Читать книгу The Willow Cabin - Pamela Frankau - Страница 16

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“Oh, dear,——” said Dorothy Knowle. “There’s the postman.” She could see him over the top of the hedge, beyond the small strip of garden; he was stopping outside the gate. The second post always arrived just after lunch. Old Dr. Knowle was upstairs taking his sleep. Dorothy’s cry of apprehension had no audience except the dog on the hearthrug.

She opened the front door and hurried down the path beside the laurels to meet the vexation halfway. She took the letters; there was a copy of the British Medical Journal for her father, a postcard from a friend in Switzerland, a seed-catalogue, and two letters from Michael; one addressed to her father, one to herself. Why, Dorothy wondered, did Michael write so often? It was a passion that mystified her. Letters were a burden to write, an intrusion to receive; and the telephone was, on the whole, worse because it made a noise as well. Dorothy’s phobia on the subject of communications from the outside world had once inspired Michael to suggest that her proper place was a nunnery. Anyway, here she was again, feeling fussed and anxious, hurrying to open the nasty thing, with an assurance that something was wrong.

She sat down by the fire in the drawing-room whose main features were chintz and dark mahogany; the room was as it had been in her mother’s lifetime, without the natural disorder created by that sweetly inefficient person. The two things that Dorothy liked best in life were order and continuity.

She opened the thick, expensive envelope with the Manchester Square address on the flap, and out came two sheets of Michael’s handwriting, with the margin that kept magically straight all down the page.

“Dearest Dorothy,

“I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday, for lunch here. The car will meet your train and take you back in time to catch the 4.10. I do appreciate your break with routine for the purpose of saying good-bye to me.”

(“He’s laughing at me again.”)

“As you know, I would have come down for the day if it had been possible to spare the time. I am writing the old man a letter by this post, as I thought he would like it. In any case, as it turns out, I shall be away only six weeks; the idea of going on to the West Coast was too difficult to work out.

“Please do something for me. I fear that it involves visiting Cold Ash, but I can’t ask anybody else to do it. On the mantelpiece, in the library, there is a small carved cat, a stone cat, sitting up; a modern thing. You may remember it. Could you collect it and bring it to London with you? I’d like to have it now.

“I may as well break to you the imminence of another battle over Cold Ash; it looks like the last. Mercedes writes me that she has finally decided to make her permanent home in France and that, in her view, the time has come to get rid of the house. That is all right with me. What is not all right with me is her idea of putting it at the disposal of a refugee-committee here, who will take it over, including the farms, for use as an agricultural training institution. It would come under a scheme that is operating already in this country and it appears to be one of M’s fancies to assist the project.

“I want that house off my mind forever. These people cannot afford to buy it; any idea of holding on, with the place as our joint property, Mercedes acting absentee-landlord, and a gaggle of impoverished voluntary-workers as tenants, is too wearisome to contemplate. I would rather give the house away. At least our domestic problem seems to have reached a climax and, if there were ever a likelihood of divorce, the time is now. I think that this prospect may cheer you, despite the tangle of obstacles that must inevitably precede it.

“There is, I still believe (though I know that you don’t), a basis of goodwill on either side which may make the solution possible.”

Dorothy said, “There!” to the dog, and was not sure what she meant by There, except that her afternoon’s programme of gardening was dislocated and that Mercedes was behaving badly again.

“And he’s still frightened of her; after all these years. She won’t get a letter like this; oh dear, no; she’ll get one of his polite, deferential invitations to discuss the whole thing next time she comes to England. Do you think I’m a fool?” she launched at Michael’s photograph. “Yes; you do; everybody does; I’m just your dull old sister with a face like a hatchet, who hates Mercedes and Doesn’t Understand. Well, you’re wrong. I do understand. I understand why you are making your ultimatum to me instead of to her; bolstering up your courage by putting your refusal down on paper. You’ll agree to her scheme; just you see if you don’t. This letter is bluff; and she’ll call it, as usual.”

When Dr. Knowle came into the room, hesitantly shuffling, with his bent knees and his round shoulders and his newspaper folded open at the chess-problem, Dorothy said, “Father dear, I have to go over to Cold Ash. I think I’ll go now, before tea. Michael wants an ornament out of the library.”

“Michael always wants something, doesn’t he?”

The mild resentment of the old man for his distinguished son often expressed itself in similar grumbles. Dorothy said, “This is nothing difficult; it’s a stone cat off the mantelpiece. I can slip it into my pocket and take it up to him to-morrow; he’s sailing Thursday, remember?”

“What’s the point of taking a stone cat to America, I should like to know?”

“He didn’t say he wanted to take it to America.”

“Stone cats,” Dr. Knowle muttered, as though he had been subject to a plague of these all his life. He settled himself in his chair.

“Here are your letters. If you want an early cup of tea, just ring and ask Mrs. Chandler to get it for you. She’ll be here till five and I shall be back before then.”

“Thank you, dear. Good girl——” he said, absently; she went out, put on her hat and coat in the hall, and pushed her bicycle down the path.

It was an afternoon of still air and spring sunshine, soothing to the ruffled sensations brought by the postman, by the image of Mercedes. Dorothy gave herself up to the sentimental journey, knowing that it was sentimental and hugging it while she shook a wise head at her own weakness.

The road turned off to the left, before the main road reached Telham, and wound inland. It was one of the roads that she had known all her life. Her childhood and Michael’s had been spent in the small Sussex town on the spine of the haunted ridge where Harold had died in battle. It was important to her.

Cold Ash had been primarily important. She and Michael had ridden their bicycles this way. In those days the house had stood empty; it was the secret, cherished place where they could play their games and explore. They had planned to buy it and live in it when they were grown-up. She wished not to recall that it was Mercedes who had made that plan work out for Michael. She saw the stone chimneys rising beyond the hump of the ploughed field and thought, “Forbidden ground; for me it has been forbidden ground always.”

She came to the gate. It was not an imposing entrance. The road had been cut across the original grounds of the house and this had made the front garden a mere oblong of lawn behind the yew-hedge. The hedge did not grow high. You could see from here that the house was of Queen Anne architecture, with a narrow stone terrace dividing it from the lawn.

Dorothy pushed her bicycle up the short drive. She came to the main door, with the chipped urns on either side of it, the shallow, mossy steps. The side of the house faced the lawn; the front faced only this baffling courtyard, with a high wall running round it and a circular fountain in the middle. She felt the beauty and the melancholy of the place possess her again. As children they had said to each other that Cold Ash was like crying in your sleep. It was only when they pushed open the door in the wall and waded through the ragged garden to look out over the weald that they had ceased to feel mysterious and sad.

The servant who opened the door said that the tenants were out for the afternoon; of course Miss Knowle could go up to the library to fetch the ornament. Dorothy crossed the hall and mounted the graceful, curving stairway; she opened the library door. She looked quickly about her, spying for any changes that the tenants might have made. The library still looked much as it had looked seven years ago, when she had assisted with the inventory. The bookcases went almost up to the carved ceiling. On either side of the fireplace, that was perfectly of the period, there stood the embroidered screens. The bronze Demeter was there, and the long table with its milky polish and claw feet. The globe stood in its corner, touched by a rounded splash of sunlight.

Dorothy went to the mantelpiece and picked up the cat. She remembered it now; it was the work of a celebrated modern sculptor who was a friend of Mercedes. It was a neat slender cat, with its front paws close together, the triangular mask of its face wise and supercilious. It fitted comfortably into her hand and she played with it for a moment, thinking that the fawn-colour of the stone was the colour of an actual Siamese cat. She put it in her pocket and went over to the far window.

This was the view that she loved. Below the north lawn and the thin rose trees, the garden petered out, the fields began. She saw the roofs of the farm buildings, the waves of land solid on the clear, washed-looking sky. They were Michael’s roofs; it was Michael’s land. How easily, she thought, he might have found peace here.

It was no inaccuracy of her devotion that invested him with this desire for peace, always unfulfilled. She knew what he wanted because he was a man and unmysterious. Poor Michael. In manner and behaviour, he was still a rock; more of a rock now, perhaps, than ever before; his outward calm persisted. But she saw the truth; that he was a person who had suffered inner torment ever since he met Mercedes. With admirable foolish loyalty, he kept silence, never admitting how often he cursed himself for the mistake of his marriage. He did not need to admit it. Dorothy knew.

Mercedes was a woman, and Mercedes was therefore to be blamed. Dorothy believed the sage who had first said, “If there were no bad women there would be no bad men.” Michael’s sins she saw always in proportion. They were male, with his virtues. As a young woman she had thought that his cardinal virtue was his love of hard work; he was always a simple person inspired with a dæmon of energy. Their parents had been proud of this; they had denied themselves much for Michael. It was Mercedes who had torn the pattern across; Mercedes who had turned Michael against his family, married him halfway through his training and squashed the idea of his taking over his father’s practice. From that hour she had dominated and terrorised him; but she had made the mistake of trying to fit him into her own rich and restless world.

“At least she’ll never come here again,” Dorothy said, staring at the sunlit hill and the sky. Perhaps the worst years of all had been the years wherein Cold Ash had become a playground for Mercedes; a centre for week-end parties. With quiet horror she recalled their ingredients; artists, actors, stupid people whose faces were photographed on society-pages. She had seen Michael enduring them politely, as he endured all Mercedes’ persecutions, being quiet because he was afraid. She did not blame him for this; men were frequently afraid of their wives, and the cold, flashy quality that she found in Mercedes was peculiarly discomforting.

At least Michael had scored a revenge by becoming famous on his own account, by falling out of love with her. Herself an immaculately virtuous woman, Dorothy knew that she should not be consoled by this last thought, but there it was; quietly consoling. Still Mercedes had the whip-hand; she could withhold from him the chance of a second marriage, of a peaceful home, a wife who would love him, a family.

“If only I could believe that he would ever stand up to her. But it’s too late now, no matter what he says. It’s always the same. Three years ago, she wanted to keep the house and Michael didn’t; so they kept it. Now she wants to turn it into some horrible institution; so that will happen.”

She turned from the window; it was time to be going; time for her father’s tea.