The Angry Tide

  And he had not listened. Not for a second had he listened. He had believed. He had trusted. He had never considered betrayal.

  It need not be so now, his logical mind argued. Twenty explanations could exist. Twenty different ones, all utterly innocent. But one thing was certain: he could do nothing else, he could think nothing else, assuredly feel nothing else, until he knew the truth.

  He stared at the locked door. Then he walked away and up to the end of the street. Then he climbed the broken railings and stumbled through the brambles and the gorse until he reached the back of his house. There was a light in the bedroom.

  It was a low house and the chink of light showing through the cheap curtains was not five feet above his eye level. He stared around like a wild man, and saw a few yards away a home-made truck that the children in the next cottage used for play. It was really an old box on two wooden wheels, but it was longer than broad, and he pulled it across the glistening grass and through the dripping brambles to prop it end-up against the wall. Then, climbing on the sill of the lower window, he stepped up on to the rickety end of the truck, careless as he would not ever ordinarily have been, of collapse and a sprained ankle. The chink of light came on to a level with his eyes, and he peered into his bedroom.

  A sight met him which for a few seconds paralysed both his mind and his body. Rowella was lying on the bed – naked, totally and utterly naked and in a wanton posture that even he, her husband, had never seen her assume. And, horror of horrors, disgust of disgust, a big man, also totally naked, was kneeling over her and twisting her feet this way and that. And from the expression on his wife’s face, she appeared actually to be enjoying it.

  He never remembered climbing down, but he could not have fallen, for next day he found no injury upon himself; somehow too he must have had the presence of mind to pull the truck back into its old position. He remembered nothing of this at all. All he remembered was crouching against the hedge and being sick – over and over until there was nothing but bile to bring up.

  And when at last the sickness ceased he began to shiver, and then he pulled himself to his feet, and, crouching, hunched, low to the ground, like a dog that has been fiercely thrashed for something it didn’t do, he began to make his way back to his parents’ home.

  Chapter Five

  I

  Cary Warleggan called to see St John Peter that same week. It was such an exceptional occurrence that the young man could hardly believe his eyes. Cary Warleggan, being now an old man of fifty-nine, scarcely moved from the office behind their bank in Truro, except to climb the stairs to the small apartment that he occupied above. He ate and slept there, and a hundred-yard stroll on a fine Sunday morning was as much as he normally ventured. Possibly this was more to do with preference than age, for, excepting his persisting bradypepsia, he ailed little.

  But St John Peter’s estate was seven miles out of Truro, and although the day was fine the roads were foul. The gaunt old scarecrow arrived on an elderly brown mare, accompanied by one servant, who had difficulty in getting him down. St John had been spending the morning with two stable boys and his thirty couple of foxhounds. Joan, his wife, Harris Pascoe’s daughter, welcomed the old man and sent for her husband.

  ‘God’s flesh and blood, Cary! What brings you here in the ill of winter? Has Truro burned down? Joan, offer him a brandy and treacle. Twill help to keep the chill away.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Cary. ‘Ah, my boy. Glad to see you looking well. Mrs Peter . . . We’ve scarce met before. Thank ee, no. A little rum and water will excellently suffice.’

  They made conversation for a few minutes. St John rolled down the sleeves of his shirt, pulled out the lace of the cuffs, crossed his booted legs and watched bits of dry mud fall on the polished oak floor. Joan Peter superintended the servant who brought drinks, her calm expression and unruffled demeanour belying the feeling of disquiet and aversion produced in her by the arrival of this old man at her front door. She knew, of course, and had done for years before she married, of the ill-will that existed between her father and the Warleggans, and of the rivalry between the banks; and since their marriage she had tried to persuade St John to change his allegiance and bank at Pascoe’s. But St John, for reasons of his own, had refused to swap horses.

  Joan was not quite sure how her husband handled her money, but she knew that most of it was still kept as fluid capital at her father’s bank, and that St John seemed to manage his extravagant living without touching more than the interest. She knew that he chose to use Warleggan’s for his day to day accounts, and suspected that he was in debt to them, and that the debt was secured against her dowry. But that was all. Nevertheless she felt that the arrival of this black-draped, bony-shanked old man could bode nothing but ill.

  And she was right. Seeing that what had to be imparted was not going to be imparted in her presence, she made an excuse and left them, and Cary, who had little finesse, and a minimum of small talk outside the subject of money, soon came to the heart of the matter. Because, he said, of certain failures of schemes that Warleggan’s Bank had recently financed: a joint stock company here, a land drainage scheme there, the temporary abandonment of the building of the Portreath rail road because Basset’s Bank had withdrawn its support, these and the sudden shortage of liquid funds which was affecting the whole country at this time, compelled them to call in a number of their short-term accommodation bills. The ledger accounts of all customers of the bank with such outstanding loans had been carefully scrutinized, and some twenty to thirty names had been selected for a shortening of their credit. St John had to appreciate, Cary said, that although he, Cary, was a full partner in the bank, his brother Nicholas was the senior partner, and beside him was his nephew George. Between them these two had been adamant that Mr St John Peter’s notes should not be renewed when they came due. He personally, Cary assured St John, had done his utmost to alter their decision in his favour, pointing out the long association all the Peters had had with the bank and trying to replace his with some other name. But they had pointed out – and with perfect truth, he had to admit – that Mr St John Peter’s was the largest unsecured personal loan that they carried and that it was a matter of pure business common sense, in this present emergency, to call it in.

  ‘Unsecured, by God!’ exclaimed St John, whose back hairs had been rising throughout this explanation. ‘You have my guarantee of the capital I hold in Pascoe’s Bank. That’s free and fluid money, held in the best securities, by God, and you’d scarce obtain better if you was to scour the City of London! By God and all his angels!’

  ‘Sir,’ said Cary, a little more formal now. ‘We appreciate that. I appreciate that. Apart from our friendship, our long friendship; which counted; be sure it counted; apart from that, it was the nature of the security which encouraged me, which enabled me to discount for you so many bills of your own and to offer you ever-increasing credit. But you must see, my boy, that such fluidity is precisely what we now require. Had you offered us land as guarantee, we might now ask you to sell it to realize the money; and land is not an easily marketable commodity at this time; land is peculiar; land is very fickle. Unreliable. It might fetch the amount of our loan made against it; it might not; but in either case there would be delay, the processes of auction, lawyers and the like; they take months. The money that your wife brought you – that, as you’ve told me often, is in ready cash or easily negotiable bonds. That is just what Warleggan’s Bank needs, to tide it over the next three months. Indeed the next month, I would say.’

  ‘You mean – you are demanding – a repayment of . . .’

  ‘Only as the notes fall due, Mr Peter. Nothing more than that—’

  ‘But all of them are due for renewal this month and next! You must know that. Indeed, you’ve seen to that by steadily shortening the dates each time I’ve signed ’em. By God, you can’t mean to call in the whole of the amount I owe you!’

  Cary pulled his coat around him like a raven folding its wings. He stared
about the sparsely furnished but handsome room in which they were sitting.

  ‘As a favour I ask you not to mention this to no one else for that would be the worse for us all, see? We want no run. We want no loss of confidence. Warleggan’s Bank stands solid as a rock. But . . . you know now. I know, that we have to draw in our horns . . .’

  St John Peter got up and walked to the door and back, plucking at his lower lip. ‘God’s blood, I shall not be able to maintain my pack!’

  ‘Hunting will be over soon,’ said Cary. ‘Who knows what next autumn will bring?’

  ‘How d’you mean? What d’you mean?’

  ‘This is temporary,’ said Cary. ‘See? We’re far too big, far too widespread, to suffer for long. Warleggan’s Bank? The biggest and soundest in the county! We’ve smelting works, tin mines, flour mills, schooners, rolling and pressing mills. We shall soon recover, see? It’s temporary.’

  St John Peter thrust his hands into his hip pockets, stared at the old man suspiciously. Hard, bitter words had been on his tongue; he’d been about to say things which would have been unforgivable by any of the Warleggans. Between friends he had always contemptuously referred to George Warleggan as ‘Smelter George’. He could think of fine names, more offensive names, to apply to Cary, and had been about to apply them. To come here in this way, to enter a gentleman’s house, not like a banker but like a common usurer, to demand, at such short notice, repayment of a vast sum of money, something he had always assured St John he would never do except – if at all – in the most gradual manner – it was outrageous and required the reply that only a gentleman could give: Very well, I will pay you, but never crawl into this house dragging your slime after you again. Out, out by the back door, and in future use the servants’ entrance, where you belong!

  St John Peter, who had more pride than sense, and too precise an idea of what a gentleman could and could not do, who had married for money and at his wedding had said to a friend: ‘I bring the blood, she brings the groats,’ who had all the pretensions of the aristocrat without the means to maintain them, needed at this moment the declaration of his utter contempt for this black-coated creature sitting before him, needed it above everything to maintain his self-respect, his self-conceit. But Cary’s last words gave him pause in spite of himself. Temporary? How temporary?

  It was a bitter pill to swallow, on top of the ignominy of knowing that this man could almost ruin him. ‘How temporary?’ he said.

  ‘Six months,’ said Cary, sitting back in his chair. ‘Six months at the most. I guarantee you, my boy: we’ll advance you the same amount again, and at the same very low rate of interest, on the 1st September next. Just in time for your hunting. How will that do?’

  St John Peter went across and picked up his coat from the back of a chair, put it on. Cary observed it. It was of green velvet, a handsome cut-away, with basket buttons. He had never owned a coat like that in his life. Not that he wanted to. Not that he wanted to. There was far more pleasure to him in controlling the people who owned such elegant apparel.

  II

  Holy Week, Ossie thought, was an inconsiderate time to die. Not that he or many of the other clergy put themselves out too much for the onset of Easter, but generally there was more to do in the parish, particularly the tiresome rash of marriages that broke out on the Sunday. And although Mr Odgers was sufficiently recovered to resume services in Sawle, his vicar had been planning a sudden descent, perhaps on the Good Friday, spending the one night at Trenwith, just to ginger up the little man and to comment on the neglect from which Sawle Church must now be suffering.

  But several people obviously weren’t going to last out the week, and that meant a tiresome number of funerals too. Among them, and by far the most important, Mr Nathaniel Pearce. Stabbed in the back, as it were, by an attack of influenza, his heart really had decided to give up the struggle at last. He lay now, an inanimate mountain, breathing in short painful gasps which certainly could not sustain that large body much longer. So he had been when Ossie called on him on the previous Thursday, and the clergyman expected every day to hear that he was gone. But as Easter approached no final message came, though his daughter on the Tuesday sent a note round to say it could only be a matter of hours.

  On the morning of Maundy Thursday Ossie debated with himself whether he should follow his usual Thursday routine. Though not a man of deep spiritual commitment, he did realize his self-denials through Lent had not been extensive. Once or twice he had checked himself when about to open an extra bottle of Mountain. He had cancelled the delivery of porter to the house, which Morwenna, remembering Dr Enys’s advice, sometimes still drank. Each Sunday he took care to preach for ten minutes longer. He had cut down the consumption of butter by the servants. He said a prayer every morning when he rose, as well as every evening. And he came home earlier on the nights when he played whist.

  But against that he had continued to visit Rowella, even though he had now been able to resume intercourse with his wife on two nights a week. He still lusted after Rowella, and lust, he knew, was not an admirable thing. It must stop, he told himself, thinking of his lust with pleasure. And this week was the proper week to stop it. Even if he gave up these visits just for a few weeks it would make Rowella less sure of him, less demanding of his little presents. And now that his wife was available again, he hadn’t the excuse for this extra-marital indulgence on the grounds of its being necessary for his health.

