A New Lease of Death (26 page)

‘Both right,’ said Wexford, giving Archery’s hand a gentle clasp. ‘I by reason and you by faith. Which, taken all in all,’ he added, ‘is only what one might expect.’

She opened the door to them carefully, grudgingly, as if she expected to see gypsies or a brush salesman from a disreputable firm.

‘I hope you’ll forgive us, Mrs Kershaw,’ Archery said with too loud heartiness. ‘Charles wanted to see Tess and as we were coming this way …’

It is difficult to greet callers, even unwelcome callers, without some kind of a smile. Irene Kershaw did not smile, but she made muttering noises in which he caught the occasional word: ‘very welcome, I’m sure,’ ‘unexpected …’ and ‘not really prepared …’ They got into the hall, but it was an awkward manoeuvre and it almost involved pushing past her. She had grown rather red and she said to Charles, now quite coherently:

‘Tess has popped down to the shops to get a few last-minute things for her holiday.’ Archery could see that she was angry and that she did not know how to vent her anger on people who were at the same time adults and from a different background from her own. ‘You’ve quarrelled, haven’t you?’ she said. ‘What are you trying to do, break her heart?’ Apparently she was capable of emotion, but once she had shown it, not capable of control. Tears welled into her eyes. ‘Oh dear … I didn’t mean to say that.’

Archery had explained everything to Charles in the car. He was to find Tess, get her alone and tell
her
. Now he said, ‘You might go down the hill, Charles, and see if you can meet her coming up. She’ll be glad of a hand with her basket.’

Charles hesitated, possibly because he was at a loss to answer Mrs Kershaw’s accusation and could not bring himself to echo so exaggerated an expression as ‘a broken heart’. Then he said, ‘I’m going to marry Tess. That’s what I’ve always wanted.’

The colour died out of her face and now that there was no occasion for them the tears trickled down her cheeks. Archery would, under other circumstances, have been embarrassed. Now he realized that this mood of hers, tears, a lukewarm resentment that might be her nearest approach to passion, would make her receptive to what he had to say. A tired tigress apparently lurked under that dull suburban exterior, a mother beast capable of being roused only when its young was threatened.

Charles let himself out of the front door. Archery, left alone with her, wondered where the other children were and how soon Kershaw himself would return. Again he was finding himself, when in the sole company of this woman, at a loss for words. She made no effort to help him, but stood stiff and expressionless, dabbing at the tearmarks with the tips of her fingers.

‘Perhaps we could sit down?’ He made a vague gesture towards the glass door. ‘I should like to have a talk, settle things, I …’

She was recovering fast, tunnelling back into the sanctuary of her respectability. ‘You’d like some tea?’

The mood must not be allowed to peter out into small-talk over the cups. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, really …’

She went before him into the living room. There were the books, the Reader’s Digests, the dictionaries and the works on deep sea fishing. The portrait of Jill on the easel was finished and Kershaw had made the amateur’s mistake of not knowing when to stop, so that the likeness had been lost in last-minute touches. In the garden which was spread before him with the unreality and the garish colours of a cushion cover in gros point, the Paul Crampel geraniums burned so brightly that they hurt his eyes.

Mrs Kershaw sat down genteelly and crimped her skirt over her knees. Today, now that it was cold again, she wore a cotton dress. She was that kind of woman, Archery thought, who would wear her winter clothes on and on cautiously until she was sure a heat-wave was fully established. Then, just as the hot weather was ending and the storm about to break, then at last the carefully laundered thin dress would be brought out.

The pearls had been restrung. She put her hand up to them and drew it away quickly, curbing temptation. Their eyes met and she gave a tiny nervous giggle, perhaps aware that he had noticed her tiny vice. He gave a small inner sigh, for all her emotion had gone and her face showed only the natural bewilderment of a hostess who does not know the purpose of a call and is too discreet to question the caller.

He must – he
must
– awaken something from
behind
that pale lined brow. All his carefully prepared openings died. In a moment she would begin on the weather or the desirability of white weddings. But she did not quite do that. He had forgotten the other stock remark that is so handy a conversation starter between strangers.

‘And how did you enjoy your holiday?’ said Irene Kershaw.

Very well. That would do as well as anything.

