A Hint of Witchcraft

by Anna Gilbert

  ‘She’ll be coming to the party.’

  ‘That’s not till Boxing Day and the house’ll be packed with people.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Well, to start with I want you to come down to floor level and find an excuse for going into town. Then I can quite decently offer to go with you. It’ll look better that way than if I push off on my own the minute I’ve got here. Surely there’s something you need – or want – or have forgotten to collect?’ He picked up a library book and looked at the date. ‘Do you realize that this book is practically overdue?’

  ‘Five days to go.’

  ‘You’re running it very close. Just think, in five days you might be struck down by a fatal disease, say cholera or bubonic plague. Or more likely fall off that ladder and break a leg. Then where would you be? It’s always wise to return a library book at least five days before it’s due. That is my own invariable custom.’

  ‘I like to finish a book if possible. That’s what I get it out for.’

  ‘You can finish it on the bus. A mere fifty pages according to the bookmark.’

  ‘There’s no need to complicate things. We can just go.’

  There was a coat to be collected from the cleaner’s, angelica for trifles, a present to be delivered. There would be time for Alex to lure Linden from her desk for coffee at Pikes while Margot did the errands. Alex’s mood as they walked down Castle Street was buoyant. Half-a-dozen people called out to him or crossed the street for a chat but he swept on, Margot hurrying to keep up, to the solicitor’s office where Linden worked.

  Worked? Her desk was at right-angles to the window. She saw them, got up unhurriedly and presently joined them on the pavement in hat, coat and gloves. She might have been expecting them.

  ‘Won’t they mind?’ Margot asked.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Margot had forgotten how attractive she was, how well her clothes became her; in this case a grey coat with deep fur collar and cuffs and a close-fitting winter hat which concealed her hair, isolating the frail facial bones and giving her the look of a medieval page. And Alex? Margot had not so much forgotten as failed to realize how handsome he was. When she left them and hurried off in search of angelica, it was with pride in their distinction as well as a variety of other emotions.

  Alex leapt on to the homeward bus just as it started and took the seat behind Margot and her parcels.

  ‘I can’t bear it.’ He leaned forward, his arms on the back of her seat. ‘Not seeing her for weeks on end.’ His voice was low and tense, just audible above the throb and rattle of the bus.

  ‘You’re serious about her?’

  ‘Serious? Good Lord, you don’t realize. She has completely changed my life. Haven’t I slaved for years to get myself into something or other – some profession worthy of her?’

  ‘You don’t know which? I thought it was definitely law.’

  ‘I’m not sure. Law may take too long.’

  ‘Too long for what?’

  He didn’t answer. They had chugged along for another mile before he said, ‘She’s so brave about her problems. It’s really touching, the way she makes light of them.’

  ‘What are her problems?’

  ‘You know – being absolutely alone in the world except for that weak-kneed desiccated mother of hers. No one she can turn to for support or financial help. Imagine her – eating her heart out in that moth-eaten office for a few shillings a week.’

  Margot’s imagination failed her. She could only remember her impression of Linden an hour ago – her elegance, her composure, the leisurely ease with which she had abandoned whatever she was supposed to be doing at her desk. But she understood – it was as clear as daylight – that the obvious solution to Linden’s problems was a husband, and if it was clear to her, how very much clearer it must be to Linden!

  ‘Can’t you get Mother to ask her to stay, Meg?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask Mother?’

  ‘Linden’s your friend, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yours, too.’

  ‘Friend? That’s not the word. You don’t know anything about that kind of thing but believe me – my God! She’s.…’

  There were no words to describe her, or the way she had stolen into his life and changed it. Her reserve enslaved him. She was always out of reach: an ice-maiden who had never melted in his arms and so had retained the mystery that haunted his imagination. That it was the product of his imagination was nevertheless a measure of the fascination she possessed. The quest for something more than she ever gave was an act of faith, a conviction that there must be something more. How dull at close quarters the legendary sirens may have been! How wise of them to keep their distance!

  ‘She’s the sort of girl that drives men mad.’

  Margot’s respect for Linden revived. There was something remarkable about a girl who could drive men to madness and at the same time inspire them to work hard at their studies. Somewhat unwillingly she did drop a hint to her mother that Linden might like to stay for a few days. The answer was firm.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, Margot. She can stay the night after the party but that is all.’

  Sarah had seen enough of the Greys to justify leaving them to make their own way. If any launching into local society had been required, Marian had accomplished the manoeuvre herself. There were in and around Elmdon a number of comfortably situated families similarly placed to Sarah’s own before she married. Their sons would enter professions, or make the army their career, or in some few cases inherit land. The Greys’ contact with such people must be marginal but somehow contact had been made. Linden was invited to hunt balls and to various charity affairs. Through a network of acquaintances her name had cropped up when Embleton and Son were looking for a young woman for their front office, to sort and post mail, receive clients, serve sherry or tea and set the correct tone for a long-established firm. It was assumed that young women who went to hunt balls would not be deterred by the slenderness of the wage: they were only in search of a little pocket money until they married, especially young women without qualifications of any kind.

  Not surprisingly, the Greys were still renting rooms in Gordon Street, the rest of their silver still presumably in store. Sarah had some idea of their straitened circumstances and the endless contrivances entailed in living on an army pension, but she had little sympathy for their pretensions. If she had formerly been complacent in dismissing Alex’s infatuation with Linden as a flash in the pan, she was now more wary. But she saw nothing in his behaviour that any reasonable parent could object to and tried to persuade herself that Alex was mature enough to know that he was too young to form a permanent attachment.

  ‘And you can’t be much more illogical than that.’ Edward was being bothered by yet another dispute with the directors, especially with his bête noire, Bedlow, and was inclined to brush aside the topic of young love. ‘As a matter of fact, I’m not sure why you object to the girl.’ That it would be years before Alex could think of marriage seemed too obvious to be worth discussing. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Quiet, rather colourless, ultimately boring, he thought.

  Sarah hesitated. It was the morning after the party. Linden had just left.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with her.’

  ‘Then that’s the trouble: there ought to be. The girl can’t be human.’

  ‘She’s human,’ Sarah said.

  Alex and Margot were relaying the drawing-room carpet which had been taken up for dancing, Alex fuming because if Linden had waited for an hour or two, he would have been free to go with her; Margot raptly happy, her grasp on her corner of the carpet erratic. She had forgotten Linden, forgotten Alex glaring at her across the room, lost as she was in memories of what had been the most wonderful of all parties.

  Lance was home from Glasgow where he was studying medicine. He spent most of his time with what he ambiguously referred to as his father’s skeleton and had to be dragged to the festivities. But almost
at the last minute, on the morning of the very day, they had heard that Miles was home from Oxford. She and Alex had gone to Bainrigg with a belated invitation.

  Miles was at the piano when a maid showed them into the drawing-room. Unprepared, he sprang up and came towards them with such genuine pleasure in his eyes and smile, and so prompt an acceptance, that the reunion after more than four years was a happy one.

  Though still shy and self-doubting, he was less awkward and no longer tongue-tied: he had learnt to some extent to talk to girls. At his school, he told Margot, as he twirled her expertly in a quickstep, there had been an interchange of dances with a girls’ school. He had taken a few lessons and found that dancing was one of the things (one of the few things, he said) that he could do. He played the piano for carols and for the final singsong before the guests went home. He had been the last to leave and had promised to come again on New Year’s Eve, and, as he was dark-haired, he would be their first-foot.

  An exasperated twist on the diagonally opposite corner of the carpet roused Margot from a rapturous daydream.

  Miles kept his promise. He came on New Year’s Eve and was sent out just before midnight; waited until the clock struck twelve, knocked, and was admitted – blushing and diffident – carrying a paper of salt in one hand and a gleaming lump of best Wallsend coal in the other.

