A Winter's Child (28 page)

She knew quite well that she was hallucinating. She also knew that it was neither uncommon nor particularly serious and that it would pass. On the last afternoon she had spent with Paul he had seen, very clearly, walking down a street in Boulogne, a man he knew to have been two years in his grave. Almost every soldier she had nursed with more than six months'service at the front had suffered delusions equally alarming and bizarre. Resurrected comrades had abounded in France. Ghosts had walked everywhere. Shell-shocked minds – and every man or woman, who had been exposed to months of constant fear remained in some degree of shock – had seen corpses piled up at suburban English street corners where none existed, had thrown themselves flat on the ground, when on leave in English gardens, at the sound of a popping cork, had turned sick at the faint hiss of domestic gas.

Her case was no different. She knew these yellowing phantoms existed only in her mind. Yet that did not prevent her mind from recoiling, cringing from them in horror, her senses dissolving in a panic far beyond her control so that the whole room began first to sway and then to heave, hurtling her with brutal precision towards the plaque and its empty frieze and then back again down some tunnel of the mind where, for a moment of pure terror, she saw herself shrinking into rapid oblivion.

She knew she was about to faint. Slipping her hands inside her sleeves she dug savage fingers with their pointed nails into her arms. It made no difference. She was falling, face down she thought, into that odour of gas and corruption and chrysanthemums until Benedict Swanfield put out an arm to bar her way and she sank instead into the shadow she had always sensed around him, where she remained, captive but safe, adapting her frantic breathing, her racing pulse to the steady rate of his, her still precariously balanced mind taking refuge in his logic, his cold realism, his power.

More clerical words were spoken. Another prayer. Another hymn. The heavy hothouse fragrance of chrysanthemums became, not pleasant, but innocent again. Her vision cleared. The festering giants shambled away, not far perhaps, but out of her sight. Sanity returned so gradually, so easily, that, once the hallucination had gone, it seemed of little importance, a matter to be shrugged off as she remembered Paul – and others – had always done.

‘Christ – I see corpses walking sometimes. Doesn't everybody?'

Benedict released her.

‘Thank you,' she said. And, as if in answer to her unspoken plea that nothing more should be made of it, he nodded and turned his attention to the congregation, now dispersing.

‘Are you all right?' hissed Dorothy from behind her, moved by her daughter's collapse yet not quite certain what the Swanfields would make of it.

‘Come dear,' murmured Miriam, intending to make nothing of it at all, rather more concerned with Polly who having started to cry did not seem able to stop. ‘You and I must do our duty.' And while Polly, her face white and drowning, was led away to the boardroom by Toby, Miriam moved forward to greet her fellow mourners, enquiring from every young woman the names and ages of her children, from every older woman the exact state of her health, even asking the occupations of the obviously single girls at the back; information to which, no matter how warmly maternal her manner, she barely listened and promptly forgot.

Claire followed her.

‘I'm so pleased you could come,' she murmured almost inaudibly, speaking the words in order to say something, meeting decency, curiosity, one or two faces that had remained stunned by sorrow, one or two pairs of resentful eyes, a pair-of sharp ones which took in, at a glance, the value of Miriam's furs and Nola's rings.

‘You were a nurse in France then, Mrs Swanfield, were you?' But it was no more than politeness, a safe topic rehearsed beforehand, and she knew they did not listen to her reply.

‘Dreadful about young Mr Jeremy,' somebody mentioned.

‘We have all of us suffered the same loss,' said Miriam gently and – at that moment – sincerely.

The band began to play, a signal which obliged Toby Hartwell to leave Polly to her own devices while he, as official master of ceremonies, organized the distribution of tea, souvenir medals and cakes. Miriam, who had been prevented only by the bleak November weather from opening her garden to ‘her workpeople', smiled, made one of her expansive gestures bidding everyone to eat their fill. Polly, rather more terrified of solitude than of sudden death, appeared dry-eyed but very pale, a little girl again quite lost inside her smart, grown-up coat, overwhelmed by her elaborate hat, her sapphire blue eyes peering timidly from beneath the brim, still looking, perhaps, for her father and finding no substitute. Eunice continued to do her duty behind the teacups, one watchful eye on Toby, her mind's eye probing fretfully in the supposed direction of her sons. Nola, in a spirit of pure provocation, had summoned all three clergymen into a corner where she proceeded to amuse herself by asking the very questions that they would have preferred not to answer.

