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A JUDGEMENT IN STONE Ruth Rendell

For Gerald Austin, with love

Chapter 1

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write. There was no real motive and no premeditation; no money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman's disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished nothing by it but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accom- plish nothing. And yet, although her companion and partner was mad, Eunice was not. She had the awful practical sanity of the atavistic ape disguised as twentieth-century woman. Literacy is one of the cornerstones of civilization. To be illiterate is to be deformed. And the derision that was once directed at the physical freak may, perhaps more justly, descend upon the illiterate. If he or she can live a cautious life among the uneducated all may be well, for in the country of the purblind the eyeless is not rejected. It was unfortunate for Eunice Parchman, and for them, that the people who employed her and in whose home she lived for nine months were peculiarly literate. Had they been a family of philistines, they might be alive today and Eunice free in her mysterious dark freedom of sensation and instinct and blank absence of the printed word. The family belonged to the upper middle class, and they lived a conventional upper-middle-class life in a country house. George Coverdale had a degree in philosophy, but since the age of thirty he had been managing director of his late father's company, Tin Box Coverdale, at Stantwich in Suffolk. With his wife and his three children, Peter, Paula and Melinda, he had occupied a large nineteen-thirtyish house on the outskirts of Stantwich until his wife died of cancer when Melinda was twelve. Two years later, at the wedding of Paula to Brian Caswall, George met thirty-seven-year-old Jacqueline Mont. She also had been married before had divorced her husband for desertion, and had been left with one son. George and Jacqueline fell in love more or less at first sight and were married three months later. George bought a manor house ten miles from Stantwich and went to live there with his bride, with Melinda and with Giles Mont, Peter Coverdale having at that time been married for three years. When Eunice Parchman was engaged as their housekeeper George was fifty-seven and Jacqueline forty-two. They took an active part in the social life of the neighbourhood, and in an unobtrusive way had slipped into playing the parts of the squire and his lady. Their marriage was idyllic and Jacqueline was popular with her stepchildren, Peter, a lecturer in political economy at a northern university, Paula, now herself a mother and living in London, and Melinda, who, at twenty, was reading English at the University of Norfolk in Galwich. Her own son, Giles, aged seventeen, was still at school. Four members of this family, George, Jacqueline and Melinda Coverdale and Giles Mont, died in the space of fifteen minutes on I4 February, St Valentine's Day. Eunice Parchman and the prosaically named Joan Smith shot them down on a Sunday evening while they were watching opera on television. Two weeks later Eunice was arrested for the crime - because she could not read. But there was more to it than that. The gardens Lowheld HE are overgrown now and weeds push their way up through the gravel of the drive. One of the drawing-room windows, broken by a village boy, has been boarded up, and wisteria, killed by summer drought, hangs above the front door like an old dried net. Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. It has become a bleak house, fit nesting place for the birds that Dickens named Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon and Spinach. Before Eunice came, and left desolation behind her, Lowfield Hall was not like this. It was as well kept as its distant neighbours, as comfortable, as warm, as elegant, and, seemingly, as much a sanctuary as they. Its inhabitants were safe and happy, and destined surely to lead long secure lives. But on an April day they invited Eunice in. A little blustery wind was blowing the daffodils in the orchard, waves on a golden sea. The clouds parted and closed again, so that at one moment it was winter in the garden and at the next an uneasy summer. And in those sombre intervals it might have been snow, not the blossom of the blackthorn, that whitened the hedge. Winter stopped at the windows. The sun brought in flashes of summer to match the pleasant warmth, and it was warm enough for Jacqueline Coverdale to sit down to breakfast in a short-sleeved dress. She was holding a letter in her left hand on which she wore her platinum wedding ring and the diamond cluster George had given her on their engagement. 'I'm not looking forward to this at all,' she said. 'More coffee, please, darling,' said George. He loved watching her do things for him, as long as she didn't have to do too much. He loved just looking at her, so pretty, his Jacqueline, fair, slender, a Lizzie Siddal matured. Six years of marriage, and he hadn't got used to the wonder of it, the miracle that he had found her. 'Sorry,' he said. 'You're not looking forward to it? Well, we didn't get any other replies. Women aren't exactly queueing up to work for us.' She shook her head, a quick pretty gesture. Her hair was very blonde, short and sleek. 'We could try again. I know you'll say I'm silly, George, but I had a sort of absurd hope that we'd get - well, someone like ourselves. At any rate, a reasonably educated person who was willing to take on domestic service for the sake of a nice home.' 'A "lady", as they used to say.' Jacqueline smiled in rather a shamefaced way. 'Eva Baalham would write a better letter than this one. E. Parchman ~ What a way for a woman to sign her namer' 'It was correct usage for the Victorians.' 'Maybe, but we're not Victorians. Oh dear, I wish we were. Imagine a smart parlourmaid waiting on us now, and a cook busy in the kitchen.' And Giles, she thought but didn't say aloud, obliged to be well mannered and not to read at table. Had he heard any of this? Wasn't he the least bit interested? 'No income tax,' she said aloud,' and no horrible new houses all over the countryside.' 'And no electricity either,' said George, touching the radiator behind him, 'or constant hot water, and perhaps Paula dying in childbirth.' 'I know.' Jacqueline returned to her original tack. 'But that letter, darling, and her bleak manner when she phoned. I just know she's going to be a vulgar lumpish creature who'll break the china and sweep the dust under the mats.' 'You can't know that, and it's hardly fair judging her by one 0 letter. You want a housekeeper, not a secretary. Go and see her. You've fixed this interview, Paula's expecting you, and you'll only regret it if you let the chance go by. If she makes a bad impression on you, just tell her no, and then we'll think about trying again.' The grandfather clock in the hall struck the first quarter after eight. George got up. 'Come along now, Giles, I believe that clock's a few minutes slow.' He kissed his wife. Very slowly Giles closed his copy of the Baghavad Gitawhich had been propped against the marmalade pot, and with a kind of concentrated lethargy extended himself to his full, emaciated, bony height. Muttering under his breath something that might have been Greek or, for all she knew, Sanscrit, he let his mother kiss his spotty cheek. 'Give my love to Paula,' said George, and off they went in the white Mercedes, George to Tin Box Coverdale, Giles to the Magnus Wythen Foundation School. Silence settled upon them in the car after George, who tried, who was determined to keep on trying, had remarked that it was a very windy day. Giles said 'Mmm'. As always, he resumed his reading. George thought, Please let this woman be all right, because I can't let Jackie keep on trying to run that enormous place, it's not fair. We shall have to move into a bungalow or something, and I don't want that, God forbid, so please let this E. Parchman be all right. There are six bedrooms in Lowfield Hall, a drawing room, a dining room, a morning room, three bathrooms, a kitchen, and what are known as usual offices. In this case, the usual offices were the back kitchen and the gun room. On that April morning the house wasn't exactly dirty, but it wasn't clean either. There was a bluish film on all the thirty-three windows, and the film was decorated with fingerprints and finger smears: Eva Baalham's, and probably, even after two months, those of the last and most lamentable of all the au pairs. Jacqueline had worked it out once, and estimated that six thousand square feet of carpet covered the floors. This, however, was fairly clean. Old Eva loved plying the vacuum cleaner while chatting about her relations. She used a duster too, up to eye level. It was just unfortunate that her eyes happened to be about four feet nine from the ground. Jacqueline put the breakfast things in the dishwasher, the milk and butter in the fridge. The fridge hadn't been defrosted for six weeks. Had the oven ever been cleaned? She went upstairs. It was awful, she ought to be ashamed of herself, she knew that, but her hand came away grey with dust from the bannisters. The little bathroom, the one they called the children's bathroom, was in a hideous mess, Giles's latest acne remedy, a kind of green paste, caked all over the basin. She hadn't made the beds. Hastily she pulled the pink sheet, the blankets, the silk counterpane up over the six-foot-wide mattress she shared with George. Giles's bed could stay the way it was. She doubted if he would notice anyway - wouldn't notice if the sheets all turned purple and there was a warming pan in it instead of an electric blanket. Attention to her own appearance she didn't skimp. She often thought it was a pity she wasn't as house-proud as she was Jacqueline-proud, but that was the way it was, that was the way she was. Bath, hair, hands, nails, warmer dress, sheer tights, the new dark green shoes, face painted to look au natural. She put on the mink George had given her for Christmas. Now down to the orchard to pick an armful of daffodils for Paula. At any rate, she kept the garden nice, not a weed to be seen, and there wouldn't be, even in the height of summer. Waves on a golden sea. Snowdrops nestling under the whiter hedge. Twice already, this dry spring, she had mown the lawns, and they were plushy green. An open-air lady I am, thought Jacqueline, the wind on her face, the thin sharp scents of spring flowers delighting her. I could stand here for hours, looking at the river, the poplars in the water meadows, the Greeving Hills with all these cloud shadows racing, racing.... But she had to see this woman, this E. Parchman. Time to go. If only she turns out to like housework as much as I like gardening. She went back into the house. Was it her imagination, or did I2 the kitchen really not smell at all nice? Out through the gun room, which was in its usual mess, lock the door, leave Lowfield Hall to accummulate more dust, grow that much more frowsty. Jacqueline put the daffodils on the back seat of the Ford and set off to drive the seventy miles to London. George Coverdale was an exceptionally handsome man, classic-featured, as trim of figure as when he had rowed for his university in 1939. Of his three children only one had inherited his looks, and Paula Caswall was not that one. A sweet expression and gentle eyes saved her from plainness, but pregnancy was not becoming to her, and she was in the eighth month of her second pregnancy. She had a vigorous mischievous little boy to look after, a fairly big house in Kensington to run, she was huge and tired and her ankles were swollen. Also she was frightened. Patrick's birth had been a painful nightmare, and she looked forward to this coming delivery with dread. She would have preferred to see no one and have no one see her. But she realised that her house was the obvious venue for an interview with this London-based prospective housekeeper, and being endowed with the gracious manners of the Coverdales, she welcomed her stepmother affectionately, enthused over the daffodils and complimented Jacqueline on her dress. They had lunch, and Paula listened with sympathy to Jacqueline's doubts and forbodings about what would ensue at two o'clock. However, she was determined to take no part in this interview. Patrick had gone for his afternoon sleep, and when the doorbell rang at two minutes to two Paula did no more than show the woman in the navy blue raincoat into the living room. She left her to Jacqueline and went upstairs to lie down. But in those few seconds she spent with Eunice Parchman she felt a violent antipathy to her. Eunice affected her in that moment as she so often affected others. It was as if a coldness, almost an icy breath, emanated from her. Wherever she was, she brought a chill into the warm air. Later Paula was to remember this first impression and, in an agony of guilt, reproach herself for IS not warning her father, for not telling him of a wild premonition that was to prove justified. She did nothing. She went to her bedroom and fell into a heavy troubled sleep. Jacqueline's reaction was very different. From having been violently opposed to engaging this woman, till then unseen, she did a complete about-face within two minutes. Two factors decided her, or rather her principal weaknesses decided for her. These were her vanity and her snobbishness. She rose as the woman came into the room and held out her hand. 'Good afternoon. You're very punctual.' 'Good afternoon, madam.' Except by assistants in the few remaining old-fashioned shops in Stantwich, Jacqueline hadn't been addressed as madam for many years. She was delighted. She smiled. 'Is it Miss Parchman or Mrs?' 'Miss Parchman. Eunice Parchman.' 'Won't you sit down?' No repulsive chill or, as Melinda would have put it, 'vibes' affected Jacqueline. She was the last of the family to feel it, perhaps because she didn't want to, because almost from that first moment she was determined to take Eunice Parchman on, and then, during the months that followed, to keep her. She saw a placid-looking creature with rather too small a head, pale firm features, brown hair mixed with grey, small steady blue eyes, a massive body that seemed neither to go out nor in, large shapely hands, very clean with short nails, large shapely legs in heavy brown nylon, large feet in somewhat distorted black court shoes. As soon as Eunice Parchman had sat down she undid the top button of her raincoat to disclose the polo neck of a lighter blue-ribbed jumper. Calmly she sat there, looking down at her hands folded in her lap. Without admitting it even to herself, Jacqueline Coverdale liked handsome men and plain women. She got on well with Melinda but not so well as she got on with the less attractive Paula and Peter's joke laide wife, Audrey. She suffered from what might be called a Gwendolen Complex, for like Wilde's I4 Miss Fairfax, she preferred a woman to be 'fully forty-two and more than usually plain for her age'. Eunice Pardlman was at least as old as herself, very likely older, though it was hard to tell, and there was no doubt about her plainness. If she had belonged to her own class, Jacqueline would have wondered why she didn't wear make-up, undergo a diet, have that tabbycat hair tinted. But in a servant all was as it should be. In the face of this respectful silence, confronted by this entirely prepossessing appearance, Jacqueline forgot the questions she had intended to ask. And instead of examining the candidate, instead of attempting to find out if this woman were suitable to work in her house, if she would suit the Coverdales, she began persuading Eunice Parchman that they would suit her. 'It's a big house, but there are only the three of us except when my stepdaughter comes home for the weekend. There's a cleaner three days a week, and of course I should do all the cooking myself.' 'I can cook, madam,' said Eunice. 'It wouldn't be necessary, really. There's a dishwasher and a deep freeze. My husband and I do all the shopping.' Jacqueline was impressed by this woman's toneless voice that, though uneducated, had no trace of a cockney accent. 'We do entertain quite a lot,' she said almost fearfully. Eunice moved her feet, bringing them dose together. She nodded slowly. 'I'm used to that. I'm a hard worker.' At this point Jacqueline should have asked why Eunice was leaving her present situation, or at least something about her present situation. For all she knew, there might not have been one. She didn't ask. She was bemused by those 'madams', excited by the contrast between this woman and Eva Baalham, this woman and the last pert too-pretty au pair. It was all so different from what she had expected. Eagerly she said, 'When could you start?' Eunice's blank face registered a faint surprise, as well it might. 'You'll want a reference,' she said. 'Oh, yes,' said Jacqueline, reminded. 'Of course.' A white card was produced from Eunice's large black handbag. On it was written in the same handwriting as the letter that had so dismayed Jacqueline in the first place: Mrs Chichester, ~4 Willow Vale, London, S. W. I8, and a phone number. The address was the one which had headed Eunice's letter. 'That's Wimbledon, isn't it?' Eunice nodded. No doubt she was gladdened by this erroneous assumption. They discussed wages, when she would start, how she would travel to Stantwich. Subject, of course, Jacqueline said hastily, to the reference being satisfactory. 'I'm sure we shall get on marvellously.' At last Eunice smiled. Her eyes remained cold and still, but her mouth moved. It was certainly a smile. 'Mrs Chichester said, could you phone her tonight before nine? She's an old lady and she goes to bed early.' This show of tender regard for an employer's wishes and foibles could only be pleasing. 'You may be sure I shall,' said Jacqueline. It was only twenty past two and the interview was over. Eunice said, 'Thank you, madam. I can see myself out,' thus indicating, or so it seemed to Jacqueline, that she knew her place. She walked steadily from the room without looking back. If Jacqueline had had a better knowledge of Greater London, she would have realised that Eunice Parchman had already told her a lie, or at least acquiesced in a misapprehension. For the postal district of Wimbledon is S. W. I9 not S. W. IS which designates a much less affluent area in the Borough of Wandsworth. But she didn't realise and she didn't check, and when she entered Lowfield Hall at six, five minutes after George had got ho, ne, she didn't even show him the white card. 'I'm sure she'll be ideal, darting,' she enthused, 'really the kind of old-fashioned servant we thought was an extinct breed. I can't tell you how quiet and respectful she was, not a bit pushing. I'm only afraid she may be too humble. But I know she's going to be a hard worker.' George put his arm round his wife and kissed her. He said nothing about her voile uttered no 'I told you so's'. He was accustomed to Jacqueline's prejudices, succeeded often by wild enthusiasm, and he loved her for her impulsiveness which, in his eyes, made her seem young and sweet and feminine. What he said was, 'I don't care how humble she is or how pushing, as long as she takes some of the load of work off your hands.' Before she made the phone call Jacqueline, who had an active imagination, had formed a picture in her mind of the kind of household in which Eunice Parchman worked and the kind of woman who employed her. Willow Vale, she thought, would be a quiet tree-lined road near Wimbledon Common, number z4 large, Victorian; Mrs Chichester an elderly gentlewoman with rigid notions of behaviour, demanding but just, autocratic, whose servant was leaving her because she wouldn't, or couldn't afford to pay her adequate wages in these inflationary times. At eight o'clock she dialled the number. Eunice Parchman answered the phone herself by giving the code correctly followed by the four digits slowly and precisely enunciated. Again calling Jacqueline madam, she asked her to hold the line while she fetched Mrs Chichester. And Jacqueline imagined her crossing a sombre over-furnished hall, entering a large and rather chilly drawing room where an old lady sat listening to classical music or reading the In Memoriam column in a quality newspaper. There, on the threshold, she would pause and say in her deferential way: 'Mrs Coverdale on the phone for you, madam.' The facts were otherwise. The telephone in question was attached to the wall on the first landing of a rooming house in Earlsfield, at the top of a flight of stairs. Eunice Parchman had been waiting patiently by it since five in case, when it rang, some other tenant should get to it first. Mrs Chichester was a machine-tool operator in her fifties called Annie Cole who sometimes performed small I7 services of this kind in exchange for Eunice agreeing not to tell the Post Office how, for a year after her mother's death, she had continued to draw that lady's pension. Annie had written the letter and the words on the card, and it was from her fur- nished room, number 6, z4 Willow Vale, S. W. I8, that Eunice now fetched her to the phone. Annie Cole said: 'I'm really very upset to be losing Miss Parchman, Mrs Coverdale. She's managed everything so wonderfully for me for seven years. She's a marvellous worker, and excellent cook, and so house-proud! Really, if she has a fault, it's that she's too conscientious.' Even Jacqueline felt that this was laying it on a bit thick. And the voice was peculiarly sprightly - Annie Cole couldn't get rid of Eunice fast enough - with an edge to it the reverse of refined. She had the sense to ask why this paragon was leaving. 