DANIEL COME TO JUDGEMENT Read online

  Mary Hocking

  DANIEL COME

  TO JUDGEMENT

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  To Gwen and Jean

  Chapter One

  ‘Daniel is coming home.’ Erica propped the letter against the toast rack and stared at it, as though a more distant reading might offer a different interpretation.

  Her sister, Dorothy, intent on clearing the table, said, ‘On leave?’

  ‘No. That wretched man Aluwawa has thrown him out along with all the others.’

  Dorothy said, ‘Oh dear,’ and took the toast rack.

  ‘He’s coming home for good.’

  But Dorothy had carried the tray into the kitchen. Erica picked up the letter and read it through again to make sure she had not made a mistake. Her daughter, Emma, rushed into the room and pecked her on the cheek. ‘I’m sorry I was a pig. Mummy.’ Erica said, ‘Yes, darling’ and Emma rushed out of the room. Erica’s son, Giles, not in the least penitent about his part in the breakfast fracas, left the house without apology. Erica turned a page of the letter. Dorothy, having had pause for reflection in the kitchen, came back and hovered in the doorway, torn between the need to get to surgery on time and the reluctant acknowledgement of a genuine crisis.

  Erica said, ‘He’s really coming home … to live.’ The morning light fell on her big, raw-boned face, as it did every morning, revealing the laughter creases at the corners of the eyes, the protest line between the brows, the declamatory exuberance of the mouth, none of which Erica would have been at any pains to conceal; but this morning the light exposed other things she would have wished hidden, uncertainty in the eyes, vulnerability in the droop of the full lips. She turned her face from the light and handed the letter to Dorothy.

  ‘I suppose he knows what he’s doing,’ Dorothy murmured. ‘But you’d have thought whoever else he threw out, he’d have clung to his scientists.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Erica asked irritably.

  ‘Aluwawa – one can understand him getting rid of all the Europeans who are living off the fat of the land, but …’

  ‘Oh, be damned to Aluwawa! I’m sick of hearing about the man – I said so only yesterday, didn’t I, when we were watching that television programme? And now look what he’s done!’

  Dorothy glanced past her sister to the clock on the mantelpiece. It was twenty past eight. She supposed she could telephone the surgery and say she would not be in until later in the morning. Or would it be better for Erica to have time alone to think this over? Erica, too, looked at the clock. She said despairingly, ‘I shall have to tell Mother.’ And later in the day, Dorothy thought, Emma and Giles would have to be told: a rehearsal might be no bad thing.

  ‘Don’t you want Daniel to come home?’ she asked bluntly.

  ‘Of course I do!’ Erica dismissed the question as she might flick away a fly. She had spent many years struggling on without Daniel there beside her to tote the burdens which husbands were normally expected to tote, and she had done it cheerfully; but not for anything would she let it be known that she did not want him back. She had no desire to become one of those unfeminine women who can get along perfectly well without a man. Having to manage on your own is one thing, preferring to do so is quite another. ‘I should have liked some warning, that’s all,’ she said. ‘It will require quite a bit of reorganising …’ She looked round the lofty room and out into the spacious hall, as though a major structural review would be necessary in order to accommodate Daniel in a house with eight bedrooms, four reception-rooms, a library, two bathrooms and four lavatories.

  ‘It will require some adjustment, certainly,’ Dorothy agreed.

  Erica looked at her sister meditatively, not liking the word ‘adjustment’. ‘You wouldn’t know, of course. You couldn’t be expected to understand …’ She clenched her fist and beat a drum roll on the table. ‘I never thought this would happen. He loves Africa so much … I never imagined him coming back.’ She sounded exasperated with fate for this maladroit intervention in her affairs; but beneath the exasperation was an anxiety which her sister very well understood. It was ten years since Erica and Daniel had lived together.

  ‘Do you mind if I phone the surgery?’ Dorothy asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To let them know I’m going to be late.’

