The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow Page 11

  I never saw Martin Slater again. For some reason it was decided that he should leave the school where we had shivered and wrestled together and go straight to Harrow. For a while I missed the hampers from Olinscourt, but soon the war was over and my family moved to America. I forgot all about my old chum.

  Not long ago a mood of nostalgia brought me to thinking of my childhood and Martin Slater again. Slowly, uncovering a fragment here, a fragment there, I found that I was able to restore this long-obliterated picture of my visit at Olinscourt.

  The facts, of course, had been in my mind all the time. All they had lacked was interpretation. Now, thanks to a more adult and detached eye, I can see as a whole something which, to my childish view, was nothing more than a disconnected sequence of happenings.

  Perhaps I am doing an old schoolfriend an atrocious wrong; perhaps I am cynically forcing a pattern onto what was, in fact, nothing more than a complex of unfortunate accidents and fantastic coincidences. But I am inclined to think otherwise. For I can grasp Martin Slater’s character so much more clearly now than when we were children together. I see a boy, teetering on the unstable brink of puberty, who revolted passionately from any physical or spiritual intrusion into his privacy; a boy of intense pride and fastidiousness who was mature enough to know he must fight to maintain his personal independence, yet not mature enough to have learned that in the wrestling match of life certain holds are barred—the death lock, for example.

  I see that boy stifled by the sincere but nauseating affection of a father who bombarded him with assiduous pieties that made him the laughingstock of his schoolfellows; of a father who, with his “Quiet Quarters,” his sermonizings, his full-mouthed good-night kisses, turned Martin’s home life into an incessant siege upon the sacred citadel of his privacy. I am sure that Martin’s hatred of his father was something deeply ingrained in him which grew as he grew towards adolescence. That hatred was kept in check perhaps so long as the undeclared war of love was waged unknown to the outside world. It was different when I came to Olinscourt. For I represented the outside world, and in front of me Sir Olin stripped his son naked of all the decent reserves. Those kisses on the mouth were, I believe, to Martin the kisses of Judas. Sir Olin had betrayed him forever.

  And Martin Slater was too young to know any other punishment for betrayal than—death.

  The details of that crime speak, I think, plainly enough for themselves. During one of his nightly absences from our bedroom Martin could easily have stolen into his sleeping father’s room and studied the combination of the safe on the back of the gold hunter. He could easily have slipped into the vault on the night before the crime and installed there some ingenious product of his workshop, some device, manufactured from an alarm clock and set for the hour at which Sir Olin invariably entered the vault, which would either automatically have shut the heavy steel door behind the baronet or have distracted his attention long enough for Martin to close the door upon him himself. Martin’s inventive powers were more than adequate to have created that last and most successful “burglar alarm,” just as his conversation with his father about installing the alarm, as witnessed by myself, would have provided an innocent explanation for the contrivance if it had been discovered later in the vault with Sir Olin.

  From then on, with me as an unconscious and carefully exploited accessory, the rest must have been simple too—an invented glimpse of Sir Olin driving off in Mr. Ramsbotham’s car, the clever trick of the old letter, steamed open probably and checked for content, planted among the morning post to put Pringle’s mind at rest about his master’s absence and to make certain that Sir Olin would not be searched for until it was too late.

  There was genuine artistry in Martin’s use of me to cover his tracks. For it was I who innocently burned the first page and the envelope of that fatal letter whose date and postmark would otherwise have proved it to have been of earlier origin. It was I, too, with my clumsy grab at the blazer, who was held responsible for that letter’s having dropped “inadvertently” into the morning mail.

  Yes, Martin Slater, at fourteen, showed a shrewd and native talent for murder. And, as a murderer, he must be considered an unqualified success. For he never even came under suspicion.

  There was one person, however, who must have been only too conscious of Martin’s dreadful deed. And in that, to me, lies the real horror of the story. I try to keep myself from thinking of Sir Olin bustling into his safe to put away his papers as usual; Sir Olin hearing a little ting-a-ling like the whirring bell of an alarm clock; Sir Olin spinning round to see the great door of the safe closing behind him, shutting him into that soundproof vault; and somewhere, probably above the door, a curious amateur device composed of a clock and some lengths of wire.

  I try not to think of the nightmare days that must have followed for him—days spent staring at that alarm-clock contrivance which he must have recognized as the lethal invention of his own son; days spent hoping against hope that Martin would relent and release him from that chamber where the oxygen was growing suffocatingly scarcer; days spent contemplating the terrible culmination of his “perfect” relationship with his beloved laddie.

  I wonder if, during those hours of horror, Sir Olin Slater’s evangelical faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature ever faltered. Somehow I doubt it. His heroic manner of death gives me the clue. For Sir Olin, however frightfully he had mismanaged his life, made a triumphant success of death. I can see him, weakened with hunger and thirst, scarcely able to breathe; I can see him neatly, almost meticulously, wrapping up the telltale alarm clock which, if left to be discovered, might have pointed to Martin’s complicity. I can see him writing a pious “suicide” note to his wife, and that other probably forgiving note, which was never to be read, to his son. I can see him producing a revolver from one of those brass-handled drawers in the wall of the vault—and gallantly taking his own life in order to shield his son’s immense crime from detection.

  Indeed, it may well be said of Sir Olin that nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.

  LITTLE BOY LOST

  The day his father died was chiefly memorable to Branson Foster because he was allowed to sleep in the small dressing room off his mother’s bedroom. An end was thus made to the nights in the fourth-story attic where the little boy had lain obdurately awake, afraid of the hostile darkness, resenting the adult injustice that separated him from the mother who adored and spoiled him. It was his father who had been responsible for his exile, and now that formidable presence, whose black moustache smelt of mouthwash and the top of breakfast eggs, was gone.

  His father’s death brought Branson not only comfort but freedom from the fear that had haunted him since his eighth birthday. The question of his departure to a boys’ boarding school had lapsed. Branny’s mother had given him tearful reassurance on that point as she kissed him good night and tucked him under the delicious warmth of the quilted eider down.

  “You are the man of the house now, darling. You must stay and help your poor mummie run this silly old girls’ school.”

  Almost certainly, the vague, bewildered Constance Foster never dreamed that her passionate adoration might be harmful for a son of nearly nine. In 1915, small English resorts had not heard of mother fixations. Nor was Dr. Sigmund Freud even a name at Oaklawn School for Girls in Littleton-on-Sea. With the death of her husband it seemed only natural to her that mother and son, sharing a common grief, should cling even closer together.

  After the funeral, at which the wheezing voice of the vicar had consigned the moustache to eternal rest, Branny’s bed was put permanently in the little room adjoining his mother’s. Attics, Mrs. Foster argued, were dangerous in wartime. From then on, going to bed became a pleasure rather than a terror for Branny. He could read as long as he liked and when his mother came upstairs, he could hear her gentle movements through the quarter-opened door and bask in the warm certainty of her nearness and safety. And during her frequent spells of poorliness—for
Mrs. Foster considered herself frail—he would tiptoe into her room when his anxiety for her goaded him too painfully, and satisfy himself that the fragile, cherished figure in the bed was actually alive and breathing.

  Almost every day of this new life brought a major or minor delight. The older girls made much of their headmistress’s only son in his bereavement. The younger girls constituted a respectful audience for whose benefit he could strut as the only male in a household of women. And as a symbol of his importance, he was permitted full use of the front stairs, strictly forbidden to housemaids, girls, and even to junior mistresses.

  Each golden day reached its climax in the evening, when instead of taking plain supper in the school dining room, he had light tea alone with his mother in his father’s erstwhile study. Often the meager wartime fare would be augmented by a boiled egg, a tin of sardines, or some similar delicacy.

  His mother would watch him devour these with a smile half-excited, half-guilty, murmuring: “It’s naughty of me, I know, in wartime, but a growing boy really does need it.”

  Luckily for the finances of Oaklawn School, she did not entertain a similar sentiment with regard to the forty or fifty growing girls under her care.

  The middle weeks of the summer term passed for mother and son as an idyl. Mrs. Foster looked prettier than ever in her widow’s weeds which lent an air of pathos to the soft brown eyes and heightened the ethereal pallor of her perfect skin. She was careful to present the world with a decorous show of grief. But inwardly she, like her son, was happier than she had been in years. Her husband’s hand, heavy as his moustache, was no longer there to suppress her natural volatility. Branny spoiled her as she spoiled him. With her son she could yield to her moods of almost childish gaiety. She could also indulge the tendency to poorliness which Mr. Foster had so unimaginatively discouraged. When the responsibilities of her position became too irksome, it was delightful to pamper a mild headache in a darkened room while Branny hovered with solicitude and eau de Cologne.

  As sole principal of Oaklawn School, Mrs. Foster dreamily muddled the accounts, allowed the servants and tradespeople to lead her by the nose, and let institutional discipline slide.

  But, halcyon as this period was, it carried in it, unknown to Branny, the seed of its own destruction. The late George Foster had bought Oaklawn School for Girls with his wife’s money and had made her joint principal. But he himself had owned two-thirds of the good will and knowing his Constance, had anticipated just such a situation as had now arisen. He had loved the school, built it up through his own labors, and had made testamentary precautions to preserve it.

  Hence the invasion of the Aunts. This started by what, in the Second World War, would have been termed “infiltration.”

  Aunt Nellie was the first to come. There seemed nothing particularly ominous about her arrival, since she appeared towards the end of the summer term, wearing dark glasses as the result of a visit to an oculist in the nearby town of Bristol. Branny had seen Aunt Nellie only once before and connected her pleasantly with strawberries and cream for tea on the lawn and a “silver penny” on her departure for India. In the dim past, an amorous pursuer on a P. & O. liner had called her a “dashed pretty woman” and the epithet had stuck, although it had long since lost any semblance of accuracy.

  Aunt Nellie was discovered in the drawing room just before lunch one day. Branny’s mother said: “Come in, darling, and say how d’you do to your pretty aunt.”

  Branny stared at Aunt Nellie solemnly. She said, giggling: “Not pretty with these awful glasses on, Constance. There, I’ll take them off.”

  Branny was still unimpressed. He saw a massive woman with fluffy pinkish hair, a great deal of jewelry, light bloodshot eyes, and a high color. Since he was in love with a small, dark woman with large eyes and ivory cheeks, he had every reason to remain unimpressed. When his aunt had removed the glasses, he said gravely: “You aren’t so very pretty even now, are you?”

  Aunt Nellie laughed again and said: “Now is that a gallant thing for a little pukka sahib to say?”

  And being a woman, she never forgave him.

  There was no silver penny this time—and no departure.

  Aunt Nellie was currently without occupation or domicile. She had made the war an excuse to get away from India, where she had left a dyspeptic colonel husband to his curries and concubines. Abandoning India, however, had not made her abandon its vocabulary. Everything around Oaklawn School became pukka or not pukka. Lunch became tiffin. Mrs. Foster was a memsahib, and Aunt Nellie drove the servants almost crazy by addressing them as ayahs and giving capricious orders in bastard Hindustani. Also, owing to the demands of her elaborate toilet, she spent an indecent amount of time in the bathroom.

  But at first Aunt Nellie’s visit was rather a joke to Branny. Her garrulous intrusion upon his private teas with his mother was tiresome, but she brought compensatory delights. For example, he discovered the joys of exploring her bedroom and made the younger pupils goggle incredulously at the report of his discoveries there. Once, thinking Aunt Nellie safely in the bathroom, he had bedizened himself with her cosmetics, wrapped himself in her satin peignoir, and attaching a pinkish false front to his head, had run down to the second-form classroom to the hysterical delight of a bevy of little girls.

  But he had paid dearly for this short-lived accolade. Aunt Nellie was lying in wait for him behind the bathroom door as he sneaked upstairs. She swooped out, a bald, outraged condor, and seized him. Snatching her property, she shook Benny till his teeth chattered, slapped his painted face several times, and banged his head against the bathroom wall so hard that Mrs. Foster, attracted by her beloved’s outcries, hovered ineffectually, screaming: “Pas sa tête, Nellie. Pas sa tête.”

