The Echoing Stones (4 page)

Time to be moving. There were still some details to be seen to in the show-rooms before the crowds could be let in. And, most important of all, there was the “CLOSED FOR REPAIRS” notice to be pinned to the door of the Tea-Room.

Of course, there weren’t any repairs going on in the Tea Room, but what else could he do? Once again, Pauline and Tracey had cried off (something to do with somebody’s sister’s baby-sitter this time) and so Arnold would be entirely on his own for the whole afternoon. There was no way he could do the teas as well as his own job in the show rooms, and “CLOSED FOR REPAIRS” looked better, somehow, than just “CLOSED”. This was not the first time he had been reduced to this subterfuge. Only last week the girls had let him down – on Tuesday, and again on the Saturday. Saturday had been really the last straw, the busiest day of the week, and they hadn’t even bothered to telphone him until the very last moment, when they ought to have been already working. No, it hadn’t been that they were ill, not this time, but they might just as well have been: this time it was the car, the garage wouldn’t have it ready before five, and so …

The
car
? Arnold had been picturing the girls coming up from the village on foot, skipping across the fields in their summer frocks. But apparently it wasn’t like that at all.

“
Walk
?” Tracey had cried, shrill with astonishment, “But, Mr
Walters
…!”

There hadn’t been time to argue; to point out that even by road the distance was barely two miles. Arnold had slammed the phone down; and so now here he was, after less than a week, pinning up his mendacious notice all over again. All over again, too, he was going to have to
face irate members of the public button-holing him and demanding, “
What
repairs?”

“Dry Rot,” he’d told them, out of the top of his head, and for no other reason than that dry rot was the only structural ailment he could think of on the spur of the moment which would show no symptoms visible to the naked eye. Dry rot is the architectural equivalent of a headache: no one can possibly say it isn’t there if you say it is.

But of course, he couldn’t hope to get away with this sort of thing for ever, or even for one more time. Already he was pushing his luck. Sooner or later some aggrieved member of the public would write a complaining letter to Them; and then They would come nosing around on some unlucky afternoon and would report to Head Office. Head Office would then look it all up in their files or their computers or somewhere and would soon find out that no repairs to the Tea Room had been authorised. And then Arnold would really be in trouble. It wasn’t that his real excuse was inadequate – anyone could see that he couldn’t be expected to do two demanding jobs in two different places at the same time. But the point was, he’d been employed as a married couple, and now he wasn’t a married couple any more. Where did that leave him, legally? Out on his ear, almost certainly, Unfair Dismissal or no Unfair Dismissal.

Out in the sunshine, on the semi-circular curve of terrace fronting the Tea Room, Arnold stepped back to survey his handiwork. He had made the notice much larger and blacker this time, filling in the letters with a felt pen, so that the ravening public would be warned of disappointment from quite a distance. This way, their sense of horror and outrage would be just a little bit muted. What had got them on the raw last time, he realised, what had raised their passions to fever-pitch, was to have trudged salivating right up to the Tea Room
doors before learning, from a small pencilled card, that everything was OFF.

Well, he’d made a good job of the notice this time. It caught your eye the moment you turned out of the main avenue. He’d done it on hardboard, too, this time, so it wouldn’t disintegrate even in the rain. If there was any rain. The barometer had been set fair for days now, but you never know …

Opening-time was approaching. Already Joyce,
mercifully
middle-aged and thus with a private life
compatible
with actually turning up for the job for which she was paid – was ensconced in her kiosk at the entrance, setting out her leaflets and booklets and little maps of the grounds.

Rushed and pressured though he was – on top of
everything
else, a school party was expected this afternoon for a special guided tour – Arnold nevertheless allowed himself a few seconds of pure enjoyment, standing alone in the sunshine. This was a magic moment, always, this oasis of golden stillness, of empty, waiting lawns, just before the crowds came bursting in. These were the moments of knowing, for certain, that he was happy, that in spite of the stresses and anxieties of the job – or could it even be because of them? – this was the place where he belonged. This was the life he wanted and to which he had committed himself almost as a novitiate commits himself to the service of God. The pinks and purples of the dahlias, the blaze of golden-rod, the blueness of the sky, the speckled shadows under the great trees – it was all his, his right to it confirmed over and over again by these moments of delight.

