An Unofficial rose Page 2

  The relaxation of the dying hand. He jumped to feel Ann's clasp upon his Ann. She had been saying something to him. It was all over. He had seen the coffin awkwardly descend into the watery pit and heard the earth fall upon it. It was allover. He turned stiffly about and let Ann lead him slowly into the quietly shifting crowd. The priest who had performed the ceremony murmured something inaudible to him. Douglas Swann came up beside him and took his other Ann. He was an old man being led away. This was what was conveyed to him by Ann's gentle pressure, by the bowing, melting, solicitous, curious crowd. He shuffled along, seeing in front of him now the gate of the cemetery, the rows of cars outside in the road. Douglas Swann was putting up an umbrella over him and making some remark. about the rain. In another moment or two he would be out again in the ordinary world.

  He turned round to know if Randall and the children were following, and saw like a shaft of light through a cloud a momentarily opened vista between the rows of dark figures. Something at the far end of that vista arrested his attention for a second before the opening was closed again by the movement of people towards the gate. Two women he had seen like bats clinging together, their glasses glinting under the black canopy, two women facing him in grotesque stillness down the rainswept vista. One of them was Emma. Hugh stopped. The vision had gone, but as if to confirm its reality he caught sight of the intent averted face of his son, and his son's hand descending after a gesture of greeting. Hugh stood still for another moment. Then he set his feet in motion.

  He passed slowly along the line of cars. He passed Randall's Vauxxhall and Felix Meecham's very dark blue Mercedes. Here at last was his own clumsy capacious Standard Vanguard.

  Oh, spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence and be no more seen.

  Hugh staggered slightly as he came towards the car. Ann was still tugging his arm and insisting that she should be allowed to come with him and drive the Vanguard. Close behind them Clare Swann was absently humming Abide with me.

  Chapter two

  'I THOUGHT this lot for the refugees, said Ann, and these perhaps I might offer to Nancy Bowshott. What do you think?

  They were sorting out Fanny's things. Ann had been very firm that they should do it at once and 'get it over, and Hugh supposed she was right; though when it came to it he could hardly bear it. At the funeral he had felt unreal and detached while Ann sobbed. Now when he wished to give himself up to a small frenzy of grief Ann was being calm and busy and practical. That was just like a woman. All the same he was deeply grateful to Ann, grateful to her for having insisted on having Fanny at Grayhallock, for having insisted on nursing Fanny. Without Ann the last six months would have been for him an almost unendurable torment.

  It was Sunday morning and they had all been back at Grayhallock for three days. Some pale sunshine made the soaked garden glitter and the steaming spongy lawn warm to the touch. More distantly, between the beech trees, the bleak lines of spiky rose bushes could be seen, sloping away below the house, scattered with a confetti of multicoloured points; and below and beyond there stretched towards the invisible sea the flat pale green expanse of Romney Marsh, crossed with reedy dykes and dotted with distant sheep and presenting to the, eye towards a bluer horizon a remarkable number of tree-shielded and variously shaped church towers. It was still early in the month of June.

  'And I thought we might give some little thing to Clare as a memento, said Ann. 'She was so terribly good to Fanny.

  'Whatever you think best, said Hugh. 'But what about you and Miranda?

  'Somehow, I'd rather not, said Ann, 'for myself I thought perhaps Miranda might have some of the cheaper bits of jewellery, if you didn't mind? I remember a painted bead necklace —’

  'Why ever should I mind? said Hugh irritably. 'Everything belongs to the family. Naturally I assumed you'd have all the jewellery. There's no point in sending it out to Sarah.

  'But some of it's valuable —’

  'Oh, for God's sake, Ann, said Hugh, 'don't make a fuss! Everything to do with money and possessions was so depressing. He knew Ann was incapable of resentment, but how tactless she was all the same. This was no moment for scrupulous counting.

