A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  ‘I suppose so …’

  ‘Suppose?’

  ‘Don’t pick me up,’ she said sharply. Glancing down she noticed a chevron of dust streaking across her skirt. For a moment she gazed at it, surprised that she had managed to get so messed-up. Her shoes were dusty too, and, she suspected, her hair. It would fall all the time in a place like this, she thought; dust, that final evidence that something had been; and even dust itself would eventually disappear, must filter from history into the void. It came off the fake Norman stairs the Council had erected, she supposed. She must have brushed against them as they came up. Somehow this inevitable disintegration of all things soothed her. It brought her back to her habitual commonsense. ‘Oh, how silly we’re being!’

  ‘Has that only just occurred to you?’

  ‘Just. Look at me—I’m smothered in dust—and my Murea suit too …’

  ‘Is that something special?’

  ‘Frightfully special!’

  ‘Here—let me …’

  ‘When we get out will do.’

  ‘No. Stand still. It’s off the wall.’

  ‘I thought the stairs. Do you like it?’

  ‘Love it!’

  ‘You haven’t said so before.’

  ‘But I knew all the same—even before you got here. Mary will look wonderful today, I said. And then you arrived and you did. You’re beautiful.’

  ‘Not ‘beautiful’, Richard.

  ‘I won’t have my judgments amended. Beautiful.’

  She laughed and stroked the ends of her gloves up under her sleeves, pretending to overlook the intent stare of his eyes and said, ‘Am I?’

  ‘Very …’ he replied gravely.

  When I look back on this, she thought, I shall see that the danger began at this point. Not at Meridian years ago, not during the walk to the Martello tower, not even at Dunwich—although there the hazards were ominous enough! But here, in a thousand-year-old window, and in a rather common way. But that won’t matter. Not then. She made a final effort to pull herself out of all this dolorousness. After all, she had still the power to refuse. Mightn’t that be the highest power of all, she wondered? To say no? To be able to reject? ‘Don’t take it if you don’t want it’, she recalled Edwina saying dozens of times to her children—Not that that ever made the slightest difference. Their plates always ended up by being crowded with crumpled bits of this and that which they hadn’t quite enjoyed. Thoughts of Edwina turned easily by a natural process to thoughts of her own mother. Wasn’t it time she should be getting back? A rather maudlin affection took over from the irritation she normally felt where her mother was concerned. Distance had done it. Twenty short miles had turned Mrs Crawford into a dear, pathetic parent. Mary could really despise herself. Yet all the pull-yourself-together, stop-worrying, be-sensible, self-advice churning around in her brain could not put a stop to what must surely be a groundless apprehension that something at Meridian would take this opportunity afforded by her absence to go amiss. It was rubbish—baseless, she knew and yet was now eager to get back to Lafney.

  ‘Dear, dear Richard …’

  ‘Don’t go. Stay and have some tea.—Stay and have some supper?’

  ‘Silly. You know I can’t. Next Sunday—how about that?’

  She knew this was a mistake the minute she said it and was relieved when he said, ‘Hopeless, I’m afraid. Sheldon.’

  ‘Oh, of course. Stupid of me. Well, soon anyway.’

  ‘Soon’ he repeated but, she thought, so complacently, that her simmering hurts bubbled up afresh in an uncontrollable wash of pain.

  ‘Well we can’t stay here,’ she murmured, feeling quite sorry for herself. To support this there was a solemn gonging from below-stairs, an expanding glory of noise which sounded wildly oriental in its progress through the stocky arches; it declared the museum closed.

  ‘One day,’ said Richard in a taut I-told-you-so voice, ‘you’ll believe what I say …’

  She gazed at him with amazement. ‘But I do.’

  ‘You do?—No you don’t; not quite.’

  ‘What?’

  The splendid Chinese noise repeated itself and if Richard answered her, then she did not hear him. He helped her climb down from the window and with its dust still smirched faintly down the side of her skirt, they left the museum and all its accurately docketted odds and ends to darkness, trailing out with the other visitors past the cold armour, under the jammed portcullis and so into the smoky gold of late January and a lane of dripping-wet chestnuts. He settled her in the Alvis, but too solicitously, so that when he thanked her—just ‘Thank you’ said very simply—she flared up. She couldn’t prevent herself.

  ‘For God’s sake, Richard, do you have to be so formal …!’

  ‘You’ve been irritable from the minute you got here‚’ he accused her unjustly. His easy, immediate anger shone in every syllable.

  ‘Irritable …? Have I …?’ She weighed this up with aggravating detachment as she fixed the driving-mirror and then a scarf over her head. Her poise grew and grew until she knew it must seem to him absolutely outrageous. So did her misery, but he didn’t suspect that. If she were nineteen she would cry. At thirty-two one might only be sick. She would do that—be sick, perhaps in the crackling darkness of the Forestry Commission’s firs where the spindly aisles reeled on and on like a remorseless exercise in perspective. The last thing she wanted to do was think. The starter, the wheel, the smeary mirror reacted confidentially to her touch. She saw him standing there, but these things assumed precedence. They mattered; they would get her home.

  ‘Good-bye‚’ she smiled through the glass. She heard the sound but he didn’t. Only the desperate sweetness of her mouth travelled beyond the window. She saw his hand flutter up to about the level of his lapel, then fall uselessly as he automatically returned the smile. Then off she went, not fast, if anything she rather jogged out of sight.

  9

  HIBBLE, on edge for hours for the front door’s click, let her in. ‘Oh, Miss … Oh, Miss …’ was all she managed to get out at first. Then she said, ‘Thank the Lord!’ which was a genuine prayer since she at no time used the sacred titles casually. ‘Oh you poor dear‚’ she fussed. Her concern was mountainous, although hardly outdoing her very obvious delight that there was something to be so concerned about. The responsibility which had been hers (for how long? Mary wondered miserably) had puffed Hibble up into a threatening pregnancy of self-importance.

  ‘Better tell me in here, Hibble.’ She pushed open the door of the morning room and saw with wistful astonishment its sameness, how the polished buds of the daffodils gangled at the tips of their over-forced stalks, and how the cushions were all wragged together at one end of the sofa for what Hibble termed, ‘Madam’s lay-down’. The Sunday Times had drifted into a crisp ruin across the carpet. A book she had been reading the evening before lay face-downwards on the window-seat. A misaddressed envelope curled in the fender—she had cast it there a minute—an age ago—who could tell? Still there it was, slovenly and chiding. She stooped and picked it up and said to Hibble.

  ‘Sit down please, Hibble. Tell me what happened.’

  ‘It was after luncheon …’

  ‘After luncheon—when Mr Yockery was here?’

  ‘No, Miss, he didn’t come. He sent a message to say he had the headache.’

  ‘Did he?’ she asked, flopping wearily into a stiffly buttoned chair, ‘I am sorry. Now just tell me quickly what happened to Mummy. Was it long after I had gone? Where is she—is anybody with her?’

  ‘She’s in her bed which is the best place for her, poor lady. She fell off her chair and when I found her she was moaning against the carpet’

  ‘That’s how she was lying, Miss—Oh, she wasn’t hurt—least not by that—the tumble, you might say. But her poor face was wet and you could see the weeping.’

  ‘You say you telephoned Doctor Fitzsimmons as soon as it happened?’

  ‘I didn’t say, but I did, of course. I’m
not the one for using things like the telephone on the Lord’s Day out of idleness.’

  ‘Then what is it—what did he say it was?’

  Hibble waited. There was something consummate in her power to protract. Something merciless, too. On no account would she be deprived of what was rightfully hers—the joy in the telling. She sagged forward, causing her thin, polished body to slip remotely inside its cocoon of Sunday silk. Her hands were clapped against her cheeks, her head niddered in a kind of disbelief that what had happened could have happened.

  ‘She had a stroke‚’ she said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know when, Miss. She was well enough for her lunch, because she ate it all. I came in later to see to the fire—and there she was, the dear soul, with the cards all round her.’

  ‘The cards—but you said she was alone? Oh, Patience, yes, of course …’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ declared Hibble, rubbing her handkerchief up and down one shining nostril—she fostered an implacable ignorance where some things were concerned; cards, drinking and what she called ‘common songs’—though where she expected to encounter the last in the neighbourhood of Meridian, had always been a mystery to Mary. ‘But there was cards all over the place, you might say. Cards in the grate, on the floor …’

  ‘Never mind about the cards. Who is with her now?’

  ‘She’s sound. The best thing too—that’s what Doctor Panton said; “sleep”, he says, “nothing better”—those were his words. Although why these doctors always have to tell a person things any fool would know …’

  ‘Doctor Panton? You said Doctor Fitzsimmons.’

  ‘I know I did, my lamb—and he sent Doctor Panton.’

  Then Hibble began to cry, a thing she had been longing to do for some time. Her tears were messy and had less in common with grief than with a severe cold. Usually they had the effect of making Mary search for her own handkerchief to ward off such a virulent drizzle. This time, however, she placed an arm round Hibble’s knotted shoulders and said, ‘There, Hibble dear; you’ve been very kind. You’ve done everything you should have. I’ll telephone Doctor Panton now and then I’ll go up and see her.

  ‘She called out, Miss. She kept on calling out …’

  ‘Well that was quite natural, wasn’t it? You go and get some tea now—get us both some and I’ll have a word with Doctor Panton.’

  At the door, Hibble paused. ‘In here?’ she enquired with a formidable melancholy.

  ‘If you like, Hibble. Yes, in here; there’s a fire here.’

  Waiting for the operator to answer she heard Hibble singing with tremulous refinement, … ‘And nightly shift my earthly tent a day’s march nearer Home …’

  Doctor Panton treated her qualms with flighty cheerfulness. They hadn’t met; he was old Doctor Fitzsimmons’s new partner, a youngish G.P. whose uncrushable conviction it was that anxiety outdid every other failing of the flesh. Root that out and then see how little there was to fear amongst the more easily-classified plagues!

  ‘Don’t worry—not a bit,’ he told Mary. She hadn’t the faintest doubt of the kind of female he was imagining at the other end of the line, one of those oddly-dumbfounded creatures, virginal and frightened, who packed towns like Lafney.

  She hardened her voice and said with absolute politeness, No, she would try not to and perhaps the best plan would be for him to call round and see her that evening since she had to know exactly what had happened and the telephone was hardly the thing for that. The telephone system belonging to Lafney possessed its own ethics where the really confidential was concerned. Gossip might be helped on its way lightly enough, but tragedy froze the service-end of the line. Between the two speakers there existed an elephantine ear, an inescapable confessor into which sank, as inevitably as pebbles in a marsh, all the hard news of the place. Mary sensed the ear new fixed expectantly between the doctor and herself like a listening fungus. ‘At six‚’ she repeated. ‘Yes, that would do very well.’ Before ringing off, she thanked him for all he had done, then hurried up to Mrs Crawford’s room. Before she went in she snatched the silver clip from her collar and put it in her pocket and pressed her hair flat, sensing that some of her ‘special’ look might still remain and give offence. Then she entered.

  Her mother was propped up in a half-sitting position against a heap of pillows, a pink mountain against a white.

  ‘So you’ve returned!’ she said in a frighteningly strong voice. The sound of it was like somebody declaiming in an empty room. There was an unnecessary wealth of vowels floating on for ever and ever. The inflexions were the same; it was her mother who was speaking, but in an entirely new register. It was like a terrible impersonation of herself by a guardsman.

  ‘Poor Mummy …’ Mary went forward quickly and grasped the fat white hand, winking with rings, which twitched above the sheet. The sour, rather indecent smell she had noticed when she first opened the door, increased. A glance was enough to tell her that every window was tightly fastened. ‘Let’s have a little air—shall we, darling!’

  There was a catch in the cumbersome breathing and then Mrs Crawford said, ‘No.’—so abruptly in her new deep voice, that there was nothing for it but to put up with the foetid warmth. Then she asked, ‘Did you have a good time?’ There was anger in this but Mary, vaguely conscious of sick-room ethics, brushed her way past it and answered simply,

  ‘A nice time, darling … Can you … can you tell me about it?—Or shall we do all that later?’

  She bent over as she spoke and tugged the oyster-coloured eiderdown straight and picked up a scratchy lace handkerchief from the floor. Mrs Crawford twisted suddenly, the bed made a sad wiry noise and a glossy sheen ran vulgarly from hummock to hummock over the eiderdown. This time it was a biscuity-looking quilted thing which began to slither floor-wards. It was when she was putting this straight that the real cause of all this disorder became obvious to Mary. Her mother was not so much lying, as floundering in her bed. Her body was drifting helplessly, shapelessly in a too-snug welter of sheets and counterpane. It was uncontrolled and enormous. Only her nose and her brow, the last smooth and tallowy, escaped this anarchy of the flesh. They stood out, thin and handsome above the soft ruin of the throat. As well as her rings, Mrs Crawford still wore her gold chain. In the scrunched-up frill of her nightdress its links glimmered and fled like beetles.

  ‘I went to Stourfriston—to see Richard—Richard Brand. We just had luncheon, then afterwards we went to the Castle Museum and walked about a bit. Darling, if only I’d had the faintest idea …’

  ‘Why are you explaining? Nobody has asked you to.’

  ‘You were so well when I left. So absolutely right …’

  ‘What has that got to do with it?’ persisted the peculiar mannish voice from the pillows.

  ‘Only that if there had been the slightest hint, the merest suspicion, do you think I would have gone?’

  Mrs Crawford, cruelly adroit in her new rôle, turned her face to the sea and said, ‘You might.’

  I might—but I wouldn’t have, Mary was about to retort in her old way, then she sensibly switched her mind to the real situation. Her mother had collapsed. She was ill to some curious degree. But what strength had raced from her ponderous physique, had not raced from her altogether. It had left her body to sink so that it might add to the soaring capacity of her will. In that way she had never been so robust. So Mary just said, with a kind of cosy playfulness she hoped would mask her distress,

  ‘Well you know I didn’t know!’ Anyone else, she implied, Hibble, the doctor—the local gossips when they found out; they could say what they liked!

  Mrs Crawford’s head rolled slowly down the pillow until her eyes met Mary’s a second only—no more. ‘Pray don’t explain,’ she said.

  ‘But, darling Mummy, I want to know.’ Surprisingly at that moment she did. If it had been possible she would have said everything. It would have all run away from her like a freed stream leaving her with gent
le, tolerable shallows in which she could reflect occasionally and regret nothing. But the moment passed and from then on she knew the depths would always remain to bewilder her.

  ‘Know what?’

  It was too much. How was she ever to compete with this fierce, new-found sagacity? The weakness had previously exploited the flesh and had been present for all to see. Now the body could be dismissed. No one would ever refer to Mrs Crawford as a big dominating old woman again, perhaps. She would be Mary’s ‘poor mother’ and as such would enjoy a far greater calculating power than all her earlier ability to trundle heavily from room to room had allowed. It was a sardonic apotheosis. Comprehending it suddenly, and with desolating clarity, Mary could only stare down on the bed, fascinated and appalled.

  ‘Nothing … nothing,’ she answered.

  In the hall she faced Doctor Panton.

  ‘Ah—Miss Crawford,’ he said, unnecessarily merry.

  ‘The thing is,’ she told him, ‘I am never away—that’s the really amazing thing! Then just this afternoon …’

  ‘Always the way.’

  ‘Always,’ she replied, finding it pleasant to play this polite game after the barbed talk upstairs. She wondered if it might be the moment to say something about wishing him well in Lafney—he had been there just a month and neither her mother nor herself had so far called—then decided it to be the absolutely wrong thing to do. For one thing, she had never seen a pair of eyes manifesting such a brilliant, bird-like interest. So she just asked, ‘Ought we to have a nurse?’

  ‘A nurse? Goodness me, no! Mrs Crawford should be up and about in a month. You can, if you feel like being extravagant, of course.’

  ‘In a month?’ She could hardly conceal her astonishment.

  ‘I understand that there has never been anything like this before?’

  ‘Oh no, never.’

  ‘Well then a month should see her right again. And that’s only a precautionary measure, added to which, you might say, a rest never hurt anybody. I should put it down to her being a bit upset over something.’