‘Explain to me the differences in your creeds. Why do you think you are right and he is wrong? What is your position on divorce, illegitimacy, the afterlife, the social position of women? And, since we are all adults and have heard of Marie Stopes, what about birth control?'

Claire, half listening, half smiling, produced with deceptive ease the polite phrases her upbringing had taught her and then, when they had been adequately delivered, moved away. And although she remained calm and quiet in her manner, her face serene, she knew herself to be in urgent need, enormous need – of what? Release. That was the word her mind offered, repeated, retained. Yet, what form it might take she had no notion. She had simply fallen – fallen deep and hard – into a state of extreme restlessness, fine-strung tension, churningunease, the state, encountered in dreams, of knowing she must set off on a journey at once, that it was vital, essential, could not wait, that she must hurry – hurry not a moment to lose. Run. Catch that train.
Listen
to the ticking of that clock. Go now. But where? For what purpose?

‘Have you seen over the mill?' asked Benedict offering her – could it be intentionally? – the respite she needed.

Yes. One afternoon, long ago, in her first trance of adoration for the knight-errant Jeremy, he had brought her on a grand tour of the Swanfield Mills, almost as ignorant as she was herself of the processes by which his family's fortune had been made. And she had walked shyly beside him, still grateful to him for wanting her, not wishing to put herself forward or appear bold, trying to look serious, intelligent,
worthy;
on her best behaviour, in fact, as her mother had told her. But her mother had also warned her to be pleasant to everyone, to make a universally good impression, and so she had smiled bravely and equally at every corner of the weaving-shed, trying not to recoil at the sour odours of raw wool and engine grease, the ferocious clatter of power-looms, the dangers of straps and picking-sticks breaking loose; had watched, with more obedience than delight, the sharp-ended, lethally-pointed shuttles flying back and forth the length of every loom, tended by scantily clad women who held voiceless conversations all day long, reading each other's lips from one loom-gate to the next.

‘They all go deaf eventually, of course,' Jeremy had casually mentioned. ‘But they can all lip-read so amazingly I suppose it's better than losing an eye. Although that can happen too, of course. Don't stand too near the looms, darling, because those picking-sticks
do
swing loose occasionally – quite hard enough to break an arm. And those shuttles don't always aim straight either. They fly out, sometimes, all over the place and if one happens to be in their way – well, what I said just now about eyes-!'

She had drawn hastily back, the noise of the machinery an assault in itself, lodging inside her eardrums, woven, by those vicious shuttles, into her mind so that even when it had been left far behind for the dignified silence of the burling and mending room, where better-dressed and, in their own view at least, better-class women sat at high tables, correcting faults in the unfinished cloth with meticulous hand stitches, she had heard it still.

But the weaving-shed was silent this November Sunday afternoon as she entered it with Benedict, the shuttles and the picking-sticks which sped them on their way through a web of yarn, no danger to anyone, the looms looking squat, sullen, but inoffensive.

And standing in the acrid silence beneath the grimy, industrial ceiling that, for all its squalor, was as high as a cathedral, they said nothing to each other of the least significance.

He made no reference at all to her distress, her near-collapse, at the unveiling of the plaque.

She did not mention his letter.

He did not mention his brother, nor she her husband.

She did not ask him why he allowed his wife to deceive him, nor why he pretended to be deceived.

Instead she listened, her head on one side, while he explained, crisply, concisely, and one by one, the processes by which the wool, once taken from the sheep's back, was scoured, then – if it was to become worsted cloth – combed into long-fibred ‘tops' and short-fibred ‘nails', or, if it was intended for woollen fabric, carded on rollers, then twisted, spun into yarn, woven into coarse, grey pieces which, having passed the scrutiny of the burling and mending room, would, by the miracles of dyeing and finishing, become camel-hair, cashmere, mohair, high quality gentlemen's suiting, fancy dress goods for ladies, fabric to upholster the seats of motor cars.

‘I have nine hundred looms in here,' he said, ‘which can give me 22,000 yards of cloth a day – if I want it.'

‘Don't you want it?'

‘Only if I can sell it.'

‘But surely –
everybody
wants to buy Yorkshire cloth. Is there any other kind?'

He smiled but not quite in her direction, just a little over her shoulder so that his amusement was not entirely shared, contact not fully made.

‘So we were brought up to believe. So they are still saying – and rather proudly – at the Piece Hall and the Wool Exchange.'

‘Are they wrong?'

‘No. Our product is excellent. But some of our markets are no longer there. Trade with Russia has collapsed since the Revolution. American import tariffs are discouragingly high. Germany has been reduced to bankruptcy and starvation. And as for the rest of Europe, including ourselves … Well, we
do
have a hefty war loan which America can't be blamed for expecting us to repay. We
do
have to look after our returned soldiers and our second army of munitions workers whose services are no longer required, but who have become accustomed to high wages. And if we can't employ them then we'll have to support them on whatever public money we have left, which can't be much when one thinks of the cost of all those shells.'

‘Oh dear. And I thought we were having a boom.'

‘So they say. So we are. The munitions workers still have their savings to spend, and the soldiers their gratuities. But when that's done – and if there's still no work – well, I suppose if the choice should be between paying the rent and buying a Swanfield camel-hair coat, that any sensible man would pay his rent.'

‘So then you wouldn't need your 22,000 yards of cloth a day.'

‘No. Nor the workers to produce it. But don't worry. The trust funds are secure.'

‘That doesn't worry me.'

‘I know. Are you ready to go back now?'

‘Yes.'

But she did not move, feeling an odd reluctance to leave the shelter of this alien machinery, their two voices echoing in the vast, anonymous shed as they played their commonplace, yet so restful, game of question and answer.

‘Do you know how to operate these machines, Benedict?'

‘Of course.'

‘And the spinning-frames in the other shed?'

‘Yes. Why do you ask?'

‘Because Jeremy didn't know how.'

‘I see you remember something about him.'

‘Yes. That much. Shouldn't he have known more?'

‘Why duplicate the same knowledge? I haven't touched a loom for years. But I know how it works and what can go wrong with it, and why. My engineers know that I know, which is the whole point of the exercise. Just as my accountants know that I can read a balance sheet – etcetera –.'

‘Yes. But do you
like
it, Benedict? Is it what you wanted?'

‘Would you like to see the burling room?'

He had not ignored her question, far more than that. He had chosen not to hear it at all, no syllable remaining as he slid open the heavy doors and switched on the lights to give her a better view of the high burling-tables shrouded identically with pieces of grey unfinished cloth.

‘It will all look the same to you,' he said, accepting her ignorance very calmly. ‘But that's a heavy worsted – that's cashmere – that's mohair –'

‘I see,' she said gravely, seeing nothing of the kind.

‘Do you? What else can I show you? Or does your conscience tell you that you ought to be listening to the band?'

She returned, refreshed, she thought, although she did not really know what had refreshed her, to the mill-yard where the band was still valiantly playing and smiled warmly at Miriam, who pretended not to have missed her, and at her mother who all too clearly had.

‘Where on earth have you been?' hissed honest, unwise Dorothy.

‘Come and sit by me, dear,' murmured clever Miriam, ‘and have a buttered scone.'

The afternoon wore on. Confectionery continued to be eaten with the enthusiasm of squirrels hoarding for the winter, a great deal of tea to be drunk. How, Claire wondered, with a twinge of desperation, could it be brought to an end? But quite soon the sky above the bandstand grew heavy with the early November dark, a sugar-induced somnolence spreading itself with the consistency of a treacle tart over the gradually wilting throng. A child, stuffed to capacity, had to be led away in sudden
extremis,
several more began to whimper or look pale, men shuffled their feet, women gathered up scarves and purses and latch keys, averting their eyes in quick distaste from the remaining curd tarts and currant pasties and ginger parkin set out before them; while even the strident music began to curl slightly at its edges like a sandwich left too long on a plate. The time – at last, thought Claire – had come.