The Solitary Child Page 11

“My dear, is it better or worse to know? I have been so wretched for you, I’ve lain awake at night.…”

  I hated her for her pity. “You’d better tell me,” I said and saw her flinch.

  “I’m sorry.” She bowed her head over the steering wheel. “James has always been so upright, priggish, I used to think when we were young together. He set himself standards that were cruelly high, when the breaking point came it must have been more violent than for a more casual man. When it happened, I thought him incapable of such a thing. But he did it, Harriet. Who else could have done?”

  “You can’t know. No one can know. He was acquitted.”

  “But he did it. Isn’t it better to face up to things and accept them? You don’t know how badly he was tried—living with that woman must have been hell. You love him, don’t you, surely you can pity him too? Oh—I am saying this so badly, forgive me, Harriet, I’m such a clumsy fool.…”

  “You can’t know,” I repeated stubbornly.

  “But Cyril knows. He told me. He didn’t tell me how he knew, but he was sure.” She wept, turned her agonised face away from me. “You’ll hate me for telling you. I hated him when he told me. But it made it easier in the end, doubt is always worse than knowledge, after a little while you’ll find that’s true and begin to forgive me.…”

  I watched her writhing shoulders, her twisted face, and felt only distaste for the ugliness of her emotion.

  I said, “But how can you expect me to believe such a lie, such vileness.”

  The truth was suddenly as clear as day. Anger ripped the kindly conventions aside, laid bare a vein of coarseness. “If James were dead, or in prison, Cyril had everything to gain. He wanted a farm, why otherwise do you think he wanted to marry you? A man who likes sexual success, pretty girls—if you think it was the ordinary things he wanted from you, you have only to look in the mirror. You know this is the truth, don’t you? It’s why you wouldn’t marry him. You knew why he’d lied to you. And you couldn’t bear it.”

  I went for a walk. Janet was getting lunch and Maggie was nowhere to be seen. James was with Cyril, I saw them from the gate to the farmyard and stopped short. I hated to see them together, I could not bear to speak to him with Sully there. I understood James’s distaste for the man now. Even if he knew nothing of his faithlessness, he must have sensed something, a kind of falseness in his presence.

  James said something in a low voice and Cyril laughed. “James, James, why must you always make such a virtue of inadequacy?”

  His tone was bantering and intimate. I thought: you sneaking little toad, how dare you sneer at him, pretending friendship. My hands trembled with loathing.

  I walked down the lane with no particular objective, only that of wasting time until James would be alone and I could express the aching tenderness I felt for him.

  I crossed the bridge over the brook. The water sang against the stones, a loud noise in the stillness. Then, to the west, above the hills, the first thunder tinkled, like someone breaking a plate.

  “Well, well. What a surprise.”

  He was leaning on the low stone wall, his face cupped in his hands. The mill behind him had been deserted long ago; the old wheel rusted high above the dwindling river. The shuttered granary housed nothing but the rats and a barn owl. The fields had been sold but no one wanted the empty building. The cottage, huddled in the shelter of the mill, was too small and without sanitation.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  I had seen him before.

  He had been in the pub the time Maggie and I had stopped there to buy the cigarettes.

  The barman was busy and I had to wait. There was a party of young people at the counter, young men in sports jackets, girls in slacks. They were on their way to Wales, one of them asked about the fishing in Lake Vyrnwy. The publican said that he didn’t know the country and a man who was standing at the far end of the bar said he thought he might be able to help them.

  He had a pleasant voice, he wore a green velour hat. The group closed round him; one of the girls asked him if he lived in the district.

  “No, but my auntie does.” He rolled his eyes at her. “Sometimes she gives a bad boy a bed for the night.”

  He lit the girl’s cigarette and she looked sideways at him through thick, dark hair; she wore a black sweater and her firm breasts jutted out like marble.

  “Why don’t you come too? Wouldn’t you like to catch a little fish?”

  One of the other men spoke to her in a low voice.

