The Elderbrook Brothers (41 page)

Some weeks later, in a totally unexpected letter, Kate herself gave him for his amusement the substance of a conversation she had had with her mother. In his answer he announced his decision to work in the East End.

‘Wouldn't it be nice, Kate dear, if Felix could come to Stanton Wold as vicar?'

‘Very nice,' Kate agreed, ‘but hardly practicable, since we have a vicar already.'

‘Poor Mr Mullion. He's getting past it, Kate. He's so forgetful. Why, the other day …'

Before her mother could get launched on a sea of narration Kate said: ‘Yes, but there he is, still alive and kicking.'

‘Not kicking, my dear. I only wish he were. And only just alive, if you ask me. Besides, why shouldn't Felix be his
curate
? Yes, that's the plan! And then, when poor Mr Mullion is taken from us, Felix could step into the living.'

‘Is the living in your gift then? I didn't know.'

‘Nonsense, Kate. It only wants arranging. I shall speak to Mr Williams about it, and he'll drop a word in the right quarter. We'll put our heads together——'

‘What? You and Daniel? Oh, Mother!'

‘—and hatch a little plot,' said Mrs Meldreth, rosy with mischief.

MATTHEW'S illness put him out of action for ten weeks. For ten weeks Ann nursed him devotedly and held her tongue. From a medical point of view it was a great success, this illness: it was the worst of its kind that Meganzer in a long experience
had seen, and it did, however reluctantly, follow a predicted course. During the first week the doctor came every day. His admiration of the mess that confronted him was boundless: it was a beautiful case. On the night of the Haslams' visit Matthew slept scarcely at all. By morning the redness on his body had become darker and more brilliant, and the ache, now continuous, had a more ferocious quality. By midday the flesh was swelling into enormous blisters, and the area of disorder had perceptibly spread: it was a broad band of inflammation running halfway round the body. Having applied a coat of brown varnish to it, and wrapped it in wadding, Meganzer said he would come again tomorrow. He left behind him some sedative tablets, but there was no sleep for Matthew that night and when morning came he was near the end of his endurance. Yet the night's torment had been punctuated by moments of a grim acceptance that was almost satisfaction. It was as if he discerned, dimly, a sort of logic in the sequence of events. Being not, like Job, a man eminently righteous, he was in a mood to embrace this punishment, to submit himself willingly to the scourge and catharsis of physical pain; moreover, it saved him from too vividly remembering the things he most wanted to forget. But he was glad in the morning to see Meganzer, whose smallness and quickness and mocking melancholy seemed to belong to another world. Meganzer was the god in disguise intervening in human affairs. He was the little man who stops you on your way through the wood and gives you three wishes. Matthew had only one wish, and Meganzer gave him that. The prick of the needle was a promise, and the assurance of deep sleep was bliss.

He slept for sixteen hours, and woke a different man. The furniture of the mind was unaltered; the protesting body resumed its protest undiminished; but in that long sleep he had surrendered his burden into other and anonymous hands. He had given up the struggle, and with it the fear: he lay in the arms of a sustaining power and was content to let things take their course. Because his will was quiescent, the tiredness that had been a
torment for so many days was now a blissful tiredness. He discovered and discovered again the rich sensual delight of going to sleep. He drank deeply of oblivion and was never filled. At night he could seldom sleep, unless drugged, and it was only by turning daytime into a series of brief nights that he could sustain his new and precarious balance. He was not yet at an end of his dreams and dark thoughts; two minutes of consecutive thinking could distil the old poison and set it working in his mind; but when that was in danger of happening the pain of the body would intervene and save him, would lash him and save him, so that to give up and go to sleep were again all his desire.

At nights Ann was in the room with him, and in daylight she was never far away. The strength he had lost seemed to have flowed into her. She was busy and quiet and cheerful. Though her secret remained unspoken, and a burden to her, she discovered to him a humour and gaiety such as he had hardly seen in her before during all their years together. It was the reassuring gaiety of a mother with her sick child, but of a mother who was herself still a child at heart. She brought him his meals and managed to give to every one of them the air of a picnic. Often she had hers with him, and the simple unspoken intimacy of those shared meals was a true sign of their marriage. In his convalescence she contrived that Patchett should come and see him occasionally, to entertain him with tales of the lambing season, which was now far advanced, and to talk of the threshing, and the new calves, and the bad temper of a recently purchased drilling machine. ‘He do get the very devil in him sometimes, master,' said Patchett proudly.

All this long while she had kept silence about what, next to Matthew himself, was nearest to her heart. She could not keep silence for ever: there were things that had to be said. They were not quite the things she would have said had she spoken months earlier. Time had been granted her, time in which to consider and to learn. These weeks in which Matthew had been entirely dependent on her goodness had taught her
something both of herself and of him: it was not a new knowledge, but an old knowledge made manifest. Yet though there was a difference between what she would have said and what she had now to say, it was a difference rather in spirit than in substance. She could now say with full confidence what ten weeks earlier she would have said tentatively and with trembling.

They sat in their accustomed chairs, on either side of the hearth.

‘You're better now, aren't you, Matt?'

He grinned. ‘Yes, thank you, nurse.'

‘I mean, really better?'

‘Right as rain.'

‘You've been back working a week now,' said Ann.

‘About time too, it was. What are you getting at?'

‘Look, Matty. There's something we've got to talk about. I didn't want to worry you while you were ill. I couldn't. But you'll have to know some time.'

He stared. ‘I shall have to know what?'

‘It's about Hilda,' she said gently.

‘Hilda?' His surprise was unfeigned.

‘Yes, Hilda,' Ann said. ‘I think she's going to have a baby.'

‘You think …? Why?'

Seeing and hating his confusion she said quickly: ‘Please don't fence, Matt. I couldn't bear it. Just tell me yes or no. Is the baby yours?'

He looked at her, and looked away. ‘I suppose so.'

He held his eyes away from her now, afraid to see her stricken by the false truth, or the half-truth, which he had gone through fire and torment to prevent her being told. A melancholy, bitter smile sat in the corners of his mouth. All that effort wasted! And yet … a child would be born. His child. If only it had been Ann's as well!

‘Ann,' he said helplessly, ‘what can I say! Does it … does it matter so much?'

‘If it matters to you, Matt, it matters to me. It's really,' she said easily, ‘for you to say, isn't it?'

The apparent lightness of her tone astonished him. ‘What do you mean? It's all past and done with, so far as I'm concerned. You must know that.'

She nodded. ‘Yes. I think I knew that.'

‘It was nothing,' he said. ‘It was simply——'

‘Not quite nothing,' she quickly broke in. ‘You're not that sort. But you don't need to explain. It was inevitable, in a way. I see that now. You see, I've had plenty of time to think about it. I've known for months.'

‘But how? Did she …?' He could not at this moment speak Hilda's name. It would make her more real. It would set her between them.

‘I knew, or I guessed. I hated myself for thinking it. But I needn't have done, need I? Because it was true.' Her smile, gentle and rueful, made him wince. ‘I think it was the way you behaved together when I came back. I felt you were both being … careful. And then I found she was in trouble. And so you see …' Her story trailed away.

‘What can I say?' he said again. ‘What can I do? Is there
anything
I can do?'

‘You can tell me the truth, Matty. Oh, not about what's happened: I know that.'

‘About what then?'

‘About what's to happen now. About us: you and me.'

‘But … don't you see? How can I make you see? It makes no difference to
us
. It never did. You and I … well, we're us, aren't we?' He couldn't find words to fit his simple, profound conviction.

‘Do you want us to stay together?'

‘You know I do.'

‘Maybe so. But it's good to have it said for once. I had to be sure.' There was silence between them. Then she said, hesitating at a difficulty: ‘But Hilda. She'll have to go, won't she?'

‘Obviously,' said Matthew.

‘Yes, but not yet. You've forgotten something, Matthew.
There's the baby. And the baby's mother too. She's a good girl, whatever people may say. I've got a plan about that.'

‘A plan?'

‘I got it out of the Bible,' Ann explained. ‘I shall take care of her till the baby's weaned. It's your baby, and maybe she'll let us keep it. You want a son, Matthew. What a wonderful chance!'

Matthew could only say: ‘I wish it were your child, Ann.'

‘It is, it will be,' she cried, in an ecstasy of faith. ‘Hilda will give him to me, and I shall give him to you. I think it must have been
meant
to happen like this. It all fits in. It makes everything right for us.'

It was in her mind that this was God's plan for the perfecting of their marriage and the solace of her barrenness; but such things, out of church, she could not say aloud. Nor did she care to pursue the Biblical parallel too far. A shadow came into her eyes as she recalled the words of the old story, which she now knew by heart: words telling how the handmaid of Sarah conceived, and ‘when she saw she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes'.

‘I hope it won't come to that,' she said softly, forgetting her audience.

‘Come to what?' Matthew asked.

‘Oh nothing,' said Ann. ‘Just silliness.'

The war to end war having been fought and won, and the world made safe for democracy, the next item on the programme was that the men who had fought and the people at home who had suffered or waxed fat should join in loving concord to gather the fruits of their heroic endeavours. The comradeship of the battlefield, overriding class distinction, was to be carried into the peace, establish social justice, and make the life of the nation one grand sweet song. So the politicians told us, and for the moment they meant it; but they had reckoned, poor fellows, without the politicians. For it was soon evident that the anthem of the new era would have to compete with other noises, with the tramp of British armies in Russia engaged (so said the malcontents of the Left) in a financiers' war, with the confusions and bitter resentments of the demobilization, with the ‘coupon' election, with the ugly scramble for jobs, and with wholesale murder and counter-murder in Ireland. On Armistice Day, and on its first few anniversaries, the national orchestra did indeed play over the opening bars of the accompaniment; but the singing was sporadic; the choir, it seemed, was not quite ready. Prices were soaring, commodities scarce. There was much talk of the new poor; and the new rich, who had been busily feathering their nests for four years, were now as busily lamenting the shortage of feathers. Controls were relaxed where (some said) they should have been enforced, and enforced (said others) where they should have been relaxed. Newspapers nagged and statesmen orated. An uneasy compromise between regimentation and go-as-you-please made the worst of both policies, the critics asserted. Harassed housewives were still paying through the nose for such luxuries as butter and eggs. The bereaved were still bereaved: the flower of a generation had perished. There were, however, changes.
The white-feather girls were older now, if not wiser: conscription had appeased their holy rage, but their men were for the most part dead or damaged, and there were not enough others to go round. Many returned warriors, who had been sustained throughout their long ordeal by a vision of England and home, were finding civilian life flat, stale, and unprofitable; particularly those of them who had been reduced, by their country's gratitude, to peddling shoe-laces in the streets or selling sewing-machines on commission. But the war was won; the League of Nations, with its Covenant, was in being; and —on a broad view—all was right with the world.

Felix, on the eve of demobilization, had been more fortunate than many, in having both something he wanted to do and an opportunity of doing it. His work in the East End, profoundly disheartening though it sometimes was, appeased his appetite to be made use of in the everlasting war upon human misery. An idiosyncrasy of temperament enabled him to pursue this aim without distraction: he lived sparely on his modest earnings, but they were enough for his needs, and being full of other concerns, both earthly and heavenly, he found nothing so easy as to take no thought for the morrow, what he should eat and what he should drink and wherewithal he should be clothed: Mrs Grapes, who cooked his meals and mended his underclothing, did that thinking for him, and would do the same in due time for his successor. He still regarded himself as a mere apprentice in the service of Christ, or as an athlete training for some dim, far-off, divine event. Meanwhile there was plenty to do and endure, here and now. He did not embrace the heresy of salvation by works alone, but he did entertain the suspicion that faith itself came by works and not otherwise. Jakes's example suggested as much, Jakes who could never be brought to admit to having any ‘faith' in Felix's sense of the term yet was clearly sustained in his ferocious busyness by something that was not, to put it mildly, self-interest, not even the ‘enlightened self-interest' to which he might have laid claim.