Marion's Angels

by K. M. Peyton

  ‘Come on,’ he said, gently.

  She turned her head slightly. Without saying anything else, he started to play again, but this time it was very gentle and pretty, soothing, and she knew he was watching her. It was easier for him to calm her with music than with words. She turned over and came upright, groping for a handkerchief she didn’t have. Still playing with one hand, he passed her a clean one out of his pocket.

  ‘Not very good,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ll have to do a lot better than that. You’ll have to come over more often. Get desensitized. They do it to people who have asthma, with injections.’

  ‘I don’t want injections.’

  ‘No. More practice, that’s all. Lots of Chopin. Ephraim playing the Franck sonata—staggering. When you can sit through that without boo-hooing, here at home, you can have a free ticket for your concert.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘I promise. You’ve improved a bit already, after all—you didn’t cut and run this time.’

  ‘No. I held on to the armchair.’ She looked at her fingernails and saw that two of them were torn.

  ‘I didn’t see what a state you were in till I’d finished. I knew you were still there, that’s all.’ He stopped playing, the tune having closed away imperceptibly into silence. They both sat there, digesting the strange evening. Marion felt terribly tired.

  ‘I think,’ Pat said, ‘Chopin would have been quite pleased.’

  ‘With you?’

  ‘With both of us.’

  Chapter Seven

  MARION BROKE UP, and spent a lot of her time at Fair Winds. Now that it was holiday time, the church was getting a lot of visitors due to Ephraim’s publicity scheme, and Mrs. Rowley’s gang started to take over. The thermometer bulb painted on the board outside already showed a degree of warmth. Motor coaches started to visit, and the ladies were forever renewing their flower-arrangements and fiddling with the altar. If Marion was around they made her run errands, or—worse—Mrs. Rowley brought Melissa and Louise to play. Marion would get the first bus she could for Fair Winds. After she knew she was welcome there, she went often.

  Pat no longer seemed to be on holiday, for he was always working, either with Ephraim or without him.

  ‘Ephraim wants him to go back to America with him afterwards,’ Ruth said to Marion. ‘I’ve told him I don’t want him to go. It makes him very cross.’

  She looked sad, sadder than Marion had ever seen her.

  She went on, ‘I know I should encourage him, but he works too hard. He doesn’t think about anything else at all. After a bit, you begin to wonder what it’s all for. Whether it’s worth it.’

  Marion rather thought it was, being famous and rich.

  But Ruth said, ‘It’s just that there’s no room for me and Lud in the programme at all.’

  They were sitting on the beach at the time. Ruth rolled over and lay facing up the shingle, looking up towards the dunes, from where the sound of music could faintly be heard on the breeze. Lud was making a castle further down where the sand was. Ruth’s fingers moved amongst the stones, picking out the small pink shells and putting them in a pile.

  ‘I ought to make a life of my own, but it’s a bit difficult with Lud, and Pat hates me not being around, even when he doesn’t say anything for days. But I think, if he goes to America, it will make the break. I shall be on my own for a bit. I shall have to work something out.’

  ‘You won’t go?’

  ‘No, I’ve told him. I’ve told him he shouldn’t go, but if he does, I’m staying. We’ve had some awful rows about it.’

  Marion wished Ruth would stop, not wanting to hear what she was saying, but she went on.

  ‘I know it’s a great opportunity and all that, but he’s so good that he doesn’t need to grasp every opportunity that comes along any more. He can afford to take more time over it. As it is now, he’s making plenty of money. It’s a good life for him. He gets enough work with orchestras to make him happy, and his recitals are very well attended. If he starts travelling all over the world, then—well—what sort of a life is that? All travelling and hotels and strangers—and he really hates chatting people up and being social—there would be stacks of that—and always a different place for practising . . . all that strain and stress. It’s bad enough doing a big concert near home, with me to hold his hand and fend people off—whatever would he feel like in Chicago or New York or somewhere? And I won’t go, whatever he says. He doesn’t need me, save as a sort of nanny, a servant—he’d be so wrapped up and wound up in the work—’ Ruth’s voice, which had been gradually rising and getting more indignant, stopped suddenly, and she put her head down into her folded arms and lay very still.

