The Town House

by Norah Lofts

  ‘I can hold together as long as I have to,’ she said, and then went back to that broken-winded breathing.

  Father gave a sort of groan. ‘She said that to me … once before. The bravest …’ he said,‘braver than …’

  And brought this low by her own daughter, a coward.

  I thought of her courage, her unquenchable hopefulness which I had so much despised; I thought of her kindness to me every time I came back to Minsham rejected and in what was tantamount to disgrace. It seemed to me at that moment that the only person on earth whom I truly loved was my mother.

  I did not stand idle. All this time I was busy with what might be helpful. Remembering Richard and his cough I propped her higher, to ease the breathing; I tried to make her drink something hot to wash the thick stuff from her throat; I wiped her face and hands with a cool cloth. Once, when I was doing that, she eyed me and said,

  ‘I’ll thank you, my lady, to take back this glove. Blanchefleur has no use for it!’

  ‘Holy Mother of God,’ Father cried and dropped his head against the wall. ‘That that should trouble her now!’ He banged his grizzled head against the wall several times and then went to the other side of the bed and cried,

  ‘Maude. You know. You must know, there was never any other. Any good tourney man, it was the fashion to pursue him. Whose glove did I carry?’

  But Mother had gone back to her fight for breath and minded neither of us.

  Then the doctor arrived.

  He looked at the bruise, just below her left breast and said gravely,‘Most unfortunate, the heart has been bruised; and the heart governs the melancholy humour. And the melancholy humour, left to run its course can lead to death. However.’ He opened his bag and gave me some small objects, the seed cases of some plant, rounded at one end, pointed at the other.

  ‘Make an infusion,’ he said. ‘Fox-glove is a sovereign remedy for the heart.’

  But it was difficult to make her drink – as I had already discovered; the battle to breathe was too urgent, too closely pressed; most of the infusion was wasted.

  She died just before sunset. The doctor, sadly disappointed by the result of his infusion, had gone; he had other patients waiting, he said and he had done all he could. He had, at last given an opiate, so that Mother seemed to sleep, though the battle for breath went on.

  Just before sunset she woke, and returned to her senses. In a very weak fluffy voice she said my name.

  ‘Anne.’

  ‘Here I am,’ I said. And my heart lifted. She knew me, she wasn’t going to die. Some of the infusion, that sovereign heart remedy had gone down and done its work; or the drugged sleep had helped to mend.

  ‘Take good care of Blanchefleur,’ she whispered. Then her eyelids fluttered, the death rattle sounded in her throat, her mouth fell open and she was dead.

  I would gladly, and this is true, have lain down there on the floor by her bed and died too. On Saturday afternoon I had deliberately killed a man and been no more troubled than if I had crushed a fly which pestered me. But this was different. Remorse, perhaps the most terrible of all feelings, now had me in its mangling jaws. By accident, by a side blow, I had killed somebody who loved me and whom I loved. There is, and of this I am certain, no more terrible knowledge in the whole world. I should carry it with me until I died, and that seemed too much to face. I flung myself down on the floor beside the bed, and sobbed, in that dry, tearless way which brings no healing, and wished that I could die, just to be rid of the burden of guilt.

  People don’t – unless they are old and nearly ready for death anyway – die from the wishing. Presently I was aware of Father, sobbing and groaning away on his side of the bed. ‘Take good care of Blanchefleur,’ they had been her last words to me; and taking care surely meant comforting him now. I got up and went round to him and sat on the bed’s edge and lifted his head so that it lay in my lap. I tried to speak comforting words about Mother soon being with the Saints in Heaven, about the great reunion of all families which would one day take place there.

  But Father was also deep in this business of self-accusation; and unlike me he could accuse himself aloud. He blamed himself for a multitude of faults, ranging from never have made a proper home or clothing her suitably, to having given her cause for jealousy in the old days. On that score, at least, I could comfort him with what I knew was truth. I told him of the talk we had had before my marriage and of the pride and triumph in her voice as she spoke of his wearing her glove and rejecting the great lady’s. As I spoke I remembered that during my time of madness I had looked at Denys’s flat archer’s shoulders and imagined myself sharing Mother’s pride. So even that was spoiled and sullied, and my words which made Father feel better, made me feel worse.

  I turned at last, for relief, to material things. I had not eaten since breakfast, and most likely Father had not even broken his fast. I slipped downstairs in the dusk – seeing as I did so, Mother’s fatal stumble and fall – and looked into the buttery. There was precious little to eat, some bread and three pigeons, ready plucked but uncooked. Another pain stabbed me at the thought that had she felt well yesterday Mother would have cooked those birds. I turned away from them and took up the bread. And then I saw the little cask of wine which Master Reed had sent on Thursday for her birthday. Her birthday!

  The wine, I thought, would help down the dry bread; so I drew a joyful, found two cups, cut the bread into slices and set it all on the table in the hall. Then I lighted three candles, one for the table and one for the head and the foot of the bed, and carrying them went up to the room where Father was waiting.

  ‘I will do what is to be done here, after,’ I said. ‘You come now and make shift to eat a little.’

  Moving like a very old man he dragged out on to the gallery and at the stairhead looked down and said,

  ‘If I’d been half a man I should have railed in those stairs. I always meant to, but I pretended to be busy with my hawks and other toys.’

  ‘It was an accident. Like your own. If you had not your mishap you would never have been compelled to live here. Do not blame yourself over-much.’

  Rather pity yourself, too, I thought. And that applied to me as well. We may make victims of one another but we are ourselves the victims of Fate, also. I had turned to Denys to seek what I could not find elsewhere.

  We made some pretence, at first, of dipping our bread in the wine and eating, but we soon put that aside. We emptied the jug and I took a candle and refilled it. Father drank most and most quickly benefited. He began, in his slow bumbling way to talk of the past.

  ‘You say she was proud of me, eh?’ he began, and then went on to tell of triumphs here, there and the other places, of doughty champions met and defeated, of noble horses he had ridden, of presents and compliments he had been given; and all so muddled that sometimes it sounded as though it was the horse which had complimented him and the gift which he had unseated. I thought of the body upstairs on the soiled bed and of what I must presently do, and wished that I could sink into a like soft cushion of mind. So I drank some more, and presently was eased. Father’s stories ceased and he began to nod. I said, ‘Come to bed,’ and he was so fuddled that on the gallery he began to walk, of habit, towards his own room. I took him by the arm and turned him gently towards the other door, towards the bed upon which I had spent Thursday night. Then he remembered and whimpered a little.

  In Mother’s room I did what was to be done, all the more easily for being a little blurred in my mind. Then I set fresh candles and drew up a stool, intending to watch all night; but the wine got the better of me and in the end I lay down on the floor and slept.

  Interval

  I

  One day – Lady Blanchefleur having then been in her grave for three months – Martin Reed said to his son,

  ‘Have you noticed the change in Anne?’

  ‘I think her grief is easing – a little,’ Richard said carefully, and turning his head away, coughed.

  ‘Sh
e drinks too much wine,’ Martin said bluntly. ‘Last evening, and the one before, she was flown.’

  ‘I know. And a good thing too!’ Answering his father’s astonished look, he added. ‘If she goes to bed with wine in her she sleeps. Otherwise she wakes, screaming from nightmare and then cries for hours.’

  ‘About her mother’s death?’

  ‘They were very close,’ Richard said. ‘You and I who never knew a mother’s love cannot measure her loss.’

  ‘It is a loss many people sustain without resorting to wine – in such quantity.’

  Richard coloured, ‘If you grudge so simple a comfort …’ he began angrily.

  ‘I grudge nothing. You know that. I just do not care to see a woman the worse for – and reeking of – wine.’

  ‘What you call worse I call better; and as for the reek, it is my bed she shares.’

  ‘I’m not wishing to quarrel,’ Martin said and left the matter there.

  Richard himself was puzzled. Once, in the night, sobbing against his shoulder, Anne had said, ‘It was my fault. I killed her.’ He had dragged out of her the story about a bed to be aired which had caused the fall. He had said, at the end of it,

  ‘I can see how you feel, but you must not blame yourself too shrewdly. The bed was to be aired some day for Isabel. It could have happened then.’

  But she had insisted that it was all her fault. Presently, thinking to comfort her he said that everybody had to die one day. And that was a mistake, for she flung herself from him, and spoke in a wild way about killing and a sin.

  ‘A sin, sweetheart, to wish to spend a night under your father’s roof! Come now!’

  That night he took a candle and went padding barefoot down the stairs to fetch the wine which seemed to comfort her; and from then on until Martin mentioned the matter, it had been Richard who would fill her cup, twice, three times, from the livery cupboard in the solar. What harm could it do? She never woke bad-tempered or liverish as those who drank too much sometimes did. The wine eased her grief, just as the grey powder eased his cough in the night. Where was the difference? It was Richard himself who first gave her another and far more potent draught, ‘to try’. It was neither French, Spanish nor Rhenish; it came from the Low Countries, where it was called brandewijn. Half a cup of it was as potent as three of any other kind.

  One evening, some weeks after Martin’s first protest, he came into the solar to bid Richard and Anne good night. It was almost bedtime and Richard had poured the brandewijn into a cup, given it into Anne’s hand and then, taking his lute, sat down at her feet on a cushion, playing a gentle, soothing tune. One candle was out, the other nearing its end, the fire sunk to a rose-hued glow. It should have been a pleasant, domestic scene, gratifying to the older man, but by some indefinable degree it missed so being and was something else, so that, even before he smelt the liquor, he was irritated; and when he did scent it and knew it for what it was he spoke more sharply than ever before in Anne’s experience.

  ‘Brandewijn!’ he said. ‘That is no drink for a lady.’

  She said,‘How would you know?’ Just the four words, with the faintest possible stress on the second, but the whole speech so insolent, so full of hurtful meaning that for a second he was checked. Then he said,

  ‘I should have said for a respectable married woman.’

  Richard asked, with a flippancy which annoyed Martin even more,

  ‘Must all pleasure be reserved for the disreputable and the unmarried?’

  Anne laughed and reached out her hand and patted Richard’s cheek. Trollop! Martin thought suddenly, and then, because that was too harsh a thought, he said,

  ‘Maybe you know best. I’m old-fashioned.’

  From him it was a handsome apology for one word, not even spoken aloud.

  He stumped up to bed, and shedding his clothes, wondered – for he was a just man – why it had slidden, that condemning word, so easily into his head? In his cool, undemonstrative way he had been fond of his daughter-in-law. Had been? Was! She was part of his achievement. A knight’s daughter. And never, until this evening, when he had blurted out his rebuke, had she by word or deed laid any stress upon the difference in rank. Provoked, she had retorted, as any woman of spirit would. He bore her no grudge for that. And even had he done there was no reason, surely, why his resentment should put that world into his mind. And yet … and yet. Even as he accused himself of injustice he recalled something so fleeting that he had sensed it rather than seen it, something so unlikely that he had pushed it away as nonsense and never thought of it again until now. Three months ago, one evening in the summer, he had stood by the back door of the house and looked out over the yard, towards the fence of the pasture. Anne and Denys Rootyer were standing close together, so close that they might have been touching; if they were they moved apart instantly, just as his eye lighted on them. No, he would never be sure, never admit to himself even, that they had stood closer than needs be. Nor would he admit that there was anything odd in the man’s fetching Anne out in the twilight to look at her lame horse; though there again the obvious thing would have been to call a smith.

  Why had he remembered it? Why think of it now?

