A Judgement in Stone (16 page)

So, on the following night, when she climbed into the van that was waiting for her in Greeving Lane, she gave nothing away.

“I noticed the Coverdale girl went back to her college yesterday,” said Joan. “Bit early, wasn’t it? All set for a week of unbridled cohabitation with that boy friend she’s got, I dare say. She’ll come to a bad end. Mr. Coverdale’s just the sort of hard man to cast his own flesh and blood out of the house if he thought they’d been committing fornication.”

“I don’t know,” said Eunice.

Twelfth Night, January 6, Epiphany, the greatest day in the calendar for the disciples of Elroy Camps. The meeting was sensational—two really uninhibited confessions, one of them rivalling Joan’s own, an extempore prayer shrieked by Joan at the top of her voice, five hymns.

They ate seed cake and drank tea. Joan became more and more excited until, eventually, she had a kind of seizure. She fell on the floor, uttering prophecies as the spirit moved her, and waving her arms and legs about. Two of the women had to take her into a side room and calm her down, though on the whole the Epiphany People were rather gratified than dismayed by this performance.

Only Mrs. Elder Barnstaple, a sensible woman who came to the meetings for her husband’s sake, seemed disquieted. But she supposed Joan was “putting it on.” Not one of that company guessed at the truth, that Joan Smith was daily growing more and more demented and her hold on reality becoming increasingly tenuous. She was like a weak swimmer whose grasp of a slippery rock has never been firm. Now her fingers were sliding
helplessly down its surface, and currents of madness were drawing her into the whirlpool.

She hardly spoke as she drove the van home, but from time to time she let out little bursts of giggles like the chucklings of something unhuman that haunted those long pitch-dark lanes.

Bleak midwinter, and the frosty wind made moan. Eva Baalham said that the evenings were drawing out, and this was true but not that one would notice. The first snow fell in Greeving, a dusting of snow that thawed and froze again.

On the cork wall, from St. Augustine:
Too late loved I Thee, O Thou Beauty so ancient and so new, too late came I to love Thee!
For Giles the road to Rome was not entirely satisfactory as Father Madigan, accustomed until recently to Tipperary peasants, expected from him their ignorance and their blind faith. He didn’t seem to understand that Giles knew more Greek and Latin than he and had got through Aquinas before he was sixteen. In Galwich Melinda was blissfully happy with Jonathan. They were still going to get married but not until she had taken her degree in fifteen months’ time. To this end, because she would need a good job, she was working quite hard, between making love and making plans, at her Chaucer and her Gower.

The cold pale sun pursued a low arc across a cold pale sky, aquamarine and clear, or appeared as a puddle of light in a high grey field of cloud.

January 19 was Eunice’s forty-eighth birthday. She noted its occurrence but she told no one, not even Joan. It was years since anyone had sent her a card or given her a present on that day.

She was alone in the house. At eleven the phone rang. Eunice didn’t like answering the phone, she wasn’t used to it and it
alarmed her. After wondering whether it might not be better to ignore it, she picked up the receiver reluctantly and said hallo.

The call was from George. Tin Box Coverdale had recently changed their public relations consultants, and a director of the new company was coming to lunch, to be followed by a tour of the factory. George had prepared a short history of the firm which had been established by his grandfather—and had left his notes at home.

He had a cold and his voice was thick and hoarse. “The papers I want you to find are in the writing desk in the morning room, Miss Parchman. I’m not sure where, but the sheets are clipped together and headed in block capitals: Coverdale Enterprises from 1895 to the Present Day.”

Eunice said nothing.

“Now I’d appreciate it if you’d hunt them out.” George let out an explosive sneeze. “I beg your pardon. Where was I? Oh yes. A driver from here is already on his way, and I want you to put the papers into a large envelope and give them to him when he comes.”

“All right,” said Eunice hopelessly.

“I’ll hold the line. Have a look now, will you? And come back and tell me when you’ve found them.”

