Enough to Kill a Horse (21 page)

And heaven knows, Fanny thought, perhaps he had been right. Perhaps until recently, when she had felt Kit struggling against the protective entanglement of her love for him and had begun to ask herself scared and disturbing questions about what she had done to him.

Since that had started to happen, something unfamiliar had emerged in her feeling for Basil. She had become far more aware of him than before, and aware of her trust in him and her reliance on him.

‘You shouldn’t have worried,’ she said, ‘it wouldn’t have done any damage.’

‘One can never be sure,’ he said.

‘Yes, yes – though perhaps there wouldn’t have been a quarrel at all. I’m not quarrelsome, am I? I don’t quarrel much with people. I’ve managed never to quarrel with Tom Mordue, for instance.’

‘You’re the sort of person who only quarrels with the people they care for,’ he answered.

‘Then there’s no need to worry about it, is there?’

‘Except that that sort of quarrel sometimes goes deep – like this quarrel you’re having with Kit. Where will that end?’

‘It’s over already, as far as I’m concerned,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I send Clare to fetch Laura, so that we could all make friends? I don’t like Laura, and I can’t understand why she should have made up her mind that she wants Kit, when, so far as I can see, she isn’t in love with him, but if they’re going to be married I’m not going to do anything to make difficulties for them. I’ll see that Kit goes off to London with her and I’ll go very, very carefully with him in future.’

‘I think it’s easy enough to understand why Laura wants Kit,’ Basil said. ‘I think in her way she is in love with him. That’s to say, I think she finds him attractive, and believes that she can make something of him. Apart from that, in spite of her good looks, she isn’t really a particularly attractive young woman and she probably knows that by now. And she’s thirtyish and she’s got a child.’

‘Thirty is quite a normal marrying age for women nowadays,’ Fanny said, vaguely in defence of herself, since she had been a great deal older than that when she married Basil, ‘and I can think of lots of marriages where the woman already had one or more children.’

‘But I expect the women themselves were apprehensive beforehand, even if they had no reason to be.’

‘And inclined to clutch at straws? Well, if I were fairly successful in any career, like Laura, I’d certainly regard Kit as a straw, a very unsatisfactory straw.’

‘Because you simply can’t remember that he’s an attractive animal, although you’ve had plenty of chances to observe the results of that fact during the last two or three years.’

‘Susan evidently didn’t think so – ’ She stopped as the telephone rang. ‘What’s the betting that’s Minnie,’ she said, ‘wanting to wail about something? You take it and say I’m out. I don’t think I could take any of the Mordues at the moment.’

Basil went to the telephone and picked it up.

As he did so, the door opened and Clare came into the room. She came in quietly and without looking at either Fanny or Basil, made straight for a chair by the fire. Jerking it a few inches nearer to the warmth, she sat down in it stiffly, holding her hands out to the blaze and staring intently into the heart of it with a wide, unblinking stare. Her face was extraordinarily pale.

Looking at her in surprise and with a sudden terrible sense of apprehension, Fanny asked sharply, ‘Whatever’s happened?’ She had been so startled by Clare’s appearance that she forgot for the moment that Basil was at the telephone.

‘I saw Laura,’ Clare said. Her voice dried up as she said it and she had to start again. ‘I saw Laura – and she won’t come. I did my best, but nothing I could say would make her come.’

When Kit had left Laura in her room at The Waggoners, she had told him that she wanted to rest. She had shown him that she was tired. Dropping wearily on to the bed, kicking her shoes off, she had shut her eyes and yawned. Kit had added a piece of coal to the meagre fire that he had persuaded Mrs Toles to light, then had gone out quietly.

Laura had lain quite still, her eyes still closed, until she heard his tread in the yard below, then she had sat up, reached hurriedly for the shoes that she had just discarded, and gone quickly downstairs.

She went to Mrs Toles.

‘Have you a telephone?’ she asked.

‘Yes, dear, through there,’ Mrs Toles said, pointing at a door in a corner of the closed saloon bar.

Laura went to the door and found that it opened into a dark cupboard. The telephone was on a shelf with a local directory beside it. The cupboard was too dark for her to be able to look up the number she wanted, so she brought the directory out into the bar and standing under the light, started flicking over the pages. Mrs Toles saw her there, then went back to the kitchen to finish her tea. She wondered if anything had happened between Kit Raven and his young lady. The girl, she thought, looked odd and excited.

