“I—I’m sorry! It’s silly—I think I’m a bit overwrought. I thought I heard a footstep on the path. Quite close.”
For nearly a minute both of them stood listening. Listening intently enough to have heard the very breathing of the birds in their nests had there been real silence. But, of course, there was no silence. They were baffled, as Meg had been earlier, by the dim flurry of the night.
A footstep, or a creaking bough? The swish of trouser legs through long grass, or merely the stirring of the great teasels, restless with growth under the midnight sky?
You couldn’t tell. No one could tell. You could stand here till dawn and still be none the wiser. Meg found herself shivering, her whole body tense with cold and with the effort of listening. She pulled Mildred back into the kitchen.
“You go into the front room,” she said firmly, “and open up the stove—clean it out, if it needs it. I’ll go back and get the coal.”
Mildred obeyed, with something like the relief of a spoilt child meeting with discipline at last. Soon the tea, and the hot-water bottle, and the argument about whether or not hot-water bottles should be filled with absolutely boiling water, had made things seem almost ordinary again.
But not quite ordinary. Lying very still in the great bed (the slightest movement was liable to dispel the hardly won warmth surrounding her body), Meg thought over the events of the evening.
Nothing had happened. Nothing at all, to either of them. Mildred had imagined she had heard footsteps, but they had turned out to be non-existent. Meg had also heard footsteps, real ones, and they had turned out to be Mildred’s. Whence then the panic into which they had both (Meg admitted it) worked themselves?
It was Mildred’s fault, of course. Any detached observer would surely have agreed about that. Seeking a fellow-sufferer—or maybe merely wanting to jolt Meg into paying attention to the whole business—Mildred had come along with this new alarm—that Uncle Paul might be seeking revenge on Meg as well as on Mildred herself.
Meg tried to analyse the whole thing from Mildred’s point of view. Here she was, an able-bodied, not unintelligent woman, leading the idle, purposeless existence of a rich man’s wife. What more natural than that she should seize on imaginary alarms and excitements as the very breath of life; and, being by nature a sociable, demanding sort of person, it was equally natural that she should want to involve other people —in this case her young half-sister—in these flights of fancy.
And yet, the story of Meg’s childish part in showing up Uncle Paul was true. And (Meg was struck by this for the first time) Mildred had shown a surprising degree of conviction—not to say courage—in thus rushing out through three miles of rain and darkness for the sole purpose of warning her young sister.
But, of course, it probably wasn’t her sole purpose. No doubt she would have had to come some time, anyway, to fetch her belongings, and when she got Meg’s telephone message she might have felt that now, when she was sure of company there, would be the best time to visit the cottage for which she had conceived—or manufactured—such horror. And maybe she had come by taxi, along the main road—obviously there must be some approach to the cottage other than over the cliffs.
Shifting her head uneasily on the high, unyielding bolster, Meg tried to see the cottage—this very room—through her sister’s eyes. Here it must have been that Mildred and Paul had slept on that ill-starred honeymoon. Had Mildred, even in those first few days, begun to suspect that her “husband” was not all that she had imagined him? Had she lain here, as Meg was lying now, staring up into a darkness misty and closed in under that low ceiling; and as she lay, had she wondered what the man beside her was thinking? Had he seemed loving to her in those first days? Had he kept up the pretence of being kind and gay? Or had he already begun to show, to her alone, the insolent, self-seeking cruelty that must have been his real self?
No wonder poor Mildred had a horror of the place; perhaps of this room in particular. For it was, in any case, a horrible little room. Meg’s neck and head were both aching now from being propped up so awkwardly against the huge, rigid bolster, and she sat up to peer round into the darkness.
Now that she was sitting up she found that she was, after all, more sleepy than she realised. Her head was buzzing slightly, and her wide-eyed stare into the darkness brought moving coils and spirals of deeper darkness into her eyes. The looming shape of the wardrobe seemed to stir and heave as she stared against its bulk; and some foolish, uneasy whim made her lean out of bed and try the great ugly door.
It was unlocked; but, of course, it was impossible to open it more than an inch or two against the bed. Meg peered into the crack of deeper darkness and wondered—a little morbidly at this hour of the night—what it might contain?
