by A. J. Cronin
‘Our duty to our bodies – keep them beautiful. Mustn’t be ashamed of them! Don’t you think it’s good to be like that? The nakedness of woman is the work of God. Tell me,’ she went on unexpectedly, ‘were you happy when you were married?’
‘Yes,’ said Lucy shortly. She neither approved the conversation nor understood its purport.
‘Did you have great happiness?’ persisted Miss Hocking. ‘Won’t you tell me?’ The subject, or the situation, seemed to rouse in her a strange excitement.
But Lucy was silent, coldly silent.
‘Really, I have a reason,’ continued the other, with wide, ingenuous eyes. ‘I should love you to tell me.’
‘I’d rather not,’ said Lucy decisively, suddenly frigid.
‘Marriage – a sweet abandon,’ rhapsodised Miss Hocking, hanging the completed daisy-chain around Fairy’s plethoric neck. ‘Of course, not everybody can – can they, my Fairy, darling? But I – well – I –’ Miss Hocking broke off, and laughed with a self-conscious skittishness which set Lucy’s teeth on edge. Never had she seen the other so ridiculous as at this moment; it grated upon her, this persistent hovering upon the outskirts of sex. Suddenly she had the recollection of that occasion: of Miss Hocking leaning forward entranced by the sight of Peter dancing half-naked in his pyjamas; yes, it was the same excited curiosity which lurked now in those dreamy eyes. She was distinctly put out.
‘Let’s get on,’ she said restlessly; and abruptly she got to her feet.
Miss Hocking, reclining with her hands behind her head, looked up languorously.
‘Such a nice talk – so intimate – we’re having! I’d like to go on and on and on. Just like Tennyson’s brook!’
In answer, Lucy began to walk down the path. A faint glimmering of understanding, a dim, uneasy intuition, had begun to trouble her.
In a few moments, however, Miss Hocking made up on her. She was gay once more, and once more full of chatter. But Lucy was not gay; thoughtful she was, and silent, as they emerged from the woods and took their way along the shore road to Ardfillan.
‘I said I didn’t want a long walk,’ she said rather crossly. ‘ We’ve come miles.’
Indeed, the road seemed interminable; her heel, she was sure, had blistered; Fairy, the daisy-chain askew upon his left ear, wore a tortured look as he panted along beside them, pausing repeatedly to lap disreputable water from the adjacent ditches. Even Miss Hocking began to show signs of dishevelment from wind and sun, but she was not dismayed. She took a cake of chocolate from her pocket, and, offering a piece to Lucy, who refused it, she began to munch it contentedly.
‘I always carry a bar about with me,’ she said cheerfully. ‘About a bar! A bar about!’ And she bit into it. A brown smudge smeared itself on her cheek. Lucy said nothing. She was limping now.
They reached Ardfillan, footsore, tired, and hungry, about six o’clock, just as the bells began to peal. As they began the ascent of Garsden Street, Lucy made an effort, and, conquering her ill-humour, she turned to her companion.
‘We’ll have a bath when we get back,’ she said; ‘and I’m dying for a cup of tea.’
These were the first words she had spoken in the last mile. But Miss Hocking’s perspiring features assumed a slow and dreamy smile.
‘You go ahead and have your bath,’ she returned agreeably, ‘ and your cup of tea.’
‘What?’ exclaimed Lucy in astonishment. ‘Aren’t you coming too?’
‘No my dear.’ All the facile chatter of the last hour was gone; she was constrained, bashful. ‘I’m going in there’ – and she pointed to where, half-way up the road, the Episcopal Church stood with open doors, already receiving a string of worshippers for the evening service.
Lucy gazed at the other in amazement – at the mud on her shoes, the tilt of her hat, the wisp of hair plastered against her smudged cheek, and finally at the almost incredible expression now stamped upon her face.
‘Surely you won’t trouble!’ she expostulated. ‘You were out this morning. And I’m certainly not going to Benediction tonight. You must be dying to sit down. Come home and have tea.’
Miss Hocking shook her head. ‘No!’ she answered coyly. ‘No, no!’
‘But you’re so untidy!’
‘I must go. Yes, I must,’ she murmured. ‘He’s preaching tonight. He would miss me if I wasn’t in my seat.’
‘He!’ ejaculated Lucy. ‘ You don’t mean –’
‘Yes, the Reverend Mr Adam – Malcolm, I should say.’ She blushed with an awful coquetry. ‘Heartbroken he would be – if I wasn’t there.’
‘Heartbroken?’ echoed Lucy, completely taken aback. ‘Why?’
She did not know, but she knew of, the Reverend Malcolm Adam: by reputation a quiet, methodical man, a man of abrupt and taciturn habit. She stared at Miss Hocking. She was convinced, positively convinced, that Miss Hocking was romancing.
‘You – you’re not serious?’ she exclaimed.
‘Completely serious!’ answered Miss Hocking, with a grotesque primness. ‘You ought to know – there’s an understanding between Mr Adam and myself, a perfect understanding. We may be married any day now.’
Lucy’s jaw dropped. She could not believe her ears. Literally she was staggered by the announcement.
‘Are you in earnest? Has he proposed to you, then?’ she gasped.
Miss Hocking halted. They were now just outside the church, and, with a frightful simper, she said: ‘Oh, no! He’s said nothing, not a word. He’s too shy to speak. It’s the way he looks at me, just that look. Oh, the way he looks at me!’ She sighed. ‘That’s how I know it! He adores me. I know it; yes, I know it. And I keep it all for him!’ Then she smiled, and swept up the steps into the church.
Lucy stood quite still. She was dazed. She remained motionless while that large, majestic figure vanished under the Gothic arch; then slowly she turned and set off for home.
It was out, out at last, the secret of that girlish playfulness behind the full, excited majesty of manner. Yes, the murder was out – out irrevocably. It was as though the afternoon had been a gradual progression towards the bathos of this frightful, ridiculous dénouement! Miss Hocking’s eccentricity might have been – well, anything! But it was this! She was profoundly dismayed, confounded by her conflicting thoughts. But there was no shadow of doubt; she saw clearly, and, indeed, she wondered why it had not dawned upon her before. She had cast in her lot with a woman virtually deranged, a woman affected by a grotesque and unbelievable obsession. Yes, it was incredible. Had she been told of this obscure yet violent passion, cherished secretly in the traditional manner, for a clergyman, she would not have believed it. Absurd, she would have said, unconvincing, the inevitable, prescribed, and immemorial commonplace. Yet here it was, an actuality, thrust suddenly before her, thrust into the middle of her life.
She let herself into the flat with a serious face. Immediately she turned on the bath, and, discarding her limp and dusty garments, she slipped into the warm comfort of the hot water. She lay back, her face flushed by the steam, still frowning faintly. She went over the whole thing in her mind – the scene in the wood, the scene at the church. It was clear to her, absolutely clear. She did not blame herself. Drawing upon her pride, sustaining herself by the thought that she could see this thing through, gradually she became less disturbed. When she got out of her bath, she had prepared herself for some sudden dramatic event, some event which would immediately precipitate the situation, and she waited calmly in her dressing-gown for the return of her companion.
But nothing dramatic happened. Miss Hocking returned quietly – a little dreamy perhaps, but again ingenuously cheerful. She began, indeed, to make a salad for Lucy. A most delicious salad it was, cool, refreshing, with French dressing – Miss Hocking had a masterly touch with such dishes – and she discussed the ingredients with an amiable enthusiasm.
So Lucy ate the salad, and said nothing.
Chapter Nine
She had prepared herself f
or a sudden rupture, an immediate cleavage of their companionship. But no rupture came. She went on living with Miss Hocking and she went on working. As time went on – and how swiftly it passed! – the weeks drawing into months, yes, the months drawing into years – she became gradually aware of the full extent of Pinkie’s aberration. She became aware of all these hidden and adoring attentions, these gifts which the recipient never acknowledged. Adam was, of course, utterly oblivious of this secret and languishing affection directed towards him; yet, out of this very ignorance, Pinkie withdrew subtly the implication of a secret understanding. A stray glance falling upon her in church, an involuntary turn of his head as he passed her window, an inflection of his voice as he addressed her with some casual and unconsidered remark about the weather – all would strike her with a ravishing thrill, strengthen her delusion to a delicious and positive belief. She sent him presents anonymously – gloves, ties, scarves, even sets of the finest woollen underwear. For an entire year she worked upon a large illuminated address of her own design and composition – an exquisitely painted school eulogising his virtues. On certain mornings she got up early, and sat patiently at her window for the pleasure of observing him pass.
Upon every other point of reason she was normal – a little frivolous, gay, perhaps a little affected, yet near enough to normal; and she was sufficiently normal to conceal on most occasions the more glaring evidence of her partiality.
The essence of it all was this: Pinkie out-reaching powerfully to find the outlet for her repression. No matter that this outlet was fatuous. Instinct was satisfied.
And now Lucy accepted this state of affairs calmly, as a thing unavoidable and constant. It would go on, she felt, in this indefinite state, interminably. When mention of it arose in the conversation, she discouraged it by a stiff and uncompromising silence.
Yet sometimes Miss Hocking became an anxiety, even an irritation. From that first week-end, when she had been burdened by the very insistence of the other’s kindness, Lucy had suffered repeatedly under an amiability – a succession of attentions, arising, no doubt, from a genuine warmth of heart, but transmuted into something so exaggerated as to become almost aggravating! These constitutionals, the enforced tête-à-têtes, the gushing conversations, the little rippling laughs, the exclamations: ‘Oh, you must, my dear!’ and ‘ But I insist, my pet!’ – all became tedious through repetition and their very emptiness. Often she would come home at nights tired from a long day’s work, desiring quietness and the solace of a restful evening, to find Miss Hocking excited, lit with laughter, in this mood of tiresome exuberance. Then they would quarrel, Lucy retire sharply to bed, Pinkie to the drawing-room, where she made slow, sad music in reparation. It was a spectacle – Pinkie clasping the body of the ’cello between her legs, tenderly, as though she embraced the form of the Reverend Malcolm Adam.
At times the thought came over Lucy: ‘Why am I living here? Am I living with this woman for what I get out of her?’ But she repudiated the thought; it was not so. Often, indeed, she stood between Miss Hocking – whose notion of money was of the slightest – and a lavish prodigality. And she was no parasite. She paid her share of the flat’s expenses determinedly. It was, of course, for her, an unparalleled chance. She lived with economy, yet in surroundings of taste and even luxury. And she was able to educate her son! Yes, that argument weighed with her most heavily; to every doubt she had the answer that she was doing it for her son.
Nevertheless, she had moments when she made up her mind to leave the flat for good, and establish herself alone on a less pretentious scale. Several times she had been upon the verge of this step, but always the recognition of some essential obligation towards Miss Hocking had acted at the last moment as a deterrent. Miss Hocking had, after all, been good to her in her own way; her intentions, never malicious, arose from a well-disposed nature, and defeated themselves only through their own foolishness. Further, she had been good to Peter, which was now, with Lucy, the final and universal argument. There had been, for example, that holiday at Fort William, a joyous interlude for the three of them, suggested and – apart from Lucy’s modest contribution – financed by the older woman. Lucy often went over it in her mind – the short train winding along the toyish single line, through the blue and purple mountains of the Western Highlands; the sudden silver vision of a loch lying beneath them, fringed by ragged pines, still with its own depth, placid with an ageless antiquity; the heather rolling endlessly, the briny tang of peat and bracken; a stag startled, racing with lowered antlers from the engine; the isolated stations, pebbled with their names, banked against the winter snowdrifts, but gaudy then with trailing nasturtiums and the fiery spurts of fuchsia. A wave of nostalgia came over her when she thought of it – it was her own country, and she loved it. Although during this holiday Miss Hocking had surpassed herself in giddy exuberance – flaunting a tartan skirt, a shawl upon her shoulder, a plumed hat, and a cairngorm as large as any buckler, and posing picturesquely, with arms akimbo, by every mountain tarn, after the manner of Flora Macdonald, whom she now decided she resembled although she had been foolish, still she had been good to Peter. Previously, she had raked from the lumber cupboard a fishing-rod that had been her father’s – no bamboo this, but a real whippy green-heart – and a pigskin fly-book containing multitudes of plumaged hooks, some rusty, with crumbling feathers, but most holding still their gaudy brilliance. Peter had fished in the Spean, had returned one afternoon pale with his intensity, his hand still tremulous, bearing a sea trout of at least two pounds. The memory of that look upon her boy’s face, triumphant almost to ecstasy, had weighed in the balance many times against the decision that she must leave the flat and abandon the other to her own resources.
Peter – yes, she admitted him to be the keystone of her life.
All through this period the school prize-givings afforded her the greatest happiness, and it was incredible how quickly they came upon her; incredible, too, the changes which they brought upon her boy. She remembered the first still, vividly, and with that initial rush of pride which she had then experienced – to see him advancing with a modest yet distinguished bearing – he had distinctly an air, she admitted to herself – to receive from the ringed hand of the Lord High Bishop of Nofar himself the silver watch and chain for Christian doctrine and the pile of books – prizes in geography, orthography, and mental arithmetic.
‘He’s the lucky boy,’ she had heard the obese parent of a less successful scholar mutter, while Peter crushed his way through a labyrinth of outstretched legs back to her side in the steaming hall.
‘Lucky, indeed!’ thought Lucy indignantly, as she slipped her hand furtively under her son’s arm, and clasped it tightly. Her face was flushed as his from her excitement; she frowned faintly in the direction of the heavily plumed hat from beneath which the remark had emanated. No, it was not luck. True, every boy in the school received a prize – it was said that Brother William had an astute contract with a bookseller in London. ‘Bili wasn’t born yesterday,’ Ramford had been heard to exclaim in this connection. True also that every boy’s name appeared in the elegantly printed prize list of the prospectus, even if it were only against the symbol: ‘Fourth Pianoforte Playing,’ or ‘ Fifth Good Conduct.’ But what of that! And, whatever the inference of Ramford’s graceless remark, assuredly it was not luck which had culled for Peter these firstfruits from the tree of learning; nor was it good fortune alone which had earned him the privilege of reciting The Burial of Sir John Moore’ – with appropriate gestures – before the same well-dressed gathering. Of that the Laughtown Courier said a week later: ‘The charming little man showed unquestionable histrionic talent, and, on taking his bow, was cheered to the resounding echo.’ And Lucy treasured this cutting, yellowing through the years, to her heart.
He had played, too, in the school band. Overture by Weber had been the piece, and, although he had not achieved his ambition of the big drum, which was, in truth, belaboured by a stout Spaniard with spectac
les, he had been given – much more appropriately, she thought – the piccolo. Her eyes had devoured the graceful dexterity of his fingers, moving one bar behind the others, and to her the whole thin volume of the band’s harmony had seemed to emanate from his ripe, distended cheeks.
Afterwards, Brother William had placed his hand benevolently upon Peter’s head, and said on his passage to another parent: ‘We’re proud of this boy.’ Brother Aloysius, too, in the background, had fixed on her his dark sloe eyes, and murmured: ‘ It‘ s a pleasure to teach your boy, Mrs Moore,’ making the note more intimate, the triumph more personal.
Her head had been high, the night air cool upon her cheeks, her heart singing exultantly as, after the ceremony, she had taken her way back to Lang’s Private Hotel: strongly recommended by the Brothers – ‘An estimable woman, widow Lang!’ Why, she had four sons day-boarders at the college.
Lucy slept little that night, and next morning, taking Peter home for the holidays, she had looked at him proudly across the carriage, and let her mind drift dreamily towards his triumphs of the future, which should be her triumphs also.
Yes, that had been the beginning, a beginning which had been magnificently sustained. He was going to be clever. Her initial exultation became moulded into a constant purpose. She became reserved about his successes, for, although she was a fond mother, she was no fool. She perceived that the college was a most excellent institution, the best, indeed, available to her; and the round annual expenditure of forty pounds was within the limits of her narrow purse. She saw, also, that the régime and regular life suited Peter, who was developing to an adequate strength and stature. The fear of his health – she had always thought his chest ‘not strong’ – lay at the back of her mind like a spectre, and, although she refused to acknowledge this dread, it gave her, notwithstanding, an indescribable satisfaction to see her son growing with every evidence of normal health. The slow changes which turned him gradually from an ingenuous child with a pocketful of marbles to a heavier boy, still incomparably charming, but now a lunging boy, destructive of his clothing, requiring size five in boots, who sang loudly and with an air of finality at every holiday the traditional rhyme: