‘If it is,’ said Tom encouragingly, though encouraging was the last thing he felt just then, ‘the police will find it out. You can be sure of that. The best possible thing Annet can do is tell George Felse everything she did during the weekend. There’ll be people who’ve seen her, and can confirm her story, if only she’ll speak.’
‘Yes – yes, that’s true, isn’t it? There are always ways of verifying such statements. If only she’ll tell us! And even here at home, you know, Tom, where does she ever go alone for more than an hour or two? Myra’s always with her when she goes to dances, and we see to it that they have reliable escorts. And even if she works late the Blacklocks always send her home by car. From choir practice Mr Collins walks her home, or Mr Blacklock brings her himself. It isn’t as if we’ve been neglectful. All our friends think the world of her, and care for her like their own. When can she have formed an undesirable acquaintance? We should have known. Someone would have warned us.’
Only too surely they would. That was why she had to learn to cover every trace, to erase the very prints of her feet where she had passed, to open her own escape hatches into the underworld below the Hallowmount.
‘There was the affair of young Miles, of course. But that was understandable folly. And since then we’ve watched her even more carefully.’
What was the sense in telling him now that that was where they’d made their mistake? And in fact it was only one in a wilderness of mistakes, and not, Tom felt, the fatal one. Something else had gone wrong with Annet’s daughterhood, something basic and incurable.
‘Don’t upset yourself, that won’t help. You’ve always done your best for her, everybody knows that.’ He leaned and extracted the quivering glass from Beck’s fingers, for it was slipping slowly through them as he watched. Beck did not seem to notice its going, only in a distant way to be relieved to find his hands free. He took his quaking head between them, staring blindly through a mist half drunkenness and half tears.
‘We did do our best. They’ll find out they’ve made a mistake. It wasn’t Annet. It couldn’t have been.’
But he was crying his denials because he knew it had been. Her charged stillness, braced to bear whatever pressures were loosed on her, and still cover up her known sins for the sake of her partner; this spoke loudly enough. And her cry of passionate denial and fearful realisation when she was forced to contemplate the sin of which she had not known; and the violence of her retreat into a semblance of death; and the ring on its ribbon round her neck.
The old man was weeping feebly, without even knowing it, letting the tears find a desultory way down the furrows of his grey, despairing face.
‘It wasn’t good enough, that’s all, our best wasn’t good enough. Where did we go wrong? Was it my fault? I never carried much weight, you know, not with anyone. Managing the children at school was too much for me sometimes. They always know,’ he said drearily, ‘who can hold his own with them, and who can’t. I never could find out how it was done. But to fail with Annet! To fall short even with her!’
‘Nonsense, of course you haven’t always fallen short. You mustn’t think like that, what good does it do? The best girl in the world can very well throw away her affection on a bad lot, we all know it happens. Is that your fault?’
Tom’s voice was gentle and reasonable; he marvelled at it himself, while his mind dallied with the thought of filling the old man to the brim with whisky, and sinking him completely. Then at least he could be manhandled to bed, and he’d be blessedly silent, affording a respite for himself and everyone else. But he’d probably be sick, and not even put himself happily to sleep. No, better not risk it. Let him talk. If it helped him, at least somebody was getting something out of it.
Drearily, drearily the fumbling voice, thickening a little now, proceeded lead-footed along its inevitable downhill road of confession, laying out his inadequacies like pilgrim stones along the way.
‘But then, why should I be expected to succeed with her? You don’t know, Tom, do you – about Annet? I’ve never told you. We never told anyone. It isn’t the sort of thing you write to your friends—’
He was laughing now, and still crying. Maybe the whisky was taking hold, and he’d pass out. Tom put a hand on his arm and shook him gently.
‘That’s all right, there’s nothing you need to tell me. Wait till tomorrow. There’ll be new developments then, maybe they’ll have found the real girl they’re looking for.’
‘They have found her,’ said Beck with dreadful clarity, and gripped Tom’s arm in his heavy, trembling hands. ‘I want to tell you. It’s been on my mind so long, I’ve got to tell someone. She isn’t mine, you see. Things might have been different if she had been. I never understood her, I never had any influence over her. I was always ashamed and afraid, because she isn’t even mine.’
He sagged into Tom’s shoulder and lay there, as it seemed, thankfully, almost comfortably. And, my God, what do you say now? What can you say?’
‘You’re a little tight, you know, better come to bed and rest. You don’t mean this. All parents have these doubts sooner or later, it’s one of the hazards of fatherhood.’
His own voice sounded to him like the phoney effort of one privately in acute pain. He got to his feet brusquely, wild to break up this inconceivable party, and lugged Beck up after him, propping him against the arm of the chair until he could get a firm hold on him. And Beck yielded. When had anyone pulled or pushed or propelled him, that he had not yielded? But he went on talking, too, with remorseless misery, all across the room and all along the empty hall.
‘You don’t believe me. But it’s true. My wife told me,’ he said with self-mutilating satisfaction. ‘She’d waited long enough for me to give her a child. In the end she got one where she could. She never told me who. She said what was that to me? I couldn’t help her. She held it against me. She still does.’
Somehow, he was never very clear how, Tom got him up the stairs and into his bedroom, and there frankly abandoned him. Sick with disgust and pity, he shut himself into the bathroom and washed the sweat and the prickling of shame from his face in cold water. He felt like vomiting, but he hadn’t had enough whisky. Maybe he ought to go down again and put himself out for the count. It would be one way of shutting the door on all this for a little while.
Was it true? Had she ever really told him such a thing? She might have, she was a woman who could if driven to it, and he was a man to whom it could be done, so crushable that in the end there might be nothing to be done with him but crush him once for all, and finish it. But even if she had told him that, need it necessarily be true? Or a gesture of hatred and cruelty engendered by the bitter frustration of their marriage?
Tom went over and over the bleak sentences he had tried hard not to hear and could not now forget, and for the life of him he couldn’t judge what was truth and what wasn’t.
But Annet herslf was the heart of the evidence. Was there anything of Beck there, in her clear-cut, self-contained, fastidious dignity? And if she was alien, and the root of their alienation, she might well be wandering, lost, trying to find her own way in a desert without asking for help from anyone. And if she knew—? How could she know? No one could be so inhuman, so insanely self-centred as to tell her? But if she knew—
And there was nothing he could do for her. Nothing to help or comfort her. Nothing, nothing to make her aware of him.
CHAPTER VI
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They came down from the Hallowmount in the fresh morning light, and separated on the road below, Tom heading for school, George for the southern end of the ridge and the straggling village of Abbot’s Bale in the long, bare cleft of Middlehope.