In the Time of Greenbloom

by Gabriel Fielding

  They could think of no questions to frame and he must have sensed the deadness of their disappointment and the vitality of their fear, for he went back to the doormat and started to wipe his shoes thoroughly on its wet surface.

  “Thought it would be as well,” he went on, “to check with the Police so I ran down to the Station and had a word with Sanders; he was most helpful and by this time he’ll have telephoned his headquarters at Scarborough and within half an hour some sort of a description of the car and its occupants will have been circulated throughout the whole of the North Riding. In addition, of course, they’ll put out every available man in this area, even those who are off duty, and patrol all main roads. All we’ve got to do is to keep calm and behave as normally as possible.”

  Still they did not speak. Mrs Blount in her grey dress watched him hungrily from the other side of the table; only her ineffectual hands with their jewelled rings moved against the stillness of her hips. John watched them writhing like the white fingers of a squid in a fisherman’s net. Her lips were slightly parted and as pale as Victoria’s. She seemed to have forgotten herself entirely in the desperation of her desire to hear him say something more; for the first time since he had known her she was quite careless of how she might be looking. The remains of tears and mascara sullied her pale cheeks, her carefully tended hair had fallen into disorder on her temples there were one or two drops of milky tea on the bodice of her dress and in her eyes was the same cold hostility which had first appeared in the bathroom half an hour earlier.

  George Harkess himself must have observed these things too. Rubbing his feet on the mat he glanced across at her twice, the first time warily, the second time with hot anger.

  “Well for God’s sake don’t stand there like that. I can’t tell you more than there is to tell, can I? It’s not the end of the world. They’ll be somewhere in this area and with all the resources of the Police force, the modern Police force, they’re bound to be found within a short time.”

  Mrs Blount watched him coldly for a moment, her eyebrows manifested surprise that he should dare to speak to her like that in front of Annie. When she spoke it was with an icy care that atoned for all the imperfections of her appearance.

  “It is just as well you waited Annie,” she said. “I was quite sure Mr Harkess would be back in a few moments, and I’m glad that you’ve been saved that long trip on your bicycle in the rain.”

  “Ah, Annie,” said George Harkess walking over to her with great joviality. “Didn’t notice you, me dear! you’re back very early aren’t you? Didn’t expect to see you this side of tomorrow morning. What happened? Did your boy friend give you the slip again?”

  Annie looked quickly at Mrs Blount and then raised her eyes boldly. “He did, Mr Harkess; but I’m not wurried now about that with all this here that’s happened sin’ I got out.”

  “No, no, of course not; but bless you! things aren’t that bad, there’s no need for you to lose your head, your good North Country common-sense, over it. Bit different for Mrs Blount, we can all see that, but it won’t help anyone if you’re going to start having the vapours as well.”

  “I know that Mr Harkess, but it would tak’ a cool yed not to be bothered by a thing like this. You see—”

  “Annie saw them,” said John.

  George Harkess frowned at him and then turned to Annie again quickly.

  “You did? When? Where were they?”

  “She saw them at ten past seven going very fast up the Stump Cross road towards the farm when she was waiting for the bus—for her friend to get off the bus.”

  “Shut up Boy! Don’t speak until you’re spoken to.” His light brown eyes transfixed Annie again. “Well?”

  “It was joost as maister John said. I didn’t know anything was oop until I got back Mr Harkess.”

  From the other side of the kitchen-table Mrs Blount interrupted them. She drew in a long breath so audibly that even the cat abandoned his immobility and glanced up at her with wide yellow eyes.

  “She waved! she waved to her, George; the poor little thing waved at her as they passed. Annie saw her, she told us when she first came in that Victoria was frightened to death and that she’d waved to her through the window as she was driven past.” She sat down suddenly on the rocking-chair and covered her face with her hands. George Harkess hurried over to her, the anger left his face, his mouth sagged into its usual planes; he patted her back and then, with his arm round her, lifted her to her feet.

  “I think we must have a discussion in the dining-room,” he said. “There’s not much time left, my dear; I expect the Sergeant here at any moment. Did you do what I told you and have a cup of tea in my absence?”

  Mrs Blount walked easily out of his embrace and took a handkerchief from the cuff of her long sleeve; she wiped her nose daintily. “I think so,” she said.

  George Harkess turned to John. “Did you have a cup of tea?” he asked.

  “Yes sir, yes Mr Harkess, but I don’t think Mrs Blount drank all hers.”

  They watched her as she walked out into the hall.

  “Well this time she’s going to have a strong one, and something in it.”

  He turned to Annie. “Make a fresh pot of tea, Annie, and fetch the decanters from my study. Don’t bother with the syphon.” He followed Mrs Blount to the dining-room, and in a few moments John joined them as they sat there at the supper-table.

  Annie brought in the tea and the whisky and George Harkess helped himself to a half-tumblerful and then stocked up his plate at the sideboard.

  Returning to the table he pushed the potatoes off his plate on to the white cloth. “These potatoes are overcooked,” he said, and raising his glass, he looked over its rim at Mrs Blount and then, distastefully, at John before draining it. He filled his mouth with a large slice of ham and chicken and began to chew automatically his eyes directed at a space somewhere just in front of John.

