The Solitary Child

by Nina Bawden

  He stood up, shuffled to the door in his slippers and held it open. He said, “Let’s move out of this pigsty. I don’t suppose you’re accustomed to bachelor squalor.”

  The study was tidy. Most of the floor space was taken up by a big, roll-top desk and a pair of leather arm-chairs. Papers were arranged on the desk with fussy neatness. The walls were lined with books and sporting prints, a fire was laid in the grate and he set a match to the paper. He poured us both a whisky and settled himself comfortably in his chair. He glared fiercely at me.

  “Some people would call you an impertinent young woman,” he said. “But I’m an easy-going sort of bloke. I take interference better than most.” He grinned, suddenly and surprisingly. “Comes of being only half-gentry, I suppose. Haven’t got such a blown-up sense of my own importance. Well—let’s get back to Miss Maggie.…” He coughed until his eyes watered and drained the whisky in his glass.

  “There she was then, looking very neat and pretty in her summer dress, carrying a basket and something wrapped up in a piece of old sacking. She was all worked up over something, she kept laughing at nothing and she couldn’t sit still. She wanted me to drive fast, she kept saying, ‘Go faster, Uncle Cyril, go eighty miles an hour,’ until we were going along those narrow lanes at a hell of a lick. She wasn’t scared. She loved it. She bounced up and down in her seat. She had a cartridge case in her hand and she played with it all the time, throwing it up and catching it.

  “When we got to the top of the Bank, she asked me to stop. The farm was at the end of a track and I wasn’t exactly anxious to damage my tyres when I hadn’t got a spare, so I stopped and let her get out. There was a steep gulley at the side of the road, what they call a cwm round here, with trees at the bottom and a dried-up brook.

  “Well … she looked into the gulley and laughed to herself and hurled the bundle she’d been carrying down the drop. It must have been something soft, because it didn’t make any noise. She looked at me with her head on one side and gave me a funny, pleased sort of grin. I asked her what she’d chucked away and she wriggled her shoulders and said it was only an old dress she didn’t want any longer. I said I supposed it was something she didn’t like and her mother had been making her wear. I said if I was her mother, I’d smack her bottom. She said, ‘Oh, no, Uncle Cyril. Mummy can’t make me do anything any longer. She’s dead.’”

  He sighed heavily, his breath made a tiny, whistling sound. “That brought me up short, I can tell you. I knew she was only a kid and a bit of a liar, but for some reason or other it sounded like the truth. I asked her what she meant and she giggled a bit and said, ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you, or I shall get into dreadful trouble.’ She peered over her shoulder as if there was a bogy after her and then she said, ‘Daddy killed her.’”

  The fire spat. The hand of the electric clock on the wall gave a little click and jumped a minute. Cyril heaved himself out of his chair and poured himself another whisky. He stood on the hearth, short legs straddled wide apart.

  He said uncomfortably, “Go on. Say something. Don’t sit there like a statue. I’ve told you, haven’t I? If you like, you can translate it into police language and I’ll sign the statement. Then you can frame it and hang it next to your marriage lines.” He laughed awkwardly.

  My voice didn’t belong to me. It grated angrily. “If you’re so sure he did it, why didn’t you tell the police?”

  He said truculently, “Now steady on, Harriet. Look— it was none of my business, was it? And anyway, it was only what the lawyer fellows call hearsay. I did what I could. I packed Maggie off to the Bank farm after her duck eggs and rushed back to Random End to see if there was anything I could do. All the time I was driving back I hoped she’d been lying. But it was true. The police had arrived when I got there.…”

  He coughed, the whisky slopped over his hand. “I’m not going to pretend that I liked Eva, because I didn’t. But that had nothing to do with it. It seemed to me there was no earthly point in involving Maggie. I’ve no time for psychological clap-trap but I can’t see it would have done her any good to be dragged through the police courts. And as for James—well, it wasn’t my job to judge him, thank God. I always believed in minding my own business.”

