The Scent of Water (11 page)

And it seemed to Paul, sitting slumped in his chair, that it never would be finished. He was only a third of the way through and already he was played out. And the thing would not come alive. It lacked the vital fire. Yet he had to go on for the man’s sake. What lunatics writers are, he thought. He was madder even than dear old Miss Lindsay. Get on, you fool, he said to himself. He sat back in his chair, and Bess lifted her chin from his feet and went comfortably to sleep again. He relaxed, trying to loosen the hold of every thought that still held him to time or place, to integrate himself for the effort of concentration that would set the spring within flowing. At first he had found it appallingly difficult to write like this, entirely within his mind. In his sighted days he had thought with his pen in his hand, writing a few words, then pausing to think again, able to look back at will, checking what he had written with what he was thinking. To create a whole chapter or scene in his mind, remembering and coordinating it without recourse to pen and paper, had seemed at first impossible, but now that he had learned the art of withdrawal within himself he found it a more satisfying way of writing than the other because giving more consciously from the depths of himself he could feel that he had given all he had to give. But it was more exhausting and it called for deeper concentration and quiet. As to results, he tried not to worry. He would have liked to have been in the first class but that was beyond one’s control. If one’s intellectual equipment was not great, one’s spiritual experience not deep, the result of doing one’s damned best could only seem very lightweight in comparison with the effort involved. But perhaps that was not important. The mysterious power that commanded men appeared to him to ask of them only obedience and the maximum of effort and to remain curiously indifferent as to results. For an hour he sat motionless, outwardly as relaxed as though he slept, inwardly at full stretch. Then he pulled the small table that held his tape recorder toward him, picked up the microphone and dictated straight through without a pause. Then he repeated the process and the clock struck twelve.

He had finished work for the night but he sat on listening to the sounds of the night that he loved more than those of the day. Intensely sensitive to the music of sound as he had become, the crashing symphony of the day sometimes almost overwhelmed him; especially in the spring when the birds and the children had gone mad, when the spring rains rushed upon the new leaves and Valerie started her spring cleaning. But the night music was quiet as one of Beethoven’s gentler sonatas, the notes falling with grave precision. There was the tick of his clock, the creak of the tired old stair treads as they relaxed in the dark, the rustle of a mouse, an owl calling and the slow deep breathing of Bess. And other infinitesimal sounds that he had never heard when he was sighted, the eddying of air on a windless night, the tinkle of dew, the breathing of trees and the steps of the moonlight. It might be that he imagined these sounds. He did not know. But if he did they were none the less exquisite for that.

It was time for bed and he moved in his chair. Bess was instantly awake and standing by him, her silken tail swishing expectantly. Every new activity, though it was merely a repetition of daily routine, was hailed by Bess as a thrilling occurrence. To eat, to sleep, to wake, to go upstairs or downstairs, to go for a walk, to come home, it was all equally wonderful to Bess because it was Paul’s world that controlled these things and she trembled to his will as a compass needle to the north. She was trembling now with eagerness to be put out, not for any need of nature because Valerie had already put her out, but because he wanted to put her out. They went together to the study door and Paul turned off the light. He had heard Valerie switch it on and knew why she had not turned it off. These small cruelties now hurt him less than they had. His love for her was tired, he supposed. She made it difficult for him to love her.

Bess took him to the back door and was let out, and he stood leaning in the doorway while she chased her tail in the moonlight. Beyond the tiny kitchen garden he was aware of the orchard and the glory of motionless blossom. There was that apple tree there, just over their fence. Fallen and broken, it still lived and bore fruit. Suddenly parting from routine, to the astonishment of Bess, he left the door and walked down the short grass path to the low fence. Here he only had to stretch out a hand and he could feel the blossoms of the fallen tree. They were cool and wet with dew and in his mind’s eye he could see their pale glimmer under the moon. There were so many of them. This fallen tree bore fruit as richly as any in the orchard, a round red little apple, crisp when one bit into it and very fresh. The dew was heavy tonight, and most welcome in this dry spell. As always after working too hard his scarred face felt tight and hot, but the coolness of the dew and its faint scent eased him. The scent of water, of the rain and of the dew. It was difficult to separate it from the grateful fragrance of the life it renewed, but it had its scent; the faint exhalation of its goodness. It would still come down upon the earth after man, destroying himself, had destroyed also the leaves and the grass. Its goodness might even renew again the face of the burnt and blasted earth. He did not know. But unlike Job’s comforters he believed there was a supreme goodness that could renew his own soul beyond this wasting sorrow of human life and death.

