A Winter's Child (58 page)

She got up, still calmly smiling, and began to walk around, unhurried, unflustered, pausing to chat to a guest – all the time in the world, nothing pressing, absolutely nothing burning – making sure everyone had seen her and knew where to find her in case of need. And, preferring to assume that he would not come, she made her arrangements accordingly, constantly bearing in mind how easily, how rapidly they might fall apart. One little snag would be enough to do it. And so she continued to walk upstairs and down, to look and feel and listen, to anticipate that snag and deal with it before it arose.

He came striding into the lobby late in the afternoon, a thin, quiet, ungainly man at his side. John David? Fervently she hoped so.

‘Hello, Major,' she said, casual and friendly, the lobby being full of departing and arriving guests and Mr Clarence's ever-sharp eyes. ‘I'll be with you in a minute. Had a good trip?'

And, with new guests to welcome and old ones to be waved farewell, it was half an hour before she saw him again.

‘Your chef came then.'

‘He came. He's gone straight to work. Doesn't want the Kellers' cottage, didn't even want to see his room. Just had his bags sent upstairs and went straight to the kitchen. Like I said – odd sort of chap.'

Leaning against his desk, Kit looked tired but very well pleased.

‘You did a first-rate job, Claire.'

‘Thank you. Do I get a rise?'

‘We'll talk about it. I knew you'd cope.'

‘You knew no such thing. You just took the gamble.'

‘Call it a calculated risk, I'll bet you didn't even miss me. You looked as cool as a cucumber when I came through the door.'

‘Kit – I have never been so glad to see anybody in my life.'

‘I wish you meant that.'

Yes. She could wish that she meant it herself. Yet now that the crisis was over, now that she could bask a little in her small moment of triumph, it was to Benedict that she longed to tell the tale of her agonies and her achievements. He was the audience she wanted. His was the approval she wished to gain. How monstrous that she could not share this with him
now
while it was still so vividly alive inside her. By Sunday afternoon she would need to re-kindle it all over again and would have remembered by then, in any case, how little her overnight management of a small hotel could really impress him when he was struggling, day in, day out, to fill the dwindling order books of Swanfield Mills, to fend off for his employees the dreaded spectre of short-time, half-pay, no time and no wages, for some of them, ever again.

He would soon have to go out looking for new markets himself, he believed, North America, South America, Africa, anywhere, to keep those looms ticking over; or would have to start cutting back, turning men off and running the risk of bringing the rest of them out on strike. Possibly he would be abroad a great deal during the next year or two. If nothing else it would be an escape, as Thornwick had been an escape. Did he want Claire to go with him? In the silence that fell between them she could feel her heart swelling, thudding painfully against the wall of her chest. Yes, of course she wanted to go. Of course. Particularly at a time of trouble. But could he promise her – did he even wish to promise – that her commitment, if she made it, would not end sooner or later at that blue chintz door?

‘I'll go with you,' she said.

‘Oh – I don't think you really want that.'

‘You're wrong.'

He shook his head, his dark skin looking grey again, his face sombre and grim, a private face, older and far more heavy-laden than the cool mask he used for public display. She would do anything for him when he looked like that, would throw away, without permitting herself a backward glance, all those things which seemed to her, by fits and starts, to have so much importance. Freedom, for instance. Self-determination. The notion, which seemed odd to her in this mood, of limiting her own development by tying it to his. What heights did she wish to teach other than her natural fulfilment as a woman? What gifts had she, what talents, other than generosity in love?

‘I'll come, Benedict.'

‘I don't think so,' he said.

Polly's engagement party, arranged to suit the exacting standards of Miriam, Kit Hardie, and the nervous but highly original John David, was as extravagant and elegant as an Ascot hat, Polly in gold and silver spangles, Miriam in old rose and pearls, Edith Timms in saffron trimmed with exceedingly costly
Valenciennes,
Roger Timms beaming cordially but otherwise not much in evidence, having been warned not to draw attention to himself, so that when Benedict proposed the toast to the happy pair it was Roger's father who replied to it.