  “You there,” he said. “When the police come, you’re to say nothing about the—trouble upstairs. Have you got that quite clear?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Good! We shan’t want you here much longer tonight. I don’t imagine there’s much more you can usefully contribute at this stage, though you’ll almost certainly be wanted in the morning.” He chewed for a moment longer. “I only want to be quite certain before you leave this room that you understand what questions it will be necessary for you to answer, and to be sure that you will not start volunteering useless information as you did in the kitchen a few minutes ago.”

  At the far end of the table his moustache twitched and he darted a glance at Mrs Blount, grey and silent as a cloud as she sat beside him. His hand slid across the table to the decanter as his eyes resumed their duty at the empty space before him. “You’re to say, if you are asked, that Mrs Blount and I were talking business in the study and that being possessed of some manners, you didn’t like to—that on your return from this damned outing you decided not to interrupt us, but to wait until we had done.”

  John said nothing. He picked a piece of egg out of his salad with the sharp prongs of his fork and studied it carefully. Another ‘Toad’, he thought; it would make no difference even to Mrs Blount or to Kay still at the Abbey, so many miles away, if they were changed round. Neither of them would ever know the difference as long as you remembered to change their clothes as well.

  “D’you see? Answer me Boy!”

  Mrs. Blount stirred, she plucked at her cup of tea. “George! I don’t think I can stand it if you are going to go on shouting at him. My nerves simply will not stand the strain.”

  “I’m not shouting at him,” he roared. “I’m simply demanding an answer to my question.”

  Mrs Blount’s cup clattered into its saucer; with her hand to her ear she leaned away from him like a tree in the wind and he lowered his voice.

  “I’m only thinking of you, Enid. I simply cannot understand your behaviour over this wretched business. You seem to have thrown all your nor
mal horse-sense to the winds. Don’t you realise that if this young fool starts behaving as hysterically as he did in the bathroom before I went out, we’re going to have a first-rate scandal in the village? It doesn’t matter to me, but there are certain things that are sacrosanct, and I’m damned if at this stage in my life I’m going to be the means of ruining a woman’s reputation. We’ve got to make sure that this boy doesn’t refer to the—situation upstairs. It’s of no possible connection with the object of Sergeant Sanders’s visit this evening, and it’s just the sort of thing that will spread like wildfire through the county if it once gets out.”

  Mrs Blount pushed her chair back from the table. “You may find my behaviour difficult to understand,” she said, “but yours, your utter selfishness, your brutality and cowardice—Good Heavens! Do you really think that any mother could care about her reputation at a moment like this. If it was only your behaviour that bewildered me I should not feel as I do; but it’s this new you, this complete change in someone I had wanted to respect and of whom I hoped I was beginning to be fond, it’s this that I don’t understand. You’re not interested in me or my reputation; you’re not even interested in Victoria, she doesn’t enter into your considerations at all. You’re only interested in yourself and the opinion of the village, and I was utterly foolish ever to think that at your age and in your circumstances you could possibly care for me in my own right.” She stood up, “But it doesn’t matter any longer; if Victoria isn’t found tonight, if I don’t see her again soon and take her in my arms and kiss her sweet forehead, nothing that you or anyone else can do to me will ever matter again. You can do what you like, George! bully the boy, lie to the Police, make love to the maid; whatever happens, whatever this terrible night may bring, you have ended something for me which had never really begun—”

  With dreadful care, with no sob or sigh, she walked over the thick carpet to the door, opened it and went out into the hall. They heard the sound of the clock from its place by the stairs before the door closed; they heard no other sound as she passed from them and went silently up to her bedroom.

  George Harkess put down his knife and fork. “You can forget all that,” he said. “You can place it with certain other incidents which have happened this evening and which you should never have witnessed.”

  “You can’t forget things that have happened,” said John; “not things like this, and nobody can make you. If you can’t make yourself forget them how can you expect anyone else to stop you remembering them?”

  “I’m warning you that on this occasion you will forget certain things.”

  He got up, towering darkly over the carved back of his chair. “I think it’s about time you realised, Blaydon, young as you are, that but for your presence here this situation would never have arisen. In the first place you were not wanted at Nettlebed. I have no connection with either you or your family, and had it not been for the respect and affection I owe to Victoria’s mother, you would never have been invited. As it is, by your influence over the girl and your persistence in making your own arrangements, you are directly responsible for the inconvenience to which my entire household has been subjected. Therefore, you had better give me your assurance, and give it quickly, that you will say nothing to the Police about my personal relationship with Mrs Blount.”

  John looked up. “What do you want me to say, sir?”

  “I’ve already told you that you are to tell them, if you are asked, that on your return to the house you were under the impression that Mrs Blount and I were talking business in the study and that consequently you thought it would be impolite to disturb us.”

  “Don’t you think, sir, that they might decide that it was rather careless of me to waste half an hour when I was so worried, just because I thought that you and Mrs Blount were talking?”

  “It’s not your business to speculate about the probable or improbable decisions of the police. It’s your business to do what you’re told, by whom you’re told, like any other decent schoolboy.”

