‘I’m glad you admit it. So you can hardly say I broke your marriage up, can you?’
‘Oh, that was different. The others were just a thing of the moment. A quick in and out after the pubs closed or round the back of the factory. I expect that’s what he thought he was going to when you grabbed him at the end of the war. He should have realized it would be different with Gerald gone. You wanted a man, and you wanted him for good–because after all, you were getting on then, weren’t you? So once you got him into your fleshy arms–’
‘My arms were not fleshy!’
‘–well, they surely are now–and you hugged him tighter and tighter, and you dragged him through the divorce courts–’
‘You co-operated willingly enough!’
‘I’d too much pride to do anything else. And then you dragged him to the altar, or was it the registrar?–I’ve never had an account of the joyful occasion–and then you came back up here, and you thought you’d be Queen of Oswaldston, with your little private income, and your nice stone house, and your upper-class ways.’
‘He dragged me up here. What was I supposed to do in a common little hole like this?’
‘And when you got back here, everyone could see that Walter was just a shell, just a husk you’d had all the goodness out of. He wasn’t even up to being works foreman any longer, quite apart from anything else. They’d have sacked him, if it hadn’t been for his war-record–it wouldn’t have looked good. And that was the end of Walter Machin. You sucked him dry.’
‘I did not suck him dry! He was sick!’
‘Yes. I reckon he was glad to die when he did. There wasn’t much left for him, was there?’
‘What do you mean, wasn’t much left? He was happy! He loved me! He loved the children!’
‘Oh yes, he probably did love the children. People like Walter always do get on well with children.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘People who are soft and good-humoured. He spoilt Rose that much he’d have ruined her if I’d let him. The trouble with Walter was, he could never say no to anyone. As you found out very quickly. But I’m glad he had the boys, I really am. Because there wasn’t much love in the house otherwise, from what I hear.’
‘Oh, you hear what you want to hear.’
‘Folk say you nagged him to death, Viola.’
Viola Machin’s face, still an unhealthy vivid red, twisted itself into an expression of contempt. ‘And how do these “folk” know, eh? Don’t make me laugh. It’s not as though the house was full of servants, listening at the doors. My income and his pay packet didn’t run to that.’
‘Oh, folk knew because Walter told them. All the factory. You probably didn’t realize about Walter: he never could keep anything back–a right old woman like that, he was.’
‘If people told you he said that, it was to make you feel better. We had a wonderful marriage–it was full, it was funny, it was loving–it was everything a marriage should be. He’d never known what it could be like before. How could he with you? You may have been his class, but you were too limited for a man like him.’
‘Limited, eh? Is it “Walter, the great intellectual” now, eh?’
‘He had more brains in his little finger than you have in your whole skinny body.’
‘If he was that smart, Viola, he would never have fallen for your little game. Because he had your number. Even Walter could tell you were a ninety-ninth-rate poetess with a grand manner, and a liking for getting people in your coils. He’d got your number the first time we met. So it was really stupid of him to let you catch him after all. That’s what I can’t forgive–that he should be so gormless!’
Viola, pretending to ignore her, took up a theatrical position, as if rapt in the memory of things past: ‘Walter was a lovely man. The most marvellous man I ever had in my life. He loved me, and I loved him–we were everything to each other, those brief years we had.’ Her back stiffened, and she turned on Hilda: ‘People are going to realize that before I’ve finished.’
‘Well, I always knew you’d get your side of the story across loud and clear, Viola. That was never in doubt. So it’s mean of you to begrudge me half a sentence.’
‘Ah! So it was deliberate! I knew it. If I didn’t think you’d go blabbing your side of the story all over town, I’d have you out of my house in two shakes.’
‘How do you know I won’t go? It’s no fun living with someone who thinks she’s a cross between Virginia Woolf and the Queen Mother. There’s nothing to keep me here now, you know. I can afford a place of my own, with the royalties that will be coming in.’
‘Who says you’ll get anything? It’s only a verbal agreement. I’ll deny all knowledge of it, if it suits me.’
