A Judgement in Stone (12 page)

It looked as if Eva Baalham had delivered Joan into her hands.

Eva was disgruntled these days because, although she now had more rewarding employment with Mrs. Jameson-Kerr, her working hours at Lowfield Hall had been reduced to one morning a week. And this demotion she blamed on Eunice, who did with ease all the jobs she used to groan over and, if the truth were admitted, did them a lot better. As soon as she thought she saw a way of needling Eunice she set about doing so.

“I reckon you’re very pally with that Mrs. Smith then.”

“I don’t know,” said Eunice.

“Always in and out of each other’s places. That’s what I call very pally. My cousin Meadows that’s got the garage, he saw you out in her van last week. Maybe there’s things about her you don’t know.”

“What?” said Eunice, breaking her rule.

“Like what she was before she came here. A street woman, she was, no better than a common prostitute.” Eva wasn’t going to destroy the esoteric quality of this by saying it was generally known. “Used to go with men, and her husband never knew a thing, poor devil.”

That night Eunice was invited to the Smiths’ for supper. They ate what she liked and never got at Lowfield Hall, eggs and bacon and sausages and chips. Afterwards she had a chocolate bar from the shop. Norman sat silent at the table, then departed for the Blue Boar where, out of pity, some Higgs or Newstead would play darts with him. Bumper cups of tea were served. Joan leaned confidingly across the table and began to preach the gospel according to Mrs. Smith. Having finished the last square of her fudge wafer, Eunice seized her opportunity.

She interrupted Joan in her louder, more commanding voice. “I’ve heard something about you.”

“Something nice, I hope,” said Joan brightly.

“Don’t know about nice. That you used to go with men for money, that’s what I heard.”

A kind of holy ecstasy radiated Joan’s raddled face. She banged her flat bosom with her fist. “Oh, I was a sinner!” she declaimed. “I was scarlet with sin and steeped in the foulest mire. I went about the city as an harlot, but God called me and, lo, I heard Him! I shall never forget the day I confessed my sins before the multitude of the brethren and opened my heart to my husband. With true humility, dear, I have laid bare my soul to all who would hear, so that the people may know even the blackest shall be saved. Have another cup, do.”

Amazement transfixed Eunice. No potential blackmail victim had ever behaved like this. Her respect for Joan became almost boundless and, floored, she held out her cup meekly.

Did Joan guess? Perhaps. She was a clever woman and a very experienced one. If it were so, the hoisting of Eunice with her own petard must have brought her enormous amusement without in the least alienating her. After all, she expected people to be sinners. She wasn’t a Wise Man for nothing.

The yellow leaves were falling, oak and ash and elm, and the redder foliage of the dogwood. What flowers remained had been blackened by the first hard frost, and fungus grew under hedges and on fallen trees, the oyster mushroom and the amethyst agaric. Rethatching began on James Newstead’s cottage, his garden filled with the golden straw from a whole wheat field.

George in dinner jacket and Jacqueline in a red silk gown embroidered with gold went to Covent Garden to see
The Clemency of Titus
and spent the night at Paula’s. The Quote of the Month was from Mallarmé:
The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books
. But Giles, far from having read all the books, was deep in Poe. If, as seemed likely, he was never going to make it to India, he might ask Melinda to share a flat with him when they had completed their educations. A Gothic mansion flat was what he had in mind, in West Kensington, say, a kind of diminutive House of Usher with floors of ebon blackness and
feeble gleams of encrimsoned light making their way through the trellised panes.

But Melinda, unknown to him, was in love. Jonathan Dexter was his name and he was reading modern languages. George Coverdale had often wondered, though never spoken his thoughts aloud even to Jacqueline, whether his younger daughter was as innocent as her mother had been at her age. But he doubted it, and was resigned to her having followed the current trend of permissiveness. He would, in fact, have been surprised and pleased had he known Melinda was still a virgin, though anxious if he had guessed how near she was to changing that irrevocable condition.

Now that the ice was, as it were, broken, Eunice often went out walking. As she had roved London, so she roved the villages, marching from Cocklefield to Marleigh, Marleigh to Cattingham, through the leaf-strewn lanes and, as St. Luke’s little summer gave place to the deep of autumn, daring the still dry footpaths that crossed the fields and skirted the woods. She walked purposelessly, not pausing to look, through breaks in the trees, at the long blue vistas of wooded slopes and gentle valleys, hardly noticing the countryside at all. Here it was the same for her as it had been in London. She walked to satisfy some craving for freedom and to use up that energy housework could not exhaust.

