by Jessica Mann
Zoe Cory had never heard the substance of Viola Hutber’s thesis before. News reporters in California and in Britain distorted by digesting it. Converts like Gillian Hutber gave out what they had taken in themselves. Now Zoe, in her turn, absorbed it selectively.
The message that impressed her was about the Infant.
The Human Infant, the Child, as the future, as the hope of mankind, as the basis of all civilisation.
‘Why do communities come together in the first place? What is it for, that original group or tribe, from which civilisation grows? It’s to protect the infant of the species! That is what society is for! Everything else is an extra. Our children are our immortality. We have to protect them, even if it does mean not having what we want. You would all give your last mouthful to a child, wouldn’t you? You would give your life to save a child? You give up pleasures for the children’s sake? You guard the baby with your life? That’s what we are here for,’ she said, her voice thrilling in its certainty.
Tamara, who had heard the speech before, and noted other details of the argument (repression and authoritarianism in the name of the child), thought, as she had done before, that the elision between undeniable premise and debatable conclusion was almost imperceptible. It was no wonder that even Zoe Cory, once the symbol of a society liberated from such shibboleths, swallowed it whole. She clapped fervently, her hands still moving in their rhythm after Viola Hutber had given a final wave and gone indoors. But her van was waiting. She would soon be out again her listeners waited, relaxed from trance, like a music-rapt audience during the concert interval, murmuring to their partners, stretching, melodies still flooding their minds. Someone began to sing the Watchwomen anthem, a nineteenth-century hymn with its words suitably adapted and sung to a tune by Bach.
Turn back, women, forswear thy foolish ways
Old now is earth and none may count her days . . .
The word ‘women’ fitted neatly where the author had said ‘Oh man’, and they sang with the gusto of converts.
Earth might be fair and humans glad and wise
Would women wake from out their haunted sleep . . .
They sang all three adapted verses, always substituting ‘women’ for ‘men’, and cheered, and awarded themselves an encore. Many of them were also Women’s Institute members, and they sang Jerusalem. More uncertainly, they sang all the verses of the National Anthem. As they sang they swayed, arms linked. Occasionally they joined in bursts of spontaneous clapping.
After twenty-three minutes Dame Viola emerged. She was accompanied by the Chief Nursing Officer and a consultant physician, two men in dark suits, who listened respectfully as she spoke. They shook hands, bowing slightly, as though to royalty.
‘Short visit,’ a reporter called.
Tamara heard the clear, pleasant voice. ‘My brother wanted to sleep. He’s in good hands here.’
The younger man with her glanced nervously at the crowd and away again. The elder took no notice of it. Dame Viola, however, though she did not make another speech, waved and spread her arms wide in a mime of embrace, and pointed with a delighted smile at some people she knew, before climbing back into the van. There was more cheering as she was driven, less slowly, away from Carmell.
‘She’s marvellous, I simply hadn’t realised,’ Zoe said, her hands stilled at last. ‘I feel great,’ she added in surprise. Without drinks or drugs she had not felt sick for an hour. The nausea returned immediately as she thought of it. All the same, she thought, a whole hour; another thing she owed to Dame Viola Hutber and Watchwomen.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Passing the open door of the school hall on her way back from lunch with Tamara Hoyland in the Copper Kettle, Zoe heard what sounded like boys playing roughly around inside it.
She had had very little to do with Lawrence’s pupils so far. A few favoured boys had been invited to Sunday supper, but most of their time was spent at the far end of the Abbey from the headmaster’s house. Zoe found that she was frightened of them. She did not know what language to use with these young male creatures. It was even worrying to meet the boys in the drive or grounds; was the smile designed for Stacey Stewart’s fans appropriate in the headmaster’s wife?
It was clearly her duty now to turf the boys out of the hall. What would she do if they refused to obey her? But they won’t, she thought. They would be afraid I’d tell Lawrence.
The sounds seemed to be coming from upstairs, from the flat that had been intended for Basil Hutber. The work had been done in a perfunctory, makeshift way, as though Rainsford who commissioned it and the workmen who performed it knew all along that Basil would never come back to St Uny’s. Zoe had been into the flat only once, and had seen the best pieces of St Uny furniture set at random around the plain walls, with no carpet laid or curtains hung.
The sounds sorted themselves out. They were whimpers, gasps, even whines. They were being made by Lawrence.
He was crouched in the room, his coat and tie flung on the floor, his hair wild. The room was in chaos. A beautiful walnut desk had been forced open, as had a carved press decorated with angels’ heads on fluted columns, and a glass fronted cabinet of porcelain. Two Dresden figures lay smashed beside it. A chisel was lying on the splintered writing surface. Papers had been flung everywhere and were scattered on the floor, on the velvet Chesterfield and on the spindly fruitwood armchairs.
Vandalism and destruction; all the same, Zoe thought that Lawrence was over-reacting.
‘Darling,’ she began; but he did not seem to hear or notice her.
He was dealing out sheets of paper from a portfolio that was spilling out of an open drawer as though he were playing cards with them, laying them one after another on to separate piles. All the time his voice was keening, wailing. It was as though he had been hurt or wounded but there was no physical sign of either. Zoe collapsed on to one of the flimsy chairs, displacing more papers that fell unheeded to the floor. She watched her husband, as changed as Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde. She had never seen Lawrence frothing with emotion – any emotion – and had always supposed that he was phlegmatic while she was volatile. She was frightened for, and – except that she could not bear to formulate the thought – of him. She touched his arm, almost timidly.
‘It’s you.’
‘Yes, it’s me. But Lawrence, darling what—?’
‘It is all here. Years’ worth. It is true, perfectly true.’
‘What, Lawrence? What is true?’
‘He was his father. All the time, all those years, pretending to be so kind and benevolent, interested, and disinterested, as though it was nothing at all to do with him personally, all those years of letting him think he was nobody, nobody’s son, abandoned, nameless, filius nullius, filius terrae, that was the only Latin he ever remembered, as though it had all been his own fault, his own failing . . .’ Lawrence was weeping, harsh, difficult tears dribbling down the accentuated lines of his grey face, his mouth squared like the mask of tragedy. ‘It is all here, there’s no denying it, the proof, the evidence.’
Zoe took one of the sheets of paper from his hand. It was a drawing that was immediately recognisable as being by Rex at his most cynical. It was of a wedding scene of monsters. The bride looked remarkably like Gillian Hutber. Zoe glanced at another picture, equally disagreeable, of Pandora opening her box with each escaping evil depicted as a twentieth-century personality. She said, ‘These are by Rex.’
‘Rex! The King. That’s what Basil means. The King of hypocrisy. Basileus, the King Emperor of pornography. Never say he didn’t give us a clue.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Don’t you?’ he sneered. He turned over more of the drawings. There were heaps of them, some sheets covered with many tiny pictures, some carrying one large, brilliant, odious sketch.
Lawrence began to tear them up, across and across, demolishing them all into scraps of paper too small to reconstruct. He moved his arm against his face to wipe moisture away but never stoppe
d in his work of wrecking. After a little while Zoe joined in. There was fifty years’ worth of private commentary here, mordant and observant, each stroke of the pen an adjective in itself. It must have been worth a small fortune. Zoe ripped and tore. Their hands worked in unison.
Later, perhaps hours later, for Zoe had lost track of time, Lawrence heaved himself to his feet. He was ankle deep in tatters of paper. He peered at his own reflection in the spotted glass of a Chippendale mirror. He picked up the chisel by its blade and swung the wooden handle to shatter the glass. Shards fell quietly on to the carpet of paper.
‘Do I really look like him?’ he said.
‘Like whom, Lawrence?’
‘Him, him, what do you think? Like Basil. Rex. My grandfather, can’t you understand? He was Allan’s father. He begot him. He abandoned him. Yes, I mean the sainted Basil, King Basil, that honoured citizen, Freeman of Carmell, fifty years of lying, he—’
Lawrence clapped one hand over his mouth and stumbled down the stairs. Zoe followed him outside. He stood there on the gravel, back to St Uny’s Abbey, his arms up and hands stiffened into claws. ‘He let him die never knowing it. And all the time, all those years, Rainsford, the Abbey, the school . . .’
