by E. H. Young
Hannah turned the lock with the latchkey Mrs. Gibson lent her and found Mr. Blenkinsop hanging up his hat in the hall.
‘Oh, good evening, Mr. Blenkinsop!’ she exclaimed girlishly. ‘You’re rather late, aren’t you?’
Mr. Blenkinsop looked at her severely through his spectacles. ‘Purposely,’ he remarked significantly, and stood aside to let her pass up the stairs before him.
Hannah went ahead meekly. She had not yet found the manner to which Mr. Blenkinsop would respond. She had tried to deepen the impression which her prowess in the basement kitchen must have made on him, she had hinted that she, too, had an interest in literature and Charles Lamb; she had asked foolish feminine questions about banking, which was Mr. Blenkinsop’s profession, but nothing stirred him. He remained grave, solid, and as monosyllabic as language and bare courtesy would allow.
‘Sickening!’ she said to herself, straightening her back, for she knew that the view, from below, of a woman ascending the stairs is often unfortunate, but when she had turned on the light in her room and looked at her reflection, she forgave him, though she had not done with him yet. Mr. Blenkinsop was clearly not a reader of character or a connoisseur of human rarities, and there was no reason why he should encourage the attentions of this woman with the satirical nose, a rather sallow skin and eyes of no particular colour, yet she felt as uneasy as a soldier in a hostile country who has left an unconquered fortified place behind him. She wished she had introduced the subject of Mr. Corder; that might have roused him and instructed her at the same time. Forewarned was forearmed and Mrs. Gibson’s views would be of no value. To her, all reverend gentlemen were good and most of them were awful; they were like the stars; they shed their light, but they were unapproachable. However, though there was no doubt about what she would say, her way of saying it might be amusing, and when Hannah had changed her outdoor dress for an old silk one which looked well enough by artificial light, she tapped on Mrs. Gibson’s sitting-room door and popped in without waiting for a summons.
‘Oh, there you are, dear,’ Mrs. Gibson sighed. ‘Always so cheerful!’
‘What’s the matter?’ Hannah asked, for Mrs. Gibson’s voice was melancholy and she was sunk in her chair as though she had been pushed there.
‘He’s been at me,’ Mrs. Gibson said, ‘about the Riddings. He’s just this minute left me. It’s either them or him, he says. What d’you think of that? I’m sorry to say it, but I call it unkind, unkind to me and to those poor things down there. Now, what would you do yourself, Miss Mole, dear? Would you turn them out? No, I know you wouldn’t. Stand-offish as she is, considering everything, if you know what I mean, I can’t help feeling I’ve got a duty by her. I can keep my eye on her. And there’s that baby. I never had one of my own and, if you ask me, the motherly ones are those that never had any.’
‘Ah,’ said Hannah weightily. Her thoughts, straying from Mrs. Gibson’s problem, were pursuing this idea. She had believed it was her own and she was surprised to find that it was also Mrs. Gibson’s. ‘But you had a husband,’ she said.
‘Well, of course, dear. And I was a good wife to him. Those are his own words.’
‘I was wondering,’ Hannah said, ‘if the best wives are the ones who are not married.’
‘Oh, my dear, I don’t hold with that kind of thing!’
But Hannah was trying to find proofs for her theory that non-realization was the highest good.
‘I don’t mean what you mean,’ she said.
‘I’m glad of that,’ said Mrs. Gibson. ‘There’s too much of that kind of thing nowadays – so I’m told.’
‘Dreadful, isn’t it?’ Hannah murmured back.
‘And anyhow, there’s no question of that here, I’m thankful to say, but he tells me there’ll be trouble again; he says he doesn’t feel the same about the place. He says he needs quiet after his day’s work.’
Hannah made a loud, derisive noise. ‘Work! Chasing money with a little shovel! It’s like playing tiddley-winks! And quiet!’ She held up a hand. ‘Listen, Mrs. Gibson. There’s not a sound.’
Mrs. Gibson nodded complaisantly. ‘A well-built house. I don’t know where he’d find a better. And then, you see, I knew his ma. At the sewing-meeting. I don’t go now, dear. I’ve enough to do with the mending at home and Mr. Blenkinsop’s very hard on his socks, but in the old days, with Mrs. Blenkinsop and Mrs. Corder, I went. And now she’s passed away and little did I think then I’d ever have her son for a lodger. She was a gloomy woman, I must say, but all the same, there it is.’
