‘Not talk that … that … to me,’ shrilled Mrs Pearson, in a voice like a bat’s, and slammed back the receiver. She leaned over the table where the telephone stood, trembling, with both hands pressed over her eyes, and was still standing there, when Erika crept anxiously up to her.
‘Mrs Pearson? You feeling bad?’ she whispered. It was the first time she had heard a voice raised in anger in Lily Cottage; even the dread Mr Pearson never shouted.
‘No, dear. I’m all right, I just had to send her away – she was worrying me – going on at me – bothering me – I’m all right now. Make me some tea, will you, schatz? and come up and have it with me.’ She pulled out a packet of cigarettes from her pocket with a shaking hand, and went slowly upstairs.
Later that afternoon, some bunches of spring flowers arrived, with a note: ‘To make my apologies. Hope you’ll change your mind soon!’
Mrs Pearson tore the card into fragments over, and over again.
But she made Erika arrange the flowers all around her room; she could resist flowers no more than she could resist a note of kindness in a voice. Her room was always full of them; her husband would not know that these irises and narcissi came from someone who wanted a sitting.
Alone, as twilight fell, she lay on her bed looking out across the room, so pretty in the pink light, with the faces of the flowers, trumpet-shaped, frill-shaped, horn-shaped, looking back at her from every side. It was completely quiet; the rich fresh colours glowed, the scents of daffodil and narcissi mingled with those from the bottles and jars on her dressing-table. Her grotesques, in glass and wood and plastic, smirked at her from the mantelpiece.
I wish Gladys hadn’t gossiped, she thought. I wish she hadn’t. Whatever happens, I mustn’t let Tom know. He’d be … he might want me … no, I don’t believe he would, now. We’ve got money, plenty of money … he wouldn’t want …
Show them, the voice insisted, show them. You’re the only one who can do it, show them. I’ll help you.
Mrs Pearson moved her head deeper into the pillow, and let her eyes close. Oh the warmth, the silence, the lovely faces of the flowers. Any instant now, the green tunnel would be there; mossy, shaded by gentle boughs.
Show them, insisted the voice. I’ll help you. Show them.
22
It was the afternoon of Easter Day. Peggy and Arnold Corbett were sitting after lunch in a silver birch coppice, surrounded by primroses. It had been raining lightly, but Peggy had sat with upturned face, the shower pouring down on her skin, while he sheltered under what protection there was, watching her with a wondering, feeble smile.
‘We’re between Slinfold and Sedgemere. If that means a thing to you?’ he said now; he had been studying an AA map.
The rain had ceased. Peggy, who had wandered off to pick primroses, came towards him, moving silently between the tree trunks. There was a scent of wet moss. She was slowly wiping her face and brow with her handkerchief.
‘Sedgemere’s a pretty little place – three cottages and a church – we might go back that way?’ Arnold suggested.
‘If you like.’ She was shockingly pale. Yet she did not seem ill; the brightness of her eyes was that of youth, not fever. She kept them fixed on Arnold’s face, as if resigning the way that they should go home to him. All right, her brilliant eyes seemed to be saying, we’ll go by way of Sedgemere. You decided, not me.
‘Sedgemere it is, then.’ He folded the map. ‘And we’d better start now, if we want to avoid the lunatics.’
Peggy made him wait while she gathered up the smallest fragments of eggshell and paper and, amid his jeers, buried them under leaf-mould and moss. He watched her with the mocking smile that the slightest sign of gentleness in her always brought to his face. ‘What’s the point? Who the hell’s going to see a bit of litter in here?’
‘Nobody. If I can help it.’ She wiped the moist earth off her hands and they went to the car.
Paler and paler grew Peggy as they approached Sedgemere in its narrow valley, and the stalks of the primroses were crushed in her hand and she stared unseeingly at the spring going by.
When they were passing through the little place with its three cottages covered in Sussex tiling and its square-towered, flint-set church, Arnold glanced at her. ‘I’ll slow down a bit, so’s we can look at it – I say, are you car-sick?’
‘Of course not. Do I look it?’
‘You look a bit green.’
‘I’m all right.’
There was silence again, while he drove slowly past the long cottage gardens and the duckpond. It was a heavy, slumbrous day; Sedgemere seemed asleep.
