“Yes,” I said.
“Scott won’t believe it. He thinks Dad brought the whole mess on himself. Scott’s very mixed up about the whole thing.”
“How does he get on with Cornelius?”
“Real well. Scott likes Cornelius. Everyone likes Cornelius, everyone thinks he’s wonderful, especially Emily, which is why I can’t talk to her about any of this,” said Tony, speaking very fast, “but I can’t live there anymore, I wish we’d come to live with you after Dad left Emily, that was a terrible thing Scott and I did to Dad—”
“Tony, you mustn’t feel guilty about that. You were so young and it was such a difficult situation and Steve realized what you were going through. You mustn’t think he didn’t understand.”
“I wish Dad were alive so that I could explain.”
“He would have been very glad that you wanted to live here, and I’m very glad, too. Would you like me to write to Emily for you?”
But he said he didn’t mind writing to Emily; he just didn’t want to have anything more to do with Cornelius.
For some time I tried not to think about Cornelius, but as the war dragged inactively into the early days of 1940 I found I was at last able to revive my memories of the recent past. In February when I had lunch with Geoffrey in Norwich I even found I could reminisce about Steve without wanting to cry.
“I’m not going to tell you you’ll remarry one day,” said Geoffrey sensibly, “because that sort of remark used to make me so angry after Jill died. But I’m glad things are going better for you, Dinah.”
“I keep thinking I ought to do some war work.” We began to speculate about the future. Geoffrey was past forty, and although he had volunteered for service the Army had taken little notice of him. He thought it likely that he would be consigned to a desk in the Army’s legal department, but meanwhile he was still working in Norwich, where he was now the senior partner of his firm.
“I’d much rather be in uniform,” he said, “because then I might have the illusion that something was going on. This is a damned odd sort of war with nothing happening.”
Yet when the pace quickened and the disasters began to overtake the British Army on the Continent my nervous anticipation increased. I felt that some unimaginable fate was gliding towards me, and to stifle my fear of the future I once more shrank back into the past. I played all my old Noel Coward records, read ream after ream of poetry, and one evening in an orgy of nostalgia I sorted out my photographs of Paul and Steve and selected the best to decorate my upstairs sitting room. I already kept my favorite pictures of the children there for the room had long been my personal retreat, and now I crammed it with souvenirs so that whenever I crossed the threshold I was plunged back into my best memories of the past.
Alan noticed the change as soon as he returned from Winchester for the Easter holidays. Tony had joined him there, and they were both planning to go up to Oxford later, Alan on a scholarship and Tony using the money he had inherited from Steve. Both of them talked of enlisting on their eighteenth birthdays, but Alan was not eighteen until the March of 1941, and I insisted that he should begin his career at Oxford even if he did not intend to finish it. I felt sick with worry whenever I thought of his future, and was thankful Edred was only ten. He was still at prep school in Sussex, and reluctantly I had arranged for Elfrida to be a weekly boarder at her school in Norwich. Transport was becoming increasingly difficult, and Mallingham was too far from Norwich to make daily journeys practical. George was already at the village school. He was happy there, and his Norfolk accent, which he had immediately acquired, amused us, but I kept wishing he too could have gone to school in Norwich. However, I told myself it was good for George to mix with working-class children, while prep school would eventually iron out the accent.
“Aren’t you being rather snobbish, Mother?” inquired Alan as he glanced curiously at my redecorated sitting room and listened to me sighing over the problems of educating George.
“Yes, darling, I’m a dreadful snob. I think I always was, but now I’m not ashamed to admit it.”
“Victorian too,” said Alan. “Nobody decks out a room like this nowadays.”
“Yes, hopelessly Victorian. I’m all the things I’ve always tried not to be—with one, exception. I’m no longer a hypocrite.”
Alan smiled guardedly but did not comment. I was glad when all the children were home for Easter because it took my mind off my nebulous uneasiness, but eventually the twins left and it was time for Alan and Tony to return to Winchester.
