The Fox in the Attic (10 page)

Mary could still remember being driven to the village, that sunny January polling-day, in the governess-cart with little Augustine: everyone wore colored rosettes and even the politest gentry children put out their tongues at children of a different color.

At this rate (she forecast) the Liberals should be back in power by 1930 or so; and by that time Gilbert ...

Having tidied in her mind these two incongruous loose ends, Mary sighed and went to sleep again.

But now she dreamed—the first time for many years—of her German cousin, Otto von Kessen.

It was in 1913—ten years ago—that Mary had gone on her visit to Schloss Lorienburg. Walther, the eldest von Kessen brother and owner of Lorienburg, was already married then of course—he had at least two sweet children, ten-year-old tow-haired Franz and the wide-eyed little Mitzi. But Otto was “married to his regiment,” they said. Handsome in uniform as some Ouida hero, in white flannels Otto played tennis with the beauty and vigor of a leaping white tiger ... Mary had been sixteen at Lorienburg, that last summer before the war, and the magnificent Otto thirty. Mary had fallen blindly, hopelessly in love; and had developed a boil on her unhappy chin.

*

Augustine that night was a long time getting to sleep at all, for the moment he was alone his mind reverted uncontrollably and quite fruitlessly from the living to the dead child. He was still racked with pity, and he thought of the coming inquest with foreboding.

Pictured on the darkness he kept seeing again the deep black pool, the sixpenny boat floating just out of reach, then the whitish something in the water ... He had had no choice, when they found she was quite dead, but to carry her home; for on the Marsh a duck shot at dusk, if the dog failed, was no more than a scatter of feathers by the time daylight came. Thus when Augustine fell asleep at last he dreamed horribly of those hungry rats that the whole Marsh teemed with.

Mrs. Winter also stayed awake late, but deliberately. She was sitting up in bed, wearing the little bed-jacket Mrs. Wadamy had given her last Christmas over a white linen nightgown with a high frilled collar, and writing a letter—by candlelight, for there was no electricity in the servants' rooms.

Mrs. Winter's “shape” looked natural now, comfortably buxom: her whalebone stays were neatly rolled on a chair. But her graying hair looked unusually skimpy; for it owed its daytime bulk to certain brown pads, and these now lay on the dressing-table. Her cheeks too looked sunken, for her pearly teeth also were on the dressing-table. They stood in a tumbler of water between two photographs in velvet frames: one was her late father, the other showed Nellie holding the baby Rachel.

“Dear Nellie,” she wrote, “I spoke to Madam about you and Gwilym and darling Rachel and she was kindness itself. She said at once ...” Mrs. Winter wrote slowly, weighing every word. For now she had made up her mind she had come to want more than anything else in the world that Nellie should consent.

It would be lovely having Rachel here. Pausing, she tried to picture dear little Rachel now as she must be that very moment, asleep in bed somewhere. But that was difficult, for she had never visited the parts where Gwilym's mother was living these days.

*

Augustine was woken at six in the morning by the jackdaws arguing in his wide bedroom chimney. He lay awake listening to them, for he was interested in birds' minds and would have liked to be able to make out what all the palaver was about. Jackdaws are notoriously social birds, and it sounded very much as if they were holding some sort of court of justice: certainly someone was getting generally pecked ...

“Getting generally pecked!”—Yes (he thought), that's about all Social Co-operation ever seems to amount to in practice. Then surely it's high time we humans gave up behaving like
birds
?

But just then the door clicked. It was Polly, and she climbed quickly onto his bed in expectation of a story.

At eight that same chilly morning, when the postman arrived, Mrs. Winter had already licked and stamped her letter for him to take. But he had a telegram for her, from Gloucester: it was a boy, and mother and child both doing well.

Nellie's pains had begun the previous evening and the doctor had carried her off to hospital in his car himself. The birth was quite normal: it was the baby's safety
after
birth the doctor had been anxious about in the mother's unnatural mood; but in fact Nellie gave her breast quite readily when they brought the infant to her, because in her drowsy state she believed it was somehow Baby Rachel come again.

