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 c
old. He made himself a nest of old eiderdowns and counterpanes, all covered with blue splashy roses, and sat down to wait.
When he came along the corridor in the silence, he thought he had been clever. The heavy, latched door was dark inside its stone arch. There was no sound of plashing or flushing. He was then seized with doubt as to whether the bathroom was in fact empty—how could any sound penetrate that solid oak? He did not want to rattle a locked door and embarrass both her and himself. So he went down on one knee on the putative drugget and put his eye to the huge keyhole which glinted at him and disconcertingly vanished as the door swung back and he smelled wet, freshness, steam in cold air. She nearly fell over him there; she put out a hand to steady herself on his shoulder and he threw up a hand and clasped a narrow haunch under the silk of the kimono.
And there it was, what Randolph Henry Ash had called the kick galvanic, the stunning blow like that emitted by the Moray eel from under its boulders to unsuspecting marine explorers. Roland got somehow on his feet, briefly clutching the silk and letting it go as though it stung. Her hands were pink and slightly damp; the fringes of the pale hair were damp too. It was down, he saw, the hair, running all over her shoulders and neck, swinging across her face, which he meekly supposed would be furious and saw, when he looked, was simply frightened. Did she simply emit the electric shock, he wondered, or did she also feel it? His body knew perfectly well that she felt it. He did not trust his body.
“I was looking if there was a light. So as not to disturb you if you were in there.”
“I see.”
The blue silk collar was dampish too. The whole thing appeared in this half-light to be running with water, all the runnels of silk twisted about her body by the fiercely efficient knot in which she had tied her sash. Below the silk hem were the ruffled mundane edge of pink winceyette and slippered sharp feet.
“I waited some time for you to use the bathroom,” she said, conciliatory.
“So did I.”
“No harm done,” she said.
“No.”
She held out her wet hand. He took it and felt its chill, and the subsidence of something.
“Good night, then,” she said.
“Good night.”
He went into the bathroom. Behind him, the long Chinese dragon wavered palely away, on its aquamarine ground, along the shifting carpets, and the pale hair gleamed coldly above it.
Inside the bathroom small patches of vapour clung to the basin, small traces of water, and one long wet footprint on the carpet inside showed she had been there. The bathroom was cavernous, built somehow under eaves, which sloped away, leaving a kind of bunker beneath them, in which were heaped maybe thirty or forty ewers and washbasins of an earlier day, dotted with crimson rosebuds, festooned with honeysuckle, splattered with huge bouquets of delphiniums and phlox. The bath stood monumental and deep in the very centre of the room, rising on clawed lion-feet, a kind of marbly sarcophagus, crowned with huge brass taps. It was far too cold to contemplate running water into this, which would in any case have taken forever to fill. Roland was sure that even the fastidious Maud would not have attempted it; to judge from her wet footprints on the cork bath mat, she had washed thoroughly at the basin.
The basin and the lavatory, which stood enthroned on its own pedestal at the dark end of the room, were English and floral and entranced Roland, whose experience had included nothing like them. Both were glazed and fired over a riotous abundance of English flowers whose tangled and rambling clusters and little intense patches seemed wholly random and natural, with no discernible repeating pattern. In the basin, as he filled it, under the hazy surface of the water, lay dog-roses, buttercups, poppies and harebells, a bank in reverse, resembling Titania’s if not Charles Darwin’s tangled bank. The lavatory was slightly more formalised than the washbasin—diminishing garlands and scattered nosegays swirled down its cascades over lines of maidenhair ferns. The seat was majestic squared mahogany. It seemed sacrilegious to use anything so beautiful for its proper purpose. Roland assumed that Maud had seen such fittings before and was uninhibited by their splendour. He washed himself, rapid and trembling, above winking poppy-heads and blue cornflowers, and on the stained-glass window the ice crackled and set again. There was a gilt mirror over the washbasin in which he imagined Maud examining her perfection; his own furry darkness was only a shadow on it. He was rather sorry for Maud. He had quite decided that she wouldn’t have been able to see the romance of the bathroom as he could.
Back in his bedroom he looked out of the window into the night. Yesterday’s dark enclosing trees were soft and shining white; across the space of his window snowflakes fell into the square of light and became visible. He should have shut his curtains against the cold but could not so much close out the strangeness outside. He put out the light and watched it all go grey—many greys, silver, pewter, lead—in the suddenly visible moonlight, in which the snowfall was both thicker, more animated and slower. He put on his sweater and socks and climbed into his narrow bed and curled himself into a ball as he had done last night. The snow fell. He woke in the small hours from a dream of great violence and beauty which went back in part to his primitive infant fear of something coming up the lavatory bend and striking at him. In his dream he was hopelessly entwined and entangled with an apparently endless twisted rope of bright cloth and running water, decorated with wreaths and garlands and tossed sprays of every kind of flower, real and artificial, embroidered or painted, under which something clutched or evaded, reached out or slid away. When he touched it, it was not there; when he tried to lift an arm or a leg it prevented him, gripping, coiling. He had the microscopic eye of the dreamer of great dreams; he could linger over a cornflower or inspect a dog-rose or lose his sense of shape in the intricacies of a maidenhair fern. The thing smelled dank in his dream and yet also rich and warm, a smell of hay and honey and the promise of summer. Something struggled to get out, and as he moved across the floor of the room he was dreaming, its ever more intricate train flowed after it, impeding yet increasing its length and circling folds. His mind said, “It is wringing wet” in his mother’s voice, censorious yet concerned for it, and noted that “wringing” appeared to be a pun; it appeared to be wringing its veiled hands as it struggled with its wrappings. His mind said a line of poetry—“Despite the snow, despite the falling snow”—and his whole soul was distressed not to be able to remember the great importance of that line, which he had heard, where? when?
9
THE THRESHOLD
The old woman bade the Childe farewell, courteously enough, if curtly, and set him on his way to the frontier, telling him to keep boldly on along the track, deviating neither to right nor left, though creatures might call and beckon to him enticingly, and wonderful lights might be seen from time to time, for this was enchanted country. He might see meadows or fountains, but he must keep his stony way, she told him, apparently with no great faith in his strength of purpose. But the Childe said he wished to come to the place his father had told him of, and that he wished to be faithful and true in all things and that she need not fear. “As to that,” said the crone, “it is all one to me whether the whiteladies pick your fingers or whether the sluggish goblins of the grimpen dispute your little toes between them. I have lived too long to care much for the outcome of one quest or another: cleaned white bones are as good as a burnished princeling in a mailcoat to my old eyes. If you come you will come; if not, I shall see the whiteladies’ flickering fire on the heath.” “I thank you nevertheless for your courtesy,” said the punctilious Childe, to which she said, “Courtesy is too fine a name for it. Be off with you before I fall into a teasing frame of mind.” He did not like to think how that frame of mind might be, so he pricked his good horse with his spurs and rode out onto the stony track with a clatter.
He had a thwarting day of it. The heath and moor were crisscrossed with little tracks, dusty and twisting between the heather and the bracken and the little juniper trees with their cling
ing roots. There was not one way but many, all athwart each other like the cracks on a crazy jug, and he followed first one and then the other, choosing the straightest and stoniest and finding himself always under the hot-sun at another crossing just like the one he had just left. After a time he decided to go with the sun behind him always—at least this led to consistency of proceeding—though it must be told that when he decided this he had only the haziest idea, dear readers, of where the sun had been at the beginning of the venture. So it often is in this life. We become consistent and orderly too late, on insufficient grounds, and perhaps in the wrong direction. So it was with the poor Childe, for at dusk he found himself apparently back at the place where he had set out from. He had seen neither whiteladies nor grimpen goblins, though he had heard singing at the end of straight sandy paths he had avoided, and had seen creatures crash and spring briefly far away in seas of bracken and moorland herbs. He thought he recognised the twisted thorn trees, and might indeed have done so; there they stood in their triangle, as they had done at dawn; but of the old crone’s little hut there was no sign. The sun was going down fast, over the edge of the plain; he pricked forward a little, hoping he might be mistaken, and saw before him, a little on his way, an avenue of standing stones, which he had no memory of seeing before, though they were, to say the least of it, hard to miss, even in the greying light. At the end of the avenue was a building, or structure, with huge gateposts and a heavy roofing stone and a stone to mark a threshold. And beyond, the growing dark. And out of this dark, towards him, stepped three most beautiful ladies, walking proudly between the stones, and each bearing before her on a silken cushion a square casket. And he marvelled much that even in the gloaming he had not been aware of their coming, and was wary of them, for he said to himself in his mind, “It may be that these are the bonecracking whiteladies of whom the old woman spoke so lightly, come to turn me from my path as the light of the world fails.” Certainly they were creatures of the evening, for each seemed to create her own light as she walked, a haze of shimmering, and glittering and fluctuating light, most lovely to behold.