The overnight rain had turned to sleet early that morning, and finally to snow. There had been radio warnings of a blizzard. Mary Helena, having made her routine checks that there was plenty of fuel for the furnace, that the kitchen was well-stocked with supplies they might need for a few days until the snow ploughs got through to their remote old mansion with its modern extensions far off the main road, relaxed into the enjoyment which the sight of snow falling, snow softly piling on bare branches, weighing down the green of the conifers, obliterating walks, disguising the little landmarks of the garden, always gave to her. She remembered also, that there would be those in danger from the snow, and those who would suffer cold and hardship, and said a prayer to be forgiven for having pleasure in what would be pain to so many people. ‘But, Lord,’ she said softly, speaking to a friend, ‘it is hard not to love Thy beauty.’ And then she slipped on a heavy black knitted shawl, gloves and boots, and gave herself over to the beauty. For a while, screened from the windows of the classroom by a row of pines, she walked in the falling snow, held her face up to it, and thanked God that at nearly seventy she could still enjoy it.
But as she paced, the thought of Nicole kept returning. She had always been one of the odd ones. St Columba’s was an odd school, Mary Helena conceded. It had been founded as a branch of a High Anglican Order in England; most Americans thought of it as a rather fancy version of Episcopalian. But Anglican nuns were rare enough anywhere, never mind in America. Nevertheless, there were enough people who wanted to send their daughters to be educated by nuns and yet who didn’t want to send them to a Catholic institution to keep the place well-tenanted and well-endowed. There was always a waiting list for St Columba’s, and the academic standards were high enough that Mary Helena knew, as Nicole must have known, that if she could satisfy them, she could satisfy the entrance requirements of most colleges for young ladies. But St Columba’s was still a religious order, and Mary Helena had strong views on maintaining a policy of admitting other than the daughters of the rich. Yes, it was an expensive school, but with a certain selected number of pupils, the fees were quite sharply reduced. That had been the case with Nicole Rainard. Mary Helena could still remember the letter that had come to the school from her mother more than eight years ago. It had been an honest letter, and yet not a begging one. Her daughter needed an education, she said; she needed a place away from Brooklyn. Anna Rainard had told the history of the family in Russia, in Paris and London. She had told of her English husband and her widowhood. She was particularly anxious that Nicole should study music, she said. The letter had sufficiently impressed Mary Helena that she had asked Anna Rainard to bring her small daughter for an interview, ‘to see how we like each other’, she had phrased it ambiguously, at the same time pointing out that many others were asking for admission to the school. The meeting with Anna Rainard, and the slight, pretty child she had brought with her to St Columba’s, had excited Mary Helena. The school, she had always maintained, needed a mixture of cultures ‒ she was ahead of her time in thinking this way. She had deliberately introduced such ones as Nicole from time to time, hoping that some understanding of another background would rub off on the too-sheltered daughters of the rich who mainly made up her pupils. So Nicole had been accepted, and had arrived, her bags and uniform marking her as no different from other children who had started there that same September. But she had been different, and not in the way Mary Helena had hoped. There had been no explosion of Russian warmth and laughter, no rages and tears. She was one of the few Mary Helena could remember who, at eight years old, had stood silently and resolutely, without even a quivering of the lips when the sounds of the taxi bearing her mother away had receded. She had gone on that way, closed, mostly silent except when asked questions, always obedient, well-behaved. That was what was wrong, Mary Helena thought. She and the other nuns had tried often to break through that cold little shell, and had not succeeded. Mary Helena thought of the English father, who had never seen his child. Could it be true that the English inheritance overrode the Russian? What did one do with a silent, always obedient, child?
And then the cold, and the whirling snow began to be too much for Mary Helena. She returned, shivering a little, to the house, and the bell was ringing for the next lesson period.
