The Unseen(110)

His footsteps drift idly away, back down the stairs, and Hester breathes again, and tries to be relieved that Cat is not to go. But even this makes her uneasy, because it is his doing and he proclaims it to be on her behalf. Her head is aching, a tight band of pain around her skull. Slowly, she rises, and lies down on the bed. She had meant to think, to plan, but her mind is both full and empty, and she can make no sense of her thoughts, nor find anything in her experience or education to inform her how to act in this alien situation. And neither can she sleep. So she merely lies, in dread of the dinner hour.


Before dinner, and at a crucial point in its preparation, Mrs Bell is summoned under protest to go upstairs and be addressed by the vicar and his wife.

‘Watch those pies, Cat – another five minutes to brown the crusts is all they want,’ she says as she waddles from the room. Cat stares steadily at the doorway once the fat housekeeper has gone through it, and tries to guess what it might mean. The whole house is loaded with tension, paused in anticipation like a clock wound too tight. Perhaps it is only the heat, but perhaps not. Cat watches the pies, and finishes scrubbing the carrots in a bucket of water, and fetches the cream for dessert from the well; and on her return to the kitchen Mrs Bell is back, and will not look her in the eye, and snaps:

‘Never you mind!’ when Cat asks what the summons was about. A while later, she speaks again. ‘You’re to put their food on the dresser when you take it up. Don’t take it to the table – they’ll serve themselves. The vicar … the vicar don’t want you too close to him,’ she says heavily, her voice laden with disapproval as she passes on this injunction.

‘What does he think – that I’ll infect him with something?’ Cat asks, incredulously.

‘How should I know what the man thinks? Just mind what he says and be thankful you’re still here!’ says Mrs Bell.

So Cat serves dinner with a feeling of angry suspicion to make her hands clumsy. She glares at them as she puts each dish on the dresser, but only Robin Durrant will look at her, and he smiles and thanks her with ostentatious ease. Hester’s eyes are fixed with a kind of desperation at the precise centre of the white tablecloth, and the vicar gazes around him with a serenity that seems wholly out of place, wholly disconnected from the room. Afterwards, when all is cleared away and she has been out for a cigarette, keeping close to the eaves of the house as a few bloated raindrops begin to fall, Cat returns to the kitchen to find Mrs Bell standing with her hands in the pockets of her apron and a look on her face that Cat has never seen before. She pulls up short. Something in that look tells her to run, but she ignores it.

‘What is it?’ she asks, warily. Mrs Bell is breathing hard, her nostrils flaring whitely. She almost looks afraid.

‘I’m to accompany you to your room. To make sure you go into it,’ she says at last, the words clipped.

‘Ah, so you’re to be my warden now? They have pitted us against each other.’ Cat smiles resignedly.

‘I may not like it, but that is what I am instructed to do. To see to it you go to bed at the end of the day, and not out to any dens of iniquity …’

‘The vicar’s words?’

‘The very same.’

‘And I suppose nobody will take my word on this any more?’

‘I think you’ve done that to yourself, Cat,’ Mrs Bell replies; and Cat smiles again, just fleetingly.

‘Very well then. Let us go up.’

Walking ahead of the housekeeper on angry feet, Cat is up both flights of stairs and outside her room, arms folded defiantly, by the time Mrs Bells puffs her way laboriously along behind her.

‘Well then, here I am. All ready to be tucked in,’ Cat says.

‘I’m to see you inside your room, and ready for bed.’ Cat steps over the threshold, walks to the bed and sits upon it.

‘Will this do? Or must I strip off and get beneath the sheet?’

‘I don’t like it much, Cat. But you’ve brung it on yourself,’ Mrs Bell replies. She reaches out, takes the door handle and begins to close the door.

‘Wait! I never close it all the way … I can’t stand it. Leave it ajar, if you please,’ Cat says. Mrs Bell hesitates, her face falling even more, a troubled frown making deep folds between her brows. Her spare hand fiddles with something in her pocket, and then she reaches for the door handle again, and her other hand emerges from her apron, and Cat sees a glint of metal in it, a warning flash of reflected light that she has no time to react to.

‘I’m sorry about it, girl,’ Mrs Bell mutters; and then the door is shut and there is a telltale click in the lock.