The Unseen (37 page)

‘Albert!’ he calls, as he strides along the hallway.
In he crashes
, Hester thinks,
like a tidal wave, like a blowing wind
. His head and
shoulders appear around the doorway, grass-stained fingers leaving smears on the cream paint of the panelling. ‘Hester! You’re very quiet in here.’ He smiles warmly.

‘Should a person not sit quietly in their own home?’ she replies, unable to meet his eye. Robin pauses, seems to think, to slow down.

‘Is everything all right? Are you upset?’ He comes into the room and stands with his hands clasped behind his back, arranging himself more formally all of a sudden.

‘I’m not upset,’ she says, but to her chagrin her voice breaks as she says it. Wanting to hide it from Robin Durrant only seems to make the weeping harder to hold.

‘Hester! You poor creature … tell me what the matter is,’ Robin commands. He puts out his hands and moves towards her, as if to offer an embrace, but Hester rises hastily from her chair.

‘Don’t touch me!’ she cries. ‘It’s your doing!’ Her pulse races, makes her fingers shake; but the words are out now, and she cannot take them back.

‘Then you must immediately tell me how I have troubled you, so that I can apologise and be sure never to do so again,’ Robin replies carefully. His words are smooth and unhurried. As seamless as the rest of him.

‘My husband … saw our maid Cat at a tavern last night. It seems she has been keeping late-night trysts with a sweetheart, and now he says she is to go and he will not hear another word on the matter. Such notions of purity he has now, you see.’ She shoots the theosophist an angry glance. ‘Such notions that he has half lost his … sense of proportion, and will brook no argument.’ As Hester speaks she looks up, just briefly, and is shocked by Robin’s expression. It veers here and there between shock and anger and consternation for some seconds before he manages to wrestle it back into his control. Hester catches her breath. ‘Did you know something of this before, Mr Durrant?’

‘I … no, of course not,’ he says, but without conviction. Hester
stares at him, her eyes widening. ‘That is, I had seen her, once or twice. Going off in the evening. Just for walks, I assumed.’

‘I see. And you did not think to mention this to Albert or myself?’

‘My apologies, Mrs Canning. I had thought no harm could come of it,’ Robin replies smoothly, and all expression in face and voice is gone, masked behind a careful neutrality.

‘Well, harm has come of it, Mr Durrant. I wonder if that was all you knew about it. I wonder if you might not have some inkling as to the identity of her gentleman friend?’ Hester says quietly, her voice shaking with nerves. Robin Durrant watches her, a new expression forming on his face. One of slight surprise and amusement. One of new understanding. Hester looks away, down at her hands. His eyes are too familiar, suddenly; they seem to laugh at her.

‘Hester, how has your opinion of me changed so much of late that you no longer trust me to speak the truth?’ he asks; a touch of soft menace in the words.

Hester fidgets, twisting her handkerchief tightly one way, then the other. ‘I have seen the two of you … speaking together. In the evenings,’ she stammers.

‘What of it? You don’t mean that
I
am her mystery man, surely? A few polite words exchanged between guest and maid, over a cigarette, and you have construed an affair from this?’

‘That’s not what I saw. It was not … polite,’ Hester whispers. Robin Durrant crosses the room towards her with a slow, deliberate step, and she fights the urge to back away.

‘You must have been mistaken, I assure you. There is nothing whatsoever between me and your maid,’ he says, standing so close to her that she can feel the warmth of his body, the moist touch of his breath as he speaks. She turns her face away, heart racing in her chest, and endures the silence for a long moment, until she thinks she might scream. ‘Still, if you’d like me to speak to your husband on behalf of the girl, I would be happy to do so. Perhaps I can
persuade him to let her stay on, if that is what you wish?’ Robin murmurs, so close now that she can hear his every breath as it rushes gently in, between his parted lips, over teeth and tongue. Her eyes well again, tears splashing messily onto her cheeks. Without hesitation, the theosophist puts out his fingers and brushes them away. Hester is rooted to the spot, too shocked to move.

‘I don’t understand what power you have over my husband,’ she says, her voice so constricted she hardly knows it.

‘Don’t you? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Unbesmirched as you are.
Virgo intacta
, a lily whiter than white; so kind and clean and innocent,’ he says, his mouth twisting to one side in cruel amusement. Hester’s jaw falls open in shock.

‘How do you … ?’ she whispers, inadvertently.

‘Albert told me. One day whilst extolling his own purity to me. He could hardly boast of his own virginity, and not by default proclaim you to be in the same state, could he?’ Robin says, with a lupine grin.

Hester shuts her eyes, her face burning. In the darkness behind her eyelids the room seems to spin, and her thoughts to match it.

‘I think you should leave this house. Leave and not return!’ she says.

‘Hester, Hester. You and I need not trouble one another,’ Robin says calmly. ‘We
must not
trouble one another,’ he adds, making the statement a command, a warning. The hand that gathered her tears lingers, moving softly over the skin of her cheek, along her jaw and from chin to neck, neck to collarbone, until the air freezes in her lungs and she can neither protest nor move nor turn away. ‘Dear Hetty. I’ll speak to Albert. I’ll convince him. You can keep your maid – a gift from me to you, to make up for whatever I have done to turn you against me,’ he says, his eyes alight and savage. His hand stays a second longer on her skin, his fingers warm, wet from her own salty tears. They seem to burn her, and his light touch is like a yoke of iron, fixing her to the spot. Then he is gone, across the hallway to knock softly on the study door. Released,
Hester heaves in great gulps of dizzying air and flees the room with blind, faltering steps.

Mrs Bell opens each hamper of laundry as it comes back from Mrs Lynchcombe, lifts out each item and checks it off the list, her eyes screwed up with the effort of reading her own cramped handwriting.

‘That should be six pillow slips – did I count six?’ she mutters; this and similar comments. Cat has seen this process many times, and knows she may as well ignore the remarks. Mrs Bell, despite a close and apparently friendly acquaintance with the laundress, seems convinced that the woman will one day conspire to rob the household of a napkin or a nightdress, and cannot be satisfied without checking the hampers herself each time. She blows out her cheeks, wipes her sweaty brow, puts her hands on the vast slabs of her hips and studies a lace-collared blouse, pressed and neatly folded in front of her. Is this the one that was sent away? Or has it been switched with one of lower quality?

‘Your own suspicions must tire you out,’ Cat observes.

‘What’s that? Don’t mumble behind my back, if you please,’ Mrs Bell grumbles.

‘I said you should be commended, for such thoroughness.’ She smiles briefly. Mrs Bell laughs a short bark of a laugh.

‘Ha! You never said that in a month of Sundays!’ She goes back to her examination of the hampers. Cat shrugs. She is breaking up the salt, which comes from the grocer in a large, hard block. She uses a round pick with a smooth wooden handle, so smooth that the effort of keeping her grip on it cramps her hand. The muscles in her forearm burn. She stabs repeatedly at the block, at just the right angle that small, usable chunks are broken off; not big pieces that must be broken again, not small gritty pieces that she will struggle to collect from the worktop. The right-sized pieces are packed into earthenware jars and sealed until they are needed. They will be ground by hand, as the need arises, to fill the silver cruet. There is
some satisfaction in the repeated stabbing, the controlled violence of the job. Precise work is needed; blows of the correct weight and speed, over and over again. Cat’s mind clears as she does it; some of the odd, cold rage that has filled her all morning starts to dissipate. An odd rage indeed, hard and numbing. She hardly knows who it is directed at. The vicar, for seeing her? The theosophist, for sending him out on crusade? Hester, for forbidding her to go out again? George, for insisting that she wed him? Or just because her secret has been found out. Because she has no secret any more: the one thing that belonged to her alone, now taken. She stabs, she breaks the block, her muscles burn, and she grows calmer. Cat kicks off her shoes, lets the cool of the flagstones press into her aching feet.

‘I may be gone from here, soon. Tonight, even,’ she says at length, her tone betraying no dismay at the prospect.

‘What are you talking about?’ Sophie Bell asks, finishing her inspection and slumping into a chair. With a sweep of her arm, she pushes away a pile of peas to be podded, so that she can spread her bosom, her mottled arms, across the table top.

‘I think I am dismissed. The vicar’s wife is speaking to him on my behalf, but I doubt she’ll convince him,’ says Cat. The housekeeper gapes.

‘But … what for, for Christ’s sake? What ’ave you done, you minx?’

‘I … go out in the night. I don’t sleep. I go out into Thatcham, and places. And now he has found me out in this. So I am dismissed.’ She shrugs, as if the future were not suddenly an amorphous thing, shapeless and menacing and empty. No reference for a dismissed servant. No further positions for her, with this last chance spent.

