by Rennie Airth
Mr Grail?
Harold had forgotten about him. Now he had to sit and listen again as Mrs Troy explained in her halting, back-and-forth way that he was the man who had looked after the garden since Tom Donkin's departure.
But there was more to it than that.
One of Edna Babb's duties had been to shop for her employer in Knowlton, but since she could no longer be relied on Mrs Troy had been forced to seek an alternative source of supplies.
'I told Mr Grail he could use the garden shed that's what he wanted — but he had to bring me food when he came.'
Why? Biggs wondered. Why on earth not ask one of the village women to shop for her? What was she clinging to so desperately? Was it her independence?
She shouldn't be living here on her own, he thought irritably. Didn't she have someone to care for her? 'What can I do for you, Mrs Troy?'
'I want you to tell him to go.' She spoke for the first time with certainty. 'I don't want him coming back.'
Biggs blinked. 'You've spoken to him, have you? Is he giving trouble?'
She shook her head. 'I can't talk to him,' she said.
'I want you to tell him.'
Now that he understood at last, Harold didn't trust himself to speak. He'd been dragged all the way out here on his afternoon off just to give some fellow his marching orders! As though to underline his sense of outrage, a loud crack of thunder sounded overhead. It was followed by a patter of raindrops on the roof that swiftly became a downpour. My God, he was going to get drenched!
He sought to keep a grip on his temper. 'Where can I find him?' he asked abruptly.
'He usually comes on a Saturday.' She turned her near-sightless eyes on him again. 'Saturday afternoons.
That's why I wanted someone here today.'
Without a word Biggs stood up and went out into the narrow hallway. He found what he was looking for — an umbrella, it was standing in a flowered china vase — and went from there directly through the house to the kitchen at the back. The smell of stale food assailed his nostrils. A pile of unwashed plates and dishes lay on the draining-board of the sink. Through the window he could see the shed, at the bottom, and to one side, of a small square of lawn bordered by flowerbeds.
He flung open the kitchen door. The rain fell like a curtain before his eyes. Fuming, he stepped outside, opening the umbrella as he did so, and splashed across the already sodden patch of grass to the shed. The door was barred by a heavy padlock. He hammered on it.
'Grail!' he called out. 'Grail! Are you there?'
There was no response. He laid his ear to the wooden door, but he could hear nothing above the noise of the rain beating on the corrugated iron above his head and pouring in a stream from the edge of the roof on to his spread umbrella.
He knocked once more, again without result, and then plodded back to the house. As he stepped into the kitchen he saw that the white leather of his new white-and-tan shoes had turned a muddy brown. Furious, he dried them with a kitchen towel. He returned to the front room.
'Grail's not in the shed, Mrs Troy. I doubt he'll come in this storm. Where does he live, anyway?'
She didn't know. Grail had never said. In short order Harold discovered there was almost nothing she did know about the man. He'd appeared mysteriously, several months back, in early spring. He came often on a Saturday but not every week. He usually brought food for her, groceries of some kind, though not always what she asked for.
'Just any stuff,' the old woman said, with sudden, fierce resentment.
So that was it! Grail hadn't lived up to his end of their bargain. Calmer in his mind now, Biggs reflected coolly. As far as he could see, the garden appeared to have been cared for. If it was just a question of the food Grail was bringing, then a word in his ear might do the trick.
Seating himself beside her again he began to put it to her, suggesting that if someone took Grail aside and- 'No! No! No! That's not what I want.' Twin pink roses like fever spots blossomed in the pallor of her cheeks. The hysteria in her voice shook him. 'I don't want to have to deal with that man. Please.' Listen to me!'
Flushing, Biggs sat back. There was no reasoning with her, he told himself bitterly. She was old and stubborn, and probably feeble-minded. She ought to be in a home. He couldn't see what this fellow Grail had done that was so terribly wrong. Anyone would think he was Satan incarnate! For a moment he wondered if there was something here he hadn't understood. Something she'd left unsaid. But he pushed the thought from his mind. All he wanted was to get the damned business settled and be on his way.
