“Thank you for those kind words. May I say in my turn that you’re looking much less like something grown in a cellar, Ray? I shall admire your manly beauty if you continue the good work.”
The villagers of Milham in the Moor were by nature conservative and tended to be suspicious of newcomers. When they first saw Anne Ferens, they were almost startled by her vividness and vitality. She was a gypsy type in colouring: black hair, smoothly parted and plaited into a big bun low down on her neck, dark eyes and amusingly tilted dark eyebrows, a brown skin and lips that were red even without her habitual cherry lipstick. Her eyes were bright and expressive, her cheeks dimpled and her lips curved easily to a wide smile, and she loved bright colours, scarlet and orange and yellow, emerald green and cerise; no colour was too bright for Anne to wear. If the villagers were a bit startled at first by both the modernity and the vividness of the new doctor’s young wife, they soon got to enjoy the look of her, as well as her gaiety and spontaneous interest in everything.
It was a few weeks after the Ferenses had settled into the Dower House that Anne received a note from Sister Monica, conveying a courteous old-fashioned invitation “to take tea” at Gramarye. Anne tossed the note across to Raymond at breakfast time. “I suppose I’ve got to go sometime, so I might as well go and get it over. I shall jolly well keep my eyes open while I’m there.”
“I shouldn’t, angel,” he replied. “Treat it as you would treat any other not very welcome social occasion. Be polite and dignified—you’re very good at both—and come away as soon as you can, having uttered nothing but courteous platitudes.”
Anne sat and thought. Then she said: “I don’t believe that woman’s fit to be trusted with the care of little children, Ray.”
“Anne, let’s get this clear,” he replied. “Gramarye is not our business. The home has a qualified medical man in charge; it is regularly inspected by the committee of management and it is known to the county authorities, who see fit to send homeless or maladjusted children there. It’s nothing to do with you or with me.” He paused, and then went on: “I think we’ve got to be very careful, Anne. Sister Monica has held a position of trust here for thirty years. I have said I don’t like her. I think she has all the bad qualities of an ageing, dominating, and narrow-minded woman, but she is woven into the very fabric of the life of this village and she has a lot of influence here. If I thought that the situation was such as to warrant interference from me, I would interfere and devil take the consequences, but I don’t think such interference is indicated.”
“Would you feel the same if a child you were fond of was there, Ray?”
“I don’t know, and I’m not going to debate a hypothetical case. To the best of my knowledge and belief those small kids at Gramarye are well housed, well fed, and well clothed. Their health is supervised by Brown and their general welfare supervised by a committee of whom Lady Ridding is chairman. Don’t go tilting at windmills, Anne.”
Anne suddenly grinned. “All right, but do just tell me this. What do you mean by windmills?”
“You know, my child. We both believe that Sister Monica has the defects of her qualities—a very useful phrase. I think she’s deceitful, and she deceives herself as well as other people. I’m prepared to believe she’s a liar, a fomenter of trouble, a sneak, and a hypocrite. I also believe she’s a very competent nurse and an excellent manager. May I have some more coffee?”
“Do. It’s good coffee, isn’t it? All right, Ray. I will refrain from observing anything.”
“Oh no, you won’t,” he said, “but kindly remember this. If you have any grounds for complaint, you can lay them before the committee. Not before me. It’s not my pigeon.”
2
After Anne Ferens had been to tea at Gramarye, she went for a walk in the park. The land to the south of the church and the Manor House fell steeply to the river. Beyond the river valley it rose again in a magnificent rolling chequerboard of farmland—“landscape plotted and pieced: fold, fallow and plough”—until the cultivated fields faded out into the greater sweep of the high moorland. Anne never tired of the wooded loveliness of the park and of the vast prospect seen from the Milham hillside. She walked today because she wanted to order her turbulent thoughts before she talked to her husband; generally a reasonable person, she admitted to herself that she was being unreasonable on the subject of Gramarye, and she made a deliberate effort to think things over.
She had been given tea in the parlour, a small room whose furnishings and garnishings seemed a hybrid of Victorianism and a nunnery; it had white “satin-striped” wallpaper on which hung religious colour prints of a sentimental variety; much-laundered cretonne covers and curtains were palely hygienic rather than decorative, and the linoleum on the floor was polished to a perilous degree. Sister Monica, in navy-blue alpaca and a white veil, seemed to brood over a low tea table which held a really beautiful Rockingham tea set (a “silver jubilee” gift to herself from Lady Ridding on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her wardenship, she explained). Sitting thus, dispensing excellent China tea and wafer-like bread and butter, she had kept up a murmur of polite platitudes
