Element of doubt, p.3
Element of Doubt, page 3
There was, a cold thin steam climbing out of the hollows. By the time dinner was over and Joe had gone up to his room the ground below the terrace was as full of stealthy motion as a vat of simmering milk. He pulled his chair to the window and sat watching the industry of it. As the moon rose, the mist thickened, laid, and the Bessemer acres were ghosts of themselves.
Half-measures, thought Joe. I suppose it was Romney I could see. He must have been a prodigy indeed to make such an impression. Beauty has to be strong, stronger than evil, to persist after death in places where people have been.
True, the impression he received was not all goodness and light. But how should there not be something violent about it when the boy was so violently cut off? To the family at the Priory it must have been like the end of the sun.
Someone knocked at Joe’s door and when he called ‘Come in’, a bunch of stubby fingers appeared discreetly on the edge.
‘Can I have a word with you, sir?’
Joe got up and opened the door wide. ‘Come in. It’s Mrs. Brewer, isn’t it?’
‘Brewer, sir. The “Mrs.” part is dead and gone.’ She shut the door firmly behind her, a tall old woman in a homely white apron. ‘Thank you, sir, I’d sooner stand. I apologise for intruding on you but what I’ve to say won’t take long.’ Joe found himself being quite openly summed up by a pair of direct, almost hard grey eyes. ‘Did Miss Steen tell you that I’ve had the charge of Master Harry?’
‘She told me you were his nurse.’
‘I’ve come to you because you’re taking him now and there’s something you should know. No one else will tell you because no one else knows of it.’
‘What is it?’
‘Lately Master Harry has been leaving his bed at nights and walking about. How often, I don’t know, but I’ve caught him at it three times.’
‘Just walking about?’
‘As far as I know.’
‘Has he said why?’
‘There was a time when I knew what was in Master Harry’s mind and didn’t need to ask. If there was anything I couldn’t know, he told me. Now,’ she said grimly, ‘I need to ask but he doesn’t need to tell.’
‘Didn’t you speak to Mr. Steen or Miss Steen about this?’
‘It’s been on my mind, indeed, but I was afraid to.’
‘Afraid? They would be more inclined to blame you for not telling them.’
‘It’s the boy I’m afraid for. They would say I must lock him in his room at nights.’
‘You think that would be a bad thing?’
She said bluntly, ‘Do you think it would be a good thing?’
‘There’s something the matter with the child. Have you any idea what it is?’
‘The matter is that he cannot be a child.’
‘Since when?’
‘I can’t put a term to it.’
‘Would you say – since his brother died?’
Old Mrs. Brewer’s mouth shut so hard that Joe thought she was not going to answer. Indeed it took her a full moment to relax enough to say, ‘Perhaps.’
‘Mightn’t he be fretting?’
‘I don’t know if I can make myself clear,’ she said painfully. ‘You’re a stranger, sir, and it’s unseemly that I should come to you behind Mr. Steen’s and Miss Barbary’s backs. But I come for the child’s sake. It’s more than time he was stopped. I’ve tried and tried but he’s beyond me.’
‘What must he be stopped at?’
She touched her white apron here and there, taking comfort from the fact that it at least still knew and kept its place. ‘It isn’t so much him as what’s riding him. A twig of a child to be stretched to breaking-point!’
‘But you’ve no idea what’s troubling him?’
‘I wouldn’t be here if I had, sir. I wouldn’t be here if Mr. Steen and Miss Barbary – ’ she floundered, coloured, ‘ – if they hadn’t a blind spot for Master Harry.’
‘They think you’re fussing, I suppose. Well, as you say, I’m a stranger, but that means I get an outsider’s view and if ever I saw a child with a load on his mind, that child is Harry. Were you a nurse to the other boy, too?’
‘I came here with Mrs. Steen when she was married.’
‘And what did you think of Romney?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say, sir.’
‘Why not?’
‘Mr. Romney is dead.’
‘I know that,’ Joe said impatiently. ‘I’m not asking you to tell me family secrets or speak ill of him. I wanted your personal opinion.’
‘One can only speak as one finds, sir.’ Those grey eyes were undeniably hard now. They left Joe in no doubt as to what Mrs. Brewer had found. ‘Will you excuse me? I have to prepare Miss Barbary’s tray.’
When she had gone Joe drew the curtains over the window and the flocculent mist. A matter of ‘de mortuis nil nisi bonum’, and one who did not love the beloved. Romney’s fault, or Mrs. Brewer’s? Hers, more likely. She had the Puritan touch and by all accounts the boy had not. He could have been shallow and feckless to her and she a deposed childhood dragon to him.
She did care, though, for Harry. She cared a great deal and she was worried or she would never have brought herself to interfere in the affairs of the family; to interfere, moreover, through the medium of an outsider. To the old-fashioned servant that was a crime of presumption.
Joe took up his pipe, began to fill it, then laid it down. On impulse he left his room and went along the corridor.
The last door on the left was Harry’s. He had fixed a transfer picture on the upper panel. It had been there some time because it was half rubbed off. Joe peered at it and made out what appeared to be the grey shape of some kind of rat.
He touched the handle very gently, hesitated, then turned it and pushed the door ajar.
Harry was not in bed. He was sitting bolt upright in a huge wooden chair, sketchy as a puppet in his blue and white pyjamas. There was a night-light burning on a side-table; it cast dark hollows along the bones of Harry’s small undistinguished skull and until Joe went close he could not see his eyes nor the whiteness of his fingers gripping the arms of the chair.
‘Why, Harry – ’
The child did not move. Stooping, Joe looked into his face and was disconcerted to find those clouded blue eyes gazing steadily into his.
‘Why are you sitting here like this?’
The sticklike bones under the pyjama jacket braced themselves even more sternly. ‘Do I look frightened?’
‘Of course not. Who said you did?’
‘It mustn’t be said.’ Harry relaxed and lay back in the chair. ‘That’s the only thing I’m frightened of – people saying I’m frightened.’
‘Who isn’t? It makes heroes of some of us. Whether you’re going to be a hero or not depends on what you’re frightened of.’
‘Does it?’
‘If it’s fire or water or heights, you have to cut quite a dash proving you’re not scared. If it’s something not so spectacular the chances are no one will know you were frightened or that you overcame your fright. What matters in the long run, of course, is not the other people but how you seem to yourself.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Harry, ‘not to me it isn’t. To me I shall seem frightened, I shall be frightened, but I can bear that so long as no one else sees it.’ He added, by way of information, ‘It’s not fire or water or heights.’
‘I see. Well you’d better go back to bed now.’
Harry moved obediently. As he lay down and Joe drew the covers over him his body was relaxed but the uncandid eyes were watchful. He was doubled and ready inside for the questions he expected.
‘A bold front seems everything, doesn’t it?’ said Joe. ‘It’s later on that you’ll find other people’s opinions of you, however good, won’t give you peace if your opinion of yourself is poor.’
Whether Harry understood, he did not know. The boy lay there gazing steadily and once again Joe was struck by the warmth in his eyes. A child with strong natural affection. On whom, thought Joe pityingly, was he able to spend that? No longer on his brother Romney; there was only old Mrs. Brewer. If anyone else cared, they had not let it be seen and at Harry’s age one could not deduce love, or presume it.
Joe sat down on the bed beside him. ‘Can you see, Harry, how believing well of yourself can keep you up to scratch? You have to try all the time to live up to it. Of course you can’t succeed all the time, but most people have something they remember, something they once did, which brought them flush with their golden opinions of themselves. It’s a good thing to have, however small and trivial it may seem to other people.’
Harry pushed himself up on one elbow. ‘What have you got?’
‘I?’
‘To remember.’
Joe smiled. ‘Nothing.’
Harry did not smile back. ‘You were in the war, weren’t you? Did you ever kill a German?’
‘I wasn’t ever called upon to do that. And if I had been, I doubt I’m of stern enough stuff to try living up to it.’
Harry lay back on his pillow. His eyes were suddenly blank and cold; it was as if he were looking not at Joe, but at immeasurable wastes between them.
‘Try to sleep now.’ Joe pushed back the hair on the child’s forehead. It troubled him to find the skin hot and damp under his fingers. ‘Do you mind if I sit in this chair awhile?’
Harry came back from his distances, his face sharpening with suspicion. ‘Why?’
‘Not of course if you don’t care about it – I was feeling a bit lonely and in need of company.’
‘Is that why you came?’
‘Of course.’
Harry smiled – it was the first time Joe had seen him do so. ‘I shan’t be company if I go to sleep.’
‘Your snores will be more companionable than the ticking of my clock.’ Joe settled himself in the chair and as Harry was still eyeing him doubtfully, asked chattily, ‘What’s that a picture of, outside on your door?’
‘A rat.’
‘Brother rat?’
‘That’s what Romney called me. He put it there.’
He was lying tranquilly enough, his hands by his narrow sides.
‘You miss your brother, don’t you, Harry?’
‘I would give everything I have, everything in the world – I would give the world – to get him back.’
‘I knew,’ Joe said gently, ‘that you loved Romney very much.’
Harry turned over, gripping his pillow with both hands. ‘I hated him.’
If ever a man was at a loss, Joe Rigby was. He had not expected a problem in Harry Steen and obviously no one else, with the exception of old Mrs. Brewer, believed that he had a problem. What they saw in Harry was a dullish aimless small boy, draggled after the manner of his kind but amenable and easy enough to handle. What Joe saw was a lonely ardent child with something far from childish on his mind. Until it was removed there could be no headway, no response to all Joe’s efforts. It was as unrewarding and as unwise as harping on an overtaut string. How to relieve Harry of his burden, how even to discover the nature of the burden, with only opposition from Harry and unawareness from everyone else, was a task that dismayed the unenquiring Joe. He had never ferreted. His respect for other people’s privacy was too profound.
This he could say with certainty – whatever it was that oppressed Harry, that had broken Mr. Steen and invoked a comfortless sense of anguish and violence in the peace of the Priory, was the death of Romney. What Romney had been that his death should inflict so much, Joe was free to imagine. He had Miss Barbary’s eulogies, old Mrs. Brewer’s laconicism and Harry’s hatred to go by. Mr. Steen’s silence was hardly a pointer, it confirmed the grief of a man who had loved his son whatever at heart that son had been.
Joe was troubled to find that Harry’s warmth was the warmth of hate rather than of love. It would have been out of place in any child, but Harry’s hatred of the dead was a perversion.
During the next few days Joe ordered and received school-books and equipment. He sounded the depths of Harry’s practical knowledge and found them shallow. On the other hand he had a curiously deep understanding; one would have said he was more ready to face life than many boys twice his age, were it not for that something in him which Joe could only describe as ‘off balance’.
There was, too, an unspoken conviction that his time was limited. Joe had to contend with that. Harry came to his lessons with the resigned politeness of one who knows it is no use, and when interest carried him away it left him as unhappy and angry as if he had been tricked.
‘I wish you’d come before,’ he said one day.
‘Before what?’
‘Before.’ Lovingly, hopelessly, he stored his new books away in his new desk.
If he was to get anywhere with Harry, thought Joe, he must use that unsteadiness, that ‘off balance’ to overthrow the boy momentarily and shock his secret out of him. Joe believed he saw how it might be done.
Old Mrs. Brewer, sorting linen in the housekeeper’s room, had a visit from the new tutor.
‘You’re the only one who would help me,’ he said. ‘The question is, can you?’
She no longer needed to size Joe up but she watched him faithfully, not so much to analyse his thoughts as to keep abreast of them.
‘I’m quite sure,’ went on Joe, ‘that whatever is troubling Harry is bound up with his brother. It’s not a thing he’s going to confide in me or anyone else. He’ll keep it to himself until he cracks. God knows when that will be. For his sake we can’t afford to wait. While he has this on his mind I can do very little with him. I’m wasting my time. I’m going to try getting him to give himself away.’ He looked steadily into the old woman’s eyes and she into his. ‘For that I want something of Romney’s, something that was very much his and known to be his. Something he used every day. Is there such a thing left? And if there is, how can I borrow it?’
Mrs. Brewer turned away. She shook out a guest towel, spread it on the table and went over it with her finger tips. She looked into it here and there before she folded it back into its squares. Her finger stayed on the blue embroidered ‘S’ in the corner.
‘Perhaps,’ she said.
‘I want it now,’ said Joe.
Mrs. Brewer looked at him from under her brows and made a decision. Once she had made it she was past surprise. She said to herself, ‘What I do, I do for the boy,’ and left it at that for the present. She alone knew she was not past recrimination – that she would inflict on herself time and again.
‘His rooms are all shut up,’ she said to Joe, ‘and locked. Mr. Steen has the keys but I have another set he has never asked for. He has forgotten them.’
‘We ought to find something there to suit my purpose.’
‘If I take you it will be a violation of Mr. Steen’s trust – ’ She ignored Joe’s attempt at denial and continued inexorably, ‘You will please to keep it between ourselves, sir.’
‘Of course. But is there any chance we may be seen?’
She dredged deep into the pocket of a stout under-apron and brought out several bunches of keys. ‘No one goes there now.’
‘Not Mr. Steen?’
‘It is the last place he would go.’
Perhaps if she had known how anxious Joe Rigby was to see those rooms, old Mrs. Brewer wouldn’t have taken him. What she was doing was to her a criminal act, it must at least be dispassionate. She would have condemned Joe’s curiosity as vulgar. She would have been wrong. Joe had never seen anything of Romney’s except his name on a tree. All else had been bundled away or destroyed. For Joe he had taken shape in other people’s minds and for Joe, at this present impasse, that was not enough. He needed to see for himself.
It was a part of the Priory he had wondered about once or twice, in fact could hardly avoid wondering about since it was on the south front where the best rooms would be. Mrs. Brewer unlocked, without any fuss, the door that led to it, although they stood in full view from that navelike corridor where Mr. Steen, Miss Barbary or anyone might be expected to appear. Perhaps she knew their habits; she was not guilty or on edge as Joe was. With the door secured behind them he gave a sigh of relief, whereat she reminded him grimly, ‘Mr. Steen also has a key.’
So when the suite was unlocked and the door opened to him, Joe was still pre-occupied by what on earth he would say to Mr. Steen and Mr. Steen to him if they were discovered.
‘I can’t open the shutters,’ said Mrs. Brewer, ‘it might be noticed from outside.’
She switched on the light and they both stood on the threshold looking in.
Joe forgot Mr. Steen. He remembered the rest of the Steens only to realise that if he were set down blindfolded in any of the rooms at the Priory he would know which of all the family’s was Romney’s. Although he had never met Romney, although Romney was dead. Why? To know that, thought Joe, I should have to be analytical and profound. And then I should know but should not feel.
There was no describing how he thought he knew, either. He could say it was not a pleasant sensation, yet he could not say it was unpleasant. It was an intensification of that conflict which was to be felt everywhere else at the Priory. And here, in this room, something was added – a spurious passionate sweetness, as of self-pity.
Joe perhaps was contributing that, for the room was beautiful too, and it was the closest he would ever come to Romney in the flesh.
In these apartments, with their south aspect, centrally placed so as to look out over the best of the park, at a point farthest from the smell of the kitchens or the traffic of the Priory’s daily life and devotions, was intended no doubt a lodging for the archbishop or cardinal. The proportions were infallible, serene. From the long windows, stopped now with shutters, the land and sky would spread away fanwise and the light reach into the plum-dark panelling. The wood had no depths now; dust and damp had bloomed it over; the same delicate fur was everywhere.
