Macdonald stood back as Stephen came out: things were quieter by then. She did not try to hide and Stephen said nothing to her, in explanation. He neither ignored her presence nor acknowledged it. It was as if he had passed her on the landing, at any time, as she walked from the bathroom back to her room. For some reason, rather absent-mindedly, he unhooked and closed the nursery gate at the top of the stairs, as if to complete his dissociation from an unbearable, carnal mess. Then he disappeared into the darkness of the hall and corridor below.
Macdonald, without hesitation, as soon as he had gone, pushed open the bedroom door and went in. The picture that was presented to her more than confirmed the situation. It showed, in agonising detail, the story of the preceding hour.
Mary had stopped crying. She was on the single bed farthest from the door and the near bed had not been disturbed. She lay on the flat of her back watching the shadows on the ceiling which were cast by her elbows, arms and interlocked fingers, held above her head. The sheet was lemon, not white, and it matched the paintwork in the room. This, and the darker tone of the wallpaper, affected the quality of the light. It was both yellow and bright although it came from only a single bedside lamp, which had been placed on the floor between the beds and partly covered by Stephen’s woollen shirt. The bed clothes of the bed on which she lay had been stripped off and hung over the bottom of it. There were usually two pillows. One lay on the counterpane on the other bed. The other did not rest under Mary’s head, but under her hips. Her red hair looked extremely untidy and long and her body looked thin and white. She was not quite naked, as she had chosen to wear a pair of very dark stockings which Macdonald had not seen before. She did not seem to object very strongly to Macdonald’s entrance, which showed that, in her mind at least, Macdonald was still considerably more the servant than the mother; but as Macdonald approached she lowered her arms slowly and covered her eyes with the backs of her hands, her fingers still interlocked. It was all there, but for the Vibro.
From the look of distaste on Macdonald’s face Mary might have thought that she was going to forget her usual infuriatingly steady manner, but this did not happen. After one short glance at the slight, anonymous body, Macdonald moved to the cupboard in the corner and unhooked Mary’s winter dressing-grown. She picked up her bedroom slippers and moved across the room. By then, Mary had slipped her legs round, and was sitting at the edge of the bed pushing her hair from her face. Macdonald bent down and put the slippers on her feet, then helped her into her dressing-gown.
As Macdonald tied the cord tightly round her waist Mary expected her to say, at the very best:
‘Either you’re going down these stairs, or I am.’
She turned round and looked up at the huge white face. The cheekbones looked as big as ribs. She felt a little afraid, and it showed in her eyes.
‘Away you go, now,’ Macdonald said very softly. ‘Away downstairs, and tell him the truth. It’s a game of consequences, so it is.’
Mary nodded gratefully. Before she had even left the room Macdonald had put the lamp back in its place and started to make the bed.
Mary and Stephen did not talk about what was going to happen and when they parted things seemed to be left more in the air, not less.
With the unswerving instinct of a Colonel’s daughter, she made for the dining-room, expecting to find him sitting there, consoling himself with a man-sized whisky and soda. But Stephen was too modest and too honest to settle for this pose. She found him at last in the kitchen where he had poured himself some coffee from the pot which always sat in one of the ovens of the Aga. He was adding milk from a bottle when Mary came in. He was cold, and as he sat down at the little kitchen table by the window, in his trousers and pyjama top, with no dressing-gown, he began to shiver. She sat down at the other end of the same table and said nothing for a while. Meantime he drank his coffee.
At last, in quite a steady low voice, which she addressed to the toes of her bedroom slippers, Mary said:
‘If you haven’t guessed already, I’m pregnant. I know I should have told you before, but I just couldn’t.’
She glanced across to him, boldly, but he did not attempt to say anything or even to turn his head. He continued drinking coffee from the huge, deep cup.
