The Round Tower Page 5

  ‘Yes, Irene. I just met him in the shop a minute ago.’

  Vanessa always thought of the woman she had known from a small child as Irene Brett, not Auntie Irene. Susan called her Auntie, but she herself had stubbornly refused to call their neighbour Auntie, or her husband Uncle. She had even amazed her parents by going so far as to address Arthur Brett by his surname. When she was asked why, she said she didn’t like the name Arthur, she liked Brett, and so he had been Brett to her ever since.

  This familiarity had always incensed Irene Brett. She now sat looking at the rain-smeared windscreen, and she was again feeling annoyed that she could find nothing to say to this girl. She had always considered Vanessa a deep, withdrawn type of girl, and she felt now that she was indeed right about her being deep. She didn’t believe for a moment that she had met Angus Cotton by accident. This wasn’t the first time she had seen them together; a fortnight ago she had seen them both standing talking outside the Technical School. Now what would she want outside the Technical School? It was miles away from the Convent, and from Brampton Hill. She had felt for a long time that Jonathan and Jane were going to have trouble with this one. They weren’t going to be able to plan her life as they had done Susan’s. Anyway, perhaps they’d be satisfied in wangling one daughter into the fringes of the titled set. They’d never let up, those two, get there or die.

  Her thoughts, touching on the second main grievance of her life, gathered momentum and she became lost in her hate, and she started as the door opened and her husband took his seat, saying over his shoulder, ‘Don’t often see you in the town, Vanessa.’

  ‘No, I don’t often come down. But it’s Father’s birthday. I was getting him a present.’

  ‘It’s his birthday, is it?’

  ‘Yes, he’ll be fifty on Monday.’

  ‘Fifty! Well, well. Yes…yes, he will be fifty.’ He was talking as if to himself. When he got the car going he added, ‘Time doesn’t stand still; no, time doesn’t stand still.’

  There wasn’t another word spoken until they turned from Brampton Hill into the side road; then Vanessa said, ‘Just drop me at your gate, Brett, that’ll be all right.’

  ‘No, I’ll take you along.’

  ‘No, please. It’s eased off.’

  ‘All right, just as you say.’

  When she got out of the car she said, ‘Thanks for the lift, Brett. Goodnight, Irene.’

  They both said together, ‘Goodnight, Vanessa.’

  A few minutes later they went up the steps, through the glass-covered lobby and into the dark, panelled hall, and there, as Irene Brett took off her hat and coat, she remarked casually, ‘Well, what do you think of that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her standing talking to that Angus Cotton.’

  He hadn’t looked at her before, but now he turned round and faced her. Then after staring at her for a moment, he said, ‘Angus Cotton and Vanessa? Well, why shouldn’t she talk to him? They’ve known each other all their lives. I remember them playing together.’

  She threw up her head, closed her eyes and turned from him, and as she went into the high-ceilinged, old-fashioned looking drawing room, she said, ‘Your simplicity makes me want to scream. It must be all of ten years or more since Jonathan put a stop to that. But of course you wouldn’t remember anything so mundane.’

  She turned round now and watched him coming slowly into the room, and when he came near her she said, ‘I saw them together outside the Technical School only a few days ago. And that’s not the only time.’

  Arthur Brett surveyed his wife. There were times when he had to screw his eyes up to get her into focus, when he had to remind himself that he had lived with this woman for twenty-five years, that she wasn’t a stranger whom he didn’t know. He said quietly to her, ‘What are you trying to make of it?’

  ‘What am I trying to make of it?’ She stressed the I. ‘I’m only making a statement. What do you think would be Jonathan’s reaction if he knew that she was talking to that fellow in the main street?’

  ‘I don’t know, Irene; and I don’t care very much what Jonathan would think. But I would think it strange if those two met in the street and passed each other. And whether Jonathan stopped them playing together years ago or not, I can recall when Angus was a big lump of a lad and Vanessa was seven or eight or more seeing them together in the garden.’

  ‘Well, you’ve seen something that nobody else saw, because if either Jonathan or Jane had known there’d have been an abrupt stop put to it. And I think a stop should be put to this if they don’t want consequences…That fellow! He’s like a great big Irish navvy. I think at least Jane should know about it.’

  ‘And I think,’ there was a hardness in Arthur Brett’s usually soft, lazy-sounding voice now, ‘I think you should mind your own business and not take it out of Jane through Vanessa.’

  ‘Take it out of…! What are you talking about? What are you insinuating?’

  ‘Just that you’re not too pleased, are you, that Jane is getting Susan married into the Braintrees. But you can’t do much about that so you intend to make her uneasy through Vanessa. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘How dare you! How dare you suggest such a thing. You’re making me out to be a vile, mischief-making…’

  ‘I’m not making you out to be anything but what you are, Irene.’ As he turned from her she hissed at him under her breath, ‘Don’t leave me like that, Arthur. Listen. Listen to me. Do you hear?’

  Not until he was at the room door did he turn, and then he said quietly, ‘I’m not going to listen to you, Irene; I don’t happen to be a member of one of your committees, nor a fellow councillor whom you are rating, nor yet a delinquent up before you on the bench. There are a number of things you can’t make me do, Irene, and that’s one of them; listen to you.’

  When he closed the door behind him and she was alone she stood with her two hands pressed tightly over her thin lips. She could understand why women committed murder. He hadn’t the gumption he was born with, yet he was inflexible about what he considered his ideals, his principles. Oh, God, how had she of all people got stuck with someone like him! She knew the answer to this, but she had long refused to think about it.

  She now walked to the couch, and with her hands still in the same position she sat herself down. She did not lean back against the couch for support, her thin body remained erect. She had a good figure and she looked after it, as she did her complexion and her hair. She was looked upon as a smart woman, but no-one had ever said she was good-looking or pretty…or charming, but she was often referred to as clever and businesslike. She was a committee woman and could get things done, at least outside her own house and family.

  After a moment she lowered her hands to her lap and her eyes moved slowly around the room. She almost hated this room, this whole house, as much as she did its owner. The place had never been redecorated inside or out for years, yet he had only to sell two or three acres of land and the whole place could be renovated. Even if he could have been persuaded to sell some of the furniture, some of these ugly monstrosities, this would have gone a long way towards lightening and refurnishing the house.

  There was a Queen Anne secretaire on the landing for which he had been offered three hundred pounds, and in a corner, over there, in the recess that hardly saw the light of day, was a William and Mary side table. There was a very old mahogany commode in Colin’s bedroom that would be worth a small fortune at Sotheby’s. There were French chairs dotted all over the house, the tapestry so threadbare the wadding was sticking through, and there was no hope of having them re-covered; he wouldn’t even allow her to put loose covers on them. There wasn’t one of the twelve rooms in the house that didn’t hold a piece of furniture that would bring in hundreds, but because his grandfather had furnished this house for his bride in 1892 he thought that was sufficient reason why it should remain as it was for his life. She knew that he had even made a will to the effect that all the furniture couldn’t be sold
on his death; certain pieces he had willed to the three boys with a request that they would think twice before parting with them. He had dared to tell her that he was going to do this. Spite. Spite, that’s what it was, and all because she wouldn’t supply him with his needs. His needs indeed! If he came into her room again she would tear his face off. Only last week he had dared to try to get into bed with her. Why? Why? When he cared as little for her as she did for him. She had warded him off for years with the excuse that she didn’t want any more children, and nothing was safe…And nothing was safe. Michael, her youngest son, was only six years old. Fancy, on the verge of forty having become pregnant again! The shame of it almost killed her. She had hardly been able to face the boys…Boys? Colin had been almost a man then: eighteen, and Paul thirteen.

  And last night he had dared to try it on again, even knowing how she felt about him. Again she had to ask herself, Why?

