The Town House

by Norah Lofts

  ‘Come in and get warm, it’s one of the last chances you’ll have,’ I said, in that same brusque way. ‘I know what I’m talking about. I went to Clevely for their last lot of wool in the month of May and Dame Clarice Gracey who acts as Treasuress, still had chilblains to the elbow. In May. She had her sleeves rolled up while she weighed the wool.’

  Maude gave a little shudder, moved her hands together, twisting the ugly ring, and then moved towards the fire and sat down on the settle, holding her hands to the warmth.

  ‘The worse it is, the better. Don’t ask me why. There are some things that shouldn’t be talked about. It makes them seem…’ she paused. ‘It makes them seem less real, less important. Can you understand that? I have a reason for going to Clevely. I told it to my grandfather, because I thought he had the right to know, and because I wanted to speak of it … yes … there was that, too. And ever since,’ she turned her head from the fire at which she had been staring and looked into my face, ‘it hasn’t seemed so real or so urgent. I’ve begun to wonder…’ She paused again. ‘I believe that you could, if you wanted, talk a thing clean away, make it be nothing.’

  I had seated myself on the opposite settle, and now, leaning forward, I said,

  ‘Try. Tell me why you think you must go to Clevely. Maybe then you won’t want to go.’

  ‘That is what I fear. Except that … there is this in it, the less I want to go the more it will count if I do.’

  ‘Count? Count against what? Come on,’ I said, ‘you can tell me. Another fortnight and the Bishop’s hands laid on me and I should have been a priest, qualified to hear any confession and advise on any matter. Imagine that! So you see, you can tell me anything.’

  Like all women she went off at a tangent. They do it, not deliberately, or because they are incapable of sticking to one line of thought as any man who has been nagged can bear witness; they do it for the same reason that a partridge whose nest is in danger, will go limping and flapping away, deluding the intruder into the hope that she can be taken by hand. It is a defensive measure.

  ‘I did not know’, Maude Reed said, ‘that you were almost a priest. What stopped you?’ She spoke as though I were a runaway horse, grabbed by the reins.

  I could hardly tell her what was my chief reason – that I knew myself unable to live celibate and should tire of pretending to be; my other reason was enough.

  ‘I’m a farmer’s son, with no family and no wealth to count on. For me the ladder to promotion was set very steep and lacked several rungs. Besides, I preferred the life of a layman; a priest should have a vocation.’

  She nodded, gravely, and her hair changed colour where the firelight caught it.

  ‘I know. Something – just a little thing it was too – happened to me and made me think there was something in the world, after all. But there is a long time before I have to decide about a vocation.’

  ‘You make such a mystery of it all,’ I said brusquely, ‘talking about a purpose and what will count and other vagaries. You’re far too young to take life so seriously. I’ll tell you what I think …

  ‘Yes?’ She looked straight into my eyes.

  ‘I think that at Beauclaire you had a bad attack of puppy love and something went wrong with it, so you go jumping into a convent like a scalt cat. It’s very silly.’

  ‘I’m not jumping into a convent. I’m only going to live at Clevely for a time, as anyone might do.’

  Quite a lively temper, too, I found myself noting with approval. And another defensive tactic.

  ‘I’ll hazard a further guess,’ I said recklessly, ‘your bit heart-break at Beauclaire was concerned with your writing teacher – the one you call Melusine.’

  Dear me, that brought a result for which I was not prepared She gave me a wild look and half rose, and then dropped back laid her arms on the side of the settle, put her head down and began to cry.

  I’ve heard dozens of women cry, with cause and without, and the most I have ever felt was a mild pity if they had what I considered good reason to weep, a testy impatience if I though otherwise. Maude’s tears seemed to come from my throat, her sobs to rend my chest.

  I went down on my knees by the settle and put my arm round her and began to talk rubbish, saying that I meant no harm, that a little sentimental attachment was nothing to cry about, that I would sooner lose my right hand – what things people say in the endeavour to be persuasive! – than cause her a moment’s pain. I reverted to childishness and referred to myself by the name that no-one had used since I went, a boy of nine, to the monk’s school at Norwich.