She and Joan Smith never communicated by phone. Joan would arrive in the van when she was sure Lowfield Hall was empty but for Eunice. Whatever friend she visited, Jacqueline must pass through Greeving, and she seldom passed without being observed by Joan from the village store. And then Joan would drive up to the Hall, make her way in through the gun room without knocking, and within two minutes Eunice had the kettle on.

“Her life’s just one round of amusement. Sherry-partying with that Mrs. Cairne she is this morning. One can just imagine what goes on in the mind of God when He looks down on that sort of thing. The wicked shall flourish like the green bay tree, but in
the morning they were not, nay, they were not to be found. I’ve got four calls to make in Cocklefield this morning, dear, so I won’t stop a minute.” By calls Joan didn’t mean store or postal deliveries, but proselytising visits. As usual, she was armed with a stack of tracts, including a new one got up to look like a comic and artfully entitled
Follow My Star
.

So fervid an Epiphany Person was she that often when Eunice called, during her walks, at the store only Norman was found to be in charge. And then, from behind the bars of his cage, he shook his head lugubriously.

“She’s off out somewhere.”

But sometimes Eunice called in time to be taken with Joan on her rounds, and from the passenger seat in the van she watched her friend preaching on cottage doorsteps.

“I wonder if you have time to spare today to glance at a little book I’ve brought …”

Or around the council estates that clung to the fringe of each village, red brick boxes screened from the ancient settlement by a barrier of conifers. Occasionally a naïve householder asked Joan in, and then she was gone some time. But more often the door was shut in her face and she would return to the van, radiant with the glow of martyrdom.

“I admire the way you take it,” said Eunice. “I’d give them as good as I got.”

“The Lord requires humility of His servants, Eun. Remember there are some who will be carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom and some who will be tormented by the flame. Don’t let me forget to stop at Meadows’, we’re nearly out of petrol.”

They presented a strange sight, those two, to the indignant watcher as she dropped
Follow My Star
into her dustbin. Joan so spindly with bones like those of a starved child pictured in a charity appeal, her religion having done nothing to conquer her ingrained habit, almost unconscious now, of getting herself up in whore’s garb: short skirt, black “glass” stockings, down-at-heel patent shoes, great shiny handbag, and fleecy white jacket with big shoulders. Her hair was like an inverted bird’s nest, if
birds ever built with golden wire, and on her pinched little face the make-up was rose and blue and scarlet.

Eunice might have been chosen as the perfect foil to her. She had added to her wardrobe since coming to Lowfield Hall only such garments as she had knitted herself, and on those chilly autumn days she wore a round woolly cap and a scarf of dark grey-blue. In her thick maroon-coloured coat, she towered above Joan, and the contrast was best seen when they walked side by side, Joan teetering and taking small rapid steps, Eunice Junoesque with her erect carriage and steady stride.

In her heart, each thought the other looked a fool, but this did not alienate them. Friendship often prospers best when one party is sure she has an ascendancy over the other. Without letting on, Eunice thought Joan brilliantly clever, to be relied on for help whenever she might be confronted by reading matter, but mutton dressed as silly young lamb all the same, a hopeless housewife and a slattern. Without letting on, Joan saw Eunice as eminently respectable, a possible bodyguard too if Norman should ever attempt to carry out his feeble threat of beating her up, but why dress like a policewoman?

Joan made Eunice presents of chocolate each time she came to the shop. Eunice had knitted Joan a pair of gloves in her favourite salmon pink and was thinking of beginning on a jumper.

All Saints’, November 1, was Jacqueline’s forty-third birthday. George gave her a sheepskin jacket, Giles a record of Mozart concert arias. Melinda sent a card with a scrawled promise of “something nice when I get around to coming home.” The parcel, containing a new novel, which arrived from Peter and Audrey had obviously been opened and resealed. George marched off to Greeving Post Office and Village Store and complained to Norman Smith. But what to say in answer to Norman’s defence that the book on arrival was half out of its wrappings and that his wife had repacked it herself for safety’s sake?
George could only nod and say he wouldn’t take it further—for the present.

That week he went for his annual checkup to Dr. Crutchley and was told his blood pressure was up, nothing to worry about but you’d better go on these tablets. George wasn’t a nervous man or one who easily panicked, but he decided he had better make his will, a proceeding he had been procrastinating about for years. It was this will which has given rise to the litigation that still continues, that keeps Lowfield Hall ownerless and deserted, that has soured the lives of Peter Coverdale and Paula Caswall and keeps the tragedy fresh in their minds. But it was carefully drawn up, with all forethought. Who then could have foreseen what would happen on St. Valentine’s Day? What lawyer, however circumspect, could have imagined a massacre at peaceful Lowfield Hall?

A copy of the will was shown to Jacqueline when she got home from a meeting of the parish council.

“ ‘To my beloved wife, Jacqueline Louise Coverdale,’ ” she read aloud, “ ‘the whole of my property known as Lowfield Hall, Greeving, in the County of Suffolk, unencumbered, and to be hers and her heirs’ and successors’ in perpetuity.’ Oh, darling, ‘beloved wife’! I’m glad you put that.”

“What else?” said George.

“But shouldn’t it just be for my life? I’ve got all the money Daddy left me and what I got for my house, and there’d be your life assurance.”

“Yes, and that’s why I’ve willed all my investments to the girls and Peter. But I want you to have the house, you love it so. Besides, I hate those pettifogging arrangements where the widow only gets a life interest. She’s a non-paying tenant to a bunch of people who can’t wait for her to die.”

“Your children wouldn’t be like that.”

“I don’t think they would, Jackie, but the will stands. If you predecease me, I’ve directed that the Hall is to be sold after my death and the proceeds divided between my heirs.”

Jacqueline looked up at him. “I hope I do.”

“Hope you do what, darling?”

“Die first. That’s what I mind about your being older than me, that you’re almost certain to die first. I might be a widow for years, I can’t bear the thought of it, I can’t imagine a single day without you.”

George kissed her. “Let’s
not
talk of wills and graves and epitaphs,” he said, so they talked about the parish council meeting instead, and fund raising for the new village hall, and Jacqueline forgot the hope she had expressed.

It was not destined to be gratified, though she was to be a widow for only fifteen minutes.

The Epiphany Temple in Nunchester is on North Hill just above the cattle market. Therefore it is not necessary when driving there from Greeving to pass through the town, and Joan Smith could make the journey in twenty minutes. Eunice enjoyed the Sunday night meetings. Hymn sheets were provided, but as anyone knows who has tried to give the impression that he has the Church of England morning service off by heart (actually to use the Prayer Book being to betray unpardonable ignorance) it is quite easy to mouth what other people are mouthing and muffle one’s lack of knowledge in folded hands brought to the lips. Besides, Eunice had only to hear a hymn once to know it forever, and soon, in her strong contralto, she was singing with the best of them:

Elroy Camps was no Herbert or Keble.

After the hymns and some spontaneous confessing—almost as good as television, this bit—the brethren had tea and biscuits and watched films about black or brown Epiphany People struggling on in remote places (
in partibus infidelium
, as it were) or delivering the Epistle of Balthasar to famine-stricken persons too weak to resist. Also there was friendly gossip, mostly about
worldly people who hadn’t seen the light, but uttered in a pious way and shoving the onus of censure and blame off onto God. Certainly the brethren honoured the precept of “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

On the whole, they were and are a jolly lot. They sing and laugh and enter with gusto into their own confessions and those of new converts. They talk of God as if He were a trendy headmaster who likes the senior boys to call Him by His Christian name. Their hymns are not unlike pop songs and their tracts are lively with comic strips. The idea of the elect being Wise Men who follow a star is not a bad one. The Camps cult would probably have been latched onto by young people of the Jesus freak kind but for its two insuperable drawbacks distasteful to anyone under forty—and to most people over forty, come to that. One is its total embargo on sexual activity, whether the parties are married or not; the other its emphasis on vengeance against the infidel, which means any non-Epiphany Person, a vengeance that is not necessarily left to God but may be carried out by the chosen as His instruments. In practice, of course, the brethren do not go about beating up their heretical neighbours, but the general impression is that if they do they will be praised rather than censured. After all, if God is their headmaster, they are all prefects.