‘And Mrs. Corder – what’s she like?’
‘Dead, too, dear. Yes. Pneumonia. It’s a terrible thing. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. Only ill for a week. Poor man! I’ll never forget the funeral.’
Now Hannah made a vague sound of sympathy. ‘A loss to the chapel,’ she suggested.
‘Well’ – Mrs. Gibson, who had been growing drowsy over the fire and her reminiscences, tried to sit more upright and her voice was almost a whisper – ‘well, I don’t know about that. People used to say things. She was never at the Sunday evening service, and that didn’t look well, did it?’
‘Tired of hearing him talk, perhaps.’
‘That might have been it,’ Mrs. Gibson said with unexpected tolerance. ‘A wife feels different to anybody else. But at the sewing-meeting, now and then, she’d be funny rather. Absent-minded,’ she added, triumphant at finding the right word.
‘Thinking of him,’ Hannah suggested again.
‘Ah, now, you can’t have it both ways!’ Mrs. Gibson cried cunningly.
‘No, but you can think in heaps of them,’ Hannah said, and she gave her nose the twist which could mean disgust or a bitter kind of satisfaction.
Mrs. Gibson wisely ignored these possibilities. ‘And then, he’d come in and give us a look round, as cheery as you could want.’
‘I know,’ said Hannah.
‘And laugh! He was full of his jokes.’
‘I know,’ Hannah repeated grimly. How was she going to meet those jokes, or were they less frequent in the family circle? She was convinced that his wife had hated him, and while Mrs. Gibson rambled on, Hannah was either gazing into a future full of dislike for that hearty man or re-constructing the married misery of Mrs. Corder.
‘How I’ve been talking!’ Mrs. Gibson said at last. ‘And you haven’t told me what I’m to do about Mr. Blenkinsop.
‘Tell him he ought to be ashamed of himself,’ Hannah said, rising from the hearthrug, and she went away, leaving Mrs. Gibson disappointed, for the first time, in the resourcefulness of Miss Mole.
Chapter 6
Beresford Road and Prince’s Road meet at a point just below Albert Square, and as they are both on the western side of Nunnery Road, where the tram-cars go up to the Downs and down to the city, they can claim to be in Upper Radstowe, but, except for that terraced row of houses on one side of what the errand boys call Prince’s, they might belong to any other mid-Victorian suburb. The houses in Beresford Road are just emerging from the basement era. Their kitchens are still a few steps below the level of the sitting-rooms, but they have been raised from the cellarage whence a sturdier, or dumber, race of servants was content to ascend a long flight of stairs an innumerable number of times a day. Some of the houses are surrounded by their own gardens; others look like one house and are really two, with their entrances deceptively placed at the side; they give, and want to give, the impression that nothing unusual or indecorous can happen within their walls, and the red bulk of Beresford Road Congregational Chapel proclaims that Non-conformity has been received into the bosom of respectability. Perhaps the great days of the chapel are over. It was built for the benefit of those rising families whose incomes permitted a removal to this part of Radstowe and whose religious convictions had not changed with their fortunes; at a time when there was still something faintly defiant in marching a large, decently clad family to chapel in the face of church-goers who had never dared anything for freedom, but no
w that the church had amiably acknowledged dissenters as men and brothers, the only flavour left in Non-conformity was the unpleasant knowledge that its supporters were still considered socially doubtful. Big families were now out of fashion: many of those girls and boys who had regarded Sundays as half festival, half penance, who had been glad to wear their best clothes over the prickly discomfort of their clean under-garments, and to watch their acquaintances through the boredom of the services, had moved on to what was called a better part of Upper Radstowe, reared two or three children and quietly seceded from the faith of their fathers. The bolder spirits, who still went anywhere, went to the Unitarian Church, but Upper Radstowe was not the right soil for Non-conformity, which flourished more abundantly on the other side of Nunnery Road, and the appointment of Robert Corder to Beresford Road Chapel, fifteen years ago, had been an attempt to stir the sluggish ground with the chemical of a vigorous personality. His predecessor had been a gentle old man who preached patiently to the shining empty pews and could not be expected to lure young people to hear him, while Robert Corder was a bold, upstanding figure and the sight and sound of him advertised the vitality of his faith. He could be seen, striding about the streets, leaping on to moving tram-cars and off them, rushing to and from committee meetings, always in a hurry, yet always willing to check his speed for a few words with his acquaintances, and these words were cheery, optimistic and delivered in a loud voice, unless a quieter sympathy was called for. A member of his chapel brought him to a halt; a deacon could divert him from his course, and then he would stride on, still faster, making up for time which, as he often and merrily told these waylayers, was not lost, but had gone, before he knew it.
