Westwood

by Stella Gibbons

  The forest trees threw their long shadows out into the glade where the town stood, and the women carrying water in wooden buckets glanced into the forest, where it was already dark, and thought of the winter and wolves.

  She looked down at the book again. The killing of a deer or boar, or even a hare, she read, was punished with the loss of the delinquent’s eyes.

  And then, with her imagination glowing like a window of rich stained-glass, she read of the tradition that Odo of Bayeux, brother of William the Conqueror, was the first Norman owner of the forests of Highgate; and how one of these hunting-crazy bishops (possibly Odo himself) had in the years between 1066 and 1080 caused a hunting lodge to be built on a hill in the forest, and formed the great park of Haringey (Hornsey) into a chase.

  Entranced, she read on; the hunting lodge was doubtless a square embattled building of shaped stones … surrounded by a moat, the entrance being by a drawbridge.

  The Bishops of London used to live there occasionally and hunt from there, but because of its age and state of decay the place had been destroyed in the fourteenth century, and all that remained of it were traces of the foundation walls and the moat; some of the stones of these walls had been used in the rebuilding of Hornsey Church. These traces remained so late as the year 1888. Mr John H. Lloyd, author of the History, had himself seen them …

  ‘Margaret, I’m hungry. Linda wants dinner,’ said a plaintive voice at her side. Dazed, still hearing the hunting-horns of nine hundred years ago, she looked slowly up and met Linda’s mild eyes. For a moment she gazed at her without speaking. So strong was the potion in which her imagination had been steeping itself that she experienced no sense of shock at returning to the contemporary world. The glamour extended itself to the room in which she sat, to Linda, and to every object surrounding them both.

  ‘Linda’s hungry,’ said the child again, gently putting a hand on her arm.

  ‘And so is Margaret!’ she answered cheerfully, shutting the book and standing up and taking the little hand. ‘Come along, let’s see about some lunch – why, Linda! It’s nearly one o’clock. No wonder we’re hungry!’

  She finished reading the account of the Bishop’s Lodge that day, and although the first wonderful glow of imaginative delight did not return, she was left with the determination to go herself to look for the site of the Lodge, and to stand, if possible, upon the very ground where it had stood. For it was within two miles of her own home! A peasant living where she now lived could have seen the tower of the Lodge upon its hill from the low doorway of his hut, while from that tower itself the glint of spears moving across the wooded plain would have been visible for miles. She derived so much pleasure from these reveries, while she worked about the house and played with Linda, that the time passed quickly and she experienced none of the oppression felt on her first visit.

  There was no doubt that Linda’s was a happy spirit; a shade more of helplessness, a greater abnormality in the speech and the shape of eyes and hands, would have produced such a disagreeable impression that only a strong love could have endured the child’s presence; but as it was, her loving nature (even more affectionate than is usual among such children) shone through the limitations of her body and almost atoned for its deficiencies, and by the end of the first week of her nightly journeys to Westwood-at-Brockdale, Margaret had begun to care for her, not as a little lacking girl for whom she felt shrinking pity, but as Linda; a person, though not a fully developed one; as much a person as some beloved cat or dog (piteous comparison! but not so piteous, perhaps, as it sounds); with the personal tastes and habits that form a character and mark its differences from other characters. There was no doubt, either, that Linda liked Margaret to be in the house and to read to her and play with her and sing to her; Margaret even thought, after her visits had been going on for about ten days, that she detected a slight, a very slight, improvement in Linda’s speech and a quickening of her intelligence, and she put this down to the stimulus of her own young, quick brain acting upon a brain naturally retarded but also artificially kept back by the kindly, unintelligent conversation of a Mrs Coates. She did not dare to mention this to Dick; it seemed so arrogant, so unkind to Mrs Coates, who had endured two years of unnatural existence with a mentally deficient child, but she herself felt increasingly sure that Linda had been living a lonely and abnormal life in her miniature fairy palace, and that some outside companionship, even some childish companionship, would be beneficial to her.

  22

  But she found the journey out to Brockdale very tiring after her long day’s work in the hot, noisy school, and for the first two or three evenings she had felt that she really could not go on with the plan; she did not get home before eleven at night, and then there were exercise books to be corrected and lessons to be prepared for her classes, and the weather was so hot (it was now the first week in a rarely beautiful May) that she could not get to sleep when at last, nearer one o’clock than twelve, she did go to bed.

