The Jury (7 page)

“I like the look of your town,” said Charles.

“I thought you would,” said Betty.

They exchanged a look of mutual understanding, and for Charles the moment had a rounded perfection like that of eternity itself. Betty was six, Charles forty years older. Each lived in a private world which the other could never enter; each brought to the other an inviolable aloneness; yet at moments like this, when something beyond word or thought flashed between them, the illusion of sharing was not to be denied. Betty had, and could have, no doubts of its reality, no doubts and no formulated thought; but Charles was haunted by the fear that for all his watchfulness, his earnest, incessant contemplation of his child, he would never understand her as her mother had understood, never make up to her for the loss of that mother. He felt himself, in his dealings with Betty, to be slow, plodding, conscientious, where Catherine had been wise and gay; by much intellectual puffing and blowing he came somewhat short of conclusions which Catherine would have reached in an intuitive flash. As a parent, he thought, he had nothing to recommend him but his devotion, his resolve, at whatever cost, even the cost of self-effacement, to do the best he could for the child. A middle-aged man, of sedentary, bookish habits, content with his routine, and cherishing no ambitions outside his official life as a Civil Servant, what sort of a companion was he, he asked himself, for a little girl of six? Catherine had been only thirty-four when she died, six months ago, and young for her years. If Betty had been a boy, it would perhaps have been a different matter, and his inaptness for parental responsibility
of less account. He did not, however, wish that Betty had been a boy; did not wish her in any single respect different from the rather dumpy, silent, stolid-looking child she was. But he knew at least enough of her to know that this appearance of stolidity was deceptive; and it was a delight to him, and an agony, that sometimes it was as if Catherine herself looked for a moment out of her daughter's eyes.

The sunlit square was full of bustle and noise, for by a piece of great good fortune (as Charles conceived) it was market day. The two rows of shops adjacent to the square were each enclosed by a railed-in pavement; and to these railings a score or two of cattle were haltered. Their broad buttocks and swishing tails drew the eyes of the two visitors; their occasional mooing and stamping dominated all other sounds. For the rest, the paved square was filled with pens containing pigs, sheep, calves, in groups of six or seven; and behind one of the pens, on a contrivance that looked to Betty like a step-ladder, stood a red-faced gentleman in a bowler hat, barking with great rapidity. “What is he doing?” asked Betty, but so quietly that her father took no notice. The man in the bowler hat seemed excited and even angry, and it puzzled Betty that the people surrounding and watching him were apparently quite unmoved by his performance. They stared and stared, and every now and again some one of them gave him a curt nod, and whenever this happened she noticed that he pitched his voice on a new note and continued his noises with renewed vigour. From this spectacle her glance strayed to a very small calf tied up near its dam, the only one in the row. Near its dam, but not near enough; for milk was oozing from her udder, and at intervals she roared lustily. Betty looked away, and found a moment's distraction in watching nine extremely pleasant little pigs busy at the dugs of their obliging parent. But her mind returned all too soon to the calf, and her glance involuntarily followed. The soft wet nose, the comical ears, the large oily eyes that expressed nothing in the world but a disarming innocence, the body scarcely bigger than a dog's, and the long spindly shanks —in happier circumstances she could have stared at this calf for ever. But he was tied by the neck to the railing, and couldn't get at his mother, for all his shy capering.

“Do you like the market?” asked Charles, smiling down at her.

Betty fixed her eyes on the ground. “Not very much.”

“Don't you?” cried he, in great surprise. “Well I never!” He suffered a pang of disappointment; for a moment the day was dark about him, and a sense of his blundering inadequacy made him almost despair. Mingling with that sense was impatience. What on earth's the matter with the child? But instantly controlling himself, he forced cheerfulness again into his voice. “Well, what would you like to do now, eh?”

“The toys,” murmured Betty.

“Toys? What toys?”

“There's a shop,” explained Betty. And she added, in the oddly grown-up way she sometimes had: “Shall I show you where it is?”

