This room might once have slept several servants when Delaye was in its heyday, money easier and wages lower. But when ‘Picocke’ died in it, if he had, what was the state of current accommodation? Had the man died on a pallet among his fellow servants? Or was the great bed already relegated to the top storey and he alone at the end? Was it conceivable (a settle in the kitchen!) that if the bed were already here such a person would have been allowed to go near it, let alone use it? And Angela must start searching at once.
Anything in those cupboards would probably be known; she expected little of them, though it was true that scattered in holes and comers all about the house were presses and chests that even her mother had never got to the bottom of. Anything found by Angela in this bare and secretless room must be of scant interest to the uninitiate; mother herself had merely damned a crossbow when it hit her by falling out of a recess though the thing was probably a museum piece.
It was with little surprise and no excitement at all that Angela, wrenching it from a corner of a built-in cupboard where it had stuck, bore into the light a dusty stave, its metal cap browned and crisp with rust.
Well? . . . They carried them, those running footmen, and there was the container for the hardboiled egg to sustain him on his run. It opened on a hinge, the snap of which was pointed. On impulse, Angela polished it with her handkerchief and took it to the window, carefully inserting it, letter by letter, to the traced inscription. The tip fitted the faint writing.
He won’t never eat that, Miss Angela.
Her own wrist bleeding from the dig of an angry beak.
And then she guessed.
A suspicion so monstrous, so insane shot into Angela’s mind that she clung to one of the great posts of the bed, a white cheek pressed against the coolness of the wood.
The bird on a moonlit lawn, signalling, hoping for death to the owners of Delaye.
One body for a noble,
Run, running runner, run.
‘Oh God, it couldn’t be that. You wouldn’t let it be that,’ prayed Angela, like a child.
2
Her thoughts scurried like trapped animals. It was some time before she realized that the fact that she hadn’t run away from the shock of a dim, groping instinct confirmed might mean a mutual relenting between herself and the room. She felt only that already it was less alien through her own, brief presence there: here was a panel she had touched, there an object she and no other had displaced . . . a species of what in happy, normal circumstances people called ‘housewarming’, meaning the merging of their personalities, with, the impression of their wills upon, that which is contained within four walls.
And there was Sue. Also contributing her share towards the humanizing of the room. Angela took it for granted that ‘tidying up’ there was a part of the girl’s duties, thought it pathetic, measured by the yardstick of her own sensations, that she should be under a routine compulsion to go in and out. . . .
Was one rather mad? There were degrees of insanity, of course, from those who raved under restraint to people like Nursie, no harm to anyone, still relishing life in their gradual, general loss of grip. ‘Perfectly sane on every subject but one,’ people said of other types of subnormality. Was Angela of their number? Could anyone in the whole house be sounded about this personal trouble? She thought not. The family knew her too well by now for theories which might enlighten. But to someone she must go.
Sue was ruled out even about the matter-in-chief. She wouldn’t understand — small blame to her! and her response to Angela’s surmises might be one of many and all unpleasant or inimical to domestic peace. Of that whole household there was no Roundelay with all the necessary qualities to face up to this affair. Evelyn would give love and patience and humour invalidated by maternal anxiety; father would give affection and worried, cautious, kid-gloved incredulity, and Margaret invaluable common sense which shoo’d away your bogeys without glancing at them and seeing them for what they were. You must know before you can fight, or heal. And this wasn’t a fight.
Like a rap on the knuckles a name clicked into her brain.
Basil Winchcombe.
Of what help he could be Angela had no idea: her impulse to him was as irrational as instinctive. With the name came also a change of mood, and she looked the room over once more as her eyes filled.
‘You poor thing. Oh, you poor thing!’
There might be time to reach the village and return before tea. Mother and aunt Sapphy would be late, they had thought.
But, running downstairs, the sound of voices in the drive told her that she was later still. Time had gone quickly, in that room. On the second landing she peered from the window; mother and aunt Sapphy were already back from Norminster and there seemed to be a crowd by the front steps: mother was offering tea to a man Angela failed to identify, doing it in her dinnerparty voice that meant she was bored and tired and civil to the last! Her daughter sympathetically hoped he would refuse even one cup, but he wasn’t doing anything but gape, and Angela’s eyes followed the direction of his own as Joe Dale scudded into view, the peacock in his wake.
Leaning against a long shutter, Angela, unaware of the sound of the tea-gong far below, unhappily pondered the manifestation.
3
The Reverend Basil Winchcombe was in the parlour of his cottage lodgings poring over an album of old theatrical postcards when, the following afternoon, Miss Angela Roundelay was shown in. He closed the book with a smack.
‘How very pleasant this is, and what a pretty creature Gabrielle Ray was! I was maddened with boredom: too early for tea, too soon to begin my sermon for next Sunday, not due to guard my bridge for another twenty-four hours and all the village obstinately stainless, for the moment, except for the infant evacuees’ language. Sit there. The other chair has springs that play Debussy’s Danses Sacrées et Profanes when you sit in it. D’you remember Maud Allan at the Palace — no, of course you weren’t born then.’
