Eustace and Hilda (56 page)

“I wish you wouldn't say those things about Dick,” said his mother.

“It was only in fun.”

“I know, but strangers mightn't understand.”

“You mean, they might understand.”

“Now, now,” said Sir John. “But how did Miss Cherrington shape?”

“I take it she played with Dick?” put in Lady Staveley.

“Well, my dear, who else could she have played with?”

“She played most valiantly,” said Anne. “I won't say she played gracefully, or with style, or that Papa would have approved of the way she hit the ball. But she played as hard as she could all the time.”

“I thought she would.” Sir John looked pleased. “But didn't Dick show her how to hold her hand?” he asked indignantly.

“Yes, he did, Papa, more than once; but strange as it may seem to you, it isn't always easy to remember the first time you play. She knocked her hands about a good deal, I'm afraid, but she didn't complain.”

“She's used to rough work, I expect,” said Lady Staveley.

“Poor girl, I hope you gave her some stuff to put on her hands. Powdered alum's the best. She ought to practise a bit this morning, gently I mean, just to harden them up and take the stiffness off.”

“I'm sure she won't want to do anything of the kind, Papa. You really have the most surprising ideas of what people will want to do. I doubt if she'll ever look at a billiard-table again.”

Lady Staveley's face brightened a little.

“You don't think she really enjoyed it?”

“I wouldn't say that,” said Anne. “In fact, I think she enjoyed it more than any of us. But I don't imagine she wants to do it all the time.”

“Monica could take her place this evening—that is, if Miss Cherrington plays bridge,” said Sir John thoughtfully. “Where is Monica, by the way? She always comes down so early.”

“She's got a bit of a headache and is having breakfast in bed.”

“Monica? A headache?”

“Well, Papa, we all have headaches sometimes.”

“She didn't have one last night.”

“How do you know? She may have been suffering agonies. I expect you were too busy playing bridge to notice.”

“I thought she looked a little tired,” said Lady Staveley.

“I never heard of Monica being tired,” said Sir John with an aggrieved air. “Perhaps Cherrington plays bridge? Though he doesn't look as if he would.... And, of course, Antony doesn't. He would have to stop talking.”

“We'll arrange a rubber for you somehow, won't we, Mama?” said Anne soothingly.

“Meanwhile, we've got to get through the day,” Sir John said, unappeased. “I suppose the Cherringtons will go to church? Or are they heathens?”

“Mr. Cherrington said he would like to walk along the sands to see the places where he and his sister used to play when they were children. He was so funny about it, he seemed to think it might be against the rules,” said Anne, smiling at the remembrance.

“Odd thing to want to do,” said Sir John.

Lady Staveley looked up.

“No, my dear, very natural. And, of course, he'd want his sister to go with him. They could do that in the afternoon. Perhaps they'd like to renew their recollections of the town and have tea there—we could send the car in to fetch them.”

Sir John's eyes looked very blue under his sandy, wiry eyebrows.

“Mustn't seem as if we wanted to get rid of 'em. Besides, we don't know what plans Dick may have.”

“No, we don't,” said Lady Staveley thoughtfully.

“Dick said something about asking them to stay till Tuesday,” Anne remarked.

“What, the whole boiling?” cried Sir John, aghast.

“No, Mr. Cherrington and his sister.”

“What on earth should we do with them?”

“People don't always want things done to them, Papa.”

“We can ask them, of course, if Dick wishes it,” said Lady Staveley. “But I imagine that Miss Cherrington will have to return to her duties.”

“Pity for a pretty girl like that to be a hospital nurse,” said Sir John.

“Oh, they're often pretty,” said Lady Staveley. “Don't tell me you haven't noticed that.”

“She isn't a hospital nurse,” said Anne. “She's secretary to a Children's Clinic. There's a lot of difference.”

“I believe Anne likes the girl,” said Sir John.

“I don't understand her,” said Anne. “She's like no one I've ever met—I don't mean in the social sense—in any sense. But I own I am intrigued by her. I don't think she cares much about people, though.”

