The Feast (10 page)

Her panic did not subside till she was across the sands and halfway up to the headland. She mastered it only to discover that her misery had returned. Despair broke over her so irresistibly that she wondered how she could still observe the pure peace and beauty of the scene. But her senses continued to tell her that the sky, sea, cliffs and sands were lovely, that there was music in the murmur
of the waves, and that the evening airs smelt of gorse blossom. To that message her mind replied: No good any more. It might have helped me once.

For she loved natural beauty, and in the earlier stages of her struggle had often found consolation in a country walk. But this was a late stage, the final stage. Now she merely felt a clearer conviction that life was over for her, the last anodyne gone. If this fair prospect could not tempt her to stay, then nothing could and she might go when she pleased.

She went to the end of the headland and sat on a rock looking out to sea. The water was flat and pale, paler than the sky, except at the horizon where a dark blue pencil had sketched a great curve. On her left, behind the dusky mass of the next point, an after sunset light still burned. On her right, over Pendizack Cove, fell the shadow of advancing night. She thought that she would rest for a little while and then go back to the sand. She would wade out into that warm, flat sea, wade as far as she could and then swim. It was years since she had swum but she supposed she still could, for how far she did not know, but far enough. She would swim straight out towards that thin blue line of the horizon, on and on, until the end. A time would come when she could swim no more. And then there might be some moments of panic. The wish to live might reassert itself before she went under the choking water. But it would soon be over. And no one would be hurt by it, for she had given up all hope of helping Paul. Her life was useless and a burden.

So much suffering, she thought. So much suffering everywhere. And as long as I live I merely add to it. I am not strong. I can do nothing. I’m simply another hopeless, helpless person.

A faint wind sighed in the dread thrift beside the rock, and a longer wave than usual fell upon the beach below her. Decision had relaxed her nerves. She leant her back against the rock and closed her eyes, her mind vacant
and open to any vision that might drift through it.
Suddenly
and vividly she saw a deep pit from which many faces peered up at her. It came and went so quickly that she could recognize none of them although she was sure that some were familiar; a girl’s face and three pale children distinct among millions and seen by a lightning flash. At the same time a voice said in her ear:
Their
shoulders
hold
the
sky
suspended.
They
stand
and
earth’s
founda
tions
stay.

Mr. Siddal had said that. Mr. Siddal had said some very strange things, sitting in the lounge and staring at the ceiling. She was not sure that she understood them. He had said that the innocent save the world and that their suffering is necessary. He said that the victims, the helpless, hopeless people everywhere, are the
redeemers
who sustain and protect mankind. She could not remember his words exactly. But she had felt very strange for a moment, while he was talking, as though she might be on the verge of some enormous discovery. Crucified, he had said. The Lord was crucified. He was innocent and He redeemed mankind. But Mr. Siddal said
redeems,
as if it was all still going on. And did he mean, she asked herself, that we are all … all the oppressed … and the poor people in China … and the homeless … the poor little Jewish babies born in ships … no home, no country, turned away
everywhere
…. Oh, I do think that is the worst of all, for a poor baby to be born with no country even … but did he mean that we are all one person, innocent and crucified and redeeming the world … always? Is that what he meant?

Another wave fell on the beach, and before its
reverberation
had died away she knew that, whatever Mr. Siddal had meant, she herself had arrived at a certainty. She had made her discovery and knew that she was no longer alone. The chain of her solitude had been broken, that solitude, forced upon her by Paul’s cruelty, which she had been unable to endure. Her pain was not
en
tirely her own, and it had transported her into an
existence
outside and beyond her own, into a mind, an
endurance
, from which she could never again be separated.

They endure for me and I for them, she thought, and strove to summon before her inward eye those pale faces peering from the pit. But the glimpse was gone and she could not bring it back. She could only speculate upon their familiarity and wonder if the girl she saw had not been Evangeline Wraxton, who was shut up now,
somewhere
in the hotel, among those wild beasts in their dens. And who must be brought out, out of the pit, before she sank.

‘At once! Immediately!’ exclaimed Mrs. Paley aloud, as she sprang to her feet. ‘Not a minute to be lost.’

She set off as fast as she could, down the path to the cove.

Night had almost fallen when, half an hour later, she returned with Evangeline. She had marched into the girl’s room without any prepared plan and had suggested a walk on the cliff as calmly as though it had been a long-standing habit. Evangeline had looked startled, but she rose obediently and put away in a drawer some objects on her dressing-table—a piece of glass, a file and a little box.

‘Shall I need a coat?’ she asked.

‘Better bring one,’ advised Mrs. Paley, ‘and then we needn’t come back if it gets cold. We can stay as long as we like. My coat is downstairs. I’ll get it as we go out.’

They had also got two cushions from the lobby settle lest sitting about on rocks should give them rheumatism.

‘Because that hotel isn’t a nice place at all,’ said Mrs. Paley. ‘It’s not nice at night.’

‘No,’ agreed Evangeline. ‘I can’t sleep there.’

‘I can’t either. With coats and cushions we can sleep on the cliff if we like.’

‘Unless it rains.’

‘It won’t. And there’s a sort of shelter, anyway, up on Pendizack Point.’

They found a comfortable little hollow in some heather close to the shelter and lay upon their backs, side by side, watching the stars come out and discussing the best way to make the tea ration last. Neither felt the least impulse, just then, to confide in the other. But they knew what united them. They were a little astonished at
themselves
and inclined to giggle, as women will, when they embark upon some daring adventure.

‘I infuse,’ said Mrs. Paley. ‘I just cover the leaves with boiling water and leave it for five minutes before I fill up the pot.’

‘You make me feel quite thirsty,’ said Evangeline.

‘I’ve got a picnic basket and a kettle and spirit lamp. If we come up here to-morrow night we’ll make
ourselves
some.’

‘That will be nice,’ said Evangeline. ‘I should like to come here every night till the week is over. I wish I didn’t have to stay. They’ve asked us to go.’

‘They know it’s not your fault.’

‘Do they? Mr. Gerry Siddal … Do you know him?’

‘Hardly at all. I’ve just seen him about.’

‘He’s nice, I think,’ said Evangeline, wistfully.

‘Is he?’

‘He’s very considerate to his mother. But … I tried to speak to him … to apologize …. and he wouldn’t listen.’

‘I’ll have a word with him to-morrow,’ promised Mrs. Paley. ‘I daresay he didn’t understand. I expect you muttered at him.’

‘Yes … I did. I can’t help it. People frighten me. Do beg him not to be angry.’

‘I will’

‘If only people wouldn’t be angry … if only they wouldn’t …’ sighed Evangeline.

Very soon afterwards she fell asleep. But Mrs. Paley
lay for a long time staring at the stars, very small and pale in the summer sky. The thin girl beside her filled her with an immense tenderness and compassion, a love beyond any she had ever felt before. She thought of the child she had lost, whose birthday this was, who had been put into her waiting arms for the first time just twenty-three years ago. But it seemed to her as if the child had been sent in place of Evangeline, because at that time her heart had been smaller and could not have accommodated a creature in no sense her own. Nor could she have borne to know as much about that child as she knew about this one, to be aware of all that life with Canon Wraxton must entail, to guess at the
significance
of that box and nail file on the dressing-table.

Presently she dozed a little, waking to find many more stars in a darker sky. The spaces between the stars looked very black and the wind whispered in the heather, and she murmured sleepily a line learnt in her forgotten childhood:
and
whispers
to
the
worlds
of
space
…
a
sentinel
…
I hear
at
times
a
sentinel
,
Who
moves
about
from
place
to
place
And
whispers
to
the
worlds
of
space
,
In
the
deep
night
,
that
all
is
well.

Miss Ellis had much to say on Monday morning about the beds of Mrs. Paley and Miss Wraxton. But her
speculations
were conducted without any help from Nancibel, who had caught sight of the truants on the cliff as she came to work and decided to hold her tongue. It was not safe to say anything about anyone to Miss Ellis.

‘Not touched since we made them yesterday,’ declared Miss Ellis. ‘Whatever does it mean? If it was only Mr. Paley I wouldn’t be surprised. He often sits up all night.’

‘All the less work for me,’ said Nancibel.

‘For us both. We’d better do Lady Guzzle.’

‘We can’t. She’s still in her bed.’

‘My patience! Where would this house be if I lay in bed all day?’

Pretty much where it’s always been, thought Nancibel and followed Miss Ellis upstairs to the Coves’ dormitory. This was a quick room to do as its occupants had neat habits. All the four beds were stripped and the sheets hung over the rails at the end.

‘Look at that!’ cried Miss Ellis in disgust. ‘Shows they don’t trust us, doesn’t it? Shows they think we just turn back the sheets.’

‘We do it at home,’ said Nancibel, turning the first mattress. ‘Our Mum always makes us hang the sheets over a chair. She says it’s a dirty habit to throw them on the floor.’

‘In a cottage,’ said Miss Ellis loftily, ‘that might be necessary. But here it’s an insult to the staff. Will you
kindly look at their nightgowns? You’d think she’d be ashamed.’

‘Dressing three children costs money,’ said Nancibel.

‘She can afford it. She’s got plenty. The stories I’ve heard about her! I thought I knew the name. Cove! I said to myself. Where did I hear that name before? But I couldn’t remember till it came out the children were called Maud and Blanche and Beatrix. Then it all came back to me. She had these three old aunts, well great-aunts really, and of course she hoped for legacies …’

‘Would you mind,’ asked Nancibel, ‘sitting on a bed I’ve made? I want to turn this mattress.’

Miss Ellis changed her seat and resumed:

‘Of course she wanted a son because of the title. And wasn’t she wild when she only had daughters? And then
he
died before his uncle did, and the title and property went to another nephew. That’s how I came to know about her. They’ve a place in Dorsetshire—the baronet, I mean. The uncle. And I lived quite near there for a while. Well, I accepted a post as housekeeper in a small nursing home for a few months. And I got quite friendly with a Mrs…. a Mrs…. oh, what was her name? Well, it doesn’t matter. Anyway she’d been a governess or something at the Court before she married, and the tales she told us about
this
Mrs. Cove, this niece, and her mean ways … they all used to laugh about it. And the last straw was that all the money was left to those children. She’s only got a life interest. Unless they die, of course. And they wouldn’t
all
die. Not likely! If they did people would think it funny. But she expected to get a big fortune and a title and this old family mansion, and when she didn’t get it she went on as if she’d been left without a penny. And all this scrimping and starving is just because she wants to make a purse for herself before those children grow up. Where are you off to?’

‘I’ve done all these beds,’ said Nancibel. ‘I’m going to the little boys’ room.’

Luke and Michael slept next to the Coves, and their sheets were scarcely turned back.

‘What’s the idea?’ said Miss Ellis, when she joined Nancibel, ‘giving us all the trouble of stripping the beds as well as making them. I never knew a family give so much trouble. Have you heard the latest? Lady Guzzle’s got to have coffee with an egg beaten up in it, in the middle of the morning!’

‘I can’t think,’ said Nancibel, ‘how she can eat all she does and stay so thin. She’s nothing but a skeleton.’

‘Ah! I’ve my own ideas about that. I shouldn’t wonder if she didn’t put on a lot of weight, one time, and got it off the Hollywood way.
You
know. Like the film stars do.’

‘No,’ said Nancibel. ‘I don’t know. What?’

She regretted the question a moment later, for she saw by her companion’s expression that the answer would be unsavoury. But she was not to be spared. Miss Ellis came round Luke’s bed and whispered two words in her ear.

‘No!’ cried Nancibel, turning pale.
‘
No!
I don’t believe it. How awful!’

‘They do,’ said Miss Ellis, nodding sagely. ‘I worked once with a girl who’d been a dresser in one of these studios, and she told me a lot.’

‘But how could they?’

‘In a little pill,’ sniggered Miss Ellis. ‘I daresay it’s not so bad in a glass of champagne.’

‘But doesn’t it make them terribly ill? Why … it might kill them.’

‘Of course it might. But they can eat all they want and not worry about weight.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ repeated Nancibel. ‘Nobody could.’

‘They have to. They have to keep their figures or go out on their ear.’

‘But she’s not a film star. She hasn’t her living to earn.’

‘I daresay she didn’t know what she’d taken.
Somebody
told her about a wonderful doctor who’d work a miracle for
£
500 and she took his pill and asked no questions.’

Miss Ellis chuckled and added:

‘I’d like to have seen her face when she found out.’

‘Well,’ said Nancibel, ‘it makes me urge. It does. It fairly makes me urge.’

‘When you’ve seen all I’ve seen of the seamy side of life,’ said Miss Ellis, ‘you won’t be so easily upset.’

They finished Michael’s bed in silence. Then Nancibel exclaimed:

‘It’s a pity you can’t say anything about anybody but only what’s disgusting.’

‘Are you speaking to me, Nancibel Thomas?’

‘Certainly I’m speaking to you, Miss Ellis.’

‘Then you’re a very impertinent girl, and I’ve a good mind to complain of you to Mrs. Siddal.’

‘O.K., Miss Ellis.’

‘This is what comes of talking to you as if you were an equal. You think you can take liberties.’

‘I’d ever so much rather you didn’t talk, Miss Ellis. If it was true it would still be disgusting. And I don’t believe half of it. Nothing but servants’ gossip, all said and done.’

‘I’ve never been so insulted in my life.’

Nancibel turned her back and stalked off to Hebe and Caroline’s bedroom, which was next down the passage. She had decided that she would make no further efforts to keep on good terms with Miss Ellis. But she did not like quarrelling with people, and made no answer when the housekeeper came to offer a piece of her mind.

‘I never expected to have to work,’ said Miss Ellis, standing in the doorway. ‘I was not brought up to earn my own living. My father was a wealthy man. We kept five servants; not rough girls out of cottages but nice, superior, well-trained girls. And it’s the bitterest of all to me, now, that I have to mix with low, common people
who think they can insult me because I have had
misfortunes
and nobody to protect me. There’s nothing a certain type of person likes better than to see their superiors brought down….’

Nancibel picked up Hebe’s dressing-gown which was lying on the floor, and took it to the wardrobe. Her gasp of surprise, when she opened the cupboard door, checked the stream of Miss Ellis’s indignation.

‘Well … I never!’ she said.

‘What is it?’ asked Miss Ellis, hastening to look.

Inside the door a large notice was fastened with drawing pins. It was printed in capitals on a sheet of poster paper, and it read:

T
ESTS FOR
N
EW
S
PARTANS

When Junior Spartans have passed all nine tests they get their membership card and can be leaders. While they are passing they can attend meetings but not vote and use all the privylege of the society including the Spartan code. But they must obey all rules.

This manifesto so much astonished Miss Ellis and Nancibel that they buried the hatchet for a while.

‘It seems so unnatural somehow,’ complained Nancibel. ‘I mean it’s unnatural. Everything nice is bad! Fancy a kiddie getting an idea like that!’

‘P’raps it’s because of all the guzzling she sees going on,’ suggested Miss Ellis. ‘Supposing she knows
something … well … like I said just now! A thing like that might give her an awful shock. Enough to start any amount of funny ideas.’

‘But she wouldn’t know. How’d she know?’

‘Might have heard servants talking. You mark my words: it’s something of that sort behind it.’

Steps were heard running along the passage, and Miss Ellis hastily shut the cupboard door. It was Hebe. When she saw them she paused in the doorway and said, with abrupt haughtiness:

‘Oh … Haven’t you finished?’

Turning and tossing her curls she ran off.

‘Someday,’ vowed Miss Ellis, ‘I’ll tell young Hebe Gifford just who she is and what she is. Gifford! Her name’s no more Gifford than mine is. They adopted her. She’s a love child, a servant’s child most likely. And I have to empty her slops!’

‘Porthmerryn is such a little place,’ said Mrs. Cove, as she hurried her family over the cliffs. ‘And full of extra visitors. If we don’t get in first with our points all the best sweets will be gone. So don’t dawdle. Blanche, can’t you walk faster?’

‘Her back is hurting,’ said Beatrix.

‘Walking is good for it.’

Blanche broke into a lopsided trot, helped along by her sisters. Their errand did not interest them for it was unlikely that they would eat any of the sweets thus promptly secured. Their mother had a habit of saving such things for a rainy day which never dawned. But they knew how important it was to possess goods which other people would be likely to want, since value depends upon scarcity.

At the top of the hill, just by Bethesda, Mrs. Cove paused for a moment to give final instructions:

‘We’d better split up. If we all go into the same shop they might see we were one family and make us take a mixed selection. I believe there are several shops. Blanche! You go along Marine Parade. Beatrix can do Church Street. I’ll do Fore Street. Maud can do Market Street. Here is half a crown for each of you, in case you can get turkish delight. Go for that if you can; it’s very scarce. If not, get marshmallows or fudge. Don’t get boiled sweets or bars; there are always plenty of those. And if there’s any nonsense about not selling to visitors tell them that you will report it to the Food Office. We’ll all meet outside the Post Office in half an hour.’

They separated and Mrs. Cove hurried down to Fore Street. But Blanche’s back had delayed them, and they were not first in the shops as she had intended. There was a considerable queue in the largest confectioners. She joined it and took her place just behind Robin Siddal and Sir Henry Gifford.

‘You’re early,’ she said sourly, when they greeted her.

‘I’m after marshmallows,’ said Gifford. ‘My wife charged me to get her some before they all disappear. They’ve got some here, I see.’

‘I want butterscotch,’ said Robin. ‘There’s none on the Parade. I saw Blanche there, Mrs. Cove, and she wants to know if she and the other girls can come with me to see a ship in a bottle that I told her about. I said if I saw you I’d ask.’

‘Where is it?’ asked Mrs. Cove.

‘In a cottage, just off the harbour. It’s Nancibel’s great grandmother’s, as a matter of fact. She’s got a lot of interesting old things.’