A Winter's Child (29 page)

A few more clerical words were spoken, each reverend gentleman avoiding Nola's eyes as he took his turn and then, as a crisp and blessed finale an address by Benedict who, by the simple procedure of thanking everyone for coming, indicated that the entire proceedings should now be considered closed. Miriam, rising slowly to her feet, still fully aware of the graceful picture she made in the midst of those eddying furs, held out both arms to indicate her readiness to shake hands once again with anyone who chose to approach her chair. Dorothy, at a signal from Edward, signalled to Claire that she should do the same. Nola retired to a corner to discuss the fundamental issues of organized religion, the human condition, and Doctor Marie Slopes with the Salvation Army minister, the only one to have stayed her course, his Anglican and Methodist counterparts having tiptoed rather gingerly away. Roger Timms arrived at the precise moment Polly was expecting him and drove off with her in his father's new car. Eunice's second son, Simon, put in a sudden appearance looking jaunty and sheepish, a combination which always meant trouble, and spent a long time whispering in his mother's ear. The bereaved families began to drift homeward in small, quiet groups clutching their medals and souvenirs and bags of leftover buns Toby had made up for the children; some of them to the nearby mill cottages they rented from the Swanfields, others to the tram stop, a long wait in the damp, cold breeze, a long walk over steep cobbles at the end of it.

Glancing at her watch, Claire was amazed to discover the hands standing at four o'clock. Surely it must be later than that? And what now? Hours more, she supposed, of Miriam's company before dinner, savouring and re-savouring every bittersweet drop of the afternoon, and the cosy chat afterwards by the drawing room fireside, reminiscing over the coffee tray. How, without giving offence – without giving hurt – could she escape it? She was immune now – more often than not – to the photograph albums, the locks of hair, the boyhood escapades, even to the moment, once impossible to bear, when the round blue eyes began to brim with tears, the small chin to quiver, the even smaller voice to whisper, ‘If only
you
had had a child – a darling little boy like Jeremy – how wonderful.' But not tonight. Assailed once again by that crashing wave of unease, the panic conviction of an urgent road to travel, a vital task to perform, a frantic sense of haste, speed, of stepping lively, taking wing, of rushing headlong towards no matter what –
whatever
it turned out to be – she knew that tonight Miriam would be a sore trial indeed.

Eunice, having seen to the proper disposal of the tea-urn and the mill china, having even given some instructions about feeding the leftover milk and meat scraps to the mill cats, shepherded her husband and son into their brand-new, still controversial motor car rather quickly, before anyone should enquire of Simon the whereabouts of his brother.

‘Can we give you a lift, Claire?' asked Toby hopefully, seeking to put off what, by the expression on his wife's face, looked like yet another day of reckoning.

‘I hardly think so,' snapped Eunice, flushing scarlet, her rudeness a sure indication of her agony. ‘Mannheim Crescent is out of our way.'

Claire smiled at Toby and shook her head.

‘I suppose you'll be coming home with us,' said Edward Lyall ungraciously, having hoped for an invitation to High Meadows, and turning peevish now that Miriam's withdrawal to ‘powder her nose'for the homeward journey made it seem unlikely.

‘Oh yes,
do
come to Upper Heaton,' said Dorothy sounding much relieved, wanting her daughter's company and grateful, for her part, to be spared the ordeal of Miriam.

How could she refuse? Yet, on the other hand, how could she possibly endure Edward – and an out-of-temper Edward at that – in her present humour? Yet to decline his invitation would upset Dorothy. Therefore she must accept it, endure him as long as she could – not long, she suspected – and then surely, inevitably, annoy him, defy him, bring on an attack of his indigestion, so that Dorothy would be upset just the same.

‘Oh Claire – there you are.' Benedict's voice startled her and then, as she understood its message, utterly dismayed her. ‘Miriam asked me to find you. She is expecting you to drive back with her and have dinner, since Polly is out for the evening. If you'd like to wait over there I'll send Parker when the car is ready.'