  ‘Tell Nick,’ I pleaded, ‘tell Nick all about it.’

  She did too! Melusine and Uncle Godfrey and Madge Fitz-Herbert and how everything depended on money, and what an awful world this was. I kept my arm round those thin little shoulders and held her steady, and pulled out my sleeve and wiped her face on it. I hated all the three that she talked about because they had hurt her. The wench who’d lifted her skirt before the ring was on her finger was dead and beyond ill wishes; I wished a pox on the other two; and on all at the great house who had let such a situation develop, not seen what was afoot, and then, after the end of it, let this child carry her grief all sealed away in loneliness.

  Presently, when she had cried herself out I asked,

  ‘This is what you told your grandfather?’

  ‘Yes. But I must not cry. I promised not to cry about it any more.’

  ‘Who made you promise such a daft thing?’

  ‘The chaplain.’

  Pox on him, too, I thought; a few good crying bouts and the wound would have begun to heal. She actually said, in a sad way,

  ‘There, now I’ve told you and it seems even farther away.’

  ‘That is why miseries should be talked over, not bottled up.’

  I left her then and put another log on the fire and again sat down opposite.

  ‘Now listen to me,’ I began. I raked through my mind for any scrap of comfort to offer her. Heresies I could have gone to the stake for poured from my lips. I told her that there wasn’t a word of evidence of the existence of Purgatory in the Bible. That Christ never exhorted anybody to pray for the dead. That the descent into Hell mentioned in the Creed was a man-made myth. ‘On the Cross, to the dying thief, Christ said, “Today you shall be with me, in Paradise”, what could be plainer than that?’

  My years of training for priesthood now served me, in reverse as it were; I was persuasive, logical, like a lawyer who can plead this side of a case or that, according to who hires his tongue.

  The result was disappointing; she listened, but was not convinced. The point I thought most telling she countered with,

  ‘That man was only a thief; not a suicide.’

  ‘Your friend had been wronged,’ I said. And then I paused, remembering that I had wronged at least two women in precisely that same way, and never until this moment had a pang of conscience about it. ‘Nobody can judge in these matters. She may have been acting in a spirit of self-abnegation; if she was with child, and had a family who would have shared the disgrace. If you want to make a disputation about it, theft is forbidden in the Commandments, there is no mention of suicide there. And if you care to be strictly logical Christ Himself was the outstanding suicide of all time; at any moment He could have called down an army of angels to rescue Him.’

  In my eagerness to comfort her I had gone too far, forgetting that I was talking to a child of twelve. I saw horror dawn and grow in her face and savoured the full irony of having done myself deep damage in her estimation, simply through pity. I stopped speaking.

  She said, ‘Now I know where I have seen you before. It has bothered me, not being able to quite remember. In the Maze at Beauclaire.’

  ‘I never was there.’

  ‘Not you. Your image. In the Rune Stone.’

  It was my turn to stare. And it was my turn – I who have always been impatient of women who told long tales about their dreams, and sceptical of those wh
o claimed to have had premonitions – to listen to the story of a supernatural experience, which had at least one redeeming feature of being comic. She described the man she had seen in her vision, and whom she claimed to be me, in full Cardinal’s wear! Maybe I had missed my mark after all.

  ‘You were trying to convince me of something, just as you were just now. And I knew you were wrong, as I know it now. Though I am sure’, she added with magnanimity, ‘you were trying to be kind. And I’m sorry to have made such a show of myself. The first thing we were supposed to learn at Beauclaire was self-control.’

