by John Lodwick
“But this is drawing-room stuff,” he said. “Why do you keep it here?”
“Because the drawing-room is locked. We never use it.” She did not seem to resent his questions and made no protest when he removed a glass and tapped it with his index finger.
“Ting,” he said, “ting,” imitating the noise. “There is such pathos in that sound, don’t you agree?”
She looked at him doubtfully, aware that he was clowning. Then she sat down, smoothed her woollen skirt, and laid her hands gently in her lap, so that for the first time he was obliged to look at her full-face.
“Do you know,” she said, “that Fiona talks in her sleep?”
“Does she?” he said, much startled.
“Yes . . . or at any rate she does now. The other night she made a fearful row. I got up because I thought she was in pain.”
“Ah?” He studied her well-modulated but unemphatic features, the small blue eyes, the facial down and the incongruous jutting chin.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” she said. “With you here, she may keep quiet.”
Thirteen
“But I assure you,” protested Rumbold, and he clutched his spade more tightly, “I assure you that I like digging.”
The gardener replied, in his barely comprehensible dialect, that in that case it would be better if the gentleman were to dig elsewhere than across the only bed of asparagus in the grounds.
“Well, I’m sorry about that,” said Rumbold. He indicated his trench, the product of an hour’s hard work. “I just thought I’d plant a few potatoes,” he said.
The gardener said that this was not the time of year to plant potatoes.
“Cabbage, then . . . or salsify or cardoons.”
The gardener said that, as the gentleman could see for himself, there was enough cabbage already in to feed the whole of Peterhead. As for the other plants mentioned, he had no knowledge of them and doubted their ability to grow in this poor soil.
“Yes,” said Rumbold, “the soil is poor. I’m with you there at any rate.”
The gardener said that the poverty of the soil was merely relative. In proper hands it gave as good a yield as any in this part of Scotland.
“Misther Eric . . . Misther Eric! Will ye come and eat your lunch.”
The situation was saved by the appearance of Martha on the kitchen steps. Smiling, Rumbold relinquished his spade and made off along the path. When he turned, the gardener had already begun to fill in the trench.
“Dirty boots! Dirty boots!” said Martha. “Wipe your feet now, there’s a good man.”
Rumbold rubbed. Sectioned by the scraper the mud fell away off in chocolate sausages. “I’m still saying my novena for your cooking, Martha,” he said.
“Ach, Misther Eric. Don’t blaspheme . . . and you a Catholic, too.”
“The only blasphemy’s that dreadful soup of yours, you old rip,” said Rumbold, and sportively he slapped her bottom. It had taken him no longer than a single day to complete the conquest of this old woman, once the children’s nurse, and now the cook; but if the task had been an easy one, it had been none the less essential to his plans. Rumbold desired no enemy within the gates, and Martha, who had watched menfolk come and go in thirty-four years of service here, might well have been a more dangerous antagonist than her mistress.
Holy Mother Church had worked the trick . . . Holy Mother Church together with a rapid consultation in the library of Brebdon’s Saints of Ireland and Abroad. Martha, in fact, made a cult of those young Amazons, the two Teresas, the three Catherines and the many Bridgets who had laid down their lives in early youth for the furtherance of the faith and the glory of its doctrines. To the ecstasies of St. Francis of Assisi she gave little credence, to the mental pyrotechnics of Loyola none at all; but the devout excesses of well-bred maidens . . . the fastings, the auto-flagellations, the trances, the massaging of dropsies and the wipings of pus from dreadful wounds . . . the recital of these deeds aroused her to the very highest pitch of religious exaltation and one which she could now share with a fellow member of the faith.
Born in 1878, in Connemara, in the historical lull between the Fenians and the ascendance of Parnell, Martha had been the seventh of nine daughters in one of those Irish families which, by right of economic plight and long-established custom, sail annually from Galway to pull up spuds in Scotland. How she had reached Peterhead and in what circumstances the grandmother had engaged her not even Peggy, usually well documented in family history, knew. In those happy days the house had teemed with servants who had scrubbed, polished, even slept in the dank, dark oubliettes beneath the stairs . . . skivvies, tweenies, cook, assistant-cook and parlour-maids; a whole female hierarchy, in fact, leavened and kept in order by the grooms.
Martha had very probably been a tweeny, for to the Papish Irish were the lowest tasks assigned. Soon, however, when the babies came, chance or some natural aptitude had elevated her, first to the honorary, then to the definite, position of their nurse. This, at any rate, was the official story, in so far as it was ever mentioned, but Fiona, enlightened by youthful conversation with the gardener (not the present incumbent, but his dad) thought that she knew better. It had been as a wet-nurse, she declared, that Martha had gained promotion. Some glorious evening in a hedge beneath a ditch had borne its just reward.
Be that as it might be, Martha, at close on seventy, was the sole survivor of the extinct domestic race, though in the matter of authority the fact profited her but little, for nowadays there came beneath her orders only a single, sullen kitchen-maid. Martha was paid one pound a week and was reputed to possess not less than three hundred of the same denomination inside a certain tea-cosy in her closet. Yet she was not miserly and half a crown travelled every Sunday from her purse into the offertory plate at Mass. This, together with the purchase of votive cards and saintly candles, was, to-day, her sole expenditure. She was not even called upon to send money back to Galway to her family, for this latter, like the domestic servants of her generation, was now extinct, or within religious cloisters, or long since emigrated to America.
Martha’s position in the household was that, familiar to novel readers, of “the old servant who knows all”. It remains but to make passing reference to her mode of speech, since samples of it must presently be rendered. Upon the broad vowels of the Gaeltacht, Scotland had imposed its throaty burr, only to yield with the course of time to the language of the gentry; first aped, then studied seriously, then finally acquired with some few native streaks to lend it pungency.
A brief wash, a briefer combing of the hair, and Rumbold passed from the ablutionary offices, along the passage hung with assegais and halberds, and into the dining-room, where the two sisters had not waited for his presence to attack their steaming plates of kedgeree.
“Sorry I’m so late,” he said. “The fact is I was gardening.”
“Yes,” said Fiona. “Aitchison has just bellowed the first communiqué on your efforts through the window. It seems that, quite apart from the asparagus, you have also put a raspberry bush beyond repair.”
Peggy said nothing. Discreetly, she was watching Rumbold’s scoffing irons. Sure enough—though innocently—he took not the fish-knife, but the other, laid beside him for the second course of cheese. Observing his mistake and the slight smile which greeted it, Rumbold first blushed, then glared. He was well aware that his antagonist had chosen the terrain best suited to her in the secret, bitter battle engaged now between them for three days. In the field of etiquette, good manners and polite usage, she had him at her mercy.
“Well,” he said, deliberately vulgar, and to add to the effect lifting a heavy load of kedgeree towards his mouth, “well, and what do you two girls propose to do this afternoon?”
“We thought we might drive into town,” said Peggy coldly. “Fiona has to get a prescription renewed
at the doctor’s.” The blow, this time, was more oblique, exploratory; for though Rumbold well knew that his mistress swallowed sleeping draughts, having tucked her up in bed himself, he also knew that Peggy could only surmise the extent to which her sister was to narcotic drugs attached.
“Very good,” he said. “Very good,” reaching for the cheese before the sullen maid had removed his plate. “Very good,” he repeated. “In that case, I will first smoke a cigar, then wander round the house,” for he knew well from the locked drawers and secrétaires discovered upon previous prowlings that it was just this procedure that Peggy had determined to prevent. In particular did she wish to keep him out of Auntie’s room.
“Don’t go and see Auntie again,” she now said baldly. “You know that in the afternoon she takes her little nap.”
“We’ll see,” he said, “we’ll see.” The tone was condescending, for in this household of three women, one of whom—the servant—was his by use of guile, and one, the mistress, his in circumstances more immutable than fate, the futility of the other’s opposition to his will was obvious. The gardener was hers, and this was true . . . but the gardener lived three hundred yards away and had other things to occupy him.
And no other form of succour, save air-mail to Ceylon . . . except, perhaps, solicitors in Edinburgh.
The kedgeree disposed of, a glaucous treacle tart was served, followed by coffee as bitter as the dottle in an ancient pipe. Luncheon over, Rumbold repaired to the library, where, lying in an easy chair with heels upon a foot-rest, he was presently joined by Fiona in fur coat and gloves.
“Don’t be horrid to poor Peggy,” she pleaded, with furred fingers on his sleeve.
“I am not horrid to your sister,” he replied, and after some other post-prandial by-play involving the unbuttoning of her jacket, permitted her to leave.
The library was warm. A turf fire in the grate supplemented the collywobbles of the central-heating pipes. Rising, Rumbold sought the drawer in which lay the box of Simon Bolivars. . . .
Who had left them there? The cigars were dry and peeling, perhaps a generation old, but still good. Reclining, Rumbold squinted as he puffed: his vision embracing a red glow, an inch of pendant ash, a portion of armorial fire-place and a glimpse of rain-soaked lawn. Half an hour later, the cigar stub abandoned, he was upstairs, padding the bedroom corridors, soft-toed.
Rustle . . . the noise was unmistakable: a page had just been turned. Then crease and pleat and rustle once again as the paper was folded to permit of closer scrutiny. Rumbold flung open the door, without benefit of knocking, and caught the old lady in full endeavour to stuff the Sporting Times beneath her pillow.
“It’s only me, Auntie,” he said soothingly.
“Ah,” she said, her night-cap all awry. “I feared that it was Peggy. She comes in like a cat.”
Rumbold sat down upon the counterpane, felt the hot water-bottle yield beneath his buttocks.
“Gazala for to-morrow,” he said. “Take my advice. You can’t go wrong. How much do you want on it?”
“Just a pound, Eric dear,” she said. “I mustn’t always risk a fiver.”
“Ach,” he said. “You’ve no nerve, no nerve at all. With your knowledge of form you should be tripling your income instead of frittering it away.”
Neck buried in her feather pillow, the old lady gazed at him much as a rabbit at the stoat. “But the girls,” she said. “I’m sure they know you’re helping me. In the old days Peggy used to cut off my subscription to the paper almost every month. I had to get them to send it to me in a Church Times wrapper in the end.”
“Never mind about the girls,” he said. “Enjoy yourself. That’s what I’m here to see,” and pulling the fallen eiderdown about her neck he offered her an Egyptian cigarette from a packet bought that morning in the town.
“Should I?” she said. “Should I really? Doctor MacAllister says they’re so bad for my heart,” but the bony hand sneaked forth none the less, shuffled the silver paper and carried the deadly nicotine to her mouth.
“There you are,” he said. “At eighty-one you still know what’s good for you.”
The room smelt of must and unswilled chamber-pots and gripe water; a sour smell, fit accompaniment to the leaden-footed afternoon. Plumb against the centre of the southern wall the bed, and in the centre of the bed, Auntie; a tiny figure, seven stone, well wrapped up in Paisley shawls and well on, too, in the interminable evening of her life. A static angina exacerbated by chronic asthma was the doctor’s diagnosis, and once a month, as regularly as the lunar periods which had long since ceased to have significance for her shrivelled womb, the attacks overpowered her, so that the room, silent normally, would be full of the flapping of wet towels and the panic-laden rush of running women.
“I don’t,” said Rumbold, “wish to put my foot in it but I should be glad to hear the true circumstances of the death of the girls’ grandfather.”
Wizened, beady-eyed, and as fluffy-faced as any Kinkajou, the old lady replied craftily: “Simon didn’t want to know.”
