by Sheila Burns
‘I don’t suppose you could really.’
Mrs. Liskeard swallowed hard. ‘Perhaps not,’ she said and with a nervous hand brushed aside a long strand of hair blowing lightly across her eyes. ‘Life is difficult, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it can be horribly difficult.’
They came to Zennor, dropping down into the village. They saw the little house where Mrs. Liskeard had lived once, a small house with white walls and a grey roof. There were blush roses blossoming against the walls, pressing their pink cushions of faces against the plaster. Across the fields lay the sea, pale blue, for here there was nothing dark, nothing that did not merge completely in with the landscape. Then the moors, with the first shimmer of light on the soft grass, the gorse in flower, and the daisies.
As they turned to come back again, Mrs. Liskeard asked, ‘What do you think of Roger?’
‘I? I ‒ I think he is charming,’ and yet that uncertainty was there. Lorna almost felt that both of them experienced it. Both felt doubt.
‘My husband never really liked him. He never relished the thought that Roger would inherit Wiseways, and everything that went with it. I’ve always loved him in my own way. If I had had a son, I would have wanted him to be like Roger.’
‘Perhaps a nephew is the next best thing?’
‘Yes, yes, of course. I was attached to him when he had all that trouble failing in his exams, and being so distressed by it. For a while he was in hospital having treatment, from one of the big brain surgeons. He had strained everything. I thought he would never be better, poor boy, but he got better. A little moody at times, but then most of us are that, and he is so good to me. He is so very very good to me.’
‘But you should try to get away from the house, and out and about more.’
‘You’re a dear girl! I’ve loved it this evening. I have just adored it, and would like to do it again every day, but what do you think Roger and Maudie would say to it?’
‘I think they’d be surprised at how much better it makes you,’ and Lorna laughed, then she said, ‘We’ll do it sometimes together; a secret trip.’
‘That would be nice. A secret, yes,’ and then, ‘You’re going over to visit Lionel Strong tomorrow, aren’t you? He is one of my oldest friends, and such a dear. You’ll love him, and his wife, though Enid does take some understanding, I admit. She’s a sculptress.’
‘He didn’t tell me. I don’t think I’ve ever met one of those.’
‘You’ll be meeting one tomorrow. She does very serious work, has a very serious mind. Enid doesn’t laugh often, and I like people who can laugh.’
They had come down the avenue, and across the lake to the house front. Wiseways was lovely in the pleasant sunlight, and Brown, having heard them, was already coming down the steps to help his mistress in. He congratulated her on the drive, something she seldom did. These servants, Lorna thought, they know what is right for her, they know she should be out and about more, for she lives life in the prison of her room. She had made up her mind to do it again.
Lionel Strong came over to Wiseways next day to fetch Lorna in his own car. The house was difficult to find, he said, well tucked away from the crowds (he had a thing about crowds), and it would be easier if this first time, he took her over.
It was a comfortable Victorian house, in a small village just inland from Penzance. In summer the crowds made the coast impossible on the peninsula, he said, and none but fools, or lodging-house keepers, lived there, so he had bought Springfield, and was satisfied with it. A high red brick wall stood round it, and the type of gate through which crowds could not look. In spring the garden was an Eden of double cherry, of camellias and magnolias, a show garden which he adored. He grew melons in his own greenhouse, it gave him something of joy to grow fruit others jibbed at, last year’s mangoes had failed him, and he had had a tragic miss with paw-paws, but one of these days he would have the lot.
He talked glowingly of his garden and his greenhouses as they drove over.
Enid was waiting for them, a very tall woman, angular, and a little clumsy. She wore the sort of dress that only an artist can choose for herself, a clinging light blue frock, and her own face was jaundiced and faded, so that it deprived her of any vestige of colour. Lorna would never have thought that Lionel would marry a woman like that, for he was quietly sympathetic, and she realised from the start that Enid was bossy.
‘You’ll have to forgive Enid for knowing everything,’ Lionel explained, trying to laugh off the situation. ‘Success has been her crown, and she does the most wonderful work. You must come and see it.’
‘She won’t want to see it,’ said Enid, ‘it’s too cold, and the studio is dusty anyway.’
‘I’d like to see it.’
They went out into the garden to the separate studio made from the old stables, and standing just beyond the house. They crossed the paved stable yard, and Enid opened the big doors, easily as though it was no effort to her; somehow Lorna knew that she was proud of her strength. The studio was enormous, for coach-house and four stables had all been thrown into the one building, and here her statues stood. Ghost ones with a sheet twisted round them, a statue in the making, as yet merely a seed in the sculptor’s imagination, a finished Ulysses in the corner, enormous, a giant against the others and almost overpowering.
Most of Enid’s work was modern art, something which Lorna did not understand or like. Enid seemed to realise this. She was a woman above the ordinary intelligence, someone who could sense another’s tastes.
‘You must forgive my ignorance,’ Lorna told her, ‘it is just that I simply do not understand it.’
‘You like white china cupids, and swans as vases perhaps?’
‘Not really. I’ve got past that phase, but although I find modern art enormously strong, it doesn’t just happen to be me.’
‘It’s me, all right,’ Enid said.
She had pale eyes, in that colourless face which she never troubled to make up. Why had Lionel married her? Had he been suddenly passionately in love? Though it did not look like it now, but obviously he still admired her very much. How difficult it was to look back to past wedding days, and understand why people married, she thought.
Enid went to Ulysses and took a giant hand, fondling it almost in devotion. She left that and went to the stone she was working on at the moment. The floor was smothered with chips from it; the soft dust had settled. It stood before her, to the world a chunk, no more, to her a thought, a theme, something she had devised and which lay within her like an unborn child, slowly taking shape. Lorna knew this, and was amazed by Enid.
‘What will it be?’ she asked.
Enid turned, her face lit up, and now the light eyes had a certain magic in them, a new life. ‘For now it is my secret. It will be the best thing I have ever done, because every new one has to be the best. Otherwise I could not put sufficient of my real self into it.’ She moved her hand across it, as though she stroked it in affection. ‘Better go inside and have tea. I think tea is more in your line, and Lionel’s too. It is so very much like Mrs. Gaskell.’
This woman was a challenge. All the time she was throwing down the gauntlet, and as she turned to go away for tea, Lorna realised that she was madly jealous. She was conscious of the bigness of her gaunt body, and the lack of beauty, and therefore ready to suspect any other woman who crossed her threshold. Lionel was an attractive man; there might come the moment when he was also the attracted man, and she knew it.
She did not dislike Lorna because she was herself, but because she had come to the house with him, and it could be ‒ it very easily could be the crisis which she had always dreaded, the moment when he turned from his wife to another.
Once she might have thought it would be fun to be married to a famous novelist, and especially such a charming man as Lionel was, and in those days Lorna understood she had not given herself to sculpture in quite the same way. Her own success had caught up with her and had drawn level. Were there moments in thi
s woman’s life when she was afraid of the future, and what it might bring her?
Lorna took her chance.
Experience as a nurse had taught her that there was always the moment when you gripped life, when you sought to establish affection between yourself and the patient, and she recognised that moment now, though Enid was not a patient. Lionel had stayed behind to find the key he had mislaid, and in the courtyard she turned to Enid.
‘You don’t like me, I know,’ she said, ‘and if you think I am after your husband, you are dead wrong. That isn’t true. He is not the man in my life.’
It took Enid entirely by surprise.
For a single moment she went almost as pale as her own statuary, then a light colour flushed into the thin attenuated cheeks which were always anaemic. ‘How did you know I might feel anything like that?’
‘You did not conceal it very well.’
‘Meaning I was rude?’
‘Certainly not! It is always more difficult to hide something that we feel intensely.’