‘Forby is your native village, I believe,’ he said. ‘I went to see a grave while I was there.’

She touched the pearls with the flat of her hand. ‘A grave?’ For an instant her voice was as raw as when she had talked of a broken heart, then all passionless Purley again as she added, ‘Oh, yes, Mrs Primero is buried there, isn’t she?’

‘It wasn’t her grave I saw.’ Softly he quoted, ‘“Go, shepherd to your rest …” Tell me, why did you keep all the works he left behind him?’

That there would be reaction and that that reaction might be anger he had expected. He was prepared for a flouncing hauteur or even that damning, dulling response so dear to the heart of the Mrs Kershaws of this world: ‘We needn’t discuss that.’ He had not thought she would be frightened and at the same time stricken with a kind of awe. She cowered a little in the armchair – if cowering is compatible with perfect stillness – and her eyes wide and glistening now, had the utter immobility of the dead.

Her fear had the effect of frightening him. It was as communicable as a yawn. Suppose she were to have a fit of hysterics? He went on very gently:

‘Why did you keep them hidden away in the dark? They might have been published, they might have been acted. He could have had posthumous fame.’

She made no answer at all, but now he knew what to do, the answer came to him like a gift of God. He only had to go on talking, gently, mesmerically. The words tumbled out, platitudes and clichés, praise of work he had never seen and had no reason to suppose he would admire, assurances and unfounded promises he might never be able to honour. All the time, like a hypnotist, he kept his eyes on her, nodding when she nodded, breaking into a wide fatuous smile when for the first time a tiny vague one trembled on her lips.

‘May I see them?’ he dared. ‘Will you show me the works of John Grace?’

He held his breath while with torturing slowness she mounted a stool and reached for the top of the book case. They were in a box, a large cardboard grocer’s box that had apparently once contained a gross of tinned peaches. She handled it with a peculiar reverence, her care all concentrated on it, so that she let the magazines which had been stacked on it cascade to the floor.

There must have been a dozen of them but only one cover picture splashed at Archery like acid on the eyes. He blinked away from the beautiful photographed face, the pale hair under a hat of June roses. He had waited for Mrs Kershaw to speak now and her words pulled him out of shock and misery.

‘I suppose Tess told you,’ she whispered. ‘It was supposed to be our secret.’ She lifted the lid of the box so that he was able to read the writing on the topmost sheet of manuscript. ‘
The Fold. A Prayer in Dramatic Form
by John Grace.’ ‘If you’d told me before I would have shown them to you. Tess said I should show them to anyone who would be interested and would – would understand.’

Again their eyes met and Irene Kershaw’s tremulous stare was caught and steadied in his strong one. He knew his face was mobile and expressive of his thoughts. She must have read them for she said, thrusting the box towards him, ‘Here, have them. You can have them.’ He drew away his hands and his body, horrified and ashamed. At once he had realized what she was doing, that she was trying to pay him off with her most precious material possession. ‘Only don’t ask me.’ She gave a little thin cry. ‘Don’t ask me about him!’

Impulsively, because he could not bear those eyes, he covered his own with his hands. ‘I’ve no right to be your inquisitor,’ he murmured.

‘Yes, yes … It’s all right.’ Her fingers touching his shoulder were firm with a new strength. ‘But don’t ask me about him. Mr Kershaw said you wanted to know about Painter – Bert Painter, my husband. I’ll tell you everything I can remember, anything you want to know.’

Her inquisitor and her tormentor … Better a swift knife thrust than this interminable twisting on the rack. He clenched his hands till the only pain he could feel came from the wound where the glass
had
gone in and he faced her across the yellowing sheets of verse.

‘I don’t want to know about Painter any more,’ he said, ‘I’m not interested in him. I’m interested in Tess’s father …’ The moan she gave and the feel of those fingers scrabbling at his arm could not stop him now. ‘And I’ve known since last night,’ he whispered, ‘that Painter
couldn’t
have been her father.’

18

… As ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed …

The Solemnization of Matrimony

SHE LAY ON
the floor and wept. To Archery, standing by helpless, it was some measure of her total breakdown that she had come so far wide of her conventional limits as to lie there prone and shake with sobs. Archery had never in his life reached such a nadir of despair. He pitied with an anxiety that had something of panic in it this woman who cried as if the power to weep had long fallen into disuse, as if she were experimenting with some new and shattering exercise.

