The Ugly Sister (23 page)

‘You have no need to.'

‘I think I have. Because as you must now perceive I have an unnatural fear of dying.'

The candle was smoking, and I snuffed it. ‘I should not think that so very uncommon.'

‘It should be uncommon in a priest, a man of faith. In my own religion there are ample loving reassurances by the Apostles, by our Saviour Himself. Even Lao-tse, the Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism, said that a man who is afraid of dying is like a person just released from prison and afraid to step into freedom.'

I stroked his forehead. ‘Let us leave it now, Uncle. I understand how you feel, and I'm sure many others have felt the same. And surely it is understandable to wish to have someone loving by your side when you go.
That's
not at all unnatural.'

His lips quivered. ‘ You remember old Sarah Kimmins – she was in the choir before your time. I was at her deathbed in January last. She was perfectly cheerful. She was looking forward to her new life with
real
pleasure.'

‘Perhaps,' I said, ‘it needs a sort of simplicity of mind to have that sort of faith.'

He half smiled. ‘Once again you teach me my own religion.'

‘I did not mean to. But seriously is this not a question of how – how complex one's mind is? You have gone deeply into your faith with a brain far more – more questioning than Mrs Kimmins. So you have to pay for it.'

‘I think the worst thing,' he said after a minute, ‘ is that it makes me so ashamed.'

T
WENTY
-
ONE YEARS
of age became twenty-two and another birthday and Christmas loomed. The Canon had recovered sufficiently to retain his benefice, though he walked with a bad limp and had had to be excused most of his Bodmin duties.

In the June my mother and her new husband, Captain Frensham, had called and spent two nights on their way to visit Thomasine. A fresh-faced very young-looking man in spite of his white hair and portly figure, he had an odd habit of going to sleep for a few minutes while in company if his attention wavered, but this seemed to do no one any harm and he woke refreshed and amiable. It was soon clear that my mother was the dominant partner and this suited her well. Looking back, it occurred to me that she had come to dominate most of the company in which she had found herself. Once or twice I heard Captain Frensham refer to his new wife as ‘my figurehead', and one could see that Claudine not only decorated the bows of their ship but helped to steer it.

I did not tell her of my experience at Place House last year. Confidence was still quite dried up between us. No doubt I was foolish, irrational, jealous on small evidence, angry, resentful. Living as I did so much within myself, suspicions festered until they became certainties, certainties grew into enormities. What was to say she had not picked the brooch up on the cliffs?

Twice that year I had had letters from Charles Lane. They were unexpectedly long letters, considering how little he had to say when we met. He seemed to feel that our railway trip together had cemented a friendship between us, and I replied in the same vein. He told me of a trip he and his wife had made to London, and I told him of the Canon's illness and slow recovery. He sent me drawings of the design for a second engine on the Bodmin–Wadebridge line which was to support the
Camel
. The
Camel
had broken down so badly during the spring that it was under repairs for two months and all traffic had been horse-drawn. The
Elephant
, the new engine, was to follow the same general design, but would be more reliable and more powerful.

His second letter told me of an accident in which he had been involved in a train running between Exeter and Crediton. The engine, he said, was reaching its top speed when a horse without its rider, whom it had thrown in the nearby hunt, came at full gallop on the other line in the opposite direction. On seeing the approaching train the horse reared up and turned round and was hit and instantly killed. The train was thrown off the rails. He, Charles, was in the first-class carriage, but when he got out the engine was upright in the ditch up to its gearing in mud, the tender also, and the first two carriages on their sides; the last carriage was on end with its wheels in the air. Yet no one was seriously injured. ‘Myself, I escaped with scarcely a bruise.'

His letters made me feel warm, rather content.

Not so comforting was a letter from Mary, from Place.

Dear Emma, I am sorry to know Uncle Francis is unwell. This will no doubt restrict your activities in the parish as he will need constant attention.

