Seven

Gideon and his sister had taken uneasy possession of the small formal parlour by the front door, rarely used except for company. They sat, unusually silent, as if that would allow them to believe the blow they’d received and still couldn’t credit. It was an obvious relief to both when they heard Jessie Thwaite answering the front door, and then the murmur of a voice they recognized as that of Tom Illingworth.

Tom would know what to do. Ever since he’d taught Gideon to ride his first grown-up bicycle when he was ten, Gideon had looked up to him as the elder brother he had never had, and often sought his advice. Once, he had thought he might become more than brother, when Grandpa had decided he ought to marry Una. However, Tom’s patent lack of interest apart, Una had soon put a stop to that. She might look as fragile as one of the harebells on the moor, but she was tough, knew her own mind and had other ideas. Despite everything else he was feeling, there flashed across Gideon’s mind the question: what of those other plans of hers, now?

Tom came into the room, asking, ‘What’s the matter with Jessie?’ As well he might, having seen the maid with her lips pressed tight together, her cheerfulness gone.

He looked around the room, mystified. Una was sitting bolt upright, as if she were frozen into the position. Gideon was standing with his back to the fire, one hand shoved into his pocket. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘You haven’t heard, then? The accident, down at the mill?’

‘Accident, what accident? I’ve been in London for a few days and only just got back.’

‘Your mother hasn’t told you, then?’

‘She’s out. I didn’t wait to see her, I came straight up here. It’s not – it’s not my uncle – not Whiteley, is it?’

‘It’s not Whiteley Hirst, Tom, it’s Grandpa. He’s had an accident. He’s dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘They found him floating in the dam, drowned, about dinner time yesterday.’

‘Good God. In the dam? I don’t understand.’

‘No one does,’ Gideon said tiredly. ‘They think he must have fallen in.’

‘What?’ Ainsley Beaumont had walked past the dam every day of his life since he was thirteen, and probably before that he had been one of the little daredevils who had balanced along the top of its wall. An accident was surely an impossibility. Even had he tripped on the path, it was unlikely he could have tumbled over the three foot wall which surrounded the dam.

Gideon was looking like a lost, hurt and bewildered schoolboy, the confidence knocked out of him. The rudder had gone from his ship and he was off course. ‘What now?’ he asked in a dazed manner. ‘What do we do? Where do we start?’

Tom clasped his shoulder. ‘One thing at a time. Just tell me, what happened?’

‘He left home for the mill as usual, but never arrived. They say he fell into the dam. I’d been in Leeds all day – to see Greenbaum’s about half a dozen pieces they claim were not up to snuff, which is a damn lie, of course, and I . . .’ His voice trailed off. ‘I didn’t get back until mid-afternoon, after they’d found him.’

‘Does Miss Harcourt know?’ Tom asked, surprisingly.

Gideon exchanged a look with his sister, as if wondering for a moment who Miss Harcourt was. ‘Laura? Well, of course. Oh, here she is.’

For a while Laura hesitated in the doorway. ‘I came to see if you wanted some tea.’

Una shook her head. ‘Please come in, Laura.’

Laura went to sit beside her and touched one of the cold hands, though she felt little warmer, herself. The news had shocked her. She had been here little over a week and scarcely more than met Ainsley Beaumont. Once or twice he had looked into the library and pronounced what she was doing as ‘champion’, but for most of the previous week he had been in London for something they called the wool sales. She was not even certain whether she had liked him or not, but in the face of such tragedy what did that count?

Although the dusk was falling rapidly outside and the claustrophobic room felt to be closing in on them, no one had thought to light the lamps. Tom saw to them now and as the light bloomed, there was the sound of an engine, and on to the flags outside the house a motorcar drew up, a rather splendid vehicle from which a bulky figure emerged, goggled, capped and voluminously overcoated. A few moments later the family doctor, Dr Widdop, came in, bringing with him an unmistakable air of reassurance and solidity. Una’s face seemed to unfreeze a little and Gideon almost imperceptibly squared his shoulders.

Having been divested of his protective gear in the hall, the doctor looked less bulky, though he was still an impressive and prosperous-looking figure in a good suit, the cloth of which might have been woven in Wainthorpe, but had certainly not been tailored there. His boots had that perfectly fitting, handmade look, and he wore a gold ring. He had a wise, worldly face.

Nathan Widdop had in fact been born into a wealthy family of Neller valley textile machinery manufacturers, but having no interest in engineering, he had trained as a doctor, set up his practice in Wainthorpe and married the district nurse. When his father died he had sold his share of the business to his two brothers and continued to live among the local inhabitants, working harder, with longer hours, if the truth be told, than most of them. He had never, however, seen the necessity to divest himself of what he regarded as the small comforts of life, and though his native accent had been almost lost somewhere in the hospital corridors and medical schools where he’d received his training, and his clothes and his car were objects of ironic amusement to his patients, he remained a well liked, even loved, family doctor. He often gave untenable advice, but he didn’t press for his bills, and it was not unknown for a load of coal to be delivered when children were ill, or a few shillings to be left on the kitchen table for a needy family after one of his visits. Between them, he and his wife had brought into the world most of Wainthorpe’s babies, including Gideon and Una.