Really, of course, it must be old coats. Why, you could smell the dusty, uncared-for smell from here—mould, mothballs, indifference. Forgetful, at this stuporous, impractical hour, of the fact that the cottage was regularly let out to summer visitors, and was almost certainly thoroughly cleaned and turned out at the end of each season, Meg fell to musing about the imprisoned garments. Year after year they must have hung there, trapped by the great bed. Perhaps Mildred, all those years ago, lying wakeful and uneasy, had peered into the crack as Meg was doing now; her brain, perhaps, had grown drowsy as she stared, and become filled with childish fancies—skeletons—corpses—a murdered bride….
Poor Mildred. Meg lay back, real drowsiness stealing over her at last. “Poor Mildred—I must try to be nicer to her.” With this familiar, oft-repeated resolution, she fell into a heavy sleep.
CHAPTER XII
MEG WAS WOKEN by a blazing shaft of sunshine across her face, and for a moment she lay bewildered, fancying she must have been ill. Why else would she be lying in a strange bed, with the sun so high, so hot that it must be nearly noon?
Then she remembered. She was here at the cottage, and Mildred was here too. No doubt she too had overslept after their upsetting evening, for there was no sound from her room, nor from downstairs. Uneasily, Meg wondered what time it was. For it is a curious fact that, even if one is on holiday, even if one is free to sleep the twenty-four hours through at will, nevertheless, oversleeping invariably brings with it a feeling of dismay, a sense of impending disaster. The whole universe seemed pushed out of gear by this strange awakening to the noonday sun. The humming of bees already grown drowsy in the heat; the subdued, occasional chirp of birds whose morning clamour is over; the sense of breakfast irrevocably missed and lunch grotesquely inappropriate; all add up to such a feeling of alienation from ordinary life as can only be described as fear.
Meg jumped out of the great bed; and only when she was downstairs and had stirred the embers of the stove to life did she feel secure enough to think of rousing Mildred.
Mildred, of course, would be used to waking at this sort of hour and would feel no dismay—might, indeed, be annoyed at being woken so soon. Meg decided to soften the process for both of them by making a pot of tea; and finding the kettle empty, she went with it into the garden to seek the pump which Mildred had often told her was the only source of water for the cottage.
“Where are you going?”
Mildred’s face, flushed and rather cross, had appeared suddenly above a tangle of foliage near the gate, where the last survivors of a once flamboyant mass of dahlias were struggling weakly for one more summer of existence before the nettles and the young, fighting elders closed over them for ever. She was dressed in a surprisingly simple—and, for her, unbecoming—cotton frock of pale yellow. Her hair was dishevelled, and she looked thoroughly put-out.
“I’m looking for the pump,” called Meg, brandishing the old iron kettle explanatorily, its black, soot-encrusted curves for a moment almost taking her breath away with their beauty against the blue, hot sky and the purple willow-herb.
“The pump? It’s here, of course,” Mildred explained disagreeably. “I’ve been trying to work it for hours. I shall die if I don’t get a cup
of tea soon.”
She motioned Meg to approach her along the narrow, overgrown path; and there at the end, set a little to one side amid a bed of vicious August nettles, stood the pump, obstinate, rusty and old. It didn’t look as if it had worked for years; and Mildred was forced now to admit, sulkily, that so far as she knew it hadn’t. “Drawing water from the well,” of which she had so zealously boasted, appeared now to have consisted of employing a woman from the cluster of cottages by the main road to bring her buckets of water every morning. And this system had, of course, broken down today, since the woman had not known that Mildred had come back.
“Go on—you try,” said Mildred ungraciously, her tone implying that Meg had been bombarding her with criticisms and exhortations. Obediently Meg took the handle and plied it once or twice. The dry, unresisting feel of it was unmistakable.
“Oughtn’t we to—what’s it called?—prime it?” suggested Meg. “You know—pour water down to start it off?”
“What’s the use of saying that?” enquired Mildred, with gloomy truculence, “when there isn’t any other water in the place. It used to work, though—long ago.” Her tone had changed now; the truculence was gone. “I remember once it wouldn’t start, and I—Paul—that is—we pulled up the stone….”