He did not know how long this abandonment to grief had lasted or would last. This room with all its apparatus for living what some call a ‘full life’ contained no clock and he had removed his watch to make room for the wrist anchorage of the bandage.
Just
as he was beginning to feel that she would never stop, she made a curious humping movement so that she rested like a flogged overburdened beast.

‘Mrs Kershaw …’ he said. ‘Mrs Kershaw, forgive me.’

She got up slowly, her breast still heaving. The cotton dress was creased into a faded rag. She said something but he could not hear her at all and he realized what had happened. She had utterly exhausted her voice.

‘Can I get you a glass of water, some brandy?’

Her head shook as if it were not part of her body but a separate thing quivering on a pivot. Her voice came in a hoarse croak. ‘I don’t drink.’ Then he knew that nothing could fully pierce the layers of respectability. She fell into the chair from which his questions had prised her and let her arms hang limply over its sides. When he came back from the kitchen and gave her the glass of water she had recovered sufficiently to sip it and to rub with the old refinement at the corners of her lips. He was afraid to speak.

‘Does she have to know?’ The words had a hollow sound to them but the roughness had gone. ‘My Tessie, does she have to know?’

He did not dare to tell her that Charles would have told her already. ‘It’s nothing these days,’ he said, and shed with a word two thousand years’ teaching of his faith. ‘Nobody thinks anything of it any more.’

‘Tell me what you know.’ He knelt at her feet, praying that all his guesses would approximate to
the
truth and that there would be few gaps for her to fill. If only he could deal well with this last task and save her the shame of confession.

‘You and John Grace,’ he said, ‘you lived close together in Forby. You were in love with each other, but he was killed …’

On an impulse he took the manuscript in his hands and laid it gently in her lap. She took it as a religious takes a talisman or a relic and she said softly:

‘He was so clever. I couldn’t understand the things he wrote, but they were beautiful. His teacher wanted him to go to college but his mother wouldn’t let him. You see, his father had a bakery business and he had to go into that.’ Let her go on, he prayed, edging away to squat on the edge of his chair. ‘He still wrote his poems and his plays,’ she said, ‘and in the evenings he used to study for some exam. He wasn’t strong enough to go into the forces, anaemia or something he had.’ Her fingers tightened on the manuscript but her eyes were dry and drained. Archery had a quick vision of the pale pointed face in the souvenir shop picture, only now it was blending into and becoming one with Tess’s.

He let his eyes linger on Irene Kershaw for a brief moment with painful compassion. They had reached a point in this telling where she must, unless he could save her, touch on that which would humiliate her most.

‘You were going to be married,’ he said.

Perhaps she was afraid to hear the words he
might
choose. ‘We never did anything wrong but the once,’ she cried. ‘Afterwards – well, he wasn’t nasty like other boys, and he was just as ashamed as me.’ Justifying herself, her head turned from him, she whispered, ‘I’ve had two husbands and then there was John, but I’ve never been much for that side of things.’ Her head swung back and her face was aflame. ‘We were engaged, we were going to be married …’

Archery knew he must rush on with his conjectures. ‘After he was killed you knew you were going to have a child?’ She nodded, silent now with the enormity of her embarrassment. ‘You had nowhere to go, you were afraid so you married Painter. Let me see, John Grace was killed in February 1945 and Painter got home from Burma at the end of March. You must have known him before,’ he said, guessing, improvising. ‘Perhaps he was stationed at Forby before he went to the Far East?’ A tiny nod rewarded him and he was prepared to go on, drawing someone else’s story out of an inspired imagination, out of a letter from Kendal, a photographed face, the bruises on a woman’s arm. He lifted his eyes from her and clasped his hands tightly to stop the sound that might have been no more than a sigh. Even a sigh would tell her. At the open French window, against the blaze of red petals, Kershaw was standing silent, still and powerfully alert. How long had he been there? How much had he heard? Archery, transfixed, sought momentarily in his expression for suffering or anger and saw a sweetness that brought a sudden strength to his heart.