A Judgement in Stone (7 page)

Illiteracy had dried up her sympathy and atrophied her imagination. That, along with what psychologists call
affect
, the ability to care about the feelings of others, had no place in her make-up.

General Gordon, in attempting to raise the morale of the besieged inhabitants of Khartoum, told them that when God was handing out fear to the people of the world, at last He came to him. But by that time God had no more fear to give, so Gordon was created without fear. This elegant parable may be paraphrased for Eunice. When God came to her, He had no more imagination or affect to give.

The Coverdales were interferers. They interfered with the best intentions, those of making other people happy. If it were not such an awful thing to say of anyone (to quote one of Giles Mont’s favourite authors), one could say that they meant well. They were afraid of being selfish, for they had never understood
what Giles knew instinctively, that selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

“I’m worried about old Parchment Face,” said Melinda. “Don’t you think she has a terrible life?”

“I don’t know,” said Giles. Melinda was paying one of her rare visits to his room, sitting in fact on his bed, and this both made him happy and threw him into a panic. “I haven’t noticed.”

“Oh, you—you never notice anything. But I can tell you she does. She’s never once been out, not all the time she’s been here. All she does is watch television. Listen, it’s on now.” She paused dramatically and turned her eyes up to the ceiling. Giles went on with what he had been doing when she first came in, pinning things up on the cork tiles with which he had covered half one of the walls. “She must be terribly lonely,” said Melinda. “She must miss her friends.” She grabbed Giles by the arm and swung him round. “Don’t you
care?
”

Her touch gave him a shock and he blushed. “Leave her alone. She’s all right.”

“She’s not. She can’t be.”

“Some people like being alone.” He looked vaguely round his room, at the heap of orange clothes, the muddle of books and dictionaries, the stacks of half-finished essays on subjects not in the Magnus Wythen curriculum. He loved it. It was better than anywhere else except possibly the London Library where he had once been taken by a scholarly relative. But they won’t let you rent a room in the London Library, or Giles would have been at the top of their housing list. “I like being alone,” he said.

“If that’s a hint to me to go …”

“No, no, it isn’t,” he said hastily, and resolving to declare himself, began in a hoarse thrilling voice, “Melinda …”

“What? Where did you get that awful poster? Is she supposed to have a green face?”

Giles sighed. The moment had passed. “Read my Quote of the Month.”

It was written in green ink on a piece of paper pinned to the cork wall. Melinda read it aloud. “Why should the generations
overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped around us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the Sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mama have not only left ample provision at its elbow but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before?”

“Good, isn’t it? Samuel Butler.”

“You can’t have that on the wall, Step. If Daddy or Jackie saw it, it’d absolutely freak them out. Anyway, I thought you were supposed to be doing classics.”

“I may not do anything,” said Giles. “I may go to India. I don’t suppose,” greatly daring, “you’d want to come too?”

Melinda made a face. “I bet you don’t go. You
know
you won’t. You’re just trying to get off a subject that might involve you, I was going to ask you to come down with me and
confront
Daddy and make him do something about her. But I bet you’ll say you won’t.”

Giles pushed his fingers through his hair. He would have liked to please her. She was the only person in the world he cared much about pleasing. But there were limits. Not even for her would he defy his principles and flout his nature. “No,” he said, and gloomily, almost sorrowfully, contorting his face in a kind of hopelessness. “No, I won’t do that.”

“Mad,” said Melinda and bounced out.

Her father and Jacqueline were in the garden, in the midsummer dusk, surveying what Jacqueline had done that day. There was a heavy sweet scent from the first flowers on the tobacco plants.

“I’ve been thinking, my darlings. We ought to do something about poor old Parchment Face, take her out, give her an interest.”

Her stepmother gave her a cool smile. In some respects Jacqueline could fill the wasp role her son had meted out to her. “Not everyone is such an extrovert as you, you know.”

“And I think we’ve had enough of that Parchment Face business, Melinda,” said George. “You’re no longer the naughtiest girl in the sixth.”

“Now you’re evading the issue.”