  It was her first experience of suffering endured in an un romantic and unselfish cause. Hitherto her sufferings had been romantic, though she would have been the last person to realize it; for if love and beauty and solitude enter into one’s sufferings, even if these qualities be present only in the mind of the sufferer, of course the pangs are romantic; and her passion for Frank Kennett, her yearnings for a wider life, her adoration for Gerard Challis, had all been romantic as the pains of Heine. But it was not romantic to travel in a crowded train through dull, neat suburbs out to a house where a helpless little girl and a tired, rather impatient man awaited her, one eager for her attention and the other for the supper which she must cook; it was not romantic to wash up in a kitchen full of cigarette smoke after Linda had been put to bed, and sit listening to the nine o’clock news while Dick glanced through the evening paper and made little attempt at conversation; and it was certainly not romantic to drag herself home at eleven at night, tired out and carrying a case full of exercise books.

  And all this time the lovely evenings, with their deepening blue skies and their soft stars and flowery trees, were lengthening, lengthening towards the longest day; she could feel and hear, as if in a distant land which she could not reach, England slowly stretching out her flower-wreathed arms in that long, long, fairy yawn that ends on the endlessness of Midsummer Night. Most of that night, Margaret thought hopelessly, as she trudged up the hill leading from the station, I shall be correcting French exercises, and I haven’t telephoned Zita for a week, and I wonder how Grantey is, and if Hebe and Mr Niland are going to have a divorce. Oh, how is he? Was he very upset about the notices of Kattë? How long it seems since I saw him!

  Mr Challis was at his best in the summer. His thin blood warmed and his smile became less glacial. It was fortunate, therefore, that the offending notices of Kattë should have appeared at the beginning of this heat-wave; as the play continued to run and to please the public, he could turn with a sense of relaxation to the enjoyment of the fine weather. Had any chance acquaintance of Mr Challis’s been asked to take a bet on the likelihood of his playing tennis, they would certainly have betted that he did not. However, he did, and played it well, and (like the young King Henry the Eighth) it was a pretty sight to see him darting about the court in his becoming white clothes. Hebe was heard to remark that Pops was getting slightly sunburnt.

  Greatly to his annoyance, the warm weather stimulated Hilda to an even faster whirl of social engagements; she was playing tennis on almost every evening with her friends, in a flutter of short white skirts and pretty bare legs, or going to dances with such of her boys as were on leave, or sometimes spending an evening at the local cinema, which activities prevented her from seeing Marcus, and caused him to ring her up every few days and testily try to arrange their visit to Kew Gardens. Hilda blithely made excuses; Marcus in the summer would probably be as dull as Marcus in the winter, and she did not like him enough to consider spending this lovely weather in his company. However, he kept on so about g
oing to his blessed old Kew that at last she half-promised to go with him in a fortnight’s time.

  ‘That is a long time to wait,’ said Mr Challis deeply.

  ‘Ever so sorry, and all that, but it can’t be helped.’

  ‘The blossoming trees will be all over.’

  ‘All over what?’

  Mr Challis maintained an offended silence.

  ‘Marcus?’ said Hilda sharply. ‘Are you still there? I thought you’d gone. Listen, I’ll try and make it on Saturday fortnight; ’phone me up the day before in case I forget, but I’ll try and keep it free. Bye-bye,’ and she rang off.

  Mr Challis replaced the receiver, and sighed. A distant howl resounded through the house; Barnabas was being taken off to bed. His grandfather knew that the nurse who was looking after Mrs Grant would brightly reprove him as she glanced into the bathroom on her way upstairs with Mrs Grant’s supper-tray. Seraphina was sitting in the hall laughing with some friends who had dropped in, and downstairs in the kitchen (though of course Mr Challis did not think about them, for there were limits) Zita and Cortway were snapping at each other as they prepared dinner.

  Westwood had become noticeably and rapidly less comfortable since his daughter and the three children had come to live there and Mrs Grant had been ill, and Mr Challis was growing increasingly conscious of the fact. It irritated him that Seraphina seemed to enjoy the noise and bustle and the children’s belongings scattered all over the house; and she encouraged Hebe to go out to parties and picture-shows and first-nights and concerts and leave the children to the careless charge of Zita, while she herself, if she did not accompany Hebe, went off to other festivities of the same sort. Why could not his wife and daughter lead poetic, solitary lives, reading in the library or wandering in the shady garden, and keeping out of his way? That was what his own heroines always did (not that anybody ever wanted them to keep out of the way, of course; people, especially men, were always looking for them). Why must they rush about and laugh and talk such a lot? It created an exhausting atmosphere and one unfavourable to the creative spirit.

  Maternity, if present at all, should be a passion, but Hebe neglected the children. Had not Mr Challis himself been compelled to take part in a painful scene which had occurred on the previous evening? He had found Barnabas, assisted only too willingly by Emma, attempting to clean Jeremy’s one tooth with his own toothbrush and a liberal allowance of toothpaste, and on being asked what on earth he was doing, he had replied that no one ever cleaned poor Jerry’s tooth, and it would go all green and fall out. Mr Challis, wincing at such plain speaking, had removed the surplus toothpaste from the roaring Jeremy’s mouth as best he could and distastefully replaced the light coverings out of which he had struggled in his sufferings and sternly dismissed Barnabas and Emma, who were standing side by side in their night attire and gazing up at him in silence, to their own room, where he subsequently heard them roaring in chorus, apparently overcome by remorse and fear. No one was looking after them; no one seemed to be in the house at all; everyone might have been dead for all the notice anyone took of the children’s cries.

  Meanwhile, it seemed a very long time to wait until Saturday fortnight, and the next week-end would be spent in an exhausting and tedious expedition to the home of his mother in Bedfordshire, accompanied by his wife, his daughter, his three grandchildren and Zita to help look after them. There was that to be got through, and then, in the background, unmentionable but unforgettable, was the fact of Hebe and Alexander’s quarrel, and the even more disturbing fact that Hebe had been living in her father’s house for nearly a month and had so far made no attempt to find a new home for herself and the children. Mr Challis supposed that if Alex had been there he would have made some attempt to find a house, but Alex was not there, and apparently Hebe had not heard from him since he went away; and no one had referred to the matter; Mr Challis disliked open discussion of these family problems, but he did feel that this gay blindness, this deliberate assumption that everything was going on as usual, was carrying things too far, especially when the direct result of it was rubber monsters left in the bath.

  Mr Challis had always admired his daughter’s looks, and had at one time hoped that she would develop into a strikingly beautiful, witty creature of whom he could be proud; but after the age of fifteen she did not seem to him to have developed at all; she had had the same complexion and curls and plump body and downright manner then that she had now; and when people extravagantly praised her looks and style, her father only thought them easily pleased, and quietly recorded another disappointment for himself, another score against life, another setback in that search for perfection that was his master-passion.

  But sometimes he remembered how she used to go for walks with him when she was a stout little girl of six; patiently collecting acorn-cups which she stowed away in her pockets and nodding satisfiedly to herself when she found an unusually large and shapely one, and scornfully throwing aside the small ones with broken edges which her younger brother, Auberon, tenderly retrieved and cherished. In those days he had been so proud of her, so fond of her, and so full of hope that she would grow up to resemble himself, that a strong impulse of affection (strong, at least, for Mr Challis) towards her lingered in his heart. It irritated and worried him to see the sulky silence by which she expressed her unhappiness, and he even thought of trying to find Alexander and having a talk with him about the situation, but he shrank from acting the unattractive part of interfering father-in-law; and besides, he respected Alexander’s right as an artist to go off and paint in solitude if he felt the compelling need; it was what he, Gerard Challis, would have done long ago if he had had Hebe and Barnabas and Emma and Jeremy all over him while he was trying to work. Hebe must suffer, he decided; her youthful egoism must be crushed and enslaved until a soul, a woman’s subtle, secret soul, was painfully born within her yet-childish body, and then she would find, perhaps, that Alexander, in wounding her, had given her a true and undying strength.

  Having thus got out of tackling Alexander and telling him he was making Hebe unhappy, Mr Challis put that problem rather successfully to the back of his mind. The problem of getting the four Nilands out of the house, however, remained as acute as ever.

  If only he were in South America with Hilda! It had been hinted to him that there was a probability of his being sent there soon on an official mission, and he would take her with him as his secretary. She would be dazzled by the chance of getting away from the monotony and restrictions of life in England, and to him it would be one long delight to wander with her through the white streets and agate mountains of those sunlit lands. When they returned he would be refreshed and fortified to take up his struggle in the world once more, and she would have beautiful memories that would last her for the rest of her life.

  Meanwhile, it seemed almost impossible to get her to Kew Gardens, let alone South America, and he did not care to write to her because he never put anything in writing to his little girls, and every time he telephoned her at the Food Office he had to wait longer before she came to speak to him, and then she was pert, and she had told him bluntly that her father and mother thought it ever so funny that he never dropped in for Sunday tea or supper. (Mr Challis, of course, only smiled his fine inward smile at the picture of Hilda’s parents thinking anything he did peculiar; he took no interest in them; he only found it surprising that such dreary commonplace people should have produced Hilda. Still, such things did happen, and her flowering would be brief enough. How he pitied women!)