'Well, I can't tell him anything if he's not here,' he said sharply. 'And I can't wait for ever.'
She sat still in her chair, her face turned away from his. The cat's purring had ceased. 'I want Mr Wolverton to come,' she said in a low voice. 'I'll speak to him.'
The implied threat in her words brought the blood rushing to his cheeks again. 'There is something I can do,' he said quickly. 'I could write him a letter. Mr Grail. I'll leave it in the shed, so if he comes tomorrow he'll find it. I'll tell him he has to go, to quit the premises. There — will that help?'
She said nothing. But her shoulders under the knitted shawl made a faint shrugging gesture.
He stood up, temples throbbing. Old and helpless as she was she'd managed to humiliate him. He felt as though she had slipped a chain around his neck and given it a sharp jerk. He moved away to a small writing desk that stood against the wall behind her chair and sat down. His hand shook as he unscrewed his fountain pen and took a sheet of paper from one of the pigeon-holes.
Dear Mr Grail Mrs Troy informs me that for some time now she has allowed you the use of her garden shed in return for certain services…
The room grew suddenly brighter as he wrote.
Glancing up he saw that a beam of sunlight had broken through the lace-net curtains. He was aware that the rain had stopped a few minutes before. The sunshine brought a flash of silver from the glass fronted cabinet, and Harold's eye was drawn that way.
He noticed a pair of tankards standing on a silver salver that occupied the top shelf of the cabinet. The sight of them awoke a recent memory in him. He had gone to an auction in Folkestone with Mr Wolverton to oversee the sale of a deceased client's effects. He recalled the auctioneer holding up a brace of silver mugs, very like the ones in the cabinet.
'Georgian,' the auctioneer had said. They had fetched 120, pounds the pair of them.
She now finds it necessary to put an end to this arrangement and I am writing to inform you of this. Since no contract exists between you and Mrs Troy I assume that a period of notice of one week from today will be sufficient…
A hundred and twenty pounds the pair of them. He could buy a wireless set for 120 pounds for a lot less, as a matter of fact, but the balance could go towards a motor-car.
Harold Biggs sat like a statue, his pen poised above the paper, while the thought of larceny slithered into his mind like an adder and lay there, quietly coiled.
He glanced at the figure in the chair. The old woman seemed to be dozing.
He got up quietly and went out of the room and into the kitchen. His heart was leaping in his chest.
He needed time to think. He drew a glass of water from the sink tap and stood at the window staring out. Scattered raindrops fell through sunshine. Blue skies showed on the heels of the clouds, which were moving eastwards. He wouldn't get wet after all.
Dry-lipped he told himself he was entitled to claim payment, to be compensated for his trouble. But it wasn't that. He knew. It was the excitement he felt racing through his veins. The realization that he might be about to do something he had never dreamed of doing. Had never dared to dream of doing. It was like stepping into a new skin. A new person.
He went back to the front room. Mrs Troy hadn't stirred. Her chin lay on her breast. Her eyes were shut.
Biggs held his breath. The cat watched from her lap as he crossed the room silently to the cabinet.
Could he do it?
Yes? No?
He opened the glass doors and took out the tankards, one in each hand, hefting them, testing their weight. His eyes, behind his glasses, began to water.
'Mr Biggs? Are you there?'
Harold froze. His back was to her.
Are you there?
He turned his head slowly — and then relaxed with a slow expulsion of breath. Her face was pointing towards the door. She couldn't see across the room. He had banked all on that.
'Mr Biggs…?'
Taking care not to make any sound, he replaced the mugs in the cabinet and shut the glass doors. Black spots danced before his eyes.
'Here I am, Mrs Troy.' He crossed the room unhurriedly to the desk. 'I'll just finish this letter now.'