‘Now that, Viola, might be very unwise. . . . ’
‘Now listen to me, Hilda. I’ve had more than enough of your little games, of your hintings and half-truths and double-meanings. You can drive me too far. If you do, I’ll forget every agreement we ever had, and I’ll fight you with everything I’ve got, so that by the end you won’t have a shred of reputation left–’
‘Reputation! That’s rich! There are other reputations than mine at risk, you know.’
‘I’ll see people know the truth about you–’
‘The truth, Viola, would be a very dangerous thing to start telling, don’t you think?’
Viola Machin, panting, looked hard at Hilda’s pert little face looking up at her with a twisted, triumphant smile. Her breath was coming now in sharp, ugly pantings.
‘Before I let you foul Walter’s memory,’ she said, with difficulty, ‘I’ll drag you through the courts. I’ll pull you down into the gutter.’ She pulled open the door. ‘I’ll see you in hell!’ she yelled.
The bang of the door resounded all over the house.
CHAPTER VIII
COMBUSTION
THE ROW BETWEEN the two widows Machin took place between six and six-thirty. It did not remain long unknown. Viola’s voice had that organ note of the English landed aristocracy, though in her case it had been formed not in the hunting-fields, but on the lonely, sheepy expanses of her native land. It certainly carried in Oswaldston. There was a goodly stretch of garden between Hilda’s sitting-room and the road, but later that evening at least three people who had passed by on the other side of the wall commented on the row in the Spinners’ Arms.
‘By gum, they were going at it,’ concluded one, with an appreciative snicker. Lancashire men like women with a bit of fight in them, especially when they direct it at each other.
So that when Greg Hocking, after an evening marking essays, came in at nine-fifteen for a good-night pint, his friend the landlord said: ‘Your old girls have been at it today.’
‘What do you mean “at it”?’ asked Greg apprehensively as if he feared to hear tales of geriatric sex-orgies.
‘ ’Ammer and tongs. Arguing. Screaming at each other. There’s three or four as ‘eard them.’
Greg groaned into his pint mug. Just what he’d hoped to avoid. There was no particular reason why he should have acted as honest broker in this affair, but he had taken it on, and had been quite pleased with himself when he seemed to have brought things off. So far things had apparently gone very smoothly. The articles in the Sunday papers had been well done in their way; the spread of photographs in the Grub had made the point Hilda had wanted made without undue underlining; all the local bookshops (two) had piles of copies of The Factory Whistle that seemed to diminish rapidly and be renewed. Even the article in the local paper had seemed on a quick glance through earlier to be all right. There had just been that one phrase. . . .
Greg thought to himself: that must have been it. That must have done it.
‘Perhaps I’d better go along and see them,’ he said. ‘See if there’s been any harm done.’
‘What’s the point?’ said the landlord, who for some reason had come in the last few weeks to regard the Mrs Machins as in an obscure way a rival show to himself. ‘You’re
not their bloody nursemaid. Why should you go clucking around them like a mother hen, just because they both hit the ceiling?’
He’s getting above himself, thought Greg. But he stayed put by the bar.
The news of the noisy row in the big house at the top of the street titillated spasmodic interest in the Spinners’ Saloon Bar all evening. Especially as this new bit of gossip came at a time when the idea that Walter Machin was becoming posthumously a national figure was beginning to filter through to Oswaldston consciousness.
‘Well, I’ll say this,’ said one elderly notable: ‘We didn’t think owt to that Machin when he were alive, and I doubt we’ll change our minds thirty years after he’s gone.’
It seemed to be the voice of Nottingham, obstinately unimpressed by the national fame of Lawrence.
‘I think it’ll be a fine thing for the town,’ said a dogmatic little schoolmaster, looking to Greg for approval in a way he found irritating. ‘Put us on the map. Make people down South realize there’s more to the North than muck and football hooligans. Not that I’ve any time for that widow of his. Puts on airs as if she were running a literary salon.’
Alf Ackroyd behind the bar pricked up his ears, as if some rival establishment to his own were under discussion. There seemed, though, a general lack of enthusiasm for the second Mrs Machin.
‘She’s basking in all the glory,’ said one man, ‘but it had bugger all to do with her. Only married him just before he died, that I do mind. She’s a foreigner and all. Nowt to do with Oswaldston in her life before he brought her here.’
‘I don’t think I’d call New Zealanders foreigners,’ ventured Greg Hocking, in protest.
‘Well, if they’re not that, what are they?’ said the man, obviously finding himself unanswerable.
If the bar conversation was anything to go by, the people of Oswaldston were going to react to their newly famous son by first denigrating him and then resenting any outsider who made claim to him. It was, Greg Hocking thought, both depressing and familiar.
But as he was finishing his second pint, and wondering again whether to go up and see one or other of the Mrs Machins, his mind was made up for him. First, flashing through the gathering dark, a fire-engine screamed past the window of the Spinners’. Then a regular popped his head around the door, like an extra in an old Gracie Fields film, and said: ‘Hey, I think there’s a fire up at Meadowbanks.’
Dashing his pint mug down on the bar, Greg Hocking darted through the door before any of the idly curious could bar his way. One glance was sufficient to show that the regular had been right. From the upstairs window of the grey-stone, substantial house at the top of the road there was billowing into the night slow, steady streams of smoke–not thick, or threatening in themselves, but culminating in a heavy, acrid cloud haloing the house, and sending a hideous smell of ruin down the gentle hill to the centre of the town. As Greg broke into a sprint, he saw–almost simultaneously–water beginning to play on the upstairs windows, a sudden spurt of flame, and a part of the roof begin to sag ominously.
Night had closed in. When Greg came to a halt outside Meadowbanks the scene was lurid, gloomy, terrifying. The firemen were having trouble with their hoses on some sides of the house, not being able to get them close enough to the burning floor to be effective. At the front, though, they had taken them through the gate and were playing them on the windows of Hilda Machin’s sitting-room. Around the gate and the two fire-engines parked by it a little knot of spectators was gathering, increasing by the minute, kept at a distance by two superbly imperturbable members of the Lancashire County force. Greg elbowed his way through and got behind the engines, from where he could see into the garden.
‘I’m a friend of the old ladies,’ he said. ‘I want to go in.’
‘You’re not allowed,’ shouted one of the constables. ‘There’s no point. We just heard–they’ve got the old lady out. She’ll be coming any moment. Don’t waste your time.’
Greg looked through the gate. Halfway along the path, surrounded by shouting, running firemen, was a little, dark group, moving slowly towards the road.
‘Which old lady?’ Greg shouted to the constable.
‘Her as lives here, likely. Is there more than one?’
At that moment both constables’ attention was distracted by a little boy who was overcome with curiosity about the working of a fire-engine. Greg dashed through the gate, dodging snaky, shifting hoses on the crazy pavement of the path, and ran towards the slowly moving little group.
It was Viola, helped along by a policeman and a fireman, weeping uncontrollably, her old legs hardly able to bear her, even with support on either side. She was still wearing the green woollen dress, but now her fine figure looked what it was–a wreck of ancient splendour, collapsed, ravaged. Her face, too, bleary, smoky, with deep channels of tears through the make-up, looked like an old woman’s–some monster from Restoration comedy, an old, peeling wall. Her voice was so choked with tears and hysteria that, even bending close, Greg could hardly make out her words.
‘I was asleep. I dozed off in front of the television. I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t smell anything. . . . Save my house. Don’t let it burn away to nothing. I don’t want to go and live with Desmond. . . . ’ As her voice died away into a mumble, Greg could see from her face that a thought had struck her. She started up with an access of energy. ‘Where’s Pimpernel? Is he still in there? Save my dog. You can’t let him burn.’
‘He’s outside, lass,’ said the fireman soothingly. ‘He ran out when we came in to get you.’
‘Where’s Hilda?’ asked Greg urgently. ‘Was she in?’