  Afterwards he and Margot drank their ginger wine together, braving the cold on the front doorstep and looking out into starlight unchanged through countless centuries since the custom began. With a touch of awe Miles was conscious of having taken part in an endless procession of men bringing coal out of the dark to placate the pagan gods of fire.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ Margot said, the wonder embracing bare branches interlaced with stars, the closeness of Miles as he drew the shawl around her shoulders, the new year ready to unfold a succession of days more glamorous than days had ever been before. ‘Looking out into night is like looking into the year ahead and wondering what it will bring.’

  ‘I only hope you chose the right man to start it off and bring good luck.’

  There was harmony between them, an interplay of light and shade; one confident that all would be well, the other daring to hope that nothing would go wrong.

  CHAPTER VI

  A spell of fine weather towards the end of June had ripened an unusually fine crop of strawberries in Miss Burdon’s garden, a mixed blessing as with all soft fruit. Miss Burdon was at a loss as to what to do with them until she remembered that there would almost certainly be visitors at Monk’s Dene over the weekend. Alex was coming home at the end of his second year at the university.

  Her friendship with the Humberts owed less to congeniality than to long association. Burdons had supplied lawn and linen for Sarah’s trousseau, and Miss Burdon herself had fashioned a boudoir cap for the bride, a confection of lace and satin ribbons which Sarah had never worn: it simply didn’t stand up to Edward’s ridicule. Nevertheless, Miss Burdon remained a family friend and the Humberts were her most valued customers, except perhaps for Mrs Rilston who from a sense of duty occasionally sent down for tapes, elastic, sateen linings and gingham for the maids’ morning dresses. But one could scarcely offer strawberries to the Rilstons. Besides, the Humberts would probably offer to pick them.

  Bella, the maid, had already started on the day’s baking. Toria Link was unwillingly detached from her bucket and broom and sent down the lane to Monk’s Dene. When she arrived at the open back door, Katie Judd was drying dishes in the scullery.

  ‘Missis says there are plenty of strawberries if Mrs Humbert wants them,’ Toria said and vanished. She was sparing of speech, a sullen-tempered, homeless woman who did the heavy work at Burdons in exchange for her keep and a bed.

  Katie carefully dried her hands and went to the morning-room. Fortunately the door there was also ajar. What to do about a closed door was still beyond Katie, much as she had improved in other ways. Three square meals a day and a tentative approach to security in being close to Miss Margot had made her less fey.

  ‘Missis says there are plenty of strawberries.…’ She repeated the message correctly and added of her own accord, ‘Toria says.’

  There was no one to hear but Margot who was altering the hem of a dress. No one else could have understood that the addition marked an advance: it could be described as an initiative on Katie’s part.

  ‘Thank you, Katie.’ She looked up. ‘You do look nice.’

  The pink-checked aprons, each with a handkerchief pocket, had been her idea: she had made them herself. With her hair under control, in unfearful moments, Katie was almost – or at least one could see that she had been intended to be – like any other girl. She had been helping Mrs Roper in the kitchen for almost a year.

  ‘If only you’d take her on, Mrs Humbert,’ Mrs Judd had brought herself to plead. ‘Nobody else will. Nobody that’d treat her right. And it’s a worry not always knowing where she is or who might be after her for reasons you know as well as I do.’

  Sarah knew them very well. It was more for Katie’s protection than for any use she might be that she had taken her on; but in her limited way she did prove useful. Maud, the housemaid, accepted her quite graciously and Mrs Roper claimed that Katie saved her legs. She also washed the kitchen floor every blessed day and swept up every scrap and crumb the minute it landed if not before.

  Margot gave her mind to the strawberries. They would have to be picked. Katie might help, but Miss Burdon did not look kindly on Katie. It would be better to send Katie to the farm for cream and she herself would do the picking. Linden would be arriving on the mid-morning bus. Would Linden enjoy strawberry-picking?

  Neither Margot nor her mother knew how it had come about that Linden would be here when Alex came home. There had been time for Sarah’s wariness to abate a little: it revived promptly when Linden arrived with an over-night bag.

  ‘You shouldn’t have asked her to stay.’