“What makes you think that?” Lady Staveley asked. “She's rather farouche, of course, and a little, well, ungracious sometimes in her manner.”

“That's partly shyness, Mama, and she may not approve of the way we live. But I don't think she realises people much—I don't think she knows what's going on round her.”

“Well, what is going on round her?” demanded Sir John, his eyebrows betraying some impatience with Anne's efforts to analyse Hilda's character.

“Nothing, we hope, except the usual dull routine of an Anchorstone Saturday to Monday,” said Lady Staveley. “Ah, here's Victor.”

Partly in order not to be late, partly in order to see Anchorstone Hall in the morning freshness that was breathing through his window, partly in the hope of stealing a march on the others, for he shrank from the thought of a crowded breakfast-table, Eustace hurried over his dressing. But his main object was to see Hilda and find out about the state of her hands before she got barricaded from him by the rest of the party. He was so used to talking to her alone that in the presence of other people he found nothing to say to her, and became painfully shy.

Outside in the quadrangle, under the blue clock which said twenty to nine, Eustace considered what would be the best moment to run the gauntlet of ladies returning from their baths and ladies' maids (of whom he envisaged a great number) discreetly hurrying to and fro—at some point in which Hilda was. A cook in a white hat emerged from a door on the left of the Banqueting Hall, looked round, and retreated. Eustace sighed. There was so much to absorb, to get used to. Perhaps it would be best to eat first and act afterwards. He went towards the Banqueting Hall. Perhaps he would find Hilda there.

But she wasn't. He had the sunny room to himself, and came out no nearer to the solution of his problem. Five minutes to nine seemed a particularly unpromising moment to go in search of Hilda —the very moment at which all bedroom doors would be flying open to discharge their occupants.

‘Good-morning, Mr. Cherrington. Can I help you? You look rather lost.'

‘Oh, I was just looking for my sister Hilda, she's somewhere along here, you know.'

‘Well, don't go in there, that's Lady Staveley's bath-room.'

‘What about this one?'

‘That's my room, if you don't mind.'

‘Oh, I'm so sorry, I'll try a little farther along. It is rather confusing, isn't it, all these doors?'

‘I suppose it must be, the first time you come.... No, that's no good, that's a W.C.'

Eustace's imaginary interlocutor began to laugh, not very pleasantly.

‘Oh dear, what a lot of mistakes I make.'

‘Yes, you haven't been very lucky so far, have you? Try the passage on the right.'

If only Antony had been awake when he came down! But he was asleep in a great tornado of bed-clothes, beside his untasted tea, and Eustace hadn't the heart to wake him.

The agitation of his thoughts had taken his steps through the gate in the railing and into the garden. He turned to the right, away from the Banqueting Hall. This was the new part, despised by Antony. What rows of windows! Hilda must be behind one of them. If only he could transfer a thought to her, a hint that she should hang a towel out, as had once been done at Glamis Castle. But that wouldn't make it much easier, inside, to find which room the towel belonged to. Eustace wondered if Anchorstone Hall was haunted, and if so, by what sort of ghost. Dick would certainly say it was, and invent a ghost on the spur of the moment. One couldn't associate him with a ghost, he was too corporeal. Ghostly and bodily. Perhaps more easily with a devil?

Eustace followed the path to the right under some chestnuts. The path was not much used: it was earthy and dank; this was not the show side of the house, perhaps the chestnuts had been planted to hide it. Here the screen stopped; here the new part ended in a plain Georgian front which was perhaps the library. It was a relief, after the self-conscious Elizabethanism of the Victorian wing. Now came a bridge over the stream that fed the moat. The rivulet wandered away rather charmingly through banks of azaleas, as though it had finished its military service and returned to civil life.

A tubby boat of nondescript build, with the paint peeling off, was moored to the bank. Inside lay a paddle, and Eustace was tempted to embark and drift downstream on the bright, shallow water through the azaleas, until he came out into the open sea. A line from Emily Brontë slid into his mind: “Eternally, entirely free.” How soothing to be borne away, with no volition of his own, past gardens with trim lawns and brick embankments, past backyards with washing hanging from the line, through cornfields and allotments, under elders and alders—a landscape that alternated perpetually between the inhabited and the uninhabited, the desert and the sown. Now the stream is going faster; ahead, look, it divides—what is that noise, that deep, grinding noise? It must be a mill, a water-mill, and he hadn't seen the danger in time; he was heading straight for the grim stone building, stretched across the stream, blank and windowless above, but below pierced with black, roundheaded holes where the mill-wheels turned. The boat would not answer to the paddle; it swung sideways and hastened to its doom. And suddenly Hilda was with him in the boat: they were together, like Tom and Maggie Tulliver in
The Mill on the Floss
.

Eustace looked again at the boat and laughed to think of the melodramatic end he had imagined for his voyage. The little craft renewed its invitation: he stepped down the bank and found that it was chained to a stake, and padlocked. Never mind, he would ask Dick for the key.

Crossing a bridge, he found himself in line with the front of the house, the famous front that was illustrated in railway carriages and books on house architecture. He walked out into the park to have a good view.

It was early Jacobean, he supposed, and rather like the front of a college, with the tower over the gateway and the wings flanking it. Flints were embedded in the grey stone, dark, sparkling points in the ashen-coloured wall. No trouble here to identify his bedroom: his window was on the left of the oriel window, which was Antony's. Mentally he marked it with a cross. Yes, Stephen, that is my window, the window of the room I sleep in when I'm staying at Anchorstone Hall. How patiently the centuries had waited for his coming! They were still alive, imprisoned in that proud building. Uplifted, he stared at the mass of time-resisting masonry; and the outline of the space of which it robbed the sky was becoming printed on his mind when he was gradually aware of another shadow in the background. Around, above, beyond the silhouette of Anchorstone Hall, dwarfing that nice little place, towered the tremendous walls of Whaplode.

Eustace crossed the bridge over the moat and received a salute from the janitor in his top hat. Returning the salute, he followed the path under the windows. They came down low enough for him to see in. There, on an indoor ledge, were the helmets Antony had spoken of: three of them, one lying on its side; they looked forgotten and at once romantic and slightly ridiculous, with their air of dusty defiance, of issuing a challenge which had expired centuries ago, and which no one, not even a housemaid, took up.

Eustace turned the corner, leaving the stream, no longer canalised for defence, to throw a wide, shining crescent of water, almost a lake, between the garden and the park. Grey stone gave place to red; the path dipped; he was below the windows of the Banqueting Hall, too far below, he was glad to think, to be visible to the breakfasters. Towards the end of the wide lawn a wooden bridge with spokes, half Chippendale, half Chinese, led to an opening which must be the flower-garden, for through the gap came a burst of brightness and flashes of white and red. Declining its invitation, Eustace went straight on and suddenly found himself standing on the edge of a little ruin. From the uncut grass, now nearly grown to hay, rose here a pillar, there a fragment of wall. Much was upright, but more was lying flat; some of the stones were quite embedded in the grass, which flowed round and over them like water. That long stone with a cross on it might have been a coffin lid; the broken octagon, with a criss-cross moulding much weathered, standing on a pedestal, must have been a font. On one side the ruins were bounded by the wall of the Banqueting Hall; clinging to its pinkish face were fragments of tracery, bosses, corbels, capitals; some had caught the rain and were crusted with moss; here a door seemed to have been filled in, there a window. Eustace tried to see the logical connection of these remnants, and make a mental reconstruction of the wall as it must once have looked; but the clues were all at different levels; the door was half-way up the wall, the window disappeared into the ground: nothing fitted. Perhaps there had been a crypt.

“Taking a look round?” said a voice behind him.

Eustace turned with a start. Dick Staveley was standing there; he was leaning on the font, with his arms crossed.

“I'm afraid I was,” said Eustace, always apt to apologise for any activity, however blameless. “I was trying to see how all that tracery fitted in. This was a chapel, I suppose?”

“You're right; lots of little Staveleys have been baptised in this font,” Dick said. “But at the time of the Reformation the Staveley of the day became such an ardent Protestant that he pulled the chapel down and used the stones for building purposes.”