So Well Remembered (11 page)

Of the schools to which he wrote, all declared they had no
vacancies.
Whether they had received unsatisfactory reports from Miss Williams, or
whether the newspaper scandal had scared them off, was hard to determine;
they gave no such reasons, of course, but after the same kind of letter had
arrived from half a dozen headmistresses he felt there was not much use
continuing. Perhaps there were schools in France or Switzerland; he would
have to look the matter up. He did not tell Livia of his lack of success so
far, preferring her to think he had merely dropped the matter; which she did,
without much delay and with great satisfaction.

For it was very pleasant to be at Stoneclough as the seasons rounded and
another spring brought new green to the trees. After the battles and scandals
of the previous year, peace seemed to have descended on the house and its
occupants; even Sarah, shrill-voiced as she shared the domestic work with
Livia, nagged less if only for the prosaic reason that she was getting deaf
and could hear less. She too had made her truce, whether of God or of the
Devil; without giving up one jot of her religious scruples, which were of the
strictest kind, she nevertheless contrived to mate them with an old
conviction that a Channing could do no wrong. He could, and had done,
obviously; and yet, in another sense, it was not so. Surely that was no
harder to believe than some of the things she heard, and with relish, from
her favourite pulpit every Sunday? She was a devout attender at one of the
Browdley Methodist chapels, where, as deafness slowly gained on
unobtrusiveness over a period of years, she had worked her way up to the
front pew immediately beneath the preacher’s oratory. She liked the preacher
in a grim, prim way—the same way that she liked Mr. Felsby. She had
never liked Emily, or Miss Fortescue, or Watson, or anyone at Stoneclough who
was not a Channing. And she only half-liked Livia, who was only half a
Channing. Livia wrangled with her, tolerated her, and thought her at times
insufferable—which she was. She was also stupid, hard- working, not
very clean, and intensely loyal.

Whereas Watson was not so loyal, rather lazy, and occasionally drunk. But
he had a knack with plants and machines, and an affection for the place he
worked at rather than for the people he worked for. He liked his employer
well enough, did not much care for Livia, whom he thought arrogant, and hated
Sarah, who had once floored him with a saucepan when he came into her kitchen
tipsy.

And yet, out of these strains and stresses, a queer equilibrium emerged
—a tideless sea in which all the storms were in teacups. It was
Browdley, that almost foreign land five miles away, where rancours increased
as trade worsened and mill after mill closed down. Even Mr. Felsby was
rumoured to be losing a small part of his fortune; one could not be sure,
however, since he forbore to come up the hill and grumble about it. And Dr.
Whiteside, his closest friend, gradually absented himself also, though he was
cordial enough with Livia when they met, as they sometimes did, in the
streets of the town.

Livia shopped, kept house, and helped with the cooking; while Martin
(since he may as well be called that) spent hours in the garden, turning
waste land into vegetable patches, thinning trees, repairing terraces and
fences. There was much to be done after so many years of Watson’s neglect and
Emily’s indifference.

One day he told her she was to go to a school in Switzerland, and that she
would like it very much because Geneva was a very beautiful city. Livia was
surprised and disappointed; she had hoped that the whole idea of school might
be dropped, but of course it was quite exciting to be going abroad for the
first time, and doubtless a Swiss school would be nothing like Cheldean. So
there followed a great scurry of preparation—travel tickets had to be
obtained, clothes to be bought, and the old Cheldean trunk taken down from
the attic over the stables. Martin, who had visited Geneva in his youth, told
her what she would see and what she must on no account miss, and that part of
the value of being at a foreign school was merely to be living in a foreign
country.

Livia was to leave by a night train on the Wednesday after Easter week.
During the afternoon she had some last-minute shopping in Browdley, and
returned towards dusk in the rather shabby old car that Martin had picked up
at a bargain price and that only Watson’s constant attention kept in going
order. The trunk was in the hall, roped and labelled; it was understood that
there would be early dinner while Watson loaded up the car for the drive to
the station. Livia, excited in a way she could not exactly diagnose, walked
into the drawing-room where she found Martin standing in front of the
fireplace reading the paper. There was nothing odd in that, but when he put
the paper aside to talk to her, Livia was transfixed by the sight of tears in
his eyes.

