She had laid her head against the back of the couch. Her face was turned towards him; her mind was saying, He would never have left you at a time like this; he would have put his arms around you and comforted you and said, ‘We’ll have another son. Don’t worry, my love, we’ll have another son.’ Those were more or less the words she had spoken to her husband: ‘I…I could give you another son,’ but he had wiped the idea away with one violent movement of his hand as he cried at her, ‘You couldn’t, unless I was prepared to sacrifice your life for him. You know as well as I do what happened the last time. The next would be fatal. Don’t talk such rubbish. I’ve had one son. I’ll never have another.’ And with his next words he had then seemed to disown both her and his daughter: ‘You had your daughter. I had my son,’ he said. ‘Now I have lost him I have nothing. I cannot expect you to understand; only a man knows what it is to lose a son, a legitimate son, the essence of his very being.’
A strange thing was happening somewhere inside, in that big knot below her ribs. It was disintegrating. She had the most odd feeling that pieces of herself were flying off in all directions, and as they left their base, they melted. And their melting caused a flood of emotion to rise inside her. It pushed out her ribs, it widened her throat. Then, such was its eagerness to spurt from her mouth, that it blocked its own outlet, and she gasped and moaned: she was choking. Then an agonised cry escaped her, and with it all her melted emotions swept through every duct they could find: her eyes, her nose, her mouth, even her ears seemed to be an outlet. She was drowning in her emotions, yet she was being held firmly and a voice was repeating, ‘There, there, my dear. That’s it, cry, cry. There, there, my love. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. That’s it, cry. Oh, yes, cry.’
She clung to the voice. She pressed it close to her, yet she could not stop her crying. And now she began to wail. She wailed for the loss of her son. She wailed for the loss of her husband. She wailed for her father whose words she had not heeded. She wailed for her mother who, she knew now, and had known for some time, had pressed her against her own instincts into security, the security that had led her to this agony. Her wailing reached the hall and brought Mary and Robertson into the drawing room to stand, mute for a moment, to see their mistress being held in the arms of Mr Mercer, while clinging tightly to him.
Graham turned his head in the direction of the servants and cried at them one word, ‘Bromide!’
‘Bromide,’ Mary repeated; then turning, she flew from the room and up the stairs and to the medicine cupboard. And from the top shelf she took a bottle of laudanum, then ran downstairs again. Mr Mercer was still holding her mistress, and she was still clinging to him.
It took all Robertson’s and Mary’s efforts to disengage her hold on Graham. And when at last she was lying slumped in the corner of the couch and still crying, still wailing, Graham, turning to Robertson, said, ‘I think you had better fetch the doctor.’ …
It was almost an hour and a half later when the doctor came into the house. He had been away on another call and his never even temper was at its lowest point. ‘What now? What now?’ he said, as he entered the room. He was well aware of the tragedy that had come upon this family, but in his line of work there was very rarely a day passed he didn’t come face to face with tragedy. Yet when he looked upon the mother of the child that had been buried this day, his innate kindness and professionalism overcame his irritability, and, sitting down beside Nancy Ann, he took her hand and while patting it said, ‘Now, now, my dear. Now, now. Come along, we must stop this crying, or it will only make you ill. And you know, you have a daughter to see to. By the way—’ He turned his head upwards and looked to where Graham was standing, and through a puzzled frown he asked him, ‘Where’s he, the husband?’ And Graham answered bitterly, ‘He’s gone on a shooting trip, I understand.’
The two men exchanged glances for a moment and then the doctor said bluntly, ‘Then all I can say is I hope his gun backfires,’ and rising to his feet, he addressed a shocked Mary and an equally shocked Robertson with a command: ‘Well now, let’s get her upstairs to bed. She’ll need to be carried. You, Mr Mercer, will kindly, I’m sure, give a helping hand.’
