Family and Friends. Emma Page
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gaze travelled a few inches and came to rest on the brandy bottle. Another five minutes. Seven-thirty was a nice round figure. She yawned again, more widely this time, leaned out and grasped the bottle by its neck.
Supper was over in the Pierson household. Sarah sat upright in a straight-backed chair at one side of the sitting room fire, knitting assiduously a square of bright red wool. All over Africa sick natives huddled themselves under the comfort of patchwork blankets stitched together by Sarah over more than forty years. Or so she liked to think.
At the other end of the little room, as far away as possible from the fireplace, her stepbrother lowered his newspaper an inch or two and stole a glance at her. He had told her at supper about the closing of the shop. She had said nothing, merely raising her eyes to give him a single veiled look and then continuing to serve the food while he did his best to soften the blow. He explained the wisdom of the decision, enlarged on the certainty of an earlier pension, pointed out the new leisure to be enjoyed.
To all this she had made no reply. When his voice had finally ceased she flicked him a glance that seemed to hold sardonic amusement. Or a trace of quiet pleasure at the prospect before her? It was gone before he could read it. She had begun to talk about his father lying upstairs.
‘He doesn’t seem to be picking up. I’ll get the doctor to look in on him again.’ Of course, worried as she was–as they both were–about old Walter, she might not think retiring a year or two earlier a matter of any particular consequence. But he would just like to be sure. He shifted in his chair, nerving himself to raise the subject again.
‘You could take a holiday,’ he ventured. ‘A good long holiday.’ He couldn’t remember when she had last been away from the house for a single night. Arrangements could surely be made for himself and his father. ‘You’d enjoy that.’ He tried to picture her on her own in a seaside resort; all he could see was an image of her sitting straight-backed in a hotel lounge, fashioning rainbow coverlets for ailing Africans. Hardly a scene of compelling gaiety.
She raised her head and held it in a listening attitude. A sound came from the room above. Arnold got to his feet.
‘I’ll go up and sit with Father.’ He abandoned all attempt to talk to Sarah and went slowly upstairs into the front bedroom.
Walter was struggling to lift himself against the pillows. His face was flushed, his look restless and bewildered. He frowned as Arnold bent over to assist him; trying to place him, to come out of his clutching dream.
‘Oh–it’s you.’ He passed a trembling hand over his face. ‘I thought I was back in France.’ Relief now in his voice. ‘A bit of a nightmare.’ He sank back for a moment into that grim memory. ‘We were going out after Cottrell. Yorke and myself. There was a bright moon.’ He let out a long shuddering breath. ‘We could hear him screaming.’
‘It’s all right, Father,’ Arnold said soothingly. He straightened the bedclothes. ‘It was only a dream.’ But he knew himself the clammy horror of such dreams when the present dropped away and there were only the helpless cries of men long dead.
He crossed to the washbasin, moistened a flannel with cool water, came back to the bed and passed the cloth gently over his father’s face and hands.
‘You’ll feel better in a moment.’ He picked up a towel. ‘Would you like something to drink? I won’t leave you, I can give Sarah a shout, she’ll get something hot.’
Walter shook his head. ‘Don’t bother Sarah. I’ll just have some of that.’ He gestured at the tray holding a glass and a tall jug of orange squash covered with a beaded muslin drape. He watched Arnold pour the drink.
‘Do you ever see anything of Cottrell’s son these days? David. He grew up a good lad. His father would have been proud of him.’
‘I see him now and again.’ Arnold held the glass while his father drank from it. ‘In the street sometimes. Just to nod to.’ He’d been at school with David Cottrell, they’d been called up together in the middle of the war, served in the same county regiment; they’d been taken prisoner together, had endured the scarring years in the same Japanese camp. And now they merely nodded to each other in the streets, at once linked and held apart by the long chain of shared experience.
‘You should ask him round some evening when he’s off duty,’ Walter said. ‘I’d like a chat with him.’ Cottrell had gone into the police after the war, a detective sergeant now, well thought of in the town.
Arnold replaced the glass on the tray. ‘I’ll see if I can catch him one of these days.’ He hadn’t the slightest intention of asking Cottrell to the house. And by tomorrow Walter would have forgotten the request.
Downstairs in the hall the phone rang sharply. ‘Sarah will take it.’ Walter put out a detaining hand as Arnold turned to go. ‘You stay and talk to me.’
But Arnold eluded his grasp. As he reached the door he heard the receiver lifted and Sarah’s brisk voice.
‘Good evening, Mrs Yorke. I hope you’re feeling better?’ He drew his brows together, listening.
‘Who is it?’ Walter asked impatiently. ‘Sarah can deal with it.’
‘It’s Mrs Yorke.’ Arnold came slowly back towards the bed.
‘Then it’ll only be some business about the shop. Pull up a chair and sit down.’
Arnold looked about for a chair, trying without success to catch at fragments of the conversation below.
‘I must confess I was a little surprised at the news about the shop,’ Sarah said into the phone. After her long years of service she might surely have expected to be told the decision with due ceremony by either Mr or Mrs Yorke instead of in this secondhand fashion through her stepbrother.
‘What news?’ Zena asked sharply.
‘That the shop is to close down, of course.’ Sarah maintained the deferential courtesy of her tone in spite of a thrust of impatience. She wished Mrs Yorke wouldn’t play her devious games.
‘It’s news to me,’ Zena said. ‘I’m certainly not thinking of closing the shop. Where did you get hold of such an idea?’
‘I don’t think there can be any doubt about it. Arnold told me this evening. Mr Yorke spoke to him this afternoon.’ She heard the intake of Zena’s breath.
There was a brief silence at the other end of the line and then Zena spoke again in a lighter, more casual tone. ‘I’ll have a word with Owen about it later. Actually, I rang up to speak to your brother. Is he in?’
‘Yes, I’ll get him, he won’t be a moment.’ Sarah laid down the receiver.
So I wasn’t mistaken, Zena thought, biting her lip. There is something going on. My shop–Owen has the nerve to talk about closing down my shop–and without a word to me. I have to learn about it from an underling! He stood there as calm as you like this evening, never uttered a syllable about it. She drummed her fingers on the table. Where was Arnold? He was certainly taking his time.
‘Mrs Yorke wants to speak to you.’ Sarah came into the bedroom, ready to take Arnold’s place while he was gone. Her tone was drily neutral, her eyes expressed nothing.
For years she had been aware that Zena had some kind of hold over Arnold. She had speculated about it, resented it, failed to understand it. He had been sweet on Zena when he was a lad, of course, and there had been some kind of fusion between them for a short time after the war; she’d have had to be blind not to have seen it. But it certainly wasn’t affection that linked them now, she was sure of that. She had caught his look when her name was mentioned, the uneager way he moved whenever Zena’s imperious command summoned him to the phone.
Arnold went reluctantly downstairs. In the hall he stared at the receiver with distaste before