*

The school party turned out to be all girls – a relief in a way, though their shrill chatter and shriller giggling ricocheting back and forth against the ancient stone walls made it difficult for Arnold to make himself heard. Still,
they didn’t lark about the way the mixed parties so often did, clambering up on things, pushing and shoving, showing-off, needing to be watched every moment. The two sexes have a deleterious effect on one another, Arnold had by now decided, though without following-through this thought to its somewhat disturbing implications for the world at large. For the moment, its implications for the handling of school parties sufficed and he
surveyed
today’s insurgents with wary satisfaction. Sixteen or twenty of them, ages around fourteen or fifteen he guessed, together with three teachers who looked hardly any older than the pupils.

Three.
Arnold sighed. In his experience to date, the more teachers you had on these school outings, the feebler and the more intermittent was the control exercised. And in this case the situation was exacerbated by the fact that the three of them stayed in a tight little huddle at the rear of the party, discussing in hushed voices some all-absorbing grievance about the atrocious behaviour of some absent colleague in respect of dinner-duty. Now and again, in deference to Arnold’s painstaking harangues, they would abandon their private discourse for long enough to urge the girls to “shush!” or to “Move along”; but as the party shuffled forward it was clear that they were at least as bored as their pupils by the manuscript room; by the Ceramics room; by the Armoury – though a small diversion was caused here by the sight of a suit of sixteenth-century armour.

“Look, hey, what a mutant!” one of the girls shrieked. “A diddy-man, he gotta be, to get insida that!”

Pleased by even this degree of attention to the exhibits, Arnold launched into the interesting question of why it was that the stature of people seemed to have increased over the past four hundred years; but his voice was soon drowned out by further apposite comments from the audience.

“A diddy-man, yeah! A dink! A proper little
skinny-bum
!” – followed by giggles, and much pointing of
forefingers
, and the enunciation of syllables which, to Arnold, conveyed absolutely nothing.

He soon gave up any attempt to instruct and set himself to hurry them through as fast as he decently could in order to get to the wax-works, in the presence of which, he knew, the chattering voices would be momentarily stilled.

And so it was. Even the grievance about dinner-duty shrivelled into silence in the presence of the life-size dead. Under the gaze of these unseeing eyes, the sound of giggling died away. Thomas Cranmer – Anne Boleyn – Lady Jane Grey – Edward Talbot: all doomed, whether by coincidence or because it was a usual cause of death for the aristocracy of those times – all doomed to die by execution.

Arnold seized upon the unwonted silence to make
himself
heard. He had always been fascinated by the Tudor period and he had, of course, read up the subject in a big way since learning that guided tours would be a significant part of his job. There wasn’t much, now, that he didn’t know, and he felt more than competent to answer any questions that the public might toss to him. These girls, he was told, when the arrangements were being made, had only last term been
doing
the Tudor period, and so there would be plenty of questions.

It was for him to set the ball rolling, though, and letting his glance travel over the silent figures, seated in remarkably natural poses at the long oak table, he tried to decide where to start. Which of those brief and tragic life-stories would most effectively capture the imagination of these schoolgirls, young, safe and healthy, untouched as yet by tragedy? Anne Boleyn, perhaps, ordering for her executioner a special sword from France, so that he might sever her neck at a single blow? Little Katherine Howard, who ran screaming up and down the echoing corridors
of Greenwich Palace the night before her execution? Or Thomas Cranmer, holding out to the flames his right hand, the hand that had signed his false recantation, that it might burn first?