  After the first forceful taking, Morwenna, he thought, had given in better than expected. True, she would now often speak to no one for hours on end, not even the servants, especially on Tuesday or Saturday mornings. And she had suddenly abandoned much of her parish work. But she accepted him when he came to her and put up no resistance. She made no physical response to him at all, which was in sad contrast to her lascivious sister; but at least it was satisfaction of a sort. And the first night, before he left her, he had told her of Miss Cane’s role – something he saw Morwenna already suspected – so there had been no attempt at all on Morwenna’s part to carry out her threat. He saw it now as the wild menaces of a hysterical woman, which never should have been taken seriously. He could hardly believe that he had been timid enough all this time to take them seriously. He had flinched at a shadow.

  But when Mr Pearce died it would be much more difficult to arrange a regular Thursday meeting with Rowella. So perhaps this Thursday, if Mr Pearce lived until tonight, he would stifle the stirrings of his better self and go for the last time. His better self told him that he had had a thoroughly enjoyable Lent.

  He left at his usual time, having had his evening word with Miss Cane to warn her never to leave her charge unguarded – for however much the threat had proved an empty one it never did to relax one’s guard – and rode to Mr Pearce’s and left his horse and was let in by Miss Pearce, red-eyed and swollen-faced – and led upstairs to where the lawyer lay, still gasping, like a fish that had been put on a slab to die. There was no other sign of life, except that his eyes were half open. Ossie wondered how he was going to spend a half hour in this close, unpleasant room.

  ‘He is – unconscious, what? Gone, eh? All but?’

  ‘I believe he recognizes us,’ said Miss Pearce, gulping. ‘He can’t move neither hand nor foot; but he still understands. He understands by winking. That’s all that’s left. Hullo, Papa, dear? Hear me, do you?’

  The enormous face on the pillow slowly closed one eye.

  ‘Dear Papa,’ said Miss Pearce, tears squeezing on to her cheeks. ‘Here’s the vicar to see you. Do you hear me?’

  The eye closed again.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Ossie sonorously, and cleared his throat. ‘So I’m glad to see you once again, my friend, if it is for the last time. Let me try to comfort you. Let me read you something.’ He took the handkerchief away from his nose and sat on a chair a little way from the bed. Then he opened the Bible. Miss Pearce discreetly withdrew. ‘Let me read you something out of Psalm 73. “Thou hast hold of me b
y Thy right hand, Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel, and afterwards receive me in glory. Whom have I in Heaven but Thee? My flesh and my heart faileth . . .”’

  He stuck it for twenty minutes and then took out his watch. There was still a smear of daylight in the sky. A little early to climb the hill; but he could stroll round the town, or even go into St Mary’s church for a while.

  ‘I must leave you now,’ he said, closing his book. ‘I trust the Lord will welcome you into the glorious company of Heaven. I must go now for I have work to do.’

  As he turned to leave Mr Pearce winked again, and a twitch of a smile moved across his mottled features. The mulberry was almost ripe.

  This smile, no doubt, was his way of expressing his appreciation for the attention Ossie had paid him all through this terrible year. It meant, Goodbye, my boy, goodbye. But registering itself on that face it seemed to have a faintly cynical, almost sinister leer about it, as if Nat Pearce, at the threshold of death, whence comes all knowledge – or no knowledge – had seen through the subterfuge of Ossie’s attentions and knew all about his trysts in the cottage up the hill.

  III

  Ossie stayed with Rowella a shorter time than usual. She had greeted him with the news that she had almost had to send back word; Arthur had been very strange and ill all week – with influenza or some sort of ague – which had laid him low, shivering and sometimes weeping in his bed, for five days, and he had only recovered, suddenly and completely, yesterday and gone off to the library as usual. Tonight he had seemed quite better and left at the same time to see his parents.