The Scold's Bridle (23 page)

She shrank away from him as if he'd struck her.

"Me then." He moved the stool back a yard to give her more room. "Why are you afraid of me, Ruth?"

Her hands fluttered in her lap. "I'm-you-" Her eyes widened in terror. "I'm not."

"You feel completely secure and at ease in my presence?"

"Yes," she whispered.

"You have an odd way of showing it." He reached for his coffee cup. "How old were you when your father died?"

"I was a baby."

"Since which time you've lived with your mother and your grandmother and, latterly, a bevy of women at boarding school." He took a sip of coffee. "Am I right that this Hughes character is the first boyfriend you've ever had?"

She nodded.

"So he's your only experience of men?"

She stared at her hands.

"Yes or no?" he demanded, the words whipping out impatiently.

"Yes," she whispered again.

"Then you obviously require lessons on the male of the species. There are only three things to remember. One: most men need to be told what to do by women. Even sex improves when women take the trouble to point the man in the right direction. Two: compared with women, most men are inadequate. They are less perceptive, have little or no intuition, are poorer judges of character and, therefore, more vulnerable to criticism. They find aggression immensely intimidating because they're not supposed to and, in short, are by far the more sensitive of the two sexes. Three: any man who does not conform to this pattern should be avoided. He will be a swaggering, uneducated brute whose intellect will be so small that the only way he can give himself a modicum of authority is by demeaning anyone who's foolish enough to put up with him, and, finally, he will lack the one thing that all decent men have in abundance, namely a deep and abiding admiration for women." He picked up her coffee cup and held it under her nose so that she had to take it. "Now I don't pretend to be a paragon, but I'm certainly not a brute, and between you, me and the gatepost, I am extremely fond of my irascible wife. I accept that what I did was open to interpretation, but you can take it from me that I went to Cedar House for one reason only and that was simply to paint your mother. The temptation to capture two generations of one family was irresistible." He eyed her speculatively. Almost as irresistible, he was thinking, as the temptation to capture the third generation. "And if my much-put-upon wife hadn't chosen that precise moment to expel me, well," he shrugged, "I wouldn't have had to freeze on. your mother's summer-house floor. Does all that set your mind at rest or are you going to go on quaking like a great jelly every time you see me?"

She stared at him with stricken eyes. She was beautiful after all, he thought, but it was a tragic beauty. Like her mother's. Like Mathilda's.

"I'm pregnant," she said finally, exhausted tears seeping on to her cheeks.

There was a moment of silence.

"I thought-I hoped-my mother-" She dashed at her eyes with a sodden tissue. "I don't know what-I ought to go-I shouldn't have told you."

Somewhere in the recesses of his heart, Jack blushed for himself. Was the self-pity of a child under intolerable stress so despicable that he had to savage it? He reached across and took her hand, drawing her off the chair and into his arms, holding her tight and stroking her hair as her father would have done had he lived. He let her weep for a long time before he spoke. "Your grandmother once said to me that mankind was doomed unless he learnt to communicate. She was a wise old lady. We talk a lot but we rarely communicate." He eased her off his chest and held her at arm's length so that he could look at her. "I'm glad you told me. I feel rather privileged that you felt you could. Most people would have waited until Sarah came home."

"I was going-"

He stopped her with a chuckle and released her back on to her chair. "Let me hang on to my illusions. Let me believe just once that someone thought I could be as easy to confide in as Sarah. It's not true, of course. There is no one in the world who can listen as well as my wife, or who can impart such sound advice. She'll look after you, I promise."

Ruth blew her nose. "She'll be angry with me."

"Do you think so?"

"You said she's irascible."

"She is. It's not so frightening. You just keep your head down till the saucepans stop flying."

She dabbed frantically at her eyes. "Saucepans? Does she-"

"No," he said firmly. "It was a figure of speech. Sarah's a nice person. She brings home wounded pigeons, splints their wings, and watches them die in slow and terrible agony with an expression of enormous sympathy on her face. It's one of the things they teach them at medical school."

She looked alarmed. "That's awful."

"It was a joke," he said ruefully. "Sarah is the most sensible doctor I know. She will help you reach a decision about what you want to do and then take it from there. She won't force you to have the baby, and she won't force you not to have it."

The tears welled again. "I don't want it." She clenched her hands in her lap. "Is that wrong, do you think?"

"No," he said honestly. "If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't want it either."

"But I made it. It was my fault."

"It takes two to make babies, Ruth, and I can't see your boyfriend showing much enthusiasm when it's fully-fledged and bawling its head off. It's your choice, not his. Sperm comes two-a-penny and most of it gets washed down the sink. Wombs and their foetuses come extremely expensive. Sarah's right when she says it's a life sentence."

"But isn't it alive? Won't I be murdering it?"

He was a man. How could he begin to understand the agony that women suffered because a biological accident has given them power over life and death? He could only be honest with her. "I don't know, but I'd say it's only alive at the moment because you're alive. It has no existence as an individual in its own right."

"But it could have-if I let it."

"Of course. But on that basis every egg that any woman produces and every sperm that any man produces has the potential for life, and no one accuses young men of being murderers every time they spill their seed on the ground behind the bike sheds. I think for each of us our own life has priority over the potential life that exists inside us. I don't for a moment pretend that it's an easy decision, or even a black and white one, but I do believe that you are more important at this moment than a life that can only come into being if you are prepared to pay for it, emotionally, physically, socially and financially. And you'll bear that cost alone, Ruth, because the likelihood of Hughes paying anything is virtually nil."

"He'll say it isn't his anyway."

Jack nodded. "Some men do, I'm afraid. It's so easy for them. It's not their body that's been caught."

She hid her face in her hands. "You don't understand." She wrapped her arms around her head.
To protect herself? To hide herself?
"It might be one of the others'. You see I had to-he made me-Oh, God-I wish-" She didn't go on, only curled herself into a tight ball and sobbed.

Jack felt completely helpless. Her anguish was so strong that it washed over him in swamping waves. He could think only in platitudes-
there's nothing so bad that it might not be worse ... it's always darkest before the dawn
-but what use were platitudes to a girl whose life lay in tatters before her? He put out an awkward hand and placed it on her head. It was an instinctive gesture of comfort, an echo of a priestly benediction, "tell me what happened," he said. "Perhaps it's not as bad as you think."

But it was. What she told him in tones of abject terror rocked the foundations of his own humanity. So shocked was he that he felt physically sick.

Sarah found him in the garden when she came home at three thirty after helping to deliver Polly Graham of a healthy baby daughter. He was forking industriously round some roses and scattering handfuls of fertilizer about the roots. "It's almost December," she said. "Everything's dormant. You're wasting your time."

"I know." He looked up and she thought she saw traces of tears in his eyes. "I just needed to do something active."

"Where's Ruth?"

"Asleep. She had a headache so I gave her some codeine and packed her off to bed." He brushed the hair from his forehead with the back of a muddy hand, "Have you finished for the day?"

She nodded. "What's happened?"

He leant on the fork and stared across the fields. The slowly fading light gave a misty quality to a landscape in which cows grazed and trees, shorn of their leaves, fingered the sky with dark filigree lacework. "That's the England men and women die for," he said gruffly.

She followed his gaze with a small frown creasing her forehead.

Tears glistened on his lashes. "Do you know that poem by Rupert Brooke? "The Soldier.' The one that goes:

" 'If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware...' "

He fell silent. When he spoke again, his voice shook. "It's beautiful, isn't it, Sarah? England
is
beautiful."

She wiped the tears from his face. "You're crying," she said, her heart aching for him. "I've never seen you cry before. What's happened, Jack?"

He didn't seem to hear her. "Rupert Brooke died in 1915. A sacrifice of war. He was only twenty-eight, younger than you and me, and he gave his life with all the other millions, whatever country they came from, for the sake of other people's children. And do you know what breaks my heart?" His dark gaze slid away from her, looking into a private hell that only he could see. "That a man who could write one of the most perfect pieces of poetry about his homeland that has ever been written should have sacrificed himself for the filth that England spawns today."

"No one's all bad, Jack, and no one's all good. We're just human. The poor kid only wanted to be loved."

He wiped a weary hand around his jaw. "I'm not talking about Ruth, Sarah. I'm talking about the men who attacked her. I'm talking about the animal who taught her obedience by shutting her in a van with a group of low-grade scum who raped her one after the other for five hours to break her spirit." He stared over the fields again. "Apparently she objected when Hughes told her to start stealing from Mathilda, said she didn't want to do it. So he locked her in the van with his mates who gave her a graphic demonstration of what was going to happen every time she refused. I've had to give my word that I'm not going to repeat this to anyone except you. She is absolutely terrified they're going to find her and do it again, and when I said we should report it to the police I thought she was going to die on me. Hughes told her that if she was ever caught, all she had to do was say the stealing was her idea. As long as she does that and doesn't mention the rape, he'll leave her alone in the future." His lips thinned. "But if she talks, he'll send his goons after her to punish her, and he doesn't care how long he has to wait to do it. Police protection won't save her, marriage won't save her. He'll wait for years if he has to, but for every year her punishment is delayed, he'll add another hour to the final ordeal. She'd have to be a quite extraordinary person to talk to the police with a threat like that hanging over her."

Sarah was too shocked to respond. "No wonder she was frightened to sleep downstairs," she said at last.

"She's hardly slept at all for weeks, as far as I can gather. The only way I could get her to take the codeine was to promise again and again that I wouldn't leave the house. She's paranoid about being caught unawares and she's paranoid about the police asking any more questions."

"But the Sergeant knows there's something," Sarah warned him. "He phoned this morning and asked me to try and find out what it was. His word for it was coercion. Hughes must be using coercion, he said, but we can't do much unless we know what sort of coercion it is. Ruth's not the only one it's happened to. They know of at least three others and they think it's only the tip of the iceberg. None of them talk."

"She's pregnant," said Jack flatly. "I said you'd know what to do. JE-SUS!" He threw the fork like a lance into the middle of the lawn, his bellow of rage roaring into the air. "I-COULD-KILL-THE-FUCKING-BASTARD!"

Sarah put a hand on his arm to calm him. "How many weeks is she?"

"I don't know," he said, rubbing his eyes. "I didn't ask. I wish to God you'd been here. I did my best but I was so damn useless. She needed a woman to talk to, not a clumsy sod who started out by telling her what nice people men are. I gave her a lecture, for Christ's sake, on male decency."

She hushed him as his voice started to rise again. "She wouldn't have talked to you if she hadn't felt comfortable with you. How long's she been asleep?"

He looked at his watch. "A couple of hours."

"Okay, we'll leave her a little bit longer, then I'll go and see her." She linked her arm with his. "I don't suppose you've eaten."

"No."

She drew him towards the house. "Come on then. Things always look worse on an empty stomach."

"What are we going to do, Sarah?"

"Whatever's best for Ruth."

"And to hell with all the other wretched girls who get broken in the future?"

"We can only take one step at a time, Jack." She looked desperately worried.