A Summer in the Twenties Page 23

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she said. ‘You were marvellous. Are you a friend of Tom’s?’

  ‘This is Mr. Barnes,’ said Tom. ‘Miss Tarrant.’

  Judy held her hand out. Mr. Barnes took it only slowly.

  ‘I hadn’t known you were friends with Mr. Hankey,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Judy. ‘He’s staying with us and coming to York Races.’

  Mr. Barnes nodded, accepting the fact.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll be saying goodbye to you, Mr. Hankey.’

  He shook Tom’s hand with deliberate formality, raised his cap to Judy and walked briskly away. Tom watched him go.

  ‘Have I said something wrong?’ whispered Judy.

  Tom picked up his cap and dusted it against his knee.

  ‘You couldn’t have known,’ he said.

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘I think he was through with me in any case.’

  ‘Oh, I am sorry.’

  He took her hands. She looked anxiously into his face.

  ‘You’re a remarkable little thing,’ he said. ‘You must have been absolutely scared out of your wits, and you still find time to worry about me and Mr. Barnes.’

  ‘I’m all right. I wasn’t, when I was just crouching there, watching them murder the Lagonda, but as soon as you came I seemed to get my wits back enough to go and find those policemen. Oh, Tom, when I saw you come dashing round the corner and start fighting all those men!’

  ‘I thought you were still in the car.’

  ‘Of course you did. But it is nice to see one’s very own hero being heroic in front of one’s eyes. Mostly they go and do it somewhere else, you know, and the girl only hears about it when it’s all over.’

  ‘Don’t tease.’

  ‘I must, or I’ll burst into tears again. Oh, I wish there weren’t so many people around. I need kissing like anything.’

  ‘So do I.’

  They found a place in one of the lanes that led up into the wolds before the Brantingham turn. Night had come heavy and slow, as though infected by the smoke cloud that hung and drifted above the glimmering lights of the estuary. Tom’s arm ached with leaning beyond Judy to hold her door shut as she drove. He could feel that she was still far more shocked than she pretended; sudden uncontrollable tremors would ripple along her side where she pressed against him. She needed simply holding and comforting far more than she needed kissing.

  ‘I was just driving along,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t going fast, really I wasn’t, but I was watching the fire, I suppose, what I could see of it. They shot out into the road from nowhere, I could have missed them if I hadn’t skidded when I braked—I must have banged that boy with my back mudguard. Honestly I did the best I could. Of course I stopped and got out to see if he was all right, and he was. He picked himself up and I was telling him I was sorry. I was going to give him some money for new trousers, and then one of them said my name and it all changed. That was what was so awful. Tom, I didn’t know they could be like that. Mummy keeps saying so, but I thought she was making it up.’

  He sighed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But she could be like that too.’

  ‘Oh, I know that. Only . . .’

  ‘So could you and I and everybody we know, if we were pushed. We’re lucky—privileged. I’m beginning to think that’s what privilege really consists of. Not money or estates or servants—they’re only mechanisms. The real thing is arranging our lives so that we don’t get pushed.’

  She answered with a questioning murmur, not so much disagreeing with what he had said as with the propriety of talking about that sort of subject at all.

  ‘What were you doing down there in the first place?’ he said. ‘Wasn’t the movie any good?’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It was too awful. They stopped the projector and flashed it on the screen. I really didn’t want to go on watching a silly old movie after that. I came out and just started to drive around until I saw the smoke. I was going down to look.’

  Tom frowned. His mind had slipped gears for a moment while she was talking. Out of nowhere, prompted perhaps by his talk of how far people could be pushed, a ridiculous notion had bubbled up, a far-fetched but possible answer to the problem of what event or change might release the tensions on which Ricardo and his colleagues relied. Instantly the idea began to ramify into violent growth, so that it was an effort to make sense of what Judy had been saying.

  ‘Flashed what on the screen, darling? The fire?’

