Give Us This Day (70 page)

The signposts of change were there for all to see. Nicely-brought-up girls had taken to marching about the streets with banners. Divorces in high places no longer proscribed the departure of parties concerned to Boulogne. And half the families she knew had exchanged carriage and pair for a variant of George’s nine-day-wonder that had once been confined to the stable block but had now, it appeared, spawned a thousand and one children, encouraging folk to swarm here, there, and everywhere like itinerant salesmen. There was no sense, so far as she could see, in any of it.

And then, as if to confirm her worst fears on this particular issue, they came to her with news that Stella’s boy, Martin, had been crushed to death by one of these monsters. Both crushed and burned she understood, although she was at pains not to enquire into the details, and it was clear then that the family was undergoing a series of plagues, like the affliction visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus, and that this was a hint that even a dynasty as firmly-based as hers was mortal and that the troubles besetting them were designed, perhaps, to chasten her pride.

She even took to attending church more regularly, and tried hard to persuade Adam to do the same. In this she failed, but having, as it were, renewed her nodding acquaintance with God, she set herself to relearn the habit of prayer as a possible means of warding off further disasters.

It was not easy after all this time, a lifetime of worshipping Adam rather than the nightshirted Jehovah of her girlhood. He seemed so remote and, just lately, so implacable, and phrases to address Him were hard to find if one was looking for anything more than the public approach set out in the Book of Common Prayer. She would have liked to have consulted Adam on her route (after all, he was recognised as Britain’s most famous router) but she knew, instinctively, that he could not help her much as regards the best way to propitiate the Almighty. He had never been a churchgoer, and she suspected that he had no real belief in survival after death, or, for that matter, in the existence of a divine plan. Even this, contemplated in the abstract, was strange, for he was certainly what she thought of as a good man, and a good Christian, too. Always, ever since the day she had met him up on that moor, he had concerned himself with the troubles and deprivations of the poor, as recommended so insistently in the gospels, but that did not seem to help. What she needed now was a guide along once familiar roads where, unfortunately, the Swann-on-Wheels insignia counted for little.

She could not bring herself to consult the rector, who occasionally came to dinner at Tryst. She had always thought of him and his predecessors as semidependants and social inferiors, men who would look to her and hers for help in their routine labours about the parish. What she required, she felt, was an ecclesiastical equivalent of Adam, say an archbishop or, at least, a bishop, and the bishop of her diocese had never been to dinner. Now that she came to think about it, he had not even attended one of her at homes, croquet parties, or garden fêtes.

There seemed no reason, however, why this should not be remedied, and she broached the subject to Adam when she was drawing up an invitation list for a dinner party she was planning for her birthday. His response was irreverent. All he said was, “Why the bishop? What’s he done to deserve it? I can’t ever recall having set eyes on the chap, though from all I hear he’ll probably take you up on the invitation. He’s a rare gad-about, I’m told, and a good judge of wine.” And then, with a twinkle, “If he accepts, let me know well in advance. I’ll look out something special for him, for I wouldn’t like him to spread it around that our cellar wasn’t one of the best in the diocese.”

