The Town House (50 page)

He came in, on that warm, dusty evening, a little late for supper, his face flushed, his eyes fever-bright and his whole manner that of one who moves in a trance. He sat down, and ignoring the food before him, told us that he had been playing his lute in the market-place. Those who had listened had given him cakes and fruit and sweetmeats and a variety of small trinkets. He laid them out on the board; a little image of St. Christopher, a knife with a horn handle, a belt buckle and a money pouch made of plaited straw.

‘They had no money to spare,’ he said, ‘but those who had …look!’ He opened the pouch and spilled out six or seven shining-farthings. ‘They liked it so much that they paid me! They paid me!’ he said.

His grandfather looked at the coins as though they had been earned by blood, fraud, prostitution. Mistress Reed looked at them as though they were her death warrant. I simply stared, thinking, Well if he can earn that much in an hour, he’s cleverer than most; a good thatcher working from dawn to dusk earned a penny and a half in the day.

Mistress Reed spoke first. She said,

‘Of course they liked your playing, Walter. You play extremely well. I always said so. But you mustn’t take all this’, she pointed to the stuff on the table, ‘as proof that you can make a living playing the lute. You see, you are very young and rather small, so they think that it is
marvellous
that you should–’

‘The Devil take your tongue,’ Walter cried. All the blood went out of his face, leaving it the colour that I had only seen before on a corpse. ‘That isn’t true. They liked it, I tell you. No matter about me. When I sang of the Death of Roland they wept. Great rough men. One man said, “What magic is this? I have not shed a tear since my child died, and what is this Roland to me?” He said that with tears running down his face. And then you say it is because I am small.’

He would have been weeping himself, had he been able, but he never could cry; he could sob and moan but I never saw him shed a tear.

His mother shrank back as though he had hit her across the face, but his grandfather leaned forward and said in a voice of controlled fury,

‘Never, in all my days have I known a boy speak so insolently to his mother. She spoke for your good and she spoke the truth. So, in the market-place a few fools praised you, and you come home calling on the Devil. You ask pardon this minute, or I’ll give you what I should have years ago, a damned good hiding.’

I watched, with great interest. When I first came to the Old Vine the boy’s choosiness over what he would and would not learn had been attributed to my failure to manage him. Let them learn.

Walter looked defiantly at his grandfather, but the old man was not to be outfaced. Set in their myriad wrinkles, under the scowl-scarred brow, his grey eyes bore down, unflinching. Walter’s stare flickered and wavered. He put out his hands and gathered all the things he had laid out for display, as though they were his defence and consolation. Across them he said,

‘I ask your pardon, Madam. But truly it was not because–’

‘That will
do
!’ Master Reed said.

There was a silence at the table, broken when Walter picked up his little silver coins and passed them lightly from hand to hand. Mistress Reed leaned forward and seemed to be about to speak, but though her lips moved and her throat jerked, no sound came. She lifted her cup and drank, set it down, and then, rather like a woman who has heard evil tidings, put her hand over her mouth and the lower part of her face. Her hands, I noticed for the first time, were like Maude’s, very long and thin, the finger joints clearly marked.

I saw Master Reed give her a sidelong glance. I thought that this was where I, one of the company, yet not emotionally concerned, should make some tactful, impersonal remark which would smooth over the awkward moment. Before I could think of one Master Reed, in a casual way which contrasted sharply with his last manner of speech, said,

‘It would serve you right, Walter, if nobody spoke to you for a week. But that would punish your mother more than you. You’d better ask her to say that she forgives you.’

Walter said as meekly as possible, ‘Please forgive me, Mother.’

Master Reed then seemed to be affected by madness. He hit the table with his hand and said more furiously than I had ever heard him speak even to a pack-whacker who had foundered two horses,

‘God’s blood! Can’t you just for once do what you’re told?’ Mistress Reed again moved her lips and tried to protest, but the old man thundered on. ‘I said, ask her to say she forgives you. Do it, or I’ll break your neck!’

By this time every eye in the dining hall was turned toward our table. Mistress Reed, ever mindful of formalities, moved a hand in a gesture very eloquent and graceful to draw Master Reed’s attention to this fact. He shook his head like a horse tormented by flies and kept his eye on Walter, who, after a minute said,

‘Mother, please say that you forgive me.’

The words came from her like liquid from an upturned bottle,

‘I do, Walter, I do. I shouldn’t have said what I did. Of course they liked your playing.’

‘Now mark this,’ Master Reed said, ‘when you lose your temper and say things like “Devil take your tongue” that is a plain invitation for the same ill wish to fall on you. You be mindful of what you say.’

I admit that on the face of it it was no more than any man might say to any child, a mere paraphrase of the old adage about ill wishes coming home to roost; but the way he said it gave it weight and importance. It was almost as though he believed that Walter’s angry words had affected his mother’s speech; as though the grandfather believed that the boy had a power to ill-wish, and wanted to warn him, privily, against inflicting hurt.

Rubbish, I told myself, superstitious nonsense. The one power which Walter Reed possessed was the one of making people think that he played better than he did. In the main he was secretive about his music, shutting himself away in the solar and playing for hours alone. On these occasions when he would say, rather pompously, ‘Now I will play for you,’ I always reminded myself that I had been schooled at Norwich where the choir is famous, and had twice heard Blind Hob of Lincoln play for the Leather Merchants’ Guild in that same city. But always, before the end, Walter would have me, and with all judgment suspended I would fall under the spell, too.

During the time immediately after Maude’s departure, whenever I heard Walter play I would ask myself whether both these children hadn’t been born with a curious power to charm, Walter by his music, Maude by just being. Walter’s charm ended when his lute was silent, but Maude’s could survive her absence. I thought of her, not always sentimentally, sometimes critically, at almost every moment during the day when my mind was not actually engaged upon some immediate business. I would try to recall her face and succeed only partially, making a picture in my mind of a blur dominated by one over-prominent feature, the way one does when someone tries to describe a person unknown. ‘He has a big nose’ they say, and you see just a nose. So I would think, in turn of
her blue, deep set eyes, the hollow in her cheek, the turn of her lip or the way her hair grew. Then, at another, unexpected time, I could recall the whole of her, down to the nails on her fingers. I thought of her, at such times, much as a man on short commons would think of some favourite, flavoursome dish. I craved to see her, and when, one day early in December, Martin Reed said, ‘I take it Maude will come home for Christmas,’ I wanted to jump up and shake him by the hand, slap him on the back, give loud and obvious evidence of my approval.

‘I take it Maude will come home for Christmas,’ he said.

Mistress Reed said in a doubtful voice,

‘I don’t know about that. Nobody mentioned it. Would it be allowed?’

Forgetful of my place I said, ‘Of course it would. Who could prevent it? She isn’t a novice, or even a school-child. She can come home when she wishes.’

‘So I should think,’ Master Reed said.

‘I’m not so sure.’ Mistress Reed looked me in the eye and said, ‘You were schooled by monks; did you go home for Christmas?’

She’d heard me say – the cunning bitch – that I did not.

‘My home was thirty miles from my school, Madam; and in return for my lessons I sang in the Choir. I could not miss the Christmas Masses. The cases are hardly comparable.’ I almost added and it would have been true – except that my brothers didn’t want me home, any more than you want Maude.

‘It shouldn’t be too difficult to find out,’ Master Reed said in his dry way. ‘Nicholas can write a letter, which I will sign.’

‘But are you sure that it is wise to unsettle her so soon–?’

‘Holy Virgin, you talk as though we wanted her there, Anne. She took this whim to go, but if she’s outlived it there’s nothing I’d like better than to unsettle her. Unsettle, that’s fool’s talk.’

Mistress Reed said with cold dignity,

‘I’m remembering my own childhood, always on the move and longing for some settled place. That was all.’

‘Well, if you can’t see the difference,’ he said angrily and snatched up his mug, drank from it and set it down with a clang.

Later, in the office, he stamped about, bringing his good leg down heavily.

‘I’m the customer, ain’t I?’ he demanded of me. ‘I pay five pounds a year for her to be there when I’d pay four times the amount to keep her
at home. You can tell them that if you like. The whole thing was a mistake from beginning to end. She should never have gone to Beauclaire. Beware of women, my boy. Yon don’t have to be in love with one for her to lead you by the nose and you don’t notice till too late. Get your things and write. How do you address a Prioress? You should know. Now I’ll say what I want to say, and you wrap it up so she’ll not think she’s dealing with an ignorant old fellow.’

My former visits to the nunnery had been made after the shearing season, when the sun was warm and the fields green; even then I had been struck by the dreariness of the place, set all alone, far from the highway behind a barrier of trees. The House and the Chapel were both shaped like haystacks built of dark, dressed flint, the least cheerful of all building materials. They were linked by a kind of cloister, begun in stone and finished in wood; some of the pillars retaining their bark. Immediately in front of the cloister was a little herb garden, at this season bleached and depleted, but as neat as a piece of embroidery. Everything at Clevely was as neat as it was bleak.

The only door in the House opened directly upon the kitchen, and there was no portress here. My old acquaintance, Dame Clarice, answered my knocking, told me that the Prioress was ill in her bed, and without ceremony opened the letter.

‘This is for Maude to decide. You may ask her. Let me see, Tuesday. You’ll find her in the dairy.’ She indicated a door immediately opposite the one at which we stood, and said, ‘At the end of the passage.’

I stepped in, aware at once of the smell of a religious house. Ordinary people on their way home from church shake the incense odour off into the air; professed religious on their short cloistered walk carry it with them to mingle with the scent of boiled onions and stockfish and the porridge that burned, very slightly in the pan. With this smell of my schooldays in my nose and my heart jumping because I was, in a moment, going to see Maude again, I walked along the cold dim passage, feeling suddenly young and unsure of myself.

I could hear, before I reached the dairy door, the sound of girlish chatter, once a merry laugh, mingled with the clatter of pans and the swish of a scrubbing brush. Perhaps she was happy here, I thought, and perversely took no joy in the thought.

There were three of them in the cold dairy, all wearing coarse sacking smocks over their clothes, wooden clogs on their feet and linen hoods covering their hair. One was engaged in scrubbing the shelves, one, on
her knees, was scrubbing the floor, the other was scouring a bucket. The three faces turned to me with looks of surprise, then the one who was kneeling scrambled to her feet and said,

‘Oh, Master Freeman, is anything wrong?’

Even as I assured her I was thinking to myself, Name of God, yes! Wrong that she who had never been full-fleshed, should have grown so much thinner; wrong that her hands should be so red and swollen, the nails broken short and grimed from the dirty water. I told her my errand and for one unguarded moment pure pleasure lightened her face, only to go out again like a blown candle. She said in a wooden way,

‘I thank my grandfather for so kind a thought; but I had best stay here.’

‘He is counting upon your presence. Would you ruin his Christmas, when in the course of nature he can have few more? Remember what I said to you about selfishness.’

‘And you remember what I said about Owd Scrat!’

I longed to pick her up in my arms and run with her, out of the place; to shake the obstinacy out of her. I could only use words, and I was choosing, out of my own hurt, the most wounding ones I could muster, when the bucket scourer came to my aid.

‘Oh Maude,’ she said, ‘please go home and bring us back some Christmas fare. Raisins,’ she said, in an ecstatic voice.

‘Ham,’ said the other, and I swear that her teeth shone for a second like a hungry dog’s. ‘Ham for me, Maude. Please. We’ll do your work. You go home and bring us back some goodies.’

‘A fine impression we shall make upon Master Freeman,’ Maude said. ‘He’ll think us entirely governed by our appetites.’

I took note of the conventual ‘we’. I said,

‘You see, demoiselle, at the cost of a very slight sacrifice of your own self-esteem you could mightily please three people – these and your grandfather.’

‘Four,’ she said. ‘I should myself be pleased.’

‘Five then, for I also should be … delighted.’

‘I should have to ask leave.’

‘It is already given. Dame Clarice said that it was for you to decide.’

‘The words must have
choked
her,’ cried the girl who had asked for ham. She giggled and put her hand to her mouth.

‘Not for twelve days, then. Four.’

‘Good Maude. Kind Maude. The sooner I shall have my raisins.’