The blood thundering in my ears had drowned out all external affairs for a moment, and when I returned to the room Miss McCallum had taken the floor.
‘Thank you, Miss Lindsay,’ she said, nodding to the schoolmistress. ‘I’m glad to see so many of you wearing the results of your forays into crochet tonight.’ There was a little smothered laughter from the corner where Vashti and Nicolette Howie had settled and two spots of pink bloomed high up on Miss McCallum’s pale cheeks, but she raised her plump chin and carried on. ‘I propose that the motto of this evening’s meeting should be: If you are wrong, regret it; if you are wronged, forget it.’ There was a round of fierce applause from the audience at that, and I found myself murmuring: ‘Hear, hear!’
‘Absolutely,’ said Vashti from her corner. ‘Very well said.’ Although her tone was as superior as ever, the general mood of the room took on a conciliatory tinge and we moved on to the fowl-plucking demonstration in a spirit of comradeship; much the best spirit with which to face dead poultry out of the blue.
Mrs Hemingborough, another amply proportioned matron as tightly trussed in her good calico blouse and worsted skirt as any chicken could ever hope to be, calmly slid a basket from under her chair and drew out a sheet of sacking which she spread upon the floor at her feet, a crisp apron which she put on and tied firmly under her bust and, finally, two dead hens. These provoked a variety of reactions amongst the assembly. Nicolette and Vashti Howie shrieked. Lorna Tait looked as though she might have liked to shriek but instead she took a deep breath and beamed. Others, those who were most unmistakably farmers’ wives, looked on with either politely concealed boredom or gimlet-eyed readiness to find Mrs Hemingborough’s technique sadly wanting. Miss Lindsay and Miss McCallum, who I was beginning to suspect were the instigators and chief defenders of the SWRI in Luckenlaw, sat forward looking eager if rather pale and several others of the village women also stirred themselves into greater alertness: here, they seemed to say, was something worth coming out for on a cold, dark night, no matter the mixed company one had to endure to get it. And to be fair, it was more interesting than one might have imagined, as it always is to watch someone do something he is very good at. (I spent hours hanging over the estate carpenter’s workshop door as a girl, goggling, with my mouth hanging open and my brain absolutely empty and I would do so still if I thought I could get away with it.) The noise of the ripping out was a tiny bit sickening, especially with the old boiling fowl – Mrs Hemingborough had brought one of these as well as a plump young hen to show the different techniques demanded by each – and some of the suggestions for the use of the feathers were beyond arresting – I could not foresee myself making a poultice of boiled feathers and bran should I ever come down with a blister – but the time passed and soon the sacking was tied around the mound of feathers, the apron and newly naked fowl were back in Mrs Hemingborough’s basket and it was time for tea.
‘Which I’m sure we’re all ready for,’ said Miss Lindsay, bravely, through lips still blue-ish from disgust. ‘There’s nothing like…’ but she gave up. The tea, which she took with lots of sugar and no milk, soon revived her however and we sturdier souls dug into the accompanying scones with gusto. I had imagined that such a forum as an SWRI meeting – all of one’s female neighbours gathered together and paying attention and no men (always so easy to please and therefore quite irrelevant) – would bring forth some fiercely excellent scones and I was right. We promenaded the room scooping spoonfuls of bramble jelly from competing pots as Lorna explained to me the working of the ‘silver shower’; one put a sixpence down beside one’s favoured pot of jelly and thus the winner was chosen and the picnic funds swollen too, and it seemed such a neat and decorous sort of competition that, added to the warmth and chumminess, I was almost ready to go home and start agitating for a Rural of my own. I settled back into my seat again feeling full, cosy, and suffused with sisterly bonhomie.
Sister MacAllister of the Victoria soon damped that flame. She took a scientific view of infant nutrition, all calorie values and protein metabolism with not so much as a mashed banana to bring it down to earth. I listened until I heard her say that ‘the coagulation of human milk in gastric juice is much more loose and flocculent than that of cows’ milk and therefore…’ and then I tried very hard not to hear any more. Clearly, Sister MacAllister was going to furnish me neither with recipes to take home to my nursery nor with a template for a successful talk on the Household Budget in a month’s time, and I felt that anyone who used the words ‘gastric’ and ‘flocculent’ (whatever it meant) in the same sentence and straight after tea did not deserve my attention. I peeped at Miss Lindsay just to check that she was not about to faint and then closed my ears and tried to think about the case.
That there were thirty-odd women here tonight in spite of everything was a sign, I thought, that no one really believed the tales. Only of Vashti and Nicolette could I think the prospect of being mauled by a dark stranger might be an enticement to come along; they were possibly young enough to have caught the current fashion for greeting almost anything in life as a ‘scream’. One heard oftener and oftener that a friend of a friend had been arrested, drunk in charge of a motor car or swimming in a public pond, and always there came with the story an unspoken demand for one to find the whole thing a ‘scream’; my inability to do so made me feel elderly sometimes.
The other women of the Luckenlaw Rural would certainly take a very different view, I was sure. If any of their number actually encountered the stranger, she would scream holy murder, retell the tale with sundry embellishments at every opportunity for months and pester the doctor for tablets and tonics to help with her nerves for the rest of her life. In short, she would turn a nasty moment into something Wagnerian and utterly without end. I could safely assume, then, that none of them really believed in a dark stranger, out there right now waiting to catch them.
So, perhaps the task before me was the equally ticklish one of trying to find out who had started the story and why and why she had been joined by others backing it up. But who to ask? I had not been introduced to any of the women and none of the names I heard in passing had chimed with those on Mr Tait’s list; neither Miss McCallum, Miss Lindsay nor Mrs Hemingborough had reported an encounter with the stranger. I let my gaze drift around the room, wondering which of these women it was who had. They all looked so very stolid sitting there, some nodding in the warmth as Sister MacAllister’s lullaby washed over them, some grimly upright, some gaping with boredom. Nicolette and Vashti were sprawled in their seats like delinquent schoolgirls, making no effort at all to hide their feelings as the voice droned on and on, and looking at them I found my own legs begin to twitch as they had not done since the days of German dictation, so that I longed to slide from my seat and roll about on the floor. I caught the eye of a young woman sitting beside Vashti and looked quickly away. The next face I noticed was looking at me too and as I darted glances all around the room I began to perceive that all eyes were upon me and that Sister MacAllister was in her seat, shuffling her papers and with a look of satisfaction at a good job well done shining upon her face.
‘Mrs Gilver?’ said Miss McCallum, and her tone told me it was not the first time she had said it.
‘Ah yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch the last thing you said, I’m afraid. Stupidly, I didn’t bring a notebook and I was, um, trying to commit Sister MacAllister’s vitamin list to memory while it was still fresh in my mind.’ A tremendous snort from the corner convinced me that one of the Howie ladies at least had seen through me, but Miss McCallum only beamed.