  Marion did not know what to say, or do. She had the most dreadful torn-apart feeling inside her, as if she was both Ruth and Pat together, warring over the future. And she felt responsible for what had happened. It had been all right at the beginning, before her prayers. It was Ephraim coming and throwing out this America idea that had sparked it all off. It was why Pat was working so hard and getting so bad-tempered and why Ruth was now lying in transparent misery on the shingle. Lud, trying to make a sand-castle out of a milk-bottle, started to bawl with frustration.

  Marion went down to him and explained why it wouldn’t work and pointed out how useful it would be instead for getting sea-water for the moat. She emptied the sand out of it, wished there was a solution as straightforward for Ruth. She couldn’t bear the thought of Ruth leaving poor Pat to fend for himself. She hated her own part in the business.

  When she went home and into the church she decided she hated it smelling of polish and all tarted up with its woman’s magaziney flower-arrangements and its beastly thermometer standing on the grass. She hated everything.

  ‘I hate you too,’ she said to the angels, staring up at their eternal calm, their peaceful eyeballs watching over the centuries. ‘It’s all your fault.’ She might have guessed, lying in the front pew watching them, as Pat had lain before his concert (did Ruth really need to hold his hand beforehand? He had looked terribly miserable) that miracles were never so simple, that large events conjured out of thin air must inevitably cause repercussions, what doctors called side-effects. She didn’t even like the church looking more prosperous and cared-for; she had liked its empty, dusty paleness and its forlorn grandeur humping over the marshes. She didn’t like the motor-coaches and the lazy tourists eating their picnics in the churchyard. She didn’t want it safe so that it was forever full of tourists and people praying. It wasn’t what she wanted at all. She could feel herself getting into one of her states, glaring up at Herbert and Ted who didn’t care at all.

  ‘You don’t care! All I’ve done for you and you don’t care tuppence! It’s all the same to you—Mrs. Rowley and all—you—and Mrs. Rowley and them—’

  She got up and started to run, frightening a mild man with binoculars round his neck nearly to death as she sped out of the doorway, shouting, making for home. She crashed into the kitchen, where Geoff was putting a frozen pie in the oven and burst into tears.

  ‘Whatever’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she sobbed, holding herself with her arms, making herself sit still at the kitchen table. Practice with Pat had helped already. Geoff watched her curiously.

  ‘It’s a lot of fuss for nothing.’

  ‘Everything then. I just feel like it!’

  She couldn’t tell him, what Ruth had said, what had set her off. Or did he already know? Had they talked about it, sitting on the dunes while Pat had played her into hysterics? She howled.

  ‘Oh, come off it, Marion,’ Geoff said, a trifle wearily. ‘It can’t be just nothing.’

  But she couldn’t tell him, hung up by the frightening images put forth by her galloping imagination. He was involved too. Her miracle had got him in its web, besides Pat and Ruth.

  ‘Did Ruth say—?’ she started, and got no farther, racked by sobs.

  Geof
f started to peel some potatoes, patient but frowning.

  ‘Ruth rang me up just now. She asked if you and me would go to Fair Winds and baby-sit the night of the London Concert. I said we would.’

  ‘She’s got to—to hold Pat’s hand—she said—’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘She said—’ Marion made a great effort to get under control. Her sobs died down to hiccups. ‘She has to go—if—if it’s a big concert—to—to hold his hand.’

  ‘Metaphorically speaking, I’m sure. Otherwise very difficult for him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Geoff gave her a sideways grin.

  ‘He needs her,’ Marion said, hiccuping.

  ‘Does he?’ Geoff said, not smiling now.

