The Coldbrook Year

Chapter 8: The Right Excuse

Her father stood in the doorway with his hat in his hand and looked past her at the room.

“Is nobody with you?” He half turned back into the passage. “Where’s the girl?”

Fanny’s voice came at once. “She wouldn’t have anybody, sir. She’s been that low all day. I had Bess in the next room the whole while, and Dilly and me in the passage, so as to be within call.”

It came out smooth. Fanny had had the length of the passage to build it.

“Then come in and shut the door,” her father said, and came in himself, and stood in the middle of the floor with his hat still in his hand.

Theodore Aldridge had never in his life seen her before, and that had made the afternoon easier than it had any business being. Her father had seen her every day for eight years. He would know how she came through a door, and where she put her hands when she was standing still, and a person could not lie about that, not to a man who had been looking at her since she could walk.

So she stood with her hands where they were and her head down, and let the silence be grief.

He was looking round the room the way a man looks at a bill he has already paid. The picture over the table. The two chairs. The shelf with the few books on it, and the clock, and the curtains. Everything was there. Everything was the second-best of its kind, bought for a girl who was in the house and had to be kept, and there was not one thing in it that a stranger would look at twice.

“It’s complete,” he said, to nobody. Then he sighed.

At four o’clock, before the lamps were lit, he had gone up to his wife’s room to ask how the afternoon had gone, and whether his sister Eleanor had said anything of the child. Cornelia had told him. Eleanor had not taken the hint. Eleanor had asked after somebody’s rheumatism instead and talked about the trains, and Cornelia had put the rest of it as delicately as she knew how, which was not very, and had finished with: “There isn’t a legitimate daughter in this house, Walter. You’ve four girls and every one of them comes with a story tied to her, and the one with the worst story is the one you want to hand to your sister and call it a compliment. She has a father-in-law. Do you want her explaining your by-blow to the Judge?”

And then, before the lamps were lit, a girl up from the kitchen to say that Mr. Theodore had gone to Miss Ada’s rooms himself, with a box, and had sat with her, and had walked home after.

Nothing in that house was private for very long. The maids’ legs were quicker than the post, and every one of them had her own reason for being the one who told.

Eleanor had sent her son. Not a hired man with a note. Her son, in the cold, down a back passage, to a child in the rooms the house called the yard.

He saw the table then.

“What’s all this?”

“Mr. Theodore brought it, sir.”

Two lots laid out on the cloth, half of it still in paper. Cinnamon and nutmeg and a twist of cloves that had got into everything; and beside them the bottles, and a parcel that smelled of camphor when the fire moved.

“He brought all that?”

“He said the house would want it, sir.”

Her father’s face changed, and then changed again. He was pleased, and pleased at being pleased, and he turned it over from three or four sides. “Your aunt has a good heart,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll thank her for it.”

“Yes, sir.”

He put his hand on the top of her head and left it there. She stood under it and looked at the boards.

There were a great many women in this house, and a man with a great many women in his house has less to give to each of them. There were a great many children, and the same arithmetic held. Whatever her mother had been to him, it had most likely not been love. Fondness, at the outside. Fondness was the smaller word and it was the one that fit. She wondered whether he had gone up to her at the end, and then she stopped wondering, because working it out would have taken her a week and would not have changed the price of anything.

“I’ve not been able to come before now,” he said. “You know what this week has been. My father put the whole of the visit into my hands and I’ve been at everybody’s beck and call since Tuesday. I’d have come sooner.”

She said nothing, and nothing was the right thing to say, and his hand came off her head, and he walked two steps and turned and walked back.

“She was a good creature,” he said. “I don’t want it said in this town that I did nothing.”

Ada kept her eyes on the boards and her mouth shut.

“I mean to have a service said for her. At the church. The minister will do it and it will be done properly, and there’ll be a place to go and stand.” He cleared his throat. “You’re young. It’s not for a child to stand up at. You’ll stop at home with your book, and that will do as well.”

It is easier to ask for a thing once a man has put it on the table himself and told you it is not for you.

Ada went down onto the boards at his feet and got both hands into the skirt of his coat.

“Ada! Get up. Get up, this minute.”

“Let me go to Coldbrook.”

He stopped with his mouth open. “What?”

“Coldbrook. The farm. Nobody’s there. It’s quiet there.”

“Child, it’s March.”

“Let me be quiet somewhere.” She had her forehead against his waistcoat now, and she pulled at his coat a little, because there was nothing better to do with her hands. “Everywhere in this house I go past something of hers and I can’t—”

She stopped. The stopping was better than going on.

“Ada.”

“Let me say my prayers somewhere she isn’t.” That came out whole. “For her. And for Grandfather. And for you. And for Mother. And for Aunt Eleanor. Long life and good health to everybody, and let her rest, and let me—”

She ran out of words and stayed on the floor.

“That’s a great many people to be praying for,” her father said.

“I’ll have a great deal of time.”

Walter Vance stood in his daughter’s room with his hat in his hand and a child hanging off his coat, and thought that he had not known she had it in her. He was not a clever man. He was not a hard one. He had come in meaning to be sorry for her, and here she was on the floor in her black, praying for his father and his sister and asking a long life for the whole of them, and there was no getting round it: it was the finest thing that had happened to him all week, and it was happening to him.

“The farm in March,” he said. “It’s a cold house, and there’s nobody there to look after you.”

“I don’t want looking after.” She lifted her face, and it was wet, and she was not sorry. “I want to be where she isn’t.”

He was quiet a moment.

“Very well,” he said. “Well. Get up. Get up, I say. I’ll see to it.”

She got up, and put her sleeve over her face, and stayed that way. In the doorway Fanny had her hand over her mouth.

*Good*, she thought. *Good. Done.*

She had said it out loud in front of him, so now she would have to mean it in front of everybody. That would want thinking about. Later. Just now her knees hurt, and her face was wet, and he was still in the room, which meant she had to keep the sleeve up.

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He went along the passage whistling, and found his wife in her sitting room with the household book open on her knee, and told her to see about it.

“See about what?”

“Coldbrook. The child wants to go, and I’m going to let her.”

Cornelia put the book down. “Coldbrook.”

“She’s asked me.” He said it the way a man says a thing he has a note for. “She can’t say her prayers in this house, she says.”

“She’s eight years old. She can’t say her prayers in a barn either.” Cornelia sat back. “It’s been shut since October. There’ll be a roof wanting. There’s a pump that was never right. There’s no fire laid in it and nobody to lay one. And it’s a farm, Walter. There’ll be men about, and a road through it, and no woman within a mile of the place.”

“Then she’ll want a woman with her, and a wagon, and whatever else there is. You’ll know better than I do.”

“I’m sure I do,” said Cornelia, “since nobody else in this house thinks about it.”

He let that go by, which he always did, and it never cost him anything.

“And how long is she to be there?” she said. “A fortnight? A month? Because a child in a shut-up house in the country with a woman she doesn’t know is a child sitting in a shut-up room with a stranger, and she may as well sit here and save the wagon.”

“If she’s that fond of praying,” said Cornelia, “let her stop the year out. It’s what’s done for a widow, and it would settle her.”

She said it for the pleasure of saying it. She had a great deal of that pleasure in her, and it never lasted.

Walter did not answer at once.

A year was what a widow did. Nobody in Marrow’s Ford was going to sit down and count the months on a girl of eight; people thought well of a family that went further than it had to and said so, and then stopped thinking about it. But he was not thinking about the town. He was thinking about the day the word came, when the child had gone down on the floor of the passage like a dropped plate and lain two days with a fever after it, and about the things that had been said in the kitchen that week, which sounded like nonsense by daylight and did not sound like nonsense at two in the morning when a man was lying awake. A child goes down on the day the woman dies. It gets talked about. And his wife’s suggestion, whatever she had meant by it, had one great merit: it put a good many miles of road between the child and the door her mother had come in at.

“A year, then,” he said. “I’ll speak to my father in the morning. He won’t mind. The place is eating its own roof.”

“Walter,” said Cornelia. “I only said—”

“I know what you said.” He was at the door and pleased with her, which was the worst of it. “You meant it for the child’s good, and it was well thought of. I’ll tell my sister you were the one who thought of it.”

The door shut behind him, and he could be heard going down the passage, and then not heard.

Cornelia sat with the household book open on her knee.

A house shut up since October. A roof. A pump that was never right. Fires to be laid and kept by somebody, in rooms where nobody had laid one since the cider came in. A wagon. And a woman in this town who would go and live in the country for a year with another woman’s child, and not write letters home about it, and be sober, and not be a fool.

She had said it to hear herself say it. She said a great many things to hear herself say them, and they went out of her mouth and were gone. This one had not gone. It had got up and put on its hat and walked down to the yard, and now it was a roof and a pump and a wagon and a year, and she would be the one to find the woman.

She reached for the bell and rang for Mrs. Hale.