‘Bet these little hovels’ll sell for a nice price,’ he said in a moment, ‘when the inhabitants die off … but no-one seems to have got on to Sedgemere yet … oh, there is a riding-school.’
Rattray Riding School, said the notice above the white gate at the edge of the meadow, Rattray Riding School, Rattray Riding School.
A young woman on a horse was coming towards them down the unfenced track; she had the type of face once called sweet, and it was plain from the first sight of her that although she might try to fight for something she wanted, it would be hopeless; she was no fighter, and the battle would be lost from the start. Fighting and battles would mean little to that face. She glanced casually at the car.
‘Do for God’s sake get on, I’m bored with Sedgemere,’ Peggy said, low but violently, and Arnold accelerated and they swept on, leaving Sedgemere asleep in the sun. The girl who lacked a fighting face turned her horse, and galloped back towards the buildings at the end of the meadow.
‘That was a pretty girl,’ said Arnold, ‘notice?’
Peggy could not have spoken; she did not see the sweeps of green meadow or the hills crowned with white hedges of blackthorn or the silvery blue sky. All her spirit pursued, with hatred, the tiny figure receding at seventy miles an hour into the sunlit distance.
They reached home about five, having spent the last half hour of the journey running blithely along almost deserted suburban roads, while the cars on the main ones jerked and crept, jerked and crept, in the contemporary idiot rhythm. Peggy was still deadly pale and at last, to avoid further questions, had to say that her head ached.
‘That’s the first time I’ve heard you admit to a human weakness in six months,’ he observed.
‘Thank you,’ said Peggy; if he would be quiet!
‘Hullo!’ added Arnold, ‘there’s the Rolls – my mother must be home.’
The Rolls was standing before the open garage with the old chauffeur, busy with a rag on the metalwork of the bonnet, looking distinctly sulky.
‘Yes, that’s mamma all right, all right, she’s given him a rocket about the car being dirty, I did tell him, weeks ago, but the lazy old blighter hasn’t touched it.’ Having parked his own car, he went into the house.
Peggy followed slowly. She felt it as the last straw that her employer should have arrived back this evening; she had planned to go to her room and be on her bed until darkness came. She felt ill; shaken by jealousy and hatred.
Mrs Corbett spent the evening, naturally, in resuming control of MacLeod House and lamenting at intervals that she had put on ten pounds, that the car had not been cleaned, apparently, since she left, and the roses not pruned hard enough.
But, on the whole, she was satisfied with Peggy’s stewardship, and the servants confided gloomily to one another in their sitting-room that it wasn’t going to be no use complaining about her; she had ‘wormed her way in’, and would doubtless be left half – if not all – of Mrs Corbett’s money.
It was, on the whole, a fine Easter. There were blue sky and warm sun and silver catkins and golden daffodils to be thankful for, as well as the alleged return from the dead of a gifted teacher with a messiah-complex. Gladys Barnes, one of millions made happy by the bright weather, confided an intention to Annie on the Saturday evening.
‘I wouldn’t. Not if I was you I wouldn’t,’ Annie said.
‘
If you was me you would, you soppy date. She’s gone fifteen. She ought to go.’
‘It’s not your business, Glad. Now is it?’
‘He’s always going on about getting people to come.’ (‘He’ was Mr Geddes.)
‘Yes, but not if it means trouble, Glad. You know Mrs P. don’t believe in the Church. You heard her, going on about the bells. We both ’eard.’
Gladys was silent. Her large eyes, innocent behind her glasses in their mended frame, were troubled.
‘Now didn’t we?’ repeated Annie.
‘Yes …’ said Gladys doubtfully, ‘but … I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not those turns of hers what make her go on like that. She hasn’t never said a word to me against the Church not when I come in of a Sunday evening. Just smiles and says have a nice service? quite ordinary. I don’t know …’
There was a pause, while they sat in their worn, comfortable old clothes in silence, enjoying the crackle and sparkle of a little coal fire, which replaced the greedy gas one in warmer weather. They were in the parlour.
‘’Course, she needn’t know!’ exclaimed Gladys at last, breaking into a sparkle bright as the fire’s.
‘Glad! That’s downright deceitful!’
Gladys made a movement of her grey curls that took some sixty years off her age, and went on sparkling in silence.
