The Elderbrook Brothers (36 page)

But her heart answered: what of me,
now?

She rose from her chair and went through into the sitting-room in search of a book. A new and astonishing notion had
come into her mind. She was not what they called a religious woman. She went to church, when she had time, as a matter of habit and social custom. If she had had children she would have taught them to say their prayers, and in the long ordeal of her illness she had learned things about prayer unknown to her before. But she was not, in the conventional sense, religious. It was years, for example, since she had opened a Bible. Yet she took it for granted that the Bible was what they said it was, a special and a holy thing and somehow (never mind quite how) the ‘Word of God'. She did not doubt that if it spoke to her it would speak with authority.

She found a Bible and began searching its pages. She was looking however, not for a magic ‘message' that should speak to her condition, but for something specific, a story she remembered or half-remembered from Sunday School days. She judged that it would take a lot of finding, and quite suddenly a great tiredness descended on her, so that it was all she could do to drag herself back, book in hand, to the warmth of the kitchen and the support of her chair. Hilda was there, looking herself again. Hilda's storm had passed: the question she had dreaded had not been put to her, and she believed she had betrayed nothing. Ann, grateful for the return to normal, thought she detected some effort behind it. But to herself, perplexed though she was, it needed strangely little effort to treat Hilda as if nothing had happened. If what she fancied, if what she half dreaded and half hoped, should prove to be true, Hilda must become an object of burning interest to her. But not now. Not yet. She put all that aside and sat turning the leaves of her Bible.

There's nothing in it, it's all my fancy, she said, when Matthew stamped into the kitchen, very ready for his tea. That was the line she had decided to take with herself. Behave as if one knew nothing, suspected nothing. Behave as if nothing had happened. And believe so too. All I want is a little time, she said. A little time to myself to be quiet in, to get upsides with everything. With everything, no matter what.

It was high tea, high and late: the last meal of the day except for the hunk of bread and cheese he would cut for himself before bed and probably eat standing, letting the crumbs fall anywhere, as men would. The lamp was lit and the curtains drawn. The kitchen was very warm and snug.

‘Well, Nanny, how d' you feel this evening?'

Calling her Nanny was a private joke between them. Her part in the game was to pretend to take offence and put on a sulky look. But tonight she could not respond. She could see that there was something on his mind and was hurt that he chose that way of hiding his preoccupation.

For the first few minutes he was talkative and persistent, unlike himself. To Ann's sharpened perception his remarks sounded rehearsed. Soon he lapsed into an equally restless silence. He picked up the current issue of the
Farmer and Stockbreeder
and turned over its pages, glancing idly from column to column. She knew he was elsewhere. When he read a book that interested him he became dead to the world: it was one of her little grievances. He had to be shaken, sometimes, before he could attend to other things. But now, when Hilda came into the room carrying a second lamp, he needed no shaking. Ann could not help observing that he was at once aware of her entry.

Never mind, she told herself. I mustn't think about it.

‘While I think of it,' said Matthew. Ann wondered which of them he was speaking to. ‘While I think of it, Ann. If I ‘ma bit late to bed, don't worry, there's a good girl. Take one of your tablets.'

‘What is it? That wretched book-keeping again?'

‘That sort of thing,' said Matthew.

She looked at him, puzzled, anxious not to ask too many questions.

‘You won't be going out again, will you?'

Supposing he was, what was there to be afraid of? Yet afraid she was.

He hesitated. His answer hung fire. ‘Shouldn't think so.
Still, you never know.' He laughed, trying to laugh the subject away. ‘Might do a bit of rat-shooting, last thing.'

For the fraction of a second his eyes rested on Hilda, who (Ann noticed) was conscious of the glance but did not meet it.

