“A very good-looking woman indeed,” repeated Colonel Adams, who had always had a harmless eye for a pretty woman. “And looked as though she could play a good hand of bridge.”
Now there was another thing that it would have been nice to have, more frequent bridge, and of this they did sometimes speak to each other because it was an attainable thing. It only needed a little change in the village population to bring it about. Colonel Adams played a first-rate hand and Mrs. Adams, who had not liked the game originally but had taught herself to like it for her husband’s sake, was adequate, the Vicar was more than adequate but not yet quite first-rate, though Colonel Adams had hope for him. But the Vicar had other things to do, and a counterpassion for chess, and they hesitated to call upon him too often. Valerie Randall could play a good hand, and when commanded by the Vicar to come with him to Holly Cottage she would do so, for she was scared of the old Vicar. His manners were exquisite but he could be sarcastic and she was not at all sure that he liked her. He liked her husband and she was always uneasy with those who liked Paul. So her bridge too was uneasy and she always had her eye on the clock, haunted by the thought of all the things she had to do at home. Valerie as a fourth was better than nothing but she was not quite what one wanted. And the three old people sitting around the table with her knew quite well, as old people always know, that she thought all old people a damned nuisance. There was Mrs. Hepplewhite at the manor, of course, but they couldn’t appeal to her because she was so extraordinarily kind. Had she known of their desire she would have whisked them in her Bentley to every bridge party for miles around. That was the trouble with Mrs. Hepplewhite’s kindness. Once let loose it was like a roaring cataract and one had to be very strong to stand against the current and live.
“Not a young woman,” Colonel Adams assured his wife. “Gray-haired. Fiftyish. Looked as though she’d enjoy her bridge.”
“Perhaps we could call,” suggested Mrs. Adams. It was a tremendous suggestion, for they hadn’t called on anyone for years.
“How do we get there?” asked her husband. It was not far, only down the lane, around the corner and across the green, but it was a long way for them.
“We get to church on our good days,” said Mrs. Adams. “And it’s not much farther. We’ll have an early lunch one day, have our rests and then go. Does she look like the sort of woman who will give us tea when we get there? That would help for the going back.”
“She looked like a woman who would do everything correctly,” said Colonel Adams. “In the way we are accustomed to. Is there another cup of tea left in the pot?”
She poured him out a third cup of tea, smiling to think how much he could still tell about a woman in one glance. Then she turned her chair to the wood fire that was burning in the grate, for though it was May the wind was in the east and a little fire was comforting in the evenings. Their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Eeles the gamekeeper’s wife, was very good about running in and doing the grate, and other jobs that were difficult for Mrs. Adams, and her husband Bert looked after their tiny garden for them though they could pay him next to nothing for doing so. Everyone was so kind. Colonel and Mrs. Adams never ceased to be touched and astonished by the kindness and generosity that they met on all sides. They couldn’t understand it. It was wonderful.
Colonel Adams finished his tea and turned his chair too around to the fire and lit his pipe. The little room was shabby and charming. The remnants of a beautiful carpet they had acquired long ago in India had been skillfully pieced together by Mrs. Eeles and fitted to the wainscot. The yellow curtains and chair covers were faded and darned but still pretty. There were books, photographs of their children, and a few bits of rare china that could not be sold because they were cracked. And the card table. It was Queen Anne, with candle slides and elegant legs, the only thing of value left to them, and they were resolved not to part with it for anything in the world the antique shops of Westwater could offer them. Outside the window the evening light was turning the garden to magic and in the wood the cuckoo was still calling.
“Five months,” said Mrs. Adams and sighed with satisfaction. Her husband knew what she meant and held out his hand to her. She meant that they could now expect five months of reasonable warmth. Their bills would go down, with no coal and less electricity. They would not catch so many colds and they would feel better. Above all, that fear that each kept so carefully concealed would be laid to rest. It was in January and February that old people died, not in the summer when their blood was warmer and their heartbeats steadier. She took his hand and laid it in her lap.