  ‘You won’t be late if you leave now.’

  Dorothy hesitated, and Erica said in an offended tone, ‘Don’t look at me like that. I’m not going to be ill. I’m not one of those women who can’t cope, thank goodness!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry …’

  ‘It’s quite unnerving the way you look at people. You probably don’t realise you are doing it, but you look at people as though you had them under a microscope. It’s one of the hazards of being a health visitor, I suppose.’

  ‘I expect so. Do you really want me to go?’

  ‘Yes, go! Think of all those inadequate mothers just waiting for you to come and tell them how to feed baby, and not to wash the nappies in detergent!’

  Dorothy went into the hall and put on her raincoat and the blue uniform cap. She paused a moment at the foot of the stairs, listening, but no sound came to her ears. She went back to the morning- room and said to Erica, ‘If I were you I shouldn’t say anything to Mother. Give yourself a bit of time to sort things out in your mind.’

  Erica said, ‘Thank you. I had worked that one out for myself.’ She was not usually so sharp as this and Dorothy guessed she was holding herself together with some difficulty, ‘I’m off, then,’ she said uneasily.

  When the front door closed behind Dorothy, Erica clasped her hands together and pressed them against her mouth; she held this pose for some forty seconds and then let her breath out in a whoosh. She stood up and pulled down the jacket of her trouser suit. ‘Daniel!’ she said. She went to the window, the better to contemplate Daniel. The lawn which Dorothy had mown at the week-end stretched before her, smooth, green and quite sizable for a property in the centre of a country town. She opened the window. The air was keen and smelt of autumn, damp leaves and turned earth. Beyond the stone wall which bounded the garden, she could see the snub roofs of the old red-brick cottages in Bates Yard with the spire of the cathedral lofted above them. In the far distance, the Downs rose on the skyline, a mass more dense than the moving bands of strato-cumulus. Yeominster was a small town with plenty of space around it: but Daniel, she recalled, had been very tiring to live with even in the vast spaces of Africa.

  It was too much, really it was too much that this should happen to her! She led a full life. There were the demands of her family to be met. She had a son of seventeen who had not yet decided what career he was to follow, so she had the problem of deciding for him; a daughter of fifteen who had decided to become a doctor, so she had the worry of wondering where the money for the course was to come from; she had a mother and sister living in the same house, who while they did not make any extra work, needed to be considered. But she did not believe that the responsibilities of the home should completely engulf a woman, and in addition to these domestic burdens of decision, worry and consideration, she was chairman of the All Saints Young Wives Group, secretary of the Yeominster Choral Society, and membership se
cretary of the Yeominster Conservation Society; she did meals on wheels twice a week and church flower arrangements once a month. It was enough.

  Really, it was quite enough, without President Aluwawa ejecting all the Europeans, even such indispensable people as microbiologists who were doing invaluable research into tropical diseases. The one thing which Erica had never denied Daniel was that his work was invaluable. ‘It is quite invaluable,’ she had said firmly, when explaining to people why Daniel lived in Africa and she lived in England. ‘He works tirelessly and without thought for himself,’ she would add, though privately reflecting that Daniel was enjoying himself enormously, being one of those completely unmaterialistic people who like living in a settlement three hundred miles from any town with the slightest pretension to civilisation. On the occasions when she was asked why she did not live in Africa with Daniel, she would answer, ‘It is for the children’s sake.’ One year and two weeks, when the children were very young, had been quite enough to convince Erica that she must return to England. One year without spring, autumn, winter to break the monotony of summer in a land where one could be sure that tomorrow the sun would shine, and the next day, and the next week and the next month, the next year, for ever and ever and ever! Oh, the terror of that certainty! There had been times when she had looked up at the blue sky with its flaming disc and screamed for God to undo his work. She had, in fact, had rather a lot of difficulties with God in Africa. For one thing, she had not liked his black children. Black faces with sliced melon smiles greeted her whenever she walked through the settlement; but as soon as the natives were behind her, the laughter died away, and if she dared to look over her shoulder, which was not often, she saw them lolling against the mud walls, watching her with faces incommunicable as the carved ebony masks in the market place. ‘It is all right for us,’ she said to Daniel. ‘But it is very bad for the children.’ The children had begun to show signs of enjoying Africa. ‘They will grow up with a mud-hut mentality.’

