Not, of course, that most people would have described it as a blow, consisting as it did of a sudden burst of glorious weather. New leaves, almost overnight, on every tree; apple blossom white against the hot blue sky; tulips, gold and scarlet, ablaze in the great circular bed that dominated the gardens; and the lawns, shimmering with new grass, freshly mown, lay smooth and inviting under the resurgent sun. Everything was coming out together, including, of course, the tourists. Instead of the usual twelve or fifteen people in the Tea-Room during the afternoon, suddenly there were ninety – a hundred – a hundred and thirty. Instead of praise for her delicious scones, Mildred’s ears rang with complaints as she rushed, hot and frantic, from table to table. “We’ve been here 25 minutes already!” they cried; and, “You call this service?” And to make matters worse, on the hottest and busiest Saturday of all, one of the two girls from the village who were supposed to help out in the afternoons had once again failed to turn up.
“She’s not feeling too good,” the surviving member of the pair explained, with a certain air of smugness, as if not feeling too good was something a bit special; and added, for good measure: “I shan’t be able to come up Wednesday, I have to go up the hospital about my injections.”
Injections for what? Distracted as she was, Mildred didn’t get around to asking, and anyway why should she? What was the matter with these girls, always off sick? If it wasn’t hayfever it was migraine, or an inflamed tendon playing up. Surely it is the old who are entitled to be ill all the time, not young things like these, barely in their twenties?
And so it went on: the glorious summer weather, and the growing hordes of tourists, ever more numerous, and ever thirstier as the thermometer climbed. Baking scones for a dozen or so customers is one thing: baking them for a hundred is quite another and, though Arnold tried to help out, driving down to the village to buy up cakes and scones in packets (ridiculously uneconomic though this was), and even serving in the restaurant himself at times – he couldn’t, single-handed, stem the tide of disaster. Apart from anything else, he had his own duties to attend to, as part-time guide and as general overseer of crowd behaviour inside the house. It was surprising what they got up to, it really was: climbing over rope barriers, pushing past “NO ADMITTANCE” notices; even trying to clamber, giggling, onto the four-post bed in which Queen Elizabeth was supposed to have slept.
Mildred was in despair. She couldn’t cope and, not surprisingly, she turned on Arnold as the cause of it all. It was he who had dragged her to this God-forsaken hole, working her to death, treating her worse than a slave: turning her into a tea-making machine, using her …
And Arnold had hung his head and couldn’t answer. For it was all true.
*
Arnold roused himself, looked at his watch. Soon, it would be two o’clock, opening time. Leaning down, he retrieved from the waste-paper basket his discarded advertisement, spread it out, read it through again.
It wasn’t just that he was a wimp – though no doubt he was; nor was it just that no rational woman would possibly want a man like that – though no doubt she couldn’t. No, the point was that he didn’t want her, whoever she might be. Mildred had been quite right: he didn’t want a live woman at all, he wanted a tea-making machine, a robot waitress.
Once again, and this time decisively, he crushed the ill-omened paper in his fist and consigned it to the waste-paper basket, this time for good.
Time to be moving. There were still some details to be seen to in the show-rooms before the crowds could be let in. And, most important of all, there was the “CLOSED FOR REPAIRS” notice to be pinned to the door of the Tea-Room.
CHAPTER THREE
Of course, there weren’t any repairs going on in the Tea Room, but what else could he do? Once again, Pauline and Tracey had cried off (something to do with somebody’s sister’s baby-sitter this time) and so Arnold would be entirely on his own for the whole afternoon. There was no way he could do the teas as well as his own job in the show rooms, and “CLOSED FOR REPAIRS” looked better, somehow, than just “CLOSED”. This was not the first time he had been reduced to this subterfuge. Only last week the girls had let him down – on Tuesday, and again on the Saturday. Saturday had been really the last straw, the busiest day of the week, and they hadn’t even bothered to telphone him until the very last moment, when they ought to have been already working. No, it hadn’t been that they were ill, not this time, but they might just as well have been: this time it was the car, the garage wouldn’t have it ready before five, and so …
The car? Arnold had been picturing the girls coming up from the village on foot, skipping across the fields in their summer frocks. But apparently it wasn’t like that at all.
“Walk?” Tracey had cried, shrill with astonishment, “But, Mr Walters …!”
There hadn’t been time to argue; to point out that even by road the distance was barely two miles. Arnold had slammed the phone down; and so now here he was, after less than a week, pinning up his mendacious notice all over again. All over again, too, he was going to have to face irate members of the public button-holing him and demanding, “What repairs?”
“Dry Rot,” he’d told them, out of the top of his head, and for no other reason than that dry rot was the only structural ailment he could think of on the spur of the moment which would show no symptoms visible to the naked eye. Dry rot is the architectural equivalent of a headache: no one can possibly say it isn’t there if you say it is.
But of course, he couldn’t hope to get away with this sort of thing for ever, or even for one more time. Already he was pushing his luck. Sooner or later some aggrieved member of the public would write a complaining letter to Them; and then They would come nosing around on some unlucky afternoon and would report to Head Office. Head Office would then look it all up in their files or their computers or somewhere and would soon find out that no repairs to the Tea Room had been authorised. And then Arnold would really be in trouble. It wasn’t that his real excuse was inadequate – anyone could see that he couldn’t be expected to do two demanding jobs in two different places at the same time. But the point was, he’d been employed as a married couple, and now he wasn’t a married couple any more. Where did that leave him, legally? Out on his ear, almost certainly, Unfair Dismissal or no Unfair Dismissal.
Out in the sunshine, on the semi-circular curve of terrace fronting the Tea Room, Arnold stepped back to survey his handiwork. He had made the notice much larger and blacker this time, filling in the letters with a felt pen, so that the ravening public would be warned of disappointment from quite a distance. This way, their sense of horror and outrage would be just a little bit muted. What had got them on the raw last time, he realised, what had raised their passions to fever-pitch, was to have trudged salivating right up to the Tea Room doors before learning, from a small pencilled card, that everything was OFF.
Well, he’d made a good job of the notice this time. It caught your eye the moment you turned out of the main avenue. He’d done it on hardboard, too, this time, so it wouldn’t disintegrate even in the rain. If there was any rain. The barometer had been set fair for days now, but you never know …
Opening-time was approaching. Already Joyce, mercifully middle-aged and thus with a private life compatible with actually turning up for the job for which she was paid – was ensconced in her kiosk at the entrance, setting out her leaflets and booklets and little maps of the grounds.
Rushed and pressured though he was – on top of everything else, a school party was expected this afternoon for a special guided tour – Arnold nevertheless allowed himself a few seconds of pure enjoyment, standing alone in the sunshine. This was a magic moment, always, this oasis of golden stillness, of empty, waiting lawns, just before the crowds came bursting in. These were the moments of knowing, for certain, that he was happy, that in spite of the stresses and anxieties of the job – or could it even be because of them? – this was the place where he belonged. This was the life he wanted and to wh
ich he had committed himself almost as a novitiate commits himself to the service of God. The pinks and purples of the dahlias, the blaze of golden-rod, the blueness of the sky, the speckled shadows under the great trees – it was all his, his right to it confirmed over and over again by these moments of delight.
*
The school party turned out to be all girls – a relief in a way, though their shrill chatter and shriller giggling ricocheting back and forth against the ancient stone walls made it difficult for Arnold to make himself heard. Still, they didn’t lark about the way the mixed parties so often did, clambering up on things, pushing and shoving, showing-off, needing to be watched every moment. The two sexes have a deleterious effect on one another, Arnold had by now decided, though without following-through this thought to its somewhat disturbing implications for the world at large. For the moment, its implications for the handling of school parties sufficed and he surveyed today’s insurgents with wary satisfaction. Sixteen or twenty of them, ages around fourteen or fifteen he guessed, together with three teachers who looked hardly any older than the pupils.
Three. Arnold sighed. In his experience to date, the more teachers you had on these school outings, the feebler and the more intermittent was the control exercised. And in this case the situation was exacerbated by the fact that the three of them stayed in a tight little huddle at the rear of the party, discussing in hushed voices some all-absorbing grievance about the atrocious behaviour of some absent colleague in respect of dinner-duty. Now and again, in deference to Arnold’s painstaking harangues, they would abandon their private discourse for long enough to urge the girls to “shush!” or to “Move along”; but as the party shuffled forward it was clear that they were at least as bored as their pupils by the manuscript room; by the Ceramics room; by the Armoury – though a small diversion was caused here by the sight of a suit of sixteenth-century armour.
“Look, hey, what a mutant!” one of the girls shrieked. “A diddy-man, he gotta be, to get insida that!”
Pleased by even this degree of attention to the exhibits, Arnold launched into the interesting question of why it was that the stature of people seemed to have increased over the past four hundred years; but his voice was soon drowned out by further apposite comments from the audience.
“A diddy-man, yeah! A dink! A proper little skinny-bum!” – followed by giggles, and much pointing of forefingers, and the enunciation of syllables which, to Arnold, conveyed absolutely nothing.
He soon gave up any attempt to instruct and set himself to hurry them through as fast as he decently could in order to get to the wax-works, in the presence of which, he knew, the chattering voices would be momentarily stilled.
And so it was. Even the grievance about dinner-duty shrivelled into silence in the presence of the life-size dead. Under the gaze of these unseeing eyes, the sound of giggling died away. Thomas Cranmer – Anne Boleyn – Lady Jane Grey – Edward Talbot: all doomed, whether by coincidence or because it was a usual cause of death for the aristocracy of those times – all doomed to die by execution.
Arnold seized upon the unwonted silence to make himself heard. He had always been fascinated by the Tudor period and he had, of course, read up the subject in a big way since learning that guided tours would be a significant part of his job. There wasn’t much, now, that he didn’t know, and he felt more than competent to answer any questions that the public might toss to him. These girls, he was told, when the arrangements were being made, had only last term been doing the Tudor period, and so there would be plenty of questions.
It was for him to set the ball rolling, though, and letting his glance travel over the silent figures, seated in remarkably natural poses at the long oak table, he tried to decide where to start. Which of those brief and tragic life-stories would most effectively capture the imagination of these schoolgirls, young, safe and healthy, untouched as yet by tragedy? Anne Boleyn, perhaps, ordering for her executioner a special sword from France, so that he might sever her neck at a single blow? Little Katherine Howard, who ran screaming up and down the echoing corridors of Greenwich Palace the night before her execution? Or Thomas Cranmer, holding out to the flames his right hand, the hand that had signed his false recantation, that it might burn first?
They would know these grim highlights of history already, of course. Who could ever forget them? What, then, of poor little Jane Grey, almost a child, only sixteen, when she had slipped into and out of history so briefly as to be almost unnoticed? A quiet, scholarly girl, whose greatest – and perhaps only – joy derived from the study of the Greek and Latin classics. By the time she was thirteen, she was said to be the equal of any scholar in Europe in knowledge of the ancient writers. Even in waxwork, now, four hundred years later, she was portrayed chin in hand, poring over some learned text. Just so would she have been sitting on the eve of her execution, when, it is said, she sat up all through the long night studying her Greek Testament; and when her anxious attendants urged her to try and get some sleep, she countered their concern with cool, unanswerable logic:
“What need have I of sleep, who so soon shall sleep for ever?”
Yes. Lady Jane Grey. So nearly the same age as these young girls lined up in the here and now, alive, in this ancient room. They could not fail to be touched with awe – with compassion – with something.
“Lady Jane Grey was executed when she was not much older than you are,” he began. “And for no other reason than that she was in line for the throne, grand-daughter of one of Henry VIII’s sisters. She was born in 1537, and …”
“We don’t do dates,” came a reproving voice from among the assembled listeners. “Miss Jeeves says history isn’t just a matter of dates, it’s about people.”
“Yes, well …” Arnold was momentarily a little thrown, but he rallied. “That may be so, but Lady Jane was a person, wasn’t she? And a very important one, as it turned out.”
“No more important than anybody else,” snapped the well-indoctrinated heckler. “Less important, actually, She was upper class. It’s the working classes that are important in history. The ordinary people.”
O.K. Let her have her head. Aloud he said, “Well, fair enough. Tell me about the ordinary people in Tudor times.”
Silence. A silence almost as profound as that of the waxwork figures at the table. Then, a cautious voice piped up:
“Well, they lived in dire poverty, see? Dire!”
Pause. Arnold did see, but he wasn’t going to let it go at that.
“Go on,” he said. “Tell me more. What was it like, living in dire poverty as they did?”
The party now seemed to be recovering from some kind of culture-shock and various suggestions began to pepper the silence.
“Well, they died of things. They starved. The rich people ate all the food.”
“That’s right. Their babies all died because the rich people ate all the food.”
“And awful diseases they died of too. The Black Death and things.”
“The Black Death was two hundred years earlier than the Tudors,” Arnold was beginning; but now one of the teachers joined the discussion, a slender little thing with steel-rimmed glasses and looking all of fourteen.
“I thought we’d told you, Mr Walters, it’s social history we’ve been specialising in, not facts and dates. We’re not interested in chronology and all that. We’re interested in ordinary people – their work – their daily lives.”
Recalling the total boredom displayed by teachers and pupils alike when he’d tried to explain to them the working of the water-wheel, and to draw their attention to the diagram showing the flow of grain from the hopper, down through the runner-stone, to be crushed and fall as flour into the great bin, Arnold found it difficult to keep a grip on the argument. And by now, anyway, his attention was almost entirely taken up by trying to prevent the girls reaching over the barriers and fingering the rich silks and velvets, the delicate lace, in which the models were clothed. In this effort he received a certain a
mount of perfunctory backing from the teachers. “No, Sadie, leave that alone.” “Don’t touch, Phyllida, you’ll make finger-marks.” “Janie, stop it! If you don’t behave properly, we shan’t be allowed to come here again!”
Not a very terrible threat, not for any of the participants. And anyway, by now the three teachers were looking surreptitiously at their watches, wondering how soon they could decently claim it to be teatime and escort their pupils to the one really popular item on the afternoon’s programme.
Bad luck! Rotten luck! But Arnold did not choose to warn them of the tea-less desert awaiting them. Why should he? Serve them right! See if he cared!
CHAPTER FOUR
Meanwhile, in London, not in their own home but only a few streets away from it, Mildred hovered uneasily in her friend’s kitchen, wishing she could find something to do that would be a help.
Val hated being helped, that was the problem; a particularly embarrassing one, of course, for a guest who arrived “just for the night” nearly three weeks ago, and who still hasn’t found anywhere else to stay.
Not that her hostess was complaining of this state of affairs, not so far. She wasn’t even throwing out hints that Mildred was outstaying her welcome. The uncomfortable feelings were all on Mildred’s side and she tried, as far as she could, to suppress them. What was the point of looking for trouble when Val herself seemed perfectly happy to have her here on an indefinitely extended visit? Really did appear to be happy about it. Mildred still felt warmed and reassured by the recollection of that afternoon three weeks ago when, limp with heat, clutching a single suitcase, her mousy-grey hair in wisps round her flushed face, she had staggered despairingly up to the only front door she knew well enough to venture on such an intrusion and had been confronted straight away by a big, welcoming grin, an outsize mug of tea, and a flood of uncritical sympathy.
The Echoing Stones Page 3