'Because I'm leaving myself.' The reply came without hesitation. 'I'm joining my son in New Zealand. The cost of living is getting impossible here, isn't it? Miss Parchman could come with me, I should welcome the idea, but she's rather conservative. She prefers to stay here. I should like to think of her settling in a nice family like yours.' Jacqueline was satisfied. 'Did you confirm it with Miss Parchman?' said George. 'Oh, darling, I forgot. I'll have to write to her.' 'Or phone back.' Why not phone back, Jacqueline? Dial that number again now. A young man returning to his room next to Annie Cole's, setting his foot now on the last step of that flight of stairs, will lift the receiver. And when you ask for Miss Parchman he will tell you he has never heard of her. Mrs Chichester, then? There is no Mrs Chichester, only a Mr Chichester who is the landlord, in whose name the phone number is but who himself lives in Croydon. Pick up the phone now, Jacqueline.... 'I think it's better to confirm it in writing.' 'Just as you like, darling.' The moment passed, the chance was lost. George did pick up the phone, but it was to call Paula, for the report on her 18 health he had received from his wife had disquieted him. While he was talking to her, Jacqueline wrote her letter. And the other people whom chance and destiny and their own agency were to bring together for destruction on ~4 February? Joan Smith was preaching on a cottage doorstep. Melinda Coverdale, in her room in Galwich, was struggling to make sense out of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Giles Mont was reciting mantras as an aid to meditation. But already they were gathered together. In that moment when Jacqueline declined to maker phone call an invisible thread lasso-cd each of them, bound them one to another, related them more closely than blood. George and Jacqueline were discreet people, and they didn't broadcast their coming good fortune. But Jacqueline did mention it to her friend Lady Royston who mentioned it to Mrs Cairne when the eternal subject of getting someone to keep the place clean came up. The news seeped through along the ramifications of Higgses, Meadowses, Baalhams and Newsteads, and in the Blue Boar it succeeded as the major topic of conversation over the latest excesses of Joan Smith. Eva Baalham hastened, in her oblique way, to let Jacqueline know that she knew. 'You going to give her telly?' 'Give whom - er, television?' said Jacqueline, flushing. 'Her as is coming from London. Because if you are I can as like get you a set cheap from my cousin Meadows as has the electric shop in Gosbury. Fell off the back of a lorry, I reckon, but ask no questions and you'll get no lies.' 'Thank you so much,' said Jacqueline, more than a little annoyed. 'As a maker of fact, we're buying a colour set for ourselves and Miss Parchman will be having our old one.' 'Parchman,' said Eva, spitting on a window-pane before giving it a wipe with her apron. 'Would that be a London name, I wonder?' 'I really don't know, Mrs Baalham. When you've finished whatever you're doing to that window perhaps you'd be good enough to come upstairs with me and we'll start getting her room ready.' 'I reckon,' said Eva in her broad East Anglian whine. She never called Jacqueline madam; it wouldn't have crossed her mind. In her eyes, the only difference between herself and the 20 Coverdales was one of money. In other respects she was their superior since they were newcomers, and not even gentry but in trade, while her yeomen ancestors had lived in Greeving for five hundred years. Nor did she envy them their money. She had quite enough of her own, and she preferred her council house to Lowfield Hall, great big barn of a place, must cost a packet keeping that warm. She didn't like Jacqueline, who was mutton dressed as lamb and who gave herself some mighty airs for the wife of the owner of a tin-can factory. All that will- you-be-so-good and thank-you-so-much nonsense. Wonder how she'll get on with this Parchman? Wonder how I will? Still, I reckon I can always leave. There's Mrs Jameson-Kerr begging me to come on her bonded knees and she'll pay sixty pence an hour. 'God help her legs,' said Eva, mounting the stairs. At the top of the house a warren of poky attics had long since been converted into two large bedrooms and a bathroom. From their windows could be seen one of the finest pastoral views in East Anglia. Constable, of course, had painted it, sitting on the banks of the River Beal, and as was sometimes his way he had shifted a few church towers the better to suit his composition. It was lovely enough with the church towers in their proper places, a wide serene view of meadows and little woods in all the delicious varied greens of early May. 'Have her bed in here, will she?' said Eva, ambling into the bigger and sunnier of the bedrooms. 'No, she won't.' Jacqueline could see that Eva was preparing to line herself up as secretary, as it were, of the downtrodden domestic servants' union. 'I want that room for when my husband's grandchildren come to stay.' 'You'll have to make her comfortable if you want her to stop.' Eva opened a window. 'Lovely day. Going to be a hot summer. The Lord is on our side, as my cousin as has the farm always says. There's young Giles going off in your car without so much as by your leave, I reckon.' Jacqueline was furious. She thought Eva ought to call Giles Mr Mont or, at least, 'your son'. But she was glad to see Giles, who was on half-term, leave his voluntary incarceration at last to get some fresh air. 'If you'd be so kind, Mrs Baalham, we might start moving the the furniture.' Giles drove down the avenue between the horse-chestnut trees and out into Greeving Lane. The lane is an unclassified road, just wide enough for two cars to pass if they go very slowly. Blackthorn had given place to hawthorn, and the hedges were creamy with its sugary scented blossom. A limped blue sky, pale green wheat growing, a cuckoo calling - in May he sings all day - an exultation of birds carolling their territorial claims from every tree. Pretending that none of it was there, refusing, in spite of his creed, to be one with the oneness of it, Giles drove over the river bridge. He intended to get as little fresh air as was compatible with going out of doors. He loathed the country. It bored him. There was nothing to do. When you told people that they were shocked, presumably because they didn't realise that no one in his senses could spend more than a maximum of an hour a day looking at the stars, walking in the fields or sitting on river banks. Besides, it was nearly always cold or muddy. He disliked shooting things or fishing things out of streams or riding horses or following the hunt. George, who had tried to encourage him in those pursuits, had perhaps at last understood the impossibility of the task. Giles never, but never, went for a country walk. When he was compelled to walk to Lowfield Hall from the point where the school bus stopped, about half a mile, he kept his eyes on the ground. He had tried shutting them, but he had bumped into a tree. London he loved. Looking back, he thought he had been happy in London. He had wanted to go to a boarding school in a big city, but his mother hadn't let him because some psycho- logist had said he was disturbed and needed the secure background of family life. Being disturbed didn't bother him, and he rather fostered the air he had of the absent-minded, scatty, preoccupied young intellectual. He was intellectual all right, 22 very much so. Last year he had got so many O-levels that there had been a piece about him in a national newspaper. He was certain of a place at Oxford, and he knew as much Latin, and possibly more Greek, than the man who professed to teach him these subjects at the Magnus Wythen. He had no friends at school, and he despised the village boys who were interested only in motor-cycles, pornography and the Blue Boar. Ian and Christopher Cairne and others of their like had been designated his friends by parental edict, but he hardly ever saw them, as they were away at their public schools. Neither the village boys nor those at school ever attempted to beat him up. He was over six feet and still growing. His face was horrible with acne, and the day after he washed it his hair was again wet with grease. Now he was on his way to Sudbury to buy a packet of orange dye. He was going to dye all his jeans and tee-shirts orange in pursuance of his religion, which was, roughly, Buddhism. When he had saved up enough money he meant to go to India on a bus and, with the exception of Melinda, never see any of them again. Well, maybe his mother. But not his father or stuffy old George or self-righteous Peter or this bunch of peasants. That is, if he didn't become a Catholic instead. He had just finished reading Brideshead Revisited, and had begun to wonder whether being a Catholic at Oxford and burning incense on one's staircase might not be better than India. But he'd dye the jeans and tee-shirts just in case. At Meadows' garage in Greeving he stopped for petrol. 'When's the lady from London coming, then?' said Jim Meadows. 'Mmm?' said Giles. Jim wanted to know so that he could tell them in the pub that night. He tried again. Giles thought about it reluctantly. 'Is today Wednesday?' "Course it is.' Jim added, because he fancied himself as a wit, 'All day.' 'They said Saturday,' said Giles at last. 'I think.' It might be and it might not, though Jim. You never knew with him. Needed his head seeing to, that one. It was a wonder she let him out alone at the wheel of a good car like that. 'Melindatll be home to get a look at her, I reckon.' 'Mmm,' said Giles. He drove off, rejecting the green stamps. Melinda would be home. He didn't know whether this was pleasing or disquieting. On the surface, his relationship with her was casual and even distant, but in Giles's heart, where he often saw himself as a Poe or Byron, it simmered as an incestuous passion. This had come into being, or been pushed into being, by Giles six months before. Until then Melinda had merely been a kind of quasi-sister. He knew, of course, that since she was not his sister, or even his half-sister, there was nothing at all to stop their falling in love with each other and eventually marrying. Apart from the three years' age difference, which would be of no importance later on, there could be no possibl- objection on anyone's part. Mother would even like it and old George would come round. But this was not what Giles wanted or what he saw in his fantasies. In them Melinda and he were a Byron and an Augusta Leigh who confessed their mutual passion while walking in Wuthering Heights weather on the Greeving Hills, a pastime which nothing would have in- duced Giles to undertake in reality. There was little reality in any of this. In his fantasies Melinda even looked different, paler, thinner, rather phthisic, very much of another world. Confronting each other, breathless in the windswept darkness, they spoke of how their love must remain for ever secret, never of course to be consummated. And though they married other people, their passion endured and was whispered of as something profound and indefinable. He bought the dye, two packets of it called Nasturtium Flame. He also bought a poster of a Pre-Raphaelite girl with a pale green face and red hair, hanging over a balcony. The girl was presumably craning out of her window to moon after a lost or faithless lover, but from her attitude and the nauseous pallor of her skin she looked more as if, while staying in an hotel in an Italian holiday resort, she had eaten too much pasta and was going to be sick. Gilesbought her because she looked like Melinda would look in the terminal stages of tuberculosis. He returned to the car to find a parking ticket on the windscreen. He never used the car park. It would have meant walking a hundred yards. When he got home Eva had gone and so had his mother, who had left a note on the kitchen table for him. The note began 'Darling' and ended 'love from Mother' and the middle was full of needless information about the cold lunch left for him in the fridge and how she had had to go to some Women's Institute meeting. It mystified him. He knew where his lunch would be, and he would never have dreamed of leaving a note for anyone. Like all true eccentrics, he thought other people very odd. Presently he fetched all his clothes downstairs and put them with the dye and some water in the two large pans his mother used for jam-making. While they were boiling, he sat at the kitchen table eating chicken salad and reading the memoirs of a mystic who had lived in a Poona Ashram for thirty years without speaking a word. On the Friday afternoon Melinda Coverdale came home. The train brought her from Galwich to Stantwich, and the bus to a place caned Gallows Corner two miles from Lowfield Hall. There she alighted and waited for a lift. At this hour there was always someone passing on his or her way home to Greeving, so Melinda hoisted herself up on to Mrs Cotleigh's garden wall and sat in the sun. She was wearing over-long jeans rolled up to the knees, very scuffed red cowboy boots, an Indian cotton shirt and a yellow motoring hat, vintage 1920. But for an that there was no prettier sight to be seen on a sunny garden wall between Stantwich and King's Lynn. Melinda was the child who had inherited George's looks. She had his straight nose and high brow, his sharply sensitive mouth and his bright blue eyes - and her dead mother's mane of golden hair, the colour of Mrs Cotleigh's wallflowers.. An energy that never seemed to flag, except where Middle English verse was concerned, kept her constantly on the move. She lugged her horse's nosebag holdall up on to the wall beside her, pulled out a string of beads, tried it on, made a face at the textbooks which hope rather than incentive had persuaded her to bring, then flung the bag down on the grass and jumped after it. Cross-legged on the bank while the useless bus passed in the opposite direction, then to pick poppies, the wild red poppies, weeds of Suffolk, that abound on this corner where once the gibbet stood. Five minutes later the chicken-farm van came along, and Geoff Baalham, who was second cousin to Eva called, 'Hi, Melindal Can I drop your' She jumped in, hat, bag and poppies. 'I must have been there half an hour,' said Melinda, who had been there ten minutes. 'I like your hat.' 'Do you really, Geoff? You are sweet. I got it in the Oxfam shop.' Melinda knew everyone in the village and called everyone, even ancient gaffers and yammers, by their Christian names. She drove tractors and picked fruit and watched calvings. In the presence of her father she spoke more or less politely to Jameson-Kerrs, Archers, Cairnes and Sir Robert Royston, but she disapproved of them as reactionary. Once, when the foxhounds had met on Greeving Green, she had gone up there waving an anti-blood-sports banner. In her early teens she had gone fishing with the village boys and with them watched the hares come out at dusk. In her late teens she had danced with them at Cattingham 'hope' end kissed them behind the village hall. She was as gossipy as their mothers and as involved. 'What's been going on in merry old Greeving in my absence? Tell all.' She hadn't been home for three weeks. 'I know, Mrs Archer's eloped with Mr Smith.' Geoff Baalham grinned widely. 'Poor old sod. I reckon he's got his hands full with his own missus. Wait a minute, let's see. Susan Meadows, Higgs that was, had her baby. It's a girl, and they're calling it Lalage.' 'You don't mean it!' 'Thought that'd shake you. Your ma's got herself on the parish council, though I reckon you know about that, and -wait for it - your dad's bought colour telly.' 'I talked to him on the phone last night. He never said.' 'No, well, only got it today. I had it all from my Auntie Eva an hour back.' The people of Greeving are careless about the correct terms for relations. One's stepmother is as much one's ma or mum as one's natural mother, and a female second cousin, if old enough, is necessarily auntie. 'They're giving the old one to the lady help that's coming from London.' 'Oh God, how meant Daddy's such a ghastly fascist. Don't you think that's the most undemocratic fascist thing you've ever heard, Geoff7' 'It's the way of the world, Melinda, love. Always has been and always will be. You oughtn't to go calling your dad names. I'd turn you over and tan your backside for you if I was him.' 'Geoff Baalhaml To hear you, no one'd think you're only a year older than me.' 'Just you remember I'm a married man now, and that teaches you the meaning of responsibility. Here we are, Lowfield Hall, madame, and I'll take my leave of you. Oh, and you can tell your ma I'll be sending them eggs up with Auntie Eva first thing Monday morning.' 'Will do. Thanks tremendously for the lift, Geoff. You are resect.' 'Cheerio then, Melinda.' Off went Geoff to the chicken farm and Barbara Carter whom he had married in January, but thinking what a nice pretty girl Melinda Coverdale was - that hat, my Godl - and thinking too of walking with her years before by the River Beat and of innocent kisses exchanged to the rushing music of the mill. Melinda swung up the long drive, under the chestnuts hung with their cream and bronze candles, round the house and in by the gun-room door. Giles was sitting at the kitchen table reading the last chapter of the Poona book. 'Hi, Step.' 'Hello,' said Giles. He no longer used the nickname that once had served for each to address to the other. It was incongrnous with his Byronic fantasies, though these always crum- bled when Melinda appeared in the flesh. She had quite a lot of well-distributed flesh, and red cheeks, and an aggressive healthiness. Also she bounced. Giles sighed, scratched his spots and thought of being in India with a begging bowl. 'How did you get red ink on your jeans?' 'I didn't. I've dyed them but the dye didn't take.' 'Mad,' said Melinda. She sailed off, searched for her father and stepmother, found them on the top floor putting finishing touches to Miss Parchman's room. 'Hello, my darlings.' Each got a kiss, but George got his first. 'Daddy, you've got a suntan. If I'd known you were coming home so early I'd have phoned your office from the station. Geoff Baalham gave me a lift and he said his Auntie Eva'll bring the eggs first thing on Monday and you're giving our new housekeeper the old telly. I said I never heard anything so fascist in all my life. Next thing you'll be saying she's got to eat on her own in the kitchen.' George and Jacqueline looked at each other. 'Well, of course.' 'How awfull No wonder the revolution's coming. A teas les aristos. D'you like my hat, Jackie? I bought it in the Oxfam shop. Fifty pee. God, I'm starving. We haven't got anyone awful coming tonight, have we? No curs or cairns or roisterers?' 'Now, Melinda, I think that's enough.' The words were admonitory but the tone was tender. George was incapable of being really cross with his favourite child. 'We're tolerant of your friends and you must be tolerant of ours. As a matter of fact, the Roystons are dining with us.' Melinda groaned. Quickly she hugged her father before he could expostulate. 'I shall go and phone Stephen or Charles or someone and make him take me out. But I tell you what, Jackie, I'll be back in time to help you clear up. Just think, you'll never have to do it again after tomorrow when Parchment Face comes.' 'Melinda...' George began. 'She had got rather a parchment look to her face,' said Jacqueline, and she couldn't help laughing. So Melinda went to the cinema in Nunchester with Stephen Crutchley, the doctor's son. The Roystons came to dine at Lowfield Hall, and Jacqueline said, Wait till tomorrow. Don't you envy me, Jessica? But what will she be like? And will she really come up to these glowing expectations? It was George who wondered. Please God, let her be the treasure Jackie thinks she is. Schade~lfreude made Sir Robert and Lady Royston secretly hope she wouldn't be, but cut on the same lines as their Anneliese, their Birgit and that best-forgotten Spanish couple. Time will show. Wait till tomorrow.