  ‘I didn’t. She must have thought.…’

  The whispers in the hall ceased as Linden came downstairs, having left her things as usual in the room adjoining Margot’s. It was immediately apparent that she would be of no use as a picker of strawberries: in her white blouse and skirt she must be kept well away from the merest drop of fruit juice.

  ‘You won’t mind coming to Miss Burdon’s? You can be looking for something to buy while I pick.’

  At that moment there occurred another of those encounters that had been from time to time rather upsetting. Katie, with a dust-pan and brush, had crept from the kitchen, bent in both senses on sweeping under the morning-room table where there were sure to be crumbs from breakfast. The unexpected sight of Linden brought her to a halt in the old state of crazy alarm. She lowered her head, shrank against the wall and sidled back to the kitchen.

  ‘She doesn’t change.’ Linden’s calm indifference was also unchanged. Such an exhibition of what she thought of as idiotic gibbering in no way threatened her apparently unshakeable poise. All the same, as a result of such incidents perhaps, Margot had sometimes sensed in Linden’s attitude towards Katie something more than amused contempt; rather a veiled hostility. Certainly Katie’s strange behaviour was unflattering and far from abating, it seemed to have increased.

  It was better not to discuss Katie as they walked up Church Lane.

  ‘Isn’t it nice – Miles is at home. He took me for a spin in his car yesterday – to Langland Priory. Such an interesting place. There’s an empty house, Langland Hall, close to the ruins.…’ She said it as casually as possible, as Linden might have done, without gushing about how heavenly it had been.

  To enter Burdon’s shop was to exchange the quiet of the village street for a deeper silence – a solemn hush between walls stacked high with bales of casement cloth and black serge. At each of the mahogany counters a tall hardwood chair invited the customer to perch, in an atmosphere heavy with the odours of fabric and furniture polish. The whole effect was weighty. Purchases were not to be made light
ly.

  If made at all. In the two years since the General Strike and the twenty-six weeks when the miners had stayed out, trade had been slow. Hours might pass without a single ring of the shop bell. With Bella far away in the kitchen and Toria on her knees in distant regions at the back, there was no sign of human life. Then presently would come a faint footfall on the thick carpet and Miss Burdon would appear.

  But on this particular morning she was already there, unusually active and flushed with pleasure in the new delivery, conscious too of having taken a bold step. Carvers, drapers in Elmdon, had also suffered losses and had put up most of their stock for sale, intending to restock with cheaper goods for a less discriminating clientele. Such a sign of change, together with the rapid greying of her hair, had concentrated Miss Burdon’s mind and made her reckless. She had dipped into her savings and bought up more of Carvers’ stock than she could afford.

  Both counters were strewn with lace-trimmed underwear, night-dresses, bed-jackets.… She had taken them lavishly from their boxes, ignoring the probability that most of them would be left on her hands for months if not for ever, and was actually humming ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’ as she checked items against the invoices.

  The arrival of Margot and Linden raised her spirits still further: they were the very ones – the only ones – likely to buy and spread the word among their friends.

  ‘Because, of course, I can offer them at a slightly lower price than Carvers were asking. What do you think of these?’

  Both girls admired a georgette scarf – and a white silk blue-sprigged blouse with a deep semi-circular flounce in place of a collar. The fashion was for low necklines scooped out in an oval or cut to a V and made more practical for daytime by the insertion of a modesty vest, a rectangle of silk of crêpe-de-Chine with concealed pins. The fashion was also for long strings of beads.

  ‘Pearls never date, do they?’ Miss Burdon had taken two necklaces from their slim boxes. ‘And really the imitations are quite convincing enough for most people.’ The remark was addressed with a smile almost roguish to Linden, as to an acknowledged arbiter of taste. ‘I shall keep them in their boxes until I have arranged the new stock and then they will look very well on the cabinet. Shall we try the effect?’ She opened the glass door of the narrow cabinet standing on the counter and Linden draped the long, gleaming string of pearls on the black velvet, and it was Linden who offered to help with the checking when Margot tore herself away to the strawberry bed.