He indicated a chair in a deep alcove by a window and she sat down in it meekly, knowing herself to be caught, and watched as he put one hand on Edward's shoulder, the other beneath Dorothy's elbow and led them out into the mill-yard, an attention which was clearly so gratifying to Edward that his temper and Dorothy's prospects of a peaceful evening, seemed much improved. Could Benedict possibly be aware of that, Claire wondered, leaning forward a little to study what she recognized as a cool and very deliberate display of charm? And if so was he being kind, or devious, or simply amusing himself with Edward's deference? Or was it simply that she herself was beginning not precisely to hallucinate again but to drift into some hazy no-man's-land between fact and fantasy, which might well be the prelude to hallucination? Very likely. Too likely. And she must not allow it to happen. She must get up now and go back to Mannheim Crescent alone and at once. Yet the prospect of her own company, her own undivided scrutiny, seemed no less an ordeal. What then? There was Euan who, having ghosts of his own, would not be alarmed by hers. There was Kit. Either one of them. She had no need for solitude. She could be with a man – either one of them – who, by the act of sex alone could exhaust her body and ease the restless aching of her mind. Was that, indeed, the root of her turmoil? Sexual desire, the altogether natural demands of a healthy body for a healthy body, of sound lungs for sound lungs; straightforward sensation – and gratitude – in place of complex emotion? Was that it? Was that
all?
And, if so, how obvious – how simple – how sad.

She saw Parker bring the car to the front steps, get out and salute Benedict with military smartness.

‘Ready for the ladies, sir.'

But instead of sending him to fetch her, Benedict simply nodded and began to say something about the running of the car which she made no effort to understand. Had he forgotten her? How marvellous if Miriam would forget her too so that she could just take a tram – something Miriam had never done in her life – and
go.
Small chance of that. She heard the tap of Miriam's diminutive feet, the swish of her furs, saw her coming down the main staircase and across the hall, Nola stalking behind.

They did not see Claire. She realized, indeed, that sitting deep in the window embrasure, no one could see her. But it made no difference. In a moment she would be called for, sent for. Benedict would remember.

‘Has anyone seen Claire?' asked Miriam, a little out of breath, since even for her it had been a long day.

There it was. Claire rose to her feet and then abruptly, incredulously, sat down again.

‘Claire?' said Benedict., his voice so level, so neutral, that even Claire, who
knew
he was lying, could not quite believe it. ‘She went to Upper Heaton with her mother.'

‘She can't have done.' Miriam sounded very positive, and then, as the effort of being cross proved too much for her, rather less so. ‘Didn't I ask her to wait for me? Well – perhaps not. Perhaps I just assumed she would. Are you sure she's gone, Benedict?'

‘I'm afraid so. I watched them drive away.'

And because it did not enter her head to disbelieve him, as it had not entered Edward's or Dorothy's a moment ago – since he had certainly lied to them too – she pouted a moment, shivered and, complaining of the chill, allowed Parker to drive her and Nola away.

Claire watched them go, at the slow pace appropriate to royalty, through the mill gates and up the rise to High Meadows. She watched Benedict get into his car and ease it forward to the exact spot which Miriam's Bentley had occupied a moment before. How strange. How extraordinary. How very
interesting!
What, she wondered, her mind hovering, quite feebly, between amusement and alarm, might happen next? Surely, on this most peculiar afternoon, anything was possible? And getting up, feeling like a sleepwalker who might at any moment succumb to a fit of wild, weak laughter, she went outside to the man who was waiting and, without a word, got into the car beside him.

‘Benedict – have you rescued me?'

And she listened to her own voice, speaking a little off-key, as if it had been the voice of another person.

‘I believe so. From Miriam and your mother at any rate. Are you in a desperate hurry to get home now?'

Home? What an odd word. Did she even know its meaning, or where to look for it, or how to recognize it should it ever be found?

‘No,' she said, answering her own question, not his.

‘Good. I have a house in Wharfedale, a village called Thorn-wick – not far. The couple who look after it for me put on a very decent dinner. Would you care to join me?'

For a moment – not a long one – she allowed the silence to fall.

‘He has a cottage in the Dales,' Nola had told her, ‘with a black marble bath and black satin sheets to match, I shouldn't wonder – where he entertains his passing fancies.'

