Give Us This Day (72 page)

Henrietta spoke up, the first word she had uttered since Adam steered her into the room. “They were trying to save us worry, Adam. You’re eighty-four…”

He made a savage gesture with his free hand. “What the devil’s my age got to do with it? I can still think clearer than any of you! I’m proving it now, and I’ll prove it at the inquest tomorrow. Stella was sick and sickness needs treatment. I can’t say whether she could have recovered or not, but that isn’t the point. My complaint is that every one of you, saving Giles maybe, let your personal problems make fools of you, and that talk of sparing me grief is no more than a face-saver.”

Avoiding his eye, Henrietta said, in a whisper, “They meant well… What else could they have done?”

His jaw shot out. “I’ll tell you since you ask, Hetty. George here, and Denzil and Edward and Deborah, and Alex, too, as head of the family. They could have put their heads together and evolved something practical, instead of hushing it up and going at it piecemeal. That’s what a firm and family is, or should be. But I blame you most of all, George, for you were the most like me in a rough and tumble. At least, I always thought so. I’m not so sure now. Well,” he drained his glass, “it’s not too late. At your age your mother and I had our share of setbacks, but we turned things in our favour and you can if you put your mind to it.” He stopped for a moment, looking baffled, as though he had mislaid the thread of his argument and was too disturbed to hunt for it, but the check was temporary and George, sensing this, said nothing. The fire rustled. Outside the wind got up again and went to probing the tops of the avenue limes, seeking its familiar passage through to the chimneys that had resisted its siege for three and a half centuries. Hearing it at work George thought, He’s like this house… rooted an
d braced, for all his eighty-four years. Who would suppose he had just dragged his own daughter from the water and was waiting to hear her death pronounced upon by outsiders? The worst affront you could offer him would be pity.

He said, at length, “That’s not all, is it, Gov’nor?”

“No, though I’m speaking out because somebody has to, and there’s only one excuse for your muddle-headedness to my way of thinking. It’s the times, the way the whole damned lot of you are going about things lately. Not just here but clear across the world. You’re all sleep-walking, and if you don’t prick yourselves awake you’re in for a God Almighty tumble. For here we are, with everything to make a new world and a new society, but all people with money in their pockets are concerned with is a month at the seaside, the next country house-party, Fanny’s coming-out dress, a search for gentility and soft living generally. Even the international apparatus we rely on to keep the garden-party going is as antiquated as feudalism and not nearly so efficient, and this attitude has a nasty habit of spreading down, to the city clerk, whose main ambition nowadays is to hoist himself another niche up the social scale. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—as a spur, for it’s what makes the world go round. What’s wrong is the way he goes about it. Not by hard work, clear thinking, self-education, and self-reliance, but by putting on airs, currying favour with the fellow above him, and learning how to talk with a plum in his mouth. It’s all a sham and I hate shams wherever I find ‘em. I hate backsliders, too, so if you’ll take a tip from me, George, you’ll go out of here and do some hard thinking and hard planning, the way you used to before you had things too easy. And you can pass that on for what it’s worth once we’ve got tomorrow’s business behind us.” He turned his back, spreading his hands to the fire as though signifying by this gesture that he had finished.

George turned to his mother. “Could I telephone Gisela and say I’ll be staying overnight and going home after the inquest?”

“Of course. We’d be glad. Find Phoebe and tell her to air the bed in the big guest-room.”

“I’d sooner have my old room. Is that possible? Without too much trouble?”

“Of course it’s possible. Tell her to get a girl to make up the bed and put a bottle in.” She glanced at the clock. “They won’t have all gone to bed yet.”

“I’ll see to it then, don’t you stir.”

He went out without another word and they heard him climbing the back stairs that led to Phoebe’s quarters in the east wing.

She said, “You hit him too hard, Adam.”

“I had to. I got through to him. That’s what matters.”

“Haven’t you anything saved up for me?”

He seemed to her to relax a little.

“Certainly no broadside, Hetty.”

“Ah, but something?”

“Advice. It can wait until this wretched business is behind us.”

“That isn’t necessary.” She chose her words carefully. “I was wondering… would it be possible for me to… to come with you tomorrow?”

“To the inquest? You could face that?”

“I’d prefer it to waiting here alone and hearing a second-hand account. George isn’t the only one who has been waiting for things to go away of their own accord.”

He looked at her tenderly, feeling a pity for her that he had been unable to feel for Denzil, or even for Stella lying under the poplars with her hair enmeshed in the flotsam of the river.

“It’s different for you, Hetty. Nothing I said applied to you. When you were young and spry you faced up to things better than any woman I know.”

“You’re not young, Adam, and you still don’t shrink from them. Not even from something as bad as this.”

“I’m a very obstinate old cuss.”

“I don’t think it is a question of age. I was thinking back, when Robert came to us to say she was missing—back to that time of Stella’s other trouble with the Moncton-Prices. You were hundreds of miles away then, but I managed.”

She could have reminded him of other occasions, many of them, when she had faced trouble squarely and alone, and made decisions most women of her acquaintance would have shirked making. The fire had died in her now, and deep down she could isolate the agent that had extinguished it. It was not age but pride, and a very counterfeit pride indeed compared with his. Flabby, overweening pride, that most people would call conceit.

She said, “Part of what you said to George applied to me. For years now I’ve thought of myself not only as privileged but deservedly so. Bad things just didn’t come my way. Not because I was lucky but because I was sharp. Well, it isn’t so, and I see that well enough now. If the others must have a share in what happened to Stella, I’m not blameless. I should have visited her more and found out for myself how things stood. The reason I didn’t would be hard for you to understand.”

“Tell me if you want to.”

“The truth is I lost patience with her long ago, ever since she sold out to the Fawcetts to the degree she did and let herself go. As a woman, I mean. I was never able to see it for what it was, a rejection of all she had thought of, up to that time, as the strictures and conventions of her own class, or that it was a natural result of what happened to her as a young bride.”

“That isn’t true, Hetty. Damn it, you steadied her up by young Fawcett. Do you imagine I didn’t know you handed her to him on a platter?”

“Not for her sake, for my own. I would have married her off to a tinker if necessary. Later on, when I realised she didn’t give a button for her waistline, or the clothes she wore, or even the way she came to speak, I think I began to despise her. It never once occurred to me that she really grew to love that farm and what it stood for, or that in her own way she loved Denzil as much as he loved her and coming to his level was the best way of showing it. Well, it’s too late to alter that now, except to be kind to the boy, and do what I can to nurse him through the next year or so. God knows, I mean to do that.” She got up, discarding her shawl. “I’ll see Phoebe about George’s room. Will you be long?”

“No, not long.”

He caught her hand as she passed him and pressed it to his lips. There was no point in trying to eradicate her sense of guilt now, but he would set about the job shortly, just as soon as the page was turned on tomorrow. And after that somehow, by some means, direct or devious, they would fight their way through to a peaceful close.

2

She thought of him then as performing the office of the Dutch boy in that old story about the hole in the dyke. A man more resolute and steadfast than any man in the world, self-dedicated to the task of averting a catastrophe. And although she was emotionally involved in every word they were saying, and aware of the covert glances they stole at her from time to time, she had eyes only for him and no more than a cognisance of the others who followed one another into the witness-box, or those who sat mute, listening to the dismal tale.

She had never previously attended an inquest, and the formality of the phraseology startled her. It had an archaic touch, like something out of Magna Carta—“Touching the death of Stella Fawcett…” “draw near and give your attendance…”—as though they had been staging a pageant instead of establishing, if it could ever be established, how the first child she had borne came to disappear in the middle of the night and reappear as a corpse two miles down the river.

She followed the drift of each witness. The long-faced doctor, who told of his examination of the body, then of his visits to Dewponds months before for the purpose of treating a woman in shock. The pills and potions he had prescribed. His professional opinion of the deceased’s state of mind between the date of his first call in December and the twenty-first day of March. He had treated her for insomnia. He did not consider the deceased as ill, or not in the accepted sense of the word. Under stress, certainly, but not ill.

She could not get used to hearing Stella described as “the deceased,” as though everyone was under an obligation not to speak her name aloud, and she wondered if this oddly impersonal term bothered Denzil, too, or whether he was too bewildered and shocked to relate it to the woman he had worshipped since he was a boy. They got little enough out of him anyway, so that she wondered if George was right about Robert rehearsing him in what he had to say. He told them that his wife had been upset by news of her son’s death and that all their married life she had had a very real fear of fire. Pressed gently by the coroner, he admitted that this fear was based on the fact that Dewponds had been burned to the ground and that the fear increased when she learned that fire had played a major part in the fatal accident last December. He identified the body taken from the river as that of his wife. He had last seen her when he went up to bed on the night of the twentieth.

The coroner, whom she recognised as a local solicitor whose wife, a rather twittery creature, had attended her garden parties, was very considerate and seemed genuinely touched by Denzil’s distraught manner. He said, gently, “You searched for her personally when you discovered her missing, Mr. Fawcett?”

Denzil replied, in a scarcely audible voice, “Aye, I looked around. I didn’t think much to it. She’d often get up and poke around after lock-up.”

“You never heard her threaten to take her life?”

“Take her life?” He seemed outraged. “Lord no, sir, she never once said anything o’ that sort.” And then, “She never said much about anything save the work on the farm. Not lately, that is.”

She glanced across at Adam, awaiting his turn to enter the box, and now wedged between Robert and George, legs crossed, arms tidily folded. He gave no sign that Denzil was on dangerous ground and, unlike herself, was clearly indifferent to the glances of jurymen and those standing at the back of the hall although he must have known almost everyone of them by name. In a curious way, even when sitting there, he dominated the proceedings, much as he had dominated her life for more than fifty years. He had a presence everyone else lacked and she wondered if he had always had it, even as a boy, or whether it was something that had settled upon him about the time he made history in the Crimea and India shortly before he met her, and later developed to a degree that empowered him to set all those wheels in motion across the country.

Surprisingly, to her at least, George was called, and she compared father and son, seeing them alike and yet curiously unlike, for George, although in full command of himself, lacked his father’s air of authority, his ease of manner and natural amiability showing through even here. The evidence he gave was brief. He told of bringing news of her son’s death to his sister in December and the manner in which she had received it, but no one could have guessed, from his reasoned tone and calm expression, that he had come within an ace of violent death himself on that occasion, and the reflection turned Henrietta’s thoughts to the hatred Stella must have felt for him at that moment. Was she mad? Were they all hard at work trying to conceal the fact and, if so, was such deception wrong under the circumstances? Perhaps so. The solemnity of the proceedings, here in this stuffy parish hall, had made its impact on her, and the flutter of uncertainty about the propriety of their concerted suppression of the facts inclined her to glance back at Adam as though for reassurance. His expression was as unchanged as his posture. He might have been listening to an Act of Parliament being read aloud, or a prose recital at one of her winter soirees, so that she thought, chillingly, Would he loo
k like that if they were discussing my death? She bowed her head for, at that moment
, he seemed as remote as the God she had tried to approach in her prayers just lately.

She caught the last few words of George’s evidence, something about the big fire at the yard at that time, and saw him leave the stand, to be replaced by his nephew Robert. Robert, poor lad, was clearly under strain and she knew why. He was a truthful, literal soul and it was upon him that the burden of sworn fiction would lie most heavily. Even the voicing of a half-truth, if that curious story about the fence and the bonfire qualified as such, would not come easily to him.

They asked him the same question as they had asked his father, had his mother ever threatened to take her own life, and he answered in the negative emphatically and with a certain defiance. He then told of his search of the buildings and assumption, planted by a footprint, that his mother had gone down to the bridge, some little distance from the farm. Could he give any reason why a woman haunted by a fear of fire should have gone in that direction? She saw Adam’s head come up sharply as he turned his dour gaze on his grandson; Robert said, carefully, “Yes, sir, there was a reason, to my mind at least. We had been burning straw on the far bank near an old hen-house. Maybe the wind had whipped up the bonfire.”