If for one happy moment I thought I’d won Drew Barrington over, I soon realized my error. He wasn’t inviting me to stay on at Mildenhall and help his daughter. He was asking my opinion merely to patch over a nasty moment at his dinner table.
But at least his question gave me an opportunity to put forward my point of view.
Nobody else breathed a word. Even Gwen, I think, recognized that a crackerjack explosion had been close. She looked from Drew to me and waited.
I hesitated.
Asked like that, bluntly, what I would suggest doing about little Jane, I faced the difficulty of getting the message across in a few words. Dare I say straight out that it wasn’t so much a matter of what I as a therapist could do, but what they as her family were willing to do? Dare I tell these people that their own attitude towards Jane had been largely responsible for her stammer? Maybe entirely responsible.
Because I was undecided how to begin, I made a hash of it. “As far as I can see, there’s really nothing wrong with Jane’s speech....”
“Nothing wrong!” Drew exclaimed impatiently. “Have you heard my daughter trying to talk, Miss Bennett?”
“Oh yes, indeed I have. I fully realize what a distressing stammer she’s got. But what I meant was, there’s unlikely to be anything physically wrong with her actual speech mechanism.”
He at least made a show of considering this. “I don’t think we ever imagined there was anything physically wrong,” he said carefully. “Presumably it’s a nervous or emotional condition.”
Tansy fluttered, “The poor little mite has always stammered. Always.”
“But has she? Are you quite certain of that?”
“Why, yes ...”
Drew nodded in confirmation. “I can’t remember her ever speaking in a normal way.”
I was on safe ground now. I’d been through this conversation many times before. Looking around the table I put a general question.
“Have you ever listened to a toddler talking? I mean, really listened?”
“Why, of course ...” they chorused.
Then Drew asked, “What is it that you’re driving at, Miss Bennett?”
“Well, take a two-year-old, for instance. Would you expect a child of that age to talk fluently, without hesitations and repetitions?”
“No ... I suppose not.”
“Their speech is all stops and starts. They say the same word over and over, and keep breaking off to begin again.”
“Well,” said Tansy, bounding to the defense of babyhood. “Poor little things. You can’t expect anything else. Not until they’ve been taught.”
I smiled at her because she meant well. “The art of fluent speech is not an easy thing for children to achieve, you know. And they have to be left to take it at their own pace. They must not be rushed. They’re always very quick to detect the least hint of criticism or anxiety from their parents and the other adults around them, and this only aggravates their difficulties.”
Corinne broke her long silence to pick me up belligerently. “Are you suggesting we shouldn’t correct our own children?”
She glanced at her brother and sister for applause. They responded with covert amusement.
Probably Drew was afraid that I might be indiscreet again. Before I could answer Corinne, he cut in, “I think I can see what Miss Bennett is getting at. Perhaps we have been a little overanxious about Jane, and she has reacted to our concern.”
“That’s exactly it,” I said warmly.
I’d have added it up rather differently myself, of course. Their barely concealed impatience would have come into it, a lack of any real interest in what the child had to say. But at least we had a starting point of understanding.
Following Drew’s lead, they gave me a hearing. I tried to explain that above all Jane had to be treated as a normal child. She was a normal child. By now, unfortunately, her stammering had become hardened into a deep-rooted habit, and like all problem habits, it couldn’t be despatched overnight.
“It will need a lot of effort and patience on Jane’s part. But I’ve got a box of tricks up my sleeve that will help. And with your cooperation ...”
I dried up. I’d been allowing enthusiasm to run away with me, taking their consent for granted.
“You’ve simply got to let Kim have a try,” Gwen instructed them loudly. “You’d never be able to forgive yourselves for not taking a heaven sent chance like this.”
I wished Gwen had not shoved her tactless foot in it yet again. Corinne looked daggers. But I think she sensed, as I did, that her husband was veering towards a more favorable attitude.
He was staring in my direction; beyond me, right through me. And then slowly his eyes focussed on mine.
“Of course, it would have to be on a proper basis....”
This gave Corinne a chance for a sharp dig at me without actually crossing Drew. “Naturally, Miss Bennett would expect a salary,” She turned to grant me a condescending smile. “We quite understand that speech therapy is your bread and butter. You would be engaged on proper terms, just like any other employee.”
I refused to be riled. Anyway, she was perfectly right, I would expect a salary. I’d got to live. Drew seemed not to have heard his wife. Or perhaps he had at that. “We can talk it over later, Miss Bennett. In private.”
“How wonderful,” exclaimed Tansy, clasping her thin hands together. She gushed at me, “I do hope you can help poor darling Janey. I get so worried about her sometimes.”
Maybe, I thought, Tansy is going to be my biggest hurdle. Her sort would smother any child with over-protective love. Drew Barrington, once convinced that I could help his daughter, could be expected to co-operate intelligently. And I guessed Corinne wouldn’t dare to oppose him openly.
But Tansy! Dear, dotty Tansy!
“I should try to forget that there’s anything to be anxious about,” I told her gently. “Don’t always rush to help Jane out when her tongue gets knotted. Praise her when she’s good, and punish her when she’s naughty.”
“Punish her? Oh, but I couldn’t punish our poor dear little Janey.”
“I expect she’d almost thank you for it. She wants to be an ordinary little girl, not a special case needing special treatment—some sort of oddity. I remember a seven-year-old patient coming to the clinic one day, proud as punch because his mother had actually shouted at him for being naughty—just as she sometimes shouted at his younger sister.”
There was a slightly stunned pause, and then Drew said slowly, “That makes good sense.”
“But surely,” Felix chimed in, artfully artless, “surely something must have made Jane start stammering. I mean, not all children in her position are affected like this.”
“What are you getting at, Felix?” Corinne snapped angrily. “Children in her position?”
“Do I really need to explain, darling? I should have thought it was only too obvious.”
I said pacifically, “Perhaps it might help if we could determine just when it was you first became aware of Jane’s speech difficulties. Could you pin it down precisely?”
This was a routine question at the clinic. The way it was answered often revealed a lot about the attitude of the patient’s family.
“My husband has already told you,” Corinne said sharply. “Jane’s always stammered. Ever since she began to talk.”
“But do you mean that with her very first words you realized she was going to be a stammerer?”
“Of course not—that’s just absurd.”
Drew looked at his wife thoughtfully. “I remember you saying to me one day that Jane seemed to be stammering. That would be about... “
“I didn’t tell you,” said Corinne abruptly.
“Didn’t you?” He frowned, and I thought he flushed too. “In that case, it must have been Aunt Tansy.”
“It’s so tragic for the poor little soul,” said Tansy, abstractedly collecting plates together. She piled them on to the trolley and wheeled it to the door. “I think it’s sherry trifle for dessert.”
I turned back to Drew. “Is there any way you could fix the date when your aunt mentioned it to you?”
“I’m afraid not.” He was shaking his head. “As I said, I thought it was my wife. The recollection is rather hazy.”
Gwen poked at her spectacles. “Well, I should say I’ve been aware of the stammering for about two years now.”
“What makes you say two years?” I pressed. “Could you be more exact, Gwen?”
“Sorry. As you know, I’m only down here for weekends, and I don’t see that much of the child. It just seems like a couple of years, that’s all.”
I persisted. Memories are often buried deep, and questioning can bring them to the top of the mind again. “Perhaps you could pin it down by association with something else that was happening at the same time. For instance, was it winter or summer?”
They all gave the appearance of thinking hard. All except Corinne, who made it quite clear that she considered the whole thing a lot of nonsense.
Verity leaned forward in a studied pose and announced languidly, “The year before last I spent most of the summer abroad, I was in Greece ...”
“With Carol Fielding’s husband,” Felix finished for her, grinning maliciously.
Little Miss Pink had come in with a large tray and was clearing away the dishes Tansy had overlooked. In a quiet aside Drew said, “By the way, Pinky, Mr. Wayne will be coming in later for coffee.”
“Damn.” Corinne’s hand came down on the table with a loud smack. “Must you keep asking the man up to the house, Drew?”
“Yes, Corinne, I must,” he observed mildly. “It’s business. And if Bill isn’t invited to dinner, the least I can do is to offer him coffee.”
“I don’t know why you dislike him so much,” Verity remarked to her sister. “Bill’s all right.”
Felix seemed amused. “Naturally you’d think so, darling.”
“And just what do you mean by that?”
“Well, he’s a man, isn’t he?”
Pinky banged a cream jug on the table, her small features screwed up tight in a disapproving frown. “Now you oughtn’t to say things like that to your sister, Mr. Felix. It’s not decent.” She regarded Corinne severely. “And I’m sure I can’t think why you don’t like Mr. Wayne, I always find him a very nice sort of gentleman.”
“Ah, but you see, my dear Pinky,” said Felix softly, “there was a time when ...”
“Don’t be a damned fool,” Corinne spat at him. “You know perfectly well that I’ve never liked the man. He’s an utter boor.”
Her brother’s ironical eyebrows rocketed upwards.
I was beginning to understand that Drew simply allowed these endless waves of petty bickering to wash over him. They didn’t touch him. Or perhaps the hurt was too deeply hidden to show.
The best thing, I decided, was to follow his example and accept the backchat as punctuation to the main theme. Doggedly I returned to my question about when they’d first noticed Jane was stammering.
“Sometimes it’s possible to pinpoint the time by reference to some fixed event. Like Christmas or Easter, or someone’s birthday.”
We went back to head-shaking and muttering. They seemed to be insistent that Jane had always stammered. Or else, they suggested, it had been so gradual a thing that it had only slowly become obvious.
I was puzzled. In my experience a dramatic beginning was usually reported. Stammers are so often born when parents happen to notice a perfectly normal babyish hesitation, and suddenly start to panic about their child’s speech.
This case was going against the book.
Tansy reappeared, bringing in the dessert. I drew her back into the discussion by asking if she could recall exactly when it was she first noticed Jane stammering.
She went straight into a tizzy. “The poor little darling has always done it. Always.”
I didn’t like contradicting Tansy, but I had to keep on trying if I was going to get anywhere at all.
“You see, that doesn’t altogether tally with what Mr. Barrington just said. He has an idea that you first drew his attention to the problem.”
She looked quite startled. “Drew said that?”
“Yes. Don’t you remember? You were in the room.”
“I didn’t tell him.” She shook her head so that the crystal goblets rattled on the silver tray. “He made a mistake.”
Felix said in a tone of serious reflection, “Casting your mind back two whole years is quite a job. Wasn’t that when we had such a long hot summer?”
“Yes, that’s right,” I said encouragingly. “I was still in England then, and I can remember a blissful holiday in September ...”
Too late I saw the glint in Felix’s eyes, and knew he was engineering some devilry.
“You couldn’t have called it exactly blissful at Mildenhall,” he said in a heavyweight voice. He paused for effect before adding, “That was when old Brian caught it. Silly fool, to get himself stoned and take a header into the pond.”
Right behind me Tansy shrieked. There was a slithering noise, and then a fearful crash. I swung round to see the tray at her feet, a hideous gooey mess of trifle and broken glass strewn stickily across the carpet.
But she wasn’t looking down at the damage. Nor was she looking at Felix. Her wildly staring eyes were fixed on Drew. She seemed terrified, her thin body trembling violently.”
I reached out to steady her, but Tansy backed away from my hand as if she’d been stung. She went on staring at Drew, panic stricken. Almost out of her mind.
Drew had jumped up. He leaned forward against the table, fingers clamped tight to the edge. His face was deadly pale.
I sensed the invisible cord linking aunt and nephew. It was as if he shared her intense distress, as if he deeply understood
But there seemed to be entreaty, too. Was he asking her not to speak? Was he begging her somehow to contain her splintering emotions?
For several numbing seconds they gazed at one another. Then with a choking sob Tansy turned and fled from the room.
In silence we listened to her frantic footsteps echoing on the stairs.