Could Benedict regard her as a fancy, passing or otherwise?
Benedict!
Was it possible? Yes, of course it was. And having decided that much, she wondered why, being far from naive, she had not suspected it before. Possible, natural, highly, terribly dangerous. She knew that she ought to be scared half to death. Yet she was not. She knew, far beyond supposition, that she would unhesitatingly have advised anyone else in her place to withdraw now – to bolt for cover – while it could still be done in a friendly fashion. Not – absolutely not, for Heaven's sake – to tamper with what any fool could see amounted to dynamite. She knew all that. But the temptation to observe this man at closer quarters, removed from the schemes and fears and frustrations of his family which so coloured him, was too strong to ignore. Here, offered to her in the guise of a simple invitation to dinner, was the challenge, the contest, the dare, her overwrought nerves had demanded. She
knew,
with an amazing cairn, that she could not resist it.

‘Thank you Benedict. I am rather hungry.'

She travelled a mile or so in a drowsy silence and then fell asleep abruptly, very deeply, a loss of consciousness rather than slumber from which she woke alert and – to her own amusement – eager; her restlessness having given ground entirely now to simple, healthy curiosity.

They were driving along a dark, narrow road, branches entwined overhead in a bare trellis through which she could glimpse a charcoal grey sky, a thin drift of cloud, an impression, on either side, of empty fields, cold, swift water, a land already drawing itself together to do patient battle with the coming winter.

She had been to Thornwick once before, she remembered, a long time ago, on a picnic with Dorothy, a holiday treat which, like so much else in childhood, had given little pleasure. For Dorothy, to whom ‘good impressions' were of greater importance than enjoyment, had, at some sacrifice, bought her daughter new shoes and a pretty new summer dress for the occasion, an outfit which, no matter how many compliments it had drawn from old ladies on the train from Faxby to Skipton, had made Claire look and feel like an overdressed doll. But Thornwick had been –
could
have been – an adventure, rural enough to seem quite foreign to her city eyes, a page from a
Girl's Own
storybook had it not been for the stiffness of her pale pink sash, the spotlessness of her white cotton gloves, the straw hat with its satin ribbon tied in a tight little bow under her chin.

There had been a village green, she recalled, a square of tufted grass, coarse and springy to the touch, with low, square stone cottages built all around it; a shop with a wonderful window like a patchwork of coloured, dimpled glass; a public house that had worn a shuttered, sheepish took; a squat grey church with an ancient graveyard where Dorothy had set her to decipher the headstones while she rested in the church porch, out of the sun. There had been a river, fast-flowing, magical, strewn with flat, white stepping-stones upon which Dorothy would not allow the child to set her feet, because of those precious, black patent shoes. There had been a steep grassy bank starry with wild flowers, where Claire, because of the pink muslin dress, had not been allowed to sit down; a dozen stiles which dress and shoes and white gloves combined had forbidden her to climb. And so they had walked about all day, prim and awkward in their finery, eating their picnic on a hard plank bench near the station yard, Claire longing to be barefoot, hatless, ‘common', Dorothy longing simply for train time, home time.

Neither one of them had ever suggested a picnic again.

‘I have been here before,' she said cheerfully now to Benedict. ‘I was seven and wearing new shoes. They hurt abominably. I scuffed them too, which made my mother very cross.'

They left the village behind, the road beginning to climb and to narrow until, for the last half mile it was little more than a can-track cut by usage between two dry stone walls, a roofless stone tunnel down which the November wind hurried, cold and whining and then rushed back again towards the high moor. Yet, in the way of tunnels, there was a light at the end of it, a gate opening into a flagged courtyard, two houses, one long and low, the other, some distance away, much smaller, the traditional grouping of farmhouse and labourer's cottage with all the agricultural debris swept away, the yard no longer littered with the rusting tools and plough-shares Claire had often seen in such places but neatly, expensively paved, the old wooden farm gate replaced by elaborately scrolled wrought-iron; an immediate impression, even in the fading light, of money well spent, good window frames, solid roof-tiles, recently cleaned chimneys; a conviction that the plumbing would be advanced and efficient, the woodwork sound, that there would even be electric Light.