What will the neighbours think, wondered Mrs Marsh, statutorily, past caring. She, alone, had sufficient courage to approach the distraught, coffee-scented woman and draw her home.
Vera stood by the door clutching her bag with both hands and looking eminently useless and unhelpful. Dennis, too, was at a loss, like a person stripped of authority in the presence of strange, but not criminal, behaviour – as indeed he was. His natural human responses had atrophied years ago under the pressure of applied order.
‘Deary me,’ said Evelyn, ‘what a to-do.’ She pressed Vera’s coat upon her. Evelyn’s father having been a bank manager, she was qualified in such extreme circumstances to give orders to a mere policeman’s wife. ‘Run along home,’ she said, adding, ‘Off you go, Dennis. Vera looks tired.’
Mr Mauss was uncomfortable and rather angry. The corner of his mouth twitched a little. His easy manners, his familiarity with the workings of the human mind as disclosed by psychiatry, his overall goodwill were inadequate to deal with this nasty scene, and he had no desire at all to witness the drunken discomfiture of an English lady. It upset his ideals. Besides, he was American and liked all events and occasions – no matter how unfortunate or bloody – to end in sweetness and reconciliation, and it seemed most unlikely that these people would finish the evening in each other’s arms singing.
‘Come along,’ said Evelyn. ‘You two can spend the night at my house.’ They could all have some more coffee, sitting round the table. It would be like the days when her brothers were young, sitting up late into the night, planning a hiking trip. ‘If we’re quick,’ she promised, ‘we’ll just catch the news and the main points of the Queen’s speech.’
‘I hope you feel better, dear,’ she said to Barbara. ‘Come across in the morning and have a cup of coffee.’ She had thought it was Mary who was the drinker and wondered for a moment, as Mrs Marsh had feared she might, how these girls had been brought up. Bad blood, she thought, and put the thought aside.
All Barbara would feel like in the morning, thought Hunter, would be a stiff formaldehyde. It seemed unlikely that he would see much even of Mary after this.
‘Goodbye,’ he said regretfully.
Mary had gone back to her room. She opened the French windows and went out into the garden.
She could see the snow falling through the small rounded light from the downstairs lavatory window, a light as pure as from any cathedral clerestory. It fell with such soft determination in the still silence – soundless, weight less: gentle alien blossom that would melt, if she waited long enough, into familiar wetness, tears on the face: bathetic melting, mud in the garden, slush on the roads, useless tears.
She lifted her face to the angelic descent in the muted darkness, to the movement compelled by something other than desire, the lifeless idle movement of the drowned, to the veil, grave cloths, the floating sinking cerements, untroubled by blood, by colour: the discrete, undeniable, intractable softness of the slow snow in the night and the silence . . .
‘Robin . . . ?’ she said.
The Birds of the Air Page 12