The night before they were due to leave I awoke abruptly. One moment I was lying inert in bed and the next I was sitting bolt upright in the dark. There was nothing to hear, but again I was conscious of some indefinable force looming larger on the horizon, and on an impulse I slipped out of bed, pulled on my dressing gown and tiptoed downstairs. I thought I would head for the kitchens to make myself some tea, but at the bottom of the stairs I paused. I was in the hall. I had not switched on any lights. Insomnia had troubled me intermittently since Steve’s death, and I had grown accustomed to using a torch for my nocturnal prowls. It saved fuel, avoided disturbing people and did not endanger the blackout.
Suddenly I felt convinced I was not alone. I was aware of a presence at the far end of the hall, but I wasn’t frightened, only excited. Mallingham was part of me and if there were ghosts I doubted that they would be hostile. Swinging my torch’s beam swiftly across the hall, I saw movement and stepped forward. The shadow moved again. I had a glimpse of pale skin, brilliant dark eyes and a graceful turn of the body as he looked back at me.
“Paul?” I said.
He was transfixed.
There was a silence. We were some way apart, perhaps twenty feet. What unnerved me most of all was how much I wanted him to come back from the dead.
I laughed. “Sorry, Alan!” I called ruefully. “Did I startle you?”
“You did a bit. Are you all right, Mother?”
“Yes, I was going to make some tea. Do you want some?”
“All right—thanks. I’ll just unplug my wireless,” he added unexpectedly. “It needs a new flex and it gets overheated if it’s left on too long. When I woke up I thought for an awful moment I hadn’t turned it off properly earlier, so I came creeping down with my torch. Of course I switched the torch off when I heard you. I thought you were an enemy agent. What a relief to find it was just you playing Lady Macbeth!”
I laughed again, and presently he joined me in the kitchens as I made the tea.
“I keep feeling most unpleasantly nervous,” I said when I sat down opposite him at the table. “That’s why when I saw you tonight and thought—don’t laugh—that you were Paul’s ghost, I was enormously relieved. It was as if the disaster I’d been expecting wasn’t gruesome after all but magical and exciting. Maybe Steve’s death has finally unhinged me—or perhaps my eccentric inheritance is catching up with me at last!”
“My dear mother,” said Alan, “you’re the sanest person I know. It’s the world that’s mad. Milk?”
“Thanks.”
We sipped our tea. Suddenly he said, “What was he really like? And don’t for God’s sake just say he was wonderful, because that’s not what I want to hear.”
“Paul?” I said. “Paul was a romantic and idealist who compromised every romantic ideal he possessed in order to pursue his ambition and his revenge.”
“Curious,” said Alan. “I pictured him as many things but never as Faust. Did you really love him? Now, be truthful, Mother—”
“I loved him as much as I was capable of loving anyone at that particular time, but probably I would have loved him better if I’d been older. Our ages were all wrong, you know. He always used to say that we’d missed each other in time.”
We went on sipping our tea. Finally Alan said, “Tell me everything—all of it,” and I talked till dawn.
Somewhere in the middle of our umpteenth cup of tea Alan said, “But what makes you so sure that Cornelius hasn’t ha
d the wretched Mallingham conveyance all the time?”
We looked at each other steadily across the table.
“Because I can’t believe,” I said, “that Cornelius would have found that deed and not taken immediate action.”
There was a silence. At last Alan said in a mild cautious voice, “Mother, do you remember that nice little kitten Chalky I had when I was small? And do you remember what a nasty cat he became when he grew up? He liked to catch birds and play with them for a long time before he finally administered the coup de grâce.”
There was another silence, heavier than the one before, and I slowly began to feel sick. Pushing away my cup, I left the table and moved rapidly into the scullery to the sink.
“Mother, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, Alan.” The nausea was already passing. “Quite all right. I’m glad you reminded me of Chalky.” I stopped gripping the edge of the sink and turned to face him. “Darling, I think we’d better try to snatch a little sleep now before breakfast. You’ve got such a long journey ahead of you today and I don’t want you to arrive at Winchester in a state of exhaustion.”
