A Hint of Witchcraft (5 page)

‘And courage,' Sarah said. ‘Not that she says much about all she's gone through.'

Even Alex was a little in awe of a woman who had been within earshot of German howitzers, endured air-raids when she nursed as a VAD in a casualty dressing station on the Western Front and survived the sinking of the
Britannic
when it was torpedoed on the way to Malta. Since then she had managed a home for war orphans in London, had been a prison visitor, secretary to more than one charitable organization, and had shown no sign whatever of needing the support of a husband.

‘A remarkable woman,' Edward repeated. ‘But look at Miss Burdon, left to run a successful family business and making a hash of it. Look at Mrs Judd. Look at Mrs Grey.'

Margot looked at each of the three as bidden. Any similarity between them, especially between Mrs Judd and Mrs Grey had not occurred to her.

‘You're thinking of our generation, Edward,' her mother pointed out. ‘Girls growing up now will find a husband, surely.'

Husbands, it seemed, had to be found; they did not materialize of their own accord. Doubts as to her own ability to search successfully inclined Margot to take her father's advice. She must somehow, albeit in the remote future, be able to earn her own living. Miss Burdon did, if only just; Mrs Judd did by taking in washing; on the other hand, Mrs Grey did not.

‘No,' her father said when she mentioned Mrs Grey's abstention from work. ‘That's just the point.'

‘I wonder if Linden will be able to earn her own living.'

‘We must hope so. Otherwise.…' From Sarah's glance at her husband Margot understood that otherwise Linden would be faced with the ordeal of searching for a husband, an ordeal which she herself hoped to escape.

‘What shall I do? About earning my living?'

‘Well,' – his daughter's brisk acceptance of her lot found Edward unprepared – ‘you must work hard at school and pass your exams and then we'll see.'

Margot relaxed. The path ahead if not smooth was less stony than she had feared. She worked quite hard already: not being clever like Alex, she had to. Unfortunately the topic prompted her father also to think of Alex.

‘It's time he settled down.'

The French Foreign Legion as a choice of career had lost its appeal, as had medicine (like poor old Pelman), mining engineering (like poor old Dad), the stage (he hadn't dared to mention it). At present he favoured the law. As a barrister he would confound the judiciary, the public, the innocent and the guilty with the eloquence of his pleas.

‘If he fails his matric this term,' Edward said, ‘he'll have to leave Bishop Cosin's and go somewhere else for a year's cramming. He can't go on picking and choosing.'

The Humberts were comfortably off. Edward would inherit his father's share in a family shipping company, importers of timber from Scandinavia mainly for pit props. In his early twenties, he had reacted from trade and commerce in favour of the ministry, but had soon found himself unable to accept its orthodoxy. He abandoned theology and trained as a mining engineer. Spiritual guidance was questionable as to the form it should take: the need for coal was indisputable, its quality easier to assess.

But the imagination and compassion that had drawn him to a pastoral vocation remained unchanged. He was efficient and practical in his present position as agent to the Fellside and District Coal Company but he found it hard to reconcile the aims of his employers with the needs of their employees, was often troubled by the ambiguities of his situation and tempted to change course again and put up for Parliament as a Liberal candidate.

‘When the children are settled,' Sarah said with her heart in her mouth, ‘we can think again.'

Meanwhile they were more active in the community than other agents had been and Edward enjoyed his position as consultant to the whole Fellside coal-field. In accepting it he had been influenced by the house that went with it. As Linden had been quick to see, Ashlaw had remained mainly a rural village. The coal under its fields was got out elsewhere. Certainly the waters of its leaf-shaded river were polluted by the Fellside colliery upstream but Ashlaw itself had no slag-heap, pit pond nor head-stock to disfigure it.

Various dwellings had occupied the site of Monk's Dene since the Middle Ages but the present house was a substantial Victorian residence with a look of age and none of its inconveniences. It faced away from the village but its back door was accessible from the main street to callers who had problems to unburden, forms to be filled in, letters to be explained – without the toil of having to get into their good clothes.

As for front-door visitors, Sarah did not flag in her intention to look after the Greys a little; that is to say, she did not flag for some time. It was a one-sided relationship. Once during the summer term, Margot was invited to 5 Gordon Street where the Greys occupied the first-floor rooms.

‘You enjoyed it?' Her mother's question invited a more generous response than Margot seemed able to make. Her hesitation was just as illuminating. The dinginess of the sitting-room, the flimsiness of the refreshments – thin bread and butter and a slice of fruit cake – could not be described with enthusiasm. The dinginess didn't matter. The flimsiness could be rectified by the cramming down of a milk chocolate bar in the bathroom. It wasn't so much the absence of cosiness and fun as the presence of a sort of stiffness that caused Margot to ponder. Linden had been as sweet as ever but had been even less talkative than usual. The room was cold. Mrs Grey, wearing a thick tweed costume and amber beads and pouring tea from a silver tea-pot into wide shallow cups, had mentioned that ‘the rest of the silver' was in store ‘until we are settled in a permanent home.'

‘Oh yes,' Margot had said brightly, the brightness a substitute for any sensible answer she could think of to such a remark.

‘I like it best when they come here,' she told her mother.

Certainly at Monk's Dene there was less constraint and more food, but seeds of doubt had been sown. Were their own meals too hearty? Too unrefined? Common sense came up with a negative reply: people needed food especially after a long day at school with a load of homework ahead. On the other hand Linden's superior sophistication could not be overlooked; she knew how things should be done.

‘They're snobs,' Lance said. ‘They're trying to keep up appearances.'

‘Why?' Margot demanded, aghast.

‘Don't ask me why. It's a form of cheating.'

Nevertheless Margot became an enthusiast for refinement. It made little difference to her life-style which was too firmly geared to fit in with other people's to offer scope for change, but her manner did alter. Linden never talked about herself, never exchanged confidences. Perhaps that was why she was so interesting – intriguing, like an unopened book whose contents may be dull but will not be found to be so as long as they remain unread.

‘Margot hasn't said a word for at least two minutes.' Her father paused in carving the Sunday joint. ‘Is anything wrong?'

‘She's stopped gushing,' Alex said, ‘and that can only be an improvement.'

‘I rather liked the gushing.'

Her father's regretful smile brought tears to Margot's eyes, but she was suddenly happy. For some reason she was constantly lurching from one mood to another these days. In the natural process of growing up her artless sincerity would doubtless have been modified as it was being already by exposure to Linden's adult manner. Linden never put her foot in it, was never impulsive. All the same, Sarah was not sorry when, at the end of term, Margot came home with the dramatic news that something terrible had happened: Linden had left school without even taking her exams and would not be returning to the Sixth Form.

‘I was stunned. So were Phyllis and Freda. It was the most awful shock. Did you know it was going to happen?'

‘Marian didn't mention it. What is she going to do?'

‘I don't know but it has certainly cast a cloud over the holidays.'

‘Seven weeks of official mourning and then a slow lightening of the gloom.' But Alex was less patronizing than usual: he had problems of his own and became visibly on edge as August drew to a close, bringing ever nearer the date of the examination results, bringing at last the fateful day.

‘I'm sorry, Dad.' He was white-faced and miserable. ‘I didn't think it would be as bad as this. I should have scraped through in maths.…'

‘Scraped!' The eloquence of the future barrister had been inherited from his father. Edward Humbert did not mince his words. Things were so bad that Margot crept to her room and closed the door, to writhe in sympathy. Presently her brother's slow footsteps on the stairs and the uncharacteristically quiet closing of his door told her that the storm had been terrible indeed. It was worse for Alex because he was so clever. Nobody would have minded, or at least not so much, if she had been the one to fail, a calamity which she prayed every night to avoid.

It had been rather a shock to learn that Linden never prayed.

‘Never?'

‘Perhaps I might' – Linden had shrugged – ‘for something very important if there was no other way. But I don't suppose it would do any good.'