‘Erika’s like her maid, Glad. She tells her what to do, and that … I know she don’t pay her nothing but a pound a week and those opairs gets three, sometimes, but she gets all her board and Mrs P. buys her cloes – I’d have thought myself a regular queen, I can tell you, if Mrs Hunter or Mrs Ross’d bought me cloes like that when I first went out to service, and I was round about Erika’s age, my first place.
‘Remember those skirts? Didn’t half pick up the muck … well. I’m going to ask her. ’Sides, it’s as dull as ditchwater for a kid her age living here, she might get taken into that Youth Club, bit of jam for her, young company.’
‘I wouldn’t. Honest, Glad. We’re all getting along so nice. I wouldn’t.’
Gladys closed the argument by getting up and going down to the kitchen in search of Erika.
They walked to Saint James’s through streets parked with paleblue, scarlet or pink cars, like a mechanized age’s version of the spring flowers. Such owners as had not started early for the coast were busy with hose and oil and rags, tending their treasures. Erika’s thoughts were vaguely occupied by the new coat and hat she wore, Easter presents from Mrs Pearson.
Gladys marched them up to her usual seat, nice and near the front where they could see and hear all that was going on, and proceeded to instruct her charge; kneeling, clasping her hands and covering her closed eyes, praying.
‘How what you mean, Glad, praying?’ breathed Erika, looking sideways at her mentor under the coquettish hat with floating ribbons.
‘Praying – good gracious, don’t you know what that is? – here, where’s the Ourfather –’ Gladys grabbed at the prayer-book and pointed with a black-gloved finger. ‘Read it. Then shut your eyes and say it, girl.’
Erika bent her head and tried to do what she was told. Her reading of English had so far been in the sheets of the Daily Mirror. Whether she felt any difference between the words therein, and those she was now studying, it is not possible to say. She was fully occupied with balancing her hat on top of her head and in admiring the church’s festal white and gold, and the many flowers.
The service was interrupted occasionally, for her, by Gladys’s hissing murmurs of explanation and comment. She pulled her down in awkward genuflexion when the cross was carried past in procession after the last hymn, and then they both knelt dutifully for a final private prayer.
‘There!’ beamed Gladys sitting up amidst the bustle and rustle of departure. ‘Set us up for the week, won’t it?’
‘Who that boy?’ whispered Erika.
The unexpectedness of it opened Gladys’s mouth and kept her silent for quite two seconds.
Natural feminine interest in such a question from a young girl struggled with her feeling that it should not have been asked here: ‘Why was that boy carrying the cross?’ yes; ‘Who that boy?’ no. Not in church.
‘That? That’s Barry Disher, very nice boy he is, good to his mum.’ She shepherded her protegée out into the moving crowd. Erika could only have meant Barry Disher; he was more noticeable, somehow, than the other boys. ‘She’s got eight, just fancy, poor thing, only of course there’s three grown up and married now,’ Gladys went on.
Erika cautiously settled the hat, looking unseeingly at the ladies moving slowly ahead of her. Her face was beginning to fill out; a pear-shaped German face with white large cheeks and a narrow brow and small eyes blue as flax. That hat, thought Gladys, kind of comical on her. But looks all right, somehow. Wish she could get a bit of colour in her face.
‘Enjoy it, did you? Like to come again?’ she asked.
Erika silently nodded. Yes, she would like to come again. Gladys did not go on to ask why, and perhaps it was as well.
‘Miss Barnes!’ said Mr Geddes cordially, at the church door, ‘nice to see you. How’s your sister?’
‘Getting on fine, thank you –’ pause, and the usual steamingup of glasses, as Gladys realized that she could neither remember his name nor find the rudeness to call him ‘Vicar’, ‘walks about a bit sometimes now, well, I said, ever since Christmas Day, ever so kind she is. When I think what a state we was all in, we don’t see much of him, I will say, but –’
‘Don’t go, I want a word with you,’ Mr Geddes firmly motioned them towards a corner of the porch with one hand while he continued his farewells to his congregation with the other.
They waited for perhaps five minutes, Gladys looking with interest at the Easter clothes of the ladies, and Erika staring vaguely out into the April sunlight.
