Turf or Stone (19 page)

Eirian shut the door.

‘If he wants to come in now he can go through the kitchen,’ she said, smiling at Phoebe. She took up a book. She was a very small woman, whose tiny, tintless face was thin and seamed. The eye sockets were peculiarly deep and age did not seem to have affected her charming blue eyes… her hair was still bushy. After all she was the little girl in the red dress who danced so wildly.

Eirian rang the bell. The tea things were removed by a morose-looking parlour maid with a fringe, whose cap was askew.

Eirian took a letter off the mantelpiece and passed it to Phoebe remarking: ‘From your mother. Something wrong, as usual. You’d better read it, I think.’

She went back to her book. Phoebe opened the letter which was very long and rather untidily written.

‘MY DEAR MOTHER,

Please send Phoebe home at once. I don’t see why I should be expected to bear everything alone, and really, she has had an easy time for two years, while I have had to put up with it all by myself. Matt’s conduct has been most annoying, although until lately he has not drunk nearly so much. Now it’s beginning all over again, for never, in all our
unhappy
married life has he been so inconsiderate and sharp tempered as he has during the last three weeks. He drinks again, and shuts himself up alone. Really, he looks ghastly, and I’m quite prepared to admit that it may be due to illness but it isn’t my fault, and I don’t see why I should have to put up with it any longer by myself. Phoebe ought to come back and see if she can do anything.

‘Yesterday, after sulking all day on something, and looking like a corpse, there was an insane outburst when he went for Philip and Rosamund and me, until both of them were crying and I hit him with the hearth brush. Then he stalked out of the room and sat in the hall with his head in his hands. By that time I was crying myself. I went to him and asked him what on earth was the matter. He said, “nothing, Dolly,” and when I begged him to tell me, absolutely screamed at me and ran upstairs shouting, “Leave me alone, or I’ll get out of all this for good”; who could stand such treatment from their husband? Do you think he could have been threatening
suicide
?

‘Today he has not left the little room he has upstairs; the door is locked and he has had no food, although I carried up a tray myself. I’m sure he is drinking. It isn’t fair on me and the children.

‘To tell you the absolute truth, I sometimes wonder if he isn’t going out of his mind. It sounds dreadful, but, if you had been through some of the scenes I have, you would probably believe me.

‘The other night he came into my bedroom at two o’clock in the morning and woke me up. He was fully dressed and sat on the end of my bed. He was holding his head, and without a doubt he had been drinking. I remember what he said, because it seemed so irrelevant and ridiculous: “Don’t you think it is easier to bear going without something all your life than if you find it and lose it?”

‘I said, “What do you mean?” He repeated the words. I may not have given them exactly as he spoke them, but almost. It was very involved, and he spoke as though he were talking in his sleep. I was very tired. I sat up and
tried to get him to say something reasonable. I asked him if this business of Easter were worrying him and he answered, “Good God, no! Why should you think that?” Then he got up and went to the window for air. He said he felt as though great stones were falling on his head. All this at two in the morning! At last he went out.

‘I haven’t told you what happened here last week. As though we haven’t enough trouble of our own, Easter must go and have an appalling row with his wife, which has resulted in her formally suing for a separation or something of that sort. I think she is a very foolish, weak-minded, hysterical woman – just the sort of person to make trouble wherever she goes. I imagined Matt might be upset in case he has to be a witness, as he saw her directly afterwards. It is so annoying to be mixed up in servants’ affairs. All terribly unpleasant. The summons was served on Easter the day before yesterday in
our
yard. Matt said he saw the constable talking to Easter and handing him the summons. Easter tore it up and cursed and swore he would not go, but afterwards he seems to have told Matt he would. The case will come off next week.

‘I tried to make Matt tell me what he saw the night of the row and he said he had heard a woman scream, and gone downstairs and found Easter’s wife in the pantry, crying with her child in her arms and half her hair cut off. He gave her some brandy. Then he looked at me and said: “but you’ll know all about it soon enough.” Certainly I shall; I mean to go to the police court next week and hear everything. This isn’t all. It appears that in addition to being a rotten servant, this man Easter is a perfectly terrible licentious brute. He’s been carrying on with
women at Pendoig, and here, in our own village. There’s a farm labourer whose wife has just had a baby he swears is Easter’s, and if ever he has a chance to get at him he’ll kill him. One thing, he oughtn’t to be hanged for doing it.