  ‘Of which,’ I said, ‘as with many another thing, a certain amount is very good, and too much deadly poison. The one thing I wish for you – because it would mean happiness in the end – is that you shouldn’t act hastily over this matter. It was a shock, and you’ve brooded over it in silence and the whole thing has grown out of all proportion. If you spent, say, just the one summer here, living an ordinary life and trying to keep your grandfather cheerful, I’m quite sure –’

  She said, ‘You know what they say in Suffolk when temptation offers, “Get you ahind me, Old Scrat!” I must say it to you.’ She smiled, with the tear marks still damp on her face. ‘I know what I must do, and I am going to do it.’

  Master Reed could be stubborn, and Walter was obstinate past all reason, and she was of their blood. But there was something other than obstinacy, there was something almost piteous in her last words to me that evening.

  ‘Besides, even if I wished to defer going it would be awkward; everything is prepared.’

  And that was true. Mistress Reed had brought her undoubted capacity for industry and organization to bear upon getting Maude’s clothes and household goods ready for Clevely with such effect that when, on St. Barnabas’ Day, she left the Old Vine for the second time, two pack horses were needed to carry her gear.

  II

  I had never cared much for Mistress Reed, thinking her cold and proud, admirable only in her devotion to her children, and in that I was but half right. After seeing her with Maude I liked her less, and because she had encouraged the girl to leave home, even hastened her going as far as possible, I began to detest her. Her punishment was on its way, however, and I sometimes wondered how far she had herself helped to fashion it. How could anyone account for Walter Reed, who was, of all the people I have ever known, the most peculiar?

  His mother was ordinary enough; she had married beneath her, but when one compared the home from which she came with that to which she had come, that was understandable enough. She had never, I am certain, entertained a thought, or experienced an emotion uncommon to her kind. She preferred her son to her daughter, but then thousands of women do that, but conceal the fact, perhaps out of deference to their husbands who usually have a fondness for their daughters and govern their sons strictly.

  Walter’s father, who had died young of the lung rot, was by all accounts ordinary, too. He was musical, and rather better educated than some merchants’ sons, but everything that was remembered about him indicated that he had been industrious and businesslike and sensible.

  Whence then Walter? How did two such ordinary human people ever breed that changeling child?

  He cared for nothing but his music. He accepted his mother’s adoration without the reciprocation of even the most tepid affection. He condescended to learn to read and write because those arts would, he thought, be useful to him when he was an itinerant musician. For music he had some talent; he could pick up the words of any song, however long it was, at one hearing, and from a fragment of a tune, hummed or whistled, he could reconstruct the whole. He also made good songs of his own. Mistress Reed, up to a point encouraged him, often remarking that he had inherited his father’s ability – that was how I learned that Richard Reed had been musical. Even when he talked of his future, although one could see that the thought of his leaving home cut her to the heart, she was curiously infirm of mind, saying, Oh there was a long time to go before he could think of that, saying when he was older he would have more sense, saying that his father had talked the same way and settled down to business in the end.

  His grandfather’s attitude towards the boy was equally uncertain; he was deeply disappointed, as any man who had built a great business out of nothing and then finds his heir scorns and repudiates it, would be justified in being. But never once did he make an open protest or seem to realize that a child could be governed and controlled. In the first three years of my time at Baildon the harshest thing I ever heard him say to Walter about his wild-cat plans was,

  ‘All right, if you go, when the time comes, you go. Don’t keep talking about it!’ And even that order Walter disobeyed when he felt like it.

  Twice in those three years Walter, after some row over his lessons, had run away and been brought back. Excused from learning to count – which in any case he was completely unable to do, he left home at last still counting on his fingers – he settled down until the summer which followed Maude’s going to Clevely.

  During that summer, in August, the height of the pilgrim season in Baildon, there was an incident, trivial but curious which I remembered years after, when Walter’s fate was decided.

  He came in, on that warm, dusty evening, a little late for supper, his face flushed, his eyes fever-bright and his whole manner that of one who moves in a trance. He sat down, and ignoring the food before him, told us that he had been playing his lute in the market-place. Those who had listened had given him cakes and fruit and sweetmeats and a variety of small trinkets. He laid them out on the board; a little image of St. Christopher, a knife with a horn handle, a belt buckle and a money pouch made of plaited straw.

