South Riding (45 page)

But, God, how he loathed this business!

She rose when he came in, welcoming him saying, “I’m glad I didn’t miss you. I wanted to see you.”

He mumbled, “I’m sorry the cheque was delayed. After harvest . . .”

Her gesture of protest cut him short.

“It’s not that. You know we trust you absolutely. We’ve been through too many sad times together to doubt each other, haven’t we?”

Carne frowned. It had never occurred to him that he had gone through his “sad times” with any one. He had been alone, completely, always. He sat down at her invitation.

“I’ve been discussing Mrs. Carne’s case with Dr. McClennan.”

“H’m?”

She shook her head to the desperate hope in his unhappy eyes.

“Much the same—to all outward appearances. But you know, Mr. Carne, for some time now I have felt it is really not much use keeping her here. Don’t misunderstand me. We’re only too willing to have her. She’s no trouble. Only—I’m being frank—I know that this is an expensive place, because we intend treatment here to effect cures. . . .”

“Well?”

“You know—you’ve known for a long time—there’s nothing we can do for Mrs. Carne now except keep her warm and clean and kindly treated.”

Those words, “warm and clean and kindly treated,” with their suggestion of a less than animal existence, were too much for Carne. He rose and began to pace the room.

“What do you suggest?”

“Why not put her somewhere—less expensive. I know that this is a bad time for farmers. I respect your desire to do the best for her. But there are—cheaper homes—or the County Mental Hospitals.”

“Oh, no!”

“But really they are good places. Quite different from the old idea of an asylum.”

In her crisp quiet voice she outlined improvements, the skilled attention, the food, the private bedrooms.

“I’m a county councillor. I know all that.”

She watched his white stricken face. She thought, some people get used to this. He never will.

“Why can’t she stay here—where she knows you?”

“I’m afraid, Mr. Carne, that she knows no one.”

He stood by the window, playing with the curtain. A pretty girl ran across the lawn, stopped and looked in at him and smiled disarmingly. Then, very discreetly, she began to unbutton her linen dress. An attendant came, spoke to her, and led her away. She seemed disappointed. He turned away, shuddering.

“Why not talk to McClennan?” suggested the matron.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“As a matter of fact, if you can’t bear the thought of a county place—I have two or three private addresses. There’s a place in Manchester.”

“I might have a look at them some time.”

“Why not?”

She wrote.

“Can I see her?”

“Of course. You know your way.”

She was deeply sorry for him. She respected him. She thought, I hope he gets some consolation somewhere. I wouldn’t mind myself. When they brought her tea, she went upstairs to find him.

The big first floor room faced south-west and was flooded with golden light. It was bare of furniture, for there had been times when Muriel Carne did not lie as she lay now, prostrate and motionless except for the rise and fall of heavy breathing. It was no longer necessary to strap her into bed. She remained oblivious of the days and seasons. The green dawn filled her room, the dull grey mornings, the dark blue nights, the chill white of snow. She never noticed. When the nurses attended to her, she gave no response. When her husband sat by her bed, fondling her hand, repeating softly her name, “Muriel! Muriel! Little love, my poor one, my little one,” she lay flaccid, unconscious, her fastidious features coarsened, her once mobile face uninhabited by intelligence.

He never dreamed of envying her nullity. He was stricken by the pain of remorse as well as sorrow. He blamed himself. He had brought her to this. My love, my little love. Forgive me. He had torn her from her home, her life, her customs. He had alienated her from all her family. He had robbed her, then, in one moment of jealous passion, had forced himself upon her. He had, very assuredly, destroyed her. There was no comfort.

Loss may be forgotten; wounded vanity heals; but even death could bring no cure for this disaster. Joy and sorrow, success and failure, were made equal by it. All pleasure had been bought for him at her expense. While he rode, dined, laughed, met friends and mastered horses, she lay there. Never again could she partake of joy. There was nothing that could ever happen, in heaven or on earth, which could erase the record of his violence. Oh, my love, my little love, forgive me.

The matron said, “Oh, Mr. Carne, they’ve just brought me my tea. Won’t you come and join me?”

“I’m sorry. I must get to my brother’s. He’s expecting me.”

“I won’t keep you then.”

But she wanted to say—at least have a drink with me before you go there. You’ll need it. She had met William Carne, the architect. She knew that there was no harmony between the brothers. The efficient snobbish builder of villas for West Riding manufacturers was not the matron’s idea of a man at all. As for Mavis Carne—his lean rapacious wife, trained like a greyhound for the vigorous athletics of social climbing— “she’s a horror,” the matron thought.

But she knew Carne’s habit of going for all unpleasant business, head down, blindly obstinate, like a bull at a gate. He had to see his brother, so would get it over, marching off into the hot August afternoon to find an address vaguely indicated on Will’s new note-paper as “Greenlawnes, Harrogate.” It was over six months since he had visited William and Mavis and meanwhile they had moved to a district more exclusive and expensive than the last. They had built their own house. That was excellent. It meant that they must be doing well, and so could help him without any inconvenience to themselves.

With characteristic lack of consideration they had not thought of telling Carne how to find their house. No taxi presented itself, so he trudged down the sunlit road on the hot pavements. He could walk twenty miles across the fields, but town defeated him.

He loathed the thought of asking Will for money. He had learned no graces of the mendicant’s art. He only wanted a loan—for harvest wages till he could sell his wheat and for the monthly account at the Laurels. He did not want to go to the bank again. Fretton was growing difficult. Interest mounted higher. He was aware of the chancy nature of credit.

Carne tried to reassure himself, but his mind was not ingenious. It lacked the subtleties with which some varieties can reassure themselves. He could have reminded himself that William was, after all, his younger brother, that he had played with him in the big tin hip-bath beside the nursery fire, hauled him up straw stacks, taught him how to ride the donkey. He could have reminded himself that Will had always been a bit of a coward, howling when the pony had run away with him, lying when a box of cigarettes was discovered in the cave they had hollowed out of the oat-stack, whimpering as a new boy at St. Peter’s—while he, Robert, had cuffed him into shape, championed and fought for him, idly magnanimous, stupid at lessons, brilliant at athletics, a natural leader in a country where muscles, courage, hot temper and slow good-humoured dignity are considered adequate requisites for leadership.

Will had done his sums and drawn his little pictures and married a smart wife and made a lot of money. That was no reason why Carne should mind sounding him for a hundred pounds to see him over harvest.

But the further he tramped the more clearly Carne knew that he did mind it. He hated the long hot walk, hated asking strangers to guide him: Can you tell me where is a house called Greenlawnes? Mr. William Carne’s place? The architect? He hated facing Mavis, who always seemed to be about the place. He hated the embarrassment of explaining his position.

By walking three times in the wrong direction to avoid asking questions, Carne found it took him an hour and a half to reach Greenlawnes from The Laurels.

The house stood back from the road in a smart prosperous geometrical garden. The lawns had been mown, the hedges clipped, the begonias planted in unhesitating rows. There was a cubist bird-bath, a crazy-paved sunk garden, a rubble tennis court, a grass court, a rose garden. The house was all white and chromium, and rectangular, with windows cut out of the corners “like rat-holes in a soap box,” sniffed Carne.

A maid in a musical comedy uniform answered the doorbell and regarded Carne with a glacial manner which belied her gay appearance.

“No, sir, Mrs. Carne isn’t in yet. No. I’m afraid not. Very likely; they have a lot of callers.”

“I’ll come in and wait. And I’d like a wash,” sighed Carne.

The hall was black and white and scarlet. A bowl of glass fruits stood on a glass-topped table. The bathroom was green and black with fishes writhing along the green tiled wall and a bath into which one descended by marble steps. The drawing-room was off-white, with immense white sofas, and vases filled with sprays of pearly honesty, and an uncarpeted floor of pale polished silvery wood.

Well, well, thought Carne. After this a hundred or so will be nothing.

There were cigarettes in glass stands on the stone mantelpiece. There was a cocktail bar like an operation theatre in one corner. The maiden offered Carne a cocktail. He hated gin; he wanted a cup of tea or an honest whisky and soda. He wanted anonymity; he wanted death. He sat himself down in one of the vast billowing chairs and waited. The fatigue, the heat, the emotions of the day had overwhelmed him. When his sister-in-law came clicking on high restless heels along the corridor she found him lying sprawled, his hands hanging to the floor, his head tilted backward, deeply asleep.

“Well, well,” she called in her high mocking voice. “Don’t let me disturb you, my dear boy.”

He sprang awake with a grunt and stared at her painted malicious face, her black pencilled line of eyebrow, her white linen sheath of costume. She was straight, brittle and inhuman as a glass wand.

“Don’t mind me. Tuck up again and go bye-bye by all means. I’m expecting some perfectly lousy people in in a few minutes. They’d be charmed to see you. Lazy creatures, you farmers. Have a cocktail?”

“No thanks. Where’s Will? Didn’t he get my note?”

He levered himself with an effort from the enveloping cushions.

“Out, poor pet. Chasing non-existent business. Well, if you won’t drink, I must. I’ve been having a perfectly frightful afternoon. I’m done to the wide.”

She busied herself with the glittering and tinkling surgical instruments of the cocktail bar. “Simply too exhausting. Duty calls, dunning—always the perfect wife, I am. Everything for poor dear Will’s sake.”

She settled herself with her drink upon the sofa. She looked as cool and unnatural as a gilded lily.

“Throw me a cigarette. Mantelpiece. Well, how are the dear dark elemental things of the countryside—the cows, aimless, homeless and witless, aren’t they? The passionate peasants?” Carne bent over her to light her cigarette. “You’re putting on weight, you know.” She poked with a pointed raspberry-painted finger-nail at his waistcoat. “Tummy running loose. Fat of the land. That’s country life. Poor Will’s like a scarecrow. It’s an ‘ard world.”

The “lousy people” began to arrive. They came from tennis courts and hotel lounges, from golf-links or motor rides. Their shrill, clipped voices rang in Carne’s aching head. Their lean clipped figures swam before his eyes. Darling, how frightful, marvellous, putrid. So at the ninth hole . . . completely off my drive. . . . Monte Carlo—Gleneagles— Wimbledon.

Oh, hell, thought Carne. Yet he was vaguely cheered by all this evidence of prosperity. He had been himself—in another far-off life—to Cannes and Monte Carlo. He did not want to be reminded of bitter-sweet memory.

He caged himself in a corner, glowering silently. By the time his brother arrived, he had less than an hour left before his train time.

The unspoken ferocity of his mood gained him private audience in the small breakfast-room. He stood with his back to a bleak little panel in the wall which, during cold weather, was an electric fireplace, and scowled down at the lean, nervous architect who had the high perspiring forehead and querulous egotism of the hypochondriac.

“It’s all very well for you, Bob,” wailed Will Carne. “Open air, good country food, your own farm, no worries, plenty of exercise, regular food. You look marvellous, marvellous. Jove, I’d give a lot to feel really fit again.”

Carne grunted. He was staring with contemptuous appreciation at his brother’s paraphernalia of luxury.

“You don’t know what it’s been like, this last two years,” moaned Will. “Every one scared stiff. Not a soul building. Private people worried, corporations bitten by the economy bug. Sweating your heart out for contracts you don’t get. Whistling for your bills.”

“This house,” suggested Carne, “must have cost a penny or two.”

“You’re right, my dear chap. You’re dead right. Had to do it, of course. Way of business. But God knows how it’ll ever get paid for. Owe the bank over two thousand already, and Mavis sold her Imperial Tobacco Shares to pay for the furniture. None of our old stuff would do, of course—and it sold for a song. You’ve no notion how lucky you were, sticking to the land. How’s Maythorpe?”