South Riding (9 page)

“I came to meet you.”

“Who’d been treating you?”

“I met a man . . .”

“Good thing it wasn’t a woman.”

“Have they . . .? Did they . . .?”

“They didn’t operate, if that’s what you mean. Small thanks to you. It’s colic and a chill. They’re keeping her in hospital under observation. Why couldn’t you have been about to fetch doctor? You take good care never to be where there’s work going. . . .”

Lydia, having put the children to bed, sat on the step of the coach awaiting her parents.

She had read till it was too dark to see, even by straining her eyes. The evening drained the fields of all their colour, leaving hedges and skyline, the broken edge of the cliff, the faint horizon of the quiet sea still visible, warm lead-colour against the liquid silver of the sky. The moon had risen, but in the north hung tattered streamers of a fading sunset. Bats flitted.

“Flying between the cold moon and the earth,” thought Lydia.

The loud speaker still crooned lazily—a dance tune.

“Set your heart at rest:

The fairy land buys not the child of me.”

Lydia’s heart was at rest. Beyond the squalor and fear lay loveliness and order.

She felt good and kind and loving.

She saw her father and mother, two dark clumsy figures stumbling along the path. She ran to meet them.

Mrs. Holly told her that Gertie wasn’t going to die.

It was all right then. The promise of the afternoon was crowned with relief.

“You ought not to be up. It’s past ten,” scolded Mrs. Holly.

“I got the kettle boiling. I thought you could do with a cup of tea.”

“Aye, I could then.”

It was dark in the coach. Lydia lit a candle, shading it with a propped newspaper from the sleeping Lennie. She cut bread and brewed tea while her mother drew her shoes from her burning feet and loosened her corsets.

“Eh, I’m tired,” she groaned, but smiled up at her daughter.

Lydia would have died for her.

Mr. Holly, swinging from the depths of remorse to the heights of jubilation, washed away the sporific effects of beer with Lydia’s strong sweet tea. Gertie was all right. He was all right. The day had been all right. He was a fine fellow. He shared his daughter’s rapture.

Looking round for some means of expressing the energy and delight surging within him, his eye fell on his wife seated in candle light on the side of their bunk, bare footed, the cup in her hand, her heavy body relaxed, her brown hair round her shoulders.

“Go to bed, Lydia,” said Mr. Holly.

Lydia crept quietly through to her younger sisters in the other room.

Mr. Holly blew out the candle.

T
HE
F
OLLOWING
evening the light waned quickly; a chill rain blew across the South Riding, and Alderman Mrs. Beddows sat warming her knees over her drawing-room fire. Her skirt was pulled high, exposing her taut rounded calves and well-turned ankles. She was proud of her legs. For a woman of over seventy they did her credit; but it was to save her skirt from scorching that she lifted it. Chloe might send her dress-lengths of brocade and marocain and dark luscious velvets from Paris, and Mrs. Beddows had by nature a taste for lavish generosity, but she had learned parsimony and forethought in a hard school.

Carne, drinking whisky and soda in the big arm-chair, sat enjoying both warmth and Mrs. Beddows.

She was his friend. To her alone had he ever been able to speak freely about his wife and daughter. She had stood by him during the terrible days when he returned from France to find Muriel unable to recognise him. It was to her hospitable house that he sent Midge whenever her absence from Maythorpe seemed desirable. It was because of Midge that he was here now. The child had been spending the afternoon with Willy Beddows’ children, and Willy, a widower, lived with his father and mother. Carne had come to fetch his daughter on his way from Kingsport market. He found Mrs. Beddows by the fire.

“I’ve been at York at a Rescue and Preventive Meeting,” she said, explaining the fire. “After wrestling all day with fallen girls and upstanding bishops I feel I need my bit of comfort.”

“How did you get on?”

“Not so long-winded as usual, but I feel I’ve soiled my ticket. I said to the secretary, ‘I want to catch the four o’clock train if I can, and I’d give a pound note to the collection if only they’d cut it short a bit.’ And would you believe it, that wretch of a man went and told the bishop, and after he’d been speaking about ten minutes, he said: ‘Well, there is much more that I could tell you of this good work, but one lady of our committee has said that she will give a pound note to the collection if I would cut my eloquence short, so in this case, though speech is silver, silence is certainly golden.’ And down he sat.”

