Miss Hargreaves (30 page)

Towards the end of October the Choral Society gave their usual concert. Lady Hargreaves occupied a prominent position, following Verdi’s
Requiem
from a splendidly bound full score (
full
score, mark you) embossed with the letter ‘H’ on the cover. Following this with a red pencil, she sat right below the doctor, whose beat suffered considerably in consequence. I’m not surprised. Even Beecham might have been intimidated.

She was asked to open a Conservative bazaar and she opened it damn well; I wandered in there after she had left and I had the strongest feeling that it was the best-opened bazaar I had ever been to. Not a bit of it was closed, you could see that.

Another matter brought her bang into the middle of Cornford, between the ‘n’ and the ‘f’ as you might say. For some time there had been a controversy waging upon the question of changing the time of closing the Cathedral. The Mayor, who had the impertinence to have a Roman Catholic daughter, had suggested to the Dean and Chapter that, in summer, the Cathedral ought to be kept open until sunset, instead of the usual hour, six-thirty. His idea was that shop people had too little opportunity of visiting the place. The idea was anathema to both Archdeacon Cutler and Canon Auty, particularly as the Mayor had used the expression ‘the people’s Church’. The Dean was for a compromise, but up to date the matter had not been settled. Letters poured into the
Mercury
, mostly supporting the Mayor. Almost at the same time there was a by-election and the Labour candidate, D. Howlsby-Skitt (who also wrote books on eagles which father sometimes put in the window), polled, according to the Nationalist supporters, a good two thousand more votes than he would have done, because he had used the Cathedral-closing-hour controversy in the course of his platform campaign. He didn’t get in, but he was near the door, so to speak. They were critical days in Cornford, I can tell you. A nearly Roman Catholic mayor combined with a Labour member–I doubt whether the Cathedral could have stood up to it. In the height of the argument, Lady Hargreaves stepped in, writing to the editor of the
Mercury
a terse, crisp letter in which she poured fine and subtle scorn upon the attitude of trippers who treated the holy building as a super-museum piece. The Cathedral, she maintained, was the property of the Church, not of the ‘people’. (And she wrote that word in inverted commas, too.) Coming down so firmly on the Close side of the fence, she so impressed Canon Auty that he declared for the tenth time to his wife that he would call at Lessways; he even went so far as to quote in a sermon two lines of a sonnet from Constance Lady Hargreaves’ pen which appeared in the
Mercury
:

‘Out, out bold Beauvais, thrust thy ancient sword

’Mongst those who never Magnify the Lord . . .’

(Nobody hated visitors to the Cathedral more than Canon Auty. He had once rudely turned out a gang of Colonials who wandered into the south transept just as the choir was lined up for Evensong. Amongst them was a retired bishop of the Windward Isles who, it is said, spent the rest of his windy life disputing in various papers the Canon’s well-known and somewhat un-Anglican views upon the liturgies of the Eastern Church.)

I saw a good deal of Lady Hargreaves. But did she ever vouchsafe to me more than the flicker of a perfectly bred eyelid? The old devil did not. Upon one occasion when I happened to come across her making a sketch of the Norman font, there was not even a flicker. I was always running into her. Popping in and out of the Deanery; exercising Sarah along Meads (Sarah never yapped now, and not a tree did she sniff at); writing verses in unexpected corners of the Cathedral; soaring at thirty-five–never more–up and down the High Street in the Rolls-Royce. I did my best to avoid her. But even if I didn’t see
her
I was constantly being tormented by the smoke that rose from the chimneys of Lessways. Once, when the wind blew a lot of soot over my music paper, I stood at the window and cursed her, shaking my fist at the house and watching the smoke, knowing I was powerless to do anything. You knew it was expensive smoke, fired from the very best household coal. I watched it in a gloomy reverie as it plumed away into the saffron evening sky and floated serenely round the Cathedral spire.

They were wretched days for me. When you make something, make it well as I had, endow it with a title and send it out into the best society, do you sleep easily in your bed when it spurns you and treats you like dust? Do you? If you do you’re a stronger man than I am.

For some time at least I kept my vow not to have anything more to do with her. Of course, she helped me to keep that vow in a way. But I don’t mind telling you it was torture–pure torture, made the more unbearable because everybody used to ask me why I wasn’t friendly with her any more. Jim was particularly impossible in that way. It was a funny thing. Before, when she’d been merely Miss Hargreaves, mother and Jim had practically accused me of snobbery. Now, when she was Lady Hargreaves, Jim, at any rate, reproached me for not calling upon her.

‘You
ought
to go and see her,’ she kept saying. ‘After all, she owes her life to you–she told us so herself.’

‘Oh, she’s far too grand for me now,’ I said. ‘I reckon I know where I’m not wanted. She’s too high-up for me, Jim. I’m not in that Close set and never will be.’

‘How stupid you are! She’s probably offended because you haven’t been to see her. It’s your duty to go.’

‘I agree with Norman,’ said mother unexpectedly. ‘I think he’s quite right not to go there. If she wanted to see us she’d come here, but she doesn’t want to. It’s been a very unfortunate friendship for the boy, and the less he has to do with her the better. Personally I should hate to see him making up to her as everybody else does, just because she’s a ladyship.’

‘Thank you, mother,’ I said. I thought it jolly sporting of her.