But the girl’s manner and looks worried him. Unless this visit were a message from her mother?
‘Thank you. Mr. Winchcombe, I don’t know quite why I’ve come here. I felt somehow that you were the only person who could help.’
The stage, thought Winchcombe, might be and indeed was going to the dogs but an apprenticeship to it had its uses, one of which was a command of the poker face. This evidently wasn’t being a message from Evelyn Roundelay, and if it were a trouble with which she couldn’t cope . . . and his own appalling habit of downright comment might upset some apple-cart with the best intentions in the world. He temporized. ‘One moment. Are you quite certain that I’m the right person?’
‘Yes.’ She thought a second or two and repeated ‘Yes. Quite certain.’
‘I want to be sure because I’m not very good at compromise or gilded pills, you know; it’s not exactly tactlessness so much as not remembering that the truth unvarnished isn’t always the helpful thing. I tell people what in their place I should want to be told myself.’
‘That’s what I want. People shelter one so.’ She was, he noted, too loyal to say ‘families’.
‘Yes, and isn’t it curiously difficult to say one’s piece to them! I was enormously fond of my father but went to pieces whenever I preached and he was in front. I hated it, for some reason. Had to tell him. He thought it “unkind” of me. Ye gods! how one’s nearest and dearest can misunderstand one.’ He was secretly watchful of the lessening of tension in the young face opposite him. ‘That feeling against preaching before my father was rather in the same class as kissing the one woman in the world in the middle of a sherry party: as far as I’m concerned it just can’t be done. A certain degree of lack of intimacy between the parties is essential to any good confidence. That, I take it, is how the confessional came into being, a kind of legalized air-raid shelter for the reserved.’ He smiled at Angela. ‘You and I know each other quite nice and badly enough to make a go of it, so suppose you begin, if I’d only leave off talking!’
Sh
e was going through all the tricks of stage-fright, first night nerves and of what in parishioners he privately called ‘confidence tricks’ that he knew so thoroughly; twisting her hands, avoiding his eye, muffing her lines, deliberately postponing the business she had come upon. A bad rehearser but could put up a good, sincere performance, given a sympathetic audience and producer.
‘Mr. Winchcombe, I suppose that when you worked in a London parish people told you some pretty odd things?’
‘They did. Go on.’
‘No, but — really kind of rather unbelievable?’
‘Yes, I’ve met that, too. I’ve even been made a present of the confession of a reasonably celebrated murder by the man who committed it, when the tecs were well on his tracks.’
‘And you never gave him away?’
‘Oh . . . I see what you’re getting at. You’re thinking I’ll sit here all sympathy, drawing you out, and then go off to Lady Roundelay and spill the beans and have a mutual-anxiety society together over you.’
That roused her and the relief on her face intensified. He spared her the embarrassment of admission by continuing, ‘Mind you, if it’s anything to do with your health I warn you I may feel bound to pass it on. Sick people aren’t always the best judges of what’s for their good — ’, but at that, her changed expression so disturbed him that he waited for what might be coming. She certainly looked very far from well, white, worn, though his own allusion to her health he had intended merely to rank as one of a number of possible barriers to absolute confidence.
She said with unwilling honesty, ‘That’s one of the things I want to find out. Supposing it weren’t a physical but a mental thing?’
‘In that case, don’t you suppose your parents would know all about you better than I?’ He was thinking that young girls . . . some love affair that even her mother didn’t guess? Those constant visits . . . it would be possible, and she’s the ferociously reserved type who’d take a disappointment or disillusion hard. Yet — one didn’t associate Angela Roundelay with men. Too elusive and fastidious, no good for the dogfight of backchat and pachydermatousness that was the fashion among young men and maidens these days.
She looked at him squarely at last. ‘Would you say that I am perfectly sane?’
His smile concealed his sudden pang of anxiety. ‘Bernard Shaw says that none of us is, and apart from that being a clever-clever gag for the groundlings there’s a lot of truth in it. When he was at his best, which was a quarter of a century ago, I always used to consider that his angle on life and manners and morals was the only normal one in Great Britain because he saw straight through things to their logical and real conclusions, however unflattering to our egos they turned out to be, yet Great Britain which only, at best, saw halfway, content to accept secondhand ideas and morals, thought him a freak and a poseur, and that resulted in such eminents as W. S. Gilbert writing “his topsy-turvy fancies” — the bourgeois, patronizing complacence of it!’ He smiled. ‘Even Lewis Carroll saw the light occasionally. But what makes you think you’re topsy-turvy?’
She thought, hard, looking clean through him to the window that gave on to the pretty, ramshackle little garden.
‘You’ve seen over Delaye, haven’t you?’
‘Rather.’
