An End and a Beginning (13 page)

He undressed and climbed into bed. He blew out the light. But he immediately got up again and crossed to the window, which he shut, drawing the heavy curtains across them. He went to the door and turned the key in the lock, then returned to bed. But as he lay there he found it impossible to shut out the figure of Miss Fetch, for still her piercing eye seemed to be full on him in the darkened room. “Wonder where her room is?” And he sat up, listening.

“Probably fast asleep by this time,” and he drew up the bedclothes.

“A very odd reception. Had a long, disturbing day, she said,” and he wondered what could disturb in this place of isolation. Then he fell asleep.

Miss Winifred Fetch
had
had a long, disturbing day. And she was not sleeping. It was the released convict who slept so soundly. Indeed, Miss Fetch had had four quite disturbing nights. The name Rath Na had a quite different sound when spoken in the ear; the house seemed suddenly lifted into another dimension. She lay awake, and the tiny, green clock measured out time in its ruthless fashion. Even the combined efforts of Three Hail Marys and a pint of hot milk containing rum had not availed. She lay in her bed thinking over the letter, so short, so abrupt, hardly a letter at all, a mere curt note. It was a horrible jerk, it was like an insult. She knew the wording of this letter by heart, and only wished that she could forget it. The words blazed at her like flames, struck her like stones, made her miserable, made her remember. At last she got out of bed and put on her slippers. Then she took up the alarm-clock and left the room. She went to another room at the far end of the passage, down a dark and narrow second landing. And she hated the clock. But she hated Miss Downey more. What could be the meaning of it? The words went careering round her mind.

“Dear Miss Fetch, Do excuse this short note. I would be very glad if you would arrange to make up a bed at rather short notice in John's old room, as you will be having a visitor for some weeks, I think. I hope you are well. Yours sincerely, Sheila Fury.”

A visitor for a month maybe, perhaps even two, who knows? And not even his name. It was preposterous.

“Please inform me name of visitor by return of post. Fetch, Rath Na.”

The telegram shot like a bullet across the channel. “Peter Fury. Downey.”

“But surely,” thought the housekeeper, “they can't ever be thinking of returning here. The idea is mad. This place is finished. I'd better write her a letter in the morning. I'd best write to the old man, and the son also. I must get a message down to Mr. Murphy, and ask him to send that buffoon Cullen up here.”

Resolution followed resolution. She tossed restlessly in her bed. “I quite thought they'd given it all up, and all the nonsense of it into the bargain. They clear out, one after the other. They left me here for ten years to look after a lunatic woman, they never even write, they never even bothered, didn't care. And a beautiful place it was indeed, once on a time. They don't deserve it, they weren't worth it. I shall write to her in the morning. I'll let her have a piece of my mind. Disturbing my peace after all these years. And what have I stayed for? To keep it alive and kicking for them, who never once cared about a brick in the place, except her of course, though God knows she never knew her own mind for more than two minutes together.

“Served them since I was ten, and they weren't worth serving. But I didn't care. They paid me, in their fashion. It was better than marrying a fisherman and starving to death on the fringe of the sea. I could have married the Colonel had I had half the chance, and he knew it, the truly randy man, and that eye he had, that wicked eye. Now he's just old and rusty, ending his days in a modern villa. And the daughter as lovely and springing as a hare goes off and picks up the first man she sets eyes on, and surprises nobody. The son is the only decent one of the Downeys. At least he'd the guts to get away from it all—the rot, the slow rot of it.”

Miss Fetch indulged in her reminiscences. Always she referred to the Downey family as if it had passed far beyond human sight. She spoke of them in the past tense, and it was like the inevitable judgment on their weaknesses, their transgressions. “They might have left me here in peace. I loved this old place better than any of them, and the old place knows it. And now I have to get out my keys and begin all over again, drawing curtains, and opening windows, unlocking doors, letting the fresh air into the place that never wanted it, which is now quiet and peaceful for ever, and was from the moment that woman died, and took the breath and the light of Rath Na with her when she went. I came myself out of a stone cottage that was licked by the sea at all four walls, and I loved this place like they never did themselves. Odd it is the way I remember my first day at the big house. Ten I was, standing quite still and looking at the sea, through a cracked window, listening to my father who was standing behind me. ‘You're for the Big House, girl,' he said, ‘they want a big strong girl up there, so they do.' How vividly I remember that day. I wish she'd never written.”

So she continued, tossing and turning in the bed, unable to settle down. Again she came out into the corridor. Over her dressing-gown she had lightly flung a silk shawl, and always she held the candle high before her. She went noiselessly over thick carpet, her mind full of turned keys, locked doors, barred windows, drawn curtains. For her, this was the only peace the house had ever known. Nothing so silent and alone had ever been more peaceful.

“This place has been like a battlefield, it deserves its peace, and after some thirty years I deserve my own. I like Rath Na, and Rath Na likes me. I know it hated all that life, for a house has a feel in it, like a creature. I must write to them all in the morning.” She moved, priest-like, in and out of rooms, and each of them required a separate key from the clanging pile she carried. Doors creaked as locks clicked.

“So I've got to get ready the son's room. For what, for whom? God knows.”

She descended the long wide staircase, its thick carpeting covered with linen drugget, her passage soundless. The soft light fell upon the cold, blue-tiled hall, and she glanced for the thousandth time at a dust-covered hat rack that held a single, lonely deerstalker. It had hung there for eleven years, undisturbed. She had never quite lost the feeling that only a moment ago it had been casually flung there. And the great oaken chest with its rusty lock, and beyond this, the big white door.

“It's like spying,” she thought, as she passed on to the kitchen, and it showed cavernous under the paltry pale light that dimmed immediately in the damper air, for the stove was now black out. She looked around her.

Eighteen feet square, with its slate floors, bare walls, its six well-scrubbed chairs, their hard shine softened only by dust. The great table that lay in the centre drew her as though by magic, and she set down the candle. Then, drawing out a chair, she sat down. She looked at the cracks and crevices, the junctions of lines and crosses, loads of initials carved into the wood, lanes of names. This had once been a great oak. She knew the names of that long line of serving people, who, one after another, had burnished the great ram's head, and made it live. On the high shelf over the big cooking range the wooden clock had stopped at three o'clock.

“Three o'clock. I wonder on what day, in what year it stopped. For years I've been in this kitchen, and now it seems that for the very first time I've noticed the clock.” There was here the feel of ice. Suddenly she picked up her candle and went out.

“I wish I could settle to sleep, but I cannot.” She remained standing in the hall, lifting up her bunch of keys, suspended by a red cord about her waist, and she tried to remember the key for the son's room, then, remembering, hurried upstairs again. For a moment she stood motionless outside this door, then she inserted the key and opened it. The immediate vision was of whiteness. Everything was covered with white sheeting, and over the carpet lay a great sheet of sail-cloth. Putting the candle down she crossed to the window. The moment she opened it, after three hard tugs at a stubborn catch, the cold night air rushed in. She had a sudden realization that she could not close it again, that it would never close. It was as though hands had beaten down the dust and damp, swept clear the sheeting, removed the sail-cloth, started the cold clock ticking again. The very air about her seemed to beat with wings of life, whole armies were streaming through the window.

“It's like opening up a grave. I wonder who this creature is? The name I know. I wonder what he's like? I wonder what he thinks he's going to do here? Probably rifle the nests and kill the birds. People from cities are terrible,
I
know. I've seen them. I suppose I have to see him for what he's worth, just as I looked after the whole cold tribe of them, who never loved a single miserable creature. But I'd better get back to bed, I must try again.”

And as she said this, she stared at the crucifix on the wall, the coloured map of the world, the great clutter of books on a locked desk. “It's really quite chilly to-night,” continuing to stare, continuing to remember, when she wished only to forget. And she looked downwards, at the empty grate, the old shoes lying about, the tennis racket flung into a corner, violently abandoned, the locked wardrobe, and she knew that nothing of John Downey remained. It was desertion, it had no feeling, it was like death, burial. Yet, staring at these objects, she was moved.

“How do I know? After all … he might even be here in the morning, or the day after that, you can't tell, you never could. They were never definite about anything.”

The guiding light in her hand, she closed and locked this door, then turned away, and a second later she was back, unlocking it, “Why should it be locked now?” Reaching her own bedroom door, she paused. “No,” she thought, “it's senseless, I can't sleep, I won't sleep this night, I'll go and dress. I'll go down to my sitting-room.”

She went in and dressed, put a woollen scarf over her head, and in a moment or two felt warm. She then went downstairs. “My fire can't have gone out yet.”

Miss Fetch's room was high up, remote. The big ash tree that shot up heavy and handsome outside her window had bequeathed to this room a kind of everlasting twilight. This room was different, it held the heat of life. Miss Fetch never failed to lock the door behind her. It was like shutting out the Arctic from the Temperate zone. It was a small room, the walls covered by a rich, sky-blue wall-paper, and a riot of red roses spread across its surface. Sparsely furnished, it was the most austere room in the whole house. It contained two armchairs and two upright ones, rarely used, since she preferred the comfort offered by the heavy black leather of the others. There was a small oak table, a shelf closely packed with devotional literature. In its darkest corner stood a sewing-machine, and alongside it, Miss Fetch's plain work-basket.

In the evenings she would sit there, concentrating on her sewing and knitting, her embroidery. But above all else Miss Fetch loved laces. This had been her room, her home, her sanctum, for thirty-one years. Here the very air was different. Here the air was exclusive, with its odour of dried flowers, lavender, and beeswax. The large reproduction of “The Annunciation”, executed in the worst possible taste; the plain wooden crucifix hanging over the fireplace, gave a sanctified air to the room. It had the aura of the vestry, the presbytery, the priest's walk, the candle-lit, incense-smelling hour. And, unlike the remaining twenty-three rooms in the house, it was warm with a special warmth, the long, soft, secret and safe warmth as of thighs, or under arms. One could feel, touch this warmth.

Day in and day out, through week and month and year, Miss Fetch sat and read, reflected, made vows and resolutions, worked for the Church, for the heart of it, and for the extreme fringes of it, in the heathen country, the hot deserts, the pestilential places, the jungles, the Arctic wastes. A long, patient quest under the fingers, building and sewing, praying and reaping. Remembering the stone cottage by the sea, its cracked window, her towering father, and the bare stone. The iron struggle, the great battle for the crumbs and the fish. The smell and taste of fish in the fisherman's cottage. The tenth year, and her going from that place. She could think of it as she sat and watched the fire blaze up, hear the coal hiss, and the cinder drop.

“Nearly forty years all told I worked for that family. A long time,” and in a moment of reflected glory, she saw the years as many golden lamps.

She removed the steel blower from the fire, and laid it in the hearth. She put milk from a large brown bowl into the waiting pan, and held it over the fire. She drank the milk; she ate the dry, oaten biscuits. It was now early morning, but she appeared not to notice the passage of time. She only half heard the ever strident tick of the clock. Suddenly she sat up. “In the morning I shall write to her. To the father, and to the son. I'll tell them what I think.”

She talked to herself as she ate, talked into the flames. “After a silence of years she writes me a letter as though it were only yesterday that she ran away from the place. This is one of her—but then her family's falsest moments were their most enthusiastic ones. I know them well. That note from her has given me something of a shock. I know. I feel it, I am not as young as I was. But I shall have objections. Oh, yes! I shall object. The moment these people want something, and only then, do they appear to realize that besides themselves there are actually other people living in this world.”

Miss Fetch gave a curious little laugh, and laughter was rare with her. “Her enthusiastic wishes about my state of health seem strange after a silence of ten years. The son was decent enough, in his fashion. I shall write to John Downey this very day. I believe he's still at the same thing, Navy, on that foreign station in a submarine. And I'll write to the old Colonel into the bargain. I'll ask him how he likes a stranger living in his house. What an hourly penance was that girl to her father, and her mother, God rest her——”