Authors: Gillian White
Georgie hesitated. ‘Perhaps he might want to know me.’
Sylvia gave her a sharp look and the car swerved slightly. ‘I doubt that, darling. I doubt that very much.’
Georgie squirmed on her seat. She didn’t want to ask questions, she didn’t want to appear too interested, but fascinated as she was, she badly needed to know. ‘But what was he like, Mummy? And what sort of trouble did he cause?’
Her voice was artificial and strained. ‘It is painful for me even to remember, let alone discuss it with you.’
‘It might have been better if you’d never told me.’
‘You had to know, Georgina. You couldn’t have grown up not knowing.’
‘Why? Why couldn’t I have?’
‘Because you have a right to know. It would have been very wrong for you to find out from some other source.’ Whatever the cost, the rules of life must be observed.
‘But only so much and no more?’
‘He was dark. Dark like you, dark like your father.’
‘But tell me what he did wrong?’
Sylvia Southwell took the top of her tongue round her lipstick to lubricate a passage for the dryness of the words. ‘He was wilful and moody from the beginning. Stephen was never an ordinary child, never placid or amenable. Every single thing he did was either for attention or to cause trouble.’
Sylvia seemed to surprise herself, to stumble over the possible discovery that she had never loved him.
‘I’m amazed that you took a second chance after that. By having me.’
‘We had no say in the matter, Georgina. You came along unexpectedly.’ And then she added quickly, ‘And we were thrilled to have you.’
A lie.
They drove along in silence then with thoughts too thick to penetrate. Eventually Georgie was forced to ask, ‘So you don’t know where he lives now?’
Mummy cleared her throat delicately. She answered her daughter with cold dignity. ‘No, and we have no desire to.’
This was so unsatisfactory. ‘Why are you still so angry with him?’
‘Because Stephen is still hurting me. You can’t lose a child and forget. Even a child such as that.’
‘You made a good attempt at it.’
‘There is no need to be offensive, Georgina. You know nothing about it at all. You are still a child, too young to understand, I see. And already I am regretting the fact that I told you.’
The conversation was just too awkward. Neither of them could cope with it.
Tall, dark conifers, their heads oddly detached in rows behind the high garden wall. Symmetrical. A square lawn. Chimneys, also detached, and everything in shades of brown. Even the house was a brown one, and the chips in the driveway were fawn.
A house in uniform.
Through the brown study door and into a totally brown hall, banisters leading up, wooden floors with matching rugs, a tall brown settle next to the telephone, and a brown umbrella and hat stand full of walking sticks and brown macs.
When the sun shone through the landing window that overlooked the hall, it glowed russet.
Immediately she entered Georgie wished she had gone to Daisy’s, but the fact was she hadn’t been asked. Not again. Not a fourth time. But what would she do all alone for three days, here, in a house which was full of things, and hung with pictures of her father’s father? And how could she possibly invite her friends?
Mummy was wicked to suggest it, knowing how impossible it was.
She knew every stair that creaked in that house, she knew every giving floor board. Born in it, she was one with it, it and its smell of pipe smoke and polish, and she hated it. She would have half an hour to go upstairs and familiarize herself once again and then it would be four o’clock and the gong would go for tea, splitting the silent house with its summons. She would have to come down for tea, that brown interlude of tea and paste sandwiches and moist fruit cake. Fascinated, she wondered which of the five bedrooms had been Stephen’s. Perhaps this one? Perhaps this very bed she lay on with her arms behind her head, perhaps this had once been his and all his things filled the cupboards?
Georgie could well understand why Stephen had fled. She had always sworn she would leave herself the moment she was old enough. She imagined a wild boy playing in the garden, messing it up, pulling up the flowers and scattering the petals about, cutting the square lawn into circles, smashing the panes of greenhouse glass.
Bravely. Gloriously and mightily. Not in the cowardly way she had broken the flower pots and hidden them afterwards.
An artist in rebellion against the sordid values of everyday life. Free from the tyranny of property and praise.
If Stephen lived here for sixteen years then he must have gone to school. It was awkward for Georgie to raise the subject again, difficult and embarrassing. She could see that, as with the facts of life, once her mother had raised the matter, it was dropped and done with for ever. But over tea, alone with Mummy after Gwyneth the maid had gone, she tried to press her once again.