  Nor did Branny’s punishment end there. For a whole week Aunt Nellie refused implacably to eat at the same table with him and he was obliged for seven days to forgo his teas with his mother and to partake once again of thick slices of bread without even jam at the “kids” table in the school dining room.

  These tribulations, however, did not greatly disturb Branny for Aunt Nellie, despite the length of her stay, was a visitor and must, surely, depart in time. Soon he and his mother would be alone again and life would reassume its untarnished bloom.

  He wrote Aunt Nellie a polite little note of apology which was frigidly accepted. In due course the teas were resumed.

  It was the second evening of his rehabilitation that Branny began to suspect Aunt Nellie was not a visitor after all. Over the teacups his aunt and his mother were discussing the French Mademoiselle who had been recalled by a telegram to her native Paris.

  “It’s about time, Constance,” remarked Aunt Nellie, “that I started to do my war bit, n’est-ce pas?”

  And sure enough, when it came to the period for French next morning, there was Aunt Nellie to give the lesson, Aunt Nellie insisting on a far too-French French accent from her pupils and making herself ridiculous by singing little French songs which no one understood.

  From that day on Aunt Nellie gave up Hindustani and interlarded every sentence with a French word or phrase and embellished them with pretty Gallic gestures.

  But Anglo-Indian or Anglo-French, she seemed to have become a permanency.

  As the summer term drew to a close Branny continually begged his mother to deny this dreadful possibility but she put him off by references to the school’s good will which were meaningless to him.

  The blow really fell about the middle of the summer holidays. For several days his mother had been busy with correspondence. The zeppelin raids over London had started and parents were rushing their children from the east to safer schools in the west. It had been necessary to have a new stock of prospectuses printed.

  Idly Branny picked up one of these as he stood by his mother waiting for her to finish a letter. The front page riveted his attention. Under the heading:

  OAKLAWN SCHOOL FOR GIRLS

  in place of the familiar Principals, Mr. and
Mrs. George H. Foster, he read:

  Principals: Mrs. George H. Foster

  Mrs. John Delaney

  Miss Hilda Foster

  Mrs. John Delaney was Aunt Nellie. Under other circumstances that would have been sufficiently terrible. But Miss Hilda Foster was Aunt Hilda, the fabulous, almost mythical Aunt Hilda of whom the very memory was panic.

  And she was coming here to Oaklawn to be joint headmistress with Aunt Nellie and his mother. The idea was beyond contemplation.

  “But, Mummy,” he wailed, “she can’t come here. This is your school. It was yours and Daddy’s.”

  Mrs. Foster kissed him a trifle wistfully and explained that his father had wished and willed things so.

  “You’ll see, Branny,” she concluded, “with your aunts here we’ll have more time together. Time for walks in the country, picnics.”

  But Branny felt desolation like a stone in the pit of his stomach. He locked himself in the lavatory and cried until he was violently sick.

  Aunt Hilda arrived with the first days of September, about two weeks before the beginning of the winter term. She was even more terrifying than Branny’s memory of her.

  Having been paid companion to a difficult lady of title, she had waited for her death and its consequent small annuity before descending on Oaklawn. She immediately showed that there is no female tyrant so absolute as one who has herself been under tyranny.

  In appearance she was almost the exact opposite of Aunt Nellie. There was no false front about Aunt Hilda, either actual or metaphorical. A short, heavy woman, she wore her greyish hair back uncompromisingly from her forehead. Her manner was uncompromising as a steam shovel. She creaked like one, too, as she moved heavily about, clucking at the inefficiencies of the establishment. She clucked over the school accounts, the tradesmen’s bills. She clucked over the laxity of the domestics, and several of Branny’s friends among the kitchen staff—especially those on whom he could rely for snatches of food at illicit hours—were sent away in tears. Aunt Hilda clucked disapprovingly over Mrs. Foster, too, whisking away all her sister-in-law’s faint protests with an abrupt: “Nonsense, Constance.”