The conclusion she reached was inescapable.

“Oh, Martin, Martin—what’s the matter? If you don’t want me to go, I
won’t. I don’t really care about Geneva or Switzerland or any place except
here! I’d RATHER stay with you, Martin—”

“Come here,” he interrupted. And then he stepped towards the girl and took
her arm with a curious nervous pressure. “It isn’t THAT…”

“Martin—what’s happened?”

He picked up the paper, folded it to a certain place, and handed it to
her. But she did not look at it; she kept staring at him till he had to say:
“I’m afraid it’s bad news… Or would you rather have me tell you?”

She looked at the paper then. It was a small paragraph on an inside page,
reporting that Mrs. John Channing had been killed instantly when the car she
was driving overturned on the road between Chartres and Orleans, and that a
Mr. Standon, who was a passenger, had been severely injured. The reading
public was further reminded that Mrs. John Channing was the wife of the same
John Channing who, etc. etc.

Livia did not speak. She read the paragraph over and over, trying to grasp
not only what it meant, but what it signified in her own life; and then,
because of the tears in Martin’s eyes, she began to weep herself. “Oh,
mother… MOTHER…” she sobbed. But even while she did so a thought came to
her in such a guise that she felt dreadful for having the kind of mind in
which it could even exist—the thought that in his distress, which was
also hers, Martin might now want her to stay at Stoneclough for company’s
sake. Yet how could one help one’s thoughts, whatever they were? And she WAS
distressed; her tears, imitative at first, were perfectly genuine as they
proceeded. But she knew now, for certain, how much she wanted not to leave
Stoneclough, and that all the excitement of packing to go abroad would be
nothing to the quiet relief, even the sad relief, of unpacking.

But it was not to be. As soon as she hinted at it, he said no; if the news
had upset her very much she could postpone departure for a day or two, but
that was all; and really, he thought it best for her to go; the change of
scene and new companions would prove a great help, he assured her.

“And it wouldn’t help YOU, Martin, if I stayed?”

He half smiled. “That’s very kind of you, my dear, but I really don’t
think it would.”

After that she was proud enough to leave that night, as had been planned,
and not accept the short delay that was so pitiable a substitute for what she
had hoped.

But she was not long away from Stoneclough. The time was April, 1914; she
had one term at the Geneva school, then returned to England for the summer
holidays just before war broke out. And when the next term began, in
September, the Germans were on the Marne and it was thought inadvisable to
send English girls across France, even to the best Swiss
finishing-schools.

One day, to escape a heavy shower, Livia entered the
Browdley Public
Library, and by sheer chance as she wandered in and out of the alcoves, came
upon a section dealing with law cases and jurisprudence; one of the books,
conspicuous by its worn condition, proved to be a verbatim report of the
Channing case. The name was a shock that set her heart beating, but a greater
one came when she opened the book and found, against the title-page, a
photograph of her father as he had been at the time of the trial all those
years before. So young, so handsome, so dashing; she could hardly believe it
was the same man… and against the photograph, scrawled in pencil, was a
word unknown to her, but which she guessed to be foul. It brought a flush to
her face that she thought everyone in the library must notice, but no one
did, and with a curious hypnotized fascination she took the book to a
secluded table and began to read carefully. Later, when she had to leave, she
hid it behind some other books, so that nobody should borrow it before she
continued reading the next day. Not being a library member she could not
borrow it herself, nor did she want to order a copy from a bookseller. But
every afternoon for a week she spent an hour or two in the library alcove,
trying to understand the crime that her father had committed. And for the
most part she was mystified. It was all to do with another world—a
world of complicated details and strange jargon—false estimates of
reserves, duplicated stock certificates, and so on. What puzzled her was the
intention behind it all, and to this she found no positive clue until she
came to the defending counsel’s speech, in which her father was portrayed as
a brilliant visionary who had wished to amalgamate a large group of cotton
mills with a view to preventing their eventual bankruptcies as separate
competitors. But then, when she came to the judge’s summing-up, the whole
picture was different—that of an ambitious, unscrupulous adventurer,
greedy for power, employing deliberate deceit to tempt unwary investors…
The two pictures made the problem harder than ever, the more so as neither
bore the slightest resemblance to the man she herself knew. She then re-read
the examinations and cross-examinations, seeking to disentangle some
corroboration of one or other viewpoint out of the mass of opposite and
bewildering evidence. The main thing she gathered was that her father had
once been in a position to deal with vast sums of money, whereas now he could
hardly afford the extra hundred pounds by which the taxes on Stoneclough had
lately been increased.

