“Tea’s ready,” said Annie-Laurie.
Hilary enjoyed his tea. He ate slowly, talking easily and amusingly meanwhile, telling Annie-Laurie tales of the country folk in his parish, repeating bits of folklore, telling her things about the birds and beasts. He was rewarded by seeing her cheeks glow and her eyes shine softly as his apparently casual talk reached down to what, from David’s talk of her, he had guessed to be the roots of her being. She began to talk a little too, not saying much, but revealing here and there by a knowledgeable word that he had guessed right and that she was country bred.
“The hills of Shropshire?” he asked her gently. “The hills that look towards Wales? Were you brought up there?”
She looked up, startled. “Why—yes—?”
“You look mountain born,” he told her smiling. “You like Welsh sheep dogs and I see from your books that you like Mary Webb.”
“Actually, I’m Welsh,” said Annie-Laurie. Hilary nodded. He had thought so. Something in her voice. And she was a typical Celt.
“Walking tours were my favorite holidays in my young days,” said Hilary. “Not that you’d think it to look at me now. I tramped all over Shropshire; it was my favorite English county. I saw a lot of Wales, too.”
He went on talking, speaking of this place and that, watching her eyes light up when he mentioned a place she particularly loved. Gradually she began to drop a few scraps of information. She had been born on a farm and had spent her childhood in the hills, the only girl in a family of boys; she had had fun with their dogs and animals. She especially loved the sheep, and their old shepherd used to let her help him at the lambing season. He gave her a bunch of little bells, morris dancers’ bells that had been in his family for generations, and sometimes for fun she used to fasten them round the necks of the lambs. She was very happy while she was still a child, not so happy when she grew older and realized how hard a man her father was, and how her mother feared him. After her mother had died she had not been happy at home any more and had fought hard to get away.
“Win a scholarship?” asked Hilary.
“Yes. . . . Will you have another cup of tea?”
“Thank you,” said Hilary. It was his third, and he didn’t want it, but anything to delay the moment of his departure. The threads were gradually coming into his hands, he felt, but it was difficult going. At the last “yes” she had shut up like a clam. So she’d won a scholarship. Gone to a good school. Had a good education. Among other girls, away from teasing brothers, she’d discovered her gifts: her singing voice, her beauty, her dramatic talent. Restless, fiery, ambitious, feeding on the Celtic poets and dramatists, she would have aimed high, but as a farmer’s daughter would have known the value of hard work. She had worked as a dispenser, David had told him. That must have come after school, but it wouldn’t have contented her for long; she would have slaved at it, saving money to help with her dramatic training. The evidence of her books made the next step obvious.
“Was it repertory after that?” he asked gently.
He’d gone too far. She was too courteous a hostess to protest at his questions, but she was not going to answer them. She put the teapot carefully and slowly back on its stand, then she clasped her hands on her lap. She did not look at him, but he felt her anger and her fear. There was nothing for it now but to give up or to take the bull by the horns. If he gave up he would have done her more harm than good, made her angry and afraid and nothing else; nothing for it now but to go on.
“Annie-Laurie,” he said, stirring his tea with deliberation and speaking slowly and softly, almost as though to himself, “you must try to forgive the curiosity of an old country clod like myself. It’s always seemed odd to me that I should be such a dull fellow when others of my family are so artistically gifted. I have always so loved their gifts—almost worshiped them—my mother’s beauty, David’s art. All artists, all creators of beauty, have my astounded reverence. . . . You have it. . . . I like talking to artists, hearing them tell about their early struggles, finding out by what steps they won their place in their world; that makes me too curious perhaps. You must forgive me. I never saw you on the stage. I wish I had. But I have heard how lovely you were.” He looked up at the bunch of bells hanging from the beam over their heads. “Were those the bells you wore when you danced the Christmas-tree dance and sang the bell song? That was the loveliest thing you did, wasn’t it? The thing that no one who saw or heard you ever forgot.”
She got up abruptly and went to the window and stood there with her back to him. Her anguish seemed beating in waves through the room. Hilary went on calmly talking.
“You made good use of your mountain upbringing, got the freshness and simplicity of it into your work. You’d a lot to give. What I can’t understand, Annie-Laurie, is why you did not go back to the stage when all that unhappy business was behind you. Didn’t you want to go on with the job?”
Annie-Laurie, in control of herself at last, turned round. He thought that she looked like an old woman. “So David Eliot did recognize me,” she said in a flat unemotional voice. “And gave me away.”
“How could he help recognizing you? He had seen you on the stage, and you won him then. It was he who used the word ‘unforgettable’ of the loveliness of your art.”
“It’s always the same,” said Annie-Laurie. “Wherever I go it follows me. We can’t get away from it, Jim and I. To get away from it and to feel safe, that’s all I want. They didn’t know here—at least I had to tell Mrs. Eliot a little—that was only fair—but I didn’t tell her much. You see, I wanted to stay here. So did Jim. One feels so safe here. And I like Mrs. Eliot—I thought we should be able to stay—” Her voice trailed away dully, in incoherent sentences.
“Why can’t you stay?” asked Hilary. “They all want you to stay. Have any of them behaved at all differently to you since my nephew recognized you?”
She looked at him, thinking over what he had said, and as the implication of it dawned upon her a transformation passed over her face that tore at his heart. She grew slowly young again. It was like the rising of the sun. Watching her he realized a little of the agony she must have gone through, fine creature that she was, dragging that story with her wherever she went, smirched and imprisoned by it like a crippled sea gull stuck in the mud. And now this joy. People of honorable living, people to whom she was essentially akin and with whom she was happy, knew her story and discounted it, accepting her for what she actually was, and not for what she appeared to be when the shadow of her history fell upon her. He wondered for how many years she had waited for this, and to what extent her mind had been poisoned by the apparent hopelessness of her hope.
Then shame fell upon Hilary. He had made what he considered his worst blunder yet. And it was a sinful blunder. He had lied; not in actual words, but in implication; he had made her believe that the whole family, and not only David and himself, knew her story. Yet seeing her joy he knew he could not go back and correct the blunder, for his unintentional lie had drawn out one of the envenomed stings that were poisoning her mind. All he could do now was to take it into the pattern of things and try to build good upon it. That’s the only use we can make of our sins and mistakes, he thought, we poor human sinners and fools.
“Then Jim and I can stay,” said Annie-Laurie at last, on a long breath of relief. “We can stay. And they won’t talk to me about it. It’s been good of them, to know and not talk to me about it. I—can’t talk about it.”
“No, they won’t talk to you about it,” Hilary was able to assure her with complete conviction. “And I won’t either after today.”
Annie-Laurie slid to the window seat and sat with her hands folded in her lap, smiling at him. “I’m glad you did, today, because otherwise I shouldn’t have known—”
“That you can stay here, safe, for as long as you like.”
He stopped, for he did not know how to go on. Her fear was the wors
t poison. She was obsessed by it. He was pitifully aware of the obvious fears through which she already must have passed: the fear of death, of shame, of publicity, but without the full confidence which she evidently was not going to give him he could not know what fear it was that haunted her now, whether it was of some objective disaster or of something in herself. He had known cases where unacknowledged sins had given to unhardened sinners such a horror of themselves that they had become mentally ill. Annie-Laurie, he could see, was nervously unbalanced as well as physically frail. But his ignorance made him powerless to help her further. Shame surged over him again. Beyond entangling himself in a whopping if unintentional lie he didn’t seem to have done much. Old fool. His shamed eyes on the knotted rheumatic hands lying on his knees, he searched back over their conversation to find some word, some sentence, that should serve him as a signpost to the next step. It shone out suddenly. “I like Mrs. Eliot.” The quiet words had expressed much more than liking. Nadine meant more to this girl than all the rest of them put together. He had been right when he said to David that this was Nadine’s business. The next step was obviously to go to Nadine, of whom he was so ridiculously terrified, and make a clean breast of the whole thing. It would be a help that she already knew a little of the story, but even so he could not imagine what her reaction would be; he knew her so little.