Mrs. Winter added a few words on the back of the envelope, then re-addressed her letter to the hospital; for the sooner now it was fixed about Rachel coming here the better.

Another telegram to the sanatorium told Gwilym, even this little buff envelope bringing an unmistakably “outside” smell into the faint odor of illness which tainted everything round him there. The news excited him wildly and brought on a fearful fit of coughing.

A
son
! Then his name should be called Sylvanus ...

How pleased little Rachel would be! How he longed to be watching her face the first time they let her hold her baby brother! Surely the doctors must let him go home now (indeed they probably soon would—but because they needed his bed for some less hopeless case).

Little Rachel ... how long would it be before she got the news, he wondered? Wales must be a nice change for her after Gloucester Docks but the place was terribly cutoff. For his mother's new home been a lonely sluice-keeper's cottage once—in the piping days of farming, when the sluices were still kept on Llantony Marsh.

*

None of these people knew yet that Rachel lay under an official rubber sheet in the mortuary at Penrys Cross.

*

Gwilym's old mother lived alone, and on Tuesday had somehow walked alone the whole nine miles to the Cross to report the child missing. She knew already that whatever his letters said her son was dying; she knew that Nellie was about to be brought to bed at any hour: they showed her the body on the slab and she collapsed. She recovered, but for the time being had lost the power of speech.

Thus Augustine had already left for the inquest at Penrys Cross by the time the news reached Mellton.

The cold had come early to the Continent that fall: in the next few days it crossed over, driving Dorset's late mellow muggy autumn away before it.

Mary's mind at Mellton these days was full of the tragedy: she was cudgeling her brains how best Nellie behind the barrier that was Mrs. Winter could be helped; but now the cold had come and her brains refused to respond. Dorset never got quite so cold as central Europe of course; but at Mellton she had not those gigantic porcelain stoves she had once laughed at in Schloss Lorienburg, nor the double windows, nor even central heating: houses in Britain were nowadays no warmer than before the war—yet, as if they had been, women had ceased wearing wool next to the skin, ankle-length drawers and long thick petticoats. Thus in a large and draughty place like Mellton Mary always found it difficult in winter to think: her blood kept being called away to do battle in her extremities, leaving her brain on terribly short commons. Thus Mary in winter had to do most of her thinking in her bath, where her brain responded to the hot water like a tortoise in the sun: she saved up most of the day's knottier problems for the bath she took each evening before dressing for dinner: and it was in her evening bath that Mary now had her brainwave about the Hermitage as somewhere for Nellie with her baby and her diseased husband to live.

That morning Mrs. Winter had told her the doctors were going to send Gwilym home. There had been a pleading look in Mary's eye as she offered to help, for she was deeply moved and longed to be allowed-to. Nellie must be desperately hard-up: naturally there was no question of Gwilym working “yet” (that “yet” which deceived no one except Gwilym himself!): with a husband to nurse and a new baby Nellie couldn't go out to work, even if she could find work now there were millions unemployed ...

But Mrs. Winter had shaken her head. Not
money
: in a life-time of domestic service she herself had saved nearly three hundred pounds, and that should at least last out Gwilym's brief time: It was her own privilege to support her sister, not an outsider's. Yet Mrs. Winter felt quite sorry for her mistress, for Mrs. Wadamy looked so sad at being shut out.

Moreover there was one kind of help they could surely properly accept. If Gwilym was “to get well” they had to find somewhere to live right out in the country: somewhere high up and windswept, such as the chalk downs ...

Mary's face had lightened at the “chalk downs”: she would speak to the Master about it at once. But when she did so, Gilbert had astonished her by being “difficult”: he had practically ticked her off for even suggesting he might let these people have a cottage! In the end she hadn't dared confess to him she had virtually promised Mrs. Winter.

Now, while Mary lay long in the hot water thinking about the Hermitage as a solution, Gilbert was already tying his evening tie and also thinking. His brisk game of squash with the doctor's son ought to have left him enjoying unalloyed that virtuous feeling which is the chief reward of exercise when you are sedentary and thirty; but thoughts of the morning's argument with Mary were troubling him.