Some day, she thought, he would tell her all about it; and then he would
be surprised to find out how much she knew already. But what DID she know?
The chief clue was missing… WHY had he done whatever it was that he had
done? Not only why had he defrauded people, for that question had already
been given two conflicting answers, but why had he been either the adventurer
greedy for power, or the visionary with dreams of reorganizing an industry?
Why? For it had been stated over and over again during the trial, as if it
were against him, that the Channing Mill itself was sound until his own
course of action ruined it; everything would have been all right, therefore,
if he had let things alone. Only he hadn’t let things alone.

And then, too, she realized with a sense of discovery, though it was
obvious by simple arithmetic, that he had spent many years in the industrial
and financial world before the crash. His career was referred to at the trial
as having been an ‘honourable’ one; distinguished connections were cited with
a number of companies besides his own. Why, then, had he suddenly broken
whatever were the rules of the game?

There was yet a third character-reading, scattered throughout the book in
sundry pencilled remarks. “Liar”, “Thief”, “Swindler”, were among the mildest
of them; but on the last page was a clue, if not to her father’s motives, at
any rate to his anonymous accuser’s. For in the margin alongside the judge’s
pronouncement of sentence was the scribbled comment: “And not half what the
—deserved for ruining me and hundreds more.”

Long after she had finished the book and had learned all she could from it
she found that even passing the library gave her an itch of curiosity—
was it still being read, was some other unknown borrower adding new pencilled
insults to the printed lines? She would sometimes dash into the building just
to see, and one day she reflected how simple it would be to put the book
under her coat and take it away as she walked out. But she could not make up
her mind to do this. It was no question of the morals of stealing, or of risk
in being discovered, but rather of her personal attitude towards Browdley: to
remove the book would somehow be accepting defeat, whereas to leave it was
—if not victory—at least a challenge and a defiance. So she left
it, and the library took on a curious significance in her mind: the place
where the book was, and where people went who hated Martin.

He never spoke to her about the past, or gave her any
opening to ask him
direct questions about it; but sometimes, apropos of other things, he made
remarks that connected themselves with it in her mind—remarks that did
not so much reveal the light as illumine the darkness. Once he said: “The
hardest thing in the world is to understand how you were once interested in
something that no longer interests you at all.” And another time, standing
with her in the garden on one of those rare clear days when all Browdley
could be seen in the distance, he said: “The factories look big, don’t they?
They dominate the town like the cathedrals at Cologne or Amiens… perhaps
they ARE cathedrals, in a way, if enough people believe in them.” And then he
mentioned a lecture by a young fellow named Boswell who was trying to get on
the Browdley Council—a lecture Richard Felsby had told him about in
great indignation because it had blamed the Channing and Felsby families for
much that was wrong about the state of Browdley. “There’s some truth in it,
though. Whenever I think of those rows and rows of drab streets huddling
under the cathedrals I have the feeling that if somebody were to send me to
jail for THAT, I’d consider it a just sentence… We’re all guilty, Livia, of
everything that happens. Read the papers and see how.” (It was the autumn of
1917, the blackest time of the war.) “And if guilt had to be paid for by
punishment, then the earth would be one vast prison. Perhaps that’s what it
is.”