Chapter 4

The Coverdales had speculated about Eunice Parchman as to her work potential and her attitude, respectful or otherwise, towards themselves. They had allotted her a private bathroom and a television set, some comfortable chairs and a well-sprung bed rather as one sees that a workhorse has a good stable and manger. They wanted her to be content because if she were contented she would stay. But they never considered her as a person at all. Not for them as they got up on Saturday, 9 May, E-Day indeed, any thoughts as to what her past had been, whether she was nervous about coming, whether she was visited by the same hopes and fears that affected them. At that stage Eunice was little more than a machine to them, and the satisfactory working of that machine depended on its being suitably oiled and its having no objection to stairs. But Eunice was a person. Eunice, as Melinda might have put it, was for real. She was the strangest person they were ever likely to meet. And had they known what her past contained, they would have fled from her or barred their doors against her as against the plague - not to mention her future, now inextricably bound up with theirs. Her past lay in the house she was now preparing to leave; an old terraced house, one of a long row in Rainbow Street, Tooting, with its front door opening directly on to the pavement. She had been born in that house, forty-seven years before, the only child of a Southern Railway guard and his wife. From the first her existence was a narrow one. She seemed one of those people who are destined to spend their lives in the restricted encompassment of a few streets. Her school was So almost next door, Rainbow Street Infants, and those members of her family she visited lived within a stone's throw. Destiny was temporarily disturbed by the coming of the Second World War. Along with thousands of other London schoolchildren, she was sent away to the country before she had learned to read. But her parents, though dull, unaware, mole-like people, were upset by reports that her foster mother neglected her, and fetched her back to them, to the bombs and the war-torn city. After that Eunice attended school only sporadically. To this school or that school she went for weeks or sometimes months at a time, but in each new class she entered the other pupils were all far ahead of her. They had passed her by, and no teacher ever took the trouble to discover the fundamental gap in her acquirements, still less to remedy it. Bewildered, bored, apathetic, she sat at the back of the classroom, staring at the incomprehensible on page or blackboard. Or she stayed away, a stratagem always connived at by her mother. Therefore, by the time she came to leave school a month before her fourteenth birthday, she could sign her name, read 'The cat sat on the mat' and 'Jim likes ham but Jack likes jam', and that was about all. School had taught her one thing - to conceal, by many subterfuges and contrivances, that she could not read or write. She went to work in a sweatshop, also in Rainbow Street, where she learned to tell a Mars bar from a Crunchie by the colour of its wrapping. When she was seventeen, the illness which had threatened her mother for years began to cripple her. It was multiple sclerosis, though it was some time before the Parchmans' doctor understood this. Mrs Parchman, at fifty, was confined to a wheelchair, and Eunice gave up her job to look after her and run the house. Her days now began to be spent in a narrow twilight world, for illiteracy is a kind of blindness. The Coverdales, had they been told of it, would not have believed such a world could exist. Why didn't she educate herself? They would have asked. Why didn't she go to evening classes, get a job, employ someone to look after her mother, join a club, meet people? Why, indeed. Between the Coverdales and the Parchmans a great gulf is fixed. George himself often 31 said so, without fully considering what it implied. A young girl to him was always some version of Paula or Melinda, cherished, admired, educated, loved, brought up to see herself as one of the top ten per cent. Not so Eunice Parchman. A big raw-boned plain girl with truculent sullen eyes, she had never heard a piece of music except for the hymns and the extracts from Gilbert and Sullivan her father whistled while he shaved. She had never seen any picture of note but 'The Laughing Cavalier' and the 'Mona Lisa' in the school hall, and she was so steeped in ignorance that had you asked her who Napoleon was and where was Denmark, she would have stared in uncomprehending blankness. There were things Eunice could do. She had considerable manual dexterity. She could dean expertly and shop and cook and sew and push her mother up to the common in her wheelchair. Was it so surprising that, being able to do these things, she should prefer the safety and peace of doing them and them alone? Was it odd to find her taking satisfaction in gossiping with her middle-aged neighbours and avoiding the company of their children who could read and write and who had jobs and talked of things beyond her comprehension? She had her pleasures, eating the chocolate she loved and which made her grow stout, ironing, cleaning silver and brass, augmenting the family income by knitting for her neighbours. By the time she was thirty she had never been into a public house, visited a theatre, entered any restaurant more grand than a teashop, left the country, had a boy friend, worn make-up or been to a hairdresser. She had twice been to the cinema with Mrs Samson next door and had seen the Queen's wedding and coronation on Mrs Samson's television set. Between the ages of seven and twelve she four times travelled in a long-distance train. That was the history of her youth. Virtue might naturally be the concomitant of such sheltering. She had few opportunities to do bad things, but she found them or made them. 'If there's one thing I've taught Eunice,' her mother used to 32 say, 'it's to tell right from wrong.' It was a gabbled cliche, as automatic as the quacking of a duck but less meaningful. The Parchmans were not given to thinking before they spoke, or indeed to thinking much at all. All that jerked Eunice out of her apathy were her compulsions. Suddenly an urge would come over her to drop everything and walk. Or turn out a room. Or take a dress to pieces and sew it up again with minor alterations. These urges she always obeyed. Buttoned up tightly into her shabby coat, a scarf tied round her still beautiful thick brown hair, she would walk and walk for miles, sometimes across the river bridges and up into the West End. These walks were her education. She saw things one is not taught in school even if one can read. And instincts, not controlled or repressed by reading, instructed her as to what these sights meant or implied. In the West End she saw prostitutes, in the park people making love, on the commons homosexuals waiting furtively in the shadows to solicit likely passers-by. One night she saw a man who lived in Rainbow Street pick up a boy and take him behind a bush. Eunice had never heard the word blackmail. She didn't know that demanding money with menaces is a popular pastime punishable by the law. But neither, probably, had Cain heard the word murder before he struck his brother down. There are age-old desires in man which man needs no instruction to practice. Very likely Eunice thought she was doing something original. She waited until the boy had gone and then she told her neighbour she would tell his wife unless he gave her ten shillings a week not to do so. Horribly frightened, he agreed and gave her ten shillings a week for years. Her father had been religious in his youth. He named her after a New Testament character, and sometimes, facetiously, would refer to this fact, pronouncing her name in the Greek way. 'What have you got for my tea tonight, Eu-nicey, mother of Timothy?' It riled Eunice. It rankled. Did she vaguely ponder on the likelihood that she would never be the mother of anyone? The 33 thoughts of the illiterate are registered in pictures and in very simple words. Eunice's vocabulary was small. She spoke in cliches and catch-phrases picked up from her mother, and her aunt down the road, Mrs Samson. When her cousin married, did she feel envy? Was there bitterness as well as greed in her heart when she began extracting a further ten shillings a week from a married woman who was having an affair with a salesman? She expressed to no one her emotions or her views on life. Mrs Parchman died when Eunice was thirty-seven, and her widower immediately took over as resident invalid. Perhaps he thought Eunice's services too good to waste. His kidneys had always been weak, and now he cultivated his asthma, taking to his bed. 'I don't know where I'd be without you, Eu-nicey, mother of Timothy.' Alive today, probably, and living in Tooting. Eunice's urges pressed her one day to get on a coach and have a day in Brighton, another to take all the furniture out of the living room and paint the walls pink. Her father went into hospital for the odd fortnight. 'Mainly to give you a break, Miss Parchman,' said the doctor. 'He could go at any time, he could last for years.' But he showed no signs of going. Eunice bought him nice bits of fish and made him steak-and-kidney pudding. She kept up his bedroom fire and brought him hot water to shave in while he whistled 'The King of Love my Shepherd is' and 'I am the Lord High Executioner'. One bright morning in spring he sat up in bed, pink-checked and strong, and said in the clear voice of one whose lungs are perfectly sound: 'You can wrap me up warm and put me in Mum's chair and take me up on the common, Eu-nicey, mother of Timothy.' Eunice made no reply. She took one of the pillows from behind her father's head and pushed it hard down on his face. He struggled and thrashed about for a while, but not for long. His lungs, after all, were not quite sound. Eunice had no phone. She walked up the street and brought the doctor back with her. He asked no questions and signed the death certificate at once. Now for freedom. She was forty, and she didn't know what to do with freedom now that she had it. Get over that ridiculous business of not being able to read and write, George Coverdale would have said. Learn a useful trade. Take in lodgers. Get some sort of social life going. Eunice did none of these things. She remained in the house in Rainbow Street, for which the rent was scarcely now more than nominal, and she had her blackmail income, swollen now to two pounds a week. As if those twenty-three years had never been, those best years of all her youth passed as in the twinkling of an eye, she went back to the sweatshop and worked there three days a week. On one of her walks she saw Annie Cole go into a post office in Merton with a pension book in her hand. Eunice knew a pension book when she saw one. She had been shown by her father how to sign his as his agent. And she knew Annie Cole by sight too, having observed her leaving the crematorium just before Mr Parchman's funeral party had arrived. It was Annie Cole's mother who had died, and now here was Annie Cole collecting her pension and telling the counter clerk how poor mother had rallied that day. The advantage of being illiterate is that one achieves an excellent visual memory and almost total recall. Annie thereby became Eunice's victim and amanuensis, paying her a third of that pension and doing needful jobs for her. She also, because she bore no malice, seeing Eunice's conduct as only natural in a catch-as-catch-can world, became the nearest Eunice ever had to a friend until she met Joan Smith. But it was time now to kill Mother off finally as she was getting scared, only Eunice as beneficiary wouldn't let her. She determined to be rid of Eunice, and it was she who, having flattered her blackmailer to the top of her bent on her housewifely skills, produced as if casually the Coverdales' advertisement. 'You could get thirty-five pounds a week and all found. I've always said you were wasted in that shop.' Eunice munched her Cadbury's filled block. 'I don't know,' she said, a favourite response. 'That place of yours is falling down. They're always talking about pulling that row down. It'd be no loss, I'm sure.' Annie scrutinised The Times which she had picked at random out of a litter bin. 'It sounds ever so nice. Why not write to them and just see? You don't have to go there if you don't fancy it.' 'You can write if you want,' said Eunice. Like all her close acquaintances, Annie suspected Eunice was illiterate or semi-literate, but no one could ever be quite sure. Eunice sometimes seemed to read magazines, and she could sign things. There are many people, after all, who never read or write, although they can. So Annie wrote the letter to Jacqueline, and when the time came for the interview it was Annie who primed Eunice. 'Be sure to call her madam, Eun, and don't speak till you're spoken to. Mother was in service when she was a girl and she knew all about it. I can give you a good many of Mother's tips.' Poor Annie. She had been devoted to her mother, and the pension-book fraud had been perpetrated as much as a way of keeping her mother alive and with her as forgain.'You can have a lend of Mother's court shoes too. They'll be about your size.' It worked. Before Eunice could think much about it, she was engaged as the Coverdales' housekeeper, and if it was at twentyfive rather than thirty-five pounds a week, either seemed a fortune to her. And yet, why was she so easily persuaded, she who was as bound to her burrow and her warren as any wild animal? Not for pastures new, adventure, pecuniary advantage, or even the chance of showing off the one thing she could do well. Largely, she took the job to avoid responsibility. While her father was alive, though things had been bad in many respects, they had been good in one. He took responsibility for the rent and the rates and the services bills, for filling in forms and reading what had to be read. Eunice took the rates 36 round to the council offices in cash, paid the gas and electricity bills in the same way. But she couldn't hire television or buy it on HP - there would have been forms to fill in. Letters and circulars came; she couldn't read them. Lowfield Hall would solve all that, and as far as she could see, receive her and care for her in the only way she was interested in for ever. The house was rendered up to an amazed and delighted landlord, and Mrs Samson saw to the selling of the furniture. Eunice watched the valuing of her household goods, and the indifference on the man's face, with an inscrutable expression. She packed everything she possessed into two suitcases, borrowed from Mrs Samson. In her blue skirt, hand-knitted blue jumper, and navy raincoat she made, characteristically, her farewells to that kind neighbour, that near-mother who had been present when her own mother gave her birth. 'Well, I'm off,' said Eunice. Mrs Samson kissed her cheek, but she didn't ask Eunice to write to her, for she was the only living person who really knew. At Liverpool Street Station Eunice regarded trains - trains proper, not tubes - for the first time in nearly forty years. But how to find which one to take? On the departure board, white on black, were meaningless hieroglyphs. She hated asking questions, but she had to. 'Which platforms for Stantwich?' 'It's up on the board, lady.' And again, to someone else. 'Which platform for Stantwich?' 'It's up on the board. Thirteen. Can't you read?' No, she couldn't, but she didn't dare say so. Still, at last she was on the train, and it must be the right one, for by now eleven people had told her so. The train took her out into the country and back into the past. She was a little girl again, going with her school to Taunton and safety, and her whole future was before her. Now, as then, the stations passed, nameless and unknown. But she would know Stantwich when she got there, for the train and her future went no further. She was bound to fail. She had no training and no experience. People like the Coverdaleswere far removed from any people she had ever known, and she was not accommodating or adaptable. She had never been to a party, let alone given one, never run any house but the one in Rainbow Street. There was no tradition of service in her family and no one she knew had ever had a servant, not even a charwoman. It was on the cards that she would fail abysmally. She succeeded beyond her own stolid hopes and Jacqueline's dreams. Of course, Jacqueline didn't really want a housekeeper at all She didn't want an organiser and manager but an obedient maid of all work. And Eunice was accustomed to obedience and hard work. She was what the Coverdales required, apparently without personality or awareness of her rights or that curiosity that leads an employee to pry, quiet and respectable, not paranoid except in one particular, lacking any desire to put herself on the same social level as they. Aesthetic appreciation for her was directed to only one end - domestic objects. To Eunice a refrigerator was beautiful while a flower was just a flower, the fabric of a curtain lovely whereas a bird or a wild animal at best 'pretty'. She was unable to differentiate, as far as its aesthetic value was concerned, between a famille rose vase and a Teflon- lined frying pan. Both were 'nice' end each would receive from her the same care and attention. These were the reasons for her success. From the first she made a good impression. Having eaten the last of the Bounty bar she had bought herself at Liverpool Street, she alighted 38 from the train, no longer nervous now that there was nothing to be deciphered. She could read Way Out, that wasn't a problem. Jacqueline hadn't told her how she would know George, but George knew her from his wife's not very kind description. Melinda was with him, which had floored Eunice who was looking for a man on his own. 'Pleased to meet you,' she said, shaking hands, not smiling or studying them, but observing the big white car. George gave her the front seat. 'You'll get a better view of our beautiful countryside that way, Miss Parchman.' The girl chattered nineteen to the dozen all the way, occasionally shooting questions at Eunice. D'you like the country, Miss Parchman? Have you ever been up in the Fens? Aren't you too hot in that coat? I hope you like stuffed vine leaves. My stepmother's doing them for tonight. Eunice answered bemusedly with a plain yes or no. She didn't know whether you ate stuffed vine leaves or looked at them or sat on them. But she responded with quiet politeness, sometimes giving her a small tight smile. George liked this respectful discretion. He liked the way she sat with her knees together and her hands folded in her lap. He even liked her clothes which to a more detached observer would have looked like standard issue to prison wardresses. Neither he nor Melinda was aware of anything chilly or repulsive about her. 'Go the long way round through Greeving, Daddy, so that Miss Parchman can see the village.' It was thus that Eunice was given a view of her future accomplice's home before she saw that of her victims. Greeving Post Office and Village Store, Prop. N. Smith. She didn't, however, see Joan Smith, who was out delivering Epiphany People literature. But she wouldn't have taken much notice of her if she had been there. People didn't interest her. Nor did the countryside and one of the prettiest villages in Suffolk. Greeving was just old buildings to her, thatch and plaster and a lot of trees that must keep out the light. But she did wonder how you managed 39 when you wanted a nice bit of fish or suddenly had a fancy, as she often did, for a pound box of chocolates. Lowfield Hall. To Eunice it might have been Buckingharn Palace. She didn't know ordinary people lived in houses like this which were for the Queen or some film star. In the hall, all five of them were together for the first time. Jacqueline, who dressed up for any occasion, got into emerald velvet trousers and red silk shirt and Gucci scarf to greet her new servant. Even Giles was there. Passing through at that particular moment, looking vaguely for his Hindi primer, he had been collared by his mother and persuaded to remain for an introduction. 'Good evening, Miss Parchman. Did you have a goodjourney? This is my son, Giles.' Giles nodded absently and escaped upstairs without a backward glance. Eunice hardly noticed him. She was looking at the house and its contents. It was almost too much for her. She was like the Queen of Sheba when she saw King Solomon -there was no more spirit in her. But none of her wonderment showed in her face or her demeanour. She stood on the thick carpet, among the antiques, the bowls of flowers, looking first at the grandfather clock, then at herself reflected in a huge mirror with gilded twirls round the edge of it. She stood halfstunned. The Coverdales took her air for poise, the silent self- sufficient containment of the good servant. 'I'll take you to your room,' said Jacqueline. 'There won't be anything for you to do tonight. We'll go upstairs and someone will bring your bags up later.' A large and pleasant room met Eunice's eyes. It was carpeted in olive drab Wilton, papered in a pale yellow with a white vertical stripe. There were two darker yellow easy chairs, a cretonne-covered settee, a bed with a spread of the same material and a long built-in cupboard. The windows afforded a splendid view, the view, which was better seen from here than from any other room in the house. 'I hope you find everything to your liking.' An empty bookcase (destined to remain so), a bowl of white o lilac on a coffee table, two lamps with burnt orange shades, two framed Constable reproductions,'Willy Lott's Cottage' and 'The Leaping Horse'. The bathroom had light green fittings and olive green towels hung on a heated rail. 'Your dinner will be ready for you in the kitchen in half an hour. It's the door at the end of the passage behind the stairs. And now I expect you'd like to be left alone for a while. Oh, here's my son with your bags.' Giles had been caught by George and coaxed into bringing up the two cases. He dumped them on the floor and went away. Eunice disregarded him as she had largely disregarded his mother. She was staring at the one object in those two rooms which really interested her, the television set. This was what she had always wanted but been unable to buy or hire. As the door closed behind Jacqueline, she approached the set, looked at it, and then, like someone resolved upon using a dangerous piece of equipment that may explode or send a shock up one's arm, but knowing still that it must be used, it must be attempted, she pounced on it and switched it on. On the screen appeared a man with a gun. He was threatening a woman who cowered behind a chair. There was a shot and the woman fled screaming down a corridor. Thus it happened that the first programme Eunice ever saw on her own television dealt with violence and with firearms. Did it and its many suc- cessors stimulate her own latent violence and trigger off waves of aggression? Did fictional drama take root in the mind of the illiterate so that it at last bore terrible fruit? Perhaps. But if television spurred her on to kill the Coverdales it certainly played no part in directing her to smother her father. At the time of his death the only programmes she had seen on it were a royal wedding and a coronation. However, though she was to become addicted to the set, shutting herself up with it and drawing her curtains against the summer evenings, that first time she watched it for only ten minutes. She ate her dinner cautiously, for it was like nothing she had ever eaten before, and was taken over the house by Jacqueline, instructed in her duties. From the very beginning 41 she enjoyed herself. A few little mistakes were only natural. Annie Cole had taught her how to lay a table, so she did that all right, but on that first morning she made tea instead of coffee. Eunice had never made coffee in her life except the instant kind. She didn't ask how. She very seldom asked questions. Jacqueline assumed she was used to a percolator - Eunice didn't disillusion her - while they used a filter, so she demonstrated the filter. Eunice watched. It was never necessary for her to watch any operation of this kind more than once for her to be able to perform it herself. 'I see, madam,' she said. Jacqueline did the cooking. Jacqueline or George did the shopping. In those early days, while Jacqueline was out, Eunice examined every object in Lowfield Hall at her leisure. The house had been dirty by her standards. It brought her intense pleasure to subject it to a spring-cleaning. Oh, the lovely carpets, the hangings, the cushions, the rosewood and walnut and oak, the glass and silver and chinal But best of all was the kitchen with pine walls and cupboards, a double steel sink, a washing machine, a dryer, a dishwasher. It wasn't enough for her to dust the porcelain in the drawing room. It must be washed. You really need not do that, Miss Parchman.' 'I like doing it,' said Eunice. Fear of breakages rather than altruism had prompted Jacqueline to protest. But Eunice never broke anything, nor did she fail to replace anything to the exact spot from where she had taken it. Her visual memory imprinted neat permanent photographs in some department of her brain. The only things in Lowfield Hall which didn't interest her and which she didn't handle or study were the contents of the morning-room desk, the books, the letters from George in Jacqueline's dressing table. Those things and, at this stage, the two shotguns. Her employers were overwhelmed. 'She's perfect,' said Jacqueline who, parcelling up George's shirts for the laundry, had had them taken out of her hands by 42 Eunice and laundered exquisitely between defrosting the fridgeand changing the bed linen. 'D'you know what she said, darling? She just looked at me in that meek way she has and said, "Give me those. I like a bit of ironing." ' Meek? Eunice Parchman? 'She's certainly very efficient,' said George. 'And I like to see you looking so happy and relaxed.' 'Well, I don't have a thing to do. Apart from her putting the green sheets on our bed once and simply ignoring a note I left her, I haven't had a fault to find. It seems absurd calling those things faults after old Eva and that dreadful Ingrid.' 'How does she get on with Eva?' 'Ignores her, I think. I wish I had the nerve. D'you know, Miss Parchman can. sew too. I was trying to turn up the hem of my green skirt, and she took it and did it perfectly.' 'We've been very lucky,' said George. So the month of May passed. The spring flowers died away and the trees sprang into leaf. Pheasants came into the fields to eat the green corn, and the nightingale sang in the orchard. But not for Eunice. Hares, alert and quivering, cropped under the hedges, and the moon rose slowly behind the Greeving Hills, red and strange like another sun. But not for Eunice. She drew the curtains, put on the lamps and then the television. Her evenings were hers to do as she liked. This was what she liked. She knitted. But gradually, as the serial or the sporting event or the cops and robbers film began to grip her, the knitting fell into her lap and she leant forwards, enthralled by an innocent childlike excitement. She was happy. If she had been capable of analysing her thoughts and feelings and of questioning her motives she would have said that this vicarious living was better than any life she had known. But had she been capable of that it is unlikely she would have been content with so specious a way of spending her leisure. Her addiction gives rise to a question. Wouldn't some social service have immensely benefited society - and saved the lives of the Coverdales - had it recognised Eunice Parchman's 43 harmless craving? Give her a room, a pension and a television set and leave her to worship and to stare for the rest of her life 7 No social service came into contact with her until it was far too late. No psychiatrist had ever seen her. Such a one would only have discovered the root cause of her neurosis if she had allowed him to discover her illiteracy. And she had been expert at concealing it since the time when she might have been expected to overcome it. Her father, who could read perfectly well, who in his youth had read the Bible from beginning to end, was her principal ally in helping her hide her deficiency. He who should have encouraged her to learn instead conspired with her in the far more irksome complexities not learning entailed. When a neighbour, dropping in with a newspaper, had handed it to Eunice, 'I'll have that,' he had been used to say, looking at the small print, 'don't strain her young eyes.' It came to be accepted in her narrow circle that Eunice had poor sight, this solution generally being the one seized upon by the uneducated literate to account for illiteracy. 'Can't read it? You mean you can't see?' When she was a child she had never wanted to read. As she grew older she wanted to learn, but who could teach her? Acquiring a teacher, or even trying to acquire one, would mean other people finding out. She had begun to shun other people, all of whom seemed to her bent on ferreting out her secret. After a time this shunning, this isolating herself, became automatic, though the root cause of her misanthropy was half- forgotten. Things could not hurt her - the furniture, the ornaments, the television - she embraced them, they aroused in her the nearest she ever got to warm emotion, while to the Coverdales she gave the cold shoulder. Not that they received more of her stoniness than anyone else had done; she behaved to them as she had always behaved to everyone. George was the first to notice it. Of all the Coverdales he was by far the most sensitive, and therefore the first to see a flaw in all this excellence.

