The Echoing Stones (14 page)

Not for months – not for years, really – had Mildred had occasion to feel this total relief at the sight of her daughter. Usually, she was scarcely able even to see the girl properly, so thick was the cloud of maternal anxieties that lay between them. But today Flora appeared as a guardian angel, and from Mildred’s point of view behaved like one. Confidently, smilingly, she approached Mildred’s unnerving interrogator, and held out her hand to him.

“Come,” she said. “We have to reach the wood before dark, remember?” and straight away, unprotestingly, he allowed himself to be led away.

From where she sat, Mildred could see that Flora was talking earnestly to her companion as they walked away, but she could hear nothing of what was being said. Her feeling, though, that she herself was the subject of the discourse was confirmed when Flora, some way away now, turned and looked back over her shoulder, and then continued speaking to her companion.

Saying what? Explaining that the lady seated on the bench was her, Flora’s, mother, and reproaching him for scaring her? Or – more likely – explaining to him that it was a waste of time trying to get a sensible answer out of the silly old moo?

Trembling still, and by now stiff with cold, for the sun was quite gone and a sharp little breeze, forerunner of the night, was ruffling the grey water which had been so blue and bright when she’d arrived, Mildred heaved herself off
the bench. Clutching her handbag tight to her side, as if that made her warmer somehow, she set off to the main house. It must be time, nearly, for the place to close; Gordon would be waiting for her. Arnold, too, would be anxious to hustle the last stragglers out of the grounds. The old anxieties about her husband’s performance of his multifarious duties here, and her own ill-defined but burdensome share in them, began to nag at her all over again. Which of course was ridiculous. It was no business of hers any more, none whatsoever.

*

Sure enough, they were waiting on the terrace, both of them. To her amazement, they were together, deep in conversation, which they only broke off when they saw her approaching.

Were they talking about
her
? Had they somehow recognised each other, and effected mutual
introductions
on her account? Or had they just got together by chance over some learned topic inspired by the recent guided tour?

Both, apparently.

“An interesting man, your husband,” Gordon remarked as he backed cautiously out of the still-crowded car-park: but before Mildred could seize on this remark as
introducing
a subject on which, for once, she actually had an opinion of her own, he had launched straight away into a detailed summary of Arnold’s intriguing theory about how the Venetian tapestries could have been safely transported from Italy at the alleged date, despite the ravages of the Piedmont wars.

“Yes,” said Mildred, as the car gathered speed towards the main road: and, “Yes, I suppose so,” and “Yes, Arnold knows a lot about that sort of thing.” And
presently
the lights of the great city embraced and enclosed them, and they were home.

Well, back at Val’s. She didn’t invite Gordon in, for a
confused medley of reasons, uppermost among which was the conviction that he would refuse. For some polite and plausible reason, no doubt, but all the same she would be left wondering if he was beginning to find her boring?

Having successfully by-passed this question at the moment of parting – with the usual chaste kiss on her cheek and brief clasp of the hand – she was faced with it again, later in the evening, as she and Val embarked on their inevitable post-mortem on the day’s outing.

“I don’t want to be rude,” Val remarked – well, not rude enough to bring further confidences to a frustrating stop – “I don’t want to be rude, but what, exactly, does he see in you?”

A good question. It had been churning around in Mildred’s own mind for some time now, so that she was not so much offended by the remark as relieved at the chance it gave her to put her fears into words.

“Well …” She paused, trying for the sake of her self-respect to see some light at the end of the dark tunnel that the question was forcing her to explore. “Well, one thing he did say, Val, he says I’m a good listener!”

Val gave a short laugh, as well she might, for “Listener” was something of an over-statement. In Gordon’s
company
, what Mildred was doing was not so much listening to him as enjoying his level of satisfaction with his own discourse, bolstering it wherever she could with bright little platitudes.

But perhaps this
is
being a good listener? Tentatively, she put this to Val: but was not too much surprised at Val’s robust response.

“You mean he likes the sound of his own voice!” she pointed out. “And you let him get away with it! Oh, Mills, will you never learn?”

Learn what? To stand up for your own tastes and opinions was what Val meant, of course; not to defer to the tastes and opinions of some man.

But what Mildred had actually learned, over many long decades, was that by deferring to the man in your life over absolutely everything that doesn’t matter much to you – as the transporting of tapestries across Piedmont in the sixteenth century didn’t matter to her – you can enjoy a peaceful and pleasant association with almost any man almost indefinitely. Though of course when something crops up that really
does
matter to you, such as Arnold’s mad change of career …

She tried to explain this distinction to Val, handsomely admitting that she
shouldn’t
have succumbed to Arnold’s wishes on this occasion; but in the case of ordinary, unimportant things …

But Val wasn’t having any.

“That’s the whole
point
, Mills!” she cried, thumping the arm of her chair with her fist until the dust flew. “By giving in to a man over what you call the unimportant things, year in and year out, you make it impossible for yourself to stand up to him about
anything.
You will have had no practice; you don’t know how to do it. It’s like trying to fly an aeroplane without first taking flying lessons.”

Since the last thing Mildred wanted to do was to fly an aeroplane, and would never have dreamed of taking flying lessons, the simile was not well-chosen. But Val continued, regardless:

“And that’s why I’m so worried for you, Mills, when I see you walking into exactly the same old trap with this Gordon fellow! You shut your eyes to the fact that he’s a pretentious windbag who doesn’t care if he’s boring the pants off you …”

“Oh, but Val!” Mildred couldn’t help remonstrating. “When he came to dinner that time, you seemed …”

But what Val had seemed was evidently no longer relevant, for she silenced Mildred’s protest with another thump on the chair arm; the dust flew in specks of gold around the reading-lamp.

“I’ve warned you before, Mills, and I’m warning you again. He’s after something. He’s softening you up ready for the kill.”

A rather mixed metaphor, but the general drift was clear enough. Mildred was puzzled rather than alarmed, and in a small way reassured. After all, a man who is “after something” isn’t so likely to be bored.

“What sort of thing, Val?” she asked, genuinely curious; and Val – who had obviously been thinking about it on the quiet – was ready with her answer.

“If you ask me, I think he’s a professional con man. I think he’s planning to steal something from your Emmerton Hall. Something really pricey, and next thing you know, he’ll be selling it in Japan or somewhere for millions and millions of dollars. I’ve heard the Japanese are crazy about Western antiques, God knows why, and money means nothing to them, and so Bob’s your uncle.”

Well, no, Bob wasn’t quite her uncle, not on this wholly speculative evidence anyway.

“But why
me
?” she enquired. “Even if what you say was true, which of course it isn’t, how could
I
be any help to him?”

“How? Why, by knowing the ropes. By having lived in the place all those weeks, so that you know the routine inside out. You know the times when your husband does the locking-up – the order in which he does it. You know where he keeps the keys, I daresay. And Gordon knows, by now, what a muggins you are, he could worm all the information he needs out of you without you even knowing he was doing it! Look at that crazy business with the sheep’s skull! A woman who can be taken in by that could be taken in by
anything,
he must have thought. And another thing, Mills. You remember how he picked you up on that bench in the park, and you assumed it had all happened by chance? Well, looking back at it,
I don’t believe for a moment that it was only chance. I think he’d seen that bit in the local paper about you and Arnold being about to start a new career at Emmerton Hall, with a picture of both of you. Remember? LIFE BEGINS AT SIXTY was the caption.”

Indeed Mildred remembered. It had upset her very much at the time. “Life Begins at Sixty,” right under the picture of both of them. It implied that she, as well as Arnold, was turned sixty, and she
wasn’t.
She was only fifty four. It was enough to upset any woman.

But Val was still following her own train of thought.

“My guess is, he decided then and there to scrape acquaintance with this woman who was going to care-take at Emmerton Hall, where there were so many valuable treasures. And so when he saw you handed to him on a plate – on a bench, I mean, in the park – well, we know the rest. He set himself to suck up to you, to win your confidence …

“You must drop him Mills. You really must. You’ll be ending up in prison if you aren’t careful, for conspiracy to defraud. You won’t stand a chance with the Judge because you’re a wife who’s run away from her husband, and he’ll see that as proof of your criminal tendencies.”