  ‘No, no, of course not. How extraordinary to think we should be sitting here and I know and you don’t. Not that I really thought he was marvellous—only the shop-girl side of me, I suppose, but even so . . .’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Valentino’s dead.’

  12

  Hull, 30th August, 1926

  EACH HOUSE IN THE WIDE ROAD stood in its own grounds; each tried to assert an individual personality by a flourish of architectural quirks—a porch with crenellations, another scaled down from a basilica, a corner-turret with a stunted spire—but somehow these superficial differences only emphasised a complete inward conformity. The houses had been built some fifty years ago to be sold to respectable merchants and lawyers, the florid and frock-coated money-makers who had then ruled Hull and had voted solidly Liberal, construing the word to mean nothing wider than freedom from interference in the process of money-making. In accordance with their principles this road had been built, but a public library had not; in accordance with their principles each of them reared his children in a space that would contain three whole closes of back-to-backs down behind the docks. Their inheritors lived here still, and though they no longer preached their principles with the same outspoken fervour, the houses themselves seemed to imply that their thoughts still moved through much the same channels. It struck Tom that this might be the self-same road in which Mrs. Barnes had once been in service. It seemed a truly extraordinary place for Kate to arrange a meeting.

  ‘Summerlea’ was typical, a weighty block of greyish brick, corners and window-surrounds dressed with yellow stone, the ground floor hidden from the road by a barrier of mottled aucuba. Beyond the gate Tom found a gravel drive that curved round a half-moon of lawn bedded out with grubby geraniums. The house lacked the fantasy element of most of its neighbours, but there was something about its stillness and slight decay that breathed a different kind of romance. The windows of the half-basement were grimy behind their bars. A rain-water pipe had cracked and streaked its paint with rust. The edges of the lawn had not been sheared and the grass was tangling into the gravel. These defects were nothing compared to the inadequacies in the upkeep of Sillerby (now at last being seriously catalogued and costed for Minnie Heusen to inspect) but seemed almost attractively eccentric in a road so dedicated to prosperity and conformity.

  Kate answered the door herself, curtseying as she did so.

  ‘I could have put on a lace cap and apron for you,’ she said. ‘I suppose you’re used to a flunkey in knee-breeches.’

  ‘Only one flunkey? I require a minimum of three before I will enter a doorway. One to take my hat. One to take my gloves. One to watch them do it.’

  ‘My!’

  Despite the banter she seemed to be in a brisk mood, not quite hustling him in before she closed the door. The hallway was clean, furnished with heavy old mahogany, but oddly bare of personal effects. He hung his hat on a completely empty hat-stand and put his gloves on a side-table which carried a small dinner-gong and nothing else.

  ‘This way,’ said Kate in bright unconspiratorial tones.

  He followed her along the hall and into a square, large room with a handsome ceiling, elaborately moulded. Not one item of its cluttered furniture and ornaments seemed to have been bought since before the war, but at the same time nothing had that look of age which comes from regular use. The seats of chairs and sofas were straining bulges of upholstery, un
mitigated by much sitting; the rugs seemed never to have experienced shoe-leather, nor the piano-keys the touch of fingers. All the room felt dead, except for two small areas of either end of the larger sofa, where two brass Benares tray-tables were laid for tea—scones, cakes and biscuits on one and on the other cups, a silver tea-pot and a silver tripod kettle, humming placidly over its mauve-flaming spirit-lamp. The large windows, though they faced out over a garden screened all round by evergreens, had the further privacy of lace curtains.

  ‘Just like one of our front parlours, really,’ said Kate. ‘Except for being at the back.’

  ‘Mrs. Barnes would like it.’

  ‘Love it—no end to the different ways she could push the ornaments around.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Bearing up. You’ve broken Uncle Ned’s heart, though.’

  She spoke the words without any variation from the tone she had used so far—in her socially neutral accent, but cheerful, almost excitedly pleased with the visit. It took Tom a moment to grasp their meaning.

  ‘I’m very sorry about that,’ he said.

  ‘You sit at that end, by the cakes. It’s very good of you to come at such short notice. I hope it wasn’t a nuisance.’

  ‘Not really. I wanted to talk to you in any case. You sounded a bit incoherent on the telephone.’

  ‘I hate those things. And I’d had to ring Brantingham first, but you weren’t there, only a butler kind of person who wouldn’t tell me anything until I made him get Miss Julyan. She nearly fainted when I told her who I was, too.’

  ‘Thrill. She thinks you’re the bee’s knees.’

  ‘She wasn’t so hot on telling me the number of Sillerby, though—oh, drat this thing!’

  She was having trouble manipulating the kettle. When she tried to pour it into the tea-pot the tripod and lamp tilted with it.

  ‘Hang on,’ said Tom. ‘There should be a little silver pin at the back, on a chain—at least there is on ours. If you pull that out it just hinges forward at the front. Mind out—it’ll be hot.’

  ‘Whew! Too late—and I knew I’d get something wrong. Now, Mr. Hankey, it’s China tea, so do you fancy milk or lemon?’

  ‘Oh, Kate!’

  ‘Something else wrong?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘I want to know.’

  ‘That isn’t what . . .’

  ‘I mean it, Tom. Please tell me.’

  ‘Oh well . . . something you said—what was it? Oh yes, “Fancy”. But my dear Kate . . .’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll remember. Now, would you like milk or lemon?’

  ‘Neither, actually. Yes, just like that. Thanks. If you want it stronger I should let it draw for a few minutes. China’s said to be slower than Indian, I believe.’

  ‘I should have brought my note-book.’

  ‘What are you up to, Kate? I have come all the way from Sillerby and I’ve got to get back tonight. Do you want to spend the whole time talking about this sort of thing?’

  ‘But it’s fascinating. People who live their lives full of little silver pins that have to be pulled out or pushed in if they want a cup of tea . . . Won’t you have a scone?’

  She emphasised the short o, glancing at him in only semi-mockery for approval.

  ‘I could send you a book on the subject,’ he said. ‘There must be hundreds of them, all utterly grim.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s another thing. The people who know about the silver pins keep shifting them round, so that if somebody does the sensible thing and writes a manual telling the rest of us where they’re supposed to be, by the time we’ve learnt it up the books are all wrong.’

  ‘I promise you, Kate, I—all the people I know—hardly ever even think about this sort of thing.’

  ‘That makes it worse, you silly man! What you’re saying is that there’s just you and your crowd who got it all in your mother’s milk—except I bet none of you ever tasted the milk of your own mother—and the rest of us, why, it’s not worth our even trying! Do you believe that, Tom?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Then there’s hope even for Red Kate Barnes?’

  ‘Of course there is. Oh, drat it, that’s not what I mean. Why don’t you ask me whether I’ve stopped beating my wife?’

  ‘Much of that go on among the upper classes?’

  ‘A bit, I believe.’

  ‘Not the same problems we have down among the Closes, keeping the screams from the neighbours.’

  Tom felt utterly exasperated. He had been nervous enough about this interview to find himself rehearsing snatches of possible conversations that might take place, but none of them had been anything like this. Originally he had planned to get in touch with Kate a day or two later, when his ideas were more fully worked out, and enlist her help. But her voice on the telephone, dry and urgent, had altered that. He must see her now, and before asking for anything he must do his best to repair the relationship. That, he had assumed, was what she had wanted too, but here they were, prattling about trivia, at the point where their worlds appeared to have minimum contact. For all her intelligence her view of the life lived by him and his acquaintances was almost irretrievably naïve—was it worth, for instance, trying to explain how the intricate village-like life lived among servants in a house such as Sillerby made secret wife-beating an activity just as difficult as it must have been down in dockland? And yet Kate seemed to have chosen this ground deliberately, as a means of avoiding any kind of explanations, or apologies, or justifications.

  Upstairs somewhere a small bell clinked. Kate rose.

  ‘Botheration,’ she said. ‘She’s supposed to be asleep. You know, Monday after Monday I come here, give Millie and Doris their afternoon off, and she’s never troubled me once. Now when I’ve got a visitor . . . She’s always liked to interfere in other people’s lives . . . Shan’t be long, I hope.’

  She picked her way out through the maze of furniture. Her stride went up the stairs two steps at a time. Tom, who had risen with her, was too restless to sit again. He wandered round the room, gazing at its strangely anonymous bric-a-brac. Twitching a lace curtain aside he saw that the garden behind the house was a dull rectangle of lawn with a pair of perfunctory, almost flowerless borders running down either side. A large holm oak brooded near the far end. The hedges had been let grow twelve feet tall. It was more like a prison yard than a garden, but it did not look utterly untended—tidy, but never loved. That could be explained, as could Kate’s choice of the place for a meeting, by the fact that the householder apparently lay bedridden upstairs; but gazing at the green, secretive rectangle Tom found that his own sense of mystery and unease was not allayed. He remembered the hall, so impossibly bare. Why was there not one hat, coat or brolly on the hat-stand? Where was the card-bowl which should have stood on the table with the gong? Why was there not one scrap of paper anywhere?

  Quietly he put his cup down and left the room. Far off he heard a squeaking, querulous voice, answered by Kate’s, mouthing her syllables strangely slow. Of course—the old woman was deaf. Both voices declared that, in their different ways. Yet another layer of secrecy. There were rooms on either side of the front door—the master’s study most likely, and perhaps a smoking-room or ‘library’. Both were locked, and Tom could not quite bring himself to stoop and peer through the keyholes, but hesitating at the left hand door he thought he detected an odour he understood, He had last smelt it, much more strongly, in the police station after the affair on Marfleet Strand, the dusty whiff of office papers.

  At the back of the hall he found the dining-room. It had not the same unused look as the drawing-room, indeed the leather of the chair at the head of the table was worn almost through. A drawer of the ornate black side-table stood open, displaying a big service of florid silver cutlery. Presumably Kate had got the teaspoons from here. Those were plain, but the handles of the dinner set were engraved with the letter H. Upstairs the voice of the old woman creaked on. Tom brooded. It was reasonable to
lock the downstairs rooms in a building so little used, so that a housebreaker would not be able to roam freely through. On the other hand the dining-room with its silver was the housebreaker’s dream. Kate might have unlocked it for the spoons, but in that case surely she would have left the key in the door, to lock up again when she was done. It wasn’t there.

  Under the stairs a smaller door opened into a little wash-room. On the shelf above the handbasin was a pair of ivory-backed hair-brushes, the sort young men got given around their sixteenth birthday. These carried the monogram ARH in lettering of exactly the same style as Cyril’s brushes, which Tom himself had taken over. Another young man killed in the war? Very likely. They and the dining-room chair were the only signs that Tom had found of an individual human life ever having been lived here. He stared at them for a moment, moved by thoughts of Cyril, ashamed of his own prying and distrusts. A stair creaked above him. He flushed the lavatory, which ran with a monstrous roaring, and came out in time to hold the drawing-room door for Kate.

  Her mood had changed. She smiled at him as she settled onto the sofa but he sensed an alteration of intent.

  ‘Who does the house belong to?’ he asked.

  ‘Her,’ she said, gesturing with a cock of the head towards the upper storeys, and contriving at the same time to refuse the topic. She drained her tepid tea and put her cup down.

  ‘Now we’d better talk,’ she said. ‘You say you want something from me. Well, I want something from you, first. I want you to tell me straight why you came to Hull and struck up with Uncle Ned.’

  ‘All right. That’s one of the things I want to talk about too. But listen—this is important. All along I’ve never been sure what was the best thing to do, but almost as soon as I started I realised that I simply didn’t know enough to make up my mind. So at least I’ve been able to tell myself that if I knew more I might come to the right decision. I started off, you see, trying to find something out—for reasons which I’m now not at all sure about and which you will think are downright bad. But however uncertain I’ve been about my original motives, I’ve always felt it was worth going on, simply in order to know. Do you understand?’