  Getting old, and fanciful. Sixty, he thought, and remembered the priest at Rede telling him that at twenty half his life’s span had fled. Out in his reckoning there, Martin thought grimly, but for my leg I’m as good as I ever was, good for another twenty years. Unless I go awry in my wits! For suddenly, out of nowhere, another fantastic fancy had slipped into his brain. In June of last year, he and Richard had both been absent from home at the same time, and he’d offered that one of the maids should come across and sleep on this side of the house. What had she replied – That what a servant could save her from would never hurt her. And the twins had been born on St. Joseph’s Day, March the nineteenth.

  Here, alone in his own bedroom, he felt his face go red and hot, his heart beat so hard that it thudded inside his skull, exactly as though he had been caught out, publicly, in some misdemeanour. How was it possible that he should have entertained such a vile, shameful thought long enough to do the reckoning? Where could such a thought have come from, unless direct from the Devil?

  He lay down in bed and blew out his candle. When new his business took him to Colchester he would buy Anne some trinket, something pretty and of value, a secret proof of his shame for allowing fantasy a place in his mind, even for a minute.

  II

  The busy, happy years sped by. With Maude always just one pace ahead the twins passed through all the fascinating stages of early childhood. When they were six years old an uninformed observer would have taken them for any brother and sister, the girl the elder by a year.

  Richard’s cough persisted, a little better in summer weather, a little worse in winter; his cheerfulness, his fixed refusal to regard himself as an invalid screened, even from Martin and Anne, the stark fact that that was what he had become. He had ceased to ride abroad, never for the reason that he was not fit to do so, always because the weather was remarkably inclement, or there was too much work to do in the office, or the errand was something which Martin preferred to do himself. It was Anne who suggested that it was useless for him to ride with her on her regular visits of inspection to Minsham.

  ‘He doesn’t know,’ she said, speaking of her father, ‘whether we go or not. I only go to see that he is being cared for. I shan’t stay an hour.’

  ‘I like to come with you. It’s such a miserable business.’

  Sir Godfrey had sunk into apathy, prematurely senile, dirty, careless, almost witless, firm only on one point, he refused to leave his home.

  ‘It’s miserable,’ Anne agreed. ‘But why should we both suffer? You stay at home and then I shall be happy to return and find you cheerful.’

  She appeared to see nothing sinister in his acceptance. And when, one day when Maude was five years old and in boisterous play had all but pushed Richard from his feet, Anne said,

  ‘Maude, p
lay a little less roughly if you please. Such behaviour is not becoming.’ The extreme fragility of Richard which was then for a moment painfully plain, had escaped her.

  On her own remorse-ridden grief time had worked its old healing magic and effected an almost complete cure. She no longer needed brandewijn to make her sleep; on Richard’s good nights she slept well. Every now and then – often after she had been to Minsham – she would suffer a nightmare and wake, and be comforted by Richard and presently sleep again. But for Maude, Anne would during the children’s first six years of life, have been perfectly happy. As it was, she was like a person who has fallen amongst thistles and afterwards carefully removed every tiny prickle except one, which breaks off and burrows down and cannot be plucked out; it can be ignored most of the time, but is capable, none the less, at any accidental pressure, of causing a sharp pain. There were days when Maude was just a little girl, inclined to be headstrong and venturesome, but easily ruled because she was so affectionate. Then a slanting ray of light would strike the child’s head where the babyish fairness was giving way to bronze; or someone would remark Maude’s size and strength – by comparison with Walter, and Anne would be most sickeningly reminded. The mystery was that Walter gave the appearance of being Richard’s son; he had the dark, slender grace, the delicate structure of bone, the slight air of defencelessness which called out all that was maternal in Anne just as surely as something, unnameable, in Maude, called forth dislike. The sense of guilt was thus kept alive, and occasionally exacerbated by a curious look which would cross Martin’s face, usually when Anne allowed her resentment to take the form of an oversharp rebuke to the little girl.

  ‘I shall forbid you to play with the yard children if you bring their manners indoors.’