‘Have a good day’ was what she said now, forcing cheerfulness on to her face, for the dream she’d had still saddened her and the memory of the meeting worried her.
‘I’ll be on the five o’clock.’ He touched her cheek with his lips, and then was gone, the door of the breakfast-room opening and closing, the hall door banging. She listened to the starting of the car and the sound of the wheels on the tarmac, then the engine fading to nothing in the distance.
She felt as he did, that together they had not done badly in twenty-seven years of marriage. She’d been a Miss Forrest; becoming Mrs Mansor had seemed the nicest thing that yet had happened to her; and for all their married life – the worries during the lean years, the bringing up of their three children-she had regretted nothing, and in the end there’d been the reward of happiness in middle age. She missed their son and daughters, all of whom were now married themselves, but in compensation there was the contentment that the house and garden brought, and the unexacting life of the village. As well, there were the visits of their children and her memories of girls whom she had taught, some of whom kept up with her. It was still a pleasure to read Horace and the lesser Greek poets, to find in an experimental way a new interpretation in place of the standard, scholar’s one.
Their house, in the style of Queen Anne though in fact of a later period, was hidden from the road and the surrounding fields by modest glades of silver birches. It was a compact house, easy to run and keep clean, modernized with gadgets, warm in winter. Alone in it in the mornings Emily often played Bach or Mozart on the sitting-room hi-fi system, the music drifting into the kitchen and the bedrooms and the breakfast-room, pursuing her agreeably wherever she went.
But this morning she was not in the mood for Bach or Mozart. She continued to sit as her husband had left her, saying to herself that she must come to terms with what had happened. She had raised her voice but no one had cared to listen to it. Only Golkorn had listened, his great tightly cropped head slowly nodding, his eyes occasionally piercing hers. At the meeting her voice had faltered; her cheeks had warmed; nothing had come out as she’d meant it to.
Unladylike assortment of calumnies. In the train on the way to Waterloo he couldn’t think of a nine-lettered word. As a chore, he did The Times crossword every day, determined to do better with practice. There’s none of the Old Adam in a cardinal (6). He sighed and put the paper down.
It worried him that she’d been so upset. He hadn’t known what to say, or to do, when she’d stood up suddenly at the meeting to make her unsuccessful speech. He’d felt himself embarrassed, in sympathy or shame, he couldn’t tell which. He hadn’t been quite able to agree with her and had been surprised when she’d stood up because it wasn’t like her to do anything in public, even though she’d been saying she was unhappy about the thing for months. But then she was so unemphatic as a person that quite often it was hard to guess when she felt strongly.
With other suited men, some carrying as he did a briefcase and a newspaper, he stepped from the train at Waterloo. He strode along the platform with them, one in an army, it often seemed. In spite of how she felt, he really couldn’t help believing that the village had been saved. Their own house and garden, and the glades of silver birches, would in no way suffer. The value of the house would continue to rise with inflation instead of quite sharply declining. There would be calm again in the village instead of angry voices and personal remarks, instead of Colin I hodes saying to Golkorn’s face that he was a foreigner. Thank God it was all over.
‘There’s been a telex,’ Miss Owen informed him in his office. ‘That place in Gibraltar.’
In the breakfast-room Emily’s thoughts had spread out, from her dream of butterflies and the meeting there had been the night before. She saw images of women as they might have been, skulking in the woods near the village, two of them sitting on the stone seat beside the horse-trough on the green, another in a lane with ragwort in her hand. They were harmless women, as Golkorn had kept insisting. It was just that their faces were strange and their movements not properly articulated; nothing, of course, that they said made sense. ‘Anywhere but here,’ snapped the voice of Colin Rhodes, as vividly she recalled the meeting. ‘My God, you’ve got the world to choose from, Golkorn.’
Golkorn had smiled. Their village was beautiful, he had irritatingly stated, as if in reply. Repeatedly it had been said at the meeting last night, and at previous meetings, that the village was special because it Was among the most beautiful in England. The Manor dated back to Saxon times, it had been said, and the cottages round the green were almost unique. But it was that very beauty, and the very peacefulness of the lanes and woods, that Golkorn had claimed would be a paradise for his afflicted women. It was why he had chosen Luffnell Lodge when it went up for sale. Luffnell Lodge was less impressive than the Manor, and certainly nothing like as old. It was larger and less convenient, colder and in worse repair, yet ideal apparently for Golkorn’s purpose. In her dream Emily had been walking with him in a field and he had pointed at what at first she’d taken to be flowers but had turned out to be butterflies. ‘You’ve never seen that before,’ he’d said. ‘Butterflies in mourning, Mrs Mansor.’ They flew away as he spoke, a whole swarm of them, busily flapping their black wings.
She rose and cleared away the breakfast things. She carried them on a tray through the hall and into the kitchen. Her dog, an old Sealyham called. Spratts, wagged his tail without getting out of his basket. On the window-sill in front of the sink, hot with morning sunshine, a butterfly was poised and she thought at once that that was a coincidence. Its wings were tightly closed; it might have been dead but she knew it wasn’t, and when she touched it and the wings opened they were not sinister.
Of course it had been for the best when the Allenbys had realized that to sell Luffnell Lodge to Golkorn would have caused havoc: dealing with the telex about the place in Gibraltar, Hugh found himself yet again thinking that. Golkorn was a frightful person; it was Golkorn’s presence rather than his sick women that one might reasonably object to. Luffnell Lodge would put the village on the map, Golkorn had confidently promised, once it was full of his patients: in medical terms he was making a breakthrough. And Hugh knew that what he had offered the Allenbys was more than they’d get otherwise. You couldn’t blame them, elderly and wanting to get rid of what they’d come to think of as a white elephant, for listening to Golkorn’s adroit arguments. The Allenbys had done nothing wrong and in the end had made the sacrifice. They’d sell the Lodge eventually, it stood to reason, even if they had to wait a bit. ‘You see, we don’t particularly want to wait,’ old Mr Allenby had said. ‘That’s just the trouble. We’ve waited two years as it is.’ The Allenbys had asked Hugh’s advice because they thought that being in the international property market he might know a little more than Musgrove and Carter, who after all were only country estate agents. ‘Dr Golkorn is offering you a most attractive proposition,’ he’d had to admit, no way around that. ‘It could be a while before anyone matched it.’ Mr Allenby had asked if he’d care to handle the sale, in conjunction with Musgrove and Carter, but Hugh had had to explain that property in England was outside his firm’s particular field. ‘Oh, dear, it’s all so difficult,’ Mrs Allenby had disconsolately murmured, clearly most unhappy at the prospect of having to hang on in the Lodge for another couple of years. Hugh had always liked the Allenbys. In many ways, as a friend and as an expert, he should have told them to accept immediately Golkorn’s offer. But he hadn’t and that was that; it was all now best forgotten.