In the months that followed Mary Helena had cause to call Nicole several times to her office, or to invite her to walk the spring-thawed gardens with her. Once they had gone together to pick daffodils in the long grass under the oaks. Mary Helena had used her time to try to probe the reason for what seemed to her Nicole’s obsessive overworking, the habit of reading late at night, which was forbidden. Nicole promised she would observe the rules about lights-out, but no one could forbid her the morning light. One of the sisters had found her just after dawn, crouched by a window in her dressing-gown, hunched over a book. ‘I have to go to college,’ was her only reply. ‘You don’t have to get your degree all in one year, Nicole.’ She went at her music in the same slightly fanatical way. She extended her practice periods until she had a row with the girl who was waiting to take over the piano in that music room. The sisters, who were more used to having to persuade girls towards learning than keeping them from it, were at a loss. Nicole had been ordered to increase her time on the tennis court; she did this unwillingly. She wasn’t good at games. But once told she must have more exercise, she threw herself into it until the tennis mistress had to tell her that she was too wild. Then she began to practise her serves with the same kind of deadly patient quiet that marked the way she played her scales. She began to play quite a fair game of singles; at doubles, she could not co-operate with her partner.
The first break in the smooth façade came when the letter from Anna had announced that instead of their usual vacation in Maine, she had arranged for Nicole to attend, for the full three months, a summer camp for girls that was generally regarded as being for the rich only. At this news Nicole had finally broken, before Mary Helena, into a storm of passionate, weeping protest.
‘I don’t want to go. I’ve spent every summer here with you ‒ except when I was in Maine. This is my last summer. I want to stay.’
In the end she went to camp as docilely as she had done everything else. She swam and rode and played tennis as everyone else did. The single difference was that her mother had made arrangements for her to go to a house nearby where she could have the use of the piano for two hours a day. They were early risers in that house, and they made no objection when that black-haired, pale-faced child, who should have been wearing the universal sun-tan of the camp, turned up for two hours of practice before breakfast. They didn’t mind; her mother was paying them well for listening to scales.
When Nicole returned from camp, Mary Helena began to worry about her seriously. ‘This is the last year,’ she said. ‘I have to get it all done now, or I’ve lost out.’
‘You won’t lose anything, Nicole.’
‘I might. I have to be sure.’ And she had flung herself into her work in a way that frightened Mary Helena. The girl wasn’t looking well. She sent her for a check-up, and the doctor pronounced her fit. ‘But you have to watch these high-strung ones.’ Nicole said nothing about the cause of her grandmother’s death, and she begged Mary Helena not to write to her mother. ‘She’ll worry. It isn’t fair to make her worry when I’m perfectly all right. I promise I won’t work longer hours than you say I may.’
Mary Helena had nodded and agreed, but she knew she couldn’t temper the intensity with which Nicole now approached every task set for her. She would obey the letter but not the spirit of the rules. There was no promise which could change that.
For Christmas that year Anna booked a room at a fashionable country inn fairly near St Columba’s. ‘I thought I’d like a break from the city,’ was her explanation, but Nicole knew that it was to keep her away from the Manhattan apartment. The deception of the apartment at Mrs Burnley’s was over for ever. On Christmas Day Anna handed Nicole, after the presents she herself
had given her, a small grey box with the name of a famous jeweller on it. ‘From Lucky,’ was all she said.
Nicole opened it, and drew out a fine gold chain, at the centre of which, neatly placed so that the open ends turned upwards, was a golden horseshoe. The fine engraving on the back of the horseshoe read: Good luck. Lucky.
Nicole sat down at once and wrote a note of thanks, trying to make it sound relaxed, and not quite succeeding. When Lucky read it he tucked it into his pocket and smiled wryly at Anna. ‘Like a letter from a nice little old lady. I wonder if the kid’ll ever wear it …’
Nicole took it back to St Columba’s and hid it under her stocking case in the farthest corner of one of her bureau drawers. She would have liked to throw it away, but she lacked the courage.
2
In a stark, bleak Victorian mansion perched on a hill overlooking a mill town in Yorkshire, a seared and yellow man lay dying. He knew that he was dying, and the time left could not be very long. The pain, rather than the doctors, told him that. While his mind was still clear of the ultimate wash of the pain against reason, he struggled to think of what he should do. Or rather, he thought of the situation as what he would do. He had always been master of his house, and he remained so. For a long time, for a time until a few years ago, he had also been master of the town below him.
The solicitors, summoned here, had brought their reports. The last report had been brought directly from London by one of the partners of a firm his local solicitor had engaged to make the enquiries. It had all been done with great legal finesse, each deferring to the other, no one quite willing to say that enquiry agents had been engaged to do the work they needed doing. But the report, suitably dressed in decorous terms, lay on the bed beside him. Two hours ago it had been read to him, every last word of it; he had told them to leave it with him, and now they waited, downstairs, until they should be summoned again. He had pretended he still had the strength to read it again for himself, but that was not so. He touched that crisp legal paper, and the edges of it seemed to cut his emaciated hand. If he had had the strength to do it, he would have gone once more to look at the town below his house, the town that his father and himself had built. But he really did not need to do that; every line of the streets, the lanes, the alleys was drawn on his memory. All that was strange now was that the stacks of the mill chimneys did not belch their familiar smoke. That had gone, a little at a time, after the great stock market crash on Wall Street in ’29. It was a fact that the man refused to recognize as a direct outcome of his quarrel with his only son, that when the crash had come, and the orders from all over the world for woollen goods had slowly dried up, he had no longer been the owner of those mills. It had not been his fortune which had blown away with the winds of world depression, but the fortune of the man to whom he had sold his mills.
What the doctors had hopefully talked of as a cure had been a period of remission. The disease had struck him again, and once again he had endured an operation. But this time even they did not speak hopeful words. He was a very tough man, was Henry Rainard. He was taking his own good time about dying, but he knew the time left to him now must be very short.
He thought with bitterness of his own children. Iris, his daughter, had been a disappointment. No more than that, no less. She had disappointed him because she had failed to produce the grandsons he had counted on, the ones he had thought of as he had laboured alone at the mills. He did not even concede that if there had been grandsons to inherit, undoubtedly, he would have held on to his mills, and he would now be nearly bankrupt. Henry Rainard seldom gave credit to anyone but himself, and by now he had, in his own mind, translated what had seemed to be the move of a dying man who had no one to carry on after him, into a stroke of financial genius. It was his great enemy, his arch-rival in the woollen business in Yorkshire who was now almost bankrupt, and, he, Henry Rainard, was held, in the local parlance, to be a very ‘warm’ man indeed. He had lots of brass, and no one to leave it to. Iris, of course, would have it. She expected to have it. She had, in these last years, made dutiful visits to this house where she had been born, and each visit they had been farther apart, and his disappointment in her childlessness more evident. He wondered if it were her fault, or the fault of that soft fool she had married, Charles Gowing. She had married his title, of course, but he was only a baronet. Henry Rainard had educated his daughter for better things than that, had settled money on her at eighteen, but after several seasons in London, all she had been able to catch as a husband was an amiable Army man, a man of impeccable family, and a small, heavy-mortgaged estate. It didn’t matter in the least to Henry Rainard that Charles Gowing had achieved the rank of Brigadier during the ’14-’18 war, and had won a clutch of medals. That he limped badly from a war wound was also against him. Henry Rainard had little time for those who were not successful ‒ to be wounded was an evidence of failure. Mentally he dismissed Iris. He didn’t want to think of her being the only one to benefit from his life of hard work; she had never done any work herself. She didn’t know what it was about. To Rainard’s way of thinking, she hadn’t earned anything.
His feelings towards his only son were more deeply bitter. Stephen had achieved the ultimate failure by getting himself killed. And he had not even been an officer, although Henry Rainard had sent him to Harrow and to Oxford, where he had lasted only a year. But that year had been enough to do the damage. Their great quarrel had come when Stephen had returned from Oxford, accepting at last that he must join his father in the mills. The fool had absorbed some half-baked ideas of Socialism at Oxford, and had actually objected to the working-hours and the wages of the mill workers, the conditions of their work. When Henry Rainard had coldly asked him how, if these things were changed, they would make their profits, Stephen had answered that their profits should be less. This was such blasphemy to Henry Rainard that he actually thought he had misheard his son. But the truth was that Stephen refused to set foot inside any of the mills until conditions were changed. The conditions remained the same, and his son had left, having only the money which his mother, a soft woman who had doted on her son and whom Henry Rainard had despised as a fool, had left to him of her own small inheritance. With that inheritance, which Henry had been unable to deny to Stephen, his son had gone to America, and there had uselessly wasted his life playing about with cars, and had married a foreigner, a Russian. A few letters had come from Stephen when he had been serving in France, with vague suggestions that they should meet, that his wife and child might join him in England. Henry Rainard had responded to only one letter, and that harshly. He thought he had plenty of time in which to let Stephen change his mind about how the mills should be run, and if Stephen came to his senses, he, Henry, would perhaps overlook his marriage to a Russian, with the thought that there would be more children, there would be sons. He had taken Stephen’s death as a personal insult, in that it wrecked his plans.
And so the years had passed, lonely years for Henry Rainard, if he had been the kind to feel lonely. The illness was an affront to him; he had expected to live for a very long time. At the moment that he decided to sell the mills, he also ordered his solicitors to investigate the whereabouts and lives of the daughter-in-law and grandchild he had never seen. He could not have said why he wished to know about them; he just wished to know.
It was a surprise to learn that the Russian had not remarried. That had pleased him, in an odd way. In that time she might have remarried, and her husband have adopted Stephen’s child, who would not now be called Rainard. If that had happened, Henry Rainard would not have bothered further.
The reports had kept coming over the years, and were surprisingly comprehensive. The feelings of Henry Rainard about what he learned were mixed. He viewed with distaste the association of the Russian with a nightclub owner. He knew about the small apartment on Central Park West, and about Mrs Burnley’s. Information came from all kinds of sources from people such as Mrs Burnley and Danny at the nightclub, who would talk if mon
ey were offered. There was the other side of it which puzzled him. He had paid a great deal to have the school his grandchild attended investigated. He didn’t approve of High Anglicanism ‒ he was a Nonconformist himself. But at least the place was English, not Russian. He learned it was a place of outstanding scholastic note, and that his granddaughter did very well in her class. He knew about the special emphasis on music, which he thought a waste of time, but evidence of her skill. She played games, but was not good at them. He learned with surprise that Anna Rainard bought a copy of the Wall Street Journal every day. He also knew the opinion Mrs Whalen at Hattonville had of her. What he did not know, because no one else had known, was what had happened between his granddaughter and her mother on the night she had come to Lucky Nolan’s, the eve of her sixteenth birthday. It was routinely reported to him that Anna Rainard had given up the fiction of living in Brooklyn, and that his granddaughter had spent the summer at an expensive camp for girls. He did not delude himself about where the money for such things came from. The reports even knew the state of Anna Rainard’s bank account, and that, very oddly at the height of a depression, she had bought a few hundred dollars’ worth of very low-priced stock. The last piece of information in the report had been of the Christmas Anna Rainard and his granddaughter had spent together in the country. It was January now, and the winds that brought the flying snow to the school in Connecticut where his granddaughter worked in the last months before her final exams, these winds blew from the east over the North Sea, and struck the house on the hill with icy roughness, found the tiny ill-fitting places at the windows, flapped the washing hung in the alleys of the town below, and made the man who was so near to death wish that just once he might feel really warm. Despite the fire that burned night and day, and the hot-water bottles laid close to his body, he was very cold, except when the pain drove out any other feeling. Iris telephoned each day, and asked to be allowed to come. He refused her. He and Iris had nothing to say to one another.
The Lynmara Legacy Page 6