They would know these grim highlights of history already, of course. Who could ever forget them? What, then, of poor little Jane Grey, almost a child, only sixteen, when she had slipped into and out of history so briefly as to be almost unnoticed? A quiet, scholarly girl, whose greatest – and perhaps only – joy derived from the study of the Greek and Latin classics. By the time she was thirteen, she was said to be the equal of any scholar in Europe in knowledge of the ancient writers. Even in waxwork, now, four hundred years later, she was portrayed chin in hand, poring over some learned text. Just so would she have been sitting on the eve of her execution, when, it is said, she sat up all through the long night studying her Greek Testament; and when her anxious attendants urged her to try and get some sleep, she countered their concern with cool, unanswerable logic:

“What need have I of sleep, who so soon shall sleep for ever?”

Yes. Lady Jane Grey. So nearly the same age as these young girls lined up in the here and now, alive, in this ancient room. They could not fail to be touched with awe – with compassion – with something.

“Lady Jane Grey was executed when she was not much older than you are,” he began. “And for no other reason than that she was in line for the throne, grand-daughter of one of Henry VIII’s sisters. She was born in 1537, and …”

“We don’t do dates,” came a reproving voice from among the assembled listeners. “Miss Jeeves says history isn’t just a matter of dates, it’s about
people.
”

“Yes, well …” Arnold was momentarily a little thrown, but he rallied. “That may be so, but Lady Jane
was
a
person, wasn’t she? And a very important one, as it turned out.”

“No more important than anybody else,” snapped the well-indoctrinated heckler. “
Less
important, actually, She was upper class. It’s the
working
classes that are important in history. The ordinary people.”

O.K. Let her have her head. Aloud he said, “Well, fair enough. Tell me about the ordinary people in Tudor times.”

Silence. A silence almost as profound as that of the waxwork figures at the table. Then, a cautious voice piped up:

“Well, they lived in dire poverty, see?
Dire
!”

Pause. Arnold did see, but he wasn’t going to let it go at that.

“Go on,” he said. “Tell me more. What was it like, living in dire poverty as they did?”

The party now seemed to be recovering from some kind of culture-shock and various suggestions began to pepper the silence.

“Well, they died of things. They starved. The rich people ate all the food.”

“That’s right. Their babies all died because the rich people ate all the food.”

“And awful diseases they died of too. The Black Death and things.”

“The Black Death was two hundred years earlier than the Tudors,” Arnold was beginning; but now one of the teachers joined the discussion, a slender little thing with steel-rimmed glasses and looking all of fourteen.

“I thought we’d told you, Mr Walters, it’s
social
history we’ve been specialising in, not facts and dates. We’re not interested in chronology and all that. We’re interested in
ordinary
people – their work – their daily lives.”

Recalling the total boredom displayed by teachers and pupils alike when he’d tried to explain to them the working
of the water-wheel, and to draw their attention to the diagram showing the flow of grain from the hopper, down through the runner-stone, to be crushed and fall as flour into the great bin, Arnold found it difficult to keep a grip on the argument. And by now, anyway, his attention was almost entirely taken up by trying to prevent the girls reaching over the barriers and fingering the rich silks and velvets, the delicate lace, in which the models were clothed. In this effort he received a certain amount of perfunctory backing from the teachers. “No, Sadie, leave that alone.” “Don’t touch, Phyllida, you’ll make finger-marks.” “Janie, stop it! If you don’t behave properly, we shan’t be allowed to come here again!”

Not a very terrible threat, not for any of the participants. And anyway, by now the three teachers were looking surreptitiously at their watches, wondering how soon they could decently claim it to be teatime and escort their pupils to the one really popular item on the afternoon’s programme.

Bad luck! Rotten luck! But Arnold did not choose to warn them of the tea-less desert awaiting them. Why should he? Serve them right! See if he cared!

Meanwhile, in London, not in their own home but only a few streets away from it, Mildred hovered uneasily in her friend’s kitchen, wishing she could find something to do that would be a help.

Val hated being helped, that was the problem; a
particularly
embarrassing one, of course, for a guest who arrived “just for the night” nearly three weeks ago, and who still hasn’t found anywhere else to stay.

