A Judgement in Stone (15 page)

“You’re crazy, Step,” said Melinda. She didn’t appreciate, was never to appreciate, that she was the only person to whom her stepbrother ever uttered more than one isolated sentence. Her mind was on Eunice, whom she sought out, armed with the Bible, next day with a dictionary of proper names. She lent her
magazines, took her the evening paper George brought home, and obligingly ran upstairs to fetch her glasses when Eunice said, as she always did, that she hadn’t got them with her.

Eunice was harassed almost beyond bearing. It was bad enough that Melinda and Giles were about the house all day so that Joan Smith couldn’t come to see her. But now Melinda was always in her kitchen or following her about “like a dog,” as she told Joan. And she was perpetually on tenterhooks what with those books and papers constantly being thrust under her nose—which she didn’t tell Joan.

“Of course you know what all that amounts to, don’t you, Eun? They’re ashamed of their wicked behaviour, and they’ve put that girl up to soft-soaping you.”

“I don’t know,” said Eunice. “She gets on my nerves.”

Her nerves were playing her up, as she put it to herself, in a way they had never done before. But she was powerless to deal with Melinda, that warm unsnubbable girl. And once or twice, while Melinda was haranguing her about names or the Bible or Christmas or family histories, she wondered what would happen if she were to pick up one of those long kitchen knives and use it. Not, of course, Eunice being Eunice, what the Coverdales would do or what would become of her, but just the immediate consequence—that tongue silenced, blood spreading over and staining that white neck.

On the twenty-third Peter and Audrey Coverdale arrived.

Peter was a tall pleasant-looking man who favoured his mother rather than his father. He was thirty-one. He and his wife were childless, from choice probably, for Audrey was a career woman, chief librarian at the university where he had a post as lecturer in political economy. Audrey was particularly fond of Jacqueline. She was a well-dressed elegant bluestocking, four years older than her husband, which made her only seven years Jacqueline’s junior. Before training as a librarian she had been at the Royal Academy of Music, which Jacqueline had attended before her first marriage. The two women read the same kind of books, shared a passionate love of Mozartian and pre-Mozartian
opera, loved fashion and talking about clothes. They corresponded regularly, Audrey’s letters being among those examined by Joan Smith.

They hadn’t been in the house more than ten minutes when Melinda insisted on taking them to the kitchen and introducing them to Eunice.

“She’s a member of this household. It’s awfully fascist to treat her like a bit of kitchen equipment.”

Eunice shook hands.

“Will you be going away for Christmas, Miss Parchman?” said Audrey, who prided herself, as Jacqueline did, on having a fund of small talk suitable for persons in every rank of life.

“No,” said Eunice.

“What a shame! Not for us, of course. Your loss will be our gain. But one does like to be with one’s family at Christmas.”

Eunice turned her back and got the teacups out.

“Where did you get that awful woman?” Audrey said to Jacqueline later. “My dear, she’s creepy. She’s not human.”

Jacqueline flushed as if she personally had been insulted. “You’re as bad as George. I don’t want to make a friend of my servant, I want her the way she is, marvellously efficient and unobtrusive. I can tell you, she really knows her job.”

“So do boa constrictors,” said Audrey.

And thus they came to Christmas.

George and Melinda brought holly in to decorate Lowfield Hall, and from the drawing-room chandelier hung a bunch of mistletoe, the gift of Mr. Meadows in whose oaks it grew. More than a hundred cards came for the Coverdales, and these were suspended on strings in a cunning arrangement fixed up by Melinda. Giles received only two personal cards, one from his father and one from an uncle, and these, in his opinion, were so hideous that he declined to put them up on his cork wall where the Quote of the Month was:
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance
. Melinda made paper chains, bright red and emerald and shocking blue and chrome yellow, exactly the kind of chains she had made every year for fifteen years. Jacqueline
took much the same view of them as her son did of his cards, but not for the world would she have said so.

On the day itself the drawing room was grandly festive. The men wore suits, the women floor-length gowns. Jacqueline was in cream velvet, Melinda in a 1920s creation, rather draggled dark blue crepe de chine embroidered with beads which she had bought in the Oxfam shop. They opened their presents, strewing the carpet with coloured paper and glitter. While Jacqueline unwrapped the gold bracelet that was George’s gift, and Giles looked with something nearing enthusiasm on an unabridged Gibbon in six volumes, Melinda opened the parcel from her father.

It was a tape recorder.

Everyone was drinking champagne, even Giles. He had been prevailed upon by his mother to come downstairs and was morosely resigned to staying downstairs all day. And it would be worse tomorrow when they would be having a party. In this view Melinda concurred—all those cairns and curs and roisterers—and she sat on the floor next to him, telling him how wonderful Jonathan was. Giles didn’t much mind this. Byron, after all, was never perturbed by the existence of Colonel Leigh, and Christmas would be bearable if such conclaves with Melinda became the rule. He fancied that the others had noticed their closeness and were overawed by the mystery of it.

Far from noticing anything about her son except that he was there for once, Jacqueline was thinking about the one absent member of the household.

“I really do feel,” she said, “that we ought to ask Miss Parchman to sit down to lunch with us.”

A spontaneous groan from all but Melinda.

“A female Banquo,” said Audrey, and her husband remarked that Christmas was supposed to be for merrymaking.

“And for peace and good will,” said George. “I don’t find the woman personally congenial, as you all know, but Christmas is Christmas and it’s not pleasant to think of her eating her lunch out there on her own.”

“Darling, I’m so glad you agree with me. I’ll go and ask her and then I’ll lay another place.”

But Eunice was not to be found. She had tidied the kitchen,
prepared the vegetables, and gone off to the village store. There in the parlour, undecorated by holly or paper garlands, she and Joan and a gloomy sullen Norman ate roast chicken, frozen peas, and canned potatoes, followed by a Christmas pudding from the shop. Eunice enjoyed her meal, though she would have liked sausages as well. Joan had cooked some sausages but had forgotten to serve them, and Norman, made suspicious by a peculiar smell, found them mouldering in the grill pan a week later. They drank water, and afterwards strong tea. Norman had got some beer in, but this Joan had deposited in the bin just before the dustmen called. She was in raptures over the salmon-pink jumper Eunice had knitted for her, rushed away to put it on, and preened about in it, striking grotesque model girl attitudes in front of the fingermarked mirror. Eunice received an enormous box of chocolates and a fruit cake from stock.

“You’ll come back tomorrow, won’t you, dear?” said Joan.

And so it happened that Eunice also spent Boxing Day with the Smiths, leaving Jacqueline to cope with food and drink for the thirty guests who came that evening. And the effect on Jacqueline was curious, twofold. It was as if she were back in the old days when the entire burden of the household work had been on her shoulders, and in Eunice’s absence she appreciated her almost more than when she was there. This was what it would be like permanently if Eunice were to leave. And yet for the first time she saw her housekeeper as George and Audrey and Peter saw her, as uncouth and boorish, a woman who came and went as she pleased and who saw the Coverdales as so dependent on her that she held them in the hollow of her hand.

The New Year passed, and Peter and Audrey went home. They had asked Melinda to go back with them for the last week of her holiday, but Melinda had refused. She was a very worried girl. Each day that passed made her more anxious. She lost her sparkle, moped about the house, and said no to all the invitations she got from her village friends. George and Jacqueline thought she was missing Jonathan and tactfully they asked no questions.

For this Melinda was deeply thankful. If what she feared was true—and it must be true now—they would have to know sometime. Perhaps it might be possible to get through this, or out of this, without George ever suspecting. Children understand their parents as little as parents understand their children. Melinda had had a happy childhood and a sympathetic devoted father, but her way of thinking was infected by the attitude of her friends to their parents. Parents were bigoted, prudish, moralistic. Therefore hers must be, and no personal experience triumphed over this conviction. She guessed she was George’s favourite child. All the worse. He would be the more bitterly disappointed and disillusioned if he knew, and his idealistic love for her would turn to disgust. She imagined his face, stern and yet incredulous, if he were even to suspect such a thing of his youngest child, his little girl. Poor Melinda. She would have been flabbergasted had she known that George had long supposed her relationship with Jonathan to be a fully sexual one, regretted it, but accepted it philosophically as long as he could believe there was love and trust between them.

Every day, of course, she had been having long phone conversations with Jonathan—George was to be faced with a daunting bill—but so far she hadn’t breathed a word. Now, however, on January 4, she knew she must tell him. This wasn’t as bad as telling her father would be, but bad enough. Her experience of this kind of revelation had been culled from novel and magazine reading and from old wives’ gossip in the village. When you told the man he stopped caring for you, he dropped you, didn’t want to know, or at best shouldered his responsibility while implying it was all your fault. But she had to tell him. She couldn’t go on carrying this frightening secret another day on her own, especially as, that morning, she had been violently sick on waking.

She waited until George had gone to work and Jacqueline and Giles to Colchester in the second car, Jacqueline supposing that while she was shopping her son would be visiting a friend—a friend at last!—though, in fact, he was to receive his first instruction from Father Madigan. Eunice was upstairs making beds. There were three telephones at Lowfield Hall, one in the
morning room, an extension in the hall, and another extension by Jacqueline’s bed. Melinda chose the morning-room phone, but while she was getting enough courage together to make her call it rang. Jonathan.

“Hold on a minute, Jon,” she said. “I want to close the door.”

It was at that precise moment, while Jonathan was holding the line and had briefly laid down the receiver to light a cigarette, while Melinda was closing the morning-room door, that Eunice lifted the receiver on Jacqueline’s bedroom extension. She wasn’t spying. She was too uninterested in Melinda and too repelled by her attentions deliberately to eavesdrop. She picked up the receiver because you cannot properly dust a telephone without doing so. But as soon as she heard Melinda’s first words she was aware that it would be prudent to listen.

“Oh, Jon, something awful! I’ll come straight out with it, though I’m scared stiff to tell you. I’m pregnant. I know I am. I was sick this morning and I’m nearly two weeks overdue. It’ll be frightful if Daddy or Jackie find out, Daddy would be so let down, he’d hate me, and what am I going to
do?
”

She was nearly crying. Choked by tears that would soon spill over, she waited for the stunned silence. Jonathan said quite calmly, “Well, you’ve got two alternatives, Mel.”

“Have I? You tell me. I can’t think of anything but just running away and dying!”

“Don’t be so wet, lovey. You can have an abortion if you really want …”

“Then they’d be sure to know. If I couldn’t get it on the National Health and I had to have money or they wanted to know my next of kin or …”

By now Melinda was hysterical. Like almost all women in her particular situation, she was in a blind unreasoning panic, fighting against the bars of the trap that was her own body. Eunice screwed up her nose. She couldn’t stand that, lot of fuss and nonsense. And perhaps it was something else as well, some unconscious sting of envy or bitterness, that made her lay the receiver down. Lay it down, not replace it. It would be unwise to
do that until after their conversation was over. She moved away to dust the dressing table, and thus she missed the rest.

“I don’t like the idea of abortion,” said Jonathan. “Do get yourself together, Mel, and calm down. Listen, I want to marry you, anyway. Only I thought we ought to wait till we’ve got our degrees and jobs and whatever. But it doesn’t matter. Let’s get married as soon as we can.”

“Oh, Jon, I do love you! Could we? I’d have to tell them even though we’re both over eighteen, but, Jon …”

“But nothing. We’ll get married and have our baby and it’ll be great. You come up to Galwich tomorrow instead of next week and I’ll hitch back and you can stay with me and we’ll make plans. Okay?”

It was very much okay with Melinda who, having wept with despair, was now bubbling with joy. She would go to Jonathan next day and tell George she’d be staying with her friend in Lowestoft. It was awful lying to him, but all in a good cause, better that than let him know, wait till they’d published the banns or got the licence. And so on. She wasn’t sick on January 5. Before she had packed her case she knew her fears had been groundless, the symptoms having resulted from anxiety and their cessation from relief. But she went just the same, and had a taxi from the station to Jonathan’s flat, she was so impatient to tell him she wasn’t going to have a baby after all.

Being in possession of someone else’s secret reminded Eunice of the days of blackmailing the homosexual and, of course, Annie Cole. It was a piece of information which Joan Smith would have delighted to hear, Joan who rather resented the way Eunice never told her anything about the private lives of the Coverdales. She wasn’t going to tell her this either. A secret shared is no longer a secret, especially when it has been imparted to someone like Joan Smith, who would whisper it to what customers she still retained in no time. No, Eunice was going to keep this locked in her boardlike bosom, for you never knew when it might come in useful.