But then, before she could think of a way of coaxing a qualified spiritual comforter into the house, disturbing hints reached her that Stella was making very heavy weather of things and behaving very oddly on that farm of hers a mile up the river. She took it for granted that Stella’s eccentricities could be attributed to the menopause and not, as Debbie was inclined to think, delayed shock regarding poor Martin’s death in the north, and there were grounds for this supposition. From all she knew of her daughter, particularly since she had shaken loose of that scoundrel she had married in such a hurry, Stella was not a person to let a misfortune like this disturb the rhythm of her life for long. What temperament she had possessed as a girl she had shed, like her social background, the minute she married that lumping farmer’s son, Denzil Fawcett. Since then, somewhat to Henrietta’s dismay, she had identified herself with the yeoman class and was now, Henrietta would have said, the least imaginative of all the Swanns and as practical as, say, George or Edward. On Henrietta’s occasional visits to Dewponds, she had seen Stella as the undisputed mistress of the place, with a sharp tongue for everyone, male or female, who did not measure up to her standards of efficiency. But nobody there, least of all Denzil, would regard this as unnatural. Denzil had never recovered from the shock of having acquired her as a wife, where the Swann bossiness had clearly asserted itself as soon as Stella had learned the rudiments of husbandry. For more than a quarter of a century now Stella’s word had been Holy Writ on Fawcett acres, and it was therefore disquieting to hear that her recent behaviour was the subject of gossip among local chaw-bacons and Twyforde villagers. For it was through these freely available sources that Henrietta learned more of what was happening at Dewponds than anyone suspected. Stella had, it seemed, abdicated authority over the staff and spoke very little, even to Denzil or Robert. In the daytime, Henrietta learned, she kept to her room or chimney corner, leaving the preparation of meals to a slut of a girl she employed, but by night, or so it was rumoured, she more than made up for her withdrawal. Sometimes as many as five times between lock-up and dawn she made her rounds of the homestead and farm buildings, obsessed by the fear of a second disastrous fire at Dewponds, and here again Henrietta would have liked very much to have consulted Adam on what was best for the girl. She was restrained, however, by Adam’s own preoccupation of late, and this was yet another source of disquiet, causing her to wonder if his age was not beginning to tell on him at last, despite his apparent fitness for a man about to enter his eighty-fifth year.

He gave no outward sign of senility and his step, notwithstanding an artificial leg, was as brisk as a boy’s. His eyes were clear, too, clear enough to read small print without spectacles, and his last spell of illness was so long ago that she had forgotten its nature. And yet, when she thought hard about it, there
was
something different about him, a hint or two, no more than that, of his daughter’s opting-out of affairs other than those relayed to him second-hand in his newspapers and journals. He enjoyed his solitary walks about the estate and his contemplation of the pictures, furniture, and valuable china he had assembled over the years. He liked his books, too, and whenever the weather was bad could always be found in the library, absorbed in one or other of the hundreds of leather-bound tomes they had inherited from the previous tenants of the house. Meantime she had no complaint at all regarding his temper. He was invariably kind and soft-spoken in his dealings with her, yet she could not help but feel, since about the time their recent spate of troubles had begun, that she had lost touch with him, that they had moved appreciably further apart than the era when he had been disposed to demonstrate his approval of her in a very practical way.

It occurred to her more than once when she was lying beside him in the great Conyer bed (her recent anxieties had revived her old trouble of insomnia) that here, possibly, was a reason for his new-found stillness. Perhaps a man’s need of a mate, and a good deal of his appreciation of life, disappeared when his senses were no longer capable of being stirred by a woman, and this was more likely to be true in the case of a man with a mind as well-stocked as his, for it might well enable him to find all the stimulus he needed in the contemplation of abstracts that had never interested her very much. But she could do no more than guess at something as complex as this and even the bishop, if she finally lured him to Tryst, could hardly be consulted on a subject so personal and delicate.

Thoughts such as these, deeply nostalgic and tinged with sadness, were drifting across her mind like cloud wisps in the small hours of the first day of spring, when the wind, gusting in from the southeast and circling the wooded spur behind the house, had banished all prospect of sleep and given her a couple of hours to pass before she could slip from the room and brew herself an early dish of tea in the kitchen. He had been reading until very late and had not come to bed until long after she had retired, but he was sleeping soundly now, and in the first glimmer of dawn she turned and looked at him, wondering how a man with so much behind him, and so brief a span ahead, could relax so completely.