  Marion began to realize then that there was nothing she could do about Pat and Ruth any longer, absolutely nothing at all. Nor Geoff either. Prayers were too dangerous. What good now, to pray that it would come out all right? She saw that it could only come right for some of them, but for all of them, it was impossible. And her father was the most vulnerable of all. But she stopped crying.

  They went to baby-sit on the day of the first concert in London. Pat and Ruth were leaving at two in the afternoon, so they arrived in plenty of time. Marion could see that Pat was in the same sort of mood as he had been on the day of the miracle, looking fragile (for him) and pale, and not talking. Ruth was packing his clothes into a suitcase and he was shaving in the bathroom. Ruth looked resigned, and not particularly happy either. Marion felt her responsibilities crowding again.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  Ruth looked surprised. ‘Mind what?’

  ‘This concert?’

  ‘No. Why ever should I?’ She looked puzzled. ‘We’re never frightfully happy beforehand—well, he isn’t, and it rubs off on me rather. But that’s quite normal. It’s lovely afterwards.’

  If that was normal then, Marion felt better.

  ‘It’s a big one, this, you see. Lots of musicians will be there. Harder playing to lots of musicians than just people in out of the rain.’

  ‘They notice all the mistakes?’

  ‘Yes. Harder to please.’

  Ruth showed her where everything was, and what there was for tea, and how the television worked, and then she went out to the car with Pat, and they took Lud out to wave good-bye. It seemed to Marion a very glamorous way of life, but when they had gone Geoff said, ‘Glad it’s not me. Give me computers any day.’

  ‘It makes you rich and famous.’

  ‘Who wants to be rich and famous?’

  ‘Me,’ Marion said.

  Geoff grinned and said, ‘Better start practising then. The piano’s right there.’

  Marion, out of the blue, framed the question she had been obsessed with for days.

  ‘Do you like Ruth?’ She didn’t know why she asked it then, or even how she was able to ask it, having wanted to and not dared to for so long. But it came out, unbidden, very sudden.

  Geoff said, ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘No. You know what I mean—not just like—I mean—I mean—’

  ‘Love, you mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes,’ Geoff said. He turned away, but Marion saw his skin flush and darken, the summer-bleached hair paler by contrast, endearingly untidy and needing cutting in a way that made Marion’s heart turn over for wanting there to be someone to look after him. Ruth! she thought. It was awful, wanting it too, as much as he did.

  ‘But it’s not on, so don’t think about it,’ he said. ‘You can see that it’s impossible.’

  But impossible too not to think about it, now that the words had been said, to think about Ruth being at home, as Liz had been, there all the time. He had thought about it too, she could see.

  She—it was only one step farther on—thought about Pat going to America and Ruth staying at home, but it was too treacherous to put into words, something she could not bear to consider.

  ‘It’s a pity the way things work out,’ Geoff said, putting it with perfect simplicity. ‘You can’t choose it, as often as not. We want another of your miracles.’

  Marion wasn’t so sure. She took Lud down on the beach, and it was hot enough to swim, even for Geoff who, for a native, wasn’t keen on cold water. Pat swam every day, however cold or rough it was. It was how he worked; he wasn’t just a fair-weather man, but took the hard things as well as the easy with a sort of animal stoicism. Marion, making a deep hole with Lud, suddenly remembered the thing he had said the first time they had met in the churchyard, about having been in prison for assaulting somebody. She remembered it with a sense of shock, yet—now she knew him better—it did not seem at all unlikely, for he certainly gave one the impression of having uncommon tensions bottled up inside him. And it struck her, digging the hole, that if he found out that Geoff loved Ruth, he might quite possibly use assault in putting his point of view. Marion had watched enough stories on television to know that it was quite a common reaction; it had also happened in the village; she could recall two instances, without any difficulty. She was quite sure that he wouldn’t like the idea of Geoff loving Ruth. Ruth said Pat didn’t need her, but Marion was quite sure that he needed her badly by his own lights.

  ‘You’re diggin’ my hole,’ Lud said crossly, and hit her on the head with his spade.