Bess pressed against his knee. He fondled her head and it was wet with dew. They went back to the cottage and crept stealthily up the stairs, terrified lest a stair creak and wake Valerie. Paul no longer slept with his wife. Valerie had her wide bed and charming south room to herself and Paul had the small room over his study. When he and Bess had got inside, and he had managed to shut the door without its creaking, he sighed with relief. With any luck he’d get to bed soundlessly. But his luck was out. Valerie had left a tin of furniture polish on the floor and he trod on it and stumbled against the wall. He listened anxiously and heard the creak of her bed as she turned over, her cough and loud weary sigh. She never let him remain in ignorance of the fact that he had wakened her. He crept into bed and lay awake until a sudden burst of joyous music bubbled up from the throat of a small bird beneath his window. He could not see that first ray of light to which the bird responded but its song was all the more wonderful to him because he couldn’t. Comforted, he turned over and slept.

A
FEW days later Bert Baker, two workmen and the inevitable boy took possession of The Laurels. Bert, a younger edition of his uncle but less impressive, possessed the calm and reassuring manner of all good builders and decorators. “It will be all right, ma’am, come the end,” was a phrase frequently on his lips. And Mary needed reassurance as papers were stripped from walls, rotting floorboards were ripped from floors, tiles shattered from the roof and it seemed that her home would soon be lying in ruins about her. To escape from the noise she did some shopping and purchased the two little period armchairs for the parlor, and she took Jean Anderson for a drive and went to tea at the vicarage and with Paul and Valerie. The week went by and it was Tuesday.

At five o’clock Bert Baker and his men departed in the roaring lorry and cradled in the deep peace they left behind them Mary moved about her room getting ready for dinner at the manor. Out in the garden were Mr. Baker and his friend Joe Rockett but they did not disturb the peace, for they were woodsmen, men of a different type, slow, taciturn, dedicated. Both lived and worked in the woods that Mary had seen beyond the Dog and Duck, Joe as a woodsman proper, Joshua Baker carrying on to the fourth generation the craft of making chair legs of beechwood. He was the last bodger in these parts, he had told Mary with melancholy pride, perhaps the last in England, for he’d never heard tell of another. She now understood his air of tragic grandeur. He represented in himself the end of an epoch. When he lay in his grave the art of bodging would lie there with him. Mary, though thankful that she had lived to see a bodger, was saddened by the thought. She had come to Appleshaw only just in time.

Punctually at seven-thirty the Hepplewhites’ car fetched her and swept her through the village and up the avenue between the rhododendrons, swirled her around the gravel sweep and set her down in front of the pillared front door of the exquisite little Georgian manor house. The chauffeur and the gravel sweep made her feel herself back in the era of her childhood and she expected the front door to be flung open by a butler. It was a shock when it was opened by a lacquered, beautiful, slightly contemptuous young woman who murmured that she was Mr. Hepplewhite’s secretary. Mary smiled at her and was glad of her own height. Few things alarmed her but these siren secretaries of successful businessmen were one of the things. Their slim palms held too much power and power corrupted women far more corrosively than men, she believed. She was sorry for Mrs. Hepplewhite. When she was ushered into the drawing room, where her hostess stood to receive her with her husband the regulation one pace behind her left shoulder, it did not surprise her that Mrs. Hepplewhite’s eyes glanced for one nervous moment at the siren. The movement had been involuntary and at once the flood of kind talk was rising upward as before. This time Mary was submerged and could take in nothing until sherry revived her.

The setting was that of one of the old drawing-room comedies of the years between the wars. The French windows, the chintz-covered sofa and chairs, were all in the right stage places and so was the white bearskin rug before the hearth, the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece and the French mirror on the wall. The flowers were perfectly arranged and placed at all the strategic points. Mary waited for the parlor maid in her black dress and flimsy apron to come in and announce that dinner was ready. It unnerved her when a Swiss girl performed this office; but she was restored to her comedy again by the dining room with its oval mahogany table, pink shaded lights and oil portraits. Of whom could they be likenesses? she wondered, aware of an aristocratic profile, a sword, a periwig, and a parakeet perched upon a white wrist. I’d give a good deal, she thought, to see the real forebears of these two.