  The voice stopped speaking, and in the quietness of his own mind John sensed the creation of a decision which he was powerless to alter. He had been uncertain of what he would do or say many times during that day, had been foolhardy when he decided to insist on having tea in the cave, timid when the hiker arrived for tea, and too slow to take and post the letter; but now, only a few feet away from the anger and insistence that reached him from the body of George Harkess, he was quite certain that he would give himself his own time and his own right to act as he wished over the question of the Police.

  “I’m not going to have them thinking I’m a fool, sir,” he said quietly, “not for anyone. If I’m going to be a fool now, and be laughed at and lied about, I’ll be a fool for ever. I’ll still be a fool when I’m as old as you are, so I won’t tell them a story that only a fool would tell and only a fool would believe.”

  George Harkess watched him ruminatively for a moment.

  “Very well then, just what do you propose to tell them?”

  “I’m not sure. How can I be sure until I see what happens? This afternoon I was quite sure what was going to happen when we went out to the caves; and it all did happen, but other things happened as well that I had never expected; so how can I be sure what’s going to happen when the Police come? When I went upstairs to the bedroom with the dogs I thought I’d find a thief or a burglar up there and that I’d been very clever to do what I did do; but when I opened the door and put on the light there was no thief and no burglar; and I wish there had been, because then whatever the dogs had done and whatever the man had done, it would have been right, and I would have been right. But you showed me that I was wrong; although you’re a man and I’m only a boy you smashed my shoulder in and lost your temper in the bathroom; and all because I thought, before I found you, that you were a criminal doing something wrong in somebody else’s house. So you see I’m not going to decide for certain what I’m going to say to the Police until I know what they’re going to say to me.”

  George Harkess left his chair. He strode over to him and took him by his bruised shoulder. “I think you had better realise that you are not going to leave this room until you have told me what you are going to tell them,” he said.

  “If you’ll take your hand off my shoulder I’ll tell you what I might say—but that’s all.”

  George Harkess grunted behind him, the hand was removed and John stood up.

  “I might say that when I got in I found the house empty, that there was no sign of anybody, and that I was alone for nearly half an hour because you and Mrs Blount were out giving the dogs a run in the home-field.”

  “I see. Yes, that is fairly sensible; and in any case there’s no time for further discussion now; mind you stick to it.”

  He stood there for a few moments longer biting his upper lip with his teeth and then he turned and walked out into the hall. Two minutes later John heard him knocking at the door of Mrs Blount’s bedroom; he knocked three times and again three times but no voice answered him and at last he came heavily downstairs and going into the study closed the door behind him.

  The house did not sleep that night; all the night long throughout the throng of the dark minutes and their hours it remained as restless as he was himself, the very fabric of its walls and floors creaking and stirring minutely like the joints and tissues of a person who wills sleep so intensively that in the very smallness of his movements he refuses to acknowledge his wakefulness and attention. Twice he heard footsteps on the landing outside his door, the sound of water running in the bathroom and the groaning of concealed pipes in the wall; and once, the high despairing sobs of Mrs Blount as they reached across the landing when she opened her door to move out upon some errand of her sleeplessness.

  He thought of Sergeant Sanders, of his quick questions and air of knowing just what he, John, had been going to say before he had actually said it. He had liked him; his clean blueness the fresh blood in his cheeks and the easy regard of hi
s grey eyes. He wished that he was out there now standing somewhere sentinel in the hall or on the landing, keeping everything in order, commanding silence and sleep from the house, inspiring the running rats and mice with so much terror that they would obediently slink back to their holes in walls and wainscots.

  Sergeant Sanders had been confident; and in the short time he had stayed talking to them all, his confidence had so fortified them that their suggestions of search-parties by torchlight and vague journeyings by car had begun to seem not only impracticable, but unnecessary too. Standing at his ease in front of the study mantelpiece, his shoulders braced and square against the looking-glass, he had explained to them that the police were even then converging on the area from all sides and that if Victoria and her companion were anywhere within it they would certainly be picked up by the early morning at the very latest. Then after closing his notebook and drinking a very small glass of whisky with George Harkess, he had left as suddenly and briskly as he had come.

  No one, thought John, could say that Sergeant Sanders had seemed to be enjoying his enquiry. He had not smiled once with his eyes in the half-hour he had stayed, or shown any other sign of pleasure, but he had seemed to be impersonally ‘busy’ about it in a manner that suggested it was not at all real to him in the sense that it was real to John. He had even felt that the very act of describing the hiker to Sergeant Sanders had made him sound progressively less real despite the fact that every particular he had given had been true. Somehow it had not been enough to say that the man had fair hair a fresh complexion and a Sunbeam car, that he had smiled often, talked with a slightly ‘brown cow’ accent, and worn a wrist-watch with a white strap. These insufficient words with which he had attempted to clothe and make real the man he had seen, in order that the Sergeant might himself see him through the borrowed senses, had seemed to stylise him into a totally different less solid and therefore less ominous person; so that by the time he had finished answering the questions he had been asked, he had begun to feel that in some extraordinary way he had cheated the Sergeant of the truth; even that he had confused him by equipping the man he was describing with some secret part of himself.