A Winter's Child (66 page)

She returned to Upper Heaton to find Miss Richmal Lyall busy in the china cupboard, listing individual items of Worcester and Crown Derby, Dorothy upstairs, not in the room she had shared with Edward but sitting, tense and frayed, on the edge of what had been Claire's bed.

‘Mother, what is that woman doing?'

‘Listing the china – every cup and saucer. All of it. What does she think? That I have to pay for anything I break?'

She was trying hard, for Edward's sake, to keep her temper and not quite succeeding.

‘And what do you think?'

‘That she can have it – take it away with her now – the lot –'

‘Mother – how could you?'

‘What?'

‘Sell yourself so cheap.'

She had spoken in sorrow not condemnation and Dorothy, hearing it, gave a sudden start, squeezed her eyes tight shut, clenched her hands, caught her breath in a great gulp and then let it out in a gasping, jerky sigh.

‘Because I was frightened and I was thirty-two and he was the only one who asked me,' she said.

‘She burst into tears then, mighty sobs which set her shoulders heaving, made her eyes smart and her head ache but ultimately did her good.'

‘How stupid,' she said, blowing her nose hard, apologizing because Edward had always been seriously offended by tears and she had trained herself to please him so rigorously that she could not break the habit all at once. ‘I'll be all right, Claire. I just wanted a roof over my head – and yours – that's all, and enough money to pay the milkman and the coalman, so I didn't have to hide when they rang the bell. At least I'll never have to do that again. I've got a home –'

‘If that woman downstairs leaves you a chair to sit on.'

‘I don't care. She can take the lot –'

‘No she can't.'

‘Claire – she's – she's just looking after her nephew – her own flesh and blood.'

‘So am I.'

‘Yes – yes I know – but don't fuss – please don't. If Edward had never married me then Henry Lyall could have moved here straight after his wedding – that's what they all want. And there's a housing shortage too, because of the war. Old buildings not repaired and new ones shoddy and costing the earth. She keeps telling me that.'

‘Then tell her to go to hell.'

‘Claire!'

‘Mother – he married you. You were his wife not his housekeeper. And a damned good wife.'

‘Please don't swear, dear – not so
she'll
hear you, at any rate.'

‘Mother – stop being so humble. Stop it –
now
this minute – there's no need. Do you want that woman to count your china?'

Dorothy shook her head.

‘Do you want her sorting through your linen?'

‘No.'

‘Do you want to give the silver away?'

‘No – I don't.'

Dorothy had spent hours, which added up to months of her life, polishing that silver, deriving comfort from its possession.

‘And do you want to end up camping out here in one half-furnished bedroom and the kitchen corner?'

Dorothy shivered, hating unfurnished rooms for the sparse memories they aroused of a past when bailiffs, not acquisitive spinster cousins, had taken the furniture, rolled up the carpets, unhooked the curtains, and carted them away in payment of debt. She had married Edward to escape from that.

‘No, I don't.'

‘All right, mother.'

Claire went downstairs to the china cupboard and said coolly, ‘Miss Lyall, I would like a word with you.'

Miss Lyall, however, had nothing she wished to say to Claire.

‘As you see, Mrs Swanfield, I am rather busy.'

‘Yes. I do see. May I ask what you are doing in my mother's china cupboard?'

‘I am making an inventory.'

‘Who asked you? And for what purpose?'

No one had ever spoken to Miss Richmal Lyall in that particular manner, a hospital matron issuing crisp, no-nonsense commands to a probationer nurse. And, although it was, of course, a tone she regularly employed with others, she was taken aback at being so addressed herself.

Claire gave her no time to recover.

‘If my mother wants an inventory then she will probably make one.'

‘It is hardly what your mother wants, Mrs Swanfield.'

‘It is
entirely
what my mother wants, at this stage, Miss Lyall. She lives here. You don't. I really must ask you to leave her cups and saucers alone.'

For a moment Miss Lyall, of whom even her peevish, spinster brother was slightly afraid, did not know what to say. Such a thing had never happened to her before.

‘Really! Indeed!' giving herself time to think of a truly crushing retort which, when it came was simply and lamely ‘How dare you speak like that to me?'

‘Easily;' replied this cool, faintly amused young woman. ‘Because you are behaving badly and I don't see why you should be allowed to get away with it.'

Edward had got away with it all his life. How she wished she had had the courage to tell him so. But this narrow, greedy woman was a fair substitute, so mean and petty and selfrighteous, so thoroughly hateful, so like him, that Claire smiled at her almost fondly as she implanted her next dart.

‘Let me make my mother's position clear, Miss Lyall.' This too she had longed to say to Edward. ‘She is not a flighty seventeen-year-old who caught your cousin's eye for a month or two and is trying to feather her nest out of a passing fancy. She lived with him as his wife for eighteen years. She nursed him when he was unwell which he usually thought he was. She had patience with his fads – and he had plenty of those. She
put up
with him. She worked damned hard for him, Miss Lyall, and she's earned her place in this house. She's
earned
her mahogany sideboards and her silver candlesticks
and
her china cupboard. She deserves her peace of mind and if you try to bully her into giving anything away or make her feel guilty for keeping it, then I shall not take it kindly.'

‘You are an insolent young woman.' Richmal Lyall had pronounced those same words on many occasions to housemaids who had been reduced instantly to tears; to shop girls who had humbly begged her pardon and, at her recommendation, had often lost their jobs; to her neighbours who knew better than to allow their dogs to stray in her garden or their children to indulge in noisy play. But this terrible person with her painted lips and her cropped head simply looked her up and down and
smiled
at her.

‘Just listen to me, my girl.' Miss Lyall had never been flustered before and did not know how to handle it. ‘When your mother prevailed upon my Cousin Edward to marry her –'

‘Prevailed?' To Miss Lyall's amazement, Claire's smile deepened to a beam of sheer delight. ‘Is that what he told you? That she'd
prevailed upon him?
Yes, I can just hear him say it. But are you really so naive? He couldn't wait to get his hands on my mother. He was – well, you're a spinster lady and so I won't embarrass you – although so was he. Just a fussy old spinster with his knitting. At heart, that is. Certainly not in other directions. Perhaps that was what made him so – oh good Lord, he was a
joke,
that's all, and rather a poor one. I should have seen it years ago.'

Suddenly she was laughing.

‘I won't listen,' said Miss Lyall, rooted to the spot, like a small rodent fascinated by a shaft of light.

‘I don't really care, Miss Lyall. There's not much more to be said. Just don't disturb my mother again, there's a good lady. I daresay you would like her to move out of here and save your nephew a lot of expense and a lot of trouble. Probably Edward would have liked that too. But she's not a housekeeper to be dismissed with a reference and a month's wages. She'll go when and if she's ready. If Edward didn't want to pay for the pleasures and services of a wife then he should have made do with a whore. It would have killed him sooner and cost him less.'

‘We haven't heard the last of it,' said Dorothy when, having escorted Miss Lyall off the premises, Claire found her mother on the landing, half-defiant, half-defeated, succumbing to mild hysteria whenever the thin spectre of Edward inserted his whine of reproach into her mind.

‘You've not heard the last of it,' said Kit Hardie, smiling across his desk at her as they checked the bar takings. ‘Not by a long shot. Hell hath no fury like an old virgin, mark my words, when it comes to the family silver. I've seen it time and again in the families I've worked for, gentle old tabby-cats growing claws like tigers over who gets the monogrammed towels and the apostle teaspoons. You know, Claire – if your mother needs a change of scene she'd be welcome here for a week or two. There's nobody in the Rose Room just now and the staff would look after her.'

‘That's kind of you, Kit.'

‘Then bear it in mind. Or take her to Bournemouth or somewhere, if she fancies that. You can have the time off.'

‘Kit-you're generous too.'

‘Yes. In fact I'm a very decent chap – more often than not. I'd expect you back, of course, before Aristide opens his doors and does his damnedest to close mine. Didn't I tell you? He's found himself a place in Petergate – used to be a chip shop, so one couldn't raise objections at Town Hall level about the cooking sinells … There's to be a gala opening, mid-September. Won't affect our business,
of course.
He won't poach any of our staff either.
What
an unlikely notion. But, just in case, if you should happen to hear of a decent pastry chef, you might let me know. Come to think of it, Bournemouth could be just the place to find one.'

‘You'll pay my expenses then, will you?'

He smiled. ‘We'll talk about it. Just look after your mother.'

She would have to be in Faxby by mid-September, in any case, for Polly's wedding.

‘Dear Claire,' wrote Miriam in several coy variations of the same demand. ‘I simply cannot understand why you have not been to see me.'

‘Dear Miriam,' answered Claire, in a bold, free-flowing hand. ‘I will come when I can. But, at present, my mother needs me.'

What would the Swanfields, or the Lyalls, make of that?

Miriam, agile and supple as ever, sent Dorothy chocolates in gold boxes and a basket of crystallized fruit decorated with pink satin ribbon. Miss Richmal Lyall, considerably more upright but far less intelligent, sent Mr Herbert Duckworth with an official proposal that Dorothy should give up the house and contents at once in favour of Mr Henry Lyall, and install herself in ‘alternative accommodation', a flat or perhaps a boarding-house in some quiet seaside town, the rental of which would be met, throughout her lifetime, by the Lyall estate. Could it be denied that the house was far more suited to the requirements of an ambitious young couple and their future children than a woman alone? And since that woman was merely a custodian, not an owner, holding the property in trust for them, was it just or even sensible to make them wait the duration of her lifetime-twenty years Miss Lyall estimated – at the end of which the Lyall children would be grown up, away at school, gone, and half the Royal Worcester would probably be broken? Miss Richmal Lyall appealed, through Mr Duckworth, to Mrs Dorothy Lyall's sense of justice or, in more basic terms, her sense of right and wrong. Could it even be denied that if Edward could speak to her from the grave, he would be urging her now to give up her claims?

Dorothy, falling immediately into panic, did not deny it. Of course he would. He may even have suggested it to her during his lifetime, in fact she rather thought he had, although she, hadn't understood at the time and he, not expecting to drop, dead so instantly of a heart attack, had not insisted. Probably, if he had lived long enough, he would have brought the matter up again. And since she would have agreed to it then, she might just as well agree to it now. She had done her best for him but he had always despised her. She was no fool, whatever anyone else might think, and no milk and water innocent either. He had despised her and had despised himself for wanting her so badly. It was true – her daughter had said it, and seen it – that he hadn't known how to keep his hands off her. And had she been to blame for that? She'd simply put up with it, like everything else, and now she was glad to be rid of it – yes, very glad – just as she'd be glad to get out of this dark, dreary house and see the last of those mouldy old wardrobes and sideboards that had always given her nightmares.

‘Let the Lyalls have them,' she shrieked. ‘I don't want them. I'll take an axe to the lot if I have to stay here. And as for that china, all Edward ever let me do was take it out twice a year and wash it and then put it back in the cupboard again. Let Richmal do that from now on. I'll just get a room somewhere, anywhere – I don't care – back where I started. I'll leave today.'

Left to herself Dorothy would assuredly have signed each and every one of her rights away, succumbed to every pressure, agreed blindly to a lifetime of genteel poverty in a rented flat and ended up thanking them for it. Mr Duckworth certainly, Miss Lyall probably, were both well aware of that.

‘No, mother,' said Claire.

‘I have to,' said Dorothy. ‘They won't leave me alone until I do, and I can't stand it.'

Claire called once again to see Mr Duckworth, conveying to him very pleasantly her mother's readiness to leave Upper Heaton.

‘Very wise, my dear. These family squabbles do tend to drag on so, you know – rarely worth it, one finds in the end. So I may close my dossier, may I, on the affair of Lyall v Lyall before it has really started?'

He looked infinitely relieved about that.

‘Not quite, Mr Duckworth.'

He sighed.

‘Since there is a great deal of money in the estate I think my mother's allowance should be increased annually. Not a great deal but enough to accommodate these rising prices one hears so much about.'