These were habits and occupations with which Miss Mole was not yet acquainted. From the window of her bed-sitting-room she could see the roof of the chapel and she had noticed it as a warm patch of red among the other roofs and the trees. She was a specialist in roofs and from many high windows in Upper Radstowe they could be seen in every shape and colour. They slid down the steep slope to Lower Radstowe, red, grey, blue and green, and spread like a flower garden over the city. There were old red tiles in close neighbourhood to shining slates, there were mossy green roofs squeezed between the walls of higher houses and, with all these variations in height, there were trees overtopping chimneys and chimneys sending their smoke into other people’s windows, but this could not be seen from Hannah’s room. Her view of the newer part of Upper Radstowe was ordinary enough, and she had made the most of the chapel roof until it had suddenly changed into a portent. She liked it no longer, yet she looked at it more often: she imagined herself sitting under it, a small drab speck against the varnish, and, during the days which passed before she heard from Lilia, she spent some time in Beresford Road, feeling like a conspirator or a private detective. She tried to get into the chapel and found, as she expected, that the doors were locked. ‘This,’ she said, addressing the ivy which grew round the porch, ‘is enough to drive anybody to Rome, and I’ve a good mind to go there. I suppose the place is so ugly that they daren’t let anyone see it unless there’s one of their entertainments going on, and then they’ve got each other’s hats to look at. Not,’ she added, ‘that there can be anything much in the way of hats.’
She would have been very gloomy if she had not been enjoying her prejudices and her prophetic powers. She was sure the red roof was painted blue on the inside, like the firmament, and sprinkled with opaque golden stars: she had seen Mr. Corder’s house, No. 14 – a long stone’s throw from the chapel and on the other side of the road – and her forebodings had been justified. It was one of the coupled houses, with an asphalt path running up to the inconspicuous door. There were a bow and a flat window on each of two floors and a small one, like an eye, in the gable. Hannah had strolled past the house adventurously: at any moment Mr. Corder might appear and it would be hard to look like a woman with a right to be in the road. She was not curious about him: it was the house she was concerned with, and if she could put her head inside its door she would know, at once, whether she could be happy in it. That, however, was further than she dared to go and she had to content herself with an external view, finding nothing hopeful in the lace curtains and the plot of grass edged with laurels and confined by iron railings. The architect of that house had been no artist. It was an ugly house, yet its twin, next door, looked infinitely more habitable, though the Venetian blinds were askew. Dusty-looking red curtains, clasped by brass chains, draped the lower bow window and a bird-cage containing a canary reminded Hannah painfully of Mrs. Widdows. No. 16 was quite as unattractive as No. 14 to the eye, but Hannah would have felt happier if the red curtains had belonged to Mr. Corder.
She was startled the next morning, when she passed again, to hear a harsh voice bidding her good day and, standing on tiptoe to peer over the privet hedge which grew above No. 16’s railings, she saw a parrot in a cage in the middle of the grass plot. The bird leered at her for an instant and then with an insulting expression, pretended it had never seen her, though she offered it the usual complimentary remarks.
‘Fond of birds?’ asked another voice, and a face popped over the privet hedge, close to her own. ‘Picking up the dead leaves,’ said its owner, showing her a handful, ‘and giving Poll an airing at the same time. Can’t let him out alone, ’cos of the cats. Even my own cats. Jealousy, I suppose. Now you’ll tell me that a bird is always a bird to a cat – and they’d eat Minnie, that’s the canary, there, if they could get her, I haven’t a doubt, but – and I’ve made a study of this – it’s not food they’re after with Poll. It’s the human voice that upsets them and he’s remarkably chatty at times. The human voice, coming from the wrong place. It’s natural, when you come to think of it.’
Miss Mole had discovered why No. 16 was a fitter habitation for her than No. 14. She recognized something native to herself in this elderly man who could fall into conversation with a stranger, something congenial in his battered old face and his roguish, disrespectful eye. As much as she could see of him was arrayed in a sleeved woollen waistcoat, a high stiff collar, and a red tie pierced by a pin with a diamond and opal horseshoe head, and he had the look of a man who would wear his cap in the house.
‘That’s very interesting,’ she said, dropping back on to her heels, while he pressed closer to the hedge to get a better sight of her, and his humorous, rather watery eyes seemed to be comparing her unfavourably with all the fine-looking women they had rested on.
‘Saw you yesterday, didn’t I?’ he asked. ‘Shaving at the time, up there,’ he jerked a thumb backwards, ‘and saw a woman at the chapel door. “That’s a new thing,” I said to myself. Couldn’t make it out at all, so I kept my eye on you. Seemed funny to me.’
‘It would have been funnier if I’d got in,’ Hannah said with a sniff.
‘Ah, not my idea of fun, but if you want to get in,’ he jerked his thumb sideways and his tone made large allowances for human vagaries, ‘you’ll get the key, I dessay, next door. Parson lives there. Went out half an hour ago with his coat tails flying. Pretended he didn’t see me,’ he gave Hannah a slow wink, ‘but I could tell him a thing or two if I liked. Only, as it happens,’ he sank out of sight and his voice came muffled through the hedge, ‘I don’t like.’ She could hear him gathering up more leaves.
A farewell seemed unnecessary, to go without one seemed rude, and she murmured something to which he made no response, but he had brightened her outlook; to live next door to a man who could tell Robert Corder a thing or two, to discover what those things were would be an alleviation of the dreariness she anticipated, and when she opened Lilia’s letter with the news that Mrs. Spenser-Smith had had her way and that Miss Mole would be expected in Beresford Road on the Tuesday of next week, Hannah could think more lightly of her bondage and face the fact that there were not many pounds left in her purse, but she made a wry face at Lilia’s much-underlined conclusion in which she pointed out that with fifty pounds a year, her board and lodging and
the rent from her house in the country, Hannah would surely be able to lay something by for a rainy day.
‘About enough to buy a cheap umbrella,’ Hannah said, flipping the letter across the table before she tore it into little pieces in carefulness that the secret of her relationship to Lilia should be kept.
For Mrs. Gibson the next few days had a noble sadness in them. She was to lose Miss Mole but could not grudge her to the exalted state of being housekeeper to Mr. Corder, and Miss Mole knew she would be welcome at any time if she liked to drop in for a cup of tea. Mrs. Gibson gazed admiringly at this woman who had appeared out of nowhere to save Mr. Ridding’s life, to keep out the policeman and avert an inquest and who betrayed no nervousness at the prospect of living with a minister, a man whose jokes, as Mrs. Gibson recognized, were comparable to passing froth on a pool of unknown depth.
Hannah’s own sadness was shot with a sense of adventure. She was prepared for every kind of dullness and annoyance, she was prepared to be sent adrift again on a world that did not want her, but her belief in approaching good was irrepressible: there was the man next door with his cats and his parrot and his canary and, for all she knew, he might be the one who was to leave her a fortune; there would be the fun of watching Lilia’s secret anxiety and careful condescension, and she was in the place she loved with the chance, if she behaved herself, of finding primroses on the other side of the river, in the spring.
Yet she wished she could have had a little longer with Mrs. Gibson, for Mrs. Ridding was still unfriendly and Mr. Blenkinsop was still the fortified place she had left behind her. She understood the nature of Mrs. Ridding’s defences and respected them, but she itched to tease Mr. Blenkinsop with feints of attack. In daily expectation of another ultimatum, Mrs. Gibson was treating him as though he were seriously ill: she whispered if she encountered Hannah on the landing outside his rooms, took special pains with the cooking of his food and carried it to him herself lest the blundering of the little servant should distress him, and this both angered Hannah and gave her the opportunity she wanted.