AFTER both women had gone to bed Matthew got out of his chair, fetched his gun from the gun-rack in the kitchen, and went cautiously out of the house. The sky was a dull silver, neither clear nor very dark. A dim diffused light hovered in the quiet fields. Leaving by the front door he hurried down the road, keeping to the grass verge. Though there was plenty of time in hand, he hurried. Though the world about him seemed empty, and the chance of his being heard was remote, he muffled his footsteps in the grass. The hurry was in his blood and the stealth was in his heart. His coming out into the road was itself reasonless, the expression of an instinct to get away from the house. To get away from the house in order to get back to the house. To approach the invisible event from outside, and take his enemy by surprise.

Two hundred yards down the road he turned left, broke into one of his own fields, and so made his circuitous way back towards home. He was approaching the back of the house, where Hilda's room was, that attic room in which almost by inadvertence he had become her lover, and where in times more placid she had so often fallen asleep with the pleasant noise of the great beech in her ears. The tree stood in a plat of rough grass, a kind of no man's land, neither garden nor field, kept in reasonable trim by occasional scything. It merged eventually, twenty yards or more from the house, into a region of fruit bushes, which itself merged into a section of close-planted orchard. The orchard afforded good cover for a careful man, and Matthew took his stand in a shadowed corner, from which he commanded a view of every approach. His visitor had two
alternatives: to enter by the front gate and make his way round to the back in the shadow of the house, or to enter by way of the farmyard and come up past the pigsties along a narrow cobbled path ending at the wash-house. Whichever he chose he would be visible to Matthew, and Matthew invisible to him.

In the last twenty-four hours Matthew had done much thinking, and much shying away from his thoughts. He felt like a man in the grip of an alien destiny, forced to act out of character, forced to transcend his amiable limitations and do violence to his nature. The chatter in his mind proceeded not logically but by fits and starts, moved not from thought to thought, from premiss to conclusion, but haphazard, in a region of half-fantasy. Yet it had a curious slipshod logic of its own. It was consistent with an unconscious imperative. At moments, in the night, he would break into a cold sweat, but discovered by experiment that by taking one thing at a time, by refusing to look too far ahead, a certain control could be maintained. Mental excitement alternated with empty-minded exhaustion. The excitement was generated by a game of pretence he was playing with himself; exhaustion was the brake, the resistant will, the reluctance to translate pretence into action or even to admit that it could be so translated. That something must be done was abundantly evident; but precisely what he did not clearly know, though he had certain ideas and at least the beginning of a plan. The tree: he could not in his thinking get away from that tree. The tall, vigorous, beautiful tree which Caidster, in talk if not otherwise, had so grossly fouled. He had given no conscious thought to that tree for years, but it had always been there, part of the place, in a sense part of himself, and now it was as if an old friend had been slandered by venomous tongues, besmirched by an evil association. That friend must be vindicated, that dirt rubbed out. Though he was very clear that whatever he undertook would be for Ann's sake, Ann's and no other, the tree too cried out to him. The tree and the spying (whether true or not) were the very head and front of the offence, as well as of the menace
it portended: greedy, gloating, malignant eyes, spying out his pleasant sin, making of beauty and pleasure a feast of offal, a rat's dinner. His enemy was no longer human, was scarcely animal, was merely a diabolical intelligence undermining his peace, sapping his spirit, working his ruin and desolation. He had promised Hilda to give Caidster the fright of his life. That was the root-assumption of his plan with her, and that he would do. That at least.

He gripped his gun firmly and stood rigid, waiting. The night was quiet, with little wind. The moon was in her first quarter and there was frost in the air. Now that his eyes had become accustomed to the dim light he could see things with a surprising clarity. The moon emerging from a cloud, he could see, where her light fell, the back door, the small back-kitchen window, and high above, in the gable, the window of Hilda's room. On the blind middle part of the wall, for there were no bedroom windows but Hilda's looking this way, he could see the pattern of the brickwork and the minute shadows cast by surface irregularities. And he could see, from his lurking-place, the many-branched tree, like a personal presence majestic in its silence, standing alone. He saw, but without feeling, that it was invested with strangeness and a new beauty, had become a creature compounded of moonlight and shadow. Its very stillness, which the small stir of the leaves only emphasized, was somehow mysterious and urgent. Yet, sharply aware though he was of the tree and its strangeness, he could spare it no attention in his mind beyond noting that it was there, where he wanted it.

