Facade (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘You’re right. Oh Kay, I wish I’d known you all my life. I believe you would have made a strong man of me. Shakespeare said:

  Our doubts are traitors,

  And make us lose the good we oft might win,

  By fearing to attempt.

  I’d never do for Kay what you have tried to do, and you know it. You must think me a pretty contemptible person.’

  ‘No, Aubrey, I don’t, I admire you. The real you. The you one day I have the feeling you will become.’

  ‘I’ve no such faith in myself.’

  As he spoke there came the violent pealing of the front-door bell. It was one of those old-fashioned bells attached to a wire which ran down the passageway to connect with a pendulous handbell. She got up, and even as she did so she had a sense of foreboding. A large touring car was standing before the house, and in the porch stood a complete stranger, whilst Edward, ashen in hue, was collapsed in the back seat of the car.

  ‘Good Heavens! Something awful has happened,’ she gasped.

  Edward had had another attack, and the stranger who happened to be passing at the time had very kindly brought him home. He was unconscious. Between them they got him indoors, up the stairs, a sagging, sprawling, splay figure, his eyes filmy, his mouth open. She and Aubrey attended him, whilst the stranger went off in his car for the Mainwaring doctor.

  Aubrey had hardly time to glance round the bedroom with its poor stained boards and drugget carpet that kept rucking up at the edges. The furniture was inauspicious, the pictures dull, and it horrified him. The rectory had been built in that unhappy period of English architecture when Victoria was doing her worst by the ’forties. It had little to recommend it, and the ill-proportioned windows and badly shaped rooms were horrible. He was alarmed at the thought that Edward Benson would die before the doctor came, and he knew that if his women folk discovered that he was here, he would never hear the end of it.

  They rolled him on to the bed, and into the pink flannelette nightshirt, and Aubrey ‒ instructed by Kay ‒ went downstairs to the kitchen for a hot-water bottle. He brought it back, carrying it like a baby in his arms. Kay was looking very distressed. Her face was moist, her eyes full of pain.

  ‘Oh, Aubrey, the doctor does seem to be such a very long time.’

  ‘He can’t be much longer. That man will have told him that it was serious.’

  He went back to the kitchen and made her some tea, bringing it up to her. She sipped it, saying that it was just what she had wanted most, but he noticed that she left half of it. She was too worried to drink it.

  At last she heard the scrape of tyres on the gravel drive, and Aubrey ran downstairs, his long legs taking him two at a time, but the doctor had opened the door, and was into the hall already.

  ‘Hello, Lester! So he’s had another one?’

  ‘Yes. He’s pretty bad. I happened to be here, thank God, but I can’t believe that he is going to live.’

  ‘He won’t if he persists in overdoing things. He’s so obstinate, of course, it’s all his own fault.’ The doctor went on upstairs, leaving Aubrey in the hall.

  He couldn’t go and leave Kay like this, although he was no use. He lingered unhappily there, looking at the pictures, and the violent red wall-paper ‒ not Kay’s choice, he felt sure ‒ the groups of cricketers not old enough to be ‘period’ but too old to be of any interest today. Brass rubbings. Old prints. Everywhere the fingermark of Edward.

  He opened the drawing-room door, peeping inside. It was an unused room, papered in yellow, with Madras muslin curtains, and a collection of furniture bought at odd times and collected with no real relationship to one another. A patchwork scene. Poor Kay, he thought, how little she has had out of life, for she herself has beautiful ideas, and adored beauty. Now perhaps he guessed that in her youth she had passed through that religious stage which had induced her to marry Edward with the idea of strengthening her faith. It must have been a chalice of disappointment. Surely, thought Aubrey, it could only be a mercy if the old fellow died?

  After a long time Kay came downstairs again.

  ‘Well, how is he?’

  ‘Oh, he’s very bad, of course.’ She took Aubrey into her own den again, the higgledy-piggledy room so much more attractive than the prim drawing-room, and with the picture of the Jungfrau over the mantelpiece, a picture that Margot had given her years ago. Brilliant. Inspiring. The one bright spot.

