“My name is Peggy Wentworth,” she replies defiantly in a tough Irish brogue. “Shall I spell it for you, Magnus? Peggy short for Margaret, have you heard that? Your father, Mr. Richard Thomas Pym, killed my husband John, and as good as killed me too. And if it takes me the rest of my living death till they put me in the grave beside him, I’ll find the proof of it, and bring the brute to justice.”
Seeing a flicker of moving light Pym glances sharply behind him. Mattie Searle is standing in the doorway with a blanket over his shoulders. His head is hung sideways to favour his good ear while he squints first at Pym then at Peggy over the top of his spectacles. How much has he heard? Pym has no idea. But his mind is made fertile by alarm.
“This is Emma from Oxford, Mattie,” he says boldly. “Emma, this is Mr. Searle who owns the hotel.”
“Pleased to meet you,” says Peggy calmly.
“Emma and I are in a college play next month, Mattie. She came up to Gulworth so that we could rehearse together. We thought we’d be out of your way down here.”
“Oh yes,” says Mattie. His eyes slip from Peggy to Pym and back again, with a knowledge that makes nonsense of Pym’s lies. They hear his lazy shuffle going up the stairs.
* * *
I can’t tell you very accurately any more, Tom, which bits she told Pym where. His first thought on escaping the hotel was to keep going, so they hopped a bus and went as far as it took them, which turned out to be the oldest, most broken-down bit of waste dockland you could imagine: gutted warehouses with windows you could see the moon through, idle cranes that rose like gallows straight out of the sea. A bunch of roving knife-bladers had pitched camp there, they must have worked at night and slept by day, because I remember their Romany faces rocking over their wheels as they trod their treadles, and the sparks gushing over the watching children. I remember girls with men’s muscles flinging fish baskets while they yelled ribaldries at each other, and fishermen strutting among them in their oilskins, too grand to be bothered with anyone but themselves. I remember with a leap of gratitude every flash of face or voice outside the windows of the prison she had locked me in with her relentless monologue.
At a tea-stall on the waterfront while they stood shivering with a crowd of down-and-outs, Peggy told Pym the story of how Rick had stolen her farm. She had begun it the moment they got on the bus, for the benefit of anyone who’d care to hear it, and had continued it without a comma or a full stop since, and Pym knew that it was all true, all terrible, even if quite often the sheer venom in her drove him secretly to Rick’s protection. They walked to get warm but she didn’t stop talking for one second. When he bought her beans and egg at a Seamen’s Mission hut called the Rover, still she went on talking as she spread her elbows and sawed the toast and used her teaspoon to get up the sauce. It was at the Rover that she told Pym about Rick’s great trust fund that took possession of the nine thousand pounds of insurance money paid to her husband John after he fell into the thresher and lost both legs below the knee and all the fingers of one hand. As she told this part she drew the lines of amputation on her own scant limbs without looking at them, and Pym sensed her obsession again and was scared of it. The one voice I never did for you, Tom, is Peggy’s Irish brogue dropping into Rick’s chapel cadences as she repeated his silver-tongued promises: twelve and a half percent plus profits, my dear, year in and year out, enough to see dear old John right for as long as he’s spared, and enough for yourself when he’s gone, and enough left over after that, my dear, to put some by for that first-rate boy of yours for when he goes to college and reads his law just the way my own son will — they’re birds of a feather. It was a Thomas Hardy story that she told, full of casual disasters that seemed to have been timed by an angry God to obtain the maximum of misfortune. And she was Hardy’s woman to go with it: lured forward by her obsession, and only her own destiny left to deal with.
John Wentworth, as well as being a victim, was an ass, she explained, and was ready to be swayed by the first charmer who walked into the room. He went to his grave convinced that Rick was a saviour and a pal. His farm was a Cornish manor called Tamar Rose where every grain of wheat had to be wrestled from the sea wind. He had inherited it from a wiser father, and Alastair their son was his only heir. When John died there was not a penny for anybody. Everything signed away, every bloody thing mortgaged to the neck, Magnus — on which word Peggy passed her bean-stained knife across her throat. She told about Rick visiting John in hospital soon after his accident and the flowers and the chocolates and the bubbly — and Pym in his mind’s eye saw the basket of black-market fruit beside his own hospital bed when he woke up after his operation. He remembered Rick’s noble caring for the aged and decrepit that he had helped him with during the war years of the great crusade. He remembered Lippsie’s sobbing voice calling Rick a teef, and Rick’s letters to her promising to see her right.
“And a free train ticket for myself,” Peggy is saying, “to come up to Truro Hospital to visit him. And your father driving me home after, Magnus, nothing too much trouble for him until he has our man’s money.” The documents he made John sign, Magnus, always witnessed by the prettiest nurses. How your father always had the patience for John, always explaining to him whatever he couldn’t understand, over and again if necessary, but John won’t listen, the deluded man is too trusting and lazy in his mind.
A fit of fury seizes her: “Me up at four in the morning for the milking and falling asleep over my accounts at midnight!” she shouts as sleepy heads turn to her from other tables. “And that stupid husband of mine lying warm in his bed in Truro signing it all away behind my back while your father sits by his bedside playing the saint to him, Magnus. And my Alastair needing a pair of shoes to walk to school in, while you’re living on the hog there with your fine schools and your fine clothes, Magnus, God save you!” For it turns out, of course, on John’s death, that for reasons outside everyone’s control the great trust fund has suffered a purely temporary problem of liquidity and can’t pay the twelve and a half percent plus profits after all. It can’t refund the capital either. And that to tide everyone over this sticky patch, John Wentworth took the wise precaution, just before his death, of mortgaging the farm and land and livestock, and bloody nearly his wife and child as well, so that nobody will ever want for anything again. And had given the proceeds to his dear old pal Rick. And that Rick has brought down a distinguished lawyer, name of Loft, all the way from London with him, just to explain the implications of this smart move to John on his deathbed. And John, to please everyone as usual, has written out a special long letter all in his own hand, assuring whom it may concern that his decision has been taken while he was of sound mind and in full possession of his mental faculties and was not in any manner subjected to undue influence by a saint and his lawyer while he was lying gasping out his last. All this in case Peggy, or for that matter Alastair, should later have the bad manners to dispute the document in court or try to get John’s nine thousand pounds back, or should otherwise show a lack of faith in Rick’s selfless stewardship of John’s ruin.