The Fen Tiger (The House on the Fens) Read online

  ‘He’ll be all right. Cover him up.’

  Rosamund didn’t like his tone at all. It was as if he were dismissing the whole thing as of little or no importance.

  ‘I’m still going for the doctor.’

  ‘It will be a wasted journey and the doctor won’t thank you.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ This question came from Jennifer, who was standing just inside the doorway now.

  Mr Bradshaw turned and surveyed her for a moment before answering, but her beauty apparently did not affect him enough to soften the brutality of his reply.

  ‘Your father is in a drunken stupor.’

  Jennifer stared at him—too taken aback to make any denial. But Rosamund did. She said harshly, ‘No! He can’t be.’

  ‘I’m afraid he can be, and is.’ He glanced over his shoulder at her.

  ‘It was the smoke—he’s not drunk.’

  The man now turned his look full on her where she stood by the head of the bed.

  ‘Have it your own way, but he’s not going to die from suffocation. He might have been a little affected by the smoke.’ He raised his finely arched brows now. ‘You seem surprised…don’t you know whisky when you smell it?’

  Did she know whisky when she smelt it? As far as she could remember back she had hated the smell of whisky. Yes, she knew whisky when she smelt it all right, for were they not imprisoned—Jennifer’s word—in the mill on the fens because of precisely that…whisky. But she hadn’t smelt any whisky from her father when they dragged him from his bed. For three months now he had never touched a drop, he hadn’t been away from the place until yesterday…Yesterday? But either she or Jennifer had been with him every minute they spent in Ely—he couldn’t have got any yesterday. But he had. As much as she disliked the man standing opposite to her, she knew now that he was speaking the truth. His sense of smell was apparently more acute than her own, but, not only that, there were other signs that had told him that her father was in a drunken stupor. She had seen her father in stupors before, and she would have recognised the reason for this one immediately had it not been for the panic occasioned by the smoking bed. It had never struck her for a moment that he was drunk. As if the shame were her own, her head was bowing. Then, checking its downward movement, she jerked it upwards and, looking at the man before her, said, somewhat primly, ‘Thank you very much for your help.’

  As he stood returning her gaze without speaking she thought, He must think me an absolute fool, racing madly across the fen at midnight in search of a doctor for a drinking bout. At this moment she could have flayed herself for her stupidity in not realising what the trouble was…what the stupor was.

  The man turned from her and left the room without another word, and she felt as if she had been pushed back against the wall, not by his hand but by his look, which said, ‘You little fool.’

  She looked now at Jennifer. Her sister was staring at her, her fingers stretched tightly over her cheek. She didn’t speak until the front door banged, then the sound seemed to jerk the words from her mouth. ‘Oh, how awful, how humiliating. What possessed you to bring him here? If it had been Andrew it wouldn’t have mattered…Anyway, I don’t believe him, I don’t believe him. Father couldn’t have got anything yesterday. Did you leave him?’

  ‘Leave him?’ Rosamund shook her head. ‘Do you think I would? I could ask you the same question. Did you?’

  ‘No. No, of course I didn’t. Only…’

  ‘Only what?’

  ‘He left me for a few minutes, in that cafe, when you went out to get the solder and things. He went to the cloakroom…You know…you remember, it was round by that partition just near the door where we came in. Oh!’ She put her hand over her mouth. ‘He must have slipped out. I remember now that shop next door. Groceries and wine merchants. It would only take him a minute…Oh, Rosie!’

  ‘Well, it’s done now. But why didn’t we smell it? He did.’ She nodded as if the man was still in the room.

  Rosamund now looked down on her father. He was breathing heavily and his face was flushed. Oh, why hadn’t she guessed? She went slowly out of the room and across the landing to his room, and there, going down onto her hands and knees, she looked under the bed. But there was no sign of a bottle. Next she searched the wardrobe. Again no sign of a bottle of any kind. While she was doing this Jennifer was going through the chest of drawers.

  ‘There’s nothing here. Somehow I just can’t believe it.’

  ‘Look, Rosie, he mightn’t have gone to the shop, I’m just surmising that. Likely that man is just surmising what he said as well.’

  ‘He wasn’t surmising, he knew all right. And so do we.’ Rosamund’s tone was flat. ‘I would have had the gumption to realise it if it hadn’t been for the panic over the fire. Well…there’s nothing here, but he’s hidden it somewhere. Wait!’ She got a chair and, reaching to the top of the tallboy, she lifted the lid of what was used as a linen chest. Groping inside, she found what she was looking for, and not only one but four of them, four flat quarter-size whisky bottles.

  ‘Four of them!’ Jennifer looked at the bottles in disgust. ‘And he promised. Oh, what’s the use?’

  ‘Well, it’s no use going on. As you say, what’s the use?’

  ‘But he promised.’

  ‘You should know by now that he’s promised before. Come on, let’s go downstairs and make a drink.’

  ‘I don’t know how you can take it like that, so flatly, so calmly.’ Jennifer was talking at Rosamund as they went downstairs. ‘And then tomorrow morning he’ll be full of remorse, disgusting remorse.’

  ‘And we’ll forgive him as we’ve done before.’

  ‘I won’t—I told him last time—I won’t.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to marry Andrew and get out of it.’

  ‘Don’t be flippant, Rosie.’

  Rosamund was entering the kitchen now and she turned almost fiercely on her sister. ‘Flippant? Flippant about this?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but it was the way you were taking it.’

  ‘How do you want me to take it, tear my hair? I stopped tearing my hair years ago.’

  Rosamund sounded almost sixty-two, not twenty-two, as she made this statement, and at this moment she felt that she wasn’t a girl, she had never been a girl, she had always been a woman who had carried the burden of a weak, charming, drunken man. She went slowly towards the open fire that was still smouldering and threw on some pieces of wood. Then, going to the oil stove, she lit it, and when the flame was clear she put on the kettle.

  Jennifer was sitting at the table, her chin cupped in one hand, and Rosamund was sitting in the armchair to the side of the fireplace. Neither of them had spoken for some time. They were one with the silence of the house, the silence that these incidents created over the years. Always there came a time when, discussing their father, it was impossible to say anything more, the feeling was too intense. Rosamund remembered the first time this silence had fallen on them. Her mother was alive then. She had been nine and Jennifer eleven and her father was…off-colour. Her mother had said, ‘No, dear, don’t go in to Daddy; he’s got a very bad head, he’s a bit off-colour.’ Jennifer had just returned from a dancing lesson and she had swung out of the room, banging the door, her ballet shoes in her hand. When Rosamund had gone after her into their bedroom to tell her what a pig she was, banging the door when Daddy had a headache, Jennifer had hissed at her, ‘Now don’t you start else I’ll slap your face. I’m sick of it, do you hear? Off-colour! I’m sick of the pretence. Off-colour! Why does Mammy keep on pretending? He’s drunk, that’s his off-colour, he’s drunk.’

  ‘Oh, you’re horrible. Oh, you’re horrible, our Jennifer. Daddy isn’t drunk.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ The tone was different now—quiet, hopeless.

  She had sat down on the bed beside Jennifer and the silence had fallen upon them. She knew that Jennifer was right, there had been something funny about Daddy’s headaches and…off-colours. Lots of things
became clear in that moment, the main one being the reason why her mother’s people would have nothing to do with them. Her mother was a Monkton; even her father would say at times, ‘Never forget your mother is a Monkton…a somebody.’ The off-colour episodes too seemed in some way to be associated with this statement—‘Your mother is a Monkton…a somebody.’ It was some years later before she realised why her father talked like this. He was not so much telling her that her mother was a well-born woman as blaming her mother for this fact. And yet he had loved her mother, who, in turn, had loved him. In spite of the ‘off-colour’ there had remained between them a warm passion until the day her mother died. There had been rows, heartbreaking rows, which would nearly always be followed by a move to another town where her father was going to work for someone who would appreciate him. He was going to begin again and everything was going to be fine. And it should have been, for Henry Morley was a craftsman in silver. He had gone to work for the Monktons as a boy and trained under one of their finest craftsmen. Monktons was a renowned firm of jewellers and they were very good to the men who worked for them, the right men, and they realised that Henry Morley was a right man. He had the fingers for a setting, he had an eye for line and design. He was thirty and very young to put in charge of a new workshop, but the Monktons thought he was the man for the job; and with just the right amount of condescension Arnold Monkton, the head of the firm, told him about this decision. Three days later, when he was still walking on air, Henry Morley met Arnold Monkton’s only daughter Jennifer for the first time—that is, to speak to. He had seen her from afar, but never had their glances met or their hands touched. When this did happen the impact on them both was like lightning and the outcome was as disastrous as if it had struck them, for Arnold Monkton did not play the forgiving father but let his daughter decide finally between himself and the upstart Morley.

  The upstart Morley set out to show the old man, but soon he was to find that the task was greater than he had anticipated in the first bright glow of love and ambition. He could find work, but only as a man in a workshop. Men who had worked up to high positions in this particular line kept their positions and did not favour anyone under them who thought they knew better than themselves. After five years working for three different firms, and striving to show them his worth, Henry Morley felt he needed fortifying. He had liked a drop now and again when he could afford it, and whisky was his drink.

  In the sixth year of their marriage Jennifer presented him with a daughter. They called her after her mother. Two years later another girl was born. They called her Rosamund.

  That night, long ago, when the silence had ended and she had sat on the bed and watched Jennifer almost tearing her ballet shoes to shreds because she would not need them any more, and listening to her talking, Rosamund was amazed to learn that they had lived in seven towns since she was born. She was also horrified to learn that that very day her father had again lost his job, and so for a time there would be no more ballet lessons. She had watched Jennifer throwing the torn shoe into the corner of the room before, in turn, flinging herself on to the bed and bursting into tears.

  Perhaps it was at that precise moment that she had taken charge of the household, for she even imagined that she actually felt herself growing up, and she must have been right, for how else would she have decided there and then not to let her mother know that she was wise to the real nature of ‘off-colour’.

  When she was fourteen her mother died, and this disaster seemed to break up Henry Morley completely. Jennifer, who was sixteen at the time and left school, decided that she would go in for ‘rep’, and she went in for it. At least she went after a job. It was as she was returning, full of the news that she had been accepted, that she was knocked down by a bus—entirely her own fault as it turned out. The joy at the prospect of being an actress must have blinded her, for she had walked straight under the oncoming vehicle. It was fortunate that she hadn’t lost her leg, but she had lain in hospital for many months after the accident.

  Henry Morley at this time became both a pitiable and despicable figure; it all depended on which of his two children was viewing him. To Rosamund he was pitiable, and to Jennifer he was despicable, and not without reason, for when she came out of hospital, able to walk only with the aid of sticks, it was to find that they had moved, yet once again, this time into two dingy basement rooms.

  The crisis came the week that Rosamund herself left school. She had been three days in her first job helping in a day nursery when Henry Morley went down with a cold that developed into double pneumonia. Added to this, Jennifer’s handicap with her lame leg and the nervous state her condition had evoked made her useless in looking after anyone, even herself.

  Such was the situation of the little family flitting from one town to another that they were virtually without friends. The doctor who was attending her father might have done something. He suggested the patient should go to the hospital, but Henry Morley’s grandiose attitude, which he sustained even with a temperature of one hundred and three, convinced him that the daughters were very capable of nursing him and running the house. The doctor was not to know that there was only a matter of three pounds at that time in the house, and no prospect of that sum being added to in any way.

  It was at two o’clock in the morning, while sitting by her father’s bedside, that Rosamund wrote the letter to her uncle. She had only seen her mother’s brother once and she was very small at the time. Her mother had dressed her and Jennifer in their best and taken them in a train right the way to London. They had gone into a big hotel and there she had met a man who looked surprisingly like her mother, and who had told her he was her Uncle Edward. She remembered him making her mother promise to keep in touch, and her mother saying that she would. But she hadn’t. She had never heard her father speak of her Uncle Edward even when he was—off-colour. Yet at these times he would upbraid her grandfather, Arnold Monkton. She knew a lot about Arnold Monkton although she had never met him. And she came to realise that her father talked about her grandfather because he hated him, but he had not the same feelings towards her uncle. She sent the letter to the firm in London, and printed in a large girlish hand in the top left-hand corner of the envelope she wrote the word ‘Private’. On the fifth day, the postman having passed the door yet once again and filled her with despair, she received an answer to the letter in person. Her mother’s brother walked into the dingy, cold room, and from that day to this she always associated her Uncle Edward with God.

  When her father was able to be moved he transported them all to decent rooms. Then one day he had asked her—not her father, nor her elder sister, but her—how she would like to live in a mill in the Fenlands of Cambridge. It appeared he had taken an old house with the idea of turning it into a weekend cottage for his family. How would she like it? Even without seeing it the mill on the fens took on a semblance of paradise.

  But things did not go smoothly with regard to their taking up life in the mill, because Uncle Edward had a wife. Rosamund could never call her Aunt Anna, she thought of her as Uncle Edward’s wife. On a visit, and unaccompanied by her husband, Anna Monkton intimated that it was a bit of a nuisance their going to live in the mill, for she had already gone to a great deal of trouble to furnish it, and a good many of her choicest pieces were there, and as there was virtually no road to the mill it had taken some time and not a little expense for the house to be furnished at all. She had also intimated that they could not possibly exist there without a boat on the main river.

  Neither Rosamund nor Jennifer had liked their Uncle Edward’s wife, nor she them, and Rosamund particularly feared her influence. This influence was made clear when her uncle, rather shamefacedly, told her that he would draw up a statement which would allow them to occupy the mill during their father’s lifetime. He had laughingly added that neither she nor Jennifer would find this any hindrance, for doubtless they would soon be marrying. Rosamund could almost hear his wife saying, ‘We’re not providing tho
se two madams with a free gift.’

  What Rosamund was sure that her aunt didn’t know was that her Uncle Edward made her an allowance of twenty pounds a month. The money was always sent to her by registered letter. Twenty pounds a month meant that they would be fed, and the mill would house them.

  Henry Morley at this time was in no position, or state, to make any protest, and he fell in with the arrangement with the acceptance of a child, yet beneath this acceptance Rosamund was always aware of a war raging, a private war, in which humiliation played a big part. For there were weeks on end when he never earned a penny.

  When they had finally come to the mill, Henry Morley had been fired once again with the urge to…show them. There was plenty of room here for him to have his own workshop. He would start on a paying game, making imitation jewellery. All he wanted was a bench, a furnace, a few tools, and the basic materials with which to begin. By the time he had got these latter his enthusiasm had worn thin, but nevertheless he did begin, and as time went on turned out some very presentable pieces.

  But, as Rosamund found, it was one thing to make the jewellery and quite another thing to sell it. After a great deal of correspondence the only reliable opening for sales was with a shop in Cambridge. The location was fortunate but the demand was small. As the owner of the shop flatly stated, he could get machine-cut bangles and brooches that looked exactly like the pieces that had taken hours of painstaking, eye-straining work to achieve and for half the price. Unfortunately, Rosamund knew that neither she herself nor Jennifer could ever hope to have the skill that was their father’s natural gift, but Jennifer was better at it than herself. Nevertheless this did not prevent Jennifer from hating it, as she did the isolation in which she lived. Yet, as Rosamund sometimes thought when her patience was tried to breaking point, Jennifer knew the remedy. She could either marry Andrew or she could leave the mill tomorrow and get a job—if, metaphorically speaking, she would forget about her leg and stand on her own two feet. With her father it was different; physically he was incapable of manual work, and he was of an age now when it was too late for him to attempt anything else. There was, Rosamund knew, a strong link of weakness between father and daughter, and as long as they had her to depend on they would foster it, and because she loved them she rarely protested.