Possession (24 page)

They glared at each other.

“I’m sorry—”

“I’m sorry—”

“I thought you were overbalancing—”

“I didn’t know anyone was there.”

“I shocked you.”

“I embarrassed you—”

“It doesn’t matter—”

“It doesn’t matter—”

“I followed your footsteps.”

“I came to look at the winter garden.”

“Lady Bailey was worried you might have had an accident.”

“The snow wasn’t that deep.”

“It’s still snowing.”

“Shall we go in?”

“I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Are there fish?”

“All you can see is imperfections and reflections.”

The work time that followed was a taciturn time. They bent their heads diligently—what they read will be discovered later—and looked up at each other almost sullenly. Snow fell. And fell. The white lawn rose to meet the library window. Lady Bailey came with coffee, silently rolling, into a room still with cold and full of a kind of grey clarity.

Lunch was sausages and mashed potatoes and buttery peppery mashed turnips. It was eaten round the blazing log-fire, on knees, backs to the slatey white-flecked window. Sir George said, “Hadn’t you better be getting back to Lincoln, Miss B.? You don’t have snow-chains, I suppose. The English don’t. Anyone’d think the English’d never seen snow, the way they go on when it comes down.”

“I think Dr Bailey should stay here, George,” said his wife. “I don’t think it’s safe for her to go even
trying
to thread her way through the wolds, in this. We can make her bed up in Mildred’s old nursery. I can lend her some things. I think we should get the bed made up and get some hot water bottles in it now. Don’t you think so, Dr Bailey?”

Maud said she couldn’t and Lady Bailey said she must, and Maud said she shouldn’t have set out and Lady Bailey said nonsense, and Maud said it was an imposition and Sir George said that whatever the rights and wrongs of it, Joanie was right and he would go up and see to Mildred’s bed. Roland said he would help, and Maud said by no means, and Sir George and Maud went away upstairs to find sheets, whilst Lady Bailey filled a kettle. She had taken to Roland, whom she addressed as Roland, whilst she still addressed Maud as Dr Bailey. She looked up at him on the way across the kitchen, the brown coins on her face intensified by the fire.

“I hope that pleases you. I hope you’ll be pleased to have her here. I hope you haven’t had some tiff, or something.”

“Tiff?”

“You and your young woman. Girl friend. Whatever.”

“Oh no. That is, no tiff, and she isn’t—”

“Isn’t?”

“My—girl friend. I hardly know her. It was—is—purely professional. Because of Ash and LaMotte. I’ve got a girl friend in London. Her name’s Val.”

Lady Bailey showed no interest in Val.

“She’s a beautiful girl, Dr Bailey. Stand-offish or shy, maybe both. What my mother used to call a chilly mortal. She was a Yorkshirewoman, my mother. Not County. Not a lady.”

Roland smiled at her.

“I used to share a governess with some cousins of George’s. To be company for them. I used to exercise their ponies, whilst they were away at school. Rosemary and Marigold Bailey. Not unlike your Maud. That’s how I met George, who decided to marry me. George gets what he’s set his mind on, as you see. That’s how I took to hunting too. And ended up under a horse under a hedge when I was thirty-five and now as you see.”

“I see. Romantic. And terrible. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t do too badly. George is a miracle. Hand me those bottles. Thank you.”

She filled them with a steady hand. Everything was designed for her ease: the kettle, the kettle-rest, the place to park and steady the chair.

“I want you both to be comfortable. George is so ashamed of the way we live—skimping and saving—the house and grounds
eat
money, just preventing deterioration and decay. He doesn’t like people to come and see how things are. But I do love having someone to talk to. I like to see you working away in there. I hope it’s proving useful. You don’t say much about it. I hope you aren’t
frozen
in that great draughty room.…”

“A little bit. But I love it, it’s a lovely room.… But it would be worth it if it was twice as cold. It doesn’t seem possible to say anything about the work yet. Later. I shall never forget reading these letters in that lovely room.…”

Maud’s bedroom—Mildred’s old nursery—was at the opposite end of the long corridor that housed Roland’s little guest bedroom and a majestic Gothic bathroom. No one explained who Mildred was or had been; her nursery had a beautifully carved stone fireplace, and deeply recessed windows in the same style. There was a high wooden bed with a rather bulky mattress of horsehair and ticking: Roland, coming in with his arms full of hot water bottles, was reminded as once before of the Real Princess and the pea. Sir George appeared with one of those circular copper dishes that contain a fat stamen of an electric fire, which he directed at the bed. Locked cupboards revealed blankets and a heap of 1930s children’s dishes and toys, oilskin mats with Old King Cole on them, a nightlight with a butterfly, a heavy dish with an image of the Tower of London and a faded beefeater. Another cupboard revealed a library of Charlotte M. Yonge and Angela Brazil. Sir George, embarrassed, reappeared with a sugar-pink winceyette nightdress and a rather splendid peacock-blue kimono embroidered with a Chinese dragon and a flock of butterflies in silver and gold.

“My wife hopes you’ll find these comfortable. Also I have a new toothbrush.”

“You are very kind. I feel so foolish,” said Maud.

“Another time might have been better with hindsight,” said Sir George. He called them, with pleasure, to the window.

“Look at it, though. Look at the trees, and the weight of it on the wold.”

It was falling with great steadiness, through a still atmosphere; it was silent and swallowing; distinctions of ledges and contours were vanishing on the hills, and the trees were heavy with capes and blankets glittering softly, curved and simple. Everything had closed in on the house in the hollow, which seemed to be filling. Urns on the lawn were white-crowned and slowly sinking, or so it seemed, in the deepening layers.

“You won’t get out tomorrow, either,” he said. “Not without a snow plough, which the Council may get round to sending if it lets up enough to make it worth it. Hope I’ve got enough dog food to go on with.”

In the afternoon they read steadily and with more surprise. They dined with the Baileys by the kitchen fire on pieces of frozen cod and chips and a rather good jam rolypoly pudding. They had agreed without real discussion to fend off questions about the letters for the time being. “Well, are they worth anything, or nothing much in your view?” Sir George asked. Roland said he knew nothing about the value, but the letters had some interest certainly. Lady Bailey changed the subject to hunting, which she discussed with Maud and her husband, leaving Roland to an inner ear full of verbal ghosts and the rattle of his spoon.

They went upstairs early, leaving their hosts to their ground-floor domain, now patchily warm, unlike the great staircase and the long corridor where they were to sleep. Cold air seemed to pour down the stone steps like silky snow. The corridor was tiled, in peacock and bronze, depicting formal lilies and pomegranates now thickly softened with pale dust. Over these had been laid long, wrinkling, canvas-like carpets—“drugget?” said Roland’s word-obsessed mind, which had met this word in the poems of R. H. Ash where someone—an escaping priest—had “tiptoed on drugget and scuttled on stone” before being surprised by the lady of the house. These runners were pale and yellowish; here and there, where a recent foot had slipped, they had wiped away the dust-veil from the gleam of the tiles.

At the top of the staircase Maud turned decisively to him and inclined her head with formality.

“Well, good night, then,” she said. Her fine mouth was set. Roland had vaguely supposed that they might, or should, discuss progress now they were together, compare notes and discoveries. It was almost an academic duty, though he was, in fact, tired, by emotion and the cold. Maud’s arms were full of files, clasped against her like a breastplate. There was an automatic wariness in her look that he found offensive. He said, “Good night, then,” and turned
away towards his own end of the corridor. He heard her behind him tap away into the dark. The corridor was badly lit; there were what he assumed to be inoperative gas-mantels and two miserable 60-watt lights with saloon-bar coolie metal covers. It was then that he realised that he would have been glad to have discussed the bathroom with her. He assumed it would be polite to wait for her to go first. It was so cold in the corridor that he intensely disliked going up and down it—or standing about in it—in his pyjamas. He decided to give her a good three-quarters of an hour—plenty of time for any female ablutions that could take place in near-ice. In the interim he would read Randolph Henry Ash. He would read, not his notes on the letters, but the battle of Thor and the Frost Giants in
Ragnarök
. His room was bitterly cold. He made himself a nest of old eiderdowns and counterpanes, all covered with blue splashy roses, and sat down to wait.