I was disappointed to miss you at Place. I had only left that morning, labouring under an intense pressure to get away, if only for a short break and change of scene. I find my mother's condition infinitely depressing, and, although Dr Culver says she may stay in this state for years, I think she is rapidly losing ground. However much one may love a person, one can hardly sincerely pray that she may continue as she is now.

I remember what a happy house it was when my father and mother were well, and in what a cheerful and agreeable way we all grew up together. Now all is changed. Desmond is morose and depressed, and the servants, such of them as are left, surly and disobedient. Slade continues to enjoy the approbation of Thomasine, and so one is powerless to amend the situation.

Indeed it was only when I spent two weeks at Tregolls that I was aware of rumours and disagreeable gossip circulating about Place. When one is
there
one is in some degree isolated, in the centre of a small group of people with only a passing interest in the outer world. So soon as one moves
out
of that group one hears the whispers, the muttered scandal, the vindictive tittle-tattle which now surrounds the house like a miasma.

Perhaps the ugliest rumour concerns yourself – which is that, because of your disfigurement, you bring ill-fortune to a house, even that it was your presence at Place that first prompted my mother's early derangement. I vehemently stamped on this hideous rumour when I heard it. Indeed, I started to destroy this letter, feeling it would cause you such distress, but then I rewrote it with the belief that you should know even at the risk of shocking and offending you – to understand the depths of the evil scandal which grows around Place.

This calumny – which is so obviously a malicious lie – strengthens my hope that all the other rumours are equally ignorant and dismissible, rumours which cannot perhaps be so easily cast out by the reasonable mind. The worst of these is that your sister is no longer observing her marriage vows and has been unfaithful to Desmond. Once or twice I have been disturbed at night by whispering voices – as you will know I sleep near to Mama's room and therefore sleep more lightly than if she were not there. Several times I have opened my door at the sound of footsteps, thinking possibly that Mama was taken worse. But the footsteps were always farther away and in the other direction. Once I heard a strange man's voice raised in anger – indeed shouting – but the next morning everyone denied having heard anything, so perhaps it was a frightful dream. In this house, in which I was born and have lived almost all my life, I now find it disturbing to walk round with a candle in the middle of the night.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of all this, I have to tell you that I cannot feel myself any longer in sympathy or even accord with Thomasine; and this makes the situation very difficult for me. I am bound to Place while my mother lives, and so must try to accept the situation as I find it. Desmond confides nothing in me. He was always reticent. But he is a
good
man, and I grieve to see him so down in the mouth and finding such little pleasure in the gentler, simpler things of life – as he used to do. As I have mentioned to you once before, I have a certain anxiety about him lest he should tend to follow our mother.

Believe me, my dear Emma, I am ashamed to burden you with a letter such as this. But there is no one else I feel I can confide in.

With love

Mary

A couple of days after receiving this letter and having read and reread it many times, I copied it out and sent the original to my mother.

D
URING MOST
of the summer the Canon achieved a plateau of semi-invalidism. He got about with a stick, but his pronounced limp grew no less. As the stroke had been on the left side it interfered very little with his speech and not at all with his writing – except to make anything he did so much more of an effort. He resumed in full the taking of services in the church, he buried and married and baptized as required, but he relied on me more than ever, so that Mary's supposition that I should have little time for myself was right.

At first his appetite was poor, but gradually it recovered. I bought a couple of cookery books and tried to tempt his palate with new-tasting things. This was successful. He began to eat and put on most of the weight he had lost. Indeed his diet became a constant topic in the household. In the end and after much persuasion I was allowed £1 a week extra to spend on fruit and fish and a few vegetable delicacies. His face always seemed to light up when I saw him in the morning; and almost always he would begin, ‘Emma, I have been thinking.' One time in four it would be about something he was going to say in his sermon on Sunday morning. The other three times it would be about food. His clerical collar now no longer seemed sizes too big.

A letter from my mother, four weeks after I had posted mine.

