John Brown's Body (5 page)

What would she have done if he hadn’t come, would she sit all night waiting, and rejoice in the morning when he did?

Bertha took off the handbrake and put the car into gear as it rolled downhill. She was a bad driver though enormously careful. Emmeline said that a car needed a lot of tractor in it to survive Bertha’s care. As the gears engaged they were both thrown forward and Ralph’s nose stubbed the windscreen.

Bertha said, “I must ask Emmeline to have that looked at.”

The car was Emmeline’s. Very little in Bertha’s world was
not directly or indirectly Emmeline’s. Except Ralph, and for him there were incumbent benefits.

“How have you been, dear? You’re always so busy, we can’t help wondering if you make time to eat properly. You looked tired last week and you didn’t want to walk the long way home from church. We noticed. Oh dear, have you a cold?”

Ralph shook his head as he wiped his eyes which were watering from the blow on his nose.

“You don’t really take care of yourself,” Bertha said wistfully. She braked hard at an empty pedestrian crossing. “Emmeline says you’re not sustaining your frame. You have a big frame, Ralph.”

It was possible to get glimpses of the estuary across the fields. Bertha and Ralph, before they married, used to walk to the estuary to watch the ships pass. Neither of them hankered to sail away, they left that to people who had business away or could not settle at home. When the salt wind blew inland Bertha remembered a Cornish town where she stayed as a child – not the sea nor the sands, just the grey street with aprons of spray between the houses. Ralph only remembered when he was off guard.

He wound down the car window and watched the coasters and liners each reduced to a pip of light bowling in and out of Emmeline’s hedges.

“Dr and Mrs Chinn are coming to dinner tomorrow.”

Ralph made an acceptance noise and Bertha said, “We thought you’d be pleased.”

Normally he took his cue, Bertha always gave him one – to be glad, to be sorry, to be indignant, to be amused – and it all went smoothly. Now he saw no just cause for Dr and Mrs Chinn, no reason, not even an excuse.

“It’s for your sake, dear.” Bertha could not make up her mind to emerge at the T-junction. “We thought they’d be company for you.” She waved on the car which waited behind them. “You are pleased, aren’t you?”

Why didn’t he take the cue? Why did he shrug and continue
to look out of the window? He knew what his silence would do to Bertha. Her dismay was tangible as she ground the car in bottom gear along the dark lane to Thorne. She signalled desperately with her headlamps at every bend. When at last they stopped outside the house he was about to put his arm round her and tell her that he’d been looking forward to just the three of them together this week-end but he was of course pleased at the prospect of Dr and Mrs Chinn, but before he could move, the door opened wide, golden light trumpeted out and there was Emmeline crying, “Ralph, darling!”

He was never sure which there was in her cry – pleasure, pain, or blame.

*

When people remarked on how the sisters complemented each other, they meant that there would never be room for two Emmelines. Not in the same family nor, thought Ralph, in the same cognisance. It was not likely that he would ever know another Emmeline: if he were obliged to, within the same lifespan, he would be crowded out of himself.

The late Colonel Openshaw had been too late for Ralph, Emmeline was already a widow when he met Bertha. By Emmeline’s account – Bertha said little more than that he was kind – the Colonel was out of Ralph’s class. He had to be, to take Emmeline. She was a challenge which Ralph had never accepted, in fact they all lived together at Thorne on the understanding that he did not.

“Ralph has something on his mind,” she said as they sat at supper. She was finishing the last of three gins with which she had prefaced the meal. Beside her plate was a lighted cigarette.

“We shouldn’t expect him to slip into our life at a moment’s notice,” said Bertha. “It’s a far cry from his.”

At week-ends they often discussed him in his presence as they did out of it for the rest of the week.

“If he feels disjointed it could be the beginning of the end
of something,” said Emmeline. “Personally I’ll be glad if it’s the end of his commuting.”

“He knows how we feel about that.” Bertha put the plate of bread at Ralph’s elbow. “The soft pieces are towards you, dear.”

“I have nothing on my mind,” said Ralph, “except the joy of being with you both.”

“His mind is putting out some interesting rays, mostly emotional, though there’s a hard streak too. Our darling’s twisted his envelope out of shape.”

“Don’t tease,” pleaded Bertha. “He must be so tired after his journey.”

“I hardly noticed the journey.”

“No, that’s not a suffering streak,” said Emmeline, “it’s too solid. And I’m not sure about the joy, he has such soft pink joy, has Ralph.”

He smiled. “I think the boot’s on the other foot. You have something on your mind, Emmy.”

She dropped her knife and fork and picked up the cigarette.

“Isn’t the beef to your liking?” Bertha asked anxiously.

Emmeline turned to Ralph. “Do you know of a good water-diviner?”

“What?”

“Divining’s in your line of country – weed-killers and pest control – surely there’s a file on Dowsers in your office?”

“No.”

“Don’t you look for the springs of life as well as the springs of death?”

“What do you want a water-diviner for?”

“Darling, to divine water.”

“It’s no joke,” Bertha warned in a stage whisper to Ralph and sounded sorry that it wasn’t.

“Hurry up and finish eating and let’s get away from the table.”

Emmeline was not interested in food. She regarded it as fuel and to her a meal was a stoking operation: Ralph, eating
Bertha’s excellent Yorkshire pudding amid Emmeline’s fuss and fume, wondered not for the first time if the sisters complemented each other to the extent of each offsetting the other’s qualities with her own defects.

“I want a diviner for this room,” said Emmeline. “And for the room above it, my bedroom. Bertha and I find the atmosphere oppressive in them both. There’s a sense of effort. Don’t you feel it? But you wouldn’t, you’re not here all the time.”

“What effort?” Ralph smiled. “In your bedroom?”

“If there’s a stream immediately under this room we shall know why it’s twice as much effort to lift a finger in here as it is anywhere else in the house.”

Ralph looked at Bertha. She sighed ambiguously and he chose a slice of bread from which the crusts had been trimmed.

“I have no difficulty lifting my fingers.”

“You wouldn’t, over a week-end. It’s a cumulative effect.”

“Of what?”

“If there’s a stream under the house we’re being bombarded with ionising rays. I feel a tug,” said Emmeline, “when I do the smallest thing I feel a tug the other way.”

“Dusting this room makes me hot,” said Bertha.

“Water is a conductor. Living over it is equivalent to continuous treatment with weak radium. We’ve lived here for fifteen years – how much radium can the system take?”

“I should think you’re super-charged,” said Ralph.

Emmeline twisted out her cigarette among the food on her plate.

“It could ultimately be lethal.” Flakes of ash settled on Ralph’s last piece of potato. “I’m not going to die that way.”

The secret of living, or partly-living with her was to be passive. If she was left to her devices they petered out.

“What worries me,” said Bertha, “is what do we do – what can we do – if there
is
water under the house?”

Ralph smiled. Here was Bertha’s quality offsetting this
defect of Emmeline’s, Bertha took Emmeline’s theories and held them up like knitting to see what the final measurements would be.

“We could move.”

“Don’t be absurd, Ralph. This is my home.”

And the final measurements were shown to be nothing.

“Thorne is well-built and structurally sound, Arnold would never have taken it otherwise. Where he came from they didn’t merely pinch the fruit before they bought, they ate it to see if it was worth paying for. He checked everything, he sent men up the chimneys and down the drains, he even had the brick content analysed. But he overlooked something that mattered more than any of that.”

“Not to him,” said Bertha. “I really don’t think it would ever have mattered to him, except insofar as it mattered to you –”

“Of course it wouldn’t. He was desensitised by his years in the East, he had reached maximum absorption and saturation point. He felt nothing.”

“He wasn’t
bothered
,” Bertha explained. “By it, I mean.” She had a way of tidying up after people, interpreting and representing them when they were dead or absent, in the kindest light.

“To my mind the terrestrial rays are more important than bricks and mortar. If they’re bad, a dry roof and good plumbing can’t compensate.”

Bertha put her hand on Ralph’s. “I’ve made you baked jam roll. Emmy and I are ending with fresh fruit. We sleep better without pudding.”

“I’ve never known you sleep badly.”

“Emmy has very disturbed nights.”

“Is it to be wondered at if I’m subjected to electromagnetic radiation all the time I’m in bed?”

Ralph knew better than to ask how it had started. How did it ever start? Not with a bang but a whimper, as someone once said.

“If there is a stream under the house it is here,” she said.
“That I know, I feel.” She tapped a cigarette smartly on the table before putting it between her lips. Ralph observed that she tapped the wrong end. “I shall close this room and move my bed to the other side of the house.”

Things being as they were it would be better if he did not observe so much, he had no intention of changing anything at this end, he accepted what had emerged at Thorne. Indeed, almost any other combination of the ingredients would have been the worse for him – and he was obliged to take whatever shaped up. Things being as they were, he had run a considerable risk.

“What do you think, dear?” said Bertha.

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters! We’re waiting for your opinion, aren’t we, Emmy?”

“I think Emmy should get married again,” he said, and filled his mouth with pudding.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

Bertha went turkey-red with alarm, Emmeline’s powder turned mauve.

Ralph said thickly, with pastry loading his tongue, “It would solve all your problems.”

Emmeline got up and left the room. Her chair, pushed back too violently, fell on its side. Bertha hurried to pick it up. “You shouldn’t have said that.”

“I suppose not. It would be a poor lookout for us if she did marry again.”

“Why did you say it?”

“I wanted to rough her up for talking such nonsense. This is excellent pastry, Bert.”

“It was unkind. Sometimes you can be unkind, dear.”

But he knew that she did not think seriously of it, only as seriously as if she had been obliged to say that his hands were sometimes dirty. To her, unkindness and dirt were skin deep.

He licked in some sweet flakes and tidied his lip from
corner to corner with a sweep of his tongue. “It’s true. She needs a husband.”

“Marriage is the answer to a lot of things,” agreed Bertha. She sat beside him and kissed his ear and he chose that moment, or was it chosen for him, to think again of the new little creature.

After leaving the train he had put her firmly from his mind, intending to regard the journey down as being a journey away from her, with Thorne as its farthest point. When he got into the train to go back to London, when the first bend of the track hid Bertha from sight, that was to be the time to re-start thinking. But here he was, remembering the miracle with shocking clarity. Shocking because the locale was wrong, the time was wrong and the physical circumstance – Bertha nibbling his ear – was ludicrously wrong.

“I’ve got something to tell you.” He jerked his head away. “I’ve cashed a cheque for two hundred pounds on our account.”

*

It wasn’t doubt that made Bertha ask questions. Of Ralph she had no doubt and she was quite easy about the money. She simply wanted to be easier still. She was like that in bed, stirring gently round and round before she went to sleep, making sure that everything was in the best possible place.

“Shall we make a lot of money?”

“No-one makes a lot nowadays with capital gains tax.”

Perhaps it hadn’t been a good idea to tell her that he had invested the money.

“Stock market dealings are like this, you get a tip and you have to be ready to take a chance. I took this one for both of us.”

“I think it’s exciting. When shall we know how we’ve done?”

He wanted the thought to occur that she might not see
the money again, she need not retain the suspicion, but it ought to cross her mind.

She asked if the investment was anything to do with kaffirs. Emmeline had told her that kaffirs could be gold shares.

“I don’t want Emmy to know about it. What we do with our money is our business.”

The plural was justified because he had done it for her too. It
was
a kind of investment.

Later she asked who had given him the tip. Was it someone he could trust?

“You must trust me,” he said. “Do you trust me?”

“Of course, dear. And it’s your money too.”

She wanted to know what it was they had bought. Shares in what? “Perhaps I shall see something about them in the paper. Emmy reads the financial page, so shall I now.”

“If she sees you, she’ll cotton on. You know how quickly she can.”

“The gardening notes are on the same page and I always read them. She won’t see anything different.”

On the Saturday evening, just before the Chinns arrived, she asked what would affect the price of their shares. What caused them to go up or down.

“A lot of things that we can’t control,” said Ralph, “at home and abroad – trade, strikes, politics, takeovers. Shares are vulnerable.”

“I hope they won’t be affected by the Vietnam war – I shouldn’t like to profit from that.”