  ‘You beast!’ He was just like Pat, standing there scowling, underlip thrust out, all ready for another assault. ‘You mustn’t hit people, even if they annoy you!’ She thought of adding, ‘Your daddy was put in prison for it,’ but didn’t. She said, ‘I’m going to dig one big enough to put you in. Would you like that?’

  ‘Will you bury me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes. Bury me.’

  Marion was glad to get on with her digging, having made herself miserable with her thoughts and not being able to convince herself that it was mere imagination. She tried resolutely not to think about any of the things that worried her, but it was difficult. Geoff didn’t help by getting bored and rather irritable, and it struck Marion afresh that babysitting was what he had been doing for. the last five years, ever since Liz had died. He had never gone out in the evenings or gone sailing at week-ends with Horry or fishing with Ted as she could remember him doing way back when she was little. She had heard it said, in fact, that as a young man he had been rather wild—hence herself. Yet one would never suspect it now. When they had put Lud to bed in the evening they couldn’t even go for a walk. She had never realized before just how very confining the whole business of having babies could be. She wondered if Geoff ever wished he hadn’t got her? She was sure now that he did, but wasn’t going to ask. She went to bed subdued and miserable.

  She didn’t know what time Pat and Ruth came home, save that there was a pearly light outside, not dark enough for still being night, yet hardly day. They came up quietly enough, but Marion was restless. She was on a spare bed in Lud’s room (Geoff was on the sofa downstairs) and her bed was against the partition wall between the two bedrooms. She didn’t want to eavesdrop, but however hard she tried to disassociate her mind from next-door she could not help but realize that the soft, urgent conversation was definitely an argument. It was vicious on Pat’s side and equally fierce on Ruth’s and hissed backwards and forwards across the bedroom as they undressed and continued after the light had been put out. Marion, unwillingly, caught odd phrases: ‘I was a fool to think, when I married you, that anything would change—’ countered by, angrily, ‘But you knew, you always knew, even then—I told you!’ ‘My mother told me!’ Ruth sobbed.

  Marion put her head under the blankets and squashed the pillow down over her ears. She was shivering, miserable enough to die of it, she felt.

  In the morning Pat stayed in bed and Ruth was in the kitchen, dark rings of weariness under her eyes, putting Lud in his high chair for his breakfast. Geoff came in cheerfully from the living-room, pulling a jersey on. Marion stood in the doorway, white and silent.

 
; ‘Hullo,’ Ruth said brightly. ‘Was everything okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ Geoff said.

  ‘I hope we didn’t wake you, coming home? We were pretty late.’

  ‘Never heard a sound. Your sofa’s very comfortable. What’s the matter with you, Marion? You look like a wet week.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Marion said, amazed by adult machinations.

  ‘Did it go well?’ Geoff asked.

  ‘Yes. Absolutely splendid. They had to do three encores—wonderful reception. It should get a very good press.’

  ‘Pat having the day in bed on the strength of it?’

  Ruth frowned momentarily. ‘He was tired, yes.’

  They stayed for breakfast, and drove home. Marion was silent, wondering if it all mattered as much as she thought it did. Geoff was quiet too, abstracted. Neither of them remarked on the common mood, and when they got home Geoff went down to work on his boat and Marion went to top up the flower-vases in the church. There were a lot of visitors that day, and she did her guide job, and watched the money rattling into the thermometer box. Geoff had to count it, and move the needle up the temperature chart.

  ‘Seems to be working, your miracle,’ he said.

  Marion went to Fair Winds a few days later and found everything apparently normal, Pat working and Ruth quite cheerful.

  Pat, emerging for lunch, said he had a ticket for her for the Norwich concert.

  ‘Front row, easy for rapid exit if necessary.’

  ‘Is Ruth coming?’

  ‘No,’ Ruth said.

  ‘You’ll be on your own,’ Pat said. ‘You can come with me. I’ll look after you.’

  ‘And bring me back?’ Marion was hesitant, because of his going to America the day after.