The BRIGHT DAY Read online

  Mary Hocking

  THE BRIGHT

  DAY

  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

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  To

  Jack and Effie

  . . . . . the bright day is done

  And we are for the dark

  Chapter One

  There was one star in the sky, pale and dying. Soon it would be light. It was difficult to believe that during the day they were up there, stars in their millions; difficult to believe that the world doesn’t just turn over with the coming of day and leave them behind along with all our dreams and nightmares.

  There are those who don’t leave their dreams behind with the coming of day, visionaries, poets, maniacs, spinsters in their late thirties-like Hannah Joyce Mason not sure who they are or where they are going.

  These thoughts were in Hannah’s mind as she left her brother’s house in Picton’s Quay soon after dawn. It was the kind of thinking that was the despair of her relatives.

  ‘It’s time she got married and settled down,’ the two women agreed as they discussed her over an hour later.

  ‘If she’s not careful, she’ll come to a bad end like her Aunt Maud.’

  The dining-room curtains had been pulled back revealing another grey day. It had been a bad spring and no one guessed what a hot summer was to follow.

  ‘The trouble with Hannah is that she’s an ordinary person trying to be extraordinary. She has to make gestures to keep up her courage.’

  ‘I wish she’d make a gesture and come down to breakfast.’

  The window was open and there was a faint breeze. The younger woman said, ‘I can smell the river today. I wish it wasn’t tidal. I’m sure we get Scotney’s refuse carried inland.’

  ‘I thought Scotney was really nasty the last time I went there. Loud and vulgar, and something else as well. It quite frightened me. What does Hannah want to live there for?’

  ‘She says it has “life”.’

  ‘It had a high life once.’ The older woman began to talk about Scotney in the days of its Edwardian elegance while her daughter went upstairs to wake Hannah, who by this time had reached the marshes.

  It was usually misty over the marshes in the early morning, but today it was clear and the Downs on the far side of the valley looked near enough for rain. The river was the colour of sedge and it flowed very quickly towards the sea, silent save where it swirled round a few small rocks and made a noise as though a plug had been pulled out somewhere beneath. The banks rose steeply on either side; there were a lot of stones in the dun-coloured earth. Hannah, who had been walking for some time, paused and looked down at her reflection, but she had dislodged some of the stones and they plopped into the water so that her image broke up and bobbed about lamentably. She said, ‘So much for Joyce!’ But she didn’t really believe she could jettison Joyce so easily: Joyce might be dull and unadventurous, but she was very resilient. Necessary, too. She worked hard for her living while Hannah dreamed her dreams.

  The river twisted through a flat valley with the Downs rising on either side. The valley was treeless and rather drab with pylons striding across it. There were one or two herds of cattle. The only sign of human occupation was an old cottage standing beside what had once been a railway halt. It was a melancholy place, a half-way house between dream and nightmare; it had an attraction for Hannah which she could not define, except to say ‘it speaks to my subconscious’. Whenever she came to Picton’s Quay, she made a point of visiting the cottage; it was more than a habit, it was a ritual and if she didn’t perform it she felt uneasy. Although she was normally fastidious, this place drew her by its very neglect. She had sometimes thought that she would like to sleep there, but contented herself with weaving fantasies about it. It was that kind of place.

  She kicked another stone and a startled bird flew up from a clump of grass ahead of her. She turned on to the track that led away from the river towards the cottage. Her sister-in-law would be annoyed with her for going off like this before breakfast. Although Hannah was glad to have escaped from her relatives, she still behaved as though she was being watched by someone, a someone to whom she must demonstrate that she was ‘different’. From early years, she had wanted to be different. It hadn’t been easy. Being like other people was a condition of survival in her home. ‘Hannah’ had only been included to please her great-aunt; even though they agreed to call her Hannah, they expected her to behave like Joyce. Now, in spite of herself, she glanced at her watch. It would have to be a quick visit this morning; there was a difference between being late for breakfast and being unpardonably late. Her upbringing made her reject the unpardonable.

  As it was, she did not have so much as a glance through one of the windows. When she was near the cottage, she heard voices and two people came into view. A man and a woman. They were quite near her, walking towards a car, the roof of which was now just visible over an untidy hedge. They did not see her, but she saw them. She recognised the man. It was a shock. This was her secret place, surely they could have found somewhere else. It would never be the same again. She turned away quickly and walked back to Picton’s Quay. Her sister-in-law said she had given them all the most awful fright. Hannah spent the rest of the day trying to make up for it.

  That was in March.

  Chapter Two

  At one o’clock in the morning of the second of May there was a thin crowd outside the Town Hall to hear the result of the by-election declared. Few had made a special journey for this purpose, but it was a clear, warm night and there were still quite a number of people out in the town. Although the discrediting of Geoffrey Ormerod, the much-favoured Conservative candidate, had created a flurry, the campaign itself had roused little interest. Scotney was used to scandal. Apart from perennial vice and violence, its superintendent of police was suspended, the district auditor was after several of the councillors, and unsavoury rumours were circulating regarding the bribing of officials in connection with the development of the West Front. Scotney, whatever else it may have lacked, had vitality, and regardless of bad government it thrived. Nevertheless, there must have been a number of people who were sufficiently offended by the stench of corruption to have made their way to the polling booths that fine May day, because when the results were announced the reforming Independent candidate had won. To faint cheers from below, and frenzied acclaim from supporters on the balcony, Neil Moray stepped forward to let a few words float down to the dingy Victorian square. A breeze carried his words into the narrow alleyways of The Warren; farther away, to the east of the town, in the area known as ‘Mario’s half¬mile’, the breeze stirred a few pieces of dirty newspaper, discarded cigarette packets, sodden potato crisps, a half-eaten ham roll, but there was nothing to indicate that any of the citizens in this area, which Moray had promised to sweep clean, were unduly perturbed.

  A party of young people who had stopped by the Town Hall on their way from smoking pot, and other activities of which he would not have approved, gave Neil Moray a good-humoured cheer. He was, as one of the girls said, ‘quite a dish’. She deliberately phrased this in the style of what she took to be his period-he was thirty-three. The Conservative candidate d
id not appear on the balcony, and Neil Moray made no mention of its having been a fair-fought campaign, although he did shake hands with the Labour candidate.

  In a quarter of an hour, he was drinking champagne in his headquarters with the handful of people most closely associated with his victory. There was not much space, as his headquarters consisted of a room ten by fifteen over a bakery, and Hannah Mason sat on the knees of Rodney Angevin Cope who had, in every sense of the words, master-minded the campaign. Most of those present were too tired to go back over the major events of the last few weeks, or to look to the future, and contented themselves with telling hilarious and largely apocryphal stories about their own canvassing exploits. The exception was Cope, one of those people who, at the very moment when others are flagging, seem to receive a fresh charge of energy. Hannah, usually able to generate nervous energy whenever she needed it, felt drained by his very proximity.

  ‘You can afford to campaign about drug addiction,’ she said. ‘You don’t need drugs!’

  ‘I’m high on success,’ he laughed.

  Neil Moray, in contrast, seemed to be suffering a reaction.

  ‘Wondering why the hell you did it?’ Cope asked him. Cope was perceptive but not always tactful. Moray, who did not like to have his thoughts read, shrugged his shoulders and turned away, a rebuff which in no way troubled Cope. Someone refilled Moray’s glass.

  ‘You should go home to bed,’ Hannah said to him.

  The warmth of her concern seemed to irritate Moray; but he took her advice and began to make his farewells, going to each person in turn and greeting them according to his estimate of them. By the time he came to Hannah he had recovered his good-humour sufficiently to smile. He had a sensitive, diffident face and his expression tended to be a little abstracted; the smile was charming and rare enough to come as a personal reward. There was, however, something enigmatic, if not a little cold, about the eyes as he looked at Hannah, assessing what was due to her. She had worked very hard during the campaign and no doubt many of those present considered that a hug and a kiss would be appropriate. Spontaneous gestures did not come easily to Moray, however, particularly if he suspected that they were eagerly awaited; so he pressed a forefinger to the tip of Hannah’s nose and murmured, ‘I’ll have more to say to thee later.’ Her heightened colour told him that she had expected him to be more demonstrative. He did not offer to drive her home, although he passed the end of her road.

  Hannah moved away and began to talk gaily to Major and Mrs. Brophy, two of Moray’s most loyal supporters. She waited until half an hour after Moray had gone before she said, ‘Time for me to make tracks.’

  ‘What!’ Cope’s eyes widened in exaggerated surprise. ‘Not staying? I thought we were going to see the real Hannah Mason tonight.’ He undid the zip of her dress a token three inches and peered down her back.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ She fumbled and said crossly, ‘I can’t do it up now.’

  ‘You need a husband.’

  ‘It’s the one time I give it serious thought.’

  ‘Dear Hannah! I don’t think you’ve been thanked properly, have you?’ He put his arms round her and hugged her, ‘Bless you, my love. You’ve been an absolute darling in every way. Three cheers for our Hannah!’

  They cheered her with a will; she was a cheerful worker and very popular.

  ‘Do you want a lift home?’ Cope asked her.

  ‘No thanks, I’d sooner walk.’

  ‘Sure?’ His persistence was not altogether kind. ‘You’re not being brave?’

  ‘I’m gasping for air, that’s all.’

  She waved a theatrically cheerful farewell to the others; Cope gave her a pat on the behind as she turned away and said. ‘That’s my girl!’ He seemed determined to demonstrate that he was aware she had been hurt.

  She was indeed hurt. She was an emotional person, although she tried to conceal the fact, and she had expected that in the moment of victory Moray would be more generous. She was also aware that he had made a greater effort to express gratitude to others than to herself. Self-pity was not one of her indulgences, however, and as she walked along the street she was saying to herself, ‘You put yourself in the centre of the picture too much. You can’t do a good job and keep quiet about it, you must have everyone standing around and applauding. No wonder you get hurt. People haven’t time for that sort of thing.’ In this fashion, she nagged herself home.

  Home was in a narrow street off the seafront; there was a lock-up garage beneath her flat, an antique shop to the left, and a meeting place for an obscure religious sect to the right. Opposite was a municipal car park set rather picturesquely in the burnt-out ruins of an old church, the lower walls of which had been left standing as though they had all the value of Roman remains. Hannah had spent a long time trying to find the right environment for herself. She often stood on the doorstep when she came back at night, looking at the street curving to the crossroads where other streets fanned out, lined with shops and restaurants, antique markets, boutiques, pubs. Not a row of semi-detached houses in miles! But tonight, she was too tired and dispirited to congratulate herself on having escaped from the atmosphere of her childhood. As she walked up the stairs, it seemed to her that Hannah Mason hadn’t become notably wiser since she left suburbia.

  Out in the streets, the breeze died down. Even the few revellers had come to rest somewhere. The policeman walking down Pont Street where Moray had his headquarters found all the buildings in darkness, the last supporter gone. On the seafront, a few drop¬outs huddled against the breakwaters. A sea-mist stole up and hid them from P.G. Turner’s hot very inquiring eyes. The clock of St. John’s Church struck three.

  As far as the staff of The Scotney Gazette were concerned, it had all happened now. Basil Todd, on his way out, was surprised to hear footsteps – not the slow, regular, flat-footed tread of P.C. Turner, or the shuffle of a late-night drunk, but the lighter tread of a woman’s feet, well-shod. He waited, one hand on the office outer door, as she came towards him out of the mist.

  He was young, ambitious, idealistic, embittered, endowed with a moderate talent and little idea how to make the most of it. War waged constantly within him. In the sick light of the street lamp, his face looked raw with the misery of it all. The editor had rejected a profile he had written, unrequested, on Rodney Cope. ‘Clever’ the editor had called it, as though there was something reprehensible about a journalist being clever! ‘This sort of thing may be fashionable in the quality papers, so-called, but I find it highly self-conscious and rather irritating.’ Pretentious ass! No, that wasn’t quite right, Todd moodily corrected himself; he wasn’t exactly pretentious, nor yet entirely an ass. Affected, precious, pedantic, pedagogic, mannered . . .Todd couldn’t hit on the right word, and while he was searching for it, the woman had come abreast of him and stopped, as he had somehow feared she might.

  ‘I want to see the editor. Is he in there?’ Her breath smelt of whisky. She turned her head aside, to conceal her identity or her drinking.

  Todd regarded what he could see of her with curiosity: trousers, a boxy camel-hair jacket with the collar turned up, a scarf concealing her hair and part of her face. He had the feeling he should have recognised her, but didn’t.

  ‘You’ll find him in his room-door at the end of this room here.’ He made it sound as though it was a usual occurrence for people to make calls on the Gazette office at this time of night. The woman certainly behaved as though it was, she went past Todd and walked towards the door he had indicated.

  ‘If it can wait until tomorrow . . .’ Todd said belatedly.

  ‘Oh, bugger off! This is tomorrow.’ She sounded like someone who has come a long way and lost a lot of enthusiasm. Todd shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t think the editor had earned any protection tonight; he went out and left him to the woman.

  ‘Are you the editor?’ the woman said, standing in the doorway. She knew that William Lomax was the editor of the Gazette, but had always thought he didn’
t look right for the job, more like the owner of an antique shop that wasn’t doing well. She was vaguely troubled now by the sight of him sitting there, his features all awry with surprise; there was something ludicrous about him, one of the sadder Shakespearian jesters. He was thin, too. Not a robust man.

  ‘Mrs. Ormerod!’ In spite of a rather disorientated expression – he looked always as though he had taken a wrong turning in a strange town – William Lomax never forgot a face or a name. A disconcerting gift, even, at times, to its owner. He could smell the whisky, and could make a guess what had brought her here, though why she should come to him to bewail her husband’s ignominious defeat, he could not imagine. He supposed there were not many of her friends who would be pleased to offer comfort at this hour of the night. He screwed his face up into a grimace which might equally have expressed pleasure or pain, and said, ‘Won’t you sit down?’

  ‘Were you outside the Town Hall?’ she asked.

  ‘I was.’

  ‘I thought I saw you.’ She moved a sheaf of paper and sat down on the chair opposite Lomax’s desk. The room was little more than a cubicle; it smelt of newsprint and the kitchen odours of the Indian restaurant next door. She undid her scarf slowly and then folded it with obsessive concern; her fingers were heavily stained with nicotine.

  Lomax fidgeted with anything that came to hand, putting papers that did not belong in piles into piles, opening and closing drawers with a brisk sound. She said, the drink making her quick to take offence: ‘It’s all right. I haven’t come for a chat.’

  ‘No?’ He settled back in his chair, regarding her furtively. A good many cranks came to the office, usually he tried to get Todd or one of the others to deal with them. Mrs. Ormerod wasn’t exactly a crank, but she wasn’t well-adjusted, either. Lomax found unbalanced people rather disturbing, they always made one so aware of the problem of balance. Mrs. Ormerod looked decidedly ill. Her dark, straight hair had the lifelessness of ill-health, her sallow face was finely scored with the sharp lines of neurosis. He was rather shocked. She could be no more than thirty, if that, and he could remember her when she had a bright, gamin charm and he had thought her wasted on Ormerod who seemed to him a cold, inadequate sort of man. That was before his own marriage broke up: he wasn’t so inclined to judge other men now.