Theirs Was The Kingdom (99 page)

His insight into Jeffs was carried a stage further whilst they were hanging about waiting for Debbie to change and catch the boat train for Paris. He said, suddenly, “Why a small-town newspaper, Milton? You’ve already made your mark in Fleet Street and done very well for a chap your age. If you prefer the provinces, why not one of the big dailies up North?”

Jeffs replied, “Two reasons, sir. In the first place, we’ve decided we want to shape our own editorial policy, even if it is limited to the design of the parish pump.”

“And the second reason?”

“A private statute of limitations. At twenty-one both of us believed ourselves capable of shifting the Alps. Now, after several years with Stead, we’re ready to settle for a few tons of topsoil from the Mendips.”

“Something in that,” Adam grunted, “but I daresay Debbie will say I’m the wrong man to admit to it.”

3

Alex and Lydia, Helen and Rowley, Debbie and Milton Jeffs, George and Gisela. Four couples paired off, three couples moved out of reach all in little over a year, yet the house was not noticeably empty on their account.

Giles looked like developing into a confirmed bachelor, but Henrietta, for one, did not underestimate the bruises left on him by that madcap Romayne, still mustered among the missing.

Hugo was living at home when he wasn’t plunging all over the country collecting cups and medals. The two younger ones, Edward and Margaret, were growing fast and filling the house with pony-mad friends. There remained Joanna, rising twenty-two, and Henrietta was not at all sure what to make of Joanna nowadays.

It was natural, of course, that she should miss Helen more than any of them. They had been closer than any two of the children since their nursery days, but she had seemed lively enough up to the time of the wedding, and through the fag-end of the summer after Helen and Rowley had sailed. Latterly, however, particularly since Christmas, she seemed to droop a little and Henrietta, quick to notice such things, detected what she could only describe as a loss of the dash and sparkle for which Jo had always been famous, particularly among the hearty hunting set she and Helen had favoured. She was still very much in demand, but Henrietta had the impression she was beginning to tire of the nonstop round of hunt balls, soirees and bicycle picnics that had been her steady diet for so long now, and wondered if Helen’s marriage had set her thinking about the advantages of settling down. There was no real evidence of this. She saw a good deal of that jolly, rakish brother of Rowley’s, Clinton Coles, but showed him no particular preference, continuing to flirt with half a dozen other young bucks, none of whom, in Henrietta’s opinion, merited more than a kiss or two under the mistletoe. She might have spoken to Joanna about prospects of marriage, but she did not. She had never enjoyed the confidence of the Inseparables. All the time they were growing up they seemed to turn to one another rather than her. In some ways she felt more at ease with Alex or Giles than with either of them. She was certainly closer to George’s Austrian wife, Gisela.

So she said nothing but kept her eyes and ears open. It was the latter that served her in the end, one windy night towards the end of March, when Adam was away in the North seeking a replacement for O’Dowd, his Irish manager, who had suddenly decided to emigrate to the United States.

It was by the merest accident that she stumbled on the cause of Joanna’s loss of appetite and partial withdrawal. Nine-year-old Margaret, down with a feverish cold, had been sleeping in Phoebe Fraser’s room for a week and had run a temperature three nights in a row. Phoebe had seemed tired out at luncheon and readily acceded to Henrietta’s suggestion that Margaret was now well enough to go back to her own room at the far end of the corridor, where she could keep an eye on her until Doctor Birtles pronounced her fit to come downstairs.

Henrietta was late to bed that night. She usually was when Adam was away, preferring to sit reading into the small hours, always half-hoping that he would reappear out of the darkness, as he often had in thirty years of coming and going. It was thus around one o’clock when Henrietta went the rounds and trudged upstairs, remembering to look in on Margaret before she went to bed. The invalid was sleeping quietly so she turned back along the corridor and was passing Joanna’s door when she heard what she took to be a cough and paused to listen, thinking irritably, “So now Jo has taken it.” But then, as the sound was repeated, she realised it wasn’t a cough but a muffled sound like a sob, and unrestrained enough to be positively identified as such if you stood there a moment or two.

She followed her instincts then and went in without knocking. Joanna might be of age but if something was causing one of her daughters that much distress, and in the middle of the night, then she regarded it her inalienable right to know what it was.

She was concerned but in no way prepared for what she saw when she pushed the door shut and moved across to the bed where Joanna was lying with her head half-buried in the pillow, her lovely, tawny hair spread like a flame. She was half undressed and the bedside lamp, turned low, threw elongated shadows across the patterned wall in a way that caused Henrietta, now deeply disturbed, to remember another night long ago, when she had heard the paddock oak crash down and had gone downstairs to find Denzil Fawcett at the door with news of Stella’s flight from the Moncton-Prices.

There was no special reason why she should remember that wretched incident, but she did and it sharpened her perceptions. She understood at once that this was no mere tantrum on Joanna’s part, and that the girl was in real trouble of one kind or another. She said, gently, “What
is
it, Jo. What’s upset you?” but then she had another shock.

Joanna, who seemed not to have heard her entry above the rush of the wind outside, suddenly jerked herself out of range of her mother’s outstretched hand and blurted out, “You’ve no
right
! This is
my
room! You always said…”

“‘All of us should have somewhere no one else has the right to enter without invitation.’ Yes, yes, I know that, and I’ve always held to it and still do.”

The girl said nothing to this but continued to crouch there like a sick animal so that Henrietta, running an eye over her, saw that she had not imagined her strange loss of vitality since Christmas-tide. Even in this subdued light it was all too evident, so that she thought herself a perfect fool not to have made a direct approach long ago.

Of all the girls, Joanna had been the liveliest and, in some ways, the most original. She had Stella’s self-sufficiency and Helen’s daring, tempered with a cool judgement, of a kind Henrietta associated with Adam. Her rare pink and white prettiness, however, was all her own. As she passed from childhood to adolescence and then to womanhood she had ceased to suggest a Swann, a Rawlinson, or even a D’Auberon, but one of the elegant models in the fashion journals Henrietta studied; the type of girl most people thought of as typically Anglo-Saxon, with strong features that would serve her well until she was past thirty when they might need regular massage.

The change, now that she looked for it, was quite startling. Her face was much thinner, almost pinched, and her eyes, red with weeping, looked as if they would never sparkle again. Her mouth, so full and generous, was drawn down at the corners, like the mouth of a nag, and suddenly, amalgamating and assessing these manifestations, she cried, “In God’s name, what
is
it? What’s the matter with you? Why are you crying like this?” But Joanna’s reply was limited to a sullen, “Leave me alone! You make rules, then break them. Go away,
do
!”

It was all Henrietta could do to prevent herself boxing the girl’s ears. It would not have been the first time by any means. All the children, at one time or another, had felt the weight of her hand, although Adam had never laid a finger on any of them. She controlled herself, however, for it suddenly occurred to her that she might know a possible reason for Jo’s wretchedness. It was linked, she was sure, to Helen’s abrupt removal from the scene and also, perhaps, to Helen’s husband Rowland, for Henrietta now recollected her own astonishment when the young doctor had turned up demanding Helen’s hand after squiring Joanna all over the county for months. The conviction grew on her then that she was looking at a jilted bride, the victim of a scurvy trick on the part of her closest confidante, and with this she felt a rush of sympathy for the girl. She said, “Tell me, Jo. It’ll surely help to tell someone. Is it because of Helen? Helen and Rowley?”

“Rowley?”

She mouthed the word as if it was all but incomprehensible to her. “You think I’m crying for Rowley?”

“Why not? He was your beau to begin with. You saw a rare lot of one another before Helen…”

“It’s nothing to
do
with Rowley! Rowley was… was dull, and it was I who helped Helen get him! But I don’t want to talk about it. Stop nagging me, please.”

It was not often Henrietta felt as baffled and helpless as she felt in the face of this. Instinct told her that Joanna, in so far as Rowland Coles was concerned, was telling the truth. She was not concerned for her pride and therefore had no interest in her brother-in-law. She said, quietly, “Very well, if you say so, but I would have thought you could talk to me since you’re obviously extremely upset over something,” and she turned to leave.

She had her hand on the latch when Joanna called; the urgency in her voice spun Henrietta round, as if in response to someone crying out in fear of death.
“Mamma! Please…!”
And then, in a voice not much above a whisper, “Don’t go. Shut the door. Is everyone asleep—Phoebe, the children?”

“They’ve all been in bed for hours.”

She came back into the room and stood close to the bed, aware that Joanna was making a great effort to control herself, to contain a fresh storm of tears and talk rationally and coherently.

“Well, Jo?”

“It isn’t Rowley. It’s nothing to do with him and nothing to do with Helen. In the beginning it was. But now… it’s Clinton, Rowley’s brother.”

“You mean you’re in love with Clinton Coles and he doesn’t love you?”

“That’s a part of it.” Her teeth, whiter and stronger than the teeth of any of the others, clamped over the heavy underlip. “Yes, I’m in love with Clint. I told myself I wasn’t over and over again but I am. I must have been…
must have been
, you understand?”

Henrietta did not as yet. The girl was making no more than partial sense and all this time hysteria was trying to raise the key of her flat, impersonal tone.

“He’s marrying someone else?”

“Not him. Clint won’t marry in a hurry. He isn’t the marrying kind.”

“Very well then, put him out of mind. You’re nearly twenty-two and you’ve been racketing about long enough…”

But the girl seemed not to be listening. She was sitting on the very edge of the bed with her head bowed so that her hair was a copper screen masking her face. Her hands fidgeted with the ruin of a pocket handkerchief, twisting it and tugging it, as if it had been the knot on a parcel.

“‘Put Clint out of mind’? How can I? I’ll be having his child in six months.”

Henrietta’s first reaction was not one of shock, or even extreme indignation. It was something more practical, for at once her glance moved from the girl’s head to her figure, searching out evidence of this appalling announcement. She found none. Joanna had always inclined to plumpness and there seemed no sign of pregnancy about her rounded, sturdy figure, although that might be because she was still wearing her corset.

She said, in a voice that seemed to come from the back of her head, “Stand up! Stand up and look at me!” and Joanna stood very slowly, like someone responding to a hypnotist’s command.

“In six months? You’re sure?” and Joanna nodded, wordlessly.

“Dr. Birtles knows?”

“No one knows.”

“Then you can’t be sure. You
can’t
be!”

“I am sure. There’s no doubt about it.”

“Wait a minute… don’t say anything… let me think…
think…
” Joanna subsided slowly on the bed, resuming her former position. There was a long silence in the room. The small fire shifted, rustling like a handful of dead leaves. Outside the wind gusted down from the spur to lose itself in the avenue beeches.

Henrietta, with an insignificant part of her mind, reminded herself yet again how much she hated wind, of the kind that tormented Tryst at this time of year.

“You say ‘no one.’ Does that include him?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve told him nothing? Not even hinted?”

“No. I was only sure myself earlier in the week. I’ve not seen him since…”

And at that Henrietta’s speechless indignation boiled over so that she wailed, “How
could
you be such a fool? How
could
you…?” But then, to her own surprise, fury ebbed from her and she rallied on something more fundamental, some hidden force that came hurrying up like a reserve, very late and very much out of breath but infinitely welcome. Sooner or later they all had need of her. Sooner or later every single one of them, from Adam downwards, came to her to solve their complicated personal problems, to make sense out of their muddles and misjudgements, their acts of thoughtlessness and bad guesses, that persisted far beyond the time when each and every one of them should have learned to stand on their own feet, as she had done when Adam lay helpless and mutilated more than twenty years ago.