In the Mordues’ cottage the telephone rang. Minnie picked it up.

‘Can I speak to Miss Mordue, please?’ said a rather peremptory feminine voice.

Minnie did not recognize the voice, so she assumed that it belonged to someone connected with Susan’s work.

‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘I think she’s home.’

She went to the bottom of the staircase and called. There was no reply. After another call, she went back to the telephone.

‘No, I’m sorry, she’s not in,’ she said.

‘Is that Mrs Mordue speaking?’ the voice asked.

‘Yes,’ Minnie answered.

‘Oh, Mrs Mordue, this is Laura Greenslade speaking,’ the voice said. ‘I do so want to speak to your daughter. It’s immensely important.’

Minnie’s hand, holding the telephone, trembled.

‘Mrs Greenslade?’

‘Yes. Will she be home soon? I must speak to her.’

‘I’m expecting her any time,’ Minnie said. ‘She generally gets in about now. You’re at the Lynams’, I suppose. Couldn’t she ring you when she gets in?’

‘No, I’m not at the Lynams’,’ the voice said. ‘I’m at The Waggoners – and I want to catch the next train back to London, so I’ll be leaving in a few minutes. But perhaps you could give your daughter a message from me. Would you do that, Mrs Mordue?’ There was an extraordinary urgency in the voice.

Minnie’s heart began to beat faster. She had a premonition of what the message was to be.

‘Of course, Mrs Greenslade,’ she said. ‘Wait while I get a pencil and paper.’

‘No, that won’t be necessary,’ the urgent, excited voice said, ‘just say – just tell her that I know that Kit’s really in love with her and not with me, and – and that I believe she’s in love with Kit, and – and that I’d never want to stand between two people who love each other, and so I’m going back to London and I hope they’ll both be very happy.’

‘But, Mrs Greenslade – Laura – you can’t just – I mean, I couldn’t …’

While Minnie, in a voice now more excited than the other, fumbled for words, she heard a sound on the telephone that might have been a laugh, then the click as the connection was cut.

A laugh? No, it couldn’t have been. It must have been a sob.

‘Oh dear,’ Minnie said, standing there looking desperate and muddled. ‘Oh dear, the poor girl. She really shouldn’t have … I mean, that isn’t the way … Oh dear, how unhappy she must be. The poor girl. The poor girl.’

‘What the hell are you talking to yourself about now?’ Tom asked, coming into the room.

Minnie stared at him unseeingly. His bald head bobbed across her vision without her being able to focus her thoughts upon him.

‘And how can I say a thing like that to Susan?’ she cried. ‘You know what Susan is.’

‘I do not,’ Tom said. ‘I do not know what anyone is, least of all Susan.’

‘She’s proud and independent,’ Minnie said. ‘It’s just the sort of thing to make her refuse ever to speak to him again. Oh, Tom, whatever shall I do?’

Tom Mordue sat down by the fire and picking up the morning’s paper, rustled it ostentatiously.

‘Leave me in peace, for one thing,’ he said.

‘But, Tom, it’s about Susan. It was that Greenslade girl. She says she’s going back to London, and she’s giving Kit up because she thinks he and Susan are in love with each other. And she wants me to tell Susan that.’

Tom lowered his paper. He looked at Minnie hard and disbelievingly.

‘You’re making this up because it’s what you want,’ he said.

Her wild, bewildered gaze met his. ‘It’s what she said and then she gave a sob. It wrung my heart, Tom. Or – or
was
it a laugh?’

‘Well, whatever it was, I’d say nothing about it to Susan, if I were you,’ Tom said. ‘If Kit wants her, he can come and ask for her – and I sincerely hope she’ll say no to him again, as she says now she did before. Young men who don’t know their minds for two days together aren’t much good to anyone, least of all when they’re a present from another woman, all done up in blue ribbon.’ He picked up the paper again. ‘
I
always know my own mind.’

‘Yes, Tom,’ Minnie said abstractedly. ‘But she
is
in love with him. I think – I think I’ll at least tell her … I mean, I said I’d give the message. Or perhaps I should ring up Fanny and ask her advice.’

‘For God’s sake!’ Tom shouted. ‘Can’t anything be done in this family without asking that woman’s advice?’