He was in good time. The waiting seemed endless. He began to feel cold, with a coldness which, creeping slowly up his limbs from the ground, seemed at last to reach his very brain, so that after a while he no longer believed that Caidster would come, would walk obligingly into the trap prepared for him. Hilda had said that he would, but she could not have been quite sure of that. No one could be sure of anything. The man had argued a little about the place of appointment: he would
have preferred (but did not tell her so) the barn where for some time now he had been spending his nights, the warm barn where the interview could be conducted in the style he favoured, and without any tedious persuasive preamble. He had argued a little, but Hilda, with an air of take it or leave it, had stuck to her point. The tree was her fancy, she said: it was that or nothing: he could please himself. Matthew, running over in his mind the little she had told him of those exchanges, could not believe that Caidster would come. He pulled out his watch, the old plump silver watch that had been his father's, but could not read it without stepping a few inches out of cover. Before doing that he stared with great intentness in the directions from which Caidster would come, if come he did. Noting the time he slipped the watch back in his pocket. He felt dispirited, frustrated, desperate. What he was doing seemed unreal, a silly ugly game. In the far distance a dog began barking. Very far away the barking was. It was like the noise of tearing silk. But presently another and nearer dog took it up, and Matthew felt that in a moment the whole countryside would be awake. He cocked his ear towards the small wind and thought he could hear sounds of restless movement in the cowsheds and stables of his own yard. He thought he heard the sound of boots on cobblestones. He stood tense with listening. But now he could hear nothing significant. It must have been fancy. Then, in the shadow of the wash-house, he fancied there was something moving. While he stared the movement stopped. But there was something there, something in the shape of a man, crouching in the shadow. In shadow it was, and crouching, but every second that passed made it more visible.

Matthew held his breath, wondering if he himself had been seen. But a moment later his doubt was resolved. Caidster came out of his shelter and moved with a light, prowling, jaunty step towards the spreading beech; and the sight of that insufferable jauntiness, that complacent self-conceit, rekindled a flame in Matthew. Caidster took his stand near the tree, with his back towards the orchard where Matthew was, and looked up
at Hilda's window. He emitted a small clear whistle: three times. His posture was still jaunty, an easy stance, legs straddled, arms akimbo, head tilted back; and Matthew could imagine the expression on his sharp face, the smile of the conquering male, confident of getting what he wanted. The assumption of intimacy implied in that whistling made the flame burn brighter. Matthew raised his gun and took aim. But it was an idle, symbolic gesture, and as soon as he had the man's head in his sights he lowered the gun, and swiftly but with caution began stalking his quarry.

He got within six or seven yards of him before Caidster turned, in sudden alarm. At sight of him Caidster uttered a strange brief noise, something between a hiss and an oath. His teeth were bared in a grin.

Matthew held his gun at the ready. ‘We're going to have a little talk, Caidster.' He did not remember that Caidster had once opened a conversation in very similar terms. His own voice startled him. In this grey half-light it seemed both loud and unreal, a loud intruder. ‘No, don't come any nearer. I like you just where, you are. You're waiting for Hilda, aren't you?'

‘She's split, has she, the bitch!' Caidster said. The expression of his face was indiscernible. ‘What's it to you anyhow? She's not your bloody piece jess because you-'

Matthew cut in. His voice had dropped almost to a whisper. It seemed a shame to profane the night's mystery with loud talk. ‘Never mind that. You're waiting for Hilda. Till she comes we'll have a little talk together. Tell me something, Caidster. Just among friends.' His tone was coaxing, almost kindly. The tension of his nerves gave him an odd sense of power, of knowing what he must do. He did not look far ahead, but went confidently forward a step at a time. He was intent on his question. ‘This tree. Did you really climb it?'

Matthew moved a step nearer. Wan moonlight illumined half the man's face. Matthew fancied that his stare had faltered, and guessed that his mind was on the gun.