Enough to Kill a Horse (4 page)

‘Peculiar?’ Fanny’s voice was shrill.

‘Don’t you see it?’ Minnie asked interestedly. ‘Doesn’t it strike you too? I thought you told me – ’

‘That was Basil, Fanny said. ‘I don’t see anything peculiar about her at all. I don’t. I think – I think she just looks beautiful and charming and intelligent!’

Jean Gregory, walking home after a meeting of the Church Restoration Fund Committee, which had occupied nearly the whole of her morning, met her husband as he came out of The Waggoners.

Jean was a fragile-looking woman of thirty. She had a small and finely modeled head, carried high between narrow and rather sloping shoulders. Her features were small and regular, her skin was delicate and perfect. She had brown, softly curling hair, which was cut very short, and large brown eyes, emotional and serious. There was always an air of intensity and faint austerity about her, a suggestion, almost, of the nun.

This was often heightened, as it was today, by the way she was dressed. A grey coat, buttoned up to her neck, with a small, round collar, swung loose from her shoulders; her long, slim-fingered hands were invisible, buried deep in her pockets; her shoes were black and flat-heeled.

Meeting Colin, she slipped her arm through his and as they walked towards their home, she started to tell him about the committee meeting.

Usually it amused him to hear her accounts of her activities in the village. She described them with self-deprecating flippancy, though they were really of the deepest importance to her. She was a very shy woman and her conscience never left her in peace because she was rich. Colin often mocked her for this, but fortunately for them both, since she was really very easily hurt, he had a sensitive touch and seldom said the word that went too far. In fact, she usually enjoyed his mockery, feeling that it helped her to remember the extreme insignificance of herself and her works.

Today, however, he was not mocking. He appeared not to be in the least amused and after a few minutes it dawned on Jean that he was not even interested. His face, when she considered it, was unusually abstracted.

She waited for a little, then asked, ‘What’s the matter, Colin?’

‘The Mordues,’ he answered at once.

‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Because of this engagement of Kit’s?’

‘Yes. Tom’s so cut up, he’s becoming quite unbearable. He tried hard to pick a quarrel with Fred Davin today.’

‘Tom worships Susan,’ Jean said in extenuation.

‘I know, heaven help the girl,’ Colin said. ‘If he’d give a little more worship to poor, down-trodden Minnie and let Susan run her own affairs – ’

‘But he does worship Minnie, you know.’

‘Queer form it takes, then.’

‘I expect nearly all real worship takes queer forms.’

He gave a curious glance at her small, earnest face.

‘Well, he can have Minnie, so far as I’m concerned,’ he said, ‘but I wish Susan could be rescued.’

‘But, Colin, what’s come over you?’ She acted extreme surprise. ‘Don’t you always argue that there’s nothing one can do about other people, that they make their own fates and the only thing is to let them get ahead with the job?’

‘Do I?’ His eyes had their most reserved look, a look that had often made Jean feel that behind his good humour and his liking for pleasing other people, there might be qualities of which she had no knowledge. ‘It’s more or less what I’ve been saying to Fanny,’ he admitted, ‘to try and cheer her up. She hates this engagement almost as much as Tom does, though that’s only partly on account of Susan. Still, at the moment I feel that if someone could persuade Susan to go a long way off before the lovely Mrs Greenslade settles here and Susan slips into the habit of being an object of pity, they’d be doing a very kindly act.’

‘But she’s got her job,’ Jean said uncertainly. ‘And I think she’s fond of those children she looks after.’

‘There must be lots of children in other places who need looking after. As a matter of fact, I was thinking – ’

‘You were thinking of Joe and Miriam!’ Jean exclaimed.

‘As a matter of fact, I was,’ Colin said. ‘Don’t they need a nurse quite badly?’

‘They did – though they may have found one by now,’ Jean said. ‘At any rate, you could ring up and ask. That might be doing a good turn to everybody.’

‘Wouldn’t that be nice for a change?’

‘It’s a new strain coming out in you. But tell me more about Fanny, Colin. What’s wrong with the engagement from her point of view? I thought she seemed quite pleased and excited when she told me about it.’