The future, he declared, for
this
couple at least, could only be made of pure gold. The girl was beautiful. The boy his only son. A piece of land had been purchased on their behalf. A villa of the very latest design, a marvel of modern plumbing and advanced domestic technology, was to be built upon it. The happiness, therefore, of his heir and of his old friend, Aaron Swanfield's youngest daughter, could not fail to be complete, as perfect in its entirety as this evening had been, since what could have exceeded the sparkle of Polly's celebratory champagne, her wonderful cake, three icing sugar baskets of pink and white roses one on top of the other; the dinner itself which had introduced ‘Empress Chicken'to Faxby, breasts hammered thin and rolled up around a stuffing of chicken liver páté and herb butter and Heaven knew what, except that Mr Timms had tasted nothing like it and would be more than ready to taste it again? The sauce, too, had had the texture of velvet, the aroma of a vineyard and a herb garden enticingly blended together. And the cheese savouries, light as a feather, with just the right amount of onion and a hint of – what had it been? Tarragon?

Her smile never wavering, Mrs Edith Timms caught her husband's eye and gave a sharp cough.

‘Oh yes,' he said, reminded of what she had instructed him to say, although his mind still visibly wandered through that herb garden, wine glass in hand. ‘My wife and I shall be delighted to welcome Polly as a daughter.'

Polly smiled, showing her perfect white teeth and her diamond ring.

‘And I shall be only too happy to welcome into my family another young son,' said Miriam, wiping away a tear, letting it be known that she was thinking of Jeremy.

Eunice, knocking over a glass, scrambled to her feet and rushed across the room to kiss her sister. ‘I hope you'll be as happy as Toby and I have always been.'

‘Hear, hear!' quickly muttered kind-hearted Toby.

There was a pause. No one had anything more to add. And then a voice was heard, husky with tobacco and alcohol. ‘Marriage as an institution is unlikely to survive the century,' said Nola.

She had improved in the sense that she was no longer quite so much trouble to anyone. Had she met another man, Claire wondered? Yes, in a sense, at a rather different level, perhaps she had. Wandering disconsolately one day into Faxby Park, vaguely the worse for the brandy she had taken at breakfast to get herself out of bed, the gin and vermouth which had served instead of lunch, she had, in fact, come across the schoolmaster who had once, in his role of Education been intended to replace discredited Sculpture in her affections.

And, expecting nothing to come of it, she had accompanied him on a visit to Faxby's Probation Service, a converted warehouse in a particularly unholy part of Faxby named All Saints'Passage, and had there encountered Mr Kilmartin, Miss Pickles, Miss Drew; and Doctor Sigmund Freud.

Faxby's magistrates had seen no reason to spend lavishly on their Probation Service, a peculiar institution at best in the opinion of those local stalwarts, who would have preferred, one and all, to sentence an offender to a flogging at the cart-tail or deportation to Australia – had such things still been possible – than to the reforming zeal of Miss Pickles or Miss Drew, in the forlorn hope that a pair of well-meaning spinsters might somehow cure them of their villainy. Yet, in these unsettled times, with the gaols full to bursting, the newspapers setting up a constant caterwauling against long sentences, particularly if the prisoner happened to be a woman; and with the vote extended to women over thirty and to
all
men, it was as well – if one wished to seek election – to avail oneself of what these newspapers and those women considered to be a humane alternative.

An old warehouse, therefore, was discovered – with no great difficulty since it had been in the Greenwood family for a couple of generations – cleaned out and painted, not too thoroughly, of course, for the reception of Faxby's socially inadequate and socially sick – according to Miss Drew; a dumping ground – as many Town Councillors saw it – for those who were neither quite vicious enough to lock away in prison, nor quite mad enough to commit to an asylum for the insane.

Which did not, of course, rule out the possibility of meeting, in All Saints'Passage, a number of people who were very vicious and extremely crazy. A circumstance – perhaps to be encountered in any dumping ground – which brought added unpleasantness to the equally large number who were naturally just a little feckless and slow; those who would not have been feckless at all had they been able to find work; those who had lost nerves or limbs or faith in France and could not come to terms with it.

To Mr Kilmartin they needed fatherly, slightly embarrassed advice which he gave, in clerical fashion, from behind the pulpit of his office desk and in carefully phrased terms which his clients often failed to understand, although they would agree to accept his advice, whether they had grasped his meaning or not – and the shilling that sometimes went with it – because anyone could see he was such a decent chap.

Miss Pickles was made of sterner stuff, a stocky woman of boundless energy and unshakeable belief in the universal panacea of soap and water treating her particular area of Faxby as, for generations, the squire's lady had treated her manorial village, seeing cleanliness as next to godliness and expecting her ‘people' to be very godly.

But Miss Drew, as spinsterish as Mr Kilmartin in her manner, had read the works of the father of psycho-analysis, Sigmund Freud, and knew, therefore, about the problems of repressed sexuality, the intensely sensual feeling of the girl-child for the father, the boy-child for the mother, which, if wrongly handled, or only slightly misunderstood, could scar the infant's emotional judgement and stability for life. And since this delicate infantile passion for a parent invariably was mishandled and often savagely misunderstood – perhaps no one should doubt that – Miss Drew believed, quite simply, that nobody was to blame for anything. Ever.

She invited Nola to tea in a frilly, pink and white flat, all organdie tablecloths and lace doylies and explained, in her piping, old-maidish treble, the terrible story of Oedipus, Prince of Ancient Thebes, who had murdered his father and married his mother, a tragedy used by Freud, said Miss Drew, to illustrate the quite passionate love a baby boy could feel for his mother, the equally savage jealousy he might entertain for his father, and how desperately that jealousy might terrify him since, when it came to any kind of contest between a powerful adult male and a toddling infant – particularly for possession of the resident female – it would seem unlikely to the child that he could win.

‘Therefore,' murmured the prim and entirely passionless Miss Drew, ‘our early years seethe, my dear – positively
seethe
– with jealousy and desire and a most volcanic sensuality which, since of course it can have no physical outlet, turns inwards and causes – Heavens, such a multitude of problems in later life. A girl, my dear, will only take as husband or lover a man who either resembles her father as closely as possible or is his exact opposite, depending on what her relationship with him has been. Likewise a young man's choice of partner is entirely dictated by how well or how badly he has got on with his mother. Therefore, you see one cripples one's children simply by existing. How sad, yet how inescapable, I fear.'

Miss Drew, in her broad outline, was probably quite correct yet, having had no lovers of her own, no husband, no children, only an invalid mother who had faded quietly away without too much trouble, her view was entirely academic and she was a little alarmed to see Nola suddenly turn pale.

‘May I give you some more tea, Mrs Swanfield?'

‘I killed one of my children,' said Nola, her pallor quite ghastly.

‘Oh dear.' Miss Drew did not, at first, know what to make of that and even when the facts were put before her could think of nothing very explicit Freud had ever said about abortion. Perhaps the ladies of nineteenth century Vienna had not gone in for it overmuch, or, if so, had had the good taste to keep quiet about it.

‘Oh dear.' Yet one thing Freud did believe in was the easing of the soul's burden by confession, his and perhaps the Church of Rome's version of ‘a trouble shared is a trouble halved'. Remembering this, she brightened.

‘Would you care to tell me …?'

Since that atrocious morning when she had woken up, neither in hell nor in oblivion, but in her own room at High Meadows surrounded by bright smiles and a conspiracy of polite silence, Nola had been consumed by the need to tell somebody.

‘These little accidents do happen,' the nurse had said. Miriam had come tripping in behind the tea-tray to pronounce her version of the same. Claire, smiling vaguely, had let her talk but had not listened. ‘Nothing,' Benedict decreed, ‘has occurred.'

But now.

‘I can't get over it,' she said, ‘I don't know why I can't. I
ought
to be the kind of woman who wouldn't let it worry her. But I'm not. It's on my mind all day. I can't get rid of it.
It follows
me. I can hardly believe it myself. All I cared about at the time was getting myself out of trouble. I expected just to go and have it done and pay for it and then, if it didn't kill me, never give it another thought. Why can't I do that?'