Viola looked at him, sniffing back sobs. ‘I don’t know. She may have gone to her daughter’s. She may have done. I was asleep. I wouldn’t have heard.’ Then, after a pause, she broke into a howl. ‘See that Hilda’s all right, Greg. She might be in there. She was my friend–she was! I wouldn’t want her to die. Please save her!’
Even as Greg turned to run towards the house, he seemed to register that Viola’s concern for Hilda was less genuine than her concern for Pimpernel.
The upper storey of Meadowbanks was now belching thick, angry, black smoke–foul, choking, desolate, but Greg had the impression from the activities of the firemen that the fire was being brought under control. He ran up to the man that he recognized through the thick night as the Chief Fire Officer.
‘I want to go in,’ he said. ‘I think there may be someone still in there.’
‘Not a hope,’ said the man, hardly looking at him. ‘Keep back. We’ve got the edge on it now. We’ll be sending one of our own men in in a few minutes.’
‘It might be too late,’ shouted Greg, coughing even here as he inhaled. ‘She’s on the first floor.’
‘I doubt it,’ said the Fire Officer. ‘She couldn’t have slept through this. We’d have seen her at the window long ago, and got her down.’
‘If I could just go in–’
‘You’ll get back and keep out of my way, that’s what you’ll do,’ said the man, by now justifiably irritated. For the first time he looked Greg in the eye and pointed towards the gate.
Greg retreated a short way down the path, and the Fire Officer turned back to the operation. For a moment a breeze cleared the clogging smoke from the air, and Greg saw, down the path, Viola Machin, sunk to the ground, sobbing with joy over Pimpernel, who was prancing agitatedly around her, whining and barking and twitching his nostrils in sensitive distaste. ‘Darling,’ she was crooning, ‘love. Don’t be frightened, my precious . . . ’
Pushing his way through the bushes along the side of the path, Greg took off into the gardens of Meadowbanks, flanking the fire-fighting operation along the front of the house. He kept his eyes fixed on the upper storey, but there was no sign of life, nor could he detect any female voice crying through the shouts of the firemen. He skirted down the side of the house, where there were few windows and only one fireman operating, and came to the back. Here everything
was in full swing, and he got the impression that the fire was now well under control. He was just meditating whether he could risk running straight in through the kitchen door when he saw two of the firemen in masks, doing just that. A great pillow of smoke billowed out after them. Greg ran up to one of the firemen who was playing his hose on Mr Kronweiser’s little room at the back.
‘Let me go in with them,’ he shouted. ‘I know the house. I could direct them.’
‘You’d choke to death in half a minute,’ said the fireman. ‘Keep back. They’ll find anyone, if there is anyone there.’
‘Couldn’t I get a mask?’
‘Stop inter-bloody-fering. We know our job. Look, if you must do something you can stand at the kitchen door and shout. Tell ’em where the bedroom doors are. I doubt they’ll hear, but you never know. But don’t take one step inside, I’m warning you.’
The kitchen door was still open, and inside the smoke was clearing. Across the kitchen Greg could see the hallway, but no further, for there the smoke was trapped. With a sense of futility, he opened his lungs and shouted.
‘Go to the bedroom upstairs. It’s at the back. Double back at the top of the stairs, and it’s the door on the right.’
He listened. There seemed to come a grunt from somewhere. Upstairs, he thought. So they had gone up. He shouted again: ‘It’s at the back. The back.’
Again he listened. Through the sound of water, and firemen, he thought he heard something again. A shout. A bump. Then at the end of the hall, he saw a shape. A fireman. He had come down the stairs, and was turning towards the kitchen.
‘Did you get to the–’ But he stopped in the middle of his question. The fireman had something over his shoulder.
Running now, the shape came through the kitchen and out into the garden. The line of fire-fighters opened for him, and he dashed through and out to an open patch of ground. Then he put down his burden. As Greg reached him he was stripping off his mask, and the two of them knelt over the form, laid face upwards on the earth.
Death of a Literary Widow Page 7