Chapter 6

They sat in church on Sunday morning and Mr Archer began to preach his sermon. For his text he took: 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful over a few things; I will make thee ruler over many things.' Jacqueline smiled at George and touched his arm, and he smiled back, well satisfied. On the following day he remembered those exchanged smiles and thought he had been fatuous, perhaps over-complacent. 'Paula's gone into hospital,' Jacqueline said when George came home. 'It's really rather awful the way they fix a day for your baby to be born these days. Just take you in and give you an injection and Hey presto!' 'Instant infants,' said George. 'Has Brian phoned7' 'Not since two.' 'I'll just give him a ring.' They would be dining, as they often did when alone, in the morning room. Eunice came in to lay the table. George dialled but there was no reply. A second after he put the phone down it rang. After answering Paula's husband in monosyllables and a final 'Call me back soon,' he walked over to Jacqueline and took her hand. 'There's some complication. They haven't decided yet, but she's very exhausted and it'll probably mean an emergency Caesarean.' 'Darling, I'm so sorry, what a worryl' She didn't tell him not to worry, and he was glad of it. 'Why don't you phone Dr Crutchley 7 He might reassure you.' 'I'll do that.' Eunice left the room. George appreciated her tactful silence. He phoned the doctor who said he couldn't comment on a case he knew nothing about, and reassured George only to the extent of telling him that, generally speaking, women didn't die in childbirth anymore. They ate their dinner. That is, Giles ate his dinner, Jacqueline picked at hers, and George left his almost untouched. Giles made one small concession to the seriousness of the occasion and the anxiety of the others. He stopped reading and stared instead into space. Afterwards, when the suspense was over, Jacqueline said laughingly to her husband that such a gesture from Giles was comparable to a pep talk and a bottle of brandy from anyone else. The suspense didn't last long. Brian called back twice, and half an hour after that was on the line to say a seven-pound boy had been delivered by Caesarean operation and Paula was well. Eunice was clearing the table. She must have heard it all, George's 'Thank God I', Jacqueline's 'That's wonderful, darling. I'm so happy for you,' Giles's 'Good,' before he took himself off upstairs. She must have heard relief and seen delight Without the slightest reaction, she led the room and closed the door. Jacqueline put her arms round George and held him. He didn't think about Eunice then. It was only as he was going to bed and heard faintly above him the hum of her television that he began to think her behaviour strangely cold. Not once had she expressed her concern during the anxious time, nor her satisfaction for him when the danger was past. Consciously he hadn't waited for her to do so. At the time he hadn't expected a 'I'm so glad to hear your daughter's all right, sir', but now he wondered at the omission. It troubled him. Lack of care for a fellow woman, lack of concern for the people in whose home one lived, were unnatural in any woman. Well done, thou good and faithful servant.... But that had not been well done. Not for the world would George have spoken of his unease to Jacqueline who was so happy and contented with her employee. Besides, he wouldn't have wanted a loquacious servant, making the family's affairs her affairs and being familiar. He resolved to banish it from his mind. And this he did quite successfully until the christening of the new baby which took place a month later. Patrick had been christened at Greeving; Mr Archer was a friend of the Coverdales, and a country christening in summer is pleasanter than one in town. Paula and Brian and their two children arrived at Lowfield Hall on a Saturday at the end of June and stayed till the Sunday. They had quite a large party on the Saturday afternoon. Brian's parents and his sister were there, as well as the Roystons, the Jameson-Kerrs, an aunt of Jacqueline's from Bury and some cousins of George from Newmarket. And the arrangements for eating and drinking, carried out by Eunice under Jacqueline's directions, were perfect. The house had never looked so nice, the champagne glasses so well polished. Jacqueline didn't know they possessed so many white linen table napkins, had never seen them all together before and all so freshly starched. In the past she had sometimes been reduced to using paper ones. Before they left for the church Melinda came into the drawing room to show Eunice the baby. He was to be called Giles, and Giles Mont, aghast at the idea now, had been roped in to be godfather before he realised what was happening. She carried him in in the long embroidered christening robe that she herself, her brother and sister, and indeed George himself, had once worn. He was a fine-looking baby, large and red and lusty. On the table, beside the cake, was the Coverdales' christening book, a volume of listed names of those who had worn the robe, when and where they had been baptised and so on. It was open, ready for this latest entry. 'Isn't he sweet, Miss Parchman?' Eunice stood chill and stiff. George felt a coldness come from her as if the sun had gone in. She didn't smile or bend over the baby or make as if to touch his coverings. She looked at him. It wasn't a look of enthusiasm such as George had seen her give to the silver spoons when she laid them out on the saucers. Having looked at him, she said: 'I must get on. I've things to see to.' Not one word did he or Jacqueline receive from her during the course of the afternoon when she was in and out with trays as to the attractiveness of the child, their luck in having such a fine day, or the happiness of the young parents. Cold, he thought, unnaturally cold. Or was she just painfully shy? Eunice was not shy. Nor had she turned from the baby because she was afraid of the book. Not directly. She was simply uninterested in the baby. But it would be true to say that she was uninterested in babies because there are books in the world. The printed word was horrible to her, a personal threat to her. Keep away from it, avoid it, and from all those who will show it to her. The habit of shunning it was ingrained in her; it was no longer conscious. All the springs of warmth and outgoing affection and human enthusiasm had been dried up long ago by it. Isolating herself was natural now, and she was not aware that it had begun by isolating herself from print and books and handwriting. Illiteracy had dried up her sympathy and atrophied her imagination. That, along with what psychologists call affect, the ability to care about the feelings of others, had no place in her make-up. General Gordon, in attempting to raise the morale of the besieged inhabitants of Khartoum, told them that when God was handing out fear to the people of the world, at last he came to him. But by that time God had no more fear to give, so Gordon was created without fear. This elegant parable may be paraphrased for Eunice. When God came to her, he had no more imagination or affect to give. The Coverdales were interferers. They interfered with the best intentions, those of making other people happy. If it were not such an awful thing to say of anyone (to quote one of Giles Mont's favourite authors) one could say that they meant well. They were afraid of being selfish, for they had never understood what Giles knew instinctively, that selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. 'I'm worried about old Parchment Face,' said Melinda. 'Don't you think she has a terrible life?' 'I don't know,' said Giles. Melinda was paying one of her rare visits to his room, sitting in fact on his bed, and this both made him happy and threw him into a panic. 'I haven't noticed.' 'Oh, you - you never notice anything. But I can tell you she does. She's never once been out, not all the time she's been here. All she does is watch television. Listen, it's on now.' She paused dramatically and turned her eyes up to the ceiling. Giles went on with what he had been doing when she first came in, pinning things up on the cork tiles with which he had covered half one of the walls. 'She must be terribly lonely,' said Melinda. 'She must miss her friends.' She grabbed Giles by the arm and swung him round. 'Don't you care?' Her touch gave him a shock and he blushed. 'Leave her alone. She's all right.' 'She's not. She can't be.' 'Some people like being alone.' He looked vaguely round his room, at the heap of orange clothes, the muddle of books and dictionaries, the stacks of half-finished essays on subjects not in the Magnus Wythen curriculum. He loved it. It was better than anywhere else except possibly the London Library where he had once been taken by a scholarly relative. But they won't let you rent a room in the London Library, or Giles would have been at the top of their housing list. 'I like being alone,' he said. 'If that's a hint to me to go....' 'No, no, it isn't,' he said hastily, and resolving to declare himself, began in a hoarse thrilling voice, 'Melinda....' 'What? Where did you get that awful poster? Is she supposed to have a green face?' Giles sighed. The moment had passed. 'Read my Quote of the Month.' It was written in green ink on a piece of paper pinned to the cork wall. Melinda read it aloud. "'Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before?" ' 'Good, isn't it? Samuel Butler.' 'You can't have that on the wall, Step. If Daddy or Jackie saw it, it'd absolutely freak them out. Anyway, I thought you were supposed to be doing classics.' 'I may not do anything,' said Giles. 'I may go to India. I don't suppose,' greatly daring, 'you'd want to come tool' Melinda made a face. 'I bet you don't go. You know you won't. You're just trying to get off a subject that might involve you. I was going to ask you to come down with me and confront Daddy and make him do something about her. But I bet you'll say you won't.' Giles pushed his fingers through his hair. He would have liked to please her. She was the only person in the world he cared much about pleasing. But there were limits. Not even for her would he defy his 'principles and flout his nature. 'No,' he said, and gloomily, almost sorrowfully, contorting his face in a kind of hopelessness, 'No, I won't do that.' 'Mad,' said Melinda and bounced out. Her father and Jacqueline were in the garden, in the midsummer dusk, surveying what Jacqueline had done that day. There was a heavy sweet scent from the first flowers on the tobacco plants. 'I've been thinking, my darlings. We ought to do something about poor old Parchment Face, take her out, give her an interest.' He stepmother gave her a cool smile. In some respects Jacqueline could fill the wasp role her son had meted out to her. 'Not everyone is such an extrovert as you, you know.' 'And I think we've had enough of that Parchment Face business, Melinda,' said George. 'You're no longer the naughtiest girl in the sixth.' 'Now you're evading the issue.' 'No, we're not. Jackie and I have been discussing that very thing. We're quite aware Miss Parchman hasn't been out, but So she may not know where to go, and it's difficult without a car.' 'Then lend her a car! We've got two.' 'That's what we're going to do. The chances are she's too shy to ask. I see her as a very shy woman.' 'Repressed by a ruling class,' said Melinda. It was Jacqueline who made the offer. 'I can't drive,' said Eunice. She didn't mind saying this. There were only two things she minded admitting she couldn't do. Hardly anyone in her circle had been able to drive, and in Rainbow Street it had been looked on as a rather bizarre accomplishment for a woman. 'I never learnt.' 'What a pityl I was going to say you could borrow my car. I really don't know how you'll get around without transport.' 'I can go on the bus.' Eunice vaguely supposed a red doubledecker trundled around the lanes with the frequency of the 88 in Tooting. 'That's just what you can't do. The nearest bus stop's two miles away, and there are only three buses a day.' Just as George had detected a flaw in his housekeeper, so now Eunice sensed a small cloud threatening her peaceful life. This was the first time any Coverdale had shown signs of wanting to change it. She waited uneasily for the next move, and she didn't have to wait long. Progenitor of Coverdales, George was the arch-interferer of them all. Employees were hauled into his office at TBC and advised about their marriages, their mortgages and the higher education of their children. Meadows, Higgs and Carter matrons were accustomed to his entering their cottages and being told to get the dry-rot people in, or why not grow a few vegetables on that piece of ground? Ever such a nice man was Mr Coverdale, but you don't want to take no notice of what he says. Different in my "ran's time. The squire was the squire then, but them old days are gone, thank God. George went on interfering - for the good of others. He bearded the lion in its den. The lion looked very tame and was occupied in womanly fashion, ironing one of his dress shirts.

5I

'Yes, sir?' Her tabby-cat hair was neatly combed, and she wore a blue and white checked cotton dress. All his life George had been looked after by women, but none of them had ever attempted the formidable task of washing, starching and ironing a 'boiled' shirt. George, if he ever thought about it at all, supposed that there was a special mystique attached to these operations, and that they could only be performed in a laundry by a clever machine. He smiled approv- ingly. 'Ah, I can see I'm interrupting an expert at a very skilled task. You're making a fine job of that, Miss Parchman.' 'I like ironing,' said Eunice. 'I'm glad to hear it, but I don't suppose you like being confined at Lowfield Hall all the time, do you? That's what I've come to talk about. My wife tells me you've never found time in your busy life to learn to drive a car. Am I right?' 'Yes,' said Eunice. 'I see. Well, we shall have to remedy that. What would you say to driving lessons? I shall be happy to foot the bill. We're doing well by you and we'd like to do something for you in return.' 'I couldn't learn to drive,' said Eunice who had been thinking hard. The favourite excuse came out. 'My sight wouldn't be up to it.' 'You don't wear glasses.' 'I should do. I'm waiting for my new pair.' In-depth questioning elicited that Eunice should have glasses, had been in need of new ones when she came to Greeving, had 'let it slide', couldn't, even with glasses, read a number plate or a road sign. She must have her eyes tested forthwith, said George; he would see to it himself and drive her into Stantwich. 'I feel rather ashamed of myself,' he said to Jacqueline. 'All the time the poor woman was as a blind as a bat. I don't mind telling you now we know the reason for it, but I was beginning to find that reserve of hers quite off-putting.' Alarm showed in her eyes. 'Oh, George, you mustn't say that! Having her has made such a difference to my life.' 'I'm not saying a thing, darling. I quite understand she's very short-sighted and was much too diffident to say so.' 'The working classes are absurd about things like that,' said Jacqueline, who would have suffered agonies struggling with contact lenses, would have bumped into walls rather than wear glasses. They both felt immensely satisfied with George's discovery, and it occurred to neither of them that a purblind woman could hardly have cleaned the windows to a diamond brilliance or watched the television for three hours every evening. At forty-seven, Eunice had better sight than Giles Mont at seventeen. Sitting beside George in the car, she wondered what to do if he insisted on coming into the optician's with her. She was unable to concoct any excuse to avoid this happening, and her experience was inadequate to teach her that middle-aged conservative landowners do not generally accompany their middle-aged female servants into what is virtually a doctor's surgery. A sullen puzzled resentment simmered within her. The last man who sought to make her life insupportable got a pillow over his face for his pains. A slight fillip came to her spirits at the sight, at last, of shops, those familiar and wonderful treasure houses that had seemed left behind for ever. They got an even greater lift when George showed no sign of accompanying her into the optician's. He left her with a promise to be back in half an hour and the instruction to have any bill sent to him. Once the car had gone, Eunice walked round the corner where she had noticed a confectioner's. She bought two Kit-Kats, a Mars bar and a bag of marshmallows, and then she went into a teashop. There she had a cup of tea, a currant bun and a chocolate eclair, which made a nice change from cassoulets and vine leaves and all those made-up dishes she got at Lowfield Hall. The picture of respectability was Eunice on that Saturday morning, sitting upright at her table in her navy blue crimplene suit, nylon stockings, Annie Cole's mother's court shoes, an 'invisible' net on her hair. No one would have supposed her mind was racing on lines of deception - deception that comes so easily to those who can read and write and have IQ's of I20 But at last a plan was formed. She crossed the road to Boot's 54 and bought two pairs of sunglasses, not dark ones but faintly tinted, one pair with a crystal blue frame, the other of mock tortoise-shell. Into her handbag with them, not to be produced for a week. The Coverdalesseemed surprised they would be ready so quickly. She was taken to Stantwich the second time by Jacqueline, who luckily didn't go with her into the optician's because of the impossibility of parking on a double yellow line. It was bad enough having to pay the fines incurred by Giles. Eunice bought more chocolate and consumed more cake. She showed the glasses to Jacqueline and went so far as to put the crystal blue pair on. In them she felt a fool. Must she wear them all the time now, she who could see the feathers on a sparrow's wing in the orchard a hundred feet away7 And would they expect her to read? Nobody really lives in the present. But Eunice did so more than most people. For her five minutes' delay in dinner now was more important than a great sorrow ten years gone, and to the future she had never given much thought. But now, with the glasses in her possession, occasionally even on her nose, she became very aware of the printed word which surrounded her and to which, at some future time, she might be expected to react. Lowfield Hall was full of books. It seemed to Eunice that there were as many books here as in Tooting Public Library where once, and once only, she had been to return an overdue novel of Mrs Samson's. She saw them as small Cattish boxes, packed with mystery and threat. One entire wall of the morning room was filled with bookshelves; in the drawing room great glass-fronted bookcases stood on either side of the fireplace and more shelves filled the twin alcoves. There were books on bedside tables, magazines and newspapers in racks. And they read books all the time. It seemed to her that they must read to provoke her, for no one, not even schoolteachers, could read that much for pleasure. Giles was never without a book in his hand. He even brought his reading matter into her kitchen and sat absorbed in it, his elbows on the table. Jacqueline read every 55 new novel of note, and she and George re-readtheir way through Victorian novels, their closeness emphasised by their often reading some work of Dickens or Thackeray or George Eliot at the same time, so as later to discuss a character or a scene together. Incongruously, it was the student of English literature who read the least, but even so Melinda was often to be found in the garden or lying on the morning-room floor with one of Mr Sweet's grammars before her. This was not from inclination but because of a menace from her tutor - 'If we're going to make the grade we shall have to come to grips with those Anglo-Saxon pronouns before next term, shan't we 2' But how was Eunice to know that? She had been happy, but the glasses had destroyed her happiness. She had been content with the house and the lovely things in the house, and the Coverdales had hardly existed for her, so little notice had she taken of them. Now she could hardly wait for them to go away on that summer holiday they were always talking about and planning. But before they went, and they were not going until the beginning of August, before their departure set her free to expand, to explore, and to meet Joan Smith, three unpleasant things happened. The first was nothing in itself. It was what it led up to that bothered Eunice. She dropped one of Geoff Baalham's eggs on the kitchen floor. Jacqueline, who was there, said only, 'Oh, dear, what a messl' and Eunice had cleaned it up in a flash. But on the following morning she went up to turn out Giles's bedroom, always a formidable task, and for the first time she allowed herself to look at his cork wall. Why 2 She could hardly have answered that herself, but perhaps it was because she was no equipped to read, made vulnerable, as it were, to reading, and because she had now become aware of the oppressive number of books in the house. There was a message on the wall beside that nasty poster. 'Why' it began. She could read that word without much difficulty when it was printed. 'One' she could also read and 'eggs'. Giles evidently meant it for her and was reproaching her for breaking that egg. She didn't care for his reproaches, 56 but suppose he broke his silence - he never spoke to her - to ask her why. Why hadn't she obeyed his 'why' message? He might tell his stepfather, and Eunice was on tenterhooks whenever George looked at her unbespectacled face. At last the message was taken down, but only to be replaced by another. Eunice was almost paralysed by it, and for a week she did no more in Giles's room than pull up the bedclothes and open the window. She was as frightened of those pieces of paper as another woman would have been had Giles kept a snake in his room. But not so frightened as she was of Jacqueline's note, the third unpleasant incident. This was left on the kitchen table one morning while Eunice was at the top of the house making her own bed. When she came downstairs, Jacqueline had driven off to London to see Paula, to have her hair cut and to buy clothes for her holiday. Jacqueline had left notes for her before, and had wondered why the otherwise obedient Miss Parchman never obeyed the behests in them. All, however, was explained by her poor sight. But now Eunice had her glasses. Not that she was wearing them. They were upstairs, stuffed into the bottom of her knitting bag. She stared at the note, which meant as much to her as a note in Greek would have meant to Jacqueline - precisely as much, for Jacqueline could recognise an alpha, an omega and a pi just as Eunice knew some capital letters and the odd monosyllabic word. But connecting those words, deciphering longer ones, making anything of it, that was beyond her. In London she would have had Annie Cole to help her. Here she had no one but Giles, who wandered through the kitchen to cadge a lift to Stantwich, to moon about the shops and spend the afternoon in a dark cinema. He didn't so much as glance at her, and she would rather anything than ask help from him. It wasn't one of Eva Baalham's days. Could she lose the note? Inventiveness was not among her gifts. It had taken all her puny powers to convince George that the optician's bill hadn't come because she had already paid it, liked to be independent, didn't want to tee 'beholder'. And then Melinda came in. Eunice had forgotten she was in the house, she couldn't get used to these bits of kids starting their summer holidays in June. Melinda danced in at midday, pretty healthy buxom Melinda in too-tight jeans and a Mickey Mouse tee-shirt, yellow hair in Dutch-girl pigtails, her feet bare. The sun was shining, a wind was blowing, the whole kitchen was radiated with fluttering dancing sunbeams, and Melinda was off to the seaside with two boys and another girl in an orange and purple painted van. She picked up the note and read it aloud. 'What's this? "Please would you be awfully kind and if you have the time press my yellow silk, the one with the pleated skirt. I want to wear it tonight. It's in my wardrobe somewhere up on the right. Thank you so much, J. C." It must be for you, Miss Parchman. D'you think you could do my red skirt at the same time? Would you?' 'Oh, yes, it's no trouble,' said the much-relieved Eunice with quite a broad smile for her. 'You are sweet,' said Melinda. August came in with a heatwave, and Mr Meadows, the farmer whose land adjoined George's, began cutting his wheat. The new combine harvester dropped bales of straw shaped like slices of Swiss roll. Melinda picked fruit, along with the village women, in the cherry orchards, Giles put up a new Quote of the Month, again from Samuel Butler, Jacqueline weeded the garden and found a thorn-apple, poisonous but beautiful and bearing a single white trumpet flower among the zinnias. And at last it was time to go away, 7 August. 'I won't forget to send you a card,' said Melinda, recalling as she did from time to time that it was her duty to cheer old Parchment Face up. 'You'll find any numbers and addresses you may want in the directory by the phone.' This from Jacqueline, while George said, 'You can always send us a telegram in case of emergency.' Useless, all of it, had they but known. Eunice saw them off from the front door, wearing the crystal 58 blue glasses to allay admonition. A soft haze lay over Greeving at this early hour, a haze thickened by smoke, for Mr Meadows was burning the stubble off his fields. Eunice didn't linger to appreciate the great purple dahlias, drenched with dew, or listen to the cuckoo's last calls before his departure. She went quickly indoors to possess what she had looked forward to. Her purpose didn't include neglecting the house, and she went through her usual Friday routine, but with certain additional tasks. She stripped the beds, threw away the flower arrangements - more or less dead, anyway, nasty messy things, dropping petals everywhere - and hid, as best she could, every book, magazine and newspaper. She would have liked to cover the bookcases with sheets, but only madness goes that far, and Eunice was not mad. Then she cooked herself a dinner. The Coverdales would have called it lunch because it was eaten at one o'clock. They were not to know how dreadfully their housekeeper had missed a good solid hot meal eaten in the middle of the day. Eunice fried (fried, not grilled) a big steak from the deep freeze, fried potatoes too, while the runner beans, the carrots and the pars- nips were boiling. Apple pudding and custard to follow, biscuits and cheese and strong black tea. She washed the dishes, dried them and put them away. It was a relief not to be obliged to use that dishwasher. She never had liked the idea of dirty plates with gravy or crumbs all over them hanging about in there all day, even though the door was shut and you couldn't see them. Mrs Sampson used to say that a woman's work is never done. Not even the most house-proud could have found more work to be done in Lowfield Hall that day. Tomorrow she would think about taking down the morning-room curtains, but not today, not now. Now for a thoroughgoing indulgence in, an orgy of, television.