‘Do you remember a servant’s bedroom on the top storey?’ He looked at her keenly. ‘“Heryn I dye”. That one?’ She flinched but nodded. ‘Can you remember if you thought anything particular about it?’
‘I remember very well indeed, Angela, and told your mother so. It’s rather a lovely place. It moved me. It has beauty.’ Her voice was forlorn as she said, ‘You felt that and I didn’t. You see? . . . Did mother ever tell you I couldn’t bear it?’
‘Yes.’
‘As though she thought I wasn’t quite — ’
‘Not in the least, my dear. She doesn’t understand your feeling, but there’s no patronage about it.’
‘But why can’t I feel as you do?’ Angela asked desperately.
‘Oh, my dear child, why isn’t an orange an onion? Why aren’t I a fishmonger in Fulham, or an atheist? Can’t you make any allowances for yourself? A diamond has many facets: hold it with me facing you and you can see one facet, I another, but they’re both on the same stone. It’s the angle-of-sight question. There may be a third or a fourth angle we know nothing about, meanwhile we both feel something, you aversion, I attraction. That’s a starting-point. Tell me exactly what’s in your mind. If it’s a bit beyond me I’ll say so, but that needn’t mean my disbelief. Come on!’
‘I — I don’t know where to begin.’
‘Start anywhere and we can sort it out later. You can trust me to do the interrupting and being tiresome if I don’t follow you.’
CHAPTER XXI
1
‘YOU know we have a kitchenmaid. Sue Privett.’
He nodded. ‘Her old Granny’s pretty bad, I’m afraid she won’t last much longer; I must go and look her up again. There have been Privetts at Delaye for two hundred years, I’m told.’
‘Oh yes, one if not the first was a Polly Privett — father, by the way, has just found out that she was sent away at no notice, she was paid a week’s money.’
He pricked up his ears. ‘Oh? . . . It’s too much to hope that Sir Edmund discovered the reason, I suppose?’
‘Yes, this — about Polly, I mean — was on a loose piece of paper in one of the accounts books.’
‘What date?’
‘1792.’
‘And then what?’
‘Another Privett was engaged almost at once. Susan.’
‘She sounds efficient! Why is Sue so much more likeable a name than Susan? Tell me, who was mistress of Delaye at that time?’
‘The French one, Marguerite.’
‘The poor soul who got done in in one of the Revolutions?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did she leave Delaye?’
Angela stared, ever so slightly impatient of side-issues. ‘She went on a visit to relations.’
‘Seems a rather odd time to choose, with the whole of Paris in a ferment. You’d have thought her husband would have put his foot down . . . but let that pass. Go on about Sue.’
‘Where had I got to?’
‘Sorry! I warned you I’d interrupt. You were saying that the accounts books — ’
‘I remember. Well, Sue and I are friends. It began, I think, even before our interest in the peacock. He’s really rather awful to everyone but Sue, and for over a year now, to me, though I’ve done my best to tame him. But in his way he’s really fond of Sue, eats out of her hand, comes to her, even the servants notice it. He was all right to me until one morning when I gave him some hardboiled egg, and he bit me rather badly. Sue was upset, quite faint, I’m told. She bound up my wrist. Father tried to get rid of him then, and Sue was miserable, and the peacock wouldn’t stay at the Severns and came back until we had to let him have his way. And yet he hates us all but Sue and me.
‘One afternoon, I saw Sue and the peacock together in a field. He was walking with her — like a person, you know. It wasn’t just following, as a pet does.’
‘One minute. What did you think when you saw them?’
‘I didn’t like it, and yet . . . I was somehow glad. I know it sounds ridiculous.’
‘And then?’
‘Yesterday afternoon — I’m probably getting things in the wrong order but it’s so difficult to think neatly, you know — Sue went for a walk with Joe Dale; he’s the Severns’ footman, the one who came three times to try to take the peacock away. He seems to be fond of her.’
‘In love?’
‘I think so, but she won’t marry him.’
‘Just an effort on his part at “keeping company”?’
‘Yes. Well, when I was leaving that room, I looked out of the window and I saw Joe Dale run across the further drive towards the avenue, and the peacock was after him.’
‘In a temper?’
‘Yes. And there
was blood on Dale’s face.’
‘He’d gone for the chap?’
‘Evidently. Mother tackled Sue about it and she couldn’t get much out of her, she just agreed that Dale had better keep away from Delaye.’
‘The country girl can be formidably modest, you know. If this Dale had taken liberties or even kissed her that type is quite capable of closing up like a clam as though they’d been disgraced. They have their own code of morality. Please go on.’
‘Just before war broke out the peacock got right into the drawing-room. He’d never done it before. He wouldn’t go, though mother was there and Musgrave had to drive him out. That night when war had been declared I saw him on the lawn. This is where you’ve got to try and believe me. I had the impression he knew about the war and was glad. He was parading as though he were hoping to make Delaye a target. There was a moon, you see.’
‘In short, you think the peacock has a definite grievance against the house?’
A Footman for the Peacock Page 21