  He sat down on the bed. It had been odd, coming back into this so familiar room in which he had seen the season change from winter to spring, and now finding the bed all folded and flattened. There had been the mornings when he came in fearing to find Fanny dead. And there was Fanny's poor old dressing-gown still hanging on the door. Ann had given her another one for going to London. Of course he had loved his wife. Any idea he might have had to the contrary was romantic and irresponsible and absurd. That was what was hollow. His marriage, whatever its shortcomings, had been a real living thing and not an empty shell. He had imagined that now, when it was all over, he might have felt, all the same, a sort of relief. But what came to him instead was a quite new sorrow, a dreadful sense of her absence. He kept missing her, searching for her. But she was nowhere now.

  Ann kept turning over the heaps of clothing and going through the pockets. The action had an air of thieving absurdly at odds with the plain humble expression of face which she had put on for the sad little scene. There was not much to find. There had not been much to find in the desk either. Poor Fanny had had no secrets. She had been woman without mystery. There had been no darkness in her. And Hugh, as he looked at intent Ann, pale shabby Ann with her short lank ginger hair pushed back behind her ears, reflected that she was, after all, in this way, not unlike Fanny. Both he and his son had married women without darkness.

  'I hope Randall won't mind our deciding things without him, said Ann.

  'He'd better not mind!

  On their return to Grayhallock Randall had retired to his room and had stayed there in a sort of voluntary state of siege. Nancy Bowshott, the head gardener's wife, brought him up his meals; and Miranda reported that he emerged each day at dawn, armed with secateurs, cut the newly opened bourbons and gallicas. Ann had apparently not set eyes on him. Hugh, who had seen his son's mйnage under strain before, had refrained from comment.

  'I suppose he hasn't changed his view about coming to Seton Blaise? said Hugh.

  Seton Blaise was the Finch's house, some ten miles distant from Grayhallock. Mildred Finch had rung up on the previous day to invite them allover to dinner on the Sunday evening. Randall had refused to have anything to do with the invitation and was reported by a giggling Nancy Bowshott as saying that he had no desire to be patronized by that horse in human form. He thus designated Colonel Meecham. Ann had then told Mildred that they could not come to dinner; but Mildred in turn had made her promise at least to bring her depleted party over for drinks at six o'clock.

  'No, said Ann. She hitched up her skirt and began folding the clothes. She added, 'I'm so glad Penny will have a chance to see Seton Blaise. He ought to see a real English country house. It's a pity Mildred and Humphrey weren't here earlier on. It would have been a nice change for him after the chaos here.

  'Our chaos is ceremony to him, said Hugh. 'And you know he thinks Grayhallock is terribly romantic!

  What a mess they'd all between them made of Penn's visit. He was to have spent a term at an English school, but they had bungled the arrangements and then it was too late to get him in; so that since his arrival in April he had been simply hanging round the house, helping Ann with the washing up; running errands for whoever was looking after Fanny, and generally acting as a rather bedraggled page to the long sad event which had lately proceeded to its end.

  'It's true that he sees no evil, said Ann.

  She sighed while Hugh attended for a moment to the more sinister aspects of the chaos to which she had referred.

  She stopped her folding and went on, 'Poor boy. You know, I hope he doesn't feel that all the time we're comparing him unfavourably with Steve —’

  Hugh got up. He was always pained and amazed at the free way in which Ann was able to refer to Steve. 'I don't see why he should feel that. No one has particul
arly talked to him about Steve, so far as I know. There was no Peronett grandson now. The name would live on only as the name of a rose.

  'All the same, children are so sensitive — He's a funny little boy. I shall miss him when he's gone back.

  Yes, thought Hugh, you are lonely, you are lonely, poor Ann. He looked at Ann's greenish-yellowish eyes, widened now and misted with sad thoughts. He apprehended her with what he knew was but a perfunctory pity and but a vague good will, poor Ann incarcerated here with spiteful mysterious Randall, and only her enemies Nancy Bowshott and Clare Swann for company. How soon, he began to wonder, could he decently go back to London?

