"An Unofficial rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murdoch Iris)

Chapter two

'I THOUGHT this lot for the refugees, said Ann, and these perhaps I might offer to Nancy Bowshott. What do you think?

They were sorting out Fanny's things. Ann had been very firm that they should do it at once and 'get it over, and Hugh supposed she was right; though when it came to it he could hardly bear it. At the funeral he had felt unreal and detached while Ann sobbed. Now when he wished to give himself up to a small frenzy of grief Ann was being calm and busy and practical. That was just like a woman. All the same he was deeply grateful to Ann, grateful to her for having insisted on having Fanny at Grayhallock, for having insisted on nursing Fanny. Without Ann the last six months would have been for him an almost unendurable torment.

It was Sunday morning and they had all been back at Grayhallock for three days. Some pale sunshine made the soaked garden glitter and the steaming spongy lawn warm to the touch. More distantly, between the beech trees, the bleak lines of spiky rose bushes could be seen, sloping away below the house, scattered with a confetti of multicoloured points; and below and beyond there stretched towards the invisible sea the flat pale green expanse of Romney Marsh, crossed with reedy dykes and dotted with distant sheep and presenting to the, eye towards a bluer horizon a remarkable number of tree-shielded and variously shaped church towers. It was still early in the month of June.

'And I thought we might give some little thing to Clare as a memento, said Ann. 'She was so terribly good to Fanny.

'Whatever you think best, said Hugh. 'But what about you and Miranda?

'Somehow, I'd rather not, said Ann, 'for myself I thought perhaps Miranda might have some of the cheaper bits of jewellery, if you didn't mind? I remember a painted bead necklace —’

'Why ever should I mind? said Hugh irritably. 'Everything belongs to the family. Naturally I assumed you'd have all the jewellery. There's no point in sending it out to Sarah.

'But some of it's valuable —’

'Oh, for God's sake, Ann, said Hugh, 'don't make a fuss! Everything to do with money and possessions was so depressing. He knew Ann was incapable of resentment, but how tactless she was all the same. This was no moment for scrupulous counting.

He sat down on the bed. It had been odd, coming back into this so familiar room in which he had seen the season change from winter to spring, and now finding the bed all folded and flattened. There had been the mornings when he came in fearing to find Fanny dead. And there was Fanny's poor old dressing-gown still hanging on the door. Ann had given her another one for going to London. Of course he had loved his wife. Any idea he might have had to the contrary was romantic and irresponsible and absurd. That was what was hollow. His marriage, whatever its shortcomings, had been a real living thing and not an empty shell. He had imagined that now, when it was all over, he might have felt, all the same, a sort of relief. But what came to him instead was a quite new sorrow, a dreadful sense of her absence. He kept missing her, searching for her. But she was nowhere now.

Ann kept turning over the heaps of clothing and going through the pockets. The action had an air of thieving absurdly at odds with the plain humble expression of face which she had put on for the sad little scene. There was not much to find. There had not been much to find in the desk either. Poor Fanny had had no secrets. She had been woman without mystery. There had been no darkness in her. And Hugh, as he looked at intent Ann, pale shabby Ann with her short lank ginger hair pushed back behind her ears, reflected that she was, after all, in this way, not unlike Fanny. Both he and his son had married women without darkness.

'I hope Randall won't mind our deciding things without him, said Ann.

'He'd better not mind!

On their return to Grayhallock Randall had retired to his room and had stayed there in a sort of voluntary state of siege. Nancy Bowshott, the head gardener's wife, brought him up his meals; and Miranda reported that he emerged each day at dawn, armed with secateurs, cut the newly opened bourbons and gallicas. Ann had apparently not set eyes on him. Hugh, who had seen his son's mйnage under strain before, had refrained from comment.

'I suppose he hasn't changed his view about coming to Seton Blaise? said Hugh.

Seton Blaise was the Finch's house, some ten miles distant from Grayhallock. Mildred Finch had rung up on the previous day to invite them allover to dinner on the Sunday evening. Randall had refused to have anything to do with the invitation and was reported by a giggling Nancy Bowshott as saying that he had no desire to be patronized by that horse in human form. He thus designated Colonel Meecham. Ann had then told Mildred that they could not come to dinner; but Mildred in turn had made her promise at least to bring her depleted party over for drinks at six o'clock.

'No, said Ann. She hitched up her skirt and began folding the clothes. She added, 'I'm so glad Penny will have a chance to see Seton Blaise. He ought to see a real English country house. It's a pity Mildred and Humphrey weren't here earlier on. It would have been a nice change for him after the chaos here.

'Our chaos is ceremony to him, said Hugh. 'And you know he thinks Grayhallock is terribly romantic!

What a mess they'd all between them made of Penn's visit. He was to have spent a term at an English school, but they had bungled the arrangements and then it was too late to get him in; so that since his arrival in April he had been simply hanging round the house, helping Ann with the washing up; running errands for whoever was looking after Fanny, and generally acting as a rather bedraggled page to the long sad event which had lately proceeded to its end.

'It's true that he sees no evil, said Ann.

She sighed while Hugh attended for a moment to the more sinister aspects of the chaos to which she had referred.

She stopped her folding and went on, 'Poor boy. You know, I hope he doesn't feel that all the time we're comparing him unfavourably with Steve —’

Hugh got up. He was always pained and amazed at the free way in which Ann was able to refer to Steve. 'I don't see why he should feel that. No one has particularly talked to him about Steve, so far as I know. There was no Peronett grandson now. The name would live on only as the name of a rose.

'All the same, children are so sensitive — He's a funny little boy. I shall miss him when he's gone back.

Yes, thought Hugh, you are lonely, you are lonely, poor Ann. He looked at Ann's greenish-yellowish eyes, widened now and misted with sad thoughts. He apprehended her with what he knew was but a perfunctory pity and but a vague good will, poor Ann incarcerated here with spiteful mysterious Randall, and only her enemies Nancy Bowshott and Clare Swann for company. How soon, he began to wonder, could he decently go back to London?

The sense of unhappiness at Grayhallock had been, since his return there, almost intolerable to him. The house was a melancholy one at the best of times, and had always seemed to him, if not exactly hostile to Ann and Randall, certainly indifferent to them. It had never, he felt, taken them altogether seriously. It had known quite other things, and there were times, especially at night, when one could feel it thinking about them. Grayhallock was only partly an old house, it had few pretensions to beauty, and such pretensions as it had to grandeur were now gentle and absurd. The long central portion of the house with its tall windows and yellow stucco and wide semicircle of steps dated from the early eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century it had been acquired by a linen manufacturer of vast wealth from County Tyrone, who had given it its present name and a pair of lateral battlemented towers. He had also added an ornate glass porch over the steps, a vast mushroom-shaped conservatory, and a red brick kitchen annexe: excrescences which, in spite of Hugh' s protests, Ann and Randall had never seen fit to remove. While within, the house always seemed to Hugh to be both dark and damp, centred, as round a vast atrium, about the cold stone-flagged still-room, full of rain-soaked overcoats and rows of muddy Wellingtons.

'Well, that's that, said Ann. She put the last garment on to the neat pile and patted it. 'Now I must find Miranda and tell her to change for church. Thanks so much for helping me, Hugh.

Ann's Christian piety, though doctrinally a little vague, was unwavering, and, Hugh conjectured, unreflective. Randall, who did not share it, tolerated it; but had been much less ready, as he put it, to see his daughter 'godded'. Miranda, however, to the surprise of some, though in so many ways her father's little girl, had so far continued firmly in the faith of her mother. Hugh himself, undramatically and again unreflectively, had no faith. Religion lay far behind him with things he had forgotten.

He got up with relief and followed Ann in the direction of the drawing-room. As he emerged into the corridor he apprehended, like a cold breeze, the presence of Randall in the house. He wondered, as he felt it, with such a presage of unpleasantness to come, blow upon him, with what icy authority it must now be touching the shrinking soul of Randall's wife.

The drawing-room was a long room with three big windows hollowed and upholstered with shabby chintz window-seats. Beside the front porch, it also had the view of the beech-fringed lawn. The lines of roses were out of sight now below the hill, and between the towering beeches there was only visible the blue and white swiftly moving sky which before a brisk north-west wind was descending across the pallid chequered Marsh in the direction of Dungeness and the twenty miles distant sea. The room, which apart from Randall's bedroom was the only 'serious' room in the house, was pleasant enough, its panelling a faded green, its furniture of a battered elegance, old miscellaneous 'finds' in lesser antique shops. The thick fawn carpet was scattered with a dim glow of threadbare rugs, which although 'if perfect' would be treasures, were now almost impossibly, manifestly, imperfect. A huge rosewood bookcase held the family library: rarely disturbed now since the younger Peronetts were not great readers.

Miranda was curled in one of the window-seats with three of her dolls propped up opposite to her. She was raising her finger as if to admonish one of them, and paid no attention to the new arrivals. Hugh was permanently disconcerted by his granddaughter. He could never, for instance, decide how far to humour her air of childishness. Miranda had always seemed younger than her age, and yet managed to combine her Peter Pannish demeanour with a knowingness which made Hugh sometimes conjecture that it was all a sort of masquerade. Yet it would be absurd to think this. The child, after all, in this respect curiously resembled her father. Randall was certainly a Peter Pan; and it was hardly-fair to raise an eyebrow at Miranda's undiminished passion for dolls when her father still kept by his bedside the woolly toys of his childhood. They were both of changeling blood.

In appearance, of course, Miranda was the living image of Ann, and indeed 'living' was the right word, since the same features glowed in the child with a difference which made the resemblance inaccessible to a casual observer. Miranda was as pale as her mother, but her face had the transparency of marble where Ann's had the dullness of wax. Miranda's hair fell consciously about her, and about her brow and eyes, in straight bright strands like a mop of red and golden tassels, while Ann's neglected hair, which grew in just the same way, was something limp and string-like to be thrust back unheeded. Yet Ann was handsome still, with her strong face and her direct green glance, if one could only see her: which, as Hugh reflected, perhaps hardly anyone could any more. It was, he reflected too, Ann's own fault if he had become invisible.

'Where's Penny? said Ann.

'Haven't the faintest, said Miranda, rearranging the three dolls. Miranda was a weekly boarder at a school not far from Grayhallock and spent her week-ends at home. During these times she did, as far as Hugh could see, nothing. She had even, as a result of a serious fall two years ago, lost interest in the Swanns' pony.

'Is he in his room? Penn occupied one of the top tower rooms, above Ann's room. Miranda occupied the corresponding room in the other tower, above Randall's room.

'As I don't know where he is I don't know whether he's in his room, said Miranda, still tкte-а-tкte with the dolls. This was one of those moments which made Hugh wonder.

'Ah, well, said Ann.

Her philosophical treatment of her daughter also caused Hugh surprise mingled with irritation. He still experienced a recurrent desire, which he had not always, he thought with satisfaction, inhibited when she was smaller, to slap Miranda hard.

'I was just wondering if he'd mind drying up while we're at church.

'I'll dry up, Hugh heard himself resignedly saying. He detested the housework which Ann kept shamelessly hinting he might help her with. Penn already did more than his fair share of it; Miranda, in Hugh's opinion, less.

'Oh, that's terribly sweet of you! said Ann. 'I'm afraid there's an awful lot. Then perhaps Penny could lay the table, if he turns up. Penn was excused church, of course, his father being one of those who could scarcely credit that any rational person still believed in God. Not that there was anything wrong with Jimmie really.

Ann was telling Miranda it was time to go and change for church, while Miranda, her slim tartan-trousered legs curled under her, continued to commune with the dolls.

Hugh wandered away down the long room and touched guiltily in his pocket the fat letter from Sarah which had arrived two days ago and which he had still not nerved himself to read properly. It had been posted before the news of Fanny's death. He glanced at it, gathered that all was well in general and that Sarah was going to have another baby; but he had not settled down to plough through the details. Sarah wrote such enormous interminable letters; heaven knew how she found the time, with four children and another on the way. What is more, she relentlessly expected an intelligent commentary in return, and complained if she didn't receive it, so there was no use skipping. Hugh loved his daughter dearly, but he had never got used to her marriage. Sarah had met Jimmie Graham during the war, when he was a fighter pilot in the Australian Air Force, and she was in the W. A. A. F. Jimmie now worked in the I. C. I. works in Adelaide. Hugh had only a faint conception of what he did. She was terribly happy of course. But all the same.

Hugh pushed the letter deeper into his pocket and withdrew his hand. He looked idly at Ann's desk. It was covered with piles of printed cards saying that the Peronett Rose Nurseries much regretted that, owing to shortage of staff, they could not receive visitors this summer. It was a mystery to him how, in these recent years, Ann had managed at all. Randall's small genius had made the nursery, of course. It was his patient work which had produced the series of new roses, most of them now well known, by which the name of Peronett would be remembered. The younger Randall had been, in his way, a remarkable horticulturalist. He had met Ann when he was studying agriculture at Reading University, where Ann was reading for a degree in English. He had communicated to her his science; but the flame of his originality he could not communicate. Randall was in the end more artist than scientist, and had nothing of the commercial. Hugh recalled his saying once of Ann, 'she doesn't really love the roses. She regards them as a chemical experiment. Perhaps the great days of the nursery were over. Yet it was on Ann's science and Ann's business sense that it depended now.

Hugh looked at himself cautiously in the big gilt rather battered cupid-encrusted mirror that soared over the mantelpiece. With a slightly guilty shock of recognition and detachment he saw a big, stout, stooping man with a dome of bald head surrounded by a thick and longish fringe of brown — grey hair. The round surprised deprecatory eyes were of a limpid brown. The flesh surrounding the eyes had darkened and sunk, and here especially the death's-head was visible. Mortality was there; yet at the same time Hugh could see his younger face present still with a cherubic complacency, alive and spirited, superimposed upon the jutting skull. And if he could see it so touchingly and so yearningly present, perhaps another might see it too.

He had tried not to think about Emma Sands, but of course it was impossible not to. The figure he had momentarily seen at the funeral had certainly been Emma; and he only rescued himself by the reflection that her presence was in bad taste from the reflection that her presence was almost sinister. But Emma had never been afraid of bad taste. She was a person who did whatever she wanted. It was a little later that Hugh reflected that Emma and Fanny had been great friends in childhood, and why should not, at such a distance in time from either object, that childhood friendship be as real to her now as the venomous jealousy with which Fanny had later inspired her. Yet this thought was disagreeable too.

His mind returned in an obsessive way to Randall's mysterious salute. Something in that gesture suggested to Hugh, that Randall was not surprised at seeing Emma. Randall was not surprised, Randall was in Emma's confidence. There was something here which if he attended to it would be perhaps intolerable. He tried not to attend to it; and his grief for Fanny, returning to him now in the house where she had suffered so long, came to him with a kind of healing intensity. He burned himself with that pure pain. But he knew too that he had been touched by something, some leper touch, which would work out its own relentless chemistry, ignore it as he might.

It was odd the way he had kept seeing Emma through those years: seeing her, but never speaking to her. It was as if some god designed that he should not forget. Yet, in a way, he had forgotten. The wound had healed, the anguish had gone, in the end, as he could never have imagined it would. It had never crossed his mind, once the first terrible time was over, to try to see Emma again; and this not because of any sense of duty, but because of a steady failure of inclination, a steady diminishing of appetite. When, at the regular intervals appointed by the god, he had espied her from the top of a bus, glimpsed her, always in the next room, at a picture exhibition, seen her back disappearing into a shop, and once passed her unobserved on an ascending escalator while she descended on the other side, he had felt an extreme but quite momentary sh6ck. He had thought of her as belonging to the past.

For nearly two days now he had known that he would have to talk to Randall about her. What he had seen made it imperative. But it was an unpleasant, even distinctly alarming, prospect and he had put off doing so. Randall had been seventeen at the time of the affair with Emma. He had certainly known a little about it at the time. He had doubtless learnt more since. But the name of Emma had never come up between them, and it was only indirectly that Hugh had learnt, and had tried to forget it at once, that Randall was sometimes to be seen at Emma's house.

What Randall did in London was a mystery to all. In the last few years, and especially since Steve died, he had taken to spending more and more time in London, where he kept a little flat in Chelsea. Ann had increasingly taken over the management of the nursery, so that by now Randall, who even dared to complain about it, seemed more like a privileged lodger than like the master of the house. At some point in this process Randall had given it out that he had decided to become a writer; and shut up in his tower room he had in fact written four plays, none of which Ann or Hugh had been allowed to see. Part of his time in London had doubtless been devoted, unsuccessfully, to getting one of these plays put on. But it had gradually and imperceptibly become fairly evident to Hugh that Randall must have a London mistress. He wondered how evident it was by now to Ann.

During Fanny's illness Randall had spent much more time at home and had behaved in a fairly orderly way, and it had seemed possible to Hugh that the bad patch was now over and that his son might settle down again with his wife and child. Randall's behaviour since their return to Grayhallock had not been exactly reassuring; but it was too early to tell, and what Randall would do next was anybody's guess. Hugh had avoided 'speaking seriously' to his son about his treatment of Ann or indeed about anything else; and he occasionally wondered if this were not, on, his part, a grave failure. He certainly ought to speak to Randall sometime about the drink. That the other things were bad might liberally be thought a matter of opinion, but it was no mere matter of opinion that the drink was bad. These were unpleasant thoughts. And Hugh knew, which was another unpleasant thought, that only the spur of a quite personal and selfish obsession, would ever make him overcome his reluctance to be frank and direct with his boy. Under the pressure of such a spur he now writhed in the direction of a decision.

'And this afternoon perhaps you'd make another search for Hatfield, Ann was saying. She did not like people to be idle. Hatfield, Fanny's cat, had run wild since her death and disappeared into the fields.

'He's gone right away, Hatfield, said Miranda. 'He won't come back ever.

'Yes he will, said Ann. 'Bowshott saw him last week quite close to the house. And the milk I left out got drunk up.

'My hedgehogs drank that milk.

'Anyway you try and find him, and take Penny with you. You're neglecting Penny.

'He wouldn't come back with me, said Miranda. 'He doesn't like me. He's a one-woman cat.

'Well, off you go to change, it's after ten-thirty. Which doll are you taking to church this time? Is Poussette the lucky one?

'That's not Poussette! said Miranda scornfully. 'That's Nanette!

You always mix them up. She uncurled herself and began to make for the door, trailing the doll in one hand.

Half-way there she stopped and turned back to Hugh. 'So sad. I never remembered to ask Granny how that card trick was done, the one where you hit the pack on to the floor and the card you looked at first is left in your hand.

The door banged behind her. Avoiding Ann's eye, Hugh settled down to read Sarah's letter.