The Scent of Water (24 page)

“I will,” said Mary. “Good-bye, Mr. Hepplewhite.”

“God bless you,” was his surprising answer and she was left looking at the upright departing back in a bewilderment touched by incomprehensible sorrow.

“Anybody would think I was some sort of Punch and Judy show,” said Valerie angrily to Paul, as she wheeled in the tea cart. “What’s that you’ve got?”

He had been in London for a week, staying with an old friend who had just driven him home, seeing his agent about his play and some book he had written. She had been pleased about the play but not particularly interested. She did not suppose it was any good. And she had thought him heartless to leave her at such a time. Her mother had come but had been entirely maddening. Having suffered acutely for some years from grandchild-starvation, her mother could now think of no one but herself. Her discovery, when they had been in Switzerland together, that in due course if all went well she would become a grandmother had revealed to her daughter the essential egoism of her mother’s nature. Her anxiety lest Valerie should have a miscarriage had not been entirely on her daughter’s account. Valerie’s contention that all men were brutes and Paul in particular, taking her by surprise like that and giving her no chance whatever to take preventive measures, had merely led her mother to express disapproval of preventive measures and then to smile tenderly and hope that nice woman Mary Lindsay was taking proper care of Paul.

“It’s Joanna who’s seeing to him,” Valerie had snapped.

“I mix them up,” her mother had replied dreamily. “I don’t mind if it’s a girl or a boy though it would be nice to have a boy with a look of your father about him.”

“Do you realize, Mother, that I’m in my thirties? I’ll probably die.”

“Nonsense. Aunt Dorothy had her first in her forties. There was no trouble. An hour and a half. And Margaret Brown. Thirty-nine. He came in the ambulance. A lovely little boy. Or was Margaret’s a girl? And then there was Hester.”

Her mother had run on like that all the time, a smooth soft flow of selfishness, both in Switzerland and at Appleshaw while Paul had been away. It had been a relief to part with her, and get Paul back, full of proper concern for her. She had been lying down when the car bringing him home had stopped at the gate, and she had not got up because she did not want to have to offer his friend tea. There weren’t any cakes because beating them up was bad for her, and she was not going to offer bread and butter only and be thought a bad housekeeper. But the sound of Paul’s voice, of Bess barking, had sent a thrill of delight through her, so warm and quick and astonishing that she had not been able to suppress it. She had still been shaken by astonishment when a few minutes later she had come down to greet Paul. In his arms she had felt herself almost melting with relief, as though some danger had threatened him. He alone now understood her. Only he was truly concerned for her. She had felt suddenly that they stood alone together against the hostile world, guarding each other with their bodies for the sake of each other and also because of this other who was to come into it.

But she had forgotten that now. “What is it, Paul?” she asked again.

He handed her a box. “Take it upstairs and look at it.”

“But I’ve just made the tea.”

“It won’t take you a moment to look at that.”

With mounting excitement, for she had seen the label on the box, she ran upstairs. The tissue paper inside rustled in her fingers like a rustle of gold, so rich and precious was its message. And there was gold beneath it, a housecoat of amber and russet and pale green, silky and marvelous. She put it on, looked at herself in the mirror and caught her breath. For she looked wonderful. It must have cost a fortune, for it took a fortune to make an aging woman look as she looked now. Was Paul mad? They were poor as church mice and the baby was coming. Yet Paul had never been reckless about money. What had happened? The explanation was knocking at the back of her mind, persistent and humbling. She went downstairs again, her head held high, rustling at every step.

Paul was aware of the rustle, and the faint scent of new silk. “You’ve got it on,” he said, hoarse with anxiety. It hurt her that he should be so scared. Had she in the past been so difficult to please that having clothed her in the sun he should still shrink from her displeasure?

“I don’t know what to say, Paul,” she said. “I’ve dreamed of having a garment like this. What do you say when you’re dressed in dreams?” The answer was so unexpected, so unlike her, that he crimsoned with shock and relief. “How did you get it? Did you go into the shop by yourself? Let’s have tea. Tell me while we have tea.”

“There was a woman I got to know in town, an actress. I asked her where to go and she told me. Then I took a taxi and went there. It seemed a small place, sort of quiet and silky, with a thick carpet your feet sank into, like beech mast. There was a woman there with a quiet silky voice, like the shop, and I told her about you. I told her what colors suited you and I described you. Then of course I had to leave it to her.”

“How did you describe me?”

He described to Valerie the girl he had married, not the woman whose present likeness had been stamped upon the screen of his mind by her edgy voice and the stifling dust that had seemed sometimes to settle upon them both, the mental fallout of her discontent. It was for the first woman that he had bought the housecoat, and for the child’s mother. They had come together in his mind, blotting out that other woman, a fused and radiant image lit up by the passion of his gratitude.