She said, ‘If it had worked I don’t suppose I’d ever have told you, so I can’t really make any excuses. Only you haven’t been a girl. It seemed the only thing to do. The only practical thing. If it had worked you’d never have been the wiser and it would probably be a happy family. That’s what I’d hoped. But it didn’t work, so that’s that.’
He said, ‘That’s why you came to the dairy that night?’
They were both glad that she managed the truth.
‘Yes, Stephen, it is.’
‘I must say, it makes sense of quite a lot of things I didn’t understand.’
‘It doesn’t mean that I’m not very fond of you—’
She stopped there.
He said, very coldly:
‘I don’t think that’s a line we should follow now.’
For a moment they were silent again, then Mary said:
‘I think it is. I can’t persuade you it’s true. I can only tell you. I’m sorry it’s all such a muck-up. Most of the things I’ve said to you since I’ve been back have been perfectly true.’
He started stirring the last of his coffee and he sipped the sugar at the bottom with the spoon. He turned suddenly and looked her straight in the eye.
He said, ‘Are you hoping that I’ll strike you?’
‘No.’
‘Or at least shout and slap your face?’
‘No.’
He said, ‘If it’s a comfort to you, the performance was spectacular.’
She put her fingers over her eyes and shook her head, saying another sort of ‘no’ this time.
He went on, clearly:
‘It never occurred to me for a moment that you weren’t telling me the truth. Then, as you know, conception, gestation and birth only crop up in my brain if they’re connected with the farm. Even if you had made a mistake or two, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.’
She sat quietly.
He said, ‘I suppose the real reason why I am so calm is that I just can’t believe it now. I know it’s true, but I can’t swallow it.’
He got to his feet, and went on:
‘If you like to stay down here for a few moments I’ll get my clothes out of the room.’
‘No, I’ll go.’
‘I’d rather lie down on the sofa. I’ll be going out early, anyway.’
She nodded and said meekly:
‘All right, Stephen,’ and that finished the conversation.
For want of something better to do, Mary, too, drank a cup of coffee.
When Stephen went upstairs there was no sign of Macdonald but both beds were made with the corner of the bedclothes turned back. The chairs had been tidied and Stephen found his clothes neatly folded. He took them down to the nursery, where he would be less comfortable than in the sitting-room. He did not even notice himself take this monk’s choice. He pulled a footstool up to the nursing chair and switched out the light on the desk. He lay there, wide awake, until at last he heard the steps on the stairs as Mary went back to bed. That the strain had been passed from one to the other was now clearly shown. Mary fell asleep within a few minutes, and Stephen sat tensely, alarmed by every board that creaked and startled by the hoots of owls.
Wherever Mary found her story of Uncle Arbuthnot’s death, it certainly was unlikely to have been complete invention. It held the essential truth about suicide, as opposed to attempted suicide. The method a person chooses for killing himself is strictly in character, if he truly means to go through with it. And Arbuthnot, the tidy boy, equipped himself with a bucket as well as a knife. There is a reason why a student chooses to hang himself in a college lavatory, why a girl drowns herself in a pretty stream, why a distracted housewife picks the gas oven and the retired Colonel shoo
ts himself in his den. Stephen must have known that he was bluffing.
His approach to suicide demonstrated the astonishing difference between David and himself. They had not after all come from very different homes and they had both taken scholarships to small public schools. Thereafter Stephen had accepted the environment of the idea: patriotism, enterprise, integrity, leadership and all the rest, although he was very conscious of falling short of the ideal. David, on the other hand, perhaps because he came from a home which was very, very slightly lower in the social scale, or perhaps because he was more mature at that age, refused the new environment. His school days were a running intellectual battle against a system which he refused to accept as desirable. Duly extended, it can be seen very easily that even if David ever reached the point of contemplating suicide the possibility of his doing so in Stephen’s gentleman’s way did not exist.
