Children of the Archbishop (67 page)

The more he thought about it the more he realised that he would have to do something, whether he was temporary, or not. It just couldn't be right to leave things. And he was quite sure that it was none of it as the old Archbishop had intended. Certainly not as Canon Mallow himself had intended. Why, in his day the Bodkin Hospital for all its faults—for all
his
faults, he should say—had always seemed such a friendly, happy sort of place. And now, though he didn't want to be unfair to Dr. Trump, the place was more like a perfectly conducted barracks with a highly profitable steam-laundry thrown in as a side-line.

Come to think of it, he hadn't heard so much as the laughter of a single child ever since he had been there; and he remembered perfectly well that, in his day, the noise at playtime had frequently been so terrific that he had been forced to close the window if he had wanted to get on with things.

“There's a lot wrong with the place,” he thought sadly. “Really there is. I shall have to speak to Dr. Trump when he gets back. I know he'll understand. It's just that I'll have to be tactful. …”

As things turned out, Dr. Trump never returned to the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital.

For a start, everything that Dr. Arlett had said about his condition proved to be correct. The natural strains of Wardenship, coupled with the disappointment of the Pageant and the numerous re-organisations and dismissals and resignations had already taken their toll. He was an exhausted man even before the additional anxieties that Sweetie and Ginger had imposed on him. And just when what he was really needing was a six-weeks' vacation to set him on his feet again, the dignified steam-roller of Mr. Vivvyan Sparkes had passed clean over him.

It was the middle of October when Fate chose to strike Dr. Trump down. And, in the end, he spent the whole of November
and most of December down at Broadstairs with Felicity and Sebastian, even celebrating Christmas in the small private sitting-room of the Ragusa Boarding Establishment.

But there was more than ill-health behind it. For cut off as Dr. Trump was down there at the seaside, the ordeal of waiting for Mr. Sparkes's report became daily more tormenting. Dr. Trump went to bed at night and woke again in the morning—usually with any number of false dawns in between—with the single thought: “What is he going to say about me? Shall I ever be able to hold up my head again?” always racing through his mind.

And then suddenly the miracle occurred. Mr. Sparkes's report appeared and it vindicated Dr. Trump completely. Indeed, the findings of the report only went to show how appearances—even Mr. Sparkes's distinguished appearance—may be misleading. For Mr. Sparkes made it plain that he had been more than favourably impressed by Dr. Trump's personality. He had found him—there the words were in the black-and-white typewriting of the Home Office—“High-principled. Conscientious. Efficient.” Admittedly, the word “Old-fashioned” occurred a little later on in the report, and there were some references to need, apparently overlooked, for a specialist in child psychology to be attached to the Hospital. But Dr. Trump was now in no mood for bothering about frills and afterthoughts. The bit about a specialist in child psychology was absurd anyway, because he did not believe in child psychologists. And “high-principled, conscientious and efficient” were quite good enough for him.

They were, indeed, what led him ultimately to offer Dame Eleanor his resignation. There was no pique and false pride about the gesture—nothing hurried, reckless, quixotic. It was merely common shrewdness and a sense of opportunism that prompted him. He had known for some time that the East India and China Missionary Society had been looking for a new organiser on the spot, a head man, someone who would be practically a bishop; and he had heard, too, before the deplorable affair of Sweetie and Ginger had blown up, that his own name had been suggested more than once in its connection.

That had been nearly six months ago, however; and, at the time, it had been the flattery rather than the prospect, that had pleased him. It was the episode of the inquiry that had brought it all up again. Several times since he had first been threatened by an investigation, he had made cautious, exploratory feelers to see if the job, the important missionary headship were still vacant.
And it was. That heartened him. He had even got as far as practising a few good openings: “In the eyes of Whitehall I may not be all that a Civil Servant should be,” he could say, lingering a little contemptuously on the words “Whitehall” and “Civil Servant” as he came to them. Or he might try something humble and disarming like: “I have no references to offer: all that I have to offer is my life.” Or even the simple, manly one: “I'm afraid that I'm no good at talking about myself. I …”—he had become thoroughly proficient at the pause, the hesitation—“I … I have never had to do so before.”