“Tom,” she whispered, her face alight with the joy of divulging a secret she had been keeping for this moment, “there’s a fowl for lunch tomorrow. All plucked and ready for me to cook. Gladys from the vicarage brought it this morning while you were in the garden.”
4
At the vicarage too they were having a late tea, for the Vicar had been visiting outlying farms.
“I saw her as I was coming out of the post office,” said Jean Anderson timidly.
“Who?” snapped the Vicar. His sister started at the sharpness of his question, tears came into her eyes and her tea slopped over into the saucer. They had lived together for ten years now and still she could not get used to the quickness of his speech, his unintentional sarcasm and the pouncing vigor of his mind. And he on his side could not learn to adjust himself to her weakness and incompetence, though he tried hard, and with resolute loyalty always refused to look back to those halcyon days when he had lived alone. Poor Jean. She was the one weakling in a brilliant and healthy family. Very odd. Their mother had had some illness or other just before her birth, he remembered, and perhaps that had had something to do with it. She’d never been able to do anything much and had lived at home with her parents, always ailing though never with any specific disease. Nothing wrong mentally but just slow in the uptake. And now she was fifty-six and looked seventy, with a tall thin frame that wavered like a bending poplar as she walked, dazed blue eyes that she protected with dark glasses when she was out, and thin wispy gray hair that was always falling into her eyes. She wore terrible wool jumpers and cardigans she knitted for herself, for knitting was one of the things she had learned to do and she enjoyed it. And she loved her hens.
The Vicar recollected something. “Did that fowl go up to Holly Cottage?” he demanded sharply.
“Yes, James,” she said shakily, and the tears ran over. She felt for her handkerchief and wiped them way. He remembered suddenly what her hens meant to her, and how deeply she felt the occasional necessary liquidations. With compunction he got up and came to her, a piece of Gladys’s marvelous plum cake in his left hand, and put his right on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Jean. I spoke sharply but I don’t mean it. It’s my way. I’m always telling you.” He gave her shoulder a friendly little shake and went back to his place. “What were you saying just now? You had seen whom?”
“The new Miss Lindsay. Coming to The Laurels.”
“God help her,” said the Vicar. “The state that house and garden must be in. What sort of woman?”
Jean hesitated, struggling to find the right words. It was all there in her mind, very clear, but she could never match the right words to the vivid pictures that she saw.
“I think,” she said at last, “she would be called smart.” And then she could have bitten her tongue out. That wasn’t the right word for that graceful woman who had leaned forward and smiled at her as she passed. She had had that bright scarf around her neck. It was a wonderful color and Jean’s slightly sentimental imagination had seen her as a tall gladiolus. She had been afraid of her, of course, for she was always frightened of strangers, but she had been attracted too.
“Smart?” ejaculated the Vicar. “Then God help us. Like the Hepplewhite?”
“Oh no, no!” said Jean, almost in tears again. “Oh no, not like her!” Mrs. Hepplewhite was the president of the Women’s Institute. Her husband had bought the mano
r house up on the hill after the old squire had died, but he was not at all like the old squire, dear old Sir Ambrose Royston. With her great kindness and capability Mrs. Hepplewhite knew exactly how to help everybody, including Miss Anderson whom with untiring perseverance she was endeavoring to cajole into “going out more.” Jean spent a great deal of time in her company because she was in all her nightmares, and she had constant nightmares. “No!” she said again.
“Well then, if she didn’t scare you stiff, go in tomorrow morning and see if there’s anything we can do for her.”
“Go and see her?” gasped Jean, and began to tremble. James did not know of course how terrified she was of that fearful house. She had never told him, or anyone, about that day when the queer old lady had popped out of the green door in the wall, like a spider out of its web, just as she was passing, seized her wrist and dragged her inside, up the stone-flagged path into the dark dreadful house and—and—Her pulse was racing madly and the sweat started out on her forehead. “The Laurels?” she whispered. “Go to The Laurels?”
“Of course,” said the Vicar briskly. “Say I’ll be calling in a day or two.” He pushed his chair back. “I’ll go along to my study. Haven’t dealt with the post yet.”
He strode from the room. Walk was not a word that could be used to describe his mode of progression. He was a tall Scot, lean but with large bones, and moved always as though over his native heather, with long steady strides. Yet only his youth and his holidays had been spent in Scotland. All his working life had been passed in Oxford, where he had been Fellow and Tutor at the same college where he had been an undergraduate, with only a few years’ break as a schoolmaster in between. For many years he had lived in rooms in college in wonderful comfort and seclusion, cared for by an excellent and devoted scout, Arthur Brewster, writing scholarly books, lecturing superbly, dining well, one of the institutions of the place and utterly contented with his mode of life. Then his mother had died and to his intense annoyance and dismay Jean had come upon his hands. But he had not shirked her, for he was not a shirker. He had taken a house in North Oxford, installed Jean and prevailed upon Arthur and his wife Gladys to come and look after them both. This had worked reasonably well except that Jean had been very miserable in Oxford. She had not been able to keep hens in the little garden and she had been terrified of her brother’s friends; old men, sarcastic and brilliant, who knew their own abstruse subjects inside out but did occasionally profess ignorance upon other subjects, and even more brilliant young men who knew everything. Young and old, they had been alike equally incomprehensible to Jean. She had grown more frail, more muddled, and would not leave the house and garden because the traffic frightened her.
Then had come the time for retirement and it had been borne in upon James Anderson that for Jean’s sake he must leave Oxford. The prospect, for him, had been appalling, for the roots he had put down in the place had gone under the very walls of the buildings like the roots of a poplar tree. Nevertheless, grim-faced, he had decided to hack them out, for that was his duty. But where should he go? It must be the country for Jean’s sake, and not too far from Oxford for his, so that he could go back now and again and gently comfort the torn remnants of those root ends that still remained under the buildings. But where? It was in this dilemma that a friend had suggested to him that he should seek ordination and a country living. He had been all his life a convinced Anglican but this suggestion had taken him by surprise. He had felt unworthy. Later, after thinking it out and discussing it with those best qualified to help him, he had come to see it as God’s will for himself and Jean. By taking a country living he would be setting a younger man free for an industrial parish, or one of the new housing estates into which the hordes of the heathen English were now pouring in their thousands, or the mission field. He had good health and private means. He would be able to take a living with a small stipend, would not find the work too much for him and would have leisure for the writing of his books. So he had gone to a theological college for a year, leaving Jean still in North Oxford in the care of the Brewsters but much happier when he was away. After his ordination they went to Appleshaw, the devoted Brewsters going with them.
How fortunate he was in the Brewsters James Anderson did not perhaps sufficiently consider, for he belonged to a generation that had taken good service and comfortable living for granted, but he was grateful for the small dignified Georgian house in which he lived, his garden, his study and his peace. As a parish priest he was thankful to find that he got on reasonably well. The glorious church gave him profound satisfaction and to administer the sacraments within it, as so many other men had done before him, shook him as nothing had shaken him yet. For a man who had been lecturing all his life preaching only needed a little readjustment, and he barked out short scholarly sermons twice a Sunday with no trouble at all. He got on famously with the indigenous countryfolk, men like Joshua Baker and Bert Eeles. He found that he understood them as well as liked them, and they on their side liked his Scottish integrity and forthrightness. But the women! Not the countrywomen, whom he liked nearly as well as their husbands, but the Hepplewhite and those like her, and that appalling woman Valerie Randall. He had never liked women. They had souls to be saved, he knew, but his knowledge remained purely academic. But there were those in the parish whom he loved with a steady and reverent affection, Colonel and Mrs. Adams, Mrs. Croft the district nurse, Dr. Fraser, a gruff and sensible fellow Scot, and Paul Randall, and to them he humbly hoped that he was sometimes of use. If he was then he could be glad that he had come here.
