Crescendo (16 page)

“Dot! Is that you? You're home early,” exclaimed Ethel.

“Am I?” said Dot in a spiritless tone. She stood with her back to Ethel, not moving, one hand resting on the banisters.

At once Ethel knew what was the matter.
She
knew.
She
guessed. You couldn't deceive Ethel.

“I knew it in a flash,” she heard herself saying to Mrs. Clapham. “That Cressey hasn't come up to scratch. He's disappointed her. He's made it clear he doesn't intend matrimony, and wasn't Madam Dot disappointed! I've always been pretty quick in the uptake, you know, and I guessed it as soon as I saw her. Talk about drooping! She looked right down wilted! Or perhaps I'd better say jilted!”

She could not help grinning.

Dot turned towards her.,

“By the way, Mrs. Eastwood,” she said in a high uneven tone: “I was going to tell you on Friday, but I may as well mention it now. Will you take a fortnight's notice from Friday, please? I've decided to join my sister in Scarborough immediately.”

She ran up the stairs and into her room and bolted the door behind her.

Ethel stood gaping. Then a gust of anger swept over her. Who did Dot Dean think she was, giving Mrs. Ethel Eastwood notice in an offhand way like that? Standing halfway up the stairs! Throwing it out without any reason given, as cool as a cucumber.

“No reason given,” she heard herself explaining to Mrs. Clapham. “Not a single word of any reason. That's what annoyed me, Mrs. Clapham. Not a word of excuse or reason. Of course it was all due to that Cressey you're so fond of—he's let her down. But that doesn't excuse her throwing me off like that, does it? ‘Join my sister in Scarborough immediately.' Hoity-toity! After all I've done for her, too. These young people nowadays have no gratitude, Mrs. Clapham, no decent feeling at all. Look at those Martins! And now Dot Dean. No consideration for me, having to get another lodger at short notice, no consideration at all.”

At this her anger suddenly fell from her, and fear took its place. The money, crisp new notes, which Dot had paid her so regularly
every week for the last two years, would cease in a couple of weeks. Its absence would leave a terrible gap in Ethel's budget.

All her worries rushed forward, clamouring, beating upon her mind with painful blows. A new lodger. And who could she find? You read such awful things nowadays about men lodgers murdering their landladies and stealing their money; not that Ethel was fool enough to keep much in the house, but that didn't seem to prevent the murders. On the other hand, women lodgers were usually pernickety, wanting this or that and continually grumbling. Who could she find? Where could she look? Should she advertise? No; that was sure to bring one of those murdering thieving men down on her. Who could she consult? And there was that side of the house which really must be pointed before the winter rains. And the sink at Number 17 which was badly cracked, you couldn't say otherwise, and the shop which needed outside painting. There was her income tax and her Schedule A, and the ball tap upstairs which was behaving badly, and her bank balance which was lower than it ought to be. Dot's defection had hit her in her most sensitive spot. Her financial position was threatened.

She sighed and came to herself and found she was still standing at the foot of the stairs, just where Dot had left her. Vexed, she shook her head irritably and moved with ponderous steps towards the kitchen. On the way she caught sight of herself in the hall-stand mirror. Her large square face, usually so set and firm, looked weak and frightened. How thin and grey her hair was nowadays! She was growing old. Old and poor. Panic seized her. She sank heavily into the kitchen rocking chair, a horsehair relic of Fred's mother's days. Too dispirited to rock, she sat forward motionless, her hands spread on her knees, her shoulders hunched, brooding.

3

After a while she began to rally from the first shock of the blow. Well! She wasn't going to be knocked over by a chit of
a girl giving notice. Not she. Not Ethel Eastwood. If she couldn't find another lodger to her liking, she'd have to make up the money in other ways. When this new Rent Act came in she'd be able to put up all her tenants' rents—not before it was time, either, thought Ethel virtuously. She stirred, and began to rock herself slowly backwards and forwards. Meanwhile … Was there anything she could do meanwhile? Anything to make up the loss of Dot's money?