“Good for you.”

“But that’s not the worst of it. When they came round with the collection, there they stood in front of me chuckling— waiting for the pound note. And I hadn’t got one. I don’t know when I felt worse; I don’t really. I said to Mr. Cross who was sitting next to me, ‘For Heaven’s sake lend me a pound,’ and he said ‘So
you’re
the lady!’ and roared with laughter and told every one. So now it’s all round the county and I’ve had to borrow a pound from Willy, and what my husband will say when he hears of it, I
don’t
know.”

“He probably has heard,” comforted Carne, “and decided to say nothing.”

“Well . . . now don’t stand about like a lad on hiring day. Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Yes, of course smoke your pipe, and help yourself to a drink. I wanted to see you.”

Meekly, Carne sat.

“What’s all this nonsense about Midge being too delicate to go to school?”

Carne bit on his pipe, smiling quietly. Mrs. Beddows could not offend him. In her ugly, cheerful house, life seemed sane and simple. All problems could be solved by courage, humour and plain common sense. Madness and doom and passion faded like wraiths.

“Good schools cost money,” he told her.

“Bad schools cost more. What’s wrong with the High School? It did well enough for Chloe and Sybil, and it’s doing well enough for Wendy.”

“Midge is a bit difficult.”

Mrs. Beddows studied him. She was never sure how far he recognised the extent of his daughter’s evil heritage. She sympathised with his reverence for the aristocracy. She herself set great store by breeding. She was far from thinking Jack as good as his master and explained failure in plebeian upstarts by saying with suave contempt: “Well, what can you expect? Wasn’t bred to power.” On the other hand, the Sedgmires were by all accounts a queer lot, and Midge had inherited more than blue blood from her maternal ancestors. Maythorpe could not afford two patients in private mental homes. Mrs. Beddows had talked to Dr. Campbell, who said it was touch and go with the child and recommended the High School.

Accustomed to take the bad with the good in this world and having wide experience of both commodities, Mrs. Beddows wasted no undue sympathy. Some people, she would say, are so full of the milk of human kindness that it slops over and messes everything. If Midge can’t stand up to normal life, she reasoned, she might as well quit it early as later. Coddling and sentiment help no one.

“There’s one thing about the school as it stands to-day,” she said cleverly. “Under Miss Holmes the numbers fell off so that it’s small enough for every girl to get individual attention. Fifty-seven day girls and fourteen boarders, isn’t it?”

“Fifty-three and thirteen,” corrected Carne, who could remember figures.

“I know it’s not easy for you to send Muriel’s daughter to school with the children of fish-and-chip-shop men and common labourers. But times are changing, and we’ve got to change with them. Why should you be afraid of other girls influencing Midge? She’s as likely to influence them.”

That was not true. As she said it, she thought that Midge, poor scrap, would influence no one.

She must try a different appeal.

She was enjoying herself. Assured of her own common sense and the wholesome wisdom of her arguments, she proceeded to the fuller education of Robert Carne, who was, like most men, a child, she considered, in practical affairs.

“It’s not the past, it’s the future you’ve got to think of. It’s your girl you’re educating, not Lord Sedgmire’s. If he’d lend a hand, that would be a different matter. But he doesn’t. He left his daughter and his granddaughter for you to deal with and we’ve got to work with the tools that providence sends us. It’s not your fault that Muriel’s where she is, poor soul. If her people had been more reasonable about her marriage all this might have been different. And if you hadn’t insisted that only the best was good enough for Muriel, there’d have been more now to spend on Midge, and I’m not sure that would have been any better for her in the long run. Midge is a dear child, but she needs knocking into shape, and company of her own age. It’s not good for her to be so much alone.”

“I know that.”

The fear haunting Carne looked for a moment through his eyes. He drained and set down his glass.

He’s tired, thought Mrs. Beddows. So was she. But hers was the pleasant fatigue that comes of work well done. When at night in bed she went over the events of the day, it was with a modest yet certain satisfaction at this misunderstanding disentangled, that problem solved, some other help given in time of need. Her good deeds smoothed her pillow.

But Carne looked like a man whom peace had deserted. Some central spring of hope had failed within him. Wherever his mind dwelt, on his farm, his public work, his wife, his daughter, his financial prospects, his health, his house crumbling to ruin, he found no cause for comfort.

Mrs. Beddows saw in this no reason to stop urging him. She crossed her legs, remembered her blue petticoat, silk, but with a patch in it, pulled down her skirt and pushed her chair farther back from the fire.

“I suppose you knew how they worked the election,” she snapped abruptly.

Carne’s slower mind followed her dully. “Yes,” he said.

“I told them you were as sound as the Bank of England, and that this rumour about failing was a lie and a damned lie,” said the alderman. “How true is it?”

“I shall get through. I’m selling some horses to pay harvest wages.”

“Is that wise?”

She knew the effect upon credit when a farmer sells horses before harvest.

“I’m dealing through a chap in the West Riding. I shall lose a bit.”

“Of course you know it was Snaith who worked the whole business.”

“I don’t need telling.”

“It’s largely your own fault. You will go at him. I told you he was a queer friend but a worse enemy. There’s not a thing going on in the South Riding he doesn’t know and not a thing he doesn’t know he can’t make use of.”

“He’s straight as a corkscrew.”

“Then you’re wrong. He’s slim, but he’s not crooked. He’ll never break the law. He’ll only work in the dark for the causes he thinks righteous. He sees you as an obstructionist. You are, too; I always told you you overdo your economy cry. It’s one thing to champion the ratepayer; it’s another to block all action. The difference between you and Snaith is that he thinks the end justifies the means and you think the means justify the end. You’d never play a dirty card; but when you do win—what is it? Just putting full stop to everything.”

She loved him so much that to scold him was a sensuous pleasure to her. When a small child she had regarded Maythorpe Hall as a superb and inaccessible palace. To have Robert, old Mr. Carne’s elder son, there at her mercy, sitting in her arm-chair, smiling at her, accepting her reproof, submitting to her advice, gave her satisfaction, too profound for words. He was so handsome, so big, so masculine. He bought such admirable clothes and wore them splendidly. A natural dandy, Muriel Sedgmire had taught him how to dress, how to order wines, how to help a woman into her coat. His official education had been completed at St. Peter’s, York, but his social education in the hunting field, at shooting parties with the “county” and in his wife’s company, had given him an air found irresistible by Mrs. Beddows. Whether he was thundering round the ring at agricultural shows on his huge heavyweights, or strolling, sullen and apathetic, into the County Hall, or sitting here in her drawing-room, melancholy and gentle, she gloried in his presence.

Mrs. Beddows had, in her time, endured humiliation, disappointment, and the sharp twisting pangs of fear and jealousy. But the tragedy of Carne’s marriage had placed him at her mercy, in need of reassurance and of comfort. She gave both, open-handed, and was unconsciously grateful to Muriel Sedgmire for afflicting Robert with that desolation which drove him to her side. In her hard, rich, varied, unconquered life, his friendship for her was one of her most treasured experiences.

She smiled at him now.

“We’ll get you in next time. Astell’s a sick man. That’s what I said to Captain Gryson. He was mad, I can tell you. He came raging to me. ‘It’s dirty work, Mrs. Beddows, dirty work,’ he kept on saying. ‘Snaith’s using Huggins and his gang to keep Carne out because Carne’s a straight man and a pukka sahib.’ ‘Have you heard Astell cough?’ I asked him. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ he said. I said, ‘There’s perhaps six months’ good work in that poor fellow and then we shall have to elect another alderman. And if you can’t work for your candidate as Snaith worked for his, you’re not the man I thought you.’ I sent him away with a flea in his ear, I can tell you. But you mustn’t go out of your way offending Snaith, and you mustn’t give cause to the heathen to blaspheme. Can you afford another two hundred or so a year to send Midge to a good boarding school?”