Chapter 7

August was to be recorded as the hottest day of the year. The temperature rose to seventy-eight, eighty, until by half past two it touched eighty-five. In Greeving, jam-making housewives left their kitchens and took the sun on back doorsteps; 59 the weir on the River Beal became a swimming pool for little Higgses and Baalhams; farm dogs hung out their tongues; Mrs Cairne forgot discretion and lay on her front lawn in a bikini; Joan Smith propped her shop door open with a box of dog biscuits and fanned herself with a fly swat. But Eunice went upstairs, drew her curtains, and settled down in deep contentment with her knitting in front of the screen. All she needed to make her happiness perfect was a bar of chocolate, but she had long ago eaten up all those she had bought in Stantwich. Sport first. People swimming and people racing round stadiums. Then a serial about much the same sort of characters as those Eunice had known in Rainbow Street, a children's programme, the news, the weather forecast. She never cared much for the news, and anyone could see and feel what the weather was and was going to be. She went downstairs and fetched herself jam sandwiches and a block of chocolate icecream. At eight o'clock her favourite programme of the entire week was due to begin, a series about policemen in Los Angeles' It is hard to say why Eunice loved it so much. Certainly she confounded those analysts of escape channels who say that an audience must identify. Eunice couldn't identify with the young police lieutenant or his twenty-year-old blonde girl friend or with the gangsters, tycoons, film stars, call girls, gamblers and drunks who abounded in each adventure. Perhaps it was the clipped harsh repartee she liked, the inevitable car chase and the indispensable shooting. It had irked her exceedingly to miss an episode as she had often done in the past, the Coverdales seeming deliberately to single out Friday as their entertaining night. There was no one to disturb her this time. She laid down her knitting the better to concentrate. It was going to be a good story tonight, she could tell that from the opening sequence, a corpse in the first two minutes and a car chase in the first five. The gunman's car crashed, half-mounting a lamp-post. The car door opened, the gunman leapt out and across the street, firing his gun, dodging a policeman's bullets into the shelter of a porch, pulling a frightened girl in front of him as his shield, 60 again taking aim.... Suddenly the sound faded and the picture began to dwindle, to shrink, as it was sucked into a spot in the centre of the screen like black water draining into a hole. The spot shone like a star, a tiny point of light that burned brightly and went out. Eunice switched it off, switched it on again. Nothing happened. She moved knobs on the front of it and even those knobs on the back they said you should never touch. Nothing happened. She opened the plug and checked that the wires were all where they ought to be. She took out the fuse and replaced it with one from her bed lamp. The screen remained blank, or, rather, had become merely a mirror, reflecting her own dismayed face and the hot red sunset burning through a chink between the closed curtains.

Chapter 8

It never occurred to her to use the colour set in the morning room. She knew it was usable, but it was theirs. A curious feature of Eunice Parchman's character was that, although she did not stop at murder or blackmail, she never in her life stole anything or even borrowed anything without its owner's consent. Objects, like spheres of life, were appointed, predestined, to certain people. Eunice no more cared to see the order of things disturbed than George did. For a while she hoped that the set would right itself, start up as spontaneously as it had failed. But each time she switched it on it remained blank and silent. Of course she knew that when things went wrong you sent for the man to put them right. In Tooting you went round to the ironmonger's or the electric people. But here? With only a phone and an indecipherable list of names and numbers, a useless incomprehensible directory? Saturday, Sunday, Monday. The milkman called and Geoff Baalham brought the eggs. Ask them and have them tell her to look such and such a number up in the phone book? She was cruelly bored and frustrated. There were no neighbours with whom to pass the time of day, no busy street to watch, no buses or teashops. She took down the curtains, washed and ironed them, washed paintwork, shampooed the carpets, anything to pass the slow, heavy, lumbering time. It was Eva Baalham, arriving on Wednesday, who discovered what had happened, simply as a result of asking Eunice if she had watched the big fight on the previous evening. And Eva only asked that for something to say, talking to Miss Parchman being a sticky business at the best of times. 'Broke down?' said Eva. 'I reckon you'll have to have that 62 seen to then. My cousin Meadows that keeps the electric shop in Gosbury, he'd do that for you. I tell you what, I'll leave doing the old bits of silver till Friday and give him a ring.' A long dialogue ensued with someone called Rodgein which Eva enquired after Doris and Mum and 'the boy' and 'the girl' (young married people, these last, with children of their own) and finally got a promise of assistance. 'He says he'll pop in when he knocks off.' 'Hope he doesn't have to take it away,' said Eunice. 'Never know with they old sets, do you? You'll have to have a look at the paper instead.' Literacy is in our veins like blood. It enters every other phrase. It is next to impossible to hold a real conversation, as against an interchange of instructions and acquiescences, in which reference to the printed word is not made or in which the implications of something read do not occur. Rodge Meadows came and he did have to take the set away. 'Could be a couple of days, could be a week. Give me a ring if you don't hear nothing from Auntie Eva. I'm in the book.' Two days later, in the solitude and silence and boredom of Lowfield Hall, a compulsion came over Eunice. Without any idea of where to go or why she was going, she found herself changing the blue and white check dress for the crimplene suit, and then making her first unescorted assay into the outside world. She closed all the windows, bolted the front door, locked the door of the gun room, and started off down the drive. It was I4 August. If the television set hadn't broken down she would never have gone. Sooner or later one of her own urges or the efforts of the Coverdales would have got her out of that house, but she would have gone in the evening or on a Sunday afternoon when Greeving Post Office and Village Store, Prop. N. Smith, would have been closed. If, if, if... If she had been able to read, the television might still have held charms for her, but she would have looked the engineer's number up in the phone book on Saturday morning, and by Tuesday or Wednesday she would have had that set back. On Saturday the Isth, Rodgedid, in fact, return it, but by then it was too late and the damage was done. She didn't know where she was going. Even then, it was touch and go whether she went to Greeving at all, for she took the first turn off the lane, and two miles and three-quarters of an hour later she was in Cocklefield St Jude. Not much more than a hamlet is Cocklefield St Jude, with an enormous church but noshop. Eunice came to a crossroads. The signpostwasuseless to her but she wasn't afraid of getting lost. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and as compensation perhaps for her singular misfortune she had been endowed with a sense of direction was almost as good as an animal's. Accordingly, she took the narrowest exit from the cross which led her down a sequestered defile, a lane no more than eight feetwide and overhungwith the dark late-summer foliage of ash and oak, and where one car could not pass another without drawing deep into the hedge. Eunice had never been in such a place in her life. A cow with a face like a great white ghost stuck its head over the hedge and lowed at her. In a sunny patch, where there was a gap in the trees, a cock pheasant with clattering feathers lolloped across in front of her, all gilded chestnut and fiery green. She marched on, head up, alarmed but resolute, knowing she was going the right way. And so, at last, to Greeving and into the heart of the village itself, for the lane came out opposite the Blue Boar. She turned right, and having passed the terrace of cottages inhabited by various Higgses and Newsteads and Carters, the small Georgian mansion of Mrs Cairne and the discreet, soberly decorated neon-less petrol station kept by Jim Meadows, she found herself on the triangle of turf outside the village store. The shop was double-fronted, being a conversion of the ground floor of a largish, very old cottage, whose front gable was half-timbered and whose roof was badly in need of rethatching. Behind it was a garden which sloped down to the banks of the Beal that, at this point, curved out of the meadows to run under Greeving Bridge. Greeving Village Store is now 64 efficiently run by Mr and Mrs Mann, but at that time the two large windows held a dusty display of cereal packets, canned fruit, and baskets of not very fresh-looking tomatoes and cabbages. Eunice approached one of these windows and looked inside. The shop was empty. It was often empty, for the Smiths charged high prices while necessarily stocking only a small selection of goods. Greeving residents with cars preferred the supermarkets of Stantwich and Nunchester, availing themselves only of the post office facilities of their village store. Eunice went in. On the left the shop was arranged for selfservice with wire baskets provided. On the right was a typical sub-post-office counter and grille with, beside it, a display of sweets and cigarettes. At one time there had been a bell which rang each time the door was opened, but this had gone wrong and the Smiths had never had it mended. Therefore, no one heard her enter. Eunice examined the shelves with interest, noting the presence of various commodities she well knew from shopping expeditions in South London. But she couldn't read? Yet who does read the name of a product or its manufacturer's name on a packet or tin? One goes by the colour and the shape and the picture as much as if one is a professor of etymology as an illiterate. It was a month since she had tasted a sweet. Now she thought the most desirable thing in the world would be to have a box of chocolates. So she walked up to the counter on the left of the grille and, having waited in vain for a few seconds, she coughed. Her cough resulted in a door at the back of the shop opening and in the appearance of a woman some few years older than herself. Joan Smith was at this time fifty, thin as a starved bird, with matchstick bones and chicken skin. Her hair was the same colour as Jacqueline Coverdale's, each aiming, of course, at attaining Melinda's natural fine gold by artificial means. Jacqueline was more successful because she had more money to spend. Joan Smith's coiffure, wiry, stiff, glittering, had the look of one of the yellow metal pot-scourers displayed for sale on her shelves. Her face was haphazardly painted, her hands red, rough - 65 and untended. In her shrill voice, cockney overlaid with refinement, not unlike Annie Cole's she asked Eunice what she could do for her. For the first time the two women looked at each other, small blue eyes meeting sharp grey ones. 'Pound box of Black Magic, please,' said Eunice. How many thousands of pairs of people, brought together into a partnership for passion, for pain, for profit or for disaster, have commenced their relationship with words as mundane as these? Joan produced the chocolates. She always had a sprightly manner, coy, girlish, arch. Impossible for her simply to hand an object to anyone and take the money. First must come elaborate flourishes, a smile, a little hop that almost lifted her feet out of her Minnie Mouse shoes, her head roguishly on one side. Even towards her religion, she kept up a familiar jolly attitude. The Lord was her friend, brutal to the unregenerate, but matey and intimate with the chosen, the kind of pal you might take to the pictures and have a bit of a giggle with afterwards over a nice cuppa. 'Eighty-five pee,' said Joan, 'if you please.' She rang it up on the till, eyeing Eunice with a little whimsical smile. 'And how are they all enjoying their holiday, or haven't you heard 7' Eunice was amazed. She didn't know, and was never really to know, that very little can be kept secret in an English village. Not only did everyone in Greeving know where the Coverdales had gone, when they had gone, when they were coming back and roughly what their trip cost, but they were already aware that she herself had paid her first visit to the village that after- noon. Nellie Higgs and Jim Meadows had spotted her, the grapevine was at work, and her appearance and the motive for her walk would be discussed and speculated about in the Blue Boar that night. But to Eunice that Joan Smith should recognise her and know where she worked was little short of magical divination. It awoke in her a kind of wondering admiration. It laid the foundation of her dependence on Joan and her belief, generally speaking, in the rightness of everything Joan said. But all she said then was, 'I haven't heard.' 'Well, early days yet. Lovely to get away for three weeks, isn't it? Chance'd be a fine thing. Ever such a nice family, aren't they? Mr Coverdale is what I call a real gentleman of the old school, and she's a real lady. Never think she was fortyeight, would you?' Thus Joan added six years to poor Jacqueline's age from no motive but pure malice. In fact, she heartily disliked the Coverdales because they never patronised her shop, and George had been known to criticise the running of the post office. But she had no intention of admitting these feelings to Eunice until she saw how the land lay. 'You're lucky to work for them, but they're lucky to have you, from all I've heard.' 'I don't know,' said Eunice. 'Oh, you're being modest, I can see that. A little bird told me the Hall'd never looked so spick and span. Makes a change, I daresay, after old Eva giving it a lick and a promise all these years. Don't you get a bit lonesome, though?' 'I've got the TV,' said Eunice, beginning to expand, 'and there's always a job wants doing.' 'You're right. I know I'm run off my feet with this place, it's all go. Not a churchgoer, are you? No, I'd have spotted you if you'd been to St Mary's with the family.' 'I'm not religious. Never seemed to have the time.' 'Ah, you don't know what you miss,' said proselytising Joan, wagging a forefinger. 'But it's never too late, remember. The patience of the Lord is infinite and the bridegroom is ever ready to welcome you to his feast. Lovely weather he's sending us, isn't it, especially for those as don't have to sweat their guts out slaving for others.' 'I'll be getting back now,' said Eunice. 'Pity Norm's got the van or I could run you back.' Joan came to the door with Eunice and turned the notice to Closed. 'Got your chocs? That's right. Now, don't forget, if ever you're at a loose end, I'm always here. Don't be afraid of putting me out. I've always got a cup of tea and a cheery word for a friend.' 'I won't,' said Eunice ambiguously. Joan waved merrily after her. Across the bridge went Eunice and along the white lane to LowfieldHall. She took the box of chocolates out of the paper bag, threw the bag over a hedge, and munched an orange cream. She wasn't displeased to have had a chat. Joan Smith was just the sort of person she got on best with, though the hint of getting her to church smacked a little of interference in her life. But she had noted something exceptionally soothing about their talk. The printed word or anything associated with it hadn't remotely come up. But Eunice, with her television set returned and as good as new, wouldn't have considered seeking Joan Smith out if Joan Smith had not first come to her. This bird-like, bright-haired and bright-spirited little body was as devoured with curiosity about her fellow men as Eunice was indifferent to them. She also suffered from a particular form of paranoia. She projected her feelings on to the Lord. A devout woman must not be uncharitable, so she seldom indulged her dislike of people by straight malicious gossip. It was not she who found fault with them and hated them, but God; not she but God on whom they had inflicted imaginary injuries. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I will repay. Joan Smith was merely his humble and energetic instrument. She had long wanted to know more about the interior of Lowfield Hall and the lives of its occupants - more, that is, than she could gain by occasionally steaming open their post. Now was her chance. She had met Eunice, their initial chat had been entirely satisfactory, and here was a postcard come from Crete, come from Melinda Coverdale, and addressed to Miss E. Parchman. Joan kept it back from the regular postwoman's bag and on the Monday she took it up to the Hall herself. Eunice was surprised and not a little put out to see her. She recoiled from the postcard as from an insect with a sting and muttered her usual defence: 'I can't see that without my glasses.' 'I'll read it to you, shall I, if I won't be intruding? "This is a super place. Temperature in the upper eighties. We have been to the Palace of Knossos where Theseus killed the Minotaur. See you soon. Melinda." How lovely. Who's this Theseus? I wonder. Must have missed that in the paper. There's always a terrible lot of fighting and killing in those places, isn't there? What a lovely kitchen! And you keep it like a new pin. Eat your dinner off the floor, couldn't you?' Relieved and gratified, Eunice came out of herself enough to say, 'I was just going to put the kettle on.' 'Oh, no, thank you, I couldn't stop. I've left Norm all alone. Fancy her writing "Melinda" like that. I will say for her, she's no snob, though there are sides to her life distressing to the Lord in his handmaiden.' Joan uttered this last in a brisk and practical way as if God had given her his opinion while dropping in for a netter. She peered through the open door into the passage. 'Spacious, isn't it? Could I just have a peep in the drawing room?' 'If you want,' said Eunice. 'I've no objection.' 'Oh, they wouldn't mind. We're all friends in this village. And speaking as one who has been a sinner herself, I wouldn't set myself above those who haven't found the strait gate. No, you'll never hear me say, Thank God I am not as other men are, even as this publican. Beautiful furnishings, aren't they, and in the best of taste?' The upshot of all this was that Joan was taken on a tour of Lowfield Hall. Eunice, somewhat overawed by all this educated talk, wanted to show off what she could do, and Joan gratified her by frequent exclamations of delight. They went rather further than they should have done, Eunice opening Jacqueline's wardrobe to display her evening gowns. In Giles's room, Joan stared at the cork wall. 'eccentric,' she said. 'He's just a bit of a boy,' said Eunice. 'Terrible, those spots he has, quite a disfigurement. His father's in a home for alcoholics, as of course you know.' Eunice didn't, any more than anyone else did, including Jeffrey Mont. 'He divorced her and Mr Coverdale was the co-respondent, though his wife had only been dead six months. I don't sit in judgement, but I can read my Bible. "Whosoever 69 shall marry a divorced woman, committeth adultery." What's he got that bit of paper stuck up there for?' 'That's always there,' said Eunice. Was she at last to discover what Giles'smessage to her said? She was. In a shrill, amazed and outraged tone, Joan read aloud: ' "Warburg's friend said to Warburg, of his wife who was ill, If it should please God to take one or other of us, I shall go and live in Paris." ' This quotation from Samuel Butler had no possible application to anything in Giles's life, but he liked it and each time he read it it made him laugh. 'Blasphemous,' said Joan. 'I suppose it's something he's got to learn for school. Pity these teachers don't have more thought for a person's soul.' So it was something he had to learn for school. By now Eunice felt quite warmly towards Joan Smith, sent by some kindly power to enlighten her and set her mind at rest. 'You won't say no to that cup of tea now, will you?' she said when, the carpet, bathroom and television set having been admired (though not, according to Joan, good enough for a superior housekeeper like yourself, more a companion really), they were once more in the kitchen. 'I shouldn't, not with Norm all on his own-io, but if you twist my arm.' Joan Smith stayed for a further hour, during which time she told Eunice a number of lies about the Coverdales' private life, and attempted unsuccessfully to elicit from her hostess details of hers. Eunice was only a little more forthcoming than she had been at their first meeting. She wasn't going to tell this woman, helpful as she had been, all about Mum and Dad and Rainbow Street and the sweatshop, not she. Nor was she prepared to go with Joan to some prayer meeting in Nunchester on the following Sunday. What, swap her Sunday-evening spy serial for hymn-singing with a lot of cranks? Joan didn't take offence.. 'Well, I'll say thanks for the magical mystery tour and your p generous hospitality. And now I must be on my way or Norm'll think I've met with an accident.' She laughed merrily at this prospect of her husband's anxiety and drove off in the van, calling 'Cheeri-bye' all the way down the drive.

Chapter 9

The relationship between Eunice Parchman and Joan Smith was never of a lesbian nature. They bore no resemblance to the Papin sisters, who! while cook and housemaid to a mother and daughter in Le Mans, murdered their employers in 1933. Eunice had nothing in common with them except that she also was female and a servant. She was an almost sexless being, without normal or abnormal desires, whose vague restlessness over the Eu-nicey, mother of Timothy, business had long ago been allayed. As for Joan Smith, she had exhausted her sexual capacities. It is probable that like Queen Victoria in the anecdote, Eunice, for all her adventurous wanderings, did not know what lesbianism was. Joan Smith certainly knew and had very likely experimented with it, as she had experimented with most things. For the first sixteen years of her life Joan Smith, or Skinner as she then was, led an existence which any psychologist would have seen as promising to result in a well-adjusted, worthy and responsible member of society. She was not beaten or neglected or deserted. On the contrary, she was loved, cherished and encouraged. Her father was an insurance salesman, quite prosperous. The family lived in a house which they owned in the better part of Kilburn, the parents were happily married, and Joan had three brothers older than herself who were all fond of and kind to their little sister. Mr and Mrs Skinner had longed for a daughter and been ecstatic when they got one. Because she was seldom left to her own devices but talked to and played with almost from birth, she learned to read when she was four, went happily off to school before she was five, and by the age of ten showed promise of being cleverer than any of 7Z. her brothers. She passed the scholarship and went to the high school where she later gained her school certificate with the fairly unusual distinction of an exemption from matriculation, as her results were so good. The war was on and Joan, like Eunice Parchman, had gone away from London with her school. But to foster-parents as kind and considerate as her own. For no apparent reason, suddenly and out of the blue, she walked into the local police station in Wiltshire where she accused her foster-father of raping and beating her, and she showed bruises to support this charge. Joan was found not to be a virgin. The foster-father was charged with rape but acquitted because of his sound and perfectly honest alibi. Joan was taken home by her parents, who naturally believed there had been a miscarriage of justice. But she only stayed a week before decamping to join the author of her injuries, a baker's roundsman in Salisbury. He was a married man, but he left his wife and Joan stayed with him for five years. When he went to prison for defaulting on the main- tenance payments to his wife and two children, she left him and returned to London. But not to her parents, whose letters she had steadfastly refused to answer. Another couple of years went by, during which Joan worked as a barmaid, but she was dismissed for helping herself from the till, and she drifted into a kind of suburban prostitution. She and another girl shared a couple of rooms in Shepherd's Bush where they entertained an artisan clientele who paid them unbelievably low rates for their services. From this life, when she was thirty, Joan was rescued by Norman Smith. A weak and innocent creature, he met Joan when she went to a hairdresser's in Harlesden for a tint and perm. One side of this establishment was for the ladies, the other a barber's shop, but there was much coming and going on the part of the assistants, and Norman often stopped for a chat with Joan while she was under the dryer. She was almost the first woman he had looked at, certainly the first he had asked out. But she was so kind and sweet and friendly, he didn't feel at all intimidated. He fell violently in love with her and asked her to marry him the 73 second time he found himself alone with her. Joan accepted with alacrity. Norman had no idea how she had earned her living, believing her story that she had taken in typing and occasionally been a freelance secretary. They lived with his mother. After a year or two of furious daily quarrelswith old MrsSmith, Joanfoundthe best way of keeping her quiet was to encourage her hitherto controlled fondness for the bottle. Gradually she got Mrs Smith to the stage of spending her savings on half abonIeof whisky a day. 'It would kill Norman if he found out,' said Joan. 'Don't you tell him, Joanie.' 'You'd better see you're in bed then when he comes home. That poor man idolises you, he puts you on a pedestal. It'd break his heart to know you were boozing all day, and under his roof too.' So old Mrs Smith, with Joan's encouragement, became a self-appointed invalid. For most of each day she was in bed with her whisky, and Joan helped matters along by crushing into the sugar in her tea three or four of the tranquillizers the doctor had prescribed for her own 'nerves'. With her mother-in-law more or less comatose, Joan returned by day to the old life and the flat in Shepherd's Bush. She made very little money at it, and her sexual encounters had become distasteful to her. A remarkable fact about Joan was that, though she had had sexual relations with hundreds of men as well as with her own husband, she had never made love for pleasure or had a 'conventional' illicit affair except with the baker's roundsman. It is hard to know why she continued as a prostitute. Out of perversity, perhaps, or as a way of defying Norman's extreme workingdass respectability. If so, it was a secret way, for he never found herout. It wasshe eventually who boldly and ostentatiously confessed it all to him. And that came about as the result of her conversion. Since she was fourteen, and she WAS now nearly forty, she had never given a thought to religion. But all that was necessary to turn her into a raving Bible-thumper was a call at her front door by a man representing a sect called the Epiphany People. 'Not today, thanks,' said Joan, but having nothing better to do that afternoon, she glanced through the magazine, or tract, he had left on the doorstep. By one of those coincidences that are always happening, she found herself on the following day actually passing the Epiphany People's temple. Of course, it wasn't really a coincidence. She had passed it a hundred times before but had never previously noticed what it was. A prayer meeting was beginning. Out of curiosity Joan went in - and was saved. The Epiphany People were a sect founded in California in the I9~OS by a retired undertaker called Elroy Camps. Epiphany, of course, is 6 January, the day on which the Magi are traditionally supposed to have arrived in Bethlehem to bear witness to the birth of Christ and to bring him gifts. Elroy Camps and his followers saw themselves as 'wise men' to whom a special revelation had been granted: that is, they and only they had witnessed the divine manifestation, and hence only they and a select band of the chosen would find salvation. Indeed, Elroy Camps believed himself to be a reincarnation of one of the Magi and was known in the sect as Balthasar. A strict morality was adhered to, members of the sect must attend the temple, pay a minimum of a hundred proselytising house calls a year, and hold to the belief that within a very short time there would be a second Epiphany in which they, the new wise men, would be chosen and the rest of the world cast into outer darkness. Their meetings were vociferous and dramatic, but merry too with tea and cakes and film shows. New members were called upon to confess their sins in public, after which the rest of the brethren would burst into spontaneous comment and end by singing hymns. Most of these had been written by Balthasar himself. The following is an example: As the Wise Men came riding in days long gone by, So we ride to Jesus with hearts held up high; Bearing our sins as they bore him presents, That shad be washed white in his holy essence. At first it seems a mystery why all this should have made an appeal to Joan. But she had always loved drama, especially drama of a nature shocking to other people. She heard a woman confess her sins, loudly proclaiming such petty errors as bilking London Transport, fraudulent practice with regard to her housekeeping money, and visits to a theatre. How much better than that could she do I She was forty, and even she could see that with her faded fair hair and fine pale skin she hadn't worn well. What next? A grim obscure domesticity in Harlesden with old Mrs Smith, or the glorious publicity the Epiphany People could give her. Besides, it might all be true. Very soon she was to believe entirely in its truth. She made the confession of the year. It all came out. The congregation were stunned by the revelation of Joan's excesses, but she had been promised forgiveness and she got it, as much as the woman who had travelled on the Tube without a ticket got it. Joan the faithless wife opened her heart to a stunned and disillusioned Norman. Joan the evangelist went from house to house in Harlesden and Wood Lane and Shepherd's Bush, not only distributing tracts but recounting to her listeners how, until the Lord called her, she had been a 'harlot' and a scarlet woman. 'I was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour,' said Joan on the doorstep. 'I had a golden cup in my hand full of the abominations and filthiness of my fornication. I was the hold of every unclean spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.' It wasn't long before some wit was making snide cracks while in the barber's chair about unclean and hateful birds. In vain did Norman ask his wife to stop it. He had suffered enough in learning of her former mode of life without this. The street buzzed with it and the boys called after him as he went to work. But how do you reproach a woman who has reformed, who counters every reproof with total agreement? 'I know that, Norm, I know I was steeped in lowness and filth. I sinned 76 against and the Lord. I was a lost soul, plunged in the abominations of iniquity.' 'I just wish you wouldn't tell everyone,' said Norman. 'Balthasar said there is no private atonement.' Then old Mrs Smith died. Joan was never at home and she was left all day in a cold and filthy house. She got out of bed, fell and lay on the floor for seven hours in only a thin nightgown. That night, not long after Norman had found her, she died in hospital. Cause of death: hypothermia; she had died of exposure. Again the street buzzed, and it was not only schoolboys who called after Norman. His mother had left him the house and a thousand pounds. Norman was one of those people - and they are legion - whose ambition is to keep a country pub or shop. He had never lived in the country or run a grocer's, but that was what he wanted. He underwent training with the post office, and at about the same time as the Coverdales bought Lowfield Hall he and Joan found themselves proprietors of Greeving Village Store -Greeving, because the only other Epiphany temple in the country was in Nunchester. The Smiths ran the store with disastrous inefficiency. Sometimes it opened at nine, sometimes at eleven. The post office was, of course, open during its prescribed hours, but Joan (for all her virtuous protestations to Eunice) left Norman in sole charge for hours and he couldn't leave his cubby-hole behind the grille to serve other customers. Those who had been regulars drifted away. The rest, compelled through carelessness to allegiance, grumbled ferociously. Joan investigated the mails. It was her duty, she said, to find out the sinners who surrounded her. She steamed open envelopes and re-glued them. Norman watched in misery and despair, longing for the courage to hit her, and hoping against all odds and his own nature that he would one day find it. They had no children and now Joan was passing through what she called an 'early change'. Considering she was fifty, it might have been thought that her menopause was neither early nor late but right on time. 'Norm and I always longed for kiddies,' she was in the habit of saying, 'but they never came. The Lord knew best, no doubt, and it's not for us to question His ways.' No doubt, He did. One wonders what Joan Smith would have done with children if she had had them. Eaten them, perhaps.

Chapter 10

For a long time George Coverdale had suspected one of the Smiths of tampering with his post. Only a week before he went on holiday an envelope, containing a letter from his son Peter, showed a glue smear under the flap, and a parcel from the book club to which Jacqueline subscribed had obviously been opened and re-tied with string. But he hesitated to take action without positive proof. He hadn't set foot in the shop or used the post office since the day, some three years before, when, in front of an interested audience of farm labourers' wives, Joan had gaily reproached him for living with a divorced woman and exhorted him to abandon his sinful life and come to God. After that he had posted his letters in Stantwich and given Joan no more than a stiff nod when he met her in the village. He would have been appalled had he known she had been in his bedroom, fingered his clothes and toured his house. But when he and his family returned from holiday there was no sign that Eunice had defected from her established ways. 'I don't believe she's been out of the house, darling,' said Jacqueline. 'Yes, she has.' Village gossip always reached them by way of Melinda. 'Geoff told me. He got it from Mrs Higgs, the Mrs Higgs who rides the bike; she's his grandma's sister-in-law. She saw her out for a walk in Greeving.' 'Good,' said George. 'If she's happy pattering about the village, I won't press her about the driving lessons. But if you should get it via the bush telegraph that she's got hankerings to learn, perhaps you'll let me know.' Late summer, early autumn, and the vegetation seemed to become too much for man and nature itself to control. The flowers grew too tall and too straggly, the hedges overbrimmed with leaves, berries and tendrils of the bryony, and the wild clematis, the Old Man's Beard, cast over all its filmy fluffy cloak. Melinda went blackberrying, Jacqueline made bramble jelly. Eunice had never before seen jam being made. As far as she had known, if it didn't exactly descend like manna from heaven, at least it was only available in jars from a shop. Giles picked no blackberries, nor did he attend the Harvest Festival at St Mary's. On the cork wall he pinned a text of his own, a line that might have been written for him: 'Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading', and he went on struggling through the Upanishads. Pheasant shooting began. Eunice saw George go into the gun room, take the shotguns down from the wall and, leaving the door to the kitchen open, clean and load them. She watched with interest but in innocence, having no idea of their being of future use to her. George cleaned and loaded both guns, but not because he had any hope of Giles accompanying him on the shoot. He had bought the second gun for his stepson, just as he had bought the fishing tackle and the fat white horse, now eating its head off down in the meadow. Three autumns of apathy and then downright opposition on Giles's part had taught George to abandon hope of making him a sportsman. So the second gun was lent to Francis Jameson-Kerr, stockbroker son of the brigadier. Pheasants were plentiful, and from the kitchen window, then from the kitchen garden where she went to cut a cabbage, Eunice watched the three of them bag four brace and a hen bird. A brace for the Jameson-Kerrs, a brace each for Peter and Paula, the remaining birds for Lowfield Hall. Eunice wondered how long the bloodied bundles of feathers were to be hung in the back kitchen before she had the pleasure of tasting this hitherto unknown flesh. But she wasn't going to ask, not she. A week later Jacqueline roasted them, and as Eunice tucked into 80 the thick slice of breast on her plate, three little round pellets of shot rolled out into the gravy. The shopping was always done by Jacqueline, or a list phoned by Jacqueline to a Stantwich store and the goods later collected by George. It was a chronic source of anxiety to Eunice that one day she might be called on to phone that list, and one Tuesday in late September this happened. The phone rang at eight in the morning. It was Lady Royston to say that she had fallen, thought she had broken her arm, and could Jacqueline drive her to hospital in Nunchester? Sir Robert had taken one car, her son the other, and then, having taken it into her head to begin picking the apple crop at the early hour of seven-thirty, she had climbed the ladder and slipped on a broken rung. The Coverdales were still at breakfast. 'Poor darling Jessica,' said Jacqueline, 'she sounded in such pain. I'll get over there straight away. The shopping list's ready, George, so Miss Parchman can phone it through when the shop opens, and then perhaps you'll be an angel and pick it up 2' George and Giles finished their breakfast in a silence broken only by George's remarking, in the interest of being a good stepfather, that such a brilliant start to the day could only indicate rain later. Giles, who was thinking about an advertisement he had seen in Time Out asking for a tenth passenger in a minibus to Poona, said 'Could it?' and that he didn't know anything about meteorology. Eunice came in to clear the table. 'My wife's had to go out on an errand of mercy,' said George, made pompous by Eunice's forbidding presence, 'so perhaps you'll be good enough to get on to this number and order what's on the list.' 'Yes, sir,' said Eunice automatically. 'Ready in five minutes, Giles? Give it till after nine-thirty, will you, Miss Parchman? These shops don't keep the early hours they did in our young days.' Eunice stared at the list. She could read the phone number and that was about all. By now George had disappeared to get 8~ the Mercedes out. Giles was upstairs. Melinda was spending the last week of her holiday with a friend in Lowestoft. The beginning of a panic stirring, Eunice thought of asking Giles to read the list to her - one reading would be enough for her memory -on the grounds that her glasses were somewhere up at the top of the house. But the excuse was too feeble, as she had an hour in which to fetch those glasses herself, and now, anyway, Giles was crossing the hall in his vague sleepwalking way, leaving the house, slamming the front door behind him. In despair, she sat down in the kitchen among the dirty dishes. All her efforts went into rousing some spark out of that atrophied organ, her imagination. By now an inventive woman would have found ways of combating the problem. She would have said she had broken her reading glasses (and trodden on them to prove it) or feigned illness or fabricated a summons to London to the bedside of a sick relative. Eunice could only think of actually taking the list to the Stantwich store and handing the list to the manager. But how to get there7 She knew there was a bus, but not where it stopped, only that the stop was two miles distant; not when it ran or where precisely it went or even the location of the shop. Presently habit compelled her to stack the dishes in the washer, wipe clean the surfaces, go upstairs to make the beds and gaze sullenly at Giles's Quote of the Month which would have had a peculiarly ironical application to herself had she been able to understand it. Nine-fifteen. Eva Baalham didn't come on Tuesdays, the milkman had already been. Not that Eunice would have dared expose herself by asking for enlightenment from these people. She would have to tell Jacqueline that she had forgotten to phone, and if Jacqueline came back in time to do it herself... She glanced up again at the cork wall, and then into her mind came a clear picture of having stood there with Joan Smith. Joan Smith. No very lucid plan had formed. Eunice was just as anxious for Joan Smith not to know her secret as for Eva or the milkman or Jacqueline not to know it. But Joan too had a grocer's shop, and once the list was in her hands, there might be a way.

She put her best hand-knitted cardigan on over her pink cotton frock and set off for Greeving. 'Long time no see,' said Joan, sparkling. 'You are a stranger! This is Norman, my better half. Norm, this is Miss Parchman from the Hall I was telling you about.' 'Pleased to meet you,' said Norman Smith from behind his grille. Endosed by bars, he had the look of some gloomy ruminant animal, a goat or llama perhaps, which has too long been in captivity to recall its freedom but still frets dully within its cage. His face was wedge-shaped, white and bony, his hair sandy grey. As if he were sustaining the cud-chewing image, he munched spearmint all day long. This was because Joan said he had bad breath. 'Now to what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?' said Joan. 'Don't tell me Mrs Coverdale's going to patronise our humble abode at last. That would be a red-letter day.' 'I've got this list.' Looking vaguely about her at the shelves, Eunice thrust the list at Joan. 'Let me see. We have got the plain flour and the oats, that I do know. But, my goodness, kidney beans and basil leaves and garlic!' The bad shopkeeper's excuse came to Joan's aid. 'We're waiting for them to come in,' she said. 'But, I tell you what, you read it out and I'll check what we do have.' 'No, you read it. I'll check.' 'There's me being tactless againl Ought to remember your eye trouble, didn't I? Here goes, then.' Eunice, checking and finding only two items available, knew that she was saved, for Joan read the list out in a clear slow voice. It was enough. She bought the flour and the oats which would have to be hidden, would have to be paid for out of her own money, but what did that matter? A warm feeling for Joan, who had saved her again, welled in Eunice. Dimly she remembered feeling something like this long ago, ages ago, for her mother before Mrs Parchman became ill and dependent. Yes, she would have the cup of tea Joan was offering, and take the weight off her feet for ten minutes. 'You'll just have to phone that Stantwich place,' said Joan, 83 who thought she saw it all, that Eunice had come to the village store off her own bat. 'Use our phone, go on. Here's your list. Got your glasses?' Eunice had. The ones with the tortoise-shell frames. While Joan bustled about with the teacups, she made her call, almost dizzy with happiness. Appearing to read aloud what she in fact remembered brought her a pleasure comparable to, but greater than, the pride of a travellerwho has one idiomatic French phrase and chances to bring it out successfully at the right time without evoking from his listener a single question. Seldom did it happen to her to prove she could read. And, putting the phone down, she felt towards Joan the way we feel towards those in whose presence we have demonstrated our prowess in the field where we least possess it - warm, prideful, superior yet modest, ready to be expansive. She praised the 'lovely old room', ignoring its untidy near-squalor, and she was moved so far as to compliment Joan on her hair, her floral dress and the quality of her chocolate biscuits. 'Fancy them expecting you to hump all that lot back,' said Joan who knew they hadn't. 'Well, they say he's a hard man, reaping where he has not sown and gathering where he has not stored. I'll run you home, shall I?' 'I'd be putting you out.' 'Not at all. My pleasure.' Joan marched Eunice through the shop, ignoring her husband who was peering disconsolately inside a sack as into a nosebag. The old green van started after some heavy manipulation with the choke and kicks at the accelerator. 'Home, James, and don't spare the horses!' The van coughed its way up the lane. Joan took Eunice to the front door of Lowfield Hall. 'Now, one good turn deserves another, and I've got a little book here I want you to read.' She produced a tract entitled God Wants You For A Wise Man. 'And you'll pop along to our next meeting with me, won't you? Sunday night. I won't call for you, but you be in the lane at half five and I'll pick you up. OK?' 'All right,' said Eunice. 'Oh, you'll love it. We don't have a prayer book like those 8` church people, just singing and love and uttering what comes into our hearts. And then there's tea and a chat with the brethren. God wants us to be joyful, my dear, when we have given our all to him. But for those who deny him there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Did you knit your cardigan yourself? I think it's smashing. Don't forget your flour and your oats.' Well content, Joan drove back to Norman and the store. It might seem that she had nothing to gain from friendship with Eunice Parchman, but in fact she was badly in need of a satellite in the village. Norman had become a cipher, not much more than a shell of a man since his wife's revelations of what his early married life had truly been. They hardly spoke these days and Joan had given up pretending to her acquaintances that they were an ideal couple. Indeed, she told everyone that Norman was her cross, though one that it was her duty as his wife to bear, but that he had turned his back on God and so could be no companion for such as she. God was displeased with him. Therefore she, as his handmaid, must concur in that displeasure. These pronouncements, made publicly along with others implying that Joan had the infallibility of God's personal assistant, had put off such Higgses, Baalhams and Newsteads as might have become her friends. People said good morning to her but Qthenvise ostracised her. They thought she was mad, as she probably was even then. She saw Eunice as malleable and green. And also, to do her justice, as a lost sheep who might be brought to the Nunchester fold. It would be a triumph for her, and pleasant, to have a faithful admiring attendent to introduce to the Epiphany People and be seen by unregenerate Greeving as her special pal. Eunice, flushed with success, turned out the morning room, and was actually washing down its ivory-painted walls when Jacqueline came back. 'Heavens, what a rush! Poor Lady Royston's got a multiple fracture of her left arm. Spring-cleaning in September? You're an indefatigable worker, Miss Parchman. I hardly like to ask if you saw to my shopping list.' 'Oh, yes, madam. Mr Coverdale will pick it up at five.' 'That's marvellous. And now I'm going to have an enormous sherry before my lunch. Why don't you have a break and join me?' But this Eunice refused. Apart from a rare glass of wine at a relative's wedding or funeral, she had never tasted alcohol. This was one of the few things she had in common with Joan Smith who, though fond enough of a gin or a Guinness in her Shepherd's Bush days, had eschewed liquor on signing the Epiphany pledge. God Wants You For A Wise Man necessarily remained unread, but Eunice went to the meeting where no one expected her to read anything. She enjoyed the ride in Joan's van, the singing and the tea, and by the time they were back in Greeving a date had been made for her to have supper with the Smiths on Wednesday, and they were Joan and Eunice to each other. They were friends. In the sterile existence of Eunice Parchman, Mrs Samson and Annie Cole had a successor. Melinda went back to college, George shot more pheasants, Jacqueline planted bulbs and trimmed the shrubs and cheered up Lady Royston, Giles learned gloomily that the tenth place in the bus to Poona had been filled. Leaves turned from dark green to bleached gold, the apples were all gathered and the cob nuts ripened. The cuckoo had long gone, and now the swallows and the flycatchers departed for the south. On Greeving Green the hunt met and rode down the lane to kill two hours later in Marleigh Wood. 'Good morning, master,' said George at his gate to Sir Robert Royston, George who would call him Bob at any other time. And 'Good morning, sir,' said Bob in his pink coat and hard hat. October, with its false summer, its warm sadness, mists and mellow fruitfulness and sunshine turning to gold the haze that lingered over the River Beal.

Chapter 11