Echoes of Silence

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘Sorree,’ Sam answered, without any obvious appearance of being so.

  Ginny ruffled the hair of her identical sons with a carelessly affectionate hand and Joey began an amiable wrestling match with his brother, an attempt to get even with him for coming first down the stairs. Sonia occasionally thought she might like to have children, but shrank at the thought of rough boys like these. It was someone like Harriet she wanted: Harriet, whose face was now flushed with unaccustomed excitement, but who had come sedately down the stairs after her cousins and was already into her coat, saying thank you for having me, in the nice, polite way she’d been taught and never forgot.

  She was a sensible, composed child, normally pale-skinned and clear-eyed, with a fringe of silky dark hair. She wasn’t like either of her parents: neither her charming and disgraceful father, Tony, now separated from wife and child for good, nor Polly (christened Paulette, but she’d soon disposed of that) with her whirlwind energy and her sometimes disastrous enthusiasms, of whom the departed and unlamented Tony Winslow was a prime example.

  ‘Has Mummy got back yet?’ Harriet asked with carefully controlled anxiety.

  Polly had done her best to teach her independence but, though she wasn’t a clinging child, she was only eight years old, after all, and had already lost one parent and couldn’t really bear to be away from Polly for too long. Her mother was the centre of her life, always late, always on the rush, too much to do. Lighting up a room when she entered it, energising it, even inanimate objects seeming to take on a life of their own. Talkative, quick-tempered sometimes, bright clothes reflecting warm colours into her face. A magic smile – Harriet’s smile as she nodded now, appearing satisfied when Sonia said, ‘She hasn’t rung, love, but I expect by the time we’ve driven up to Low Rigg she’ll either be there already, or she won’t be long.’

  2

  The light had gone by the time Sonia had left the town behind, had negotiated her car round the hairpin bend at the bottom of the hill, and was crawling up towards the moors and Low Rigg. The houses grew progressively fewer, the hills loomed either side and the headlights reflected sharp sparkles of frost from the road surface. Sonia, who was a timid driver at any time, and especially in the dark, decided she wouldn’t stay for supper, even if Freya should ask her, which was by no means certain. She didn’t mind the thought of leaving Harriet with her mother-in-law. The child and the old woman got on together, which was just as well. If Freya didn’t take a shine to anyone, she could be very unkind, as Sonia knew to her cost.

  Harriet, strapped into the front seat, had fallen asleep within minutes of getting into the car, as she invariably did, lulled by the motion, and tired out tonight by the exuberance of her cousins. Sonia would have liked to have listened to what was left of PM but didn’t want to waken her. In the silence, her thoughts rambled inconclusively, undirected.

  She wondered if Peter would remember that she’d left the remains of last night’s stew for him to heat up in the microwave. Probably not, or if he did, he wouldn’t bother with it. He professed to hate anything that came within nodding distance of the new technology, even pecking away at his sermons and other parish matters on an ancient portable Olympia and refusing to think of a dishwasher. Not that they could have afforded one, anyway. He’d frowned on the microwave as an unnecessary luxury, but it had been a present from Sonia’s parents, who didn’t approve of her marriage to Peter and ecclesiastical poverty. Sonia would never have bought the microwave herself, but she blessed it for its usefulness.

  She didn’t care about luxury, as such. As servants of the Church, you weren’t supposed to, anyway, but she truly didn’t. Never having been deprived in her childhood, having chosen her vocation of being married to Peter, rejection of material things was easier for her than for him. She didn’t have to prove it so much, as it were.

  Sometimes, she wanted to tell him to relax, but as a second wife, and one of only a few years’ standing, she still had to tread carefully. He was a difficult man, and there were areas of his life which were still uncharted seas to her. She didn’t, for instance, have a clue why he’d married her. She was pushing forty and not attractive, had no skills as a parson’s wife (though she worked harder in the parish than he did, and with more joy), he wasn’t interested in the prospect of what she’d inherit from her parents, and as for sex … That was something she preferred not to think about.

