The Winds Of Heaven Read online

  Arthur was so tired tonight that he had hoped to sit quietly in the drawing room with his drink while Miriam finished preparing supper; but Louise was there with her sewing. She showed him that she was mending his children's clothes, as if to justify her presence, and even he could see that she was making a poor job of the darning. It was amazing that such a capable, skilful woman as Miriam could have been raised by Louise, who was deficient in nearly all the domestic qualities.

  Louise found it hard to sit without talking in a room with someone else, especially someone like Arthur, with whom she could never quite relax. She asked him about his case, an unimportant but unusual murder trial, which was receiving some attention in the newspapers. She had been looking forward to hearing Arthur's side of it, and to writing about it to her friend Sybil, at Ryde, who craved inside information about anything, from the royal family to sex murderers.

  Arthur never talked about his cases at home until they were long past and paid for and then only when there had been wine and brandy at dinner and he could expand to an audience, Louise had not learned this yet. She continued to bumble into ill-received questions, ascribing Arthur's terse answers to the fact that he was tired.

  Louise wished that someone would come into the room; but Judy was in bed, and Simon and Ellen were in the kitchen having supper, since Arthur only allowed them to dine with the grown-ups on Sundays. Presently, Miriam came in, wearing a green silk dress with a choker necklace round her swan-like throat, and announced that dinner was ready, although she did not look as if she had cooked anything more arduous than a boiled egg. Arthur got up and went to the side-table to make her a drink.

  "For you, Mother?" he asked, and Louise said: "Oh, I don't know that I "

  This or similar dialogue took place every night, except when there was company and Louise was automatically handed a drink with everyone else. Arthur was quite willing to give his

  mother-in-law a drink every night. His wine bills were so big that it would not make any difference; but Louise, although she loved a martini, sharp and dry the way he made them, felt bad about accepting it, when she could not afford to buy the household even an occasional bottle of gin.

  So she demurred, and Arthur poured her a drink just the same.

  "One of these days," he murmured tonight to Miriam, when Louise had gone through the door before them to the dining room, "your mother won't get a drink, unless she learns to say: Td love one. Just what I want.'"

  "How can she?" Miriam said. "She feels it's charity."

  "My foot," said Arthur. "People who have got nothing can't be so proud."

  Ellen was waiting in the hall to say good night. She listened to see if diey were going to say any more; then, as they came out of the drawing room, she slid into the dining room, to kiss her grandmother and question her eyes to see if she had heard.

  2

  AT WAS Sunday. Once on a Sunday, Miriam had offered to drive her mother to the Catholic church five miles away, and once the gardener had taken her; but Arthur said it was not fair to ask the man to give up part of his free day.

  Louise was almost glad that the matter of whether or not to go to church had been taken out of her hands. She knew that she ought to go to Mass, and then again, she felt that she should not. She had not been married in a Catholic church. Dudley had refused, and Louise had been so young and so naively in love that she had thought the only thing that mattered was Dudley's pleasure. She knew that in the eyes of the Church she had been living in sin with Dudley, which must make her children illegitimate.

  Her parents had attended the register office wedding, although unhappily, with hurt eyes. They would not have liked Dudley wherever Louise had married him. He did not like them either. Over the years, Louise gradually saw them less and less; but when they died, she was lonely for them. They had been the last link with herself as a happy person. There seemed to be no one left who cared.

  If Dudley was in a mood he would go for days without speaking to her, except to ask for things he wanted. Even the girls grew away from her at a surprisingly young age. They had secrets, and private occupations, and found their own solutions to childish problems. They seemed to have decided that there

  were two opposing tribes in the world—children and grown-ups —and that the barriers must be maintained between them.

  In her loneliness, the faith against which Louise had transgressed came back to her, tempting her with its consolations. She crept to church, half expecting to be struck down by a bolt from heaven as she knelt in a back pew. Nothing happened, except that she felt better. She went again, braving Dudley's ridicule when he found out. He did not forbid her to go, however. He said he did not care what she did, as long as she did not drag the children into her God-bothering gambols.

  The Catholic church was an easy target for Dudley's brand of humor. He was the kind of man who likes to make jokes about priests and nuns and to snort if anyone mentions the Pope. If Louise ever secretly tried to tell her children some of the things she wanted them to know, they would quote some irreverent denigration of their fathers, with which he had primed them against possible seduction.

  Louise went to church as a beggar, feeling that she had forfeited her right to be there. She humbled herself before Christ, knowing that if you only had sufficient humility anything could be forgiven. Often she felt reassured, but then, was that being humble—to fancy that God could be influenced by your inadequate prayers?

  When the problem became too much for her, she mustered her courage and went to a priest, expecting to be chided, and found that she was listened to with the first real compassion she had ever known. She even got a concrete suggestion for help. The thing to do, the priest said, as practically as if he were a contractor discussing blueprints, was to work on the hope that as her husband grew older and mellower he would eventually consent to join with her in a belated wedding ceremony in church.

  "Yes, but you don't know Dudley/' Louise had said sadly.

  "He's not the devil," the priest said. "More impossible things have happened. Look at Saint Paul. Tell you what"—he was a

  very boyish priest—"111 pray for you like mad. It's a good cause."

  Louise believed that he did pray for her, and was grateful. But she let him down by her own craven failure to do her part. Although Dudley did eventually weary of the Catholic church as an object of derision, and stopped ordering meat for her if they went to a restaurant on Friday, Louise could never bring herself to broach the subject of a church wedding. She had never dared, and now it was too late. Dudley was dead, and her sin was still upon her, and, like the daughters of Jerusalem, upon her children; and she still did not know if she was doing more wrong by going to Mass or staying away.

  Dudley had been ill for several weeks before he died. He was ill at home, and Louise had bought white overalls and nursed him, guiltily happy in his helplessness and need of her. He was much nicer when he was ill. He had not the strength to put on the interminable acts of self-importance on which he had relied all his life, and which made him so difficult to live with.

  Before his illness, he had always boasted of being self-sufficient, of needing help from no man. Even the domestic services which Louise performed for him, he had received ungratefully, with the attitude that she could do them if she chose, but he could manage perfectly well without her. He imagined that he did half the work of the house himself, although in actual fact he barely raised a finger except to look for dust along the shelves.

  After he died, Louise read his diary, half fearful that his ghost would come and catch her at it, She found that he had recorded all the most trivial events of his days, with the words I, My and Me scattered over the pages like mustard and cress. The diary was a masterpiece of egotism. Louise came across an entry which related to the time when she had washed a blankej: —an unusual feat for her. She had struggled unsuccessfully to wring it out, and was finally forced to ask Dudley to help her. She could see now the face with which he had performed this
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  short task, the face of a man martyred almost beyond endurance. In his diary that day, he had recorded: "Tonight I washed some blankets after a hard day's work/*

  She also found the entries for the time when she had a bad attack of influenza, and was ordered by the doctor, who knew Dudley, to stay in bed and ignore everything else in the house but her care of herself. The girls were all away from home then. Dudley had brought her one sketchy meal, groaning and panting up the stairs like a slave laborer. After that he had stayed out of the house most of the time, and only brought her an occasional cup of tea if he was making some for himself. Louise had to stagger to the kitchen and forage for herself to avoid starving to death.

  The entries in Dudley's diary, however, stated: "Now I am nurse, cook and maid-of-all-work, tied to the house with a sick wife, whom I must wait on hand and foot."

  When Louise was first married she had looked forward to taking a part in her husband's business life, to listening to his problems, even advising perhaps, and sharing with him the ups and downs he met as he made his way forward to the prosperity he was always blusteringly promising her. But Dudley had locked her away from that side of his life from the start. She knew nothing about his work, except that he was in a shipping company, which did not appreciate his talents.

  Long before he was due to retire, he came home one night and announced that he had resigned his job, because it was a dead end, and he was sick of working himself to death to benefit a lot of sharks and boneheads.

  "But the money!" Louise said, aghast, "They were paying you a good salary. How will we live now?"

  "Don't you worry, Tubby," Dudley said, wagging his head complacently. "I've been making some contacts. I've got plans for myself. I'm going to get into the big money."

  What his new enterprise was, Louise barely knew, except that it was something to do with shares and companies, and necessitated his having lunches with mysterious-sounding men

  in places like the Savoy, which Louise did not think they could afford.

  She did not really know what they could afford, for Dudley never discussed finances with her. He paid the bills for the house, and the children's clothes, and school fees and holidays. Louise had two hundred pounds a year of her own, which her father had left her, so she did not have to ask Dudley for money to spend on herself.

  He always seemed to have enough to buy himself a new car, or an expensive suit, or another cigarette case to add to his collection. Toward the end, when he began to grumble about the laundry and grocer s bills, and to tell Louise that she must cut down, or they would have to leave the house, he still seemed to have enough to buy himself a radio-phonograph and to fly to Le Touquet for the week end.

  Louise imagined that there was still money coming in; she did not know from where, and Dudley would not have told her if she had asked. Braggart to the last, when he was ruined, he would not admit it to her. He was still seeing prosperity just around the corner.

  "Dudley is a big shot/* his brother used to tell Louise, "A big-time operator. He knows it all. No one can tell him anything/'

  When the big shot lost his health he lost some of his bravado with it. He had to rely on Louise for everything, although even toward the end, when he could hardly see, he still would not let her read his letters to him. They piled up beside his bed, and once one of the mysterious men arrived, to see why he was not getting an answer. Dudley was not allowed visitors, but he heard the conversation in the hall, and shouted weakly through the door. To quiet him, Louise admitted the man to the sickroom. He came out quite soon, looking concerned, and glanced at Louise for a moment with an odd look of baffled pity, before he put on his black hat and padded overcoat and went thoughtfully out of the house.

  When Louise was nursing Dudley, she was happier than she

  had been for years. At last she had something really important to do. She bustled about, knocking over things in the sickroom, spilling soup on the tray, and bumping into Dudley's bed every time she walked by it.