Not that her hostess was complaining of this state of affairs, not so far. She wasn’t even throwing out hints that Mildred was outstaying her welcome. The uncomfortable feelings were all on Mildred’s side and she tried, as far as she could, to suppress them. What was the point of looking for trouble when Val herself seemed perfectly happy to have her here on an indefinitely extended visit? Really did appear to be happy about it. Mildred still felt warmed and reassured by the recollection of that afternoon three weeks ago when, limp with heat, clutching a single suitcase, her mousy-grey hair in wisps round her flushed face, she had staggered despairingly up to the only front door she knew well enough to venture on such an intrusion and had been confronted straight away by a big, welcoming grin, an outsize mug of tea, and a flood of uncritical sympathy.

“C’mon in! Join the Club!” Val had cried, ushering her visitor into her large, untidy front room, its sash window pushed up as far as it would go to let in the eddies of cool air which every now and then, on the North side
of the house, created a small respite from the prolonged heat-wave of this summer.

“Join the Club!” With these three words Val had lifted her visitor effortlessly and at once over any number of potentially embarrassing hurdles, such as explaining about Arnold, and why she’d walked out on him and what, if anything, she planned to do next.

For Val had recognised it all at a glance, as soon as she saw Mildred and her suitcase in the doorway. Had she, Val, not been through exactly the same thing herself, barely a year ago? Well, not
exactly
the same, because in her case it was Malcolm who had walked out on her; but what difference did it make, which of the warring partners actually upped and left?

“
Men
!” Val had summed it up, flinging herself backward against the sofa cushions, her fuzz of blonde-ish hair making a sort of quivering halo round her outraged face. “
Men
! Men when they retire!
Retirement
, it’s like a bomb, it’s a killer! You might as well be on a terrorist hit-list as have a husband coming up to sixty-five!”

“Well, sixty-one, actually, in our case,” Mildred
interposed
, but Val, understandably, brushed this aside.

“Well – sixty – sixty-five – Whatever. It’s death to the marriage when it happens, that’s for sure. You might as well take out divorce papers in advance when you see the date coming. Husbands go
mad
, stark staring raving mad. All of them! It’s their real natures coming out at last. If they don’t do one crazy thing, they do another.

The crazy thing done by Malcolm, it transpired, had not been (as in Arnold’s case) to plunge headlong into a ludicrous new career. No, in his case he had plunged
head-long
into the arms of a woman whose extravagance, bad temper and history of nervous breakdowns would ensure him a life incomparably more nerve-racking, harassing and exhausting than that as Manager in an International Pharmacautical Company had ever been.

This, anyway, was the version expounded by Val when, that first evening, seated just inside the open French
windows
, the two friends whiled away the summer twilight, and indeed half the night, with a delicious exchange of grievances about their errant husbands.

It was wonderful! Never had Mildred felt so free, so untramelled in the very core of her being. She could speak her mind at last. Once a marriage is over (as hers had been for all of sixteen hours), loyalty is suddenly seen to be nothing more than an encumbrance, a burden, a barrier to clear thinking. Well, it had always been
that,
of course, but in a successful ongoing marriage clear thinking is commonly kept to a minimum anyway, or where might it not lead?

The delights of slowly, and in congenial company, tearing to shreds the character of an errant spouse, savouring to the full every detail of his deficiencies, have never been fully documented in sociological treatises; and in this particular case the joys of the process were greatly enhanced for each of the participants by the
encouragement
they got from the other. They egged each other on and, as the last traces of sunset faded above the straggly lilac bushes and the posts for the washing-line at the end of Val’s garden; as the stars broke dimly, a few at a time, through the pinkish haze of the London sky, a point came when Mildred felt she had actually dismembered Arnold, laid him out piecemeal on a slab, where he deserved to be. She felt cleaned, reborn. With Val’s help she’d quite dispelled that niggle of guilt she’d already begun to feel on the train up. Wasn’t it rather awful, that niggle had warned her, to have left her husband so totally in the lurch? And on a Saturday afternoon, too, at the height of the season, and with no guarantee at all that those two girls would even turn up to do the Teas, let along put their backs into it once there.

But, No, no,
no
! had cried Val.
Guilty
? What a fantastic
notion!
Arnold
was the guilty one, he deserved everything he got. Look how he’d dragged her against her will on this crazy ego-trip of his, without the smallest consideration for her feelings, or even for her health. A typical chauvinist pig, Val declared. No consideration, no sensitivity: totally selfish, totally wrapped-up in his own selfish concerns. Far from feeling guilty about letting him down, Mildred should be feeling triumphant at having had the courage to do her own thing at last, to be her own person.

“You were a
saint
, Mills, to have put up with it as long as you did. No one should be as saintly as that. It’s wrong. It’s anti-life. You could have had a breakdown, you could have ruined your health, slaving all day at this job of his. Much he’d have cared!”

This last couldn’t be quite true, and in her heart Mildred knew it. But so delicious was Val’s unshakeable
partisanship
that it seemed a shame to spoil it by any blurring of Arnold’s villainy.

For half of that first night and for much of the next day (which was a Sunday), the conversation had continued on these lines. It seemed for a while that they would never come to the end of anecdotes about ill-usage by their respective husbands, nor ever tire of the delicious sense of shared outrage engendered by each others’ grievances.

But all things come to an end. On Monday morning Val went back to work, leaving Mildred with what can only be called an emotional hangover from an excess of letting her hair down, of being what Val called “her own person” for a whole weekend. Mildred wasn’t used to being her own person, she found it both tiring and disquieting; and the more so because in Val’s house, it seemed, there wasn’t anything to
do.

“I
hate
being helped,” Val had declared that first Monday morning, deftly preparing a casserole for supper before setting off for work at the Housing Department,
“I really hate it, so please don’t try to tidy up or anything. Just – well – enjoy yourself. Do your own thing.”

What
was
her own thing? Mildred hadn’t had much practice at it, one way and another, and she saw this now, through Val’s eyes, as a grave deficiency. The first thing she must do, of course, was to find somewhere else to live. She couldn’t go on trespassing on Val’s hospitality for ever. And a job, too, of course, though as yet she wasn’t particularly short of money. Money from the joint account, that is. Arnold’s money. It was
too
humiliating.

A job. Yes. That Monday morning she’d got as far as going out and buying the local paper (“Nice to see you back, Mrs Walters,” the newsagent had greeted her, and kindly though it was meant, it sounded to Mildred’s ears like some kind of an accusation, though she couldn’t quite work out why.) Back at Val’s she spread the paper out on the kitchen table.

There were lots of jobs. Pages and pages of them, but even before she had finished reading to the end of the first column Mildred knew already that she couldn’t do any of them. Couldn’t type. Couldn’t drive. Couldn’t operate a switchboard. Couldn’t (as had been made disastrously clear) cope with the stresses of the catering trade.

“I’m so
incompetent
!” she’d wailed to Val that evening, when, the casserole having been consumed and the dishes whisked into the washing-up machine (by Val, of course – “I know
exactly
how I want it done”) the two settled themselves in garden chairs to enjoy the cool of the evening. “I wish I’d trained for something. But what with getting married, you see, and then …”

Val’s response was immediate and predictable.

“What’s getting married got to do with it?” she demanded. “A woman’s entitled to take whatever job she likes, whether her husband likes it or not. If Arnold didn’t approve, you should have told him he could do the other thing! Oh, I know it’s it’s difficult, of course I do, because
Malcolm was just the same. They all are, you know. Once a man gets married he starts to assume that he’s bought you, body and soul. He thinks he has a right to every minute of your time, every ounce of your energy, it’s all there just for
him
,
to be expended on pandering to his whims, furthering his interests. You have to fight it, Mills, you really do. You should have
insisted
on having your own career, right from the beginning. You shouldn’t have listened to his objections.”

Had
Arnold made objections to her having a career? She couldn’t really remember the subject having come up, certainly not in this clear-cut way. And anyway …

“I
did
have a job, you know,” she protested. “For quite a while. I was a part-time filing clerk at Wishart Brothers. The trouble is, no one wants filing clerks any more, it’s all computers and things. But I don’t think Arnold minded. Not at the time.”

“Well, he wouldn’t would he? It didn’t threaten him, did it, not
filing.
Men never mind their wives doing something low-status and boring, just to bring in a little money. It’s if she gets a
proper
job, something that
stretches
her, that uses her
talents
,
that’s when …”

Actually, the filing job had used talents of a sort, though not ones that Val was likely to recognise. Mildred’s talent for not getting bored easily had come in very useful. But, alas, it was no longer the marketable asset it had once been. In an awful lot of jobs nowadays boringness had been replaced by complication, and this didn’t suit Mildred at all.

She tried another tack.

“And anyway, we had Flora in the end, and so whatever I’d done I’d have had to give it up then.”

Val was fairly bristling. She sat bolt upright in her chair, which creaked alarmingly under her feelings of outrage.

“
Why
would you have had to give it up? Why shouldn’t
Arnold have given up
his
job instead? She was
his
baby too, wasn’t she?”

Indeed she was. Mildred’s modest energies could never have extended to finding herself an extra-marital
relationship
, not in a hundred years. The marital one was as much as she could cope with. But still, that wasn’t what Val had in mind. It was the Women’s Lib thing she was talking about; how fathers ought to share equally in the chores of child-care.

Mildred pondered.

“I don’t think actually that men make very good fathers,” she mused: and then, realising what she had said, went on hastily:

“Arnold was very good with her, really, when she was small,” she recalled, trying to be fair. “He used to read to her and things. It was when she was growing older, a teenager and so on … that he began to … Well, so did I, you know. We both did.”

From that point on, the problems of bringing up daughters began to dominate the conversation. Rudeness, untidiness, problem boy-friends, pocket-money … and Val had won – if that was the right word – inasmuch as her Rosemary now had a steady partner and a place at a College of Business Studies, whereas Flora was still causing Mildred untold anguish. All Arnold’s fault, of course, Val assured her. If only he’d spent more time with the girl, cared about her more … In the fading gold of twilight, Val’s hands looked very white and rather beautiful as she gesticulated wildly over the matter of paternal inadequacies. Not all of her accusations were quite fair. Arnold
did
care about Flora, worried desperately about her, though not perhaps in quite the way that Mildred worried. His worries were more general, more wide-ranging – about the girl’s whole way of life, really, and what sort of future she could be heading for. Mildred’s anxieties tended to be more specific, as
the anxieties of mothers often are. The contact lenses, for example. Was Flora taking them out each night and sterilising them properly in the right kind of solution? Was she washing her hands thoroughly before inserting them? How could she be taking these sorts of precautions in that unhygienic hovel, with sleeping-bags all over the floor and the water running brown out of the only tap that worked? And if she wasn’t, might she not contract some horrible eye disease? Mildred wished, passionately, that Arnold had never bought her the things, but all the same, you couldn’t actually blame him for it. He’d just wanted his daughter to look beautiful, to be able to discard her unbecoming glasses, to have the best of everything, despite her surliness and ingratitude.

Val, such a tower of strength in discussing broken marriages and the manifold failings of the male sex, hadn’t proved quite so supportive about Flora, though she’d tried to be.

“Well, at least she’s not pregnant,” Val had remarked at one point, in an attempt at consolation, but, as it happened, this was entirely the wrong thing to say.

Because Mildred would have
loved
Flora to be
pregnant
. An illegitimate baby would be such a healthy sort of a problem, such a normal – even a fashionable – one. One that Mildred could do something
about.
Money. Baby-sitting.
Something.
And, who knows, in this situation Flora might begin to feel – might even show – a spark of gratitude for what her mother was doing for her. And wouldn’t that be wonderful!