He discovered that Valerie was crying. “Not in that frock or coat or whatever it is,” he implored her. “You’ll spoil it. Is it only what’s to be expected in your interesting condition or is something the matter?”

“I don’t look like that any more.”

“It’s what you look like to me, and what you are in yourself. The thing suits you, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Paul, it does.”

“Well, there you are then. If it was matched to my description, and suits you, then my description was accurate, for it was a very clever woman who sold it to me.”

Valerie laughed and dried her eyes. “I bet she was! They are in those soft silky places. And in shops that are very quiet they charge the earth. Poor lamb, the shock you must have had when you heard the price!”

“It wasn’t a shock,” said Paul cheerfully. “The moment I went in I felt that sort of religious feeling that there is in places where they fleece you. I didn’t mind. Nothing is good enough for my wife.”

“Paul, you’re different. Reckless and happy. It was an actress, you said, who sent you to that place?”

“Yes. Do you think she was in league with the woman in the shop?”

“Obviously. Paul, is it the play?”

“The play and the book.”

“Both accepted?”

“Yes. From now on, Val, life’s going to be easier for you.”

“But how do you know they’ll succeed?”

“There’s such a thing as the law of demand and supply.”

“Who’s demanding?”

“The baby.”

“What a child you are! When the baby comes there’ll be two of you.”

He was suddenly serious. “Val, I’m not supposing that from now on our life is going to be a sort of prolonged happy ending to an up-and-down story. The state of the world is as ugly as ever. Our human nature is still what it was. I only mean that no desert is so dusty as not to have an oasis here and there. What’s that Psalm? ‘The pools are filled with water.’ Don’t you think we’re coming to an oasis now? I feel we are.”

She did not cry any more but gripped his hand for a moment under the tea cart. Then to her utter astonishment she heard herself say, “I’m glad we’re having this baby.”

A strange deeply buried desire to please him had welled up from somewhere, but she felt winded and dazed. What she had said was something she could not go back upon, something she must keep to, and with one brutal twist it had stripped from her mind the comfortable delusion that she was a martyred woman.

A
PPLESHAW was shaken as though by an earthquake. At first they could not believe it, as they would not have believed it if the green had suddenly cracked open and swallowed the church. It was true that the news made headlines in all the morning papers, and that was the first that most of them knew of it, but the events that hit the headlines had never hitherto had any connection with Appleshaw and it took them a long time to grasp the fact that this one had. There it was, in print, with photographs in the picture papers. Mr. Hepplewhite had been arrested. According to temperament, incredulity and shock turned to dismay, sorrow, excitement, even pleasure. How are the mighty fallen! The dramatically minded could not help a feeling of aesthetic satisfaction, and those who were not in the red were aware of their own financial solvency shining like a halo behind their heads, enormously to their credit. But not Colonel and Mrs. Adams. There was no room in their minds for anything at all except grief for Mrs. Hepplewhite. Nor was there in the Vicar’s.

“The poor woman must be visited,” he said to Jean. His tones were those of ultimatum and his fierce eyes went boring through his sister’s head.

Jean had just taken up a shovelful of coal to mend the fire and she dropped the lot. The room swung around her and she thought she was going to faint. No demand made upon her had ever been worse than this, no spiritual struggle more fierce than the one which brought her with the help of God to the whispered words, “Yes, James. Do you want me to go now?”

“What? You? Good heavens, no! I must go myself. Don’t wait tea.”

“Put your muffler on, dear,” said Jean to the closing door. Then she heard the front door bang and knew she was alone. She sank into the nearest chair as faint with relief as a moment before with terror. Reprieved from the impossible! She knew now how Abraham had felt when he had not had to sacrifice Isaac after all. But poor James. She believed he had been nervous. His voice had sounded very jerky when he went out.

James Anderson’s stride was also jerky as he stormed up the hill. What an appalling kettle of fish! Mrs. Hepplewhite of all people. She’d weep. Now this was just the sort of thing that had made him dread becoming a parson. Weeping women. Fashionably dressed women. Fashionably dressed women weeping, with their powder melting, if that was what powder did, and their lipstick running down. He was fortunate of course that so far only the country griefs had come his way, the sorrow for the one who had had his life, for the happy release, with prosaic reliance upon the will of God and childlike pleasure in the new black clothes, none of which had embarrassed him at all. But this! Would he have to visit Hepplewhite in prison? Of course he would. Now may God Almighty help me! James Anderson ejaculated mentally. Good heavens, am I here already?

To his astonishment the door was opened to him by Mary Lindsay, cool and competent, and the realization that she, not he, was evidently in charge of this affair so flooded him with relief that his tense gaunt frame relaxed upon the doorstep like an icicle in sunshine, and Mary’s eyes twinkled. Unwinding his muffler in the hall he found he did not object to the twinkle, nor to the competence, though as a rule he disliked competence in women. So few women could exercise competence without fuss. As she disentangled him from the last few yards of his muffler, which had stretched considerably through the years, and gave him the necessary information sugar-coated with a little tactful instruction, he could for the first time believe that she had held the positions of administrative responsibility assigned to her by gossip. Certainly the present situation, which included himself, was being administered very well indeed.

“Elise fetched me a couple of days ago, after Mr. Hepplewhite had gone,” said Mary. “Mrs. Hepplewhite was at first prostrated, and no wonder, and asked for me. She seems to have lost touch with her own relatives. She is now quite in command of herself and, being a humble woman, hurt pride forms no part of her grief. She doesn’t want sympathy. She is loyal to her husband, and devoted to him, and to speak of his merits comforts her.”

“Merits? Tell me a few.”

“They will occur to you. But what will please her best of all will be the fact that you’ve come and she can talk to you. If she asks questions tell her the truth.”

James Anderson found himself in the drawing room. Mrs. Hepplewhite was on the sofa with her feet up, Tania on her lap, a bottle of eau de cologne and a large photograph of Mr. Hepplewhite on a table beside her. The November sun showed him that she had a bad headache but she was well dressed as ever and her makeup had been carefully applied. He felt inclined to cheer, noting the slightly defiant angle at which she held her head and the even greater defiance of the photograph so prominently displayed beside her. She held out her hand with something of a regal gesture, as though daring him to pity her, but she was pleased to see him and came to the point at once.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” she said. “You’re the only person I can ask. Sit down here, please. Has my husband done anything wicked? I’ve read and read the papers but they are so confusing. I can’t understand at all. I expect Mary knows, she’s so clever, but though I love her I can’t ask her. It would be disloyal to Mr. Hepplewhite. But I can ask you because you’re a clergyman. What exactly has he done? Whatever you tell me will make no difference to my love for him, but I would like to know if you think he has done wrong. The papers have said some horrible things. One of them said he was nothing but a common thief.”

“He has certainly done wrong, Mrs. Hepplewhite. He has defrauded a good many people of a great deal of money. But I wouldn’t call him a common thief. He did not deliberately set out to steal other men’s money, as a common thief does. He gambled with it. I have not the type of mind that can grasp the complicated financial affairs of big business, but so far as I can gather it was a daring and brilliant gamble. Had he brought it off he, and other people too, would have made fortunes. But something went wrong and he failed. And so he is execrated.”

“So if he had succeeded he would not have done wrong?”

“Not in the eyes of the world.”

“But in your eyes?”

“Yes, I should have thought he had done wrong. The money was not his to gamble with, and it represented the prosperity and happiness of other people.”

“Other people are ruined because of what he did?”

“Perhaps ruined is too strong a word, but they will suffer.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Hepplewhite simply, and then after a pause, “I must do something for them.”

The typical kindness touched him but that she should think that anything she could do would ameliorate even the fringe of the devastation touched him even more. It was like a child trying to empty the ocean with a toy bucket. Yet the same criticism could be leveled at every individual attempt to ameliorate or withstand the titanic evils of the world, and the puny efforts had to be made because it was all one could do. And if there were enough children with enough buckets . . .

“I agree with you,” he said. “We will talk about it later when the situation is clearer.”

“They call my husband an adventurer, too.”

He perceived that everything they called Mr. Hepplewhite was sticking into her like Sebastian’s arrows, and grieving that they should have reached the wrong target, he tried to comfort her. “That word has two meanings, Mrs. Hepplewhite. If you take it in the favorable sense it means that your husband loved adventure for its own sake. I think that’s true.”

“You mean like discovering the North Pole and climbing Everest?”

James Anderson replied that in different circumstances he was sure Mr. Hepplewhite would have done both those things. The reply was, he hoped, truthful, for given a certain number of circumstances anyone could doubtless do anything. And then suddenly he had a queer mental vision of Mr. Hepplewhite plodding through a blizzard, his head down against the whirl of snow, a massive dogged bulk of obstinacy. “Your husband is a man of great strength,” he said. “And, I think, of resurgence. One cannot imagine him doing anything with a storm except eventually getting the better of it.”

Mrs. Hepplewhite brightened, and then the gleam of light passed as she asked, “How long will he be in prison?”

“I don’t know. Possibly for some years.”

“It’s a long time,” she said. “But it will pass. I suppose I ought to want him to be sorry, repentant, yet do you know I don’t really want him to be anything different from what he is. I’ve always loved him just as he was, however unhappy he made me.”

This was suddenly too much for James. He ought to be saying that they should wish for repentance but just now he couldn’t. What she said was so utterly true of human love at its deepest, blindest and most heartbreaking. All he could say was, “I am sure you will find, when you get him back, that he is still essentially himself.”

He left her and said to Mary, as she let him out, “That is an extremely good woman.”

“But you knew that before, surely?”

“Possibly, but without the humility to recognize my knowledge.”

“And Mr. Hepplewhite?”

“He will emerge. The power to do that is of course a virtue. You are staying here?”

“For the present,” said Mary. “I’ve even brought my cat.”

“When you first came here I should never have suspected you of a cat. Good day.”

Now what does a cat symbolize? Mary wondered as she shut the door on him. Domesticity? Decay, like pears going mushy? Anyway I’ve got the cat. She remembered Tiger with acute pleasure and then turned back to the front door as the afternoon post shot through the letterbox.

She took Mrs. Hepplewhite the mail and went to fetch the tea cart. When she wheeled it into the drawing room she found her in a flood of tears so desperate that Tania had betaken herself to the hearth rug. I never did like poodles, thought Mary briefly, and conquering her native distaste of elderly women in tears she knelt down and put her arms around Mrs. Hepplewhite. The time-honored phrases came to her quite easily. “Do you good to have a good cry, my dear.” And then later, “What you want now is a cup of tea.”

“It was in my stars,” said Mrs. Hepplewhite huskily, accepting the cup of tea. “It was in my stars that we should be great friends. Do you remember that day I called on you and told you I knew we should be friends?”

“I remember,” said Mary, and had a moment of alarm. She had always liked to choose her intimate friends, not have them thrust upon her. Yet why should she have things as she liked them? She abandoned the alarm. “Was there bad news in your post, Hermione?” she asked. It was the first time she had used Mrs. Hepplewhite’s Christian name.

“Oh, my dear, call me Dolly!” Mrs. Hepplewhite begged her with another quick burst of tears. “No, not bad news. It was that
he
called me Dolly. Fred. I’ve had a letter from him. Just saying that he’d like me to go and see him. Just that, but calling me Dolly. I thought he’d quite forgotten that he used to call me Dolly. That was my name when we got married, my real name, but when we began to get on in life he didn’t like it any more. He didn’t like anything that reminded him of the early days, and being poor and so on. He told me to choose something more dignified. So I chose Hermione. I saw it in a newspaper and thought it was dignified. But I’d like you to call me Dolly.”

“I’d rather go on calling you Hermione,” said Mary. “It suits you.”

“Why, dear?”

“Did you ever read
The Winter’s Tale?
”

“That’s Shakespeare, isn’t it? No, I don’t read poetry. It muddles me. Why use lots of unnecessary words just so as to get a rhyme at the end of each line?”

“Well, the woman in it is called Hermione. She was not well treated by her husband but she won him back in the end.”

“You mean . . . you think . . . ?”

“Yes, I do.”

“But Mr. Anderson doesn’t think people ever change very much.”

“A man is not a different person just because he becomes aware. Oh I know it must seem like metamorphosis when the eyes of a blind man are opened, but he’s the same man. We grow, mercifully, and growth is just awareness of more and more.”

“Could you read me
The Winter’s Tale?
I love your voice and all those words might make some sort of sense if you spoke them.”

“I’ll read it to you,” Mary promised. “Won’t you tell me about the days when you first met Fred?”

For the rest of the day Mrs. Hepplewhite told her, and no poet at his most eloquent had ever had more to say. There was even a lyric quality in Mrs. Hepplewhite’s description of her early years, when Dolly Arnold had been living within her own milieu like a fish in the sea. The sweet ease of those days had invested them with a poetic glow of beauty. For each of us, Mary thought, where we rest and are at home is beautiful. But our conception of home changes as awareness grows and would she be happy now in the Edgware Road and the Gaiety Theatre?

“Would you like to go back there?” she asked.

“Where, dear?”

“To the Edgware Road.”

They were in Mrs. Hepplewhite’s bedroom now and it was night. She shook her head and looked out of the window at the winter trees, their dark sculptured beauty motionless against the starry sky. “No. I don’t think I’d like the television aerials or the noise of the traffic. Not now. But I’d like a little house or a bungalow. All modern, with gadgets.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “There’s going to be one for sale in the village. Julie told me. The Howards are leaving. It’s only two doors off from those dear Adamses.”

Now may heaven strengthen the Adamses, thought Mary. Aloud she said, “You could let this house.”

“If Fred agrees I’ll sell it,” said Mrs. Hepplewhite. “And my jewels and the Bentley.”

“Won’t you miss the Bentley?”

“No. I’ve always longed to travel by bus with all the other people. It’s lonely alone in the Bentley. And I can give the money to the people who will be poor because of Fred.”

Mary knew with James Anderson that it would be as a drop in the ocean, but she agreed. “Shall I stay with you until you sleep?” she asked. She had been doing that these last few nights, sitting by Mrs. Hepplewhite until her sleeping tablets took effect. But tonight she was sufficiently convalescent for the terror of loneliness to be less severe. “With Tania on the bed I’ll be all right,” she said.