A Judgement in Stone (6 page)

“Your dinner will be ready for you in the kitchen in half an hour. It’s the door at the end of the passage behind the stairs. And now I expect you’d like to be left alone for a while. Oh, here’s my son with your bags.”

Giles had been caught by George and coaxed into bringing up the two cases. He dumped them on the floor and went away. Eunice disregarded him as she had largely disregarded his mother. She was staring at the one object in those two rooms which really interested her, the television set. This was what she had always wanted but been unable to buy or hire. As the door closed behind Jacqueline, she approached the set, looked at it, and then, like someone resolved upon using a dangerous piece of equipment that may explode or send a shock up one’s arm, but knowing still that it must be used, it must be attempted, she pounced on it and switched it on.

On the screen appeared a man with a gun. He was threatening a woman who cowered behind a chair. There was a shot and the woman fled screaming down a corridor. Thus it happened that the first programme Eunice ever saw on her own television dealt with violence and with firearms. Did it and its many successors stimulate her own latent violence and trigger off waves of aggression? Did fictional drama take root in the mind of the illiterate so that it at last bore terrible fruit?

Perhaps. But if television spurred her on to kill the Coverdales, it certainly played no part in directing her to smother her father. At the time of his death the only programmes she had seen on it were a royal wedding and a coronation.

However, though she was to become addicted to the set, shutting herself up with it, drawing her curtains against the summer evenings, that first time she watched it for only ten minutes. She ate her dinner cautiously, for it was like nothing she had ever
eaten before, was taken over the house by Jacqueline, instructed in her duties. From the very beginning she enjoyed herself. A few little mistakes were only natural. Annie Cole had taught her how to lay a table, so she did that all right, but on that first morning she made tea instead of coffee. Eunice had never made coffee in her life except the instant kind. She didn’t ask how. She very seldom asked questions. Jacqueline assumed she was used to a percolator—Eunice didn’t disillusion her—while they used a filter, so she demonstrated the filter. Eunice watched. It was never necessary for her to watch any operation of this kind more than once for her to be able to perform it herself.

“I see, madam,” she said.

Jacqueline did the cooking. Jacqueline or George did the shopping. In those early days, while Jacqueline was out, Eunice examined every object in Lowfield Hall at her leisure. The house had been dirty by her standards. It brought her intense pleasure to subject it to a spring cleaning. Oh, the lovely carpets, the hangings, the cushions, the rosewood and walnut and oak, the glass and silver and china! But best of all was the kitchen with pine walls and cupboards, a double steel sink, a washing machine, a dryer, a dishwater. It wasn’t enough for her to dust the porcelain in the drawing room. It must be washed.

“You really need not do that, Miss Parchman.”

“I like doing it,” said Eunice.

Fear of breakages rather than altruism had prompted Jacqueline to protest. But Eunice never broke anything, nor did she fail to replace everything on the exact spot from where she had taken it. Her visual memory imprinted neat permanent photographs in some department of her brain.

The only things in Lowfield Hall which didn’t interest her and which she didn’t handle or study were the contents of the morning-room desk, the books, the letters from George in Jacqueline’s dressing table. Those things and, at this stage, the two shotguns.

Her employers were overwhelmed.

“She’s perfect,” said Jacqueline who, parcelling up George’s shirts for the laundry, had had them taken out of her hands by
Eunice, laundered exquisitely by Eunice between defrosting the fridge and changing the bed linen. “D’you know what she said, darling? She just looked at me in that meek way she has and said, ‘Give me those. I like a bit of ironing.’ ”

Meek? Eunice Parchman?

“She’s certainly very efficient,” said George. “And I like to see you looking so happy and relaxed.”

“Well, I don’t have a thing to do. Apart from her once putting the green sheets on our bed and once simply ignoring a note I left her, I haven’t had a fault to find. It seems absurd calling those things faults after old Eva and that dreadful Ingrid.”

“How does she get on with Eva?”

“Ignores her, I think. I wish I had the nerve. D’you know, Miss Parchman can sew too. I was trying to turn up the hem of my green skirt, and she took it and did it perfectly.”

“We’ve been very lucky,” said George.

So the month of May passed. The spring flowers died away and the trees sprang into leaf. Pheasants came into the fields to eat the green corn, and the nightingale sang in the orchard. But not for Eunice. Hares, alert and quivering, cropped under the hedges, and the moon rose slowly behind the Greeving Hills, red and strange like another sun. But not for Eunice. She drew the curtains, put on the lamps and then the television. Her evenings were hers to do as she liked with. This was what she liked. She knitted. But gradually, as the serial or the sporting event or the cops and robbers film began to grip her, the knitting fell into her lap and she leant forwards, enthralled by an innocent childlike excitement.

She was happy. If she had been capable of analysing her thoughts and feelings and of questioning her motives, she would have said that this vicarious living was better than any life she had known. But had she been capable of that, it is unlikely she would have been content with so specious a way of spending her leisure. Her addiction gives rise to a question. Wouldn’t some social service have immensely benefited society—and saved the lives of the Coverdales—had it recognised Eunice Parchman’s
harmless craving? Give her a room, a pension, and a television set and leave her to worship and to stare for the rest of her life? No social service came into contact with her until it was far too late. No psychiatrist had ever seen her. Such a one would only have discovered the root cause of her neurosis if she had allowed him to discover her illiteracy. And she had been expert at concealing it since the time when she might have been expected to overcome it. Her father, who could read perfectly well, who in his youth had read the Bible from beginning to end, was her principal ally in helping her hide her deficiency. He, who should have encouraged her to learn, instead conspired with her in the far more irksome complexities not learning entailed.

When a neighbour, dropping in with a newspaper, had handed it to Eunice, “I’ll have that,” he had been used to say, and looking at the small print, “Don’t strain her young eyes.” It came to be accepted in her narrow circle that Eunice had poor sight, this solution generally being the one seized upon by the uneducated literate to account for illiteracy.

“Can’t read it? You mean you can’t
see?
”

When she was a child she had never wanted to read. As she grew older she wanted to learn, but who could teach her? Acquiring a teacher, or even trying to acquire one, would mean other people finding out. She had begun to shun other people, all of whom seemed to her bent on ferreting out her secret. After a time this shunning, this isolating herself, became automatic, though the root cause of her misanthropy was half forgotten.

Things could not hurt her, the furniture, the ornaments, the television. She embraced them, they aroused in her the nearest she ever got to warm emotion, while to the Coverdales she gave the cold shoulder. Not that they received more of her stoniness than anyone else had done. She behaved to them as she had always behaved to everyone.

George was the first to notice it. Of all the Coverdales, he was by far the most sensitive, and therefore the first to see a flaw in all this excellence.

They sat in church on Sunday morning and Mr. Archer began to preach his sermon. For his text he took “Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful over a few things; I will make thee ruler over many things.” Jacqueline smiled at George and touched his arm, and he smiled back, well satisfied.

On the following day he remembered those exchanged smiles and thought he had been fatuous, perhaps overcomplacent.

“Paula’s gone into hospital,” Jacqueline said when he came home. “It’s really rather awful the way they fix a day for your baby to be born these days. Just take you in and give you an injection and hey presto!”

“Instant infants,” said George. “Has Brian phoned?”

“Not since two.”

“I’ll just give him a ring.”

They were dining, as they often did when alone, in the morning room. Eunice came in to lay the table. George dialled, but there was no reply. A second after he put the phone down it rang. After answering Paula’s husband in monosyllables, after a final “Call me back soon,” he walked over to Jacqueline and took her hand.

“There’s some complication. They haven’t decided yet, but she’s very exhausted and it’ll probably mean an emergency Caesarean.”

“Darling, I’m so sorry, what a worry!” She didn’t tell him not to worry, and he was glad of it. “Why don’t you phone Dr. Crutchley? He might reassure you.”

“I’ll do that.”

Eunice left the room. George appreciated her tactful silence. He phoned the doctor, who said he couldn’t comment on a case he knew nothing about, and reassured George only to the extent of telling him that, generally speaking, women didn’t die in childbirth any more.

They ate their dinner. That is, Giles ate his dinner, Jacqueline picked at hers, and George left his almost untouched. Giles made one small concession to the seriousness of the occasion and the anxiety of the others. He stopped reading and stared instead into space. Afterwards, when the suspense was over, Jacqueline said laughingly to her husband that such a gesture from Giles was comparable to a pep talk and a bottle of brandy from anyone else.

The suspense didn’t last long. Brian called back twice, and half an hour after that was on the line to say a seven-pound boy had been delivered by Caesarean operation and Paula was well.

Eunice was clearing the table. She must have heard it all, George’s “Thank God!” Jacqueline’s “That’s wonderful, darling. I’m so happy for you,” Giles’s “Good,” before he took himself off upstairs. She must have heard relief and seen delight. Without the slightest reaction, she left the room and closed the door.

Jacqueline put her arms round George and held him. He didn’t think about Eunice then. It was only as he was going to bed, and heard faintly above him the hum of her television, that he began to think her behaviour strangely cold. Not once had she expressed her concern during the anxious time, or her satisfaction for him when the danger was past. Consciously he hadn’t waited for her to do so. At the time he hadn’t expected a “I’m so glad to hear your daughter’s all right, sir,” but now he wondered at the omission. It troubled him. Lack of care for a fellow woman, lack of concern for the people in whose home one lived, were unnatural in any woman. Well done, thou good and faithful servant … But that had not been well done.

Not for the world would George have spoken of his unease to Jacqueline, who was so happy and contented with her employee. Besides, he wouldn’t have wanted a loquacious servant, making
the family’s affairs her affairs and being familiar. He resolved to banish it from his mind.

And this he did quite successfully until the christening of the new baby, which took place a month later.

Patrick had been christened at Greeving, Mr. Archer was a friend of the Coverdales, and a country christening in summer is pleasanter than one in town. Paula and Brian and their two children arrived at Lowfield on a Saturday at the end of June and stayed till the Sunday. They had quite a large party on the Saturday afternoon. Brian’s parents and his sister were there, the Roystons, the Jameson-Kerrs, an aunt of Jacqueline’s from Bury and some cousins of George’s from Newmarket. And the arrangements for eating and drinking, carried out by Eunice under Jacqueline’s directions, were perfect. The house had never looked so nice, the champagne glasses been so well polished. Jacqueline didn’t know they possessed so many white linen table napkins, had never seen them all together before and all so freshly starched. In the past she had sometimes been reduced to using paper ones.

Before they left for the church Melinda came into the drawing room to show Eunice the baby. He was to be called Giles, and Giles Mont, aghast at the idea now, had been roped in to be godfather before he realised what was happening. She carried him in in the long embroidered christening robe that she herself, her brother and sister, and indeed George himself, had once worn. He was a fine-looking baby, large and red and lusty. On the table, beside the cake, was the Coverdales’ christening book, a volume of listed names of those who had worn the robe, when and where they had been baptised and so on. It was open, ready for this latest entry.

“Isn’t he
sweet
, Miss Parchman?”

Eunice stood chill and stiff. George felt a coldness come from her as if the sun had gone in. She didn’t smile or bend over the baby or make as if to touch his coverings. She looked at him. It wasn’t a look of enthusiasm such as George had seen her give to
the silver spoons when she laid them out on the saucers. Having looked at him, she said:

“I must get on. I’ve things to see to.”

Not one word did he or Jacqueline receive from her during the course of the afternoon when she was in and out with trays as to the attractiveness of the child, their luck in having such a fine day, or the happiness of the young parents. Cold, he thought, unnaturally cold. Or was she just painfully shy?

Eunice was not shy. Nor had she turned from the baby because she was afraid of the book. Not directly. She was simply uninterested in the baby. But it would be true to say that she was uninterested in babies because there are books in the world.

The printed word was horrible to her, a personal threat to her. Keep away from it, avoid it, and from all those who will show it to her. The habit of shunning it was ingrained in her; it was no longer conscious. All the springs of warmth and outgoing affection and human enthusiasm had been dried up long ago by it. Isolating herself was natural now, and she was not aware that it had begun by isolating herself from print and books and handwriting.