As soon as Stephen took the Colonel’s shot-gun from the cloakroom which, in itself, was a tricky operation, as he was certain that Macdonald was awake, he found himself in difficulties. The Colonel had locked up his cartridges but, after searching his pockets, Stephen found one, in an old hacking jacket, behind the door. It was dawn when he arrived outside the house and he was at once embarrassed by the enthusiasm of the Colonel’s Labrador, who appeared from nowhere, barking madly, certain, on seeing Stephen with a gun, that it must be the morning of the Christmas shoot. As quickly as he could, and savagely, Stephen shoved him into the first place he could think of, which was the black shed where all the apples were kept. He then proceeded on his way, more than ever determined to do the right thing, quickly, before he had time to think.
He went up to the woods above the bothie, but in the end, for reasons which were later very obvious to him, he walked right through the wood, where the trees creaked a little in the wind, to a rough patch of moorland at the edge, which long before this incident and for some forgotten historical reason, had been called the Hospital. Perhaps some keeper, years ago, protected wounded birds there. When the moment came, and the woods were behind him, Stephen behaved less like a gentleman and more like a schoolboy. His movements had the formality of a Fascist officer who had come to pay himself a debt of honour, by the grey light of dawn, under the cloud-swept sky. One detail in the following swift physical action which closely resembled the first movement of ‘shoulder arms’ was highly important. When the gun was cradled in his arm, and his head tilted slightly to one side, he was careful at the last instant to save his eye. This pushing forward of the head would probably in itself have saved his life, but the important fact was that the cartridge was in the first barrel, and it was the choke barrel that dug into his skin. The result was more or less serious than the spirit of farce invited. The best thing that could have happened would surely have been that he missed altogether, or alternatively blew off his head. What did happen was that he shot a considerable hole in his head and collapsed unconscious, with the softness of failure, on a large clump of sphagnum moss. The keeper who found him, not very long afterwards, used this as a first emergency dressing. By mid-day he was conscious, comfortable and silent, in the room in the cottage hospital which Captain Gordon had been so determined to avoid.
The news was brought to Mary by someone who was almost a stranger, and fortunately she heard it when she was alone. How that happened was fairly simple. The gamekeeper, who was employed in the neighbouring estate, came down to the bothie to ring for the ambulance and, before returning to Stephen, told the woman who ran the bothie to go across to the house and tell them what had happened. This woman, however, was of an extremely nervous temperament. She found herself catering for only half a dozen girls, in the heart of the country, because the task of running a small boarding-house at an east coast seaside resort had reduced her to a winter of poverty and tears. She could not possibly have faced the prospect of telling a young wife that her husband had shot himself, and she used as a double excuse, the imminent arrival of the baker’s vans and a nose-bleed which she had been trying to control since breakfast-time. One of the girls, therefore, who cannot have been more than sixteen, volunteered to run across to the farm. Like anybody of that age, she enormously enjoyed bearing ill-tidings, even if she denied this to herself.
All this was relatively natural and honest. It was the interview between Mary and this long-faced, bright-eyed girl, that had its bad moment.
Mary was over by the garage, outside the back of the house, when the girl arrived and called breathlessly:
‘Mrs Cameron, oh, Mrs Cameron. I’ve terrible news for you.’
At that, before her mind had time to calculate what the news might be, Mary looked duly alarmed. She looked at the girl severely.
‘It’s Mr Stephen – Mr Stephen’s shot himself.’
Again, nothing went wrong. Mary grew paler and placed on the ground the bucket which she had been taking to the hens.
The girl went on to say:
‘They’re taking him in the ambulance, Fyvie the keeper’s there. They’re taking him to the cottage hospital. You’re not to worry, Fyvie says. He’s going to be all right.’
The girl smiled, but even she was a little mystified by the expression which in that instant passed across Mary’s face. Had Pink been there he would have defined it. In a second it was gone, never to be seen again, but Pink would not have missed it. It was an expression of bitter disappointment and it was a moment or two before Mary could find words. The girl thought her confusion was understandable, but she would have backed away had she understood it.
In the next few moments, Mary extracted all the details and immediately afterwards made the necessary telephone calls, but it was that moment of self-revelation, not Stephen’s condition, nor, as Macdonald thought, the events of the previous days, that winded her so badly. She never came near to weeping, but for an hour or two after the first frenzy of activity she seemed to be literally struck dumb. Even Macdonald was alarmed by her condition and went into the dining-room where she sat and coaxed her to take some coffee. Macdonald’s expression as she did this was cagey. She seemed to be saying, ‘Even if I do give you a warm drink, do not imagine that I have changed my opinion of you. It is only by the grace of God that you are not a murderess.’ With that last sentiment Mary, for quite different reasons, would have had to agree.
Pink also tried to cover up his first reaction when Macdonald went into the nursery to tell him what had happened. She was by this time generally impatient of his behaviour so she did not stay to examine his reaction. She simply put her head round the door, announced the news, then went back to the kitchen where Cathie stood, petrified with excitement. In fact, Pink, at first, looked deeply offended, rather as if his understudy had been given all the notices. Then after a moment or two he shouted angrily to the closed door:
‘Well, there’s damn all I can do about it, is there?’
Stephen was kept in hospital for several weeks, and Mary visited him practically every day. Their meetings each afternoon at half past three would have been of interest to David, in his preparation of ‘The Obligatory Scene’ for Moral Philosophy and the Dutch popular Press. They never approached the obligatory in all the weeks Stephen was there and yet, on his return to the house the change had been made, the decision had been taken, the future was as settled as ever it can be. Mary’s attitude towards him during these weeks might also have reminded David of his own angelic mother. She never referred to the attempted suicide, or to the days that preceded it, nor did she ever substitute for them some convenient euphemism. It was Macdonald, when she visited, in hat and fur cape, cluttered up with parcels of sweets, shortbread and grapes, who referred to the ‘accident’. Mary did not mention it. It was as if she disapproved entirely of his action, never forgot it, but quite forgave it, and was determined to show, as his closest relation, that it did not in any way affect her liking for him. The visits were never cheerful and the two of them often sat in silence, but over the weeks they found the bond between them. Stephen saw very clearly tha
t Mary’s attitude to him was identical with her attitude to herself. It was as if she were saying to him, as a request so urgent that it was nearly a command, ‘Make no mention of what has gone before and it is possible we will find a way. Mention it once and we are done for.’ There was a severe see-no-evil conservatism in her attitude more common in older people, that is often mistaken as mental laziness. It is in essence, a refuge, a tight-rope of compromise, a narrow plank on which it is necessary to walk without saying a single word about the gulf that lies below.
The most cheerful visit, curiously enough, was Pink’s. He only came once, at the wrong time, without being announced, but during one of his enlightened days. These grew fewer and fewer now, but when they came they had an extra warm quality. Coming in, as he did, in dark glasses, a week after the New Year, he looked to Stephen as if he were at the bottom of the trough. He brought as a present a ‘make it yourself’ transistor radio.
‘By God,’ he said. ‘This’ll make you wild. Guaranteed to whizz you round the bend.’
And seeing Stephen’s dismay, he burst into a long wheeze of a laugh and tucked his dark glasses into his breast pocket, in which, that day, he was sporting five propelling pencils and pens, and a tyre pressure gauge. He looked round the room, which was like any small private room in a hospital, except that it boasted new, plastic, Venetian blinds, and he said:
‘Everything, old man. I could take everything except the bed pans.’ It was as if he were talking of wild animals. ‘They’d get me in the end.’ Pink dared subjects which everybody avoided. He approached them with a directness that would have horrified the nurses. He started to laugh again, leaning back, and holding one knee between his hands.
At last he managed to say:
‘Old Flush,’ which was the name of the Colonel’s Labrador, ‘Old Flush in the apple shed, eh? That’s what got me.’
Household Ghosts Page 36