R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield (77 page)

'You already have,' she said, and then, 'Go back to sleep now. We'll get around to making plans in the morning. We're not pushed for time. It isn't until the end of summer term.'

The storm built up, prowling round the buildings like a sullen enemy looking for a chink in the defences, but it didn't bother her. She felt reassured somehow, and more hopeful of the immediate future than she had been since the Bradshawe incident.

3

The feeling grew on her isolating her from the place as a whole and even, to an extent, from him, so that she persuaded herself she was beginning to get things in proportion at last. It would be fun to have a child, especially his child, and the prospect released her into a more tranquil world, an intensively private one where she was content with her role as a bystander, a touchline supporter of Bamfylde's day-to-day being.

Her health remained good and the slight embarrassment she experienced moving among so many males with a swelling figure was a small price to pay for the mounting confidence she felt in herself. The winter tailed off, with its frosts and gales, and spring came, a dry, windy, sunny spell, lasting through April and May. But then, like a vicious kick from behind, her new-found peace was shattered in an hour and she was lost again, this time out of sight and sound of a guide.

It struck without even a token warning, a sudden spell of dizziness, and a single spasm of pain, as she was climbing the stairs to the first landing to see how the decorators were getting on with the little room overlooking the quad that had been selected as a nursery. She caught the iron rail of the banister and stood there, waiting for the spell to pass before moving up the last few stairs into the bedroom and finally she reached it with a sense of panic mounting in her as she hauled herself over the threshold and fell sideways across the bed.

The second spasm made her cry out and old Rigby heard her from the stairwell, calling up anxiously, 'Is that you, ma'am…?' and when she was unable to answer she had a terrible certainty that she would die here alone before anyone was aware of what was happening. Mercifully he called again, 'Ma'am? Did you call?' and she knew then that Rigby was her sole chance of summoning help and shouted, 'Rigby! Up here…!' and the old chap came at a trot, peering round the edge of the bedroom door and blinking at the sight of her sprawled sideways across the bed.

'The doctor… quickly… then the head, but phone first!'

He had his wits about him, senile as he appeared to most people, and was gone in a flash as the waves of pain crashed down on her submerging everything save a sense of maddening frustration that she was going to lose the baby within the hour. Then, unaccountably, the room seemed half-full of people, among them Davy and the matron, and her sense of time and place
evaporated so that she was adrift on an ocean of pain and wretchedness, with only occasional glimpses of land in the form of Davy's anxious face and the fumbling hands of the matron as they wrestled with her clothes and tried to ease her into bed.

Willoughby must have arrived soon afterwards but there was little he could do but ease the pain to some extent and then, quite suddenly, she was aware that some hours must have passed for the sun patterns on the west-facing wall had lengthened telling her that it was evening. She heard Willoughby say, 'Take it easy, now… it's all over,' and she wanted to ask if there was any chance that a seven-months-old child could live but could not frame the question for her mind was still confused and her strength utterly spent.

It was nearly twelve hours later that she came to grips with it, opening her eyes to find the room empty save for the matron, who was standing by the tall window, her back to the bed, looking out on dawn creeping over the eastern edge of the moor. She looked cool and very clinical in her uniform, so cool that Chris found herself hating the woman's detachment. She said, 'It was stillborn, wasn't it?' and the woman gave a slight start and turned back to the bed, saying, 'I'm afraid so, Mrs Powlett-Jones. A boy. I
am
sorry…' but stopped, looking troubled and embarrassed.

'Where's my husband?'

'He's asleep, I think. He was here until an hour or so ago. Doctor made him go and take a nap. Shall I fetch him?'

'No.'

She didn't want him fetched and she didn't want his sympathy or anyone else's sympathy. Anything anyone said to her now would sound banal and would stoke the rage and bitterness that glowed in her like a furnace.

'Could you eat something? Some soup, perhaps?'

'Later. What time is it?'

'Getting on for six. At least let me get you some tea.'

'Very well.'

She did not want the tea but she did want to get rid of the woman, if only for a few minutes. The sense of doom and failure enfolded her like a huge, soggy blanket and she turned her face from the wan light, lying still until matron came rustling in with the tea.

'Did Dr Willoughby give any reason?'

'He said it might be one of many… maybe a fall, or some heavy exertion.'

She wanted to hurl the teapot at the woman's head. She had had no fall,
had done nothing out of the ordinary beyond climbing a few extra stairs. But it was her second dead child and she remembered she had told Willoughby of the first.

Davy came in, saying little but sitting by the bed and holding her hand. What was there to say, anyway? Then Willoughby tried the medical guff 'Chance in a thousand… no reason at all why she couldn't bear a live child… happened sometimes quite inexplicably touched off by an incident too insignificant to be recalled…' She wished them all to the devil, along with the scores of boys who erupted in the quad at stipulated intervals during the day, their assemblies and dispersals regulated by that damned bell.

A day or so later Davy tried a new tack. They would go away on a long Continental tour the day term ended. Down the Rhine, maybe, to Switzerland and then Italy if she fancied. Her responses were mechanical and he did not press her, sensing that the depression was too deep to be charmed away by reassurances and promised treats.

In another day or two she was allowed up but had no wish to go downstairs and still took her meals in the bedroom. They brought her books but she could never summon enough concentration to get beyond the first paragraph or two. All day the sun shone strongly through the southern window and in the evening, when Davy came up to take supper with her, the room was flooded with the pink reflection of sunset on the rim of the moor. On the third day she had been out of bed, he said suddenly, 'You've got to snap out of it, Chris. Not for my sake but your own. God knows, I realise how keen you were to have that child and why, but this isn't
you
. You're a fighter and you've got to come to terms with it sooner or later. Willoughby swears there's absolutely no reason at all why you shouldn't have a child and I never once heard him use soft talk on a patient.'

'How long did it take you to “snap out of it"?'

'Me? Well, it's not the same for a man… I realise that.'

'I'm not talking about losing the baby. I'm talking about the time you lost Beth.'

She caught him off guard and he looked away. 'A hell of a long time. But this place helped.'

'It can't help me, Davy.'

'It can if you'd let it.'

She changed the subject. She could never make him understand her affections were centred wholly upon him, owing nothing to this great pile of brick
and stone and timber that had succeeded, God alone knew how, in steering him through a succession of crises.

'Where's Grace? Why hasn't she been to see me?'

'She's still in France, brushing up for the exams.'

She remembered then. Grace had gone off to spend a month with a pen-friend in Caen, with the object of improving her chances of getting a distinction in French, her best subject. She was glad the kid was out of it, glad too that she did not have to parry someone else's sympathy. The bell went again and he said, 'That'll be the end of prep. There's a prefects' meeting in the Sixth and I promised I'd look in. I'll only be an hour. Will you go to bed now or would you like matron up for company?'

'No. Do what you have to, Davy. I'll be all right.'

He went out with a troubled face and she heard him descending to the hall and the quad door opening and closing. The harsh clang of the heavy door decided her, symbolising what Bamfylde had become, a prison where every inmate, save only her, had become acclimatised to its routines and strictures. She knew then what she must do and went about her preparations with feverish haste, cramming a change of clothes into a night bag, checking the money in her handbag and detaching her car key from the ring on the mantelshelf. She opened the door and slipped on to the landing, listening for sounds from below. There were none. All the boys had gone into Big Hall for supper and the forecourt, overlooked by the landing window, was empty in the fading light of the sun's last rays. She hesitated a moment longer, wondering whether to leave a note but decided against it. A note would mean immediate pursuit and in any case what was there to explain that he hadn't already guessed. Prisoners didn't leave notes when they went over the wall to look for better luck on the outside.

She went down the stairs holding firmly to the iron rail, out of the front door and then round by the shrubbery path that led to the ramshackle car- and cycle-shelter. Nobody heard her go, for the incline of the west drive was enough to coast down to the road without starting the engine. A minute later and she was turning right at Stone Cross and speeding between the huge clumps of rhododendrons in the direction of Bamfylde Halt.

4

It was by the merest chance Molyneux saw her. He was driving back from the village, after his customary two pints at the Fleur de Lys, when he saw the glint of the car as it coasted out of the drive and disappeared round the curve of the bank between the two exits. He recognised the beat of the engine and paid no particular attention to the incident until, an hour or so later, he happened to encounter David crossing the quad and say, 'Glad to see the Missis is perking up, P.J.,' a remark sufficiently puzzling for David to stop short and ask if he had been in to visit her while he was at the prefects' meeting. Molyneux said he hadn't but assumed, after seeing her drive off in the direction of Stone Cross, that she was up and about again.

'You
saw
her drive off?
Tonight?
Are you absolutely sure, Molyneux?'

'Well, it was her little roadster. About an hour ago. Caught a glimpse of it just as I was turning in the west drive.'

'It couldn't have been her. She hasn't come downstairs yet. Somebody must be joy-riding.'

'One of the boys?'

'Who else? No one on the staff would have borrowed the car without asking. I'd better check,' and before Molyneux could reply he hurried off to the rear to the car-shelter behind the kitchen to confirm the fact that the car was gone.

Even then he had no inkling that it was Chris who had driven it off but it was just possible someone might have required transport in a hurry and, unable to locate him, had gone up to the bedroom to ask for the keys. He went into the head's house at a run and, hurrying upstairs, experienced an unpleasant qualm when he found the room empty and two of the drawers wide open. The nightdress and dressing gown she had been wearing were on the turned-back bed and he called, 'Chris? Are you there, Chris?' but then he noticed her handbag was missing from the dressing table and the near-certainty that she had gone hit him like a blow between the eyes.

He ran downstairs to the kitchen where old Rigby was having one of his stoveside naps.

'Did you see my wife go out, Rigby?'

The old fellow rubbed his eyes. 'Out? No, sir. She's upstairs, isn't she?'

'No, she isn't. Has anyone been in while I've been with the prefects?'

'No, sir. No one.'

Driven by instinct he ran back through the arch to the car-shelter and stood beside Molyneux's still-warm machine, trying to check the panic rising in him. Women who had recently given birth sometimes behaved very oddly and Chris had been frighteningly depressed since the loss of the baby. He felt the night breeze strike him cold under his arms and shivered. Where the hell could she have gone and why? He took several deep breaths and forced his mind to think logically. Stone Cross direction Molyneux had said, and about an hour since, for he had only been absent about ninety minutes. Stone Cross probably meant the road to the Halt but she couldn't take a train anywhere at this hour and, in any case, she had the car. A tiny gleam of hope pricked him. There was less than half a gallon in the tank. He knew that because he had used the car earlier in the day to get her tablets from Doc Willoughby's dispensary. The car averaged, on these gradients, no more than thirty-two miles to the gallon, usually less, and she couldn't get petrol until morning and even then no nearer than Cooper's ramshackle garage in Steepcote, ten miles or so on the road to Dulverton; providing she was heading for Dulverton and those open drawers indicated she had taken some luggage. Perhaps this in itself was reassuring. At least it indicated that she hadn't rushed off into the night in response to some half-crazed impulse.

He dashed back to Rigby, his profound agitation causing him to catch the old chap by the lapel of his old-fashioned tail-coat, a relic of pre-Herries butling. 'Listen, Rigby. Find Mr Howarth. Tell him I've got to dash over to Dulverton and I'll phone him inside two hours. Tell him to wait up in my study and that it's very urgent.' And then, making a snap decision to half-confide in the old servant, 'Mrs Powlett-Jones seems to have overestimated her own strength. She took it into her head to go for a drive and I'm going after her. In the Dulverton direction. If I don't ring back after midnight ask Mr Howarth to contact the doctor, do you understand?'

'Well… yes, sir. Certainly, sir.'

The man looked more bemused than he had at the time of Alcock's fatal heart attack but there was no time to waste in further speculation. He ran back through the arch and wheeled out Molyneux's heavy machine. It started at the first kick and in less than a minute he was roaring down the drive and heading for Bamfylde Halt.