The Elderbrook Brothers (35 page)

That question came to a head at last, when Matthew, seizing a chance opportunity, suddenly confronted her.

‘Everything all right, Hilda?'

She put on a sullen, mulish, self-defensive look.

‘Has Caidster left you alone?' His tone was quick and peremptory. He was nervously angry with her long silence, though he knew she was not to blame for it. ‘Has he?'

‘Oh yes, of course,' she said, with bitter sarcasm. ‘It's likely, isn't it? A perfect gentleman like him.'

‘Well?' he said impatiently. ‘What has he done, or said?'

She turned an angry, flushed face towards him. ‘What did you let him come here for? You might have known!'

‘I couldn't prevent it. You must know that, girl. Be reasonable. What does he want?'

He saw, too late, the ineptitude of the question.

‘Don't talk so silly,' said Hilda. ‘“What does he want?” What did
you
want? Well, he wants the same, I shouldn't wonder.'

He stared at her in wonder. The shock of finding her so
changed showed in his hurt eyes, and she was suddenly contrite, her anger spent.

‘I didn't ought to have said that. You're good, you are. Always was.' After the briefest pause she said: ‘He wants me to go out with him.'

He shuddered at the euphemism. ‘And you won't,' he said, with decision.

‘Seems I shall have to,' she said, with a pretence of indifference.

‘Why?'

He knew the answer, but he must bear it, must have it pat, solid, unmistakable.

‘If I don't he'll tell her.'

‘Tell her …?'

‘What he knows, or guesses. Or what he makes up. Anything. It's all one.'

‘Then it would be our word against his.'

He spoke musingly, thinking aloud. Caidster's word against theirs? Where then was the difficulty? She would never accept from a stranger, from Caidster, what he, Matthew, denied. But his heart found no comfort in this specious reasoning. His own guilt was heavy upon him. Could he, if she asked him the question, face her and deny it? Could he save her by a second and deeper betrayal, by lying? He could try. He could, for her sake, try. But if he bungled it, if the lie were not convincing, not believed, if even an iota of doubt remained, then all were lost, his marriage poisoned, Ann broken, Ann's Matthew dead and damned.

‘So he said that, did he? I see.'

His tone was curiously calm. The case was complete, and there was no hope. First Hilda. Then it would be money. And then, perhaps, the very farm itself. There would be no end to that rapacity.

Two days later he again chanced upon Hilda alone. In the interval he had done much thinking.

‘Look, Hilda,' he said. ‘There's something I want you to do.'

EVEN with one's dearest friend there are problems one cannot discuss. Though Nora and Mrs Macfarlane were on terms of unstinted mutual kindness there was one point of silence between them, a question never asked, an assurance never given. By the difference of age and temperament, as well as by human affinity, they were almost perfectly suited to each other. The older woman knew the wisdom of never, out of her ripe experience, offering unsolicited advice; and the younger, with an intuition as quick as it was generous, seldom failed to ask for what she knew her friend was eager to give. Concerning the care of Joseph Charles James Elderbrook, under which burden of names her child endearingly staggered, she asked much from Mrs Macfarlane's store, and received it gracefully, if not always with the intention of acting on it; and she was glad that in these maternal conferences Mrs Macfarlane was often led to talk about her son. Her memory was so vivid, and the artless art of her narrative so telling, that Nora, who had never seen him, in the course of months found herself thinking of Charlie Macfarlane as a living person, denied to her sight by the merest trick of time. Had she been tempted to make a stock generalized figure of him, the young citizen-soldier fallen in battle, his mother's racy recollections of babyhood and boyhood would have sufficed to prevent her doing so; yet even in these earlier appearances he wore, for Nora, the tragic halo of his destiny. In her private imaginings, and sometimes in her dreams, he became a dear friend, a symbol of high romance, and her secret consolation.