It was not the first time they had visited this town. They had passed through it in the car almost precisely a year ago. Catherine had been with them then, and Catherine and Betty had got out at a certain shop, where they had spent rather less than five minutes looking round. “Inspection invited: you will not be asked to buy”—it was that kind of shop. It was because Charles had completely forgotten the place, and because Betty had wanted to come again, that he called it
her
town. “Don't you remember,” she had said, “that day Mummy and us …” For at last they had got over their shyness of mentioning Catherine; or perhaps it was only that Charles had learned to hide his wincing reluctance at the subject. In reply to the inevitable questions he had done violence to his stern veracity and told the traditional story about going to live with Jesus in heaven. He himself had no belief in it, and he was sometimes afflicted by the suspicion that Betty saw through his benevolent pretence, though from time to time, in conversation, she had amplified it with fancies of her own.

And now here they were again at the Arts and Crafts Shop, and Charles was mercifully spared any recollection of his former sight of the place. It was here, at this corner, that Catherine had asked him to stop the car; but on that tour she had made a similar request several times, and anyhow he
had a bad memory for places. Betty was too much accustomed to this peculiarity in her father to feel any surprise at it now. That he should have completely forgotten what she remembered so vividly did not for a moment engage her thought. Her mind was filled with a picture of that past. The shop-window was full of bright junk, copper and brass and pottery, and something called ‘peasant-work'. There were also moral maxims hand-lettered on pieces of cardboard, such as
See it through and see through it,
and
Count your blessings and they multiply.
But inside, as Betty remembered, there was a back room devoted to toys. They were toys of quite unearthly fascination: dogs, horses, men, camels, all the creatures of the farmyard and all the creatures of the Ark carved in a white soft wood and dabbed each with a significant spot of bright colour. No two were alike; each was a creation embodying the thought of its maker. The Ark, too, had a character all its own. It was somehow better than any doll's house Betty had seen, better even than any other ship; and the whole scene became part of the pleasant furniture of her mind. Since that day she had looked at it a thousand times, at the group of animals on their way up the broad plank that led into the Ark, at Mr and Mrs Noah standing stiffly in the foreground waiting till all were safely in, and particularly at the giraffe and the donkey. The giraffe seemed to have lost his place in the queue and to be quite unconcerned about it. He stood outside the Ark, with his tail to the others and his long neck stretching towards the Ark's window, through which was thrust the friendly head of the donkey. The two were in conversation, Betty supposed; and the thought of that conversation going on and on, that moment of time caught and held, gave her, whenever she remembered it, a deep though obscure satisfaction. And now she was on the point of seeing it again, not in fancy as she had so often seen it, but in solid and delicious fact.

“Is this your toyshop? Would you like us to go inside?” asked Charles humbly, after they had stared for some seconds at the windowful of assorted quaintness.

“Yes,” said Betty.

He looked down at her, trying to read her mind. But for its solemnity her plump little face was almost expressionless.
He could not for the life of him decide whether or not she was happy in the prospect of going inside.

“We'll see if they've got any toys, shall we?” said Charles, grasping her hand and moving towards the door. “Though it doesn't look quite like a toyshop to me,” he added.

Betty was held in a trance of expectation. His warning fell on deaf ears, and she did not answer him. And for the moment he paid her no further attention, for as soon as they were in the shop a pale lily of a girl came floating towards him with a nice shop-smile on her face.

“You would like to look round?” she asked.

“We want to look at the toys,” explained Charles, with a somewhat self-conscious air of humour.

“Toys?” The shop-smile became tinged with sincerity as the young woman glanced at Betty. Then it vanished altogether, to be succeeded by a frowning effort to remember something. “I'm not sure that we have any,” said the young woman vaguely. “But perhaps you'd like to look round?”

“We were here this time last year,” said Charles. “And my instructions are,” he continued, with a facetiousness of phrase for which he despised himself (but he was too shy to say ‘my little girl tells me'), “my instructions are that you then had a large number of toys on sale. A whole room full of them, I fancy.”

“Ah, yes, I expect we did,” said the young woman warmly. She seemed delighted to agree with him. “I wasn't here then, but my friend will know.” She retired to the back of the shop and held a shouted conversation with an invisible but not inaudible female. On her return she explained that the toy-room was now used for a display of glass and china.

Charles glanced helplessly at his daughter. Her expression, or lack of expression, had not changed.

“And the toys?” he said. “They're gone, are they?”

“Well,” said the young woman, with a laugh, “I don't expect they were sold. I dare say they're about somewhere. Put away, you know. We've an attic where we stow our lumber. Such a glory-hole!”

“Well, Betty?” Charles gave her a little dig, wishing she would speak up for herself. “Would you like to go and hunt for them?”

Betty shook her head.

“Wouldn't you?” said the young woman coaxingly. “I'll show you the way if you like. We'll hunt together.”

But the donkey and the giraffe were no longer in conversation. Betty shook her head again. “No, thank you,” she said politely. She could not, however, manage a smile. Suddenly she remembered Catherine and began dragging at her father's hand towards the door. … And time, with unhurrying, un-deviating flow, carried him on towards his meeting with Roderick Strood, Lucy Prynne, James Bayfield, the excellent Bonaker, and some others. The crime was not yet conceived that was to bring together this diversity of souls.

BUT how could he be happy? The cottage he had found for Elisabeth at Frendham was everything that could be desired. The surroundings were perfect, and the distance from town was not excessive. But how could Roderick Strood be happy in it while the bitter problem of Daphne remained unresolved? He tried to remember a time when he had been in love with Daphne, but it was too long ago, if indeed it had ever happened at all. He was confident that he had never felt about Daphne as he now felt about Elisabeth Andersch. How young he had been in those days, how ignorant of himself, how much the dupe of biological forces, how ingenuously ready to believe that the first woman he kissed was the one woman! The whole business, he now thought, had been a piece of half-wilful self-deception, the sentimentalizing of a commonplace need. The marvellous affinity between himself and Daphne had existed only in his imagination, for in all the years that had followed they had never really learned to understand each other. They had lost their illusion of love without finding anything to put in its place. This was how he saw the matter now. He was not so simple as to suppose that Daphne had greatly changed, and it puzzled and exasperated him that qualities and mannerisms that he had once found charming should now be merely irritating. Could he have looked at her
through Mark Perryman's eyes he would have seen a sleek, admiration-loving, but undeniably seductive young woman; through Brian Goodeve's he would have seen and adored a creature of infinite mystery and magical beauty. His Daphne was as different from these as these were from each other; and the real Daphne was different from them all. That occasional pout of hers, which Mark found amusing, was to Roderick an intolerable affectation of childishness; that social manner, which drew tears of admiration from Brian when in his solitude he recalled it, seemed to Roderick both mechanical and pretentious. There was, to his mind, a metallic hardness and glitter about this woman he had married.

If that had been all, there would have been no problem. But it was very far from all. For Daphne was Daphne, the first woman in his life. He did not want her, and did not believe she wanted him except for her pride's sake; but the idea of hurting her was painful to him, and now he caught himself perpetually wondering, with a wincing conscience, how she was getting on. In some way he could not have defined, he felt that he had a more than legal responsibility for her. If she was unhappy—and she certainly was—he was ready to believe that it was his fault. He was ready to believe it, and she was more than ready to impress it upon him. During the few days he had spent at home after returning from Heidelberg, things had been said that would never be forgotten while he or she was alive to remember them. He had stated his position at first with studied calm, and then with a display of emotion which he now blushed to recall; he had begged for patience, friendship, understanding—but above all for patience. “How can I say whether it's permanent or not?” he said. “I'm simply lost in it. It possesses me.”