  Plainly, he considered this a virtue. I said, with horror, “But if he had killed his wife, surely that was your business?”

  “Why on earth should it be? As far as I was concerned, James was a decent sort of chap and I liked him.”

  “How can you be so complacent? What about the poor woman? She was dead—dead. And you think that you were right to mind your own business? I think it is contemptible.”

  He said defensively, “Why should you think you can lay down the law about what’s right and what isn’t right? Do you really think it would have helped matters for James to hang? He was a much better person than his wife. If he killed her, she’d driven him to it…”

  “It’s easy for you to say that. You didn’t like her.”

  “No.” He paced the hearth rug, his glass in his hand. I noticed that the little tufts of hair growing in his ears were snow white, although the hair on his head was thick and strong and black.

  Suddenly he exploded. “She was a damn’silly bitch. Full of airs and graces. Treated me like dirt. Very conscious that she was carriage trade and I ought to come in by the back door. My father rented a hill farm, he made a bare living, there was no money for fancy nonsense. I got where I am by hard work and sweat, so I wasn’t good enough for my lady. She didn’t want Ann to marry me, I didn’t speak properly, hadn’t been to a public school, only a horse doctor, that sort of thing. It would be so awkward for her to have me in the family. She might have to ask me to dinner when she had some of her fancy friends down from Oxford. That wouldn’t suit Miss Eva at all. Though what grounds she had for thinking herself so superior, I don’t know. I’d like to bet she’d never read a book, only the literary reviews.…”

  He was angry. I had never seen Cyril angry. He was sneering and his face, except for the scarlet threads of veins, was white. His hands were shaking. Then he looked at me and smiled, shame-faced. “Sorry, Harriet. It’s a sore spot. I’m a self-educated man, you know, the kind they make funny jokes about in clever books. An easy target for Eva. She couldn’t miss.…”

  “What shall I do?” I mourned. “What shall I do?”

  His voice was gentle. He crouched on his plump haunches and peered into my face.

  “I don’t know. It isn’t my affair. I can’t help. James doesn’t talk to me any more, you know. He suspects everyone, even his friends.” Wistfully he added, “You’d never think, would you, that we used to be good friends? Boys together.…”

  His eyes were damp. Whisky and sentiment had taken hold of him. He took the glass from my hand and refilled it. I wondered if this was my second drink or my third. I had lost count.

  “Why don’t you forget all about it?” he asked.

  “How could I forget?”

  He rolled the whisky round his glass. He said heavily, “I’m not much of a hand at advice. Always thought it was a bad thing to tell other people what to do.” He stared reflectively at the ceiling. “You know, James used to be a jolly man before she got hold of him and dragged him down. Simple sense of humour like a schoolboy. He’s had a hell of a lot of trouble. Don’t put any more on his shoulders.” He blinked at me with dark, wet, shining eyes. “After all, you married him, didn’t you, for better or worse? And if he’s a murderer, he’s still the same man that you married. The only thing that’s different, now that you’ve found out, is you.” He stabbed an emphatic finger at the air.

  I drained my glass. I felt peaceful and rather sleepy. It seemed that Cyril was the fount of all wisdom.

  I appealed to him. “It’s worse than you think. We had a row last night. He walked out of the house and didn’t come back. I don’t know where he is.”

  He patted my shoulder. “Don’t you worry. You’re a good girl. You’ll make out. Believe me. I’m
a rough sort of chap but I know good stock when I see it.” He frowned at me gloomily. “You’re thinking I’m a foolish, drunken old man, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  He laughed richly. “Well, you should be. I am. Now be off with you. Make it up with James. And don’t you tell Ann that I gave you whisky. She’d think it immoral at this time of the morning.”

  My head was throbbing. I drove the car cautiously along the empty, white road. There was a crust of ice like thin glass on the surface of the snow. In the sky the sun was pale and transparent like the moon.