Sylvia eyed her crossly. Her daughter was breaking the rules. She poured tea from the silver pot and her handkerchief trailed from her sleeve like disappointment. She answered Georgie’s question abruptly, and the bitterness, it was almost hate, crept back into her tone. ‘Stephen went to Grantly House until he was thirteen, and then he was sent to your father’s school, Stoyle. At both schools he disgraced us. I’ll say no more than that. They only kept him on because of the family traditions, but in the end he was too much for them and he was expelled. Of course, that nearly killed your father.’ And she patted a pin-curl into place.
Family tradition! Family name! Georgie was tempted to laugh. A military family until it came to Daddy with his poor eyesight and his hip. In spite of family tradition the Army refused him. And yet photographs of men lined up glowered from the walls of Harry Southwell’s study, jutting chins, ruddy faces, ranked in military or sporting rows, which did not matter. Guns replaced cricket bats, khaki berets replaced caps with a smooth indiscrimination. Yet Daddy had not inherited those fat shiny knees, those tuberous thighs or those clothes-hanger shoulders. Oh, he had the rigid stance, the love of discipline, the yearning for rules. Daddy was a walking moustache, twitching and twirling at the edges. Routine. Order. Duty. But courage and medals and mentions in dispatches don’t make for money. Not a generation later they don’t, and the worn leather chairs and the threadbare carpets said as much. It was years before Georgie realized that her childhood was spent in genteel penury.
Daddy, working permanently at home, dealt in stocks and shares not terribly successfully. Sylvia, with her respect for worldly position and wealth, called his projects hare-brained schemes, told her friends he was empty of enterprise. But the lady of a house never lifted a duster, never plugged in an iron, these were the jobs of the live-in maids, and they came and went back to their homes in Wales in regular succession, probably because of the surfeit of work. Sometimes they could light fires in the autumn, sometimes they could not, depending on the market. Cauliflower cheese, bubble and squeak, rice puddings, meat rissoles, brisket and fish pie were regulars at the table, all well browned on top. School uniforms came second hand and Georgie suspected her fees were paid by some kind of military trust. Trimming the sails and making ends meet were constant irritations, but Sylvia kept accounts at all the best local stores while bitterly resenting her restrained circumstances. Such mortification. She had a real horror of poverty, of eventually having to sell the house and lose face in the neighbourhood. Oh yes, at all costs, the image must be preserved.
So on that first night at Furze Pen Cottage, pouring her baked beans over her toast, Georgina Jefferson shivered. She had escaped from all that eventually, but not quite soon enough. She wished she’d had Stephen’s determination.
She decided to drag the mattress downstairs and sleep beside the fire tonight, next to Lola. She needed warmth. She needed light. But the most disconcerting thing was the silence.
Georgina desperately needed sound.
P
LEASE BE PATIENT. WE
must proceed slowly and with caution because of Georgie’s frail state of mind.
So, she was housebound. It was no longer a matter of strolling up the street to collect the dreaded papers, far from it. She looked upon a snowy world spangled with winter sunshine and saw the pint of milk on her step, as promised. And that slim white bottle was the one firm thing which gave her a sense of contact with this new and extraordinary world.
Melting snow dripped off the thatchy overhangs. The tall tufts of grass in the garden turned asparagus green at the tips. Birds flashed from branch to branch between statuesque apple trees, and she prayed that the thaw would continue so she could get out tomorrow.
Her radio was a life-saver. Plugging it in and turning it on made Sunday familiar again. She fixed some breakfast on the mean, cream cooker in the starkest kitchen imaginable and opened the stable door to let Lola out. Slowly. Slowly. To fill out the time. To adjust to this new pace of life.
Apart from electricity the cottage’s one concession to the twentieth century was the tiny shower in the whitewashed bathroom, an outhouse stuck to the side of the kitchen. You squeezed yourself small to get inside, but merely to see it in this freezing weather raised goose pimples everywhere. The frosted window, an odd gesture to modesty here, was fortified by rusty iron bars. It looked as if it hadn’t been used for the last fifty years, and so did the stained lavatory, and Georgie gave a gasping shriek when a splosh of water fell on her head straight after she tried the chain.
She banked up the fire, which was smouldering nicely. If Stephen’s liver had rotted away where were the empty medicine bottles? Someone had cleaned up the cottage, whoever it was had removed them, too.
The solicitor’s letter had been brief and to the point, and the telephone call she made to the firm had not thrown much light on the subject. It seemed to be a matter of coming to see for herself, and ‘we will be here should you require assistance’. But the letter included the phrase ‘house and contents’, so presumably there were contents once worthy of the name.
‘How did you trace me?’ she’d asked Tom Selby.
‘From his birth certificate, Mrs Jefferson. That’s all the information we had.’
‘It was lucky my parents lived at the same address for so long.’
‘Yes, that was helpful. And so was the fact that the present occupants knew where you worked. We traced your present address from that.’
‘My mother only died four years ago and that’s when the house was sold. I met the people who bought it, I suppose I must have mentioned my work during the brief conversations we had.’
‘Mr Southwell was a sick man for many years.’
For a second Georgie was thrown, believing he referred to her father. Flustered she replied, ‘We didn’t know him, Mr Selby. He cut himself off from his family years ago. Nobody knew where he went. There was no communication between us.’
‘Ah. An obstinate man. I believe he refused all advice in the end and refused to go to hospital. In fact, he declined any help he was offered.’
So he had died at home. Where? Something made her ask, ‘Who found him?’
‘There was an inquest, of course.’ She heard Tom Selby rustling his papers to find the answer to her question. ‘A neighbour,’ he eventually replied. And then he read in his dusty old voice, and Georgie imagined his thin-rimmed spectacles, ‘A Mr Horsefield of Wooton House. It gives no more information than that. He was found soon after his death, Mrs Jefferson, you need not worry on that account, he was not left mouldering for days.’
And did she sense a tiny barb of accusation? Or was that her guilty conscience speaking? Because her only living relative had been so needy and she hadn’t known, hadn’t bothered to find out? But any guilt Georgie felt was soon replaced by anger, anger at time, at life, at the world, but above all anger towards Stephen, who had gone and died without giving her time to get in touch, or the chance to be near him in his hour of need.
And what was worse, she might have been able to love him.
She gazed around while she ate her breakfast, sitting erect at the gateleg table with a pile of damp magazines piled haphazardly before her. All the magazines—she’d taken a look last night—had a passed-on look and the name Horsefield was scribbled on the corner of each:
Horse and Hound
,
The Devonian
,
The Country Landowner
, an impersonal mixture of taste that managed to give nothing away. So Stephen had died somewhere in here, maybe in this very room, not three months since. She could only assume that Mr Horsefield of Wooton House must live in the most imposing of the four Wooton-Coney dwellings, the house with the newly pointed walls and the fresh thatch she had noticed last night opposite the farm.
Could it be this Mr Horsefield who removed most of Stephen’s belongings? Could he have been a friend of Stephen’s, a fellow boozer, a regular caller? There was some sense of community, then, here in this peculiar valley, in spite of her frosty reception at the farm last night. Silly, but she had half expected a visit from someone because, hell, apart from the smoke from the chimney, her car parked outside on the road, all sorts of pointers would make it clear the cottage was occupied again.
And how could anyone live in this tiny insular hamlet and not be aware that a stranger had arrived?
The morning slowly meandered by, and she, who had grown to loathe the phone, wished there was one in this house. She smiled wryly when she realized she was already talking to herself; it was more of a little hum she supposed, just to relieve the silence. She took Lola for a short walk, but turned back, puffing and out of breath, unable to cope with the slippery hills. She must be well out of condition. She’d done far too much sitting around and moping miserably of late. There was no point in drying the dog, there were no carpets to be ruined, no piece of furniture she could jump on and make damper than it already was. So, blowing hard on cold fingers, Georgie shut Lola inside and firmly resolved, despite some qualms, she set off down the road to call on Stephen’s friend, on the man who had found his body, on the man who could be the last person on earth to have seen her brother alive.