The Skeleton in the Grass

by Robert Barnard

  “I wonder how Barry knew about Mr. Hallam being sick.”

  Roland shrugged.

  “It’s common talk around the village. Only someone like Barry would make an issue of it. Most of the people with all their wits about them realize that Mr. Hallam is a bookish sort of man. They expect that type to be sensitive.”

  “I just wonder how they know. There were just the four of us in the car.”

  “I expect Mrs. Munday talked. She’s a great gossip, you know, with the women who go up to Hallam to clean.”

  Sarah let it go at that. They said goodbye at the gate, very warmly, and Sarah promised to try to get another evening off soon. They did not kiss good night. Sarah never kissed her boyfriends (there had been two) on the first evening out. She believed only very fast girls did.

  “Will you be all right up to the house?” asked Roland.

  “Of course. It’s only a couple of hundred yards. There’s still some lights on, so there’s still family up. I’ve got a key, anyway.”

  “I’ll wait here till you’re safely in.”

  That did give Sarah a feeling of extra security. She turned when she got to the door and waved. Once inside, she knocked on the door to the sitting-room and went in. It was Helen and Dennis who were still up, unusually late for them. Helen got up and went over to her.

  “Sarah dear, there’s a telegram arrived for you. From Derbyshire.”

  Helen knew, and Sarah knew, that telegrams did not arrive from home without there being bad news inside them. When she took the little brown envelope her hands were trembling, but she tore it open.

  The message read baldly: MOTHER DIED THIS MORNING.

  Sarah turned to Helen and sobbed on her breast, as she had never, since a little child, sobbed on the breast of the dead woman.

  CHAPTER 6

  Oliver drove Sarah to the station next morning. They were both very quiet, but as they drew up at the ugly little building, Oliver said rather awkwardly, but in a touchingly grown-up voice:

  “Whatever you decide, Sarah, remember that you have a home here too.”

  Her father, when much later she arrived at the vicarage in Stetford, also said very little. As he kissed her he told her the time of the funeral next morning. Later in the evening, as they were sitting silent in the dark front room of the vicarage, he said: “It’s very inconvenient her dying just now—.” Sarah was convinced that he had intended to add: “just before harvest festival,” but had thought better of it.

  The funeral was conducted by a clergyman from a neighbouring parish. So that her father could hide his own lack of emotion, Sarah thought. Then she chided herself for a cheap jibe: her father felt his wife’s death as deeply as he was capable of feeling anything of an emotional nature. A slight by the Bishop, however, would have hurt him more.

  He sat throughout the service icy and remote, apparently contemplating arctic vistas. After the sad spectacle at the graveside he received attempts at comfort and commiseration in the same tight-lipped manner with which, at Christmastime, he was accustomed to receiving compliments of the season.

  Back at the vicarage some attempt had been made to provide fare for the principal mourners. It seemed to Sarah that such food and drink as there was had been provided, unasked, by Mrs. Wilcox and Mrs. Spencer, wives of churchwardens. Her father had played no part in the provision of it, and played next to no part in the dispensing of it. Nobody knew whether they were meant to go back to the vicarage, and nobody who went could decide how long they ought to stay. They ate to hide their embarrassment, and escaped as soon as was decent.

  The women of the church—who in fact kept the congregation together, since the Reverend Causeley’s ministry seemed to concern itself solely with forms, tithes, and marks of respect that should be paid to him personally—were a comfort to Sarah. Her mother had done all the things a vicar’s wife was expected to do, and had done them as well as anybody of her shy, dispirited nature could be expected to do them. A vicar’s family did after all occupy (and the Reverend Causeley was extremely forward in asserting it) some position in rural society—lower than the local gentry, certainly, but at least as high as the doctor. The big house in the area was seldom occupied, since the gentleman of the house was busy retrieving the family’s fortunes in the City of London. Indeed, local rumour had it that he was not so much retrieving the family’s fortunes as quite simply making a lot of money for himself—that he would gladly have got rid of the house if he could have found anybody foolhardy or vainglorious enough to have bought it. Thus a considerable burden had fallen on Sarah’s mother, and the ladies of the parish were warm—perhaps over-warm—in their praise of her manner of carrying it.

  When they had all gratefully ducked off, there seemed nothing to do, nothing to say. Sarah took herself off for a walk, on a hill path where she could be quite certain she would be alone. The late afternoon sunlight restored her spirits. When she got home her father was in his study, no doubt “writing a sermon”—one of those dry discourses, like the financial statement of a company chairman, which showed little sign of the literary pains that were apparently bestowed on them. Whatever he was doing, he would certainly be happier on his own. Sarah found a book—it was Angel Pavement, which her mother had had out from the library. She would have to take it back in the morning. Meanwhile it would help to take her mind off the clock ticking.

  Her father emerged from the study as the time approached for his little bit of supper. Sarah asked if he would like anything, and he murmured that he thought he could just manage a piece or two of toasted cheese. Sarah made several slices, some for herself, and they sat around the fire eating them. There was no intimacy. They said nothing. Only when her father had finished, and he sat wiping his fingers, did he say:

  “How much notice do you think the Hallams will expect you to give?”

  Unconsciously she had been expecting that question in one form or another. Perhaps it was Oliver who had prepared her mind for it. She had not planned an answer, but it came without hesitation:

  “I shall not be giving notice. I shall go back to work there:”

  There was a long pause.

  “So you do not intend to come back here?”

  “No.”

  She went back to her book. When she had finished a chapter she began to clear the supper things away. Later in the evening, when Sarah had washed up and made two cups of cocoa, her father said, his voice now having an undertone of whine:

  “But what is to become of me?”

  “I’ll talk to Mrs. Wilcox in the morning. I’m sure there are many women in the village willing to do the cooking and cleaning. I’ll find the most reliable.”

  “But that will cost money.”

  “Yes.”

  It did not help that, next morning, when she went to talk to Mrs. Wilcox, she was greeted with: “Well, we’ll be seeing more of you in the future, Sarah.”

  Sarah had taken off her ridiculous grey hat and coat, and sat in Mrs. Wilcox’s semi-detached’s sitting-room.

  “Actually I shall be staying at my job, Mrs. Wilcox. That’s what I’ve come to see you about.”

  “Staying at your job? But we assumed you’d be coming back to look after your father.”

  “Did you?”

  “Well, naturally . . .”

  “Do you think that’s natural? I’m not sure that I do.”

  “But you being a daughter, and an only child . . .”

  “Being a daughter shouldn’t make you a natural choice for being a martyr. I’ve always intended to make some sort of career for myself, and I don’t see any reason to change my plans.”

  “Well, I am surprised. I never thought of you as one of those modern young ladies, Miss Sarah.”

  “Didn’t you? Perhaps I’ve only just found it out myself.”

  “But what’s going to happen to your father?”

  They chewed over the subject, and went through the candidates for cook and daily help. They selected the widow of a cowman, who w
ould keep the house spotless, and would cook the vicar a substantial midday meal. She was also, Mrs. Wilcox said, scrupulously honest—which meant, Sarah knew, that she would not take more than the few scraps from the kitchen that she would regard as her legitimate perks.

  “But she’s got her three sons,” said Mrs. Wilcox. “I don’t know as she’d want to go back to the vicarage in the evening and cook the vicar his supper.”

  “I don’t see that a man is incapable of learning how to cook a bit of toasted cheese, or open a tin of baked beans and heat it up,” said Sarah briskly. She got from Mrs. Wilcox the going rate for the job, and by evening she had it all arranged.

  When she left next morning, just before midday, the new help was already at home in the kitchen, and a steamed meat pudding was on the stove. Sarah had packed the night before, and had dawdled through the morning till she could decently leave. Her father had retired to the study, where he was doubtless polishing the annual balance sheet. Sarah adjusted her only, and dreadful, hat in front of the hall mirror. Nothing was going to make it look anything but ridiculous. Then, her heart thumping, she tapped on the study door and put her head round.

  “Goodbye, Father.”

  “Goodbye.”

  He did not look up, and purposely did not say her name.

  So that was it. She shut the front door and walked, case in hand, through the little village. News had obviously spread that she would not be coming back to look after her father, and some of his women parishioners gave her looks of disapproval. News had obviously not got to the station master, however, because as he clipped her ticket, he said:

  “Guess we’ll be seeing you back here soon, miss.”

  “Yes—I may come back for Christmas,” she said insouciantly.

  Now the news would spread to male and beer-drinking spheres.

  The journey back to Oxfordshire would be slow and circuitous. The train was a tiny local one, going to Crewe, and she had a compartment all to herself. As it pulled almost imperceptibly out of the station she felt a great lifting of the heart, and, following that, a great surge of gratitude to the Hallams that she had not sold herself into slavery. It was Oliver’s words that had prepared her, it was the Hallams who—quite unintentionally—had given her the confidence, the courage and the vision to know that martyrdom within a loveless family was wrong.

  As the train chugged through heart-stopping scenery, Sarah suddenly jumped up and threw her hat to the roof with a joyful shout. She was free. Life was opening up before her. Then she laughed and laughed with relief, and when she stopped she didn’t feel ashamed at all.

  CHAPTER 7

  Sarah was greeted with great and loving kindness by the Hallams when she returned. Since the subject had never come out into the open between them, none of them asked her if she had made any decision to stay or to return home. When she resumed her ordinary duties next day and said nothing that seemed to augur departure, the Hallams took her decision as read, and were obviously pleased. Eventually Helen Hallam asked her how she thought her father would cope, and what arrangements she had made for him. When they had discussed it for a little—Sarah displaying that reticence that spoke volumes—Helen pressed her hand and said she thought she had been very sensible. “The days of female immolation are past,” she said.

  “We’ve decided we’re not going to get worked up over those incidents,” Oliver announced to Sarah over dinner, on her first full day back. He was treating her with great attention, and talking about any subject but the death of her mother. “Why should we dignify them by taking notice of them? It is the silly season, after all.”

  “The silly season is newspapers, not people,” objected Elizabeth.

  “The only reason the newspapers have a silly season is because people do silly things,” returned Oliver.

  This new resilience was a relief to Sarah, and she decided that they were right. Attention was what the incidents seemed to be crying out for, and what they should not be given. The atmosphere in the house was certainly light and cheerful again. Oliver played ball games on the lawn with Chloe and Bounce, and had lots of friends over for tea. The approach of the Oxford term apparently made him wish for company before the serious business of life began again. Helen made a couple of trips to London to buy clothes, and took Elizabeth with her on one of them. They apparently began scouting round for “some dowager,” as Helen put it, to chaperone Elizabeth during her Season. Helen would hardly have liked to do it herself, and as she said, the only people she knew in London were of entirely the wrong sort. Dennis’s idea of happiness was being busy, and he was very busy indeed.

  “Everyone is dying,” he protested, half-humorously. “And I seem to be appointed necrologer. I’ve no sooner finished a long memorial piece on Housman than they’re after me for an article on Lorca. God—poor Lorca. And there’s a dreadful spate of books on T. E. Lawrence they expect me to review, presumably because he was brought up in Oxford. Our paths certainly never crossed in Egypt. Oliver would do a much better job, having at least been to these places recently, but they thought that would look like nepotism, and insisted I do it.”