  “Take no notice of Gerald,” she said. “He’s just a teeny weeny bit jealous, aren’t you, ducky?”

  “Beats her every Saturday night just to teach her.”

  “Black and blue all over her pretty bottom.”

  There was a gale of laughter. The stranger said:

  “We all need regular exercise.”

  Then the barman served me. He knew me, he said it was a nice day, wasn’t it, and called me by my name.

  I saw the man looking at me as I put the change in my handbag. When I left the pub, he followed me.

  He said he was a neighbour of mine. As he said this he laughed, as if he had said something amusing. We talked for a moment or two about the weather and the countryside. He followed me to the car.

  He asked Maggie if she remembered him. She had looked nervous and said nothing. He had laughed again, said that she had grown taller and thinner, quite a big girl now, wasn’t she? Then he had done the thing that had made me remember the incident. “I like your hair shorter.” He had touched Maggie’s hair lightly. “Curly nob, copper nob,” he said.

  I had not recognised him when Mrs. Dennison had shown me the photograph of Archie. I recognised him now.

  “What are you doing here?” I repeated. And then, with incredulous, mounting anger, “How dare you come here.”

  I walked through the gateway into the mill yard. We stood on the same side of the wall. He looked down at me from his tall height and laughed.

  “I’m not trespassing, Mrs. Random.”

  He tucked his thumbs in his brocade waistcoat. His face was handsome but somehow not pleasant to look upon. The skin was clear and healthy, the expression sweet and wholly gentle so that it was difficult, at first, to see where the ruin lay. And yet it was there, behind the bright and boyish innocence, there was a kind of weary knowledge. His eyes were old, older than the eyes of many an old man, and tired.

  He said gently, “So you know all about me, Mrs. Random? And you’re astounded at my effrontery. It’s an insult, isn’t it? Why do you look at me like that? What did you expect, a friend?”

  “No.” I stared at him, bewildered and disarmed.

  “Well…” he shifted awkwardly, like a boy, he seemed suddenly very conscious of his hands.

  We heard the car start up; we both turned and looked in the direction of the farm. It was the Delage. Everything paled before the fear that James should find him here.

  “Go,” I said quickly. “Hide.” I pushed him frantically in the chest. “It’s James, you fool. Haven’t you done enough harm?”

  He stood there, irresolute. Panic mounted in his face, he looked young and extraordinarily vulnerable.

  I looked at the mill door, the hinges were rusted and it hung limply against the wall. “In there.”

  “No.” The refusal was explosive and final. “I can’t.”

  “But why? If not for his sake, for your own.…”

  “I can’t,” he repeated helplessly, and, meeting my eyes, produced the tardy explanation. “It’s no use, anyway. He’d see the car.”

  I saw the red two-seater car parked at the side of the mill. It could be seen from the lane, but only if you were looking for it.

  The Delage bumped through the brook. We waited stupidly by the wall.

  James said nothing. His eyes travelled over us both and then he glanced over his shoulder. Cyril’s car came through the brook, shooting the water high, and braked behind the Delage.

  James waite
d until Cyril had climbed out and then he said to me, “Where’s Maggie?” He waited for my answer, his face still and expressionless.

  “At home,” I said, surprised.

  He nodded and turned to Archie. His tone was brisk and business-like, not angry.

  “I thought I told you to keep away from here.”

  “This isn’t your property.”

  “No.”

  Archie raised his eyebrows, his expression was insolent but it was the kind of insolence of a boy defying his headmaster. So it was surprising that James should hit him, and somehow ludicrous that Archie should stagger back against the low wall with the blood pouring from his nose. It was irrelevant, like a scene from a slap-stick comedy; there was no emotion in it at all.

  Archie wiped his nose with a white, linen handkerchief. He said, “Nice husband you’ve got, Mrs. Random.”

  “That’s enough,” James said mildly. He took an apple out of his pocket and began to eat it. He always ate under stress, if there was nothing to eat he chewed his nails. But that he should eat an apple at this particular moment gave the scene a curious, dream-like quality.

  Cyril said, “Get along with you, boy.” He leaned across the wall and gave Archie a little push between the shoulder-blades. He stood up, still holding the handkerchief to his streaming nose, and stumbled over to his car.

  He reversed it skilfully in the tiny yard and roared away up the lane.

  I said, “I walked down the lane and found him here.”

  James grinned. “I didn’t think it was an assignment.” He put his arm round my shoulder. “Don’t let it worry you. Darling, we’ve got a spot of trouble. I have to go and report it. Don’t wait lunch for me.”

  He got into his car, his hand waved briefly from the window before he disappeared round the bend in the lane.

  Cyril lingered, he looked uncomfortable. “Shall I run you back, Harriet?”

  I said curtly, “I can walk.”

  He stared at me thoughtfully with his dark, gipsy eyes. He said, under his breath, “Poor devil,” and I wondered who he meant. Then he sighed and turned to his car. He said, over his shoulder, “Those pigs have got swine fever. It’s lucky James don’t keep many pigs.”

  “What does it mean?”

  He heaved himself into the driving seat. “A loss of a few hundred quid. They’ll have to be shot.” He smiled faintly. “Are you angry with me? It isn’t my fault, you know.” He wheezed out a cough, his eyes watered. “Asthma,” he explained. “It gets worse at this time of the year. Or perhaps I’m just getting old.” He coughed again.

  I wondered if he expected sympathy from me. I walked away without saying good-bye to him; the tired, choking sound followed me up the lane.

  They shot the pigs in the early afternoon and James and Bill buried them with a policeman standing by. The rain came down like a veil over the valley; hunched in a mackintosh, I stood beside James and watched until he told me to go in out of the wet.

  He rested on his spade and smiled, quite cheerfully. The raindrops dripped from his hair and the end of his nose. “You’re taking it too hard, my girl. What you need is some fun. Would you like to give a party? It would poke’em all on the nose.”

  “Can we afford it?”

  “Good lord, yes.” He grinned. “We’re not broke yet.”

  I ran across the swimming gravel. As I opened the door I heard Maggie call, “Charlie, Charlie!” She sounded tired and petulant.

  They were upstairs. The child appeared on the landing, tiny and bow-legged, the loosened nappie flapped round his fat ankles.

  I bent to take off my boots and he fell. He bounced on each stair like a sack of dirty linen. In between each bump he began a wail that came to an abrupt close as he hit the next stair. At the bottom, he lay face downwards on the flagged floor, quiet and completely still.

  She was down the stairs before I could cross the hall. When I reached them, she was sitting on the floor with the little body cradled in her arms.

  She rocked him backwards and forwards, crooning in a high, soft voice. “Charlie, it’s all right, Maggie’s here. Poor Charlie.” The baby wailed. He was not hurt, he had been gathering his breath to scream. He arched himself backwards across her lap, his face purple with fury.

  I shouted above the noise. “Did you push him?”

  Immediately I was ashamed. I couldn’t think what had possessed me to say such a thing. She looked up, lips parted, eyes wide and wondering and guiltless.

  “No, Harriet,” she said.

  Chapter Seven

  He came on the morning of the party. It was one of those clean winter days when the early frost was no more than a sparkle on bright grass, an additional glitter in the air.

  The house was never locked, except at night. As I ran down the stairs to answer the bell, he pushed the door gently and it swung wide open. He stood, surprised, on the threshold, fidgeting with his feet like someone who does not expect to be made welcome.

  He did not look at my old skirt with the coffee stain down the front, my untidy hair. He had practice in sparing people the smaller kinds of embarrassment.

  He said his name was William Ross and that he was a journalist. He worked for the Echo.

  It was a shock because he didn’t look like a reporter. He had a remote, academic air. I would have shut the door in his face except that he so clearly expected me to do so. He appeared shy; he told me his name and profession as if he regretted it deeply. It was always his manner, and, in some measure, the secret of his success. It produced an instant sympathy, you had to be gentle with so tentative a creature.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We don’t talk to reporters.”

  He stammered, “I only wanted a few moments with you.”

  “Not my husband?” James had gone into the town to fetch the drink for the party and taken Maggie with him.

  “No.” He hesitated. “I covered your husband’s trial for my paper.”

  “Oh. What do you want now?”

  He sounded ashamed. “Human interest story. How a man like that picks himself up after he’s been kicked in the mud. That sort of thing.”

  “There is nothing to say.”

  “Are you sure? Couldn’t we talk for a little? I won’t take up much of your time.”

  He waited, polite and diffident. Upstairs, Janet switched off the Hoover and the house was silent.

  I said, “You’d better come in.”

  He followed me into the unused drawing-room opposite the big kitchen. It was cold and damp in there, but I did not want him upstairs, among the preparations for my party.

  He stood humbly in the middle of the floor. He was short and stocky and square. He was dressed like an undergraduate in sports jacket, corduroy trousers and a polo-necked sweater. He had a squashed face and a blue chin. Behind thick, pebble lenses, his eyes were young and steady and kind. He smiled and his ugly face took on an aspect of extraordinary goodness—there is no other word.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  “A story. Something to whet the appetite on Sunday mornings when the joint is cooking in the oven.”

  “I see.” I moved the dust-sheet and sat down on the couch. It was covered with brown leather and felt cold against the back of my knees.

  He blurted out, “I saw your husband, Mrs. Random. After his trial.”

  “Did he talk to you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why should I?”

  “He didn’t talk to me but he didn’t turn me out, either. He was even polite in the dreadful way people are polite when something has shattered their world. He reminded me of a man I interviewed during the war. A sailor. He’d been sent home on special leave because his wife and baby had been killed in the bombing. Blown to pieces—not a trace of them. Nor of his home—he was left with nothing. I got him at the docks, just as he came off the ship. He had all he possessed in a suitcase, a blue papier-mâché one, tied up with string. He was an enormous brute of a man with big hands. But he was as
gentle as a baby. And helpless. He didn’t look stunned—nothing so dramatic. Just puzzled. And appallingly polite, that’s the thing I always remember. The awful, quiet politeness.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Despair. Anger, perhaps. I thought he would hit me. After a bit, I hoped he would.”

  “The sailor? Or my husband?”

  “What?” He smiled. “Both, I think. Your husband was just like that sailor. He listened to me like a child. I tried to get him angry—told him that in his place I’d want to get my own back. If my bitch of a wife had killed herself and I’d been tried for her murder, I’d want to get the injustice of it out of my system. I’d be hating everyone—her and the police and the whole damn system of justice. I’d want to splurge the wickedness and the folly of it over every newspaper in the country. But it was like talking to a stone. He just looked at me, like the sailor, with the same damned, hurt eyes, and said he had nothing to say. And even those words dragged up from God knows what pit.” He looked around him. “I saw him here, in this room.”

  I said flatly, “You would have been too young, during the war, to be working on a paper.”

  Of course there had never been a sailor. He was only an introduction, a device to catch the attention of the audience. Ross used his imagination like a scientist, each objective lie served his purpose as a chemical used in a laboratory to test the reaction of a subject. If the lie did damage, he would be sorry but not very sorry. He was capable of compassion, but only on a large canvas; the indignation he felt at injustice tore him to pieces but he felt nothing for the trembling, individual soul. Because of this I was, later, to feel extraordinarily safe with him. He would never lie to protect me, only to find out the truth.

  He ignored my remark. I said, “What right have you to badger me?”

  “You’re news, you and your husband. Public interest doesn’t die, you know.”

  “Only with a hanging.”

  “What? Oh, yes. Yes, I suppose you could say that. Look at William Wallace. Bothered till the day he died, poor devil. How old are you, Mrs. Random?”

  “Twenty-two.”