Chapter 11
Mary’s joy was short-lived, for the rest of the morning went from bad to worse. Her cold increased and like all exceptionally healthy people she was apt to exaggerate minor ailments when they afflicted herself, though when they afflicted other people her optimism took a more hopeful view. “I’m sure I’ve got flu,” she said to Miss Giles at break, over the tepid tea brought to them by a worried Annie. “It hurts to swallow.”
“That’s not to say you have flu,” said Miss Giles with maddening calm, and not looking up from the Daily Telegraph. “Why not take your temperature? The thermometer is in the bathroom cupboard. It’ll stop you fussing.”
Mary flew from the room, lest she wring Giles’s neck, and up the stairs to the bathroom, banging the door behind her. Fussing! And here she was with a temperature of a hundred and two keeping on her feet with the greatest difficulty just so as not to leave poor old Giles to do all the work alone. She inserted the thermometer under her tongue and sat down on the edge of the bath. “If I die will Donald Woodcote send a wreath?” she wondered. “Daffodils and tulips.” She withdrew the thermometer. 98.4. She shook the thermometer furiously over the side of the bath, dropped it and smashed it. “Damn!” she said for about the sixth time that morning, gathered up the pieces and went downstairs again.
“A hundred and two?” asked Miss Giles, still not looking up from the Daily Telegraph.
“Sub-normal,” snapped Mary.
“Bad luck,” said Miss Giles.
“Heavens, I don’t want to be ill!” ejaculated Mary.
“Don’t you? I thought you did.”
“I’m in such a rage. I just want to be what I’m not, that’s all,” said Mary.
“What would you like to be?” asked Miss Giles.
“Not a school marm. Those kids have been driving me so wild this morning that I’ve snapped the heads off the lot of them.”
“Don’t do that,” said Miss Giles absently, her head still bent. “It’s not their fault if you’ve caught a cold.”
Mary gasped, holding to the edge of her chair with both hands lest she seize the tea-cosy and bring it down on Giles’s head. Giles to tell her not to snap at the children! Giles! She sneezed explosively into her handkerchief.
Miss Giles looked up and met the accusing eyes above the handkerchief, then looked down again. “I know, O’Hara,” she said. “It’s not the children’s fault that I’m not a happy woman. Yet I take it out of them. You’re quite right. Yet, do you know, I’ve only just begun to realize it.”
Mary’s eyes became gentle. “One doesn’t realize,” she murmured.
“One doesn’t want to,” said Miss Giles. “Who wants to realize that human nature, not excepting one’s own, is fundamentally cruel? Belsen, the torture chambers of Barcelona, all such things, they are putrescence pushing up from the general unhealthiness. We are all intolerably wicked.”
“You’ve spent most of break staring at the Daily Telegraph,” said Mary. “Are you reading it?”
“No,” said Miss Giles.
“Then read it,” said Mary. “You’re in no state of health just now to stare at your own intolerable wickedness. You’d take a jaundiced view. Wait till you’ve had a tonic and a fortnight’s holiday.”
Miss Giles smiled. “It’s your half-day, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I’m going to get those tickets.”
“Then get me a tonic at the same time, will you? And some for yourself too, I should think, with that cold. What do you usually take?”
“Anything that has one of those nice little booklets with pictures of before and after,” said Mary. “It’s the pictures that do me good. I’m very suggestible.”
“That’s the blessing of being a Celt,” said Miss Giles. “I’m from the manufacturing midlands and I find faith hard. Break’s over. Ring the bell, O’Hara.”
The rest of the morning continued difficult, for resolved not to snap the children’s heads off Mary taught them with that long-suffering, martyrish gentleness and patience which are so maddening to those who are being suffered and endured. The children only vaguely understood the situation but they did feel that they were being treated as though they were naughty, when they were not, and that by their beloved Miss O’Hara, and with that unerring sense of suitability which children possess they made the crime fit the punishment and became naughty, and the morning ended in tears. At dinner time they were still damp, and there was underdone cod and overcooked rice pudding, and the rain had come on again worse than ever.
“Ought you to go out, now it’s turned like this?” asked Miss Giles after dinner.
“I must walk it off,” said Mary. “Of all the tempers I’ve ever been in this is the worst. I tell you, Giles, I’ve never been quite so hateful as I am today.”
Upstairs in her bedroom she could not find anything. She had finished her face powder and though she had a new box somewhere it had disappeared. She dropped her lipstick and it rolled into a dark corner and vanished. She could not remember where she had put her beret, and dragging out a heavy drawer to look for it she pulled the drawer too far and fell over backwards with it. “Why? Why?” she demanded furiously of fate. “Yesterday was such a lovely day. I was so well and looked so pretty and I felt a saint.” The contrast between yesterday and today was so ludicrous that she began to laugh. She had noticed before that health and the consciousness of beauty caused what felt like a holy serenity to spread through one’s whole being and one’s pride mistook the source of it. In a chastened mood she drew the hood of a very shabby old brown raincoat over her head, hiding her bright hair. Her face she left as it was, red-nosed and shiny; on a day like this no one would be out and no one would see her. She stuffed her handbag full of handkerchiefs and ran downstairs. Just as she was opening the front door to escape from the hated house Annie came out into the hall and waylaid her.
“Miss O’Hara, I’m that worried about Mrs. Belling. She’s sleeping so heavy.”
“Well, do her good, Annie,” said Mary impatiently. “You told us she was having a day in bed because she was tired. Though what she does to make her tired only she and heaven know.”
“But she didn’t eat her lunch, Miss O’Hara.”
“Mary O’Hara, I hate you,” said Mary to herself. “That last remark of yours was quite vile. Now if Annie says Aunt Rose had dover sole and strawberry mousse you are not to remark that the school had cod and rice pudding.”
“Such a nice little bit of sole and a peach to follow,” said Annie sadly. “Very dainty it was.”
“Really?” said Mary with sarcasm. “Nicely cooked I expect, neither underdone nor overdone, not like—” She bit her lip. “Don’t worry, Annie,” she said gently. “People don’t feel hungry when they’re in bed. But she’ll wake up ready for her tea. You’ll see.”
She slipped through the front door and turned to shut it, but Annie had hold of it. “I wish you’d just step up, Miss, and take a look at your aunt.”
“It’s my half-day,” said Mary desperately. “And anyway I’m no good at illness. If you’re anxious ask Miss Giles to look at her.”
She turned and ran, and did not stop running until she was some way down the road. Even then she walked quickly, with a queer feeling in her spine, as though she expected a long hairy arm, with a clammy hand with clutching fingers at the end of it, to reach out of the gate of Oaklands, take hold of her about the waist and pull her back again. The sensation is well known by those who have only one half-day a week.
She walked a little further and saw the old granite bridge spanning the river. A faint gleam of sun shone through the rain and lit the wet stone to silver. The tops of the tall elms were faintly flushed with color and a hint of a rainbow in the sky echoed the arc of the bridge. The fugitive moment of beauty came down like a bright sword between Mary and Oaklands. When it passed she was set free. She stopped hurrying and
turned quietly to the right across the bridge and stood there leaning on the parapet looking at the slipping water, pearl grey and dimpled with the rain.
But though she was free from the oppression of Oaklands she had not forgotten about it and she felt ashamed that she had not gone upstairs to look at her aunt. After all, she was her aunt, and it would have been kinder to Annie; also to poor old Giles. The fact was that she had funked it. She had dreaded going back to that room after the interview of the morning. It had been an utterly horrid interview, and yet she did not quite know why. Nothing had happened exactly, except that she had been rude to Aunt Rose. She was ashamed of that and yet somehow not ashamed of the interview as a whole, for she had fought as well as she could. It had been an odd sensation, that feeling that a fight was on and that she and her aunt had in their private quarrel been like the two spearheads of opposing forces. Those forces must have had great strength, for she had felt as though she leaned back against immense power. “Is it ludicrous?” she wondered. “Would such power make use of a rude, undisciplined, self-righteous gawk like me?” She supposed it would. She supposed that any human spirit was at every moment a spearhead for one side or the other. The battle faced all ways and it was always a hand to hand tussle, and yet always with the power of all behind each. “We won that,” she thought. “I had a queer feeling in the middle of it as though . . . I remember . . . as though far off the tide turned. . . Did I really think that or is it the river making me think I did?”
She blinked, for the water was now liquid silver. The sun was out again. She turned, conscious suddenly of someone with her, not just passing by but with her as no one had been with her yet. A tall scarecrow figure, in a disreputable muddy mackintosh and an obliterating dripping hat, was standing near her. He raised the hat, revealing a countenance startlingly other than Mary had expected, and immediately replaced it again.
“Please forgive me, but could you tell me where the vet lives?”
“Which vet?” asked Mary. “There are two.”
“Fool that I am!” lamented the man. “I never asked which vet.”
“Is it cows and pigs or dogs and cats?” asked Mary. “They both do both, but they are specialists.”
“Cows and pigs,” said the man. “One pig, to be correct, Josephine.”
“That’ll be Mr. Viner,” said Mary. “I hope it’s not serious?”
“Not quite the thing. Just to call at his leisure. Our telephone is out of order, but I wanted the walk. It’s my half-day.”
“Mine too,” said Mary, and found that she had crossed the bridge and was walking towards the little town in the scarecrow’s company. “I appear to be showing you the way,” she said, in surprise.
“It’s very necessary that you should,” he replied, “for I don’t know it.”
She suited her stride to his, contentedly and easily, walking not as people walk in the town, going a short distance in a hurry, but as they walk in the country, going a long way for pleasure. Standing beside her he had been with her as no one had ever been with her, asking for guidance he had said something that she knew was of profound importance to both of them, walking together she could scarcely believe that five minutes ago she had been alone. What was happening? She did not feel anything about him particularly, except an overmastering curiosity to see his face again. Accustomed to go straight for what she wanted she said, “That hat is a wonderful combination of hat and umbrella in one, but it has stopped raining.”
He laughed and took it off. She looked at him, as she was accustomed to look at every stranger, with frank interest. Then not knowing what she did she pushed her hood back, for it was getting in the way of her vision, and looked at him with slowly growing recognition. So when it happened suddenly this was how it happened. She had often wondered. But the magazine stories had got it all wrong. It was not an affair of sudden heartbeats, and hot and cold flushes, as though one were going to have influenza, it was just this quiet recognition. But in the approach of love there must be a sharpness, for that moment of beauty that had come down like a sword had cut her life in two. When she crossed the bridge she had crossed from her girlhood to womanhood.
The moment of understanding passed and she was aware of the dark eyes of an extremely attractive man looking at her with that sparkle of lively appreciation with which she was familiar in attracted males. She responded with her accustomed reciprocal sparkle, delightfully conscious as she smiled and dimpled of her own prettiness. Then she sneezed, and remembered. No lipstick, no powder, a cold in the head, hair anyhow. A slut like Aunt Rose. Like Annie. She was betrayed now by her own indiscipline. She looked away from him. It had not been appreciation she had seen in his face, only a puckish mockery. She would not look at him again but as she walked on, sadly blowing her nose, she could still see his vivid mocking face. It had only been a short journey together after all. She stopped, turning her head away to sneeze once more. “It’s that house there,” she said in muffled tones. “The one with the green door. Good-bye.”
“You’ve a rotten cold,” he said. “Bad luck.” She resented the amusement in his tone with a sudden flash of the demon, but her quick movement away from him was rendered a little uncertain by her inability to remember where she was going. “Wouldn’t a cup of tea do you good?”
“It’s not tea-time,” she said. “And I’ve shopping to do.” Then she remembered her manners and turned towards him. “But thank you. Good-bye.”
Yet she remained where she was. Yes, he was amused, but not unkindly so; from the way he looked at her she might have been Winkle. He was a much older man than she had thought. He had taken off the ridiculous mud-caked mackintosh, much too big for him and obviously not his, and she saw that he wore shabby but well-made clothes. He had an air of assurance and distinction that made her suddenly feel like a little girl, like Winkle, and yet he had an exhausted look that made her feel intensely motherly. She hesitated, for once in her life at a loss as to what to do, and she was glad when he abruptly took charge.
“Look,” he said, “you go and do your shopping and I’ll go to the vet, and then we’ll meet at the teashop over there. It won’t be so early by that time. I know you’re not the kind of girl who lets herself be picked up in this casual fashion, but then I’m not the kind of man who does casual picking up, but this once, why not? I’m staying at Belmaray as temporary pig-man and gardener to Miss Wentworth at the manor. I think her nephew the vicar would vouch for me; though I’m bound to say he doesn’t know me very well. Is that all right?”
“Quite all right,” said Mary, smiling. “I teach Mr. Wentworth’s little girls.”
“Do you? Then we can talk about them. I like Margary. Good-bye for the moment then.” He smiled at her and went quickly across the road without looking back. She watched him, thinking how well he moved, and then suddenly realized that she was watching him and turned away, feeling suddenly desolate. This sense of recognition, was it possible for one person to have it and not the other?
She got the concert tickets and then went to Boots, where she bought a tonic for herself and Giles, and lipstick and powder. Then going upstairs to the library she sat on the window seat and did her face. She was humiliated to the depths to see the fright she was looking. The scarecrow he had seemed at first could have felt kinship with such an object, but not the man who had emerged from the chrysalis. Pig-man and gardener? He must be keeping pigs for a joke. Or as a cure. Country people said being with sheep cured whooping cough. What did pigs cure? Now she came to think of it he had had in his face that something indefinable that makes the beholder sorry even when he is only a passer-by in the street. Something contrary to well-being is there, some strain or conflict or sickness of mind or body, and one hates to pass on and to have done nothing to help. Was it true, as Giles had said, that human nature was fundamentally cruel? Fundamentally compassionate too, surely. She had snapped the children’s heads off this morning and yet she woul
d give her life for any of them. One was very ready to give one’s life for those one loved, even though one was not very nice to them always. Whatever it was or wasn’t, she thought, human nature was fundamentally odd. And having reached this profound philosophic conclusion, and being distinctly pleased with it, she went downstairs and out into the street.
She walked to the teashop slowly and with a queer mixture of eagerness and reluctance. She wanted to be there and yet she had a sense of inadequacy, of shrinking from something that might be too much for her. With her usual self-confidence at a low ebb she arrived at the teashop shy and hesitant and found the pig-man already waiting for her; with on his side no lack of self-confidence as he got up and welcomed her, helped her off with her coat, settled her in her chair and ordered their tea. She had never dined at a fashionable restaurant or had supper at a nightclub, but that was where he made her feel that she was. She realized that his actions and manner had the ease of long custom. His talk was the gay automatic patter of a man who takes pretty girls out to meals so often that he can entertain them in his sleep. His eyes were distant, and troubled and she thought he had not noticed the change for the better in her looks. She was suddenly piqued and her shyness left her. She waited for a pause in his easy talk about nothing at all and then asked abruptly, “Shall I call you the pig-man, or have you a name?”
There was a sudden odd, sharp pause. Had she been rude, she wondered? She knew that she was, sometimes, in her abruptness. She looked at him anxiously and saw that he was looking at her with such profound awareness of her that she realized he had never been unaware, only his awareness had gone deeper than what she had done to her face. She was ashamed. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“What about?” he asked sharply.
“I was—trivial.”