It all sounded rather exciting. Better than being dropped for being boring, anyway.

Perhaps there
was
a case, though, for dropping Gordon herself? Drop before you get dropped, and save yourself the humiliation.

How much would she miss Gordon? As a potential lover, not at all. After four successive outings, and still only that chaste kiss on the cheek, such an outcome seemed very much not on the cards; and in the mixture of relief and disappointment which this realisation caused her, she was aware that relief predominated. She was being spared yet another of those challenges that she might easily prove to be no good at.

Companionship, then? Despite all that Val had said, and despite her own sense of inadequacy as a companion to a man of his calibre, she still nurtured a warm, secret feeling that she
did,
somehow, contribute something to the apparently one-sided conversations that took place between them.

None of this could be explained to Val. Or even to herself.

“I’ll think about it,” she said; and Val, taking this for acquiescence, launched good-humouredly enough into some general reflections on the man-woman predicament, and in particular those aspects of it to which her friend should pay special attention.

“What does a woman of our age need a man friend
for
? Let’s be quite, quite frank about it,” Val urged. Not sex, that was for sure. “In our generation we’ve had sex up to
here
,” she declared, waving her left hand somewhere on the level of her ear. “It’s been rammed down our throats ever since we were at Primary School.”

Although none of this abundance had formed any part of Mildred’s experience, she accepted the “we” meekly enough as the royal plural, and listened with some anxiety to what might follow from such a premise. Companionship, would it be? Even as she made the suggestion, Mildred was aware of how platitudinous the thought sounded, and how ripe for pouncing on.

And pounced on it was.

“
Companionship
, Mills? You must be joking! When I hear of a woman getting married for the sake of
companionship
, I just fall about! Don’t they realise that a husband keeps you away from far more companionship than he provides you with? By the time he’s decided that he can’t stand any of your relatives, and has driven all your friends away by throwing sulks every time they set foot in the house – well, quite soon you find yourself serving a life-sentence, banged-up twenty-four hours a day, two to a cell.”

Had it really been like this for Val? And if so, was it any wonder that her fellow-prisoner had engineered his escape? Mildred opened her mouth to ask about this, but Val was still being quite, quite frank, with special reference to Mildred’s current predicament:

“So what
do
women want a man friend for? Not sex. Not companionship. Don’t kid yourself it’s either of those. No, they just want to show him off to their friends. The Look-What-I’ve-Got syndrome. Ugh!”

Mildred shrank a little, recognising the element of truth in this diagnosis. But this wasn’t the
whole
truth, of course it wasn’t. But while she was still trying to assemble her thoughts on the matter, Val got in ahead of her. Well, Val had the advantage of having assembled her thoughts long ago, at many a Women’s Rights meeting, and therefore having them at the ready.

“Any relationship with a man,” Val was declaiming, “whether inside or outside marriage, is a full-time job for which you aren’t being paid. He is basically an accessory, an advertisement for your personal charms. He’s a framed certificate of your proficiency in the sexual attraction stakes. But, Mills, don’t forget: it’ll cost you! A man in your life –
any
man, whether he’s a lover or not, is like an expensive and fashionable outfit in which you are either too hot or too cold, and certainly can’t move freely, or do anything at all active. So be warned, Mills! Be warned!”

But she spoke good-humouredly, and soon the two of them were enjoying a midnight cup of cocoa, shoes off, feet up on ottoman and sofa respectively, and taking an agreeable off-stage part in a T.V. quiz show: one so stunningly elementary that even Mildred was able to call out the answer to just about everything.

Relaxing thus on the shabby but comfortable sofa, an electric fire purring companionably alongside, it occured to Mildred that these were the bits of life she liked best:
the soothing little interludes that crop up in the interstices of life’s serious activities, like little bright weeds between paving-stones, indomitably thriving in their narrow and apparently unpromising confines.