You’ll want to know what the position was between me and Marjorie. Well, I’m sorry to tell you (or am I sorry?) that she’d quite given me up. She’d started to go round with Pat Howard. No, I can’t honestly say I
was
sorry. There was a lack of imagination about that girl which had always worried me. She never quite came to life, somehow, though she looked pretty enough. I mean . . . Pat Howard! Greasy hair, padded shoulders, check plus-fours and a stinking little three-wheeler that belched blue smoke at you from an exhaust like a ship’s siren . . . No! Pat Howard no doubt had his points. But I never liked him. I can’t say I’d trust my money to the bank he works in.

And that brings me to the question of Connie’s money. Where had she got it all from? She’d given five thousand for the house alone and a rumour had it that she’d paid Mr Carver, the agent, the entire sum in bank-notes. I knew in a roundabout way, via Pat Howard as a matter of fact, that she had no account at the Metropolitan and I’d never seen her going in or out of any of the other banks in the town. Had I (and this was only one of many such questions which I could never answer) made the bank-notes too? Suppose they turned out to be duds? A nice kettle of fish that would be–
my
kettle of fish as well as hers, for I hadn’t the slightest doubt she would, in some ingenious way, plunge me directly into it. I should get boiled; not she.

On the other hand, imprisonment would at least mean the end of her in Cornford. It would be nice to visit her in jail and gently point out to her that I was still master of the situation. I toyed with the idea a good deal; perilously I approached a peak. It got possession of me. Whisperings round Cornford: Lady Hargreaves is a common crook: marked coldness from the Close: the Dean is twice out when she calls: discovery–by me–of a printing-press for turning out bank-notes in the vast cellars of Lessways: headline–‘Lay clerk discovers criminal plot in Cathedral City’: the Trial: ten years: visits to Connie in prison: I appeal to the Governor to allow her to play the Chapel organ. Safely locked up I at last have her under strict control. No more high aristocratic jinks.

‘My God!’ I said, ‘I’ll scotch her!’

The plot thickened in my mind, in my room late at nights. She was climbing too damn high. Some rungs, if not all, must be wrenched from her ladder. Get the rumour round, get the tatty trotty tongues of Cornford wagging, and it would be the beginning of the end of her. She was not popular with the townsfolk after the Cathedral-closing incident, and the weather in the Close is as fickle as any April day can offer. I didn’t suppose, of course, that the bank-notes
were
forged; I never carried the plot so far as trial and imprisonment. But it would be good enough if some such rumour got round.

It’s no good your reading this and condemning me and saying I’m horribly malicious. I had to do something about it. I couldn’t sit back for ever and watch Connie capering in her Cloud-Cuckoo-Land of Deans and Archdeacons. One kind word from her, one smile in her old fashion, one wink of recognition–and I would not have acted as I did.

It was easy enough. I sent an anonymous letter to Mr Carver the house-agent, choosing him because I knew that once a typed letter gets filed in a business house, it’s as good as placarded on the town walls. And I wanted the story to buzz from the town, not from the Close. Nobody believes stories that start in the Close, everybody believes what they hear in the barber’s shop, over the counter of the Happy Union, or what the office boy tells the messenger boy from the bank.

I was very careful about it all. If you’re going to be Anon you’ve got to do it well; otherwise you’ll end up by merely being incognito. I went to town one plain day and spent half a crown in a typewriting office in St Martin’s Lane. This is what I wrote:

‘Sir. This is a warning to you.
Do not trust
the woman who calls herself “Lady Hargreaves”. Neither her title nor her money are genuine. She is a dangerous member of the I.R.A. If you value Cornford Cathedral, keep an eye on her.’

I signed it ‘Ulsterman’.

How well I remember that afternoon. I was standing in Charing Cross post office with crowds of busy people buzzing about me. The letter had just been dropped into the country box. I stood there, biting my fingers and wondering how I could get it out again. I knew at once that I had done a mad thing. But the whole trouble with me, as you’ll have found out, is that I never realize I’ve done a mad thing until I
have
done it.

The evening after that I was in the Happy Union, sitting alone in the corner by the fire. The wind was wailing outside, the rain pouring. I was sad. Bitterly I regretted sending that letter, the first and the last anonymous letter of my life. I don’t know whether you’ve ever tried it, but sending anonymous letters gives you a kind of thin, mean feeling inside, as though in trying to hide your own personality, you’d only succeeded in giving birth to a new and detestable one. I’ve always hated that fellow Anon whose poems appear in so many anthologies; now, sneaking into the seclusion of the Happy Union under his name, I hated myself.

The swing-door opened suddenly, and I heard Henry’s voice, talking to somebody with him. I was in the public bar (father and I hate the saloon lounge) and I was expecting Henry to come in. But he didn’t. I heard him go through to the saloon, and then I heard Pat Howard’s voice. I sighed. If Henry went into the saloon with Pat Howard, we might just as well not be friends any more, I thought.

Well, I eavesdropped. Anon would; it’s in character. Anyhow, I couldn’t very well help overhearing what they said which is the typical sort of excuse Anon would make.

‘What’s the matter with Huntley, these days?’ I could hear Pat saying. I guessed they were drinking pink gins.

‘God knows!’ So Henry. And I could hear his shoulders shrugging. ‘He’s miserable to death over this Hargreaves woman.’