Riders in the Chariot (8 page)

But Peg was not taken in. She would say in her slightly gritty voice, "You are not flying into one of your tantrums, Miss Mary?"

And Peg was always right, the way glass is, and water--all that is blameless.

Which made it the more desperate when Mary Hare went into Peg's room, and saw that her friend had died, fust after dressing. On a dry morning. Peg had lain down again on the bed, in her dress that had once been a brighter colour. There she lay, very brittle, like a branch of one of the good-smelling herbs, rosemary, or thyme, or the lemon-scented verbena, that people used to break off to put away.

After a while the mistress dared to touch her maid. Then, she knew, at last, she was, indeed, alone. She stayed a long time in a corner of the room, looking, and it was only in the course of the morning that she remembered William Hadkin.

William was somebody Mary Hare had never taken to, perhaps because, on the night of her father's shooting match, when all the other servants were still away at the picnic, he had remained in the grooms' quarters, together with his deafness. That deafness of William's was something Mary had never been able to believe in, because of the thundering of her own emotions on the night in question. Yet, he had remained faithful, and in the days of her mother would take them for little drives in an old buggy that had survived. And on a pittance. Though, of course, he was old, nor ate, nor needed very much. By the time Mrs Hare died, he had practically given up shaving, because of a tender skin, yet was always seen in the same length of stubble, with the same rivulet of spittle in the same white ravine. He had the same smell, too, of most old men. Which again could have been a reason why Miss Hare had not taken to him. Old men, on the whole, are smellier than old women.

It was William, of course, that his mistress told of Peg's death.

"Well, yes," he said. "I was reckoning she would die. There was nothing to her."

He was greasing a strap of harness, for which there was no longer any use, but it helped to keep him in practice.

"I would not have let myself think," began Mary Hare.

"That was what all you people was such artists at," said William Hadkin, stroking his leather.

"What do you mean?" asked Miss Hare.

She began to tremble, but not with rage.

"As far as I can see, lookin' back and all," William said, "you was the race of pretenders."

"Some of us had imagination, if that is what you mean."

"To set the house on fire without the matches!"

"That is enough, William," said Mary Hare, as she had heard parents. "You must go about Peg."

"All right! All right!" he said. "Don't agitate me!"

He stood looking at the holes in the strap.

"I wonder you stayed if you could not bear us," his mistress said.

"I stayed," he said, "because I got used to it. There's a lot of that sort of thing going on, you know."

Because his mistress was always the first to recognize the truth, there was really nothing for her to say.

The last and worst encounter with William Hadkin occurred a few weeks after her maid's death. She came across him just after he had killed a cock. There was the bird's head, shamefully detached and dead, while William watched and laughed as the body danced out the last steps of life in a shambles of its own blood.

Mary Hare stood very still. She could not find the strength to move even when her boots were sprinkled with the cock's blood.

William observed.

"Well," he said, laughing, "you've gotta eat, if it's only an old stringy rooster."

And continued to laugh.

"See," he said, "what I meant the other day? The rooster got so used to it he can dance without his bally head."

"The way I see it, you are a murderer," accused Mary Hare.

"What! To kill a cock for you to eat?"

"There are ways and ways of killing."

"That is something you should know."

"How? I?"

"Ask your dad."

Mary Hare turned so pale. She remained standing by the woodshed long after the groom had gone about other business. She was left looking at the wattles of the dead cock.

Soon after that William Hadkin, without a word, sorted his thoughts apparently, and disappeared from Xanadu. Now, at last, I shall be free, and all to the good, murmured Mary Hare, afraid. But remembered the goat, and at once her spirits were restored.

The goat had appeared already before Peg's death. From where it had come was never discovered. A white doe heavy in kid, it would follow the women for company, choosing its leaves and grass with a certain finical air. After the doe had been delivered of a dead buck, Peg said they should milk their goat, which Mary Hare proceeded to do. She lived for it. In time her mind grew equal to the tranquil wisdom of the goat-mind, and as she squatted in the evening to milk her doe, after they alone were left, their united shadow would seem positively substantial. So much so, the woman's love began to conflict with her reasoning, and she grew quite frantic that something might happen to the animal: some disaster to follow those which she herself had been permitted to outlive, or, simply, that it might decide to leave.

So, when night began to fall, the mistress would run to shut her creature in a little tipsy shed, within sight of the kitchen, on the edge of the yard. Heaping boughs and pouring endearments, she would padlock her goat every night, and return, and return, to see whether her love might not have vanished in the course of some devilish conjuring act. But there the goat would be. As she shielded her lamp, the white mask glimmered at her through the dark. The amber eyes pacified her fears, and the long lip would move in what she knew was sympathy.

Even on the morning of the mistress's severest trial, the abstraction of a goat's mask continued to communicate. Even though the goat itself had become a skull and shred of hide in the ruins of the black and smoking shed.

How she herself survived the holocaust of her discovery, Mary Hare could never be sure. But the morning was kind. Leaves were laid upon her face. The earth was soft to her trembling knees. For she went off into the scrub almost immediately, and remained there how long nobody was able to tell her, because nobody knew that she had gone. She remained there probably two or three days, for she returned stiff and scratched, hungry, at least for one who was almost never visited by hunger, and anxious to recall even the painful reason for her absence.

As she sat chewing a crust of stale bread, for which she had immediately rummaged in the crock, she had to suppose: Eventually I shall discover what is at the centre, if enough of me is peeled away.

Never in her life, she felt, had she reasoned so lucidly, with the result that she swallowed a whole lump of softened bread.

Mrs Jolley was in two minds.

It could have been the cobwebs. She would drag them down. They could have been ropes. They could have been chains. Then she would pick, and flick, not to say dash, and bash, all thumbs and fingers, elbows too, as she struggled to divest herself. But would never be free. The grey skeins clung, like a sense of guilt.

"Who isn't nuts!" she would cry at times. "But, of course, a person can always give notice--tomorrow, or the day after, any day of the week."

Nobody would have thought to accuse Mrs Jolley of not being rational at every pore, even at moments when, netted in cobweb, clamped with bobby-pins, teeth upstairs in the tumbler, her answer might stumble. As she pursed her lips, and turned her head, to disengage the reluctant words, was she guarding a secret, or merely having trouble with her lolly?

At least she would remain a lady, whatever else might come in doubt.

For the mirrors had begun to follow her down the passages, and on one occasion, she had been compelled to finish a flight of stairs at the run. For no obvious reason. Her legs had simply taken over, and her calves, still strong, and firm, and glossy, had bulged rather frantically; her breasts were jumping under the corset by the time she reached the top.

"Everybody has their off days," Mrs Jolley liked to say.

When, for instance, one of her eyes--blue for mothers--would water from the corner.

"I am so afraid you are not happy at Xanadu," remarked Miss Hare--it was at breakfast, over the crispies, in the kitchen.

"It is not that I am not happy," answered Mrs Jolley. "I am always happy, of course, more or less. It is that a lady does expect something different."

Miss Hare mashed her crispies.

"What?"

"Oh, you know," said Mrs Jolley, "a home, and a Hoover, and kiddies' voices."

"I do not know," replied Miss Hare. "This is my life. This is my home."

And she munched the crispies.

"You are that hard at times," Mrs Jolley protested, "and unwilling to understand."

Miss Hare munched her crispies.

"When a loved one passes on, it is as if you was lost for a bit. See?"

Miss Hare would not. She was familiar with the core of rock she must acquire to match Mrs Jolley.

"As if a bit of you went with him. And if you don't follow, too, it is because of a sense of duty to others. I once read in a horoscope"--here Mrs Jolley picked the cloth--"that my sense of duty is very, very highly developed."

"I am not preventing you from following whoever you wish to follow," Miss Hare replied. "If that is what you mean."

"You know that I was referring to my late hubby," said Mrs Jolley, "and you will not hurt my feelings, however hard you try."

That face!

"Oh, dear, it is breakfast," sighed Miss Hare.

Mrs Jolley went off into laughter. She laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

"I will not ask what you find so amusing," announced Miss Hare.

"People are that funny!" Mrs Jolley laughed.

Her throat had knots in it, almost a goitre, and farther down was the cleft upon which the eyes of her late husband, presumably, had rested, whether in approval or disgust.

Miss Hare, who had finished her crispies, turned the plate upside down as usual.

Mrs Jolley had stopped laughing. Very, very patiently she said, "You are a dirty girl. That is what
you
_ are!"

And stood back to look.

"A habit is a habit," said Miss Hare.

"Dirty is dirty," replied her companion.

"Mrs Jolley, two people cannot live together unless they respect each other's habits. That is something I have learnt by painful degrees in my relationships with birds and animals."

"I am not a bird, or a animal," Mrs Jolley replied. "I am a--"

"No. I know what you are. Please, do not tell me!" Miss Hare begged.

"You do not know me," Mrs Jolley said, "any more than you don't know nothing at all."

"No," Miss Hare agreed. "You are often right."

"I know what I am," said Mrs Jolley, "and more's the pity. My late husband thought he knew, but didn't. He thought he knew. Oh, yes, he knew everything. He had taken night courses, and collected stamps. He was paying off a cyclopaedia, for years, in the oak cabinet, beside the settee."

Quite suddenly Mrs Jolley began to cry.

Miss Hare sat as still as she could, and watched.

"All I did," Mrs Jolley cried, "was to make him a clean and comfortable home, and yet, that night when I handed him his cup of tea, you would of said I had committed a crime."

Miss Hare watched. The kitchen at Xanadu was one of those big, old, black kitchens which swallow up, but Miss Hare was never swallowed. She was feeling very bright now.

"Do you mean that your husband blamed you for his death?"

Mrs Jolley almost choked.

"You are that hard!" she protested. "And this house! You can hear your own thoughts ticking, along with the mouldy furniture. I will leave, of course. But, in the circumstances, not yet."

Then she stopped. She seemed to have immediate control over her emotions, or almost anything, if she wished. Mrs Jolley was what Miss Hare supposed they called a practical woman.

"There!" said Mrs Jolley. "Finished now!"

And pursed her mouth up.

But Miss Hare was not finished. Her train of thought, she feared, had only started. If she had not been so fascinated, she would have retreated from the presence of Mrs Jolley, who was responsible.

"What you have just told, has made me remember something," she said. "Only one person ever blamed me for his death."

"Who?"

Mrs Jolley took possession of Miss Hare's disgusting, fascinating, down-turned plate.

"My own father."

"You have not spoken much about your dad," Mrs Jolley slowly realized.

"There is so much to tell, and almost all of it painful," said Miss Hare.

"But your own father."

"A long time ago. He died most horribly. By drowning in a cistern."

"Where?"

"Out there. Across the yard. It collects the rain-water from the roof, and in those days was allowed to remain open. It was only closed later, on account of the mosquitoes."

"And your father fell in?"

"Oh, there are some people--I might as well say from the beginning--will tell you other things. My father was said to be unstable."

"And you saw it?"

"I sometimes wonder exactly what."

Norbert Hare had experienced his moments of illumination. Doors had opened once or twice in music, or he had turned a corner on an Italian street, or descended dizzily, breathlessly, his vision grown milky and unreliable, from a too reckless encounter in the stone branches of some Gothic forest. On occasions release had even come simply by watching the line of hills beyond his property of Xanadu, although he was inclined to suspect deliverance by inexpensive means. Whatever the source of his experience, he was, however, aware of a splendour that he himself would never achieve except by instants, and rightly or wrongly, came to interpret this as failure. He would sometimes laugh, unpleasantly, and what seemed irrelevantly, to those who heard, with the result that many of his acquaintances and neighbours became convinced that Norbert was mad. Only his daughter, Mary, obviously more than a little dotty herself, sensed his dilemmas. She might even have understood them if she had been allowed.