  Upstairs in his room, Arthur Brett was asking himself the same question. Why? Why, when their love was dead, so dead you forgot when it had died, did you revisit the corpse? Why did you want to put your arms around it, put your mouth on its mouth, press your body into it, work over it, struggle with it, even knowing it wouldn’t move? It never had moved during all the years of their married life. The act had been an act of sufferance on her side and had brought him humiliation; yet he suffered humiliation a thousandfold in going to her and begging for his body’s easement. Why? Why didn’t he go down to Bog’s End? He could find ease in Bog’s End. He could reel off the names of at least eight men he knew on his floor who visited Bog’s End regularly. He had just to say one word to Will Hobson and he’d be fixed up. The times he had made up his mind to say that word to Will. He would be determined when he had left the house in the morning that the first thing he’d do would be to see Will and put an end to this torment. He always got as far as seeing Will but he never mentioned Bog’s End. Again, why?

  Perhaps it was because at these moments he would remember that but for his grandfather’s taste for high living, and his father’s easygoingness and lack of business sense, he might today be Will Hodson’s employer, because the firm of Affleck and Tate had once belonged to the Bretts. His grandmother’s name was Affleck. She had brought the business—much smaller than it was now admittedly, but nevertheless a thriving concern—she had brought it to one Arthur Brett, a handsome, loving, carefree individual, who had a taste for good furniture, good wine, entertaining, and horses, which tastes he indulged right up to the middle of the thirties. He died at the table drinking wine; he actually died in toasting his white-haired and still beautiful wife. It was all very romantic.

  He could remember the night his grandfather died as if it was yesterday. It was a beautiful summer evening, and he was home from boarding school. He was sitting at his grandmother’s right hand and he was looking at her profile as she gazed down the table towards her big, corpulent, but still handsome husband. When he fell forward over the table she gave a thin high scream and then became quite still. Three days later she herself died. His father said that was as it should be; they both had enjoyed life and one couldn’t exist without the other.

  His own father had almost repeated the pattern in his approach to life and way of living. It wasn’t until Arthur himself was seventeen that he realised that Affleck and Tate was no longer their firm, that the shares had been sold gradually until their holdings were now non-existent, and that all that remained of the once-affluent Afflecks was the house and land; and, of course, the furniture, the furniture which his father wouldn’t part with even to keep up some kind of appearance in the town.

  He was nineteen when he met Irene Bailey, and she was a year older than him, and he hadn’t thought he was deceiving her by not explaining the financial position in which his parents stood. After all, thinking socially, she was of little consequence in town. Her father was a schoolteacher, elementary. She was attractive and vivacious, and he had fallen deeply in love with her, besides which he was full of admiration for her. She hadn’t got to the high school, but she had supplemented her elementary education by going to night school. She could talk intelligently; she only had to have a smattering of any subject and she could give the impression of knowledge.

  He knew she was flattered by his attention; also that she was impressed by the big house, and the fact that he was the only son of the Bretts, and that they were Affleck and Tate.

  He had told her casually before they were married that they were no longer Affleck and Tate, and he imagined at the time that it had meant nothing to her, but he knew now that she married him because she thought she could do something with him, restore him to the lost eminence of his grandfather, if not in the works, then along other lines.

  But he was not cut out for other lines; except perhaps he could have been manager of Affleck and Tate. Oh yes, yes, he could have been manager, and he should have been manager because, after all, Affleck and Tate was in his blood so to speak. Yet all this had been forgotten when a certain Jonathan Ratcliffe, whom incidentally he had befriended when he first came into the drawing office, inveigled himself into the good books of the board, by what method he had never been able to find out, and he had been too proud to enquire. Of course there had been the usual tittle-tattle about sucking up; but any move upwards brought this reaction. Anyway, Jonathan had gone from the drawing office to the building across the yard, and there had become assistant to the undermanager, Rowland. Yet he must be fair. That was likely as far as he would have got if both Bowden, who was manager at the time, and Rowland, who took his place, hadn’t died within the next five years.

  Life was odd. He went to the window and looked out through the leafless trees. There, in the distance, he could see Jonathan’s house. It was lit up. They were entertaining again, likely Susan’s fiancé’s people. He liked entertaining did Jonathan; it was a mark of his power. They were rarely asked next door, because he embarrassed Jonathan. He also knew he angered him. He had still things Jonathan wanted, the river frontage, for instance, and the land, all of it. The land. Oh, yes, all of the land.

  He turned from the window and went out of the room and was crossing the landing when his eldest son, Colin, came up the stairs. They blinked at each other over the distance and Colin’s look said, ‘You two been at it again?’

  Arthur knew that his eldest son saw him through the eyes of his mother. This didn’t boost one’s morale. Still, he had the consolation of Paul. Paul was different. Paul was the replica of himself, quiet, easygoing; clever in a way. But what was the use of being clever in a way, you had to be clever in all ways. He doubted somehow if Paul would be any different from himself in this way either. He had no push. He wanted to meander through life like they both used to meander at night through the wood, then sit in the old summer house looking at the river and talk, or be silent, and sometimes laugh. Paul was the only real companion he’d had in his life. Irene had made certain of Colin and was making certain of Michael, but she could do nothing with Paul. Paul had stuck to him as if he was his own sweat.

  Irene had made no fuss about Paul going to college. He knew that she had welcomed the fact that the other part of her husband would be out of the house. She was at her worst during the holidays, but the holidays were the only thing he lived for. And this year they would be short, at least for him, because Paul was going abroad on a walking tour. He had wanted him to go along, and if there had only been the two of them he would have jumped at the chance, but he couldn’t see himself being one of a party of four exuberant youths.

  After his bath he went straight to bed. This wouldn’t interfere with the routine of the house; he rarely had anything to eat after teatime. Later on, when they had all retired, he might go down to the kitchen and make himself a hot drink and sit by the stove. He liked sitting by the stove. He had sat a lot in the kitchen when he was a boy; it had been a different stove then. The old one had exploded one day and the cook had fainted. She had been a big old Irish woman, and when she came round the first
thing she said was, ‘Oh God, have I been blown into heaven?’ And they had all laughed and laughed. They had laughed a lot in this house at one time. Everybody in it had been compatible; there had been no in-law trouble when he was young. His mother and father had lived all their married life with his grandfather and grandmother, and he himself had brought his bride to live with his mother and father. It was from then that the laughter had eased off.

  It was around ten o’clock when he heard Irene come upstairs and go to her room. She did not look in on him. That, too, had ceased a long time ago. He lay for a time, his book lying on top of the quilt, his two hands flat on the open pages, and he staring down at them as he asked himself questions to which there were no answers. When eleven o’clock struck he switched the light off and got up and opened the curtains. He was surprised to see the moon shining brightly. The rain had stopped and the tangled garden below him and the long stretch of wood beyond looked like an enchanted forest. He pulled his dressing gown about him and sat on the broad window sill, with his knees up under his chin. He could still do that for he wasn’t pot-bellied. There was no movement outside, no wind; March was in but she was withholding her signs. It could have been a June evening except that it would be cold out. He had always wanted to write poetry; there seemed such a lot of poetry locked up inside of him. He envied people who could write. There must be great easement in writing, pouring out your feelings and being able to read them back to yourself. Not only must it be alleviative, but also satisfactory. That’s why he missed Paul so much. Paul, in a way, had been his form of release, his outlet.

  As he stared at the treetops his eyes were caught by a movement down below to the left of him. There was a shadow crossing the open space, which was the north side of the Ratcliffes’ garden. There were no open spaces in his garden. It took gardeners to create open spaces, and he himself was no gardener for the simple reason he hated to cut anything down, even weeds. Killing in any way was abhorrent to him, but he didn’t give this reason for the neglect of his garden. He just said that he was no gardener, also that he was innately lazy.