  And so, for the sake of the children. Erica had accepted the burden of life without Daniel. On the whole, she had borne it well. Her problems had been eased by the fact that she could live in her mother’s house in Yeominster. The house was much too big for Mrs. Prentice to run, and by occupying a large part of it. Erica had saved her mother the worry of having to sell it, or let it out in flats. It was, of course, too big for Erica to run on her own, but she had resourcefully met this problem by persuading her younger sister, Dorothy, to return home. ‘As much for your sake as ours,’ she had said, anxious to make it clear that her motives were not selfish. Dorothy had had a long, abortive affair with a married man and Erica was sure it was better for her to live in the company of others to whom she could be of service. ‘Single women on their own can become very selfish,’ she had pointed out. Dorothy’s return had been opportune because about this time Mrs. Prentice decided that she was ill, and Dorothy, being a trained nurse, was able to look after her. It all worked very well, and Erica was always ready to acknowledge her sister’s contribution. She was aware that, with her greater vivacity and more mercurial temperament, she must always attract more interest than Dorothy and she was constantly seeking to redress the balance. ‘People might be inclined to disregard my sister,’ she would explain to people who, in fact, had never been so inclined. ‘But they would be mistaken. Dorothy may not have a striking personality, but she has great gifts of character.’ A resolute little person, Dorothy seemed to Erica, a person to be relied on to cope sensibly with practical problems. Daniel, however, posed problems with which Erica could not expect Dorothy to help her.

  ‘Perhaps he will have changed,’ she thought, staring over the roofs of the houses at the dim blue line of the Downs. It was three years since she had last seen him, and then he had spent a week at a conference in Edinburgh where he caught a severe cold which had drained his energy for the remainder of his leave. She could hardly expect him to have a permanent cold. How old would he be now? Forty? Yes, he must be forty; she had been twenty when she had Giles, and Daniel was two years older than she. Forty was one of those milestones in one’s life; the high tide, after which the youthful desire for adventure recedes as energy begins to wane. A time for consolidation. She was still standing by the window, trying to imagine Daniel at ebb-tide, when her mother came into the room.

  ‘I didn’t know you were up,’ Erica said, startled.

  ‘Should I have told you?’

  ‘If you had called out, I would have brought breakfast up to you.’

  ‘If I’m in the way, I’ll go upstairs again.’ Mrs. Prentice gave her shoulders a little shake and braced her back, invigorated at having got in the first thrust of the day.

  ‘You know I didn’t mean that,’ Erica said, furtively surveying the table to see where she had left Daniel’s letter. Her mother, who did not like to have it made so easy for her, commented without interest, ‘A letter from Daniel?’

  ‘Why not?’ Erica was immediately defensive. ‘He does write to me sometimes.’

  ‘As often as you write to him,’ her mother acknowledged.

  ‘I don’t write often because he isn’t interested. He doesn’t relate to life over here. When he is home on leave, he finds it as strange as if he had just dropped in from Mars.’

  ‘Doesn’t relate?’ Her mother repeated the phrase as though it was the first time she had heard it. ‘That doesn’t make sense to me. What does it mean?’

  ‘It means it doesn’t make sense,’ Erica said shortly. ‘What would you like for breakfast?’

  ‘I don’t think I could eat anything.’ Mrs. Prentice was quietly reproachful, as though the mention of breakfast to anyone in her condition was a deliberate provocation. Erica, who had never learnt when to break off an engagement with her mother, asked:

  ‘Did you have a bad night?’