‘Cat Morley … Cat Morley …’ Mrs Bell says her name as if it is a very curse to be uttered in disbelief, in extremis. Her sliver eyes are wider than ever before. ‘How could you be so stupid? And you so bright?’ she asks, and this is so far from what Cat expected, so far from the scorn and the derision, that at first she can’t think how to reply.

‘I … I love a man,’ she says at last, pausing with the pick buried deep in the salt, stuck fast there. She jabbed it too hard, drove it too deep. Mrs Bell shakes her head.

‘A man! What good is a man? You had everything here!’ Cat wrestles mutely with the pick. Flies circle the stuffy room, and Mrs Bell seems, for once, to be robbed of words.

‘What everything? Truly? What have I here but every day the same, like I am not a person at all but a machine? And to be told that this is my lot, and I should be happy for it while others have it that they can lie around and … and … press flowers all the livelong day!’ she cries, her voice shaking treacherously.

‘What everything? A bed! In a clean, warm house … three meals a day and an income – employers that don’t beat you, but tolerate your lip when it gets away from you! That’s what everything!’ Mrs Bell says. ‘Is that not enough for you, when countless thousands would wish to be so fortunate?’

‘No,’ Cat tells her solemnly. ‘It is not enough. I can’t abide it. I can’t.’ She waits, and watches; but the housekeeper merely stares ahead, then down at her chapped and ruined hands, and does not speak. Cat takes a slow breath. ‘If I am gone by tonight, I wanted to say I’m sorry about your boy. About you losing him. And I’m sorry you lost your husband too. I’m sorry if I … scorned you, for being a good servant. You are everything you should be. I am the one with no place in any of it, as you’ve been telling me from the start,’ she says, in a measured tone.

‘Don’t give me contrition, girl. It don’t suit you,’ Sophie Bell replies, but the whip-crack tone of her voice has gone slack, has lost all its sting, and wanders instead like her gaze around the room; unravelling like a loose thread from a hem.

Robin emerges just a quarter of an hour later. Hester is in her room, but she hears the study door open and then close with a soft, resolute thump. There had been voices, low and muffled, the entire time the theosophist was in with her husband. Mostly Robin’s,
as far as she could tell, with a few loaded pauses; a few hesitant, barely audible words in Albert’s voice. Even through the floor she could sense his uncertainty. And yet she knows, as she hears the theosophist’s footsteps go first into the parlour, and then along the hall to the bottom of the stairs, that he will have got his way. For whatever is Robin’s way is now Albert’s way as well. She sits at her dressing table with her powder puff in her fingertips, poised by her cheek. She had been about to repair the damage her tears had done, but had caught her own eye in the mirror, and halted. Her eyes are puffy, and below them her cheeks seem more sunken and drawn than ever before. Her hair is flat and lifeless, and in the bleak light from the window it has no lustre at all. She is a dull creature indeed, she thinks. No wonder Albert should prefer his fairies, his beautiful theosophist. The powder puff trembles a little, sending a scatter of fine, pale dust down onto the mahogany table top.

Robin’s footsteps on the stairs make her heart jolt. His walk is so instantly recognisable – he makes no effort to be subtle, to tread quietly. He bangs about like a thoughtless child … but no. Hester can no longer think of him as childlike – however unruly his hair, however quick his grin. He knocks respectfully at the door, and she does not answer.

‘Hester? Mrs Canning?’ he calls. She hears the mocking way in which he interchanges these two forms of address, as if it is up to him to choose which one to use, appropriate or no. ‘Hetty? I have good news,’ he says; and though her pulse beats hard inside her head, she still does not reply. In the mirror she sees her lips pinch tightly together, a grim line that makes her even less lovely. There is a long pause, and then he chuckles. ‘I shan’t huff, or puff, or blow your house down … but I have it from Albert that Cat can stay on. There – doesn’t that cheer you up? He has some … conditions to this, which she’s not going to like, but I did my best. At least she’s not to be cast out into the world without means. Hester? Aren’t you going to thank me?’ he asks.
No!
she cries silently, suddenly sure that whatever the reason he has done this
thing, it is in his own interests. ‘Very well. Perhaps you are resting. Perhaps you are sulking. Either way, I shall see you at dinner, Mrs Canning; and thanks to me there will be a maid to serve it to us.’