The Skeleton in the Grass (21 page)

“I thought they'd been laid to rest long ago, but I suppose this business has revived them. People remember, in villages.”

“Perhaps we should have fought harder against them,” said Helen.

“I wouldn't have deigned to. A pacifist proving his fighting credentials? Anyway, the truth is so ludicrous they'd never have believed it. Shot in the foot by a bloody careless Welshman, who couldn't even do firearms drill without letting the thing off.” He turned to Sarah again. “We were both in Cairo, as part of the Expeditionary Force preparing for the Dardanelles campaign. The care I got for my wound was hopeless, it started festering, and I was shipped home. The Welshman survived Gallipoli, and sends me a card every Christmas saying it's wonderful how famous I've become and he hopes the wound isn't hurting. What am I supposed to do? Show the card around to prove I didn't do it myself? The whole thing was farcical—practically surreal.”

“I don't think anyone who knew you would believe you did it yourself,” Elizabeth said stoutly.

“But they do! They must do! That's why all the Major's slanders have fallen on such fertile ground. Of course I know they've never understood us, or what we've tried to do all these years. I remember saying as much to you, Sarah, when you first arrived. But you would think that when something like this came up, they'd stand by us, wouldn't you? Not immediately jump to the worst conclusion . . . You know, I really think that all our work for peace just confirms them in the belief that I'm a coward who shot himself to get out of the war . . . Sometimes I despair.”

Helen patted the cushion on the sofa beside her, and he came to sit by her with a rueful smile.

“You bear the brunt of all my black moods,” he said. She took his hands.

“We'll come through it, Dennis. We always have,” she said. “Through my silly fling with Jerry Cousins, through
Edward's death, through your coming home wounded and all those rumours the first time round. We must be survivors, I think. We'll come through all this as well.”

“Of course we will . . . Meanwhile the business of coming through has to be faced up to, and I don't know that I'm ready for it yet.” Dennis brushed the hair from his eyes, reminding Sarah very much of Will. “I was going to go up to London tomorrow, to see Victor Gollancz. You know, about the
Writers for Peace
anthology that he wants me to put together for the Left Book Club. I was going to take the train from Hatherton, but I don't think I could meet their faces on the platform. I think I'll drive in to Banbury . . . Isn't it ridiculous? I feel guilty and ashamed even though I've done nothing. It's like being a child again.”

Elizabeth said: “It's Coffey who ought to feel ashamed. Even if he didn't kill him, he started it all off.”

Helen said: “Please God it may all end soon. Please God they make an arrest.”

Sarah remembered Oliver's words, echoed by Winifred: “The longer the investigation lasts, the less likely there is to be an arrest.”

S
arah was having a nightmare. Except that it didn't feel like any nightmare she had had before in her short life. For a start she felt herself to be awake, and always in the past she had struggled, suffocatingly, to waken. Then, this nightmare seemed not to centre on concrete dangers or horrors—monsters, deformed men, precipices or juggernaut machines—but somehow to be about ideas, interpretations, mental states.

To be sure there were objects in it, and those objects seemed to have come together in some
Alice in Wonderland
sort of conjunction, but they seemed not so much terrifying as ridiculous. A cream cake and an old sepia photograph of cricket teams. Sometimes the photograph, in a silver-gilt frame, sat on top of the cream cake. Sometimes they seemed to dance in her consciousness in some lunatic waltz.

If she struggled she could pinpoint whence they had intruded themselves into her sleeping mind. Surely she
was
sleeping? They were associated with her first day at Hallam. They had eaten cream cake, and she had found it too rich . . . But
that
wasn't it . . . And Dennis had talked about a cricket game played just before the war, between a team of his own friends, and a team of village men. The photograph she had somehow imagined for herself, on the model of sepia photographs of parish outings that they had
had at home. She had never seen any actual photograph of the teams at Hallam.

But it wasn't the cream cake or the photograph as
objects
that were important. Some significance lay behind them. There were questions that the cake and the photograph were trying to thrust upon her, but which she struggled against articulating. And when they did assume some verbal form in her mind, they seemed merely silly: when Helen offered to go and fetch the cream cake from the kitchen, did she know cream cakes shouldn't sit out in the sun? When Dennis said that by 1916 only two of the cricketers were still alive, was he talking about both teams, or just the team of his own friends? The questions were absurd.

But there was something behind them, some significance that would not let itself be thrust down, however reluctant Sarah was to look it squarely in the face. It seemed ungrateful, selfish, almost impious, to go into the implications of the questions, and yet . . .

Mrs. Munday was very hard-worked. Pinner too, but Mrs. Munday especially. She worked gladly, cheerfully, with love—for she really did love the Hallams. But did that make it better or worse? The Hallams were uneasy with the whole business of being employers of servants. That was why they employed daily women from the village. But wouldn't life have been a great deal easier for Mrs. Munday if there had been a few more full-time servants? It was Mrs. Munday, Sarah remembered, who had eventually brought out the cake.

She herself—this was when Sarah hated herself for her selfishness—had had a wonderful feeling when she arrived of being part of the family. And
such
a family. So warm, and friendly, and wise, and good-looking. They had treated her, always, as a
person
, not as a governess. When she had asked for time off, it had been conceded without
question: whenever she wanted it, she only had to ask. But wouldn't it have been better if she had not had to ask? If they had come to some agreement about evenings off, days off, as soon as she'd taken up the position? She hadn't liked to ask too often, and of course the opportunities offered by the villages were few. She had really worked very hard since she had arrived at Hallam.

Of course she had worked with love—for Chloe, for Helen. She felt they, all of them, had liberated her. She had cast off at Hallam the small-mindedness and petty tyrannies of her home. And yet was there not a danger that she might, willingly and with love, have shaken off one set of family chains, only to assume another set? Was that what Winifred, in her kind, not very articulate way, had been trying to warn her against?

How often had Helen put Chloe to bed since she arrived? How often had she seen Helen helping Mrs. Munday in the kitchen?

Sarah put those questions from her, as being too ridiculously petty.

Because the other question really was the more important. Somehow she was morally sure that Dennis had meant that only two from
his
team were still alive in 1916. Two from his world of witty, well-spoken, well-educated people—the sort of people with whom he felt at home.

The Hallam world suddenly presented itself to her as two tracts of territory, separated by a ditch. Within the inner circle were the family and servants at Hallam—a warm, beautiful, cosy community. Beyond the ditch was humanity at large, for whom the Hallams had a great, generous love, the highest aspirations. But between those two worlds were the people in the ditch: the people among whom the Hallams lived, and for whom they felt nothing. For example the people in the villages—ordinary, humdrum, inarticulate humanity.

Helen barely knew the names of the women who came daily from the village to scrub and vacuum and dust. She was always very charming to them, but she hardly knew them—what families they had, what problems there were in living on a farm-labourer's subsistence wage. Even her mother had taken more interest than that in the villagers of Stetford. Dennis knew more names, but he confessed himself unable to communicate with the local men, or they with him. Dennis lamented the terrible slaughter of the Great War, but when Mrs. Keene's husband died a delayed death from his wartime gassing, it was Oliver who had gone to help her get money for his funeral from the Foresters and the British Legion. Dear, kind, unglamorous Oliver—it was always he who shouldered the difficult tasks. And when he had gone to see Mrs. Keene after Chris's death, Helen had even forgotten to ask him if there was anything they could do.

Of course the Hallams had been embarrassed by the whole idea of being gentry, by the pattern of proprietorship and subservience that it implied. Yet they had lived the life of the gentry, hadn't they? They hadn't given it up. They had just given up the gentry's duties.

And it wasn't just the villagers who were somehow outside their vision. Helen had no sympathy for Winifred Hallam's frustrated maternal instincts. Her longing for children merely repelled and frightened her. It aroused no pity. And Mostyn they all dismissed as stupid.

Did Mostyn Hallam deserve the ridicule that the Hallams served him with whenever his name came up? She remembered them suggesting that he would hate them arriving at Cabbot in Bumps, but he hadn't displayed any such reaction, merely unashamed pleasure at seeing them there. He had been perfectly amiable to a wide range of people, something the Hallams found it difficult to be. There were many different kinds of exclusiveness, and Sarah
suddenly realized that her Hallams were intensely exclusive people.

It was Winifred Hallam who had discovered her passion for gardens. Helen had never probed her interests. And Winifred had suggested a practical way of using that passion in a future career. Sarah remembered Roland telling her who had helped him get his Oxford scholarship: “Mr. Mostyn Hallam.” And Mostyn helped him out in vacations by employing him. Admittedly Mostyn was the local MP, and had to curry favour. But she didn't think Roland saw it like that. There had been an emphasis:
“Mostyn
Hallam.” Had he been trying to say that he could have expected no help or encouragement from the Dennis Hallams? That they did nothing for the ordinary people in the village?

Why,
when this business had blown up, had the villagers been against the Hallams right from the start? The Major was a mere outsider—usually a figure of suspicion in a village. His manner was not of the sort to gain him support. His attitudes were reactionary in a way hardly calculated to appeal to ordinary people. But they had been, all the time, instinctively on his side. Was it because they were instinctively against the Hallams?

There was something about the Hallams' attitude to people, their relationships with them . . .

Chan. Suddenly Sarah thought of Chan. Had he liked being called Chan? The name of a ridiculous Chinese detective. She put the thought from her, despising herself. They had got on well with Chan: he had liked them, and they had liked him. Oliver and doubtless all his friends at Oxford had called him Chan. It was no different from shortening William to Will . . . Will, rather than Bill. Shakespeare, rather than Sikes . . .

There was something about the Hallams that instinctively shrugged off everything that was common and ordinary and homespun.

They could talk to Chan, because he was one of themselves—a thinking, intellectual, politically active person. They could not talk to Mrs. Keene. Only Oliver—kind, concerned Oliver—could talk to Mrs. Keene. A phrase from
Bleak House
thrust itself into her brain: Telescopic Philanthropy. The Hallams kept their eyes on the horizon, on a new and better world, but they hardly noticed what went on around their feet. There was in the Hallams, for all their high-thinking and their social concern, a sort of lack, a sort of blankness.

And they were quite unaware of it themselves. When Dennis had talked about his brutal reception in the village, surely there had been—she had noticed it, but hastily suppressed the knowledge—a note of self-pity in his voice. You would have thought, he had said, that the village would have stood by him. His better self would have told him that loyalty had to be earned. But at the crisis he had retreated into the role of squire, expecting the backing of the peasantry.

Loyalty had to be earned. But the public-spiritedness of the Hallams had spread itself too wide, had been too general or too abstract. And here at home they had not had enough love or concern to extend it to their poorer, less intelligent neighbours in the village. They had retreated into their warm little nest, the loving family circle with their devoted servants and their funny old car, and their ball-games on the lawn with Bounce.

When she thought of Bounce she suddenly remembered Mrs. Munday's account of him on the night of the murder, barking at the door and wagging his tail.

Sarah shivered, and knew she was awake.

“O
h goody! We've got visitors!”

Chloe was a child with wonderfully elastic spirits. The house had been dismal since Dennis's encounter with Dunnock, and Sarah was not the least affected: she spent more time than she cared to admit wondering whether the new perspectives on the Hallams presented to her in her nightmare vision were a revelation or a delusion. “You were bound to fall out of love violently,” said Will to Sarah, when they met during the Blitz.

Many years later, when plump, thirtyish Chloe came to interview Sarah for an article in the
Sunday Times
Colour Magazine on “Wives of the Mandarins” (Sarah had never thought of Roland as a Mandarin, and he himself defined his admittedly eminent job in the Colonial Office as “Preparing for the end”), Sarah had said to her soon after she'd sat down: