Fiona, the child of sensible ordinary parents living in East Anglia (her father worked in a bank), being then eighteen years old, at a pop festival jumped impulsively on to the back of a teenage boy’s motor cycle with the intention (which she fulfilled) of running away from home. She ran away with her handbag but without a coat. Her youthful ‘abductor’ took her on his bike as far as Ennistone where, after an argument, he abandoned her. The first person she then met was Alan McCaffrey. She spent the night with Alan (where is not recorded) and then and there (so the legend has it) conceived a child. This child, after causing its parents some initial dismay and indecision, forged resolutely ahead and was duly born and soon thereafter known as Tom McCaffrey. Alex divorced Alan (I shall start to call her ‘Alex’ now as this is how she is familiarly known) and Alan married Fiona with whom it appeared he was genuinely in love. ‘Feckless Fiona’, as she was called, must have been a person of charm. ‘A dotty girl’, people would say, and as they said so they would smile indulgently. And they said that she had ‘a happy temperament’. However, Fiona was not destined to be happy for long, since she died of leukaemia when Tom was three years old. It is not true that when she was dying Alex entered the room and took the child away. What is certain is that Tom went to Belmont to join his brothers, with Alan’s consent, soon after his mother’s death. Alan, very evidently afflicted, left Ennistone and went into practice in Hong Kong where he died three years later in a mysterious accident in a laboratory without ever seeing his youngest child again.
Tom was of course very much younger than George and Brian, who were by this time grown-up. It was said that Alex doted on her little stepson to the exclusion of her sons, causing the latter to conceive a deep hatred for the child. A variant story has it that although Alex adored Tom she never got over her original passionate attachment to her first-born, George, and that although George may have hated Tom, Brian developed a protective fatherly relationship to the newcomer. Meanwhile it should be recounted that George and Brian were busy getting themselves married. George married Stella Henriques, not an Ennistonian, daughter of an English diplomat of Sephardic Jewish extraction. Stella was said to be ‘academic’ and ‘awfully clever’, though she gave up her studies on marriage. Brian married Gabriel Bowcock, a cousin of Percy Bowcock who runs the big shop (the Bowcocks are also Quakers). Two other McCaffreys deserve mention: Adam McCaffrey, son of Brian and Gabriel, and Rufus McCaffrey, son, deceased, of George and Stella. Rufus died as a small child in some sort of mishap at his home. Those who take a tolerant view of George’s ‘temperament’ attribute it to continued shock as a result of this loss. Others, less tolerant, put a more sinister construction upon the child’s death. At the time of this story Alex is sixty-six, George is forty-four, Brian is forty-one, Tom is twenty, and Adam is eight.
THE EVENTS IN OUR TOWN
A bird was singing in the cold spring-time afternoon in the garden at Belmont. The sky was radiant on one side, leaden on the other. A rainbow had glowed intensely, then faded quickly.
In the drawing-room a wood fire was burning. Beside the fire stood Alexandra McCaffrey, née Stillowen. Near the door stood her old servant, Ruby Doyle. Ruby had just asked Alex about a pension; she had simply said, ‘What about my pension?’ Alex did not understand. She paid Ruby good wages. Did this mean that she wanted to leave? Ruby had been with her since Alex was sixteen.
‘Do you want to leave?’
‘No.’
‘Do you want to stop working?’
Alex asked this question sometimes as a matter of form, but she did not conceive that Ruby would want to stop working; she was in good health, and whatever could she do if she stopped working?
‘No.’
‘Or work less? I told you I would arrange a daily woman.’
‘No.’ Ruby had always jealously resisted the idea of a ‘daily’.
‘If you stopped work I would give you a pension,’ said Alex, ‘but wages are more than a pension. Do you understand? You don’t need a pension. People don’t have pensions and wages too.’
‘A pension.’
‘Just try and understand what I’ve said,’ said Alex, ‘Could you take the tea tray?’ She poured the dregs of tea out of her cup into the pot, as she always did, so that Ruby could save washing-up by using the same cup.
Ruby advanced and picked up the tray, holding it easily in one hand.
‘I saw that fox again.’
‘I told you not to talk about foxes.’
Ruby left the room.
The servant was a tall stout woman, as tall as Alex, with a strong grave face. She had a dark complexion and her eyes stared at the world with unemotional critical curiosity. She had a square face and a straight profile and straight bushy hair, almost black. The brown skin of her powerful arms was rough and resembled fish scales. Someone once said that she ‘looked like a Mexican’, and although this did not make much sense it was accepted as an expressive description. She was a silent woman and wore her skirts very long. She was at first thought to be half-witted, but later on people took to saying, ‘Ruby’s no fool, she’s deep.’ Alex herself declared, ‘She’s a mystery.’ Yet she had not felt this until lately; she had not really believed that Ruby was a substantial alien being with thoughts and passions which she concealed.