He went to bed. I returned to my room but did not sleep. Later that morning I took the boys to catch their train.
“Don’t forget to ask Mr. Grimsby to replace the flex on my wireless,” said Alan, kissing me at the station, and I promised to bring the mended wireless with me when I visited Winchester at half term.
I kissed Tony, wished both of them a safe journey and stepped back as the guard blew his whistle.
“Look after yourself, Mother!” Alan called as the train drew out of the station.
I went home and for a while could think only of Chalky, but gradually the Germans ousted even my fear of Cornelius from my mind. The British Army was collapsing in France, and in a mighty pincer movement the Germans swung around to drive the British into the sea.
I listened to Churchill. We all listened to Churchill, and Churchill’s voice was the voice of nine hundred unconquered years stretching behind us into infinity in our tortured corridor of time.
On Saturday the twenty-fifth of May I scraped up the remains of my petrol ration and drove into Norwich to meet Geoffrey for lunch; I could no longer bear to wait at Mallingham. When I returned home I still felt restless. George had gone out to tea with a friend. The house was empty and should have been peaceful, but soon all my familiar uneasiness had returned and I went outside again to sail the dinghy across Mallingham Broad. It was a fine afternoon, perfect for sailing, the wind steady but not strong, the sun sparkling on the clear water, the birds skimming over the reeds. I tacked all the way to the dike and even wondered whether to go on toward Horsey Mere, but some instinct made me turn the tiller and head for home.
I saw him when I was halfway across the Broad. He was sitting on the terrace. He was waiting for me, just as I had long been waiting for him, and suddenly all I knew was not fear but relief that our waiting should at last be at an end.
He was dressed immaculately in black. The wind was whipping at my hair and I felt so exhilarated that I tacked more daringly than ever across the water and cut my corners so fine that the little dinghy seemed to dance in triumph across the shining surface of the Broad.
Reaching the jetty, I tied up the dinghy and paused to watch a gull soar across the sky. I was wearing a pair of shabby slacks, a Fair Isle jersey and no makeup, but I needed no armor, for I was on my own ground and ahead of me across the lawn was Mallingham, the source of all my triumphs and tragedies, over six hundred years of times past, unspoiled, untouched, shimmering in the brilliance of that late-spring afternoon.
I tossed back my hair, straightened my back and faced the terrace.
For a long moment we were both motionless, and then I began to walk across the lawn towards him.
He stood up politely and took off his hat. The sun shone on his fair hair and burnished it to a gleaming gold.
I never hesitated, and as I went on walking uphill across the lawn I continued to look past him to the walls my ancestors had built when America had been a wilderness. At the corner of the terrace I mounted the six steps and was level with him. We were exactly the same height, and this bizarre likeness seemed to symbolize not only our equality but our shared inheritance from Paul, who had brought us face to face at last fourteen years after his death.
I was still. Now it was he who moved, and as he stepped forward I saw the lost innocence in his romantic, poet’s face, the shadow of a corruption which only the most frightening power can buy.
“Miss Slade,” he said. It was not a slip but a deliberate error, and I knew that he had always thought of me as Miss Slade just as I had always thought of him by his first name.
We had known each other for such a long, long time.
“Welcome to Mallingham, Cornelius!” I exclaimed in my most sociable voice. “Do come in. May I offer you some tea?”
He gave me an enchantingly boyish smile. “Why, thank you!” he said in a voice rendered attractive by the purest of American accents. “That would be very nice.”
The preliminary skirmishes ended abruptly. We went indoors and our last battle began.
Seven
I
WE WERE FASCINATED WITH each other. After years of speculation the desire to compare the fruits of our imagination with reality was irresistible and we both succumbed to the temptation.
Finally Cornelius laughed. “Perhaps we should spend the first five minutes putting each other under a microscope!” he commented, and even that remark illustrated the gulf between my mental picture of him and the man he really was. No one had ever told me Cornelius possessed any quality remotely resembling a sense of humor.