A most pathetic case ... yes, but a question of Principle was involved. Yet he doubted if Mary even in the end had hoisted in fully how right he had been to refuse—and the doubt pained him, for he loved Mary. The point was that these people were strangers. His first duty was to his
own
people, he had tried to show Mary; and cottages were scarce: at the moment even his own new carpenter was having to live in lodgings till a cottage fell vacant for him. But Mary had seemed unimpressed (her picture of the dying Gwilym refusing to be ousted from her mind). The bachelor carpenter was quite comfortable at the Tucketts, she had urged: couldn't he wait?

Couldn't Mary see it would be morally wrong to give strangers a Mellton cottage over Mellton heads? If you don't draw the line somewhere (Gilbert argued), you soon cease being able to do your duty by your own people, the people to whom it is
owed
. One's duty to mankind at large isn't in that same way a personal, man-to-man relationship: it's a collective duty, and one's services to Liberalism rather are its proper discharge—not random little drop-in-a-bucket acts of kindness. Surely no one supposed he ought to rush off to Turkey personally to rescue a massacred Armenian or two? But he'd certainly make time to address that Armenian Atrocities Protest Meeting next month; and similarly his correct Liberal response to these strangers' plight was to campaign for improved National Insurance, more Houses for the Poor: not try to take these particular poor under his own personal wing ...

As Gilbert stood there tying his tie the lean face which looked back at him from the glass ought to have been reassuring: with its firm jaw and permanently indignant gray eyes it was so palpably the face of a Man of Principle. But was Mary truly a woman of Principle? That was the trouble. Alas, Mary yielded all too easily to irrational instinct! There were times lately you almost sensed a distaste in her for all a-priori reasoning, however clearly it was put ...

Gilbert loved Mary; but was he perhaps a little afraid of her always in any ethical context?

Gilbert was silent and distrait at dinner that night—not on Nellie's account however, or because of the Poor: no, it was something of vital importance. For as he left his dressing-room he had been called to the telephone and what he had heard was disturbing. The speaker knew someone very close to L.G. (with him now, on his American tour). It had been noised widely abroad that lately the Little Man seemed bent on concocting his own little economic ideas unaided, and from what this chap said might not be quite sound even about Free Trade any more! Then the cat was among the Liberal pigeons indeed.

In short, Liberalism just then had problems on its plate more immediate than slaughtered Armenians and the Poor ... imprimis, there was the split in the party itself to heal—or to exploit; and Gilbert was involved in all that up to the neck.

Thus at dinner Gilbert hardly understood Mary at first when she mentioned the Hermitage: his mind flew first to St. Petersburg, then to his wine-cellar.

“No—up on the downs! In the chase. As somewhere for Mrs. Winter's sister.”

That
place—for her to
live
in?—Lumme ... but after all, why not? Certainly no one else would want it.

This lonely Hermitage was a little romantic folly in 18th-century gothic: an architect's freak, built of the biggest and knobbiest flints they could find and designed to look like a toothy fragment of ruined abbey (the largest window was a lancet, the rest more like arrow-slits). But it had been built for a
habitable
hermitage: indeed a professional hermit had originally been persuaded by a good salary to live there, groaning and beating his breast dutifully when visitors were brought to inspect him. Once hermits went out of fashion however it had mostly stood empty: it was too remote, as well as too uncomfortable ... the well even was a hundred feet deep, which is a long way to wind a bucket up.

Aesthetically in Gilbert's opinion so arrant a sham deserved dynamite. However, it still stood; and at least you could be sure the woman wouldn't roost there long! Moreover his consent would stop Mary ...

“Stop Mary” doing what?—“Nagging him” was the dire meaning he expunged before it could even form in his mind. (Jeremy had once remarked unkindly that Gilbert didn't know how to be insincere: “He believes every word he says—as soon as he has
said
it!” Thus Gilbert had to be most careful what thoughts he allowed into the reality of words even in the privacy of his own head.)

“By all means—an inspiration, my dear!” he answered. “But now, if you'll excuse me ...”