‘Well,’ said Mr Geddes at last, coming across to them, ‘and who’s this?’ smiling at Erika.
‘Miss Hartig, frorleen really, she’s German, come over to help Mrs P. but more of a niece, in a way, had a very hard time,’ lowering her voice and glancing significantly at the top of Erika’s hat, ‘grannie wasn’t no more than a b-e-g-e-r-,’ spelling tactfully, ‘in an old-folk’s home now, best place for them I said, now they’re both old, but you could see it was from them, all in German, the rackman got a friend to make it out, so they’re all right, and she’s getting on nicely aren’t you Erika?’
Erika looked up from under the hat brim, flat as a plate, and smiled. Her scarlet ribbons fluttered slightly in the spring wind.
‘Well I’m pleased to see you both,’ Mr Geddes said. ‘Now what I wanted to ask you was this, Miss Barnes – would your Mrs Pearson like me to come and see her? I gathered – or rather Father Corliss gathered – from old Mr Fisher that she isn’t at all well, and worried about herself, it seems. Is that so, do you think?’
‘Oh I shouldn’t if I was you, no I shouldn’t,’ Gladys burst out earnestly, ‘very kind of you, means well, you can see that I said to Annie, but very against all that, well, I said, they have to ring them Christmas Day, no I shouldn’t.’
Mr Geddes, recalling various shreds of information, gathered that Mrs Pearson was ‘against the Church’.
‘She wouldn’t like it, then? I just wanted your opinion. I’m sorry. All the same, I shall come. When is the best time to see her?’
‘Never goes out except in that car of a night with him, in her dressing gown all day but nice and tidy, ever so pretty really, all pink and gold and spotlessly clean, Erika and me do the shopping, don’t we?’
‘So I could find her at home most hours of the day, you think?’
‘Sure to. Has her lunch on a tray, not a hearty eater, but smoke smoke all day I wonder she isn’t afraid of that lung cancer and costs her pounds a week I reckon, shall I just mention it?’
‘No. Please don’t; I’ll look in some afternoon and take my chance. Good-morning, Miss Barnes, good-morning, Miss Hartig, nice to have seen you and
I hope you’ll be coming regularly.’
‘I’m not having no-one calling you Erika not without they know you better,’ Gladys said, the instant they were out of earshot, ‘Miss Hartig sounds more respectful – proper-like. That was the Vicar, the head of it all. But we don’t want him round at ours, there’ll only be trouble.’
She did not pursue this line of thought but at once began to enjoy their homeward walk.
She had forgotten – or it lingered only at the back of her mind – that Mrs Pearson did not know she had taken Erika to church. She thought, in a comfortable bustling way, oh well, where’s the harm if it does come out, besides, all that going-on about the bells and that, it isn’t right.
So, when she opened the front door; and they came into the hall of Rose Cottage just as Mrs Pearson was going past carrying a tray, she was unprepared for what happened.
23
‘There you are, schatz,’ Mrs Pearson exclaimed. ‘Wherever have you been? I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
She stood there in her pink dressing gown, holding the tray laden with cups and teapot, and smiling at them. There was no trace of annoyance in her tone.
‘We’ve just been out –’ Gladys was beginning, her voice loud with nervousness, as the implications of their excursion came suddenly upon her – when her words were cut across by Erika’s slow voice:
‘Gladys took me to the church.’
Instantly, Mrs Pearson’s face became transformed. It was no longer her own, and Gladys stared in horror. A vile green light poured from her eyes, her mouth squared itself, and, fixing the fierce malice of those eyes on Erika, she squealed in a voice so high that the words seemed to keen past their ears like a narrowly tunnelled wind:
‘No – no – keep away – never go there – you take her there and we tell him and he send her back and she die and – and – no – no – NO.’
The tray in her hands tilted dangerously, and Gladys, instinct startling her out of her terror, jerked forward and made to take it from her. But she clung to it with a passionate strength, as if her hands relished the contact with the wood, and for seconds, they almost struggled, in a hush that echoed with that other voice … Erika stood looking at them dully. Of course; sooner or later everyone quarrelled and fought. Suddenly, Mrs Pearson’s hands relaxed their grasp, but gently; she almost settled the tray into Gladys’s clasp, and said, in her usual voice but pitched higher: