A Judgement in Stone (4 page)

On the Friday afternoon Melinda Coverdale came home. The train brought her from Galwich to Stantwich, and the bus to a place called Gallows Corner two miles from Lowfield Hall. There she alighted and waited for a lift. At this hour there was always someone passing on his or her way home to Greeving, so Melinda hoisted herself up onto Mrs. Cotleigh’s garden wall and sat in the sun.

She was wearing over-long jeans rolled up to the knees, very scuffed red cowboy boots, an Indian cotton shirt, and a yellow motoring hat, vintage 1920. But for all that, there was no prettier sight to be seen on a sunny garden wall between Stantwich and King’s Lynn. Melinda was the child who had inherited George’s looks. She had his straight nose and high brow, his shapely sensitive mouth, and his bright blue eyes. And her dead mother’s mane of golden hair, the colour of Mrs. Cotleigh’s wallflowers.

An energy that never seemed to flag, except where Middle
English verse was concerned, kept her constantly on the move. She lugged her horse’s nosebag holdall up onto the wall beside her, pulled out a string of beads, tried it on, made a face at the textbooks which hope rather than experience had persuaded her to bring, then flung the bag down on the grass and jumped after it. Cross-legged on the bank while the useless bus passed in the opposite direction, then to pick poppies, the wild red poppies, weeds of Suffolk, that abound on this corner where once the gibbet stood.

Five minutes later the chicken farm van came along, and Geoff Baalham, who was second cousin to Eva, called, “Hi, Melinda! Can I drop you?”

She jumped in, hat, bag, and poppies. “I must have been there half an hour,” said Melinda, who had been there ten minutes.

“I like your hat.”

“Do you really, Geoff? You are
sweet
. I got it in the Oxfam shop.” Melinda knew everyone in the village and called everyone, even ancient gaffers and gammers, by their Christian names. She drove tractors and picked fruit and watched calvings. In the presence of her father, she spoke more or less politely to Jameson-Kerrs, Archers, Cairnes, and Sir Robert Royston, but she disapproved of them as reactionary. Once, when the foxhounds had met on Greeving Green, she had gone up there waving an anti-blood sports banner. In her early teens she had gone fishing with the village boys and with them watched the hares come out at dusk. In her late teens she had danced with them at Cattingham “hops” and kissed them behind the village hall. She was as gossipy as their mothers and as involved.

“What’s been going on in merry old Greeving in my absence? Tell all.” She hadn’t been home for three weeks. “I know, Mrs. Archer’s eloped with Mr. Smith.”

Geoff Baalham grinned widely. “Poor old sod. I reckon he’s got his hands full with his own missus. Wait a minute, let’s see. Susan Meadows, Higgs that was, had her baby. It’s a girl and they’re calling it Lalage.”

“You don’t
mean
it!”

“Thought that’d shake you. Your ma’s got herself on the parish
council, though I reckon you know about that, and—wait for it—your dad’s bought colour telly.”

“I talked to him on the phone last night. He never said.”

“No, well, only got it today. I had it all from my auntie Eva an hour back.” The people of Greeving are careless about the correct terms for relations. One’s stepmother is as much one’s ma or mum as one’s natural mother, and a female second cousin, if old enough, is necessarily auntie. “They’re giving the old one to the lady help that’s coming from London.”

“Oh, God, how mean! Daddy’s such a ghastly fascist. Don’t you think that’s the most undemocratic fascist thing you’ve ever heard, Geoff?”

“It’s the way of the world, Melinda, love. Always has been and always will be. You oughtn’t to go calling your dad names. I’d turn you over and tan your backside for you if I was him.”

“Geoff Baalham! To hear you, no one’d think you’re only a year older than me.”

“Just you remember I’m a married man now, and that teaches you the meaning of responsibility. Here we are, Lowfield Hall, madame, and I’ll take my leave of you. Oh, and you can tell your ma I’ll be sending them eggs up with Auntie Eva first thing Monday morning.”

“Will do. Thanks tremendously for the lift, Geoff. You are
sweet
.”

“Cheerio then, Melinda.”

Off went Geoff to the chicken farm and Barbara Carter, whom he had married in January, but thinking what a nice pretty girl Melinda Coverdale was—that hat, my God!—and thinking too of walking with her years before by the river Beal and of innocent kisses exchanged to the rushing music of the mill.

Melinda swung up the long drive, under the chestnuts hung with their cream and bronze candles, round the house, and in by the gun-room door. Giles was sitting at the kitchen table reading the last chapter of the Poona book.

“Hi, Step.”

“Hallo,” said Giles. He no longer used the nickname that once
had served for each to address to the other. It was incongruous with his Byronic fantasies, though these always crumbled when Melinda appeared in the flesh. She had quite a lot of well-distributed flesh, and red cheeks, and an aggressive healthiness. Also she bounced. Giles sighed, scratched his spots, and thought of being in India with a begging bowl.

“How did you get red ink on your jeans?”

“I didn’t. I’ve dyed them but the dye didn’t take.”

“Mad,” said Melinda. She sailed off, searched for her father and stepmother, found them on the top floor putting finishing touches to Miss Parchman’s room. “Hallo, my darlings.” Each got a kiss, but George got his first. “Daddy, you’ve got a suntan. If I’d known you were coming home so early I’d have phoned T.B.C. from the station. Geoff Baalham gave me a lift and he said his auntie Eva’ll bring the eggs first thing on Monday and you’re giving our new housekeeper the old telly. I said I never heard anything so fascist in all my life. Next thing you’ll be saying she’s got to eat on her own in the kitchen.”

George and Jacqueline looked at each other.

“Well, of course.”

“How awful! No wonder the revolution’s coming.
A bas les aristos
. D’you like my hat, Jackie? I bought it in the Oxfam shop. Fifty p. God, I’m
starving
. We haven’t got anyone awful coming tonight, have we? No curs or cairns or roisterers?”

“Now, Melinda, I think that’s enough.” The words were admonitory but the tone was tender. George was incapable of being really cross with his favourite child. “We’re tolerant of your friends and you must be tolerant of ours. As a matter of fact, the Roystons are dining with us.”

Melinda groaned. Quickly she hugged her father before he could expostulate. “I shall go and phone Stephen or Charles or someone and
make
him take me out. But I tell you what, Jackie, I’ll be back in time to help you clear up. Just think, you’ll never have to do it again after tomorrow when Parchment Face comes.”

“Melinda …” George began.

“She has got rather a parchment look to her face,” said Jacqueline, and she couldn’t help laughing.

So Melinda went to the cinema in Colchester with Stephen Crutchley, the doctor’s son. The Roystons came to dine at Lowfield Hall, and Jacqueline said, Wait till tomorrow. Don’t you envy me, Jessica? But what will she be like? And will she really come up to these glowing expectations? It was George who wondered. Please God, let her be the treasure Jackie thinks she is.
Schadenfreude
made Sir Robert and Lady Royston secretly hope she wouldn’t be, but cut on the same lines as their Anneliese, their Birgit, and that best-forgotten Spanish couple.

Time will show. Wait till tomorrow.

The Coverdales had speculated about Eunice Parchman’s work potential and her attitude, respectful or otherwise, towards themselves. They had allotted her a private bathroom and a television set, some comfortable chairs and a well-sprung bed rather as one sees that a workhorse has a good stable and manger. They wanted her to be content because if she were contented she would stay. But they never considered her as a person at all. Not for them as they got up on Saturday, May 9, E-Day indeed, any thoughts as to what her past had been, whether she were nervous about coming, whether she were visited by the same hopes and fears that affected them. At that stage Eunice was little more than a machine to them, and the satisfactory working of that machine depended on its being suitably oiled and its having no objection to stairs.

But Eunice was a person. Eunice, as Melinda might have put it, was for real.

She was the strangest person they were ever likely to meet. And had they known what her past contained, they would have fled from her or barred their doors against her as against the plague. Not to mention her future, now inextricably bound up with theirs.

Her past lay in the house she was now preparing to leave. An old terraced house, one of a long row in Rainbow Street, Tooting, with its front door opening directly onto the pavement. She had been born in that house forty-seven years before, the only child of a Southern Railway guard and his wife.

From the first her existence was a narrow one. She seemed one of those people who are destined to spend their lives in the restricted encompassment of a few streets. Her school was almost next door, Rainbow Street Infants, and those members of her family she visited lived within a stone’s throw. Destiny was temporarily disturbed by the coming of the Second World War. Along with thousands of other London schoolchildren, she was sent away to the country before she had learned to read. But her parents, though dull, unaware, molelike people, were upset by reports that her foster mother neglected her, and fetched her back to them, to the bombs and the war-torn city.

After that Eunice attended school only sporadically. To this school or that school she went for weeks or sometimes months at a time, but in each new class she entered the other pupils were all far ahead of her. They had passed her by, and no teacher ever took the trouble to discover the fundamental gap in her acquirements, still less to remedy it. Bewildered, bored, apathetic, she sat at the back of the classroom, staring at the incomprehensible on page or blackboard. Or she stayed away, a stratagem always connived at by her mother. Therefore, by the time she came to leave school, a month before her fourteenth birthday, she could sign her name, read “The cat sat on the mat” and “Jim likes ham but Jack likes jam,” and that was about all. School had taught her one thing—to conceal, by many subterfuges and contrivances, that she could not read or write.

She went to work in a sweetshop, also in Rainbow Street, where she learned to tell a Mars bar from a Crunchie by the colour of its wrapping. When she was seventeen, the illness which had threatened her mother for years began to cripple her. It was multiple sclerosis, though it was some time before the Parchmans’ doctor understood this. Mrs. Parchman, at fifty, was confined to a wheel chair, and Eunice gave up her job to look after her and run the house. Her days now began to be spent in a narrow twilight world, for illiteracy is a kind of blindness. The Coverdales, had they been told of it, would not have believed such a world could exist. Why didn’t she educate herself? they would have asked. Why didn’t she go to evening classes, get a
job, employ someone to look after her mother, join a club, meet people? Why, indeed? Between the Coverdales and the Parchmans a great gulf is fixed. George himself often said so, without fully considering what it implied. A young girl to him was always some version of Paula or Melinda, cherished, admired, educated, loved, brought up to see herself as one of the top ten per cent Not so Eunice Parchman. A big rawboned plain girl with truculent sullen eyes, she had never heard a piece of music except for the hymns and the extracts from Gilbert and Sullivan her father whistled while he shaved. She had never seen any picture of note but
The Laughing Cavalier
and the
Mona Lisa
in the school hall, and she was so steeped in ignorance that, had you asked her who Napoleon was and where was Denmark, she would have stared in uncomprehending blankness.

There were things Eunice could do. She had considerable manual dexterity. She could clean expertly and shop and cook and sew and push her mother up to the common in her wheel chair. Was it so surprising that, being able to do these things, she should prefer the safety and peace of doing them and them alone? Was it odd to find her taking satisfaction in gossiping with her middle-aged neighbours and avoiding the company of their children who could read and write and who had jobs and talked of things beyond her comprehension? She had her pleasures, eating the chocolate she loved and which made her grow stout, ironing, cleaning silver and brass, augmenting the family income by knitting for her neighbours. By the time she was thirty she had never been into a public house, visited a theatre, entered any restaurant more grand than a teashop, left the country, had a boy friend, worn make-up, or been to a hairdresser. She had twice been to the cinema with Mrs. Samson next door and had seen the Queen’s wedding and coronation on Mrs. Samson’s television set. Between the ages of seven and twelve she four times travelled in a long-distance train. That was the history of her youth.

Virtue might naturally be the concomitant of such sheltering. She had few opportunities to do bad things, but she found them or made them.

“If there’s one thing I’ve taught Eunice,” her mother used to say, “it’s to tell right from wrong.” It was a gabbled cliché, as automatic as the quacking of a duck but less meaningful. The Parchmans were not given to thinking before they spoke, or indeed to thinking much at all.

All that jerked Eunice out of her apathy were her compulsions. Suddenly an urge would come over her to drop everything and walk. Or turn out a room. Or take a dress to pieces and sew it up again with minor alterations. These urges she always obeyed. Buttoned up tightly into her shabby coat, a scarf tied round her still beautiful thick brown hair, she would walk and walk for miles, sometimes across the river bridges and up into the West End. These walks were her education. She saw things one is not taught in school even if one can read. And instincts, not controlled or repressed by reading, instructed her as to what these sights meant or implied. In the West End she saw prostitutes, in the park people making love, on the commons homosexuals waiting furtively in the shadows to solicit likely passers-by. One night she saw a man who lived in Rainbow Street pick up a boy and take him behind a bush. Eunice had never heard the word “blackmail.” She didn’t know that demanding money with menaces is a popular pastime punishable by the law. But neither, probably, had Cain heard the word “murder” before he struck his brother down. There are age-old desires in man which man needs no instruction to practise. Very likely Eunice thought she was doing something original. She waited until the boy had gone and then she told her neighbour she would tell his wife unless he gave her ten shillings a week not to do so. Horribly frightened, he agreed and gave her ten shillings a week for years.