The Scent of Water (23 page)

“I don’t feel my usual despair about this book, nor about that play you sent off for me a few weeks ago.”

She saw the letter on the table and picked it up. “It’s from your agent.”

“It’s too early to hear anything yet.”

She opened the letter and glanced through it. “No, it’s not too early. I’ll read you the letter.”

It seemed to her strained nerves that she read it in a silence in which Appleshaw itself was listening. She saw the face of the monk with the thorns around his neck and she fancied that his smile broadened into a triumphant grin. Having finished reading she could no longer trust herself to speak. It was a detective play, written before she had come to Appleshaw, but she was a whodunnit addict and she had suggested alterations which had given it added punch and excitement. Paul laughed, the sound exploding joyously, and held out his hand to her. She took it and he swung their linked hands backward and forward in boyish high spirits. “It will probably come to nothing,” he said.

“Why say that when you know it won’t?”

“Placating fate, I think. Valerie comes back tomorrow. What a gorgeous bit of news to greet her with.”

“She will be pleased,” said Mary. One o’clock struck and he got up, for Joanna preferred punctuality though she was adjusted to its absence. “I’ll come with you to the door.”

They walked across the lawn to the wistaria tunnel. It had been so hot that the green leaves were already tipped with gold. Paul stopped.

“Mary, what can I say? I realize how much you’ve helped me.”

“It’s been a happy partnership.”

“It’s been like dew coming down on dry earth, or like dead bones living.”

Mary laughed and opened the door in the wall. “You exaggerate, but we’ve enjoyed ourselves. Come around tomorrow and we’ll take your tape recorder and manuscripts back to the cottage.”

She shut the door behind her and went quickly into her cool, dark hall. She would see him tomorrow but he would not be the same man tomorrow. What he had said about the dew had truth in it, for somehow renewal had come to his marriage and his work, and so to himself. He was different now and would be increasingly so as success came to him. Though not less in stature he would be perhaps less lovable. Though never to her. She would achieve shelter and steadiness and would suffer less with the passing of time, but she would carry this with her until she died. She found she was looking at the oak chest, now in place in the hall, and once again she remembered the monk with the thorns around his neck. She turned away and went upstairs to wash her hands for lunch. Her feet felt like lead on the stairs. But on the top step she remembered John, and half expected to see him come toward her out of the shadow. “It is you I love in this man,” she said to him, “and I love him as you loved him. The thing is mutual now, and so strong that I do not think I am any longer a landlocked sea.”

The next morning Paul visited Charles for the third time. After Valerie had gone away he had asked Dr. Fraser to take him with him on his hospital days and to leave him with Charles while he visited other patients. Not even Mary had known of his visits, for he had managed not to coincide with anyone else. The first visit had been pure embarrassment for both of them, for he had been unable to explain to Charles why he had come. How could he say, “I have not come in a spirit of pious forgiveness because you flirted with my wife, got drunk and drove her into a telephone post, I’ve come because you look like a chap in a book I’m writing.” This would have sounded odd to Charles in any case and in view of the fact that Paul was blind, stark mad. And so the first visit had remained an embarrassment and the second had not been much better at first, though later they had achieved ease, even a sort of happiness together. This one went very differently. As soon as the preliminaries were over, Charles asked bluntly, “Why do you come?”

“We didn’t get that walk we’d promised ourselves.”

“Things have changed a bit since then, haven’t they?”

“As regards myself, for the better.”

“You mean Val is thoroughly fed up with me?”

“Yes, she is, and I’m enjoying the rebound.”

“Good,” said Charles and he meant it, but his embarrassment was not relieved. Let him think me mad, thought Paul. What does it matter? And he took the plunge.

“I don’t come to see you for any reason connected with Valerie. That’s all past. I come because I’m writing a book and you’re the chap in it.” He was aware of blankness like an empty bucket and tried again. “That must sound mad to you. The book’s about myself really, though I didn’t know it till that night at the pub.”

“I don’t know much about writing books,” said Charles, “but if you think this chap in yours is like both you and me then you’ve made a mistake about one of us. Of course I don’t know what you think about yourself, or me, but if you think there’s the slightest resemblance between us then all I can say is, I’m more capable of writing this book than you are; that is if a rudimentary understanding of character is necessary to the writer’s craft, which I was under the impression it was.”

Paul laughed. “Probably you could have written it better than I can. Shall I tell you about it?”

“I might see more light if you did.”

Paul told him about it with an ease that astonished him. Was it relief from loneliness that was making him so garrulous with Mary and Charles? With Charles, of course, it was like talking to himself. With Mary it was much the same, for she could have been that companion who is to a man the other half of himself. That was why rage had seized him at Charles’s way of speaking of her at the pub. At some deep level of existence she was his woman. Valerie his wife was not. The knowledge had come lately like a flash of lightning, with burn and shock. Then he had accepted the knowledge and let it take its place with the fact.

He came back to awareness that there was now something in the bucket. “A diatribe against war, in fact,” said Charles. “There are so many. Do they do any good? Is there anything now that can be done about our fate except to rail at it? By the common man, I mean. The VIPs of course are like a bird in a bush mesmerized by a snake, so mesmerized by horror that it just hops nearer and nearer. The common man, that’s you and me.” He seemed pleased by this and smiled. “But can we do anything?”

“Rail,” said Paul. “Scream at the bird from behind.”

“Is your book a powerful scream?”

“I hope so. The common man of our generation knows what he’s talking about.”

“Yes. I don’t know as much about it as you do, you know. I wasn’t in the war for long. It’s true I’ve been a mess since but then I was a mess before. People talk a lot of ballyhoo about suffering improving you. I should say that what it does is to underline what you were before. It did that to me. And probably, in a different way, for you. No, I can’t blame what I am on the war.”

“The last one. What about the one before?”

“Good Lord, I can’t go back that far! And I still don’t see why you recognize me as the chap in your book.”

“I don’t think I can explain really. Say I recognize you and always will and leave it at that.”

“I’ll be glad to,” said Charles simply. “I’m always coming back to Appleshaw. Don’t move away from the place when you’re a VIP yourself.”

“Is the job your father told me about still waiting for you?”

“Yes. I’m starting in ten days’ time, I hope. There’s Fraser out in the passage. Damn!”

“You sound better. Go on with the good work.”

“Yes. You go on with the book. It won’t do any good but go on with it and good luck to it.”

“Good luck to your new job.”

“It’s not much of a job. Just something to be going on with.”

Outside in the passage, waiting for Dr. Fraser to finish with Charles and join him, Paul thought they had laid a good deal of emphasis upon mere going on. It was of course a stark necessity unless one wished to be a beatnik. He imagined it was what made Charles tick. His religion in fact. If he could get to the end without having thrown in his hand he would have kept his integrity. No one could wish man a greater gift than the power to avoid apostasy.

I
T was Saturday afternoon and Mr. Hepplewhite decided to go for a walk. The decision was momentous, for he never walked. Like all the lordly ones, he shot, that being the natural activity of the species, and he played golf to keep his weight down, and these pursuits involved walking, but walking for walking’s sake had always seemed to him an act of insanity. What was the point of it? Muscles could be stretched in more intelligent ways and the beauties of nature could be more conveniently observed from the window of a car. There was of course this question of wanting to be alone. On a golf course there were other men. A car did not take one to lonely places and legs did. But he could be alone in his library. Shrugging on his mackintosh in the hall, he realized with something of a shock that he had not wanted to be alone out of doors since his childhood. Not until this afternoon.

Mrs. Hepplewhite, her needlework in her hand, had come to the door of the drawing room. “Are you going out, Frederick?” Her eyes went to the fine drizzle outside the window and then came back anxiously to his face. “What is it, dear? Indigestion?”

“No,” said Mr. Hepplewhite shortly. Mrs. Hepplewhite took a few tentative steps toward him. He was troubled in mind. He never confided in her but she knew the signs. Irritability and a queer sort of emergence of Fred, the young waiter she had married. It was difficult to say in what this emergence consisted. A slight intonation of the voice, a look in the eyes, a movement? She could not analyze it and emergence was the wrong word, for it was more of a memory than an emergence. It came so seldom, for Frederick was hardly ever troubled. His business affairs were always triumphantly satisfactory. Was it Julie? He had come home last night without Julie and had announced briefly that he had dismissed her. He had dismissed a pretty secretary before, when she had gone stale on him, and turned to the next with renewed enthusiasm. But Julie she believed had gone deeper than the others. It was hard for her to express sympathy, with her heart singing for joy at Julie’s downfall, but she did most truly grieve that he should be troubled and she put her hand timidly on his sleeve. “If you’re going for a walk may I come with you?” He gazed at her in astonishment, for she never walked either, then shook her hand from his sleeve, grabbed his stick from the stand and disappeared into the rain.

He strode steadily through the village, for his walk had a purpose. In order to keep hold upon faith in his own sanity he had had to think up some sort of reason why he should tramp through woods in the rain. Looking at his estate map this morning he had noticed that he had never been to Fox Barton farm. It was only a ruin, his bailiff had told him, and the lane that led to it was too narrow for his car or shooting brake. He had shot in Nightingale Wood but he had never happened to come near the farm. All the same, a landowner should know every corner of his land. Once he had seen Fox Barton, practically every yard of his would be in the possession of his memory. His memory? He forged across the green without seeing it, his powerful shoulders straight and his mouth grim. His hands were on this place and it was inconceivable that he could lose his grip upon anything that was his. Yet he had thought Julie was his until he had seen her the other night at the cocktail bar at the theatre with Lawson, his enemy, and with him in that unmistakable way. And then he had discovered that leak of a bit of information; not important as it happened but there might have been other leaks and Lawson was damned clever.

He scarcely noticed Ash Lane as he tramped down it and only at the edge of the wood did he become aware of his surroundings. It was November and the beech trees still carried their leaves. The fine drizzle was no more than a drifting veil and it was almost dry and strangely warm under the weight of gold. Sometimes a single leaf floated down and fell into the beech mast below like a drop of rain into the sea, to be lost there, but otherwise there was no movement. And no sound, not even of his own footsteps on the moss and soft earth.

He had come to the farm before he realized it, for its gold-lichened roof and silver-gray walls were hardly distinguishable from the wood around it. The mist was wet on his face again as he crossed the clearing, cool as the spray that had so often drenched him on board his boat. He came to the door and found it locked. He pushed hard, hoping the lock would break, for the place was his and the resistance angered him. He banged on the door but there was no answer, only silence and the drip of trees. He went to the right-hand window but though the glass was gone he could make no entrance through the iron bars fixed across it. He shook them but they were as unyielding as the door. He could only look through them. He saw the workshop with the shavings on the floor, the workbench and lathe, the chair legs and Mr. Baker’s artifacts upon the shelf. He saw no beauty in their wooden shapes and wondered that anyone should think them worth protecting with these bars.

Then after a while the workshop captured his attention and held it. He realized slowly that a man spent his working life there. It was his world, as much to him as a great factory to its owner, or as the vast web of high finance to the men who spun and schemed within it. But this world upon which he looked through the bars had a stark simplicity. The man who worked here was not dependent upon other men. There was nothing here to entangle or betray him. The primitive lathe, the wood of trees, his own vision, brain and muscle, the silence, were all he had. Mr. Hepplewhite stood and gazed until it seemed the scene he looked upon had burned itself into his mind. It was utterly unfamiliar to him and yet he recognized it. Men whose blood was in his veins, his mother’s people, had lived this way. He stood and looked and nostalgia became a sort of despair. He went quickly to the other window and shook the bars there, trying to banish the misery with anger. But he could not recapture the anger, he could only stand there looking in. This was no workshop, only an emptiness, but he saw the gracious ruined stairway, the Adam mantelpiece and the broken plaster flowers upon the floor. He vaguely remembered the Vicar telling him that the squire whose portrait hung in his dining room had rebuilt the manor house. He had not been sufficiently interested to ask where the fellow had lived in the meantime. It could have been that the man who in later life had spent his evenings where he spent his, in the library at home, had sat here before this hearth, reading or listening to his wife playing the harpsichord. His books would have lined the walls, the smoke from his pipe drifting its blueness across the gold and crimson of their bindings. That past too was now in his blood. He looked in upon the man and again he looked so long that he was bemused.

Coming back to himself he was aware of the iron bars in his grasp, cold and wet, and claustrophobia gripped him, as though they were keeping him in instead of out. He stepped quickly back, aware of the blessed space of the clearing about him. He was ashamed of his momentary panic but he did not look again through the two windows, he walked to the end of the clearing and looked instead at the old thorn tree. For a while it held his attention with its twisted strength. Most of the leaves had gone but it glowed deep crimson with berries. Then he saw the well and did not know that he’d walked to it.

There was a small boy leaning over the edge of the well, sniffing the scent of water, feeling the cool breath on his face, feeling down with one hand for the cavity behind the wet ferns where the butter was hidden. He found it but the butter was not there today. There was an emptiness. He peered down the well, expecting to see his own brown face. But there was a fair-faced boy down there, snub-nosed, freckled and redheaded. There were two small boys and it was morning. The sun shone and the birds sang.

A few moments later, sitting on the parapet of the well but with his back to it, Mr. Hepplewhite was in the grip of rage. Had Julie been here he could have murdered her, yet it was scarcely against her that he raged, or even against his own incredible idiocy that had allowed the little bitch to know too much. His fury now lay deeper than those surface things, though possibly the savage laceration of his pride and his emotions had laid him open to it. It had to do with those two rooms at which he had been looking through the bars, with the well and the two boys. For the first time in his life he had seen with vividness a picture of a world that had gone, the craftsman’s world, the world of the Adam garlands about the hearth and the books upon the wall, of the wells of faith and the innocence and perception of children. Even he, a child of the slums, had once perceived the scent of water. Had he lived in this place a hundred years ago he would not have sat here now, one of the richest and most successful men in the country yet facing defeat like the crashing of ice floes about him, and sickened of the whole business to the marrow of his bones. It was not his fault. If he had made himself what he was he’d not made the so-called civilization that had not offered him, as far as he had been able to see, any ladder to climb other than the one he had climbed. Other men had built up this vast crashing screaming madhouse and now it was falling down upon the lot of them, the innocent and the guilty alike. Sitting perfectly still he cursed these guilty ones, exhausting himself with hatred and despair.

He staggered to his feet at last and found that a watery sun was shining. He turned and looked down into the well and saw a gleam of it caught in the water, and was pleased he had seen it, as though the seeing was to his credit. He thought suddenly that perhaps the men he had been cursing felt much as he did himself. Helpless. Trapped. Innocent yet guilty. For now his rage was spent he found that he did somehow feel guilty. He remembered that evening in his library when he had momentarily wanted to destroy those letters. Something had occurred then. There had been some occurrence in a timeless dimension, a voice or movement neither heard nor seen. He had no explanation for what had occurred but he did know that he had deliberately chosen to be deaf and blind. And not for the first time. All his life he had been forever stabbing something out as one extinguished the glowing end of a cigarette. That yielding to Julie had only been the last refusal of many. Each in its own place had possibly been just as disastrous yet at the time apparently so inconsiderable, and so immediately forgotten. It must be the same with all men. And so the sparks were stabbed out and darkness gathered and one man’s darkness, since one man is many men, was the darkness of the world.

Striding across the clearing he was angry again. The thing, whatever it was, had no right to demand this watchfulness. If it had anything to communicate then let it blaze and thunder the news across the heavens for all men to see and hear. This was no world for whispers and intuitions. It might have been once when the monks lived here, or when the woman who had played the harpsichord in that room had dropped her hands in her lap to listen. Possibly the old anachronism who now toiled at his craft in that workshop knew a thing or two. No one else did nowadays. They’d no silence. Little by little it had been stolen from them. Raging at the thieves, raging at whatever it was, if anything, that would not speak out, he began to feel more like himself, his sense of guilt overlaid by returning self-confidence. By the time he reached the lane he was even jeering at his own fears. He’d been in tight corners before and rounded them. He’d always been a lucky fellow. He was almost cheerful by the time he came out onto the green and saw Mary and Valerie at the gate of Orchard Cottage. He raised his hat to them and called out a greeting, then went over to them.

“You look well, Miss Lindsay.” Mary acknowledged the fact of her good health and thought how expertly he did it, his glance lingering upon her face just long enough for her to know that he complimented her upon her looks as well as her physical well-being, before moving on to Valerie with a kindling enthusiasm. “And you, Valerie? I’ve never seen you look better. Feeling fine, are you? May an old friend congratulate you? Splendid.”

Valerie flushed but met his glance steadily, as though daring him to interpret her flush as one of embarrassment. It was actually of annoyance, for every face she met now was wreathed in congratulatory smiles. From the way everyone was behaving anybody would think there’d never been a baby expected in Appleshaw before. Nor of course had there been, except among the gypsies and farm laborers’ wives and people like that. Jeremy had been born before the Talbots came here and the rest of the village people were old. It was maddening to have everyone rejoicing so selfishly in her misfortune, with never a thought for her suffering and peril. Serve them all right if she died.

“Will you come in and have a cup of tea?” she inquired of Mr. Hepplewhite with weary dignity. “You too, Mary.”

Mary, who had come to return a basket, returned it and excused herself. Mr. Hepplewhite did likewise and they turned away together, a little too quickly, for they missed the drooping exhaustion of Valerie’s figure as she returned to the house. Mr. Hepplewhite came with Mary to the door in the wall of The Laurels, left wide open for the first time in his experience, and was caught by what he saw. There were still a few wistaria leaves left, and the pale sun lit their transparency to gold. The front door was wide open too and he saw the gleam of gold chrysanthemums in a pot on an old chest. Beyond was only deep shadow and an intimation of warmth and safety. The façade of his recent self-confidence suddenly cracked and with inward terror he knew it for what it was, a mere façade. It fell and all else with it.

“Won’t you come in?” said Mary gently. She was aware of some change in him and aware too that for the first time in their acquaintance she liked him. He shook his head, for he was now outside safety, turned away and then swung back.

“The boy,” he said gruffly. “Jeremy. He’s not been to see me lately. He’s all right?”

“Quite all right,” said Mary. “He had a bicycle for his birthday.”

“That’s it,” said Mr. Hepplewhite, accepting the fact that he could not hope to compete with a bicycle with matter-of-fact humility. “When you see him give him my love, will you?”