‘I’m so sorry I couldn’t get here sooner.’ He shook hands with Tom, and with Laura when introduced, giving her a shrewd look, then bent to kiss Una and put an arm around her shoulder. She shrank a little, as she was apt to do from bodily contact, but allowed his hand to remain. ‘My dear, this is a bad business, a bad business.’ He looked tired and uneasy. He had spent the night before last attending to a woman enduring a long and difficult labour in one of the poorer houses in the rabbit warren of narrow streets, yards and alleys at the end of the town, and then last night he had again been called out at midnight to the lingering deathbed of an eighteen-year-old lad suffering from TB. Conscious all the time of the abominable death of his old friend.

‘How could such a thing have happened, Dr Widdop?’ Gideon asked.

The doctor looked from Gideon to his sister, ran his finger round his collar, where a faint rash showed, and rubbed at a similar patch on the back of his hand. ‘I think we should all sit down. There is something I have to say, which may . . . where’s your mother, Gideon?’

‘Upstairs. She’s been very upset since we heard – you know how she is – but Una’s persuaded her to lie down.’

‘Then we won’t disturb her. I’ll go up and see her later.’ They exchanged a long look and a nod. The doctor looked again around the circle of bewildered faces. ‘Do you have any brandy?’

Gideon waved towards glasses and a decanter on the sideboard.

‘For all of us, then.’

‘I don’t want any brandy,’ Una said, with a shudder.

‘You need it, however. Shall we sit?’

They waited uneasily until Gideon, glad of something to occupy himself with, had poured and dispensed the drinks and they had all taken their first sip – apart from Una, who drank hers off as if it were medicine. He then told them in a few short words that Ainsley had been seen by him in a professional capacity six months ago, that eventually a brain tumour had been diagnosed, and he had been told he did not have more than a possible six months to live.

The silence when he had finished could have been cut with a knife. ‘But he told no one,’ Una whispered at last. ‘He didn’t seem ill. How could he have kept such a thing to himself?’ The brandy which she’d drunk too quickly had brought two spots of hectic colour to her pale cheeks and her eyes were over-bright.

‘That was what he wanted. No fuss. And perhaps in the end he found his own way of going.’

With a sharp tap that was almost a bang, Gideon put the glass, which he had scarcely touched, on to the polished table by his chair. He stared at the doctor. ‘You are not saying what I think – that he did this thing deliberately?’

Widdop said bleakly, ‘Gideon, he didn’t have much to look forward to. You know your grandfather and I, friends that we were, didn’t always see eye to eye, but I have to say that in this he may have had a point.’

‘What point? What point could there be in something so – so crass as that?’ He fell into a furious silence but brought out at last, in a sudden rush of anger, ‘Well, if it’s true what you say about a brain tumour, it could explain why he’s been acting in such a deuced peculiar way lately. But to drown himself . . . No! I don’t believe it. I’ll never believe it. You know as well as anyone he was one to face up to things. He didn’t know the meaning of fear, and he would never have taken the coward’s way out. I don’t think the idea would even have occurred to him.’

‘None of us know how we would react to that kind of thing until it happens,’ Widdop said with weary experience.

‘He was an old man,’ Gideon went on as if the doctor hadn’t spoken, ‘and if he was as ill as you say, might he not have taken a sudden turn for the worse when he was walking along the dam-side, perhaps leaned against the wall for support, lost himself and toppled forward into the water?’ He was clutching at straws, but then he stopped. How likely was it that an old man like Ainsley, sick into the bargain, could have managed this acrobatic feat?

Unexpectedly, Una put in her support. ‘Throwing himself into that filthy dam? Not Grandpa, not in a month of Sundays.’ She exchanged a look with Gideon. ‘My brother is right.’

‘Of course I am. For one thing, if he’d wanted to do such a thing deliberately, he would have stuffed his pockets with stones or something, to make certain, like that woman did last year, when she threw herself into the canal. I don’t care how unlikely it seems, an accident’s the only explanation.’

The doctor said quietly, ‘It’s possible, you know, that he chose to take his life in a moment of aberration, or despair, not allowing himself time to think. However, accident or suicide, we shall have to wait for the autopsy.’

‘Autopsy?’ Una looked slightly sick.

‘A post-mortem. I’m afraid the coroner . . . in such cases . . .’ He paused. There seemed to be something else he was reluctant to say. But he remained silent and after a moment he rose stiffly. ‘I must see your mother before I go. Stay where you are, I know her room.’