There I had it out with him.
I didn’t waste any time over preliminaries but came straight to the point, which wasn’t Mrs Ormerod but Mary. I told him—which was perfectly true—that she seemed to me to be thoroughly run down and despite the country air not nearly so well as when I saw her in town.
He agreed. ‘I am afraid it is my fault,’ he said. ‘This deputation work takes up a lot of time, and then there is my book as well. Mary is too much alone. Perhaps I ought to speak to Mrs Ormerod. She once half suggested that she should share our meals. I expect we ought to have treated her more as one of the family, but as one gets older one sets a higher value on privacy and we have been accustomed all our lives to live alone. How would it be if I asked Mrs Ormerod and Simon to have lunch with us—we might all have it in the kitchen—and then if the plan succeeded we might extend it to other meals? I am at times conscious that we are a divided household.’
I could have shaken the man for his obtuseness.
‘Aleck,’ I said, ‘just listen to me. You are living in a fool’s paradise, and Mrs Ormerod is the serpent. If you really care for your wife’s peace of mind, not to mention your own, you have just got to get rid of the woman. She makes Mary’s position impossible. In all sorts of ways she humiliates her. She can’t even go into her own kitchen. Only yesterday when we were picking up windfalls in the orchard she told me how much she would have enjoyed making jam, but Mrs Ormerod liked to make it in her own time and in her own way. And I believe that Mary would gladly have typed out your manuscript for you. Why ever didn’t you suggest it to her?’
Aleck pulled off his spectacles and wiped them nervously. ‘Perhaps I ought to have done,’ he said, ‘but Mrs Ormerod volunteered, and the book, my dear, the book is not exactly pleasant reading. I don’t quite know whether Mary would have liked it. Of course I realise that Mrs Ormerod is—what shall I say?—a rather queer woman, and one doesn’t see all her good qualities at first. But I believe she is devoted to the boy. It would be difficult for her to find a home for him. One mustn’t always do the easiest thing.’
‘Aleck,’ I said, ‘whether you like it or not, you are doing the easiest thing in letting matters drift like this. Mary won’t give Mrs Ormerod notice. She is not well enough to face up to it. But you are. The truth of the matter is that you are frightened of Mrs Ormerod. She may be, as you say, a rather queer woman. Don’t think about that, but concentrate on the fact that she is intensely selfish, thoroughly uncongenial, and is getting on your wife’s nerves. Give her notice today while I’m with you. She will turn on me, and there will be an unholy row, but from the affection I have for you both I’m prepared to stand the racket.’
He fidgeted with a paper knife.
‘I am willing to admit that there may be something in what you say and I’m grateful for your speaking out like this. You mustn’t be dragged into any quarrel though, and in any case a matter of this magnitude can’t be decided upon in a hurry. I shall sleep on it and let you know my final decision before you leave.’
You can imagine, my dear, that our last evening together was not one of the brightest and best. Aleck and Mary were glum, and since I didn’t know what the silence might bring forth I had my work cut out in filling in the gaps in the conversation with the most awful rubbish. At last I pleaded my headache—by this time it was real enough—and the fact that I was leaving first thing in the morning—as an excuse for bed.
After my first unsuccessful attempt to get a hot-water bottle I had not bothered about it. After all, the nights were not cold. Really I supposed I funked going down to the kitchen to face Mrs Ormerod. You can imagine then my surprise when she knocked at my bedroom door with my bottle in her hand, filled and gloriously hot.
‘I thought perhaps you would like it tonight,’ she said. ‘They are comforting if you chance to wake in the early hours.’ Then came the wink. ‘Goodnight!’
I wondered as I lay in bed if she thought I might, after all, be worth propitiating. But I didn’t wonder any longer when I woke up about two to find the blessed thing had leaked and had soaked the bedclothes and mattress. It was a new bottle, too. By the light of my candle I surveyed the damage. I could see no puncture, so I unscrewed the stopper. The rubber washer was torn, and of course Mrs Ormerod had torn it. She must have gone to sleep chuckling. I remembered her ‘if you chance to wake in the early hours’. That wink of hers, like a witty man’s stutter, was her way of pointing her remarks. I wondered if she were awake then and if Aleck and Mary were letting their minds wander along the dark passages of Viner’s Croft in search of peace. I wondered if I should have the courage to ring the bell and summon Mrs Ormerod from the vasty deep. But Mary might come instead, Mary who had lived for months in rain-sodden huts in tropical Africa. Pioneers! O Pioneers! I fixed up some sort of bed on the hardest of sofas and, with the candle still burning to comfort me, fell at last into a restless, aching sleep.
It was half-past six when I awoke to gaze with gathering resentment upon the disorder of my room. In less than three hours Viner’s Croft would see me no more. There was satisfaction in that. Why not anticipate my return to civilisation and ring for an early morning cup of tea? Such a demand would annoy Mrs Ormerod very much and I wanted to annoy her. I gave a tug at the old-fashioned bell-pull and waited. Silence for five minutes and then a pad, pad along the corridor and a knock at the door.
‘Come in!’ I said.
Enter Mrs Ormerod in a mauve wrapper and bedroom slippers, registering injured innocence and anxious solicitude except for the left eye, which was wholly malevolent.
‘I am most awfully sorry to trouble you,’ I said, ‘but do you think you could get me a cup of tea? I’ve been lying awake for hours; the bottle leaked in the night and I’m chilled to the bone.’
‘I’ll light the fire at once and put the kettle on. No trouble I assure you’ (wink), ‘most unforeseen.’
The boy Simon brought up the tea very weak and barely tepid. He held it out to me with a sickly grin and then darted off, leaving the door open. Mrs Ormerod had whistled for him. I didn’t drink it. For all I knew it might have been doctored—poison she wouldn’t have dared to try. It went out of the window to water the Michaelmas daisies.
Breakfast. A lively meal. Aleck jocular over his porridge and Mary finding it hard to express her gratitude for the four delightful days I had given them. Did I want to say goodbye to Mrs Ormerod? Oh, I had already seen her that morning, and Simon too! She didn’t want to hurry me, but she always insisted on Aleck taking plenty of time when he drove to the station, and—in a whisper to me—‘You won’t talk to him while he’s driving, will you? He’s rather short-sighted and the car requires all his attention.’
Dear Mary! How easy it was to see through her. She thought that I thought that the time for the great tête-à-tête had arrived.
I said very little to Aleck; his spirits were boisterously high and I could see that he had come to some decision, though it wasn’t until the train was moving off from the platform that he told me that as soon as he got back to Viner’s Croft he was going to give a month’s notice to Mrs Ormerod.
Did he do it? No, my dear. In this queer world, this very queer world, there’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip. What exactly happened I never heard either from Aleck or Mary. There came rumours, and for my own peace of mind I wrote to Mrs Wilson, the vicar’s wife, whom I had met at lunch at Viner’s Croft.
Aleck on his way back from the station had run into Simon and had half killed the boy. It seems that he had been standing by the roadside, a hundred yards from the house, waiting for the car, when, hearing Mrs Ormerod’s whistle, he darted across the road and the mudguard caught him in the back. They think that it is quite likely he will live, but it will be months before he can be moved. ‘How fortunate,’ wrote Mrs Wilson, ‘that the Inchpens are both doctors. Poor Simon has given Mary a new object in life. She lives for the day when he will be well enough to go with his mother to the sea. But he is horribly frail, a
nd though I’ve never breathed it to Mary, I fear he will never leave the house. The strange Mrs Ormerod bears up wonderfully.’
Cheer up, Agatha. You have never had to deal with a woman like that. She can’t really touch the Inchpens; they are too good. But ordinary mortals like you and me? Ugh! I shall dream of Mrs Ormerod tonight.
THE FOLLOWER
‘THEY SAY miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is we make trifles of terrors; ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.’
Lyn Stanton had found at last the quotation he wanted in All’s Well that Ends Well, and he had spent the best part of an hour in looking for it. He drew up his chair to the fire and filled his pipe. If only he could hit on the idea for the story, something uncanny, something sinister. It was not yet ten o’clock on an April morning, but he was just in the mood to submit himself to an unknown fear. The story was in him or around him, in the air. He knew the effect he wanted to get, but what was the story itself? Why wouldn’t it take shape, come out into the open so that he could see at least the dim outline, the skeleton rather, which later he could clothe at will?
What was it, he asked himself, that was to account for this half pleasurable feeling of tingling apprehension? He had had, it was true, a disturbed night, for he had awakened from a bad dream about two, to lie for an hour gazing through the uncurtained window at a light burning in the Old Vicarage of Winton Parbeloe half a mile away across the valley. Canon Rathbone, the oriental scholar, was living there, he had heard, with a German friend, Dr Curtius. The light which would not go out had kept him awake. Canon Rathbone and Dr Curtius had kept him awake, though they were half a mile away across the valley.
‘We have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar,’ he repeated, and then stopped. The idea for his story was coming. He began to see the vague, shadowy outline. The skeleton became clear.
At the end of half an hour Stanton took a new exercise book from his desk and wrote on the back of it The Follower with the date. Then slowly but without erasures, he began the summary.
‘An old scholar searching for manuscripts in the monasteries of Asia Minor comes across some palimpsests of an unusual character. The collector’s fever overpowers him—usually the mildest and most honest of men—and with the help of a monk he acquires the documents by means which others would have undoubtedly described as shady. The monk persuades the scholar to take him back to England, since his help will be invaluable in deciphering the manuscripts. They live together in a remote country village. With extraordinary difficulty they make out the meaning of the palimpsests, which appear to be not fragments of a lost gospel but something very different. The scholar is held fascinated and pursues. The monk, who passes in the district as a Doctor of Divinity, is his constant companion and follower.’
Stanton was pleased with himself. The idea was a good one. It might even be worked up into a long story, but on the whole he felt inclined to keep it short, three or four thousand words perhaps. He didn’t see how it would end, but he wasn’t worried about that. Very likely it would end itself. The main thing was to get the atmosphere right—the seeming knowledge and the unknown fear.
Canon Rathbone, of course, and Dr Curtius had given him the germ of the idea. If he hadn’t woken at two in the morning and seen the light burning in the Old Vicarage, half a mile away across the valley, there would have been no story. ‘And Shakespeare too,’ he said to himself. ‘If I hadn’t found that passage I was looking for, I shouldn’t have got into the right mood.’
Lyn Stanton sat down to lunch with the feeling of a morning lazily and not unsatisfactorily spent. He would do some strenuous digging in the garden in the afternoon, he told himself, and then put in a couple of hours’ work on his novel between tea and supper. The short story could simmer. After a day or two he would have another look at it and see how it was getting on.
But his equanimity was upset by his sister announcing that Mrs Bramley and Miss Newton were coming to tea. He had no particular fault to find with the vicar’s outspoken wife. She was quite in keeping with Winton Parbeloe. But Miss Newton always got on his nerves. It was hard luck having as a neighbour a free-lance journalist with a malicious pen. He disliked her literary gossip, chiefly because he knew that she would not scruple to work up some chance remark of his into a paragraph in some Book-Lovers’ Causerie. Probably she wanted to pump him about his new novel. A dangerous woman who would have to be humoured.
So Stanton took his spade and in his shirt-sleeves worked out his resentment on the stony patch of ground that he was doubletrenching. He saw the visitors arrive soon after half-past three, gave them a quarter of an hour for garnering the first light crop of parochial scandal, and then with a reluctance adequately concealed joined them in the drawing-room. After all Mrs Bramley was quite an authority on roses. Tea had just been served and Stanton was trying to give Miss Newton a noncommittal reply to a question about the significance of a modern poet whose work he particularly disliked, when he heard the garden gate click and saw two figures approaching up the long gravel path.
The first was an old clergyman, clean-shaven, rather down at heel, who walked with a rapid and yet shuffling gait. He was followed by a tall man with a long black beard dressed in an old-fashioned frock-coat.
The bell rang, and a minute later the maid announced Canon Rathbone and Dr Curtius.
‘I’m afraid, Miss Stanton,’ said the canon, when the introductions had been made, ‘that our call is a little irregular. We are strangers to your delightful village, and I have spent so much of my life in out-of-the-way places that I am all too apt to ignore the ordinary rules of etiquette. We keep very much to ourselves at the Old Vicarage, and quite unconsciously I am afraid we frighten our visitors away. But we want to be neighbourly—I assure you we want to be neighbourly.’
The old gentleman was obviously nervous, but Miss Stanton had the gift of putting people at their ease, and distinguished strangers were not too common at Winton Parbeloe.
Mrs Bramley, however, had a grievance to air.
‘I am sorry, Canon Rathbone,’ she said, ‘that we have not had the pleasure of seeing you at church.’
The old man looked up with a start, but it was Dr Curtius who spoke. ‘Asthma,’ he said, ‘de asthma.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Canon Rathbone went on hurriedly. ‘It is a curious thing, a very real misfortune, but I find, I find that the use of incense invariably brings on an attack. I have to be most careful.’
‘And Dr Curtius,’ said the undaunted Mrs Bramley, ‘he suffers from asthma too?’
‘Dr Curtius,’ replied Canon Rathbone, ‘is not a member of the Church of England.’
It was at this point that Hilda Newton changed the conversation. ‘I wish,’ she said, ‘you would tell us something about your discoveries, Canon Rathbone. I know you must have had the most thrilling adventures in the East. We in Winton Parbeloe lead such humdrum lives—foxes are the only things we hunt; you know—that it’s hard for us to imagine the excitement of tracking down some priceless old manuscript.’
Canon Rathbone put down his cup. ‘You are quite right, my dear young lady,’ he said; ‘the fascination is extreme, the fascination is quite remarkable.’ And then to Stanton’s surprise he began to talk. He was no longer the nervous little clergyman, but the enthusiast carried away by his subject. He spoke of the monasteries of Greece and Asia Minor and Sinai, of libraries ransacked again and again by scholars, of piles of rubbish where even yet documents of extraordinary value could be found, of monks who seemed simple and ignorant but were often scholarly and astute, knowing quite well the worth of what they kept in secret hiding-places. ‘Dr Curtius could tell you more about that,’ he said. ‘His first-hand experience is far greater than mine, but unfortunately he speaks little English.’
‘Dat ees so,’ said Dr Curtius, breaking silence for the second time. ‘
Greek, yes, Latin, yes, Armenian, yes, Syriac, and Aramaic, but Engleesh hardly no.’
‘The secret languages of dead mysteries,’ said Miss Newton, ‘with words for things and experiences that mean nothing to us poor humdrum mortals. How I envy you!’
‘What’s that? What’s that?’ asked Canon Rathbone nervously. ‘As I was saying, the task of deciphering these palimpsests is extraordinarily difficult. You must remember that—’
But Stanton’s eyes were fixed on Dr Curtius. He had eaten nothing and was now slowly stirring his tea. Why was it that the motion looked so clumsy? Because he was stirring it from left to right, of course, and because all the time he was watching like a great black cat the bird-like little figure of his friend on the sofa. What a horribly luxuriant beard the man has, thought Stanton, and then he found himself trying to see if he had a tonsure, only to avert his eyes hurriedly when Dr Curtius looked up into his face with an enigmatic smile.
Canon Rathbone was still talking.
‘ . . . they were of course difficult to procure, extremely difficult to procure, and to tell you the truth we had considerable trouble in getting them out of the country. The task of deciphering them is laborious. We burn the midnight oil, Miss Stanton, we burn the midnight oil, and my eyesight is, unfortunately, not as good as it was, but Dr Curtius is always ready to act as my spectacles.’
‘It all sounds perfectly thrilling,’ said Miss Newton. ‘And when are the results to be published?’
‘I am afraid,’ said Canon Rathbone, ‘I am afraid it may be rather difficult to find a publisher.’
The Double Eye Page 27