by MARY HOCKING
He stood looking round the sitting-room which had not taken kindly to the mixture of his and Norah’s furniture and had positively annihilated the wit and gaiety of the abstract paintings which had shown to such advantage in the house in Hampstead. He gazed gloomily at a sampler worked by an aunt of Norah’s who must have had a lot of time on her hands and little talent in her fingers. His nostrils quivered as he inhaled deeply. No appetizing smells from the kitchen rewarded him. He had travelled a long way from Winchester. Caroline would have prepared one of his favourite dishes which would come from the kitchen attractively presented to please the eye and tempt the palate. There would have been no hint of effort. He felt again that sense of some monstrous trick having been played on him. He had bade her good day in the morning and, it seemed from the doctor’s report, she had thereafter sat down on the couch and passed peacefully beyond his reach. But he still had unfinished business to conduct with her. He crossed to the French windows almost as if he expected to find her standing in the Hampstead garden, its green lawns and hedges manicured to perfection, ready with an explanation of her behaviour.
Norah looked at him in dismay through the branches of a rambler rose which she was supporting. ‘Gracious! Whatever time is it?’
‘Half-past five.’
‘And his lordship’s carriage arrived and no one to attend him at the gate!’
Initially, it had been the quirky humour and the pleasant, twinkling smile which attracted Hesketh to Norah Nancarrow. He now found himself able to resist both.
She cleared a temporary resting place for the rose and came towards him, casting aside secateurs and wire, then tugging off her gardening gloves. They stood looking at each other awkwardly, this chance-met couple, reflecting on their respective duties. She folded her hands to her brow in the sign of peace.
‘The weather brightened after lunch, m’Lud. It’s been so deadly recently, I just rushed out here when the sun came out.’ She seemed to have some hope of winning his favour, but no idea that an apology might be required.
He experienced the now familiar spiral of rage rising in him. Hesketh Kendall was used, on his return, to gin and vermouth in tall frosted glasses and a garden to be contemplated, not one rampant with unsolved problems. Norah was now offering tea and saffron cake. After which, he supposed, she would return to succour the rose.
‘What ails the thing?’ he asked.
‘We had a gale last night. It needs staking back to the wall. It won’t take very long.’ This he recognized as a phrase used to soothe a patient enduring a painful dressing of a wound, a child set to perform an uncongenial task – it bore no relationship to Greenwich Mean Time. ‘I’ll just make the tea and . . .’
‘I’d rather have a drink.’
‘Isn’t it a little early?’
‘I am not an alcoholic, simply a weary traveller come from distant parts and in need of refreshment – Odysseus returned to his Penelope.’
She gave him a grateful smile and moved by her responsiveness he kissed her.
‘There’s trout,’ she said. ‘That won’t take long, and I’ve prepared the potatoes and veg.’
But first she must attend to the rose and then she must have a bath. She was meticulous about cleanliness. Hesketh sauntered down to the river. On the day when they made an offer for the house it had been a blue enamelled border to lawn and shrubbery. He had seen rather more of it since then and most of the time it wasn’t blue. Now, in the early evening, it had lost what noonday charms it possessed and a faint mist was rising from it. That mist must have hung about the house for all of its three hundred years’ existence. He was chilled by the time he went indoors. He went slowly up to the main bedroom and changed into slacks and pullover. Norah was singing in the bathroom, her voice high and clear and unconcerned. He ran a hand down one wall. It felt cold but not damp. He opened a cupboard and sniffed. There was some sort of smell, but rather on the warm side, as though a dusty electric fire had been left burning. He looked thoughtfully at the bed but did not examine it. Norah was fussy about the bed, it was regularly made and remade and stripped and the mattress put out to air – whatever else was wrong with the bed, it could not be damp. He went downstairs and watched Emmerdale Farm on television.
At eight o’clock he went into the kitchen. ‘Not long now,’ Norah greeted him. Her flushed face and anxious manner betrayed the person who has extreme difficulty in co-ordinating her activities. Years ago, when he had rashly undertaken some advisory work for a local residents’ association, he had been given a secretary like that. He had insisted that she be replaced.
‘It’s not that you are slow,’ he said. ‘It’s that you don’t programme your time.’
‘I had enough of programmed time in hospital.’
She had no sense of a need to plan ahead. She opened each day like a new book, saying to herself, ‘Now I wonder what this will be about.’ Hesketh began his days with preconceived ideas.
He went back to the sitting-room and started to do The Times crossword puzzle. It was after nine when they sat down to eat.
‘As a nurse,’ he said, making a joke of it, ‘I would have expected you to be eminently suited to run a house.’
‘You should be thankful I’m not like some nurses, forever fussing about every speck of dust.’
He watched her separating flesh from bone with the competence of a surgeon. She looked untidy and defiant. She had presented herself to him at her best when he first met her. A tall woman with a good carriage, she could, with some attention paid to her hair, achieve a certain distinction, if not elegance. No woman who cared so little about clothes could ever attain elegance.
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘I don’t think nine o’clock is all that late to eat.’
Hesketh Kendall felt that life had cheated him unforgivably. He recalled how charmingly surprised and grateful she had been to find herself singled out for the wifely part she was now so inadequately performing. He had imagined himself a magical benefactor at whose touch this not wholly ungraceful woman would blossom and flourish, showered by the gifts his wealth could afford. He had congratulated himself on not falling to the temptation, so prevalent among men of his age, to rate youth and sexual stimulation above the more enduring qualities of the good homemaker. Once more, he had anticipated, he would find himself the centre of a world of warmth and security. His daughter Samantha notwithstanding.
It was dark now and night had come up to the window. He got up to draw the blinds and noticed that the panes of glass were filmed with mist. The room looked small when he turned back to it, the low ceiling only a foot above his head. He had a moment of panic at finding himself alone here with this unlikely stranger.
‘There is a letter from Samantha for me, I see,’ he said when they had finished their silent meal. ‘I suppose I had better find out what she wants this time. Unless you would like me to assist with this . . .’ He waved his hand dismissively over the plates and dishes.
‘There is rather a lot, isn’t there? It would be a help.’
In the kitchen he said, ‘I have been travelling all day.’
She replied cheerfully, ‘Then it will do you good to stand for a bit,’ and passed him a plate to wipe.
When eventually they went into the sitting-room, he with a pot of coffee, she with a mug of Bovril, it was half-past ten. ‘What do you do all day?’ The question was put more in wonder than sarcasm. There were some ways in which Norah was infinitely more mysterious than Caroline.
‘Well now . . . Mrs Herbert’s Jason cut his knee. Mrs Petty asked me to change her dressing. Old Mr Lock got in a panic because he had a bad night and thought he was going to die – which he might well have done, poor old thing. That more or less disposed of the morning. Then . . .’
‘Who are these people?’ he asked angrily. ‘You speak as if I knew them.’ It seemed that her life went on much as usual. She had simply made a little space in it to accommodate him.
‘They are just neighbours and old patients
of mine.’
‘But you are not nursing any more.’
She laughed. ‘Nurses are always in demand, same as handymen.’ ‘You shouldn’t let people presume on your good nature.’
She replied with a flash of impatience, ‘People don’t presume when they are sick or injured, they need help and they cry out for it. That’s one of the good things about being a nurse, you are always needed.’
‘I need you,’ he said sulkily. ‘Had that occurred to you?’
She turned her head away, suddenly a great lady – haughty expression, proud carriage of the head – and he a menial who had overreached himself. She was very unpredictable. At other times when he reproached her with neglect she would cry. He had quite expected that she would cry now and tell him how much she had longed to care for and comfort him, how it hurt her that she should fail so often. Then, because he was not a sadistic man, he would console her and encourage her by elaborating the things which she did well before trying to help her to understand her little failings. It was quite apparent, however, that she was not going to cry this time. He found it unnerving that he could never be sure of her reactions. She was as bad, if not worse, than Judge Colbert. It was as if she had the emotional equivalent of perfect pitch – when he failed to strike the right note she was immediately aware of it and ruled his submissions out of court.
‘That coffee is bad for your liver,’ she said, picking up the newspaper. She put up a hand and took one straggling strand of hair, winding it round a finger while she read. He could imagine her doing this when she was young and the hair, so he had been assured, a great fiery bush. Perhaps she still thought of it like this? There was a certain assurance in her attitude to her hair.
He put down the cup and stalked out of the room. Some rather ostentatious slamming and banging marked his passage from room to hall and back again. She did not raise her eyes from the paper; the strand of hair was now held between her teeth. He looked down at the envelope in his hand and said angrily, ‘Damn paper knife.’ There followed a further disturbance in the hall – table doors opened and shut, noisy rummaging in the cupboard under the stairs, displacement of various cleaning materials, fall of some heavy object, probably the vacuum cleaner. He was one of those men at whose touch inanimate objects take on a malign life of their own. At last he reappeared in the doorway to the sitting-room, hair ruffled and red of face, ripping the envelope with his fingers. Inevitably, he tore a piece out of the letter. So he must go to the bureau and turn over its contents, pencils, writing pads, old cheque books, keys which opened doors not yet discovered, the paper knife, of course, and, at last, sellotape. He strode to the kitchen for scissors. Finally, the letter roughly stuck together, he returned to read it.
Norah said, ‘Bernard Levin is so funny. When you have finished that you must read him.’
But she watched while he read the letter, saw how his eyes jerked from one line to the next, noted the heavy breathing which betrayed constricted muscles.
‘Problems?’ she asked gently when he had finished.
‘She has lost her job. At least, she has given in her notice. The man she worked with was an absolute swine, couldn’t keep his hands off her. She says she needs to get out of London for a while. So she is coming to stay here for a few months.’ He looked at her, hoping for that swift, sure touch which sweeps aside the dark curtains and lets the sunlight come flooding in to dispel the nightmare; but when she said, ‘You’re not going to agree?’ he became angry.
‘Well, she is my daughter.’
‘I can’t!’ Her nightmare was stronger than his. She looked at him in utter dismay, her features at odds with one another, making her face ludicrous. ‘I can’t have her here. You must see that I can’t.’