At work at his study table he was aware of the vicarage thrush singing at the bottom of the garden. The cadences of his song seemed to intensify the silence and deepen the blue of the spring evening. He laid down his pen and listened, not so much to the song as to the silence, and found it hard to believe that anything existed within it except himself and the thrush. He was Adam, in those days of blessed solitude before Eve came. Since he came to Appleshaw he had tasted solitude with more understanding than in his Oxford days, and for this knowledge also he was glad that he had come.
Chapter IV
1
MARY too, as she left her bedroom, was aware of the depth of the country silence, but it was now her duty to turn her attention to her bathroom. “Baker and I distempered it,” said Mrs. Baker. “We felt we couldn’t let you see it like it was.”
The bathroom was over the kitchen and looked out over the kitchen garden. The walls were shocking pink and the ceiling sky blue. Tact was one of Mary’s strong points and as she smiled her appreciation there was no sign upon her face of her inward recoil. The bath was an old-fashioned one poised on four legs, with the enamel peeling off. It was extremely small but on the other hand the mahogany throne was approached by two steps. It seemed to Mary that there was no washbowl, towel rail, chair or cupboard, but the light was growing dim and she put out her hand for the switch. There did not seem to be one. “There’s electric light?” she asked.
“Oh no,” said Mrs. Baker. “Lamps and candles. We’ve only had the Rayburn the last two years. Those bills I told you of are in the kitchen, and the bills for the tea and sugar and eggs and that. I thought you must have something to start you off, and I took bread and milk for you. It’s all in the larder.” They were at the bottom of the stairs now and Mary had gone down them stepping carefully in the center of the worn treads, as she had done as a child. “The parlor and dining room are clean but they’ve not been lived in for some while, for Miss Lindsay was bedridden at the last. They smell a bit damp and I laid a fire in the parlor just in case you should wish to put a match to it.”
In the kitchen she gave Mary the bills and put on a shrunken coat that hung behind the door. It must once have been a child’s and was as much too tight for her as Baker’s coat was too large for him. “I’ll be around in the morning at ten o’clock,” she said. “You won’t be nervous all on your own?”
“I don’t think I’ve got a nerve in my body
,” said Mary. “I’ve been terrified, in the blitz, but never nervous. I slept alone in my London flat.”
“Ah, you’re used to it,” said Mrs. Baker. “Good night, dear,” and she banged the door behind her and was gone.
Now I’m alone in my house, thought Mary. Now it’s beginning.
She went upstairs again and in the last of the sunset light unpacked her things, folding them carefully away in the drawers that Mrs. Baker had lined with clean white paper, stopping sometimes to look at the room and get the feel of it, for she was one of those women to whom the privacy of her bedroom is as important as his shell to a snail. It was always a matter of astonishment to her that those religious who slept not in cells but in dormitories could retain their sanity. She supposed they abandoned their shell for love of God and in prayer found the sheltering of His hand instead. Mary herself came of an agnostic family but she had been confirmed at school, under pressure from her head mistress, had enjoyed singing hymns in chapel and still went to church at Christmas and Easter, finding herself deeply moved by the beliefs that were the rock beneath the charming traditions and practices. But where had she heard the phrase that had come into her mind, the sheltering of God’s hand? She couldn’t imagine. It had seemed to come from the room.
The light had nearly gone but she had taken possession of her shell. Many other women had called it theirs but they had passed and now it was hers. Her Chinese dressing gown with the golden dragons lay on the bed and the silver-backed brushes and silver-topped bottles from her dressing case, miraculously not smashed when Mr. Baker dropped it, sparkled on the grave Victorian mahogany dressing table. John’s photograph was on the mantelpiece and a volume of Jane Austen was by her bed. She liked Jane. She liked her cheerful sanity. She had expected no very great things of human nature, yet she had loved it, and in Mr. Knightley and Jane Bennett she had portrayed a quiet steady goodness that had been as lasting in literature as it would have been in life. And she had lived in a house much like this, in a village hidden in a quiet fold of green and rural England, and found her existence entirely satisfying. That’s why I’ve come, thought Mary. To have a look at the few last fragments of her England before it is too late; that and to keep faith with Cousin Mary.