ON THE FOLLOWING MONDAY MORNING ETHEL Rigby returned to school with a handkerchief drenched in eucalyptus, to support the legend of the cold, and some inconspicuous pieces of surgical plaster on her fingers. During the day the frequent – and, Miss Mayfield thought, unnecessary – application of the handkerchief to her nose turned it pink, and once, looking at her, Miss Mayfield was reminded of the theory that people become like the pets to which they are devoted. There was something rabbity about Ethel’s pale prettiness.
By three o’clock in the afternoon Miss Mayfield had become irritated by Ethel, who throughout the day had been markedly inattentive. The Walwyk school furniture was surprisingly modern and functional; each child had a desk with an adjustable top which, could be made to slope or lie flat at will, and between this top and the floor, on the right-hand side, were three open shelves for the accommodation of exercise books, pens, pencils and paints. On four separate occasions during that Monday Miss Mayfield – whose eye returned to Ethel more often than she realized – caught the girl taking out, looking at or hastily replacing some object from her top shelf.
On the fourth occasion she felt that some mild rebuke was called for, so she said:
‘Ethel, you have missed almost two weeks’ work, and you should be working hard to make up. Whatever it is that is diverting your attention, please leave it alone, or I shall have to ask you to put it on my desk.’
Ethel turned scarlet and behaved impeccably for the rest of the session.
At four o’clock, with the class dismissed, again without fully realizing what she was doing or why, Miss Mayfield looked at Ethel Rigby and noted that she was empty-handed. And the moment the door was closed and she was alone with her pile of books to be marked, Miss Mayfield went to Ethel’s desk.
The top shelf held nothing which might not be expected to be there, nor did the second, and the third seemed unrewarding, too, until Miss Mayfield, reaching in to pull out a paintbox, felt the back of her hand brush against something that was fastened to the division between the second and third compartments. She closed her fingers about it – it felt like a small box – and pulled. There was a ripping sound, and there in her hand was a little cardboard box, with the ends of the surgical plaster which had held it to the top of the compartment falling limply on either side.
She noted, with a curious detachment, that her fingers had begun to tremble and had turned hot, damp and limp. She had been curious to know what it was that had been distracting Ethel’s attention, and she had looked for it and found it. But now . . . now she was reluctant to push forward with her investigation. She stood there holding the little box slightly away from her, as though it might explode.
At last she opened the lid and saw some harmless cotton wool. The thought came to her that this was something which a girl, a pupil of hers, treasured, had wrapped in cotton-wool and tried – not without skill – to hide. What right had she to pry? What right? What reason?
Using the very tips of her finger and thumb, she lifted the cotton-wool covering and looked down at the object thus revealed without any surprise, with, indeed, a momentary satisfaction – I knew it! I knew it all along!
It was a little figure made from a length of softened-down candle, greyish white in colour and semi-opaque. It was male – indeed, its sex was exaggerated out of all proportion – and it was in two parts; the whole of the top of its head had been cut off and was still separate, like an Indian scalp, but pressed into position by the bolstering of the cotton-wool in which it lay, cotton-wool that was specked and flecked with little bits of something that looked like the broken brittle remains of some green leaf.
The voice in Miss Mayfield’s mind said, This is Sydney. Granny Rigby made it and severed the top of the head. Cut off his consciousness. Ethel put the whole thing together and wrapped it in cotton-wool to keep it safe.
What madness is this? This is the year nineteen hundred and fifty-nine. Nobody has believed in witchcraft for at least two hundred years; the laws against it have been repealed; and here I stand, an ordinary God-fearing village schoolteacher . . . with the evidence in my hand.
But it’s a joke, a well-worn joke; make a wax model and stick pins in it. Janet Lovelace had a record of some of the numbers from a popular West End revue: a man parked in a place inconvenient to another man, who said he’d make a wax model of the intruder’s big end (whatever that might be) and stick pins in it. In the record you could hear the hearty laughter that greeted that joke. Yes, it was a joke nowadays.
Not to Sydney. Not to his mother. Not to Ethel. And not to me. God help me, not to me!
She remembered how she had prayed, very humbly, either to be given some sign in this bewildering situation or to be given the strength of mind to dismiss it.
Was this the sign?
Equally urgent was the question: What to do with it? She was tempted to take it and lock it away somewhere, so that at some future date, if she ever needed it, she could produce it. But why should she ever need it? And had she the right to take it? It belonged to Ethel just as much as any other piece of property.
In the end, she replaced the cotton-wool, closed the box and fixed it back into position with the ends of sticky tape. Then she tried to forget it but couldn’t, and found herself, almost every day, under a neurotic compulsion to check on its presence. Day after day, as soon as school was dismissed for the afternoon, she would go to Ethel’s desk and push in an exploratory hand. The little box was always there. Ethel, having hit on a safe hiding place, was content to leave her secret there.
More than a week passed before anything noticeable happened.
At the very beginning of the term, Canon Thorby had spoken, about the Fête which was held every year on the third Saturday in July in the Rectory garden.
‘Ostensibly,’ he said, ‘it is to raise funds for the National Children’s Homes. My mother started it when it was called Waifs and Strays. I personally would rather write a cheque and be saved the bother and mess, but I can see that it is a social occasion justifying a new frock. We have coconut shies and bowling for a pig and a buried treasure and all the usual things, including – and this is where you come in – some kind of entertainment by the school children.’ He put on a half-comic, half-serious look of appeal. ‘And please, dear Miss Mayfield, could it not be animated nursery rhymes this year? Mrs Westleton’s inventiveness stopped short there, and apart from comparing this year’s Miss Muffet with last year’s – always to her detriment – interest is completely dead. Of course,’ he added hastily, ‘I know it is difficult to find anything which makes use of such diverse ages and sizes. Nobody must be left out.’
She said, rather tentatively, ‘Once, in Alchester, we did little scenes from history – very simple: Raleigh spreading his cloak for Queen Elizabeth; Charles the First going to his beheading, and so on. Do you think they’d find that kind of thing dull?’
‘If you but knew! No, I’m sure they’d be delighted. You’d need a lot of costumes, but you can always hire those.’
‘We could make some. You see, that wouldn’t link it with the sewing as well as the history lessons. I really am a great believer in correlation, though I believe that is frowned upon now as being old-fashioned.’
‘I think that is a splendid idea – just so long as you don’t undertake too much and make a chore of it.’
The girls had taken eagerly to the idea of making costumes instead of dull everyday garments. Audrey Head, whose mother was the village dressmaker, proved to be an expert and rapid worker on the sewing machine, and during the sewing lesson with which the week always closed, on a date which Miss Mayfield remembered – the twenty-ninth of May – Audrey was very anxious to have a fitting. One of the garments sufficiently advanced to be fitted was the black one in which Ethel Rigby, as Mary Queen of Scots, was to appear.
Miss Mayfield, who was eager for the girls themselves to take the responsibility for the costumes, remained in the background while they bustled excitedly about, bossed by Audrey, who presently said:
‘Come on, Ethel. This is yours.’
‘Can’t I try it on over my jumper? Save pulling my hair about.’
‘No, you can’t. This is going to fit. Bother your hair; I’ll lend you my comb afterwards.’ With the black dress, looking very long and limp, hanging over her arm, Audrey advanced purposefully towards Ethel, who backed away.
‘I don’t want you pulling me about, Audrey Head,’ she said sullenly. ‘Here, give it to me.’
She snatched the dress and retreated until she was standing with her back to the wall, and there she carefully removed her jersey and skirt and stepped into the dress, contorting herself in order to work the long zipper at the back of it. Miss Mayfield and Audrey, in conference, had decided to allow the anachronism in order to facilitate ease in changing.
Over Miss Mayfield’s mind there rippled a thought which had nothing to do with Ethel in her capacity as old Mrs Rigby’s granddaughter; it was a self-congratulatory thought. I chose well, she said to herself; she is just that degree less buxom than any of the others; she might very well have ‘sat out her twenty years at Fotheringhay’. All the girls, indeed, were altered by their costumes, but Ethel was transformed into beauty and a kind of sad dignity.
Miss Mayfield said:
‘I never thought, until now, that you should wear a ruff, Ethel; I’m not sure that anyone would, in the circumstances; but you must have a big upstanding ruff, and you must take it off – rather slowly – and that will be a kind of symbol of resignation.’
‘I ain’t absolutely sure that hem is level,’ said Audrey with self-important self-criticism.
‘I am not,’ Miss Mayfield corrected her.
‘You neither?’ said Audrey, misunderstanding. ‘Turn round, Ethel. No, not like that – slowly. I’m right; it cocks up on the left.’
She went down on her knees and busied herself with the pins.
Miss Mayfield, under cover of watching this operation, went close, took a position slightly behind Ethel, and when Audrey said, ‘There, that’ll do. Nothing else wrong that I can see,’ Miss Mayfield leaned forward and ran down the zipper.
With admirable self-control she only said:
‘All right, Ethel, you can get dressed. And now, Audrey, what about your own?’
Half an hour later she sat alone in the deserted schoolroom, brooding.
Once – and although it was in time so recently, it seemed half a lifetime away – Canon Thorby had told her that if ever she needed a woman confidante, his sister was the one to go to. And now, little as the idea appealed to her, it seemed the right thing to do . . . And I shall take that little doll, just to prove that I am not imagining things, she thought.
She rose and went through the now familiar motion of feeling under Ethel’s desk. The box had gone. Between the Thursday afternoon and Friday, it had been removed. All that remained to show that it had ever been there was a slight stickiness where the tape had adhered for so many days.
I was a fool not to have taken it while I had the chance, she told herself bitterly. Then she had a second thought; far, far better to approach this on the level of fact, not of fancy. What she imagined and what she suspected had no part to play here at all.
She went home, made a rather stronger pot of tea than usual and forced herself to drink it calmly. Then she washed her face in cold water and combed her hair. It was just half-past five when she rang the bell at the Rectory and was admitted by Reeve, who, when she asked for Miss Thorby, said nothing to indicate that Miss Thorby was not receiving that afternoon. However, shown into a room which she had not entered on her first visit and which she saw was a library, she was greeted by the Canon, who said with a kind of mock plaintiveness:
‘Please, will I do?’ He then added, in his ordinary manner, ‘Poor Isabel has one of her incapacitating headaches and is lying down.’
‘I’d rather tell you about it, really; but you did once tell me that Miss Thorby . . .’
‘I quite understand. Oh dear me, you do look troubled. Sit down and tell me everything.’
‘This afternoon we were fitting on the costumes for our scenes at the Fête, and when it was Ethel Rigby’s turn, I found . . .’
‘That you’d run out of material? Dear Miss Mayfield, let that be the least of your worries. I told you to hire what was needed.’
‘Ethel Rigby,’ Miss Mayfield said in a dogged voice, ‘had had, very recently, a really savage beating.’
‘What? Ethel Rigby?’
‘Ethel Rigby. And I think I should tell you that I have, before this, been told that her grandmother ill-treats her.’
‘Old Phoebe Rigby ill-treat Ethel! Miss Mayfield, that is palpable nonsense; there isn’t a more doting, indulgent . . .’ He sought for some final, clinching adjective.
‘I know. I’ve heard all that, Canon Thorby. And I know it looks that way. The girl herself connives to maintain that impression. But I can’t believe it, not after what I saw this afternoon.’
‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘we can soon settle the truth of this. I’ll go straight round there and see for myself. You can come with me or not, just as you prefer.’
‘I’ll come. I’m the one who made the accusation.’
There’s probably some – I won’t say reason; physical violence is never reasonable, but some justification. Though there again I must admit that Ethel never struck me as a girl who needed chastisement. If Reeve, now, took a stick to that baggage Juliet, nobody could blame him; Ethel always seems a bit spiritless; but, of course, how they seem in public and how they behave at home are very different things.’
‘Nothing,’ said Miss Mayfield flatly, ‘could possibly have earned a girl such a thrashing.’
‘Dear me, as bad as that?’ He looked at her sideways from his greater height. ‘You’ll excuse me asking this, won’t you – is this your first brush with this kind of thing?’
‘Not quite . . .’ She told him about the cases in Alchester, adding, ‘Africans are extremely indulgent to their children when they are young, but they have some . . . some very brutal customs, which I had to learn to live with. I’m not unduly squeamish.’
‘No, of course. I was forgetting. You have such a delicate, Dresden-china air, you know; one thinks of you as having been in a glass cabinet all your life. And I suppose the very reverse is true.’
Mrs Rigby said, ‘Good evening, sir,’ and then, with greatly diminished cordiality, ‘Good evening, Miss,’ and ushered them into the parlour, She knows why we are here, Miss Mayfield thought; and was glad of the Canon’s support.
The old woman, having seen them seated, sat down herself on one of the hard straight chairs and folded her hands in her lap.
Canon Thorby, maintaining an easy and affable manner, went straight to the point.
‘Mrs Rigby, Ethel had cause to remove her dress in school this afternoon and Miss Mayfield saw, to her consternation, that her back shows marks of a beating. A pretty severe beating.’
‘Be a funny thing if it didn’t,’ Mrs Rigby said with no sign of being abashed or repentant. ‘Laid it on good and hard, I did. She’ll bear the marks for a week, I reckon.’
‘May we know why you beat her?’
‘You may. You’ll understand, sir. I’m not having her go the way Maud went, at least not for lack of a hiding to bring her to her senses.’
‘Not that old trouble already?’
‘Sorry as I am to say it, that is so. I’ll name no names for the present, and I’ve knocked sense into Ethel I think, but if I have any more bother, I shall ask you to hev a word with the chap. Everything else apart, she’s only fourteen and, sometimes I think, not all that bright.’
‘I’ll do more than have a word,’ he said sternly. ‘To revert to Ethel. Don’t you think she is a little old to be whipped? Have you tried other persuasions?’
‘I’ve talked till I was black in the face. Now, you’re both clever people, you tell me; what do you do with a girl of fourteen who turns round and says, “I’ll do what I like”? Specially’ – her voice almost broke – ‘when you know what happened before and can look back . . . and remember.’
‘I know, I know,’ Canon Thorby said hastily. ‘It is a very trying situation. You know, you may be a little over-anxious. History seldom so exactly repeats itself. Would you mind if I had a word with Ethel?’
‘Why should I? She’s right here.’ She opened the door into the back room and called. Ethel came in, carrying her knitting. It was some of the dish-cloth yarn which, smeared with aluminium paint, was to be chain mail in some of the scenes. The elder girls had been entrusted to work on it at home.
‘Hullo, Ethel,’ the Canon said. ‘I should like you to tell me, in your own words, exactly what happened last evening.’
‘What about last evening, sir?’
‘Weren’t you punished?’
Ethel swung round on her grandmother and said venomously:
‘What did you want to go telling about that for? You hit me, didn’t you? Wasn’t that enough? D’you want to make me look a fool in front of everybody?’
‘It was I, Ethel. I saw your back when I unzipped the dress this afternoon. I thought something should be done about it.’
‘Oh.’ From lowered sulky eyes Ethel shot Miss Mayfield a look of hatred.
‘If you’d looked a little closer. Miss,’ said Mrs Rigby with cold politeness, ‘you’d have seen that something was done. She had lotion on the stripes last night and again this morning; She’s my own flesh and blood; I don’t like hurting her. But running round and answering back I just will not have.’
‘Ed Woodly only walked down the lane with me, if you call that running round,’ Ethel said insolently.
‘That,’ said Canon Thorby, ‘is no way to speak to your grandmother. One of these days, when you are older and have more sense, you’ll realize how much you owe her. You should be ashamed to cause her such anxiety.’
‘She is, sir. She is,’ the old woman said defensively. ‘Thass why she spoke so sharp.’ She turned to Miss Mayfield. ‘There’s only so much that schools are responsible for, you know, Miss, and others we have to take care of ourselves as best we can.’
‘You’re right, up to a point, Mrs Rigby,’ Canon Thorby put in. ‘I’m sure Miss Mayfield would be the first to . . .’
To what? Confess herself mistaken? Apologize? I will not. I’m still not convinced. I don’t know why, but I’m not; made to look a fool again, but not convinced.
‘I think any teacher – or anyone else, for that matter – who saw such marks on a child is morally bound to do something.’
‘Well, what are you going to do?’ Mrs Rigby spoke quietly, but insolently for all that.
‘I asked Canon Thorby’s advice. And I feel bound to mention that he has no knowledge of the extent of the lacerations.’
‘That’s easily remedied. Ethel, off with that jumper.’
‘Look,’ Ethel said, ‘I sauced you and you give me a hiding. I ain’t going to be made a peep-show of.’ She put the knitting on the table and doubled one hand into a fist and, bending her arm behind her, gave herself a clout between the shoulder blades. ‘Don’t hurt,’ she said.
But that was a lie; Miss Mayfield had seen the skin go white and tight around her mouth and the root of her nose.
‘There been about enough fuss over this,’ Ethel said, and opened the door of the back room, went through and slammed it smartly behind her.
‘You see,’ Mrs Rigby said.
‘Yes. You have your hands full. One thing rather stands out, though, doesn’t it, Mrs Rigby? Beating her doesn’t seem very effective.’
‘Well, sir, it was a try. I’ve still got a trick or two up my sleeve. And, sir, I don’t want you to say I complained about Ed Woodly; it was Ethel brought his name in. I daresay I was hasty. They weren’t up to any real harm, but you know what he is, bad as they come; and when she turned cheeky, I did lose my temper and laid on a bit harder than I meant.’
When? Miss Mayfield wondered, trying to visualize the scene. The beating had not been administered through Ethel’s clothing, of that she was almost sure.
‘By the way,’ Mrs Rigby was saying, ‘I wrote out that recipe for pot-purry Miss Isabel asked me about when mine took the prize. Now you are here, p’raps you’d take it; we shall soon be saving up the rose petals.’
She went to the cupboard and returned with a piece of paper, which the Canon folded and placed carefully in his wallet. He rose as he did so.
‘Don’t go forgetting it, now,’ she said, smiling.
‘I’ll try not to. Well, Mrs Rigby, I’m sorry about all this. I shall take the first opportunity of saying a few words about obedience and respect to parents and elders, and I’ll have a tactful word with Master Woodly, too. He’ll find himself out of a job if he doesn’t mend his ways.’
‘Please, sir, not over this bit of silliness. Why, I’ve known his mother since she was about as old as Ethel is now; together in service, once we were. I wouldn’t have her heart broke just for a bit of thing like this. Mind, he’s bad, no denying that – with girls, I mean – but he’s good to his mother, and I wouldn’t on no account . . .’
‘All right, Mrs Rigby, we’ll forget it, this once. And go easy on Ethel, will you? She’s at a difficult age and I’m sure there’s no real vice in her. Goodnight.’
As they walked along Curlew Lane, he said:
‘Well, do you feel happier about it now?’
After too long a pause, she said, ‘I suppose I have to be.’
‘Old Phoebe let her temper get the better of her, that’s plain, and I think she’s ashamed of it but too proud to say so. You’d understand why she is a little unbalanced about boys if you knew her whole story.’
‘Miss Benson did give me a bare outline.’
‘A whipping, you know, is quite different from prolonged neglect or the deliberate sadism that one reads about. There was a time when the highest people in the land beat their children.’
‘Lady Jane Grey. Margery Paston. I know. What bothers me is Ethel’s attitude.’
‘Rude and defiant, I agree.’
‘I didn’t mean that exactly – though the rudeness and the defiance seemed to me to be out of character, assumed. No, what mystifies me is the way she sides with her grandmother.’
‘Surely that is an indication that there is nothing very much wrong in their relationship.’ He was silent for a moment, and Miss Mayfield could hear the soft sad cry of the wood-doves from the trees beyond the allotments. ‘I haven’t spent all my life in this peaceful backwater. For four years, immediately after my ordination, I was a curate in a very poor parish in East London. A case or two of cruelty to children came to my notice there, and I assure you that no child, even in the safeguarding presence of strangers, would have dared speak to the person who had ill-used it as Ethel Rigby just spoke to her grandmother.’
‘Unless it had been told to, as part of the deception, so the people who asked questions should come away saying exactly the thing which you have just said.’
He stopped still on the path.
‘How very shrewd!’ he exclaimed. Then, walking on, he said, ‘It might be true in some cases, I suppose. But not in this. They had no time to concoct a tale. The old woman opened the door and called Ethel in. Ethel’s performance was quite unrehearsed, I am sure. I can’t seriously imagine old Granny Rigby laying on the stripes and saying, “If anybody asks you, whack, how you came to be beaten, whack, you’re to say, whack whack, that you’d been running round with boys.” Can you?’
‘Not when it’s put like that,’ she said a trifle wearily. ‘But there could be a kind of over-all understanding that any inquiry was to be fobbed off, lest something worse should happen.’
There was a slight grit of impatience in his voice when he next spoke:
‘I do think, you know, that you’re making it all unnecessarily complicated. I’ve known Phoebe Rigby all my life. She isn’t a sadistic, scheming, deeply cunning child-beater; she’s a poor simple old woman whose one darling daughter ended up on the streets and who is terrified of her granddaughter going the same way. By the same token, she’s known me a long time, too, and when I say “Go easy on Ethel”, she takes it as the order it was meant to be. I have my village well in hand, Miss Mayfield, casual as I may seem. Now, let’s speak of a more cheerful subject. How are the scenes from history shaping up?’
They had by this time almost reached her house, having taken the little footpath directly across the Green.
‘Most of the children are word-perfect. But, of course, it’s the spectacle we count on to rouse interest; it’s to look at more than to listen to. The colours really are rather nice. As a matter of fact, I have the sketches I made for them indoors at this moment. Would you like to see them?’
She was faintly aware of being sycophantic; she had annoyed him and wanted to get back into his good graces.
‘I’d like that very much,’ he said.
They entered her house and went into the sitting room, where she spread the gay drawings on the sofa, and floor. Canon Thorby sat down in a chair and once again suffered one of his physical collapses. Miss Mayfield realized that the little episode just ended had exhausted him; his colour had faded, all the lines of his face sagged in an immense weariness. She remembered Miss Thorby’s headache. His life probably contained unsuspected strains and stresses.
She said, in a voice which she did not know was almost maternal:
‘May I get you one of your own drinks, Canon Thorby?’
‘That would be very kind indeed. I’ve had rather a brute of a day. And this . . . Absurd as it seems, I always loathe having to take anybody to task. I know it has to be done, and I do it, but it does go against the grain.’
‘I can see that.’
He shot her a glance. ‘Most people aren’t so perspicacious; they think I go through life like a well-upholstered steam roller.’ He smiled.
‘Would you like sherry?’ she asked, anxious to minister to him.
‘Not, alas, the sherry which I, remembering Mrs Westleton’s taste, provided for you. I like only dry sherry, so if you’ll give me brandy and soda again, I shall be very happy.’
When she returned to the room, he had revived again, and began to talk with great enthusiasm of her drawings.
‘They’re absolutely beautiful. I’d no idea you had such talent. They’re professional. What do you intend to do with them?’
‘They’ve served their purpose. The costumes are now in the making.’
‘Well, they’re certainly not going back into that portfolio, to blush unseen. With your permission, we’ll have them framed. And then, for a start, we’ll exhibit them at the Fête. . . . Yes, in the Orangery, where the teas are served. . . . Just to show off what talent we now have in Walwyk. And then, after that – well, we’ll see. . . .’
Miss Mayfield, who had a modest estimate of her own skill, decided that he was being exaggeratedly complimentary to make up for having been a little out of temper with her.