‘Only for a few months.’ He was blundering about in the darkness from which she had failed to rescue him. ‘I think it is the least we could do. A few months . . .’ He only came home at weekends so for him it would be a matter of weeks rather than months. ‘Things were rather bad between us about the time of Caroline’s death. I should like to heal that breach.’
‘What you mean is that you want me to heal it for you, to gather all the pieces together into some kind of order.’ Her face had become flushed and her voice was pitched high. ‘I can’t do it, Hesketh. I’m not made that way.’
‘You said only half an hour ago that when people were hurt or injured they cried out for help.’
‘I meant physically hurt or injured. I’m trained to deal with that. And, anyway, Samantha isn’t crying out for help – not to me, anyway. She hates me. She made that quite clear when she met me.’
‘That was shock. You have to make allowances for the shock.’
She pressed her knuckles against her lips. He watched her with that unblinking stare which made him look so much older. This was a situation he did not know how to handle – handling had always been Caroline’s province. Some kind of peace had been preserved between him and Samantha during Caroline’s lifetime.
Norah took a deep breath and spoke quietly, persuasively. ‘It’s all I can do to manage, you know that. There is so much to get used to . . .’
‘Samantha would help about the house, I’m sure.’ He had no recollection of her ever having done this, but once he had stated it he expected it to be accepted as gospel.
‘She would take over, you mean? I expect she has already decided how she wants her bedroom arranged. And you and she don’t get on. You would get at each other through me. I couldn’t cope with that. Not now. We need time, Hesketh.’ She was imploring for his help, but as it was help of a kind he was unfitted to give this made him the more angry. ‘Once we have settled down together, become . . . united . . . it won’t be so easy for her to come between us. Can’t you understand the harm it would do to our marriage if she were to come now?’
He looked down at the letter. ‘But what am I to say to her?’
‘You must explain to her that we can’t have her just now.’ Her voice became regrettably sharp. ‘There must have been times in her life when someone said “no” to Samantha.’
‘We can’t exclude her from our lives. She is my daughter.’
‘And, in any case, why didn’t she write to me if she wants to stay here? That would have been the correct thing to do.’
‘I expect it seemed the natural thing to write to her father.’
‘She won’t accept that I am the mistress of the house. That is an indication of how she will behave if she comes here. I haven’t much confidence, Hesketh. What I have she will destroy.’
He folded the letter and put it back in the envelope. ‘We will discuss it later. There is no hurry. She does say she is going to have two weeks in Majorca staying at a friend’s villa.’ He raised a hand as she began to speak. ‘We will talk about it later.’
‘Hesketh, it isn’t that I won’t. I can’t.’
‘I have nothing more to say. You have upset me very much. We will talk about it later.’
He went out of the room and began his nightly routine of closing windows and locking and bolting doors. He recognized this procedure as the practical equivalent of taking arms against a sea of troubles, since it was not burglars whom he sought to keep at bay, but the river. When he had finished, he called out, ‘I have put out the milk bottles, so there is no need to open the front door.’ There was no reply. He glanced into the sitting-room. She still had the paper spread out on her lap, but her head hung forward and her eyes were closed. After all that had passed between them, she had actually fallen asleep.
Chapter Four
‘I want to do in yere,’ Mrs Quince informed Charles Venables. She stood in the doorway to his study, a hand like a brick resting on the vacuum cleaner, sweating powerfully.
It was Saturday morning. She had been prevented from coming during the week by the illness of one of her grandchildren. He had not sought to identify the sufferer since this would involve a recital as laborious as the Book of Numbers. It seemed to him surprising that a woman
as mighty as Mrs Quince, from whose womb had sprung such legions, should have failed to produce sons and daughters capable of ministering to their own offspring. All that he said, however, was ‘Now?’ in a tone of pained surprise.
‘Yurs.’ Mrs Quince treated him as though he was a piece of furniture which had had the temerity to speak. ‘I done the rest.’
They stared at each other and Mrs Quince breathed heavily. The peace of his weekends was precious to Charles. Nevertheless, he was wretchedly at the mercy of Mrs Quince who differed from the newer breed of cleaner in that she was prepared to raise her arms above eye level and to go down on her knees to scrub. Since he dared not risk losing her services, he contented himself with saying austerely, ‘I should be glad if you would not disturb the papers on my desk, Mrs Quince.’
‘Yurs, Mr Venbulls.’ She pushed at the swivel chair and sent it reeling against the wall; an armchair followed at a more leisurely pace. Charles Venables winced. There was something obscene about this ritual baring of the carpet which was old and needed to have its worn patches and the one bad stain decently covered. He had once suggested that it was bad for the carpet to be vacuumed so often, but it had been to no avail. He retreated to the sitting-room.
He should have brought his notes on Anna Karenina with him, but having failed to do so he did not like to return. The less he saw of Mrs Quince’s work methods, the better. And, in any case, her animal odour had overlaid Anna’s traces, and it would take time for her image to reform in his mind. He sat down and pondered why it was that beauty was so vulnerable and the brutish so enduring. But then, of course, that was to compare like with unlike. Anna would survive as long as Caliban, even if in life it was the Mrs Quinces who prevailed.