The Piper's Tune

by Jessica Stirling

  One hand laid against his cheek like a man with toothache, Albert watched Tom complete the inspection.

  ‘She isn’t in the apartment. Where is she, Albert? Did McCulloch come for her? Did Forbes take her away?’

  ‘McCulloch?’

  ‘Forbes McCulloch, the person who’s been paying your rent.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Forbes. No, he wouldn’t come for her. He abandoned her.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Wants no more to do with her since she got – you know.’

  ‘Is it not his child?’

  Albert raised his other hand, pressed it hard against his other cheek, causing his moustache to flick out at the ends like torpedo fins. He groaned once more, low and crooning. ‘Yes, yes, it’s his child. There’s no doubt of that. I had nothing to do with it. Had to happen sooner or later, nature being what it is, had to happen. How did you…’

  ‘Find out? Sylvie called on my wife yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Your wife?’ For a moment it seemed that Albert had forgotten about Tom Calder’s marriage, then he said, ‘To the Franklin girl, yes, right, of course. You married the Franklin girl.’

  ‘Sylvie told my wife everything.’

  ‘And your wife told you?’

  ‘Of course she told me. What’s more, Sylvie showed herself to Lindsay McCulloch and told both of them the whole sad, sordid story. Don’t tell me that you didn’t know? I thought you’d sent her to ask for money?’

  ‘Money? Me? No, not me. No.’ Alarm at the unjust accusation awakened Albert’s wits. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I have to go to the lavatory. Back in a mo’.’

  In the clean, cool, tiled room Albert relieved himself. He bathed his face with tap water and washed out his mouth. He drank half a tumbler of water slowly and then, a little revived if not exactly refreshed, returned to the hall.

  Tom was in the drawing-room, looking down into the street.

  The sky had a funny tinge to it, whisky-coloured, sour. Even from the heights of the Mansions you could see no distance at all.

  Albert stared bleakly at the window, waiting for Tom Calder to make the next move which, with any luck, might even be an offer of financial assistance.

  Tom turned.

  ‘Are you lying to me, Albert? Do you really not know where Sylvie is?’

  ‘Would I lie to—no, I don’t. I really do not.’

  Still clad only in the torn shirt, he seated himself on the arm of the sofa and modestly tucked the shirt-tails into his lap. He told himself that he had negotiated with Tom Calder too many times in the past to be intimidated and he was confident that paternal sentiment would leave Sylvie’s father vulnerable to the right kind of persuasion.

  It did not occur to him that Tom Calder too had changed.

  ‘When did you see her last?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Yesterday, in the forenoon.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes, here. I left about noon to go into the city on business.’

  ‘Drinking business, I suppose,’ Tom said. ‘Was Sylvie here when you got back last night?’

  ‘I think – yes, I’m sure she was. Tucked up in bed.’

  ‘You don’t know, do you, Albert?’ Tom did not await an answer. ‘How long has she known Forbes McCulloch?’

  ‘If you mean how long has she been his – his sweetheart, five years going on six. I didn’t approve of the arrangement and all I can say is, thank God her mother, that Florence isn’t alive to see what’s befallen her daughter. Yes, I say daughter, Tom; although she wasn’t, she seemed like it, and Florence and I both thought of her as our flesh, our own dear child.’ He placed a finger to the corner of his eye and brushed at an invisible tear. ‘Since McCulloch abandoned her things have been very bad for us. She, the dear girl, knows how worried I’ve been about making ends meet what with the baby coming and all, and how I’ve not been well. I mean, she wouldn’t stoop, would not humiliate herself by begging Forbes to give her money. She wanted to go to you, to take you into her confidence. She knew you’d understand, that you’d see us right until we got straightened out and back on our feet. But I said no. No, I said. Tom’s got a life of his own and a wife of his own and a house of his own and he doesn’t want to be bothered with you. But’ – Albert paused for breath, sighed, gestured with an open palm – ‘obviously she didn’t heed my advice. Swallowed her pride, not for her sake, for my sake, my sake and the baby’s.’

  Tom listened patiently and apparently without scepticism to the harangue. He listened without moving from his stance by the window, his arms folded, long chin tucked down almost to his breastbone.

  Albert watched for a sign, any sign – a quiver of the lip, a clenching of the fingers, a quick moist flutter of the eyelids – that he was making headway, getting through, but Tom’s expression was remarkably unrevealing.

  ‘So,’ Albert said, ‘will you help her, Tom? She’s been a foolish girl, a wicked girl, she’s aware of that, she’s ready to admit it, but she has no one else to turn to now, no one else who will stand by her in her time of need, and you, after all, are her papa.’

  ‘Where is she, Albert? She’s more than eight months pregnant. Where is she?’

  It was the one question that Tom had no right to ask, the one question to which he, Albert Hartnell, could not fudge an answer, a question that nullified all that had gone before and wasted the long heart-rending, hypocritical speech that had been the one and only card in his hand.

  He covered his eyes to hide his tears.

  ‘Oh, Tom,’ he said, sincerely. ‘Oh, Tom, I wish to God I knew.’

  * * *

  Gowry drove for a little over an hour. Even at speed the motion of the Vauxhall generated no cooling breeze. The air seemed almost abrasive, stinging his cheekbones and brow. He followed the route that Forbes and he had driven one afternoon not long after his brother’s break-up with Sylvie. They had talked about it then in a general sort of way and before he’d had any reason to take Forbes’s suggestion seriously.

  She bounced beside him, knees spread under the summer dress, one fist on the padded rim of the panel, the other hand held not to her bonnet but to her stomach as if to keep in place whatever nestled within her.

  Fifteen miles out the road narrowed and dipped into the valley under the ridge of the Ottershaw Hills and the twin rivers that watered the plain became visible. The sky to the west was marked by a long, flat plain of matt black cloud that lay motionless behind the mountains.

  Inside his flapping leather overcoat Gowry sweated.

  He wished that she would ask him where he was taking her. Her trust in him made him feel bad.

  They passed farm wagons laden with late hay or, for all he knew, straw from the first-cut crops of the autumn season. They passed a miller’s van grinding down the hill into the village, then two carts and, scattered along the grassy verge, a skitter of eight or ten bullocks in the care of a man and a boy.

  Gowry braked, slowed to a point where he could hear the engine spluttering and smell the brassy stench of the radiator coming up to the boil.

  As the motor crawled past, Sylvie waved and called out, ‘Don’t be frighted. Don’t be frighted,’ not to the boy or the man but to the dung-smeared and panicky cattle. ‘It’s only a motoring car, our motoring car.’

  Gowry steered to the bottom of the hill and turned left towards the loch.

  * * *

  ‘I take it you’ve heard the news?’ Kay said as soon as her sister-in-law was shown into the drawing-room.

  ‘Of course I have heard the news,’ Lilias retorted. ‘Do you think I would be visiting at this hour of the morning if I hadn’t heard the news?’ She paused and composed herself for the half lie. ‘Martin called me on the telephone and I cancelled my appointments and came round straight away.’

  ‘Do you want tea?’

  ‘No, Kay, I do not want tea. I want an explanation as to what’s going on.’

  ‘Desertion,’ Kay McCulloch said. ‘Plain and simple. There’s you
r explanation. She’s run off with her sailor boy.’

  ‘That isn’t the story I heard,’ Lilias said.

  She seated herself on the sofa and glanced at the portrait of her long-dead sister-in-law that hung over the empty fireplace. It had been years, in fact, since she had been in this room in her brother’s house, for she had never been a frequent visitor to Brunswick Park. In spite of her agitation the portrait caught and held her attention; she had forgotten just how pretty Lindsay’s mother had been in her youth.

  Kay said, ‘I’m not sure he’ll want to take her back.’

  Lilias gave herself a little shake. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Forbes: I’m not sure he’ll have her back.’

  Lilias had heard rumours about Lieutenant Commander Paget’s interest in her niece but, having met the fellow, found it difficult to cast him in the role of seducer. It was fortunate, however, that Martin had had the foresight to call her on the telephone and tell her what had occurred at the yard and to confirm Lindsay’s version of events, otherwise she might have been tempted to give some credence to Kay’s threat.

  Kay said, ‘He might: just to avoid a public scandal, he might.’

  ‘A public scandal?’ Lilias said.