“Thank you, Annie-Laurie, for the best tea I’ve ever taken.” He got up to go and she came to him, smiling, and he took her hand. “You know, of course, of what any man or woman possessed of any insight whatever is convinced the minute he sets eyes on you, and that is that the verdict of not guilty was a true one.”
It was the worst thing he could possibly have said. Her blue eyes looked suddenly black in her blanched face. For perhaps ten minutes he had brought back her youth and given her happiness, and now with that one sentence he had shattered his gift so cruelly that he thought it would have been better if he had never brought it to her. Yet somehow he kept steady. He kept his eyes on hers, in spite of what he had seen in them, and there was no change in the kindness of his smile. He said what a good cake it had been, and left a suitable message for Malony. Then he said again what a pretty room it was, whistled to the Bastard, and as he went down the steps, called back a few cheery remarks about the weather. In the yard, though she had shut her door, he turned and waved, in case she should be looking out of the window. It was not until he was safely within the shadows of the porch that his legs gave way beneath him and he sat down suddenly on the seat. The Bastard, his legs also giving way in sympathy, sat down suddenly too and laid his chin on Hilary’s boot. After ten minutes of misery Hilary suddenly lifted his head and took a deep breath, as though a load had been lifted. “Nevertheless,” he said, “though she did it, yet she’s innocent.”
— 4 —
The ironing had been cleared away, and Jill and the twins were having nursery tea. They were a pleasant sight. The twins had blue bibs with rabbits on them, and a shaft of sunlight was coaxing unexpected gleams of gold from Jill’s pale hair. There was honey for tea, and sponge fingers. The twins, with their heads tipped back and mugs of milk obliterating their noses, took no notice of their uncle, but Jill looked up with a smile. She had a writing pad beside her plate and a pencil in her hand, and was writing as she ate bread and honey. “Just a line to Auntie Rose to catch the post,” she explained to Hilary. “Before I mention it to Mrs. Eliot I thought I’d just sound Auntie.”
“Yes, do, Jill,” implored Hilary. “I should hate anything to be done hastily because of a chance remark of mine.”
“There’s many a good thing comes to pass just by chance,” said Jill. “Jerry, drink your milk quietly. There’s no need to make that rude noise.” Jerry continued to make a loud wet noise inside his mug. “Jerry, dear, did you hear what I said?”
Jerry lowered his mug slightly, so that his bright eyes sparkled at Jill over its rim, but the noise he made was louder than ever.
José put her now empty mug down on the table, panted from the exertion of absorption, wiped away a milk mustache with her bib, and explained. “He’s ducks quacking.”
“He is not,” said Jill. “He is a very disobedient boy making a very rude noise. Jerry, stop that noise at once.” She did not raise her voice. She looked at Jerry and he looked at her. He quacked louder. Jill stretched out a hand and removed the mug with a quick deft movement that spilled no milk and expressed no irritation, merely calm unhurried resolution. Jerry made a noise like a turkey gobbling and José ee-hawed like a donkey. Jill picked up the honey pot and put it out of reach on the dresser. “I told you yesterday,” she reminded them, “that if you were noisy at tea again you should have no honey.”
Her charges burst all at once into the most appalling roars. Their faces went as scarlet and crumpled as opening poppy buds, but no tears appeared. Either their eyelids were too tightly screwed up to allow the passage of any moisture, or else the tour de force was not an expression of grief but merely of frustration. Whichever it was Hilary decided that nursery tea was not such a pleasant sight as he had thought. He smiled at Jill, and followed by the Bastard beat a hasty retreat to the turret stairs. Looking back he saw that the twins’ faces were now fuchsia-colored, and feared for the blood vessels in their heads. Jill, however, seemed to have no such fears. She was going placidly on with her letter.
Hilary went up the stairs to the chapel, and to his astonishment found it empty of everyone except Nadine. His heart missed a beat. Though he had decided to talk to Nadine as soon as possible, he had had a lingering hope that today might have proved impossible; tomorrow, he thought, would have been better. But there it was. He had noticed before that, a resolve taken, God tends to put one to the test with a humorous suddenness that is slightly disconcerting. “Could I talk to you, Nadine?” he asked abruptly, giving his courage no time to ebb out at his boots.
Then he abruptly forgot himself as he looked at his sister-in-law. In her plain dark dress, standing there remote and still, she did not seem the Nadine whom he knew. He had come upon her at a moment when she had believed herself alone, and though she had turned round to him when he spoke to her, it had been with the slow movement of a half-awakened dreamer who does not know yet who has disturbed him. Facing him she was still again, and her face looked pathetically young, like that of a frightened little girl emerging from a sleep in which she had forgotten that today it is the dentist. Suddenly Hilary knew that he had never known Nadine at all. A woman of the world, he had called her, and been afraid of her, and yet had never really thought out what he meant by the cliché. The term, examined, was meaningless, like most clichés, and in using it he had been guilty of the intellectual laziness of all cliché users. If she was a woman of the world he was just as much a man of the world, but both of them only in their outward seeming. Their intrinsic selves were in the world but not of it; what was of it was the mask that each of them wore, masks made for them by the way of life that each had to follow, hers a mask of sophistication and his of austerity. But only masks. They looked at each other, both of them, and with a flash of astonishment saw each in the other the frightened, ignorant, simple children that they were. They smiled, then moved towards each other, assuming each their familiar relationship; with a difference.
“I was just thinking about you,” said Nadine. A low wooden table had been brought in to hold the paraphernalia needed for cleaning the walls. She sat down on the edge of it and cleared a space for Hilary to sit beside her. She was not afraid of him any more. The challenge in him that had always scared her, the challenge of a man who had done what she dared not do, was no longer there.
“About me?” asked the astonished Hilary.
“Wishing I could be happy like you. And like the man who painted these walls.”
“Yes, he obviously enjoyed himself,” said Hilary, looking about him. “Not that it matters.”
“You mean—not being happy doesn’t matter?”
/> “No. Why should it? At least, not the sort that I think you’re thinking of: personal enjoyment. That is largely a matter of temperament and health, I think, things over which you’ve only the control of your common sense, not your choice.”
“But there’s another sort, a matter of choice?”
“Yes. Best described by saying it’s how you choose to use your unhappiness. That sounds a very negative sort of thing. But it isn’t really.”
“I know what you mean,” said Nadine. “Compassion isn’t at all negative.”
“And those who are happy in the first way never seem capable of it. Which brings me to what I wanted to talk to you about. Annie-Laurie. Now there’s a child in a thoroughly bad emotional and mental state, in pretty desperate need of compassionate help.”
“You’ve been talking to her?” asked Nadine.
“Yes, and I could scarcely have made a worse mess of things. It’s your job, Nadine, not mine.”
“It’s difficult,” said Nadine. “She’s not the child she looks, and she’s only been open with me up to a point.”
“I’ve collected some scraps of information that might be useful to you. Not a very pleasant story.”
“Never mind. Tell it to me.”
He told her the story David had told him, his conversation with Annie-Laurie, and his own conclusion. “My poor Annie-Laurie!” murmured Nadine, and she shivered a little. Those two men! Annie-Laurie must have been torn to pieces between their conflicting demands. And the child. And the death of the child. She thought in silence for a few moments. “If it’s as you say, and she’s guilty and yet somehow justified, it will have been because of the child. The child will have been the crux of it.”