‘I’ll manage her myself,’ Graham said. ‘It will be easier.’ And bending, he put one arm under her knees and the other under her armpits, and with Mary supporting her head, he carried the woman he loved, the girl he had loved and whom he had lost because he was too considerate to plead his cause.
Consideration, he had learnt, was a vice not a virtue. Yet, if her husband had been considerate he himself would not now have been holding his beloved in his arms for the one and only time.
Three
When does the fall of any house begin? Not necessarily when the rot is discovered, for then it can be too late: the timbers may have been attacked, eaten away with worm; the bricks beginning to crumble; the foundations starting to sink into bog, with walls taking on crazy angles. The whole place becomes so rotten that nothing can save it.
That is the deterioration of a house.
But what if it’s the owner who has disintegrated? Where did the rot start in him? With the loss of his son? Or, before that, the loss of his brother? Or, going back further still, did it begin with the fantasy created in him by his father that he was someone special? That God had seen fit to place him in a position of wealth which spelt power? That he was bred specifically to be a member of that society that believes itself privileged because privilege had been the right of its ancestors, right back to the time when they were thieves and vagabonds, traitors and sycophants, their loyalty given only where it would show good return?
Coming down the line from that, could the descendant then be blamed for his traits? Not if he was a good loser; not if he was the kind of real sporting fellow who would bet on a fly crawling up a window. Not if he was Dennison Moorland Harpcore, and not if the said Dennison Moorland Harpcore had still a well from which to draw. There was no disgrace in owing money to a bank, but there was deep disgrace at being unable to settle your gambling debts, and the disgrace at the moment was weighing heavily not only on Dennison Harpcore, but also on his whole household.
Many things had happened in the years since the day of the child’s funeral.
Dennison’s stay in Scotland had lasted five weeks. And following on from the day of his return Nancy Ann had known that another phase of life had begun. He had remained at home for four days, during which time he showed no desire to see his daughter. On one occasion when Rebecca, seeing him, had flown to him and grabbed his hand, he had patted her on the head; and when the child cried, ‘Oh, Papa, I’m glad you are home,’ he had pressed her aside, saying, ‘Be a good girl now,’ and left her standing mute with tears in her eyes. To Nancy Ann herself, his manner was coolly polite. When he had asked after her health she had answered, ‘I have been rather unwell.’ And he had replied, ‘That’s to be understood’; then had added, ‘We have both been rather unwell, and are likely to be for some time.’
During his short stay he did not seek her bed, for which she was thankful; nor did he sleep in the dressing room, but had ordered his things to be moved to a guest suite. This action had created deep humiliation in her: although she did not desire any bodily contact with him, the fact that he was moving himself from the proximity of her emphasised in some tortured way that he was blaming her for the loss of her son. And yet, she asked herself again and again, how could that be? If it hadn’t been for her timely rescue of himself, he, too, might have been drowned.
How near she was to the reason for his behaviour she wasn’t to know till some years later.
Looking back on that year, Nancy Ann saw it as a nightmare in which she had become a young girl again, telling herself she couldn’t go on, that she wasn’t able to cope with these changed circumstances and begging her grandmama to let her take Rebecca and stay with her, and then being upset by Jessica’s blunt refusal: the emphasis on it being that she was a wife and mother, that life was full of ups and d
owns. A tragedy had been experienced. This would pass; time was the healer.
But time did not prove to be the healer. When Dennison was at home he spent most of his time in the library. What he read she did not know; she wondered if he was once again aiming for a place in Parliament, even though his first attempt had ended in an ignominious defeat. Such was the wall he had put up between them that she could not have penetrated it even if she had so wished. She rarely saw him after he left the dinner table, at which his efforts at conversation would almost drive her to yell at him, ‘Your small talk is not fooling the servants. They know the position. They know everything. Why bother? You are only fooling yourself.’ But she never raised her voice; she would answer him politely. However, she made a point of never opening the conversation or asking a question.
