The Town House (53 page)

‘You’re very late,’ she said.

‘Yes, I am. Would you like me to put out the candles for you?’

‘No. Not yet. Come and talk to me for a little while.’ She put her hand on my arm and I went into the room with her. She moved towards the window, which stood wide on the garden. The lop-sided moon which had lighted me home hung like a lantern and the sweet night air, the breath of flowers and green things growing came in to mingle with the sharp scent of the brandewijn.

‘I’m so lonely,’ she said. ‘Years and years and years with nobody to talk to.’

She sat down on the window seat and would have pulled me down beside her, but I stiffened myself, and her hand, as I resisted, slid down from my arm to my hand. She twisted her fingers so that for a moment they were twined with mine and she looked at me with as plain an invitation as any woman ever gave any man.

I thought very rapidly; a dozen thoughts in a breath’s space. Ha, I thought, and I had believed that it was too late to work my way in with her. And I thought how amusing to see the trollop who had lived behind that screen of whalebone and good breeding. And I thought, you are the one who sent Maude to Beauclaire and therefore to Clevely and I will have no truck with you. Other thoughts I had too, of how long she had lived widowed, of things Clemence had murmured in moments of joy, of how it was better to live out your time as a maid than to be widowed since what you had never had you did not miss. Almost I could be sorry for her. But not quite. Besides, I had just come from Clemence and there was no desire in me. So I pulled my fingers free and said,

‘Madam, it is too late now for talk. I am for bed. I advise you to do the same.’

She began to whimper, saying that she could not sleep; that once the brandewijn would assure her slumbers, but now no more.

‘In the end there is nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing left. Nothing at all.’

I reached over her bowed head and closed the window and latched it. As I did so she half rose and pressed herself against me. I stepped back and said,

‘Madam, you are not quite yourself this evening. Come take my arm and I will help you upstairs.’ I left one candle burning and put out the rest.

Still whimpering she said, ‘I am myself. Locked in, all alone with terrible things to remember.’ She looked at me with drunken cunning and with a change of tone said, ‘Ah, you would like to know, wouldn’t you? And all I’ll tell you is that God has taken away Walter, to punish me. So I’m all alone and even you won’t be kind to me.’

My surprise and mixed feelings had settled down now into simple disgust. I said briskly,

‘I am always civil to you, Madam. Even now I am offering you my arm, and to light you upstairs.’

She gave me a beaten look, but she put her hand in the crook of the arm I offered and moving unsteadily mounted the stairs. At the door of her own room she paused.

‘They come and stand by the bed and look at me,’ she said in a complaining, confidential way. ‘They never did that before. I’m afraid.’ For a second I suspected that this was a cunning trick to get me into her bed-chamber; but almost immediately her manner underwent another sudden change. ‘I shan’t flinch,’ she said. ‘The blood of brave men runs in me. Let them do their worst.’

She opened the door and marched in, as though meeting a challenge, and before I could give her the candle, slammed the door in my face.

I went on to my bed thinking about Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. As a character I had never much admired him, but now I saw the story from his viewpoint. I only hoped that when she woke, sore-headed and sober in the morning, she would have forgotten the whole episode. But her manner betrayed her. She had never been markedly pleasant to me; now she became even less so, always speaking to me in a cold, contemptuous way and taking trouble to make wounding remarks. She told me that I was going bald very early, and another time said that I was getting fat, unbecoming in a young man; she even hinted that my hose could do with a wash. One would have thought that I was the one who had made an attempt to seduce her.

That was why I spoke frankly to Master Reed of the need to make his will; but like all unlearned and self-made fellows he regarded the making of a will as tantamount to signing his death warrant.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I will see about that.’ And did nothing.

For a boy who had evinced so little affection for his family while he lived in its bosom, Walter wrote very regularly and at some length. I suspect that some, at least, of his letters, were written to advertise his skill and in the hope of drawing custom. He had plainly become one of the great fellowship of the open road and at various times his letters were delivered to the Old Vine by tinkers, minstrels, pilgrims, friars and merchants. Once even, a gay young knight with two squires in his train and his jousting armour on a packhorse, came jingling along to hand in a letter which Walter had written at Nottingham Castle.

‘The boy played with such skill,’ he explained, ‘that I invited him to come with me to Colchester where I join my Lord Delahaye who has a lively appreciation of talent. The young knave made mock of my offer but said that if I went to Colchester I could deliver a letter for him. It has added some miles to my journey, but no matter; I have seen the nest that hatched so sweet a throstle.’

Master Reed and I had just finished supervising the loading of one of the pony trains, and were on our way into the house.

‘If you would be pleased to dismount and enter, sir,’ Martin said, ‘you would be welcome to the best I have to offer.’

‘I thank you, but I am already delayed.’

‘Run find your mistress,’ Master Reed said to me; and to the young knight, ‘One moment more, for charity. The boy’s mother … it would ease her mind to speak with one who saw him so recently.’

Mistress Reed came running out, and the knight doffed his feathered cap and answered, with civility, the questions she asked about how Walter looked, was he still well shod, and what kind of company he was in. He repeated the story of his offer to introduce Walter to Lord Delahaye, and Mistress Reed, already a little mazed with wine, drew herself up with great dignity and said,

‘If Walter had wanted advancement in that way he could have gone to his cousin Astallon at Beauclaire.’

The young knight said, ‘Madam, your son will never lack advancement. With his skill and effrontery he should go far.’

If Walter’s letters were to be believed such offers, and some even more dazzling, were an everyday matter to him. His reply was always that to him confinement in a great house, even a palace, would be as irksome as in a small. He seemed more impressed by his smaller triumphs, ‘everybody wept’, ‘some women came and kissed my hand’, ‘a man gave me his last farthing’.

Mistress Reed kept all the letters in a box of carved wood, spent hours brooding over them and fingering them, and constantly referred to them as proof that Walter was dutiful, that he remembered his home and family with affection and would most surely return.

Once when she said that, Master Reed said, mildly, but with meaning, ‘We trust that he will. And it would be a pity if he found us in less good fettle than he left us.’

That was the most pointed remark he ever made to her in my presence; but then, despite his lack of learning and his gruffiness he was not insensitive. Whether in private he remonstrated with her I do not know. To me, on one occasion, when her insobriety was such as no one could overlook, he said,

‘Poor woman. She cannot face grief. When her mother died it was the same, and when Richard died. It is her refuge, as work has been mine.’ He thought for a second, sticking out his underlip. ‘At least she hurts nobody but herself,’ he said. ‘By my work I’ve ruined two men that I know of, and probably others.’

I forgot Mistress Reed. I thought to myself, it is a bad sign when old men who have led successful lives begin to look back and reckon what damage they have done. It is a foreshadowing of the final reckoning which they are preparing to face.

Time went on; the seasons changed. My little secret hoard of coins grew, more swiftly as Martin Reed relaxed, bit by bit, the strictness of his supervision. Physical changes in those one sees several times every day escape one’s observation; it was with surprise that one summer evening, coming suddenly upon Mistress Reed in the garden, with the level rays of the westering sun fell upon her, I realized that she had grown fat and that puckers of loose skin hung like little bags beneath her eyes and under her jaw. She was drunk, as usual; and she was staring so fixedly at a place where the grass grew lush under an apple tree that I thought she had dropped something and was searching for it. She actually pressed one hand against the trunk of the tree for support, and thus balancing, bent over and with the other hand touched the grass.

I was going straight past her, but she heard my step on the path and straightened up, and squeezing her eyes against the light of the sun, said, as though we had been for some time in converse,

‘That is the
one
thing that is sure and certain, the one thing you can count on. God punishes every sin.’

‘So we are taught,’ I agreed, and made to pass on.

‘But we don’t believe it. That is where we make our mistake. And then it is so subtle. The punishment never comes either from the direction, or in the form that you expect. Bear that in mind. You plant a sin like a grain of wheat and you think punishment will come up, a full ear of wheat. For that you are prepared. But it isn’t wheat that comes up; it’s a damask rose, and you pluck it, and the thorns tear your flesh and the scent of it is poison. I know what I’m saying.’

‘I have no doubt of that, Madam. Would you like my arm to assist you into the house? Then I must ask you to excuse me.’

I went on into the house, thinking that here we were with another year almost half gone, Midsummer Eve again. And Master Reed still with his will not made, my future still very insecure and Clemence growing a little, a very little, but still noticeably cooler. It was fifteen months since Maude had gone back to begin her novitiate, and though I had done my best to shut her out of my mind, more than once, in the very act with Clemence I had suddenly thought of her and gone impotent. That had frightened me; and Clemence, sympathetic the first time, had turned suspicious the second.

Leaving Mistress Reed, maudlin under the apple tree I thought to myself – It hardly needs God to punish us; we somehow contrive to punish ourselves.

The news about Walter took a long time to reach us. A letter written in the April of 1451, arrived from Gloucester in June. It said he was well, and about to set out for Winchester. After that there was silence.

We should hear at Christmas, Master Reed said; yes, Mistress Reed echoed, we should certainly hear at Christmas. But the season came and went without a word. Mistress Reed burrowed more securely into her refuge and the old man said, whether to comfort himself or her, that the absence of news might be a good sign. Probably in the autumn, faced with the discomforts of another winter, Walter had turned his face for home and therefore did not think to write.

Then, on a blustery March evening, my master and I were in the office when a servant girl, white of face and wide of eye, ran in and said that there was a creature asking for Master Reed at the yard door.

‘If you mean a beggar, say so,’ Martin said and prepared to lever himself out of his chair.

‘I’ll go,’ I said, and jumped up.

‘If it is a letter or a message from Walter, bring the bearer in. A spoken word tells twice as much,’ Master Reed called after me.

The servant girl ran straight back to the kitchen instead of hanging about, as their habit is, to catch a word out of which to make a long story. When I reached the door I realized that her use of the word ‘creature’ had a frightful accuracy. There are the natural deformities to which the eye becomes accustomed, the squints, hare-lips, hunch-backs, mutilations due to accident or battle. But there is another sort, inflicted by unscrupulous showmen upon infant children. They take them when their bones are soft and pliable and shape them, as a gardener shapes a tree that is to be espaliered. Then, if the unfortunate child survives – few do – they have something truly unusual, something out of nature, for a sight of which, in a dim-lighted booth, the sensation seekers will hand over their pence.

This was one such, a striking example of the devilish art. His left arm had been trained to grow behind his head, so that he had two arms, one long and one short, on the same side, and his head appeared to grow from under his arm, like those of a strange people mentioned in some traveller’s tale.

In his armpit his head lay sideways, so that to look up he must turn his eyes almost out of their sockets.

‘Are you Master Martin Reed?’ he asked. His voice was muted.

‘I’ll take you to him,’ I said, sickened beyond being able even to ask his business. With my back to him as he pattered after me towards the office I managed to ask,

‘Is it anything concerning Walter Reed?’

‘Yes. Yes. Bad news that I hate to tell. But I promised.’

Outside the office door which I had closed behind me because the wind was raging through the house, I said,‘Wait here a moment.’ I went in.

‘It is about Walter,’ I said, as gently as I could, ‘and bad news, he says. And the bearer, sir, is one of those freaks that they show at fairs – a shocking sight.’

He drew a deep breath which lifted and straightened his heavy bowed shoulders.

‘Let’s know the worst,’ he said.

I admitted the poor creature, but did not go in myself. I went and sat on the stairs, near enough to be within call, telling myself that this was, after all, the proper thing to do. I was
not
one of the family, intimately as I lived with them; nevertheless, knowing the real reason for not going into the
office I knew that I was a deserter. Still, I was here if I was wanted. And in a minute, no more, the office door opened and Master Reed, grey-faced, but quite calm, came out, turned towards the kitchen, saw me and stopped. He lifted a warning finger.

‘Go and ask them to mull some ale,’ he said, almost in a whisper, ‘and bring it and some bread and meat, to the office. Then go and bring down my sheepskin coat. The poor creature’s starving and soaked to the skin.’