A Little Treachery

32

The summer burned its way towards the autumn, and still there were long series of beguiling days. Drought set the heaths blazing, heavy palls of smoke were to be seen hanging over the horizon, the hooters wailed near and far and Simon ran out two or three times a day in the hope of meeting or even overtaking the clanging bells.

But from that oozing soil the destroying sun merely drew a tropical luxuriance.

Lost, surrounded by her ravening weeds, overcome by the ground she had designed to conquer, she now reposed in idleness undisguised. Only a few months ago she had been struggling desperately to preserve some semblance of a garden, and a little sadness, at least, might have been expected to mingle with her resignation. But it was not so. The serious view of the cottage had been disposed of by Emmy; and now that she had no longer to pit herself against the riot of the jungle, there was no need to strain against the affinity with it in her own soul, the dubious fellowship with its anarchy. Let it all go as it would! She no longer made any pretence of work, had not a thought of facing the more and more critical condition of her own affairs, sometimes even neglected to visit Clem, and made no more efforts on her behalf save those enforced upon her. So she lay overwhelmed and uncaring, allowing physical trifles to acquire a strange power over her mind, to absorb all her attention with their soothing triviality, as sick people do.

The willows shimmered, the poplars kept up their shelly rustling; clouds of butterflies hovered over the weeds, their little giddy shadows dancing with frolicsome effect, and for hours on end she could hear some small monotonous bird close at hand in the bushes and yet feel no vexation but rather was lulled by the soft, iterated sound. Simon found a large, glistening beetle whose carapace shot rays of gold in the sunshine, like a nugget of metal, and it was an hour’s wonder to her. She did not know what it was and thought she must go to the library and look up the creature’s designation, but that, too, did not get done. Another intense pleasure was to watch Emmy’s face, down-turned, full of reflected light from the white sheet stretched on the board, like the gilded, delicately hollowed face of a doubtful angel whose hidden eyes would have betrayed it. Or she could watch – or close her eyes to them if she pleased – Simon’s little clumsy hands playing with fire.

Often, while the young ones roved the town or made excursions farther afield, her nights being half sleepless, she would sleep outright, seduced by the warmth and stillness, even before the noon.

Waking one morning from one such doze, she saw Emmy approaching through the flowers, and something in this approach, sinuous and a little wary, conveyed from afar a degree of anxiety and communicated the fact that the girl was charged with a shifty message. Catherine noticed that she had changed her dress, and without observing the details of its fashion, for such things escaped her, she gathered that it was of the sensational style which was really Emmy’s natural style, but which she had lately abandoned for country simplicity. And was that a flowery coronet she was wearing? Emmy’s ballet skirt blew out so that she had to catch at it and step delicately past the weeds. Catherine could tell the exact moment when the girl became conscious of her regard; that moment when she gave her head a solicitous tilt, when the eyes narrowed in a honied way and the big mouth began to curl and drive back its corners so that the cheeks dimpled. ‘She is going to ask me something – a favour,’ Catherine thought apprehensively. The next minute Emmy stood before her.

‘I suppose you wouldn’t care to see some friends of mine? Ah, never mind if you don’t!’ she cried in the same breath.

‘Well, it’s Greg,’ she explained at Catherine’s question. ‘And Roy’s come as well – another friend of mine – because the car’s his, you see. And, unfortunately, Ferdy’s with them. Oh, they won’t stay more than five minutes, you know – not if you don’t wish it.’

Catherine looked up into the leaning face. It was the face, the voice, the air of a charmer, down to the last nuance, caressive, wooing; but it was consciously, funnily so – Emmy knew it and was taking herself off, and this gave pungency to what would have been cloying and displeasing. In smiling surrender, Catherine consented.

She consented, but not without wondering at herself, not unconscious that an inner voice cried warningly, ‘No, draw the line here!’ She rose and tried to put herself to rights. The fumes of a dream still hung in her mind, clouding judgement. ‘Why, it’s past twelve,’ Emmy answered her inquiry. ‘Oh dear, Surely not! I was dreaming – How untidy I am!’ she protested, thinking in sudden shame of how she had been dozing there even in the morning.

‘You look very nice – ever so nice,’ Emmy breathed, assisting her. ‘Really they want us to go and have lunch at the Unicorn. . . . Let me put your hair right – that’s better.’ Catherine sighed and submitted herself to Emmy’s ministrations. Emmy stood behind her, arranging her hair. ‘Why do you bother so much? You always look dignified.’ ‘Little flatterer, little honeypot,’ Catherine thought, smiling lazily to herself. No, she did not mind, it exhilarated her.

‘But what does your brother want? What has he come for?’

‘What’s he after, you say? Why, Emmy and her millions.’

‘Well, Emmy, I don’t mind Mr Gregory so much – or your other friend, I suppose – but, going entirely by what you yourself have told me, you know –’

‘You could have done without Ferdy. Oh, so could I!’ Emmy’s voice, close to her ear, had a plaintive note.

‘And in fact isn’t it rather odd of Mr Gregory to have brought your brother with him?’

Emmy answered in surprise, ‘Why, bless you, it isn’t like that, you know. It’s Roy’s car – but Roy’ll do anything Ferdy wants. As for Greg, it’s just that he thought he’d better come with Ferdy.’

‘To keep him in order, you mean?’

‘To have a try at it,’ Emmy dryly amended.

‘Well – that’s good of him,’ Catherine said doubtfully.

‘Oh, he’s a good sort, he’s been a good friend to me,’ the girl assured her. ‘Only weak as water.’

She followed Emmy up to the house, and there stood two of the young men, waiting, and were amusing themselves with Simon meanwhile, teasing him, Catherine judged, for Simon was excited and pushful, using his top notes. She saw first a large, fat young man in the early thirties, with a red face, of exceptionally gross appearance. Such was her first impression as, now thoroughly reluctant, deeply regretting her compliance, she came forward to receive her visitors. A young man who looked a mere conglomeration of all the sensualities. ‘So this is Ferdy – and looks it,’ Catherine thought. Beside him stood the second visitor, a somewhat younger man, a nice-looking little fellow, fair and mild – but on a second view it was difficult to tell his age, his little sallow face was seen to be full of the hard lines scored by grimaces, some of which must have been very ugly. Both faces smiled at her, ingratiatingly, rather foolishly, which improved neither of them.

The next instant, however, Emmy said sharply from behind her, ‘Where’s Ferdy?’

‘Keep calm,’ one of them answered. ‘He’s up with the car.’

‘Well, Miss Hare,’ said the fat, red one, Gregory. ‘Heard all about your raw deal with the cottage – dirty luck.’ (Emmy’s face, beside him, at this showed a little anxious.) ‘Yet I must say it’s a pretty thing to look at. Period, and that . . .’

And then all three of them, as if moved by a shared thought, turned to look at the cottage. They looked with peculiar intensity, Catherine felt, in an unaccountable silence; but she did not get as far, in that moment of fast-coming impressions, as to think they were like people taking stock of a piece of property in which they had an interest. But perhaps they were merely relieved to have ready to hand some common subject for conversation. For they were all embarrassed, all conscious in their several ways that as a party they were now an odd mixture.

Greg was the first to break through this. ‘Sorry about it all,’ he turned to Catherine to say. ‘I mean, the whole thing,’ and she was almost shocked on meeting those little, jolly, piggish eyes and reading in them genuine good feeling – shocked to silence when she realized that he had heard of Clem and did indeed mean the whole of it. She said, ‘Yes – yes –’ But her attention had wandered. Then she heard a quick exchange.

‘What d’you say? Six hundred?’

‘Six hundred? Well, come on, you’ve got another bob’s-worth. Try again. Six hundred for that perfect little jewel!’ This came from Emmy, with intense vivacity.

Catherine turned her head and then saw Emmy’s rounded eyes fixed on the cottage, rounded and fixed in the lustful glare of a cat which stares at a bird; but when she met them, this expression was entirely gone, gone so quickly that the voice of gratification in which the girl cried, ‘Hear that, dear? Ferdy thinks you could get a thousand for it!’ seemed to Catherine touchingly benevolent.

‘No – nonsense,’ Catherine said, laughing.

But prices had so risen, they assured her in chorus, standing round her, and all appeared wonderfully well-informed – considering that country housing seemed hardly to be in their way of business – on the state of the property market, which they termed a racket.

‘However that may be,’ she answered at length, ‘I must live somewhere.’

‘Of course you must, of course you must!’ Greg agreed heartily.

And a little silence fell, and then it was proposed that they should go down to the Unicorn for lunch.

‘But you really must wait till Simon’s had a wash and brush-up – and I must change the child’s clothes,’ Catherine protested, coming to her senses. For Simon was wearing his jeans and a soiled tartan shirt; it was his play-suit and did well for the garden. At first Catherine had been very particular about the appearance of a child who had come to her with his little wardrobe so correct and in such beautiful order; a child who had certainly never been allowed to run about like a little hooligan. But Emmy, saying, ‘Why wash things, when you needn’t?’ had bought him this outfit, which he wore continually, although Catherine disliked it, thinking that, among its other harmful effects, it encouraged swagger and roughness. The little boy had no mind to be parted from his treasured jeans, in which he felt a big fellow, and the others laughingly backed him. Did it matter what the urchin wore? Of course it did not! Catherine felt she could not keep the whole party waiting against its wishes. So now Simon was to go to the Unicorn in his dirty jeans, looking a regular little rough, with grubby face and hands. While she helplessly considered this, the others began to make a move. She stopped to lock the back door.

‘Emmy,’ she called hastily, ‘do see that Simon doesn’t run out into the road, will you? He’s excited and he’ll want to look at the car.’ Emmy scampered off. Turning, Catherine found that Gregory had waited for her, and was now telling her, ‘I’m afraid I’ve come to take Emmy away from you. Fact is, I’ve got her the offer of a staff job, so she’d have to come back to town.’

Catherine forced herself to say, ‘I wouldn’t argue against it for anything – if it’s really something worthy of her talents? But she has been such a great comfort to me!’ she could not help crying out, and a tone of despair escaped into the words, in spite of herself.

Greg halted with a foot on the first step to look round at her. He rubbed his hand over his head. ‘Well, don’t worry – she isn’t too keen,’ he said, but without conviction and obviously just to be kind. ‘But she’s a clever girl, you know, is Emmy. Not many girls with her background could handle such an opportunity, but she’ll manage, she’ll learn. She’ll soon see what’s needed – and what isn’t needed. She’s sharp. And, what’s more important, she’s tough.’ And Greg smiled admiringly. ‘Though, in a way, I like to think of her staying with you. Country air – and nice manners – and so forth. It’s been a good influence. And her family off her neck for once, poor kid.’

‘So they’re really like that? It’s too bad. What has her brother come for, do you suppose?’

Greg seemed to hesitate. ‘Why – just to try squeezing her, of course. She’s making good money. I want to keep hold of his collar, if I can.’

‘Oh, but Emmy’s so sensible – I can’t think she’d allow him to sponge on her to any serious extent?’

‘Why, you know, she’d do anything for her family. She’d stand by Ferdy to the gallows’ foot – and probably will.’

Catherine was silent, and, feeling as if her heart was slowly being compressed, began to climb the steps with Gregory beside her.

‘Yes, Emmy’s a good girl,’ he repeated vaguely. ‘She’s a good girl – in herself.’

These steps, at right angles to the flank of the cottage, were not really a staircase but a stepped slope made of flints, like one of the stepped lanes of Clovelly, and were wide enough to allow them to walk side by side and to face each other when they stopped, as they now did again.

Then, striving to express herself tactfully, she remarked that she greatly hoped the job he was offering Emmy was of a better quality than her present one, and she attempted to hint that, in her opinion, Emmy’s present employment was coarsening.

Greg paused again, with a wrinkled brow. Perhaps this was a side of the situation he had never considered before. Yet it seemed likely that he did not attach much importance to Emmy’s refinement, while it was clear that her words had given him something to think about. They stood face to face, committed to a moment of privacy in the well of the steps, in the chilling shadow of the old walls; and his eyes met hers with frankness, grave and estimating.

‘A word in your ear. Have you any friends of your own? Near you, within reach? You know what I mean? – people of your own sort.’

‘I suppose – yes, one or two,’ Catherine admitted, too much taken by surprise to be disturbed.

‘Well, stick to them. Keep in touch with them. . . . Mind, I’m not saying a word against Emmy, not one word – Emmy’s all right – Why, hell, where’s the fellow got to, then?’ For Emmy had suddenly looked over the wall on the road and announced that there was no Ferdy.

Catherine stood in the sun and put her hand to her head, while staring dubiously at the showy car, which she now understood to be hardly Roy’s property, but borrowed. Greg’s words had left an impression which she seemed to feel physically, connected with the chill of the damp shaft. She felt slightly bewildered, with a sense that she was being carried away past her reckoning.

And a more queerly assorted party could hardly have been got together, she thought, as they trooped across the pavement and packed into the conveyance, to whomsoever it might belong. She hoped the owner had been aware of the loan. It was decided to count Ferdy out.

The courtyard of the Unicorn was crowded with parked cars and the large restaurant was full of business and professional men from the shops and offices of the little community, older retired men of the same type and women of leisure and means from expensive villas out in the unspoiled country who had been spending a morning in the town with their shopping lists. They were people who represented the gentry of the neighbourhood, such as it was nowadays. Voices were cultivated, often rather too notably so; little cliques communicated with their members in passing in and out, and the room was full of friendly, lunch-hour gossip.

Catherine had always felt ill at ease in these surroundings.

Now she sat down with her party, resolute not to care; only marvelling that they had not been turned away at the doors.

The odd thing was that she really did care very little. Her feeling of unnatural complaisance persisted. She examined her companions dispassionately, found humour in their slightly grotesque variety, and even in what was raffish and unseemly. Emmy’s new dress, she now observed, would have been charmingly in place in a theatre chorus, with its low neck-line and exaggerated corsage, revealing in so much brighter a fashion than the frank and simple sun-dresses which appeared here and there; and the same could be said for the morsel of sparkling stuff, made of net, flower or ribbon, with which Emmy’s head was decked. Roy’s clothes were villainously smart; Greg’s were villainously shabby, stretched almost indecorously over his paunchy bulk as if too small for him. Simon simply wanted washing – but now Catherine suddenly noticed that this was not all, that his hair was standing up in an inch-long fuzz all over his head. She herself, in a summer dress an incredible number of years out of date, felt crumpled and untidy. Nor did she usually go about without a hat, for she was too conscious that her hair, very fine and soft and always unmanageable, had not the sophisticated finish required for the street. Besides, the hot sun on her uncovered head resulted in headache and dizziness. Yet here she sat with all the shortcomings of her hairstyle exposed, and in truth felt that the sun had given her a dazed sensation. To what else could this dullness of feeling be attributed, and the moral languor which made her so curiously tolerant of unseemliness?

It only needed Rippy, she thought, to make the picture complete. But Ferdy did not appear.

No, she had no sense of shame, she sat there without thought of protest; all the concern she felt was concern at her threatened loss. With hands clenched in her lap, she sat flushed and trembling, lest she was about to lose her little jester and pussy-cat.

As for the others, from Simon to Gregory, they seemed to be taking a jolly and naïve satisfaction in making a good stir. They talked at the top of their voices, they laughed as loudly. Roy was impertinent with the waiter and played an asinine trick upon him, which resulted in a small breakage. Simon laughed with all his heart at this; it seemed to him famous. Gregory had now no thought for anything but his food and drink, and spread himself to the meal and scooped it in with heartening gusto. His appetite assuaged, however, he began looking round him, blinking his little eyes, moist with his exertions. He espied two nuns passing the window, and from the deep bed of his animal satisfaction looked benevolently upon them. But they suggested to him several improper ‘ideas’, at which his friends shrieked with laughter. Drinks unknown to Catherine were poured and dispatched with what seemed to her an alarming celerity. She touched no intoxicants herself; drink did not tempt her, she was not likely to fall from grace in such a manner. But sometimes, putting her hand to her head, she felt as if the others’ drinks had affected her; she felt not quite normal, or as if something was a little wrong in the scene itself.

Certainly to the outward eye much was wrong. Greg had lunched too well, though the dry and wizened Roy showed not the slightest disorder, unless it was in the frankness of his approach to Emmy. Greg’s increased jollity led him to give of his best in the way of joke and anecdote, but at length it reached a point when Emmy told him to shut up. This reminded him that the present party was something a little different from his usual company, and, breaking into a good-natured smile, he took Emmy’s reproof with the sweet humility of a child. At this, Catherine could barely control her amusement. This angelic amiability, contrasting with the coarse and low sentiments, the real foulness of thought he had displayed, appeared to her, in her peculiar blunted state, comic to a degree almost delightful. She did not view the man with any sense of disgust, felt indeed that it was impossible to help liking him.

For her curious moral inertness persisted.

Emmy was making free with her story, hinting more and more freely and exposing the details of the tragedy in a way which showed she and her friends had already discussed it thoroughly, holding her grief up to cynical or careless eyes, now more than a little jolly – and Catherine was almost indifferent to this fact which a little while ago she would have found intolerable.

‘Don’t go, Emmy,’ was all her besotted prayer. ‘Don’t leave me!’

Yet she was conscious at last of some surprise at what seemed to be an unaccountable interest in herself, till, beginning to listen more intelligently, she made out what the attraction was. Emmy inveighed against rules and authorities, against walls and prisons, inveighed against hospitals of that kind which ‘hadn’t to answer for anything they chose to do, hand in glove as they were with the law – a pretty pair, medicals and legals together, a pretty pair of devils into whose claws to fall –’ and story was capped by story from the others. Then Catherine saw that the facts of Clem’s case could not have been put before people on whom this point of the loss of freedom made a deeper impression. Emmy’s own face as she talked grew tense and sharpened, the top lip seemed on the verge of lifting a little upon one side to show the teeth in a snarl; while Roy’s expression was one of affront, like that of a child when shown something ugly. A ground of sincerity had been reached.

After that they went on to drag up to the bar of judgment every participant in the ‘swindle’ of the cottage, using their teeth, tearing and rending – for here they were enjoying the rogue’s luxury of castigating moral blemish in the virtuous.

So of course it was now Hungerford’s turn; and if in his case a tacit agreement to guard their speech was made and roughly kept to, out of consideration for Simon and what he might understand, no forbearance beyond this was practised. Now they were at the heart of the evil, now they had uncovered the wanton stroke of treachery, the cause of that sudden fatal exacerbation of the morbid state which peace of mind and happiness and good fortune would have dissipated. For if Clem had had a peaceful, cared-for life, if only, even at the end, a little comfort instead of fright, worry, shock – (But she dropped the finger pointing to Hungerford, for she heard herself raging in the past, ‘Why not pull yourself together? How dreadful you optimists are when you do collapse!’)

They were still at it. Well, they could only be called her sympathisers. And a sense of this had for a time warmed her. Yet she cooled as she listened. An exaggeration and caricature of views held by herself, passions of her own carried to gross excess, could at last only act to open her eyes to an alarming unbalance and injustice in her own attitude; to how distorted her sick view had been of people who were perhaps only human and beset by difficulties.

But to argue with her company would have been useless. Its conclusion was inevitable, a simple belief in the simplest and basest motive possible. As for Hungerford, he had received ‘a good rake-off’ for a dishonest report on the cottage. And if Catherine had objected that so petty a haul could never have tempted him, they would have known better. She should have spoken to those who had will and capacity for such a deed themselves, who were acquainted with human meanness in their own hearts. For money, for the most pitiful sums, people would do anything. And the trick was handled with a glib comprehension, the ways of the swindler unmasked by the slick hands of experts with a candour which was almost naïve.

She observed this. Then from the satisfaction which had warmed her there began a quick decline, which speedily turned it to revulsion.

She pushed back her chair. This exhibition of moral indignation from which the springs of righteousness were quite lacking, suddenly gave her, as nothing else had done, an impression of viciousness, abruptly exposing to her the blackguardism of her company.

With a sensation of great weakness, she became conscious of herself sitting in their midst, vaguely smiling, and of Clem’s name vainly tossed about.

And there, straight before her, was Simon, his soft, thick little mouth red with a sultry thirst, hanging jealously on to Emmy.