‘You don’t look like Basil Hutber at all,’ Zoe said.
Lawrence’s car was parked, as always, by the main entrance.
‘Lawrence, where are you going? You aren’t in a fit state—’
But he was already behind the wheel, roaring the engine. Gravel spat backwards from the tyres. He was going to see Basil Hutber, his grandfather, himself.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Gillian Hutber’s instantaneous thought on finding her father-in-law dead was ‘at last’.
Decorum supervened. Gillian always behaved and felt as she knew she should. Sharing Carmell’s prejudices, she behaved as it expected.
Gillian Hutber had grown up in what she now thought of as ‘the world outside’. She knew about anonymity, loneliness and the lack of distinction. Rainsford Hutber (whom she had first met at a ‘Young Farmers’ Club Dance’ when she went to the Lake District for a holiday with her church) had given her everything she valued in life; all the result of going out with, going to bed with, going to stay with and eventually going to the altar with the heir to the Abbey.
His inheritance had been a long time coming, but it was known to be coming, as everything was known in Carmell. Gillian’s life was conducted for the sake of people who might say, or think, or notice, and who treated her (perhaps in return for her care for their sensibilities) with deference.
Even in the hospital, the charge nurse left a bed-bath to speak to her. ‘He hasn’t rung since Dame Viola left him. When Mr Cory came he was asleep.’
‘I won’t wake him if he’s still dozing,’ Gillian promised.
But he was not dozing. She realised that at once. He was dead.
She was the mistress of St Uny’s Abbey. That was the significance of the still body, of the dropped jaw: The sight was horrible but welcome.
When Gillian returned to the room, still weeping but supported now by her husband and a nurse, the jaw had been tied closed. Now Basil looked like the corpse in a film, or in a Victorian painting of a death-bed. Gillian stood soberly beside Rainsford, who was accustomed as the Coroner to be shown dead bodies, but did not know what a son should do. If this were indeed a film or a genre painting he would bend to kiss the cold forehead. No such thing seemed to be expected. A young doctor came in and spoke of a massive stroke, not entirely surprising, and since Rainsford was, in a way, professionally interested, he went into technical details about the death.
‘But he was quite well when my aunt came today, I heard,’ Rainsford said.
‘So he was. So he was. But you can never tell with stroke patients. And at his age . . .’
The nurse smoothed the white hair and removed a feather from the corner of Basil’s mouth. Gillian said, ‘His own feather pillows and linen sheets. I brought them in every day.’ She was still clutching her bag of clean linen.
‘Wasn’t there any warning? I should have liked . . .’ Rainsford began.
‘I can only say that he seemed to be in a stable condition when I saw him this morning. Of course, the post mortem may—’
‘Rainsford, not that!’ Gillian cried.
He pulled at his ear. ‘It won’t be up to me, my dear. The deputy coroner will have to . . . you don’t feel you can issue a certificate?’
‘After what you said, Mr Hutber—’ The young man was on his dignity.
‘We are so grateful to you all for your care of him.’ Gillian smiled winningly at the doctor and the nurse, who said, ‘He had so many visitors today. Perhaps it was too much. There was Mrs Cory, and another young lady, and Dame Viola, and then Mr Cory – perhaps I ought to have . . .’
‘You have nothing whatever to blame yourself for,’ Rainsford said with dignity. He left with Gillian’s arm protectively around him. He had guided countless clients through the formalities of bereavement and hardly needed to be shielded from them himself, but it was proper for Gillian to make the gesture. He let her drive him home, guide him to a chair and bring him a drink. When Nigel and Fiona came in he told them that their grandfather had been taken to a better place.
*
Rainsford’s partner looked in that evening bringing a copy of Basil’s will. It had been made in 1977, after Basil had inherited everything from his wife – the Abbey, the land that remained of the original St Uny estate, the silver, the pictures, the furniture.
Basil willed everything to his children and, if they predeceased him, to theirs. His daughter had died, childless, in 1980, in a boating accident in Canada.
‘So you scoop the lot, Rainsford,’ his partner said. ‘Though it might have turned out differently. I think he was planning to make some changes. I had to read him every word over the telephone the other day, and as a matter of fact I was due to go in tomorrow to execute a codicil.’
‘To what effect?’
‘He didn’t say. There was something he wanted to ask Dame Viola first. You could ask her.’
‘I should like to carry out his wishes, naturally.’
‘You planning changes at the Abbey, Rainsford? The place should be worth a fortune.’
‘It’s Rainsford’s family home,’ Gillian said indignantly. ‘Don’t forget he’s half a St Uny.’
‘Of course, there must be a sentimental attachment,’ the young solicitor said politely.
‘We might even live there ourselves. We could take the name. Mrs Rainsford Hutber St Uny.’ A scheme flashed through Gillian’s mind, of garden parties, open days, associations of stately-home owners; of her signature to letters on paper engraved with a drawing of the Abbey; of coming-out balls for Fiona and coming-of-age for Nigel. She watched her husband’s face.
‘Perhaps it is a bit soon for making plans,’ his partner said.
‘I have been making them for years,’ Rainsford replied. ‘What do you think the place would fetch?’
‘Darling!’
‘Not much for probate, with the school sitting there. But with vacant possession, I don’t know. A hotel? A conference centre? It’s good and close to the town. The school’s the stumbling block.’
‘I warned Lawrence Cory that there would be no security of tenure,’ Rainsford said, tugging at his earlobe. ‘Unfortunately I couldn’t dissuade my father. He insisted on taking him in.’
‘Darling,’ Gillian protested again, but neither man was listening. They were both busy with calculations about capital and dividends, property and profits.
Chapter Thirty
The next morning Tamara caught up with the Watchwomen at their headquarters for south-west Scotland, which were in what used to be a shop. A chocolate coloured board painted in gold letters still announced that it sold confectionery and tobacco, but the windows were plastered with photographs of Dame Viola and advertisements for meetings of Watchwomen.
A bell rang when the d
oor opened and Tamara went into a room that had been streakily repainted in mauve and green. The old mahogany counter was piled with Watchwomen’s leaflets in their flower-decorated paper. The storage shelves behind held rows of collecting tins, box files and ‘free gifts’ of pencils or coffee mugs that advertised the movement.
Three women were working hard, moving from trestle table to trolley with armsful of paper, making lists, ticking off names and sorting paper. The atmosphere reminded Tamara of a party headquarters at election time, with enthusiasts united in uncommon commitment to a common cause, happy in their frenetic, repetitive industry. Hand lettered notices on the walls appealed for envelope stuffers, canvassers, leaflet folders and collectors. ‘Spread the word!’ stickers were ranged along the dado, interspersed with others exhorting, ‘Capture a convert!’ The busy cosiness was dominated by a lifesize cut-out of a poster showing Dame Viola herself; the big sister was watching.
‘Annie . . .?’
‘Upstairs.’
Tamara went up a flight of linoleum covered stairs to a store room where cardboard cartons of stationery waited for a big campaign. Annie Hamilton Routley and Noelle Stephenson were collapsed on cushions.
‘What a success!’ Tamara said.
‘In Carmell?’
‘Of course.’
‘Not a bad turn-out,’ Annie agreed.
‘It was all Annie’s work,’ Noelle explained. ‘Goodness knows how she managed it in the time.’
‘Just a standard PR operation.’
‘You are too modest,’ Tamara said sincerely.
‘The basic structure was all ready and waiting, it was only a matter of getting things going. It’s the cell system.’
‘Like a resistance movement.’
‘Or a chain letter. Each member contacts four others.’
Noelle said, ‘You had better not talk about the organisation in your programme. I don’t think the Leader would like it.’