‘This is a dreadful letter. I tell you, mother, I wish I’d never been born, except for dear, dear Philip who is, thank heaven, very well. But even he spends his time playing with Easter’s odious little boy Shannon, a horrible
foxy-haired
little brat who is to be found all over the house, even in the drawing room. I thought I’d break that up, anyway, so I ordered Phil to have nothing more to do with him, and Phil wouldn’t kiss me, wouldn’t come near me, even began to jeer at me, until, on Matt’s advice, I gave way, like a fool. Then I got a governess for Phil. He actually refused point-blank to do any work unless the child was there too. So imagine it, there he sits with his dirty little hands in a box of letters all the morning. And Miss Mason doesn’t object at all.

‘I tell you, we shall be well rid of that brood, for I forgot to say Easter took himself off after receiving the summons and hasn’t come back. Good riddance! I always told Matt to sack him, then all this would never have happened.

‘So please send Phoebe back to cope with her father. I can’t. She can go back later. After all, she’s seventeen. With love.

‘DOROTHY.’

Phoebe folded up this letter carefully and restored it to the envelope. She sat fingering it for a long time. She had turned very white; her face was liable to sudden changes, which seemed almost to transform her features so that one
would hardly have recognised the young girl who had been laughing with Leyden in the street.

‘Well?’ said Eirian.

Phoebe passed her the letter and began to thread her fingers in and out of her long plaits.

‘I must go home,’ she said.

Eirian marked her place in the book with her handkerchief, and laid it down on her knees. She watched Phoebe steadily.

‘Do you really think it’s necessary? Can you do anything?’

‘I don’t think I can, Grannie, but I’d better go.’

‘You evidently take it more seriously than I do.’

‘It is serious.’

‘Of course… if your father really is ill. Your mother won’t be of the smallest use – in fact, she’ll make everything ten times worse. But this business of the servants seems to me quite unimportant. Sooner or later one always experiences these things. Your grandfather had a coachman very like this man, who used to get drunk and beat his wife. Your grandfather once got out of the carriage and thrashed him. I was there, and it didn’t upset me. Dorothy has lost her head. Who is this Easter?’

‘Father’s groom. He’s a very strange man, Grannie. I… hate him.’

‘You are looking worried, Phoebe. If I were you I should feel inclined to go home for a few days and find out exactly what is wrong. After all, it may be nothing new.’

They discussed it for a while, and then Phoebe wrote a letter to her mother. She took it to the post herself. When she returned she went close to her grandmother, who was dozing in her chair.

‘Grannie…’ she said.

Eirian moved her head, but did not open her eyes.

‘Put some coal on the fire, dear. It’s cold.’

Phoebe did so, and for the first time tears came into her eyes. Her grandmother’s fair share of troubles were over… let her be. Phoebe went away.

For over two years she had tried to stifle a nauseous memory: she was fully aware that Matt and Mary were, or had been, lovers. She had seen them kiss, and she had never dreamed that two people could be so savage… she had heard them arrange to pass a night together and she had never imagined that two faces could be so pinched and agonised with momentarily frustrated love. It had made her sick, this dreadful inadvertent discovery which in the end had compelled her to go and live with her grandmother. Even then, she had been pursued by an unsigned letter which informed her that Easter also knew everything. That he himself had written it she never doubted. It was hideous, mocking, like his smile. She was escaping and he could not prevent her, but she should not get away without a final pang.

Could she have done anything to prevent the imminent explosion of which her mother was so completely unconscious? Dorothy was going to the police court; that in itself made little difference, save for the horror of public discovery, for, as Matt had bitterly remarked, she would know all about it soon enough. But there before a crowd, before a Bench who knew them, there Easter would surely blow the Kilminster household to jagged scraps unless something could stop his wicked mouth.

‘I’ll tell mother myself rather than that.’

She lay awake tearing at her mind.

The next morning she started for The Gallustree. Seeing the little dictionaries on the dressing table she put them aside as indifferently as if they had been Philip’s toys.

That same afternoon Dorothy and Matt were together in their drawing room. The weather was wet, the rain falling heavy and fast with a drumming roar. They could hear the conservatory door banging in the draught.

Dorothy was sitting by the window on a green lacquer chair, in front of a lacquer chest of drawers, holding up a long strip of Chinese embroidery on satin. From the open drawer bright silks spilt over her knees – purple, sheeny blue, dull rose, and greenish yellow. The floor was littered with bits of brocade and lace. Her head was turned away from Matt, who was lying back in his chair, apparently asleep.

Gladys brought in the tea. Her somewhat noisy arrangements roused Matt and he sat up, his hands clasped before him, staring blankly across the room. His face was bloodless: he appeared like a man who has had a terrible shock from which he has had no time to recover.

‘Tea’s ready,’ Gladys announced, as she went out.

Dorothy was rummaging with her back turned.

‘Where are Philip and Rosamund?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Having their tea in the kitchen, I suppose.’ She came to the tea table, lifted the teapot and set it down again without pouring out any tea.

‘Matt!’

‘Yes, Dolly?’

‘Have you a headache?’

‘No.’

She rose and sat down again on the arm of his chair, in a coquettish attitude, laying two fingers on his hair.

‘Darling…’ she said after a pause. He drew a deep breath and bent his head.

‘If I met you today for the first time I should fall in love with you all over again. There, what a compliment! Make me a bow. Or kiss me… yes, kiss me, Matt….’

‘Don’t, Dolly.’

She kissed him.

‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’

He could not answer her. He leant back against her arm, his face smothered in her hair, and he longed to push her away. She excited him. He smelled smoke, and ‘Dernier Soupir’, and a far older subtler perfume, something like sandalwood which clung to her fingers from the silks she had been handling.

‘What
is
it? Tell me… don’t pretend any longer. There’s something I’m sure. I won’t be angry. I’ll keep my temper. I’ll help you.’

She clasped his face between her hands. He plucked at the arms of the chair.

‘Will you?’

‘Yes. If it isn’t too bad. But you’d never be really bad, would you? Because I couldn’t bear it.’

‘What a help you are! What a support you have always been! A tower of strength to me,’ he whispered, vibrating with bitter emotion. He raised his arm, closed his hand over hers, which still lay on his hair, and passed it smoothly over his brow.

‘I’ve seen you do that to your canaries – smooth them
with your finger, I’ve heard you petting them and cursing them, like you do me. You fool… you fool of a woman, what use to a man have you ever been?’

He was still passing her hand regularly over his forehead, and his voice was rising almost to a pitch of hysteria. Dorothy dragged her hand away.

‘I’ll never try again!’

He continued disjointedly: ‘What do I care for anything? I’m done. Let them say what they like.’

‘You
shut up
,’ screamed Dorothy, vixenish. She sprang to her feet and stamped, her face creasing with temper. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you’re off your head.’

‘So do I,’ he remarked, going towards the door.

He looked at her.

‘I hope to God I’ll be free one day,’ she shouted. Whether it was some actual pang that passed over his face, or whether he turned paler she could not tell, only something like a white flash transformed every feature. He left her. She snatched a biscuit, nibbled it, threw it in the fire, muttered ‘
Impossible
,’ and looked at the clock. Phoebe would arrive any minute now. Matt went through the dining room, pushed up a window, and stepping out into the rain, followed a stone path round to the back premises. Passing the kitchen door which was slightly open, he heard the servants scolding and the children’s laughter. Philip was chasing Gladys round the table with a dripping spoonful of jam…. Custom only muffled Matt’s footsteps. He noticed as he went along by the wall how the water butt was overflowing across the path, and how rich and spongy the thick moss on the laundry roof looked.

Farther on, almost hidden behind laurels and junipers there was another door, painted dark green. He pushed up the latch and walked straight in. The door led into a large stone room, with slate shelves on three sides which were crowded with dishes, and wire meat-safes. Crockery was piled up untidily. A small lamp burned. It was the larder.