But now, armed with Mr. Sparkes's testimonial, what bliss it was not to have to get up to any of those tricks. The letter that he finally sent off was a corker, a real challenge to the whole missionary movement. “
Naturally
” it concluded, “
I would not have considered even making known to you my deep, indeed, life-long interest in your work so long as there was any possibility of a smirch upon my own good name. Publicly vindicated however, by one of our most eminent K.C.s
…”

The night Margaret left Dame Eleanor, she had nowhere to go.

As she made her way back down the long winding drive she was crying. And when she reached the road and the street lights, she saw people turn and stare as the shabby, middle-aged woman, carrying the cheap cardboard suitcase, went by them. But she was past caring what people thought of her. She had her own thoughts and they were fully occupying.

“I've got to get somewhere to sleep,” she kept telling herself. “And then I'll find a job. And after that I'll start looking for Sweetie again. I've got to find her somehow. I've got to find her …”

It was over in Hammersmith that she found somewhere to sleep. “BED AND BREAKFAST, 3/6” the notice in the window said, and she went to the house gratefully. There was no difficulty there. The landlady preferred single ladies, provided they weren't the flashy kind. And when she discovered that Margaret was hungry she gave her a cup of tea and a biscuit. It was the first food that Margaret had eaten since breakfast.

The bed wasn't a bad one as three-snd-sixpenny beds go. It was clean, and there was a comfortable groove down the middle where the other three-and-sixpenny sleepers had rested. But Margaret was too tired for sleep. Too tired, and too miserable.

“I've got to find her,” the words went on forming themselves inside her brain. “I've got to find her. I can't leave Sweetie somewhere they don't understand her.”

There was no one left to turn to now; no one at all. What she did not know was that, over in Putney, Dame Eleanor had put the light on again.

“I shouldn't have let her go away again,” she was thinking. “She's the only one that was ever any good. Even if she had the child here, it would be better than nothing. At least I'd get
some
attention.”

Dame Eleanor had made up her mind. She couldn't exist without Margaret, and she was prepared to admit it. The last companion, after a singularly unfortunate little incident when she had upset a whole carafe of water over Dame Eleanor's morning correspondence, had been sent packing; and Dame Eleanor now had no one. She therefore needed Margaret at once. But where to find her? At the thought that, through her own stubbornness, she had allowed Margaret to slip through her fingers, Dame Eleanor became desperate. She tried the police; she wrote to Arkleydale; she pestered Canon Mallow; she inserted advertisements; she failed. And then, when the hunt was at its height, Margaret solved everything for her. She telephoned to ask if Dame Eleanor was better.

The response surprised her. Dame Eleanor asked her to come round at once.

It was the urgency of it all that bewildered Margaret. She began to fear that something had happened to Sweetie, that there was some alarming piece of news that they had to break to her. She did not guess that she herself was simply what Dame Eleanor wanted. And Margaret had a job to think of, too. She was now a kitchen hand in a restaurant and was getting two pounds a week. She was even planning to save on it.

Not that Dame Eleanor had been idle about Sweetie. On the contrary, so far as Sweetie was concerned, everything was practically arranged. For a start, she had sent for her brother, the bishop, and asked him to help her. He had come, a gaunt, vulture-like
creature with long spatulate fingers and pale protruding eyes, and had sat beside the bed, fiddling with his ring and listening suspiciously to what his sister was saying to him. He had always hated getting mixed up in family affairs—it was somehow only in other families' affairs that he was so wise, so prescient, so episcopal—and what he disliked particularly was the way Eleanor always swept him along so. She was such a rusher. Unless he were careful, he had kept telling himself, he would find himself let in for something foolish—he had not yet forgotten the snub, the poke in the eye, from the Home Office when he had tried to forestall Mr. Vivvyan Sparkes's inquiry. So, after saying for the third time: “Let me make some inquiries first, dear. Let us see how we stand,” he had given her a dry, refrigerated kiss and withdrawn.

But this time everything had been quite simple. The family tentacles had reached out firmly, possessively. The chaplain of the Blackheath Remand Home proved to be an old pupil of the bishop's: he had in fact ordained the man. There were no difficulties there. The matter of public accommodation was, moreover, on Sweetie's side as well. The Blackheath Remand Home was already crowded out with a hundred-and-one other Sweeties all in need of a good home background and firm supervision; and, when the chance came of moving Sweetie on and so making room for still another one, the authorities jumped at it. She could leave the Remand Home next Monday they said.

And then Margaret did one of those incomprehensible things that made Dame Eleanor wonder if she had done wrong even to think of having her back again. For Margaret insisted that she would have to work out her time at the restaurant. They had been very kind to her at the restaurant, Margaret told Dame Eleanor, and she would not like to think of leaving them in the lurch without proper notice. Sunday was the earliest that she could come to Dame Eleanor's.

It was as though, having discovered that Sweetie was alive and well and that in three days' time she was going to have her with her again, Margaret had lost all anxiety.

“I'll sleep here on the Saturday night, if I may, please,” she said. “Just so that I can get everything ready for Sweetie when she comes. I don't want her to be a trouble to anyone.”

It was five o'clock on an October afternoon when Margaret went across from Dame Eleanor's to collect Sweetie.

And all the way in the big, old-fashioned car, Margaret kept saying to herself: “It's going to come true. It's going to. Just like I knew it would. I shall have Sweetie for always now.”

She made a strange figure as she sat there, amid the interior splendour of the tassels and ivory-handles and little cut-glass bottles. She was sitting right forward on the very edge of the seat. But that was only because she was too excited to lean back, too excited to do anything but wait for the moment when she would see Sweetie again.

The light was already fading from the sky when they drew up at the high green gates outside the home. They were a blank, forbidding pair of gates, with a metal grille set in the middle of one of the panels. And, when they opened, Margaret could see into a stone-paved courtyard flanked on three sides by a high, brick wall. She shuddered.

“It's not right,” she told herself. “It's like a prison. They didn't never ought to have sent Sweetie here.”

The interior of the Home was just as prison-like. There was too much stone about. And there weren't enough lights. The corridor was merely a tunnel with occasional glints set down the length of it. And the waiting-room, with its plain deal chairs and the naked electric light bulb dangling from the ceiling, was like a cell.

It wasn't however, so much the bleakness of the place that Margaret minded. It was the fact that when they brought Sweetie to her, the Matron had her arm round Sweetie's shoulders. She was suddenly jealous of the woman. It was only natural that other people should like Sweetie—she didn't see how they could help it, in fact. But it wasn't fair, to go shutting her away like this, and then start playing on her emotions. It was stealing something that by rights belonged to Margaret.

And now that she looked, she noticed that there was a change
in Sweetie. It was less than a month since she had last seen her. But somehow she was different. They'd given her new clothes when she arrived at the Home: perhaps that was it. Or the way her hair was done. Margaret leant forward. “They haven't been cutting Sweetie's hair, have they?” she asked herself.

But it was more than Sweetie's clothes, or the way her hair was done, that was different. And, as Margaret looked at her, she realised what it was. “She's growing up,” she told herself. “That's what she's doing. She's growing up.” For some reason the thought frightened her. “I only hope I'm strong enough to deal with her,” she went on. “But I've got to be. I'm going to
make
her grow into a good girl. That's what I'm going to do: I'm going to
make
her good.”

Her eyes met Sweetie's for a moment. But only for a moment. It was as though Sweetie were avoiding them. There was that sudden pang again, a feeling as though something had been stolen from her. She started to reach out her hand; then she restrained herself.