She pointed to a slab of moss-grown paving stone on the ground by the pump. “There’s a sort of well underneath,” she explained, “and when it gets too low, the pump won’t work and you have to get it up with buckets. We could try it.”
Meg gazed doubtfully at the slab of stone with the rusty metal ring let into its centre.
“It looks pretty heavy,” she said; but Mildred seemed suddenly full of energy and optimism, quite unlike her usual complaining self.
“Let’s try it,” she repeated; and, bending down, regardless of the ominous splitting sound in the seams of her yellow dress, she took a good grip on the ring. In spite of her inactive life, Mildred was still quite a strong woman, and the stone had begun to given even before Meg had added her weight from behind. Soon, under their united efforts, it had fallen back with a thud among the nettles, and a glistening square of blackness was exuding into the sunshine the icy damp breath of underground.
Meg knelt down and peered over the edge. The water was low indeed; fifteen feet or more of dank, slimy brickwork lay between her and the dark, motionless gleam of water at the bottom. No wonder the pump hadn’t worked.
“It looks terribly shallow,” she announced—and her voice rang hollow and strangely nasal as she spoke into the dark shaft. “Even with a bucket, I doubt if we can get much—”
A queer uneasiness suddenly assailed her, and she edged back into the sunshine. Without warning, without any conscious preliminaries, a picture had come into her mind, a picture vivid and painful, of the young Mildred leaning over this shaft fifteen years ago; laughing, perhaps; enjoying the vicissitudes of rustic living. And beside her—or a little behind —stood a young man, dark, inscrutable, smiling. A charming picture; a picture of young love. Was it only in the light of subsequent events that it seemed so ghastly now; so fraught with danger? Or had Mildred even then, as she leaned perilously, happily, over that brink, felt a sudden doubt …?
Meg became aware of the nettles stabbing into her arms as she crouched back on her heels under the noonday sun. She was breathing fast, almost as if that problematic moment of danger encountered by Mildred fifteen years ago had been encountered again, this morning.
Had Mildred felt it too? Looking up into her half-sister’s face, Meg felt that she had indeed been in touch with some long-buried memory—or was it some new fear? For Mildred too was breathing fast, and had grown pale.
An unusual closeness was between them. Without argument, without explanation, they replaced the stone and returned to the cottage, waterless.
One thing at least was clear. Since a cup of tea could not be made here, and since Mildred’s survival for so much as another hour was, she continued to declare, dependent on this beverage, then Mildred must return to the Sea View Hotel. And Meg, Mildred insisted, must return with her. Whether this insistence was really due to her concern for Meg’s safety, or merely to her own unwillingness to walk across the cliffs alone even by daylight, Meg was not sure; but in any case Mildred’s motives did not matter to her at the moment, for she had a reason of her own for complying.
The reason, she admitted to herself as she prepared to leave, was Freddy. The last she had seen of him had been three days ago, on the day of the walk with Captain Cockerill. Freddy had then been staying, inexplicably, at the Sea View Hotel. Since then, there had been neither word nor sign from him. Was he still at the hotel? Had he gone back to London? Why hadn’t he come to see her at all during that long forty-eight hours of rain when he must have known that she was marooned in the caravan with Isabel and the children?
She felt, uneasily, that she knew the answer. He hadn’t come because it was raining. Freddy hated discomforts. No, more than hated—disapproved of them. Only the English, he used to declare patronisingly, would endure such things.
That was all very well. But all the same, surely any man, of any nationality, if he really cared for a girl—
Well, and who had ever said he did care for Meg? Certainly not Freddy himself. In spite of the extravagant endearments in which he sometimes indulged, he was always exceedingly careful not to say anything that even the stupidest girl could possibly believe. It was silly, really, to speculate about his movements at all. He’d either turn up again or he wouldn’t; there was nothing you could do about it.
Meg finished tidying her bedroom, and then stepped across the awkward little staircase to the other room to see if Mildred was ready. She found her sitting idly in front of the small, damp-spotted mirror; when Meg’s face appeared suddenly beside her own, she gave a great start. Her slightly parted lips twisted in sudden dismay, and she whirled round in her chair.
“There, there, you silly!” Meg patted her shoulder soothingly. “Who on earth did you think I was? You mustn’t be so jumpy—and in broad daylight, too! Come on—if we don’t hurry up lunch’ll be off at the hotel. And tea too, I wouldn’t be surprised. I haven’t a notion what the time is.”
Slowly Mildred levered herself from her seat and began to wander about the room, stuffing this and that into her bag—detachedly, as if she did not care at all what she took or what she left. That was Mildred all over, thought Meg. Lazy and careless in the extreme about her belongings until the moment came when she actually wanted to use them, and then ready to cause any amount of trouble and disturbance in order to get them fetched, found, mended, pressed or otherwise prepared for her. Her air of preoccupation continued even to the moment of departure, when she even began absent-mindedly to put on Meg’s old raincoat which was hanging behind the door. Meg firmly took it from her.
“Wake up, Mildred, do!” she expostulated. “It won’t even go on you. And it would be a rotten exchange, anyway,” she added, holding out admiringly the shimmering black weatherproof garment in which Mildred had arrived.
“Oh—I’m sorry. How silly of me!” Mildred laughed, nervously. “But you don’t know how worried I am, Meg, really you don’t. It’s all very well for you to pooh-pooh other people’s troubles, but if your nerves were in the state mine are in …”
The account of Mildred’s nerves, heavily interspersed with grievances about the heartless Hubert, who had never either understood her nor given her an adequate dress allowance (a tolerable husband should, surely, do either one or the other, though it was not clear which Mildred would have preferred) brought them, tired and very hungry, to the Sea View Hotel. Lunch, as Meg had predicted, was “off’; and there followed a protracted but vigorous argument in which the Kitchen’s refusal to produce anything hot was pitted against Mildred’s refusal to accept anything cold; an appropriate compromise being finally reached in the form of a pot of tepid coffee and some slices of corned beef on damp, steaming plates fresh from the sink.
At the end of thi
s repast, Mildred announced her intention of going upstairs for a rest; and it was just as Meg was about to follow her out of the deserted dining-room that Freddy appeared.
“Hullo,” he said, seating himself tranquilly on the chair that Mildred had just vacated. “Sit down again, Meg, and give me some of that real Olde Englishe coffee. Why haven’t you been to see me all this time?”
“Well, I like that!” Meg laughed, suddenly gay once more. “Here—take it. It gets more Olde Englishe than ever if you don’t drink it at once. Why haven’t you come to see me, if it comes to that. I bet it was because of the rain!”
“Well—of course it was!” said Freddy reproachfully. “You wouldn’t expect me to go out in the wet, would you? The things women expect! You’re just like my great-grandmother.”
“Your great-grandmother? Why, was that the last time you went out in the rain?”
“Don’t be flippant. My great-grandmother was a very stern, very imperious old lady. Listen, and I’ll tell you her story. When she was a very stern, very imperious young lady, just like you, she had two suitors, both so charming, so handsome, that she didn’t know which to choose. So one day, a day of showers and puddles, when all the trees were dripping, she went out for a walk with these two young men. And as she tripped along the lanes on her dainty little feet, with her little bustle bobbing as she went, she came to a place where there were wild roses in the hedge, and nothing would satisfy her but she should have a spray. Oh, but not one of the nearby sprays: not any of those that were easy to reach. No, she must have that one, high up in the hedge, the other side of the treacherous, overgrown ditch; and with her wide, innocent little eyes she looked meltingly up at the nearest of her young men.
“And the young man? What did he do in this moment of crisis? I’ll tell you. He looked down at his shoes, his lovely, shiny new shoes. As soon as my great-grandmother saw the direction of his glance, and realised that the thought of spoiling his shoes was making him hesitate even for a second, she said to herself: ‘He doesn’t love me! I will never marry him!’ and she turned her melting glance on the second young man. He, the brave fellow, never hesitated for a moment. He plunged waist-deep into the ditch; he tore his hands on the thorns, he scattered drops of water all over his fine suit, and secured her the coveted spray.”
Uncle Paul Page 11