“Simon,” replied Rumbold, “is, from what I hear, somewhat lacking in imagination.” (We are talking now, you must understand, of Peggy’s husband, in Ceylon.)
“Simon,” Rumbold added, “would probably not want to know even if he had guessed.”
Across the coverlet his thick fingers making advance entwined in their moist grip those of the invalid. The stoat and rabbit relationship was re-established.
“I have never told this to anybody . . .” she began.
“Oh, naturally not, and I commend you for it. But you’ll tell it to me, won’t you, because I have a very special reason for asking.” The thick fingers renewed their moist and sympathetic pressure.
“He cut his throat,” she said. “Cut it with a Wilkinson razor two months before the girls’ father was born. My sister, whose character was firm, as you can now perhaps appreciate, heard a curious noise, rushed in, and found him lying on the tiles beside the bathroom door. . . .”
“And the verdict . . . ?” he said.
She hesitated, blanching now, two generations later, with the memory. “It was death by misadventure,” she replied at last. “My sister, whose character, as I have told you, was firm, lifted the body and thrust it through the lower pane of glass which formed the window. The jury, who were chosen well, assumed that he had fainted . . . and fainting fallen. The razor had been previously removed.”
She puffed at her cigarette, inexpertly, yet indeed not without a certain charm; like some old relation abandoned by theatre-going relatives in a tatlered alcove of the Ladies’ Lyceum Club.
“Why,” he said, “did she never let you marry?”
“Yes, it’s true,” she said. “There was a clergyman. She thought him vulgar.” A faint giggle. “He was a bit High Church, I must say. But she was so much more beautiful than I. . . .”
“So that, all your life, you have stayed here.”
“Oh, not all. Once I went to Jamaica as a governess. But she got me back double quick. The job was, of course, a little infra dig.”
“Was she really so beautiful?” he said.
“Oh yes, exceedingly. You can have no idea. Even in middle age men turned to stare. And so kind too. Believe me, this is no old woman’s fancy. She could be kind . . . upon occasion.”
“How is it then,” he said, “that she got on so badly with the children’s mother?”
The invalid rearranged her shawl. “Bah!” she said, “a mere fish-packer’s daughter at one genteel remove. Sylvia saw through her . . . saw through her at once.”
“Which did not prevent her,” he suggested, “from accepting the odd hundred for an educational excursion to Salzburg or Milan. . . . ?”
“Why not?” she said. “She had a household to keep. She fed them. Their mother was a g
adabout. Her cheques always came late.”
Rumbold extended a saucer, clipped off the grey curve of ash which leaned towards a fall.
“Yet,” he said, “it was in your room . . . this room . . . that Fiona sometimes cried.”
“Yes,” she said listlessly. “Here or with Martha. It depended. Of course Peggy never cried at all.”
Her head was drooping (no excitement; absolutely no emotional disturbances, the doctor had prescribed). The cigarette slipped from her fingers, charred the sheet. Rumbold rescued it, then taking the old lady by the shoulders laid her once more within the ravine of the pillows.
“Now you just lie quiet and have a little snooze,” he said, and added: “I’ll bring you cream cakes for your tea, and ones with pink icing too, and little blobs of marzipan.”
But she only grunted; already in her happy Land of Nod.
He tip-toed from the room, hesitated in the passage, then tip-toed farther down towards Peggy’s room.
The door was locked.
Rumbold smiled, crossed the passage, returned with the bathroom key, which slid and turned without hindrance in the latch. It was funny how they never realised that duplicity is the near relative of cunning. He entered the room, locking the door behind him. On the desk a half-finished pencil-written letter lay. Rumbold skipped the stilted references to the weather and the church bazaar, his eye descending with sure instinct to the third paragraph.
“As for Eric, I cannot make him out as yet, but I dislike and distrust him very deeply. . . .”
Such rounded periods for a schoolgirl hand! For a moment Rumbold was tempted to draw a little picture of a heart pierced by an arrow, where the letter ended. Resisting this impulse, he commenced to search the drawers.