Kindly remove all your belongings and leave the door unlocked…
Biggs's pen squeaked faintly on the paper.
I shall return next Saturday, a week from today, to ensure that the shed has been vacated as Mrs Troy requests.
Yours faithfully,
Harold Biggs (Solicitor's Clerk) 'I've been thinking this over, Mrs Troy.' He spoke to her from the desk as he addressed an envelope in clear capitals: mr grail, by hand. 'A letter's not enough, I feel. I ought to handle this in person. I'll be coming back next Saturday to make sure this fellow has got the message. Don't worry, I'll have him out of here, bag and baggage, I promise you.'
Because he didn't want to take the tankards now. Not today. He had thought it all out in the kitchen.
First, Grail had to be sent packing. Then, anything found missing from the cottage could be laid at his door. He'd be the obvious culprit, a man with a grievance. It was an added bonus, as far as Harold was concerned, that he did not need to trouble his conscience, either. Even if the police got around to questioning Grail they would find no evidence of the theft, no stolen goods, and the matter would be dropped.
Always supposing it came to that. Always supposing Winifred Troy even noticed the mugs had gone missing.
He sealed the envelope, got up and went over to where she was sitting.
'Do you understand, Mrs Troy?' He sat down beside her again. 'This letter's his notice to quit. I'll be back in a week to make sure he's gone. You don't have to deal with him. If he makes any objection refer him to us, to the firm. Tell him we're handling the matter.'
He didn't like it when she turned her face to him.
An exchange of glances was part of any conversation.
You looked into the other person's eyes and tried to judge their reactions. Mrs Troy's clouded gaze gave no hint of her feelings. Then he felt her fingers close on his.
'Thank you, Mr Biggs.' It was no more than a murmur. 'I'm sorry to have put you to all this trouble.'
Too late, he thought angrily, pulling his hand from hers. He didn't want to think about her, or her life.
Or how little of it was left.
'I'll be going now,' he said, getting up. 'I'll see you a week from today.'
He went out of the room without waiting for her response and left the house by the kitchen door, crossing the lawn and pausing at the shed to slip the letter under the door. The puddles in the dirt track outside the wicket gate reflected the washed blue sky.
He stopped for a moment to savour the extraordinary events of the past half-hour. He had walked across the room to the cabinet in her presence and taken out the tankards! He had done what he meant to do. Assert himself! He only wished he could bring it to Mr Wolverton's attention. Somehow ram it down his throat!
As it was, he couldn't even tell Jimmy Pullman what he'd done, or what he planned to do. It would have to remain his secret.
Always in the past he had lacked courage, he thought, needing an explanation for the mediocrity of his life. But he felt if he could do this one thing return next week and take the tankards — the whole of his future might change. In spite of everything he had a deep-rooted belief in his own good fortune.
' You're a lucky devil.'
Harold grinned at the remembered words. They had been spoken to him by a woman he had picked up one evening in the high street in Folkestone. It was in the second year of the war. He'd forgotten her name now.
They had walked arm in arm from the upper town to one of the pubs in the harbour, down the same winding road that, day by day, echoed to the marching feet of thousands of men on their way to the moored Channel steamers, and to France. (Harold heard them still in his dreams, those marching feet.) She told him her fiance had been killed at Loos and he had wondered whether this bright-eyed girl with the brassy manner might not feel contempt for a man who, with the help of weak eyesight and a cough he had learned to exaggerate, had worked himself a soft posting in the quartermaster's stores at Shorncliffe Camp. She soon put him right.
'I'll take a live man over a dead hero any day,' she declared, and proved it to him a few hours later, up against the wall in a dark alleyway behind the pub.
'You're a lucky devil.'