‘Tom!’ Minnie said in a shocked voice.

He crumpled up the paper. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve nothing against Fanny. But it’s almost as bad as asking for charity, this asking for advice, instead of using your own judgement.
I
never ask for advice.’

‘No, Tom.’

He turned his head, listening.

‘There’s Susan now,’ he said.

‘I’ll give her the message,’ Minnie said, ‘then
she
can use her own judgement. That’ll be best, won’t it?’

She nodded her shaggy head, satisfied with her own wisdom.

They heard Susan prop her bicycle against the wall below the window and come in. While she was still in the little hall, dragging off her gloves and blowing on her cold fingers, Minnie called out to her. When Susan, listlessly inattentive, made no answer, Minnie came hurrying out.

‘There’s just been a telephone message for you, dear,’ Minnie said, ‘from Laura Greenslade.’

Susan frowned absently. Her small, square face looked chilled by the cold wind and her eyes were preoccupied. She was used to withdrawing herself from both her parents, often only half-listening to what they were saying to one another or to her, and now a moment passed before it occurred to her that what had been said was something of interest. When it did, when the name of the person of whom, as it happened, she was thinking, penetrated to her mind, she frowned harder than ever, so that her face for a moment bore a striking resemblance to her father’s.

‘What did you say?’ she said sharply, almost as sharply as Tom might have said it.

Minnie gave a confused version of Laura’s message.

A curiously anxious look came into Susan’s eyes as she listened. She said nothing, but stood looking down at her hands, then in a quietly deliberate way she started pulling on her gloves again and in spite of the fact that they were old and shapeless, smoothed them very carefully over her fingers, staring at them hard as she did so. Then suddenly she put an arm round her mother’s neck and kissed her, went quickly out of the house, took her bicycle, wheeled it along the garden path to the lane and set off towards the village.

At first she pedalled fast, feeling that it was of desperate importance that she should see Laura before she left to catch the train to London. She did not know what she wanted to say to her. In fact, it would be easiest, she thought, not to say anything at all but simply to slap Laura’s face. Susan wished she had it in her to do that, instead of having to put her feelings into words. Words, in the experience of Tom Mordue’s daughter, were treacherous things that generally created lasting havoc. From harmless little beginnings, they grew and grew in power and cruelty till everything within their range was destroyed. And she had no desire to destroy Laura. She did not even want to hurt her much. She only wanted …

What did she want? Did she or did she not want Kit?

Susan’s pedalling grew slower. She found herself thinking less of Laura and more of Kit. She was, of course, in love with him. In spite of the extraordinary emotional crudity and stupidity of his treatment of both herself and Laura, she was deeply in love with him. And knowing at last for sure that she was in love with him, and thinking of herself as something worse than emotionally crude and stupid, she had been bitterly miserable during the last two weeks. She had not believed for a moment that she could get him back. Even after they had met at Fanny’s party, and she had seen quite clearly that his engagement to Laura had given him little happiness, Susan had not believed that there was any way of stopping him proceeding with it. Having lived all her life close to Tom Mordue, it was perhaps natural for her to take for granted that when a man had made up his mind to do something truly preposterous, there was no way of saving him from himself.

But now Laura was tossing him back at her.

Susan had not yet met Laura. She had only seen her photograph and heard Fanny talk about her, and now the remarkable message that had come by telephone had reached Susan only through her mother, so that she had not even heard Laura’s voice. She did not know precisely what had been said, or in what tone the message had been given. Her mother had told her that Laura had sounded very excited, but Susan did not think of Minnie as a reliable reporter, and one doubt haunted Susan now, that in fact some sort of vicious joke was being played upon her. Pedalling her bicycle more and more slowly, she found herself thinking of that job that Colin Gregory had tried to make her take, found herself wondering if perhaps it was still open.

In the village street she saw Jean Gregory.

Jean was standing in front of The Waggoners, looking up and down the street, and for a moment Susan had a distinct impression that she was looking up and down to see whether anyone was watching her.

It was a curious impression to have. There could be few people so unlikely to be acting in such a fashion as Jean Gregory. There could be few people with so little reason in their lives ever to need to act furtively. Yet as Susan applied her brakes, jumped off her bicycle and wheeled it towards Jean, she felt that Jean had been startled by her appearance, was put out by it and quite at a loss.