“So was I. Such a waste of time. My name is Michael Stone.”
The name seemed familiar but she could not remember why. Both Michael and Stone were, after all, very usual names. Perhaps she had met a Michael Stone before. She smiled and said, “My name is Mary O’Hara. I’m afraid it sounds rather like a musical comedy but I can’t help that. I’m Irish.” He laughed in sudden delight and she wondered why. “Is that so funny?” she asked.
“Funny that you should think it necessary to tell me you’re Irish. Apart from the name your looks give you away even before you open your mouth, and when you speak you’re damned entirely.”
“Damned?” she asked, affronted.
“In the eyes of these stiff English. They’re so damned superior. We Celts are the blood in their veins but they don’t know it. Their loss, of course.”
“You don’t look Irish,” said Mary.
“Heaven forbid! I’m Welsh.”
“But Stone isn’t a Welsh name.”
His face tightened and Mary thought she had been abrupt again. “I’m Welsh,” he repeated.
“From the mountains?” she asked.
“I was born in the mountains,” he said.
“I live in a valley running down to the sea,” said Mary. “Miles from anywhere. The gales roar over your head but it’s warm and sheltered in the valley.”
“You must like it here,” he said gently. “With the greenness and the soft air and the wind from the sea. Do you know Belmaray?”
“Not yet. I’ve not been here long. I teach at Oaklands, my aunt’s little private school. But Mr. Wentworth asked me to go and see them at Belmaray.”
“You must go,” he said. “And when you come you must see the manor and its garden. Ruined, but so lovely. They’ve very little to do with this world at all. And neither has Miss Wentworth.”
“Is she so extraordinary?” asked Mary.
“Very extraordinary. She gave me the job, though I had no reference, and when I told her I’d been in prison she never asked why.”
It seemed to Mary that the room was tipping over. The table in front of her seemed to be on a slant and she braced her shoulders. But the earthquake was in her own mind, where recent thoughts and phrases were falling headlong one over the other. . . Human nature is fundamentally odd. Ruined but so lovely. One is loath to pass on. I always wanted to marry a hero but I would give my life for one of the children. . . The room steadied about her again and she found that he was helping her on with her coat. She had not looked at him. Why all this melodrama in her mind? No one was asking her to give her life. Nothing was required of her at present but common politeness and not to pass on. She turned round and smiled at him. “Are you in a hurry to get back to Josephine or shall we walk as far as Farthing Reach, where the swans are? It’s up-river a little way. Not far.”
“Yes, I’d like that,” he said.
Outside they found fitful sunshine, pools of clear blue above them in the sky and reflected below in the shining tarmac of the road. It was cool and fresh with now and then a scent of flowers drifting across their faces, for Silverbridge was one of those towns that have old walled gardens hidden away behind the house fronts, gardens where the violets have been multiplying for generations. When they reached the path by the river they had these gardens upon their right and every now and then, through an open door in an old stone wall, they could see drifts of daffodils and the crimson and gold of polyanthus. Beside one of these garden doors Mary noticed a board up, “For Sale,” and through the door she could see a particularly attractive little house. “What lunatics, to sell a little house like that,” she thought briefly, and then forgot it, intent upon talking to Michael. It was she, now, who kept their talk going for Michael’s mood had become one of exhaustion and discouragement. He had taken a very sudden decision, she guessed, in telling her what he had, and now he wished he had not done it.
“I wonder where you got that hat?” she asked him, laughing.
“Borrowed it from Bob Hewett, who’s laid up at present. He’s senior gardener and pig-man. I haven’t had time yet to collect any suitable pig-garments of my own. He’s a grand old chap. Doesn’t resent me.”
“He’s glad to have you, I expect.”
“Possibly.”
“And you like Margary best of the Wentworth children.”
“She’s like her father.”
“It’s Winkle who’s my pet,” she said, and kept him going with stories of her children, racily told, until they came to Farthing Reach, where the river widened almost to a lake, with small streams winding through the sedges and the water-meadows carpeted with kingcups. Year after year the swans nested deep within the sedges and a few of them were always to be found here. There were three now, floating serenely on the blue water. A small wooden bridge crossed a stream here and they stopped and leaned their arms upon the parapet while stillness and silence held them. The sun was low and the streaming gold from the west burnished the kingcups to an unbelievable brilliance. Michael shut his eyes against the bright blue and green and gold, and the intolerable whiteness of the swans. The gentleness and softness of the west-country, that just now so suited his mood, was absent from this scene, and there was something piercing about its brilliant beauty.
“Gorgeous birds,” murmured Mary beside him.
“Yes,” he answered.
“You’re not looking at them.”
He abruptly opened his eyes. “I’m sorry. And you’ve brought me all this way to look at them. Their plumage is sheer light. Beautiful but rather alarming.”
“They’re made of alarming stuff,” Mary agreed. “Light and power. Don’t you think a swan is one of the birds of power? They focus something, as a stormcock does.”
“Something I’ve never liked the thought of,” said Michael.
“They heard you. They’re moving away,” said Mary. To her there was no sharpness in the bright beauty, though it woke almost unbearable longing in her. All about her she was conscious only of a pure distillation of good will, but she could not reach it. It was odd, she thought. With her aunt this morning, that regular churchgoer and indefatigable knitter for charities, she had been conscious of such evil. With this man, of whom she knew nothing except that he had lately been in prison, of such good, his good a part of the good will that she could not reach. She thought of her own longing for goodness, her deep intent of love, and of her abysmal failure today. There was a missing link. Until the death of self had come to pass the deep intent could not make contact with the good will that waited, longing as the heart longed to bring the seed to flower.
“Another man would not have told me,” she said suddenly, her own truth delighting in this absence of the guile she hated.
“I told you because it struck me that when you came to Belmaray I should like to be the one to show you the manor. If I had done that without telling you what I have told you we should have advanced very quickly to friendship.” He smiled at her. “Two Celts in a foreign land. It wouldn’t have been fair to you.”
He was still looking at her and the sadness in him seemed to dim the brightness. She realized now, with awe and fear, that the recognition had not been on her side only.
“Now it will be quite fair,” she said. “And I couldn’t let anyone but you introduce me to Josephine.”
They were walking back towards the town now. He was looking away and did not immediately answer. Then he looked round and smiled again, a smile of such delight that it took her by surprise. “You’re as extraordinary as Miss Wentworth,” he said. “I believe you would do as she has done, let it go on to friendship and never try to find out, from myself or another, what crime I’ve committed.”
“It wouldn’t go on to friendship if I did,” said Mary. “I believe asking questions is fatal to—to—any sort of happy relationship. I try not to ask them even in my mind. I don’t mean that I don?
??t wonder about people and try to understand them, I do, but never—” She paused, blushing hotly. She was sounding conceited and trite.
“We have a right to our own experience,” said Michael. It’s a part of our house of life. You don’t go into other people’s houses unless they invite you in.”
“No,” said Mary in a small voice. It struck her suddenly that that was an invitation that had never come her way. In the large turbulent family to which she belonged intimacy had been only of the physical sort. Their bodies had tumbled over each other in a constricted space but the harassed parents had shown little of themselves to the children and invited no confidence in return. To have that sort of door opened to you by someone you loved, to go in, and thereafter for the same house of life to shelter two souls. Did that ever happen? Or was it like the contact she longed for, a happiness achieved so rarely that she could scarcely hope for it? If it could happen, as the fruit of much patience and selflessness, then it might be one of the best things life had to offer.
“But no one can be expected to build a friendship in a vacuum,” said Michael, smiling. “There must be a few facts to make some sort of scaffolding.” He paused and she could feel by the unease in her own body how difficult it was for him to go on. Then he plunged jerkily and curtly into it. “I had two professions. I was a writer, and a solicitor as well. A mistake, I think, for me at any rate. Rather like having two wives, you’re bound to love one more than the other and sacrifice one to the other. And that’s what I did. Of course during the war I had to abandon both of them and fight, but after the war I took up with them again. I wrote a play that I thought pretty good. Other people didn’t agree with me and they wouldn’t back it. I was a conceited oaf and didn’t think that anything that had my name to it could possibly fail. So I backed it myself, with trust funds. You know what that means? I was sure I’d be able to pay back what I’d borrowed but the play failed and my client’s money was lost. I was what is known as a fraudulent solicitor. In other words, a common thief. I got a stiff sentence and I deserved it. That’s the bare outline of a nasty story.”
“I remember now,” said Mary. “I read about your trial. And I’ve read two of your books, and I saw one of your plays acted by a repertory company once.”
“Did you like my books?” he asked.
“No.”
“Do you still want me to show you Josephine?”
“Of course. All that has nothing to do with Josephine and me.”
“Did you ever read the poems of Thomas Sturge Moore?” he asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Mary, bewildered. “I’m afraid I don’t read as much poetry as I ought.”
“He wrote a poem about a swan that might appeal to you,” said Michael. “And one about kindness that appeals to me. Here we are, back at the bridge. You go across it, don’t you? I stay this side.”
He’d had enough. He was abrupt about it but she did not mind. “Good-bye,” she said, “until I come to Belmaray.”
She turned once, at the top of the bridge, and waved to him, and then went lightly away down the other side. He stood and watched her, and the words of an Irish poet came into his mind. “My thoughts are going after her, and it is that way my soul would follow her, lightly, and airily, and happily, and I would be rid of all my great troubles.”
Chapter 12
1
Winkle had inherited not only her father’s love of the creatures but also his knight-errantry. At a tender age she had been fishing spiders out of the bath, putting moths out of the window and placing creatures that had got upside down right way up again. She was ever on the watch for those unfortunates who had fallen into, or been placed in, an environment unsuited to them, and no considerations of personal safety or convenience were ever allowed to stand in the way of their immediate rescue. And neither were the conventional prohibitions of society. She would have been the first to pull an ox or an ass from a ditch on the sabbath day, and the fact that Baba belonged to Mrs. Belling was not to her way of thinking sufficient reason why Baba should remain at Oaklands when it would be better for him to be at the vicarage. Pat might think so but she did not. Her sense of property had as yet been a merely one-sided development. She yelled blue murder if any beloved object was removed from her, but she had not yet realized that what she desired to lay her hands upon was not necessarily hers to dispose of by divine right. The sense of divine right died hard in her, and the fact that it was coupled more often than not with the crusading spirit did not make her occasional pilfering any less embarrassing for her family. She had not relinquished Baba on Friday afternoon because her conscience had been persuaded, but because even in the midst of tears and temper her good sense had realized that the moment for abduction was not yet. But upon this wet Monday the golden opportunity was hers, and she seized it with a promptitude and skill remarkable in one so young.
“Please may I be excused?” she asked Miss Giles in the middle of the afternoon’s handicraft lesson, which was irritating her extremely. She was not good with her hands and her woven raffia basket was looking less like a basket and more like a bird’s nest with every moment that passed. The more she pulled at it the worse it got. The palms of her hands were sticky and she felt hot and bothered and as wicked as could be. Miss Giles looked down at Winkle’s crimson, exasperated face, and the tangled mess of her basket, and thought peacefully that a brief period of separation between the two of them would be good for both. “Yes, Henrietta,” she said. “But you must be back in this room again in five minutes’ time.”
“Ten minutes,” said Winkle, who had in mind a short trip to her country for the refreshment of her jaded spirit.
Miss Giles, who beneath the new serenity was still Miss Giles, quelled the giggling of the class with a sharp look and said firmly, “Five minutes.”
Winkle glowered and slid to the floor. She had every intention of being fifteen. She had started the day as good as gold, and while Miss Giles had been reading the story about the little girl who had gone through a door and found the secret garden, just as she went through her door and found the country, her spiritual state had been that of a cherub. But her adored Miss O’Hara’s bad temper had upset her completely. Her idol had fallen and now she was so miserable that naughtiness was her only hope. She was rarely miserable, but she had discovered that when she was disobedience gave her a feeling of revenge which was very soothing. She walked to the door with clumping feet and a truculent lower lip, and shut it behind her more forcibly than was necessary.
But out in the hall Winkle knew suddenly with dismay that it was no good going to the broom cupboard because she could not go to the country. She knew it intuitively, as a horse knows he cannot take a fence too high for him and balks and turns aside. In her disillusionment and naughtiness she was much older than she had been. She was the Winkle she would be in a few years’ time, longing for the country but not able to go there any more. Where should she go? Standing miserably at the foot of the staircase she remembered that the day girls were forbidden to go upstairs, so she thought she would go there. If it was not going up the stairs to the door of the country it was a least going upstairs and that was something. She mounted slowly and stealthily, feeling rather small although she was also feeling so old, towards the forbidden territory of the upstairs landing.
When she got there she did not like it. The only light came from the hall below, and through a closed dirty little window curtained with ivy outside and cobwebs inside. It was murky and stuffy and chilly. The landing was carpeted with a mud-colored oilcloth and the draughts that came from under the tall brown doors ran over it and coiled themselves about Winkle’s ankles like slimy eels. At the end of the landing the back stairs fell away into blackness, and up them came a dirty sort of smell compounded of faulty drains, stale food and the kitchen cat. Outside the closed bathroom door a pool of water lay on the floor, where Annie had spilt it when she had been emptying Mrs. Be
lling’s slop pail. To Winkle, standing at a distance, it looked thick and horrible, like a frightening picture of Darnley’s murder that she had seen once in a history book; and what was the form lying there with arms flung out and head tipped back, groaning and gasping? And whimpering too. Or was it someone else who was whimpering? Some little boy who was slowly being put to death like the other horrible picture of the princes in the Tower.
For the first time in her life Winkle was in the grip of intolerable fear. She felt sick and dreadfully cold, and a little rivulet of sweat was running down her back. She wanted to cry out, but her throat had closed up and she could not. She wanted to run away but her feet would not move. She was lost and cast away in this evil place and there was no help for her either in heaven or earth for she had lost them both. Her country was gone and home was gone and she was alone. “Mummy! Mummy!” That was the little boy crying out, the little boy who was being murdered. “Mummy!” No, it wasn’t, it was herself. Her throat had opened again and she was crying aloud for her mother in this dreadful place. But her mother couldn’t hear her, for she was miles away in the different darkness of home, the different chilliness, that clean darkness of the house and that coolness of the fresh spring. But the thought of her mother saved her. Mummy was alive and at home waiting for her. She must get to Mummy.
She began to edge forward towards the top of the stairs. She must get down backwards she thought, keeping her eyes on the groaning thing on the floor, for otherwise it might come alive and jump on her from behind. She began to feel sick again but she went on edging forward, keeping her eyes on the thing and the pool of blood under its head. And then suddenly, in the stronger light at the top of the stairs, she saw what it was; just a pile of dirty clothes lying on the floor waiting to be counted for the laundry. And the pool of blood was only a pool of water. “Mummy!” she breathed in relief, not crying out this time, just remembering the talisman of the name that had saved her. She knew where she was now, not lost but just on the upstairs landing at school. And that wasn’t someone groaning, but someone fast asleep and snoring behind that half-open door. And it wasn’t a little boy whimpering but a dog. It was Baba! She stood still and listened, courage returning as crusading zeal burned in her once again. She turned and made her way back down the landing to another half-open door from which the sound seemed to be coming. To reach it she had to pass that other door, and it took all her courage to pass it, but she could get at her courage now, and scuttling past that horrid snore she pulled open the door of the cupboard and dimly saw Baba in a shivering heap on the floor. She snatched him up, scuttled past the snore again, and pelted down the stairs to the broom cupboard. She ran in and sat down with Baba in her arms. One of his eyes had been cut at the corner and one paw seemed to be hurt. She rocked him in her arms and crooned to him, and soon he stopped whimpering and was comforted.