None of his stone-faced photographs had done him justice. They had caught the perfection of his exquisitely molded cheekbones, the unbelievable shade of his hair and the splendor of his black-lashed gray eyes, but not the spark of his wry intelligence and his utter masculinity. Men might once have thought Cornelius effeminate, but I was sure no woman had ever made such a mistake. It was true he was short, but he was perfectly proportioned. If he had been a Hollywood actor they would simply have given him a petite leading lady, and every woman in the audience would have sworn he was at least six feet tall.
Most unnerving of all, there was a slight but unmistakable family likeness between him and his great-uncle. I recognized not only Paul’s straight handsome mouth but the mysterious air of confidence in his movements, the grace which hinted at an athlete’s muscular coordination. Like his friend Sam Keller he was the most attractive man.
I suddenly remembered I was wearing slacks and a dirty pullover and probably reminded him of the Wreck of the Hesperus.
“We’ll have tea upstairs in my sitting room,” I said. “Excuse me while I speak to my housekeeper.” And I left him in the hall while I went to the kitchens in search of Mrs. Oakes.
Later when I showed him into the sitting room I said, “Excuse me again, but I never receive visitors while I’m wearing trousers, so I shall now go and change. I won’t be more than five minutes. Do sit down.”
I left him with my photographs of Paul, Steve and the children just as I’d planned and after escaping to my room I leaned back against the door panels until I was breathing more evenly. I felt frightened for the first time since I had seen him, but I steadied myself and began to change. I used only the minimum of makeup, but I brushed my hair up into a knot to make me look efficient and put on the traditional businesswoman’s uniform, my classic smooth black tailor-made coat and skirt with the white silk blouse and the row of pearls. Without thinking I stepped into a pair of high-heeled shoes, but fortunately I remembered his height and took them off. There was no point in annoying him unnecessarily. I was just searching in my wardrobe for a pair of flat shoes when I heard Mrs. Oakes enter the sitting room next door with the tray.
Emerging two minutes later, I found that Mrs. Oakes had gone, the silver teapot was standing stoutly on the table and Cornelius was
looking at my best photograph of Elfrida.
“Your daughter’s pretty,” he said. “I guess she must be about the same age as my little girl.”
“Elfrida is a little older than Vicky, I think.” I sat down to pour the tea and was aware of his glance flickering without expression over the pictures of my sons. He already had his back to the photographs of Paul and Steve.
“Did you come to see Tony?” I asked as he sat down opposite me on the sofa.
“No, I came to see you,” he said with a smile. “I must apologize for not calling first, but I felt I knew you well enough to stop by unannounced. How’s Tony getting along?”
“Very well. I thought Emily might have asked you to persuade him to return to America.”
“She did, but I have no intention of doing anything of the kind. I’m delighted if Tony’s happy here. He certainly wasn’t happy in the States, and to be honest I found him a great trial. It was a pity. I did my best, but nothing worked.”
“Rather ironic, isn’t it,” I said, handing him his cup, “that you should find yourself looking after Steve’s children.”
“Well, Scott’s no problem. And as for the little girls …” He shrugged to indicate not indifference but equanimity. “Since I was responsible for Emily’s marriage to Steve it’s only right that I should now assume responsibility for the results. Though the mills of God grind slowly,’ ” added Cornelius surprisingly, “ ‘they grind exceeding small. Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all.’ ”
“Ah yes,” I said, “the Sinngedichte of Friedrich von Logau. Such a heavy-handed translation by Longfellow, I’ve always thought. How long have you been in England?”
“Twenty-four hours. I arrived yesterday after a long, uncomfortable and devious passage from Germany, where I had to go to sever some connections which Sam had unwisely made when he was in Europe last year.” He sighed. “I knew I’d hate it and I did. I can’t speak German, no one wanted to speak English and I was terrified everyone would think I was a spy and march me off to a concentration camp. It was all very tiring—and I couldn’t even get fresh orange juice for breakfast,” he added crossly as an afterthought.
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