The desk was full of papers, many of them clipped together and all headed with something or other. Eunice hesitated, then replaced the receiver without speaking to George again. Immediately the phone rang. She didn’t answer it. She went upstairs and hid in her own room. The phone rang four more times and then the doorbell. Eunice didn’t answer that either. Although she wasn’t celebrating her birthday, it did strike her that it was very disagreeable having this happen today of all days. A person’s birthday ought to be nice and peaceful, not upset by this kind of thing.

George couldn’t understand what had happened. The driver came back empty-handed, the consultant left without the Cover-dale history. George made a sixth call and at last got hold of his wife, who had been in Nunchester having her hair tinted. No, Miss Parchman wasn’t ill and had just gone out for a walk. The
first thing he did when he got home was find the papers on the very top of the pile in the writing desk.

“What happened, Miss Parchman? It was of vital importance to me to have those papers.”

“I couldn’t find them,” said Eunice, laying the dining table, not looking at him.

“But they were on the top. I can’t understand how you could miss them. My driver wasted an hour coming over here. And surely, even if you couldn’t find them, you could have come back and told me.”

“They cut us off.”

George knew that was a lie. “I rang back four times.”

“It never rang,” said Eunice, and she turned on him her small face, which now seemed to have increased in size, to have swollen with resentment. Hours of brooding had filled her with gall, and now she used to him the tone her father had so often heard in the last weeks of his life. “I don’t know anything about any of it.” For her, she was quite voluble. “It’s no good asking me because I don’t know.” The blood crept up her throat and broke in a dark flush across her face. She turned her back on him.

George walked out of the room, impotent in the face of this refusal to take responsibility, to apologise or even discuss it. His head was thick with his cold and felt as if stuffed with wet wool. Jacqueline was making up her face in front of her dressing table mirror.

“She’s not a secretary, darling,” she said, echoing the words he had used to her when she had hesitated about engaging Eunice. “You mustn’t expect too much of her.”

“Too much! Is it too much to ask someone to find four clearly labelled sheets of paper and hand them over to a driver? Besides, it isn’t that which I mind so much. I never really knew what dumb insolence meant before, it was just a phrase. I know now. She doesn’t give the number or our name when she answers the phone. If a pig could say hallo it would sound just like Miss Parchman.”

Jacqueline laughed, smudging her mascara.

“And to put the phone down on me! Why didn’t she answer when I called back? Of course the phone rang, it’s just nonsense to say it didn’t. And she was positively rude to me when I spoke to her about it.”

“I’ve noticed she doesn’t like doing things which are—well, outside what she thinks of as her province. It’s always the same. If I leave her a note she’ll do what it asks but a bit truculently, I always think, and she doesn’t like making phone calls or answering the phone.” She spoke quite blithely as if laughing off “men’s nonsense,” humouring and soothing him because his cold was now worse than hers.

George hesitated, put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s no good, Jackie, she’ll have to go.”

“Oh no, George!” Jacqueline spun round on her stool. “I can’t do without her. You can’t ask that of me just because she let you down over those papers.”

“It isn’t just that. It’s her insolence and the way she looks at us. Have you noticed she never calls us by our names? And she’s dropped that sir and madam. Not that I care about that, I’m not a snob,” said George, who did and was, “but I can’t put up with bad manners and lying.”

“George, please give her one more chance. What would I do without her? I can’t face the thought of it.”

“There are other servants.”

“Yes, old Eva and
au pairs
,” said Jacqueline bitterly. “I had some idea what it would be like at our Christmas party. I didn’t enjoy it if you did. I was doing the food all day and running around all night. I don’t think I spoke to anyone except to ask if they wanted another drink.”

“And for that I have to put up with a servant who would have been a credit to the staff at Auschwitz?”

“One more chance, George,
please
.”

He capitulated. Jacqueline could always win him over. Could he pay too high a price, he asked himself, to see his beloved wife happy and relaxed and beautiful? Could he pay too much for
peace and domestic comfort and a well-run elegant home? Was there anything he wouldn’t part with for that?

Except my life, he might have answered, except my life.

He intended to react by taking a firm line with Eunice; in accordance with his calling, to manage and direct her. He wasn’t a weak man or a coward, and he had never approved the maxim that it is better to ignore unpleasantness and pretend that it does not exist. She must be admonished when she returned his smile and his “good morning” with a scowl and a grunt, or he would have a quiet talk with her and elicit from her what the trouble was and how they had failed.

He admonished her only once, and then jocularly. “Can’t you manage a smile when I speak to you, Miss Parchman? I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve that grim look.”

Beseechingly, Jacqueline’s eyes met his. Eunice took no notice apart from slightly lifting her shoulders. After that he said no more. He knew what would happen if he tried a tête-à-tête with her. “There’s nothing wrong. It’s no use talking about it because there’s nothing.” But he realised, if Jacqueline did not, that they were conciliating Eunice Parchman, allowing her to manage and direct them. For Jacqueline’s sake and to his own self-disgust, he found himself smiling fatuously at his housekeeper whenever they encountered each other, asking her if her room was warm enough, if she had enough free time, and once if she would
mind
staying in on a certain evening when they had guests for dinner. His warmth was met by not a shred of reciprocation.

February came in with a snowstorm.

Only in pictures and on television had Eunice seen real country snow before as against the slush which clogged the gutters of Tooting. It had never occurred to her that snow was something that could bother people or change their lives. On the morning of Monday, February 1, George was up before she was and, with an unwilling sleepy Giles, clearing in the long drive two channels for the wheels of the Mercedes. The first light had brought Mr. Meadows out with his snow plough into the lane. A
shovel and boots and sacks were put into the car’s boot, and George and Giles set off for Stantwich with the air of arctic explorers.

Against a livid sky the great flakes whirled, and the landscape was blanketed but for the dark demarcations of hedges and the isolated blot of a skeleton tree. No going out for Jacqueline that day or the next or the next. She phoned to cancel her appointment with the hairdresser, her lunch with Paula, the evening engagements. Eva Baalham didn’t bother to phone and say she wasn’t coming. She just didn’t come. You took that sort of thing for granted in East Anglia in February.

So Jacqueline was imprisoned with Eunice Parchman. Just as she was afraid to use her car, so were her neighbours who might have used theirs afraid to call on her. Once she would have seen the coming of the snow as a possible topic of conversation between herself and Eunice, but now she knew better than to try. Eunice accepted the snow as she accepted rain and wind and sunshine. She swept the paving outside the gun-room door and the front steps without comment. Silently she went about her work. When Jacqueline, unable to repress herself, exclaimed with relief at the sound of George’s car successfully returned through the thickening drifts, she reacted no more than if this had been a normal day of ordinary weather.

And Jacqueline began to see George’s point of view. Being snowbound with Eunice was more than disconcerting. It was oppressive, almost sinister. She marched doggedly through the rooms with her duster and her polishing cloths. Once, when Jacqueline was seated at the desk writing to Audrey, the half-filled sheet of paper was lifted silently from under her nose while a duster was wiped slowly across the surface of inlaid leather and rosewood. It was as if, Jacqueline said later to her husband, she were a deaf patient in a home for the handicapped and Eunice a ward maid. And even when the work was done and Eunice departed upstairs to watch afternoon serials, she felt that it was not the snow alone which pressed a ponderous weight on the upper regions of Lowfield Hall. She found herself treading carefully, closing doors discreetly, sometimes just standing in the
strange white light that is uniquely the reflection thrown back from snow, gleaming, marmoreal, and cold.

She was not to know, never dreamed, that Eunice was far more afraid of her than she was intimidated by Eunice; that the incident of the Coverdale history papers had made her retreat totally into her shell, for if she were to speak or allow them to speak to her, that archenemy of hers, the printed word, would rise up and assail her. Reading in an armchair pulled close to a radiator, reading to please Eunice and keep clear of her, Jacqueline never guessed that she could have done nothing to please Eunice less or arouse her more to hatred.

Every evening that week she needed twice her usual allowance of sherry to relax her before dinner.