‘Don’t laugh at her, Thaddeus.’
Although the keyhole of the connecting door contained no key, Maidment did not stoop to a more intimate
witnessing of the scene. He did not see Thaddeus – in pale corduroy trousers, tweed jacket and tie – standing in front of the empty fire-place, nor observe the holding back of Letitia’s tears. The deep blue of her dress reflecting the dots of sapphire in her earrings, her fair hair plaited in a coil, she stood also, pressed into the corner by the door, as though her sympathy for Mrs Ferry consigned her there. Her dog – a retriever she had found as a puppy, drowning in a ditch – was stretched out between the two sets of french windows, half an eye on the misty garden outside.
‘I’ll do whatever you say, Letty. This is too little a thing to disagree about.’
Maidment carried that plea to the kitchen. ‘If there’s going to be quarrelling between them,’ he gloomily predicted, ‘it’ll be the end of us.’
In retrospect, a few hours later, there is a harshness in the statement that passed unnoticed at the time. Phlegmatic and an optimist, Zenobia simply retorted that if he was talking about separation or divorce he was being altogether too pessimistic. Married couples disagreed, as they had observed both in a personal way and in their experience of other households. The infant born four and a half months ago in this one will become a child with characteristics and a nature of her own, an influence for stability and for good should such an influence be needed, which Zenobia doubted. Colouring her argument, she touched upon the occasion of the birth: cherry brandy poured in the kitchen at a quarter past eleven at night, she herself clapping her hands, then clasping them to give thanks, Mrs Iveson in the house as the prospective grandmother, the midwife brisk and self-important, the January night damply mild. After the gloom
of miscarrying in the past it had been the happiest of events and most certainly boded well.
‘Added to which they do not row at all, those two.’
When first they came to the house, before Maidment made his way through past and present correspondence, and listened in on the kitchen telephone when Zenobia’s back was turned, the Maidments’ impression was that Thaddeus Davenant’s wife had done well for herself. They had not known the house gone to rack and ruin, and did not then realize the circumstances of its rescue. Now they knew everything.
‘I’m only saying,’ Maidment defended himself. ‘I’m only telling what’s said.’
‘They’re suited. We both know that.’
Favouring black in clothes worn tightly, accentuating plumpness, Zenobia has soft hazel eyes in a soft face, her cheeks streaked like two good apples, her hair flecked with the grey her forty-nine years demand. In contrast, her husband is a hawk-faced man, dark-jowled and lankly made, his servant’s wear – black also – completing the priestly look he cultivates. Second to his servant’s curiosity, Maidment’s interest is the turf.
‘Their natures complement one another,’ Zenobia’s insistence firmly went on. ‘That is important.’
Leaving the kitchen with cloths and a tin of Mansion polish, Maidment did not pause to comment on that. Strengths and weaknesses were distributed to the marriage’s advantage, Zenobia’s view was, and neither party trespassed on ground that was already claimed: alone again in her particular domain she reflected on that, and saw the future bright.
‘Please go to her,’ Maidment heard, his cloths on the dining-room table, the lid taken from the polish tin. A hole-in-corner thing, he concluded, a long-ago affair his employer could hardly be blamed for not wishing to pick over.
‘Go
to her? She doesn’t actually ask–’
‘Darling, she asks for reassurance and a little money. A dying woman who is alone, Thaddeus.’
‘She doesn’t actually say she’s dying.’
Heard by Maidment but not seen, the dog, called Rosie, yawned, then pushed herself on to her feet, slipping about on the polished boards with a scrabble of paws. She settled herself again and, while the two familiar voices continued, slept.
Thaddeus was patient and conciliatory. Quarrels were pointless; they did no good; nothing was ever gained. He had been careless, he was to blame. But even so this need not become more tiresome than it was already, and visiting Mrs Ferry would certainly be as tiresome as anything he could imagine.
‘I’ll write, Letty. It’s all she wants. It was nineteen seventy–nine when I knew her. It would be awfully difficult, meeting again.’