  Only a postcard from Will dented the gaiety. The very stamp and postmark made Helen go white when she saw it: it had been posted in Barcelona. Will wrote that Madrid itself was under immediate threat, and nobody was taking bets on its remaining in government hands long. There was urgent need for young men with military training to join the anti-Fascist forces. There was talk of an International Brigade. He bitterly regretted not having joined the Officer Cadet Corps at school, but anyway he expected to be ready to fight in a matter of weeks. Already the British volunteers had suffered their first casualties—John Cornford wounded.

  “He talks about casualties as if they were a matter of pride”, said Dennis Hallam sadly. “As some people talk about having been blooded after a fox hunt.”

  “Who is this Cornford?” asked Helen. “Should we know?”

  “He’s a young Cambridge hot-head, made quite a name for himself with the up-and-coming generation. Mistresses—a child, I think. And fancies himself as a poet.”

  Helen sighed.

  “He sounds like the sort of man Will would look up to.” She wiped her eyes. “Please God it ends soon.”

  “It’s not going to end soon,” said Dennis bleakly.

  But they were now quite helpless, and quite unable to influence Will’s decisions. From self-protection they put such moments speedily behind them.

  Meanwhile the summer was fading, and Sarah learnt that with the turning of the leaves the minds of people in that part of Oxfordshire began turning to the autumn party at the Wadhams’. She had heard of Lord Wadham, whose property began half a mile away, on the other side of the river. People had mentioned him over tea, never with anything less than affection. He was, though, just a name, for he had been involved in none of the visiting over the summer. It was the Hallams who were the “house” people for all the villagers whom Sarah had tentatively begun to talk to. They were all on the Hallams’ side of the river, and the Wadhams’ greatness, such as it was, was acknowledged in villages on the other bank, to the east. Their house, she had learned, was called Beecham Park, and their party was an annual event.

  “The purpose,” said Dennis, grinning, for the Wadhams in general seemed to provoke mirth, “is to mark the end of summer, or more accurately to mark the resumption of Parliament. You might think from that that Waddy is a highly political person, but he’s not. So far as I know he’s attached to no party—he merely attends daily at the House of Lords, and speaks at random on whatever subjects attract him.”

  “So at random,” remarked Oliver, “that I would think any party would pay him not to attach himself to it. His speeches would be sublimely embarrassing.”

  “That only shows how boring and humourless politicians are,” said Helen. “They ought to be queueing to sign up such an individual old dear. Waddy in the government would add enormously to the gaiety of nations.”

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p; “He’s a love,” agreed Elizabeth. “I wonder if I should ask Lady Waddy to be my chaperone for the Season.”

  At this the family collapsed into gales of laughter. The Wadhams, it seemed, were not likely to be formidable hosts. Sarah asked timidly what kind of a party it was to be.

  “A fun and games party,” explained Oliver. “Monopoly and murder, and croquet on the lawn in the dark—oh, and what else? Piquet, poker, shove ha’penny, and anything else that can be dragged out of the cupboards at Beecham. Waddy will certainly give readings from Dickens at some point—”

  “Dickens?”

  “That’s right. But he doesn’t mind if you slip away. Do I gather you are not up in Dickens, Sarah?”

  “Not really. I don’t remember we even had copies at home. I’ve read Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. Oh, and bits of Pickwick, but I never found it as funny as other people seem to.”

  “Dear me. Well, I don’t think Waddy will do ‘Death of Nancy’ or ‘Death of Steerforth.’ It’s much more likely to be Flora Finching—he has a very good line in Floras—or maybe Harold Skimpole. I would suggest you prepare yourself by reading Bleak House.”

  “Don’t scare Sarah,” said Helen. “It’s not at all a scary occasion, my dear. The whole and only purpose is for everybody to have fun—in particular Waddy, who needs some lightening of the spirit before he returns to his duties at Westminster.”

  They all laughed. In fact all the Wadhams seemed to provoke such wholehearted and good-natured mirth that Sarah realized there could be no possible element of the alarming in their forthcoming party. She felt she was beginning to mingle with the great on the easiest possible terms, and under the best possible auspices. Nevertheless she began to read Bleak House.