  For a while it all seemed very simple. I had got what I wanted, the truth at last, and with knowledge there was an end of much that could twist and torture, an end, above all, of the fear that I was sick in my mind. Beside that, his certain guilt was almost unimportant: I had, after all, suspected it for so long that confirmation brought an emotion that was not entirely despair.

  And, when I thought about it, not despair at all. For I no longer feared him, and with fear gone there was no obstacle to our lives together. It struck me with an aching pity that he must have been afraid too. He had lacked the courage to confront me with the truth and the fear that I might, of my own accord, discover it, must have been an appalling and continued nightmare. But soon that fear would be past with all the other fears; we would comfort and reassure each other.

  Yet, after a while, I seemed to drift not into clarity, but into thicker darkness. Because, if Maggie had been there, what safety lay in our future? She had seen her father kill her mother, and only God knew what it had done to her. Always a solitary child, she had grown twisted, convinced of persecution. Her mind was peopled with a hundred hostile enemies—I wondered, now, whether they had always worn her father’s face. She had tried to tell me she was afraid. I remembered her words on the mountain: I feel that I am alone on a bridge and there is no safe place at all.

  Because I had not believed her, she had resorted to experiment; the powdered glass had been no more than a cry for help to me, the one person she loved and trusted. If I believed she was in danger, she would be safe. To her, perhaps, it had seemed a logical thing to do.

  Suddenly I was elated. If she could be brought to admit the truth, her delusions would vanish. Confession would heal her poor sick mind, lift from it what must have been an intolerable burden.

  The way was clear before me. I would go and see her, she loved me, she would talk to me.… I swung the car into the lane.

  She was sitting at the piano in the drawing-room, playing a hymn with a lot of crashing chords. I think it was “Abide With Me.” The room was filled with an odd, still light reflected from the snow.

  She lifted her hands from the piano and looked at me with an expression of alarm as if she expected a scolding.

  I threw down my coat. I said, “Maggie, my darling,” and she ran to me, smiling, her hands outstretched.

  “Harriet, I ran away.” She put her head on one side with a mischievous, sweet look. “Auntie locked me in my room. I climbed out of the window.”

  I was shocked. “Locked you in your room? You?”

  “Yes.” She frowned slightly as if at an unpleasant memory. “They said I’d been naughty. But it wasn’t true. They were afraid I’d talk to you.”

  “Afraid? Why?”

  We sat down on the couch. My arm was round her shoulders and she patted my cheek with soft little love pats.

  “Oh … nothing.”

  She looked at me with a kind of childish cunning. She wore a bright green sweater that clung close round her white neck. I held her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes.

  “My darling, why were they cross with you? Please tell me. Whatever you tell me, I won’t be angry.”

  She wriggled under my hands. She bit her lip.

  “Please, darling, tell me.”

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes, fixed on some point beyond my shoulder, were large and grey.

  “You put the glass in the porridge, is that it? But if you did it, you did it for a reason. Because you were worried and frightened and no one would understand why?”

  Her eyes came slowly back to my face with a curious blankness in their depths as if she were quite deliberately closing her mind against me. Her forehead was damp with sweat. I felt a sudden fear that if I did not take this opportunity there would be no other, that in some way she would slip beyond me, out of reach.

  I said clumsily, “Maggie, you must listen to me for a minute. You’ve been very naughty. But I don’t think you meant to be. Tell me, darling, do you love and trust me?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was low but clear.

  “Then you must believe that I love you. And whatever I say, hang on to that because so much depends on it. And make an effort to stay with me, don’t go off into one of your dreams because they aren’t real, d’you see?”

  I could feel the sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades. The skin puckered between her eyes, her mouth trembled, but her eyes looked straight into mine with such an expression of frank and limpid courage that I could have cried for joy. She was not going to evade me. She understood that it was important she should not. Whatever the likeness of the world into which she was accustomed to escape, for the moment it was sealed off: we stood, for this moment, on the same ground.