  ‘A divorce would be all over the newspapers.’

  Lilias gave a ragged little laugh. ‘Ah, I see. Forbes is willing to forgive and forget out of a sense of family duty. How noble of him. What, may I enquire, would Forbes’s case stand upon?’

  ‘Desertion. She walked off with another man.’

  Even Lilias was flabbergasted at the woman’s effrontery, the conviction that her son was the wronged party and her ability not merely to twist the facts to suit that view but to accept her version as absolute and incontestable.

  ‘Lieutenant Commander Paget?’

  ‘That’s the man,’ said Kay, nodding. ‘Her lover.’

  ‘Kay.’ Lilias chose her words with care. ‘I feel that I should warn you to be careful in what you say. There is such as a thing as slander, you know.’

  ‘Walked out of this house on his arm and hasn’t been seen since.’

  ‘What – twelve hours ago?’

  Flat denial, Kay’s defence, would not stand up for long. Apparently it hadn’t dawned on her sister-in-law that she, Lilias, had already heard the whole story and that Forbes McCulloch’s scandalous affair with poor Tom Calder’s daughter was swiftly becoming common knowledge.

  ‘Is…’ Lilias paused. ‘Is Forbes at work?’

  ‘Of course he is,’ Kay said indignantly. ‘He’s not going to squander valuable time trailing after her, is he? It’s up to her to come back to him.’

  ‘I see,’ said Lilias. ‘And to ask his forgiveness?’

  ‘He’s a generous boy. He might do it.’

  ‘Is that what you would advise him to do, Kay?’

  ‘It isn’t up to me. He’s a grown man now.’

  ‘Not too old to heed his mother’s advice, surely?’ Lilias said.

  She had lost her awe of the McCullochs long ago. She had nothing but scorn for them and knew that if she set her mind to it she could shred her sister-in-law’s arguments and grind them down as finely as a pound of Scotch beef. It was, Lilias saw, not ignorance or deviousness but a mad kind of egotism that protected Kay and her kin against reality. She wondered at the nature of the man – a man she had never met – who stood in the shadow of this woman, who had fathered sons and daughters upon her and who, by the immutable laws of nature, must have had some sort of influence upon their lives.

  ‘I will be telling Forbes,’ Kay said, ‘to do what’s right.’

  ‘Right for whom?’ said Lilias.

  ‘For the family.’

  ‘To follow his conscience?’ Lilias said. ‘Is that what you mean?’

  Instinct made Kay wary but not wary enough to avoid the trap. She stiffened her shoulders, straightened her spine and endeavoured to appear both hurt and haughty. ‘Aye, that is what I mean.’

  ‘And the child?’

  ‘He would not be wanting the children to be without a mother.’

  ‘Or a father?’ Lilias said.

  The foxy eye was suddenly as sharp and glittering as a shard of glass. Her head twitched and her lips were sucked in against her teeth. She squinted up malevolently at her tall and elegant sister-in-law as Lilias got to her feet.

  ‘Or a father?’ Lilias said again.

  ‘Forbes isn’t the father. That creature is lying.’

  ‘That creature?’ Lilias said. ‘Well, eventually it will be for a court to decide whether she’s lying or not.’

  ‘Court, what court?’ Kay said.

  ‘Oh, come now, Kay, surely you don’t think my niece is going to remain married to an adulterer?’

  ‘She’s the adulterer.’

  ‘Is she?’ Lilias said. ‘On what evidence?’

  ‘On the evidence of that sailorman.’

  ‘Well,’ Lilias said, almost too airily, ‘I doubt if a counterclaim will carry much weight when it comes to arranging the financial settlement; but you never can tell with the law, can you? Meanwhile, our Mr Harrington or one of his colleagues will draft a petition for judicial separation so that proceedings may get under way. Lindsay will probably be anxious to have charge of the children – her children, I mean – and be free of her obligations to Forbes. She will, of course, expect to be maintained here in the family house on terms not dissimilar to those under which your son has been keeping Miss Sylvie Calder: rent paid and livings provided, that is. If those terms do not prove satisfactory, or if Forbes wishes to marry again in the near future, then we will progress immediately to a full petition for divorce, in which case the newspapermen will have a great deal of fun and the Franklins’ business may very well suffer some setback.’

  Kay listened with her mouth open.

  ‘As to his position in the firm, the partnership,’ Lilias concluded, ‘that is not a matter than can be settled at once. Besides, it’s something for the men to discuss and decide upon.’

  ‘How?’ Kay began: she swallowed. ‘How did we fall to talking about the end of my son’s marriage? Lindsay hasn’t been gone but twelve hours; you said so yourself. Nobody knows where she is, what she feels about any of this. She’s with her sailor…’ Abruptly Kay jerked upright, scowling. ‘Oh! So that’s it!’ she exclaimed. ‘You want Lindsay to marry this sailor, don’t you, so that Franklin’s will have more pull with the navy contractors?’

  ‘Don’t,’ Lilias said, ‘be ridiculous.’

  ‘Forbes will have something to say about that.’

  ‘No doubt he will,’ said Lilias. ‘However, I have said my piece, Kay, and I’m going home now.’

  ‘Hah!’ Kay said. ‘It’ll be a different story when she turns up, you’ll see.’

  Lilias could not resist. ‘Sylvie Calder, do you mean?’

  ‘I mean Lindsay. She won’t agree to any of this divorce nonsense.’

  ‘Will she not?’ Lilias said. ‘Oh, I think she might, my dear, given that it was her idea in the first place. By the way, she has “turned up” as you put it, not that she was ever really lost.’

  ‘What? Where is she?’

  ‘At Harper’s Hill, of course,’ Lilias said, ‘waiting to join me for lunch.’

  * * *

  They sat idly for a while on the shore of the loch under a jumble of elephant-grey boulders. Behind and around them conifers released a resinous smell in the sultry noon heat. The loch was not large enough to attract boatmen and there were no fishermen casting from the shore at that hour on a weekday.

  The couple by the loch side did not speak. There seemed to be nothing left for them to say.

  Sylvie sat back, the crown of the sun-bonnet crushed against the rocks, her legs stuck out before her. Even she was perspiring now, a light film of sweat on her upper lip and forehead. Folded passively on her stomach, her hands moved with the rhythm of her breathing. Propped on an elbow at her side, Gowry studied her cautiously. From across the tops of th
e trees, where the ridge broke to the north, came a faint mutter of thunder. Gowry raised his head and listened for a moment, then he said, ‘You can still be rid of it, Sylvie.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ she said.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Gowry said.

  He had taken off the leather overcoat and had left it in the Vauxhall. The motor-car was parked at the end of a rough track fifty or sixty yards away behind the rock step. He leaned closer, and lowered his voice.

  ‘You can still be rid of it if you want to,’ he said. ‘I know a way.’

  ‘What way would that be?’

  ‘The way the girls do it in the part of Ireland where I come from.’

  ‘Drowning. It’s drowning,’ Sylvie said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Hmm,’ Gowry murmured. ‘It never fails.’

  ‘She hasn’t arrived yet. How can we drown her if she hasn’t arrived?’

  ‘You walk out into the water and stand there,’ Gowry said. ‘Stand there for – oh, five or ten minutes.’

  Sylvie turned her head just an inch. ‘That won’t do it.’

  ‘It will, you know. I’ve seen it happen.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Malahide, in Ireland.’

  ‘They must be very strange people in Malahide.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Gowry said. ‘No, no, it isn’t the drowning that does it, it’s the cold. The cold does it. The cold causes them not to breathe any more.’

  Her cool grey eyes were upon him. ‘And then what happens to them?’

  ‘They pop out.’

  ‘Under the water?’ Sylvie said.

  ‘Under the water,’ Gowry said. ‘It’s painless. You won’t even notice it. You don’t even have to look. It just happens.’

  ‘Does not.’

  ‘Does too,’ said Gowry.

  She turned her head again and looked at her feet, then, lifting herself away from the rock, stared at the glassy water.

  ‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘I should try?’

  ‘I dunno,’ said Gowry. ‘It’s up to you.’

  ‘Does it always work?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Gowry, do you want me to try?’

  Sweat ran down the sides of his face. He did not dare wipe it away. She wasn’t looking at him, though, she was looking at the water.