. Don’t forget your flour and your oats.”

Well content, Joan drove back to Norman and the store. It might seem that she had nothing to gain from friendship with Eunice Parchman, but in fact she was badly in need of a satellite in the village. Norman had become a cipher, not much more than a shell of a man, since his wife’s revelations of what his early married life had truly been. They hardly spoke these days, and Joan had given up pretending to her acquaintances that they were an ideal couple. Indeed, she told everyone that Norman was her cross, though one that it was her duty as his wife to bear, but that he had turned his back on God and so could be no companion for such as she. God was displeased with him. Therefore she, as His handmaid, must concur in that displeasure. These pronouncements, made publicly along with others implying that Joan had the infallibility of God’s personal assistant, had put off such Higgses, Baalhams, and Newsteads as might have become her friends. People said good morning to her but otherwise ostracised her. They thought she was mad, as she probably was even then.

She saw Eunice as malleable and green. And also, to do her justice, as a lost sheep who might be brought to the Colchester fold. It would be a triumph for her, and pleasant, to have a faithful admiring attendant to introduce to the Epiphany People and be seen by unregenerate Greeving as her special pal.

Eunice, flushed with success, turned out the morning room, and was actually washing down its ivory-painted walls when Jacqueline came back.

“Heavens, what a rush! Poor Lady Royston’s got a multiple fracture of her left arm. Spring cleaning in September? You’re an indefatigable worker, Miss Parchman. I hardly like to ask if you saw to my shopping list.”

“Oh yes, madam. Mr. Coverdale will pick it up at five.”

“That’s marvellous. And now I’m going to have an enormous sherry before my lunch. Why don’t you have a break and join me?”

But this Eunice refused. Apart from a rare glass of wine at a relative’s wedding or funeral, she had never tasted alcohol. This was one of the few things she had in common with Joan Smith who, though fond enough of a gin or a Guinness in her Shepherds Bush days, had eschewed liquor on signing the Epiphany pledge.

God Wants You for a Wise Man
necessarily remained unread, but Eunice went to the meeting where no one expected her to read anything. She enjoyed the ride in Joan’s van, the singing and the tea, and by the time they were back in Greeving a date had been made for her to have supper with the Smiths on Wednesday, and they were Joan and Eunice to each other. They were friends. In the sterile existence of Eunice Parchman, Mrs. Samson and Annie Cole had a successor.

Melinda went back to college, George shot more pheasants, Jacqueline planted bulbs and trimmed the shrubs and cheered up Lady Royston, Giles learned gloomily that the tenth place in the bus to Poona had been filled. Leaves turned from dark green to bleached gold, the apples were all gathered and the cob nuts ripened. The cuckoo had long gone, and now the swallows and the flycatchers departed for the south.

On Greeving Green the hunt met and rode down the lane to kill two hours later in Marleigh Wood.

“Good morning, Master,” said George at his gate to Sir Robert Royston, George who would call him Bob at any other time.

And “Good morning, sir,” said Bob in his pink coat and hard hat.

October, with its false summer, its warm sadness, mists and mellow fruitfulness and sunshine turning to gold the haze that lingered over the river Beal.

Melinda would have learned that when Eunice went out, as she now frequently did, it was to visit Joan Smith, and that when she set off in the dusk on Sunday evenings the Smiths’ van was waiting for her at the end of the drive. But Melinda was back at college and had returned to her father’s house only once in the month since her departure. And on that one occasion she had been very quiet and preoccupied for her, not going out but playing records or sitting silent and deep in thought. For Melinda had fallen in love.

So although every inhabitant of Greeving who was not an infant or senile followed with close interest the Parchman-Smith alliance, the Coverdales knew nothing about it. Often they didn’t know that Eunice wasn’t in the house, so unobtrusive was she when there. Nor did they know that when they went out Joan Smith came in and passed many a pleasant evening with Eunice, drinking tea and watching television on the top floor. Giles, of course, was invariably in. But they took care not to speak on the stairs, the thick carpet muffled the sound of an extra set of footsteps, and they passed unseen and unheard by him into Eunice’s bedroom where the incessant drone of the television masked the murmur of their voices.

And yet that friendship would have foundered in its earliest days had Eunice had her way. The warmth she felt for Joan cooled when her delight over the deciphering of the shopping list subsided, and she began to look on Joan, as she had always looked on most people, as someone to be used. Not to be blackmailed
for money this time, but rather to be placed in her power as Annie Cole had been, so that she could always be relied on as an interpreter and trusted not to divulge her secret if she discovered it.