  ‘They had no money to spare,’ he said, ‘but those who had …look!’ He opened the pouch and spilled out six or seven shining-farthings. ‘They liked it so much that they paid me! They paid me!’ he said.

  His grandfather looked at the coins as though they had been earned by blood, fraud, prostitution. Mistress Reed looked at them as though they were her death warrant. I simply stared, thinking, Well if he can earn that much in an hour, he’s cleverer than most; a good thatcher working from dawn to dusk earned a penny and a half in the day.

  Mistress Reed spoke first. She said,

  ‘Of course they liked your playing, Walter. You play extremely well. I always said so. But you mustn’t take all this’, she pointed to the stuff on the table, ‘as proof that you can make a living playing the lute. You see, you are very young and rather small, so they think that it is marvellous that you should–’

  ‘The Devil take your tongue,’ Walter cried. All the blood went out of his face, leaving it the colour that I had only seen before on a corpse. ‘That isn’t true. They liked it, I tell you. No matter about me. When I sang of the Death of Roland they wept. Great rough men. One man said, “What magic is this? I have not shed a tear since my child died, and what is this Roland to me?” He said that with tears running down his face. And then you say it is because I am small.’

  He would have been weeping himself, had he been able, but he never could cry; he could sob and moan but I never saw him shed a tear.

  His mother shrank back as though he had hit her across the face, but his grandfather leaned forward and said in a voice of controlled fury,

  ‘Never, in all my days have I known a boy speak so insolently to his mother. She spoke for your good and she spoke the truth. So, in the market-place a few fools praised you, and you come home calling on the Devil. You ask pardon this minute, or I’ll give you what I should have years ago, a damned good hiding.’

  I watched, with great interest. When I first came to the Old Vine the boy’s choosiness over what he would and would not learn had been attributed to my failure to manage him. Let them learn.

  Walter looked defiantly at his grandfather, but the old man was not to be outfaced. Set in their myriad wrinkles, under the scowl-scarred brow, his grey eyes bore down, unflinching. Walter’s stare flickered and wavered. He put out
his hands and gathered all the things he had laid out for display, as though they were his defence and consolation. Across them he said,

  ‘I ask your pardon, Madam. But truly it was not because–’

  ‘That will do!’ Master Reed said.

  There was a silence at the table, broken when Walter picked up his little silver coins and passed them lightly from hand to hand. Mistress Reed leaned forward and seemed to be about to speak, but though her lips moved and her throat jerked, no sound came. She lifted her cup and drank, set it down, and then, rather like a woman who has heard evil tidings, put her hand over her mouth and the lower part of her face. Her hands, I noticed for the first time, were like Maude’s, very long and thin, the finger joints clearly marked.

  I saw Master Reed give her a sidelong glance. I thought that this was where I, one of the company, yet not emotionally concerned, should make some tactful, impersonal remark which would smooth over the awkward moment. Before I could think of one Master Reed, in a casual way which contrasted sharply with his last manner of speech, said,

  ‘It would serve you right, Walter, if nobody spoke to you for a week. But that would punish your mother more than you. You’d better ask her to say that she forgives you.’

  Walter said as meekly as possible, ‘Please forgive me, Mother.’

  Master Reed then seemed to be affected by madness. He hit the table with his hand and said more furiously than I had ever heard him speak even to a pack-whacker who had foundered two horses,

  ‘God’s blood! Can’t you just for once do what you’re told?’ Mistress Reed again moved her lips and tried to protest, but the old man thundered on. ‘I said, ask her to say she forgives you. Do it, or I’ll break your neck!’

  By this time every eye in the dining hall was turned toward our table. Mistress Reed, ever mindful of formalities, moved a hand in a gesture very eloquent and graceful to draw Master Reed’s attention to this fact. He shook his head like a horse tormented by flies and kept his eye on Walter, who, after a minute said,