  Her happiness was short-lived, however. He insisted that he must have a nurse. The nurse was suave and secretive, and cost ten pounds a week. Louise did not think that they could afford it; but only guessed that they could not, when the day after Dudley died, the nurse came back to tidy up, and brought her last weekly check, which had been returned to her with the letters 'R.D/ in red pencil across the top.

  With a nurse in the house, Louise felt more redundant than ever. The nurse did everything for Dudley, including cleaning his room and cooking such food as he could take. She moved through the house like a narrow whirlwind, so quick and purposeful that she made Louise feel shamefully slow and useless. There was nothing for Louise to do except to telephone her daughters, and cook meals for herself and the nurse, which they ate mostly in silence, having no common interests except Dudley, whose condition the nurse would seldom discuss.

  Louise did not realize that the end was approaching. She would have sent for the girls, but the night nurse did not call her from her room until three o'clock in the morning, just before Dudley died.

  He did not know her, and after he died Louise barely knew him. The chill, resigned face, and the long ridge of body under the sheets had lost every trace of the bravado that had sustained his charlatan passage through the world.

  For a few hours, Louise had the wild idea of having him buried in a Catholic cemetery, thinking that this might atone for the defection of their secular marriage. She found that this was impossible. He was technically Church of England, so in a Protestant cemetery, with the wind and rain blowing across the relentless gravestones, she sent him to his God, with whom he had never yet sought encounter.

  Miriam came to the funeral with a new black hat, and a face

  that concealed whatever she felt at out her father's death. Eva came in a black velvet beret, with a face that was saddened more by pity than by loss. Anne, the youngest daughter, came looking defiant and untidy, with a pack of dogs in the car. She brought her husband with her. Louise had not seen Frank since he and Anne were married the year before. Dudley had fought against the marriage. He called it a tragedy, and forbade it. When Anne defied him, he refused to see either her or her husband, because Frank was a smallholder and spoke with a slight Bedfordshire accent, and had committed the insulting crime of permitting Dudley s daughter to marry beneath her.

  Louise thought it was magnanimous of Frank to come to the funeral after the way Dudley had treated him. When she said: "It was so nice of you to come," he looked at her honestly with his bright blue eyes and said: "I thought maybe you'd like it."

  Louise realized that she was going to like Frank. She would be able to see him and get to know him now that she was on her own, with no one to tell her what to do.

  Everyone said that Louise was 'wonderful' about Dudley's death, but she could not be anything else, because, shocking though it was to her, she hardly cared. She was free for the first time in thirty-five years. She could go where she liked, do what she liked, behave as she pleased, without having to face contemptuous censure.

  She began to plan the life that she would make for herself. She was fifty-seven. It was not too late to start to live. Then Arthur, solemnly shouldering his position as the reliable son-in-law, came round to her house to check on her financial position, and she found that she was going to be lucky if she had any sort of a life at all.

  Dudley had left her nothing. Nothing except his debts. He had lost everything in the maniac speculations about which Louise was completely ignorant. He had sold every share he possessed, mortgaged the house, and realized his life insurance. He had been owing income tax for so long that Arthur could not understand how he had kept out of jail.

  Louise wished that it had been anyone but Arthur who had to discover the catastrophe. Arthur was so impeccable, so efficient and respectable. Louise was embarrassed when he asked her where he could find Dudley's bonds, his policies and bank statement, and she did not know. She had never been near Dudley's desk. He had e
ven dusted it himself. Her embarrassment turned to humiliation when Arthur began to find the evidence of Dudley's ruin.

  "You mean to say, Mother, that you didn't know all this was going on?" he kept asking, and Louise could only shake her head, and feel hopelessly foolish, and weep for the first time since Dudley died.

  "I did wonder a bit," she stuttered, "when the nurse came with the dishonored check. But I thought it must be a mistake—that Dudley had another bank account or something. I

  didn't know. He never told me. He went on spending "

  She looked at the shiny radio-phonograph, which Dudley had hardly played.

  Soon she had to sell it. She sold the house, the car, Dudley's pictures and gold cigarette cases, even what little jewelry she had, to help pay off the debts. She had nothing except the money from her father, which had been poorly invested, and was now not even bringing in two hundred pounds a year.

  What was she going to do? How was she going to live? The question troubled her daughters as much as it did Louise.

  Louise had a girlhood friend, Sybil Vernon, who ran a hotel near Ryde, in the Isle of Wight. She and Louise had been at school together; unlikely friends, for Sybil was masterful and insubordinate, while Louise had always been cowed by authority, even in the shape of the physics teacher, whom everyone else sought to electrocute with one of her own experiments.

  Louise had kept in touch with Sybil mainly through letters, but she had seen, her off and on ovei the years, in spite of the fact that Dudley did not like her. In middle age, Sybil was still noisy and casual, and she needed gin as other people need

  water, but she was warmhearted and impulsive, and when she learned of Louise's plight she offered her a room for whatever she could afford to pay, during the winter months when her hotel was half empty.

  But the rest of the year? There was nothing for it but that Louise should stay with her daughters in turn to pass the spring and summer months. It was all arranged at an embarrassing family conclave, when no one could say what he was thinking, and each tried to outdo the other in unselfishness,