Dot she’d been in 1979, not Mrs Ferry, as somehow in Thaddeus’s thoughts she had since become. Receptionist at the Beech Trees Hotel – two AA stars – she had married Ferry, who was its manager, sharing his duties when they returned from honeymooning. A little later she’d been unfaithful to him in Room Twenty. Airless and poky, with windows opening on to the hotel’s well, Room Twenty had been suitable for surreptitious afternoon love, being tucked
away and quiet. ‘Two of a kind, dear,’ the husky voice came back to Thaddeus, the fleshy limbs, hair dyed a shade of henna. ‘Bad hats, bad news,’ Mrs Ferry liked to whisper in Room Twenty, an older woman who’d been around, who had renamed the cocktail bar the Pink Lady and the dining-room The Chandeliers. She folded underclothes on to the one chair the room supplied and afterwards, putting them on again, often spoke about her husband, her voice gone slack, touched with disdain. ‘Tried going without it, dear, but it doesn’t work.’ His sandy moustache was what he tried to go without; he had a gammy leg as well. A likeable enough man in Thaddeus’s memory, who would presumably have left her years ago.
‘Please, Thaddeus.’
‘If you really want me to, of course I’ll go to see her.’
He smiled although he did not feel like smiling. It wasn’t necessary to visit the woman and he did not intend to. He wondered if the nature of the relationship had crossed Letitia’s mind, if even for a passing moment it had occurred to her that the woman she wished to see assisted had been his associate in passionate intimacy, that they had deceived a decent man, carelessly gratifying desire. Even after six years of marriage he didn’t know his wife well enough. She could have suspected everything or nothing: her tone gave no clue when next she spoke, only a freshness in it marking the end of the contretemps.
‘This summer will be an idyll,’ she said, and he knew she meant because it was Georgina’s first. A quality in Letitia often anticipated happiness, and for a moment Thaddeus regretted his own shortcomings in this respect.
‘I have the pullet chicks to collect this afternoon.’ She
smiled and crossed the room to kiss him. ‘Thanks for doing the box.’
That morning he had attached a wooden box to the carrier of her bicycle, large enough to contain the six chicks she had arranged to fetch. Since she did not drive, Letitia cycled about the lanes – to collect honey from a bee-keeper she had got to know, or tomatoes because Thaddeus didn’t grow them any more, or to call in to see old Mrs Parch or Abbie Mates. Even when it was cold, or raining quite hard, she preferred cycling to walking or being driven. She had made the lanes her own, local people approvingly remarked to Thaddeus, and he agreed that his wife knew the lanes well by now.
‘I’ll settle Georgina in the garden before I go. The sun is trying to come out at last.’
Thaddeus opened the french windows, Rosie lunged to her feet. Why Letitia should wish to keep chickens would once have been bewildering, as would her concern for a woman she had never laid eyes on. She didn’t know about chickens. She won’t know whether the half-dozen shown to her are good of their kind or not. Nor will she know if the man selling them is telling the truth about their being disease-free or about whatever other hazards there may be. She will believe the man, every single word he utters, and somehow her purchases will survive disease and lay the eggs expected of them: when Letitia trusted to luck she was more often than not rewarded. This irrational trust, and Letitia’s goodness, the practical steeliness of her resolve, were entangled in a nature that was disarmingly humble. It was his considerable loss, Thaddeus was every day aware, that he did not love his wife.
‘Yes, it’s going to be sunny,’ he agreed.
That morning, too, he had constructed a coop, eight posts driven into an out-of-the-way patch of ground, chicken-wire stapled into place, a crude door, mostly of chicken-wire also. The pullets will spend only their nights in it, safe from the jaws of foxes. By day, they’ll scratch about among the silver birches.
‘I don’t think I should be long,’ Letitia predicted. ‘An hour maybe.’
‘I’ll cut the grass.’
‘You’ll keep an eye on Georgina?’
‘Yes, of course.’
In the dining-room Maidment gathered up his cloths and polish tin. In the kitchen Zenobia beat up eggs for a sponge cake, saying to herself that one of these Sundays they must drive over to see the Scarrow Man, a wonder cut from the turf of Scarrow Hill. Georgina was wheeled into the garden, and settled beneath the big catalpa tree in case the sun became bright.
Later, Maidment watched his employer throwing an old tennis ball for his wife’s dog, then starting up the lawn-mower, although in Maidment’s opinion the grass was still too wet to cut.
Why don’t you make a sign?
a previous communication from Mrs Ferry had chided, the violet writing-paper stained in a corner with a splash of something yellow, which he had unproductively sniffed.