She was again in Scotland, and had been out grouse shooting for the first time. After a longish descriptive passage about the pleasures and perils of the shoot and a further account of the grandeur but coldness of the house in which they were staying she came round to the letter I had sent.

I do not think, my dear girl, to take Mary's epistle too seriously to heart. All she is doing is repeating rumours which may be circulating, or they may not. She does not produce a single fact to bear out her fears, and if her belief in Tamsin's infidelity is as flimsily based as these absurd and superstitious stories about you, I should not worry for them at all.

I said ‘ or they may not', because of the mental condition of the writer. If her mother's unstable inheritance has passed down to her daughter, and there has always been a suspicion that Mary, while sensible enough in most ways, has a morbid streak in her, then these stories and suspicions
may not be circulating at all
. Mary has always been eccentric, and with the added strain of Aunt Anna's illness, she may feel herself peering over the brink.

I hope Uncle Francis is better.

Love,

Mother

Uncle Francis was not better. As the autumn came on he stayed longer in bed in the mornings, and slept soundly in the afternoons. His interest in life and in the well-being of the church did not falter, but it was as if he were seeing it at a distance from which he was no longer closely involved. He wrote again to the Bishop of Exeter offering his resignation, and His Lordship refused it and said if the Canon's health deteriorated further he would send a curate to assist him. Most of all the Canon seemed to enjoy talking to me.

‘I wonder sometimes,' he said, ‘ whether I have been a bad churchman.'

‘Oh, Uncle, that is quite absurd.'

‘Possibly yes, possibly no. My principles at all times have been very strict, yet practice has often been imperfect, and then I have punished myself by adopting regimes of thought, regimes of action which smack too much of the puritan. I've lived moderately but often selfishly. Indulging in pleasures of food and wine and giving less pleasure than I should to others. It has been on the whole a
comfortable
life, far too comfortable. This lovely parish with its beautiful variety of scene, its superb church, its separation from much that is cruellest and wickedest in life; I think if I had my time again I would try to find a benefice in one of the great industrial towns of the north, where crime and poverty have to be fought on one's own doorstep. Here, barring the normal effluences of human nature, everything has been so peaceful, so humdrum, an eddy, a backwater of peace.'

‘If you had been working in an industrial parish, you would not have had time for your writings.'

He lay looking up at the ceiling. His face, with its blue eyes behind their rimmed glinting spectacles, silhouetted against the candle flame, seemed suddenly vulnerable and old.

The following day he said: ‘ Emma, I think my time is coming soon.'

I said, with assumed indifference: ‘I think you will have to postpone such ugly thoughts for a week or two. You have confirmation classes next Tuesday. And a meeting of the railway venturers the following week. What is the matter with you?'

‘I feel ill.'

‘Is your leg troubling you?'

‘No. I have not had another stroke. But I feel different, more composed.'

‘Is that anything to complain of?'

‘No. I must accept it. It is a sort of composure which portends a new phase in my life. A very late one, I fear.' He coughed. ‘Age is an unattractive thing. I wish I had met you ten years earlier.'

‘I'm afraid I was not a very agreeable child. You wouldn't have liked me.'

He turned his head to look at me, and a little glint of laughter showed in his eyes. ‘Then you might have married me after all, and it would not have been good for you.'

‘Why not?'

‘A soul dedicated to God – in the way a man's is – does not have quite the lively incentive you have, not quite the savour. That is very irreligious of me, I know, but perhaps I may be forgiven a little apostasy at this late stage.'

‘My influence would have been very bad. You were safer remaining a bachelor.'

He smiled slightly. ‘I think you must allow me to decide that.'

He died the following day. In the evening he sent for the Rev. Vernon Hext to administer the sacrament. Dr Smith came and went. Mr Hext had gone down to supper; he was a very old friend and he was aware of some change in the Canon which made him offer to stay the night. I would have been glad of his company, but in fact the Canon looked at me quietly soon after Mr Hext had left the room and said: