A Winter's Child (69 page)

The postponement of Polly's wedding had also put off the ordeal of seeing Benedict again, although Nola still slipped into the Crown from time to time for a quick drink before dashing off to analyse the dreams and, therefore, pinpoint the neuroses of some harassed and penniless mother of twelve whose main obsession would probably turn out to be how to borrow a shilling or two to pay the rent.

The holiday in Italy had not been a great success. Nola had embarked upon it as upon a crusade, in search of the maternal instinct which her own self-analysis, conducted in accordance with Freudian practice as laid down by Miss Drew, had taught her that she did not naturally possess. Her intentions had been of the noblest and the best. She wished to sacrifice herself entirely for her children, even if it meant returning to a husband who made her feel uneasy and ashamed. She knew he did not like her. She hoped he never would. It was her way of walking barefoot on hot ashes in penitence for her infanticide. She followed him, head bowed, through Rome and Venice, as extreme in her obedience as in everything else. She followed him through Florence and Pisa, as silent as her increasingly bewildered sons. ‘Where would you like to go now?' he asked her. Once, only a year ago, she would have gone rushing off alone to Vienna to find an analyst of the Freudian school and lay herself, an ardent disciple, at his feet. The thought entered her head and went out again. She was too tired.

‘Anywhere,' she said.

‘Home?'

Thank God. These self-contained, critical boys did not want her sacrifice. They wanted – yes –
money,
that was it. Like herself they had been brought up to understand affection in terms of what it cost, and it was their father who held the purse-strings, their father who paid for all this first-class travel, these luxurious hotels, this rich living, as her own father had done. She saw, somewhat dimly, having dined rather richly herself, that Christian and even Conrad, who was deeper – her
own
son, she'd thought – admired this in Benedict. What did they admire in her? It struck her that she was an embarrassment to them, a person for whom, should they ever become articulate enough, they would feel bound to apologize. And what better service could an embarrassment perform than remove itself? She went down to the Arno that night rather thinking she might drown herself but, confused by
Chianti
and
Cointreau,
did not immediately notice that the river was dry, returning to the hotel not as some cold, dead Ophelia in the arms of pall-bearers, but on her own exceedingly muddy feet.

Even suicide, it seemed, was more difficult than she had expected and by the time she had scraped the mud from her shoes and the hem of her dress and then, realizing the futility of the task, had thrown them away, she had lost the urge to try it again in any case.

‘Home,' said Benedict, looking as if his perseverance too was deserting him.

Home. But not High Meadows. Going at once to All Saints' Passage she rushed straight into the cubby-hole of an office occupied by Miss Drew, completely ignoring the several dozen people who had been waiting, some of them all morning, on the benches outside.

‘I am quite desperate,' she said.

‘Oh dear –' Miss Drew, accustomed only to desperation among the lower classes – ‘ladies'usually have been brought up with the good taste not to mention it – looked startled.

‘I thought, if I could just devote myself to them that I'd get over it. But they wouldn't let me. I got drunk and fell in the river and they were
polite
to me. I was supposed to be committing suicide. I couldn't even manage that.'

She burst noisily into tears and Miss Drew, finding herself unable to cope with hysteria in a woman wearing fox furs and emeralds rather than the more usual apron and blanket shawl, called on the stalwart Miss Pickles for assistance who, looking Nola up and down, pronounced at once, ‘The trouble is, my dear, that you haven't enough to do. Work is the thing, you know. Care to give it a try?'

They set her to filing their papers to begin with until Mr Kilmartin voiced timorous doubts as to her ‘suitability' –‘These are
confidential
documents, ladies, containing the most intimate details of our clients' lives,
not
to be bandied about in a cocktail bar' – after which they released her, in small doses, upon the clients themselves who, in general, were quite happy to tell anybody anything.

Not their ‘best'clients, of course, not the ‘interesting'cases, not the girls who were best responding to Miss Pickles' methods of scouring front doorsteps with pumice stone or baking ginger parkin, not the tortuous, emotional webs Miss Drew was so expert at untangling; not the girl in St Jude's Terrace who was in love with her mother's husband; not the musician at the end of Taylor Street who had developed hysterical paralysis of the hand which had been convicted of a minor forgery: not the bold young harlots who might, one never knew, turn ‘theatrical'and whose conversation, even now, was entertaining: not those who challenged or intrigued Miss Drew, nor any of those who, in the opinion of both these ladies, might, with careful handling, be encouraged to adopt better ways.

But Nola, perhaps, might care to interest herself, not in the stars of Faxby's criminal community, but in certain minor members of its chorus, the hopeless cases who, being incorrigible or incurable, could not really be made worse by anything Nola did to them; the dull cases; the pettier of the petty thieves; the commoner of the common prostitutes; the inarticulate, the sub-normally intelligent who – after so many years of them – frustrated Miss Pickles and bored Miss Drew.

Nola was not ideal. They were well aware of it. But they were overworked, hardly paid at all. And she was willing.

‘Mrs Swanfield, would you be so kind as to deliver this dear old gentleman to the Salvation Army?' The man was abusive, had a most suspicious tendency to scratch, and filled Nola's car for hours afterwards with an odour of unwashed skin and sweat-soaked, very probably urine-soaked cloth which stung her eyes. When he asked her for ‘beer money'meaning a few pence at the most, she gave him a five-pound note, having nothing less in her purse, with the result that he walked away from the Salvation Army Hostel and never came back again.

‘Nola dear, could you be a love and take this old granny to wherever it is she lives? She's had a drop too much, you see, and if the police should pick her up – for singing or shouting or for just falling asleep in doorways again – then the magistrates have faithfully promised to send her to gaol.'

‘Granny'who looked at least ninety and as frail as a half-drowned sparrow, was not only drunk but could not remember her address.

‘Oh dear,' said Miss Drew when Nola brought her back to All Saints'Passage. ‘Just drive her around the town a little – it might jog her memory. If not then – well, I don't suppose the Salvation Army will take her after last time, so you'll have to drop her off somewhere, as far from the police station as you can.'

Neurotics were Miss Drew's speciality. Not vagrants, who took their neuroses away with them, nor drunkards who had forgotten theirs.

‘Do the best you can, dear,' she said, never for one moment expecting that Nola would take the old woman to the kitchen at High Meadows, causing what would have been a complete walk-out of the staff had Benedict not put a stop to it, and hysterics in Polly and Miriam who went about for days afterwards searching the entire house for fleas.

‘Mrs Swanfield – could you just
talk
to this woman?' That seemed safe enough. But the woman in question was voluble, psychopathic, making up a new life story every day of the week, boring but harmless to Miss Pickles and Miss Drew who had met the type before and knew all she really wanted was an audience to play to. But so plausible, so fascinating to Nola, who was so utterly convinced by the image presented to her of a gentlewoman down on her luck, that she took her to lunch at the Crown, offending Councillor Redfearn who happened to be at the next table and had once ‘sent her down'for something or other, and considerably embarrassing Kit when it was discovered that all the toilet soap and towels and somebody's chinchilla wrap were missing from the powder room.

‘Now then, Mrs Swanfield, this is Patsy who is terribly lonely. Could you keep her company – shall we say once a week, for an hour or two?'

Patsy was pale, depressive, ready to talk all day and all night in a toneless whisper about disaster, misery, suicide, about how no one, anywhere, had ever cared for her or understood her, or given her a chance. She believed it. Nola believed it.

‘I need you,' said Patsy.

‘Any hour of the day or night,' said Nola, writing down her telephone number and her address so that one never knew, at High Meadows, after that, just when the telephone might shrill out in the middle of the night to release the hysterical babble which was Patsy's cry for help – instant and immediate, ‘Come at once' – to Nola: or when Patsy herself might be discovered in the early morning, curled up against the kitchen doorstep, wraith-like and scantily clad, having waited there, with the eerie patience of a cat, all night.

‘This is Ginny, Mrs Swanfield – a likeable soul, except that please don't give her money –
ever
. Our aim is to help our clients to stand on their own feet, not ours. So no money. Please.'

Ginny was small, quick-witted, apparently fertile although the children who hung about her were not always her own. She was also prone to pains in her hands, a condition caused by the cold, and considerably aggravated by the fact that she had no gloves. Nola at once took off her own – expensive, hand-stitched doeskin – and would have been saddened and surprised to know, although Miss Pickles and Miss Drew would not, that they fetched five shillings that same evening in Faxby Market Place.

‘God love you, Mrs Swanfield,' said Ginny, trundling to market week after week with the blankets her ‘bairns' – neighbours'children hired for the day every one – had needed to get through the winter, the boots in assorted sizes without which they could not go to school, the pots and pans to ‘help put a morsel or two in their little bellies', the cradle for the ‘next poor little bastard'she alleged to be on his way.

‘I feel,' said Miriam, looking seriously upset about it, ‘that I am under siege.'

‘Don't ever borrow her car or let her give you a lift,' warned Polly who, having encountered something she recognized instantly as a louse, although she had never met one before, on Nola's passenger seat had just consigned to the kitchen fire a nearly-new
silk foulard
dress.

‘I have caught scabies from somebody,' announced Nola as if she expected congratulations. ‘Look – in the joints of my hands.'

‘Don't come near me,' shrieked Polly.

‘Don't go near Justin or Simon or my little boys,' said Eunice.

‘Oh dear,' said Miriam, suddenly sitting down. ‘Oh my goodness – Not a word – absolutely not a word of this to anyone.'

‘It's only a matter of time,' Toby told Claire, entirely without malice, ‘before she falls in love with a housebreaker. And what are the Greenwoods and the Redfearns going to make of it if they happen to be on the bench the day she marches into court and asks for him to be released into her custody, swag-bag and all, because she's the only one who understands him?'

What would Miss Pickles make of it – and Miss Drew? What would Benedict make of it?

Claire preferred not even to wonder, going about her business at the Crown as untroubled by the memory of him, as could be expected, until the night when Elvira Redfearn's penetrating voice reached her across the restaurant, its ‘I declare this meeting open!' quality rising far above the discreet murmurings of the other diners as she informed her companion, a woman as overbearing as herself, ‘My dear, if you are thinking of a little place in the country, then I believe I can point you in the right direction. Benedict Swanfield has just put up for sale an absolutely delightful Dales farmhouse – presumably someone left it to him since the contents are up for auction too – next Saturday, I believe. Yes indeed, I
shall
be attending the sale. Perhaps we could go together. Lovely pieces of art glass.'

Claire went to the powder room and leaning hard against the washbasin stood for a while, her eyes tight shut, her forehead pressed against the mirror, her body alternating for long, sickening moments between flushes of damp heat and the freezing chill.

He was selling the farm, the Tiffany lamps, the cameo glass, the Chinese rugs, the memories. Had he found it impossible to take another woman there? Triumph and despair tore at her both together. Where would he go, then, not for sex which he would always find easily attainable but for peace and rest and his illusion of freedom? The farm had been far more to him than a convenient place to entertain women. It had been his escape from High Meadows, a sanctuary. Her eyes still closed she felt the tranquillity of that low, oak-beamed room wash over her, remembered how, in the midst of Miriam's gold and scarlet Christmas, she had longed for it. Now she had robbed him of that too.

Some days later a messenger from Swanfield Mills brought her a parcel on which an imperious hand she recognized had scrawled ‘Fragile. With care.' She knew it was the lily bowl and, taking it up to her room that night, found that she could not open it. It sat on her table, staring at her through its brown paper wrappings while she drank her bedtime cocoa. It was there, waiting for her, the next morning when she got out of bed. And when she put it away in her wardrobe out of sight, barricaded into a corner behind a heap of sweaters, it still worried her. She could neither give it away nor keep it. She could neither unwrap it nor bear to think of it, never more than a few yards away from her, suffocating beneath its sawdust and somebody's old cricket sweater. In the end she took it to Dorothy's spare room in Faxby Park.