The key in the lock, p.5
The Key In the Lock, page 5
I withdrew my hand. ‘I have sat with patients before. And as you said, what is one night?’
‘Quite.’ He looked up at the sky, the cruel white daylight. Conversationally, almost, he said, ‘Perhaps Miss Draper will confide in you.’
‘I thought you’d asked them not to speak of it.’
‘Amongst themselves. But some people will say as much to a doctor as to a priest.’
I looked at him. ‘And a doctor keeps no worse confidence.’
He gave me a look which said, but you’re not a doctor, are you? When he spoke aloud, though, he said, ‘You don’t think her guilty.’
I looked at my feet. It’s my fault. ‘It’s as you said yourself. Nobody ought to decide before the facts are known.’
‘You know Old Tremain as well as I. He would smother facts in their cradles, if they were not convenient to him. If you care about the facts, you’ll see what you can get from Miss Draper.’
I met his eyes, but said nothing.
He turned away into the lane. By the gate, he stopped, and said, ‘She won’t be harmed. Tremain knows I’m watching …’ He paused. ‘You and I both saw the bag, Miss Cardew. She was on her way out of that house. And I’d like to know why.’
Back in the parlour, Father was still standing by the fire. My heart was beating hard. Father held out his arm, and I stepped under the wing of it, let him pull me close. I could feel his weariness, feel him almost lean on me. I wanted to say something, but at that time I still thought a woman should show her reluctance in signs rather than words, and Father was not watching the hunch of my shoulders, my pick-picking at the shred of dry skin beside my thumbnail.
‘To tell you the truth, her chest isn’t as bad as it sounds,’ Father said. ‘Although she seemed … she was shocked, as you said, and chilled, of course, from the pond. But let her have her day in bed. Sometimes women simply need a day … She’s had a dreadful shock.’
I conjured Agnes’s bold, nervy eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘I’ll come first thing,’ Father said. ‘And check her over, before the inquest.’
I looked up at him again, and then nodded, into his shoulder. She had refused to talk to Boscawen: well, that I could understand. But I couldn’t help thinking of a man my father had treated once, in the kitchen of the Polneath lodge. Caught poaching, and shot in the knee – by another poacher, Tremain had said. June, several years ago, those light nights. Mr Edward had been over as usual, with his family, from the Continent. He had come down himself, paid Father quietly, and fixed it so that no charges were pressed. But, while there was a question of the law, everything had seemed to go out of the poacher: guilt had sent him limp, and made him turn his face away, just as Agnes had to Boscawen.
‘You’ll go to bed, now, Father, won’t you?’ I said.
‘Of course.’ Father patted my arm, absently. ‘You’ll be back before I know it,’ he said.
Walking to Polneath after a late breakfast, I looked out over the lumps of died-back winter rushes, and the bare mud of the channel, the broken reeds beyond. A flight of curlew made me jump, but after that there were no birds, no sounds except a pair of powder men coming in the other direction, who touched their caps to me, and studied me. One asked if I was going up to the big house. When I said I was, the other paused, and then asked me to tell Mr Edward that he had their prayers.
I walked on, unnerved. The news had got out, then.
I wondered how much had been spoken of. Whether people thought it a pure sad accident, or whether they yet knew about Agnes being out of her room, William curled small beneath her bed, a fire sprung up in the office below and nowhere near the hearth.
The mills would be closed that day, of course. But in the village they would all be asking already when they would open again. They had children to feed, whom they would all hold a little more tightly this evening, and those children would not pause in their hunger. I wondered what the fate of the mills would be.
Boscawen had stated so bluntly the situation at Polneath, a house that would once have needed ten servants. It was well known that Tremain was running out of money, about the groom retired and his duties loaded on to Jake. The butler who had accompanied Tremain on a journey to London the previous year and elected not to return. When Mr Edward had come back to Polneath a widower, it had been expected that Tremain would take on more people again, but he had not – and now there was only a cook, a maid and a gardener. Jake had not said that things were so bad as that, and there was no other way of telling. Those from the village who made deliveries to Mrs Bly did not come into the house; it was Agnes who undertook Polneath’s errands, and she did not talk much.
If Tremain was truly in trouble, if the mills closed, it would be the death of St Rumon’s. However little Tremain himself was liked, every mine owner in the district had always had reason to treat him well, and he took certain steps to see that he appeared a liberal employer. Every summer, there was a tea given in the mill woods; the late Mrs Tremain had given the tea, and then Tremain had given it himself; and then each June, Edward’s wife, Emily, had given it. The workers ate the tea, but they still distrusted Tremain. Nobody would have spoken against him to his face, but the village had ways of making its discomfort felt. They had long wanted Edward to take over the running of the mills, but what if it was too late?
I had pictured fiercely that year, more than once, an accident befalling Tremain, and the prospect of my catching Edward’s attention somehow, and becoming mistress of Polneath. It was a foolish wish, with long roots: even at twelve, throwing rice at his wedding, I had felt a pang of spite towards his yellow-haired bride with her London dress. Older, I’d confessed my liking to Edith, who thought it a delicious secret. I had pieced together scraps of knowledge: that Tremain had pulled Edward early from his studies to marry, his degree left incomplete; that his wife had headaches, and did not take to Cornwall. I had watched him become the model of a doting father, and nurtured in myself a calf sort of love, which had nothing to do with bodies. Edward had always been the perfect subject for such a love: his gentle, rather beautiful face, his beautiful manners; hair that was always a fortnight past needing cutting. And never quite present: only in St Rumon’s for the month of June. So I wished for him, wished and prayed, and I had thought it didn’t matter.
But I knew now, the guilt growing heavier as I walked, that it did. It did matter.
I had known it was wrong, in truth, to think of a married man, a recent widower. But it had been so easy to wish for Edward Tremain, and not least because it meant I did not have to imagine leaving St Rumon’s, leaving Father. There were not a handful of men in the district of the right age, and unmarried; even fewer with the means to support Father and me both. St Rumon’s was close enough by the daily ferry to Truro and to Falmouth, where the streets were paved and the great ships came and went. But at night, once the ferry stopped, it was a hard hour’s ride into Truro, on roads hock-deep in mud and fallen leaves. Even when his hands were bad, Father never wanted to call in men from Truro to help him with his rounds, because the simple fact was they would not come. The effort of the journey did not warrant what they would earn. Father must either give up his position as St Rumon’s doctor, or he must keep it up. The possibility of keeping it up seemed by the month to decrease; yet if he did not, how would we live?
Approaching the Polneath gates, I thought of Boscawen. What Father might have meant, when he said to him that he was sure I would be willing.
The gates looked locked, though they weren’t, but produced a creak and swing as I opened them. The track led on through thickets of rhododendron, which gave way quite suddenly to thinly spaced trees. Between the trees were the expense magazine, and the stores for the three elements which made up the powder: the brimstone, saltpetre and the charcoal in its airless casks. The buildings for pressing and drying. Over along the stream were the seven pairs of incorporating mills: the newer ones downstream and, higher up, the older ones, two pairs still neatly roofless from the accident in the spring, like soft-boiled eggs with their tops removed. I kept on up towards the blast wall, over which I could just glimpse the roof of the house.
Though the family had been at Polneath for centuries, Old Tremain’s father had established the mills. He had rebuilt the house, too, a new classical frame thrown up over the roots of the ancient manor house. But money had run short, even in those days, and the service portions of the house, the north and south wings, were a relic of the old structure – of squat dimensions and old stone. The new main house was loftier, more perfectly square, though once the budget had been spent, savings had been made with the fittings. A grand enough face, I had heard Mrs Mason say, but it was dim and draughty within. It had been hard to tell, last night, in the dark.
I stopped in the shadow of the blast wall, hearing a sound, and then stepped off the path. Boscawen’s gig lumbered by. I nodded to the driver. The gig was covered. William’s body coming away.
It was cold of Boscawen, leaving Agnes Draper at Polneath another night, even with me to tend her. But then, Boscawen was cold. He had been bred up in St Rumon’s as well as I, and knew the powder business. The truth will never out by itself. The quickest way to find the piece of grit in a measure of powder is to grind and grind and grind the three elements, and squat outside the mill, listening carefully for the catch.
4.
1918
I might never have attempted to enquire further into our son Tim’s death, had it not been for a memorial notice, which was printed three months ago, in September, just above the casualty lists in the Times. I was turning through the newspaper, rather distracted, having woken from the usual dream. Five months of checking the narrow space between mattress and carpet, then brushing the fright out of my hair, dragging myself down to the breakfast table.
Fossett, when he had brought the paper in, had commented that it was a morning for a good brisk walk, and I had taken that to mean that he wished for half an hour away from Mrs Fossett. He looked grey in the face, and I had heard her voice raised in vexation, echoing up from the kitchen as I had poured my coffee. So I had asked Fossett to step round to the vicarage, to say that I would give an hour to the flowers that afternoon, if that would be of use.
He looked at me rather intently, asked if I was quite sure.
I told him I was.
I spread the newspaper flat on the table, telling myself that September was a tricky time of year for the church flowers, the first breath of autumn. Not much in the way of berries yet. The vicar’s wife was always so inclined to use the big overblown roses from her garden, so that they might have their last gasp on the altar, but really, they only lasted a day or two before wilting entirely. She ought to accept that the summer was finished, ought to be made to accept it.
All summer I had avoided her, the other St Rumon’s ladies. Mourning Tim and Richard’s infirmity had furnished my excuses, but it could not go on forever. Perhaps it was time to rejoin the world, to face them.
I glanced over the leading articles. Everything was about the end, towards which we were swiftly moving. I still could not bear the military detail, but I was reading a piece about the proposed expansion of one of the London underground railway lines, when Richard began calling my name from upstairs.
‘Ivy!’ And a moment later, more weakly, ‘Ivy?’
I waited a moment, in guilty silence. I would go up at nine, I always went up at nine; it was now only a quarter to. Out of the dining room window, in the garden, Jake was cutting the grass.
After a few moments, Richard stopped calling.
Besides, I could not go up until I had looked at the casualty lists, so that I might keep an even tone of voice while reading them aloud for him, as he had insisted I do, every morning since he had been confined to his bed.
To work up to the casualties, I always looked at the ordinary death notices; they felt less unnatural, with their ages of sixty-three and seventy-nine, with their mentions of short illnesses, their requests for donations in lieu of flowers.
But then it was that the name caught my eye, and I kept back a gasp. I smoothed the page. I listened, but there was only the ticking of the clock, the shucking of Jake’s shears outside, the distant rattle of roof tiles in the wind.
In memory of Archibald Tremain, killed in action.
One year ago that week.
The first thing I felt, strange as it might seem, was a stab of envy. Killed in action. And the next thing, of course, was pity. His son dead a year, and I had known nothing of it.
Correspondence to Mr E. Tremain at his club.
Edward Tremain. It must be him. There could not be many – and that had been his second son’s name, Archibald, I was sure of it.
Correspondence at his club; that was queer. But perhaps flowers would upset his wife, as they had me, after Tim died. For I knew Edward had married, as I had; taken his second wife a year or two after the business at Polneath, though never, understandably, come back to the district. I had heard about it, from Edith. She had caught and passed on bits and pieces of gossip, over the years, though they were not really acquainted. She’d said that he was something at the War Office.
And now he was childless again.
The club’s address was just off the Strand. I was still attempting to decipher my feelings when the front door slammed. That was Fossett back.
Yes, I thought, flowers and black-edged cards would upset his wife: or? Or he no longer had a wife, and spent his days, as London widowers do, in the comfort of his club. I studied the page again.
‘Ivy!’ came again the shout from upstairs.
I started. My face had turned rather hot. Without thinking, I whisked the page out from between the others, folded the paper and sat on it, just as Fossett came into the room.
‘Mrs Benson says that would be extremely welcome, madam,’ he said.
‘What would?’
‘Your help,’ he said. ‘With the flowers.’ He looked confused.
The shout floated down from upstairs again.
Clumsily, I took the rest of the paper, and held it out to Fossett. But I could not stand up, so he had to come right the way around the table to take it from me. But dear Fossett, he only looked sympathetic. He had always been a darling, but since the spring he had been a perfect angel.
‘I think tea is wanted,’ I said.
Fossett took the paper. ‘Are you certain you are quite well, madam?’ he said. ‘I can offer your apologies to Mrs Benson, if you aren’t –’
‘I am quite well, Fossett, really,’ I said.
He bustled off and I cursed myself, for in taking the memorial notices I had also removed the casualty lists, and Richard would be sure to notice. I shifted my weight in the chair, and pulled out the folded page of newsprint. I kept folding, once, twice, five times, very quickly until it would not fold any longer, only bend. I put the wedge of paper into my pocket. I poured myself a second cup of coffee, which I stirred, particular to not let the spoon clink against the cup. I drank it, looking out on the green jewel of the lawn. Jake would be back in a moment, to pick up the clippings. I could just hear the murmuring of Fossett delivering the tea.
Then the shout came again. ‘Ivy!’ Insistent, now, aggrieved.
I put my cup down, and began to climb.
The bedroom door was open, and Fossett standing by, his face apologetic.
‘Were you calling, my dear?’ I felt the first wave of guilt as Richard made to push himself more upright against the pillows.
‘The newspaper is missing the casualties.’
Crisp, petulant. You’d never have known there had been anything wrong with his speech. After the haemorrhage, he had formed the habit of talking to himself, when he thought no one could hear, and he was still doing it, even then. Forming his words, very particular, the blur in them no longer detectable, the precision of his vowels and consonants rendering all the crueller the stubbornly useless legs, atop which the newspaper now lay unfolded.
‘Missing them?’ I paused for a moment, expertly evading his eyes.
‘Have a word with the boy, would you?’ Richard said. ‘Tell him it won’t do.’
‘I will,’ I replied, soothingly, conscious of the wedge of folded paper distending my pocket. I made my voice gentle, offhand. ‘Would you like me to read something else?’
‘No,’ Richard replied. ‘I suppose you might go.’
Downstairs, I retreated to the study – what had been his study. I was still getting used to it being mine. Fossett had moved the stack of post to the desk; uppermost, a doctor’s bill. I took out the folded page of newspaper, and smoothed it.
Killed in action.
I filled my pen and shook it, and pulled a sheet of paper towards me. I couldn’t think what to call him, so I simply began.
I was dreadfully sorry to read about your son. Might I offer you my heartfelt condolences? Forgive me, I hadn’t heard – only I saw the memorial notice. You may be aware that our own boy was killed in February. Richard has been unwell, since the spring, quite confined to his bed. Please think of me, if I might be of any service to you, and consider me,
Yours as ever –
From the moment my pen touched the paper, I knew it was wrong. I was not condoling, or not only condoling. Richard could not be permitted to see this letter. I fetched an envelope, and painstakingly addressed it.
Mr E. Tremain Esq., c/o Timperley’s …
There, that would do. He could reply, if he wished, and perfectly naturally mention his wife, or else her passing.
I felt disgusted with myself.
I let the letter rest on the desk, and crouched to feed the stolen page of newsprint to the hearth, watched it curl and catch, hoping the boy who brought the paper each morning would avoid a sharp word from Mrs Fossett. I looked at the letter where it lay on the thick stained blotter.
I could hardly say, even now, precisely why I wrote it. Perhaps it was simply the thrill of having an address for him again. I was still aggrieved, of course I was, that Edward had simply gone, after what had happened at Polneath.
