The Hireling (27 page)

This black-out was, from one point of view, very convenient for her; as long as she did not contradict herself, she could choose what to remember. No one could check up on her loss of memory. As the days passed the black mist receded, leaving visible to her conscious mind many things she had genuinely forgotten, like rocks uncovered by the ebbing tide. But the thing she wanted most to know did not declare itself.

The accident had been a face-saving business all round. It had saved her face, Hughie’s, Leadbitter’s, and Ernestine’s.

Had it saved Ernestine’s? Did anyone besides herself know that for Ernestine the blow had been a double blow? Did Ernestine suspect Constance of knowing?

How delicate was it, her own situation? Her friends had come to see her, they had written; only a very few had failed to make some sign. They had condoled with her on her misfortune and congratulated her on her escape - emphasizing the one or the other according to their temperaments and their several estimates of where she stood. Perhaps the absentees had stayed away, and the silent had refrained from writing, because they could not make their minds up, or had made them up in a way unfavourable to her. She would want them now, her friends, and she must look them up and atone for her neglect of them - for how easy it is, when one is in love, to neglect one’s friends I Beside the voice which is so much nearer and more urgent, their voices sound like a distant murmur, hardly intelligible. She would need all her friends for a life that from now on must be based on friendship, not on love.

Ernestine was not a real friend; should she go and see her? Yes, her conscience said, but Constance had always kept her conscience in its place; she didn’t believe in encouraging it; she liked it, as she liked her wine, to be dry. She thought a soggy, suppurating conscience did more harm than good and had trained herself to be suspicious of its promptings, unless some obvious good would come of them.

What good would come of seeing Ernestine? But was a drama of human feeling into which she had, for many years, put everything she had to give, unselfishly as well as selfishly - was it to be dismissed as unmentionable, because of one slip at the end? Was human understanding so bankrupt that she could not even approach the other woman, could not even press her hand and go away without speaking? It seemed it was; it seemed as though the maximum effort of two hearts, expended on the self-same object, could never coalesce, could never touch, could never be so much as made known to each other; for every consideration that reconciled her to Hughie’s death to Ernestine would be an added insult, a new cause for suffering. Another woman’s experience! Far from telling Ernestine about it, she must keep it from her with every lie at her command. This should not be difficult, for Ernestine was utterly unsuspecting; her mind was in the clouds when not turned inwards on itself. Her egoism and her idealism, which were complementary, repelled objective fact. Yet might not a spark somehow fly between them - a thought that common humanity had kindled, even if it had no bearing on their joint experience?

It was Constance’s good fortune that her thoughts controlled her feelings. But she knew that with Ernestine it was the other way about; if any thought was going to help her, it would have to be presented in an emotional form.

No such thought occurred to Constance, but the sense of mission was inherent in her, and now that Hughie was gone instinctively it sought another object. She did not connect Ernestine (why should she?) with the unidentified memory at large in the mist, yet separately they were always in her thoughts. ‘What can I say to Lady Franklin?’ and on the last morning of her stay in hospital the answer, or a part of it, came to her. She was awakened by the voice of a man shouting, shouting with so much urgency and such a clamour of sound, that it might have been someone in the street below her, crying for help. At first the words were indistinguishable; then they were borne to her on a kind of echo: Tell Lady Franklin that I -‘ After the ‘I’, which had a frenzy of appeal in it, like the last affirmation of an identity on the threshold of dissolution, she heard no more; but even while she recognized the voice as Leadbitter’s, two things happened in the depth of her consciousness; she knew that the lost memory had been recovered, and knew what she must say to Ernestine.

But afterwards she doubted, doubted first if the message was complete. Clearly it was not complete; the vital part was missing. Had it eluded her, was it still adrift in the limbo of concussion? She didn’t think so; the sense of wholeness had come back to her, the nagging shoe-lace had been tied up; all that Leadbitter had said, she had remembered. But the second doubt was harder to dispose of. How could she go to Ernestine with half a message? How could she convey its urgency without its meaning? To Leadbitter it had meant, she was convinced, all that he had it in him to mean: it was the final utterance of his spirit. If only she could have had a record of it, with every intonation and vibration sounding! Then it would have told its own tale, unfinished though it was. But spoken in her woman’s voice, emasculated, across the tea-cups, how could it fail to be an anti-climax? ‘Really, Miss Copthorne, if that is all you have to tell me!’ - for even Ernestine could be alarming in her regal moods.

And how should she present herself? Not wearing a white sheet for Hughie - that she would never do. Bluffing her way through the interview with a jaunty boldness? ‘It wasn’t so bad, you know, just the usual kind of head-on crash. We hadn’t time to be frightened. I couldn’t go to Hughie’s funeral, I was out of action, but no doubt you were there? They are rather sad occasions, aren’t they, though they can be funny. I expect that all Leadbitter’s relations turned up at his. I should have liked to send a wreath - the working class make such a thing of funerals -but I didn’t know where to send it…. Oh yes, I could have, because it must have happened after the post-mortem - I suppose he had to be buried somewhere? - by which time I was compos mentis, more or less. He had a message for you, by the way,’

That wouldn’t do, either. She simply couldn’t imagine herself in the other woman’s presence. Supposing Ernestine refused to see her? Would she then feel absolved from further effort, either on her own behalf, or Leadbitter’s?

What - she kept asking herself - had Leadbitter wanted them to tell Ernestine, that he couldn’t say himself? For it was they who were to tell her, and not he. Why? Had he foreseen his own death? Had he perhaps decided on it?

Thinking of Leadbitter’s last moments, and the words that had been almost forced out of him, Constance grew more and more confused. Did he want them to say he hadn’t sent the letter? (Hughie’s threat to tell on him was one of the things she had found hardest to forgive.) But then he would have said, ‘Don’t tell Lady Franklin that I - sent the letter,’ because she wouldn’t suspect him, presumably, unless they told her. Did he want them to say that the letter was a lie? Tell Lady Franklin that I - made it up?’ He might have meant to say that. The letter was her only clue; whatever the message was, it must have been to do with the letter. Yet she couldn’t mention the letter to Ernestine: it was the very last thing she could mention.

What did he want to say to Ernestine so urgently that he died trying to say it?

She couldn’t think, but she must take the message, meaningless though it was, or Leadbitter’s ghost, with its harsh, desperate voice, would haunt her, unappeased.

A secretary replied to Constance’s letter saying that on her doctor’s advice Lady Franklin was not seeing visitors, but that she very much wanted to see Miss Copthorne, and suggested tea on such and such a day. But (the secretary added this on her own account) would Miss Copthorne not stay too long, as Lady Franklin got very quickly tired.

On a sunny afternoon Constance arrived at the house in South Halkin Street, noticed the net curtains drawn across the window and rang the bell. She felt more nervous than she had felt for years; any curiosity she had had evaporated, the things she had prepared to say fled from her, she only wanted the interview to be over. She hardly took in her surroundings, though she noticed that the sofa on which Lady Franklin had reclined for her portrait had been pushed against the wall and was so covered with cushions that there was no room even to sit on it: it had the air of being roped off.

Lady Franklin came in a moment later, looking smaller than Constance remembered her, but dressed in the old blend of blue and white. She brought so little personality with her that she scarcely seemed to disturb the air; the room itself did not recognize its mistress, it felt no different after she had entered, and when she said in her fluttering way: ‘Oh, Miss Copthorne, I am so pleased to see you,’ it was almost as if she had not spoken.

I mustn’t stay long,’ said Constance, sinking into a chair beside the low tea-table, and feeling she had already stayed a long time, ‘for I know how quickly you get tired,’

The words were no sooner out of her mouth than they seemed altogether too positive a statement to make about Lady Franklin.

‘They tell me I get tired,’ said Lady Franklin, rather vaguely, ‘and I suppose I do: it is so easy to feel what you are told that you feel, isn’t it? And less trouble, too,’ she added with the ghost of a smile.

A woman who can take her state of health on trust from someone else can’t be very ill, thought Constance, but she said as sympathetically as she could: ‘I know just what you mean. I have been ill, too, and when the doctor asked me how I was, I sometimes used to answer, “That’s for you to say.”’

‘Of course you have been ill,’ said Lady Franklin, sliding into self-reproach, ‘much worse than I have. How are you feeling now?’

‘Oh, much better,’ Constance said. ‘I start work again on Monday,’ She paused, overwhelmed by self-consciousness; and an absurd idea came to her that she ought to explain to Lady Franklin what the word ‘work’ meant.

‘I sometimes wish I had to work,’ said Lady Franklin. ‘The pressure of outside circumstances is something one can’t invent for oneself, can one? And when outside pressure stops, inside pressure begins. Or does that sound affected?’

‘No, of course not,’ Constance said. ‘I don’t know what I should do if I hadn’t to work,’

‘Do you find it an answer to everything?’ asked Lady Franklin.

‘I hope I shall,’ said Constance, thinking, I shall never be able to shift the weight of unspoken words that lie between us; I might as well go now.

‘I have found another answer,’ said Lady Franklin, looking away from Constance, ‘at least it has found me. … I could tell you … But why should I bother you with my affairs?’

Constance grasped at this.

‘I hoped,’ she said with difficulty, ‘that you would tell me something, so that I could also tell you ..,’

‘Will you begin?’ said Lady Franklin.

‘No, I’d rather you did,’

‘Well, Nature is merciful in a way, I feel She doesn’t really mean us to suffer,’

‘You think not?’ said Constance. ‘I confess I’ve sometimes wondered,’

‘I think not. You see, I suffered a good deal over the accident… and everything,’

‘I’m sure you did,’

‘But I don’t suffer now, or not as much,’

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ Constance said.

‘You knew Hughie well, didn’t you?’ said Lady Franklin, and her out-thrust underlip began to tremble.

‘Yes, very well,’

‘Did you think him very talented?’

‘No, not really,’ Constance said.

‘I did, but perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I was wrong about him altogether. If he had lived -‘ Lady Franklin stopped.

‘Yes?’ said Constance cautiously.

‘He might have made some woman happy. … You, perhaps,’

‘Me?’ said Constance. ‘But he would have been married to you,’

Lady Franklin clasped and unclasped her hands.

‘No … No … We had broken it off. I thought you would have known,’

‘I did know, as a matter of fact,’ said Constance, reddening.

‘I thought you must have. It was kind of you to say you didn’t. Now I sometimes think I could have married him -that I ought to have - but I didn’t think so then. … I was so bewildered … and hurt, too. It wasn’t so much his loving another woman that I minded, as his not loving me,’

‘I don’t quite understand,’ said Constance. ‘Won’t you explain?’

‘It was the letter … the letter someone sent to say he had a mistress, and meant to go on seeing her after we were married. I believed it at once … I always believe what people tell me. But now I’m not sure I do. Supposing an enemy of his had sent it, out of spite? Or an enemy of mine? I didn’t know I had one, but perhaps we all have. I hadn’t time to think, I was so stunned. And just because I didn’t want to believe it, I thought it must be true,’

‘Did he deny it?’ Constance asked.

‘Oh yes, but then he had to. Oh, I hated not being able to believe him, but what could I do? I couldn’t make myself believe. It wasn’t till afterwards - long afterwards - that I began to wonder if … if I hadn’t done him the most cruel injustice, and missed my own happiness, too. Anonymous letters are often untrue, aren’t they? People I’ve asked have told me so,’

‘Did you tell anyone about the letter?’ Constance asked.

‘Oh no, indeed not, that was a thing I have to be so grateful for - I didn’t tell anybody, I couldn’t. I did nothing at all. I didn’t take any steps - you know, to cancel the arrangements - until I heard about the accident. And then of course, I had to. It was much easier than I thought it would be - the mechanical part, I mean - just a matter of writing and paying - and everybody was so sweet to me. … I haven’t finished answering the letters yet. It helped me a great deal at first to know that people were sorry for me, but after a time I couldn’t bear it - everyone taking it for granted we were still in love with each other, and then I stopped reading the letters and put a notice in the paper to say I would answer later. In a way it was the letters all saying the same thing that made me wonder if I had been mistaken about Hughie. And that was the worst part -wondering if I had misjudged him,’

‘Would you rather think that he had loved you, or that he hadn’t?’ Constance heard herself asking.