Mr. Hepplewhite was an astonishment. The back view she had seen getting out of the car had predisposed her to expect the round red face and hearty manner of the conventional self-made man, genial and self-satisfied in what he had achieved. But Mr. Hepplewhite’s front view was not at all like that. His fleshy face was smooth and olive-skinned, he had firm beautifully molded lips and a profile like a Roman emperor on a coin. His gray hair was thick and wavy, his plump hands white and well kept, one of them adorned with a sardonyx signet ring. He had fine dark eyes which looked straight into Mary’s as he talked to her, giving an appearance of great candor, and his voice was clear and well produced and at the same time caressingly gentle. There was no sense of strain about him, for he was entirely relaxed in his part. There was little to suggest it was a part; only his back view and the fact that his signet ring was just a little too large. He was an enthusiastic host and talked with knowledge and intelligence upon every subject that came up; although, as Paul had said, he did not listen well. He never looked at his wife but now and again her eyes turned to him, nervously and with a naked adoration that made Mary want to weep. She realized that Mr. Hepplewhite was an extremely clever man. She did not know if she liked or disliked him, for he did not allow her to find out. His presentation was too dazzling for her to be aware, as with Mrs. Hepplewhite, of the person behind the personage. Perhaps there wasn’t one. Perhaps Mr. Hepplewhite was dead. It was a startling thought. But he had a different back view and she found the remembrance of it oddly reassuring.

It was also reassuring to turn to Roger Talbot beside her, and look at Joanna across the table, for a more serenely normal couple she had never met. Roger, she found, was an architect with an office in Westwater. Joanna was a rosy brunette with work-roughened hands and that very special attractiveness of a comely young woman who takes no interest in her appearance. Her black dinner dress had probably done her for dinners ever since she had married, and showed to perfection the contrast between the rich tan of arms and neck and the dazzling whiteness of the skin that was normally covered by her high-necked short-sleeved jumper. She had a delightful friendly smile and Mary was quite sure she had been at Roedean and later had been a games mistress. She liked her but could not visualize her as mother to that strange little Edith.

The Talbots took her back to the village and asked her to come in for a cup of tea. “One needs it after a Hepplewhite evening,” said Joanna, leading the way through the open gate in the wattle fencing of their garden. The house was contemporary and Mary was thankful it stood well back in its garden and could not easily be seen from the village green. Contemporary was a word that stood for everything she disliked in the way of architecture and furniture; boxlike houses with too much window and furniture poised on inadequate legs; and that just shows, she said to herself, that I am now old. The garden was also contemporary. There were asphalted paths and beautifully kept grass, and here and there a little pointed evergreen tree, looking in the moonlight as though it had been cut out of green tin, stood up starkly, but there were no flowers and no trees apart from the old mulberry close to her garden wall. She could see that there was a vegetable garden behind the house where a vast amount of things to eat grew in neat rows, but again there were no trees. No wonder the children had preferred The Laurels; children, she thanked heaven, were never contemporary. Their manners unfortunately could sometimes be so described but not the children themselves, for like the very old they were ageless in their unself-consciousness.

The ground floor of the house consisted of what Mary believed was called, in contemporary houses, the living space. Finding her way around the half walls from one area to another always made her feel as though she was wandering around a maze, but with no hope of finding any core of privacy when she got to the end. Yet this maze was fun, and so were the queer reptilian plants that sprang from scarlet pots to claw one wall of the living area, and the large painting that hung against the other. She had not the faintest notion what the picture represented but it was splashed with red and orange and emerald green and was bright and gay. There was a staircase with airy treads and no visible means of support, and a central chimney of roughhewn stone that soared up through the house like a tree trunk. The furniture was reduced to a minimum and as curiously shaped as the reptilian plants, and there was a good deal of space and brilliant light. Close to her, on top of a bookcase, a hamster was curled up fast asleep in a wooden cage with stairs, a sight as astonishing as though a Beatrix Potter picture had appeared in the midst of a modern action painting. The house was striking as well as fun but it was an astonishing apparition to appear in Appleshaw, and she wondered what Jean would have thought of it. She could also understand Edith’s passion for the little things.

“Did you design it?” she asked Roger.

“I did,” he said with pride. “If you’re building a house in a village like Appleshaw, then build it of your own period, right up to the minute, and don’t try to ape old places like The Laurels and Orchard Cottage. To my mind there’s a sort of dishonesty about it. Cowardice too. One should have the courage of one’s own convictions in one’s own generation and not cower back into the past. Do you like Jo’s picture? ‘Sunset in the New Forest.’ ”

So Joanna was a painter, not a games mistress, and had probably never been near Roedean. It is good for me, thought Mary, to have come to this country backwater. It is possible that I shall learn more about the modern generation here than I could have done in London. How very odd. “The country,” she said to Roger, “isolates things. Even modernity. I believe I shall come to appreciate this house better in Appleshaw than I would have done if you had built it at Wimbledon.”

“You don’t appreciate it yet?” he asked with twinkling eyes.

“I don’t think it’s a very good setting for the hamster,” she replied lightly, and then, half to herself, “nor perhaps for Edith.”

She had thought of Joanna as being in the kitchen making the tea, and had forgotten that the kitchen area was separated from her only by a low wall of silvery wood crowned by a row of pots containing the kind of ferns that like steam. She was suddenly aware of Joanna looking at her through the green ferns. Her brown eyes were troubled and they stayed troubled after she had carried the tray around the ferns and they were drinking their tea.

“You’ve seen Edith?” Roger asked Mary.

“We met last Sunday morning in my garden. No, don’t protest, and don’t tell Edith not to come into the garden. I want her there. And the others too. I told you before, I like children.”

“Mummy, I want a drink!”

The imperious cry of a small boy sounded from upstairs and Joanna said, “You go, Roger. Did Mr. Hepplewhite send them anything?”

“Toffees and Lindt chocolate,” said Roger, and Mary noticed that his pockets were bulging. “Hepplewhite is an odd man, Miss Lindsay. I suspect him of being devoid of the usual human affections yet he always sends gifts to the children.”

He went away up the airy stairs two at a time and Joanna turned instantly to Mary.

“I love children so much,” she said breathlessly. I imagined that because I’d had two myself I knew all there was to know about them. I didn’t realize how blessedly ordinary my own two are. I didn’t realize how ordinary I am. And Roger. I imagined that because we are artists we are unordinary, intuitive and so on. But of course it doesn’t follow at all. It’s the kind of picture you paint, or the kind of book you write, that makes you unordinary, not just writing a book or painting a picture. Don’t you think so?”

Mary had discovered during the evening that Joanna was inclined to lose herself in abstract discussion and she brought the conversation gently back to what she imagined it was supposed to be about, Joanna’s failure with her adopted child. “How old was Edith when you adopted her?” she asked.

“Five. Her mother was a school friend of mine. We were at Malvern together. Anne and Rupert were killed in a motor smash. There were no near relatives to take Edith and so we did. She took our name. We were awfully fond of the little scrap and we thought it would be the best thing for her. But it’s not worked out right and I don’t know why.”

She was near tears and Mary said, “It
will
work out right, for what else could you do? The inevitable thing is always in the end right. Why was she called Edith?”

“It was Rupert’s mother’s name. He was devoted to his mother and she died a little while before Edith was born.”

“What was Rupert’s work?”

“He was on the stage. Charming and queer and brilliant, Edith’s like him.”

“Brilliant?”

“No. That’s the queer thing. The children go to a good day school. Roger takes them on his way to work. Next year we want Rose and Edith to go to boarding school together but Edith is doing so badly she’ll never make the grade. She doesn’t get on well with the other children either and she keeps being sick. The doctor can’t find any reason, but he’s worried and he suggested I keep her at home for the rest of this term and teach her myself. But I can’t teach and she doesn’t respond to me at all. She’s such a funny shut-up little thing. Forgive me for pouring this out to you, the very first time you come to see us, but I felt suddenly that it would help to tell you.”

“Would you like me to teach her?” asked Mary. “I taught when I was young. I’m old-fashioned now but I have teaching friends who will send me the right books and help me to get up to date. I’d do it for my own pleasure because I like teaching and I love children. Would you like me to try?”

She was instantly filled with dismay. Whatever was she doing? Soon Rose would need coaching in a few subjects and then Jeremy would feel left out. Before she knew where she was, she would be running an old-fashioned dame school. And she had come here to seek solitude and retirement. She had spoken without premeditation, on one of those impulses that come behind you like a wave and lift you off your feet before you know where you are.

Joanna’s face went an even brighter pink and tears came into her eyes. “Would you really do it? It would be marvelous for Edith if you would. But how can we let you do such a thing? May I talk to Roger about it?”