He did not look more than about seventy, with his clear skin and firm, slightly aquiline features. His hair, although snow white now, had never receded and his teeth, surprisingly, were as preserved as those of a man in his thirties. She thought, pettishly, It’s not fair… the way some men stop themselves ageing, just as i
f they were empowered to slam the door on time… No woman can do that, or not once she has lost her shape child-bearing and is running to fat, and her hair has thinned and turned grey… But then, chiding herself for taking advantage of his repose t
o find fault with him, she forced herself to remember the good times she had had with him right here, in this vast bed, the bed that he always declared had been used as a mating couch for that old pirate Conyer and his haughty-looking wife, for whom he had named this house more than three centuries ago. And they had been good, too, those gay, rollicking hours when she was in her early twenties and he was in his mid-thirties, and but recently embarked upon his glorious adventure.

She had always thought of this room and particularly of this bed as a refuge from the family and the external pressures of his life and hers, and in those days he had taken such a delight in her and all she had to offer, which was really no more than he had taught when he had married an eighteen-year-old goose as green as grass, totally ignorant of what men wanted most from a wife. And remembering this she took heart a little, reminding herself of the astonishing durability of his satisfaction in her, for he had never once wandered off in search of fresh pasture. There had always been the network to hold him and after the network her own supple body, and the two had sufficed to keep him to her and hers over a span of more than fifty years.

She supposed she could give herself some credit for that and, indeed, for surviving this long as his partner. Almost all the women she had known in her youth and middle-age were dead or widowed, and here they were, in comparatively good health, getting on for fifty-four years after their first encounter on a heath a few miles north of her father’s house…

She was wide awake now and could see through the chink in the curtains that it was all but light outside. There was no prospect of dropping off again, so she eased herself cautiously from bed and slipped into her favourite bedgown, a silk one emblazoned with gold and silver dragons that he had bought for her from a tea importer years ago.

She would try her luck at tip-toeing downstairs and making that much-needed dish of tea without disturbing him testing each old floorboard before putting weight on it. She got as far as the door before he stirred, heaving himself over and shouldering her share of the bedclothes but not waking, or not so far as she could determine, for his breathing at once became regular again. She was able to lift the latch and slip into the corridor, leaving the door ajar rather than risk another rattle.

It was much lighter in the kitchen, with its uncurtained east-facing window, and it took her no more than a minute to bring the water in the iron kettle to the boil and lay herself a tray. The big, solemnly-ticking clock told her it was coming up to six and in the brief interval she allowed for the tea to brew she stirred up the fire, for the kitchen, opening directly on to the stableyard, was full of draughts. It was then, in the act of stabbing at the smouldering log with a poker, that she heard the step outside and at once, without a split second’s pause for rationalisation, she was gripped by panic.

It was not unreasoning panic either. Her memory, travelling backwards at the speed of light, reminded her of an almost identical situation, a little tableau set out in this same high-ceilinged room at approximately the same hour of day, in which there were two principals; herself and Denzil Fawcett from Dewponds.

He was young Denzil then, a lad of around twenty, who had walked here through wind and rain with news that he had come upon her daughter Stella drenched through and hysterical after her mad flight from the Moncton-Prices over the county border. Now she knew, with horrid certainty, that the scrape on the gravel outside was a variant of those same circumstances, betokening yet another period of wretchedness.

She was so sure of this that certainty robbed her of any surprise she might have experienced when she crossed the room, drew the bolt, and threw open the door. It was not Denzil who was climbing the short flight of steps from the yard, however, but Denzil’s son, Robert, the eldest of her many grandchildren.

She said, without preamble, “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Badly wrong! Come in and speak quietly. The maids will be up and about in less than an hour.”

He came in, leaving a trail of mud on the slated floor, saying, “I wouldn’t have said anything to anyone but you or Grandpa… I would have made some excuse. But seeing you’re up and about…” And then, looking wildly distracted, he broke off.

“What is it, Robert? What’s happened?”

“It’s mother. She’s wandered off again. God knows where this time, for father’s no idea how long she’s been gone. We’ve searched the buildings and the fields on both sides of the river, but there’s no sign, or wasn’t when I left.”