Consolation for what? Stubbornly, heroically, she refused even to ask that question. She was a happy wife and a proud mother: of that there could be no doubt. Not only did she love and admire her husband: she also liked him, which was a different and equally important thing. At home, though he had dark moods like other men, he was nearly always good company, kind and gay even in his lordly moments. All the
thought he could spare from the grand career was hers for the asking; he enjoyed young Joey; and, his imaginative energy being canalized by his soaring ambition, he never, as the saying went, looked at another woman. What from Nora's point of view could be more satisfactory? What more could she or any wife hanker after? She would not allow herself to wish him different in any point whatsoever; yet she sometimes drifted into imagining what life would be like if in small significant ways he
were
a little different. His attitude to the war was something she had never quite understood. Had he been an outright pacifist she would have argued with him at first, and then—who knows?—perhaps ultimately have agreed with him. It was his air of detachment that puzzled her sometimes, detachment that seemed to enclose him in impenetrable armour. That he was safe, that he knew how to look after himself, was surely something to be thankful for, wasn't it? And to wish that he could have been safe in spite of himself, and in spite of his chafing at safety, would have been not merely disloyal but illogical. To eat her cake and have it, to have him courting danger and at the same time to be sure that he would survive without scathe, this was Nora's secret, unformulated wish. More frankly, since there was no harm in it, she wished he were in closer touch with his brothers; for Matthew and Felix were still only names to her, less evocative by far than the name of Charlie Macfarlane. The one, unable to leave his farm, had sent a wedding present; the other had been a soldier in France at the time; and now that the war was over, and Felix demobilized, Guy was still too busy, it seemed, to do anything about it.

When Guy was with her she was ready to believe herself the luckiest young woman in the world. He was good to her and Joey; he was good to Mrs Macfarlane; and for old times' sake he was good to his partner, now virtually retired, her ageing, tippling father. Poor Jimmie was a frequent guest. He and Guy had been useful to each other, but his ambition had been fitful, easily quenched by comfort, and he had lapsed without
pain or resentment into the position of tolerated father-in-law and old retainer.

Guy was clever. Guy was goodnatured in his fashion. She was infinitely safe in his keeping. But was there, could there be, a flaw in his perfection? Could he not have been a little more like Charlie? These were questions Nora would not willingly discuss even with herself, and still less with Charlie's rnother.

ANN, in recent days, had studied as never before the changing expressions of Hilda's so familiar face. Standing in the scullery doorway she stared now with a quiet intentness. Hilda was busy at the sink.

An interested observer would have been struck by the contrast between the two women. Ann was small and neat, with a suggestion of squareness: square shoulders, square face. Her complexion was inclined to sallowness; her eyes and her hair were both of the same dark brown; and she had the habit, which illness had only interrupted, of holding herself very straight and moving with a certain primness. The girl Hilda, compared with her mistress, seemed large, though she was not exceptionally so; seemed ample and uncontrolled in her movements, though she was not that either. She had a fair skin and a high colour, dark eyebrows, dark lashes, and eyes with a gleam of bronze in them. In these years of her brief blooming, for the village girls age quickly in Mershire, she looked a picture of amiable and honest contentment, except in moments of shyness or anger when her features were apt to swell and stiffen into a mask of stupidity.

‘Well, Hilda, can you manage?'

To Hilda, who was always managing, the question seemed meaningless. Instead of attempting an answer she said reproachfully: ‘You didn't ought to be standing there, m'm. You know you didn't. What would Mr Elderbrook say?'

‘Nonsense,' said Ann, though without much conviction. ‘I'm not going to be coddled any more. It's time I took a hand with things. You look tired, Hilda.'

‘Please to go and sit down,' said Hilda, turning back to her sink.

‘You've looked tired for quite a few days.'

‘I'm
not!'
A shrill note crept into Hilda's voice. ‘Not specially,' she said, with a droop into anti-climax.

‘Take an aspirin and lie down,' said Ann. ‘I can finish the washing-up for once. Is it the usual bother?'

‘No, it's not that,' said Hilda quickly.

The inference was clear to Ann, though not to Hilda herself. If it was not ‘that' it was something else. In the old days mistress and maid had been on easy terms, and the work's routine had been enlivened with many a scrap of talk. Hilda had never been a garrulous girl, but she enjoyed retailing the village news, especially to someone as ready to hear it as Ann had been, and was. That unexacting relationship had been resumed at once on Ann's return. She had seen no difference in Hilda, for the sufficient reason that Hilda, with her knack of forgetting what she did not choose to remember, felt no difference towards her. But now there were things Hilda could not put out of mind. There was a visible change in her, a change visible indeed to one who was very tired of her own company and for most of the day had no one but Hilda to look at or talk to.

‘Coming nearer to Hilda she said gently: ‘You're not in trouble, Hilda, are you?'

Hilda, with eyes averted, said: ‘I don't know yet.'

In the startled silence that followed, Ann felt herself blushing, and she saw that Hilda, too, was burning red. Ann blushed because she had stumbled inadvertently on a secret. In putting her simple question she had forgotten that ‘in trouble' might have for Hilda a quite specific meaning. She had not meant it so, and was suddenly at a loss. She supposed that something in the way of reproof was called for, or at the least an expression
of shocked surprise. But neither would come naturally to her lips and she would not force it. As the moment lengthened, another and yet more startling thought flashed into her mind, creating there a numbness, a silence. It was a new thought, yet it linked up with a number of tiny earlier impressions, too slight to be noticed separately. It suddenly completed a structure, a pattern, which she had been utterly unaware of building. The thing was probable; it was obvious. But she said to her heart not so fast not so fast, forcing herself to recognize that it might not be true.

It could not be true. And yet …

A half-stifled noise came from Hilda at the sink. She was crying, crying and sniffing and vigorously rattling the crocks in her basin. That big girl crying: it was an awkward and unlovely sight, but Ann, because she had always liked her, was touched.

‘Don't worry, Hilda.' And what else? ‘Let's hope for the best,' Ann said lamely, knowing neither quite what she meant, nor what she was willing to imply.

Her thoughts rioting, she could say no more, but turned away and went slowly back to her fireside chair. It pleased her nowadays to sit in the kitchen, within sight and touch of the things that belonged to her peace, the simple familiar things that spoke of her life with Matthew. The aged oak dresser that he had bought for her at a sale, the gleaming kitchen crockery, the best blue china, the custard glasses, the pewter, the large silver ladle: these could be taken in at one comfortable glance. She had scolded him for extravagance when she heard what the dresser had cost him, but it was specially for her, and the extravagance that shocked her careful soul had at the same time delighted her. On the mantelshelf, above the smart kitchen range she had had fixed in the ancient brick hearth, was a row of squat wooden canisters, each bearing the name of its contents: rice, sugar, tea, coffee, sage, and the rest. The big bread bin and the flour bin dated from earlier times; and so did the grandfather clock and the great iron hooks in the cross-beam from
which bacon used to be hung. But they were all hers and all dear to her. Her eyes ran over them gratefully.

She did not sit quiet for long. The silence in her had given place to a murmuring activity. Thoughts too many and too strange for articulation buzzed in her ears. They frightened and bewildered her. They threatened the very centre of her life. What a bad wife I must be to be believing such a thing, she said. And the next minute: but what if it's true? But a voice from the depths of her being, a quietly insistent voice, was saying something else, was saying that whatever he had done he was Matthew, her husband, a good husband, the best of husbands, a husband to whose faithfulness, whatever he had done, she owed her life. He had wanted her to live when she could so willingly and wearily have died. With that wanting he had sustained and comforted her. He had been with her, whatever he had done, in the valley of that shadow, a strong abiding presence. He had always, whatever he had done, been kind to her, more than kind. Kinder than ever since her homecoming, though of late moody and sometimes abstracted. When he sat with her, and yet was absent, what did that mean? She shuddered away from a possible answer, a possible and all too plausible answer, and rested in the arms of her idea of him, of his goodness. What mattered, she suddenly felt, was not what he did or had done, but what he was; and she knew in every fibre of her being, with a long-matured knowledge, that what he was was good. Pictures rose in her mind which, if she looked at them, would unseat her reason. Yet look she must and did, steadily, with pain, but without ultimate disaster. The conjured fantasy had done its worst and she was still alive. She could look at it and see through it. It was nothing, or almost nothing. It was of no importance. Poor Matthew, she said. Of course. Why not? All that dreary, dreary time. Why, of course!