Yes! She rather thought there was! Ethel smiled, and began to rock more vigorously. Tenants needn't think they could put her off with silly presents instead of paying their rent, thought Ethel with a virtuous sniff—for it was only a present, after all, whatever he might say. He
said
it would more than pay a month's rent, but that was nonsense. She'd take it back, and ask for her money in exchange. After all that was what she had meant in accepting it—simply to hold it as a kind of pledge, for him to redeem with the rent money when he was able. He'd better be able now. Because Mrs. Ethel Eastwood couldn't wait any longer for her rightful money, not with Dot leaving and everything. She'd go up there first thing tomorrow morning, you could bet on that.

But wait a minute. Why not go now? She wouldn't be able to sleep a wink all night unless she did something to offset Dot's notice. When money worries harassed her mind she was apt to toss and turn in a perfect stew for hours. So why not go tonight? It was a nice light evening. She could take the Hudley bus as far as Blackstalls Bridge, change there into the Black-stalls Brow bus, get off at Brow Lane and walk up to High Royd, get her money and come down the lane and catch the bus on its return journey, just as she had done before. (Though it was a shame to have to spend four bus fares to get her rightful rent, still, for the sake of peace of mind, she'd do it for this once, and teach that Freeman a lesson.) Of course it might take a little longer than it had before to get her money, with the present coming into it and all that. But not much longer.
She rather fancied she was a match for Mr. Francis Freeman. More than a match, she rather thought.

She laughed aloud, and rising from her chair began to bustle about the house making preparations. There was no sound from Dot's room as she passed the door.

“Probably sobbing her heart out beneath the bedclothes,” thought Ethel, smiling. “Well, she needn't think I shall beg her to stay, because I shan't.”

She took out Freeman's present from her wardrobe drawer and without troubling to wrap it up wedged it into her big shopping bag. (It was small enough to fit in fairly easily; that in itself showed you how little value the thing had, didn't it? Quite a small thing. She'd been a ninny ever to accept it, even as a mere pledge, a token; but she'd been feeling pretty well off at the time and the old man had a way with him.) She put on her good flowered print and her off-white coat and hat and her chamois gloves and black court shoes, and decided as she looked in the glass that although her hair was thinning and her bust swelling, she was still a smart good-looking woman, equal to anybody.

She caught the Hudley bus without any rush, made the transfer to the Blackstalls bus at Blackstalls Bridge successfully, secured a good front seat, and clasping her bag firmly in her ample lap, was borne away up and up among the hills that surrounded Ashworth and Hudley.

“It must be awkward driving up these hills in the winter,” reflected Ethel, as she had done the last two months when she had visited Mr. Freeman. “I shouldn't like to be a driver on this route. But then, of course, they're paid for it.”

At Brow Lane she dismounted. The bus rolled away along the flank of the hill.

Ethel stood considering. There were two routes up to High Royd. The main way led up Brow Lane, a steep cobbled causeway which curved round the slope of the overhanging brow from which its name was derived and brought you to the
side of the farmstead before meeting a gate and degenerating into a mere bridle path over the moors to Blackstalls. (This was the old route to the upland township of Blackstalls, Ethel had heard say, but it was so steep and rough that later road-makers had rejected it with a shudder and taken the longer way round.) There was, however, another route to the house available for pedestrians which was even shorter and steeper than the lane; namely some steps through a stile in the wall and a flagged pathway straight up the rocky, grassy, heathery bank itself. This pathway was certainly much shorter, reflected Ethel; if she took the pathway, she would have more time in which to extract the rent money from Freeman. But it was really appallingly steep. And then again, possibly the fact that the interview must be very short because she must leave quickly to catch the bus might be useful in the interview with Freeman. She could perhaps more easily bustle him into it. She turned up Brow Lane.

Soon she came in sight of the old stone house. It was very old: stone lettering above the porch gave its date as 1672. Its twin-gabled roof was made of stone tiles. As she approached Ethel eyed these suspiciously; but apart from a little moss here and there they looked in good condition.