“No, we’re not. Jackie and I have been discussing that very thing. We’re quite aware
Miss
Parchman hasn’t been out, but she may not know where to go, and it’s difficult without a car.”

“Then lend her a car! We’ve got two.”

“That’s what we’re going to do. The chances are she’s too shy to ask. I see her as a very shy woman.”

“Repressed by a ruling class,” said Melinda.

It was Jacqueline who made the offer.

“I can’t drive,” said Eunice. She didn’t mind saying this. There were only two things she minded admitting she couldn’t do. Hardly anyone in her circle had been able to drive, and in Rainbow Street it had been looked on as a rather bizarre accomplishment for a woman. “I never learnt.”

“What a pity! I was going to say you could borrow my car. I really don’t know how you’ll get around without transport.”

“I can go on the bus.” Eunice vaguely supposed a red double decker trundled around the lanes with the frequency of the 88 in Tooting.

“That’s just what you can’t do. The nearest bus stop’s two miles away, and there are only three buses a day.”

Just as George had detected a flaw in his housekeeper, so now Eunice sensed a small cloud threatening her peaceful life. This was the first time any Coverdale had shown signs of wanting to change it. She waited uneasily for the next move, and she didn’t have to wait long.

Progenitor of Coverdales, George was the arch-interferer of them all. Employees were hauled into his office at T.B.C. and advised about their marriages, their mortgages, and the higher education of their children. Meadows, Higgs, and Carter matrons were accustomed to his entering their cottages and being told to get the dry rot people in, or why not grow a few vegetables on that piece of ground? Ever such a nice man was Mr. Coverdale, but you don’t want to take no notice of what he says. Different in my gran’s time. The squire
was
the squire then, but them old days are gone, thank God. George went on interfering—for the good of others.

He bearded the lion in its den. The lion looked very tame and was occupied in womanly fashion, ironing one of his dress shirts.

“Yes, sir?” Her tabby-cat hair was neatly combed, and she wore a blue and white checked cotton dress.

All his life George had been looked after by women, but none of them had ever attempted the formidable task of washing, starching, and ironing a “boiled” shirt. George, if he ever thought about it at all, supposed that there was a special mystique attached to these operations, and that they could only be performed in a laundry by a clever machine. He smiled approvingly.

“Ah, I can see I’m interrupting an expert at a very skilled task. You’re making a fine job of that, Miss Parchman.”

“I like ironing,” said Eunice.

“I’m glad to hear it, but I don’t suppose you like being confined at Lowfield Hall all the time, do you? That’s what I’ve come to talk about. My wife tells me you’ve never found time in your busy life to learn to drive a car. Am I right?”

“Yes,” said Eunice.

“I see. Well, we shall have to remedy that. What would you say to driving lessons? I shall be happy to foot the bill. You’re doing well by us and we’d like to do something for you in return.”

“I couldn’t learn to drive,” said Eunice, who had been thinking hard. The favourite excuse came out. “My sight wouldn’t be up to it.”

“You don’t wear glasses.”

“I should do. I’m waiting for my new pair.”

In-depth questioning elicited that Eunice should have glasses, had been in need of new ones when she came to Greeving, had “let it slide,” couldn’t, even with glasses, read a number plate or a road sign. She must have her eyes tested forthwith, said George, he would see to it himself and drive her into Stantwich.

“I feel rather ashamed of myself,” he said to Jacqueline. “All the time the poor woman was as blind as a bat. I don’t mind telling you now we know the reason for it, but I was beginning to find that reserve of hers quite off-putting.”

Alarm showed in her eyes. “Oh, George, you mustn’t say that! Having her has made such a difference to my life.”

“I’m not saying a thing, darling. I quite understand she’s very shortsighted and was much too diffident to say so.”

“The working classes are absurd about things like that,” said Jacqueline, who would have suffered agonies struggling with contact lenses, would have bumped into walls rather than wear glasses. They both felt immensely satisfied with George’s discovery, and it occurred to neither of them that a purblind woman could hardly have cleaned the windows to a diamond brilliance or watched the television for three hours every evening.

At forty-seven, Eunice had better sight than Giles Mont at seventeen. Sitting beside George in the car, she wondered what to do if he insisted on coming into the optician’s with her. She was unable to concoct any excuse to avoid this happening, and her experience was inadequate to teach her that middle-aged conservative landowners do not generally accompany their middle-aged female servants into what is virtually a doctor’s surgery. A sullen puzzled resentment simmered within her. The last man who sought to make her life insupportable had got a pillow over his face for his pains.

A slight fillip came to her spirits at the sight, at last, of shops, those familiar and wonderful treasure houses that had seemed left behind forever. They got an even greater lift when George showed no sign of accompanying her into the optician’s. He left her with a promise to be back in half an hour and the instruction to have any bill sent to him.

Once the car had gone, Eunice walked round the corner where she had noticed a confectioner’s. She bought two Kit-Kats, a Mars bar, and a bag of marshmallows, and then she went into a teashop. There she had a cup of tea, a currant bun, and a chocolate éclair, which made a nice change from cassoulets and vine leaves and all those made-up dishes she got at Lowfield Hall. The picture of respectability was Eunice on that Saturday morning, sitting upright at her table in her navy-blue Crimplene suit, nylon stockings, Annie Cole’s mother’s court shoes, an “invisible” net on her hair. No one would have supposed her mind
was racing on lines of deception—deception that comes so easily to those who can read and write and have I.Q.s of 120. But at last a plan was formed. She crossed the road to Boots’ and bought two pairs of sunglasses, not dark ones but faintly tinted, one pair with a crystal blue frame, the other of mock tortoise shell. Into her handbag with them, not to be produced for a week.

The Coverdales seemed surprised they would be ready so quickly. She was taken to Stantwich the second time by Jacqueline, who luckily didn’t go with her into the optician’s because of the impossibility of parking on a double yellow line. It was bad enough having to pay the fines incurred by Giles. Eunice bought more chocolate and consumed more cake. She showed the glasses to Jacqueline and went so far as to put the crystal blue pair on. In them she felt a fool. Must she wear them all the time now, she who could see the feathers on a sparrow’s wing in the orchard a hundred feet away? And would they expect her to
read?

Nobody really lives in the present. But Eunice did so more than most people. For her, five minutes’ delay in dinner now was more important than a great sorrow ten years gone, and to the future she had never given much thought. But now, with the glasses in her possession, occasionally even on her nose, she became very aware of the printed word which surrounded her and to which, at some future time, she might be expected to react.

Lowfield Hall was full of books. It seemed to Eunice that there were as many books here as in Tooting Public Library where once, and once only, she had been to return an overdue novel of Mrs. Samson’s. As small flattish boxes, she saw them, packed with mystery and threat. One entire wall of the morning room was filled with bookshelves, in the drawing room great glass-fronted bookcases stood on either side of the fireplace, and more shelves filled the twin alcoves. There were books on bedside tables, magazines and newspapers in racks. And they read books all the time. It seemed to her that they must read to provoke her, for no one, not even schoolteachers, could read that much for pleasure. Giles was never without a book in his hand.
He even brought his reading matter into her kitchen and sat absorbed in it, his elbows on the table. Jacqueline read every novel of note, and she and George re-read their way through Victorian novels, their closeness emphasised by their often reading some work of Dickens or Thackeray or George Eliot at the same time, so as later to discuss a character or a scene together. Incongruously, it was the student of English literature who read the least, but even so Melinda was often to be found in the garden or lying on the morning-room floor with one of Mr. Sweet’s grammars before her. This was not from inclination but because of a menace from her tutor—“If we’re going to make the grade we shall have to come to grips with those Anglo-Saxon pronouns before next term, shan’t we?” But how was Eunice to know that?

She had been happy, but the glasses had destroyed her happiness. She had been content with the house and the lovely things in the house, and the Coverdales had hardly existed for her, so little notice had she taken of them. Now she could hardly wait for them to go away on that summer holiday they were always talking about and planning for.