  You had to watch your step with Peter. She felt it must surely pain him to realise he wasn’t much of a success as a parish priest and she tried to make allowances, telling herself it was that which made him so touchy, and very often angry. She wished the bishop would offer him another living, send him where he might be appreciated, to some High Anglican city parish where the parishioners called him ‘Father’. In this chapel-orientated society where they lived, he was just tolerated by the dwindling minority of the faithful at St Wilfrid’s C of E, and regarded with scepticism by the rest.

  He’d always intended to take up some sort of career in the world of art but then, while still at art school, had apparently experienced a sudden conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. Saul on the road to Damascus could not have been a more fervent convert, Sonia thought. He burned with – was it missionary zeal, religious fervour? We-ell, perhaps. He preached love and forgiveness, turned the other cheek, he embraced sacrifice – and yet …

  And yet, there was an unforgivingness about him she found hard to understand. Moreover, although he accepted living without luxury, she didn’t miss the way his eyes lingered lovingly and rather wistfully on various objets d’art when they visited Freya at Low Rigg – at least, those objects you could see under the layers of dust.

  Her thoughts skittered away with some relief from her marital dissatisfactions as she approached the narrow turn-off that led up through the hamlet which had given Low Rigg Hall its name. Rounding a bend of the hill, she steered the car between the last habitations before the moors proper began: nothing more than a cluster of old dwellings and the ancient inn that was called the Moorcock, then the rambling bulk of the big house glimpsed in the headlights after the last exceedingly steep few hundred yards.

  The house had been built in the seventeenth century as a farmhouse-cum-manor for the thriving little weaving community of Low Rigg, to stand overlording its domain. Low-built, of solid stone that had been quarried from the heart of the hills two miles away, and weathered to darkness by time and industrial pollution; mullioned windows, low, sweeping, stone-slated roofs. Crouched with its back to the side of the hill, seeking shelter from the scouring winds, it was surrounded by what had at one period been a garden, which was, in turn, encircled by a dry-stone wall. The moor rose up behind, with nothing beyond but bare stretches of heather and bilberry and cotton grass.

  The garden was bare now, save for gaunt, stunted elms bent by the prevailing winds, in which crows and jackdaws nested. Nothing much had been done to it for years so that most of the time it looked a mess. The only time Sonia thought it approached anything like attractiveness was when the daffodils, unchecked for decades, covered the garden with sheets of gold in spring, blowing and dancing in the wind. Or when the great, blowsy, sugar-pink rambling rose of unknown origin was in bloom: a vulgar, heavily scented beauty with wicked thorns, festooning the back wall of the house in summer. One day, vowed Polly, one day I’ll get at that garden … But she was never there long enough.

  Inside, it was never really quite clean, despite Dot Nagle’s half-hearted attempts, except when Polly visited and saw to it that at least some of it had a brisk going over, which annoyed both Dot and Freya. And even so, in the lesser used parts, dust gathered in corners and spiders swung from the ceiling, mice scampered behind the wainscotting. Freya, so fastidious about her person, either didn’t see it or didn’t mind – or probably, as Polly maintained, enjoyed the drama of it. Her working life had been spent in the glare of the cameras and it wasn’t inconceivable that she saw it as an outré background for one of her outdated fashion pictures,
like the one where for some reason she was shown draping a mink stole across a windswept mudflat, her back-combed hair and side flick-ups still immaculate. But Polly was right about one thing – nothing, dust, cobwebs or anything else, could make any real difference. The house resisted change, it would never be anything but its implacable self, Sonia thought with a shiver, as she drew up on the flagged frontage.

  ‘There’s Mummy’s car!’ cried Harriet, waking up as the engine died.

  And there was Polly at the open door, light spilling on to the flags, arms wide for Harriet to rush into.

  Only one vacant space was left in the car-park of the Woolpack when Tom Richmond arrived. He slid into it, surprised at the number of cars there, mid-week. He’d chosen the Woolpack for the simple pub he remembered, a free house, unpretentious, situated in the centre of Steynton. It didn’t take him long now to realise that one of the breweries had got hold of it and given it a face-lift: conference rooms had been added, and the old, leisurely, shabby comfort had gone. It was now a clone of every other hotel, all co-ordinated fabrics, wallpapers and curtains, background Vivaldi, and a so-called French chef.

  ‘Dinner will be served in the breakfast room tonight, sir,’ he was informed by the receptionist, a pretty girl with a warm, bright smile and broad northern vowels, Caro by her name tag. ‘We’ve a function on in the main dining-room. Actually,’ she added confidentially, ‘you’ll be on your own, if that’s not a problem for you? We’re full up, but all the other residents will be at the dinner dance.’

  ‘Dinner dance? Not above the music, my bedroom, is it?’

  She smiled, understanding his alarm. ‘No problem, sir, you’re at the front. You won’t hear a thing.’

  Richmond, who had been contemplating a light snack alone in his room, glanced into the breakfast room, saw a roaring fire and changed his mind, and was glad he had when he’d located and surveyed the accommodation allotted to him. A northerly aspect, though warm and comfortable enough, if a bit cramped, as single rooms in hotels invariably were. A hard-stuffed, upright armchair and a huge television set dominating the small space. The steep streets of Steynton dipped and rose and swung away at crazy angles from the market square and somehow the window of this first-floor room was level with an aerial on the roof of a tall building below. A row of melancholy rooks sat on it and stared in at him as he unpacked. A decent meal, and afterwards a glass of scotch in a comfortable chair in the lounge with a book was a tempting thought. But after dinner he had business to conduct.

  ‘I’d like to eat at half-past seven, if that’s all right?’ he’d asked at the desk. ‘A Mrs Austwick will be coming in to see me at eight fifteen, so I want to be finished by then.’

  ‘No problem, sir.’

  ‘Anywhere my guest and I can be private?’

  ‘The dinner’s a reunion for Brackenroyd’s retirees, so they won’t be bothering with the residents’ lounge. You’ll be quiet there.’

  Richmond had already noticed more than the usual quota of elderly couples wandering around. Retirees. Well. ‘All right, I’ll wait for coffee until Mrs Austwick comes and we’ll have it in the lounge.’

  ‘I’ll have them bring it to you there,’ returned Caro with a bright, professional smile, adding, yet again, ‘No problem, sir.’ She handed him his key. ‘Number 14, there you go.’ She turned to answer the telephone, leaving Richmond wondering whether a training in American-speak had been a mandatory requirement, as part of the hotel refurbishment.

  3

  Sonia had stayed to supper after all, since Polly was there.

  Polly, energetic and smiling, wearing the glossy brown waves of her long hair drawn back either side and fastened behind with one of her big slides. An art nouveau one tonight, oval, with an asymmetrical design, picked up from a market stall, she said. The layers of dark patterned velvet and other rich materials that Sonia could scarcely have described and would certainly never have dared to wear probably came from the same place. The leaping firelight caught the glow of the velvet, the crimson waistcoat and the curve of the silver slide whenever she turned her head, the huge silver and amber ear-rings swung; Sonia watched, half-jealous, fascinated, as Polly sat with her arm around her daughter and talked so airily of how she had disposed of most of the tangible evidence of the last unhappy years of her life – along, presumably, with her memories of Tony Winslow. She had, she said, put her few remaining things into storage. ‘All done and dusted, but let’s hope it won’t be for long.’ She smiled down at Harriet, as if the upheaval had all meant nothing, but perhaps the show of cheerfulness was for the child’s sake. ‘Now we must look for somewhere to live, Hattie. There’s that house I saw last time I was here. Maybe it’s still on the market.’

  ‘You can’t mean that one in Ingham’s Fold?’ Freya protested. ‘That’s ridiculous! It’s only a little old terraced house!’

  ‘It’s a very nice one, for all that. The best of those I can afford. I can just about scrape the deposit together.’

  ‘You could surely get something less …’ Freya paused. ‘Something with more character.’

  ‘Not at the price.’

  Freya had been on the verge of saying something like ‘less working class’, Polly had no doubt, was surprised she hadn’t come right out with it, but sometimes even Freya remembered such remarks might prompt reminders of her own origins, and that was something she never cared to discuss.

  ‘I don’t see what’s wrong with staying here,’ she insisted. ‘We’re not exactly short of room. But I suppose you’ll do as you please.’ She’d withdrawn, as usual opting out, putting up a barrier between herself and anything unpleasant. She’d always been able to act as if on another planet, but only when it suited her. She could be as practical as Polly if she chose.

  Polly, in fact, was ambivalent about staying here at Low Rigg, she and her mother living in such close proximity … there was no surer recipe for disaster. She would get irritated by Freya’s vagueness and the way the house was being – well, allowed to take over. Or that was what it felt like. But if she said what she thought, it would create an atmosphere. It would be wiser, if only for Harriet’s sake, to move out as soon as possible.

  The small house she’d inspected on her last visit wasn’t Low Rigg by any means, but it was solid, square and decent, and moreover had a back door and a front one – not in a back-to-back street as it might have been for the price, but in a little cobbled cul-de-sac and with its rear windows overlooking an unobscured view of the town. There was no front garden, but the flagged back yard had been made into an attractive sitting-out place by the present owners, and it had an apple tree in the corner. It wasn’t what she would have chosen, but it was a hundred per cent improvement on the various rented accommodations they’d suffered in the last few years.

  ‘Why don’t we find a flat, like Elf’s?’ Harriet remarked into the grown-ups’ silence, polishing off her portion of the delicatessen treacle tart Polly had brought as a coming-home treat for Harriet, knowing she loved it and correctly surmising that there would be no pudding provided by Freya.

  ‘Elf is different,’ Freya answered shortly, looking displeased, but silenced.

  Elf had once lived in one of the old weavers’ cottages down in the village, the last to belong to the Denshaws. It crouched at the end of a row, and had tiny windows and draughts, but after Low Rigg Hall, with its low roofs and cold corners and stone-flagged floors strewn with a varied assortment of rugs, liable to trap the unwary, Elf had declared it held no terrors for her. For a time, she’d had the fanciful notion of using it for its intended purpose. She’d had a loom installed in the original loom-chamber upstairs, where she wove pieces of cloth and Rya-type rugs, by which she tried to make a living, selling them in craft shops and fairs. It was an ill-conceived idea, not at all suited to her temperament. She’d tried other things, finally ending up managing a small art gallery, which she’d recently bought from the owner. She had a flat in the same mill-conversion where Ginny had her shop,
smart and self-contained, like Elf herself. When she moved out of the little house, the Nagles had moved in, after Freya had been persuaded into some modernisation.

  Perhaps thinking of the draughty cottage, Freya shivered and said now, ‘Throw another log on the fire, Polly, please.’ The fire didn’t need it but Polly obliged. Like Ginny, Freya complained if her surroundings were not always at Turkish bath temperatures. Yet most of the house remained chilly, even in summer, except for this room. She called it the morning room, if you please, a grand name for a good-sized parlour at the back of the house which the Denshaws had always used as a family living-room, since it was on a south-west-facing corner of the house with windows to either side and consequently received the sun for much of the day. So much sun was a mixed blessing – it had faded and rotted the yellow silk curtains and cracked the white paint on the window sills and panelling, which should never have been painted at all, since they were of oak. But Freya had liked the idea of a yellow and white room, an antidote to so much dark panelling elsewhere, and so, yellow and white it was.

  ‘Anyway, good news,’ Polly said. ‘I’ve got myself fixed up with a temporary job, starting after Christmas – at your school, Hattie. A teacher’s had to leave unexpectedly. How’s that for a bit of luck?’

  ‘Oh, wicked,’ said Harriet.

  ‘It’s not a permanent solution, but it’ll do until I start at Dean House.’

  Working as she did, teaching children with special needs, she’d counted herself lucky in being promised a permanent position at the one school in Steynton dedicated to such. The position wasn’t available to her for six months, so this temporary job was welcome, enabling her to keep Harriet at the school she was already attending, the twins’ school, one with an excellent reputation.

  Teaching ran in the family: their father, whose whole life it had been; his brother Philip who, while practising as a doctor for forty years, had also taught music in his spare time to generations of Steynton schoolchildren. Polly herself had chosen the profession almost in default, not knowing what else she wanted to do, though now, specialising as she did, she couldn’t imagine any other kind of work she’d like better.