The appearance of High Royd vexed her. She had let it very cheaply because it was almost a ruin, but now it looked quite smart, “all poshed up,” Ethel described it to herself, with glossy black and white paint, and old tubs painted black standing by the door with cheap flowers, nasturtiums and such, growing in them. Of course she ought to have been pleased because her property had certainly increased in value under Mr. Freeman's care, but somehow it annoyed her. She disliked all that arty, highbrow stuff. She felt at once snubbed and contemptuous in its presence. Who had ever authorised that expenditure on paint, anyway? Certainly not Ethel; as far as she knew she had ordered simply the minimum number of coats of a respectable drab. No doubt Freeman had painted
it all himself—just like his cheek. The inside of the house was just as bad, too, she remembered sourly; some of the walls were painted different colours, and others had pictures actually painted on them. Such nonsense! There was one very long picture, for instance, a kind of panorama of what you could see from the front windows of the house, showing the hills and the valley and Ashworth and Hudley down at opposite sides in the distance, with mill chimneys smoking. As if mill chimneys were proper things to be put in pictures!

Hot and breathless from the climb, Ethel paused a minute before turning along the front of the house to the doorway. A large black cat, its paws tucked in, lay on the wall facing her in the evening sunshine. Motionless, it gazed at her stonily from gleaming yellow eyes. Ethel took a step forward. The cat leaped up and fled, with an effect of insult. Ethel tramped on angrily. She felt a trifle nervous, for Mr. Freeman was a rather overpowering sort of man—“his eyes stick out like chapel pegs,” she remembered uneasily—but all the same she meant to stand no nonsense; she couldn't afford to stand any nonsense now that she was losing her lodger; she meant to have her rent.

1

He was old, of course. His strong, solid body, once so magnificently robust, so instantly responsive, though still a powerful instrument now fell short of muscular perfection; his physical functions were beginning ever so slightly to falter—they were already something of a nuisance to himself, soon they would become a nuisance to others. The thick black hair
which once sprang so vehemently from his great forehead, though still plentiful and wiry, was beginning to recede and whiten; the skin of his hands had begun to wrinkle, his bold blunt profile had blurred and roughened.

But all this was of no consequence if one accepted it with the dignity of full awareness. It was good to have a time, before the thought of death became too intrusive, of leisure in which to survey one's life, acknowledge one's defeats and commemorate one's victories, to repent of one's stupid blunders and unintentional cruelties, to savour the agonising, joyous, passionate, tender, angry, striving whirl of sensation which had been one's life.

And High Royd was a good place in which to perform this survey.

Of course it was strange, and sometimes struck him as unbearably ironic, that he, after his wide rangings over the capitals of Europe, his frequent excursions to New York and Hollywood, should be tucked away in this quiet, remote, almost barbaric spot. But from this lofty perch one saw on either hand great vistas of Pennines rolling away into the distance; while at one's feet, as one leaned against the low wall of the little garden, fields of long grass, moulding in intricate curves the contours of the hills, plunged headlong down to the road and thence to the valley and the invisible river far below. Far to the right down there, with the yellow evening light blazing here and there in sudden gold on its windows, lay the town of Hudley; to the left, more in shadow for some grey clouds were rising up the sky, lay the town of Ashworth. Both these teeming industrial cities, so important in their own eyes, looked at this distance like agreeable toys, their mill chimneys and water towers, their cinema domes and school blocks, their long terrace rows and concentric brick housing estates, taking on a playful, childlike quality; it was easy from here to compassionate them, to forgive what went on in their tiny neat little streets, to perceive the fundamental well-meaning innocence
of human activity, the pathos of humanity caught in an externally imposed predicament. Freeman smiled at the towns benevolently now, and examined the wide landscape with the eye of an artist.

In the west a charming though not vivid sunset was developing in shades of pale gold and grey. The wind—there was always a wind at High Royd—rippled the fields; red sorrel, white hemlock, tall dandelion clocks in fluffy grey and branching golden buttercups bowed their heads rhythmically amongst the deep grasses, which as usual in the West Riding were of a somewhat muted green.

“A pretty landscape,” decided Freeman. “A bright scene.”