Taken At The Flood

It was good to be out of the Wrens and a free woman again, although she had really enjoyed her overseas service very much. The work had been reasonably interesting, there had been parties, plenty of fun, but there had also been the irksomeness of routine and the feeling of being herded together with her companions which had sometimes made her feel desperately anxious to escape.

It was then, during the long scorching summer out East, that she had thought so longingly of Warmsley Vale and the shabby cool pleasant house, and of dear Mums.

Lynn both loved her mother and was irritated by her. Far away from home, she had loved her still and had forgotten the irritation, or remembered it only with an additional homesick pang. Darling Mums, so completely maddening! What she would not have given to have heard Mums enunciate one cliché in her sweet complaining voice. Oh, to be at home again and never, never to have to leave home again!

And now here she was, out of the Service, free, and back at the White House. She had been back three days. And already a curious dissatisfied restlessness was creeping over her. It was all the same—almost too much all the same—the house and Mums and Rowley and the farm and the family. The thing that was different and that ought not to be different was herself…

‘Darling…’ Mrs Marchmont’s thin cry came up the stairs. ‘Shall I bring my girl a nice tray in bed?’

Lynn called out sharply:

‘Of course not. I’m coming down.’

‘And why,’ she thought, ‘has Mums got to say “my girl”. It’s so silly!’

She ran downstairs and entered the dining-room. It was not a very good breakfast. Already Lynn was realizing the undue proportion of time and interest taken by the search for food. Except for a rather unreliable woman who came four mornings a week, Mrs Marchmont was alone in the house, struggling with cooking and cleaning. She had been nearly forty when Lynn was born and her health was not good. Also Lynn realized with some dismay how their financial position had changed. The small but adequate fixed income which had kept them going comfortably before the war was now almost halved by taxation. Rates, expenses, wages had all gone up.

‘Oh! brave new world,’ thought Lynn grimly. Her eyes rested lightly on the columns of the daily paper. ‘Ex-W.A.A.F. seeks post where initiative and drive will be appreciated.’ ‘Former W.R.E.N. seeks post where organizing ability and authority are needed.’

Enterprise, initiative, command, those were the commodities offered. But what was wanted? People who could cook and clean, or write decent shorthand. Plodding people who knew a routine and could give good service.

Well, it didn’t affect her. Her way ahead lay clear. Marriage to her cousin Rowley Cloade. They had got engaged seven years ago, just before the outbreak of war. Almost as long as she could remember, she had meant to marry Rowley. His choice of a farming life had been acquiesced in readily by her. A good life—not exciting perhaps, and with plenty of hard work, but they both loved the open air and the care of animals.

Not that their prospects were quite what they had been—Uncle Gordon had always promised…

Mrs Marchmont’s voice broke in plaintively apposite:

‘It’s been the most dreadful blow to us all, Lynn darling, as I wrote you. Gordon had only been in England two days. We hadn’t even seen him. If only he hadn’t stayed in London. If he’d come straight down here.’

‘Yes, if only…’

Far away, Lynn had been shocked and grieved by the news of her uncle’s death, but the true significance of it was only now beginning to come home to her.

For as long as she could remember, her life, all their lives, had been dominated by Gordon Cloade. The rich, childless man had taken all his relatives completely under his wing.

Even Rowley… Rowley and his friend Johnnie Vavasour had started in partnership on the farm. Their capital was small, but they had been full of hope and energy. And Gordon Cloade had approved.

To her he had said more.

‘You can’t get anywhere in farming without capital. But the first thing to find out is whether these boys have really got the will and the energy to make a go of it. If I set them up now, I wouldn’t know that—maybe for years. If they’ve got the right stuff in them, if I’m satisfied that their side of it is all right, well then, Lynn, you needn’t worry. I’ll finance them on the proper scale. So don’t think badly of your prospects, my girl. You’re just the wife Rowley needs. But keep what I’ve told you under your hat.’

Well, she had done that, but Rowley himself had sensed his uncle’s benevolent interest. It was up to him to prove to the old boy that Rowley and Johnnie were a good investment for money.

Yes, they had all depended on Gordon Cloade. Not that any of the family had been spongers or idlers. Jeremy Cloade was senior partner in a firm of solicitors, Lionel Cloade was in practice as a doctor.

But behind the workaday life was the comforting assurance of money in the background. There was never any need to stint or to save. The future was assured. Gordon Cloade, a childless widower, would see to that. He had told them all, more than once, that that was so.

His widowed sister, Adela Marchmont, had stayed on at the White House when she might, perhaps, have moved into a smaller, more labour-saving house. Lynn went to first-class schools. If the war had not come, she would have been able to take any kind of expensive training she had pleased. Cheques from Uncle Gordon flowed in with comfortable regularity to provide little luxuries.

Everything had been so settled, so secure. And then had come Gordon Cloade’s wholly unexpected marriage.

‘Of course, darling,’ Adela went on, ‘we were all flabbergasted. If there was one thing that seemed quite certain, it was that Gordon would never marry again. It wasn’t, you see, as though he hadn’t got plenty of family ties.’

Yes, thought Lynn, plenty of family. Sometimes, possibly, rather too much family?

‘He was so kind always,’ went on Mrs Marchmont. ‘Though perhaps just a weeny bit tyrannical on occasions. He never liked the habit of dining off a polished table. Always insisted on my sticking to the old-fashioned tablecloths. In fact, he sent me the most beautiful Venetian lace ones when he was in Italy.’

‘It certainly paid to fall in with his wishes,’ said Lynn dryly. She added with some curiosity, ‘How did he meet this—second wife? You never told me in your letters.’

‘Oh, my dear, on some boat or plane or other. Coming from South America to New York, I believe. After all those years! And after all those secretaries and typists and housekeepers and everything.’

Lynn smiled. Ever since she could remember, Gordon Cloade’s secretaries, housekeepers and office staff had been subjected to the closest scrutiny and suspicion.

She asked curiously, ‘She’s good-looking, I suppose?’

‘Well, dear,’ said Adela, ‘I think myself she has rather a silly face.’

‘You’re not a man, Mums!’

‘Of course,’ Mrs Marchmont went on, ‘the poor girl was blitzed and had shock from blast and was really frightfully ill and all that, and it’s my opinion she’s never really quite recovered. She’s a mass of nerves, if you know what I mean. And really, sometimes, she looks quite half-witted. I don’t feel she could ever have made much of a companion for poor Gordon.’

Lynn smiled. She doubted whether Gordon Cloade had chosen to marry a woman years younger than himself for her intellectual companionship.

‘And then, dear,’ Mrs Marchmont lowered her voice, ‘I hate to say it, but of course she’s not a lady!’

‘What an expression, Mums! What does that matter nowadays?’

‘It still matters in the country, dear,’ said Adela placidly. ‘I simply mean that she isn’t exactly one of us!’

‘Poor little devil!’

‘Really, Lynn, I don’t know what you mean. We have all been most careful to be kind and polite and to welcome her amongst us for Gordon’s sake.’

‘She’s at Furrowbank, then?’ Lynn asked curiously.

‘Yes, naturally. Where else was there for her to go when she came out of the nursing home? The doctors said she must be out of London. She’s at Furrowbank with her brother.’

‘What’s he like?’ Lynn asked.

‘A dreadful young man!’ Mrs Marchmont paused, and then added with a good deal of intensity: ‘Rude.’

A momentary flicker of sympathy crossed Lynn’s mind. She thought: ‘I bet I’d be rude in his place!’

She asked: ‘What’s his name?’

‘Hunter. David Hunter. Irish, I believe. Of course they are not people one has ever heard of. She was a widow—a Mrs Underhay. One doesn’t wish to be uncharitable, but one can’t help asking oneself—what kind of a widow would be likely to be travelling about from South America in wartime? One can’t help feeling, you know, that she was just looking for a rich husband.’

‘In which case, she didn’t look in vain,’ remarked Lynn.

Mrs Marchmont sighed.

‘It seems so extraordinary. Gordon was such a shrewd man always. And it wasn’t, I mean, that women hadn’t tried. That last secretary but one, for instance. Really quite blatant. She was very efficient, I believe, but he had to get rid of her.’

Lynn said vaguely: ‘I suppose there’s always a Waterloo.’

‘Sixty-two,’ said Mrs Marchmont. ‘A very dangerous age. And a war, I imagine, is unsettling. But I can’t tell you what a shock it was when we got his letter from New York.’

‘What did it say exactly?’

‘He wrote to Frances—I really can’t think why. Perhaps he imagined that owing to her upbringing she might be more sympathetic. He said that we’d probably be surprised to hear that he was married. It had all been rather sudden, but he was sure we should all soon grow very fond of Rosaleen (such a very theatrical name, don’t you think, dear? I mean definitely rather bogus). She had had a very sad life, he said, and had gone through a lot although she was so young. Really it was wonderful the plucky way she had stood up to life.’

‘Quite a well-known gambit,’ murmured Lynn.

‘Oh, I know. I do agree. One has heard it so many times. But one would really think that Gordon with all his experience—still, there it is. She has the most enormous eyes—dark blue and what they call put in with a smutty finger.’

‘Attractive?’

‘Oh, yes, she is certainly very pretty. It’s not the kind of prettiness I admire.’

‘It never is,’ said Lynn with a wry smile.

‘No, dear. Really, men—but well, there’s no accounting for men! Even the most well-balanced of them do the most incredibly foolish things! Gordon’s letter went on to say that we mustn’t think for a moment that this would mean any loosening of old ties. He still considered us all his special responsibility.’

‘But he didn’t,’ said Lynn, ‘make a will after his marriage?’

Mrs Marchmont shook her head.

‘The last will he made was in 1940. I don’t know any details, but he gave us to understand at the time that we were all taken care of by it if anything should happen to him. That will, of course, was revoked by his marriage. I suppose he would have made a new will when he got home—but there just wasn’t time. He was killed practically the day after he landed in this country.’

‘And so she—Rosaleen—gets everything?’

‘Yes. The old will was invalidated by his marriage.’

Lynn was silent. She was not more mercenary than most, but she would not have been human if she had not resented the new state of affairs. It was not, she felt, at all what Gordon Cloade himself would have envisaged. The bulk of his fortune he might have left to his young wife, but certain provisions he would certainly have made for the family he had encouraged to depend upon him. Again and again he had urged them not to save, not to make provision for the future. She had heard him say to Jeremy, ‘You’ll be a rich man when I die.’ To her mother he had often said, ‘Don’t worry, Adela. I’ll always look after Lynn—you know that, and I’d hate you to leave this house—it’s your home. Send all the bills for repairs to me.’ Rowley he had encouraged to take up farming. Antony, Jeremy’s son, he had insisted should go into the Guards and he had always made him a handsome allowance. Lionel Cloade had been encouraged to follow up certain lines of medical research that were not immediately profitable and to let his practice run down.

Lynn’s thoughts were broken into. Dramatically, and with a trembling lip, Mrs Marchmont produced a sheaf of bills.

‘And look at all these,’ she wailed. ‘What am I to do? What on earth am I to do, Lynn? The bank manager wrote me only this morning that I’m overdrawn. I don’t see how I can be. I’ve been so careful. But it seems my investments just aren’t producing what they used to. Increased taxation he says. And all these yellow things, War Damage Insurance or something—one has to pay them whether one wants to or not.’

Lynn took the bills and glanced through them. There were no records of extravagance amongst them. They were for slates replaced on the roof; the mending of fences, replacement of a worn-out kitchen boiler—a new main water pipe. They amounted to a considerable sum.

Mrs Marchmont said piteously:

‘I suppose I ought to move from here. But where could I go? There isn’t a small house anywhere—there just isn’t such a thing. Oh, I don’t want to worry you with all this, Lynn. Not just as soon as you’ve come home. But I don’t know what to do. I really don’t.’

Lynn looked at her mother. She was over sixty. She had never been a very strong woman. During the war she had taken in evacuees from London, had cooked and cleaned for them, had worked with the W.V.S., made jam, helped with school meals. She had worked fourteen hours a day in contrast to a pleasant easy life before the war. She was now, as Lynn saw, very near a breakdown. Tired out and frightened of the future.

A slow quiet anger rose in Lynn. She said slowly:

‘Couldn’t this Rosaleen—help?’

Mrs Marchmont flushed.

‘We’ve no right to anything—anything at all.’

Lynn demurred.

‘I think you’ve a moral right. Uncle Gordon always helped.’

Mrs Marchmont shook her head. She said:

‘It wouldn’t be very nice, dear, to ask favours—not of someone one doesn’t like very much. And anyway that brother of hers would never let her give away a penny!’

And she added, heroism giving place to pure female cattiness: ‘If he really is her brother, that is to say!’

CHAPTER 2

Frances Cloade looked thoughtfully across the dinner table at her husband.

Frances was forty-eight. She was one of those lean greyhound women who look well in tweeds. There was a rather arrogant ravaged beauty about her face which had no make-up except a little carelessly applied lipstick. Jeremy Cloade was a spare grey-haired man of sixty-three, with a dry expressionless face.

It was, this evening, even more expressionless than usual.

His wife registered the fact with a swift flashing glance.

A fifteen-year-old girl shuffled round the table, handing the dishes. Her agonized gaze was fixed on Frances. If Frances frowned, she nearly dropped something, a look of approval set her beaming.

It was noted enviously in Warmsley Vale that if any one had servants it would be Frances Cloade. She did not bribe them with extravagant wages, and she was exacting as to performance—but her warm approval of endeavour and her infectious energy and drive made of domestic service something creative and personal. She had been so used to being waited on all her life that she took it for granted without self-consciousness, and she had the same appreciation of a good cook or a good parlourmaid as she would have had for a good pianist.

Frances Cloade had been the only daughter of Lord Edward Trenton, who had trained his horses in the neighbourhood of Warmsley Heath. Lord Edward’s final bankruptcy was realized by those in the know to be a merciful escape from worse things. There had been rumours of horses that had signally failed to stay at unexpected moments, other rumours of inquiries by the Stewards of the Jockey Club. But Lord Edward had escaped with his reputation only lightly tarnished and had reached an arrangement with his creditors which permitted him to live exceedingly comfortably in the South of France. And for these unexpected blessings he had to thank the shrewdness and special exertions of his solicitor, Jeremy Cloade. Cloade had done a good deal more than a solicitor usually does for a client, and had even advanced guarantees of his own. He had made it clear that he had a deep admiration for Frances Trenton, and in due course, when her father’s affairs had been satisfactorily wound up, Frances became Mrs Jeremy Cloade.

What she had felt about it no one had ever known. All that could be said was that she had kept her side of the bargain admirably. She had been an efficient and loyal wife to Jeremy, a careful mother to his son, had forwarded Jeremy’s interests in every way and had never once suggested by word or deed that the match was anything but a freewill impulse on her part.

In response the Cloade family had an enormous respect and admiration for Frances. They were proud of her, they deferred to her judgment—but they never felt really quite intimate with her.

What Jeremy Cloade thought of his marriage nobody knew, because nobody ever did know what Jeremy Cloade thought or felt. ‘A dry stick’ was what people said about Jeremy. His reputation both as a man and a lawyer was very high. Cloade, Brunskill and Cloade never touched any questionable legal business. They were not supposed to be brilliant but were considered very sound. The firm prospered and the Jeremy Cloades lived in a handsome Georgian house just off the Market Place with a big old-fashioned walled garden behind it where the pear trees in spring showed a sea of white blossom.

It was to a room overlooking the garden at the back of the house that the husband and wife went when they rose from the dinner table. Edna, the fifteen-year-old, brought in coffee, breathing excitedly and adenoidally.

Frances poured a little coffee into the cup. It was strong and hot. She said to Edna, crisply and approvingly:

‘Excellent, Edna.’

Edna went crimson with pleasure and went out marvelling nevertheless at what some people liked. Coffee, in Edna’s opinion, ought to be a pale cream colour, ever so sweet, with lots of milk!

In the room overlooking the garden, the Cloades drank their coffee, black and without sugar. They had talked in a desultory way during dinner, of acquaintances met, of Lynn’s return, of the prospects of farming in the near future, but now, alone together, they were silent.

Frances leaned back in her chair, watching her husband. He was quite oblivious of her regard. His right hand stroked his upper lip. Although Jeremy Cloade did not know it himself the gesture was a characteristic one and coincided with inner perturbation. Frances had not observed it very often. Once when Antony, their son, had been seriously ill as a child; once when waiting for a jury to consider their verdict; at the outbreak of war, waiting to hear the irrevocable words over the wireless; on the eve of Antony’s departure after embarkation leave.

Frances thought a little while before she spoke. Their married life had been happy, but never intimate in so far as the spoken word went. She had respected Jeremy’s reserves and he hers. Even when the telegram had come announcing Antony’s death on active service, they had neither of them broken down.

He had opened it, then he had looked up at her. She had said, ‘Is it—?’

He had bowed his head, then crossed and put the telegram into her outstretched hand.

They had stood there quite silently for a while. Then Jeremy had said: ‘I wish I could help you, my dear.’ And she had answered, her voice steady, her tears unshed, conscious only of the terrible emptiness and aching: ‘It’s just as bad for you.’ He had patted her shoulder: ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes…’ Then he had moved towards the door, walking a little awry, yet stiffly, suddenly an old man…saying as he did so, ‘There’s nothing to be said—nothing to be said…’

She had been grateful to him, passionately grateful, for understanding so well, and had been torn with pity for him, seeing him suddenly turn into an old man. With the loss of her boy, something had hardened in her—some ordinary common kindness had dried up. She was more efficient, more energetic than ever—people became sometimes a little afraid of her ruthless common sense…

Jeremy Cloade’s finger moved along his upper lip again—irresolutely, searching. And crisply, across the room, Frances spoke.

‘Is anything the matter, Jeremy?’

He started. His coffee cup almost slipped from his hand. He recovered himself, put it firmly down on the tray. Then he looked across at her.

‘What do you mean, Frances?’

‘I’m asking you if anything is the matter?’

‘What should be the matter?’

‘It would be foolish to guess. I would rather you told me.’

She spoke without emotion in a businesslike way.

He said unconvincingly:

‘There is nothing the matter—’

She did not answer. She merely waited inquiringly. His denial, it seemed, she put aside as negligible. He looked at her uncertainly.

And just for a moment the imperturbable mask of his grey face slipped, and she caught a glimpse of such turbulent agony that she almost exclaimed aloud. It was only for a moment but she didn’t doubt what she had seen.

She said quietly and unemotionally:

‘I think you had better tell me—’

He sighed—a deep unhappy sigh.

‘You will have to know, of course,’ he said, ‘sooner or later.’

And he added what was to her a very astonishing phrase.

‘I’m afraid you’ve made a bad bargain, Frances.’

She went right past an implication she did not understand to attack hard facts.

‘What is it,’ she said; ‘money?’

She did not know why she put money first. There had been no special signs of financial stringency other than were natural to the times. They were short-staffed at the office with more business than they could cope with, but that was the same everywhere and in the last month they had got back some of their people released from the Army. It might just as easily have been illness that he was concealing—his colour had been bad lately, and he had been overworked and overtired. But nevertheless Frances’ instinct went towards money, and it seemed she was right.

Her husband nodded.

‘I see.’ She was silent a moment, thinking. She herself did not really care about money at all—but she knew that Jeremy was quite incapable of realizing that. Money meant to him a four-square world—stability—obligations—a definite place and status in life.

Money to her was a toy tossed into one’s lap to play with. She had been born and bred in an atmosphere of financial instability. There had been wonderful times when the horses had done what was expected of them. There had been difficult times when the tradesmen wouldn’t give credit and Lord Edward had been forced to ignominious straits to avoid the bailiffs on the front-door step. Once they had lived on dry bread for a week and sent all the servants away. They had had the bailiffs in the house for three weeks once when Frances was a child. She had found the bum in question very agreeable to play with and full of stories of his own little girl.

If one had no money one simply scrounged, or went abroad, or lived on one’s friends and relations for a bit. Or somebody tided you over with a loan…

But looking across at her husband Frances realized that in the Cloade world you didn’t do that kind of thing. You didn’t beg or borrow or live on other people. (And conversely you didn’t expect them to beg or borrow or live off you!)