Enid turned. The angriness had gone from her eyes, and now it seemed that she had changed. She steadied herself, and she said, ‘I’m jealous because Lionel is some years younger than I am. Over forty is a considerable landmark in a woman’s life, it is so little in a man’s. I’m not good-looking, and my art is all I have got to recommend me.’ She paused, as if she searched for further words in which to clothe her anxiety, then not finding them, added, ‘You do understand?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘I’m sorry. It takes something for me to say that, but I am sorry.’
‘You needn’t be. I just wanted it to be quite clear that I was not the woman you dreaded, the woman who probably will never enter your life at all, but just be a ghost.’
Enid nodded. Her big hands were almost tearing the handkerchief that she held in them. ‘There ‒ there is somebody else in your life?’
‘Yes, there is.’
‘I see.’ They walked across the courtyard and down the side path, past rockeries which were bright with alyssum and rock roses and dying aubretia, for the day had been hot. Then she said, ‘Lorna ‒ I may call you Lorna, mayn’t I? ‒ you have done me a lot of good. You have made me see sense.’
‘A few silly years should not stand between you and your husband. They don’t matter really, you know.’
‘Of course you’re right. Go in and have your tea. I’ll come in a moment.’
Alone Lorna went on and into the house; she heard Lionel coming up behind her, jingling the keys in his hand. She knew that Enid wished to be left alone so that she could go back into the studio and have the good cry that she needed. Perhaps too many women allowed what they felt to be the horror of a few years’ seniority to stand between themselves and their love. They were matterless. There was no need for jealousy, or for doubt.
Lionel was not the sort of man any woman ought to suspect.
She went into the house, into the small room that they called the parlour, where tea was laid in the Victorian manner. The parlour had all the attributes of the time of that great Queen whom Lionel so admired. There were silhouettes on the walls, wax flowers under glass domes, a marble clock on the shelf, flanked by glittering lustres. The tea-table bore the crochet cloth, and the service had obviously been bought about 1850. She looked at the ornate cake basket, the ponderous teapot and tea-kettle, and smelt the faint smell of meths from the tiny stove which kept the water hot.
‘How nice this looks!’
Lionel was behind her. ‘I hope it all tastes as nice. Where’s Enid?’
‘She went back to the studio for something.’
‘She’s like that. Never mind. Will you be mother?’
‘Of course.’
She sat down in the chair with the horsehair seat which matched the twirly-curly sofa along the wall. Lionel was right; this special background had peace, about it there was something so different from the modern world that it had a certain consolation for living in the harshness of today.
Half nervously Lionel began, ‘I do hope you get on with Enid, she is a dear at heart, but like the hedgehog, always exposes her prickles. I adore her. She has a slight tendency to be jealous of pretty women, she thinks she is not good-looking, which to me she is. I love big gaunt women. There is something about her personality which reminds me of Dickens’ novels.’
‘We shall get on all right together, for I think that she is a dear, too,’ and she changed the subject. ‘I’m a wee bit worried about the Liskeards.’
‘The Liskeards? Why?’
‘It’s Roger. I don’t like him.’
‘Most women adore him. Enid is the only one I know who cannot stick him. It’s curious you should feel the same way.’
‘There is something about him. Something that I find quite, quite un-understandable.’
‘He has always been something of the problem child, and probably knows that himself, but I don’t think that should worry you.’
‘When he met me at the station, for a moment I thought ‒ I thought that he was ‒ that man!’
‘Which man?’ For a moment Lionel had not drawn level with her line of thought.
‘The night when we met; the man who disappeared when you came along and saved me.’
‘Good heavens! How ever could that be? Roger was down here at that very time staying with his aunt. Besides, he would never do something like that. He’s very shy, and that fellow must have been much shorter. Not that I actually saw him, but just as he went off I ‒ well, I thought he was shorter.’
‘Perhaps he was.’
‘I’m sorry you feel this way about him, because he is a very nice chap in lots of ways.’
‘The servants dislike him.’
‘Probably they dislike him because his aunt likes him so much. They were very upset when old Liskeard died, Roger behaved stupidly; felt bad about it and showed it all the wrong way. Then he is rather hand-in-glove with Dr. Morde.’
‘I have only seen him for a short time, and didn’t like him,’ Lorna admitted. Maudie had visited them today, she had been in the garden at the time and had only seen him as he left. He had not asked to see her, which she would rather have expected.
‘He’s fond of the bottle. It’ll kill him in the end but probably not soon enough as far as his patients are concerned. I admit that.’
She took another sandwich, carefully replacing the parsley that ornamented the pile. ‘It’s a relief that Roger was here that ‒ that particular night. I’ve been stupidly worried, I suppose the whole thing was a very big shock, and I am apt to dwell on it deep down inside myself, and Roger’s eyes are odd. You can sometimes see the whites round them.’
‘But lots of people’s eyes do that. Mostly the comedians’!’ Lionel laughed, passing his cup up for more. ‘What about Cyril Fletcher and Bob Monkhouse, and many others? Men get into the habit of doing that, and ‒ well, there you are! It means nothing. Poor Roger! Fancy you thinking that about him! He’s just a quite ordinary home-loving man.’
Enid came in at that very moment.
She had even brushed her hair, back from her face, and looked in a way reassured. It was plain that she had now convinced herself that everything was all right, and was no longer disturbed. She talked gaily, and was refreshingly amusing. This, Lorna thought, is the way Lionel saw her ‒ when he fell in love and married her. This is the real Enid.
The afternoon was turning out far better than she had ever thought it could.
Chapter Five
Lionel had an appointment in St. Ives that evening, so he took Lorna back and dropped her at the door of Wiseways, without going in himself. He had gone when Brown opened the door, standing there a little hunched with the years, his coat dragging in places, loose in others.
‘Mrs. Liskeard,’ he said, in a strained voice. ‘Something dreadful has happened. She has had another attack.’
‘Another attack?’
They always say that a well trained nurse never runs, but Lorna r
an then across the hall, and up those gentle shallow stairs along the corridor to the room where she knew Mrs. Liskeard would be lying. As she opened the door she saw the scene. Henderson, her face drawn, was by the bed with Dr. Morde. Roger was on the sofa, his eyes glazing, and on his face the look of complete horror. He was terribly frightened.
‘What has happened?’ she asked gently.
Dr. Morde turned to Lorna. He was a small man, a man she could never like, or trust. She realised instantly that he did not know what to do, or perhaps if it came to it, how to do it.
‘She must be kept absolutely still.’
‘When did it come on?’
‘They telephoned for me at four thirty.’
‘But why did they not send for me? They knew I was at Mr. Strong’s.’ She looked across to Roger.
He made a helpless indication with his hands, as though he did not understand why they had not sent for Lorna, as though none of this really mattered when greater importances were at stake. Two fat tears rolled down his cheeks; she recognised that he was not in the right mood, that he was terribly worried, and she turned again to the bed, where Mrs. Liskeard lay unconscious.
‘We have to get a specialist down here to her,’ Maudie said. ‘There’s Kinsome.’
Kinsome was a back number, and Lorna knew it. In this hour a patient was in peril, she needed the best possible advice, and although Lorna did not want Michael Bland down here, her profession must come before her personal feelings.
‘I should have said that the best possible man on thrombosis today was Michael Bland.’
‘Ah, I believe he is.’ Maudie was a drowning man grasping at a straw. ‘Yes, he is someone. There was a bit about him in the Lancet the other day.’ He stared owlishly.
‘I shall phone his secretary and get him to come down here.’ Roger had gone very white, obviously distressed about his aunt, and he blundered out of the room.
The two stood on either side of the bed. She was breathing heavily, with long gasps between, lying flat, her face a leaden colour, the skin stretched so tight that she looked quite unlike her real self.