Though shaken, Margot felt bound to go on praying. To stop now and risk failure in her exams would be foolhardy and of course there were all the other reasons for praying. All the same, now that Alex had failed, it seemed mean to pray more earnestly than ever that she would pass, especially as there were more than three years to go.

Meanwhile Alex was granted a reprieve. After a consultation with his headmaster, the threat of sending him to a crammer was withdrawn – provisionally. Instead he was enrolled as a boarder at Bishop Cosin's on the understanding that his nose was kept firmly to the grindstone; exeats and even games were to be strictly limited.

Alex accepted banishment gracefully, even cheerfully and with a determination that astonished his parents, applied himself so steadily to his studies that in one year he had matriculated with honours and two years later enrolled as a student at London University.

‘I should have put my foot down earlier,' his father said. ‘A disciplined life with no distractions was what he needed.'

‘He came to his senses just in time,' Sarah agreed. ‘We have a great deal to be thankful for.'

Margot felt rather sorry for her misguided parents who flattered themselves that they and the masters at Bishop's had worked the miracle. She could have enlightened them as to the true cause of the transformation but she held her tongue.

CHAPTER V

Lance's first appraisal of Linden's looks and manner had been impartial. As his father might have diagnosed in a patient a glandular disorder or a shortage of protein, he had diagnosed in Linden a difference.

But that, the younger girls at the Elmdon High School could have told him, was the whole point. Linden's difference fascinated them. She had been instantly noticeable, appearing as she did in the middle of the spring term and in the Upper Fifth without the bother of drably working her way up through the lower forms.

‘Distinguished-looking,' Phyllis suggested, as the newcomer was discussed over milk and buns in the refectory during morning break.

‘Not quite. You'd say that about an older person like the Head.' Freda chewed thoughtfully. ‘She's distinctive, whereas the rest of us are ordinary. The common herd, you might say.'

‘I do rather object to the word “common”. But distinctive, yes, you're right,' Phyllis conceded. ‘And part of being distinctive is that you get away with things.'

‘What sort of things?' Margot asked.

‘The length of her tunic, for instance. You're not going to tell me that it's two and a half inches above her knee.'

‘Shorter?'

‘No, longer.'

The breach of regulations was obviously significant but the distance between hem and knee was too prosaic to be dwelt on. For them Linden had glamour, that subtle quality to be felt but not described except by saying that she had grace and poise, as if accustomed to a sphere of existence unknown to the humdrum inhabitants of their own town. She had come from elsewhere, had lived in the south and even abroad. The pitch of her voice was low, its accent free of any local inflection. Not that she was talkative: if challenged no one would have been able to remember anything of significance she had ever said.

It would not have occurred to Lance when he first met her, or indeed at any other time after, that when wearing her hat with the brim turned up like a dark halo she might put one in mind of Botticelli's
St John;
that bare-headed, she would not have been out of place among the aloof and pallid women favoured by the Pre-Raphaelites. Nor did she actually resemble any of them. Regular features, eyes of a greyish blue, hair soft and dark with a deep wave – did not yet amount to actual beauty.

Her gift – a natural endowment since she was neither old enough nor clever enough to have acquired it – was to suggest qualities she did not possess, to direct the eye of the beholder to a wider vision than she herself was capable of. There was a certain magic in it and since all magic must be suspect, Lance had once again hit the nail on the head when he muttered that Alex had better watch out.

It was only gradually that Margot came to a similar conclusion. One evening in the spring term of Alex's second year as a boarder, she had stayed on at school for a lecture on ‘Careers for Women' and was hurrying to catch the bus to Ashlaw. Having cut it rather fine, she felt justified in taking a short cut along the river-bank, a shaded path out of bounds according to school rules. It was still twilight but would soon be dark. At a pace between running and walking, with no other sense of danger than fear of being seen by one of the mistresses, she came suddenly on two people loitering at the foot of one of the steep tree-bordered paths leading down to the river.