  ‘Don’t worry. He’ll get better,’ said Aubrey.

  ‘I don’t know. Worse, I don’t know what I want to happen. We can’t go on this way, with Edward having strokes all the time, and refusing to rest or do anything the doctor says. It’s too big a strain on me.’ She pushed her hair back from her tired little face and looked at him nervously.

  ‘Can’t I help? We’re old friends.’

  ‘No, you can’t help. I’ve got to fight this myself, and alone. It’s all contradictory, because there are dozens of silly old women who would give their eyes to be bedridden, and have friends bring them flowers and grapes, and it has to be Edward who gets it. Edward, who simply loathes the idea.’

  ‘But will he be bedridden?’

  ‘The doctor thinks one side may be permanently paralysed this time. I ‒ I’m quite horribly worried.’

  He said, ‘Don’t cross your bridges until you come to them; he may recover again, some people do.’

  ‘Yes, some people do, but Edward won’t. The district nurse is coming in for tonight, which is one mercy. He isn’t conscious yet, and he doesn’t know that he is stuck in bed; when he does, he’ll be utterly furious. Oh dear, isn’t life difficult?’

  ‘Poor Kay!’

  ‘You’ve been very kind, Aubrey, and most helpful. I’m sorry you got mixed up in all this, it doesn’t seem fair, but I couldn’t help it.’

  ‘I’m glad I was mixed up in it. I’m very fond of you,’ he said.

  He had never realized it quite so forcefully as today. Today he knew that he hated leaving her alone to face it.

  He went home. At the sagging gate he met the district nurse turning in with her heavy bicycle. She was an amiable woman of too sure years, with several chins and benevolent eyes. She worked hard and her face was weather-beaten; he thought it was unfair that any woman should have to work so hard. ‘There’s trouble here,’ he said.

  ‘Trouble?’ she asked briskly. ‘Well, and hasn’t he been asking for it for years?’

  Sixteen

  ‘Of course you would have to be hanging round Fincham Rectory when it happened,’ said his mother when he went in to say good night to her, and told her about it.

  ‘Your choice of words is a bit regrettable. I wasn’t hanging about there at all. I went to see Kay.’

  ‘Really, Aubrey, have you thought what people will say? They are always willing to start a scandal, the chatterboxes of country places are thorns in the flesh. Then you must go and give them further food for conversation.’

  ‘But how could I leave Kay alone when that had happened? I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘In this life it isn’t what you actually do, it’s what people think you do,’ and she tapped her foot impatiently; she could never understand him.

  He said nothing but turned and left her, knowing that this woman was responsible for much of the misery in his life. It was she who had set the facade before him, making it impossible for him to live with her unless he used it. Her fear of public opinion had influenced his infancy, had been imprinted in the impressionable years, bred in him. Freud was right; it was those first years that told. Now inside him there was a well of human emotions which longed to rise up and flow into his life, yet seemed to be for ever dammed.

  ‘You’re a very difficult young man,’ she said as he closed the door.

  He stood at his bedroom window staring out into the heart of the trees, uncertain what to do next. The leaves were still with inanimate silence, the same stillness of a drowned body that moves with the tide, but is itself immobile.

&n
bsp; He knew now that, if ever he were to have any life at all, he must cut himself adrift from the sentimental chains, but how? He had got to escape from Thornhill. The house that he had always believed had stood as an oasis in his desert, was in truth no oasis; it was the desert.

  For some time George Herrick had been restless. He had come to dislike the cottage since his mother had died; he had come to a sense of depression for its isolation, for the children that filled it to overflowing. One day, sitting over his tea, he said with an air of finality, ‘I’m going to give’m up.’

  Alice stared at him. ‘The cottage?’

  ‘It’s nowt but an old shack. The war’s changed things, we could do better. ’Cause my folks were content to live and die here, I w’unt.’

  ‘We’re going away?’ she asked, and her eyes suddenly brightened at the prospect.

  She had always disliked the little cottage, approached by the field which meant that she was for ever scrubbing dirty footprints away. The garden was full of broken bricks and stones, with the children barking their knees, and she had to fetch every drop of water in a bucket from the farm. She hated it. The thought of escape was a joy.

  ‘There’m be a job at Burton’s farm, t’other side of Mainwaring. I’m going to see about it. It’s a good cottage and a well’n its own. A tidy bit’n garden and a proper road to it. If we could get’n, it’d be fine.’

  ‘It would be fine, George.’

  He went back to the farm after he had finished his tea, and she washed up. She couldn’t help thinking of the joy of living on a proper road, of being close to the town so that there’d be shops to look at, and a cinema sometimes, and fun. She ached for fun. It would be very pleasant to get away from all this, for the place was getting her down.

  She saw that a big motor car had stopped at the gate across the field, a handsome one, and a gentleman was coming along the rude path to the cottage. He wore a good suit, and Alice appreciated the fact that he must be rich to have such a big car and such smart clothes. She went to answer the door to him and he raised his hat politely.

  ‘I’ve run out of water,’ he said, ‘do you think you could let me have a bucket-full?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir.’ She reached for the bucket she had brought but recently across the field. ‘I’ll bring it out to you.’

  ‘I can take it,’ then, seeing her perplexed face, ‘I won’t steal it, you know.’

  ‘I never thought of that, sir. It just isn’t right for gentry to be carrying buckets.’

  She went into the field with him and between them they carried it to the waiting car. He was obviously unused to carrying a full pitcher, and the water slopped down his side. She laughed at it.

  At the gate she saw that there was a lady sitting in the motor car; she had on one of those Frenchified hats with flowers in the front in bright colours, she wore a lovely grey suit, and there were more flowers pinned to the lapel of her coat; ear-rings were in her ears and pearls at her throat, big ones, like little eggs. She looked at Alice, and Alice looked at her, knowing instantly who it was. Even though the decayed front teeth had been either stopped or drawn, even though there was no smell of rancid white rose, and no messy little bag of sweets. Undoubtedly Milly had done well for herself.

  ‘Fancy seeing you!’ said Alice.

  Milly stared at her. ‘Who on earth are you?’

  ‘It’s Alice. Don’t you remember? I used to be at Thornhill along of you. I left, because … because …’ and she turned red. The gentleman had taken the bucket to the radiator and was standing there filling it up with a chugging sound. He could not hear.

  ‘Yes, you left, because …’ said Milly, and in an undertone, ‘Shut up! Do you think I don’t know your sort? Do you think I would ever have come here if I’d known it was you? I thought you’d left the place ages ago, too hot to hold you after what you did. You make me tired, straight you do!’

  The same Milly! ‘But …’ said Alice.

  ‘Shut up, I tell you, shut up!’ And at that moment the man came round from the front of the car, with the empty bucket in his hand.

  ‘I’m very grateful, what do I owe you?’

  ‘Water don’t cost nothink,’ she said, but her voice had gone dull. She hadn’t thought that Milly, her heroine, could have been so mean. Milly, whom she had worshipped.

  ‘Nonsense, you’ve been very kind. Put that in your little boy’s money box,’ and he held out half a crown. She took it dumbly.

  ‘Now come along, Alaric dear, we mustn’t be late,’ said Milly, all honeyed tones. He got in beside her. Milly never even looked at Alice.

  Alice watched the car drive off, and in her hand she held a half-crown that she longed to spit upon. Now she felt that she hated everything in her life. It seemed to be years since she had shared that room at Thornhill with Milly, and had listened to all the girlish chatter, chewing cheap sweets. When she got back to the cottage there was not a single drop of water in the place, and she pushed the yoke and buckets towards Kay.

  ‘Fetch me some more water, for the love of Gawd!’

  ‘But it’s my Latin, Mum.’

  ‘Blast your Latin,’ she said, ‘a lot of good it’ll do you. I’m dead beat and I’ve got to get the brats to bed. Go and get the water and don’t back answer.’

  He went.

  Aubrey saw the boy as he was returning from the office, which nowadays interested him not at all. It could have meant a lot, but he had lost touch. He was sick of the societies for which he lectured, he ought to have been happy because people respected his authority and his judgement, but all the time he knew that he had lost faith in everything. As he brought the car over the prow of the hill he saw the boy staggering with the buckets and taking them dripping across the field. The sight infuriated him, and he was immensely strengthened by it. He got out of the car.

  ‘Here, Kay! Kay, what are you doing?’

  ‘Mum’s run out of water, sir.’

  ‘Those buckets are much too heavy for you.’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ and he grinned over them.

  But Aubrey was so angry that he grabbed them. ‘Here, give them to me. I’ll carry them.’

  ‘You’ll only spill them, and then Mum’ll be angry.’

  ‘She won’t be angry. You leave this to me.’

  He left the car and went across the field with the boy. He carried the buckets distastefully, feeling gauche with them, even though nobody would see. He came to the garden with its unfertile soil that had not been fertilised for years, with the little plants that were starved for nutrition; the creeping jenny struggled on the path, with the dry runnels that the water made beside it. Alice came to the door.

  ‘Oh, my goodness!’ she said, seeing Aubrey there, ‘whatever have you done, you naughty boy, to let a gentleman carry them buckets?’

  ‘He would do it, Mum,’ said young Kay. Aubrey set the buckets down on the step.

  ‘This is too heavy work for a child of that age, Alice, you oughtn’t to let him do it.’

  ‘Someone’s got to do it. I don’t see why he should not, it won’t hurt him.’

  ‘He isn’t old enough.’

  ‘He’s my child, and I’ll do what I like with’n,’ she flashed back.

  ‘He’s my child too,’ said Aubrey, the facade suddenly slipping, and he himself feeling very strong. Alice was in a temper, disgusted over the scene with Milly, and she snapped back.

  ‘A fat lot you’m done for’n,’ she said, and all the time the boy was staring from one to the other of them, looking amazed.

  ‘Alice, I’d be willing to do more. He oughtn’t to be here, he shouldn’t be working this way. The cottage is falling down on you …’

  ‘George’n gone to see about getting another.’

  ‘A bigger one? With room for young Kay?’ She bridled again at that, angry that the boy should be put before the others.

  ‘Kay’ll have to take what he’n get,’ she said, and going inside, she slammed the door in Aubrey’s face. The slam c
aused the whole place to quiver, and from the eaves above, a child, rudely awakened by the noise, raised its infant voice in protest.

  Aubrey pulled himself together and went back across the field; one thing about which he had made up his mind was that the child should not continue this way. It didn’t matter what Frances or his mother said, the child must be got out of his present surroundings.

  When he got to the field gate, he saw that George Herrick was coming towards him. He looked at Aubrey.

  ‘I hear you’ve been after a new job?’ said Aubrey.

  ‘Just been to see th’ farmer, sir, and I can have it, he says. Better cottage too, with a road. Me mum wore this’n out.’

  ‘Better wages?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Altogether better. This cottage is a bad’n, it get my Alice down.’

  ‘I’m very glad you’re going somewhere better. This ought to be condemned.’

  As he went home, Aubrey remembered that with the departure of the Herricks, Frances might change towards him. It had been what she had wanted all along. This was perhaps the opportunity to pick up the broken pieces, and make his life a new thing. But first he must do something about that child. In Switzerland Kay had warned him of that duty, now he knew that it was urgent and that he must fulfil it.

  In the Thornhill garden, Mrs. Parkin was gathering mint. It was strange to see Mrs. Parkin with her large bosom and larger stomach, trying to gather mint, where once a young girl had knelt, with her greened hands, and lovely flowery little face. Aubrey could still picture her as she had been, though now time had dealt hardly by her. Alice was well on towards the Parkins stage of unattractiveness, but the picture that Aubrey carried in his heart was of Alice as she had been that day in the mint bed, adolescently lovely, ripening with that shy beauty to something that had warmed him.

  ‘It’s the stooping what gets me, sir,’ said Mrs. Parkin, coming with difficulty into the upright position.

  ‘Let me?’ He gathered a handful of it. Long sprigs of mint coming into flower, tasselled in mauve. ‘It’s going off a bit, isn’t it?’