‘Oh, Betty would never have let me do that. Going home from school with Betty and Dick was different. But then they left, you see. They left the Grammar when Belle and I were just finishing at Miss Pritchard’s, the same time that –’
‘Darling, the Stritches have to be here. We have to have help.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that, Ralphie.’
‘Do what?’
‘I wish you wouldn’t begin a sentence like that.’
He frowned at my smile, not understanding what was in my mind even though he was an understanding person. He didn’t understand when I explained that I could manage the house on my own, that I didn’t need Mrs Stritch in the way. I explained to him that Mrs Stritch had once taken a pair of gloves from Blow’s. ‘Please let’s try it,’ he said, and of course I didn’t want to be difficult. I wanted him to see that I was prepared to try what he wished to try.
‘Yes,’ I said, smiling at him.
Like a black shadow she was in the drawing-room. She leaned back in her chair, one hand stretched out to the round table in front of her. It was just a memory, not the ghost of Mrs Ashburton, nothing like that. But the memory would have been better if Mrs Stritch hadn’t always been around when Ralphie wasn’t. Ralphie would go off every morning in his gaiters, and then Mrs Stritch would arrive. She would dust and clean and carry buckets of soapy water about the house. Her husband would come to the kitchen to have lunch with her, and Ralphie and I would have lunch in the dining-room. All afternoon I’d continue to be aware of her in the house, making little noises as she did her work. When it was time for her to go Ralphie would be back again.
‘We’re buying the Lazes’ land,’ he said one evening, crossing the drawing-room and pouring some whisky for himself from a decanter. I could see that he was delighted. ‘I think your mother’ll want to sell too,’ he said.
I knew she would. Joe and Arthur were getting old, my stepfather was always saying the day would come. He’d no interest in the farm himself, and my mother would be glad not to have the responsibility.
‘But you’ll let the Lazes stay on in the farmhouse?’ I said, because it worried me that they should have to move away.
He shook his head. He said they didn’t want to. They wanted to go and live nearer the town, like the Fryes did.
‘The Fryes? But the Fryes don’t want to move away. You said they were going to farm a couple of acres –’
‘They’ve changed their minds.’
I didn’t smile at him any more because I didn’t like what he was saying. He’d explained quite clearly that the Fryes would stay in the farmhouse, and that the Lazes could if they wanted to. He had reassured me about that. Yet he said now:
‘You wanted the estate to be all together again, Matilda.’
‘I didn’t want people driven off, Ralphie. Not the Fryes and the Lazes. And what about my mother? Will she go also?’
‘It’ll be your mother’s choice, Matilda. As it was theirs.’
‘You’ve bought them all out. You promised me one thing and –’
‘We need the housing for our own men.’
I felt deceived. I imagined a discussion between Ralphie and the man he’d hired to look after the estate, a cold-faced man called Epstone. I imagined Epstone saying that if you were going to do the thing, do it properly, offer them enough and they’ll go. I imagined a discussion between Ralphie and his father, Ralphie asking if he could have another loan in order to plan his estate correctly, and his father agreeing.
‘Well, I dare say,’ I said to Ralphie, smiling at him again, determined not to be cross.
‘In the old days on the Challacombe estate,’ he said, ‘it would have happened less humanely.’
I didn’t want to hear him going on about that so I didn’t ask him what he meant. Even though he was considerate, I had begun to feel I was his property. It was an odd feeling, and I think it came from the other feeling I had, that he’d married me because I was part of an idea he’d fallen in love with. I used to look at the china vases on the drawing-room mantelpiece and feel like one of them, or like the carpets and the new wallpaper. I was part of something his money had created, and I don’t think he noticed that the rattling of his newspaper or the clink of the decanter against his glass had a way of interrupting my thoughts. These noises, and his footsteps in the hall or in a room, were like the noises Mrs Stritch made with her buckets and the Electrolux, but of course I never told him that.
I have forgotten a little about all that time in the house with Ralphie. He didn’t always tell me what was happening on the estate; in a way he talked more readily to Mrs Stritch, for I often heard him. He also talked to himself. He would pace up and down the lawns Mr Stritch had restored, wagging his head or nodding, while I watched him from a window of the house. As time went by, it was clear that he had done what he’d wanted. As he said, the estate was all of a piece again. He had bought our farm and the farmhouse, offering so much for both that it couldn’t be resisted. Joe and Arthur worked for him now.
Years were passing. Sometimes I walked over to see Miss Pritchard, going by the meadow we’d gone through on our way to school. I can’t quite recall what we talked about as we had tea; only bits from our conversations come back to me. There is my own cheerfulness, my smiling at Miss Pritchard, and Miss Pritchard’s glumness. Now and again I walked down to our farm and sat for a while with my mother, getting up to go before my stepfather returned. I went to see Betty and Belle, but I did that less and less. I began to think that they were all a little jealous of me. I thought that because I sensed an atmosphere when I went on these visits. ‘You’re cruel, Matilda,’ Miss Pritchard said once, seeming to be unable to control the ill-temper that had caused the remark to surface. She turned her head away from me when she’d spoken. ‘Cruel,’ she said again, and I laughed because of course that was nonsensical. I remember thinking it was extraordinary that Miss Pritchard should be jealous.
Ralphie, I believe, must have begun to live some kind of life of his own. He often went out in the evenings, all dressed up. He came back jovial and would come to my room to kiss me good-night, until eventually I asked him not to. When I inquired at breakfast about where he’d been the night before his answer was always the same, that he had been to a house in the neighbourhood for dinner. He always seemed surprised that I should ask the question, claiming on each occasion that he had told me these details beforehand and that I had, in fact, refused to accompany him. In all this I really do not think he can have been right.
I welcomed the occasions when Ralphie went out in the evenings. I drew the curtains in the drawing-room and sat by the fire, just happy to be there. I thought of the time when we were all together in the farmhouse, my father teasing Betty about Colin Gregg, Dick going as red as a sunset because my father mentioned an empty Woodbine packet he’d found. Every Sunday morning Ralphie went to church and, since Mrs Stritch didn’t come on Sundays, that was another good time. Ralphie would return and sit opposite me in the dining-room, carving the beef I’d cooked him, looking at me now and again from his pink face, his teeth like chalk beneath the trim brown hedge of his moustache. I wanted to explain to him that I was happy in the house when Mrs Stritch wasn’t there and when he wasn’t there. I wanted to make him understand that old Mrs Ashburton had wanted me to be in her house, that that was why she had told me so much when I was a child, that everything had to do with the two wars there’d been. He didn’t know as much about war as Mrs Ashburton had, even though he’d fought in one: I wanted to explain that to him, too. But I never did because his eyes would have begun to goggle, which they had a way of doing if something he couldn’t comprehend was put to him. It was easier just to cook his meals and smile at him.