He never saw her again, but her words stayed with him. As the war continued, and the casualty lists lengthened, and weak eyes and doubtful lungs were no longer enough to keep a man out of the trenches, Harold had waited for the day when his name would be added to the columns marching down daily to the water's edge. It never arrived. He had remained at his post in the quartermaster's stores. And with the passing of time he came to see that what the girl had told him was true, though in a way she could not have imagined. He was specially blessed. Anointed. One of those, who, by fate or accident, was destined to escape the slaughter.
He still had the shiny new shilling he had been given when he enlisted and he had drilled a hole in it and threaded it on to his key ring. Even now, in moments of doubt or indecision, he would find himself slipping his hand into his pocket and running his thumb over the milled edge.
Amos Pike slipped into the kitchen and deposited the parcel of food he had brought in the pantry. He waited, expecting to hear the old woman's voice from the front room asking who was there. When she didn't speak he went through and found her sitting in her usual place by the window. In the fading light of early evening she seemed unusually pale and shrunken and he looked at her with cold-eyed concern.
'I brought you some things,' he said, in his dead voice.
'Thank you, Mr Grail.'
She sounded breathless, uneasy.
'I got some fish, like you asked.' He studied her face, observing the faint tremor that tugged at the corners of her mouth.
'Thank you,' she whispered again.
Pike's brow creased. He seldom conversed with anyone, but his instincts, like an animal's, were strongly developed.
'Is something wrong?' he asked.
She shook her head at once. 'No, nothing. Thank you for bringing the food.' She kept repeating herself.
He knew she found his presence unsettling, but now there was something else in her manner: a kind of tension, which she was trying to hide. He moved a little closer. He wanted to get to the bottom of this.
Distrust and suspicion were the dominant strains of his character, together with his need, and it was this last — the constant thrust of his longing — which caused him to turn away suddenly and leave her sitting where she was.
He would find out later what had upset her.
A last-minute change in Mrs Aylward's itinerary had meant a delay of several hours in his departure for Rudd's Cross. Normally he accepted these occasional disruptions in his plans without emotion. He could afford to take the long view.
But this afternoon for the first time he had felt impatience. The everyday world with its routine of chores and duties was becoming a burden to him.
Though he wasn't aware of it, the frail moorings that bound him to common reality were starting to fray.
Twilight was falling when he opened the shed door, and he failed to see the letter lying on the floor at his feet. When he lit the paraffin lamp a minute later he had already stripped the dust cloth off his motorcycle and thrown it aside. It fell on the floor, covering the wh
ite envelope.
He reached the forest before midnight and slept, wrapped in his groundsheet, beside his motorcycle until dawn. At first light he was on the move, hoisting his heavily laden bag on to his shoulder and striding, silent and ghostlike, through the thick ground mist that swirled about the tree trunks.
He found the dugout as he had left it, apart from a layer of mud that had accumulated at the bottom with the recent rains. He used his entrenching tool to scrape it out, stamping the remaining wet soil into a hard surface, and then went in search of one of the many stands of saplings with which the forest was seeded, returning an hour later with two armfuls of poles, which he trimmed and laid side by side on the packed mud floor, damp-proofing the pit.
At noon he broke off to open a tin of bully beef.
All morning he had kept his mind fixed on the minutiae of the jobs he was engaged in: on the branch he was trimming to size, on the neatness of the levelled floor. But he had been conscious all the time of the forces gathering within him: a tidal bore of emotion that throbbed at his nerve ends, making his skin prickle and burn as though lava flowed in his veins.
The sensation was thrilling. But it also made him uneasy. Self-control was the anchor of his life. It had steadied him through years of near-unbearable anguish and aching need, and the fear of losing it now was enough to calm him and keep his mind fixed on the tasks ahead.
When he had finished eating he left the area again, this time heading for a nearby pond, and returned with a sheaf of willow branches. Earlier he had nailed together a rough frame from the remaining saplings and now he began to plait the willow into a lattice to be fixed to the frame. It was painstaking work, and twice he had to return to the waterside for more willow laths, but by five o'clock he had constructed a roof for the dugout and laid it in place.