  ‘I think someone tried to break into the house,’ Mrs. Prentice extemporised.

  ‘You probably heard Giles come in. He was rather late.’

  ‘Midnight. Must have been after midnight. What’s he up to Coming in at that time and making all that noise? He’s not demonstrating again, is he?’

  ‘Giles doesn’t demonstrate all the time, Mother.’

  ‘Demonstrated over that bacteriological business at Brocklehurst, didn’t he? Climbing over barbed wire fences …’

  ‘That was a long time ago, and even then he didn’t do it at midnight! There’s no one to demonstrate to at midnight.’

  ‘I wonder you let him out so late.’ Mrs. Prentice went into the hall muttering, ‘Tearing his trousers on barbed wire …’

  Erica watched her mother making her way purposefully towards the kitchen where she would undoubtedly prepare herself a large breakfast. She snatched up Daniel’s letter and read it through for the third time. On this reading, a few words at the top of the last page caught her attention. ‘… two or three days in London to see what is going …’ What is going? Erica puzzled about this for a few minutes, until it occurred to her that Daniel was temporarily unemployed. As he was a civil servant and would certainly be found another post, this should not have occasioned too much concern; nevertheless, she said dramatically, ‘What shall we do?’

  She sat down to consider this. But as her brain was accustomed to thinking about six things at once, and usually had to function to the accompaniment of physical activity of one kind or another, in a few moments she found herself by the window dialling the number of the vicarage, while she craned her neck to see whether the stock of bird food needed to be replenished. The squirrel was there, hanging on to the barrel and eating the nuts. She said, ‘You beastly animal!’ and had the window open and was shouting at the squirrel when the vicar’s wife answered the telephone. The vicar’s wife had forgotten to obtain the loan of a projector for the afternoon’s meeting of the Young Wives’ Group. By the time that Erica had chased the squirrel away, made six telephone calls, tracked down a projector and was on the way to fetch it, she had forgotten about Daniel’s letter.
On her return to the house, she began to feel sick, but was saved from a rather alarming collapse by the realisation that she was late for meals on wheels duty. It was five o’clock before she had a moment to think about what she was to say to the children. ‘Oh, Giles, my baby!’ she moaned. It was going to be so much more difficult for Giles than for Emma. Giles had always behaved as though he had no father, whereas Emma, against all the evidence, behaved as though she had one and might, therefore, conceivably be glad to see him.

  Dorothy and Mrs. Prentice had supper in Mrs. Prentice’s sitting- room. The old lady sat with her hands folded in her lap examining the blue veins knotted beneath the wrinkled flesh; she cracked her knuckles and sighed as Dorothy came in with a tray. Dorothy took no notice. Mrs. Prentice, who liked her younger daughter, deigned to make her complaint vocal.

  ‘What’s up, then?’

  ‘Up?’

  ‘Why are we having our meal up here?’

  ‘We often have our meals up here.’

  ‘Not on a Thursday.’

  Erica usually went to the choral society on a Thursday and Dorothy and Mrs. Prentice were left in charge of Emma and Giles. Dorothy considered the question while she helped her mother to fish pie.

  ‘Are they having something special?’ Mrs. Prentice regarded the fish pie without enthusiasm.

  ‘Special? With Emma living on cheese and raw vegetables?’

  ‘What is it, then? Is Erica entertaining her fancy man?’

  ‘Don’t let Erica hear you talk about Harry like that. Mother,’ Dorothy laughed. ‘And you can be sure that if she was entertaining him, we should be down there, too!’

  Mrs. Prentice allowed herself to be sidetracked into a comment on Erica’s sense of propriety. ‘I wonder he remains so faithful. He certainly doesn’t get much encouragement.’

  Dorothy said, ‘The reason Erica is having supper alone with the children is that Daniel is coming home. She wants to tell them.’

  ‘Coming home?’ Mrs. Prentice looked up in surprise. ‘On leave?’