  I said carefully, “Do you remember when Mummy died?”

  She nodded. She watched my lips like a child learning the alphabet.

  “Everyone thought you were away, didn’t they? Well, I know you were here, on the farm, know it for certain.”

  She looked faintly puzzled and then she smiled sweetly; the faint inclination of her head gave me my answer. Her eyes shone; just then, in the snow-lit room, she was more beautiful than I had ever seen her. She was looking at me with such a look of tranquil innocence that I faltered, faced by the fear that I might, after all, be wrong, that she might know nothing.

  “I only want to help you, you believe that, don’t you?” Perhaps I should have been warned by her slight physical withdrawal. The hand which, up to now, had lain softly in mine, fluttered against her breast.

  She said gently, “But you want me to tell you something, don’t you?”

  It struck me then that she was quite unmoved; that the love and terror that agitated me found no echo in her. It was because of this, I think, that I went straight into the matter; it seemed that the quicker the words were spoken, the sooner it would be over for all of us.

  “Only so that I can help you. Maggie, did you see what happened to your mother?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Her head was a little on one side, her hand against her heart. The still, unreal light that flooded the room made the pose theatrical. And yet her smile was natural and childish; she answered with a simple docility that was quite without guile.

  I wanted to take her in my arms, to hold her bright head close to my shoulder but I was afraid that a show of emotion would only frighten her. She was completely unconscious that there was any tension in the situation; to bring it to her notice might jeopardise the frankness of her answer.

  “Then—what?” I asked, smiling to show that it was not so serious, that she could confide in me without fear.

  “She died,” she answered flatly. “There was blood on my frock.”

  “And you threw it away? That was very sensible, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She turned her head away as if she had lost interest in the matter, rose from the couch and went to the fire where she looked at the chimney breast as if something there was entirely absorbing her attention. I followed her.

  “Darling, don’t you see that you must tell me all about it now?”

  She turned her head and gave me a long, grave look as if she were turning over something in her mind. For a moment there was a hint of an ordinary emotion in her eyes, a kind of brief panic. Then it faded and she said:

  “I’ll tell you some time. But not now. Please don’t make me.”

  The appeal was defi
nite and humble but I could not accept it. Victory was so nearly in my hands that I ignored the warning note in her surrender.

  “Yes, my love. You must tell me now.”

  She stretched out her slim foot on the steel fender and regarded it thoughtfully.

  “She told Archie that he mustn’t come to see me again. So I was glad when she was dead.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  At my outraged voice she raised her eyes to my face. They were steady and very bright.

  “But I was glad,” she insisted stubbornly. She bit her lip, the look she gave me was both pleased and sly. “I wanted to pay her out. It was too bad.…”

  “Too bad?” I echoed.

  “Of her to stop me seeing him,” she finished with a quaint air of complacence.

  And with a faint smile on her mouth she told me. The recreated atmosphere was all the more chilling because of the complete absence of feeling; anything, even hate, would have been better than the cool logic of her calm little voice. Her mother had asked Archie to come to Random End. Maggie had overheard her making the appointment on the telephone, and when she was sent on her errand she had taken the basket, walked until she was out of sight of the house and then returned by the fields and waited in the wain-shed. She had spoken to Archie after his interview with her mother and he had told her he was going away, that they wouldn’t be able to meet again. She was cross with Archie—cross was her own word and its nursery overtone was more terrifying than a more violent word would have been—and cross with her mother. She ended simply, “So of course I was glad when she was dead. I was frightened because there was so much blood all over her head and on my dress. But I was glad too.” She smiled at me placatingly. “You’re not angry, are you, Harriet?”

  She moved towards me, held out her hands. Involuntarily, I shrank away. I could not bear her to touch me, it would be like touching a snake. Aware of my withdrawal, she frowned, her hands dropped limply to her sides. She smiled at me tentatively as if something were puzzling her.