Pat had said, ‘Patience. I know Denny; this phase will pass.’ She said that in the first year. She didn’t say it so often in the second. And there were times now when she called that she never mentioned his name.
It was towards the end of the second year that a number of things happened. Jennie died. David, at seventeen, left school and went to Australia, from where she had since received four letters. He was working hard and he was making money; life was rough and men from all over the world were flooding the country. In his first letter to her he had spoken of Mr Barrow, that he had been greatly surprised on meeting him, expecting a very old man, but he was only middle-aged…He seemed to get on well with this Mr Barrow, as his uncle had evidently done, too. The fourth letter she had received some months ago, and in it he had spoken of coming back for a holiday. He had not said coming home.
It was during the third year that she had to ask Dennison to meet the tradesmen’s bills, for some were pressing. It was after that he sold the hunters that were kept at the farm and, seemingly, in consequence, his drinking became heavier.
Then at one period last year he had come to her somewhat shamefacedly and asked her if she had any loose cash as he had run out and he wanted to get up to London to see his banker. She had given him all that was in her cash box, nine pounds ten shillings. That time he had been in London a week and when he returned he seemed greatly agitated. It was then he asked her if she would loan him one or two pieces of her jewellery, and she had replied, ‘They are yours.’
As she did not often wear jewellery and had no great fancy for it, it was all kept in the safe which was situated behind a picture in the library. On that occasion he showed her the pieces he was taking, a diamond and ruby studded tiara, three rings, and two brooches. At that moment she had been sorry for him, for he had stood with his head bowed, muttering, ‘You shall have them back. I promise you, you’ll have them back.’ She wanted to cry, ‘I don’t want them, it’s you I want back,’ only a second later, to ask herself: Did she? Did she want this man back? This man who had killed all love within her, for nothing could wipe out his neglect which, over the past years, had amounted to cruelty.
Now had come the spring of ’ninety-two, and she felt strongly that an end to her present existence was looming near. Things could not go on as they had been. He was having to sell the farm and five hundred acres of land. Last week she had forced herself to confront him and say that some of the tradesmen had stopped delivering. At the same time she had reminded him that next month the staff wages were due. But it was during this evening that a happening would take place which would lead to final severance.
He had been in the library for some hours. He didn’t go there to work any more, but to drink.
She was crossing the hall on her way to say goodnight to Rebecca when she saw Robertson coming from the direction of the servants’ quarters. He was carrying a tray on which was a decanter, and just as she put her foot on the bottom stair, he stopped and said, ‘Ma’am, may I have a word with you?’
‘Yes, Robertson, of course.’
The man looked down at the decanter as he said, ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but I have decanted the last bottle of whisky. I…I put the order in some weeks ago but they haven’t as yet sent it.’
She swallowed deeply and gripped the bottom of the bannister tightly before saying, ‘What about the wine and the older stock?’
‘There are only half a dozen bottles of wine left, ma’am.’
‘But the vintage?’
The man was still looking down at the decanter, and it was a moment or so before he said, ‘The master has been taking them with him to…to town, ma’am.’
She turned her gaze from him and looked up the stairs. The humiliations. To what depths had her husband sunk when he had to sell, or bribe with, the contents of the cellar. She very rarely went down into the wine cellar, but she remembered it as she had first seen it, stacked from floor to ceiling, rows and rows of bottles, one particular section with the cobwebs of years on them. Dennison had proudly pointed out to her, that some of these bottles had been laid down in his father’s youth. Swiftly now she turned about and, putting out her hand, she said, ‘I will take the tray.’
The man held on to the salver, looking her in the face now and saying, ‘Are you sure, ma’am?’
‘Yes, yes, Robertson, I’m sure.’
At this he relinquished his hold and watched her walk across the hall, her gait wavering as if she too had been drinking.
Without knocking at the library door she went straight in. He was sitting to the side of the fire in a deep chair, his legs sprawled out. On a small table to his side was another decanter and glass. He had not turned his head, and when she reached his side, he said, ‘Put it there.’ It was only when she said, her voice grim, ‘This, so I have been informed, is the last of your cellar,’ that he lumbered round in his seat and blinked at her, then said, ‘That’s nonsense, nonsense. Get out! Go to bed!’
‘I shall not go to bed.’ She walked round to the front of the chair and faced him, and there, her face tight, her hands clenched at her waist, she cried at him, ‘You are a disgrace to your house, your name, me, everything.’
He thrust himself back in the chair and peered at her. His whole face was bloated, his skin blotched; his neck was thick and his paunch bulged. There was very little left of the man he had been five years ago, and the picture he presented caused her lip to curl as she said, ‘You are disgusting.’
Her words acted on him like an injection, for so quickly did he pull himself up from the chair that she jumped back in some fright. And now he was yelling at the top of his voice, ‘Disgusting, am I? Disgusting. And who’s to blame for that? Eh? Have you asked yourself who’s to blame for that? Disgusting, you say. I would have believed it if you had said I was a fool, yes, a fool, to have ever married you. Do you know that? I haven’t had a day’s luck since I married you. They told me it was a mistake. But would I listen? No. No. Parson’s Prig they nicknamed you, and by God they were right, for you’ve brought the vicarage with you. And from the day you entered the door of this house—’ he now took his hand and wiped the saliva from his mouth before spluttering, ‘my luck went down. I could lose before, but I could win twice as much, and things might have levelled out. Aye. Aye, they might have. But you had to go and strip Rene, and I, like the bloody fool I was, threw her off. But she’s got her own back. By God! she has. Because, you know what, my little lady? ’Tis her man that has stripped me, with the assistance of my dear friend Larry. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Funny that, funny.’ He paused, as if thinking now, before he went on, muttering, ‘Bloody underhand game somewhere. Can’t put a finger on it. All honourable. Huh! All honourable play. Skilful, not cheating. Oh, no, not cheating, just skilful. But it’s cheating.’ His voice had suddenly risen to a scream, and now he was pointing at her. ‘They are bloody well cheating me. Do you hear? They’ve cheated me out of everything, and all through you. If I’d only had the sense to make it up in town everything would have been all right. But I was thinking of you, you, my little prig, and told myself, whoever warmed my bed it mustn’t be her…thinking of you. I must have been mad. And she went mad. Aye, aye, she did, in a dif
ferent way.’ He had turned and flung his hand out towards the decanter, and he stared at it for a moment before looking back at her again, and, his voice lower now and each word coming as if sieved through his teeth, he growled, ‘And you humiliated me. I could have saved my son, but you had to put your pious little hands out and stop me.’
When her face stretched in amazement he nodded at her, then went on, ‘I couldn’t swim, but a dog thrown in the water will paddle, and I just needed one more arm’s stretch and I would have had him. But no, my wife had to humiliate me, save me from drowning. God! How I hated you that day. You look amazed, and so right you are to look amazed. You will say I could never have saved him, but in my heart I know I could. I am strong. It only needed another split second and I could have conquered that bloody river. But no…’
‘You shan’t, you shan’t put the blame on me. You…you sank, you went under. You were threshing like a mad dog. You could never have saved him. You just told yourself that to ease your conscience, because since your brother drowned in the river you have been afraid of it. Yes, you have.’
As his hand came up to strike her she sprang back and watched his doubled fist hover in the air. Then he screamed at her, ‘Get out of my sight before I do you an injury.’
And she got out of his sight, stumbling, as if she herself was drunk.
Robertson and Mary met her in the hall. They had made no pretence they were there by accident, and Mary had helped her up the stairs to her room. And there she had given way and cried in Mary’s arms, and asked of the woman who had become her friend, ‘What’s to be done? Where’s it going to end?’ And Mary had said, ‘God knows, ma’am, but it must have an end soon. You can’t go on like this. You’ll kill yourself.’ …
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