The Flowering Thorn Page 17

  ‘They’re up late,’ thought Lesley, ‘I suppose it’s the storm;’ and hoping to emulate Patrick’s example, she hastily undressed herself and got into bed.

  3

  But now the thunder was worse. They were not giants, they were postmen, double-knocking on an iron door. Lesley opened her eyes. There was a knocking. Loud, erratic, and far nearer than any symbolic gates, it seemed to batter at the wall directly below her bed. It was a knocking at the cottage.

  She put her hand to the switch. It clicked uselessly.

  ‘Damn!’ thought Lesley. ‘The light’s gone.’

  She lay in the dark a moment, and heard the knocking continue. Through the open door came a faint rustling.

  “That you, Pat?”

  His voice came calm and matter-of-fact as usual: but she had the impression that he was glad to hear her.

  “There’s someone trying to get in, Frewen,” he said. “They’ve been banging and banging.”

  ‘On a night like this, poor devils!’ thought Lesley, feeling for her slippers. There was a candle on the chest; she jumped out of bed and cast a flickering match-light over the room. From the tail of her eye, as she thrust on her dressing-gown, she saw Patrick too preparing to rise.

  “No, you stay here, Pat,” she said. “I won’t be a minute, and you’ll catch cold.” There was a draught on the twisting stair, indeed, that nearly blew her light out: she shielded it with her fingers and bore it safely into the sitting-room. A fresh volley of knocks had just begun: and her anxiety to stop the racket effectually swamping all other emotions, she went straight to the door and pulled it open.

  Close under the thatch stood a small dark figure. It was the eight-year Walpole boy, hooded in an overcoat and dripping like a tiddler.

  The wind blew him inside and slammed the door. By the light of the candle Lesley saw his lips part and move; and in that instant, directly overhead, thunder crashed back. The hot wax dripped on her fingers, she reached for his sodden cloak and tried to take it off. But he would not let her, he clutched it round him, and for an instant they shouted ineffectually at each other against a dwindling rattle. Then the last rumble died and in a sudden silence the child got out his message.

  “Please, Miss Frewen, Mother says will you use your telephone and get Miss Cook?”

  The blank irrelevance of it was so astonishing that for a moment Lesley stood tongue-tied. Then,

  “Who in God’s name is Miss Cook?” she demanded.

  “District Nurse, Miss. They want her quick.”

  The light flickered, the wax dripped.

  “Is it for Florrie?”

  He nodded dumbly. With the strangest mixture of emotions—pity and repugnance, response and withdrawal—Lesley went over to the telephone and lifted the receiver. There was no response. The line was dead.

  She tried again, clicking impatiently at the hook and calling into the mouthpiece. It was no use. The line was dead. She hung up the receiver and turned back to the child.

  “Have you done it, Miss?”

  “No. It’s either a line down or the lightning, but tell your mother I’ll stay here and keep on trying.” She broke off to look at him and was suddenly aware that beneath his stolidity he was frightened out of his wits. Her words might have reached his ears, but he had certainly not taken them in. To put him out in the rain again would be not only barbarous, but completely futile. And seeing him stand so dumb, terrified and uncomprehending, Lesley came to a sudden decision. She said quickly, “I’ll go back to your mother, Georgie, while you stay here. There’s Patrick too, so you won’t be alone.”

  The belated recollection of his name seemed to lend her words authority, and she ran back upstairs with the child stumping obediently after her. To Patrick she said with equal firmness,

  “Georgie is going to stay here, Pat, while I run over to the Walpoles. There’s someone ill there. Don’t light the candle again, and try and go to sleep.” She stooped for her shoes; he was taking it quite calmly. “And you, Georgie, get out of those wet things and roll yourself in a blanket. You can curl up on the end of Pat’s bed, if you like, and tell each other stories.”

  As she spoke she was pulling on her clothes, the stoutest and simplest that came to hand. Her raincoat was downstairs and an old leather hat: it was no night for umbrellas. With a glance at the two children—they appeared reasonably wrapped up, and more excited than alarmed—Lesley ran downstairs again and out into the storm.

  4

  The wind, on first meeting it, was like a buffet in the face. She put down her head and let her body think for her. The fence by the tool-shed—that was the place to cross, where a couple of big stones made a rudimentary stile. The rain beat in her eyes, the mud sucked at her shoes; she reached the fence panting as though after a two-mile run. Up, now, and over! Her skirt caught on a nail, she ripped it free and hurried on to where the Walpoles’ back door showed a crack of light. It widened as she approached to a yellow rectangle filled with a black figure: Mrs. Walpole was waiting, half out in the rain with a shawl over her head.

  “Miss Frewen!”

  Lesley got her breath.

  “I’ve left Georgie with Pat,” she said. “The telephone isn’t working.”

  The old woman’s face seemed suddenly to shrivel.

  “I thought as much,” she said; and in the silence between their words and the thunder, there came from within the house a long, despairing sound. It was neither cry nor moan, but something between the two; and it was completely uncivilised.

  Lesley shuddered.

  “Is that—?”

  “Florrie. It’s the storm done it.”

  The voice was dry, hopeless, and yet somehow appealing. ‘My God!’ thought Lesley, ‘she can’t be expecting me to do anything!’ And as though reading her thoughts, the woman said,

  “I daren’t leave her, Miss Frewen, and Walpole ’e can’t set foot to ground. Except for Georgie’s young brother I’ve got no one in the house.”

  For an interminable moment Lesley stood dumb. But she was not, like Georgie, frightened out of her wits: her difficulty was far more subtle. In brief, the whole situation was so utterly hackneyed that she could not believe it to be really happening. It was like a very early movie. Childbirth in a thunderstorm, with Tom Mix on his wonder-horse to ride for a doctor! The image flashed through her mind; she thrust it away and took a fresh grip on reality. The rain poured, the wind blew, in a room upstairs Florrie Walpole laboured: Miss Cook—

  “Where does the woman live?” asked Lesley, in a tone of pure annoyance.

  “Second house on the Wendover Road. It’s about two mile, Miss Frewen.”

  “Hasn’t anyone got a car?”

  “Only Sir Philip, and that’s a mile back to start. But there’s Florrie’s bicycle.”

  ‘My God!’ thought Lesley again. ‘A bicycle!’ It was the finishing touch, the last stroke of unreality; and she had almost laughed aloud when suddenly, at something in the old woman’s eyes, the current of her thought was changed. And it set in a strange channel.

  She was conscious, for almost the first time in her life, of being one of the gentry. The gentry, on whom people still at a pinch depended: who were still, it seemed, expected to rise out of their beds and career through a thunderstorm whenever an incontinent young woman saw fit to have a baby. Feeling extraordinarily akin to the Sir Giles who threw daggers, Lesley accepted her lot.

  “Right,” she said. “You’d better give me the thing.”

  With no word, but her whole face suddenly relaxing, the old woman took a step into the passage and wheeled forth a bicycle. Its lamp, Lesley noted, was already alight.

  “I go straight down to the village—”

  “And that’s all you need go, Miss Frewen. As far as the village, and then knock up the Coxes. If you give ’im the bicycle, Tom can go on from there.”

  Lesley nodded. In spite of this considerable alleviation, she was still in an extremely bad temper. The action of lifting the mac
hine, moreover, as she bore it across the threshold, had taken her straight back to the Upper Fifth. The Upper Fifth had bicycles, the Sixth looked down on them; and it was thus a dozen years at least since she had last mounted one. But cycling, they said, was like swimming—once learnt, never forgotten; and as she wobbled out at the gate Lesley sincerely hoped this was true.

  At that moment, however, she had no need to do anything but balance, for by a piece of supreme good fortune the wind, against which she could scarcely have pedalled a yard, was now more or less steady at her back; it blew her down Pig Lane like a scudding leaf or a scrap of paper. At the turn into the village she not unexpectedly fell off: but the mud was at least soft, and she zigzagged into the square plastered but unharmed.

  And now, across the mild glow of achievement, a doubt came troubling. The Coxes—did that mean the Coxes at the Post Office, or the Coxes next to the pub? Lesley put foot to ground and looked up through the rain from one set of windows to the other. Like all the rest of the village, they were dark: and standing astraddle over her mount Lesley swore like a trooper. And she had reason to swear: before Tom could be off she would have to hammer at doors, bawl explanations, knock into God knew how many thick heads the necessity and the errand: she would have to struggle back on foot and sit with Mrs. Walpole—sit with Florrie, perhaps—and wait and wait till the nurse arrived. All these things were good reasons for swearing: but the strongest reason of all was that she would not be doing any of them.

  ‘Blast the Coxes,’ thought Lesley, ‘I’d better go myself.’ Her foot, one instant ahead of her mind, had already returned to the pedal. She pressed down, wobbled forward, and let the wind blow her out of the village.

  That the errand was one of mercy could never have been guessed from her language; nor did an occasional forktongued flash tend to soothe. For though to be struck by lightning is an ancient—nay, a primeval—mode of death, to Lesley Frewen it was death doubly horrible, death whose second and sharper sting would be a three-line obituary, between a champion cow and a hundredth birthday, in that provincial foot-of-the-column, From All Quarters. Should judgment also visit the herd, she and the cow might even be lumped together, sharing their modest half-inch in a ration of two to one.… ‘During the same storm, a cow belonging to Mr. Horace Walpole—’

  “Blast Horace Walpole and blast all cows,” muttered Lesley impartially; and from a sudden smoothness in her motion knew that she was on the metalled quarter-mile between the bridge over the canal and the Wendover road. The wind was now less friendly, so that rain and sweat ran mingling in her eyes; Lesley bent over the handlebars, topped a short rise, and found the gradient in her favour. Still drawing freely on her vocabulary, she bowled downhill, turned sharply to the right, and fell off her machine at Miss Cook’s front door.

  Like everyone else, Miss Cook had gone to bed.

  The door had no knocker, but two electric bells. Lesley put a finger on each and held them there. On the slightest provocation—a minute’s delay, for example—she would probably have broken a window. (Sir Giles would have broken the door, and on less provocation still.) Almost immediately, however, and directly overhead, a sash rattled. Lesley looked up through the rain and saw a kind and sensible gargoyle lean suddenly forth.

  “Miss Cook?” asked Lesley. “I’ve come from the Walpoles’. They want you for Florrie.”

  “Who says so?” countered Miss Cook. “Florrie or her mother?”

  “Her mother.”

  With a gesture of assent the head withdrew; and both temper and strength having suddenly evaporated together, Lesley leant patiently against the wall and waited for something to happen. It happened almost at once: the door opened, a light shone, and Miss Cook with her skirt on stood beckoning in the hall.

  “Come in,” she said, “and bring your bicycle. I’m going to take the Morris.”

  Like Georgie Walpole half-an-hour earlier, Lesley walked dripping and blinking into the strange lady’s room. The bicycle was taken from her, she was told to sit, and obediently she did so. Meanwhile Miss Cook moved neatly about the room, dressing as she moved, and putting things together in a battered attaché-case. She then disappeared, with a word about the garage, and following as far as the door Lesley observed, in an incredibly short space of time, the rear end of a car protruding out of the dark. Cautious as a tortoise, it fidgeted its way out: then rain glittered in the lamps and a door swung open.

  “Get in,” said Miss Cook.

  Lesley did so, and jerky as her thoughts the car lurched forward. It wasn’t so bad. Within the circle of the hills, thunder still muttered: but the rain was abating, and they had only once to get out and wipe the windscreen. The greatest enemy was the gale, which, having blown Lesley there, seemed determined to prevent her getting back. But the old car laboured mightily, rattling louder than the thunder and tunnelling into the wind like an ancient mole in clayey soil. As a conversational background, however, its efforts were not happy, and they had covered nearly two-thirds of the distance before Miss Cook found a lull in which to ask her first question.

  “Did you see Florrie, Miss Frewen?”

  “No. But I heard her.”

  “Poor thing! Well, I hope this time she has better luck,” said Miss Cook. “Where’s your little boy all this while?”

  For the first time since leaving him Lesley remembered Patrick.

  “At home in the cottage, with Georgie Walpole. They’re both in the same bed, to keep each other company,” she explained; and against the next burst of thunder heard her companion shout something about Keating’s. It was their only attempt at conversation, for the racket had recommenced; but as they turned into Pig Lane Miss Cook gathered her forces for one last remark.

  Said Miss Cook, with a nod of her head towards the desolate universe—

  “Well, I must say, Miss Frewen, I never expected to see you here.”

  Part IV

  CHAPTER ONE

  As on every Wednesday afternoon, Lesley Frewen sat in the orchard and darned Pat’s shirts. Wash on Monday, air on Tuesday: at the Vicarage they left the mending till Thursday, but Lesley liked to get it out of the way. On the chair at her side lay a paper bag containing a quarter of a pound of chocolate almonds, which the Post Office now kept in stock for her along with Basildon Bond writing-paper and silk washing elastic. (Other people were beginning to buy them too, said Miss Cox: they hadn’t any smell to them.) From the other side of the fence came the constant low grunting of Walpole pigs, but otherwise all was so still that Lesley could hear Pat and the youngest Pomfret conversing afar under the pear-tree.

  “Gr-r-r—I’m a lion.” That was Pat, conservative as ever.

  “Well, I’m a bus—I’ll put you in my radiator.”

  “No, you can’t—this isn’t a stopping-place.”

  “Yes, I can—I’m marked Private.”

  There was a short pause.

  “Oh, well,” said the lion philosophically, “I’ll be a beetle.”

  Lesley heard them with pleasure, for most of the time they were off all day looking for motor bandits. The way they did it was to lie concealed outside road-houses and see that the same people got into cars as had previously got out of them; and though no bandits had actually been caught, enthusiasm as yet showed no sign of waning. To the recital of their exploits, however, neither Lesley nor Mrs. Pomfret lent a particularly sympathetic ear: for in the opinion of both it would have been much nicer and healthier to go on being lions.

  ‘But they’re growing up so!’ thought Lesley, helping herself to a chocolate almond. The nut crunched agreeably between her teeth; and suddenly out of the shadow walked Alice the cat, newly elegant after the weaning of her five kittens. She was bound for the back door, nor did the sight of company distract her from her course: with a casual nod, so to speak, she waved her tail and sauntered purposefully on.

  “Where’s Pincher?” called Lesley.

  Alice looked scornfully over her shoulder. There had once, it is true, been a ti
me when the sound of that name would have sent her flying into an apple-tree; but that was long ago, and the joke palled.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ thought Lesley (concealing nevertheless her chagrin), ‘it must be years since Alice has jumped!’ And she began idly to calculate how long they had had her. Alice! There had been a lamb called Alice as well, but that was in spring. Alice the cat dated from a summer—from the summer, in fact, when Florrie had her baby; and the youthful Gerald (he had been christened after the eldest son of Princess Mary) was now two years old.

  ‘Two years!’ thought Lesley. ‘And I’d been here more than a year already. Nearly four years.…’ And she looked vaguely round the orchard as though to see what had become of them.

  Well, there they were, at any rate in part. The grass was not yet a lawn, but there were some quite smooth patches: her two herbaceous borders, without actually blazing, at least gave out a glow. They had hollyhocks in them, lupins both blue and yellow, sunflowers, anchusas, a good deal of lavender, oriental poppies, phlox and tiger-lilies; so they would blaze all right in time. But the next bed she made—with the true gardener’s instinct her mind at once ranged ahead—was to be for roses.…

  Only chintzes first; for with the gardener there dwelt a housekeeper, and the two were occasionally at war. Well, chintzes first, then; and from the visionary Maréchal Niels Lesley’s eye came affectionately and thoughtfully to rest on the cottage itself. Everyone said it was perfect, but she knew better. One might just as well call Pat perfect, or the garden, when to the eye of understanding they were all three of them very little more than hopeful beginnings. From without, to be sure, the cottage was good, for behind the plaster there had been broad black timbers—no neat and superimposed zigzag, but the strong irregular pattern of upward heaving arms. That was good, that was very good, that was not to be bettered: but within! Without moving from her seat Lesley looked straight through the walls and saw her four spurious ladderbacks, once a collector’s triumph, now a daily reminder of the Tottenham Court Road. The fireplace, too, for instead of having it bricked she had temporarily lost her head to the quaintness of Dutch tiles. Well, that could be put right easily enough, as soon as she had the money; only curtains must come first, because even across the orchard the blowing pink-and-blue chintz showed lamentably faded.…