Palladian (21 page)

Margaret had shaken off her ‘flu’. She always ‘shook off’ indispositions, as if the very fact of the illness departing was a sign of her superiority, as perhaps it was.

‘Surely you are not going out!’ cried Tinty.

‘Indeed I am. Two days indoors is more than enough for me.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t. Where
is
everybody?’

‘Everybody? There are only Tom and Marion left.’

‘Please, dear! I
meant
where are
they?
Where is Tom? Where is Marion?’

‘What do you want them for?’

‘I don’t want them. I only want to know where they
are.’

‘Mother, this seems to be a time, you know, for something to be done about Tom.’

Tinty waved her hand and frowned to indicate Mrs Adams
coming in with some damp sawdust, which she flung out like chicken-food over the stone floor to settle the dust, by this time mostly lying safe on cornices and bannisters and picture frames.

‘Because he hasn’t deviated for just over a week,’ Margaret continued as if Mrs Adams were half-witted.

‘I wish you wouldn’t go out, dear, in such doubtful weather.’

‘I see nothing wrong with the weather,’ Margaret said, standing at the front door and looking out at the lawns covered with tan-coloured leaves. She was really rather repelled by the look of outdoors, but stepped resolutely over the heap of rugs and went down the steps. Now each leaf at the beginning of its decay was different and interesting. They lay over the drive like shells, like coins, lemon-yellow and black-spotted, or whole fans of chestnut outlined with gold. However much she tried to walk in the middle of the lane, her instinct kept leading her into the ditch, where she shuffled along ankle-deep in beech leaves. The willow trees were hung with strips of grey silk. She leant against the gate half-way down the hill and watched a plough draw one straight furrow across a field. Feeling a little breathless and shivery, she set off again, walking briskly. It would not do for her mother to have been right.

Rain fell softly against her face and then less softly, then like bullets, so hard that she was forced to keep her eyelids lowered. There was nowhere to shelter except the porch of the pub and she ran towards it and stood there very still while the water dripped from her. It was only a shower and already the sky had cleared beyond the park, which was a good thing, for she felt uneasy standing where she was, even so quietly, even so unobserved.

‘How do you do,’ said Mrs Veal, opening the door. ‘The wretched bell scarcely ever works. Only the merest chance I happened to see you from the saloon bar window. Do come in. How wet you are!’

She had had time to slip on some court shoes and tidy her hair, whereas Margaret was wet and battered and, for the moment, speechless. Mentally she rejected one explanation after another and finally, wiping her shoes on the mat and looking up with a rueful, frank smile, began: ‘I couldn’t go on any longer without apologising, explaining about the other afternoon.’

‘The other afternoon?’ Mrs Veal echoed with feeble incredulity. She led the way into the room with all the niched cushions and china rabbits. The fire burnt nicely and Gilbert was lying down upstairs.

‘At the funeral,’ Margaret went on, and it was wonderful to hear the confidence gathering again in her voice. ‘I know I looked right through you, and I should not have waited so long with this apology, but I have had “flu”.’

‘Then you shouldn’t be out now,’ said Mrs Veal, thinking of herself.

‘Oh, I am not in the least infectious now,’ Margaret assured her, reading her like a book.

‘As if I was thinking of that!’ Mrs Veal made a gesture of dismissal.

‘The truth is,’ Margaret continued, ‘it was all too much for me. I had to leave the others and go and sit in the car. Perhaps it was the “flu” coming on, perhaps not. It has all been rather – much, you know. I thought I was tough, but these days … !’ She shrugged and smiled, making a screen of her pregnancy as she had scorned to do before. ‘However do I come to be sitting here?’ she thought, refusing a cigarette, assuring her hostess that a little smoke would not in the least upset her. Mrs Veal was triumphant, like a spider with a live fly in its web. ‘I just knew that if I spoke to anyone I should …’ Margaret was saying.

‘Is she wearing Tom’s shoes?’ Mrs Veal asked herself. ‘Of course I understand,’ she said aloud. ‘No one feels themselves at
a funeral. That poor kiddie. I’m sure I was beyond noticing anything myself.’ ‘She knows I
know
she was sheltering from the rain,’ she thought. Yet she respected, as Tom or Marion would not have done, Margaret’s dissembling, and even admired her inventiveness and presence of mind. Meanwhile, she had been offering a cup of tea and Margaret had accepted.

There was a creaking sound, a groan, as Gilbert turned over in bed upstairs. ‘I’m damned if I’ll feed his turkeys, even if he lies there till it’s dark,’ his wife was thinking. ‘How’s your brother?’ she asked Margaret casually. ‘We haven’t seen him since that terrible day.’

‘I don’t think you
will
see him again,’ Margaret said slowly, holding her cup and saucer high above her large stomach.

‘Is he going away?’

Margaret heard the danger in that voice, so silken, so tranquil.

‘Yes, I think he will go away. My mother and I have worried about him these last few months, but everything seems better lately. We should not like to talk about it to anyone outside the family, but if you understand you might help. He has to be helped, you know, not hindered.’

‘Do you suggest that I have hindered him?’ (The spider was in fact turning into the fly.)

‘Only inadvertently. I think you have sometimes made it possible for him to drink more than he should. He has weaknesses, you know …’

‘I’ll say he has weaknesses!’ Her hand shook, so she put her cigarette on the fire. ‘One of his nasty little weaknesses is helping himself to any money that happens to be lying about.’

With that sentence she threw up hope, she threw away her last illusions about Tom, all the self-deceptions with which she had helped herself through the last few weeks, her scheming, her dissembling, her hard, hard struggle against her years, and
was left empty, not frightened, only spiteful. ‘They say nothing can take away your memories,’ she thought. ‘But bitterness changes them all, makes something else of them. So that once you’ve felt bitter you’ve lost the lot.’

One side of Margaret’s neck reddened. She recalled Marion telling her to go down to the village to plead for her brother’s honour, mocking her. ‘I wish you would explain,’ she said wretchedly.

Mrs Veal felt tired. ‘It was nothing. He couldn’t help it.’

‘You see, it
will
be best if he will go away. Won’t you help about it?’

‘Nothing I say can make any difference. But he’ll go. You needn’t worry. There’s nothing to keep him here any longer.’ Margaret tried to fit a name into this piece of jig-saw. ‘Cassandra?’ she wondered aloud.

‘Not her. It isn’t in him to care about women any more.’

‘Then …’

‘Sophy,’ she said. ‘While she was alive he would never have left her.’

Margaret reddened again at the preposterous insinuation and then whitened because the suggestion was not preposterous at all: it was the missing piece of the puzzle. Everything fell into place and, linking up, had meaning. It was only odd that she had never thought of it before.

‘I think I
should
like a cigarette.’

Mrs Veal handed her the box, clicked open the lighter. She was a little frightened of what she had done, although her manner was smooth.

‘I would never have said anything before. For Sophy’s sake.’

‘Surely she has a sake now she is dead, just as when she was alive?’

‘Oh, no!’ said Mrs Veal, speaking the truth.

‘Do people know about this?’

‘No. It’s all right,’ she said, her temper whipped up. ‘You needn’t fret, I shall say nothing.’

‘Of course. I know that,’ said Margaret, who felt she knew nothing of the kind. ‘What made you tell me?’

‘I don’t know.’ Indeed, she could imagine herself lying awake, night after night, wondering just that.

Upstairs there were creaking sounds all over the floor. Gilbert was up and padding about in his stockinged feet. Mrs Veal wanted Margaret out of the house before he came down, and Margaret wanted to go.

The rain had stopped and the countryside grew still as if settling to a dry, dark evening. Margaret had time to say ‘thank you’ for her tea and be out of the house before Gilbert came down. ‘You won’t …?’ Mrs Veal began, as she was closing the door, but after all she closed the door, for now she had dropped the stone into the water and nothing could stop the ripples spreading if they would.

When Margaret entered the darkening house tea was over and her brother pacing up and down the library, wearing his overcoat.

In your usual forthright and open-handed way, you have passed on your “flu” to me,’ he complained and tried to cover his face with a large, torn handkerchief before he sneezed.

‘I expect it is just a cold, if you are sneezing like that already.’

The name you choose for it makes no odds. The trouble is that I haven’t this knack of yours for shaking things off. It will go on for weeks and lower me.’

‘Tom, when I go back to London, will you come with me?’

She perched on the corner of the table and waited.

He stopped his pacing and leant against a shelf of books.

‘With
you
?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good Lord, no! Are you demented?’

She began to explain, rather indistinctly, her head down. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said that to come with me would make an excuse for doing what you will have to do sooner or later.’

‘Explain,’ he said patiently, taking a book from a shelf and seeming to weigh it in his hand.

‘Soon Marion is going to know that Sophy was not his child.’

‘Are you going to enjoy telling him that?’

‘You have a poor idea of me,’ she suggested.

He merely waited.

‘I have teased Marion often enough in the past,’ she went on. ‘I hope I have never been wantonly cruel. When I look back now it seems that I must often have said things in my ignorance which seemed ironical to you and in the worst taste. But I would not wittingly do anything vicious.’

‘I always believed that even you would draw the line at some things. I am glad I had so much faith in you and that it has been justified. But if not you, who?’

‘Mrs Veal.’

‘She has a name to you at last, then? Before this she was always “that woman”. One moment you are cutting her dead in the churchyard, the next moment hatching cosy little plots together.’

‘I explained that to her.’

‘It would take some explaining, too, I should think. Even for you.’

‘Don’t keep saying “even you”. as if I were the dregs of society.’

‘So you think Marion is going to throw me out, or horsewhip me down the drive? But you have overlooked what is called a salient point … or perhaps it would be better to say the crux of the matter – both expressions delight me so, I don’t know which to choose …’

‘You are trying to make me impatient.’

‘The crux of the matter is …’ he replaced the book … ‘that Marion knows already.’

Margaret looked angry. ‘How could he? And you? How could you stay here? How long has he known?’

‘He knew – let me see—’ Tom considered … ‘I should say about nine months before Sophy was born.’

Margaret burst into tears at the shock. Perhaps it was a good thing that Tinty had an instinct for arriving at such times.

‘Tom! Margaret darling! I’ve been watching from the window for you. How can I have missed you? Tom, whatever you have been saying to upset your sister, it is really too thoughtless of you. You know how lowering “flu” is.’

‘I shall soon find out.’

‘This cold library, too! I lit a fire in the drawing-room. Let’s all settle down and have a nice cosy evening together. We so seldom do. Cheer up, darling. I will make you a cup of tea, and there is a lovely surprise for you on the mantelpiece in the drawing-room. A large fat letter from Ben.’

‘From large fat Ben,’ said Tom.

Tinty looked warningly at him, as she used to look when he was a child and showed off in company.

‘It came by the afternoon post, soon after you had gone out,’ she went on, coaxing Margaret towards the drawing-room.

As soon as they had gone, Tom went quickly towards Marion’s room, taking the stairs two at a time. Marion was sitting at the table writing a letter.

‘Margaret is crying,’ Tom said at once.

‘How awkward.’

‘She is crying because of a lie I told her.’ He went to the fire, putting himself at Marion’s back.

‘You had better go and untell it then, and perhaps she will stop.’

‘It doesn’t in the least matter if she stops or not. But I came to turn the lie into the truth.’

‘What is all this?’ But Marion went on writing, not concerned. He felt that nothing would concern him much again.