The Scent of Water (5 page)

In her dainty kitchen-dining room, tying on her flowered overall, Valerie said to herself, No time even for a cup of tea. That’s married life. What’s to happen to Paul and me? Do we just go on and on like this till we go mad? Or I do, for he won’t. I don’t think I’d find him so maddening if only he’d realize how rotten our life is. But he never realizes anything. He’s self-centered as a cow. Her thoughts ran on in this habitual manner, a tragic Greek Chorus to the central figure, until there came a sudden check. . . . I liked that woman, she thought. She looked as though she’d had an interesting life. Not like me. . . . And then the Chorus was back and telling her what rotten luck it had been that she, at nineteen, not long out of school, should have married a man who a few months after their marriage was back on her hands a blind and nerve-shattered wreck. And his plane had been shot down in the last two weeks of the phase of the war. If it had ended a fortnight earlier it wouldn’t have happened. She could remember as though it was yesterday standing in the hospital corridor on VE Day, waiting for permission to go in and see Paul, trembling and reluctant, for suffering in any form terrified her, thinking that it was VE Day and everyone had been happy and rejoicing in the streets, and this had happened to her and Paul. Of course it had been awful for Paul but it had been much worse for her. It was always worse for the wife. Everybody said so. And it got worse still as time went on because people did not sympathize with you any more. They couldn’t do enough for you at first, and that helped, and then they got bored with your troubles. But your troubles went on just the same and you had to bear them alone. Again came the check. . . . That really
was
a marvelous suit. I wonder what she gave for it?

“A very good-looking woman,” said Colonel Adams to his wife as they sat over their late tea. They did not have supper, just cocoa and bread and butter when they went to bed, cocoa being cheap, so they had a late tea. It helped to pass the evening, for happy though they were together, the evenings did sometimes seem long, especially in the winter. The fact was that by the time they had done the work that had to be done in the cottage, cooked and eaten their frugal lunch and washed up afterward, they were tired and couldn’t do much more for the rest of the day except sit; out in the garden in warm weather, in front of the fire in winter.

Colonel Adams was eighty-two and crippled with arthritis. He had suffered with a grim and humorous heroism for many years though now the joints were fixed and he was in less pain; but it was difficult to get about on his two sticks. Mrs. Adams was younger, a little creature who hardly reached to her husband’s shoulder, but her physique had not been equal to the strain of bearing her four sons, losing three of them in the war and having the fourth turn out so disappointing. Then there had been the perpetual planning and contriving that had been necessary with the cost of living ceaselessly rising and Service pensions staying where they were. And so now she was delicate. They had had a little private money once but Charles’s debts had swallowed most of that long ago. One couldn’t refuse to help one’s own son, especially one so beloved as Charles.

But if life had been hard for Mrs. Adams it had never occurred to her to think so, and her soft face was serene as a kitten’s. It had never occurred to the Colonel to complain either. His lean brown face, with bushy white eyebrows and white cavalry mustache, was wrinkled in lines of perpetual good humor. It was only their evident exhaustion and the faded blue eyes of both of them that suggested suffering. Nothing else. They had each other. An unusually happy marriage, its selflessness strengthened by shared tragedy, had grown into something more, an identification so close that each could be said to have passed beyond the barriers of self and to live in the other with an immediacy that very largely shut out thought of the future. Largely, not entirely. The thought of death did come at times and they would smile at each other and say, “We’ll go together.” But in each was the fear, never expressed to the other, that it might not be so. They hardly realized the uniqueness of their love, and their good fortune in its possession, though they did know they were happy. The discontent and unhappiness of others was a great puzzle to them, especially if those others happened to have television. At the heart of their mutual content was this mutual longing for a TV. It was not an acquisitive longing, it was almost the mystical longing of a child for the morning star. On the few occasions when they had seen it, and had sat before it spellbound, it had seemed to them an unbelievable magic. And so their longing was not a corroding one, because no one expects to possess the morning star. They did not speak of it to each other because neither liked the other to think that they wanted anything more than the riches they had in each other.

“A very good-looking woman indeed,” repeated Colonel Adams, who had always had a harmless eye for a pretty woman. “And looked as though she could play a good hand of bridge.”

Now there was another thing that it would have been nice to have, more frequent bridge, and of this they did sometimes speak to each other because it was an attainable thing. It only needed a little change in the village population to bring it about. Colonel Adams played a first-rate hand and Mrs. Adams, who had not liked the game originally but had taught herself to like it for her husband’s sake, was adequate, the Vicar was more than adequate but not yet quite first-rate, though Colonel Adams had hope for him. But the Vicar had other things to do, and a counterpassion for chess, and they hesitated to call upon him too often. Valerie Randall could play a good hand, and when commanded by the Vicar to come with him to Holly Cottage she would do so, for she was scared of the old Vicar. His manners were exquisite but he could be sarcastic and she was not at all sure that he liked her. He liked her husband and she was always uneasy with those who liked Paul. So her bridge too was uneasy and she always had her eye on the clock, haunted by the thought of all the things she had to do at home. Valerie as a fourth was better than nothing but she was not quite what one wanted. And the three old people sitting around the table with her knew quite well, as old people always know, that she thought all old people a damned nuisance. There was Mrs. Hepplewhite at the manor, of course, but they couldn’t appeal to her because she was so extraordinarily kind. Had she known of their desire she would have whisked them in her Bentley to every bridge party for miles around. That was the trouble with Mrs. Hepplewhite’s kindness. Once let loose it was like a roaring cataract and one had to be very strong to stand against the current and live.

“Not a young woman,” Colonel Adams assured his wife. “Gray-haired. Fiftyish. Looked as though she’d enjoy her bridge.”

“Perhaps we could call,” suggested Mrs. Adams. It was a tremendous suggestion, for they hadn’t called on anyone for years.

“How do we get there?” asked her husband. It was not far, only down the lane, around the corner and across the green, but it was a long way for them.

“We get to church on our good days,” said Mrs. Adams. “And it’s not much farther. We’ll have an early lunch one day, have our rests and then go. Does she look like the sort of woman who will give us tea when we get there? That would help for the going back.”

“She looked like a woman who would do everything correctly,” said Colonel Adams. “In the way we are accustomed to. Is there another cup of tea left in the pot?”

She poured him out a third cup of tea, smiling to think how much he could still tell about a woman in one glance. Then she turned her chair to the wood fire that was burning in the grate, for though it was May the wind was in the east and a little fire was comforting in the evenings. Their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Eeles the gamekeeper’s wife, was very good about running in and doing the grate, and other jobs that were difficult for Mrs. Adams, and her husband Bert looked after their tiny garden for them though they could pay him next to nothing for doing so. Everyone was so kind. Colonel and Mrs. Adams never ceased to be touched and astonished by the kindness and generosity that they met on all sides. They couldn’t understand it. It was wonderful.

Colonel Adams finished his tea and turned his chair too around to the fire and lit his pipe. The little room was shabby and charming. The remnants of a beautiful carpet they had acquired long ago in India had been skillfully pieced together by Mrs. Eeles and fitted to the wainscot. The yellow curtains and chair covers were faded and darned but still pretty. There were books, photographs of their children, and a few bits of rare china that could not be sold because they were cracked. And the card table. It was Queen Anne, with candle slides and elegant legs, the only thing of value left to them, and they were resolved not to part with it for anything in the world the antique shops of Westwater could offer them. Outside the window the evening light was turning the garden to magic and in the wood the cuckoo was still calling.

“Five months,” said Mrs. Adams and sighed with satisfaction. Her husband knew what she meant and held out his hand to her. She meant that they could now expect five months of reasonable warmth. Their bills would go down, with no coal and less electricity. They would not catch so many colds and they would feel better. Above all, that fear that each kept so carefully concealed would be laid to rest. It was in January and February that old people died, not in the summer when their blood was warmer and their heartbeats steadier. She took his hand and laid it in her lap.

“Tom,” she whispered, her face alight with the joy of divulging a secret she had been keeping for this moment, “there’s a fowl for lunch tomorrow. All plucked and ready for me to cook. Gladys from the vicarage brought it this morning while you were in the garden.”

At the vicarage too they were having a late tea, for the Vicar had been visiting outlying farms.

“I saw her as I was coming out of the post office,” said Jean Anderson timidly.

“Who?” snapped the Vicar. His sister started at the sharpness of his question, tears came into her eyes and her tea slopped over into the saucer. They had lived together for ten years now and still she could not get used to the quickness of his speech, his unintentional sarcasm and the pouncing vigor of his mind. And he on his side could not learn to adjust himself to her weakness and incompetence, though he tried hard, and with resolute loyalty always refused to look back to those halcyon days when he had lived alone. Poor Jean. She was the one weakling in a brilliant and healthy family. Very odd. Their mother had had some illness or other just before her birth, he remembered, and perhaps that had had something to do with it. She’d never been able to do anything much and had lived at home with her parents, always ailing though never with any specific disease. Nothing wrong mentally but just slow in the uptake. And now she was fifty-six and looked seventy, with a tall thin frame that wavered like a bending poplar as she walked, dazed blue eyes that she protected with dark glasses when she was out, and thin wispy gray hair that was always falling into her eyes. She wore terrible wool jumpers and cardigans she knitted for herself, for knitting was one of the things she had learned to do and she enjoyed it. And she loved her hens.

The Vicar recollected something. “Did that fowl go up to Holly Cottage?” he demanded sharply.

“Yes, James,” she said shakily, and the tears ran over. She felt for her handkerchief and wiped them way. He remembered suddenly what her hens meant to her, and how deeply she felt the occasional necessary liquidations. With compunction he got up and came to her, a piece of Gladys’s marvelous plum cake in his left hand, and put his right on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Jean. I spoke sharply but I don’t mean it. It’s my way. I’m always telling you.” He gave her shoulder a friendly little shake and went back to his place. “What were you saying just now? You had seen whom?”

“The new Miss Lindsay. Coming to The Laurels.”

“God help her,” said the Vicar. “The state that house and garden must be in. What sort of woman?”

Jean hesitated, struggling to find the right words. It was all there in her mind, very clear, but she could never match the right words to the vivid pictures that she saw.

“I think,” she said at last, “she would be called smart.” And then she could have bitten her tongue out. That wasn’t the right word for that graceful woman who had leaned forward and smiled at her as she passed. She had had that bright scarf around her neck. It was a wonderful color and Jean’s slightly sentimental imagination had seen her as a tall gladiolus. She had been afraid of her, of course, for she was always frightened of strangers, but she had been attracted too.

“Smart?” ejaculated the Vicar. “Then God help
us
. Like the Hepplewhite?”

“Oh no, no!” said Jean, almost in tears again. “Oh no, not like
her!
” Mrs. Hepplewhite was the president of the Women’s Institute. Her husband had bought the manor house up on the hill after the old squire had died, but he was not at all like the old squire, dear old Sir Ambrose Royston. With her great kindness and capability Mrs. Hepplewhite knew exactly how to help everybody, including Miss Anderson whom with untiring perseverance she was endeavoring to cajole into “going out more.” Jean spent a great deal of time in her company because she was in all her nightmares, and she had constant nightmares. “No!” she said again.

“Well then, if she didn’t scare you stiff, go in tomorrow morning and see if there’s anything we can do for her.”

“Go and see her?” gasped Jean, and began to tremble. James did not know of course how terrified she was of that fearful house. She had never told him, or anyone, about that day when the queer old lady had popped out of the green door in the wall, like a spider out of its web, just as she was passing, seized her wrist and dragged her inside, up the stone-flagged path into the dark dreadful house and—and—Her pulse was racing madly and the sweat started out on her forehead. “The Laurels?” she whispered. “Go to The Laurels?”

“Of course,” said the Vicar briskly. “Say I’ll be calling in a day or two.” He pushed his chair back. “I’ll go along to my study. Haven’t dealt with the post yet.”