I am a nuisance perhaps. Or are you gone away? ‘Has the old house become too much for him?’ I say to myself. ‘Has he ages ago gone from it and do my letters lie dusty in the hall, picked up by no one? Yet how attached he was to that house!’ I say again. ‘It would fall down around him yet he would not leave!’ How much
a single line would mean! That and any little you can spare a needy friend
.
Maidment’s reconstruction of the friendship had established that Mrs Ferry was aware his employer was married now. She was not in the business of making trouble, she had assured, each word of that underlined twice. But neither that nor her belief that the house had been abandoned rang true. What did was what wasn’t written: that she had come to know there was money where once there hadn’t been. There was a taste of blackmail here, in Maidment’s view.
In the kitchen Zenobia’s sponge cake cooled on a wire tray, and when Georgina was in the house again and Maidment was laying the dining-room table Thaddeus pushed the lawnmower over the cobbles of the yard, its engine still running, the grass of the two lawns now cropped close. He turned the ignition off and, watched by Rosie, her shaggy head interestedly on one side, he hosed away the debris of clippings from the blades. Letitia was taking longer than she’d said and he imagined her asking questions at whatever farm it was she had gone to, and listening to the answers in her careful way.
The clock in the hall was striking six when the two policemen came.
There is Georgina to consider now: Letitia’s mother says that first, and Thaddeus wonders if somewhere beneath that comment there is Mrs Iveson’s wish to bring up her grandchild herself. There is no reason why the thought should not be there, why Mrs Iveson should not have envisaged Georgina in the flat near Regent’s Park, why grandmother and grandchild should not belong together, both being alone in the world. The assumption that he will not come up to scratch as a father on his own seems to Thaddeus to be a natural projection of Mrs Iveson’s more general opinion of him.
But on the telephone one morning, just over a week after the funeral, nothing of that outrageous kind is mentioned. Instead, Mrs Iveson speaks of the employment of a nanny. ‘I’ll help you choose one,’ she offers, ‘if you would like me to.’
Taken aback, for he had not considered such a necessity, Thaddeus hesitates before replying. ‘You feel I should take on a nanny?’ he responds eventually.
‘I rather think, you know, Letitia would want us to. If you advertise,’ Mrs Iveson quietly continues, seeming to Thaddeus to have taken charge of the matter, ‘I’d come and look the possibles over.’
‘It’s kind of you.’
‘You’ll phone me when you’ve had a few replies?’ And
Mrs Iveson suggests where the advertisement should be placed and the form some of its wording should take. It is a woman’s thing, Thaddeus tells himself, and therefore understandable that his mother-in-law should slip into this role: she is not by nature a domineering person.
‘Yes, I’ll be in touch,’ he agrees. ‘I’m very grateful.’
So, for the moment, the matter is left. ‘A girl is to be taken on,’ Maidment reports in the kitchen. ‘Mrs Iveson to have a hand in the appointment. Which stands to reason.’
It is Zenobia who later draws attention to the little room next to the nursery, which long ago nannies must have occupied. She puts it to Thaddeus that she should run up new curtains for it, and a matching bedspread while she’s at it. The windowsill and skirting-board could do with a coat of paint, and Maidment does that work on the afternoon of the Derby, a transistor radio turned low beside him.
While the advertisement is placed and replies to it awaited, the hiatus that affects the household continues. Kept private, disguised as best he can, melancholy is Thaddeus’s natural state. The cruel ending of a life aggravates this shrouded disposition, while permitting its exposure now. In the bleak aftermath of what so suddenly and so terribly occurred, as often he has on less awful occasions, Thaddeus seeks consolation in his possession of the house that long ago became his, in its rooms and garden and protective walls. The place is everything to him, is presently a comfort because its household order has so often survived the fractures of arrival and departure, of domestic drama and the finality of death. At a time when all thought is shaded by sorrow and by guilt it is reassurance of a kind that the house seems greater than its passing occupants, that effortlessly it once
carried the mores of one dying century into the next, has been part monument part deity to its generations, benevolent in sunshine, bequeathing gloom through the grimness of its aspect in certain weathers. Secrets are locked into its fabric, its windows seeing and yet blind. His secrets are there too, Thaddeus knows, to be left behind one day. His wife left none, for secrets were not her way.