The Oracles Read online

  Her plans were, as usual, sensible and economical. Very little had to be bought, since The Rowans was already well stocked with everything that they could ever want. They could lock the door of the old house any morning and sleep that night in the new one, without chaos or exhaustion. Only their personal possessions, clothes and books, need be transferred before the move, and these she meant to take over daily, in instalments. Sam Dale would transport for her, sometime or other, a few large pieces of furniture, but she meant to sell most of the things at Bay Hill, since the Rowans had a better dining-room table, more capacious wardrobes, and a much handsomer three-piece suite.

  Dickie passively waited to be told when they should go. The old house looked emptier every day and the new one, whenever he was obliged to go there, looked fuller. He therefore supposed that the date must be drawing near. Upon a Saturday afternoon he was instructed to bring over all their gramophone records; Christina had taken the cabinet that morning in Mrs. Selby’s station wagon. They had a great many; he had quite forgotten how many. Instead of stacking them in the car and getting off immediately after lunch, he wasted time in looking them over and wondering why he had neglected certain old favourites for so long. He even played a couple of them over, for he would not have another chance to do so until Dale’s truck transported the radiogram. He felt slightly aggrieved to think that some days must elapse before he could play them again, although he had neglected them for months.

  At last he pulled himself together and carried them all out to the car, wishing that there were not so many. Christina could have thrown half of them away for all he cared. She had, in fact, thrown out a good many because they were old and scratched, and with them one called Edward! Edward! which was in perfect condition but which she never wished to hear again.

  When he reached The Rowans she was upstairs, putting clothes away. She heard him arrive and shrugged her shoulders resignedly, for she knew why he was so late. If she asked him to bring over books he just wasted his time, sitting about and reading them instead of putting them away on shelves.

  He carried a first stack of records into the study, and there he got a surprise. Pethwick’s gift stood in the window, gleaming in the afternoon sun, mysteriously animated, redeeming all the promises with which his memory had enriched it. She must have sent for it and put it there to please him.

  Touched and grateful, he walked round it, viewing it again from every angle. The glass had been carefully dusted and polished. Upon his desk he found a small bottle of surgical spirit which she must have got for the purpose.

  For some time now he had been aware of her deliberate attempts at reconciliation, and he had been grieved at his own inability to respond to them. They could not restore the past; they had come too late. He had thanked her and had known that his thanks were not what she wanted. Now, however, he was so much delighted that he felt an impulse which could be expressed without any humbug. He bounded upstairs and found her putting clothes away in a large mahogany wardrobe.

  ‘Tina!’ he said, pulling her to him and kissing her warmly. ‘I’ve just been into my study. You are a darling girl!’

  ‘I thought it would be a surprise,’ she said.

  ‘It was. And so beautifully dusted.’

  ‘It looks nice there, dosn’t it? I’ve got to like it, now I’m used to it. I’ve got to like it very much.’

  Poor girl! he thought. What a raw deal she was getting! With another man she might have been so much happier, a man who appreciated her many virtues better, and cherished her, and made love to her. He had not done so for a long, long time: not since some night before that storm which had marked the beginning of all their troubles. Even when they ceased to quarrel a tacit uneasiness had held them apart. He had not known how to end it.

  Such a state of things could not go on for ever. Their marriage might have been a disastrous mistake for both, but they were young, they were normal, and they could not spend the rest of their lives in a state of courteous celibacy. He must soon do something about it, yet he half dreaded an intimacy which might only reveal the measure of distance between them. He must try, he thought, to make her happy, to give her a good time. That used not to be difficult.

  He watched her for a while as she took clothes from a trunk, folded them neatly, and stowed them in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. Then he looked round the room, which had been his parents’ bedroom in the old days. Since his mother’s death it had been unoccupied, for his father had moved into a single room on the garden side of the house.

  Everything reminded him of his boyhood. Upon the dressing-table was a small china tree on which his mother had hung her rings. The same pieces of old English pottery decorated the mantelpiece: Wesley preaching to the blacks, and Grace Darling rowing towards a rose-embowered lighthouse. Above them was a picture of two Russians in fur caps driving over the snow in a sleigh. The large double bed was bare and heaped with pillows and bolsters in clean striped ticking. But there was plenty of linen for it in his mother’s well-stocked cupboards—beautiful linen, so Christina said, the envy of every other woman in East Head. She loved all these good, solid things. Perhaps they might be of some consolation to her.

  She continued to move steadily between the trunk and the wardrobe. He turned again to watch her, noticing the graceful stoop and curve of her body as she bent to lift the clothes out, her young energy, the swing forward of her bright hair over face and neck.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked suddenly.

  She glanced up at him in surprise. This was not a question which he often asked nowadays.

  ‘Oh, lots of things,’ she said. ‘So many things at once that they really add up to nothing.’

  ‘Poor Tina! You’ll be glad when this move is over.’

  ‘Shan’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I think so. I dare say we’ll both feel better. I … I don’t quite know what’s got into me lately.…’

  Yes you do, she thought, as she began on the next drawer, which was to hold his shirts. You’ve been thinking it’s hell to be married to me. And now you’re thinking that perhaps it isn’t so bad after all. You’re right. We couldn’t hurt each other worse than we have, so perhaps it will be better.

  She half smiled to herself and went on with her work.

  Her smile and her silence took him aback; they were almost like a challenge. After all, she was his, and had no business to be mysterious when the gist of his complaint was that he understood her far too well. Disturbed, he continued to watch her, and told himself that she was really a most beautiful girl. It was ridiculous to go on like this.

  Christina, aware of his scrutiny although she did not look round, knew what was happening to him. She could not decide whether she was glad or sorry. She ought to welcome any sign that she still had power with him, but her heart was heavy. She had hoped for something else, for some different kind of understanding, when she put that surprise for him in his study. This, the renewal of desire, would have been bound to take place sooner or later; she would have preferred to feel that they were completely friends again before it did.

  ‘This will be our room, I suppose?’ he said at last.

  He went across to the bed and thumped the box-spring mattress, which was, like everything else in The Rowans, the best of its kind.

  ‘Come along, Tina!’ he exclaimed, almost impatiently. ‘Let’s see if it’s comfortable.’

  She turned and stared at him. Did he mean now? His face, flushed, a little blurred and blunted, left her in no doubt about it. Oh well, she thought, going to him. It’s one way of getting a man back. The only way, so they say. I must try to make him happy.

  She supposed that she had when, after murmured words of gratitude, they fell apart again on that enormous bed. It had been all right, too much so, she thought, for people who were not really friends. And now they were once more thinking their separate thoughts. She mused upon a possibility which had not, it seemed, occurred to him: this reckless, unpremeditated embrace might
have given them another child, begotten in their new house before they had even left the old one.

  She had no objection. She wanted several babies, and she hoped that the next would be a little girl, a companion to whom she could talk, a little daughter whom she would call Anne. She did not want another boy, doomed to grow up into an incomprehensible, unhappy man. Always wanting something, they don’t know what, she thought, and it wouldn’t do them much good if they did, for it would turn out to be something quite out of this world, something nobody has ever had. Men! Oh, I wouldn’t be a man for anything. Poor things, they’re never contented with what they do; they’re always thinking it might be better. Because they can never do anything so wonderful as have a baby. No. Not all the greatest discoveries and inventions and art and religion and everything, all the things they do, can be so wonderful as a perfect live human being. We know we just couldn’t do better when we’ve had a baby, which we do with hardly any trouble. Yes, and everybody praises us and congratulates us; while if a man wants to do something perfectly wonderful everybody laughs at him.

  She turned to look at Dickie. His face was pale now, remote and grave. He is thinking about death, she surmised, and how soon we shall die.

  He was. He had begun by remembering their honeymoon, and the folds of their mosquito curtain, and the racket the Italians kicked up in the street all night, under the hotel windows, shouting and laughing and starting up motor bicycles. From that his mind had leapt forward to the last time, years ahead; they would not know it to be the last, perhaps, but there would be one. On this bed? In this house? The abode of bodies doomed to die.…

  *

  ‘Yoohoo! Christie! Yoohoo!’

  A loud hooting from the hall shattered the quiet of the house. Christina jumped up with a startled cry.

  ‘That’s Allie!’ she said. ‘I must go down or she’ll be coming up. She’s been wheeling Bobbins out with her Nancy and she said she’d bring him here at four o’clock.’

  Allie had brought the babies and the perambulator into the hall. She stood there and shouted and wondered why Christina did not come. Just as she was upon the point of exploring upstairs, her friend came running down, full of apologies, a little dishevelled, and making no attempt to explain why she had been so long.

  ‘Has Bobbins been good?’ she cried. ‘Hullo? Hullo? You, Bobbins? Have you been good? Have you?’

  What, wondered Allie, can she have been up to? She looks funny. If it was anybody but Christie I’d think …

  ‘Are you going to keep this old wall-paper?’ she asked, looking round the hall. ‘Awfully old-fashioned, isn’t it?’

  ‘Wall-paper is coming in again,’ snapped Christina.

  Dickie now appeared on the landing. He came down the stairs looking rather sheepish, nodded to Allie and went out to the car for more records. The situation became clearer to Allie. She grinned and turned away to inspect the Pattison umbrella-stand, which was at present empty, since the umbrellas would not arrive until the family did.

  That grin annoyed Christina. Allie could be dreadfully common sometimes. Had it been herself she would probably have made no secret of the strange way in which she had spent the afternoon; she would have retailed the whole episode with much giggling. Nor would she hold her tongue about this discovery. She would make a tale of it, to some of the younger matrons: Yes, really! At four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. No wonder we all sighed for Dickie! I always say Christie was born lucky.

  For the first time in her life Christina began to comprehend a little of Dickie’s dislike for East Head. She felt an impulse to get away and live among people who did not inevitably know everything about their neighbours. This sort of thing would not be so likely to happen if they could select their friends and if intimacy was not simply imposed by habit. What had she, after all, in common with Allie? Why were they supposed to be such close friends? Propinquity had been the chief agent; they had some affection for one another but very little respect. In another place she might find a companion who was superior to Allie, whom she could admire, perhaps, and even imitate to a certain extent. There was nobody of that description in East Head, but there might be somebody somewhere else.

  Allie was peering about into the rooms and taking notice of Christina’s alterations. Presently she went into the study.

  ‘My goodness!’ she cried. ‘What on earth …?’

  ‘Mr. Swann did it,’ explained Christina, joining her. ‘Mr. Pethwick gave it to Dickie.’

  ‘What’s it supposed to be, then?’

  ‘Nothing. Just what it is.’

  Allie shook her head and turned up her eyes.

  ‘Weird,’ she commented. ‘Still and all, I like it better than the one we’ve got in the Pavilion.’

  ‘Yes. I wish they’d take it away.’

  ‘My dear! Haven’t you heard? It’s never going away. It’s there for good. We’re going to buy it.’

  ‘What! Buy it? Who’s going to?’

  ‘Town’s going to. With the war-memorial money.’

  ‘Allie! No! They can’t! They can’t!’

  ‘They’re going to. Aren’t they crackers?’

  ‘But who? The committee? Why, Dickie’s on the committee! He’s never said a word about it.’

  ‘So’s Mummie on the committee, and she ought to know. You know how she goes on about the younger generation?’

  ‘But nobody else! Nobody else.…’

  ‘Oh yes, lots of people are very keen. Mr. Dale says it will give a big boost to East Head to be so modern. And then Sir Gregory interfering got into a lot of people’s hair.’

  ‘Oh dear! I’ve been so busy. I’ve hardly seen anyone these last few days. I’d no idea …’

  ‘Funny Dickie never mentioned it. Mummie says he’s written to Mr. Swann about it, to ask if it’s for sale. The committee asked Dickie to write.’

  ‘When? When?’ cried Christina. ‘Oh, I remember Wednesday. They met on Wednesday. But … but what does Mr. Swann say, then?’

  ‘Why ask me? You’re married to a member of the committee. You ought to know more about it than I do.’

  ‘Mr. Swann mayn’t realise … mayn’t know … what it is.’

  ‘Ha! ha! ha! That’s good. Even Mr. Swann!’

  Christina had rushed off to meet Dickie, who was coming up the path with an armfull of records.

  ‘Dickie! Dickie! What’s this about the town buying that thing in the Pavilion? Is it true?’

  ‘It’s been proposed,’ said Dickie. ‘But I don’t know if it will go through. I haven’t heard from Swann yet.’

  ‘But he can’t. You mustn’t. It must be stopped. You don’t like it yourself, Dickie. You know you don’t.’

  ‘My dear Tina, I can’t prevent the rest of the committee from buying what they want.’

  ‘You could. You stopped them buying the portrait.’

  ‘I had grounds. But this is a work of art.…’

  ‘Not it’s not. It’s rubbish! Ridiculous rubbish.’

  ‘If you want these records brought in you must please let me get on with it.’

  She stood aside and let him go on to the house.

  The shock quite confused her. She had been so busy lately that she had seen few people and heard very little news. Such an item would not, in any case, have excited great interest in her circle, and nobody had thought of mentioning it. They naturally supposed that Dickie had done so. She had believed all danger to be at an end; weeks had gone by without any discovery or exposure, and Swann’s effects were shortly to be removed to Coombe Bassett. Frank Archer was helping him to find a house there. Now it was upon them.

  And Mr. Swann, she thought, when he gets that letter won’t know what Dickie is talking about. He’ll suppose it’s the statue he really did. He may say yes. He doesn’t know about that Thing, that wicked dangerous Thing!

  She knew what it really was, yet she feared and hated it so much, it had been the agent of such double dealing, that she almost felt it to be deliberately
malign. Ever since it appeared it had worked on people, causing them to deceive themselves and each other, to quarrel, to lie, to desert one another, to pile betrayal upon betrayal. She was sure that some discovery of the truth had caused Martha to fly, leaving her friends in the lurch. Conrad Swann would inevitably suffer when it all came out, as it was now bound to do. Everybody would laugh at him and nobody would buy his work any more. His other supporters, Dickie, Nigel Meadowes, would, unawares, do him a great injury. Good, innocent citizens, like Mrs. Hughes, would be blamed for making a laughing-stock of their town. Several people had undoubtedly done wrong, but she herself was worse than any, for she could have prevented the whole calamity had she spoken in time. She could have stopped the exhibition. By her silence she had brought this trouble upon everybody and Dickie would never forgive her.

  For a moment she glanced at the fact that she need not be involved. She could hold her tongue, allow things to take their course, and nobody need ever know that she had been to blame. But that would be to abandon all of them—Swann, Dickie, Mrs. Hughes—to a disaster which might still be prevented. If Swann were warned, he could turn down the offer, and the whole mistake might be hushed up.

  Dickie would never forgive her if he knew. She could hold her tongue, but in that case she was not sure that she would ever be able to forgive herself. She felt quite unable to decide which was the worse alternative.

  When he came out of the house again she was still standing on the path where he had left her. He was looking rather black; that she should follow up their reconciliation with a fresh squabble over Swann augured badly for the future. She would seem to have learnt nothing.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she demanded. ‘Why did you say nothing about it?’

  ‘Because,’ he said coldly, ‘it’s not a subject upon which we can ever agree, is it? We’ve found that out by experience. We can’t discuss it without getting angry, so we’d much better not discuss it, I think.’