  The sense of unhappiness at Grayhallock had been, since his return there, almost intolerable to him. The house was a melancholy one at the best of times, and had always seemed to him, if not exactly hostile to Ann and Randall, certainly indifferent to them. It had never, he felt, taken them altogether seriously. It had known quite other things, and there were times, especially at night, when one could feel it thinking about them. Grayhallock was only partly an old house, it had few pretensions to beauty, and such pretensions as it had to grandeur were now gentle and absurd. The long central portion of the house with its tall windows and yellow stucco and wide semicircle of steps dated from the early eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century it had been acquired by a linen manufacturer of vast wealth from County Tyrone, who had given it its present name and a pair of lateral battlemented towers. He had also added an ornate glass porch over the steps, a vast mushroom-shaped conservatory, and a red brick kitchen annexe: excrescences which, in spite of Hugh' s protests, Ann and Randall had never seen fit to remove. While within, the house always seemed to Hugh to be both dark and damp, centred, as round a vast atrium, about the cold stone-flagged still-room, full of rain-soaked overcoats and rows of muddy Wellingtons.

  'Well, that's that, said Ann. She put the last garment on to the neat pile and patted it. 'Now I must find Miranda and tell her to change for church. Thanks so much for helping me, Hugh.

  Ann's Christian piety, though doctrinally a little vague, was unwavering, and, Hugh conjectured, unreflective. Randall, who did not share it, tolerated it; but had been much less ready, as he put it, to see his daughter 'godded'. Miranda, however, to the surprise of some, though in so many ways her father's little girl, had so far continued firmly in the faith of her mother. Hugh himself, undramatically and again unreflectively, had no faith. Religion lay far behind him with things he had forgotten.

  He got up with relief and followed Ann in the direction of the drawing-room. As he emerged into the corridor he apprehended, like a cold breeze, the presence of Randall in the house. He wondered, as he felt it, with such a presage of unpleasantness to come, blow upon him, with what icy authority it must now be touching the shrinking soul of Randall's wife.

  The drawing-room was a long room with three big windows hollowed and upholstered with shabby chintz window-seats. Beside the front porch, it also had the view of the beech-fringed lawn. The lines of roses were out of sight now below the hill, and between the towering beeches there was only visible the blue and white swiftly moving sky which before a brisk north-west wind was descending across the pallid chequered Marsh in the direction of Dungeness and the twenty miles distant sea. The room, which apart from Randall's bedroom was the only 'serious' room in the house, was pleasant enough, its panelling a faded green, its furniture of a battered elegance, old miscellaneous 'finds' in lesser antique shops. The thick fawn carpet was scattered with a dim glow of threadbare rugs, which although 'if perfect' would be treasures, were now almost impossibly, manifestly, imperfect. A huge rosewood bookcase held the family library: rarely disturbed now since the younger Peronetts were not great readers.

  Miranda was curled in one of the window-seats with three of her dolls propped up opposite to her. She was raising her finger as if to admonish one of them, and paid no attention to the new arrivals. Hugh was permanently disconcerted by his granddaughter. He could never, for instance, decide how far to humour her air of childishness. Miranda had always seemed younger than her age, and yet managed to combine her Peter Pannish demeanour with a knowingness which made Hugh sometimes conjecture that it was all a sort of masquerade. Yet it would be absurd to think this. The child, after all, in this respect curiously resembled her father. Randall was certainly a Peter Pan; and it was hardly-fair to raise an eyebrow at Miranda's undiminished passion for dolls when her father still kept by his bedside the woolly toys of his childhood. They were both of changeling blood.

  In appearance, of course, Miranda was the living image of Ann, and indeed 'living' was the right word, since the same features glowed in the child with a difference which made the resemblance inaccessible to a casual observer. Miranda was as pale as her mother, but her face had the transparency of marble where Ann's had the dullness of wax. Miranda's hair fell consciously about her, and about her brow and eyes, in straight bright strands like a mop of red and golden tassels, while Ann's neglected hair, which grew in just the same way, was something limp and string-like to be thrust back unheeded. Yet Ann was handsome still, with her strong face and her direct green glance, if one could only see her: which, as Hugh reflected, perhaps hardly anyone could any more. It was, he reflected too, Ann's own fault if he had become invisible.

  'Where's Penny? said Ann.

  'Haven't the faintest, said Miranda, rearranging the three dolls. Miranda was a weekly boarder at a school not far from Grayhallock and spent her week-ends at home. During these times she did, as far as Hugh could see, nothing. She had even, as a result of a serious fall two years ago, lost interest in the Swanns' pony.

  'Is he in his room? Penn occupied one of the top tower rooms, above Ann's room. Miranda occupied the corresponding room in the other tower, above Randall's room.

  'As I don't know where he is I don't know whether he's in his room, said Miranda, still tкte-а-tкte with the dolls. This was one of those moments which made Hugh wonder.

  'Ah, well, said Ann.

  Her philosophical treatment of her daughter also caused Hugh surprise mingled with irritation. He still experienced a recurrent desire, which he had not always, he thought with satisfaction, inhibited when she was smaller, to slap Miranda hard.

  'I was just wondering if he'd mind drying up while we're at church.

  'I'll dry up, Hugh heard himself resignedly saying. He detested the housework which Ann kept shamelessly hinting he might help her with. Penn already did more than his fair share of it; Miranda, in Hugh's opinion, less.

  'Oh, that's terribly sweet of you! said Ann. 'I'm afraid there's an awful lot. Then perhaps Penny could lay the table, if he turns up. Penn was excused church, of course, his father being one of those who could scarcely credit that any rational person still believed in God. Not that there was anything wrong with Jimmie really.

  Ann was telling Miranda it was time to go and change for church, while Miranda, her slim tartan-trousered legs curled under her, continued to commune with the dolls.

  Hugh wandered away down the long room and touched guiltily in his pocket the fat letter from Sarah which had arrived two days ago and which he had still not nerved himself to read properly. It had been posted before the news of Fanny's death. He glanced at it, gathered that all was well in general and that Sarah was going to have another baby; but he had not settled down to plough through the details. Sarah wrote such enormous interminable letters; heaven knew how she found the time, with four children and another on the way. What is more, she relentlessly expected an intelligent commentary in return, and complained if she didn't receive it, so there was no use skipping. Hugh loved his daughter dearly, but he had never got used to her marriage. Sarah had met Jimmie Graham during the war, when he was a fighter pilot in the Australian Air Force, and she was in the W. A. A. F. Jimmie now worked in the I. C. I. works in Adelaide. Hugh had only a faint conception of what he did. She was terribly happy of course. But all the same.

  Hugh pushed the letter deeper into hi
s pocket and withdrew his hand. He looked idly at Ann's desk. It was covered with piles of printed cards saying that the Peronett Rose Nurseries much regretted that, owing to shortage of staff, they could not receive visitors this summer. It was a mystery to him how, in these recent years, Ann had managed at all. Randall's small genius had made the nursery, of course. It was his patient work which had produced the series of new roses, most of them now well known, by which the name of Peronett would be remembered. The younger Randall had been, in his way, a remarkable horticulturalist. He had met Ann when he was studying agriculture at Reading University, where Ann was reading for a degree in English. He had communicated to her his science; but the flame of his originality he could not communicate. Randall was in the end more artist than scientist, and had nothing of the commercial. Hugh recalled his saying once of Ann, 'she doesn't really love the roses. She regards them as a chemical experiment. Perhaps the great days of the nursery were over. Yet it was on Ann's science and Ann's business sense that it depended now.

  Hugh looked at himself cautiously in the big gilt rather battered cupid-encrusted mirror that soared over the mantelpiece. With a slightly guilty shock of recognition and detachment he saw a big, stout, stooping man with a dome of bald head surrounded by a thick and longish fringe of brown — grey hair. The round surprised deprecatory eyes were of a limpid brown. The flesh surrounding the eyes had darkened and sunk, and here especially the death's-head was visible. Mortality was there; yet at the same time Hugh could see his younger face present still with a cherubic complacency, alive and spirited, superimposed upon the jutting skull. And if he could see it so touchingly and so yearningly present, perhaps another might see it too.