The Jury (9 page)

All his truculence was now gone. He was awed into a feeling of insignificance by the atmosphere of this strange new world. It was like being in church, yet unlike it as well, for the quiet of this place has a sinister quality, clean, bare, cold. And now the ward-sister had possession of them: he and Gladys stood before her like a pair of shabby school-children,
downcast and docile, listening respectfully while she spoke of Dolly's accident and Dolly's condition. The patient had just regained consciousness. They might see her, if they wished, for three seconds, no longer: she must not be expected to talk.

“Is she …?” said Mr Bayfield. “I mean, will she …?”

“She has everything on her side,” said the ward-sister. “We're going to give her a nice sleep.”

So they went and looked at the death-pale stranger that Dolly had become. She smiled at them with her eyes, though her mouth was misshapen with pain. Dolly's mother stared while she could: Mr Bayfield glanced in dismay from one to the other, startled to see a sudden beauty drawn in his wife's faded face. “You're going to have a nice sleep,” he heard her say, but he was already groping his way back to the door, and in a moment Gladys was with him again, and asking questions of the sister.

“Here's the young man himself,” said the sister. “He can tell you more than I can.”

Mr Bayfield turned to confront a tall youth who carried his arm in a sling and his head in a bandage. “Huh!” he said. “What's he got to do with it?”

“Oh,” stammered the young man breathlessly, “are you Mr and Mrs Bayfield? I'm so … I'm so … How's Dorothy now? I hope …”

“Dorothy?” echoed Mr Bayfield. “If it's my daughter you mean …”

Mrs Bayfield intervened. “Are you George? She was asking about you.”

“Who was asking about him?” said Mr Bayfield.

“Be quiet, Jim.” He was quiet.

“You see,” explained the young man, “we were in the crash together. I was taking her for a run in the car, and I crashed. Like a fool, though it wasn't really my fault. It's no good saying I'm sorry. Worst of it is, I'm hardly hurt at all, and Dorothy …”

Mr Bayfield resented this George, resented his youth, his air of breeding, his making free with the name of Dorothy. If he
must
use a familiar name, why not the name that was truly hers, and not this stuck-up, superior-sounding ‘Dorothy'?
Taking her for a run in the car, was he! And what, Mr Bayfield asked himself darkly, were his intentions?

“Taking her for a run, if you please,” remarked Mr Bayfield, when they had regained the street. “Nothing about bringing her to see us.”

Mrs Bayfield did not answer for a moment. She seemed to be lost in thought. When she did speak it was to say: “Save your coppers, Father. We shall want 'em for the telephone.”

“Telephone?” he echoed vaguely.

“Yes,” she said. “I've got the number safe and sound.” She gave him a bleak smile and added: “In my bag.”

HAD Mrs Cranshaw been told that before the year was out she would be sitting at the same table with so small a tradesman as Mr Bayfield of Peckham, she would have been incredulous, mystified, and indignant—in that order. But no prophet arrived to disturb the serenity of this golden Sunday afternoon in July. Mrs Cranshaw reclined in a hammock under the largest of her cedars and took pleasure in the smooth green of the lawn that stretched at her feet. Her white stone house, with its civil proportions, its good sense and unobtrusive dignity, had this afternoon, she thought, almost the brilliance of an Italian villa. The faint wistfulness induced by the memory of Italian holidays rather enriched than impoverished the enjoyment of her moment. Mrs Cranshaw was not a woman much given to wistfulness. She had no anxieties, material or spiritual, and no lack of interest in the everyday incidents of a life that to outsiders must have seemed tame and colourless. She exchanged afternoon calls with ‘some nice people'; she owned one of the half-dozen beautiful houses left in a suburb largely overrun by rows of red brick; she was fond of gardening and spent much time stridently instructing the aged man nominally in charge of that department; and she approached her fortieth year with equanimity. Every day, when she looked in her glass, she saw a dark-haired, dark-eyed, and still comely woman, and,
though she was the least bit stouter than she could have wished, it seldom occurred to her to question that Time would treat her like a gentleman. “If anything were to happen to my husband,” she had once remarked to the Vicar's wife, “I should keep a dog and live very quietly.” And, five years ago now, something
had
happened to her husband, something into the nature of which she did not too curiously inquire, well assured that having died solvent, and been buried according to the rites of the Church of England, he had gone to the place prepared—by an Anglican Saviour—for the reception of English gentlemen. Though only to be expected at his age, it was sad that he had had to go, poor dear man; but she was in no hurry to join him. At this moment her cup of contentment was brimming over. She had paid her respects to God by attending morning service at Saint Andrew's; she had had an excellent lunch, and knew that in the fullness of time the comfortable maternal Millerby, one of the few ‘treasures' left in domestic service, would bring tea and cream-cakes on a tray; and the day had reached that point of ripe perfection at which it seems inconceivable that the cosmic arrangements are not entirely of the best. A hammock, a patch of shade on a sunlit lawn, and the dead body of Sir Peter Chezil just discovered in the library: what more could a middle-aged lady ask of life? Clare Cranshaw asked nothing more, unless … at times … something that neither marriage nor luxurious widowhood had brought her—some intimate glory, compact of earth and fire, that even a detective novel could not give.

Not even a detective novel, and not even Major Forth, though her meeting with that gentleman was to have momentous consequences for her. Major Forth, late of India, was enjoying a rather different kind of widowhood some six or seven miles south-west of Mrs Cranshaw's house. His memsahib, being (alas) something less than pukka, had discovered to him, ten years ago now, a preference for a junior officer of his own mess. She had paid for the indiscretion with the loss of husband and children, and here was Major Forth, at fifty-nine, tolerated by Evangeline and Edgar, and managed by a hard-faced housekeeper, living a life of spiritual isolation in Kensington. At the club, where the greater part of his
time was spent, he was always ready to talk of old times, but not always able to find a listener. He walked in the Gardens every Sunday. He was punctual in his attendance at what he still liked to call church-parade. He often regretted his retirement from the service, and sometimes, in moments of exceptional wisdom, he even regretted that he had come into the old man's money—for what was the use of it to him, what purpose did it serve but to keep him idle and discontented when he might have been busy and important? As Mrs Cranshaw, turning the pages of her novel, decided that the French maid could not possibly be an accomplice, the evidence against her being so pointed, Major Forth spared a passing glance for the statue of Physical Energy and wished himself a younger man. It was Muriel who had made him old, he said to himself bitterly; and because of Muriel he would never trust woman again. But catching sight of a squirrel, which sat with bright listening eyes at the foot of a tree, he was surprised into sudden pleasure, felt like a boy again, and the novel thought visited him that perhaps after all there had been excuses for Muriel's perfidy. If Mrs Cranshaw had chanced to be walking in the Gardens that afternoon … but Mrs Cranshaw was busy following another false trail laid by the ingenious author.

Next to the soldier, and next but one to the widow, at that conference-table of the future, would sit Oliver Brackett, whose foxy-red face and yapping recitative were endeared by familiarity to all those of his neighbours who frequented the local sale-room. Oliver had been born and bred to auctioneering, stepping into his father's shoes as a young man. He was young no longer, nor yet old: a man of substance, with a wife already grey-haired, and two sons, one of school-leaving age. Everyone knew him for a brisk business man: no one guessed, not even his wife, that there was a secret in his life. This Sunday afternoon, while Major Forth strode along in Kensington Gardens, and Mrs Cranshaw swung gently in a hammock, pushing at the ground with her neatly shod little foot, Oliver Brackett was enjoying a fantasy of his own making. The morning he had spent on the golf-course, breaking the Sabbath with certain godless neighbours. During lunch he had listened, a little absently, to Molly's
conversation, which, being so often pent-up (she was much alone), was apt to flow at full tide on such occasions. And after lunch, with the expressed intention of having forty winks, he had retired to the little sitting-room in which we now find him. But Mr Brackett led a double life, and his forty winks was a mere fiction. That he was a great reader was no secret from Molly: indeed it was one of her grievances. But the nature of his reading was a matter with which she did not think to concern herself. Mr Brackett, an addict of the stage, possessed a large collection of dramatic literature, old and new, picked up in all sorts of odd places, from the second-hand shops of Charing Cross Road to the dusty corners of his own sale-room. In the course of his business great quantities of unregarded books passed through his hands, to be sold, for the most part, in bundles of fifty or so at a few shillings a bundle. No one knew (except his clerk, who thought it a dull form of eccentricity) that nothing in the shape of a play ever got into those bundles; that for years Mr Brackett had made a practice of putting all such volumes into a separate lot, and buying them himself at his own auction. Good or bad, old or new, it was all one to Mr Brackett so long as it was a play, and so long as it contained a part or two in which he could see himself as an actor. For an actor was what he dreamed of being. It was nothing so practical as an ambition: it was a form of daydreaming, hidden from the world by an invincible shyness. In his heart he had no doubt at all that he could have done wonders on the stage; and in his fancy, every Sunday afternoon, those wonders were achieved, amid tumultuous applause. His auctioneering itself was a dramatic performance, the only one that the fates had allowed him; and, though he often wearied of the part, he was sustained by a secret pleasure in the fact that the people who came to watch and listen could not see through his make-believe to the real person behind it. He had small acquaintance with literature in general, and no taste for it; but his knowledge of the English drama, though haphazard, was extensive. Sitting at ease in his large leather chair, he spent this afternoon strutting and posturing and mouthing in the character of Webster's Brachiano; and so it was that his wife, when she came to call him to tea, found him with a book in his lap and a
gleam in his wide-open eyes. The gleam vanished at sight of her, to be replaced by a look of embarrassment.

“There you go again,” she said, in half-humorous reproach. “You come in to have your forty winks, and you've been at your blessed books all the time, I'
II
be bound!”

She had said precisely that more often than he could count. Nearly every Sunday she said it.

EMERGING from the telephone-box after giving Daphne's message to Roderick, Mark Perryman took a handkerchief from his pocket and began mopping his face and ears. He heaved a sigh of discontent, wishing that his two friends could have contrived to quarrel and part without his help. There was Roderick, away in the country, staging a full-dress romance in a cottage surrounded by green fields and wooded hills. There was Daphne, amid the comfort of her well-staffed house in Merrion Square, building high tragedy out of a commonplace situation; and here was he, Mark Perryman, sweating like a pig in the blazing heat of the Strand. And now, having spoken to Roderick, he must communicate his answer to Daphne. The telephone-box was at his elbow, waiting to be re-entered. Mark had the pennies in his hand, and Daphne's number was on the tip of his tongue, but he turned away and sauntered undecidedly in the direction of Kingsway. At this moment he had little stomach for a conversation with Daphne. But that was only half the truth. When he remembered the new Daphne that this situation had called into being he was repelled and wanted to avoid her. But the thought of her purely personal quality lit a flame in him, and he was exasperated to feel that his status in this affair obliged him to behave like a perfect gentleman. His uncensored thoughts were wanton enough to make him chafe under that tedious obligation. He greeted these thoughts with a grin, taking what pleasure he could in playing the part of sardonic spectator of himself; and with the same grin he noted that his feet were carrying him rather rapidly—
far too rapidly for so hot an evening—in the direction of Merrion Square. To take a taxi or a bus would have committed him too definitely to a course of action he was pretending not to have decided on: it was better to drift, and so to escape responsibility for the fact that at half-past seven he found himself at the door of the Stroods' house.

“Good evening, Tucker. Is Mrs Strood at home?”

Tucker greeted him with a cheerful smile: a small, snub-nosed man who had never quite lost his sense of good luck in having survived the war. He had been batman to Mark himself for nine fantastic months in France, and now formed part of a man-and-wife employed by the Stroods on Mark's introduction. With the air of pleased surprise that was habitual in him he conducted Mark to the drawing-room and said he would tell madam. The trenches were homelier, thought Mark, glancing round at the modernist interior he had seen so often before. But not, he added, so comfortable. He sat down in a chair whose eccentric design was justified by the exquisite tact with which it received and supported him. It was a smart room, the latest thing, and clearly Daphne's choice; but so smart, thought Mark, so infernally well-bred, that it might have been designed for the express purpose of making a plain man feel small. Mark wasn't precisely a plain man, but he felt small none the less. A place like this calls for dress-clothes, he said resentfully, and at that moment Daphne appeared. She appeared noiselessly, gracefully. He met her in the middle of the room and took her hand. For a moment he felt that he was on a stage with her, in a fashionable West-end play. Enter Lady Constance, exquisitely gowned. There are signs of nervous strain in her face. She moves centre to greet Henry. She gives him her hand. He stands stiffly before her, with questions in his eyes.… But that sense of theatricality vanished. And it was as if the room itself vanished, leaving only Daphne. For Daphne at least was vivid and real enough, vivid, real, and infernally desirable. What more does Roderick want? But he knew the question for a foolish one.