‘Intermittently, I expect, she is,’ he said. ‘But then she gets so wild with jealousy, she’s ready to hate the girl. By the way, we’re invited to cocktails on Saturday.’

‘To meet Laura?’

‘And Clare Forwood and Sir Peter Poulter.’

She gave him a startled look. He nodded. Jean frowned unhappily.

‘That does sound rather like jealousy or something,’ she said. ‘I mean, trying so hard to impress – though Clare Forwood, of course, is a very old friend and it’s quite natural to ask her in the circumstances.’

‘But you feel that laying on Sir Peter Poulter too is going a bit far?’

‘No, of course not. Not exactly. But …’

He patted her hand. ‘Fanny herself thinks so. She told me all about it.’

‘About being jealous too?’

‘In a way. If Fanny gives herself away unintentionally, she generally catches up on it in time to turn the lapse into charming candour. Only she wanted me to think that she was jealous of Basil, rather than of Kit. She feels that’s more normal.’

Jean looked at him seriously, questioningly, then reluctantly she smiled.

‘You
are
an awful cat, of course,’ she said.

‘It’s how I while away my idle life.’

They had reached their gate. With his hand upon it to push it open, Colin stood still. For a moment his eyes searched hers.

‘Jean,’ he said, ‘Jean darling, you do hate my idle life, don’t you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t start that now. Please.’

She walked quickly up the path ahead of him.

Their house, next door to the Lynams’, was not as old. Its Georgian brick looked almost modern beside the other. The spring sunshine, entering through tall sash windows, fell on white-painted paneling and lovingly polished mahogany. It was a sedate house that looked as if it had always been lived in calmly and with an attitude of reserve. It was without the strange shadows and general unexpectedness of the house next door. For all its sunniness, there was some severity about it. It demanded a certain standard of its inhabitants.

To Jean this was as it should be. She had something here to live up to, something that mere money, that terrible liability which kept her permanently in debt to life, could not supply. Here it was essential to have taste and a sense of fitness. Jean would never have felt at ease in a house that could tolerate dust in its corners and allow as much disorder to the people living in it as there was in its own arrangement of rooms and crooked passages, dark cupboards and uneven stairs.

Lunch was ready for her and Colin in the dining room, a light, cold lunch that came mostly out of tins. Jean had very little interest in food and to spend much money, time or thought upon it came high on her list of sins. But the chopped ham and salad was served on plates of old Worcester by a manservant in a white jacket, and when the baby in a perambulator in the garden set up a wail, it was the wife of the manservant who ran out from the kitchen to see what had disturbed her.

Not that Jean was by any means happy about being waited on by other people. If only she had not been rich, she could have done her own cooking and run out herself to comfort her baby. But to achieve that desirable state of affairs, she would have had to dismiss the Brodskys, who were refugees and elderly, and though not outstandingly efficient in their work, had always been very kind to her and Colin.

Colin chattered during lunch as if he had accepted without question Jean’s injunction that he should drop the subject that he had raised at the garden gate. But when coffee was brought, he returned to it, saying suddenly, after a short silence during which he had lit their cigarettes, ‘Be honest, Jean – you can’t bear it, can you?’

She hesitated, as if she were wondering whether or not to pretend that she did not know what he was talking about. Then she shrugged her shoulders.

‘I don’t know what to say when I’ve said so often – ’

‘Don’t worry about what you’ve said before,’ he said. ‘I want you to say what you really feel, for a change. Say something new. Because, you see, if you were to tell me that it makes you terribly unhappy to see me just sitting around, I think I’d … well, you know I’d do anything you really wanted me to, don’t you?’

She sighed deeply. ‘But there’s no need for you to work if you don’t want to, is there? We’ve been over it all so often and we’ve agreed – ’

‘But it’s just my not wanting to that you can’t bear,’ he said. ‘You try to, you try awfully hard. But you don’t really believe your own arguments. So let’s start from that point now. Tell me what you’d really like me to do, since you can’t stand my going on indefinitely being simply an unusually contented man.’

She frowned at the little grey heap of ash in the ashtray.

‘
Are
you contented?’ she asked.

‘Very,’ he answered.

‘In that case, why do you keep coming back to this? What is it that
you
really want? Is it that you half-wish I’d give you a push to make you do something?’

‘Perhaps,’ he said.

‘If it were … But that’s something you’ve got to decide for yourself. I can’t. I can’t possibly.’

‘Even though you’re a much stronger character than I am?’ His smile was sardonic. ‘Don’t you think that if you minded less about exerting power over me through your money, and told me simply what you think I ought to do, it might be better for us both?’

‘So you aren’t so very happy?’

‘I am, but you aren’t.’

They looked at one another frowningly. The expressions on both their faces might have been of a deep distrust. Then, at the same moment, they laughed.

Standing up, Colin let his hand fall on her short, curling hair.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘we both know I’m just a lazy devil with occasional flickers of conscience. But I love you – I love everything about you, including your blessed money, and I’m very happy – what more can a man say? But d’you know something? I might – I just might drive over to see Joe and Miriam this week.’

‘To see if they’ve got a job for Susan?’

‘Yes, that – and to see if Joe, who’s good at that kind of thing, could make any suggestions as to how I might at least look as if I were constructively employed, so that you’d have to think up fewer excuses for me.’

Jean’s fingers lightly touched his cheek.

‘You have your virtues, even as you are. I endure you better than you think. But if you do go to see them, mind you come back in time for Fanny’s party.’

She went to the door and out into the garden.

She went to take a look at the baby, now peacefully asleep under a frilly cot-cover. Yet she stayed there only for a moment. Going indoors again, she went upstairs to a small room, furnished with a desk, a chair, a bookcase and a filing cabinet. It was a cold-looking, stark room, meant more for meditation than for work, because, in spite of herself, Jean had not really a great deal of work to do.

Today some letters needed answering. She began on them, but her mind soon wandered and after a while she discovered that she hardly knew what she was writing. Discussions with Colin on the subject of his idle life always had the same effect on her. The trouble was that she really did not know what her true feelings on the subject were, or what Colin’s were either. Not that he was actually idle. He was usually as fully and zestfully occupied as any well-brought-up child. He looked after the garden, went bird watching, collected various kinds of insects, took excellent photographs and read a great deal. But no one paid him for the way that he spent his time. In fact, at thirty-three, he behaved like a man who had retired.

True, the retirement appeared to be a singularly happy one. Yet he was right when he insisted that Jean was unable to convince herself finally that there was nothing morally wrong in the situation. Vaguely, uncertainly, she attributed it all to the war and his wounds, which had been terrible. During the long months in hospital, she thought, the hospital in which they had first met and she, a young nurse, had had the care of him, his hold on life had been so precarious and so painful that to live at all might have come to seem an end in itself.

She often told herself that she had no real reasons for worry. Colin loved her and he loved their child, of those two things she was certain and that should have been enough. Her doubts, her severe mind told her, were merely conventional.

Once roused, however, they made her restless. Giving up the attempt to write letters, she went downstairs again and out into the garden, slipped through a gap in the hedge and looked in at the window of the Lynams’ sitting room.

She saw Fanny lying stretched out on the sofa. Her shoes were on the floor, her grey hair was tumbled over her forehead, Martin the cat was curled up on her stomach. The room was filled with a flickering light from the logs that were now alight on the hearth. It was a very peaceful scene, or it would have been, but for the look on Fanny’s face, as she stared at the photograph that she was holding in both hands.

Jean saw that look only for an instant, because as soon as Fanny saw her at the window, she smiled and beckoned her to come in, yet in that glimpse of her that Jean had had there had been something which suggested to her that Fanny had been considering the efficacy of sticking pins into the photograph.

As Jean came into the sitting room, Fanny sat up and holding out the photograph, said, ‘Is there something the matter with me, Jean, or
is
there something peculiar about that face?’

Jean looked at it carefully.

She had seen it before and had looked at it carefully enough then, because a newcomer in the rather intimate little community that had developed in the village during the last few years was naturally a matter of interest.